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This is a blog about political philosophy, focusing on the concerns of liberal democracies.

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Science and Knowing

Lately there has been some hubbub over Thomas Nagel's book, Mind and Cosmos.  In the book and elsewhere Nagel contends that science does not explain consciousness, does not explain subjective experience.  Science can point to some factors involved in the mind but these identified parts do not sum back together to fully explain the mind.  When science seeks to break the Humpty Dumpty of consciousness apart, Nagel says that science does not find enough pieces to put the egg man back together again.

In a blog post, Alva Noe notes some distinctions about Nagel's position.  To Noe, Nagel is not merely saying that we have not found full explanations for consciousness yet.  Rather, Nagel is taking the more categorical stance that we cannot explain our minds through an identification of component parts.  The mechanisms of our consciousness are in sum and whole unknowable.  Noe's other important distinction is that, perhaps, science cannot explain consciousness because consciousness is a cognitive illusion and therefore defies explanation.  Noe thinks that perhaps the fault rests with the concept of consciousness, not science, as an understanding of human engagement with the world.

Nagel would agree with Noe's first distinction.  He thinks that we simply have no idea how purely physical explanations of the mind would work.  This does not make them wrong so much as extremely rudimentary.  Nagel writes that "nothing is proved by the inadequacy of physicalist hypotheses that assume a faulty objective analysis of mind. It would be truer to say that physicalism is a position we cannot understand because we do not at present have any conception of how it might be true" (Nagel 1974, 446).  Physicalism is not so much an explanation as "a schema for explanation, supported by some examples" (Nagel 2012, 6).  It is so fundamentally incomplete that we cannot say whether it is right or wrong. 

Nagel's next step is to then claim that because science is incomplete we therefore should not reject what he calls the "incredulity of common sense" (Nagel 2012, 7).  We should be open to the ideas that that some things cannot be reduced to component parts, that some things in the natural world are non-accidental, and that the mind is a thing in itself which should be incorporated into theoretical models of the universe.  This last point would be Nagel's response to Noe's second distinction: the mind is not a false concept.  Rather, it is real and must somehow be taken into account.

Nagel's position is explicitly not religious but it also explicitly draws inspiration from present day religious positions that try to wed science and religion.  For example, Nagel references creationists who claim that some elements of life, such as the human eye, are irreducibly complex.  They think that the human eye has to have been created because there is no other way of explaining how something as complex as the eye could appear in nature.  Evolutionary biologists, of course, disagree and offer detailed explanations of how "our kind of eye—the type common across vertebrates—took shape in less than 100 million years, evolving from a simple light sensor for circadian (daily) and seasonal rhythms around 600 million years ago to an optically and neurologically sophisticated organ by 500 million years ago" (Lamb 2011).

Scientists, I am sure, would also disagree directly with Nagel.  They would not characterize the scientific enterprise as a vague potential understanding supported only by unsystematic anecdotes.  Rather, they would argue that the logic of scientific inference allows us enormous and preponderant confidence that the universe (and the human beings within it) can be explained by physical mechanisms without resort to metaphysics or antireductionism. 

Further, scientists would accuse Nagel of confusing what the gaps in the present scientific picture of the universe actually are.  They would argue that the gaps are like missing pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.  They would contend that you can have enormous confidence in the content of the puzzle's picture owing to all of the pieces that they already have connected and in place.  They would say that the missing pieces are very unlikely to somehow change the nature of the overall puzzle.  They would argue that there being as yet missing pieces does not mean that the missing pieces will never be found or that the jigsaw puzzle is somehow not actually a jigsaw puzzle.

In offering this metaphor for the scientific position,  I am referring to the ongoing tradition of Enlightenment thought which holds that the universe is knowable and that science is the proper means for understanding it.  Nagel recognizes the contributions of Enlightenment thought and the worth of its insistence on looking for physical explanations for the universe.  But he also thinks that this approach has reached its high water mark, that it has come to a point where it cannot explain some things like the mind.  Nagel thinks that we should accept these things as unexplainable and  move on from that acceptance, formalizing "the mind" into a prominent role int the history of the cosmos.

