Gadzooks! Are philosophers really this dumb? I get it that they REALLY like ideas, but why does that lead them to defend the belief that the universe is made up of physical stuff AND mental stuff, as if the two were separable? This week's thought experiment is a variation of Frank Jackson's paper from 1982 titled "Epiphenomenal Qualia", which was extended and clarified (and given a much better title) in 1986 with the paper "What Mary Didn't Know." It forms the basis for The Knowledge Argument, which "aims to establish that conscious experience involves non-physical properties" and is apparently "one of the most discussed arguments against physicalism." Honestly, reading through the lengthy Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy entry on this argument made me feel like I was back in the middle ages surrounded by philosophers trying to prove the existence of god. But before I go any further, let's look at the actual experiment.

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     Mary knows everything there is to know about the colour red. As a scientist, it has been her life's work. If you want to know why we can't see infrared, why tomatoes are red, or why red is the colour of passion, Mary is your woman.
     All this would be unremarkable, if it weren't for the fact that Mary is an achromat: she has no colour vision at all. The world, for Mary, looks like a black and white movie.
     Now, however, all that is to change. The cones on her retina are not themselves defective, it is simply that the signals are not processed by the brain. Advances in neurosurgery now mean that this can be fixed. Mary will soon see the world in colour for the first time.
     So despite her wide knowledge, perhaps she doesn't know everything about the colour red after all. There is one thing left for her to find out: what red looks like.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 37.
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To put a finer point on this and understand just how subversive this line of argument is attempting to be, it's helpful to go back to Jackson's 1986 paper and quote the first paragraph from it:

Mary is confined to a black-and-white room, is educated through black-and-white-books, and through lectures relayed on black-and-white television. In this way she learns everything there is to know about the physical nature of the world. She knows all the physical facts about us and our environment, in a wide sense of 'physical' which includes everything in completed physics, chemistry, and neurophysiology, and all there is to know about the causal and relational facts consequent upon all this, including of course functional roles. If physicalism is true, she knows all there is to know. For to suppose otherwise is to suppose that there is more to know than every physical fact, and that is just what physicalism denies.

In logical form, the argument goes something like this:

(1) Mary has all the physical information concerning human color vision before her release.
(2) But there is some information about human color vision that she does not have before her release.
Therefore
(3) Not all information is physical information.

Hogwash! The first premise is patently false because Mary does not have "all the physical information" and cannot know "all there is to know" about this subject without having experienced it firsthand. Why? Precisely because we live in a physical universe where mental imaginings are not enough to move the physical atoms that make up the nerves in our eyes and the synapses in our brains. In philosophical terms, there is a real epistemic barrier to what we can learn no matter how much we sit in our rooms and read and think. All the travel books in the world cannot tell you what it feels like to walk around in Thailand. Nor can all the cook books in the world tell you what a peanut butter and mustard sandwich would taste like, even if you've separately already eaten lots of peanut butter and lots of mustard. (I imagine it would be quite horrible, but honestly the salty crunch with the vinegary spice might be appealing if it was balanced just right. I don't yet know.) All over the world and all throughout history, people have experienced new things for the first time and learned what that feels like. At no time did that create a non-physical entity in the universe. Our mental world is composed from different brain states, which a cursory study of neuroscience will readily explain.

"Hang on," the idealist might still say. "You physicalists may have seen around this particular trick of ours to try to separate experience from knowledge and place it out there in the ether, but you still haven't explained what it feels like to see red. Isn't knowledge about that subjective bit of consciousness something else entirely?"

I'm sure I'll have more to say about this in about 60 weeks when we get to Thomas Nagel's Bat and what that means for the study of consciousness, but as far as this week's argument against physicalism goes, no, it's not something else entirely and the idealist is just using different words to try to make it seem so. If the experience of seeing red was truly separable from the knowledge of what it feels like to see red, then not only could Mary know what it feels like to see red without having the actual experience (which she couldn't), but someone else could have the experience of seeing red without then knowing what it feels like to see red, and that cannot be done either. The physical experience is directly tied to the mental state of feeling the experience, and vice versa. This is because they are both formed from physical stuff and tied together by physical stuff. And with that, I'm done with this and going out to experience more new physical sensations.

Time to add this week's thought experiment to the back of your brain and let it tickle you for a while. This one's a doozy that I have always hated and can hardly wait to write my response to it. Have you heard it before?

