There are important questions about the appropriate role of government in encouraging healthy behavior. As a free society we should have deep reservations about forcibly taking people’s money and using it to tell them how they should live, even when we are sure that would make for a better society. History is replete with examples of tyrannical majorities wasting resources and even fueling crime combating`harmful’ behavior. Thus we already have plenty of reason to tread carefully when legislation to discourage tobacco use, encourage exercise or promote a healthy diet is proposed. However, I have a much more fundamental question. Is it even preferable to have a society where people live longer?

At first glance this seems to be a truly stupid question. After all it’s bad when people die early. Isn’t it? Well, I certainly don’t want to die and neither do most people but that misses the point. We all die eventually and even if we personally want to put off death as long as possible can we truly say that a society where the average life span is 90 years rather than 70 is a better place? Would a society where the average life span was 200 years be even better? What sort of life span would be optimal?

It’s tempting to answer ‘infinite’ and certainly it would be wonderful if we could all retain our youth for forever and never have to grieve over lost friends and family. However, for the immediate future this simply isn’t possible. No healthy diet or prudent lifestyle can reduce the (average) number of friends we must mourn¹ and no amount of yoga or wheatgrass smoothies can prevent old age from taking it’s toll. Moreover, suppose we really could increase our lifespan indefinitely. At least for the next century or so we would have to virtually stop reproducing to avoid outgrowing our resources.

Ultimately we can’t simply say ‘life is good so we want more of it.’ Almost certainly such a policy would actually demand we divert money from healthcare into programs encouraging reproduction. As a society we’ve already reached the conclusion that it’s better to maintain a relatively small population that can live well than to expand into a great multitude that can barely make do. But rationally applying this insight to this question suggests that investing in longer life spans might not make sense.

Certainly we feel greater pain when someone is snatched from life too early and so we certainly shouldn’t stop pursuing more effective treatments to save people who might otherwise be struck down in the prime of life. Nor would we want to create distress or anger by denying people treatment. However, researching ways to further prolong our life span would likely introduce greater variability (some people die of heart attacks at 65 others make it to 130) and thus prolong the time people would have to endure the loss of loved ones as well as the sense of tragedy and anger at their deaths. Other things being equal a society is better if people spend a smaller proportion of their lives old and frail and since extending old age is unlikely to make people substantially happier (on average²) investing in technologies to lengthen our lifespan seems counterproductive. Of course we should look for technologies that let people be healthy and fit for a greater fraction of their lives and if we are able to make 80 feel like 55 that might justify more investment in keeping people alive till 80.

The observation that merely putting off death is not necessarily a desirable end in and of itself also has substantial consequences to what kind of charity and aid is best to give to the third world. However, that will have to wait for another post.

So in a recent post I pointed out how unreasonable it was to assume that aliens advanced enough to transfer their consciousness into computers would have motives or behaviors anything like what the current human species does. Of course there is an implicit assumption here that a simulation of our brain process on a computer would be just as conscious as we are (the strong AI hypothesis). Here I argue that this isn’t really true. Of course I don’t doubt that artificial conscious beings can be constructed. There is nothing magical about conception, if we manufactured nerve cells in the lab and put them together in a brain it wouldn’t be any less conscious than you or I. However, this doesn’t mean that the particular means by which our brain performs it’s calculation is irrelevant to consciousness. As I shall argue here we actually have pretty good reason to believe that simply simulating what the brain does on a microchip as we know them ¹ is unlikely to give rise to any experiences no matter how faithfully it might reproduce the behavior of that brain². This is a pretty long post so I continue below the break.

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So my fiance Sharon Berry posted a very early (like 2 years early) draft of her thesis on a wiki here. The broad question she is addressing is how we can come to have accurate mathematical knowledge which I figured might be of interest to some people who check out the philosophy part of my blog. I also figured I’d take this chance to share my own thoughts on the subject. However, to give credit where credit is due I would never have really thought through these issues if Sharon hadn’t brought up the subject and many of the ideas are really hers. However, I take them in a very different direction than she does.

The really short version of my attitude to the problem of mathematical knowledge is “What Problem?” I mean obviously mathematical knowledge is subject to the same skeptical doubts that other forms of knowledge are but I’m unconvinced that there is any particular problem unique to mathematical knowledge. More specifically I would say that mathematical knowledge is nothing but a limiting case of other sorts of knowledge so it poses no problem over and above the problem of understanding the meaning and our knowledge of other sorts of statements. Of course explaining meaning is a notoriously difficult problem in it’s own right but I’m tempted to think that it’s a hopeless problem. Ultimately one must merely take meaning to be a primitive concept but that’s another discussion.

