Pig Thoughts on Qi

Virtual Infidelity

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 07:26:00 +0000

In A Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, there’s a scene like this: Mr. A has been married to his wife for many years, and waves of boredom keep washing over him. He wants to cheat, but he knows deep down that he loves his wife and his family. One day, Mr. A learns of a company that offers a “virtual infidelity” service. This kind of company can provide a fully simulated affair — falling in love, the heat of romance, going to bed… an experience that can even feel better than the real thing! And all of it happens purely inside a computer simulation, with no actual third party involved.

If a married person never grumbles about their marriage, something must be off with their IQ or EQ. The philosopher Montaigne once said: “A good marriage is one between a blind wife and a deaf husband.” This is exactly why a happy marriage so often belongs to the “numb” — those who, when they marry badly, tell themselves heaven is testing them; who, when they fight, explain it away as lovers’ quarrels that end in the same bed; who, when a third party intrudes, write it off as simply human nature’s flaw.

I suspect that for many people, some things just aren’t so easy to let go of. In a family where a third party has intruded, one side has to endure the heartbreak of sharing a partner, while the other is torn between two boats — how could that not be painful? The assumption that one side (usually the man) always comes out ahead is probably why society despises “the other woman” so much.

Of course there are many reasons a third party intrudes — practically speaking: psychological, economic, social factors and so on; more fancifully, even climate (hotter places see more infidelity than colder ones) and terrain (less of it happens at high altitude). But to those who appear to be the wounded party, an affair has everything to do with emotional fidelity — it is simply unforgivable under heaven. This reminds me of how our news always says some country’s such-and-such action has “damaged the friendship between the two nations.” Is there some hidden, drip-fed connection between these two kinds of “hurt feelings”? I can’t say. But setting aside the causes, does dwelling endlessly on the emotional drama actually comfort either side?

Getting off track — back to the original question. Buried in it is a much bigger social issue: betrayal within marriage. Most countries in the world legally practice monogamy (there’s a village in the U.S. that practices polygamy, where one old man apparently has over a hundred grandchildren — astonishing). Of course, we all understand that law is only a constraint for the majority. Under a monogamous system, there often exist plenty of de facto polygamous or polyandrous arrangements. Setting those special cases aside, if a third party intrudes into an ordinary couple’s marriage, then in defense of monogamy, public opinion, law, and morality alike must come down hard on it.

But wait — there’s something worth noting. The infidelity company Mr. A learned about is entirely virtual! Meaning no physical third party ever appears. So does that perfectly resolve the contradiction between cheating and not betraying one’s family? Clearly not. According to sociological surveys, even married women who merely discover that their spouse masturbates feel a sense of shame — so wouldn’t this kind of virtual infidelity be seen by them as an even greater disgrace?!

At what point does something actually count as “cheating”? Purely physical, purely mental, or both physical and mental boundaries crossed at once? Or does mental infidelity only count once the body follows through and acts on it? — Perhaps years from now there will be some kind of “consciousness monitor” that visualizes emotion, and at that point even fantasizing alone will count as cheating.

The Psychology Trap

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 09:02:58 +0000

photo/john john jesse

Evolutionary psychology is one of the most controversial schools of thought of the past several decades. Those who firmly believe in this theory hold that every aspect of human behavior can ultimately be explained by the selective advantages our ancestors retained in their struggle for survival. This claim looks, on the surface, like it puts rationalization first, but if you go around recklessly applying it to explain human behavior, you’ll end up with some pretty big jokes. Look at the examples the book uses — just wearing a baseball cap backward is enough to spin out a whole pile of theory. (See A Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, p.92 — that’s really all there is to it.)

This kind of thing really does come up often in psychology. In positive psychology, for instance, researchers often try to examine how subjectively happy a person feels, but just like with those random human behaviors, how could someone else possibly detect or observe another person’s subjective views and feelings? Of course, psychology naturally tends to use scales to measure such things, but these scales are all built on top of certain theoretical assumptions — for instance, the assumption that subjective well-being is made up of a certain set of factors. Any proper quantitative analysis is, without exception, built on a foundation of various assumptions!

Talking about this, I wonder if you’ve noticed — certain subjective psychological and behavioral matters, under the scale of certain kinds of research, can seem to be analyzed, can seem to be compared… just like what one philosopher once said: man is a machine with a soul. We are governed and manipulated by a kind of vulgar consensus, a kind of prejudice that runs through psychology, and under this bias, faith reduces a person to nothing more than a simulated machine. Communism can, in this sense, dictate what counts as happiness and what counts as correct; so too can capitalism; so too can Taoism, Buddhism, and Islam.

