From Kassis, Jeremy                Mar 21, 01 09:51:20 PM -0800
To: "'fuchs@michaelfuchs.org'" <fuchs@michaelfuchs.org>
Cc: sc@ewav.com, cpoplawski@iMediation.com,
        "Kassis, Jeremy"
	 <jkassis@netfish.com>
Subject: RE: 2000.03.20



> > Anyway, my take on the [_The Moral Animal_] is that it's awfully accurate.
> 
> Yeah; depressingly so.

JK: it's only depressing because it reveals situations that you have not
considered in which you behave according to genetic programming and not
according to your existing concept of "free will."  like me, you were
probably bummed when the doctor tested your reflexes by bonking your knees
with a rubber mallet.  i tried and tried to control that "knee-jerk"
reaction.  but i failed.  i was both disappointed, but fascinated at the
same time.  i had the same response when i realized i had limited control
over the dilation of my eyes and rate of pulse.  i can control my eating
habits to an extent.  but sometimes i just get damn hungry.  these examples
are not quite comparable to those of TMA.  what The Moral Animal shows, and
what most people aren't ready for, is the fact that genetic imperatives
affect patterns of consciousness.  we experience this fact, but seldom
formally recognize it.  think about when you get hungry.  your thoughts
become "consumed" with images of food and strategies to get it.  "oh, there
are those granola bars in the cabinet."  TMA and evo-psych in general is
crushing because it extends the reach of the genetic imperative into complex
and subtle patterns of conscious thought.  it shows how subtle cues in the
environment and our social networks are responsible for complexity.  it is
depressing because you have lost a few illusions.

but the upside is as Fuchs argues.  it is very clear that much of what we do
is determined by the adaptionist mechanism of mind.  and it is the case that
the mind, as it complexifies, affords ever greater opportunities for making
choices that "go against the grain" of our evolutionary programming.  your
free will is only augmented by the knowledge you now have.  you actually had
less choice as a child, not only because your parents told you what to do,
but because your mind had not been filled with the data and experiences it
requires to buck its programming.  do you have more control over your
thoughts now than you did as a kid?  i do.  i don't get boners in class
anymore.  thank god.

the question that concerns me, even more than the question of "free will" is
happiness.  and i think that TMA analysis is also beneficial in this regard.
by identifying what our imperatives tell us to do, we have a guide to what
we "should" do.  in the simplest analysis.  what we "should" do is strive,
compete, and complexify because these are the means by which we ensure the
most suitable mates that ensure the survival of our offspring.  in this very
real way, the purpose of life is life.  whether you believe this is shallow
or profound is really just an issue of your perspective - your cognitive,
intellectual background.  but i guarantee that if you throw off your
intellectualism and heed the wisdom of your genetic imperatives, you'll find
it quite beautiful.

once you've come to the realization of the profound beauty of that statement
at your deepest levels, you can begin to engage your rationality to
elaborate your concept of what life entails.  this is the aesthetic of god
which i am trying to cultivate in myself because it leads to the harmonious
resolution of existence (our genetic origins and heritage), emotion (how i
feel every day), and consciousness (the pinnacle of evolution - a
dynamically configured, adaptionist, executor of behavior).


> However, the fact remains that Wright is not rigorous
> (philosophically). He seems to make the claim that ALL behaviour is
> determined by environment and genetics. But, then, almost in the same
> breath, he makes prescriptions for ways we ought to try and act. ?! If
> you're a strict determinist, which he appears not only to be, but to be
> comfortable being, then the only prescription you can ever make is to
> kick off and play golf. Wright can't both make suggestions for behaviour

