Snuffing the Spark: A Nihilistic Account of Moral Progress
by rsbakker
If we define moral progress in brute terms of more and more individuals cooperating, then I think we can cook up a pretty compelling naturalistic explanation for its appearance.
So we know that our basic capacity to form ingroups is adapted to prehistoric ecologies characterized by resource scarcity and intense intergroup competition.
We also know that we possess a high degree of ingroup flexibility: we can easily add to our teams.
We also know moral and scientific progress are related. For some reason, modern prosocial trends track scientific and technological advance. Any theory attempting to explain moral progress should explain this connection.
We know that technology drastically increases information availability.
It seems modest to suppose that bigger is better in group competition. Cultural selection theory, meanwhile, pretty clearly seems to be onto something.
It seems modest to suppose that ingroup cuing turns on information availability.
Technology, as the homily goes, ‘brings us closer’ across a variety of cognitive dimensions. Moral progress, then, can be understood as the sustained effect of deep (or ancestrally unavailable) social information cuing various ingroup responses–people recognizing fractions of themselves (procedural if not emotional bits) in those their grandfathers would have killed. The competitive benefits pertaining to cooperation suggest that ingroup trending cultures would gradually displace those trending otherwise.
Certainly there’s a far, far more complicated picture to be told here—a bottomless one, you might argue—but the above set of generalizations strike me as pretty solid. The normativist would cry foul, for instance, claiming that some account of the normative nature of the institutions underpinning such a process is necessary to understanding ‘moral progress.’ For them, moral progress has to involve autonomy, agency, and a variety of other posits perpetually lacking decisive formulation. Heuristic neglect allows us to sidestep this extravagance as the very kind of dead-end we should expect to confound us. At the same time, however, reflection on moral cognition has doubtless had a decisive impact on moral cognition. The problem of explaining ‘norm-talk’ remains. The difference is we now recognize the folly of using normative cognition to theoretically solve the nature of normative cognition. How can systems adapted to solving absent information regarding the nature of normative cognition reveal the nature of normative cognition? Relieved of these inexplicable posits, the generalizations above become unproblematic. We can set aside the notion of some irreducible ‘human spark’ impinging on the process in a manner that makes them empirically inexplicable.
If only our ‘deepest intuitions’ could be trusted.
The important thing about this way of looking at things is that it reveals the degree to which moral progress depends upon its information environments. So far, the technical modification of our environments has allowed our suite of social instincts, combined with institutionally regimented social training, to progressively ratchet the expansion of the franchise. But accepting the contingency of moral progress means accepting vulnerability to radical transformations in our information environment. Nothing guarantees moral progress outside the coincidence of certain capacities in certain conditions. Change those conditions, and you change the very function of human moral cognition.
So, for instance, what if something as apparently insignificant as the ‘online disinhibition effect’ has the gradual, aggregate effect of intensifying adversarial group identifications? What if the network possibilities of the web gradually organizes those possessing authoritarian dispositions, renders them more socially cohesive, while having the opposite impact on those possessing anti-authoritarian dispositions?
Anything can happen here, folks.
One can be a ‘nihilist’ and yet be all for ‘moral progress.’ The difference is that you are advocating for cooperation, for hewing to heuristics that promote prosocial behaviour. More importantly, you have no delusions of somehow standing outside contingency, of ‘rational’ immunity to radical transformations in your cognitive environments. You don’t have the luxury of burning magical holes through actual problems with your human spark. You see the ecology of things, and so you intervene.
Three Pound Brain 
Ugh, human condition spoiler tag yo!
I am a rock chucker at any crystal sphere or construct that argues my individual spirit can be or already is fixed. The Man from the underground and I both are moral or sullen and unpleasant by our own chosen morals. No science can neasure my soul and if it attempts to explain my brain as matter migrating to the best vagina by the span of my seed to make more progeny… Dostoevsky and I will smash through its crystal constraints even it nessisatates our wankers slappiing it down to bloody ruin….
Anyway I WHEN IS YOUR NEXT BOok?!?!? Last I saw they were to dine on snarck and the wizard had been saved with his dsughter tagging along after the dead dragon died and the captain was arrow slain….
I need the next book please!!!!@
God bless you Marine NCO! Soon your wait will end! 🙂
I’m fairly sure that our NCO friend is describing the end of WLW, in which case, the next book, The Great Ordeal (3/4 of The Aspect-Emperor) is out ;).
