2023-05-06 Reason Is Fun #1 - Fun, Fury, Feeling
Duration: 01:12:52
Transcript
Lulie Tanett
Welcome to the Reason is Fun podcast. I’m your host, Lulie Tanett, and today I’m having a conversation with David Deutsch about his fun criterion and how to live a life of fun. And then we get into a debate about emotions and whether anger is a good emotion. So it’s a lot of fun in this episode and I hope you enjoy. Hello again. Hi. So, today’s topic is the fun criterion because my Twitter handle is called Reason is Fun and so is the name of this podcast. And do you remember that you actually suggested that as a new Twitter handle for me?
David Deutsch
No, I don’t remember. But I do remember a previous video podcast or whatever you call it on the fun criterion. So we’re going to expand on that today or what? Yeah. Well, so basically I’m going to ask you a ton of questions about the fun criterion because I’ve always disliked it. I’ve always thought that the word fun is too misleading because it can get mistaken for sort of mindless fun. Yes. But by the way, I don’t really like the word criterion. So there we are.
Lulie Tanett
Well, what don’t you like about the word criterion?
David Deutsch
Well, we already have criteria for choosing between ideas, namely whether they’re good explanations, basically whether we think they’re true or false. Fun criterion sounds as though you can kind of evaluate in advance what’s going to be fun, whereas I think it’s more accurate to say that fun is a mode of criticism rather than a criterion. Fun or rather lack of fun. If something seems to be not fun, that is prima facie a criticism of it. You may still have to do it. You may still decide that you have to do it because you don’t yet have enough knowledge to not do it and so on. But if something you are doing or propose to do isn’t fun, then there’s something unsolved there. It’s something that has to be answered.
Lulie Tanett
Sorry, why do you not like the word criterion?
David Deutsch
Well, what I’ve just said doesn’t describe a criterion. It describes a mode of criticism. That is, something is going wrong if you’re not having fun. So I guess one of my questions is why the word fun, given that it has this ambiguity with mindless going out and getting drunk and using video games as escapism and that sort of thing. I think there are several things I could say about that. One is that no term is going to be accurate. This is the case in Popperian philosophy generally, in fact, all philosophy, in fact, anything you might talk about. If you want to say something new, the terminology you use is going to be unsuited for it because the terminology is going to be adapted to previous ways of thinking.
Lulie Tanett
What you can do is just invent your own terminology. That’s a terrible idea because no one will understand what you’re saying.
David Deutsch
Secondly, it is subject to the same problem that it will only represent accurately, fairly accurately your thoughts at a particular time.
Lulie Tanett
When you’re addressing a new criticism, it will no longer be suitable. So I think what people usually do and what is done in physics and what’s done in philosophy, what Popper did is to use the nearest existing term and be very careful to explain that one means something new by it. Why not the word enjoyment?
David Deutsch
Enjoyment is too explicit a term. So if you say I only want to do enjoyable things, that also kind of captures the idea. It immediately raises the question, what is enjoyable?
Lulie Tanett
What are you enjoying? So, you know, I watch bad documentaries and you ask me why and I say because it’s, if I said because it’s enjoyable, then I wouldn’t have really explained anything.
David Deutsch
I’m really just saying I watch them because I watch them. If I say it’s fun, I’m saying I have a reason for watching them. Yes, it’s enjoyable or whatever, but I can’t necessarily say what is enjoyable.
Lulie Tanett
Isn’t that true also of fun?
David Deutsch
Well, to me, fun suggests that the reason is not necessarily known. I think I’m not the only person to use fun in this way, to use the term fun in this way. You have pointed out that Feynman also seems to use it in the same way. It’s where sometimes when he’s explaining why he does a thing, he can explain why he does it, but other times he says it’s fun. And that means, of course, there is an explanation, but it’s not necessarily known explicitly or it’s not necessarily known yet. But is a man to be deprived of his dinner because he cannot explain the workings of his own stomach?
Lulie Tanett
Does that chess player that you watch also use the word fun? Ginger GM? Yes, yes.
David Deutsch
I can’t remember if he uses the word, but he certainly uses the concept. I mean, the reason why his rating often dips below 2500 is that he’s not trying to win quite a lot of the time. Sometimes he is. By the way, he was recently in an amazing game in Iceland, Reykjavik Open, where he not only had fun, but it was a devastating victory. Another thing, I mean, while we’re talking about Ginger GM, we the public mostly see his games that he’s commentating on in real time. So he’s commentating on his own game. And these are usually like five minute games or 10 minute games or even three minute games. And he’s not great at the short time versions of the game. So he’s kind of distracting himself from the game. Now, this, I don’t know if I can speak for him, but this commentating during the game and recording a video and then making money out of the videos or whatever, this is really bad for achieving the best play because you’re distracting yourself all the time.
Lulie Tanett
Yeah, I did some Twitch streaming and I was playing a simple game like Animal Crossing and even that was, I couldn’t entirely talk about abstract things. Well, on the other hand, I was talking more about a different topic when I was doing that. So maybe it’s not equivalent.
David Deutsch
I think it does sound equivalent. Talking about something is not the same as thinking about the thing.
Lulie Tanett
Ah, yeah, because then you’ve got this meta discussion layer going on. So instead of being completely immersed in the flow of the thing that might not even be in words, but it’s like completely focused on it.
