John G. Messerly's Blog, page 8

How Natural Is LGBTQ+ Diversity?”

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Editor’s Note: Frans de Waal’s** new book, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, has generated some controversy and misunderstanding. ( Note. Professor de Wall died on March 20, 2024.)

He will address these issues in a series of short essays which will be published at 3QD and can all be seen in one place here. More comments on these essays can also be seen at Frans de Waal’s Facebook page.

Florida Senator Rick Scott recently declared that “Men are men, women are women,” adding “we believe in science.” He was talking about transgender athletes.

I wish the senator did believe in science, though, because to reduce the gender palette to just two colors with nothing in between hardly works for biological sex and even less for gender expression and identity. It’s an outdated view.

The social roles of men and women are surrounded by persistent myths, often accompanied by the term “natural” as a stamp of approval and “unnatural” for patterns that we condemn. Most natural/unnatural distinctions have little grounding in biology, however. This is because biology is much more flexible than people assume. In the same way that no two trees of the same species are identical, nature is marked by high individual variability. Variability is what evolution works with. Since every individual comes with a unique genetic make-up, we can’t expect them to show the same sexual orientation and gender expression.

As American sexologist Milton Diamond is fond of putting it: “Nature loves variety, even though society hates it.”

Over five decades working with apes, I have known quite a few that acted atypically for their sex. These individuals form a minority, but nearly every group seems to have one. There are always males with less machismo than others, and always females who act tomboyish. Males who ignore the social hierarchy may be muscular giants, yet stay out of confrontations. They never reach the top, but also don’t sink to the bottom, because they are perfectly capable of defending themselves. The typical status game (and the social tensions and physical risks that it entails) is not for them.

As for the females, let me describe Donna, who grew up in a large grassy outdoor area with twenty other chimpanzees at the Field Station of the Emory Primate Center, outside of Atlanta. As a youngster, Donna always ran up to me if I walked by to engage me in a tickling match while giggling her hoarse chimpanzee laugh. She also frequently sought out the alpha male of the colony for wrestle play. This large male roughhoused daily with little males eager to test their strength against him. That Donna enjoyed the same games was the first hint that she was different.

Donna grew into a robust female who acted more masculine than any other I have known. Her genitals were those of a female, but she had the large head with rough-hewn facial features, sturdy hands and feet, and broad shoulders typical of males. Even her body hair reflected this. As in our species, male chimpanzees are the hairier sex. This allows them to look larger than life when they “go pilo” (from piloerection, or bristling hair). Donna could go pilo all over her body like a male. She furthermore acted as if she was part of the male world, charging by their side during noisy hooting displays. You’d swear you saw a full-grown male.

Individuals born as one sex, yet feeling to belong to the opposite sex, are known as transgender. Transgender persons usually turn this around and prioritize their felt identity. They were born as one sex, but inside the body of the other. We have no way of applying this to Donna, because we can’t know how she perceived her gender, yet she clearly was far less feminine than other females.

Science often focuses on typical behavior, thus ignoring exceptional individuals, but once we start looking for it I’m sure we’ll find plenty of gender diversity outside our own species. This also holds for sexual orientation. Homosexual behavior is well-documented throughout the animal kingdom. In some species, such as dolphins and bonobos it is so common that I prefer to label them bisexual: they don’t seem to have a clear preference for sex with one gender or the other. In other species, homosexual behavior is less common than heterosexual behavior, but we know for penguins, sheep, monkeys, apes, and tons of other animals that such behavior regularly occurs, and not only in captive settings.

The first reports that wild male and female macaques frequently mount members of their own sex were met with disbelief and attempts to explain this behavior away (the poor monkeys must have been confused about their partners’ gender or else were only engaging in “pseudo-” or “shamsex”), but evidence is now overwhelming that homosexual behavior is deliberate and serves important social functions, which is why nature has added pleasure to it. It’s no accident that both dolphins and bonobos have the largest clitorises in the animal kingdom, considerably larger than those of human females.

The most important difference with other species is not so much the degree of gender diversity in our species, but the way we react to it. Other primates show none of the discomfort and intolerance that LGBTQ+ individuals face in human society. Their societies accept other individuals as they come. I have never noticed hostility towards individuals escaping typical gender patterns.

FURTHER READING

LGBTQ+ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and others. The “plus” represents other sexual identities including pansexual and Two-Spirit.

Milton Diamond interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MvNisJ7FoQ

The variable sexual behavior of bonobos is well-documented, and here is a 2021 report on chimpanzees in the journal Behaviour: “Sociosexual behaviour in wild chimpanzees occurs in variable contexts and is frequent between same-sex partners” (brill.com/view/journals/beh/158/3-4/a...)

For further details and references to the literature, read “Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist” (Norton, 2022). A video about the book can be seen here: https://fb.watch/ffbauZBzNb/

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Published at 3 Quarks Daily ON MONDAY, OCT 10, 2022 2:05AM BY FRANS DE WAAL

**Professor de Wall died on March 20, 2024

Till Your Own Garden

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My readers may have noticed a lot of guest posts on the blog lately. Here’s why.

After nearly hosting the blog for over ten years and writing almost 1500 posts you sometimes need a break. In addition, one should only write when they have something new to say and often I simply don’t.

Another reason is its summer in Seattle. Now this isn’t the summer many people experience—the 15 day forecast calls for highs in the 60s and 70s Fahrenheit—but when I see the sun shining after a cloudy winter I’m like a little kid—I want to be outside! I take long walks, often 5 or 6 miles almost every day and try to fight sarcopenia by mild workouts at the gym.

I keep up with the news, reading the NY Times, Washington Post, Salon, Slate, Vox, and a few other news sources daily. As usual I’m terrified of the possibility of fascism coming to America (which is a real possibility) but I try not to dwell on it. I don’t bury my head in the sand but I recognize my limited ability to effect world affairs.

Here I’m reminded on Voltaire’s counsel to “till your own garden.” What Voltaire meant was that we should keep a good distance between ourselves and the world for too close an interest in politics or public opinion causes aggravation and danger. Now the flipside of this is that keeping a distance from politics doesn’t mean it will keep a distance from you—you can’t till your garden if the regime under which you live becomes too regressive and authoritarian.

For me employing Voltaire’s implies loving my wife and children and grandchildren as best I can, eating a whole food plant based diet, getting enough sleep, moving my body, and improving my mind. There are many weeds in my garden, but I keep trying to pull them out.

 

Once More Around The Sun, Then Home

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From 3 Quarks Daily, Jan. 1, 2024, by Akim Reinhardt

We’re circling the Sun at a rate of between 18.20–18.83 miles per second. It is not a fixed speed because Earth travels on an ellipsis, and moves a hair faster when it’s closer to the Sun than it does when further away. It averages out to about 67,000 miles per hour over the course of the year. At that speed, a full revolution is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds in the making. At least for now.

Each year, Earth’s voyage around the Sun takes just a little bit longer, to the tune of roughly 3 nanometers per second. It’s minuscule, but adds up over time. Since the solar system’s inception 4.571 billion years ago, Earth is moving 22 mph slower.

The main reason is that Earth is drifting ever so slightly away from the Sun, stretching out the orbital path, and lengthening the duration of a revolution.

We’re not fleeing the Sun so much as it’s pushing us away. As the Sun’s hydrogen core transmogrifies into helium through the process of nuclear fusion, the Sun loses somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 million tons of mass every second. Since that process began billions of years ago, the Sun has lost mass equivalent to 1 Saturn, or approximately 95 Earths if you prefer to think about it in homier terms. The Sun also suffers particle loss through Solar Wind, and that has resulted in its shrinking by another 30 Earths or so. Solar flares and coronal mass ejections also steal away mass. In all, the Sun is ~1027 kg lighter than it was at the birth of our Solar System. Here’s what 1027 looks like written out in digits:

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Since a ton equals two-thousand, feel free to add another three zeroes and flip that one to a two. Then again, a gram ain’t much, so maybe just leave it as is, stare at it a bit, and try to feel the full weight of it.

