The Science of Morality & Human Well-Being

March 25, 2019


Nihilism: 1. the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless; 2. belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated

 In the last few months, some commentary here and elsewhere have raised the idea that many concepts related to politics, concepts relating to concepts such as good and evil, fact and non-fact, logic and illogic, and truth and lie are essentially meaningless. Meaninglessness arises from subjectivity that can be inherent in things one might think of as mostly objective. For example, some people believe it is a fact that there is a strong consensus among expert climate scientists that anthropogenic global warming is real. About 27% of Americans reject that as false and no amount of discussion and citing fact sources will change most (~ 98% ?) of those minds.

 Does that mean there is no way to discern facts or truth from lies or misinformation? When it comes to morality, is nihilism basically correct and contemplating morality from any point of view is too subjective to be meaningful in any way?

  In another example, the rule of law concept is seen by some analysts as an essentially contested concept, which is something subjective and not definable such that a large majority of people will agree on what the rule of law is and when it applies. If the rule of law cannot be defined, how can what is moral and what isn't be defined?

Pragmatic rationalism: The anti-bias ideology advocated here, “pragmatic rationalism”, is built on four core moral values, (1) respect for objective facts and truth, to the extent they can be ascertained, (2) application of less biased logic (conscious reasoning) to the facts and truths, (3) service to the public interest, which is conceived as a transparent competition of ideas constrained by facts and logic, and (4) reasonable compromise in view of political, social and other relevant factors. If nihilism is correct, the anti-bias ideology is nonsense.

Science and morality: In his 2010 book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, neuroscientist Sam Harris argues there can be enough objectivity in matters of morals and human behavior and well-being that there is a great deal of objectivity in morality. In essence, Harris is arguing that science can find things that foster human well-being by tending to make people, e.g., happy, unhappy, and socially integrated or not. On morals, religion, secularism and the role of science in discovering morality, Harris writes:

On the first account, to speak of moral truth is, of necessity, to invoke God; on the second, it is merely to give voice to one’s apish urges, cultural biases and philosophical confusion. My purpose is to persuade you that both sides in this debate are wrong. The goal of this book is to begin a conversation about how moral truth can be understood in the context of science.

While the argument I make in this book is bound to be controversial, it rests on a very simple premise: human well-being entirely depends on events in the world and on states of the human brain. A more detailed understanding of these truths will force us to draw clear distinctions between different ways of living in society with one another, judging some to be better or worse, more or less true to the facts, and more or less ethical. I am not suggesting that we are guaranteed to resolve every moral controversy through science. Differences of opinion will remain—but opinions will be increasingly constrained by facts.

Does our inability to gather the relevant data oblige us to respect all opinions equally? Of course not. In the same way, the fact that we may not be able to resolve specific moral dilemmas does not suggest that all competing responses to them are equally valid. In my experience, mistaking no answers in practice for no answers in principle is a great source of moral confusion.

The the deeper point is that there simply must be answers to questions of this kind, whether we know them or not. And these are not areas where we can afford to respect the “traditions” of others and agree to disagree. . . . . I hope to show that when we are talking about values, we are actually talking about an interdependent world of facts.

There are facts to be understood about how thoughts and intentions arise in the human brain; there are further facts to be known about how these behaviors influence the world and the experience of other conscious beings. We will see that facts of this sort will exhaust what we can reasonably mean by terms like “good” and “evil”. They will increasingly fall within the purview of science and run far deeper than a person’s religious affiliation. Just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim algebra, we will see that there is no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality. Indeed, I will argue that morality should be considered an undeveloped branch of science. 

Having received tens of thousands of emails and letters from people at every point on the continuum between faith and doubt, I can say with some confidence that a shared belief in the limitations of reason lies at the bottom of these cultural divides. Both sides [Christian conservatives and secular liberals] believe that reason is powerless to answer the most important questions in human life.

The scientific community’s reluctance to take a stand on moral issues has come at a price. It has made science appear divorced, in principle, from the most important questions of human life.

It seems inevitable, however, that science will gradually encompass life’s deepest questions. How we respond to the resulting collision of worldviews will influence the the progress of science, of course, but may also determine whether we succeed in building global civilization based on shared values. . . . . Only a rational understanding of human well-being will allow billions of us to coexist peacefully, converging on the same social, political, economic and environmental goals. A science of human flourishing may seem a long way off, but to achieve it, we must first acknowledge that the intellectual terrain actually exists.

