Category: Uncategorised

Dan Dennett [DD] thinks (now) that there would be more peace of mind in one’s last years (or maybe in one’s earlier ones too) if everyone were signed up ab ovo for a no-opt-out 80-85 apoptosis policy.

When I was in my sophomoric teens, I contemplated having a vasectomy, “It is selfish and wrong for people to reproduce — to create, out of nothing, a potential for suffering, with the patient being someone other than themselves. (No potential for pleasure can compensate for this.)”

Friends said: Are you sure? What if, when you get older, you start to feel broody. You may rue this decision. It’s irreversible. You can’t opt out afterwards.

My (sophomoric) reply: “If I change my mind later on, it serves me right. What I think and feel now is right. If I feel otherwise at a later date, then I’ll be wrong, then. I disavow my later avatar.”

But I never got ’round to having that vasectomy. And I did reach the broody age, when I was glad I had not, and declared my prior callow incarnation to have been the one that was wrong.

But I never got ’round to breeding either. (And now I’ve reached an age where I think I was right the first time.)

All by way of an analogy with Dan’s stance. What about freedom? And variations and variability in the life cycle? Is humankind to be pre-inscribed in a genetically engineered, no-opt-out 80-85 apoptosis policy? Without consultation? After a plebiscite? Does everyone feel that’s right for them?

Will Dan feel that way in the hale, compos mentis and creative ’90s that I fervently wish upon him?

If Chris Hitchens had remained alive, compos mentis and creative till his ’90s, would he not have opted to keep struggling to live, think and write till the very last moment, as he did, mortally ill in his ’60s?

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§   §    CODA    §    §
DD: “Stevan’s response is all very sensible and heartfelt but he never gets around to addressing the question of whether his vision of freedom could actually be counterproductive. All the people vegetating away in nursing homes probably share (or shared, when they were compos mentis) his vision of unshackled freedom. Odysseus showed us that if there are some things, some adventures, you want to have, you have to tie yourself to the mast so that you can avoid the negative after-effects of getting what you want.”

I might be willing to pin myself to a biometric mast, but not to a chronometric one!

DD: “A question for those who just don’t see the point I’m trying to make: suppose today you got a credible offer of a two hundred year lifespan by taking a purple pill (and it’s free, if that matters). You have to take the pill now, and you don’t get any guarantees at all about what sort of life you’ll be living after, say, your 90th birthday. Do you take the pill? Think of how knowing something about your longevity will probably distort the rest of your life if you take the pill. Is it obvious that you should opt for the pill?“

Yes, it’s obvious, dead obvious. (And opt for euthanasia — elective or biometric — if ever you opt to opt out.)

Commentary on Dan Dennett [DD] (2011) “Whole-Body Apoptosis and the Meanings of Lives” On the Human.

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DD: “…which would you prefer for your last months on earth: being struck by lightning at some point before you began losing your faculties, or an indefinitely long period of decline, during which you would gradually become unable to perform the simple actions of life and participate meaningfully in conversation or decision-making?”

More options: How about choosing the moment on the fly, based on your condition and prognosis in real time? Or pre-specifying the objective medical criteria on the basis of which you would like it to be decided when the euthanasia should be done (while you’re asleep)? (But wouldn’t many people prefer to be able to say goodbye?)

DD: “We could arrange to have a human body switch itself off quite abruptly and painlessly at a time to be determined. ”

Why apoptosis? Nocturnal barbiturate administration would do the trick, if the criteria were objective and reliably (and verifiably) followed. (Apoptosis just adds a needless further layer of sci-fi on the problem, which is merely to determine when the euthanasia should take place. Surely it’s better to make that decision an objective criterion-based one rather than simply an a-priori time-based one?)

DD: “Almost nobody would want to know to a near certainty the exact day and hour of their death, and the reasons why are made vivid in any number of death-row dramas. ”

Are death-row inmates (whether guilty or innocent) representative of the rest of humanity? Surely there are many people and reasons for wanting to know when. And even if one does not know, the question is whether the cut-off should be actuarial clock-triggered or substantive criterion-triggered. (Determining the right criterion – or, for that matter, the right chronometry – are another matter, and that’s probably where the real substantive issues reside.)

