tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37114038206846188582024-03-13T08:54:40.916-07:00Juridical CoherenceTheory on framework issuesStephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.comBlogger74125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-43627753391453053112017-07-24T16:03:00.000-07:002017-09-03T19:47:28.637-07:0027.2. Epistemological implications of a reduction of theoretical implausibility to cognitive dissonance<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The
Aronsonian re-interpretation of cognitive dissonance <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2017/02/270-cognitive-dissonance-glue-of-mind.html">as
caused by ideas in conflict with self-image</a> forestalled some obvious
applications to philosophical issues lying at the border with psychology. As the
action-oriented approach suggests, when Festinger's theory is deepened to
pertain to the relations between far-mode and near-mode representations, the
similarity between cognitive dissonance and theoretical plausibility becomes
almost obvious. Implausibility has the same properties and role as cognitive
dissonance. It is an aversive state that can motivate a change in far-mode
beliefs, and the change is toward a form of coherence among beliefs. Rival
theories can be rated on a single dimension of plausibility in the same way
that they evoke different degrees of dissonance. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The
reduction of implausibility to cognitive dissonance bears significant
philosophical weight. It denies both Bayesian and coherentist theories of
knowledge. The fashionable Bayesian interpretation of implausibility is in
terms of degrees of rational belief. A theory is implausible according to the
Bayesian School when it possesses a low a priori probability. But we don't
thereby scale our beliefs for rationality if we scale beliefs by how much
dissonance they cause. Moreover, to scale them by rationality would require
that we have some independent reason for thinking, apart from the comparative cognitive
dissonance they arouse, that one theory is more rational than is the other.
Scaling our beliefs by the cognitive dissonance they arouse cannot itself be
justified on a priori grounds, since dissonance reduction often takes us
systematically away from the truth, as in fact is the case in most experimental
studies of dissonance. (This helps explain why the identity of dissonance and
implausibility hasn't previously been noted.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Regarding
the other negative implication of the dissonance account of implausibility - coherentist
theories of knowledge haven't arrived at a clear meaning of
"coherence," but coherentist theories emphasize logical and
explanatory relations among far-mode ideas (although recent versions have included
the role of ideas derived directly from perception). The dissonance theory of
implausibility holds that dissonance is aroused by pragmatic incompatibility
between near-mode and far-mode cognition. However, we don't seem to be immune
to conflicts between our far-mode ideas, although the extent to which we are -
the extent of the immunity to far-mode hypocrisy - tends to surprise many of
us. The resolution of this problem is that the <a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/10/sex-is-near-love-is-far.html">logical
analysis </a>of the relations between far-mode ideas is itself a near-mode
activity. (Consider that the practice of mathematics is near-mode, as much as
its content is abstract.) We are sensitive to inconsistencies in far-mode ideas
only to the extent that we draw upon them in our analytical practices - and to
the extent that our own activity involves such practices. Those involved in
expounding a doctrine or acting in its terms will be subject to dissonance to
the extent that far-mode ideas pragmatically conflict with the performance of their
analytical performances.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The
dissonance theory of plausibility also bears on the mystery of the conjuring up
of theoretical terms. We know that scientific theories go beyond the empirical
evidence, as in principle there are infinitely many theories consistent with
any set of empirical facts. On the dissonance account of plausibility, theory
creation and acceptance is driven by dissonance reduction. Far-mode theories
promote scientific practices by energizing them. They do this by providing the
framework in which scientists work. If work is to be systematic, a framework is
necessary, but are the declarative propositions the framework expresses true?
Do they have a probability of truth? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Scientific
Realist philosophers of science have argued convincingly that theoretical
propositions in science often purport to be true, but nobody has come close to
providing an account of what it means for an abstract theory to be probable, such
that we can inquire regarding the epistemic probability that Newtonian physics
was true. The notion that we have rational degrees of belief in theories does
accord with some intuitions. Plausibility must allow at least ordinal ranking,
since dissonance involves choice between different cognitive states according
to their plausibility. This in turn means that the laws of probability apply to
ordinal relations. For example, the plausibility of Theory A and Theory B will
never be greater than the plausibility of Theory A. But let me suggest that
even this is a product of dissonance as shaped by theoretical development, as
is shown in studies showing that in many situations we empirically find the
conjunction fallacy compelling - that is, plausible.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Sometimes
the search for dissonance reduction leads to truth, and sometimes it leads away
from truth. Rationality is a limiting case of dissonance reduction, but it's
one impossible to specify except from within a psyche subject to the laws of
cognitive dissonance. Then this problem: how do we even express the expectation
that scientific theories get closer to the truth and religious theories do not?
We can say that scientific theories depend on experimental and observational
practices and therefore have at least the possibility of resting on actual
evidence. We can say scientific theories have greater plausibility than
religious theories, these both being judgments that are a product of the law of
dissonance. But, counter-intuitively (at least for me), we can't say that
scientific theories are more probable than religious theories. It isn't, it's
important to notice, that we don't know which is more probable. Rather, the
whole notion of probability as applied to theories is misbegotten. That a
theory is implausible or plausible is a far-mode conclusion, and far-mode
doesn't deal in the relative frequencies modeled by the probability calculus. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">A
simple example might be clarifying in showing the limits of the concept of
probability and its closeness to near-mode experience. During the last
presidential election, pollsters arrived at estimates of the probability of
winning for each candidate. Pollsters use mainly near-mode reasoning to
engineer the best predictive formulas. The pollsters substantially agreed, as
you would expect when they each applied similar methodologies, all based on
simple extrapolation of the near-mode process of sampling and generalizing to a
defined population. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The accuracy of these conclusions, however, depended on
certain far-mode assumptions, such as that people taking polls respond
honestly. What if this assumption didn't hold? Well, it didn't; Trump won and
the main reason the polls got it wrong was (or might have been, if you prefer)
that voters polled weren't honest about their preferences. We might ask, what
should have been the true probability estimate, given that the pollsters didn't
take into account the probability that their model was based on false
assumptions. How should they have taken this into account? Probability estimates
result from the near-mode operation of fitting observation to a relative
frequency model. We can complicate the model to take account of more
information, but what we can't do is adjust the probability estimate to take
account of the model's own fallibility. (At a deeper level, Bayesian estimates
can’t adjust for the probability that the Bayesian methodology itself is
invalid—as I contend it is in fact.) If it makes sense to assign a probability
to a theory being true, how much belief should be accorded in some idealized
rational world, then it should be possible to approximate that probability.
Someone can adjust it "intuitively," but my point is that there is
nothing appropriate for an intuition to be about. Theoretical plausibility is
not probability. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">At
this point arises a skeptical temptation, for not only is our knowledge not
absolute, it isn't even probable.
Plausibility can systematically take us away from knowledge. We seem to long
for a rationale for doing the rational thing, and such a rationale is supplied
when knowledge and rational conduct is represented by Bayesian and
decision-theoretic formulas. We see ourselves as free and availed of (mentally)
unlimited choice. We are rational because we choose to be, and that entails
that the choice itself be rational. But our possibilities aren't unlimited,
freely chosen. Our ideas will evolve </span><a href="http://disputedissues.blogspot.com/2017/06/a-model-of-persuasion.html" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">in
accordance with the demands of cognitive dissonance</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> or else </span><a href="http://disputedissues.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-role-of-suggestion-in-persuasive.html" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">moved
by receptivity to suggestion</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">. There's <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/search/label/free%20will">no "free will" to seize the initiative</a>, and no direct access to rationality to guide us.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><b>Usage note:</b> Far-mode and near-mode are alternative terms (contributed by Robin Hanson) for the abstracting and concretizing mindset of Trope and Liberman's Construal Level Theory. I use them interchangeably. </span></div>
Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-77981633064138613432017-04-30T22:59:00.002-07:002017-04-30T23:00:35.154-07:0027.1 Cognitive-dissonance theory applied to writing styles<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">See my other blog <i>Disputed Issues. </i><a href="http://disputedissues.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-role-of-suggestion-in-persuasive.html">"The Role of Suggestion in Persuasive Writing: 'What is Classic Prose?' Revisited"</a></span>Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-78402937557299553502017-02-26T15:24:00.003-08:002017-04-01T15:11:47.268-07:0027.0. Cognitive Dissonance: The Glue of the Mind<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Two of the most
significant framework theories in social psychology in the past half century
have been Leon Festinger's </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">theory of cognitive
dissonance</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> and Trope and Liberman's </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construal_level_theory" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">theory of construal
level</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">. Although these theories haven't been previously integrated, they
each contain the answer to the most significant puzzle presented by the other.
For those with some familiarity with both theories, each of which has been
treated in my blogs, the conclusion can be briefly stated: cognitive dissonance
is elicited by discrepancies between abstract and concrete representations.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";">The theory of
cognitive dissonance was a framework theory with deep implications that were
best appreciated by Roger Brown in the classic text <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Social Psychology</i> (1965). Cognitive dissonance theory expressed the
insight that the human detestation of ambivalence was at the center of the
evolution of beliefs. Brown saw that Freud's insights into the repression of
threatening ideation could be conceived as a reaction to the engendered
ambivalence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";">Cognitive dissonance
theory was subsequently reduced to the platitudinous by its leading expositor,
the social psychologist Scott Aronson, when he concluded that cognitive
dissonance is aroused only by inconsistency with an agent's positive
self-regard, reinterpreting the reduction of dissonance as limited to
self-justification. The different interpretations can be illustrated in the paradigm
<a href="https://faculty.washington.edu/jdb/345/345%20Articles/Festinger%20&%20Carlsmith.pdf">$1/$20
experiment</a>, where subjects changed their views more toward the views
receiving a token payment for their advocacy than did subjects paid a
substantial amount. On Festinger's original account, the subjects in the
token-payment condition suffered more cognitive dissonance, because the
knowledge that they are advocating something different from what they actually
believe is an inconsistent mental state. Whereas, on Aronson's
self-justification account, the inconsistency is not between the beliefs
expressed and the beliefs held but between the expression of bogus beliefs and subjects’
positive self-concept. Aronson contended that subjects resist thinking of
themselves as the sort of persons who would deceive others to their detriment
about one's own beliefs for no substantial reason.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";">If cognitive-dissonance
theory concerns defensive self-justification, its impressiveness would lie not
in its enunciating a new psychological principle but rather in showing that the
otherwise banal self-justification hypothesis reaches further than we expect.
But to establish that the $1 and $20 experiment concerns self-justification,
Aronson needs evidence that agents think it more honorable to lie for a large
reward than for a small one. This is far from obvious given that the criminal law
on the subject says the opposite: the transgressor's gain increases the
severity of fraud.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";">Festinger was on the
right track. What repels subjects is ambiguity and ambivalence. Cognitive
dissonance is more fundamental than self-justification; it may provide the
explanation for the human tendency to self-justify, and it potentially explains
much more. Festinger’s theory is consistent with Sigmund Freud's view that
conative overload is the driving force for ego defense.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";">Festinger's theory isn’t
explicit about the nature of the inconsistency. Festinger says that usually
agents don't tell a falsehood for no good reason. But it isn't the case that
all expectancy failures arouse dissonance. When Festinger presents the theory
more formally, he explains that cognitions A and B are dissonant when A implies
B's obverse, a term for which Festinger provides no logical analysis. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";">A new interpretation
of cognitive-dissonance theory in the Festingerian hatred-of-ambivalence
tradition is the <a href="http://www.psych.nyu.edu/amodiolab/Publications_files/Harmon-Jones_Advances_2009.pdf">action-oriented
account </a>proposed by Harmon-Jones and colleagues, who, first, recognized <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that the state of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cognition</i> giving rise to cognitive dissonance should be
distinguished from the uncomfortable <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">emotional</i>
state. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Discrepant</i> cognitions are
said<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to produce dissonance, where cognitions
are discrepant if they have opposed implications for action. They facilitate or
impair a line of conduct, as is consistent with experimental evidence that
dissonance starts when agents <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">commit</i>
to specific conduct, at which<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>point
agents marshal their mental resources to actually carry out their commitments.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";">Thus, when subjects in
the $1 and $20 experiment commit to the bargain by agreeing to lie, they will
be best equipped to carry out their commitment either if they are motivated to
earn $20, or if they can convince themselves that the communication is true.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";">The action-based
interpretation of cognitive-dissonance theory resolves the major theoretical
problem facing another theory in social psychology, construal-level theory,
which proposes that the deployment of abstract and concrete concepts functions
as separate systems. Agents, accordingly, can hold abstract beliefs that are in
logical tension, even contradiction. This has led at least one commentator to
conclude that abstract beliefs evolved for purposes related to social
signaling. But for signaling to be viable, abstract belief must be subject to
concrete belief to some substantial degree.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";">On the present view, the
primary function of abstract thought is the self-regulation of concrete
conation. The direct manipulation of the world for practical purposes is a
function of concrete thought. But abstract thought, while not directive for action,
serves to energize (or de-energize) it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";">Cognitive-dissonance
theory explains how agents may be induced to change their abstract beliefs due
to pressure <span style="font-family: "verdana" , "sans-serif";">from </span>concrete experience. The balancing act that an explanation
must accomplish is to permit abstract logical contradictions while also prohibiting
tensions logically weaker. This is accomplished by making the cognitive
discrepancy between abstract and concrete representations pragmatic rather than
logical. These tensions are perhaps the only means we have for rational
influence on far-mode beliefs. While logical contradiction is not necessarily
dissonant, sometimes it is.</span></div>
Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-54251909457635997832015-06-22T17:29:00.000-07:002015-07-14T13:15:04.382-07:0026.0. Consciousness, communication, and the pursuit of happiness<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Happiness requires conscious awareness<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman reports as his
most important insight: events affect our happiness only while
we’re aware of them. Discovering the capacities that conscious awareness confers
on human performance has proven daunting; even the old paradigm case for
necessary conscious awareness, sight, is possible in neurology
patients lacking conscious awareness of visual information. The strict
proposition that happiness is completely dependent on the contents of
consciousness should give psychologists pause, as happiness and unhappiness may
be awareness’s only identified consequences. Kahneman cites supporting studies,
but in fact his conclusion can be reached by reflection, as by considering an
example he supplies: the pleasure an owner receives from a luxury automobile is
limited to that obtained when dwelling on it. “The answer may surprise you but
is straightforward: you get pleasure or displeasure when you think about your
car, which is probably not very often.” The issue isn’t just that we define happiness
as a conscious state of mind but that humans care exclusively about what we’re
conscious of. But—this is the reason Kahneman’s insight can be reached by pure
reflection—the sense in which we care only about what’s conscious is the sense
of care implying conscious awareness: we don’t <i>consciously</i> care about what isn’t conscious. A tautology; what’s
remarkable is that—despite our goal-directed
behavior being driven by preconscious motives—we attach supreme importance
to those rewards that find representation in conscious awareness, seeing ourselves as holding a specific self-interest in the hedonic valence (degree of positivity or negativity) of our
conscious mental states. As Freud wrote, “What [does everybody] demand of life
and wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They
strive for happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Demonstrating the logical eliminability of the happiness concept are nonhedonic ethical theories
that, </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">by defining utility as the satisfaction of preferences,</span> dispense with conscious satisfaction as the criterion for well-being, which they peculiarly imply is enhanced by merely formal “satisfaction” obtaining after death. That
the doctrine gains any traction (mainly with economists looking to rationalize
the market as stage for “revealed preference”) points to the <i>logical</i> arbitrariness of the happiness
criterion of well-being. Yet its distance from the actual human investment in
the happiness construct makes this version of utilitarianism seem absurd. On
the other hand, limiting the concept of utility to satisfactions that the agent
learns of—disregarding their subjective valence—seems arbitrary. (If satisfaction
matters even if it brings no pleasure, why should the agent have to learn of
the occurrence?) Happiness is the referent of utility in a compelling
utilitarianism where the emotional valence of experience produces a complete
ordering of outcomes. But the seductiveness of pleasure utilitarianism depends on
falsely assuming the possibility of comparing all appetitive and aversive
reinforcers based on their intensity, usurping through valence the explanatory
tasks of habit. There is no single dimension of abstract valence.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Conscious awareness is a linguistic adaptation<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Our concept of happiness incorporates the elevated
importance we attach to our conscious valences, but the choice of the particular
valences we value must be something of a personal and cultural construct. What
explains the elevated moral importance we attach to conscious valences? The
function of the outward manifestation of affect is communication, and the
importance of communication in the evolution of human emotion is shown in the
interconnection between the brain’s emotional circuits and the facial
musculature. Since emotion is expressive, linguistic organisms would presumably
find it useful to articulate information previously conveyed mainly by the
face. We know by introspection that we can’t articulate a thought without
thinking it consciously. (I’ll return to the broader significance of this
truism.). This provides a skeletal evolutionary account as to why emotional
valence is prominent among the contents of consciousness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The foregoing by itself doesn’t explain why we regard
conscious emotional valence as the sum and substance of well-being. A recanted<a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/05/why-happiness.html"> insight into the function of happiness by social scientist Robin Hanson</a> helps with an answer. Hanson proposed that happiness
evolved to signal satisfaction with group, and he provided evidence of the link
between happiness and satisfactory affiliation: the smile as both an expression
of joy and submission and the role of pain as a cry for help. I would add: 1) we
respond to the unhappiness of others around us as being reproachful; 2)
Kahneman again, “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the
experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.” In their
struggle for existence, organisms would benefit if they could articulate the
degree of their satisfaction with their fellows to negotiate adjustments. The
importance of conscious valence in our concept of well-being expresses
humanity’s deep sociality.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One further theoretical step takes us to a theory of the
adaptive function of conscious awareness itself, the following theory being
almost obvious in light of the role of conscious emotional valence. Humans are
conscious of information that prehistorically was adaptive to communicate to
our fellows, making awareness fundamentally an instrument of communication
rather than of thought. One activity introspection shows we can’t perform without
consciousness is that of articulating our thoughts in speech. What Freud called the
Preconscious may suffice for everything except communication.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">“Awareness,” as I hope has been clear, refers to mental contents (that is, to information),
<a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/search/label/qualia">not to (illusory)
phenomenal qualities</a>. My concern here is with the specific awareness of
valence. We can now meaningfully ask whether nonlinguistic animals have similar
valences. Are they happy or unhappy? If conscious awareness is a linguistic
adaptation, we shouldn’t expect it in nonlinguistic animals. Presumably having
implication for neurophysiology, the conclusion that nonlinguistic animals don’t
have conscious awareness doesn’t seem to imply new conclusions about their
behavior. But for some moral realists, it might have implications for animal
entitlements, since organisms incapable of happiness are free of suffering. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-43787119121226310682014-11-12T18:46:00.003-08:002015-12-31T12:40:41.971-08:0025.0. Authorized police prevarication as a clue to the nature of the state<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One-hundred-fifty
militarized riot police, bearing assault rifles and worse, faced off in
Ferguson against unarmed protesters. Shallow reformers cried “police
dysfunction”; many accused the police of white racism (really only a
plea for a more diverse police). The police dysfunctionalists view the police
as “servants of the public” gone astray—or, perhaps, run amok. But others deny that
the police—who have a definite sociological character quite the opposite of
being servants of the people—can be reformed. They’re indeed servants, but the
public isn’t their master. Rather, the police are the tool of moneyed elites; the
police serve to dominate multitudes in elitist interests, and they served their
purpose by making a show of military might. </span><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The drive
to ground state authority in raw power by shock and awe is accentuated in an
economically polarized and culturally divided society, where the police can no
longer even pretend to serve a unified public.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">License to
lie</span></span></b></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">My narrow focus
will be on a single clue to the nature of the police: their universal enjoyment
of a license to lie to the public. In no jurisdictions, of course, do police
enjoy the <i>legal</i> right to lie to <i>courts</i> (although in every jurisdiction
they often do), and the United States, by allowing investigators to lie during
interrogation, further than some other countries, extends the license. The foregoing
lies are either prohibited by law or subject to public debate, whereas lies
to arbitrary members of the public are <i>never</i>
punished as crimes.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">On what
subjects do the police—not just with impunity but approbation—lie? They lie
about rights of citizens: it is routine for the police to ask citizens lawfully
in their own homes or perambulating the neighborhood for identification papers,
even expressly claiming they have the right to see them in jurisdictions (like
California) where they have no such right. Police will also tell citizens that
they can’t use a given piece of angry language when on their own property.
