The Kikonians
I thought the first couple of paragraphs of Joshua Rothman’s interview with Patricia Churchland were more interesting than anything in The Moral Landscape. That sounds very rude, but it’s not meant to – it’s just that TML was fundamentally uninteresting to me because it sidestepped everything that’s genuinely interesting about humans and morality. Churchland, on the other hand, zoomed right in on it.
She starts by explaining what’s most clearly known about how morality works in the brain. We know, she argues, that human moral behavior is rooted in the brain’s “circuitry for caring”—ancient biological circuitry that we share with other mammals. (When wolves care about their offspring, what happens in their brains and bodies is remarkably similar to what happens in ours.) Most mammals care only about themselves and their children. In human beings, though, the circle of caring extends widely, even to strangers.
See? That is interesting, where just insisting “it’s about well-being” over and over isn’t.
I said the same thing a year ago, too. I said it while discussing the article based on the book that Harris published at the time. I said it’s about caring, and that he’d forgotten to spell that out. Inexplicably.
I got it from the Odyssey, and an interesting passage in which Odysseus and his crew invade an island and treat the inhabitants as a predator treats prey.
The first and only glimpse of moral concern (or perhaps it’s prudential, or more likely it’s both) is Odysseus’s concern to make sure all his men got their fare share of the treasure and the women that they had all grabbed. The Kikonians might as well be animated figures in a computer game. This isn’t a factual issue. It’s not that Odysseus and his crew think the Kikonians are robots or zombies – it’s that they don’t care. They should care, but they don’t. Facts are part of getting them to care, but they’re not enough. Facts are necessary but not sufficient.
That’s still what I see as missing from The Moral Landscape, still what makes it an unhelpful and uninteresting book on morality. Churchland’s book, on the other hand, sounds terrific; I’m looking forward to reading it.
I can really recommend Churchland’s book. It’s what Harris’ book should have been – a detailed scientific exploration of why we have moral values. I like her writing style too.
Oh good – I look forward even more.
An interesting interview in Friday’s LA Times with Antonio Damasio
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-damasio-q-a-20110514,0,5601547.story
He thinks consciousness is in the brain stem – certainly not something restricted to humans.
Frans de Waal suggests that morality may have its biological origins in maternal care of offspring.
Michael – #4 — Are there really people who think that only humans are conscious? If so, I find that beyond bizarre.
I think so – seems to be one of those religious things – humans are special and all.
Except – why should we care? if it is possible for humans to not care about out-groups (and it clearly is), then why should we? it is possible for humans to care about inanimate stuffed animals (a small but vocal proportion of the population certainly does) but that is not a sufficient reason to convince everyone else to protect teddy bear rights.
The answer is that caring about out-groups (of other humans) increases our own lives. That is, it increases our own well-being.
Harris wasn’t arguing with you, Ophelia. He was arguing with people who want an objective reason to care about our natural biological impulses.
Josh – as far as we know, yes, only humans are fully self-conscious. Furthermore only humans appear to be capable of language and moral reasonsing, despite the existence of precursors or even limited forms of those abilities in other animals.
It would nice to be proved wrong, but there is nothing ignorant or unscientific about asserting that humans are the only conscious animals on the planet.
I was under the impression from some video bouncing around the interwebs someone linked last week that humans, chimps, and orangutans are the three so far identified animals as having self-aware consiousness? http://youtu.be/8Biv_8xjj8E at around the 10 minute to 11 minute mark, with the experiment under discussion in the prior minutes of the video.
No, no. Be careful there. I said “conscious.” You said “fully self-conscious.” That’s a crucial but important distinction. Though I’m sure you didn’t mean to, you moved the goalpost, and you didn’t define what you mean by “fully self-conscious.” I’m not trying to pick nits – this is bigger than a nit.
Again, don’t pack so many assumptions into one statement. Some studies suggest higher apes are capable of moral reasoning (whether you choose to see it as rudimentary or as a precursor is less important). Don’t add language in there. . .it muddles the conversation.
I’m simply asserting that I don’t find it odd that animals should be simply conscious. That is, possessing a sense of self that is distinct from the world and other individuals. In fact, I find it downright baffling that the default assumption (“No anthropomorphizing!!!”) is that animals are not conscious or self-aware. That seems to me completely insupportable. At the very least, there’s no reason to think it should be the null hypothesis, and what’s more, there’s much evidence that it isn’t true.
