Psychopaths and Confucian moral psychology

I have little respect for the New York Times. Their quality of journalism is poor but unfortunately standard fare for much of the world's press. However, occasionally one can find gems such as this well researched article on psychopathy by Jennifer Kahn.

Psychopathy is a philosophically rich topic with clear relevance for moral psychology and meta-ethical debates on the nature of moral reasons and moral motivation. 

What has always interested me about psychopaths is not that they have little regard for other people's welfare which is obvious but that they often display very little regard for their own. They are known to be extremely brazen and do things that jeopardize their own well-being. Punishments often do not sway them from harming others (as the article nicely illustrates). Violent psychopaths have very high recidivism rates. They seem to have little to no fear and show little to no anxiety and stress.

I remember reading or hearing of a famous experiment involving psychopaths. A control group and a psychopathic group were wired up and told they were about to receive painful shocks. The control groups displayed profound stress (measured in physiological makers such as heart rate, galvanic skin response, cortisol levels, etc) between the shocks. In other words, they were anticipating the shocks and felt understandable stressed at the future prospects of the pain. But the psychopathic groups felt almost no stress.

psychopaths have often do not recognize fear in others (probably because they don't feel the emotion themselves). In one incident, a psychopath was asked to identify a collection of pics of facial expressions representing various emotions. She identified all of them correctly except the photo of a face displaying fear. She said that she didn't know what that face was expressing but she had seen such an emotion before right before she stabs her victims.

As the article illustrates, psychopaths often are carelessness and recklessness. But I am also reminded of a passage in the Analects that says roughly that one tell-tale mark of someone to be feared in a position of power or state rule is someone that have little regard for their own safety. Presumably, this is saying that if they have a history of little regard for their own well-being, they are the type that will have little regard for the well-being of others and ought not be trusted with ensuring the well-being of others. I can't remember the passage so if Carl knows which one this is, I'd really appreciate his help.

Evolution and masochism

I just finished reading a really good sci-fi novel called the Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. The behavior of the lead protagonist, Caroline, got me thinking of the evolutionary roots of masochism. Caroline is an extreme masochist and enjoys being tortured. It got me thinking of a passage that always stuck with me after many years from the great 20th century feminist work The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvior. de Beauvior was quoting (approvingly it appears) the claims of a famous German psychoanalyst (Karen Horney) who said something like "All women are masochists". Now this seems way overstated.

But even if it is somewhat true that there are many female masochists, from an evolutionary perspective, why is that? What possible evolutionary purpose does it serve? If some psychologists are correct, certain fantasies that are extremely masochistic (even life endangering) seem to be common in women so de Beauvior and Horney seems to be on to something.

It seems to me that masochists would be more likely to be culled out of the population, that such a trait is detrimental to fitness in the genetic sense. Thus those who are genetically disposed to it should be a very small minority. de Beauvior and Horney suggest a cultural explanation for that prevalence. But mightn't there be an evolutionary answer (as well)? I am divided between the cultural and the genetic dispositional perspectives. Maybe it is a combination of both factors interacting in complex ways (like many complex traits).

What I'm about to say may be extremely unPC but it seems that one possible reason that may explain the prevalence of female masochism is that it does confer an advantage. It may be that masochistic women are more desirable to men, that more dominant women are less so and thus the masochist traits are passed down more often than otherwise. Maybe even women who resist rape are more likely to be killed by their attackers (especially from foreign barbarian hordes which I'd imagine was once quite a common threat) than those who do not resist (and presumably a masochistic disposition may go some ways to make this acquiescence more likely). Non resisters are then more likely to be then taken into the group of the invaders or attackers as a "war bride" or something like it and thus bodily survive albeit psychically and dignity wise shattered. Mightn't masochism make even psychological recovering from these kinds of incidents more likely?

But what about male masochists? After all, the term is named after a man (Sacher-Masoch). Are male masochists as common as females? If males are far less likely to be masochists then the evolutionary psychological answer I gave may have some support because it does seem that it would be detrimental for males to be masochists. After all the hypothesis is basically a "rape theory" of masochism. Of course even if it is the case that men are far less likely to have that disposition it may be as de Beauvior suggests, because of cultural factors alone which tends to inculcate masochistic tendencies through the conditioned association of certain images and narratives to normal sexual sensibilities. There may not be any sex-selective differences on this account.

I'm usually not partial to evolutionary psychology because of its common, ad hoc, just-so stories, and I realize that I am giving an evopsy answer (and like many evopsy claims, very unPC!). But I make no claims to giving a scientific answer, just some crazy speculation.

A Critique of Brzezinski

I posted this on another blog.

Brzezinski: Dangerously Wrong

Zbigniew Brzezinski is a well known political scientist and the media often gives him opportunities to voice opinions on foreign policy. How deserving is this accorded credibility? Well, though I have not read much from him, from the looks of this article he wrote in foreignpolicy it would appear that his competence as a expert on international affairs is grossly inadequate and, moreover, because that incompetence is combined with influence, it makes him very dangerous too. 

So I will only criticize that article. It is about the dangers of a declining US and the rise of China. (Anyone who is more familiar with his writing and views, please disabuse me of my ignorance if I am shown to misunderstand him.) 

My criticisms are two fold: First a hermeneutic critique and then a theoretical one. On the one hand, he seems to have made severely deficient errors in interpreting and applying the ideas in the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes. The theoretical critique relies on findings in modern social science. 