To put a fresher spin on something I often say: our behavior and psychology may well just be a bunch of clichéd viewpoints — when it comes to things that can be reduced to symbolic operations, like the conduct of the masses or social etiquette, analysis genuinely works. But what about human beings themselves? It’s entirely possible that human beings really are complex machines, too difficult to fully grasp, because we are, always and forever, irreducibly ourselves.

God and the Good

Wed, 12 May 2010 15:30:03 +0000

Let’s start by looking at a passage quoted in the book (The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten), drawn from Plato’s Euthyphro, a dialogue between God and a philosopher.

God said to the philosopher: “I am God, I am divine, I am the source of all that is good. So why do those worldly philosophers pay me no heed?”

The philosopher said to God, “Before I answer you, I must ask you a few questions first. You command us to do good things. But is it good because you command it, or do you command it because it is good?” (What an impressive philosopher)

“Well,” said God, “it is good because I have told you to do it.” (This is what God originally meant)

“Honorable God, that is clearly the wrong answer! If something is good merely because you say so, then if you wished it, torturing infants could also be good. But that would be even more absurd, wouldn’t it?”

“Of course,” God replied. “This was a test for you, and you have satisfied me well. So what is the other option?” (The clever God hastily changed his tone)

“You choose good things because they are good. But this clearly means that good does not depend on you. So we have no need to study God in order to learn what is good.”

“Even so,” God said, somewhat embarrassed, “you must admit that I have already set quite a number of examples on this matter…”

From this dialogue, we can see that God, swept along by the philosopher’s reasoning, hastily changed his tune and ultimately found himself in an awkward position. Of course, the philosopher here weakens God’s intelligence somewhat, but there’s one point within theism that we cannot deny (even as atheists): humanity’s understanding of goodness can exist independently of God or any other deity (or anything resembling one).

This reminds me of a story from when I first learned to roller skate as a child. At first I simply couldn’t skate very fast. A classmate who was very good at it played a joke on me — he touched my skates with his hand and said that now, under the touch of his divine hand, my skates had become “magic skates,” and that if I just kept skating in them for a while, I’d become fast. So I skated and skated, day after day, until one day the wheels had worn down to nearly half their size — and to my amazement, I discovered I could skate just as fast as he could.

Looking back on it now, the reason I could skate fast clearly wasn’t because he’d actually turned my skates into magic skates, but because of all my practice.

The lesson from roller skating applies just as well to analyzing the concept of “God.” Some people feel that the “goodness” God speaks of, or simply the guidance religion offers, is good, and so they convert, bow piously, and ultimately go on to do good deeds and accumulate virtue. In this, the role God plays is much like my “magic skates” — serving as a kind of suggestive prompt, inspiring people to act. Some people have grasped this key point and gone on to exploit this psychological effect by loudly proclaiming its miraculous effects — the elixirs and magic pills of ancient China are exactly this kind of thing. Surely the alchemists themselves knew it was they, as mere “people,” who had concocted these things?

But before criticizing any of this, it seems we’ve gotten something mixed up. In other words, we seem to have conflated two entirely distinct concepts — God and goodness. To put it another way, God finds himself in a rather awkward position: if he represents “goodness,” then we wouldn’t need the word “goodness” at all; and if he merely guides us toward goodness, then clearly we must already have known what goodness was before him — so what use would he be?

Think about our own organs for a moment. Our limbs are good — they let us move freely; our genitals are good — they give us pleasure and allow us to reproduce; our intestines, all the way down to the anus, are good — they help us absorb nutrients and expel waste. Following the theistic logic of the dialogue above, then, limbs, genitals, intestines, and anus are all good, and ought to stand on equal footing with God. But that’s clearly not how things actually work — hardly anyone treats the intestines or the anus as “good,” or worships them the way they worship God (though genital worship certainly does exist). Not only that, but things like feces have become taboo. Christians once made a great fuss over whether God had intestines at all, and in the second century, a certain church father went so far as to declare that Christ “only ate and drank, but never excreted.”

It seems, then, that we’re actually quite clear-headed after all, capable of distinguishing good from evil. In truth, the problem still lies within the person. There’s a saying that the moment you resolve to do evil, you become a devil — I suspect the same holds true for doing good.

The Veil of Ignorance

Mon, 10 May 2010 15:31:44 +0000

The veil of ignorance is an important concept from Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. Searching the keyword “veil of ignorance” in my school library’s system turned up several hundred works on the subject! This unfamiliar term struck me hard, an outsider to legal studies.

