Tuesday, November 29, 2016

How Everything You Do Might Have Huge Cosmic Significance

Infinitude is a strange and wonderful thing. It transforms the ridiculously improbable into the inevitable.

Now hang on to your hat and glasses. Today's line of reasoning is going to make mere Boltzmann continuants seem boring and mundane.

First, let's suppose that the universe is infinite. This is widely viewed as plausible (see Brian Greene and Max Tegmark).

Second, let's suppose that the Copernican Principle holds: We are not in any special position in the universe. This principle is also widely accepted.

Third, let's assume cosmic diversity: We aren't stuck in an infinitely looping variant of a mere (proper) subset of the possibilities. Across infinite spacetime, there's enough variety to run through every finitely specifiable possibility infinitely often.

These assumptions are somewhat orthodox. To get my argument going, we also need a few assumptions that are less orthodox, but I hope not wildly implausible.

Fourth, let's assume that complexity scales up infinitely. In other words, as you zoom out on the infinite cosmos, you don't find that things eventually look simpler as the scale of measurement gets bigger.

Fifth, let's assume that local actions on Earth have chaotic effects of an arbitrarily large magnitude. You know the Butterfly Effect from chaos theory -- the idea that a small perturbation in a complex, "chaotic" system can make a large-scale difference in the later evolution of the system. A butterfly flapping its wings in China could cause the weather in the U.S. weeks later to be different than it would have been if the butterfly hadn't flapped its wings. Small perturbations amplify. This fifth assumption is that there are cosmic-scale butterfly effects: far-distant, arbitrarily large future events that arise with chaotic sensitivity to events on Earth. Maybe new Big Bangs are triggered, or maybe (as envisioned by Boltzmann) given infinite time, arbitrarily large systems will emerge by chance from low-entropy "heat death" states, and however these Big Bangs or Boltzmannian eruptions arise, they are chaotically sensitive to initial conditions -- including the downstream effects of light reflected from Earth's surface.

Okay, that's a big assumption to swallow. But I don't think it's absurd. Let's just see where it takes us.

Sixth, given the right kind of complexity, evolutionary processes will transpire that favor intelligence. We would not expect such evolutionary processes at most spatiotemporal scales. However, given that complexity scales up infinitely (our fourth assumption) we should expect that at some finite proportion of spatiotemporal scales there are complex systems structured in a way that enables the evolution of intelligence.

From all this it seems to follow that what happens here on Earth -- including the specific choices you make, chaotically amplified as you flap your wings -- can have effects on a cosmic scale that influence the cognition of very large minds.

(Let me be clear that I mean very large minds. I don't mean galaxy-sized minds or visible-universe-sized minds. Galaxy-sized and visible-universe-sized structures in our region don't seem to be of the right sort to support the evolution of intelligence at those scales. I mean way, way up. We have infinitude to play with, after all. And presumably way, way slow if the speed of light is a constraint. Also, I am assuming that time and causation make sense at arbitrarily large scales, but maybe that can be weakened if necessary to something like contingency.)

Now at such scales anything little old you personally does would very likely be experienced as chance. Suppose for example that a cosmic mind utilizes the inflation of Big Bangs. Even if your butterfly effects cause a future Big Bang to happen this way rather than that way, probably a mind at that scale wouldn't have evolved to notice tiny-scale causes like you.

Far fetched. Cool, perhaps, depending on your taste in cool. Maybe not quite cosmic significance, though, if your decisions only feed a pseudo-random mega-process whose outcome has no meaningful relationship to the content of your decisions.

But we do have infinitude to play with, so we can add one more twist.

Here it is: If the odds of influencing the behavior of an arbitrarily large intelligent system are finite, and if we're letting ourselves scale up arbitrarily high, then (granting all the rest of the argument) your decisions will affect the behavior of an infinite number of huge, intelligent systems. Among them there will be some -- a tiny but finite proportion! -- such that the following counterfactual is true: If you hadn't made that upbeat, life-affirming choice you in fact just made, that huge, intelligent system would have decided that life wasn't worth living. But fortunately, partly as a result of that thing you just did, that giant intelligence -- let's call it Emily -- will discover happiness and learn to celebrate its existence. Emily might not know about you. Emily might think it's random or find some other aspect of the causal chain to point toward. But still, if you hadn't done that thing, Emily's life would have been much worse.

So, whew! I hope it won't seem presumptuous of me to thank you on Emily's behalf.

[image source]

Sunday, November 27, 2016

The Odds of Getting Three Consecutive Wars in a Row in the Card Game

What better way to spend the Sunday after Thanksgiving than playing card games with your family and then arguing about the odds?

As pictured, my daughter and I just got three consecutive "wars" in the card game of war. (I lost with a 3 at the end!)

What are the odds of that?