Other examples will occur to people in different walks of life. The police lie about their intent: "We just want to talk to you." Police
prevarication is common knowledge, but it wasn’t always; once, law students
were surprised upon being instructed regarding the police license to lie, about
which, today, the police are heard to openly brag.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Servants don’t
claim the <i>right</i> to lie to their
masters. That some countries may have peculiarities isn’t to be denied; what is
striking is the license’s universality. As far as I can discover, no
jurisdiction criminalizes informal police prevarication. <span style="color: red;">Whether it be only among the police themselves (when their
license to lie is semisecret) or the broader public (when the police flaunt
it), the license to lie serves to differentiate the police from the population
as the sole possessors of a <i>right</i> to
moral turpitude.</span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Some will
contend that, to infiltrate the mob, the police must lie. The <i>secret</i> police are outside the scope of
this essay because they raise different associated problems, not those of
personnel who <i>represent themselves to the
public</i> as state officials, yet avoid the otherwise general criminal
prohibition on official misrepresentation.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Consequences</span></span></b></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">A general
consequence is that, <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2011/12/14-why-do-what-oughta-habit-theory-of.html">morality
being fundamentally habitual</a>, the officerly habit of lying increases the
incidence of police perjury. In circumstances where the public doesn’t know
about the license to lie, the result is expansion of arbitrary police power.
When it is known, a hazardous uncertainty is, in addition, created. <span style="color: red;">Increasingly, you can’t know whether the police are telling
you the truth about vital matters without placing yourself it risk.</span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">A horrific
example was the <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/ohio-wal-mart-where-cops-shot-black-man-pulls-pellet-n215156">Ohio
Walmart shooting</a> of a youth holding a pellet gun that was part of the store’s
merchandise. A veritable SWAT team responded to a meritless complaint, and the
police demanded he drop the gun. Did the police have the legal right to make
this demand? When the youth had a moment of doubt, he lost his life.</span></span></div>
Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-43431908603134228502014-09-07T19:01:00.001-07:002014-09-12T13:43:37.077-07:0024.0. Abstract construal is offline thinking<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The
foundation of </span><a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/03/150-taxonomy-of-political-ideologies.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">construal-level
theory</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> doesn’t </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">seem</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> to be a
“framework” matter (</span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">per</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> this blog’s
subtitle), but I will treat it so by contending the theory describes how two
basic forms of human cognition differ; in fact, no less than how human
cognition differs from that of nonhuman animals. To glimpse these
underpinnings, we must descend beneath the experimental findings, which provide
the semblance of a continuous dimension, to the ultimate binary opposition
between </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">online</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> and </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">offline</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> cognition.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">These two
forms of cognition were distinguished by linguist Derek
Bickerton. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Language-Species-Derek-Bickerton/dp/0226046109/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410139925&sr=8-1&keywords=language+and+species">Language
and species<span style="font-style: normal;"> (1990)</span></a></i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Language-Human-Behavior-Jessie-Lectures/dp/0295974583/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1410139624&sr=1-10&keywords=derek+bickerton">Language
and human behavior<span style="font-style: normal;"> (1996)</span></a></i>, and
others.) They refer to brain processes that depend for their elicitation on
external stimulus (online), versus processes that can originate autonomously
from internal processing (offline). Offline processing, an evolutionary product
of language, originated in the long development of protolanguage—language-based
concepts without syntax for their manipulation—by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">homo erectus</i>; and marking the beginning of our species, the sudden
emergence of syntax. Protolanguage provided the neural space for primitive
offline processing, as when our ancestors could call up the thought of
potential prey—without its having any particular empirical presence—by having
learned the term for woolly mammoth. With syntax came the ability to think of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">anything</i>. Thus, language evolved, more than as a tool for communication, as a vehicle for thought. (The most basic
argument is that language could not have developed for communication because
the ability to communicate depends on the listener’s ability to understand. A
language mutation in a single organism, serving communication, would be
useless.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Online</span></i><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"> processing can be applied
exclusively to matter that is immediately present. Only the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">offline</i> variety of thinking, created by
language—gradually through protolanguage and punctuatedly through syntax—enables
abstraction. Distance and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>abstraction
are the fundamental facets of construal level.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">One way
that abstractness and psychological distance seem to differ from offline
processing is that construal level is a continuum, whereas offline/online processing
is a dichotomy. Intermediate construal levels must be generated from elemental proportions.
The dichotomous underpinnings of construal level are apparent in absolutely
extreme construal levels—pure expressions; some processes are entirely online,
like scratching an itch, and others, like thinking about metaphysics, are
entirely offline. This pattern differs from dimensions, such as intelligence or
extraversion, which are unbounded, without maxima. Construal level reveals its
dichotomous essence in its modelike quality: a concrete/near and abstract/far
polarity, despite the presence—even predominance—of intermediates.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">I’m aware
of one interpretation alternative to construal level as degree of offline
processing. It comes from economist Robin Hanson’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">homo hypocritus</i> theory, which, among other interesting claims, <a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/04/two-faced-brains.html">holds that abstract
construal serves impression management</a>. Hanson’s theory says that our
ancestors evolved mental modes involving concrete and abstract construal
(Hanson terms them “near-mode” and “far-mode”) under pressure for separating
the functions related to representing things as they are, on the one hand, and
on the other, representing the self as we would like to be perceived. For
Hanson, abstract construal is mainly about our ideals. Accordingly, he
identifies abstract construal with Freud’s super-ego (conscientious tendency)
and concrete construal with the id (impulses for immediate gratification).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">On the
present offline-processing analysis, abstract construal serves foresight more
than moral hypocrisy, although morality and moral hypocrisy do require offline
processes; in fact, they <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/10/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html">seem
particularly insulated from online processing</a>, and practical offline
processing generally depends on the testing of abstract intuitions against
concrete facts. Thus harnessed, offline thinking serves foresight, the abstract
construals capturing essential causal relations for the sake of accurate
long-term prediction.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The
critical concrete fact that may decide the issue in favor of online/offline
processing is that efforts at impression management, <a href="http://disputedissues.blogspot.com/2014/07/plain-talk-writing-countersignals-power.html">termed
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">signaling</i></a>, typically occurs
online, in direct communication with another person, based on immediate
perceptions. If, as Hanson claims, humans evolved two modes because the
knowledge needed to manipulate the world would contaminate human efforts to
impress others, then these modes are richly contaminated, because social
signaling, in the prototypical face-to-face interaction, relies heavily on
“near-mode” processing.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The
strongest argument for a moralistic/hypocritical adaptation behind abstract
construal is the human practice of fashioning arguments opportunistically, not
as a tool to reach correct conclusions, but only as justification, as if one
were defending against accusers. My alternative explanation is the <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2011/02/111-confusion-between-belief-and.html">opinion/belief
analysis</a>. We form and defend opinions in deliberation, whereas we act on
beliefs. Abstract construal developed (during the protolanguage stage) under
selective pressure for good deliberators.</span></div>
Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-30894044998832469862014-05-14T23:55:00.000-07:002014-09-07T19:04:45.586-07:0023.0. The death penalty and Hegel’s law of quantity into quality: The incoherence of executions<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">If the
gruesome Oklahoma execution portends the death-penalty’s demise, the reason may
have more to do with the obnoxious applause of apologists, satisfied that
justice was done, than the righteous denunciations of opponents. </span><b style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="color: red;">The arguments against
the death penalty have never been strong, mainly because, by equally impugning
incarceration, they prove too much.</span></b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> While mass incarceration and executions
both implement racism (for example), mass incarceration is the far greater racial
injustice.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Folk-logical confusion</span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: red; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The public rationale for
the death penalty is (necessarily) based on an implicit error of “folk logic”; this
error underlies its ethically coarsening consequences.</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">My
discussion is grounded in a few basic observations about the criminal-punishment
system, which is three-tiered: fines, incarceration, and death. Each tier is
supposed to correspond to a qualitative worsening of offense: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">malum prohibitum</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">malum in se</i>, and heinous crime (minimally involving murder). The rationale,
in short, is that taking a life is the ultimate crime, deserving loss of life,
the ultimate punishment. Although we can question whether loss of life is
really the worst that can happen to someone, that’s the way it’s presented, and
it perhaps necessarily appears so to the mass mind. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">But, accepting
the premise, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: red;">the
rationale pretends a nonexistent symmetry</span></b>, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: red;">the asymmetry being in the capability of one
person to inflict harm on others in great number. </span></b>If death is the
ultimate punishment, it doesn’t follow that taking life is the ultimate crime:
a criminal is but a single person capable of harming many. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The 19<sup>th</sup>-century
philosopher Georg Hegel diagnosed the cognitive bias of failing to see that change
in degree (“quantitative” change), carried far enough, produces a change in
kind (“qualitative” change). In this light, look at the banking collapse that
led to the U.S. mortgage crisis, involving crimes by bankers that have yet gone
unpunished and which would never be punished by execution. (If you need worse,
consider the industrialists who <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">funded</i>
Hitler’s ascent.) Ordinary <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2013/02/1411-utilitarianism-twice-fails.html">“thin utilitarian”</a> public-moral intuition tells us
that knowingly causing suffering for millions is worse than even the sadistic
murder of a single person; if there were a qualitative category of heinous
crimes, at some tipping point sublethal mass crimes would become heinous. You
might advise don’t stop executing murderers, rather expand execution to
heretofore unpunished crimes of massive scale, but <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: red;">we find no point of qualitative inflection</span></b>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Moralistic
misdirection</span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">From this artificial
abstraction of the act of individual murder stems the fundamental misdirection
society incurs when it institutes a death penalty, which reinforces and
accentuates the <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/03/150-taxonomy-of-political-ideologies.html">near-mode</a> bias that carves, with the knife of extraordinary public
vengeance, horrific <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">individual</i> acts
out of their <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">societal</i> context. The
social symbolism in capital punishment dwarfs (at most historical junctures) any
specific deterrence effect. Capital punishment engineers a public mentality myopically
preoccupied with vengeance against <a href="http://kanbaroo.blogspot.com/2013/12/106th-installment-lawyer-duesnot.html"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">victims</i></a>
of far worse wrongs consequently ignored. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">This
analysis rests on the insight that <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: red;">public consciousness imputes a qualitative distinction between
deeds where the law applies qualitatively different punishments</span></b>, and
it is confirmed by the fate of another potential tier of punishment. The
deliberate infliction of pain is proscribed: we don’t flog criminals; but<span style="color: red;"> <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">isn’t it curious that
we regard killing as humane and flogging not—when we might <i>execute</i> for killing, but never for nonlethal flogging?</b></span> Why the reversal of
values when assessing crimes and their punishment? My explanation is that flogging
competes with long-term incarceration, and they can’t easily co-exist, since we
would then distinguish punishments without reciprocally distinguishing crimes. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="color: red;"><b>When
flogging and stoning reappear, they serve a corresponding false distinction in
crimes,</b></span> and crimes can be special by being no crime at all; theocracies have
resurrected flogging and stoning to punish <a href="http://kanbaroo.blogspot.com/2014/02/108th-installment-three-strikes-against.html">thought crimes</a>. <b><span style="color: red;">Legally manufacturing
a spurious moral hierarchy—such as one including capital crimes—foments mass
myopia. </span></b></span></div>
Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-21435809941711921852014-03-30T20:27:00.000-07:002014-06-01T12:46:06.095-07:0022.0. The concept of belief and the nature of abstraction: A social propensity account<i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Belief</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">, puzzling to
philosophy, is part of psychology’s conceptual framework. The present essay
provides a straightforward yet novel theory of the explanatory and predictive
value of describing agents as having beliefs. The theory attributes
full-fledged beliefs exclusively to agents with linguistic capacities, but it
does so as an empirical matter rather than </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">a
priori</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">. By treating abstraction as an inherently social practice, the
dependence of full-fledged belief on language resolves a philosophical problem
regarding its possibility in a world where only concrete particulars </span><a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2013/01/191-meaning-of-existence-lessons-from.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">exist</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b>The propositional character of belief</b></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">It can appear mysterious that the content of epistemic
attitudes <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2011/02/110-confusion-between-belief-and.html">(belief
and opinion)</a> is conveyed by clauses introduced by <i>that</i>: “I believe <i>that</i> the
dog is in his house.” If beliefs were causes of behavior, our success in denoting
them gives rise to an apparently insurmountable problem: how do propositions—if
they exist at all—exist independently of human conduct, so as to be fit for
causally explaining it?</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">While belief ascriptions figure prominently in many behavioral
explanations, their propositional form indicates that they pertain to states of
information. My belief that my dog is in his house consists of the reliable use
of the information that he’s there. Not only will I reply accordingly if asked
about his location; in directing other my conduct, I may use that information.
If I want the dog to come, I will yell in the direction of his house rather
than toward his sofa. Yet, I won’t <i>always</i>
use this information: I might absent-mindedly call to my dog on the sofa
despite knowing (hence believing) that he is in his house. Believed information
can be mistakenly disregarded.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Belief “that p” is a <i>propensity</i>
to take p into rational account when p is relevant to the agent’s goals. But
taking certain information into account involves also various skills, and it must
be facilitated by the appropriate habits. The purposeful availability of
believed information is also affected by, besides skills, inhibitions, habits,
and desires.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">What becomes striking on recognizing beliefs as propensities
to use particular information is that behavior can be so successfully explained,
when we know something of an agent’s purposes, by reference to the information
on which we can predict the agent’s reliance. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Is this successful reliance a unique feature of human
cognition? We can use belief ascriptions to describe nonhuman behavior, but we
can do the same for machines. The concept of belief, however, isn’t essential
to describing nonintelligent machine behavior. When my printer’s light
indicates that it is out of paper, I might say it believes it is, particularly
if, in fact, the tray is full. </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The printer’s “belief” that it is out of paper is expressed
in two ways: it refuses to print and a light turns on, and I can refer to these
directly, without invoking the concept of belief.</span></span> Compare it to what is true of me when I
run out of paper, where my belief that I have exhausted my supply can explain
an indefinitely large set of potential behaviors, from purchasing supplies to
postponing work to expressing frustrated rage—in any of an indefinitely large
variety of manners. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Applying the concept of belief to nonhuman animals is
intermediate between applying it to machines or to humans; it can be applied to
animals more robustly than to machines. It isn’t preposterous to say that a dog
believes his bone is buried at a certain location, particularly if it’s been removed
and he still tries to retrieve it from the old location. What can give us pause
about saying the dog <i>believes</i> arises
from the severely limited conduct that’s influenced by the dog’s information
about the bone’s location, as is apparent when the dog fails, except when
hungry, to behave territorially toward the bone’s burial place.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Humans differ from canines in our capacity to carry the
information constituting a belief’s propositional content to indefinitely many
contexts. This makes belief indispensable in forecasting human behavior:
without it, we could not exploit the predictive power of knowing what
information a human agent is likely to rely on in new contexts.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">This cross-contextual consistency in use of information
seems to rest on our having language, which permits (but does not compel!) the
insertion of old information into new contexts.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b>The social representation of abstractions</b></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Explaining our cross-contextual capacities is the problem
(in the theory of knowledge) of how we manage to mentally represent
abstractions. In Kripke’s version of Wittgenstein’s private-language argument,
the problem is expressed in the dependence of concepts on extensions that are
not rule-governed. The social consensus engendered by how others apply words
provides a standard against which to measure one’s own word usage.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Abstraction relies, ultimately, on the “wisdom of crowds” in
achieving the most instrumentally effective segmentations. The source of
abstraction—a form of social coordination—lies in our capacity to intuit (but
only approximately) how others apply words.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The capacity to grasp the meanings of others’ words underlies
the fruitfulness of using believed propositions to forecast human behavior.