Put simply, the veil of ignorance is a curtain hung in front of decision-makers, so that they don’t know what outcome their upcoming decision will produce — that is, they don’t know whether they themselves will end up as the “strong” or the “weak.” As a result, they tend to make a compromise decision. In this way, both others and themselves are left with some “way out.”

Rawls believed that if this kind of procedure were operated rationally, it would allow the most disadvantaged groups to receive the greatest benefit. But people often have another course of action available to them behind the “veil of ignorance” — gambling. Before a gamble concludes, none of the gamblers know who the eventual winner will be, yet the winner stands to gain the greatest benefit. Before the decision is made, wouldn’t there always be someone willing to risk everything on a single throw? This is one example used to argue against the veil of ignorance.

Even taken purely on its own terms, the idea isn’t all that realistic either. When people make choices, they inevitably carry their own “biases” with them, and the sources of these biases tend to be social status, education level, one’s position in society, and so on. As with the kind of scenario quoted in the book (The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten), it really is… far too idealized.

Rawls’s theory doesn’t rule out the factor of gambling, but he imagined human beings as far too simple and pure, and made justice come far too easily. At least in my own experience (the college entrance exam, for instance), I did once stand behind something like a “veil of ignorance” — but more often, I heard certain people’s hints and pointers. From a certain angle, “ignorance” is fair, at least, to the “fool” — because he always lives behind the curtain anyway.

The Absurdity of Reason

Thu, 06 May 2010 21:21:13 +0000

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes raises a question like this: Is there anything that is self-evident and therefore beyond doubt? Is it possible that our lives are nothing but a dream, or that the world is merely a fiction of our own imagining?

On the surface this question seems simple enough, yet it has genuinely stumped no small number of philosophers! Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy opens with exactly this maddening question. He makes a whole production out of a wooden table. First there’s the color you see when you look at the table — different people will see different colors depending on how light reflects off it; a person with normal vision and a colorblind person see it differently, and someone wearing blue-tinted glasses sees it differently still. Then Russell turns his attention to the table’s grain — on the surface it looks flat and smooth, but under a microscope it’s full of rough hills and valleys. And so on and so on — think it through carefully and you’ll find even more such problems.

If that’s the case, can we really say the table is not a “physical object,” but rather a heap of some xx? Let’s see how various thinkers have answered what that xx actually is. Leibniz (1646–1716) tells us it’s a heap of souls; Bishop Berkeley (1685–1753) says it’s an idea in the mind of God. Both of these famous idealists, without exception, manage to think the poor table out of existence entirely. But look at what our rigorous science has to say — it’s an enormously vast swarm of violently moving electric charges. This, too, seems to point toward an idea: that the table is a phantom conjured by the human brain…

Following this mode of thinking, we can think something that plainly exists out of existence, and we can also think into existence something that doesn’t exist at all. Given that, have devils, gods, ghosts, and spirits actually been “produced” in just this way?

In fact, even if we manage to come up with answers we feel are correct to the two questions above, an even deeper question immediately follows — the very faculty by which we’re able to think these questions through at all, —reason itself — is it sound, or is it absurd? As the book (The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten) puts it: “Our rational faculties are the basis on which any serious thinking proceeds. We can question whether any particular piece of reasoning is sound through painstaking thought. But we cannot doubt whether our general capacity for reasoning itself is flawed. At most we can say it appears to serve us well.” But clearly, this too is a deeply contradictory question…

Perhaps we should all just wave our hands at the question of “reason” and say: we’re off to buy some soy sauce… and then the question returns — is the soy sauce we bought even real?

A Choice With No Winner

Tue, 04 May 2010 23:01:31 +0000

A soldier named Sachs is ordered to do something terrible — to rape and then kill a prisoner. But as far as he knows, this prisoner is nothing more than an innocent civilian, arrested only because of an unacceptable ethnic background. If he follows the order, he will be tormented by his conscience, because this is an unjust war crime; if he refuses, he himself will be executed. What should he do?

Chinese people often say that someone is like grass on a wall, swaying with the wind. In truth, this is simply instinct — like a plant’s tendency to lean toward sunlight, nothing more than a reaction seeking advantage and avoiding harm. You have it, I have it, everyone has it. Under the pressure of certain high-stakes relationships, some people bow their heads, obey orders, and trim their sails to the wind, while others do exactly the opposite — they’re brave, upright, daring to challenge injustice. It’s this latter kind of person who tends to appear in the eyes of our nation’s future generations, because this is the “morality” we promote.

