The Happy Button

There’s a thought experiment of mine that has always kind of bothered me, and I think I finally worked out my take on it today. That thought experiment is the “happy button.” Simply put: Imagine you have a button, which has a wireless link to an electrode in your brain. When you push this button, you are happy. Why should you do anything besides push the button?

Note that the happy button has several differences from “an IV full of heroin.” There are no physiological side effects and no withdrawal symptoms. Also, you can push the button as much as you want with no supply issues, so you’ll never have to worry about getting more. Finally, the button has no tolerance effect, except insofar as happiness itself does. It produces the same sensation of perfect happiness every time you push the button. I want to stipulate these things so that the heart of the matter is exposed. The question comes down to value systems—is the most important thing in life to be happy?

The reason I have struggled with this highly hypothetical scenario is that I can only answer part of the question. I strongly feel that I would not want to simply push the button. At the same time, I’m not sure why. (If we’re endowing the button with amazing happiness-giving properties, my vague emotional objections would presumably wilt away once I pushed it. Thus, “because I feel icky about it” is again, not a reason to vote against the button.) I like to be able to articulate my thoughts, it makes me feel clever. Yet I also believe that people ought to look after their own happiness as long as it does not harm others, which the button does not. I will use arguments like this in reference to homosexuality and drug legalization. I have said that modern society’s high divorce rate is far preferable to people remaining in unhappy marriages. For someone so opposed to a happiness button, I frequently make reference to happiness as a cardinal value.

Perhaps we can solve this problem with recourse to morality and ethics. Is it wrong to push the happiness button? Unfortunately, I can’t think of a moral system that I support that would consider it so. Years ago on this blog I brought up my issues with divine command ethics, so let’s just discard that right now. Utilitarianism would ask me to judge which of my actions would produce the most happiness. In this case, well, I can theoretically make myself so happy that I would be well in the right. If we judge that I can’t be made that happy, then we run into an issue of whether it is ever moral to pursue my own happiness. After all, it’s highly likely that I—as a middle-class American—could send all my money to the third-world poor and achieve more utilitarian happiness than I would by, say, buying myself Cane’s Chicken. (Oh man, do they not have Cane’s where you are? It’s like, better than Chick-Fil-A and you don’t feel guilty about gay people afterwards.) While I certainly respect that it’s a good thing to engage in charity work, I worry about a principle that suggests I totally retard my own well-being until everyone is at least as well-off as I am. We also have deontological ethics, which aren’t quite as helpful with easy-to-apply rules and formulas. Our best bet is Immanuel Kant’s “act according to that maxim which you can at the same time will to become a universal law.” So, “would it be wrong to press the button?” can be transformed to “would it be wrong if everyone pressed the button?” Everyone pressing the button just makes everyone in the whole world happy. Again, that doesn’t seem so bad.

I could also try to make an appeal to something more than happiness. One character takes this appraoch near the end of Huxley’s Brave New World:

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

This is the most attractive option so far. It certainly seems very good, at least on some emotional level. Yet, somehow, I’ve never quite been able to buy it. The Savage seems to imply, after all, that he isn’t happy with hedonism. He speaks about all of his wants, desires not provided to him by the society he is being offered. This isn’t an argument for his position, it’s simply a statement of his position. Certainly, the Savage here is essentially rejecting the happiness button, but he doesn’t really explain why—just that he is. You’ve helped illustrate the position, my friend, but not gotten me any closer to understanding the impulse. I don’t like vague emotional sentiments underlying my philosophical opinions. I like to be able to write long blog posts about my motivations, you know?

