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1. I ask out of real ignorance: is it possible that it is an impenetrable mystery? Of course, how would we know?

   — Michael Simpson · Apr 24, 01:31 AM · #

2. Of course it’s possible. It’s even possible that it’s not impenetrable per se, but that humans aren’t smart enough to penetrate it. Who knows? I suspect reality itself is an impenetrable mystery in the narrow sense that our investigations of it have no bottom – it’s turtles all the way down. Maybe consciousness is like that? But even if we never hit bottom, we’ve learned an awful lot about reality by digging. We may learn an awful lot about consciousness the same, even if we never unravel the central mystery.

   — Noah Millman · Apr 24, 02:01 AM · #

3. Noah:

   Let me take try to take this one piece at a time.

   I don’t think Derb would disagree with me that the analogy to bees is a poor one,

   I wasn’t trying to draw an analogy with bees, but a comparison. (This sounds pedantic and obnoxious, but I’m just trying to be clear.)

   or that there is something mysterious about human consciousness. (He’s an avowed mysterian after all.)

   Check.

   The bee lacks moral agency because we don’t believe a bee has sufficient consciousness to have a self, much less a self-as-moral-agent.

   Check.

   A number of more advanced mammals may indeed have some degree of moral agency; it’s hard to know for sure.

   Check, although because of “may” and “hard to know”, i.e., consciousness is mysterious. If you believe that consciousness is created by brain complexity, then the only reason it’s unclear is the “shades of gray” problem. On the other hand, if you’re even less sure about what creates consciousness, then uncertainty is yet deeper. I’m in the second camp.

   In any event, animals like dogs respond to discipline in a way that suggests a conscious awareness of wrongdoing.

   Not so sure about this one. Responding to pain / pleasure and matching physical movements to positive / negative feedback may be purely instrumental.

   So: If you don’t disagree that we feel we have moral agency, and you don’t disagree that we will continue to feel we have moral agency even if science is casting doubt on the “folk narrative” of human decisionmaking, then what’s the problem in talking as if we have moral agency?

   If I feel like the earth is flat, and I’m going to continue to feel like the earth is flat, even if this new-fangled science says it’s not, then what’s the harm in talking as if it is? Well, the plane I fly on will crash and so on. But suppose you lived in a village with 11th century technology, you knew you wouldn’t travel more than a few miles by walking in your life and so on. If you were convinced through stellar observations and geometric logic that the earth was roughly spherical, would you “un-think” that?

   We talk about matter being solid even though it’s mostly empty space. Mental states are real enough to be studied; that’s real enough for me.

   Maybe (and I don’t mean this sarcastically) I’m too linear, but it seems to me that either: (1) my actions are predictable with perfect knowledge of physical laws plus perfect knowledge of initial conditions, (2) they are not because of some structural uncertainty built into physical laws that produces uncertainty, or (3) my behavior is unpredictable. I think that only case 3 conforms to what I would call moral agency. I recognize that it may be that case 3 arises from some fantastically complex interactions between components each of which is governed by case 2-like quantum effects.

   Crude behaviorism is, at this point, a scientific dead letter.

   Check.

   We still can’t build a machine that passes the Turing Test, and there are very good arguments out there that we can’t (that, in other words, the human brain is not a Von Neumann machine), arguments that I don’t believe Derb rejects.

   It’s unclear to me that just because the brain is not a VN machine that therefore we can’t build a VN that simulates it with sufficient accuracy to pass the Turing Test, but I take your point.

   There is kind of deep mystery at the heart of human consciousness – and we all agree that this mystery is a fit subject for scientific investigation.

   Check.

   So what is the argument here?

   Here’s how I would put it. If supernatural forces are not the source of natural law (that is, the provision of meaning for terms like “right”, “wrong”, “justice” and so on) and “normal” (i.e., not as mysterious as consciousness) physical processes like combustion do not provide this, then it seems to me that either these terms have no salience, or else the “non-normal” physical processes provide it. If somebody rejects supernatural sources of meaning for them, yet still insists that they are not meaningless, then I am trying to understand what it is about the “non-normal” physical processes (e.g., consciousness) that provides this meaning.

