In Memoriam Albert Hoffmann

O nobly-born, that which is called death being come to thee now, resolve thus: 'O this now is the hour of death. By taking advantage of this death, I will so act, for the good of all sentient beings, peopling the illimitable expanse of the heavens, as to obtain the Perfect Buddhahood, by resolving on love and compassion towards them, and by directing my entire effort to the Sole Perfection.'
-- The Tibetan Book of the Dead


If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thru' narrow chinks of his cavern.
-- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

First person plural

When I first read it, Daniel Klein's paper, The People's Romance: Why People Love Government as much as they do (PDF), it struck me as one of the more interesting things I've read to come out of a libertarian/marketeer perspective. I recently reread it and was less impressed. Klein manages to take one step out of his individualistic economist assumptions, but ultimately fails to take the next step, which is to realize that his entire program is broken.

Imagine if someone had spent 20 years devoting themselves to elucidating a model of humans as atomized individuals governed by rational self-interest. Suddenly, that person realizes that this is not a very good model, and seeks to explain why people deviate from this supposed ideal. And let's say this person is reasonably smart and honest, and is willing to at least look at and acknowledge certain facts that undercut their model -- that people crave community for instance. That they seek to belong to various social groupings that can provide a "higher purpose". That they enjoy subsuming themselves into a larger group, and a larger mission, than pursuit of their own individual goals. What could explain this?

Klein takes a trip through a constellation of related ideas, from the basic biological need and urge to coordinate, to the notion of Schelling points as natural foci for collective action, to the government's role as the ultimate such point. From there, it's a short trip to requiring that collectivities be totally encompassing, and from there to coercion.

He provides many examples of the kind of collectivism he deplores, for instance, the title of Richard Rorty's book Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America; a quote from a census director praising his project because “every household that returns the form does strengthen the ties that bind us together as a civilized society”. From Klein's perspective, all this talk is simply wrong, dangerous, and an indicator of a style of thinking that needs to be combated. One suspects that Klein would distrust any use at all of the first person plural, as in "we want to end poverty", or "we believe in democracy"? What you mean "we", white man?

Klein can't really connect the two parts of his analysis. He observes, correctly, that people actively seek coordination and commonality. His economist principles make it hard to say that any human desires are wrong per se, but because these desires are inherently social rather than individual he can't bear to live with the consequences of these desires. The problem is, coordination and community are fundamental to human nature, they underlie our natures, our very being. They aren't a mere bolted-on superstructure to a framework of individual goal-seeking. We will never get rid of this, and thus we will always be faced with the problem of what happens when group goal-seeking gets out of control.

The first half of the 20th century saw the People's Romance swell to ridiculous and dangerous proportions, embodied in mass totalitarian movements. That age fortunately seems to have passed. The postmodern condition is just about defined by the absence of these large-scale romances -- there are no more large causes to bind oneself to. The neoconservative movement, in its current form, is essentially an attempt to rekindle the romance of the state by inflating global Islam to a threat big enough to inspire war and the strong attachment to the state produced by war. It's a lost cause, because their heart isn't in it and despite their best efforts to whip up war hysteria the people have not responded properly.

The Obama phenomenon may be seen in the light of the People's Romance -- the US population's love affair with their country has grown old, stale, cynical, and tired. Suddenly a young attractive persona appears who seems to be able to rekindle the lost spark of group identification, with an added twist of racial ambiguity to make things more exciting. Young people see a chance to fall in love with their country via his allegedly transformative persona.

Me, I'm too old and cynical, too much betrayed by my past romantic attachments to put a lot of faith in Obama, or any politician. And yet -- I do believe that people need to take collective action. While I am all for non-coercive emergent coordination networks taking care of business, I'm pretty sure we'll still need some sort of Official Government Institutions to handle the heavy lifting and dirty work. Given that, it is not necessarily a bad thing for people to have some positive feelings for their government. There's gotta be a happy medium between masochistic devotion and total alienation. I rather doubt Obama can deliver on the emotional payoff he is promising, but I hope he gets a chance, because the alternatives are not good.

Well, I was hoping this post would turn into a rigorous refutation of Klein's position, but I don't feel coherent enough to attempt it, so it's just a bunch of disjointed reactions. What I'd like to do is turn his analysis around and use it to try to think about how you design collectivities so they have just the right level of "romance" associated with them -- enough to work, to keep people involved and attached and functioning, but not so much that they lose themselves utterly and let the collectivity trample over individual rights and dignities, and otherwise get out of control the way institutions do. Well, something to think about for later.

