Liberty and Limitation

Contemporary libertarians, viewing society as composed of transactions between autonomous actors, seem to expect that these transformational choices will be individual in nature. But as has been cogently argued by a number of critics, individual choice will probably not be decisive. Once the enhanced set the standards, it will pretty much be impossible for the unenhanced not to have to try to keep up, if only because their life chances, and ultimately even their continuing recognition as members of society, will be at stake. So rather than choices made by independent rational actors, the decisions about radical enhancement are more likely to be either collective or to be imposed from above by an elite, as predicted by Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis, among others. Or it may be that the choice will not be made intentionally at all, but simply imposed by realized technological possibility — a progression hinted at by the spread of steroid use among athletes today.

The attachment of some libertarians to transhumanism is deeply misguided, for at least two reasons. First, the phenomenon that Richard J. Herrnstein got so much grief for pointing out in his 1973 book I.Q. in the Meritocracy — namely, that true egalitarianism and meritocracy tend to produce, through the marriage of the smart with the smart, a genetic aristocracy, almost a genetic caste — would likely deepen dramatically in the future the transhumanists desire, with consequences for the liberty of the unenhanced. At some point, those who celebrate the liberty of human beings will have to face the fact that liberty will look very different when we are no longer merely human. Second, our enhanced offspring might have to confront novel existential threats, such as the problem of an artificial intelligence bent on the destruction of humanity, or of self-replicating nanobots run amuck — guarding against which would likely require the governance of some massively powerful and intrusive entity like the World Controller in Huxley’s Brave New World. The rule of bureaucrats and experts, which has already started small in Europe and which elites seem to be pushing for throughout the West, would probably evolve apace with the rapidly expanding new science into the rule of experts at all levels.

Still, however one reacts to the transhumanist project — and it is probably only a technical question as to how far it can go and how fast — it means that the most powerful weapon in the traditional anti-utopian arsenal may no longer have much power. Every utopia that came before was a “no-place” (the literal meaning of the word “utopia”) because it abstracted to some degree from human nature as it had always been, and so the perfect world it imagined could not exist. Thus, utopias could be divided, as Leo Strauss has suggested, into two kinds. There were the philosophical and theological utopias, those which knowingly described an impossible world but nevertheless used the narrative to focus on certain aspects of humanity in order to clarify goals and to offer moral encouragement to improve. And then there were the ones like Skinner’s, modern utopias of social engineering that naïvely bought into the possibility of radically changing human life by simply ignoring crucial aspects of it as it exists now. Both of these kinds of utopias could be reliably predicted to fail (were they to be tried in practice) because they were contrary to human nature.

There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this essay, I discuss the implications of these problems for the conduct and interpretation of research.

SCIENTISTS make much of the fact that their work is scrutinised anonymously by some of their peers before it is published. This “peer review” is supposed to spot mistakes and thus keep the whole process honest. The peers in question, though, are necessarily few in number, are busy with their own work, are expected to act unpaid—and are often the rivals of those whose work they are scrutinising. And so, by a mixture of deliberation and technological pressure, the system is starting to change. The internet means anyone can appoint himself a peer and criticise work that has entered the public domain. And two recent incidents have shown how valuable this can be.

The easy problems of consciousness are those about explaining the relevant objective functions associated with consciousness, such as perceptual discrimination, control of behavior, verbal report, and so on, whereas the hard problem is that of subjective experience. In the book, I went on to describe my preferred theoretical approach to the hard problem. I always thought of the distinction between the easy problems and the hard problem as just five minutes in the background of saying the obvious. Everybody knew all along what the hard problem was, but at least the terminology seemed to catch on quite fast, especially for scientists. It has proved to be quite a useful heuristic device for isolating the problem of what philosophers call “phenomenal consciousness”, and drawing it to the attention of scientists and so on as a distinctive problem.

I have also been exploring interactionism – which I was quite opposed to in the book – which is the idea that consciousness might be non-physical but still play a causal role in physics, and I have become interested in the idea that consciousness might play a role in quantum mechanics and in collapsing wave functions, which in fact is what I’m going to talk about in the talk tomorrow.8 In the book I actually argued against that. I said, “I don’t think this can work and here’s why”, whereas I’m now inclined to think that that was much too hasty. So I’m at least interested in exploring that idea. I don’t know that it’s correct, but it might be. Another direction in which my views have developed is that I have become much more inclined to see deep connections between consciousness and intentionality than I was at the time of writing the book.

I said that intentionality has functional aspects and phenomenal aspects, and maybe I put more emphasis on the functional aspects, whereas now I would be inclined to put more of the emphasis on the phenomenal aspects. Maybe the core of intentionality is the kind of intentionality you find in consciousness.

I think panpsychism has many attractions. It offers a very integrated picture of the place of consciousness in the natural order, in a monistic, simple picture. It provides a potential causal role of consciousness in the natural order. I think of it as having many of the advantages of materialism and the advantages of dualism without having the disadvantages associated with the respective positions: too much reductionism for materialism and problems of physics for dualism. The big problem for panpsychism for me is not the counter-intuitiveness; I don’t find it particularly crazy or outlandish. It’s maybe a little counter-intuitive, but I don’t know that our intuitions about consciousness and where it is present count for all that much. After all, it’s not something you can observe. These intuitions are very culturally relative and some cultures have found it very plausible.

I consider the main problem with panpsychism to be the combination problem. How do the little bits of consciousness add up to the kind of consciousness we have?

What I’m skeptical of are certain reductionist approaches to the problem of consciousness, about developing a theory of consciousness in wholly physical terms. I think that’s probably not going to work out. But I’m very much open to scientific non-reductive approaches to consciousness, which take consciousness to be something fundamental and primitive and develop theoretical principles about it. I think there’s a lot of that happening right now. The talk I’m doing tomorrow can be viewed as a contribution to that project – consciousness collapsing wave functions.14 The work of someone like Tononi is also interesting.15 He very much sees his work as a non-reductive approach. So what we have got out of the science of consciousness in recent years, as I see it, is basically a non-reductive science. It doesn’t try to reduce consciousness to the brain.

This paper challenges David Chalmers’ proposed division of the problems of consciousness into the ‘easy’ ones and the ‘hard’ one, the former allegedly being susceptible to explanation in terms of computational or neural mechanisms and the latter supposedly turning on the fact that experiential ‘qualia’ resist any sort of functional definition. Such a division, it is argued, rests upon a misrepresention of the nature of human cognition and experience and their intimate interrelationship, thereby neglecting a vitally important insight of Kant. From a Kantian perspective, our capacity for conceptual thought is so inextricably bound up with our capacity for phenomenal consciousness that it is an illusion to imagine that there are any ‘easy’ problems of consciousness, resolvable within the computational or neural paradigms.