Free Will: There Are No Easy Answers

 

by Stuart Kauffman

Free will!

Saint Augustine wrote about it linking our consciousness to a direct connection to the mind of God, and discussion about whether God left us, as evidenced by Adam and Eve and the apple, with free will. Then in the Abrahamic tradition, the question of free will is intimately tied up with the omnipotence of God and the conditions of forbearance in God's use of his Will in granting us humans our own free will.
The debate changed radically in the West with Rene' Descartes and Newton. Descartes famously proposed a dualism: Res Extensa and Res Cogitans. Res Extensa is a philosophical version of his "mechanistic" philosophy in which the bodies of humans, like all animals and plants and other things in the universe are "machines". But for humans, the mind is Res Cogitans, thinkiing "stuff".
For Descartes, as I have noted in previous blogs, this raised two major questions: 1) How could mind ACT on matter? 2) How could mind have a free will, which seems to be both an uncaused cause, yet a "choice" we make, perhaps via Res Cogitans.
  Matters assumed their more or less modern form with stunning Newton, the differential and integral calculus, initial and boundary conditions and thus deterministic differential equations, ordinary and partial. Given the initial conditions and boundary conditions, the future (and past) behavior of the system is entirely determined. One integrates the differential equations. I keep being amazed at the degree to which we are captives of Newton's conceptual framework.
Given that framework, the first question for Descartes seems unaswerable: 1) How can mind act on matter? If we assume, as virtually all scientists do, that the mind and brain are "identical", then the brain's dynamics is some kind of deterministic system of differential equations, thereby a Cartesian machine. (I note again that recourse to "stochastic" differential equations does not remove the underlying determinism, but only makes US ignorant of the details of the perhaps chaotic or noisy behavior, which remains deterministic in detail.) Given this determinism, the brain is fully sufficient to determine the next state of the brain. Then, critically, THERE IS NOTHING FOR MIND TO DO! Worse, there is no obvious way for mind stuff to ACT on the matter of the brain.
In past blogs, in the Czech version of my book Investigations, and in my Reinventing the Sacred, I have explored, and continue to explore, the hypothesis that the mind-brain system is a quantum cohering, decohering to classicity and recohering again to quantum behavior system in a Poised Realm interposed between fully quantum and classical for all practical purposes behaviors, FAPP. Then on this view, mind does NOT act causally on brain,but decoheres ACAUSALLY to classicity FAPP. I truly believe this is a cogent answer after 350 years to the problem Descartes set us: How can mind act on matter.
To act repeatedly on matter, I must suppose that the mind-brain system can decohere to classicity and recohere to quantum behavior repeatedly. Evidence for this reversibility in the Poised Realm is slowly mounting. We must pay it close heed, for the Poised Realm seems to be a new and profound aspect of reality, neither quantum, nor classical - something new whose physics remains largely to be explored. It is not even clear that "laws" will describe all the behaviors of the Poised Realm at this point in time.
But that brings us to the debate of the past half century about free will. If I am a determinist mind-brain system, I clearly have no free will. The Compatabilists argue that this is fine: we can train the young not to kill little old ladies and behave morally. While this view has proponents, I find it inadequate.
But we confront the horns of a dilemma when we include both classical deterministic physics and "classical" quantum mechanics of closed systems where the unitary evolution of the Schrodinger equation holds, and von Neumann's axiomatization of quantum mechanics is assumed.
If we are deterministic, no free will.
If we are "standard" quantum mechanical as above, then the Schrodinger wave propagates unitarily, meaning that the square of the amplitude of all of the propagating amplitudes, interpretable as probabilities, sum to 1.0. Then via von Neuman, in a measurement event, each amplitude has a probability of being "measured" and becoming suddenly classical, proportional to the square of its amplitude and via a magical von Neumann R process, all the probability weight is put on a SINGLE OUTCOME, which is now the measured and classical outcome. But on the Copenhagen interpretation, which I favor over the multiple worlds or Bohm interpretations, it is entirely acausal and ontological "chance" which of these amplitudes is measured and becomes "classical".
This random process per unit time is Poisson, so gives rise, when integrated, to an exponential fall off, the familiar half life of radioactive decay.
So now, in an attempt to find a free will, suppose that we imagine a standard quantum event, it might as well be a quantum random radioactive decay, bad for my brain but fine for my point. Then I walk down the street, presto the decay occurs, and I kill the old lady.
Am I responsible for this "act of free will"? No, it was quantum random. I have no responsibility.
So we are stuck: If classical, no responsible free will. If quantum no responsible free will.
These are the horns of the modern dilemma about a responsible free will.
Can the Poised Realm, where quantum becomes classical, help escape the horns of this dilemma? Yes, at least partially:
Help comes in the predicted and confirmed processes called the Quantum AntiZeno Effect. Here, as seen in supercooled sodium ions, an emergence of classical behavior happens FASTER than a Poisson process and its familiar exponential half life decay! The experimental results, first of their kind, are in, and fit theory, called a Floquet process. Then the behavior is not Poisson, as in "classical" quantum behavior for a closed quantum system. In an OPEN quantum system and it's environment, the Schrodinger equation does not propagate unitarily, for phase information is lost from the system to its environment. One result is that the behavior of the system is no longer standard quantum mechanics "random" or Markovian. The AntiZeno Effect is clearly non-Markovian.
This means that the Poised Realm escapes the horns of the dilemma. If our mind-brain system is quantum-Poised Realm-classical reversibly, its behavior is neither deterministic nor quantum random. The behavior is something else.
So at a minimum the Poised Realm allows us a very first step to escape the modern horns of the dilemma about a responsible free will.
How much might the Poised Realm help? This is almost entirely unknown, for the behaviors of a system of quantum degrees of freedom coupled to one another, and to the classical system that "embodies" them, and receiving quantum and classical input "information" and "acting on its world via quantum, poised realm and classical behavior,t is almost entirely unknown. Among the issues are these: When a quantum degree of freedom decoheres to classicity FAPP, and remains there for a long time, that would seem to ALTER THE HAMILTONIAN OF THE CLASSICAL SYSTEM ITSELF. Rocks that are 4 billion years old are classical very much FAPP and would be parts of the Hamiltonian any physicist would write down.
But then, the alteration in the Hamiltonian of the classical system alters its own dynamics which must ALSO OFTEN ALTER THE BOUNDARY CONDITION HAMILTONIAN OF THE REMAINING QUANTUM SYSTEM.
More, if classical degrees of freedom can recohere to quantum as begins to seem likely, then when they do, that again MODIFIES THE CLASSICAL HAMILTONIAN, AND THEREBY BOTH THE QUANTUM HAMILTONIAN AND THE VERY SET OF QUANTUM DEGREES OF FREEDOM IN THE SYSTEM.
A first point, a crucial point, becomes this: The above embodied quantum-poised realm-classical system, with quantum and classical inputs and outputs is clearly processing information and "acting on its world". But the above system is absolutely NOT algorithmic. It is not a Turing machine, the idealization of a classical Cartesian machine whose every behavior is absolutely definite. Then given the above example, even in rude form, we need never again be convinced that the human mind MUST BE ALGORITHMIC.
The universe is richer and contains what I want to call Trans-Turing quantum-Poised Realm-classical information processing and acting systems that are anything but algorithmic.
Of course quantum computers are algorithmic, but they remain fully quantum coherent, while these embodied quantum-poised realm-classical systems do not remain coherent and the Schrodinger equation does NOT propagate unitarily in them, nor does emergence of classicity via at least decoherence constitute the R process of von Neumann. We confront something deeply new.
Now comes a deeper problem. Suppose that we construct such a system or better that our mind-brain system is such a Trans-Turing system. Can it have "responsible free will"?
Here is why the problem is hard. Consider an OUTSIDE third person description by me of the behavior of such a system, eg. a device or your mind-brain system operating in the quantum-poised realm-classical worlds where the Possibles of the quantum BECOME IN THE POISED REALM the Actuals of the classical world. I am not allowed to appeal to something outside of this system at its "free will". But then, ALL I have is my third person description of the behaviors of this Trans-Turing system. What constitutes "deciding"? I want to say that a transition from a quantum to a classical behavior of a degree of freedom, from the Possible of Res Potensia via the Poised Realm, to an Actual Classical event, constitutes DECIDING. But what third person grounds do I have to say that such a transition is "a decision"?
I do find this idea attractive. But I am still trapped. Let this transition from quantum to classical via the poised realm be the becoming of a decision. Fine, but is all this wonderful quantum-poised realm-classical new behavior a "responsible free will"?
Here are at least some of the issues: 1) Agency. In physics there are only happenings, no doings. Agents "do things". But given the third person description of the Trans Turing system, there are still only happenings. Where can we get agency and doings?
In Investigations I posited doings in molecular autonomous agents, fully classical systems that reproduced and did work cycles. I still like that, but I "posited" doings, eg as a Wittgensteinian "language game".
Can we do better?
I do NOT know. It seems we need first person experience and hence qualia - my awareness of the redness of red, or my deciding, to get agency without just positing it. How do we get there? I am coming to the slow conclusion that there is no pathway from third person descriptions to agency, hence experience and qualia.
I have blogged about consciousness being participation in "the Possible", Res Potentia. But that too does not give qualia.
Perhaps we could show that consciousness IS participation in "the Possible", for example by showing that 500 Duke undergraduate students concentrating on a two slit experiment could reduce interference patterns, but not if asleep. You see, constructive and destructive interference imply that the "real possibilities" of QM interact non-causally and change the classical outcome, as in the interference pattern. So perhaps we can show that consciousness does have an acausal consequence for quantum interference by reducing it in the two slit experiment. This would support Bohr's belief that mind is somehow "constitutive of the world".
In my blog "To Be Is To Be Perceived" , I made use of a feature of the Shor theorem for correcting decohering degrees of freedom in a quantum computation, that implies that any such correction merely shifts the decoherence from the decohering quantum system to the ENVIRONMENT. To my amazement, this implication of Shor's theorem could yield a conscious observer, the quantum-poised realm-classical observing system, consciously "aware" of the two slit experiment, exporting decoherence from within that observer to the environment, hence reduce two slit interference. Shor, plus the hypothesis that consciousness participates in Res Potentia, the Possible, may yield Bohr's consciousness "constitutive of the world".
But even that amazing result would not suffice to explain qualia.
We all have experiences. Perhaps we just have to accept this as a feature of the entire universe, as A.N. Whitehead does, or perhaps limited to Res Extensa and Res Potentia interacting via the Poised Realm in mind-brain Trans-Turing systems. I know no adequate answer, along with the rest of us.