David Deutsch
Yes. And it’s not even only that because you’ve also got to think of the audience. So you’re thinking about three things. You’re thinking about how to put into, you’re thinking about the game, you’re thinking about how to put into words about the game. And then you’re thinking about whether the way you said it is misleading the audience and making them think something else that you don’t want them to think. And then if you have anxiety, you’re also thinking about how you’re coming across and whether you’re good as a person. Well, okay, that’s going to put a spanner in the works.
Lulie Tanett
Yeah, possibly those people wouldn’t go on Twitch for long. So now rarely we saw a game of his where he was not commentating. He was absolutely concentrating on the game in the Reykjavik Open and other people were commentating on the game. And they were like, oh my God, oh my God, you know, what a great game this is and so on. So wait, how do we get into that? Yeah, you were explaining in what way does Ginger GM use the fun criterion in your view?
David Deutsch
Well he often says things like, okay, I can’t remember whether he specifically says this move seems fun, but he says something like, okay, I’m really tempted to play so and so. No, I know I shouldn’t. No, so I won’t therefore. Okay, there’s a better way. No, no, I can’t resist. I’m going to play it. But you said in the fun criterion video that the fun criterion is when your explicit ideas and your inexplicit ideas converge or say to do the same thing. And now you’re talking about a situation where his apparent explicit ideas are saying, oh, don’t do that thing, but that thing is fun. Yes, I think that’s not a contradiction. I think his explicit ideas are he’s trying to be a chess commentator. So he is trying to say what in this position is most likely to lead to a win or something like that. I don’t, probably you can’t put into words what is most likely to lead to fun, except to say that it will. But I feel like there are often situations where you think, oh, I really shouldn’t do this. But it’s so much fun and fun in that situation is still the same as what you would call the fun criterion. Yes. Even if you’re thinking, oh, this is bad, I shouldn’t do it. Like, oh, this is a bit rebellious. I think in those situations, you’ve got several different voices, not only the inexplicit one and the explicit one, but also the commentator one. And …
Lulie Tanett
There might be more than one commentator. Isn’t the commentator the explicit one?
David Deutsch
No, no, because, to compare it with chess again, whenever you make a chess move, you’re talking about something highly logical. You’re talking about if this, then that and so on. But that isn’t the only thing that is guiding your play. And then so whenever you make a chess move, there’s some explicit theory behind it as well as an inexplicit one. But then when you’re commentating, you haven’t got access to all of that. The thing that so if you’re if you’re playing voluntarily, if you’re playing to have fun, you know, if you’re if you’re doing what will make you enjoy the process the most, then you are integrating explicit with inexplicit theories. Chess is a game where you can’t play unless you integrate them to some extent, unless you’re unless you’re a chess engine. They only have explicit theories and they’re incapable of having fun. And their games, many of their games are notoriously not fun. Occasionally, they hit on one which is fun, but that’s not because they were aiming towards it. It’s because the third party can look at it and say, ah, yes, that’s brilliant. That’s beautiful. It doesn’t know that it only knows that it’s going to lead to a win. But you’re saying the commentator part of you is different from the explicit part. Yes. Yes. Well, the explicit part can be focusing on something other than winning as well. I mean, the explicit part in the kind of talk that I was I was recalling from Ginger GM, he’s saying something like again, I can’t remember the words, but he’s saying something like this move would be fun. Part of the fun is that it’s raising possibilities that seem to lead to a good game and so on. I can’t follow all the tracks down to their conclusion because it’s too complicated. You have to be superhuman to do that. But they look good. And if I do them, something good is likely to happen, whether or not I win. If I win, it’ll be like a very enjoyable win because it will have harnessed all these good things that make a game beautiful. So you’re talking about the situation where you’re playing this chess game on a Twitch stream and you’ve got the thoughts of what will be good for the audience, which is …
Lulie Tanett
What you’re calling the commentary. And then you’ve got the like what would be a good play, which may be explicit.
David Deutsch
I don’t know. Maybe explicit and inexplicit. Yeah. And then you’ve got fun, which is this, I guess, broadly inexplicit thing.
Lulie Tanett
Yes, exactly. Although you may have some theories about it. Exactly. What about the situations where you’re doing something and indeed your explicit theories say this is bad or naughty or something or like I’m, I don’t know, having a chocolate cake or something and I’m breaking my diet, but it’s a thing and no one will know. And there could be a fun to that. So how does that not violate the fun criterion? So I think in general, this is not good. So in general, if… That’s spicy.
David Deutsch
Yes, in general, if you’re thinking I want to do this, but it’s naughty, but no one will know, you know, no one will know is a dead giveaway. All right. So maybe I’m describing a situation that is too conflicted, but sometimes I’m on my Twitter and I want to say something that is a bit provocative or that is something that I don’t fully believe myself, but I know that it’s fun to say. And also I know that there’s a chance that it will alienate some people. And I don’t know, this is a bad example I realized because I do post it and I’m like, well, I believe in fun, but it does seem to suggest that I’ve got some explicit ideas that would cut against doing Twitter kind of trolly type things. You’re right that the way you described it is ambiguous or at least multilayered. Humans are complicated. When I talk of explicit and inexplicit theories being in conflict, really I ought to give the impression that there are like a dozen explicit theories and a dozen inexplicit theories. And anyway, the distinction between them isn’t so sharp anyway. So some of these theories are 90% explicit and 10% inexplicit and so on. And you also mentioned just now that the situation that I said is generally bad can be reinterpreted.
Lulie Tanett
When you look at it from a creatively defined new angle, you can see that this thing, which would be suffering if it was experienced straight, can be fun when experienced from a different angle created for the purpose of making it fun.