JK: the conclusion does not follow the premise - belief in strict
determinism does not philosophically motivate golf-playing.  first, you are
confusing golf-playing with doing nothing.  this is a minor point, but it's
important to realize that golf-playing is *not* nothing.  it offers psychic
rewards.  it's fun.  i believe that you are trying to draw the distinction
between striving for "the good" (however that might be defined), and doing
nothing.  with that assumption about your intent . . . the second problem
with this statement is that you are making an ethical prescription based
upon a behavioral observation: it's an observable behavior of any organism
that when they *believe* that their actions will have no positive outcome,
they give up doing anything.  It's called "learned helplessness" and the
cognitive state is equivalent to depression.  See Martin Seligman, Learned
Optimism.  The behavior has nothing to do with the organism's belief in
determinism.  It simply has to do with the learned/perceived potential
reward for effort.  Consciously, whether or not you *believe* you are
actually making a choice, you can *imagine* the outcome of two paths of
action and assess the desirability of one versus the other.  you will make
the choice based on the perceived *good* that the choice brings to you.
very religious people are good examples of extreme determinists that work
very hard.  "God only knows, god makes his plans.  The information is not
available to the mortal man." - P. Simon (one of the most influential
songwriters of the last several decades).  Do the billiard balls stop moving
when they realize their trajectories and final resting points were computed
prior to the break?  The fallacy is that doing *nothing* is never the best
choice.  For this reason, to me, determinism isn't worth worrying about.
Personally, I am a strict determinist that believes in pseudo-randomness.
In the Cerebral Code (a very fucking hard book that I have only scratched),
Calvin shows the neurological pathways that *generate* thoughts by randomly
recombining existing thoughts to create "new" ones, filter them for
consistency with the existing memetic infrastructure, and allow them to
replicate and compete for territory on the surface of our cortex.


> That's my technical quibble. More substantively, I just think he's got
> it slightly wrong. We do have autonomy, or a soul--and I think I've
> found it. More on that in a second.
> 
JK: I think we agree.


> Part of its role seems to be to override other, more primitive, selected
> behaviours. Ie it's what gives us power (albeit limited power) to take
> control of the machine. And I believe such a mental module would be
> selected for in an uncertain and fluctuating ancestral environment. Ie,
> I'm evolution making your brain: "Okay, dude, here are a bunch of
> pre-programmed behaviours which should maximize Darwinian fitness.
> However, things do change, and sometimes these behaviours will actually
> fuck your shit up. So, here also is this 'override' module to let you,
> sometimes, choose other behaviours."

> THAT, I'm positing, is the soul--the true seat of the self. The soul is
> located in the prefrontal cortex. Notably, even our closest genetic
> relatives lack this.) 

JK: This is basically correct as far as I understand.  Consciousness evolved
as an adaptionist tool to deal with complex, rapidly changing circumstances
and factors.  The need for reconfiguration arose in what was really a
cognitive arms race among humans in their evolutionary crucible.  It has
always been the intention of the genes (if I can say that) that
consciousness serve their interests, but adaptability - the ability to
override pre-programmed behaviors became so valuable in survival that
consciousness is now able to override even the "prime directive" of
reproduction.  People commit suicide and monks take vows of celibacy.  There
may be more subtle situations in which consciousness interferes with
behavior programmed at more primitive levels.  A child that has been told
he's an idiot his whole life by a parent may be less aggressive in the
sexual marketplace.  Had the parent only been able to take out his anger in
threatening gestures, rather than the more debilitating transference of
destructive memes, the child might still be a champ because he internalized
less of his dysfunctional parent.  I would say that this is really a case of
pre-conscious cognitive override of a genetically determined behavior.  I
think there is an important point here: there is a difference between
consciousness and cognition.  It is significant that the only behaviors that
we are able to override are the ones that we *know* about, that is, those
that are in our consciousness.  The correction I made that it is not simply
the role of consciousness to override less effective hardwired behavior.  It
is really the purpose to augment those systems.  It has been shown that
dysfunctions in phylogenicly earlier systems cause dysfunctions in
cognition.


> Moreover, he doesn't even ADDRESS what may be the REAL barb of the
> problem of morality: our durable notion that SOME THINGS ARE ALWAYS
> WRONG, regardless of ethical utility. The classic example is
> recreational torture. We are in pretty strong agreement that
> recreational torture is ALWAYS wrong--even if it makes the toturer
> happier than it makes the victim sad (which would make it okay in an EU
> view). The rub is: WHERE DOES THAT "ALWAYS wrong" come from?