I would argue that there is little value in this position at this time.  Scientists have achieved the progress that Nagel values precisely through the refusal to take previous opportunities for antireductionism.  We have modern physics because bright minds insisted on, say, examining light's properties rather than accepting it as ineffable.  We have modern medicine because physicians insisted on investigating the interior of the human body rather than regarding only its outward appearance.  Nagel, to me, seems like another of a long line of thinkers who have in some way thought that we cannot know more than we already do.  I suspect that like Lord Kelvin who said in 1900 that "there is nothing new to be discovered in physics," Nagel too will be proven wrong in the decades that follow him regarding our ability to understand the mind.

Why do I suspect this?  I do not think that we currently understand the brain or the mind well enough to flat-out contradict Nagel.  Rather, I argue that the the pace and depth of neurological research is such that it is far, far too soon to resort to antireductionism.  For example, take a recent piece in Science entitled "A Large-Scale Model of the Functioning Brain."  Their work is a 2.5-million-neuron model of the brain using the NEF algorithm.  This cell count is far short of the billions of neurons in actual brains, and the construction of the model is based on inferences about brain function rather than mirroring real brains. However, it is nevertheless a remarkable accomplishment in modeling how a brain's parts can result in the sorts of outcomes that we know brains produce.  It is increasingly less of a mystery how neurons working in concert result in a mind.

Eliasmith, Chris, Terrence C. Stewart, Xuan Choo, Trevor Bekolay, Travis DeWorld, Yichuan Tang, and Daniel Rasmussen.  2012.  "A Large-Scale Model of the Functioning Brain."  Science.  338(6111): 1202-1205.

Lamb, Trevor D. 2011.  "Evolution of the Eye."  Scientific American.  305(1): 64-69

Nagel, Thomas.  1974.  "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"  The Philosophical Review.  83(4):435-450

Nagel, Thomas.  2012.  Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.  New York: Oxford University Press.

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Is the Universe Simulated?

It is an unresolved question whether or not the universe we perceive is real or a simulation.  In place of "unresolved" we might be tempted to say "unimportant" because the universe could be any number of things which we cannot prove.  Yet, scholars continue to revisit this particular possibility of the universe being a simulation.  Why?

Before answering the question, let's briefly define what is meant by a simulation.  for our purposes it means a computer-generated copy of or variation upon the universe, as seen in movies like The Thirteenth Floor.  Simulations are different from the artificial environments in movies like The Matrix or Dark City, though, because even the persons in the simulations are simulated.  Robin Hanson offers suggestions regarding simulations' purposes for the advanced civilizations that run them:

First, some historical simulations will be run for academic or intellectual interest, in order to learn more about what actually happened in the past, or about how history would have changed if conditions had changed. Other historical simulations, however, perhaps the vast majority, will be created for their story-telling and entertainment value. For example, someone might ask their "holodeck" to let them play a famous movie actor at a party at the turn of the millennium.

We can assume that these simulations are sufficiently real to fool their self-aware inhabitants, otherwise there would be no point to the simulation.

Likelihood

One reason that the simulation hypothesis keeps capturing interest is that it is likely. I mean "likely" in the sense that of all possible universes real and simulated in which sentient beings are seen to exist, more are likely to be simulated than real if you allow a few assumptions:

that simulating universes or portions of them will be a viable option for advanced civilizations

that advanced civilizations will want to simulate possible universes to test their theoretical expectations about the universe against their observations

that these simulations will be run in iterated fashion to account for random variations

These assumptions would suggest that for every real universe with advanced sentient life in it, there may be millions of simulated copies or variations upon that universe.  The odds are, then, that if you find yourself living in a universe, you are far more likely to be in a simulation than a real universe (absent evidence or weighting one way or the other).  This is my rather simplistic take on the issue and it obviously leaves out Hanson's idea of entertainment-based simulations.

