I worry that some rationalists, while rejecting wooly dualist ideas about ghosts in the machine, have tacitly accepted the dualists’ baseless assumptions about the gloomy consequences of materialism.
There actually is a way in which they're right.
My first thought was, "You've got it backwards - it isn't that materialism isn't gloomy; it's that spiritualism is even gloomier." Because spiritual beliefs - I'm usually thinking of Christianity when I say that - don't really give you oughtness for free; they take the arbitrary moral judgements of the big guy in the sky and declare them correct. And so you're not only forced to obey this guy; you're forced to enjoy obeying him, and have to feel guilty if you have any independent moral ideas. (This is why Christianity, Islam, communism, and other similar religions often make their followers morally-deficient.)
But what do I mean by gloomier? I must have some baseline expectation which both materialism and spirituality fall short of, to feel that way.
And I do. It's memories of how I felt when I was a Christian. Like I was a part of a difficult but Good battle between right and wrong.
Now, hold off for a moment on asking whet...
I disagree with most of this but vote it up for being an excellent presentation of a complex and important position that must be addressed (though as noted, I think it can be) and hasn't been adequately addressed to satisfy (or possibly even to be understood by) all or most LW readers.
Phil, I suggest, that you try to look at Christian and secular children (and possibly those of some other religions) and decide empirically whether they really seem to differ so much in happiness or well being. Looking at people in a wide range of cultures in situations would in general be helpful, but especially that contrast or mostly, I suspect, lack of contrast.
Phil, I suggest, that you try to look at Christian and secular children (and possibly those of some other religions) and decide empirically whether they really seem to differ so much in happiness or well being.
Children are where not to look. Dogs psychologically resemble wolf-pups; they are childlike. Religion, like the breeding of dogs, is neotenous; it allows retention of childlike features into adulthood. To see the differences I'm talking about, you therefore need to look at adults.
Anyway, if you're asking me to judge based on who is the happiest, you've taken the first step down the road to wireheading. Dogs have been genetically reprogrammed to develop in a way that wires their value system to getting a pat on the head from their master.
The basic problem here is how we can simultaneously preserve human values, and not become wireheads, when some people are already wireheads. The religious worldview I spoke of above is a kind of wireheading. Would CEV dismiss it as wireheading? If so, what human values aren't wireheading? How do we walk the tightrope between wireheads and moral realists? Is there even a tightrope to walk there?
IAWYC except for the last paragraph. While CEV isn't guaranteed to be a workable concept, and while it's dangerous to get into the habit of ruling out classes of counterargument by definition, I think there's a problem with criticizing CEV on the grounds "I think CEV will probably go this way, but I think that way is a big mistake, and I expect we'd all see it as a mistake even if we knew more, thought faster, etc." This is exactly the sort of error the CEV project is built to avoid.
Let me expand upon Vladimir's comment:
Some degree of randomness is necessary to allow exploration of the landscape of possible worlds. CEV is designed to prevent exploration of that landscape.
You have not yet learned that a certain argumentative strategy against CEV is doomed to self-referential failure. You have just argued that "exploring the landscape of possible worlds" is a good thing, something that you value. I agree, and I think it's a reflectively consistent value, which others generally share at some level and which they might share more completely if they knew more, thought faster, had grown up farther together, etc.
You then assume, without justification, that "exploring the landscape of possible worlds" will not be expressed as a part of CEV, and criticize it on these grounds.
Huh? What friggin' definition of CEV are you using?!?
EDIT: I realized there was an insult in my original formulation. I apologize for being a dick on the Internet.
Most likely, all the best optimums lie in places that CEV is designed to keep us away from, just as trilobite CEV would keep us away from human values.
That a "trilobite CEV" would never lead to human values is hardly a criticism of CEV's effectiveness. The world we have now is not "trilobite friendly"; trilobites are extinct!
CEV, as I understand it, is very weakly specified. All it says is that a developing seed AI chooses its value system after somehow taking into account what everyone would wish for, if they had a lot more time, knowledge, and cognitive power than they do have. It doesn't necessarily mean, for example, that every human being alive is simulated, given superintelligence, and made to debate the future of the cosmos in a virtual parliament. The combination of better knowledge of reality and better knowledge of how the human mind actually works may make it extremely clear that the essence of human values, extrapolated, is XYZ, without any need for a virtual referendum, or even a single human simulation.
