Airs – Ian Lance Taylor

The recent clamor over Rand Paul’s comments on the Civil Rights Act were a useful indicator of one of the problems with the libertarian approach to society. Paul was clear, in retrospect, that he supported the Civil Rights Act, but he was also clear that he was concerned about its effect on business owners.

Any society is a balancing of rights among all its members. All societies agree that people have different rights in different roles. The complex cases for societies are deciding what to do when those rights conflict. The libertarian point of view tends to emphasize one particular right over all others: the right to private property. But that is not the only right in our society, and cases like segregated lunch counters give that a nice clarity. If a business is open to the public, then if we are a member of the public, we have the right to expect it to be open for us. There are a number of ways which society permits business to discriminate; most obviously, businesses may discriminate against people without money. But society does not permit businesses to discriminate against people on the basis of skin color. This is not a grey area.

If you focus only on the right to private property, then the ability of businesses to discriminate against customers is a troubling case. That is how Paul got into trouble and had a hard time giving a clear answer to a relatively simple question. If you consider this issue as a balancing of rights, then there is no difficulty.

There are certainly hard cases in rights balancing; this just isn’t one of them. A hard case is how much accommodation a small business must provide a disabled customer. E.g., we all agree that the business must serve someone in a wheelchair, but is a business required to make it possible for that person to get to all parts of the store?

If Paul wants to get elected and be an effective senator, he must not only learn to answer simple questions in a straightforward way. He must also learn that the role of the politicians is to balance rights, not to promote one specific right over all others.

E.O. Wilson’s notion of biophilia, which is slightly different from closely related to the newer idea of evolutionary psychology, posits that humans can not be healthy without some access to the natural world. The argument basically amounts to saying that we have evolved in a world which is not completely under human control, and we are not happy unless we are, at least to some extent, in such a world today.

I think the basic argument is likely true for most people. There was an interesting experiment which seemed to show that people next to a window onto an outside nature scene were under less stress than people next to a television screen showing the same image (I can’t find a link, but Journal of Evolutionary Psychology by PH Kahn). I think that many of us look for something to exist outside ourselves, and nature can play that role.

Some people use that as an argument for preserving the environment: we should preserve the environment to keep ourselves healthy (this is in some ways a variant on the idea that we should save the rainforest because we can find new pharmaceutical drugs there). Unfortunately, while I’m definitely in favor of preserving the environment, I think this argument fails. I think that technology can provide us the health benefits of access to the natural world, by hiding the sources of the technology. I think that a sophisticated robot dog can provide all the psychological benefits of a real dog, and more. With a good design we can get the unpredictability, the sense of a different mind and a different world operating. I think those are the things we need. I don’t think they have to actually come from nature.

I just finished Neal Stephenson’s new book Anathem. I enjoyed it quite a bit. The book is based on a lot of the Western philosophical tradition, albeit under different names. He provides an SF explanation for Plato’s Theory of Forms, which I think anybody has to appreciate, loosely (very loosely) based on some of Gödel’s work. And he is getting better at actually writing endings to his novels.

Is consciousness a purely syntactic process or does it require semantics? That is another way of asking whether, if you take a snapshot of all the neurons in a human brain, and simulate it on a computer, the resulting program will be conscious. Computers are purely syntactic engines: they simply manipulate symbols. So if consciousness requires semantics, then a program running on a computer can not be conscious.

Of course, if you asked the program whether or not it was conscious, it would simulate the answer that the human would give, and would say that it was conscious. In fact, by definition, it would give all the answers that the human would give. So to argue that the program is not conscious requires believing in something very much like zombies–people who act perfectly normal but are not conscious. I think that the whole idea of zombies is incoherent, and it baffles me that some philosophers appear to take it seriously. Consciousness is not something extra that gets added on to our brains, and thus can be added to some brains but not others. Anything which acts exactly like a conscious human must be conscious.

So that would seem to settle the question. Actually, though, it doesn’t. I’ve assumed that it is possible to simulate a human on a computer. I can see two reasons that that might not be possible.

