Virtue Ethics and Neural Nets: Mental Models of Rising Suicide Rates and the Decline of Human Flourishing

The following is a response to the WSJ presentation"Why ‘Deaths of Despair’ May Be a Warning Sign for America" considering the causes of rise of the suicide rate in America between 1996 and 2016, which significantly surpasses Europe.


Are we really that different than Anna Karenina? Pretty much all American culture is like Tolstoy’s aristocracy and none like Tolstoy’s peasants. We try to find life’s purpose within sensual gratification, temporal conquest, and social standing, instead of acknowledging objective [external] purpose--for example living a simple peasant life constrained by family, nature, and virtue.

There are many paradigms and mental models that can be proposed regarding depression, but you might consider one of the oldest—virtue ethics—and a newer one—neural nets.

Virtue ethics would say happiness and peace are not the same as happy sensations. Instead, there is a right way of living that results in holistic well-being, and positive sensations are a result. ‘Shalom’ and Aristotle’s concept of happiness are examples of virtue ethics. On the other hand, American culture is permeated with pragmatism—to an extent that perhaps even Ben Franklin might not recognize as profitable—and we seek happy sensations without regard to how it is come by. It may be that we have missed the foundation for the thing we are seeking. Even worse, our regular practice [of pragmatism] denies that there is a foundation. What I see a lot today is pragmatism directed by “follow your heart.” This emotional pragmatism causes us to live as if there is no objective foundation to happiness or purpose in life. It’s really a form of self-idolatry. Emotional pragmatism can be practiced tacitly by religious believers or consistently by secular sceptics and hedonists. Is the hard-working academic or partying/cheating academic to be preferred if they get the same score? I don’t think emotional pragmatism enables us to make the right choice.

Neural nets offer another paradigm for understanding human flourishing and the lack thereof. The brain is a neural net and it is clearly linked to human flourishing. Human attempts to mimic the brain in computer neural nets--though computationally and structurally inferior—seems to offer a natural analogy into how the brain converges on a coherent solution, instead of outputting chaos. It actually can take a bit of work to get a computer neural net to converge in a desired way. Initial conditions, internal structure, and test data selection are critical. An engineer might select relevant input data to train a simple neural net, but you may also need to provide a corresponding “answer key”. The net will become trained with that data. One way a neural net can be trained wrong is by providing the wrong answers… or by selecting an irrelevant set of data for the desired output. “‘Garbage in—garbage out’ is an old saying.” More advanced neural nets can be programmed to naturally sort data, without being trained by a provided answer key. In these cases, the internal structure is what helps sort the data, and for a new problem, the search for a solution will likely be non-trivial and require expertise. If a network ignores the test data but emphasizes internal products, you may get a fancy geometric pattern, but you won’t get the desired function or meaningful information (patterns have low amounts of information, etc.). Now for the analogy, which really is more of a mental model I find useful. People seem to be not merely a neural net, but a network of neural nets. We accept the ideas of others as inputs to what we ourselves think about. Even more than ideas, we see behavior (research mirror neurons) and are trained by it. We are trained in positive as well as negative ways. According to attachment theory, attachment to a primary parent (and thus humanity) occurs (or does not occur) primarily at a certain stage in the brain’s sophisticated development. Sexual abuse enters into a person’s perception of themselves, and trains them in negative ways, i.e. ways not leading to a coherent, harmonious, and “flourishing” output. Now it is self-evident that people can actively shape the focus of their thoughts, as we on more than one occasion find ourselves deciding what to think about. We are not passive agents, not perpetually asking why “now why did I think about that?” So as active agents who require inputs from other people—considering all we’ve learned about neural nets—how is America deciding to shape its network of neural nets? I think America is leading a movement against the natural family, against natural identity (grounded in nature instead of choice), and against the constraints of objective virtue. Each of these three individually has large ramifications for a set of neural nets, though their exact effect (on average) is hard to specify. Together, I would expect to see more neural nets [in the borader American ‘network’] exhibit signs of chaos, instead of some nominal level of coherent convergence. Without needed input from family, attachment issues and lesser evils may result in the brain’s neural net. Without the constraints caused by acknowledging objective identity, a neural net may amplify noise within themselves and seemingly could make a person feel ungrounded. Without acknowledging that objective virtue exists, nothing prevents wrong data sets from being selected without distinction or conscience. Increased probability of chaos would result. (As a side note, social media may have an effect on the culture by what it excludes, even more than what it introduces, and I do not mean to imply that all the influence of social tools are bad.) So a basic understanding of neural nets and human psychology may suggest that chaos will result from radical movements that distract from, minimize, or oppose objective realities like family, identity, and virtue.

Why don’t we read Anna K in schools? ;)

Final thought--If there is a real human teleology external to us, training our gaze to identify purpose inside may frustrate our basic human functioning, as we search from object-to-object as our fancy changes. If someone claims to justify her own existence, then she has denied herself the foundation for her pursuit of meaning, and I think it’s only a matter of time and logical consistency before she comes to think her life meaningless. So then, as humans, we must be willing to search for meaning and existence outside ourselves, which is an exciting and terrifying responsibility.