Scared of Darwin for All the Wrong Reasons

May 4, 2012 By leahlibresco 48 Comments

UPDATE: I’ve expanded a response to a commenter in a new post: “Have Humans ‘Won’ Evolution?”

Over at Patheos’s group blog on science and religion, Connor Wood is trying to explain why people have a visceral discomfort with evolution.  He sees natural selection as the ultimate example of “nature red in tooth and claw” — a rigged game that pits us all against each other and suppresses the better angels of our nature.  He writes:

Once you start looking at evolutionary reasons for human behavior, you very quickly run aground on some very uncomfortable ideas. These can be summed up in a simple formula: we are not here to love one another. We are here to spread our genes.

This means that, whatever aspirations we have, whatever loves we think we cherish, whirring beneath the entire mechanism of human social life is a bleak drive to win life’s game… Queasily, the entire world began to look like a kind of vast sorting mechanism, a heartless machine for separating the beautiful and talented from the mediocre, charmless, and wretched.

He turns to religion in part because it is counter-Darwinian; the demands of a Christian life of self-sacrifice fly in the face of the evolutionary imperative he fears.  I’m excited by his impulse, and long to welcome him to the ranks of the transhumanists, but I’ve got some big problems with the way he’s thinking about evolution.

Wood seems to imagine Evolution as somehow akin to the Gamemakers in The Hunger Games.  It’s forcing us into a particular way of being, and it wants to bring us down.  The problem is that evolution isn’t directed toward any moral end in particular.  It’s only favoring behaviors that are stable and resilient.

So we see a blend of evolutionary strategies, even if we limit our sample to our closest relatives.  There’s everything from the courtship-by-infanticide of gorillas to the solving-problems-through-orgies of bonobos.  Most species, just like humans, have a blend of strategies; the only total egoists are Ayn Rand protagonists or psychopaths (but I repeat myself).

Evolution isn’t railroading us into anything, moral or immoral, and that fact might end up creeping Wood out a good deal more.  There’s a kind of relief in imagining Evolution as a malevolent force that only really pressures us in one direction.  Virtue becomes easy; it’s defined in opposition to this force (ok, so carrying out virtue is still hard, but it’s not hard to know what you ought to do).

The really scary thing is thinking you’re adrift in Harris’s moral landscape with no way to distinguish a local optima from the ideal you should actually be striving for.  You can’t react against evolutionary pressures as a way to bootstrap a metric for moral choices.  The moral law (the elevation in Harris’s landscape) has to be rooted in something else.

Yudkowsky has a short story (“The Sword of Good”) that does a pretty good job reminding you that you may have skipped over the really hard part of philosophy, the part that feels dangerous to think about.  How do we recognize and cleave to the Good, when our minds and traditions feel suspiciously kludged together?

Filed Under: Atheism, Epistemology/Philosophy, Morality in Practice Tagged With: , , , , 48 Comments

Irrational with Respect to What?

April 19, 2012 By leahlibresco 39 Comments

In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman draws on a lot of empirical studies where subjects make clearly irrational decisions.  A choice throws an exception in an otherwise functional heuristic, and the subject takes an action that doesn’t promote his or her stated goal.  But one of the studies Kahneman cites doesn’t seem to fit into this model.

In the experiment, subjects placed a hand into painfully cold water and had to keep it there for 60 seconds.  After a break, they put their other hand into an identical water bath, but after the 60 seconds were up, they kept their hands in for an additional 30 seconds and the temperature of the bath was raised so that it was still uncomfortable, but not as painful.  (For the methodology nerds: the order of these experiences were randomized, the right/left assignment to the treatment conditions were randomized, and the subjects were just told they needed to keep their hand in the bath until the experimenter said to take it out.  The subjects didn’t have the description of the differences between the conditions)

After experiencing both conditions, the subjects were told that they had one more round, but they could pick which condition they would repeat: the one they’d had on their right hand or the one on their left.  Overwhelmingly, the subjects chose to pick the longer trial, even though it was an extension of the discomfort in the shorter experience.

This kind of preference is known as the peak-end rule.  We don’t tend to remember experiences as the average of pleasure and pain, multiplied by the length of the experience.  Instead, we seem to rank them according to two criteria: how bad (or good) was the most intense part of the experience and what did we feel right before the experience ended.  Both water baths had the same unpleasant peak, but the longer condition had a less awful feeling right before the trial ended, so it was preferred.

Kahneman found this heuristic unnerving:

Decisions that do not produce the best possible experience and erroneous forecasts of future feelings — both are bad news for believers in the rationality of choice. The cold-hand study showed that we cannot fully trust our preferences to reflect our interests… Tastes and decisions are shaped by memories and the memories can be wrong.

