I was talking to a friend recently about life and its aims and meaning. Offhand I mentioned I was reading Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius, arguably the most powerful man in the world when he was composing it. There is debate about whether he wrote Meditations for public consumption, but that is somewhat irrelevant to why we moderns read it.

I could attempt to derive the fundamental theorem of calculus and reconstruct vast swathes of modern mathematics from first principles. But I don’t. Part of it is that I don’t have the skill or time. But another aspect is that I can stand on the shoulders of those who have come before, and lean upon the hard work that has come before. And so with natural science, which has a institutional backdrop I can’t recapitulate. There’s no point in reinventing the wheel.

There are those, like Steven Pinker, who suggest that the nature of modern philosophy is that it has been relegated to answering questions which seem well night insoluble. And I am in broad sympathy with this perspective. But the reason I look to the ancients is that often I find their musings more human and real than those of the philosophers of today, who in the analytic tradition put passion in thrall to reason, and on the Continent place a premium on stylistic verve at the cost of coherency. I don’t think that Marcus Aurelius, or Seneca or Christ for that matter, had any specific deep insight into the general human condition. But they probably addressed most of the same questions that the average person today has. There may be benefit then in seeing what their answers to the deep questions were, because presumably the generations that have intervened have selected at least some for memetic clarity, if it not depth.

A few separate pieces that I read today came together thematically for me in an odd confluence. First, an article in The Straits Times repeats the shocking statistics about the nature of modern academic intellectual production, Prof, no one is reading you, that you may be aware of. Here’s the important data:

Even debates among scholars do not seem to function properly. Up to 1.5 million peer-reviewed articles are published annually. However, many are ignored even within scientific communities – 82 per cent of articles published in humanities are not even cited once. No one ever refers to 32 per cent of the peer-reviewed articles in the social and 27 per cent in the natural sciences.

If a paper is cited, this does not imply it has actually been read. According to one estimate, only 20 per cent of papers cited have actually been read. We estimate that an average paper in a peer-reviewed journal is read completely by no more than 10 people. Hence, impacts of most peer-reviewed publications even within the scientific community are minuscule.

What ever happened to the “republic of letters”? Are humanists reading, but not citing, each other? Or is it that humanistic production has basically become a matter of adding a line to one’s c.v.? So the scholar writes the monograph which is read by their editor, and then published to collect dust somewhere in the back recesses of an academic library.

Second, an article in The New York Times, Philosophy Returns to the Real World, declares the bright new world in the wake of the Dark Ages of post-modernism. Through a personal intellectual biography the piece charts the turn away from the hyper-solipsistic tendencies in philosophy exemplified by Stanley Fish in the 1980s, down to the modern post-post-modern age. Operationally I believe that Fish is a human who reconstitutes the characteristics of the tyrannical pig Napoleon in Animal Farm. Despite all the grand talk about subjectivism and a skepticism about reality which would make Pyrrho blanch, Fish did very well for himself personally in terms of power, status, and fame by promoting his de facto nihilism. Money and fame are not social constructs for him, they are concrete realities. Like a eunuch in the Forbidden City ignoring the exigencies of the outside world, all Fish and his fellow travelers truly care about are clever turns of the phrase, verbal gymnastics, and social influence and power. As the walls of the city collapse all around them they sit atop their golden thrones, declaring that they are the Emperors of the World, but like Jean-Bédel Bokassa are clearly only addled fools to all the world outside of the circle of their sycophants. After all, in their world if they say it is, is it not so? Their empire is but one of naked illusions.

Finally, via Rod Dreher, a profile of David Brooks in The Guardian. He has a new book out, The Road To Character. I doubt I’ll read it, because from what I can tell and have seen in the domain of personal self-cultivation of the contemplative sort our species basically hit upon some innovations in the centuries around 500 B.C., and has been repackaging those insights through progressively more exotic marketing ploys ever since. Xunzi and Marcus Aurelius have said what needs to be said. No more needed for me.