David Deutsch
I suppose when people get into sports that involve pain, like mountaineering is my favorite example, but also boxing. If you find that fun. Now, I think some people do that for compulsive reasons like teenagers cut themselves and that sort of thing. And they are also reinterpreting pain in a way that’s positive to them. But I think they are not, generally speaking, they are not doing something that’s good for them. Though
Lulie Tanett
There might be one or two here and there in the world who are doing it because it is good for them.
David Deutsch
How would I know? But in general, I think that people who enjoy mountaineering or boxing have reinterpreted the entire experience of being in a state of unpleasant conflict from a new angle, which makes that a complex and desirable thing to mold and to turn to one’s advantage. So the same would be true of the situation of wanting to eat cake or rebelling against one’s parents or the law and breaking the law. Rebelling against parents or in some cases rebelling against the law is slightly different because there one is getting into a conflict with something creative and the other side is exerting creativity. Now the mountain never exerts creativity. I suppose the opposing boxer does or the opposing chess player does, but that’s within rules and you can identify with succeeding against the rules. Just like with the mountain, you can be succeeding against the laws of physics and the mountain and so on. But when you’re in conflict with someone who’s got it in for you, someone who wants to change you in their way, regardless of whether you suffer or someone who wants to make you suffer for one reason or another, it’s a very different situation. There’s no a priori reason why there should be a way of making that enjoyable or a way of making you succeed.
Lulie Tanett
Because you would need to constantly be creating new… Yes. Well, I mean, so I would agree that you wouldn’t always succeed, but also the fact that you are up against an opponent. I mean, that’s where most game fun comes from. Games are more fun when you’re playing against someone else who’s also exerting creativity to best you.
David Deutsch
Yes, but as I said, that is only fun when you’re playing within the rules. If you’re playing chess and the opponent can get angry and sweep all the pieces off the board, that’s unpleasant.
Lulie Tanett
I have a different view on this. This comes down to what is suffering, which I think you and I have a different view on, because I think that suffering is effectively, it’s resisted emotions. Also there’s feeling sad or angry or fearful or whatever, which are, quote, bad emotions. And then if you don’t want them, if you’re trying to push away this experience, then that causes unpleasant sensations. However, if you are fully in them. Now I guess this does kind of bring the one maybe counter example of this, which is when… Maybe I would agree with you that if someone is trying to torture you and using creative ways to hurt you in new ways, but I think I want to say based on my current worldview that that is because they find ways to prompt you into doing this resisting the way you feel thing or resisting the situation or something. Because you can imagine someone kind of going along with it and then not suffering. And so it’s in the tension between the what is happening and what I want. Well, yes. Just to make the example crisp. So if you’re being tortured and you think, ah, they’re going to stop any minute now, then those minutes might be more painful than if you realize, ah, this is going to go on for hours and so I might as well… And then you get into a better state of mind when you have this allowing or you acknowledge ah, this is the situation. I…
David Deutsch
Well, I do disagree. Although I think there are things close to what you said, which I might agree with.
Lulie Tanett
Yeah, I also want to clarify that I’m not suggesting dissociating because I think that would be the natural response to being tortured or whatever. It’s more… Yeah, anyway, there’s nuance here, but sorry, go on. So there are microorganisms that torture you for reasons of their own, like some of these horrible tropical diseases that make you itch unbearably until you’ve scratched away your flesh and that kind of thing. They have evolved over, I don’t know, millions or hundreds of thousands of years to overcome. Like when you first get… Well, let me start a bit earlier. We scratch itches for a reason.
David Deutsch
I’m not sure I know what all the reasons are, but usually in life, you know, something itches, you scratch it, you carry on with your life and the itch goes away and that’s that. Then there’s a thing where you get into a compulsive state where it doesn’t go away. You scratch in a way that makes it itch more and you can also be in a psychological version of that where you’re in a compulsive state of mind that causes you to think in certain ways which, if this wasn’t so complex a situation, just would be the normal way of getting on with your life and setting it aside. But because it’s evolved to make it, to sort of sabotage that way of being, you instead scratch in a way that makes it worse and so you get into a cycle of psychological self-inflicted pain. So those are examples where it’s more like what you were saying that although the pain is something external, it’s really you cooperating with it that is doing all the heavy lifting. But if you take the tropical disease case, there’s a lot of knowledge in that organism to make it difficult for you to get over it and to say to yourself, no, I’m not going to scratch this because it’ll only make it worse. But you know, it has thought of that. It’s only thought of that in a finite way, but it’s going to take you, you know, it’s had hundreds of thousands of years and also millions of victims to hone its way of causing sensations that make it hard to get out of. You’ve only had like days. Even so, it’s possible for you to find your way out of this situation. It’s also possible that you don’t and it ends up killing you. Now that’s only a microorganism. Another case is where it’s not a microorganism. It’s the built in knowledge in your own body that’s making it difficult. So for example, if you go out of your front door, slip on the ice and break an arm and a leg and you’re in extreme pain and the pain gets unbearably worse when you even try to move. Again you are the victim of the knowledge in your own genes. The knowledge in your own genes evolved to make you absolutely not move even if you want to in that situation. And it takes, it might take, you know, like with the disease, it might take days or weeks for you to get over it. So it might with the breaking a bone and so it’s not realistic. Even though in a sense all the origin of your suffering is inside you, it’s unrealistic to frame it as you could get over it. In practice you couldn’t get over it. In practice you’re going to be suffering until the ambulance comes. But does that apply to purely emotional coercion? No. So like I could imagine, yes, okay, so suffering physically, maybe that’s one of these situations
Lulie Tanett
Where you do in fact suffer and maybe physical suffering is a different type of suffering from psychological, emotional suffering.
