You could look at the Standard Dispute over “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?,” and you could do the Traditional Rationalist thing: Observe that the two don’t disagree on any point of anticipated experience, and triumphantly declare the argument pointless. That happens to be correct in this particular case; but, as a question of cognitive science, why did the arguers make that mistake in the first place?
The key idea of the heuristics and biases program is that the mistakes we make often reveal far more about our underlying cognitive algorithms than our correct answers. So (I asked myself, once upon a time) what kind of mind design corresponds to the mistake of arguing about trees falling in deserted forests?
The cognitive algorithms we use are the way the world feels. And these cognitive algorithms may not have a one-to-one correspondence with reality—not even macroscopic reality, to say nothing of the true quarks. There can be things in the mind that cut skew to the world.
For example, there can be a dangling unit in the center of a neural network, which does not correspond to any real thing, or any real property of any real thing, existent anywhere in the real world. This dangling unit is often useful as a shortcut in computation, which is why we have them. (Metaphorically speaking. Human neurobiology is surely far more complex.)
This dangling unit feels like an unresolved question, even after every answerable query is answered. No matter how much anyone proves to you that no difference of anticipated experience depends on the question, you’re left wondering: “But does the falling tree really make a sound, or not?”
But once you understand in detail how your brain generates the feeling of the question—once you realize that your feeling of an unanswered question corresponds to an illusory central unit wanting to know whether it should fire, even after all the edge units are clamped at known values—or better yet, you understand the technical workings of Naive Bayes—then you’re done. Then there’s no lingering feeling of confusion, no vague sense of dissatisfaction.
If there is any lingering feeling of a remaining unanswered question, or of having been fast-talked into something, then this is a sign that you have not dissolved the question. A vague dissatisfaction should be as much warning as a shout. Really dissolving the question doesn’t leave anything behind.
A triumphant thundering refutation of free will, an absolutely unarguable proof that free will cannot exist, feels very satisfying—a grand cheer for the home team. And so you may not notice that—as a point of cognitive science—you do not have a full and satisfactory descriptive explanation of how each intuitive sensation arises, point by point.
You may not even want to admit your ignorance of this point of cognitive science, because that would feel like a score against Your Team. In the midst of smashing all foolish beliefs of free will, it would seem like a concession to the opposing side to concede that you’ve left anything unexplained.
And so, perhaps, you’ll come up with a just-so evolutionary-psychological argument that hunter-gatherers who believed in free will were more likely to take a positive outlook on life, and so outreproduce other hunter-gatherers—to give one example of a completely bogus explanation. If you say this, you are arguing that the brain generates an illusion of free will—but you are not explaining how. You are trying to dismiss the opposition by deconstructing its motives—but in the story you tell, the illusion of free will is a brute fact. You have not taken the illusion apart to see the wheels and gears.
Imagine that in the Standard Dispute about a tree falling in a deserted forest, you first prove that no difference of anticipation exists, and then go on to hypothesize, “But perhaps people who said that arguments were meaningless were viewed as having conceded, and so lost social status, so now we have an instinct to argue about the meanings of words.” That’s arguing that or explaining why a confusion exists. Now look at the neural network structure in Feel the Meaning. That’s explaining how, disassembling the confusion into smaller pieces that are not themselves confusing. See the difference?
Coming up with good hypotheses about cognitive algorithms (or even hypotheses that hold together for half a second) is a good deal harder than just refuting a philosophical confusion. Indeed, it is an entirely different art. Bear this in mind, and you should feel less embarrassed to say, “I know that what you say can’t possibly be true, and I can prove it. But I cannot write out a flowchart which shows how your brain makes the mistake, so I’m not done yet, and will continue investigating.”
I say all this, because it sometimes seems to me that at least 20% of the real-world effectiveness of a skilled rationalist comes from not stopping too early. If you keep asking questions, you’ll get to your destination eventually. If you decide too early that you’ve found an answer, you won’t.
The challenge, above all, is to notice when you are confused—even if it just feels like a little tiny bit of confusion—and even if there’s someone standing across from you, insisting that humans have free will, and smirking at you, and the fact that you don’t know exactly how the cognitive algorithms work, has nothing to do with the searing folly of their position . . .
But when you can lay out the cognitive algorithm in sufficient detail that you can walk through the thought process, step by step, and describe how each intuitive perception arises—decompose the confusion into smaller pieces not themselves confusing—then you’re done.
So be warned that you may believe you’re done, when all you have is a mere triumphant refutation of a mistake.
But when you’re really done, you’ll know you’re done. Dissolving the question is an unmistakable feeling—once you experience it, and, having experienced it, resolve not to be fooled again. Those who dream do not know they dream, but when you wake you know you are awake.
