Explaining Existence

First written: Aug 2018, Last update: Aug 2023

“Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.”

(“Nicht wie die Welt ist, ist das Mystische, sondern dass sie ist.”)

Why is there something rather than nothing? How can we explain the fact of existence?

This most fundamental question may be worth pondering for various reasons. Such pondering may help sharpen our thinking about the nature of the world, our place within it, and the scope of our understanding. It may also lead us to some significant answers to the question itself.

Is Non-Existence Coherent?

I would argue that the key to (dis)solving this mystery lies in questioning the coherence of the idea that there could be nothing in the first place — the notion that non-existence could exist or be the case. For existing is, after all, exactly what non-existence, by definition, does not. Non-being, by definition, cannot be. Yet, in asking why there is not nothing, we are indeed somehow imagining that it could.

To say that non-being could be is, I submit, to contradict the principle of non-contradiction, as one then asks for something, or rather “nothing”, to both be and not be at the same time.

As David Pearce writes:

One can apparently state the epistemic possibility of nothing having existed rather than something. But it’s unclear how it could make cognitive sense to talk of the epistemic possibility of nothing-or-other having even been the case. For the notion of something-or-other being the case is about as conceptually primitive as one can get. For just what is the (supposedly non-self-refuting) alternative with which one would be contrasting the generic notion of existence – in the sense of something-or-other being the case – that we have at present? The notion doesn’t seem to make any sense. It’s self-stultifying.

“Why Does Anything Exist“, sec. 9.

Philosopher Bede Rundle made a similar point: “We cannot conceive of there being nothing, but only of nothing being this or that, and that is a use of ‘nothing’ that presupposes there being something.” (p. 113)

Furthermore, even if we were to grant that non-existence could be the case, we would still seemingly end up with the conclusion that it cannot. For if non-existence were the case, then its being the case would itself be a truth, which implies that this truth would at least (also) exist. And yet this truth is not nothing in the strictest sense. In other words, the hypothetical assumption of non-existence obtaining itself appears to imply the existence of (more of) something. And such a supposedly empty state would in fact imply other properties as well, such as the property of being free from contradictions (genuine contradictions could not exist in any possible state of existence, much less one that is purportedly empty). Thus, even the notion of a state with absolutely no properties other than its mere being appears incoherent.

This may hint at an answer as to why there is something rather than nothing: the alternative is simply incoherent, and hence logically impossible. Only “something” could conceivably be the case.

In other words, if we hold that the nature of an explanation is to show why one epistemic possibility obtains over another, and if we establish that the existence of nothing is incoherent and hence not an epistemic possibility (let alone an ontological possibility), meaning that existence is the only epistemic possibility there is, then we have explained existence according to this conception of an explanation.

Thus, contra Wittgenstein, one may argue that the real mystery to explain is indeed how the world is, not that it is — to explain which properties the world has, not that it has any.

Necessity and Contingency

Another way to realize that there could not possibly be nothing, even if we were to assume that the notion is coherent, is to think in terms of necessary and contingent facts (following the reasoning of Timothy O’Connor found here). For the suggestion that there might have been nothing essentially amounts to the claim that existence might merely be a contingent rather than a necessary fact. Yet the fact that we are here proves that existence was, at the very least, a possibility. In other words, the reality of (at least) the possibility of existence is undeniable. And yet the reality of the possibility of existence is not nothing. It is, in fact, something. Thus, even if we assume that the fact of existence is merely contingent, we still end up with the conclusion that it is in fact necessary. The existence of the mere possibility of existence necessarily implies, indeed amounts to, existence in full, and hence the suggestion that existence may merely be contingent, and that there could instead have been absolutely nothing, is revealed to be impossible in this way as well.

One can use a similar contingency-versus-necessity argument to argue for the necessity of physical existence in particular (without assuming that physical existence is coterminous with existence in general). For the claim that the non-existence of the physical world could have obtained likewise amounts to claiming that its existence is merely a contingent fact: a possibility that could have not obtained. Yet the fact that the physical world does exist proves that its existence was at least a possibility. Thus, by this reasoning, there must necessarily exist (at least) a potential for the physical world as we know it to emerge. And yet such a potential is not nothing, nor is it non-physical proper — at least not in the widest sense of the term “physical”, which includes not only physical actualities but also physical potentials. In other words, the observed fact of physical existence implies the necessity of physical existence, at least in a broad, “potential-inclusive” sense of the term.

One may object that the notions of contingency and necessity ultimately do not make sense, or that they are just human ideas that we cannot derive deep metaphysical truths from. Yet the notion of contingency is exactly what a claim such as “physical reality might not have been” itself rests upon. So if these terms and the argument above make no sense or have no bearing on the actual nature of reality, then neither does the problem that the argument is trying to address.

No Purpose or Reason Behind Existence, Only Within

The all-inclusive nature of existence implies that, just as there cannot be a mechanism or principle that lies behind or beyond existence, there could not be a reason or purpose behind it either, since behind and beyond existence lies only that which does not exist. Hence there could not possibly be an ultimate purpose behind our being here.

Yet this by no means implies, contrary to what may naturally be supposed, that reasons and purposes, of the most real and significant kinds, do not exist within existence. Indeed, it is obvious that they do. For instance, the capacity to pursue purposes and to act on reasons has clearly emerged over the course of evolution. Beyond that, it is exceedingly plausible, at least to me, that some states of the world — especially states of extreme suffering — are worse than others. Therefore, I would argue, we have good reason to act so as to minimize the occurrence of such states, and to work to create a better world. This seems to me our highest purpose.

August 16, 2018

Darwinian Intuitions and the Moral Status of Death

“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”, wrote evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky. And given that our moral psychology is, at least in large part, the product of our biology, one can reasonably make a similar claim about our moral intuitions: that we should seek to understand these intuitions in light of the evolutionary history of our species. This also seems important for our thinking about normative ethics, since such an understanding is likely to help inform our ethical judgments — by helping us better understand the origin of our intuitive moral judgments, and how they might be biased or evolutionarily contingent in various ways.

Contents

An Example: “Julie and Mark”

A commonly cited example that seems to demonstrate how evolution has firmly instilled certain moral intuitions into us is the following thought experiment, which first appeared in a paper by Jonathan Haidt:

Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide not to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that? Was it OK for them to make love?

According to Haidt: “Most people who hear the above story immediately say that it was wrong for the siblings to make love […]”. Yet most people also have a hard time explaining this wrongness, given that the risks of inbreeding are rendered moot in the thought experiment. But people still insist it is wrong. An obvious interpretation to make, then, is that evolution has in some sense hammered the lesson “sex between close relatives is wrong” into our moral judgments. And given the maladaptive outcomes of human inbreeding, such an intuition would indeed make a lot of evolutionary sense. Yet in a modern context in which birth control has been invented and is employed, the intuition suddenly seems on less firm ground.

(It should be noted that the deeper point of Haidt’s paper cited above is to argue that “[…] moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached.” And while it seems difficult to deny that there is a significant grain of truth to this, Haidt’s thesis has also been met with criticism.)

Moral Intuitions About Death: Biologically Contingent

With this idea in the back of our heads — that evolution has most likely shaped our moral intuitions significantly, and that we should perhaps not be that surprised if these intuitions are often difficult to defend within the realm of normative ethics — let us now proceed to look at the concrete issue of death. Yet before we look at the “human view of death”, it is perhaps worth first surveying some other species whose members are unlikely to view death in remotely the same way as we do, to see just how biologically contingent our view of death probably is.

For example, individuals belonging to species that practice sexual cannibalism — i.e. where the female eats the male prior to, during, or after copulation — seem most unlikely to view dying in this manner in remotely the same way as we humans would. Indeed, they might even find pleasure in it, both male and female (although in many cases, the male probably does not, especially when he is eaten prior to copulation, since it is not in his reproductive interest, which likely renders it yet another instance of the horrors of nature).

The same can likely be said of species that practice so-called matriphagy, i.e. where the offspring eat their own mother, sometimes while she is still alive. This behavior is also, at least in many cases, evolutionarily adaptive, and hence seems unlikely to be viewed as harmful by the mother (or at least the analogue of “viewed as harmful” found in the minds of these creatures). There may, of course, be many exceptions — cases in which the mother does indeed find herself harmed by, and disapproving of, the act of being eaten. Yet it nonetheless seems clear that the beings who have evolved to practice this behavior do not view such a death in remotely the same way as a human mother would if her children suddenly started eating her alive.

The final example I wish to consider here is the practice of so-called filial cannibalism: when parents eat their own offspring. This practice is much more common, in terms of the number of species that practice it, compared to the other forms of cannibalism mentioned above, and it is also a clearer case of convergent evolution, as the species that practice it range from insects to mammals, including some cats, primates, birds, amphibians, fish (where it is especially prevalent), snails, and spiders. Again, we should expect individuals belonging to these species to view deaths of this kind very differently from the way we humans would view such, by any human standard, bizarre deaths. This is not to say that the younglings who are eaten do not suffer a great deal in these cases. They likely often do, as being eaten is often not in their reproductive interests (in terms of propagating their genes), although it may be in the case of some species: if it increases the reproductive success of their parents and/or siblings to a sufficient degree.

The deeper point, again, is that beings who belong to these species are unlikely to feel remotely the same way about these deaths as we humans would if such deaths were to occur within the human realm — i.e. if human parents ate their own children. The evolutionary history of a species greatly influences how it feels about deaths of various kinds, as well as how it views death in general.

Naturally, Most Beings Care Little About Most Deaths

It seems plausible to say that, in most animal species, individuals do not care the least about the death of unrelated individuals within their own species. And we should not be too starry-eyed about humans in this regard either, as it is not clear that we humans, historically, have cared much for people whom we did not view as belonging to our in-group, as the cruelties of history, as well as modern-day tribalism, testify. Only in recent times, it seems, have we in some parts of the world made all of humanity our in-group. Not all sentient beings, sadly, but not merely our own family or ethnic group either, fortunately.

So, both looking at other species, as well as across human history, we see that there appears to be a wide variety of views and intuitions about different kinds of deaths, and how “problematic” or harmful they are. Yet one regard in which there seems to be less disagreement is when it comes to “the human view of an in-group death”. And I would suspect this particular view to strongly influence — and indeed be the main template for — any human attempt to carve out a well-reasoned and general view of the moral status of death (of any morally relevant being). If this is true, it would seem relevant to zoom in on how we humans naturally view such an in-group death, and why.

The Human View of an In-Group Death

So what is the human view of the death of someone belonging to our own group? In short: that it is tragic and something worth avoiding at great costs. And if we put on our evolutionary glasses, it seems easy to make sense of why we would be inclined to think this: for most of our evolutionary history, we humans have lived in groups in which individuals collaborated in ways that benefitted the entire group.

In other words, the ability of any given human individual to survive and reproduce has depended significantly on the efforts of fellow group members, which means that the death of such a fellow group member would be very costly, in biological terms, to other individuals in that group — something that is worth investing a lot to prevent for these other individuals, and something evolution would not allow them to be indifferent about in the least.

