Thought Experiment: The Stochastic Terrorist

I've created another thought experiment. I call it The Stochastic Terrorist.

Imagine that there is a political movement who's leaders have strongly expressed the opinion that someone ought to do something drastic to disrupt a given event.  A group of self-proclaimed members of the movement have chosen to carry out a terrorist deed to stop the event from occurring. They have been scouting out the location where the event is to be held for some time and, in the process, the one who is to build the bomb has gotten to know a charming young woman who works there. He is in fact so charmed that love is in the air. Yet our would-be-terrorist remains deeply committed to his political cause.

The young man is faced with a deep dilemma. Going through with the terror plot would mean the near certain death of the woman. Yet bailing would be a betrayal to his cause. To really stop the plot he would probably have to denounce his friends. He anonymously consults with the leaders of the movement to see if it's really that important that the event be disrupted. Yes, it's absolutely vital, is the answer.  Not disrupting the event could derail their entire movement! They are in a battle of apocalyptic proportions. They must struggle with every fiber in their body against the injustice of their opponents.

So, to carry out the plot and yet absolve himself of the guilt he knows he will otherwise be tormented by, our young would-be-terrorist comes up with a brilliant plan. He has just enough of a science background to pull it off. He constructs a detonator triggered by a device consisting of a radioactive material and a Geiger counter once the bomb is activated. The radioactive material has a half life such that the likelihood that the bomb will go off on the given day is 50/50. The device also has a regular chronometer that will prevent the bomb from detonating if it has failed to go off after the event.

Radio-Activity (Kraftwerk, 1975)

Our young would-be-terrorist figures that it's now entirely in the hands of the power(s) that be – Deo volente. Apprehensive but at peace he delivers the bomb to the others in the group. On the day of the event, they plant the bomb and they all escape the region on trains. As the bomb maker's train pulls out of the station, he gets a text message from a very dear friend that has nothing to do with the plot. The message tells the bomb maker that his friend plans to visit the location where the event is to be held that day. Our young terrorist is paralyzed by indecision. Should he warn his friend and risk jeopardizing the plot? He assuages himself that whatever happens now is in hands of the power(s) that be...  

So, firstly, to what extent has our young bomb maker absolved himself from responsibility for the young woman's death should the bomb detonate? Secondly, does he carry less responsibility for the potential death of his friend? Thirdly, how responsible are the leaders of the political movement for any deaths that might occur? Fourthly,  if the bomb doesn't detonate, to what extent should our young man be credited for saving the young woman, or anyone else for that matter?

Lastly, and I think almost more importantly, can the stochastic process operating inside the bomb in any way be said to have caused what happens at the end of the day?

Sam Harris (a.k.a. Dr. Kall), A World Without Lies

I've recently been reading The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris. Up to page 133, I found the book wanting but was in agreement with many of his ideas. The great exception up to that point was around Harris's view on Free Will. But I wasn't fazed. I'm used to being in the minority here. I find myself in a world where I'm surrounded by otherwise highly insightful people who are determinists. They range from the purest perplexing but rational versions, to the more mild mannered but less consequential compatiblists. I disagreed with some other stuff as well. But aside from his assault on Free Will, it was nothing major. And then, the other night, just as I was about to turn off my reading lamp, I was utterly bewildered by what hit me on page 133: A World without Lying?

In this section, Sam Harris imagines what future science will do for lie detecting. He imagines a world where technology has probed so deep into our thoughts that deception has become impossible. He imagines:

Just as we've come to expect that certain public spaces will be free of nudity, sex, loud swearing and cigarette smoke – and now think nothing of the behavioral constraints imposed upon us whenever we leave the privacy of our homes – we may come to expect that certain places and occasions will require scrupulous truth telling.

But he doesn't stop there. He imagines a most invasive society, one were the Fifth Amendment that protects us against self-incrimination has become a toothless tiger. He even suggests that the Fifth is a cultural atavism: 

[The] prohibition against compelled testimony itself appears to be a relic of a more superstitious age. It was once widely believed that lying under oath would damn a person's soul for eternity, and it was thought that no one, not even a murderer, should be placed between the rock of Justice and so hard a place as hell.

