Interesting view of intelligence shifting from fluid to crystallized as we get older. I've had somewhat the same thoughts but from the other end. I grew up in a rural area, and we climbed everything in sight, especially trees. After a while, we only climbed trees we hadn't climbed before. After more while, only types of trees we hadn't climbed before. And after a while, we stopped climbing trees. I don't know if I'd call that crystallizing our tree-climbing experience, but it does seem related. "Been there, done that" also comes to mind.
I became a computer programmer. At first, every new computer (like during the RISC vs CISC wars) meant ordering the manuals and studying the instructions of computers I would never program. Every new language was something more to experiment with; I remember especially Java on Linux and spending a year or two expanding on a single useless program just for the fun of playing with a new language, and never using Java in any job. But then Perl replaced basic shell utilities (grep, sort, awk, sed, ...) and a job which used nothing but Perl, and when Python, Ruby, Haskell, and some others came out, they were interesting to learn about, but not to learn, and only for a few weeks; actually using them for serious experimentation was no longer interesting.
I remember being in this exact state; once you get the hang of python/perl/ruby type programming other languages seem to have nothing to teach you, except for Haskell and Prolog, which teach you to program with one hand tied behind your back, and why is that interesting?
And then I read the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, and learned lisp/scheme. And that was a revelation, and showed me that the python/perl/ruby/OOP cluster was a set of choices about what sorts of things are important to model, and that those choice aren't suited for every problem.
And that was great fun, and has made me a better programmer in python and in every other language I have used. And it even made my realise what the Haskell and the Prolog people were trying to do, and why.
The book is free and online, there are excellent videos of the authors teaching the course, and the Scheme environment DrRacket has a nice SICP-compatibility mode so you can go through it all without much friction.
I recommend it very highly and think you might enjoy it as much as I did.
I'll have to look into that. One of the languages I taught myself before the university realized I wasn't going to classes was SNOBOL; another was some variant of lisp. Both were great for learning about learning.
Honestly, just go watch the first lecture and have Dr Scheme up in SICP mode while you do so you can follow along with a real interpreter. It's great. Guy Steele who was Sussman's close collaborator was actually involved in the design of Java. Those guys knew what they were talking about.
>There is an alternative view of the status of normative beliefs for which I can offer no adequate rebuttal: moral nihilism. According to that position, nothing is good or bad, virtuous or wicked. Moral beliefs are neither true nor false. The consistency of those beliefs, at the level at which they are consistent, is due not to moral reality but evolutionary biology. Humans have evolved those hardwired moral beliefs whose possession led to reproductive success in the environment in which we evolved, along the general lines of the previous chapter. Since we are all descended from ancestors who evolved under roughly similar circumstances we are all hardwired with about the same beliefs, with the exception of a small minority of defectives, the equivalent of people with the misfortune to be born blind. While the blind have the misfortune of being unable to perceive some features of physical reality, psychopaths have the misfortune, or sometimes the fortune, of failing to share the useful illusions of the rest of us.
If evolution is true, and applies to the mind, then this has to be true. If moral realities existed and we were able to perceive them through some form of intuition, and they damaged our reproductive success, then we'd have evolved out the ability to perceive them.
So we can "intuitively perceive the moral truth" if and only if it aided our reproductive success in the environment in which we evolved.
Hell of a coincidence, that.
Don't you see the problem with this? You've got two explanations for the same thing, and one of them is nice and physical and kind of has to be true, and the other one is an appeal to magic.
It reminds me of religious people claiming that God set up the whole system so that man would evolve in his own image. Wishful thinking.
It is sometimes a very bad, very dangerous mistake to believe something only because you want it to be true.
This is one of those cases, because we are on the verge of creating new minds. Will they be compelled by the universal morality? Or will they simply act according to whatever utility function we have accidentally given them, as rational agents do?
> Well, does evolution explain all features of man?
I don't know, we haven't explained all the features of man yet, so I don't how to explain them. But there don't seem to be any other credible ideas on the table.
> Does there exist satisfactory explanation of language and consciousness?
Language seems unproblematic, and a lot of the features of the human mind that aren't the 'hard problem' have very good explanations in terms of evolution.
But I've never heard anyone say anything sensible about the 'hard problem' of consciousness, except to note that one of the things that's hard about it is to express what the problem even is or what a satisfactory explanation might look like. So I've no idea at all what the answer might be. I am very confused.
"You've got two explanations for the same thing, and one of them is nice and physical and kind of has to be true, and the other one is an appeal to magic. "
Why "has to be true"?
Until the hard problem is satisfactorily answered, there can not be any "has to be true".
Oh well, I take it as read that evolution is true, and applies to the mind. That's true irrespective of the hard problem.
