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Thought Experiment 48: Evil Genius

3/29/2016

Screen shot from the Nazi propaganda film "Triumph of the Will"

Ooh, I really like this week's thought experiment. Check it out and see what you think.

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The critics all agreed. The cinematography was breathtaking, the acting first rate, the dialogue crisp, the pacing perfect, and the original score both magnificent in its own right and used expertly in the service of the movie. But they also agreed that De Puta Madre was morally repulsive. The worldview it presented was one in which Hispanics are racially superior to other human beings, cruelty to the old is seen as necessary, and childless women are liable to be raped with impunity.
There the consensus ended. For some, the moral depravity of the film undermined what would otherwise be its strong claims to being a great work of art. For others, the medium and the message needed to be separated. The film was both a great work of cinematic art and a moral disgrace. We can admire it for its former qualities and loathe it for the latter.
The debate was more than academic, for so repugnant was the film's message that it would be banned, unless it could be argued that its artistic merits justified exemption from censorship. The director warned that a ban would be a catastrophe for free artistic expression. Was he right?

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 142.
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How would you analyse a movie like De Puta Madre? Would you censor it? I'll be back on Friday to discuss.

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Response to Thought Experiment 47: Rabbit!

3/25/2016

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Want to join me going down a rabbit hole?

Finally, after a few weeks of rehashed ideas, we get a fresh thought experiment from a philosopher we haven't heard from before in this series — W.V.O. Quine. When I wrote about him during my initial Survival of the Fittest Philosopher essays, I noted that "a recent poll conducted among analytic philosophers named Quine one of the five most important philosophers of the past two centuries." This experiment is based on Quine's thesis on the indeterminacy of translation, which "has been among the most widely discussed and controversial theses in modern analytical philosophy." Hillary Putnam called it "the most fascinating and the most discussed philosophical argument since Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the Categories."

Let's see what all the fuss is about.

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Professor Lapin and his assistant were very excited at the prospect of building a lexicon for a previously unknown language. They had only recently discovered the lost tribe of Leporidae and today they were to begin recording the meanings of the words in their language.
The first word to be defined was "gavagai". They had heard this word being used whenever a rabbit was present, so Lapin was about to write "gavagai = rabbit". But then his assistant interjected. For all they knew, couldn't "gavagai" mean something else, such as "undetached rabbit part" or "Look! Rabbit!"? Perhaps the Leporidae thought of animals as existing in four dimensions, over time and space, and "gavagai" referred only to the part of the rabbit present at the moment of observation? Or perhaps "gavagai" were only observed rabbits and unseen rabbits had a different name?
The possibilities seemed fanciful, but Lapin had to admit that they were all consistent with what they had observed so far. But how could they know which one was correct? They could make more observations, but in order to rule out all the possibilities they would have to know more or less everything about the tribe, how they lived, and the other words they used. But then how could they even begin their dictionary?

Source: Word and Object by W.V.O. Quine, 1960.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 139.
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Doesn't seem like such a big deal, does it? To me, this lack of anything interesting is unsurprising. It's exactly what usually comes from the technical world of analytical philosophy. You can see my Philosophy 101 post for a few more details on that school of thought, but let's just "show" rather than "tell" how quickly it can go down the rabbit hole, so to speak, into a dense, jargon-filled analysis of the minutia of language. Don't worry though, since this blog is intended for a general audience, I'll try to hop over those difficulties and get to a general summary of the ideas as quickly as I can.

First, here's a tiny bit more background to set the stage. When I blogged about Quine, I wrote about my first encounter with analytical philosophy, which happened back in college after I had made it through some introductory logic and medieval philosophy courses. I said how: "I was really excited then to finally qualify for a more senior-level course in contemporary analytical philosophy. I remember thinking about how many holes that I, as an uneducated kid, had poked in the theories of Plato and Augustine and Anslem and Aquinas, and I couldn't wait to see what the field had figured out over the 1,000 years since that time. I don't remember exactly what I found in that course, but it must have been something like this:

How are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula "To be is to be the value of a variable"; this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard. —W.V.O. Quine

I dropped the class after a few weeks, abandoned my plans for a minor in philosophy, and began taking other electives from a wide range of fields. What I didn't know then (but have since discovered on my own) was just how much philosophy had turned in on itself once the is-ought stumbling block that Hume had outlined became accepted as unbridgeable. With facts and values separated, science took over the discovery of facts, and artists and religions kept up their endless debates on values. These so called Two Cultures of C.P. Snow came to be watched from the sideline by a philosophy that had once ruled them both."

So here we have in this thought experiment a perfect example of how one major school of philosophy turned in on itself. Check out just a bit of the academic discussion on this. (You can skip to the next dashed line when you can't take it anymore.)

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Radical translation is a thought experiment in Word and Object. It is used as an introduction to Quine's theory of the indeterminacy of translation, and specifically to prove the point of the inscrutability of reference.

