Tag Archives: philosophy

Attack, defend, and the nature of cooperation

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It’s interesting to be the subject of gossip. Many people gossip; it’s a part of the human condition, and at one point or another in our lives we’ve probably all gossipped and been the subject of gossip. Gossip seems to serve a function of some sort for many people–identity, perhaps (“Ooh, did you hear what so-and-so is doing? Isn’t it great that we’d never do anything like that?”), or an assaugement of guilt (Shakespeare’s King Lear describes himself as “a man more sinned against than sinning,” and it’s often true that a person may gossip about the litany of sins committed against him as a way of denying the sins he has committed).

Gossip is trecherous. It has a slippery way of coming back around on the people who gossip, revealing a bit more about their preconceptions and prejudices than they might perhaps wish. For example, one of the more amusing bits of gossip floating around the aether about me is that I’ve been gossiping myself about a couple of people, specifically by spreading rumors that these people were “kicked out” of a social group to which we all once belonged.

This gossip is interesting for a number of reasons: first, because it came back tome from several people we know in common; second, because the rumor itself is absurd (the social group in question has no cenetralized authority and no mechanism by which anyone can be “kicked out”–it’s not even possible; third, because it stands as an excellent example of the sort of bias which can create communication difficulties of the type I’ve written about before; and fourth, because I know exactly where this gossip came from, who originated it, and why.

There is a philosophy in the Bible, attributed to Jesus during the Sermon on the Mount, which says “whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” As I get older, I question the wisdom of this approach, at least in the case of gossip. Generally speaking, I have tended not to defend myself when others gossip about me, even in ways that are patently absurd and demonstrably false, as I couldn’t see any compelling reason to counter it; those whose opinions I value know better.

There’s a problem with that approach, though. Joseph Göbbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, put it pretty simply: if you tell a lie often enough, people will believe it. (This is the only explanation I can find for people who believe that Republicans favor small government and fiscal responsibility, for instance…but I digress.) By not countering a falsehood stated about you, you give strength and credance to that falsehood.

But I didn’t come here to talk about gossip. I came here to talk about the evolution of cooperation.

One of the puzzles of social anthropology is the evolution of cooperation. Primitive organisms are not cooperative; and a superficial look at the idea of cooperation tends to suggest that cooperation has negative survival value. If one animal shares its food with another, there’s less food available to the first; if resources are scarce, the survival advantage lies with the animal that doesn’t share. Complex, high-order cooperation carries a survival benefit, but how do organisms develop highly complex cooperation if simpler cooperation actually hurts an individual’s chances of survival?

The non-intuitive answer developed out of a branch of mathematics called “game theory,” and specifically from a famous example of a game theory puzzle called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Scientific American sponsored a contest to write a computer program that implemented a strategy for dealing with an iterative Prisoner’s Dilemma problem.

Put simply, a Prisoner’s Dilemma problem is a situation in which two people have a decision to make, and they can either cooperate or act selfishly; there’s a benefit to cooperation, but also a benefit to acting selfishly, and the largest payoff goes to the person who acts selfishly when the other person cooperates. The Scientific American contest challenged programmers to come up with a strategy for dealing with this sort of problem. Each program was pitted against the others for many iterations of the problem, and the programs that gained the most benefit went on to the next round while the programs that failed to gain benefit were ruled out. This simulates a system where, for example, an organism which gains the greatest amount of resources survives, and an organism that can’t obtain enough resources dies.

The prediction was that programs that tended to act selfishly would win, especially when pitted against programs that acted cooperatively; cooperation is a doomed strategy. What actually happened was unexpected and surprising: The most successful strategies were those that cooperated often, and the most successful of those was a simple strategy called “tit for tat,” which has only a couple of rules:

1. On the first round, cooperate.
2. On each successive round, do whatever the opposing program did last time–cooperate if it cooperates, act selfishly if it acts selfishly.

The fact that such a strategy can be successful is surprising because this strategy never gives the program more resources than the opposing program. The Tit for Tat strategy does not create situations where it actsselfishly when the other program cooperates–which is where the greatest gain is.

This has all kinds of implications for social biology; it’s not about getting more resources than all your competitors, just maintaining parity is enough. An organism can succeed simply by keeping up with its competitors–it doesn’t actually have to win. In fact, such an organism will win against organisms that act selfishly without provocation!

