A* Is Born
Foundations
Consider the first few decisions you’ll make tomorrow morning:
- what to wear
- what to eat for breakfast
- what route or means to get to work
There is for each decision a finite set of choices. Imagine you wrote all the available options for each choice on notecards, and laid them out before you on a table. There will be some natural organization, e.g. you would put socks on before your shoes, undergarments before pants and shirt, or you might need to choose cookware appropriate for your breakfast choice. Imagine that you arranged the notecards, if loosely, by this natural organization of options.
Imagine that each decision is simply a traversing of one path of options among all those possible. You might take a highlighter and mark each notecard in the sequence leading up to fulfilling your decision. If, for instance, you decided to have eggs for breakfast, you’d decide whether to use “real” eggs or a healthier substitute, whether to fry or scramble, whether or not to top with cheese, etc. If you had a notecard for each step, your marked cards would make a path across the table, each card noting a step toward the goal of eating scrambled eggs for breakfast.
Imagine now that there were a notecard for every such step along the path toward every act, decision, or event which might ever have been or might ever be, all spread across a very large table. Every galactic group, every galaxy, every star, every atom, every proton, every quark, and every string (or some other fancily small thing) which was or could have been represents a collection of notecards, each card chronicling a point at which all possible outcomes for that step collapsed into one.
Stepping on Stones
Sit down in front of your TV, and slide the Pacman cartridge into your Atari 2600 until it clicks into place. Soon after pushing the power button, your animated pie chart floats around a maze gobbling fruit, alternately preyed upon, and then preying upon, a small cadre of ghosts.
Those ghosts appear pretty clever, but they’re actually quite stupid. If at all, you’re being fooled primarily by their clever programmer. He applied a pathfinding algorithm to imbue these pixel wraiths with a shadow of intelligence, i.e. artificial intelligence
Imagine that you pause the game. Look at Pacman’s position and those of his pursuers. You might initially think he’s in trouble if the straight-line distance from a ghost to Pacman is short, but you’d be overlooking an important part of the puzzle: the walls. There’s a lot of space on the screen, but very little freedom of movement. A pathfinding algorithm sorts through all possible paths from a starting point (in our freeze-frame, a ghost) to a goal point (Pacman). Each position, or node, is ranked by its effectiveness as defined by its distance to the goal node, and the distance from adjacent nodes to the goal node. Of course, some nodes will have fewer neighbors than others, since there are walls in the game. The successful path takes the ghost around any walls and along the most efficient available sequence of nodes.
Even in the case of a simple game like Pacman, the solutions might be quite difficult to find. With the passage of each frame, each instant of the game’s time, the paths are recalculated; if not, to beat the ghosts you’d need only to move one or two spaces from your starting point. As you guide Pacman toward bananas, cherries, and power pellets, the software guides the ghosts on paths considered most likely to result in a life lost. It’s a fury of number crunching, to be sure.
What might those ghosts do in a world of moral dilemmas and bills to pay?
Synthesis
Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of a volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An ‘instinct’ is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man’s desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that that is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love of life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Before our first breath, we each begin as a sequence of RNA transcription by DNA, of folding proteins, of all kinds of eventual cellular operations which eventually dump us screaming into a cold extrawombular world. At each point, several things might happen, but only one does (for our purposes; this isn’t a technical thesis): either meitosis carries on successfully, or it doesn’t; either our brain or heart develops, or it doesn’t; either we’re born alive, or we’re not. We could build a deck of notecards as a chronical of all these steps and their possible alternatives, lay them out on a table, and find the sequence which led to who we have become. Theoretically, anyway.
If you’re reading this, though, you’re not quite done becoming yourself. However you might gauge a “moment”, as each of them passes, so passes a frame of the animation of your life. You make several decisions, of varying complexity, in each of those moments, slowly pruning the hairy mess of possible options, bit by bit, toward something necessarily simpler. At each step, each node, you rank the effectiveness of the open paths toward your goal. Mostly, you hope to choose relatively short paths; only the truly prescient could hope to always find the shortest.
Now, you might wonder (especially if you wonder in the midst of a tortured metaphor): how would I measure the distance from my present node to my goal node? Logically, you’d need to know what and where your goal node is. Look out upon our practically infinite tabletop, with notecards for every possible facet of a decision to be made (deterministically, probablistically, or consciously). What is your goal? Where is it’s card? How can you get there from here at all, let alone most efficiently?