Some of the mass that the Sun spits out slams into our planet after flying through space for around three days. These solar whacks push Earth away from the Sun by just over half an inch each year. It doesn’t sound like much, but Earth is now about 50,000 km (<31,000 miles) further away from the Sun than it was 4.5 billion years ago.

We all slow down as the years pass, mortality dancing in our eyes. You’ll die eventually. So will I, and everyone else. The Sun and Earth too are doomed.

As with you, me, and all mortal creatures, ultimate reckoning might come for Earth quickly through unforeseen events, or it might slowly reach an inevitable conclusion.

Some large object might come hurling across the galaxy, collide with us, and end it all in the universe’s version of a car crash. No seatbelts, no air bags. Boom.

Something akin to a major stroke is the roughly 1% chance that over the next billion years, the solar orbit of one of the four inner planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars) will destabilize. If that happens, Earth is done. Even if our own orbit remains stable, another inner plant’s orbital destabilization would unleash such havoc that Earth will either crash into the Sun or shoot out of the solar system altogether.

I’m rooting for the former; I’d always rather be too warm than too cold.

The best we can hope for is “natural causes.” If we dodge catastrophes near and far, and our solar system manages to live out its full duration, the Sun will eventually heat up, and life on Earth will become untenable. What’s more, as the process continues and the Sun become a Red Giant, it will expel yet more mass. This will result in Earth’s orbital path slinging outwards by 10–15%, and the speed of its revolution decreasing by a similar percentage. Solar expansion will continue until Helios swallows Mercury and Venus, like some ancient Greek god devouring its children. Earth itself will crash into the remnants of the Sun in ~1026 years, give or take.

I’d write out 1026 , but it’d just seem anti-climactic.

As for now, I guess we can all agree to call pretend that we’re witnessing Earth’s 2024th trip around the Sun. Yes, yes, we tell ourselves, as of the middle of last night, it is the year 2024.

Or 7421 (Chinese). Or 6774 (Assyrian). Or 5784 (Hebrew). Or 5137 (Mayan). Or 5124 (Hindu, Kali Yuga). Or 4356 (Korean). Or 2777 (Ancient Roman). Or 2568 (Buddhist). Or 1945 (Balinese). Or 1445 (Islamic). Or 1431 (Bengali). Or 1024 (Igbo)

Or, if we’re being honest, whatever the numerical designation, perhaps we’ll just call it t-minus Red Giant

Either way, let’s see if we can make it another 365.2422 days. If not, we shouldn’t say we didn’t see it coming.

Akim Reinhardt’s website, which will soon slam into a picture of the sun and be reborn, is ThePublicProfessor.com

Gerrymander Unbound

From 3 Quarks Daily, Nov. 27, 2023, by  JERRY CAYFORD*

A friend of mine covers his Facebook tracks. He follows groups from across the political spectrum so that no one can pigeonhole him. He has friends and former colleagues who, he figures, will be among the armed groups going door to door purging enemies, if our society breaks into civil anarchy. He hides his tracks so no one will know he is the enemy.

That trick might work for the humans, but artificial intelligences (AI) will laugh at such puny human deceptions (if artificial intelligence can laugh). When AI knows every click you make, every page you visit, when you scroll fast or slow or pause, everything you buy, everything you read, everyone you call, and data and patterns on millions like you, well, it will certainly know whom you are likely to vote for, the probability that you will vote at all, and even the degree of certainty of its predictions.

All of that means that AI will soon be every gerrymanderer’s dream.

AI will know not just the party registrations in a precinct but how every individual in a proposed district will (probably) vote. This will allow a level of precision gerrymandering never seen before. There is only one glitch, one defect: with people living all jumbled up together, any map, no matter how complex and salamander-looking, will include some unwanted voters and miss some wanted ones. To get the most lopsided election result possible from a given group of voters—the maximally efficient, maximally unfair outcome—the gerrymanderer has to escape the inconvenience of people’s housing choices. And since relocating voters is not feasible, the solution is to free districts of the tyranny of voter location. The truly perfect gerrymander that AI is capable of producing would need to be a list, instead of a map: a list of exactly which voters the gerrymanderer wants in each district. But that isn’t possible. Is it?

Our idea of a district is a place, a community, a geographical area where voters live in proximity to one another. The technical properties are “compactness” and “contiguity”: a district is a physically contiguous patch of land, meaning it is all one patch, and all of it compactly situated pretty close together. This idea of districts is only a constraint on gerrymandering, though, if it is codified in the law—which both compactness and contiguity are in most (but far from all) states—and if we enforce the law.

A gerrymandered district is one that has escaped the constraint of compactness. The term derives from an infamous 1812 redistricting: “Elbridge Gerry, the governor who signed the bill creating the misshapen Massachusetts district, was a Founding Father: signer of the Declaration of Independence, reluctant framer of the Constitution, congressman, diplomat, and the fifth vice-president” (Smithsonian Magazine). The outraged 1812 opposition coined the term: “It looked like a salamander, another dinner guest noted. No, a ‘Gerry-mander,’ offered poet Richard Alsop.”

An AI-created, perfect gerrymander would have to go one better and escape both compactness and contiguity. It might not be visualizable at all. If it looked like anything, it would be an abstract, pointillist painting, with a dot for every voter, color-coded to the voter’s assigned district. This would be, clearly, a mockery of our concept of a “district.” But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen, so let’s ask how it might.

You can infer from the prevalence of gerrymandering today that our expectation of compactness is routinely violated. As a primer on redistricting puts it, “In practice, compactness tends to be in the eye of the beholder.” Having gotten this far, then, the remaining barrier to a perfect gerrymander—the gerrymander that AI will soon be able to give us—is the requirement of contiguity. The same primer says, “In practice, the vast majority of congressional districts … will be drawn to be contiguous.” The reason contiguity is still respected (so far), while compactness is not, is surely partly that compactness is on a sliding scale, but contiguity is basically yes or no. Still, the primer tells us “Few redistricting concepts are absolute, and contiguity is no exception” (emphasis mine), so we should ask how a gerrymanderer could get around it.

Following their success ignoring compactness, gerrymanderers might just brazenly brush aside contiguity, too. Dick Cheney’s lawyer, David Addington, described this tried-and-true political strategy in immortal words: “We’re going to push and push until some larger force makes us stop.” So, what larger force might stop the ultimate gerrymander? Since contiguity is legally required in many places (and taken for granted everywhere), our first thought would be that the courts are that force.

The Congressional Research Service publishes useful summaries of redistricting issues and laws. (Congressional Redistricting Criteria and Considerations is a good start, with links to more specifically legal summaries.) The ominous bottom line, though, is that the Supreme Court, after waffling for some decades, decided in 2019 in Rucho v. Common Cause that courts should stay out of gerrymander fights. As the high court succinctly put it, “Held: Partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions be­yond the reach of the federal courts.” So, the courts have chosen not to be that “larger force,” but rather fobbed off on legislatures the defense of our democracy from the evil of gerrymanders.

Legislators are, of course, the main beneficiaries of gerrymandering, so it’s a bit discouraging to hear they are also supposed to be our main force stopping it. Still, politicians don’t like incurring the public’s anger, and our whole concept of legislative districts is that they are places, maps, contiguous pieces of territory. Turning them into lists would so violate the public’s expectations that surely any legislator would be loath to even try it. And yet legislators have become quite practiced lately at violating public norms. For example, redistricting is only supposed to happen every ten years, after the census, but recall the Democratic Texas legislators’ famous 2003 flight to Oklahoma to deny the Republicans a quorum for a vote to redistrict, just one of many examples of legislators defying the public’s expectations of what’s right and proper in order to redraw district lines mid-cycle. A polarized public did not unite against them. Public sensibilities, then, also do not seem to be that larger force that will stop the AI-driven super-gerrymander.