It is a mistake to suppose, for example, that a human-based CEV process will necessarily give rise to a civilizational value system which attac...
Because EY has specifically said that that must be avoided, when he describes evolution as something dangerous.
That doesn't mean that you can't examine possible trajectories of evolution for good things you wouldn't have thought of yourself, just that you shouldn't allow evolution to determine the actual future.
I don't think there's any coherent way of saying both that CEV will constrain future development (which is its purpose), and that it will not prevent us from reaching some of the best optimums.
I'm not sure what you mean by "constrain" here. A process that reliably reaches an optimum (I'm not saying CEV is such a process) constrains future development to reach an optimum. Any nontrivial (and non-self-undermining, I suppose; one could value the nonexistence of optimization processes or something) value system, whether "provincially human" or not, prefers the world to be constrained into more valuable states.
Most likely, all the best optimums lie in places that CEV is designed to keep us away from
I don't see where you've responded to the point that CEV would incorporate whatever reasoning leads you to be concerned about this.
Groups that didn't/don't value evangelizing their values:
We get into one sort of confusion by using particular values as examples. You talk about valuing human life. How about valuing the taste of avocados? Do you want to evangelize that? That's kind of evangelism-neutral. How about the preferences you have that make one particular private place, or one particular person, or other limited resource, special to you? You don't want to evangelize those preferences, or you'd have more competition. Is the first sort of value the only one CEV works with? How does it make that distinction?
We get into another sort of confusion by not distinguishing between the values we hold as individuals, the values we encourage our society to hold, and the values we want God to hold. The kind of values you want your God to hold are very different from the kind of values you want people to hold, in the same way that you want the referee to have different desires than the players. CEV mushes these two very different things together.
I tend to think that the hazard of perverse response to materialism has been fairly adequately dealt with in this community. OTOH, the perverse response to psychology has not. The fact that something is grounded in "status seeking", "conditioning", or "evolutionary motives" generally no more deprives the higher or more naive levels of validity or reality than does materialism, hence my quip that "I believe exactly what Robin Hanson believes, except that I'm not cynical"
You only included the last sentence of Dawkins' quote. Here's the full quote:
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
The universe is perverse. You have to learn to love it in spite of that.
The universe is perverse. You have to learn to love it in spite of that.
What? Why would you love the indifferent universe? It has to be transformed.
Right. Materialism tells us that we're probably going to die and it's not going be okay; the right way to feel good about it is to do something about it.
Maybe easier, but is it the right thing to do? Obvious analogy is wireheading. See also: Morality as Fixed Computation.
But it seems to me that "loving" the current wasteland is not an appropriate emotion.
Granted. It seems to me that the kernel of truth in the original statement is something like "you are not obligated to be depressed that the universe poorly satisfies your preferences", which (ISTM) some people do need to be told.
Since when has being "good enough" been a prerequisite for loving something (or someone)? In this world, that's a quick route to a dismal life indeed.
There's the old saying in the USA: "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." The sentiment carries just as well, I think, for the universe as a whole. Things as they are may be very wrong indeed, but what does it solve to hate the universe for it? Humans have a long history of loving not what is perfect, but what is broken--the danger lies not in the emotion, but in failing to heal the damage. It may be a crapsack universe out there, but it's still our sack of crap.
By all means, don't look away from the tragedies of the world. Figuratively, you can rage at the void and twist the universe to your will, or you can sit the universe down and stage a loving intervention. The main difference between the two, however, is how you feel about the process; the universe, for better or worse, really isn't going to notice.
The amount of pain in nature is immense. Suffering? I'm not so sure. That's a technical question, even if we don't yet know how to ask the right question. A black widow male is certainly in pain as it's eaten but is very likely not suffering. Many times each day I notice that I have been in pain that I was unaware of. The Continental Philosophy and Women's Studies traditions concern themselves with suffering that people aren't aware of, but don't suggest that such suffering comes in varieties that many animals could plausible experience.
