"Compassionate" Politicians - Exactly Not

(HT) Just in case you were worried politicians might actually care about their constituents, someone ran the numbers.

Using investment rather than the welfare state bureaucracy, you can purchase an annuity of more than your annual income for the price of the social security tax you were paying anyway. Combining Murray's numbers with La Wik's, you can have private doctors for about the cost of public doctors, if that's what you are actually after. In other words, drop wait times, lose the bad attitude, and provide an incentive for smart students to become doctors, and in return get doctors for everyone.

We all know politicians are liars. But do you really get what that means? "Our new initiative will help the poor and the sick by...." Whatever the initiative will do, you can be sure it is not helping the poor or the sick.

I have no idea if the authors actually connected, but I first read a version of this idea on Unqualified Reservations; MM noted that simply giving every American a financial instrument equivalent to their legislative due would be vastly more effective at the stated goals than what's actually going on.

This is how you can tell that the stated goals are just noise. The solutions are generally practised elsewhere, simpler to design, not difficult to understand, and if ignorance is a barrier, then simply showing your representative Murray's article should sweep it away. Despite this, what's actually created are byzantine networks that both intentionally obfuscate and always seem to put lots of money in the pockets of politician's friends...

What's even more interesting to me is that it works. The golden goose never seriously questions the story that its egg is being sold to provide bread for poor children. It's even more remarkable if you consider how easy it is to draw a person into outrage at their governments, as long as you limit the discussion to concrete particulars.
(Just in case you're worried that the person does have good things to say about their government as well, check to see if they're using vague happy-speak or whether they can talk specifically of actual uncompromised benefits, without ignoring their downsides.)

Murray also touches on the real issue. "The welfare state is pernicious ultimately because it drains too much of the life from life." If socialism simply taxed the wallet, it would just be annoying. The real problem is that socialism taxes the soul. I was tempted to think this is a side effect, but I found out that the degradation of family and community greatly benefits the perpetrators of the welfare state, although I hesitate to say it is 'intentional.' For example, did Alfred Kinsey want to promote violent, jealous rages, or was he just out to prove his own impulses were morally sound? To the democratic state, however, all those warped children are sources of power. So, Kinsey's friends get funding and exposure, while his enemies, the opponents of human misery, perhaps equally oblivious of their sociological role, become persecuted.

Independent Discovery and Journalism; Consciousness in New Scientist

It is certainly not an article I expect from such a bastion of orthodoxy as New Scientist. Clearly, the commenters agree. As per my last post, yes, sometimes journalism will rise above its mandate and produce something approaching worth reading. (NS has also published Lee Smolin, whose writing could not be more different than the bulk of the magazine.)

The key is here:

"It is about the deep philosophical confusion embedded in the assumption that if you can correlate neural activity with consciousness, then you have demonstrated they are one and the same thing, and that a physical science such as neurophysiology is able to show what consciousness truly is."

Tallis fails to follow this through properly, I think. As most discussions of consciousness do, it begs the question. On one side, consciousness is physical, and the only thing left is to demonstrate it, while on the other, with Tallis, consciousness is clearly not physical, and it is just a matter of making the other side admit this. The whole point of the debate is whether the neural correlates, or some equivalent, are indeed consciousness itself or not; there's no use in just reasserting one's opinion.

I will now follow it through properly.

Assume we have the neural correlates exactly corresponding to consciousness, and we have completely described the brain. To use the eye, we can trace the trail of causation as photons enter the eye, as spikes travel through nerves and neurons, as the voluntary nervous system swings into action, and the person responds. ("That is one fine and dandy picture you got there.")

I take this model. I change one thing; I assume the correlates are unconscious. Does the model still work?

"The analogy fails as the level at which water can be seen as molecules, on the one hand, and as wet, shiny, cold stuff on the other, are intended to correspond to different "levels" at which we are conscious of it. But the existence of levels of experience or of description presupposes consciousness. Water does not intrinsically have these levels."

By definition, we have no direct access to another's consciousness, we can only correlate neuron spikes with consciousness reports, and liken those reports to our own experience. The reports, however, are themselves unverifiable, and if there's any systematic bias, they will be systematically wrong.

(As any Buddhist can tell you, there's lots of systematic bias. As long as you're not talking about consciousness, a good psychologist can also go on and on about systematic biases.)

I strip the unreliable reports out; the reports are not necessary for the model to work, and indeed should be predictions of the model, not components. I simply show, using our hypothetical exact model, how certain questions cause these answers. As per my one change, the reports are because of the neural correlates, not because of the contents of consciousness. If indeed the materialists are correct, a full causal description of the brain is simply a full description.

Now, hopefully, you can clearly see why Tallis is correct, that it is self-contradictory to look for consciousness in the brain. Materialism contradicts the very existence of consciousness; and indeed all materialists are in fact crypto-dualists. To reiterate, the neuroscientific persuasion of materialist measures a neural correlate, asks the subject what they're experiencing, and then correlates the two. Which is fine that far, but then they assume the subject's response was not caused by physical thing they just measured, but because of their conscious state, and then they assume the conscious state was the thing they just measured. This species works through the problem with dualism, and then assumes the answer is monistic.

To see this another way, to assume as above that the correlates are in fact unconscious is either to assume consciousness doesn't exist or to assume epiphenomenal dualism is true. The fact that the model still works if Ockham's razor is applied like this means that the model either assumes consciousness doesn't exist, or is dualistic.

(So, do you think my characterization of the camps is accurate?)

As a bonus, this kind of answer is not just philosophically wrong, but scientifically wrong as well.

I've seen complaints that dualism is just a myterious answer to a mysterious question. Neural correlates are actually a mysterious answer to a mysterious question. Ask the physicist question; how does this neural correlate know it is supposed to be happiness, and not surprise? As your neural cortex is processing red, why would even bother to know it is processing red, and not just do it? Consider further: it is a bunch of electrons, protons, and neutrons processing red and apparently also knowing that they are processing red. The photon itself is long gone at this point, there's no actual redness around. How do these particles know they're supposed to be correlating to red, and the particles in your hair know they're not supposed to be?

What is qualitatively different about being a neuronal neutron versus a hirsute neutron? How does it know? Because, if it can't know, then it must be the same, and either both unconscious...or both conscious.

Many materialists are aware of these kinds of issues, which tends to bring emergence into the discussion, but unfortunately that is even more absurd, because emergence hardly even pretends to be objective. Briefly, a flock is an emergent structure. Now, read Tallis' bit about water again. To say we became conscious because of emergence is to say we became conscious because of features of consciousness. Physics doesn't recognize flocks. Physics recognizes fundamental particles, and that's all.


To touch on journalism again, it seems obvious to me why Tallis didn't follow through properly; the whole article reeks of being crammed into a tiny space. (Long form Tallis.) While I can say Tallis should not have written the article, or NS should not try to stuff such a complex, difficult, frustrating topic into the corner...to do so consistently would violate Sturgeon's Second.

And now for some light fisking. I wonder if the article would be so glibly dismissesd if these errors were corrected.

"If it were identical, then we would be left with the insuperable problem of explaining how intracranial nerve impulses, which are material events, could "reach out" to extracranial objects in order to be "of" or "about" them."

Tallis fails to explain why the problem is insuperable. In fact, the perspective is new to me, so I have no idea if he's right, or even if he's on to something at all.

"Straightforward physical causation explains how light from an object brings about events in the occipital cortex. No such explanation is available as to how those neural events are "about" the physical object. Biophysical science explains how the light gets in but not how the gaze looks out."

I mentioned independent discovery, although that last sentence is more question-beggging.

Further down is,

"I believe there is a fundamental, but not obvious, reason why that explanation will always remain incomplete - or unrealisable."

Again,

"There are also problems with notions of the self, with the initiation of action, and with free will. Some neurophilosophers deal with these by denying their existence,"

Finally, Tallis trips up more seriously.

"It does not, as you and I do, reach temporally upstream from the effects of experience to the experience that brought about the effects. In other words, the sense of the past cannot exist in a physical system. This is consistent with the fact that the physics of time does not allow for tenses: Einstein called the distinction between past, present and future a "stubbornly persistent illusion"."

To LIFO... physics does not respect tense because there is only the present. Each fundamental particle only feels its immediate surroundings, both spatially and temporally, as per the principle of locality,[1] and the name for the temporally local is simply 'the present.' Particles don't care about the past or future because, almost by definition, the particles can touch neither.

However, your memories exist in the present. While we look backward by inducing a feeling of looking backward, it doesn't mean the process of remembering means moving backward in any way. The bar against correlation works both ways.


[1] I must note that while our current principle seems very local, as it basically means adjacent, it need not be, and locality can be back-defined; the local is simply the things a particle can touch, wherever they happen to be. For example, you could say entangled particles don't send signals faster than light, but rather bend space.

References to Hume's Ought

My youngest memory of the phenomenon:

"Our form of government and efforts at "emancipation" cannot change the fundamental fact of their existence (there is no way to get to "ought".)"

I often see similar constructions, all error. My apologies, but Hume never proved his is-ought distinction, he simply pointed out many instances of people failing to derive is from ought.