With language we can represent the information that another human agent is also
able to represent and can transfer to all manner of contexts. But this linguistic
requirement for full-fledged belief does not mean that people’s beliefs are always
the beliefs they claim (or believe) they have. Language allows us our
propositional knowledge about abstract informational states, but that doesn’t imply
that we have infallible access to those states—obviously not pertaining to
others but not even about ourselves. Nor does it follow that nonlinguistic
animals can have full-fledged beliefs limited only by concreteness.
Nonlinguistic animals lack full-fledged beliefs about even concrete matters
because linguistic representation is the only available means for representing
information in a way allowing its introduction to indefinitely varied contexts.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">This account relies on a weakened private-language argument
to explain abstraction as social consensus. But I reject Wittgenstein’s
argument that private language is impossible: we do have propositional states
accessible only privately. Wittgenstein’s argument proves too much, as it would
impugn also the possibility of linguistic meaning, for which there is no fact
of the matter as to how <i>society</i> must extend the meaning to new information. The
answer to the strong private-language argument is the propositional structure
of perception itself. (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Origins-Objectivity-Tyler-Burge/dp/0199581398/ref=tmm_pap_title_0">See</a> T. Burge, <i>Origins of Objectivity</i> (2010).) What language provides is a consensual standard against
which one’s (ultimately idiosyncratic) personal standard can be compared and
modified. (Notice that this invokes a dialectic between what <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2011/02/111-confusion-between-belief-and.html">I’ve
termed “opinion” and “belief.”</a>)</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">This account language's role in abstraction
justifies the early 20<sup>th</sup>-century Russian psychologist Vygotsky’s view
that <a href="http://disputedissues.blogspot.com/2011/03/can-bad-writers-be-good-thinkers-part-1.html">abstract
thought is fundamentally linguistic</a>.</span></span></div>
Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-18689661380724276982013-10-30T11:31:00.000-07:002014-01-09T12:10:03.231-08:0021.1. Status inflation and deflation: Prestige, the essence of status, permits broad alliances<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Is status a positional good?</span></b><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">As the
concept of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">social status</i> itself
attains higher status (through employment in evolutionary psychology), class
struggles over the material conditions of life are recognized as impregnated
with status aspirations. The conclusion may be drawn or implied that these
conflicts are inherently wasteful: we’d be better off if people accepted their
lot, because status is a positional good—a zero-sum game—what is won by some is
lost by others. (See, for example, Robin Hanson’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/08/inequality-is-about-grabbing.html">Inequality
talk is about grabbing</a></i>.) But it also seems that a society beset with
severe status inequality will suffer status deflation.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">One approach
to the question of whether status is a positional good is whether status is
(implicitly) measured using an ordinal scale of measurement or a higher scale,
interval or ratio, where ordinal scales express only rank, whereas interval and
ratio scales express degrees of difference. An example of an ordinal scale
expressing social status is military rank. The status of the rank of major
depends on the mass of soldiers a major outranks and the number who outrank the
major, so, if half of the captains are promoted to major, the major’s status
declines.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: red; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Social
status can seem similar to military rank, but (I contend) this is a confusion:
the social status of an entire population can rise or fall (inflate or deflate),
because the main component of social status is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">prestige</i>, which has ratio properties.</span><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"> The confusion results from conflating prestige with
dominance, more primitive and prototypical, but prestige is a ratio scale, not
an ordinal scale like dominance, because it results from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">summing</i> over <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">weighted</i> dominance
relations. Consider our major in contrast to a lieutenant under his command. The
lieutenant may have received higher grades in the military academy, he may come
from a wealthier family, and he may be the president of a nonmilitary club in
which the major participates as an ordinary member. Which has more prestige? The point
is that the question makes sense; we combine information about position in
various <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">separate</i> dominance
hierarchies with other information about their potential power to determine their
prestige, the information’s additivity implying that prestige is at least an interval
scale (probably a ratio scale), not a mere ordinal scale like dominance. Concern
with prestige (as distinct from dominance) is a human-specific trait, with few
roots other than dominance in our primate psychology.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Why prestige?</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Evolutionary
psychologists propose that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">prestige</i>
(usually referred to simply as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">status</i>,
a convention I will abide) reflects a person’s value as an ally: a high-status
person is a powerful ally. (The person with the highest prestige is <a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/09/the-functions-of-faith.html">God,
the most powerful ally</a>.) Other primates appear to have only dominance, which
suffices for simian calculations because apes, living in a single hierarchy,
don’t need to sum over different hierarchies. Humans live embedded in multiple
social hierarchies—at root, dominance relations—which must be weighted and
added to appraise an individual’s value in alliances. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">If
primordial alliances were exclusively alliances pitted against other allied humans,
prestige could still be a zero-sum game despite its ratio scaling. But the
alliances formed primordially weren’t exclusively competitive alliances:
alliances were presumably formed for foraging and child care. <span style="color: red;">Ratio-scaled prestige, a currency spanning dominance
hierarchies, allows more and broader alliances.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Two
distinct explanatory tasks regarding prestige concern its evolutionary function
and its individual motivation. Evolutionary psychologists hypothesize that
status derives from the differential value of persons as allies. The
quest for prestige aligns the individual’s efforts with adaptation: by pursuing
prestige, one becomes a more powerful ally, deriving the corresponding social
(and reproductive) advantages. But the mechanism is more complex and itself
provides additional clues about function. Prestige is a reaction formation
against envy. This agrees with the observation that we accord prestige to
those we would otherwise envy. (See Theodor Reik, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Love and Lust: On the Psychoanalysis of Romantic and Sexual Emotion</i>
regarding the idealization process—rooted in unconscious envy—in romantic love.
“Reaction formation” is a psychodynamic mechanism involving experiencing the
opposite of certain thoughts, to deny them conscious access.) </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="color: red;">Since status
is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/02/status-as-strength.html#disqus_thread">commonly
perceived value as ally</a></i>, status deflation means decreased willingness to
rely on—to ally with—others.</span> In <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2011/03/113-pathologies-of-belief-opinion.html">11.3,</a>
I discussed opinionation as a pathology of belief-opinion confusion: we are
opinionated when we fail to rely sufficiently on the opinions of experts.
<span style="color: red;">Status deflation causes irrational opinionation</span> (as well as other adverse
societal effects, <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2013/08/210-dismal-employment-picture.html">including
some relating to macroeconomics)</a>. <span style="color: red;">The modern
expression of the tendency toward excessively narrow alliances is lack of
regard for the opinions of most others, including experts.</span> At the same time, (one's own) status deflation
increases the experienced envy. In societies where status is
most deflated (typically, traditional agrarian societies), this two-pronged attack
on the sublimation of envy results in the bullheadedness of the peasant.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Countering status deflation and generating
inflation.</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Economic
inequality is a manifestation of status deflation as well as one of its causes
(as I maintained in <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2013/08/210-dismal-employment-picture.html">21.0</a>.)
In modern capitalist societies, <a href="http://www.aeonmagazine.com/living-together/peter-turchin-wealth-poverty/">the
main ways of reducing inequality</a> have been restricted immigration (to
reduce the supply of labor and increase its price) and progressive taxation.
But these policies have been applied sporadically and are only practiced weakly
in most advanced countries. Within Europe, the Common Market has opened
borders, and in the United States, wealth inequality is so high it rivals some
third-world countries. <span style="color: red;">The reason stringent immigration
control and progressive taxation are only sporadically applied is that these
methods don’t correspond to any humanly valued relational model</span>—which as
Alan P. Fiske (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Structures-Social-Life-Alan-Fiske/dp/0029066875/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1383101256&sr=8-1&keywords=structures+of+social+life">Structures
of Social Life <span style="font-style: normal;">(1991)</span></a></i>) shows, enable
the <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/search?q=fiske">moralization
of social practices</a> and, as John Bolender elaborates (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Self-Organizing-Social-Mind-Bradford-Book/dp/0262014440/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1383097741&sr=1-1&keywords=bolender+john+%22social+mind%22">The
Self-Organizing Social Mind<span style="font-style: normal;"> (2010)</span></a></i>),
correspond to the four scales of measurement. (Communal/Sharing is nominal,
Authority/Ranking is ordinal, Equality/Matching is interval, and Market/Pricing
is ratio.) A flat tax employs a ratio scale, a fact that helps account for its
ideological popularity despite its practical infirmity. To human intuition,
progressive tax rates are arbitrary. As to immigration control, absolute
restriction would correspond to Communal/Sharing, but like the flat tax rate, mere
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">reduction</i> of immigration rates doesn’t
form an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">intuitively</i> compelling public
policy. (This is not to <i>disparage</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">instrumental </i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">use</span> of either
immigration control or progressive taxation.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2013/08/210-dismal-employment-picture.html">State socialism</a>,
on the other hand, can be <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/12/180-capitalism-and-socialism-express.html">grounded in intuitive metrics</a>: equality matching
(interval scale) embedded in communal sharing (nominal scale). It has proven </span><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">not only </span>to
provide a greater degree of status equality (thus
status inflation) but also to be more durable. </span></div>
Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-17146961770972042222013-08-10T21:51:00.000-07:002014-04-06T12:45:31.683-07:0021.0. The dismal employment picture: A social-status-theory explanation<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Most economists agree automation costs jobs, but the reason it does
is unclear. Economists had theorized that automation would create more jobs
than it eliminates. This essay sketches a novel theory explaining why, today,
automation costs jobs, whereas introducing machinery into production once
created jobs and continues to create them in some economically backward
countries, particularly China. I’m not an expert on the subject, and I confine
myself to basing my theory on a few facts and principles of economics that are
widely accepted, to which I apply the nascent social-status theories from
evolutionary psychology. (Economist Robin Hanson’s blog, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/">Overcoming Bias</a></i>, which
has influenced my thinking regarding social status, contains numerous novel
applications of social-status theory.) This explanation is independent of my </span><a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/12/180-capitalism-and-socialism-express.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">previous
theorizing</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> that the tendency of rate of profit to decline is a source of
economic decline. The point of this essay is to propose that social-status
theory is relevant to macroeconomics.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Aggregate demand and the industrial revolution</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The concept taken from economics is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aggregate demand</i>. Rising aggregate demand allows the economy to
grow in the long-term, furnishing the reason economists had believed automation
would create jobs. By creating wealth more efficiently, automation permits the
employment of more workers, whose increased buying power supports their
employment.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">This logic can collapse if workers doing the new jobs are
paid less than the workers replaced in the labor force. Profits will then rise,
and while profits contribute to aggregate demand, they do so less than wages
because the profit-takers are wealthier than workers and spend less of the
increase than workers would spend. Investments in machinery increase aggregate
demand, but the profitability of these investments depends on unreliable technological
opportunities. Every modern society that has been economically expansive
long-term has raised the standard of living of the masses of people. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The fundamental reason the industrial revolution allowed
vast expansion of the economy is that expansion of the labor force occurred
primarily by turning peasants and farm workers into manufacturing workers. Workers
were paid low wages and worked as much as 14 hours a day before they organized
into unions, but still, at least in long historical perspective, their income
was better than that of the peasants they had replaced. Even today,
agricultural workers throughout the world get much lower wages than do manufacturing
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">or</i> personal-service-sector workers.
The creation of an urban working class meant an expanding economy with
expanding employment. The process is observed today in fast-motion in China,
where an expanding economy is powered by converting very poor peasants into
better-off workers, creating rising aggregate demand. This isn’t the only
tendency in the early and middle industrial revolution. In a countervailing tendency, much emphasized in the popular
imagination, skilled workers are replaced by unskilled workers. The first
tendency is stronger.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">During the past hundred years, another trend came to
dominate: the growth of the personal-service sector. “Personal-service sector” (from
which I exclude the “producer services,” which aren’t “personal”) is an
amorphous term <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>including well-paid
occupations, such as physicians, but most advanced-country workers
not employed in manufacturing goods are employed in distributing goods (wholesale
and retail sales), restaurants and hotels, and the nonprofessional health-care
sector, and these workers are everywhere paid more poorly than those employed
in manufacturing. Hence the worry about the “disappearing manufacturing jobs.”
Replacing manufacturing jobs with service-sector jobs entails slower growth in
aggregate demand. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Social-status theory from evolutionary psychology</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The question seldom addressed is why service-sector workers,
such as retail clerks, food preparers, and nursing aides, are so poorly paid. Lower
skill requirements may be <i>part</i> of the reason, but the fact that service-sector
jobs remain unskilled may itself be best explained by their inherently lower
status, which is the answer I propose. Socially stratified societies allocate
social status to the various occupations based on criteria rooted in instinct.
The personal-service occupations are accorded lower status because these
occupations carry indicia of servitude and servility. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Modern social-status theory derives from evolutionary
psychology, which emphasizes our continuity with chimpanzees, whose social life
is characterized by dominance hierarchies. But evolutionary psychology also
recognizes that bands of hunter-gatherers were usually egalitarian: “primitive
communist” societies resisting any attempts by strongmen to dominate them or
establish material or other status-based inequalities. With the
agricultural revolution, the accrual of social surpluses and the need for
large-scale social coordination both intensified and unfettered the striving for
social dominance—power, prestige, wealth—from the group control that held them
in harness throughout 90% of humankind’s span of existence, producing societies
divided into social classes.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Allocation of status depends on instinctual triggers, including
the marks of servitude: all else being equal, one who serves has less status
than the one served. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Indicia of servitude aren’t the exclusive basis for awarding
status to occupations, as demonstrated by the vast range of incomes among
occupations in the personal-service sector. Anything associated with power
increases status. Status theory can explain the higher incomes of manufacturing
workers compared to peasants and farm workers by the prestige of cities,
associated with urban power. The link between status and power might also
explain why economists of the early industrial revolution, such as Ricardo and
Marx, underestimated the ability of manufacturing workers to sustain wages
higher than the price of bare necessities: the economists could not foresee the
consequences of the comparatively high social status of workers in
manufacturing, or perhaps, the relative status of manufacturing workers wasn’t
evident to them. Even today, farm workers have far lower incomes than either
manufacturing or personal-service workers. Physicians have high status because
they command medical technologies that afford power over life or death.
Consequently, the large incomes of physicians are a new development: 19<sup>th</sup>
century physicians weren’t affluent and highly respected, since they didn’t
command the powers of modern chemistry. Occupations that require considerable
skill and demonstrate intelligence are high status. But the trend is
proliferation of personal-service jobs in retail sales, hotels and restaurants,
and health-care, where workers have low status based on bearing indicia
of servitude.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Status inheres in making useful goods that does not inhere
in providing useful services. Dwell, for a moment, on the concept “the dignity
of labor.” Even unskilled work has a dignity that is absent in personal
service; think of the fake smile a sales agent or nurses’ aide must present. Insincerely
agreeable affect is demeaning, compared even to unskilled manual labor, which
may be boring but isn’t humiliating. This is only an example—and not the most
obvious example.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The whole of society may conspire to bring about the low
wages of service-sector workers. Laws protecting full-time workers often don’t
extend to part-time workers, who are more common in the personal-service
sector. But since wages are set primarily by market pricing, the assertiveness
of the workers, especially their collective assertiveness, is probably the main
proximal mechanism by which status influences income. High status produces
confidence and sense of entitlement, a collective refusal to accept conditions
below their due, because of their station in life.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Prospects</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">These trends paint a bleak picture: rising inequality,
growing unemployment, and <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2013/10/211-status-inflation-and-deflation.html">social-status deflation</a>. Not only are the
macro-economic trends unfavorable, but the means to resist them politically diminishes
as the assertiveness of the downtrodden declines with their loss of
self-confidence and sense of class entitlement. The analysis does point to a
public policy that might slow or reverse these trends. Although no great cause
for optimism in the absence of any practical means of effecting change, I’ll end
on that note of relative optimism: we must ask how the social status of
personal-service workers might be raised. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">If the triggers for low status are
inevitably the signals of servitude inherent in these occupations, upgrading
their status entails <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">adding</i>
high-status signals. Statizing personal-service industries would accomplish
this. Government, being powerful, is high status, and all else being equal, workers
employed by government will enjoy higher status than those working in the
private sector. The evidence includes the strength of unions in the public
sector despite their obliteration elsewhere. Statization of personal services, regretably, isn’t today’s trend.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span> </div>
Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-69755599486958033492013-07-07T22:22:00.000-07:002015-05-09T13:04:48.222-07:0015.3. Why ideology types and the political spectrum match: The theory of ideological concealment<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: x-small;">4th in <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/search/label/ideology">Ideology Types series</a></span></div>
<b><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The
correspondence problem in general</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/05/151-utopianism-demagogism-and.html">unanticipated
correspondence</a> between <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/03/150-taxonomy-of-political-ideologies.html">ideology
types</a> and segments of the left-right political spectrum posed an
unexpectedly difficult theoretical problem. The solution is now at hand: you
must consider not only what the types each <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tell</i>
but also what they <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">conceal</i>. But
first, a review of the basics of construal-level theory and the theory of
ideology types.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Construal-level
theory from social psychology deals with <i>abstract construal</i> (or <i>far-mode</i>) and
<i>concrete construal</i> (or <i>near-mode</i>), where <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">abstract</i>
means lower granularity achieved by deeper cognitive processing and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">far</i> means distant (primarily) in time. The
alternative names for these perspectives on reality correspond to two facets of
construal level, which are correlated but can diverge. Managerialism is
concrete and present-oriented, Utopianism abstract and future-oriented; but
Demagogism is abstract and present-oriented, Monomaniacalism concrete and
future oriented.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The
unexpectedly difficult problem is to explain why the far political right fits
the Demagogist pattern, the far left the Utopianist, the broad center
Managerialist. To understand why, first notice that construal-level theory can
seem to contradict an <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/03/150-taxonomy-of-political-ideologies.html">earlier
claim</a>: ideologists view abstract or far components of ideologies as more
important than concrete or near components. How can this be, when
construal-level theory informs us that the concrete and near seem more important?