Yes, but that assumes this difference is favorable to your hypothesis. David Foster Wallace from "Consider The Lobster":
Lobsters do not, on the other hand, appear to have the equipment for making or absorbing natural opioids like endorphins and enkephalins, which are what more advanced nervous systems use to try to handle intense pain. From this fact, though, one could conclude either that lobsters are maybe even more vulnerable to pain, since they lack mammalian nervous systems’ built-in analgesia, or, instead, that the absence of natural opioids implies an absence of the really intense pain-sensations that natural opioids are designed to mitigate. I for one can detect a marked upswing in mood as I contemplate this latter possibility...
The entire article is here and that particular passage is here. And later:
...Still, after all the abstract intellection, there remain the facts of the frantically clanking lid, the pathetic clinging to the edge of the pot. Standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any meaningful way that this is a living creature experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/escape the painful experience. To my lay mind, the lobster’s behavior in the kettle
In this last paragraph (which btw is immediately preceded, in the article, by an observation strikingly similar to mine in the grandparent), I would argue that "frantically" and "pathetic" are projections: the emotions they refer to originate in the viewer's mind, not in the lobster's.
We are demonstrably equipped with mental mechanisms whereby we can observe behaviour in others, and as a result of such observations we can experience "ascribed emotions", which can sometimes take on an intensity not far removed from the sensations that originate in ourselves. That's where our intuition that the lobster is in pain comes from.
Later in the article, the author argues that lobsters "are known to exhibit preferences". Well, plants are known to exhibit preferences; they will for instance move so as to face the sun. We do not infer that plants can experience suffering.
We could build a robot today that would sense aspects of its surrounding such as elevated temperature, and we could program that robot to give a higher priority to its "get the hell away from here" program when such conditions obtained. We would then be in a position to observe the robot doing the same thing as the lobster; we would, quite possibly, experience empathy with the robot. But we would not, I think, conclude that it is morally wrong to put the robot in boiling water. We would say that's a mistake, because we have not built into the robot the degree of personhood which would entitle it to such conclusions.
tuning your ears to the words “just” and “merely.”
Indeed! See also this classic essay by Jerry Weinberg on Lullaby Words. "Just" is one of them, can you think of others before reading the essay? ;)
...At the Princeton graduate school, the physics department and the math department shared a common lounge, and every day at four o'clock we would have tea. It was a way of relaxing in the afternoon, in addition to imitating an English college. People would sit around playing Go, or discussing theorems. In those days topology was the big thing.
I still remember a guy sitting on the couch, thinking very hard, and another guy standing in front of him, saying, "And therefore such-and-such is true."
"Why is that?" the guy on the couch asks.
"It's trivial! It's trivial!" the standing guy says, and he rapidly reels off a series of logical steps: "First you assume thus-and-so, then we have Kerchoff's this-and-that; then there's Waffenstoffer's Theorem, and we substitute this and construct that. Now you put the vector which goes around here and then thus-and-so..." The guy on the couch is struggling to understand all this stuff, which goes on at high speed for about fifteen minutes!
Finally the standing guy comes out the other end, and the guy on the couch says, "Yeah, yeah. It's trivial."
We phy
I thought the mathematical terms went something like this:
I assert that it ("obviously" in math) is most often used correctly, but that people spend more time experiencing it used incorrectly -- because they spend more time thinking about it when it is not obvious.
Although I found that scene hilarious, I have actually heard several smart people po-facedly lament the fact that the universe will end with a whimper. If this seriously bothers you psychologically, then your psychology is severely divorced from the reality that you inhabit. By all means, be depressed about your chronic indigestion or the Liberal Media or teenagers on your lawn, but not about an event that will happen in 1014 years, involving a dramatis personae of burnt-out star remnants. Puh-lease. There is infinitely more tragedy happening every second in a cup of buttermilk.
So, what's your argument here? That we shouldn't care about the far future because it is temporally very removed from us? I personally deeply dislike this implication of modern cosmology, because it imposes an upper limit on sentience. I would much prefer that happiness continues to exist indefinitely than that it ceases to exist simply because the universe can no longer support it.
Why should I only emotionally care about things that will affect me?
I don't see any good reason to be seriously depressed about any Far fact; but if any degree of sadness is ever an appropriate response to anything Far, the inevitability of death seems like one of the best candidates.
