17.1. 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")

From ego-depletion theory, 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 cause judges to deny almost all petitions 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:

Decisions become remarkably harder and less competent with each succeeding decision.

Two societal implications are that 1) accepting or declining economic transactions is costlier than we think and 2) electing numerous officials curtails democracy.

Ignored transaction costs

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.

The harm never considered is how much willpower is drained from those who refrained from borrowing, who successfully resisted the impulse to take a home loan; how the drain on their willpower paralyzed them in making other 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. It’s the great hidden societal cost of market transactions. And while researchers assume 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.

The faux-democratic proliferation of electoral events

Like proliferating consumer “choices” that kill happiness and productivity while seeming to enhance them, the proliferation of elections has an analogous paradoxical effect on democracy. 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.

Although dramatically reforming the American political structure is neither feasible nor high priority, it is well to have a vision 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 construal-level theory offers additional standards. It proposes that

“Seeing the forest” and “seeing the trees” involve integrated mental sets, dubbed far-mode and near-mode 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.

Outcomes will depend on whether the decision is construed in far-mode or near-mode. 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 near-mode, due both to small districts and frequent elections, and presidential elections may be most far-mode, although Senate terms are longer. Near-mode fosters resistance to change, so it is theoretically consistent with construal-level theory that the House has taken so strongly to saying no.

But if the system succeeds in eliciting different construal levels in different government branches, this has come to seem a defect rather than merit. If government is to deal in broad purposes, far-mode should dominate in formulating policies. If policies are to be implemented intelligently, near-mode should dominate in their local application. 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 far-mode processes, unlikely to lead to effective near-mode reasoning by the appointees.

Another little used but in-theory effective means of unifying local government with national government could better secure the appropriate allocation of near and far cognition: indirect election of progressively higher levels of government by local bodies, so the choices are minimized and each delegation is progressively more far-mode. 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 near-mode to far-mode while economizing human willpower.

18.0 Capitalism and socialism express conflicting reciprocity norms: A reinterpretation of Marx’s theory of capitalist decline

Capitalist stagnation

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, Capital.

Marx’s central argument is counterintuitive but simple. Value consists of labor hours embodied in products. Employers (capitalists) 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 increasing organic composition of capital—as proportionately more value is created through capital goods—rate of profit must fall, since it is based on exploiting labor and that already embodied in capital goods has been sold and accounted for.

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. 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 Marxian rate of profit entail a declining actual rate of profit?

Conflicting reciprocity norms

That owners of capital (capitalists) profit from a series of “fair” exchanges could be termed the central premise of Capital. 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 each antagonist in the historical drama—the social classes workers and capitalists—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. (See Alan Page Fiske, Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms of Human Relations (1991) [“equality matching” and “market pricing,” but Fiske, while discussing Marx, doesn’t link equality matching to the labor theory of value].)

The market’s function

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. 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.

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 as a whole, 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.

Limits of state action under capitalism

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, surplus value) 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 obvious 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.

But insuperable obstacles to using government to redirect the market keep Marxian surplus value 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. 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.

The result is only limited 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. 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.

Corrected on January 2, 2013: the organic composition of capital increases rather than declines. The point is purely terminological and the result of my still not grasping why machinery is termed "organic." Thanks to a correspondent, who corrected me.

17.0. Akrasia explained. Part 1 of "Philosophical and political implications of ego-depletion theory"

A recent empirical theory in social psychology solves the problem of weakness of the will (akrasia). Before Roy F. Baumeister developed ego-depletion theory, 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 practical rationality consists of allocating the brain’s minuscule energy supply fueling our capacity to decide.

The problem of akrasia (weakness of will)

Weakness of the will (akrasia) 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?

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? Something limits our ability to decide, but only Freud previously formulated that the limitation consists of the leaden weight of decisions recently made.

Attempted Solutions

Decision theory redefines rewardingness as including, as a feature, the time 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?

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.

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 decision fatigue takes on people is shown by the declining performances on real-life judicial issues, resulting in a change from 70% to 10% favorable decisions between the beginning and end of the day.

Ego depletion and free will

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 make ourselves do some things, it conflicts with our intuition that we can always do what we want. Ego-depletion phenomena present yet another breakdown of the concept of compatibilist free will.

Next essay in series: Implications for the structure of government, welfare economics, and even psychotherapy.