Philosophical zombies would also have an intuitive sense of morality and write the same things about moral realism, and indeed about how confused they were by the hard problem.
One thing p-zombies won't have is intuitive sense of anything.
There are other problems. Even language (though there is nothing actually "even" about language) has no good explanation, though I rather appreciate the ideas of Julian Jaynes.
And introspection or inner monologue is inextricable from language.
"police officers are not particularly law abiding" This can be easily seen in the work of auditors on YouTube, who are frequently detained or arrested for engaging in constitutionally protected activities. Some are more knowledgeable than others -- the channel Audit the Audit covers examples both positive and negative -- but in many cases they indeed have to teach the police officers they encounter to follow the law.
Let me offer a very short outline of an alternative view of the nature of moral prepositions -- what is moral is what enhances the flourishing of the community, and what is immoral is what detracts from the flourishing of the community. What's missing are strong senses of who the community is and what flourishing is. What's good is that a lot of moral disputes become understandable as people reacting to disparate contexts, e.g. water use practices in Rhode Island vs. New Mexico.
David, have you in your adult life ever reversed or substantially altered your position on some major topic you considered important?
These examples seem to fit more into a category like “found new, sometimes surprising reason(s) to support the conclusion you already supported or would have been inclined to support”.
The change in my view of morality, becoming a moral realist, is a pretty clear case, assuming that eighteen or nineteen counts as adult. So is my shift from minarchist to anarchist in my early twenties.
A fuzzier case is my dropping belief in a purely agoric economy, one where all coordination is through the market rather than partly hierarchic within firms, due to becoming familiar with Coase's ideas, partly through _Market and Hierarchy_ by Oliver Williamson.
"how weak the evidence was for is’s, facts of reality."
This is, in my opinion, a dangerous road to take. The very act of conveying a philosophical proposition assumes the reality of physical objects that are used to convey the proposition.
(Means to Message: a treatise on truth by Father Stanley Jaki), As succinctly stated "The object is there is object"--the objects are what must not be doubted.
if a philosopher puts forward any proposition or philosophical system, that proposition must be communicated through some physical medium—whether written words on paper, spoken sounds, or electronic text. These physical means necessarily exist as real, objective things in the world.
The philosophical implication is profound: any neglect of accounting for the objective reality of the means will result in philosophical sleights of hand that endlessly breed one another.
"C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man, where he argued that all societies have, at some level, the same moral code, which he referred to as the tao."
But one may leave the Tao as perhaps the liberal Western countries.
CS Lewis also gives an analogy of nations as telescopes that are needed to view the largest thing that is--which is God or in secular terms, the moral law. This point is entirely missed by the liberal writers that individuals do not themselves perceive the moral law; it is the whole society that does so. The moral perceptions of the individual are largely formed by the society he is a part of.
Please forgive me for making an off the cuff statement, but my assessment is that morality is real but not ontologically fundamental. From a logical standpoint, any ontological heirarchy can be understood as correlating to assymetries in implication. If you accumulate observations of any sort, they will eventually develop into evidence for physics. A good model of physics does not constitute evidence of any particular piece of evidence that points to it.
What I believe is your core claim on moral realism:
"My claim is not that we deduce moral reality from physical reality, the claim of Ayn Rand that I disputed back in Chapter XXX. It is that our knowledge of moral facts comes in the same way as our knowledge of physical facts and so has the same epistemological status—a reasonable, although not in either case certain, basis for belief."
My sense is that this just defers the matter from addressing whether morality has an objective basis to whether epistemics has an objective basis, and there it only concludes epistemics is a mechanically objective process. It's also very important to be able to do that if we can do that, but for the same basic reason Descartes found the Cogito and then failed to turn that into a foundation for anything, this doesn't seem like it gets you to the subject of morality at all.
The asymmetry of ontological layers doesn't just mean all evidence leads back to the most fundamental facts over time. It also means that, in the cases where the most fundamental facts cannot lead to a certain reality, that is enormously more important than any one less fundamental fact. Physics can approximate negative theology in this sense. We can say what morality is not, while still remaining committed to moral realism.
When heliocentrism replaced geocentrism, nobody concluded that the sun or the planets did not exist. Precision harms the semiotic entanglements of our emotions, I think, but doesn't actually annihilate meaning.
Interesting view of intelligence shifting from fluid to crystallized as we get older. I've had somewhat the same thoughts but from the other end. I grew up in a rural area, and we climbed everything in sight, especially trees. After a while, we only climbed trees we hadn't climbed before. After more while, only types of trees we hadn't climbed before. And after a while, we stopped climbing trees. I don't know if I'd call that crystallizing our tree-climbing experience, but it does seem related. "Been there, done that" also comes to mind.