Is Time In A Hurry?

 

by Marcelo Gleiser

Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images

 

Time keeps on flipping into the future. 

Well, 2009 is almost over. To me at least, and I bet to most of you, it went way too fast. On average, it was a year like any other, with some new things to celebrate and others to lament. (I'll abstain from listing them. Each person has her own list.) But it's hard to shake off the feeling that everything happened faster, that time seems to be in a hurry to get somewhere. Sometimes, people ask me if it's possible, from a physics perspective, for time to be passing faster. It can't.
According to the theory of relativity, time can slow down but not speed up. There are a few ways to do this. For example, you may move faster than other people. If you get to speeds close to the speed of light, time will slow down for you relative to the others. Hard to do, as the speed of light is a whopping 186,400 miles per second, in round numbers. Or, you may go live on the surface of the Sun. Time there would tick slower than here as well. But that's really not what people have in mind when they wonder about time. The question is about our psychological perception of time. And I am sure many of you would agree that sometimes it does feel like time is on a roller coaster.
Time is a measure of change. If nothing happens, time is unnecessary. So, at a personal level, we perceive the passage of time in the changes that happen around and within us. What's interesting is that—as anyone who has tried to meditate knows—even if you shut off all your senses, time keeps ticking away. As our thoughts unfold, our brains give us time. To "quiet the chatter" is the big challenge for going deeper into a meditative state, to be in the now.
The passage of time is about the ordering of events, things that happen one after another. Numbers, some say, are devices that were created to help us order time. Maybe, although counting chicks is also very useful if you are a hen. However, if we are to order events, we must remember them. Ergo, the perception of time is deeply related to memory. If our memories were to be erased, we would revert to the wonder of babyhood, where time extends forever. The more we have to learn, the more memories we make, the slower time passes. Routine, sameness, makes time speed up. Since routine is not usually equated with fun, this seems to go contrary to the "time flies when you're having fun" dictum. What's going on here?
  The answer may be in the level of mindful engagement, that is, in how tuned-in your brain is to what you are doing. Newness, as in fun newness, works as a flood of information and places the focus on the immediate. There is no ordering between events yet and not sense of the passage of time. I have felt this disengagement when lost in a calculation for hours or trying out a new trout stream with my fly rod. This is the opposite of routine, where new memories are not being made and the now is all there is. But maybe someone will prove me wrong.
In physics, things are simpler. Time is a fundamental quantity, something that cannot be defined in terms of anything else. There are some issues with this, that we will address some other time. (Sorry...) The second is the universal unit, and it's defined as 9,192,631,770 oscillations between two levels of the cesium-133 atom. Very different from the tick-tack of old mechanical clocks, which are not very reliable.
Einstein had a colloquial definition of the relativity of time: by the side of a pretty girl an hour feels like a second; if you burn your hand on the stove, a second feels like an hour. His special theory of relativity showed that the simultaneity of two events depends on how they are observed: what may be simultaneous for one observer will not be for another moving with respect to the first. Be that as it may, even in physics the ordering of time is essential: that's causality, causes preceding effects so that the present vanishes into the past and the future becomes the present.
At the cosmic level, there is a well-defined direction of time: the expansion of the universe, which has been going on for 13.7 billion years, pointing resolutely forward. Link it to our own passage through life, and we have a well-defined asymmetry of time, what's sometimes called time's arrow . There is not much we can do to escape this at the physical level. But at the psychological level, to slow down time we have to engage our minds, create more memories, absorb knowledge. Perhaps I will leave my guitar aside for a while and start playing the piano.

A Tear At The Edge of Creation: Science And Reasoned Heresy

by Adam Frank

It was a dream first dreamt in our collective childhood. It was a dream of unity. It was a dream that behind the messy diversity of appearances lay a deeper perfection in which the One would embrace the All.

The Hellenistic Greeks, those great dreamers, were the first to imagine this vision of the world in the colors of mathematics. Pythagoras told us all was number. Plato asked his fellow philosophers to save night sky's appearances by finding the ideal geometric forms that lay behind them.
History changed and the dream changed with it. Centuries later, European scholars living in a Christian universe would find God to be the Whole at the center of the Many. Their philosophical, astronomical and mathematical investigations were heroic attempts to read just a little of the Creators perfect thoughts in the invisible structure of His perfect creation. The wheel of history continued to turn but somehow the dream remained: the Age of Reason; the Enlightenment and onward. Now with mile-long particle accelerators and telescopes perched at the air's edge, we physicists build models of pure math always searching for the single force, the unifying field, the One behind the All.
Through it all no one asks — why?
It's hard to question the foundations of your cherished endeavor. It's hard to even see the biases that guide, bind and hide the metaphysics supporting your basic beliefs. This can be just as true for scientists as for anyone else. If questioning those assumptions is going to take you someplace meaningful you have to have the stomach and the insight for it. Marcelo Gleiser, my fellow blogger here at 13.7, has both. Marcelo's new book A Tear at the Edge of Creation is coming out this week and at the risk of being overly enthusiastic about someone whose work I am clearly enthusiastic about, I wanted to lay out the reasons for my substantial enthusiasm.
  A Tear at the Edge of Creation carries the subtitle A Radical New Vision for Life in an Imperfect Universe. The adjective "radical" is well deserved because what Marcelo is arguing for is a profound reassessment of the purpose of science. From classrooms to magazine articles to Nova specials we learn that truth is beauty and beauty in science is to be found in higher and higher levels of mathematical unity. This unity, we are told, will be embodied by ever more abstract symmetries and the equations describing them (which ultimately will neatly fit on a T-shirt).
Marcelo like many of us began his career as a true believer. He beautifully recounts his own journey, his own heart felt desire to read the "mind of God" through physics (though like many of us he is an atheist). But after years of working at the frontier of these ideas Marcelo found his faith shaken. As he writes,

