Now it is time for impeachment

I argued against Trump impeachment in <this post>. The Ukraine allegations have shifted the balance, and of course I am far from alone in reaching that conclusion. I find myself in agreement with most of the articles and "friendly" op-eds in the New York Times. I don't think I have much to add beyond what they say, which makes it tempting to skip this blog post. But I'll make it anyway.

I argued before that if you can't get a conviction, it's best not to impeach. But the Ukraine case changes things. Trump is using the power of his office with foreign governments to help get him reelected in 2020, and that undermines our democracy going forward, not just in retrospect.

I can't say I'm newly outraged. My outrage meter has been pegged to the top of the gauge for a long time now. Reasons to be outraged about Trump are layered one on top of the other... there are many layers. Instead of feeling outraged, I'm rather hoping this is an opportunity to get rid of Trump and Trumpism more effectively in the 2020 election -- and perhaps to constrain his behavior between now and then.

A big part of the problem is that the crucial constituency here are those ardent pro-Trump voters who vote in disproportionate numbers in Senate primary contests. Republican senators are very wary of provoking their ire. So the politics centers heavily on what those pro-Trump voters think.

What do they really think? What would it take for some significant portion of them to abandon Trump? I don't really know.

When Trump was elected, I worried that he might simply order the military to arrest Congress. The leftists and centrists would be outraged, but would it be enough? Would Trump voters have just cheered him on as President For Life? There are of course ways to subvert democracy without arresting Congress, and Trump has already used some of those methods (as in withholding a contract from Amazon because of Jeff Bezos's politics), but the subtlety might well be lost on Trump voters.

The readiness with which Trump and allies (including notably Fox News) will lie and obfuscate is concerning. A look at the Fox page shows their guns are blazing as never before. Earlier today there was an "Aha!" story claiming Schiff did the same thing as Trump. Why? Because some prankster claiming to be from Ukraine with dirt on Trump called him a couple years ago and he said he would be interested in that information. There is just no parallel. When someone offers information to someone in the intelligence community, they naturally take it. Whether they find it credible when they get it and what they would do with it are separate questions, but accepting the information is not a problem.

There are three key parties on the Republican side of this issue. First, Trump is a strange, despicable human being. Second, there are Trump voters, and I don't know what makes them tick. They might just be very ignorant, and think there's nothing more important at stake than how it feels good when Trump zings people they don't like. There are people (and not just right-wingers) who think "Don't vote, it just encourages them" is a funny bumper sticker. Third, there are the Republican senators. I'm convinced they aren't ignorant and they know enough history to understand the danger of tyranny. You imagine most of them would personally prefer a Pence presidency to a Trump presidency, if their voters would let them get away with it. And now it's time for them to look in the mirror. On the one side, democracy itself is at stake. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance and the spotlight is now on them. On the other side, their jobs might be at risk if they can't sell an anti-Trump position. Lots of us face job insecurity, and risk losing our jobs if we do the right thing. We can sympathize with people who don't do the right thing if losing the job means financial ruin. But ex-senators do not face financial ruin.

Positive things could happen without Trump actually being removed from office. If Republican senators privately tell him that they will vote against him if he goes too far, it could moderate his behavior without the senators having to pay the political price.

If we assume that Trump is defeated in 2020, the picture still does not look very good unless the Democrats retake the Senate. We face ongoing gridlock in this highly polarized era unless Senate, House, and President are all from the same party. I suppose Republican senators might worry about losing to a Democrat in the final election, as well as worrying about losing to a Trump supporter in the primary. I don't have strong intuitions about how the impeachment process will play out in terms of the Senate count. If tribalism continues, Republican-leaning states will continue to elect Republican senators.

But far more is at stake here than partisan politics. Much as I dislike Pence's politics, I do not have any reason to think he is inclined to disrupt international relations and the integrity of the political process. I just hope there is not some other demagogue ready to take Trump's place if he goes.

The linkage of free will, consciousness, and morality

The scientific worldview has been dramatically successful in explaining how things work and letting us build technology to vastly improve our lives. The one mystery it has no idea how to explain is consciousness -- the fact that we all feel a "seemingness" to life.

