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In defense of sheep

"Think for yourself. Don't just follow the crowd. Don't give in to peer pressure." It is all good advice. Some of the time.

Consider religions. Alongside their differences, they are all opposed to such things as deserting your children, drinking your wages away, engaging in extramarital affairs, and being unkind to your family members. Most members of most congregations do not do those things, most of the time. A person who is tempted to stray would do well to follow the crowd.

Some people would do well to belong to a crowd so they can follow it. The loners who commit campus shootings come to mind. Despite their isolation at one level, we can consider them members of an implicit crowd: society at large. They would do better to follow the wisdom of the crowd.

These cases may seem to miss the point a little because we doubt the philanderer or shooter is thinking they are performing a moral act. Suppose we consider the advice narrowed down to "When deciding whether something is morally right, don't just follow the crowd." Is this good advice? Some of the time.

Consider some nonconformists who made the news: The founders of Heaven's Gate, and the founder of Jonestown (Jim Jones). Both groups ended with mass suicides. (You can focus on the followers, who we wish had not followed the crowds they had joined, but here we focus on the leaders, who started their groups by not following a crowd.) William Miller convinced followers that the world was to end on a certain day in 1844, and while the consequences were less dire than suicide, it does not on balance seem to have been a good thing. We celebrate radical nonconformists, notable examples being Jesus, Buddha, or Martin Luther. But consider that for all we know for every one of them there have been three others who led people astray.

For those who believe abortion is murder, whether to kill doctors who perform abortions might not be a simple choice. The world would be better if all followed the overwhelming view of the anti-abortion movement that this is not a good choice, instead of a few following their consciences to a different conclusion.

Sometimes the problem is not knowing what is right and what is wrong, but how important it is. It is easy for a group to get bogged down and miss its primary objectives if members who are intent on following their consciences insist on objecting to using paper plates and plastic silverware, using a conventional product when a fair trade one is available, or debating whether the term "people of color" or "non-whites" is more appropriate.

Should a group sell all its stock in a company that does bad things, or should it keep the stock and try to change the policies through shareholder resolutions? You can express your views in discussion, but once the group has decided, maybe it is better to go along rather than stand on principle and refuse to let the question subside.

Suppose you belong to a high school group, and some members have a habit of littering. Should you take a strong stand and risk expulsion from the group? It isn't obvious. Suppose group members use ethnic slurs talking amongst themselves? You certainly do not have to participate, and there is a strong case for speaking up, but is a high-stakes confrontation called for? Working within to change opinions has merit, and the person's own need to belong has to be considered. We don't want a situation where all high school students of conscience have to be loners, because they find something morally questionable about the actions of all of their peers.

So what it comes down to, really, is that you should follow the crowd when they are right and not when they are wrong -- and when it is important. And it might be more often than not that the wisdom of the group is better than your own solitary judgments.

Thoughts on the time before death

At my FUSN visioning table several weeks back we got into a discussion of death, which got me thinking.

Typically we attach great significance to the time just before death. When reporting a person's death, people are very likely to add that the person died surrounded by friends and family, that it was peaceful, and/or that it was at home, whichever of those things were true.

It is important if we think it is important; shared customs of this kind do not need justification. But sometimes I wonder whether it has to be so important. My thoughts are based on the premise that nothing significant of a person survives death. Sure, the deceased lives on in memory, which is obvious. But otherwise, nothing. Those who do not accept that premise may feel unmoved by what follows.

Suppose a dear friend leaves you, moving to some remote spot, never to communicate with you again. If in your final parting your friend is happy and comfortable with your relationship, then in your years ahead you can imagine him or her as staying happy and comfortable. If your friend is distraught and angry, you will imagine things differently. This makes sense because your last communication is a good predictor of future feelings.

If on the other hand your friend dies instead of moving away, how do you feel then? I think I perceive a general tendency to feel the same way, to project your last interactions into this person's future, but in this latter case there is no support in reality for that feeling.

Consider a different aspect of the same situation. Suppose the friend stayed her last night as a guest in your house, and you have an earnest, emotionally intense few hours where you try to tie up loose ends and say goodbye. Suppose her flight is cancelled, and she comes back to spend one more night. Does this invalidate your hours of goodbye?

Suppose that in her next-to-last week alive, your friend is distraught and angry, and in her last week alive, she is calm. On the other hand, suppose she is calm in her next-to-last week and distraught in her last week. Once again, it feels like it matters, and it matters if we think it does, but does it have to?