14.4. The deeper solution to the mystery of moralism—Morality and free will are hazardous to your mental health

The complex relationship between Systems 1 and 2 and construal level

The distinction between pre-attentive and focal-attentive mental processes  has permeated cognitive psychology for some 35 years. In the past half-decade has emerged another cognitive dichotomy specific to social psychology: processes of abstract construal (far cognition) versus concrete construal (near cognition). 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.

The state of the art on pre-attentive and focal-attentive processes is Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, where he calls pre-attentive processes System 1 and focal-attentive processes System 2. The reification of processes into fictional systems also resembles Freud’s System Csc (Conscious) and System Pcs (Preconscious). I’ll adopt the language System 1 and System 2, but readers can apply their understanding of preconscious – conscious, pre-attentive – focal-attentive, or automatic processes – controlled processes 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 awareness, which in this context refers to the contents of working memory rather than raw experience and accompanies System 2 activity.

To integrate Systems 1 and 2 with construal-level theory, 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, such as whether to vote in an election, 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. The potential voter might:

Case 1. Make a conscious decision to vote based on applying the principle that citizens owe a duty to vote in elections.

Case 2. Decide to be open to the candidates’ substantive positions and vote only if either candidate seems worthy of support.

Case 3. Experience a change of mind between 1 and 2.

The preceding were examples of the three routines System 2 can perform:

Case 1. Make the choice.

Case 2. “Program” System 1 to make the choice based on automatic criteria that don’t require sequential thinking.

Case 3. Interrupt System 1 in the face of anomalies.

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. Case 2 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 Case 3, 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.

A delegate System 1 operates with holistic patterns typifying far cognition. This mode is far 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 far cognition from the lazy failure of System 2 to perform properly in Case 3, as such failure isn’t specific to mode. Far cognition, System 1 acting as delegate for System 2, is a narrower concept than automatic cognition, but far cognition is automatic cognition. Near cognition admits no easy cross-classification.

Belief in free will and moral realism undermine our “fast and frugal heuristics”

The two most important recent books on the cognitive psychology of decision and judgment are Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and Gut Reactions: The Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer, and both insist on the contrast 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 overall appraisal of near and far processes, as Gigerenzer is a far thinker and Kahneman a near thinker, and they are both naturally biased for their preferred modes. Far thought shows more confidence in fast-and-frugal heuristics, since it offloads to System 1, whose province is to employ them.

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 principles of integrity to regulate our conduct, sometimes we do better in far mode, 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 Case 1: based on a conscious decision. But principles of integrity do not really 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. Principles of integrity are applied more accurately in far-mode than near-mode. [Hat Tip to Overcoming Bias for these convenient phrases.]

But beliefs in moral realism and free will impel moral actors to apply their principles in near-mode because these beliefs hold that moral conduct results from freely willed acts. I’m not going to thoroughly defend the premise here, but this thought experiment might carry some persuasive weight. Read the following in near mode, and introspect your emotions:

Sexual predator Jerry Sandusky will serve his time in a minimal security prison, where he’s allowed groups of visitors five days a week.

Some readers will experience a sense of outrage. Then remind yourself: There’s no free will. 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. Morality inculpates based on acts of free will: morality and free will are inseparable.

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 intuit your volition. 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 co-determine our System 1 judgments, whereas according to moral realism and free will, moral good is the product of conscious free choice, so System 2 contrasts 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? System 2 makes the qualitative judgment that System 1 is biased one way or the other and corrects System 1, implicating the overcompensation bias, by which conscious attempts to counteract biases usually overcorrect. 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 excessively purist. Whatever standard the voter uses will be taken too far.

Belief in moral realism and free will biases practical reasoning

This essay has presented the third of three ways that belief in objective morality and free will causes people to do other than what they want:

1. It retards people in adaptively changing their principles of integrity.
2. It prevents people from questioning their so-called foundations.
3. It systematically exaggerates the compellingness of moral claims.

16.1. The raw-experience dogma: Dissolving the “qualia” problem

1. Defining the problem: The inverted spectrum

Philosophy has been called a preoccupation with the questions entertained by adolescents, and one adolescent favorite concerns our knowledge of other persons’ “private experience” (raw experience or qualia). A philosophers’ version is the “inverted spectrum”: how do I know you see “red” rather than “blue” when you see this red print? 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 see “blue.”

The intuition that allows us to be different this way is the intuition of raw experience (or of qualia). 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 it’s time for nihilism about qualia, whose claim to exist rests solely on the strength of a prejudice.

A. Attempted solutions to the inverted spectrum.

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.

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. Emotion only seems more capable than cognition of explaining raw experience because emotional events are memorable. The affect theory doesn't answer how an emotional reaction can constitute a raw subjective experience.