Nick Bostrom wrote a longer discussion of the likelihood of living in a simulation for Philosophical Quarterly.  He first considers whether human subjective experience can be simulated.  He thinks, contrary to Thomas Nagle, that subjective experience can probably be simulated owing to the mind's reducibility to physical mechanics.  We need only assume "that it would suffice for the generation of subjective experiences that the computational processes of a human brain are structurally replicated in suitably fine-grained detail, such as on the level of individual synapses."

He also considers the computational challenges of the simulated realities.  If all a simulator cares about is human behavior, then the computational task enters the realm of possibility.  All the simulators need to do, he writes, is "to ensure that the simulated humans, interacting in normal human ways with their simulated environment, don’t notice any irregularities."  The creators of the simulation need not calculate the quantum mechanics behind a rock so long as the rock nevertheless behaves appropriately to all interested parties in the simulation.  Any foul-ups can be edited out by the simulation administrators.

Given these possibilities, he goes on to suggest a model for the numerical prevalence of simulations:

fsim = fpfINI / (fpfINI + 1)

Here fsim is the "the actual fraction of all observers with human‐type experiences that live in simulations."  fp is the fraction of all civilizations that reach a stage where they are capable of modeling the universe or at least human existence.  fI is the fraction of capable civilizations that actually do run simulations.  NI is the number of simulations run per such capable and willing civilizations.

If neither fp or fI are zero (or effectively zero), then fsim has to be pretty close to one.  That is, if we get any non-trivial amount of willing and capable advanced civilizations, then the ratio of simulations to realities is going to be so high that the likelihood of being a living, sentient being in a reality is very low (with chances of selection being equal).

fp or fI may be zero, though.  The former may be zero owing to the general unlikelihood of life combined with the likelihood of doomsday events.  That is, the exacting set of circumstances that lead to the possibility our existence (from the universal level on down to the planetary level) combined with the improbability of a species reaching sentience let alone advancement (think of all the possible intervening extinction events, among other things) lead to the likelihood of any civilization anywhere reaching advancement being possibly very, very low.  As for the latter term, well, who knows what logic advanced civilizations will follow.  Maybe their thought processes will be such that they do not need or do not care about simulating their ancestors or alternative histories.  Bostrom wonders if advanced civilizations may regard simulations as unethical owing to the massive amount of suffering inflicted on self-aware entities.

Bostrom adds a few additional thoughts before closing his article.  They are thoughtful but have contradictory implications.

If we reach a stage where we create our own simulations, then we have to admit that the odds of our being in a simulation are higher.  This is because we have found evidence that suggesting that fp and fI are not zero.  Physicists are already simulating the universe at very small scales, and they contend that "future scientists will likely make the effort to perform complete simulations of molecules, cells, humans and even beyond."

Simulations within simulations are a genuine possibility.  This leads to the possibility of a potentially infinite regression of simulations.  Bostrom comments, though, that "one consideration that counts against the multi‐level hypothesis is that the computational cost for the basement‐level simulators would be very great. Simulating even a single posthuman civilization might be prohibitively expensive. If so, then we should expect our simulation to be terminated when we are about to become posthuman."  We might wonder, then, if reaching the point where we can simulate a universe actually counts against our being in a simulation.

Given the lack of finality, this seems like much ado about nothing.  We might want to take Hume's route with his `skeptical argument' and just ignore the possibility that we live in a simulation as unimportant regarding the conduct of our lives.

Evidence

It may become harder to ignore the possibility that we live in a simulated universe if we obtain evidence of simulation, though.  The genuine possibility of this evidence is another reason why the simulation hypothesis pops up every so often.  Where might this evidence come from?  Physicists Silas R. Beane, Zohreh Davoudi and Martin J. Savage suggest that some parts of current simulations of quantum mechanics might well persist in future and perhaps all simulations, giving us things to look for in our own universe to test if we are simulated.  Namely, they posit that simulated universes will each be built upon a three-dimensional lattice ("a finite hyper-cubic grid of points"), in which nothing can exist one a scale smaller than the lattice itself.  High energy particles enter more and more minute areas of space as they gain energy.  Therefore, if there is this lattice upon which the universe is simulated, we should expect to see a cut off point for the exhibited energy of particles.  We should also, according to the authors, expect to see movement along the lattices rather than in other directions.

