On what basis is it possible to make any moral or social claims, such as that people should be treated with respect?

I have the impression that while no two people on this forum agree on what exactly consciousness is or isn’t, or whether it constitutes a problem and if so what to do about it, there is general (though not complete) agreement that consciousness doesn’t actually do anything.

If consciousness doesn’t do anything then our brains are machinery, and all the characteristics of that machinery are the result of evolution by natural selection.

Evolution, however, is not the usual starting point when considering questions of politics or morality. In fact, the word “Darwinian” tends to be reserved for unacceptably competitive and ruthless behaviour. It seems to me that this leaves a gap in the materialist view of the world, which tends to be filled with totally non-materialist things like spirituality or Buddhism, or by claims that mechanism is compatible with treating each other decently. It is compatible, but it’s also compatible with treating each other anything but decently. If we are machines, where does decency come into it?

The snag is that evolution is indeed largely red in tooth and claw. Natural selection works by individuals of the same species competing with each other, or rather, by genes competing with each other. Altruistic behaviour and extensive cooperation among non-human conspecifics (individuals of the same species) are both limited to relatives, which share a higher proportion of the same genes. Close cooperation between millions of individuals, including the sharing of large amounts of information, is almost entirely limited to clones (e.g. the cells of multicellular organisms) or extra closely related individuals (e.g. ants).

Humans are unusual because millions of individuals cooperate and share quantities of information without being closely related. Many evolutionary theorists think that this is because humans are good at reciprocity (returning favours, and sharing out the benefits of cooperative action equitably. I think Theory of Mind enables us to do this because it enables accurate estimation of costs and benefits for others – non-human animals don’t have these accurate estimates and don’t reciprocate nearly as much.)

Is this enough for human social behaviour, seen from the inside? A combination of nepotism and back-scratching looks Darwinian in the pejorative sense. Being altruistic to relatives and fairly strictly reciprocating with everybody else feels rather too calculating for comfort. Perhaps it makes sense for individuals to leave a margin of extra altruism in their behaviour, to be regarded as valuable members of the group.

zoon wrote:If we are machines, where does decency come into it?

Good point, zoon. If saying "people should be treated with respect" automatically resulted in people being treated with respect, then we would be machines that operated on that sort of "syllogism", with actual semantic content in the word "should".

I think you have to be happy with the fact that saying "people should be treated with respect" results in more people being treated with respect than would be the case if most people said, "people should be treated with disrespect".

I think you know about Hume.

What remains to be determined is how much this situation would find itself reduced if we simply stopped saying, "people should be treated with respect". Hmm? I think you would find that little change would occur, except for the fact that people who get off on saying "people should be treated with respect" would not be getting off in the tried and true old way.

As for back-scratching, where there's a will, there's family relations. A hot topic today is figuring out the bare minimum of reciprocity necessary in order not to get left out of the inheritance. For those abandoned by one parent or another in infancy, this problem tends to be rather of less concern. Spend less time in the jungle studying hunter-gatherers, and more time in the housing estates. You will find much to learn in the latter, zoon.

zoon wrote:On what basis is it possible to make any moral or social claims, such as that people should be treated with respect?

Well it may well be impossible if you have a meta-ethical stance (What do we mean when we say something is good?) that isn't empirically based. If you start with the stance that "moral" is a tag that we apply to our own mental attributions and then investigate the mechanisms behind them, then the possibility is obvious.

It's not like we've been given the concept of morality and now have to go out and discover it hidden somewhere. The experience of positively or negatively valuing actions came first. Then magical thinkers tried to reify our label for that and have been leading the world on a snipe hunt ever since.

I think moral rules are unconscious strategies.

We don't explicity follow moral rules for our own benefit. The whole point of moral rules is that they are in addition (or sometimes even in opposition) to more obviously self-interested inclinations. But this is a property of all strategic thinking - you are not focussed on immediate rewards, and there is no visible link between your current actions and your future rewards. You follow strategic rules blindly in the belief that you have worked out your strategy correctly and will benefit in the long run.

But moral rules are special in that we don't explicitly work out the strategy for ourselves. In fact we don't know we are employing strategies. The strategic behaviours emerge out of social interactions over many generations, both as verbal rules which we are indoctrinated into following and as (more primitive) biologically hardwired "moral sentiments".

the PC apeman wrote:The experience of positively or negatively valuing actions came first. Then magical thinkers tried to reify our label for that and have been leading the world on a snipe hunt ever since.

Chrisw wrote:I think moral rules are unconscious strategies.

Yes, I was thinking of morality in terms of unconscious strategies which have been reified. I think this kind of unconscious strategy is still important in human cooperation, which isn’t yet understood.

I think the point I was groping for in the OP is that if we are machinery, then consciousness is not essentially private.

The only reason we can’t read each other’s minds is the contingent, biological fact that brains are massively complex and fast and (so far) we don’t know how to follow, predict or control them in any detail.