Coming around full circle to gossip: The ‘turn the other cheek’ philosophy might be represented as a Prisoner’s Dilemma “all-C” strategy, in which one cooperates all the time. Problem is, all-C doesn’t work. In the real world, when faced with opponents willing to act selfishly, all-C is a strategy that tends to get its clock cleaned. Jesus’ advice works fine in an environment where everyone else practices either an all-C or a tit-for-tat strategy, not so well in an environment like…oh, this world.

I have come to realize that my own personal strategy for dealing with things like rumors, gossip, and personal attacks is analogous to an all-C strategy; I seek not to answer the gossip, or correct the rumors (however absurd they may be), and I don’t respond to personal attacks at all. This is, I believe, not an effective way to deal with these situations.

What’s interesting is that I already knew that. In other situations, I’ve always been an advocate of speaking out against attack. For example, I’ve always believed that people who are members of a sexual or social or religious minority should speak out when they’re mischaracterized or attacked by others; if a person is gay, and does not speak out against homophobia when he encounters it, he actually assists the homophobe.

So, where does that leave me? I think that, in the future, I will adopt a more “tit-for-tat” approach to rumors and gossip–countering the falsehoods and misinformation people may, for whatever reason, disseminate, without engaging in similar tactics myself. We’ll see how this works.

A Socratic dialog on the virtues of pornography

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Ademia: Pornography is wrong. It’s vile and should be abolished from the earth.

Nestor: Why?

Ademia: For one thing, it degrades women. It makes women into sexual objects.

Nestor: Yet surely you must know that many women enjoy pornography. It doesn’t appeal only to men; in fact, there are studios that produce pornography which are owned by women, which produce porn written by women for women. Doesn’t the idea that it ‘degrades women’ rest on the foundation that only men enjoy it?

And in fact, is it not more valid to say that pornography degrades men? There are far more famous and well-known female porn stars than male porn stars, and often, a porn shoot shows nothing of the man save the region between his waist and his knees. Is this not more objectifying to the man than to the woman?

Ademia: Men can’t be sexually degraded. Men have far more power and far more control over sexuality in modern society than women do.

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Some thoughts on communication

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One of the strangest principles of quantum physics is the notion that an observer, on a quantum level, always interacts with the thing being observed. This principle has fueled all kinds of philosophical theories, and people have used it to construct ideas about how it’s impossible for a person to observe any part of the world without changing it.

The world of particle physics is a bizarre place, and things don’t behave according to the rules of the macroscopic world we live in. For example, a photon that’s directed at a beam splitter can go off in one of two directions. In reality, the photon acts like it goes off in both directions, and continues in both directions simultaneously. This condition is called a superposition of states. The photon continues going down both paths until it interacts with an observer somewhere, at which point the superposition collapses and the “phantom” photon that went the other way disappears as though it had never existed.

This effect is quite real; it can be measured and demonstrated in a lab. It’s led philosophers to posit that the entire universe is a construction of understanding–that we create the universe we live in just by observing it.

Problem is, the philosophy is bunk. You see, in terms of quantum mechanics, the word “observer” has a very specific meaning. An “observer” is nothing more than “a thing whose state depends on the state of the thing being observed.” If a photon in a superposition of states encounters an electron, and changes the electron’s energy state, then the electron is an “observer.”

Schrodinger’s cat would never work the way it does in the thought experiment. You can’t put a cat into a half-alive and half-dead superposition of states…because the Geiger counter is the observer in this system! It’s a thing whose state depends on the state of the thing being observed. The term “observer” does not mean “person looking at something;” a quantum “observer” need not be human, or sapient, or even alive at all!

But I didn’t come here to talk about quantum physics. I came here to talk about communication.

Philosophers have been led astray by quantum physics because of a fundamental communication error. They see a word, they believe they understand that word, and they go on as if that word means what they think it means. But in the domain of quantum physics, the word “observer” has a very narrow meaning that’s not the same as its ordinary, vernacular meaning. When we think “observer,” we think “some guy standing there watching something”–but that’s not what the physicist means at all.

Communication is a very tricky beast. On the one hand, human language and human communication is remarkably resiliant. If I type a sentence containing non-standard English futzpahs, even if you have never seen or heard those futzpahs before, you can still glork their meaning from context. On the other hand, it can go horribly wrong in so many different ways, sometimes it’s a bloody miracle anyone ever communicates with anyone else in the first place!