It would be downright strange that humans-and only humans-had anything resembling self-awareness. It’s almost creationist.
You might want to read the interview – I don’t find it odd either. Damasio seems to think it is pretty basic to having a brain.
Surely one of the lessons of biology is that something like “consciousness” isn’t going to be a binary on-off distinction with only us in the “on” category. Consciousness must be something that animals can have to various degrees, and we’re the extreme case – like cheetahs and running speed, or butt-ugliness and naked mole rats.
For what little it’s worth, my opinion: social animals need circuitry for modelling their conspecifics as entities with internal states (hungry, angry etc.) and consciousness is what happens when that faculty goes recursive, i.e. when we are modelling ourselves as entities with internal states who are modelling ourselves…
Well, yes. On balance, people simply caring about people does lead to people caring about me. I would assume that it’s also quite important for the effectiveness of infrastructure, and infrastructure is useful for me.
@”Full Self-Consciousness”: Mirror test? Or is the discussion about something more magical?
Bodhi:
I suggest that our sadly departed dogs Normie and Charlie, who each knew when the other was being referred to as against when they individually were being referred to, both had self-awareness.
Yahzi:
That sort of category problem commonly results in what Josh describes as ‘goalpost shifting’ because people generally want to think of themselves as members of a genus which is at least one cut above anything else in the animal kingdom. It used to be asserted that only humans have a soul/morality/language etc as the occasion demanded, but as more and more studies were done on perception, language and (what could be inferred about) the consciousness of mammals other than Homo sp., the more bolts had to be tightened on the Homo category.
Peoples’ behaviour morally is of course variable with the situations they find themselves in. Being in a crowded lifeboat with capacity for n when 2n are in the water swimming to it can provoke a collective mutual-support (altruistic?) response from those in the boat directed (non-altruistically) at preventing those in the water getting aboard. I think it happened when the Titanic went down.
OB:
I’m a fan of Patricia Churchland more generally. There’s a rather wonderful interview of her by Nigel Warburton over at Philosophy Bites that’s well worth listening to. It’s also important to realise that she and her husband Paul really are the subject of quite a lot of very startling anger in philosophical circles for their (I feel) rather sensible Eliminative Materialism, that there’s every chance that a lot of folk psychological terms simply don’t exist and won’t survive a more thorough science of the mind.
On Sam Harris though all I’ll say is I object to the catagorical tone you take against his book. I think I can see why you wouldn’t have found it as useful as say Churchland’s ‘s book if expanding circles is what you’re looking for. On the other hand I’ll point out that asking Harris to make his case this way is just too Humean and so fully embedded in the kind of philosophy he’s objecting to. All I’d ask is that you accept that some of us, and I include myself with Harris, think that morals conceived of in terms of ordinary intuitions about what caring or motivation actually are is wrong and that in turn we do have reasons for thinking we need to reinterpret what these experiences actually represent in the same way that the Churchlands’ Eliminative Materialism reinterprets experiences like belief. You might have reasons for not going along with this project, or even thinking it’s wrong, but I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss it too easily.
Just to end I find it hard to stop referring to Patricia Churchland as Pat. I had to stop myself because I think I would have a hard time justifying it as not being patronising and that’s the last thing I’d want here and particularly about someone I rather admire. On the other hand the reason I suspect is that she really comes across as such a likeable and sensible person, completely in contrast to the brimstone and devil horns picture I sometimes get from inside philosophy. As I say, chalk me up on the Churchland fan club and expect me to be reading her book next.
Odysseus and his crew were ‘heroic’ representatives of a Bronze Age predatory culture and the Kikonians were ‘outsiders’, if, at any time, Odysseus’s enemies had the advantage, he and his crew, would have been the victims,that’s why they didn’t care. Odysseus’s concern that his men receive a ‘fair share’ implies that he recognizes an in-group sense of morality amongst his crew. Life was too nasty, brutish and short to indulge in universal moral principles,the only ‘fact’ was survival.
#8 Yahzi,
“It would nice to be proved wrong, but there is nothing ignorant or unscientific about asserting that humans are the only conscious animals on the planet.”