I started to find a way out of this conundrum when I started to imagine what life would be like with this button. Eventually, even with the button, I would get hungry or thirsty. Happy people still need these vital biological inputs, after all. Like it or not, you’re made out of meat. Does the button remove the desire for food and water? If yes, then it will eventually kill me, and I have a very good reason not to press it. If no, then it can’t necessarily keep me happy; eventually, I will become unhappy with having not eaten, etc. And, when I go to find food, I’ll need to either hunt and gather for it or participate in the modern economy, which requires that I work. (Or, it requires that someone else work on my behalf—which is unsustainable enough to mount a moral argument against the button.) In other words, a being bounded by physical limitations simply cannot both survive and be happy all the time. Some thought experiments rely on simplifications, but we can see that this one actually has faulty premises which lead to a contradiction.

In the end, this was a pretty stupid thing to think about. Did I really just conclude that I shouldn’t use the happiness button because there can be no such thing? Why not stipulate away the issues, like I did at the beginning? To answer this, let’s look carefully at the original question: “Why should you do anything besides push the button?” My question was, given bountiful happiness for low effort, are there reasonable grounds to do something else? The limiting case of this argument is limitless happiness and no effort—and what we discovered is that there are still human needs left over. I used hunger and thirst, but humans have plenty of other desires—for risk, for freedom, for goodness, etc. Being happy may mean that you don’t want to act on those desires, but it doesn’t remove those desires.

So yes, there is an excellent reason to do something besides be happy: we, as human beings, want more out of life than happiness. In fact, I never wondered about the morality of using the button at all. A properly balanced person can seek out their moments of happiness and truly enjoy them—while the hedonist can’t, because their happiness is self-limiting. In the end, without all the unhappy parts of life, we’re left without any context or substance to fill our moments of happiness with.

Myers-Briggs and Me

A few weeks back I was talking to a friend of mine (yo Madeline) and she brought up the Myers-Briggs personality test, which is an innocuous enough topic to bring up. I remember taking it—years ago—and being interested in the results. I read over the different categories, thought it was interesting, felt that it described me. But when Madeline brought it up, I had a different emotional reaction than the default I strive for, which is enthusiastic engagement. For reasons I didn’t really understand at the time, I said “Ehhhh. It’s kinda bullshit.”

Alright, so, why did I say that? Do I have a problem with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), on psychological grounds? I’m not a psychologist, not by a long shot. I do have a few objections on purely systematic grounds. Let’s say we test four people for a trait, and give them a percentile score. This trait could one of the four MBTI variables, or in reality it could be pretty much anything. Anyway, everyone with a 50% or below, we are going to put in group A, and we will call them Type A people. Everyone above that threshold will be Type B people. Our four subjects score a 5%, a 45%, a 55%, and a 95%. That makes sense. For most traits, people will fall into a normal Gaussian distribution, a bell curve. We expect most people should be in the middle of the scale, because that’s what the middle of the scale means. However, because of the way we bin our results, Mr 5% and Mrs 45% are treated identically by our test. In fact, Mrs 45% is more like Mr 55%, yet they belong to two different types—and in Myers-Briggs, these types are supposed to form a binary opposition! In addition, if the standard deviation of the distribution is too low—that is, if people are really clustered around 50%--then most people will be just a few percent off, which is probably within the error of the test. If your test grade is +/- 5%, and you score 46%, Myers-Briggs has wholly failed to sort you into a category, despite the fact that these categories are defined to be essentially bipolar.

That’s a pretty real objection, but it doesn’t address the issue much. After all, just because the bins are too large doesn’t invalidate the idea of the bins. In addition, it may be that people aren’t actually normally distributed in the Myers-Briggs traits. (Although you can check the Wikipedia page; they are.) I also strongly suspect the feeling of “oh yes, this is me” that people (including yours truly) get from the descriptions. I just took a Myers-Briggs test, and got INTJ (but with only “slight” preference on the last two, so, that illustrates my above point). INTJ is a pretty classically “nerdy” type, and it is what I usually score. I think I’ve also gotten INFJ or INTP or something before, but that’s not really important. Let’s look at the first paragraph of the description:

To outsiders, INTJs may appear to project an aura of "definiteness", of self-confidence. This self-confidence, sometimes mistaken for simple arrogance by the less decisive, is actually of a very specific rather than a general nature; its source lies in the specialized knowledge systems that most INTJs start building at an early age. When it comes to their own areas of expertise -- and INTJs can have several -- they will be able to tell you almost immediately whether or not they can help you, and if so, how. INTJs know what they know, and perhaps still more importantly, they know what they don't know.

