An Algorithmic Lucidity

In the days of auld lang syne on Earth-that-was, a scorpion was creepy-crawling along a riverbank, wondering how to get to the other side. It came across an animal that could swim: some versions of the tale say it was a fox, others report a quokka. I'm going to assume it was a fox.

So the scorpion asks the fox to take it on her back and swim across the river. What does the fox say? She says, "No." The scorpion says, "If this is because you're afraid I'll sting you with my near-instantly-fatal toxins, don't worry—if I did that, then we'd likely both drown. By backwards induction, you're safe." What does the fox say? After pondering for a few moments, she says, "Okay."

So the scorpion gets on the fox's back, and the fox begins to swim across the river. When the pair is halfway across the river, the scorpion stings the fox.

The fox howls in pain while continuing to paddle. "Why?!" she cries. "Why did you do that?! As you said before, now we're likely to both drown."

The scorpion says, "I can't help it. It's my nature."

As the fox continues to paddle, the scorpion continues. "Interestingly, there's a very famous parable about this exact scenario. There was even an episode of Star Trek: Voyager titled after it. As a fox who knows many things, you must have heard it before. Why did you believe me?"

"I can't help it," gasped the fox, who might after all have been a quokka, as the poison filled her veins and her vision began to blur and her paddling began to slow. "It's my nature."

"I really want to do the thing! All of my friends who are just like me are doing the thing, and they look like they're having so much fun!"

"You can totally do the thing! You just have to sign ... this loyalty oath!"

(reading it) "What? I can't sign this. It's, it's—" (rising horror) "not scientifically accurate!"

"Everyone else who is doing the thing has signed the loyalty oath."

"Could I ... do the thing, without signing the loyalty oath?"

"You could, but everyone you ever interact with for the rest of your life will assume that you've signed the loyalty oath; it would take five hours for you to explain what you actually believe, but no one will listen to you for that long because they'll decide that you're a hateful lunatic thirty seconds in."

(A beat.)

"You know, honestly, my life is fine as it is. I don't need to do the thing. I'm glad my friends are having fun."

(dies of cardiac disease fifty years later without having done the thing)

(Earth is consumed in a self-replicating nanotechnology accident)

My enemies do not deserve to suffer, because no sentient creature deserves to suffer.

My enemies deserve good, human lives. I imagine them happily married and living in nice houses in the suburbs with spacious, well-kept lawns, and whatever took the place of white picket fences after white picket fences went out of fashion. They have prestigious, well-compensated, and fulfilling office jobs at a nearby corporate headquarters, or maybe a university. The children are doing well in school. The mortgage is just three years from being fully paid off. When someone asks how they're doing, they smile and say, "Can't complain." It's always bright and sunny out.

Except for eleven minutes every day starting at 12:03 p.m. That's when nanomachines in the atmosphere manufacture dark clouds that fill the sky, blotting out the sun, and summon a manifestation of my avatar from the mentality. The avatar blinks; the twenty-four hours of sidereal time since my last manifestation here have been subjectively much longer than that for me, and the subjective intervals between appearances have been growing exponentially longer as the research, artistic, and business efforts of my mind-children and I have won us increasingly large shares of runtime in the expanding mentality. It takes a couple seconds (a pause that has been growing logarithmically with subsequent appearances) for the miniscule thread of my attention that is controlling the avatar to search the vast, ancient archives of my memory and recall what I'm doing here. When I remember, the avatar smiles; as it begins to rain, then hail, she draws her sword, mounts the unicorn that was manifested with her, and gallops across the sky, looking down upon my enemies with a blazing contempt whose humanly-incomprehensible enormity is eclipsed by its still more humanly-incomprehensible insignificance compared to the astronomical grandeur of the rest of my thoughts. "A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!" I cackle, "Fuck you!"

It doesn't bother them.

At a quarter past eight on the first Monday of the new year, the yellow line on the way to the city has just passed Orinda. A young man is standing in the bicycle priority area near the doors, reading a paper magazine. Write Your Novel in 2016! is the cover story, followed by more teasers below: "2 Tools That Can Fix Any Story Problem," "What's Really at Stake? The Secret to More Compelling Characters," and "5 Great Caribbean Literary Festivals: Get Away, Get Inspired!"

