The Fog Blog

No blogging for a while; I'll be in Ireland visiting family, and here until July 26th.

For and against (roughly) the a priori, by two of the brightest and best bloggers around. (Follow the comments.)

Here's a Map of things to do in Budapest, from Crooked Timber; it has advice on what one can do in Budapest, if one happens to be going there this summer. I'm extremely happy to say that I am such a one! In just about a week I'll be heading home for a short visit to Ireland, followed by a two week seminar entitled "Aspects of Moral Responsibility" at the Central European University in Budapest: I recently received news that I've been accepted on this interesting-sounding course!

This is an extremely interesting post by Eric Schwitzgebel on the Psychology of Philosophy, urging us, as philosophers, to do more empirical work to try, for example, to figure out why we hold the views we do.

I especially liked the following passage:

Typically, philosophers present themselves as believing things for good reasons, because the arguments compel it. This is of course almost entirely bogus, and here’s how I know that: On day one of your first class in normative ethics, you were either sympathetic or unsympathetic to consequentialism. Those sympathies almost certainly didn’t change by the end of the class. Since at the beginning of the class, you had no appreciation of the subtle arguments pro and con, those subtle arguments can’t really be what’s driving your view. Almost always, I find, we are immediately attracted to or repulsed by philosophical views – long before we really appreciate the arguments, long before we have a sense of what philosophers of different leanings consider to be fatal objections to our views – and those attractions and repulsions don’t change much over time. So why do you love (or hate) Kantian ethics? Why do you accept (or reject) compatibilism about free will? Why do you think metaphysical idealism has to be false? If it’s not a deep understanding of the arguments, what is it? I doubt you have much idea.

Schwitzgebel admits that even a suspiciously motivated view may end up being the correct one on a given question, but he thinks that the understanding we would gain as a result of trying empirically to discover the psychological roots of our various philosophical views and commitments would be valuable. To this end, he calls for an expansion in the activities of experimental philosophy.

Schwitzgebel thinks that this sort of enterprise -- the psychology of philosophy (rather than vice versa) -- is a subfield of philosophy that "has not been pursued seriously since the time of Nietzsche, James, and Dewey"; the time is ripe, he thinks, for it once more to be the focus of our attention.

Good grief! (For context, see my post on Existential Risk.)

Posted by James Miller at Overcoming Bias.

What is the probability of the Large Hadron Collider destroying the universe? -

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will create conditions “last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.”  A lawsuit has been filed to prevent the LHC from being turned on for fear that it might destroy the earth or perhaps even the universe.  Some scientists associated with the LHC have stated that the LHC is safe to operate.

But, as the Dilbert Blog points out, should we trust these scientists’ stated opinions?  Scott Adams writes:

“And who exactly ran the numbers to decide it wasn’t that risky? After all, the whole point of the Large Hadron Collider is to create conditions that are not predictable. If someone already predicted what would happen using nothing but his laptop and Excel, and determined it was safe, I don’t think we’re getting our $8 billion worth.

I can’t see the management of this project spending $8 billion, realizing it was a huge boner, and then holding a press conference suggesting it be turned into a parking garage. I’ll bet a lot of people in that position would take at least a 5% risk of incinerating the galaxy versus incinerating their own careers. I know I would.

If the lawsuit succeeds, imagine trying to get another job with that project failure on your resume.

Interviewer: 'So, you spent $8 billion dollars trying to build a machine that would either discover something cool or destroy the universe. Is it fair to say you are not a people person?'”

Some of this blogs’ readers and writer seem to know a lot about physics.  Here is a question for you:

(1)  What is the probability that the LHC will destroy the visible universe?

If you think the answer is zero please don’t bother posting a comment since your knowledge of probability theory is insufficient for your comment to be informative. 

And here is a question for everyone:

(2)  For what answers to (1) should the LHC be prevented from operating?

[Overcoming Bias]

Philosophers' Carnival #71 is here.

On the back of my recent posts about dolphins, non-human and human animals in general, what "intelligence" is, various animals' relative "importance", etc., I was greatly interested to read this post at Practical Ethics. As well as reading the main post, it's also worth following the links, and in particular the first link to an article in New Scientist entitled So you think humans are unique?

