mindstalk | Naturalism, take 2

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philosophy

Naturalism, take 2

Apart from some childhood animism (apologizing to doors I kicked, mercy-killing my breakfast sausages) and fear of an unnamed but Zeus-like thunder god ("to whom it may concern, if you're going to strike my house, could you please wait until my parents get home so I'm not out on the street by myself?"), I've always been an atheist. (I think atheist and agnostic overlap a lot, but called myself agnostic once out of cowardince on a school bus, and was promptly shamed out of that.) Or "godless", to be more general. But over the years many debates, over atheism and religion, over libertarianism, over AI, made me realize that this was only one of two key issues, and possibly the less important one. Many an atheist will try to argue the impossibility of God, which I think is a crock, since I can easily imagine us being in some big comptuer simulation. The Christian deity is tres unlikely, but a Deistic Creator, while uninformative, is certainly possible. Heck, a meddling Creator is equally possible.

No, what my view of science really doesn't leave room for is the soul[1], in the sense of an immaterial immortal thingy with a free will somehow neither fully caused nor random. And what I came to realize is that for many godless people, while they would deny a belief in a soul if asked outright, their stated beliefs on other issues revealed a hollow shape where a soul should be. Their network of concepts on free will, inherent human dignity or specialness, human rights, and the possibility (or not, usually not) of AI, or of subservient AI, strongly resembles the network of a Christian, with the God and soul concepts deleted but no other big changes. Similarly, many people who deny Creationism, or even God, maintain an effective belief in a Great Chain of Being progressing up to humans, to the ongoing frustration of evolutionary biologists. The causal concepts have been deleted, but the network of resulting concepts has not been reorganized or regenerated to account for the change.

So that's why I mentioned http://naturalism.org a couple of days ago: it's a growing collection of essays written by people who seem to have my worldview, a fully naturalistic one where there is no soul, humans are just animals and computational devices, and free will is a feeling we have, not a cause unto itself. Like Epicureanism, except that Epicurus flinched and made up some atomic swerves to provide a handwavy basis for free will.

[1] Between the ages of 8-10 was a big time for me. I got exposed to quantum, relativity, evolution, DNA mechanisms, and neuroscience, particularly all the weird things that various types of brain damage can do. Carl Sagan's Cosmos, The Brain of PBS and Richard Restak, Richard Feynman on Nova followed by The Dancing Wu Li Masters and The Cosmic Code, all in a casually atheist household where my economist father told me "mathematics is the language of science" and science was Good. And that's just the books I remember or have on my shelves, not counting forgotten library books on biology, or the kid's science magazines. No wonder I'm such a materialist.

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I enjoyed the thoughts on the soul... I don't have a completely consistent, well-formed philosophy yet on such things, but I generally believe something similar -- I think.

I saw a book I liked quite a lot at Borders: "What is Thought", by Eric Baum, from MIT Press. There might not be anything new in there for you -- I think it just says that thought is an evolved computation device or something. It's written from an AI perspective so I enjoyed the topics as I skimmed through in the store. Also, a large part of his argument is about the utility of compact representations in thought, and as such he makes plenty of ties into metaphor/analogy.

A paradox of naturalism is that it predicts its own weakness as a meme. A naturalistic worldview considers ideas as having both truth value and functional value. Considering the space of all ideas, there does appear to be a correlation between the "truth value" of some bits inside these human computational devices, and the "functional value" of how much these bits are replicated in the next generation. It is hard to imagine how we got to where we currently are without such a correlation. But the idea of naturalism itself, despite being true, appears to decrease the fitness of the human computational devices containing its representation. Instead we have various illusions that limit the damage caused by having an incoherent worldview, while preventing too much deviation from normal reproductive behavior.

On a completely different note, what is your current view of Steve Sailer? I looked in the Gale archives and noticed a few of you discussing his article on New Orleans; you seemed the most willing to evaluate his writing strictly on truth value rather than automatically dismiss it due to its distastefulness. As far as I can tell, his perception of reality is usually accurate. I disagree with some of his practical recommendations (my preferences lean toward the democratic transhumanistic), but I think he's right about the likely consequences of excessive illegal immigration, etc. I am curious if you think differently, and if so, why. I'm also curious about the "unfortunate things about Steve Sailer himself" that Anne referred to, since I have donated money to him recently and would like to know if it would be incorrect to repeat that in the future.

