Meaningful research and the "antibiotic apocalypse"

I wanted to share a recent article at BBC news that caught my eye, especially considering a conversation Mike, Jim, and I had just the other day regarding the argument that any kind of public health service in the U.S. would hurt medical research, which is currently funded in large part by American pharmaceutical companies.  It seems to me, at least, that the general assumption behind that argument is that nobody else in the world is making real, significant contributions to medical discovery and that if the U.S. offers a public option, which could hinder pharmaceutical profits, then research will suffer.

The BBC news article discusses a new project examining life from isolated areas of deep oceanic trenches for fresh ideas on antibiotics.  The two things I wanted to sort of highlight from the article are: 1) the research is being led by scientists from Aberdeen University in Scotland, a country that coincidentally has a public health service; and 2) the last sentence of this quote - the bold font is mine:

"Project leader Marcel Jaspars, professor of chemistry at the University of Aberdeen, said: "If nothing's done to combat this problem, we're going to be back to a 'pre-antibiotic era' in around 10 or 20 years, where bugs and infections that are currently quite simple to treat could be fatal."
He said there had not been a "completely new" antibiotic registered since 2003 - "partially because of a lack of interest by drugs companies as antibiotics are not particularly profitable"."

It's cherry-picking, I know, but I wanted to share because we were just talking about the idea.  Money is absolutely important when it comes to research. But maybe the approach and general philosophy behind research can and should sometimes be of greater importance than who can dump the most money into a problem (and the foreseeable profit that can be made from a discovery).

Philosophical thought of the day

Cheer up: even if you didn't have a good day today, someone indistinguishable from you did, somewhere.

Philosophical Implications of Inflationary Cosmology

It is said that the ancient Greek philosopher Diodorus Cronos once put forth a powerful argument for a peculiar view about the relationship between the possible and the actual. Diodorus claimed that everything that could possibly happen is either occurring right now or will occur at some point in the future. His claim, in other words, was that there are no unrealized possibilities. Unfortunately, the works of Diodorus have been lost, and although a number of modern philosophers have tried valiantly to reconstruct his argument, no one really knows exactly how it was supposed to go.

Nonetheless, we think that Diodorus's conclusion was essentially correct, and we will here provide a new, entirely modern argument for it. Unlike the orignal argument of Diodorus, however, our argument draws on inflationary cosmology and quantum mechanics. It follows from inflationary cosmology that the universe is infinite and can therefore be divided into an infinite number of regions of any given size. But it follows from quantum theory that the total number of histories can occur in any one of these regions in a finite time is finite. We draw on these two premises to argue for our central conclusion: that all possible histories are realized in some region of the universe.

Perpetual Union

Can you break the unbreakable? Truncate the infinite? End the perpetual?

I ask because I want to briefly wade into history (I'm pretty confident I'll be revealing some serious ignorance in this one). Some time ago, our Confederate friends believed that states could choose to leave the Union and, apparently, some states' rights folks still think this. The Civil War, then, apparently decided only that if your state wants to leave, it better be packing more firepower than the states that want it to stay.

We know that the Articles of Confederation was the first real governing document for the United States. But if you read the Articles, you'll notice repeated references to itself as the "Articles of Confederation and perpetual Union." In fact, the Articles stressed no less than six times that the union it was establishing between the states was to be perpetual.

I'm compelled to raise the questions in this post because one day while looking at the wiki page on the Constitution, I saw this:

On September 17, 1787, the Constitution was completed, followed by a speech given by Benjamin Franklin, who urged unanimity, although the Convention decided that only nine states were needed to ratify. The Convention submitted the Constitution to the Congress of the Confederation, where it received approval according to Article 13 of the Articles of Confederation.[10]

I didn't remember that bit about receiving approval from the Congress of the Confederation from history class (should I? perhaps this is an embarrassing admission) and the reference they give for that assertion is the National Archives page on the Constitution; it wasn't immediately obvious during a brief browse where on the site that factoid could be found.

But, assuming it's true, it seems to raise an interesting philosophical question. Though the Constitution didn't require unanimity for ratification and the Articles did require unanimity for the adoption of amendments (as you can see from Article 13 below), it's worth noting that the Constitution did ultimately receive unanimous ratification so at least in practice that discrepancy is without consequence.

Article XIII. Every State shall abide by the determination of the united States in congress assembled, on all questions which by this confederation are submitted to them. And the Articles of this confederation shall be inviolably observed by every State, and the union shall be perpetual; nor shall any alteration at any time hereafter be made in any of them; unless such alteration be agreed to in a congress of the united States, and be afterwards confirmed by the legislatures of every State.

The first question that occurs to me is pretty straightforward. If the Constitution was indeed adopted in accordance with Article 13 of the Articles of Confederation (right down to actually being submitted to the Congress of the Confederation), then is it indeed what it was originally supposed to be: an amendment to the Articles of Confederation? Perhaps I was zoning out during this bit of American history but I had always thought that the Constitution was written only after the Framers decided that amending the Articles was a lost cause and an entirely new document, written outside the context of the Articles, was needed. But if the Constitution is itself only a legitimately passed amendment to the Articles--granted, an entire overhaul but one done within the context and conceptual framework of the original document--then it is part of an unbroken chain that started with the writing of the original Articles.

And that leads to my second question. Is the "perpetual union" bit not still in full force? I ask because the Articles contained a very odd thing: An Infinity. A perpetual union is one that will exist for all time and presumably cannot be undone. The only way, then, to overcome that would be to deny the legitimacy of the Articles and supplant them with something entirely different. Which is what I had always thought is what happened.

But if the Constitution is technically just an amendment to the Articles, then it still acknowledges the legitimacy of the original document; again, this hinges on whether its passage was actually done in compliance with amendment rules set forth in Article 13 of the Articles but for the purposes of this post I'm assuming that's true. And since that document contained An Infinity, I would think that even a complete re-write couldn't scrub that Infinity out of existence. That is, it seems to me that under the original Articles, you couldn't have an amendment passed under Article 13 that said "oh, about that perpetual union thing? nevermind." The reason being that you can't create An Infinity and then later decide that you want to cap it, even retroactively. If the original document is valid and it creates An Infinity, then I would think that Infinity will persist for as long as the validity of the document is recognized. Even the full power of the document can't undo what it has done. You can't close Pandora's Box.

