Philosophy hand signals

Courtesy of Brian Leiter, the APA Philosophy Referee Handsignals. I now want someone to make these into semaphore format. And for Sam Harris:

On the problem of the problem of evil and Darwin

In yet another essay reprising his argument that theists can be good Darwinians (a position I concur with, incidentally), Michael Ruse makes the following comment, based on a book by Karl Giberson and Francis Collins, The Language of Science and Faith: Straight Answers to Genuine Questions:

Where I do want to defend Giberson and Collins is over the problem of evil. Let me say that I am not sure that the problem of evil — how could a loving, all powerful God allow evil — can be solved. I am with the chap in the Brothers Karamazov who said that even if everything is good in the end, the cost is not worth it. My salvation, Mother Teresa’s salvation, is not worth the agony of Anne Frank and her sister in Bergen-Belsen. It just isn’t. But I am not sure that biology, Darwinian evolutionary biology, exacerbates it.

Nor am I, but for more general reasons than Ruse gives. The Problem of Evil, as it is usually referred to, is very widely debated and has been since Epicurus (see this excellent article at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Michael Tooley). There are all kinds of positions taken, from incompatibilist arguments against the existence of God, through to arguments that this state of affairs is a tradeoff for a greater good that is the best possible outcome. How theists resolve this is to me beside the point; that they must is not. Evil exists, so if you believe in a “tri-omni” deity (omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent), you had better find a reconciliation. I happen to think, as a matter of logic, there is none.

But now consider whether or not Darwinian evolution is incompatible with that kind of theism (there are many others that are not vulnerable to the PoE, in which gods are not one of the tri-omni kind), any more than anything else. For example, if we accept that the universe is not deterministic, and has some irreducible randomness in it, as modern physics appears to claim, then why is Darwinian evolution any more problematic than physics? If we accept the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, is God any more able to know the world than we are? And so forth. All of modern science presents a challenge to tri-omni deities. Hence, weather, subatomic physics, and even logic itself present limitations upon the tri-omni deity. Darwin is at best a local sideshow exemplifying this on the crust of one planet of the universe – essentially Darwinian evolution is almost none of the problem for theism, as it applies to a domain less than 1 part in 1.3 to the power of 41 of the universe, by my calculations.

Moreover, consider this: when you are dealing with exclusive infinities, a single counterinstance is sufficient to make the claim false. If God is all-something and therefore the existence of a single thing is contrary to God’s being that property, then that is enough to show God is not like that. The suffering of one single organism with a neural system gives you the problem. “Nature red in tooth and claw” is just banging on the point. Even if the biosphere were largely harmonious as the older natural theologies insisted, it would not matter. God is not Good if a single worm is in pain, no matter how good the tradeoff. It doesn’t matter if mutations are random when the appearance of quantum foam and the decay of radioactive isotopes is. Complain to Bohr and Rutherford, not Darwin.

So, you theists, stop worrying about Darwin and start worrying about physics, ecology and physiology. Darwin is just piling on. You have bigger fish to fry.

Descartes before the horse – does information exist?

I have been kind of busy with actual, you know, work, which is ironic because I do not actually have, you know, employment. But I am teaching. Anyway this is by way of being an apology and apologia for not having posted lately. Be assured much Wilkinsy goodness is being done behind the scenes.

So my text for today is John Horgan’s piece in Scientific American on whether or not everything is built from information. His argument is not great: basically it fails common sense. Many things fail the common sense test without thereby being false, and the commentators pick up on this almost immediately. However, I agree with the conclusion even if not that argument. Here are some equally bad ramblings on why.

There is a long-standing western tradition that derives from the classical era, that there is something ontologically unique about information, usually given the label Logos. Philo of Alexandria bequeathed that philosophy to the eventually-Christian west out of nascent neo-Platonism, but information as a quantity is rather late. For most of the history of the Christian west, “form” not information was the key property. Like information now, it was not physical but it had physical effects. Basically, this view, known as hylopmorphism (substance-formism), was a constraint upon what evolved into modern science. It was mostly supplanted by atomism and its physical heirs and successors, such as quantum mechanics and modern subatomic physics and The Zoo.

Okay, so why is information now so important? As communications technology improved, it became important to ensure that a signal sent at one place was received properly at the end point. At Bell Labs in the 1930s and 1940s, Claude Shannon developed a mathematical theory of communication (note: not “information” as such) which involved the definition of “bits” (binary digits) and an entropy-like equation that came to be known as “Shannon’s metric”:

Basically, Shannon’s metric is the number of binary decisions it takes to get from a field of possible states or symbols to a single state or symbol. It’s a measure of difference.