   — Jim Manzi · Apr 24, 02:31 AM · #

4. I’m really enjoying this conversation, guys.

   Two really quick thoughts:

   The non-normal physical processes (the quantum stuff) “do” provide meaning, kind of, but I can’t think of a way to connect this to “moral truths”. Quantum “truths” are probabilities, as you know, and these probabilities bias the straight line and simplest path, so much so that higher, firmer envelopes of energy (matter) can exist as “entities” in space-time. It’s still a mystery how this happens, how what seems to us to be uncaused, entirely random symmetry-breaks (decoherences, wave-function collapses, whatever) happen with enough unexplained regularity to give us the higher orders of matter. This irreducible element of ‘chance’ is what Einstein complained of, and what caused Stephen Hawking to respond, “God not only plays dice, but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.”

   Given these ‘strangenesses’ at the bottom, it’s tempting to attribute the highest strangenesses of consciousness to the space-time blurring effects of at the quantum level. For all I know this is a correct reading of the situation: certain activities of the brain are right on that nano-line that separates classical physics from quantum. And for all I know this “return” to the quantum could be responsible for reification and self-consciousness by some strange quantum-mirroring effect. That’s entirely plausible…for all I know.

   What I don’t get is the idea that these quantum-connections could be a non-normal way to access some undefined substance called panconsciousness or moral truth. That’s just too pat, too convenient for me: the history of these things is eviction, followed by sleeping on the couch at the house of the nearest as-yet-unresolved Mystery. I imagine if quantum reality were de-mystified tomorrow by a deeper theory, it would take no time for “consciousness” and moral truths to find a new place to sleep in the dark.

   To be clear, I’m reflexively anti-mysterian. But I just don’t see it.

   — JA · Apr 24, 04:22 PM · #

5. I’ve wondered whether or not our difficulty in discerning the origins of consciousness aren’t something of a defense mechanism: Perhaps doing so requires an introspective perception so acute that it would become paralytic, like when a computer is doing so many operations it exceeds its available RAM.

   — James F. Elliott · Apr 24, 07:42 PM · #

6. JA:

   Is it fair to interpret your last two paragraphs as meaning (to put it crudely): “Yeah, yeah, we don’t understand QM the way we do something like Newtonian mechanics, but people are always imputing all kinds of mystery to things on scientific frontier, and eventually it all gets reduced to normal science so that the “mystery” keeps getting pushed further down. People used to think fire was mysterious and had all kinds of sppoky properties, too.”

   If so (and I think this is a non-crazy point of view), then unless you posit a supernatural basis for moral law, haven’t we gotten to the point where you accept that humans are not capable of either moral or immoral actions?

   — Jim Manzi · Apr 24, 08:48 PM · #

7. Jim:

   re: flat earth: well, the earth is flat, from the perspective of somebody walking. That won’t do for flying a plane, of course. But the universe is flat from the perspective of somebody flying a plane. And that won’t do for somebody traveling between the stars. Similarly: from the perspective of a human being dealing with himself or with other human beings, we have agency. From the perspective of understanding the behavior of neurons, there’s no evident agency. And from the perspective of an economist or a sociologist examining billions of human beings and their behavior, also less clear – if social science is possible, then groups of humans should be law-bound in their collective behavior (in a statistical sense, of course, like hot liquids). (Of course, social science may be impossible.)

   re: the three options regarding predictability of human action (predictable; predictable in theory but not in practice because of complexity and/or magnification of quantum uncertainties; unpredictable because supernaturally caused): I think option three requires a lot clearer elaboration before anyone could call it a hypothesis. Dualism – spiritual or material – has fundamental conceptual problems that have been well worked-over. In any event, this still amounts to a “God of the gaps” answer: we don’t know where agency comes from, so we posit that it comes from outside the universe. My suspicion is that any scientific answer in category 3 really is a special case of category 2.

   re: semiotics: well, I’m something of a pragmatist about these matters. The language of moral agency works for us humans. Why are we obliged to abandon it if consciousness is an emergent natural phenomenon? Saying that moral language is meaningless if agency isn’t supernatural in origin seems to me of a piece with saying that if mental states can be reduced to physical causes, then they don’t “really” exist. Why not? A duck can be reduced to hyrogen, oxygen, carbon, and a variety of other elements. But it still walks like a duck and quacks like a duck. Why isn’t it a duck?