But if you were in Sachs’s position, what would you do? Should he violate his conscience and carry out the order, or would he rather die defending the bottom line of morality, sacrificing himself — or is there some other reasonable course of action? Clearly, there’s no real “good solution” to this problem, which means there’s no such thing as a truly “good person” in this scenario either. So where, then, does the force that produces and drives morality actually come from? (Question drawn from The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten)

To Eat or Not to Eat?

Sun, 02 May 2010 15:35:50 +0000

Photo/Witkin

The scenario goes like this: a pig, after undergoing genetic modification, can talk! It says to Max Berger, a man who has been a vegetarian for forty years, “Come on, eat me!” When it’s led to the slaughterhouse, it goes full of anticipation, hoping to be eaten as soon as possible. So, as a vegetarian, should Max eat it or not — that is the question.

There are basically two reasons vegetarians abstain from meat year-round. The first is the belief that eating meat is bad for the body — understandable enough, since it’s simply a matter of personal preference. The second is the belief that humans have no right to hold power of life and death over animals; animals should have their own welfare. Of course, as the book points out, people don’t seem to think about this when they’re swatting mosquitoes…

That second point is exactly what I don’t understand. Humans are always “instinctively” doing a great deal of thinking on behalf of others. As it happens, I recently read I Am Not a Murderer, in which a critically ill patient named Vincent is fully conscious but unable to end his own life — a situation just as awkward, just as painful, as that of the pig standing before vegetarians at the dinner table, wanting to be eaten. How foolish it is that humanity so widely interferes with euthanasia!

Can we ever truly grasp what another being is thinking, and act correctly on that basis? The answer to this question is the same as the answer to “as a dog, you can never explain why cats prefer independence from humans.” Because you are always, inescapably, yourself.

The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten

Sat, 01 May 2010 22:24:57 +0000

Ever since I was little, I’ve been someone who likes to ponder all sorts of things. Besides wondering “where should I go play today,” I’d also find myself thinking about questions like “does God exist,” “what did dinosaurs actually look like,” “why don’t girls have breasts when they’re little”… As I grew older, I gradually came to ponder more and more questions — it’s probably the best way I have of passing the time. I understand exactly what Emily Dickinson meant when she wrote that the brain is wider than the sky, and deeper than the sea. To my mind, human intelligence owes itself to thinking, and the sheer complexity of human nature springs precisely from the differences in how we think.

Cover of the Chinese edition

There are plenty of people who spend their whole days pondering questions — we tend to call them “philosophers,” “scholars,” and the like, and our impression of such people is generally that they sit holed up in some ivory tower, researching things so profound they’re beyond reach. In daily life, the moment something gets associated with “philosophy,” people instinctively back away. The books such people publish come in every conceivable form, which only reinforces the idea that philosophy is impossibly deep and mysterious — something to be admired from a distance, never approached. In truth, the starting point of philosophy is nothing more than questions, big and small, deep and shallow. Think about them enough, and they’re not so difficult after all.

Russell, in The Problems of Philosophy, points out: “Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves.” And these questions can liberate the mind from narrow prejudice, which has an enormous effect on changing and clarifying how we look at things.

Cover of the English edition

Julian Baggini’s The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten is built on exactly this foundation of “philosophical problems.” The author carefully designed 100 thought experiments to “invite” readers into philosophical reflection, to enjoy the pleasure of thinking philosophically. Some readers online have said that these are all questions without answers, and not worth thinking about. But to me, questions without answers are precisely what reveal the limits of human thought — they leave you with “nowhere to go,” and yet that’s exactly what drives you to keep progressing.

Another book in this vein is 101 Philosophical Problems, published by Xinhua Press. More recently, philosophy books have even been turned into comics — there’s one called The First Philosophy Comic Book (A Concise Comic Guide to the Philosophical Thought of the World’s Most Famous Philosopher, Nietzsche), also worth a look! (I once wrote down some thoughts based on the content of The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten before, but at the time I’d only seen a preview edition. Now I’ve finally bought the actual book, ha~ Some of the text above is also drawn from an earlier journal entry of mine)

Eternity.

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 08:27:00 +0000

Finals are finally over, and I got brutally worked over by four math exams. The blow wasn’t small, and in this moment of extreme dejection and exhaustion, I actually found myself thinking about eternity again! Solve one class of equations, and there’s still the second class, the third class… Intel’s CPUs got slower, so there came 65nm, then 45nm, then 32nm… A rocket launches as No. 1, and there will be No. 2, No. 3, No. 4, one after another… Roads get dug up and paved, paved and dug up again, over and over… Buildings get demolished, and then thousands more rise up. We sprint through a world that has no eternity, chasing after a faint, illusory “eternity.”