B. The “substitution bias” of solving the “easy problem of consciousness” instead of the “hard problem.”

As in those examples, attempts at analyzing raw experience commonly appeal to the substitution process that psychologist Daniel Kahneman discovered in many cognitive fallacies. Substitution 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 accompanies “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. Avoiding the “substitution bias” is particularly hard when dealing with raw awareness, an unarticulated intuition; articulating it is a present purpose.

2. The false intuition of direct awareness

A. Our sense that the existence of raw experience is self-evident doesn’t show that it is true.

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.

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^th century. We have an intuition that every event has a cause, which determinists believe but indeterminists deny. Sequestered intuitions aren’t knowledge.

B. Experience can’t reveal the error in the intuition that raw experience exists.

To correct wayward intuitions, we ordinarily test them against each other. A simple perceptual illusion illustrates: the popular Muller-Lyer illusion, 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, 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. 

C. We can’t capture the ineffable core of raw experience with language because nothing's really there.

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, we describe qualia by applying terms denoting the ordinary cause of the supposed raw experience. The simplest explanation for the absence of a vocabulary to describe the qualitative properties of raw experience is that they don’t exist: a process without properties is conceptually vacuous.

D. We believe raw experience exists without detecting it.

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 through 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 blindsight, a condition in which patients report complete blindness yet, by discriminating external objects, demonstrate that they can perceive them. Blindsighted patients can report only according to their beliefs, and they perceive more than they believe and report that they perceive. Qualia nihilism analyzes the intuition of raw experience as perceiving less than you believe and report perceiving, the reverse of blindsight.

3. The conceptual economy of qualia nihilism pays off in philosophical progress.

Eliminating raw experience from ontology produces conceptual economy. A summary of its conceptual advantages:

   A. Qualia nihilism resolves an intractable problem for materialism: 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.

 

    B. Qualia nihilism resolves the private-language problem. 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.

    C.  Qualia nihilism offers a compelling diagnosis of where important skeptical arguments regarding the possibility of knowledge go wrong. 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 about 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.

4. Relying on brute-force intuition is rationally specious.

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. 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.

[Overlaps 16.0 The supposedly hard problem of consciousness and the nonexistence of sense data: Is your dog a conscious being? The present essay is comparatively more sequential, as opposed to global.]

16.0 The supposedly hard problem of consciousness and the nonexistence of sense data: Is your dog a conscious being?

Of dogs and cows

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?

The reason the questions are obscure deserves scrutiny. I think I know you’re 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. Thus, I necessarily omit from the description exactly what I want to explain: the qualitative character of the “brown” experience.

Apparent self-evidence

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.

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.

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: 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. Qualia are inherently ineffable contents of perception or imagination.

The illusion’s evolution

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.

Bypassing “sense data” in the theory of knowledge

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.

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—such as “brownness.”

Two illusions

This account of raw experience as an adaptive illusion brings clarity to the argument that free will is illusory. The sense of free will, I concluded, is the misperception that experienced deciding causes behavior. But “experience” doesn’t exist. Compatibilist free will is incoherent because it assumes the causal efficacy of unreal raw experience. 

See also the overlapping 16.1. The raw-experience dogma: Dissolving the “qualia” problem.

10.1.2. Reflexive prediction, determinism, and the impossibility of free will

 6th in free-will series

Will you—or won’t you—take an M & M candy in the next minute after it’s placed in front of you? In this thought experiment, we assume that I’m able to predict your action with absolute accuracy based on physics. I inform you that I predict you’ll take the candy, but you’re a rebellious sort, and just to prove you’re no automaton, you decide on defiance. Your proneness to disconfirm predictions deliberately seems to render impossible any prediction of your choice, provided you’re informed of it in advance. But remember I can predict your choice. 

    At least one of the following assumptions concerning the physical possibilities must be false to remove the contradiction:

    1. That it’s physically possible that you be informed of a deterministic prediction when you’re indifferent to the alternatives

  

    2. That it’s physically possible to predict your behavior precisely

  

    3. That it’s physically possible for you to defy the prediction

A.   Because you don't want to defy it

B.   Because you won't be able to defy it despite wanting to

The possibility of conveying a precise prediction (No. 1)

It might be claimed that physics precludes that you could ever be informed of a determinate prediction when you’re indifferent to the alternatives, since you’ll be moved to falsify it. But if perfect prediction is possible, conveying its substance should be easy: no barriers are apparent.