Don't know that I'm convinced naturalism reduces fitness, or that it predicts that it does. There's also fitness in some general sense vs. fitness for humans; fictional AIs tend to be naturalist, I think. Naturalistic... damnit, no free related words to naturalism. Though yes, it's never swept human populations; Epicureanism did decently but wasn't dominant, and then Theodosius stomped on everything.

As for Sailer, I don't know. Yeah, I'm open to the possibility that there's a strong genetic influence on IQ and various personality traits -- if I trust Pinker, this is in fact known. That some populations (I'll try to avoid 'race') might have correlations here, selected for in a strange loop between genes and culture, doesn't seem impossible either, especially given lactose tolerance and immune system genes and Ashkenazi health problems; we know gene frequencies can shift in a few millennia, even centuries. As for actual conclusions, I just don't know; I don't know if good enough data is even out there and if there is I obviously haven't reviewed it myself. Sailer made some persuasive cases, has I think attracted persuasive refutations in some things, and also appears like a wingnut in other cases -- his posts on Marginal Revolution were increasingly turning me off, though I won't be able to go into detail. Also I'm suspicious in general of anything which treats Africans as a coherent population, because they're supposed to be the most genetically diverse population, which is what evolutionary theory would predict. (This is a problem I had with William Calvin's model, which has human brain development being driven by projectile hunting below the glaciers, and filtering back into the rest of the human population. Though it might not be a killer problem for him, and Calvin doesn't emit the racist vibes Sailer does.)

I don't know what Anne meant. Maybe just that he seems really racist, talking about black superiority in movement and verbal skills and not seeming to pay attention to cultural factors. And you went through the gale archives? Wow, and ow.

Oh, interesting. You link to Pinker
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2003_06_06_globe.htm
writing a year after the Blank Slate came out, and saying that something he'd mentioned -- a gene linked to 4 points in IQ -- had been withdraw due to failure to replicate in a larger study.

(Split into two posts due to excessive length.)

Don't know that I'm convinced naturalism reduces fitness, or that it predicts that it does. There's also fitness in some general sense vs. fitness for humans; fictional AIs tend to be naturalist, I think.

Okay, I "predicts" too loosely; my thinking was that this sort of analysis pretty much must be performed with a naturalistic mindset. In any case, the argument is that believing in naturalism encourages one to choose to optimize a utility function significantly more distant from the evolutionary optimum than otherwise. There are exceptions (e.g. Patri Friedman), but statistically naturalists do have less kids than, say, Catholics or Muslims. There are of course all kinds of major confounding variables like wealth and educational level; but then, it actually doesn't matter precisely why naturalists have less kids on average, only that it happens. Thus naturalism is very dependent on lateral transmission, which is difficult, especially when other memes are developing more defenses against it. I remember a guy speaking against "secular humanism" back in my churchgoing days.

Geoffrey Miller (http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_9.html#miller) has written about this from a different angle.

Epicureanism did decently but wasn't dominant, and then Theodosius stomped on everything.

Hmm, I really should shore up my background in philosophy to avoid spending too much time reinventing wheels in the future. I didn't know anything about Epicureanism until looking it up just now, despite it being such an important predecessor to my own thinking.

Also I'm suspicious in general of anything which treats Africans as a coherent population, because they're supposed to be the most genetically diverse population, which is what evolutionary theory would predict.

Most discussion of Africans in the US is referring specifically to the subset of West Africans which were involved in the slave trade, a more genetically homogeneous population.

There certainly is a lot of diversity within Africa; consider the polar opposite running capabilities of West and East Africans, or the contrast between the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, for starters. That said, consider the Eurasian east-west axis of cultural transmission that Jared Diamond discusses in Guns, Germs, and Steel. Because of that axis, most populations in Europe and Asia have had millennia to genetically adapt to the basic parameters of Eurasian civilization. Sub-Saharan African populations all missed out on this. Thanks to the diversity you mention, it isn't too surprising that a few of those populations, e.g. the Tutsi, may have turned out somewhat adapted anyway. But the average level of adaptation to Eurasian civilization is lower.