Suppose a person has been working hard for years on a scientific project, and the moment of truth arrives, when we find out whether it is a success or failure. Is the person’s life to be viewed differently if she dies the day after the news is known, or the day before? It would matter a great deal if she was leaving for a remote location, but does it matter if she instead ceases to be?

One reason that a person’s final days or hours might seem so important is that we apply our “moving away” feelings. For believers in an afterlife, this may make sense. Perhaps you could take the strength of the rightness of those feelings to indicate that you really do believe in an afterlife even if you thought you didn’t. But I think it’s worth considering that our many cultural traditions that make the end of life special could be shadows of a denial of the finality of death, rather than its acceptance.

To put this in context, being together and caring for one another in times of distress is good. Measures to reduce a dying person's feelings of pain, anxiety, and loneliness are very important. Doing whatever we as the living need to do to gain closure in our relationship is also important. Keeping a community whole by observing its traditions can be important. Death of a loved one can be so hard to bear, I think anything that works or that helps is good, no questions asked. But on the other hand, if a dying person is not interested in deep conversations, or wants to deny to the end that he or she is actually dying, could those be valid choices too? Or if someone cannot make it to the deathbed, or they could have but didn't, it could offer some comfort to consider that the situation could be viewed more matter-of-factly, and with considerable justification.

Thoughts on a few aspects of abortion

I had a thought about one aspect of the abortion debate. It addresses the narrow question of whether a person should feel more uncomfortable about a woman having an early-stage abortion (say two months) than using contraception. I suggest that some reasons for this discomfort might not be valid.

What are the differences between contraception and abortion? They are both means of preventing a baby from being born. Assume that we are discussing a barrier method of contraception. In what I will call the gamete case, a bunch of sperm and an egg are kept apart, but if allowed to come into contact they might produce an embryo that would grow into a baby. In the other case the embryo already exists. What makes the embryo more worthy of protection?

One possible argument is that the embryo will result in a baby but the gamete case probably won't. But neither is certain to produce a baby. The embryo has about a 90% chance of turning into a baby (the spontaneous abortion rate is around 10%). If we assume the most favorable gamete case, a reasonable guess is at least 30%. It is not a large difference in the realm of moral reasoning, and I have never heard of anyone whose discomfort with contraception increased with the likelihood that a pregnancy would otherwise result.

Another possibility is that a large part of the potential baby's future nature is determined in the embryo case but not the gamete case, because its genetic makeup is complete. (Note that the half of the genetic material from the mother has already been specified in the gamete case too). The genetic blueprint for the potential baby has been determined -- but no one knows what it is. Here I think an analogy is useful. Suppose there is a national lottery, and one million people have bought tickets for $10 each. Before the drawing, the Supreme Court rules it illegal, and everyone gets their $10 back. No one has much cause for complaint. Suppose on the other hand that the drawing is to be done in two stages, one to determine the city of the winner and the other to determine the individual. The first part of the drawing has been done, but no one has looked at the result and that information is about to be destroyed. I doubt there would be any serious complaint then either. I use the two-stage drawing to account for the fact that a person's nature is determined by far more than their genetics. If the drawing has already been completed and Frank Jones of Cleveland has been on the news discussing how he will spend his winnings, many people would feel that is not fair, but that is a different case.

Another reason that abortion might cause more discomfort is because in that case a symbiotic relationship between mother and embryo has started to develop. People might learn whether this reason affects them by considering how much discomfort they feel about the destruction of extra embryos created in vitro as part of fertility treatments.

There are other reasons a person might feel an early-stage embryo is worthy of more protection, perhaps because thinking that it will feel pain, or that it has started to look a little like a person, or it has been endowed with an immortal soul. I won't address those.

There are many people who view abortion as murder, and some who feel so strongly about it that it becomes the focus of their lives. There is a natural tendency for pro-choice people to try to meet them halfway. I think that is sensible as it pertains to policy, but I think it also may lead people to inappropriately modify their own personal beliefs.

Failure to detect aliens does not mean we are doomed to destroy ourselves

I wrote previously (http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2008/06/aliens-are-bountiful-but-unreachable.html) on the subject of extraterrestrial intelligence. I recently found the issue discussed in my daughter's college astronomy textbook. I expected a textbook to have more precise thinking, but I was disappointed.

Starting on p754 of The Cosmic Perspective, by Bennett et al, 5th edition.:

This paradox [of why we have not met any aliens] has many possible solutions but broadly speaking we can group them into three categories:

1. We are alone.

2. Civilizations are common, but no one has colonized the galaxy. There are at least three possible reasons why this might be the case. Perhaps interstellar travel is much harder or vastly more expensive than we have guessed, and civilizations are unable to venture far from their home worlds.

