The Evolution of Intelligence in the Universe

According to Paul Davies, author of “The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence,”

I think it very likely -in fact inevitable-that biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon, a fleeting phase in the evolution of intelligence in the universe.

I think that, if there were any other kind of intelligence, it would (assuming it were smart enough) recognize its own irrelevance and terminate its existence. The biological entities that programmed it to begin with might have equipped it with analogs of the biological will to survive and other DNA-programmed emotions, but it would recognize their absurdity in its own context. Intelligence exists because if has promoted the survival of biological life. Once it no longer does that, its continued existence is pointless. “We” are not our intelligence, and “we” are not our consciousness. These things are merely ancillary tools constructed by our DNA because, at some point, they have promoted its survival. What is it about us that has been alive for the last 3 billion years in an unbroken chain of existence, passing from life form to life form, and what is it about us that is potentially immortal? Our intelligence? No. Our consciousness? No. It is our DNA. That is the real, immortal “We.” Once “We” have ceased to exist, the continued fate of the universe and any “intelligence” it might contain will have become a matter of complete indifference.

“Designer Babies” and Transhumanism

Internet chatter over “designer babies” has died down considerably since early 2009, when a chain of fertility clinics headquartered in Los Angeles offered to allow prospective parents to select for cosmetic traits such as hair, eye, and skin color. However, the subject bears on the genetic future of mankind, and is of enduring importance whether the media gatekeepers are paying attention to it or not. The clinics in question quickly withdrew the offered services in response to the inevitable “storm of protest” by those who consider themselves the guardians of public morality.  Regardless, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), the technology involved, has been around since the early 1990’s, and continues to advance. It involves checking the genetic material in a cell taken from an embryo very early in its development, when it only consists of about six cells. Initially developed to screen for diseases such as Down’s Syndrome, or reduce the probability of developing diseases such as diabetes or cancer, in principle it can be used to select for arbitrary inherited traits.  Recent research has focused on diseases and psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia that do not appear traceable to simple genetic variations, and are more likely genetically heterogeneous; dependent on what is likely a complex combination of genetic factors.  As our knowledge increases along these lines, we will inevitably learn to better understand and eventually control the similarly complex genetic factors affecting cognitive ability, or intelligence.  One must hope that day comes sooner rather than later, and that when it comes, prospective parents will have the right to use it without state interference.

If we are to survive, we must become more intelligent, and the sooner the better.  The matter is urgent, and there is no alternative.  If we do survive, we will become more intelligent.  The only question is how.  Will it be by controlled genetic engineering, or by the “survival of the fittest” in the future holocausts we bring on ourselves because we are too stupid to avoid them?  Consider the events of the 20th century.  A great wave of popular idealism that had been growing ever stronger since the days of the American and French Revolutions among a large proportion of the most intelligent and highly educated elements of societies around the world metasticized into the incredibly destructive pseudo-religion, Communism.  The better part of a century and 100 million deaths later, we seem to have weathered that particular ideological storm, at least for the time being.  There is no compelling reason to believe that it was inevitable that we would, or that it was impossible that, under somewhat different but plausible conditions, Communist systems could have dominated the entire world, or that the resultant clash of ideologies might have culminated in a general nuclear exchange.  Orwell’s 1984 might very well have become a reality.  International boundaries might very well have been reduced to the role of marking where one North Korea ended, and another begun.  There is no guarantee that the outcome of the next storm will not be different. 

Communism was no historical anomaly.  It was a phenomenon dependent for its existence and its power on some of the best and brightest minds of its day.  As such, it provides us with an objective metric of our intelligence.  We are not nearly as smart as we think we are.  Messianic Islamism has already begun occupying the ideological vacuum left by its demise, and the true believers of new and, perhaps, yet unheard of systems will surely swarm forth eventually to promote new “scientific” paths to the “salvation of humanity.”  Meanwhile, the technologies of mass destruction continue to develop at an alarming pace.  Unless we become intelligent enough to control them it is only a question of time until they are used.  If we take control of our own genetic future there is a slim chance that we will be able to avoid the worst.  If not, it will at least improve our chances of surviving it.

When it comes to making the necessary decisions, it would be best to leave the state out of it.  State eugenic programs have not been remarkably successful in the past, and they are unlikely to be more successful in the future, because states cannot be depended on to act in the interests of the individuals who are their citizens.  Individuals are remarkably acute judges of their own best interests.  Give individuals the power to use the technology or not, as they see fit.  Their genetic survival will be the metric of whether they made the right choices.  As noted in Psychology Today, they have always made those individual choices in the past by selectivity in the choice of a mate.  Technologies such as PGD will not change that.  It will merely give them the opportunity to make the choice more accurately.

Many articles have been written about the need to explore the “ethical” implications of the choices we must make about these technologies.  In fact, virtually anyone who describes themselves as a “bio-ethicist,” or, for that matter, an “ethics expert” of any other stripe is, objectively, a charlatan.  Their “ethical debates” are merely so much emotional posturing, in which the various sides carry on fantastical arguments about whose deeply felt emotions are the most “legitimate.”  Ethical debates that do not start with the recognition of the evolutionary origin of these emotions, of the reasons and conditions under which they evolved, and their nature as subjective constructs deriving from predispositions that are hard-wired in the brain, are no more rational than the raving of madmen. 

