New Sophists' Almanac

Alpha Theory

Dear Gord,

I hope your winter English camp isn't going too awfully. From your blog I judge you're just about done. I've been looking around for things to talk about and I think I found something neat.

Aaron Haspel at God of the Machine ("Culling my readers to a select few since June 2002") has been working on consilience: he's elaborated a theory that he believes describes the physical laws to which ethical rules must ultimately refer for any sustainable living system. It's well-written, often humorous, and persuasive as far as it goes. As I read it the theory is descriptive, not prescriptive (so far, anyway), and I have some questions which I'll discuss below. But first let me provide the links to the various parts of the arguments. Don't be put off by the size of the pages that load—the arguments are concise, but the comments are abundant and long-winded.

The Disconsolation of Philosophy, Aaron Haspel

Part 1
Part 2: Among the Ruins
Part 3: Eustace Goes to Vegas
Interlude
Part 4: Randomness, Two Kinds
Part 5: Solutions, Two Kinds
Part 6: The Universal Law of Life
Alpha Primer [a recapitulation and summary]
Q&A

I'm immediately struck by the fact that he starts with many of the assumptions of Peter Kreeft in his "Apple Argument": he has no patience for people who want to argue about whether we can identify apples or whether the external world exists. But instead of using bullying tactics to thinly disguise a Medieval apologia, he turns to known physical laws to see if he can identify the ones that must rule the behavior and continued existence of any physical system as a discrete system, living or not. What he ends up with is a fairly simple formulation, rooted in basic thermodynamics and probability theory, that he calls the "universal law of life": in order to sustain itself, a living system must generate sufficient negative entropy not to perish, first of all; but beyond that, in any given situation, given the total information available to the system at the time, there exists an ideal strategy for sustainability, and the closer a system can approximate that ideal, the more likely it is to survive and flourish. But living systems are not perfect information processors, so in practice there will be a gap between the best possible strategy and the strategy actually adopted. In Haspel's theory, the first strategy (the ideal) is ethics, whereas the second strategy (the one conditioned by ignorance) is actual behavior. He calls his idea the Alpha Theory: alpha is the negative entropy generated by a system's behavioral strategy, and maximizing alpha is what makes a system most sustainable. ("Behavioral strategy" covers everything from mitochondria to minds.) [Update. I have been corrected: please see below.]

Unlike some of Haspel's interlocutors I'm not hung up on the fact that this formulation doesn't appear to allow us to deduce rock-solid moral laws: it doesn't prove that "thou shalt not kill," and Haspel himself states that "If alpha theory had a motto, it would be there are no universal strong solutions." No permanent universal sustainability strategies, just rules of thumb (or so I read it) that are more or less useful depending on context. Presumably this translates into the absence of any universal or objective moral rules, and although I'm sympathetic to the claim (since I didn't much believe in them anyway) I'm still leery of the connection between sustainability and ethics.

My instinctive response is to ask about the difference between quantity and quality. Does the strategy for maximum human sustainability produce a life I'd actually want to live? To paraphrase Bill Hicks: Yul Brenner smoked, drank, and got laid every day of his life; Jim Fixx spent his mornings running around dewey tracks at dawn. Brenner's dead. Fixx is dead. Shit."

There's also the question of scope. An individual is part of many things that can be called systems. There's your body, your immediate family, your neighborhood, your extended family or your kin group, your city, your province, your nation, your species, the local ecosystem, the global ecosystem...I think we can stop there for now. How do we decide the system that most deserves to be sustained in a given instance? At what point does the ethical balance permit me to put my own happiness before the survival of the species, for instance (can I smoke in the privacy of my own home?). That's rather important, especially as the possibility for species-wide calamity seems to be increasing with technical progress and not decreasing.

One can easily imagine the alpha theory being put to totalitarian use by people who argue that maximizing alpha for the species or for the state requires the elimination of certain genes, people, or ideas. This is basically what fundamentalists do when they argue that homosexuality and apostasy must be fought in order to preserve the "fabric of society;" but it's also what we do when we argue that murderers and rapists belong in jail and not on the streets even independently of the question of punishment. And it is, in a way, what we do when we argue that some people's tax dollars (their local alpha currency) should be spent on other people's welfare and education, not just for fairness' sake but to improve society overall.

