Between a Rock and a Hard Place

A particularly philosophical friend of mine and I had a similar train of thought a few weeks ago concerning personal ethics and freedom. She approached it via deterministic self-knowledge, whereas I was looking at it from the tiresome old question of purpose in life. I will use her case as the departure point as it is more general, though I think not explicit on a few points that I was thinking about.

"Knowing who you are means you have a good idea what you're going to do next. Perfect self-knowledge means you can predict precisely what you'll do in response to any situation. But that's equivalent to knowing your future. And knowing your future means giving up free will, because you can see every choice you're going to make." 

~Elizabeth Marston (via Facebook)

Free Will versus Meaning
Self-knowledge thus negatively correlates with phenomenological free will. This holds true for and deterministic vector, including purpose in life. If there is an intrinsic purpose in life, then it functions as a goal for your actions – that is if you are aware of it. If you were to know your purpose in life (if there is one), you would have a fantastic amount of self-knowledge. You would have, in effect, a blueprint for every nontrivial action (which would also incidentally solve most – if not all – issues of personal ethics). The downside of this is that this blueprint reduces you to a slave to your purpose. You becomes an automaton, devoid of [the experience of] free will.

On the other end of the spectrum, having zero self-knowledge causes the problem of being a wild animal, slave to your most base drives, with no way of self-checking. Ethics –personal or otherwise – are not even on your radar. At this hypothetical extreme, memory isn't possible as it is a form of self-knowledge. You are again a mere automaton. Furthermore, you gain an intrinsic purpose: to follow your drives. Les extrémités se touchent, as the French say.

While free will may be a de facto illusion, clearly we do experience free will within the limits of a mixed strategy. The question of where we achieve the optimum output of free will I do not think can ever be definitively answered, and certainly not within the scope of this blog.

Free and Meaningful Tug-of-War
Is free will an important thing? As roughly meaning autonomy and agency, we certainly do seem to value it culturally, though this was not always so. It is not an imperative, though purpose (meaning) is. It could be said that meaning is a prerequisite to free will, as without it you are unable to act (you are without direction, without the ability to evaluate), hence a mixed strategy being optimal as far as free will is concerned. The only way for this to happen requires imperfect or incomplete ("flawed") purposes, meanings or models.

Again we are brought back to the problem of what we should value. We have conceived several times here of pure systems that fully lack phenomenological free will, which incidentally may be more honest if we are to assume determinism to be true. As I've noted elsewhere, the act of the gears turning is experienced as conscious free will, and we as thinking beings cannot escape it either.

So here we are, stuck between two extremes. Finding optimization of whatever ratio of free will and meaning that we feel is right, though no one solution will ever satisfy the problem completely. This is another facet of the human condition. By our very nature, we cannot ever completely win. But perhaps that isn't either here nor there. Perhaps this need is what keeps us going, searching, thinking, acting. We have an action potential that cannot ever be fully discharged until death takes us. We could still achieve all that we do without this, as machines and computers, but – I think – this is the difference of what makes us human.

"He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool." 

~Albert Camus 

Outline

1. Complete free will requires the absence of intrinsic purpose, and vice versa
2. Purpose is approximately equal to meaning, and thus value
• We need values in order to evaluate
• We need to be able to evaluate against some model in order to act
• Purpose is a prerequisite to action, and this free will
• A mixed strategy is required in order for free will to operate
3. We are thinking creatures, and experience "the gears turning" as free will
• We cannot escape free will or the need for meaning

Reverse Experience Machine

Everyone remember the Experience Machine? It is used as a rebuttal of pure-hedonism in value theory, or to evaluate the pleasure principle as a primary drive in a person. The weak form (what minimum conditions must be met to plug in) is becoming increasingly interesting to me. It shows what values you hold to be important, other than pleasure and reality.

I have been thinking a lot about inverses lately, and when you invert the Experience Machine, you get a rebuttal of pure-truthism. In its' weaker form, you get to see how people gamble as well ^.~

The Reverse Experience Machine (weak form):

1. You are given indisputable proof that you are living in a simulated reality
• Yes, sort of like "The Matrix"
2. Everyone else is a computer simulation, including all the people you know
3. You have always lived in this virtual reality
4. You can get "unplugged" and live in reality, but you can never plug back in if you do
5. You are not told what unplugged reality is like

So far, many people seem willing to take this chance. You might wake up burning to death, you could wake up as a church mouse, or you could wake up in a fantastic utopia. You don't know, you'd just have to risk it.