David Deutsch
Well there’s also built in emotional suffering. For example, if you’re claustrophobic or something. No.
Lulie Tanett
Okay, so this is the view. So I think that all of those things like claustrophobia would be the fear of being in a small space or any kind of fear or any kind of whatever. All of that is because there is some sensation, some feeling, some emotion that you’re feeling that you do not want to have and that you are trying to resist. So it’s not the fear itself, it’s the I’m not letting myself feel that fear or I’m not letting myself feel that like whatever is underneath that fear.
David Deutsch
Yes, but I think that’s misleading because in the case where you’re claustrophobic or something and you’ve fallen down a well and you can’t get out and the space is very small and you’re panicking, the theories that are in conflict are all inborn still. They’re not something that someone’s done to you or something that, yes you can get over them but meanwhile you’re in a well.
Lulie Tanett
Is claustrophobia inborn?
David Deutsch
I don’t know, I’m just guessing. Suppose it is.
Lulie Tanett
Okay, so if I can continue to ad hoc modify my theory until it meets all of the objections like a good Popperian. What if it’s physical and also these inborn things and then everything else you can do this thing where the unresisted sensations are actually just fine. But also incidentally I would have thought like because people reinterpret their inborn stuff all the time and so really you’d have to propose a situation where there are these inborn things and there is a person using creativity to cause you to keep hitting up against the inborn things or something. I don’t know, there are skydivers and they enjoy that feeling of fear.
David Deutsch
Yes, yes, so there are skydivers, there are also people who are being dangled off the top of a building by their enemy and they’re terrified and it’s not a good analysis of that situation to say that the only thing that’s wrong is what’s in their own mind.
Lulie Tanett
You could say, well, why are you suffering?
David Deutsch
Look at that skydiver up there, he’s enjoying the same thing as what you’re going through. It’s not helpful because well, where there is a torturer, where there is someone actually thinking about how to thwart you, then it’s not, I don’t think it should be controversial there may be no way out because if there is, then you could apply it to the torturer. The torturer is also facing a problem and you can’t both win. In that situation, I would say the appropriate emotion to feel, which you may disagree with, …
Lulie Tanett
Is anger and anger would make that situation at least more enjoyable than if you didn’t have that and so I’m wondering whether you’ve got this sort of anger-shaped gap in your view and so you say, ah, well, all suffering is internal really and it’s all about reinterpretation except in this situation where it involves other people and other people’s creativity and then I would say, well, in that situation, get angry. I don’t think so. So this is a fruitful disagreement, I think, because I think whichever of us is right or wrong or both or whatever, there’s certainly things I don’t understand about this kind of situation but I think there are things you don’t, so you know. May we learn from each other.
David Deutsch
Yeah, quite. One thing is, if to the extent that you’re not maximally suffering from the torture, he’s dangled you from the top of a tall building and you’re kind of, I don’t know, you’re screaming or you’re saying something but you’re obviously not suffering as much as his usual victims. And then you get angry with him. Then he will get angry with you. The thing about getting angry…
Lulie Tanett
I mean, presumably he’s already a bit pissed with you, otherwise why would he be dangling you?
David Deutsch
There are all sorts of reasons why he might be dangling you. He might be a sadist. He might just enjoy whatever or he might want to get the information out of you or whatever. He’ll have reasons. It might be that he’s already angry with you but that’s only one possible reason. Okay. The thing about getting angry is that it’s contagious. So you’re getting angry with him. Basically, you’re saying, you’re hurting me but I’m refusing to be the victim you want me to be. I’m not going to react in the way that you want. I’m instead going to be at least verbally and emotionally aggressive towards you, just as you’re being physically aggressive towards me. That is not anger and this is part of our disagreement about what anger is. That can and is often associated with anger. But I think the cleanest form of anger doesn’t actually look like aggression.
Lulie Tanett
It looks more like having boundaries. If you are angry but you are not so caught up in your anger that that’s the only blind rage and everything, and rather if it’s something like you’re angry and you’re like, wow, this is not right. It is not right that he’s doing this and I’m going to look for ways that I can say no to this. It looks more like determination. You can even, while being angry, take a particular strategy that looks like other emotions. That’s perfectly legitimate. If he’s this torturer and whatever and you know that if you respond in a particular way, then that could be part of the, ah, I’m determined and I’m going to get out of this situation. So this is what I’m going to do. Again, you’re talking about layers, which I have to admit or rather assert exist. But I don’t think that this fully describes the situation of suffering. What I was going to say earlier was that once you’re both angry, you’ve basically shut down the modes of creativity that are going to solve this. So you’ve basically given up on solving it. Why would creativity be shut down then?
David Deutsch
Because anger is the state of being angry. It itself involves creativity. I mean, you have to create that state and maintain it, which involves creativity on your part.
Lulie Tanett
I don’t think that’s true either. I mean, so would you say that is true of all emotions? That every emotion takes creativity to create and maintain?
David Deutsch
No. Okay. What makes anger different? Good question. Well, actually, wait a minute. Wait a minute. No, I take that back. I think all emotions, not sensations, all emotions take ongoing creativity to maintain. Oh, you’re doubling down on it. Okay, cool. Sensations are different because I can feel that the room is too hot, and I can carry on feeling that indefinitely as long as it remains too hot. But I can reinterpret that in all sorts of ways.