What I liked in a nutshell:
What would you prefer to be made of, if not matter?
On behalf of chemicals everywhere, I say: Screw you!
If there is a fact question at stake, take no prisoners; but you don’t get extra points for unnecessary angst.
"Love is Wonderful biochemistry."
"Rainbows are a Wonderful refraction phenomena"
"Morality is a Wonderful expression of preference"
And so on. Let's go out and replace 'just' and 'merely' with 'wonderful' and assorted terms. Let's sneak Awesomeness into reductionism.
From what I can tell, my framing depends upon my emotions more than the reverse, though there's a bit of a feedback cycle as well.
That is to say, if I am feeling happy on a sunny day, I will say that the amazing universe is carrying me along a bright path of sunshine and joy, providing light to dark places, and friendly faces to accompany me, and holy crap that sunlight's passing millions of miles to warm our lives, how awesome is that?
But if I am feeling depressed on that very same day, I will say that the sun's radiation is slowly breaking down the atoms of my weak flesh on the path toward decay and death while all energy slips into entropy and... well, who really cares, anyway?
The art of not being perverse consists in seeing the same reality as others and agreeing about facts, but perceiving more in an aesthetic sense.
If emotions drive the words, as I feel they do, then this statement, while true, comes from the bright side: "Say happy things, look at the world in a happy way, and you, too, will be happy!"
My dark side disagrees: "There's yet another happy person telling me I shouldn't be depressed, because they're not, and it's not so hard, is it? Great. Thanks for all your help. "
I can only conclude that if I took them to see Seurat’s painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," they would earnestly ask me what on earth the purpose of all the little dots was.
... which we might call the disappointment of explicability. “A rainbow is just light refracting.” “The aurora is only a bunch of protons hitting the earth’s magnetic field.” Rationalists are, sadly, not immune to this nasty little meme.
It occurred to me upon reading this, that perhaps your analogy about the painting is overlooking something importan...
In my experience, the inability to be satisfied with a materialistic world-view comes down to simple ego preservation, meaning, fear of death and the annihilation of our selves. The idea that everything we are and have ever known will be wiped out without a trace is literally inconceivable to many. The one common factor in all religions or spiritual ideologies is some sort of preservation of 'soul', whether it be a fully platonic heaven like the Christian belief, a more material resurrection like the Jewish idea, or more abstract ideas found in Eastern a...
If we are nothing but matter in motion, mere chemicals, then there are only molecules drunkenly bumping into each other and physicists are superstitious fools for believing in the macroscopic variables of thermodynamics such as temperature and pressure.
I find the philosophical position of "nothing buttery" silly because, in the name of materialist reductionism, it asks us to give up thermodynamics. It is indeed an example of perverse mindedness.
It's said that "ignorance is bliss", but that doesn't mean knowledge is misery!
I recall studies showing that major positive/negative events in people's lives don't really change their overall happiness much in the long run. Likewise, I suspect that seeing things in terms of grim, bitter truths that must be stoically endured has very little to do with what those truths are.
Let's talk about worldviews and the sensibilities appropriate to them. A worldview is some thesis about the nature of reality: materialism, solipsism, monotheism, pantheism, transhumanism, etc. A sensibility is an emotion or a complex of emotions about life.
Your thesis is: rationalist materialism is the correct worldview; its critics say negative things about its implications for sensibility; and some of us are accepting those implications, but incorrectly. Instead we can (should?) feel this other way about reality.
My response to all this is mostly at th...
We are not born into this world, but grow out of it; for in the same way an apple tree apples, the Earth peoples.
Your interpretation of this is overly charitable. The analogy to the apple tree makes it basically teleological; as apples define an apple tree, people define the earth. This phrasing implies a sort of purpose, importance (how important are apples to an apple tree?) and moral approval. Also, "We are not born into this world" is a false statement. And the process by which the earth generates people is pretty much nothing like the way in which an apple tree produces apples.
I take exception to this passage, and feel that it is an unnecessary attack:
I have actually heard several smart people po-facedly lament the fact that the universe will end with a whimper. If this seriously bothers you psychologically, then your psychology is severely divorced from the reality that you inhabit.
On behalf of chemicals everywhere, I say: Screw you! Where would you be without us?