During the past 50 years discoveries in experimental physics have shown time and time again that our expectations of higher symmetry are more expectations than reality

Abandoned the search for symmetries as the ultimate meaning in physics Marcelo turns in the other direction. Using examples from the study of time, space, matter and life he argues that asymmetry and imperfection are just as often the real guiding principle behind what we see. In this way there is lots of good science in Marcelo's book to sink your teeth into.
But A Tear at the Edge of Creation is not your usual popular science book. It does not track through glorious past ages of discovery and show how it all inevitably led to the glory of our present, perched as we are at the edge of momentous discovery.
Instead it takes a critical look at the development of science itself and asks: How have we been blinding ourselves? One of its most important arguments to see the quest for unification for what it is — an impulse with deep roots in the western religious tradition. The aspiration towards a vision of Unity in unifying mathematical physics is nothing less than the mirror image of an aspiration to know the mind of God in all the other ways human beings have explored. This is the unspoken urgency behind the quest for string theories, unified fields and those Theories of Everything.
In writing this book Marcelo is making brave step, asking us imagine a different response to the question — what is science about? Instead of seeking a perfect God's-eye vision of creation, Marcelo returns us to the importance of our own imperfect but cherished perspective — the only one we truly have. What kind of science, what kind of culture and what sense of sacredness in both would that lead us too?

Taking The Mind Of God Out Of Science

 

by Marcelo Gleiser

laverrue/via flickr

 

It's time to let go of the old aesthetic of perfection, of equating beauty with truth.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," wrote the poet John Keats in 1819. For centuries, this belief has been the life force of science and of physics in particular. No wonder that the emblem of the venerable Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Einstein's American academic home after 1933, depicts the goddesses Beauty and Truth holding hands. Here, beauty represents the rational order behind the perceived complexity of the natural world, an expression of mathematical symmetry and perfection.
This rational order is truth in its purest form, the hidden code of Nature, the blueprint of Creation. The implicit assumption is that we, humans, can decipher it through the diligent application of reason and intuition. As we search, we transcend our human boundaries, our frailty, lifting ourselves into a higher plane of existence. This has been the dream of countless philosophers and scientists, from Plato and Ptolemy to Kepler and Einstein. Who can resist the seductive appeal of searching for immortal truth through reason? Who wouldn't want to play god?
Since Thales asked what is the primal substance that makes up all matter around 650 BCE, we have been searching for oneness. This search, as old as philosophy, has served us well. There is a value system behind it, based on a double belief: First, that there is indeed an overarching structure behind all that is; second, that we can figure it out.
I question both. The corollary here is that this unique structure is beautiful and thus true: the aesthetics of physics. Yesterday, my esteemed co-blogger Adam Frank presented some of the thoughts behind this search, as he generously introduced A Tear at the Edge of Creation to our faithful 13.7 readers. Today, I want to take this notion further.
  Symmetry principles are extremely useful in the natural sciences. The problem starts when symmetry ceases to be a tool and is made into dogma. Nowadays, the hidden code of Nature is represented by the so-called theory of everything, or final theory. The best candidate is superstring theory, a theoretical construction that shifts the basic atomistic paradigm — that matter is made of small building blocks — to a new one whereby vibrating strings in nine spatial dimensions can represent what we measure as particles at lower energies and in 3d.
I spent my Ph.D. years and a few years after working in higher dimensional theories, trying to make sense of how to go from 9 to 3 spatial dimensions. For many years, I was a devoted unifier. Now I see things in very different ways, prompted by a combination of empirical evidence (or better, lack thereof) and an understanding of the historical roots of monistic thinking in science.
People should be free to search for theoretical constructions and follow their tastes and beliefs. However, as a scientist, one should also think critically about what's going on and ponder if, indeed, the pursuit of a certain idea makes sense. After some 26 years, we have no clue how to construct a viable superstring model that reproduces our universe. Right now, there seems to be a near-infinite number of possible formulations, each producing a different cosmos. We may call these solutions parts of a multiverse, but that doesn't really help. We don't know even how to write down the equations for string theory to search for plausible solutions. Add to this very practical and technical limitation the empirical lack of any reason to believe there is a single theory behind the myriad phenomena of Nature, and you start to realize that maybe this is simply the wrong way to think about the world.
The world isn't perfect in a rational, mathematical sense. Yes, we find symmetries out there, and they are useful. But we should have the humility to see Nature for what it is and not for what we want it to be. Fifty years of particle physics have again and again crushed the symmetries that we have hoped for.
(For the experts, just think of the violation of parity and of charge conjugation in the weak nuclear force. Also, remember that even electromagnetism is only perfectly symmetric in vacuo, that is, in the absence of sources: there are no magnetic monopoles. Finally, the electroweak unification is not a true unification since the electromagnetic and weak forces retain their signatures throughout. And Grand Unified Theories, well, no trace of them either.)
Science is a construction, a wonderfully successful but still limited construction. What we have are models that approximate what we measure with more or less efficiency. And speaking of measurement, we see right here an impediment to a final theory: because what we know depends on what we measure, and what we measure is limited by our instruments, we can never be certain of what's hiding in the shadows of our ignorance. No, I'm not speaking of gods, fairies, and spirits. I'm speaking of a possible new layer of "fundamental" particles, a new force, an unexpected effect. We can't know all there is to know. Ergo, we can't ever know if our theory is final or not. We should take the mind of God out of physics. It's very liberating! We don't need to believe in the existence of a sunken treasure to explore the ocean. The treasures are many, starting with each drop of water.
It's time to let go of the old aesthetic of perfection, of equating beauty with truth. Here is a new banner, based on the beauty of imperfection: Nature creates through asymmetry. Perhaps we can use Andy Warhol's print of Marilyn Monroe as our emblem, stressing her very prominent and very beautiful asymmetric beauty mark. Would she be as beautiful without it?

BEYOND BELIEF

Science And Morality: You Can’t Derive 'Ought' From 'Is'

by Sean Carroll

A little while back, I picked up on the debate between Sam Harris and Sean Carroll on Science and Morality. This is a subject Ursula has also written about for us. Today Sean Carroll guest blogs for 13.7 and offers some more thoughts on the issue. Sean is a well known theoretical physicist, blogger and author of the most excellent From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. We've also invited Sam Harris to reply to this post.
—Adam Frank
Thanks to Adam and the others for a chance to wander away from my normal stomping grounds and post here at 13.7.