Lulie Tanett
What about emotional sensations? Emotional sensations. Well, hang on. We’ll get there in a minute. So I think it’s notorious that pleasure, like pleasure of eating, pleasure of sex, pleasure of physical sensations like having a hot bath and so on, are transient. You need to create, if you want them to continue, you need to create the framework and keep creating the framework for them to continue to be fun. In fact, come to think of it, in a way, nature has played a nasty trick on us with our sensations.
David Deutsch
The natural thing when you discover, let’s say, a new taste, you discover butterscotch ice cream, and you’re thinking at that moment that you could spend the rest of your life eating this. It would just be totally great for the rest of your life. And now it’s possible that you will eat so much of it that you feel ill, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Even aside from that, and I think before that, long before that, unless there’s something else wrong, you will get tired of it. The only way you can continue that enjoyment, that state of fun, pleasure, whatever, is to have new ideas about how to eat butterscotch ice cream. If you don’t have new ideas, it will no longer be fun and you will kind of go off that sensation. If you’re in a compulsive state such that you nevertheless eat it because you’ve reinterpreted that as a mechanical way of feeling good, which it can’t be, that’s a different issue. Then you will run into other problems. But even if you haven’t got that, there’s still the fact that your inborn criteria for when to eat
Lulie Tanett
Are misleading you into thinking that this is a mechanical thing coming from the outside, whereas it never is.
David Deutsch
Even your very first taste of that is a creative act on your part. It’s just so relatively easy to do and so inexplicit that you don’t notice that it’s a creative act, but it is. And unless you keep exerting creativity, it will wear off.
Lulie Tanett
Behind my question was something like, so here you’re talking about sensations that initially kind of come up because, I don’t know, some idea is sparked in your mind such that it produces those sensations or that you have some response to some stimuli, which because of your ideas, both inborn and developed, like what kinds of ice cream you like, then there are pleasure sensations and you might not get those pleasure sensations if it was a type of ice cream that you didn’t like, but someone else did like. But when I said putting creativity into maintaining those emotions or sensations, most people when they hear putting creativity into maintaining would think that there is some kind of active effort there. Like there is some kind of deliberate or conscious or something, whereas actually I think like you don’t think that. Like you think that most creativity happens unconsciously anyway. But I want to tie it back to the original thing about anger because what was it? So we were saying that you would have to use creativity to maintain the anger. Yes. I would say that in that situation where anger is appropriate, the natural thing your brain will be doing is using, like anger will be part of the creative problem solving of that situation. And the anger sensation isn’t just this thing that is being created for no reason. It is part of how to come up with the right type of solutions to deal with that. So like, ah, because I’m feeling angry, then I will think of more solutions involving drawing boundaries or getting ahead or getting space or something like that. Whereas if you were in a scared thing, then you might think of more solutions around running away. Or if you are sad, then more like submitting that sort of thing.
David Deutsch
There is a sense in which I agree with all that, but I think we’re still disagreeing on some level. So I think, again, the reason why I’m agreeing is because you began to describe additional levels of what’s going on or what could be going on. And so I would say anger can be helpful. That is, going into a state of anger can be helpful if your previous problem contained elements that are incompatible with anger. For example, if some part of you thought that you deserved this, or some part of you thought that you were a natural victim or second class citizen or whatever, then feeling anger could be associated with realizing that you’re not. You’re a fully fledged person with boundaries, as you say. And in that case, it’s not that the anger is a good state. It’s that the anger is a temporary side effect of getting yourself out of a previous error, which may be entrenched. And if it’s entrenched, then all the more reason why an unusual state might help you to get out of it. I’m thinking of… I don’t know if this will speak to you.
Lulie Tanett
Have you seen the movie Conan the Barbarian with Schwarzenegger? When I was a kid, maybe.
David Deutsch
Maybe I shouldn’t mention this because some people will get spoilers. Well, so spoiler warning. Spoiler warning, yes. So Arnie is a barbarian, and the good guys in this movie are the barbarians, and the bad guys are the people who are in cities, who are in evil, static societies. And he’s been captured by the king of this, and the king decides to crucify him. So he gets crucified, and we, the audience, think, okay, he’s had it now. This is going to be the end of the film. Or perhaps we don’t think that, but anyway, we don’t guess what’s actually going to happen, which is that he gets weaker and weaker while being crucified, and eventually a vulture settles on him and starts to peck at him, because it thinks he’s nearly dead. And so he suddenly turns to the vulture, bites it, kills it, starts eating it, thereby regaining his strength. And eventually, I forget now what happens, but presumably he eventually gets down off being crucified, and so on, and then wins. So I think that I interpret this not as Arnie being very angry, especially not Arnie being very angry with the vulture. He doesn’t hate the vulture, you know, the vulture is part of the natural world, and on the contrary, he sees the vulture as food. He does not see the vulture as part of the torture that he’s undergoing. And in order to have this idea, he had to have a new idea about the situation of being crucified, because it’s not realistic, it couldn’t happen in real life, and so on. But that’s not the point of the film. I think if he was in a state of rage while being crucified, he wouldn’t have thought of that idea.