The key to resolving the apparent contradiction is that what’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ideologically</i> most important isn’t the
same as what’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">simply</i> most important.
In fact, what’s most important ideologically serves to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">conceal</i> what’s really more important to typical individuals espousing
the ideologies. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Explaining
the correspondence of each ideology type</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">In
Managerialism, the typical ideology of modern, stable regimes, the low
commitment to both components of ideology conceals the strength of its
nonideological commitment to practical policies favoring particular interests.
Managerialists portray themselves as flexible, as carrying their ideologies
lightly, because they want the population to think they are more open to input
and pressure than they are. President Obama, the complete Managerialist,
concealed his political commitment to the survival of the banking monopolies,
under a pragmatic rhetoric according to which the old bank “regulators” were
simply the most capable candidates available. Managerialism corresponds to a
broad centrism because powerful interests support the status quo and must look
flexible to appear less powerful than they are. The commitment to the status
quo is paramount.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Utopianism
shows the opposite pattern where intransigence is exaggerated rather than
downplayed. Utopianism is often the ideology of those of the downtrodden who have
the capacity to resist by collective action. While powerful individuals must try
to appear flexible, those in a position to offer contest should appear
implacable. They must downplay what is really most important to them, concrete improvements,
since by concealing their willingness to compromise they can extract better
compromises. The Social Democratic Parties of the Second International often
emphasized their Maximum Program, which was socialism, while in practice
pursuing concrete, less ideological concrete measures. The Maximum Program improved
their bargaining position in pursuing their Minimum Program.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Demagogists
are ideologically committed to abstract means and seem to choose issues
without concern for consistency, but their commitment to abstract means
conceals their opportunistic orientation to immediacy. Demagogists are on the
far right because Demagogism appeals to peasants and small businessmen who, in
their social isolation, flounder and are unable to resist. They lack the raw collective
strength of the workers or the individual power of the capitalists and high
managers, so they desperately want immediate relief. The issues may vary, but
they always deal with the immediate. The Tea Party campaigned under an abstract
ideology of privatization of government services, but when it came to their own
benefits, they were grasping; aged Tea Partiers wanted above all to preserve
their Medicare “entitlements.” Demagogists must conceal their real concern
about their narrow and immediate self-interest because even the transitory
political coalitions they enter would come apart if the narrowness of its
components was understood. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Monomaniacalists
are unique in spanning the ideological spectrum, and they correspond to amorphous
class interests. What they conceal is the rigidity of their very outlook, its obsessional
quality, which can preclude getting serious support. Ron Paul’s ideological
emphasis on abstract liberty concealed the primacy of his fetishistic support
of the gold standard and his mechanical negative votes on any tax bills.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The two
sources of ideology</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Not one singly but
two bases in practical life jointly support ideologies: the interests of social
classes and the <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/06/152-practical-basis-for-mass-ideologies.html">habitual thought patterns of occupations</a>. These don’t always correspond. Engineers
are prone to Monomaniacalist thinking, but if an engineer becomes very wealthy,
Managerialist ideology will better express his interests. As his interests
won’t support his Monomaniacalist tendencies and his Monomaniacalism doesn’t
support his Managerialist interests, he is an unlikely ideologist.</span></div>
Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-72787279052235368672013-05-20T16:51:00.001-07:002013-11-13T21:59:57.506-08:0011.6. Belief–opinion confusion and the contradictions of capitalist investment markets: Fictional-market socialism<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8pt;">(Part
7 of </span><a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/search/label/belief" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8pt;">Belief-versus-opinion series</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8pt;">.)</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Economic
recessions, like the one we hope we’re recovering from, have varied
causes, but any causes inhering in capitalist markets are fundamental in that
they won’t be eliminated without basic systemic change. My theory of
belief-opinion confusion explains a fundamental cause of business cycles:
investment markets necessarily rely on beliefs at places in social-decision processes
where opinions are appropriate.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Belief and
opinion: Two kinds of judgments</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">With mild
regimentation of ordinary language, belief and opinion name two distinct entity
types—dispositions versus occurrent mentation—derived from two perspectives on
reality: abstract construal and concrete construal. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">This chart summarizes the differences between belief and opinion:</b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6g5rs-dkSGwBbjsmXchTgdUFeVW_owRcb63x75hvLC39mCix6PN1up1NBptsg6xSVylZHPZqnbDcJat2748K40-hSIEQwiF3qLXxtqxSNp5D_4DzNps2JGp2-l_nFScCC87iObVgZnDCx/s1600/Epistemic+attitude+clip+diagram+7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="147" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6g5rs-dkSGwBbjsmXchTgdUFeVW_owRcb63x75hvLC39mCix6PN1up1NBptsg6xSVylZHPZqnbDcJat2748K40-hSIEQwiF3qLXxtqxSNp5D_4DzNps2JGp2-l_nFScCC87iObVgZnDCx/s320/Epistemic+attitude+clip+diagram+7.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Belief and
opinion ideally correspond to ways of participating in decisions in groups,
including entire societies: action and deliberation; deliberation concerns figuring out what ought to be done, and action concerns doing it. <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2011/03/112-confusion-between-belief-and.html">Confusion
is rife in electoral democracies</a> with deeply opposed interests, since one
forum serves both purposes.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">“Deliberation”
by capitalist markets defectively supplants opinion with belief</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">But if the
political arena is the scene for opinion-belief confusion, the investment
markets are where belief completely supplants opinion. Markets are mechanisms
for societal decision-making: in a democracy of the dollar, your purchases
figure into the determination of what is produced. In markets for use, the
buying decisions follow from the buyer’s opinion, which—being personal—translates
smoothly into belief, without deliberation. Whose opinion but your own should
you consult? Markets for commodities and other easily comparable items
effectively combine the opinions of buyers, since they can decide
independently. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Investment
markets are fundamentally different because investors must rely on the past
financial performance of an enterprise; usually that’s the most important
information available, so they must mainly extrapolate from an investment's past market results. In the societal deliberative process, investors express
their beliefs rather than opinions, and these beliefs are heavily laden with
others’ judgments (although from a personal standpoint, <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/06/152-practical-basis-for-mass-ideologies.html">they express their opinions</a>, since they value </span><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">most </span><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">what is original in the judgment).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The
investment process can be viewed as forgoing opinion formation prior to
deliberation, where the decision to invest should be based on independent
opinion if the “deliberative process”—consisting of the “decisions” issued by
the market—is to function properly.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The cost of
this type of dysfunctional substitution of belief for opinion in deliberation
is <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2011/03/113-pathologies-of-belief-opinion.html">conformism</a>,
and when decisions are made sequentially, a consequence is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_cascade">information cascades</a>, where random variations are amplified into large
swings. This results from extrapolation, the result of investors using the
previous judgments of other investors—expressed as stock or bond prices—as
guide. Judgments by investors are essentially expressions of investors’
beliefs, primarily based on others’ judgments previously given. Obscuring the
role of extrapolation is the apparent paradox that profits are made on the
market by betting against the consensus, but extrapolating from investment-market gains <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> to extrapolate based
on outperforming the crowd. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Purified
fictional markets under socialism</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2011/02/111-confusion-between-belief-and.html">Conceptualization of belief-opinion confusion</a> suggests that the solution is
to obtain independent opinions, which investments don’t reflect because
investors know their beliefs are more veridical than their opinions, which are
based on very limited data. Opinions can be obtained only if personal gain is
divorced from investment decisions. Not only can’t capitalist investors be expected to invest
according to opinion; they won’t even disclose their true opinions because they
benefit from the ignorance of other investors.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Opinions
could be obtained in an economy where capital is state owned—probably in such
an economy exclusively. The model suggested is a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fictional market</i> where numerous government functionaries make
investment decisions based on their opinions but don’t lose or profit because
of their decisions: those incentives would cause them to “invest” based on
beliefs. The fictional investments regulate the economy, which is state owned
despite being controlled by a market purified of cascades and the other distortions
due to correlated judgments.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Such a
society requires a high level of material well-being and a high level of social
consciousness, so the functionaries will afford concern with following
instructions for which they won’t be rewarded or punished. These requirements may
illuminate the ultimate failure of the socialistic experiment that was the
Soviet Union, where slow growth set the stage for a pro-capitalist coup. In a
society still materially poor, fictional use of the market would degenerate
into a real capitalist market.</span></div>
Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-56725824951634982762013-04-15T13:59:00.000-07:002013-09-04T14:15:22.501-07:0011.5. Why do we confuse belief and opinion?: A construal-level-theory analysis. THE CONFUSION BETWEEN BELIEF AND OPINION AND THE NATURES OF FANATICISM AND PHILISTINISM. PART 6.<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Why do we </span><a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2011/02/111-confusion-between-belief-and.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">confuse
the epistemic attitudes</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">opinion</i>
and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">belief</i>, which—to serve the </span><a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2011/03/112-confusion-between-belief-and.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">distinct
functions</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> of </span><a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2011/04/114-explaining-deliberation-confusion.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">deliberation
</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">and action—should be based, respectively, on our own thinking or on that of
our epistemic superiors and peers? We confuse them because we’re prone to see
our own beliefs as being more like original opinions than they are, so we </span><a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2011/03/113-pathologies-of-belief-opinion.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">forgo
the distinction</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">, treating these epistemic attitudes identically whether
as opinion or belief. </span><a href="http://disputedissues.blogspot.com/2012/02/construal-level-theory-and-matching.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Construal-level
theory</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> provides the explanatory concepts. <b>We use a distinctively global way
of thinking—abstract construal or far-mode—when we contemplate the future and
the psychologically distant; and we use a distinctively narrow way of thinking—concrete
construal or near-mode—when we act for the present and on the psychologically
near.</b> Appraisals of belief, unlike opinion, result from abstract construal, but when we
think of our own (hence psychologically near) beliefs, we construe concretely, eliminating construal level as a cue to distinguish belief and opinion to assess each on its proper grounds.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="color: red;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Belief is
more psychologically distant than opinion because one’s own person is near, others’
distant, and </span><a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2011/02/110-confusion-between-belief-and.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">belief</i> incorporates (averages) others’
opinions</a></span></b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b><span style="color: red;">, which are disregarded in rational <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">opinion</i> formation.</span></b> Construal-level theory would indicate that we perceive others as acting for their beliefs and ourselves as acting for our
opinions, that is, we see ourselves as engaged in deliberation when we see our
counterparts engaged in action. The spiral ensues in which parties to
deliberation misperceive the other as advancing an agenda rather than engaging
in good-faith deliberation, forcing each to reciprocate because the party
engaging in action </span><a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2011/03/112-confusion-between-belief-and.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">controls
</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">through benefiting from the distraction.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Beliefs and
opinions are different entities, not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">just</i>
different functions that entities serve. We typically ascribe beliefs to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">others</i> to describe and predict their
conduct. <span style="color: red;">Beliefs are far-mode constructions that must be grounded in an inbuilt
template—since belief ascription is humanly universal—an idealization, which
reality only approximates.</span> If you believe that “She’s telling the truth,” your
actions will comport with the absence of suspected untruthfulness but only to a
point. Belief is a matter of degree, based on how close the template and
reality match.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Belief is a
primitive intuition regarding others, but applying the concept of belief to
oneself doesn’t come naturally. <span style="color: red;">Ferreting out the contours of unarticulated
belief is what gives insight-based psychotherapy its power.</span> Although the thinking
comes easily that another agent is deceiving himself about what he really
believes—others’ beliefs proven by behavior more than words—the agent himself
often rejects belief ascriptions contradicting the words he tells himself.
Those words are usually his opinions: our ordinary unwillingness to attribute
an opinion to someone who can’t express it shows that opinions are closely tied
to particular words. Opinion is the construct more suitable for possible neurobiological
reduction, whereas belief is a family-relations concept, not a sharply
delineated entity.</span></div>
Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-41025717364213262252013-03-29T13:52:00.001-07:002013-04-23T13:35:24.844-07:0020.0. Buridan’s ass and the psychological origins of objective probability<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The medieval philosopher Buridan reportedly constructed a
thought experiment to support his view that human behavior is determined
rather than </span><a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/search/label/free%20will" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">“free”</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">—hence
rational agents can't choose between two equally good alternatives. In the
Buridan’s Ass Paradox, an ass finds itself between two equal equidistant bales
of hay, noticed simultaneously; the bales’ distance and size are the only
variables influencing the ass’s behavior. Under these idealized conditions, the
ass must starve, its predicament indistinguishable from a physical object
suspended between opposite forces, such as a planet that neither falls into the
sun nor escapes into outer space. (Since the ass served Buridan as metaphor for
the human agent, in what follows I speak of “ass” and “agent”
interchangeably.)</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Computer scientist Leslie Lamport formalized the paradox as
“Buridan’s Principle,” which states that the ass will starve if it is situated
in a range of possibilities that include midpoints where two opposing forces
are equal and it must choose in a sufficiently short time span. We assume,
based on a principle of physical continuity, that the larger the bale of hay
compared to the other, the faster will the ass be able to decide. Since this is
true on the left and on the right, at the midpoint, where the bales are equal,
symmetry requires an infinite decision time. Conclusion: within some range of bale
comparisons, the ass will require decision time greater than a given bounded
time interval. (For rigorous treatment, see <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/buridan.pdf"><i>Buridan’s Principle </i></a>(1984).)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Buridan’s Principle is counterintuitive, as Lamport
discovered when he first tried to publish. Among the objections to Buridan’s Principle
summarized by Lamport, the main objection provides an insight about the source
of the mind-projection fallacy, which treats probability as a feature of the
world. The most common objection is that when the agent can’t decide it may use
a default metarule. Lamport points out this substitutes another decision
subject to the same limits: the agent must decide that it can’t decide. My
point differs from that of Lamport, who proves that binary decisions in the
face of continuous inputs are unavoidable and that with minimal assumptions
they preclude deciding in bounded time; whereas I draw a stronger conclusion:
no decision is substitutable when you adhere strictly to the problem’s
conditions specifying that the agent be equally balanced between the options. Any
inclination to substitute a different decision is a bias toward making the
decision that the substitute decision entails. In the simplest variant, the ass
may use the rule: turn left when you can’t decide, potentially entrapping it in
the limbo between deciding whether it can’t decide. If the ass has a metarule resolving conflicts to favor the left, it has an
extraneous bias.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Lamport’s analysis discerns a kind of physical law; mine
elucidates the origins of the mind-projection fallacy. What’s psychologically telling
is that the most common metarule is to decide at random. But if by random we
mean only apparently random, the strategy still doesn’t free the ass from its
straightjacket. If it flips a coin, an agent is, in fact, biased toward
whatever the coin will dictate, <i>bias</i>,
here, means an inclination to use means causally connected with a certain
outcome, but the coin flip’s apparent randomness is due to our ignorance of
microconditions; truly random responding would allow the agent to circumvent
the paradox’s conditions. <b>The theory that the agent
might use a random strategy expresses the intuition that the agent could turn
either way. It seems a route to where the opposites of functioning according to
physical law and acting “freely” in perceived self-interest are reconciled.</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This false reconciliation comes through confusing two kinds
of symmetry: the epistemic symmetry of “chance” events and the dynamic symmetry
in the Buridan’s ass paradox. If you flip a coin, the symmetry of the coin
(along with your lack of control over the flip) is what makes your reasons for
preferring heads and tails equivalent, justifying assigning each the same
probability. We encounter another symmetry with Buridan’s ass, where we also
have the same reason to think the ass will turn in either direction. Since the
intuition of “free will” precludes impossible decisions, we construe our
epistemic uncertainty as describing a decision that’s possible but <i>inherently</i> uncertain.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">When we conceive of the ass as a purely physical process subject to two opposite forces (which, of
course, it is), then it’s obvious that the ass can be “stuck.” What miscues
intuition is that the ass need not be confined to one decision rule. But if by
hypothesis it is confined to one rule, the rule may preclude decision. This
hypothetical is made relevant by the necessity of there being <i>some</i> ultimate decision rule. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>The intuitive physics of an agent
that can’t get stuck entails: a) two equal forces act on an object producing an
equilibrium; b) without breaking the equilibrium, an additional natural law is
added specifying that the ass will turn. Rather than conclude this is
impossible, intuition “resolves” the contradiction through conceiving that the
ass will go in each direction half the time: the probability of either course
is deemed .5. Confusion of kinds of symmetry, fueled by the intuition of free
will, makes Buridan’s Principle counter-intuitive and objective probabilities
intuitive. </b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">How do we know that reality can’t be like this intuitive
physics? We know because realizing <i>a</i>
and <i>b</i> would mean that the physical
forces involved don’t vary continuously. It would make an exception, a kind of
singularity, of the midpoint. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-40347957858861052752013-03-07T11:22:00.001-08:002013-07-01T20:35:43.410-07:0014.2.1. The habit theory of morality, moral influence, and moral evolution<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Contrasting with all forms of moral realism, the </span><a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2011/12/14-why-do-what-oughta-habit-theory-of.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">habit
theory of morality</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> recognizes </span><a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/01/142-what-is-morality-for.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">no
“terminal moral values,”</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> since it holds that transgression of an agent’s
principles of integrity is necessary to allow their adjustment to circumstances.
