Where I've Been and What's to Come

My life looks quite a bit different now than it did when I first started this blog in 2013. Back then I knew I wanted to write and had all the time in the world to do it, but was too often unsatisfied by the quality of my output. Having re-published some of my favourite (edited) pieces in 2015, I can look back now on very little that I've produced, but lean towards being pleased with what's there.

Last year was a year of exposure - if I was going to write I wanted to be well-versed in my various interests, so I committed to reading 52 books through the year. Taken together with the launch of a new, information-heavy career trajectory, this was a lot of work for my poor eyes. But I did succeed, and coming out the other side I feel knowledgeable in a way that I never have before.

While wanton exposure may feel enlightening, I have noticed that when encountering certain intellectual stumbling blocks my instinct has been to reach for the book with the answer rather than sketch it out myself. Since I'd rather be compared to an encyclopedia than a reference catalogue, 2016 will be a year of integration. I want to take the things I've learned about and begin to apply them to my life in a way that encourages commitment and standing on positions rather than floating back and forth between them. Eventually I'd like this to lead to a year (or more!) of action, but that will come with time (and *ahem* financial savings). All that said, I'm pleased with the fortuitousness of my current circumstances and plan to make the most of them.

I'll list the 52 books I read last year below, for those interested. Some topics I pursued were evolution, genetics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, the rationality of religion, critical thinking, political history, psychology of ethics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. I would never claim expertise in any of these areas, but now that I know a little more about them I hope I can pursue my remaining questions in a more productive and properly contextualized fashion.

Being exposed to lots of new facts and ways of thinking can be destabilizing, and that's definitely something I experienced last year. There was a lot of questioning and introspection happening between the reading. Although I'd like to work on planting my feet a little more sturdily this year, I've also come to realize that fear of destabilization is unsustainable. The world is changing quickly, and our most important ideas are starting to be supplanted by new ones that are radically different. This progression is both a challenge and a warning: the challenge is to be a part of shaping the future, the warning is not to fade away as a spectator who merely allows it happen. 

Developing my philosophical virtues will help prepare me for the future and embrace the life I have along the way. I'll try to write some shorter articles more frequently to document my path as it continues to extend out before me.

Reading list 2015:

1. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion - Jonathan Haidt

2. Meaning in Life and Why it Matters - Susan Wolf

3. The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism - Octavio Paz

4. The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? - David Brin

5. Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity - Raymond Tallis

6. Argumentation: Critical Thinking in Action - David Lapakko

7. Experiments in Ethics - Kwame Anthony Appiah

8. Mind: A Historical and Philosophical Introduction to the Major Theories - Andre Kukla

9. Freedom Regained: The Possibility of Free Will - Julian Baggini

10. Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism - Paul Boghossian

11. Summers of Discontent: The Purpose of the Arts Today - Raymond Tallis

12. Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us - Claude Steele

13. The Ego Trick: In Search of the Self - Julian Baggini

14. Love: A History - Simon May

15. Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era - James Barrat

16. ID: The Quest for Meaning in the 21st Century - Susan Greenfield

17. Curiosity - Alberto Manguel

18. Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk - Massimo Pigliucci

19. Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything - F.S. Michaels

20. Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences - Rebecca Jordan-Young

21. History of Ethics Volume 1: Graeco-Roman to Early Modern Ethics - Vernon J. Burke

22. On the Move: A Life - Oliver Sacks

23. Truth - John D. Caputo

24. Minds and Computers: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence - Matt Carter

25. In Defense of Science: Why Scientific Literacy Matters - Frank R. Spellman

26. Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape the Human Mind - Jesse J. Prinz

27. Truth - Chase Wrenn

28: Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution - Peter J. Richardson

29. The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science - Will Storr

30. DNA: The Secret of Life - James D. Watson

31. The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture - Matt Ridley

32. The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution - Gregory Cochrane

33. Genetics and Philosophy: An Introduction - Paul E. Griffiths

34. A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History - Nicholas Wade

35. Theatre of the Mind: Raising the Curtain on Consciousness - Jay Ingram

36. Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality - Theodore Dalrymple

