Philosopher's Carnival: January 2012

Jared at Philosophy & Polity is hosting January's Philosopher's Carnival. It can be found here.

Patricia Churchland on the Golden Rule

La Justice, Bernard d'Agesci: scales in one hand and in the other hand a book with "Dieu, la Loi, et le Roi" on one page and the Golden rule on the other page.

"...when we extol the Golden Rule we assume that both sides are decent, not twisted; that both sides have much the same set of moral values; that others feel about things as we do. This assumption, note, is not morally neutral, but contains moral content—content independent of the Golden Rule itself. Moreover, it is a sad fact that of life that this assumption of universal decency does not always hold, or at least not always look the same, even among those who advertise themselves as morally upstanding. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of idealogical extremists and religious cultists and sadomasochists and sociopaths, and they can apply the Golden Rule as rigorously as anyone else."

Patricia Churchland
Braintrust (2011)
Chapter 7

Apple's New iTunes U and iBook Author

Apple recently announced two exciting additions to their educational footprint. The first is iBook Author and the second is a newly updated iTunes U. The latter offers universities the ability to compile an entire course's material into one digital entity (the image looks a lot like a self-bound book in iTunes). The benefit of this is that learners can now access syllabi, presentations, lecture videos, and miscellaneous course materials from one place. It used to be that each of these things was in a separate area in iTunes (some on the iTunes store, some in podcast form), or worse: it was not available at all (e.g. presentaion slides). The new iTunes U is an obvious improvement!

The former announcement, however, has been received with mix reviews. As usual, Apple announced the product with pomp and circumstance, making claims like "[we are] reinventing the textbook" (Philip Schiller). Tech junkies and education pundits are not exactly unanimous in their agreement with Apple. Jeffrey R. Young says—in his article on the Chronicle of Higher Education's website "Apple's New E-Textbook Platform Enters an Already Crowded Field"—that iBook Author will likely suffer in a market already saturated by similar programs. He adds that iBook authors, since their publications will be available exclusively to iPads, will not reach as broad an audience as other authors using other publishing software. Two other things that might limit an author's audience are these two facts: (a) the iPad is not the most competitively priced tablet and (b) Apple uses a closed operating system.

While all of Young's claims are based on facts, his conclusions, I think, contain errors. First, it is not clear that what Apple has released is comparable, for better and for worse, to existing etextbook publishers. For example, it is much easier to use than other ePublishing software (it is strikingly similar to Apple's word processing app known as "Pages"). Second, the software is as easy to download as an iTunes song. Other differences include that authors need to be using an Apple computer to create their textbooks (though they can import Microsoft Word content) and readers will need to use an iPad. These last two facts are indeed limiting. However, much of Apple's technology and software involves exclusivity in some form or another and yet Apple portable computers make up the majority of college students' computers, iPods make up the majority of peoples' MP3 players, and iPads are the most popular tablet computer on the market. So, judging by Apple's track record, iBook Author's limitations will not necessarily cripple the success of the program.

Young also critiqued Apple's closed platform philosophy. His claim is that because Apple's operating systems are not as easily customized, the iPad will be less useful to schools. I fail to see how the iPad would be less useful to school for this reason. Few K-12 IT departments have the means to regularly reconfigure the operating systems their computers, let alone tablets. So not only do I doubt there is a huge need for such configuring, I doubt the resources exist to make it happen anyway. Moreover, Apple's closed platform offers at least one benefit to schools. It hinders unwanted hacking by students, who as everyone probably knows, are far more tech savvy than their pedagogues. Also Apple's mobile devices limit explicit content quite well. So, if a school has any interest in limiting access to questionable material, then the iPad is a much better choice than, say, an Android tablet.

Another claim of Young's is that iBook Author is not actually more cost effective than textbooks. He supports his claim by pointing out that the first textbook costs $499 (the minimum cost of a new iPad 2) + $14.99 (the maximum cost of Apple's new textbooks). It is simple to see how his example, though true, is downright myopic. Anyone with the ability to do basic arithmetic can understand how using an iPad for one textbook is not cost effective when compared to one printed textbook. When considering a few years of textbooks, however, the economic tables turn.

Consider the cost of a high schooler's textbooks. I had no less than 6 textbooks each year as a high schooler. If I averaged the cost of those books at $50—a charitable assumption no doubt—then four years of books amounts to $1200. If, however, those textbooks were iPad textbooks, then the total would be $859 [$499 + $360], at most. Add the fact that an iPad can do much more than a pile of books and the cost comparison becomes a no brainer. Students get much more out of an iPad than they get out of printed textbooks, and they pay less in the long run.

