Philosophy On The Mesa

There is a good deal of interest in evolutionary explanations of religious belief.  This research project is using computer simulations to mimic an evolutionary process.

The computer model begins with assumption that some people have a genetic disposition to communicate unverifiable information to others and then compares the reproductive success of people who communicate real information with those who pass on unreal information.

“Under most scenarios, “believers in the unreal” went extinct. But when Dow [the writer of the program] included the assumption that non-believers would be attracted to religious people because of some clear, but arbitrary, signal, religion flourished. ”

‘” Somehow the communicators of unreal information are attracting others to communicate real information to them,’ Dow says, speculating that perhaps the non-believers are touched by the faith of the religious”.

So what is this clear signal? Why would non-believers have been touched by the faith of the religious? Could it perhaps be the sense of psychological certainty possessed by believers, facing conditions of real uncertainty, that made non-believers willing to communicate with believers.

The Internet is full of Albert Einstein today: A Jan.3, 1954 letter from Einstein to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, being sold in London on Thursday by Bloomsbury Auctions, states that

 “The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.”

What happened to famous Einstein quotes such as “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind,” (1941) and “God does not play dice with the universe” (1926)? As far as the last one goes, that was never meant to be a comment on God, according to Einstein scholars. Einstein was worried about the scientific implications of his own theory of quantum mechanics. Besides, there are two versions of it. Here’s the original: Raffiniert ist der Herrgott, aber boshaft ist er nicht (1921). Loosely translated as “God is subtle, but he isn’t malicious.” Later, Einstein claimed that God doesn’t throw dice. And “Science without religion is lame”? For one thing, there’s a little translation problem: “Wissenscaft ist lahm” doesn’t mean that “science is lame,” but that “science is paralyzed.” And the meaning itself? According to some, it is evidence of Einstein’s feeling of cosmic spirituality and admiration for the structure of the universe. But this is nothing new—Einstein didn’t want to declare himself an atheist or a pantheist, but it was common knowledge that he didn’t believe in a personal god.

So why does this matter? If anything, it is a testimony to our preoccupation with classifications, sound bites, and neat explanations. But of course today’s debate about whether Einstein was religious or not  is also symptomatic of what many perceive as a cultural divide between two world views, one with and one without religion. Everybody would love to claim Einstein as one of “theirs”—theists as well as atheists. And he has been perceived as a bridge between these two views, with his awe of the universe. But for the sake of our own conviction, one way or another, will it make us feel better if we can pin him down on one idea once and for all? Will that validate our own conviction?

Brian Boyd’s essay in the American Scholar on the evolutionary origin of art and narrative is speculative but nevertheless interesting on a variety of levels. He argues that art and storytelling are adaptations.

 “Art is a form of cognitive play with pattern…Our adult compulsion for the cognitive play of art—from tribal work songs to tradesmen’s transistors to urbanites’ iPods—allows us to extend and refine the neural pathways that produce and process pattern in sonic, visual, and kinetic modes, and especially in sociality.”

Art makes us smarter, as a species, because it enhances our capacity for complex pattern recognition. The cognitive play of art—both its production and consumption—influences differential survival rates thus conferring a reproductive advantage on those who participate.

And why do we engage in this cognitive play? In a word, pleasure.

It’s the pursuit of pleasure, at least of the kind that is produced by pattern recognition, that explains the emergence of human intelligence—so much for Plato’s campaign against artists and religion’s campaign against pleasure.

Perhaps this is what Mill had in mind when he argued that the higher pleasures are to be valued more highly than the lower pleasures.

I guess good sex guided by the Kama Sutra must be better than unaided good sex.

There is an interesting and important discussion going on at Brian Leiter’s blog regarding the proper characterization of naturalism and its relation to philosophy.

Naturalism is the view that reality consists only of the natural world. The issue is whether the language and methods of science are sufficient to understand reality; or are there aspects of nature that must be understood philosophically.