Now this is not really what most people think of when they think of information, although it is part of it. Shannon himself was fairly clear that this had nothing to do with semantic information, or meaning. Moreover, he and his colleague Norbert Weiner, the founder of cybernetics, knew very well that this was about formal descriptions of things, not the things themselves. Weiner even wrote:

Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day. (Wiener 1948: 132)

What was information, then? Well, it was something that “existed” in descriptions and statements. It was the structure of some string of symbols and our uncertainty that the string we have received is the string that was sent. How, then, is the universe supposed to be comprised of information, as the physicist John Wheeler, whose slogan “the it from bit” indicated, held that it was? Wheeler’s view (1990) was basically this: if a state of the universe or part of it can be clearly described, as physicists think that it can be, then there is an information content to that state. Using equations like the Wave Function we can describe the universe and its evolution over time. Therefore, the universe is made from information. A similar argument is often put under the rubric “the Matrix”, after the famous film, by David Chalmers. Any reality we experience is simply the sum of all the information we have about it. This is Berkeleyan Idealism updated for the computer age.

Now if I may step back a bit to the oft-abused scholastic philosophers of the late medieval period, they made a distinction that later was adopted by C. S. Peirce, between the sign and the signified. If you like, it is between the words, and the world. The informational idealism of Wheeler is, in effect, to say that all we have access to, and therefore ontologically all there is, is the information contained in our equations and descriptions of the world. Not only is to be a matter of instantiating a variable as Quine put it, it is just the value of the variable. This is a case of an error of inversion: putting Descartes before the horse, so to speak.

Assume with me now that there is, in fact and independently of anything anyone may know about it including gods, a computer before me. I am actually, whether I know it or not, typing on this computer. Now suppose I give you a clear and precise description of that process. Call that description D and the state of the computer being typed S. Does S resolve down to D? Is S nothing more than D? Is the sentence “John types on his Mac” the state of John typing on his Mac? Surely that is faintly absurd. I might say that the fact of John typing on his Mac is the sentence or some proposition that has equivalent information, sure. I might even say that my knowledge (or anyone’s knowledge) of that case consists entirely in the information content of that sentence or proposition. But to say that my typing on my Mac is just the factual propositional content of D is a case of anthropomorphism of the highest water.

To mistake the sign (the word, description or formalisation) for the signified (the denotation, extension or reference) is a classic mistake. It goes by the name “reification fallacy” (Marcuse) or “hypostasis“. Whitehead, that badly-underappreciated philosopher, called it the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness“. John Maynard Smith would walk up to students in the cafeteria at the University of Sussex and ask of their discussions “Is this about words, or the world? If it is about the world, I will stay, but if it is about words, I will go.” [Anecdote about JMS by David Penny, c2000] Surely we cannot be making such a simple mistake?

We can, and do. In fact it is I think one of the enduring mistakes of western thought for 2500 years, to the point where a good many people think it is not a mistake at all. It underlies the argument from design (since Socrates, according to Sedley 2007). It puts our conceptual forms, and symbolic formulations, before the world they are supposed to refer to. It’s in Locke, Kant and Russell. And it is, I believe, entirely unnecessary. One need not think that the world has semantic content even if it has structure.

The misuse of information talk, the new hylomorphism, is ubiquitous. We cannot conceive of things without representing them, so we mistake our representations for the things. Consider arguments from simulation, such as the infamous “Singularity” views of Ray Kurzweil. Ignore the fact that few if any of the predictions made by people since Turing have come to pass; that may be due more to the problems of technological development. Kurzweil’s argument is roughly this: we can simulate the activity of each neuron in the brain. A neural simulation behaves the same way. As we are the sum of all the neuronal behaviours of our brains, eventually we will be able to instantiate ourselves in a computer, and live forever.

But, and here is the hypostatic fallacy, a simulation is not the same as the thing simulated, or a computer model of the solar system would have a mass of 1.992 x 10³⁰kg, which it doesn’t. A “brain” being simulated is a simulated, not a real, brain. Physical differences make a difference. This new anthropic hylomorphism misleads our thinking. It is found in genetics (genes are “transcribed”, “edited”, and “code for” properties). It is found in physics. It is obviously found in information technology. It is found all over the place. There is even a tendency for scientists to mistake their formal descriptions and record keeping (as in the Ontology project, the very name of which is a giveaway) for the things they record. Systematists in biology, in their battles over nomenclature, often make this very error.

