Prediction

How to Build an Artificial Human

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I was going to use “Artificial Intelligence” in the title here but realized after thinking about it that the idea is really more specific than that.

I came up with the idea here while thinking more about the problem I raised in an earlier post about a serious obstacle to creating an AI. As I said there:

Current AI systems are not universal, and clearly have no ability whatsoever to become universal, without first undergoing deep changes in those systems, changes that would have to be initiated by human beings. What is missing?

The problem is the training data. The process of evolution produced the general ability to learn by using the world itself as the training data. In contrast, our AI systems take a very small subset of the world (like a large set of Go games or a large set of internet text), and train a learning system on that subset. Why take a subset? Because the world is too large to fit into a computer, especially if that computer is a small part of the world.

This suggests that going from the current situation to “artificial but real” intelligence is not merely a question of making things better and better little by little. There is a more fundamental problem that would have to be overcome, and it won’t be overcome simply by larger training sets, by faster computing, and things of this kind. This does not mean that the problem is impossible, but it may turn out to be much more difficult than people expected. For example, if there is no direct solution, people might try to create Robin Hanson’s “ems”, where one would more or less copy the learning achieved by natural selection. Or even if that is not done directly, a better understanding of what it means to “know how to learn,” might lead to a solution, although probably one that would not depend on training a model on massive amounts of data.

Proposed Predictive Model

Perhaps I was mistaken in saying that “larger training sets” would not be enough, at any rate enough to get past this basic obstacle. Perhaps it is enough to choose the subset correctly… namely by choosing the subset of the world that we know to contain general intelligence. Instead of training our predictive model on millions of Go games or millions of words, we will train it on millions of human lives.

This project will be extremely expensive. We might need to hire 10 million people to rigorously lifelog for the next 10 years. This has to be done with as much detail as possible; in particular we would want them recording constant audio and visual streams, as well as much else as possible. If we pay our crew an annual salary of $75,000 for this, this will come to $7.5 trillion; there will be some small additions for equipment and maintenance, but all of this will be very small compared to the salary costs.

Presumably in order to actually build such a large model, various scaling issues would come up and need to be solved. And in principle nothing prevents these from being very hard to solve, or even impossible in practice. But since we do not know that this would happen, let us skip over this and pretend that we have succeeded in building the model. Once this is done, our model should be able to fairly easily take a point in a person’s life and give a fairly sensible continuation over at least a short period of time, just as GPT-3 can give fairly sensible continuations to portions of text.

It may be that this is enough to get past the obstacle described above, and once this is done, it might be enough to build a general intelligence using other known principles, perhaps with some research and refinement that could be done during the years in which our crew would be building their records.

Required Elements

Live learning. In the post discussing the obstacle, I noted that there are two kinds of learning, the type that comes from evolution, and the type that happens during life. Our model represents the type that comes from evolution; unlike GPT-3, which cannot learn anything new, we need our AI to remember what has actually happened during its life and to be able to use this to acquire knowledge about its particular situation. This is not difficult in theory but you would need to think carefully about how this should interact with the general model; you do not want to simply add its particular experiences as another individual example (not that such an addition to an already trained model is simple anyway.)

Causal model. Our AI needs not just a general predictive model of the world, but specifically a causal one; not just the general idea that “when you see A, you will soon see B,” but the idea that “when there is an A — which may or may not be seen — it will make a B, which you may or may not see.” This is needed for many reasons, but in particular, without such a causal model, long term predictions or planning will be impossible. If you take a model like GPT-3 and force it to continue producing text indefinitely, it will either repeat itself or eventually go completely off topic. The same thing would happen to our human life model — if we simply used the model without any causal structure, and forced it to guess what would happen indefinitely far into the future, it would eventually produce senseless predictions.

In the paper Making Sense of Raw Input, published by Google Deepmind, there is a discussion of an implementation of this sort of model, although trained on an extremely easy environment (compared to our task, which would be train it on human lives).

The Apperception Engine attempts to discern the nomological structure that underlies the raw sensory input. In our experiments, we found the induced theory to be very accurate as a predictive model, no matter how many time steps into the future we predict. For example, in Seek Whence (Section 5.1), the theory induced in Fig. 5a allows us to predict all future time steps of the series, and the accuracy of the predictions does not decay with time.

In Sokoban (Section 5.2), the learned dynamics are not just 100% correct on all test trajectories, but they are provably 100% correct. These laws apply to all Sokoban worlds, no matter how large, and no matter how many objects. Our system is, to the best of our knowledge, the first that is able to go from raw video of non-trivial games to an explicit first-order nomological model that is provably correct.

In the noisy sequences experiments (Section 5.3), the induced theory is an accurate predictive model. In Fig. 19, for example, the induced theory allows us to predict all future time steps of the series, and does not degenerate as we go further into the future.

(6.1.2 Accuracy)

Note that this does not have the problem of quick divergence from reality as you predict into the distant future. It will also improve our AI’s live learning:

A system that can learn an accurate dynamics model from a handful of examples is extremely useful for model-based reinforcement learning. Standard model-free algorithms require millions of episodes before they can reach human performance on a range of tasks [31]. Algorithms that learn an implicit model are able to solve the same tasks in thousands of episodes [82]. But a system that learns an accurate dynamics model from a handful of examples should be able to apply that model to plan, anticipating problems in imagination rather than experiencing them in reality [83], thus opening the door to extremely sample efficient model-based reinforcement learning. We anticipate a system that can learn the dynamics of an ATARI game from a handful of trajectories,19 and then apply that model to plan, thus playing at reasonable human level on its very first attempt.

(6.1.3. Data efficiency)

“We anticipate”, as in Google has not yet built such a thing, but that they expect to be able to build it.

Scaling a causal model to work on our human life dataset will probably require some of the most difficult new research of this entire proposal.

Body. In order to engage in live learning, our AI needs to exist in the world in some way. And for the predictive model to do it any good, the world that it exists in needs to be a roughly human world. So there are two possibilities: either we simulate a human world in which it will possess a simulated human body, or we give it a robotic human-like body that will exist physically in the human world.

In relationship to our proposal, these are not very different, but the former is probably more difficult, since we would have to simulate pretty much the entire world, and the more distant our simulation is from the actual world, the less helpful its predictive model would turn out to be.

Sensation. Our AI will need to receive input from the world through something like “senses.” These will need to correspond reasonably well with the data as provided in the model; e.g. since we expect to have audio and visual recording, our AI will need sight and hearing.

Predictive Processing. Our AI will need to function this way in order to acquire self-knowledge and free will, without which we would not consider it to possess general intelligence, however good it might be at particular tasks. In particular, at every point in time it will have predictions, based on the general human-life predictive model and on its causal model of the world, about what will happen in the near future. These predictions need to function in such a way that when it makes a relevant prediction, e.g. when it predicts that it will raise its arm, it will actually raise its arm.

(We might not want this to happen 100% of the time — if such a prediction is very far from the predictive model, we might want the predictive model to take precedence over this power over itself, much as happens with human beings.)

Thought and Internal Sensation. Our AI needs to be able to notice that when it predicts it will raise its arm, it succeeds, and it needs to learn that in these cases its prediction is the cause of raising the arm. Only in this way will its live learning produce a causal model of the world which actually has self knowledge: “When I decide to raise my arm, it happens.” This will also tell it the distinction between itself and the rest of the world; if it predicts the sun will change direction, this does not happen. In order for all this to happen, the AI needs to be able to see its own predictions, not just what happens; the predictions themselves have to become a kind of input, similar to sight and hearing.

What was this again?

If we don’t run into any new fundamental obstacle along the way (I mentioned a few points where this might happen), the above procedure might be able to actually build an artificial general intelligence at a rough cost of $10 trillion (rounded up to account for hardware, research, and so on) and a time period of 10-20 years. But I would call your attention to a couple of things:

First, this is basically an artificial human, even to the extent that the easiest implementation likely requires giving it a robotic human body. It is not more general than that, and there is little reason to believe that our AI would be much more intelligent than a normal human, or that we could easily make it more intelligent. It would be fairly easy to give it quick mental access to other things, like mathematical calculation or internet searches, but this would not be much faster than a human being with a calculator or internet access. Like with GPT-N, one factor that would tend to limit its intelligence is that its predictive model is based on the level of intelligence found in human beings; there is no reason it would predict it would behave more intelligently, and so no reason why it would.

Second, it is extremely unlikely than anyone will implement this research program anytime soon. Why? Because you don’t get anything out of it except an artificial human. We have easier and less expensive ways to make humans, and $10 trillion is around the most any country has ever spent on anything, and never deliberately on one single project. Nonetheless, if no better way to make an AI is found, one can expect that eventually something like this will be implemented; perhaps by China in the 22nd century.

Third, note that “values” did not come up in this discussion. I mentioned this in one of the earlier posts on predictive processing:

The idea of the “desert landscape” seems to be that this account appears to do away with the idea of the good, and the idea of desire. The brain predicts what it is going to do, and those predictions cause it to do those things. This all seems purely intellectual: it seems that there is no purpose or goal or good involved.

The correct response to this, I think, is connected to what I have said elsewhere about desire and good. I noted there that we recognize our desires as desires for particular things by noticing that when we have certain feelings, we tend to do certain things. If we did not do those things, we would never conclude that those feelings are desires for doing those things. Note that someone could raise a similar objection here: if this is true, then are not desire and good mere words? We feel certain feelings, and do certain things, and that is all there is to be said. Where is good or purpose here?