Additionally, it turns out I have a counter-proof.

Assume something has value. Intrinsically, avoiding or preventing this thing results in a less valuable world.

Actually that's a false start, which I'm leaving in to help steer you into the right frame of mind.

Imagine the world has no intrinsic value - that the world 'value' is actually meaningless. (Nihilism is true.)

Imagine the world does in fact have some contingent quantity of value in it - positive or negative.

We must prefer the latter world. The former world renders even our preferences meaningless; it cannot be preferred (or preferred against). In other words, this is another species of Cogito: by our having values, the world is imbued has value...even if our values somehow turn out to be inconsistent.

'Ought' is defined thusly; it is better to do what we ought to do, than not. The world we ought to work toward is more valuable than the world we ought not to.

The problem is not that 'oughts' may not be refined from 'is,' but only in defining 'value' and working out what it picks out.


Now I'm going to perform a check. Famous, prestigious philosopher, John Searle also tackles the is-ought problem. Can he (by proxy) refute my analysis?

Searle says that institutions, which require rules to exist at all, bind the participants by the rules. (Elaborated here, as Searle is not part of the internet generation and hasn't spoken for himself online.)

"For example, when it is my turn to bat I am obligated to step up to the plate." Or, you could fail to continue to play baseball by violating this rule. This is the twofold problem with Searle's analysis. Yes, to perpetuate the baseball game, one is required to adhere to the rules of baseball, but at no point is one obligated, by this analysis, to perpetuate baseball.

In one situation, baseball continues - the bat is swung, the ball is hit or not. In the other, baseball ceases, at least momentarily, perhaps people are angry, or confused. So what? Can we really say, objectively, that one is better than the other? (Hint: maybe.) Let's say you choose not to step up to the plate, for no reason other than that you just realized there's no ought here, and people are angry. Even on pure intuition, is that really so bad? Again: so what?

There will be consequences to each action, and again, so what? Say they find your behaviour so contrary you're off the team, despite it being a casual league. It's not important; baseball is not something anyone can prove you ought to do, nor is it necessary to define pissing people off as 'wrong' to persuade an agent to avoid doing it.

I will ignore the second problem - that from this account, there is no direct link between institutional rules and the definition of 'ought.' Even without this, the oughtness of baseball must be inherited from the more fundamental level, which Searle attempted to circumvent.

Bayesian 'Reasoning' and Fallacies

That the process of rational reasoning works cannot be justified by reason. The simplest way of looking at why I have to use scare quotes on Bayesian 'reasoning' is that it attempts to justify itself. Why would anyone hold up Bayesian thinking as better than regular thinking? Because they think it's a good idea - they come to the conclusion that Bayesian conclusions are better than their regular conclusions.

Oops.

Bayesian reasoning pre-supposes regular reasoning, and further supposes that it can be reasonably justified, which puts Bayesian reasoning entirely inside regular reasoning. Indeed, Bayes worked out and proved his theorem as a special case with existing tools in an existing framework, just like all mathematical theorems.

While boring to do so, I must disclaim that I do use simple Bayesian kinds of inference, though it seems I've just found the natural Bayesian network in the brain and I use it - I don't ever actually do the Bayes theorem calculation.

If you haven't considered it deeply before, there's an introduction I can recommend, both for showcasing the advantages of Bayes' theorem, and diving with both feet into many of the associated fallacies.


Tribes, Grass, and Rain

As lethal as my single point is, were I Bayesian Bicurious, I would find it unsatisfying.[1] The rest of this section is illustration. The goal is that each point will also be fatal, but be a special case of the overall error.

To start with, Bayes' theorem requires three pieces of information, (as you can see in La Wik) the prior probability of A, the same of B, and the probability of B given A. That scans as utter gibberish to me, so here's an example.

I'm going to use wet grass as evidence of rain. To calculate the probability it has rained if the grass is wet, p(A|B), (as opposed to the probability it's because someone has been washing their car) you need the probability the grass is wet in general, p(B), the probability it has rained in general, p(A), and the probability that the grass gets wet if it has rained, p(B|A). The probability p(B) can also be expressed like this: p(B|A)*p(A) + p(B|~A)*p(~A), which has applications when you don't know p(B) per se but you do know of a lot of possibilities that aren't rain - like car washing - that second part essentially reads, "the probability the grass gets wet from not-rain, times the probability it hasn't rained."

The first problem is that is an awful lot of probabilities to need. The second, more serious problem is that in a controversy, it is easy to the point of inevitability that these probabilities are going to be fudged.

Notice how this computation spirals out of control as more priors are added; p(A|BCDE), isn't too bad, as it's essentially just four of these calculations, but what if, say, C and D are also in dispute, and you need to calculate p(C|XY) as well, and so on? It rapidly becomes a hierarchy of tears, except maybe for a few specialists in the field of A-ology. You, poor schmuck layman, are forced to simply accept the probability calculations of expert A-ologists. (Oh wait, don't we already do this? Err...revolution where now?) To be fully 'rational,' apparently you need a multimillion research budget.

However, the second problem is the pernicious one. Take a moment and realize how ridiculous it is that water falls from the sky. What, do little leprechauns take it up there with buckets? And it just hangs around, ignoring gravity for a while, before it gets into the mood to hang around on the ground again? If it weren't so pervasive, and thus familiar and normalized, rain would be far more mysterious and mystical to stone-age humans than silly little volcanoes. I strongly recommend it - open a door or window next time it rains, and consider how bizarre it is this liquid is just falling willy nilly out of nowhere.

Right, in that frame of mind, let's insert a rain controversy - democracy in the stone age. One clan thinks that when the rain fairies alight on the ground, they leave behind drops on the grass. Another clan thinks that the grass fairies excrete water when it rains, basically to say 'hi,' like they do to greet the morning. These lead to different calculations of p(A|B) - how likely it is that it has rained if the grass is wet. (Through convoluted logic, most of the clans believing one or the other determines who gets to go yak hunting.)

The first clan is certainly less wrong, and they see that the chance of wet grass if it rains is 100%: p(B|A) = 1. The second clan is not about to go down without fighting; observing grass on a hot, dry day, (only slightly missing the actual end of the storm) they notice the grass is dry. They declare that the grass fairies were just unhappy that day, conclusively showing that p(B|A) is actually somewhat less than one. The first clan is outraged, "You were obviously wrong about the rain! There's no way it can rain without the grass getting wet!"

(Technically you're not supposed to ever use probabilities 1 or 0, because they break Bayes' theorem, something I'll detail further down.)

This conflict cannot be resolved by Bayesian reasoning. To work out p(B|A) requires p(A|B) - the very thing that was in dispute to begin with. It's one equation with two unknowns. This is an example of the general problem of assigning probabilities to various pieces of data; the assigned probability unavoidably depends on that non-Bayesian reasoning stuff Bayesians are trying to improve upon.

Note also that neither p(A) nor p(B) can even be properly collected by the clansmen. Their sample size is too small and the demands of hunting and gathering don't help. When our society attempts to probe questions at the limit of our understanding, we run into the same problem - plus, just like the clansmen, it is difficult to even know that our sample is somehow flawed.

In the end, the first clan was mostly from a warm, wet sub region, while the second clan's region had days that were significantly hotter and drier. Their error was not in their logical progression - the first thought that they could tell from the grass if it rained while they slept, the second realized that they couldn't tell for sure - but in how they tried to state their observations. Ultimately, both were right, and both were wrong. And, obviously, I should be the one who gets to go yak hunting.

This is just not compatible with how human reasoning naturally works. Setting aside true random events - for which Bayes' theorem undoubtedly works better than human reasoning - the actual probability of any hypothesis being true is either 0 or 1. (Within certain tolerances - otherwise all hypotheses are false, probability 0, because they're not exactly true.) Bayesians aside, all human reasoning reflects this by backing one horse above all others. Personally I find this handy, as for some reason once I've strongly stated the hypothesis that wins given my available information, I find it much easier to gather and remember related information, often poking holes in my own ideas within days.


Fallacies

Hot Hand Fallacy

So rather than focusing on how it might be true, (ironically, the best way to activate one's confirmation bias) let's turn this fallacy around and see what it might be useful for. (As inspired by a comment.)

How many fair rolls were there in the ancestral environment? Look at how much effort has to go into making fair dice and roulette wheels, and how much effort goes into certifying and inspecting them. Fair gambling is high tech; the stone age would never have seen a truly fair gamble.

However, look at the exact detail of people's beliefs about dice. A die that is giving up wins easily is likely to give up more wins, but each win deplete the die, making further wins less likely. I can't think of a place that kind of belief would have not been useful for a hunter-gatherer. Plants grow in patches. Animals need to find each other to breed. But, every time you actually bag a particularly juicy plant or animal, that's one less left to find.

Even setting that aside, I can bring up the issue of how random distributions actually look:



(from here)

Notice that even if a plant is actually randomly distributed, it will still end up in clumps and veins. There will be hot spots and cold spots. Similarly, if animal activity is linked to weather, the good days and bad days will often occur in clumps. In general, if your hunting or gathering is going well, it is highly rational to expend some extra effort that day, because it will likely be rewarded more efficiently than usual.