This boils down to “INTJs are smart at particular things, but not at everything. They have an accurate self-image of how much they know.” The first is pretty much universal, while the second is the sort of thing that everyone would like to believe about themselves, which to me smacks of the empty vagaries of newspaper horoscopes. . The description goes on to be more specific, of course, and in many respects it does seem to describe me (“Typical INTJ career choices are in the sciences and engineering”). However, it also identifies me as Ensign Ro from The Next Generation, and I never liked Ro. So, I have to object on Star Trek grounds.

So, I took another test. This time I got INFP, with both of those last ones fairly strong. Reading the INFP, I’m struck by how well this one describes me as well (“never lose their sense of wonder” “switch from fantasy to reality and back” “like Dr Bashir from Deep Space 9, isn’t he the greatest”). Interestingly, it does so by talking orthogonally to INTJ. That is, whereas INTJ focused on things like, how I go about doing work and how I formulate problems, the INFP description focuses on my moral sense and my attitude towards the universe. These don’t contradict at all. But if I can be –FP and –TJ at the same time, how are we placing these in binary opposition? Again, it’s a test that seems to describe me, but I’m not convinced that their classification is actually revealing anything.

At this point I’m being overly harsh, just like I was in my conversation with Madeline earlier. Certainly it gets enough aspects right that my knee-jerk dislike for it isn’t really justified. So what, exactly, is behind this emotional reaction? To tell the truth, I have a philosophical objection to the whole enterprise. You see, I really hate the idea that a personality could be determined by four parameters, each of which has two possible values. That a person’s attitude towards life, relationships, and work can be stored in a four-bit string. Obviously, this isn’t an unreasonable position to take—the unreasonable part is me putting Myers-Briggs up as something that claims this. I don’t think anyone claims that there is a personality test or type that would fully encapsulate who we are.  

Still, humans have this terrible instinct to put people into boxes and act as if that box contains them. We hear jokes about people planning love lives based on astrology or the like, but the fact is that people do that. (To clarify, I think Myers-Briggs is a good deal better than astrology, being based on some semblance of reality. Astrology serves to get us out of the specifics of the problem and demonstrate my general boxing issue, though.) Of course, throughout history we’ve come up with ways to do this. We do it with race—how many different ethnicities are covered in “black”?  We do it with gender, and only recently is our society starting to untangle that particular pair of boxes.

I identify as a humanist. “Humanist” is not a code word for “atheist” for me. It’s not a way to dodge accusations of ideological servitude to Richard Dawkins.  I am a humanist, with atheism as an aspect of that.  I am a humanist because, truth be told, I love people. I love it when they build things and care about things and when they tell stories. I love it when they set out to discover more than they know. I love the look in a person’s eye when they get excited. I love the acts of kindness we hear about, however rarely we hear of them. (I suspect what’s rare is the hearing.) People are fascinating—really, every single one of them. I know people who have spent their whole lives growing up in the same rural region of Oklahoma. You know what? They’re full of stories. They know so much about the land and the people around them. It’s wonderful. They’re not well-traveled, but they don’t need to be.

I have experienced only a narrow, infinitesimal slice of humanity. There are types of music I have never heard or dreamed of. There is art that would make me weep, from cultures I never knew existed. Yet even the half-dozen or so people I would consider close friends represent tremendous differences in personality. I’m like them, in many ways. But in many ways—arguably, many important ones—I’m not. Somehow that makes things better between us, because all these differences add to our relationship.