As Monsanto (and some of my user friends :-) ) tells us, "Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible."
More seriously, this post voiced some of the things I've been thinking about lately. It's not that it doesn't all reduce to physics in the end, but the reduction is complicated and probably non-linear, so you have to look at things in a given domain according to the empirically based rules for that domain. Even in chemistry (at least beyond the hydrogen ...
So facts can fester because you only allow yourself to judge them by their truthfulness, even though your actual relation with them is of a nonfactual nature.
One I had problems with: Humans are animals. It's true, isn't it?! But it's only bothering people for its stereotypical subtext. "Humans are like animals: mindless, violent and dirty."
Festering facts?
Bravo for an excellent post!
The one point I want to make is that gloominess is our natural emotional response to many reductionist truths. It is difficult not to see a baseless morality in evolution, hard not to feel worthless before the cosmos, challenging not to perceive meaninglessness in chemical neurology. Perhaps realising the fallacies of these emotional conclusions must necessarily come after the reductionist realisations themselves.
We're evolutionarily optimized for the savannah, not for the stars. It doesn't seem to me that our present selves are really as capable of being effortlessly content with our worldview as some of our forebears were, because we have some lingering Wrong Questions and wrong expectations written into our minds. Some part of us really wants to see agency in the basic causal framework of our lives, as much as we know this isn't so.
Now that's not a final prescription for hopelessness, because we can hope not to be running on the same bug-riddled brainware for ...
I completely disagree with your post, but I really appreciate it. Perhaps as an artful and accurate node of what people who are satisfied or not satisfied with materialism disagree about.
The materialist in me figures from first principles, that it would seem that life has no meaning, morality has no basis, love is an illusion, everything is futile, etc. This is an intellectual and emotional response dove-tailed together. I would say that the intellectual response is first, and the emotional response comes second, because the melancholy is only there if I...
The materialist in me figures from first principles, that it would seem that life has no meaning, morality has no basis, love is an illusion, everything is futile, etc.
Perhaps part of the difference between those who are satisfied/not satisfied with materialism is in what role something other than materialism could play here. I just don't get how any of the non-materialist 'answers' are more satisfying than the materialist ones. If it bothers you that morality is 'arbitrary', why is it more satisfying if it is the arbitrary preferences of god rather than the arbitrary preferences of humans? Just as I don't get how the answer 'because of god' to the question 'why is there something rather than nothing' is more satisfying for some people than the alternative materialist answer of 'it just is'.
As Eliezer says in Joy in the Merely Real:
You might say that scientists - at least some scientists - are those folk who are in principle capable of enjoying life in the real universe.
Why produce new metaphors when we can subvert ones we already know are compelling?
For it is written: The Word of God is not a voice from on High but the whispers of our hopes and desires. God's existence is but His soul, which does not have material substance but resides in our hearts and the Human spirit. Yet this is not God's eternal condition. We are commanded: for the God without a home, make the universe His home. For the God without a body, make Him a body with your own hands. For the God without a mind, make Him a mind like your mind, but worthy of a god. And instill in this mind, in this body, in this universe the soul of God copied from your own heart and the hearts of your brothers and sisters. The Ancients dreamed that God had created the world only because they could not conceive that the world would create God. For God is not the cause of our humility but the unfulfilled aim of our ambition. So learn about the universe so that you may build God a home, learn about your mind so you may build a better one for God, learn about your hopes and desires so that you may give birth to your own savior. With God incarnate will come the Kingdom of God and eternal life.
It has been a while since I've read Watts, but I suspect you're misreading his attitude here. In essence the buddhist (particularly the Zen Buddhist) attitude toward reality is very similar to the materialist view which you endorse. That is, that reality exists, and our opinions about it should be recognized as illusory. This can be confused for nihilism or despair, but really is distinct. Take the universe as it is, and experience it directly, without allowing your expectations of how it should be to affect that experience.
Perhaps he doesn't share thi...
"We are not born into this world, but grow out of it; for in the same way an apple tree apples, the Earth peoples.”
This statement is patently false in many ways and there is no way to justify saying that "the basic idea is indisputably correct". The basic idea that the OP imputed was not derivable from this statement in any way that I can see. Am I missing some crucial bit of context?