The Base Rate Fallacy actually has a point, as these kinds of calculations come up almost exclusively in professional contexts. However...I can get them right, and it's not by trying Bayes' theorem. I instead use the physicist approach. "Probability is defined as the prevalence divided by the total population," I say to myself. Then, using this definition, I simply have to find the relevant numbers, which is straightforward as long as I understand their definitions. In the case linked, it's the number of homosexuals with the disease divided by everyone with the disease, and indeed they also dodge Bayes' theorem by doing the calculation explicitly.

Moreover, when I get the wrong, the reason is because I'm using shortcuts learned during probability classes in public school. I strongly suspect that a physician mis-estimating, say, the odds of a positive mammography to mean cancer, is being mislead by exactly the same training. The cure is not Bayesianism. The cure is to teach math properly.

Conjunction Fallacy

This is a fun one. First, I will forward a hypothesis as to why framing is important. It's because survey subjects will always read things into the question that aren't there, and survey designers not only have no idea what those things are, but are often ignorant that they need to design surveys to account for this. My source for this hypothesis is something I think every philosopher will empathize with; how long it took me to train myself to only read what was there, and not hallucinate all sorts of interesting random things, and subsequently ascribe them to the author.

With this in mind, between the possibilities,

1. The United States will withdraw all troops from Iraq.
2. The United States will withdraw all troops from Iraq and bomb Iranian nuclear facilities.

Why would survey subjects respond that #2 is more likely? I can think of myriad possibilities. Here's one: into option #1, they read, "will withdraw for no reason at all," while into #2 they read, "will withdraw because they want to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities." Both are narratives, but only the second makes any damn sense.

Here's another: in amateur introspectors, the positive feeling of reading a narrative and the positive feeling of high probability are not distinguishable, as they're quite similar.

Oh great Bayesian survey-writer, Accept your Ignorance. You have no idea what your surveys are actually testing, which kind of means more surveys will not help very much.

As below, I like testing things. Let's take these ideas for a spin.

"Is it more likely that Linda is a bank teller, or a bank teller and feminist?"

The average person will read that as,

1. Linda is a bank teller and not a feminist.
2. Linda is a bank teller and a feminist.

Oddly, they ascribe more likelihood to #2.

Why will they read it this way? Because that's how the average person talks. For me, it took quite a bit of mathematical education before I read 'x > 3' as what it means; x can be four, or ten, or a million, or 29 436 502 974, or infinity. Before that point, I read 'x is more than three' as meaning something like eight or so, but probably not beyond ten. As indeed, if you want to talk about things that are in the millions, you need to say, 'x is somewhere over a million.' If it's absolutely necessary to talk about things with a wide range, people say so explicitly, "The variable 'x' can vary widely, sometimes as low as four, but can reach heights vastly exceeding a billion." Further, what non-mathematical object has properties like that? Certainly, that quoted sentence is not one a journalist will ever have cause to use.

Note that you probably just made the exact error I'm detailing. 'have cause to use' does not mean it's the best option, only that it could be accurately used. I'm saying that a journalist will never cover a subject where this sentence will even be useful. (Point of prose: I could say that, but it doesn't seem any less likely to produce the same error, and is drier.)

These ideas spin well. Let's do it again.

"Consider a regular six-sided die with four green faces and two red faces. The die will be rolled 20 times and the sequences of greens (G) and reds (R) will be recorded. You are asked to select one sequence, from a set of three, and you will win $25 if the sequence you chose appears on successive rolls of the die. Please check the sequence of greens and reds on which you prefer to bet.

1. RGRRR
2. GRGRRR
3. GRRRRR

65% of the subjects chose sequence 2, which is most representative of the die, since the die is mostly green and sequence 2 contains the greatest proportion of green rolls. However, sequence 1 dominates sequence 2, because sequence 1 is strictly included in 2. 2 is 1 preceded by a G; that is, 2 is the conjunction of an initial G with 1. This clears up possible misunderstandings of "probability", since the goal was simply to get the $25."

Um...no it doesn't? Again, I have no idea what the subjects are actually perceiving when they read those options, but it's almost certainly not strictly what's there.

Perhaps they're taking the examples as characteristic of a longer sequence.

Or...it's quite difficult to set aside one's general problem solving habits - which must work, or they'd be rapidly changed - just because some researcher is offering you $25. They may solve the problem this way: "What does the most probable sequence look like?" (In me, this part is involuntary.) They then compare the presented sequences to their ideal sequence. This is much, much faster and more efficient than actually solving the problem at hand. (Employers constantly complain that their employees can't follow directions, incidentally.) The gains from efficiency, in real life, outweigh the costs in efficacy. As a bonus, this interpretation post-dicts their responses.

Or...as amateur introspectors, they're solving it by comparing the greenness feeling of the dice to the greenness feeling of the sequences. For some bizarre reason, this process works better with ratios than with precise numbers. This error is solvable with better math education; mine makes me accept that, oddly, my feelings don't perform math well, and that I have to do the calculation explicitly if I want a precise answer. Err, kind of like all logic.

Moreover, it's not even guaranteed they have an accurate definition of 'probability.' So...are we assuming people are born knowing what 'probability' actually means, and we just later learn the word for it? Are we assuming that, since everyone assumes their own reason is reliable, (as indeed you must) that the default assumption is that each person will assume they can accurately calculate probabilities? Before speculating at the assumptions of the subjects, it's kind of necessary to know the assumptions of the researchers.

While this section is largely made up of just-so stories, these plausible scenarios are not even acknowledged, let alone addressed, by Bayesian proponents.

Ironically, all these fallacies are the result of a Bayesian process. Evolution picks priors by chance, and then the priors are decremented by killing people holding the wrong ones. Literally, your possible ancestors who thought more 'rationally' all got killed. At the very least they got killed in the contest of baby counts - our actual ancestors were just better baby factories. While it may throw up some interesting bugs in a modern environment, are you really comfortable saying that all those people who died were right, and the ones who lived were wrong? So what...does that mean their rightness or wrongness was irrelevant at the time, or have humans, as a species, just been monumentally unlucky?

Bayesian Reasoning Tells Us About Ignorance

The standard thing to do when you have multiple possibilities and no further information is to assign equal possibilities to each one. Say I find my car is flattened, and the possibilities are bigfoot and alien landing site, but as apparently alien ships are foot-shaped, there's no way to tell the difference, and thus they get 50% each. I can sue bigfoot, but the alien landing means we're being invaded, so it matters to get it right.

From this, I can narrow my search - if I find no bigfoot scat, it's probably aliens, and if I find no green glowing alien exhaust, it's probably bigfoot. However, as additional possibilities accumulate - 33% each, 20%, 16%, and so on, the first effect it that it starts telling me more about my own mind than about the singular event that actually happened. The possibilities I come up with start being less about my smushed car and more about what sheet metal reminds me of, or even ideas I just happen to find evocative. (Heh heh.)

What is the probability of dark matter, given our gravitational lensing pictures of colliding galaxies? The converse, the probabily of not-dark-matter, given same, is basically a function of how many other theories you can come up with - as a Bayesian, you have to share out equal probabilities in the case of ignorance, and as you add more possibilities, dark matter starts out as a smaller and smaller piece of the pie, but the relative growth from the pictures is the same...

More importantly, as possibilities multiply, the odds that even one of them are like-correct drops. So it's not really 33-33-33, it's more like there's three possibilities, plus the possibility I have no idea what I'm talking about, so 20-20-20-40. As ignorance grows, the chance you don't even know enough to properly quantify your ignorance grows as well.

Our ignorance of dark matter is probably on par with the ancient Greeks' ignorance of regular matter. It turns out Democritus was less wrong about this, but even he was wrong all over the place. Similarly, the odds that dark matter is neither MACHOs nor WIMPs is pretty high.

So whenever I learn something new, I want to try it out. I'm going to try this one out on extra-terrestrial civilization.

A lot of people want to know if there's other intelligence out there.

Actually, SETI is kind of ironic, as they're so sure ETI is out there, it's hardly worth their time to actually find it - a bit like the first clan was so sure the grass has to be wet after rain.

But, looking around the universe, we don't see evidence of any engineered structures. Now, p(ETI|solar-scale engineering) equals pretty much one, but what about p(ETI|~solar-scale engineering)? Well, it's not like we produce any solar scale structures, but who knows what we'll be capable of the in the future?

So, err, precisely - who knows what we will be capable of a million years in the future? Who knows what we'll find worthwhile a million years in the future?

Going back to the original equation - so what's p(solar engineering) - the general odds of looking at a solar system and finding engineering there? What's p(aliens) - the general odds of looking at a planet and seeing complex life there? We can't even gather these numbers. Drawing in the many-possibilities thread, we don't even know if life has to look all carbony like we do or not. You can run spectrographic analysis on exoplanets that transit the star, and you might find both water vapour and methane in the atmosphere, but it doesn't tell you very much.