Since contiguity is more open and shut than compactness, we will no doubt try the courts again; they might throw their hands up at adjudicating degrees of compactness but still insist that contiguity is the law. So, it is worth considering what arguments the gerrymanderer might make. Even if we hadn’t all seen some shockingly political judgements in real court cases recently (I don’t dare give examples, but I’ll give you this), we have all watched enough courtroom dramas to have a sense of the weaselly, hair-splitting, word-twisting arguments that sometimes convince judges. So, let’s imagine we are shyster lawyers trying to give a sympathetic judge just enough wiggle room to get away with rejecting contiguity and ruling for our gerrymandering clients. What do we have to work with?

As the redistricting primer describes it, “A district is contiguous if you can travel from any point in the district to any other point in the district without crossing the district’s boundary.” Obviously we can’t do that, if we want to be able to put voters from any old place into a district. But if we could get rid of the idea that a district has a boundary at all, maybe we could get away with it. A list, after all, doesn’t have a boundary; we can get from any point on a list to any other without leaving the list. So, does a “district” have to be a geographical space?

We go to Wikipedia (our preferred source for legal wisdom): “An electoral district … is a subdivision of a larger state (a country, administrative region, or other polity) created to provide its population with representation in the larger state’s legislative body.” Hmmm… a subdivision of a state or polity seems somewhat spatial, but not too rigidly. “A state is a centralized political organization that imposes and enforces rules over a population within a territory. Definitions of a state are disputed.” That sounds promising: a state is the political organization within a territory, but not the territory itself! Even less physical. And disputed! Let’s check our backup, “polity,” for confirmation. “A polity is a term for an identifiable political entity, defined as a group of people with a collective identity, who are organized by some form of institutionalized social relations.” Bingo! A polity is people, not land at all. We’re ready.

“Your Honor, we humbly submit that our client’s proposed electoral districts, composed of lists of voters assigned to each district by their AI program, fully comply with all legal requirements. The requirement of contiguity is inapposite to districts such as these, which perform their political functions as districts without being a physical location. Being inapposite, the requirement should be considered presumptively fulfilled. We ask that you find in favor of our client.”

If this scenario seems far-fetched, remember that the question is not whether the perfect, big-data-AI-generated, maximally unfair gerrymander fits our conventional ideas of redistricting; the question is what larger force will stop it. The courts have clearly expressed their wish to leave it to the political branches; the politicians have clearly expressed—through their bipartisan embrace of it—the belief that they must gerrymander or die; and the public is too divided and too uncertain to force a different outcome. Things look bleak.

But there is a fourth possible force I have not yet considered: that very AI so ominously poised to do us irreparable harm. Can we fight fire with fire and turn the talents of computers to good and not evil? If AI is allowed to design districts unconstrained by either compactness or contiguity, we can expect it to do the job very, very well, locking in lop-sided, one-party rule beyond the reach of democracy to counteract. But computers intent on preserving the legal constraints can do that equally well. What if we turn computers to constructing districts that truly are compact and contiguous?

Compactness may be in the eye of the human beholder, but the blind mathematical eye can see it clearly. Compactness is an easily definable mathematical property. Once defined, it is as open and shut as contiguity; this district is compact, yes or no. (There are several different ways to define it, but they are highly correlated with one another.) MGGG Redistricting Lab (formerly the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group) has been studying for years how best to use mathematical modeling to create fair political districts. The time has come—and the technology is ready—to take redistricting out of human hands. Not to undermine democracy, as AI is capable of doing—and will do, if the current gerrymandering free-for-all continues—but to increase competition, weaken incumbency, and restore democracy.

Some of the issues I raise are discussed in greater detail by Douglas Rudeen in “The Balk Stops Here: Standards for the Justiciability of Gerrymandering in the Coming Age of Artificial Intelligence,” which concludes that “the only reliable way to forestall gerrymandering in the age of AI is to employ a form of fully-automatic redistricting.” It may seem paradoxical that abandoning human discretion to machines can increase human freedom. But in the end, the computers are going to be doing our redistricting either way. Our choice will be between computer gerrymandering that pre-determines electoral outcomes, depriving us of democratic control of our lives, or computer redistricting that creates compact, contiguous, fair, and competitive districts. If we choose the latter, we can without fear join Jeopardy! champion and fellow human being Ken Jennings in his gracious and cheerful concession after being trounced by IBM’s Watson: “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.”

In all seriousness, though, the choice is ours. The courts have chosen not to prevent gerrymandering. The politicians have chosen not to stop doing it. AI is not capable of choice (so far, anyway). That leaves the largest of those larger forces, us, the public. We loathe gerrymandering, but we dither. We can either have AI serve democracy, or let would-be overlords use AI to create super-gerrymanders. They will certainly do so, unless we choose to make them stop.

Reprinted with permission.

Quotes From Russell’s “The Conquest of Happiness”

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I recently remarked on re-reading Russell’s classic, The Conquest of Happiness. In the meantime I’ve discovered a number of quotable gems in the book. Here are a quote or two from each chapter.

From Chap. 1 – What Makes People Unhappy

“I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more. This is due partly to having discovered what were the things that I most desired and having gradually acquired many of these things. Partly it is due to having successfully dismissed certain objects of desire — such as the acquisition of indubitable knowledge about something or other — as essentially unattainable. But very largely it is due to a diminishing preoccupation with myself. … Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to centre my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.”

“Self-absorption is of various kinds. We may take the sinner, the narcissist, and the megalomaniac as three very common types. … This man [the sinner] is perpetually incurring his own disapprova … He has an image of himself as he thinks he ought to be, which is in continual conflict with his knowledge of himself as he is….Narcissism is, in a sense, the converse of an habitual sense of sin; it consists in the habit of admiring oneself and wishing to be admired….When vanity is carried to this height, there is no genuine interest in any other person, and therefore no real satisfaction to be obtained from love….The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men in history.”

Chap. 2 – Byronic Unhappiness

” I do not myself think that there is any superior rationality in being unhappy. The wise man will be as happy as circumstances permit and if he finds the contemplation of the universe painful beyond a point, he will contemplate something else instead. . . . the truth is that they are unhappy for some reason of which they are not aware, and this unhappiness leads them to dwell upon the less agreeable characteristics of the world in which they live.”

Chap. 3 – Competition

“What people mean, therefore, by the struggle for life is really the struggle for success. What people fear when they engage in the struggle is not that they will fail to get their breakfast next morning, but that they will fail to outshine their neighbours. It is very singular how little men seem to realise that they are not caught in the grip of a mechanism from which there is no escape, but that the treadmill is one upon which they remain merely because they have not noticed that it fails to take them up to a higher level….The root of the trouble springs from too much emphasis upon competitive success as the main source of happiness.”

“Education used to be conceived very largely as a training in the capacity for enjoyment — enjoyment, I mean, of those more delicate kinds that are not open to wholly uncultivated people. In the eighteenth century it was one of the marks of a ‘gentleman’ to take a discriminating pleasure in literature, pictures, and music. We nowadays may disagree with his taste, but it was at least genuine. The rich man of the present day tends to be of quite a different type. He never reads. If he is creating a picture gallery with a view to enhancing his fame, he relies upon experts to choose his pictures; the pleasure that he derives from them is not the pleasure of looking at them, but the pleasure of preventing some other rich man from having them.”

Chap. 4 – Boredom and Excitement

“We are less bored than our ancestors were, but we are more afraid of boredom. We have come to know, or rather to believe, that boredom is not part of the natural lot of man, but can be avoided by a sufficiently vigorous pursuit of excitement….Young men and young women meet each other with much less difficulty than was formerly the case, and every housemaid expects at least once a week as much excitement as would have lasted a Jane Austen heroine throughout a whole novel.”

“I am not prepared to say that drugs can play no good part in life whatsoever. There are moments, for example, when an opiate will be prescribed by a wise physician, and I think these moments more frequent than prohibitionists suppose. But the craving for drugs is certainly something which cannot be left to the unfettered operation of natural impulse. And the kind of boredom which the person accustomed to drugs experiences when deprived of them is something for which I can suggest no remedy except time. Now what applies to drugs applies also, within limits, to every kind of excitement. A life too full of excitement is an exhausting life, in which continually stronger stimuli are needed to give the thrill that has come to be thought an essential part of pleasure. A person accustomed to too much excitement is like a person with a morbid craving for pepper, who comes last to be unable even to taste a quantity of pepper which would cause anyone else to choke. … A certain power of enduring boredom is therefore essential to a happy life, and is one of the things that ought to be taught to the young.