Some non-trivial holes: We ARE born into this world; we do not grow out of it in any sense, even metaphorical (though I think many here hope to accomplish the...
I dunno, man, my angst at the state of the universe isn't that it is meaningless, but that it is all too meaningful and horrible and there is no reason for the horror to ever stop.
Alex Rosenberg is arguing for the more gloomy take on materialism.
From amazon:
"His bracing and ultimately upbeat book takes physics seriously as the complete description of reality and accepts all its consequences. He shows how physics makes Darwinian natural selection the only way life can emerge, and how that deprives nature of purpose, and human action of meaning, while it exposes conscious illusions such as free will and the self."
I like to do some plain ole' dissolving of my unupdated concept of the world and asking "What did I value about X (in the unupdated version)?" and compare the result to see if those features are withstanding or not in the updated version. And oftentimes I only care about that which is left unchanged, since my starting-point is often how normality come about rather than what normality is. Come to think of it, this sounds somewhat like a re-phrasing of EY:s stand on reductionism(?).
Strangely relevant: "Hard pill in a chewable form": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmjmFNrgt5k
I worry that some rationalists, while rejecting wooly dualist ideas about ghosts in the machine, have tacitly accepted the dualists’ baseless assumptions about the gloomy consequences of materialism.
The real problem for me has not been that materialism implies in principle that things are going to be gloomy, for example because of lack of free will, souls, consciousness, etc. It is not the rules of physics that I find problematic.
It is the particular arrangement of atoms, the particular initial conditions that are the issue. Things could be good under materialism, but actually, they are going more mixed.
Maybe, that is the problem. Can't you look at a coastline and see the beauty of it without thinking about fractals? Can you not enjoy a flower w/o thinking of Phi?
No, why should I? It adds to the awesomeness of coastlines that they are paradoxically unmeansurable, and that flower leaves grow according to repulsion which results in fibbonachi spiral systems.
I can already do the simple trick of "that's a pretty thing" but when I think about the maths it gets better.
...Also, if by reductionism you are talking about reducing objects down to their i
You are misunderstanding the purposes of this discussion.
I don't have any problems, I can hardly not see anything as beautiful without maths.
But normalfolk are not so fortunate. How do we trick them into thinking that reductionism is cool?
This website is devoted to the art of rationality, and as such, is a wonderful corrective to wrong facts and, more importantly, wrong procedures for finding out facts.
There is, however, another type of cognitive phenomenon that I’ve come to consider particularly troublesome, because it militates against rationality in the irrationalist, and fights against contentment and curiousity in the rationalist. For lack of a better word, I’ll call it perverse-mindedness.
The perverse-minded do not necessarily disagree with you about any fact questions. Rather, they feel the wrong emotions about fact questions, usually because they haven’t worked out all the corollaries.
Let’s make this less abstract. I think the following quote is preaching to the choir on a site like LW:
“The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
-Richard Dawkins, "God's Utility Function," Scientific American (November, 1995).
Am I posting that quote to disagree with it? No. Every jot and tittle of it is correct. But allow me to quote another point of view on this question.
“We are not born into this world, but grow out of it; for in the same way an apple tree apples, the Earth peoples.”
This quote came from an ingenious and misguided man named Alan Watts. You will not find him the paragon of rationality, to put it mildly. And yet, let’s consider this particular statement on its own. What exactly is wrong with it? Sure, you can pick some trivial holes in it – life would not have arisen without the sun, for example, and Homo sapiens was not inevitable in any way. But the basic idea – that life and consciousness is a natural and possibly inevitable consequence of the way the universe works – is indisputably correct.
So why would I be surprised to hear a rationalist say something like this? Note that it is empirically indistinguishable from the more common view of “mankind confronted by a hostile universe.” This is the message of the present post: it is not only our knowledge that matters, but also our attitude to that knowledge. I believe I share a desire with most others here to seek truth naively, swallowing the hard pills when it becomes necessary. However, there is no need to turn every single truth into a hard pill. Moreover, sometimes the hard pills also come in chewable form.
What other fact questions might people regard in a perverse way?