I need to get back to working on my thesis so I won’t give more than a very very quick sketch of my thoughts here but roughly I take it there are two primary reasons one might think that mathematical knowledge requires special explanation.

1. The Benacerraf problem: How could we come to know anything about numbers if they don’t have causal powers, we don’t interact with them and so forth.
2. How could it be that our mathematical theories turn out to be useful in the way they are.

Platonism and Reference

So if one accepts a platonic theory of mathematical meaning then there may indeed be special problems about mathematical knowledge. That is if the meaning of a statement like 2+2 =4 is really that some special 2 object out there bears a certain relation to itself and the four object one might wonder how it is that we come to know about these platonic objects. However, I’m inclined to simply turn the question around and ask whether the platonic theory in question provides any reason to think that “2″ refers to something we would ‘recognize’ as an integer or whether it could (logically not metaphysically) be that 2 refers to the concept of bunny rabbits and all our statements about arithmetic are really nonsensical. If the platonic interpretation of mathematics tells us that the reference of two must really behave like 2 to qualify as the correct reference then we know exactly how we come to have true beliefs about the numbers — because if our beliefs weren’t largely true we would be talking about something else[^enough]. On the other hand if we don’t have any restrictions about what sort of platonic object 2 might refer to then we aren’t justified in adopting this kind of theory in the first place.

Unfortunately the debate about Platonism and competing philosophies of mathematical largely distracts from what I think are the important issues. As I’ve argued previously Platonism in and of itself says very little about mathematics. What the last paragraph as well as my previous post on the issue emphasize is that it isn’t really Platonism that is doing the work it is your theory of reference. Really on it’s own Platonism says nothing very significant¹, it’s the means by which our talk maps to particular platonic objects that really does the work in the theory. This raises the obvious question of what we even mean when we say that the reference of a certain term is such and such. Are we merely making a claim about dispositions and talk or are we invoking some real metaphysical relation. While Platonism provides a good motivation to consider the issue I think a proper examination of this question of what sort of thing the meaning relation is in the first place illustrates the non-problem of philosophy of mathematics in general.

Platonic Realism About Reference

There are two ways one could understand claims about meaning and reference One could think that the relation of meaning is a truly objective notion with metaphysical substance. That is that the relation between words/mental states/speaking contexts is some and references/meanings is something like a platonic entity in it’s own right. On such a theory it is presumably logically possible (but not metaphysically) that when I say “2″ it really (by virtue of this objectively existing meaning relation) refers to rabbit. In other words the meaning of word is a notion much like the moral status of an action under on a realist moral theory.

Just as with moral realism I think the appropriate response to this notion of meaning is to challenge that it counts as meaning at all. Ultimately there is just this relation out there mapping situations/worlds/utterances/mental states/whatever to references/intentions but why should we think this picks out what we talk about when we use the term meaning? Additionally on this sort of platonic realism about meaning we don’t have any reason to actually believe that we really do have knowledge. After all maybe the objective meaning relation isn’t what we think it is at all and what we take to be true statements aren’t true at all.

One might still be tempted to insist that obviously we have knowledge thus the fact that this theory can’t explain this fact is a puzzle requiring explanation. However, this simply gets things backwards and implicitly rejects the very assumptions of the theory itself. If we accept this sort of theory we need to just bite the bullet and say we don’t know if we really know anything and thus how we know things doesn’t require explanation. Personally I think our intuition that our usage determines meaning is a good reason to reject this sort of theory but in either case this leaves no special problems for mathematics. Of course you might try and say that the mapping between statements and meanings/references must obey certain restrctions but this does no good at all since of course any actual map will have some facts that are true of it but this does nothing to offer us reason to think we have any knowledge of what they are.

Naturalist Theories of Meaning

I think a much more promising approach² is to jettison all the metaphysical baggage and start from the assumption that meanings, ultimately must be defined in terms of sounds, dispositions, actions and other arrangements of matter. That is nothing special or magical goes on with meanings. They are just a concept introduced to organize very complicated descriptions of human behavior in terms of atoms and physical laws. Thus the ultimate standard against which we judge a theory of meaning is it’s predictive accuracy and theoretical utility (how well does it work with other models we wish to use). In some sense already this approach should suggest that there shouldn’t be any deep paradoxes in terms of meaning. After all we are confident that the description of human behavior at the level of atoms is consistant thus any apparent difficulty at the level of meanings either reflects a confusion on our part or a poor choice of definition.