Welcome to board, Marine! It sounds like you’re describing the end of WLW: if so your wait for The Great Ordeal is over. The conclusion to series is slated to be released next year, so not long now.
What sources are you relying on for ‘prehistoric ecologies characterized by resource scarcity and intense intergroup competition’. You seem pretty positive about this, but my reading in the area revealed pretty complex and unresolved debates (not to mention the inherent lack of certainty in studying deep history, especially social aspects).
Resource scarcity maybe, maybe not – it probably ebbed and flowed. While contested, Marshall Sahlins’ work on this undermined the previous Hobbesian certainties. And yet, Christopher Boehm points out in ‘Moral Origins’ that while it used to be assumed that without large agricultural populations to compete with, Palaeolithic foragers had access to abundant resources, recent advances in palaeoclimatology have taught us that the climate back then was much less stable than we’ve assumed. In turn, while this means less resource certainty, it also means (according to Boehm’s 10-year statistical analysis project) that the most prevalent social form would have been the ‘simple’ nomadic egalitarian mode famously noted in contemporary !Kung. And Raymond Kelly’s book on warless foragers notes that this style of living correlates with lower incidence of protracted conflict, largely due to the recourse to upping and leaving to solve potential conflicts.
Anyway, not that I’ve a clear image to replace your clear image with – just pointing out the lack of clarity in your ‘solid generalisations’. Your argument has some correspondence with Stephen Pinker’s ideas, and his work, while often excellent, seems quite naive and slanted when it comes to the Palaeolithic.
That said, you rightly avoid his naivety regarding our current situation. ‘Better Angels’ came out in 2011, maybe just at the limit of the time where you might be forgiven for being naive about the instability of our global situation – a mistake that’s becoming pretty inexcusable now!
Thanks for the context and welcome to the board, Gyrus–I’m by no means deeply read on the subject and this is precisely the kind of feedback I’m fishing for. This piece is largely plucked from a larger one engaging Allen Buchanan and Russell Powell and the sources they cite in the course of arguing their account of moral progress (which contradicts mine). They advance this claim based on the presumption that group level selection is the best way to explain the degree of cooperativeness we find in humans (all I’ve read here is Bowles and Haidt). This fits with their hypothesis, of course, since militarizing the ingruop/outgroup boundary makes moral progress (what they call ‘inclusivity’) that much more difficult to explain naturalistically. They also concede the relationship between resource scarcity and inclusivity, the way the ingroup passes we hand out to erstwhile competitors requires plenty.
But otherwise, I’ve always been impressed, in all my worldly travels, how every place I visit possesses temples and walls. Migration means war in history: though it’s entirely possible this is a trend that begins with agricultural settlement and the way this anchors groups to territories, the fact that history begins with humans killing humans en masse strongly suggests we’ve been at it for quite some time.
Thanks, will have to follow your trail when I’ve time! I’ve not gone into the evolutionary side much, i.e. group selection. I recall reading Howard Bloom on this (‘The Lucifer Principle’), and reading around that I gathered group selection was still very contraversial among neo-Darwinists. No bad thing sometimes – I imagine, as ever, ‘it’s complex’.
My own background is looking at either violence (https://archive.org/details/WarTheNobleSavage) or cosmological beliefs, and what I’ve learned in both areas is that while the forager / agriculture divide can be complex, and over-simplified through our distance from it, it pays off to pay attention to it. Raymond Kelly’s work goes further and divides foragers into ‘segmental’ and ‘unsegmented’ social arrangements, which relates to the looseness (or otherwise) of kin groupings, and stuff like population density. It’s the basis of his argument that nomadic foragers are generally ‘warless’ (though not categorically ‘peaceful’) – war is based on ‘social substitutability’, i.e. taking a grudge out on anyone in a rival kin group because of something that happened with one or a few people from that group. Nomadic foragers often lack this kind of social consolidation, and conflicts are often solved by moving (in the case of a conflict with neighbours) or splitting (in the case of intra-group conflict). I imagine this entire dynamic would play an important part in group competition / selection theories (and no doubt make theorising harder!).
It’s easy to fall prey to the primitivist simplification that it all went wrong with agriculture. Doubly so because it’s a simplification of a complex truth, rather than an outright falsehood 🙂
There remains the question of how much ‘evolution’ has happened in the past 12,000 years, however small that span is evolutionarily speaking. Lactose tolerance – why not proclivity for violence? Definitely a tricky question.