"The linguist has no idea if the term 'gavagai' is actually synonymous to the term 'rabbit', as it is just as plausible to translate it as 'one second rabbit stage', 'undetached rabbit part', 'the spatial whole of all rabbits', or 'rabbithood'. To question these differences, the linguist now has to translate words and logical particles. Starting off with the easiest task, to translate logical connectives, he formulates questions where he pairs logical connectives with occasion sentences and going through several rounds of writing down the assent or dissent to these questions from the natives to establish a translation. Any further translation of logical particles is however impossible, as translation of categorical statements (for example) relies on the translation of words, which in turn relies on the translation of categorical statements.

So far the linguist has been able to (1) Translate observational sentences (2) Translate truth functions (3) Recognize stimulus analytic sentences (4) Recognize intrasubjective stimulus synonymous sentences. To go beyond the limits of translation by stimulus meaning, the linguist uses analytical hypotheses, where he hypothetically equates parts of native sentences to parts of sentences in his own language. Using this, he can now form new sentences and can create a complete translation manual by trial and error through the use of these sentences and adaption of his analytical hypotheses where needed.

The whole of analytical hypotheses cannot be evaluated as true or false, as they are predictions that can only be judged within their own system. As a result, all translation is fundamentally undetermined (and not just underdetermined). This indeterminacy is not meaningless, as it is it is possible to construct two separate translation manuals that are equally correct yet incompatible with each other due to having opposing truth values. A good translation is possible, but an objectively right translation of exact terms is impossible."
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Let me try and translate that for you. Because all words may have some subjective meaning tied to them for each individual, we cannot know for certain that we are talking about the exact same thing whenever we talk to someone, in this language or another. At least, I think that's what Quine and his fellow analytic philosophers are trying to say. According to them, I can't know for sure!

There is so much more jargon I could share with you on this, but the point was actually made clearer in an unrelated passage from this week's Scientific America blog post, The Singularity and the Neural Code, where British neurobiologist Steven Rose explains the difficulty the singularity movement will have in decoding how our brains think. The article tells us, "decoding neural signals from individual brains will always be extraordinarily difficult because each individual’s brain is unique and ever-changing. To dramatize this point, Rose poses a thought experiment involving a “cerebroscope,” which can record everything that happens in a brain, at micro and macro levels, in real time. Let's say the cerebroscope records all of Rose's neural activity as he watches a red bus coming down a street. Could the cerebroscope reconstruct what Rose is feeling? No, because his neural response to even that simple stimulus grows out of his brain's entire previous history, including a childhood incident when a bus almost ran him over."

So what Quine is saying with this thought experiment is that even when we try to talk about something as simple as a "bus" with another person, we can't know *exactly* and with *certainty* what the other person *completely* means when they say "bus", because all terms everywhere have been built up from translations in one form or another. This may be true, but does anyone really give a fuck?

(Don't judge that word. You don't know what it means to me.)

I've already covered multiple times how our knowledge can only ever be probabilistic, yet we pragmatically move on in the world. Now, we have to recognize that our knowledge of words is only ever approximate too. But in my Response to Thought Experiment 23: The Beetle In The Box, I wrote something that gives us some comfort about this ever-so-slight fuzziness in our understanding.

No one can know exactly what it is like to be another person or experience things from another’s perspective (look in someone else’s box), but it is generally assumed that the mental workings of other people’s mind are very similar to our own. From the perspective of an evolutionary philosophy, this is highly self-evident. For other philosophers to claim that our internal thoughts and feelings are ineffable, unknowable, and "private" from others in society, is to deny the billions of years of evolutionary history that we share, during which time the (essentially) same bodily structures were created everywhere in our species as we evolved to survive in the shared environment we exist within in this one universe. As neuroscientists unravel the functions of our brain structures, we don't find infinite varieties of beetles (or non-beetles) crawling around in our heads; we find 99.5% similarities in our molecular sub-structure. We are not so alone in our minds...even if other's thought experiments can sound awfully confusing at first blush.

So with that, I'm now going to go celebrate Easter with some shinrinyoku. Don't know what that means? It's from this lovely article about the 11 Beautiful Japanese Words That Don't Exist In English. "Shinrinyoku” means "forest bathing", to go deep into the woods where everything is silent and peaceful for relaxation. It's just the thing to go and forget about the technical ramblings of an analytical philosopher who is practically unconcerned with the real world. Aaaaahhhhhh.

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Thought Experiment 47: Rabbit!

3/21/2016

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I give up. What am I?!

The title of this week's thought experiment makes it sound like a perfectly timed arrival for Easter and Spring. Let's see what it's really about though before we get too egg-cited.

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Professor Lapin and his assistant were very excited at the prospect of building a lexicon for a previously unknown language. They had only recently discovered the lost tribe of Leporidae and today they were to begin recording the meanings of the words in their language.
The first word to be defined was "gavagai". They had heard this word being used whenever a rabbit was present, so Lapin was about to write "gavagai = rabbit". But then his assistant interjected. For all they knew, couldn't "gavagai" mean something else, such as "undetached rabbit part" or "Look! Rabbit!"? Perhaps the Leporidae thought of animals as existing in four dimensions, over time and space, and "gavagai" referred only to the part of the rabbit present at the moment of observation? Or perhaps "gavagai" were only observed rabbits and unseen rabbits had a different name?
The possibilities seemed fanciful, but Lapin had to admit that they were all consistent with what they had observed so far. But how could they know which one was correct? They could make more observations, but in order to rule out all the possibilities they would have to know more or less everything about the tribe, how they lived, and the other words they used. But then how could they even begin their dictionary?

