Rational Philosophy

Lawyers who filed a class action on behalf of those who purchased the computer game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas have been surprised and disappointed that the class of those offended by the hidden sex scenes is very small. The scenes themselves, a legacy of pre-release versions of the game, weren’t even completed, and could only be accessed with special hardware or software. Of the many millions who bought the game only a couple of thousand have expressed interest in the settlement. The lawyers, on the other hand, stand to recoup fees of $1.3M if the settlement is approved by the court. Makers of the game should perhaps consider recouping these fees in turn by designing a new game called Grand Theft Lawyer.

This odd situation of the lawyers so misjudging the shrug factor of the game players when it came to the hidden sex scenes seems to highlight a curious matter of our perspectives on sex in general.

A new report on the safe, or unsafe, sex practices of New Yorkers tells us that people in the city have a fair bit of sex and that many of them don’t wear a condom when common sense would say they should. But it’s the comments on this story that quickly become provocative. Alongside people talking frankly and straightforwardly about the difficulties of dealing with desire and pleasure and the practicality of condoms, we have this creepy and passionate post: “burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful and receiving their dues… ”

Sex is something we’re set up to do, something that comes naturally, something that non-conscious creatures have no hang-ups about. So how and why did sex become such a tricky topic when humans developed consciousness?

I’ll hypothesize that there may be several reasons:

1. We realized that sex is a high-stakes activity — It can end up with children and long term responsibility, and it decides the future of our group.

So, when people figured these things out it became important to establish social rules and conventions that would prevent problems in the coupling business and ensure the best survival rate for the society.

2. We became aware that the act of sex and the state of desire change our perception of ourselves and the world around us. We became conscious of a diminishing sense of self control when we were aroused, of the strength of the sex impulse, and of the tug of certain stimuli (erotic triggers).

Being conscious of these things tended to bring us into conflict with another gross effect of consciousness — self-control. The tension between the two led inevitably to self-consciousness about sex, and, in the extreme, feelings of shame and embarrassment.

(These ideas are supported by the varying degree of openness about sex in different cultures.)

One woman who purchased the Grand Theft game for her fifteen year old son had this to say when asked whether she would have bought the game if she’d known that it allowed players to kill police officers: “Well, I think he does have games with violence,” adding that she would have “possibly” bought such a game — though not one that contained sex scenes like those in San Andreas.

And the beat goes on…

On industrious criminals and the lure of lucra.

As law enforcement officials round up members of the Gambino, Bonanno and Genovese crime families, I find myself pausing at a phrase in the NY Times piece on the arrests — “the scope of the schemes carried out by [La Cosa Nostra's] members are limited only by their imagination and industriousness.” Imagination and industriousness. These are not dull-witted layabouts. Surely with such imagination and industry members of these families could make money legally, but they have found a niche and a sure-fire way of maximizing profit — exploit what’s illegal. For the mob, illegality becomes leverage. Looked at purely as a business philosophy it makes a lot of sense. If cable companies can make money selling cable access legally, for instance, the mob knows it can make more money pirating cable channels and selling them illegally. It’s all about knowing your business and seeing the angle.

I’m not trying to justify or glamorize illegal activity, just unearth a philosophical truth.

Jerome Kerviel saw the angles, too. Driven by a desire to demonstrate his trading genius, he ended up demonstrating instead that he was a lousy trader but an excellent fraud. He figured out how to work around the Societe Generale’s controls and systems to make trades that he shouldn’t have been making, then cover these up with more trades that he shouldn’t have been making, until the bank was in the hole for $7.2 billion.

Research suggests that Monsieur Kerviel’s urge to trade, even in the face of losses, may not be so unusual. Making money can stimulate the same kind of gratifying response as having sex, apparently. “If you make money and make money again,” says Jason Zweig who wrote a book on the subject, “it is very similar to a chemical addiction and it becomes very hard to let go.” Brain imaging of drug addicts and traders supports the theory.

Two philosophical questions present themselves: What is the connection between material success and a rational theory of life? And why would imaginative and industrious people stick with a business model founded on illegality?

Unlike taking drugs or having sex, making money, while it can have physiological effects, stimulates our sense of gratification entirely mentally. The only impulse is one’s consciousness of making money.

So, the concept of making money must be closely connected to something directly felt. Money represents bartering power and prestige. If you have a billion under your belt, having another billion isn’t going to buy you anything that the first billion can’t buy you. So the directly felt thing must be not increased bartering power but prestige. (This is just what Kerviel described when he explained his feelings about trading, even though he kept his trades secret — he wanted to be seen as brilliant.)

People experience these kinds of feelings whether they’re risking any real bartering power or not. If we play gin rummy for points with no money on the game, for instance, the same powerful feelings of gratification can arise when we win. This confirms that a sense of increased prestige, a sense of being a winner, is sufficient to cause the rush. If I end a game of gin rummy with 100 points, what does that matter to me if my opponent has 101?

The answer to the second question follows from the answer to the first. I imagine that members of La Cosa Nostra would tip my second question on its head and ask “why make money legally if you can make it illegally?” If we’re talking about the rush of success, making money illegally must up the ante by adding considerable risk to the transaction. The possibility of getting caught must speed the flow of juices in the same way that for Kerviel the fluctuations of the market made his trades unpredictable. The greater the risk, the greater the feeling of gratification when one succeeds.

Just as the market eventually caught up to Kerviel, so too the law has caught up to the Gambinos, Bonannos and Genoveses. While crime and fraud can inspire imagination and industry, they’re not the most rational of pursuits.

Why sex makes sense.