This may help resolve some puzzles. For example, many of us claim to hold a purely sentiocentric ethical view according to which consciousness is the sole currency of moral value: the presence and absence of consciousness, as well as its character, is what matters. Yet most people who claim to hold such a view, including myself, nonetheless tend to view dreamless sleep and death very differently, although both ultimately amount to an absence of conscious experience just the same. If the duration of the conscious experience of someone we care about is reduced by an early death, we consider this tragic. Yet if the duration of their conscious experience is instead reduced by dreamless sleep, we do not, for the most part, consider this tragic at all. On the contrary, we might even be quite pleased about it. We wish sound, deep sleep for our friends and family, and often view such sleep as something that is well-deserved and of great value.

On the view that the presence and absence of consciousness, as well as the quality of this consciousness, is all that matters, this evaluation makes little sense (provided we keep other things equal in our thought experiment: the quality of the conscious life is, when it is present, the same whether its duration is reduced by sleep or early death). Yet from an evolutionary perspective, it makes perfect sense why we would not only evaluate these two things differently, but indeed in completely opposite ways. For if a fellow group member is sleeping, then this is good for the rest of the group, as sleep is generally an investment that improves a person’s contribution to the group. Yet if the person is dead, they will no longer be able to contribute to the group. And if they are family, they will no longer be able to propagate the genes of the family. From a biological perspective, this is very sad.

(The hypothesis sketched out above — that our finding the death of an in-group member sad and worth avoiding at great costs is in large part due to their contribution to the success of our group, and ultimately our genes — would seem to yield a prediction: we should find the death of a young person who is able to contribute a lot to the group significantly more sad and worth avoiding compared to the death of an old person who is not able to contribute. And this is even more true if the person is also a relative, since the young person would have the potential to spread family genes, whereas a sufficiently old person would not.)

Implications

So what follows in light of these considerations about our “natural” view of the death of an in-group member? I would be hesitant to draw strong conclusions from such considerations alone. Yet it seems to me that they do, at the very least, give us reason to be skeptical with respect to our immediate moral intuitions about death (indeed, I would argue that we should be skeptical of our immediate moral intuitions in general). With respect to the great asymmetry in our evaluation of the ethical status of dreamless sleep versus death, two main responses seem available if one is seeking to make a purely sentiocentric position consistent (to take that fairly popular ethical view as an example).

Either one can view conscious life reduced by sleep as being significantly more bad, intrinsically, than what we intuitively evaluate it to be (classical utilitarians may choose to adopt this view, which could, in practice, imply that one should work on a cure for sleep, or at least to reduce sleep in a way that keeps quality of life intact). Or, one can view conscious life reduced by an early death as being significantly less bad — intrinsically — than our moral intuitions hold. (One can, of course, also opt for a middleroad that maintains that we both intuitively underestimate the intrinsic badness of sleep while overestimating the intrinsic badness of death, and that we should bring our respective evaluations of these two together to meet somewhere in the middle.)

I favor the latter view: that we strongly overestimate the intrinsic badness of death, which is, of course, an extremely unpalatable view to our natural intuitions, including my own. Yet it must also be emphasized that the word “intrinsically” is extremely important here. For I would indeed argue that death is bad, and that we should generally view it as such. But I believe this badness is extrinsic rather than intrinsic: because death generally has bad consequences for sentient beings. Furthermore, I would argue that we should consider death a bad and harmful thing (as I indeed do) not just because this belief is accurate, but also because not doing so has bad consequences as well.

An Ethic of Survival

With respect to ethics and death, I recently encountered an interesting perspective in an exchange with Robert Daoust. He suggested, as I understood him, that the fundamental debate in ethics is ultimately one between an ethic of survival on the one hand, and an ethic of concern for sentience on the other. And he further noted that, even when we sincerely believe that we subscribe to the latter, we often in fact do support the survivalist ethic, for strong evolutionary reasons. A view according to which, even if life is significantly dominated by suffering, survival should still be our highest goal.

I find this view of Daoust’s interesting, and I certainly recognize strong survivalist intuitions in myself, even as I claim to hold, and publicly defend, values focused primarily on the reduction of suffering. And one can reasonably wonder what the considerations surveyed above, as well as similar considerations about the priorities and motives that evolution has naturally instilled in us, imply for our evaluation of such a (perhaps tacitly shared) survivalist ethic.

I would tentatively suggest that they imply that we should view this survivalist ethic with skepticism. We should expect evolution to have given us a strong urge for survival at virtually any cost, and to view survival — if not of our own individual bodies, then at least of our own group and bloodline — as being intrinsically important; arguably even the most important thing of all. Yet I would argue that this is an implausible ethical view. Specifically, to accept continued survival at virtually any cost, including the cost of increasing the net amount of extreme suffering in the world, is, I would argue, highly implausible. Beyond that, one can argue that we, for evolutionary reasons, also wildly overestimate the ethical badness of an empty world, and grossly misjudge the value of the absence of sentience. Indeed, on a purely sentiocentric view, such an absence is just as good as deep, dreamless sleep. And what is so bad about that?

August 10, 2018

A Brief Note on Eternalism and Impacting the Future

Something I find puzzling is that many people in intellectual circles seem to embrace the so-called eternalist view of time, which holds that the past, present, and future all equally exist already, yet at the same time, in terms of practical ethics, these same people focus exclusively on impacting the future. These two positions do not seem compatible, and it is interesting that no one seems to take note of this, and that no attempt seems to be made at reconciling them, or otherwise examining this issue.

For why, given an eternalist view of time, should one focus on impacting the future rather than the past? After all, the eternalist view of time amounts to the rejection of the common-sense view that the past is fixed while the future is not, which is the view of time that seems to underpin our common-sense focus on trying to impact the future rather than the past. So how can one reject the common-sense view of time that seems to underlie our common-sense practical focus, yet then still maintain this focus? If the past and the future equally exist already, why focus more on trying to impact one rather than the other?

The only attempted reply I have seen so far, which came from Brian Tomasik, is that if, hypothetically, the present were different, then the future would be different, and hence it makes sense to focus on such changes that would render the future different. The problem, however, is that the same argument applies to the past: if, hypothetically, the present were different, then the past would presumably also have to be different. Tomasik seemed to agree with this point. So I fail to see how this is an argument for focusing on impacting the future rather than the past given an eternalist view of time.

Possible Responses

There are various ways to respond to this conundrum. For example, one could try to argue that there is no conflict between eternalism and focusing exclusively on impacting the future (which seems the prevailing assumption, but I have yet to see it defended). Another path one could take is to argue that we in fact should focus on impacting the past about as much as we focus on impacting the future (a position I find highly dubious). Alternatively, one could argue that it is just as senseless to try to change the future as it is to change the past (something few would be willing to accept in practice). Lastly, one could take the tension between these two widely esteemed views to imply that there may be something wrong with the eternalist view of time, and that we should at least lower our credence in eternalism given its apparent incompatibility with other, seemingly reasonable beliefs.

My Preferred Path: Questioning Eternalism

I would be curious to see attempts along any of the four paths mentioned above. I myself happen to lean toward the last one. I think many people display overconfidence with respect to the truth of eternalism.

In particular, the fact that the equations of the theory of relativity, as they stand, do not necessitate an ontologically existing “now“ does not imply that no such thing exists (where this “now”, it must be noted, is not defined as “clocks all show the same”, as such a now is clearly impossible; yet there is no contradiction in the existence of a unique, ontologically real “present” in which initially synchronized clocks show different times).

In other words, although the equations of relativity do not necessitate the existence of such an ontologically real present, they do not rule it out either. Yet it seems widely believed that they do rule it out, and people thus seem to accept that eternalist view almost as though this ontological position were a matter of logical certainty, when it is not. I think it is important to point this out, since false certainties can be dangerous in unexpected ways (for example, if the eternalist view is mistaken and if it leads us to falsely conclude that trying to impact the future is senseless).

Beyond that, one can question to what extent it makes sense to say — as eternalists often do, and as the name eternalism itself implies — that all moments of time exist “always”? After all, doesn’t “always” refer to something occurring over time? The meaning of claims of the sort that “every moment exists always” is, I believe, less obvious than proponents of eternalism appear to think, and seems in need of unpacking.

A General Note on Our Worldview

I think the tension explored here speaks to a more general point, namely that we often do not derive the practical views we hold — e.g. that we can influence the future but not the past — from our fundamental ontological views. Instead, our practical views are often derived mostly from tacit common-sense notions and intuitions. This means that the views we hold on various subjects, such as the philosophy of time and practical ethics, might be scarcely compatible. The project of bringing our views across such different areas in concert is, I believe, an important and potentially fruitful one, both for our theoretical views in themselves, as well as for our practical efforts to act reasonably in the world.

August 8, 2018

The Endeavor of Reason

“[…] some hope a divine leader with prophetic voice
Will rise amid the gazing silent ranks.
An idle thought! There’s none to lead but reason,
To point the morning and the evening ways.”

— Abu al-ʿAlaʾ al-Maʿarri

What is reason?

One could perhaps say that answering this question itself falls within the purview of reason. But I would simply define reason as the capacity of our minds to decide or assess what makes the most sense, or seems most reasonable, all things considered.

This seems well in line with other definitions of reason. For instance, Google defines reason as “the power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgements logically”, and Merriam-Webster gives the following definitions:

a (1) : the power of comprehending, inferring, or thinking especially in orderly rational ways […] (2) : proper exercise of the mind […]

These definitions all seem to raise the further question of what terms like “logically”, “orderly rational ways”, and “proper” then mean in this context.

Indeed, one may accuse all these definitions of being circular, as they merely seem to deflect the burden of defining reason by referring to some other notion that ultimately just appears synonymous with, and hence does not reductively define, reason. This would also seem to apply to the definition I gave above: “the ability to decide or assess what seems most reasonable all things considered”. For what does it mean for something to “seem most reasonable”?

Yet the open-endedness of this definition does not, I submit, render it useless or empty by any means, any more than defining science in open-ended terms such as “the attempt to discover what is true about the world” renders this definition useless or empty.

Reason: The Core Value of Universities and the Enlightenment

At the level of ideals, working out what seems most reasonable all things considered is arguably the core goal of both the Enlightenment and of universities. For instance, ideally, universities are not committed to a particular ethical view (say, utilitarianism or deontology), nor to a particular view of what is true about the world (say, string theory or loop quantum gravity, or indeed physicalism in general).

Rather, universities seem to have a more fundamental and less preconceived commitment, at least in the ideal, which is to find out which particular views, if any, that seem the most plausible in the first place. This means that all views can be questioned, and that one has to provide reasons if one wants one’s view to be considered plausible.

And it is important to note in this context that “plausible” is a broader term than “probable”, in that the latter pertains only to matters of truth, whereas the former covers this and more. That is, plausibility can also be assigned to views, for instance ethical views, that we do not view as strictly true, yet which we find plausible nonetheless (as in: they seem agreeable or reasonable to us).