Have either of you read “Violence and Warfare among Hunter Gatherers” yet? The two articles on Australia provide extensive evidence of chronic warfare on that continent, which was the only one to be exclusively inhabited by nomadic foragers until the late 18th century. Moreover, Azar Gat has demonstrated in “Proving Communal Warfare Among Hunter-Gatherers:
The Quasi-Rousseauan Error” that Australian Aboriginals were engaged in violent conflict in even the most arid regions. Gat also has this to say on the issue of fortifications: “In reality, the picture that emerges
wherever we have both archeological
and ethnographic or historical evidence
on prestate horticultural and
agricultural societies is that some of
the most warlike societies lacked fortifications.
While fortifications are a
sure positive sign of warfare, their
absence is not an indication that ferocious
warfare was not endemic. Settlement
nucleation (and, where
possible, protected location) were sufficient
to counter the most common
and most lethal form of prestate warfare,
the surprise night raid.56,64,65
The following are but a few examples.
As Polybius writes,66:2.17 the ancient
Celts “lived in unwalled villages…
and were exclusively occupied with
war and agriculture.” The Greek
poleis, despite the endemic warfare
among them during the Archaic
period (eighth-sixth centuries BC),
were not surrounded by walls until
well into the fifth century BC. The
same applies to the city-states of Mesoamerica.
In particular, the Classic
Maya, lacking city walls and famously
celebrated by early researchers as
having been peaceful, have been
revealed to have been ferociously belligerent
after the deciphering of their
script.67 The analogy with and lesson
for the prehistoric Levant is all too
obvious.
The ethnographic record from
around the world reveals a similar
picture. For example, the Mae Enga
horticulturalists in highland New
Guinea, whose violent death rate for
adult males was nearly 35%, lived in
clan farmsteads, “defended, literally,
to the last yard”68:2 and lacked fortified
villages. More recently, the nineteenth
century’s Montenegrins, one
of Europe’s last tribal populations,
who had an estimated violent death
rate among adult males of about
25%, built houses with small windows
and thick walls, but no specialized
communal fortifications.69 The
societies of multi-island Polynesia,
long the object of Rousseauan fantasies,
have been shown to have been
rife with violence and warfare.
According to a major study of eighteen
of them, from the largest to the
smallest, not one lacked endemic
warfare.70,71 Nonetheless, fortifications,
though existing in many places,
were far from being evident
everywhere or from correlating with
the intensity of warfare. For example,
“In striking contrast to New Zealand
or Rapa, the Hawaiian Islands –
despite the endemic warfare that
characterized late prehistoric [that
is, ethnographically known] Hawaiian
culture – generally lack fortified
sites.”70:213, 72 In all these cases —the
rates of killings among the African
Bushmen and Canadian mid-Arctic
hunter-gatherers, Polynesian and
Maya warfare, the Natufians, and
many others (including the cause of
the death of Neolithic “Iceman” Otzi, €
an arrowhead discovered in his
shoulder decades after he had been
found) — the surprise discoveries
always go in one direction.
Thanks Jö. I haven’t read those particular articles, but the arguments sound very similar to Lawrence Keeley’s. They involve an elision of all prestate societies, mixing together evidence for agricultural, horticultural, complex hunter-gatherer, simple hunter-gatherer, sedentary, and nomadic cultures – the argument being that there is evidence for endemic warfare among prestate societies, which not many (if any) serious scholars argue against. (I think this in itself is an important part of the debate, casting an argument in terms that no one making it does – a kind of popular fantasy never proposed by scholars, not even Rousseau – and taking it apart on those terms.)
To me the most important rejoinder to this ‘attack’ on the issue is Raymond Kelly’s book, which argues that simple nomadic hunter-gatherers show a lack of proclivity for war. His argument that this style of living is typical of archaic human life (before the Upper Palaeolithic at least) is strongly backed up, I think, by Christopher Boehm’s 10-year statistical survey of all our hunter-gatherer ethnography (although obviously everything dealing with this topic is inherently uncertain and subject to revision – any particular position will be challenged.)