</span><span style="color: red; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">By conceiving moral principles as principles of
integrity, prosocial habits serving as indispensable self-control devices in a
psychological economy where willpower is an exceedingly <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/11/170-akrasia-explained-part-1-of.html"><span style="color: red;">scarce resource</span></a>, it<a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2011/12/14-why-do-what-oughta-habit-theory-of.html"></a>
uniquely explains—without recourse to <i>group
selectionism</i>—how humans could evolve a group-minded morality.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Group selectionism</span></i><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"> is the minority view among
evolutionists that natural selection in humans occurs in the manner of eusocial
species, at the level of groups, not just genes. Eusocial species comprise
primarily the social insects, whose hives’ genetic commonality permits group selection,
which in their case—unlike the human—reduces to the gene level. Social
psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his recent book <i>The Righteous Mind </i>(2013) frames the case for human group selection
with the aphorism “Humans are 90% chimpanzee and 10% bee.” Haidt observes that most
moral arguments are hypocritical, aiming to impress or control others, agents
often ignoring standards when they can avoid punishment for transgressions. Yet
Haidt acknowledges that humans occasionally behave selflessly, as when a
soldier takes huge personal risks for his fellows or zealots lose themselves in
moral or political causes. Haidt thinks these phenomena inexplicable at the
gene or individual level because it would subject agents to strongly adverse
selection pressures, since their altruism fails to serve their individual interests.
Group selectionism is subject to a standard objection: inevitable exploitation
by free riding, which group-selectionist theory must contain a mechanism to
punish. Human societies curtail free riding by social approval and disapproval,
including material rewards and punishments.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">According to Haidt (and other strict-adaptationist
theorists), the proclivity to reward and punish transgression against group
interest must arise through group selection because otherwise approval and
disapproval meted out in the group interest would be another form of
self-sacrifice. <span style="color: red;">The habit theory of morality treats
moral approval and disapproval as expressing the same habit set used for self-control, </span>illustrated by the <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/01/141-habit-theory-of-civic-morality.html">habit
theory of civic morality</a>: U.S. citizens practice habits of frugality in
their personal lives by demanding the government cut spending. The same
equivalence describes moral suasion directed toward individuals.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Ironically, moral hypocrisy provides evidence that self-control
and moral suasion practice a unified moral habit. If hypocritical demands are
seen as <i>purely</i> deceptive, it’s hard
to see how they would serve as a <i><a href="http://disputedissues.blogspot.com/2013/03/verbosity-affronts-court.html">costly
signal</a></i>; carrying no costs, moral hypocrisy would have no value as a
signal. Hypocrisy has no point if anyone can be a hypocrite cheaply.<span style="color: red;"> But if engaging in moral suasion agents rehearse <i>(practice)</i> principles
of integrity that they habitually apply to themselves, the cost of <i>demanding</i> more morality than you want to
give is <i>becoming</i> more moral than you
wish.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The workings become clearer and more plausible with more
concreteness about the structure of the moral habits (or principles of
integrity), and Alan P. Fiske’s <a href="http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/fiske/relmodov.htm">relationship-regulation
theory</a> integrates well with the habit
theory. According to Fiske’s model, systems of moral principles are activated when
their associated social relationships are “constituted,” where the systems of
moral principles are Unity, Hierarchy, Equality, and Proportionality. (<a href="http://www.irsp.ucla.edu/Images/PDFs/Rai%20%26%20Fiske%202011.pdf">T.S.
Rai and A.P. Fiske</a>, <i>Moral psychology
is relationship regulation</i> (2011) <span style="font-variant: small-caps;">Psychological
Review</span>, 118: 57 ‒ 75.) Hierarchical principles, for example, are
activated when the appropriate social relations of Authority/Ranking are constituted, so when an agent is involved in an authoritarian relationship, such as between
employees and their boss, the corresponding Hierarchical principles of
unconditional submission and conditional protection dominate. To restate in
habit-theory terms, negotiating hierarchical relationships motivates agents to form
habits based on Hierarchical principles. Most importantly, the Hierarchical
structure is a coherent whole, including facets involving regulation of both self
and others. <span style="color: red;">In the habit theory, other-directed
morality is a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_%28biology%29"><span style="color: red;"><i>spandrel</i></span></a> deriving from the primary adaptive value
of self-control.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-66166852285478418242013-02-18T09:56:00.001-08:002013-06-12T14:59:47.161-07:0014.1.1. Utilitarianism twice fails<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It seems
almost self-evident that (barring foreign subjugation) a government will care about the
wants of (some of) its citizens and nothing else: no other object of concern is
plausible. If governments concern themselves with the wants of noncitizens,
that will be only because citizens desire their well-being. The now
platitudinous insight that the only <i>possible</i>
basis for government policy is people’s wants can be attributed to
utilitarianism, which gets credit in its stronger form for the apparent success of
weaker claims. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
Another reasonable claim
derives from utilitarianism: citizens’ wants should count equally. This seems
only fair in a democracy, where one citizen gets one vote. Few today would
deny the principle that public policy should serve the most good of the
greatest number, which may seem to contradict <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/01/141-habit-theory-of-civic-morality.html">my claim</a> that no general moral principle
governs public policy, but in practice, the consequences of this limited
utilitarianism are thin indeed, leaving ample room for ideology. I’ll call <i>thin</i> utilitarianism this public-policy formula:
the greatest good for the greatest number <i>of
citizens</i>, weighting their welfare equally. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
First, I’ll consider whether thin
utilitarianism succeeds on its own terms by providing a practical guide to
public policy. Second, I’ll examine how this deceptively appealing guide to
public policy transmogrifies into the monster of <i>full-blown utilitarianism</i>, a form of <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2011/12/14-why-do-what-oughta-habit-theory-of.html">moral realism</a>. The first constrains even casual
use of thin utilitarianism; the second impugns utilitarianism as a general
ethical theory.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">1. Non-negotiable
conflicts between subagents undermine thin utilitarianism<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Although
simple economic models attributing conduct to rational self-interest require
that agents assign <i>consistent</i>
utilities to outcomes, agents are inconsistent. One example of inconsistent utility assignment is the endowment
effect, where agents assign more value to property they own than to
the same property they don’t own. The inconsistency considered here is stronger than the endowment
effect, which we can surmount with
effort, as professional traders must do. Despite the endowment effect, there is an answer to how much utility an outcome affords, the
endowment effect being a <i>bias</i>, which willpower
or habit may neutralize.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The
conflict between subagents within a single person, on the other hand, can’t be
resolved by means of a common criterion, such as market price, since two subagents
pursue different ends. Which of these subagents dominates depends on
situational and personological factors that elicit one or the other, not on bias. <a href="http://disputedissues.blogspot.com/2012/02/construal-level-theory-and-matching.html">Construal-level theory</a> reveals a conflict between
intrapersonal subagents, <i>near-mode</i> and <i>far-mode</i>,
integrated mindsets applied to matter experienced at fine or broad
granularities. Modes (or “construal levels”) differ in that far-mode is more
future-oriented and principled, near-mode, present-oriented and contextual. Far-mode
and near-mode are elicited by the way social choices are made: voting elicits
far-mode and market choices, near-mode; the utility of a choice depends on construal
level.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Take a
policy choice: how much wealth should be spent on preventive medicine? There
are two basic ways allocating resources to medical care, political process and
the market, socialized medicine being an example of political process, private
medicine, the market. Socialized medicine makes allocating funds for the
medical care a political decision; the market makes it each consumer’s personal
choice. When you compare the utility of the choices by political process with
those on the market, you should expect to find that when people choose
politically, they use far-mode thinking encouraged by voting; whereas when they
make purchases, they use near-mode thinking encouraged by the market<span style="color: red;">.</span> The preventive-care expenditure will be higher under
socialized medicine because political process elicits far-mode, which is
concerned with <i>future</i> health. People
will be more miserly with preventive care under private medicine, where the
decision to spend is made by consumer choice in near-mode, where we care
more about the present. People favor spending more on preventive care when they
vote to tax themselves than when they buy it on the market. Which outcome provides
the greater utility—more preventive care or more recreation—is relative to
construal level. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The same
indeterminacy of utility occurs when comparing decisions made under different
political processes, such as local versus central. Local decisions will be
near-mode, central decisions far-mode. <i>Assuming</i>
socialized medicine, less funding would be available if it were subject to state
rather than federal control. Which provides more utility depends on whether the
consequences are evaluated in near-mode or far-mode; no thin-utilitarian criterion
applies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Some
utilitarians will protest that we should measure experiences rather than wants. The objection misses the
argument’s point, which is that utility is relative to mode, a conclusion
easiest to see in the public-choice process because the alternatives may be
delimited. If the conclusion that utility depends on construal level holds, the
same indeterminacies occur in evaluating experience. That apart, when
utilitarianism is applied to public policy, present wants rather than experienced
satisfaction is the criterion; agents necessarily choose based on present wants
whether on the market or the political process.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">2. Full-blown
utilitarianism stands convicted of moral realism<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Full-blown
utilitarians are necessarily moral realists, but increasingly they are seen to
deny it. While moral realism is widely recognized as absurd, utilitarianism seems
to some an attractive ethical philosophy. For the sake of intellectual
respectability, utilitarians can appear to reject anachronistic moral
realism while practicing it philosophically. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Full-blown
utilitarianism often obscures its differences with thin utilitarianism, which
is a questionable doctrine but in accord with ordinary common sense. It emerges
from thin utilitarianism by the misdirection of subjecting ethical premises to
the test of simplicity, a test appropriate to realist theories exclusively, because
simplicity serves truth. A classic illustration: Aristotle
theorized that everything on earth that goes up goes down; Newton set out the gravity
theory, which applies to all objects, not just those terrestrial, and which
predicts that objects can escape the earth’s gravitational field by traveling
fast. Scientists confidently bet on Newton well before rockets were invented,
and their confidence was vastly increased by the simplicity of Newton’s theory,
which made correct predictions concerning <i>all</i>
objects. Although philosophers have explained variously the correlation between
simplicity and truth, they generally agree that simplicity signals truth. Unless
utilitarians can otherwise justify it, searching for a <i>simple</i> moral theory means searching for a <i>true</i> theory.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The
full-blown utilitarian seeks a misplaced simplicity by insisting that all
entities that can experience happiness, a much <i>simpler</i> criterion than “current citizens,” serve as the beneficiary
reference group—including <i>future </i>generations of humans and even beasts, whose <i>existence</i> depends on policy; whereas,
thin utilitarianism is a democratic <i>convention</i>,
serving only the wants of the currently existing citizens. Because they must
incorporate future generations into the reference group, utilitarian
philosophers have had to accept that using a policy-dependent reference group entails
a dilemma regarding interpretation of full-blown utilitarianism, with
unattractive consequences at both horns, which realize radically different
ideals. In one version, you maximize the
average utility obtained by the whole population; in the other, you sum the
utilities. These interpretations seem almost equally unattractive: the
averaging view says that one supremely happy human is better than a billion
very happy ones; the adding approach implies that a hundred trillion miserable
wretches is better than a billion happy people. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">To apply a utilitarian standard
to scenarios so distant from thin utilitarianism, accepting their consequences
because of simplicity’s demands, is to treat moral premises as truths and to
practice moral realism, despite contrary self-description. Those agreeing that
moral realism is impossible must reject full-blown utilitarianism.</span>Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-15572275124883247982013-01-25T17:31:00.001-08:002013-09-15T12:06:18.569-07:0019.2. Infinitesimals: Another argument against actual infinite sets<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Argument<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">My argument
from the incoherence of <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2013/01/191-meaning-of-existence-lessons-from.html">actually existing</a> infinitesimals has the following
structure:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">1.
Infinitesimal quantities can’t exist;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">2.
If actual infinities can exist, actual infinitesimals must exist;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">3.
Therefore, actual infinities can’t exist.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Although
Cantor, who invented the mathematics of transfinite numbers, rejected
infinitesimals, mathematicians have continued to develop analyses based on them,
as mathematically legitimate as are transfinite numbers, but few philosophers try
to justify <i>actual</i> infinitesimals, which
have some of the characteristics of zero and some characteristics of positive numbers. When you add an infinitesimal to a real number, it’s like adding zero.
But when you multiply an infinitesimal by infinity, you sometimes get a finite
quantity: the points on a line are of infinitesimal dimension, in that they
occupy no space (as if they were zero duration), yet compose lines finite in
extent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Few
advocate actual infinitesimals because an actually existing infinitesimal is
indistinguishable from zero. For however small a quantity you choose, it’s
obvious that you can make it yet smaller. The role of zero as a boundary
accounts for why it’s obvious you can always reduce a quantity. If I deny you
can, you reply that since you can reduce it to zero and the function is
continuous, you necessarily can reduce any given quantity—precluding actual infinitesimals. When I raise the same argument about an infinite set, you can’t
reply that you can always make the set bigger; if I say add an element, you
reply that the sets are still the same size (<i>cardinality</i>). The boundary imposed by zero is counterpoint for
infinitesimals to the openness of infinity, but actual-infinitesimals’
incoherence <i>suggests</i> that infinity is
similarly infirm. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Can more be
said to establish that the conclusion about actual infinitesimal quantities
also applies to <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2013/01/191-meaning-of-existence-lessons-from.html">actual infinite quantities</a>? Consider again the points on a
3-inch line segment. If there are infinitely many, then each must be
infinitesimal. Since there are no actual infinitesimals, there are no actual
infinities of points. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But this
conclusion depends on the actual infinity being embedded in a finite
quantity—although, as will be seen, rejecting bounded infinities alone travels
metaphysical mileage. For boundless infinities, consider the number of quarks
in a supposed universe of infinitely many. Form the ratio between the number of
quarks in our galaxy and the infinite number of quarks in the universe. The ratio
isn’t zero because infinitely many galaxies would still form a null proportion
to the universal total; it’s not any real number because many of them would
then add up to more than the total universe. This ratio must be infinitesimal. Since
infinitesimals don’t exist, neither do unbounded infinities (hence, infinite
quantities in general, their being either bounded or unbounded).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Infinitesimals and
Zeno’s paradox<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Rejecting
actually existing infinities is what really resolves Zeno’s paradox, and it
resolves it by way of finding that infinitesimals don’t exist. Zeno’s paradox,
perhaps the most intriguing logical puzzle in philosophy, purports to show that
motion is impossible. In the version I’ll use, the paradox analyzes my walk
from the middle of the room to the wall as decomposable into an infinite series
of walks, each reducing the remaining distance by one-half. The paradox posits
that completing an infinite series is self-contradictory: infinite means uncompletable.
I can never reach the wall, but the same logic applies to any distance; hence,
motion is proven impossible.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The
standard view holds that the invention of the integral calculus completely
resolved the paradox by refuting the premise that an infinite series can’t be
completed. Mathematically, the infinite series of times actually does sum to a
finite value, which equals the time required to walk the distance; Zeno’s deficiency
is pronounced to be that the mathematics of infinite series was yet to be
invented. But the answer only shows that (apparent) motion is mathematically
tractable; it doesn’t show how it can occur. Mathematical tractability is at
the expense of logical rigor because it is achieved by ignoring the distinction
between exclusive and inclusive limits. When I stroll to the wall, the wall
represents an inclusive limit—I actually reach the wall. When I integrate the
series created by adding half the remaining distance, I only approach the limit
equated with the wall. Calculus can be developed in terms of infinitesimals,
and in those terms, the series comes infinitesimally close to the limit, and in
this context, we treat the infinitesimal as if it were zero. As we’ve seen,
actual infinity and infinitesimals are inseparable, certainly where, as here,
the actual infinity is bounded. The calculus solves the paradox only if actual infinitesimals
exist—but they don’t. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Zeno’s misdirection
can now be reconceived as—while correctly denying the existence of actual
infinity—falsely affirming the existence of its counterpart, the infinitesimal. The paradox assumes that while I’m uninterruptedly walking to
the wall, I occupy a series of infinitesimally small points in space and time,
such that I am at a point at a specific time the same as if I had
stopped.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Although
the objection to analyzing motion in Zeno’s manner was apparently raised as
early as Aristotle, the calculus seems to have obscured the metaphysical
project more than illuminating it. Logician Graham Priest<i> (Beyond the Limits of Thought </i>(2003)) argues that Zeno’s paradox
shows that actual infinities can exist, by the following thought experiment.