The possibility of predicting precisely (No. 2)

We may try denying the second assumption, that precise prediction of your behavior is possible. It might be said that human organisms aren’t the kind of systems that can be predicted precisely. But again, one must wonder why not. Organisms are but clumps of matter; they can be described as systems in biological terms, but otherwise they are no less subject to purely physical description than other purely physical systems. No specific barrier limits prediction of biological systems when they’re conceived as physical systems.

The possibility of defying the prediction: You won’t want to defy it (No. 3A)

The possibility of defying the prediction must be questioned. Perhaps you won’t choose to be negative, your character and personality notwithstanding. But the truth of the prediction doesn’t affect any of the things that we use to attribute a reactant tendency to infer what you want to do; its truth affords no cause for bringing other motives into play. A true prediction confronts you no differently from a false prediction: whether the prediction happens to be true or false has in itself no bearing on how it’s received.

The possibility of defying the prediction: You can’t defy the prediction despite wanting to (No. 3B)

Having excluded the other possibilities, we should conclude that you will confirm the prediction despite not wanting to confirm it. This result is due to your taking of the candy being a physical act, which must conform to physical prediction, whereas having an attitude of wanting is identified by psychological criteria and does not necessarily conform to any specific physical criteria.

A note on quantum indeterminacy

Although the ground is well traveled by others, I should say a couple of words about quantum mechanics in its bearing on whether absolutely true predictions really are physically possible. First, the relevant macroscopic states are essentially deterministic.  Second, quantum uncertainty doesn’t explain why in the thought experiment you would want determinately according to your character, for which expectation I argue.

Conclusion

The thought experiment serves as an “intuition pump” (Daniel Dennett) concerning the incongruence between mentalistic and physical concepts. Compatibilism is the doctrine that the world can be deterministic despite your ability to exercise “volition.” Compatibilism thus implies that in describing our “wants” we describe a real cause of our behavior.

Mental concepts, such as "wanting," refer only fictitiously. They serve fallibly to enhance foresight about our behavior and that of other people. Fatally for compatibilism, the thought experiment accentuates that fallibility.

15.2. The practical basis for mass ideologies: Construal-level theory of ideologies meets habit theory of morality

3rd in ideology-types series

 

In A habit theory of civic morality, I explained political morality as an extension of particular adaptive principles of personal integrity, so because an ethic featuring frugality controls personal life, a passion for paying off the national debt inauspiciously arises during this world depression. (See, also, The puzzling persistence of resistance to Keynes by Professor Mike Dorf.) Here, I extend the explanation from civic morality to ideologies, which I claim are determined by nonmoral habits.

Occupations are like politics in offering common kinds of issues and multifarious means of resolving them, the issues and methods presenting at levels of abstraction typical for a class of occupation, inducing habitual mental sets conducing to the corresponding ideology types. The diagram below (click to expand) depicts the association between the four ideology types and occupations that foster the corresponding habits of thought.

The clearest example is in the Monomaniacalist quadrant, with computer programming the prototypical occupation. A programming task is Monomaniacalist because the programmer faces issues construed abstractly (e.g., create certain functionalities in a word processing program) but must find concrete solutions (strings of symbols in a programming language). For programmers currently, linkages to ideology are clearest: programmers are inclined to libertarianism, the leading Monomaniacalist ideology, at least in the United States.

Although programmers are the purest Monomaniacalists, “knowledge work” generally inclines to this ideology type, as with teachers, who manipulate concrete prescribed lessons to achieve abstract educational goals. Science, in its ordinary practice, uses concepts largely reduced to concrete operational definitions to reach abstract goals of incremental knowledge. The expansion of the knowledge-worker occupational category may partly explain the 20^th century influence of another Monomaniacalist current, Stalinism.

An occupation can influence ideology type in two ways: the work’s content or its form. In some occupations, the work grips the mind, in which case the content rather than the form is important, as in the occupations already discussed; in others, the work is a means to an external end. For an example of an occupation where its form is important, take the case where no real work is required: the occupation of capitalist as pure “coupon clipper,” who, like Bill Gates, remain the richest of the business class. Capitalists must concern themselves with the concrete issues of maximizing return on investment and the concrete method of manipulating the particulars of their stock portfolios. Combining a concrete orientation toward issues and method, capitalists incline to a Managerialist outlook.

The issue peasants face is the concrete one of realizing maximum revenue from production. The peasantry meets the concrete issues by sentimentalizing land ownership. The peasant becomes emotionally attached to land and seeks to own more, and from this abstract sentiment arises much of the motive to work the land and produce the most from it. An abstract means is harnessed to a concrete issue, fitting the Demagogist pattern. The small businessman displays a dampened version of the peasant’s ideological predilections and has a similar if less flagrant attachment pattern to property.