Well, the odds of getting just one war are 3/51, right? Here's why. It doesn't matter whether my or my daughter's card is turned first. That card can be anything. The second card needs to match it. With the first card out of the deck, 51 cards remain. Three of them match the first-turned card. So 3/51 = .058824 = about a 5.9% chance.

Then you each play three face down "soldier" cards. Those could be any cards, and we don't know anything about them, so they can be ignored for purposes of calculation. What's relevant are the next upturned cards, the "generals". Here there are two possibilities. First possibility: The first general is the same value as the original war cards. Since there are 50 unplayed cards and two that match the original two war cards, the odds of that are 2/50 = .040000 = 4.0%. The other possibility is that the value of the first general differs from that of the war cards: 48/50 = .960000 = 96.0%.

(As I write this, my son is sleeping late and my wife and daughter are playing with Musical.ly -- other excellent ways to spend a lazy Sunday!)

In the first case, the odds of the second general matching are only one in 49 (.020408, about 2.0%), since three of the four cards of that value have already been played and there are 49 cards left in the deck (disregarding the soldiers). In the second case, the odds are three in 49 (.061224, about 6.1%).

So the odds of two wars consecutively are: .058824 * .04 * .020408 (first war, followed by matching generals, i.e. all four up cards the same) + .058824 * .96 * .061124 (first war, followed by a different pair of matching generals) = .000048 + .003457 = .003505. In other words, there's about a 0.35% chance, or about one in 300 chance, of two consecutive wars.

If the second war had generals that matched the original war cards, then there's only one way for the third war to happen. Player one draws any new general. The odds of player two's new general matching are 3/47 (.063830).

If the second war had generals that did not match the original war cards, then there are two possibilities.

First possibility: The first new general is the same value as one of the original war cards or previous generals. There's a 4 in 48 (.083333) chance of that happening (two remaining cards of each of those two values). Finally, there's a 1/47 (.021277) chance that the last general matches this one (last remaining card of that value).

Second possibility: The first new general is a different value from either the original war cards or the previous generals. The odds of that are 44/48 (.916667), followed by a 3/47 (.063830) chance of match.

Okay, now we can total up the possibilities. There are three relevantly different ways to get three consecutive wars in a row.

A: First war, followed by second war with same values, followed by third war with different values: .058824 (first war) * .04000 (first general matches war cards) * .020408 (second general matches first general) * .063830 (odds of third war with fresh card values) = .000003 (.0003% or about 1 in 330,000).

B: First war, followed by second war with different values, followed by third war with same values as one of the previous wars: .058824 (first war) * .960000 (first general doesn't match war cards) * .061224 (second general matches first general) * .083333 (first new general matches either war cards or previous generals) * .021277 (second new general matches first new general) = .000006 (.0006% or about 1 in 160,000).

C: First war, followed by second and third wars, each with different values: .058824 (first war) * .960000 (first general doesn't match war cards) * .061224 (second general matches first general) * .916667 (first new general doesn't match either war cards or previous generals) * .063830 (second new general matches first new general) = .000202 (.02% or about 1 in 5000).

Summing up these three paths: .000003 + .000006 + .000202 = .000211. In other words, the chance of three wars in a row is 0.0211% or 1 in 4739.

Now for some leftover turkey.


As it happens we were playing the variant game Modern War -- which is much less tedious than the traditional card game of war! But since it was only the first campaign the odds are the same. (In later campaigns the odds of war increase, because smaller cards fall disproportionately out of the deck.)

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

The Moral Compass and the Liberal Ideal in Moral Education

Here are two very different approaches to moral education:









[image source]

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Three Ways to Be Not Quite Free of Racism















[image source Prabhu B Doss, creative commons]

Wednesday, November 09, 2016

Thought for the Day

What you believe is not what you say you believe. It is how you act.

What you desire is not what you say you desire. It is what you choose.

Who you are is how you live.

You know this about other people, but it is very difficult to know this about yourself.


Acting Contrary to Our Professed Beliefs (Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 2010).

Knowing Your Own Beliefs (Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2011).

A Dispositional Approach to the Attitudes (New Essays on Belief, 2013).

The Pragmatic Metaphysics of Belief (in draft)

Friday, November 04, 2016

Use of "Genius", "Strict", and "Sexy" in Teaching Evaluations, by Discipline and Gender of Professor

Interesting tool here, where you can search for terms in professors' teaching reviews, by discipline and gender.

The gender associations of "genius" with male professors are already fairly well known. Here's how they show in this database:

Apologies for the blurry picture. Click on it to make it clearer!

On the other hand, terms like "mean", "strict", and "unfair" tend to occur more commonly in reviews of female professors. Here's "strict":

How about "sexy"? You might imagine that going either way: Maybe female professors are more frequently rated by their looks. On the other hand, maybe it's "sexier" to be a professor if you're a man. Here how it turns out:

Update, 10:45.

