Skinner was correct that mind, intentionality, thought, desire, etc, are unscientific. Where behaviorism went wrong was ascribing behavior to conditioning and underplaying the role of biology (although Skinner never denied the importance of biology; unlike Chomsky and the computationalists). I'd accuse computationalism of being "cryptodualism" except that Chomsky's project was explicitly Cartesian and was only non-dualistic in the sense that he believed the laws of physics would have to change to incorporate non-biological computational models of the mind.

If your view is simply that the brain is performing computations and that it makes sense to talk about them in terms of algorithms then that's fine. I have no problem with that. If you're going to argue, as some philosophers do, that this somehow vindicates "the mind" and the posits of folk psychology then you're making a very different argument altogether. Skinner's belief that intentionality is on par with Aristotelian teleological physics is perfectly compatible with the first view. The notion that calling the brain a computer and talking about algorithms naturalizes dualism (i.e., the algorithms are the mind and the brain is the implementation), on the other hand, is pure mysticism.

I wouldn't want to be a wirehead. I do things like exercise to keep my mood up now but I think of it terms of wanting to be productive rather than happy. (I find that exercise, health and regular sleep/wake cycles are essential for this.) If you could wire me up to be smarter and more productive (intellectually), but the cost was chronic pain, I'd probably sign up for that. (I can't really imagine how you could reconcile higher productivity with chronic pain though; the experience of pain seems to necessarily involve restricted attention.)

Andy Wood,

I'm just curious - was the despair about anything? Did it have no referent at all? You had a stable environment, good relationship with parents, self-confidence, social success, and yet still despaired? Was there no consistent content in your despairing thoughts?

I had all those things. Before I became depressed I stopped being sociable and started having problems with school attendance; I don't know if that was the cause of my depression or just an early development of it. I was certainly very bored at school and my home environment didn't offer any alternative intellectual stimulation. But, whether these things caused my depression or not, I can honestly say that I never felt it had any content. Even when the depression caused problems in my life I found the depression itself more overwhelming than the problems. I tend to be very unaffected by life events even now actually. I've considered that perhaps I had two problems and one of them was/remains an inability to fully appreciate consequences.

I've suffered from clinical depression with absolutely zero correlation to social factors and life circumstances. Between onset at age 11 and my early 20s I experience pervasive, uninterrupted despair. Oddly enough, it never affected my goals or terminal values, just my ability to achieve them. Then again, many people (perhaps the majority) die with many of the same goals they had in their youth, having done absolutely no work toward achieving them; so I'm not convinced explicitly held goals have a strong causal relation to behavior; perhaps having a goal is like getting a tattoo. But I digress. Biology matters a lot. I wouldn't say clinical depression is the same as being unhappy about something; even at the most basic level, there's obviously a lot more going on when someone's unhappy about a life event than if they have wonky receptors for some neurotransmitter or another. (I never experienced the sort of confabulation that makes the clinically depressed try to attach their depression to life events though; perhaps because I was young.) I think we could achieve some working simulacrum of happiness biologically though.

What could be more exciting than embracing nihilism?

"Should" has obvious non-moral uses: you should open the door before attempting to walk through it. "Right" and "better" too: you need the right screwdriver; it's better to use a torque driver. We can use these words in non-problematic physical situations. I think this makes it obvious that morality is in most cases just a supernatural way of talking about consequences. "You shouldn't murder your rival" implies that there will be negative consequences to murdering your rival. If you ask the average person they'll even say, explicitly, that there will be some sort of karmic retribution for murdering your rival; bad things will happen in return. It's superstition and it's no more difficult to reject than religious claims. Don't be fooled by the sophisticated secularization performed by philosophers; for most people morality is magical thinking.

So, yes, I know something about morality; I know that it looks almost exactly like superstition exploiting terminology that has obvious real world uses. I also know that many such superstitions exist in the world and that there's rarely any harm in rejecting them. I know that we're a species that can entertain ideas of angry mountains and retributive weather, so it hardly surprises me that we can dream up entities like Fate and Justice and endow them with properties they cannot possibly have. We can find better ways for talking about, for example, the revulsion we feel at the thought of somebody murdering a rival or the sense of social duty we feel when asked to give up our seat to a pregnant woman. We don't have to accept our first attempt at understanding these things and we don't have to make subsequent theories to conform to it either.

As I said previously, I think "moral progress" is the heroic story we tell of social change, and I find it unlikely that these changes are really caused by moral deliberation. I'm not a cultural relativist but I think we need to be more attuned to the fact that people inside a culture are less harmed by its practices than outsiders feel they would be in that culture. You can't simply imagine how you would feel as, say, a woman in Islam. Baselines change, expectations change, and we need to keep track of these things.

