Some thoughts on biocentrism and utilitarianism

I have written about utilitarianism before. Utilitarianism is a consequentialistic ethical view point that places the moral weight of an action on the utility of that action towards increasing a desirable thing/notion and/or reducing an undesirable thing/notion. However, something I have only mentioned once is a fundamental question that is at the core of utilitarianism. Utility is a term relative to some end. So for example, when we say that computers are useful, we mean that they are useful for us.

Whenever there is utility, there is an end.

Who is the beneficiary of the notion of utility in utilitarian ethics? This brings us back to the equality question and the answer utilitarianism gives. This was covered here. Unlike other ethical systems, classical utilitarianism is species-blind. It does not give humans a special status. The only relevant criteria is whether or not the being in question can feel pain. If you feel pain, you are a beneficiary regardless of your species. This means that, a priori, the end of minimising the pain of a human adult and the end of minimising the pain of a sheep adult are weighed equally. I covered this topic here. But I want to take this a step further. Who is the beneficiary of the notion of utility in utilitarian ethics? Living beings with central nervous systems. As a rule of thumb, CNS-equipped life forms are capable of experiencing pain. We will leave the CNS out of the equation in this post.

The beneficiaries of utility are a particular group of life forms.

This makes utilitarianism a bio-centric ethical system as opposed to most ethical systems that tend to adopt anthropocentric stances.

For now on, we will assume both a utilitarian stance and a bio-centric stance. What are the implications of holding those views? As Daniel Pearce pointed out in the Antispeciesist Revolution, the implications are huge, titanic. Implications the size of which have never been faced by the human species. Imagine the implications that having 3000 children could have for a mother. We are effectively talking about taking care of millions, perhaps even billions, of CNS-equipped life forms as we would if they were humans. From birth to death. Physical and psychological health, happiness, constant monitoring. Any of these alone is complex enough let alone all of them at once. But that is what we would have to do under our assumptions. We will leave aside the financial feasibility of carrying out and ensuring the above to throw around some questions.

Ensuring the “happiness” of CNS-equipped life forms would be have some major consequences. If we decide that to ensure their happiness, they should be protected from predators and we would be affecting the world ecosystems in major ways, not necessarily beneficial for humans or even life forms in general.

There is also the issue of carnivore life forms. The nascent technology of synthesized meat could tackle this. But would producing amounts of meat large enough to feed all the CNS-equipped carnivores be affordable? Another issue is reproduction. It is very likely that in the absence of predators and with enough food available, reproduction at a massive scale is going to happen. How would we control their population? Chemical castration? While technically useful, we run the risk of overuse it and chemically castrating a whole species. It is very likely that a change like isolating all mammals from their predators could transform the world ecosystems in such a way that it becomes detrimental to our survival.

Are these life forms to be protected?

Their protection might spell our end or a period of famine if the changes affect plant population levels. Not protecting them implies leaving them exposed to potential harm and thus pain. It soon becomes a matter of self-interest. Do I expose them to pain or do I expose us to pain? In this simplified world, if we were to decide to protect them, we might have to accept a drastic reduction of our species size as a result of the likely changes in the ecosystem that would follow our isolating of all mammals in species based natural spaces. If were to decide not to protect them, our current state, we would have to face the huge amount of pain we could be avoiding and the huge amount of pleasure we are not providing.

However, you see it, adopting a practical utilitarian bio-centric approach does not automatically calculate the rational path to take. Technology could help us choosing which path to take but, is such technology existent or will it develop in the near future? And even if it does, will it be helpful enough to let us see in clear ways the advantages and disadvantages of the different ways to take care of the biosphere utilitarianism-style?

In the absence of this technology, all we can see from our limited perspective is that both protecting and not protecting CNS-equipped life forms produce pain. The million dollar question is which path produces less pain. A quick idea that would likely be noticed on this landscape of never-ending pain is that reducing the population numbers of a species will reduce the pain in the long term. The combined pain experienced by 30 CNS-equipped life forms is lower than the combined pain of 3,000,000,000,000,000,000 CNS-equipped life forms, other things being equal. Assuming that, on average, all CNS-equipped life forms experience the same amount of pain when exposed to the same painful stimuli, it is easy to conclude that:

The less life forms alive, the lower the amount of pain we have to reduce.

We could choose to keep the CNS-equipped population numbers low and all our ethical conflicts would also be reduced. The reason for this is that ethics has always been confined to living beings, in some cases only life forms belonging to the human species, in others, only CNS-equipped life forms, and in some, all life forms. While some religion-based system of ethics could make a case for an ethical system of some inanimate object like a rock, it seems very unlikely to be accepted outside that particular religion. So, ethics is for those are alive.What are the implications of reducing a species numbers to reduce the amount of pain it experiences as a whole? The most immediate one is that if you do it for one species, you are bound to do the same with the rest. So we would be bound to keep our own population numbers under some number. What are the implications of this? Just like our decision reduced or deprived animals of their reproductive capability:

Our decision will limit our reproductive freedoms

Some legal mechanism like the Chinese one-child policy would be enacted but without discriminating on the sex of the baby. Laws are made to be broken. A very popular aphorism that could apply to the attitude of some parents towards this hypothetical policy. Ideally, all humans would be aware of the full chain of reasoning leading to the child policy and would all adopt a bio-centric and utilitarian stance. But it is not likely to be the case. It is very likely that for some parents, their own interests will have a higher priority than those of the rest of CNS-equipped life forms. For them, the chain of reasoning would be completely meaningless because they rejected the initial premise:

A priori, the interests of all CNS-equipped life forms are weighed equally.