Back in March, a TED talk by Sam Harris sparked a debate about whether you could derive morality from science? I posted about it, and Harris responsed, and I posted a brief followup.  But my contributions were more or less dashed off, and I never did give a careful explanation of why I didn't think it was possible.
So, what do you say, once more into the breach?
I'm going to give the basic argument first, then litter the bottom of the post with various disclaimers and elaborations.
I want to start with what I think is a non-controversial statement about what science is.  Namely, science deals with empirical reality — with what happens in the world, i.e. what "is."  Two scientific theories may disagree in some way — "the observable universe began in a hot, dense state about 14 billion years ago" vs. "the universe has always existed at more or less the present temperature and density."  Whenever that happens, we can always imagine some sort of experiment or observation that would let us decide which one is right.  The observation might be difficult or even impossible to carry out, but we can always imagine what it would entail.  (Statements about the contents of the Great Library of Alexandria are perfectly empirical, even if we can't actually go back in time to look at them.) If you have a dispute that cannot, in principle, be decided with observable facts about the world, your dispute is not one of science.
With that in mind, let's think about morality. What would it mean to have a science of morality?  I think it would look have to look something like this:
Human beings seek to maximize something we choose to call "well-being" or "utility" or "happiness" or "flourishing" or something else.  The amount of well-being in a single person is a function of what is happening in that person's brain, or at least in their body as a whole.
That function can in principle be empirically measured. The total amount of well-being is a function of what happens in all of the human brains in the world, which again can in principle be measured.  The job of morality is to specify what that function is, measure it, and derive conditions in the world under which it is maximized.
All this talk of maximizing functions isn't meant to lampoon the project of grounding morality on science, it's simply taking it seriously.  Casting morality as a maximization problem might seem overly restrictive at first glance, but the procedure can potentially account for a wide variety of approaches.  A libertarian might want to maximize a feeling of personal freedom, while a traditional utilitarian might want to maximize some version of happiness.
The point is simply that the goal of morality should be to create certain conditions that are, in principle, directly measurable by empirical means.  (If that's not the point, it's not science.)
Nevertheless, I want to argue that this program is simply not possible.  I'm not saying it would be difficult — I'm saying it's impossible in principle.  Morality is not part of science, however much we would like it to be.  There are a large number of arguments one could advance for in support of this claim, but I'll stick to three.
  1.  There's no single definition of well-being.  
People disagree about what really constitutes "well-being" (or whatever it is you think they should be maximizing).  This is so perfectly obvious, it's hard to know what to defend.  Anyone who wants to argue that we can ground morality on a scientific basis has to jump through some hoops.
First, there are people who aren't that interested in universal well-being at all. There are serial killers, and sociopaths, and racial supremacists. We don't need to go to extremes, but the extremes certainly exist.
The natural response is to simply separate out such people; "we need not worry about them," in Harris's formulation.  Surely all right-thinking people agree on the primacy of well-being.  But how do we draw the line between right-thinkers and the rest?  Where precisely do we draw the line, in terms of measurable quantities? And why there?  On which side of the line do we place people who believe that it's right to torture prisoners for the greater good, or who cherish the rituals of fraternity hazing?  Particularly, what experiment can we imagine doing that tells us where to draw the line?
More importantly, it's equally obvious that even right-thinking people don't really agree about well-being, or how to maximize it.  Here, the response is apparently that most people are simply confused (which is on the face of it perfectly plausible).  Deep down they all want the same thing, but they misunderstand how to get there; hippies who believe in giving peace a chance and stern parents who believe in corporal punishment for their kids all want to maximize human flourishing, they simply haven't been given the proper scientific resources for attaining that goal.
While I'm happy to admit that people are morally confused, I see no evidence whatsoever that they all ultimately want the same thing.  The position doesn't even seem coherent.  Is it a priori necessary that people ultimately have the same idea about human well-being, or is it a contingent truth about actual human beings?  Can we not even imagine people with fundamentally incompatible views of the good?  (I think I can.)  And if we can, what is the reason for the cosmic accident that we all happen to agree?  And if that happy cosmic accident exists, it's still merely an empirical fact; by itself, the existence of universal agreement on what is good doesn't necessarily imply that it is good.  We could all be mistaken, after all.
In the real world, right-thinking people have a lot of overlap in how they think of well-being.  But the overlap isn't exact, nor is the lack of agreement wholly a matter of misunderstanding.  When two people have different views about what constitutes real well-being, there is no experiment we can imagine doing that would prove one of them to be wrong.  It doesn't mean that moral conversation is impossible, just that it's not science.
2.  It's not self-evident that maximizing well-being, however defined, is the proper goal of morality. 
Maximizing a hypothetical well-being function is an effective way of thinking about many possible approaches to morality.  But not every possible approach.  In particular, it's a manifestly consequentialist idea — what matters is the outcome, in terms of particular mental states of conscious beings.  There are certainly non-consequentialist ways of approaching morality; in deontological theories, the moral good inheres in actions themselves, not in their ultimate consequences.  Now, you may think that you have good arguments in favor of consequentialism.  But are those truly empirical arguments?  You're going to get bored of me asking this, but:  what is the experiment I could do that would distinguish which was true, consequentialism or deontological ethics?
The emphasis on the mental states of conscious beings, while seemingly natural, opens up many cans of worms that moral philosophers have tussled with for centuries.  Imagine that we are able to quantify precisely some particular mental state that corresponds to a high level of well-being; the exact configuration of neuronal activity in which someone is healthy, in love, and enjoying a hot-fudge sundae.  Clearly achieving such a state is a moral good.  Now imagine that we achieve it by drugging a person so that they are unconscious, and then manipulating their central nervous system at a neuron-by-neuron level, until they share exactly the mental state of the conscious person in those conditions.  Is that an equal moral good to the conditions in which they actually are healthy and in love etc.?  If we make everyone happy by means of drugs or hypnosis or direct electronic stimulation of their pleasure centers, have we achieved moral perfection?  If not, then clearly our definition of "well-being" is not simply a function of conscious mental states.  And if not, what is it?
3.  There's no simple way to aggregate well-being over different individuals.
The big problems of morality, to state the obvious, come about because the interests of different individuals come into conflict. Even if we somehow agreed perfectly on what constituted the well-being of a single individual — or, more properly, even if we somehow "objectively measured" well-being, whatever that is supposed to mean — it would generically be the case that no achievable configuration of the world provided perfect happiness for everyone.  People will typically have to sacrifice for the good of others by paying taxes, if nothing else.
So how are we to decide how to balance one person's well-being against another's?  To do this scientifically, we need to be able to make sense of statements like "this person's well-being is precisely 0.762 times the well-being of that person."  What is that supposed to mean?  Do we measure well-being on a linear scale, or is it logarithmic?  Do we simply add up the well-beings of every individual person, or do we take the average?  And would that be the arithmetic mean, or the geometric mean?  Do more individuals with equal well-being each mean greater well-being overall?  Who counts as an individual? Do embryos?  What about dolphins?  Artificially intelligent robots?
These may sound like silly questions, but they're necessary ones if we're supposed to take morality-as-science seriously.  The easy questions of morality are easy, at least among groups of people who start from similar moral grounds, but it's the hard ones that matter.
This isn't a matter of principle vs. practice; these questions don't have single correct answers, even in principle.  If there is no way in principle to calculate precisely how much well-being one person should be expected to sacrifice for the greater well-being of the community, then what you're doing isn't science. And if you do come up with an algorithm, and I come up with a slightly different one, what's the experiment we're going to do to decide which of our aggregate well-being functions correctly describes the world?  That's the real question for attempts to found morality on science, but it's an utterly rhetorical one; there are no such experiments.
Those are my personal reasons for thinking that you can't derive ought from is.  The perceptive reader will notice that it's really just one reason over and over again — there is no way to answer moral questions by doing experiments, even in principle.
Now to the disclaimers. They're especially necessary because I suspect there's no practical difference between the way that people on either side of this debate actually think about morality. The disagreement is all about deep philosophical foundations. Indeed, as I said in my first post, the whole debate is somewhat distressing, as we could be engaged in an interesting and fruitful discussion about how scientific methods could help us with our moral judgments, if we hadn't been distracted by the misguided attempt to found moral judgments on science.  It's a subtle distinction, but this is a subtle game.
First: It would be wonderful if it were true.  I'm not opposed to founding morality on science as a matter of personal preference. I mean, how awesome would that be?  Opening up an entirely new area of scientific endeavor in the cause of making the world a better place:  I'd be all for that.  Of course, that's one reason to be especially skeptical of the idea; we should always subject those claims that we want to be true to the highest standards of scrutiny. In this case, I think it falls far short.
Second: science will play a crucial role in understanding morality.  The reality is that many of us do share some broad-brush ideas about what constitutes the good, and how to go about achieving it.  The idea that we need to think hard about what that means, and in particular how it relates to the extraordinarily promising field of neuroscience, is absolutely correct.  But it's a role, not a foundation.  Those of us who deny that you can derive "ought" from "is" aren't anti-science, we just want to take science seriously, and not bend its definition beyond all recognition.
Third: morality is still possible. Some of the motivation for trying to ground morality on science seems to be the old canard about moral relativism: "If moral judgments aren't objective, you can't condemn Hitler or the Taliban!"
Ironically, this is something of a holdover from a pre-scientific worldview, when religion was typically used as a basis for morality. The idea is that a moral judgment simply doesn't exist unless it's somehow grounded in something out there, either in the natural world or a supernatural world.  But that's simply not right.  In the real world, we have moral feelings, and we try to make sense of them.  They might not be "true" or "false" in the sense that scientific theories are true or false, but we have them.
If there's someone who doesn't share them (and there is!), we can't convince them that they are wrong by doing an experiment. But we can talk to them and try to find points of agreement and consensus, and act accordingly.  Moral relativism doesn't imply moral quietism.  And even if it did that wouldn't affect whether or not it was true.
And finally: Pointing out that people disagree about morality is not analogous to the fact that some people are radical epistemic skeptics who don't agree with ordinary science.  That's mixing levels of description.  It is true that the tools of science cannot be used to change the mind of a committed solipsist who believes they are a brain in a vat, manipulated by an evil demon; yet, those of us who accept the presuppositions of empirical science are able to make progress.  But here we are concerned only with people who have agreed to buy into all the epistemic assumptions of reality-based science — they still disagree about morality.  That's the problem.  If the project of deriving ought from is were realistic, disagreements about morality would be precisely analogous to disagreements about the state of the universe fourteen billion years ago. There would be things we could imagine observing about the universe that would enable us to decide which position was right.  But as far as morality is concerned, there aren't.
All this debate is going to seem enormously boring to many people, especially as the ultimate pragmatic difference seems to be found entirely in people's internal justifications for the moral stances they end up defending, rather than what those stances actually are.  Hopefully those people haven't read nearly this far.  To the rest of us, it's a crucially important issue; justifications matter!  But at least we can agree that the discussion is well worth having.  And it's sure to continue.
This piece first appeared on Cosmic Variance