A Secret Emptiness
Human history has no shortage of individuals and groups of them who have proffered some brand of moral rubric or another. Yes, it might be argued that the single most prolific class of such rubrics is religion. Whether a particular religious doctrine aims to list the rules one might follow toward being “right”, or else to give more general advice up for interpretation, the goal of any such doctrine is to provide direction to the individual toward that “right” place. That is, religion is a practicing of an instititutionalized path-finding solution.
However, religion is overly maligned as some sort of recipe toward a path, not of rightness or clarity, but of servitude or idolatry. The only way to make such a claim, as I see it, is to have found the way to rightness as a counterproof; and I can’t say that I’ve had much luck coming across news of this. While I join quite a few people in thinking that science, the classic foil of religion (a bit unfairly), probably provides a more refined algorithm for finding a useful path, science has its limitations. I mentioned something about this a while ago.
Pitting God against science implies that the Bible and physics texts serve competing interests. On the one hand, the pious perceive the world as a divine creation, its creatures, principally humans, serving some purpose toward that divinity. On the other hand, scientists perceive the world nearly as a happenstance, a function of statistical mechanics, of probability, with no intelligence behind its function. Taken as such, the foundations of the debate appear sound.
Nope.
Religion and science no more compete as solutions to the meaning of life than 5W30 and 89 octane compete to keep my Plymouth Breeze roadworthy. Science and religion address different sets of issues, with some overlap. Within the tenets of each are statements about how the universe was created, for instance. Science and religion each serve as methods or practices for understanding the world. It’s in the nature and means of applying that understanding that we find the key to settling the debate.
Scientists themselves keep their work within limitations, limitations accepted as necessary for the advancement of scientific inquiry itself. That isn’t to say that scientific inquiry may not someday return us a map toward that point of rightness somewhere across our infinite table. It is to say, though, that there are more immediate questions to consider before aiming particle accelerators and Bunsen burners at moral questions.
Crowding in around science and religion are all kinds of other proposed path-finding machines, and, obviously, all of these things sort of provide direct or indirect input and output to one another. We find scientists, politicians, clergy, actors, and venture capitalists in among the same gene pool, after all. In some cultures, for instance U.S. culture, you’ll be hard pressed to make it through a waking day without someone offering you some piece of The Map. Sarah Jessica Parker voices over a tutorial on how completely a woman can humiliate herself in a restaurant with a stick of butter and a glass of wine. Judge Judy lays down “the law” to offending adulterers. Stephen Colbert not very subtly lambastes George Bush’s foreign policy; and George Bush less subtly defends his policy as the will of “the People” (whoever they are). Your mom (God lover ‘er) tells you you look tired, or thin, and wonders why you never call, and then tells you how the family is apparently trying to corner the market on stupid.
Take them all, all those snippets, and collect them, and you might be able to tape together something that makes sense. More likely, you’ll feel either overwhelmed and repelled, or pulled in multiple different directions. There’s something fundamentally flawed with any collection of these scraps of “wisdom” you might gather: no one else knows where they should be going any more than you do.
A path to rightness presupposes that (a) rightness exists and (b) you can get there. Even before considering how, by what directions, someone might approach rightness, both (a) and (b) must be true. Further, assuming they are, obviously someone needs to know where on the table rightness actually is. The algorithm that tells Pacman’s hunters which way to go knows where Pacman is, else no measure of distance could be made. We don’t seem to have the same kind of information when it comes to rightness.
The best we can hope for is, well, to keep trying. It’s not worthless to wonder if we should, though.
The unique quality within the biotic world that we demand morality of our surroundings, and an adequate meaning to it all, that is something we can hardly relinquish. And yet, what we call Nature displays neither morality nor meaning. So the question, What is the meaning of life? is less fertile than, Why do we ask for the meaning of life? Cats do not.
Peter Wessel Zapffe, via The Galilean Library
I challenge the presumption that life itself is dependent upon a purpose for it. I see no evidence to suggest that there exists any intrinsic need within the universe for life, any more than there is a need for gravity, and so there is no purpose served by either. Certainly it might be contended that life, like gravity, is a useful result of the perturbations of forces and particles over billions of years, temporal and light, though gravity seems far more useful. At the very least, the terrestrial environment is likely quite different than it would be had not humanity achieved its historic influence. However, whatever this utility might be it is only utility in the context of open-ended processes, with no more value in one or the other possible consequence. If humanity eventually affects some noticeable presence and deformation of some statistically significant volume of the Milky Way galaxy, it would be no more or less beneficial a result than if the species had become extinct. Either is simply a potentiality unfettered by design or intelligent direction. In the absence of life or gravity, the universe would simply be built differently to one degree or another.
So I ask: where are you going, and how do you get there?
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