Yes,there is,until scientists can first determine how consciousness arises in humans and then demonstrate that the mechanism or process doesn’t exist in non-human animals.
#12 SAWells,
yes, perhaps there is some kind of gradient for animal consciousness.
Yeah, “fully self-conscious” is one of those self-defining True Scotsmen. Whenever someone shows evidence of consciousness in non-humans, one can always say “but that’s not fully self-conscious” without really grappling with the empirical difficulties of consciousness.
Also, I think it is fair to say that humans are unique and amazing and worth celebrating (and sometimes condemning) — but one has to be careful when one decides what precise properties make us unique, because they’re surprisingly hard to pin down. On any single “human” characteristic, we can show animal equivalents or near-equivalents. Symbolic language? All sorts of animals communicate in symbolic language, from bees to parrots to squid. Tool use? Dolphins, elephants, ravens, octopuses all use tools. Moral reasoning? Not just primates, but capuchin monkeys and dogs will respond to unfair distribution of food.
Given what we know of evolution, we should expect there to be gradations of human characteristics in other creatures. What is unique is our particular mix of attributes, and in the case of symbolic language, the incredible lengths to which we have taken it (or more precisely, to which it has taken us).
I couldn’t agree more that care (or sympathy) is the root of morality. It also looks like Sam Harris makes several references to care in his book. It is a pity that Harris gets obsessed with abstractions like well-being, not seeing the wood for the trees.
And as you say, Ophelia, in your earlier article, it requires refinement and nuance to gain a kind of civilised notion of morality. This refinement is even more comprehensive and complex in terms of justice and law.
I look forward to read P. Churchland’s book, but based on what’s been quoted so far, I suspect she is wrong in a rather fundamental assumption/assertion. (Albeit not really damaging to the important message in her book)
I do not think it has been convincingly demonstrated that maternal care is exclusive to mammals. See e.g. http://www.jstor.org/pss/1565491.
This probably means that the “brain modules” for this type of behavior has an even older evolutionary origin.
Cassanders
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.Kurt Vonnegut . Cat’s Cradle
I am looking forward to reading Pat Churchland’s new book as well. It’s supposed to arrive either today or tomorrow. It looks to me as though it will be a <i>genuine</i> attempt to explore relationships between brain science and morality, whereas <i>The Moral Language</i> was more in the nature of a polemic which ignored the fact that much of the work of polemic has already been done. In one sense, Harris was speaking about a real constituency for whom moral language is essentially religious, but in another sense, by ignoring most contemporary moral philosophy he did not take note of what had already been done — things that he needn’t bother doing. Divine command morality, while still alive and kicking in fundamentalist circles, has no traction in contemporary moral philosophy, except insofar as Christians think that they can establish a Christian philosophy which is distinct from the wider stream of academic philosophy, and this is only a delusion, no matter how prominent a few of them have become (people like Alvin Plantinga, for example). I think the reason for Harris’s choosing of “well-being” as a basic category of moral thought is that it seems to give him some kind of a bridgehead in science (not, as Yahzi suggests, because morality all comes back to well-being in the end), and there, I believe, he is fundamentally mistaken. He can’t get outside of the is-ought dilemma that easily. I think Harris published his book too soon, before he had really digested the contents enough to be able to sort out the kinds of problems that others would inevitably spot. This should have been obvious to him from the response to his TED lecture, and he made very few adjustments between that lecture and the publication of his book. I suppose, by that time, the book was essentially finished. I still think, despite the fact that Harris does have his supporters, that Harris needs to go back and redraft what he has done, and tighten up his argument. He’s left too many too simple errors. Churchland has been working the borderlands of neuroscience and philosophy for many years. It would not surprise me to find that she has <i>really</i> come to grips with the real issues that these disciplines raise. I too look forward to reading her book.
Sorry about the html. I keep forgetting that there are two sides to every page at B&W.
@ Chris Lawson,
I suspect you need to rethink your understanding of the difference between symbol and signal. Both contain information, but the ways the information content in these categories are perceived and processed are fundamentally different.
I would think this is the issues Daniel Dennet has worked/written extensively about.
(“Brainstorms”, “Consciousness explained” and others)
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
I read braintrust a few weeks ago. It was excellent. Most of it is on neuroscience, the later chapters are on more traditional philosophical topics. Most def worth a read.
