Science, Environmental Ethics, and the Public Sphere

The National Science Foundation sponsors a week-long workshop on Science, Ethics and Public Policy at the Center for Ethics at the University of Montana organized by Dane Scott. As a participant in this workshop, I had the opportunity to meet some very interesting and influential people in the public policy world and also think more deeply about some of the ethical and philosophical issues that we face as scientists, citizens and humans. Here are some of the interesting people and ideas that came out of my attending the workshop:

1. Intrinsic Value as a Heuristic- One of the central questions in Environmental Ethics (and Ecological Economics) is whether nature has intrinsic value or just instrumental value. Because Philosophers love thought experiments, they pose the following: Suppose you are the only human left on Earth, would it be morally wrong to cut down a beautiful, old Redwood tree, just for the fun of it? If you answer yes, it’s likely because you see the tree as having some intrinsic value. If you answer no, you’re probably an Economist. In other words, you see the tree as having instrumental value (providing some fun for the last person on earth) rather than inherent value.

I’m not so much interested in weighing in on the question itself, but I do have something to say about the meta question: Why do so many of us (including me) have the intuition that nature has value independent of what it can do for us? How would this value system come about if humans presumably evolved to use the environment to promote their own survival and reproduction? I’d like to suggest that one possibility is that intrinsic valuation of the environment is a heuristic that preserves long-term instrumental value. Perhaps pure instrumental valuation of the environment makes over-exploitation likely, while intrinsic valuation creates behavioral predispositions that enable a more sustainable long-term instrumental use of the environment. Another interesting feature of the ‘intrinsic value heuristic’ is that it seems to be immune to argument about the best use of a resources’ value. This intrinsic value framing might provide rhetorical power that would not be possible with a position of simply preserving long-term instrumental value.

2. Communicating with the Press, Public and other Disciplines- One of the highlights of the week was meeting and talking with Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post, arguably one of the few remaining investigative reporters covering the White House and Environmental issues. Ms. Eilperin noted that many scientists rarely talk to the public about their research and often lack the skills to effectively communicate about the implications of their work. We talked about the importance of engaging with others outside of your discipline, outside of academia, and outside of the ’socio-educational elite.’ The ability to communicate across these lines can promote both the public good and scientific progress by enabling the dissemination of important information.

3. Spatial and Temporal ‘Gaps’ - Andrew Light of George Mason University and the Center for American Progress, a DC think tank, spoke on a number of topics related to science, ethics and policy, including the challenges inherent in motivating public support for mitigating climate change and the potential risks associated with the prevalent use of nanomaterials in consumer products. (Because nanoparticles can penetrate into the nuclei of cells and cross the blood-brain barrier, their use in consumer products without adequate safety testing is a matter of concern.)

For me, the most interesting aspect of Dr. Light’s work was the emphasis he placed on what he called spatial and temporal gaps in the way humans reason about their effects on the environment, working from data derived from survey responses to questions about climate change. Spatial gaps are the devaluing of the effects that are far away in space and temporal gaps are the devaluing of the effects that are far away in time. This focus on the spatial and temporal dimensions resonates with the new framework for conceptualizing cooperation that I have been working on. In this work, I focus on the spatial and temporal effects that occur when individuals interact with their environments and make decisions that have consequences far away in space and time (download my Spatial and Temporal Assortment paper or check out my Research page). Dr. Light also noted that he’s found strong relationships between attitudes towards egalitarianism versus hierarchy and attitudes about climate change, work that draws on George Lakoff’s approaches to moral cognition and political beliefs.

4. Human Rights, Climate Change and Personal Responsibility- Don Brown of Penn State University spoke about the ethical dimensions of the climate change debate, especially the influence that climate change has on individuals in third world countries and on future generations (again the spatial and temporal issues from #3). His website, Climate Ethics.org, was voted by Time magazine as one of the top 15 Green websites of the year. Brown advocates framing inadequate responses to climate change as human rights violations (of those who will be negatively effected by climate change). When I asked him about the respective roles of governmental versus personal responsibility, he said that human rights theory is very clear on this issue: according to human rights theory, each of us has a personal responsibility to prevent harm to others if we know that harm might occur because of our actions or inactions.

