Everything is a Goat!

Philosophy

Everything is aGoat Bill Capra rebutts a cosmological argument against goatism. Last goat standing P hilosophers can be perverse. Sometimes intuitive, common-sense ideas are challenged by clever and apparently compelling arguments that lead to extraordinarily counterintuitive conclusions. Consider the common-sense principle that everything is a goat, otherwise known as goatism. This is a simple, intuitive claim about the world, part of our unreflective outlook – something we take for granted but don't ordinarily examine. Yet surprisingly, some philosophers have thought an argument can be mounted against this common-sense idea. Indeed the argument purports to show not just that not everything is a goat, but that it could not be that everything is a goat. This argument begins from a compelling principle: Goats eat everything. This principle seems correct. Some animals will eat this and not that, but not goats. They are omnivorous. The principle that 'goats eat everything' says that they actually do this, not just that they can or might do this. Everything can and everything does go down a goat's throat. Everything is eaten by a goat. Goats are not just omnivorous, but omnivoracious. Yet reflecting on this omnivoraciousness opens up the possibility of an argument. The argument in question is a cosmological argument against goatism. The argument runs as follows: Premise 1: Goats eat everything. Premise 2: Eating is asymmetric. That is, if A eats B, then B does not eat A. Therefore: Conclusion: There is at least one non-goat. If goats eat everything, this applies to goats too, since they are things. Therefore all goats must be eaten by goats. But goats that do the eating of goats must in turn be eaten by goats. The problem is not with the top of the food chain, but the bottom. Surely there must be something which is eaten which is not an eater. So there must be something that is eaten by a goat which is not itself a goat. I shall argue that although this argument is superficially plausible, it is ultimately spurious. Of course, many will already be suspicious of the argument because its conclusion is so deeply counterintuitive. But let us charitably examine the argument for its intrinsic plausibility, recognizing that others may not share our views of what is intuitively implausible. Clearly premise 1 is unassailable. It is premise 2 – that the eating relation is asymmetric – which is the disputable premise. Let us call premise 2 the Eating Asymmetry Thesis ('EAT'). EAT seems to follow from an analysis of the eating relation. If A eats B, then at the conclusion of the eating process B ceases to exist while A remains. Hence the common maxim that it is better to eat than to be eaten. Let us distinguish two versions of EAT – 'diachronic' and 'synchronic'. Diachronic EAT says this: If A eats B at one time, then it cannot be the case that B eats A later on. This seems questionable. Surely Jonah might have decided that he would eat his way out of the whale after having being swallowed by it. (Of course, given goatism, Jonah and whale would have been a prophetic and an aquatic goat, respectively.) It might be said that if Jonah had been eaten properly, which includes some form of digestion, he could not have been intact enough to eat his way out of the whale. But is it a necessary truth that what has been eaten no longer exists? If not, then Jonah might yet persist to some degree, and in a form in which he could eat the whale back, as it were. However, suppose for the sake of argument that it is indeed a necessary truth that what has been eaten no longer exists. If eating a thing destroys it, is that clearly the end of goatism? Surely not. For nothing has been said concerning the origin of goats. So long as new goats come into existence to eat whatever eats a goat, there is no difficulty for goatism. There can be an infinite (food-) chain of goats eating goats eating goats. Why should we think that there need be some primal or final nongoat? So let us ignore the diachronic version of EAT, since antigoatism cannot be established with it. January/February 2009 ● Philosophy Now 31 The anti-goatist might now retreat to the doctrine of Synchronic EAT: If A eats B, then at that time, it cannot be the case that B eats A. But on reflection this also seems to not be the case. One can easily imagine two friendly goat cannibals sitting down to lunch happily munching each other at the same time. Eventually there will not be much left apart from two mouths, two esophaguses, two stomachs, and two digestive tracts. It might appear that there is a metaphysical or perhaps a logical difficulty with continuing eating much (or lunch) beyond this point. This would be like the difficulty of eating oneself beyond a certain point. Could one eat oneself so that nothing remains? Certainly one can carry on eating oneself forever, so long as one takes smaller and smaller bites. There is a potential infinity of bites of oneself (or of a fellow cannibal) that one can take. But – the anti-goatist will ask – can one complete the task, and have as it were a completely clean plate (or two completely clean plates)? Surely it is intuitively plausible that one cannot completely eat oneself, and that our two friendly cannibals cannot completely eat each other. Intuition says that they can eat quite a lot of each other, they can even carry on eating