In Brzezinski’s article, he argues that the decline of the US and the rise of China posses a great threat to the security of the world. He gives almost no explicit support for this pessimistic view except for a brief reference to an ominous “Hobbessian world,” an allusion to the thoughts of the 17^th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. 

While a sudden, massive crisis of the American system — for instance, another financial crisis — would produce a fast-moving chain reaction leading to global political and economic disorder, a steady drift by America into increasingly pervasive decay or endlessly widening warfare with Islam would be unlikely to produce, even by 2025, an effective global successor. No single power will be ready by then to exercise the role that the world, upon the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, expected the United States to play: the leader of a new, globally cooperative world order. More probable would be a protracted phase of rather inconclusive realignments of both global and regional power, with no grand winners and many more losers, in a setting of international uncertainty and even of potentially fatal risks to global well-being. Rather than a world where dreams of democracy flourish, a Hobbesian world of enhanced national security based on varying fusions of authoritarianism, nationalism, and religion could ensue.Perhaps we can reconstruct the argument he has in mind from this suggestion. 

Brzezinski may be construing states as similar to what Hobbes viewed people. Hobbes thought, famously and overly pessimistically, that life was “nasty, brutish and short” in a state of nature for human beings. The only way to establish civil society was for everyone to give up much of the freedoms they have in that state of nature (such as the freedom to kill and rob one another) and to submit to an all powerful sovereign (usually a king) who will use force and coercion to enforce cooperation among all for the benefit of all. This sovereign has many powers including life and death over his subjects. Why would anyone submit to this? Because there are clear benefits to living in a civilized society. One gives up certain freedoms from the state of nature in order to achieve some peace-of-mind and more opportunities for cooperative relationships and hence mutual benefit. This is why Hobbessian political philosophy is often termed a kind of “social contract theory” (if I have misunderstood Hobbes, I hope Allen, who likely has studied him more extensively than I, will correct me). 

In order for Hobbes to get his argument off the ground, he had to rely on several criteria and premises. 1. that everyone in a state of nature is roughly equal in strength, intelligence, cunning, etc. and mostly care about themselves and thus there will be a perpetual state of “war of all against all.” 2. An absolute sovereign needs to be all powerful. 3. He or she has the implicit or explicit consent of all governed and 4. He or she is disinterested between his subjects and applies the rule of law fairly to insure the benefit of all. 

Brzezinski seems to suggest that the US is analogous to such an absolute sovereign and the other states of the world are analogous to people in Hobbes’s world. He also assumes that without an absolute sovereign the world would devolve into something analogous to people in the state of nature, a state of war of all against all. How accurate is this? 

Hobbes’s argument requires that all premises set out above are true (it’s complicated why his argument requires all these premises). Not only do states not satisfy all of Hobbes’ premises for his argument which is aimed at individual people and an absolute sovereign, they seem to satisfy none so there is a glaring disanalogy between states and people. Some non-absolute sovereign states are far more powerful than others and thus is not analogous to Hobbes’s first premise. China, for example, can obliterate the tiny state of San Marino quite literally in seconds by pressing one button. 

The US does not behave in the way an absolute sovereign behaves in a Hobbesian world. It constantly undermines international law and is itself a partisan actor. It is not impartial but unquestioningly biased for its own interests and those of its allies. Its unilateral military actions are not meant to enforce international law but constantly undermines it and it does so for its own interests to the detriment of everyone else. Besides that, other states likely would not consent to absolute rule by the US even if the US does have absolute power over everyone which, of course, is certainly untrue. There are already some world powers that are close in military might to that of the US and under the right circumstances may defeat it in a war (US wars in Vietnam, Korea and Afghanistan are just a few examples). 

So there appears to be few similarities between people and states and between an absolute Hobbessian sovereign and the US in the scheme of a Hobbesian framework. Brzezinski’s analogy breaks down on those two fronts. 

But his folly does not end there. He assumes that without an absolute Hobbessian sovereign there cannot or is unlikely to evolve peaceful cooperation in a multipolar world with many roughly equally powerful states without an absolute sovereign. For the sake of argument, assume that Brzezinski is right that the US is currently such an absolute sovereign. Is he then also correct that as China matches the US in power there cannot evolve peaceful cooperation between states and that international affairs will likely devolve into a “state of nature” where all is against all because the optimal strategy would be not cooperating? 

That is pure rubbish. 

First of all, why did Hobbes think that in a state of nature people will devolve into such a state of war of all against all? Some modern philosophers have argued that Hobbes was thinking of a scenario similar to a one-off prisoner’s dilemma game. In this game, it is always rational not to cooperate with another player for defecting is the optimal choice (it strictly dominates in the jargon).

	Cooperate	Defect
Cooperate	3, 3	0, 5
Defect	5, 0	1, 1

Thus one can argue that players ought to devolve into a Hobbessian State of Nature in situations that are modeled by this game and when there is no absolute sovereign to coerce or enforce rules to cooperate. 

But one-off prisoner dilemma games often do not model situations in the real world. Rather relevant situations in the real world are more accurately modeled by iterated prisoner dilemma games (with memory). Here many games are repeated one after another with indefinite (or unknown) number of games. That seems far more like reality because we don’t only play only a single “game” with other players (other people or other states for that matter) in the world and just “go home” afterword. Rather we are stuck with each other for good or bad, doomed to either cooperate or defect in many repeated situations. Moreover, we remember how each behaved in previous games and update our future decision accordingly to take into account that information. 