The truth here is that good and being are convertible. The objection (to my definition and to Clark’s account) is not a reasonable objection at all: it would be a reasonable objection only if we expected good to be something different from being, in which case it would of course be nothing at all.

There was no need for an explicit discussion of values because they are an indirect consequence. What would our AI care about? It would care roughly speaking about the same things we care about, because it would predict (and act on the prediction) that it would live a life similar to a human life. There is definitely no specific reason to think it would be interested in taking over the world, although this cannot be excluded absolutely, since this is an interest that humans sometimes have. Note also that Nick Bostrom was wrong: I have just made a proposal that might actually succeed in making a human-like AI, but there is no similar proposal that would make an intelligent paperclip maximizer.

This is not to say that we should not expect any bad behavior at all from such a being; the behavior of the AI in the film Ex Machina is a plausible fictional representation of what could go wrong. Since what it is “trying” to do is to get predictive accuracy, and its predictions are based on actual human lives, it will “feel bad” about the lack of accuracy that results from the fact that it is not actually human, and it may act on those feelings.

Structure of Explanation

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When we explain a thing, we give a cause; we assign the thing an origin that explains it.

We can go into a little more detail here. When we ask “why” something is the case, there is always an implication of possible alternatives. At the very least, the question implies, “Why is this the case rather than not being the case?” Thus “being the case” and “not being the case” are two possible alternatives.

The alternatives can be seen as possibilities in the sense explained in an earlier post. There may or may not be any actual matter involved, but again, the idea is that reality (or more specifically some part of reality) seems like something that would be open to being formed in one way or another, and we are asking why it is formed in one particular way rather than the other way. “Why is it raining?” In principle, the sky is open to being clear, or being filled with clouds and a thunderstorm, and to many other possibilities.

A successful explanation will be a complete explanation when it says “once you take the origin into account, the apparent alternatives were only apparent, and not really possible.” It will be a partial explanation when it says, “once you take the origin into account, the other alternatives were less sensible (i.e. made less sense as possibilities) than the actual thing.”

Let’s consider some examples in the form of “why” questions and answers.

Q1. Why do rocks fall? (e.g. instead of the alternatives of hovering in the air, going upwards, or anything else.)

A1. Gravity pulls things downwards, and rocks are heavier than air.

The answer gives an efficient cause, and once this cause is taken into account, it can be seen that hovering in the air or going upwards were not possibilities relative to that cause.

Obviously there is not meant to be a deep explanation here; the point here is to discuss the structure of explanation. The given answer is in fact basically Newton’s answer (although he provided more mathematical detail), while with general relativity Einstein provided a better explanation.

The explanation is incomplete in several ways. It is not a first cause; someone can now ask, “Why does gravity pull things downwards, instead of upwards or to the side?” Similarly, while it is in fact the cause of falling rocks, someone can still ask, “Why didn’t anything else prevent gravity from making the rocks fall?” This is a different question, and would require a different answer, but it seems to reopen the possibility of the rocks hovering or moving upwards, from a more general point of view. David Hume was in part appealing to the possibility of such additional questions when he said that we can see no necessary connection between cause and effect.

Q2. Why is 7 prime? (i.e. instead of the alternative of not being prime.)

A2. 7/2 = 3.5, so 7 is not divisible by 2. 7/3 = 2.333…, so 7 is not divisible by 3. In a similar way, it is not divisible by 4, 5, or 6. Thus in general it is not divisible by any number except 1 and itself, which is what it means to be prime.

If we assumed that the questioner did not know what being prime means, we could have given a purely formal response simply by noting that it is not divisible by numbers between 1 and itself, and explaining that this is what it is to be prime. As it is, the response gives a sufficient material disposition. Relative to this explanation, “not being prime,” was never a real possibility for 7 in the first place. The explanation is complete in that it completely excludes the apparent alternative.

Q3. Why did Peter go to the store? (e.g. instead of going to the park or the museum, or instead of staying home.)

A3. He went to the store in order to buy groceries.

The answer gives a final cause. In view of this cause the alternatives were merely apparent. Going to the park or the museum, or even staying home, were not possible since there were no groceries there.

As in the case of the rock, the explanation is partial in several ways. Someone can still ask, “Why did he want groceries?” And again someone can ask why he didn’t go to some other store, or why something didn’t hinder him, and so on. Such questions seem to reopen various possibilities, and thus the explanation is not an ultimately complete one.

Suppose, however, that someone brings up the possibility that instead of going to the store, he could have gone to his neighbor and offered money for groceries in his neighbor’s refrigerator. This possibility is not excluded simply by the purpose of buying groceries. Nonetheless, the possibility seems less sensible than getting them from the store, for multiple reasons. Again, the implication is that our explanation is only partial: it does not completely exclude alternatives, but it makes them less sensible.

Let’s consider a weirder question: Why is there something rather than nothing?

Now the alternatives are explicit, namely there being something, and there being nothing.

It can be seen that in one sense, as I said in the linked post, the question cannot have an answer, since there cannot be a cause or origin for “there is something” which would itself not be something. Nonetheless, if we consider the idea of possible alternatives, it is possible to see that the question does not need an answer; one of the alternatives was only an apparent alternative all along.

In other words, the sky can be open to being clear or cloudy. But there cannot be something which is open both to “there is something” and “there is nothing”, since any possibility of that kind would be “something which is open…”, which would already be something rather than nothing. The “nothing” alternative was merely apparent. Nothing was ever open to there being nothing.

Let’s consider another weird question. Suppose we throw a ball, and in the middle of the path we ask, Why is the ball in the middle of the path instead of at the end of the path?

We could respond in terms of a sufficient material disposition: it is in the middle of the path because you are asking your question at the middle, instead of waiting until the end.

Suppose the questioner responds: Look, I asked my question at the middle of the path. But that was just chance. I could have asked at any moment, including at the end. So I want to know why it was in the middle without considering when I am asking the question.

If we look at the question in this way, it can be seen in one way that no cause or origin can be given. Asked in this way, being at the end cannot be excluded, since they could have asked their question at the end. But like the question about something rather than nothing, the question does not need an answer. In this case, this is not because the alternatives were merely apparent in the sense that one was possible and the other not. But they were merely apparent in the sense that they were not alternatives. The ball goes both goes through the middle, and reaches the end. With the stipulation that we not consider the time of the question, the two possibilities are not mutually exclusive.

Additional Considerations

The above considerations about the nature of “explanation” lead to various conclusions, but also to various new questions. For example, one commenter suggested that “explanation” is merely subjective. Now as I said there, all experience is subjective experience (what would “objective experience” even mean, except that someone truly had a subjective experience?), including the experience of having an explanation. Nonetheless, the thing experienced is not subjective: the origins that we call explanations objectively exclude the apparent possibilities, or objectively make them less intelligible. The explanation of explanation here, however, provides an answer to what was perhaps the implicit question. Namely, why are we so interested in explanations in the first place, so that the experience of understanding something becomes a particularly special type of experience? Why, as Aristotle puts it, do “all men desire to know,” and why is that desire particularly satisfied by explanations?

In one sense it is sufficient simply to say that understanding is good in itself. Nonetheless, there is something particular about the structure of a human being that makes knowledge good for us, and which makes explanation a particularly desirable form of knowledge. In my employer and employee model of human psychology, I said that “the whole company is functioning well overall when the CEO’s goal of accurate prediction is regularly being achieved.” This very obviously requires knowledge, and explanation is especially beneficial because it excludes alternatives, which reduces uncertainty and therefore tends to make prediction more accurate.

However, my account also raises new questions. If explanation eliminates alternatives, what would happen if everything was explained? We could respond that “explaining everything” is not possible in the first place, but this is probably an inadequate response, because (from the linked argument) we only know that we cannot explain everything all at once, the way the person in the room cannot draw everything at once; we do not know that there is any particular thing that cannot be explained, just as there is no particular aspect of the room that cannot be drawn. So there can still be a question about what would happen if every particular thing in fact has an explanation, even if we cannot know all the explanations at once. In particular, since explanation eliminates alternatives, does the existence of explanations imply that there are not really any alternatives? This would suggest something like Leibniz’s argument that the actual world is the best possible world. It is easy to see that such an idea implies that there was only one “possibility” in the first place: Leibniz’s “best possible world” would be rather “the only possible world,” since the apparent alternatives, given that they would have been worse, were not real alternatives in the first place.

On the other hand, if we suppose that this is not the case, and there are ultimately many possibilities, does this imply the existence of “brute facts,” things that could have been otherwise, but which simply have no explanation? Or at least things that have no complete explanation?

Let the reader understand. I have already implicitly answered these questions. However, I will not link here to the implicit answers because if one finds it unclear when and where this was done, one would probably also find those answers unclear and inconclusive. Of course it is also possible that the reader does see when this was done, but still believes those responses inadequate. In any case, it is possible to provide the answers in a form which is much clearer and more conclusive, but this will likely not be a short or simple project.