If you limit yourself to Bayesian reasoning, these undefineable numbers will remain so forever. Sure, you can define any hypothesis[2] of p(aliens) and p(~aliens) you want, such as 50% each, and revise p(aliens) downward every time you see a planet with no life on it, but you'll run into something of a barrier in knowing how much to revise it downward; calculating p(aliens|lifeless planet) uses p(lifeless planet|aliens) which is zero, and this zero reduces Bayes' theorem to the trivial 0=0. (This is why you're not supposed to use 1 or 0 as probabilities, but it's not like 0.0001 is much better, and indeed even how many zeros to put after the decimal is a judgement call in this case.) Without knowing beforehand the actual p(aliens) and p(~aliens) for a random planet, Bayes' theorem is powerless. In other words, you have to already know the answer to get the right answer.

The summation of this debacle is thus: are you a philosopher? No? Then, if you have a philosophical thing to say, you should Google 'philosophy forums' and pick one, then sign up and post, "Hey there good Mr. and Ms. philosophy dudes, does this make any bloody sense at all?" They'll generally reply, "No! And get off my lawn!" In addition, they'll be happy to tell you what you should be doing instead, as vetted by thousands of years of the smartest people on the planet. (On many issues, philosophy hasn't advanced beyond Aristotle because he got it right.) If that doesn't work, I understand professors are more than happy to answer the curiosity of the public - find one's email and email them. (At least, it works for me. If it doesn't for you, try a second philosopher.) I don't run around saying I know statistics better than you, so how about you do me the honour of not pretending you know philosophy better than I do?

Tangents:

[1] Actual Bayesians, I would guess, have roughly zero percent chance of being persuaded, p(open-mind-on-this-issue|Bayesian) -> 0.

[2] Hypotheses come, surprisingly enough, from outside Bayesian reasoning, even according to Bayesians. How one comes up with a good hypothesis is not addressed.

As an epistemologist, I almost always should avoid probability. That particular problem is a problem for ontologists.

Universal Ethics

Taking together basic ethics and property rights from first principles, it is possible to define universal ethics. It is, unfortunately, very delicate, meaning (even more than usual) that you need advanced philosophical skills to avoid abusing the idea. In the end, these ethics justify multiple kinds of (what is normally) violence as self-defence. However, I've not found a succinct wording of the rule (there's only one.)

Because it is wrong to violate your control of your property, the only events which are morally valid for your property are the ones you value. Therefore, a particular inversion of the Golden Rule is true, a rule I once saw labelled the platinum rule. This isn't quite it:

Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.

A priori I would expect it would be wrong of them to demand donations of you, even though it follows a naive reading of the rule. Why is the demand, in fact, wrong? The angle I like best here is the angle that this value of theirs (hey, I like cash, and you have cash...) overlaps your own values for your own stuff, and becomes a self-contradiction by requiring that their values can change your values, which would naturally mean, by symmetry, that your values can change their values, but then their values can change yours which can change mine which...is just a mess, not logic.

Also, if you were morally constrained to follow this first approximation, it would be morally impossible to interact with anyone; practically speaking you cannot fully suss out someone's values before trying to have a conversation, and as such have to make assumptions about what they want. Even before this, looking at the logic, what if someone doesn't want to be spoken to at all? How can you find this out?

So. It turns out the libertarians are correct. Only negative rights exist, because all positive rights require that one person's values are allowed to set another's.

Do not unto others as they would have you not do unto them.

(This is still not exact.) As a first approximation, do not unto others as you would have them not do unto you. Until they inform you otherwise (ignorance is a defence) you can assume that humans are far more similar than different.

I said it was delicate. There's more, too; what about when someone doesn't want to be looked at, yet insists on walking down city streets? I don't want to get into value hierarchies right now, so the short answer is that first, ignorance is a defence, and second that this individual can't have both, and must value being outside more than being unviewed.

The idea is that you have your self, and your other possessions, and they should be treated according to your values, insofar as they can be so treated without automatically infringing upon the values of others.

Since it isn't useful to the general public anyway, perhaps I should stop trying to construct a soundbite version.

What is moral is to not intentionally contravene the values of others for themselves or their possessions, nor through neglect allow your actions to unintentionally contravene these values, noting that values that interfere, constrain, or are about the values of others are automatically invalid as moral values.

Also nice would be a single word that means 'moral values' to differentiate from the lay usage. Just use your spiffy hominid context-sensor for now. Values can still be values even if they don't work as moral precepts, even though I don't talk about that kind specifically.

In practise this works out nicely, in that usually people's values are other-neutral. In the donation example, there are many ways to become rich without extortion. In the second example, most likely the person who wants to be invisible doesn't want invisibility per se but rather has crippling low self esteem or is, in fact, ugly, both problems which are patched by invisibility, or by solitude, but could also be solved in other ways. These are means which illustrate a value, an end; the actual ends people hold are usually other-neutral. There's also marriage and similar, which is other-neutral to most individuals and looks for a matching other-non-neutral individual.

And, of course, most other-non-neutral values aren't valid, as they automatically lead to conflict between two individuals which can, in general, only be solved by violating one of the values - violence. Even if it is wanting the best for your kids, it's still violence to impose it on them. Your children are not your property.

Though this brings up another sticky, delicate issue, in that children must be a special case. The whole ethical framework depends on symmetry, and symmetry only provisionally applies to children, especially small children. For now, as I have no children of my own, I must leave the question unanswered, except to say that treating small children differently than adults is justified exactly to the extent that they are, in fact, scientifically, different than adults. Similarly, the difference in treatment must parallel the actual difference in properties and abilities. I don't think this will be much of a problem either, simply because children like being taken care of, with the addition that children can be convinced of just about anything by a parent, meaning parents can simply alter their values as needed.

But that's enough about what's right, I'm going to delve into what's wrong, specifically what it means in this framework if you violate someone's values. As far as I know, this is the only framework that automatically justifies self-defence, and needs no specific exception.

To violate someone else's values is to state that you don't value respecting other's values. By symmetry, you are, to them, an 'other' and as a result it cannot be immoral for them to violate your values - any of them. Again, there is some delicacy; using the logic thus far, you can happily murder someone for spitting on your shoe. I believe this can be fixed by appealing to further values, (you recoil from the idea of doing so; obviously following your own values would stop this kind of pathology) but until someone takes this idea seriously, I have no desire to fix it for them.

And here we come to something that gives me confidence in the framework's integrity; it has a place and purpose for forgiveness. To wrong someone is to lose your only right, but to gain their forgiveness, either through mercy or through reparations, is to regain that right. How would you like that, eh? In addition to 'how do you plead' at the beginning, every court would have 'and does the defendant grant their forgiveness for the sentence imposed?' If not, the defendent is welcome to offer additional reparations.

Section elided; how the framework interfaces very nicely with a justice system. Just know that from a bird's-eye view, our justice system can work perfectly in this framework, although the frog's eye view reveals that nearly every law is unjust.


To the politically sensitive: hello! This definition is the ultimate in pluralism. Because the only way to define ethics is from your values, what is ethical for you derives entirely from what you value, not from what other people value, regardless of all the usual considerations used to impose morality.

However, using this theory as a tool, I can now look at multiculturalism as well, and highlight one of flaws. Values differ somewhat between individuals, but the gradient shoots up between cultures. Without an agreement specifying how to translate actions across the interface, I can see from experience that, for instance, every Muslim expects multicultural infidels to act Muslim, while simultaneously their opposite expects the Muslim to act Anglo-Saxon. Using this framework as perspective, I can see that these ideas are not just rude, but highly evil.

Of course, with such agreements, a multicultural city can, theoretically, work like an oiled machine. If both value sets are intrinsically valid, the transformation between them should be possible or even trivial to figure out.


So I want to gain something practical from my morality. I actually started studying morality at a very young age, and I started with a single rule; pain is bad. Eventually I had to add too much, by my standards, onto this system to cover everything that seemed wrong, so I discarded it, but it was still a helpful stepping stone. What I wanted out of it I have, now, gained. If you complain when you feel wronged, the other party will, invariably, try to argue their way out of it. However, I now have an ironclad objective theory of ethics, which means that I can prove it, one way or the other, every time, instead of having to weigh one feeling against how I felt about doing something about it, which could be useful if I wanted to disentangle all my emotions in each individual situation.
This is especially important to me as I've found it is quite easy to simply impose my ideas upon the other person (unless they're in a government beaurocracy.) I know, from how it feels to contemplate this course of action, that I cannot rationally stop myself abusing this power without some objective technique.

Rewrite Of Definition of Property

This is a repair of Locke's argument. I was amused when I learned this; I didn't set out to repair his argument and indeed I did not explicitly read any Locke until I heard I was following him. This doesn't surprise me, this is what influence means; to change the thoughts of large numbers of people. They don't have to know you're doing it and indeed it seems obvious that once you have large influence, many people are going to learn your ideas through osmosis.

I'm writing this basically because I find I don't want to link to the old version, for various reasons.

Two notes. Epistemologically speaking, a full definition is a proof, because a full definition must explicitly show each condition under which it does not obtain. Otherwise, the definition invites invalid use. A full proof achieves this by being explicit about assumptions. Second, each premise of this definition-proof can be proven by showing that the opposite proposition is self-contradictory.

Here we go.