Source: Word and Object by W.V.O. Quine, 1960.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 139.
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Surely the iterative steps it takes to build knowledge, and the provisional nature of everything we "know," would answer the surface questions about dictionaries that Professor Lapin and his assistant have, but does this thought experiment have any further implications for how we understand the world and each other? I'll be back on Friday to try to extract some meaning from this problem of language. Hopefully by using some ordinary language as well. Till then, try to use your own words to express what this means to you.

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Response to Thought Experiment 46: Amoebaesque

3/18/2016

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Seen this image before?

Apparently, individual identity is a hot topic among philosophers. This week's thought experiment is the 9th one out of 46 so far that has touched on the subject. For new readers, I'll give a quick recap of what I've said on this topic, but if you have a shared history with me, you can probably just give this one a quick skim.

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The press had given him the nickname "worm man", but his friends knew him as Derek. Scientists had manipulated his DNA to mimic one of the most amazing features of the common or garden worm: the ability to regenerate lost tissue. And it had worked. When they chopped off his hand to test him out, a new one had regrown within a month.
Then it all went wrong. His body was slowly deteriorating. To save his life they had to transplant his brain into a new body. However, a major mistake during the operation severed his brain in two.
Fortunately, both halves fully regenerated and both were successfully transplanted into new bodies. The only problem was that both the men who now had one of the brains believed they were Derek. What is more, both had Derek's memories, mental skills, and personality. This created problems for Derek's boyfriend, who couldn't tell them apart. It also led to the Dereks getting entangled in a legal battle to claim Derek's assets. But which was the real Derek? They couldn't both be him, could they?

Source: Section 89 of Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit, 1984.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 136.
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From the index to The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, we can see that this is the third and final thought experiment based on the writings of Derek Parfit. I'm not sure why Baggini chose this repeat subject, rather than constructing something from Parfit's repugnant Repugnant Conclusion (I'll try to touch on that some other time), but let's deal with what is in front of us. In my Response to Experiment 30: Memories Are Made of This, I noted that:

This is now the second thought experiment inspired by Derek Parfit, who has been highly influential among contemporary philosophers on the subject of personal identity. Parfit is a reductionist, "believing that since there is no adequate criterion of personal identity, people do not exist apart from their components." In a late 1990's documentary on Channel 4 called Brainspotting, Parfit described four traditional theories of what components might constitute the self: the body, the brain, memories, or a soul. (You can see Parfit discuss this in two 10-minute clips here: Part 1, Part 2.) As an evolutionary philosopher looking at the evidence in nature, I've already dispatched with the idea of the soul. Descartes' dualism was thrown out long ago too, so we can rule out the body or the brain as separate entities that are able to work one without the other. And in the first Parfit-inspired thought experiment on the teletransporter, we saw that memories alone are also not able to necessarily and sufficiently explain personal identity. For example, what if the teletransporter made three of you that all remembered the same things? It's obvious that the three of you would diverge quickly into independent beings, but even before the divergence happened, there wouldn't only be one of you after the other physical copies had been made.

So the four traditional components of identity do not stand alone. (And the soul doesn't stand at all.) The brain, body, and memory are all integral parts of the whole, and they are not static entities. I first discussed the changing nature of such personal identity in my post on John Locke, whose theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self. There, I gave another analogy for this topic that might prove helpful:

Identity lies at the Mind x Body intersection. One helpful analogy is to say identity is like a river. Not the water that flows through it, but the channel that actually forms the river. When storms occur and water is high, the river is deepened. When drought occurs, the river slows and silts up. When earthquakes or glaciers reshape the landscape, the riverbed may hold no water at all. If we know the events that carved the river, we can recognize its identity no matter what state it is in. Likewise, we can recognize identity when we know the events that shaped it. If you know the river and are told the volume of water that will flow its way, you know what the river will look like. If you know a person and are told the events that will occur to them, you will recognize how they handle it. This is how we know people after long absences, and this is how changes during brief separations can surprise us.

Such changes to identity were further explored in my Response to Thought Experiment 11: The Ship Theseus where I wrote:

So identity is not a fixed, unchanging thing. All people and things undergo metamorphoses over time. Sometimes slowly, sometimes cataclysmically. Words, labels, and categories may be easy to think of as permanent markers, but since the things they represent are always changing, then it follows that these names for things must be changing too. ... The universe and everything in it are always changing in almost infinitesimally continuous ways. We've developed the branch of mathematics called calculus to help describe these tiny changes, but it would be incredibly difficult to keep track of reality this way by calling everything x, then x1, then x2, then x3, etc. on into infinity. It's much easier for our brains and our languages to just call something X and treat this x as a concrete thing even though it actually has very fuzzy borders at the edges. ... I, for one, will try to remember this the next time I meet my friend called "Jane" or "Joe" or "Mary" or "Mike". They've changed since the last time I've seen them, and Jane724 might have something more to teach me than Jane723 did. And then I can become Edxxxx....."

