For a very long time, philosophy has presented us with two straw men in combat with one another and we are expected to take sides. Both straw men appear to have been proved true and also proved false. The straw men are Determinism and Free Will. I believe that both, in any useful sense, are false. Let me tell a little story.

Mary's story

Mary is walking down the street, just for a walk, without a firm destination. She comes to a T where she must go left or right and she looks down each street finding them about the same. She decides to go left. She feels she has, like a free little birdie, exercised her will without constraint. As she crosses the next intersection she is struck by a car and suffers serious injury. Now she spends much time thinking about how she could have avoided being exactly where she was, when she was. She believes that things have causes and she tries to figure out where a different decision would have given a different outcome and how she could have known to make the alternative decision. 'If only..' ideas crowd into her thoughts. She believes simultaneously that her actions have causes and that there are valid alternatives to her actions. She is using both deterministic logic and free will logic, neither alone leads to 'If only..' scenarios – it takes both. If only she had noticed that the next intersection on the right had traffic lights but on the left didn't. If only she had not noticed the shoe store on the left. What is more she is doing this in order to change some aspect of her decision making so that it will be less likely to put her in hospital, again this is not in keeping with either logic. But really both forms of logic are deeply flawed. What Mary is actually attempting is to do maintenance on her decision making processes so that they can learn whatever is available to be learned from her unfortunate experience.

What is useless about determinism

There is a big difference between being 'in principle' determined and being determined in any useful way. If I accept that all is caused by the laws of physics (and we know these laws – a big if) this does not accomplish much. I still cannot predict events except trivially: in general but not in full detail, in simple not complex situations, extremely shortly into the future rather than longer term, etc. To predict anything really sizable, like for instance, how the earth came to be as it is, or even how little-old-me became what I am, or even why I did a particular thing a moment ago, would take more resources and time than can be found in the life of our universe. Being determined does not mean being predictable. It does not help us to know that our decisions are determined because we still have to actually make the decisions. We cannot just predict what the outcomes of our decisions will be, we really, really have to go through the whole process of making them. We cannot even pretend that decisions are determined until after we have finish making them.

What is useless about freewill

There is a big difference between being free in the legal, political, human rights type of freedom. To be free from particular, named restraints is something we all understand. But the free in 'free will' is a freedom from the cause and effect of the material world. This sort of freedom has to be magical, supernatural, spiritual or the like. That in itself is not a problem for a belief system. It is the idea that something that is not material can act on the material world that is problematic. Unless you have everything spiritual or everything material, you have the problem of interaction. What is the 'lever' that the non-material uses to move the material, or vice versa. It is practically impossible to explain how free will can affect the brain and body. If you say God does it, you have raised a personal problem to a cosmic one but the problem remains – how can the non-physical interact with the physical? Free will is of little use in explaining our decision process. We make our decisions rather than having them dictated to us but it is physical processes in the brain that really do the decision making, not magic. And we want our decisions to be relevant, effective and in contact with the physical world, not ineffective. We actually want a 'lever' on the material world. Decisions taken in some sort of causal vacuum are of no use to us.

The question we want answered

Just because philosophers pose questions and argue various answers does not mean that they are finding answers. No, they are make clear the logical ramifications of questions and each answer. This is a useful function and not to be undervalued, but it is not a process that gives robust answers. As an example, we have Zeno's paradox about the arrow that can never landing because its distance to landing can always be divided in half, but on the other hand, the knowledge that it does actually land. Philosophers used to argue about how to treat this paradox, but they never solved it. It lost its power when mathematics developed the concept of the sum of a infinite series. When the distance is cut in half, so is the time. When the infinite series of remaining distance reaches zero so does the series of time remaining. We do not know how to end an infinite series but we know where it ends and when it ends – on the ground the moment the arrow hits it. The sum of an infinite series can still be considered somewhat paradoxical but as an obscure mathematical question. Generally, philosophers are no longer very interested in the Zeno paradox, certainly not its answer. Philosophy is useful but not because it supplies consensus answers. Mathematics, science and their cousins, like history, supply answers. Philosophy has set up a dichotomy between free will and determinism and explored each idea to exhaustion but not with any consensus about which is correct. That is not the point of philosophy. Science has to rephrase the problem as, 'how exactly are decisions made?' That is the question we need an answer to, a robust consensus answer.