To put the point a bit differently we should think about a theory of meaning much the way we think about thermodynamics as derived from statistical mechanics. Yes, it can be a powerful theory with useful concepts and important impacts but ultimately just as debates about whether entropy is the log of the number of possible states holding X,Y and Z fixed or just X and Y doesn’t reflect any fundamental fact about the universe but a definitional choice we make that is judged on it’s utility. Thus theories like fictionalism or formalism shouldn’t be understood as making different philosophical claims but rather judged simply on their utility in predicting how people actually use words. Indeed one might very well conclude that different models are most appropriate in different circumstances.

Ultimately then the question about how we can come to have mathematical knowledge is largely a non-question. I can point to the actual ways that mathematicians prove theorems and reach conclusions and that right there shows how we come to have mathematical knowledge. Still one might ask but why are the results of our proofs actually true? However, this has a totally trivial answer. The reason that proofs give us true mathematical results is that every step of the proof is truth preserving. Indeed we can go through this and using the fact (in the meta-language) that A and B is true if and only if A is true or B is true show that the methods mathematicans use to reach theorems really do produce true theorems. Asking for anything more is a demand to know why logic is true. Obviously at a very basic level we have to just assume that logic is true (see Quine’s arguments about this point in his discussions of radial translation) so it’s unclear what is left to be explained at all.

To put the point slightly differently it’s contradictory to worry about how we get mathematics correct. Either the question tells us how we have reason to believe we do get mathematics right, in which case it tells us the answer or it offers no such explanation and we have no need to explain a phenomena that we don’t have reason to accept as true.

Usefullness of Mathematics

This finally brings us to the question of why mathematics turns out to be useful. One might think that it’s surprising that the results of mathematics tells us useful things about the world. Certainly in one sense it is surprising, but that’s the sense in which the understandability of the world is surprsing, i.e., that induction works. While it may appear that mathematics directly makes predictions about the world (if I have two apples in my bag and place another two apples into my bag I have four apples in my bag) in fact it’s only the combination of mathematical theorems with contingent bridge laws that makes these predictions (apples don’t appear or disappear when I place more of them together). One might try and minimize the significance of these bridge laws by saying something like “So long as apples don’t appear or disappear the number of apples in my bag is the number of apples I added minus the number I removed.” However, this merely begs the question by working in our expectation that the plus operation on the natural numbers describes how objects behave into the definition of appear or disappear. I could equally well claim that apples were disappearing and reappearing all the time but if they didn’t do so we could see that adding n apples to a bag with m apples in it results in a bag with n x m apples in it.

In fact the usefulness of something like mathematics is an easy consequence of a well known theorem in recursion theory. Supposing we have a language complex enough to express arbitrary procedures³ then that language will contain infinitely many different ways to state the same procedure, some subset of which will be possible to construct a verification that they are equivalent. In other words no matter how weird your language is you can’t get around the fact that some things will turn out to be non-obviously equivalent which suggests that it will be useful to have a means to identify at least some of them.

Usefullness and Knowledge

The final worry is that one might try and link the two concepts and ask how it is that we come to have mathematical knowledge that yields useful results. Thus even if we don’t have abstract reasons to believe that the syntactic manipulations of mathematicians meet some independent standard of being true we do notice that they let us build rockets and cure disease and the like. Thus one might think the utility of mathematics requires some explanation.

Once again though I think a careful examination of the question reveals it to be a non-worry. If by mathematics you merely mean the sort of thing that mathematicians do then it’s undeniable that what counts as mathematics is partially determined by what is useful. While many types of mathematics are very abstract the subject in the large is influenced by what has solved problems presented by the world. This point is made even more forcefully if you try to define mathematics as any abstract rule based manipulation of symbols. After all under such a definition certain types of astrology would qualify which most assuredly is not useful. Similarly any other means by which you tried to formally define the problem is likely to either reduce to triviality or not call our for any explanation at all.