Kavka’s Toxin

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Gregory Kavka discusses a thought experiment:

You are feeling extremely lucky. You have just been approached by an eccentric billionaire who has offered you the following deal. He places before you a vial of toxin that, if you drink it, will make you painfully ill for a day, but will not threaten your life or have any lasting effects. (Your spouse, a crack biochemist, confirms the properties of the toxin.) The billionaire will pay you one million dollars tomorrow morning if, at midnight tonight, you intend to drink the toxin tomorrow afternoon. He emphasizes that you need not drink the toxin to receive the money; in fact, the money will already be in your bank account hours before the time for drinking it arrives, if you succeed. (This is confirmed by your daughter, a lawyer, after she examines the legal and financial documents that the billionaire has signed.) All you have to do is sign the agreement and then intend at midnight tonight to drink the stuff tomorrow afternoon. You are perfectly free to change your mind after receiving the money and not drink the toxin. (The presence or absence of the intention is to be determined by the latest ‘mind-reading’ brain scanner and computing device designed by the great Doctor X. As a cognitive scientist, materialist, and former student of Doctor X, you have no doubt that the machine will correctly detect the presence or absence of the relevant intention.)

Confronted with this offer, you gleefully sign the contract, thinking ‘what an easy way to become a millionaire’. Not long afterwards, however, you begin to worry. You had been thinking that you could avoid drinking the toxin and just pocket the million. But you realize that if you are thinking in those terms when midnight rolls around, you will not be intending to drink the toxin tomorrow. So maybe you will actually have to drink the stuff to collect the money. It will not be pleasant, but it is sure worth a day of suffering to become a millionaire.

However, as occurs to you immediately, it cannot really be necessary to drink the toxin to pocket the money. That money will either be or not be in your bank account by 10 a.m. tomorrow, you will know then whether it is there or not, and your drinking or not drinking the toxin hours later cannot affect the completed financial transaction. So instead of planning to drink the toxin, you decide to intend today to drink it and then change your mind after midnight. But if that is your plan, then it is obvious that you do not intend to drink the toxin. (At most you intend to intend to drink it.) For having such an intention is incompatible with planning to change your mind tomorrow morning.

The discussion goes on from here for some time, but the resolution of the puzzle is easier than Kavka realizes. There is only a problem because it is implicitly assumed that the belief that you will or will not drink the toxin is something different from the intention to drink it. But in the case of voluntary actions, these are one and the same. The reason you cannot intend to drink the toxin without thinking that you will end up drinking it is simply that the intention to drink the toxin is the belief that you will end up drinking it. If the brain scanner works correctly, it registers that you intend to drink the toxin if you in fact think you will end up drinking it, and it registers that you do not intend this if you in fact think you will not drink it.

Is there a problem on the practical level? That is, is it possible for someone to get the million, or is it impossible because everyone in such a situation would expect that they would reconsider tomorrow morning, and therefore they will not believe that they will end up drinking it?

Possibly, and for some people. It is entirely possible in some situations that beliefs about what you will in fact do, apparently simply based on facts, entirely prevent certain decisions and intentions. Thus if someone has tried dozens of times in the past to give up smoking, and consistently failed, it will become more and more difficult to intend to give up smoking, and may very well become impossible.

However, Kavka gives a theoretical argument that this should be impossible in the case of his thought experiment:

Thus, we can explain your difficulty in earning a fortune: you cannot intend to act as you have no reason to act, at least when you have substantial reason not to act. And you have (or will have when the time comes) no reason to drink the toxin, and a very good reason not to, for it will make you quite sick for a day.

Again, it may well be that this reasoning would cause an individual to fail to obtain the million. But it is not necessary for this to happen. For the person does have a reason to intend to drink the toxin in the first place: namely, in order to obtain the million. And tomorrow morning their decision, i.e. their belief that they will drink the toxin, will be an efficient cause of them actually drinking the toxin, unless they reconsider. Thus if a person expects to reconsider, they may well fail to obtain the million. But someone wanting to obtain the million will also therefore plan not to reconsider. And tomorrow morning their belief that they will not reconsider will be an efficient cause of them not reconsidering, unless they reconsider their plan not to reconsider. And so on.

Thus, someone can only obtain the million if they plan to drink the toxin, they plan not to reconsider this plan, and so on. And someone with this plan can obtain the million. And maybe they will end up drinking the toxin and maybe they won’t; but the evening before, they believe that they factually will drink it. If they don’t, they fail to obtain the million. And they may well in fact drink it, simply by carrying out the original plan: going about their day without thinking about it, and simply drinking that afternoon, without any additional consideration of reasons to drink or not drink.

There is also a way to obtain the million and avoid drinking, but it cannot happen on purpose. This can happen only in one way: namely, by being lucky. You plan on every level not to reconsider, and expect this to happen, but luckily you end up being mistaken, and you do reconsider, despite expecting not to. In this case you both obtain the million, and avoid the drink.

 

Employer and Employee Model: Happiness

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We discussed Aristotle’s definition of happiness as activity according to virtue here, followed by a response to an objection.

There is another objection, however, which Aristotle raises himself in Book I, chapter 8 of the Nicomachean Ethics:

Yet evidently, as we said, it needs the external goods as well; for it is impossible, or not easy, to do noble acts without the proper equipment. In many actions we use friends and riches and political power as instruments; and there are some things the lack of which takes the lustre from happiness, as good birth, goodly children, beauty; for the man who is very ugly in appearance or ill-born or solitary and childless is not very likely to be happy, and perhaps a man would be still less likely if he had thoroughly bad children or friends or had lost good children or friends by death. As we said, then, happiness seems to need this sort of prosperity in addition; for which reason some identify happiness with good fortune, though others identify it with virtue.

Aristotle is responding to the implicit objection by saying that it is “impossible, or not easy” to act according to virtue when one is doing badly in other ways. Yet probably most of us know some people who are virtuous while suffering various misfortunes, and it seems pretty unreasonable, as well as uncharitable, to assert that the reason that they are somewhat unhappy with their circumstances is that the lack of “proper equipment” leads to a lack of virtuous activity. Or at any rate, even if this contributes to the matter, it does not seem to be a full explanation. The book of Job, for example, is based almost entirely on the possibility of being both virtuous and miserable, and Job would very likely respond to Aristotle, “How then will you comfort me with empty nothings? There is nothing left of your answers but falsehood.”

Aristotle brings up a similar issue at the beginning of Book VIII:

After what we have said, a discussion of friendship would naturally follow, since it is a virtue or implies virtue, and is besides most necessary with a view to living. For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods; even rich men and those in possession of office and of dominating power are thought to need friends most of all; for what is the use of such prosperity without the opportunity of beneficence, which is exercised chiefly and in its most laudable form towards friends? Or how can prosperity be guarded and preserved without friends? The greater it is, the more exposed is it to risk. And in poverty and in other misfortunes men think friends are the only refuge. It helps the young, too, to keep from error; it aids older people by ministering to their needs and supplementing the activities that are failing from weakness; those in the prime of life it stimulates to noble actions-‘two going together’-for with friends men are more able both to think and to act. Again, parent seems by nature to feel it for offspring and offspring for parent, not only among men but among birds and among most animals; it is felt mutually by members of the same race, and especially by men, whence we praise lovers of their fellowmen. We may even in our travels how near and dear every man is to every other. Friendship seems too to hold states together, and lawgivers to care more for it than for justice; for unanimity seems to be something like friendship, and this they aim at most of all, and expel faction as their worst enemy; and when men are friends they have no need of justice, while when they are just they need friendship as well, and the truest form of justice is thought to be a friendly quality.

But it is not only necessary but also noble; for we praise those who love their friends, and it is thought to be a fine thing to have many friends; and again we think it is the same people that are good men and are friends.

There is a similar issue here: lack of friends may make someone unhappy, but lack of friends is not lack of virtue. Again Aristotle is in part responding by pointing out that the activity of some virtues depends on the presence of friends, just as he said that temporal goods were necessary as instruments. Once again, however, even if there is some truth in it, the answer does not seem adequate, especially since Aristotle believes that the highest form of happiness is found in contemplation, which seems to depend much less on friends than other types of activity.

Consider again Aristotle’s argument for happiness as virtue, presented in the earlier post. It depends on the idea of a “function”:

Presumably, however, to say that happiness is the chief good seems a platitude, and a clearer account of what it is still desired. This might perhaps be given, if we could first ascertain the function of man. For just as for a flute-player, a sculptor, or an artist, and, in general, for all things that have a function or activity, the good and the ‘well’ is thought to reside in the function, so would it seem to be for man, if he has a function. Have the carpenter, then, and the tanner certain functions or activities, and has man none? Is he born without a function? Or as eye, hand, foot, and in general each of the parts evidently has a function, may one lay it down that man similarly has a function apart from all these? What then can this be? Life seems to be common even to plants, but we are seeking what is peculiar to man. Let us exclude, therefore, the life of nutrition and growth. Next there would be a life of perception, but it also seems to be common even to the horse, the ox, and every animal. There remains, then, an active life of the element that has a rational principle; of this, one part has such a principle in the sense of being obedient to one, the other in the sense of possessing one and exercising thought. And, as ‘life of the rational element’ also has two meanings, we must state that life in the sense of activity is what we mean; for this seems to be the more proper sense of the term. Now if the function of man is an activity of soul which follows or implies a rational principle, and if we say ‘so-and-so-and ‘a good so-and-so’ have a function which is the same in kind, e.g. a lyre, and a good lyre-player, and so without qualification in all cases, eminence in respect of goodness being added to the name of the function (for the function of a lyre-player is to play the lyre, and that of a good lyre-player is to do so well): if this is the case, and we state the function of man to be a certain kind of life, and this to be an activity or actions of the soul implying a rational principle, and the function of a good man to be the good and noble performance of these, and if any action is well performed when it is performed in accordance with the appropriate excellence: if this is the case, human good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete.