There is nothing logically or metaphysically private about consciousness. Our minds are private and only observable to ourselves because of a biological accident which neuroscience is on the road to sorting out (though, admittedly, neuroscience hasn’t got very far yet and may never achieve understanding, prediction or control in real time).

The snag is that when we imagine the possibility of predicting or controlling brain mechanisms directly, human cooperation seems to disappear from the picture. I can imagine controlling someone else (fine), and I can imagine someone else controlling me (anathema), but how could we continue as equals?

The unconscious strategies which are sometimes reified as morality have been wired in by evolution at the same time as the Theory of Mind system which enables us to put accurate values on costs and benefits for others. Human cooperation is through reciprocity: humans do things for each other, and undertake cooperative action, while monitoring carefully what the costs and benefits are for others as well as for self. This accurate monitoring enables cooperation to evolve without being sabotaged by cheats. The unconscious strategies of morality improve the cooperation (moral imperatives to be fair and to police fairness between others, to avoid killing members of one’s own group, etc).

Humans are still competitive, and human coalitions have an element of internal instability, with individuals or subgroups seeking advantage within the coalition. A new type of advantage gained by an individual or subgroup may have a destabilizing effect. Direct access to each other’s minds would be likely to be thoroughly destabilizing, so we find it difficult to imagine, and so consciousness continues to feel as if it were inherently private when it isn’t.

zoon wrote:Yes, I was thinking of morality in terms of unconscious strategies which have been reified. I think this kind of unconscious strategy is still important in human cooperation, which isn’t yet understood.

Of course human cooperation is itself a strategy and "important" is just another way of expressing what one values. The whole topic seems to boil down to preferences and predictions - two things brains seem to churn out regularly. The consciousness aspect of this, though pleasantly amazing, seems superfluous. It could be epiphenomenal or even absent. We are machines with the ability to be amazed (and distracted) by our own amazement.

zoon wrote:The snag is that when we imagine the possibility of predicting or controlling brain mechanisms directly, human cooperation seems to disappear from the picture. I can imagine controlling someone else (fine), and I can imagine someone else controlling me (anathema), but how could we continue as equals?

I don't know what you mean by 'controlling' here. You mean like evil scientists putting implants in my brain? Of course all our usual assumptions about autonomy and cooperation go out of the window then but this doesn't have any implications for normal situations (does it?)

the PC apeman wrote:

zoon wrote:On what basis is it possible to make any moral or social claims, such as that people should be treated with respect?

Well it may well be impossible if you have a meta-ethical stance (What do we mean when we say something is good?) that isn't empirically based. If you start with the stance that "moral" is a tag that we apply to our own mental attributions and then investigate the mechanisms behind them, then the possibility is obvious.

It's not like we've been given the concept of morality and now have to go out and discover it hidden somewhere. The experience of positively or negatively valuing actions came first. Then magical thinkers tried to reify our label for that and have been leading the world on a snipe hunt ever since.

Zoon, you've just been reading this book, haven't you?

Steve wrote:I think evolution is hard at work on this issue. The unique talents of humans are having an effect on the environment and humans will have to expand their sense of belonging beyond a roof and food to include a biosphere in which they can survive. Our ability to model and predict may be very fine but we seem to shitting in our own nest. If morality has nothing to say here then it is a luxury. Which is to say morality itself is subject to evolutionary forces and life is not yet a closed book.

I agree evolution is still at work, but it does work very slowly, so I hope our current ability to model, predict and cooperate saves enough of the environment before we win a collective Darwin award. I would certainly agree that morality as a built-in part of our thinking is subject to evolutionary forces, and was created through natural selection because it aided survival.

the PC apeman wrote:

zoon wrote:Yes, I was thinking of morality in terms of unconscious strategies which have been reified. I think this kind of unconscious strategy is still important in human cooperation, which isn’t yet understood.

Of course human cooperation is itself a strategy and "important" is just another way of expressing what one values. The whole topic seems to boil down to preferences and predictions - two things brains seem to churn out regularly. The consciousness aspect of this, though pleasantly amazing, seems superfluous. It could be epiphenomenal or even absent. We are machines with the ability to be amazed (and distracted) by our own amazement.

Attributing consciousness to others, I think, is part of what Theory of Mind does, and I don’t think ToM is superfluous, but I’m still (unlike SpeedOfSound) baffled by self-consciousness and I agree with you there. I sometimes wonder if it would take a really puzzled computer to be self-conscious.

Chrisw wrote:

zoon wrote:The snag is that when we imagine the possibility of predicting or controlling brain mechanisms directly, human cooperation seems to disappear from the picture. I can imagine controlling someone else (fine), and I can imagine someone else controlling me (anathema), but how could we continue as equals?

I don't know what you mean by 'controlling' here. You mean like evil scientists putting implants in my brain? Of course all our usual assumptions about autonomy and cooperation go out of the window then but this doesn't have any implications for normal situations (does it?)