DD: “We install in every human being and in every subsequent human embryo a system that ensures the swift, painless death at some randomly determined time between the age of 85 and 90… ”

Why between 85 and 90, or between any t1 and t2? Is the idea that the interval is an absolute, universal one, that fits all of humankind? If not, then surely it is what other factors (e.g., health, performance capacity, desire to stay alive…) determine the individuals’ time-window that matter far more than keeping the moment within the time-window unpredictable.

DD: “How do we balance the increase of suffering against the non-suffering lives of a few?”

By basing the euthanasia point on individual, objective criteria, not a-priori timing.

DD: “If you would prefer to die by lightning bolt while you are still effective and healthy, the price you must be willing to pay is foregoing some years or months that would have been just as effective and healthy as your last days.”

There’s decline and there’s decline. Some people would put up with some bodily deterioration as long as they remained mentally sharp. None of these things is predictable, for an individual, from a-priori timing alone. That’s just population statistics, and if we’re to be treated according to those, then we may as well not see doctors when we are ill: just type in our age and symptoms, or perhaps just our age (so we can be treated automatically for its most common illness)!

DD: “…just because we could arrange to live to be 100 (or 120!) we really have no right to use up so much more than our fair share of the world’s resources and amenities.”

If we are to reason along those lines, it’s not just our right to live out our years that must be subordinated to the rest of the planet’s needs, but what we have a right to whilst we’re alive (and others are wanting). There’s much to be said for (and against) thinking along these general lines, but it has another name than euthanasia or apoptosis. And the management of how long people are entitled to live will be far less consequential than the management of other entitlements (such as wealth, property, reproduction rights, and perhaps even how we spend our days and use our capacities).

DD: “One of the most interesting objections I have provoked in recent discussions is the suggestion that this policy, if adopted, would rob us of precious opportunities to prove our strength by enduring suffering.”

That objection conflates the question of euthanasia itself with pre-timed pop-off. And it is an example of one of the most sordid and sociopathic justifications for withholding euthanasia (reminiscent of an equally noxious credally based one): Let them suffer for the good of their souls (and mine).

Well, fine, in the cases where “their” and “mine” are co-referential. (In other words, where I’m the one who decides I’d rather stick around and suffer.) But that’s the luxury problem, while there are so many who would rather not stay around and suffer, but are not allowed or able to do anything about it.

DD: “…we could use technology to fine-tune the system, to monitor various plausible measures of quality of life in both individuals and populations, so that apoptosis could more optimally track actual mean rates of decline or even rates of decline in individuals so that apoptosis could be customized in any of a dozen ways.”

Better still, once we’ve figured out a better way of “customizing” the hour, forget about the apoptosis and just use nocturnally administered barbiturates…

DD: “We should pause to take seriously — very seriously — the prospect of protecting some aspects of our lives and deaths from management, and thereby reframing our landscape of decisions.”

And actuarially pre-planned apoptotic obsolescence is a protection from management?

DD: “Why should we devote so much of our R&D budget to finding ways of extending life?”

That’s an entirely different matter, completely independent of pre-planned obsolescence.

DD: “…the prospect of being able to live out your remaining days relatively confident that your survivors will not have to set aside memories of a pathetic decline in order to get to the memories of you that matter. What would you trade for that? I’d trade any number of years over 85…(I am 65 as I write this). ”

Any updates on this view, now that another half-decade has gone by? The criteria for such decisions are of course personal matters, but I, for one, think the world would be far, far better off with Dan Dennetts staying around as long as they are compos mentis, than by doing them at an appointed age so as to stretch strained old-age pensions one epsilon further. If we’re going to contemplate sci-fi fantasies, looking for a way to engineer apoptosis for pre-programmed death seems to me far less to the point than looking for a way to convince people to limit reproduction, become vegans, and convert to a sustainable way of living.