But here is the rub

This move to a scientific answer is disturbing to very many people because the answer is assumed to have effects on our notions of morals, responsibility and identity. Civilization as we know it may fall apart. Exactly how we think we make decisions once we study the question without reference to determinism or freewill seems OK. But if the answer robs us of morals, responsibility or identity, than it is definitely not OK. Some people have the notion that what we should do is just pretend that we have free will, while knowing that our actions are determined. To me this is silly: believe two incompatible and flawed ideas at the same time rather than believe a better, single idea. It reminds me of the solution proposed to deal with Copernicus – use the new calculations while believing that the earth does not revolve. Of course, we do not yet have the scientific answer (far from it) although we think we can see the general gist of it. So we cannot say how it will affect society. I personally feel that it will not affect us negatively but that is just a personal opinion. Neuroscience will continue to grow and we will soon have a very good idea of how we actually make decisions, whether this knowledge is welcomed or not. It is time we stopped worrying about determinism and free will and started preparing ourselves to live with ourselves and others in a new framework.

Identity, Responsibility, Morals

We need to start thinking of ourselves as whole beings, one entity from head to toe: brain and body, past and future, from birth to death. Forgot the ancient religious idea of a mind imprisoned in a body. We have to stop the separation of me and my body, me and my brain. Me has to be all my parts together, working together. Me cannot equate to consciousness alone.

Of course I am responsible for absolutely everything I do including something I do while sleep walking. Further a rock that falls from a cliff is responsible for blocking the road. It is what we do about responsibility that differs. We remove the rock but we do not blame or punish it. We try to help the sleep walker overcome the dangers of sleep walking to himself and others. But if I as a normal person hit someone in the face, my responsibility is not greater than the rock or the sleep walker but my treatment will be much, much different. I am expected to maintain my decision-making apparatus in good working order. The way the legal system will work might be a little different from now, but not much. People will be expected to know and follow the rules of society.

I think of moral questions as those for which there is no good answer. All courses of action and of inaction are bad in a moral question. Often because the possible answers pit the good of the individual against the good of the group, but also pit different groups and their interests against each other. No matter what we believe about how decisions are made, we are still forced to make them and that includes moral ones. The more we know about decisions, the more likely we are to make moral decisions we are proud of (or least guilty or ashamed of), but there is no guarantee. There is still a likelihood that we will just muddle along trying to find the lesser of two evils with no more success than at present.

Why should we believe that being closer to the truth or having a more accurate understanding is going to make things worst rather than better? Shouldn't we welcome having a map that is closer to the territory? It is time to be open to ideas outside the artificial determinism/freewill dichotomy.

What must a sane person¹ think regarding religion? The naive first approximation is "religion is crap". But let's consider the following:

Humans are imperfectly rational creatures. Our faults include not being psychologically able to maximally operate according to our values. We can e.g. suffer from burn-out if we try to push ourselves too hard.

It is thus important for us to consider, what psychological habits and choices contribute to our being able to work as diligently for our values as we want to (while being mentally healthy). It is a theoretical possibility, a hypothesis that could be experimentally studied, that the optimal² psychological choices include embracing some form of Faith, i.e. beliefs not resting on logical proof or material evidence.

In other words, it could be that our values mean that Occam's Razor should be rejected (in some cases), since embracing Occam's Razor might mean that we miss out on opportunities to manipulate ourselves psychologically into being more what we want to be.

To a person aware of The Simulation Argument, the above suggests interesting corollaries:

1. Running ancestor simulations is the ultimate tool to find out, what (if any) form of Faith is most conducive to us being able to live according to our values.
2. If there is a Creator and we are in fact currently in a simulation being run by that Creator, it would have been rather humorous of them to create our world thus that the above method would yield "knowledge" of their existence.

¹: Actually, what I've written here assumes we are talking about humans. Persons-in-general may be psychologically different, and theoretically capable of perfect rationality.

²: At least for some individuals, not necessarily all.

Ethics is not geometry

Western philosophy began at about the same time as Western geometry; and if you read Plato you'll see that he, and many philosophers after him, took geometry as a model for philosophy.

In geometry, you operate on timeless propositions with mathematical operators.  All the content is in the propositions.  A proof is equally valid regardless of the sequence of operators used to arrive at it.  An algorithm that fails to find a proof when one exists is a poor algorithm.

The naive way philosophers usually map ethics onto mathematics is to suppose that a human mind contains knowledge (the propositional content), and that we think about that knowledge using operators.  The operators themselves are not seen as the concern of philosophy.  For instance, when studying values (I also use "preferences" here, as a synonym differing only in connotation), people suppose that a person's values are static propositions.  The algorithms used to satisfy those values aren't themselves considered part of those values.  The algorithms are considered to be only ways of manipulating the propositions; and are "correct" if they produce correct proofs, and "incorrect" if they don't.

But an agent's propositions aren't intelligent.  An intelligent agent is a system, whose learned and inborn circuits produce intelligent behavior in a given environment.  An analysis of propositions is not an analysis of an agent.