Priest asks that you imagine that rather than walking continuously to the wall,
I stop for two seconds at each halfway point. Priest claims the series would
then complete, but his argument shows that he doesn’t understand that the
paradox depends on the points occupied being infinitesimal. Despite the early
recognition that (what we now call) infinitesimals are at the root of the
paradox, philosophers today don’t always grasp the correct metaphysical analysis.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Distinguishing actual
and potential infinities<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Recognizing
that infinitesimals are mathematical fictions solidifies the distinction
between actual and potential infinity. The reason that mathematical infinities
are not just consistent but are useful is that <i>potential</i> infinities <i>can</i>
exist. Zeno’s paradox conceives motion as an <i>actual</i> infinity of sub-trips, but, in reality, all that can be
shown is that the sub-trips are <i>potentially</i>
infinite. There’s no limit to how many times you can subdivide the path, but traversing
it doesn’t automatically subdivide it infinitely, which result would require
that there be infinitesimal quantities. This understanding reinforces the point
about dubious <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2013/01/190-can-infinite-quantities-exist.html">physical theories that posit an
infinity of worlds.</a>
It’s been argued that some versions of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics that invoke an uncountable infinity of worlds don't require actual
infinity any more than does the existence of a line segment, which can be
decomposed into uncountably many segments, but an infinite plurality of <i>worlds </i>does
not avoid actual infinity. <i>We</i> exist
in one of those worlds. Many worlds, unlike infinitesimals and the conceptual
line segments employing them, must be conceived as actually existing.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>[Edit September 15, 2013.] </b>Corrected claim that many-worlds theories of quantum mechanics posit an infinity of worlds. Some many-worlds theories do, and <a href="http://hanson.gmu.edu/mangledworlds.html">some don't</a>. This argument applies only to those versions positing infinite worlds.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-47403512214980897922013-01-21T13:19:00.001-08:002013-01-22T09:05:42.083-08:0019.1. The meaning of “existence”: Lessons from infinity<a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2013/01/190-can-infinite-quantities-exist.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #38761d;">Based
on 19.0. Can infinite quantities exist?</span></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The topic
is the <i>concept</i> of existence, not its <i>fact</i></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">—not</span> why there's something rather than nothing—</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">but </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">the bare concept brings its own austere
delights. Philosophical problems arise from our conflicting intuitions, but
“existence” is a primitive element of thought because our intuitions of it are
so robust and reliable. Of course, we disagree about whether certain
particulars (such as Moses) have existed and even about whether some general
kinds (such as the real numbers) exist, but disputes don’t concern the concept
of existence itself. If Moses’s existence poses any conceptual problem, it concerns
what counts as being him, not what counts as existence. Adult readers never
seriously maintain that fictitious characters exist; they disagree about
whether a given character is fictitious. Even the question of the existential
status of numbers is a question about numbers rather than about existence. As
will be seen, sometimes philosophers wrongly construe these disputes as being
about existence.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">When essay
19.0 asked “Can infinite quantities exist?” existence’s meaning wasn't in play—infinity’s
was. Existence is well-suited for the role as a primitive concept in philosophy
because it is so unproblematic, but it’s unproblematic nature can be thought of
as a kind of problem, in that we want to know <i>why</i> this concept is <i>uniquely</i>
unproblematic. We would at least like to be able to say something more about it
than merely that it’s primitive, but in philosophy, we acquire knowledge by
solving problems, and existence fails to provide any but the unhelpful problem
of its being unproblematic. The problem of infinity provides, in the end, some
purchase on the concept of existence, which concept I assumed in dealing with
infinity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2013/01/190-can-infinite-quantities-exist.html">one
argument against actual infinity</a>, I proposed as conceptually possible that separate
things might be distinguishable only concerning their being separate things. If we assume that infinite sets can exist, the implication is the
contradiction that an infinite set and its successor—when still another point
pops into existence—are the same set because you can’t distinguish them. (In
technical terms, the only information that could distinguish the set and its
successor, given that their members are <i>brutely</i>
distinguishable, is their cardinality, which is the same—countably infinite—for
each set.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What’s
interesting is the role of <i>existence</i>,
which imposes an additional constraint on concepts besides the internal
consistency imposed by the mathematics of sets. Whereas we are unable to
distinguish existing points, we are able—in a manner of speaking—to distinguish
points that exist from those that don’t exist. While no proper subsets are
possible for existing brutely distinguishable points, the distinction within<i> the abstract set of points</i> between “those”
that exist and “those” that don’t exist allows us to extend the successor set
by moving the boundary, resulting in contradiction.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">If finitude
is a condition for existence, we’ve learned something new about the concept of
existence. Its meaning is imbued with finitude, with definite quantity.
Everything that exists does so in some definite quantity. <span style="color: red;">Existence is that property of conceptual referents such that
they <i>necessarily </i>have some definite quantity.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Existence
is primitive because almost everyone knows the term and can apply it to the
extent they understand what they’re applying it to. The alternative to
primitive existence is primitive sensation, as when Descartes derived his
existence from his “thinking.” But <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/08/160-supposedly-hard-problem-of.html">sensationalism
is incoherent</a>; “experiences” inherently lacking in properties (“ineffable”)
are conceived as having properties <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/09/161-raw-experience-dogma-dissolving.html">(“qualia”)</a>. The heirs of extreme logical empiricism, from Rudolf Carnap to David Lewis,
have challenged existence’s primitiveness. Carnap defined existence by the
place of concepts in a fruitful theory. Lewis applies this positivist maxim to
conclude that all possible worlds exist. Lewis isn’t impelled by an independent
theory of logical existence, such as a Platonic theory that posits actually
realized idealizations. Rather, the usefulness of possible worlds in logic
requires their acceptance, according to Lewis, because that’s all that we mean
by “exists.” Lewis is driven by this theory of existence to require infinitely
many existing possible worlds, which disqualifies it <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2013/01/190-can-infinite-quantities-exist.html">on
other grounds</a>. But the grounds aren’t separate. When you don’t apply the
constraints of existence because you deny their intuitive force, you lose just
that constraint imposing finitude. <span style="color: red;">The incoherence of
sensationalism and actual infinitism argues for a metaphysics upholding the primacy
of common-sense existence.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-64146780145842662013-01-01T19:21:00.000-08:002013-07-26T22:08:27.352-07:0019.0. Can infinite quantities exist?<h3>
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">1. The actuality of infinity
is a paramount metaphysical issue.</span></b></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Some major issues in science and philosophy demand taking a
position on whether there can be an infinite number of things or an infinite
amount of something. Infinity’s most obvious scientific relevance is to
cosmology, where the question of whether the universe is finite or infinite
looms large. But infinities are invoked in various physical theories, and
they seem often to occur in dubious theories. In quantum mechanics, an
(uncountable) infinity of worlds is invoked by the “many worlds interpretation,”
and anthropic explanations often invoke an actual infinity of universes, which
may themselves be infinite. These applications make actual infinite sets a
paramount metaphysical problem—if it indeed is metaphysical—but the orthodox
view is that, being empirical, it isn’t metaphysical at all. To view infinity
as a purely empirical matter is the modern view; we’ve learned not to place
excessive weight on purely conceptual reasoning, but <span style="color: red;">whether
conceptual reasoning can definitively settle the matter differs from whether the
matter <i>is</i> fundamentally conceptual</span>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Two developments have discouraged the metaphysical exploration
of actually existing infinities: the mathematical analysis of infinity and the proffer
of crank arguments against infinity in the service of retrograde causes.
Although some marginal schools of mathematics reject Cantor’s investigation of transfinite
numbers, I will assume the concept of infinity itself is consistent. <span style="color: red;">My
analysis pertains not to the concept of infinity as such but to the actual
realization of infinity.</span> Actual infinity’s main detractor is a Christian
fundamentalist crank named William Lane Craig, whose critique of infinity, serving
theist first-cause arguments, has made infinity eliminativism intellectually disreputable.
Craig’s arguments merely appeal to the <i>strangeness </i>of infinity’s
manifestations, not to the <i>incoherence</i> of its realization. The standard arguments against infinity,
which predate Cantor, have been well-refuted, and I leave the mathematical
critique of infinity to the mathematicians, who are mostly satisfied. (See Graham
Oppy, <i>Philosophical perspectives on
infinity</i> (2006).) </span></div>
<h3>
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">2. The principle of
the identity of indistinguishables applies to physics and to actual sets, not to
everything conceivable.</span></b></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">My novel arguments are based on a revision of a metaphysical
principle called the <i>identity of
indistinguishable</i>s, which holds that two separate things can’t have exactly
the same properties. Things are constituted by their properties; if two things
have exactly the same properties, nothing remains to make them different from
one another. Physical objects do seem to conform to the identity of
indistinguishables because physical objects are individuated by their positions
in space and time, which are properties, but this is a physical rather than a
metaphysical principle. <span style="color: red;">Conceptually, <i>brute distinguishability</i>, that is, differing from all other things simply in
being <i>different</i>, is a property, although
it provides us with no basis for identifying one thing and not another.</span>
There may be no way to use such a property in any physical theory, we may never
learn of such a property and thus never have reason to believe it instantiated,
but the property seems conceptually possible.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But the identity of indistinguishables does apply to <i>sets </i>of existing things (actual sets): indistinguishable
actual sets are identical. Properties <i>determine</i> actual sets, so <span style="color: red;">you can’t define a proper subset of brutely distinguishable things</span>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
<h3>
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">3. Arguments against
actual infinite sets.</span></b></h3>
<h4>
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A. Argument based on
brute distinguishability.</span></b></h4>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">To show that the existence of an actual infinite set leads to contradiction, assume the existence of an
infinite set of brutely distinguishable points. Now <span style="color: red;">another point pops into
<i>existence</i></span>. The former and latter sets are indistinguishable, yet they aren’t
identical. <span style="color: red;">The proviso that the points themselves are
indistinguishable allows the sets to be different yet indistinguishable when
they’re infinite, proving they can’t be infinite.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: red;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<h4>
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">B. Argument based on
probability as limiting relative frequency.</span></b></h4>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The previous argument depends on the coherence of <i>brute distinguishability</i>. The following </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">probability</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">argument depends on different intuitions. Probabilities can be
treated as idealizations at infinite limits. If you toss a coin, it will land
heads roughly 50% of the time, and it gets closer to exactly 50% as the number
of tosses “approaches infinity.” <span style="color: red;"><span style="color: black;">But</span> if there can actually be an infinite number
of tosses, contradiction arises.</span> Consider the possibility that in an infinite
universe or an infinite number of universes, infinitely many coin tosses
actually occur. The frequency of heads and of tails is then infinite,
so the relative frequency is undefined. Furthermore, the frequency of rolling a
1 on a die also equals the frequency of rolling 2 – 6: both are (countably)
infinite. But <span style="color: red;">when there are infinitely many occurrences</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="color: red;">,</span> <span style="color: red;">relative frequency <i>should</i> <i>equal</i> the probability <i>approached </i>in a finite world</span>.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Therefore, infinite quantities
don’t exist.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<h3>
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">4. The nonexistence
of actually realized infinite sets and the principle of the identity of
indistinguishable sets together imply the Gold model of the cosmos.</span></b></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Before applying the conclusion that actual infinite sets can’t exist, together with the principle of the identity of
indistinguishables, to a fundamental problem of cosmology, caveats are in
order. The argument uses only the most general and well-established physical
conclusions and is oblivious to physical detail, and not being competent in
physics, I must abstain even from assessing the weight the philosophical
analysis that follows should carry; it may be very slight. While the
cosmological model I propose isn’t original, the argument is original and as
far as I can tell, novel. I am not proposing a physical theory as much as
suggesting metaphysical considerations that might bear on physics, whereas it
is for physicists to say how weighty these considerations </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">are </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">in light of
actual physical data and theory.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The cosmological theory is the Gold model of the universe, once favored by Albert Einstein, according to which the universe undergoes a
perpetual expansion, contraction, and re-expansion. I assume a deterministic
universe, such that cycles are exactly identical: any contraction is thus
indistinguishable from any other, and any expansion is indistinguishable from
any other. Since there is no room in physics for brute distinguishability,
they are identical because no common spatio-temporal framework allows their distinction. <span style="color: red;">Thus, although the expansion
and contraction process is perpetual, it is also finite; in fact, its
number is unity. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Gold universe—alone, with the possible exception
of the Hawking universe—</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">avoids </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">the dilemma of the realization of infinite sets or
origination </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">ex nihilo</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(<b>Edited July 25, 2013</b>: Clarified in Section 2, last paragraph and other places, that the identity of indistinguishables applies to <i>actual </i>sets.)</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p><br /></div>
Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-64853268404938388482012-12-18T13:07:00.001-08:002013-11-13T22:03:05.081-08:0017.1. Societal implications of ego-depletion theory and construal-level theory: Ignored transaction costs and proliferation of electoral events (Part 2 of "Philosophical and political implications of ego-depletion theory")<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">From </span><b style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/11/170-akrasia-explained-part-1-of.html">ego-depletion theory</a></b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">, we should
conclude that making choices is far costlier than what’s told by common sense,
this conclusion the source of the theory’s societal implications. Nobody
expected that decision fatigue at the day’s end would </span><a href="http://disputedissues.blogspot.com/2011/12/decision-fatigue-its-implications-for.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">cause judges to deny almost all petitions</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> they heard. According to common sense, the main cost of decision-making
is the time it consumes, but ego-depletion research shows that there’s a much
greater unnoticed cost:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: red; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Decisions
become remarkably harder and less competent with each succeeding decision. </span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Two societal
implications are that 1) accepting <i>or
declining</i> economic transactions is costlier than we think and 2) electing
numerous officials curtails democracy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Ignored transaction
costs<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The housing
mortgage crisis exemplifies the first implication: commentary has failed to
take account of the toll imposed on people who want to buy homes, when
pseudo-opportunity taxes their willpower. The structure of “opportunity” is
central here: an open offer from varied offerors isn’t subject to
once-and-for-all decisive rejection. Instead, a potential borrower may have to
wrestle with impulse for months, so that finally accepting a loan becomes a
desperate response to the constant drain on scarce willpower.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The harm <i>never</i> considered is how much willpower
is drained from those who <i>refrained</i>
from borrowing, who successfully resisted the impulse to take a home loan; how
the drain on their willpower paralyzed them in making <i>other</i> decisions—having been forced to squander their willpower on
resisting loans that should never have been offered. Willpower is a scarce
resource, and it is far more costly than almost anyone realizes. <b><span style="color: red;">It’s the great
hidden societal cost of market transactions.</span></b> <b><span style="color: red;">And while researchers <i>assume</i> willpower is replenished with a night’s sleep and breakfast,
I suspect that longer frames also operate—this is the reason we need weekends
and vacations.</span></b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><br /></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The <i>faux</i>-democratic proliferation of
electoral events<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Like
proliferating consumer “choices” that kill happiness and productivity while
seeming to enhance them, the proliferation of elections has an analogous
paradoxical effect on <i>democracy</i>.
Since every choice offered diminishes our ability to make choices, elections
for judges and dogcatchers or for the multiple offices required under the U.S.
federal system weaken democracy by detracting from the effort citizens devote
to any electoral contest. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Although
dramatically reforming the American political structure is neither feasible nor
high priority, it is well to have a <i>vision</i>
of what kind of structure is or isn’t effectively democratic. Ego-depletion
theory tells us that the fewer offices for which a citizen votes the better, but
<b><a href="http://disputedissues.blogspot.com/2012/02/construal-level-theory-and-matching.html">construal-level theory</a></b> offers additional
standards. It proposes that <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: red; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">“Seeing
the forest” and “seeing the trees” involve integrated mental sets, dubbed <i>far-mode</i> and <i>near-mode</i> because distance of time, place, and person makes us
think in terms of forests and nearness in these respects makes us think in
terms of trees.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Outcomes
will depend on whether the decision is construed in <i>far-mode</i> or <i>near-mode</i>. The
theory might be invoked to support a system of checks and balances like the
U.S. system, where elections staged at different intervals and over
different-sized constituencies induce varying construal levels. At the federal
level, elections to the House of Representatives are relatively <i>near-mode</i>, due both to small districts
and frequent elections, and presidential elections may be most <i>far-mode</i>, although Senate terms are
longer. <i>Near-mode</i> fosters resistance
to change, so it is theoretically <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/05/151-utopianism-demagogism-and.html">consistent with construal-level theory that the House has taken so strongly to saying <i>no</i></a>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">But if the
system succeeds in eliciting different construal levels in different government
branches, this has come to seem a defect rather than merit. <b><span style="color: red;">If government is to
deal in broad purposes, <i>far-mode</i>
should dominate in formulating policies. If policies are to be implemented
intelligently, <i>near-mode</i> should
dominate in their local application.</span></b> How to square this with
ego-depletion theory’s moral that the number of contests in which any citizen votes
be limited, preferably to a single office? One way to try to accomplish this might
be a unicameral parliament with local bureaucracies appointed top down, but
this produces an effect opposite to the intended. Appointments to distant career
posts are based on <i>far-mode</i>
processes, unlikely to lead to effective <i>near-mode</i>
reasoning by the appointees.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Another
little used but in-theory effective means of unifying local government with
national government could better secure the appropriate allocation of <i>near</i> and <i>far</i> cognition: <b><span style="color: red;">indirect election of progressively higher levels of
government by local bodies, so the choices are minimized and each delegation is
progressively more <i>far-mode</i>.</span></b>
It may be objected that this was part of the defunct scheme originally adopted
under the U.S. Constitution, which provided that local government bodies elect
U.S. Senators and delegates to the electoral college, but the U.S.