Although the unskilled manual worker is engaged in concrete thinking at work, this is repetitious and automatized, the details requiring minimal attention. The focus of attention controls. Workers must concern themselves with their entire conditions of life. Unlike the peasant, the worker cannot rely on a concrete measure based on amount earned, since workers have surrendered hours of their very lives to control by their bosses. Workers must enter in the balance even the psychological costs of submitting to an arrogant boss. Workers sell their time to their bosses, and this condition forces them to make the totality of their conditions the issue and to fashion or embrace matching concepts to persist at dreary work. In long historical perspective, the workers incline to Utopianism.

15.1 Utopianism, Demagogism, and Managerialism are left, right, and center: Patterns of opportunism and rigidity

2^nd in ideological-types series

(Open taxonomy chart from 1^st in series in separate window.)

Construal-level theory generates a taxonomy that amplifies rather than supersedes the left–right political spectrum. Managerialism corresponds to the broad center, Demagogism the extreme right, and Utopianism the far left. Monomaniacalism consists mainly of ideologies that seem to defy linear characterization. I expected exceptions to the correspondence between ideological types based on construal-level theory, but I haven’t found any; the reason for the correspondence isn’t generally obvious. Managerialism's centrist character is easy to explain, in that radical change is far (that is, subject to abstract construal) and Managerialism is near (subject to concrete construal) in both choosing issues and devising means, but explaining the other types will require additional insights.

Several aspects of the distinction between issues and means will be usefully kept in mind. Issues are what ideologists use to find common ground with people they’re trying to persuade. Even when an ideology commands little support, the issues it raises will concern many, so that the issues an ideology features may be a unique collection, but the various ideologies repeat the same individual issues. The means command narrower support because an ideology recommends its own means of solving an issue acknowledged by other ideologies.

To begin to understand why the ideological types fall in distinct segments of the linear spectrum, this essay will consider one way that construal-level processes differently affect different segments of the spectrum: the different weights ideologies place on their choice of issues versus their contrival of means, producing different forms of rigidity or opportunism. According to construal-level theory, we access our goals and values—future-oriented abstractions—in far mode. Since our goals define how we assess importance, what we construe abstractly will be more important to us than what we construe concretely. Our abstract construals often serve to express goals and values, and being their reflection, will be seen as important, since they’re measured by the same standards creating them. We value what we construe abstractly more avidly than what we construe concretely because the far mode serves to commit us to goals and values.

Managerialism and Utopianism find a relative balance between issues and means: Managerialism is only weakly committed to each; Utopianism is strongly committed to both. For these ideologies, issues and means fit together because they’re defined at similar levels of abstraction and work coequally. The modally mismatched ideologies can’t form a unified whole because issues and means are conceptualized at different levels of abstraction. In these types, the abstract prong is viewed as more important than the concrete prong.

Demagogists, who construe issues concretely and means abstractly, put little stock in their choice of issues, unconstraining issue choice. The Demagogist Tea Party can campaign against President Obama’s Managerialist regime as endangering senior medical entitlements and as refusing to cut the budget, despite the contradiction between these appetites. For Demagogists, the issues of the day aren’t fundamental. What is fundamental is the abstractly construed means: privatizing government functions.

Monomaniacalists are the mirror image of Demagogists, in that the former emphasize their unique choice of issues and demonstrate flexibility on choice of means. Libertarians make an abstractly conceived “liberty” the issue of choice. Ron Paul is sometimes accused of rigidity for his refusal to vote any appropriations bills, but he’s been accused of opportunism too, for supporting racists on the right in the early 60s and antiwar protesters on the left in the late 60s. But these means were mere vehicles for his commitment to an abstractly conceived liberty, and opposition to appropriations is strictly negative. A firm negative stance on particular means is likely to arise when issues are construed abstractly and means are construed concretely, because negation is concrete and affirmance is abstract.

10.1.1. Another refutation of compatibilism: Newcomb’s paradox shows that free will is entirely illusory

 5th in free-will series.

Hard determinists (such as I)—maintaining that genuine free will is illusory—typically concede that genuine volition exists but claim the sense of free will concerns thoroughgoing agent autonomy: origination. (See T. Honderich, A theory of determinism (1998).) Previous essays defended hard determinism by reducing origination to the illusory sense of free will, consisting of the misperception that experienced deciding causes action. In this essay, I attack the illusion of free will at its home base: volition. It is not even the case, I contend, that our behavior is under voluntary control.