That is by far the most likely possibility. The book earlier sketched the enormous difficulties to interstellar travel imposed by the laws of physics. But in this section it just blithely assumes it will be possible some day. I suspect I know why. Frequently a history of a marvelous technology begins with a quote from some learned person in the past who said it could never happen. We implicitly condemn this person as being closed-minded and insufficiently imaginative. No scientist wants to be cited in the future in such a fashion. There are countless times scientists have claimed that something is impossible, and it in fact turns out to be impossible (faster-than-light travel, practical alchemy, perpetual motion machines), but they do not give rise to quotes that fit into historical narratives.

If the judgment that interstellar travel is effectively impossible is correct, no other explanation is needed as to why the aliens are not here.

Continuing:

Perhaps the desire to explore is unusual, and other societies either never leave their home star systems or stop exploring before they've colonized much of the galaxy. Most ominously, perhaps many civilizations have arisen, but they have all destroyed themselves before achieving the ability to colonize the stars.
...
[This] category of solutions has ... terrifying implications. If thousands of civilizations before us have all failed to achieve interstellar travel on a large scale, what hope do we have? Unless we somehow think differently than all other civilizations, this solution says that we will never go far in space. Because we have always explored when the opportunity arose, this solution almost inevitably leads to the conclusion that failure will come about because we destroy ourselves.

The two alternative explanations lack the aura of inevitability. If there are millions of civilizations, the highly unlikely isn't going to account for the failure of all of them -- only the impossible will do. Why would we think that self-destruction is inevitable? Even if there are strong forces leading towards that outcome, there are plenty of opportunities for things to be slightly different: some variation in intelligent species' psychology or sociology, or local ecologies, or local geology. It's hard for me to see why a desire to explore would peter out most of the time, and far harder to believe it would happen in all cases.

We don't have any realistic hope of colonizing the galaxy. But there is room to hope for a long future right here on earth. We might in one way or another come up with a civilization in balance with nature, probably with fewer people than we have now. It might embody a high standard of living, social justice, and intellectual and artistic accomplishments which constitute progress over what we have today. Perhaps such a civilization would view an attempt at interstellar colonization as we today view an attempt to jump across the English Channel carrying bricks (http://montypython.50webs.com/scripts/Series_1/67.htm.) Maybe a harmonious and pleasant future stretching millions of years into the future is incredibly unlikely. But the absence of aliens doesn't figure in that discussion.

Perhaps we should interpret "If thousands of civilizations before us have all failed to achieve interstellar travel on a large scale, what hope do we have?" differently. Perhaps the author assumes interstellar travel is so important that failure to achieve it is equivalent to catastrophic failure of the entire civilization. That is a very narrow set of values that would be foreign to most people.

The absence of aliens or evidence of past alien visits implies that we will not engage in exponential colonization. That's all.

3. There is a galactic civilization, but it has not yet revealed its existence to us.

That is an intriguing possibility. A common theme in arguments about other planets, life forms, and civilizations is that what happens on any planet has no effect on what happens on any other one. We have millions of independent observations, as a scientist might put it. Once we assume easy space travel, the independence assumption disappears. The dominant one can influence events on other planets, and the galactic civilization could in statistical terms be a single data point. If its values call for not revealing itself, maybe that is why we aren't detecting aliens.

But as mundane and uninspiring as it may be, my educated guess is that you simply can't (economically) get there from here.

Evolution explains why happiness is elusive

Happiness is what we strive for. We imagine that if we get what we want, we will be happier -- permanently. But psychology has determined that for the most part people's happiness level gradually adapts to changed circumstances. People think that if they can buy the bigger house or make more money they will be happier, but if they achieve their goal, within months they will take that into account and report themselves no happier than before. Similarly, people may feel that losing a job or being forced to give up a home will make them miserable, but once again they take that into account before too long and report themselves just as happy as before.

Can evolution shed light on this state of affairs?

The evolutionary advantage to pleasure or happiness does not come in the moment it is experienced, but in anticipation. When we consider alternative courses of action, we prefer the actions that will bring us to happier futures. The things that bring us happiness are (or were in the environment we evolved in) conducive to reproductive success, such as eating better, being safer and more comfortable, having higher status, and of course sex.