Constitutional scheme insubordinated local power to national by limiting the
power of the federal government, whereas in the (unitary rather than federal)
system here envisioned, the higher levels dominate the lower despite being
selected by them, to subordinate <i>near-mode</i>
to <i>far-mode</i> while economizing human
willpower.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-26708169790287202052012-12-01T15:07:00.000-08:002014-01-08T11:51:02.511-08:0018.0 Capitalism and socialism express conflicting reciprocity norms: A reinterpretation of Marx’s theory of capitalist decline<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Capitalist stagnation</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">U.S.
workers’ wages stagnated in the last three decades, state-driven China almost
alone internationally in substantially improving popular living standards.
While other political economists in Marx’s day had observed a tendency for
profit rates—driving production under capitalism—to decline, Karl Marx claimed the decline is inevitable, this
forming the conclusion of Marx’s three-volume magnum opus, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Capital</i>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Marx’s central
argument is counterintuitive but simple. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Value</i>
consists of labor hours embodied in products. Employers (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">capitalists</i>) profit by paying laborers for their time, the amount
of value paid being less than the amount of socially necessary labor the
workers add. With capitalism’s evolution, a declining proportion of the value produced
is constituted of labor directly employed, an increasing proportion of
labor already concretized in capital goods, since mechanization of production is
the fundamental means to increasing economic efficiency, where capital goods
contribute to the value of a product to the extent they are consumed in its production. With the <i>increasing </i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">organic
composition of capital</i>—as proportionately more value is created through
capital goods—rate of profit must fall, since it is based on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">exploiting</i> labor and that already
embodied in capital goods has been sold and accounted for.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Despite its
centrality to Marx’s analysis of why capitalism eventually comes to retard
economic progress, the tendency of the rate of profit to decline is far from
universally accepted as true even by Marxian commentators. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: red;">Marxian academics have even questioned it mathematically,
but the real issue isn’t the almost-trivial mathematics but its mapping to
reality: does the declining <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Marxian</i>
rate of profit entail a declining <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">actual</i>
rate of profit?</span></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Conflicting
reciprocity norms</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">That owners
of capital (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">capitalists</i>) profit from
a series of “fair” exchanges could be termed the central premise of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Capital</i>. Workers exchange their labor
time for its value—that is, the laborers’ own price of reproduction. The
arrangement is fair under a reciprocity norm according to which commodities
trade at their market value. But it is unfair under a reciprocity norm
according to which all receive in proportion to their value-producing labor. Although
Marx didn’t stress the point, what’s striking is that <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: red;">each antagonist in the historical drama—the social
classes <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">workers</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">capitalists</i>—frames its interests in
terms of a simple coherent reciprocity principle, with the difference that the
workers favor a ratio derived from production and the capitalists from
distribution. </span></b>(See Alan Page Fiske, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Structures-Social-Life-Alan-Fiske/dp/0029066875/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1354672231&sr=8-1&keywords=Alan+page+Fiske">Structures of Social Life</a>: The Four
Elementary Forms of Human Relations</i> (1991) [“equality matching” and “market pricing,”
but Fiske, while discussing Marx, doesn’t link equality matching to the labor
theory of value].) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The market’s function</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Attacks on the
soundness of Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to decline derive
from its seeming impossibility—this, in turn, due to not seeing the connection between “profit” as defined in the theory and in the ledger. We must
start from fundamentals. According to Marx, civil society exists to allow human
cooperation in the labor process. Civilization is built on accomplishing this
by fostering the accumulation of economic resources by few; capitalism was the
form economies came to take at the onset of the industrial revolution. Like
other economic systems that followed the agricultural revolution, it arose and
became ascendant because of its efficiency in extracting value from labor,
but it accomplishes this with a progressive enlargement of the value diverted
to augmenting industrial machinery rather than directly producing more products
for consumption, which gradually changes the tasks presented. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: red;">As the contribution
of machinery grows relative to the direct contribution of laborers, the basic
economic tasks besetting society change from producing value from labor to
realizing the value embodied in machinery.</span></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">But the
capitalist market continues to be a system adapted to extracting value from
labor. Insofar as profit represents a gain in value accruing to the capitalist
class <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as a whole</i>, it comes from the
value contributed by the laborers. As the production process has progressively
less proportionate need for laborers, it becomes harder to profit sufficiently
at their expense.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Limits of state action under capitalism</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">It might be
thought that this Marxian profit is a reification. Who’s to say it is the
proper abstraction for understanding capitalist motivation, rather than, say,
the concept of “interest,” favored by the ultracapitalist “Austrian school.” One
response that denies the centrality of Marxian profit (technically, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">surplus value</i>) is that state action can
co-opt the market to new ends. Since the market tends to overproduce capital,
adroit government spending might redirect it to produce more consumer goods.
This is the essence of Keynes’s policies. The most <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">obvious</i> problem is that unprofitable spending is competitively
inefficient and is only sustainable in huge nation states with considerable
economic autonomy; otherwise, it may cause a nation’s industries to fail
against international competitors, who are free-riders on the increased buying
power of the local population. International economic competition sets limits
on a country’s ability to use Keynesian policies or any policies involving
state subsidy. Yet periods aren’t rare when one capitalist power dominates and
is subject to diminished international competition. Also, if Keynesian policies
are directed to creating positive externalities or “public goods” favoring
profitability, their benefit may outweigh their harm to profits.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">But insuperable
obstacles to using government to redirect the market keep Marxian <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">surplus value</i> a good first approximation
to balance-sheet profit. While a government-regulated market is often thought
to provide the best of capitalism and socialism, in an important sense, it
provides the worst of each in that the state attempts to regulate in ignorance
of the facts, a company’s plans a closely guarded commercial secret. But the
more fundamental problem with government-directed capitalism is that it amounts
to the government’s adding to some capitalists' profits at the expense of other
capitalists. Where political power follows economic power, the political unity
of the class of capitalists depends on their shared economic interests.
<span style="color: red;"><b>Private property is the means of coordinating individuals into a social class
sufficiently unified to legitimize government. This unity depends on
allocating wealth according to the dominant reciprocity norm, based on market
exchange rates.</b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The result
is only <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">limited</i> government
intervention can please the capitalist class. Rather than contributing to the
profits of the class, government policy must use incentives which advantage
parts of the class at the expense of the other parts. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: red;">To create an incentive sufficient to replace
the incentive of Marxian profit with balance-sheet profit, differently
constituted, would involve huge wealth transfers within the capitalist class, calling
the system’s legitimacy into question by undermining its broad support by the dominant
social class.</span></b></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="color: #38761d;">Corrected on January 2, 2013: the organic composition of capital<i> increases </i>rather than <i>declines</i>. The point is purely terminological and the result of my still not grasping why machinery is termed "organic."</span></span></span> <span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="color: #38761d;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Thanks to a correspondent, who corrected me.</span></span></span></div>
Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-21513614136485347562012-11-02T16:36:00.002-07:002013-04-03T21:31:27.476-07:0017.0. Akrasia explained. Part 1 of "Philosophical and political implications of ego-depletion theory"<b><span style="color: red; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">A recent empirical theory
in social psychology solves the problem of weakness of the will (<i>akrasia</i>).</span></b><b><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"> </span></b><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Before Roy F. Baumeister developed <i><a href="http://disputedissues.blogspot.com/2011/12/decision-fatigue-its-implications-for.html">ego-depletion
theory</a></i>, philosophers and psychologists (besides Freud) hadn’t seen need
for an energy construct to explain the limits of the ego’s ability to exercise
control. Ego-depletion theory’s message is that <b><span style="color: red;">practical</span></b><span style="color: red;"> <b>rationality consists of allocating the
brain’s minuscule energy supply</b></span> <b><span style="color: red;">fueling our capacity to decide</span></b>.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><br /></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The problem of akrasia
(weakness of will)<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Weakness of
the will (<i>akrasia</i>) has remained an
unsolved philosophical problem since articulated by the ancients. Why do we accord
the present moment more importance than the future, when rationality demands an
Archimedean impartiality between our “present and future selves”? Why would you
judge an action rational, as in your interest all things considered, yet not
perform it?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The problem
of akrasia is one of reconciliation with our commonsense introspective knowledge
that, despite our failings, we clearly can (sometimes) make ourselves do things
that we believe are the better choices. We make (some) rational choices and
conform our behavior accordingly. What stops us from doing so consistently and
biases us for the immediate? <i>Something</i>
limits our ability to decide, but only Freud previously formulated that the
limitation consists of the leaden weight of decisions recently made.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><br /></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Attempted Solutions<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Decision
theory redefines <i>rewardingness</i> as including,
as a feature, the <i>time</i> its utility is
experienced. The utility function describes the decreased value of the same
object enjoyed later, but it doesn’t render it rational. To the extent the
timing of experience is relevant in no other respect, it isn’t rational to
discount time. Why does the rational-choice assumption, that we will do what’s
best for ourselves, fail so miserably when the rewards happen to occur later?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">I can recollect only a single theory of why we discount future selves: Derek Parfit takes
the language of “future selves” literally to maintain that they present
to us as the same, in principle, as other persons’ selves, with which we
identify only according to the degree of their relatedness. The cost of Parfit’s
move is the concept of personhood. But while personhood doesn’t deserve to be
part of our ontology, it’s a useful fiction over most of our personal
transactions, failing conspicuously with regard to time discounting. We should
aim to discover why.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Notice
seems not to have been taken by philosophers of what would seem a scientific
solution to the problem of why somewhat rational beings are so akrasic. The
simple empirical answer offered is that we have a tiny daily ration of
willpower. Rational beings can overcome the tendency to discount time by
exerting will power, but they can only do it a few times a day. Our rationality
is limited by our ability to exercise willpower, which is based on a measurable
physical energy source—partly replenished by consuming glucose. The toll <i>decision fatigue </i>takes on people is
shown by the declining performances on <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-from-decision-fatigue.html?_r=3&ref=science&">real-life
judicial issues</a>, resulting in a change from 70% to 10% favorable
decisions between the beginning and end of the day.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><br /></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Ego depletion and free
will<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Why is
there resistance to recognizing that decisions become harder the more of them you
make? While decision fatigue comports with the introspection that we can <i>make</i> ourselves do some things, it
conflicts with our <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/05/1011-another-refutation-of.html">intuition that we can always do what we want</a>. <span style="color: red;"><b>Ego-depletion
phenomena present yet another <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/search/label/free%20will">breakdown
of the concept of compatibilist free will</a>.</b></span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #548235; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #548235; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: accent6; mso-themecolor: accent6; mso-themeshade: 191;"></span><br />
<span style="color: #548235; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #548235; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: accent6; mso-themecolor: accent6; mso-themeshade: 191;"><a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/12/171-societal-implications-of-ego.html">Next essay in series</a>: Implications
for the structure of government, welfare economics, and even psychotherapy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-30635348269883929102012-10-12T13:54:00.000-07:002013-05-16T12:44:25.993-07:0014.4. The deeper solution to the mystery of moralism—Morality and free will are hazardous to your mental health<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The complex
relationship between Systems 1 and 2 and construal level</span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The
distinction between pre-attentive and focal-attentive mental processes<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>has permeated cognitive psychology for some
35 years. In the past half-decade has emerged <a href="http://disputedissues.blogspot.com/2012/02/construal-level-theory-and-matching.html">another cognitive dichotomy</a> specific to
social psychology: processes of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">abstract
construal</i> (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">far</i> cognition) versus <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">concrete construal</i> (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">near</i> cognition). <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: red;">This essay will theorize about the relationship between these
dichotomies to clarify further how believing in the existence of free will and in
the objective existence of morality can thwart reason by causing you to choose
what you don’t want.</span></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The state
of the art on pre-attentive and focal-attentive processes is Daniel Kahneman’s
book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Thinking, Fast and Slow</i>, where
he calls pre-attentive processes <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">System 1</i>
and focal-attentive processes <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">System 2</i>.
The reification of processes into fictional systems also resembles Freud’s
<i>System Csc</i> (Conscious) and <i>System Pcs</i> (Preconscious). I’ll adopt the language <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">System 1</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">System 2</i>, but readers can apply their understanding of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">preconscious </i></span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">– </i><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">conscious</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">, </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">pre-attentive – focal-attentive</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">, or </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">automatic processes – controlled processes</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">
dichotomies. They name the same distinction, in which System 1 consists of
processes occurring quickly and effortlessly in parallel outside awareness;
System 2 consists of processes occurring slowly and effortfully in sequential </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">awareness</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">, which in this context refers
to the contents of working memory rather than </span><a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/09/161-raw-experience-dogma-dissolving.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">raw
experience</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> and accompanies System 2 activity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">To
integrate Systems 1 and 2 with <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/03/150-taxonomy-of-political-ideologies.html">construal-level theory</a>, we note that System
2—the conscious part of our minds—can perform any of three routines in making a
decision about taking some action, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">such
as whether to vote in an election</b>, a good example not just for timeliness
but also for linkages to our main concern with morality: voting is a clear example
of an action without tangible benefit. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The</b>
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">potential voter might:</b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Case 1.</span></b><span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"> Make a conscious
decision to vote based on applying the principle that citizens owe a duty to
vote in elections.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #00b050; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Case 2.</span></b><span style="color: #00b050; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"> Decide to be open to
the candidates’ substantive positions and vote only if either candidate seems
worthy of support.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #7030a0; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Case 3.</span></b><span style="color: #7030a0; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"> Experience a change
of mind between 1 and 2.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The preceding were examples of the
three routines System 2 can perform:</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Case 1.</span></b><span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"> Make the choice.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #00b050; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Case 2.</span></b><span style="color: #00b050; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"> “Program” System 1 to
make the choice based on automatic criteria that don’t require sequential
thinking.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #7030a0; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Case 3.</span></b><span style="color: #7030a0; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"> Interrupt System 1 in
the face of anomalies.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><b><span style="color: red;">When System
2 initiates action, whether it retains the power to decide or passes to System
1 is the difference between concrete and abstract construal. </span></b></span><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><b><span style="color: #6aa84f;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #00b050; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Case 2</span></span></span></b> is key to understanding how Systems 1 and 2 work to produce the effects
construal-level theory predicts. Keep in mind that the unconscious, automatic
System 1 includes not just hardwired patterns but also skilled habits. Meanwhile,
System 2 is notoriously “lazy,” unwilling to interrupt System 1, as in </span><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><b><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #7030a0; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Case 3</span></span></b>,
but despite the perennial biases that plague System 1, resulting from letting
it have its way, the highest levels of expertise also occur in System 1.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">A delegate
System 1 operates with <a href="http://disputedissues.blogspot.com/2012/07/you-too-have-optimal-sentence-length.html">holistic patterns typifying <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">far</i> cognition</a>. This mode is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">far</i> because we offload distant matter to
System 1 but exercise sequential control under System 2 as immediacy looms—although there are
many exceptions. It is critical to distinguish <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">far</i> cognition from the lazy failure of System 2 to perform properly
in <span style="color: #7030a0;"><b>Case 3</b>, <span style="color: black;">as</span> s</span>uch failure isn’t specific to
mode. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Far</i> cognition, System 1 acting
as delegate for System 2, is a narrower concept than automatic cognition, but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">far</i> cognition <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> automatic cognition. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Near</i>
cognition admits no easy cross-classification.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Belief in free will
and moral realism undermine our “fast and frugal heuristics”</span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The two
most important recent books on the cognitive psychology of decision and
judgment are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Thinking, Fast and Slow </i>by
Daniel Kahneman and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gut Reactions: The
Intelligence of the Unconscious</i> by Gerd Gigerenzer, and both insist on the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">contrast</i> between their positions, although
conflicts aren’t obvious. Kahneman explains System 1 biases as due to employing mechanisms outside their evolutionary range of usefulness; Gigerenzer
describes “fast and frugal heuristics” that sometimes misfire to produce
biases. Where these half-empty versus half-full positions on heuristics and
biases really differ is their <a href="http://disputedissues.blogspot.com/2012/07/you-too-have-optimal-sentence-length.html">overall appraisal</a> of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">near</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">far</i> processes,
as Gigerenzer is a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">far</i> thinker and
Kahneman a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">near</i> thinker, and they are
both naturally biased for their preferred modes. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Far</i> thought shows more confidence in fast-and-frugal heuristics,
since it offloads to System 1, whose province is to employ them.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The
fast-and-frugal-heuristics way of thinking helps in understanding
the effects of moral realism and free will: they cause System 2 to supplant System 1 in decision-making. When we apply <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2011/12/14-why-do-what-oughta-habit-theory-of.html">principles of integrity</a> to regulate
our conduct, sometimes we do better in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">far
mode</i>, where System 2 offloads the task of determining compliance to System
1. Not if you have a principle of integrity that includes an absolute
obligation to vote; then you act as in </span><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><b><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Case 1</span></span></b>: based on a conscious decision. But
principles of integrity do not <i>really </i>take this absolute form, an illusion
created by moral realism. A principle of integrity flexible enough for actual use
might favor voting (based, say, on a general principle embracing an obligation
to perform duties) but disfavor it for “lowering the bar” if there’s only a
choice between the lesser of evils. The art of objectively applying
this principle depends on your honest appraisal of the strength of your
commitment to each component virtue, a feat System 2 is incapable of performing; when it can be
accomplished, it’s due to System 1’s unconscious skills.