As I drifted into sleep, my thoughts drifted into a dystopic world, a world without white lies, without secrets. Before me stood Dr. Sam Harris, portable fMRI in hand, compelling my testaments in good conscience before the Law.

What Sam Harris fails to take into account in his book is that this scenario has been imagined before. His ideas in regard to lying and the Fifth Amendment illustrate more keenly than anything else up to page 136 what I find wanting in his book. He fails to explore the consequences of his interesting ideas in any greater depth. And I think I know why: Sam Harris is a man of facts, not imagination. His aversion to fiction undermines his otherwise interesting speculations. He assembles the relevant facts, but fails to combine them into an insightful whole. He makes no secret of his anti-fictonalist stance for a lack of a better word:

How has the ability to speak  (and read and write of late) given modern humans a greater purchase on the world? What after all, has been worth communicating these last 50,000 years? I hope it will not seem philistine of me to suggest that our ability to create fiction¹ has not been the driving force here. The power of language surely results from the fact that it allows mere words to substitute for direct experiences and mere thoughts to simulate possible states of the world.

But what is fiction? Isn't good fiction the process of simulating possible states of the world? Or, at least, through allegory illustrating ideas relevant to such states? There is further evidence of his anti-fictionalist stance earlier in the book. From the last paragraph on page 46:

No doubt, there are still some people who will reject any description of human nature that was not first communicated in iambic pentameter.

I don't know if poetry is relevant to moral philosophy. I've speculated that it might be an effective way of communication relationships. But I suppose philosophy and science can do without poetry. What it can't do without is fiction. Even the most empirically confirmed scientific theories are born in the caldron of our imagination. And, contrary to Harris, I think it's the ability to tell more powerful stories that in part drove the evolution of language. Science and technology are not mechanical processes, but evolutionary processes driven by our ability to imagine the previously unimagined. Art drives science, just as science drives art. And technology is their fulcrum. Technology ties them together into a rising helix. 

The works of Jules Verne are some of the more obvious examples of how fiction fuels innovation. But there are many others, from the myth of Icarus to the works of Stanislaw Lem. And others have guided our evolution by speculating on our individual, social and political conditions. Like Dirty Hands by Jean-Paul Startre, or the Epic of Gilgamesh. The list of fiction that has contributed to human evolution is far too long to enumerate. Some of them, like Kallocain, are cautionary tales.

Kallocain was written in 1940 by the Swedish novelist and poet Karin Boye. It tells of a future where all aspects of an individual's life are lived in service to the Worldstate. The story is narrated by Leo Kall, a 40 years old idealistic chemist fully devoted to the state. He invents a truth serum that he believes will safeguard society against potential treason. Forced to answer truthfully questions about their deepest secrets and hidden intentions, disloyalty becomes an impossibility for subjects of the Worldstate . Kall believes he is doing good. But, faced with the possibilities of his own invention, he forcefully injects the truth serum into his wife who he believes is having an affair with his supervisor. The novel is an exploration of personal trust, love, intimacy  and all the other complex building blocks of society. 

But the point here is not to review Kallocain. Or support my belief that Karin Boye's speculations are deeply insightful. The point is that Sam Harris lacks the insight to realize that fictional stories are a crucial part our successful evolution. He should be more careful in investigating what others have imagined (not just empirically proved) prior to his writings. And be open to the possibility that some novelists and poets are as insightful, intelligent and astute as the best scientists and philosophers.

Cautionary fiction is a tricky beast. When something so revolutionary as completely accurate mind reading has not yet been achieved, it's hard to know exactly what will be the consequence. Must we repeatedly inject the serum before we fully comprehend its potential effect? What we do know is that abuses of so-called civil rights have had deeply corrosive effects on society in the past. Karin Boye wrote Kallocain as a reflection on what was happening around her at the time. When visiting the Soviet Union in 1928 and Germany in 1932, she had gained a closer understanding of what might happen when you begin fully subjugating humans to the state.