How about materialism, the view that reality consists, at bottom, in the interplay of matter and energy? This, to my mind, is the biggie. To come to facilely gloomy conclusions based on materialism seems to be practically a cottage industry among Christian apologists and New Agers alike. Since the claims are all so similar to each other, I will address them collectively.
“If we are nothing but matter in motion, mere chemicals, then:
The usual response from materialists is to say that an argument from consequences isn’t valid – if you don’t like the fact that X is just matter in motion, that doesn’t make it false. While eminently true, as a rhetorical strategy for convincing people who aren’t already on board with our programme, it’s borderline suicidal.
I have already hinted at what I think the response ought to be. It is not necessarily a point-by-point refutation of each of these issues individually. The simple fact is, not only is materialism true, but it shouldn’t bother anyone who isn’t being perverse about it, and it wouldn’t bother us if it had always been the standard view.
There are multiple levels of analysis in the lives of human beings. We can speak of societies, move to individual psychology, thence to biology, then chemistry… this is such a trope that I needn’t even finish the sentence.
However, the concerns of, say, human psychology (as distinct from neuroscience), or morality, or politics, or love, are not directly informed by physics. Some concepts only work meaningfully on one level of analysis. If you were trying to predict the weather, would you start by modeling quarks? Reductionism in principle I will argue for until the second coming (i.e., forever). Reductionism in practice is not always useful. This is the difference between proximate and ultimate causation. The perverse-mindedness I speak of consists in leaping straight from behaviour or phenomenon X to its ultimate cause in physics or chemistry. Then – here’s the “ingenious” part – declaring that, since the ultimate level is devoid of meaning, morality, and general warm-and-fuzziness, so too must be all the higher levels.
What can we make of someone who says that materialism implies meaninglessness? I can only conclude that if I took them to see Seurat’s painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," they would earnestly ask me what on earth the purpose of all the little dots was. Matter is what we’re made of, in the same way as a painting is made of dried pigments on canvas. Big deal! What would you prefer to be made of, if not matter?
It is only by the contrived unfavourable contrast of matter with something that doesn’t actually exist – soul or spirit or élan vital or whatever – that somebody can pull off the astounding trick of spoiling your experience of a perfectly good reality, one that you should feel lucky to inhabit.
I worry that some rationalists, while rejecting wooly dualist ideas about ghosts in the machine, have tacitly accepted the dualists’ baseless assumptions about the gloomy consequences of materialism. There really is no hard pill to swallow.
What are some other examples of perversity? Eliezer has written extensively on another important one, which we might call the disappointment of explicability. “A rainbow is just light refracting.” “The aurora is only a bunch of protons hitting the earth’s magnetic field.” Rationalists are, sadly, not immune to this nasty little meme. It can be easily spotted by tuning your ears to the words “just” and “merely.” By saying, for example, that sexual attraction is “merely” biochemistry, you are telling the truth and deceiving at the same time. You are making a (more or less) correct factual statement, while Trojan-horsing an extraneous value judgment into your listener’s mind as well: “chemicals are unworthy.” On behalf of chemicals everywhere, I say: Screw you! Where would you be without us?
What about the final fate of the universe, to take another example? Many of us probably remember the opening scene of Annie Hall, where little Alfie tells the family doctor he’s become depressed because everything will end in expansion and heat death. “He doesn’t do his homework!” cries his mother. “What’s the point?” asks Alfie.
Although I found that scene hilarious, I have actually heard several smart people po-facedly lament the fact that the universe will end with a whimper. If this seriously bothers you psychologically, then your psychology is severely divorced from the reality that you inhabit. By all means, be depressed about your chronic indigestion or the Liberal Media or teenagers on your lawn, but not about an event that will happen in 1014 years, involving a dramatis personae of burnt-out star remnants. Puh-lease. There is infinitely more tragedy happening every second in a cup of buttermilk.
The art of not being perverse consists in seeing the same reality as others and agreeing about facts, but perceiving more in an aesthetic sense. It is the joy of learning something that’s been known for centuries; it is appreciating the consilience of knowledge without moaning about reductionism; it is accepting nature on her own terms, without fatuous navel-gazing about how unimportant you are on the cosmic scale. If there is a fact question at stake, take no prisoners; but you don’t get extra points for unnecessary angst.