each other for ever; but it is intuitive that they can never finish every last morsel, any more than one can eat every last morsel of oneself. If so, the doctrine of goatism is finished, for then goats do not and cannot eat everything, including themselves. However, we should be wary of the role modal intuition is playing is this argument. Severed from empirical science, the question of whether goats can eat themselves is merely an abstruse, arcane question, of little but academic interest – reminding one of the preposterous discussion in bygone eras of how many angels can fit on a pinhead.1 Whatever 'intuition' might or might not have to say, it is simply part of the goatist outlook that one can completely eat oneself, and that friendly goat cannibals can finish eating lunch. Once one has embraced goatism, any intuitions rooted in a previous non-goatist paradigm can be rejected as unreliable. Such intuitions should go the way of equally dubious intuitions concerning simultaneity, once one has embraced relativistic space-time. One cannot simply assert the existence of a possibility or an impossibility, when what possibilities or impossibilities obtain lie downstream from the correct metaphysics. So the intuition that it is impossible for two friendly goat cannibals to complete lunch cannot be used in support of synchronic EAT. Moreover, it's not just that the anti-goatist appeal to intuition is dialectically empty, but also that science itself provides positive support for the possibility of self-eating goats. Some might argue that the existence of a being that consumed itself would conflict with physical conservation laws because mass/energy would not be conserved in the space-time locality where the self-eating occurs. After lunch there would be missing mass and energy. But this takes a narrow view. It is widely thought that there is gradually increasing entropy in the universe. Postulating the existence of self-eating goats would help explain that fact. Furthermore, there is a more direct scientific confirmation, from the existence of black holes. Contemporary physics suggests that black holes are self-eating goats – for the way energy implodes in a black hole is what one would predict as a self-eating goat nears the end of its lunch. Most goats, of course, do not eat themselves. Only a few do. Most goats are content to eat other goats. But the goats that do eat themselves are plausibly identified with black holes. Contemporary science confirms goatism. Since we have no good reason to believe either the diachronic or the synchronic versions of EAT, and indeed some reason to reject them, it follows that the cosmological argument against goatism fails by helping itself to what it needed to show. Clearly, goats eat everything; but we have not been given any reason to believe that the eaten cannot eat the eater, or that the eater and the eaten cannot be one and the same. Although the cosmological argument fails, it is not wholly without value, for it does alert us to the metaphysical and gastronomic dependency relations that obtain between the items which comprise the ultimate furniture of the universe. Ours is not a flat world, but a structured and nuanced world. Ours is not a world of metaphysical egalitarianism. Some goats are more equal than others. In particular, it is not the case that all goats that are eaten eat the goats that eat them. Note that this argument does not obviously yield the conclusion that there is one primal goat – the Great Goat – which eats other goats but is not itself eaten by them. The world might consist of an infinite tower of goats standing on the back of goats standing on the back on goats, and so on – each eating the goat on which they stand. That there is a Great Goat would be a further claim. The Great Goat would be a goat no other goat eats, although it eats itself. Whether there is a Great Goat is a deep and important matter, which must await further investigation. But for the present we can be satisfied to have rebutted an apparently attractive argument against the common-sense thesis that everything is a goat. Speaking for myself, I believe in the Great Goat, although I admit candidly that this is a bold conjecture. The idea is that as the universe unfolds through time, goats come into existence and eat other goats, which eat other goats... but there eventually will be just one goat remaining. After almost all the goats have been eaten by goats, there will be one last goat – the Great Goat, which has directly or indirectly eaten all the other goats. This Great Goat then eats itself, and with that the world ends. In current physical theory, the end of everything is known as the Big Crunch, but it might be better called the Big Munch or the Big Lunch. As I say, this is a bold conjecture, for given what we now know, it is possible that the universe will collapse into two cannibal goats who eat other, or even a veritable banquet of mutually-eating cannibal goats. There will be a Last Lunch. For the goatist, the only question is: How many goats will turn up at the Last Lunch for the Big Munch? © BILL CAPRA 2009 Bill Capra ruminates at the CHVR Institute. 1 How comically absurd those scholastic discussions appear from the vantage point of today's more sophisticated rationalistic outlook! We now know that angels and pinheads are one and all goats. Transformed into a goatist metaphysics, this question becomes empirically tractable, instead of merely a matter of abstract word-play governed by no proper methodological rules. This is yet another example of the way an issue that was once part of merely speculative philosophy later becomes part of respectable empirical science. 32 Philosophy Now ● January/February