Chap. 5 – Fatigue

“Purely physical fatigue, provided it is not excessive, tends if anything to be a cause of happiness; it leads to sound sleep and a good appetite, and gives zest to the pleasures that are possible on holidays. But when it is excessive it becomes a very grave evil. . . . Physical labour carried beyond a certain point is atrocious torture, and it has very frequently been carried so far as to make life all but unbearable.”

“Even great sorrows can be survived; troubles which seem as if they must put an end to happiness for life fade with the lapse of time until it becomes almost impossible to remember their poignancy. But over and above these self-centred considerations is the fact that one’s ego is no very large part of the world. The man who can centre his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life which is impossible to the pure egoist….My own belief is that a conscious thought can be planted into the unconscious if a sufficient amount of vigour and intensity is put into it….A man who has learnt not to feel fear will find the fatigue of daily life enormously diminished.”

Chap. 6 – Envy

“Envy is itself a terrible obstacle to happiness. I think envy is immensely promoted by misfortunes in childhood. The child who finds a brother or sister preferred before himself acquires the habit of envy, and when he goes out into the world looks for injustices of which he is the victim, perceives them at once if they occur, and imagines them if they do not….Merely to realise the causes of one’s own envious feelings is to take a long step towards curing them. The habit of thinking in terms of comparisons is a fatal one. When anything pleasant occurs it should be enjoyed to the full, without stopping to think that it is not so pleasant as something else that may possibly be happening to someone else….With the wise man, what he has does not cease to be enjoyable because someone else has something else. Envy, in fact, is one form of a vice, partly moral, partly intellectual, which consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations….You cannot, therefore, get away from envy by means of success alone, for there will always be in history or legend some person even more successful than you are. You can get away from envy by enjoying the pleasures that come your way, by doing the work that you have to do, and by avoiding comparisons with those whom you imagine, perhaps quite falsely, to be more fortunate than yourself.”

Chap. 7 – The Sense of Sin

“As a matter of fact the sense of sin, so far from being a cause of s good life, is quite the reverse. It makes a man unhappy and it makes him feel inferior. Being unhappy, he is likely to make claims upon other people which are excessive and which prevent him from enjoying happiness in personal relations. Feeling inferior, he will have a grudge against those who seem superior. He will find admiration difficult and envy easy. He will become a generally disagreeable person, and will find himself more and more solitary. An expansive and generous attitude towards other people not only gives happiness to others, but is an immense source of happiness to its possessor, since it causes him to be generally liked. But such an attitude is scarcely possible to the man haunted by a sense of sin.”

Chap. 8 – Persecuation Mania

“One of the most universal forms of irrationality is the attitude taken by practically everybody towards malicious gossip. Very few people can resist saying malicious things about their acquaintances, and even on occasion about their friends; yet when people hear that anything has been said against themselves, they are filled with indignant amazement. It has apparently never occurred to them that, just as they gossip about everyone else, so everyone else gossips about them….This gives them a wrong sense of proportion, and causes them to attach undue importance to facts which are perhaps exceptional rather than typical.”

9. Fear of Public Opinion

“I think that in general, apart from expert opinion, there is too much respect paid to the opinions of others, both in great matters and in small ones. One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways….Fear of public opinion, like every other form of fear, is oppressive and stunts growth. It is difficult to achieve any kind of greatness while a fear of this kind remains strong, and it is impossible to acquire that freedom of spirit in which true happiness consists, for it is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbours, or even our relations.”

Chap. 10 – Is Happiness Still Possible?

“Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West results from the combination of comfort with powerlessness. Powerlessness makes people feel that nothing is worth doing, and comfort makes the painfulness of this feeling just endurable….The happiness of the reformer or revolutionary depends upon the course of public affairs, but probably even while he is being executed he enjoys more real happiness than is possible for the comfortable cynic.”

Chap. 11 – Zest

“The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has, and the less he is at the mercy of fate, since if he loses one thing he can fall back upon another. Life is too short to be interested in everything, but it is good to be interested in as many things as are necessary to fill our days….Adventurous men enjoy shipwrecks, mutinies, earthquakes, conflagrations, and all kinds of unpleasant experiences, provided they do not go so far as to impair health. They say to themselves in an earthquake, for example, ‘So that is what an earthquake is like’, and it gives them pleasure to have their knowledge of the world increased by this new item.”

Chap. 12 – Affection

“The best type of affection is reciprocally life-giving; each receives affection with joy and gives it without effort, and each finds the whole world more interesting in consequence of the existence of this reciprocal happiness. There is, however, another kind, by no means uncommon, in which one person sucks the vitality of the other, one receives what the other gives, but gives almost nothing in return. Some very vital people belong to this bloodsucking type. They extract the vitality from one victim after another, but while they prosper and grow interesting, those upon whom they live grow pale and dim and dull. Such people use others as means to their own ends, and never consider them as ends in themselves. Fundamentally they are not interested in those whom for the moment they think they love; they are interested only in the stimulus to their own activities, perhaps of a quite impersonal sort. Evidently this springs from some defect in their nature, but it is one not altogether easy either to diagnose or to cure. It is a characteristic frequently associated with great ambition, and is rooted, I should say, in an unduly one-sided view of what makes human happiness.”

Chap. 13 – Family

“This failure of the family to provide the fundamental satisfaction which in principle it is capable of yielding is one of the most deep-seated causes of the discontent which is prevalent in our age.”

Chap. 14 – Work

“Consistent purpose is not enough to make life happy, but it is an almost indispensable condition of a happy life. And consistent purpose embodies itself mainly in work.”

Chap. 15 – Impersonal Interests

“One of the sources of unhappiness, fatigue, and nervous strain is inability to be interested in anything that is not of practical importance in one’s own life. The result of this is that the conscious mind gets no rest from a certain small number of matters, each of which probably involves some anxiety and some element of worry….The result is excitability, lack of sagacity, irritability, and a loss of sense of proportion. All these are both causes and effects of fatigue. As a man gets more tired, his external interests fade, and as they fade he loses the relief which they afford him and becomes still more tired. This vicious circle is only too apt to end in a breakdown.”

“A man who has once perceived, however temporarily and however briefly, what makes greatness of soul, can no longer be happy if he allows himself to be petty, self-seeking, troubled by trivial misfortunes, dreading what fate may have in store for him. The man capable of greatness of soul will open wide the windows of his mind, letting the winds blow freely upon it from every portion of the universe. He will see himself and life and the world as truly as our human limitations will permit; realising the brevity and minuteness of human life, he will realise also that in individual minds is concentrated whatever of value the known universe contains. And he will see that the man whose mind mirrors the world becomes in a sense as great as the world. In emancipation from the fears that beset the slave of circumstance he will experience a profound joy, and through all the vicissitudes of his outward life he will remain in the depths of his being a happy man.”

Chap. 16 – Effort and  Resignation

“The wise man, though he will not sit down under preventable misfortunes, will not waste time and emotion upon such as are unavoidable, and even such as are in themselves avoidable he will submit to if the time and labour required to avoid them would interfere with the pursuit of some more important object. Many people get into fret or a fury over every little thing that goes wrong, and in this way waste a great deal of energy that might be more usefully employed. Even in the pursuit of really important objects it is unwise to become so deeply involved emotionally that the thought of possible failure becomes a constant menace to peace of mind.”

