Month: June 2013

What’s it like to be an octopus? Peter Godfrey-Smith explores the question in pursuit of a philosophy of mind:

Action by an octopus … would mix elements that are usually distinct in animals like us. When we act, the border between self and environment is usually fairly clear. When we move an arm, the arm can be controlled both in its general path and in the details. You can then watch your arm move, but what you are watching are the consequences of choices, or perhaps of habits that are the remnants of earlier choices. Various other things in the environment are not under your direct control at all, though they can be moved indirectly by manipulating them with your limbs. Uncontrolled movement by an object around you is usually a sign that it is not part of you at all (with partial exceptions for knee-jerk reflexes and the like). If you were an octopus, these distinctions would be blurred. Your arms would move in a way that is a mix of the centrally and peripherally controlled. To some extent you would guide them, and to some extent you would just watch them go.

Godfrey-Smith on the worthiness of “what it’s like to be X” thought experiments:

Some philosophers working within a broadly materialist framework are opposed to asking questions about “what it’s like” to have a particular kind of mind. They regard this way of setting up the issues as misguided. I think these questions are good ones, as long as they are asked in a way that does not doom them to unanswerability from the start. The divide between first-person and third-person points of view is real regardless of what minds are made of. Knowing how an animal’s body and brain are put together does not put you into a state that is similar to what is going on inside that animal, so in that sense no description can tell you “what it’s like to be” that animal. Getting a sense of what it feels like to be another animal—bat, octopus, or next-door neighbor—must involve the use of memory and imagination to produce what we think might be faint analogues of that other animal’s experiences. This project can be guided by knowledge of how the animal is put together and how it lives its life. When the animal is as different from us as an octopus, the task is certainly difficult, but it is one worth undertaking.

See also Thomas Nagel’s 1974 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” here (and a recent takedown of Nagel here). Recent Dish on “what it’s like” thought experiments here.

(Video: Moving Octopus Vulgaris, Wikimedia Commons)

Ryan Avent puts the NSA’s data collection in historical context:

One of the interesting points in Tyler Cowen’s ebook “The Great Stagnation” is that, historically, technological advance has both created demand for and enabled growth in the reach of the state.

Air travel, for instance, generated interest in and demand for government involvement in everything from direct production of aircraft to construction of airports to management of air traffic to control over passenger security. Those demands broadened the scope of government involvment in our lives—being groped and/or photographed naked is now a standard part of life for the American traveling public—while also directly expanding the government’s reach in other ways. The same technology that allows travelers to flit off for a weekend in the Bahamas gives America the ability to project power across the globe.

Growth in Leviathan’s tentacles therefore amounts to a not-half-bad measure of technological progress in society. It is no coincidence that the period from 1870 to 1950, a remarkable era of human technological achievement, also happened to include a dizzying and unprecedented growth in the state.

A reader pushes back against another:

Your reader claims that the FISA Court must be a “kangaroo court” because it never denies applications. I, too, do not like the appearance of a court that grants almost every warrant application.  But this is much more complicated than it looks.

First, the warrant process can be back-and-forth.  I have heard FISA Court judges explain that in reviewing applications they sometimes find some aspect deficient, and tell the DOJ of their concern.  The DOJ then, if possible, tries to improve the application (say, with additional facts) to satisfy the court’s concern.  If they know they cannot, the DOJ may simply withdraw the application.  This means the “granted versus denied” number is much less informative than it first appears.

Second, FISA applications are complex and often lengthy.  The government does not bother with one unless they really want one, and then they put the time in to make the application thorough.

Third, it’s worth looking more carefully at who some of these judges are (and have been).  In many ways the court is secretive, but one thing we do know is the members.  They are all sitting federal judges.  Here are a few who served recently:  Judge James Roberston, of the D.C. district court, was on the FISA court for a number of years until he resigned in 2005 to protest the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program.  He was appointed to the federal bench by President Clinton, and early in his career worked for the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights under Law.  His public judicial work shows that he is anything but a rubber stamp for government police powers.  Yet he (apparently) rejected almost no applications, as there were only 11 rejections out of almost 34,000 from 1979-2012.  Or consider Judge James G. Carr, who served on the FISA Court from 2002-2008.  He was appointed to the federal bench by President Clinton, and is a former law professor who wrote an extensive treatise on wiretapping law.  I have practiced in front of Judge Carr; he, too, is no rubber stamp.

It is definitely worth scrutinizing the FISA Court, but it is not a kangaroo court.

I’m grateful to have this expert perspective; and relieved.

Chait celebrates the Senate’s lopsided cloture vote on the bill today:

It’s a vote to have a debate on immigration reform, not a vote for a particular bill, which is sure to attract fewer than 82 votes in the end, and probably far fewer. But it gives the general impression that conservative opponents are merely going through the motions and have made their peace with a likely defeat. And that impression is not wrong.

That 82 votes is a signal that Republicans in the Senate are, indeed, not using every tool they have to block a bill. Eighty-two votes to proceed is a way of signaling that the status quo, not the expected outlines of a bill, is what is most unacceptable. This is the opposite of how Republicans have approached the major legislation of the Obama era, beginning with the stimulus, when they did not make any distinction between voting to allow debate and voting on the underlying merits of the final bill. Republican senators today faced a choice to position themselves as fundamentally opposed to the entire process, and most of them decided to stand aside.

Weigel adds:

Only the delegations from Alabama, Idaho, and Wyoming voted fully against proceeding to debate. Less trivially, reformers have stuck to “70” as the number they need to hit in the Senate in order to build momentum for a vote on a House reform bill. They can afford to lose 12 of today’s “aye” votes; Republicans are convinced they can limit those losses if they allow some amendments that allow them to save face on “border security.”

Barro believes that immigration reform is going to pass:

For many, many House Republicans, the ideal situation is for a reform bill to pass over their objections. Business interests will get the bill they want, Democrats will be deprived of a powerful talking point with Hispanic voters, and individual house members will be able to tell conservative primary voters that they tried to “stop amnesty.” Win, win, win.

This is encouraging:

Dear Attorney General Holder and Director Mueller,

… Assertions in the press that our compliance with [NSA] requests gives the U.S. government unfettered access to our users’ data are simply untrue. However, government nondisclosure obligations regarding the number of FISA national security requests that Google receives, as well as the number of accounts covered by those requests, fuel that speculation. We therefore ask you to help make it possible for Google to publish in our Transparency Report aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures—in terms of both the number we receive and their scope.

Even better:

Seeking to drag the shadowy world of U.S. national security law into the light, a bipartisan group of senators has proposed a bill that would declassify significant legal opinions reached by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court… The bill is based on Merkley’s past proposal to declassify important FISA court opinions. He is joined by a small bipartisan group of senators that includes Democratic Sens. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Ron Wyden of Oregon, Jon Tester of Montana, Mark Begich of Alaska, and Al Franken of Minnesota. Republicans joining the effort include Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Dean Heller of Nevada.

A more open and transparent FISA court process would be a big step forward toward ensuring this isn’t abused. So would what Google proposes.