Toward A Science Of Morality

 

by Sam Harris

Last week Sean Carroll posted some thoughts on his continuing debate with Sam Harris on Science and Morality. This is a subject Ursula has also written about for us. We invited Sam Harris to reply and here is his response to Sean.
—Adam Frank

Over the past couple of months, I seem to have conducted a public experiment in the manufacture of philosophical and scientific ideas. In February, I spoke at the 2010 TED conference, where I briefly argued that morality should be considered an undeveloped branch of science.
Normally, when one speaks at a conference the resulting feedback amounts to a few conversations in the lobby during a coffee break. I had these conversations at TED, of course, and they were useful. As luck would have it, however, my talk was broadcast on the internet just as I was finishing a book on the relationship between science and human values, and this produced a blizzard of criticism at a moment when criticism could actually do me some good. I made a few efforts to direct and focus this feedback, and the result has been that for the last few weeks I have had literally thousands of people commenting upon my work, more or less in real time. I can't say that the experience has been entirely pleasant, but there is no question that it has been useful.
If nothing else, the response to my TED talk proves that many smart people believe that something in the last few centuries of intellectual progress prevents us from making cross-cultural moral judgments — or moral judgments at all. Thousands of highly educated men and women have now written to inform me that morality is a myth, that statements about human values are without truth conditions and, therefore, nonsensical, and that concepts like "well-being" and "misery" are so poorly defined, or so susceptible to personal whim and cultural influence, that it is impossible to know anything about them.
Many people also claim that a scientific foundation for morality would serve no purpose, because we can combat human evil while knowing that our notions of "good" and "evil" are unwarranted. It is always amusing when these same people then hesitate to condemn specific instances of patently abominable behavior. I don't think one has fully enjoyed the life of the mind until one has seen a celebrated scholar defend the "contextual" legitimacy of the burqa, or a practice like female genital excision, a mere thirty seconds after announcing that his moral relativism does nothing to diminish his commitment to making the world a better place. Given my experience as a critic of religion, I must say that it has been disconcerting to see the caricature of the over-educated, atheistic moral nihilist regularly appearing in my inbox and on the blogs. I sincerely hope that people like Rick Warren have not been paying attention.
  First, a disclaimer and non-apology: Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy. There are two reasons why I haven't done this: First, while I have read a fair amount of this literature, I did not arrive at my position on the relationship between human values and the rest of human knowledge by reading the work of moral philosophers; I came to it by considering the logical implications of our making continued progress in the sciences of mind. Second, I am convinced that every appearance of terms like "metaethics," "deontology," "noncognitivism," "anti-realism," "emotivism," and the like, directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe.
My goal, both in speaking at conferences like TED and in writing my book, is to start a conversation that a wider audience can engage with and find helpful. Few things would make this goal harder to achieve than for me to speak and write like an academic philosopher. Of course, some discussion of philosophy is unavoidable, but my approach is to generally make an end run around many of the views and conceptual distinctions that make academic discussions of human values so inaccessible. While this is guaranteed to annoy a few people, the prominent philosophers I've consulted seem to understand and support what I am doing.
Many people believe that the problem with talking about moral truth, or with asserting that there is a necessary connection between morality and well-being, is that concepts like "morality" and "well-being" must be defined with reference to specific goals and other criteria — and nothing prevents people from disagreeing about these definitions. I might claim that morality is really about maximizing well-being and that well-being entails a wide range of cognitive/emotional virtues and wholesome pleasures, but someone else will be free to say that morality depends upon worshipping the gods of the Aztecs and that well-being entails always having a terrified person locked in one's basement, waiting to be sacrificed.
Of course, goals and conceptual definitions matter. But this holds for all phenomena and for every method we use to study them. My father, for instance, has been dead for 25 years. What do I mean by "dead"? Do I mean "dead" with reference to specific goals? Well, if you must, yes — goals like respiration, energy metabolism, responsiveness to stimuli, etc. The definition of "life" remains, to this day, difficult to pin down.
Does this mean we can't study life scientifically? No.
The science of biology thrives despite such ambiguities. The concept of "health" is looser still: it, too, must be defined with reference to specific goals — not suffering chronic pain, not always vomiting, etc. — and these goals are continually changing. Our notion of "health" may one day be defined by goals that we cannot currently entertain with a straight face (like the goal of spontaneously regenerating a lost limb). Does this mean we can't study health scientifically?
I wonder if there is anyone on earth who would be tempted to attack the philosophical underpinnings of medicine with questions like: "What about all the people who don't share your goal of avoiding disease and early death? Who is to say that living a long life free of pain and debilitating illness is 'healthy'? What makes you think that you could convince a person suffering from fatal gangrene that he is not as healthy you are?" And yet, these are precisely the kinds of objections I face when I speak about morality in terms of human and animal well-being.
Is it possible to voice such doubts in human speech? Yes. But that doesn't mean we should take them seriously.
The physicist Sean Carroll has written another essay in response to my TED talk, further arguing that one cannot derive "ought" from "is" and that a science of morality is impossible. Carroll's essay is worth reading on its own, but in the hopes of making the difference between our views as clear as possible, I have I excerpted his main points in their entirety, and followed them with my comments.
Carroll begins:

I want to start with a hopefully non-controversial statement about what science is. Namely: science deals with empirical reality — with what happens in the world. (I.e. what "is.") Two scientific theories may disagree in some way — "the observable universe began in a hot, dense state about 14 billion years ago" vs. "the universe has always existed at more or less the present temperature and density." Whenever that happens, we can always imagine some sort of experiment or observation that would let us decide which one is right. The observation might be difficult or even impossible to carry out, but we can always imagine what it would entail. (Statements about the contents of the Great Library of Alexandria are perfectly empirical, even if we can't actually go back in time to look at them.) If you have a dispute that cannot in principle be decided by recourse to observable facts about the world, your dispute is not one of science.

I agree with Carroll's definition of "science" here — though some of his subsequent thinking seems to depend on a more restrictive definition. I especially like his point about the Library of Alexandria. Clearly, any claims we make about the contents of this library will be right or wrong, and the truth does not depend on our being able to verify such claims. We can also dismiss an infinite number of claims as obviouslywrong without getting access to the relevant data. We know, for instance, that this library did not contain a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. When I speak about there being facts about human and animal well-being, this includes facts that are quantifiable and conventionally "scientific" (e.g., facts about human neurophysiology) as well as facts that we will never have access to (e.g., how happy would I have been if I had decided not to spend the evening responding to Carroll's essay?).

