Stupid Questions

You know, there are such things as stupid questions, even if I don’t think they’re particularly obvious. Specifically, there are a few which, on the surface, seem hugely important. Then, on closer inspection, turn out to be more or less irrelevant. I get asked about these all the time, and need a place to write about them, so I thought I’d make it a sort of always-evolving article, like some of my others. Hopefully less abortive, though.

Let’s jump right in.

¶Nature vs Nurture just isn’t that interesting

I have an article called Genetics is Nurture. I say there:

There is a constant tension in any animal science between the impact of nature and the impact of nurture. How much of who we are and what we do is the result of our genetic predispositions, and how much because of our environment?

But this isn’t just a delicate sparring match between academics. Instagram and TikTok are choc-a-block with people claiming evolutionary motivations for stuff that have been corrupted by or are at odds with our socialisation. The most common one is gender. People love Buss’ sexual selections stuff, even if they always get it wrong. The idea that men evolved to be powerful resource hunters and leaders of the household and women evolved to be homemakers, ready to breed at a moments notice, and the modern world has us all messed up because we’re trying to go against our natures.¹

Even if, one finds this kind of fantasy sexy, and I must admit that I do, we should still think that it’s kind of stupid, for three reasons.

¶Evolutionary stories are just stories

Firstly, evolution, as an explanation, is over-rated. I complain about this all the time. Essentially, you can tell any story you like by appealing to evolution. They’re called Just-So Stories for a reason:

Evolutionary narratives often seem to have this … ‘it could be anything’ quality about them. You know, you might ask why giraffes have long necks. It could be because their ancestors found better food higher on the trees. But it could also be that longer necks made them more deadly in the odd combat giraffes get stuck into. And so on.

Evolutionary narratives have a place. We should at least test our theories against an evolutionary perspective so we don’t come up with:

such fantastic dead-end notions as Oedipal desires and death instincts.

But trying to do more than that with them is just story-time. Infinite explanations and no one can go back in time to prove the counterfactual.

¶Genetics is nurture

The second reason I think nature vs nurture is a stupid concept is because, as I linked up top, Genetics is nurture. Genetic evolution is the product of the environment at different time-points. This is true in two ways actually.

Firstly, obviously genetic evolution is evolving in response to the environment, but it can happen surprisingly fast—in thousands if not hundreds of years. More surprisingly, although I’m skeptical of epigenetics and postgenomics because it seems like it’s just becoming the new evolutionary theory with regard to ‘explaining everything’, the entire body of literature points to genetic changes that happen within one generation, or even within our lifetime.

In fact, if anything, it’s probably even speeding up. Neutral evolution—in which “genetic drift”, i.e. mutation with no selective value, is just left alone—means that all our efforts at health innovation are reducing the evolutionary cost of mutations. Reducing evolutionary penalties increases the amount of genetic drift.

The second way genetics is the product of the environment is actually built into how scientists talk about it. Scientists don’t ever refer to ‘geneticness’ when they’re trying to describe genetic influences. They talk about ‘heritability’. Heritability is a stat that tells us how much of the variation in a trait at a timepoint, within a population, and under certain environmental conditions can be attributed to genetic differences. It necessarily relies on the environment—if the environment changes, the relative contribution of genetic variance can change, even when biology stays exactly the same. For example, the heritability of height increased all over the place in the 20th century, purely because our nutritional environments became better and more uniform (see this for both the theory and a critique). People ate the same, so genetic differences showed more. The point being, that genes don’t have intrinsic effects that are independent of the environment. It depends entirely on the environment, and thus, there’s no reason to privilege some historical genetic story, because it simply may not apply now, under these conditions. The same genes could produce entirely different outcomes.

Genetics is nurture.

¶It literally never matters!

Which leads us to my third reason, which I think applies even if you don’t accept the other two: evolutionary stories are fucking boring. They are true Malcolm Gladwell shit—superficially sexy but practically useless. No one has ever come to me with a convincing reason to believe that understanding something as nature rather than nurture helps me meaningfully. Not just because there could be any number of competing explanations, nor because I can’t disentangle them from the environment. It’s because it’s so obvious that the environment matters way more. And if it’s truly immutable, then frankly, I’m not enough of a fatalist to want to believe it.

All in all, why bother asking?

¶Who cares if there’s no such thing as free will?

There has always been a question around whether free will exists. It’s probably as old as dual-process models of mind—there are obviously some actions that are under our control, because there are just as obviously actions that aren’t. Hot and cold thinking, fast and slow thinking, passion and logic, emotion and reason, conscious vs unconscious and rational vs irrational processes, or as I like to call them, thinky versus non-thinky motivations.

The question is, more or less, how much control do we have over our behaviour? Indeed, more specifically, the question is do we have any control at all? Is there such a thing as free will? Or is our behaviour deterministic—entirely determined by aspects of our environment. It’s a debate with a great deal of history. Just consider the concept of fate for example, or the logical consequences of believing in an omniscient god.