This was a pretty hurried and scattered explanation of my thouhts so hopefully people ould follow it. If you are confused but curious about what I’m trying to say anyway feel free to post a comment or ask me via email

There is a great article over on the New York Times about recent psychological studies of moral impulses. Perhaps the most interesting point in the piece was the observation that people’s emotions strongly demand they make distinctions they can’t rationally justify and appear not to really be rationally justifiable at all but that individuals with damage to the relevant emotional centers in the brain revert to being utilitarians. This is interesting because the sort of unjustified moral antipathy toward things like consequence free incest, using parts of an American flag as a bathroom rag or directly (as opposed to indirectly) killing one to save others bear a great resemblance to the moral judgements of earlier ages we now repudiate. It’s the same type of disgust we have at consequence free incest that makes others demonize homosexuality or (at least in the past) interracial marriage and the same distaste we might feel at using the American flag to wipe toliets still gives rise to laws against insulting the prophet in much of the muslim world.

Now the only reason we shouldn’t toss moral philosophy out as useless is that we believe that by formulating simple unifying theories about what’s moral we can refine our judgements. In other words moral theorizing only makes sense if you believe that by rational considerations we can identify and discard the sort of things we now recognize as moral superstitions (like objecting to autopsies). Yet if we know that the same unjustified instinctive reactions that demand punishment without deterrent value or cringe at pure hedonic pleasure are responsible for the misguided morals of the past surely these sorts of emotional pulls must be discounted in our moral theorizing. Given the further evidence that people fall back to being utilitarians once the misleading effect of these emotional reactions has been swept aside it would seem that utilitarianism is the only real candidate for a good moral theory.

In other words if we believe in moral philosophy at all and join with the rest of society in rejecting many of the odious moral notions of the past we must explain what caused these prior moral beliefs to go bad and avoid applying the same methods in the present. If the scientific work shows that what the beliefs we now find objectionable had in common was their grounding in this emotional part of the brain this gives us good reason to discount these emotions as a basis for our current moral theories. If science also tells us that in the absence of these misguiding emotions we end up being utilitarians then it seems we must either repudiate moral philosophy as a reasonable inquiry or accept some form of utilitarianism.

One of the principle arguments both for our confidence in the application of our physical theories to unobservable situations¹ and the reality of the postulated objects is that our physical theories are particularly simple. The background idea is that when we approximate a function by fitting points or some other general method we expect to get a complex unwieldy object back thus the simplicity of our physical theories shows they aren’t just good approximations based on lots of data points but somehow really get at what is happening. However, I’m skeptical that our intuitions about simplicity are correct. In particular I worry that our idea of what’s simple is deeply influenced by what we find useful. To explain further let me offer an example.

Suppose you are given a box that lets you dial in any² number between 0 and 1 and returns some output value between 0 and 1 within some experimental error³. If after trying many values you derive a polynomial with 25 coefficients that lets you very closely approximate the average result⁴ for a given input you probably wouldn’t think you’d hit on anything deep about the operation of the box. In fact you’d probably guess that greater precision (averaging over more tests) would reveal subtle distinctions between your approximate function and the true value. On the other hand if after the same number of tests it appears that sin(x) is an equally good approximation you might think this was the true function and expect this to be born out by further experiments. You might even make hypothesises about the box’s mechanism on this basis.

My worry is that those theories we take to be simple and elegant really aren’t simple at all. For instance is it really the case that sin(x) is a simpler function than some 25 term polynomial with integer coefficients between 1 and 10? The obvious way to answer this is to ask how many symbols it takes to define each function but this answer depends on what we take to be our primitive terms. To put the point more formally the Kolmogorov complexity of a string depends on our choice of a universal prefix-free machine. However, it’s reasonable to think that so long as we pick one system to represent out theories in and stick with it then it will function as a useful measure of a theories complexity⁵.

However, in practice we never really fix one system and insist on writing all our theories in terms of it. When people discovered that the sin function was frequently useful in describing physical systems they stuck it into their toolkit. They didn’t stick with whatever previous system they had been using and include the definition of sin(x) in all of their theories. Yet if our idea of what a simple theory is changes in response to what seems to make good predictions we no longer have a good argument for the truth of our theories. If it had turned out that a parametrized solution to the equation y^3+x*y=x^2 had been widely useful in physical theories instead of solutions to x^2+y^2=1 then it would probably have been those functions rather than cos(x) and sin(x) that we regarded as elementary functions.

I don’t doubt that evolution has endowed us with a notion of simplicity that works well in everyday macroscopic scenarios. What I’m skeptical of is the claim that the abstract mathematical theories that underlie particle physics and cosmology are really especially simple. Certainly it’s true that they can be expressed in a form that strikes us as elegant and appears simple but they only do so by making use of many layers of abstraction. I’m not so sure that if we examined the mathematical framework for quantum mechanics written out as a formal statement in PA it would still strike us as particularly simple.