Harris is right, nihilism is wrong: If Harris is correct that intellectual moral terrain actually exists and is subject to scientific scrutiny, then pragmatic rationalism would seem to be a political counterpart of Harris’ vision of what can lead to human well-being for the long run. Maybe because of personal bias and/or the amazingly good fit between what Harris argues and the core moral values that pragmatic rationalism is built on, Harris is right. Science can shed light on an at least somewhat objective vision of right and wrong, good and evil. Nihilism is wrong and destructive of both self and civilization.

What the unconscious mind thinks of interracial marriage

Saturday, March 23, 2019

The human mind operates simultaneously on two fundamentally different tracts, unconscious thinking and conscious thinking. Recent estimates accord unconscious thinking with about 95-99.9% of human mental bandwidth, decision-making influence or "firepower." The rest is our conscious thinking. Conscious and unconscious thinking or decisions can be in conflict. The split human reaction to interracial marriage is a case in point.

A recent Washington Post article describes brain responses to photos of same-race and different race married heterosexual couples. The article is based on data published in a recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology "Yuck, you disgust me! Affective bias against interracial couples"

Brain scans of people who claim to have no disapproval of or bias against interracial couples show disgust or disapproval of photos that show interracial couples (black and white), but not photos of black couples or white couples.

According to the WP article, "Researchers found that the insula, a part of the brain that registers disgust, was highly active when participants viewed the photos of the interracial couples, but was not highly engaged when viewers saw the images of same-race couples, whether they were white or black."

This shows the possibility of disconnects between what the unconscious mind sees, thinks and decides, i.e., disgust toward interracial couples, and what the conscious mind sees, thinks and decides, i.e., acceptance of interracial couples.

What may be unusual about this difference of opinion is that, at least for young people (college student volunteers in this case), the conscious mind dictates personal belief and behavior toward interracial couples despite a contrary innate unconscious belief or judgment. For politics and social matters like this, that triumph of the weak human conscious mind over our powerful unconscious mind is the rare exception, not the rule.

For better or worse, that's just the nature of what evolution conferred on the human species in terms of how we see and think about what we think we see in the world.

Questions: Does the data show disgust, or is data obtained from the human brain simply not believable? Is it possible that our unconscious mind can be so powerful compared to our conscious thoughts and reason?

The human species' greatest threat

Saturday, March 23, 2019


The human species faces a number of threats that could damage civilization or, in the worst case, lead to extinction. A major nuclear war would at least significantly damage civilization. At least hundreds of millions of people would die. Polluting human activity could initiate a chain reaction that leads to a toxic environment and possibly human extinction. Various climate change episodes that caused mass land animal extinctions are known, e.g., anoxic events and the Permian-Triassic extinction event or Great Dying of about 252 million years ago. Given incomplete human knowledge, it is possible that human activity could trigger such an event without human awareness until it is too late to save the species.

If humans do wind up damaging or destroying modern civilization or even annihilating the human species, the ultimate cause would necessarily come from some sort of human behavior that is at least theoretically avoidable. The question is, what is mankind's greatest survival threat?

This discussion excludes threats that humans simply cannot affect or prevent, e.g., a mass extinction caused by eruption of a supervolcano.

The human cognition threat: From a cognitive and social science point of view, the greatest threat lies in the nature of human cognition and the irrational politics it engenders. That directly reflects human biology. In turn, that directly reflects the intellectual firepower that evolution endowed the human species with. Whatever mental capacity humans have as individuals and when acting in groups or societies, it was undeniably sufficient to get humans to where we are today.

The unanswered question is whether what evolution resulted in is sufficient to survive our technology and ability to kill ourselves off.

Under the circumstances, humanity's greatest threat lies in the psychology of being human. The very nature of human sentience and the individual and group behavior that flow therefrom are the seeds of human self-annihilation. If, when and why the seeds might sprout are open questions. Nonetheless, the seeds are real and viable.

Within the last century, research from cognitive, social and other relevant branches of science proved that all humans are driven mostly by our unconscious minds, which are intuitive-emotional-moral. In terms of politics and religion, output from our unconscious minds are not mostly fact- and logic-based. Powerful unconscious biases heavily affect what little we wind up becoming consciously aware of. As a consequence, we are not primarily driven by objective fact or logic. Instead, (i) false perceptions of reality or facts, and (ii) conscious thinking (reason or common sense) that is heavily influenced by powerful unconscious biases drives thought, belief and behavior.

