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Do We Have Stable Dispositions?
“Everything is much more complicated. At every moment it is much more complicated. ‘They got married because they fell in love and wanted to share their life’…’he lied because he didn’t want to hurt’. What ridiculous stories! We are stratified creatures, creatures full of abysses, with a soul of inconstant quicksilver, with a mind whose…
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Materialism and the Void: The Emptiness at the Heart of Modern Culture
Our culture provides such extraordinary opportunities for rich and interesting lives that it is hard to understand how we mostly end up doing so poorly. Our problem is not opportunity, it is execution. And when it comes to building a good life, not just giving us the tools for it, our culture often works against…
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Intelligent Virtue and the Beauty of Modern Virtue Theories
Virtue theory is the flip side of transformative experience. Though L.A. Paul’s Transformative Experience concentrates on rationality theory and choice optimization, the implications of transformative experience lead directly to some form of virtue theory. If you are choosing between experiences that will change who you are (like going to college or enlisting), you need some…
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The Open Society as the Enemy
The interaction of our embodied selves with the world creates cognitive structures that instantiate preferences, values, dispositions, and skills. Much of this requires neither thought nor justification. One can choose to attach reasons to liking steak more than pork, or blackjack more than poker, but the exercise is post-hoc and unnecessary. This isn’t to say…
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Apollo, the X-Prize and the Art of Making Better People
I’ve been listening to Julian Guthrie’s “How to Build a Spaceship” which tells the story of the X-Prize, the $10 million prize that helped kickstart the private space industry and transform the space program. It’s a compelling story with dozens of fascinating people, from Burt Rutan and Paul Allen (who ultimately won the prize) to…
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Longtermism: A Lot Less Rational Than It Might Seem
In What We Owe The Future, William MacAskill presents the case for longtermism, the idea that we should place much more moral weight than we do on the very long-term future. It’s an intriguing book, well and clearly written, with interesting things to say about issues as diverse as AI, the value of having children,…
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Cognitive Science, Decision-Making and Ethics
Everybody loves a good debate about the mystery of consciousness. Physicists get to invent quantum mechanical explanations of macroscopic phenomena. Humanities folk get to poo-poo the evils of reductionism. Journalists can trot out their full repertoire of both scientific and ethical cliches. Everybody gets to argue. There are good working theories of consciousness that are…
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Words Fail Us – Language and Rationality
“Strange to wander in the mist, each is alone. No tree knows his neighbor. Each is alone.” Hesse Cognitive science can’t settle questions of right and wrong. But it can set the table for theories of rational decision-making and ethics. And the one thing we know for sure about how we think is that, at…
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The Role of Reinforcement Learning in Transformative Decision-Making
Cognitive science can’t settle questions of right and wrong. But it can set the table for theories of rational decision-making and ethics. And the one thing we know for sure about how we think is that, at the most fundamental level, our brains are connection systems that are changed by experience.This matters; transformational experiences and…
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Problems in Cognition and the Work to be Rational (Post)
For a decision-maker, the nature of human cognition creates the challenges of transformational experience and the necessity for self-altering decisions. But the nature of connection systems also creates a series of important hurdles to both optimal decision-making in preference optimization and thoughtful decision-making around self-change. Since connection systems can do amazing things (like become unbeatable…
We are not rational animals, we are animals that must work to be rational
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