Another worry about iBook Author is that authors must use their own content or content in the public domain. The reason is that big publishers own the rights to a great deal of printed content. Since many authors are not affiliated with big publishers, there is a worry that authors will not have enough content. I beg to differ. I had no less than 5 textbooks—costing about $100 each—that were chock full of public domain literature and editor's prefaces. Also, as a graduate student, I frequently look for public domain material to read. However, what I find is often formatted poorly for reading—usually it is HTML text from a university's online archives. With iPad textbooks, the most I could be charged for a readable and digital version of the classics I seek would be $14.99. As someone who already has an iPad, I find that pleasing. And when I consider that iBooks is constantly adding well-formatted public domain texts to their store (for free), it seems obvious how students could be saving money by using iPads—again, in the long run.

One should notice, also, that whatever limitation is imposed on iBook Authors (or any independent authors) via copyright legislation is not Apple's fault. Many educators expend their own efforts working on papers in an attempt to have their own work published. After writing, peer-reviewing, and waiting, only a select few papers make it to print. And who owns them? Not the writers or peer-reviewers, but the journal that publishes them. Oh, and the journals sell their stuff for a profit. That journals somehow make claim to an educators unpaid services is beyond me, and that it hinders endeavors like iBook Author is no fault of Apple.

To be fair, however, Apple will own the material that authors publish using iBook Author. In fact, they will own the entire creative process. This is part of the reason Apple can guarantee a maximum price of $14.99 for a textbook: authors receive a share of each purchased textbook—again, that's better than what can be said of printed journal publications—but they are not paid anything for the work itself. The big hang-up for some critics is that authors are not free to republish their book (or parts of their book) in other formats without Apple's permission. Some think this discourages authors' participation. To be clear, it discourages the authors who are out to make money, but authors that are out to offer rich digital textbook experiences to students at a low cost have no reason to hesitate. With iBook Author, they can easily put their media into a textbook and get it in the hands of students. And should an author decide later that he is out to make money, then he can simply buy Apple stock.

So Apple's iBook Author is not without its limitations. Then again, Apple's limitations have not prevented its products from being praised as the premier tech devices so far. Apple's iBook Author could very well be the next staple etextbook publishing software and iPads could be the next staple classroom technology. Alas, only time will tell.

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To learn more about Apple's new programs visit their new webpages here.

Are you an educator, a student, or a publisher? Feel free to share your perspective below by clicking "comments."

Blackburn & Churchland on Moral Learning

"'The emotional and moral environment in which children grow up is pervasive and many-faceted, carefully engineered by their care-givers, replete with soap operas, stories, sagas, and gossip full of villains and heroes, retailed with smiles and frowns and abundant signs of esteem and dislike, and gradually entered by practise, imitation, correction, and refinement.'"[1]

"Once a child has internalized local practices and knows what is expected, merely contemplating cheating or stealing is likely to be accompanied by images of consequences, and when those include social disapproval, the pain system will be active, if only in a low-level fashion. One might say that the child thus recognizes that the plan is wrong, or that his conscience tells him that doing the action would be wrong."

"Because the generalized pain of shunning and disapproval is so aversive, and the pleasure of approval and belonging so rewarding, what is learned regarding social practices has a strong emotional valence. So strong are these feelings about what is right and what is wrong that they may be regarded as having a status of divine origin, and the practices, as objective and universal. The practice of one's own clan can appear to be absolute and rational; differing practices can appear to be barbaric and irrational."

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[1] Simon Blackburn, "Response to Hauser's Tanner Lecture", 2008.

Patricia Churchland on "The Gene for X"

"Serotonin...figures in cardiovascular regulation, respiration, circadian rhythm, sleep-wake cycles, appetite, aggresion, sexual behavior, sensorimotor reactivity, pain sensitivity, and reward learning.[1] Depression has been associated with a short allele (variant of the gene) for the serotonin transporter protein, and the data are sometimes interpreted as meaning that having the gene causes depression. In fact, the effects are actually small, though statistically significant, and the presense of the short allele accounts for only 3-4% of the variation in the general population of the measures of depression, and 7-9% of inherited variance of the trait. This means that many other factors play an important role in the occurence of depression.[2] This is not surprising. Consider that the physical trait of height is associated with 54 known alleles, but collectively, they account only for 5% of the heritability of height. The rest is a mystery."

"...all the functions of a gene product such as cyclic AMP phosphodiesterase might have been more closely related, but as time and evolution moved on, sturctural branch points became increasingly elaborate and widely separated. Thus serotonin, perhaps handling only a single job in very simple organisms, gets recruited for new tasks, and ultimately ends up doing many things who connections with each other are lost in our evolutionary past. Consequently the functions of the gene product can end up in very different categories....By and large, the strategy of trying to link a single gene to a particular phenotype has been superseded by the understanding that genes often form networks, and that a given gene is liekly to figure in many jobs."