So, if information is not a physical property of energy or matter, what is it? Here I think the ideas of Edward Zalta, who among other things edits the wonderful Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, can help. In his theory of abstract objects (1988), Zalta distinguishes between things that are bounded by space and time, and are hence concrete, and things which are not so bounded, which he calls abstract objects. For my money, only a concrete object can have causal powers, and hence only a concrete object can be explanatory for physical processes and states. Information is an abstract property that inheres in abstract objects. Words, qua words, are abstract objects (but an instance of a word is a concrete object of sound, ink or electromagnetically modulated signals), and so they have no causal power. This debate, too, is old. It includes the famous nominalisms and conceptualisms of the middle ages: are universals (things which include more than a single particular thing) real or in the head? Is information just in the head? How can a physicalist like me account for shared informational properties?

Again, I refer to the abstract/concrete distinction. What is in my head, and indeed what is in the sum of all heads across time and space, is concrete even if it is a functional rather than material thing. All cases of the word “dog” and cognates exist in physical heads or something like them, and ancillary contexts for recording and retrieving information sensu lato. But the concept itself does not. It is unbounded by time and space. And that suggests that the nominalist view, that these things do not really exist, is correct, and so I conclude. We are the ones that instantiate abstractions, and so the information exists, inasmuch as it does, only in our semantic behaviours. There is no existing thing that is information, just behaviours that we abstract out for formal purposes. However, one may take a different line and still be a physicalist or a realist of some flavour. I’m just giving my preferred defence of the matter.

So if we abandon the metaphysics of hylomorphism and adopt a realist view of the world, I think that is common sense of a kind. It avoids the unnecessary anthropomorphism that we have and probably always will fall into. It’s not an easy view to hold, but I think it is right. Information is an abstraction, and does not, strictly speaking, exist.

Repost: What actually *is* design?

This is a repost from my old site, with corrections. I will be back properly online next week, I hope.

I’ve been wondering of late what it is that is explained when something is called “designed”.

Why philosophers should publish in science journals

Generally my papers cause a mild reaction – like a dose of poison ivy. But i just had a paper published in Zootaxa, a mild mannered systematics journal, and as well as a two week turnaround, unheard of in philosophy (my last big paper took a year and a half), within hours I had over a dozen requests for a copy, and an author who I greatly admire offer to write a reply!

Why can’t the humanities work like this?

More when I’m not restricted to the iPhone app.

More on philosophy and society

H/T Lehoo

The nature of philosophy and its role in modern society

Those who spend their days obsessively noting every little change in blog designs will note that I have added a big red “P” at the bottom left. This links to the Philosophy Campaign – an attempt to make philosophy more relevant to modern society. So I got to thinking… what is the relevance of philosophy today?

It certainly isn’t its ability to contribute to the commodification and managerialism of modern tertiary education. Philosophy programs are being downgraded or even closed around the world. In Queensland, where I taught, only one major philosophy department was left after the entirety of Humanities was closed at other universities. Proper philosophy programs are becoming much rarer. Even moreso if you happen to threaten an authoritarian government or lobby (the latter case a pro-Israeli lobbyist politician). Why is this?

Philosophy is generally, whether it will or no, true to its main mission statement: to corrupt the minds of the youth. Well, that’s what Socrates was convicted of. He would have said it was to make young minds think critically, and for most authoritarian governments, that amounts to the same thing. Critical reasoning skills are dangerous! Students might doubt God, or the status quo or worse, the prevailing political platform. I think one of my major mistakes was to use advertising and media as examples of bad reasoning, because that is an economic challenge to the status quo, and nobody survives that.

Philosophy is relevant in ways that do not serve the interests of those in power, on either side of politics (as if there were only two sides, another comfortable truism that serves those in power). Mostly it is a threat for the third of the three questions of philosophy. These questions are:

What is there? [Metaphysics]

How do we know? [Epistemology]

What is its value? [Aesthetics, ethics and political philosophy]

All philosophy deals with one of these three questions or more. Me, being a moral vacuum and an aesthetic sink, I tend to focus on the first two. And even this can threaten elites. Suppose we took philosophy into schools, and allowed kids to ask a metaphysical question: do states exist? If they found themselves adopting something like methodological individualism, they might infer that states have no interests or rights, and therefore governments must be constrained in their infringement of actual right-bearers’ rights in pursuing faux wars on abstract evils. Imagine that. Fortunately for the elites this will never happen, of course.