If the authors' assumptions about particle behavior are wrong, then tests of the hypotheses may result in false negatives where we think we have not found evidence of a simulation when in fact we were not looking in the right places.  "Nevertheless," the authors say, "assuming that the universe is finite and therefore the resources of potential simulators are finite, then a volume containing a simulation will be finite and a  lattice spacing must be non-zero, and therefore in principle there always remains the possibility for the simulated to discover the simulators."  This claim holds onto the assumption that the universe is made of discrete parts and can be made into a lattice.  This may not be true.  Chiral fermions in the Standard Model suggest that the universe cannot be reduced to a lattice and that we are not living in a simulation of the type that Beane, Davoudi and Savage posit.  We may yet be living in a simulation, but it might have to defy what we think we know about the bottom level of simulations.  The lattice might, for example, have to exist at a level below quarks so that chiral fermions can be chiral.

Consequences of Behavior

But so what if we probably live in a simulated universe?  So what if we even find evidence that we do?  Why should it impact the way we go about our lives in the slightest?  Put another way, why should we care about any findings regarding the simulation hypothesis?  Robin Hanson suggests that our "decisions should be based on a weighted average over the different possible worlds" that we might live in.  If we agree with Bostrom that we are more likely to be living in a simulation than the alternatives, then we should favor behavior that benefits us in simulations.

Hanson favors the idea that simulations will often be for entertainment value.  This leads to the conclusion that we should try to be as interesting as possible so that the being enjoying our simulation keeps us around.  It also means, though, that we should seize the day, as our simulation may well end before we reach old age.

If, as Bostrom suggests, awareness of simulation leads to termination, then we are engaged in some dangerous behavior right now.  Hansons flips this argument, though, pointing out that if some introspection is expected by the simulation-runners and we avoid it for fear of being deleted, this may actually hasten our deletion as an outlier universe.  

Ultimately, it only makes sense to condition our behavior if we can learn of not just the existence but also the purpose of the simulation we are in. That seems unlikely without the intervention of the simulation-runners, and why would they ever regard intervention as ethical or productive?

Douglas Adams

I'm not sure how to conclude this mess of a post, so I'll end it with a quote from Douglas Adams:

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

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Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism is the position that cultural groups, particularly longstanding minority cultural groups, merit protections that go beyond the blanket protections offered to all citizens of a country.  Multiculturalism stems from the assertion that countries are not neutral regarding which culturally-defined groups are supported by the state.  Language policy, workplace regulations, and school curricula are among a variety of areas that multiculturalists cite as locations for systemic disadvantages for minority cultures.  An official language policy, for example, can squeeze out the usage of a minority group's language, not only making that language's survival in the long term questionable but also making it more difficult for users of the minority language to obtain jobs and government services in the short term.

Prominent muliticulturalists such as Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor argue that having a dominant or societal culture in a state is inevitable.  Therefore, the best course of action is to compensate for a state's lack of cultural neutrality by creating group-differentiated protections for vulnerable cultural groups.  These protections can involve land-use rights, language support, guaranteed airtime, and inclusions of minority culture in school curricula.

Opponents of multiculturalism contend that group protections are not necessary or that they miss the mark.  Some claim that liberalism is sufficient for meeting the needs of minority cultures because it attends the the individual needs of its members and raise everyone in the state to an equal standard.  Others argue that by protecting cultures they are cemented and essentialized, defying the actual fluid nature of culture.  Yet more assert that focusing only on cultures for minority protections too readily ignores or even incidentally hurts other meritorious groups such as those defined by physical condition or gender.

Multiculturalism has become policy in countries like Australia, Canada and the Netherlands.  These countries have created group-differentiated policies designed to accommodate and strengthen minority cultures.  It is an ongoing contention for certain scholars, however, that multiculturalism in practice is currently in decline as states react to threats like terrorism with policies that favor assimilation to national norms over cultural pluralism.