But this section jumped out:

“I started out as a writer, fresh out of college, thinking that if I could make my living at it – write for an airline magazine – I’d be happy,” says Brooks over coffee in downtown Washington, DC; at 53, he is ageing into the amiably fogeyish appearance he has cultivated since his youth. “I’ve far exceeded my expectations. But then you learn the elemental truth that every college student should know: career success doesn’t make you happy.” In midlife, it struck him that he’d spent too much time cultivating what he calls “the résumé virtues” – racking up impressive accomplishments – and too little on “the eulogy virtues”, the character strengths for which we’d like to be remembered. Brooks builds a convincing case that this isn’t just his personal problem but a societal one: that our market-driven meritocracy, even when functioning at its fairest, rewards outer success while discouraging the development of the soul. Though this is inevitably a conservative argument – we have lost a “moral vocabulary” we once possessed, he says – many of the exemplary figures around whom Brooks builds the book were leftists: labour activists, civil rights leaders, anti-poverty campaigners. (St Augustine and George Eliot feature prominently, too.) What unites them, in his telling, is the inner confrontation they had to endure, setting aside whatever plans they had for life when it became clear that life had other plans for them.

Many of the ancients argued for the importance of inner reflection and mindful introspection. Arguably, the strand of Indian philosophical thought represented by the Bhagavad Gita was swallowed up by this cognitive involution, as one folds in upon one’s own mind.

But let me tell a different story, one of the outer world, but not one of social engagement, but sensory experience of the material domain in an analytic sense. Science. A friend of mine happens to be the first using next-generation sequencing technologies to study a particularly charismatic mammal. I reflected to her recently that she was the first person in the history of the world to gaze upon this particular sequence, to analyze it, to reflect upon the natural historical insights that were yielded up for her by the intersection of biology and computation. It is highly unlikely that my friend will ever become a person of such eminence, such prominence, as David Brooks or Stanley Fish. Feted by her fellow man. But my friend will know truth in a manner innocent of aspirational esteem totally alien to the meritocratic professionals David Brooks references. On the day that you expire, would you rather be remembered for a law review article, or discovering something real, shedding light on some deep truth (as opposed to “truth”)?

This perhaps offers up a possibility for why humanists don’t cite each other. Too many have been poisoned by the nihilism of the likes of Stanley Fish. They do not see any purpose in the scholarship of their peers, because humanistic scholarship of the solipsistic sort is primarily an interior monologue with oneself. The experiments of English professors always support their hypotheses. Their struggle is to feed their egos, they wrestle with themselves, Jacob’s own angel as a distillation of their self-essence. The limits of their minds are the limits of their world.

Finally, this filament threaded through, of a reality out there, the possibility of being made aware of it, even through the mirror darkly, is why I continue to do what I do, and aspire to what I aspire to. The truth is out there. It does not give consideration to our preferences. But it is, and we can grasp it in our comprehension. Over the past ten years in the domain of my personal interest, and now professional focus, genomics, we’ve seen a sea change. That which we did not even imagine has become naked to us. Before the next ten years is out who knows what else we’ll discover?

Lately my daughter has been expressing unintentionally philosophical questions. For example, when we were discussing as a family events from the “deep past,” i.e., before her existence, she asked “Where was I?” And we don’t even need to get into questions about the nature of death, which does come up when companion animals expire.

This dovetails with another thought which has been percolating in my mind recently: is there any point to philosophy of the existential kind once you have children? Men such as Plato and St. Paul did not have a family life in a conventional sense, though Aristotle did marry, and also had a son. Does this perhaps reflect itself in the nature of the philosophies expounded by Plato and his most famous pupil? Since becoming a father I have difficulty even understanding why the nature of Being and existence bothered me at all as a younger man. Children seem to give an answer to many of the “deep” questions we might have, on an emotional if not rational, level.* This is all ironic because it seems to me that children are the ones who most naively probe the root of the gaps in our comprehension of ontology.