And if that's true then even under the current Constitution its parent's commitment to a perpetual union of states must still be in effect. Because you can't uncreate The Infinity contained within the Articles without rejecting the Articles, which the Constitution doesn't seem to have done (again, assuming its ratification was done with the assumption of the Articles' validity, i.e. as an amendment to the Articles). The reason being, quite simply, that if you could end something with a simple amendment, then it couldn't have been perpetual in the first place. Similarly, if you could simply cap the infinite whenever you felt like it, it couldn't have really been infinite to begin with. "Perpetual" means a very specific thing and, I think, implicit in that definition is that nothing at all can end it. And if the Constitution is cut from the same cloth as its predecessor, then even though the words "perpetual union" are no longer in the governing document they must still be operative anyway.

Does any of this make sense? Am I way off base here?

Theme from M*A*S*H†

One of the great friendships in all of animated comedy began in an unlikely time and an even more unlikely place: a suicide booth in the year 3000. Of course, I'm talking about 20-something slacker Fry and his buddy Bender, some sort of wonderful mechanical man. Fry, mistaking the closest suicide booth for a phone booth, stepped into the booth where he met the then- suicidally depressed robot. The two managed to escape from the suicide booth, setting up one of the great exchanges in the pilot episode:

Bender: I'm a bender. I bend girders, that's all I'm programmed to do.
Fry: Were you any good?
Bender: Are you kidding? I was a star. I could bend a girder to any angle. 30 degrees, 32 degrees, you name it. 31... But I couldn't go on living once I found out what the girders were for.
Fry: What for?
Bender: Suicide booths.

Like nearly everything in Futurama, when you peel away the hilarity there's a much deeper layer there for you to think about. Could there in fact be a distant future in which the purposeful taking of one's own life not only isn't taboo but is actively encouraged for those who would wish it? The basic rationale for the suicide booth concept was laid out in a now 115-year-old short story, The Repairer of Reputations, in which the distant future being envisioned was the year 1925. In the story, the Governor of New York spoke to introduce the first "Government Lethal Chamber":

"The laws prohibiting suicide and providing punishment for any attempt at self-destruction have been repealed. The Government has seen fit to acknowledge the right of man to end an existence which may have become intolerable to him, through physical suffering or mental despair. It is believed that the community will be benefited by the removal of such people from their midst. Since the passage of this law, the number of suicides in the United States has not increased. Now that the Government has determined to establish a Lethal Chamber in every city, town and village in the country, it remains to be seen whether or not that class of human creatures from whose desponding ranks new victims of self-destruction fall daily will accept the relief thus provided." He paused, and turned to the white Lethal Chamber. The silence in the street was absolute. "There a painless death awaits him who can no longer bear the sorrows of this life. If death is welcome let him seek it there." Then quickly turning to the military aid of the President's household, he said, "I declare the Lethal Chamber open," and again facing the vast crowd he cried in a clear voice: "Citizens of New York and of the United States of America, through me the Government declares the Lethal Chamber to be open."

While a fundamental right to life has been celebrated by Western political thinkers for centuries, a corresponding right to death has proven far more controversial and, to many, abhorrent. But the contemporary debate on the subject rarely even considers the full breadth of the question. It focuses on the ethics of allowing euthanasia for the purpose of ending human suffering by allowing patients who are terminally ill, in extreme pain, or facing a severely impaired quality of life due to injury or illness to end their lives with dignity. Certainly this is an important debate to have, complicated--as I'm sure Jim knows--by the bit of the Hippocratic Oath in which doctors pledge: "I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan."

But the understanding of the freedom of self-termination associated with the concept of the suicide booth is far more expansive than this. You don't need a doctor's note, you don't need an externally "valid" reason to end your own life. Simple existential weariness, intense dissatisfaction, or mental disquietude are no less valid reasons for voluntarily exiting existence than is terminal illness.

The reasons for allowing this seem clear. One of the great truths underlying the logic of natural selection is that not all beings that come into existence are meant to be in the time and place in which they find themselves. For these creatures, when the paradox is revealed circumstance corrects the cosmic error. In many ways, our mastery of our environment has disrupted this cycle, leaving self-selection for existential departure the only defensible replacement for it (the alternative, preferred at present by social attitudes, is dogged and often purposeless persistence in the face of misery and paradoxical existence). Most of us know from experience that there is a great deal of mental anguish that must be endured by the sharp and self-reflective mind. The demands of sentience can simply be too taxing, particularly in the absence of overriding faith or hedonistic indulgence.

Given these realities, it seems only logical that the right to life would be balanced by the right to end one's life in the time and manner of one's choosing (provided, perhaps, that the process is minimally disruptive for others). But as novel as the idea of the suicide booth--or a voluntary "lethal chamber"--is, it reinforces the prejudice that such an act must necessarily be unpleasant, lonely, and desperate. This is, I suppose, an artifact of the view of death that is so pervasive in our culture--namely, that it's something unspeakably horrible to be avoided at any cost (literally, considering the vast sums of money we spend on briefly extending the lives of people who are irrevocably on their way out). We might view self-termination as the antithesis of what I view to be an unhealthy obsession with immortality that seems so common these days. It is the acceptance--the embrace, even--of mortality as a necessary and perhaps desirable component of existence.

We can look elsewhere in science fiction to find an alternative to the cold, sterile, and frankly unpleasant vision of self-termination that seems inherent to the suicide booth (as brilliant as the concept is). In my favorite scene from Soylent Green, the protagonist's friend and partner, Sol, opts to end his life at a government assisted suicide facility after discovering the awful truth about one of the world's main synthetic foodstuffs, the eponymous Soylent Green (SPOILER: It's people!). You can watch the process he goes through below. It's portrayed as being a singularly moving and beautiful experience; the scene is more poignant when you remember that Soylent Green takes place in a vastly overpopulated, environmentally devastated dystopia where the images Sol enjoys are found virtually nowhere in the world anymore.