Several questions are raised by the weak formulation:

• Do you value your lived experiences as authentic?
• Could continue to do so?
• Do you value all that you have invested in the virtual reality?
• Relationships
• Education
• Way of life
• To what degree is actual reality valued?
• This directly correlates to the probability that someone would unplug
• How motivated are you by curiosity? (yes, this one is common)
• How much of a gambler are you?
• 49.999% chance it's better, 49.999% chance it's worse, 0.002% chance it's the same

The Reverse Experience Machine (strong form):

1. You are given indisputable proof that you are living in a simulated reality
• Yes, sort of like "The Matrix"
2. Everyone else is a computer simulation, including all the people you know
3. You have always lived in this virtual reality
4. You can get "unplugged" and live in reality, but you can never plug back in if you do
5. You are given indisputable proof that unplugged reality is dystopian

Most people probably use mixed values and strategies, so the weak forms of the thought experiment actually tell you more about an individual, whereas the strong forms are clear enough to make a point.

The bias that both of these reveal about the original and reverse Experience Machine is that people many simply choose what is familiar. You're already used to the reality/unreality that you know, and "if it's not broken, don't fix it."

I'm interested in what people would do in both formulations of the Reverse Experience Machine. Please tell me what you'd do in the comments section if you are so inclined!

Checksum Values

One argument that keeps coming up against me in conversation against my line of thought is that we have some biological imperative. To address this, I'm going to respond directly to hundun's comments on one of my posts.

The argument summarizes thus:

• The mammalian brain is imperfect due to the lack of refinement form evolution
• Our minds are "like a crapware-saddled virus-ridden Vista-running laptop brought back in time to 1973"
• Human cognition is fundamentally irrational
• Biological drives (survival, reproduction, etc) constitute our basic impulses
• The human mind is not unified
• We are no different from other mammals

Okay, great, I agree with all of this except for the irrational part (to some degree). But I would argue that this model is incomplete. While I am a determinist, I still think that we have the illusion of free will (the experience of the processors chugging away). We have biological drives, but we also effectively (though not actually) have choice. In the words of Sartre, "[people] are condemned to be free." I can choose to rebel against all of my biological drives, stop eating, isolate myself, or commit suicide. I can die for a cause, or make huge sacrifices for the sake of an idea.

Yes, we absolutely have irrational biological drives, but we also have a rational cogito. Our mind is divided, hence why we can feel so divided. The pull of all these parts determines action, as if on a voting system. Your Freudian superego was installed (experimentally and by accident via evolution) to make you a social animal, but went haywire and now you can possess values that are counterproductive to evolutionary reproduction.

You do have choices over your biological drives. You can madly lust after someone, yet never act on your desire, even if given the opportunity to get away with it. Yet another person would take advantage of the situation. Why is that? The cogito portion of the democracy that is your mind can have a pretty strong say in your actions. Often these cogito functions are programmed by the indoctrination of children by their caregivers. This tends to lend itself to the realm of ethics on a social scale. However, as individuals, how can we justify wanting this or that, or valuing what we've learned through authority. Taking authority at face-value can be a very dangerous thing.

My existential crisis was born out of a number of factors that led me to recognize the value nihilism of nature: that existence precedes essence. My body gives me biological rewards by making me feel pleasure when I do certain things that I am programmed biologically to do. But is feeling good the point? Are we mere slaves to our passions? Clearly not, or at least not all of us.

Values essentially sweep through as a diagnostic of our actions. "Is this right?" is what our drives are always asking. It performs a checksum on each part of our being. But when you turn the diagnostic against itself, it can't checksum because it has nothing to check against. All the other people have different values. Our OS was installed without the ability to check if our diagnostic tool is functioning, and everyone is running different plug-ins, so we can't compare to each other.

I think there's a good chance that Douglas Adams was right, and the checksum is 42.

Can't Handle the Truth

Disclaimer

This post deals with a fine detail about truth, which I feel has significant implications for the theory of values that I am assembling here. Some may find it massively redundant.

Preamble

Playing a card game with some friends the other say, I brought up the example of the Experience Machine thought experiment. It was well received, and the votes added up thus: 2 would absolutely not plug into the machine under any circumstances (including myself), 2 were unsure, and 1 would definitely do it. The interesting thing about one of the two that were unsure was that she would given specific conditioner about incorporating real people into the scenario with you. We have termed this "multiplayer." It seems that asking people what minimum conditions would have to be met in order to plug in is actually a fascinating way to explore what a person values.