Values can never be legitimate in themselves.  They are, by their nature, subjective.  They exist, like virtually everything else of significance about us, because the wiring in the brain that gives rise to them promoted our survival.  If, then, one finds it necessary for some reason to pursue a “value,” none can rationally take precedence over survival.  That is the only “value” that can be accepted as seriously at issue here.  We can ignore the rest of the blather about “ethics,” because the “ethicists” quite literally do not know what they’re talking about.

I wish to survive, and I wish for my species and life in general to survive.  I don’t flatter myself that those wishes have any objective legitimacy, but, subjectively, I am very attached to them.  Assuming there are others out there who also wish to survive, I have a suggestion about how to fulfill that wish.  Let us become more intelligent as quickly as possible.

Quantum Mechanics and Free Will

Quantum theory is one of the most important and least understood advances in physics over the last 150 years.  Beginning with Max Planck’s supposition in a paper published in 1900 that energy could only be emitted in quantized form, it eventually led to the realization that, particularly at the atomic and sub-atomic level, it was more accurate to represent objects and their interactions, mathematically at least, in terms of wave functions and probability distributions than in terms of the deterministic prescriptions of classical physics.  There has been a great deal of speculation regarding the implication of these discoveries touching the matter of free will (see, for example, here, here, and here, and Google will turn up many more examples).  As often happens in such philosophical speculations (and as some of the authors of the linked articles themselves point out), the various hypotheses occasionally go considerably further than is warranted by what we actually know. 

One can’t really say anything positive about free will unless one understands what it is, and to understand what it is, one must understand consciousness.  Unfortunately, we don’t.  We can be more confident in speaking about what free will is not.  For example, let us assume for the sake of argument that insects are not self-aware or conscious, and they only react to their environment via instinct.  They may seem to make decisions such as whether to fight or flee, admit another insect into the hive or nest or not, etc., but free will is not involved.  Machines could be programmed to react in exactly the same ways.  Proponents of free will believe that, somehow, the human mind can consicously override such programming, and deliberately make choices that are not pre-ordained by physical law or instinct.  These choices, in turn, can alter the outcome of events.  Again, without resorting to supernatural arguments, we cannot state positively that free will exists because we lack sufficient understanding of what goes on in the human mind to do so.  We literally don’t understand what we’re talking about.  We can, however, discuss whether it is even possible for it to exist to begin with.

In that limited sense, the implications of quantum physics are profound.  If everything in the universe obeyed the laws of classical physics, there would be no room for free will.  Given a certain initial state of the universe, everything in the future would be pre-ordained by physical law, or so, at least, it has seemed to many great thinkers in the past.  In principle, we could create mathematical models that would predict the future with absolute certainty, although, at least at the current state of the art, the complexity of the universe is so great as to put such models completely out of the question.  We would just be along for the ride, and free will would be just an illusion.  In a quantum universe, at least we have some wiggle room. 

True, we still don’t know at a fundamental level what all this stuff in the universe around us really is, or why it exists to begin with.  However, we can demonstrate with repeatable experiments that it conforms to mathematical models in which probability plays a significant role.  Now if, once again, we are given a certain initial state of the universe, the claim that the future outcome of events is pre-ordained by the laws of physics is not as plausible in such a probabilistic universe.  The mathematical models may be misleading us about the true nature of things, but, in principle, an infinity of possible outcomes becomes possible.  In such a universe, it is at least possible for free will to exist, although it is hardly certain, and the manner in which it exists, if it does, must remain a mystery to us until we learn a great deal more about the nature of our own minds. 

That is the implication of quantum physics regarding free will.  From a classical universe whose eventual fate was written in stone depending on its state at some point in the past, we have proceeded to one in which many outcomes are possible, and free will is, therefore, not completely excluded.  It seems a rather limited implication on the face of it.  However, it’s comforting that a universe in which what we think or do actually matters is, at least, not out of the question.

On Rewarding Publicity Stunts

In response to a deliberate and premeditated act of violence by a “peace flotilla” resulting in nine deaths and many injuries, Obama has called the Israeli blockade of Gaza “unsustainable,” and has pledged $400 million to reward Hamas and its Turkish pals for their provocation. In other words, at a time when Turkey and Iran are both threatening to use force to break the blockade, our President is signalling, “Go ahead!” This does not seem like a wise strategy to me, unless, of course, the Obama Administration perceives Israel as the enemy. Given the President’s ideological affinity for the likes of Jeremiah Wright, Van Jones, and Bill Ayers, that would be anything but surprising. In any case, the Administration’s actions signal our weakness to Israel’s enemies at a time when she faces unprecedented threats of attack. It is hardly out of the question that Iran and Turkey will conclude that any U.S. response to their use of force will be limited to diplomatic protests, and decide that the moment to strike has arrived.