It took 50 generations of robots evolving from basic light-sensitive wheeled mechanisms to something much more sophisticated—but now the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology can boast of having created four groups of robots who have evolved into light-consuming and communicating entities. Three out of the four groups will alert the other robots when they “find food.” The final group has developed robots who will lie about the food source, telling the others that it is poison, and then eat it all themselves. And if that isn’t enough, some robots have evolved into heroes who will alert others to danger and die saving the others. In The God Delusion Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) calls human altruism a “precious Darwinian mistake.” So does this mean that any evolving, communicating entity will travel along the same path as we humans have? Here is a quote from the original report summary:

 “We conducted repeated trials of experimental evolution with robots that could produce visual signals to provide information on food location. We found that communication readily evolves when colonies consist of genetically similar individuals and when selection acts at the colony level. We identified several distinct communication systems that differed in their efficiency…. Under individual selection, the ability to produce visual signals resulted in the evolution of deceptive communication strategies in colonies of unrelated robots and a concomitant decrease in colony performance. This study generates predictions about the evolutionary conditions conducive to the emergence of communication and provides guidelines for designing artificial evolutionary systems displaying spontaneous communication.” 

So the “liars” were unrelated to the others, while communication went smoothly if the individuals were genetically similar. Without having read the entire report I will jump to the conclusion that the “heroes” came from the genetically similar groups. But does this prove that Dawkins is right (Moriae, weigh in!), or that this is no “mistake” at all—that self-sacrifice will happen, because being a member of a colony fosters genuine selflessness? Then again, maybe the researchers at the Swiss lab have merely reinvented an ant hill…

As usual Stephen Pinker is good on the science; not so good on the moral philosophy. Pinker’s recent article in the NYTimes on the science of morality begins by suggesting that, although most people would judge that Mother Theresa was more worthy of moral admiration than Bill Gates, such a judgement is an irrational illusion.

“Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care….I doubt these examples will persuade anyone to favor Bill Gates over Mother Teresa for sainthood. But they show that our heads can be turned by an aura of sanctity, distracting us from a more objective reckoning of the actions that make people suffer or flourish. It seems we may all be vulnerable to moral illusions the ethical equivalent of the bending lines that trick the eye on cereal boxes and in psychology textbooks.

In other words, a rational point of view would lead us to judge moral worth based on the consequences of an action–utilitarianism.

But when Pinker describes the lastest research in moral psychology, that research shows why we are not utilitarians.

“Joshua Greene, a philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist, suggests that evolution equipped people with a revulsion to manhandling an innocent person. This instinct, he suggests, tends to overwhelm any utilitarian calculus that would tot up the lives saved and lost. The impulse against roughing up a fellow human would explain other examples in which people abjure killing one to save many, like euthanizing a hospital patient to harvest his organs and save five dying patients in need of transplants, or throwing someone out of a crowded lifeboat to keep it afloat.”

There is an interpersonal dimension of morality that includes emotional responses and reactive attitudes that often conflict with purely rational calculation, a view which is supported by MRI research in brain activity.

The moral goodness of Mother Theresa’s activity is not an illusion. It is the product of a well-functioning brain that responds to caring activities regardless of outcomes.

Aside from this peculiar account of moral illusion, Pinker’s essay is full of important information about the science of  morality.

A new report suggests human evolution accelerated as human beings moved into new environments with different selection pressures.

“The increase in human population from millions to billions in the last 10,000 years accelerated the rate of evolution because “we were in new environments to which we needed to adapt,” Harpending adds. “And with a larger population, more mutations occurred.’”

 I wonder how globalization will effect this as human beings become less confined to particular environmental niches.

The Edge (an online magazine devoted to the intersection of culture and science) has a fascinating series of brief articles from 118 scientists, social scientists, and philosophers on what they have changed their minds about.

“When thinking changes your mind, that’s philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that’s faith.
When facts change your mind, that’s science.

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?”

Check it out here.

The Kyoto University cognitive scientist Tetsuro Matsuzawa has just  published a study where he demonstrates that a group of chimpanzees have better memory functions than a test group of college students. That ought to interest our students, here close to the finals…

“Matsuzawa showed a computer screen grid of nine numbers to six chimpanzees, all trained to recognize the ascending nature of arabic numberals, and nine college students. When subjects touched one number, the others disappeared. Then they had to touch the squares in the order of the numbers that used to be there. When the original numbers remained on-screen for seven-tenths of a second, the college kids fared as well as Ayumu, the most prodigious of the chimps. Both had a success rate of 80 percent. But when the numbers flashed for just four-tenths of a second or less, Ayumu’s success rate stayed the same, while the others plummeted to 40 percent. Even with six months of training, three students still couldn’t beat Ayumu.”