Sol died when he no longer wished to live and he did so in a manner of his choosing, resulting in an experience much more pleasant than that offered by a suicide booth. That scene epitomizes my own vision of a future where a humanitarian option for self-termination exists for those (presumably a fairly small minority of humanity) who, for whatever personal reason, realize, as Sol did, "I've lived too long." A beautiful and controlled departure for those who are ready to leave.

Ain't no rest for the wicked, 'til we close our eyes for good.


† In case you don't get the joke, the title of the theme from M*A*S*H is "Suicide is Painless."

Unpersons

I've long held that the abortion question isn't about a rigid biological definition of life or a political question of individual choice vs government authority. Instead, the issue revolves around the social definition of a person. Everyone knows the two dominant frames for this issue:

Life: Abortion is the the termination of a human life and, as such, has the moral (and ought to have the legal) equivalence of murder. Life begins at conception and ought to be protected by law from that point forward.

Choice: Abortions are private procedures that involve what amounts to a temporary appendage of a woman's body. Government influence over a decision as personal as having an abortion is unwarranted.

I don't think it's particularly controversial to suggest that most pro-choicers don't condone murder and most pro-lifers aren't partial to a choiceless totalitarian state. As always, the question depends on where we draw the lines and how we view the world. Both sides will generally agree that it is--and ought to be--illegal to kill a person. But "person" is a social concept distinct from a human life.

To prove this, we need look no further than the famous Hyde amendment that prevents federal funds from being used to pay for abortions for Medicaid recipients. It includes an exception that all but the most rigid pro-lifers generally accept:

SEC. 508. (a) The limitation established in the preceding section shall not apply to an abortion-
(1) if the pregnancy is the result of an act of rape or incest; or
(2) in the case where a woman suffers from a physical disorder, physical injury, or physical illness, including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself, that would, as certified by a physician, place the woman in danger of death unless an abortion is performed.

Fetuses conceived through circumstances that are not socially sanctioned (i.e. rapes or incestuous couplings) are not to be afforded the same protections that other fetuses enjoy. There's no basis for arguing that such fetuses are less alive than their more conventionally-conceived peers. The only reason to grant a woman an additional choice in those particularl instances is that the fetus lacks social legitimacy: one can question whether or not it constitutes a member of society (i.e. is a person). If it isn't a person then terminating its life isn't murder and the government has no authority to interfere with a person's privacy and forbid an abortion. And thus you get a an area, limited as it may be, where the conclusions of pro-lifers and pro-choicers converge.

The reason is that their positions aren't necessarily incompatible, their definitions are. The disagreement centers on the question of when and under what circumstances a biological proto-human enters society and falls under the umbrella of its protections. When does personhood begin? And that's a social question whose resolution can't be decided by any sort of scientific argument.

The problem is choice

Please, as I was saying she stumbled upon a solution whereby nearly 99 percent of all test subjects accepted the program as long as they were given a choice, even if they were only aware of the choice at an unconscious level. . . As you adequately put, the problem is choice. -- The Architect, The Matrix Reloaded

I got a "Vote Yes on Issue 3" mailer today. This comes on the heels of a barrage of vaguely-worded commercials featuring some FOP guy who assures me I can trust him. I can see why the Yes on 3 issue ad campaign is supposed to be one of the most expensive in state history.

I can't say I really lean either way. But Issue 3 serves as a reminder that when it comes to money-making schemes, nobody does it quite like a cash-strapped state or locality. Cities will lease their parking meters, states will lease their toll roads to foreign companies, set up state lotteries, sell government buildings, or, as with Issue 3, roll out the red carpet for casinos to set up shop. Many of these schemes can end up being highly regressive, with the costs falling on people lower down the economic ladder (rich people don't play the lotto quite as much as the less well-off).

I suppose this is palatable to some people, in part, because of the emphasis we as a culture put not on fatalism but on free will and personal responsibility. Some of our schemes might take money away from those who can least afford to part with it but it's their fault for making that choice. This is far less tyrannical than, for example, a tax that falls more heavily on the upper economic strata.

The same sort of logic is often applied to the health reform debate. I've seen people outraged that the government will mandate them to get something that they already have. I've heard people argue that poverty alleviation and the provision of health care is the duty of good Christians but it must be done freely through acts of personal charity: government involvement through progressive taxation isn't appropriate (despite the fact, apparently, that these are social problems). For some people, the key is their ability to choose--willingly submit--to help.

We can raise money on the backs of folks who have little, as long as they are given a choice--even if they are only aware of the choice at an unconscious level--to spend their money on cigarettes, lotto tickets, casinos, whatever. But we can't coerce money from those who can afford to part with it. The problem is choice.

Does God Play Chess?

There is a peculiar fact about the effect scientific progress has on perceptions of the relevance of religiosity: namely, that progress eliminates god at the same time that it validates it.

The God of the Abyss

In the beginning there was nothing. The beginning of human knowledge about the universe, that is. Things happened without any particular rhyme or reason. As long as the universe was an orderless Abyss that didn't appear to be playing by a set of consistent rules, a person could conclude either that 1) the world is fundamentally random and devoid of reason or 2) events can be explained by the caprices of a deity. The latter notion at least provides the universe with an organizing principle, an indication that there's some intelligence behind events. This is a comforting thought to the organized mind of a human being, even if knowing that offers no predictive power. This deity--that which separates us from an orderless, incomprehensible universe--is what I'll call the God of the Abyss.

