Calls to mind Hume's bundling theory and the like. (Also, the Kids in the Hall sketch Skoura the Gentle Shark, about a killer whale who, while he keeps chomping the limbs of the people in a small town, is beloved because he doesn't _mean_ to do it ("he's a killer with a gentle heart!").
I think Gray is wrong about free will, not just because the classic neuroscience blindsight experiments didn't replicate, but for the more fundamental reason that he didn't grok causal emergence https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/a-primer-on-causal-emergence & the physical existence of free will (under indeterminism).
That aside, I think it is worth separating two different points in your post -- (1) attributions about agentic capacity (agentic affordances) and (2) attributions about blame.
The two are different. I'll go on at too great a length to get some thoughts clear for myself.
1.1 People regularly misattribute agency / human causal features to entities that lack it -- witness the current spat of articles about what LLM's "feel," or their internal states.
1.2 People also regularly make misattributions of others' internal states -- projection and mindreading are fundamental features of mentalization.
1.3 What's going on? As the p-zombies debate shows, there is no real way to differentiate between a self with qualia (internal states) vs. one without -- we can only know others through external behavior.
1.4 Agentic/qualitative attributions are really hypotheses (ampliative inferences) meant to predict future (observed) behavior. [And the "self" is just such hypotheses about self observed externally and introjected, but that's a different topic.]
1.5 There are two ways to solve the principal agent problem of trusting someone to do/not do something tempting when your back is turned -- you can either find the type of person who wouldn't do that, or else arrange it so that they can't. A faithful spouse, or a chastity belt.
1.5.1 Relatedly, if you're looking for evidence of a crime, you might look to who could possibly have done it in terms of physical affordances, or who would have a motive to do it, depending on information costs.
1.5.1 Plausibly then, attributions about agentic capacity vs. qualia/feelings are just implementations of these solutions. Those who can feel pain will fear pain, and can be trained with behaviorism to behave within certain parameters; those who can plan/act can respond to incentives. [Maybe the difference comes down to how much you get to observe someone's behavior.]
1.5.2 Of note is that the two will tend to be two sides of the same coin -- faith vs. acts is an old debate indeed, but usually acts are produced by faith and faith acts. (Karl Friston and the predictive processing people have more to say on this---an action is a prediction and vice versa, & each aim at reducing uncertainty---but that's an aside.)
1.6 In considering how these systems work, it's often useful to think about how they malfunction.
1.6.1 On the affective side: Contrast Hare psychopaths/ASPD/NPD (people who often have high cognitive 'empathy,' but low/no affective sympathy) vs. cluster B (histrionic/borderline/etc) vs. ASD (mentalization impaired in general -- low to no theory of mind, and hence, often, an inability to predict others' intentions and thus how they'll behave, but often unimpaired or supranormal capacity to suss out cause and effect relationships in the world of things).
1.6.2 On the agentic/causative side, compare compulsive gamblers, alcoholics, gambler (who often understand consequences but feel they "can't" stop) with naïfs, fools, the demented, etc. (who can perhaps stop, but do not understand consequences).
1.7 Turning to ordinary functioning: while there are various failure modes in attributions of agency/internal states to other agents, what is remarkable is how well mentalization works. We can understand language and intent; rules are followed; etc. People are by and large incredibly good at inducting the intentions of agents from actions, and predicting actions from intentions. [This is because of evolution and the free energy principle / biosemiosis in the Peircean sense, but that again is an aside.]
***
2. Turning to blame: People can, do, have, and will assign moral blame to "things" with no actual agency, from "the economy" to weather systems to illness.
2.1 Yet all that is required for moral attributions---praise- or blameworthy---is that there be some purgative convention that recognizes the assignment. E.g., the sin eater or scapegoating ritual, or the ritual of going to see a doctor or accountant or therapist.
2.2 Blame is conventional. It's an ex post justification or theory of events that serves some conventional purpose -- usually to tie a group/community together, or keep behavior within certain parameters, or (relatedly) to dissipate instincts to revenge/other unproductive urges (or to channel them to certain ends).
2.2.3 When Hitler blamed Germany losing WW1 on a "stab in the back" by the Jews, and whipped the nation into frenzy, it wasn't really a causal theory subject to proof of disproof. Modern politicians and pundits in America blame all manner of ills on crypto-Nazis, or Racism, or Trump and his dictatorial turn.