37. The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Scientific Age - John Horgan

38. Enlightenment 2.0: Restoring Sanity to Our Politics, Our Economy, and Our Lives - Joseph Heath

39. Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible - Jerry A. Coyne

40. The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation - John Horgan

41. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon - Daniel C. Dennett

42. War of the Worldviews: The Struggle Between Science and Spirituality - Deepak Chopra and Leonard Mlodinow

43. Theism and Explanation - Gregory W. Dawes

44. Is There a God? - Richard Swineburne

45. The Myth of Sisyphus - Albert Camus

46. Understanding Beliefs - Nils J. Nilson

47. The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life - Nick Lane

48. The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science - Siddhartha Mukherjee

49. Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them - Joshua Greene

50. Intuition Pumps and other Tools for Thinking - Daniel C. Dennett

51. Biology as Ideology - Richard C. Lewontin

52. The Quest for a Moral Compass - Kenan Malik

Bolded = favourites

What a list! This year will feature a bit less reading, but more writing and thinking are to come, as well as a list of films I've watched that will be just as long as this one :)

See you soon.

Unpersuaded

We can't all be experts in everything – this idea marked my philosophical starting point as I launched headlong into Will Storr's 2014 book The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science. It is inherent to human temporal finitude that even the very best of those lucky enough to have received advanced education will have only enough time to become experts in a few areas, if any at all. As individuals, a necessary consequence of our inevitable participation in more activities than we can personally and deeply understand is that we end up making use of knowledge that has been generated by others. Today's technology has gifted us with the opportunity to be flooded by the knowledge of others in any subject we should choose at the mere click of a button. However, technology has also proliferated opportunities for forgery, allowing frauds and scammers to fool the public into accepting and even purchasing their false, underdeveloped "knowledge". It would be no understatement to say that the task of identifying reliable information has become a defining challenge of our time.

A benefit of relegating the generation of knowledge to society at a whole is that each person is then relieved of the burden of keeping it all in mind. Modern knowledge-building has largely been taken from the hands of individual intellectuals and trusted to networks or institutions like science that produce new facts at a rate never before seen in human history. That is not to say that there are no longer knowledgeable individuals, certainly there are, and we have developed an increasing number of cognitive heuristics to identify them when researching new ideas. Signals of expertise include pieces of paper that indicate achievement in the most rigorous institutions of learning, publications in journals that are meticulously reviewed by other experts, and competitive success in the development of products for markets where truth dominates falsity. Heuristics and signals help lead us to good information quickly; that is, to the most reputable people and institutions that have developed knowledge that we would like to make use of despite our inability to create it on our own. Our society depends on the success of these people and institutions, and the comfort with which we repeat the simple, standalone facts we learned in school (which often took loads of time, money, and brilliance to generate) reflects our confidence that they are indeed functioning well.

Psychology as Moral Evasion

I spontaneously picked up Theodore Dalrymple’s “Admirable Evasions – How Psychology Undermines Morality” as an Amazon suggestion because I was grabbed by the subtitle. “Finally,” I thought, “someone to bridge the gap between the psychological description of behaviour and the moral prescription of behaviour”. I’ve made no secret of my amateurish fascination with both pop-psychology and moral philosophy, and it’s always seemed obvious to me that each was lacking the other in its attempt at explanatory completeness. A good combination of the two should provide knowledge of how and why we act and suggest the best ways of responding to that knowledge. Unfortunately – and this has been the struggle with every science that encroaches on morality – the two domains of inquiry seem to operate in different realms, under distinct and incompatible assumptions.

Behavioural psychology takes a cause-and-effect perspective of human behaviour, where the action of the subject is the termination of a long chain of events both inside and outside the body, events which can be identified and used to predict future action. Moral philosophy takes the individual as the starting point of decision-making and places value on the contribution of this individual to the resulting action, enabling what we call moral responsibility. The contradiction between the two modes of thinking should be clear: if behaviour is primarily a product of extenuating circumstances then the contribution of the individual can be shrunk to the point that is disappears; alternatively, if the moral agent is to be held fully responsible, his behaviour should not be predictable by forces outside of those he marshals to make the choice to act. This contradiction has itself been challenged, and I hope to write about the efforts to dissolve it another time. However, I’ve yet to come across what I would consider a seamless resolution.