For this very reason, it would also be problematic to view the fundamental role of universities to (only) be the uncovering of what is true, as such a commitment may assume too much in many important and disputed academic discussions, such as those about ethics and epistemology, where the question of whether there indeed are truths in the first place, and in what sense, is among the central questions that are to be examined by reason. Yet in this case too, the core commitment remains: a commitment to being reasonable. To try to assess and follow what seems most reasonable all things considered.

This is arguably also the core value of the Enlightenment. At least that seems to be what Immanuel Kant argued for in his essay “What Is Enlightenment“, in which he further argued that free inquiry — i.e. the freedom to publicly exercise our capacity for reason — is the only prerequisite for enlightenment:

This enlightenment requires nothing but freedom—and the most innocent of all that may be called “freedom”: freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters.

And the view that reason should be our core commitment and guide of course dates much further back historically than the Enlightenment. Among the earliest and most prominent advocates of this view was Aristotle, who viewed a life lived in accordance with reason as the highest good.

Yet who is to say that what we find most plausible or reasonable is something we will necessarily be able to converge upon? This question itself can be considered an open one for reasoned inquiry to examine and settle. Kant, for instance, believed that we would all be able to agree if we reasoned correctly, and hence that reason is universal and accessible to all of us.

And interestingly, if one wants to make a universally compelling case against this view of Kant’s, it seems that one has to assume at least some degree of the universality that Kant claimed to exist. And hence it seems difficult, not to say impossible, to make such a case, and to deny that at least some aspects of reason are universal.

Being Reasonable: The Only Reasonable Starting Point?

One can even argue that it is impossible to make a case against reason in general. As Steven Pinker notes:

As soon as we are having this conversation, as long as we are trying to persuade one another of why you should do something or should believe something, you are already committed to reason. We are not engaged in a fist fight, we are not bribing each other to believe something. We are trying to provide reasons. We are trying to persuade, to convince. As long as you are doing that in the first place — you are not hitting someone with a chair, or putting a gun to their head, or bribing them to believe something — you have lost any argument you have against reason; you have already signed on to reason, whether you like it or not. So the fact that we are having this conversation shows that we are committed to reason. That is the starting point.

Indeed, it seems that any effort to make a case against reason would have to rest on the very thing it attempts to question, namely our capacity to assess and justify the merits of our claims. Thus, almost by definition, it seems impossible to identify a reasonable alternative to the endeavor of reason, broadly construed.

Some might argue that reason requires us to have faith in reason in the first place, and hence that reason is ultimately no more reasonable or defensible than is faith in anything whatsoever. Yet this is not the case.

First, there are important ways in which faith and reason, as commonly conceived, are polar opposites. Reason seeks justification for our beliefs, whereas faith — holding beliefs without justification — does not. Second, unlike faith, reason is not committed to accepting any particular claim from the outset: everything can in principle be doubted and scrutinized, including the very soundness of reason itself; even if such scrutiny is ultimately untenable, as it is itself is a manifestation of — and to some degree rests on the validity of — reason, broadly construed.

What, then, can ultimately justify any claim?

It Seems Reasonable: The Bedrock Foundation of Reasonable Beliefs

The idea that reason demands justification for any given belief may seem problematic, as it gives rise to the so-called Münchhausen trilemma: what can ultimately justify our beliefs — a circular chain of justifications, an infinite chain, or a finite chain (or web) with brute facts at bottom? Supposedly, none of these options are appealing. Yet I disagree.

For I see nothing problematic about having a brute observation, or reason, at bottom of our chain of justification, which I would indeed argue is exactly what constitutes, and all that ever could constitute, the rock bottom justification for any reasonable belief. Specifically, that it just seems reasonable.

Many discussions go wrong here by conflating 1) ungrounded assumptions and 2) brute observations, which are by no means the same. For there is clearly a difference between believing that a car just drove by you based on the brute observation (i.e. a conscious sensation of) that a car just drove by you, and then merely assuming, without grounding in any reason or observation, that a car just drove by you.

Or consider another example: the fundamental constants in our physical equations. We ultimately have no deeper justification for the values of these constants than brute observation. Yet this clearly does not render our knowledge of these values merely assumed, much less arbitrarily or unjustifiably chosen. This is not to say that our observations of these values are infallible; future measurements may well yield slightly different, more precise values. Yet they are not arbitrary or unjustified.

The idea that brute observation cannot constitute a reasonable justification for a belief is, along with the idea that brute assumptions and brute observations are the same, a deeply misguided one, in my view. And this is not only true, I contend, of factual matters, but of all matters of reason, including ethics and epistemology, whether we deem these fields strictly factual or not. For instance, my own ethical view, according to which suffering is disvaluable and ought to be reduced, does not, on my account, rest on a mere assumption. Rather, it rests on a brute observation of the undeniable intrinsic disvalue of the conscious states we call suffering.

Such a foundationalist account is, I submit, the solution to the Münschhausen trilemma.

Deniers of Reason

If reason is the only reasonable starting point, why, then, do so many seem to challenge and reject it? First, those who criticize and argue against reason are not really, as I have argued above, criticizing reason, at least not in the general sense I have defined it here (since to criticize reason is to engage in it). Rather, they are, at most, criticizing a particular conception of reason, and that can, of course, be perfectly reasonable. (I myself would criticize prevalent conceptions of reason as being much too narrow.)

Second, there are those who do not criticize reason, and who indeed do reject it, at least in some respects. These are people who refuse to join the conversation Steven Pinker referred to above; people who refuse to provide reasons, and who instead engage in forceful methods, such as silencing or extorting others, violently or otherwise. Examples include people who believe in some political ideology or religion, and who choose to suppress, or indeed kill, those who express views that challenge their own. Yet such actions hardly represent a reasonable or compelling challenge to the validity of reason.

Reason Broadly and Developmentally Construed

The conception of reason I have outlined here is, it should be noted, not a narrow one. It is not committed to any particular ontological position, nor is it purely cerebral, as in restricted to merely weighing verbal or mathematical arguments. Instead, it is open to questioning everything, and takes input from all sources.

Nor would I be tempted to argue that we humans have some single, immutable faculty of reason that is infallible. Quite the contrary. Our assessments of what seems most reasonable in various domains rests on a wide variety of faculties and experiences, virtually none of which are purely innate. Indeed, these faculties, as well as our range of experience, can be continually expanded and developed as we learn more, both individually and collectively.

In this way, reason, as I conceive of it, is not only extremely broad but also extremely open-ended. It is not static, but rather self-regulating and self-updating, as when we realize that our thinking is tendentious and biased in many ways, and that our motives might not be what we (would like to) think they are. In this way, our capacity for reason has taught itself that it should be self-skeptical.

Yet this by no means gives way to extreme skepticism about everything. After all, our discovery of these tendencies is itself a testament to the power of our capacity to reason. Rather than completely undermine our trust in this capacity, discoveries of this kind simultaneously show both the enormous weakness and strength of our minds: how wrong we can be when we are not careful in our efforts to be reasonable, and how much better informed we can become if we are. Such facts do not make a case against employing our capacity to reason, but rather make a case for more careful employments of this capacity of ours.

Conclusion: A Call for Reason

The endeavor of reason is not one that we pursue automatically. It takes a deliberate choice. In order to be able to assess and decide what seems most reasonable all things considered, one must first make an active effort to learn about the world, and then consider the implications carefully. And I believe we have good reason to do this. Generally speaking, following what seems most reasonable all things considered seems the best choice before us.

July 9, 2018

The (Non-)Problem of Induction

David Hume claimed that it is:

[…] impossible for us to satisfy ourselves by our reason, why we should extend [our experience of cause and effect] beyond those particular instances, which have fallen under our observation. We suppose, but are never able to prove, that there must be a resemblance betwixt those objects, of which we have had experience, and those which lie beyond the reach of our discovery.

This gives rise to the problem of induction: how can we defend assuming the so-called uniformity of nature that we take to exist when we generalize our limited experience to that which lies “beyond the reach of our discovery”? For instance, how can we justify our belief that the world of tomorrow will, at least in many ways, resemble the world of yesterday? Indeed, how can we justify believing that there will be a tomorrow at all?

A point worth highlighting in response to this problem is that, even if we were to assume that we have no justification for believing in such uniformity of nature, this would not imply that we thereby have justification for believing the opposite: that there is no uniformity of nature. After all, to positively state that the patterns we have observed so far do not predict anything about states and events elsewhere would also amount to a claim about that which lies “beyond the reach of our discovery”, and so this claim seems to face the same problem.

The claims 1) “there is (some degree of) uniformity throughout nature” and 2) “there is no uniformity throughout nature” are both hypotheses about the world. And if we look at the limited part of the world about which we do have some knowledge, it is clear that the former hypothesis is true to a large extent: patterns observed at one point in time and space do indeed predict a lot about patterns observed elsewhere.

Does this then mean that the same will hold true of the part of the world that lies beyond the reach of our discovery? One can reasonably argue that we do not have complete certainty that it will (indeed, one can reasonably argue that we should not have complete certainty about any claim our fallible mind happens to entertain). Yet if we reason as scientists — probabilistically, endeavoring to build the picture of the world that seems most plausible in light of all the available evidence — then it does indeed seem justifiable to say that hypothesis 1 seems much more likely to be true of that which lies “beyond the reach of our discovery” than does hypothesis 2. This is not least because hypothesis 2 would imply an extreme uniqueness of the observed compared to the unobserved, whereas hypothesis 1 merely amounts to not assuming such an extreme uniqueness.

If we think in this way — in terms of competing hypotheses to which we assign different levels of plausibility — Hume’s problem of induction no longer seems so compelling or problematic. After all, even if we cannot deductively prove our hypotheses about that which lies beyond our experience, we can still have probabilistic reasons — based on cumulative observations — to consider some hypotheses (much) more likely than others.

The Problem of Induction Relies on Induction

In addition to these points about probabilistic reasons, it is worth noting that one can turn Hume’s skeptical argument on itself. For example, Hume’s argument assumes that there is something that lies “beyond the reach of our discovery”, beyond our known experience. But, in Hume’s spirit, we can ask what justifies this inductive assumption about there being something beyond our known experience. It seems that Hume is here assuming something for which he has no deductive proof. In the very framing of his argument, he is tacitly assuming what he thinks we cannot have satisfying reason to believe. After all, what deductive proof can Hume give for there being anything beyond our known experience?

Relatedly, one can make an argument suggesting that it is impossible to give a coherent argument against (at least some degree of) uniformity in nature. For in order to even raise a doubt or an argument against (some degree of) uniformity in nature, one is bound to rely on the very thing one is trying to question. For example, one must assume that words will still mean the same in the next moment as they did in the previous one, and not least that there will be a next moment to begin with.