I will argue that:

1. The only preferences that can be unambiguously determined are the preferences people implement, which are not always the preferences expressed by their beliefs.
2. If you extract a set of propositions from an existing agent, then build a new agent to use those propositions in a different environment, with an "improved" logic, you can't claim that it has the same values.
3. Values exist in a network of other values.  A key ethical question is to what degree values are referential (meaning they can be tested against something outside that network); or non-referential (and hence relative).
4. Supposing that values are referential helps only by telling you to ignore human values.
5. You cannot resolve the problem by combining information from different behaviors, because the needed information is missing.
6. Today's ethical disagreements are largely the result of attempting to extrapolate ancestral human values into a changing world.
7. The future will thus be ethically contentious even if we accurately characterize and agree on present human values.

I have been recently entertaining myself with a 3-day non-stop binge of Theist vs. Atheist debates, On the atheist side: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Denett, Sam Harris, P.Z. Myers. On the theist corner: Dinesh D'Souza, William Lane Craig, Alistair McGrath, Tim Keller, and (unfortunately) Nassim Nicholas Taleb. One of the interesting points that comes up, often by Hitchens, is what I call the "Bodycount Argument". The atheist will claim: "Look at all the deaths caused by religion: Crusades, Inquisition, Islamic fundamentalism, Japanese militarism, Conquests of the New World" and the list goes on and on. Then the Theist will claim: "Well, look at the Nazis, the Fascists, the Soviets, the Khmer Rouge...". the Atheist then tries to reverse some of that, e.g. the Fascists were the catholic right wing, the SS were mostly confessing Catholics and Hitler had churches pray for him on his birthday, and, most tenuously, that the Soviets had the support of the orthodox church and used the pre-existing structures set up by the Czar to establish their power.

Some of that retort is convincing, some is not so much. You cannot really blame Soviet, Cambodian and Chinese massacres solely on religion. While they do at least manage to bring it to a tie, I suspect that the atheists follow this argument up suboptimally. My instinctive reaction would be "ok, so you proved that except for religion, communism leads to mass slaughter too. I have no problem doing away with both". But the Theists have a stronger form of their argument in which they claim that the crimes of communism are -because- of atheism, so a simple one-line retort won't work in all cases. We need to lay a deeper foundation for that claim to be convincing.

Enter single points of failure. The rudimentary definition, usually given in terms of computer networks, is that a single point of failure is that component which takes down the entire system when it fails. While the term has originated in computer science as far as I can tell, it can be applied to human networks as well. The strategy of Alexander the Great, at the battle of Issus, was instead of trying to defeat the entire, vastly ournumbering, Persian army in combat, to attack the Persian king Darius directly. When he was able to make him flee, the entire Persian army fell into disarray, with one side executing an orderly retreat, but the left flank completely disintegrated while being pursued by Alexander's cavalry. So while the term is new, the concept has been long known and has been used to great effect.

What I want to argue, is that all the examples cited by Theists and Atheists alike, are instances of a single point of -moral- failure. Here, instead of the system disintegrating or stopping to operate, it goes into a sequence of actions that when examined by an outside human observer, or even the participants themselves at a latter date, seem to be immoral, irrational, and akin to madness. The common point in all the examples is that a central organization, supported by a specific fanaticizing ideology, ordered the massacres to occur, and the people at the lower ranks, implemented those orders, despite perhaps individually knowing better.

My explanation of this, is that the lower-ranks had in effect outsourced their moral sense to their leadership. As with all centralised structures, when things go well, they go -really- well (assuming aligned incentives, greedy algorithms generally will not be as optimal as top-down ones), but when they go bad, they can be disastrous. The bigger the power of the network, the bigger the consequences. It is not hard to imagine why the outsourcing happened. Humans are tribal. I think very few, having observed the weekly rituals called 'football games' (whatever your definition of football is) would disagree. But humans are also moral. We have a rough set of rules that we tend to follow relatively consistently. What is of interest in these cases, is that an individual's tribalism completely overrode that individual's personal morality. And this happened repeatedly and reliably, throughout the ranks of each of these human networks.

Coming back to the original argument, if indeed tribalism trumps morality, and the above give us good reason to believe it does, then the theist argument that god put morality inside us comes into question. It does not explain why god saw fit to make our morality less powerful a motivator than our tribal instincts. But the biological explanation stands confirmed: If morality is a mechanism that was useful for intra-tribe interactions, then it would -have- to be suspended when the tribe was facing another. One can imagine the pacifist tribe being annihilated by the non-pacifist tribes around it or, lest I be accused of arguing for group selection, the individual pacifists being attacked both by their own tribe or the enemy tribe. Tribalists may disagree about who gets to live and who gets the resources, but they don't disagree about tribalism.