Is Statistics the Key to the Soul?

I've been brushing up on my statistics, since I was convinced I didn't learn anything practical in my two semesters of calculus-based 'statistics.' It turns out that I did learn a thing or two besides how to integrate Poisson distributions. What struck me most about statistics this time around is its objective power. I'm coming to believe that the history of human progress is the history of increasing abstraction--from markets, which abstract price from use value; to language, which substitutes abstract signs for the world's infinitude; to representative governments, which generate the will of the people from voter preferences; to information theory, which abstracts universally-understood 0's and 1's from meaning. Each new power of abstraction provides a new tool for humans to shape the world.

Borges' library has been found!

Of course, abstraction has its price. There's always something lost in the process of abstraction. Jorge Luis Borges (the author of the story for which this blog is named) writes at length about the experience of hitting the limits of abstraction, the real world. For example, if all knowledge was written down, we could never know anything, since we'd spend all our time sifting through an infinite number of books contained in an infinitely-forking library. If we remembered every experience we had in its minute detail, we'd never be able to live in the present or learn from the past. Similarly, the will of the minority loses out to the will of the majority, and statistics can never replicate lived experience.

Processes of abstraction can also be fetishized for their own sake. The operations of markets, the intricacies of language, the back-and-forth of the political process, the elegance of algorithms, or the endless march of statistical analyses are all deep, deep rabbit holes from which many never return. There's a point at which every student of philosophy--having been convinced by philosopher after philosopher--decides that it impossible to determine who is right and resolves, if only for a short time, to study philosophy solely for the beauty of its systems. There's even a perverse pleasure in the counter-intuitive nature of abstract thought, such as learning that rent control makes rent higher or that work = 0 when something is moved a great distance before returning to its origin.

One of the most interesting characteristics of processes of abstraction are the ambiguities inherent in them. Since abstractions miss something real, they are always equivocations. This happens in language when we can't decide what to call something. Is Pluto a planet or an asteroid? In statistics, ambiguity appears in the form of studies that contradict each other. Are eggs good for you or not, for chrissake? Statistical analyses are objective and help us overcome the biases of our thought processes, such as when they show us the irrationality of our fear of flying, sharks, and home invasion. But it's easy to slice the world into irreconcilable parts when those parts are so small in comparison to the actual, ever-changing world. Scientists often can't reproduce the results of their experiments. This means that either 1) the laws or regularities of the world are not the same now as they were at the time of the experiment or 2) there is some variable which they have not accounted for. And there are always variables that are not accounted for.

With the growing trend of personal data collection, from activity tracking to sleep monitoring to mental acuity quantification, we will soon be able to analyze ourselves with ever greater scrutiny. If you want to know exactly how far you've run in the last five years, you can do that. Does this make you a better runner? That is not clear, but the trend is. We'll soon be able to use the data mining techniques that advertisers like Google created on ourselves. In some ways, this is exciting. What better way to know thyself than with objective data? Conquering ourselves may be the next frontier of the powers of abstraction. But this path will be fraught with even greater dangers of experience lost, fetishization, and ambiguity.

The Story

What about 'Knowledge of Philosophy'?

I recently read that there are only three interview questions:

1. Can you do the job?
2. Will you love the job?
3. Can we tolerate working with you?

In the past, I haven't had a lot of trouble with these three. My problem is:

4. What's with the PhD in philosophy?

There are plenty of reasons not to fret about this. I doubt my answer matters much given my ability to answer the other three. Plenty of people take a non-linear career path, and there are lots of reasons to get a PhD--it has helped me to get noticed, if nothing else. Finally, a PhD in, say, computer science probably wouldn't give me any more special knowledge than one in philosophy, because what I would have studied would have been so specific and so quickly dated. Still, the question comes up often enough in normal conversation that I'd like to be able to give a reason more interesting than 'broadening my intellectual horizons' and shorter than my dissertation. Here's my attempt.

A degree in engineering (and some experience in the field) shows you how to solve problems, but it doesn't provide much help in figuring out questions like 1) What should I solve? 2) What is it right to solve? At Penn State, the main recruiting industries were military. I knew that I didn't want to kill people, but I didn't know much besides that. I lacked direction, and the only guidance I got from my computer ethics class (Ayn Rand) wasn't particularly helpful. (She says: go do great things, but what were those things I should be doing?) My philosophy classes were more promising, but they really only whetted my appetite.

In grad school I focused on moral and political philosophy. That is, instead of trying to prove or disprove God's existence or understand how we can know anything, I was interested in: 1) What is the Good? and 2) What is the Just? These problems were particularly difficult because, like most non-fanatics, I didn't think there could be just one answer. But my moral intuitions gave me reason to suspect there had to be some kind of answer. It's that space between 1 and infinity that's tricky.

It took some work, but eventually I became a philosophical pragmatist. I realized that, like most philosophers today, I thought I had accepted that there was no Absolute Truth when I was really still hankering after It. Pragmatists have a good explanation of relativism without believing that whatever you think is the right thing to do. (If you're really interested, start here). You simply can't accept that there are multiple right answers and keep asking the same old questions, like 'What is the Good?' or 'What is the Just?'

James figured out a new way of thinking with an old name

Pragmatism involves bringing scientific thinking to all areas of life, including moral and political questions. What most people don't realize is that science has become relativistic in the 20th century. From Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to Godel's incompleteness theorem, scientists have stopped looking for absolute truths and now couch their hypotheses in terms of the highly-specific and reproducible experiments. One cannot extrapolate beyond those experiments for all situations and times. Brian Cox often says that there's no good reason to assume scientific 'laws' will hold for any amount of time--we simply find that they do so in many situations.