The God of the Gaps

With the benefit of hindsight, we now identify the God of the Abyss as the God of the Gaps. Today we know that recurring patterns--underling laws--are responsible for natural events. Thus the God of the Gaps argument posits that religion has always served as a placeholder whose utility disappears as the body of scientific knowledge grows. Religion's God of the Gaps offers explanations in the absence of genuine understanding; but the order it brings to an otherwise orderless universe is only temporary. It is supplanted by scientific knowledge as the gap--which we recognize to be a gap in that scientific body of knowledge--shrinks. The God of the Abyss, dating from a time when it was not known that there were laws governing the universe, did not, strictly speaking, fill gaps because it was not recognized at the time that there was another side to the chasm.

Thus, the argument goes, just as science has shown us that the God of the Abyss was actually the more limited God of the Gaps, it has also indicated that in the limit that those gaps shrink to zero there is no need for god. Science slays god.

Chess

But there is another way to view this progression. Physicist Richard Feynman once described our quest to understand the underlying laws of the universe by using the analogy of a chess game:

One way, that's kind of a fun analogy in trying to get some idea of what we're doing in trying to understand nature, is to imagine that the gods are playing some great game like chess, let's say, and you don't know the rules of the game, but you're allowed to look at the board, at least from time to time, in a little corner, perhaps, and from these observations you try to figure out what the rules of the game are, what the rules of the pieces moving are.

The God of the Abyss arises from the assumption that there are no rules that the pieces on the chess board obey, merely an intelligent hand moving them around as it sees fit. Once we recognize that the pieces do obey laws, the mysterious intelligent hand is invoked only to explain chess moves that do not yet conform to our understanding of the rules (e.g. we might be absolutely befuddled the first time we observe castling). The recognition of underlying rules reduces the God of the Abyss to the God of the Gaps, as long as we regard god as a fundamentally pragmatic tool. But ultimately we will understand all of the rules and we won't need to assume that any sentient hand is guiding any of the pieces.

However, one might also look at the chessboard and muse on how extraordinary it is that the pieces follow any rules at all. If they moved randomly it might be psychologically comforting to "explain" their motions as occurring due to the actions of an intelligent player with designs of his own that remain mysterious to us. But the simplest explanation under those circumstances would simply be that the pieces are drifting around without any organizing principle accounting for their movements. The very lack of apparent purpose behind their movements could easily be taken to indicate the lack of an intelligence behind the game. Thus a rule-less chess game lends itself to both arguments: 1) that it must indicate that an intelligence with independent will (some cosmic rebel without a cause) is moving the pieces or 2) that the pieces move the way they do precisely because the chess game lacks any intelligent force driving it. This is the issue faced by a person living in the Abyss.

But a person living in an ordered universe with gaps--areas of incomplete knowledge of the laws that we trust can and will disappear as we learn more--faces the same problem. On the one hand, one can argue that things happen because they're obeying the laws. A chess game on autopilot doesn't require a chess player. But the mere existence of underlying rules can also be taken to indicate the existence of an intelligence somewhere in the process. If we take this interpretation, then the steady march of scientific progress merely vindicates faith because it demonstrates that something ("the laws of physics") is governing the universe. And that's a very curious fact. Why should a godless universe be governed by mathematically elegant rules?

Which way do we lean on this one? Sadly, the question is unresolvable. Is there an intelligence at work somewhere, is there not--the answer you prefer depends on your world view. The facts don't favor either one because what's at stake here is merely an interpretation of the facts. We know that the chessboard has rules. The question is whether that relieves us of the burden of having to worry about a deity or whether the chessboard is gesturing frantically in the direction of some chess-playing deity watching--or perhaps not watching--its game play out according to the rules it devised.

And therein lies the intellectual honesty of the agnostic position: fuck if I know.

Political Absurdism in Action

Bill Clinton was on The Daily Show last Thursday for an extended interview that can be viewed in full on the TDS's website. The earlier post about the employer mandate in the House health care reform bill reminded me of an exchange that occurred between Bill Clinton and Jon Stewart.

If you remember the Democratic presidential primary last time around, you'll probably recall that there wasn't much breathing room between the candidates on most policy issues. Honestly, looking back it was the mostly wonkishly absurd thing you can imagine. Bill Richardson trying to distinguish himself by setting the cap on his cap-and-trade carbon proposal a little bit higher than anyone else's. John Edwards arguing with Obama over tactics of all things: should we choose an aggressive or conciliatory approach when beginning health reform negotiations? Hillary getting booed for making the point to a liberal-leaning audience that lobbyists do have a role to play in the legislative process (a fact Obama, it seems, has come to appreciate).

Once the field had been whittled down to the Final Two the major policy difference concerned the question of mandates: does the health reform plan need to include an individual mandate that forces people to obtain health insurance? Hillary Clinton included an individual mandate in her health care plan, Barack Obama did not. In fact, he frequently made the mandate an object of scorn and repeatedly used it to club Clinton over the head. Here's part of an Obama ad during the primaries:

SCRIPT: Announcer: "Hillary Clinton's attacking, but what's she not telling you about her health care plan? It forces everyone to buy insurance, even if you can't afford it, and you pay a penalty if you don't. Barack Obama believes that it's not that people don't want health care, it's that they can't afford it. That's why the Obama plan reduces costs more than Hillary's, saving $2,500 for the typical family. For health care we can afford, vote for change we can believe in."

Let's pop into the Bill Clinton interview (the bit I'm talking about starts around 4:30 minutes in):

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - Bill Clinton Extended Interview Pt. 2
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Healthcare Protests

Jon Stewart: Is it hard not to give a little poke, give a little thing--because Obama now he says, well, in health insurance maybe there should be an individual mandate. That was something Hilary had said during the campaign, he had come out against that, now he's saying it's a good thing. You sit at lunch and lean over and go like "yeah, that individual mandate, looking good now isn't it?"

Bill Clinton: You know, I don't. I ran in too many elections to know that you get in these elections and you have to highlight the differences and minimize the commonality otherwise how will people make a choice? And what you have to do when you're running so that you can feel good about yourself is to at least believe in the differences. But then after an election there are always circumstances, particularly if you become President, where circumstances take over and then the job becomes a constant contest between doing what you pledged to do when you ran--without which you will feel like you let the American people and especially the people that voted for you down--and responding to incoming fire...