I googled Dalrymple after placing the order for his book and experienced a moment of apprehension. His list of previously published titles, including but not limited to “Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass,” “In Praise of Prejudice,” and “Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality” triggered the alarm bells of my Left-leaning intuitions. I read about his earlier career as a prison doctor and psychiatrist and wondered how this might have influenced his moral opinions. The book's arrival presented yet another concern – at a slim 119 pages it was hardly long enough to do justice to the title. Nevertheless, I jumped in excited to discover some miraculous turn of phrase that would both assuage my suspicions about the author and illuminate some aspect of the aforementioned conflict that I had missed.

Questions about the Self

Seeing as how I’m all about learning things and being challenged by new ideas (hence this blog), at some point last year I figured I should be doing this stuff in real life too. I searched around my local community for some sort of philosophical discussion group, and although I was surprised at the slim pickings in this supposedly intellectual region, I did end up finding a small group of like-minded people with whom I've been sharing some very enlightening discussions for the past half a year or so. The organizer of the group recently emailed me asking if I would be willing to lead the discussion for the upcoming topic “What is the Self?” and I happily agreed. Here I’ll sketch out some ground I’d like to cover at the meet-up and try to raise some questions that should generate an active discussion.

Contemplating the necessary components.

The first question in any debate about such a nebulous topic is a pedantic one: how do we define our terms? Defining the self can be a cumbersome task though; somewhat like explicating the function of “the” in a sentence, the explanation is disproportionately more difficult than the usage. I thought a better way to get people comfortable talking about themselves would be to flip the question and ask what they would have to lose in order to not be themselves any longer – in other words, what would have to happen for you to become someone else?

Becoming someone else is an idea that makes me uncomfortable to think about. I like me and would prefer to continue being me for as long as possible. But I don’t need to look too far into the past to find someone who occupies not only all of my familiar places but even my body, someone who I hesitate to identify as me. I recognize that at one point this person was me, but whoever he was is distinct from the me that exists currently. Becoming someone else is evidently something I've done before, probably several times at least, and yet it’s something I look forward to doing again with trepidation. On the other hand, some changes seem desirable; for example, I will be in some very subtle way different after the meet-up discussion of this topic – hopefully more informed and knowledgeable. This change doesn't seem as problematic because something necessary is maintained: the periphery is affected but the core remains the same.

Ex Machina - Exploring Artificial Consciousness

"In battle, in the forest, at the precipice in the mountains, 
On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows, 
In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame, 
The good deeds a man has done before defend him."
- Bhagavad Gita

About half a year ago I was roaming though movie trailers on YouTube and was lucky enough to catch a glimpse of Ex Machina, an AI thriller set to be released in early 2015. Opting to check it out in theaters over its conceptual competitor Chappie, I waited patiently for the limited release to expand into my area. Finally it did, and I’m happy to say the film didn't disappoint – a simple plot and a very complex machine made for quite a fun time. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

The film begins with tech employee Caleb Smith winning a contest to visit who is presumably his company’s founder, Nathan, in order to put a new technological breakthrough to the test. The breakthrough is the first functional artificial general intelligence (AGI), and the test is a variant on the famous Turing test – in this case, our lucky lad is to spend a short period of time each day speaking with the AI in order to decide whether or not he thinks it is conscious. Caleb is flown via helicopter to the remote and secluded research facility, where his nonchalant boss encourages him to relax his nerves and treat their time together as time between two normal guys.

An artificial general intelligence is essentially a computer that can successfully perform all of the operations of human cognition. The film’s AI, named AVA, is composed of a gel brain installed into a robot that resembles a human female in shape and function. She (never “it”) is locked within her own section of the facility, consisting of a make-shift bedroom and a corridor leading to the room where the interviews take place. Caleb is able to speak to AVA from the other side of a thick glass wall, and although their first conversation is charming and friendly we get our first ominous undertones as he notices a conspicuous crack in the glass on her side.