Science, facts, values and morality

Just finished a very good book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris. It is quite meaty, as Harris is a neuroscientist, but this book is not about the brain, but about the basis of morality.

He says, science can help us ... understand what we should do, and should want ... in order to live the best lives possible. [28] He continues, there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, just as there are right an wrong answers to questions of physics, and such answers may someday fall within reach of the maturing sciences of mind.

Harris argues that the split between facts and values--and therefore between science and morality--is an illusion.[179]

And he claims that morality and values relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures .... and that consciousness is the only intelligible domain of value. He asks, what is the alternative? I invite you to try to think of a source of value that has absolutely nothing to do with the ... experience of conscious beings. [32]

An enjoyable, thoughtful book. Part of it is a spirited urging of his fellow scientists to stop ceeding the realm of morality to religion, as so often happens. Those sections were the most enjoyable. Most world religions have done a terrible job of describing morality, much less modeling it. If world religious leaders want to continue to speak of morality, they will need to step up their game.

Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

Interesting, engaging, and sometimes challenging. My only criticism of the book is that he dwells a bit on fads in academia which are fading, but since he's been extensively challenged by that crowd, I suppose it is forgivable.

I'll quote extensively from the last chapter, but first, Emily Dickinson (quoted in that final chapter):

The Brain--is wider than the Sky--
For--put them side to side--
The one the other will contain
With ease--and you--beside-- 

The Brain is deeper than the sea--
For--hold them--Blue to Blue--
The one the other will absorb--
As Sponges--Buckets--do-- 

The Brain is just the weight of God--
For--Heft them--Pound for Pound--
And they will differ--if they do--
As Syllable from Sound--

And the beginning of the final chapter:

The Blank Slate was an attractive vision. It promised to make racism, sexism, and class prejudice factually untenable. It appeared to be a bulwark against the kind of thinking that led to ethnic genocide. It aimed to prevent people from slipping into a premature fatalism about preventable social ills. It put the spotlight on the treatment of children, indigenous peoples, and the underclass. The Blank Slate thus became part of secular faith and appeared to constitute the common decency of our age.  

But the Blank Slate had, and has, a dark side. The vacuum that was posited in human nature was eagerly filled by totalitarian regimes, and it did nothing to prevent their genocides. It perverts education, child-rearing, and the arts into forms of social engineering. It torments mothers who work outside the home and parents whose children did not turn out as they would have liked. It threatens to outlaw biomedical research that could alleviate human suffering. Its corollary, the Noble Savage, invites contempt for the principles of democracy and of "a government of laws not of men." It blinds us to our cognitive and moral shortcomings. And in matters of policy it has elevated sappy dogmas above the search for workable solutions. 

The Blank Slate is not some ideal that we should all hope and pray is true. No, it is anti-life, anti-human theoretical abstraction that denies our common humanity, our inherent interests, and our individual preferences. Though it has pretensions of celebrating our potential, it does the opposite, because our potential comes from the combinatorial interplay of wonderfully complex faculties, not from the passive blankness of an empty tablet. 

Regardless of its good and bad effects, the Blank Slate is an empirical hypothesis about the functioning of the brain and must be evaluated in terms of whether or not it is true. The modern sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution are increasingly showing that it is not true. The result is a rearguard effort to salvage the Blank Slate by disfiguring science and intellectual life: denying the possibility of objectivity and truth, dumbing down issues into dichotomies, replacing facts and logic with intellectual posturing. 

The Blank Slate became so deeply entrenched in intellectual life that the prospect of doing without it can be deeply unsettling. ...Is science leading to a place where prejudice is right, where children may be neglected, where Machiavellianism is accepted, where inequality and violence are met with resignation, where people are treated like machines? 

Not at all! By unhandcuffing widely shared values from moribund factual dogmas, the rationale for these values can only become clearer. We understand *why* we condemn prejudice, cruelty to children, and violence against women, and can focus our efforts on how to implement the goals we value most. ... 

... Acknowledging human nature does not mean overturning our personal world views... It means only taking intellectual life out of its parallel universe and reuniting it with science and, when it is borne out by science, by common sense.