Stupid American politics

Our politics is so stupid. The right is piling onto Obama for some perfectly valid remarks he made that dared to reference "bitterness". This kind of crap will keep happening, he will be damaged, the Democrats will continue to engage in fratricide, and we'll end up with a bomb-bomb-Iran McCain administration. Fuck. Not that I'm under any illusions that a Democratic administration would usher in utopia, but there's less chance of another nightmare of craziness, evil, and incompetence.

This guy (Mark Ames) is my new god:

But what if the Truth is that Americans don't want to know the Truth? What if Americans consciously choose lies over truth when given the chance—and not even very interesting lies, but rather the blandest, dumbest and meanest lies? What if Americans are not a likeable people? The left's wires short-circuit when confronted with this terrible possibility; the right, on the other hand, warmly embraces Middle America's rank soul and exploits it to their full advantage. The Republicans know Americans better than the left. They know that it's not so much Goering's famous "bigger lie" that works here, but the dumber the lie, the more they want to hear it repeated.

And his description of the Bush administation as "Inspector Clouseau meets the Book of Revelations".

via Sadly, No!

Or maybe the American people will surprise me.

Progressives and Libertarians go together like peanut butter and jelly

For decades I've vaguely had the idea that the libertarians and the left should get together. Libertarianism, after all, is officially at the zero-point of the left-right axis, although in practice it veers strongly to the right. For years, libertarians have been the useful idiots of the Republican party, providing their small-government rhetoric as they plunder the treasury and wreak havoc on civil liberties and build up an enormously powerful national security state. But the root ideas of libertarianism -- freedom, limited government, individualism -- are not innately horrible, and it always seemed that a real libertarian should have more in common with the left than the right. Well, a new group is coalescing to explore that idea, and unearthing all sorts of interesting weird stuff, like the the history of Samuel Konkin III and the Alliance for the Libertarian Left. Unlike most libertarian discussions, they seem to be capable of grappling with real issues: they are anti-corporation, for the most part, they will point out the obvious fact that roads are just as much if not more a case of government-subsidized travel as mass transportation, and they talk about the tension between health regulation and tasty street food.

On the other hand, here's libertarian-flavored Arnold Kling (Ph.D. economist and Cato adjunct, no less) making a perfect ass of himself and getting roundly and deservedly mocked. Sorry, I couldn't make a post about libertarianism without making fun of somebody.

The poverty of reductionism

I've been flaming away on Overcoming Bias about reductionism, trying to articulate what I think is a sensible and obvious position that nobody else seems to have, or understand, or even wants to engage with. Oh well. It is not all that original -- it has similarities, at least, to various forms of emergentism and Platonism. But I don't want to do philosophy if it relies on parsing narrowly defined schools of thought, that is extremely boring. Let's put it this way -- I feel that there I've got some insight into the nature of reality that is staring me in the face, that almost everyone else is missing, and I feel an overwhelming urge to try to communicate it.

On reflection, it's pretty obvious why my approach is falling on deaf ears. The more simpleminded and popular views serve obvious functions. Reductionism is what drives scientific explanation, and standard dualism lets people believe in immortal souls and all that jazz. What market niche does emergentist neoplatonism, or whatever it is, serve? TBD. In the meantime, I've collected my flames in one place.

Starting here:

Here's a question for reductionists: It is a premise of AI that the mind is computational, and that computations are algorithms that are more or less independent of the physical substrate that is computing them. An algorithm to compute prime numbers is the same algorithm whether it runs on an Intel chip or a bunch of appropriately-configured tinkertoys, and a mind is the same whether it runs on neurons or silicon. The question is, just how is this reductionist? It's one thing to say that any implementation of an algorithm (or mind) has some physical basis, which is pretty obviously true and hence not very interesting, but if those implementations have nothing physical in common, then your reduction hasn't actually accomplished very much.

In other words: let's grant that any particular mind, or algorithm, is physically instantiated and does not involve any magic non-physical forces. Nonetheless, it is mysterious how physical systems with nothing physical in common can realize the same algorithm. That suggests that the algorithm itself is not a physical thing, but something else. And those something elses have very little to do with the laws of physics.

Previous attempts to articulate something like this:

Asymptotically approaching religion

Independence Day

[update: and here: Ultramaterialism]

I used to argue the pro-reductionist side on Telic Thoughts. I still believe myself to be on the right side of that particular debate -- the anti-reductionists there wanted to believe in disembodied spirits that were creating the world, designing life, and infusing meaning. That sort of dualism is just retarded. But there seems to be something missing from the standard forms of reductionism, which I keep trying to get my fingers on.