“Some people are unable to bear with patience even those minor troubles which make up, if we permit them to do so, a very large part of life. They are furious when they miss a train, transported with rage if their dinner is badly cooked, sunk in despair if the chimney smokes, and vowing vengeance against the whole industrial order when their clothes fail to return from the sanitary steam laundry. The energy that such people waste on trivial troubles would be sufficient, if more wisely directed, to make and unmake empires. The wise man fails to observe the dust that the housemaid has not dusted, the potato that the cook has not cooked, and the soot that the sweep has not swept. I do not mean that he takes no steps to remedy these matters, provided he has time to do so; I mean only that he deals with them without emotion. Worry and fret and irritation are emotions which serve no purpose.”

Chap. 17 – The Happy Man

“The man who is unhappy will, as a rule, adopt an unhappy creed, while the man who is happy will adopt a happy creed; each may attribute his happiness or unhappiness to his beliefs, while the real causation is the other way round. Certain things are indispensable to the happiness of most men, but these are simple things: food and shelter, health, love, successful work and the respect of one’s own herd. To some people parenthood also is essential. Where these things are lacking; only the exceptional man can achieve happiness, but where they are enjoyed, or can be obtained by well-directed effort, the man who is still unhappy is suffering from some psychological maladjustment which, if it is very grave, may need the services of a psychiatrist, but can in ordinary cases be cured by the patient himself, provided he sets about the matter in the right way….It should be our endeavour therefore, both in education and in attempts to adjust ourselves to the world, to aim at avoiding self-centred passions and at acquiring those affections and those interests which will prevent our thoughts from dwelling perpetually upon ourselves. It is not the nature of most men to be happy in a prison, and the passions which shut us up in ourselves constitute one of the worst kinds of prisons. Among such passions some of the commonest are fear, envy, the sense of sin, self-pity and self-admiration. In all these our desires are centred upon ourselves: there is no genuine interest in the outer world, but only a concern lest it should in some way injure us or fail to feed our ego.”

Russell concludes,

“In fact the whole antithesis between self and the rest of the world, which is implied in the doctrine of self-denial, disappears as soon as we have any genuine interest in persons or things outside ourselves. Through such interests a man comes to feel himself part of the stream of life, not a hard separate entity like a billiard-ball, which can have no relation with other such entities except that of collision. All unhappiness depends upon some kind of disintegration or lack of integration; there is disintegration within the self through lack of coordination between the conscious and the unconscious mind; there is lack of integration between the self and society where the two are not knit together by the force of objective interests and affections. The happy man is the man who does not suffer from either of these failures of unity, whose personality is neither divided against itself nor pitted against the world. Such a man feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely the spectacle that it offers and the joys that it affords, untroubled by the thought of death because he feels himself not really separate from those who will come after him. It is in such profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found.”

Daniel Dennett Has Died

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Daniel Dennett (1942-2024) died a few weeks ago. The first book of his I remember reading was The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, a collection of essays he edited with Douglas Hofstadter. But his works that most influenced me were:

Freedom Evolves;

Breaking The Spell:Religion as a Natural Phenomenon; and

Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life.

In Freedom Evolves Dennett defends a view of compatibilism that depends upon an evolutionary perspective. Because of abilities that have evolved we are free to make decisions without duress—assuming a very specific definition of free will. What I liked about this book was Dennett’s committment to an evolutionary view which, as regular readers are aware, is something that I too am committed too.

In Breaking The Spell Dennett argues that religion should be the subject of scientific inquiry. Briefly he argues that religion has evolutionary roots and survives through the transmission of memes. Almost anyone like myself who had previously read E. O. Wilson’s On Human Nature was receptive to religion as a biological and social phenomenon.

But it was his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea that most effected me.

In it Dennett describes evolution as a universal acid that eats through everything it touches; everything from the cell to consciousness to the cosmos is best explained from an evolutionary perspective, as are metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, religion, and the meaning of life. To better explain his ideas, Dennett considers the “great cosmic pyramid.” Traditionally this pyramid explains design from the top down—from god down through mind, design, order, chaos, and nothingness. In this interpretation, god acts as the ultimate “skyhook,” a miraculous source of design that does not build on lower, simpler layers. By contrast, evolution reverses the direction of the pyramid explaining design from the bottom up, by what Dennett calls “cranes.” Here physical matter and the algorithmic process of evolution explain the evolution of more complex structures from simpler ones, and they do so without miraculous intervention.

Now applied to meaning, evolution implies that no godlike skyhook is needed to derive meaning; instead, meaning must be created from the ground up, as subjectivists like Sartre argue. So if we abandon the idea that god or mind comes first, we see that meaning can evolve from the bottom up as order, design and mind are created. At one time there was no life, mind, or meaning, but slowly, imperceptibly each emerged. Meaning does not descend from on high; it percolates up from below as mind develops. The meaning that mind now experiences is not full-fledged meaning, but it is moving in that direction as mind develops. From a mind that was built by cranes—composed of molecules, atoms, and neurons in ever more complex arrangements—meaning evolves.

The mental states that give rise to meaning are themselves ultimately grounded in biology. Darwin showed us that everything of importance, including our minds, evolved slowly from below, and all are connected in a tree of life. The tree of life created by evolution is no god to be prayed to, but it inspires awe nonetheless. It is something sacred. Life is not now completely meaningful, but it is becoming progressively meaningful as mind evolves.

So the compatibility of my mind with Dennett’s arose from our understanding philosophical issues from an evolutionary view. If we have some freedom, its because it emerged as we evolved. If religion is to be understood and explained, we must understand its biological underpinnings. If life is to be meaningful ,we must make it so.

Evolution is a universal solvent which helps explain everything in the universe. That’s how to best understand our bodies, our minds, and our behaviors.

___________________________________________________________________________Below is a tribute from Doug Hofstadter written with just friends and family as the intended audience but which he has graciously agreed to share.

Dear friends and relatives,

I just received the very sad news about the passing of Dan Dennett, a lodestar in my life and in many thoughtful people’s lives.

Dan was a deep thinker about what it is to be human.  Quite early on, he arrived at what many would see as shocking conclusions about consciousness (essentially that it is just an emergent effect of physical interactions of tiny inanimate components), and from then on, he was a dead-set opponent of dualism (the idea that there is an ethereal nonphysical elixir called “consciousness”, over and above the physical events taking place in the enormously complex substrate of a human or animal brain, and perhaps that of a silicon network as well).  Dan thus totally rejected the notion of “qualia” (pure sensations of such things as colors, tastes, and so forth), and his arguments against the mystique of qualia were subtle but very cogent.

Dan had many adversaries in the world of philosophers, but also quite a few who shared his views, and as for myself, I was almost always aligned with him.  Our only notable divergence was on the question of free will, which Dan maintained exists, in some sense of “free”, whereas I just agreed that “will” exists, but maintained that there is no freedom in it.  (Scott Kim joked that I believed in “free won’t”, which was very clever, but really the negation should apply to “free” rather than to “will”.)

Dan was also a diligent and lifelong “student” (in the sense of “studier”) of evolution, religion, artificial intelligence, computers in general, and even science in general.  He wrote extremely important and influential books on all these topics, and his insights will endure as long as we humans endure.  I’m thinking of his booksBrainstorms; The Intentional Stance; Elbow Room; Consciousness Explained; Darwin’s Dangerous Idea; Kinds of Minds; Inside Jokes; Breaking the Spell; From Bacteria to Bach and Back; and of course his last book, I’ve Been Thinking, which was (and is) a very colorful self-portrait, a lovely autobiography vividly telling so many stories of his intercontinental life.  I’m so happy that Dan not only completed it but was able to savor its warm reception all around the world.

Among other things, that book tells about Dan’s extremely rich life not just as a thinker but also as a doer.  Dan was a true bon vivant, and he developed many amazing skills, such as that of house-builder, folk-dancer and folk-dance caller, jazz pianist, cider-maker, sailor and racer of yachts (not the big ones owned by Russian oligarchs, but beautifully crafted sailboats), joke-teller par excellence, enthusiast for and expert in word games, savorer of many cuisines and wines, wood-carver and sculptor, speaker of French and some German and Italian as well, and ardent and eloquent supporter of thinkers whom he admired and felt were not treated with sufficient respect by the academic world.