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     Mary knows everything there is to know about the colour red. As a scientist, it has been her life's work. If you want to know why we can't see infrared, why tomatoes are red, or why red is the colour of passion, Mary is your woman.
     All this would be unremarkable, if it weren't for the fact that Mary is an achromat: she has no colour vision at all. The world, for Mary, looks like a black and white movie.
     Now, however, all that is to change. The cones on her retina are not themselves defective, it is simply that the signals are not processed by the brain. Advances in neurosurgery now mean that this can be fixed. Mary will soon see the world in colour for the first time.
     So despite her wide knowledge, perhaps she doesn't know everything about the colour red after all. There is one thing left for her to find out: what red looks like.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 37.
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This version of the Mary problem seems pretty innocent as it's presented, but the further implications that philosophers usually draw from this have been staggering (and quite malevolent in my view). To make that clear, and so you don't just dismiss this thought experiment too soon, here's part of the explanation that comes from Baggini when he discusses this issue.

"Most educated people don't have much time for the view that mind and body are two different kinds of stuff, which somehow coexist side by side. ... Simply rejecting one erroneous worldview, however, does not guarantee you will be left with a true one. If you kick out mind-body dualism, what is to replace it? The obvious candidate is physicalism: there is only one kind of stuff, physical stuff, and everything, including the human mind, is made of it. ... But physicalist zeal can go too far. ... This is what the story of Mary illustrates. As a scientist, Mary knows everything about red in physical terms. Yet there is something she doesn't know: what it looks like. No scientific account of the world can give her this knowledge. Science is objective, experimental, quantitative; sense experience - indeed all mental experience - is subjective, experiential, and qualitative. What this seems to show is that no physical description of the world, however complete, can capture what goes on in our minds. As philosophers put it, the mental is irreducible to the physical. This presents a challenge to physicalists. How can it be true both that there is nothing in the world apart from physical stuff, and yet at the same time, that there are mental events that cannot be explained in physical terms?"

So what do you think? As an evolutionary philosopher, I'm a confirmed physicalist who has always found this line of reasoning annoying, but how would you tackle it?

Unfortunately, there's not a lot to get into with this week's thought experiment. Fortunately, however, that means I have more time to go do what it's telling me to...

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     Roy looked down from the cliffs at the man drawing in the sand. The picture that started to emerge startled him. It was an extraordinary face, not realistically rendered, but seemingly viewed from many angles at once. In fact, it looked much like a Picasso.
     As soon as the thought entered his mind, his heart stopped. He lifted his binoculars to his eyes, which he then felt compelled to rub. The man on the beach was Picasso.
     Roy's pulse raced. He walked this route every day, and he knew that very soon the tide would sweep in and wash away a genuine Picasso original. Somehow, he had to try and save it. But how?
     Trying to hold back the sea was futile. Nor was there any way to take a cast of the sand, even if he had had the time he was actually so short of. Perhaps he could run back home for his camera. But that would at best preserve a record of the work, not the picture itself. And if he did try this, by the time he got back, the image would probably have been erased by the ocean. Perhaps then he should simply enjoy this private view as long as it lasted. As he stood watching, he didn't know whether to smile or cry.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 34.
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Last week's experiment about the ship Theseus being dismantled and repaired into two new boats served as a reminder that 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 the 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. Fortunately, when we really want to hold on to something, we do have long lasting nerve cells in our brains that allow us to keep memories for decades if they are important enough and if we revisit them occasionally. I hope this experiment will help me remember to savour the right things in my life more often and more deeply.

The artist Andy Goldsworthy, whose work was profiled in the mesmerising documentary Rivers and Tides, is probably the best I've seen at exploring this notion of time and ephemerality. Check out the trailer below and then consider seeing the film to let this idea sink in more deeply. It's a worthwhile experience that lasts far longer than one might expect...

Time for this week's thought experiment. Enjoy these while they last!