"The idea is not merely that things are complex, which they surely are, but that a gene product can have many roles, and genes interact in ways that are typical of a nonlinear dynamical system—more like the behavior of a flock of crows than that of a clock. As (Ralph) Greenspan has remarked, 'The wider the network of contacts a gene product makes, the more chances there are for an alteration in another gene to infuence it.'[3]"

Patricia Churchland
Braintrust (2011)
Chapter 5

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[1] Irwin Lucki. "The Spectrum of Behaviors Influenced by Serotonin," Biological Psychiatry 44, no. 3 (1998): 151-62. Andrea Bari et al., "Serotonin Modulates Sensitivity to Reward and Negative Feedback in a Probabalistic Reversal Learning Task in Rats," Neuropsychopharmacology 35, no. 6 (2010): 1290-301.

[2] Klaus-Peter Lesch et al., "Association of Anxiety-Related Traits with a Polymorphismin the Serotonin Transporter Gene Regulatory Region," Science 274, no. 5292 (1996): 1527-31.

[3] Ralph Greenspan. "E Pluburus Unum, Ex Uno Plura: Quantitative and Single-Gene Perspectives on the Study of Behavior," Annual Review of Neuroscience 27 (2004): 99.

Patricia Churchland on Moral Intuition

"Once certain practices become the norm, once they are seen to bring benefits and to circumvent toubles, once they are reinforced by social approval and disapproval, they do of course seem to reflect the only right way for things to be."

Patricia Churchland
Braintrust (2011)
Chapter 3

Gary Cutting on The Moral Implications of Your Degree

"...earning a college degree shows that you have the “moral qualities” needed for most jobs: you have (to put it a bit cynically), for a period of four years and with relatively little supervision, deferred to authority, met deadlines and carried out difficult tasks even when you found them pointless and boring."

Gary Cutting
What is College For?
NYT (01/11/12)

Philosophers' Brains: Part I

If you've been here before you might know about my interest in scanning the brains of philosophers. Well, that is generally put. What I am interested in are neural correlates of proclivities towards and aversions to various philosophical beliefs, should any exist.

And if you have been here before, you might also know that I have yet to find folks doing this kind of research. The more I look into it, however, the more I find that existing research publications can paint a picture of what might be discovered should philosophers consent to intracranial examination. A couple such studies will be considered in what follows. Most of the studies I have found recently involve the relationship between neurotransmitters and social behavior.

An example of the method of such studies goes something like this:

1. Gather a bunch of people who seem mostly normal and mentally healthy.
   
2. Gather information about each subject via pre-test questionnaire.
   
3. Give some of the subjects a dose of oxytocin (OXT), vassopressen (AVP), or dopamine (DA).
   
4. Begin an exercise, game, or stress test with subjects.
   
5. Compare differences in behavior between control subjects and experimental subjects.
   
6. Compare differences in answers to post-test questionnaires between the control group and the experimental group.

What studies consistently report is that subjects who receive OXT demonstrate lower stress, an increased proclivity to trust, and increased cooperation.[1] Even in non-human test pools, OXT and AVP mitigate fear responses, lower stress (i.e. coritsol) levels, and blocks aggressive behavior.[2] This makes sense since previous studies report that OXT is involved in a variety of areas (amygdala, hippocampus, brain stem, spinal cord),[3] and that "its manifold effects include the promotion of trust and cooperation."[4]

Interestingly, another study shows that receiving OXT before playing a game (e.g. Trust) had little effect on the severity of punishment dished out by a subject when an "out-group" player is uncooperative.[5] It is as if OXT heightens one's demand for trust and cooperation that OXT subjects just as willing to pay to spite the uncooperative as non OXT subjects.[5]

To bring it back to philosophy, these studies make me wonder about, say, differences in political philosophy. If OXT seems to have such a salient effect in trust and cooperation, then I would not be surprised if OXT could play a role in the different theories of a state of nature. For example, could Thomas Hobbes's idea of the state of nature—characterized by uncooperative humans who experience "continual fear, and danger of violent death," and whose life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"—be partially the result of a relatively low levels of OXT? Would Hobbes have thought differently is he had been receiving nasal injections of OXT while writing the Leviathan? Contrarywise, could Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idea of a state of nature—which challenged Hobbes's with the claim that moral order would reign in the state of nature—be partially due to comparatively higher levels of OXT?