Pragmatism is important for thinking about technology in at least two ways: 1) It helps us reconcile morals with science. For example, if new technologies make the consequences of our actions very widespread, we must become more knowledgeable about them in order to realize our moral principals. 2) On a social scale, it shows us how to think about technology and the greater good. For instance, instead of thinking about technology as just a tool or as the savior of mankind, we should look at how some technologies help us solve certain collective action problems. In either case, the main point is to look at concrete problems and technologies, not technology, morality, or justice in general.

All this is very brief, but that's because it's what my blog is all about: applying principles to specific problems. I still tend towards the overly-philosophical side, but I'm getting there.

Music for Computers

ENIAC boards or early keytars?

I've been thinking about human - computer interaction, and it strikes me that the philosophical questions central to early Artificial Intelligence research do not seem to have much resonance any longer. In the 50's and 60's, research into AI led to many innovations in computing. But it also caused people to worry about the future of humanity. Joseph Weizenbaum, designer of the ELIZA program, which seemed so close to passing the Turing Test half a century ago, afterwards turned against AI research due to its imagined consequences. The most striking image of the computer that the 60's left us with is HAL, an embodiment of the singularity in which human life is no longer rational.

But now, the singularity is mostly the stuff of Hollywood, filling in for Nazi's or Communists. The philosophical question that arises from the the Matrix is, 'Dude, what if we're in the Matrix?' The doomsday scenario today is a product of human hubris (man-made climate change, bio-medically-engineered zombies, or radiation-induced mutation), not thinking machines. The singularity, according to futurologists like Ray Kurzweil, is something to be embraced, not feared

I think the main reason the mood has changed is that computers are no longer as alien as they once were. They used to be huge machines that had to be talked to with 0's and 1's. They were very smart in certain respects, but unfathomably stupid in others. They existed in places like MIT, not the living room or minivan. In the 70's, however, computers started to become a part of our everyday lives. One way this happened was through music.

I used to have one of these

The 80's might have been the decade in which electronic music became mainstream, but it was the 70's when new technologies like synthesizers, drum machines, and tapes were really explored and developed. Here's a broad sample of some early electronic music. It's not always made by computers, but I often listen to it in front of one. Check out:

Sly and the Family Stone - It's a Family Affair - First use of a drum machine.

Brian Eno - Big Ship - Pioneering warm, synthesized sound.

Kraftwerk - Robots - Hilarious 'live' show.

Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder - I Feel Love - Post-disco is a lot better than disco.

Einojuhani Rautavaara - Cantus Articus - Tape machines and orchestras unite.

In sum, the philosophical questions of early AI have faded away with the growing ubiquity of computers. Computers have become products and extensions of our thought, not alternatives to it. We already know what computers are. They send email and show us YouTube videos. We stare at their spreadsheets all day long at work. I wonder if computers have become too near for us to ask questions about their objective value. But perhaps this is just a story of a very abstract question ('Will computers one day think?') becoming more concrete ('How can we make a search engine that knows what you want even if you don't?' or 'How can we make a better-sounding guitar?').

Technology and the Limits of Ethics

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Everyone--or almost everyone--knows the Golden Rule. It's some variant of: Do unto others as you'd have others do unto you. There's the negative form of Confucius:  What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others. The Ten Commandments tries to lay it out in a bit more detail with its well-known thou shalt's. In fact, many people have tried to show that all ethics are really rooted in the principle of reciprocity. Whether or not this is true, it does not tell us whether or not ethics should be about reciprocity. Why shouldn't ethics evolve over the course history, much in the way science has? Is there anything technology can teach us about ethics, or ethics about technology?

Philosopher of technology Hans Joas argues that, despite the vast differences between religious beliefs and traditions, ethics principals typically share the following four features. See if you agree.

• First, they are usually anthropocentric. The Golden Rule is explicitly about humans and their relation to other humans. Any consideration of animals, ecosystems, geographic formations, or interstellar bodies must be for the sake of humans.
• Second, ethical principles typically refer to immediate actions and problems we currently have . They don't mention future generations or even our future selves. The Ten Commandments says to honor thy father and thy mother, but not your children or children's children.
• Third, ethical principals are about the things we do, not the beings that we are. You cannot turn the Golden Rule into a statement about being, such as become who'd others would want you to be. 
• Finally, ethical principals treat technology as ethically neutral or ignore it entirely. Technologies are simply means to ends. It is the ends that are important--the means can be ignored.

Joas argues that recent technological developments have put all of these assumptions into question, and for two reasons. First, technology has increased the range of consequences beyond immediate human interactions. For this reason, knowledge has become essential to being ethical. Today many ethical arguments start with questions like, "Did you know that your chicken comes from..." or "Did you know those clothes are manufactured by the people in..." or "Did you know that such-and-such company gives funding to..."  It is no longer sufficient simply to consider the situation at hand.

Second, technology has made the future of humanity uncertain. We can eliminate human life forever or we can extend it indefinitely (at least, in principal). We will soon be able to create genetic superpeople. Even everyday actions like driving or eating implicate thousands of people around the globe and may have consequences for future generations. And it's not just about people. It is no longer a given that the Earth can heal itself no matter what we do.

What would ethics grounded in the reality of today look like? It's hard not to think that the future of ethics is politics--both state-centered politics involving legislation and treaties as well as as decentralized collective decision-making about the world we want to leave for the future. The latter is already happening at the water cooler and on blogs. Is this enough? Is ethics fine the way it is? Or do we need a prophet of a new set of commandments for the Internet Age?