In short I’m worried that we underestimate the power of additional layers of abstraction. Sure, the mathematical concepts used in modern physics are the result of a series of definitions and abstractions each one of which strikes us as simple and elegant but the essential question is whether alternative theories giving similar agreement with the data would admit a similar chain of definitions. Given that no real work (to my knowledge) has been done about the additional complexity each layer of abstraction brings to a theory what reason do we really have to be confident about the simplicity of physics?

In philosophy it is common to take strong intuitions about a subject as reason to believe what we intuit as true. For instance in moral philosophy we generally take our intuition that abducting bums and torturing them to death is wrong to weight against any moral theory that concludes the opposite. Now how these intuitions could give us the proper sort of epistemic access to moral facts is a classic problem in meta-ethics and analogous problems are equally famous in areas like philosophy of math, counterfactuals and many more but I want to try to approach this problem a bit differently¹. Suppose you are dosed with a drug and this altered state of consciousness provokes an extremely strong moral intuition. Does this intuition still give one reason to believe it’s conclusion is true? Is it just as good as a sober intuition? If not why not?

For concreteness sake let’s assume that every time you take MDMA² you have an outflowing of love and sympathy which makes the death penalty or any retributive (as opposed to deterrent or preventative) punishment seem to be a horrible moral abomination³. Or even just that you know that if you were to take the drug you would feel this intuition. Now intuitively one wants to say in these cases that such a drug induced intuition doesn’t count or at least counts much less but why? Well one reason we might wish to exclude such intuitions is the worry that there would be too many of them. Indeed if you believe experiences (or whatever intuitions are) supervene on local physical state (e.g. brain state) then your likely to think that some kind of brain intervention could create any moral intuition desired⁴. But this isn’t a (sound) argument that these intuitions aren’t equally valid it’s merely a wish that they aren’t. It would be nice to have access to moral facts but we can’t discredit the possibility that none of our intuitions, drugged or otherwise, give us any evidence just because we don’t like it.

A more promising approach is to observe that we don’t credit the sensory experiences of inebriated people to the same degree we credit those of sober folks and argue that philosophical intuitions work similarly. While this sounds good the problem is that it’s just not true that we always trust sober perceptions more than chemically altered ones. For instance if a perceptual task requires great focus we very well might prefer the observation of someone taking a small dose of amphetamines than that of a sober person⁵. Certainly imagine drugs or other brain alterations that would improve our perceptual accuracy in some ways even while they might impair it in others. Thus it’s not that we have a blanket rule about trusting sober observations more, rather, we merely induct on prior observations about perceptual accuracy in different states. Without an independent check on moral facts we don’t have any reason to take our normal sober brain states as more reliable in this regard than others⁶.

More broadly one might observe that even without knowing anything about drugs or the effects of brain injuries one would probably believe that most modifications to the brain would degrade, rather than improve our perceptual abilities. However, we only believe this because we have reason to believe that evolution has tuned our brain for perceptual accuracy. Given a situation where we have reason to believe evolution would have tuned our perceptions to get an incorrect, rather than correct, result⁷ we should believe that random alterations to our brains would be likely to improve the result. After all if your brain is a reliable mispredictor (when X occurs we perceive ~X) then any alteration in that behavior would have to be an improvement. Thus whether or not we should assign a higher probability to our normal sober intuitions being correct or those induced by brain changes depends on whether or not we have reason to believe evolution favored accurate or inaccurate intuitions.

When our intuitions are not subject to an external check I really don’t think we have any reason to give more weight to our actual intuitions than those we would have if our brains were altered. In the particular case of moral intuitions I would argue that if anything we have reason to believe that our intuitions are, if anything, less reliable than those selected at random. We have plenty of meta-moral intuitions like ‘all people deserve equal moral consideration’ yet there seems to be no shortage of examples where evolution has favored more concrete intuitions in conflict with these principles, e.g., people tend to have different moral reactions when it’s a family member’s life on the line than a strangers. Thus any analysis that gives more weight to our actual intuitions than other possible ones must acknowledge the existence of evolutionary pressures to have inaccurate moral intuitions while their are both in principle (moral facts would seem to lack causal powers) and pragmatic (continued failure to show otherwise) reasons to think there isn’t any evolutionary pressure for our moral intuitions to match up with true moral facts.