Dan was also a most devoted husband to his wife Susan — they were married for nigh-on sixty years — and a great dad to their two children, Peter and Andrea.  He entertained the kids by building all sorts of things for them, and he supported them through thick and thin.  I saw that from up close, and really admired his ardent family spirit.

Both Dan and Susan had near misses with death over the past decade or two, and on one of those occasions — his own close call when his aorta ruptured — he wrote a memorable essay called (if I recall correctly) “Thank Goodness”, which was all about how the human inventors and practitioners of modern medicine had saved his life (and the lives of countless others), and that it was deeply wrong to “thank God” for saving anyone’s life, and that what should be thanked was human goodness incarnated in the form of all those people who so deeply cared about helping their fellow humans (nurses, doctors, medical researchers, etc.).  Although Dan understood why his religious friends prayed for him, he thought that such actions were profoundly misguided and that belief in divine intervention was not a healthy approach to life.

Like his friends Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins (the quartet was nicknamed “the four horsemen of the apocalypse”), Dan was a committed atheist — and unlike me, he didn’t shy away from applying that word to himself, with all its flavors of an aggressive anti-religion stance — and he tried to explain, with great patience and subtlety, what is so compelling about religion to the human mind, but what is at the same time, so wrong about it.

Probably Dan’s two greatest heroes were Charles Darwin and the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (who was his doctoral advisor at Oxford), although he had quite a few others (including, for example, Cole Porter and J. S. Bach).  Dan had many friends of many sorts in many lands all around the world, and I was proud to be one of them.  He and Susan loved hosting their friends at their farm in Maine, which they owned and operated for about 40 years, and Dan himself did much of (probably most of) the physical maintenance of the home and the fields and trees, learning a great deal from his Maine neighbors.  Dan loved Maine and he loved calling it “Down East” (as the Maine folks do), and he loved the jargon he picked up from farming and from sailing, and he employed it often in his writings (and I was often a bit thrown by some of the terms he dropped with such ease and naturalness, as if everybody were as familiar with farm life and the sailing life as he was).  I once offhandedly called Dan a “tillosopher”, and he loved the epithet and even embraced it with delight in his recent autobiography.

Dan was a bon vivant, a very zesty fellow, who loved travel and hobnobbing with brilliance wherever he could find it.  In his later years, as he grew a little teetery, he proudly carried a wooden cane with him all around the world, and into it he chiseled words and images that represented the many places he visited and gave lectures at.

Dan was a truly faithful friend to me over the four-plus decades that we knew each other.  He always supported my ideas, and I am proud that he often sought feeback from me on drafts of manuscripts that he was writing, and I often provided detailed suggestions.  Seldom did I disagree with the thrust of his ideas; I usually just provided suggestions for how to phrase a sentence a tad bit more clearly, or perhaps some examples that would support his point.  I’m proud that over the years, I moved him close to my position on the importance of using nonsexist language in one’s speech and writing.

Some of Dan’s insightful essays, such as “Real Patterns”, which talked about what “exists” in the abstract two-dimensional world of John Conway’s amazing Game of Life (and by analogy, about what “exists” in our 3-D physical world), were deep mind-openers, as was of course his brilliant short story “Where Am I?” (one chapter inBrainstorms), which led to our friendship and our intimate collaboration on the anthologyThe Mind’s I, way back in 1980 and 1981.

Dan appreciated me in ways that I will never forget, and he counseled me wisely and empathetically concerning romantic dilemmas during the year I was on sabbatical in the Boston area.  He was deeply considerate and compassionate, and as I say, filled to the brim with zest and enthusiasm.  He was a great dad and a great husband and a great friend, as well as a great intellectual and a great writer.  He was “bigger than life”, as my friend David Policansky described him, one time when we together were guests at Susan and Dan’s farm in the early 1980s.

I personally will deeply miss Dan, and so will so many other thoughtful people — even people with whom Dan seriously disagreed, such as my old doctoral student Dave Chalmers, whose ideas on consciousness are diametrically opposed to Dan’s, but their friendship was warm because they both valued honest human contact and respect, and clear communication, far above such goals as fame or power or status.

Dan Dennett was a mensch, and his ideas on so many subjects will leave a lasting impact on the world, and his human presence has had a profound impact on those of us who were lucky enough to know him well and to count him as a friend.

Requiescat in pace, Dan.

Yours,

Doug

Do Science and Philosophy Lead To Unhappiness?

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In the waiting room at the doctor’s office this morning I was reading Bertrand Russell’s 1930 classic, The Conquest of Happiness, a book I first read almost 50 years ago. (I’m still old school, I take a book to the doctor’s since I don’t have a smart phone!)

At the beginning of chapter 2 I came across the following,

It is common in our day, as it has been in many other periods of the world’s history, to suppose that those among us who are wise have seen through all the enthusiasms of earlier times and have become aware that there is nothing left to live for. The men who hold this view are generally unhappy, but they are proud of their unhappiness, which they attribute to the nature of the universe and consider to be the only rational attitude of the enlightened man…. I do not myself think there is any superior rationality in being unhappy.  The wise man will be as happy as circumstances permit, and if he finds the contemplation of the universe painful beyond a point, he will contemplate something else instead…. I am persuaded that those who quite sincerely attribute their sorrows to their view of the universe are putting the cart before the horse: the truth is that they are unhappy for some reason of which they are not aware, and this unhappiness leads them to dwell upon the less agreeable characteristics of the world in which they live.

The quote struck me as uncommonly wise. How easy it is for someone passionate about life’s meaning to think that happy people must be simpletons and that a sober view of reality entail absurdism or nihilism. It does not. Rather it leads to skepticism and the key in my view is not to accept that life is meaningless but to learn to live not being sure if it all makes sense or not. In the meantime we can try to find the happiness and fulfillment that life offers.

Don’t CEO’s Care About Their Grandchildren?

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Posted at 3 Quarks Daily FEB 5, 2024 By BARRY GOLDMAN Reprinted with permission.

Reading about corporate greed and depredation over the past few years, I keep getting stuck on the same question: Don’t these people have grandchildren? (I wrote on this topic almost ten years ago.)

How can corporate decision-makers spend their days actively working to destroy the environment, pollute the water, kill off the animals, melt the glaciers, and incinerate the biosphere? Even if what they care about the most is making more money no matter how much money they already have, don’t they care at all about the world they’re leaving for their kids?

I’ve arrived at a theory. But first I need to back up a few steps.

Readers of 3QD may be familiar with the brain fungus that causes “zombie ants” to leave the safety of the forest floor and climb up the stalks of plants to die. Or the parasite that causes mice to lose their fear of cats. In both cases, the parasite has evolved to hijack the brain of the host and cause it to behave in ways that are suicidal to the host but beneficial to the parasite. The behaviors the parasite causes are often exquisitely complex and particular. It seems impossible that something as primitive as a fungus could be the explanation. But evolution has come up with lots of similar strategies. She is very clever. She doesn’t have a sense of fair play or sportsmanship. If a behavior increases the chances of getting the genes of one generation reproduced in the next, it succeeds. Nothing else matters. And she has lots and lots of time to experiment.

So that’s the first idea we need – the fungus that hijacks the brain of one species to improve the reproductive success of another.

Then we need the idea of cultural evolution. Human beings don’t have to wait for genetic evolution. We have evolved the ability to get information from one generation to the next without having to wait for it first to be encoded in the DNA. We don’t have to start from scratch with each generation, and we don’t have to proceed by trial and error. We have culture, language, and traditional practices.

In the modern world, I don’t have to know how anything works. I don’t have to know how cars or computers work, for example, or how to build them. It’s enough for me to know how to drive and how to type. As long as somewhere in my culture there are people who know how cars and computers work and how to build them, I can off-load that responsibility to them and spend my time on other things.

One more idea and we will be ready for my theory. That’s the idea of a meme. A meme is to cultural evolution what a gene is to the biological kind. It’s the unit of transfer, the basic building block. Cooking is a meme. When the idea of cooking enters into a culture, lots of things change. People live longer because cooking releases more nutritional value from food. People get bigger and stronger. Their teeth get smaller. Jaw muscles get weaker and on and on.