So lets say that in the future, there is relative decline of the US and that is balanced by an ascending China such that there is now a bipolar world with two roughly equally powerful superpowers and thus no one “absolute sovereign” (I’m abstracting from the more likely scenario that it will likely turn into a multipolar world with more than two equally powerful superpowers). Does that mean it is rational for both countries to not cooperate (to defect) such as in one-off prisoner’s dilemma games? No. 

The optimal strategy for iterated prisoner’s dilemma games is the famous tit-for-tat strategy. In this game, cooperation can spontaneously evolve and it is completely rational to cooperate. The best strategy is to cooperate at first then play tit-for-tat with random (or actually pseudo-random) forgiveness if the other player keeps defecting. The basic strategy is that one ought to always cooperate unless provoked (this is called a “nice” strategy) and once in a while forgiving non cooperative behavior by cooperating which stops “death spirals” that is, repeated, alternating revenge tactics. Such a strategy is optimal and do not require an absolute sovereign to enforce cooperation. 

The success of the tit for tat strategy, which is largely cooperative despite that its name emphasizes an adversarial nature, took many by surprise. In successive competitions various teams produced complex strategies which attempted to “cheat” in a variety of cunning ways, but tit for tat eventually prevailed in every competition. 

This result may give insight into how groups of animals (and particularly human societies) have come to live in largely (or entirely) cooperative societies, rather than the individualistic “red in tooth and claw” way that might be expected from individuals engaged in a Hobbesian state of nature. 

The more cooperative players are to begin with the quicker and more beneficial the strategy will work to the benefit of all players. However, as many game theorists are also quick to point out, trust is asymmetric: it is far easier to break than to build back up once it is broken. Distrust or broken trust also has multiplier effects and is contagious. Rather than consent to be ruled by an absolute sovereign, in situations modeled by iterated prisoner’s dilemma, it is most rational to instead build trust from the beginning. The US has consistently undermined trust in international affairs by its capricious unilateral actions, military, political and economic. But the faster people start building trust and cooperating, the more beneficial this strategy will be for everyone. Even the iterated prisoner’s dilemmas underscores the actual situation in the world for these games assume that all players are only interested in themselves. In the real world, interests often overlap and, moreover, there exists some instances of empathy, altruism, friendship and alliances across nations (some sense of cosmopolitanism and the brotherhood of mankind). 

We can excuse Hobbes’s ignorance for he lived 300 years before the development of modern game theory. Brzezinski cannot rely on such an excuse. His argument seems to be dependent on the assumption that states in the world takes on a Hobbessian structure with the US as absolute sovereign and furthermore the world needs such a structure to maintain peaceful cooperation. Not only is he wrong, and furthermore, wrong, but he is dangerously wrong. He has likely misunderstood and misapplied Hobbes’s ideas which is itself deeply flawed. By arguing that the world needs an absolute sovereign and, hence, presumably promoting international support for continued American hegemony instead of embracing and promoting a multipolar world with rational and trustworthy actors, Brzezinski may be undermining the possibility of peaceful global cooperation.

Refilling the Liberal vacuum

Another post on my political blog:

In a previous post I talked about the Liberal tradition (that is, the explicit and formal human rights framework, not to be confused with how people often use the term to refer to a political or economic “left” or being “progressive”) as being a byproduct of religious, political and other kinds of oppression in the west. I also talked about the importance of instituting rule of law and rights protection for China in the coming years in the comments section.
However, I always have had serious reservations about the Liberal model on philosophical grounds.

Focusing on rights may actually hamper ethical or moral development in society because it focuses on bare minimum ethical standards of conduct and behavior. It detracts attention and energy from more positive accounts of ethics such as those from virtue cultivation and community-building. There’s some debate whether a Liberal framework can handle more nuanced and more positive accounts of ethics. I happen to doubt that it can. Confucius mention 2500 years ago that even in societies with well established laws, people can still find ways to treat each other like shit and make life hell for each other. That is because even in such a society, people may still not be virtuous and find ways around the law to behave despicably.

I think that the serious development of the rights framework ought only be a temporary in China so that bare minimum standards are set in place for now and into the near future so that basic rights are protected and society will have something to fall back on for protecting people’s rights. But I also think that as China gets richer, as people get more educated, China ought to progress into a more Confucian model which focuses not on what we owe each other in the form of bare minimum duty and other rights but on our virtue and on the quality of our relationships. This is a much more nuanced and robust form of ethical development but it has the drawbacks that it is more difficult to develop requiring extensive education and good, solid, development of welfare for the whole population. As Confucius mentioned, societies become immoral when two major events occur: when either the education system collapse or when the country does not have enough to feed, clothe, or build infrastructure for the whole population.

Now, I believe also that we may never get totally away from having some legal protection for individuals in society from abuses of their rights no matter how we cultivate virtue in the population because there will always be some bad apples making the whole society worse off and law may be the only way to protect people from abuses from these intractable individuals.
But it seems to be a good goal to try and build something more ethically solid. How would we build such a society that moves away from focusing on rights and starts focusing on individual virtue cultivation?

I would start with a secular moral education. I believe that students should start learning philosophy such as ethics and critical thinking as early as possible (maybe as soon as they are in the 4th or 6th grade). I think Confucius would agree to this.