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     Roy looked down from the cliffs at the man drawing in the sand. The picture that started to emerge startled him. It was an extraordinary face, not realistically rendered, but seemingly viewed from many angles at once. In fact, it looked much like a Picasso.
     As soon as the thought entered his mind, his heart stopped. He lifted his binoculars to his eyes, which he then felt compelled to rub. The an on the beach was Picasso.
     Roy's pulse raced. He walked this route every day, and he knew that very soon the tide would sweep in and wash away a genuine Picasso original. Somehow, he had to try and save it. But how?
     Trying to hold back the sea was futile. Nor was there any way to take a cast of the sand, even if he had had the time he was actually so short of. Perhaps he could run back home for his camera. But that would at best preserve a record of the work, not the picture itself. And if he did try this, by the time he got back, the image would probably have been erased by the ocean. Perhaps then he should simply enjoy this private view as long as it lasted. As he stood watching, he didn't know whether to smile or cry.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 34.
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I haven't had to mention it before, but in the book I'm sourcing these 100 thought experiments from, the author Julian Baggini ends each entry with a "See also" section where he lists other experiments that are related to that topic. After blogging about 10 of these now, I've finally reached the first one that's fairly similar (according to Baggini) to one I've already tackled, but let's get a reminder now of this week's experiment and then see if I can't say something new about it.

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     This is not what Ray North had bargained for. As an international master criminal he prided himself on being able to get the job done. His latest client had demanded that he steal the famous yacht Theseus, the vessel from which British newspaper magnate Lucas Grub had thrown himself to his death and which more recently had been the scene of the murder of LA rapper Daddy Iced Tea.
     But here he was in the dry dock where the boat had just finished being repaired, confronted by two seemingly identical yachts. North turned to the security man, who was being held at gunpoint by one of his cronies.
     "If you want to live, you'd better tell me which one of these is the real Theseus," demanded Ray.
     "That kinda depends," came the nervous reply. "You see, when we started to repair the ship, we needed to replace lots of parts. Only, we kept all the old parts. But as the work progressed, we ended up replacing virtually everything. When we had finished, some guys thought it would be good to use all the old parts to reconstruct another version of the ship. So that's what we've got. On the left, the Theseus repaired with new parts, and on the right, the Theseus restored from old parts."
     "But which one is the genuine Theseus?" demanded Ray.
     "I've told you all I know!" screamed the guard, as the crony tightened his grip. Ray scratched his head and started to think about how he could get away with both...

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 31.
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Have you figured out which experiment this is supposed to remind you of? It's a question of the boat's true identity that we are worried about here, so it's a similar problem to the one posed in thought experiment number 2: Beam Me Up. My response to that problem included a passage I wrote during my analysis of John Locke, which I think will be useful to bring up once again. So here it is:

"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."

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.

One of the best examples of this comes from evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould who, after a lifetime of studying fish, concluded that there was no such thing as a fish. "He reasoned that while there are many sea creatures, most of them are not closely related to each other. For example, a salmon is more closely related to a camel than it is to a hagfish." And yet....we all still communicate using the word "fish."

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. Thought experiments like this one about the ship Theseus though, serve as excellent reminders of the fuzziness that surrounds us.

So the true identity of Theseus has enlarged. It's now a little bit contained in each of the two new boats, and there are probably pieces of it laying around on the shop floor of the dry dock as well. For legal purposes, an appropriate authority may confer continuity of ownership from one boat to the next, and that might be what the criminal Ray North is concerned with, but that doesn't change the changing nature of Theseus' actual identity.

This may sound like a silly example concerning an imaginary object of little importance, but I for one will try to remember it 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.....

This week's thought experiment is another one about identity. See what you think of it.

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     This is not what Ray North had bargained for. As an international master criminal he prided himself on being able to get the job done. His latest client had demanded that he steal the famous yacht Theseus, the vessel from which British newspaper magnate Lucas Grub had thrown himself to his death and which more recently had been the scene of the murder of LA rapper Daddy Iced Tea.
     But here he was in the dry dock where the boat had just finished being repaired, confronted by two seemingly identical yachts. North turned to the security man, who was being held at gunpoint by one of his cronies.
     "If you want to live, you'd better tell me which one of these is the real Theseus," demanded Ray.
     "That kinda depends," came the nervous reply. "You see, when we started to repair the ship, we needed to replace lots of parts. Only, we kept all the old parts. But as the work progressed, we ended up replacing virtually everything. When we had finished, some guys thought it would be good to use all the old parts to reconstruct another version of the ship. So that's what we've got. On the left, the Theseus repaired with new parts, and on the right, the Theseus restored from old parts."
     "But which one is the genuine Theseus?" demanded Ray.
     "I've told you all I know!" screamed the guard, as the crony tightened his grip. Ray scratched his head and started to think about how he could get away with both...

