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Jerks, Zombie Robots, and Other Philosophical Misadventures Jerks, Zombie Robots, and Other Philosophical Misadventures Eric Schwitzgebel Schwitzgebel December 5, 2018 Jerks & Zombies, p. 1 in memory of my father, psychologist, inventor, parent, philosopher, and giver of strange objects Schwitzgebel December 5, 2018 Jerks & Zombies, p. 2 Preface I enjoy writing short philosophical reflections for broad audiences. Evidently, I enjoy this a lot: Since 2006, I’ve written over a thousand such pieces, mostly published on my blog The Splintered Mind, but also in the Los Angeles Times, Aeon Magazine, and elsewhere. This book contains fifty-eight of my favorites, revised and updated. The topics range widely, as I’ve tried to capture in the title of the book. I discuss moral psychology (“jerks”), speculative philosophy of consciousness (“zombie robots”), the risks of controlling your emotions technologically, the ethics of the game of dreidel, multiverse theory, the apparent foolishness of Immanuel Kant, and much else. There is no unifying topic. Maybe, however, there is a unifying theme. The human intellect has a ragged edge, where it begins to turn against itself, casting doubt on itself or finding itself lost among seemingly improbable conclusions. We can reach this ragged edge quickly. Sometimes, all it takes to remind us of our limits is an eight-hundred-word blog post. Playing at this ragged edge, where I no longer know quite what to think or how to think about it, is my idea of fun. Given the human propensity for rationalization and self-deception, when I disapprove of others, how do I know that I’m not the one who is being a jerk? Given that all our intuitive, philosophical, and scientific knowledge of the mind has been built on a narrow range of cases, how much confidence can we have in our conclusions about strange new possibilities that are likely to open up in the near future of Artificial Intelligence? Speculative cosmology at once poses the (literally) biggest questions that we can ask about the universe while opening up possibilities that undermine our confidence in our ability to answer those same questions. The history of philosophy is humbling when we see how badly wrong previous thinkers have been, despite their intellectual skills and confidence. Schwitzgebel December 5, 2018 Jerks & Zombies, p. 3 Not all of my posts fit this theme. It’s also fun to use the once-forbidden word “fuck” over and over again in a chapter about profanity. And I wanted to share some reminiscences about how my father saw the world – especially since in some ways I prefer his optimistic and proactive vision to my own less hopeful skepticism. Other of my blog posts I just liked or wanted to share for other reasons. A few are short fictions. It would be an unusual reader who liked every chapter. I hope you’ll skip anything you find boring. The chapters are all free-standing. Please don’t just start reading on page one and then try to slog along through everything sequentially out of some misplaced sense of duty! Trust your sense of fun (Chapter 47). Read only the chapters that appeal to you, in any order you like. Riverside, California, Earth (I hope) October 25, 2018 Schwitzgebel December 5, 2018 Jerks & Zombies, p. 4 Part One: Jerks and Excuses 1. A Theory of Jerks 2. Forgetting as an Unwitting Confession of Your Values 3. The Happy Coincidence Defense and The-Most-You-Can-Do Sweet Spot 4. Cheeseburger Ethics (or How Often Do Ethicists Call Their Mothers?) 5. On Not Seeking Pleasure Much 6. How Much Should You Care about How You Feel in Your Dreams? 7. Imagining Yourself in Another’s Shoes vs. Extending Your Love 8. Is It Perfectly Fine to Aim for Moral Mediocrity? 9. A Theory of Hypocrisy 10. On Not Distinguishing Too Finely Among Your Motivations 11. The Mush of Normativity 12. A Moral Dunning-Kruger Effect? 13. The Moral Compass and the Liberal Ideal in Moral Education Part Two: Cute AI and Zombie Robots 14. Should Your Driverless Car Kill You So Others May Live? 15. Cute AI and the ASIMO Problem 16. My Daughter’s Rented Eyes 17. Someday, Your Employer Will Technologically Control Your Moods 18. Cheerfully Suicidal AI Slaves 19. We Would Have Greater Moral Obligations to Conscious Robots Than to Otherwise Similar Humans 20. How Robots and Monsters Might Destroy Human Moral Systems 21. Our Possible Imminent Divinity 22. Skepticism, Godzilla, and the Artificial Computerized Many-Branching You 23. How to Accidentally Become a Zombie Robot Part Three: Regrets and Birthday Cake 24. Dreidel: A Seemingly Foolish Game That Contains the Moral World in Miniature 25. Does It Matter If the Passover Story Is Literally True? 26. Memories of My Father 27. Flying Free of the Deathbed, with Technological Help 28. Thoughts on Conjugal Love 29. Knowing What You Love Schwitzgebel December 5, 2018 Jerks & Zombies, p. 5 30. The Epistemic Status of Deathbed Regrets 31. Competing Perspectives on One’s Final, Dying Thought 32. Profanity Inflation, Profanity Migration, and the Paradox of Prohibition (or I Love You, “Fuck”) 33. The Legend of the Leaning Behaviorist 34. What Happens to Democracy When the Experts Can’t Be Both Factual and Balanced? 