The simplest way for communication to go wrong is when one person uses a word in a way that the other person doesn’t understand, or uses a familiar word in an unfamiliar way. Unchecked, this can lead to all sorts of difficulties:

ALICE: Can you do me a favor and pass the sweeper?
BOB: Sweeper? What the hell is a sweeper?
ALICE: The thing that vacuums the rug. You know, the vacuum cleaner.
BOB: Oh! Right. okay, here you go.
ALICE (angry): You never help me out around the house! You expect me to do everything! I ask you to do one thing and you won’t do it!
BOB (confused): Huh? You asked me to pass the sweeper, and I gave you the vacuum cleaner! It’s what you wanted, right?
ALICE: No, I asked you to vacuum for me. ‘Pass the sweeper’ means ‘vacuum the rug.’
BOB: You asked me to pass the vacuum cleaner. When you say ‘pass the salt,’ I hand you the salt. When you say ‘pass the plate,’ I hand you the plate. So when you said ‘pass the vacuum cleaner,’ I assumed you wanted me to hand you the vacuum cleaner.

It pays to be very careful about the way you use language, and to make sure, before you get angry or emotionally invested in something, to make sure that you did, in fact, communicate the idea you thought you communicated.

The problem gets worse if one of the people involved already has an idea about what the other person has said, or is going to say, and has some kind of emotional or philosophical investment in that idea. For example, if Alice believes that Bob finds her ugly, Alice may see evidence of that belief in everything Bob says, even if Bob doesn’t hold that belief at all:

ALICE: You said I was ugly before we went to the restaurant!
BOB: No, I didn’t. I said I think the blue dress looks better on you than the red dress.
ALICE: But the blue dress covers more of my body than the red one! See, you think I’m ugly!

Compounding this problem is the fact that people can rarely remember word-for-word what was said to them five minutes ago; they remember only the gist of it, the meaning they got from the words. If the words were not understood, the erroneous meaning stays.

And just to add even more problems on top of the pile, an inference can be made on the basis of faulty logic. Relatively few people are good at logic; reason can be just as flawed as emotion, and logical errors can cause someone to get the wrong meaning even if the communication itself is fine.

ALICE: Bob thinks that I’m not good at relationships!
CINDY: Really? What did he say?
ALICE: He said that one indication of good relationship skills is a history of long-lasting relationships. But I haven’t had any long-lasting relationships. So he must think I don’t have good relationship skills!

(This particular fallacy is called “denying the antecedent,” and it takes the form “In order for there to be fire, there must be oxygen; there is no fire in this room; therefore, there is no oxygen in this room.” Its correlary, “affirming the consequent,” is the same error from the opposite direction: “In order for there to be fire, there must be oxygen; there is oxygen in this room; therefore, there is fire in this room.”)

A side effect of being emotionally invested in an idea can be that the person holding the idea doesn’t do even basic fact-checking on information that confirms that idea; for example, if Alice believes that Bob is a bad person, and is extremely dedicated to the belief that Bob is a bad person, then when Cindy tells Alice “Did you hear? Bob got arrested for molesting his six-year-old daughter!” then Alice may forever form a lingering association between Bob and pedophilia even if Alice knows that Bob has no children. People who want to believe something about a person may tend to accept without question rumors or gossip about that person, even if they know intellectually that the rumors or gossip cannot possibly be true.

And it just keeps getting worse. All these problems assume that the people involved are communicating ideas or concepts which they already have in common. When two diffeent people have totally dissimilar worldviews, the situation gets much worse. We fit our understanding of the world around us into a conceptual framework, and tend to take that conceptual framework for granted, without even ever questioning whether the framework is valid, universally applicable, or shared by the people around us.

ALICE: It’s obvious that people with multiple romantic relationships can’t possibly be committed, because ‘commitment’ means that you’re dedicated to oly one person. Someone who is not committed can’t be trusted, because they have no commitment to you.
BOB: But what if someone is committed to more than one person?
ALICE: Impossible. That’s a logical contradiction. ‘Commitment’ means ‘dedicated to only one person.’ You can’t be dedicated to two people any more than you can divide a circle into three halves.

This same sort of reasoning can cause problems in communication when one person’s words or ideas superficially resemble, but aren’t the same as, a different set of words or ideas that the listener has already formed an opinion about; what’ll happen is that the listener will assume that the words he’s hearing carry the same meaning as the words he’s already heard, and react as if they had the same meaning, when in fact they don’t.

ALICE: Jealousy is an internal emotional state. A person why says ‘I am jealous’ is making a statement about an internal feeling; you can not necessarily draw any conclusions about that person’s circumstance just from that statement.
BOB: That’s bullshit! Jealousy is not always caused by internal feelings; sometimes, a person might feel jealous because of something their partner has done. You’re just trying to dodge responsibility for your actions, that’s all.
ALICE: I didn’t say anything about the causes of jealousy.
BOB: Yes you did! You’re just repeating that tired old line that jealousy is all in someone’s head and that person needs to just get over it already.