Second, Confucius said that ritual is another important aspect of moral cultivation of virtue and community ties. But what rituals ought we employ to further this end in a secular 21st century China? (Note: Confucius said that rituals can be wholly secular). I think this is a crucial question that Chinese people should look to themselves and their own history for answers.

It struck me that another useful application of experimental philosophy may be to see if rituals can improve moral conduct.

Is the Indian Caste System a form of Racism?

I've only read a few articles on the philosophy of race and critical race theory so I'm not sure about this area of philosophy but it seems that the question of whether the caste system of India (actually, there are many kinds of caste systems in practice today in India but I elide on this unnecessary complication) ought to be classified as a racist institution needs to be seriously addressed. It would obviously have large implications morally and legally for a large swath of humanity if it is deemed such. I don't know if the question has been addressed in the philosophical community but from what I have cursorily read about the caste system from the wikipedia page, the objections to such a classification (usually the one's from Indian sociologists) are quite lame.

The objection from these objectors to the racism charge is that castes are not races and so any discrimination among castes cannot be construed as racism or racial discrimination. Because they say that members of different castes are of the same race, the discrimination lower castes face, though may be repugnant, is still not racial discrimination.

This line of reasoning is based on a misunderstand how contemporary race theorists understand racism (see here for one example of a contemporary understanding of racism). Nearly all contemporary race theorists AFAIK do not understand racism to be defined by mistreatment necessarily from different races. They have good reason for this. For one, race is notoriously difficult to define and thus what constitutes discrimination on that basis is not clear. Furthermore, members of the same race may be racist towards each other. In other words, race component in racism is in the eyes of the beholder, or more specifically, the eyes of the perpetrators of discrimination or the negative intentional, racial attitudes. If members of a group sees racial differences in another group and treats them or have attitudes towards them that are discriminatory then that would be racist even if those differences are illusory and not in anyway biologically, physically instantiated. Also, remember that someone can be racist towards their own race.

Consider the racism that was met out to the Jews during Nazi Germany. That was racism as most race experts would agree though most German Jews are indistinguishable physically (and cluster closely even genetically) from “Aryan” Germans. The racial differences were merely in the eyes of the Nazis, i.e., they were wholly illusory. The Jews (among many other victims such as Gypsies and Slavs) were treated as somehow fundamentally different by their “racial essence” their “blood” according to their “Aryan” counterparts in society. That viewpoint from the perspective of the perpetrators is what counts, not the actual “race” (whatever that is) of the victim vis a vis the perpetrators. Also consider the genocide in Rwanda. The Tutsi and Hutu are physically (and linguistically, genetically and culturally) almost indistinguishable from each other. However the genocides they have committed against each other (in the 70s and 90s) are indeed racial in nature.

It was racial because the perpetrators each time saw their enemies, the people they would go on to exterminate as somehow fundamentally different in essence from them. That essence can be passed down from one generation to the next and is, for the most part, viewed as immutable. That sounds rather like the ideology behind caste system! 

Objectors to the caste-as-racism theory may object that though “actual race” is irrelevant to racism, the caste system is still not racist because the categories of races are a western categorization. But descriptively, there may be little to no difference between how the caste system structures society along the same lines as how racism structures society (i.e. based on perceived inherent abilities of groups that are passed down through generations). One may respond that any semantic hairsplitting is just an apologia for such oppressive practices as the caste system inherently may be.

One may wonder if different intuitions that separates a descriptivist versus a direct reference theory of language is at the heart of this issue. Descriptivists may say, “hey, if it walks like a duck, quacks like duck, it is a duck!” Thus because the caste system has all the qualitative hallmarks of a racialist institution (walking and quacking along perceived similar lines as racism), it is a racist institution. But direct reference theorists such as a causal reference theorist may say that the word “racism” has certain cultural connections to how they have been actually used in the west to refer to specific institutions and do not reference to other institutions no matter how qualitatively similar.

This brings up the issue of whether even if the direct reference theorists (or those who share that kind of intuition) are correct about the caste system, that would only be an empty victory for the caste system apologists because such a system though not “de jure” racist may be justifiably then deemed “de facto” racist especially if the institutions are extremely harmful like they are in actual racism (and there seems to be wide agreement that the caste system is extremely harmful to members of certain lower castes).

So if India has such widespread institutions of racism (or something very much like it) then it ought to motivate the civilized world to action in abolishing such oppressive institutions. India has already begun since the 1950s policies which aim at ameliorating the negative effects of caste discrimination. But it is still a largely caste society; sentiments towards different caste divisions still run deep in society and even if there are no more negative ostensible effects from the caste system, it may still be inherently oppressive system (or set of systems) and worth abolishing completely. Indeed the UN has already denounced Indian caste system as racism before.  

Twins and pain redux

Awhile ago I had a post about Wittgenstein's conjoined twin and pain argument. I argued against W that if materialism is true then he is wrong. Looks like the empirical evidence says that philosophers share that intuition but the folk do not. It's no surprise that W would favor the folk over the philosophers.

Article in the NYT

I thought I'd give people a heads up on a rare quality article in the New York Times (Wanted: Worldly Philosophers). It is written by two economists talking about the parochial vision of modern economists and advocates a "worldly" philosophical approach to economics much like the early economists who were also moral philosophers such as Smith, Mill, Marx, and Keynes. The article forgot to mention modern philosophers and economists that take a more comparative/holistic approach to economics and asks foundational economic problems associated with justice such as Rawles and Sen. It's nice to see two economists admit the limitations of their current field and give credit where it's due to philosophy.