That’s the sort of spiritual reverence I have for humanity, for the “miracle of human consciousness.” I accept that mental phenomena are ultimately physical phenomena somehow. (From a Buddhist point of view, I’ll add “and vice versa” but that’s not relevant.) Obviously there is some finite amount of information that would represent my personality. But the practice of putting people into boxes or bins—whether by star sign, or Myers-Briggs type, or college major—seems to me to cheapen not just my own uniqueness, but the stunning beauty that is human society. An irrational response, I admit, one founded in sentimentalism and my own secular quasi-religious feelings.   It’s as if, instead of the Mona Lisa, you looked at a Polaroid photo of it. In a more modern analogy, think extremely low quality bitmap image. True, this representation doesn’t remove the original—people still have complex inner lives and the painting is still hanging in Paris, regardless of how we communicate it to people. Yet, if I showed you a blurry, pixilated image and said “this is the Mona Lisa,” wouldn’t you feel a little cheated?

There are more things in heaven and earth, Myers-Briggs than is dreamt of in your psychology.

Fun and relevant quotes:

"It's like, that people … well, that everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds … not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe." -- Neil Gaiman, A Game of You

"What is sacred to Bokonists?" I asked after a while.

"Not even God, as near as I can tell."

"Nothing?"

"Just one thing."

I made some guesses. "The ocean? The sun?"

"Man," said Frank. "That's all. Just man."

--Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

In this Post, Nuclear Weapons Make Me Sad

As those of you who know me at all are aware, I'm pretty pro-science. It has been suggested that if science were anthropomorphic and female we would probably be like, married by now. That said, there's one subject--and really pretty much just this one--that makes me almost question the entire enterprise, and that's nuclear weapons. (This post is inspired by me reading the first few chapters of Richard Rhodes's "The Arsenals of Folly", but see also Feynman's comments on the matter, and see also Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle".)

You might think that, since nuclear weapons have only been deployed twice, and there is an argument to be made that those were justified--I'm not convinced, but I can see the point of view--you might think that while dangerous, nuclear weapons are not the worst scientific sin. What about the Tuskegee Experiment, or Nazi eugenics, or DDT, or the Industrial Revolution? Right, well. Obviously I'm not ok with those. But to me those have always been human faults, expressed in the scientific realm, you know? They occurred in the presence of science and technology, but there was nothing unique about them that required that presence. They could have happened--and indeed, things just as bad HAVE happened--for the sake of ideological or religious fundamentalism. 

Not nuclear weapons. See, the thing that gets me is the inevitability: You're investigating electricity. That's a good thing! It's useful. It's important to our civilization. I think everyone would agree that we are glad electricity was investigated. But, of course, if you investigate electricity, you inevitably discover the electron. Suddenly, you've stumbled right into the structure of matter. That's a fascinating question. And clearly, a very important one; it's something mankind has worried about since the ancient Greeks.

You probe a little more, and you discover that these electrons are actually incredibly light--nearly all the mass of an atom is contained in its very center, in a bundle of particles you name a "nucleus." At first you suppose that these nuclei are particles themselves, but you then discover that they are made of smaller pieces, protons and neutrons. That's cool! You have a positive, a negative, and a neutral particle discovered. It's also fantastically useful. This theory can explain pretty much all of chemistry, after all, from a few simple principles. You explore a little more, because you'd like to understand how all these different elements came to be--imagine the excitement, finally being able to understand the diverse forms matter takes and why it does that. You discover something about the nucleus: it's incredibly tightly bound together. It must be, to hold all the positive charges together. Furthermore, certain nuclei are more tightly bound than others--the larger ones are naturally a little less stable than the smaller ones. (And the really small ones are less stable than the larger ones, actually--the peak is at Iron-56.) So if you take a large nuclei and split it apart, you get two smaller, each at a lower energy state. And then there's extra energy released, in the form of kinetic energy/heat. Fascinating!

Wait, shit. Ok. Wait. Suppose we had a large sample of fairly unstable atoms. Suppose then that we started them splitting. Would the first one to start splitting be able to use that excess energy to trigger another split? I want to note here that it's not inevitable that this would be possible. At least, I can imagine in my mind a world where there was no substance that this was possible in. That's not the way the universe works though, and at this point "all" you have to do is to do the math and show that. And there it is, it's possible.