In modern sciences of mind, things started to heat back up with Benjamin Libet’s famous experiment. He had people make a voluntary action, and report when they became aware of the urge to make that action. He reliably detected brain waves that predicted their conscious awareness by something like 350 ms. And if brain activity predicts ‘voluntary’ decisions before we’re aware of their voluntary nature, then how could they possibly be voluntary?

Libet’s study is old as hell, and has been picked over for meat hundreds of times, but we actually regularly find stuff like this. I link there to stuff that interested my lab, where you could predict people’s brain activity five seconds into the future, never mind predicting their behaviour. More generally, there is now an entire field called the neuroscience of free will. We find brain shit that predicts ‘voluntary action’ in all sorts of places, which again raises questions about just how voluntary it is.

¶Determinism and free-will aren’t exactly opposites

Perhaps surprisingly, this actually isn’t really that interesting in the context of the free will debate. At least for me. As I say elsewhere:

I don’t really think this is very helpful. Unless you’re a really strict non-materialist—you think that there’s some soul or psyche that’s distinct from the stuff sloshing around in your body—then it’s probably obvious to you that if you’ve had a thought … something needed to precede the thought

Some people interpret this as necessarily deterministic. The case goes something like:

Is mental activity determined or not? Is it determined by something else, or is it undetermined by anything? If it’s undetermined, then it’s random, and you can’t be in control of something that’s random. If it’s determined by something, then is that further inside the mind or external? If it’s external, then you’re not in control. If it’s internal, then you’re simply deferring the problem. You need to answer the question of whether it’s determined or undetermined.

A similar argument goes something like:

Who are you? You give your name, but that isn’t you. That’s a word. So you might point to your body, but you aren’t your body, are you? You don’t say “am hand” or “am head”, we say “my hand” and “my head”. So you point to your spirit, or your mind. But this is your spirit and your thoughts, they aren’t you. And so on.

Put this way, it feels rather inescapable, but this is a bit of a mislead. It treats the brain like a kind of passive transformer of events into action, ignoring the possibility that at least some of this might actually be determined by the agent. It well could be, in some complicated manner. Assuming you don’t want to defer to some kind of soul, it’s not hard to imagine some kind of foundational mental state or states, or even some web of interconnected mental states with none overly priviledged over the others. On this line of thinking, the very same infinite regress we’re using to deliver a punchy account of determinism can be used to illustrate the opposite—personhood could rely on this regressive structure. Acting in accordance with desires, even if those are determined, when everything is determined by everything else… why is this inadequate?

Mental states can be both caused by prior mental states and constitute genuine mental agency because they form an integrated system. The person is that system. This is why most contemporary free will defenders are compatibilists: people who accept determinism but argue free will is compatible with it. Determination, for them, doesn’t undermine control.

¶And anyway, it essentially never matters!

Which brings me to my point. If we have to get this far into the weeds to even debate this, then what’s the fucking point! As I mention elsewhere:²

this world is so intractably complex that for almost all practical purposes, it doesn’t matter.

It’s not even clear to me that if we could prove it then it would matter. Neuroethicists think so—if our behaviour is determined, then how can we justify punishing people for crimes, for example. But to me, that’s the wrong way to think about things. Like I point out with the nature vs nurture stuff, all it does is highlight the critical importance of the environment and socialisation.

Free will or no, behaviour is something we can change. If it’s not, then we’re stuck at the Fatalist’s Idle Argument: if you’re fated to behave in a certain way, then it doesn’t matter what you think or do, it’s fated. So why bother asking the question?

¶The hard problem of consciousness isn’t a problem

What is consciousness? Lots of people want to know. Lately this is largely because everyone is wondering if AI is conscious. But understanding whether something is conscious requires an understanding of what consciousness is. And this is where you start running into problems. Problems that I reckon don’t actually really matter.

The typical way people teach consciousness is to talk about the colour red. The ‘redness’ of red. I’ve no idea why. Maybe it’s because it’s such a good illustration of the thing, but this goes back to at least John Locke. So we will also use “redness”, so when someone starts talking about the “redness” of red, you will know what’s coming and make an excuse to leave.

¶What is consciousness?

For me, the cleanest example is Frank Jackson’s thought experiment, Mary’s Room:

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specialises in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on…What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a colour television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?

Television, because this essay is from the ‘80s, but you get the point. Mary’s never seen red, but obtains all there is to know about colour. Then one day, she sees red. Has she learned something new about the colour red? I think you’ll agree that she has. Jackson certainly thought so,³ that there is some kind of knowledge beyond the physical properties we understand about them—it’s “redness”. That knowing about red is not the same as experiencing it.

This, whatever this is, is an example of what’s known as qualia. True to form, Wikipedia, at the time of writing, has a red colour patch with the caption:

The “redness” of red is an example of a quale.⁴

Thomas Nagel puts it in an interesting way in his famous paper. He says that, though we can, in theory, understand everything there is to know about how bats echolocate—the physics of sound waves, the physiology, the behavioural responses, the information processing—we will never know what it’s like to experience the world through echolocation. There is “something it is like” to be a bat, and it doesn’t really seem like you can pass along that subjective, phenomenal character with a description.