I admit that this query would be just about impossible to test in light of the fact that brains are often the first part of the corpses to decay and Hobbes and Rousseau have been long dead. I also admit that the analogue between an individual's cooperation and a philosopher's theory could be lacking. However, it seems plausible that neural correlates like those between social behavior and the brain could exist between a philosopher's reported beliefs and his or her brain. Whether we're talking about a difference in the amount of a neuropeptide (e.g. OXT), in the size of a certain cortex, or in the level of activation in that cortex, it would be unsurprising if it correlated with a tendency towards a belief (or an aversion to a belief) in large groups of philosophers.

And how interesting would it be if differences between philosophers were at least partially represented by differences neurobiology? I suppose the answer depends on what you care about, but personally, I can think of few things that are more interesting, which is why this project will be on-going. In the next post on this subject, I plan to take a look at dopamine and how it might correlate with philosophical beliefs.

I will be presenting this hypothesis along with its implications at the "Toward a Science of Consciousness" conference in Tuscon in April.

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[1] M. Kosfeld, M. Heinrichs, P. Zak, U. Fischbacher, and E. Fehr. "Oxytocin Increases Trust in Humans," in Nature 435, no. 7042 (2005): 673-76.

[2] D. Huber, P. Veinante, R. Stoop. "Vasopressin and Oxytocin Excite Distinct Neuronal Populations in the Central Amygdala," Science 308 (2005) 245–248.

[3]S. Rodrigues, L. Saslow, N. Garcia, O. Johna, and D. Keltner. "Oxytocin Receptor Genetic Variation Relates to Empathy and Stress Reactivity in Humans," in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences 106, no. 50 (2009): 21437–21441.

[4] C. De Dreu, L. Greer, M. Handgraaf, S. Shalvi, G. Van Kleef, M. Baas, F. Velden, E. Van Dijk, S. Feith. "The Neuropeptide Oxytocin Regulates Parochial Altruism in Intergroup Conflict Among Humans," in Science 328, no. 5984 (2010): 1408-11.

[5] E. Fehr. F. Gaechter. "Cooperation and Punishment in Public Goods Experiments," American Economic Review, American Economic Association 90, no. 4 (1999): 980-994.

Patricia Churchland on Human Morality and Rationality

"'Human-style' morality, moreover, is not a single set of moral values, given the variability in what human cultures adduce as their moral values. Some cultures accept infanticide for the disabled or unwanted, others consider it morally abhorent; some consider a mouthful of the killed enemy's flesh a requirement for a courageous warrior, others consider it barbaric."

"Although [social] attachment may be the platform for morality, there is no simple set of steps—no deductive operation, no exactly applicable rule—to take us from "I care, I value" to the best solution to specific moral problems, especially those problems that arise within complex cultures. Pretty obviously, social problem-solving is a messy practical business within an individual brain, where many interacting factors push, pull, compete, and constrain the decision the brain settles on. Some constraints take priority over others; some factors will be conscious, others not; some can be artiiculated, some not. In general, decision-making is a constraint-satisfaction business, and when it goes well, we say that rationality has prevailed.[1]"

Patricia
Braintrust (2011)
Chapter 2

[1] David Danks. "Constraint-based Human Causal Learning," in Proceedings of the 6th International Conference of Cognitive Modeling (ICCM-2004), ed. M. Lovett, C. Schunn, C. Lebiere, and P. Munro (Mahwah: NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004):342-43.

Patricia Churchland on Brain Size & Intelligence

"Compared to other mammals, humans have a very large brain relative to body size. In some imprecise sense, we are smarter than other mammals: we have greater cognitive flexibility, and a greater capacity for abstraction and long-term planning, and we show an especially strong ability and inclination to imitate.[1] What exactly is conferred by larger brain size and how it contributes to intelligence, however, is anything but clear.[2] Dissappointingly, the link between expanded cortex and intelligence is not well understood, though it is known that prefrontal cortex is important in decision-making, impulse control, and attributing goals and perceptions to others.[3] Speculations linking intelligence to brain size are plentiful, but until more is known about brain function and organization, these are nicely regarded as nice stories."

Patricia Churchland
Braintrust (2011)
Chapter 2

[1] Kehagia, Murray, Robbins. "Learning and Cognitive Flexibility: Frontostratial Function and Monoaminergic Modulation," Current Opinion in Neurobiology 20, no. 2 (2010)199-204; Lyons, Young, Keil. "The Hidden Structure of Overimitation," Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 104, no. 50 (2007): 19751-56.

[2] Deary, Penke, Johnson. "The Neuroscience of Intelligence Differences," Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11, no. 3 (2010): 201-11

[3]Robbins and Arnsten, "The Neuropsychopharmocology of Fronto-Executive Function: Monoaminergic Modulation," Annual Review of Neuroscience 32, no. 1 (2009): 267-87.