But Dan’s essay can also be taken to be addressing a far more important and urgent matter than pre-programmed pop-off, namely, euthanasia itself. The worst thing about the status quo on death now is the fact that most people cannot choose to die, even when they wish to. Surely before we can have consensus on pre-programmed pop-off for all (whether or not they want it) we must first agree to allow those who do want to die, now, to do so. Yes, there are complications and risks of abuse that need to be taken carefully into account, but the current status quo is cruel, unjust, and irrational.

SUMMARY
Pill-Popping vs. Apoptosis: I think that neither (1) one uniform pre-selected cut-off interval for the life of all human beings nor (2) a preference for being taken by surprise within that interval (“Unexpected-Hanging-Paradox“-style) is for everyone. Or even for most or many — but this could only be settled by a survey (or perhaps not even that, since people don’t always do what they claim they would do…)

Euthanasia itself, however, should (with due precautions against thought disorder and abuse) be available to those who wish it.

So the main point of disagreement is the basis for selecting the time-window for terminating a life. Once that interval is settled, then, if you don’t want to know exactly when the grim one will reap, you can start taking randomized, pre-coded pills before going to sleep (5 years’ worth, daily, if you like), all of them sugar except the one fateful (double-blind-coded) barbiturate.

The second point of disagreement is the no-back-out condition. I think that’s rather harsh, arbitrary, and non-optimal. So I don’t mind that the mortal can decline to take the pills altogether if he changes his mind. The rest is the argument against pre-determining the time-window actuarially for the entire population rather than basing it on individual criteria and wishes.

Compassion and Complacency, Sympathy and Sociopathy

Laws are rational base-camps on the slippery slopes of life

Sociopathic Sanctimony

There seem to be three reasons why directors tamper with operas today: (1) To try to freshen them up and make them more “relevant”. (2) To try to put more (paying) bums on today’s (declining) seats. (3) To allow scope for the “creative” contribution of the director.

That’s all fine, for minor works. But when it comes to the masterworks, let them speak and sing for themselves.

Gounod’s Faust is not Goethe’s masterpiece, but it’s far from a minor work either. Gounod/Barbier/Carré reduce most of the depth and dimensionality of Goethe’s Faust to just the seduction and redemption of Marguerite. Faust himself is downsized to a somewhat ambivalent libertine. No sign of the doctor fallen from the heights of scholarly inquiry with which he had become disillusioned to try his hand at the ordinary layman’s love-making that he felt he may have missed. Not much trace of the bargain of pawning his soul for the second chance. And a lot more exalted Christian prudery sanctified as virtue in the devout Gounod’s version than in the more worldly and universalist Goethe’s.

Yet there is more than enough of the universal in Gounod’s Faust to make it unnecessary to strain to make it more “relevant.” Believers or non-believers, we can still understand that many once considered it a big deal to seduce, inseminate and abandon a naive girl. And even more immediate today is our horror at how cruelly she was treated for her “crime” by others, especially her beloved brother. We can even still understand — though we cannot endorse or condone — the brother’s anguish at his sister’s “fall.” (And, no, we need not view this portrayed en travesti as islamic honor killings in order to get the point.)

Fortunately, most of this manages to get through in the Met’s current Faust, directed by Des McAnuff. The way he chose to obtrude with a new “premise” (inspired by Dr. Jacob Bronowski’s renunciation of physics upon seeing Nagasaki) was in recasting Doctor Faust’s learned inquiries as 20th century atomic bomb-making rather than medieval alchemy and magic.

Well, yes, that certainly makes it more current and relevant, but does it make sense? The destruction wrought on Nagasaki was real enough, and horror at having contributed to it is certainly universally understandable. But what does it mean to renounce this destruction in favour of the goading of the gonads? Goethe’s Faust abandons airy scholarship because it has not brought him the satisfaction he had sought; Gounod’s Faust turns instead to seeking it in earthly seduction. But what, exactly, is the deal with McAnuff’s Dr. Strangelove? Is he trying to make amends for Nagasaki, or to make matters worse?