I was suggesting that it has implications for thinking about consciousness rather than for everyday life. One thing that is repeatedly asserted about consciousness is that it is essentially private, that one person’s consciousness is inaccessible to anyone else. It seems to me that if, as most people on this thread agree, thoughts are entirely the product of brain machinery, then they are not in fact essentially private, they could in principle be accessed in detail by another person. I was further suggesting that one reason why this is not generally acknowledged as a background possibility is that such access, and the further possibility of direct control, would short-circuit our evolved ability to cooperate, so it is seen only as a potential nightmare. The book review Krull links to seems to bear out that suggestion – the direct controller is pure evil scientist.

Krull wrote:Zoon, you've just been reading this book, haven't you?

I hadn’t come across it, thanks for the link, it seems to be illustrating the idea I was floating that even imagining direct access to each other’s minds is usually avoided because it is assumed that the result would be horrible. I hope, if mindreading ever does become commonplace, that people will have found some way to avoid that scenario.

SpeedOfSound wrote:There is a parallel between the idea that knowing we are mechanistic and caused should change the fact of our morality and Mary's Room where knowing about color is conflated with seeing color. Or at least this is what the detractors of physicalism see as wearing our shoes.

No amoung of fact finding can change the simplicity of you being the thing that the fact is about.

But it's even more interesting than that. There is an irony here that is truly wonderful. Try and see this.

To be thus persuaded by the ascribed facts of our mechanism, to the effect that you start to be different than your mechanism prescribes, denies the very mechanism you have the facts about.

It is in this manner that dualism still clings to us to the highest levels of the adoption of physicalism. We still think we can bend spoons with our minds.

I’m not suggesting that anything is going to happen to our morality unless we actually gain the ability to access other’s minds, which may never happen (and if it does, it’s likely to have been preceded by a thinking through of the implications for cooperation). Until we have direct access, the guesswork system of Theory of Mind is the most effective available way of thinking about other people, and ToM comes with the evolved, built-in system of cooperation which is central to the way humans operate, and which I did not mean to suggest ditching.

I think that if direct access to each other’s minds becomes possible, then it would be necessary to rethink the bases of cooperation, because the evolved system would be bypassed. Meanwhile, even considering the possibility of direct access tends to be avoided because the idea is associated with thoroughly antisocial behaviour along the lines described in Krull’s link.

zoon wrote:

chrisw wrote:I don't know what you mean by 'controlling' here. You mean like evil scientists putting implants in my brain? Of course all our usual assumptions about autonomy and cooperation go out of the window then but this doesn't have any implications for normal situations (does it?)

I was suggesting that it has implications for thinking about consciousness rather than for everyday life. One thing that is repeatedly asserted about consciousness is that it is essentially private, that one person’s consciousness is inaccessible to anyone else. It seems to me that if, as most people on this thread agree, thoughts are entirely the product of brain machinery, then they are not in fact essentially private, they could in principle be accessed in detail by another person. I was further suggesting that one reason why this is not generally acknowledged as a background possibility is that such access, and the further possibility of direct control, would short-circuit our evolved ability to cooperate, so it is seen only as a potential nightmare. The book review Krull links to seems to bear out that suggestion – the direct controller is pure evil scientist.

It's not so much that the scientist is evil - it's more like, if we buy into his philosophy, we can no longer judge his actions as good or bad. His crimes are all "intuition pumps" intended to convert his friend (and by extension, the reader) to his brand of nihilism. It is basically an attack on Dennett's distinction between intentional, design and physical stances, by encouraging us to permanently adopt a lower level stance towards each other. The worry isn't so much that people could be manipulated, but that ordinary folk psychological rules like our emotional regard for each other will be suspended, due to people no longer valuing their own feelings, and technology subsequently turning personality traits into commodities. Life will go on, but only because boredom and despair are more easily curable by neural intervention than by suicide.

I’m not suggesting that anything is going to happen to our morality unless we actually gain the ability to access other’s minds, which may never happen (and if it does, it’s likely to have been preceded by a thinking through of the implications for cooperation).

More likely I'd expect it to play out like it does in the book - being used on terrorists to make them fall in love with their interrogators, in order to get a confession out of them.

Neuropath's arguments only work if we assume our ability to make sense of our own actions proceeds by way of confabulation, a sort of post-hoc rationalisation of behaviour that fits it into a narrative. So no matter what you do to people's brains, they will feel as if they are chosing freely and rationally. There is one case in the book where a guy attributes his actions to god; this is just a more accurate confabulation (as a rule people claim responsibility for their actions). But I'm not sure what the evidence is for this useless storytelling module in the brain, it seems a bit too simplistic to me.

zoon wrote:Attributing consciousness to others, I think, is part of what Theory of Mind does, and I don’t think ToM is superfluous,

Fine but that's a different context than the one I originally responded to:

zoon wrote:On what basis is it possible to make any moral or social claims, such as that people should be treated with respect?

...which strikes me as concerning ethical theory, not theory of mind.