With that in mind, let's think about morality. What would it mean to have a science of morality? I think it would look have to look something like this: Human beings seek to maximize something we choose to call "well-being" (although it might be called "utility" or "happiness" or "flourishing" or something else). The amount of well-being in a single person is a function of what is happening in that person's brain, or at least in their body as a whole. That function can in principle be empirically measured. The total amount of well-being is a function of what happens in all of the human brains in the world, which again can in principle be measured. The job of morality is to specify what that function is, measure it, and derive conditions in the world under which it is maximized.

Good enough. I would simply broaden picture to include animals and any other conscious systems that can experience gradations of happiness and suffering — and weight them to the degree that they can experience such states. Do monkeys suffer more than mice from medical experiments? (The answer is almost surely "yes.") If so, all other things being equal, it is worse to run experiments on monkeys than on mice.
Skipping ahead a little, Carroll makes the following claims:

I want to argue that this program is simply not possible. I'm not saying it would be difficult — I'm saying it's impossible in principle. Morality is not part of science, however much we would like it to be. There are a large number of arguments one could advance for in support of this claim, but I'll stick to three.

1. There's no single definition of well-being.
People disagree about what really constitutes "well-being" (or whatever it is you think they should be maximizing). This is so perfectly obvious, it's hard to know what to defend. Anyone who wants to argue that we can ground morality on a scientific basis has to jump through some hoops.
First, there are people who aren't that interested in universal well-being at all. There are serial killers, and sociopaths, and racial supremacists. We don't need to go to extremes, but the extremes certainly exist. The natural response is to simply separate out such people; "we need not worry about them," in Harris's formulation. Surely all right-thinking people agree on the primacy of well-being. But how do we draw the line between right-thinkers and the rest? Where precisely do we draw the line, in terms of measurable quantities? And why there? On which side of the line do we place people who believe that it's right to torture prisoners for the greater good, or who cherish the rituals of fraternity hazing? Most particularly, what experiment can we imagine doing that tells us where to draw the line?

This is where Carroll and I begin to diverge. He also seems to be conflating two separate issues: (1) He is asking how we can determine who is worth listening to. This is a reasonable question, but there is no way Carroll could answer it "precisely" and "in terms of measurable quantities" for his own field, much less for a nascent science of morality. How flakey can a Nobel laureate in physics become before he is no longer worth listening to — indeed, how many crazy things could he say about matter and space-time before he would no longer even count as a "physicist"? Hard question. But I doubt Carroll means to suggest that we must answer such questions experimentally. I assume that he can make a reasonably principled decision about whom to put on a panel at the next conference on Dark Matter without finding a neuroscientist from the year 2075 to scan every candidate's brain and assess it for neurophysiological competence in the relevant physics. (2) Carroll also seems worried about how we can assess people's claims regarding their inner lives, given that questions about morality and well-being necessarily refer to the character subjective experience. He even asserts that there is no possible experiment that could allow us to define well-being or to resolve differences of opinion about it. Would he say this for other mental phenomena as well? What about depression? Is it impossible to define or study this state of mind empirically? I'm not sure how deep Carroll's skepticism runs, but much of psychology now appears to hang in the balance. Of course, Carroll might want to say that the problem of access to the data of first-person experience is what makes psychology often seem to teeter at the margin of science. He might have a point — but, if so, it would be a methodological point, not a point about the limits of scientific truth. Remember, the science of determining exactly which books were in the Library of Alexandria is stillborn and going absolutely nowhere, methodologically speaking. But this doesn't mean we can't be absolutely right or absolutely wrong about the relevant facts.
As for there being many people who "aren't interested in universal well-being," I would say that more or less everyone, myself included, is insufficiently interested in it. But we are seeking well-being in some form nonetheless, whatever we choose to call it and however narrowly we draw the circle of our moral concern. Clearly many of us (most? all?) are not doing as good a job of this as we might. In fact, if science did nothing more than help people align their own selfish priorities — so that those who really wanted to lose weight, or spend more time with their kids, or learn another language, etc., could get what they most desired — it would surely increase the well-being of humanity. And this is to say nothing of what would happen if science could reveal depths of well-being that most of us are unaware of, thereby changing our priorities.
Carroll continues:

More importantly, it's equally obvious that even right-thinking people don't really agree about well-being, or how to maximize it. Here, the response is apparently that most people are simply confused (which is on the face of it perfectly plausible). Deep down they all want the same thing, but they misunderstand how to get there; hippies who believe in giving peace a chance and stern parents who believe in corporal punishment for their kids all want to maximize human flourishing, they simply haven't been given the proper scientific resources for attaining that goal.

While I'm happy to admit that people are morally confused, I see no evidence whatsoever that they all ultimately want the same thing. The position doesn't even seem coherent. Is it a priori necessary that people ultimately have the same idea about human well-being, or is it a contingent truth about actual human beings? Can we not even imagine people with fundamentally incompatible views of the good? (I think I can.) And if we can, what is the reason for the cosmic accident that we all happen to agree? And if that happy cosmic accident exists, it's still merely an empirical fact; by itself, the existence of universal agreement on what is good doesn't necessarily imply that it is good. We could all be mistaken, after all.
In the real world, right-thinking people have a lot of overlap in how they think of well-being. But the overlap isn't exact, nor is the lack of agreement wholly a matter of misunderstanding. When two people have different views about what constitutes real well-being, there is no experiment we can imagine doing that would prove one of them to be wrong. It doesn't mean that moral conversation is impossible, just that it's not science.

Imagine that we had a machine that could produce any possible brain state (this would be the ultimate virtual reality device, more or less like the Matrix). This machine would allow every human being to sample all available mental states (some would not be available without changing a person's brain, however). I think we can ignore most of the philosophical and scientific wrinkles here and simply stipulate that it is possible, or even likely, that given an infinite amount of time and perfect recall, we would agree about arange of brain states that qualify as good (as in, "Wow, that was so great, I can't imagine anything better") and bad (as in, "I'd rather die than experience that again.") There might be controversy over specific states — after all, some people do like Marmite — but being members of the same species with very similar brains, we are likely to converge to remarkable degree. I might find that brain state X242358B is my absolute favorite, and Carroll might prefer X979793L, but the fear that we will radically diverge in our judgments about what constitutes well-being seems pretty far-fetched. The possibility that my hell will be someone else's heaven, and vice versa, seems hardly worth considering. And yet, whatever divergence did occurmust also depend on facts about the brains in question.
Even if there were ten thousand different ways for groups of human beings to maximally thrive (all trade-offs and personal idiosyncrasies considered), there will be many ways for them not to thrive — and the difference between luxuriating on a peak of the moral landscape and languishing in a valley of internecine horror will translate into facts that can be scientifically understood.

2. It's not self-evident that maximizing well-being, however defined, is the proper goal of morality.

Maximizing a hypothetical well-being function is an effective way of thinking about many possible approaches to morality. But not every possible approach. In particular, it's a manifestly consequentialist idea — what matters is the outcome, in terms of particular mental states of conscious beings. There are certainly non-consequentialist ways of approaching morality; in deontological theories, the moral good inheres in actions themselves, not in their ultimate consequences. Now, you may think that you have good arguments in favor of consequentialism. But are those truly empiricalarguments? You're going to get bored of me asking this, but: what is the experiment I could do that would distinguish which was true, consequentialism or deontological ethics?

It is true that many people believe that "there are non-consequentialist ways of approaching morality," but I think that they are wrong. In my experience, when you scratch the surface on any deontologist, you find a consequentialist just waiting to get out. For instance, I think that Kant's Categorical Imperative only qualifies as a rational standard of morality given the assumption that it will be generally beneficial (as J.S. Mill pointed out at the beginning of Utilitarianism). Ditto for religious morality. This is a logical point before it is an empirical one, but yes, I do think we might be able to design experiments to show that people are concerned about consequences, even when they say they aren't. While my view of the moral landscape can be classed as "consequentialist," this term comes with fair amount of philosophical baggage, and there are many traditional quibbles with consequentialism that do not apply to my account of morality.