So can alpha theory yield a doctrine of inalienable rights and responsibilities, an actual ethical system? Probably not: "there are no universal strong solutions." But I'd note that one of the reasons we have the idea of inalienable human rights is not just because Enlightenment thinkers selfishly wanted to do whatever they pleased, but also because they theorized that societies which recognize such rights will be more successful than those that don't. However history has seen some highly sustainable despotisms, so I don't know if we can call the theory proved; and sometimes even despotisms have legal structures in place to protect individual rights to some extent.

These things said, I should also note that I haven't yet read all of the hundreds of comments, in which a number of apparently learned individuals are waving their big sticks, so it's possible my concerns are addressed there. But I find this whole idea sufficiently fascinating to go ahead and blog on it here before I've made up my mind. So far what I see is an interesting predictive and descriptive hypothesis, to wit: if living systems do actually succeed in correlation to the degree to which they maximize alpha (negative entropy), then we should expect behavioral norms and ethical rules expressed by those systems to have been shaped by evolution (physical and cultural) such that they permit and encourage members of the system to maximize the alpha of the whole by strategies sufficiently consistent to ward off common threats to survival and sufficiently diverse to ward off the rare extraordinary threat to survival. If it sounds like utilitarianism, I think Haspel would say it's actually an attempt to provide the most basic possible unit of utility—which utilitarianism always lacked—as a starting point for further exploration.

Oh, I should also note that he seems to believe that his theory gives a new and concrete value to art (representational art, anyway). Given that people can probably only know a tiny fraction of the things needed to truly maximize alpha at any given point, art has a great role to play in helping us imagine the possible contexts and situations that might arise in which humans must make decisions, and the consequences large and small of those decisions. Aesthetic value would thus be closely tied to the honesty and accuracy with respect to alpha of a given artwork.

Which leads me to one last thought for now: wouldn't alpha theory make a great component of a Culture novel? What are the Culture's Minds in their caretaker role but huge alpha-calculating machines, working far above the levels of human cognition?

Cheers,

Marvin

P.S. Mr. Haspel is fast, and has corrected me on a crucial point:

Marvin of New Sophists — a Spinal Tap joke lurks in that title — comments at length. At the risk of seeming churlish, I want to correct one small point of his generally accurate interpretation. He writes that "alpha is the negative entropy generated by a system's behavioral strategy." Not exactly. Alpha is the ratio between enthalpy plus negative entropy, in the numerator, and positive entropy, in the denominator. It is not measured in units of energy: it is dimensionless. That's why I say life is a number, rather than a quantity of energy.)

And since I can't yet do it justice on my own, I'll quote some more:

Which leaves the question of what α is, exactly. It can be thought of as the rate at which the free energy in a system is directed toward coherence, rather than dissipation. It is the measure of the stability of a system.

Oranges!

Gord!

I recently discovered that my uncle has a web page where he has posted some of his poems and essays. He has worked in the arts and in academia pretty much all his life, and he's a fun guy. You might get a kick out of something there. Right now I'm trying to figure out what he said in his essays about tennis, textuality, and discourse...or if he even finished saying what he intended to say. I think I'm going to have to read that stuff again.

By the way, I hope you had a good holiday, or some kind of holiday at least. I spent most of mine chuckling through a compilation of Bill Hicks' routines and unpublished papers. And I read a book about El Cid and am now reading about the Knights Templar. Fun stuff! The latter two books seem to be very good about providing a neophyte (that would be me) with lots of history about the times and the times leading up to the times of their subjects so that the subjects can be understood in context.

Cheers,

Marvin

Bad Apples

No bold insights, but I thought I'd post something anyway. Before Christmas I had the idea of doing a much longer, point-by-point analysis of Peter Kreeft's apple argument that incorporated and addressed some of the points made in other articles on his web site. But the more I thought about it, the weirder the idea became. He believes in demons as demons. He considers the Enlightenment to have been a ghastly mistake. He uses the philosophical terms of Aquinas as though they were self-evidently sufficient and true: only an sadly deceived materialist intellectual pervert could find reason to quibble with them. And after reading many of the essays and listening to MP3s of his lecture on the culture war (which was a breath of fresh air, really, since apparently the Enemy are not actually liberals and freethinkers, but demons and of course sin) I've begun to ask myself, "Why bother?"