As for democracy, I think there are many cases where democracy is an impediment to economic progress, and so causes standards of living to be lower. I doubt Singapore would have been better off had it been more democratic and I suspect it would have been much worse off (nowadays it probably wouldn't make a lot of difference either way). Likewise, I think Japan, Taiwan and South Korea probably benefited from relative authoritarianism during their respective periods of industrialization.

My own perspective on electoral democracy is that it's essentially symbolic and the only real benefit for developing countries is legitimacy in the eyes of the West; it's rather like a modern form of Christianization. Westerners tend to use "democracy" as a catch-all term for every good they perceive in their society and imagine having an election will somehow solve a country's problems. I think we'd be better off talking about openness, responsiveness, lawfulness and how to achieve institutional benevolence rather than elections and representation.

Now, you could argue that because I value things like economic progress, I have a moral system. I don't think it's that clear cut though. One of the distinctive features of moral philosophy is that it's tested against people's supposed moral intuitions. I value technological progress and growth in knowledge but, importantly, I would still value them if they were intuitively anti-moral. If technological progress and growth in knowledge were net harms for us as human beings I would still want to maximize them. I think many people here would agree (although perhaps they've never thought about it): if pursuing knowledge was somehow painful and depressing, I'd still want to do it, and I'd still encourage the whole of society to be ordered towards that goal.

I remember first having this revelation as something along the lines of: "You know when you're in love or overcome by anger, and you do stupid things, and afterward you wonder what the hell you were thinking? Well, your 'normal' emotional states are just like that, except you never get that moment of reflection to wonder what the hell you were thinking." I tried to resolve it with the kind of reflective deliberation that I think you're prescribing here. Later I adopted a sort of happy fatalism: We're trapped inside our own psychology and that's fine!

Not long after, I read the obscurantist French philosopher Alain Badiou (who I do not recommend!), and was inspired by his account of truth. Badiou takes truth to be "fidelity to the event." We are witness to a transformative event and take it upon ourselves to alter the world in its name. What I realized was (and not to disappoint my fans) the only thing that can interrupt business-as-usual for us is science. Science is the only thing truly alien to us; it's the only thing that can rupture the fatalistic clockwork playing-out of our psychology on our environment. The potential of science lies in its ability to transform us. So I adopted a sort of utilitarianism where the goal is to maximize the amount of science being done and maximize the degree to which it transforms our lives.

That's enough morality for me.

Unknown and Hopefully Anonymous, If basing your beliefs on established science and systematically rejecting every incompatible methodology is "religion" then stick a ridiculous hat on my head and call me the Pope of Reality.

I don't buy this sort of skepticism at all. Yes, we can imagine that the external world in an illusion, but the basic flaw is (like so much in philosophy) privileging our ability to imagine something over science. Whether we can be deceived in this way is an empirical matter. Yes, you can say "everything you learned about empirical science is part of the illusion," but all you've done is taken your ability to imagine an outcome and privileged that above scientific experiment. Science always trumps imagination. It is therefore, I think, impossible to formulate the skeptical thesis.

This is difficult to think about. Philosophy has given us a view of the world where perception is essentially a subset of imagination. We have pictures in our head and sometimes, if we're lucky, they correspond to the world. The scientific view of perception, however, is that it's just physics-as-usual. The philosophical story is an a priori psychology; if you reject the a priori, yet still buy that story, then you haven't doubted "all the branches and leaves of that root" sufficiently. The scientific story of perception involves photons and receptors and neurons and macromolecules and all that good stuff. It can't be used to call those things into doubt.

The correct view of all this is a (restricted) Quinean one: You have to accept the ontology of science as basic ontology. Science undermines our methods of determining other (metaphysical) ontologies (i.e., a priori reasoning); in everything we do, beginning with thought and perception, science should be our starting point. Nothing we know about thought and perception can undermine what we know about physics and chemistry and molecular biology because thought and perception are high-level areas of biology: everything we know about them is based on scientific ontology. No skeptical theses that undermines science can be constructed (science, however, can still undermine our common sense view of the world) and without skepticism epistemology reduces to neurobiology and sociology.

This is the difficult part: Even if it's empirically possible to totally deceive somebody, to run a simulation of them inside a supercomputer and manipulate their entire life and history, we still have no reason to doubt science. Personally I doubt that this is possible. I think the whole concept of a "subjectively real" simulation is a basic error of reasoning and I doubt that cognition and memory can be so arbitrarily manipulated anyway. Regardless, if my doubts turn out to be unfounded, it will be empirical science that proves them unfounded and the argument itself will only be as strong as empirical science itself. We cannot formulate this argument based on what we can merely imagine happening to ourselves.

Descartes had it backwards. If he'd thrown out "I think therefore I am" and taken the new physics and mathematics as his starting point he would have had a very powerful form of naturalism on his hands. A naturalism that doubts common sense and accepts science as the starting point of all reason. As I like to say, there's no distance between ourselves and the world, what happens at the retina is no more privileged than what happens at the microscope or the voltage clamp. We can just as easily take those as our starting point.