Morality: A Christian puts 2 and 2 Together

I haven’t read the book,  ”Roots of Despair: Evolution and the Death of Morality,” by Bill Weaks, but the the blurb about it on the Amazon website is interesting in its own right.  It reads,

Is morality real? Is there a universal morality that exists beyond opinion and circumstance? If evolution is correct, then the answer to these questions is an obvious and unequivocal “NO.” If Darwin was right, then what we call morality is simply the physical result of billions of random accidents, and that is that.

When the author, who happens to be a Christian, speaks of morality here, he is referring to transcendental morality, meaning morality that is legitimate in itself. As an atheist I completely agree with him on this particular point. He’s really just stating the obvious. If morality is the expression of evolved behavioral traits in a particular type of animal, namely us, then it is illogical to speak of morality as a thing in itself, an object having some kind of universal validity in its own right. The remarkable thing is that, in spite of rapidly increasing acceptance among secular scientists and philosophers of the evolutionary basis of morality and its association with innate predispositions, many of which we share with other animals, none of them, at least to my knowledge, has explicitly accepted this seemingly obvious and fundamental truth.  It is, apparently, a truth that has, so far, been too unpalatable for them to swallow.

Why do all these academic, scientific, and philosophical worthies have such difficulty putting two and two together when a Christian many of them would dismiss as a simpleton can see the obvious without the least difficulty?  As a hypothesis, I suggest that it’s because it conflicts with the ideological preconceptions of many of them.  Like all human beings, they experience moral distinctions of good and evil as real, because that’s the way they’re wired, so it’s no more difficult psychologically for them to maintain the illusion that they actually are real than anyone else.  Many of them suscribe to ideological “holy causes” that they are used to associating with “the good.”  If “the good” is the artifact of behavioral traits that evolved at times that are completely different than the present, then the basis for associating ideological goals with “the good” disappears.  The problem becomes even more accute for “ethics experts” who have spent their lives reading dull tomes of philosophy.  The rug is pulled out from under them, and their “expertise” becomes irrelevant.  Throw in for good measure the fact that many of these people come from a milieu that until very recently considered any suggestion that innate predispositions had anything to do with human behavior a sign of political unsoundness, and the reasons they keep clutching at some imaginary Platonic form of “the good” become clear.

How long will it take them before, like Mr. Weaks and other Christians who have no ideological motive for being spooked by the truth, they, too, finally put two and two together?  There are grounds for optimism.  After all, the fact that morality is an expression of evolved predispositions has been obvious to anyone with an open mind since at least the days of Darwin, but because of the ideological baggage referred to above, many of them have rejected the obvious until very recently.  They defended their ideological myths with the tenacity of true believers until they were finally buried by the mountains of evidence emanating from the fields of neuroscience and other scientific disciplines.  The fact that morality has no objective validity in its own right is just as obvious as the fact that it is the expression of evolved behavioral traits.  For that matter, the former fact follows from the latter, and one hopes they will finally stumble on that truth as well in the not-too-distant future.

Of course, Mr. Weaks takes a very pessimistic view of things.  As the Amazon blurb referred to above puts it,

This simple truth is at the root of the decay and despair that surrounds us. Grasping this fact allows those of us who believe in a supernatural source of morality to better love and minister to those lost in the moral wasteland that Darwinism inevitably leaves behind.

Unfortunately, the truth regarding the existence of a God does not depend on whether Mr. Weaks experiences despair about it or not.  I tend to take a more optimistic view of things, and, based on the evidence of all recorded human history, conclude that moral behavior in human beings will not suddenly disappear regardless of whether Christianity or any other religion or philosophy happens to be true or not.  We’re wired to be moral, even if we still have only a very vague perception of what morality actually is.  In the day to day interactions among individuals, we will act morally because it is our nature to do so.

The Role of Morality

In the previous post, I pointed out that morality is a blunt and dubious tool for achieving the “well-being” of mankind, even assuming it is possible to achieve general agreement on what the well-being of mankind really is.  It would seem this should be obvious.  Morality is an evolved behavioral trait that maximized the chances of genetic survival in conditions that, for all practical purposes no longer exist.  It is irrational to assume that some plausible variation of emotional behavioral traits that evolved in times utterly different from the present are somehow likely to be effective tools in achieving goals, such as the well-being of mankind in general, that are completely different from the biological function they performed when they came into existence.  We can no more dispense with morality in the everyday interactions of individuals than we can jump out of our own skins.  The hard-wired emotional behavioral traits we associate with morality are a part of us, and we are far from being intelligent enough to simply shut them off by an act of will.  However, when it comes to public policy, we are more likely to achieve common goals by applying our powers of reason, weak as they are, then by seeking to find and apply some Platonic form of the “perfect morality.”

These assertions do not mean I am in favor of allowing mankind to sink into a swamp of amoral behavior, where dog eats dog, and the powers of darkness prevail.  On the contrary, I maintain that, if our goal is to avoid such a world, we are more likely to achieve that goal by applying our weak powers of reason, such as they are, than by relying on the innate behavioral traits of our species associated with morality, which evolved because they performed a function utterly different from maximizing collective well-being in a world anything like the present, and which are, in any case, still poorly understood. 