I became a computer programmer. At first, every new computer (like during the RISC vs CISC wars) meant ordering the manuals and studying the instructions of computers I would never program. Every new language was something more to experiment with; I remember especially Java on Linux and spending a year or two expanding on a single useless program just for the fun of playing with a new language, and never using Java in any job. But then Perl replaced basic shell utilities (grep, sort, awk, sed, ...) and a job which used nothing but Perl, and when Python, Ruby, Haskell, and some others came out, they were interesting to learn about, but not to learn, and only for a few weeks; actually using them for serious experimentation was no longer interesting.
I remember being in this exact state; once you get the hang of python/perl/ruby type programming other languages seem to have nothing to teach you, except for Haskell and Prolog, which teach you to program with one hand tied behind your back, and why is that interesting?
And then I read the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, and learned lisp/scheme. And that was a revelation, and showed me that the python/perl/ruby/OOP cluster was a set of choices about what sorts of things are important to model, and that those choice aren't suited for every problem.
And that was great fun, and has made me a better programmer in python and in every other language I have used. And it even made my realise what the Haskell and the Prolog people were trying to do, and why.
The book is free and online, there are excellent videos of the authors teaching the course, and the Scheme environment DrRacket has a nice SICP-compatibility mode so you can go through it all without much friction.
I recommend it very highly and think you might enjoy it as much as I did.
I'll have to look into that. One of the languages I taught myself before the university realized I wasn't going to classes was SNOBOL; another was some variant of lisp. Both were great for learning about learning.
Honestly, just go watch the first lecture and have Dr Scheme up in SICP mode while you do so you can follow along with a real interpreter. It's great. Guy Steele who was Sussman's close collaborator was actually involved in the design of Java. Those guys knew what they were talking about.
David, a quote from your actual essay:
>There is an alternative view of the status of normative beliefs for which I can offer no adequate rebuttal: moral nihilism. According to that position, nothing is good or bad, virtuous or wicked. Moral beliefs are neither true nor false. The consistency of those beliefs, at the level at which they are consistent, is due not to moral reality but evolutionary biology. Humans have evolved those hardwired moral beliefs whose possession led to reproductive success in the environment in which we evolved, along the general lines of the previous chapter. Since we are all descended from ancestors who evolved under roughly similar circumstances we are all hardwired with about the same beliefs, with the exception of a small minority of defectives, the equivalent of people with the misfortune to be born blind. While the blind have the misfortune of being unable to perceive some features of physical reality, psychopaths have the misfortune, or sometimes the fortune, of failing to share the useful illusions of the rest of us.
--------------------------------------------------------
If evolution is true, and applies to the mind, then this has to be true. If moral realities existed and we were able to perceive them through some form of intuition, and they damaged our reproductive success, then we'd have evolved out the ability to perceive them.
So we can "intuitively perceive the moral truth" if and only if it aided our reproductive success in the environment in which we evolved.
Hell of a coincidence, that.
Don't you see the problem with this? You've got two explanations for the same thing, and one of them is nice and physical and kind of has to be true, and the other one is an appeal to magic.
It reminds me of religious people claiming that God set up the whole system so that man would evolve in his own image. Wishful thinking.
It is sometimes a very bad, very dangerous mistake to believe something only because you want it to be true.
This is one of those cases, because we are on the verge of creating new minds. Will they be compelled by the universal morality? Or will they simply act according to whatever utility function we have accidentally given them, as rational agents do?
Well, does evolution explain all features of man? Does there exist satisfactory explanation of language and consciousness?
David Stove gives many examples of how evolution fails to provide reasonable explanation of human behavior.
> Well, does evolution explain all features of man?
I don't know, we haven't explained all the features of man yet, so I don't how to explain them. But there don't seem to be any other credible ideas on the table.
> Does there exist satisfactory explanation of language and consciousness?
Language seems unproblematic, and a lot of the features of the human mind that aren't the 'hard problem' have very good explanations in terms of evolution.
But I've never heard anyone say anything sensible about the 'hard problem' of consciousness, except to note that one of the things that's hard about it is to express what the problem even is or what a satisfactory explanation might look like. So I've no idea at all what the answer might be. I am very confused.
"You've got two explanations for the same thing, and one of them is nice and physical and kind of has to be true, and the other one is an appeal to magic. "
Why "has to be true"?
Until the hard problem is satisfactorily answered, there can not be any "has to be true".
Oh well, I take it as read that evolution is true, and applies to the mind. That's true irrespective of the hard problem.
Philosophical zombies would also have an intuitive sense of morality and write the same things about moral realism, and indeed about how confused they were by the hard problem.