This sounds like a weird objection.  We know that humans lay down memories according to the peak-end rule.  Is it really rational to optimize according to how we think we should record and rank experiences rather than how we actually do?  Eliezer Yudkowsky writes about this kind of problem in his analysis of Newcomb’s Problem (it’s a little long and complex to excerpt, so I recommend just reading the whole thing.

The first place I ran across an example of the peak-end properties of memory was in a discussion of colonoscopies.  By leaving the probe in the patient for an extra minute at the end of the exam, doctors ensured that the end of the experience was less awful than the more active parts of the exam.  Patients in this condition remembered their exams as less unpleasant than did the patients whose doctors hadn’t extended the experience.

So what I’m wondering is, if Daniel Kahneman were going in for a colonoscopy, which technique would he prefer the doctor use?  Would he really rather feel reasonable than feel comfortable?

I guess Kahneman could sidestep some of these problems if he’s willing to operate in the constraints of how his memory works now, but plans to go full-bore transhumanist and work on rejiggering how human memory encodes sustained sensation.  I really doubt that’s his project, but if it were, I’d be really interested in what criteria he or anyone else would use to compare different memory schema.

Filed Under: Epistemology/Philosophy, Morality in Practice, Reviews/Recommendations Tagged With: , , , , 39 Comments

Quasi-Transhumanist Charismatic Christians

April 18, 2012 By leahlibresco 12 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.

This was a fascinating book to read right on the heels of Thinking Fast and Slow, because both books seemed to be mostly about changing our intuitions and heuristics. Luhrmann is embedded in a charismatic sect of Christianity.  No snake-handling, but plenty of two-way dialogue with Jesus and what Luhrmann calls ‘sensory overrides’ that might more commonly be called hallucinations.

The visions and auditory overrides don’t come unprompted.  Luhrmann describes a variety of techniques that parishoners use to be more open to hearing God.  Believers are encourage to keep a prayer journal and organizing it into their own pleas and God’s replies.  One of the four keys in a prayer guide Luhrmann reads recommends “writing down the dialogue so it appears real to you.”

Members of this church also practice focused visualization exercises, imagining themselves as witness to the Gospels or at dinner with Christ and trying to feel what they would have felt.  The deliberate cultivation of brushes with the divine reminds Luhrmann of psychotherapy — the goal is to remap your emotional responses.  And it tends to work.

After living with these charismatic Christians, Luhrmann did an empirical study where she assigned Christian to one of three prayer practices: kataphatic (intense, focused visualization of the Gospels), listening to academic discussion of the New Testament, and centering prayer (listening to pink noise while focusing on a particular world or phrase).  The people in the kataphatic group did report that their mental imagery (in prayer and elsewhere) had gotten sharper and they were most likely to be excited about their practice and to report sensory overrides that seemed to come from God.  (And one person in the kataphatic group said the prayer tapes cured her acne.)

These results couldn’t be a surprise to Luhrmann.  After all, in a previous research project, she had been following Wiccan visualization exercises and had a visual sensory override where she ‘saw’ a group of Druids in her house.  This vision felt indistinguishable from normal sensory perception.  After reading the book, I’m pretty confident that Luhrmann’s found and formalized a sensory feedback loop that has the power to change our perceptions.

Now, as a transhumanist, I’m really interested in how people decide when it’s appropriate to use a feedback loop to hack their brain in the first place.  The parishioners Luhrmann interviews seem to have made a deliberate choice to alter themselves and their minds, in conformance with what God wants for them.  These prayer practices let them short-circuit their thought process — it’s the same kind of tactics I might use to subvert an inaccurate intuition or a cognitive behavioral therapist might use with a patient to alter a habit.

The trouble with these feedback loops is that we’d don’t know for sure whether they’re right, we just know that they work.  And signing on to change your mind this way will make it harder to change it back or recognize that you’re wrong.  How confident should you be before you start trying to hack your intuitions?

Some intuition subversions are easy to justify, you can just do the math out on the Monty Hall problem and realize you’ve been thinking about it wrong.  In other cases, aggregated data might teach you that most people who think they’re an exception to a moral rule are wrong and you should be really suspicious of those thoughts.  These seem like sufficient reasons to kill (or maim) your ordinary ways of thinking, but I don’t think the charismatic prayer clears those hurdles.

 

What criteria/data make it less dangerous to change your thinking than to remain as you are?

Is kataphatic prayer or meditation only an unreasonable gamble for skeptics?  If you believe in God is the marginal harm a lot lower?

What other kinds of feedback loops work even if you know you’re trying to hack yourself?

 

Patheos will be hosting a live chat with the author on Friday, April 27th at 2pm EST.

Filed Under: Epistemology/Philosophy, Reviews/Recommendations Tagged With: , , , , , 12 Comments
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