Although we are sentient and conscious, unconscious (intuitive-emotional-moral) mental bandwidth or thinking is 100 million to 100 billion times more powerful than conscious thought. For better or worse, the human mental constitution dominated by unconscious intuitive knowledge and thought was sufficient for modern humans to survive and dominate.

None of that is a criticism of humans or their intellectual makeup. Those are objective facts based on modern science.

That biology applies to politics and it always has. In other words, politics is mostly irrational and based on false information, conscious thinking (common sense) that is heavily biased by unconscious personal beliefs and morals and evolutionary biases that all humans share.

Misinformation is easy to acquire and very hard to reject, especially when it rejecting it undermines personal ideology, belief or morals. Often or usually, there is insufficient information or situations are too complex or opaque for true objectivity. The unconscious human mind nonetheless has to act in the face of that. In their 2016 book Democracy For Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce responsive Governments, social scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels summarized the human condition in politics like this:

“. . . . the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. . . . cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. . . . . the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.”

All modern societies operate under some form of government and political system. What nations, societies, groups and individuals do and don't do is governed by human biology. That is mostly governed by our heavily biased, unconscious perceptions of reality (facts) and thinking. That irrationality, disconnection from reality and associated group behavior, including a lack of empathy toward outsiders, is where the greatest threat to the human species resides.

Questions: Is humanity's greatest threat the imperfect cognitive and social biology that underpins politics? If it is, can our weak, usually deceived and misinformed conscious minds do anything to change the status quo? Or, as some cognitive and social scientists at least imply, are humans destined to never rise much above their innate cognitive and social biology, leaving the fate of the human species up to irrational biology?

B&B orig: 8/16/16

Book Review: The User Illusion

Saturday, March 23, 2019

In The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down To Size (Penguin Books, 1991, English translation 1998), Danish science writer Tor Norretranders dissects the powerful illusion that humans believe that what they see and think is real. The User Illusion (TUI) relentlessly describes human consciousness and the false reality that we believe is real. TUI is about the constraints on knowledge. The 2nd law of thermodynamics and the curse of always increasing disorder (entropy), information theory and mathematics all make it undisputable that everything sentient in the universe operates under severe constraints. That includes all forms of life and the limits on the human mind. To believe otherwise is a mistake, or more accurately, an illusion.

TUI’s chapter 6, The Bandwidth of Consciousness, gets right to the heart of matters. Going there is an enlightening but humbling experience. When awake, the information flow from human sensory nerves to the brain is about 11.2 million bits per second, with the eyes bringing in about 10 million bits per second, the skin about 1 million bits per second, with the ears and nose each bringing in about 100,000 thousand bits per second. That’s a lot, right? No, it isn’t. The real world operates at unknowable trillions of gigabits/second, so what we see or perceive isn’t much. It’s puny, actually.

But, remember, we needed only enough capacity to survive, not to know the future 10 or 100 years in advance or to see a color we can’t see using eyes with just three different color sensing cell types. For human survival, three colors was good enough. Evidence of evolutionary success is a planet population of 7 billion humans that’s rapidly heading toward 8 billion.

Although that 11.2 million bits/second may sound feeble, things are much, much weirder than just that. The 11.2 million bits/second are flowing into our unconscious minds. We are not conscious of all of that. So, what is the bandwidth of consciousness? How much of the 11.2 million bits/second we sense do we become aware of? The answer is an even more humbling 1-50 bits/second. At least, that’s the estimated rate at which human consciousness processes the information it is aware of. Silently reading this discussion consumes about 45 bits/second, reading aloud consumes about 30 bits/second, multiplying and adding two numbers consumes about 12 bits/second, counting objects consumes about 3 bits/second and distinguishing between different degrees of taste sweetness consumes about 1 bit/second.

What’s going on here??: It’s fair to ask what's really going on and why does our brain operate this way. The answer to the last question is that (i) it’s all that was needed to survive, and (ii) the laws of nature and the nature of biological organisms like humans are simply limited in what they can do. The human brain is large relative to body size but nonetheless only it processes information at a maximum rate of about 11.2 million bits/second because that’s what evolution conferred.

The more interesting question is what’s going on? What’s going on is that our unconscious mind takes in information at about 11.2 million bits/second, discards what’s not important or needed, which is about 11.2 million bits/second minus about 50 bits/second and then presents the little trickle of important information to consciousness. That’s how much bandwidth humans need, e.g., for finagling sex, spotting and running away from a hungry saber tooth cat before being eaten, finding or hunting food, or whatever was needed to survive.