The first is that human intelligence may require quantum operations. If the human brain is a way of turning quantum effects into macroscopic effects, then it need not be possible to simulate those effects on any non-quantum computer. And while we don’t fully understand what a quantum computer is at this point, it is at least possible that it is not a purely syntactic engine. A quantum computer can, supposedly, come up with the answer to a problem without walking through all the intermediate steps. In that sense a quantum computer is not a purely syntactic engine. This is similar to the way that one can argue that the spaghetti sorter–in which you represent all the inputs as strands of spaghetti, tap them on the table, and easily pick out the largest one–is not a purely syntactic engine. The spaghetti sorter uses physics to jump immediately to the right answer. A quantum computer may do the same thing. Admittedly, arguing that this is what we want “semantics” to mean is going to be a bit of a slog. But I think it is fairly clear that it is not what we mean by “syntax”.

The second reason it may not be possible to simulate a human on a computer is that it may not be possible for human consciousness to exist separated from the world. The simulated human brain may simply be unresponsive. Arguably one could proceed the simulate the whole world around the human, or at least the perceptible part of it. But at some point I think it is reasonable to ask whether this is possible even in principle. Simulating all the neurons in a brain already sounds pretty darn hard, but one imagine simplifying to just the neurons and the neurotransmitters. Simulating the whole world sounds pretty darn hard. Can we possibly do it without requiring a computer which is as complicated as the world? And that implies, again, a quantum computer.

My bias is to believe that computers can be conscious, and to believe that the brain is purely a syntactic engine. I think that the brain dampens quantum effects rather than magnify them. But I have to admit that the alternate argument is coherent and may be the truth.

I’m a vegetarian for moral reasons. Animals raised for meat in this country are in general treated horribly (I think every meat eater should have some familiarity with factory farming of animals, since I think one should understand the consequences of a lifestyle one chooses). One question I’m occasionally asked is: is it OK to eat animals that you raise yourself in humane conditions, or that you hunt?

Clearly humans evolved hunting and eating meat, so it is in some sense natural. Obviously many other animals hunt and eat meat, but that is not particularly relevant since those animals are incapable of making moral choices. So one part of the question is whether something which is natural from our evolutionary history is therefore moral. I’ve argued in the past that the basis of our morality is our evolutionary history. However, it doesn’t follow that everything from our evolutionary history is moral. We are able to pick and choose. Observation of hunter gatherer tribes in New Guinea and the Amazon suggests that our evolutionary history included living in small bands and regarding people from other bands as subhuman others. We no longer accept that as a moral view–morally speaking, we now believe that all people are created equal.

Another side of the question is whether it is OK to use animals for anything. Some people have argued that keeping pets is immoral because it is unnatural for the animals. My view on that is that domestication is a choice. Humans have domesticated themselves–that is the choice we made in choosing agricultural and city living. I think it is morally OK for other animals to make the same choice, for all that they do it unconsciously. Some animals can not be domesticated–zebras are a well-known example. Some animals thrive on it, such as dogs. I think that keeping pets is OK, and, extending that slightly, I think it is OK to keep animals and use their byproducts such as wool, eggs, milk, and honey. That said, the details do matter: there are factory farms for dairy cows that are nearly as bad as the ones for meat cows, and that is not OK.

Would it be OK to raise a domesticated animal and then eat it after it dies of old age? Yes, I think it would. The only objection I see would be a sort of fastidiousness, the reason that we do not eat dog meat in this country. There is nothing wrong with that fastidiousness, but I don’t think it is a moral requirement.

Would it be OK to kill and eat an animal if you would otherwise starve to death? Yes, I think it would. I do think that humans have a right to life which somewhat exceeds that of other animals. This is a very hypothetical situation, though, and not only would it never happen today, it would be rather unlikely even in the distant past. For example, it’s not OK to head out into the desert with a cow and then conclude that you must eat the cow because there is nothing else around: you acted wrongly in heading out to the desert with that plan in mind.

This brings us to the real question, which is whether it is OK to raise a domesticated animal under humane conditions, and then kill it and eat it. This is close to the line between the morally acceptable and the morally unacceptable. Which side of the line does it fall on? It’s possible to imagine an animal making an informed choice to accept a domesticated lifestyle in exchange for an early death. Douglas Adams, himself a vegetarian, put a humorous spin on this in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. In the real world, in some species of mites the mother never lays her eggs; instead, the mother dies, the eggs hatch inside her body, and the babies eat their way out.

Since animals can’t make that informed choice, we must make it for them. What I see is that animals struggle for life even in extreme conditions. I don’t think humans would make such a choice, except perhaps when in the depths of despair, and at base we are animals too. I don’t think animals would make that choice either.

So my conclusion is that it is not OK to raise animals for the purpose of killing and eating them, even if you do so humanely. It is close to the line of what is OK, but it falls on the far side.