Kelly is careful, though, to argue for ‘warless’ rather than ‘peaceful’ simple hunter-gatherers because he (like all serious scholars) isn’t stupid enough to believe in the Rousseauian straw man of a spotless form of humanity. All humans are violent, it’s a question of degree. I would, though, note a complication to this fact, in that our best quantitative measure – violent deaths per 100,000 per year – is itself sometimes deceptive. ‘Warless’ people such as African Bushmen can evidence murder rates – which don’t escalate into ‘war’ – that rival modern hotspots like Johannesburg. However, the social scale among hunter-gatherers is such that the same per capita murder rate as modern urban hotspots translates to something like one murder every 20-30 years. That’s once a generation. We can’t abandon per capita measures, because absolute measures have even greater problems, but we need to bear in mind this problem with per capita. When you have one murder a generation – without anything slightly resembling police or a state – then everyday social life can be thoroughly friendly and peaceable in a way that doesn’t obtain in modern cities.
Another complicating factor, though – which undermines all positions in the debate pretty much – is the reliability of contemporary evidence for gauging prehistoric life, especially in the deep past. I think Boehm’s arguments for a predominance of simple nomadic hunter-gatherers is good, though obviously we should allow for the rise and fall of other ways of life leaving no archaeological trace, not to mention the temporary, seasonal occurrence of other ways of life (see Graeber and Wengrow’s recent work – http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.12247/abstract). However, when it comes to contemporary evidence for how different societies live, the question of violence is dramatically impacted by colonial contact – which by definition affects all evidence in some way. Impacts actually precede contact, due to trade networks and disease. And while it’s pretty easy to make the case for violence-engendering impacts, there’s also a case for violence-limiting impacts (e.g. colonial enforcement of peace). I’d say the former predominate, but then I would 😉
The case of Australian Aborigines is interesting, although I’ve not read around it much. My impression is that (perhaps because of the isolation) they evolved much more complex kin structures than we find in more peaceable hunter-gatherers, and the potential for entrenched violent disputes created by such structures is significant. There’s also the fact that it seems likely the not only were they complex rather than simple hunter-gatherers, they may not just have been hunter-gatherers either (http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bushtelegraph/rethinking-indigenous-australia's-agricultural-past/5452454). So we’re back into the false dichotomy between state and prestate societies, when the significant barrier is the one between simple and complex hunter-gatherers. Keeley acknowledges that Kelly’s rejoinder was important, lending a positive quote to the book’s cover, but most scholars chipping in to the popular debate cleave to Keely’s framing.
Like I say, though, until some other evolutionary mechanism is found to explain the kinds of altruism you find in human ingroups, group selection really is the only game in town. So even if the evidence between demure groups and competitive groups were split, I would err on the competitive side. Abductive warrant is all we can muster in many of these cases.
Thanks, Jo. Fascinating stuff. It also strikes me as more plausible that history simply picks up where prehistory left off than it suddenly inclined us to killing each other (which remains entirely possible).
The only ‘evolutionary’ aspect of this I’ve gone into a bit is looking at violence among our nearest relatives – and there it’s mixed at best again, with chimp violence offset by bonobo free love. I guess the real frame for my position is the cultural background, i.e. the whiggish Victorian idea of inevitable progress / primitive savagery. That’s so strong in civilisation, I think it deserves careful attention. Even when ‘it was ever thus’ is ostensibly used as an argument against ‘progress’, it can be part of a cultural context justifying ongoing decimation of indigenous people. Of course there’s the danger in my approach of allowing cultural considerations to distort interpretation of scientific facts – even as you try to do the opposite.
As for group competition, one the one hand I often wonder about the fact that so many indigenous self-applied names get translated as ‘humans’ or ‘the people’ – does this mean anything in terms of how outsiders are considered / treated, i.e. are they ‘dehumanised’ in some sense? On the other hand, to what extent does genetic selection at the group level entail violence, and to what extent could fission-and-mobility among nomads lead to selection without endemic inter-group conflict?
Jö, many thanks, the Gat article looks excellent. I’ll have to study it properly later – I read the intro and conclusion, and a fair summary / discussion I found here: https://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/azar-gat-on-war-in-state-of-nature.html
A few thoughts:
– I studied the debate 2006 – 2007. Sounds like I caught things after people like Kelly had dropped some of the more naive ideas of the 20th C., but before sophisticated counters like Gat’s arrived. Between Kelly and Gat it actually seems like the debate has found some productive middle ground, and a lot of the disputes left are about framing and the wider cultural resonance of emphasis given.
– A caveat on that is that R. Brian Ferguson’s surveys of the literature seem to show that the Rousseauians were never as Rousseauian as has been made out. This resonates with Ter Ellingson’s fascinating ‘Myth of the Noble Savage’, which traces that concept and finds that its modern image was actually constructed as a straw man by a racist Victorian.
