Can functionalism save my unicorn ?

A while back I posted some stuff over at PotC about John Locke, and a sort-of sequel post on what it would be like to be a ghost (and a another one about split brains). This generated some very nice discussions in a variety of places, so here, albeit belatedly, I want to collate some of the major themes from that.

My basic take on consciousness is that it's a sort of field-like thing. It is non-physical, yet, like a more familiar electrical or gravitational field, it has an effect on physical substances. Unlike most physical fields, it requires a specific configuration of matter to generate it, and can only interact with that particular configuration. Thus it remains highly localised, giving a very limited but nevertheless real aspect to "mind over matter". It is important to emphasise the non-physical nature : I am not suggesting something directly analogous to electromagnetism or some "substance" with a corresponding particle. 

The aim of this is to save common sense intuition that our thoughts control our actions whilst minimalising the amount of mystical woo. I do not pretend any knowledge of what consciousness is (I offer a description, not an explanation), only that its effects are highly limited but not zero. Further, I say that we do not have direct control over our thoughts - that would be a contradiction in terms - but that we can beckon our thoughts in certain directions. Thus our free will is also limited, but again, quite definitely real in spite of that.

In order to keep this summary as brief as possible (some of the discussion threads were very very long), I'll try and arrange things thematically. I'll be anonymising the content to avoid accusing anyone of saying something that they didn't or didn't mean. For the enthusiasts, the two main discussions can be found here and here, with a third smaller one here (another short discussion occurred on MeWe, which doesn't allow linking).

1) Can we test for free will ?

I believe consciousness is efficacious. My thoughts control my actions and are dependent upon entirely subjective concepts and qualia. Numbers do not physically exist, but they have a manifest impact on my actions. Likewise, nothing else in nature is posited to be utterly passive; everything affects everything else to varying degrees, and for consciousness to be any different would be radically strange.

Since I view consciousness as a quasi-physical phenomenon, generated by hardware, I've suggested that this view of free will could be tested by building a robot with AI and running a simulation of the same robot. If consciousness really does depend on hardware, and really does give us a measure of control, then their behaviour should be different.

A difficulty for this came up in discussions. It was suggested that the notion that free will would require you to be able to make a different choice given physically identical conditions : if there is something non-physical at work then it ought not to be bound by physical reality. This poses two difficulties, one scientific and one philosophical. 

The scientific objection is that (as I understand it) the Uncertainty Principle means not that we merely can't measure things accurately, but that things literally don't have certain properties. So an exact repeat is fundamentally impossible, not a measurement problem. And it should be noted that mere randomness is not the same as intention - free will according to me means that I do something because I choose to, and that choice occurs through subjective thought, not through random electrical currents in the brain (although this might tip the balance in some cases).

The philosophical objection concerns identity. If we re-ran history and everything was identical except that I decided to vote for Boris Johnson, something would be seriously amiss. There would be no causality - I would have continued going on lengthy monologues against the prattling twit only to suddenly decide to actually vote for him ? It wouldn't make any sense. If I did something so out of character it would make a mockery of the whole concept of personal identity. Certainly there are some things I could do entirely differently and not feel like I'd soiled myself (like choosing waffles or toast for breakfast), but others are fundamental to who I am*. Sometimes decisions are easy, at other times they involved prolonged wrangling, but at all times I cannot escape the clear sensation of being in control.

* This does not mean accepting determinism, only that free will has limitations like everything else.

I do not have any answers to these points.

2) But does consciousness do anything in the first place ?

There were an interesting variety of positions on this which I hadn't previously considered. One is that consciousness is real, affects the world, but doesn't allow for free will (how that one works I don't know, the discussion moved on to other things). Another is that panpsychism, while a form of dualism, doesn't necessarily imply that consciousness interacts with anything. One could be a dualist in saying that subjective experience is not the same as physical reality, yet still deny that consciousness actually does anything. This surprised me, but on reflection it's perfectly consistent.

A more extreme version posed was that maybe fictional characters are conscious. I'm reminded in an author's comment on a webcomic : you see, he's a fully realized little guy, in my head, and HE made that decision to leap, not me. Or from one of the discussions : plenty of authors note that their characters often do things that they never intended, and they had to follow the story where they led. Superman isn’t just a passive model in your head, but an active simulation. This is similar to another description of consciousness as a simulation, of the brain talking to itself, a way to try and simulate what will happen if we run action x given condition y. And we certainly know that the brain does fill in a lot of gaps, and even that there's a delay between sensory data and our mental realisation of it, with the brain extrapolating so we don't realise the difference. Conscious experience doesn't always mesh well with sensory input data at all.

But to me if we allow fictional characters to have consciousness then we've robbed it of any real meaning. Anything I imagine is under my control (even if limited) - to say I could imagine something with a will of its own seems contradictory to me; an internal simulation is distinctly different from an external one. And rather than asking, "is Superman conscious ?" we should perhaps first ask, "does Superman experience qualia ?". I think the answer is clearly no. At the most, fictional characters can only receive the qualia their authors deign to give them, and this has some distinct tones of idealism rather than panpsychism.

(None of the discussions mentioned idealism much, and anyway I recently finished Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge which certainly warrants its own post. So I'll leave idealism aside for now.)

3) Is consciousness actually any different from matter ?

There were a couple of really interesting takes on what consciousness actually is. First, I periodically returning to the mind-bending idea of illusionism, that we're not really thinking at all. The discussion here helped illuminate what might be meant by this, since other examinations have hitherto proved fruitless.

Optical illusions are perhaps the best way to illustrate this. Consider the waterfall illusion, which induces the sensation of motion without causing any "real" motion. This is an illusion : what we see does not correspond to reality : we perceive motion where none exists. Also recall the extreme case of having to re-learn to see after a protracted period of blindness, how assigning meaning to the world can be extremely difficult. This may help explain motion blindness, with motion being a qualia-like sensation, something we have to learn to experience rather than perceiving directly. So much of what we perceive - everything, in fact - is actually our own internally-assigned meanings, not the raw sensory data at all.

(Which is not, of course, to say that everything is perception, which I think is daft, but more on that in a forthcoming PotC post on Berkeley.)

In this vein, illusionism could be interpreted to mean that we do have inner mental lives and we do experience qualia. It's just that instead of them having any direct connection to objective reality, they are entirely mental constructs. Our thoughts themselves are qualia-like constructs; we have the sensation of thinking things we're not really thinking.

This can perhaps be better explained using another example : CGI movies. Can the brain do all the calculations needed to produce a Marvel movie ? This is surprisingly contentious point with a variety of implications. In dreams, it was argued, the detail is actually very low but the perception of detail can be arbitrarily high (similarly, most people can't draw a dollar bill in any detail at all from memory). So we have a sensation of perceiving details we actually don't perceive. Other optical illusions seem to attest to this, such as the grid of dots.

But is that really what's happening ? Let's reduce this to something more basic. Is my mental image of something much simpler - say, a circle - really an image at all, or, for want of a better description, merely the sensation of perceiving a circle ? I would dispute the claim that we don't really perceive high levels of details in dreams - I've tried to deliberately concentrate on details in dreams and found them only to increase in vividity. Likewise while some people possess no mental imagery at all, others have the extreme opposite condition. So it's probably a mistake to get carried away with this. Sure, our brain does fill in a lot of missing stuff, and that we can sense motion where none is apparent is interesting - but I see no reason why our brain couldn't just be creating moving images. 