Next, the rate of change of within these changing identities was explored in my Response to Thought Experiment 12: Picasso on the Beach, where I wrote:

The natures of things are always changing. This week, we see how that change can take place slowly, as in a Picasso painting, or quickly, as in a Picasso sand drawing. Of course, those speeds are relative too depending on the timeframe you choose to look at. Compared to cosmic time, even the painting that lasts a few hundred years, or several lifetimes to you and me, is around for just a tiny blink in existence. And while the sand drawing may last "half a lifetime" for a mayfly, we may find that it is gone too soon for our own tastes.

Finally, in my Response to Thought Experiment 38: I Am A Brain, we looked at a specific example of how identity can change by taking things away from an identity, piece by piece. For that scenario, I wrote:

There is a concept I failed to cover in my essay on David Hume that addresses this well, and that is Hume's idea of the bundle theory. (Bundle theory was discussed, though, in the silly Three Minute Philosophy video on Hume that I shared.) According to bundle theory, "an object consists of its properties and nothing more: thus neither can there be an object without properties nor can one even conceive of such an object; for example, bundle theory claims that thinking of an apple compels one also to think of its color, its shape, the fact that it is a kind of fruit, its cells, its taste, or at least one other of its properties. Thus, the theory asserts that the apple is no more than the collection of its properties." The clarity that bundle theory brings to this thought experiment comes when you imagine taking away all the properties of an object one by one until all of them are gone. Once that is done, according to Hume, nothing of the object is left. And so it is in this case, where our personal identity is a bundle of our purely physical body parts plus our mental parts that reside in our physical brains. Take them away one at a time, and "we" are still there in some capacity, but in a way that is understood to be diminished. In this case, Ceri 2 [brain only] < Ceri 1 [brain & body]. If the properties were taken away in a different order, say she suffered a stroke and her decimated brain was replaced with another working brain, then Ceri's body (Ceri 3) would still have life, but it would only be a very diminished sense of Ceri that was still around. In other words, Ceri 3 < Ceri 2 < Ceri 1. It is not until every property of her life has gone that we say Ceri has disappeared. But once all those bundled properties are removed, there is nothing left - no insubstantial, permanent soul.

All of this preparation leads us to a quick conclusion for this week's thought experiment, where an identity has changed by division and addition. In this case:

Derek Left ≠ Derek Right
Derek Left = Old Derek + New Derek Left
Derek Right = Old Derek + New Derek Right

We have as little trouble recognizing the new identities of these Derek's as we would for two identical twins whose shared portion of "old" would be purely genetic. The new Dereks would have shared portions of "old" that were made of genes AND experience, but their new experiences would quickly diverge them into separate and distinguishable identities. Unfortunately for the original Derek, his boyfriend and his possessions cannot split and regenerate, so they just have to be split in some negotiated way.

And with that, it's time for me to split too. Hopefully this old identity problem won't regenerate too many more times in the week's ahead.

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Thought Experiment 46: Amoebaesque

3/14/2016

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No, I'm Derek!

Okay, race you for it.

This week's thought experiment is the last one from contemporary philosopher Derek Parfit, who's known for his sci-fi explorations regarding the identity of persons. Hopefully this'll be a good one.

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The press had given him the nickname "worm man", but his friends knew him as Derek. Scientists had manipulated his DNA to mimic one of the most amazing features of the common or garden worm: the ability to regenerate lost tissue. And it had worked. When they chopped off his hand to test him out, a new one had regrown within a month.
Then it all went wrong. His body was slowly deteriorating. To save his life they had to transplant his brain into a new body. However, a major mistake during the operation severed his brain in two.
Fortunately, both halves fully regenerated and both were successfully transplanted into new bodies. The only problem was that both the men who now had one of the brains believed they were Derek. What is more, both had Derek's memories, mental skills, and personality. This created problems for Derek's boyfriend, who couldn't tell them apart. It also led to the Dereks getting entangled in a legal battle to claim Derek's assets. But which was the real Derek? They couldn't both be him, could they?

Source: Section 89 of Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit, 1984.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 136.
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What do you think? Is it just me or did we do this thought experiment already? Some part of me will be back on Friday to discuss.

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Response to Thought Experiment 45: The Invisible Gardener

3/11/2016

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Someone's been tidying up this clearing, right?

If you've been reading along with this site at all, it's unlikely you'll find this week's thought experiment challenging or even all that interesting. So let's get through it quickly and find the reward of a super smart, catchy, fun song at the end.

