Morphics and Ethics

Reading the news about the Duterte, new Philippine leader, killing thousands of accused drug dealers and drug users without trial ... and noticing so many generally good-hearted Filipinos defend him on the grounds that he's "cleaning up the country" ... reminded me how far the human world is from understanding the weakness of simplistic utilitarian approaches to ethics ...

My own inclination, to be quite open about it, is toward a highly peace-biased conditional pacifism in the style professed by, for instance, Einstein and Bertrand Russell.....   I.e., I don't believe violence should be eschewed in every case, but I think it should be avoided except in extreme cases where -- after as much careful, compassionate reflection as the situation allows -- there really seems no plausible alternative but to do some violence to avoid even worse violence...

What I'll do in this post is connect these ethical issues with some more metaphysical and complex-systems-dynamical points....   I will lay out what I see as a  fairly conceptually obvious connection between the notion of morphic resonance aka “tendency to take habits”, and the reasons why a naïve utilitarian approach to ethics could be expected to generally fail in reality, whereas conditional pacifism could be expected to do better...

Morphic Systems

I'll start in a fairly airy abstract realm, and then eventually get back to the practicalities of pacifism....   

I'll start by formulating the notion of “morphic dynamics” in a highly general way.   My notion of morphic dynamic is inspired loosely by Rupert Sheldrake's thinking on morphic resonance, but is not quite the same as his idea....  (Rupert is a great guy and a deep, honest, adventurous thinker; and we have discussed these ideas a few times, and we don't exactly disagree profoundly on anything, we just have different intellectual styles and orientations.)

I suggest that: A system may be said to be “morphic” if its dynamics manifest the “tendency to take habits”  (the latter phrase being drawn from the philosophy of Charles Peirce) – i.e. if it’s the case that, within subsystems of the system S, the odds of the future resembling the past are surprisingly high.   

What does “surprisingly” mean?   That gets subtle, but one way to formulate it is: “Surprisingly often means significantly more often than in a random possible world meeting the specified conditions.”  

Suppose there are 10 different subsystems of the system S, in each of which one has observed pattern P 5 times during the last hour.    Then, across these subsystems, what will be the distribution of the number of occurrences of P during the next hour?   

In general, one would expect the mean of this distribution to be 5.  But in a morphic system S, the variance of the distribution will be much narrower than one would find via looking at random systems.   Because there would be a surprising tendency for the pattern distribution in the future of a subsystem, to resemble the pattern distribution in the past of a subsystem.

Smolin’s “precedence principle” suggests that the physical universe is morphic in a similar sense (though he uses a quite different language), and derives aspects of quantum mechanics therefrom.   Sheldrake’s morphic resonance theory suggests the biological, psychological, physical and metaphysical universe is morphic in a similar sense, and seeks to explain a variety of phenomena such as psi, epigenesis and the origin of life in these terms.   

See this earlier blog post that connects the dots between these previous ideas; and see this blog post for  the initial presentation of the idea of morphic resonance as related to peaked (surprisingly low variance) distributions.

Regardless of whether the universe is foundationally morphic, though, it may still be the case that particular systems like, say, human minds or human societies are morphic.

One way that society would get to be morphic, apart from any general principle of morphic resonance, would simply be via the tendency of people to jump to conclusions emotionally (even before the evidence merits it probabilistically), and the tendency of people to copy each other.   Both of these tendencies are, of course, very real and well documented.

If human societies are morphic then this has significant ethical implications.  It affects the logic of voting – in a morphic society, on the whole, whether one person votes today, has a surprising impact on the number of people to vote tomorrow.   As another example, it also has implications regarding the argument for pacifism.