Aristotle took what was most specifically human and identified happiness with performing well in that most specifically human way. This is reasonable, but it leads to the above issues, because a human being is not only what is most specifically human, but also possesses the aspects that Aristotle dismissed here as common to other things. Consequently, activity according to virtue would be the most important aspect of functioning well as a human being, and in this sense Aristotle’s account is reasonable, but there are other aspects as well.

Using our model, we can present a more unified account of happiness which includes these other aspects without the seemingly arbitrary way in which Aristotle noted the need for temporal goods and friendship for happiness. The specifically rational character belongs mainly to the Employee, and thus when Aristotle identifies happiness with virtuous action, he is mainly identifying happiness with the activity of the Employee. And this is surely its most important aspect. But since the actual human being is the whole company, it is more complete to identify happiness with the good functioning of the whole company. And the whole company is functioning well overall when the CEO’s goal of accurate prediction is regularly being achieved.

Consider two ways in which someone might respond to the question, “How are you doing?” If someone isn’t doing very well, they might say, “Well, I’ve been having a pretty rough time,” while if they are better off, they might say, “Things are going pretty smoothly.” Of course people might use other words, but notice the contrast in my examples: a life that is going well is often said to be going “smoothly”, while the opposite is described as “rough.” And the difference here between smooth and rough is precisely the difference between predictive accuracy and inaccuracy. We might see this more easily by considering some restricted examples:

First, suppose two people are jogging. One is keeping an even pace, keeping their balance, rounding corners smoothly, and keeping to the middle of the path. The other is becoming tired, slowing down a bit and speeding up a bit. They are constantly off balance and suffering disturbing jolts when they hit unexpected bumps in the path, perhaps narrowly avoiding tripping. If we compare what is happening here with the general idea of predictive processing, it seems that the difference between the two is that first person is predicting accurately, while the second is predicting inaccurately. The second person is not rationing their energy and breath correctly, they suffer jolts or near trips when they did not correctly expect the lay of the land, and so on.

Suppose someone is playing a video game. The one who plays it well is the one who is very prepared for every eventuality. They correctly predict what is going to happen in the game both with regard to what happens “by itself,” and what will happen as a result of their in-game actions. They play the game “smoothly.”

Suppose I am writing this blog post and feel myself in a state of “flow,” and I consequently am enjoying the activity. This can only happen as long as the process is fairly “smooth.” If I stop for long periods in complete uncertainty of what to write next, the state will go away. In other words, the condition depends on having at each moment a fairly good idea of what is coming next; it depends on accurate prediction.

The reader might understand the point in relation to these limited examples, but how does this apply to life in general, and especially to virtue and vice, which are according to Aristotle the main elements of happiness and unhappiness?

In a basic way virtuous activity is reasonable activity, and vicious activity is unreasonable activity. The problem with vice, in this account, is that it immediately sets up a serious interior conflict. The Employee is a rational being and is constantly being affected by reasons to do things. Vice, in one way or another, persuades them to do unreasonable things, and the reasons for not doing those things will be constantly pulling in the opposite direction. When St. Paul complains that he wills something different from what he does, he is speaking of this kind of conflict. But conflicting tendencies leads to uncertain results, and so our CEO is unhappy with this situation.

Now you might object: if a vicious man is unhappy because of conflicting tendencies, what if they are so wicked that they have no conflict, but simply and contentedly do what is evil?

The response to this would be somewhat along the lines of the answer we gave to the objection that moral obligation should not depend on desiring some particular end. First, it is probably impossible for a human being to become so corrupted that they cannot see, at least to some degree, that bad things are bad. Second, consider the wicked men according to Job’s description:

Why do the wicked live on,
reach old age, and grow mighty in power?
Their children are established in their presence,
and their offspring before their eyes.
Their houses are safe from fear,
and no rod of God is upon them.
Their bull breeds without fail;
their cow calves and never miscarries.
They send out their little ones like a flock,
and their children dance around.
They sing to the tambourine and the lyre,
and rejoice to the sound of the pipe.
They spend their days in prosperity,
and in peace they go down to Sheol.

Just as we said that if you assume that someone is entirely corrupt, the idea of “obligation” may well become irrelevant to them, without that implying anything wrong with the general idea of moral obligation, in a similar way, it would be metaphorical to speak of such a person as “unhappy”; you could say this with the intention of saying that they exist in an objectively bad situation, but not in the ordinary sense of the term, in which it includes subjective discontent.

We could explain a great deal more with this account of happiness: not only the virtuous life in general, but also a great deal of the spiritual, psychological, and other practical advice which is typically given. But this is all perhaps for another time.

Employer and Employee Model: Truth

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In the remote past, I suggested that I would someday follow up on this post. In the current post, I begin to keep that promise.

We can ask about the relationship of the various members of our company with the search for truth.

The CEO, as the predictive engine, has a fairly strong interest in truth, but only insofar as truth is frequently necessary in order to get predictive accuracy. Consequently our CEO will usually insist on the truth when it affects our expectations regarding daily life, but it will care less when we consider things remote from the senses. Additionally, the CEO is highly interested in predicting the behavior of the Employee, and it is not uncommon for falsehood to be better than truth for this purpose.

To put this in another way, the CEO’s interest in truth is instrumental: it is sometimes useful for the CEO’s true goal, predictive accuracy, but not always, and in some cases it can even be detrimental.

As I said here, the Employee is, roughly speaking, the human person as we usually think of one, and consequently the Employee has the same interest in truth that we do. I personally consider truth to be an ultimate end,  and this is probably the opinion of most people, to a greater or lesser degree. In other words, most people consider truth a good thing, even apart from instrumental considerations. Nonetheless, all of us care about various things besides truth, and therefore we also occasionally trade truth for other things.

The Vice President has perhaps the least interest in truth. We could say that they too have some instrumental concern about truth. Thus for example the VP desires food, and this instrumentally requires true ideas about where food is to be found. Nonetheless, as I said in the original post, the VP is the least rational and coherent, and may easily fail to notice such a need. Thus the VP might desire the status resulting from winning an argument, so to speak, but also desire the similar status that results from ridiculing the person holding an opposing view. The frequent result is that a person believes the falsehood that ridiculing an opponent generally increases the chance that they will change their mind (e.g. see John Loftus’s attempt to justify ridicule.)

Given this account, we can raise several disturbing questions.

First, although we have said the Employee values truth in itself, can this really be true, rather than simply a mistaken belief on the part of the Employee? As I suggested in the original account, the Employee is in some way a consequence of the CEO and the VP. Consequently, if neither of these places intrinsic value on truth, how is it possible that the Employee does?

Second, even if the Employee sincerely places an intrinsic value on truth, how is this not a misplaced value? Again, if the Employee is something like a result of the others, what is good for the Employee should be what is good for the others, and thus if truth is not intrinsically good for the others, it should not be intrinsically good for the Employee.

In response to the first question, the Employee can indeed believe in the intrinsic value of truth, and of many other things to which the CEO and VP do not assign intrinsic value. This happens because as we are considering the model, there is a real division of labor, even if the Employee arises historically in a secondary manner. As I said in the other post, the Employee’s beliefs are our beliefs, and the Employee can believe anything that we believe. Furthermore, the Employee can really act on such beliefs about the goodness of truth or other things, even when the CEO and VP do not have the same values. The reason for this is the same as the reason that the CEO will often go along with the desires of the VP, even though the CEO places intrinsic value only on predictive accuracy. The linked post explains, in effect, why the CEO goes along with sex, even though only the VP really wants it. In a similar way, if the Employee believes that sex outside of marriage is immoral, the CEO often goes along with avoiding such sex, even though the CEO cares about predictive accuracy, not about sex or its avoidance. Of course, in this particular case, there is a good chance of conflict between the Employee and VP, and the CEO dislikes conflict, since it makes it harder to predict what the person overall will end up doing. And since the VP very rarely changes its mind in this case, the CEO will often end up encouraging the Employee to change their mind about the morality of such sex: thus one of the most frequent reasons why people abandon their religion is that it says that sex in some situations is wrong, but they still desire sex in those situations.

In response to the second, the Employee is not wrong to suppose that truth is intrinsically valuable. The argument against this would be that the human good is based on human flourishing, and (it is claimed) we do not need truth for such flourishing, since the CEO and VP do not care about truth in itself. The problem with this is that such flourishing requires that the Employee care about truth, and even the CEO needs the Employee to care in this way, for the sake of its own goal of predictive accuracy. Consider a real-life company: the employer does not necessarily care about whether the employee is being paid, considered in itself, but only insofar as it is instrumentally useful for convincing the employee to work for the employer. But the employer does care about whether the employee cares about being paid: if the employee does not care about being paid, they will not work for the employer.

Concern for truth in itself, apart from predictive accuracy, affects us when we consider things that cannot possibly affect our future experience: thus in previous cases I have discussed the likelihood that there are stars and planets outside the boundaries of the visible universe. This is probably true; but if I did not care about truth in itself, I might as well say that the universe is surrounded by purple elephants. I do not expect any experience to verify or falsify the claim, so why not make it? But now notice the problem for the CEO: the CEO needs to predict what the Employee is going to do, including what they will say and believe. This will instantly become extremely difficult if the Employee decides that they can say and believe whatever they like, without regard for truth, whenever the claim will not affect their experiences. So for its own goal of predictive accuracy, the CEO needs the Employee to value truth in itself, just as an ordinary employer needs their employee to value their salary.