We don’t have to worry about these superadded fine points during most of the opera, however; they are obtruded only at the very beginning (where they puzzle, but otherwise do not matter, nor meddle) and at the very end — but there they do pose a bit of a problem. For when Marguerite eludes the long haul in Club Mephistopheles, because she is forgiven by the Almighty both for her original “sin” and for the madness and infanticide to which she was driven by all her pious unforgiving friends and family (with the exception of the youth who loved and lost but never condemned her) — the chorus of angels that cheer her up to the heavens is sung by legions of the lab-coated scientists that kept appearing here and there during the entire performance.

So it’s not forgiveness (whether Christian or generic) that triumphs and redeeems, but what? And why? And how does Nagasaki and disenchantment with research fit in all this?

Go figure. As long as it has that note of “relevance,” filled the seats, and brought due attention to the director, who cares?

Especially since (apart from the arbitrary atheistic irony of the ascent at the end) Gounod and the wonderful performers and conductor were nevertheless able to successfully reanimate this 19th century magic and alchemy yet again in the 21st.

The agony of mortality.
Not your own mortality.
That of those you love.

Not losing them.
That’s mere endless pain:
Yours.
Like their going off somewheres,
never to return again.

The agony (whose?)
is what they lose.
The loss, not them, but theirs.

Letter to TLS, Nov 4 2011:

“Stevan Harnad misstates the criteria for the Turing Test when he describes a sensing robot that could pass the test by recognizing and interacting with people and objects in the same way that a human can (October 21). Alan Turing’s formulation of the Turing Test specifies a computer with no sensors or robotic apparatus. Such a computer passes the test by successfully imitating a human in text-only conversation over a terminal.
    “Significantly, and contrary to Harnad’s formulation, no referential “grounding” of symbols is required to pass the Turing Test

                         David Auerbach 472 9th Street, New York 11215.

David Auerbach (TLS Letters, November 4) is quite right that in his original 1950 formulation, what Turing had called the “Imitation Game” (since dubbed the “Turing Test”) tested only verbal capacity, not robotic (sensory/motor) capacity: only symbols in and symbols out, as in today’s email exchanges. Turing’s idea was that if people were completely unable to tell a computer apart from a real, live pen-pal through verbal exchanges alone, the computer would really be thinking. Auerbach is also right that — in principle — if the verbal test could indeed be successfully passed through internal computation (symbol-manipulation) alone, then there may be no need to test with robotic interactions whether the computer’s symbols were “grounded” in the things in the world to which they referred. But 2012 is Alan Turing Year, the centenary of his birth. And 62 years since it was published, his original agenda for what is now called “cognitive science” has been evolving. Contrary to Turing’s predictions, we are still nowhere near passing his test and there are by now many reasons to believe that although being able to pass the verbal version might indeed be evidence enough that thinking is going on, robotic grounding will be needed in order to actually be able to pass the verbal test, even if the underlying robotic capacity is not tested directly. To believe otherwise is to imagine that it would be possible to talk coherently about the things in the world without ever being able to see, hear, touch, taste or smell any of them (or anything at all).

Harnad, S. (1989) Minds, Machines and Searle. Journal of Theoretical and Experimental Artificial Intelligence 1: 5-25.

Harnad, S. (1990) The Symbol Grounding Problem Physica D 42: 335-346. http://cogprints.org/0615/

Harnad, S. (1992) The Turing Test Is Not A Trick: Turing Indistinguishability Is A Scientific Criterion. SIGART Bulletin 3(4): 9-10.

Harnad, S. (1994) Levels of Functional Equivalence in Reverse Bioengineering: The Darwinian Turing Test for Artificial Life. Artificial Life 1(3): 293-301.

Harnad, S. (2000) Minds, Machines, and Turing: The Indistinguishability of Indistinguishables. Journal of Logic, Language, and Information 9(4): 425-445. (special issue on “Alan Turing and Artificial Intelligence”)

Harnad, S. (2001) Minds, Machines and Searle II: What’s Wrong and Right About Searle’s Chinese Room Argument? In: M. Bishop & J. Preston (eds.) Essays on Searle’s Chinese Room Argument. Oxford University Press.