Until this point we've been entirely curiosity-driven, but actually a few sentences into that last paragraph the motivations shifted entirely. As soon as the question, "is a chain reaction possible?" is properly formulated, it becomes vitally important that we answer it. Because if it is possible, and someone else does it first, we may be screwed. Suddenly, scientific curiosity isn't running the show. Suddenly, it's the cold logic of game theory guiding our hand irrevocably. We have to investigate fission, and we have to confirm that it is possible.

I think there's actually another equilibrium here--the equilibrium where nobody has nuclear weapons and nobody has the infrastructure to make them. It's such a huge effort that you can't reliably create them in secret, and so you and everyone else can happily sit around not having them, secure in the knowledge that if anyone tries, you can either get up to speed just as quickly as them, or you can take military action to stop them. I think this is the ideal equilibrium in a disarmed world, and arguably the one that kinda-sorta exists in the Middle East. (EVERYONE KNOWS, Israel.)

That's not the equilibrium we have though. Because of the circumstances of its invention, because of the timeline history happened to take, we built bombs. And so, they built bombs. They had to, really. So we built bigger, and more bombs. They replied in kind, again, because that was the game theory-mandated course of action. 

Imagine that a nuclear attack was launched, once the arms race was well and truly under way. We see the nukes coming. We know that we are all dead. America's cities are minutes from turning into hellish fireballs, flash-incinerated. If you don't live in a city, chances are you too close from one to escape the radiation--even if your dose isn't that bad, the infrastructure to treat you is going to be gone. The absolute logic of MAD demands that we counterattack. Not just their military--after all, the first strike is already out, we are not winning this war. No, we have to fire on enemy population centers. It is important that we launch a counter-genocide. Because if we didn't, if we weren't willing to carry out the logic to its fatal conclusion, then the whole structure wouldn't work.

This isn't science's fault, really. At some point, we fell into the prisoner's dilemma, and it was a matter of logic and sociology and politics. But that's how we got here. We asked questions about the natural world. We didn't do anything malicious, we didn't break any ethical rules--we just wondered, and we followed our curiosity. All my life, I've held that emotion in the highest regard, and thought it one of humanity's greatest traits. I am studying physics because I want to understand the world. But...was it worth it? We sought to understand the world and in doing so we discovered a way to end it. And it's not like we directed research towards it--we were well out of the curiosity regime by the time the Manhattan Project was formed. Simple questions, experiments--the natural flow of our desire for knowledge endowed us with powers to murder on a scale previously thought unthinkable. It led us to a situation in which we were required to develop ever-greater destructive capabilities. How many nuclear weapons are pointed at New York? How many guns do we have to the head of Washington D.C.? Moscow, Pyongyang, Beijing, Havana, Tehran? 

I didn't do this. And maybe it's not fair to say that physics did this, either. The possibilities we discovered are a part of the laws of physics. They're the same laws that led to us being formed, the same rules that allow stars to forge hydrogen into heavier elements that make life possible. The same structure that allows us to arise from stardust, allows us to return to dust should we so choose. Still, it chills me to the bone to realize that the warm, wondrous view of the universe I hold can be so easily married to a cold logic of death. 

The question becomes: is it worth the risk? Is it worth it to wonder and to discover, if there is some chance you might discover Armageddon? I suspect there's no good answer to this. I suspect that any answer to this will be entirely emotional and essentially a leap of faith. Scientists, it seems, are not immune to great questions of conscience.

Of course, I myself hold that it is worth it. The desire to explore something is tied up in who we are, as humans. We explore the world around us through science, we explore ourselves through art, and we explore each other through love and friendships. None of them are risk-free scenarios. None of them are all that safe and many of them are discomforting, sometimes over and over again. But we keep trying--because if we didn't, we may as well die. So I intend to keep exploring. I'm not sure I have a choice.