* It is then of note that celibacy is common in many “higher religions” for professional clerical elites.

Now that I have a daughter I do reflect a bit more on what the purpose of my life is, because at some point I want to talk to her about the purpose of her life. There is a little bit of irony in this insofar as now she is a primary purpose of my life! But in any case, though Chris Rock’s raison d’être speaks to me, additionally my job is also to make sure that my daughter doesn’t become a C.P.A. Certain professions, such as dentistry or accountancy, are honorable. But there are enough people who want to enter those financially lucrative professions as it is. In a world of such absolute affluence we can afford the luxury of the life the mind. Aristotle’s father was a physician, no doubt a good man. But his memory persists only because of the incandescent brilliance of his son, who ventured into wide intellectual waters.

Speaking of Aristotle, Aristotle Onassis is reputed to have said that “If women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.” Point taken, and I think there’s a great deal of truth in this. But let me rephrase it: if books didn’t exist, all the time in the world would have no meaning. To many this sort of assertion would seem strange, but I suspect among my readership it is comprehensible. And by books I don’t mean to imply paper and ink and binding, I mean the information encoded within those books.

With that out of the way, I thought I would share an email from a long time reader (though only very rarely a correspondent). I don’t necessarily agree with everything stated here obviously, and I hope that the comments don’t devolve in discussions of the nature of East Asian society. I didn’t feel comfortable expurgating that aspect just because some might take objection though. Rather, it is to consider how one might find a place to flourish and be nurtured socially in their intellectual explorations.

Justin Wolfers & Betsy Stevenson have a piece up in Bloomberg, Crowds Are This Election’s Real Winners. In The Signal and the Noise Nate Silver has a chapter on Wolfers’ belief that prediction markets are superior to the sort of quantitative analysis that is his stock & trade. The belief isn’t based on an intuition. One of Wolfers’ graduate students produced a paper showing that Intrade was actually better than FiveThirtyEight in 2008. Silver demurs in the chapter because he suggests that the model which Wolfers and his student lay out in the paper had some modifications which allowed for one to judge Intrade’s performance superior. I’m willing to accept Silver’s assertion here because I’ve seen enough economic models which are modulated just enough to produce elegant and clean results. That being said, the general tone of the chapter is such that in his heart Silver seems to agree that Wolfers is fundamentally correct in the long term. Prediction markets, when done right, are more powerful than any analytic an individual could cook up.

The recent controversy over Peter Singer and Fordhman got me thinking about the logical implications of a consistent ethos. Singer certainly has a consistent ethos. Or at least he tries to work out the logical implications of his axioms, no matter where that goes. I don’t agree with Peter Singer’s utilitarianism because I am skeptical of his extreme ethical reductionism, but it’s clarifying at least.

But that got me to thinking about the implications of being pro-life in the 21st century, as biotechnology becomes more and more a part of our lives. From what I gather the standard pro-life position is that life begins at conception, where you have the potential for a human being. One aspect of this has always disturbed me: it is likely that more than 50% of conceptions miscarry, without anyone being the wiser. Most karyotype abnormalities, for example, miscarry. If these are human lives, does this mean that the majority of humans die even before they are born? How can we fix this tragedy?

In the pre-modern age there wouldn’t be a tragedy to fix. Saving these humans would be beyond our power. But today there are ways we may reduce the harm. First, one could fertilize a range of eggs, and then screen them for genetic abnormalities. Only the ones who pass a quality control threshold would be implanted, to minimize miscarriage risk.* The others could be put in ‘stasis,’ until the point where medical technology has advanced to the point that ailments can be fixed by genetic re-engineering at the zygotic stage.

And that is my attempt to think like a pro-life Peter Singer.

* In the future artificial wombs are definitely the way to go, as the developing fetus could be closely monitored.

