6 Volume 99 in the series, Popular Culture and Philosophy®, edited by George A. Reisch To find out more about Open Court books, call toll-free 1-800-815-2280, or visit our website at www.opencourtbooks.com. Open Court Publishing Company is a division of Carus Publishing Company, dba Cricket Media. Copyright © 2016 by Carus Publishing Company, dba Cricket Media First printing 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, Open Court Publishing Company, 70 East Lake Street, Suite 800, Chicago, Illinois 60601. ISBN: 978-0-8126-9906-7 This book is also available as an e-book. Library of Congress Control Number: 2015959265 7 19 The Playful Thought Experiments of Louis C.K. CHRIS A. KRAMER If you don’t think it’s great being white you’re an asshole! —LOUIS C.K. In what world is it possible that the assholes Louis C.K. is addressing would not only continue listening to and enjoying his apparent verbal violence directed at them, but also accept his accusation as true? In what world could this lead to attitude change among the “assholes” in the audience? That world is this one—the real world. In much of Louis’s humor, he creates a fictional joke-world, but one in which he intends to convey something as actually being true in the real world. So, what he’s saying is, in one sense, serious. As a comedian, he is of course being playful in his performance, because he truly intends to get people to laugh, but he also wants them to follow him to his punchline or “conclusion.” Louis is using a persuasive device that is a ready-to-hand weapon in the philosopher’s arsenal (and the scientist’s too): the thought experiment. This is a tool for testing ideas in the workshop of our minds, sometimes to bring to our attention an important concept, or to convince us that something is true. Usually, a thought experiment is a fantastic account that “hooks” us in a way that straightforward arguments rarely do, and induces us to shift perspectives and see what has always been right beneath our noses but we have failed to notice, often because we wished not to. 189 Philosophers Playing with Thought Philosophers like to use make-believe worlds—“possible worlds”—to help readers wrap their minds around otherwise complex and controversial issues that cannot be examined in a real physical laboratory, especially when doing so might require harming another person. For instance, if we’re pondering what would have to be extracted from someone so as to remove her personal identity, we can’t just start poking around in her prefrontal cortex to see what happens. But we can do this in imagination—in a thought experiment. With thought experiments, a philosopher can construct little stories from which we can easily draw a mental picture to aid in understanding. We imagine brain transplants to tackle identity dilemmas, or chasing a beam of light to unravel the puzzles of special relativity, or, as Louis muses in Shameless, we can visualize how World War II could have been avoided if Louis had a time machine to go back and rape Hitler. One of the most influential of all philosophical thought experiments comes from Plato who gets us to envision what it would be like to confuse shadows for reality and how we might even threaten to kill those who dare to point out our flawed worldview. We don’t mistake Plato’s famous “Allegory of the Cave” for a true historical account, but when we picture prisoners chained to a cave wall whose entire world consists of the shadows of puppets cast upon the back wall by the light of a fire, we learn something that might be true about human minds in the real world. Two connected insights from this story are also found in Louis’s comedy: the awareness of our deep-seated tendency to hold onto our feelings of certainty, and our willingness to remain closed to alternative accounts of the world and ourselves that disturb that complacency. When one of the escaped prisoners returns to the darkened cave after being illuminated by the genuine light of the sun, Plato proposes that the others would violently oppose him just for suggesting a new way of seeing, contrary to their habituated outlook. Reading this thought experiment, we have no illusions about who is closer to the truth within the story. But Plato’s literary description invites us to consider how the fictional characters are similar to us (Republic, line 515a). We might call this a Socratic form of “education” in which he “draws out,” educes, frames of reference already within his readers. Plato is stoking our imaginations triggering the appropriate emotions and our own ideas. As Ernst Mach, the philosopher of science who popularized the phrase “thought experiment” puts it; these ideas “are more easily and readily at our disposal than physical facts. We experiment with thought, so to say, at little expense.” We see the world and ourselves through frames or expectations that have formed over time through experience. These lenses are also constructed through 190 cultural stereotypes that can contaminate our perception of other people, frequently without our conscious awareness. Since these frames can be implicit, we need some means of drawing our attention to them. Philosopher Tamar Gendler argues that thought experiments elicit “a reconfiguration of internal conceptual space.” The experiment in thought extracts what we already (should) know about a question. It allows us to compare our assumptions that were not initially formed through argument, with specific details in an imaginative scenario. Gendler is mostly concerned with scientific thought experiments, but a similar case can be made for ethical or social observations of the sort Louis addresses in his performances and TV shows. In one example, Gendler equates the Biblical parable of King David with a successful thought experiment. This is the tale of the King of Israel who takes advantage of and impregnates the beautiful woman Bathsheba and has her husband killed. David comes to see his actions for what they are when he gets swept up in a fictional story about the unjust actions of the central figure. The moment of conversion is when it clicks for David that the imaginative scenario mirrors his own, and he cannot avoid the conclusion that he is guilty. He finally “gets” the “punch line” but by way of an indirect, imaginative construction. David is encouraged to recall his own ideal principles and apply them to a fictional case. But the moment he does this, it strikes him that he is violating his own imperatives in the real world. This facilitates an attitude change in David in a way straightforward argument likely would not have. Gendler claims that this example shows how to overcome the closed- mindedness common to hubris or pride “by framing the story so that David is not in a position to exhibit first-person bias with respect to what turns out to be his own actions. The story he has been told is fully effective; it reshapes his cognitive frame, and brings him to view his own previous actions in its light.” The focus here is on the reshaping of frames of reference and the openness to being persuaded through imaginative creations. This requires the inclination to shift perspectives even if doing so might otherwise be unpleasant, as is usually the case when an inconsistency has been spotted between your professed values and your behavior. But the thought experiment brings readers into the story which, as Gendler claims, makes them (willing) contributors in the “constructive participation . of the experiment-in-thought.” When we get the point of a thought experiment there is often a flash of recognition or feeling of “Aha, I get it.” This is the “Huh!” or “That’s funny” response that is often the beginning of genuine philosophical thinking. What distinguishes comedians like Louis is his expertise in pushing the “Huh!” and “Aha!” mental states of understanding common in thought experiments, with the emotional, motivating feelings of mirthful “Ha-ha’s” in humorous laughter. 191 Comedians Playing with Thought Some philosophers, such as John Morreall and David Gooding, have commented on the connection between thought experiments and jokes. Gooding points out that “thought experiments have much in common with jokes . There is a punch-line requiring an insight which changes our understanding of the story. In both cases we see the point without its being articulated as an argument.” These elements are found in Louis’s humor, most of which could be backed up by direct argument, but this is not necessary when he presents it in a way that tunes us into something that is just obvious to us now, after our frames of reference have been adjusted. Louis explores many situations where our ideals conflict with other dogmas that we tenaciously hold onto because they validate our nation or us, like the slogans “My country right or wrong” or “The US is the single greatest and best country God has given man on the face of the planet,” or being constantly told “You are amazing” (Live at the Comedy Store). Most of us believe that there are no morally relevant differences between men and women, or between whites and blacks, or that the ideals of the US should generate a genuine meritocracy in which the individual is solely responsible for all of her successes and failures.