Perhaps both are true to some degree. Maybe the details in dreams are more like foveated rendering, created only when necessary, with the memory of details in other areas preserved only in sufficient detail to fool us into thinking we're seeing more than we actually currently are. In any case, while I can accept that there's more to qualia than we might at first guess (like understanding the meaning of motion or shape or distance), I still don't see how this could apply to thought or perception itself. In short, I still think illusionism is without merit. If I think I'm perceiving a circle, then dammit, it must be so. I can't be mistaken about my own perceptions, only how those perceptions correspond to objective reality.

4) Is the brain a computer ? 

Before going to the second interpretation of how consciousness relates to matter, it's worth discussing here whether the brain is actually doing calculations in the classical sense. Obviously, it is not literally doing the same process as when we do a sum on pen-and-paper; there is no in-built "carry the one" subroutine that the brain employs. But arguably we could turn this on its head. The brain doesn't do mathematics, but, it was suggested instead, mathematics describes what the brain does. When we calculate the trajectory of a projectile, we're describing in linguistic, numerical form the procedures the brain must do in order to extend our hand to catch a ball.

I have some sympathy for this view. The brain clearly has outstandingly high performance when it comes to sensory data processing, as described already. And though it can't process data in the same way as a computer, bare intuition is incredibly powerful - one can see, at an instant glance, whether two things are perceived to be the same or different, whether there is structure in data or not, so long as everything is displayed in a format the brain accepts. Expecting it to be able to speak the same language as mathematicians, however, is not viable, any more than we could feed punch cards into a Dell laptop and expect it to process them.

I'm less sure about how far we can extend this. Computers can operate to arbitrary precision, and it seems unlikely the brain can do the same - we can't guess the trajectory of a ball with perfect accuracy, much less actually catch it every time. Claims that the brain might be able to calculate pi to the nth decimal place just don't hold up. I lean towards the brain doing something fundamentally quite different to mathematics; I don't see any reason to presume that mathematics is in any sense a reflection of neural processes. The brain is warm, squishy, and prone to paradoxical contradictions. That mathematics is derived from that warm squishy mess doesn't mean that it must follow the same parameters.

5) Does consciousness need to offer a survival advantage ?

Even if it doesn't exactly do complex mathematics, clearly the brain does something. There would be no point at all in evolving such a complex structure if it hadn't any useful function at all. This causes no great difficulty for biologists or psychologists, who are happy to equate emotions, senses, motivation, and cognition in general with actions. But it causes no end of problems for philosophers.

One argument is that we only perceive that which offers a survival benefit, which I completely reject. A more interesting approach was raised that, since we can imagine an automaton performing all the same actions as someone conscious, there is no unavoidable need for it. Thus, consciousness cannot have evolved, hence the appeal of panpsychism : it must be a basic property of matter.

This is to my mind at least more sophisticated than other arguments against the evolution of consciousness, which I found so foolish that I haven't bothered to rebut them. I don't buy it though. Evolution comes up with all kinds of wacky things that offer no advantage - it does not optimise very well, producing some things which are indeed genuine adaptations and some which are purely side-effects. 

Let's flip this around. Things which don't have consciousness have severe survival disadvantages. Yes, we can imagine an awareless automaton managing to react unconsciously but appropriately. But, can we imagine the opposite - could a conscious, intelligent robot with goals and motivations suffer a survival disadvantage ? I would say no. If you have a conscious desire, intelligence and understanding, you'll generally perform far beyond the level of pure instinctive stimulus response. How could pure stimulus response deal with novel situations correctly ? I'll venture that it couldn't. Genuine understanding, the capacity for at least a rudimentary analysis, requires consciousness by definition.

6) Is it all just a terminology problem ?

Which brings us at last to the eponymous aspect of functionalism. Having read Locke, then Berkeley, and a good chunk of Hume, I'm struck by the way Berkeley and Hume seize on the same points in Locke and then (mis)interpret them in radically different ways. And so in the discussions here : accepting that "there is no objective evidence for anything", I would assume would be a clear mark of an idealist. Not so. Instead, this went the exact opposite way, to a distinctly materialistic and functionalist view of consciousness. Qualia are thus viewed as objective as everything else - that is, not at all.

Functionalism is apparently the mainstream view of consciousness but as far as I can tell it's a big cop-out. Rather than trying to define consciousness by what it is, functionalism essentially says, "consciousness is just whatever the brain does". Or, per the discussion : The brain handles 100% of all thinking, including the bits we’re conscious of. There is no brain function where we’re 100% consciously driving it, they’re all just tips of various icebergs, mostly out of reach... I do not think conscious thinking is very good for almost anything at all… except for reflection. It is a way to look at our own actions as if done by someone else.

In other words there is a direct one-to-one correlation between physical reality and consciousness. Do something to the brain and you inevitably do something to the consciousness. Thus (if I understand correctly), any influence the consciousness appears to have over our actions is just the result of physical processes altering the consciousness, and our will is just an illusion.

But what I don't understand is why need to presume this goes one way. Why is it more legitimate to say that the brain affects the mind than the mind affects the brain ? How can we be sure that inherently subjective things always correspond perfectly to objective reality ? How do we know that it's a change in brain activity which causes a change in our thoughts, rather than our changing thoughts causing a change in physical properties in the brain ?

The functionalist answer seems to be that they are one and the same, that no differentiation between brain activity and subjective experience is possible or meaningful. 

This I do not find helpful. Clearly I can imagine things which are absolutely non-physical in nature, e.g. concepts like justice, responsibility, disagreement, concepts themselves... these things cannot exist except as mental constructs, labels. They are of a qualitatively different nature to physical objects; you can't hit someone in the head with yellow. Granted, our labels and descriptions of physical things are themselves mental constructs. Hence the need for a magical, illusory horse, i.e. a unicorn.

Does functionalism help with this ? I don't think so. I think it's an attempt to define the problem out of existence. It seems undeniable to me that mental imagery and concepts do not exist in the world. True, mental states corresponding to duty and honour and numbers do exist, and correspond to physical properties of the brain, but the concepts themselves are nowhere to be found in nature. Nor do I see how we can ever know that measurable, observable mental states in the brain invariably correspond to subjective thoughts in the mind - I see no reason to assume a perfect correspondence. In short, no, functionalism cannot save my unicorn.

Well, ramblings over. I don't expect this will convince anyone of anything, but then, that was hardly the point. 

Reading back over one of the previous links, I still feel indignant about an old comment saying that I "just don't get it". For whatever it's worth, I've tried to explain different positions in different ways to give the best possible chance to understand them even while disagreeing with them. 

Ultimately, I suspect, consciousness remains something that people either find deeply mysterious or perfectly ordinary. These things like, "it's all just a feedback effect" or "it's whatever the brain does", seem to genuinely satisfy those who to subscribe to them. As for me, I think they explain nothing at all, and indicate the problem is not properly understood. Then again, maybe I really just don't get it.

Welcome to the metaverse ?

There's a recent piece in Wired which is so awful I refuse to repeat or link it here. Basically it says that Facebook's determination to push ahead in becoming a "metaverse" company is akin to lavishing praise on a "rich white kid". That is, developing virtual reality is apparently racist because they should be building schools and hospitals instead.

A much better piece on the metaverse can be found here. Basically, the concept is much like that Futurama episode where they surf the web in the year 3000. Instead of reading text and watching YouTube videos, it's a vast, sprawling 3D simulation of a city. Websites are buildings, stores, etc. - it's a "real" place you can wander around in and talk to people as you would in real life. Zoidberg - sorry, Zuckerberg's vision is basically this, after a fashion.

So, is this (a) technically achievable in five years as per Facebook's vision, (b) desirable in principle, and (c) seriously, does it have to be Facebook ? Here's my take as a proudly Oculus-wielding VR acolyte who sincerely wishes Mark Zuckerberg wasn't a thing.