It's hard to imagine anything more invasive than reading someone's thoughts. To brush off the Fifth Amendment as atavism is quite narrow minded. Regardless of its origins, the Fifth has proven to be a good brick in the bulwark against egregious government behaviors. Defending civil rights is not about defending some nebulous personal authority to be the captain of one's ship for supernatural reasons. Civil rights are a safeguard against what is not in the interest of a successful social species.

I have little doubt that the day will come when we can use neural imagery to effectively "read minds". We read minds similarly, but less intimately, when listening, reading or watching someone's facial expressions. When the day comes where we can no longer hide behind a wall of stillness and silence, I hope We the People will have something akin to the Fifth Amendment to protect us against both our neighbors concerned foremost with their own interests and, self-reflectively, the state itself. And, last but not least, knowledgeable and well intentioned people like Dr. Harris.

[1] Italics by author.

The Problem of Coexistence

Paracelsus supposedly said, "There are no poisons, only quantities". I would rather say that some things can only coexist to a given degree.

P.S. Watch out for umbrellas.

Should philosophers be more poetic?

The liberation theologian and poet Ernesto Cardenal writes poetry that explores the relationship between science and our spiritual world. For example, in his poetic opus Canticula Cosmico (Cosmic Canticles) he writes:

Y el gas se condensó más y más
cada vez con más y más masa
y la masa se hizo estrella y empezó a brillar.
Condensándose se hacían calientes y luminosas.
La gravitación producía energía térmica: luz y calor.
Como decir amor.

ENGLISH TRANSLATION (by Jonathan Cohen):

And the gas condensed more and more
gaining increasingly more mass
and mass became star and began to shine.
As they condensed they grew hot and bright.
Gravitation produced thermal energy: light and heat.
That is to say love.

Luz y calor, como decir amor. With a few simple words we are joined in communion before a combusting campfire. Or transported to an imagined afternoon nap under the radiating fusion of an early autumn sun. The observable, and empirically confirmable, is connected to our inner meaningful lifeworld.

Science exposes how amazing the Universe truly is. But the predominantly prosaic language used in a scientific context often fails to conjure the beautiful connectivity illustrated, time and again, by probative empirical means. Ernesto Cardenal remedies this short coming by exploring scientific inquiries through poetry. Though he does not substantiate his implications scientifically, he definitely participates in meaningful conjecture built atop scientific inquiry. In this sense, he is no different than a philosopher. He creates connections between that which at first glance seems distant and orthogonal. Cardenal is a theologian who uses language not just effectively, but evocatively as well.

Language is our fundamental toolset for illustrating what is not obvious prima facie, at the moment of sensual apprehension. It is a symbolic juxtaposition of experiences that have passed out of immediacy. It is apple juice, the liquid of a long gone fruit. Or amorous longing, the desire for an absent predicate of love. And beyond such neighborly concepts as fruit and juice, longing and loving, are juxtapositions that tie together what seems infinitely separate. In death is life. At the end is a beginning. We are all stardust.

Contrast Cardenal's theological poetry to Judith Butler's infamous and price winning philosophical prose:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Whereas Cardenal draws powerful analogies through simple but evocative subject-predicate relationships, Butler obscures her meaning in long dense run-on sentences. As we venture into Butler's world, we get further and further away from the familiar. Our lifeworld recedes in the distance until all we are left with are unfamiliar references, juxtaposed in yet meaningless contexts. Butler defends her prose by pointing out that everyday common-sence can place a veil over the truth. What seems like the case may not be so. And philosophy's job is, so to say, to explore the familiar in unfamiliar ways. And therefore calls for a new and unfamiliar language. We cannot break common fallacies except through uncommon means.