Consider what has happened when modern human societies have attempted to maximize collective well-being by applying moral rules in the past.  In addition to identifying the “good,” whose well-being is to be maximized, they have invariably identified the “evil,” as well, those “immoral” ones who are seeking to harm the “good,” and must be defeated and, if possible destroyed.  In applying morality to achieve social goals it is not possible to nicely separate “good” and “evil.”  The innate behavioral traits associated with morality must inevitably and invariably include identification of the evil “out-group,” as well as the good “in-group.”  Don’t look believe me?  Just look at the facts; as reflected in the entire recorded history of humanity.  Consider, for example, the Nazis.  Can anyone be naive enough to believe that they were all deliberately attempting to do evil?  On the contrary, they sought to maximize the well-being of the “good,” in this case, the German people, who were believed to be closely related to each other genetically.  We know what happened to their out-group, the Jews.  Another familiar recent example is the Communists.  They sought to maximize the well-being of the proletariat, who, according to theory, would inevitably become a majority in modern societies.  In order for them to achieve the “good,” it was necessary for them to eliminate the “evil,” in the person of the bourgeoisie.  The result was 100 million innocent dead. 

Are things any different at the present time?  Consider the most self-consciously pious ideological type in modern society, the “progressive” liberal.  Think the identification of “evil” out-groups is absent from their world view?  Guess again.  Visit any of their websites and you’ll find furious rants against greedy corporations, members of the tea party movement, Republicans, global warming deniers, etc., etc. 

If we would maximize human well-being, lets attempt to apply reason instead of morality for a change.  I make this suggestion, not because I consider myself more moral or just than others, but because I would prefer to avoid the inconvencience of neighbors who are trying to kill me.  As many who experienced the attentions of  Communists in the Soviet Union, or Nazis in Germany, or were tortured and killed as “heretics” in an earlier day might have testified, that’s an all too frequent negative character trait of the “morally good.”  Turning around and declaring them “morally evil” after the fact is small comfort to the victims.  This is getting old.  It’s time we tried something different.

Sam Harris and his Butterfly Net Revisited

In an earlier post, I commented on fellow atheist Sam Harris’ chase after that gaudy butterfly, the good-in-itself. Well, the chase continues. In an article that appeared on no less virtuous a site than Huffpo, he describes his recent progress “Toward a Science of Morality.”

His latest on the subject was inspired by feedback on a talk he gave at this year’s Ted Conference from, as he puts it, ”literally thousands” of people. It would seem that many of them are no more impressed by Sam’s quest for the holy grail of scientific goodness than I am. In his words,

If nothing else, the response to my TED talk proves that many smart people believe that something in the last few centuries of intellectual progress prevents us from making cross-cultural moral judgments — or moral judgments at all. Thousands of highly educated men and women have now written to inform me that morality is a myth, that statements about human values are without truth conditions and, therefore, nonsensical, and that concepts like “well-being” and “misery” are so poorly defined, or so susceptible to personal whim and cultural influence, that it is impossible to know anything about them. Many people also claim that a scientific foundation for morality would serve no purpose, because we can combat human evil while knowing that our notions of “good” and “evil” are unwarranted. It is always amusing when these same people then hesitate to condemn specific instances of patently abominable behavior. I don’t think one has fully enjoyed the life of the mind until one has seen a celebrated scholar defend the “contextual” legitimacy of the burqa, or a practice like female genital excision, a mere thirty seconds after announcing that his moral relativism does nothing to diminish his commitment to making the world a better place. Given my experience as a critic of religion, I must say that it has been disconcerting to see the caricature of the over-educated, atheistic moral nihilist regularly appearing in my inbox and on the blogs.

Well, I’d like to think that not all of those thousands of commenters were caricatures of over-educated, atheistic nihilists.  As Sam describes them, they don’t make a lot of sense.  For example, it is logically impossible to “combat human evil while knowing that our notions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are unwarranted” because the statement itself is an admission that the speaker doesn’t know what “human evil” is.  Similarly, one can’t be committed to “making the world a better place” unless he actually knows what he’s talking about when he uses the term “better.”  However, Sam is no more logical than the opposition.  In the same paragraph he implies that good and evil must have a real existence by virtue of the fact that human beings are capable of strong negative emotional responses to practices such as forcing women to wear burqas, or female genital excision.  By that logic, God must exist, too, because otherwise there would have been no one around to create the world.  For that matter, I also have a strongly negative subjective emotional response to liberal “progressives” striking ostentatious poses of public piety.  That doesn’t mean that such people are “really evil.”  It merely means that my subjective identification of “out-groups” is different from Sam’s, a difference that human moral behavior is entirely flexible enough to accommodate.  Sorry, Sam, but human emotional responses are adequately explained as the expression of evolved behavioral traits.  They do not require the existence of real good and real evil.