To the first one my guess is yes but with major caveats. Of course, no-one is really envisioning that walking around the internet as a literal simulated city would be in any way practical. Rather, imagine something more like a super-advanced version of Microsoft's HoloLens : the ability to bring up well-rendered, 3D graphics wherever and whenever you are, using data from across the internet. Essentially, portable augmented reality on demand. 

The technical state of VR is looking pretty rosy. Headsets are getting lighter, more powerful, and cheaper. Standalone headsets can do some pretty impressive things, but couple them to a PC and the graphical quality improves dramatically. Given developments like the Steam Deck, I don't think it's at all crazy to postulate affordable, entirely standalone (that is, a single purchasable unit), wearable, PC-quality VR within five years. Maybe it won't be run by the headset itself, but by a Deck-like device in a backpack, or streamed wirelessly from a remote server. 

(Actually I'm a bit surprised that there's been so much focus on developing more powerful headsets rather than just giving them dedicated streaming equipment to let a PC do the heavy lifting, but the point is there are a variety of solutions to this part of the challenge.)

My expectation of a device needed to make the metaverse feasible would be something much closer to a beefy pair of glasses than the current helmet-like googles. Something weighing 1-200g or so, that's no more difficult to put on and no less comfortable than regular glasses. It may or may not have a separate accompanying wearable device to do the main computations. The glasses themselves would include high-resolution colour cameras to provide a 3D display of the real world, together with a LIDAR scanner and of course accelerometers. This is not too far off the capabilities of current high-end smartphones.

The two key features are the need to be wireless and to provide real-world visuals, both of which VR can do today but in a severely limited fashion. With a wire, all other improvements are almost neutered, since you're still tied to a clunky external device : convenience is destroyed, and climbing into the metaverse would be something you'd have to dedicate special time and effort to. This is fine for games, but useless for regular productivity. Currently, the wireless PC streaming works pretty darn well on the Quest, but not all routers meet the ideal capacity and not everyone has or needs a high-end gaming PC, hence the need for a standalone package.

The requirement for real-world visuals is that a big problem for VR is the space requirement. Again, it's fine for dedicated gaming if you have to set aside an area, but not much fun for productive work if you have to clear out a space every time you want to use it (especially in small, crowded offices). Having a simultaneous clear view of reality - I mean one that's good enough that you could tolerate it for hours at a stretch - would eliminate this need. Being able to overlay graphics* means you could use real surfaces as an advantage rather than a hindrance (and using a screen instead of clear pane allows the possibility to switch back and forth between VR and AR as required). This is only just about possible right now, and the impact is not even close to being fully realised. But in five years, with Facebook's resources ? Probably possible.

* And they have to be high-quality graphics. Currently things are sufficient for immersive gaming, but not for reading the large quantities of text that actual work requires. There are people who swear by VR apps for productivity, but my experience thus far has fallen far short of what I need.

So would this be desirable in principle ? Yes, but as to whether it will really be something widely adopted in five years, I'm very skeptical. It might be technically feasible in five years but it will take a lot longer before the levels of reliability and adoption become close to what Facebook hopes. VR devices are threshold-limited : get anything slightly wrong and everything becomes worse. None of the technical requirements are outlandish, but they all have to be done well or it just won't work. Getting to the required level of quality and especially price in five years would be a big challenge, given the rate of development of Oculus devices.

Similarly, would people really be likely to adopt this en masse as Facebook hopes ? Here the Wired author has an abysmal lack of imagination. Suppose you could bring up technical documents on a whim, arranging them in three-dimensional space around you however you like. Instead of needing multiple expensive monitors, or arranging multiple desktops, your whole environment would become a giant screen. But then also imagine bringing in collaborators, who could walk around your virtual world inspecting documents as they please, annotating and drawing, making physical gestures... this is a huge change. Would you ever want a conventional monitor again ? I doubt it. At most you'd want a physical keyboard for the tactile experience of typing.

I think the full implications of a true 3D AR interface are only going to become apparent when we've got one. We'll start with reproducing existing GUIs, for familiarity, but from there things will diverge in unpredictable ways. 

The convenience of this is key. If it's an expensive piece of equipment that's laborious to set up, that makes the experience qualitatively different from the case of being no more burdensome that putting on a pair of sunglasses. Sure, if my main task is managing spreadsheets, a clunky, pricey headset would offer only disadvantages. But if it's so easy to put on that it's no burden, and if it lets me do all the same stuff I do in conventional interfaces and more, why would I ever opt out ?

Likewise the potential everyday uses are manifold. I go on holiday, I see something interesting - I instantly bring up information with a wave of hand, with no need for bringing out a phone and typing out a query. I remain fully immersed in the environment I've come to enjoy but with a richer experience, not a diminished one. I no longer walk along the streets glued to a phone and bumping into lamp-posts. I bring up instructions on cooking, maps, DIY... I can examine objects and animals, history and science in a way I could never do otherwise. I experience more of life than I would otherwise, not reduce myself to a tiny screen.

But don't mistake my meaning here. This is not some glorious technocratic solution to all the ills of the world. Those who aren't interested in a topic won't become more interested just because it's in VR. It'll just make things better for those who are, and provide convenient, more effective assistance in certain situations. Making good into great is a hell of a lot easier than making bad into good.

So yeah, I can buy in to the potential of a genuinely revolutionary AR/VR "metaverse" that would break out of the current niche appeal of VR and be used routinely in regular office jobs; it needn't be a Utopian solution to all problems to still offer huge advantages. But just as the technical achievements will be bottlenecked by the weakest link in the chain (to mix metaphors), so too do the details of the interface matter. Which brings up the third and final point : does it have to be Facebook ?

Or perhaps it would be fairer to envisage the ways this could go wrong. The scope for privacy violations is huge. A bad interface could make organisation next to impossible, and transitioning from the familiar displays to something so wholly new won't be easy. There will be a lot of tasks that don't benefit from AR/VR at all. It could be overwhelmed with notifications, adverts.... to say nothing of the even greater potential for misinformation and manipulation. It won't bring about the dystopian real world that everyone cheerfully brushes aside in Ready Player One, but it could potentially have equivalently awful consequences.

There is no question to me that a VR metaverse is desirable. Equally, a metaverse could be awful. It doesn't follow that all forms of metaverse are wonderful any more than it follows that they're all abhorrent. They are neither. VR, to me, is a wonderful and enriching technology, but no purely technological safeguards can prevent misuse. I think it's utter cynical, knee-jerk reactionary garbage to claim Facebook shouldn't work on this because they could do something else instead, but equally, we've already seen what happens when we're cavalier about social media technology. If we don't learn the right lessons about regulating information, any new technology will only make things worse.

Please just sod off now, thanks

Excuse me, I just need to go on a little rant.

To start on a positive note, while I'm pathologically biased against Boris Johnson and his bunch of self-serving idiotic racist cronies, the government has done a few things right during the pandemic. They implemented lockdowns. They furloughed workers and encouraged home office. They brought in mass testing. And though their innumerable u-turns point to an abysmal level of incompetency, they have at least been u-turns in the right direction. They've also made some good suggestions about replacing isolation with testing for the fully vaccinated, and at least made noises about using Covid passports in the face of their bewildering unpopularity.