You control your body. Actually that's the definition; whatever controls your body is you.

(This is because, using a different definition, I would not be able to interact with 'you' but instead would interact instead with whatever controls your body. I would expand the definition if bodies ever became alienable property. The first step would be to reverse the definition; whatever it is that you directly control is your body; this is to deal with brain-scanning revealing sub-consciousnesses that do not have access to gross motor control, but only a neuronal subset.)

To continue controlling your body, you need to remain alive. Let me define life.

Life: every living thing can be assigned goals. If it ever becomes unable to strive for any goals, it stops being alive.

This definition makes the statement above tautological; to control your body is to make it serve your goals. To continue serving your goals you need to be able to strive for goals. (This also means the definition covers aliens.)

A specific goal all life has is to harvest and control energy. If not, thermodynamics #2 would steal all their available energy and they would perish. If life is defined without this property of goals, it would not be self-sustaining and thus we would not have anything observable to define; it would all have starved to death long ago.

(Test the goals by attempting to interrupt them. The living thing should divert energy to maintain the goal. Note that if you attempt to assign a goal to a nonliving thing, it will be contradicted when they do not divert energy to maintain that goal. Even if you define a threat to them, they will never react to that threat. As always, this is an attempt to codify an intuitive definition; it cannot be proven, only tested against the pre-existing intuition on the subject.)

So, all living things must control their environment to remain alive.

Now, if I have the right to interrupt your control, for consistency you must have the right to interrupt my control. We are, at the level necessary for this proof, identical beings, and therefore cannot have divergent rights. But, by this, I can interrupt your control of my control, and thus retain my control; a contradiction. It is hypocritical to interfere with someone else's body. Therefore, the only valid right is to respect each other's self control.

This is essentially an example of Basic Ethics (1.1), and is the basis of self-ownership.

Self-ownership: the controller of a particular living body is that body's owner. It is wrong to attempt to contravene this ownership. (I leave defining 'direct control' up to practical considerations, as this does not seem to be a common point of contention.)

So, you have ownership of your body in an attempt to control your surroundings, with some expectation of success. Consider the reverse; if you had no expectation of control, you would not attempt the action. Assume for some reason you want to pick up a rock, and so you do. If you had known in advance that you would be prevented from controlling that rock for your 'some reason,' you would not have picked it up. Whenever I see a lifeform attempt to control their surroundings, I can assume they expected some level of success.

Therefore, since I want you to not interfere with my manipulations of the environment, and you're almost identical to me, it cannot be right for me to interfere with your manipulations of the environment. Thus, we expect to own our environment, as an extension of our self-ownership.

There are some exceptions. Insane people's expectations cannot be matched with outcomes, and indeed this forms a decent definition of insanity. Also, people can be mistaken, expecting something that they have no good reason to expect. Both these cases create a contradiction in the logic at the very base; they cannot properly be assigned goals, because they cannot or will not properly defend those goals. As an example, someone may expect to control the quantum state of the atoms of my body, but of course they have no good reason, and indeed as my atoms evolve they will be unable to deflect them toward any goal they might be assigned. If that were the only goal they could be assigned, they would immediately 'die,' according to the definition.* Thus, for this goal, they cannot be considered alive, and thus cannot have self-ownership, and thus their expectation of control cannot be supported as ownership.

*(This makes me realize that goals that can't fail, such as expecting my atoms to evolve randomly, fail as goals because they define control as choosing the absence of control.)

I include this restriction by saying the expectation of control must be reasonable. They must have the faculties of reason, and the faculties must accord with their expectation. (Plants, therefore, cannot own anything, even though they are alive.)

I conclude that ownership is defined as reasonable expectation of control.



In human society, the reasonable expectation of control is achieved through security. Now why is this?

There have always been, and every reason to believe there always will be, people who wish to contravene ownership, either by guile or force. Thieves and robbers, essentialy, and the latter when state-scaled are called warmongers. Because of this, to reasonably expect to retain your property requires you to secure it against these threats, just as to retain control of your body requires you harvest energy, and defend it both from decay and from the attacks of other organisms.

I own my wallet. I can reasonably expect to control it, because I am part of a society that prevents theft first by moral condemnation and second by the police. Similarly, my society itself is protected by the army. (While I'm Canadian, it seems America has been, for some time, playing global police by disincentivizing non-Israeli territory-conquering wars.)

My expectation of control of my wallet is empirically reasonable as well; it has never been stolen. So if it is stolen, does that mean I was wrong that I could reasonably expect to control it, and thus the theft is a non-theft?

The answer to that is no, and I've done that on purpose by using the word 'expect.' Obviously, an omniscience would clearly know that my wallet was going to be stolen, but the reasons available to me at the time clearly lead me to expect it won't be stolen. No matter how much you spend on security, there will always be some way to circumvent it. And indeed, if there were not, there would be no point in defining theft, because it would be impossible.

I would also like to be pedantic about the moral position of the thief; if they had no reasonable expectation of controlling the wallet after it was taken from my pocket, they would not have tried to take it. And thus they, knowing I had reason to expect to retain my wallet* they knowingly violated that reasonably expectation, and supplanted their own. As logical objects, we are not different enough to possibly justify such an asymmetry, and thus all thefts are wrong, even according the thief; theft is hypocritical.

*(Indeed, if I had no such expectation, why would I have taken it with me outside? Would I have ever bothered to acquire one at all?)

This strongly suggests a method for changing an object from unowned to owned; secure it against threats to your control. Right now, the moon is unowned, as nobody can expect to affect events on its surface. Once a transportation corridor is established, someone will own the parts of the moon they can prevent from being conquered by third parties. (Within reason.) Kindly note that this doesn't necessarily require an army; a simple contract may suffice (plus some anti-vandalism patrols.) Similarly, deep-sea habitats generally don't need to fight off pirates, although when deep-sea travel becomes cheap, it will become necessary to stop delinquents from damaging the property, and may become necessary to stop some state-level threats as well.

Nevertheless, as long as reasonable steps are taken, it is wrong to attempt to take or destroy someone else's expectation of control.

Having defined this, there is but a short hop to universal ethics. Short version; humans want to be good. If everyone knew it was wrong to violate reasonable expectation of control, very simple, cheap, and peaceful methods of security may suffice for nearly all property.



Notes:

While this definition applies to sentient aliens, I don't know how, if at all, it applies to the less conscious life forms of Earth. I am a carnivore, so I suspect it does not. My first instinct is to say that nonhuman life forms cannot create security structures, and this immediately makes me think that even if they did, it isn't obvious that my argument that (since I have values, I have to respect yours) applies across significantly different species, because the way they have values is going to turn out to be qualitatively different.

You can check this idea by referencing children, who have the kind of cognitive differences we might see in aliens. The rules for ownership are not entirely symmetrical in this case.



An interesting objection I have seen is; 'What about part ownership, such as shares?' What we've said here is that ownership of a single object can be divided into parts, of which the ownership is absolute.

Example; you and your sibling each own half of a restaurant, and have hired a manager to run it. Naively, it appears the manager is controlling the restaurant. However, what happens if you and your sibling both decide to fire the manager, or otherwise override their decisions? Similarly, if you and your sibling have a disagreement on whether to fire the manager, you cannot both achieve your goal, so whose goal can we reasonably expect will be achieved? That person is the real owner. If the restaurant is controlled by anyone else, it is because of delegation of control.

Given a whole apple, multiple people cannot all eat the whole thing, though multiple people can eat a part of it. Similarly, given one car, it can only go in one direction. The passengers may agree on the direction, but only one person controls the direction. This is true of all objects; there can be only one owner, because there can be only one controller, and thus only one person who can reasonably expect to control it. (Though of course there are often, even frequently, violations of ownership in the real world that are not criminal per se. As an Anarcho-formalist, I think we'd all be happier if we actually respected the formal truth of these situations.)

You can test the ownership of any real-world object by asking various people to try to control it. It is unambiguous if only one person's goals are realized. If there are multiple people, you can fall back upon the reasonableness test, though at least the control test will narrow the candidates.

So yeah, I have found again that Communism can't work. Someone has to control the stuff, which is exactly what Russia discovered in the Soviet system.



Of course, that word 'reasonable' isn't entirely clear. People lie. You can always make the argument that you expected to control an object, you just can't always reasonably, truthfully do so. In addition, people are wrong. They did expect to control it, but not for any good reason and thus it wasn't reasonable, but of course they don't realize that, and they may convince other people to not realize it either.

It's a judgement call. That is why the head of a court is called a judge.* Nevertheless, it is in principle possible to determine who had good reason to expect control, and who did not. It just isn't feasible, which reflects back and means precision in defining ownership is overkill anyway; you can't unambiguously determine ownership in contentious real-world situations regardless.

*The Five Factor personality test gave me this idea. Folk philosophy tends to settle close to the actual truth. And in fact, common law can be almost entirely derived from the principle of reasonable expectation of control, including the fact that the reason part requires a judgement call and thus a judge.


I believe that's everything. Let me know if I've forgotten something, again; as usual one of my primary motivations for writing this is to help ensure it's correct.