One thing p-zombies won't have is intuitive sense of anything.
There are other problems. Even language (though there is nothing actually "even" about language) has no good explanation, though I rather appreciate the ideas of Julian Jaynes.
And introspection or inner monologue is inextricable from language.
p-zombies absolutely will, or at least they will say they do, for the same reasons we do.
Moral intuitions may be nothing else but the law of one's people instilled in one's childhood.
This is taking the law in its general sense, as the customs and mores of a people.
The rebuttal would be that they correlate pretty well across peoples.
Which can be explained, at least partly, by shared ancestry and shared history.
How would the idea that an individual directly intuits moral truths be judged?
"police officers are not particularly law abiding" This can be easily seen in the work of auditors on YouTube, who are frequently detained or arrested for engaging in constitutionally protected activities. Some are more knowledgeable than others -- the channel Audit the Audit covers examples both positive and negative -- but in many cases they indeed have to teach the police officers they encounter to follow the law.
I assume that police officers often don't know the law. In the cases I discussed they know something is illegal, don't care.
Let me offer a very short outline of an alternative view of the nature of moral prepositions -- what is moral is what enhances the flourishing of the community, and what is immoral is what detracts from the flourishing of the community. What's missing are strong senses of who the community is and what flourishing is. What's good is that a lot of moral disputes become understandable as people reacting to disparate contexts, e.g. water use practices in Rhode Island vs. New Mexico.
David, have you in your adult life ever reversed or substantially altered your position on some major topic you considered important?
These examples seem to fit more into a category like “found new, sometimes surprising reason(s) to support the conclusion you already supported or would have been inclined to support”.
The change in my view of morality, becoming a moral realist, is a pretty clear case, assuming that eighteen or nineteen counts as adult. So is my shift from minarchist to anarchist in my early twenties.
A fuzzier case is my dropping belief in a purely agoric economy, one where all coordination is through the market rather than partly hierarchic within firms, due to becoming familiar with Coase's ideas, partly through _Market and Hierarchy_ by Oliver Williamson.
"how weak the evidence was for is’s, facts of reality."
This is, in my opinion, a dangerous road to take. The very act of conveying a philosophical proposition assumes the reality of physical objects that are used to convey the proposition.
(Means to Message: a treatise on truth by Father Stanley Jaki), As succinctly stated "The object is there is object"--the objects are what must not be doubted.
if a philosopher puts forward any proposition or philosophical system, that proposition must be communicated through some physical medium—whether written words on paper, spoken sounds, or electronic text. These physical means necessarily exist as real, objective things in the world.
The philosophical implication is profound: any neglect of accounting for the objective reality of the means will result in philosophical sleights of hand that endlessly breed one another.
"C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man, where he argued that all societies have, at some level, the same moral code, which he referred to as the tao."
But one may leave the Tao as perhaps the liberal Western countries.
CS Lewis also gives an analogy of nations as telescopes that are needed to view the largest thing that is--which is God or in secular terms, the moral law. This point is entirely missed by the liberal writers that individuals do not themselves perceive the moral law; it is the whole society that does so. The moral perceptions of the individual are largely formed by the society he is a part of.
Please forgive me for making an off the cuff statement, but my assessment is that morality is real but not ontologically fundamental. From a logical standpoint, any ontological heirarchy can be understood as correlating to assymetries in implication. If you accumulate observations of any sort, they will eventually develop into evidence for physics. A good model of physics does not constitute evidence of any particular piece of evidence that points to it.
What I believe is your core claim on moral realism:
"My claim is not that we deduce moral reality from physical reality, the claim of Ayn Rand that I disputed back in Chapter XXX. It is that our knowledge of moral facts comes in the same way as our knowledge of physical facts and so has the same epistemological status—a reasonable, although not in either case certain, basis for belief."
My sense is that this just defers the matter from addressing whether morality has an objective basis to whether epistemics has an objective basis, and there it only concludes epistemics is a mechanically objective process. It's also very important to be able to do that if we can do that, but for the same basic reason Descartes found the Cogito and then failed to turn that into a foundation for anything, this doesn't seem like it gets you to the subject of morality at all.
The asymmetry of ontological layers doesn't just mean all evidence leads back to the most fundamental facts over time. It also means that, in the cases where the most fundamental facts cannot lead to a certain reality, that is enormously more important than any one less fundamental fact. Physics can approximate negative theology in this sense. We can say what morality is not, while still remaining committed to moral realism.
When heliocentrism replaced geocentrism, nobody concluded that the sun or the planets did not exist. Precision harms the semiotic entanglements of our emotions, I think, but doesn't actually annihilate meaning.