Newcomb’s paradox is incoherent

My starting point is the well-known problem in philosophical decision theory called Newcomb’s Paradox. I don’t claim to be a serious student of decision theory; my purpose is to turn the paradox to a different purpose—different but not entirely novel. Others have argued that the denial of free will is inherent in the paradox’s assumptions, but I take the argument a step further by contending that in relevant part the assumptions are true.

In the form I’ll use, Newcomb’s Paradox concerns a game organized by a faultless Predictor. The game’s set-up consists of two boxes, one transparent and the other opaque. Predictor places a thousand dollars in the transparent box but places an amount in the opaque box that’s contingent on the prediction. Chooser is to pick either the opaque box or both boxes. When Predictor knows Chooser will pick the opaque box, it places a million dollars in it, but if Predictor knows Chooser will pick both boxes, it leaves the opaque box empty. Chooser’s best outcome would be to pick both boxes when it contains a million dollars, but the infallible Predictor then will have left the opaque box empty, since being infallible, it has predicted the choice. But the Predictor goes exclusively with its prediction and makes no changes after Chooser's actual choice, and following this line of thinking, Chooser should pick both boxes. If Predictor put the million in the opaque box, then Chooser gets $1,000,000 + $1,000 = $1,001,000. But since Predictor is always right, it would have predicted that Chooser would choose both boxes, so Chooser is stuck with only a thousand.

Both sides have advocates because valid principles seem to support either decision. Supporting the both-box choice is the principle that we should choose based on the consequences of our choices, that is, based on what they cause. The maxim holding that correlation isn’t necessarily causation expresses this principle. We should choose both boxes because what's done is done. The other principle is that we can rely on lawful regularities when they—as opposed to relations of mere correlation—underpin our choice. Since the Predictor always rewards the choice of the opaque box with $1,000,000 and punishes the choice of both boxes by awarding only $1,000, we should choose the opaque box. The two valid principles lead to contradictory solutions because the puzzle itself contains contradictory assumptions: if you can choose something besides what the Predictor prophesies, the Predictor isn’t infallible, since Predictor then can be wrong. If you focus on the assumption that Predictor is infallible, you pick the opaque box. If you focus on the causal consequences of your ability to choose, you choose both boxes.

Re-evaluating volition

Commentators haven’t widely recognized the incoherence of Newcomb’s paradox because (as tacit compatibilists) they don’t see how a precise prediction derived without considering Chooser’s volition could be perfect: why can’t Chooser contravene a determinate prediction in willful pursuit of its self-interest? The problem is evident if Predictor were to announce beforehand that it predicts Chooser will pick the opaque box: what’s to stop Chooser from refuting Predictor by picking both boxes—netting a $1,000 increase in payoff? Predictor’s infallibility might be said to stop Chooser, but the question is how could Predictor be infallible (or how could the universe be suitably deterministic) when Chooser may want to thwart the prediction, if informed. What’s the outcome when Chooser—as seems entirely possible—wants to pick contrary to prediction? The answer must be that Chooser fails to pick what it wants. If Predictor forecasts the opaque box and Chooser wills the both-box choice, Chooser can’t act according to its will. It will have to act as if in a hypnotic trance when hypnotic suggestion conflicts with volition. (Post-hypnotic suggestion may be a useful model for hard determinism.) 

The weakness of this solution to Newcomb’s paradox is abruptness. Why should choice suddenly become impossible when prediction is complete yet occur when prediction is almost complete? The paradox should force us to reconsider the general proposition that genuine volition exists, and Libet’s findings provide a basis for re-evaluation. If we will our behavior, how do we know we do, given that we find out that we carried out a willful act only after our brains transmit the effective impulse? I’ve been calling that impulse the “decision,” but Chooser frames the decision after the act. Our predecision intentions comport with our actions only because of the formers' abstractness and vagueness, and strict volition is an illusion caused by our flawed perception of mental temporality. The conclusion holding that perfect-prediction’s logical possibility precludes choice is a dispositive claim against compatibilism, which—to deny any contradiction between free will and determinism—analyzes free will as volition. Our acts aren’t truly voluntary. 

Changed on July 2, 2012, 11 a.m.: Clarified that Predictor announces prediction in second-to-last paragraph. (See discussion with Joseph.)

I elaborate on the logic of the second-to-last paragraph in 10.1.2 Reflexive prediction, determinism, and the impossibility of free will