Lulie Tanett
I think that is so, first of all, he may well not have been angry. I can also imagine coming at that from a playful point of view. So like, ah, like, lol, there’s a vulture there, I will bite it, lol. I could also imagine having a type of anger, like, ah, I’m really going to step up here. But I think when you think of rage, you think of something aggressive. Whereas I would say anger is not inherently aggressive. It can be aggressive, but the most fundamental version of anger is more about determination, clarity, boundaries, drawing lines. You said that to me before and I keep forgetting it, so you’ll probably have to say it again. I wonder whether there are situations where you would see something kind of happening and you wouldn’t class it as anger, although I would, because of the physiological things that are going on inside them, because the anger is what I would call clean. And this also ties back to things about whether weeping from something beautiful or something so sweet or so happy, and whether you think that’s a good state of mind. I don’t know what your current view on that is. I’m not sure. You’re right that my natural interpretation of that is that there’s something wrong with it. Yeah, I’ve also gone back and forth. What is my current view on this?
David Deutsch
I think quite often it’s to do with a mixture of, yeah, I’m not sure, I’d have to think about this. But, okay, but winding back a bit. So you said that anger in some situations can cause you to think of solutions that you wouldn’t have otherwise thought of, and in those situations maybe anger is good? Yes, but it’s only good in it itself is still bad, but in the overall situation that can often happen.
Lulie Tanett
So I still want to ask you why anger is bad, but I’ll just finish my question, which is to what extent is that true of all emotions? To what extent is what true? That the emotion is only good to feel if it is providing you with solutions that you wouldn’t otherwise have?
David Deutsch
Yes, maybe providing you with is the wrong phrase, because as I said, I now think, you know, in this conversation I have realised that it’s the solutions that you’re finding, the creativity that you’re exerting, that make it pleasant in the first place, or that cure the unpleasantness in the first place. So it’s not that the emotion is providing you with something, it’s just a description of the same thing. I’m not sure if I understand.
Lulie Tanett
You asked, is it true of all emotions that they are helpful in that they provide you with solutions?
David Deutsch
Well, yes, but that’s maybe misleading terminology, because I don’t think emotions provide you with anything. They cause a frame of mind that make it easier to think of some solutions that you were cutting out of your solution set. Yes, and the example that I thought of is maybe a class of examples that you consider too narrow, namely the class where the reason it was difficult before is some kind of irrationality that you had, because you had an entrenched mistake before, and then this emotion puts you in a new situation in which you can then creatively think of why you were wrong before and what a better state of mind is. Whereas I think you want to say it’s not only that situation, it’s that you can just solve, an emotion might help you to solve things, and indeed you probably want to say that whenever you solve something, it’s because your emotions and your explicit and inexplicit theories and all that stuff work together, even when there’s no bad state that had preceded this, just a state of having a problem even in the best possible sense.
Lulie Tanett
Yeah, my picture is that when emotions are free to move instead of getting jammed up, then you’re constantly having all sorts of emotions and it’s part of the creativity process. And then, so there is a sense in which I could agree with that or at least consider it plausible, but then you’re inclined, I think, to then just smoothly go over into sensations like pain and pleasure and so on, or we maybe disagree about whether anger is one of them, but I think in this conversation, the most successful case I had was considering large amounts of pain and how that, so that’s a sensation much more than it is an emotion. So once you go into sensations, the trouble with that is that sensations are felt by the brain, but they are very much tied to the body, at least many of them are, there are sensations like grief, which doesn’t originate in the body or at least doesn’t seem to, but when you extend this idea that all creativity is associated with emotions, when you extend it to sensations as well, it’s very hard to find a way of connecting that to my general ideas about information flow and computation. In the Popperian framework, but if people like David Chapman are right, then this might, this actually is one of the big things that’s causing me to look into David Chapman’s stuff, because I think there is a big question mark around this stuff that I have found from all of this personal development, emotions, psychology and so on, and that it doesn’t neatly yet fit into everything I’m hoping to find a way. But okay, I think, so that would be a fascinating conversation, this sensations versus emotions versus mental stuff. I would love to have that conversation in a future chat. Let’s go back to the fun criterion stuff, because I have some further hard hitting questions for you. Okay, that wasn’t hard hitting. I will create hard hitting questions for you. So here’s my first one. You, so going back to fun is when your explicit ideas and your inexplicit ideas are in alignment. Yes. To use a buzz phrase of the day. Right. Oh yeah, so it is. You also say that the mind doesn’t have beliefs and that it is full of contradictions and that at any given time, you’ve got a ton of different contradicting ideas. Yes. So how are these two, like, because your ideas are never in alignment, so what’s up?