Basic Objective Ethics; Version 1.1

I start with Hume's ought; there is no ought from is.

More explicitly, there is no fact about the objective world from which it logically follows that any agent ought to do anything. However, note that this isn't complete; I have to use the modifier 'objective world.'

I use one assumption; value exists. Kindly keep in mind explicitly that value is inherently valuable. Since you desire things, I think this is a pretty safe assumption. (I have an irresistible urge to note that assumptions can only be challenged by self-contradiction.)

In the subjective world, there are values. Assume that right now, you value an ice cream. Because of Hume's ought, there can be no reason you ought not to go have some ice cream. However, I can construct a reason you should go get some ice cream; it would uphold your values and thus add value to the world.

That is, because of Hume's ought, normative statements can be constructed.

For a less toylike example, assume instead that you want some ice cream, but also value not consuming animal products. In this case, to have some ice cream would be to contradict your own values. I cannot construct a case that you ought to have ice cream, but I can construct a case that you ought not to have ice cream.

This is the only known way to validly construct normative statements. This also applies to any deities; while your values may be dependent on theirs for a variety of reasons, theirs will depend upon this structure; the fact that it is impossible to objectively contradict their values.

Now, you may object that because of this, morals are in a way voluntary. You are subject to them because you have opted in. However, all living things will opt in. Let me define life.

Life: Every object that can be assigned a goal is alive.

Living things will defend these goals, and if you manage to interrupt their goals, they will die. Another name for goal is value.

That is, if you can control your environment, make it conform to your goals, you have values.

"You ought not to follow ethics." This statement cannot be objectively supported. It can only be supported if you value not following ethics - if you value not following your values.

That is, to answer the question, "Ought I follow ethics?" with 'no' is a contradiction and by the law of excluded middle the only valid answer is 'yes.'

But perhaps 'ought' has no actual meaning at all, and as such the above question is meaningless. Equivalently, perhaps the question assumes a 'yes' answer to something that is, in fact, 'no.' However, this cannot be, because I would be able to construct a contradiction stemming from the physical consequences that question answered 'no;' the real consequences of that branch would contradict the logical consequences of this one. (Physicists use this principle to probe deeper logical levels all the time.)

And because all subjective facts can be reframed as objective facts (and vice-versa) Hume's ought is in fact a paradox. Are your values independent of my perceiving them, or not? Relative to me, they are objective, and thus the system of ethics that determines whether your actions are right or wrong is objective. (Kindly note explicitly the symmetry; my values are objective relative to you, and since the truth must not depend on perspective, all values must have properties consistent with objectivity. Though I should note that a different but equivalent argument applies if you take the axiom that subjectivity is first instead of objectivity.)

Nevertheless, there is truth behind Hume's ought. Yet it is strangely difficult to phrase it non-paradoxically without assuming my conclusion. "There is no ought that can be derived from non-value objects."

Bobby Dunbar; Hypocrisy and Misdirection

(I jump right in with the spoilers, before I list either the name or the link. I apparently think suspense, while not without upsides, is completely dominated by downsides and is therefore a waste of time. If you disagree, I suggest finding a workaround.)

I was watching something accurately billed as 'should be a tedtalk.' And I thought, "Man, he really knows his stuff." So I decided to check out the stuff produced by the dude who knows his stuff.

'Best of' lists have been pretty useful to me before. So I tried it again and it worked again. But even here, even 'best of,' even non-politicized reporting, you need skill to not be mislead by. They're not even intentionally spinning this stuff; it happens more or less automatically, to the point where it would take a serious amount of skill to stop.

Again, I worry that this is just me. That everyone else just deals with this with their hypocrisy circuit. Certainly, the Dunbars believed that Bobby was a Dunbar. Similarly, the listeners here will believe he was an Anderson, and all the character conclusions that will imply. That is, if I go up and talk to them, that is what they'll say to me. However, if you judge their beliefs by their actions* then the listeners, when dealing with someone like a Dunbar, may behave very differently than their stated beliefs would indicate.

*(Specifically actions that don't include talking about their actions or beliefs.)

All this to say that, unfortunately, my brain doesn't work that way. I must consciously understand the real motivations and the actual justified conclusions behind what is stated in shows like Ghost of Bobby Dunbar, or I'll end up doing something stupid.

This may be because I don't stop at the first level of conclusions. I tend to take things as far as they'll go, as is required for philosophy. The hypocrisy circuits don't function well outside common-sense domains beyond which these logical peregrinations often take me.

Hopefully, though, this isn't just me. Hopefully I can say in general: not being mislead by journalism takes a good deal of skill.

Sadly it wasn't as good as I hoped. Maybe I just don't like journalism, but to me, on an absolute scale, journalism can and should be a whole lot better, especially if this is the best. (Simply put, the YouTube videos seem a lot more like a real person talking about things they really care about. You'll see below how everyone in the show don't even consciously know what they really care about, let alone can talk about it.)

Nevertheless, at least for the best, the pro outweigh the cons. Especially the philosophical resources provided by the radio show I settled on. Quotes not checked for accuracy; the seeking function on the podcast is not worth me wrestling with. I tried to disentangle my real angle, about families, bonds, and identity from the rest, but it turns out it's a continuum and it didn't work. Ultimately this is to continue my theme of an economic purpose for philosophy. These people need my services, or the services of someone like me.

But in short, my real point, my main point, is just that the Dunbar family has rejected Margaret, quite stupidly. Blood is a terrible reason to form bonds, but if you try and it works, it means there were good reasons. It doesn't matter if Margaret is a Dunbar by genes or not. What matters is, did the Dunbars enjoy her company? Did she enjoy theirs? Then the bonds were there, for good reasons, not reasons of blood.

The second part is about her father. "If my grandpa isn't my grandpa, who am I?" "My first guess is who you always were. The fact is you have always been an Anderson living among Dunbars. I would suppose you could continue being an Anderson living among Dunbars, except now you're not mistaken about this." "But that's not who my blood says I am!" "So, what, now you know you're an Anderson, you're going to take up farming? Knowing who your ancestors were changing absolutely nothing about who you are. It changes your 'real' name and who you can safely have sex with, and that's all."

I read about this in fiction often enough. Usually it is cheesy and simplistic, but all my books come to the same conclusion; for human relations, human bonds, it doesn't matter what your birth certificate should look like.

There are two minor points I'll highlight as well. One is implicit, about children, which you'll notice by the glaring lack of any further commentary.

The story also shows, again, how children are seen by our people. The question never asked is 'How does Bobby feel about all this? Did he just go along with this? Did he question it? Did he fight it?" Our people consider children to be objects. Just bit pieces. No better than slaves. Objects, bit players, slaves....they don't have thoughts or feelings.

(Admittedly, once Bobby matures (20s) he's allowed beliefs. They suggest he created the legend himself to help convince himself he was really a Dunbar, so he could get on with living his life and stop worrying about meaningless labels.)

The second is very explicit, and hearkens back to at least the Bible, about how flawed human characters really are, and about how much effort everyone puts into denying their own flaws and the flaws of people they like, ultimately to their own detriment. It's the ultimate in conditional love.

'No, honey, you're perfect!' And they really deceive themselves into believing that. Let me translate.

'Yeah, uh, honey, if you weren't perfect I would hate you. Notice how I rag on even the slightest defect in my coworkers. No pressure though!'

(There's also a less cynical third option, which is that your flaws are actually quite irrelevant, much like the actual quality of the food is irrelevant to food preferences. Rather, we all see the flaws, but pointing them out is simply a way to communicate disgust, contempt, or hatred, whereas lying about it is the way to communicate trust, respect, and love. Less cynical but still counter-productive.)

I bring up this character thing because it's something I only recently cured myself of. Now, I'm very good at spotting patterns. I've intentionally played up this already strong facet of the human brain. Other people do not act as if they know how flawed the real people behind these story characters are. (By flawed I simply mean lacking in virtue, not as in badly designed.) The only issue with this conclusion is that I cannot be entirely sure the two ways of acting are different for other people, but they are for me.

Certainly they mouth the words - I've seen at least on reference to flawed humans in the New York Times - the simple fact is that condemnation is rarely if ever non-hypocritical. It is never mitigated by the deserving humility in the face of your own flaws. Everyone is willing to cast the first stone. (Unless specifically asked, the percentage drops then, because the rarely-used conscious computer engages.)


I'll jump right into the hypocrisy.

"'Know why I stayed in my shell of grief.'

She had to have, on some level, known."

So presumably this woman, according to Wizard's First Rule, believed what she wanted to believe, not the truth. But, in the end, the hypocrisy circuit fails. The weight of that nagging feeling in the back of the head releases you from the lies you tel yourself.

The thing is, now what? Does she repatriate Bobby, nee Bruce? No. Hell no! She can't do that. And precisely for the reason given above. People make mistakes, but she knows that it's hellishly unlikely that Jillian would have thanked her for admitting her error. No, more likely she would just be piling external grief on top of internal grief. And so, because everyone is willing to cast the first stone, Jillian never saw her son again. Good going, you jerks.

Of course, even without all this, Bobby would probably be used to life with the Dunbars now. Another adjustment would probably be pretty bad for him, as shown by the condition of the kids social services takes custody of.

