“What’s Hard is Simple, What’s Natural Comes Hard”

April 21, 2012 By leahlibresco 8 Comments

This post is part of Patheos’s book club for T.M. Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. I recieved a review copy free of charge.


In T.M. Luhrmann’s ethnographic study of charismatic evangelical Christians, When God Talks Back, communing with God is a strenuous practice.  Cultivating a personal, two-way relationship is a choice for these Christians, and the sheer level of effort they put into changing their minds trips a lot of my epistemological red flags.  The people Luhrmann profiles sound like they’re brainwashing themselves and making it hard to ever recognize their error in the future.

A few days after finishing the book, though, I noticed a weird discrepancy in the way I think about religion.  Whether or not I believe in God, I don’t find anything weird about the idea that hewing to religious morality is hard and requires continual discipline and mortification of the self.  Heck, I think that’s true of most atheistic moral philosophies as well.  The difficulty isn’t necessarily a cue that moral obligations are foreign to us or unnatural, just that we’ve strayed away from our telos, and it takes a wrenching effort to get back on track.

Back when I saw Freud’s Last Session (a two-person play that imagines a debate/conversation between CS Lewis and Sigmund Freud), I thought Freud-in-the-play lost the argument when he complained that Christian morals were unlivable and therefore unreasonable, not that they were false.  I think I’m significantly out of sync with the person I ought to be that it’s not surprising that fixing myself might require a fairly radical and difficult overhaul of my habits of thought.  So why do I still feel very different from the people Luhrmann interviewed?

The brainhacking I do, from foreswearing free food to trying to accept gifts are an attempt to entrench a moral virtue as habit.  I’ve already been convinced I need to change my behavior, and now I’m trying to make the new practice sticky.  I’m suspicious of the people in Luhrmann’s book because they seem to be overhauling their minds as part of the evidence-gathering stage, not the post-decision implementation stage.

There are some disciplines that require a big shift in thinking before you can even understand what you’re studying (my go-to example is topology, but quantum mechanics is in this category as well).  But these changes seem safer since they’re a few degrees away from moral philosophy.   Having a bad idea of four-dimension geometry isn’t likely to lead you into the kind of error where you hurt other people or yourself (though I realize some of the commenters who see my neo-Platonism as pernicious may disagree about this last point).

Historically, most people who ask you to override your senses are tricking you and/or harming you (though some may be doing it unintentionally).  Most “visionaries” are wrong and therefore have reason to fear truth.  It’s prudent to be chary of this kind of epistemological change unless you’ve got some robust error-correction measures in place.

In math and quantum mechanics, there’s not a terribly long lag between learning a new mode of abstract thought and seeing positive consequences.  And the benefits you accrue in these disciplines (being able to write proofs, read papers, and imagine tesseracts) are a lot less ambiguous than possibly being in contact with God.  Ultimately, I see brain-hacking as pretty similar to making any other kind of radical personal change: it’s better to do it as the result of a considered decision, not as a way of exploring a possible choice.

 

The title of this post comes from the song “Anyone Can Whistle” from the Sondheim musical of the same title. A recording from the original production is available below:

YouTube Preview Image
Patheos will be hosting a live chat with the author of When God Talks Back on Friday, April 27th at 2pm EST.

Filed Under: Epistemology/Philosophy, Reviews/Recommendations Tagged With: , , , , , , 8 Comments

Simulated Ethics and Brainmodding

December 8, 2011 By leahlibresco 6 Comments

It’s a week of tough questions about transhumanism.  After reading my post on moral hazard for uploaded humans, Gilbert asked:

OK, so people value other people based on some kind of proximity function. In practice they instinctively use some evaluation procedure that generalizes badly to modern situations (where interactions can be more remote) and even worse* to uploads. Perhaps a bit like different polynomials may be functionally identical on some finite fields but not on others so that using the “wrong” one may be efficient for one domain put catastrophic for another one.

Going by your premises the solution seems obvious: Mass upload and then fix the bug.

That is, of course, unless patching healthy minds is somehow taboo. Which it is, for the same reason doing the same to the body is: Both are unnatural in the philosophical sense of the term. But if human nature wasn’t intrinsically worthy of respect, well then you would be better advised to chip away at reverence for the mind-as-it-is so we’d be more comfortable studying how it leads us astray and making any helpful and feasible modifications.

Once again, let me start with the very practical and then wander out to the philosophical.  Being able to upload and/or simulate consciousness is no guarantee that we’d understand how it works or how to fix it.  Geneticist can sequence the genes of various species and can even synthesize an entire genome, without knowing what any of the genes do or how you would alter their function.  So the fact that humans minds could be run outside of conventional bodies wouldn’t mean we’d be able to have direct influence over their workings or that the any changes we could make would have very predictable effects.

That caveat aside, I think Gilbert’s question raises some really interesting ethical dilemmas.  You run into the expected problems of identity, but the uncertainty involved in altering the mind also brings up issues of medical ethics.  How would you test a mind-modification that you thought might have the potential to do a lot of good.