In real life this situation can cause problems. The employer needs their employee to care about being paid, but if they care too much, they may constantly be asking for raises, or they may quit and go work for someone who will pay more. The employer does not necessarily like these situations. In a similar way, the CEO in our company may worry if the Employee insists too much on absolute truth, because as discussed elsewhere, it can lead to other situations with unpredictable behavior from the Employee, or to situations where there is a great deal of uncertainty about how society will respond to the Employee’s behavior.

Overall, this post perhaps does not say much in substance that we have not said elsewhere, but it will perhaps provide an additional perspective on these matters.

Schrödinger’s Cat

entirelyuseless Metaphysics, Probability, Science, Uncategorized , , , , , , , ,

Erwin Schrödinger describes the context for his thought experiment with a cat:

The other alternative consists of granting reality only to the momentarily sharp determining parts – or in more general terms to each variable a sort of realization just corresponding to the quantum mechanical statistics of this variable at the relevant moment.

That it is in fact not impossible to express the degree and kind of blurring of all variables in one perfectly clear concept follows at once from the fact that Q.M. as a matter of fact has and uses such an instrument, the so-called wave function or psi-function, also called system vector. Much more is to be said about it further on. That it is an abstract, unintuitive mathematical construct is a scruple that almost always surfaces against new aids to thought and that carries no great message. At all events it is an imagined entity that images the blurring of all variables at every moment just as clearly and faithfully as does the classical model its sharp numerical values. Its equation of motion too, the law of its time variation, so long as the system is left undisturbed, lags not one iota, in clarity and determinacy, behind the equations of motion of the classical model. So the latter could be straight-forwardly replaced by the psi-function, so long as the blurring is confined to atomic scale, not open to direct control. In fact the function has provided quite intuitive and convenient ideas, for instance the “cloud of negative electricity” around the nucleus, etc. But serious misgivings arise if one notices that the uncertainty affects macroscopically tangible and visible things, for which the term “blurring” seems simply wrong. The state of a radioactive nucleus is presumably blurred in such a degree and fashion that neither the instant of decay nor the direction, in which the emitted alpha-particle leaves the nucleus, is well-established. Inside the nucleus, blurring doesn’t bother us. The emerging particle is described, if one wants to explain intuitively, as a spherical wave that continuously emanates in all directions and that impinges continuously on a surrounding luminescent screen over its full expanse. The screen however does not show a more or less constant uniform glow, but rather lights up at one instant at one spot – or, to honor the truth, it lights up now here, now there, for it is impossible to do the experiment with only a single radioactive atom. If in place of the luminescent screen one uses a spatially extended detector, perhaps a gas that is ionised by the alpha-particles, one finds the ion pairs arranged along rectilinear columns, that project backwards on to the bit of radioactive matter from which the alpha-radiation comes (C.T.R. Wilson’s cloud chamber tracks, made visible by drops of moisture condensed on the ions).

One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.

It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a “blurred model” for representing reality. In itself it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.

We see here the two elements described at the end of this earlier post. The psi-function is deterministic, but there seems to be an element of randomness when someone comes to check on the cat.

Hugh Everett amusingly describes a similar experiment performed on human beings (but without killing anyone):

Isolated somewhere out in space is a room containing an observer, A, who is about to perform a measurement upon a system S. After performing his measurement he will record the result in his notebook. We assume that he knows the state function of S (perhaps as a result of previous measurement), and that it is not an eigenstate of the measurement he is about to perform. A, being an orthodox quantum theorist, then believes that the outcome of his measurement is undetermined and that the process is correctly described by Process 1 [namely a random determination caused by measurement].

In the meantime, however, there is another observer, B, outside the room, who is in possession of the state function of the entire room, including S, the measuring apparatus, and A, just prior to the measurement. B is only interested in what will be found in the notebook one week hence, so he computes the state function of the room for one week in the future according to Process 2 [namely the deterministic  wave function]. One week passes, and we find B still in possession of the state function of the room, which this equally orthodox quantum theorist believes to be a complete description of the room and its contents. If B’s state function calculation tells beforehand exactly what is going to be in the notebook, then A is incorrect in his belief about the indeterminacy of the outcome of his measurement. We therefore assume that B’s state function contains non-zero amplitudes over several of the notebook entries.

At this point, B opens the door to the room and looks at the notebook (performs his observation.) Having observed the notebook entry, he turns to A and informs him in a patronizing manner that since his (B’s) wave function just prior to his entry into the room, which he knows to have been a complete description of the room and its contents, had non-zero amplitude over other than the present result of the measurement, the result must have been decided only when B entered the room, so that A, his notebook entry, and his memory about what occurred one week ago had no independent objective existence until the intervention by B. In short, B implies that A owes his present objective existence to B’s generous nature which compelled him to intervene on his behalf. However, to B’s consternation, A does not react with anything like the respect and gratitude he should exhibit towards B, and at the end of a somewhat heated reply, in which A conveys in a colorful manner his opinion of B and his beliefs, he rudely punctures B’s ego by observing that if B’s view is correct, then he has no reason to feel complacent, since the whole present situation may have no objective existence, but may depend upon the future actions of yet another observer.

Schrödinger’s problem was that the wave equation seems to describe something “blurred,” but if we assume that is because something blurred exists, it seems to contradict our experience which is of something quite distinct: a live cat or a dead cat, but not something in between.

Everett proposes that his interpretation of quantum mechanics is able to resolve this difficulty. After presenting other interpretations, he proposes his own (“Alternative 5”):

Alternative 5: To assume the universal validity of the quantum description, by the complete abandonment of Process 1 [again, this was the apparently random measurement process]. The general validity of pure wave mechanics, without any statistical assertions, is assumed for all physical systems, including observers and measuring apparata. Observation processes are to be described completely by the state function of the composite system which includes the observer and his object-system, and which at all times obeys the wave equation (Process 2).

…

It is evident that Alternative 5 is a theory of many advantages. It has the virtue of logical simplicity and it is complete in the sense that it is applicable to the entire universe. All processes are considered equally (there are no “measurement processes” which play any preferred role), and the principle of psycho-physical parallelism is fully maintained. Since the universal validity of the state function is asserted, one can regard the state functions themselves as the fundamental entities, and one can even consider the state function of the whole universe. In this sense this theory can be called the theory of the “universal wave function,” since all of physics is presumed to follow from this function alone. There remains, however, the question whether or not such a theory can be put into correspondence with our experience.

This present thesis is devoted to showing that this concept of a universal wave mechanics, together with the necessary correlation machinery for its interpretation, forms a logically self consistent description of a universe in which several observers are at work.

Ultimately, Everett’s response to Schrödinger is that the cat is indeed “blurred,” and that this never goes away. When someone checks on the cat, the person checking is also “blurred,” becoming a composite of someone seeing a dead cat and someone seeing a live cat. However, these are in effect two entirely separate worlds, one in which someone sees a live cat, and one in which someone sees a dead cat.

Everett mentions “the necessary correlation machinery for its interpretation,” because a mathematical theory of physics as such does not necessarily say that anyone should see anything in particular. So for example when Newton when says that there is a gravitational attraction between masses inversely proportional to the square of their distance, what exactly should we expect to see, given that? Obviously there is no way to answer this without adding something, and ultimately we need to add something non-mathematical, namely something about the way our experiences work.

I will not pretend to judge whether or not Everett does a good job defending his position. There is an interesting point here, whether or not his defense is ultimately a good one. “Orthodox” quantum mechanics, as Everett calls it, only gives statistical predictions about the future, and as long as nothing is added to the theory, it implies that deterministic predictions are impossible. It follows that if the position in our last post, on an open future, was correct, it must be possible to explain the results of quantum mechanics in terms of many worlds or multiple timelines. And I do not merely mean that we can give the same predictions with a one-world account or with a many world account. I mean that there must be a many-world account such that its contents are metaphysically identical to the contents of a one-world account with an open future.

This would nonetheless leave undetermined the question of what sort of account would be most useful to us in practice.

Aristotle on Future Contingents

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In Chapter 9 of On Interpretation, Aristotle argues that at least some statements about the future need to be exempted from the principle of Excluded Middle:

In the case of that which is or which has taken place, propositions, whether positive or negative, must be true or false. Again, in the case of a pair of contradictories, either when the subject is universal and the propositions are of a universal character, or when it is individual, as has been said,’ one of the two must be true and the other false; whereas when the subject is universal, but the propositions are not of a universal character, there is no such necessity. We have discussed this type also in a previous chapter.

When the subject, however, is individual, and that which is predicated of it relates to the future, the case is altered. For if all propositions whether positive or negative are either true or false, then any given predicate must either belong to the subject or not, so that if one man affirms that an event of a given character will take place and another denies it, it is plain that the statement of the one will correspond with reality and that of the other will not. For the predicate cannot both belong and not belong to the subject at one and the same time with regard to the future.

Thus, if it is true to say that a thing is white, it must necessarily be white; if the reverse proposition is true, it will of necessity not be white. Again, if it is white, the proposition stating that it is white was true; if it is not white, the proposition to the opposite effect was true. And if it is not white, the man who states that it is making a false statement; and if the man who states that it is white is making a false statement, it follows that it is not white. It may therefore be argued that it is necessary that affirmations or denials must be either true or false.