Pacifism and Morphic Dynamics

--> My father’s parents were Quakers and devout pacifists.   I grew up with a highly pacifist orientation as well, to the point where up till a certain point in high school, I tended to let other kids beat me up, simply because I felt it would be wrong to hit them back.   I hated being beaten up, but I also had no desire to hurt the other kids, and felt hurting them would still be wrong, even though they were hurting me.   At a certain point I was just getting beaten up too often, though, because certain bad-hearted kids had decided it was really fun to beat the crap out of the local pacifist every day after school.   I started fighting back, which predictably decreased the incidence of attacks on me.   I wasn’t quite convinced this was philosophically correct, but in practice life pushed me to adopt what philosophers would call a conditional pacifism, with something of a utilitarian flavor.
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Einstein and Bertrand Russell were also conditional pacifists – they were strongly biased against violence, yet both advocated fighting back against Hitler, feeling that in this case taking a pacifist hard line would cause much more harm than good.   In general, if one is conditionally pacifist in their style, one believes that violence should generally be avoided, but that in some extreme cases it may be the most ethical course to take.

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On the other hand, as I write these words, the new leader of the Philippines, Duterte, is making headlines for large-scale extrajudicial killing of suspected drug dealers or drug users.   It seems clear that some false positives are occurring in this process – i.e. some folks who are being killed, were not actually drug dealers or drug users.   But a utilitarian argument could be made that this is a justifiable cost, if it results in a massive decrease in drug use across the nations, because the drug epidemic is killing so many people. 

Clearly the conditional pacifism of Einstein and Russell was not the kind of simplistic utilitarianism that would justify Duterte's recent actions.  Yet, as a child and on into adulthood, the conceptual foundation of their more sophisticated style of conditional pacifism has often vexed me.

Even fairly extreme pacifists such as Gandhi have acknowledged the inevitably conditional nature of real-world pacifism.  Gandhi noted that living in the world almost inevitably involves doing harm to some other beings; but that if one acts with awareness and compassion toward all living beings, one will be able to minimize the amount of harm one causes.   This may not have been the emotional orientation of Einstein and Russell, but it would have been quite possible to fight Hitler’s army while feeling compassion for Hitler himself and his soldiers as well.    Similar to how one may feel compassion for a rabid dog, yet still shoot it to avoid it from spreading rabies and thus causing even greater harm (and in that case, to end its own suffering as well).  

But conditional pacifism does not equate to naive utilitarianism in which one kills or harms whenever a simplistic calculation suggests one may save 2 lives by killing one guy.

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One argument for having a strong bias toward peace – in the style of Einstein and Russell -- is that, to put it simply, violence tends to breed violence – and sometimes in non-obvious ways.

The “violence breeds violence” argument against Duterte-style utilitarian murder, argues that solving problems with violence tends to lead to further problems indirectly, down the line.   So that, for instance: Even if it’s true that lives are saved via the extrajudicial killing intimidating people into not selling or using drugs, achieving this goal via this means creates subtler problems.  It creates people who hate the government due to its murder of their innocent friends and family members.  It scars the minds of the killers themselves in various ways, with various (mostly bad) consequences.   And it also leaves people with the same psychological and social problems that pushed them to use drugs in the first place – which may then find an outlet via other means … suicide, emotional abuse of friends or family members, etc.  

The particulars via which “violence breeds violence” may be quite complicated.  But the point I want to make here is that the existence of SOME such particulars would follow naturally from the assertion that society is morphic … whether due to manifesting a broader cosmic principle of morphic resonance, or “just” due to that being part of the nature of its self-organizing dynamic.

So, for instance: If one holds that life is generally valuable, then the hypothesis of a morphic society would lead one to the conclusion that one should not generally kill N people to save N+1 people, because doing violence often has indirect consequences that are bad (for life-forms associated with the violence in various ways).   In some cases one should kill N people to save N+K people for various K; but the more morphic society is, on the whole, the larger K would be.

In terms of the practicalities of ethics and pacifism, I have certainly broken no new ground here.   In terms of conventional philosophical categories, I suppose my point regards the potential derivation of certain ethical stances (e.g. variants of conditional pacifism) from either a) metaphysics or b) empirical facts regarding the nature of complex social systems.

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