¶Why is consciousness considered a ‘problem’?

Now. Here is the problem. Why does red have “redness”? Why is there “something it is like to be” at all? It’s a difficult question to answer.

Chalmers calls this the hard problem of consciousness to pose it against easy problems—related phenomena that we can, in theory, explain:

the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report

These are all processes that lend themselves to examination. They can be explained functionally and mechanistically. They are easy problems. The hard problem is explaining why these things are accompanied by a sense of experience—by qualia. Why does Mary learn something new when she sees red, beyond knowing all of its physical properties? Why can’t we know what it’s like to be a bat?

Chalmers uses the example of a sort-of automaton to illustrate: we can imagine a person who goes about behaving in all the ways you or I do, but with absolutely no experience attached. A zombie or a robot, mechanically acting and reacting to the world around it. There doesn’t seem, on the surface of it, any reason for it to also experience that stuff.

¶The ‘solutions’ to the hard problem don’t really solve anything

Now, lots of people try to solve this problem in lots of ways. I have a whole article on solutions to the hard problem, but I will run through them here in brief:

1. Non-materialists say that consciousness just isn’t a material, physical thing. Think of a soul or a mind.
2. Emergentists and functionalists say that consciousness just emerges from certain configuration of neurons, like water emerges from a configuration of atoms.
3. Illusionists and eliminativists say that thinking of consciousness as anything at all is a mistake. It’s some kind of illusion, or a category error. Like asking where the University is when you’ve been shown all the buildings and the faculty and so on.
4. Panpsychists go particularly off-piste, and say that it’s the intrinsic nature of the physical stuff that physics describes: physics tells us what things do, not what things are, so maybe consciousness is what things are.

Are you getting tired yet? I am.

What’s annoying about all this is that it’s impossible to have a proper conversation about it with all these perspectives because you have to take whichever one of them you prefer on faith. They all suffer the same explanatory gap. Whether you think it arises from configurations of neurons, or a soul, or the space that physics leaves unexplained, you still have to explain how it actually interacts with the stuff we do know about—Chalmers’ easy problems. Nobody has managed this. No one is really even close.

The modal position in academia is the emergentist one—that consciousness sort of comes about with the right configuration of neurons or whatever. You walk around the lab I used to work at and this is what people would say. It’s what I would have said (and did). In fact, people would probably be confused to learn there were other perspectives on it, because we are well into the scientistic era and this feels like science. It also feels reasonable because consciousness sure seems like it’s dependent on our perceptions. You can’t really experience something without perceiving it first.

And so, there’s some optimism here that, if we study the brain hard enough, consciousness will turn from a hard problem into an easy one. We’ll make this thus far impossible jump from the perception of something to the experience of it.

And so you see debates about whether AI systems have genuine experiences, or whether honey bees are conscious, or, Brian Key, in one of my favourite academic articles, writing in the equivalent of academic caps lock that fish cannot feel pain. They don’t have the neurobiology for it. The journal, Animal Sentience, invites responses, and there are tens of responses arguing that not only can fish feel pain, they can suffer too! They’re conscious!

¶And more to the point, none of it matters!

And this is where I start to lose interest in the project, because so what? Under what realistic circumstances, precisely, would this matter? When would it actually matter whether something was truly conscious versus actually concsious? If things seem conscious, we already know how to respond.

Sam Harris has a nice essay and TED Talk about this. He says:

Why is it that we don’t have ethical obligations toward rocks? Why don’t we feel compassion for rocks? It’s because we don’t think rocks can suffer. And if we’re more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects, as indeed we are, it’s because we think they’re exposed to a greater range of potential happiness and suffering.

The secret hope, I suspect, is that, by working out what consciousness is, we can reduce suffering. But we can do that now. We can do it by caring about things that seem to suffer in a way that makes them seem to suffer less, and we can do all that without proving that they have qualia.

We’re not close to understanding the distinction. Some reckon we’ll never crack it, like an ant will never crack calculus. And even if we could, I can’t actually tell what would change. Would we stop caring about animal welfare if we proved they weren’t strictly conscious? Or treat rocks differently if we found out they were?

Of course not, because it’s not an interesting question. It’s the behaviour that matters. Whether there is some ineffable ‘what it’s like’ behind the curtain is practically irrelevant.

So why bother asking?

¶Outro

Obviously all of these questions have another side. A reason they are interesting. If we measure consciousness like Sam Harris hopes, we might be able to map the moral landscape—how to treat everything perfectly. If things are determined, or genetic, we might better cater for what is out of people’s control.

But you see what I mean. This isn’t a job for random people on Instagram hashing out the evolutionary merit of traditional gender roles. Do that shit in the bedroom, it’s more interesting. This is a job for people at the frontiers, applying an incredible amount of thought to really difficult concepts.

For everyone else it simply doesn’t matter. A lot of hot air wasted on irrelevant questions.