– It’s very important to emphasise that our sense of the desirability of working for peace shouldn’t rely on its supposed achievability, based on an idea of it being our ‘natural’ state. Probably goes without saying here 🙂
– Gat’s big new contribution seems to be Australian Aboriginal anthropology, though he seems to take its hunter-gatherer purity for granted. I linked to an article about the possibility that horticulture and agriculture had taken root there before contact. There’s a lot of scope between ‘pure’ hunter-gatherer and agriculture, and I imagine that topic is complex.
– Always worth bearing in mind social scale, where statistical death rates from modern violence hotspots can translate in HG contexts to a death every 20-30 years. This ‘statistically dense but experientially sparse’ factor surely has an impact on theories about the impact on evolution, not to mention our image of daily life.
Anyway, I’m revamping my blog at the moment. Catching up on the literature since I wrote http://www.archive.org/details/WarTheNobleSavage will make a good post. Cheers!
You can find the Gat article for free if you search for it on Google Scholar.
Past rounds of techno-commercial evolution brought moral progress. We know moral progress is good because we like it.
Future rounds of techno-commercial evolution lead us into crash space. We’ll go there anyway because… we’ll like it.
Ain’t that the truth…
The comments to the previous post discussed “accumulation of the power to accumulate” at some length. One of the things we do know, from climate history and our own waistlines. is that for most of human history seven fat years would eventually be followed by seven lean years. You could always count on a plague, drought, famine or war to come along. The great thing about expanding your ingroup during the fat years is that larger ingroups can be expected to do better than small ones when it comes time to survive the lean years. Growing your ingroup has historically been one of he best ways to accumulate power to accumulate. If it makes sense to expand our ingroup during the fat years as a hedge against the lean years then anything, like technological progress, that gives us more fat years than lean years will cause us to accumulate larger and larger in groups, in the same way that technological progress allows us to accumulate larger and larger waistlines.
Although for the bulk of our history, many if not most social groups would have had limits placed on their size by nomadism. Infanticide and euthanasia were likely practiced for this reason. Sedentary hunter-gatherers can expand group size more, but there seems to be little evidence for this before the end of the last Ice Age (so far).
In any case, I guess this fits with the thesis about technology, insofar as tech progress (and waistline expansion) was naturally very, very slow until sedentism and agriculture got going in earnest. But it often seems to me that the moral progress associated with tech progress has a kind of twofold ‘arms race’ aspect to it, with advances being necessary to compensate for the extent to which tech progress has regressed social / moral life. Modern tech has begun to get ahead, i.e. make up for a lot of the degradation entailed in agriculture and civilisation. An example in health is that it’s only in the modern period that average heights have returned to the level that agriculture dragged them down from 12,000 years ago.
Gyrus, what’s the basis of agriculture having driven heights down?
I’ve not caught up with the latest research, but I imagine among the see-sawing between polarised positions, and cherry-picking on both sides, the general idea has been borne out. I gather Harari’s book Sapiens generally concurs with the dim view of agriculture’s initial impact, and I’ve always been struck by the way that scholars who can be highly dismissive of hunter-gatherer life (e.g. David Lewis-Williams) often have no argument here.
I disagree with Diamond not just because the title of his article (‘The Worst Mistake in Human History’) is begging to be ‘debunked’ with cherry-picked facts to the contrary, but because it holds up the progressivist myth that we developed agriculture intentionally to improve our lot. But aside from the fact that it worsened our lot (for many millennia at least), everything I’ve read suggests it arose as the side-effect of other efforts (perhaps temple-building at Gobekli Tepe).
Despite metaphysical speculations about How we developed into the morality we are now, we might take the limit of our morality right now and find a certain nihilism involved and just plain fact that you can’t destroy someone who disagrees with you morally. Individually perhaps but I think what we’re learning is that they are dividual is relatively ineffective, that the effectiveness of the individual loses its effectiveness in the same way that 3 pound brain wants to describe this group dynamic, I think because then you have to argue the ability for the individual to exist in a group for it to be able to be called a group, because we have to account for Activity not just theoretical constructs.
In the end if we could destroy that which offends us then we wouldn’t have various ethical groups in competition, The morality of one would hardly be morality if there wasn’t someone else who disagreed with the former morality. And in so much as we don’t destroy it there we have interacting moralities behaving as a group.