It sounds to me like he's combining two different things here. After that last sentence he went into the example of how 9/11 affected the Bush agenda and forced the President to react to unforeseen circumstances. And certainly that's true, the President (and any elected official) always has to be flexible enough to roll with the punches.

But that's not the same as choosing to believe something during a campaign because it's politically convenient, which is how I read that bolded part. Obama is not a dumb man and I doubt he had some Eureka! moment upon becoming President that convinced him that mandates are better policy. It doesn't seem plausible to me that he knew significantly less about health care policy last year than he does now. So perhaps Bill is correct: in order to win votes, Obama chose to believe in a policy idea that his rational side would ultimately reject, a transition that PolitiFact labeled a full flop (the highest degree of flip flop they bestow ).

In the picture Bill Clinton presents, Obama was not being deliberately disingenuous. Not exactly, anyway. Instead of simply knowing he was trashing a policy that he would ultimately have to embrace, he somehow made himself genuinely believe that a plan without a mandate would be superior--so he could still feel good about himself, as Bill put it. And this is a part of what I was getting at when I posted about political absurdism--in practice, the only political or policy truths that exist are the ones we choose to will into existence. Rationality often takes a backseat to apparently deep-seated (but perhaps newly fabricated) beliefs that may turn out to be extremely capricious.

When his goal was to win a primary, it was politically important for Obama to believe mandates were unnecessary or even destructive. Now that his goal is to create a reform plan that doesn't collapse in on itself when implemented, it's likely necessary for him to believe in the importance of the mandate. Of course, it may never have risen to the level of actual belief, Obama may have just been playing dumb (with others but perhaps also to some extent with himself) but still partially engaging in the sort of doublethink that makes human beings so maddeningly complex. Avoiding blatant dishonesty in the face of the demands the political system makes on a person occasionally requires a compartmentalization of what one knows and what one believes. Which one--political knowledge or belief--is more malleable I'm not quite sure.

In this case, the campaign was about believing, governing is about knowing. It's interesting to see Bill Clinton sort of almost make that point.

Political Absurdism

In a roundabout way, I broached the topic of political nihilism in a previous post. In this one we’ll consider another road, one that I’ll tentatively call political absurdism (referring broadly to the absurdist creation of personal meanings in the face of the apparent absence of universal meaning).

In describing his first Senate campaign in 1984, Al Gore wrote in The Assault on Reason of his political consultant’s suggestion when his opponent was narrowing Gore's lead: “If you run this ad at this many ‘points’ [a measure of the size of the advertising buy], and if Ashe responds as we anticipate, and then we purchase this many points to air our response to his response, the net result after three weeks will be an increase of 8.5 percent in your lead in the polls.”

I authorized the plan and was astonished when three weeks later my lead had increased by exactly 8.5 percent. Though pleased, of course, for my own campaign, I had a sense of foreboding for what this revealed about our democracy. Clearly, at least to some degree, the “consent of the governed” was becoming a commodity to be purchased by the highest bidder.

The former Vice President, good and decent man than he is, lamented the “trend in U.S. politics towards ignoring facts and analysis when making policy decisions.” Long known (and, sadly, often ridiculed) for being a strong proponent of the Internet, Gore believes this medium offers the antidote: a free and fair marketplace of ideas where reason can dominate in separating the good from the bad. I would respectfully suggest that the reality is exactly the opposite. Ironically, the more ways we find to involve The People in the political process, the less effective our democratic system becomes. People are easily swayed by frames and frequently come under the control of others. At the risk of sounding condescending, I'll suggest that they becoming unwitting pawns in a chess game they don't fully comprehend.

The reason is that politics on a mass scale becomes an exercise in manipulation. Instead of simply presenting facts and analysis, politickers often seek to take advantage of the vagaries of human psychology using what an old professor of mine called “cognitive tricks.” The way an issue or proposal is framed or the way a problem is defined can have enormous influence in shaping perceptions. The effects that the precise wording of a poll question or the order of candidates’ names on a ballot can have in shaping opinions or affecting a candidate’s vote share are well-known. Chalking this up merely to laziness—or worse, stupidity—on the part of the public seems too easy.

In the 1910s and ‘20s, a nephew of Sigmund Freud named Edward Bernays pioneered the use of psychology to shape public opinion for marketing purposes. Bernays viewed groups of men as dangerously irrational and so he advocated using his techniques to control them. In a famous book called Propaganda, Bernays explained the role of popular manipulation in a democracy:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

In a world where external factors color individual perception—or acknowledgement—of facts, the notion of a democratic or republican system as one in which individual political preferences are pooled and sorted out rationally in a political marketplace of ideas seems quaint. The public becomes merely another political tool to be harnessed and wielded against one’s foes. The impartial observer finds himself in a system devoid of any overriding truth. The "truth" is whatever one can convince a large enough slice of the population to believe (contrast this with the notion of using rational argumentation to bring opponents--through reason alone--to discover that which is already, and independently, true). Popular support can be generated and opinions manufactured to support virtually any political position, subject to the limits of inertia. If you're not convinced, go back and consider the role of astroturfing in manufacturing public opinion.

This situation is not quite like the political nihilism I described in the other post as "purposelessly drifting through the political landscape." In this quasi-absurdist conception of the political process, certain luminaries with ideological direction and policy purpose seek to actively reshape that political landscape to conform to their own personal truths. These opinionmakers need not be elites like public officials or media figures. They can be ordinary members of the public, driven to press their case and gifted with a knack for manipulation or persuasion. The result of accepting the absence of something akin to absolute truth is the ascension of what Orwell called doublethink. This is the reason that virtually no one is entirely consistent in his political beliefs (the starkest examples, of course, involve things like praising Medicare while decrying "government-run health care").