David Deutsch
Well, it’s not the ideas that have to be in alignment, it’s the processes. So the conventional culturally accepted picture of the brain and thinking and mental processes is, I don’t know whether this was always true or whether it’s the fault of the ancient Greeks or whatever, but the picture that our conceptual framework and terminology have is that the brain is, the mind is largely consistent. That is, if we’re sane, it’s largely consistent and that inconsistencies are bad and that the ideal state is to have a consistent state of mind. And on that view, you can misinterpret the fun criterion as saying that your inexplicit theories and your explicit theories in particular should be consistent with each other. And that’s really the opposite of what I think, because if they were consistent with each other, then you wouldn’t be thinking, you’d just be sitting there like a zombie. And as I say in Beginning of Infinity, its other name is death. So, you know, you would be in effect dead because there’d be no incentive to think. The creativity always begins with the problem. So my picture of the mind is that it’s full of conflicting theories, but ideally they’re not causing coercion, they’re not causing suffering, they’re causing something really good. And as I have often said, it’s unfortunate that in our language and conceptual framework, the word problem is used to refer to both to the best thing in the world and to the worst thing in the world. And we don’t have a rich enough terminology. Every time we come to this issue, I have to explain at length that by problem in one context, I mean one thing, in another context, I mean another thing. And they’re not unrelated, they’re opposites. So, first of all, the difference between fun and not fun is not in whether the ideas are in conflict, it’s whether the processes trying to resolve the conflict are opposing each other or not. When I say opposing each other, I don’t mean that they come from different objectives or whatever. That can also happen and is all part of the fun. I mean that they’re not actually thwarting each other. What’s the difference between thwarting something and presenting a problem? Well, thwarting… So, if I’m playing chess against the computer, let’s take out the element of having an opponent. If I’m playing chess against the computer and the computer makes a move that I didn’t expect, which causes all sorts of thoughts to spring up in my mind, how on earth am I going to counter that? Or has it made a mistake? Or whatever. That’s fun. That’s the kind of conflict which we need to have if we are not to die. On the other hand, if the computer crashes and I can’t remember what the position was, that is thwarting my fun, my problem solving. And that is something that I have to get over. It’s not a problem that I enjoy having. So is it expected problem versus un-ing?
David Deutsch
No. What’s the difference? Well, the whole problem situation is different. I began this chess game hoping that there would be the first kind of problem and hoping that there wouldn’t be the second kind of problem. But it’s not that I was… the second kind of problem doesn’t give me the fun that I was hoping to have. Now you can say, you can have fun resurrecting a computer after a crash. Yes, you can. But that requires creativity to get you into the state of mind of having fun resurrecting a computer. How is hoping different from expecting? What is the actual difference between the two? I think if I could really answer that question satisfactorily, I’d know how to do AGI. But I can say a lot about it. I mean, I think a lot is known by Popper and by me about what the difference is. It’s the same as asking what is the difference between a creative process and automatism.
Lulie Tanett
What’s the difference between behaving, just enacting your program and being your own programmer? But this is a situation where a non-creative action caused you annoyance, namely the computer shutting down. Yes. So in both cases, the problem that I have is caused by a non-creative system. It’s caused by my non-creative environment. So the difference between the two is the difference between… so in the case where the computer crashes, in order to get back into a good frame of mind, I have to convert this. So let me step back a bit. You may not immediately see why this is relevant, but there are two kinds of computer programs possible. There’s the creative ones and the non-creative ones. And we do not know how to even check a computer program, even if we have the code in front of us. We do not know how to check whether it is creative or not. However, there are these two kinds, and the creative kind at the moment, the only computers that we know that are running creative programs are human brains and the human mind is such a program. One day we will have artificial ones as well, but we don’t know how to detect the difference. We don’t know how to make a creative program either. Now, if I’m right, and this may be oversimplifying the issue, but even if it is, it doesn’t matter for the point I’m making at the moment. We therefore don’t know what kinds of program can suffer. I assume that the AGI kind can, and the non-AGI kind can’t. It may turn out to be more complicated than that in reality, but there’s going to be some kind of distinction like that in reality, which we will eventually know about. Do you think dogs suffer?
David Deutsch
I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s no good my introspecting to try to sympathize with dogs, because there are all sorts of reasons why that is going to be error prone.
Lulie Tanett
Do you think cats suffer?
David Deutsch
Much less possible. It could be that the solar system suffers, or that peanut butter suffers. Panpsychism? Yeah, it may be. People who should know better have seriously suggested that. And who knows they’re right, because when we don’t know what the truth is, when we have no idea really, sorry it’s exaggerating to say we have no idea, but where we simply don’t know how to cross the gap between us and actually understanding this, we should be modest about dismissing people who say, well, maybe the answer lies in such and such direction. But, okay, having said that, between you and me, panpsychism is silly. Okay, we’re going back to… Yeah, so we fundamentally don’t know. So there’s going to be a computer just sitting there, and it might be, given the program in it, it might be suffering or not. It might be having enormous satisfaction, like maybe superhuman satisfaction or superhuman suffering. I don’t think so, but you know, perhaps, but at any rate, there is a distinction. We don’t know what that is. We don’t know how to create it. We don’t know how to detect it. But we know, I think, that there are some computer programs that it is highly immoral to run, and some that it is highly desirable to run. We know that, even though we can’t tell the difference between the two. Now, since we can’t even… we don’t even have a viable theory of what that distinction is, it’s not surprising that I can’t properly articulate the difference between suffering because your mountaineering expedition has gone wrong in a bad way. I can’t put it better than that. And being exhilarated because your mountaineering expedition has gone wrong in an unforeseeable way, which is exactly what you were hoping for when you set out that you were hoping it would set you problems.
Lulie Tanett
Is it a matter of how you interpret the situation that you’re in, or is it a matter of what type of situation it is, or both of those, or neither?
David Deutsch
It’s fundamentally a way of how you’re interpreting it, but some situations make it very difficult, require a lot more creativity, even to get into the state of being able to devote creativity to how to solve the problem. Some situations make it difficult, and that depends on who you are. Some situations make it difficult to get into the enjoyable state. Some, in practice, make it impossible. You’re just not going to get into the enjoyable state until you’ve been rescued, gone to hospital, come out of hospital, are at a dinner party where you’re telling people about the situation. Then you’re enjoying it. But it may be unrealistic to enjoy it in advance while it’s happening. And then there are other situations which are equally unexpected, which were exactly what you’re hoping for, that you’re doing this mountaineering. By the way, I’m just imagining what it’s like to be a mountaineer.