None of this hides the truly disgusting levels of incompetence, however*. There doesn't seem to be all that much genuine malevolence in Johnson's government, except for that hellspawned demon Pritti Patel (seriously, how does she sleep at night ?) and aspiring Victorian imperialist Jacob Rees Mogg. And Johnson himself, to some extent. Boris is an authoritarian clownish psychopath who isn't out to inflict pain but just doesn't care if he does. Most of the rest just strike me as bumbling halfwits who've wandered into their jobs after making a wrong turn in a corridor, and ever since have been desperately hoping not to be found out. Or at worst, are suffering from high levels of Dunning-Kruger, thinking themselves statesmanlike while actually coming across as feckless amateurs.

* Even what they've done right has usually only been after they've been dragged into it, a la Churchill : the Tories will sometimes do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else.

The last few days have gone from things merely being awful to being an awful farce. It is a total, incoherent omnishambles. It doesn't even have a guiding ideology, let alone any practical principles. It's deranged.

First, the government never should have endorsed the term "freedom day". It should have learned from the countless times its unnecessary, high-handed rhetoric has blown up in its face - to make definitive assertions about inherently changeable events just makes you look like a moron. And lo, the pingdemic (which they were warned about but chose and continue to choose to do nothing about) makes a mockery of the whole process, to say nothing of the rising case and hospitalisation numbers. It's not much of a freedom if you start sending people to hospital.

Second, as cases and hospitalisation rates soar, it should not merely have shifted back the end of restrictions but significantly tightened the existing ones. It should be obvious now that there isn't any one solution but many : track and trace, frequent testing (oh yeah, the country also ran out of lateral flow tests, wonderful), rapid isolation, social distancing and masks wherever and as much as possible, lockdowns where things get out of hand, better ventilation, and to a lesser degree hand washing. You ease these measures gradually, as the percentage positive test rate drops below 5% according to WHO guidelines.

And, yes, vaccinations. These are important too. But the government has decided that vaccinations are a magic bullet and therefore all of the rest can go hang, including the ones which are of little or no burden. Despite the fact that their efficacy, especially the case of the Oxford vaccine, is significantly reduced against the delta variant. Obviously vaccines are necessary, but they are simply not sufficient by themselves.

Third, they decided that Covid passports will be required in nightclubs from September. This really got under my skin. It's a clear acknowledgement that the virus is dangerous and nightclubs are particularly susceptible to spreading infections, while explicitly saying, "just let it run rampant for now". It's bloody stupid. Surely, you should either close the nightclubs or set any entry condition (like a negative test and/or vaccination*) right now. How on Earth does anyone decide that it's okay to let the virus spread right now but we'll crack down on it later, when cases are soaring ? It doesn't make any sense !

* Even weirder, the government decided that it will only be vaccination that's accepted, explicitly ruling out negative tests.

(Johnson's explanation in PMQs that it would only be fair from September - because by then everyone will be vaccinated - I found laughably stupid. The virus doesn't care about fairness.)

Fourth, there's all that kerfuffle over whether isolation is or isn't mandatory. Now here I think some things have been at least a little unfairly criticised as confusing. There's nothing inherently confusing about "amber list" countries and I disagree with Labour's call to scrap the list. It's just that the government made a right hash of it. Yes, of course you can go on holiday in such countries, if they let you - but only provided you can self-isolate afterwards. To get drawn into arguments about permitted reasons for visiting amber list countries is to court confusion - just make travel allowed for any reason, but stress the requirement for self-isolation. That's all they needed to do.

What should not be confusing is the nature of the geopolitical block commonly known as France. Most people think of France as a country, but this government has decided otherwise. For in the list of countries according to risk we have red, amber, green and... France. Yes, really. Never did I think the government would be confused as to whether France was a country or a colour, but apparently this is too much for them to handle.

What should also not be confusing at all is the need to self-isolate if pinged by the NHS app. Here they flat-out contradicted themselves as to whether this was or wasn't mandatory, and then doubled down on the incoherency by saying employers would be evaluated on a case-by-case basis as to whether their staff should self-isolate. This is just inviting further disaster. Look, it's easy. Fully vaccinated staff in any profession should isolate until they test negative (which could be the same day), everyone else must isolate for a few days (say, 5) and then test negative to release. Bam, done. No need to delay this one at all - implement it immediately. 

Fifth, there's the pay "increase" of 3% for the NHS. After saying 1% was all they could afford, they've now dug deep and decided the NHS can somehow pay for itself. So if staff take the pay rise - a paltry one that does nothing to offset the decade of real-term cuts that amounts to more like 18% - they'll be responsible for funding cuts in the services. That tries to blame the staff themselves for the failings of the government. It's not a pay rise at all, but a cut - and an especially insidious and cruel one at that. And all this is coming from people who wanted to spend untold billions on a stupid bridge over a munitions dump and/or a tunnel from Wales to Northern Ireland, who think a new Royal Yacht will somehow be good for morale, who waste money hand over foot on defective PPE, who wanted a pointless "moonshot" £100 billion mass testing program, who spent upwards of £30 billion on a dysfunctional test-and-trace system, and who still insist that tens of billions more on getting from London to Birmingham twenty minutes faster is a good use of public funds. What a joke.

Oh, and Johnson outright refused to deny or even apologise for saying that it was only the elderly who die of Covid, as though they were unimportant. I could go on, but that's disgusting enough.

All of which is to say that I hate them. Their valuation of short-term economic gain over long-term impacts on lives, on insisting that we need to live die with the virus, is deplorable. They're not a government any more. They're a farce. Led by donkeys ? I'm pretty sure donkeys can at least manage to follow a path when it's so clearly laid out before them. This government would instead simultaneously announce that we're going left, right, sticking to the path, digging a hole, and staying put in order to take up line dancing instead.

Sigh.

Liberal - Utilitarian = Libertarian

I'm trying to resume my long-delayed short post series looking at John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. Ahead of that, recently I looked at a couple of nice articles on the irony of individualism - how too much concern for individual rights can damages the rights of the individuals, and the difficulties of how we want people to think independently but also act in support of the common good.

That post got me thinking. So as a sort-of prelude to the remaining JSM posts, let me tie up a few more loose thoughts.

In the first part of the JSM series, I looked at what Mill had to say about that recurring topic beloved mainly of lunatics : free speech. This has been all too successfully co-opted by right-wing hypocrites. They think nothing of loudly proclaiming how much they love free speech and then disowning anyone who takes a stand against racism. Free speech my foot ! They are not using it for some noble purpose of speaking truth to power, or ensuring a productive debate unhindered by untouchable rulers, which are essential parts of a sensible government - they are using it to get away with saying they don't like black people. It's as simple as that. 

(I, for one, do not buy the argument that if we want to hold the government to account we're just going to have to accept people being abusive towards each other, nor does the need to say unpopular things demand we also allow people to discriminate on grounds of skin colour. FFS, that's stupid.)

In the second JSM post I'll look at what Mill had to say about how we should act within society. Mill was fiercely individualistic, but he was also a utilitarianist. And while utilitarianism has its flaws, in the case of classical liberalism I believe it's a very powerful asset. In Mill's view, liberals are individuals but with a profound sort of egalitarianism. That is, they possess no intrinsic strengths or weaknesses relative to each other, no innate reason why the rights of one individual should take precedence over the rights of another, equally conscious, equally valuable individual. A classical liberal need not insist that racists be allowed to vent whatever they want in any circumstances, since that oppresses the rights of other individuals. The liberal need not defend the right to free expression as an absurd absolute - that's a libertarian, not a liberal, view.

Equality is only the default presumption, however. When differences can be demonstrated and justified (e.g. medical expertise has to be earned), this no longer holds - equality should be initially presumed, but not permanently insisted upon. Liberalism is thus designed around a functioning community of individuals, not individuals acting in independent isolation. It seeks the greatest freedom for the greatest number, at the expense only of the smallest restrictions for the smallest number. 