Is life worth living?

This is a provocative article arguing that it is not (at least for humans). I touched on similar topics (here, here, here and here) arguing that the premise David Benatar uses that the accounting of happiness and pleasure versus pain and suffering are the only things to consider in evaluating life is wrong. Benatar's conclusion is that we should stop producing successive generations and effectively end our species's time here on the planet. His argument is surprisingly Schopenhauerian (and even more pessimistic for at least Schopenhauer had a soteriological component to his philosophy!)

But even if we concede for argument sake with Benatar that that accounting is the only criteria for judging the value of life, I still have reservations about his specific supporting arguments in the article. He uses much empirical data from psychology and personal reflection to support his claim that there is bound to be far more bad than good in just about every human life. Consider this extended passage:

Consider pleasures and pains. Most lives contain both, to varying degrees, but there is an unfortunate asymmetry between these that seems to apply to even the best of lives. The upshot of this is that there is much more pain than pleasure. For example, while the most intense pleasures, such as sexual or gustatory ones, are short-lived, the worst pains have the capacity to be much more enduring. Indeed, pleasures in general tend to be shorter-lived than pains. Chronic pain is common, whereas there is no such thing as chronic pleasure.

This is a one dimensional account of pleasures and pains, only looking at duration and not intensity. It is not clear that when intensity is taken into account, the shorter periods of pleasure will make up for the longer but less intense periods of desire/pain. Also, Benatar ignores the fact that people tend to relive (and relish) their sexual conquests and great meals. I've known people, several gourmands, who will go on and on in the most vivid detail about their best meals, reliving them in their minds and displaying with, no doubt to my mind, the highest satisfaction of those memories. The memories of a good meal or a good romp with a fine woman/man last for a life time for many people.

Now consider this passage from Benatar:

Moreover, the worst pains seem to be worse than the best pleasures are good. Anybody who doubts this should consider what choice they would make if they were offered the option of securing an hour of the most sublime pleasures possible in exchange for suffering an hour of the worst pain possible.

This seems positively false. Some drug addicts will endure long periods of intense misery (some have even sold their own children for example) for brief periods of intense pleasure. Also athletes also must endure a long period of pain, exhaustion and let-downs lasting for many years for the small opportunity to experience a relatively brief period of intense pleasure. I'd wager that the calculus of pleasure versus pain is made worthwhile because of the intensity of the pleasure of succeeding in athletic events at the highest level.

Now consider this passage:

Consider how an injury can be incurred in a split second and the effects felt for life. While it is true that we can also avoid an injury in an instant, we do not gain benefits that are comparable in their magnitude and longevity in a mere moment.

I think this passage ignores the psychological literature showing that even the worst injuries, the kinds that we normally think devastating for all those afflicted in regards to their quality of life such as paralysis and blindness are not as devastating as one may think. People who suffered those harms almost always recover their previous level of life satisfaction and happiness after 2-3 months. People are also remarkably resilient in the loss of their children or spouse or other loved ones recovering previous levels of happiness in only 2-3 months and this is common in all cultures. Here's a good paper detailing the research so far on this topic.

Next, Benatar says:

Second, even when desires are fulfilled, this usually occurs only after the exercise of effort. This means that there is a period of time in which the desire is not yet fulfilled. Finally, when desires are eventually fulfilled, the satisfaction is typically only transitory. Satisfied desires give way to new desires. (For example, one is hungry, eats to satiety, but then becomes hungry again.) Thus a relatively small proportion of life is spent satisfied.

I think the argument here ignores the fact that often, the effort and striving in obtaining a goal or object of desire is pleasurable. The details are complicated but it has been known that the act of willing and the active pursuit of a goal that is considered desrable produces the same neurochemicals as when the goal is achieved. These neurochemicals are similar to cocaine (especially dopamine). Consider a artist at work. The act of working towards the production of a piece of art itself produces pleasure independently of the end result. A child's play also produces pleasure in a similar neurochemical pathway. There is no end result here, just the act itself. Often when we desire and actively pursue a goal, the journey is more meaningful and produces far more pleasure than the end result of obtaining the goal. See this book which covers the dopamine mechanism of desire and desire satisfaction.

I also think that Benatar misses all the ambient pleasures of life most notably expressed by the insights of Nietzsche and Zen monks. When Nietzsche says that even the act of willing bodily muscle movements in doing many humdrum actions produces trace amounts of pleasure, he notices something subtle and truthful. There is a small amount of pleasure for example, even in dish washing and floor sweeping or talking before the experience of the pleasure of a job well done or the end satisfaction of a clean house as many house wives and even Zen Monks have noticed and attested to. These pleasures in performing bodily actions in some humdrum action and of speech add up and may cancel or even surpass the persistent ambient (but also mild) dissatisfaction in not getting most of the things one wants Benatar uses to argue his case.

Empirical psychological literature today also suggests that there are some events that give many people a consistent source of pleasure such as a happy marriage, a good education and good friends. It's the gifts that keeps on giving.

I think in the end, Benatar makes interesting points throughout despite my disagreement to the points he raised above. I only want to show that there are considerations that could be made to show that Benatar's accounting is off and that an accurate accounting may be far closer to break even or even on the positive side for many.