Repurposing at the Santa Fe Institute

I recently returned from my first visit to the Santa Fe Institute, a highly interdisciplinary research institute that promotes dialogue and collaboration across traditional lines, where I participated in a Workshop entitled “Principles of Repurposing” (link to the wiki), organized by Jessika Trancik and Jon Wilkins. Twelve presenters and a handful of other participants from all over the country (and the world) came together for three and a half days of talks and discussions on the topic of repurposing, i.e., how systems come to have new functions. We came from areas as diverse as Architecture, Computer Programming, Engineering, Biology, Economics, and Psychology to discuss the principles of repurposing that transcend disciplinary boundaries.

Below I briefly discuss a few of the questions and ideas that I found most compelling from the workshop:

1. How do we quantify structural and functional repurposing of systems? (Posed by Jessika Trancik) During discussions with Jessika and a number of other participants, we discussed the possibility that functional repurposing could be quantified by simply measuring the change in input and output of the entire system and that structural repurposing can be quantified by measuring the changes to input and output of the components that make up the system (e.g., by using network analysis). This could potentially provide a way of measuring repurposing that allows one to easily switch between multiple levels in a hierarchical system (since input and output changes are being measured at all levels).

2. What kinds of environments allow for the development of ‘repurposable’ systems (i.e., systems that can be easily restructured to perform new functions)? F lexible and repurposable systems presumably take longer to develop and ‘pay off’ than systems that perform the function at hand but cannot easily be restructured to perform new functions. It is for this reason, that there needs to be sufficient ‘gestation’ time for developing repurposable systems. Dave Ackley and I talked about the potential importance of long oscillations between weak selection and strong selection in this context. Long periods of weak selection create ‘development time’ for repurposable systems that have long-term high payoffs, and subsequent strong selection can then cull away the less fit competition that might have been able to survive during the periods of weak selection.

3. Stories as a vehicle for attracting investment. One particularly interesting recurring theme from the workshop was the importance of ’stories’ about the intention or function of a system in attracting investment. This topic came up (in various forms) in the talks of Victor Seidel, Nicholas de Monchaux and others. Because the creating or repurposing of technological and social systems requires development time and capital, the ability to attract investment can enable a richer and longer-lasting microenvironment in which the system can develop. Since humans have the ability to speculate about the likely long-term payoffs of investments, we can synthetically create microenvironments for system development, i.e., through the stock market and private investment. In these situations, the ’stories’ behind a company or a prospective product can play an important role in generating and maintaining investment.
There is an interesting parallel between these ideas and the notion of the SCI (Social Cognitive Interface) that my graduate advisor (Robert Kurzban) and I wrote about in a recent PSPR paper. Essentially, we suggested that humans have evolved an SCI to maintain and transmit the most positive plausible representations about the self. This is essentially the same principle of ’stories being a vehicle for attracting investment. ‘ In the context of the evolution of social abilities, the capacity to effectively ‘tell viable self-promotional stories’ is likely to have lead that individual to be more highly valued by others and therefore a more likely recipient of social investment.

As part of the workshop, I presented some simulation findings demonstrating that a very simple rule foraging rule can be ‘repurposed’ as a rule for leaving uncooperative social partners and groups (several papers on this ‘Walk Away’ strategy can be downloaded from my research page). I also discussed the importance of system composition (assortment) in promoting (or disfavoring) selection at the level of the group or aggregation. In biological systems, certain compositions are more likely to promote selection for cooperation and other higher level functions (to read more about assortment and cooperation, download the manuscript in prep, “Assortment in Space and Time,” which I’ll soon make available on my website).

All in all, this workshop was highly engaging, creative and stimulating. In addition to the presentations and discussions, we also had some wonderful time exploring the restaurants of Santa Fe and talking informally about many of these topics and others. I especially enjoyed the informal discussions with Jon Wilkins, who seemed to have an endless supply of interesting ideas and unbounded tolerance for listening to my speculative musings.

Metaphors and Oscillatory Dynamics at SPP

This weekend I attended my first conference of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. I had some wonderfully creative interactions with very interesting people:

1.Michael Anderson of Franklin and Marshall presented very innovative work on the functional architecture of the brain using graph theory. Our later discussions lead to a number of unique insights, including the connection between the spatial/topological social organizations that favor the spread of defection and neural organizations that promote the spread of entrained neural firing (leading to epilepsy). We also discussed various manufacturing and transportation metaphors for information processing in the brain. Briefly, sensory input (raw materials) are often locally processed, becoming value added products (parts) which are then transported to more central areas along the corpus callosum where they are combined with other products, then outputted to the rest of the body (exported). These ideas both originated from some interesting new data on the white matter pathways in the brain that are soon to be published in PLOS Biology.