Or suppose they adopted a corporatist view of nations and held that the only true reality was the entire population. They might begin to challenge the view that oligarchies can do with state instruments whatever they wish. And so on. The thing about philosophy is that it does not block ahead of time any view so long as it is coherent. And coherent views can lead to results that people who have vested interests may not want a populace to find.

So, on with corrupting the youth! While you are at it, corrupt some elders too.

Modus Darwin and the *real* modus darvinii

Elliot Sober has published a claim (Sober 1999, Sober 2008: §4.1, 265ff) that Darwin used, and we should too, a particular syllogism: similarity, ergo common ancestry.

This cannot be right, for several reasons: logical, historical and inferential. First the logical, as this is rather vapid, and can be guarded against (although Sober does not so guard) relatively simply: it cannot be that similarity in itself is evidence of common ancestry, or every dice would have a common ancestor, and every rock that resembles Abraham Lincoln’s profile would too. Now the way to guard this might be to assert that yes, they do have common ancestors, in the general sense they have common etiologies. All dice resemble each other because there is a chain of cultural descent that links back to some “dice taxon” in the past somewhere in Asia. The rocks have a shared etiology in the physiognomy of Abraham Lincoln. But that is not quite the claim Sober is proposing. For this would involve the cognitive and cultural dispositions of ourselves as classifiers, and common ancestry in no way relies upon us, although our recognition of it of course does. Can we infer from similarity that the two objects that are similar (to us) have a shared causal history? The Lincoln case suggests not. One rock might be formed by a lava flow, while another might be half a world away and formed from the erosion of sandstone. Without limitations on the kind of similarity, it implies nothing at all about the objects (and perhaps quite a lot about the observers engaging in pareidola).

The historical objection is that Sober, and most other modern commentators, read Darwin wrongly. Darwin used not similarity, but affinity, as evidence for common ancestry, and technically, he inferred common ancestry from “group subordinate to group” taxonomy; that is to say, he explained this taxonomic arrangement with common ancestry, rather than defended the claim of common ancestry that way. Had he wanted to use similarity, there was a perfectly good term, before Owen’s invention of the notion of homology: analogy, as can be found in the discussions in the Quinarian literature. Darwin wrote, in chapter XIII of the first edition of the Origin:

… all organic beings are found to resemble each other in descending degrees, so that they can be classed in groups under groups. This classification is evidently not arbitrary like the grouping of the stars in constellations. [411]

Thus, the grand fact in natural history of the subordination of group under group, which, from its familiarity, does not always sufficiently strike us, is in my judgment fully explained. [413]

And he goes on to note

Naturalists try to arrange the species, genera, and families in each class, on what is called the Natural System. But what is meant by this system? Some authors look at it merely as a scheme for arranging together those living objects which are most alike, and for separating those which are most unlike; or as an artificial means for enunciating, as briefly as possible, general propositions,—that is, by one sentence to give the characters common, for instance, to all mammals, by another those common to all carnivora, by another those common to the dog-genus, and then by adding a single sentence, a full description is given of each kind of dog. The ingenuity and utility of this system are indisputable. But many naturalists think that something more is meant by the Natural System; they believe that it reveals the plan of the Creator; but unless it be specified whether order in time or space, or what else is meant by the plan of the Creator, it seems to me that nothing is thus added to our knowledge. Such expressions as that famous one of Linnæus, and which we often meet with in a more or less concealed form, that the characters do not make the genus, but that the genus gives the characters, seem to imply that something more is included in our classification, than mere resemblance. I believe that something more is included; and that propinquity of descent,—the only known cause of the similarity of organic beings,—is the bond, hidden as it is by various degrees of modification, which is partially revealed to us by our classifications. [413f, emphasis added]

Darwin goes on to discuss how external resemblances are not evidence for propinquity (nearness, or kinship). He discusses how similarity is mere “adaptive or analogical characters” and that it is “a general rule, that the less any part of the organisation is concerned with special habits, the more important it becomes for classification”. Darwin knew well about convergence. “We must not, therefore, in classifying, trust to resemblances in parts of the organisation”, he concludes. That we need an ensemble of characters, and that they are not necessarily about similarity, is clear from this passage:

The importance, for classification, of trifling characters, mainly depends on their being correlated with several other characters of more or less importance. The value indeed of an aggregate of characters is very evident in natural history. Hence, as has often been remarked, a species may depart from its allies in several characters, both of high physiological importance and of almost universal prevalence, and yet leave us in no doubt where it should be ranked. Hence, also, it has been found, that a classification founded on any single character, however important that may be, has always failed; for no part of the organisation is universally constant. The importance of an aggregate of characters, even when none are important, alone explains, I think, that saying of Linnæus, that the characters do not give the genus, but the genus gives the characters; for this saying seems founded on an appreciation of many trifling points of resemblance, too slight to be defined. [417]