I can't resist adding one more. "Favorite":

Wednesday, November 02, 2016

Introspecting an Attitude by Introspecting Its Conscious Face

In some of my published work, I have argued that:

(1.) Attitudes, such as belief and desire, are best understood as clusters of dispositions. For example, to believe that there is beer in the fridge is nothing more or less than to be disposed (all else being equal or normal) to go to the fridge if one wants a beer, to feel surprised if one were to open the fridge and find no beer, to conclude that the fridge isn't empty if that question becomes relevant, etc, etc. (See my essays here and here.)


(2.) Only conscious experiences are introspectible. I characterize introspection as "the dedication of central cognitive resources, or attention, to the task of arriving at a judgment about one's current, or very recently past, conscious experience, using or attempting to use some capacities that are unique to the first-person case... with the aim or intention that one's judgment reflect some relatively direct sensitivity to the target state" (2012, p. 42-43).

Now it also seems correct that (3.) dispositions, or clusters of dispositions, are not the same as conscious experiences. One can be disposed to have a certain conscious experience (e.g., disposed to experience a feeling of surprise if one were to see no beer), but dispositions and their manifestations are not metaphysically identical. Oscar can be disposed to experience surprise if he were to see an empty fridge, even if he never actually sees an empty fridge and so never actually experiences surprise.

From these three claims it follows that we cannot introspect attitudes such as belief and desire.

But it seems we can introspect them! Right now, I'm craving a sip of coffee. It seems like I am currently experiencing that desire in a directly introspectible way. Or suppose I'm thinking aloud, in inner speech, "X would be such a horrible president!" It seems like I can introspectively detect that belief, in all its passionate intensity, as it is occurs in my mind right now.

I don't want to deny this, exactly. Instead, let me define relatively strict versus permissive conceptions of the targets of introspection.

To warm up, consider a visual analogy: seeing an orange. There the orange is, on the table. You see it. But do you really see the whole orange? Speaking strictly, it might be better to say that you see the orange rind, or the part of the orange rind that is facing you, rather than the whole orange. Arguably, you infer or assume that it's not just an empty rind, that it has a backside, that it has a juicy interior -- and usually that's a safe enough assumption. It's reasonable to just say that you see the orange. In a relatively permissive sense, you see the whole orange; in a relatively strict sense you see only the facing part of the orange rind.

Another example: From my office window I see the fire burning downtown. Of course, I only see the smoke. Even if I were to see the flames, in the strictest sense perhaps the visible light emitted from flames is only a contingent manifestation of the combustion process that truly constitutes a fire. (Consider invisible methanol fires.) More permissively, I see the fire when I see the smoke. More strictly, I need to see the flames or maybe even (impossibly?) the combustion process itself.

Now consider psychological cases: In a relatively permissive sense, you see Sandra's anger. In a stricter sense, you see her scowling face. In a relatively permissive sense, you hear the shyness and social awkwardness in Shivani's voice. In a stricter sense you hear only her words and prosody.

To be clear: I do not mean to imply that a stricter understanding of the targets of perception is more accurate or better than a more permissive understanding. (Indeed, excessive strictness can collapse into absurdity: "No, officer, I didn't see the stop sign. Really, all I saw were patterns of light streaming through my vitreous humour!")

As anger can manifest in a scowl and as fire can manifest in smoke and visible flames, so also can attitudes manifest in conscious experience. The desire for coffee can manifest in a conscious experience that I would describe as an urge to take a sip; my attitude about X's candidacy can manifest in a momentary experience of inner speech. In such cases, we can say that the attitudes present a conscious face. If the conscious experience is distinctive enough to serve as an excellent sign of the real presence of the relevant dispositional structure constituting that attitude, then we can say that the attitude is (occurrently) conscious.

It is important to my view that the conscious face of an attitude is not tantamount to the attitude itself, even if they normally co-occur. If you have the conscious experience but not the underlying suite of relevant dispositions, you do not actually have the attitude. (Let's bracket the question of whether such cases are realistically psychologically possible.) Similarly, a scowl is not anger, smoke is not a fire, a rind is not an orange.

Speaking relatively permissively, then, one can introspect an attitude by introspecting its conscious face, much as I can see a whole orange by seeing the facing part of its rind and I can see a fire by seeing its smoke. I rely upon the fact that the conscious experience wouldn't be there unless the whole dispositional structure were there. If that reliance is justified and the attitude is really there, distinctively manifesting in that conscious experience, then I have successfully introspected it. The exact metaphysical relationship between the strictly conceived target and the permissively conceived target is different among the various cases -- part-whole for the orange, cause-effect for the fire, and disposition-manifestation for the attitude -- but the general strategy is the same.

[image source]