Case: Schematic of a Win-Win

I returned to my car a little after midnight, and found the parking lot uncommonly quiet. The only sound came from an empty styrofoam cup rolling gently back and forth, making echoes from the walls. And I thought of Selfridge's "Pandaemonium"[1] and said to myself, there is the one and only other living thing here.

I see no difficulty in attributing thought or life, even if extremely dim and primitive forms, to odd things. This is something that wise people have done across cultures for generations, and it has lead people to extremely stable and harmonious ways of living. That this view should arise in the elaboration of modern empiricism, materialism, and late technoscience only confirms to me its truth.

And I wondered to myself what it must be like to have a mind consisting of nothing but echoes stray breezes.

As I walked to the car, I noticed there was also dark green katydid sitting alone on the ground. It was chirping to the empty lot. It must have been lead by the bright lights to this barren space, and now was singing to a hopeless, lifeless absence. This struck me as incredibly sad.

I thought about taking the katydid home, to release into my yard, but I had no container to put it in. Transporting a living thing to a better place only seems like a sound act of charity if you can assure its safe passage on the way. At the far end of the lot, the cup began to roll back and forth, and I thought, ah, of course, life seeks out life.

So I put the solitary katydid into the solitary styrofoam cup, and took them both home. The katydid is now singing to other katydids, and the trash is no longer on the ground. Episodes like this one, however, make me think that there should really be no such thing as "trash."

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INPUTS: lost insect, piece of trash

OUTPUTS: transportation of insect to a friendlier home

What kind of procedure produces outputs like this from inputs like that?

Note the structure of the phenomenon. The problem presents as a division: the insect is out of its normal place, the cup has been left where it should not be. The solution appears as a unification (with intentional, but not exclusive reference to "unification" in the sense that a logic engine "unifies" terms): the cup and the insect become mutual parts of a process that puts things back where they belong.

What other sorts of problems present as division, and are solved by unification?

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The skeptic might protest that not only was this a pointless or self-indulgent diversion, but that there is no guarantee that it would not ultimately result in a "net-evil" in utilitarian terms. That is, what if transporting the insect robs a starving bird or bat of a meal, or what if it leads to a plague, or what if the katydid turns out to be the orthopteran equivalent of Adolf Hitler, ad infinitum. (I would also add "ad absurdum".) Utilitarian arguments, such as this one, suffer from a certain conceptual lack: they recognize that causes may have far-removed and unexpected effects, but then assume that these effects do not themselves become causes, and thus can be evaluated as magnitudes of goodness or badness that can be used to compare courses of action. Such comparisons, however, are silly if they are arrived at by reasoning that uses "unexpected consequence" as a factor since (1) there are always unexpected consequences and (2) the same process that produces these consequences produces effects that evaluation at a single point in time cannot take into account.

We should recognize that every action has far-reaching and essentially unforeseeable consequences. This does not trivialize decision-making, but it does exclude the existence of "perfect plans" or "final solutions", both of which, as we have all seen, fail miserably at implementation time.

It is my firm conviction that if the Universe has anything like a logic to it, this logic is complete, in the technical sense of "complete", and whatever actions are good and right are exactly the rules of proof. Thus is how we live throughout that matters, and not some result that is tabulated, judged, or measured after a certain interval of time has passed. An action, then, is good simply if it is done in a good way. When we are confident that we have used the right means, we don't worry about whether our action has strange or startling, or even disturbing consequences any more than we would reject a strange or startling or disturbing theorem with a water-tight proof.

Goodness is truth, and truth is goodness, and goodness is as goodness does.

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[1] Selfridge, Oliver G. "Pandaemonium: a paradigm for learning". Mechanization of Thought Processes: Proceedings of a Symposium Held at the National Physical Laboratory, 1958, London: HMSO, pp 513-526.