I think this actually establishes an extremely strong negative result. In the absence of a plausible naturalized epistemology of morality (or philosophy of math, or knowledge of possible worlds) it’s irrational to use our intuitions as evidence. Without any justification of why our actual intuitions are more likely to be valid than any of those intuitions we could have had it’s an outright error to treat them as stronger evidence for their claims than the fact that we could have had some other intuition. However, even if you aren’t willing to take it this far it raises some very interesting questions. One that seems particularly challenging for the meta-ethicists is the following:

Suppose theoretical analysis (or survey of galactic civilizations) reveals that our moral intuition about the importance of life is actually an improbable fluke and evolution tends to equip any sentient being with the intuition that it’s the future of someone’s genetic line (or their happiness) that is morally salient not whether they live or die. Does that give us reason to believe that death isn’t morally salient? If not how can it be rational to believe something about moral facts on the basis of an accident without any connection to these facts?

I’m listening to an interview on KQED’s forum (local NPR station’s call in show) with science journalist Timothy Ferris. Apparently he just wrote a new book about amateur astronomy which I don’t doubt is well researched and accurate but as people called in he apparently felt the need to opine on time travel and quantum mechanics ’scientific’ matters and I was appalled. Since he’s also written a book called “The Whole Shebang” his misleading answers can’t be explained as mere failure to research. However, I’m inclined to think that in this case the fault lies with the physicists themselves (either for doing bad philosophy or using mislead metaphors.

It started with someone bringing up the Fermi paradox (why haven’t advanced alien civilizations contacted us yet). The host then steered the question towards whether this was an argument against time travel as well (failure to see time travelers). Timothy Ferris replied that he didn’t find it very compelling because he expects time will be lack a deck of cards so that if you go back in time of forward in time you end up in one of many possible pasts or many possible futures. While he admitted it was just his expectation he clearly conveyed the sense that it was a possibility that experts would take seriously.

I happen to think the very idea of something being time travel requires that we go back into the past not merely enter some universe that looks like the past.¹ However, let’s set this point aside. I suspect the journalist was referencing some approaches to quantum mechanics that go by the name of sum over histories or multiple histories. Possibly he meant to refer to many minds or many worlds theories. The problem is that traveling to an ‘alternate’ past doesn’t even make sense in any of them. Supposing it was true and even meaningful that we have multiple histories in this QM sense we would have multiple presents as well. What the hell would it even mean for a person, who is really a superposition, to visit one component of a prior superposition? Pure many worlds theories only really make sense² if we understand them as collapsing down to a many mind’s theory and it certainly isn’t clear what it would mean for a mind that rides atop the superposition to time travel by itself, certainly not in the sense of some dude from the future appearing.

That’s confused and I was annoyed that he said it with such apparent authority but what really got my goat was when he talked about how interesting it would be if we ended up with quantum computers since we couldn’t explain their processing power with just one universe and would have to say that they use other universes to do their computations. This is just a lie that is being pushed on the public. The fundamental laws of nature could just offer us an oracle that computer anything we wanted as fast as we want. For all we know there is some special experiment we can do that reveals the true bits of 0′ (the set of the halting problem). Worse this is certainly not anything scientists have or can test. It is purely unjustified bad philosophical speculation that misleads the public.

I’m not sure whether to be mad at the people who promote this crap or applaud the physicists for great PR. Maybe we should just adopt this for math. Push the whole confusion about Godel’s theorem a bit more and try selling the Banach-Tarski paradox as a proof that “space is an illusion.”

Bit about quantum computer

UPDATE: Fixed some wording, added clarification at the bottom.

Consider a philosophical debate between two materialists over whether a virus is alive. Philosopher A advances the hypothesis that any organism capable of manipulating it’s environment to copy itself is alive. Philosopher B counters that Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” has this property as it’s induces people to produce reproductions of the work and instead argues that a being is alive only if it doesn’t require outside intervention to duplicate itself. Philosopher A counters with an example of a plant that humans have cultivated for long enough that it is now incapable of reproduction without intentional human intervention.

Now we can imagine this debate continuing as both philosophers refine their theories as to what constitutes life but no matter how long they argue in this fashion they can’t hope to reach any substantive conclusions. Why? Because they didn’t disagree about anything but word usage at the outset. As materialists they both reject the notion of some elan vital that we might add to our fundamental ontology to ‘explain’ what counts as alive and what doesn’t. As far as the virus goes they would both accept the biologists explanation as to how it reproduced they only disagree on how to label this event. Now there are certainly times it makes sense to argue about labeling but we naturally expect such debates to take a very different form. In particular when people merely disagree about how we should term something they will usually sidestep the debate eventually and simply qualify their wording. When people disagree on how in fact people are inclined to use words they tend to either shrug and move on or to start pulling out real empirical data¹. In no case where people understand themselves to be merely debating a matter of labeling would we expect them to argue about the issue for decades in reputable journals with no hint that they view themselves as debating some empirical fact about usage or pragmatic fact about what would make for good usage.