The emphasis on the mental states of conscious beings, while seemingly natural, opens up many cans of worms that moral philosophers have tussled with for centuries. Imagine that we are able to quantify precisely some particular mental state that corresponds to a high level of well-being; the exact configuration of neuronal activity in which someone is healthy, in love, and enjoying a hot-fudge sundae. Clearly achieving such a state is a moral good. Now imagine that we achieve it by drugging a person so that they are unconscious, and then manipulating their central nervous system at a neuron-by-neuron level, until they share exactly the mental state of the conscious person in those conditions. Is that an equal moral good to the conditions in which they actually are healthy and in love etc.? If we make everyone happy by means of drugs or hypnosis or direct electronic stimulation of their pleasure centers, have we achieved moral perfection? If not, then clearly our definition of "well-being" is not simply a function of conscious mental states. And if not, what is it?

Clearly, we want our conscious states to track the reality of our lives. We want to be happy, but we want to be happy for the right reasons. And if we occasionally want to uncouple our mental state from our actual situation in the world (e.g. by taking powerful drugs, drinking great quantities of alcohol, etc.) we don't want this to render us permanently delusional, however pleasant such delusion might be. There are some obvious reasons for this: We need our conscious states to be well synched to their material context, otherwise we forget to eat, ramble incoherently, and step in front of speeding cars. And most of what we value in our lives, like our connection to other people, is predicated on our being in touch with external reality and with the probable consequences of our behavior. Yes, I might be able to take a drug that would make me feel good while watching my young daughter drown in the bathtub — but I am perfectly capable of judging that I do not want to take such a drug out of concern for my (and her) well-being. Such a judgment still takes place in my conscious mind, with reference to other conscious mental states (both real and imagined). For instance, my judgment that it would be wrong to take such a drug has a lot to do with the horror I would expect to feel upon discovering that I had happily let my daughter drown. Of course, I am also thinking about the potential happiness that my daughter's death would diminish — her own, obviously, but also that of everyone who is now, and would have been, close to her. There is nothing mysterious about this: Morality still relates to consciousness and to its changes, both actual and potential. What else could it relate to?

3. There's no simple way to aggregate well-being over different individuals.
The big problems of morality, to state the obvious, come about because the interests of different individuals come into conflict. Even if we somehow agreed perfectly on what constituted the well-being of a single individual — or, more properly, even if we somehow "objectively measured" well-being, whatever that is supposed to mean — it would generically be the case that no achievable configuration of the world provided perfect happiness for everyone. People will typically have to sacrifice for the good of others; by paying taxes, if nothing else.
So how are we to decide how to balance one person's well-being against another's? To do this scientifically, we need to be able to make sense of statements like "this person's well-being is precisely 0.762 times the well-being of that person." What is that supposed to mean? Do we measure well-being on a linear scale, or is it logarithmic? Do we simply add up the well-beings of every individual person, or do we take the average? And would that be the arithmetic mean, or the geometric mean? Do more individuals with equal well-being each mean greater well-being overall? Who counts as an individual? Do embryos? What about dolphins? Artificially intelligent robots?

These are all good questions: Some admit of straightforward answers; others plunge us into moral paradox; none, however, proves that there are no right or wrong answers to questions of human and animal wellbeing. I discuss these issues at some length in my forthcoming book. For those who want to confront how difficult it can be to think about aggregating human well-being, I recommend Derek Parfit's masterpiece, Reasons and Persons. I do not claim to have solved all the puzzles raised by Parfit — but I don't think we have to.
Practically speaking, I think we have some very useful intuitions on this front. We care more about creatures that can experience a greater range of suffering and happiness — and we are right to, because suffering and happiness (defined in the widest possible sense) are all that can be cared about. Are all animal lives equivalent? No. Are all human lives equivalent? No. I have no problem admitting that certain people's lives are more valuable than mine — I need only imagine a person whose death would create much greater suffering and foreclose much greater happiness. However, it also seems quite rational for us to collectively act as though all human lives were equally valuable. Hence, most of our laws and social institutions generally ignore differences between people. I suspect that this is a very good thing. Of course, I could be wrong about this — and that is precisely the point. If we didn't behave this way, our world would be different, and these differences would either affect the totality of human well-being, or they wouldn't. Once again, there are answers to such questions, whether we can ever answer them in practice.
I believe that covers the heart of Carroll's argument. Skipping ahead to final point:

And finally: pointing out that people disagree about morality is not analogous to the fact that some people are radical epistemic skeptics who don't agree with ordinary science. That's mixing levels of description. It is true that the tools of science cannot be used to change the mind of a committed solipsist who believes they are a brain in a vat, manipulated by an evil demon; yet, those of us who accept the presuppositions of empirical science are able to make progress. But here we are concerned only with people who have agreed to buy into all the epistemic assumptions of reality-based science — they still disagree about morality. That's the problem. If the project of deriving ought from is were realistic, disagreements about morality would be precisely analogous to disagreements about the state of the universe fourteen billion years ago. There would be things we could imagine observing about the universe that would enable us to decide which position was right. But as far as morality is concerned, there aren't.

The biologist P.Z. Myers has thrown his lot in with Carroll on a similar point:

I don't think Harris's criterion — that we can use science to justify maximizing the well-being of individuals — is valid. We can't... Harris is smuggling in an unscientific prior in his category of well-being.

It seems to me that these two quotations converge on the core issue. Of course, it is easy enough for Carroll to assert that moral skepticism isn't analogous to scientific skepticism, but I think he is simply wrong about this. To use Myer's formulation, we must smuggle in an "unscientific prior" to justify any branch of science. If this isn't a problem for physics, why should it be a problem of a science of morality? Can we prove, without recourse to any prior assumptions, that our definition of "physics" is the right one? No, because our standards of proof will be built into any definition we provide. We might observe that standard physics is better at predicting the behavior of matter than Voodoo "physics" is, but what could we say to a "physicist" whose only goal is to appease the spiritual hunger of his dead ancestors? Here, we seem to reach an impasse. And yet, no one thinks that the failure of standard physics to silence all possible dissent has any significance whatsoever; why should we demand more of a science of morality?
So, while it is possible to say that one can't move from "is" to "ought," we should be honest about how we get to "is" in the first place. Scientific "is" statements rest on implicit "oughts" all the way down. When I say, "Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen," I have uttered a quintessential statement of scientific fact. But what if someone doubts this statement? I can appeal to data from chemistry, describing the outcome of simple experiments. But in so doing, I implicitly appeal to the values of empiricism and logic. What if my interlocutor doesn't share these values? What can I say then? What evidence could prove that we should value evidence? What logic could demonstrate the importance of logic? As it turns out, these are the wrong questions. The right question is, why should we care what such a person thinks in the first place?
So it is with the linkage between morality and well-being: To say that morality is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal), because we must first assume that the well-being of conscious creatures is good, is exactly like saying that science is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal), because we must first assume that a rational understanding of the universe is good. We need not enter either of these philosophical cul-de-sacs.
Carroll and Myers both believe nothing much turns on whether we find a universal foundation for morality. I disagree. Granted, the practical effects cannot be our reason for linking morality and science — we have to form our beliefs about reality based on what we think is actually true. But the consequences of moral relativism have been disastrous. And science's failure to address the most important questions in human life has made it seem like little more than an incubator for technology. It has also given faith-based religion — that great engine of ignorance and bigotry — a nearly uncontested claim to being the only source of moral wisdom. This has been bad for everyone. What is more, it has been unnecessary — because we can speak about the well-being of conscious creatures rationally, and in the context of science. I think it is time we tried.

'Inception' And The Dream Of A Physics Of Dreams

by Adam Frank

Melissa Moseley/Warner Bros.

 

Get Into The Brood: Cobb, DiCaprio's character in Inception, is haunted by dreams of his dead wife (Marion Cotillard).

We are all artists in our dreams but rarely are we scientists.