What's the moral here? That if you have a policy direction in which you wish to go, your objective must simply be to win. Though we'd like to believe that involves a high-minded approach, it likely requires the fine art of manipulation that's often referred to euphemistically using phrases like "message crafting" and "issue framing." One must change the perceptions of others, yes, using methods that might best be described as tricks or gimmicks. Consent does, as Mr. Gore discovered so long ago, become a commodity--or, rather, the consent-generating psychological tactics that media consultants use to build support for campaigns become the commodity. Is this the best way to view the political and policymaking process? I don't know. But I hope to follow up on this post soon using a current real-world example to flesh out some of these notions.

What Lies Ahead?

I've been thinking about the future a lot lately. Since it's easier to tread in the footsteps of others than to forge your own path, my thoughts have been guided by the imaginings of others. Namely, the writers of the science fiction films I know and love. It seems to me that it's possible to classify the different types of futures that these film-makers have envisioned into a few sci-fi archetypes. Here's what I've got:

The Utopia

The first future we'll consider is also the rosiest. It presumes a steady betterment of society, culminating in a reduction of social, economic, and personal shortcomings to the point that the world is essentially perfect, at least when compared to today. The clearest manifestation of this picture of the future can be found in Star Trek, though cracks in the Utopian facade become apparent at various points in the different franchise series. Money has (mostly) ceased to exist, as have most forms of human want.

Free of the burdens of, well, reality, man is free to tap into his inner nobility. People are explorers, scholars, philosophers. Peace reigns. In short, this is the future everyone dreams of but, perhaps secretly, most people don't believe is truly possible.

The Technocracy

Next we come to a slightly different picture of the future. Like most examples of The Utopia, The Technocracy boasts large technological advances that have forever altered society. However, the Technocracy has significant dystopian characteristics. While technology has--to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke--reached a point where it is indistinguishable from magic, it has created a world that is increasingly cold, impersonal, and perverse. Human beings exist but their humanity is slowly melting away. Movies like Minority Report--in which people are preemptively jailed based on technology-provided predictions of future guilt-- and Gattaca--in which destinies are shaped by a sort of technologically-ascertained genetic determinism--give us glimpses of such a future.

In some forms of The Technocracy, technology has supplanted God as an object of devotion and worship. In the most unsettling versions of this future, man himself has, in essence, become God with technology left, ironically, to provide the humanity that man has come to lack. 2001: A Space Odyssey famously features a computer, HAL 9000, who acts in a more human manner than the two detached, emotionless human astronauts with whom he is Jupiter-bound. I'll touch on Ray Kurzweil's non-fiction picture of a future Technocracy later but for now I'll mention that he foresees a fusion of man and technology to the point where essentially a new species is born.

The Wasteland

This future inherently assumes that the hubris of man will lead to his downfall. In The Wasteland, the human race has been partially or mostly destroyed and the remnants of humanity are locked in a constant struggle for survival. In most incarnations, it is the inevitable outcome of the Technocracy. For example, in Terminator and The Matrix the creation of advanced artificial intelligence ultimately backfires and leads to the destruction of much of the human race. In 12 Monkeys, human tampering with dangerous viruses kills most of the population and drives the survivors to a primitive existence underground.

The Wasteland is invariably post-apocalyptic. Regardless of whether he retains a measure of technological prowess, man has regressed substantially. His (perhaps foolish) primary goal is to regain what has been lost, often without any clear conception of how he will prevent history from repeating itself. I would classify the future depicted in the original Planet of the Apes as The Wasteland because it contains numerous themes of rebuilding a fallen society (the astronauts' entire voyage is designed for such purposes: of the woman astronaut, Charlton Heston explains "She was to be the new Eve" and it seems clear he has similar designs on the mute future-human Nova).


The Hellhole

In this future, the excesses of humanity have run amok. Unlike in The Wasteland, however, these excesses haven't necessarily all but destroyed man: they have merely made his existence miserable. Exploding populations, dwindling resources, and growing environmental devastation combine to lower the average standard of living. Soylent Green exemplifies this future. As Charlton Heston realizes just a bit too late, "The ocean is dying, the plankton is dying… It's people! Soylent Green is made out of people. They're making our food out of people. Soon, they'll be breeding us like cattle—for food."

This overcrowded, under-supplied future can lead to a different level of self-awareness than The Wasteland. While Wastelanders think of little else than rebuilding their pre-Fall society, Hellholers understand that their path is irreversible. Their world has a set of new--largely unpleasant--constraints on it that must simply be accepted. The environment cannot be repaired, the population can only be curbed through very unpleasant corrections (e.g. famine and war). Whether or not we take responsibility for our mistakes (or make any sort of amends), we pay for them. And it is impossible to ignore or forget this fact.


Corporatocracy

The last picture of the future might be the most disturbing because it hits so close to home. In the corporatocracy, power is concentrated largely (perhaps almost exclusively) in the hands of amoral corporations. The Alien franchise is the clearest example of this future. The sinister Weyland-Yutani corporation habitually endangers the lives of its crews and colonists in the pursuit of "the perfect organism," presumably so that they may construct the perfect weapon. The Corporation either has its own private military or it has jurisdiction over military matters (I'd have to see Aliens again to know for sure).

This is a future in which individuals do not matter. We have ceded our moral authority--indeed, ourselves--to stateless, conscience-less, profit-seeking organizations. Men and governments have given way to shareholders and corporations.

Of course, not all sci-fi movies are easily classified because many blur the lines between these categories. Blade Runner, for example, has elements of all of these archetypes (except, of course, The Utopia). It's a Technocracy but with terrible side effects of its technological advances hinting at a slow lurch toward The Wasteland. At the same time, there are hints of a corporatist society that faces many of the problems characteristic of the Hellhole. These rules are all sort of fast-and-loose but I think they generally hold. If I've forgotten any categories, let me know.