JK: No matter what the content of an ethical prescription, one observation
about ethics, to me, is inescapable.  It is negotiated.  You can make what
arguments you like about ethics being objective and following from
fundamental principles and unarguable.  But when you make these arguments,
the most accurate existential description of what you are doing is
"negotiating."  You are making arguments to shove your memes down someone
else's cognitive cake hole.  If your memes have an air of internal
consistency, the other person is weak-minded, and they have no competitive
position, they will agree with you (maybe - many people are just obstinate).
This perspective explains, to me, all ethical conundrums, including the
*some things are always wrong* conundrum.  The reality is that there is no
such thing as wrong, and some people can never be brought to believe it.
Many people can believe there is such a thing, because we have a similar
evolutionary heritage.  When you say SOME THINGS ARE ALWAYS WRONG, you are
saying that you believe that SOME THINGS ARE ALWAYS WRONG.  Some people will
agree with you.  Many will on the perspective of recreational torture.  But
reality is that during colonial times, recreational torture of slaves was
pretty common.  And nothing you could say would convince the sadists
otherwise.  We have stomped most of that out by force.  Anyone remember the
Civil War?  When memes do not win on their own merit, when they cannot
replicate into new fertile ground, they sometimes harness other memes (the
concept of the enemy, the will of god) to destroy the hosts of competing
memes.  People have been killed throughout history for what was in their
heads.  Ethics are subjective.  And Ethics are negotiated.  And I'll go out
on a limb here to say that anyone that disagrees has their idealism blinders
on.


> I think the
> challenge is to find a *rational* basis for morality. Camus quoted
> someone, I forget who: "In the tomb, vice and virtue are
> indistinguishable." We need for this to be wrong. But how?

JK: We don't need for this to be wrong.  And we don't need a rational basis
for morality.  I say, "I want to live in a society that severely punishes
recreational torture.  Who's with me?"  I don't have to have a reason.  I
just need to have options.  The idea will either make sense to people or it
won't.  If I live in a society that disagrees with what I want for myself,
and I can't change it, I need to get out.  We negotiate ethics only because
we can't get away from each other.  When nanotech hits and space
colonization becomes a reality, you can bet I'll be on the first fucking
spaceship out of this place (not without real remorseful tears for the
abandonment of mother earth).  And hopefully, I'll have with me a set of
founding principles that my companions share.  The concept of objectivist
ethics, of one standard from basic principles, rationally consistent . . .
is . . . a . . . stratagem.  It is a play for mindshare and sucks bandwidth.
We can make rational appeals for certain ethical policies, but they are
grounded in emotion and the genetic imperative.


> > What's Life all about? Is this the end of evolution? Is there something
> > more? Is Life a process of growth or a process of aimless exploration
> > and filling a niches? If the only point to all this crap is to make more
> > life, then what does it matter how any of that life acts toward the poor
> > and the downtrodden of their kind? If life is a process of growing up,
> > like people have always thought for millions of years, wouldn't it make
> > more sense for the weak and superfluous to be weeded out the way
> > evolution has always done up until a few thousand years ago? Why should
> > you question a process that made these really cool human brains?

JK: Fuchs said it.  "most of us agree about how we want the answers to turn
out."  That's good.  Look no further than how you feel or you'll just
confuse yourself.  "What's life all about?"  Cognitive question.  Formulate
a cognitive answer that *feels good*.  "Is this the end of evolution?"  No.
Just the beginning.  "Is there something more?"  Yes.  e.g. Neural uploading
and space exploration.  Designer genetics and communities.  The Grand
Unification of Physics and time travel.  Parallel Universes.  Your brain on
a real-time dynamically configurable hardware platform.  Speaking with sea
mammals like dolphins and whales.  Consequence-free acid trips.  Month-long
orgasm sabbaticals.  Death, if that's something you want.  "If the only
point to all this crap is to make more life . . ."  Loaded question, you
have already drawn your conclusion about the value of the crap before you
have done the analysis.  "What does it matter how any of that life acts . .
."  How do you *feel* when you walk by a homeless man shaking change in a
bowl?  How does it *feel* to have a poor Mexican man that barely knows how
to speak English wash your car for minimum wage?  How do you feel when you
think about a society of exploitation?  Now tell me . . . do your feelings
matter?  Do they matter to *you*?  I hope so.  If so, then we have hope
together.  And we have the basis for a moral society.

jk