This lead me to question why I value truth so strongly. Is it reasonable? My intro to philosophy textbook states that "the philosopher's faith is that Truth is good and worth pursuing for its own sake." That's one heck of an assumption. It is, of course, a useful assumption if you're a philosopher, because without it, what are you doing? But that is little solace, because a priest assumes the existence of god to justify their lines of thought too.

In my various searches for a basis for values, I have actually had to overturn most of what I based by identity on. I'm dismantling, but hoping for reconstitution through rigorous application of - and deduction from - the most certain axioms: the a priori. Kant tried the very same thing, but I don't think that he dug nearly deep enough, and I find many of his axioms to be unsatisfying. Nietzsche refuted (many times) many of Kant's assumptions. The existentialists tried to find a solution, but ultimately deferred the question. They all also toss around this concept of "truth" as if it were an assumption as mentioned above.

I can't seem to find anything online written on the ontology of truth. There is quite a lot on theories of truth (which do touch on my question), but I'm looking at it from a more fundamental level. What is the ontology of truth, and to what degree should we pursue it? Is it worth sacrificing happiness as in not entering the Experience Machine?

Definition Derivation

It is reasonable to say that existence must true. But which is prior? Truth must exist, and existence (material or ideal) must be true. But that is contradictory, as something cannot precede its' own ground.

The negative of existence is nothingness. Both are true. However there cannot be an untruth in an objective reality (material or ideal). Untruth does not correspond to either existence or nothingness, as both are true, and the objective world is thus always true. Untruths can only be expressed through language as lies, and are thus only part of the mind and language. Art does not constitute untruth because a work of art is a true thing in itself, even if it "uses lies to be the truth." And even lies have an element of truth to them, as it is true that they do not express the truth.

Truth is inescapable. So where is it? We can only look at it through other things, never directly. It's always in the corner of your eye, but you can't see it directly. Truth seems to function linguistically as a way of asserting that something exists or not. It is a function of the mind to compare our understanding (an idea image) to the external reality (original image).

It is a function in the mathematical sense f(x), where we compare x to the array of reality (existence and nothingness), and return a true if x is a subset of the array, and return false if it does not. I suppose it would return a partial truth if some of the elements of x correspond to the reality array. I will call this truth-as-operation or the Truth Function. It also falls under the correspondence theory of truth.

Truth-as-Operation

f(x): iff image(x) ⊆ [[being] ∪ [nothingness]] = true;

The Truth Function is deeply troubling to me as opposed to truth as a fundamental ontological category. Truth does not exist independently, it is merely a property of ideas. If truth were a fundamental ontological category, it could be used as a part of the basis of an a priori value theory. It cannot be used as a justification of valuing reality, because it relies on a valuing of the reality-image. It is yet another evaluative tool that requires a ground. To value truth requires valuing reality for its' own sake, unless supported by some other morality hereto unknown to me. To say that you value reality because it is true is a tautology, or even possibly absurd. You're really saying "I value what is real because I have this way of comparing my ideas to it." It's like saying that you like the Mona Lisa because you can buy a print and compare it to the original in the Louvre.

That's not to say that this operation isn't extremely useful. The usefulness of our senses - and in fact our very survival - is dependant on the Truth Function (or so we are led to believe). This is debatable on skeptical grounds, but that is a conversation that I do not have space for here.

It's quite amazing how many terms are truth-as-operations. Words such as "because," "therefore" or anything else dealing with justification including causality are all the Truth Function. All of rationalism relies on it. What is our justification for justifying something? Remarkably, we can actually ask this question because truth is not an ontological category, but a function, and can chain: f(f(x)) AKA (f o f)(x).

The expression f(f) of course does not return anything as the function does not exist independently of of an analytical subject, so truth-in-itself does not exist, which is counterintuitive to our way of thinking. We cannot justify justification unless applied to a subject.

Functionally this requires some adjustment in language and thought. To say that "it is true that I think therefore I am" is a tautology because a self-evident statement is an expression of direct reality, and contains collapsed truth in its' self-evidency. Evidence is truth-as-operation, so the requirement is already met within the statement itself. Things that we know with certainty (a priori) do not need to be run through the Truth Function for this reason.

Rationality Bias

This entire endeavour of trying to find justification for values assumes that one should find values that are rational. Schrödinger Imperative demands that we resolve this crisis, so that is not called into question. But need it being found on a rational basis? Why do I value certainty in values? How do you justify rationality over irrationality? The Truth Function is a tool that I can use here, but should I? How do I evaluate if a Truth Function is worth using? I may need to accept it for reasons of coherence.