Review of Arif Ahmed (ed.), Newcomb's Problem

Philosophy

Arif Ahmed (ed.) Classical Philosophical Arguments: Newcomb's Problem Arif Ahmed (ed), Classical Philosophical Arguments: Newcomb's Problem, Cambridge University Press, 2018 Reviewed by Jack Spencer, MIT Realistic Newcomb problems might arise in monetary policy, first-past-the-post elections, and prisoner's dilemmas, but the most familiar Newcomb problem is fantastical. There are two boxes: one opaque, one transparent. The agent has two options: she can take either only the opaque box or both boxes. The transparent box contains $1,000. The opaque box contains either $0 or $1,000,000, depending on a prediction made yesterday by a predictor who is known to be very reliable. If the predictor predicted that the agent would take both boxes, the opaque box contains $0. If the predictor predicted that the agent would take only the opaque box, the opaque box contains $1,000,000. Assuming that the set-up of the case is coherent and possible, we face the initial normative question: What should the agent do? Should the agent one-box or twobox? Robert Nozick, who brought the problem to attention in 1969, noted the attending disagreement: [...] I have put the problem to a number of people, both friends and students in class. To almost everyone it is perfectly clear and obvious what should be done. The difficulty is that these people seem to divide almost evenly on the problem, with people thinking that the opposing half is just being silly. (Nozick 1969: 117) A recent, more rigorous survey finds a similar divide. David Bourget and David Chalmers (2014) included Newcomb's problem in the survey they ran trying to determine what professional philosophers think concerning thirty central philosophical issues, and, 2 among the roughly 55% of respondents who would took a stand on the matter, about 40% were one-boxers and about 60% were two-boxers. The staying power of Newcomb's problem is impressive and due partly to the disagreement it engenders. But the interest of Newcomb's problem goes well beyond the initial normative question, as this volume of ten previously unpublished essays attests, and I think the staying power of Newcomb's problem is due primarily to the interesting light it sheds on other philosophical issues. Newcomb's problem raises questions about the nature and normative significance of time and causation. It raises questions about fairness, freedom, agency, and the nature of opportunity. It raises questions about the methodological interaction between social science and rational choice theory, descriptive and normative decision theory. And it serves as a dialectical fulcrum, since the two leading approaches to rational choice theory-evidentialism and causalism-are standardly taken to recommend one-boxing and two-boxing, respectively. This volume should appeal to a wide audience, not just philosophers, but social scientists, psychologists, and political theorists, too. It should appeal to readers unfamiliar with Newcomb's problem, who can get up to speed quickly by reading the introduction to the volume, written by Arif Ahmed, who also edited the volume. And it also should appeal to readers familiar with Newcomb's problem; for almost all of the essays in the collection move the dialectics they engage with forward. To provide a sense of the volume's contents, let me mention a few of the questions the volume raises and a few of the ways in which the collected essays engage with those questions. One question raised by the volume concerns the possibility of Newcomb problems. José Luis Bermúdez argues that it is impossible for an ideal agent to face a Newcomb problem. The rest of the contributors argue or assume that Newcomb problems are possible, and some of the authors-for example, Robert Grafstein-seem to believe that the world abounds with Newcomb problems and that a proper understanding of Newcomb problems is an essential tool in social science. 3 A second question raised by the volume concerns the granularity of rationality. Most of the contributing authors defend the orthodox view: that rationality applies in the first instance to choices. But some of the contributing authors, including Chrisoula Andreou and Preston Greene, explore the rival view: that rationality applies in the first instance to choice-making dispositions. Andreou's essay explores the connection between Newcomb's problem, Kavka's (1983) toxin puzzle, Quinn's (1990) self-torturer puzzle, and Andreou's (2008) own Newxin puzzle, with an eye toward determining whether it is ever rationally permissible for an agent to choose an option that they know for certain to be the worst option available to them. Greene explores a "success-first" approach, in which normative decision theorists attempt "to discover decision theories ... and determine their efficacy, under certain idealized conditions, in bringing about what is of ultimate value" (p. 117). As Greene points out, if we apply his success-first approach at the level of choice-making dispositions, then we are lead to a decision theory that not only recommends