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.

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.

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.

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.

These days I do see monotheism as something of an advance. The earliest cultures we know of believed in gods who were much like people, albeit people who were both powerful and sometimes unpredictable. In some cases the gods were simply ancestors. I think this is a natural consequence of our tendency to attribute events to causes. When we want to understand the weather, our impulse is to give it a personality and motivations. It’s only a small step to think that there is a powerful person–a god–who controls the weather.

This then becomes an obstacle to actually understanding what is happening. If you already have an explanation for the weather, and your explanation inherently incorporates unpredictability, there is little purpose to looking for a deeper explanation. Since I do think that scientific thought is an advance in human culture, it follows that these early religions prevented advances.

Monotheism reduces the mass of gods to just one. This god still controls the weather, but now there is just one entity that you have to understand. It becomes possible to seriously think about god’s will and hope to reach some conclusions about it. As thinking progresses, the god becomes more abstract—created the whole world, pays attention to everything—and it becomes easier to think in terms of fixed laws rather than whims. It’s still a big step to get to science, but it’s more feasible, and monotheism may be a necessary stopping point.

I was reminded of this line of thought while reading about the Gospel of Judas. Today I don’t see how it’s possible to see Judas as anything but a patsy—hence his lyric from Jesus Christ Superstar “I only did what you wanted me to.” The Gospel of Judas doesn’t really present him that way, but it does suggest that Judas was himself a human sacrifice to Christ. This was, after all, a time when animal sacrifices to the gods were routine, though not a practice of the Christians. The Gospel of Judas was an alternate view of the Christ story, one that was suppressed by the early church as they coalesced on a single view of the religion. Ditching the Gospel of Judas was a good move, since it seems pretty complicated. Anyhow, reading about it reminded me that there is a lot of contingency in the religions that we have today. Monotheism may have been an advance in retrospect, but, unlike agriculture, it wasn’t an advance at the time. I don’t see any reason to think that things could not have gone otherwise.

Most people want to lead a good life, but my guess is that these days most people don’t really believe in a literal heaven. Without a set of rules handed down from the priests, how do we know what a good life consists of? Based on what I see in bookstores, a lot of people—at least enough for a niche publishing market—are aiming for happiness. A good life is a happy life.

This does not imply an outbreak of hedonism and selfishness, as many people are made happy by altruism and quiet reflection. However, to me, it doesn’t seem like the right sort of goal. I don’t think I have the goals of a good life fully pinned down, and it’s not like I think one should strive to be unhappy, but happiness as a goal doesn’t seem right to me. It seems to me that happiness should be a result of a good life. We should aim to do the right thing; if we succeed, we can expect to be happy. Aiming for happiness seems to put it the wrong way around.

Happiness by itself just seems too disconnected, too prone to short-circuiting a deeper examination of the situation.

There are many choices beyond the basics. Some popular choices seem to be freedom; security; stability; opportunity; happiness; religious adherence; ethics; perpetuation of the power of the leader(s); support of a given ethnic group. Of course all societies have these goals and many others in different proportions, but different societies emphasize different ones. Is it possible to decide which ones are best?

In particular, is it possible to decide which ones are best if we know that different societies exist? A society which loses its members due to emigration or invasion would seem to be unsuccessful. The required security may conflict with other goals.

But if we speak too seriously about goals like survival of the society, and protection against other societies, then we are heading down the path of equating “good” with “survival,” which also pretty quickly leads us to determine that the societies which exist today are the best ones so far. Is this reasonable? Can we speak of an ideal society which existed once but no longer exists? Presumably an ideal society ought to be able to cope with natural disasters of at least intermediate scope—e.g., short of the sinking of Atlantis. Or what if the ideal society emphasizes freedom, and everybody chooses to leave?

But if survival is not the major goal, then what is? Since different societies have different ethical beliefs, how can we choose among them? If we think they are wrong, and they think we are wrong, then how can we decide? Determining the ideal society would seem to require first developing a universal ethics.

In Carl Sagan’s novel Cosmos he suggested that there is a message buried deep in the digits of key transcendental numbers like pi. He suggested that this proved that the universe was designed; I think it more likely to prove that the universe is simulated. Finding a message embedded in the universe would be a pretty strong sign.

Another strong sign would be finding parts of reality that aren’t well filled in. For example, perhaps there are places which are unable to support lots of molecules. Perhaps pushing more in would cause the space to run more slowly, or perhaps it simply wouldn’t accept them. Of course there don’t seem to be any such spaces on Earth; the place to look would be interstellar space.

I personally tend to favor the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. I don’t know if that would be harder or easier to simulate; refusing to collapse the wave function might permit everything to run out of a few equations. Alternatively, perhaps the wave function does collapse, and perhaps that collapse is itself a sign of limitations of the simulation. Note that troubling aspects of quantum mechanics, such as non-local quantum entanglement, are much less troubling if they are being simulated.

Taking the other tack, is there any way to prove that our reality is not being simulated? That seems quite difficult to me. One could perhaps make some sort of argument based on complexity, but in some sense that begs the question, since our knowledge of complexity is based on our knowledge of the universe.

If it is possible to simulate our sort of universe–which has not been proved–then it seems very likely that all of existence contains far more simulations than it does actual universes. Given that, what are the odds that our universe is a real one? Most likely we are simulated. Fortunately, it doesn’t make any real difference to us, until they pull the plug.

I’m not going to discuss the whole article, which you can read for yourself, but I’m going to pick out one quote: “In the West, we believe that in business and government, fairness should trump community and try to root out nepotism and cronyism. In other parts of the world this is incomprehensible — what heartless creep would favor a perfect stranger over his own brother?” The point is not, in fact, expressed fairly: we do not expect people to favor perfect strangers, we expect them to recuse themselves to avoid conflicts. Since people often fail to recuse themselves, we threaten them with punishment to force them to do so.

The real point is that we enforce the idea that the interests of society take precedence over personal interests. Some other societies (apparently) do not. Where did this idea come from historically? How many societies adopt it? Can we make an argument for it based on any sort of moral instinct, or must we argue for it based on beneficial results?

OK, I’m going to mention one more point. Pinker suggests that some people dislike research into moral instinct, on the grounds that finding a natural basis for morality will discredit the more philosophical basis. I would be more sympathetic to that argument if we had any grounds to believ that we will in fact find a more philosophical basis, one which is not grounded on an argument from the authority of God.