Lulie Tanett
Unlike Popper, who actually was one.
David Deutsch
True. How interesting. Yes. Yes. But the spirit of what I’m imagining must be true. So you set off on this expedition. You weren’t hoping that nothing would happen on it that you didn’t imagine in advance. You’re hoping that unexpected things will happen, like when you’re entering a chess game or anything enjoyable. You’re hoping that things will happen into which you can sink your creative claws and then munch on the meat, even though you don’t know in advance, if you knew in advance everything that was going to happen, it wouldn’t have the property that you were looking for. So, just as I can’t tell you the difference between given, of course, it’s always given the mountaineer’s existing problem situation, and given the mountaineer’s existing problem situation, we don’t know how to specify the difference between an unexpected problem that makes him suffer and an unexpected situation that just adds to the enjoyment. Ultimately, we don’t know what the difference is between the two kinds of problems, or the kind that is the worst thing in the world and the kind that’s the best thing in the world. However, in many cases, in many interesting cases, we know it when we see it. And also in many interesting cases, the denial that there’s a difference between the two is a time-honoured piece of sophistry that everybody concerned knows is a piece of sophistry, at least at some level, sometimes even explicitly. And they’re saying, you know, like the slave owners in America in the 19th century would say, well, we’ve got slaves and we make them work, but you do exactly the same thing with your workers. Like if they didn’t work, they would starve. And so that’s wage slavery. And they knew that at some level, they knew that this was a concocted argument, because they weren’t making that argument before they had to defend slavery. That argument came up in the context of defending slavery. Nobody ever thought of that otherwise. Even Karl Marx thought of that in the context of advocating violence. So, you know, we’re advocating violence because after all, you, the people that we are going to use violence against, are starving people, even as we speak. And so whether I’m right in psychologising that everybody always knew that this was sophistry, it is, objectively. And in fact, there’s a huge objective difference between slavery and employment. Even though it’s perfectly possible that a slave could be happy and it’s perfectly possible that an employee could be very unhappy. Even so, that happiness and the unhappiness aren’t attributes of the slavery or employment. They are attributes of other parts of the person’s mind. So, also, there is an objective difference between being thwarted and being presented with an interesting, fun problem. But you don’t know in words what that difference is exactly.
David Deutsch
I can’t express in words what it is. And I can’t even reliably tell in every case, even if I knew all the facts. But I think in realistic cases and in cases that people argue about, it is fairly obvious. And you have to make a sort of great philosophical obfuscation in order to obscure the difference between the two. You know, like children are punished in school for doing a thing rather than another. But they’re also punished in the playground if they misstep on the playground apparatus and fall down and hurt themselves. In both cases, they have ideas which are incompatible with the world around them. And if they go too far, they get hurt. And so it’s OK to spank them. In some sense, we all know that is a false analogy. For a start, our terminology, which automatically builds in all sorts of other errors that we make, hasn’t done it in this case. We know perfectly well that spanking and falling off of playground equipment are completely different situations. We have completely different terminology to describe them. And we know that as soon as you take this to somebody’s wife or somebody’s employee, the logic, we know that the logic breaks down. It’s not logic. It’s sophistry. It’s obfuscation. As I said, there are cases where it’s not clear. And you’ve been sort of probing at situations where it’s not clear, like whether the anger is a good thing or a bad thing. Well, I mean, you say it’s not a bad thing intrinsically, but whether it’s integral to solving the problem or not integral or a side effect or an accidental side or solving the problem is an accidental side effect or whatever. If you take enough care describing the situation, I won’t be able to articulate why I think the anger is in itself a bad thing. And I won’t even know. I mean, I won’t even know whether it is. It’s possible that my intuition about these things are wrong in these specially constructed cases. Or you have a wrong theory about what emotions are and how they work. It could be that I have a wrong theory about everything, including knowledge and information flow and so on. I mean, you think you do have a wrong theory about everything because all theories are wrong. Yes, but there are some things that I think I have a well explored critique of. Like, for example, I know that if I stick a pin in my finger, the pain that I feel is not in the finger, even though I’m experiencing it there. It is actually in the brain. You’ll probably agree with that one. But if I say if I am queasy in my stomach, then even though there’s a lot of information processing going on in the stomach, maybe more than in the brain because the stomach has a number of nerves, although it’s not as much as in the brain, it’s a substantial proportion of the number of nerves in the brain. I know that my feeling of discomfort is nevertheless entirely in my brain and not in my stomach. So in summary, we don’t know exactly which features of a situation cause suffering and which cause fun.
David Deutsch
Yes, or which are suffering and which are fun.
Lulie Tanett
Given that all of our ideas are contradictory anyway, in what sense is it the case that fun is when your explicit and your inexplicit ideas align?
David Deutsch
Well, in essence, it’s because it’s not the ideas, it’s the processes. So the difference between being thwarted and being presented with an interesting problem has nothing to do with the actual theories involved. Those could be the same in principle, they could be the same in both cases. The difference is in the processes, whether the process that is stopped and has to do something else is stopped by a problem or whether it’s stopped by a thwarting is, I think, an objective difference, but I can’t characterize that with infinite precision. And processes are the way that you are thinking about something?
Lulie Tanett
Yes. Cool. Alright, well I think that’s all of the time that we have for today, so this was fun, let’s do it more. Yes, let’s.
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