I think this is a somewhat better nihilistic account of postmodern ethics.
I kind of don’t know what this post is aiming at, but my own bent towards a ‘moral progress’ is home production of food and sharing it around outside the home. Usually the only way to become cohesive with neighbours is to buy things – basically giving away your money, which as best is only going to happen with disposable income. So growing vegetables is like creating disposable income. Anyway, the idea is that as well as adding to cohesiveness, the very idea of giving for cohesiveness might catch on in some of those given to, causing an outward expansion of the social gluing.
Otherwise currently, due to so many resources and yet (to me) the leaness of disposable income, the way to join a social cohesive is to say the same things as them and state you subscribe to the same beliefs (particularly in internet groups, as there is no way to share actual goods – so the only social currency is thumping the same tub)
Any ideas on how to construct a group, IRL or online, that runs contrary to that, in today’s society? Or, are there accessible groups that exist otherwise, today or historically?
Using Bakker’s definition above, what you’ve described seems a reasonable way to create moral progress. I can’t really think of any way to do it otherwise, which is why I ask. (maybe historically adding in giving of information, but with the internet, that seems mostly moot).
Do you mean ‘inline with’, rather than ‘contrary to’? If so, there’s no organisations that are as prominent as churches or McDonalds, I think. But there are community gardens, seed exchanges, soup buses, gardening guilds, there’s a ‘food is free’ laneway in my city….there’s an underground of giving, out there.
In the end the idea is it’s viral – you give goods and promote the idea of growing and giving goods and maybe someone else takes it up for a time as well, which maybe means someone else takes it up and so on. So it starts from individuals – if there’s a group, that’s the cohesiveness starting to kick in!
In the end though, it’s harder to hate someone who’s given you a potato! As silly as that sounds, it’s still true.
[ I’ll have to caveat and say it’s hard getting up a system of regular production and I’m still working on regular goods output rather than just sporadic output. But my spring onion seedling production is pretty good – I’d offer one or more to all people on TPB if it were physically possible ]
I did mean contrary too though, because you presented your idea as one solution to encourage morale progress, I just can’t think of any other way to do it. You can’t really ‘force’ people to want to work together. And, unfortunately, sharing is hard to do on a large scale, so its a localized solution that stops working in the growing global economy.
Are you Italian? If not, maybe you should be 😉 . Those Italian’s are always giving people food, it makes them happy to feed people (speaking about all the ones I know at least – which largely amounts to my wife’s family).
There is certainly something to it though, giving things, it builds camaraderie, the sharing of food especially I think. I imagine your corner of the neighborhood will be a nicer place for it.
I don’t know how to form a genuine cohesive group without sharing resources (without being Dunyain amongst world born) – there’s no real charity there. I guess it could be resources other than food though – that could be carved wood or even stories. Thing is the person giving the resource needs food to do so. And if they exchange the story for food, then it’s an exchange rather than a charity. Plus also the people receiving stories can’t eat stories – how much can community remain cohesive without food?
I imagine your corner of the neighborhood will be…
I’m disappointed with my production development (my accumulation of the capacity to accumulate, as Scott puts it) over the years. My reach is poor – I’ve had to develop a bunch of growing techniques and the seasonal cycle means the experiments in new techniques take seasons to complete. I should have paid more attention to my mothers vegetable patch as a youth! Dammit!
callan, there’s a woman from canada who was showing an impressive output using containers with windows in them, which she used to produce outisde all year round. all kinds of exotic leafy green vegetables i’ve never heard of. she gave a presentation around here a few years back and implied that the methods could be easily followed. cant remember her name. google found it first hit http://yearroundveggiegardener.blogspot.com/
For reasons probably obvious to you, I’m interested in online communities. I really wish I had a better understanding of how and why such communities form and stay cohesive.
Most of the forums (also wikia/wiki type places are a great example. Reddit as well) that I have seen consist largely of a few people ‘giving’ – generating content, posting, updating, recruiting, etc. – and many many times more people ‘receiving’ / ‘consuming’ said content.
Seems a very precarious balance. Lose a few of those generators, or in your neighborhood the lose of yourself, and the whole thing collapses. Now, since I don’t really believe in altruism (the pure giving of something for nothing), this seems like a system ripe for failure. To bring it all back, it just doesn’t bode well for long term continued morale progress.
