Rational Philosophy

The Hotel New Yorker, Abu Ghraib, and surreptitious sampling.

Nikola Tesla, perhaps one of the most brilliant people of all time, spent the latter years of his life holed up in The Hotel New Yorker, Room 3327, a mental prisoner of sometimes odd thoughts. Tesla, who died in 1943, supported the idea of selective breeding: “A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit,” he said, “than to marry a habitual criminal.” “The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization.” Tesla clearly had a particular view of human rights.

Tesla also hoped to be able to capture and replay people’s thoughts by recording the impact of thoughts on the optic nerve, essentially photographing the mind through one’s eyes.

One thinks that perhaps Errol Morris has pondered on Tesla’s optical ideas. Writing for The New Yorker Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris explore the pathology behind the notorious photographs that exposed and compounded the wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib. Gourevitch and Morris stitch together a careful and compelling perspective on the actions of the young MPs who debased, abused and documented their ill-treatment of Iraqi prisoners. The structure of implicit and explicit endorsement by Military Intelligence, and, by association, the military chain of command, peels away the easy conclusion that the MPs were just bad people doing bad things. As one reads the article one begins to have the uneasy impression that one is somehow culpable, too.

And lawyers have begun to challenge the practice of “surreptitious sampling” of DNA by law enforcement agencies. Bypassing legislation that prohibits unwarranted search and seizure, law enforcement officers have been quietly and successfully collecting indirect DNA samples from suspects (from cigarette butts, coke bottles, drinking glasses, etc.). The lawyers claim that this violates the suspect’s right to privacy.

“Unlike garbage that can be withheld or destroyed before it is released into the world,” reads the motion to suppress the DNA evidence in one case, “we cannot do so with our biological tissues.”

“We conclude that under the circumstances, the expectorating defendant had no reasonable expectation of privacy in his spittle,” the Mass Appeals court ruled in another case, “or in the DNA evidence derived therefrom.”

Does one have any particular right to the privacy of one’s DNA? How is a DNA sample different from a photograph or a mental picture? Could a suspect challenge a candid photograph or an eye-witness ID as an infringement of privacy?

I expect that most of us feel the emotional pull of the right to privacy. We live with ourselves, with our thoughts. We can withdraw into ourself. We can choose not to disclose. As we grow up we develop what we might call a sacred pact of privacy with ourselves. As Schopenhauer pointed out, we only know the world through our experience of it, and our only immediate experience is the experience of our self.

On the other hand, privacy is one wall of the mind’s prison. Just as Tesla locked himself into the habit of threes (he would only stay in hotel rooms with numbers divisible by three) we lock ourselves into a prison of the mind that reveres privacy. As Gourevitch and Morris astutely draw out, the MPs in Abu Ghraib took photographs in part as an attempt to break down that wall of privacy, to reveal themselves, to deprive themselves of some responsibility for their actions.

To exist, we must act in the world; we cannot avoid it. Existence sentences us to participation, however reluctant, however minimal. And, as we act in the world, we create and leave behind traces of ourselves, whether they be ideas, influences, creations, physical remnants. These traces, I would argue, must be embraced as the residue of our existence, for good or ill. We have a right to them only in as much as a prisoner has a right to the bars of his cell.
“He had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene… His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor’s instinct and practical American sense.”

So said Nikola Tesla of Thomas Edison.

How pride evolved as a beneficial trait… with drawbacks.

Over the years I’ve often landed on a great idea for an invention only to find out after the fact that it has already been invented. Audio historians now acknowledge that an inventor came up with the idea of recording sounds, and succeeded in doing so, more than twenty years before Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph. These same historians claim that this finding doesn’t diminish Thomas Edison’s achievement, because Edison went the extra step of replaying the sound he’d recorded, and because he apparently knew nothing of his predecessor’s work. While this perspective probably wouldn’t wash in a patent court, it certainly gives me a renewed sense of pride in my own innovations.

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautogram captured sound in squiggles on a sooty piece of paper. Scott was concerned with visual sound representation rather than sound reproduction, and it wasn’t until a team of researchers unearthed examples of Scott’s recordings and deciphered them with hi-tech wizardry that his phonautogram was proven to have done what he claimed it did. We can now hear some of Scott’s recordings reproduced.

Scott lived to see Edison’s phonograph make a hit, and fumed at the fact that Edison got all the credit. “What are the rights of the discoverer versus the improver?” Scott wrote.

Reference sources differ on the primary meaning of the word ‘pride.’ Dictionary.com prefers to go with the negative connotation first “a high or inordinate opinion of one’s own dignity, importance, merit, or superiority, whether as cherished in the mind or as displayed in bearing, conduct, etc.” Whereas the American Heritage dictionary takes a more charitable view, with “a sense of one’s own proper dignity or value; self-respect,” and relegating the sense of an inordinate opinion of one’s self-worth to fifth place in its list of meanings.

Before Edison’s invention, one could say that Scott felt pride in his achievement. After Edison’s famed achievement, Scott’s pride was hurt. He then displayed pride in the negative sense.

I wonder to what extent the two definitions of pride refer to the same philosophical concept revealed under different conditions.

Paleontologists have just dated a jaw fragment found in Europe pushing back evidence of the appearance of human ancestors in those parts from 800,000 to 1.1 million years ago. The bone was found along with remnants of stone tools and butchered animals.

The story of human evolution aches with the concept of valuing achievement. Above all others, two things drive us to achieve — the desire for preservation of ourselves and our like, and the drive to achieve for the sake of having achieved.

From an evolutionary perspective, the former motive will more rarely stretch the species into new areas of achievement. Instead, I would say that it follows rationally that we have evolved to feel an intrinsic sense of satisfaction in achievement for the sake of achievement, for the very reason that this would tend to accelerate the selection of this beneficial trait.

Getting back to pride.

We attempt to achieve because we are genetically predisposed to seek to achieve. We feel a sense of satisfaction in having achieved something, again, because we are genetically disposed to feel this. When someone belittles or seems to belittle our achievements we feel an attack and, if we’re sensitive, a diminishment of this sense of achievement, which then results in either a prideful defense of our value or a pained withdrawal from the attack.

When Edison received acclaim for his invention, Scott’s pride was hurt for two reasons — firstly, he felt that his invention hadn’t received its due attention, his achievement was retrospectively diminished. And secondly, even after he laid claim to the original idea, people chose to continue to heap praise on Edison, adding insult to injury.

Objectively, of course, it doesn’t really matter who had the idea first. So long as Edison didn’t steal the idea, which, apparently he didn’t. Both men were brilliant and inventive. But one can’t help empathizing with Scott’s sense of hurt pride.

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