Last night I saw Inception, the new film by mega-auteur Christopher Nolan. Nolan is famous for the most recent Batman movies and while those were both blockbusters with ideas, the new movie harkens back to Nolan’s early work, Memento, that told a story (backwards) of a man with no short-term memory desperately searching for his wife’s killer. Like Memento, Inception has layers within layers and is told with such visual artistry that scenes and themes stay with you for hours after you leave the theater.  Its’ tightly paced, noir-tinged and full of amped-up chases all in service of a single, multi-layered idea:
What is real and how can you tell?
The plot revolves around dreams.  The main characters attempt to plant an idea in a wealthy young industrialists mind using their ability (never really explained thankfully) to share and sculpt his dreams.  To carry out the job the team must create a nested set of dreams within dreams within dreams.
The dreamer must dream he is dreaming.  And in the dream he dreams again.
Director Nolan uses this hall of mirrors to ask how do we ever really know which “level” we are on?  How do we recognize when we are “on top" and in reality.  Nolan’s answer, in many ways, is physics.
  Every night, every human being demonstrates their profound capacity as artists when they dream.  All of us create fantastic images, brilliant metaphors and original story lines in our dreaming.  That is what makes dreams and dreamers so fascinating.  What is often most telling about a dream is its logic, a logic that defies the normal rules of space, time and laws of nature.
In our dreams we fly.  In our dreams we run in slow motion, animals talk, objects turn into people and we seem to appear and disappear into scenes of terror or staggering beauty. What makes dreams so compelling is that the laws of this world are voided in the word of the dream.
Physics is malleable.
Nolan makes explicit use of dreams and their physics. Each dream-spy carries a totem to help them distinguish the multi-level dream from reality.  These totems are physical objects whose experienced material properties — the heft of a loaded set of dice, the spin of child’s metal top — identify the real world from the dream.
Thus it is the rules of this world, the fact that there are rules, that makes it real.
Which leaves us with some questions.  Why do we experience the patterns of the world as limits, which our dreaming minds free us from?  Does this too come from experience?  Would we still dream of flying if there were no birds to show us what we cannot do?  Our mythologies (and superhero comics) are full of characters with dreamlike powers.  Likewise our concepts of heaven can also invoke freedom from physics as if in death these laws become just another form of dream logic.
Why?
What is it in the laws of physics and the patterns set by the natural world that we run from in our dreams?  Is it the very concept of law itself?  Or is the flying and "teleportation" in our dreams a bedrock for the creative processes that let us imagine these things in our collective scientific efforts?
Dream on.

RIGTH OR WRONG? >> MAKING THE CALL

Exopotent And Endopotent: Examining More Than One Truth

 

by Ursula Goodenough and Varadaraja V. Raman

When is a person right?
When is a person wrong?
What’s involved in making the call?

A useful way of framing the matter is to speak of exopotent truths and endopotent truths.
For exopotent truths, such as those concerned with natural phenomena and their coherent, consistent, rational explanations, it is possible to make the call in well-stated contexts using currently available data.
On the other hand, for endopotent truths such as those that have an impact on our inner sense of self or status, there is no standard way of determining which view is correct and which is not correct; they represent interpretations of many situations that can be seen to be meaningful.
Exopotent truths are sometimes wrong (in science, often in retrospect), but when they’re wrong, there’s a procedure in place to correct them.
By contrast, endopotent truths entail an intrinsic uncertainty that can generate irreconcilable conflicts because, in such cases, I-am-right implies that you-are-wrong.
  Exopotent truths have not, of course, always been adjudicated by scientific inquiry, nor have they historically been accorded the optional status that they hold in our times. Historically, cultures have self-organized around accounts of origins, identity, and morality, conveyed in the narrative form called Mythos, and persons have been asked to normalize their endopotent truths to the exopotent truths articulated by that Mythos. One’s endopotent truths might indicate X, but if the tradition said Y, then the tradition trumped.
Scientific inquiry has provisioned us with a set of exopotent truths that are a) not user-friendly, particularly without education; b) not the obvious plot-line for a human-centric narrative; and c) not the bearers of obvious moral imperatives. So while we slurp up these truths to the extent that they undergird our technologies, they don’t have the normalizing effect on endopotent truths that the old narratives had and, in countless cases, continue to have.
In the old days, when members of tribes or denominations held an aberrant endopotent truth – one at odds with the prevailing exopotent Mythos – it was considered heresy and quickly snuffed out. We’re now multi-tribal, so my endopotent truths that are sanctioned by my Mythos are right, and yours are wrong, because we don’t share a normative account.
The result is pretty much the mess that we call our global situation.
If our “scientific Mythos” is to step to the plate and provide a pan-tribal exopotent orientation that serves to constrain – not censor, but constrain – endopotent truths such that we’re all moving in the same direction rather than shouting I’m right you’re wrong at one another, then this strikes us as something that would be a good thing.  Indeed, if this 13.7 blog can be said to have an overarching theme, it would be to foster such a trajectory.
That said, the challenges inherent in such a project can often seem insurmountable.
Co-blogger Varadaraja V. Raman (known as VV) is Emeritus Professor of Physics and Humanities at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He writes on many aspects of Indian heritage and on the science-religion interface.

Borges, The Universe And The Infinite Library

 

by Marcelo Gleiser

Enlarge Keystone/Hulton Archive / Getty Images

Keystone/Hulton Archive / Getty Images
 

How much can we learn of the world? Perhaps Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges knew all along. This photo of him was taken in March 1982.

In the short story The Library of Babel, the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges constructs a metaphorical replica of the universe, both celebrating and teasing the cosmologists of his time.
His irony is timeless and has much to say about current efforts as well.
The Library of Babel is different from any other library. In it, we find all books that have been written and those that will be written, those that make sense and completely absurd ones, works that group meaningless sequences of letters compiled into random arrangements with no purpose whatsoever. Everything that has been and will be thought can be found in a forsaken corner of the endless library.
Borges clearly had in mind a geometrical rendition of the cosmos for his library: “The Universe (that some call the Library) is composed of an undefined, maybe infinite number of hexagonal galleries.”
An infinite beehive, describing the homogeneity of space: all galleries are equivalent, none being more important than another. The Cosmological Principle, the conceptual backbone of modern cosmology, states that at large enough scales, the universe is homogeneous and isotropic so that no point is more important than any other.
The light in the Library is insufficient, leaving the readers partially in the dark, as when we peer into the night sky to unveil its secrets, that we are only able to partially resolve. Or maybe, the darkness in the Library reminds us of the darkness of outer space, that so filled Pascal with terror.
Since the Library is the Universe, nothing exists outside of it. So, the readers and the narrator are part of it. Can we ever fully understand something when we are not able to examine it as a whole? Like a fish that wants to understand the totality of the oceans, the librarians try in vain to decipher the mysteries of their world, unaware that all they can acquire is a partial knowledge of reality.
They believe that because the library contains all books, a catalog that describes their contents must exist somewhere. But because the library is complete, there must be a catalog that describes this catalog and then one that describes that one and so on, in an infinite progression.
So, it’s impossible to find a single book that includes all other books, since its existence implies in the existence of another book that includes it.
Complete knowledge is impossible.
  Because part of the Library is accessible to study and cataloging, the librarians “suffer dangerous illusions of what is knowable.” To see part of the world, or even many parts of the world, doesn’t mean we can see it all.
The librarians catalog the books and compute probabilities, trying hard to arrive at a final answer. What they don’t know, or don’t seem to want to acknowledge, is that some mysteries will remain beyond their reach. To Borges, science will never be able to answer all questions about the world simply because we are part of the mystery.
The story (The Aleph is another example) also reveals a deep worry with reductionism. Even if all books are written with the same letters of the alphabet, to know these letters doesn’t bring anyone closer to an understanding of the fundamental nature of the Universe. I wonder if Borges was criticizing the search for the building blocks of matter, the elementary particles of high-energy physics. These particles are the alphabet with which the world is “written.”
Is this search fated to failure?
The answer depends how far one wants to go. Even though we aim to go as far as possible, we should remember that we are limited to those regions of the Library which are better illuminated (sometimes by the light we bring in), where we can find, here and there, another volume that reveals a bit more of the great and endless mystery.