Thus, it seems impossible to coherently argue against or doubt at least some degree of uniformity in nature, which itself seems to be a reason to believe in such uniformity. After all, that something cannot be coherently doubted arguably gives us some reason to believe it.

In sum, if one thinks we have good reason to take the problem of induction seriously, or good reason to believe that this problem will persist in the future (since it has in the past), then one also believes that we have good reason to make (at least some) inductive generalizations about that which lies beyond the reach of our discovery.

June 11, 2018

“The Physical” and Consciousness: One World Conforming to Different Descriptions

My aim in this essay is to briefly explain a crucial aspect of David Pearce‘s physicalist idealist worldview. In particular, I seek to explain how a view can be both “idealist” and “physicalist”, yet still be a “property monist” view.

Pearce himself describes his view in the following way:

“Physicalistic idealism” is the non-materialist physicalist claim that reality is fundamentally experiential and that the natural world is exhaustively described by the equations of physics and their solutions […]

So Pearce’s view is a monist, idealist view: reality is fundamentally experiential. And this reality also conforms to description in physical terms. Pearce is careful, however, to distinguish this view from panpsychism, which Pearce, in contrast to his own idealist view, considers a property dualist view:

“Panpsychism” is the doctrine that the world’s fundamental physical stuff also has primitive experiential properties. Unlike the physicalistic idealism explored here, panpsychism doesn’t claim that the world’s fundamental physical stuff is experiential. Panpsychism is best treated as a form of property-dualism.

How, one may wonder, is Pearce’s view different from panpsychism, and from property dualist views more generally? This is something I myself have struggled a lot to understand, and inquired him about repeatedly. And my understanding is the following: according to Pearce, there is only consciousness, and its dynamics conform to physical description. Property dualist views, in contrast, view the world as having two properties: the stuff of the world has insentient physical properties to which separate, experiential properties are somehow attached.

Pearce’s view makes no such division. Instead, on Pearce’s view, description in physical terms merely constitutes a particular (phenomenal) mode of description that (phenomenal) reality conforms to. So to the extent there is a dualism here, it is epistemological, not ontological.

The Many Properties of Your Right Ear

For an analogy that might help explain this point better, consider your right ear. What properties does it have? Setting aside the question concerning its intrinsic nature, it is clear that you can model it in various ways. One way is to touch it with your fingers, whereby you model it via your faculties of tactile sensation (or in neuroanatomical terms: with neurons in your parietal lobe). You may also represent your ear via auditory sensations, for example, by poking it and noticing what kind of sound it makes (a sensation mediated by the temporal lobe). Another way, perhaps the clearest and most practical way for beings like us, is to model it in terms of visual experience: to look at your right ear in the mirror, or perhaps simply imagine it, and thereby have a visual sensation that represents it (mediated by the occipital lobe).

(For most of us, these different forms of modeling are almost impossible to keep separate, as our touching our ears automatically induces a visual model of them as well, and vice versa: a visual model of an ear will often be accompanied by a sense of what it would be like to touch it. Yet one can in fact come a surprisingly long way toward being able to “unbind” these sensations with a bit of practice. This meditation and this one both provide a good exercise in detaching one’s tactile sense of one’s hands from one’s visual model of them. This one goes even further, as it climaxes with a near-total dissolution of our automatic binding of different modes of experience into an ordered whole.)

Now, we may ask: which of these modes of modeling constitute the modeling we call “physical”? And the answer is arguably all of them, as they all relate to the manifestly external (“physical”) world. This is unlike, say, things that are manifestly internal, such as emotions and thoughts, which we do not tend to consider “physical” in this same way, although all our sensations are, of course, equally internal to our mind-brain.

“The physical” is in many ways a poorly defined folk term, and physics itself is not exempt from this ambiguity. For instance, what phenomenal mode does the field of physics draw upon? Well, it is certainly more than just the phenomenology of equations (to the extent this can be considered a separate mode of experience). It also, in close connection with how most of us think about equations, draws heavily on visuospatial modes of experience (I once carefully went through a physics textbook that covered virtually all of undergraduate level physics with the explicit purpose of checking whether it all conformed to such description, and I found that it did). And we can, of course, also describe your right ear in “physics” terms, such as by measuring and representing its temperature, its spatial coordinates, its topology, etc. This would give us even more models of your right ear.

Different phenomenological models of the same thing

The deeper point here is that the same thing can conform to description in different terms, and the existence of such a multitude of valid descriptions does not imply that the thing described itself has a multitude of intrinsic properties. In fact, none of the modes of modeling an ear mentioned above say anything about the intrinsic properties of the ear; they only relate to its reflection, in the broadest sense.

And this is where some people will object: why believe in any intrinsic properties? Indeed, why believe in anything but the physical, “reflective”, (purportedly) non-phenomenal properties described above?

To me, as well as to David Pearce (and Galen Strawson and many others), this latter claim is self-undermining and senseless, like a person reading from a book who claims that the paper of the book they are reading from does not exist, only the text does. All these modes of modeling mentioned above, including all that we deem knowledge of “the physical”, are phenomenal. The science we call “physics” is itself, to the extent it is known by anyone, found in consciousness. It is a particular mode of phenomenal modeling of the world, and thus to deny the existence of the phenomenal is also to deny the existence of our knowledge of “physics”.

Indeed, our knowledge of physics and “the physical” attests to this fact as clearly as it attests to anything: consciousness exists. It is a separate question, then, exactly how the varieties of conscious experience relate to descriptions of the world in physical terms, as well as what the intrinsic nature of the stuff of the world is, to the extent it has any. Yet by all appearances, it seems that minds such as our own conform to physical description in terms of what we recognize as brains, and, as with the example of your right ear, such a physical description can take many forms: a visual representation of a mind-brain, what it is like to touch a mind-brain, the number of neurons it has, its temperature, etc.

These are different, yet valid ways of describing aspects of our mind-brains. Yet like the descriptions of different aspects of an ear mentioned above, these “physical” descriptions, while all perfectly valid, still do not tell us anything about the intrinsic nature of the mind-brain. And according to David Pearce, the intrinsic nature of that which we (validly) describe in physical terms as “your brain” is your conscious mind itself. The apparent multitude of aspects of that which we recognize as “brains” and “ears” are just different modes of conscious modeling of an intrinsically monist, i.e. experiential, reality.

The view of consciousness explored here may seem counter-intuitive, yet I have argued elsewhere that using waves as a metaphor can help render it less unintuitive, perhaps even positively intuitive.

April 25, 2018

Resources for Sustainable Activism

“Altruism is a marathon, not a sprint.”

— Attributed to Robert Wiblin

Avoiding burnout is worth prioritizing for activists, both for their own sake and for the sake of those they advocate for. The following is a list of resources that may be useful in this regard.

Melanie Joy:

Sustainable Activism:

How Vegans Can Create Healthy Relationships and Communicate Effectively:

Jonathan Leighton:

Thriving in the Age of Factory Farming

Guided Meditation for Activists:

Paul Bloom and Richard Davidson:

Important and informative conversation about reasons to cultivate compassion rather than empathy:

Here is a playlist with compassion meditations:

Teo Ajantaival:

Positive roles of life and experience in suffering-focused ethics

Michael Bitton:

Investing in Yourself

Nate Soares:

The Replacing Guilt series

Brian Tomasik:

Is Utilitarianism Too Demanding?

Magnus Vinding:

Suffering-focused ethics and the importance of happiness

December 30, 2017

A Contra AI FOOM Reading List

First published: Dec. 2017. Last update: Nov. 2023.

It seems to me that there is a great asymmetry in the attention devoted to arguments in favor of the plausibility of artificial intelligence FOOM/hard takeoff scenarios compared to the attention paid to counterarguments. This is not so strange given that there are widely publicized full-length books emphasizing the arguments in favor, such as Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence and James Barrat’s Our Final Invention, while there seems to be no such book emphasizing the opposite. And people who are skeptical of hard takeoff scenarios, and who think other things are more important to focus on, will of course tend to write books on those other, in their view more important things. Consequently, they devote only an essay or a few blogposts to present their arguments — not full-length books. The purpose of this reading list is to try to correct this asymmetry a bit by pointing people toward some of these blogposts and essays, as well as other resources that present reasons to be skeptical of a hard takeoff scenario.

I think it is important to get these arguments out there, as it seems to me that we otherwise risk having a too one-sided view of this issue, and not least overlooking other things that may be more important to focus on.

I should note that I do not necessarily agree with all claims and arguments made in the resources below. For example, Steven Pinker has made some bad arguments that make FOOM skepticism seem ignorant. Yet I still think that each of the entries below make at least some good points. I should also note that not all the following authors consider a hard takeoff to be extremely unlikely, as opposed to merely considering other scenarios more likely.

Robin Hanson:

Some Skepticism

The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate (co-authored with Eliezer Yudkowsky)

Yudkowsky vs Hanson — Singularity Debate (video)

Two Visions Of Heritage

Distrusting Drama

What Core Argument?

Is The City-ularity Near?

The Betterness Explosion

Meet the new conflict, same as the old conflict: Comment on David Chalmers “The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis”

I Still Don’t Get Foom

Irreducible Detail

This Time Isn’t Different

How Different AGI Software?

Hanson on intelligence explosion, from Age of Em

Brains Simpler Than Brain Cells?

This AI Boom Will Also Bust

Foom Justifies AI Risk Efforts Now

How Deviant Recent AI Progress Lumpiness?

Robin Hanson on AI Skepticism (video)

How Lumpy AI Services?

Robin Hanson on AI Takeoff Scenarios – AI Go Foom? (video)

Decentralized Approaches to AI Presentations (video; also features Eric Drexler and Mark Miller)

Conversation with Robin Hanson

Foom Update

Why Not Wait On AI Risk?

AGI Is Sacred

Robin Hanson on Predicting the Future of Artificial Intelligence (video)

AI Risk, Again

Waiting for the Betterness Explosion (video)

What Are Reasonable AI Fears?

The Optimistic Hansonian Singularity (podcast)

Ramez Naam:

Top Five Reasons ‘The Singularity’ Is A Misnomer

The Singularity is Further Than it Appears

Why AIs Won’t Ascend in the Blink of an Eye – Some Math

Ben Garfinkel:

How sure are we about this AI stuff? (video)

Ben Garfinkel on scrutinising classic AI risk arguments

Does economic history point toward a singularity?

Tim Tyler:

The Intelligence Explosion Is Happening Now

The Singularity Is Nonsense

Against the Singularity

Steven Pinker:

We’re told to fear robots. But why do we think they’ll turn on us?

MIT AGI: AI in the Age of Reason (Steven Pinker) (video)

Steven Pinker and Stuart Russell on the Foundations, Benefits, and Possible Existential Threat of AI

Eric Drexler:

Reframing Superintelligence: Comprehensive AI Services as General Intelligence

Reframing Superintelligence (video)

Brian Tomasik:

Artificial Intelligence and Its Implications for Future Suffering

Artificial general intelligence as a continuation of existing software and societal trends

Jacob Buckman:

Recursively Self-Improving AI Is Already Here

We Aren’t Close To Creating A Rapidly Self-Improving AI

Ben Goertzel:

The Singularity Institute’s Scary Idea (and Why I Don’t Buy It)

Superintelligence: fears, promises, and potentials

David Pearce:

The Biointelligence Explosion (Extended Abstract)

Humans and Intelligent Machines: Co-Evolution, Fusion or Replacement?