Where things get very, very strange is in the presentation of the little trickle to consciousness. Discussing that step is a different discussion, but a glimpse of it as applied to politics is in the Democracy for Realists book review. This discussion focuses on the human brain operating system and the inputs and outputs it deals with and creates.

If one accepts the veracity of the science and Norretrander’s narrative, it is fair to say that the world that humans think they see is more illusion than real. Other chapters of TUI and the science behind the observations reinforce this reality of human cognition and its limits. For example, chapter 9, The Half-Second Delay, describes how our unconscious minds make decisions about 0.5 second before we become aware of what it is we have unconsciously decided. Despite that, we consciously believe that we made a decision about 0.5 second before we became aware of it. We trick ourselves.

In other words, we operate under an illusion that our conscious minds is making decisions when in fact that is the rare exception. The rule is that our unconscious minds are calling the shots most of the time. When it comes to perceiving reality, the low-bandwidth signal the brain uses to create a picture is a simulation that we routinely mistake for reality. As Norretranders sees it, consciousness is a fraud. That’s the user illusion.

B&B orig: 8/20/16

Book Review: Democracy For Realists

Saturday, March 23, 2019

In their book, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, social scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels (Princeton University Press, 2016) describe the major disconnect between what people believe democracy should be, what it really is and why it exists. The difference flows from human social and cognitive biology.

That's no surprise. Human biology dictates that people's beliefs, perceptions and thinking about politics are usually more personal or subjective than objective and fact-based.

In democracies, the typical voter believes that people have preferences for what government should do and they pick leaders or vote their preferences in ballot initiatives. That then leads to majority preference becoming policy, which in turn, legitimizes government because the people consented through their votes. In that vision, government is ethical and has the people's interests at heart.

That folk theory isn't how democracy works. The authors point out that the false definition leads to cynicism and unhappiness: “One consequence of our reliance on old definitions is that the modern American does not look at democracy before he defines it; he defines it first and then is confused by what he sees. We become cynical about democracy because the public does not act the way the simplistic definition of democracy says it should act, or we try to whip the public into doing things it does not want to do, is unable to do, and has too much sense to do. The crisis here is not a crisis in democracy but a crisis in theory.”

That reflects the reality that people don’t or, because of their social and cognitive biology, can't pay enough attention to politics for the folk theory to work as people believe it should work. Humans are biologically too limited to truly understand what’s going on even if they tried. The authors put it like this: “. . . . the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. . . . cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. . . . . the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.”

That describes reality based on what sentient humans can reasonably do. It's not a criticism of the human condition. Democracy and all or nearly all issues in politics are far too complex for voters to rationally deal with based on facts and unbiased reason. Instead, we have to simplify reality and apply heavily biased reason (common sense) to what we think we see. For the most part, what we believe we see is more illusion than objective reality.

The authors acknowledge the problem: “The result may not be very comfortable or comforting. Nonetheless, we believe that a democratic theory worthy of serious social influence must engage with the findings of modern social science.”

Although Democracy For Realists dissects popular democratic theory and analyzes science and historical data from the last hundred years or so, the exercise is about analyzing the role of human social and cognitive biology in democracy. Our false beliefs about democracy are shaped by human biology, not political theory. The authors research finds that the most important driver of voter belief and behavior is personal social or group identity, not ideology or theory. For most voters, race, tribe and clan are more important than anything else.

That manifests as irrational voter thinking and behavior. For example, the “will of the people” that’s central to the folk theory is a mostly a myth. People are divided on most everything and they usually don’t know what they really want. Average voters usually do not have enough knowledge to rationally make such determinations.

For example, voter opinions can be very sensitive to variation in how questions are worded. This reflects a powerful unconscious bias called framing effects. For example, in one 1980’s survey, about 64% said there was too little federal spending on “assistance to the poor” but only about 23% said that there was too little spending on “welfare.” The 1980s was the decade when vilification of “welfare” was common from the political right. The word welfare had been co-opted and reframed as a bad thing.

Similarly, before the 1991 Gulf War, about 63% said they were willing to “use military force”, but less than 50% were willing to “engage in combat”, while less than 30% were willing to “go to war.” The subjective nature of political concepts is obvious, i.e., assistance vs. welfare and military force vs. combat vs. war. What was the will of the people? One can argue that serving the will of the people under the folk theory of democracy is more chasing phantom than doing the obvious.