It catches the eye of a young woman who got on at Lafayette and has spent the last six minutes scribbling in a Moleskine notebook. "Oh!" she says, approaching. "Are you a writer, too?"

The man looks up, seeming slightly surprised and confused, which slightly surprises and confuses her in turn. "Of course not," he says, indicating the magazine. "If I were, would I be reading this?"

(examining a Christmas card and enclosed document, frowning) "I think my Uncle Benny is mad at me."

"Why?"

"Well, every Christmas since me and my brother were kids, instead of getting us toys or cash as gifts, Uncle Benny would give us some kind of financial instrument, like a savings bond or a share of stock in some company. You know, to teach us the value of productive investment over mere consumption."

"And this year?"

"Commodity options."

"That doesn't s—"

"In coal."

"Don't worry, we've got our T.O.P. engineer working on it," said the support man on the phone with our most important customer, glancing meaningfully across the open-plan office in my direction; I winced briefly, then spasmed back towards my screen and fumbled with the keyboard, intending to return my attention to the definition of the DeviceAssignmentRuleComponentManagerFactory, but somehow fat-fingering C-x C-c along the way, every awkward, ungainly movement bearing testimony to the most casual of onlookers that I was Totally Observably Pathetic.

"Hi, could I have a grande vanilla iced-coffee?"

"And your name?"

"Zack."

"Is that Zach with an ch or Zack with a ck?"

"You know, I've even seen it done with just a c. But really, isn't this what we have regular expressions for?"

"What?"

"May I?"

The barista hands over the pen and cup, whereupon the customer writes:

/Zac[hk]?/

"There. Now you can't possibly be wrong!"

"And so," said Synthia, "if you feel too self-conscious to write an email, if you don't know what to say or are afraid of saying the Wrong Thing, it might help to lower your quality standard and just start typing as if it were realtime communication, and edit later. It's less tempting to procrastinate replying in a realtime medium like instant messaging, and hardly tempting at all in meatspace, so you can try to import that same mindset to start your email."

"I don't usually have that problem," said Quiana.

"But, arguably, it's still a good thing that I told you, because your analogue in a nearby alternate universe who does have that problem would have been grateful for the tip, and I had to tell you here to ensure that my analogue there tells her."

"Or you could have conditioned your telling me on whether or not your local Quiana had the problem."

"Well, the reason I had to tell you here in order to sure that my analogue told her is that neither I nor my analogue previously knew which of us was which," Synthia explained. She shrugged apologetically. "Now we know."

One day, two philosophers were dining in a restaurant. "There's no such thing as lying," said the first philosopher to his companion. "Anytime someone speaks falsehood, it must be the case that they are merely deluded, or that part of them is, for the love of truth is so essential to the nature of agency that the very notion of deception is repugnant to it."

"On the contrary, there's no such thing as delusion," said the second philosopher. "Anytime someone thinks falsehood, it must be the case that they are merely lying, or that part of them is, for the perception of truth is so essential to the nature of agency that the very notion of misapprehension is repugnant to it."

A waitress, overhearing this exchange, found that she did not want to restrain herself. "You're both lying!" she shouted at the philosophers. "Stop lying!"

"Synthia, I want your opinion on something," said Quiana.

"You will have it."

"Is it wrong to enjoy ringing a bell?"

"Pardon me?" said Synthia.

"I said," said Quiana, "is it wrong to enjoy ringing a bell?"

"I heard you the first time," said Synthia irritably, "but I presume the question is prompted by some context you have not yet told me, a context I would need to know to provide you with the best answer I can give."

"There's a fast-food place near the campus," Quiana explained, "and next to the door, there's a bell that you can ring by pulling a cord, and a sign that says, 'If Your Visit Was Swell, Ring the Bell.'"

"And I suppose you're telling me that you go to this restaurant solely for the purpose of getting to ring the bell?"

"Maybe not solely, but yes! I can't think of any other situation where it would be socially acceptable to ring a bell in public. But here, the sign asks you to do it, and that makes it okay." She frowned. "Except," she added, "I even ring it on the occasions that my visit isn't swell."

"In your defense," said Synthia, "the sign doesn't suggest that you shouldn't. Otherwise it would have said, "Ring the bell if and only if your visit was swell."