Josh@ #5: There are indeed such people. They are called “religious”. Their “holy” scriptures tell them that animals were created for them to do with as they please. It was all explained to me years ago by an obnoxious, arrogant catholic priest , who looked at me pityingly when I said that animals have their own reasons for existence.
One of the many minor Augustines wrote that it didn’t matter what you did to animals because they coud not feel pain. All he had to do was go out in the street and kick the first dog he saw to have known his idea was bullshit. But he didn’t bother. He knew he was right.
However anyone who has lived with animals, or at least mammals, knows that they have intelligence and self-awareness in varying degrees just as do humans. It’s one of the great pleasures of life to watch a young animal learn all the things it needs to know (and much more sometimes) in such a compressed timeframe.
BTW: what leads one to define the degree of consciousness that humans may have reached as “fully conscious”?
@ sailor 1031
—————————————beginquote
BTW: what leads one to define the degree of consciousness that humans may have reached as “fully conscious”?—————————————endquote
I would think Dennet’s discussion of the concept : intentionality should be rather helpful (if you really wonder, and just don’t intend(sic) to be rhetorical :-) )
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
Isn’t Harris’s argument that the total wellbeing(where well-being is a loosely defined term almost to the point of not being defined) of a universe where you “care” for strangers is probably more than one where you dont and hence caring would be the more moral option? Surely caring for someone is related ot both the persons well-being and ours.
The whole subject of how Greeks treated Greeks from the befogged authorship of the Odyssey right up to the age of Alexander is fascinating. Even in the constitutional struggles over the government of this or that city state you can see the tension in the Greeks’ political identities. City states warred with each other pitilessly, each enslaving the others as they razed conquered cities. And yet, the city states recognized each other as part of the same cultural inheritance and all Greeks seemed proud to be Greeks, whatever they might think of all the other Greeks.
This to the point that they could put aside hundreds of years of internecine warfare to unite against the Persians (only to go right back to perpetual civil war once that threat had diminished).
Heck, even different political constituencies from the same city could get pretty nasty with each other. And remember, these were the guys who founded our tradition of moral reasoning.
The distinction is made by the interpreter, not by any property of the phenomenon itself. Any stream of symbols can be interpreted or treated as a signal and any signal can be interpreted or treated as a stream of symbols. A good example is the bee dancing mentioned as a possible example of symbolic language in animals. Entomologists have decoded particular symbols — for direction, for color, for quantity — from the dances, but the fact that one can find symbols in the signal doesn’t tell us anything about how the listener bees go about interpreting it (whether they’re like radios picking up a signal or like Turing machines receiving instructions from a sequence of symbols).
Dennett doesn’t have everything worked out as clearly as you seem to suggest. For example, if intentionality is part of the picture, then it’s still not what makes human consciousness unique. I’m fairly certain dogs can reason intentionally. Do something puzzling near a dog and see if it doesn’t a) get confused and b) start watching you closely to see what you do next.
That’s not to knock Dennett. He has a lot of good arguments. But he’d be one of the first to admit he doesn’t have it all figured out yet.
If you’re looking for The Unique Thing that human consciousness does, you may be looking for the wrong thing. We do consciousness stuff more than other animals. We’re unique like whales are unique for being huge.
@ Dan L
I would think your first claim is true, but not the following. I believe the information carried by symbols usually are of a different kind than signals. As far as I understand, the processing of symbols requires other mechanisms (usually preformed by other brain “modules”) than the processing of signals. This does not preclude signals from e.g. leading to very complicated behaviors (I suspect you are familiar with the “sphexiness” meme, -with some relevance for your bee dance example).
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
Exactly. And Harris doesn’t address that – he seems to take it for granted, instead.
No, that’s not the answer at all. If only it were that simple.
Montag – I don’t think I am dismissing Harris’s book too easily. For one thing, I really did try to figure out why some people liked it.
The second claim is completely true. In fact, it’s a rough and ready description of digital signal processing. The basic idea is that you “sample” (measure the intensity) of a signal at known intervals. The samples as a set can be used to reconstruct the original signal to an arbitrary degree of precision using Fourier analysis, but the samples themselves are represented by a stream of signals (most commonly 1s and 0s).