Unfortunately there seems to be no shortage of arguments in philosophy that can’t be explained as anything other than a confusion of a question of terminology as a substantive question². There are a host of examples but let me give a couple

Is formalism or fictionalism the right philosophy of math?

Now there is (arguably) a genuine substantive question as to whether mathematical Platonism is true. Is there or is there not a realm of platonic objects out there? And if you believe in a substantive notion of reference (reference facts aren’t ontologically reducible to physical/mental facts) whether or not that is what we refer to with mathematical talk. However, when we get down to debates between functionalism and fictionalism things suddenly become much more unclear.

Neither theory disagrees about what in fact mathematicians assert nor makes any fundamentally different metaphysical suppositions. Nor do the two theories compete on genuine empirical predictions. Neither theory attempts to best predict what in practice people will tend to assert about mathematics. So in what sense can there be said to be a substantive question at issue here? And if not why believe these two interpretations are in opposition to each other?.

The “Proper” Conception of Evidential Support

In formal epistemology there seems to be a great deal of ink spilt arguing over what the ‘proper’ notion of confirmation is. Now Brandon Fitelson has always (at least to my eyes) pushed for a ‘there is no fact of the matter’ resolution to many debates in this area so I wouldn’t accuse him of making this sort of mistake but this paper of his gives a nice picture of what sorts of arguments are at play in the area. In particular there seems to be a long lasting dispute as to what the ‘right’ notion of confirmation turns out to be. Is it a three place relation between evidence, theory 1 and theory 2 or is it a two place relationship between evidence and a hypothesis?

Now I would be most surprised if anyone in this debate thought confirmation was an substantive notion (but I’ve been wrong about this sort of thing before), that is that when we assert that evidence E favors hypothesis H we aren’t just asserting some fact about probabilities, models or events but actually claiming that there is some special ‘confirmation’ property in our ontology that adheres to that particular relation but not to others that we might have chosen instead to term confirmation and that. Yet if we aren’t being ontologically liberal like this it would seem that all this debate about what is the ‘right’ notion of confirmation seems silly. We can all agree on the formal consequences of each notion and just set aside the contentious terminological question³.

Is Welfare Desire Satsifaction or Utility Maximization

I mention this because it was the argument that first made me realize that many of these debates couldn’t be substantive. While many people want to add an extra ontological fact to explain morality few people are inclined to indiscriminately add ontological entities for subsidiary moral concepts like welfare yet they are perfectly happy to debate the issue as if it were substantive.

In particular many people argue about whether we maximize welfare by maximizing utility or by maximizing desire satisfaction (or something else) as if it was a separate question we resolve prior to figuring out what is morally good. However, short of proposing a new fundamental property or relation it would seem that the debate over what increases someone’s welfare is merely a terminological question.

Kripke’s Causal Theory of Reference for naturalists

I debated about including this one since some people who buy into Kripke’s theory believe it as a genuine substantial claim. That is they add extra fundamental objects to their ontology (references, meanings etc..) and make the substantial claim that somehow our intuitive explanations of words in terms of other words track these objects and that as a real ontological fact it turns out that the reference of our word is determined by it’s causal history.

However, many of the people who take these theories seriously would call themselves naturalists or physicalists and would balk at the suggestion that by endorsing Kripke’s theory they were making grandiose metaphysical claims that couldn’t possibly be explained in terms of anything physics could in principle ever discover. Presumably as a physicalist one should accept the fact that there is nothing more to speech acts than certain configurations of matter and that there is no free floating metaphysical object ‘the reference’ that exists over and above the configuration of matter. As I’ve argued before it’s absurd for a good naturalist/physicalist to have a horse in the internalist/externalist debate except insofar as one turns out to be a genuinely better empirical predictor of future events.

My thesis is that there is a strong bias towards taking mere disputes about terminology and assuming that they are substantive. Not only is it a tempting fallacy to fall into on it’s own but it also creates for a much more interesting seeming discussion. It seems much more significant to say that one is figuring out the nature of life than to admit one is merely debating what we should call “life.” In any case whatever the reason it seems that this is a common fallacy that I see in philosophical discourse and one we should guard against. There are more than enough substantive arguments to keep philosophers busy and some of these non-substantive arguments are worth having as well but which arguments we take to be persuasive will be very different once we understand it is merely a terminological debate. Importantly once we accept that many of our debates are merely terminological we can no longer assume that there is any tension between things like internalism and externalism or different measures of confirmation.