Harnad, S. (2002) Darwin, Skinner, Turing and the Mind. (Inaugural Address. Hungarian Academy of Science.) Magyar Pszichologiai Szemle LVII (4) 521-528.

Harnad, S. (2002) Turing Indistinguishability and the Blind Watchmaker. In: J. Fetzer (ed.) Evolving Consciousness. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pp. 3-18.

Harnad, S. and Scherzer, P. (2008) First, Scale Up to the Robotic Turing Test, Then Worry About Feeling. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 44(2): 83-89

Harnad, S. (2008) The Annotation Game: On Turing (1950) on Computing, Machinery and Intelligence. In: Epstein, Robert & Peters, Grace (Eds.) Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer. Springer

Harnad, S. (2011) Minds, Brains and Turing. Consciousness Online 3.

The recent findings of Watanabe and Logothetis on dissociating attention and awareness are interesting

Watanabe, M, K Cheng, Y Murayama, K Ueno, T Asamizuya, K Tanaka, N Logothetis (2011) Attention but not Awareness Modulates the BOLD Signal in Human V1 During Binocular Suppression. Science 11 November 2011 DOI: 10.1126/science.1203161

but a more conservative interpretation might be that when there is divided stimulation and divided attention, stimulation and attention both contribute to awareness (of stimulation), with attention selectively enhancing the effects of the stimulation.

Harnad, S. (1969) The effects of fixation, attention, and report on the frequency and duration of visual disappearances. Masters thesis, McGill University.

I have only read the summaries of Steve Pinker’s new book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” but I wonder about the demographics on which it is based:

As the centuries go by, is violence declining proportionally or absolutely? I suspect it’s the former. The population grows Malthusianly, but as civilization progresses, the proportion of violence “tolerated” goes down. Yet at our exponential population growth rate, that still leaves it open that the absolute amount of human/human violence is still growing, daily, relentlessly — just not as fast as the human population is growing.

So, yes, it’s nice that the relative proportion of violence is not growing as fast as the population, but that’s just a statistic. The number of (human) sparrows felled (by humans) daily is still monstrous: bigger than it ever was, and growing. Taking solace from the fall in proportion is akin to tobacco-company thinking, it seems to me: Is Steven Pinker unwittingly falling into apologetics for the unpardonable, whether then, since, or now?

(And let’s not forget — although it’s well-hidden and sanitized — that the absolute amount of violence we are heartlessly inflicting daily on the helpless nonhuman creatures that we purpose-breed — not out of necessity: for savour, not survival — is growing just as exponentially as our own numbers…)

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This absolute/relative question has obviously been put to Pinker many times:

Q: Your claim that violence has declined depends on comparing rates of violence relative to population size. But is that really a fair measure? Doesn’t a victim of violence suffer just as much regardless of what happens to other people of the time? Was the value of a life less in the 13th century than in the 21st just because there are more people around today? Should we give ourselves credit for being less violent just because there has been population growth?

But Pinker’s reply to the question is not very convincing:

R: You can think about it in a number of ways, but they all lead to the conclusion that it is the proportion, rather than the absolute number, of deaths that is relevant. First, if the population grows, so does the potential number of murderers and despots and rapists and sadists. So if the absolute number of victims of violence stays the same or even increases, while the proportion decreases, something important must have changed to allow all those extra people to grow up free of violence.

This reply provides solace to statisticians, but not to victims.

R: Second, if one focuses on absolute numbers, one ends up with moral absurdities such as these: (a) it’s better to reduce the size of a population by half and keep the rates of rape and murder the same than to reduce the rates of rape and murder by a third; (b) even if a society’s practices were static, so that its rates of war and violence don’t change, its people would be worse and worse off as the population grows, because a greater absolute number of them would suffer; (c) every child brought into the world is a moral evil, because there is a nonzero probability that he or she will be a victim of violence.

Try replacing potential “victim” by potential “perpetrator,” and add that to the fact that the absolute number of victims is still growing.