<span style="color: red;"><b>Principles of integrity are applied more accurately in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">far-mode</i> than <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">near-mode</i>.</b></span>
[Hat Tip to <a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/">Overcoming Bias</a> for
these convenient phrases.]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="color: red;"><b>But beliefs
in moral realism and free will impel moral actors to apply their principles in <i>near-mode </i>because these beliefs hold that moral conduct results from <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2010/12/what-how-and-why-of-free-will.html">freely willed acts</a>.</b></span>
I’m not going to thoroughly defend the premise here, but this thought
experiment might carry some persuasive weight. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Read the following in near mode, and introspect your emotions:</b></span></div>
<div class="MsoQuote">
<br /></div>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoQuote">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #538135; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-themecolor: accent6; mso-themeshade: 191;">Sexual predator Jerry Sandusky will serve his time in a minimal
security prison, where he’s allowed groups of visitors five days a week.</span></b></div>
</blockquote>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Some readers
will experience a sense of outrage. Then <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2010/12/what-how-and-why-of-free-will.html">remind yourself</a>: <b>There’s no free will.</b> If you
believe the reminder, your outrage will subside; if you’ve long been a
convinced and consistent determinist, you might not need to remind yourself. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Morality</i> inculpates based on acts of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">free will</i>: morality and free will are
inseparable. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">A point I
must emphasize because of its novelty: it’s System 1 that ordinarily determines
what you want. System 2 doesn't ordinarily deliberate about the subject
directly; it deliberates about relevant facts, but in the end, you can only <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">intuit</i> your volition. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What a
belief in moral realism and free will do is nothing less than change the
architecture of decision-making. When we practice principles of integrity and
internalize them, they and nonmoral considerations </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">co-determine</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> our System 1 judgments, whereas according to moral
realism and free will, moral good is the product of </span><a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/08/160-supposedly-hard-problem-of.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">conscious free choice</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">, so
System 2 </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">contrasts</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> its moral opinion
to System 1’s intuition, for which System 2 compensates—and usually
overcompensates. With the voter who had to weigh the imperatives of the duty to vote and
the duty to avoid “lowering the bar” when both candidates promote distasteful or vacuous programs, System 2 can prime and program System 1 by
studying the issues, but the multifaceted decision is itself best made by
System 1. What happens when System 2 tries to decide? <span style="color: red;"><b>System
2 makes the qualitative judgment that System 1 is biased one way or the other and
</b></span></span><span style="color: red;"><b><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">corrects</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> System 1, implicating the </span><a href="http://disputedissues.blogspot.com/2008/11/overcompensation-for-persuasion.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">overcompensation
bias</a></b></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="color: red;"><b>, by which conscious attempts to counteract biases usually overcorrect.</b></span> A
voter who thinks correction is needed for a bias toward shirking duty will vote
when not really wanting to, all things considered. A voter biased toward "lowering
the bar" will be </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">excessively</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> purist. <span style="color: red;"><b>Whatever
standard the voter uses will be taken too far.</b></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Belief in moral
realism and free will biases practical reasoning</span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">This essay has presented the third of three ways that b</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">elief in objective morality and free will causes people to do other than what they want:</span></div>
<br />
<ol>
<li><b><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">It retards people in <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2011/12/14-why-do-what-oughta-habit-theory-of.html">adaptively
changing</a> their principles of integrity.</span></b></li>
<b>
</b>
<li><b><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">It prevents people from <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/04/143-unraveling-mystery-of-morality.html">questioning
</a>their so-called foundations.</span></b></li>
<li><b><span style="color: red;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-fareast-font-family: Verdana;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; line-height: normal;"></span></span></span><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">It systematically exaggerates the
compellingness of moral claims. </span></span></b></li>
</ol>
<br />Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-76057317921743615292012-09-12T17:04:00.002-07:002013-02-03T11:00:26.052-08:0016.1. The raw-experience dogma: Dissolving the “qualia” problem<h3 align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">1. Defining the problem: The
inverted spectrum</span></b></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Philosophy
has been called a preoccupation with the questions entertained by adolescents,
and one adolescent favorite concerns our knowledge of other persons’ “private
experience” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">raw experience</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">qualia</i>). A philosophers’ version is the
“inverted spectrum”: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: red;">how do I know you see “red” rather than “blue” when you see this
red print?</span></b> How could we tell when we each link the same terms to the
same outward descriptions? We each will say “red” when we see the print, even
if you really <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">see</i> “blue.” </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The
intuition that allows us to be different this way is the intuition of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">raw experience</i> (or of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">qualia</i>). Philosophers of mind have
devoted considerable attention to reconciling the intuition that raw experience
exists with the intuition that inverted-spectrum indeterminacy has unacceptable
dualist implications making the mental realm publicly unobservable, but <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: red;">it’s time for nihilism
about qualia, whose claim to exist rests solely on the
strength of a prejudice.</span></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<h4 class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">A. Attempted solutions
to the inverted spectrum.</span></span></b></h4>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">One account
would have us examine which parts of the brain are activated by each
perception, but then we rely on an unverifiable correlation between brain
structures and “private experience.” With only a single example of private
experience—our own—we have no basis for knowing what makes private experience
the same or different between persons. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">A subtler
response to the inverted spectrum is that red and blue as experiences are
distinct because red looks “red” due to its being constituted by certain
responses, such as affect. Red makes you alert and tense; blue, tranquil or
maybe sad. What we call the experience of red, on this account, just is the
sense of alertness, and other manifestations. The hope is that identical observable
responses to appropriate wavelengths might explain qualitative redness. Then, we
could discover we experience blue when others experience red by finding that we
idiosyncratically become tranquil instead of alert when exposed to the long
wavelengths constituting physical red. This complication doesn’t remove the radical
uncertainty about experiential descriptions. </span><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Emotion only seems more capable than cognition of explaining raw experience because emotional events are memorable. The affect theory</span><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"> doesn't answer how an
emotional reaction can <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">constitute</i> a raw
subjective experience. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<h4 class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">B. The “substitution
bias” of solving the “easy problem of consciousness” instead of the “hard
problem.”</span></span></b></h4>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">As in those
examples, attempts at analyzing raw experience commonly appeal to the <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/9l3/the_substitution_principle/">substitution process</a> that psychologist Daniel Kahneman discovered in many cognitive fallacies. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Substitution</i> is the unthoughtful replacement of an easy for a related
hard question. In the philosophy of mind, the distinct questions are actually termed
the “easy problem of consciousness” and the “hard problem of consciousness,”
and errors regarding consciousness typically are due to substituting the “easy
problem” for the “hard,” where the easy problem is to explain some function
that typically <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">accompanies</i>
“awareness.” The philosopher might substitute knowledge of one’s own brain
processes for raw experience; or, as in the previous example, experience’s
neural accompaniments or its affective accompaniments. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: red;">Avoiding the “substitution bias” is particularly
hard when dealing with raw awareness, an unarticulated
intuition; articulating it is a present purpose.</span></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<h3 align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">2. The false intuition of
direct awareness</span></b></h3>
<h4 class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">A. Our sense that the
existence of raw experience is self-evident doesn’t show that it is true.</span></span></b></h4>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The theory that
direct awareness reveals raw experience has long been almost sacrosanct in
philosophy. According to the British Empiricists, direct experience consists of
sense data and forms the indubitable basis of all synthetic knowledge. For
Continental Rationalist Descartes, too, my direct experience—“I think”—indubitably
proves my existence. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">We do have
a strong intuition that we have raw experience, the substance of direct
awareness, but we have other strong intuitions, some turn out true and others
false. We have an intuition that space is necessarily flat, an intuition proven
false only with non-Euclidean geometries in the 19<sup>th</sup> century. We
have an intuition that every event has a cause, which determinists believe but
indeterminists deny. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: red;">Sequestered intuitions aren’t knowledge.</span></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<h4 class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">B. Experience can’t
reveal the error in the intuition that raw experience exists.</span></span></b></h4>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">To correct wayward
intuitions, we ordinarily test them against each other. A simple perceptual
illusion illustrates: the popular <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCller-Lyer_illusion">Muller-Lyer
illusion</a>, where arrowheads on a line make it appear shorter than an
identical line with the arrowheads reversed. Invoking the more credible
intuition that measuring the lines finds their real length convinces us of the intuitive
error that the lines are unequal. In contrast, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: red;">we have no means to check the truth of the
belief in raw experience; it simply seems self-evident, but it might seem
equally self-evident if it were false</span></b>. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<h4 class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">C. We can’t capture
the ineffable core of raw experience with language because nothing's really there.</span></span></b></h4>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">One task in
philosophy is articulating the intuitions implicit in our thinking, and sometimes
rejecting the intuition should result from concluding it employs concepts
illogically. What shows the intuition of raw experience is incoherent
(self-contradictory or vacuous) is that the terms we use to describe raw
experience are limited to the terms for its referents; we have no terms to
describe the experience as such, but rather, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: red;">we describe qualia by applying terms denoting
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ordinary cause</i> of the supposed
raw experience</span></b>. The simplest explanation for the absence of a
vocabulary to describe the qualitative properties of raw experience is that
they don’t exist: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: red;">a process without properties is conceptually vacuous</span>.</b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<h4 class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">D. We believe raw
experience exists without detecting it.</span></span></b></h4>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">One error
in thinking about the existence of raw experience comes from confusing
perception with belief, which is conceptually distinct. When people universally
report that qualia “seem” to exist, they are only reporting their beliefs—despite
their sense of certainty. Where “perception” is defined as a nervous system’s
extraction of a sensory-array’s features, people can’t report their perceptions
except <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">through</i> beliefs the
perceptions sometimes engender: I can’t tell you my perceptions except by
relating my beliefs about them. This conceptual truth is illustrated by the
phenomenon of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blindsight</i>, a condition in which patients report complete blindness yet, </span><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">by discriminating external
objects, </span>demonstrate that they can perceive them. Blindsighted patients </span><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">can report only according to their beliefs, and they </span>perceive <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">more</i> than they believe and report that they perceive. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: red;">Qualia nihilism analyzes the intuition
of raw experience as perceiving <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">less</i>
than you believe and report perceiving, the reverse of blindsight</span></b>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<h3 align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">3. The conceptual economy
of qualia nihilism pays off in philosophical progress. </span></b></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Eliminating
raw experience from ontology produces conceptual economy. A summary of its
conceptual advantages:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"> A. Qualia nihilism resolves an
intractable problem for materialism:</span></span></b><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"> physical concepts are dispositional, whereas raw
experiences concern properties that seem, instead, to pertain to noncausal
essences. If raw experience was coherent, we could hope for a scientific
insight, although no one has been able to define the general character of such
an explanation. Removing a fundamental scientific mystery is a conceptual gain.</span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"> </span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"> B. Qualia nihilism resolves the
private-language problem.</span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"> </span></i></b><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">There
seems to be no possible language that uses nonpublic concepts. Eliminating raw
experience allows explaining the absence of a private language by the
nonexistence of any private referents.</span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-fareast-font-family: Verdana;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> <b>C.</b><i><b> <span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></b></i></span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Qualia nihilism offers a compelling
diagnosis of where important skeptical arguments regarding the possibility of
knowledge go wrong</span></span></b><i><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">.</span></span></b></i><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">
The arguments—George Berkeley’s are their prototype—reason that sense data,
being indubitable intuitions of direct experience, are the source of our
knowledge, which must, in consequence, be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">about</i>
raw experience rather than the “external world.” If you accept the existence of
raw experience, the argument is notoriously difficult to undermine logically
because concepts of “raw experience” truly can’t be analogized to any concepts
applying to the external world. Eliminating raw experience provides an elegant demolition; rather than the other way around, our belief in raw
experience depends on our knowledge of the external world, which is the source
of the concepts we apply to fabricate qualia.</span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<br /></div>
<h3 align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">4. Relying on brute-force intuition is rationally specious.</span></b></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Against
these considerations, the only argument for retaining raw experience in our
ontology is the sheer strength of everyone’s belief in its existence. How much
weight should we attach to a strong belief whose validity we can't check? None.
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: red;">Beliefs
ordinarily earn a presumption of truth from the absence of empirical challenge,
but when empirical challenge is impossible in principle, the belief deserves no
confidence.</span></b></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: #38761d;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">[Overlaps <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/08/160-supposedly-hard-problem-of.html">16.0 </a><i>The supposedly hard problem of consciousness and the nonexistence of sense data: Is your dog a conscious being?</i> The present essay is comparatively more <a href="http://disputedissues.blogspot.com/2012/07/you-too-have-optimal-sentence-length.html">sequential, as opposed to global</a>.]</span></span></span></div>
Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3711403820684618858.post-52252145295700254252012-08-02T18:25:00.000-07:002013-07-01T18:55:00.079-07:0016.0 The supposedly hard problem of consciousness and the nonexistence of sense data: Is your dog a conscious being?<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Of dogs and cows</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Are dogs
conscious? My guess, you think so: that’s why they’re termed “sentient.” We
assume that dogs see the world much as we do, despite being receptive to
different information; they experience the same conscious data of sense as we
experience. You, nevertheless, might be prepared to concede the ultimate
unfathomability of the question, but if not, consider a related question: when
did consciousness first arise in the course of organic evolution?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The reason
the questions are obscure deserves scrutiny. I think I know <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you’re</i> conscious because you say you
know what I’m saying when I mention “consciousness” or “experience,” but the
limits of my knowledge of consciousness are telling: I will never find some
physical structure to explain it. This isn’t due to lack of empirical research
or of theoretical ingenuity. To explain an observation, you must describe it,
and the language used for describing conscious experience is the same language
used for describing the object the experience refers to. The most I can do to
describe the experienced “brownness” is achieved by referring to its cause.
When I see a brown cow, I can only describe the raw experience as “brown”: the
color that ordinarily gives rise to the experience. <span style="color: red;">Thus, I necessarily omit from the description exactly what I want to explain: the qualitative
character of the “brown” experience.</span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Apparent self-evidence</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">If
qualitative consciousness existed, it would be utterly inexplicable; yet, the
evidence of direct experience seems self-evidently to support its own
existence. This seemingly immediate awareness of our raw mental states seems to
be just what it is like to be ourselves. (Thomas Nagel.) Regardless of the
apparent indubitability of the intuition that we have raw experiential states,
this intuition remains nothing more than belief, and beliefs are subject to
illusions that mislead us systematically.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">One reason you
might resist the conclusion that qualitative experience is illusory is that wholesale
distortion of reality regarding objects of seemingly immediate awareness seems
implausible just because of our intimate connection with our own experience, but scientific developments can render seemingly unrelated philosophical positions
plausible. The work of neurologists, such as Oliver Sacks, should
caution against the prejudice that some experiences are so basic they resist
radical distortion and fabrication. An example Sacks describes is a
brain-damaged patient who mistook his wife for a hat. Neuroscientists conclude
that cognitive functions are assemblies of modules, making it less startling
that beliefs can be so radically wrong. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">There’s
also a conceptual reason for the reluctance of philosophers and scientists to
reject the intuition of raw sense experience: lack of clarity about how to
characterize the prewired belief responsible for the illusion. The intuition
seems too complex and sophisticated to accommodate innate belief; philosophers
trying to nail down the precise content of the belief that qualia exist have
had recourse to thought experiments remote from actual experience, and nobody
seems to have characterized the essence of qualia. My suggestion: <span style="color: red;">the illusion of qualitative awareness is the belief that when we perceive or imagine objects we have independently real experiences characterizable
only by the terms used to describe the external object itself</span>. <b>Qualia are inherently ineffable contents of
perception or imagination</b>.</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The illusion’s
evolution</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">This
definition suggests an evolutionary explanation for the illusion of
qualitative experience. Thought doesn’t depend on the illusion of
consciousness, as one can easily conceive of an intelligent being without
illusory beliefs about the nature of the thinking process, but the illusion of
consciousness might have encouraged the development of thinking. Perhaps human
ancestors evolved the innate belief that they have experiences with properties
corresponding to those of their referents because this belief encouraged them to make mental models of the world—encouraged them to engage in the
offline thinking unique for our species. Objectified conscious experience could
encourage mental-model making by generalizing the prior insight that you can predict
one external object by manipulating a similar external object. Our ancestors would
then need only substitute internal objects for external ones.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Bypassing “sense data”
in the theory of knowledge</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">According
to one longstanding theory in epistemology, sense data are our only basis for
knowing the external world. This doctrine, taken to its logical conclusion,
leads to skepticism about the external world’s existence: sense data,
supposedly our window to the world, became an insuperable barrier to cognition,
for if all our knowledge is nothing but construction from sense data, our sense
data are all we know. We can’t get out of our own minds.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">The reason
the sense data theory leads to skeptical conclusions goes back to ineffability.
If we know the world by sense data, you can draw conclusions about the world
only through analogy, that is, by forming a relationship between two descriptions.
Ineffable sense data have nothing in common with a world of things, except
their names</span><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">—such as “brownness.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Two illusions</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">This
account of raw experience as an adaptive illusion brings clarity to the
argument that <a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2010/12/what-how-and-why-of-free-will.html">free
will is illusory</a>. The sense of free will, I concluded, is the misperception
that experienced deciding causes behavior. But “experience” doesn’t exist. <span style="color: red;"><a href="http://tinyurl.com/cdl69lk">Compatibilist free will</a> is incoherent because
it assumes the causal efficacy of unreal raw experience.</span> </span><br />
<span style="color: #134f5c;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #38761d;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="color: #134f5c;"><a href="http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/2012/09/161-raw-experience-dogma-dissolving.html">See also the overlapping</a> </span><b>16.1.</b> <i>The raw-experience dogma: Dissolving the “qualia” problem.</i> </span></span></div>
Stephen R. Diamondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07165258952900481659noreply@blogger.com8