35. On the Morality of Hypotenuse Walking 36. Birthday Cake and a Chapel Part Four: Cosmic Freaks 37. Possible Psychology of a Matrioshka Brain 38. A Two-Seater Homunculus 39. Is the United States Literally Conscious? 40. Might You Be a Cosmic Freak? 41. Choosing to Be That Fellow Back Then: Voluntarism about Personal Identity 42. How Everything You Do Might Have Huge Cosmic Significance 43. Penelope’s Guide to Defeating Time, Space, and Causation 44. Goldfish-Pool Immortality 45. Are Garden Snails Conscious? Yes, No, or *Gong* Part Five: Kant vs. the Philosopher of Hair 46. Truth, Dare, and Wonder 47. Trusting Your Sense of Fun 48. What’s in People’s Stream of Experience During Philosophy Talks? 49. Why Metaphysics Is Always Bizarre 50. The Philosopher of Hair 51. Obfuscatory Philosophy as Intellectual Authoritarianism and Cowardice 52. Kant on Killing Bastards, Masturbation, Organ Donation, Homosexuality, Tyrants, Wives, and Servants 53. Nazi Philosophers, World War I, and the Grand Wisdom Hypothesis 54. Against Charity in the History of Philosophy 55. Invisible Revisions 56. On Being Good at Seeming Smart 57. Blogging and Philosophical Cognition 58. Will Future Generations Find Us Morally Loathsome? Schwitzgebel December 5, 2018 Jerks & Zombies, p. 6 Schwitzgebel December 5, 2018 Jerks & Zombies, p. 7 Part One: Jerks and Excuses Schwitzgebel December 5, 2018 Jerks & Zombies, p. 8 1. A Theory of Jerks Picture the world through the eyes of the jerk. The line of people in the post office is a mass of unimportant fools; it’s a felt injustice that you must wait while they bumble with their requests. The flight attendant is not a potentially interesting person with her own cares and struggles but instead the most available face of a corporation that stupidly insists you stow your laptop. Custodians and secretaries are lazy complainers who rightly get the scut work. The person who disagrees with you at the staff meeting is an idiot to be shot down. Entering a subway is an exercise in nudging past the dumb schmoes. We need a theory of jerks. We need such a theory because, first, it can help us achieve a calm, clinical understanding when confronting such a creature in the wild. Imagine the nature-documentary voice-over: “Here we see the jerk in his natural environment. Notice how he subtly adjusts his dominance display to the Italian-restaurant situation….” And second – well, I don’t want to say what the second reason is quite yet. As it happens, I do have such a theory. But before we get into it, I should clarify some terminology. The word “jerk” can refer to two different types of person. The older use of “jerk” designates a chump or ignorant fool, though not a morally odious one. When Weird Al Yankovic sang, in 2006, “I sued Fruit of the Loom ’cause when I wear their tightie-whities on my head I look like a jerk” or when, in 1959, Willard Temple wrote in the Los Angeles Times “He could have married the campus queen…. Instead the poor jerk fell for a snub- nosed, skinny little broad”, it’s clear it’s the chump they have in mind.1 The jerk-as-fool usage seems to have begun among traveling performers as a derisive reference to the unsophisticated people of a “jerkwater town”, that is, a town not rating a full- scale train station, requiring the boilerman to pull on a chain to water his engine. The term expresses the traveling troupe’s disdain.2 Over time, however, “jerk” shifted from being primarily a class-based insult to its second, now dominant, sense as a moral condemnation. Schwitzgebel December 5, 2018 Jerks & Zombies, p. 9 Such linguistic drift from class-based contempt to moral deprecation is a common pattern across languages, as observed by Friedrich Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality.3 (In English, consider “rude”, “villain”, and “ignoble”.) It is the immoral jerk who concerns me here. Why, you might be wondering, should a philosopher make it his business to analyze colloquial terms of abuse? Doesn’t the Urban Dictionary cover that kind of thing quite adequately? Shouldn’t I confine myself to truth, or beauty, or knowledge, or why there is something rather than nothing? I am, in fact, interested in all those topics. And yet I see a folk wisdom in the term “jerk” that points toward something morally important.
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