Which is to say: When you’re done, you’ll know you’re done, but unfortunately the reverse implication does not hold.
So here’s your homework problem: What kind of cognitive algorithm, as felt from the inside, would generate the observed debate about “free will”?
Your assignment is not to argue about whether people have free will, or not.
Your assignment is not to argue that free will is compatible with determinism, or not.
Your assignment is not to argue that the question is ill-posed, or that the concept is self-contradictory, or that it has no testable consequences.
You are not asked to invent an evolutionary explanation of how people who believed in free will would have reproduced; nor an account of how the concept of free will seems suspiciously congruent with bias X. Such are mere attempts to explain why people believe in “free will,” not explain how.
Your homework assignment is to write a stack trace of the internal algorithms of the human mind as they produce the intuitions that power the whole damn philosophical argument.
This is one of the first real challenges I tried as an aspiring rationalist, once upon a time. One of the easier conundrums, relatively speaking. May it serve you likewise.
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Wrong Questions
Where the mind cuts against reality’s grain, it generates wrong questions—questions that cannot possibly be answered on their own terms, but only dissolved by understanding the cognitive algorithm that generates the perception of a question.
One good cue that you’re dealing with a “wrong question” is when you cannot even imagine any concrete, specific state of how-the-world-is that would answer the question. When it doesn’t even seem possible to answer the question.
Take the Standard Definitional Dispute, for example, about the tree falling in a deserted forest. Is there any way-the-world-could-be—any state of affairs—that corresponds to the word “sound” really meaning only acoustic vibrations, or really meaning only auditory experiences?
(“Why, yes,” says the one, “it is the state of affairs where ‘sound’ means acoustic vibrations.” So Taboo the word “means,” and “represents,” and
all similar synonyms, and describe again: What way-the-world-can-be, what state of affairs, would make one side right, and the other side wrong?)
Or if that seems too easy, take free will: What concrete state of affairs, whether in deterministic physics, or in physics with a dice-rolling random component, could ever correspond to having free will?
And if that seems too easy, then ask “Why does anything exist at all?,” and then tell me what a satisfactory answer to that question would even look like.
And no, I don’t know the answer to that last one. But I can guess one thing, based on my previous experience with unanswerable questions. The answer will not consist of some grand triumphant First Cause. The question will go away as a result of some insight into how my mental algorithms run skew to reality, after which I will understand how the question itself was wrong from the beginning—how the question itself assumed the fallacy, contained the skew.
Mystery exists in the mind, not in reality. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. All the more so if it seems like no possible answer can exist: Confusion exists in the map, not in the territory. Unanswerable questions do not mark places where magic enters the universe. They mark places where your mind runs skew to reality.
Such questions must be dissolved. Bad things happen when you try to answer them. It inevitably generates the worst sort of Mysterious Answer to a Mysterious Question: The one where you come up with seemingly strong arguments for your Mysterious Answer, but the “answer” doesn’t let you make any new predictions even in retrospect, and the phenomenon still possesses the same sacred inexplicability that it had at the start.
I could guess, for example, that the answer to the puzzle of the First Cause is that nothing does exist—that the whole concept of “existence” is bogus. But if you sincerely believed that, would you be any less confused? Me neither.
But the wonderful thing about unanswerable questions is that they are always solvable, at least in my experience. What went through Queen Elizabeth I’s mind, first thing in the morning, as she woke up on her fortieth birthday? As I can easily imagine answers to this question, I can readily see that I may never be able to actually answer it, the true information having been lost in time.
On the other hand, “Why does anything exist at all?” seems so absolutely impossible that I can infer that I am just confused, one way or another, and the truth probably isn’t all that complicated in an absolute sense, and once the confusion goes away I’ll be able to see it.
This may seem counterintuitive if you’ve never solved an unanswerable question, but I assure you that it is how these things work.
Coming next: a simple trick for handling “wrong questions.”
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191
Righting a Wrong Question
When you are faced with an unanswerable question—a question to which it seems impossible to even imagine an answer—there is a simple trick that can turn the question solvable.
Compare:
“Why do I have free will?”
“Why do I think I have free will?”
The nice thing about the second question is that it is guaranteed to have a real answer, whether or not there is any such thing as free will. Asking “Why do I have free will?” or “Do I have free will?” sends you off thinking about tiny details of the laws of physics, so distant from the macroscopic level that you couldn’t begin to see them with the naked eye. And you’re asking “Why is X the case?” where X may not be coherent, let alone the case.
“Why do I think I have free will?,” in contrast, is guaranteed answerable. You do, in fact, believe you have free will. This belief seems far more solid and graspable than the ephemerality of free will. And there is, in fact, some nice solid chain of cognitive cause and effect leading up to this belief.
If you’ve already outgrown free will, choose one of these substitutes:
“Why does time move forward instead of backward?” versus “Why do I think time moves forward instead of backward?”