Now, I don't blame sub-Saharan Africans for this accident of geography; hence my democratic transhumanist philosophy. If they want kids who are genetically better adapted to Eurasian civilization than they are, I believe we should ensure they can get them.

Which basic parameters are those? Africa's had agriculture for a good long time, and northwestern Europe got it later than other places, obviously. They skipped the Bronze Age but had iron relatively timely; AFAIK they didn't have literacy but then neither did most of Europe AFAIK, though the Romans may have been pretty literate. Organized societies they did have: kingdoms in the area of Mali in West Africa impressed Arabic and European visitors through the 15th century in scale and peacefulness, before slave trade, ivory trade, and cattle plagues really ruined things.

It's been a few years, but I read Basil Davidson, and R. Oliver's _A Short History of Africa_, and got an eye-opening view of African history, vs. my prior "bunch of tribes in jungle who got enslaved". And this is serious history, not excessively Afrophillic "Egyptians invented electric light bulbs". An intuition that African civilization had less selection on a millennia scale for IQ or co-operation than France or Germany or Scotland, say, seems harder to support after learning more about Africa.

AFAIK they didn't have literacy but then neither did most of Europe AFAIK, though the Romans may have been pretty literate.

This may be the key parameter. A distinguishing characteristic of Judaism is that it has essentially required literacy. The average IQ gap between European Jews and other Europeans is roughly as large as that between Europeans and African-Americans.

I will try to take a look at _A Short History of Africa_.

I don't know what Anne meant. Maybe just that he seems really racist, talking about black superiority in movement and verbal skills and not seeming to pay attention to cultural factors.

The reason is that without excessive discrimination, culture is strongly influenced by natural capabilities; and the evidence suggests that we have in fact brought discrimination mostly under control over the last four decades. A disheartening gender representation disparity remains in the mathematical sciences -- but it has been wiped out in medical schools, and there is no real evidence that scientists have been more discriminatory than doctors. The notion that the former gap remains due to subtle forms of discrimination that we simply haven't noticed yet is intellectually interesting, and indeed in some contexts it's the correct professional bias. But it isn't very consistent with the reality that in many fields, no significant effort beyond opening the door needs to be made at all. It's easy to argue that culture is more friendly to female doctors and lawyers and black musicians than it is to female physicists or black mathematicians, but that begs the question of how culture became friendly to the former in the first place. Because it certainly wasn't 50 years ago.

And you went through the gale archives? Wow, and ow.

I used to follow gale several years ago, though I didn't write much. After seeing you support my side in the argument against Will Chamberlain in two completely different places, I recalled that there was a Damien that had written a lot on gale back in the day, and wondered if it was the same person. Sure enough, it was.

I then searched for "Sailer" in the logs, since I know that my most controversial views are partly derived from his writings, and I was curious what you folks thought of them.

something he'd mentioned -- a gene linked to 4 points in IQ -- had been withdrawn due to failure to replicate in a larger study.

Yup. Experiences like that contribute a lot to my skepticism of Kurzweil-style timelines.

I think it's clear what direction current research is going, though. It's telling that so few people want to perform the test suggested in the Cochran-Hardy-Harpending paper (which Pinker does currently find plausible) -- it suggests to me that most people find plausible deniability on this subject useful.

It very well could be. However, I'm not ready to stifle my bias toward intellectual openness on the topic until I've seen a more detailed argument explaining why self-censorship actually helps the democratic transhumanist agenda.

It's easy to argue that culture is more friendly to female doctors and lawyers and black musicians than it is to female physicists or black mathematicians, but that begs the question of how culture became friendly to the former in the first place. Because it certainly wasn't 50 years ago.

Oops, very bad example with "black musicians"; culture has accepted them for a lot longer than 50 years. Should have said "black baseball players".