There ain't nothin' about Mary

The knowledge argument purports to show that physicalism is false. The arguments exploits our intuition that Mary learns something new when she sees red for the first time for its rhetorical force. But if we can show that that intuition may not shared for a group with different native linguistic-conceptual color scheme the argument may lose much of its persuasiveness. The linguistic color scheme one employs is a historical contingency. It may have been that one was born into a society that employs a different scheme. If one's intuitions on philosophical issues turn out to be different based on that contingency, that would cast some doubt as to the substantiveness of findings based on that intuition. The argument goes something like this:

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’.… What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had allthe physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false. (From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article “The Knowledge Argument)

Before I turn to my basic argument, I need to give a little primer on linguistic relativism. It has been known to linguists that many language groups have different color terms than ours. For example, native English and modern Chinese speakers both have the same number of basic color terms and both languages partition the color spectrum in essentially the same way but other languages do not partition the color spectrum the same way.

Similarly, languages are selective when deciding which hues are split into different colors on the basis of how light or dark they are. English splits some hues into several distinct colors according to lightness: such as red and pink or orange and brown. To English speakers, these pairs of colors, which are objectively no more different from one another than light green and dark green, are conceived of as belonging to different categories.[1] A Russian will make the same red-pink and orange-brown distinctions, but will also make a further distinction between sinii and goluboi, which English speakers would simply call dark and light blue. To Russian speakers, sinii and goluboi are as separate as red and pink or orange and brown. (wiki article on color terms. See also wiki article “linguistic relativity and the color naming debate” and “linguistic relativity”)

Some languages such as certain Trans-New Guinea languages only have two basic color terms (dark and light!) and all colors are considered a shade of those two basic colors. Likewise, some languages have more than we do and native speakers tend to speak of, and presumably think of, more basic colors concepts. Keep in mind that it has been shown by anthropologists and cognitive psychologists that people all over the world can see and make color distinctions the same way we do (unless they are colorblind of course). It's the way that they partition and group the colors on the spectrum that is culturally/linguistically distinctive. It should be noted that "color relativism," that is, this notion that color term differences reflect differences in cognitive differences in color concept classification and that this classification is in turn a function of cultural/linguistic norms is still a controversial thesis among linguists, anthropologists and cognitive scientists. But if the relativists are correct, even partially, my argument follows.

My skeptical question as relating to the issue of color qualia is this: let's say that there is someone, call him Larry, who has lived an otherwise normal life except that for whatever reason, Larry has never seen a particular shade of yellow before. This shade only spans one nanometer on the color spectrum and may be a rare shade of yellow so it may not be a big deal that Larry has yet seen such a shade. One day he comes across this shade which we will call 'mellow.' Has Larry learned anything new by perceiving mellow for the first time? Has he learned anything new much as Mary presumably learns upon seeing red?

It seems that most folks would say "no.” If mellow is similar enough to a shade of yellow Larry is familiar with, Larry may not even realize he is seeing a shade of yellow he has never encountered before. It would be a wholly uneventful event for Larry. The “no” answer seems plausible for assume that the answer is yes. Larry gains a new color concept corresponding to the qualia associated with mellow. He has a new color experience analogous to the first experience of seeing red in the original knowledge argument. The color segment of the color spectrum may be divided into shades and these shades may be further divided into sub-shades of those sub-shades further divided and so on perhaps ad infinitum (I'm assuming that the color spectrum is continuous but even if it is not but divisible into very fine sub-shades, my reductio argument follows). So ex hypothesi knowing and experiencing a segment of the color spectrum for the first time, even if a tiny segment corresponding to a shade of some familiar basic color as Larry presumably has in my scenario is to know and grasp a new color concept, then we can ask what happens when instead of seeing mellow, Larry sees a shade of yellow that is also a shade of mellow perhaps occupying half the length on the color spectrum as mellow. If he also learns a new color in this scenario (we will call this sub-shade 'sub-mellow') then we may reiterate the question mutatis mutandis of whether he learns a new color concept and so on. There seems to be no clear line to draw when Larry does not learn of a new color concept from ever so fine divisions of shades of yellow. But if there is no line to draw and the color spectrum is continuous then seeing any shade for the first time of arbitrary spectrum span implies learning an (uncountable) infinite number of new color concepts. That I think is absurd.

Each of us normally sighted individuals may see many new shades of familiar colors everyday. And each of those shades may be divided into sub-shades. But it is preposterous to say that we learn an infinite number of new color concepts on a daily basis. So Larry does not learn a new color concept simply by seeing that shade of yellow for the first time. He simply sees yellow, not gain a new “mellow” color concept.

Now imagine that a tribe of people that makes only the two dark-light basic color distinction and their possible reaction to the Mary though experiment. Will they say that Mary learned anything new by seeing red which presumably they think is just a shade of their super-color "dark"? It may be that they would say "no" much as we do to the hypothetical case of mellow I gave above and for the same reasons we give. For them, red is just some shade in the basic super-color dark. Our intuitions about the knowledge argument seem to be sensitive to the linguistic color scheme we actually employ. If accidents of our birth influences the direction our intuitions point regarding some thought experiment, there may be good reason to be suspicious of insights those intuitions are supposed to offer us.

This so far of course, a limited application of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis for color terms to explain qualia. Much as many think that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a skeptical hypothesis regarding realism of natural properties or kinds, my attempt has been to use the hypothesis as a skeptical attack on qualia. Thus, if my skeptical attack is correct we, under another color schemes may not agree that Mary would learn anything new upon seeing red. She may simply dismiss it at most simply as a perhaps odd shade of "dark" or "black" much we under our color conceptual scheme presumably view the person first seeing the uneventful mellow for the first time.