Now if this be so, nothing is or takes place fortuitously, either in the present or in the future, and there are no real alternatives; everything takes place of necessity and is fixed. For either he that affirms that it will take place or he that denies this is in correspondence with fact, whereas if things did not take place of necessity, an event might just as easily not happen as happen; for the meaning of the word ‘fortuitous’ with regard to present or future events is that reality is so constituted that it may issue in either of two opposite directions. Again, if a thing is white now, it was true before to say that it would be white, so that of anything that has taken place it was always true to say ‘it is’ or ‘it will be’. But if it was always true to say that a thing is or will be, it is not possible that it should not be or not be about to be, and when a thing cannot not come to be, it is impossible that it should not come to be, and when it is impossible that it should not come to be, it must come to be. All, then, that is about to be must of necessity take place. It results from this that nothing is uncertain or fortuitous, for if it were fortuitous it would not be necessary.

The argument here is that if it is already true, for example, that I will eat breakfast tomorrow, then I will necessarily eat breakfast tomorrow, and there is no option about this and no ability of anything to prevent it. Aristotle is here taking it for granted that some things about the future are uncertain, and is using this as a reductio against the position that such claims can be already true. He goes on to give additional reasons for the same thing:

Again, to say that neither the affirmation nor the denial is true, maintaining, let us say, that an event neither will take place nor will not take place, is to take up a position impossible to defend. In the first place, though facts should prove the one proposition false, the opposite would still be untrue. Secondly, if it was true to say that a thing was both white and large, both these qualities must necessarily belong to it; and if they will belong to it the next day, they must necessarily belong to it the next day. But if an event is neither to take place nor not to take place the next day, the element of chance will be eliminated. For example, it would be necessary that a sea-fight should neither take place nor fail to take place on the next day.

These awkward results and others of the same kind follow, if it is an irrefragable law that of every pair of contradictory propositions, whether they have regard to universals and are stated as universally applicable, or whether they have regard to individuals, one must be true and the other false, and that there are no real alternatives, but that all that is or takes place is the outcome of necessity. There would be no need to deliberate or to take trouble, on the supposition that if we should adopt a certain course, a certain result would follow, while, if we did not, the result would not follow. For a man may predict an event ten thousand years beforehand, and another may predict the reverse; that which was truly predicted at the moment in the past will of necessity take place in the fullness of time.

Further, it makes no difference whether people have or have not actually made the contradictory statements. For it is manifest that the circumstances are not influenced by the fact of an affirmation or denial on the part of anyone. For events will not take place or fail to take place because it was stated that they would or would not take place, nor is this any more the case if the prediction dates back ten thousand years or any other space of time. Wherefore, if through all time the nature of things was so constituted that a prediction about an event was true, then through all time it was necessary that that should find fulfillment; and with regard to all events, circumstances have always been such that their occurrence is a matter of necessity. For that of which someone has said truly that it will be, cannot fail to take place; and of that which takes place, it was always true to say that it would be.

Yet this view leads to an impossible conclusion; for we see that both deliberation and action are causative with regard to the future, and that, to speak more generally, in those things which are not continuously actual there is potentiality in either direction. Such things may either be or not be; events also therefore may either take place or not take place. There are many obvious instances of this. It is possible that this coat may be cut in half, and yet it may not be cut in half, but wear out first. In the same way, it is possible that it should not be cut in half; unless this were so, it would not be possible that it should wear out first. So it is therefore with all other events which possess this kind of potentiality. It is therefore plain that it is not of necessity that everything is or takes place; but in some instances there are real alternatives, in which case the affirmation is no more true and no more false than the denial; while some exhibit a predisposition and general tendency in one direction or the other, and yet can issue in the opposite direction by exception.

Now that which is must needs be when it is, and that which is not must needs not be when it is not. Yet it cannot be said without qualification that all existence and non-existence is the outcome of necessity. For there is a difference between saying that that which is, when it is, must needs be, and simply saying that all that is must needs be, and similarly in the case of that which is not. In the case, also, of two contradictory propositions this holds good. Everything must either be or not be, whether in the present or in the future, but it is not always possible to distinguish and state determinately which of these alternatives must necessarily come about.

Let me illustrate. A sea-fight must either take place to-morrow or not, but it is not necessary that it should take place to-morrow, neither is it necessary that it should not take place, yet it is necessary that it either should or should not take place to-morrow. Since propositions correspond with facts, it is evident that when in future events there is a real alternative, and a potentiality in contrary directions, the corresponding affirmation and denial have the same character.

This is the case with regard to that which is not always existent or not always nonexistent. One of the two propositions in such instances must be true and the other false, but we cannot say determinately that this or that is false, but must leave the alternative undecided. One may indeed be more likely to be true than the other, but it cannot be either actually true or actually false. It is therefore plain that it is not necessary that of an affirmation and a denial one should be true and the other false. For in the case of that which exists potentially, but not actually, the rule which applies to that which exists actually does not hold good. The case is rather as we have indicated.

Basically, then, there are two arguments. First there is the argument that if statements about the future are already true, the future is necessary. If a sea battle will take place tomorrow, it will necessarily take place. Second, there is the argument that this excludes deliberation. If a sea battle will take place tomorrow, then it will necessarily take place, and no place remains for deliberation and decision about whether to fight the sea battle. Whether you decide to fight or not, it will necessarily take place.

Unfortunately for Aristotle, both arguments fail. Consider the first argument about necessity. Aristotle’s example is that “if it is true to say that a thing is white, it must necessarily be white.” But this is hypothetical necessity, not absolute necessity. A thing must be white if it is true that is white, but that does not mean that “it must be white, period.” Thus for example I have a handkerchief, and it happens to be white. If it is true that it is white, then it must be white. But it would be false to simply say, “My handkerchief is necessarily white.” Since I can dye it other colors, obviously it is not simply necessary for it to be white.

In a similar way, of course it is true that if a sea battle will take place, it will take place. It does not follow at all that “it will necessarily take place, period.”

Again, consider the second argument, that deliberation would be unnecessary. Aristotle makes the point that deliberation is causative with respect to the future. But gravity is also causative with respect to the future, as for example when gravity causes a cup to fall from a desk. It does not follow either that the cup must be able not to fall, nor that gravity is unnecessary. In a similar way, a sea battle takes place because certain people deliberated and decided to fight. If it was already true that it was going to take place, then it also already true that they were going to decide to fight. It does not follow that their decision was unnecessary.

Consider the application to gravity. It is already true that if the cup is knocked from the desk, it will fall. It does not follow that gravity will not cause the fall: in fact, it is true precisely because gravity will cause the fall. In a similar way, if it true that the battle will take place, it is true because the decision will be made.

This earlier discussion about determinism is relevant to this point. Asserting that there is a definite outcome that our deliberations will arrive at, in each case, goes against our experience in no way. The feeling of “free will,” in any case, has a different explanation, whether or not determinism is true.

On the other hand, there is also no proof that there is such a determinate outcome, even if in some cases there are things that would suggest it. What happens if in fact there is nothing ensuring one outcome rather than another?

Here we could make a third argument on Aristotle’s behalf, although he did not make it himself. If the present is truly open to alternative outcomes, then it seems that nothing exists that could make it be true that “a sea battle will take place,” and false that “a sea battle will not take place.” Presumably if a statement is true, there must be something in reality which is the cause of the statement’s truth. Now there does not seem to be anything in reality, in this scenario, which could be a cause of truth. Therefore it does not seem that either alternative could be true, and Aristotle would seem to be right.

I will not attempt to refute this argument at this point, but I will raise two difficulties. First of all, it is not clear that his claim is even coherent. Aristotle says that “either there will be a sea battle or there will not be,” is true, but that “there will be a sea battle” is not true, and “there will not be a sea battle” is not true. This does not seem to be logically consistent, and it is not clear that we can even understand what is being said. I will not push this objection too hard, however, lest I be accused of throwing stones from a glass house.

Second, the argument that there is nothing in reality that could cause the truth of a statement might apply to the past as well as to the future. There is a tree outside my window right now. What was in that place exactly 100 million years ago to this moment? It is not obvious that there is anything in the present world which could be the cause of the truth of any statement about this. One might object that the past is far more determinate than the future. There are plenty of things in the present world that might be the cause of the truth of the statement, “World War II actually happened.” It is hard to see how you could possibly have arrived at the present world without it, and this “necessity” of World War II in order to arrive at the present world could be the cause of truth. The problem is that there is still no proof that this is universal. Once things are far enough in past, like 100 million years, perhaps minor details become indeterminate. Will Aristotle really want to conclude that some statements about the past are neither true nor false?

I will more or less leave things here without resolving them in this post, although I will give a hint (without proof at this time) regarding the truth of the matter. It turns out that quantum mechanics can be interpreted in two ways. In one way, it is a deterministic theory, and in this way it is basically time reversible. The present fully determines the past, but it equally fully determines the future. Interpreted in another way, it is an indeterministic theory which leaves the future uncertain. But understood in this way, it also leaves the past uncertain.

Employer and Employee Model of Human Psychology

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This post builds on the ideas in the series of posts on predictive processing and the followup posts, and also on those relating truth and expectation. Consequently the current post will likely not make much sense to those who have not read the earlier content, or to those that read it but mainly disagreed.