And he then discusses affinities by saying “Our classifications are often plainly influenced by chains of affinities” [419]. Affinities, not analogies (and as we argued, “affinity” means roughly shared sets of homologies). He summarizes by noting that

All the foregoing rules and aids and difficulties in classification are explained, if I do not greatly deceive myself, on the view that the natural system is founded on descent with modification; that the characters which naturalists consider as showing true affinity between any two or more species, are those which have been inherited from a common parent, and, in so far, all true classification is genealogical; that community of descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking, and not some unknown plan of creation, or the enunciation of general propositions, and the mere putting together and separating objects more or less alike. [420, emphasis added]

It is plain that Darwin held that what was evidence for common ancestry was shared sets of homological relations independently of adaptive characters, which can converge. Affinities are evidence, not analogies, and Darwin knew this well.

This brings us to the inferential objection. Sober fails to deal with convergent evolution as a cause of similarity, and yet this is so well known to systematists as to be hardly worth discussing. Because he adopts what is basically a statistical notion of classification, Sober thinks, we suppose, that homoplasy, that is to say, convergence, is eliminated somehow by technique or methodological algorithms. However, every systematist strives to eliminate homoplasy before analyzing data, just as Darwin said. There is no magic method for doing this: what looks homological may turn out, upon comparison of many taxa, to be homoplasious or indeterminate, and vice versa. But despite our limitations here, we can do this successfully in most cases – if we could not, then we could not do natural classification at all.

In neither place where Sober advances modus Darwin, does he defend against this obvious objection. In conflating similarity with affinity, we are confused about what counts as evidence for a given scenario of common ancestry. Although we have suggested that there is no fixed or privileged direction of inference in a field, it does appear that if you begin with uncertainty, then recognition of naive classification based on homological relations is going to constrain and set up the explanandum for the hypothetical account to explain. The hypothesis, a historical narrative, is not evidence for itself.

Darwin is often used as a mythological figure upon whom the preferred philosophies of the writer may be painted. In that respect he is like the Bible, except that he is a lot clearer as to his intent. The actual inferential process Darwin used – the real modus darvinii[i] – is more like this: affinity, explained by common ancestry. Since affinities are groups of homological relations we might use a term of Hennig’s and say that synapomorphies give the pattern that the historical process explains. The two are not identical.

Note

i. I am indebted to Reed Cartwright for helping me with the Latin here.

References

Sober, Elliott. 1999. Modus Darwin. Biology and Philosophy 14 (2):253-278.

Sober, Elliott. 2008. Evidence and evolution: the logic behind the science. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Logic, evolution, and classification

Sometimes, as a philosopher, one forgets that not everyone has been forced to undergo a logic class. This is a problem, both because logic is taught as the second most boring subject after calculus, and because, like calculus, it is enormously relevant to everything we do. Most especially it is something that is relevant to scientists. Now, I do not want to imply that all scientists do not understand logic, or misuse it, but it is worthwhile occasionally revisiting the basics. Especially for the nature of classification and inference in science.

Last time I wrote about natural classification, I discussed the use of clades as a straight rule for induction. An induction, for those who do not recall their introductory philosophy of science, is an inference from a limited number of particular observations to a general conclusion: all the swans I have seen are white, so swans are white. Inductions can be wrong. Deductions move from the generalisation (“All swans are white”) to the particular case (“this is a swan, so it is white”). Deductions cannot be wrong if the premises (the generalisation itself, and the claim this is a swan) are true. Now, the most widely known philosophy of science, that of Karl Popper, is based upon a logical deduction – if the general claim (the “law”) says that all As are Bs, and this B is not an A, then the law is false. He called this “falsification”. It is based on what we call the modus tollens, and is bandied about all the time by philosophers and scientists alike. It seems to me that not everybody understands what is at issue here. So, a simple introduction follows below the fold.

Intelligent designoids are unsure about me

Normally I wouldn’t link to these guys, but I’m having a kind of odd week with the ID crowd. On the one hand the ever reliable Casey Luskin has declared I am condescending for suggesting we teach science free of religious overtones to young children (but Kelly Smith is more condescending). And on the other, Michael Behe says my species book is great! I’m so conflicted.

I suspect Behe thinks that because I am critical of the standard or received essentialist story I am undercutting evolutionary thinking. I am not, of course, but maybe he just thinks it’s a damned good read.