   — Noah Millman · Apr 24, 09:19 PM · #

8. Jim: “…unless you posit a supernatural basis for moral law, haven’t we gotten to the point where you accept that humans are not capable of either moral or immoral actions?”

   I think one of the things that holds us back from understanding moral judgments is the lack of adequate analogies. Upon reading your question my first thought was to think of one (an analogy) to show why the formulation “humans are not capable of moral action” may confuse more than it clarifies. What I came up with sucks, but here it goes:

   Ask yourself, are humans capable of making pizzas? After all, there is no physical law or axiomatic system from which we can derive the necessity of pizza. Nothing we can measure called “pizzaness” is embedded in the fabric of the universe. “Pizza” written in the language of the universe (information) would look nothing like the “pizza” we’re used to. An alien species who saw the world at the molecular level would describe “pizza” according to its three-dimensional value (micrometers), its diverse yet modular organic compounds, its variable viscosity, and its entropy (temp.). If this alien knew rudimentary physics it could describe these values back to us, and we would be hard-pressed to see a recognizable signal in the data. And yet, were we to zoom out and look at it with our human eyes, we would say, “Oh…it’s pizza.”

   So are humans capable of making pizza? Yes, of course they are. But is there something called “pizzaness” that exists outside the human mind, so that if humans were wiped out tomorrow there would remain a Universal Law of Pizza tied into the very fabric of space-time? No, I can’t see that there is.

   Another question that suggests itself is whether or not we can make the perfect pizza system that’s right every time, that every single time the formalized pizza rules are passed through a human brain and used to make a pizza, the pizza that comes out on the other end is, in fact, a member of the set of perfect pizzas.

   I think the clear answer is no, because to avoid human error and neuter the effects of environmental contingencies like altitude, air pressure, and stove imperfections, you’d have to have a perfect human cooking on a perfect stove at a perfect altitude at the perfect time. Error is inescapable.

   But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to pursue the perfect pizza, and it doesn’t mean this pursuit can’t be facilitated by reason. After all, we know, roughly, the characteristics that would make a perfect pizza — we know why pizza exists, we know what it is for — and we can characterize these characteristics under one general rubric called “perfect pizza for humans”.

   All of this is a very long, inapt way of saying that morality exists for human beings, and therefore human beings are capable of moral acts. It’s also an even worse way to imply that, should we discover the answer to “why the moral instinct exists” — which I’m pretty certain is, at the most general level, “to keep us together to keep us alive” — this would be exactly the same as discovering “why pizzas exist” and we could then use that knowledge to pursue an asymptotically perfect moral system (though like the recipe for a perfect pizza it will probably be terribly complex and prone to error).

   — JA · Apr 24, 10:23 PM · #

9. One more thing (sorry!).

   I wrote, “…should we discover the answer to “why the moral instinct exists” — which I’m pretty certain is, at the most general level, “to keep us together to keep us alive” — this would be exactly the same as discovering “why pizzas exist” and we could then use that knowledge to pursue an asymptotically perfect moral system (though like the recipe for a perfect pizza it will probably be terribly complex and prone to error).”

   I forgot to add that, in addition to a perfect-ish morality being terribly complex and prone to error, we must never forget who will be eating it. Perfect pizza, for humans. Perfect morality…for humans (this is another way of say that we must import to our moral system the knowledge we have about human psychology, just as the perfect pizza maker might want to import knowledge about human taste).

   — JA · Apr 24, 10:33 PM · #

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