Evil Genies

One of the first philosophical treatises I read (and perhaps the only one cover-to-cover, being so short and direct) was Discourse on the Method by Rene Descartes. I must have read it twenty years ago or so, in a Phil 101 class at night school. Needless to say, I was quite intrigued. Marked it up real good with the yellow highlighter. Especially that part about the evil genie.

Now as you know, I’m a philosophy scholar of the strictest, armchairish, pick-and-choosingist, love-of-the-game variety. Admittedly, I have not read the Discourse or much Cartesian stuff since. But Señor Descartes was quite influential in setting up one of the key components of modern thought: the duality of mind and body with primacy being placed on rational reasoning. He is one of the philosophic forerunners of modern-day science.

His main argument in the Discourse is simple. In trying to determine what thoughts, beliefs, and ideas are beyond doubt, he subjects them all to ever-fanciful tests. Sensations can be doubted for there are situations in which the body may not be trusted. Information he learns may be mistaken. He can never be certain that what another person tells him is true. Even his belief in an outside world can be doubted, because he might be deceived into believing its existence by an evil genie. Finally, the only thing he can be certain of is his own existence, because he is able to think. Cogito ergo sum, as the Latin goes, I think, therefore, I am.

Let’s back up a step. My interest is on the genie. Baggini, in his book The Pig Who Wants to Be Eaten, wrote: what if the genie is in our DNA? That sentence has captivated me.

Boiled down and chiseled away, it says that we deceive ourselves. Which I guess is hard to argue against. Each and every one of us deceives himself in some way throughout the little things of the day. Me, I eat ice cream swearing that I’m not gonna get fat. How’s that working for me? Oh, yeah, I’m twenty pounds heavier than I was a year ago. But I can easily envision – and you can, too – people deceiving themselves about being happy in their jobs or relationships or that the state of the economy will just get better over time (loaded political comment inserted – check!). You get my drift.

That does not interest me, and I don’t think it interests the genie, either.

What does interest the both of us is … wait for it … metaphysics. Yes, metaphysics. A ten dollar word for Reality. After all, that’s what both Descartes and Baggini are focused on here.

How does our DNA deceive us regarding the Great Out There?

Two thoughts come to mind. Unfortunately, they are two thoughts I’m ill-equipped to expound on with a Cartesian sense of certainty. But I’ll offer them up in the off-chance they might form a connection, a linkage, a new neuro-association within the synapses and dendrites of that wondrous and mystical point in your skull where the soul meets matter.

First is the anthropic principle. Basically, it states that the universe is the way it is because we are here to observe it thus. From a physics and cosmological point of view, the fundamental constants and the four forces and the Standard Model explaining matter as quarks and leptons are all fine-tuned to make life possible. That’s the only way it could be for life – for us – to exist to observe the universe. Or something. I never completely understood it. Nor have I understood why it needed to be stated. I kinda viewed it like the “problem of free will” in ethics: who cares, because ultimately I can’t affect it and it doesn’t make any difference to the hyphen that’s my life.

Also, it’s a fairly modern conception, and like most modern thought, it contains the Potential-to-Idiocy. A lot of people interested in the anthropic principle wonder about the possibilities of non-Carbon based life. So, now, we have another derogatory PC term. Sexism (male dominating the female) was surpassed by speciesism (humans dominating the animal kingdom) is now surpassed by Carbon chauvinism (us Carbon-based life forms dominating, uh, …, uh, non-Carbon-based life forms?).

Still, that genie in the DNA acts as a lens on how we view the Out There. It’s just beyond my grasping, but I sense it’s something to do with an endowed adjustment to those physics fundamentals. Like a set of rabbit ears on an old teevee set. We can’t see reality any other way than the way we were built.

Which flows naturally to my second point. Kant.

I read a bit of him over the winter. However, I never delved deep enough to be able to write a term paper for a passing grade, so don’t expect one here. But my gut tells me his metaphysics most closely resembles, of all the kookie nutty philosophies over the past four centuries, his most nearly parallels quantum theory. (And please! If you know this stuff, let me know if I’m right or wrong!)

How so?

Well, Kant details Reality as a shadowy, unknowable world. A “noumenal” world as opposed to a “phenomenal” world. We are only able to interact with it, whether it’s touching a book on a table, looking through a telescope, or talking to a friend, by our minds putting their own meaning and order on this dark and mysterious landscape. Our logic, our concepts of space and time, our convention of cause-and-effect, we send this out somehow to bring order from chaos. The image of a potter comes to my mind, though this may be way off base. Reality is a lump of clay. It doesn’t become an ash tray to us until we reach out and mold it with our hands. That’s the analogy I always get reading Kant.

This Kantian action of imposing our logic, etc, on the world always struck me as the collapsing of the quantum wave function. But that’s the subject of an entirely separate post.

Or maybe that evil genie is just what I thought it was when I first read it twenty years ago. Remember when Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck tunneled into that treasure cave in the desert, and rubbed that magic lamp … ?