We set out the model by positing three members of the “company” that constitutes a human being:

The CEO. This is the predictive engine in the predictive processing model.

The Vice President. In the same model, this is the force of the historical element in the human being, which we used to respond to the “darkened room” problem. Thus for example the Vice President is responsible for the fact that someone is likely to eat soon, regardless of what they believe about this. Likewise, it is responsible for the pursuit of sex, the desire for respect and friendship, and so on. In general it is responsible for behaviors that would have been historically chosen and preserved by natural selection.

The Employee. This is the conscious person who has beliefs and goals and free will and is reflectively aware of these things. In other words, this is you, at least in a fairly ordinary way of thinking of yourself. Obviously, in another way you are composed from all of them.

Why have we arranged things in this way? Descartes, for example, would almost certainly disagree violently with this model. The conscious person, according to him, would surely be the CEO, and not an employee. And what is responsible for the relationship between the CEO and the Vice President? Let us start with this point first, before we discuss the Employee. We make the predictive engine the CEO because in some sense this engine is responsible for everything that a human being does, including the behaviors preserved by natural selection. On the other hand, the instinctive behaviors of natural selection are not responsible for everything, but they can affect the course of things enough that it is useful for the predictive engine to take them into account. Thus for example in the post on sex and minimizing uncertainty, we explained why the predictive engine will aim for situations that include having sex and why this will make its predictions more confident. Thus, the Vice President advises certain behaviors, the CEO talks to the Vice President, and the CEO ends up deciding on a course of action, which ultimately may or may not be the one advised by the Vice President.

While neither the CEO nor the Vice President is a rational being, since in our model we place the rationality in the Employee, that does not mean they are stupid. In particular, the CEO is very good at what it does. Consider a role playing video game where you have a character that can die and then resume. When someone first starts to play the game, they may die frequently. After they are good at the game, they may die only rarely, perhaps once in many days or many weeks. Our CEO is in a similar situation, but it frequently goes 80 years or more without dying, on its very first attempt. It is extremely good at its game.

What are their goals? The CEO basically wants accurate predictions. In this sense, it has one unified goal. What exactly counts as more or less accurate here would be a scientific question that we probably cannot resolve by philosophical discussion. In fact, it is very possible that this would differ in different circumstances: in this sense, even though it has a unified goal, it might not be describable by a consistent utility function. And even if it can be described in that way, since the CEO is not rational, it does not (in itself) make plans to bring about correct predictions. Making good predictions is just what it does, as falling is what a rock does. There will be some qualifications on this, however, when we discuss how the members of the company relate to one another.

The Vice President has many goals: eating regularly, having sex, having and raising children, being respected and liked by others, and so on. And even more than in the case of the CEO, there is no reason for these desires to form a coherent set of preferences. Thus the Vice President might advise the pursuit of one goal, but then change its mind in the middle, for no apparent reason, because it is suddenly attracted by one of the other goals.

Overall, before the Employee is involved, human action is determined by a kind of negotiation between the CEO and the Vice President. The CEO, which wants good predictions, has no special interest in the goals of the Vice President, but it cooperates with them because when it cooperates its predictions tend to be better.

What about the Employee? This is the rational being, and it has abstract concepts which it uses as a formal copy of the world. Before I go on, let me insist clearly on one point. If the world is represented in a certain way in the Employee’s conceptual structure, that is the way the Employee thinks the world is. And since you are the Employee, that is the way you think the world actually is. The point is that once we start thinking this way, it is easy to say, “oh, this is just a model, it’s not meant to be the real thing.” But as I said here, it is not possible to separate the truth of statements from the way the world actually is: your thoughts are formulated in concepts, but they are thoughts about the way things are. Again, all statements are maps, and all statements are about the territory.

The CEO and the Vice President exist as soon a human being has a brain; in fact some aspects of the Vice President would exist even before that. But the Employee, insofar as it refers to something with rational and self-reflective knowledge, takes some time to develop. Conceptual knowledge of the world grows from experience: it doesn’t exist from the beginning. And the Employee represents goals in terms of its conceptual structure. This is just a way of saying that as a rational being, if you say you are pursuing a goal, you have to be able to describe that goal with the concepts that you have. Consequently you cannot do this until you have some concepts.

We are ready to address the question raised earlier. Why are you the Employee, and not the CEO? In the first place, the CEO got to the company first, as we saw above. Second, consider what the conscious person does when they decide to pursue a goal. There seems to be something incoherent about “choosing a goal” in the first place: you need a goal in order to decide which means will be a good means to choose. And yet, as I said here, people make such choices anyway. And the fact that you are the Employee, and not the CEO, is the explanation for this. If you were the CEO, there would indeed be no way to choose an end. That is why the actual CEO makes no such choice: its end is already determinate, namely good predictions. And you are hired to help out with this goal. Furthermore, as a rational being, you are smarter than the CEO and the Vice President, so to speak. So you are allowed to make complicated plans that they do not really understand, and they will often go along with these plans. Notably, this can happen in real life situations of employers and employees as well.

But take an example where you are choosing an end: suppose you ask, “What should I do with my life?” The same basic thing will happen if you ask, “What should I do today,” but the second question may be easier to answer if you have some answer to the first. What sorts of goals do you propose in answer to the first question, and what sort do you actually end up pursuing?

Note that there are constraints on the goals that you can propose. In the first place, you have to be able to describe the goal with the concepts you currently have: you cannot propose to seek a goal that you cannot describe. Second, the conceptual structure itself may rule out some goals, even if they can be described. For example, the idea of good is part of the structure, and if something is thought to be absolutely bad, the Employee will (generally) not consider proposing this as a goal. Likewise, the Employee may suppose that some things are impossible, and it will generally not propose these as goals.

What happens then is this: the Employee proposes some goal, and the CEO, after consultation with the Vice President, decides to accept or reject it, based on the CEO’s own goal of getting good predictions. This is why the Employee is an Employee: it is not the one ultimately in charge. Likewise, as was said, this is why the Employee seems to be doing something impossible, namely choosing goals. Steven Kaas makes a similar point,

You are not the king of your brain. You are the creepy guy standing next to the king going “a most judicious choice, sire”.

This is not quite the same thing, since in our model you do in fact make real decisions, including decisions about the end to be pursued. Nonetheless, the point about not being the one ultimately in charge is correct. David Hume also says something similar when he says, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Hume’s position is not exactly right, and in fact seems an especially bad way of describing the situation, but the basic point that there is something, other than yourself in the ordinary sense, judging your proposed means and ends and deciding whether to accept them, is one that stands.

Sometimes the CEO will veto a proposal precisely because it very obviously leaves things vague and uncertain, which is contrary to its goal of having good predictions. I once spoke of the example that a person cannot directly choose to “write a paper.” In our present model, the Employee proposes “we’re going to write a paper now,” and the CEO responds, “That’s not a viable plan as it stands: we need more detail.”

While neither the CEO nor the Vice President is a rational being, the Vice President is especially irrational, because of the lack of unity among its goals. Both the CEO and the Employee would like to have a unified plan for one’s whole life: the CEO because this makes for good predictions, and the Employee because this is the way final causes work, because it helps to make sense of one’s life, and because “objectively good” seems to imply something which is at least consistent, which will never prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A. But the lack of unity among the Vice President’s goals means that it will always come to the CEO and object, if the person attempts to coherently pursue any goal. This will happen even if it originally accepts the proposal to seek a particular goal.

Consider this real life example from a relationship between an employer and employee:

 

Employer: Please construct a schedule for paying these bills.

Employee: [Constructs schedule.] Here it is.

Employer: Fine.

[Time passes, and the first bill comes due, according to the schedule.]

Employer: Why do we have to pay this bill now instead of later?

 

In a similar way, this sort of scenario is common in our model:

 

Vice President: Being fat makes us look bad. We need to stop being fat.

CEO: Ok, fine. Employee, please formulate a plan to stop us from being fat.

Employee: [Formulates a diet.] Here it is.

[Time passes, and the plan requires skipping a meal.]

Vice President: What is this crazy plan of not eating!?!

CEO: Fine, cancel the plan for now and we’ll get back to it tomorrow.

 

In the real life example, the behavior of the employer is frustrating and irritating to the employee because there is literally nothing they could have proposed that the employer would have found acceptable. In the same way, this sort of scenario in our model is frustrating to the Employee, the conscious person, because there is no consistent plan they could have proposed that would have been acceptable to the Vice President: either they would have objected to being fat, or they would have objected to not eating.

In later posts, we will fill in some details and continue to show how this model explains various aspects of human psychology. We will also answer various objections.

Truth and Expectation III

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Consider what I said at the end of the last post on this topic. When our Mormon protagonist insists that his religion is true, he improves the accuracy of his expectations about the world. His expectations would actually be less accurate he decided that his religious beliefs are false.

Now we said in the first post on truth and expectation that in part we seem to determine the meaning of a statement by the expectations that it implies. If this is the case, then why should we not say that the Mormon’s beliefs are definitely true? In fact, in the post linked above about truth in religion, I suggested that people frequently do mean something like this when they say that their own religion is true. Nonetheless, it is easy to see that truth in this particular sense does not imply that each and every claim in the religion, understood as a claim about the world, is true.

But why not, if one’s expectations become more accurate, just as with statements that are clearly true? As I noted in the earlier post, to say that “that man is pretty tall” is a statement about the man. It is not a statement about myself, nor about my expectations, even if the meaning is partly determined by these things. So ultimately the truth or falsehood of the claim about the man is going to be determined by facts about the man, even if they need to be understood as facts about the man in relation to me and my expectations.