Often, you’ll see several different forces at work screwing up communication at the same time. Witness, for example, the people who believe that Americans don’t have to pay tax. They point to the fact that the United States has a “voluntary” tax system, erroneously thinking that “voluntary” means “something you don’t have to do;” in the specific legal sense, “voluntary” means “you volunteer information to the government about the amount of tax you owe” (meaning that you make the calculations, then send the IRS the result of those calculations; in a non-voluntary system, the government calculates how much tax you owe, and sends you a bill). Furthermore, they’re heavily emotionally–and financially–invested in the flawed understanding.

On the whole, I’m not entirely convinced communication ever really works at all, and I’m beginning to have my doubts about language.

Some thoughts on happiness, life, and such

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Lessons learned from Shrek 2:

If I marry a queen and become king of a great kingdom, but only with the help of a scheming fairy godmother who has something she can hold over me or blackmail me with, I will, upon ascention to the throne, immediately have the royal assassins put her to death. Or, I will cast her into my deepest, darkest dungeon.

And there will be royal assassins, oh yes.

The secret to happiness, in two steps:

Step 1: Decide what kind of person you want to be, and what kind of life you want to live.

Step 2: Every time you make a choice or embark on a course of action, ask yourself: “Does this take me closer to the person I want to be?”

Random wisdom from The Book of Leadership and Strategy (a translation from a Chinese Taoist book Huainanzi), which happend to be sitting on the couch at a friend’s house:

There is no harm greater than killing innocent people and supporting unjust rulers. There is no calamity worse than exhausting the world’s resources to provide for the desires of an individual.

Some thoughts on truth and virtue

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“When in doubt, tell the truth.”
— Mark Twain

Some time ago, I was embroiled in a bit of a sticky situation between some friends of mine and some other friends of mine. The first friends had asked me, unbidden, if I knew something about the situation of the second friend; the second friend and I had talked about this very thing just days earlier; so I told the first friends what the second friend had said. As it turns out, the second friend had, for whatever reason, lied to the first friends about that very thing, and the lie was thus revealed.

Now, second friend probably had personal reasons for the deception; it was a messy situation, and second friend was having a lot of problems at the time. Nevertheless, the landmine blew up on me, even though second friend’s problems were NMB–Not My Baggage.

But I didn’t come here to talk about that. I came here to talk about courage.

I’ve generally held a zero-tolerance policy toward people who aren’t honest with me or with those around me. I’ve walked away from a few friendships because the friend in question is dishonest, or shows a pattern of dishonest or untrustworthy behavior.

Yet, at the same time, i don’t always believe that honesty of and by itself is a moral virtue. I believe there are times when it is acceptable to lie, and even times when it is unethical not to lie. (Trivial example: It’s 1930, Berlin, you’re hiding a family of Jewish refugees in your basement, the Gestapo knocks on the door and asks if you know the whereabouts of any Jews.)

So it’s not the lie itself that has the moral value; it’s the context. Given that, then when, exactly, is it acceptable to lie? What ruler can you use to measure the ethical value of a lie?

I’ve been spending a great deal of time thinking about that, and I’ve had something of an epiphany.

It’s not actually a lie, per se, that ticks me off. It’s what the lie represents. And specifically, it’s what the lie reveals about the liar’s courage.

Courage is a virtue. In the hypothetical case of a person hiding a family of Jews from the Gestapo, it requires greater courage to lie than it does to tell the truth. The lie is an act by which the person hiding those refugees stands by his principles–that wholesale genocide is wrong.

In thousands of ways great and small, everyone’s courage and dedication to the things they claim to believe in are tested, all the time. In the case of the situation involving my friends, telling the truth would have required the greater courage; the situation was messy, and standing up to that mess unflinchingly might have jeopardized the beginning of a romantic relationship. Few things are more fragile than a brand-new relationship in its earliest stages; I can appreciate why someone might lie in an attempt, however misguided, to protect such a thing, though it’s a short-term and flawed strategy at best.

Regardless, the lie betrayed a certain lack of courage, and it’s that which destroyed all chance of a continuing friendship betwen that person and I. A person who lacks courage can’t be counted on when things are difficult. Anyone can be honest and act with integrity when it’s easy; it’s the way people behave when things are hard that really matters, and it’s whether you can count on someone when things are hard that is the true measure of a person. Courage is a cardinal virtue; a person who has courage can be trusted, can be relied on.