one-boxing in Newcomb's problem but also recommends one-boxing in a variation of Newcomb's problem in which both boxes are transparent. One-boxing in a transparent version of Newcomb's problem is a particularly vivid case in which an agent chooses an option that they know for certain to be the worst option available to them, but one-boxing in the familiar version of Newcomb's problem is arguably another case in which an agent chooses an option that they know for certain to be the worst option available to them. A third cluster of questions raised by the volume concern the nature and normative significance of time and causation. Melissa Fusco's essay argues that both evidentialism and causalism give rise to time bias. Reuben Stern's essay explores the various ways that an agent facing Newcomb's problem might be represented using causal graphs and argues that whether agent's should one-box or two-box depends on how agency in Newcomb's problem should be represented. Robert Stalnaker's essay explores the causal structure of game theory and the light that game theory might shed on unstable problems 4 that are thought to make trouble for causalism. And Huw Price and Yang Liu's essay presents a dilemma for causalism, which turns on the nature of causation. On the first horn of Price and Liu's dilemma is a subjectivist conception of causation. Causalists usually assume that an agent facing Newcomb's problem has no causal control over how much money is contained in the opaque box. But if a subjectivist conception of causation is true, then an agent facing Newcomb's problem can retro-cause there to be $1,000,000 in the opaque box by one-boxing, and evidentialism and causalism then both recommend one-boxing. On the other horn of Price and Liu's dilemma is an objectivist conception of causation, which ensures that the agent has no causal control over how much money is contained in the opaque box. But, according to Price and Liu, an objectivist conception of causalism makes it "mysterious why causality should be the arbiter of rational choice, in a way that [causalism] proposes" (p. 161). If an objectivist conception of causation is true, then two-boxing causally dominates one-boxing: twoboxing is better than one-boxing, given the truth of any hypothesis about how the world beyond the agent's causal control is. But, according to Price and Liu, if an objectivist conception of causality is true, it's mysterious why there should be any special connection between causal domination and rational choice. One possible line of response to Price and Liu, drawing on Spencer and Wells (2019), takes the connection between rationality and causation to be indirect. Causalists might first connect rationality to actual value, taking rationality to consist in choosing so as to maximize one's subjective expectation of actual value. Causalists then could connect actual value to causation, arguing that the actual value of an option is (say) the value that would be realized if the agent were to choose the option. This indirect connection between rationality and causation makes the connection between causal domination and rationality unmysterious. If a causal conception of actual value is true, then from the fact that two-boxing causally dominates one-boxing an agent can infer that the actual value of two-boxing exceeds the actual value of one-boxing. And if the agent knows that the actual value of two-boxing exceeds the actual value of one-boxing, then it 5 follows trivially that the agent's expectation of the actual value of two-boxing exceeds the agent's expectation of the actual value of one-boxing. Whether a causal conception of actual value is defensible remains to be seen. But, interestingly, the claim that rationality consists in choosing so as to maximize one's subjective expectation of actual value can be shown to be inconsistent with evidentialism, even without assuming a causal conception of actual value. (See Lewis (1988; 1996).) A fifth question raised by the volume concerns "why ain'cha rich?" arguments. Andreou and Greene both address "why ain'cha rich?" arguments indirectly, by exploring the connection between success and rationality. Arif Ahmed and James Joyce both address "why ain'cha rich?" arguments directly. Ahmed's essay is concerned with the "why ain'cha rich?" argument for oneboxing and the opportunity-based criticism of it. One-boxers almost always get $1,000,000 upon facing Newcomb's problem; two-boxers almost always get $1,000; and many one-boxers infer from these two facts that an agent facing Newcomb's problem should one-box. Two-boxers, like Wells (2019), respond to this argument by controlling for opportunities. Following Ahmed, let's say that "an agent has a C-opportunity to get a prize X at a time t if either (a) the agent does get X because of something that she does at t or (b) if the agent had chosen to act in some other way at t the agent would have got, or would have had a non-negligible chance of getting, X" (p. 64). As two-boxers point out, if we sort agents facing Newcomb's problem into equivalence classes by their Copportunities, then we can turn the tables and run a "why ain'cha rich?" argument for two-boxing; for two-boxers are always $1,000 richer than one-boxers who had the same C-opportunities. It's here that Ahmed's essay picks up the dialectic. Ahmed grants that we should control for opportunities when running a "why