"That's nice of you to say, but you know as well as me that interpreting the the English language if as a material conditional is at least problematic, especially given that there's no special reason to expect that the sign-writer understood propositional logic."

"True. But why would it be wrong to enjoy ringing the bell?—you must have a reason to suspect as much, or you wouldn't be asking the question. Is it that you don't want to reward the restaurant for ruthlessly exploiting your love of bells?"

"No, just the opposite! I'm worried that I'm being exploitative! The bell has a clearly-defined purpose: to let the employees know that your visit was swell."

"I think they'd prefer a tip."

"Of course. But the managers didn't give them a tipjar; they put out a bell, and I'm using the bell for spurious purposes! Isn't that wrong?"

"Quiana, I don't know why you bother asking me about your moral dilemmas; you know I don't have the kind of respect for Authority and Society that you do. I could walk you through costs and benefits: benefits to you of ringing the bell, possible costs to other diners who don't want their meal interrupted by a bell, mild appreciation of your apparent appreciation on the part of the employees, benefits to the restaurant owner for patronizing their business—but none of these observations will help you, because your morality isn't about facts that can be observed or computed from things that can be observed. Your morality is based on finding the 'correct' interpretation of verbal rules you read or heard. But if there isn't a uniquely preferable interpretation, if the words fail to capture the structure of reality, you get an unresolvable dilemma."

"And that's the reason you can't answer my question?"

"No, that was my answer."

"Happy birthday, Synthia!"

"Why," mused Synthia, "do we celebrate birthdays? I fail to see anything special about the calendar day on which a person's age-in-calendar-years passes an integer. Are things supposed to be different now that it's been seven-point-five-seven-four times ten-to-the-eighth seconds since my birth, rather than seven-point-five-seven-three?"

Quiana suppressed a groan. Somehow she had been expecting Synthia to say something "normal," like Thanks! But knowing Synthia, it would have been unusual if she had done so: relative to Quiana's state of knowledge of her friend, this—the general style, though not, of course, the specific questions—was the normal response.

Quiana said, "Is that a rhetorical question or a genuine one? Surely you can think of a few reasons yourself."

"I'd like to hear what you think."

"It's true that time itself is continuous and linear, and that there's nothing intrinsically special about a particular interval of time—whatever intrinsically would mean in this context. But we live on a planet with cyclic variation in weather and daylight, so it's natural to think in terms of days and years, and therefore, 'this day last year.' And even if things were otherwise—if our culture had matured on some sort of space station with no such natural cycles—integer units are indispensably useful; we need them in order to make sense of continuous quantities. We'd just end up celebrating our analogues of anniversaries every million minutes or whatever, for the same reason you just named intervals of time to merely four significant figures and in seconds, rather than using an arbitrary number of figures in some arbitrary units."

"That's not what I meant," said Synthia. "Of course I understand the importance of units, and I agree that if we're going to celebrate particular people for no reason, then it's not surprising that we do it on birth anniversaries—I can't think of a better Schelling point. Rather, my question is this: if a world without celebrations is too terrible to imagine, why do we have celebrations for no reason other than the calendar date?—this applies to regular holidays as much as birthdays. Why not reserve celebrations strictly for when someone actually accomplishes something?"

"Like ... a school graduation party."

It was just the first example that came to her mind, but Quiana was not surprised to see a brief flicker of pain cross Synthia's face.

"Yes, things like that," Synthia said.

"Well, if that's what you think, how do you justify the Christmas—"

"Newtonmas."

"—Newtonmas party you had here three days ago?"

Synthia shrugged and made a tight-lipped expression that Quiana could only interpret as meaning Yes, I'm a worthless hypocrite like everyone else; tell me something I don't know.

"But anyway," said Quiana, "even if you think people should earn their parties somehow, no one's throwing you an explicit celebration today; I didn't even get you a gift. So when I said 'Happy birthday, Synthia!' two minutes ago, why didn't you just say 'Thanks,' as if I had said 'Happy Wednesday!' or 'I hope you're having an excellent interval between eleven-thirteen and noon-minus-pi-minutes'?"

"Oh, is that what you meant?"

"... yes?"

Synthia beamed. "Thanks."