Outline:

1. "Truth" is an evaluative tool

• Compares an idea to reality
• Truth is a property of ideas
• Is not a fundamental ontological category
• Being and nothingness are independent of truth
• Truth is dependant on ideas and existence and nothingness as it is a function
• Truth is not a candidate for a ground for values
• One can only value reality, not truth
• Self-evident statements contain truth already

The Defining Game

Okay, veering away from the value thinger for a moment, I'm frustrated with the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I'm not done reading it yet, but the author is arguing quite strongly that not all things can be defined, and they can only be grasped through some mystic immediate knowledge. I wholly disagree.

Truth is useful because it represents a glimpse of reality. Truths are tiny pinhole windows of understanding along a long wall in a dark room. The hope is that we will eventually poke enough holes in the wall to see clearly. Some disagree with this, and I'll get to Gödel and Quine in an upcoming post (I tend to have a few rough drafts on the go at a time.) I disagree as well, in the sense that we as human being could ever know everything. There are limits to our perceptions, and there is an enormous amount of information being generated every moment. Something that Pirsig points out (well, Poincaré points it out) is that there are an infinite number of hypotheses that correlate to empirical evidence. So any idea that create from a posteriori knowledge contains the possibility to being only interpretive and equally valid to another interpretation.

Portrait of a skeptic

Sadly, as a skeptic I also have to hold that only those things which are self-evident are can be considered true as the rest could be an elaborate hoax. I cannot know the validity of my perceptions or authority figures with the same certainty as the knowledge that a triangle has three sides. I would guess that each interpretation is probably at best 99% accurate, showing overlap in being able to explain some phenomena, but also being wrong to some small degree. I would assert that there is a solid reality, but that we cannot know all of it... at least not nearly yet.

Pirsig goes on to try to justify the mystic mode of "knowledge" by getting people to try to define "quality" and showing that they can't do it in a simple sentence even though we all know what we are talking about. I think the problem is with his definition of definitions. It's really nice to have something spelled out on paper, in black and white, but as an artist myself I can tell you that the syntax of that language is limited (as are all languages.) Perhaps oral/written languages are as ill-equipped to handle "quality" as music is to handle shopping lists. Behind each idea, each interpretation of bit of the world as you see it is a tiny collapsed point of an idea. Let's call this the virtual idea. To clarify, I'm not talking about Pure Idea, just the bit of a particular idea that you then express.

Wittgenstein has this great solution in his book Philosophical Investigations. He says that we learn words through "language games," such that given enough examples of something we can eventually refine our understanding of the word (as a symbol) of the virtual idea. I think Pirsig should have considered this possibility. It makes things much more difficult to write down, but can be the only way to express something (especially as language only works for shared experience.) Perhaps we need to extend our definition of valid definitions to include things known (ie: virtual ideas) that are shared understanding, but cannot be expressed in a given language.

I must admit then that formal logic may be missing something as it is bound by its syntax. Granted I would suspect then that anything proven with rigour via self-evident statements  should be true, but that you can only find a subset of all truths deducible from self-evident statements.

Outline:

1. Ideas exist as hypotheses to help us understand reality
• They may be refined
• An infinite number of hypothesis exist that can explain any phenomena as long as they are deficient even in the slightest way
2. Words are symbols (placeholders) for ideas
• We use them to communicate
• We can only communicate shared experience
• Language-games define things by showing
• Language games do not rely on strict syntax
• There are some things that traditional definitions cannot express
• We need to extend our concept of "definition" to include things that do not express well in the common language
3. All languages are only able to express a subset of all things that you would like to express
• Music cannot tell you to buy milk, but verbal language can't express some ideas that music can
4. Formal logic is a type of language, and thus can only express a subset of truths

Do as I Say, Not as I Do

I'm going to start by saying that I have no background on political science, so if someone does and finds a problem with what I say, please educate me on it.

Kaitlin over at Equality Kitten made a post about Stephen Harper's condemnation of an American church threatening to burn some Qur'ans on September 11th. I think her post is great, but I have to point out a smaller problem that may not have resolution:

"...I am a big fan of freedom of religion, and thus allow Harper his own beliefs..."

Yes, Harper can have his own beliefs, but only within a limit. We can extract a key position from this statement: freedom of thought and religion.

Freedom on religion only exists in the private sphere in Canada. But the private has the potential for becoming public. That's what a democratic society is. A group of people expressing their beliefs on a particular topic. Religion (or any belief system, theistic or otherwise) shapes a person's views.