So what does this mean? The Wired headline asks, “Are You Smarter Than a Chimpanzee?” but that is not the key question. Memory and intelligence are not the same—birds and squirrels have a fantastic capacity for remembering where they hid the nuts the year before.  It is what we do with our memory that makes the difference. It is entirely conceivable that other animals may have skills that supercede our own; eidetic memory may have been more necessary in the wild for the chimp ancestors than the human ancestors. What is truly interesting about this study is that we barely bat an eye anymore at the suggestion that chimps are smart—and the sea change has happened really fast: In 2000 a Chicago conference on animal behavior chaired by Jane Goodall concluded that there would no longer be any legitimate reason to claim that animals had no emotional life, nor any form of intelligence. In contrast to what was considered an appropriately skeptical academic attitude in most of the 20^th century, a new generation of researchers is now weighing in, from the notion that animals may have a natural morality (see Dwight’s blog below) to the concept of animal rationality. Some of us are saying, “It‘s about time,” after a century of critics across the board have disregarded the clear evidence of animal minds based on two cases of animals who weren’t as smart as first assumed, the horse Clever Hans and the ape Nim Chimpsky. As Frans de Waal, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Roger Fouts have pointed out in recent books, the ape capacity for morality as well as abstract thinking expressed in verbal and nonverbal language is real, and not a matter of researchers superimposing their own interpretations on animal reactions in a training program, as the Nim Chimpsky critics used to claim. As late as the 1980s I myself heard the influential linguist Thomas Sebeok lecture that animals have no rational mind activity or language comprehension whatsoever, and now, 20 years later, we are more than willing to accept the thought that not only apes, but dolphins, elephants and perhaps even dogs have some form of self-awareness, through the mirror self-recognition test.

             Add to this paradigm shift the case of Matthew Hiasi Pan, highlighting the fact that these debates about ethics and capacity for reason aren’t just academic ivory tower discussions: As of late September 2007 Pan was in danger of being sold unless the Vienna Supreme Court grant him personhood, because Pan is a chimpanzee, and the animal shelter where he has lived for 25 years is in bankruptcy. Echoing Kant’s infamous dichotomy, the Austrian legislators only recognize the status of a person, and the status of a thing, and as of now, Matthew Hiasi Pan is a thing. In England, New Zealand and Australia apes are considered hominids with limited rights. It seems that Austria is about to have a debate about personhood on their hands. Stay tuned.

Time Magazine’s cover story for their December 3 issue is a fascinating summary of recent work in understanding the biological and evolutionary basis of morality.

“The deepest foundation on which morality is built is the phenomenon of empathy, the understanding that what hurts me would feel the same way to you. And human ego notwithstanding, it’s a quality that other species share.”

This research, which includes animal studies, investigations into the neurobiology associated with moral behavior, and child development studies, suggests that human beings have a genetically encoded moral compass that has emerged through eons of evolution.

This research is in its infancy and there are limits to how much science can tell us about moral conduct. However, if the research stands up to scrutiny, there are a variety of widely held myths that must be set aside.

Myth #1 would be the pernicious belief in original sin–the doctrine that human beings are inherently corrupt and can lead morally good lives only through God’s grace. Apparently, the capacity for morality is as deeply embedded in human nature as the capacity for savagery.

Myth #2 is the belief that, because evolution prescribes  ”survival of the fittest”, evolution has designed us to be self absorbed moral cretins eager to slay anything that piddles on our property. Instead, apparently, “fitness” is in part bound up with the capacity to recognize and respond to the vulnerability of other human beings.

Myth #3 is the idea that becoming moral is a matter of overcoming our animal nature, an idea for which we have Christianity and Kant to thank. Apparently, to be moral we ought to embrace our animal nature–an idea for which we have Nietzche to thank.

Myth #4 is related to #3–the idea that becoming moral is a matter of becoming more rational and less emotional. Apparently, it is rational to embrace at least some of our emotional responses.

This biological and psychological research reduces the plausibility of Kantian and (some?) utilitarian moral frameworks. It enhances the plausibility of Aristotelian ethics and the ethics of care because both revel in the goodness of being animal.