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 31.
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So which one would you take? I'll be back on Friday with my answer.

This week's thought experiment tries to give you a practical situation where John Rawls' veil of ignorance might actually come into play. If you remember from my post on Rawls, his veil of ignorance goes something like this:

The “original position” is Rawls’ thought experiment to replace the imagery of a savage state of nature from prior political philosophers like Thomas Hobbes. In it, parties select principles that will determine the basic structure of the society they will live in. This choice is made from behind a “veil of ignorance,” which would deprive participants of information about their particular characteristics: his or her ethnicity, social status, gender, and conception of the good (an individual's idea of how to lead a good life). This forces participants to select principles impartially and rationally. The original position is designed to reflect what principles of justice would be manifest in a society premised on free and fair cooperation between citizens, including respect for liberty, and an interest in reciprocity.

We will never have the opportunity like this to actually discuss societal justice before our "particular characteristics" come into existence, but we might get a chance to discuss a new blueprint for a new society some day. Like in this thought experiment for example:

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     The twenty civilians selected to go and live on the Mars colony were set an unusual task. On the red planet there would be a number of goods, including accommodation, food, drink, and luxury items. They had to decide, before they went out, on what basis these goods would be distributed. But, critically, they did not know what the most important tasks would be on the colony. All the work could be manual, or none of it. It might require great intelligence, it might be better suited to those less in need of mental stimulation.
     The first suggestion made was that everything should be shared equally: from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs. But then someone raised an objection. If there was lots of work to be done and someone refused to do their share, wouldn't it be unfair to reward them with an equal slice of the cake? Surely there needed to be an incentive to contribute?
     The objection was accepted, but that just seemed to lead to more problems. Fairness did not appear to mean the same as giving everyone the same. But what then did it mean?

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 28.
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So, unlike Rawls, we're not focusing on all issues of social justice, such as those concerning the treatment of different genders, races, or social status. We're really just focusing in on economic justice for this experiment. As a reminder, in my post What Can Evolution Tell Us About the Economy?, I laid out a few basic principles for this topic. Firstly:

The goal of an economic system is to maximize the survival of the species. Its goal is not to maximize profits or consumer benefits.

This is easy to lose sight of when talking about 6 billion people who are dominating the planet and seem to be in little (imminent) danger of going extinct. For 20 people trying to carve out a habitable niche on a hostile foreign planet though, the importance of this tenet becomes much more obvious. One of the more radical proposals being discussed these days to help alleviate poverty and income inequality is the idea of an unconditional basic income, which is "a form of social security in which all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money, either from a government or some other public institution, in addition to any income received from elsewhere." There are lots of reasons why countries like Switzerland are considering this idea, but on Mars, where each of the 20 people in this thought experiment would be incredibly important to keep alive, and presumably they would have been chosen for the mission because of their work ethic, it seems obvious that this would be the first place to start when distributing the local resources. Basic accommodation, food, and drink to support existence should be given to all. But what about the luxury goods? How should those be distributed? Let's look at a few more of my economic principles for guidance.

Advocating free market capitalism for an economic system is advocating for extreme competition. But as competition gets fiercer and fiercer, the time horizon for survival becomes shorter and shorter as too many firms and individuals must sacrifice the long term just to stay alive in the short term. Sacrificing the long term threatens the survival of the species.

Advocating communism for an economic system is advocating for extreme cooperation. But without competition, there are no losers and no incentives for winners. Progress grinds to a halt and the species remains stagnant until it is overtaken by events or other species. This is also a threat over the long term.

The perfect economic system is somewhere between these extremes of competition and cooperation. No perfect balance can be known ahead of time and the economy is too complicated to forecast its design with great accuracy. We must set broad and balanced goals for outcomes and adjust market mechanisms by trial and error to reach these goals. Minimize market failures. Protect commons. Price in externalities. Create a long-term bias. Favor sustainability. Protect consumers. Ease the movement of and access to capital and labor. Provide employment or retraining opportunities. Invest in innovation. Keep exposure to debt default low. Favor robustness over fragility. To each according to his or her talent and effort; not according to his or her means or needs. Replace the extremes of capitalism and communism with these sustainable principles of "evism."