This post wouldn't be complete if I didn't throw in a reference to the predictions of inventor/futurist Ray Kurzweil. I haven't read his books so my knowledge of these predictions extends no further than that wiki article. But it's clear that Kurzweil expects The Technocracy and, while he eagerly awaits it, I find his predictions deeply unsettling. In the future Kurzweil envisions, technology redefines existence far more than in even the most ambitiously Technocratic future captured on film. Here's a sample of what he believes the year 2099 will be like (notice how that final bullet point neatly sidesteps the possibility of the Technocracy giving way to The Wasteland):

● Humans and machines merge together in the physical and mental realms. Cybernetic brain implants enable humans to fuse their minds with AI's.
● In consequence, clear distinctions between humans and machines no longer exist.
● Most conscious beings lack a permanent physical form.
● The world is overwhelmingly populated by AI's that exist entirely as thinking computer programs capable of instantly moving from one computer to another across the Internet (or whatever equivalent exists in 2099). These computer-based beings are capable of manifesting themselves at will in the physical world by creating or taking over robotic bodies, with individual AI's also being capable of controlling multiple bodies at once.
● Individual beings merge and separate constantly, making it impossible to determine how many “people” there are on Earth.
● This new plasticity of consciousness and ability for beings to join minds seriously alters the nature of self-identity.
● The majority of interpersonal interactions occur in virtual environments. Actually having two people physically meet in the real world to have a conversation or transact business without any technological interference is very rare.
● Organic human beings are a small minority of the intelligent life forms on Earth. Even among the remaining Homo sapiens, the use of computerized implants that heavily augment normal abilities is ubiquitous and accepted as normal. The small fraction of humans who opt to remain "natural" and unmodified effectively exist on a different plane of consciousness from everyone else, and thus find it impossible to fully interact with AI's and highly modified humans.
● "Natural" humans are protected from extermination. In spite of their shortcomings and frailties, humans are respected by AI's for giving rise to the machines.

Scary stuff. Any thoughts on which one of these possible futures is most likely to come to pass?

Sleeping in the Ship of Theseus

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned [from Crete] had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same. —Plutarch, Theseus

This is an old philosophical question: if I take a thing and replace every bit of it piece-by-piece with new parts does it remain the same thing? In the case of a boat, the question isn't particularly important, though it is somewhat interesting. But--assuming consciousness and the sense of I stem entirely from the functioning of the human brain--when one considers a person or a brain, the stakes are a bit higher.

When I applied to UChicago those many years ago, one of the essays I chose to write was on the topic of teleportation. It was a philosophical prompt:

In a book entitled The Mind’s I, by Douglas Hofstadter, philosopher Daniel C. Dennett posed the following problem: Suppose you are an astronaut stranded on Mars whose spaceship has broken down beyond repair. In your disabled craft there is a Teleclone Mark IV teleporter that can swiftly and painlessly dismantle your body, producing a molecule-by-molecule blueprint to be beamed to Earth. There, a Teleclone receiver stocked with the requisite atoms will produce, from the beamed instructions, you—complete with all your memories, thoughts, feelings, and opinions. If you activate the Teleclone Mark IV, which astronaut are you—the one dismantled on Mars or the one produced from a blueprint on Earth? Suppose further that an improved Teleclone Mark V is developed that can obtain its blueprint without destroying the original. Are you then two astronauts at once? If not, which one are you?

I don't know what I wrote (hey, when you look this good, you don't have to know anything) but I do remember that this question has always boiled down to one thing for me: continuity of consciousness. Of course, this question is merely a high tech reformulation of the question posed by the Ship of Theseus. We're breaking down a person and rebuilding them somewhere else from something else. The problem is again the same when one considers the possibility of mind-uploading in the future--if I transfer my consciousness into a machine, is it still me?

This question is important because before I teleport or transfer my mind to a machine I'd like to be sure that I'm not simply killing myself and letting a duplicate--granted, one who has all of my memories and the distinct sense of being me--take my place. One way of asking this question might be: is the transition from this mode of experience to the next one (i.e. this body to the new one, or this body to the machine) smooth? Or do I experience a discontinuity in my conscious experience?

If we compare these seminal events (teleportation or mind-uploading) to everyday experience, the difference seems stark. But in part this assumes a static present that is illusory. Our bodies are, like the Ship of Theseus, in constant flux, undergoing a constant give-and-take with our environment. Like the Ship, over time our bodies are slowly replaced with new parts as molecules and nutrients freely flow in and out. And yet this is not scary because I seem to experience continuity of consciousness. My body may be made of entirely different materials than it was a decade ago but there haven't seemed to be any sudden, sharp breaks in my sense of I. My consciousness has carried on smoothly over this period, even as my body was being replaced.

But let's delve a bit deeper. If I were experiencing discontinuities in consciousness, if my consciousness were dying and a different but equivalent one were taking its place (say, every hour), how would I know it? The sense of a conscious self that I'm experiencing at this moment would be less than an hour old, yet it would share all of the memories of its predecessors, since the information contained in the hardware of my brain (i.e. memories) is still there to be accessed at will. I would then die within the hour--my lifetime limited to the brief period between discontinuities in consciousness--only to be replaced by someone else.

I'll illustrate why I say this discontinuity is equivalent to death with an example from Star Trek: The Next Generation. The transporters in Star Trek seem to operate according to the same principle as Dennett's thought experiment above: the body is destroyed on the transporting pad, the information of how to build a person is relayed to the destination, and a new version of the person is reconstructed from local materials. In an episode called "Second Chances" we (and the crew of the Enterprise) discover that years earlier a transporter mishap had led to two materializations: one Will Riker was beamed back to his ship, another rematerialized at the transport point after the original transporting-Riker's body was destroyed. The result was that two copies of Riker after the time of that botched transport exist: Will Riker and Tom Riker. They may be "the same person" in almost every technical sense but ultimately, since they clearly have distinct conscious experiences, they cannot really be the same person. Thus there cannot be a smooth transition of conscious experience from before-transport to after-transport and, I suspect, when the body is destroyed during the transport process, the "original" person dies and consciousness ends. Both Tom and Will #2 are recreated at their destinations but that's little comfort to the original transporter (Will #1) as his conscious experience in this universe has come to an end.