They would argue that they only care about their fetus and could not give a “chocolate bun” about the rest of life forms. It would be really difficult to argue with someone with whom you have no shared premises. And one could predict that there would be plenty of these self-interested parents who would try to break the law and do anything and everything to give birth to as many humans as they want.

I did not write this with a solution in a mind but only to expose the entangled nature of the implications of adopting a practical utilitarian bio-centrism.

Ted Chiang Series 5: the Written Word (Part 1) – Internal Insight

Ted Chiang’s recent release of his latest work in two years seemed like a good incentive to add two or three extra posts to the already finished Ted Chiang Series. It’s also a chance to comment about a short story written by Ted that I did not mention before: 72 Letters.

The common theme in both stories is the idea of words as a tool endowed with power. In The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling (TFTF), the power is the ability to gain personal insights, while in 72 Letters, the power is the ability to influence the external world. This dual view of words as tools of personal and external change is highly reminiscent of the idea of practical magic and spiritual magic discussed in the “Ted Chiang: Science, Language and Magic” interview.

The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

Forgive and forget.

In one of the storylines, somewhere in the future, a journalist is tasked with the review of Remem, a software that brings up specific videos on (oral) request. To put things into context, lifelogging has been popular for a long while so people have hundreds of Gigabytes of video about their personal lives stored in their computers or in the cloud. The use of Remem becomes equivalent to the act of remembering; the only difference being that Remem is 100% accurate while our memories are not reliable, as psychology research has shown. What are the implications of using Remem? This is what the anonymous journalist asks himself. The use of lifelogging records in the justice system has proved its usefulness. But what about its use in relationships? He thinks that the use of empirical evidence to prove oneself right might be a source of conflict in couples.

———————

“Joel is always saying that he knew it all along,” said Deirdre, “even when he didn’t. It used to drive me crazy, because I couldn’t get him to admit he used to believe something else. Now I can. For example, recently we were talking about the McKittridge kidnapping case.”

She sent me the video of one argument she had with Joel. My retinal projector displayed footage of a cocktail party; it’s from Deirdre’s point of view, and Joel is telling a number of people, “It was pretty clear that he was guilty from the day he was arrested.”

Deirdre’s voice: “You didn’t always think that. For months you argued that he was innocent.”

Joel shakes his head. “No, you’re misremembering. I said that even people who are obviously guilty deserve a fair trial.”

“That’s not what you said. You said he was being railroaded.”

“You’re thinking of someone else; that wasn’t me.”

“No, it was you. Look.” A separate video window opened up, an excerpt of her lifelog that she looked up and broadcast to the people they’ve been talking with. Within the nested video, Joel and Deirdre are sitting in a café, and Joel is saying, “He’s a scapegoat. The police needed to reassure the public, so they arrested a convenient suspect. Now he’s done for.” Deidre replies, “You don’t think there’s any chance of him being acquitted?” and Joel answers, “Not unless he can afford a high-powered defense team, and I’ll bet you he can’t. People in his position will never get a fair trial.”

I closed both windows, and Deirdre said, “Without Remem, I’d never be able to convince him that he changed his position. Now I have proof.”

“Fine, you were right that time,” said Joel. “But you didn’t have to do that in front of our friends.”

“You correct me in front of our friends all the time. You’re telling me I can’t do the same?”

———————

Still on the topic of relationships, the journalist also thinks that forgiveness depends on partially forgetting the action to be forgiven. In his opinion, Remem’s accurate algorithms will make forgetting impossible. Erica Meyers, a spokesperson from the company that developed Remem, replies to the journalist’s concerns.

———————

“If your marriage is solid, Remem isn’t going to hurt it. But if you’re the type of person who’s constantly trying to prove that you’re right and your spouse is wrong, then your marriage is going to be in trouble whether you use Remem or not.”

———————

The journalist talks about the influence of technology in episodic memory (memories about personal experiences) and semantic memory (factual knowledge). While the journalist agrees with placing our semantic memory in electronic devices, he feels uneasy about doing the same with episodic memories.

People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments.

The journalist worries that technology mediated episodic memories will imply losing a part of our uniqueness. With these mixed feelings, he decides to use Remem to find a video about an emotionally sensitive event that happened in his past. It turns out that his recollection of the event differs with the video Remem brings up. He is eventually forced to face the reality that he built a narrative based on a distorted memory and this has had damaging psychological consequences for his daughter. The journalist concludes that a narrative based on inaccurate memories might not be that good after all. Narratives will still be built, Remem will just ensure that they are not too far away from reality. The following quote signals the turning point of his attitude towards Remem:

And I think I’ve found the real benefit of digital memory. The point is not to prove you were right; the point is to admit you were wrong.