Now, our sensory systems are based on habituation. If we come into a room with a distinctive smell, we will soon get accustomed to it and only experience new smells. If we go from sunlight into a dark cave, our visual system adapts so that what was dim before will seem very bright. This makes sense, since our senses benefit us by getting new information, and whatever is a constant background does not convey information any more. We could imagine an organism wired so that it always experiences sunlight as very bright but can make small distinctions among what looks very bright, as well as seeing dark areas as very dark but able to make small distinctions in what seems very dark. But for whatever reason we are not wired that way. From that perspective, it is not surprising that we also habituate to happiness.

If the average outcome for a man in our environment of evolution is to have one mate, he could imagine himself happier having two or three and less happy if he had none. But if he does have three mates, evolution has no desire in having him rest content there -- it is very much to the advantage of his genes if he can have four or five mates*. Similarly, if he has no mate at all, a permanent funk is not adaptive -- contributing to the success of nephews and nieces might be his new standard of happiness. (The situation with women is somewhat more complicated). Both sexes could also recalibrate in other aspects of their lives. For instance, improving a very poor diet to a merely poor one would bring happiness, but it is advantageous to recalibrate and then go on to seek a rich diet or a very rich one.

It is also to our evolutionary advantage to not easily understand our recalibration of happiness. If we did, it would undercut the motivation we get from bettering our current condition, whatever it may be.

There are ways to be happier at any given level of life circumstances by meditation, exercise, and thinking about things differently, but I imagine these were not relevant in the environment we evolved in.

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*This is not a defense of polygamy or philandering. We can and should and usually do transcend such innate inclinations.

Deciding where to give money

Some of us feel morally compelled to look beyond our own well-being to try to make the world a better place. The variety of needs is far greater than any one person could address. How should a person choose? Donations of time and labor can be very valuable, but to simplify the question, I will discuss only the aspect of financial donations, since there is some organization that will accept checks to address just about any issue. I recognize that many of us do not have the means to give much money away; not all of us have the luxury of confronting this issue.

I exclude from consideration donations made for a service received, even though the payment is not required. This could include the "suggested donation" at a concert, giving to a public radio station because one enjoys the programming, or giving to one's religious organization. Some of us have money to give for which we get only the most indirect return, such as feeling we have done a good thing.

One general approach to giving is what I might call reactive. We consider the issues that come to our attention while we are doing other things. We give to what our friends and neighbors are giving to. We respond to mailings asking for help. We give to help the victims of disasters we see on TV news.

Another approach might be called inner-directed. We would consider what within ourselves we value most and find ways to give money to carry forward those values. We would not give to organizations that sent the most numerous and most eloquent fundraising letters. We might not give to what our friends give to if, on reflection, it isn't so important to us.

A cerebral version of this might be to first allocate a fixed amount of money and then divide it according to our values. That is my tendency.

A more emotional approach can be reactive but it can also be inner-directed if we make a point of not making decisions when biased by immediate exposure to a particular cause.

It is hard to write much about where feelings lead us -- people's feelings are individual and personal. Strong feelings could lead us to dig into money we would have spent on ourselves.

So, returning to the cerebral side, how could we decide?

One consideration might be giving as part of a community effort. If someone asks to be sponsored for a "Walk For X", giving to that cause is part of a social relationship with the person.

Another way to decide would be to find the greatest need. This might lead us to send all our discretionary money to Africa. Though some moral philosophers might look down on us, I think for most of us there is an irresistible tendency to want to give to causes we identify with personally and people who are more like us.

It is surely natural to give to blood relations, especially our children. This is so strongly ingrained that to me it falls more in the category of money spent personally than for the greater good.

The categories and dimensions we might use for determining who is worthy of our money are certainly numerous: geography, language, race, religion, nationality, social class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic heritage, intimate experience with any particular disease, interest (such as a hobby), educational institution, or species (humanity). There is an interesting complication, however: When we fall on the privileged side of any categorization of people, there is a tension between giving to people like ourselves and giving to those more in need. For instance, a person with a home might give to the homeless (different) but to the homeless of the US rather than other countries (same).

Some causes are not linked directly to particular people. Preservation of nature and the environment is in this category, and historical preservation to some extent.

Another dimension is short-term relief as opposed to longer-term. Feeding people at a homeless shelter is shorter-term, while working for affordable housing is longer-term.

There is a tradeoff between spreading money across many organizations or giving more to a few. Limiting the organizations saves overhead costs and reduces somewhat the flood of fundraising letters. On the other hand, one way used for gauging the strength of an organization is how many people contribute to it, not just the total value of the contributions.

I have little to say about where these criteria lead me. I find it a hard problem. But I present the framework for wider consideration. Perhaps other people have other ways of thinking about it.