J Storrs Hall:

Self-improving AI: an Analysis

Engineering Utopia

Monica Anderson:

Problem Solved: Unfriendly AI

Reduction Considered Harmful

James Fodor:

Critique of Superintelligence (link to first post in a five-part series)

A Critique of AI Takeover Scenarios

David Thorstad:

Against the singularity hypothesis

Theodore Modis:

Why the Singularity Cannot Happen

François Chollet:

The implausibility of intelligence explosion

Rodney Brooks:

The Seven Deadly Sins of Predicting the Future of AI

Katja Grace:

Counterarguments to the basic AI x-risk case

Philippe Aghion, Benjamin F. Jones, & Charles I. Jones:

Artificial Intelligence and Economic Growth

Alessio Plebe & Pietro Perconti:

The slowdown hypothesis (extended abstract)

Max More:

Singularity Meets Economy

Richard Loosemore:

The Maverick Nanny with a Dopamine Drip

Ernest Davis:

Ethical Guidelines for A Superintelligence

AI Impacts:

Likelihood of discontinuous progress around the development of AGI

Sebastian Benthall:

Don’t Fear the Reaper: Refuting Bostrom’s Superintelligence Argument

Paul Christiano:

Takeoff speeds

Scott Aaronson:

The Singularity Is Far

Nicholas Agar:

Don’t Worry about Superintelligence

Maciej Cegłowski:

Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

Timothy B. Lee:

Will artificial intelligence destroy humanity? Here are 5 reasons not to worry.

Neil Lawrence:

Future of AI 6. Discussion of ‘Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies’

Kevin Kelly:

The Myth of a Superhuman AI

Paul Allen:

The Singularity Isn’t Near

Alexander Kruel:

AI Risk Critiques: Index (links to many articles)

John Brockman (editor):

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI

Martin Ford:

Architects of Intelligence: The truth about AI from the people building it

Magnus Vinding (me):

Reflections on Intelligence

Why Altruists Should Perhaps Not Prioritize Artificial Intelligence: A Lengthy Critique

Chimps, Humans, and AI: A Deceptive Analogy

Some reasons not to expect a growth explosion

Two contrasting models of “intelligence” and future growth

Reasons that reduce the probability of extinction from rogue AGI

Short summary and review of Reflections on Intelligence by Kaj Sotala:

Disjunctive AI scenarios: Individual or collective takeoff?

Various:

Tech Luminaries Address Singularity

Perspectives on intelligence explosion

Not directly about the subject but still relevant, in my opinion:

The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

The Ascent of Man

The Evolution of Everything

The Secret of Our Success

Intellectuals and Society

December 16, 2017

Suffering, Infinity, and Universe Anti-Natalism

Questions that concern infinite amounts of value seem worth spending some time contemplating, even if those questions are of a highly speculative nature. For instance, if we assume a general expected value framework of a kind where we evaluate the expected value of a given outcome based on its probability multiplied by its value, then any more than an infinitesimal probability of an outcome that has infinite value would imply that this outcome has infinite expected value. And hence that the expected value of such an outcome would trump that of any outcome with a “mere” finite amount of value.

Therefore, on this framework, even strongly convinced finitists are not exempt from taking seriously the possibility that infinities, of one ethically relevant kind or another, may be real. For however strong a conviction one may hold, maintaining only an infinitesimal probability that infinite value outcomes of some sort could be real seems difficult to defend.

Bounding the Influence of Expected Value Thinking

It is worth making clear, as a preliminary note, that we may reasonably put a bound on how much weight we give such an expected value framework in our ethical deliberations, so as to avoid crazy conclusions and actions; or simply to preserve our sanity, which may also be a priority for some.

In fact, it is easy to point to good reasons for why we should constrain the influence of such a framework on our decisions. For although it seems implausible to entirely reject such an expected value framework in one’s moral reasoning, it would seem equally implausible to consider such a framework complete and exhaustive in itself. One reason being that thinking in terms of expected value is just one way to theorize about the world among many others, and it seems difficult to justify granting it a particularly privileged status among these, especially given a tool-like conception of our thinking: if all our thinking about the world is best thought of as a tool that helps us navigate in the world rather than a set of Platonic ideals that perfectly track truths in a transcendent way, it seems difficult to elevate a single class of these tools, such as thinking in terms of expected value, to a higher status than all others. But also given that we cannot readily put numbers on most things in practice, both due to a lack of time in most real-world situations and because, even when we do have time, the numbers we assign are often bound to be entirely speculative, if at all meaningful in the first place.

Just as we need more than theoretical physics to navigate in the physical world, it seems likely that we will do well to not only rely on an expected value framework to navigate the moral landscape, and this holds true even if all we care about is to maximize or minimize the realization of a certain class of states. Using only a single style of thinking makes us inherently vulnerable to mistakes in our judgments, and hence resting everything on one style of thinking without limits seems risky and unwise.

It therefore seems reasonable to limit the influence of this framework, and indeed any single framework, and one proposed way of doing so is by giving it only a limited number of the seats of one’s notional moral parliament; say, 40 percent of them. In this way, we should be better able to avoid the vulnerabilities of relying on a single framework, while remaining open to being guided by its inputs.

What Can Be the Case?

To get an overview, let us begin by briefly surveying (at least some of) the landscape of the conceivable possibilities concerning the size of the universe. Or, more precisely, the conceivable possibilities concerning the axiological size of the universe. For it is indeed possible, at least abstractly, for the universe to be physically finite, yet axiologically infinite; for instance, if some states of suffering are infinitely disvaluable, then a universe containing one or more of such states would be axiologically infinite, even if physically finite.

In fact, a finite universe containing such states could be worse, indeed infinitely worse, than even a physically infinite universe containing an infinite amount of suffering, if the states of suffering realized in the finite universe are more disvaluable than the infinitely many states of suffering found in the physically infinite universe. (I myself find the underlying axiological claim here more than plausible: that a single instance of certain states of suffering — torture, say — are more disvaluable than infinitely many instances of milder states of suffering, such as pinpricks.)

It is also conceivable that the universe is physically infinite, yet axiologically finite; if, for instance, our axiology is non-additive, if the universe contains only infinitesimal value throughout, or if only a freak bubble of it contains entities of value. This last option may seem impossibly unlikely, yet it is conceivable. Infinity does not imply infinite repetition; the infinite sequence ( 1, 0, 0, 0, … ) does not logically have to contain 1 again, and indeed doesn’t.

In terms of physical size, there are various ways in which infinity can be realized. For instance, the universe may be both temporally and spatially infinite in terms of its extension. Or it may be temporally bounded while spatially infinite in extension, or vice versa: be spatially finite, yet eternal. It should be noted, though, that these two may be considered equivalent, if we view only points in space and time as having value-bearing potential (arguably the only view consistent with physicalism, ultimately), and view space and time as a four-dimensional structure. Then one of these two universes will have infinite “length” and finite “breadth”, while the opposite is true of the other one, and a similar shape can thus be obtained via “90 degree” rotation.

Similarly, it is also conceivable (and perhaps plausible) that the universe has a finite past and an infinite future, in which case it will always have a finite age, or it could have an infinite past and a finite future. Or, equivalently in spatial terms, be bounded in one spatial direction, yet have infinite extension in another.

Yet infinite extension is not the only conceivable way in which physical infinity may conceivably be realized. Indeed, a bounded space can, at least in one sense, contain more elements than an unbounded one, as exemplified by the cardinality of the real numbers in the interval (0, 1) compared to all the natural numbers. So not only might the universe be infinite in terms of extension, but also in terms of its divisibility — i.e. in terms of notional sub-worlds we may encounter as we “zoom down” at smaller scales — which could have far greater significance than infinite extension, at least if we believe we can use cardinality as a meaningful measure of size in concrete reality.

Taking this possibility into consideration as well, we get even more possible combinations — infinitely many, in fact. For example, we can conceive of a universe that is bounded both spatially and temporally, yet which is infinitely divisible. And it can then be infinitely divisible in infinitely many different ways. For instance, it may be divisible in such a way that it has the same cardinality as the natural numbers, i.e. its set of “sub-worlds” is countably infinite, or it could be divisible with the same cardinality as the real numbers, meaning that it consists of uncountably many “sub-worlds”. And given that there is no largest cardinality, we could continue like this ad infinitum.

One way we could try to imagine the notional place of such small worlds in our physical world is by conceiving of them as in some sense existing “below” the Planck scale, each with their own Planck scale below which even more worlds exist, ad infinitum. Many more interesting examples of different kinds of combinations of the possibilities reviewed so far could be mentioned.

Another conceivable, yet supremely speculative, possibility worth contemplating is that the size of the universe is not set in stone, and that it may be up to us/the universe itself to determine whether it will be infinite, and what “kind” of infinity.

Lastly, it is also conceivable that the size of the universe, both in physical and axiological terms, cannot faithfully be conceived of with any concept available to us. So although the conceivable possibilities are infinite, it remains conceivable that none of them are “right” in any meaningful sense.

What Is the Case? — Infinite Uncertainty?

Unfortunately, we do not know whether the universe is infinite or not; or, more generally, which of the possibilities mentioned above that are true of our condition. And there are reasons to think that we will never know with great confidence. For even if we were to somehow encounter a boundary encapsulating our universe, or otherwise find strong reasons for believing in one, how could we possibly exclude that there might not be something beyond that boundary? (Not to mention that the universe might still be infinitely divisible even if bounded.) Or, alternatively, even if we thought we had good reasons to believe that our universe is infinite, how can we be sure that the limited data we base that conclusion on can be generalized to locations arbitrarily far away from us? (This is essentially the problem of induction.)

Yet even if we thought we did know whether the universe is infinite with great confidence, the situation would arguably not be much different. For if we accept the proposition that we should have more than infinitesimal credence in any empirical claim about the world, what is known as Cromwell’s rule (I have argued that this applies to all claims, not just [stereotypically] “empirical” claims), then, on our general expected value framework, it would seem that any claim about the reality of infinite value outcomes should always be taken seriously, regardless of our specific credences in specific physical and axiological models of the universe.

In fact, not only should the conceivable realizations of infinity reviewed above be taken seriously (at least to the extent that they imply outcomes with infinite (dis)value), but so should a seemingly even more outrageous notion, namely that infinite (dis)value may be at stake in any given action we take. However small a non-zero real-valued probability we assign such a claim — e.g. that the way you prepare your coffee tomorrow morning is going to impact an infinite amount of (dis)value — the expected value of getting the, indeed any, given action right remains infinite.

How should we act in light of this outrageous possibility?