Now I mused earlier about the possibility of such a discontinuity happening naturally every hour or so. Clearly there's no reason to think this is the case, though I don't think we can rule it out. But what about every day? We experience a discontinuity of consciousness every single night when we fall asleep. Is it possible that in the interregnum between sleeping and waking--in the trough between dreams--our consciousness dies and a new one is born? Every time we awaken our minds would literally be born anew. We believe we are the guy who went to sleep the night before when in fact he is effectively dead, replaced by a new consciousness (confusingly, us). Sleep, then, is equivalent to the transport or mind-uploading process in that we experience a discontinuity of conciousness that signals the death of the original and the creation of the replacement.

Is this even remotely possible? I have no idea. But for a time last night I was afraid of sleep. So seize the day--it may be the only one you ever experience.

Political Nihilism

It's been nearly two weeks since I received a $184,178 piece of paper declaring that I have some negligible amount of expertise in the nebulously defined field of "Public Policy Studies." The most common question about this area--one I freely admit to not having a complete answer to--is straightforward: what the hell is public policy? The very close runner-up is probably "is that like political science?" I'm going to indulge myself by ruminating on these questions for a bit.

To understand what public policy is, it is necessary to tackle politics first. Let's consider two kinds of thinkers: Politicians and Utopians. The difference between the two is the difference between what is and what should be. The Politician has the unenviable task of facing the harsh realities of today. Politics is invariably ugly and unpleasant because it is the mirror society holds up to itself. The Politician is responsible for representing the views of his constituents--sometimes ugly, sometimes irresponsible--well enough to get re-elected. The Utopian is tasked with envisioning the Good Society and outlining its structure. Unconcerned with constraints, the Utopian is preoccupied by possibilities, meticulously constructing elegant solutions to intractable social problems. Rough caricatures that these labels may be, they do an adequate job of making the distinction clear.

Public policy, in an ideal world, is the bridge between the world of the Politician and the world of the Utopian. Not quite myopic enough to appease only the Politician and not quite bold enough to satisfy the Utopian, public policy is a tiptoe--perhaps a half-step in extraordinary times--toward a goal envisioned by the Utopians. Thus public policy is borne of a collaboration between the Politicians and the Utopians of the world. It is a program or course of action--or inaction--to which the government commits itself with some purpose in mind.

Of course, one likes to think that few pure Politicians or Utopians exist in the world. We prefer to believe that our elected officials serve with some purpose and some vision and that those academics, policy analysts or advocates, and long-shot candidates who help to shape our discourse are not completely divorced from reality. Übercynics and ivory tower buffoons would make strange bedfellows indeed. But only the shrewdest of operators can successfully navigate both worlds to produce good policy.

The question of what constitutes "good" policy is, of course, the great unresolved social question that occupies us every two years. "Good policy" is often--erroneously, I believe--assumed to lie in the purview of the Utopian; the Politician merely mucks up the implementation of the Utopian's pristine plans. "We know what works but the political system will never let us do it," a friend majoring in political science once complained to me. The fatal flaw in this logic, of course, is that it ignores the purpose of a representative democracy. The questions at the heart of public policy are philosophical: what is important to us? How should the world be? What is the role of government in society? And so on. The Utopian assumes certain answers to these questions and proceeds to prescribe antidotes to the problems he diagnoses in society.

Therein lies the paradox. As any public policy student can attest, identifying a problem is the first step toward developing a policy solution. But problem definition is an inherently political process: there are no "right" answers, only consensus answers. And we have elected not to leave the decision-making to a select group of Utopian oligarchs. Instead, we are all afforded a say in making the value judgments underpinning the public policy process: we get to elect representatives of our views. This is why the idealistic view of public policy-making as a strict matter of quasi-scientific problem-solving best left to the Utopians is untenable. This view forgets that the philosophical questions underlying every step of the policy process from problem definition to the formulation and implementation of solutions can be answered only by the body politic. We can be idealists or democrats but not both.

But once we accept--not grudgingly but enthusiastically--the key role the political process must play things become very murky. Complexities begin to pile on top of complexities. Elected officials are more than just representatives of districts; they are not simply vessels through which the will of a constituency is done. They lead and follow at the same time, they manipulate the masses as they are manipulated by the opinions and passions of their districts. Policy-making becomes more than just a contorted sort of problem-solving in which palatable solutions are developed to address problems identified by consensus. Solutions can be decoupled from problems; indeed, problems can be conjured to fit pre-existing solutions. The distinctions between "campaigning" and "governing" begin to blur and no longer can each be identified simply by noting whether it happens to be an even or an odd numbered year.

The noble vision of policy-making and governing fades into a less gratifying image: that of a game. A grave game with enormous consequences but a game nonetheless. The culprit, I suspect, is, in part, uncertainty. The dissolution of the Absolute--the Good Society toward which we strive--leaves us rudderless. We--the collective public--drift between political persuasions with the ebbs and flows of popular opinion often dictated by events seemingly beyond our control. Compare the political climate of 1920 with that of 1932 or the prevailing political winds of 1980 with those of 2008. "Right" answers are elusive. Some people grasp onto an ideology that contains the philosophical precepts that offer a guide to formulating public policy (i.e. contain an implicit picture of what the Good Society will look like), while others prefer a more pragmatic and less ideologically-anchored approach.

A participant in the policy process who becomes unmoored from ideological preferences and personal passions finds himself in a dire situation. The loss of faith leaves him with only the cold embrace of cynicism. He can be little more than a "hired gun," choosing a side and playing to win by any means necessary. Politics and policy-making become solely about the acquisition of power or a simple love of the game. The notion of identifying desirable social goals and using policy to launch us in the direction of the Utopian's dream becomes quaint and, if anything, simply a tool in the political manipulator's arsenal. This sense of purposelessly drifting through the political landscape is what I'll call political nihilism (a usage of the phrase that differs a bit from what Wiki tells me is usual). It isn't any more endemic to society than is religious agnosticism but I suspect--as with religious agnostics--there are many adherents among us. However, this might be getting a little simplistic and less coherent so I'll stop for now. More to come, I think.