My definition of moral progress would be to have something like America in the 80s existing as a choice in the future, safe and separate from whatever techno heaven or hell ends up as the default state. Maybe we just all opt out of consciousness or get gobbled up by those who have in the quest for efficiency.
shades of Rorty, some massive and well-funded technologies are helping to segregate us into smaller and smaller classes while they extract whatever resources they can from us in the process, no?
https://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2016/10/17/tim-wu?nref=121031
https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2016/oct/31/crash-how-computers-are-setting-us-up-for-disaster-podcast
Very cool article on the heuristic limitations of both artificial and human intelligence. Hadford’s examples fit right into the neglect wheelhouse.
The text link is: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/11/crash-how-computers-are-setting-us-up-disaster
we are treading such waters over @
https://installingorder.org/2016/10/28/complexity-management-and-the-information-omnivores-versus-univores-dilemma/
Reblogged this on synthetic zero.
https://theintercept.com/2016/10/13/pentagon-video-warns-of-unavoidable-dystopian-future-for-worlds-biggest-cities/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/03/technology/how-the-internet-is-loosening-our-grip-on-the-truth.html
Scott, I’m convinced now that you are typical of some thinkers who are the producers of one great idea or concept: and, because of this it has become an Idée fixe throughout your posts and fiction. You’re one idea: Medial Neglect (BBT) That we’re ignorant of our ignorance, and yet we revolve in a circle of that ignorance copping to every sundry theory and revelation from myth to reason trying to explain with ignorance what we are in essence ignorant of (i.e., our ignorance is our blindness and inaccessibility of the brain and its processes).
Every essay or post you write revolves around this and only this idea of how we continue to presume an ability (intentionalism) of how to explain things with ignorance of our ignorance. It’s like those unknown unknowns of Bush’s Secretary of State, Rumsfeld. So once you’ve understood your basic concept of ‘medial neglect’ its almost anti-climatic to keep returning to this site and reading the same notions over and over in some eternal repetition of the Idée fixe you’ve insistently been explaining to all who will listen his one Idea from every perspective and angle.
What I’ve repeatedly asked is when will you publish your book and get this out of you system? It’s as if you’re driving yourself into a corner, or at least a circle where you’re trying to explain this to both the common reader and the scientific community when in fact that is impossible. I’ve seen too many comments from your professional clientele (i.e., scientists) seeking you to streamline your case in the neuroscientific jargon they are used too. While others seek the common drift. One has to choose one path or the other as far as the book is concerned. Since ultimately it seems to be you’ve chosen to dismantle the philosophical myths of our time and their reliance on intentionalism, then why not write you book to that? Otherwise I’d skip the sessions of explaining to the common drift the multifarious perspectival approach.
I’m rooting for you, but have a feeling your repeating yourself ad infinitum to an audience that for the most part already perceives your drift. We seek something definitive from you, something better than a continuous array of posts. Get your book finished…
Yes, I’m being my usual preachy self… I think you have it in you to do this. You just have to get over whatever hump is keeping you from finishing that project. Do it. Don’t turn back… get er done!
If I had a nickel… 😉 The site is committed to tailoring ill-fitting clothes. Anyone who isn’t occupying some interstice between incompatible ingroups is committing themselves to cultural irrelevance, I think. The audience problem you mention is a pinch I feel all the time, but it’s just the cost of doing business.
Heuristic neglect is key to understanding intentional cognition in naturalistic terms. Understanding intentional cognition in naturalistic terms is the holy grail of cognitive science. I could be wrong about what it is I think I see, but then I could be right. If I’m right, then I’ve solved one of the great mysteries of our age. Even if I had only a 1% chance of being right, I would have to be mad to ‘get it out of my system’!
Otherwise, I’m far from repeating myself: explaining away moral progress while accounting for its appearance is no small feat! If I have unravelled the riddle of cognition, then it makes sense that it would have something to add to any debate involving cognition. There’s no counting these, and working through them teaches me a little something each time. The work I’ve done here is the whole reason JCS accepted “On Alien Philosophy” (which is why I give a shout out to you all in the acknowledgements). And on top of all this, empirical evidence supporting my position… keeps… mounting…
Thank about it: I have a theory that lets me pivot from the inner to the outer with ease, without any explanatory lacuna. The altitude may be dizzying at times, but I actually have a theory of meaning! one that’s either onto something important, or possesses a near-bottomless capacity to deceive.
That all said, Man-with-a-Hammer syndrome has to be my biggest fear. Never in my life have I held one view for so long.