Pascallian and Counter-Pascallian Claims

The problem, or perhaps our good fortune, is that, in most cases arguably, we do not seem to have reason to believe that one course of action is more likely to have an infinitely better outcome than another. For example, in the case of the morning coffee, we appear to have no more reason to believe that, say, making a strong cup of coffee will lead to infinitely more disvalue than making a mild one will, rather than it being the other way around. For such hypotheses, we seem able to construct an equal and oppositely directed counter-hypothesis.

Yet even if we concede that this is the case most of the time, what about situations where this is not the case? What about choices where we do have slightly better reasons to believe that one outcome will be infinitely better than another one?

This is difficult to address in the absence of any concrete hypotheses or scenarios, so I shall here consider the two specific cases, or classes of scenarios, where a plausible reason may be given in favor of thinking that one course of action will influence infinitely more value than another. One is the case of an eternal civilization: our actions may impact infinite (dis)value by impacting whether, and in what form, an eternal civilization will exist in our universe.

In relation to the (extremely unlikely) prospect of the existence of such a civilization, it seems that we could well find reasons to believe that we can impact an infinite amount of value. But the crucial question is: how? From the perspective of negative utilitarianism, it is far from clear what outcomes are most likely to be infinitely better than others. This is especially true in light of the other class of ways in which we may plausibly impact infinite value that I shall consider here, namely by impacting the creation of, or the unfolding of events in, parallel universes, which may eventually be infinitely numerous.

For not only could an eternal civilization that is the descendant of ours be better in “our universe” than another eternal civilization that may emerge in our place if we go extinct; it could also be better with respect to its effects on the creation of parallel universes, in which case it may be best for negative utilitarians to work to preserve our civilization, contrary to what is commonly considered the ultimate corollary of negative utilitarianism. Indeed, this could be the case even if no other civilization were to emerge instead of ours: if the impact our civilization will have on other universes results in less suffering than what would otherwise be created naturally. It is, of course, also likely that the opposite is the case: that the continuation of our civilization would be worse than another civilization or no civilization.

So in these cases where reasons pointing more in one way than another plausibly could be found, it is not clear which direction that would be. Except perhaps in the direction that we should do more research on this question: which actions are more likely to reduce infinitely more suffering than others? Indeed, from the point of view of a suffering-focused expected value framework, it would seem that this should be our highest priority.

Ignoring Small Credences?

In his paper on infinite ethics, Nick Bostrom argues that it is extraordinarily unlikely that we would end up with perfectly balanced credences when one choice might have infinitely better consequences than another:

This cancellation of probabilities would have to be perfectly accurate, down to the nineteenth decimal place and beyond. […]

It would seem almost miraculous if these motley factors, which could be subjectively correlated with infinite outcomes, always managed to conspire to cancel each other out without remainder. Yet if there is a remainder—if the balance of epistemic probability happens to tip ever so slightly in one direction—then the problem of fanaticism remains with undiminished force. Worse, its force might even be increased in this situation, for if what tilts the balance in favor of a seemingly fanatical course of action is the merest hunch rather than any solid conviction, then it is so much more counterintuitive to claim that we ought to pursue it in spite of any finite sacrifice doing so may entail. The “exact-cancellation” argument threatens to backfire catastrophically.

I do not happen to share Bostrom’s view, however. Apart from the aforementioned bounding of the influence of expected value thinking, there are also ways to avoid such apparent craziness of letting our actions rest on the slightest hunch from within the expected value framework: disregarding sufficiently low credences.

Bostrom is skeptical of this approach:

As a piece of pragmatic advice, the notion that we should ignore small probabilities is often sensible. Being creatures of limited cognitive capacities, we do well by focusing our attention on the most likely outcomes. Yet even common sense recognizes that whether a possible outcome can be ignored for the sake of simplifying our deliberations depends not only on its probability but also on the magnitude of the values at stake. The ignorable contingencies are those for which the product of likelihood and value is small. If the value in question is infinite, even improbable contingencies become significant according to common sense criteria. The postulation of an exception from these criteria for very low-likelihood events is, at the very least, theoretically ugly.

Yet Bostrom here seems to ignore that “the value in question” is infinite for every action, cf. the point that we should maintain some non-zero credence in any empirical claim, including the claim that any given action may effect an infinite amount of (dis)value.

So no action we can point toward is fundamentally different from any other in this respect. The only difference is just whether one action might be more likely to be infinitely better compared to any other action. And when it comes to such credences, I would argue that it is reasonable to ignore sufficiently small probabilities.

First, one could argue that, just as most models of physics break down beyond a certain range, it is reasonable to expect that our ability to discriminate between different credence levels breaks down when we reach a sufficiently fine scale. This is also well in line with the fact that it is generally difficult to put precise numbers on our credence levels with respect to specific claims. Thus, one could argue that we are typically way past the range of error of our intuitive credences when we reach the nineteenth decimal place.

This conclusion can also be reached via a rather different consideration: one can argue that our entire ontological and epistemological framework itself cannot be assumed credible with absolute certainty. Therefore, it would seem that our entire worldview, including this framework of assigning numerical values, or indeed any order at all, to our credences, should itself be assigned some credence of being wrong. And one can then argue, quite reasonably, that once we reach a level of credence in any claim that is lower than our level of credence in, say, the meaningfulness of ascribing credences in this way in the first place, this specific credence should generally be ignored, as it lies beyond what we consider the range of reliability of this framework in the first place.

In sum, I think it is fair to say that, when we only have a tiny credence that some action may be infinitely better than another, we should do more research and look for better reasons to act on rather than to act on these hunches. We can reasonably ignore exceptionally small credences in practice, as we already do every time we make a decision based on calculations of finite expected values — we then ignore the tiny credence we should have that the value of the outcomes in question is infinite.

Infinitarian Paralysis?

Another thing Bostrom treats in his paper is whether the existence of infinite value implies, on aggregative consequentialist views, that it makes no difference what we do. As he puts it:

Aggregative consequentialist theories are threatened by infinitarian paralysis: they seem to imply that if the world is canonically infinite then it is always ethically indifferent what we do. In particular, they would imply that it is ethically indifferent whether we cause another holocaust or prevent one from occurring. If any non-contradictory normative implication is a reductio ad absurdum, this one is.

To elaborate a bit: the reason it is supposed to be indifferent whether we cause another holocaust is that the net sum of value in the universe supposedly is the same either way: infinite.

It should be noted, though, that whether this really is a problem depends on how we define and calculate the “sum of value”. And the question is then whether we can define this in a meaningful way that avoids absurdities and provides us with a useful ethical framework we can act on.

A potential solution to this conundrum is to give up our attachment to cardinal arithmetic. In a way, this is obvious: if you have an infinite set and add finitely many elements to it, you still have “the same as before”, in terms of the cardinality of the set. Yet, in another sense, we of course do not get “the same as before”, in that the new infinite set is not identical to the one we had before. Therefore, if we insist that adding another holocaust to a universe that already contains infinitely many holocausts should make a difference, we are simply forced to abandon standard cardinal arithmetic. In its stead, we should arguably just take our requirement as an axiom: that adding any amount of value to an infinity of value does make a difference — that it does change the “sum of value”.

This may seem simplistic, and one may reasonably ask how this “sum of value” could be defined. A simple answer is that we could add up whatever (presumably) finite difference we make within the larger (hypothetically) infinite world, and to then consider that the relevant sum of value that should determine our actions, what has been referred to as “the causal approach” to this problem.

This approach has been met with various criticisms, one of them being that it leaves “the total sum of value” unchanged. As Bostrom puts it:

One consequence of the causal approach is that there are cases in which you ought to do something, and ought to not do something else, even though you are certain that neither action would have any effect at all on the total value of the world.

Yet it is worth noting that “the total value of the world” is not left unchanged on every definition of these terms; it just is on one particular definition, one that we arguably have good reason to consider implausible, since it implies that adding another holocaust makes no difference to the “total value of the world”. If we can help alleviate the extreme suffering of just a single being, while keeping all else equal, this being will hardly agree that “the total value of the world” was left unchanged by our actions, at least in the most plausible sense.

Imagine by analogy a hypothetical Earth identical to ours, with the two exceptions that 1) it has been inhabited by humans for an eternal and unalterable past, over which infinitely many holocausts have taken place, and 2) it has a finite future; the universe it inhabits will end peacefully in a hundred years. Now, if people on this Earth held an ethical theory that does not take its unalterable infinite past into account, and instead focuses on the finite future, including preventing holocausts from happening in their future, would this count against that theory in any way? I fail to see how it could, and yet this is essentially the same as taking the causal approach within an infinite universe, only phrased in purely temporal rather than spatio-temporal terms.

Another criticism that has been leveled against the causal approach is that we cannot rule out that our causal impact may in some sense be infinite, and therefore it is problematic to say that we should just measure the world’s value, and take action based on, whatever finite difference we make. Here is Bostrom again:

When a finite positive probability is assigned to scenarios in which it is possible for us to exert a causal effect on an infinite number of value-bearing locations […] then the expectation value of the causal changes that we can make is undefined. Paralysis will thus strike even when the domain of aggregation is restricted to our causal sphere of influence.

Yet these claims actually do not follow. First, it should again be noted that the situation Bostrom refers to here is in fact the situation we are always in: we should always assign a positive probability to the possibility that we may effect infinite (dis)value. Second, we should be clear that the scenario where we can impact an infinite amount of value, and where we aggregate over the realm we can influence, is fundamentally different from the scenario in which we aggregate over an infinite universe that contains an infinite amount of value that we cannot impact. To the extent there are threats of “infinitarian paralysis” in these two scenarios, they are not identical.

For example, Bostrom’s claim that “the expectation value of the causal changes that we can make is undefined” need not be true even on standard cardinal arithmetic, at least in the abstract (i.e. if we ignore Cromwell’s rule), in the scenario where we focus only on our own future light cone. For it could be that the scenarios in which we can “exert a causal effect on an infinite number of value-bearing locations” were all scenarios that nonetheless contained only finite (dis)value, or, on a dipolar axiology, only a finite amount of disvalue and an infinite amount of value. A concrete example of the latter could be a scenario where the abolitionist project outlined by David Pearce is completed in an eternal civilization after a finite amount of time.

Hence, it is not necessarily the case that “paralysis will strike even when the domain of aggregation is restricted to our causal sphere of influence”, apart from in the sense treated earlier, when we factor in Cromwell’s rule: how should we act given that all actions may effect infinite (dis)value? But again, this is a very different kind of “paralysis” than the one that appears to be Bostrom’s primary concern, cf. this excerpt from the abstract of his paper Infinite Ethics:

Modern cosmology teaches that the world might well contain an infinite number of happy and sad people and other candidate value-bearing locations. Aggregative ethics implies that such a world contains an infinite amount of positive value and an infinite amount of negative value. You can affect only a finite amount of good or bad. In standard cardinal arithmetic, an infinite quantity is unchanged by the addition or subtraction of any finite quantity.