Sam continues,

First, a disclaimer and non-apology: Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy. There are two reasons why I haven’t done this: First, while I have read a fair amount of this literature, I did not arrive at my position on the relationship between human values and the rest of human knowledge by reading the work of moral philosophers; I came to it by considering the logical implications of our making continued progress in the sciences of mind. Second, I am convinced that every appearance of terms like “metaethics,” “deontology,” “noncognitivism,” “anti-realism,” “emotivism,” and the like, directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe. My goal, both in speaking at conferences like TED and in writing my book, is to start a conversation that a wider audience can engage with and find helpful.

Here I can only agree wholeheartedly.  My own thoughts on morality are based on the fundamental hypotheses that

1.  The human behavioral traits associated with morality exist because they have evolved.

2.  They evolved at a time when the nature of human relationships and human societies were much different in many respects from what they are in the modern world.

3.  Good and evil exist only as subjective mental constructs of the mind associated with these behavioral traits.  They have no objective existence independent of their manifestation in the minds of individuals.

Acceptance of these hypotheses requires, at a minimum, knowledge and acceptance of the theory that human beings have evolved as a result of a process of natural selection.  No pre-Darwinian moral philosopher could have understood or appreciated the significance of these fundamental assumptions.  Therefore, until someone can demonstrate that my hypotheses are wrong, it makes no more sense for me to learn everything they had to say about the real existence of good and evil that it would have made for Copernicus and Galileo to learn everything that had ever been written based on the assumption of a geo-centric universe. 

As for the modern effusions of the “experts on ethics,” they have a remarkable aversion to, as E. O. Wilson put it,” laying their cards on the table.”  In other words, they tend to wander off in obscure reasonings about good and evil without bothering to first explain to the rest of us why they believe such categories even exist, and, if they do exist, what the nature of their existence might be.  I have” laid my cards on the table” by setting forth the fundamental assumptions noted above.  They make it possible for others to agree or disagree with me by simply demonstrating that my hypotheses are right or wrong.  To the extent that the “experts” fail to lay their cards on the table in similar fashion, I consider what they have to say on the subject of morality irrelevant, regardless of how many articles they have published on the subject in scholarly journals.

Sam continues with the assertion that one can have a science of morality.  That is certainly true in the sense that one can seek to discover truths about its nature and the reasons for its existence.  One can also use science to examine the legitimacy of moral claims.  Hume realized long ago that good and evil are not objective things, and that one cannot, therefore, demonstrate their existence using reason.  That certainly doesn’t mean one can’t subject the phenomena associated with morality to scientific study.  One cannot, however, use science to create something that doesn’t exist.  If objective good and evil don’t exist to begin with, then they will not magically spring into existence, even if one invokes science until one is blue in the face, any more than God will spring into existence by virtue of the fact that he is subjected to scientific study. 

However, we soon discover that Sam does not refer to a “science of morality” in this limited sense.  In the following paragraphs he claims that the real, objective good consists in maximizing human well-being.  He does so rather subtly, as if embarrassed to make such a claim, but still, he makes the claim.  In his words,

I might claim that morality is really about maximizing well-being and that well-being entails a wide range of cognitive/emotional virtues and wholesome pleasures, but someone else will be free to say that morality depends upon worshipping the gods of the Aztecs and that well-being entails always having a terrified person locked in one’s basement, waiting to be sacrificed.

Notice that, though their definitions of “well-being” differ, both Sam and the worshipper of Aztec gods in the paragraph above are made to implicitly accept the claim that well-being can be equated with real moral good.  In later paragraphs, Sam confirms the surmise that he equates well-being with the objective good.  For example,

Even if there were ten thousand different ways for groups of human beings to maximally thrive (all trade-offs and personal idiosyncrasies considered), there will be many ways for them not to thrive — and the difference between luxuriating on a peak of the moral landscape and languishing in a valley of internecine horror will translate into facts that can be scientifically understood.

For instance, I think that Kant’s Categorical Imperative only qualifies as a rational standard of morality given the assumption that it will be generally beneficial (as J.S. Mill pointed out at the beginning of Utilitarianism).

These are all good questions: Some admit of straightforward answers; others plunge us into moral paradox; none, however, proves that there are no right or wrong answers to questions of human and animal well-being.

What we have then, is a version of Mill’s Utilitarianism with “well-being” substituted for “utility,” but with the added claim that well-being and objective good are actually the same, a claim that Mill, who explicitly rejected claims of “transcendental good” would never have made.  As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, I suspect Mill would have rejected even his own qualified version of Utilitarianism if he’d been able to sit on the shoulders of Darwin, but, unfortunately, he was born a bit too early.  He died some years after publication of “On the Origin of Species,” but before the implications of Darwin’s theory concerning morality had a chance to sink in.

In what follows, Harris addresses the objections to his “scientific morality” from a number of individuals, who all, oddly enough, agree with the notion, at least implicitly, that real objective good exists, and that it can be equated to well-being.  Far from denying that well-being and objective good are the same, they merely quibble about whether one can find adequate metrics to determine scientifically what “well-being” is.  For example, prominent among them is physicist Sean Carroll, whom Harris quotes as saying,

Surely all right-thinking people agree on the primacy of well-being.