Science also holds that free will is impossible -- the idea that there is a "self" that makes decisions for reasons other than a causal interplay of physical processes. As I see it, consciousness is essential to our concept of free will. If we are unaware of having alternatives and choosing one of them, then we did not exercise our will. On the other hand, consider a very sophisticated computer program. We can point to inputs from the program's environment, which could include truly random inputs like radioactive decay, interwoven with an extremely complicated series of computations. Despite all the complexity, we still wouldn't say that the computer had free will.

Science also has nothing to say about the idea of values -- what's worthwhile or what's not. It is only one aspect of the human mind and brain. You could build into a program some abstract notions like, "complexity is better than simplicity", and derive from that the desirability of preserving complex ecosystems and preferring complex civilizations to simple ones. Most of morality concerns the experiences of beings that we assume to be conscious and experiencing the world the same we do in the relevant respects (more on that below). But essential to the very idea of morality is choice -- free will. If something happened that was beyond our control, we cannot be said to have moral responsibility for it.

Moral responsibility as we humans think of it requires free will. Free will requires consciousness. All three are fundamentally foreign to the scientific method and central to our conscious experience, and all seem foreign to science and inherent to our lived experience in exactly the same way.

The requirements do not run in the opposite direction. We can imagine conscious experience without free will -- we can imagine having no control over what we think about. It does however sound very alien to our own experience -- even if we were completely deprived of sensory input or the ability to influence the outside world in any way, we could still decide what to think about. We can also easily imagine free will without morality -- we can choose our actions based on anything at all. But moral responsibility requires the other two.

As a footnote, most of morality concerns the experiences of beings that we assume to be conscious. At the heart of reducing animal suffering is the idea that animals are conscious and experience suffering -- if they don't, then there is no obstacle to doing things to them that we would hate. When we hear them cry or whimper, our concern is that they are feeling the way we feel when we cry or whimper. On the other hand, if someone builds a very sophisticated robot that emulates an animal, then we congratulate the builder if it cries or whimpers when an animal would, but we don't think the robot is suffering. To the extent we feel some sympathy for HAL as Dave disassembles him in "2001: A Space Odyssey", it is because we assume HAL is truly conscious, as when he says "I can feel it". When it comes to human beings, we have a very elaborate sense of moral and immoral ways to treat each other, based primarily on assuming their conscious experience is just like ours. The common assumption that others experience the world as we do and that this guides our moral action is interesting, but not part of the main thrust of my argument.

Online privacy and targeted advertising

I have heard all the dire warnings about how corporations are gobbling up my personal information and know far more about me than I would like. I suppose it's true. I will sometimes go to the privacy settings for Facebook or Google or some other place and set them to be more restrictive. But then within a year or two they change it and I have to go back in and do it again, some different way. A person gets tired. I don't read privacy policies any more closely than I read user agreements when they install software. Does anyone? I could disable cookies, but cookies are actually very convenient in customizing my personal experience.

One reason I'm not upset enough to take vigorous action is that the reason they are doing this (as far as we know) is to more precisely target the advertising they give me to be more relevant. Well, if I have to look at advertising, surely it's better the more likely it is to be relevant. Studies show that people are susceptible to various devious tricks and are being manipulated by all advertising. But I figure that's my problem. (On those rare occasions I watch TV, I deliberately get up and do something else when the ads come on). I don't know how anyone could legislate the removal of subtle manipulation in advertising. Perhaps I should be upset because this same data could be used for more intrusive purposes if it got into the wrong hands. I guess I'm just not in practice taking that possibility all that seriously.

Four years ago I experienced the ultimate in targeted advertising. I was looking for a new small car, focusing on the Toyota Yaris and Honda Fit. I used Google search. As a result, I started getting advertising related to cars, and it continued after I had bought my Yaris. One picture showed me not just a Yaris, and not just one of the same color (blue) -- it was a picture of the actual car I had bought, which I could identify by the background of the photo showing the lot where I had first seen it. The advertising certainly was precisely targeted!