Indeed, one can argue that the “Cromwell paralysis” in a sense negates this latter paralysis, as it implies that it may not be true that we can affect only a finite amount of good or bad, and, more generally, that we should assign a non-zero probability to the claim that we can optimize the value of the universe everywhere throughout, including in those corners that seem theoretically inaccessible.

Adding Always Makes a Difference

As for the infinitarian paralysis supposed to threaten the causal approach in the absence of the “Cromwell paralysis” — how to compare the outcomes we can impact that contain infinite amounts of value? — it seems that we can readily identify reasonable consequentialist principles to act by that should at least allow us to compare some actions and outcomes against each other, including, perhaps, the most relevant ones.

One such principle is the one alluded to in the previous section: that adding something of (dis)value always makes a difference, even if the notional set we are adding it to contains infinitely many similar elements already. In terms of an axiology that holds the amount of suffering in the world to be the chief measure of value, this principle would hold that adding/failing to prevent an instance of suffering always makes for a less valuable outcome, provided that other things are equal, which they of course never quite are in the real world, yet they often are in expectation.

The following abstract example makes, I believe, a strong case for favoring such a measure of (dis)value over the cardinal sum of the units of (dis)value. As I formulate this thought experiment, this unit will, in accordance with my own view, be instances of intense suffering in the universe, yet the point applies generally:

Imagine that we have a universe with a countably infinite amount of instances of intense suffering. We may visualize this universe as a unit ball. Now imagine that we perform an act in this universe that leaves the original universe unchanged, yet creates a new universe identical to the first one. The result is a new universe full of suffering. Imagine next that we perform this same act in a world where nothing exists. The result is exactly the same: the creation of a new universe full of suffering, in the exact same amount. In both cases, we have added exactly the same ball of infinite suffering. Yet on standard cardinal arithmetic, the difference the act makes in terms of the sum of instances of suffering is not the same in the two cases. In the first case, the total sum is the same, namely countably infinite, while there is an infinite difference in the second case: from zero to infinity. If we only count the difference added, however— the “delta universe”, so to speak— the acts are equally disvaluable in the two cases. The latter method of evaluating the (dis)value of the act seems far more plausible than does evaluation based on the cardinal sum of the units of (dis)value in the universe. It is, after all, the exact same act.

This is not an idle thought experiment. As noted above, impacting the creation of new universes is one of the ways in which we may plausibly be able to influence an infinite amount of (dis)value, arguably even the most plausible one. Admittedly, it does rest on certain debatable assumptions about physics, yet these assumptions are arguably likely than is the possibility of the existence of an eternal civilization. For even disregarding specific civilization hostile facts about the universe (e.g. the end of stars and a rapid expansion of space that is thought to eventually rip ordinary matter apart), we should, for each year in the future, assign a probability strictly lower than 1 that civilization will go extinct that year, which means that the probability of extinction will be arbitrarily close to 1 within a finite amount of time.

In other words, an eternal civilization seems immensely unlikely, even if the universe were to stay perfectly life-friendly forever. The same does not seem true of the prospect of influencing the generation of new universes. As far as I can tell, the latter is in a ballpark of its own when it comes to plausible ways in which we may be able to effect infinite (dis)value, which is not to say that universe creation is more likely than not to become possible, but merely that it seems significantly more likely than other ways we know of in which we could effect infinite (dis)value (though, again, our knowledge of “such ways” is admittedly limited at this point, and something we should probably do more research on). Not only that, it is also something that could be relevant in the relatively near future, and more disvalue could depend on a single such near-future act of universe creation than what is found, intrinsically at least, in the entire future of our civilization. Infinitely more, in fact. Thus, one could argue that it is not our impact on the quality of life of future generations in our civilization that matters most in expectation, but our impact on the generation of universes by our civilization.

Universe Anti-Natalism: The Most Important Cause?

It is therefore not unthinkable that this should be the main question of concern for consequentialists: how does this impact the creation of new universes? Or, similarly, that trying to impact future universe generation should be the main cause for aspiring effective altruists. And I would argue that the form this cause should take is universe anti-natalism: avoiding, or minimizing, the creation of new universes.

There are countless ways to argue for this. As Brian Tomasik notes, creating a new universe that in turn gives rise to infinitely many universes “would cause infinitely many additional instances of the Holocaust, infinitely many acts of torture, and worse. Creating lab universes would be very bad according to several ethical views.”

Such universe creation would obviously be wrong from the stance of negative utilitarianism, as well as from similar suffering-focused views. It would also be wrong according to what is known as The Asymmetry in population ethics: that creating beings with bad lives is wrong, and something we have an obligation to not do, while failing to create happy lives is not wrong, and we have no obligation to bring such lives into being. A much weaker, and even less controversial, stance on procreative ethics could also be used: do not create lives with infinite amounts of torture.

Indeed, how, we must ask ourselves, could a benevolent being justify bringing so much suffering into being? What could possibly justify the Holocaust, let alone infinitely many of them? What would be our answer to the screams of “why” to the heavens from the torture victims?

Universe anti-natalism should also be taken seriously by classical utilitarians, as a case can be made that the universe is likely to end up being net negative in terms of algo-hedonic tone. For instance, it may well be that most sentient life that will ever exist will find itself in a state of natural carnage, as civilizations may be rare even on planets where sentient life has emerged, and because even where civilizations have emerged, it may be that they are unlikely to be sustainable, perhaps overwhelmingly so, implying that most sentient life might be expected to exist at the stage it has existed on for the entire history of sentient life on Earth. A stage where sentient beings are born in great numbers only for the vast majority of them to die shortly thereafter, for instance due to starvation or by being eaten alive, which is most likely a net negative condition, even by wishful classical utilitarian standards. Simon Knutsson’s essay How Could an Empty World Be Better than a Populated One? is worth reading in this context, and of course applies to “no world” as well.

And if one takes a so-called meta-normative approach, where one decides by averaging over various ethical theories, one could argue that the case against universe creation becomes significantly stronger; if one for instance combines an unclear or negative-leaning verdict from a classical utilitarian stance with The Asymmetry and Kantian ethics.

As for those who hold anti-natalism at the core of their values, one could argue that they should make universe anti-natalism their main focus over human anti-natalism (which may not even reduce suffering in expectation), or at the very least expand their focus to also encompass this apparently esoteric position. Not only because the scale is potentially unsurpassable in terms of what prevents the most births, but it may also be easier, both because wishful thinking about “those horrors will not befall my creation” could be more difficult to maintain in the face of horrors that we know have occurred in the past, and because we do not seem as attached and adapted, biologically and culturally, to creating new universes as we are to creating new children. And just as anti-natalists argue with respect to human life, being against the creation of new universes need not be incompatible with a responsible sustainment of life in the one that does exist. This might also be a compromise solution that many people would be able to agree on.

Are Other Things Equal?

The discussion above assumes that the generation of a new universe would leave all else equal, or at least leave all else merely “finitely altered”. But how can we be sure that the generation of a new universe would not in fact prevent the emergence of another? Or perhaps even prevent many infinite universes from emerging? We can’t. Yet we do not appear to have any reason for believing that this is the case. As noted above, all else will often be equal in expectation, and that also seems true in this case. We can make counter-Pascallian hypotheses in both directions, and in the absence of evidence for any of them, we appear to have most reason to believe that the creation of a new universe results, in the aggregate, in a net addition of a new universe. But this could of course be wrong.

For instance, artificial universe creation would be dwarfed by the natural universe generation that happens all the time according to inflationary models, so could it not be that the generation of a new universe might prevent some of these natural ones from occurring? I doubt that there are compelling reasons for believing this, but natural universe generation does raise the interesting question of whether we might be able to reduce the rate of this generation. Brian Tomasik has discussed the idea, yet it remains an open, and virtually unexplored, research question. One that could dominate all other considerations.

It may be objected that considerations of identical, or virtually identical, copies of ourselves throughout the universe have been omitted in this discussion, yet as far as I can tell, including such considerations would not change the discussion in a fundamental way. For if universe generation is the main cause and most consequential action to focus on for us, more important even than the intrinsic importance of the entire future of our civilization, then this presumably applies to each copy of ourselves as well. Yet I am curious to hear arguments that suggest otherwise.

A final miscellaneous point I should like to add here is that the points made above may apply even if the universe is, and only ever will be, finite, as the generation of a new finite pocket universe in that case still could bring about far more suffering than what is found in the future light cone of our own universe.

In conclusion, the subjects of the potential to effect infinite (dis)value in general, and of impacting universe generation in particular, are extremely neglected at this point, and a case can be made that more research into such possibilities should be a top priority. It seems conceivable that a question related to such a prospect — e.g. should we create more universes? — will one day be the main ethical question facing our civilization, perhaps even one we will be forced to decide upon in a not too distant future. Given the potentially enormous stakes, it seems worth being prepared for such scenarios — including knowing more about their nature, how likely they are, and how to best act in them — even if they are unlikely.

December 1, 2017

Notes on the Utility of Anti-Speciesist Advocacy

I recently took part in a panel discussion, alongside Leah Edgerton, Tobias Leenaert, Oscar Horta, and Jens Tuider (moderator), on whether animal advocates should focus on veganism or anti-speciesism (I’ve outlined my own view here). In my opinion, the discussion went well, not least because there was a sense of a shared underlying goal among the panelists, as well as a high level of intellectual openness, humility, and friendliness.

Unfortunately, yet predictably, the limited time available for each person to speak in such a panel discussion meant that I didn’t get to make half of the points I wanted to. And given that I had these unshared points written down already, it seemed worthwhile to publish them here for everyone to read.

Main Points: Scale and Receptivity

Two main points in favor of anti-speciesist advocacy that I did get to make, albeit briefly, have to do with scale and receptivity. In terms of scale, anti-speciesist advocacy is better than vegan advocacy, as well as other forms of advocacy that focus only on beings exploited by humans, in that it pertains to all non-human animals, including those who live in nature.

At an intuitive level, this may seem like a small point in favor of anti-speciesist advocacy. “+1 to anti-speciesist advocacy for being better in terms of scale.” Yet to think in this way is to fail to appreciate the actual numbers. Just as the much greater number of “farm animals” compared to the number of “pets” is a huge rather than small point in favor of focusing on the former rather than the latter in our advocacy, the much greater number of beings that anti-speciesist advocacy pertains to is an extremely significant point in its favor.

This analogy actually understates the disparity in numbers, as there are less than a hundred times as many “farm animals” as there are “pets”, while the number of wild animals is about a thousand times greater than the number of “farm animals”. A thousand times is a lot, and yet this is only counting vertebrates; the number is much greater if we include invertebrates in our considerations as well, as we should. In other words, if we include invertebrates in our considerations, it becomes clear that the analogy to the ratio between “farm animals” and “pets” is actually a strong understatement. Yet our intuitions have a hard time appreciating such big numbers. Especially when the beings in question live in nature.

