Kevin Simler
· 31 min · Original

A Natural History of Beauty

A mashup of ideas from David Deutsch, Geoffrey Miller, and Richard Prum, with a little César Hidalgo for good measure. —— Of all the problems that can plague a discussion of beauty — and there are several — perhaps the most damning is how to define the word, to find a sturdy concept worthy of the label. Look no further than the debates over whether beauty is “objective” or “subjective.” Is it out there in the world, or in here in our minds? When we can’t agree on this most fundamental distinction, we're not talking about the same thing. I’ve been mulling over the idea of beauty recently, letting the word glide around over many possible meanings. It took a while, but I finally found one that clicked. Unlike the other meanings I’ve toyed with, this one is tangible and solid; it keeps its shape. I’ve had a lot of fun playing around with it, and I’m going to share it with you today. But please, understand that I’m not trying to annex the word, to repurpose it to point toward my preferred concept. I don’t particularly care what other people mean when they talk about “beauty”; I have no dog in that fight. I just want to describe something that happens in the world, something I think is fascinating. And the best label I can think to give it is “beauty.” Are you with me? Here’s a little preview of where we’re headed: I want to talk about beauty as a game. Specifically, a two-player game. Or to be maximally precise: a family of games with two main player classes. It will make sense soon, I promise. In the meantime, please leave your semantic baggage at home, put on your Quinean naturalist’s hat (ideally with a bright feather in it), and let’s head out on a little armchair safari. Desire As a way of approaching this thing we want to talk about — “beauty” — we’ll begin with a…

Kevin Simler
· 24 min · Original

Crony Beliefs

[Note: if you prefer audio, you can listen to this essay narrated by Grognor on his excellent podcast Second Enumerations. —Ed.] Credits up front: This essay draws heavily from Overcoming Bias, Less Wrong, Slate Star Codex, Robert Kurzban, Robert Trivers, Thomas Schelling, and Jonathan Haidt (among others I'm certainly forgetting). These are some of my all-time favorite sources, so I hope I'm doing them justice here. — For as long as I can remember, I've struggled to make sense of the terrifying gulf that separates the inside and outside views of beliefs. From the inside, via introspection, each of us feels that our beliefs are pretty damn sensible. Sure we might harbor a bit of doubt here and there. But for the most part, we imagine we have a firm grip on reality; we don't lie awake at night fearing that we're massively deluded. But when we consider the beliefs of other people? It's an epistemic shit show out there. Astrology, conspiracies, the healing power of crystals. Aliens who abduct Earthlings and build pyramids. That vaccines cause autism or that Obama is a crypto-Muslim — or that the world was formed some 6,000 years ago, replete with fossils made to look millions of years old. How could anyone believe this stuff?! No, seriously: how? Let's resist the temptation to dismiss such believers as "crazy" — along with "stupid," "gullible," "brainwashed," and "needing the comfort of simple answers." Surely these labels are appropriate some of the time, but once we apply them, we stop thinking. This isn't just lazy; it's foolish. These are fellow human beings we're talking about, creatures of our same species whose brains have been built (grown?) according to the same basic pattern. So whatever processes beget their delusions are at work in our minds as well. We…

Kevin Simler
· 27 min · Original

Social Status: Down the Rabbit Hole

"After this," says Morpheus to Neo in The Matrix, "there is no turning back." You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Today I'm offering a red pill (of sorts): an eye-opening account of social status. I won't say there's "no turning back" after reading this — but I've seen down the rabbit hole, and it's indeed as deep as advertised. If you decide to join me (warning: long), by the end of this essay you'll know most of the important things I know about social status. There are wider and more practical perspectives we could take, but today we're going straight down, i.e., into the theoretical and evolutionary roots of the thing. Allow me briefly to set the stage. In seeking to understand particular forms of human behavior, especially social behavior, it often pays to look for analogues elsewhere in the animal kingdom. In a way, this makes perfect sense: humans are animals, after all, creatures sculpted by the same inexorable forces that have given rise to all other life forms. But we're also far and away the most intelligent species on the planet, which suggests that we're capable of many things no other animal can do. Why, then, is it so useful to study other species? Haven't we largely risen above our biology? The problem is this: Even though we're capable of a seemingly-infinite variety of individual behaviors, our patterns of behavior are a lot more constrained — in particular, by the laws of economics and game theory. So although we're physically capable of moving around by cartwheel instead of by walking, for example, it's such an economically inefficient use of energy as to keep us from making a habit of…