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Stanley and Livingston had been observing the picturesque clearing for over two weeks, from the safety of their makeshift hideout.
"We've seen no one at all," said Stanley, "and the clearing has not deteriorated in any way. Now will you finally admit that you were wrong: no gardener tends this site."
"My dear Stanley," replied Livingston, "remember I did allow that it might be an invisible gardener."
"But this gardener has made not even the quietist of noises nor disturbed so much as a single leaf. Thus, I maintain, it is no gardener at all."
"My invisible gardener," continued Livingston, "is also silent and intangible."
Stanley was exasperated. "Damn it! What the hell is the difference between a silent, invisible, intangible gardener and no gardener at all?"
"Easy," replied the serene Livingston. "One looks after gardens. The other does not."
"Dr. Livingston, I presume," said Stanley with a sigh, "will therefore have no objection if I swiftly dispatch him to a soundless, odourless, invisible, and intangible heaven."
From the murderous look in Stanley's eye, he was not entirely joking.

Source: "Theology and Falsification" by Antony Flew, republished in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, 1955.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 133.
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Obviously, this is a story meant to mimic the ones religious people tell about their gods. As you can see in the source citation, this thought experiment was brought up by Antony Flew who wrote the article "Theology and Falsification," which "argued that claims about God were merely vacuous where they could not be tested for truth or falsehood." Over on the blog Philosophical Disquisitions, academic philosopher John Danaher summarized the argument this way: "Many religious utterances...appear to be assertions or explanations for what we observe, but often undergo "death by a thousand qualifications" when confronted with evidence to the contrary. This renders the utterances meaningless, vacuous, and devoid of empirical or theological content."

Agreed. I've already written blog posts about the evolution of religion, the arguments for religion that all fail, and my hope for a world without religion, and then in my Response to Thought Experiment 9: Good God, we saw how Euthyphro's Dilemma from Plato showed that gods are not needed to explain goodness. Here now, we're seeing how the traditional concepts of gods have taken steps away from all the rest of the aspects of reality too. We've seen no evidence of gods from scientific observations of places and times as small as clearings in the woods for a few weeks, all the way up now to the expansion of the universe ever since the Big Bang. The proposed tangible qualities of gods has in turn been forced to shrink to ever smaller holes in our knowledge, towards what has become known as the god of the gaps, a form of the argument from ignorance fallacy. Gaps will always exist in what we know, but as I talked about in my Response to Thought Experiment 28: The Nightmare Scenario, I have little patience for non-falsifiable stories from philosophers invented to entertain us about the things we don't know, and I have even less patience for such stories from theologians looking to tell us what to do. So, feel free to trot this thought experiment out to your favorite believer if you're looking for an argument with them, but it'd probably be more fun to share instead this fantastic song called God of the Gaps, by the fascinating Canadian rapper Baba Brinkman off his album "The Rap Guide to Religion." It does a great job of tracing the arc of human definitions of gods from when they existed everywhere all the way to the tiny point of invisible nothingness that they occupy in my life now. Till next week...enjoy!

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Thought Experiment 45: The Invisible Gardener

3/7/2016

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Who's behind all of this exactly....?

Back to some familiar philosophical stomping grounds for this week's thought experiment.

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Stanley and Livingston had been observing the picturesque clearing for over two weeks, from the safety of their makeshift hideout.
   "We've seen no one at all," said Stanley, "and the clearing has not deteriorated in any way. Now will you finally admit that you were wrong: no gardener tends this site."
   "My dear Stanley," replied Livingston, "remember I did allow that it might be an invisible gardener."
   "But this gardener has made not even the quietist of noises nor disturbed so much as a single leaf. Thus, I maintain, it is no gardener at all."
   "My invisible gardener," continued Livingston, "is also silent and intangible."
   Stanley was exasperated. "Damn it! What the hell is the difference between a silent, invisible, intangible gardner and no gardener at all?"
"Easy," replied the serene Livingston. "One looks after gardens. The other does not."
   "Dr. Livingston, I presume," said Stanley with a sigh, "will therefore have no objection if I swiftly dispatch him to a soundless, odourless, invisible, and intangible heaven."
From the murderous look in Stanley's eye, he was not entirely joking.

Source: "Theology and Falsification" by Antony Flew, republished in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, 1955.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 133.
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So, do you side with Livingston on the question of invisible gardeners, or like Stanley, do you think such ideas should be out of sight, out of mind? I'll be back on Friday with a response you can probably see coming a mile away.

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Response to Thought Experiment 44: Till Death Us Do Part

3/4/2016

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One of the best rational decisions I ever made...

I thought this week's thought experiment was going to be pretty quick and straightforward, requiring a simple one-off answer. But judging by some of the reader comments that were submitted when I introduced this experiment, I have more to write now, and will probably have more to defend and respond to later as well. Such is the nature of repeated interactions....a point that will become important in a moment. For now, let's remind ourselves of the thought experiment under consideration.

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Harry and Sophie wanted to take seriously the words the minister would utter as they exchanged rings: "These two lives are now joined in one unbroken circle." This meant putting their collective interest first, and their individual interests second. If they could do that, the marriage would be better for both of them.
But Harry had seen his own parents divorce and too many friends and relations hurt by betrayal and deceit to accept this unquestioningly. The calculating part of his brain reasoned that, if he put himself second, but Sophie put herself first, Sophie would get a good deal from the marriage but he wouldn't. In other words, he risked being taken for a mug if he romantically failed to protect his own interest.
Sophie had similar thoughts. They had even discussed the problem and agreed that they really would not be egotistical in the marriage. But neither could be sure the other would keep their part of the bargain, so the safest course of action for both was to secretly look out for themselves. That inevitably meant the marriage would not be as good as it could have been. But surely it was the only rational course of action to take?