About sex differences: I've thought myself, before, of "so, back then, there weren't any female biologists or geologists either, so why so many more now than in physics?" And I don't know. But there's an interesting article today on discrimination: a scientists who switched sexes from female to male serves as a nice measurement of bias. Ben Barres, formally Barbara.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/12/AR2006071201883.html

"His work is so much better than his sister's." And a female scientist whose paper acceptance rate shot up after she started using her initials.

And I can note that while the number of female CS grad students at IU is low, there are relatively a lot more Indiana and Chinese women here than white. A professor says the ratio of women used to be higher, but declined in the 1990s -- not sure if that's fewer women coming or a lot more men. This all might speak more about culture than bias.

http://home.att.net/~Resurgence/L-inferiorIQ.htm

This might be of interest: data on discriminated-against groups tending to have lower IQs. Including Catholic Irish in Northern Ireland, and Polish or Russian Jews in the US around 1900 and WWI, and Koreans in Japan as opposed to Koreans in the US.

Even Charles Murray agrees that massive discrimination has some impact, and in particular that (i) reduction in discrimination has most likely contributed to the observed decrease in the US black-white IQ gap over the last four decades, and (ii) some further improvement in the situation can be expected. The disagreement is whether we can assume the gap will converge to zero, or at least become small enough to have negligible social relevance. I doubt it. (But the good news is that it shouldn't actually matter, if we eventually give everyone access to germline engineering. "Genetic" may have equated to "immutable" in the past, but there's little excuse for letting that continue any longer than it has to.)

The writer is certainly wrong when he claims "Many conservatives argue that people who are smarter tend to go on to college more, and because whites are more intelligent than blacks, there are more whites in college. But regardless of the reason why this is so, it cannot be because of a genetic edge in intelligence." First of all, college attendance is obviously a multifactorial phenomenon -- proving the existence of other relevant factors does not prove the irrelevance of genetics. Also, he provides as "evidence" a table with a bunch of small differences and then one entry that absolutely leaps out of the data. This entry just happens to be ~50% Ashkenazi Jewish, while none of the other entries have a significant Ashkenazi Jewish fraction. In principle, of course, Russian/Jewish achievement could be purely culturally driven. But for him to think that the table he references "disproves" genetics as a causative factor, when Ashkenazi Jews were historically more reproductively isolated than just about all the other listed groups (it's irrelevant, for the purposes of this analysis, what their current outbreeding rate is), and then just happen to singlehandedly double the range of the distribution, is absurd.

As for bad IQ scores of Polish and Russian Jews in WWI, by the 1920s this anomaly disappeared. Examination of the evolution of IQ tests (as of WWI, they had barely been invented) suggests that the Army hadn't yet figured out good g-loaded test design, and that this is a primary cause of the anomaly. Almost any reasonable test has some positive correlation with g, but it takes some work to maximize that correlation and minimize biases. WWI IQ tests are easy to criticize; WW2-era tests, not so much.

I don't know much about Koreans in Japan, but I will try to look that up; I expect that to be his best and most illuminating example.

That FAQ has some other entries on the Bell Curve as well.

Have you heard of gene imprinting? It's a hot new thing in genomics, genes being inherited in on or off positions under various conditions -- part of the DNA gets methylated, so it's not expressed. The cases I know for sure about relate to the fetus: fetal-growth genes will be turned on if inherited from the father, off if from the mother; vice-versa for growth-suppression genes. A little selfish genetic war over how much maternal resources the fetus gets.

I'm not sure if the following is data or speculation, but I've seen talk about organisms who experience starvation having offspring who are pre-disposed to put on weight. The DNA strings haven't changed, but certain genes have been turned on, and can take a few generations to turn off even if conditions remain affluent. So if you see some study about black children being adopted and still scoring low, there are multiple explanations, beyond "bias against black" or black genes being bad: of course the child might have been malnourished in the womb, but also if their mother or grandmother had been in stressful circumstances, the genes might still be imprinted for a conservative metabolism or something (lower brain growth, lower conduction speeds, whatever).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/12/AR2006071201883.html
Ah, an article, talking about the obesity effect. So I think imprinting may refer specifically to parental inheritance differences, but epigenesis is a more general phenomenon.

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Naturalism, take 2

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