Thus, in terms of scale, the actions of many aspiring effective animal advocates may be more akin to donations to local animal shelters than they would like to think. This is not surprising. We humans are notorious group thinkers, and the animal movement has traditionally focused only on beings exploited by humans. Consequently, we should expect this history to bias us strongly toward that focus (objections such as “we should focus on beings exploited by humans first” may be found answered here and here).

The other main point in favor of anti-speciesist advocacy has to do with people’s receptivity toward such advocacy. In light of the above, one may think “sure, anti-speciesist advocacy is best in terms of scale, but will people be receptive to such advocacy? Isn’t it too abstract?”

This is an empirical question, and more research on it is sorely needed. Yet there are at least tentative reasons for thinking that people are in fact receptive to such advocacy, perhaps even more so than toward most other forms of advocacy. One line of evidence comes from Oscar Horta, who has delivered talks on speciesism and conducted surveys after these talks, which suggested that, surprisingly, “most people who attended these talks accepted the arguments against speciesism.” Horta made more interesting findings than this, including that a focus on speciesism may be the best way to promote veganism, yet given that I have already reported on some of these findings elsewhere, and linked to his own summary of the findings, I shall not delve further into it here.

Another line of evidence comes from a study conducted by Vegan Outreach in 2016, in which they tested four different booklets against each other, one of which focused on the case against speciesism (another one was centered around a “reduce your consumption” message, another on the harms that “farm animals” suffer), and then examined which of them led to the greatest reduction in consumption of “animal products”. The results, in a nutshell, were that all the booklets caused a significant reduction in such consumption among readers, and that the booklet that focused on speciesism did the best of all the booklets, although the difference was not statistically significant.

In light of this (admittedly limited) data, we have reasons to think that, even if our only goal were to make people reduce their consumption of “animal products”, focusing on the case against speciesism is at least roughly as good as other, more traditional forms of advocacy.

And yet such a narrow focus cannot be defended. As I also argued during the panel discussion, we have an unfortunate tendency in our movement to view “total consumption of animal products” as a good measure of the quality of the (non-human) sentient condition on the planet, or at least of “how good we’re doing”. It is not. It only says something about a tiny fraction of the non-human beings on the planet, and we cannot defend excluding the rest, i.e. wild animals, in our considerations.

In conclusion, when we combine these two considerations — a much greater scope in terms of the number of beings our advocacy pertains to, as well as a level of receptivity toward anti-speciesist advocacy that seems at least as good as that of other forms of advocacy — we seem to have good reason to focus on anti-speciesist advocacy. And if we then factor in the neglectedness of such advocacy compared to the forms of advocacy and tactics we have traditionally been pursuing, including technological innovations such as in vitro meat, which has millions of US dollars in funding, the case becomes stronger still.

Objections Against Anti-Speciesist Advocacy

But What About the Tractability of the Problem of Suffering in Nature?

While it is true that anti-speciesist advocacy seems optimal in terms of scale because it also includes wild-animal suffering, one may object that the tractability of suffering in nature has been left out of the picture in this analysis.

In response, one can say that, given that the number of wild animals is more than a thousand times that of “farmed animals”, it would seem that the tractability of farm-animal suffering would have to be more than a thousand times greater (to the extent we can meaningfully say such a thing) than the tractability of wild-animal suffering in order for it to make sense to focus almost exclusively on the former (as the animal movement currently does). I do not think that is a reasonable view.

Moreover, the preceding framing makes it appear as though we must choose one over the other. Yet this is a false choice. Anti-speciesist advocacy defends both “farmed” and “wild” animals, and, as seen above, it may be as successful with regard to the former as other forms of advocacy. Again, in light of the notes on receptivity above, one could make a case that we should focus on anti-speciesist advocacy even if we only cared about the wrongs done to beings exploited by humans.

Similarly, even if there were a strong conflict between focusing on “wild” versus “farm” animals, and even if suffering in nature indeed were a thousand times as intractable as suffering caused by direct human exploitation, the much greater neglectedness of wild-animal suffering would still count as a strong reason in favor of doing advocacy that pertains to such suffering, as anti-speciesist advocacy does.

I Don’t Think Wild Animals Have Net Negative Lives

Opposing discrimination against individuals in nature in general, and defending the claim that we should help them to the extent we can in particular, does not rest on the claim that such beings live net negative lives, any more than the claim that we should not discriminate against other human individuals, and help them when we can, rests on the claim that such humans have net negative lives.

(That being said, I have made a theoretical case for wildlife anti-natalism here, in which I argue that merely applying a non-speciesist position on procreative ethics implies that we should, in theory/if we can keep other things equal, prevent the births of the vast majority of non-human individuals in nature. More than that, I think we do tend to significantly underestimate how bad most lives in nature in fact are.)

Another point I would make in response to this claim is that even on the conservative assumption that only one in ten non-human individuals in nature have lives as bad as the average non-human individual cursed to live out their life on a factory farm, the big difference in terms of the number of beings in nature versus on factory farms still implies that there is more than a hundred times as many non-human beings living very bad lives in nature than there is on factory farms, meaning that even given such a relatively small “concentration of suffering” in nature, the greatest opportunity for reducing the most total suffering still lies here.

Isn’t Anti-Speciesism too Abstract?

More specifically: don’t we risk turning people off by seeming to claim that, say, a mosquito has the same moral value as an elephant?

I would make a few distinct points in response to this objection. First, to the extent this is a problem, we can say that anti-speciesism does not imply that all beings should be prioritized equally, just as total opposition to discrimination within the human species does not imply that, say, a human fetus has the same moral value as an adult human individual. The specific traits of a being do matter, and anti-speciesism does not demand us to overlook these differences, but rather to prioritize equal interests equally.

Second, I would argue that, to the extent anti-speciesism promotes more concern for smaller beings compared to other forms of advocacy, this is actually one of its main strengths rather than a weakness, as we generally underestimate the moral value of small beings. One way to see this is to consider the numbers. If we take fish, for instance, it is estimated that there are 10,000 times as many fish on the planet as there are humans, yet fish do not tend to weigh correspondingly strongly on our moral scale, even among animal advocates.

And if we consider invertebrates, our focus seems even more misaligned still, as it is estimated that there are about ten quintillion insects on the planet, ten to the power of nineteen, and yet we fail to take them seriously in moral terms for the most part. One might then object that the number of beings is not a good measure of moral value. Rather, one may argue, we should look at the total number of neurons for a better measure. Yet even if we adopt this as a proxy for moral value, the moral weight of the insect realm still appears staggering, as there are, on a rough estimate at least, a hundred times more insect neurons on the planet than there are human neurons.

(I am not claiming that “number of neurons” is a perfect proxy for moral value by any means, but merely that no matter which of these simple measures we use, we appear to underestimate small beings a lot; Brian Tomasik’s Is Brain Size Morally Relevant? is quite apropos here, although I should note that I disagree with his view of consciousness.)

Why we underestimate smaller beings is a question worth pondering, I think, and I believe we can readily identify at least three reasons. First, small beings, such as fish and insects, tend to be more numerous, which makes greater moral concern for them inconvenient, and we are generally biased against inconvenient updates. Second, smaller beings are generally very different from us in terms of what their bodies look like, which makes it more difficult to empathize with them, even disregarding the size difference. For instance, feeling empathy for a chimpanzee-sized insect or fish seems more challenging than feeling it for a chimpanzee. Third, the size difference itself seems likely to make us more biased against smaller beings as well. Compare the difficulty of feeling compassion for a normal-sized chimpanzee versus feeling it for an ant-sized chimpanzee. Or for a lobster versus an ant; the latter reportedly has more than twice as many neurons as the former.

Another distinct point I would make in relation to this objection is that the case against speciesism is very similar, in terms of its form, to the case against racism, and most people seem to accept the latter today, implying that there may be much ready potential we can tap into here. The argument against racism does not seem too intellectually advanced for most people, which provides an additional reason to question the intuitive assumption that the case against speciesism necessarily must be too advanced or abstract for most people to follow it (along with the non-peer-reviewed studies cited above that tentatively suggest the same). More than that, the philosophical case against speciesism also happens to be exceptionally strong, much stronger than we animal advocates tend to realize — the literature that argues in favor of speciesism is surprisingly thin and weak — and I think we ignore this strength at our peril. We have a powerful tool at our disposal that we refuse to employ.

Anti-Speciesism Is Often Better than (Naive) Consequentialist Calculations

If one is a wannabe consequentialist rationalist, it is easy to be misguided about where much of our moral wisdom comes from, by imagining that we have gained it via clever deductive consequentialist analyses. Yet for the most part, this is not the case. Our rejection of racism today, for instance, is mostly due to cultural evolution, including lessons from history, that has accumulated gradually; it has not primarily been due to consequentialist arguments (to the extent arguments have played a crucial role, it seems to me that they have rather rested on consistency). As a result, we have now arrived upon a moral wisdom that is deeper, I believe, than what a simple chain of consequentialist reasoning could have readily produced prior to this cultural change (after all, how would you make a solid consequentialist case that human slavery is wrong? It is not easy. And if you can, would it apply equally to the property status of non-human individuals? If not, why?).

And I think the same applies to anti-speciesism: it tends to be wiser than naive consequentialist analyses. It provides us with a free download of the full package of the moral progress we have made over the last few centuries with respect to human individuals, ready for us apply to non-human individuals by simply using the heuristic “what would we do if they were human?” With this package installed, we can quickly gain wise views on many ethical issues pertaining to non-human beings, including veganism and “happy meat” — it provides a clear case for and against them respectively. One could be forced to spend a long time arguing for these conclusions otherwise, if one were to insist on employing directly consequentialist arguments, even though these conclusions arguably are what a complete consequentialist analysis would recommend (I believe Brian Tomasik would mostly disagree, although he would do so for complicated reasons).

New Information: Have We Updated Sufficiently?

Something I think we should be wary of is when we build up our views on a given issue over a long period of time, and then encounter a new piece of information that makes us change our outlook completely, yet without properly updating our views and attitudes.

To be more concrete: I think many animal advocates have spent a lot of time thinking hard about how to best advocate for non-human animals so as to reduce their suffering as much as possible. Unfortunately, what they have been thinking hard about has chiefly concerned what we should do in order to reduce the suffering of non-human beings exploited by humans, and they have then built up their preferred strategy for advocating for non-human individuals based on this outlook. A positive thing that has then happened is that they have become convinced of the importance of wild-animal suffering.

This has changed the outlook of these advocates in some ways, yet it seems to me that their preferred strategy in terms of advocacy has remained suspiciously unchanged, which should give them pause. We have had our minds expanded by this piece of information that changes everything: the vast majority of beings is not found in the realm we have been focusing on for all these years. Yet the ideal form of advocacy somehow remains largely the same as before we came upon this information.

In conclusion, I would encourage all animal advocates to reflect on whether they have properly factored in the importance of wild-animal suffering in their current view of the best advocacy strategies and tactics. As far as I can tell, virtually none of us have.

October 24, 2017