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 130.
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As I mentioned on Monday, I very recently celebrated my 14th wedding anniversary. So maybe that coloured my reaction, but honestly, when I read this, I viewed it as such a patently absurd view of marriage that I had to read Baggini's discussion of his thought experiment to understand why exactly he'd invented it. Here is what he said:

This is a form of problem known as the 'prisoner's dilemma', after a well-known example concerning how two prisoners should plead. Prisoner's dilemmas can occur when cooperation is required to achieve the best result, but neither party can guarantee the other will play ball. ... The dilemma reveals the limitations of the rational pursuit of self-interest. If we all individually decide to do what is best for each one of us, we may end up worse off than we could have been if we had cooperated. But to cooperate effectively, even if our motive for doing so is self-interest, we need to trust one another. And trust is not founded on rational arguments.

What nonsense! The Prisoner's Dilemma is a very specific situation from game theory where no communication is permitted between the two prisoners who must make a one-time decision that will affect the entire outcome of the game. Does that sound anything like a marriage? Of course not. In the real world, people talk to one another and we have multiple chances to build reputations for trust. The real world is much more likely to be modeled by the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. In this version:

"...two players play prisoners' dilemma more than once in succession and they remember previous actions of their opponent and change their strategy accordingly... The iterated prisoners' dilemma game is fundamental to some theories of human cooperation and trust. On the assumption that the game can model transactions between two people requiring trust, cooperative behaviour in populations may be modeled by a multi-player, iterated, version of the game. Interest in the iterated prisoners' dilemma (IPD) was kindled by Robert Axelrod in his book The Evolution of Cooperation (1984). In it he reports on a tournament he organized of the N step prisoners' dilemma (with N fixed) in which participants have to choose their mutual strategy again and again, and have memory of their previous encounters. Axelrod invited academic colleagues all over the world to devise computer strategies to compete in an IPD tournament. The programs that were entered varied widely in algorithmic complexity, initial hostility, capacity for forgiveness, and so forth. Axelrod discovered that when these encounters were repeated over a long period of time with many players, each with different strategies, greedy strategies tended to do very poorly in the long run while more altruistic strategies did better, as judged purely by self-interest. He used this to show a possible mechanism for the evolution of altruistic behaviour from mechanisms that are initially purely selfish, by natural selection. The winning deterministic strategy was tit for tat, which Anatol Rapoport developed and entered into the tournament. It was the simplest of any program entered, containing only four lines of BASIC, and won the contest. The strategy is simply to cooperate on the first iteration of the game; after that, the player does what his or her opponent did on the previous move."

Using only the cold logic of analysis from this portion of game theory, Harry and Sophie were unlikely to have just arrived at the wedding day with no knowledge or experience of trusting one another. They were much more likely to have begun dating several months or years ago, took many turns proving they were each willing to sacrifice for one another on occasion, and then made a rational decision to believe the other one could be trusted when they promised to do so for the duration of their marriage. The simple answer to this thought experiment lies in the fact that life is not a one-off academic exercise with artificial constraints placed upon it.

That's all I would have written about this experiment, but a couple reader comments expanded the area of inquiry in ways that deserve to be touched upon. First, Dr. John Johnson wrote:

I suspect that Baggini is using this scenario as an example of the prisoner's dilemma or game theory more generally. [my note: Ding, ding, ding, ding! Well spotted, John.] My own take on this problem is that it represents the fuzzy thinking inherent in talking about the "interests of collectives" over and beyond the interests of the individuals who are members of a collective. ... I submit that there is no such thing as the "interest of the collective" that transcends the interests of the individuals. In every case, a particular event can be, to some degree, for or against the interests of all of the individuals, but there is no event that is in the interest of the collective but not in the interests of the individuals. I challenge anyone to give an example of something that is "good for the marriage" but not good for either of the individuals in the marriage. ... Language about "common good" or "good of the marriage" is a rhetorical smokescreen to convince the person whose interests are less served to go along with what the person whose interests are more served.

Again, I think time helps clear up some of this concern about what is good for a collective vs. what is good for an individual. Short-term interests often need to be sacrificed for the sake of long-term gains, and this is what is often the issue when trying to strike the balance between individuals and collectives. For example, in the case of the use of economic "commons", it is detrimental to all individuals now to limit their exploitation of the resource in the common, but it is beneficial to all individuals over the long term to make that sacrifice. Further complicating the issue is the fact that individuals have their own internally competing needs and wants, so some of them must be sacrificed for the sake of other ones too. My short-term gluttonous instincts must regularly be sacrificed for the long-term benefits of my desire for health. In the case of my marriage, both of our short-term urges for pleasurable couplings with sexy strangers should be sacrificed for the long-term benefits of being able to trust that a supportive partner will be there for us when we need it. You could say monogamy is "good for the marriage" but not "good for either individual", but only if you don't look at the benefits the individuals eventually get from the marriage. It's a complicated math, but tradeoffs must be made the longer you look and the larger set of interests you realize you must take into account. As I wrote in this month's cover story in Humanist magazine:

"While the freedoms and liberalism of the Enlightenment can be viewed as understandable and beneficial reactions to centuries of authoritarianism, oppressive governments, and rigid religious dogmas, I would argue we have now taken this too far. Modern communitarianism is a reaction to this; it is a reaction to excessive individualism with its overemphasis on individual rights that has led people to become selfish and egocentric. Communitarian philosopher Amitai Etzioni writes that all societies must have a carefully crafted balance between rights and responsibilities and between autonomy and order. Focusing on one side alone is not enough."