Posted by Rebecca Roache at Practical Ethics -

The New Scientist recently reviewed a variety of studies showing that many traits often supposed unique to humans are in fact shared by animals. There is evidence that apes, dolphins, songbirds, elephants, chimpanzees, and monkeys share with humans some of the most important aspects of behaviour associated with speech; killer whales have distinct cultural groups; great apes and some monkeys have a degree of understanding of the minds of others, enabling them to deceive; chimpanzees, gorillas, and crows use tools; and there is suggestive evidence that elephants, magpies, baboons, whales, and chimpanzees demonstrate emotional behaviour, and that monkeys and rats are capable of drawing primitive moral distinctions.

Claims that animals have capacities usually thought unique to humans are controversial, and those who make them are often accused of anthropomorphising animal behaviour. Plausibly, there is often more to such accusations than concern for explanatory parsimony. As humans, we profit from using animals—for food, research, sport, and so on—in ways that we would not use other humans, and suggestions that animals are more like humans than we usually suppose place an unwelcome demand on society to rethink its ethical stance towards animals. This suggests that a clear division between humans and other species is important to us in justifying the discrepancies between what we view as ethical treatment of other humans and what we view as ethical treatment of non-human animals. Pragmatically speaking, if we humans wish to retain a privileged moral status, and if our privileged moral status is at least partly due to our being different to other animals in certain important (usually biologically-based) respects, then it is in our interests to resist attempts to draw similarities between humans and other animals.

However, the claim that all humans enjoy a higher moral status than all non-human animals is threatened not only by important biological similarities between humans and other animals, but also by important biological dissimilarities among humans. Philosophers like Peter Singer observe that certain humans, including infants and the mentally disabled, have mental capacities that more closely resemble those of certain non-human animals than those of adult, healthy humans. And David Hull has argued that "it is simply not true that all organisms that belong to Homo sapiens as a biological species are essentially the same" [1]: specifically, any property possessed only by humans is not possessed by all humans, and any property that is possessed by all humans is not unique to humans. This means that there is no group of properties possessed by all and only humans, in virtue of which we can claim to enjoy a privileged moral status. The upshot of this, in essence, is that one’s moral status is not properly determined by one’s species.

These observations about human differences and their ethical implications are familiar to academic philosophers, but are rarely mentioned in public debate. To the extent that there is public debate about humanity, it usually focuses on emphasising similarities between humans and playing down our differences. Issues such as racism, sexism, and homophobia make this attitude understandable. However, the explosion in discoveries of human "genes for"—including a gene for obesity, a gene for left-handedness, a gene for obsessive behaviour, and even a Jewish gene for intelligence—shifts the focus from human similarities to human differences. Genetic engineering to improve physical and mental capacities could in the future increase genetic diversity among humans, if widely adopted. Either way, an increasing awareness that humans differ in as many ways as they are similar seems inevitable.

Is this a good thing? I believe that, potentially, it is a very positive thing. Delineating moral status along species lines may be convenient, but it is crude. It encourages the view that all humans have equal needs, and that it is acceptable to treat non-human animals in ways that we would never treat even those humans of comparable sentience and cognitive abilities. Focusing on genetic similarities and differences between individuals could greatly improve society’s abilities to meet the needs of those individuals, whether or not they are human. Ethically, this would be a huge step forward for humans, and especially for other animals.

Reference

[1] Hull, D. L. (1986) "On Human Nature", PSA 2: 3-13.

[Practical Ethics]

For an interesting and somewhat alarmingly radical (compatibilist) perspective on free will, see here, at Overcoming Bias. Of particular interest to me (I am generally sympathetic to his views on these matters in any case) were Kip Werking's remarks in the comments: scroll down to read these.

UPDATE: Kip Werking has brought the above post at Overcoming Bias to the attention of GFP, here; discussion may follow.

UPDATE(2): Next installment by Eliezer Yudkowsky at Overcoming Bias is here.

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