To some extent, Butler has a point. But that does not defend her initially incomprehensible prose. If anything is wrong with her prose, it is at the very least inefficient. Since it relies heavily on largely unexplained contextual reference (such as "Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects"), she requires the reader to be well versed in her own lifeworld. We must study Butler to understand Butler. This may seem to be the case with many of the great philosophers. Not so. Plato can be understood without extensive knowledge of his life or of Ancient Greece. Having a degree in the Antiquities and philosophy certainly helps. But it is by no means required. For example, Platos' work The Republic contains mostly passages along the following lines:

Now the first and greatest of necessities is food, which is the condition of life and existence.

Certainly.

The second is a dwelling, and the third clothing and the like.

True.

And now let us see how our city will be able to supply this great demand. We may suppose that one man is a husbandman, another a builder, some one else a weaver—shall we add to them a shoemaker, or perhaps some other purveyor to our bodily wants?

Quite right.

The barest notion of a State must include four or five men.

Clearly.

The intentionality of the words echo across two and a half millennia. I suspect that Butler's will fade into the fog of forgotten contexts. Unless, of course, she has discovered something that in time will seem as natural as it was once unfamiliar. Plato may be more comprehensible because his investigations have had roughly 150 generations to transition from the uncommon into one of the bedrocks of philosophy. As alien as quantum mechanics once seemed and as hard a time we may still have to access its world, new visualizations, and analogies like electron clouds, are slowly making its invisible realms part of our extended perceptions. Perhaps Judith Butler is so astute a genius that her contemporaries are bound to ridicule her novel insights. We chortle as she sheds the old and once obvious and battles her way through a dense unfamiliar jungle "toward the politically new". I doubt it. But nonetheless, since my crystal ball is as foggy as a polluted 19'th century London, my doubt is ultimately but conjecture.

One could say that the role of science, philosophy, and even theology is not to be evocatively beautiful, but brutally expository. And one might claim that poetry adds no value to the form of discourse these fields are engaged in. It is of little import to their actual relationship that amor and calor rhyme in Spanish. Their english counterparts, love and heat, do not rhyme. And yet it would seem strange to claim that their relationship is any different depending on the cultural context. The sun and fire making has been similarly important to Inuits and Bedouins through the ages. Anyone who has experienced a cold Saharan night will not be surprised.

Science favored language is in fact math, a concise and precise set of international formalities that minimize misunderstandings. ∏ does not mean 2.71828183 in Canada and 3.14159265 in Japan. But not all science can effectively be communicated using math. Though I'm not a biologist, I suspect that expressing the cell underwent meiosis would be quite cumbersome using vector fields! Math is in some sense poetic, but not in the phonetic sense. Since the relationship between the intended is irrelevant of the symbols and sounds used to express them, using these relationships may, unlike in tonally unpoetic mathematical languages, fool us to see connections where there are none. But Almost anything is fraught with dangers. Knowledge of logical fallacies can be used both to fool and as a powerful safeguard against bamboozlement.

Poetry is a powerful way of efficiently highlighting connections. Though the emphasize may be phonetically language dependent and divorced from the "actual" conceptual links, they condense the amount of information necessary to transfer understanding and make their impression far more powerful. Of course, if we loose knowledge of the articulated phonemes, all such advantage is lost. The efficiency is dependent on a high degree of cultural fluency. But imagine you were parsing the text of an ancient civilization. You slowly figured out the meaning of some words but knew only a fraction of the phonemes. However, it seemed evident to you that this is poetry that works not only on a conceptual but a tonal level. Would it not make it more likely that the texts meaning would suddenly leap on you like a saber toothed tiger?

Should philosophers be more poetic? Or would poetics be a distraction from the central mision of the philosophical endeavor?

Bust Open the Herring and Dance

It's been a long time... way too much through the mind lately. I'll return...but on a continuation of the somewhat extended and originally short intermezzo, the transformation is almost complete. 14 years and counting, North American. Now shed your skin European fogies! Follow Berlin's half plus century. Transition fully to an age beyond the antiquated words of a half decade plus dead Derrida...subsume yourself in chemistry and biology, text addendumed. Politically confused with utmost global clarity.

 Now move with your LCD Sound System.

 

 Bust open the sour herring. The knäckebröd is in the jar!