It's not all science fiction. Check out Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation) or brain implants for depression (http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110207/full/news.2011.76.html)

As is standard procedure for risky but promising treatments, the mod could be offered to volunteers in the virtual world who were painfully deficient with regard to their moral instincts and wanted to be better (the equivalent of this guy from C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce).  It might be tempting to just run computer models, but once you can adequately simulate human minds, that sounds a lot like creating people for the sole purpose of research and then destroying them.

The best option I can come up with is letting volunteers bifurcate.  When they agreed to enter the trial, they’d duplicate their software/consciousness and make the change to one of the copies.  (Fellow scientists reading this are already squeeing at the rigor of the control group set-up).  But at the end of the experiment, what would you do?

Cantor Set (or the flow chart for your experimental design)

Maybe both copies would want to go on as they are, but, if a change dramatically improved our lives, would the control group version of you want to merge with the augmented self?  Is there anyway to talk about such a merge (or maybe the initial treatment, too) without it being the same thing as death?

I’m suspicious of any attempt to define a flaw as central to our own identity, but I don’t know how radical a change you can go through and still have any connection to your previous self.  For example, I was pretty roundly disliked before I went to college and, in that environment, developed some pretty bad moral habits.  I certainly wish that my future self will treat people more like people and less like prompts on a kind of morality SATs, but I don’t wish that Future!Leah would act differently because she had our past erased.

I’m suspicious I’m rebelling mainly against the way the change happens, not it’s magnitude, so I don’t know if I trust my revulsion.  We applaud major identity shifts provided they take place over a long timespan, but I don’t see any great virtue in prolonging suffering and bad habits as an end-in-itself.  Why shouldn’t the bifurcates subjects remerge and abandon the warped path one of them was stuck on?

How good would a change have to be in order to make it worth your while to subsume your self in a similar but different version?  How confident are you that you would recognize the altered you as superior if it truly was?

Call it a fun sci-fi premise.  Or a decent metaphor for conversion.

Filed Under: Morality in Practice Tagged With: , , , , 6 Comments

High Octane Ritual

October 20, 2011 By leahlibresco 5 Comments

Yesterday I made a case for authority among atheists and today I’m addressing ritual without religion.

In the big discussion about Greg Epstein’s humanist chaplains and the twitter forum on #humanistcommunity, PZ Myers claimed setting up atheist rituals that paralleled religious tradition was “a cheat and a waste.” At their essence, Myers claimed, ritual is just another world for “waste of effort, feel-good displacement activities that take the place of thought.”

It’s easy to think of fairly harmless secular rituals that might not meet with Myers’s ire. My technically-Jewish family still sticks by the highly traditional custom of going out to a movie and eating Chinese food on Christmas Day. Other deracinated rituals I can think of off the top of my head include graduation ceremonies and the recitation of entire Monty Python sketches.

At their heart, these toothless rituals are jargon. They are enacted by members of some group and not by others. They may not be particularly emotionally resonant, but they are shorthand for some kind of community bond.

It’s the use of shorthand that I suspect puts Myers off. Compressing and ritualizing ideas can be a pretty good way to make us stop thinking critically about them. A person used to mouthing a prayer may not notice they no longer mean the words they’re used to saying. And, in the secular world, plenty of academic disciplines end up so turned in on themselves that they look more like performance art than scholarship.

But shorthand is too valuable to be cast off because it’s risky. If we’re all on the same page, it’s nice to be able to talk about ideas paying rent without having to summarize Yudkowsky’s formulation every time. That’s a convenience; ritual becomes a necessity when it’s a way of gesturing at ideas we don’t know how to express and formalize. I can reach for a parallel in literature when I don’t know how to work through a feeling on my own. When I want to comfort a friend, sending flowers, or some other ritualized act can express my empathy more effectively than an explicit declaration. And, for people who don’t have time to master every subject, shorthand can give them enough of a grasp of a difficult topic to get by.

But shorthand and abstraction don’t really capture all of what ritual is about. If regular old discourse is prose, ritual is poetry. It’s emotionally charged and cognitively sticky. So why should we want to imbue these inside jokes with content and emotional resonance? I’ll definitely concede to Myers that it will make it harder to abandon them.

But most of us aren’t striving for a world of detatchment. We’re going to become emotionally attached to something, we’ll decide some group memberships are essential parts of our identity. Shouldn’t the constraints we embrace be tied to some actual content? Embracing ritual means doubling down on the thought patterns/traditions/values you want to embody.

If you don’t have a philosophy/ethics/telos you feel comfortable turbocharging, get looking.

Again, this is getting long, so I’ll hold for a separate post a few briefer thoughts on ritual and historical continuity, along with an example of secular ritual from my summer camp

Filed Under: Atheism Tagged With: , , , 5 Comments
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