Kevin Simler
· 24 min · Original

Ads Don’t Work That Way

There's a meme, particularly virulent in educated circles, about how advertising works — how it sways and seduces us, coaxing us gently toward a purchase. The meme goes something like this: Rather than attempting to persuade us (via our rational, analytical minds), ads prey on our emotions. They work by creating positive associations between the advertised product and feelings like love, happiness, safety, and sexual confidence. These associations grow and deepen over time, making us feel favorably disposed toward the product and, ultimately, more likely to buy it. Here we have a theory — a proposed mechanism — of how ads influence consumer behavior. Let's call it emotional inception or just inception, coined after the movie of the same name where specialists try to implant ideas in other people's minds, subconsciously, by manipulating their dreams. In the case of advertising, however, dreams aren't the inception vector, but rather ideas and images, especially ones which convey potent emotions. The label ("emotional inception") is my own, but the idea should be familiar enough. It's the model of how ads work made popular by Mad Men, and you can find similar accounts all across the web. A write-up at the Atlantic, for example — titled "Why Good Advertising Works (Even When You Think It Doesn't)" — says that advertising rarely succeeds through argument or calls to action. Instead, it creates positive memories and feelings that influence our behavior over time to encourage us to buy something at a later date. "The objective [of advertising]," the article continues, "is to seed positive ideas and memories that will attract you to the brand." Lifehacker echoes these ideas in an article intended to help readers mitigate the effect of ads. "An ad succeeds at making us feel…

Kevin Simler
· 24 min · Original

Personhood: A Game for Two or More Players

Being a person is not the essence of humanity, only... one of its many masks. — John Gray Pardon me while I scratch a little itch here in public. I'd like to describe for you a concept that I can see very clearly in my mind. I can't entirely justify its existence or its utility, but it's given me that consummate intellectual satisfaction: the feeling of ideas clicking into place. When I think about human social interactions, I often think about specific relationships and the roles that they entail: husband and wife, citizen and representative, superhero and sidekick, BFFs. But today I want to talk about the most generic relationship — the one that exists between any two members of a society. What is the nature of that relationship? As an implicit social contract, what are its expectations and obligations? I think it makes sense to call this generic social contract "personhood," and those who abide by it "persons." Bear with me now. I realize these terms are hotly contested, not least because they're the focus of a number of longstanding legal and moral debates. Many would claim, for example, that a fetus is already a "person," and that therefore abortion is murder. But this is emphatically not the notion of personhood I want to discuss. So please: don't get hung up (yet) on whether my notion of "personhood" accords with yours. We may or may not be talking about the same thing. The idea of a "person" that I'm going to use today is most similar to the idea of a "lady" or "gentleman" — without the gender connotations, obviously, but in the same sense of being a label or status earned through proper behavior (which then creates an obligation for others to treat us nicely in return). So it's often said, "If you want to be treated like a lady, you have to act like a lady."…

Kevin Simler
· 22 min · Original

Neurons Gone Wild

To reject gods and spirits is easy: just bully them away in the name of science. But to accept them, or at least our experiences of them, and yet give them a scientific explanation: there's a task worthy of our art. It demands that we look them in the eye and take them seriously, while standing absolutely firm in our materialist convictions. I don't know how much of what I'm about to say is true. All I know is that it's damn interesting. Today we court madness from the bedrock of science. Today we will face addictions and compulsions, alter-egos and imaginary friends, angelic voices and demonic possessions, even exorcisms. And we will attempt to ground these madnesses, one and all, in a unified, sane, materialist framework. We will begin, naturally, with the neuron. Neurons, selfish and feral In a recent Edge interview, Dan Dennett pitches the most fascinating new idea I've read in a long, long time: That our neurons are powerful computational building blocks in part because they've reverted to an older and slightly feral state. Here's Dennett [1]: Realize that every human cell in your body, including your neurons, is a direct descendent of eukaryotic cells that lived and fended for themselves, for about a billion years, as free-swimming, free-living little agents. They had to develop an awful lot of know-how and self-protective talent to do that. But when they joined forces to become multi-cellular creatures, they gave up a lot of that. They became, in effect, domesticated — part of larger, more monolithic organizations. In general, we don't have to worry about our muscle cells rebelling against us. (When they do, we call it cancer.) But in the brain, I think, some little switch has been thrown in the genetics that, in effect, makes our neurons a little bit feral.…