Without knowing the precise nature of the luxury goods or what the 20 people in our experiment will be doing we can't create a defined distribution plan, but using these general philosophical principles along with a few successful examples from the business world, we should be able to develop a process that works. I know, for example, that Whole Foods has a voting requirement for team members to decide if new hires should continue to be employed after 30-60 days. It's probably not an option to send people home all the way from Mars, but perhaps a trial run on Earth followed by this procedure would help select a good team. Companies like Buffer have been successful having complete transparency with their salaries. This seems like a good idea to squelch gossip and unnecessary worry among our small group. And I have also read about some organisations experimenting with team members voting on the salaries of others within their groups. Some NBA teams distribute playoff earnings this way. That may not work in enormous and impersonal bureaucracies and economies, but for our small band of intrepid explorers it seems like a good idea to hold everyone accountable.

So, that's my plan. Select the group carefully for how well they work together, pay everyone enough to live, then vote for how to distribute the rest of the resources with the results being transparent to all. What do you think? Is this a good start? What downsides do you foresee and how might you address those?

Sorry I'm a day late with this week's thought experiment. Monday was a holiday here in Britain and I just felt like slacking off with my dog in a big grassy field all afternoon. So what are you going to do to me about that?

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     The twenty civilians selected to go and live on the Mars colony were set an unusual task. On the red planet there would be a number of goods, including accommodation, food, drink, and luxury items. They had to decide, before they went out, on what basis these goods would be distributed. But, critically, they did not know what the most important tasks would be on the colony. All the work could be manual, or none of it. It might require great intelligence, it might be better suited to those less in need of mental stimulation.
     The first suggestion made was that everything should be shared equally: from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs. But then someone raised an objection. If there was lots of work to be done and someone refused to do their share, wouldn't it be unfair to reward them with an equal slice of the cake? Surely there needed to be an incentive to contribute?
     The objection was accepted, but that just seemed to lead to more problems. Fairness did not appear to mean the same as giving everyone the same. But what then did it mean?

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 28.
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What do you think? And please don't just say "the market will decide" because then I will know you haven't given this any serious thought.

Somewhere, there's a picture of me at age 5 or 6 sorting my matchbox cars according to speed, as determined from dozens of races down gravity-fed race tracks. It seems I've always had a mind that likes to experiment and organise. I was also a first-born son in a nurturing family that moved to the country where it was safe for me to explore every nook and cranny in my environment. I grew to be very slightly above average in height, but with quite high levels of coordination, so of all the sports I tried, volleyball was the one I excelled at the most, so much so that I eventually moved 3,000 miles away from my rural, religious upbringing to be near the epicentre of the volleyball world in urban and progressive California. I was painfully shy in my youth - generally a sign of strong emotional concern with social evaluation. But I was also forged in a competitive family that forced the development of a prefrontal cortex able to suppress and overcome my emotional floods if I wanted to win on smaller or larger stages. And it sure felt good to win.

How many of us have origin stories like this? Ones where some combination of nature and nurture that was completely out of our control helped define who we are today. I watched the BBC documentary Human Planet last week and saw all kinds of things I didn't know humans could know - like how to train a fig tree to grow roots across a river so they'll form a bridge for our descendants in a few hundred years, or how you can cook a tarantula to perfection because they're done when their leg joints start to hiss while roasting over the fire. I've never remotely considered actions like these because we can't learn from things we haven't experienced. But if a brain scanner could see all the synaptic connections that have been made from what I've experienced and place that information in the context of my genetic strengths and weaknesses, could a sufficiently intelligent computer program figure out how I'm likely to react to the next stimulus that comes along? Isn't that what we already do when we know ahead of time how loved ones will react to certain events? And what does all this mean for this week's thought experiment?

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     For the seventy-third series of Big Brother, the producers had introduced a fiendish new toy: Pierre. The show's consultant psychologist explained how it would work.
     'As you know, the brain is the engine of thought and action, and the brain is entirely physical. Our understanding of the laws of physics is such that we can now accurately predict how people's brains will react - and thus how people will think - in response to events in their environment.
     'On entering the Big Brother space station, a brain scanner maps the brain states of all the participants. Our supercomputer, Pierre, monitors the various stimuli the contestants are exposed to and is able then to predict what their future behaviour will be.
     'Of course, all this is so fiendishly complicated that there are severe limits. That is why the technology works best in a controlled, enclosed environment such as the Big Brother space station, and also why predictions can only be made for a few moments ahead, since tiny errors in predictions soon compound themselves into large ones. But viewers will enjoy seeing the computer predict how the contestants are about to react. In a sense, we will know their minds better than they do themselves.'