The good doctor at least does me the credit of seeing me as the patient and not the staph infection. And I'll give him credit for consistency; he appears to be as skeptical of modern conservatism as any well-meaning and sincere Medieval Christian ought to be. On the other hand he insults my intelligence by defending his argument for God from design with this:

"But there is no scientific proof of natural selection as the mechanism of evolution. Natural selection 'explains' the emergence of higher forms without intelligent design by the survival-of-the-fittest principle. But this is sheer theory. There is no evidence that abstract, theoretical thinking or altruistic love make it easier for man to survive."

Does a professor at Boston College have any right to be this ignorant? One wants to argue with him, but what's the point? Furthermore one wonders if he is willing, as he ages, to do without much of the medical biological reasearch of the last 50 years. "No, doctor, don't bother to give me the advanced amoxycillin for my antibiotic-resistant infection. I'll just do with a bit of the original penicillin, please. Nobody's ever demonstrated that natural selection actually works, you see." Somehow I don't see it happening.

Which is not to say that I think we understand how natural selection produced every last human trait; of course we don't. But as Mr. Kreeft himself argues in another context, partial ignorance doesn't necessarily mean one's quest for knowledge is on the wrong track.

Anyway, after reading lots of this stuff—not all, but a good sample—I returned to his apple argument and realized a couple of things. One, the apple argument seems to be designed to hide Mr. Kreeft's philosophical assumptions, not to make them clear. Contrasted with his usual style it appears to be a specialty argument to be deployed in cases where the traditional religious theological language might be off-putting. Thus it is suspect. But more than that, I started paying more attention to his thesis sentence: "I will try to persuade you that if we know what an apple is, Roe v. Wade must be overthrown, and that if you want to defend Roe, you will probably want to deny that we know what an apple is."

Basically, his argument is designed not to prove a point about abortion itself, or about the concept of personhood itself, but to justify an attitutde of peremptory disregard for anyone who dares take deep questions about what people and things really are, whether from a philosophical or scientific point of view, seriously. If you think the Medieval Catholic theologians possibly did not investigate every possible avenue of ontolotical, social, or ethical inquiry; or if you think that modern biology and science in general might have something to say about human nature or the human condition that we didn't understand before; then you are a dupe of modernism and an ethically unserious person who is beyond reasoned discussion—on Peter Kreeft's terms, anyway.

Combine this tactic with the fact that he's not really laying his cards on the table in a straightforward fashion, and one must begin to suspect that this argument isn't really "for actual use in dialogue with intelligent pro-choicers." It's more for use with gullible pro-choicers who don't have enough philosophical experience to spot the sleights of hand. In the end one must ask oneself if it's worth it even to argue with the man, especially in a point-by-point way, when the points in question aren't even being offered or argued in an honest and candid way. Unless I'm willing to turn back the clock to about 1600 A.D. or so, there's no way we'll be able to agree on terms, so where can we actually go? It is, of course, possible that nearly all western philosophy and science from the Enlightenment on was a horrible mistake, but I think it's Mr. Kreeft's job to prove that; not mine to recapitulate the last four centuries of philosophy, anthropology, biology, and so on. He is the one being paid to think, after all; I do all my cogitation pro bono.

However I do think I can accurately restate Mr. Kreeft's true beginning premise. Not the crypto-Medieval premise he's secretly arguing, but the premise he expects his interlocutor to hear. It's something like this: "If you and I were in a grocery store and saw a basket of big, red, steroid-pumped American Red Delicious apples, we would both be willing to agree that they're apples." He wants to convince us that true personhood, and thus the ethical issues surrounding abortion, are really as clear and as straightforward as that. He takes the high likelihood that two people will agree on a matter of common and ethically neutral usage and uses it as a stand-in for informed agreement about deep questions about reality, being, truth, and so on. If you question any further premise of his, then you're guilty of standing in the grocery store aisle and saying an apple isn't an apple, even when the clerks have clearly marked the bin "apples." The seemingly self-evidential nature of common usages is made to stand in for any actual analysis of the concepts at stake, and at each step he shepherds the reader away from doing such analysis by insisting on some form of common usage.

Again, why bother arguing with this tactic? There's no actual argument to argue with. However there are other arguments on his web site that might be fun to tackle. I think there's one where he argues for an essentialist definition of personhood against a functionalist definition of personhood...that might actually offer some substance to grapple with. In the meantime I think I'll stay away from Mr. Kreeft's bad apples...I've no need for a diet of worms.