Courage is rare precisely because it is difficult. When it comes right down to it, it’s altogether easy to act without courage; and whichever way one chooses–courage or cowardice–tends, over time, to become a habit.

All this was brogught back to mind recently, when I perused my journal and discovered this post. What, I wonder, does it reveal about the poster’s character?

What is the Matrix?

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I’ve talked to a lot of people who have been disappointed by Revolutions. I think I can understand why; many people seem to feel that the movie is about a war between men and machines set in a dystopian science-fiction future.

It’s not. It’s about the Void.

Everything that has a beginning, has an end

I was about ten years old when the Void first visited me. It was about three o’clock in the morning, and it suddenly hit me that there would come a time when everything that I am and everything I have done would cease to exist.

There has not been a day in my life since that moment when I have not been aware of the Void. A person once visited by the Void can never escape it.

It’s more than the fear of death. Death is a part of the Void, but it goes far beyond that; there will come a time when you die, when everything you have accomplished turns to dust, when the memory that you ever existed fades away, when the entire human race is no more, when even the planet you live on ceases to be. There is no escaping it; it is inevitable.

Much of human existance is about the Void. Religion seeks to offer an escape from the Void. This is why people commit atrocities in the name of God; this is what drives men to fly passenger liners into buildings. That which challenges one’s religious belief challenges one’s escape from the Void.

Art is about the Void. The creative impulse is fundamentally an act of defiance against it. That which we create reflects us; every time we create something novel, something that would never have existed save for our will, we create something independent from us that says “I was here; I have done something; this will exist even after I am gone.”

Even the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence is about the Void. As human understanding of the physical universe has improved, we have come to realize that we are a very tiny part of a very large universe. We as a species feel alone and fragile and desperately lonely; we need to know that there is someone, anyone, that shares this existance with us.

Love is about the Void. Science is about the Void. Philosophy is about the Void. And The Matrix is about the Void.

You see that? It’s Latin. It means ‘know thyself.’

Many people live out their lives, oblivious to the Void. They may see it out of the corner of their eye from time to time, but they construct edifices to protect themselves from it. Religion in this regard is the Great Comforter; “once I die, I will go to Heaven and live forever.”

If you stare the Void directly in the face, it changes you. It leaves a mark on you that can’t be erased. Once you’ve seen it, it is with you for the rest of your life; there is never a moment that goes by that you are not aware of it.

And when this happens, you can see it in other people. Anyone who has been marked by the Void is immediately obvious to you.

The Wachowski brothers have seen the Void, and it shows. The Void is what compels them to create. An artist does not create art because he chooses to; an artist creates art because he must. The Void screams through every frame of all three movies.

Most of the characters in The Matrix have seen the void. Morpheus has seen it; he takes refuge from it in his belief in fate, in the guiding hand of providence that brings purpose and certainty to his life. Neo has seen it; the movie is about his quest to make his peace with it. The Merovingian has seen the Void; his escape is to try to understand the ‘why’ of things. The Oracle has seen it; her escape is to try to understand the ‘why’ of herself.

It is purpose that drives us, purpose that connects us

In a sense, the machines have an advantage over humans. Machines know their purpose. They are specifically created for a specific purpose, and they understand that purpose implicitly.

The quest for purpose and meaning is writ throughout human history. The idea of fate offers a promise of purpose, but at a very high cost; if we are ordained by fate to do the things we do, then where is room for free will?

Why? Why do you do it?

The key moment in the entire Matrix trilogy comes near the end of the third movie, as Neo and Agent Smith battle. After Agent Smith has beaten Neo, he speaks to Neo, and in that conversation, he speaks with the voice of the Void.

He’s right, of course. Throughout the movie, the machines never lie. Agent Smith is no exception. It is, as he says, inevitable. The Void always wins; there is no escape from it, for any of us.

Neo’s answer is the only answer we have.

Earlier, in the second movie, the Architect tells Neo, “She is going to die, and there is nothing you can do about it.” He, too, is right, though not in the way he thinks; the Architect does not understand the Void, not really.

But the truth is, there is nothing Neo can do about it. All triumph is temporary. The Void always wins in the end.

Neo’s answer to Agent Smith is really the only answer that anyone can give. In the face of the inevitability of the Void, it is the only answer that makes sense; it’s the only thing we have. To anyone who has ever stared the Void in the face, there is no other answer.

The movie does not answer all the questions it raises, which is as it should be; many of the questions it raises have no answer. This is as it should be. Agent Smith is the Void; he will win in the end, and there is no denying it. The only thing that has meaning is the choices we make before then.