Moral Theory IV: Serving Oneself

Moral Theory:
I. Intuitionism
II. Authoritarianism
III. Divine Command and Attributes
IV. Ethical Egoism
V.  Utilitarianism
VI. Virtue and the Golden Rule

Negative Morality:
Divine Hierarchy

Last time, we argued that objective moral Truth is independent of the existence of God. After learning this, one might come to believe that without a divine source, the only measure of morality left is for people to do what is best for themselves, to spend life pursuing their own goals, interests, and desires. In this view, if helping others does not benefit someone, they have no moral obligation to do so. Basing one’s moral principles on self-interest is called Ethical Egoism.

Ethical Egoism is a two-sided coin. On the one hand, it can inspire people to work hard and put lots of effort into mastering skills, learning, and becoming a better person. The book Atlas Shrugged by the infamous Ethical Egoist Ayn Rand, despite its mind-numbingly shallow characters, has inspired and motivated people to compose beautiful songs, write best-selling novels, or start successful businesses. A few hours after I started reading it, I put it down and cleaned my apartment. There is just something about the call to get up and do something worthwhile that puts fire in people’s veins.

The cover for Faith of the Fallen by Terry Goodkind,

who portrays Ethical Egoism as heroic.

On the other hand, Ethical Egoism has no judgment for those who can screw other people over and get away with it. It would say there is nothing wrong with being a con artist or a thief or a money-grubber if doing so won’t have any negative effect on you or your future. And since competition inevitably favors those who play underhandedly, societies built on Ethical Egoism make it easy for the selfish and devious to rise to the top. Once in power, they rewrite the laws to further benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else. It is Social Darwinism, survival of the fittest applied to human wellbeing, and Ethical Egoism only shrugs.

It is a mixed package. The grandness of the life it offers is tempting, but there is a terrifying ugliness to the world it leads to. Our instincts pull us both ways. But we are looking for an objective foundation for morality, so for the moment, we will try to put aside our emotions and see whether Ethical Egoism has a rational foundation.

Ethical Egoism says that we should always aim toward that which would be the most fulfilling to ourselves, or in other words, we should always seek to maximize our own satisfaction. But if we follow that to its logical conclusion, we get a world of Social Darwinism, where the vast majority of people are trodden underfoot and forgotten. This does not feel like what morality should be, However, that is not actually a refutation of the theory, but an appeal to intuition, and we have already shown that intuition is not the basis for morality.

One could, in fact, still make a case that Ethical Egoism is the ultimate answer to objective morality. It may be that by everyone doing what is best for themselves, the standard of living is raised for everyone, even though the inequality between the top and the bottom makes it look unfair. However, it can be proved that is not the case. There is a thought experiment in game theory called the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which exposes Ethical Egoism’s fatal flaw. As I explain it, you can follow along in the image below.

Suppose you and someone else are partners in crime. You are caught, and questioned separately. The system is not very just, and you are given an offer: If neither you nor your partner confess, you will both get one year in prison. If you both confess, you will both get three years in prison. If one of you confesses and the other does not, the one who confesses will get off free and the other will get four years in prison. You are told that your partner has also received the same offer.

Now you weigh the possibilities. If your partner confesses, you get three years if you confess and four if you don’t. If your partner does not confess, you get one year if you do and none if you don’t. Either way, it is better for you if you confess. If you and your partner are Ethical Egoists, you will both confess and get three years. However, if you and your partner are playing as a team, neither of you will confess, so that you both get one year, which is best overall.

In cases like the Prisoner’s Dilemma, Ethical Egoism actually leads to outcomes that are worse for the people making decisions than some more altruistic moral system would. One could argue that the true option that lines up best with one’s self-interest would be to not commit crimes and to try to improve the legal system, but the Prisoner’s Dilemma is a proof of concept; only the logic matters, not the details. Ethical Egoism defeats itself, failing as a candidate for objective morality.

So far in the Moral Theory series, we have looked at the naive ideas of morality that people fall into with no or little thought, and which professional moral philosophers no longer consider worth pursuing. For the final two episodes, we will take on the big guns. We hope that the glimpses they provide us of moral Truth are as inspiring as Ethical Egoism, without the looming specter of Social Darwinism.

More Musings on Consciousness

Recommended Pre-Reading:
Consciousness 1
The Scientific Jigsaw Puzzle
Equivalence

Eighty years ago, there was a puzzle in science. Sometimes atoms broke apart into smaller atoms, releasing even smaller particles and energy. But when all of the remaining energy and momentum was totaled up, some of it was missing. Conservation of energy and momentum are two of the foundational laws of physics, so this was a real problem. To try to solve it, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli proposed that there was another particle, a neutrino, that escaped detection. Decades passed, and then finally someone was able to build a detector to search for these neutrinos, and found them.

The story of the neutrino is one way that things are discovered in science. There is a puzzle with a missing piece, people make suggestions for what that piece might be, and eventually someone finds the answer. Consciousness, however, is a different story. When we look at the human brain, it seems to function completely fine on its own, with just matter and electricity. Human behavior, decision-making, aesthetic taste, and basically everything about us can be understood by our DNA and the electrical signals running through our neurons. Unlike atomic decay with a neutrino-shaped hole, the brain puzzle is complete, and we perplexedly have a consciousness-shaped piece left over.