2.3 Or consider criminal law and tort--the branches of Anglo-American law that most directly deal with blame--and "proximate cause". What is proximate cause? It's just the kind causal interposition the community deems blameworthy. This is conventional -- what's "justified" reliance on representations? What constitutes "consent"? Is is caveat emptor or caveat venditor -- wherever the balance is struck, the community will adjust [though some configurations will tend to be more efficient].
2.3.1 "Proximate cause" takes advantage of our affordances and intuitions about causality, of course, but cannot explain the normative dimension of judging some kinds of causation to be more or less blameworthy to begin with (much less the impulse to find something blameworthy at all).
2.3.2 Of similar nature are notions like "materiality" or the "reasonable person" -- our views of who has the "power to act" and thus should bear the blame for events gone awry can take many configurations.
2.5 Again: blame is conventional -- there is usually some song and dance about cause and effect, to better keep the peace/bind a community, but since ex post blame as such doesn't help victims, there's no necessary connection to cause and effect. We've burned witches; we've put cats on trial; we've sacrificed animals to placate the gods.
2.6 So too with apologies. People have demanded apologies from nations for actions that happened years before anyone in the nation was born; people have demanded reparations. It's a ritual. Saying sorry doesn't actually make the boo boo stop bleeding.
* * *
Let's now turn back to the topic at hand: George Floyd the Big Baby. You (Mr. Kling) posit that we shouldn't see him as a _baby,_ since after all we can construct counterfactuals where he complied with cops, or didn't do drugs, or chose to study hard and go to college in another state, etc. etc.
I, too, have in the past made such normiecon points about how, "You know, what they're _really_ doing is depriving fine African-American young men of their very agency! Yep!"
But let's get a grip: these efforts persuade nobody -- had such a counterfactual come to pass, the control left would just have latched on to another Sacred Victim as the focus for their propaganda frenzy.
More to the point, the religious fervor over Floyd has little to nothing to do with anything in the causal structure of the encounter. Floyd seems to have died since he OD'd; that won't stop the officers from burning at the stake.
By questioning his Sacred Victim status, you are just inviting the rejoinder that you are just trying to shift attention from the _very moment_ when the _face of evil, the white man Derek Chauvin, the COP_ pinned _sainted baby Floyd, 8lbs 6oz,_ etc. etc.
This propaganda emerged through careful market testing, and it's already seen mass adoption, so your attempts to shift the level of generality will just win you jeers from the converted. The very best you can hope for is someone granting that, sure, if not for _structural racism_ guiding Floyd's path like Athena used to guide arrows, perhaps he'd not have come to such a poor end. Your intuitions about the kinds of actions/affordances that theoretically may have been available to a human in George Floyd's shoes at his time of death less some # of hours or days simply doesn't enter into the picture.
I have to wonder, though: why go to the pretense otherwise? It's hard to kick against the pricks.
How much agency should we assign to people who are adults but low IQ?
What is the proper way to deal with the nature of their agency?
These were questions Charles Murray tried to answer. For the most part he felt that they could show agency only if they were surrounded by higher IQ people that reinforced good behaviors (and conversely, could be led astray by high IQ people reinforcing bad behaviors). Some of the ways that would reinforce good behavior would mean leaving people alone, he was a libertarian after all.
To me it sounds like something more then a child but less then an adult (or, at least, a full fledged citizen).
Kholberg surveys have a constant outline for ~25 year old YAs: the top 5% believe in "rule of law" (libertarians with strong college background), the bottom 5% only responds to incentives, and the middle is split between peer affiliation (working class populists) and loyalty to order (above-average conservatives). In the case where someone is more or less uneducated, they may still have conscience within a social environment e.g. religious congregations. Drop the science and Socratic reasoning, return to faith in humanity...
But the last 5% is distinct from this line of logic, and that it is better to take care of them than to listen to them in earnest. This cluster is also independent from the left-right divide.
It applies to how many people react to the homeless and to street people, too. Nice. Thanks.
Convenient link to The Mind Club book.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0143110020/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Brilliant post!