In contrast, libertarianism seems to me to be pure selfishness and barely a step from naked villainy. It says that the rights of individuals are all there are, and simply ignores any conflict between individuals. It is easily perverted into anarchy in the pejorative sense, or authoritarianism in which the strongest are allowed to do what they will to the weak. It's the "I'm alright Jack" mentality exemplified in the quote by Thatcher that "there's no such thing as society". If everyone is free to take what they wish, some people will take everything.

That's the sort of "freedom" espoused by some : total freedom to and no freedom from - hence such shameless hypocrisy as advocating free speech but throwing a hissy fit of censorship when someone says something they disagree with. "Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people" as Charlie Chaplain put it. There is no concern for the well-being of the group. A dictator, ironically, could be seen as a kind of utility monster : there would be an awful lot of freedom in total, but only for a very small number.

I think, though, that classical liberalism doesn't have this problem. Indeed, it can't, precisely because of its utilitarianism of being explicitly concerned with the whole community. It seems to me that utility monsters are what happens when you do utilitarianism very, very badly, treating "happiness" or "freedom" as a linear sum : a big heap of happiness that you can add or detract from, with the only goal being to increase the size of the pile. This simply doesn't work.

A much better strategy would be to first and foremost simultaneously minimise the harm done to the smallest number of people in order to maximise the good done to the greatest number. If you don't do both simultaneously, you get monsters. That, among other reasons, is why you can't go around chopping people up to harvest their organs against their will : you'd cause the recipients more happiness but an enormous degree of suffering to the "donors". More subtly, you can't easily compare happiness and sadness, certainly not in a rigorously quantifiable way - any more than you could sum up the total amount of music in the world and subtract the total number of leopards.

I am not sure if there a good, simple mathematical analogy for this kind of summation. It may be that the unquantifiable nature of freedom and happiness just don't work well mathematically at all. One person being supremely happy or free clearly isn't the goal of liberalism, but rather everyone being as free and happy as possible. As with feminism, the goal is raising everyone up, not pushing some people up only because some others go down. There's no direct equivalence at work, no weighing scales to balance the happiness of one against the misery of another.

Nor should a liberal set out to pre-emptively decrease anyone's freedom. There must be some justification to do so, e.g., the criminal actions or intent of one threatens the liberty of many*. Even then, there should be the smallest possible punishment for the greatest possible gain. And crucially, it's more important to make everyone content than a few people ecstatic. For example, if we were to have a fairer wealth distribution, we'd have a small number of billionaires being a bit less happy because they couldn't buy any superyachts at the gain of a large number of people being very much happier indeed because they could afford both food and rent at the same time.

* EDIT :  Liberalism is not a complete moral philosophy by itself - the goal of maximising liberty does not inherently justify the means even of minimising restrictions for the smallest number, which could still be unjust.

Perhaps there's a more complex mathematical operator (or formula) that would better describe things than a simple sum, but I don't know what that would be. It would not be a linear or vector sum, and the order would matter - prioritising the minimisation of suffering rather than the maximisation of happiness. Suggestions welcome.

Even so, there still seems to be a paradox here. True freedom demands equality : if our economic positions are hugely unequal, we have no power of veto. If we are notionally free to quit an employer but no other jobs are available, this is clearly a sham freedom - we have no real choice except what those above us deign to provide. Yet, if we are to be truly free, to maximise our liberty, this also demands the possibility that we become unequal ! Freedom to rule over others, whether if through direct power structures or only de facto through economic realities, isn't necessarily all that great for the ruled (notwithstanding justifiable and consenting differences in expertise).

Perhaps this suggests that freedom and equality are independent, uncorrelated parameters that can't be easily compared. Or maybe there are different senses of the word "freedom" than the usual "freedom from" or "freedom to" (for example, Epictetus' notion that freedom is fundamentally impossible without accompanying responsibility). Equity may be more important than equality : we want people to be treated equally in some areas (i.e. never having so many economic resources that no-one else can compete with them) but differently in others (recognising the different strengths and weaknesses of each). "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" is not necessarily a mark of full-blown Communism.

This suggests to me that a useful definition of liberal socialism would be liberalism that also seeks to maximise equality. The greatest freedom for the greatest number also requires the greatest equality for the greatest number, at the cost of the smallest inequality for the smallest number. Both equality and freedom should be maximised for the highest number of people. This is arguably a natural extension of liberalism, given that true freedom requires a level playing field, though it is not, as far as I'm aware, to be found anywhere in Mill. More on what JSM himself thought next time.

EDIT : From discussions, it becomes clear why libertarianism allows racism while classical liberalism doesn't. Both are types of individualism, but of very different natures. If you truly treat other people as individuals, you can't possibly be a racist, by definition. Anyone who says they're an individualist but is actually a racist is a liar and a hypocrite, but it's they themselves who are at fault, not the liberal philosophy they falsely claim to hold. By contrast, the libertarian Tory party is manifestly racist - but this is because libertarianism is selfish. This is view is, "if it's better for me, then fine", with no concern for the effect on others. Libertarianism uses the individualism of liberalism to give itself a veneer of respectability, but it's only a disguise for its selfishness. Hence, libertarians can certainly be racists, but (genuine) classical liberals, with a concern for maximising the rights of all individuals, cannot be.

Wibbly-wobbly mindy-windy

You might remember back in January there was an interesting study showing how political party policy shapes the opinion of party members. The strength and speed of this effect, with no backfire reported at all, rather surprised me. My (purely anecdotal) experience is that people select a political party to support based on an alignment of existing policy, with hardly anyone supporting a party in absolutely everything they say and do. Parties seem to be driven by preferences of their members more than the other way around : witness continuous in-fighting in Labour about which direction to pursue, or the total collapse of the Liberal Democrats following their abandonment of abolishing tuition fees.

I suggested that a possible reason for this might be that people support some policies rather casually and emotively : if you like and trust a party overall, you'll probably go along with them on the things you're not all that interested in. So if they change stance, you'll change stance. You're not actually thinking very deeply about the issues at all, you're deferring to a perceived source of expertise instead. You're using the party as a means of extended cognition.

This might sometimes be the case. But looking back, I don't think it fits the particular policies of the original study all that well, which were prominent issues and not minor technicalities. Another study has come to my attention which suggests it's a lot more subtle than that, and in a sense is even due to the exact opposite effect.

The press release linked above is decent enough, but I wanted more details so I read the original paper as well. The main aspect is choice blindness. As they describe in the press release :

Choice blindness was discovered in 2005 by a team of Swedish researchers. They presented participants with two photos of faces and asked participants to choose the photo they thought was more attractive, and then handed participants that photo. Using a clever trick inspired by stage magic, when participants received the photo it had been switched to the person not chosen by the participant — the less attractive photo. Remarkably, most participants accepted this card as their own choice and then proceeded to give arguments for why they had chosen that face in the first place. This revealed a striking mismatch between our choices and our ability to rationalize outcomes. This same finding has since been replicated in various domains including taste for jam, financial decisions, and eye-witness testimony.

So what they did here was to quiz people as to their responses on various political issues and get them to respond with a classic "how strongly do you agree with blah..." as in innumerable internet tests. Shortly after, they'd bring the participants back to review their results. In one group the answers were not altered at all, while in another the answers were inverted. They would have respondents either simply confirm that this was their response or elaborate as to why they responded as they did. They did the same thing a week later as well.

When the answers were unchanged, they found high consistency in the participants across time, both in terms of the actual answers and their confidence. So ordinarily these people do seem to just go about their daily lives really believing these issues. As they should, since they chose them to be "salient political topics" that participants ought to have clear opinions about, e.g. "The Swedish elementary school should be re-nationalized". The statements also included a brief explanation. Participants were instructed to interpret any ambiguities without any guidance from the researchers.