As an aside I think this is in some sense the issue between Carnap and Quine over the nature of analyticity but that’s something for another post.

CLARIFICATION: I don’t want to claim that these debates couldn’t be rendered substantive. Really all I want to claim is that they are not naively substantive questions so using a standard of argumentation suited to this assumption is in error. I don’t mean to say that we need to abandon these questions only that we should figure out what we are trying to say and what it would take to establish our claim before we try to argue for one side or another.

Also I’m not convinced that any particular philosopher is making this error. It often seems that when I talk to any given philosopher about the matter they have some complex alternative interpretation of the claims at issue that either recognizes them as not substantive or renders them so through some non-obvious interpretation. It’s entirely possible that this is merely a process error but at the very least something is wrong when people adopt the form of a substantive argument for notions that don’t seem like they could be substantive without giving an indication as to what way it is (non-obviously) substantive (least different people think they are debating different questions). What I really want to do hear is not so much to advance my particular theory as to what is going wrong but to call attention to the fact that something seems really out of wack (or have someone give me a satisfactory explanation as to why it is not).

This is a quesiton that has been bothering me for awhile so you’ll have to excuse me if I’ve already said this but why can’t we keep peace in Iraq like Saddam did?. Now obviously the answer seems to be that we choose not to do so, probably if we tortured innocent people, rewarded corrupt officials who repressed their people for us and otherwise behaved like dictators do all over the world we could oppress the Iraqi people just like Saddam managed to do. The question I really want to ask is whether it’s reasonable for us to refuse to behave like Saddam.

In particular many liberal’s beliefs about Iraq consist of the following two views:

• Invading Iraq was a horrible mistake that made the average Iraqi much worse off than they were under Saddam, often with the clear implication that a civil war or some other sort of massive bloodshed is inevitable.
• If we could do something for the Iraqis we should but we can’t so we should just leave now.

I realize this doesn’t summarize all liberal’s beliefs about the war (certainly not mine). Some people believe (unreasonably IMO) that things will get much better once we leave and there might be some who even believe the Iraqis are better off now than they were under Saddam but I get the sense that the two views I summarized represent at least a significant percentage of mainstream liberals.

Don’t they entail that we should stay in Iraq but just clamp down just like Saddam did? For those of you who doubt we could do this all we would need to do is pick some local strongman and use our troops as muscle to help him establish himself as Saddam 2. Heck, maybe we could even keep our hands clean by just giving him implicit support and training his forces.

So why shouldn’t we kill a few innocent people now to save many more from a potential civil war? Or was the initial invasion actually a good thing?

Philosophers and stoned college students have long been intrigued by the idea that we could be living in some kind of simulation but I was surprised to see this idea mentioned in the New York Times ¹. The NYT article summarizes this paper by philosopher Nick Bostrom who has also created a webpage with links to background reading, depictions of simulation scenarios in the media² and even someone’s wiki about ’simulism’³. The paper, while interesting and notable for getting into the New York Times, doesn’t say anything really new. It merely fleshes out the argument that if we believe that simulated individuals would have real experiences and that it is likely that humans will create many simulations of humanities past then you should assign a high probability to the proposition that you are actually being simulated.

While my intuition is that the idea behind this argument is correct I think the argument Professor Bostrom gives isn’t quite right. In particular the focus on what human civilizations are likely to do and ancestor simulation seems all wrong. There is no reason why totally alien beings could not simulate people nor to believe that our simulated universe resembles the real one in which the simulation is running much less that we are an earlier stage of the simulators history. Later I might think about how to fix this point but what made me want to write this post was the comment in the NYT that you could get out of the argument by either denying strong AI (a simulation wouldn’t be conscious) or by assigning a low probability to the chances that human beings will progress far enough to run such simulations.

This reminded me of the post I wrote a year ago about Sleeping Beauty in The Matrix arguing that a widely accepted solution to the sleeping beauty problem also implied we should believe the universe creates infinitely many individuals with the same memories and experiences as we have. Of course intuitively I think the conclusion of this argument is total crap but it’s tough to figure out why it’s wrong⁴. In short I think there is something very subtle going on in these sort of arguments that I don’t yet understand. If I ever figure it out I will post but until then I’m remaining skeptical.