Look up “information theory” or “communication theory”, “digital signal processing,” and “Claude Shannon” on wikipedia to learn more.
“Fourier analysis” as well. It’s the actual mathematical technique I was thinking of for transforming signals into symbols (and vice versa).
Although you’re correct — and I said as much in my original reply — that interpreting data-as-signal requires different hardware than does interpreting data-as-symbols. What I’m saying is that there is always the possibility of a third bit of hardware that can convert between the two paradigms. They’re not “different types of information” in the way you seem to suggest. In fact, information theory is all about finding a definition of information that can be used consistently with both paradigms.
“a stream of signals (most commonly 1s and 0s).”
Should be “stream of symbols.”
Dan L,
“This is to the point that they could put aside hundreds of years of internecine warfare to unite against the Persians”
Actually, the Greeks didn’t unite against the Persians, there were Greeks on both sides at Salamis and Plataea and some city states accepted Persian support against their fellow Greeks while Persia remained a threat. Apparently the in-group had expanded since the Bronze Age to encompass the polis and its hinterland,but not much further.
OB:
No, that’s true. I’m well aware that you do engage in due dilligence in terms of your criticisms. I have nothing but respect for your ability to wade through as much of that Templeton dreck as you do and goodness knows how you manage to keep your patience around Mooney.
I’m reluctant to rehash too many of my arguments here which is why I was trying to take a more live and let live approach this time. That’s all.
Well I read it three times – dreadfully muddled and far too prolix; and weak on automata theory. Also it doesn’t seem to have any relevance to this discussion.
Anyway, my point was that if we state that only humans are “fully conscious” we are effectively claiming that there exists some scale that objectively measures consiousness and that humans are at the top of that scale; that there can be nothing, anywhere, that can be more “conscious” than humans. This is the same anthropocentric BS we get from religion.
“Fully conscious” can also make sense if we’re referring to some threshold ‘amount’ of consciousness, sailor. It doesn’t have to reflect an inappropriately anthropocentric belief that humans are either the only example or the pinnacle of consciousness.
This discussion is making Harris look very naive and Churchland look very trite (I don’t see how she’s saying anything that wasn’t said by philosophers before her?).
Yahzi:
I don’t think that’s the answer. I think it’s more that we get confronted, at some point, by the arbitrariness of the distinction between the in-group and the out-group. We care about the in-group, not randomly, but because they possess certain qualities that are important to us. And then we find out that the out-group has those qualities too. E.g., the ability to reason, or the ability to feel pain, or the ability to create and transmit culture. And once we see this, it becomes much more difficult to retain the sharp distinction between in-group and out-group. We might still care more about the in-group, but it becomes harder to dismiss the claims of the out-group to any type of consideration at all.
» See? That is interesting, where just insisting “it’s about well-being” over and over isn’t.
And then Churchland goes and does just that:
And no, there is no more sophisticated goal for morality to strive for in sight. So, I wonder, what exactly is it that makes Churchland just so much more interesting that Harris?
Caring. That’s what. She spells out that it has to do with caring.
Caring about what? Anything other than well-being?
Well, I read that, Ophelia. The question still remains being begged, though: mammals care about what, if not the well-being of other creatures?
Peter…the point is that Churchland spells out that caring about the well-being of others is what morality is about. Harris forgets to do that until almost halfway into the book. It’s blindingly obvious (as Jenavir notes, above) but it needs to be spelled out all the same.
Harris talks most of the time as if well-being is the only site of disagreement, but that’s just absurd.
I do get your dissatisfaction with Harris’s choice of focus, but I don’t think you can argue that a thing is blindingly obvious and at the same time say that it is just absurd not to devote a lot of time to its discussion. Also, in your post you say that the observation that morality is about others is more interesting than everything you read in TML, now in your comment you say that Harris mentions it halfway into the book. That leaves me a bit puzzled, I must confess.
Well, Peter, have you read any other books on meta-ethics? It’s just completely normal to spell everything out, no matter how obvious. It’s necessary to do that, because otherwise it’s not clear what you’re arguing. Harris for some reason took it as read, and I think that’s a fatal mistake.
He mentions it halfway through (via Churchland, as a matter of fact) but not in an interesting way and he doesn’t do anything interesting with it.
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