When the answers were manipulated, overall about half were accepted by the participants as being their original answer. That is, people could sometimes be very easily tricked into thinking they held the opposite opinion to what they were usually very consistent on. They were more likely to notice the differences when they were also asked to justify their reasons (as opposed to just acknowledging them), if their response was extreme and/or their confidence was high, and if they had a high score in the Cognitive Reflection Test. So the more deeply they thought about their answer, the more likely they were to spot the manipulation*.

*A caveat is that CRT may simply reflect better memories rather than analytic abilities. Also, there was no correlation with political involvement. 

I found the paper a bit of a slog and it's tough to extract numbers from. They also don't present all the statements they showed to participants. But the gist of it is clear enough. You can, under certain circumstances, very easily persuade people to believe the exact opposite of what they profess, and this holds for at least a week*. You can't fool everyone about everything, but you can still fool 'em plenty. It would have been nice to know what was the highest degree of agreement/confidence that they succeeded in reversing, but as I said it's a bit tricky to extract the numbers.

*This prolonged consistency suggests to me that they're not just saying things to conform, that they really have changed their minds. But also, people remain embedded in their social networks for very much longer after than experiment lasts, so I'd be surprised if this change of stance was all that long-lived  - weeks, perhaps, but not months.

What seems to be happening is that people engage in "confabulation", or, they rationalise their response rather than critically analyse it. This strongly reminds me of research in inducing rich false memories, where people were asked to continuously recall something that never happened. In this case the change occurred much more rapidly and easily, but the principle is similar. Unlike the memory experiment, in this case things happened very quickly indeed.

A caveat is that when asked to justify their responses, the rate of corrections (i.e. spotting the manipulation) increased - but not by very much. It could be that if no justification was explicitly asked for, the participants did in fact justify their reasons internally, and just didn't think about them as carefully as when they had to explain them out loud. And when asked to justify, their attitude shift was greater than when only asked to acknowledge, strongly suggesting that rationalisation is a key factor. Not by much though, so this will hardly be the last word on the subject.

Even so, this suggests a possibly more compelling reason why people shift their stance according to party policy. Rather than simply "going with the flow", they are actively thinking about the policy in question. But only in a very biased way. They are being, in effect, asked to provide reasons why this new stance is actually a good one, thus coming up with actual concrete reasons to support it rather than simply the metadata that everyone else they know believes it. And by doing so themselves, they are inherently keeping this within their own world views and ideologies, not fighting against political opponents who they probably don't perceive as trustworthy. Once they accept their manipulated answer, they can hardly disagree with themselves, or construct reasons they wouldn't believe.

This is not entirely mutually exclusive with my earlier idea. Deferring to the perceived expertise of and trust in their political leaders, they nevertheless still do have to alter their own views accordingly. Policy change therefore induces a rationalisation rather than being quite as crude as "because I said so" level of reasoning. And importantly, there are still people within parties who disagree on certain issues - they just disagree a bit less when policy changes, rather than becoming full-throated enthusiasts.

The big question as I see it is the limits to which this applies. Again, there are some policy shifts which are just too radical - people do switch allegiances between parties, so parties are driven by opinions as well as the other way around. The general conditions as to what sort of policy change a party affiliate can accept and what will discourage them would be a very interesting study indeed. And it may be that some of these issues are ones of which people have never really thought deeply about before (which would be the easiest to rationalise a change in stance), whereas others they have a much deeper, independent, core level of belief in (which cannot be so easily altered).

Another question is to what extent changing stance changes underlying moral ideology. The authors raise the fascinating suggestion that perhaps we evaluate our own beliefs much as we evaluate those of others : we see people behaving in a certain way and conclude they believe something; we see our own behaviour and conclude what it is we actually believe. Interesting, but I'm not sure about that one. My guess is that a lot of issues are ideologically fuzzy, with relatively few policies flowing directly from ideology. For example a higher taxation policy could be justified on the different ideological moral grounds of restricting the power of the wealthiest, improving civil infrastructure, or for investment for long-term economic growth. Culling animals could be justified on grounds of disease control or economic necessity. Universal Basic Income can be justified on grounds of welfare or reducing bureaucracy. So changing stance on one issue doesn't necessarily alter basic ideology or morality one bit, and it would have been fascinating to hear some of the justifications participants came up with. 

The final question this raises for me is : how do we get people to evaluate issues more objectively ? People are apparently very, very good at rationalising. This requires a high degree of analytic intelligence. Might there also be a hidden capacity for greater levels of critical thinking as well ? We don't need to get everyone to do this for everything, but if we could at least do this for the major policy issues, that'd be nice.

All in all, people remain unpredictable and almost paradoxically weird. They'll fight tooth and nail against a suggestion from outside their group, but defend the same idea to the death if it comes from their own clan. Their combination of absurd stubbornness and ludicrous flexibility is utterly baffling.

I Want A COVID Passport, Dammit

A recent poll in The Economist has some remarkable findings. Apparently, 40% of people want to keep masks forever, and 35% think there should be a permanent 10 day quarantine on returning from abroad - both regardless of COVID. 25% want to shut all nightclubs and casinos, and a similar fraction also think there should be a permanent 10pm curfew, again regardless of COVID.

What exactly does this tell us ? Bugger all, probably, for two reasons. One is the sampling bias where only very strange people respond to surveys. The second is to generalise from one of the main lessons of bullshit : that if something seems too good to be true it probably is; or in this case, if something seems too extreme to be true then it's at least a good idea to be deeply suspicious of it.

I don't believe the Economist poll for a moment. The actual fraction of people who support a permanent 10pm curfew is probably closer to 0.2%, not 20%. Certainly there are lots of weird idiots out there, but when did you ever hear people calling out for more curfews ? You never did. Never. Not at all. It isn't a thing and it never will be. There just aren't that many idiots who are that sort of weird out there.

For this reason I find objections to COVID passports a bunch of bollocks. I mainly mean the sort intended for domestic use, where you'd have to prove vaccination/testing/previous infection status before access was granted to normal services like restaurants and the like. People raise bizarre objections about "a two-tier society" and that "it's nothing to do with health". This is plainly ludicrous. When did you ever hear anyone saying that they yearn for a world in which things are harder to buy and shops are more difficult to gain entry to ? You never did, because it doesn't make a lick of sense. 

To my mind re-opening based on immunological status is completely sensible. It wouldn't get you true herd immunity but it would go an awful long way towards an effective herd immunity. The people doing by far the most interactions in society, and so having the most exposure to the virus, would be the ones with the highest degree of protection, i.e. previously infected or immunised. Hence, society and the economy would re-open as much as possible for the greatest possible number while still reducing the infection rate to its lowest possible number. That's what "learning to live the virus" ought to mean, not the government's bollocks interpretation where it means "accepting thousands more people will needlessly die".

This needn't be a binary proposition like the UK government seems to favour with its idiotic "freedom day" nonsense. The extremes need not be absolutes. That this, those with the greatest restrictions wouldn't have to become virtual prisoners (except for the most vulnerable), nor would those with the greatest protection/lowest risk be allowed to run naked in the streets and vomit on people. Everyone needs access to essentials like food and pharmacies; conversely, there's no good reason to do away with masks or mass testing just yet, nor do we have to rush to re-open nightclubs. But a passport system would seem to be an obvious and potentially very powerful weapon in the arsenal of allowing the maximum degree of normality at the smallest level of restrictions enforced on the smallest possible number.

