Airs - Ian Lance Taylor

Where do physical laws come from? Of course we can not know. We don’t even know if the physical laws are the same everywhere in the universe–we assume they are, but there is no way to be sure.

In the absence of knowledge, we have to give up, or guess. My current favorite guess is the landscape theory. In this theory, there are a vast number of universes, of which ours is just one. Each universe can have its own set of physical laws. Our universe is not special. The fact that we exist to observe it proves merely that the physical laws in our universe suffice to support our form of life (the weak anthropic principle).

This theory appeals to me because it satisfies the Principle of Mediocrity: we are not special. If we were special, we would have to understand how and why. Since we don’t understand, I think it makes more sense to assume that we aren’t special.

I argued earlier that we can base a universal ethics on human nature, or biology. Is there anything we could use? Many universal ethical systems are based on some form of the golden rule or the categorical imperative. That itself tends to be taken as an axiom. Utilitarianism is based on a utility function, which is an axiom.

I think one way to consider whether these ethical systems are truly universal is to consider whether they would apply to any imaginable alien race, and to consider whether they would apply to a solipsist.

We tend to assume that any given person is about as ethically valuable as any other person; we certainly don’t think it is OK to kill 100 random people to save one person’s life, though the reverse may be acceptable in some cases. For an intelligent ant, on the other hand, thousands of ants would happily die to save the queen. Do these ants violate the golden rule? It seems like they do. Utilitarianism is OK if we define the utility function appropriately, and the categorical imperative is OK.

A committed solipsist could ethically take just about any other action, since no other person exists. Is there any way to show that the solipsist is wrong in doing so? Only by showing that he or she is mistaken. These ethical theories don’t help with that, though.

An ethics based on biology does show that a solipsist is mistaken–nobody can really believe in solipsism. And such an ethics doesn’t say anything about alien races, except that they will have their own ethics.

Where does this get us? I’m not sure. I like the idea of finding some sort of grounding for ethics, but grounding it in biology gives us all the problems of evolutionary psychology: we mistake what is for what should be. How can we avoid that?

A couple of times I’ve alluded to an idea I first saw from Peter Singer, that the structure of society creates a great deal of the value which flows to the wealthy. Our legal system and our stable system of property ownership is crucial for building successful companies. Yet the value gained from companies flows largely to company management and partially to dividends to shareholders. None of goes to the operations which support the company: the courts, the police, the schools which train the workers, etc. Instead, we tax profits, and use the tax money to pay for the infrastructure.

This naturally suggests that we could arrange matters differently. Instead of using taxes to pay for the courts, companies could pay the courts directly. And likewise for other social services. This would match my understanding of how libertarians think society should work. It would bring the benefits of free competition to the court system: the best courts would get the most money.

Of course, there is an obvious so-called moral hazard: if you choose whether or not to pay the fire brigade, then if you chose not to pay, the fire brigade has a pretty strong incentive to burn down your house as an example to encourage others to pay. And if you pay the court system, then the judges have a very strong incentive to issue findings which favor whoever pays them the most.

Also, if different court systems compete, then how do you pick which court system to use when two parties in a dispute pay for different ones? While this could be negotiated, in extreme cases the winner will be the most powerful party, which will normally be the richest party.

So as far as I can tell such a system degenerates reasonably quickly into control by the wealthiest. Of course they would normally hide their power in a velvet glove, but it would be there when needed.

Is that any different than our system? I think there is a difference, which is that we can vote people out of power. Voting does not require a great deal of commitment, it just requires making a decision. So we have a way of derailing powerful people, a way which would not be available if societal infrastructure were privatized.

Of course there are many very powerful people in our society who are not elected. But even those people can be controlled by the masses, via the court system. It doesn’t happen all that often–the lawsuits which followed the stock market crash are over now–but it does happen, and it does constrain people to obey the rules to some degree.

The opposite of privatizing societal infrastructure is nationalizing private property. The U.S. does this in a very limited way via eminent domain. It has been done effectively on a larger scale in countries like South Africa. But too much privatization leads to a state socialist system like the U.S.S.R., which we could see was a disaster.

So there is some sort of balance to strike, or perhaps a third way to find, in the ideal society.

The New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a short piece by Jim Holt on the idea of universal consciousness. The idea is that consciousness can be found everywhere in the universe, even in rocks.

This is based on the premise that “physical properties alone cannot account for subjectivity. (How could the ineffable experience of tasting a strawberry ever arise from the equations of physics?)” The argument is logical: if we accept that premise, and we accept materialism, then we pretty much have to conclude that consciousness must be in everything.

Now, if this were a sane world, that would be a nice reductio ad absurdum, demonstrating that the premise is false. Yet somehow sensible people are so attached to that premise that they are willing to believe in conscious rocks rather than give it up.

Astonishing stuff. Some people need to apply a little more reasonable thought and a little less ineffability.

Larry Niven’s classic science fiction short story “All the Myriad Ways” points out a problem with the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics: if there is no collapse of the quantum wave function, then all possibilities actually happen. That would seem to imply that we make all possible personal choices, including the really bad ones. This makes a mockery of our notions of free will, even worse than determinism: if we make all choices, then we really don’t exercise our will at all.

There is an obvious flaw in this argument: there is no particular reason to think that uncertainty at the quantum level leads to our making different choices. Most quantum events actually have no effect at the macroscopic level at which we live. If one entire molecule of oxygen tunnels across a room–an event which will occur at a vanishingly smal probability–nothing will change at the macroscopic level. And even if a bunch of molecules in my brain switch places, that doesn’t mean that I will change my mind about something.

Our actions are constrained by who we are. Quantum activity could conceivably make us into different people. It can’t make us be the same person who made a different decision.

Still, quantum mechanics in general, and the Many Worlds Interpretation in particular, pose some real philosophical problems. Unfortunately they don’t pose the problems addressed by science fiction novels about parallel worlds. The problems are more along the lines of what it is like to live in a world in which low probability events are not only possible but actually happen all the time.

Iain M. Banks, in his novel “The Algebraist,” argued that the only universal religion is one in which we assume that our universe is actually being simulated by an incomprehensibly large computer, and that our only meaningful goal is to try to reach the creator by proving that it really is a simulation. That seems as good a reason as any for why we never see low probability events in macroscopic universe: because the computer doesn’t bother to simulate them.