Calls to mind Hume's bundling theory and the like. (Also, the Kids in the Hall sketch Skoura the Gentle Shark, about a killer whale who, while he keeps chomping the limbs of the people in a small town, is beloved because he doesn't _mean_ to do it ("he's a killer with a gentle heart!").
I think Gray is wrong about free will, not just because the classic neuroscience blindsight experiments didn't replicate, but for the more fundamental reason that he didn't grok causal emergence https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/a-primer-on-causal-emergence & the physical existence of free will (under indeterminism).
That aside, I think it is worth separating two different points in your post -- (1) attributions about agentic capacity (agentic affordances) and (2) attributions about blame.
The two are different. I'll go on at too great a length to get some thoughts clear for myself.
1.1 People regularly misattribute agency / human causal features to entities that lack it -- witness the current spat of articles about what LLM's "feel," or their internal states.
1.2 People also regularly make misattributions of others' internal states -- projection and mindreading are fundamental features of mentalization.
1.3 What's going on? As the p-zombies debate shows, there is no real way to differentiate between a self with qualia (internal states) vs. one without -- we can only know others through external behavior.
1.4 Agentic/qualitative attributions are really hypotheses (ampliative inferences) meant to predict future (observed) behavior. [And the "self" is just such hypotheses about self observed externally and introjected, but that's a different topic.]
1.5 There are two ways to solve the principal agent problem of trusting someone to do/not do something tempting when your back is turned -- you can either find the type of person who wouldn't do that, or else arrange it so that they can't. A faithful spouse, or a chastity belt.
1.5.1 Relatedly, if you're looking for evidence of a crime, you might look to who could possibly have done it in terms of physical affordances, or who would have a motive to do it, depending on information costs.
1.5.1 Plausibly then, attributions about agentic capacity vs. qualia/feelings are just implementations of these solutions. Those who can feel pain will fear pain, and can be trained with behaviorism to behave within certain parameters; those who can plan/act can respond to incentives. [Maybe the difference comes down to how much you get to observe someone's behavior.]
1.5.2 Of note is that the two will tend to be two sides of the same coin -- faith vs. acts is an old debate indeed, but usually acts are produced by faith and faith acts. (Karl Friston and the predictive processing people have more to say on this---an action is a prediction and vice versa, & each aim at reducing uncertainty---but that's an aside.)
1.6 In considering how these systems work, it's often useful to think about how they malfunction.
1.6.1 On the affective side: Contrast Hare psychopaths/ASPD/NPD (people who often have high cognitive 'empathy,' but low/no affective sympathy) vs. cluster B (histrionic/borderline/etc) vs. ASD (mentalization impaired in general -- low to no theory of mind, and hence, often, an inability to predict others' intentions and thus how they'll behave, but often unimpaired or supranormal capacity to suss out cause and effect relationships in the world of things).
1.6.2 On the agentic/causative side, compare compulsive gamblers, alcoholics, gambler (who often understand consequences but feel they "can't" stop) with naïfs, fools, the demented, etc. (who can perhaps stop, but do not understand consequences).
1.7 Turning to ordinary functioning: while there are various failure modes in attributions of agency/internal states to other agents, what is remarkable is how well mentalization works. We can understand language and intent; rules are followed; etc. People are by and large incredibly good at inducting the intentions of agents from actions, and predicting actions from intentions. [This is because of evolution and the free energy principle / biosemiosis in the Peircean sense, but that again is an aside.]
***
2. Turning to blame: People can, do, have, and will assign moral blame to "things" with no actual agency, from "the economy" to weather systems to illness.
2.1 Yet all that is required for moral attributions---praise- or blameworthy---is that there be some purgative convention that recognizes the assignment. E.g., the sin eater or scapegoating ritual, or the ritual of going to see a doctor or accountant or therapist.
2.2 Blame is conventional. It's an ex post justification or theory of events that serves some conventional purpose -- usually to tie a group/community together, or keep behavior within certain parameters, or (relatedly) to dissipate instincts to revenge/other unproductive urges (or to channel them to certain ends).
2.2.3 When Hitler blamed Germany losing WW1 on a "stab in the back" by the Jews, and whipped the nation into frenzy, it wasn't really a causal theory subject to proof of disproof. Modern politicians and pundits in America blame all manner of ills on crypto-Nazis, or Racism, or Trump and his dictatorial turn.