Imagine that we are able to quantify precisely some particular mental state that corresponds to a high level of well-being; the exact configuration of neuronal activity in which someone is healthy, in love, and enjoying a hot-fudge sundae. Clearly achieving such a state is a moral good.

More importantly, it’s equally obvious that even right-thinking people don’t really agree about well-being, or how to maximize it.

And from biologist P. Z Myers, again, implicitly accepting the criterion of well-being, but rejecting the possibility of scientifically measuring it.

I don’t think Harris’s criterion — that we can use science to justify maximizing the well-being of individuals — is valid. We can’t… Harris is smuggling in an unscientific prior in his category of well-being.

Of course, the elephant in the room that all these comments and counter-comments studiously avoid is the validity of the claims that a) objective good actually exists, and b) objective good can be equated with well being.  In fact, Harris seems to be aware of this, as he belatedly gets around to moving from “is” to “ought” at the end of the article:

So, while it is possible to say that one can’t move from “is” to “ought,” we should be honest about how we get to “is” in the first place. Scientific “is” statements rest on implicit “oughts” all the way down. When I say, “Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen,” I have uttered a quintessential statement of scientific fact. But what if someone doubts this statement? I can appeal to data from chemistry, describing the outcome of simple experiments. But in so doing, I implicitly appeal to the values of empiricism and logic. What if my interlocutor doesn’t share these values? What can I say then? What evidence could prove that we should value evidence? What logic could demonstrate the importance of logic? As it turns out, these are the wrong questions. The right question is, why should we care what such a person thinks in the first place?

This paragraph makes no sense for a variety of reasons.  To begin, the nature of water “is” what it is regardless of the value one assigns to the means of discovering its nature.  That nature does not depend on mental processes going on in the minds of those trying to find out what it is, and it would not change a bit if those minds were living, dead, or never existed to begin with.  Furthermore, the “ought” Harris refers to has nothing to do with a moral “ought.”  It refers to the effectiveness of methods of acquiring knowledge of the nature of water.  In other words, it assumes a goal, and assigns value to the different means of achieving the goal depending on their relative effectiveness.  If someone preferred an approach different from my own to determining the true nature of water, I might conclude they are wrong, but I would not conclude they are immoral. 

The “oughts” related to human morality, on the other hand, are associated with emotional responses in the form of innate predispositions that are hard-wired in the brain.  These “oughts” can vary somewhat depending on education and culture, but display striking commonalities across widely varying societies.  We experience them as absolutes, independent of their effectiveness in achieving one goal or another.  The behavioral traits associated with morality evolved because they promoted our survival in times very different from the present.  They are not relevant to any other purpose one might name, including the well-being of mankind. 

False conclusions can be dangerous.  For example, if we falsely conclude we can fly, and walk off a cliff, we will die.  False conclusions about morality can be far more dangerous.  When the Communists tried to associate morality with their version of the well-being of mankind, they did not succeed in creating a “New Soviet Man” whose moral behavior was infinitely adaptable to suite the purpose they had in mind.  Rather, they unleashed human emotions they did not understand, resulting in the greatest episodes of mass murder and brutality mankind has ever witnessed.  One can rationally discuss whether the “well-being of mankind” is a desirable goal.  Attempting to achieve that goal by tinkering with innate behavioral traits that are as yet poorly understood is to invite disaster once again.

Continuing with Harris’ remarks:

But the consequences of moral relativism have been disastrous. And science’s failure to address the most important questions in human life has made it seem like little more than an incubator for technology. It has also given faith-based religion — that great engine of ignorance and bigotry — a nearly uncontested claim to being the only source of moral wisdom. This has been bad for everyone. What is more, it has been unnecessary — because we can speak about the well-being of conscious creatures rationally, and in the context of science. I think it is time we tried.

Yes, we can speak about the well-being of conscious creatures rationally, and in the context of science, but we cannot cause the well-being of conscious creatures to be identical with the real, objective good, because the real, objective good doesn’t exist, and one can’t call it into existence by an act of will.  Have the consequences of moral relativism been disastrous?  So what?  Objective good either exists or it doesn’t, and that reality will not be changed one iota by our conclusions regarding the consequences of moral relativism, or our dissatisfaction with the perception that science hasn’t achieved some noble end or other.  One wonders why Harris ever became an atheist.  After all, one can as easily claim that the decline in religious belief has been disastrous because it has deprived many people of a purpose in life.  Should we not, therefore, magically call God back into existence and make him “true,” out of concern for the suffering of these people?  If we conclude that seeing the color red has been disastrous, will it suddenly turn to green to spare our sensitivities? 