Nevertheless, I must disclaim that you don't get a free moral pass just because you contributed your womb. Jillian's quest to reunite with her son, just as Lessie's, was an utterly selfish quest. She felt bad not personally taking care of her son, and wanted to find that son to feel good again. It had nothing to do with his well being or his wishes, the first you know by the fact that he was likely no worse off with the Dunbars.

The Dunbars, however, thought Margaret was being selfish, not Lessie. While there are many unstated facts that might make this true, ultimately it is the family that's being the most selfish. "She found a truth you didn't like, just one, and now you're never going to speak to her again? Just to hide from this one meaningless fact?"

"Why do you need to do this?"

Why does it matter? If it turns out Bobby's legend was true, nothing changes. If it's false, nothing should change. It's only meaningful because Margaret was curious. They want to pretend it's not true in any event! They could just do that! But no, they have to do that and act as if its true when talking to Margaret. And apparently nobody even notices the cast-iron cohones this takes, let alone tries to call them on it. Think about it; if Margaret is just wrong, what's with all the ire? That makes her crazy or stupid, not an evil "orchestrating" mastermind. She can only be evil if she's right but they just want to pretend otherwise.

Oh, and because people are highly irrational unless forced to consciously think about it.

More tragically, there's very little guarantee that the actual DNA test was accurate. First, a single test is not very reliable in this case. While indeed you share 50% of your non-autosomal genes with your parent, they had no living parent to test, or even great grandparent. (Handy chart.) On average, you share 50% of your genes with a sibling. What that means is that sharing none of your genes is quite possible. Further, this test was not against an actual sibling, but against some apparently random Dunbar. Finally, I'm not convinced the lab was testing under the knowledge of what they were doing, if one of their techs considered it a paternity test. An easy check would be to now test the father against an Anderson. I consider this check no less than completely necessary. (For instance, a huge percentage of men are cuckolded. What if Bobby Dunbar wasn't ever a Dunbar?)

"It's like they don't believe me."

On the face of it: well boo fucking hoo. Not that! Anything but that!

I actually should be misogynist here. I should blame this on her being a woman and disliking conflict more and needing social support more...but I'm not going to.

She is weak. She is weak like a child, but not because she's a woman. She's weak because she has avoided conflict and strife in her life instead of facing it and withstanding it. She has sacrificed her personal values and beliefs for the sake of momentary comfort. Eventually, now, one of her drives has forced her to face adversity, and she has no idea what to do.

(Is this her fault? Or is it her parent's fault? Or her society's fault?

(Also, you see what I did there? The misogynist view is, in this case, actually more charitable than the one supported by the facts. Take note if you talk to a feminist; equality cuts both ways, and it's trivial to slice a woman on the sword of affirmative action. If you talk to a dumb feminist, play with them by noting that direct insults on individual women are required if you're to respect women as a whole. The fireworks should be quite spectacular.)

So, as per my standard practise, it's time to toss the surface reading. By "It's like they don't believe me," she means "I wish my (adoptive) family would support me." (Of course I don't even really know what 'support' is supposed to mean, but you get my drift.) This woman sees no reason for her family to break the bonds between them. Similarly, I see no reason. So she believes something contrary to what you believe. So what?

Compare this latest debauchery by the Dunbars to the actions of the Andersons. (Contrary to progressive thought, blood will tell. While you can overcome your breeding, most people don't. And most of them don't do it on purpose. {Frankly most people don't even overcome their first instincts, let alone their genetic predispositions.})

The Andersons were fully aware that the Dunbar's story was the opposite of theirs. Nevertheless, they attended a talk given by Margaret. They worked closely with her, in fact. Clearly, the actual motivations behind the Dunbar's shunning of Margaret are selfish and defensive in nature. They don't want to know; and that's fine. But (naturally) they're being highly hypocritical about it.

"They don't like what it suggests about their ancestor's motives and characters."

Again, I see the denial of flawed human beings. Of course your ancestor's motives and characters were bad. Everyone's is, including yours. Now you just know how. Or, in the Dunbar's case, deny how. (Please remember that if the truth had been the opposite, or if a repeat DNA test upturns the verdict, I would be accusing the Andersons of hypocrisy instead. They would fare no better in this test, except for the meaningless difference that it wouldn't be a family member they would be shunning.)

Margaret keeps talking about how they know, deep inside. This is just some truth bubbling up through her hypocrisy circuit. In this case, about the hypocrisy circuit. These Dunbars did some self serving things by deceiving themselves. You will too, most likely in the next few hours. Hell, I'm probably doing so right now. (And remember, you can't fix a problem you don't consciously know you have.)

She also speaks about how Percy is 'capable' of stabbing a man, as if this has any bearing on whether he could lie about Bobby. Again, I can go to the New York Times; everyone is capable of evil. The thing is, I don't see any reason to stab a person. Neither does Margaret, but apparently Percy did. That is a difference of belief, of thinking, not capability.

He did it on the eighth anniversary of the presumed death of the original Bobby Dunbar. Beware anniversary reactions; you're not aware of it, but your body knows the exact time and date at nearly all times, and fully understands the significance of both.


Notes
Margaret thinks the stories in the papers are 'how judgemental' of Julia. So I guess she agrees with me; they may also be true, a point she has avoided, stating only a preference and a fact. In the times, having three children by two men, neither her current husband, was the definition of loose morals. Whether this means Julia was a slut or not is more difficult to determine, but there's no reason she might not have been. The other implications may be equally true, or not.

Note how Julia Anderson "Had no lawyer and no allies in Appaloosa, and thus the boy was now Bobby Dunbar." Our court system takes no note of the fact that justice depends on these things and desperately needs to be revised if it wants to pretend to serve anyone but the rich. I personally suggest a rousing round of privatization. It's not like you can stiff the poor more than we already are. (And by definition they don't have that much property to protect anyway.)

There was no side-by-picture because Jillian Anderson had no picture of Bruce. (Good lord how did they, some of the best in the business, not catch things like this?)

The plan was to keep the results of the DNA test sealed. Margaret could have easily kept them to herself. She didn't. Her father could have also.

There were several other intentional manipulations I caught as well, that I don't deem worthy of pinioning.

In the end, every family's story contradicts those of the other families. Most likely, they're all mistaken. I've read a lot of people who know investigations into these stories never turn out well, precisely because if you tell anybody, they'll react like the Dunbars. In the real story, everybody is deeply flawed. What really happened is most likely a small or forgivable initial wrong, followed by escalating salvos of major wrongs by all sides. Everyone ends up looking bad - that is, the flawed humans they always were but can no longer deny.

The age of Bruce during the incident isn't consistent within the show. Whether and who did any kidnapping, moral or legal, is not consistent within the show. No wonder press accounts even at the time weren't consistent; the media can't even manage self-consistency. Just another example about how fraught even the simplest historical conclusions are.

On reviewing the show, I was struck by how petty the whole thing is. People can, and have to, deal with dead children, and so could have Lessie. Julia could have visited her son or ascertained that he was being cared for at any time. It's one child who was adopted more or less by accident instead of the usual way. Oh no. What a difference.

Can this support all the acrimony and attacks this spawned? Clearly not. It can hardly support the court costs incurred. No, this is classic angst. (Which is why I can't stand people accusing teenagers of being angsty. Such hypocrisy.)


Character Assassination
Though really it's more character suicide.

Julia Anderson, much as she may have reformed in her third marriage, had a disreputable youth. Her choice of husbands was so wise and had such forethought that she was shot in the foot the night of her wedding. (On purpose? By accident? Pretty bad accident, anyway.) Her constant attention to her lost son speaks more of obsession than of any kind of straightforward loss.

Finally, the whole incident would have been impossible had Julia not let Bruce go with Walters.

None of this means her loss was in any way deserved or justified. But just because she was wronged, in this story, many people will believe her a saint. Kind of ironic, since elsetimes people are wont to ask "Why do bad things happen to good people?" as if they're surprised. (Shows what I get for trying to take people's words at face value, hence my policy above.)

Lessie Dunbar, in desperation, deceived herself and used the flaws of the legal system to take a boy that wasn't hers. (Probably; again, the genetics test needs to be checked. Also, if the DNA had gone the other way, they would have held up some other letter supporting that conclusion instead.) Her husband stabbed a man and, apparently, was a chronic adulterer, and she left him, and the children, not too long after the incident with Bobby.

Finally, this would not have been possible if Lessie had been properly watching her son during their excursion into the alligator-infested swamp. (Which is why parents obsessing over car seats and padded playgrounds irritate me so much. Modern parents are not much more capable than Lessie - they put the children in cars to begin with, an extremely risky move compared to a playground.)

For both, I think it would have been helpful to know that they were being coerced by their biology. They were pursuing their kids long after it was a good idea to do so, even in light of how much they wanted them back. They're not just in love, (it really doesn't matter if they are or not) they're obsessed, by biological imperative. On the other hand, they may strongly resent this knowledge, just as the Dunbars did. Ideology is powerful stuff, not to be trifled with.