2.3 Or consider criminal law and tort--the branches of Anglo-American law that most directly deal with blame--and "proximate cause". What is proximate cause? It's just the kind causal interposition the community deems blameworthy. This is conventional -- what's "justified" reliance on representations? What constitutes "consent"? Is is caveat emptor or caveat venditor -- wherever the balance is struck, the community will adjust [though some configurations will tend to be more efficient].
2.3.1 "Proximate cause" takes advantage of our affordances and intuitions about causality, of course, but cannot explain the normative dimension of judging some kinds of causation to be more or less blameworthy to begin with (much less the impulse to find something blameworthy at all).
2.3.2 Of similar nature are notions like "materiality" or the "reasonable person" -- our views of who has the "power to act" and thus should bear the blame for events gone awry can take many configurations.
2.5 Again: blame is conventional -- there is usually some song and dance about cause and effect, to better keep the peace/bind a community, but since ex post blame as such doesn't help victims, there's no necessary connection to cause and effect. We've burned witches; we've put cats on trial; we've sacrificed animals to placate the gods.
2.6 So too with apologies. People have demanded apologies from nations for actions that happened years before anyone in the nation was born; people have demanded reparations. It's a ritual. Saying sorry doesn't actually make the boo boo stop bleeding.
* * *
Let's now turn back to the topic at hand: George Floyd the Big Baby. You (Mr. Kling) posit that we shouldn't see him as a _baby,_ since after all we can construct counterfactuals where he complied with cops, or didn't do drugs, or chose to study hard and go to college in another state, etc. etc.
I, too, have in the past made such normiecon points about how, "You know, what they're _really_ doing is depriving fine African-American young men of their very agency! Yep!"
But let's get a grip: these efforts persuade nobody -- had such a counterfactual come to pass, the control left would just have latched on to another Sacred Victim as the focus for their propaganda frenzy.
More to the point, the religious fervor over Floyd has little to nothing to do with anything in the causal structure of the encounter. Floyd seems to have died since he OD'd; that won't stop the officers from burning at the stake.
By questioning his Sacred Victim status, you are just inviting the rejoinder that you are just trying to shift attention from the _very moment_ when the _face of evil, the white man Derek Chauvin, the COP_ pinned _sainted baby Floyd, 8lbs 6oz,_ etc. etc.
This propaganda emerged through careful market testing, and it's already seen mass adoption, so your attempts to shift the level of generality will just win you jeers from the converted. The very best you can hope for is someone granting that, sure, if not for _structural racism_ guiding Floyd's path like Athena used to guide arrows, perhaps he'd not have come to such a poor end. Your intuitions about the kinds of actions/affordances that theoretically may have been available to a human in George Floyd's shoes at his time of death less some # of hours or days simply doesn't enter into the picture.
I have to wonder, though: why go to the pretense otherwise? It's hard to kick against the pricks.
How much agency should we assign to people who are adults but low IQ?
What is the proper way to deal with the nature of their agency?
These were questions Charles Murray tried to answer. For the most part he felt that they could show agency only if they were surrounded by higher IQ people that reinforced good behaviors (and conversely, could be led astray by high IQ people reinforcing bad behaviors). Some of the ways that would reinforce good behavior would mean leaving people alone, he was a libertarian after all.
To me it sounds like something more then a child but less then an adult (or, at least, a full fledged citizen).
The "eternal teenager" isn't really a bad way of describing those with ~85 IQ.
Emil Kirkegaard dropped a hint on people's "basic skills", and that ~20% of the population in the US cannot do basic math or read a map (NALS 2 problems). https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/how-many-people-can-solve-this-kind https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/national-intelli-basic-skills
Kholberg surveys have a constant outline for ~25 year old YAs: the top 5% believe in "rule of law" (libertarians with strong college background), the bottom 5% only responds to incentives, and the middle is split between peer affiliation (working class populists) and loyalty to order (above-average conservatives). In the case where someone is more or less uneducated, they may still have conscience within a social environment e.g. religious congregations. Drop the science and Socratic reasoning, return to faith in humanity...
But the last 5% is distinct from this line of logic, and that it is better to take care of them than to listen to them in earnest. This cluster is also independent from the left-right divide.