Kevin Simler
· 21 min · Original

Consciousness: An Outside View

(Originally published at Ribbonfarm.) How can 'mere' matter, properly configured, manage to be conscious? Are chimpanzees or elephants conscious? Can a computer be conscious? Today we will answer none of these questions. In fact, we won't even address them. These questions probe what David Chalmers calls, for good reason, the "hard problem" of consciousness. It's a notion so slippery that some have spent their whole careers misunderstanding it, while others flirt with denying its very existence. But ours is not to get mired in this debate. Instead, we're going to do an end-run around the hard problem of consciousness by taking the "outside view." Rather than asking about consciousness in the context of an individual mind, we're going to step back and take a populations-eye view of it. Enter here the field of epidemiology. Epi (upon) + demos (the people) + logos (study). The study of what is 'upon' the people. Traditionally this has meant diseases — immunity, susceptibility, vectors, contagion, etc. But epidemiology can be used to study other things that live 'upon' the people. Dan Sperber, for example, uses the tools of epidemiology to study culture. In the broadest sense, it's the study of the patterns, causes, and effects of certain conditions within a population. So today we're going to look at consciousness through the lens of epidemiology. This isn't a rejection of the neuroscientific approach, but rather a complement. We're going to see how far we can get, and what interesting things we might be able to say about consciousness, without "looking under the hood," so to speak. More precisely, though, our investigation will concern itself with different states of consciousness. We don't care about consciousness in the abstract (i.e., what distinguishes a man from a…

Kevin Simler
· 17 min · Original

Post-Atheism: Religion Refactored

This is the second installment in a multi-part series on Post-Atheism. In the previous essay, I noted some parallels between atheism and the teenage years and argued for a more 'adult' conversation. Today we'll take a fresh look at religion, to correct some of the misconceptions atheists bring to the discussion. And finally, next week, we'll answer the question, "What would a fully scientific religion look like?" Why religion matters As readers of this blog are aware — perhaps painfully so — I have something of a fetish for religion. It's not that I'm religious myself (quite the opposite), but I find the phenomenon deeply fascinating. I've been asked on a number of occasions why I'm so fascinated by religion. The truth is, I'm baffled why others aren't fascinated. Religion is both fundamental and alien. It's fundamental to the human condition, and utterly alien (to myself, at least, and to fellow atheists). How can you look at religion and not be filled with fascination — with equal parts awe and curiosity? As a social phenomenon, religion is a puzzle of the finest order. What's going on here? Why do so many people, across all times and cultures, believe such strange things? Why do their beliefs persist in the face of newer and much more powerful theories about how the world works? What benefit do they get from these beliefs? And are the beliefs even important, or are they a complete distraction — or misdirection? How have religions endured for millennia, achieving stability in the face of so much social and political change? There are religions alive today which have outlived almost every other institution on the planet — every corporation, economic regime, and currency — every legal system, university, and (secular) school of thought — every dynasty and empire, every…

Kevin Simler
· 23 min · Original

The Economics of Social Status

(Originally published at Ribbonfarm.) In economics, a good is anything that "satisfies human wants and provides utility." This includes not just tangible goods like gold, grain, and real estate, but also services (housecleaning, dentistry, etc.) as well as abstract goods like love, health, and social status. As an economic good, social status is a lot like health. They're both intangible and highly personal. In proper economic terms, they are private goods — rivalrous and mostly excludable. And the fact that they're hard to measure doesn't make them any less valuable — in fact we spend trillions of dollars a year in their pursuit (though they often elude us). But status differs from health in one very important respect: It can be transacted — spent as well as earned. It's not a terminal good, but rather an intermediate good that helps us acquire other things of value. For example, I can trade some of my status for money, favors, sex, or information — and vice versa. Health, if it's possible to spend at all (e.g. in pursuit of career success), is extremely illiquid. But as I will argue today, status is so liquid — so easy to transact, and in real time — that it plays a fundamental economic role in our day-to-day lives. Before we dig into the transactional nature of social status, let's ground ourselves, briefly, in its biology and sociology. The biology of status No one plays status games in Heaven. Why bother? Souls have no want for food, sex, or smartphones — and thanks to His omnipresence, God even takes the fun out competing for an audience with Him. Meanwhile, here on Earth, we (embodied primates) engage in all manner of status games. It's one of the ways we compete over access to scarce resources like food and mates. And it's something we share with a lot of other…