In what way this is supposed to lead to a "two tier" system I really struggle to understand. It's in no-one's interests to keep the shops closed for a minute longer than necessary. If we hark to the usual advice of "follow the money" and ask "who benefits ?", the answers would seem to be that exactly no-one benefits financially from keeping everyone out of the shops. Nobody at all has any direct financial benefit from closing the shops, except indirectly in preventing their customers from dying. Take away the health risk and it's in everyone's interests to re-open as much and as quickly as possible.

Furthermore, the vaccine is freely and readily available - there is no good reason why anyone can't or shouldn't get one, except on grounds of medical exemption. Since vaccines are pretty much universally being delivered according to age, there is no reason to think that a passport would exacerbate inequality - providing, of course, that sensible financial protections are bestowed on those unable (not unwilling) to be vaccinated.

Now to be fair we've seen various governments do all kinds of crazy shenanigans in response to the pandemic, not least of which is forbidding large shops from selling "non essential goods". That was bollocks, and I signed petitions against it. But in no way whatever does that hint at a move towards some despotic managed economy. There's a meme going round saying that our economy collapses when we stop buying stuff we don't need, but surely the main economic hit has been on the hospitality and travel sectors, not retail - which goes against other popular memes about how we just don't talk to each other enough these days. You can't have it both ways.

(Yes, free-market consumerism is a real problem, but it seems to me that this has little or nothing to do with the pandemic. It's a separate issue, and trying to tie the the two together only induces unnecessary confusion.)

To be fair, there are hints (though only hints thus far) that the government is moving back towards a passport system again, but only after it was needlessly dismissed before. And again, the government continues its track record of barely fettered incompetence. In particular it rightly decides to reduce the requirement for self-isolation for the fully vaccinated who've been in contact with someone infected, but only after another full month. There's no reason they couldn't bring this in tomorrow via the NHS app. I accept the travel sector does need time to prepare even for positive changes, but removing the self-isolation requirement requires at most a week's notice to inform everyone of the planned change.

For my part, I'm back in the office twice a week most weeks, but I'd be fine with less. What I'm less fine with is not having been home in eighteen months. While I think it's stupid to blindly end all restrictions, I think it would be equally stupid to blindly keep all restrictions now that the vaccine program is fully underway. A passport system would be an extra incentive towards vaccination, not some weird lurch into an Orwellian nightmare.

You Turn If Everyone Else Wants To

Today, a couple of nice little pieces about the problems and potential of individualism, which has has cropped up a few times here lately albeit more implicitly.

Background : The Problem Of Racist Sheep

The essential difficulty is that individualist people tending to be selfish but less discriminatory, whereas those more inclined towards collectivism tending to be selfless but racist. If you're in a group, you're more supportive of members of that group, but also more inclined towards conformism and distrustful of non-members. We seem to want everybody to "think for yourselves and agree with me !" as NewsThump put it. It seems very difficult to get the best of both worlds : a conformist who isn't a sheep is almost an oxymoron; a group member who isn't in some way opposed to people who don't share their beliefs has similar (though perhaps lesser) difficulties.

Ideally, I suppose, we want a group to have individuals who are largely free-thinking but put the good of the group ahead of their own needs whenever any conflict arises : we want people working independently towards the common good. A consensus is strongest when there is diversity of methods and ideologies; the probability that a decision is correct is strongest when opposing and/or independent forces all reach the same conclusion. And we want that "common good" to generally mean everybody, with sub-groups being only for collaborative expertise and shared interests, not parts of our identity causing us to define ourselves by being opposed to anyone who isn't in the group. This is not at all easy to manage in practise, especially in the political sphere.

1) Individualism hurts individual freedom

Anyway, the first piece approaches this from a generalised, philosophical perspective. Aping John Stuart Mill (I'll try and get back to finishing that post series when time permits), but very badly :

Nozick’s entitlement theory of justice, which is at the heart of this thinking, is deeply individualist because it is concerned only with individual interactions and not with the overall shape of the society that results from these interactions. It is consistent with gross inequality and is not even meritocratic since Nozick has no problem with unlimited inherited or gifted wealth. Provided what you hold has been acquired justly, then any consequences of the acquisition are of no account. Any kind of distributive justice beyond this is completely rejected.

The ‘Utopia’ Nozick outlines allows for sub-communities under the umbrella of a minimal state, which can be based on any principles consenting participants choose. Ironically perhaps, it would be possible to construct a communist community within the minimal state, or indeed any variation on this.

JSM's solution was that membership of communities must be voluntary : individuals must be genuinely free to leave, and more generally, the strongest aspect of liberalism must be that it cannot tolerate illiberalism. No-one can voluntarily deprive themselves of their own liberty. Yes, you can surrender aspects of your decision-making to others, but you must always be able to reassert control should you choose. More on JSM another time though.

One major criticism is that he has confused atomism with individualism, and this atomistic vision is built on negative liberty which is simply about removing restrictions and barriers. In the Rousseauian tradition, Nozick assumes that society places restrictions and barriers in the way of individuals, so concludes the less of it the better.

It's worth remembering the H.G. Wells notion that freedom is not a linear sum : more laws do not necessarily mean less freedom, nor do less laws guarantee more freedom. Truly maximising freedom - to gain the greatest possible liberty for the greatest possible number while simultaneously restricting the fewest possible people by the smallest amount - is not at all an easy task, and Nozick's idea just seems like pure batshit tomfoolery and childish idiocy. 

Only in a society with a developed education system and structured opportunities, a culture of tolerance and debate and legal protections well beyond those envisaged by Nozick can individual autonomy be fully exercised. The social context empowers autonomy, and without empowerment autonomy is empty. We might call this positive freedom individualism as opposed to Nozickian individualism.

Which is another key aspect. As the author also mentions, real freedom depends on ability and authority. It's no good having freedom under law if you don't also have freedom under economics : if you're legally able to leave your job but practically this would result in starvation, your freedom is a sham.

It requires us to accept that there is a shared humanity that can be stronger than all the things that divide us. It is difficult to see how those who reject this idea could happily coexist with others who are very different from themselves. So, the price we pay for an individualistic yet unified society does in fact impose some limits on the individual – the paradox of individualism must lead to compromise; autonomy seems to lead to limitations on autonomy.

Again, it's not really a vector sum : take away the freedom of a murderer and everyone else gains a very great deal of freedom. This goes right back to Plato. It's not easy to balance, and, to give Nozick a little more credit, the simplistic idea that more law = less freedom does have a certain appeal of obviousness about it. But it just doesn't work like that.

2) Worked example : the maddening paradox of the Tory party

This leads nicely to a practical example from the second piece : Conservative party policy regarding the pandemic. The Tories seem betwitched by this crude idea not so much of small government but of individual choice. Whereas Wells and Mill both expressed strong individualistic tendencies, both understood all too clearly that no man is an island. Both articulated that when an individual makes a choice that affects only themselves, it's no-one else' business to tell them what to do. But when anyone makes a choice that has repercussions for others, then those others do get a say in that decision - precisely because their autonomy as individuals would be affected.

The Tory party just doesn't get this. They treat society as a collection of non-interacting individuals, as though any choice only affects those who make it. So they say mask-wearing should be optional, but this is dumb : it's much more about protecting others from you than protecting you from others. It isn't just your life and your liberty your choice affects, but a huge, cascading chain of other individuals as well. In that situation, I've no doubt JSM would certainly say that society has a clear and unarguable right to legislate on your actions, not just make half-hearted requests and suggestions.