But you didn’t answer my question: When’s the book coming? We Look Through a Dark Mirror… 🙂
Through the Brain Darkly. I have the manuscript ready to go. I sent the pitch to Punctum more than a year a go, but it took them so long to reply that I lost faith in them. Now that the Journal for Consciousness Studies is coming out with On Alien Philosophy (if not this winter issue, then the summer issue, I’ve been told), and given the glowing feedback I’ve received on it (from the likes of Dennett, no less) I think I should hold out.
Good! Then at least it’s coming sometime in a couple years… good for you!
Or is ‘On Alien Philosophy’ the book in question? What is the acronym JCS stand for… and when is that coming out?
Journal of Counsciousness Studies, I believe :).
would you consider http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/
or are you looking to get paid?
Even if I had only a 1% chance of being right,
Can’t resist a quote!
Jesus, Alfred, count the dead… thousands of people. What’s next? Millions? He has the power to wipe out the entire human race, and if we believe there’s even a one percent chance that he is our enemy…
http://journal.frontiersin.org/journal/psychology/section/cognitive-science
should be published in frontiers, not in punctum or open humanities. well maybe the revised BBT of the appearance of consciousness. i dont know if they publish book length works, i doubt it.
What do you guys think of going with Zero Books?
I was going to suggest Zero if you don’t go OA
Not sure. I just scanned zero’s catalogue. They seem to have more topical ‘applied’ theory where OPEN humanities seems more ontology /philosophy of philosophy stuff which I think would be more geared to BBT. Default to DMF, I’m just an over opinionated guy with an internet connection
I wonder what Scott thinks about this:
https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-a-distraction-from-the-real-one
‘The classical view of perception is that the brain processes sensory information in a bottom-up or ‘outside-in’ direction: sensory signals enter through receptors (for example, the retina) and then progress deeper into the brain, with each stage recruiting increasingly sophisticated and abstract processing. In this view, the perceptual ‘heavy-lifting’ is done by these bottom-up connections. The Helmholtzian view inverts this framework, proposing that signals flowing into the brain from the outside world convey only prediction errors – the differences between what the brain expects and what it receives. Perceptual content is carried by perceptual predictions flowing in the opposite (top-down) direction, from deep inside the brain out towards the sensory surfaces. Perception involves the minimisation of prediction error simultaneously across many levels of processing within the brain’s sensory systems, by continuously updating the brain’s predictions. In this view, which is often called ‘predictive coding’ or ‘predictive processing’, perception is a controlled hallucination, in which the brain’s hypotheses are continually reined in by sensory signals arriving from the world and the body. ‘A fantasy that coincides with reality,’ as the psychologist Chris Frith eloquently put it in Making Up the Mind (2007).”
The rest of the article is interesting as well.
I mentioned before he needs to do a BBT vs Free-energy predictive coding to see where the BBT stacks up with or could add to the FE/PC paradigm. I am going to say it again!
And I’m going to listen again!
I was planning to do this with a review of Clark’s book… It would probably still be a worthwhile review to do.
Interesting piece, though I think he’s clinging to too many residual commitments. I highly recommend Andy Clark’s Surfing Uncertainty or Jacob Hohwy’s (now dated somewhat) The Predictive Mind. I’ve been closely following Frith and Friston for a few years now because I think they are where it’s at. I actually think BBT is entailed by Bayesian brains. Tononi used to interest me, until I realized he was basically a new kind of identity theorist… which this bloke seems to be as well.
not so sure. i dont recall him making too much of an issue about identity in “An Interoceptive Prediction Coding Model of Conscious Presence” (which in fact contains one of the ONLY cognitive models out there of affective depersonalization)
The reigning in of, presumably, continually expanding hypotheses is a interesting one. I think maybe if you try and stop the hypotheses like removing oil from between the gears that are the mind and the gears that are the world – without oil, they grind against each other.
But the continual expansion of hypotheses – reminds me of Conphas and his feelings of being a god.
i just remember that paper by brassier where hes talking about NORMATIVE ATTITUDES being the “motor of modernity”. i am like you gotta be kidding me!
Ghost motors!
to me it that information proliferation and diffusion cracks the skull of the world open. i remmeber having this experience at the age of 6 or so where all beliefs started to looking exchangable and interchangable to me as i was cycling through the list of cosmogenies and political ideologies that i was finding in my encyclopedia
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