An extra puzzle piece that we cannot find a place for means something is wrong with the picture as a whole. In order to solve this problem, we have to identify and question our basic assumptions about our paradigm. Examining my own beliefs, I find I have always assumed an idea similar to substance dualism, that consciousness is its own substance, independent from other things. But what if it is simpler than that? What if consciousness is just what matter, or some forms of matter, looks like from the inside? This equivalence would mean that what seems to be its own piece of the puzzle is really just another way of looking at the pieces that are already in place.

At first, this seems preposterous. Rocks don’t have consciousness. Wind doesn’t have consciousness. Statues cannot see or hear. But this is where something like Integrated Information Theory comes in. A conscious experience would be meaningless unless it happens in a system of interconnected elements, each of which affects all of the others. Another way of saying this is that consciousness can only be meaningful if the information in the system is irreducibly complex and under constant change. Think of a brain. It is a vast network of neurons, connected in loops, branches, and highways. When a neuron fires, it pulses against other neurons, some of which are set off in turn. This is part of an unbroken, lifelong chain of cycles and patters. This is integrated information.

Let's do a thought experiment, where we imagine a mind whose only experience is seeing the color black. This mind has no concept of the outside world, no concept of sound, or touch, or space or time. Its entire existence is the perception of the color black. But by having nothing to compare the color black against, it does not even truly experience sight. So even though it experiences a quale, the color black, it is not conscious in the sense that we think of the word. Instead, we might call it proto-conscious.

Now imagine a mind whose subjective experience consists of only a single, unchanging scene, perhaps the equivalent of a photograph of a sunny day at the park. This mind does not think, it does not feel, and it does not get bored. Because it does not analyze the image nor remember having seen it moments before, the mind does not perceive time passing. To it, the entire lifespan of the universe is a single instant. This mind too is only proto-conscious.

The idea of proto-consciousness being everywhere in the universe, even in non-meaningful states devoid of change or organization, seems like something a mystic or spiritualist would claim. Nevertheless, given the information we have, I believe it is a sensible possibility. I am sure you have had the experience of waking up from sleep feeling a strong emotion, as if you were just in the middle of doing something stimulating, but could not remember what you were dreaming. When we are awake, our stream of consciousness is full of thoughts that flit in and out of our awareness. Most of the time we forget them instantly, and it is as if we never thought them in the first place. In other words, we have conscious and semi-conscious experiences that fade from existence and are forever lost to memory. Of course, even these examples require brains full of neurons in order to exist, but even so, is it unreasonable to hypothesize that qualia momentarily pop in and out of existence in matter all over the universe like virtual particles in a vacuum?

I often wonder if computers might have some kind of consciousness. They work completely differently from brains, storing and processing information as static bits instead of unbroken flows like neurons, but considering what we have been talking about so far, I think it is a reasonable question. If they are conscious, is it anything like human consciousness, or is it completely alien, impossible for us to imagine or comprehend? I see no reason why human consciousness should be typical of consciousness in the universe, and that there would not be senses and emotions impossible for human brains to have, or even other types of experiences we cannot imagine.

I don’t know whether mind-matter equivalence is the answer, but if it is, it would answer a lot of questions and eliminate a lot of assumptions. The puzzle would fit together, all its pieces intact, revealing a new edge to build from and explore. Perhaps we could figure out how to build artificial consciousness, or enhance our own to experience things never dreamed of. Perhaps we could learn exactly how conscious animals are, and how best to treat them ethically. A new ocean would be revealed, ready to be explored by science and science fiction.

The Profoundness of Equivalence

What is Knowledge?

Toolbelt of Knowledge: Concepts
Algorithms
Equivalence
Emergence
Math
The Anthropic Principle
Substrate-Independence
Significance

Have you ever had an argument with someone, only to find that you actually agree, but were just using different words? Have you ever memorized a long number in chunks, and then found out that someone else had memorized the number by breaking up the chunks differently? What you have stumbled upon is the principle of equivalence, the fact that something that is true can be thought about in different, yet equally valid ways.

For example, we all have our own ways of representing reality. Some of us think of reality in pictures. Some see everything in terms of words. Others see everything as equations. These are all different, but they are equally valid ways of representing reality. They are equivalent.

Equivalence appears all the time in physics. The most famous example is Einstein's Elevator, a thought experiment that led Einstein to formulate his theory of gravity, General Relativity. Einstein imagined waking up in an elevator, his body floating above the floor as if in space. There would be no way to tell if he was actually in space, or if he was freely falling down the elevator shaft. This showed him that zero-gravity and free-fall are equivalent, which, with some help from math and a few experiments, led to the realization that gravity is not truly a force but a distortion in spacetime.

For a more down-to-earth example, suppose you are holding a brick. We call it a solid object, and think of it as the stuff taking up the space within its boundaries. But we also know it is made of atoms, which are mostly empty space. So is the brick a solid substance, or is it mostly empty space? It is both. “Solid substance” and “mostly empty space of rigidly arranged atoms,” though they seem completely different, are two ways of saying the same thing. Equivalent.

Of course we also have to watch out for false equivalence, when we treat two things as the same when they are really not. Nothing is as simple as it first seems, and figuring out how to tell the difference is part of learning. The glass is half empty, and it is half full.

Being aware of equivalence and learning to identify it can help us make sense of the world and what is happening around us. Sometimes things that seem unrelated or even contradictory are actually the same thing. If we practice finding these connections, we start to see that the world is a lot more understandable than we may have realized.