ain'cha rich?" argument, but he argues that the sort of opportunities that we should control for are not C-opportunities, but rather E-opportunities, where "a proposition represents an E-opportunity for a deliberating agent if her confidence in its truth is not independent of her current intention" (p. 65-6). If we sort agents facing Newcomb's problem into equivalence classes by their E6 opportunities (and assume that the predictor is reliable but not perfect), then all of the agents belong to the same equivalence class, and one-boxers are again richer on average. I'm not convinced that equality of E-opportunities entails equality of opportunities. After all, we can improve someone's E-opportunities just by deluding them. Even if it's impossible for poor people in America to become rich, we can give them the E-opportunity of becoming rich just by convincing them that they will become rich if they work hard. Similarly, it seems clear to me that agents who choose between $1,000,000 and $1,001,000 have better opportunities than do agents who choose between $1,000 and $0, even if the agents have the same E-opportunities. But what it takes for two agents to have equal opportunities is a question that matters not just in rational choice theory, but also in social and political philosophy, so I hope to see the issues discussed in Ahmed's essay discussed more going forward. Joyce's essay defends two main claims: (i) that rationality requires that decisionmaking agents reach a certain kind of psychological equilibrium, and (ii) that causalism never errs in the recommendations it gives to agents who have reached the relevant sort of psychological equilibrium. One challenge to causalism, which is equally a challenge to Joyce's causalism, are unstable problems, like Egan's (2007) Psychopath Button, Ahmed's (2014) Dicing with Death, and the following modification of an example from Spencer and Wells (2019): Frustrating Boxes. There is an envelope and two opaque boxes, A and B. The agent has three options: she can take box A, box B, or the envelope. The envelope contains $40. The two boxes together contains $100. How the money is distributed between the two boxes depends on a prediction made yesterday by a reliable predictor. If the predictor predicted that the agent would take A, then box B contains $100. If the predictor predicted that the agent would take box B, then box A contains $100. If the predictor predicted that the agent would take the envelope, then the predictor flipped a fair coin and placed $100 in box A if the coin landed 7 heads and placed $100 in box B if the coin landed tails. The agent knows all of this. According to causalism, if an agent facing Frustrating Boxes has reached psychological equilibrium, in Joyce's sense, and is thus 50% confident that box A contains $100 and 50% confident that box B contains $100, then the only rationally impermissible option is taking the envelope: taking box A and taking box B are both rationally permissible. But there is a strong intuition that this prediction is exactly backward: that the only rationally permissible option for such an agent is taking the envelope. And we can undergird the take-the-envelope intuition with a "why ain'cha rich?" argument. Envelope-takers always get $40 upon facing Frustrating Boxes. A-takers almost always get $0. B-takers almost always get $0. And, unlike in Newcomb's problem, in which agents have equal Eopportunities but unequal C-opportunities, envelope-takers, A-takers, and B-takers have equal E-opportunities and equal C-opportunities. So, if success, holding fixed Eopportunities and C-opportunities, is a guide to rationality, then, contra causalism, the only rationally permissible option in Frustrating Boxes is taking the envelope. Joyce is well-aware of the anti-causalist intuitions that unstable problems elicit and the "why ain'cha rich?" arguments that can be used to undergird those intuitions, and his essay attempts to develop the resources needed to resist them. Trying to determine when a "why ain'cha rich?" argument is sound and whether any sound "why ain'cha rich?" argument can be given for the anti-causalist intuitions elicited by unstable problems will, I suspect, continue to be of topic of interest going forward. Space prevents me from broaching the many other interesting and important questions that the volume raises. But I hope that this review conveys how and rich and stimulating the volume is. References Arif Ahmed. 2014. "Dicing with Death." Analysis 74: 587-94. Chrisoula Andreou. 2008. "The Newxin Puzzle." Philosophical Studies 139: 415-22. 8 David Bourget and David J. Chalmers. 2014. "What Do Philosophers Believe?" Philosophical Studies 170: 465-500. Andy Egan. 2007. "Some Counterexamples to Causal Decision Theory." Philosophical Review 116: 94-114. Gregory S. Kavka. 1983. "The Toxin Puzzle." Analysis 43: 33-36. David Lewis. 1988 "Desire as Belief." Mind: 323-32. ------. 1996. "Desire as Belief II." Mind 105: 303-13. Robert Nozick. 1969. "Newcomb's Problem and Two Principles of Choice." In N. Rescher (ed.), Essays in Honor of Carl. G. Hempel, 114-46. Reidel. William Quinn. 1990. "The Puzzle of the Self-Torturer." Philosophical Studies 59: 7990. Jack Spencer and Ian Wells. 2019. "Why Take Both Boxes?" Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 99: 27-48. Ian Wells. 2019. "Equal Opportunity and Newcomb's Problem." Mind 128: 429-57.