Consider again Scott Sumner’s anti-realism. Scott claims that we cannot distinguish between “our perception of reality, and actual reality.” As I said there, this is right in the sense that we cannot consistently hold the opinion, “This is my opinion about reality, but my opinion is false: reality is actually different.” But we can recognize the distinct meanings in “my perception of reality” and “actual reality.” Scott’s failure to recognize this distinction leads him to suggest on occasion that our beliefs about certain matters are just beliefs about what people in the future will believe. For example, he says in this comment:

You misunderstood Rorty. He is not recommending that you try to trick you colleagues into believing something that is not true. Rather he is merely describing what society regards as true. And who can deny that society tends to regard things as true, when they believe them to be true. No you might say “but what society believes to be true is not always really true.” But Rorty would say that statement means nothing, or else it means that you predict that a future society will have a different view of what is true.

Most people, without even realizing it, assume that there is some sort of “God-like” view of what is “really true” which is separate from what we believe is true, and or will believe in the future to be true. Rorty is an atheist. He believes that what society’s experts believe is the best we can do, the closest we can come to describing reality. Rorty would suggest to Hayek “if you want to convince other economists, use persuasive arguments.” I think that is very reasonable advice. It is what I try to do on this blog.

This is much like Bob Seidensticker’s claim that moral beliefs are beliefs about what society in the future will believe to be moral. In both cases, there is an unacceptable circularity. If our belief is about what people in the future will believe, what are the future people’s beliefs about? There is only one credible explanation here: people’s beliefs are about what they say their beliefs are about, namely the very things they are talking about. Moral beliefs are about whether actions are good or bad, and beliefs describing the world are about the world, not about the people who hold the beliefs, present or future.

This does not imply that there is “some sort of ‘God-like’ view of what is ‘really true’.” It just implies that our beliefs are distinct from other things in the world. Sumner is suggesting that a situation where everyone permanently holds a false belief, forever, is inconceivable. But this is quite conceivable, and we can easily see how it could happen. Just now I counted the cups in my cupboard and there are exactly 14 (if anyone is surprised by that value, most of those are plastic.) It is entirely conceivable, however, that I miscounted. And since I also have some cups that are not currently in the cupboard, if I did, I will probably never get it right, since I will just assume there was some other assortment. And since there is presumably no way for the public to discover the truth about this, society will be permanently deluded about the number of cups in my cupboard at 11:16 AM on July 14, 2018.

What would it mean, then, if it was not “actually true” that there were 14 cups in my cupboard? It would be determined by facts about the cups and the cupboard, not by facts about me, about society, about my expectations or society’s expectations. It would not be actually true if there were, in fact, only 13 cups there, even if no one would ever know this.

This all remains related to expectations, however. I don’t think I miscounted, so I think that if I go again and count them, I will get 14 again. If I did miscount, there is a good chance that counting again would result in a different number. Now I don’t intend to bother, so this expectation is counterfactual. Nonetheless, there are at least conceivable counterfactual situations where I would discover that I was mistaken. In a similar way, to say that the Mormon holds false religious beliefs implies that there are at least counterfactual situations where the falsehood would be uncovered by a violation of his expectations: e.g. if he had been alive at the time and had followed Joseph Smith around all the time to see whether there were any golden plates and so on.

Nonetheless, one cannot ultimately separate the truth of a statement from facts about the thing the statement is about. A statement is true if things are the way it says they are, “the way” being correctly understood here. If this were not the case, the statement would not be about the things in the first place.

Truth and Expectation II

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We discussed this topic in a previous post. I noted there that there is likely some relationship with predictive processing. This idea can be refined by distinguishing between conscious thought and what the human brain does on a non-conscious level.

It is not possible to define truth by reference to expectations for reasons given previously. Some statements do not imply specific expectations, and besides, we need the idea of truth to decide whether or not someone’s expectations were correct or not. So there is no way to define truth except the usual way: a statement is true if things are the way the statement says they are, bearing in mind the necessary distinctions involving “way.”

On the conscious level, I would distinguish between thinking about something is true, and wanting to think that it is true. In a discussion with Angra Mainyu, I remarked that insofar as we have an involuntary assessment of things, it would be more appropriate to call that assessment a desire:

So rather than calling that assessment a belief, it would be more accurate to call it a desire. It is not believing something, but desiring to believe something. Hunger is the tendency to go and get food; that assessment is the tendency to treat a certain claim (“the USA is larger than Austria”) as a fact. And in both cases there are good reasons for those desires: you are benefited by food, and you are benefited by treating that claim as a fact.

Angra was quite surprised by this and responded that “That statement gives me evidence that we’re probably not talking about the same or even similar psychological phenomena – i.e., we’re probably talking past each other.” But if he was talking about anything that anyone at all would characterize as a belief (and he said that he was), he was surely talking about the unshakeable gut sense that something is the case whether or not I want to admit it. So we were, in fact, talking about exactly the same psychological phenomena. I was claiming then, and will claim now, that this gut sense is better characterized as a desire than as a belief. That is, insofar as desire is a tendency to behave in certain ways, it is a desire because it is a tendency to act and think as though this claim is true. But we can, if we want, resist that tendency, just as we can refrain from going to get food when we are hungry. If we do resist, we will refrain from believing what we have a tendency to believe, and if we do not, we will believe what we have a tendency to believe. But the tendency will be there whether or not we follow it.

Now if we feel a tendency to think that something is true, it is quite likely that it seems to us that it would improve our expectations. However, we can also distinguish between desiring to believe something for this reason, or desiring to believe something for other reasons. And although we might not pay attention, it is quite possibly to be consciously aware that you have an inclination to believe something, and also that it is for non-truth related reasons; and thus you would not expect it to improve your expectations.

But this is where it is useful to distinguish between the conscious mind and what the brain is doing on another level. My proposal: you will feel the desire to think that something is true whenever your brain guesses that its predictions, or at least the predictions that are important to it, will become more accurate if you think that the thing is true. We do not need to make any exceptions. This will be the case even when we would say that the statement does not imply any significant expectations, and will be the case even when the belief would have non-truth related motives.

Consider the statement that there are stars outside the visible universe. One distinction we could make even on the conscious level is that this implies various counterfactual predictions: “If you are teleported outside the visible universe, you will see more stars that aren’t currently visible.” Now we might find this objectionable if we were trying to define truth by expectations, since we have no expectation of such an event. But both on conscious and on non-conscious levels, we do need to make counterfactual predictions in order to carry on with our lives, since this is absolutely essential to any kind of planning and action. Now certainly no one can refute me if I assert that you would not see any such stars in the teleportation event. But it is not surprising if my brain guesses that this counterfactual prediction is not very accurate, and thus I feel the desire to say that there are stars there.

Likewise, consider the situation of non-truth related motives. In an earlier discussion of predictive processing, I suggested that the situation where people feel like they have to choose a goal is a result of such an attempt at prediction. Such a choice seems to be impossible, since choice is made in view of a goal, and if you do not have one yet, how can you choose? But there is a pre-existing goal here on the level of the brain: it wants to know what it is going to do. And choosing a goal will serve that pre-existing goal. Once you choose a goal, it will then be easy to know what you are going to do: you are going to do things that promote the goal that you chose. In a similar way, following any desire will improve your brain’s guesses about what you are going to do. It follows that if you have a desire to believe something, actually believing it will improve your brain’s accuracy at least about what it is going to do. This is true but not a fair argument, however, since my proposal is that the brain’s guess of improved accuracy is the cause of your desire to believe something. It is true that if you already have the desire, giving in to it will improve accuracy, as with any desire. But in my theory the improved accuracy had to be implied first, in order to cause the desire.

The answer is that you have many desires for things other than belief, which at the same time give you a motive (not an argument) for believing things. And your brain understands that if you believe the thing, you will be more likely to act on those other desires, and this will minimize uncertainty, and improve the accuracy of its predictions. Consider this discussion of truth in religion. I pointed out there that people confuse two different questions: “what should I do?”, and “what is the world like?” In particular with religious and political loyalties, there can be an intense social pressure towards conformity. And this gives an obvious non-truth related motive to believe the things in question. But in a less obvious way, it means that your brain’s predictions will be more accurate if you believe the thing. Consider the Mormon, and take for granted that the religious doctrines in question are false. Since they are false, does not that mean that if they continue to believe, their predictions will be less accurate?

No, it does not, for several reasons. In the first place the doctrines are in general formulated to avoid such false predictions, at least about everyday life. There might be a false prediction about what will happen when you die, but that is in the future and is anyway disconnected from your everyday life. This is in part why I said “the predictions that are important to it” in my proposal. Second, failure to believe would lead to extremely serious conflicting desires: the person would still have the desire to conform outwardly, but would also have good logical reasons to avoid conformity. And since we don’t know in advance how we will respond to conflicting desires, the brain will not have a good idea of what it would do in that situation. In other words, the Mormon is living a good Mormon life. And their brain is aware that insisting that Mormonism is true is a very good way to make sure that they keep living that life, and therefore continue to behave predictably, rather than falling into a situation of strongly conflicting desires where it would have little idea of what it would do. In this sense, insisting that Mormonism is true, even though it is not, actually improves the brain’s predictive accuracy.