“Why was I born as myself rather than someone else?” versus “Why do I think I was born as myself rather than someone else?”
“Why am I conscious?” versus “Why do I think I’m conscious?”
“Why does reality exist?” versus “Why do I think reality exists?”
The beauty of this method is that it works whether or not the question is confused. As I type this, I am wearing socks. I could ask “Why am I wearing socks?” or “Why do I believe I’m wearing socks?” Let’s say I ask the second question. Tracing back the chain of causality, I find:
I believe I’m wearing socks, because I can see socks on my feet.
I see socks on my feet, because my retina is sending sock signals to my visual cortex.
My retina is sending sock signals, because sock-shaped light is impinging on my retina.
Sock-shaped light impinges on my retina, because it reflects from the socks I’m wearing.
It reflects from the socks I’m wearing, because I’m wearing socks.
I’m wearing socks because I put them on.
I put socks on because I believed that otherwise my feet would get cold.
Et cetera.
Tracing back the chain of causality, step by step, I discover that my belief that I’m wearing socks is fully explained by the fact that I’m wearing socks. This is right and proper, as you cannot gain information about something without interacting with it.
On the other hand, if I see a mirage of a lake in a desert, the correct causal explanation of my vision does not involve the fact of any actual lake in the desert. In this case, my belief in the lake is not just explained, but explained away.
But either way, the belief itself is a real phenomenon taking place in the real universe—psychological events are events—and its causal history can be traced back.
“Why is there a lake in the middle of the desert?” may fail if there is no lake to be explained. But “Why do I perceive a lake in the middle of the desert?” always has a causal explanation, one way or the other.
Perhaps someone will see an opportunity to be clever, and say: “Okay. I believe in free will because I have free will. There, I’m done.” Of course it’s not that easy.
My perception of socks on my feet is an event in the visual cortex. The workings of the visual cortex can be investigated by cognitive science, should they be confusing.
My retina receiving light is not a mystical sensing procedure, a magical sock detector that lights in the presence of socks for no explicable reason; there are mechanisms that can be understood in terms of biology. The photons entering the retina can be understood in terms of optics. The shoe’s surface reflectance can be understood in terms of electromagnetism and chemistry. My feet getting cold can be understood in terms of thermodynamics.
So it’s not as easy as saying, “I believe I have free will because I have it—there, I’m done!” You have to be able to break the causal chain into smaller steps, and explain the steps in terms of elements not themselves confusing.
The mechanical interaction of my retina with my socks is quite clear, and can be described in terms of non-confusing components like photons and electrons. Where’s the free-will-sensor in your brain, and how does it detect the presence or absence of free will? How does the sensor interact with the sensed event, and what are the mechanical details of the interaction?
If your belief does derive from valid observation of a real phenomenon, we will eventually reach that fact, if we start tracing the causal chain backward from your belief.
If what you are really seeing is your own confusion, tracing back the chain of causality will find an algorithm that runs skew to reality.
Either way, the question is guaranteed to have an answer. You even have a nice, concrete place to begin tracing—your belief, sitting there solidly in your mind.
Cognitive science may not seem so lofty and glorious as metaphysics. But at leas
t questions of cognitive science are solvable. Finding an answer may not be easy, but at least an answer exists.
Oh, and also: the idea that cognitive science is not so lofty and glorious as metaphysics is simply wrong. Some readers are beginning to notice this, I hope.
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Mind Projection Fallacy
In the dawn days of science fiction, alien invaders would occasionally kidnap a girl in a torn dress and carry her off for intended ravishing, as lovingly depicted on many ancient magazine covers. Oddly enough, the aliens never go after men in torn shirts.
Would a non-humanoid alien, with a different evolutionary history and evolutionary psychology, sexually desire a human female? It seems rather unlikely. To put it mildly.
People don’t make mistakes like that by deliberately reasoning: “All possible minds are likely to be wired pretty much the same way, therefore a bug-eyed monster will find human females attractive.” Probably the artist did not even think to ask whether an alien perceives human females as attractive. Instead, a human female in a torn dress is sexy—inherently so, as an intrinsic property.
They who went astray did not think about the alien’s evolutionary history; they focused on the woman’s torn dress. If the dress were not torn, the woman would be less sexy; the alien monster doesn’t enter into it.
Apparently we instinctively represent Sexiness as a direct attribute of the Woman data structure, Woman.sexiness, like Woman.height or Woman.weight.
If your brain uses that data structure, or something metaphorically similar to it, then from the inside it feels like sexiness is an inherent property of the woman, not a property of the alien looking at the woman. Since the woman is attractive, the alien monster will be attracted to her—isn’t that logical?
Rationality- From AI to Zombies Page 79