Yesterday I posted a piece on new or renewed questions about why organisms reproduce sexually (as opposed to asexually). In short, no current theory can explain why organisms have evolved to reproduce sexually. Theories have been proposed — such as the desirabilty of high gene mutation rates to aid adaptation and resistance to parasites — but these theories haven’t been borne out through scientific analysis.

VS.

As I tried to clear my mind for meditation this morning on my subway ride to work, it occurred to me that perhaps we are asking the wrong question. Instead of asking why evolution led to such a broad and successful range of sexual reproducers, would it make sense instead to ask “why not”?

I’ll try to explain what I mean.

Darwin’s theory of natural selection is often misparaphrased as “survival of the fittest.” (I almost did it myself, before I researched the origin of that phrase; Herbert Spencer coined it after he adopted, adapted and misused Darwin’s theory for his own purposes). If we look around us we see that the world is far from filled with absolutes. Instead, the various paths that life and evolution have taken have led to an enormous and bewildering array of living things. The number of types and subtypes of plants, animals, insects, etc., is dizzying.

Bdelloid Rotifers do very nicely without sex, but that doesn’t mean that we all need to. We’re not competing with Bdelloid Rotifers, we’re all just doing what we do until something comes along to stop us.

To couch this in more scientific terms, theories of gene mutation don’t need to explain why sexual reproduction is better than asexual reproduction as an evolutionary fork in the road. They just need to explain how it is that sexual reproduction is a viable evolutionary fork.

Mathematically, a new species will only fail to survive if the threats to its survival outweigh its ability to adapt and thrive. When the number of threats is low, the species doesn’t need to be a super-survivor, it just needs to be good enough.

The same is true within human society. We can’t all be superstars, supremely attractive, incredibly smart, strong, mature, creative, resourceful. But that doesn’t mean we can’t survive and lead a fruitful life, reproduce, create a genetic legacy. Just one clear look at the world around us demonstrates the futility in seeking to understand why, from an evolutionary perspective, a particular trait has survived. Why not? What was the force that would have stopped it from being perpetuated?

And given the amount of time most people spend thinking about sex and participating in it or wanting to participate, there would have to a fairly major turn of events to stop us continuing down this particular alley.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

Reports from a team of Cambridge scientists last week presented a theory explaining how an asexual organism (a tiny invertebrate pond-dweller, the bdelloid rotifer) has been able to survive 80 million years without sexual reproduction.

In a related article scientists from the University of Sussex show that the rate of mutation in a range of sexual organisms is lower than it would need to be if sexual reproduction occurs to guard against the harmful effects of mutation.

All of which seems quite new and interesting to those of us who haven’t been keeping up with the theories of evolutionary biology. But apparently the elusive evolutionary benefits of sexual reproduction over asexual reproduction have been much hunted and seldom in clear view for quite some time.

I also read the first two parts of a fascinating essay by Errol Morris “Which Came First, The Chicken or The Egg.” Although it’s about photographs from the Crimean war, the Morris piece reminded me, as did the two science reports, that evidence and hypothesis make a far less solid foundation for our understanding of the world than it sometimes seems. Morris’s article also makes a powerful case for the importance of careful, methodical, skeptical inquiry. It may be a long time before we know as much about the wending path of evolution as we once thought we did. And for this reason what we think we know can’t tell us as much as we might hope.

But if we look through the other end of the telescope things become a little less dizzying. We can ask the question: Do we need to know the details of each stage and step of evolution to know that organisms evolve? If organisms evolve, what can this tell us about the purpose of evolution?

For the past few mornings when I’ve walked into my office and pressed the light switch, the lights have flickered on and then off. Only after repeatedly pressing the switch off and on again have they remained “on.” Through my experience I know enough about electrical circuits to deduce that there is a loose connection somewhere.

I don’t know very much about electricity. As far as I understand it, there’s a flow of electrical current (electrons). I couldn’t design a generator. I would be able to replace a light switch, but that’s about it. My point is that I don’t need to know about electricity to turn on a light. When I press the light switch, the lights generally come on.

The concept of evolution says that living organisms tend to improve their ability to survive by becoming better adapted for survival over time. Using the parallel of the light bulb, understanding that this happens doesn’t require us to know exactly how it happens.

I’m immediately struck by the thought of extinction. (Yesterday I was reading Mo Willems story about Edwina — the dinosaur who didn’t know she was extinct — to my son; highly recommended.) Species that become extinct at first seem to be counter-examples of evolution. But when we think again, we realize that they instead provide evidence that a species won’t survive if it is not well adapted to its environment.

Another possible counter-example: Genetic weaknesses. Genetic weakness that can be produced by in-breeding (either by cultural or social practice or by design). But this again supports the general concept that evolution works more effectively when such circumstances don’t interfere.

Generally then, we can say that as time passes organisms tend to become incrementally better adapted to their environment. This is actually a much narrower conceptual risk than to accept the specific details of the evolutionary process itself.

But I believe we can even take another step away from the whole question and ask whether the principles of space and time provide a philosophical basis for the concept of evolution. (An approach I pursue in my book LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do to Survive.)

The principles of space and time show us that things will continue to exist in space if their form remains stable over time. If we think about fundamental particles and the way the stuff of the universe has persisted we can understand that stable particles and stable conglomerations of matter predominate. The same is true of living organisms. The more stable and persistent organisms, the ones that evolve, survive, and adapt, tend to predominate over time. Extreme circumstances can produce counter-examples, but then statistics will take over again and evolution will tend to win out over time.

While it’s helpful to be skeptical, methodical, and careful, and remember that we know a lot less than we’d like to think we do; we also perhaps know a lot more than we sometimes care to imagine.