Now for a much deeper question—the meaning of love itself. In a comment on this week's thought experiment, reader atthatmatt wrote:

True love simply means that you prioritize the other person higher than yourself. ... If just one of them truly loved the other, the deal would work, at least abstractly. The game logic wouldn't matter, because one of them would go all in regardless of the other's decision. ... A person who is fully committed to someone who isn't fully committed in return is in a bit of a pickle. They have a hard choice to make.

First, I'll agree with the second half of that comment that a relationship might be sustainable if one person is truly committed and open to being exploitable by another one who is happy to accept that. I don't think such a relationship is optimal though, nor truly sustainable given the possibility the committed person will stop being a sucker some day, at which point it will be awfully difficult to make up the imbalance accrued in the relationship.

As for true love, I think it's not as simple as prioritizing one person higher than yourself. Let me share some passages from some great books on love to help me explain my point. First, I recently re-read Trine Erotic by evolutionary psychology professor Alice Andrews, and there was this piece of dialogue:

"Well, you're right. I've been in love. And it's what I tried to explore in [a previous story]. I called it the hot love / warm love meme. It's romantic love versus companionate love, I think. Being in hot, romantic love, there is never a chance to think. Never. Not a gulp of air. Nothing. No control. No sense of self. Just 'other'. Just feeling. No thoughts. No thought about being selfless, just selfless... But the paradox is, we can look at that and see that it's really selfish, right? To be unthinking is selfish. The mechanicalness of it doesn't really leave room for you to consider the other person, even though that's all it feels like you're doing."

These fictional words are a perfect example of the problem with such "other directed" love as discussed in two passages from Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy by the brilliant existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom. He wrote:

Every therapist knows that the crucial first step in therapy is the patient's assumption of responsibility for his or her life predicament. As long as one believes that one's problems are caused by some force or agency outside oneself, there is no leverage in therapy. If, after all, the problem lies out there, then why should one change oneself? It is the outside world (friends, job, spouse) that must be changed—or exchanged. (Prologue)

I do not like to work with patients who are in love. Perhaps it is because of envy—I , too, crave enchantment. Perhaps it is because love and psychotherapy are fundamentally incompatible. The good therapist fights darkness and seeks illumination, while romantic love is sustained by mystery and crumbles upon inspection. I hate to be love's executioner. (Opening to Chapter 1)

So, I consider these three passages, and I think you cannot say love is simply prioritizing another over yourself. Firstly, you could again look at the iterated version of the prisoner's dilemma and say you don't always have to prioritize an 'other' over yourself. You just have to take it in turns to do so. That would avoid the deadlock of a "clash of martyrs" that Dr. Johnson worried about in his comment on this idea. More importantly, however, is the question of how you decide to prioritize another person. What is the criteria? Where does that criteria come from? These questions show that there is something more fundamental to love than simply prioritizing another person.

So what is my position? I argue that true love is driven by long-term admiration of a person's life, as expressed by their personal philosophies that are rationally chosen and conscientiously acted upon. In my writings on How to Know Thyself, I had these two short things to say about spouses:

Finding a romantic partner is natural and useful. A good one will provide the focus of your secure attachment needs in adulthood, thus providing much safety and comfort for exploration. Primal sexual urges lead some to believe that monogamy is not natural, but that is short-term yielding to gratification at the expense of long-term happiness and satisfaction. A spouse can be your companion through life. Find one that can grow and develop with you over the long term. Find one whose life goals are compatible with yours. Find love - love being the admiration of a person’s life.

It takes time to know someone, to hear their stories, know their beliefs, see them in action, see them respond to stress. It takes time to find love. Do not mistake the short-term feelings of desire, lust, and curiosity, strong as they may be, for the long-term feeling of love. Do not believe in the myth of love at first sight—that denigrates the actual meaning of the word. Do not believe that there is only one soul mate out there for you. There are no souls, and there are many people worthy of love if you are worthy of it yourself.

Those were very short, clinical conclusions about spouses and love that I wrote to get the ball rolling for discussions about my philosophical beliefs. I know they need much more to back them up, and I have tried to do that through this blog and my fictional writings. I'm almost done with my next novel, and there happens to be a big passage in it on this topic, which I'd like to share now. To set it up, you need to know that the novel is about a biotechnology firm that is seeking candidates for new life-extension technologies that stop their ageing process and render them effectively immortal in the absence of accidents. This passage is from an interview between one of the candidates and the leader of the biotech firm. (I've changed some names and titles to stop any spoilers from being released.) I hope it clears up some of what I'm trying to say about love.