There's also another interesting paradox here :

By emphasising the inability of people to govern themselves, it justifies the need for a government to look after them... If you reduce people to just psychology, it makes their actions entirely a consequence of individual choice. If we get infected, it is because we chose to act in ways that led to infection: we decided to go out and socialise, we ignored advice on physical distancing.

This mantra of individual responsibility and blame has certainly been at the core of the UK government’s response throughout the pandemic. When cases started rising in the autumn, the government blamed it on students having parties. Hancock even warned young people “don’t kill your gran”. And as the government envisages the total removal of restrictions, the focus on what people must do has become even stronger. As the prime minister recently put it: “I want us to trust people to be responsible and to do the right thing.”

[I don't entirely disagree with all of the government's messages, but the sentiment is clear enough] 

Instead of addressing these issues and helping people to avoid exposing themselves and others, the individualistic narrative of personal responsibility blames the victim and, indeed, further victimises vulnerable groups.

This is a complex, maddeningly incoherent paradox. The government - especially Boris Johnson - has a professed devout belief in the common sense of the Great British Public, that individual choices will see us through. This absolves them of responsibility when people make the wrong choices, yet this also lets them justify deregulation ! They justify the need for government on the grounds that people can't make the right decision for themselves (because they are individuals and sometimes make mistakes), yet are happy enough to say that individual choice is paramount (because they are individuals and apparently infallible even when it comes to making decisions for other people). Their whole approach seems to be to just blame everyone else for their own incompetence* and call it the price of freedom.

* There are a raft of possibilities for unobtrusive virus-mitigating measures that could have significant impacts in a fully vaccinated country : better financial support for self-isolation (much easier as case numbers should now be much lower), mandatory mask-wearing in crowded public places, support for airflow monitoring and control systems, etc.. I actually agree with their new approach on increased testing in schools and for the double-jabbed (as opposed to blanket quarantine), but they don't seem the slightest bit interested in any of the others. They just want to open up.

It's nonsensically inconsistent. To put it another way, it's Schrodinger's Government : which simultaneously believes the public are both able to understand the complex problems of epidemiology just on the basis of general life experience, but are also a bunch of idiots who need the benevolent hand of a bunch of a upper-class toffs to tell them what to do. Legal powers exist not for governance, not to encourage right action, but solely to punish transgressors. 

The UK government assumed that people’s cognitive fragility would lead to – and explain – low adherence with the measures necessary to combat COVID-19. But the evidence showed that adherence was high due to a sense of community among the public – except in areas where it is hard to adhere without adequate means. Instead of emphasising individual responsibility and blame, then, a successful response to the pandemic depends on fostering community and providing support.

What they refuse to understand is that people obey rules not (only) due to the threat of punishment for violations, but the far more basic reason that rules are assumed to actually be necessary. Advice, on the other hand, by definition isn't necessary. Yes, it might be a good idea to eat five portions of fruit and veg a day, but you couldn't possible legislate that people must do this. Hence it's advice : optional but not necessary.

When it comes to a pandemic, this way of thinking is bonkers. We do not have the "common sense" needed to make these kinds of judgements because we're not by nature equipped to deal with exponential growth or understand virology. We look to the government to set rules because they've consulted experts to tell them what the best policy ought to be, hence, things we must all do to support the common good. Advice, on the other hand, is almost by definition seen as something that would benefit individuals, or at most would have a benefit to society if everyone followed it but no negative consequences if they didn't.

If a government constantly tells you that the problem lies in those around you, it corrodes trust in and solidarity with your fellow community members – which explains why most people (92%) state that they are complying with the rules while others are not doing so.

This, I think, is a very powerful weapon in the Conservative arsenal : the lowest common denominator. Everyone wants to believe they're better than everyone else, so this narrative that the problems are down to rule-breakers is a very powerful one. Of course, nothing can come of nothing, and rule breakers do exist and do cause problems. But are they the main problem ? I doubt it - nor is individual stupidity/choice the main reason behind their actions. Give people the financial resources needed for self-isolation and to support them during furlough and you won't need so much threat to keep them in line.

It behoves a Tory government to blame individuals because in doing so they shirk their responsibility. Nothing can ever really be their fault because it's all about people simply choosing to ignore them out of bone-headed idiocy or sheer belligerence. It not only misses how people interpret the nature of rules and advice, but it's also an incredibly crude interpretation of the purpose of law and liberty.

Of course, the opposite sort of extreme conformism would just be another variety of awful. But it seems to be that a responsible representative government needn't have these issues at all. It would listen to the various concerns (I'm worried about getting sick, I can't afford time off, I'm going crazy stuck at home, I'm in a high-risk category, etc.) and weigh them accordingly. What's more important : letting people go to the pub or protecting the vulnerable ? "Learning to live with the virus" ought to mean, "learning to keep the virus under control and minimising fatalities". Instead it's become perverted into, "accepting the fact that thousands more people will needlessly die because a bunch of bozos want a pint". It doesn't say much for individual freedom in my book if the cost of this is yet more wholly preventable deaths. Screw you, Boris.

A unicorn is for cosmology, not just for Brexit

It seems to me that when people say that we only believe what we want to believe, they're usually talking about other people. Or more specifically : other, stupider people. Clever, smart, wise, rational people are those who by definition aren't so easily susceptible to their own preferences.

This isn't wholly wrong. But it's worth remembering that things are a good deal more subtle than that. For one thing, confirmation bias may or may not lean towards what we want to believe rather than what we actually do believe (which are not always aligned). For another, it's emphatically not only about stupid people. For example in the tension between different measurements of the Hubble constant :

The calculations using Cepheid stars still give higher numbers, but according to Freedman's analysis, the difference may not be troubling. "The Cepheid stars have always been a little noisier and a little more complicated to fully understand; they are young stars in the active star-forming regions of galaxies, and that means there's potential for things like dust or contamination from other stars to throw off your measurements," she explained. To her mind, the conflict can be resolved with better data.

"That's the way science proceeds," Freedman said. "You kick the tires to see if something deflates, and so far, no flat tires."

It isn't only stupid people who believe in unicorns - which seems to have become a popular term for wanting magical things that can only be obtained through paradoxes. Johnny Foreigner, a.k.a. Schrodinger's Immigrant, is perhaps the best example of this : an expat who simultaneously comes over here to both steal our jobs (because he's willing to work under any conditions for practically nothing) and our unemployement benefits (because he's a lazy, good-for-nothing slob who's willing to go to extraordinary lengths not to lift a finger). 

I would suggest that cosmologists aren't anywhere near that variety or level of stupid, but they too yearn for a unicorn of sorts. They too have conflicting, mutually-exclusive desires. Practically every scientist would love to find some genuinely revolutionary physics that would overthrow all those other dogmatic fools - that's the whole, undeniable point of the job. Equally undeniably, we also want the hard-won established models to succeed... we don't want to throw them away unless we have to !

My take is that this is another examples of how are brains aren't always Bayesian nets. When we establish something, we don't automatically discard all (or even any) of our older, now-conflicting opinions. Likewise we can want things that simply can't co-exist, but we want them anyway. I personally would bet heavily on the Hubble tension being a sort of measurement problem, so I want the Standard Model to be true in that I want to be right (who doesn't ?) but I also want it to point to a properly spectacular revolution (again, who wouldn't ?). We have different reasons for different desires which can make them horrendously irrational.

This does not put cosmologists on a par with unicorn-hunting Brexiteers, of course. But we'd do well to remember than even very clever people can be as dumb and stupid as the rest of us - or at least, their motivations and desires are just as irrational as those of anyone else. Only if we take the time and trouble to consciously examine what it is we really want do we have any guarantee of self-consistency. This is not (only) because we're idiots. It's just part of human nature.