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 25.
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First, let me pick at two items from this scenario. 1) If anyone should know that the laws of physics aren't enough to predict the behaviour of a human being, it should be a show's psychologist. Wherever emotions are involved, every action is not met with an equal and opposite reaction. Psychological needs are capable of outweighing physical ones, to the point that even in an extreme event like being shot at by someone with a gun, we can imagine responses ranging from diving out of the way to leaning into the bullet. And both of those responses could change based on who else was in the room with us or whether we had spent the last several hours focusing on depressing events in our lives, heroic actions of martyrs, or how much we longed to see a loved one in another country. This leads to my second point about this thought experiment, that 2) "enclosed environments" like space stations aren't really controlled environments after all. With memory, imagination, and focus of attention, we can provide any stimulus we want.

Now, given all of this super-complexity of genetic makeups, lifetimes of experience to draw upon, and ever-changing body chemistry reacting to physical and mental processes, could behavioural outcomes still be predicted with any real certainty? As I said, we already do this to some extent. How often do people we know truly surprise us? It may happen from time to time, but those surprises can usually be explained once more facts are known. However, if we were to add the element of a computer (or a person) claiming to be able to perfectly predict our responses, then that fact alone would provide an additional stimulus to the actors in this scenario, which would probably change their responses. To me, this is similar to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (at least the observer effect portion of his idea) where the act of measuring is so intrusive that it actually changes the state of affairs. We social animals often need to be unpredictable. To defeat scheming rivals or cheaters, or even just to choose long-term gains over short-term pleasures, we need to be able to override any of the emotional tugs that pull is in many different and often contradictory directions. This is why we would rebel against Pierre's predictions, perhaps even acting randomly just to prove we weren't so transparent. To a compatibilist like myself in the free will vs. determinism debate, this is the kind of freedom we have that is important for our concepts of self-determination, moral responsibility, and social justice, even if we should have sympathy for others because not everything that influences us is under our control.

The argument to find the fine line between determinism and free will is an old one one that is likely to continue for centuries more, so I don't want to rehash that all here. I'll finish instead with my favourite literary example of how the theoretical actors in this version of Bigger Brother might respond to Pierre's observations. This comes from a passage by Doesteyevsky written way back in 1864 in his short novella Notes from Underground.

"…you say, science itself will teach man that he never had any caprice or will of his own, and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano key or the stop of an organ, and that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature.  Consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him.  All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 180,000, and entered in an index; or better still, there would be published certain edifying works of the nature of encyclopaedic lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will be no more incidents or adventures in the world.
     Then - this is all what you say - new economic relations will be established, all ready made and worked out with mathematical exactitude, so that every possible question will vanish in the twinkling of an eye, simply because every possible answer to it will be provided. Then the "Palace of Crystal" will be built. Then...in fact, those will be halcyon days. Of course there is no guaranteeing (this is my comment) that it will not be, for instance, frightfully dull (for what will one have to do when everything will be calculated and tabulated), but on the other hand everything will be extraordinarily rational. Of course boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom that sets one sticking golden pins into people, but that would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I dare say people will be thankful for the golden pins in them. Man is stupid, you know, phenomenally stupid; or rather he is not at all stupid, but he is so ungrateful that you could not find another like him in all creation. I, for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, a propos of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity a gentleman with ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical countenance were to arise and, putting his arms akimbo, say to us all: "I say, gentlemen, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!" That again would not matter, but what is annoying is that he would be sure to find followers - such is the nature of man. And all of that for the most foolish reason, which, one would think, was hardly worth mentioning: that is, that man everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated. And one may choose what is contrary to one's own interest, and sometimes one positively ought (that is my idea). One's own free unfettered choice, one's own caprice, however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at times to frenzy - is that very "most advantageous advantage" which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continuously being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice."

What do you think? Is that pretty much what you thought I'd say about this experiment? Am I becoming too predictable?