For both, I think that carefully not seeing the essentially self-serving nature of the incident was helpful. If Lessie got Bobbie back, she wasn't responsible for letting her son get eaten by an alligator. If Julia got Bruce back, she wasn't responsible for letting her son get lost in the wilds, never to be heard from again. The obsessive pursuit speaks of someone who can't face the real reason for their pursuit, as would be necessary to reassess the pursuit and stop or achieve closure.

And the fact is, you are, statistically, just as selfish and hypocritical as these people. I'm not condemning them. (Or at least, I shouldn't be. Oops. It would be more obvious if I were talking to them in person.) I can't credibly do so. I'm accusing you(plural) of condemning them.


Unanswered Questions
Now, a very important note. Like nearly everything, the show attempts to distract you from unanswered questions by focusing on interesting parts of what they do know. However, considering these unanswered questions shifts the viewpoint on what they've said considerably.

If Bruce didn't look like Bobby, how did they find him with the peddler, Walters?

Was Julia Anderson's statement that Walters kidnapped the child also a self-serving, self-deceiving lie?

How are Julia's last seven children so obsessed with a man they never met?
This person had no direct impact on their lives whatsoever. You can see their real reaction when he briefly visited one of them. Their hypocrisy circuit immediately realizes that, in real human terms, he's little different than any yahoo off the street, and commands no special action. As I would predict, the man goes with his first instinct and does nothing. No one demanded he think consciously about it, and so he didn't. (I have several flags set up for exactly this kind of situation, which suggests you can do the same.) His later regret is also a self-delusion. He's obsessed with a man he made small talk with for some portion of a half hour total, ever.

What else don't I know, because they attempted to condense a century-spanning epic tragifarce into less than an hour of talking?


Emotional Logic versus Rational Logic
I think this is the core of my objection to this bit of journalism in particular. Clearly, its main goal is to satisfy the emotional system by telling a story. However, it also wants to pretend to analytic integrity by conveying some facts. As such, it fails at both. On the emotional side, I rather like the digressions into stories about their families. I want to hear about how other people live and relate to each other in the privacy of their own homes or their own times. But these are pushed into digressions because the show is supposed to be working toward a conclusion. On the flip side, because so much time is devoted to human relations, the focus on the facts is weak. The rational story is inconsistent and tattered.

Perhaps a bit of this is trying to please everyone a bit instead of pleasing one person properly. But mostly, it is an attempt to weld emotional logic to rational logic, as opposed to an attempt to unify them, to tell both stories at once. More precisely, it is an attempt to appear so welded; in fact, it is an entertainment product that entertains by deluding the listener into thinking it is informative.

Of course it may just be that knowing epistemology is bad for appreciate of journalism, just as knowing physics is bad for appreciation of action movies.


Finally, it would be helpful to know if I successfully got this essay to read well.

My emotional logic circuits completely outstrip my rational circuits. For instance, I came to the conclusion that nobody realizes how flawed everyone is before rationally analyzing the abundance evidence in favor, and initially wrote it down in that order. (Specifically I'd seen plenty of evidence, but hadn't rationally considered it yet.) It really screws up my flow. Was I able to fix it?

I find this is a general problem. The natural flow of my ideas is anything but linear and translates very poorly into essay form. So...uhh....get on creating that nonlinear form of writing for me, mmmkay? I'd do it myself but first I'm busy and second, aren't other people supposed to be good at stuff too?

The First Property of Consciousness

Towards a definition.

The first property of consciousness is directness.

There are two reasons. First, it is the exact same situation as with axioms; to reason, you have to start somewhere. Second, the property of sensation that I find most mysterious is this very directness.

To come to a logical conclusion - any logical conclusion - requires two completely unjustifiable assumptions. First, the rules of logic. Second, the first premises from which you construct your conclusion.

To justify the first assumption would be circular. The only way to prove the rules is to use the rules, begging the question. The only way to justify the second is to use a more fundamental assumption, which would then itself have to be justified.

Now, if you're Richard Brown and think infinite regression isn't a fallacy, this isn't a problem. However, if infinite regression isn't a fallacy, then you can resolve the Barber Paradox. The deal is, if the barber is unshaven, he concludes he must shave himself, but then the barber would be shaving a man who shaves himself - seemingly unnecessary, so he concludes he should stop shaving. But then he finds he's unshaven... This goes on ad infinitum...which should be resolvable if infinite regression isn't a fallacy.

Of course the real problem with the barber paradox is not oscillation, but the fact that it's a misuse of language. It's not actually a sentence. It's nonsen(ten)[s]e. I would assume I'm wrong and assign a truth value to the Barber paradox, but it's not actually a valid proposition in the first place, but simply does a good job at masquerading as one.

The other interesting example of infinite regression is to posit that there is no fundamental particle, that every particle is made up of yet smaller particles. The first problem is that we empirically know this is false. Beyond a certain size, smaller particles would be physically meaningless. The second problem is that for this to make sense, the smaller particles have to be different than the larger particles.

Consider the opposite; "The electron is made up of four smaller particles each with exactly one quarter of an e, spin 1/8, and so on. These particles cannot be unbound without immediate decay. Further, these particles are made up of yet smaller particles..." Ockham's razor scrapes that right off. Like quarks, the smaller particles must be different so as to explain interactions with other particles, instead of simply repeating the mysteries but with more entities to explain.

Unfortunately, with an actual infinite number of different particles, every electron would have within it every possible combination of properties. (Though presumably a tau lepton would have them in a different order.) It would be possible to create any possible interaction at all. It would be impossible not to create every possible interaction, constantly, as none of them would be barred.

Also, one of the possible combinations is a black hole. Every particle would be a black hole, contradicting the original premise. (Also we wouldn't be around to make these fancy proofs.)

A final point is the fact that infinite series can be summed. This is done using limits - in other words, we don't actually sum an infinite number of terms, but rather we get arbitrarily close to the sum. Note that the method for finding a sum of an 'infinite' series is actually very finite. That is, while it can be represented using infinity, it is exactly equivalent to a finite representation. Infinite series that are only equivalent to an infinite series - series where you would actually have to add an infinite number of terms - are divergent, and their sums are undefined; to define any sum is to make a contradiction.

Ultimately, while for physics you can treat it as a number, infinity is not really a number. To be sure, it is a mathematical object, but not a number. A proof by infinite regression would actually be making a very large number of claims that don't actually form a proof, but get arbitrarily close to a proof. This sounds a whole lot like induction to me, not deduction.

To reason, to deduce, you have to start somewhere, and that thing cannot be from deduction.


Second.
Here's my favorite quiz;

You have two facts. Jeanne is on the Eiffel tower. The Eiffel tower is in Brasilia.
Thus you can work out what city Jeanne is in; Brasilia.

But here's the actual question; How do you know Jeanne is on the Eiffel tower? That is, not 'how did you learn that' but once learned, how do you know it? What is the process of knowing? How do you justify knowing that Jeanne is on the Eiffel tower, and using it as a premise, given that a (reliable) source has supplied you with this data?
Similarly, all physically relevant math is based on counting, lately defined by Peano Arithmetic.
How do you know 1 comes after 0? How do you know what 0 is? The Peano Axioms don't supply these - they are assumed. Similarly, if the concept of 0 somehow depends on an actual justification, I can always bring it back until 'you just know' something, which means I've found a true fundamental axiom.

Here's the fact. You know these things directly. There is no proof or logic or process or justification. However we are to define 'you' as a coherent entity, knowing that Jeanne is on the Eiffel tower is known to you directly; it is an integral part of your identity. Even if it turns out there is some process, some instrument between you and Jeanne, then it just means you know that instrument directly instead.

Consider the opposite. Assume we know everything indirectly. The problem is the previous 'sentence' is no more a proposition than the Barber Paradox. It has dropped some implied words, so let me first expand a parallel example.

"Food is important." This is invalid. Food cannot be intrinsically important. It cannot value itself. It especially can't value itself for nutritional value without someone to eat it - that is, without an extrinsic entity. In reality, the full concept is, "Food is necessary for my survival, and my survival is important to me." It is necessary for and important to. Without a subject to modify, both words are meaningless.

Note, however, the chain ends at 'important to me.' This is axiomatic. It's true by virtue of being assumed. "Assume we know everything indirectly, through (x)." The concept is self-contradictory. Since infinite regress is a fallacy, this indirectness has to stop somewhere, at an (x). And whatever this unknown is, we know it directly.

And it is this I find so fascinating and mysterious about consciousness. It is the set of all things we know directly at any given moment. (It may be other things as well, but it's always this one thing.) Similarly, anything we start to know directly will become conscious. That's what it is; that's what I'm defining it as.


As always, this is a rational logic definition which follows an emotional logic definition. The rational definition should essentially confirm and clarify the emotional definition, though it's allowed a few unintuitive consequences. Since definitions are essentially assumptions, this cannot be challenged deductively, except by self-contradiction. (It seems to me, however, that the negation - consciousness isn't direct - has already been shown invalid by self-contradiction.) However, a better definition may be possible, which would match the emotional definition with greater fidelity. Nevertheless, my definition would not die, nor would whatever properties I unearth change; it would simply lose the label 'consciousness.'