Thinking it over, eternity is a rather terrifying thing. When you hope for love to be eternal, you end up burying the happiness you should have had, focusing instead on possession and proof; when you long for life to be eternal, you cast aside the joy of the present moment to go searching for the secret of immortality. And when our society indulges single-mindedly in the “eternity” of development, prosperity, and harmony, what do we lose in the process? I suspect those “nail households” who blocked the government from seizing their land, and then mysteriously vanished, might just be one of the small “moves” humanity decisively makes in service of the “eternity” of development.

Very few people can truly see through eternity. At least, I cannot.

The Puzzle of Continuity

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 05:40:00 +0000

Continuity is a major issue in mathematics, and the same is true for human beings. Sometimes the basis on which we judge our own existence is whether we remember the past or can perceive the present. It’s like Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” — without a brain, no one could “think,” and therefore could not “be.” But we often overlook the changing nature of things. We often plan certain things, but after some time has passed and we look back, it feels as though it happened long, long ago, because the plan has already been changed, or forgotten.

Time is always passing, people and things are constantly changing, and yet we use past plans to make demands on the present and future — much like searching for a sword by marking the spot where it fell from the boat. You might really feel a sense of “consistency” from this, but at best it’s only similarity — never returning is the true nature of things. Unfortunately, those who clearly understand this still love to wallow in the past — when venturing out into the world, they cling to their hometown, wanting their roots to return to the soil when they fall; when stirring up trends, they go retro, nostalgic, carrying on old culture. Isn’t all of this the past?

Humanity’s attachment to bygone, vanished experience is, in the end, exactly the taste favored in The Romance of the Confused — necrophilia.

How Can One Be Free

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 17:59:00 +0000

Screenshot from the film PTU

Just one more week until exams. Looking back on the two weeks since classes ended, life has become very regular: asleep by 11:30, up at 7:30, a full day in the library. This morning I woke at 7 without an alarm, fully alert, and lying there tossing and turning I found myself thinking that I’m becoming more mechanical every day, repeating a pre-set pattern step by step. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad.

Thinking about it, the brain really is quite “physical” — it receives stimuli and produces responses. In theory, if we understood the laws governing every physical form’s operation, we could easily predict the behavior that follows, much like in many documentaries where scientists keep deconstructing the brain to explain things people previously couldn’t understand. But saying this is bound to draw objections from many people, who firmly believe they possess a clear, independent spirit and a freely beating heart, rather than being some “ATM machine” constantly depositing and withdrawing “money” from the brain.

There was a time when I thought this way too, because doesn’t this view deny the very freedom I want?

Actually, not quite. All freedom is built on top of unfreedom. If we hear that Blogger has been unblocked, we’re bound to feel we’ve gained some freedom — but isn’t that just suddenly stepping out of some continuous state for a moment, and suddenly finding the lotus blooming differently red? Frankly, it’s just an illusion. Whether it’s unblocked or not is still entirely up to the relevant state authorities — the temporary unblocking just slaps a “freedom” label onto the shackles and chains binding us.

And it’s not just that. Most of our time is spent on highly mechanical processes — most people just don’t want to admit it. Take eating, sleeping, using the bathroom, and so on — these processes are all quite procedural, and saying this isn’t some Matrix-style claim at all. If you’re used to scooping your rice first and then picking up your spoon, then once that order is switched, it will definitely take a few days to get used to. And at night, when you sleep, you’ll unconsciously favor lying on your left or right side — force a change in direction and you definitely won’t sleep soundly. Even more famous is that question of which finger ends up on top when you cross your hands.

If you still don’t believe it, or lack good enough self-observation skills, then think about the people around you. Can’t you predict what your good friends will say, what gestures they’ll make, what kind of clothes they’ll wear? Or you’ll know that someone you keep tabs on will show up at a certain spot in the library at a certain time. Seen this way, that so-called scientific “mind-reading” is, at its core, nothing more than observing the minutiae of life.

But does this make you feel unfree? I think we simply overestimate what we call freedom, and underestimate humanity’s “proceduralism,” or mechanical nature (doesn’t it resemble The Matrix?). But in the end, we are still unfree — which brings to mind the method of achieving free will mentioned in The Free Will (Der Freie Wille, 2006) — death. And now it seems the question is whether death is really an exit into freedom — does it achieve freedom, or merely escape unfreedom? These two are fundamentally different.