One theory (and a good one in my opinion) is that ethics and morality are codes used to promote the functioning of a society. If someone's belief system runs contrary to what would help the individuals in a society function bot in isolation and as a community, or impede them in any way from feeling fulfillment, then their belief or action is by definition unethical, immoral, or both. For example, opposing gay marriage is unethical because it oppresses a group of individuals who constitute a part of society, and limits their ability to cultivate their happiness at the expense of no one else. Same with denying women to be clergy (if they choose not to be that is their prerogative.)

As mentioned above, Canadian law is established such that a person can follow their personal code of conduct in the private sphere, but

We also have two contradictory positions at play:

1. Freedom of expression of personal beliefs (including religion)
2. Separation of church and state

See the inconsistency? These two rules allow for the possibility of a Cardinal to become Prime Minister. A Cardinal holds many unethical beliefs... that is to say, beliefs that would limit the cultivation of growth and happiness of many individuals in a society. This is a problem.

So what is the solution? Make it unambiguous and specific what the goal of government is: the smooth running of a society that promotes the well being and positive growth of each citizen as best it can provide. Hold whatever views you like Harper, just don't bring them all with you to work.

We approach this unambiguity more in the judicial branch of government, which is built on a series of axioms in the form of documents (Constitution, Charter of Rights and Freedoms &c) and the doctrine of precedent, in a (hypothetically) purely logical fashion. Of course this can fail too, but typically only on the failing to adhere to unbiased logic, or the lack of an axiom that needs to be there (which will fix itself as time goes on and law is refined.)

The Schrödinger Imperative

I will be including outlines of the ideas covered at the end of every (philosophical) post in order to make review of the core ideas presented quick, and to remove some of the bias I could create with rhetorical [self-]deception by presenting it in a bare bones, skeleton form.

It's official: I'm trapped. We all are.

For some reason, I am here. I exist, I think, I have awareness, I make choices. I did not decide to be here. How could I? I didn't choose to have choice. But I do. The fact that I think gives my agency. This is also not a choice. It's there, and I use it all the time. To stop having agency would require killing myself (unless I'm missing something), but doing so requires agency too. It would be an act of agency. I cannot simply "turn agency off."

All choices that I make are done on the basis of some justification. If I do something "random," I've really just chosen to do something unexpected. There is no random. I am a machine. The gears and cogs all turn and chug away, and I do things on a basis no different from a wind-up toy. Okay, I'm a pretty complex wind-up toy, but a machine never the less. I agree with Laplace when he said:

"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of the past and the cause of the future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes"

Perhaps this is what some people mean by "fate." You cannot escape it. With enough understanding of the parts involved, you could predict every little action. I've held for some time that free will is an illusion. Granted, it's an illusion that is necessary for the way we function... but it is still an illusion.

Part of this machinery that constitutes us is (in a virtual sense) the act of evaluation. We take input, evaluate it, and output an action (thought, idea, motion, belief, and so on). But we have this little problem. On what basis do we evaluate? It's quite simple to evaluate things as being bigger or smaller than each other. On a more complex level, it is just as easy to compare things to a prototypical "image" of something, or to say that something is closer or further away from an ideal. But to say that something is better than another, such as that it is better to live or better to get out of bed in the morning (or their inverses), you need to evaluate them on the basis of a personal beliefs called values.

In some sense, you are still comparing things to some "image", it is just an image of value. Where did you get this image? On what basis do you evaluate these images against each other? There needs to be an underlying image, and an image for that image, and so as you spin out ad infinitum (and really: ad absurdum.) You need a basis that is justified somehow. We have a priori truths. These seem to be the only way to go as far as I can tell.

So in order for a person to evaluate any input, they need a set of beliefs called values. Without values, you cannot evaluate, you cannot make decisions, you in effect cannot think (as thinking requires constant choice and evaluation), and then the major premise "I think therefore I am" falls apart. And then what are you? You are inert matter, devoid of thought and life.

But you do not have a choice about that. You do think. Anything that you do now requires choice, and everything that goes with it. If you do, or do not do, anything, you are still in the same trap. It does not require judgement to discern then that resolving this crisis is nothing short of imperative.

Outline:

1. I exist
• I think therefore I am 
2. Thinking is an action
• This is agency
• I cannot "turn off" my agency
• If I did I would have no justification for #1
• The only conceivable way is suicide
• It takes agency to "turn off" agency
• It is a choice (see #3 and #4)
3. Actions all involve choice (do this or not to do this), despite how conscious of a process this is
4. Choices require evaluation
• Evaluation is dependent on values
• One must resolve value nihilism in order to make choices
5. It is imperative that my existential crisis be resolved
• I cannot change #1 without resolving this crisis
• There is no way out
• It is an imperative in order for #1 to hold true