R: As I note on p. 47: “Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease. So the number of people in a given time and place who enjoy full lives has to be counted as a moral good, against which we calibrate the moral bad of the number who are victims of violence. Another way of expressing this frame of mind is to ask, `If I were one of the people who were alive in a particular era, what would be the chances that I would be a victim of violence?’ [Either way, we are led to] the conclusion that in comparing the harmfulness of violence across societies, we should focus on the rate, rather than the number, of violent acts.”

If one takes the allocentric rather than the egocentric perspective on this, a declining proportion of suffering does not compensate for a growing amount of suffering unless we give my potential pleasure more weight than your actual pain.

Q: What about all the chickens in factory farms?

R: I discuss the chickens in a section on Animal Rights in chapter 7, pp. 469–473.

Well, I guess that settles that, insofar as concerns any potential complaints from the chickens (whose unlucky numbers are not only growing absolutely but whose proportions are not even declining relatively, like those of the lucky human survivors): So let them take solace in humanity’s increasingly angelic nature the same way the growing number of absolute human victims do. (A sentiment reminiscent of Marie-Antoinette — or perhaps a moral-credit Ponzo Plan, in which we amortize the increasing number of victims of human violence by increasing the total human population even faster…)

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Yet, all that said, I too think there’s hope: but it will only begin to be realized when it is the absolute number of victims (human and nonhuman) that begins to decline — and not just the proportion. And, yes, reducing rather than increasing our own absolute numbers might not be a bad step in that direction…

Re: “Physicists in tune with neurons”

My guess is that you could predict consonance/dissonance without recording neuronal activity. It’s already in the physics: consonant sounds share more harmonics, bottom up. You could measure that without neurons, just a device that can detect differences in the harmonic spectrum. (And it would be trivial to make neural devices mirror the same property.)

Besides, consonant/dissonant does not correspond to aesthetically “pleasant/unpleasant” (and the right aesthetic adjective is not quite the word “pleasant” anyway): Some of the most excruciatingly beautiful harmonic moments are dissonant ones. (It has more to do with the drawing out or manipulation of expectation in the passage from dissonant to consonant — but that too is a trivialization…)

(As happens so often: take an absolutely trivial empirical correlation, and make one of its correlates our own precious brain activity, and people are almost superstitiously ready to marvel, the same way they do at their own horoscopes, when they seem to fit…)

And, of course, having detected the physical difference, you’re left with the usual (hard) problem, which is not why one feels pleasant and the other not, but why any of it feels like anything at all…

 Yes, the commentator in the Khodorkhvsky movie who said “Kh was the best of the worst” (the worst being all the oligarchs, including Kh) seems to have captured the essence of the puzzle. 

There is no question that Kh’s enormous business success was due in part to the government selling him public assets at a low price (partly to keep them in Russian hands, partly because of insider wheeling and dealing and self-interest). There were no doubt dirty tricks and gangsterism on both sides (oligarchs and government) along with collusion. There is also little doubt who the worst of the worst was and is (VVP). 

How did Kh become the best of the worst? It looks as if his motives for acquiring wealth never came from those lowest depths of sociopathic cupidity that drove so many others; his motives seem to have been more technical than materialistic: it was a skill he was obsessed with developing. There may even have been some self-serving belief in its “trickle-down” benefits for the rest of the world too. But he clearly had a first round of remorse and rethinking that led to his support of the political opposition to Putin (possibly because of conflicts and conflicts of interest with Putin), and this is what led to his arrest (by which time he had already developed a sense of fatalism, if not martyrdom; probably his wealth and influence also gave him some illusion of immunity, so far only partly confirmed).

But what about now? In prison, having lost (almost) all, he had a second round of second-thoughts about wealth acquisition, and he seems to think he is now fighting for a principle (though it is not at all evident what that principle is).

Probably Kh would have made (and might still make) a better president than Putin. But that just means the best of the worst would be better than the worst of the worst.

Human character is capable of remorse and reform, but I think Russia’s chances would be better in the hands of Politkovskaya (compassionate, intelligent, funny, and equally obsessive and fatalistic —  surely closer to the best of the best) if the worst of the worst (or some of his competitors) had not already done their worst with her.

Cryptography’s
poetastery.

Art should make
you feel
not reel.