The corporation is a meme. It is a legal invention, a legal fiction, if you like. Corporations don’t exist in the way that tables and chairs exist. They don’t have weight or take up space. They have no natural life span. Some of them are much older and vastly richer than any person. They can own property, enter into contracts, sue and be sued. And, since the US Supreme Court decision in Citizens United and related cases, they can donate unlimited amounts of money to the political causes of their choice.

I quote here from The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs, by David Runciman:

The 18th century jurist Edward Thurlow famously complained: ‘Corporations have neither bodies to be kicked, nor souls to be damned; they therefore do as they like.’ Sentient beings with bodies and souls disappear inside the group once it has acquired its own identity. They can shrug their shoulders as the victims of the group’s decisions come looking for justice. Meanwhile, the group has no shoulders to shrug.

Mitt Romney famously said, “Corporations are people, my friend.” But he was profoundly wrong. They are not people. Corporations are a brain fungus. They act to benefit themselves. And they hijack the brains of the people who work for them and cause them to do things no sane person would do.

That’s the answer to my question. Corporations can act the way they do because they don’t have grandchildren. The people who make corporate decisions to poison the earth do so because their brains have been hijacked by the virus. Partly this is accomplished with simple bribery. Corporate CEOs are awarded vast salaries and ridiculous compensation packages in order to blind them to their human responsibilities. But that alone is not sufficient. The brain fungus also works at a more subtle level. It convinces the corporate decision maker that he is part of a larger system, and that it is the system that is responsible for ethics. In this view, he (it is almost inevitably a he) doesn’t have to know anything about the ethics and morality of his decisions. He can offload that responsibility. His job is to increase shareholder value. It is the job of the political system, the law, or the market to impose restraints. The mechanism is a little fuzzy, but what’s important is that there is a division of labor. “You just concentrate on producing revenue,” the fungus whispers to the CEO. “Other parts of the system will worry about protecting the biosphere.”

This is a corollary to Upton Sinclair’s famous dictum. It is easy to get a man to believe something when his stock options depend on his believing it.

Lawyers are embedded in a system with a similar architecture. This is the adversarial system I discussed in an earlier 3QD post. Under the adversarial system a lawyer’s duty is to his client. If the client is a greedhead scumbag, well, he’s a greedhead scumbag. The lawyer’s duty doesn’t change. His job is to provide zealous advocacy. The job of seeing to it that the scumbag gets what’s coming to him is off-loaded to the larger system. I don’t think that’s a good idea in the legal context, and I don’t think it’s a good idea in the context of the corporation.

Quoting from Runciman again:

How, for example could multinational oil corporations have spent years suppressing and distorting the evidence that fossil fuels were responsible for dangerous levels of climate change? We might choose to believe that the people working for these companies are especially bad, reckless, irresponsible, selfish. But they are not: they are, on the whole, just people like the rest of us. It is the corporation that chose to pursue this path and the people involved, because they are like the rest of us, followed, because following a corporate decision is the path of least resistance. It is more than likely that many of the people involved knew that what they were doing was wrong. But the corporation didn’t because the corporation isn’t sentient.

This suggests there may be a sliver of hope. We all have multiple roles. In his corporate role, the CEO of a fracking concern is a zombie host mindlessly obeying the dictates of a parasitic brain fungus. But he has other roles. He is also a human being and, likely, a grandfather. The planet might have a future if something or someone could shake him from his zombie trance and remind him of that. It is not sufficient to leave the future of the world to the workings of the political system, the law or the market. The responsibility to act morally cannot be off-loaded. Wake up and think of your grandchildren!

Is Game-Playing the Highest Ideal of Human Existence?

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by John Danaher

Bernard Suits’s The Grasshopper is an odd book. Part philosophical dialogue, part playful allegory, it is most famous for its philosophical analysis of games. In a sharp rebuff to Wittgenstein — who thought that games had no essence — Suits suggests that games do have an essence. They are voluntary attempts to overcome unnecessary obstacles. More precisely, he says that all games share the following three features:

Prelusory Goal: Some state of affairs in the world that is sensible and definable apart from the rules of the game and that determines the point of the game (i.e. that determines the score or outcome of the game).

Constitutive Rules: The rules that constitute the game and that place unnecessary obstacles between the player and the prelusory goal.

Lusory Attitude: The willingness on the part of the player to accept the unnecessary obstacles.

Take a game like basketball. Here, the prelusory goal is to put the ball in the net. Doing this more times than your opponent determines the outcome of the game. The constitutive rules are just the rules of basketball itself. You are not allowed to kick the ball into the net. You must throw or dunk it from within a pre-defined space (the court). You have to contend with other players in the process. These players may try to block or steal the ball from you. You cannot simply run with the ball from one end of the court to the other; you have to bounce it. And so on. Each of these rules places an obstacle between you and the prelusory goal. They force you to achieve the prelusory goal in an inefficient manner. But you are willing to accept those inefficiencies because you want to play the game (i.e. because you have the lusory attitude).

This analysis of games is justly famous. It seems to account for most of what we group under that label. Philosophers of language and sport have pored over its ramifications for decades. In doing so, they have sometimes neglected or ignored the fact that the Grasshopper pushes a rather extreme view of games. It argues — to the extent that a dialogue can have a clear line of argument — that games are the highest good of human life. In other words, if we were to build a utopia, we would build a world in which we did nothing but play games. Let’s call this view ‘Ludic Utopianism’.

I mentioned Ludic Utopianism in a previous post about Suits’s work, but I never really considered the argument in its favour. In this post, I want to make up for that omission. I want to look at something I will call the ‘Reductio’ Argument for Ludic Utopianism and then address some criticisms of that argument.

1. The Reductio Argument for Ludic Utopianism
Suits’s main argument for Ludic Utopianism comes via a thought experiment. We are asked to imagine a seemingly utopian world – a world in which all human wants and needs can be met with a minimum of effort. Imagine a future of technological perfection where machines are waiting to feed you when you are hungry, cure you when you are sick, and clothe you when you are cold. Imagine a future where there is no deprivation or lack. Every moral problem has been solved (poverty, inequality, war, social conflict etc.), every scientific theory has been formulated, every itch has been scratched.

In short imagine a world where every problem that currently preoccupies your mind, including problems of the mind, can be solved at the flick of a switch (or, more outlandishly, simply by wishing that it be solved — Suits’s goes to this more outlandish possibility in his book by imagining that telepathic communication with the machines is possible).

Maybe a world of this sort is physically impossible. Maybe it is metaphysically impossible. Ignore those complications for now. Just try to imagine yourself in this world.

What would you do? So much of our lives are spent addressing personal, social and intellectual problems. We pour our collective energies into them. What would happen if we didn’t have to address them anymore? Well, supposing we don’t simply wish for an end to it all, the only thing we would have left to do is play games.

Why so? Because any activity in this utopian future would be a game. Remember you can get everything you want or need by simply flicking a switch or wishing that it be so. You never need to do anything ever again. So it follows, by necessity, that any action you do perform involves the voluntary assumption of unnecessary obstacles.

Suppose you want a house. Given the nature of utopia, you could just wish a house into a existence. Houses are available, in all shapes and sizes, to cater to every whim and preference, at the flick of a switch. No effort, no blood, no sweat. But you don’t want to just flick the switch. You want to build the house with your own bare hands. You want to draw up the blueprints, source the materials, lay the foundations, pour the concrete, cement the bricks, tile the floors, all by yourself. You want to do it the old fashioned way. In short, you want to turn house-building into a game in which the prelusory goal (the construction of the house) is achieved by overcoming voluntarily imposed obstacles (constitutive rules).