One possible response to my argument thus far is that it only shows that red qualia (or any color qualia not light or dark since all known linguistic communities have at least these two basic color concepts/terms) does not have the epistemic properties ascribed to it by the knowledge argument and thus it is not effective as an argument against physicalism in whole. Though there are no red qualia, there are still white and black qualia for no known linguistic communities lack these basic color concepts and thus all communities presumably concede that there are qualia corresponding to white and black qua basic colors.

The argument I made is meant to show that the quintessential example of color qualia red can be doubted that it has the private epistemic property it is alleged to have by culturally relativising red. If red qualia goes by way of this kind of relativism, what is to stop all color qualia including light or dark qualia going with it? What makes these more special as qualia that red is not? Now the burden is at least shifted. This is the main rhetorical point of my argument.

Lastly I'd like to see an X-PHI experiment comparing survey responses of two linguistic groups: a group composed of native language speakers of a language that does not recognize the color red as a unique primary color but a shade of some supercolor such as "dark." The other group does recognize red as a primary color such as native English speakers. The speakers of the language that doesn't recognize red should be from a group that also has not had much influence from western culture or any cultures that partitions the color spectrum in a different way. Of course that will be hard and in practice no culture is so discrete from the linguistic and cultural influence of others but there still are some cultures that are relatively isolated. Many speakers of the Trans-New Guinea languages are so isolated even today. They would be a good group to sample because as I've mentioned, they only recognize two basic primary colors (dark and light). They would serve as a good comparison group with Native English speakers, e.g. To test the intuitions on the knowledge argument compared to the control group of native English speakers would be a good way, in my view, to see if there is anything substantive and sound about it. Let's say that the non control group doesn't think that Mary learns anything new once she sees the apple for the first time, that would go in some ways in showing that it is conceivable Mary learns nothing new when she sees red for the first time contrary to Jackson's original claim in his argument.

Puzzle of the self-torturer revisted

One other thing I want to mention about the "puzzle" is that it assumes that pain is continuous and not noticeably discrete. However pain may have various threshold "steps" and experience of pain as it gradually increases may jump to the next step once it reaches certain thresholds. This would also need to be taken into account and it may be one objection raised to the possible rejoinder to my original response that the increments instead be in increases of pain levels (as opposed to external electric currents in the example).

Also see here for evidence of what I alluded to earlier in that blog about the psychological factors which come into evaluation of pain.

Dimensions

In 1968 Melzack and Kenneth Casey described pain in terms of its three dimensions: "Sensory-discriminative" (sense of the intensity, location, quality and duration of the pain), "Affective-motivational" (unpleasantness and urge to escape the unpleasantness), and "Cognitive-evaluative" (cognitions such as appraisal, cultural values, distraction and hypnotic suggestion).^[40] They theorized that pain intensity (the sensory discriminative dimension) and unpleasantness (the affective-motivational dimension) are not simply determined by the magnitude of the painful stimulus, but “higher” cognitive activities (the cognitive-evaluative dimension) can influence perceived intensity and unpleasantness. Cognitive activities "may affect both sensory and affective experience or they may modify primarily the affective-motivational dimension. Thus, excitement in games or war appears to block both dimensions of pain, while suggestion and placebos may modulate the affective-motivational dimension and leave the sensory-discriminative dimension relatively undisturbed." (p. 432) The paper ends with a call to action: "Pain can be treated not only by trying to cut down the sensory input by anesthetic block, surgical intervention and the like, but also by influencing the motivational-affective and cognitive factors as well." (p. 435)

The old children's story of the frog in the pot who is slowly being boiled alive reminds me of this self torturer puzzle. The frog may suddenly feel a sharp rise in pain once some threshold (psychological or otherwise) is reached and jump right out instead of being boiled alive. That would seem realistic and explanatory and thus dissolve the puzzle of the self torturer as well.

Indeed there is some evidence from animal experiments that verify the threshold answer.

In 2002 Dr. Victor H. Hutchison, Professor Emeritus of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma, with a research interest in thermal relations of amphibians, said that "The legend is entirely incorrect!". He described how the critical thermal maximum for many frog species has been determined by contemporary research experiments: as the water is heated by about 2 °F, or 1.1 °C, per minute, the frog becomes increasingly active as it tries to escape, and eventually jumps out if the container allows it.^[3][21]

Review of Genetics and Reductionism

By Sahotra Sarkar. Here.

"flourishing metric"

In the previous post I suggested that what I called a "flourishing metric" be used to compare when something is over or under valued in the market outside of the value or price set by supply and demand forces in the market. I realized that one way to do with may be to work off of Martha Nussdaum's "capabilities approach" which is built on original Sen's idea. Both Nussbaum and Sen are influenced by the Aristotelian notion of flourishing.

So I decided to look up Nussbaum's capabilities approach to refresh my memory after having been years since I've read her "Frontiers of Justice." Nussbaum has a open list of ten or so "capabilities" that defines human flourishing. I wikied "capabilities approach" and it turns out that economists are actively trying to obtain such a metric.