In the comments below there is a discussion about whether personhood is a continuous or categorical trait. I lean toward the former proposition as a matter of fact, but let’s entertain the second. What if personhood, and in particular consciousness and moral agency, emerged repeatedly over the past two million years in singular individuals? A model I propose is that the reason that ‘behavioral modernity’ exhibited such a long lag behind ‘anatomical modernity’ is that the first conscious human kept killing themselves. After all, imagine that you come to awareness and all your peers are…well, ‘dirty apes.’ You are literally the sane man in the asylum. This is similar the idea proposed, reasonably enough, that a demographic ‘critical mass’ was required for cultural evolution to truly enter into ‘lift-off.’ In any case, perhaps ~50,000 year ago a psychopath was born who could live with the knowledge that their days were to be spent copulating with and eliminating with animals. Animals whom said psychopath could congenially manipulate to increase their own fitness. No sensitive soul, he.

Ultimately obviously my hypothesis is far more science fiction than serious model. But it does get to the heart of something critical: the essence of humanity is not our rational reflective individual faculties, but our powerful social awareness and need for embeddedness. Even a misanthrope like me can recognize this. By our negation of it we recognize that which is the standard. Consciousness and self-awareness did not explode into the world like a shot in the dark in the form of the original human. Rather, groups of proto-humans through their collective actions stumbled upon the configuration of characteristics which connote to us humanity. There was no sentinel, only the passage of countless generations, melting unto each other.

A reader below asked me to exposit in more detail what I only alluded to in my post, The scourging of Sam Harris, when it came to substantive disagreements. The reason I did not elaborate much in the post is because Sam Harris’ original contribution had more to do with the deficits of interacting on the internet, and being routinely mischaracterized and having your reputation smeared. In this area I’m in close agreement with Harris, as I’ve experienced many of the same things. I suspect part of it is that like Harris, and unlike many internet commentators, I don’t really exist within a relatively tidy social-ideological bubble. My readership spans the ideological gamut, and though I’m personally on the Right, I don’t have much of a problem posting material which those on the Left may find congenial to their self-image (which naturally results in the tendency for random conservatives to term me a “liberal blogger,” totally unaware that I’m often a token conservative in science and secular circles). I’m not a contrarian, as much as I don’t really care too much about politics. People may remember Richard Feynman 1,000 years from now. They will be far less likely to remember Bill Clinton.

One minor note: I put “perceived” in the title because I understand that I may have misconstrued Sam Harris or his acolytes. I’ve read End of Faith, but have only a cursory familiarity with his follow up work. Of course it is hard to avoid Sam Harris and his detractors if you follow debates on the internet, so I think I have a sense of where he and his critics are coming from. But I could be wrong. A major problem that people have in constructive discourse is misunderstanding the positions of those who they think the disagree with (which is why I routinely ban any commenter who attempts to rewrite my own opinion before launching into their response; if you have to rewrite what I said when I’ve already written my opinion, I don’t see that as a good sign)

In my post below in regards to Sam Harris’ recent interactions on the web I reasserted by suspicion of reason. This naturally elicited curiosity, or hostility, from some. I’ve talked about this before, but the illustration to the left gets at my primary issue. When individuals are reasoning alone they often have a high degree of uncertainty as to their conclusions. But when individuals are reasoning together they seem to converge very rapidly and with great confidence upon a particular position. What’s going on here? In the second case it isn’t reason at all, but our natural human predisposition toward group conformity. There’s a huge psychological literature on this, so I won’t belabor the point. When people brandish “reason” and “rationality” explicitly I’m somewhat skeptical. If rational conclusions are so plain and self-evident why are we even asserting the primacy of reason? If something really is so clearly reasonable you usually don’t go around trumpeting how reasonable it is.

Of all the taxonomic ranks species is the most clear, distinct, and concrete. More practically, it is the level which most naturally falls out of the patterns of life’s tree. Or does it? If the term “species concept” does not ring a bell, please see this entry. If it does, how do you define species in a non-arbitrary manner?