This book was published in 2002, and I think Pinker and his fellow scientists who investigate human nature are beginning to make headway. This book was a good reminder of some of the nonsense we are now sweeping into the dustbin of history, and new understanding of human nature now coming to light.

Thinking about thinking

Since I last wrote about this, I've done more reading and thinking about how we humans perceive, interpret, judge, learn, think and communicate about the world. Perhaps this started with Proust was a Neuroscientist, but there are loads of interesting books I've been finding. Even The Horse, The Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World was about how early culture and language shapes our modern world.

Last month I read one much more interesting than it sounds: The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right, which details the debate in Enlightenment thinking between the English Burke and the American Paine, which produced the American Left and Right, and perhaps in Europe the British versus the continent. This followed Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe, which detailed the changes in both knowledge and philosophy at the very beginning of the Enlightenment, chiefly through short biographies of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. So that's the historical view; I want experiment and neuroscience!

The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics was particularly interesting, since it covered how children learn language, as well as a survey of how linguistics as a field has thought about that. Now I'm reading two books simultaneously, and they are sparking thoughts back and forth. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt is an excellent follow-up to The Great Debate, but in an analytical way, rather than a philosophical debate. Right alongside, an older book by George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. This book is heavy, in every sense of the word, but so rich. I was glad I had read the psycholinguistics text first, and the analogy book last summer, so that I could make sense of this scholarly, radical, amazing tome. I must quote the top Amazon comment on the book:

Lakoff concentrates on the way people *really* think, not the way philosophers would like them to. His approach: We use cognitive models that we acquired in childhood to solve almost every problem - to estimate, to schedule, to infer. What strikes me most about the cognitive science of metaphor is the possibility to apply it to many fields like computer interface design, social sciences, linguistics, you name it. His argument is partly very sophisticated, yet understandable also for a non-philosopher, and he comes up with lots of examples and evidence. This book has become a kind of "creativity technique" to me, I find myself developing new ideas based on Lakoff's approach all the time. Among the people who have no scientific interest in the matter, I recommend this book to designers, programmers and everybody in the field of communication. It is worth every minute you read.

I guess we all know that how we think we see and make sense of the world isn't the way we actually see and justify our decisions. The implicit bias tests prove that, over and over. But these books illustrate the inside of my own head, the life I've lead with my family, my culture, my fellow humans, and how we're getting along. I hope as more is understood, more of us will learn about human nature, so we can improve our lives, our families, companies, politics and policies. It is better than accepting the thinking that got us where we are today.

Promote Lamarckian evolution through GSoC

A short TED talk by neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran inspired me to blog one more time about our upcoming Google Summer of Code project. Whether you are thinking of applying, are preparing to mentor, or are part of a team with some project ideas, give a listen (it's only 7:44 minutes) about how we are literally built to teach and learn from one another. http://www.ted.com/talks/vs_ramachandran_the_neurons_that_shaped_civilization.html?quote=628

What caught my ear was his comparison of Darwinian evolution, which is very slow, with Larmarckian evolution, which can leap ahead, exactly as our culture does. The students who struggle in GSoC, are the ones out of touch with the team, and with their mentors. Sometimes it is the students who withdraw contact when they're in trouble, and sometimes mentors are the ones who are not staying in touch. Either way, the team can notice what is happening, and in a friendly, helpful way, draw the two back into contact.

Success happens when we communicate, because that's how learning happens. Students, when you encounter difficulty, please remember to get into the IRC channel, and if no one answers, write an email. Don't wait a day; don't wait an hour. The summer rushes by and you need all the time so that you can relax and do good work.

Mentors, please experiment with your student at the beginning of your bonding time, what forms of communication work the best for the two of you, or three of you if you have a mentor team. Google hangouts or other voice chats work, as long as someone writes an email summing up the understanding of the road ahead. IRC is important for the team, and students can get a bouncer account by asking the KDE sysadmins once their developer accounts are in place.

Stay in touch! As Vilayanur Ramachandran says,

There is no real independent self, aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world, inspecting other people. You are, in fact, connected not just via Facebook and Internet, you’re actually quite literally connected by your neurons.

So work with your brain, and stay connected.