Perhaps things like housing can be assessed to their objective quantifiable value based on the contribution they contribute to flourishing or, relatedly, our "capabilities". Any value over and above that value may be construed as over evaluation (such as due to greedy profiteering, etc)

Homo Economicus (Rational Man?) and the 2007 economic collapse

In this Nova special, economists talk about what led up to the global economic melt down. Two major economic schools of thought are at each other. One school which posits as one of its fundamental principles is that Man is essentially rational and that almost all his decisions behave as if they are rationally calculated based on the evidence given him and for the benefit of his self interests. This school of thought is most prominently associated with the Chicago School. The contending school works on 50 years of behavioral economics posits that much of human behavior and decision making is irrational.

At one point in the film, one of the Chicago School guys tried to defend the thesis in regards to the housing bubble. When that bubble burst, many economists thought that it burst because housing was over valued and it became that way when greed got a hold of individual private investors and banking professionals. There was a hysteria of greed and people bought houses or properties not based on rational deliberation of carefully calculating the risks of buying houses measured against the potential profits of the investment but on motives stemming from competition with other investors and greed.

Well, the Chicago guy basically called the collapse a "shift in value." That is, he thought that the collapse was simply a market regularity that reflected a change in interests/desire of buyers and sellers.

That seems preposterous to me. But it also seems that his justification is based on the idea that value of things like property is market relative. They lack a value outside of the supply and demand of particular markets at particular times. This is a kind of relativism. There's no such thing as being over priced or under priced in the market in such a scheme because the market always determines the proper price. Its value simply is its price as determined by such market forces.

For those like me, it seems that there is such a thing as over/under-valuation of things like houses. What determines their worth or value "objectively" outside of market forces? I think it is their relative contribution to human flourishing. This idea of flourishing is originally Aristotelian but developed also by the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen. Houses are valuable for living in but do they have any value beyond that? Some values are not potentially valuable to flourishing. Some things are desired by society and thus have high market value but do not contribute to human flourishing. Take cocaine. Or maybe IPODs. I don't know.

The basic idea behind flourishing is that human beings are embodied beings which have a natural (thus evolutionary) history. Some circumstances are good for our wellbeing and others not so. Which determines what is largely determined by our physical and psychological constitution which is largely (though not completely since some psychological elements are culturally or individually particular) fixed by our basic human nature.

Things like education has value outside of their worth in the market place. We can imagine a society of philistines who do not value education but does value fancy shoes. In their market, good shoes are very valuable but books are nearly worthless. A Chicago guy might say that books are of little value in that market and thus worth only what they are willing to pay for them which in their case means very little. But it seems to me that these philistines are paying too little for their books. That is, they have under-valued their books, both monetarily and in more familiar senses. Their shoes do not contribute much to their wellbeing but their books has tremendous potential to do so. Moreover, they have made an irrational decision to value their shoes more than their books.

I'm not an economist but it seems to me that this is the way to go but the next part will be how we could obtain a quantitative science of valuation according to the notion of flourishing so that accurate measures of value can be assessed on some flourishing metric (a flourishing dollar standard perhaps). Certainly, psychology, medical science, sociology, economics and anthropology has a thing or two to say about what contributes to human wellbeing but there needs to be something more robust and concrete so that this will be applicable in economics. I don't know how to develop this metric but it's worth thinking about.

XPhi

Experimental philosophy (XPhi) has received some press in the last few years. I am skeptical of its purported powers to offer insight on philosophical questions so far. Maybe in the future there will be novel and interesting ways that do offer insight into the philosophical questions but I don't see the way it is being used now doing that.

XPhi uses surveys to ask a "representative sample" ("the Folk") of the population what their philosophical intuitions are in the hypothetical thought experiments used by philosophers to generate intuitions used in philosophical debates. If the Folk's intuitions tend to lean one way, it is interpreted by XPhi proponents as some (but not conclusive) evidence that that way is the right way. In other words, XPhi philosophers are sometimes suspicious of their own intuitions and will give certain weight to the intuitions of the Folk. And there is evidence from XPhi that the intuitions of philosophers tend to run differently than the intuitions of the Folk on many issues.

An example of one instance where XPhi experiments has used to give credence for one perspective over another in contemporary debate is the debate over what are lies. Don Fallis has used experiments showing that the Folk consider bald-faced lies to be real lies. This is counter to many philosopher's claims that bald-faced lies are not lies because they don't involve an element of deception as is required with genuine lying. Experiments show that the Folk considers bald-faced lies to be lies contrary to the classical definition of lies accepted by most philosophers. Fallis has adduced this as evidence that the classical definition must thus be false. My reasons that XPhi as it currently is used is not that interesting and relevant to philosophical questions are the following:

1. Many of the samples used in XPhi experiments are not representative samples (they are the undergrad students of XPhi philosophers who are taking phil 101 type classes).

2. Much like individuals often get similar but different concepts confused, it's not that much of a stretch that sometimes, a majority of the population will similarly conflate two different but (superficially) similar concepts.

3. There may be very good reasons why philosophers have the intuitions they do. They may do so because they realize a subtle difference that the Folk do not that must be upheld in any definition. There are good reasons for including a deception criteria in lying for example as I have pointed out before and also see here.

4. It's been known for a long time by cultural psychologists and anthropologists that surveys, intra and especially inter cultural ones, can vary widely in the responses given simply by changing subtle wordings in the questions asked or the context in which they are given. The answers sometimes do not reflect true differences in cognitive thought processes and profiles but rather in "surface" linguistic differences in how words and scenarios are interpreted.

Perhaps one day XPhi will be used in a way that is insightful but the experiments so far do not seem convincing to me in settling any philosophical issues.