Airs – Ian Lance Taylor

What should a society seek to provide for its members? The most basic goals have to be the survival of members of the society and inducting new members into the society. Any society which can not achieve these goals will fail. (The most obvious way to induct new members is to have children, but there are successful micro-societies formed entirely from immigration, such as the Vatican.)

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.

It’s possible that what we think of as reality is a simulation being run on some powerful computer. Perhaps the entire universe as we think it exists is a simulation. Or perhaps the simulation is much simpler, and merely covers the solar system and space around it in detail, with everything else being only sketched in. Is there any way that we can determine whether or not this is the case?

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.

Steven Pinker wrote an interesting article in the New York Times magazine this Sunday. I’m not a big Pinker fan. I think he tends to simplify a little too much, and sometimes falls into the classic error of evolutionary psychology: thinking that a plausible explanation is the right explanation. This was a good article, though, discussing research on what our instinctive moral judgements might be. As I’ve written before, I think that it is an interesting possible grounding for a universal ethics. In fact, I don’t know of a better one.

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.

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?