More here:

I posted this in the last thread but didn't get much response, so I'll try again:

Here's a question for reductionists: It is a premise of AI that the mind is computational, and that computations are algorithms that are more or less independent of the physical substrate that is computing them. An algorithm to compute prime numbers is the same algorithm whether it runs on an Intel chip or a bunch of appropriately-configured tinkertoys, and a mind is the same whether it runs on neurons or silicon. The question is, just how is this reductionist? It's one thing to say that any implementation of an algorithm (or mind) has some physical basis, which is pretty obviously true and hence not very interesting, but if those implementations have nothing physical in common, then your reduction hasn't actually accomplished very much.

In other words: let's grant that any particular mind, or algorithm, is physically instantiated and does not involve any magic non-physical forces. Nonetheless, it is mysterious how physical systems with nothing physical in common can realize the same algorithm. That suggests that the algorithm itself is not a physical thing, but something else. And those something elses have very little to do with the laws of physics.

And here:

"Algorithms are made from math" -- indeed, mathematical objects of any kind also have the peculiar properties that I noted. A hexagon is a hexagon no matter what it's made of. A hand is a hand not because its composed of flesh, but because it has certain parts in certain relationships, and is itself attached to a brain. Robotic hands are hands. While there is nothing magically non-physical going on with minds or hands, it does not seem to me that a theory of hands or minds can be expressed in terms of physics. This is the sense in which I am an antireductionist. There are certain phenomena (mathematics most clearly) which, while always grounded n some physical form, seem to float free of physics and follow their own rules.

And here:

I wouldn't call my view "vintage Platonic idealism", but maybe it is, I'm not a philosopher. I'm not saying that forms are more primitive or more metaphysically basic than matter, just that higher-level concepts are not derivable in any meaningful way from physical ones. Maybe that makes me an emergentist. But this philosophical labeling game is not very productive, I've found.

And here:

Brian Macker: Mysterious was maybe the wrong word. Let's say rather that physical reduction just doesn't help explain some higher-level phenonmenon.

Your swing example is interesting. There are obvious physical similarities between the two systems (rotation, tension, etc) even if the two swings are made of different materials. But consider the task of adding up a column of 4-digit numbers, You do it on pencil and paper, I use a calculator. There is nothing physical in common with these two activities, but surely they have something in common.

However algorithms (especially running ones) and flexibility do not "exist" unconnected to the physical objects that exhibit them. Just like the other guy pointed out the number four doesn't exist by itself but can be instantiated in objects. Like a four having four tines.
I agree with this.
The concept resides in your head as a general model, while the actually flexibility of the object is physical.
These concepts that reside in my head are funny things. Presumably they have a physical incarnation in my brain, but they probably have a rather different incarnation in yours. And if we could talk to silicon-based lifeforms from Altair, we would probably find they have a concept of "four", and maybe even one of "flexible", which is similar to ours but has nothing physical in common with ours.

You don't have to consider this mysterious if you don't want to. But it suggests to me that the reductionist way of looking at the world is, if not wrong, not that useful. You could know all about the states of my neurons' calcium channels, and it would not help you understand my argument.

And here:

Quarks, the only allowed causally efficacious entities in the universe, have a lot to answer for. Quarks are causing the US economy to falter, quarks are killing our soldiers in Iraq, quarks are behind communism, nazism, racism, and people who drive too slow in the fast lane. Quarks made me write this obnoxious and inane comment. Damn you, quarks!

And here:

Have to agree about Chalmer's ideas about zombies being the most deranged around, and I guess that is a polite way of putting it. They make no sense whatsoever. However, his view is not the only alternative to reductionism, and you would do yourself and your project a favor if you engaged with some of the more plausible forms, such as emergentism.

Consider "squareness". It is a property of many physical objects or systems, but it doesn't depend on what those objects are made of. It relies on the physical configuration of the object's components, but not on the physical properties of the components. If you had a quantum-level simulation of the universe, it wouldn't tell you when squares appeared (unless you also had, within the simulation or outside of it, something with the about the same computational power of the human visual system). It is a non-physical concept, but implemented, incarnated, and intimately tied to the physical. If you removed one of the sticks or pencils or iron bars making up the square, it wouldn't be a square any more. But it wouldn't make sense to talk about a zombie-square, which would be a physical object in the same physical configuration that somehow is not a square.

And here:

Z M Davis - my point is that there are versions of non-reductionism or weak reductionism that do not depend on or imply supernatural forces. That's the sort I'm interested in, anyway. The zombie argument is a paradigm of how not to explore the conceptual space between strict reductionism and outright religious dualism.

I'll say again that the zombie argument is inane...and the fact that people who expound it have fame and tenure indicates that the quarks are cruel, arbitrary, and capricious.

And that is more than enough for now.

Candles in the wind

From a memorial service to mark the 4000th US soldier killed in Iraq -- San Francisco Civic Center, 3/24/2008.