Anything you do that avoids the mental telepathy/switch-flipping that is at your disposal has the same character. It follows then that in this utopian world, every activity is a game. This suggests to Suits that game-playing is the highest ideal of human existence. Why? Well it makes sense for us to create technologies that will address all our wants and needs in an efficient manner. The general arc of human history suggests that this is a widely-shared goal. We don’t want there to be any deprivation or lack. But if we succeed in creating technologies that address our wants and needs in the most efficient manner possible, we will have created a world akin to the utopia he asked us to imagine. All that will be left for us in that world will be games. But since we should want to create that world, it follows that a life filled with games would be our highest ideal.

Let’s try to craft this line of reasoning into an argument:

(1) A game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.(2) A utopian world is one in which all needs and wants can be addressed by the most efficient possible means (flicking a switch; telepathic wishing).(3) Any activity in a utopian world would involve avoiding the most efficient possible means to achieving what you want or need.(4) Avoiding the most efficient possible means to achieving what you want or need is to voluntarily impose unnecessary obstacles on yourself.(5) Therefore, all activities in a utopian world are games.(6) Living in a utopian world is the highest ideal of human existence.(7) Therefore, playing games is the highest ideal of human existence.

2. Objections and Replies
So that’s the reductio argument. Should we accept it? Obviously, there are some problematic assumptions within its premises and these can form the basis for some objections to the argument. Holowchak (2007) identifies two objections in particular: the incoherence objection and the stipulation objection.

The incoherence objection argues that games are impossible in the utopia that Suits asks us to imagine. Proponents of this objection are effectively arguing that Suits’s three-part definition of a game is missing something essential. One suggestion is that it is ignoring the need for failure in games. It is no fun playing a game if you can win, with ease, every time. But in Suits’s imagined utopia failure is never possible: if anything goes wrong, you can simply wish for the desired outcome. Similarly, Holowchak himself argues that Suits’s analysis ignores the need for contention or competition in successful games. In other words, there needs to be some psychological desire to beat yourself or beat your opponent in order for there to be a game. But, again, in Suits’s imagined utopia there is no real contention or competition. He supposes that any psychological desire for contention or competition can be cured through our perfected technology.

I have to say that neither of these versions of the incoherence objection seems plausible to me. If they were essential requirements for games, then games themselves would be impossible. They are both suggesting that we cannot fake the possibility of failure or the desire for competition/contention. But clearly we can do this. Think about it. There is no possibility of failure and no real contention/competition in the games we currently play. Not really anyway. It is all facade and artifice. It is only by accepting the constitutive rules that failure and contention enter the fray. When I play golf, I can, if I like, pick my ball up and just drop it in the hole. I need never fail to achieve the prelusory goal in an efficient manner. But of course I don’t do that because I accept the constitutive rules. I go along with the facade of needing to use clubs to manipulate the ball through the air and over the ground. Accepting these constraints doesn’t make my eventual triumph in getting the ball into the hole any less authentic or real.

A more interesting objection is take issue with the way in which Suits defines what utopia is (or ought to be). Proponents of this objection suggest that Suits hasn’t really argued that games are the highest ideal of human life at all; he has simply stipulated that it is. He has defined utopia in such a way that games are the only possibility, but we don’t have to accept that definition of utopia. Indeed, I am sure that some people objected to it when I first set it out.

Look back to premise (2) of the argument. It claims that a utopian world is one in which all wants and needs can be addressed by the flick of a switch. Is that really a utopian world? I think some people would balk at the notion. For them a utopian world might be one in which we constantly get better and push and strive towards new goals — towards that which is always just out of reach. We shouldn’t try to solve all problems, deprivation or lack; we should always be searching for the new frontier of problems.

But if that’s your view of utopia, it raises some prickly questions. After all, the Suitsian view makes a certain degree of sense. If constantly seeking out the new frontier is what’s best, then how different is that from what we already currently have? Does it imply, as per Leibniz, that we already live in the best of all possible worlds, despite its problems? Or does it just cast the whole notion of utopia into doubt? Can there really be a best state of existence? Are we doomed to forever feel unsatisfied with what we have?

This work by John Danaher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

A Shuffled A Deck Of Cards: The Order Has Never Appeared Before

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This article originally appeared in 3 Quarks Daily,  by JONATHAN KUJAWA

When you well shuffle a deck of cards the resulting order has never appeared before in all of history! Amazing but true. This is just another example of how our intuition misleads us.

A few years ago I decided I should learn a few card tricks. …

While idly shuffling cards I stopped and wondered: what is the chance that a deck of cards has ever occurred before in exactly the same order as the ones in my hand? [1]

On the one hand, I knew that there are many, many, many possible orderings of a 52-card deck. On the other hand, there are millions of decks of cards being shuffled all the time. Just imagine all the shuffling in Vegas alone!

The answer is truly startling! I was surprised and delighted by the how incredibly likely my deck of cards had never occurred before. Let’s do the numbers together.

First, how many orderings are there for 52 card deck?

Well, let’s say we have an ordered deck and work our way from top to bottom counting the possibilities. There are 52 possibilities for the top card. Whatever that is, there are 51 possibilities for the second card (because it can’t be whatever the top card was). Whatever the top two cards are, there are 50 possibilities for the third card (because it can’t be either of the two top cards). And so on. At the very end there is only one possibility for the last card as the other 51 are already accounted for.

To get the total number of possible orderings, we should multiple 52, 51, 50, …., 3, 2, 1 all together (to see that this is right, it’s easier to try it first with a 3 or 4 card deck). The shorthand for this product is 52! (read fifty-two factorial). According to wolframalpha, the number of different orderings of a 52 card deck is:

80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000

This is round about 80 vigintillion. That’s 80 with 63 zeros after it. By way of comparison, that is way, way more than the number of atoms which make up the Sun. A big number by anyone’s measure!

Now, how many different orderings have occurred in the history of card shuffling? There is no way to know, of course, but we can estimate. To be on the safe side, at every step we’ll err on the side of overestimating.

People have been playing cards for a few thousand years. To be safe, let’s say 10,000 years.There are about seven billion people on the Earth. Let’s say that now and in the past there have always been 10,000,000,000 people.There are 31,536,000 seconds in a year. Let’s say there are 50,000,000 seconds in a year.

Now, imagine that from the moment cards were invented everyone devoted every second of every day to shuffling decks of cards. To count the number of orderings which have occurred, we multiply these numbers. That is, the number of orderings we’ve seen so far is at most:

5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

That’s 5 sextillion; a 5 with 21 zeros after it. That’s a huge number – but it’s way, way smaller than the 80 vigintillion possible orderings.

In fact, to go back to my original question, the odds that my well mixed deck of cards has occurred before is (5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000)/(52!). Computing this on wolframalpha, we see that’s comparable to the odds of picking one out of all the atoms in the earth.

Here’s another way to put it in perspective. Let’s compare the likelihood of my deck of cards having previously occurred with winning the Powerball lottery. The odds of winning the grand prize in the Powerball lottery is 1 in 175,223,510. A quick calculation shows that it is more likely that I will win the next five Powerball drawings in a row!

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[1] By well mixed, I mean the cards have been shuffled enough so that every possible ordering is equally likely. By shuffle I’m thinking of the usual riffle shuffle used by most card players. It’s not hard to see that certain orderings can’t possibly happen after only one shuffle. For example, if you think about the card which is at the bottom of your deck, after one shuffle it is still somewhere in the bottom half of your deck. So definitely not all orderings are equally likely after one shuffle. And indeed there are card tricks which depend upon the fact that even after three shuffles a deck is still not well mixed!

So how many shuffles does it take to ensure a deck is well mixed? Mathemagician Persi Diaconis and Dave Bayer answer that question in a delightful paper entitled “Trailing the dovetail shuffle to its lair” which is available here. In it they compute how close a deck of cards is to well mixed after m shuffles. Here is the table from their paper where they compute the “distance” between a deck shuffled m times (Qm in the table) and a well mixed deck (U in the table). Remarkably, their work shows that while the first few shuffles of a deck aren’t very random, you converge to a well mixed deck very rapidly thereafter. You can also read about their work here.

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The upshot is that seven shuffles is probably enough to consider the deck well mixed for every day card play, and 15 shuffles is plenty if you’re playing for serious money.