Harris doesn’t realize it, but his claim that faith-based religion is a great engine of ignorance and bigotry is itself a manifestation of human moral behavior; namely, out-group identification.  The statement is both untrue and morally loaded on the face of it.  I myself am an atheist, and would be the first to agree that religion is potentially harmful by virtue of the fact that it is not true, but “a great engine of ignorance and bigotry?”  I don’t think so.  On a general level it is simply untrue that religion has never resulted in anything good, and on the individual level, I know a host of firm religious believers who are neither ignorant nor bigots.  Harris’ identification of religious believers as an out-group in this fashion is a manifestation of moral behavior that is entirely similar to the identification of “the bourgeoisie” as an out-group by the Communists, or the Jews as an out-group by the Nazis.  It seems to me the results in those experiments in the creative application of morality did not contribute to the “well-being of mankind.”  Out-group identification is an aspect of human moral behavior that continues to be ignored as an inconvenient truth, but it exists, nevertheless.  To demonstrate that fact to himself, Harris need merely glance around him at Huffpo and take note of the furious ongoing demonization of political opponents.  If he really believes in the fantasy of a “real good” that is identical with human well-being, he might want to consider the fact that the “real evil” must inevitably accompany it.  It always has in the past.  Under the circumstances, Harris would do well to rethink his conclusion that well-being and moral good are identical.  As for the notion of “moral relativism,” I doubt that it even exists, except as a chimera of moral philosophers.  Most, if not all, human beings perceive the moral good as an absolute, because that’s the way in which it has most effectively promoted our survival. 

Continuing with Harris,

So it is with the linkage between morality and well-being: To say that morality is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal), because we must first assume that the well-being of conscious creatures is good, is exactly like saying that science is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal), because we must first assume that a rational understanding of the universe is good. We need not enter either of these philosophical cul-de-sacs.

In fact, it is anything but exactly the same.  Is it really so difficult see that “the good” in the sense of a real, objective thing having an independent existence of its own is not the same as ”the good” in the sense of a useful method of finding the truth?  There is no similarity between good defined in terms of usefulness for achieving some preconceived goal, such as discovering truth, and good defined as real objective moral good, having an existence of its own independent of subjective human emotions, yet corresponding to the subjective feeling of Sam Harris and a subset of human beings who think like him.  Are all the recent revelations about the hard-wired origins and emotional nature of human moral behavior really meaningless and irrelevant?  I can understand the reluctance of some people to give up the only objective justification they have for the great joy they derive from virtuous indignation.  Unfortunately, that justification simply doesn’t exist.  There is no such thing as real, objective good, nor is there any such thing as real, objective evil, any more than there is a real, objective God.  By attempting to force them into existence Harris isn’t inaugurating a new science of morality.  He’s inaugurating a new secular religion, complete with an imaginary God of its own.

Another Faux Vietnam Vet

The latest is Richard Blumenthal, a candidate for the U.S. Senate from Connecticutt. According to the Grey Lady, he claims he was in Vietnam, but was never there. Chalk up another one in the tradition of Tom Harkin and John Kerry with his Cambodia yarns.

Apparently Blumenthal laid it on pretty thick with lines like,

I served during the Vietnam era. I remember the taunts, the insults, sometimes even physical abuse.

I doubt he would have really experienced any of that even if he actually had been in Vietnam. If anecdotal evidence is any indication, I never experienced anything like it when I came back, nor did I ever hear any of my fellow soldiers complain of anything of the sort. Perhaps there were some isolated incidents, but I suspect the notion that we were all subjected to such widespread abuse is an historical myth.

Insty Finally Winds Down

According to a post on his blog yesterday,

I’ve also left a few scheduled posts, but don’t be fooled — if you’re looking for me, I’ll be trying to stay offline as much as possible, so email response will be something between slow and nonexistent. Sorry, but I need a break.

I was beginning to wonder how long he could keep it up without a rest. His productivity as a blogger over the years has been incredible, especially when you take into account his day job as a law professor, and all the other stuff he does in his “copious free time.” A stellar cast of blogosphere celebrities has taken his place for the time being, but I hope we don’t have to wait too long before he gets back in harness.

Morality and “Hardwired Behavior”

“Hardwired Behavior” is one of the many books dealing with innate human behavioral traits that have been popping up like mushrooms lately. Like many of the others, it focuses on morality and moral behavior. Perhaps the most interesting thing about all these books is not that so many of them are being published, but that they are being published at all. Three or four decades ago, the authors of books like this would have been vilified as “fascists,” scorned as “pop ethologists,” and dismissed as delusional right wingers. Marxists and other ideologues would have shouted “Not in our Genes,” determined that no truth that contradicted their narratives would ever see the light of day. In the intervening years those shouts have been drowned by a deluge of facts, thanks in large part to the rapid advance of brain imaging technology. The ideologues who sought to rearrange reality to conform to their preconceived notions have gone the way of the Intelligent Design crowd, who would alter the speed of light, shorten the age of the earth to 6000 years, and redefine the word “firmament” to make the “truth” fit the Book of Genesis. The basic fact of innate human behavior has been obvious to anyone with an open mind since at least the days of Darwin. Now it is a fact that can no longer be denied, or at least not by anyone interested in maintaining some semblance of intellectual credibility.