*

The second storyline follows Jijingi, a young member of a Nigerian tribe experiencing the arrival of the first Europeans. A Christian missionary called Moseby befriends Jijingi and teaches him the art of “making marks on paper” (writing).

The sounds a person made while speaking were as smooth and unbroken as the hide of a goat’s leg, but the words were like the bones underneath the meat, and the space between them was the joint where you’d cut if you wanted to separate it into pieces. By leaving spaces when he wrote, Moseby was making visible the bones in what he said.

Writing gives Jijingi the ability to think differently about language.

Jijingi realized that, if he thought hard about it, he was now able to identify the words when people spoke in an ordinary conversation. The sounds that came from a person’s mouth hadn’t changed, but he understood them differently; he was aware of the pieces from which the whole was made. He himself had been speaking in words all along. He just hadn’t known it until now.

When Reiss, the European anthropologist, arrives to the tribe, there is also a brief comparison between the sermon-preaching Moseby trying to get everyone to follow European cultural practices and the note-taking Reiss assuming an impartial stance while she learns more about the culture of the tribe.

Jijingi receives a copy of one of the stories of Kokwa, the storyteller, and becomes disappointed at realising that writing does not capture the non-verbal language used by the storyteller.

 …the sound of his voice, the movement of his hands, the light in his eyes. He told you the story with his whole body, and you understood it the same way. None of that was captured on paper; only the bare words could be written down.

He also finds out that Kokwa tends to change the words each time he tells a story. He confronts the storyteller about this and Kokwa makes him question whether or not being perfectly accurate is important when telling a story.

After one of his sermons, Jijingi and Moseby have a talk about the use of writing to refine one’s thoughts. He then realises that Kokwa and Moseby have different approaches when it comes to telling an event.

Even though Kokwa was telling the same story, he might arrange the words differently each time he told it; he was skilled enough as a storyteller that the arrangement of words didn’t matter. It was different for Moseby, who never acted anything out when he gave his sermons; for him, the words were what was important.

As Jijingi’s writing abilities expand so does his understanding of writing:

Writing was not just a way to record what someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements. Writing let you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn’t if you were just talking, and having seen them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate.

Another aspect of writing comes later on, when Jijingi is twenty. He finds that some boys were sent to an European missionary school and now that they are back, they use their ability to write for selfish purposes. It is worth noting that those boys were the ones the tribes wanted to get rid of and that no one else in the tribes, apart from Jijingi and those boys could read and write. This effectively gave them power over the rest of the tribe.

The Europeans often believe paper over people.

Jijingi tells Moseby that the word “true” has two words in their language. “Vough” is factual truth while “mimi” is that which is best for the involved people. The truth of fact and the truth of feeling are weighed equally. This difference plays a central role later on when a dispute threatens to split the tribes apart.

The assessment report of the Europeans was vough; it was exact and precise, but that wasn’t enough to settle the question. The choice of which clan to join with had to be right for the community; it had to be mimi. Only the elders could determine what was mimi; it was their responsibility to decide what was best for the Shangev clan.

The term “vough” is roughly equivalent to the idea of semantic memory, while “mimi” is equivalent to the idea of episodic memory. In the first story, the journalist struggles getting to grips with a technology that he feels will imply a change in the nature of his episodic memories. In the second story, Jijingi’s understanding of the written word with an implicit higher regard of facts over feelings conflicts with his native culture where matters of “mimi” or truths of feeling are not mediated by technology.

Writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated.

This is the central topic of the story, the characters try to resist changes in their worlds that have as consequence the introduction of technology-mediated episodic memories. Given the nature of these memories, it feels like giving up something very personal. However, both characters come to terms with the new changes. The journalist has a talk with his daughter that opens his eyes to the truth of fact and Jijingi’s elders send members of their tribes to Christian schools where they learn to read and write. Jijingi’s jump from mimi to vough feels similar to the journalist’s shift from relying on organic memories to relying on technological retrieval of memories. They both get new insights: Jijingi, about the way his tribe  thinks and the journalist, about the errors he made in the past.

How much personal insight can I claim if I can’t trust my memory?

You’re probably thinking that, while your memory isn’t perfect, you’ve never engaged in revisionism of the magnitude I’m guilty of. But I was just as certain as you, and I was wrong. You may say, “I know I’m not perfect. I’ve made mistakes.” I am here to tell you that you have made more than you think, that some of the core assumptions on which your self-image is built are actually lies. Spend some time using Remem, and you’ll find out.

Asking Sabe to defer to the paper was asking him to act against what he considered right.

But the reason I now recommend Remem is not for the shameful reminders it provides of your past; it’s to avoid the need for those in the future. Organic memory was what enabled me to construct a whitewashed narrative of my parenting skills.