2.Tony Chemro, also of Franklin and Marshall, had many interesting things to tell me about oscillators and entrainment, two of my favorite topics. In addition to a very stimulating conversation about whether you can do anything (including complex social cognition and behavior) with enough responsive oscillators, he pointed me to the work of Richard C. Schmidt, Doug Eck, Mari Jones and others who work on rhythmic behavior and oscillatory dynamics.

3.George Ainslie, a specialist in the area of intertemporal choice (decision making about the future), and I discussed the oscillatory dynamics underlying addiction, in particular the speeding up of the period of the oscillators underlying approach behavior. He also described the delicate balance that must be achieved in imagining of positive future outcomes: too little (not reinforcing enough) or too much joy (so reinforcing that the individual only daydreams) can both lead to decreased motivation to engage in the actual pursue that of that goal. We discussed the importance of properly yoking the positively reinforcing ‘images’ of success to process of making progress towards that final goal.

4.Richard Samuels suggested to me an interesting parameter to add to my SIMPLE model (described in the first chapter of my dissertation, downloadable from my research page). In the present model, agents can store energy inside their somatic boundaries, where they are unavailable to others, or in their local environment, where they are partially available to others. Dr. Samuels suggested that an interesting modification to make would be to create a parameter that specified the accessibility (to others) of somatically stored resources. In other words, this parameter could specify the likelihood that other entities can ‘take’ energy belonging to another agent. This kind of approach could be used to model many kinds of predator/prey, host/parasite and intraspecies exploitation interactions in SIMPLE.

Turing machines and parallel computation in the SIMPLE model

In my trip to Reed a few weeks ago, I was asked a very clever question after my talk on my SIMPLE model (a general model of social behavior that I developed for first chapter of my dissertation, downloadable from my research page). Greg Jenson, Allen Neuringer’s very smart Research Assistant, asked me “Have you ever thought about this model as a turing machine with multiple heads?” The answer was then no, but I have since thought about this almost daily and have been speculating that SIMPLE might be even more general than I had previously thought. In addition to being a general model of social interaction, it builds on the most general principles of computation.

In SIMPLE (Simulation of agent Interaction through Movement and Production in a Local Environment), agents move along a ring made up of several hundred unique cells, changing the energy level on those cells as they produce and consume energy. This is analogous to a turing machine which has a tape (in SIMPLE, the environment) with multiple squares containing information (energy), a head that can read the tape and alter it (adding or taking away energy) , a table which specifies how the tape is altered and how the head should move based on what is read and current state of the head (decision rules for movement, production and consumption), and a state register which tracks the present state of the head (read more about turing machines on Wikipedia).

It can easily be demonstrated that a turing machine with multiple heads is equivalent to one with just one head. I suspect that the ability of heads to replicate, mutate and terminate themselves (as they can in the SIMPLE model) leads to surprising dynamics that might be difficult to intuit from considering a turing machine with just one head (even though they are analytically equivalent).

Reminiscing and representing at Reed College

My undergraduate thesis advisor, Allen Neuringer, a wonderfully creative, personable, and highly renowned Psychologist is retiring this coming year. In his honor, the Psychology Department at Reed held a conference-style reunion for academic and non-academic Psychologists from all graduating years. Allen has done tremendously interesting work on the reinforcement of variable behavior and is a proponent of self-experimentation. He has been an extraordinary mentor to me and to generations of Reed graduates.

On the first day of the associated conference, I presented my new work on the “SIMPLE” model, a general model of social behavior (see the research page of my website) and had the opportunity to meet a number of researchers with unconventional approaches to scientific inquiry. Among the highlights were:

1) meeting and developing a potential collaboration with Jon Schull of Rochester Institute of Technology on innovation and agent-environment interaction

2) talking with Seth Roberts, self-experimenter, author of the book “The Shangri-La Diet,” and professor emeritus at Berkley, about the potential importance of oscillations in resource availability (and other environmental inputs) in shaping eating and social behavior, and

3) hearing Michael Owren’s talk on laughter and speaking with him afterwards about the relationship between his theoretical approach to signaling and the passive/active signaling distinction I developed in the final chapter of my dissertation.