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(book excerpt)

"...What about love? The initial rush of falling in love is so strong, but all great love stories end with saying ‘till death do us part.’ How will we ever say that to someone without death looming over us any more? Will we have to promise to love a person forever? Is that even possible? And if we can’t promise to love someone forever, will we ever promise it at all? I guess I’m wondering what the chances are that this program might actually take love as we know it away from us all.”
Bob paused to consider Bill's questions for a moment before he was ready to begin. Once he was, he looked directly at Bill and asked him, “Have you been in love before?”
“A few times.”
“And what’s the longest amount of time you’ve been in love?”
“A little over two years once, when I was in college. But our lives sort of just led us on our separate ways. That’s one reason I’m leery of this project. I can’t imagine two lives leading down a shared path for hundreds and hundreds of years.”
“Well, I’ll be honest with you, Bill. I’m not sure how that will play out either. I can tell you that sometimes love requires sacrifices of the self, but I don’t know how long we might be prepared to sacrifice something—a perfect job for example, or some time apart—in order to make love last.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
“What I do know though, is that we need to be careful about which kind of romantic love we are talking about. Psychologists currently say there are two, so we should consider each one. The first type is passionate love. That’s the short-term burst of chemicals built on ancient biological responses that makes us feel like we’re falling head over heels and unable to focus on anything else. Do you know that feeling?”
“Yes. You could say that I do.”
Bob tilted his head slightly at Bill's use of the present tense, but he continued on without pressing for an explanation.
“Well, based on our biology, jolts from that type of love won’t ever stop reoccurring, but we already regularly ignore this for the sake of the second type of love, which is what psychologists call companionate love. That’s the feeling one has about a long, slow, deepened relationship between two people that have shared a life together for many years. It may never cause the intense biochemical highs of passionate love, but for many people the strength and breadth of it can far outweigh the temporary pleasures of passionate love.”
“I’m familiar with that. My parents, for example, seem to have built that kind of love; they’ve been married for almost forty years. But I have no idea if they’d want to make it to four hundred.”
“I don’t know that either, but here’s what I can say about the possibility of companionate love lasting for a candidate. Leonardo DaVinci once said, ‘Those who try to censor knowledge do harm to both knowledge and love, because love is the offspring of knowledge, and the passion of love grows in proportion to the certainty of knowledge.’ You know that my wife’s life was cut short some years ago, but up until that time, as I grew to know my wife more and more, I became more and more certain of my love for her. This doesn’t happen in all marriages, but when it does, you get the kind of people who are ninety-five years old and have been married for seventy-five years and say they would never want to live apart from their spouse. We can take comfort from those couples and believe that love could last for our candidates. Or they might work harder to find that type of love. Just like many people who are stuck in bad jobs currently wait things out because there’s no time to start again, the same thing is probably true for many people stuck in bad marriages. I’d like to think that our life-extension technology would liberate those people to go and find better matches.”
“But how would we ever know we had found the right match?” Bill asked, thinking back on his own recent failure at this task. “Isn’t love something that’s out of our control? Wouldn’t the life-extension program just doom us to repeating painful mistakes over and over until we maybe get lucky and get it right?”
“Ah, well, the passionate love of chemical reactions does seem out of our control, but that’s not the case for companionate love built over the long term. I see why most people don’t think of it that way though. Because the passionate love comes first, and because marriages were unequal partnerships for much of recorded history, philosophers actually have had a long history of considering love as something to be leery of. Eastern philosophies, for example, generally teach that attachment leads to unhappiness. And so love, being one of the greatest attachments, is therefore something these ancient belief systems often say should be held at a distance. In the west, it was even worse. The philosophers there, from Plato all the way through the canon of Christian moralists, believed that love debased us as humans, that love consumed us to the point of irrationality and illogical distractions, and kept us from acting with virtue. While that can certainly be the case under the unthinking spell of passionate love, I believe these philosophers all missed the kind of wisdom that true companionate love requires.
“That kind of love,” Bob continued, “is directed towards another person’s entire life. It is a response to the values that person embodies, the values that form a person’s character, that give them their goals, that drive their smallest reactions and gestures. It is for those unique and inimitable actions that we grow to adore and cherish someone over time. And they’re all driven by values, which can be rationally constructed and chosen. Does that kind of love sound capricious or like something that is out of our control?”
“No,” Bill had to admit, “which I have to say is a bit of good news.”
“It is,” Bob agreed. “One of the worst consequences of rational philosophers ceding discussions about love to the emotional romantics has been the widespread survival of the belief that love is a ‘matter of the heart’, or that ‘the heart wants what the heart wants’, and there is nothing that the mind can do about it. Those beliefs have doomed countless people to weak-willed mistakes and unnecessary heartbreak. Those beliefs may be true for passionate love, but that is the lesser and fleeting of the two loves. That love is blind, whereas companionate love can see, for it is built on the foundation of a shared philosophy.”
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So with that, I'll just close by saying thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts in an effort to build a shared philosophy with me. I do love you for that.

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