Other aspects of voter behavior also make serving the people's will difficult at best. For example, voters are usually irrational about rewarding and punishing politicians for their performance in office. Incumbents are routinely punished at the polls for floods, drought, offshore shark attacks on swimmers, a recent local university football team's loss and, more importantly, when things are going badly in the last few months of the politicians current term in office. Where's the logic in any of that?

Why should an incumbent worry about the people's will, when the people don't reward or punish on that basis? Incentives matter.

Achen and Bartels show that there are sound biological reasons for why elections don't produce responsive governments.

Questions: Is the vision of democracy that Achen and Bartels portray reasonably accurate, nonsense or something else? If their vision is reasonably accurate, what, if anything can or should average voters do? Or, is what we have the about best that can be expected from the subjective (personal) biological basis of human social and cognitive biology?
Is trying to understand and serve the will of the people the highest calling of democratic governments, or, would something else such as serving the "public interest"** constitute a better focus?

** Defined here: http://dispol.blogspot.com/2015/12/serving-public-interest.html

B&B orig: 8/21/16

Are Some Platforms Wising Up to Lies and Propaganda?

Thursday, March 21, 2019

Last month, Pinterest initiated a policy of cracking down on anti-vaccine content. The NYT reported:

Pinterest, a digital platform popular with parents, took an unusual step to crack down on the proliferation of anti-vaccination propaganda: It purposefully hobbled its search box.

Type “vaccine” into its search bar and nothing pops up.

“Vaccination” or “anti-vax”? Also nothing. Pinterest, which allows people to save pictures on virtual pinboards, is often used to find recipes for picky toddlers, baby shower décor or fashion trends, but it has also become a platform for anti-vaccination activists who spread misinformation on social media.

But only Pinterest, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal, has chosen to banish results associated with certain vaccine-related searches, regardless of whether the results might have been reputable.

In another reaction to propaganda about vaccines, Amazon announced that it will remove some books that contain vaccine misinformation, while Facebook and YouTube are similarly moving to shut false information down on their platforms. The Washington Post writes:

YouTube said it was banning anti-vaccination channels from running online advertisements.

Facebook announced it was hiding certain content and turning away ads that contain misinformation about vaccines, and Pinterest said it was blocking “polluted” search terms, memes and pins from particular sites prompting anti-vaccine propaganda, according to news reports.

Amazon has now joined other companies navigating the line between doing business and censoring it, in an age when, experts say, misleading claims about health and science have a real impact on public health.

NBC News recently reported that Amazon was pulling books touting false information about autism “cures” and vaccines. The e-commerce giant confirmed Monday to The Washington Post that several books are no longer available, but it would not release more specific information.

Culture war explodes: People who believe false information and science including science of anthropogenic climate change have been adamant that their free speech rights includes the right to spread their views everywhere on an equal footing with real truth and established science. Proponents of false truth and false science vehemently argue they speak real truth and science to liberals, socialists, communists, corrupt corporations and other liars, deceivers and manipulators. Facebook, Amazon, Pinterest and other social media are privately owned and therefore they can choose what content they allow and disallow on their platforms. The point is this: Every person and company can choose to believe what is truth and valid science and what isn't. If a company chooses to block what it believes is lies and false science, that is its choice.

  Dark free speech (DFS) forced this war: The rise of dark free speech[1] forced this situation. American conservative and populist politics is heavily infused with DFS. Independent fact checkers constantly reinforce this fact.

 Whether these moves will significantly blunt the rise of DFS is unknowable. Maybe it is already too late. Regardless, these tentative steps are extremely welcome measures by the private sector in defense of liberal democracy, freedom and common decency. These mover are faint early signals that maybe significant portions of the private sector[2] in American is still on the side of truth, democracy, personal freedom and science.

 An obvious question is this: Should DFS be suppressible by private entities because it is legal speech? DFS in public speech fora cannot be suppressed because that violates 1st Amendment free speech rights.

  Footnotes:
 1. Dark free speech = lies, deceit, misinformation, unwarranted opacity, and fact and truth hiding, unwarranted emotional manipulation especially including fomenting unwarranted fear, rage, hate, intolerance, distrust, bigotry and racism, and etc.

 2. Obviously not including the carbon energy sectors who continue to deny climate science to protect their profit margins and political power.