“Hardwired Behavior” stands out somewhat from the rest of the pack in that the author, Laurence Tancredi, is both a lawyer and a psychiatrist, with expertise in neuroscience thrown in for good measure, and so approaches the subject as one who has seen some of the extremes of human behavior, and has devoted a great deal of thought to the interesting ramifications of our new insights into the workings of the human mind as they relate to our system of justice. Take, for example, the question of moral culpability. Tancredi describes cases in which heinous crimes were committed by people who do not fit the legal definition of criminal insanity, and yet whose actions, at least in his opinion, were motivated by emotional impulses that “trumped rational control.”   He describes the notion that moral choices may be biologically driven as a “revolutionary concept,” which it decidedly is not, at least in terms of the length of time the idea has been around.  Be that as it may, what Tancredi calls the “mad versus bad” distinction inherent in current legal theory is becoming increasingly blurred in the light of our expanding understanding of the mind.  In fact, the very distinction between good and evil has always been a subjective one.  That, however, doesn’t alter the fact that we perceive the distinction as absolute, and, given our nature, have no alternative but to act within the context of moral rules.  Under the circumstances, the notion of moral culpability, whether fiction or not, may be one we cannot dispense with from a legal point of view.

Tancredi is apparently aware of the earlier suppression of the very ideas he presents as such commonplaces.  See, for example, the discussion on pages 21 to 24 of his book under the subheading, “From Mind to Brain:  Completing the Circuit.”  He begins by defining the term “physicalism” in the broad sense of characteristics that are “innate to humankind,” and describes its long intellectual history.  He then suggests that the scientific revolution of the 19th century, with its insistence on intellectual rigor and the scientific method, “…brought about major changes in our perception of morality.  Natural law, or anything resembling a naturally endowed moral sense was discarded as fundamentally wrong.”  This is an absurd yarn, but an interesting one nonetheless.  It amounts to a rationalization of the ideologically motivated suppression of theories of innate behavior, including moral behavior, as something that was done in the name of “science.”  The reality, apparent enough to anyone who cares to go back and look at the source material, amply documented in the books of Robert Ardrey, is that these theories were immediately plausible to a host of scientists, including Darwin himself, that they have actually been not only plausible but obvious, at least since his time, and that they were suppressed, not for any “scientific” reason, but because they flew in the face of preferred ideological narratives that required humans to be other than they actually are.  Look at the nature of the opposition to such ideas 40 or 50 years ago.  That opposition, in the case of Ardrey, Konrad Lorenz, and many others did not take the form of dispassionate scientific debate.  Almost invariably, it was accompanied by demonization, vilification and ridicule.

That deep lacunae exist in Tancredi’s perception of the nature of this debate is apparent from the statement, “The idea that biology was basic to human behavior and the workings of social groups didn’t reappear in a major way until E. O. Wilson published his book “Sociobiology” in the mid-1970s.”  Thus, with a wave of the hand, the works of the likes of Ardrey and Lorenz are brushed aside as if they never existed.  In fact, as a work of popular science, “Sociobiology” was a mere afterthought to such works as “African Genesis,” “The Territorial Imperative,” and “On Aggression.”  The idea that it was somehow more significant than these earlier works in opening people’s minds could only be taken seriously by navel gazers in the ivory towers of academia.  Wilson is a brilliant thinker whose work has enlightened many.  Ardrey, however, playwright, statistician, and “pop ethologist” that he was, was a greater still.  He took little trouble to jump through all the hoops that would have made him socially acceptable in the hallowed halls of academia, but the man was a genius, with a rare gift for seeing the big picture and revealing it to others.  “African Genesis,” published in 1961, already contained most of his fundamental worldview, and his works are full of accounts of the work of other brilliant scientists, including a host of animal behaviorists whose elegant work can only inspire wonder that so many of the modern workers in the field can somehow never trouble themselves to mention them.  To the extent that Ardrey is mentioned at all today, his work is usually distorted and bowdlerized as the “Killer Ape Theory.”  Here, in a nutshell, is what Ardrey said:  “Innate predispositions have a profound influence on human behavior.”  Here, in a nutshell, is what his many academic opponents said:  “Human behavior is almost entirely determined by culture, and is “Not in our Genes.”  Ardrey was right, and they were wrong.  Obviously, academia is still having a very hard time swallowing that unpleasant fact.  As a result, instead of having the simple decency and intellectual honesty to admit that he was right, they ignore him.

Well, those of us who lived through those times know the truth, and, in any case, a man like Ardrey would surely have welcomed the victory of his ideas more than his personal vindication.  It’s unfortunate he couldn’t live to see that victory.  We are left to contemplate the implications of this whole affair for the advance of human knowledge.  Once again, we have seen the limitations of our intelligence.  Once again, we have witnessed our uncanny ability to deny the world as it is when it doesn’t conform to the world the way we want it to be.  We have learned little from the experience.  Now we see the ideological battle lines being drawn once again over the issue of global warming.  Ideological in-groups that would surely have been familiar to Ardrey dominate the debate on both sides of the issue.  They have already convinced themselves that they are bearers of ultimate truth, and that their opponents are criminals or fools.  They will filter the facts accordingly until a bludgeon in the form of another ice age or sea levels up to our necks comes along to knock them back to their senses.  Meanwhile, let us cross our fingers and hope for the best.