Problems and solutions
It comes down whether you believe the human brain is something more than a deterministic machine with certain probabilities, or if it’s not. If it is deterministic, then these “fuzzy problems” with no real solutions do not exist, and instead we just lack the knowledge and computer power currently to solve them.
I like to think that we are deterministic and no more “special” than any other living organism.
Take for example Go. Nobody would argue Go is something more than a game with rules, that it actually has some sort of “sentience” that is above and beyond the rules it has. But computers can’t figure Go out, they suck at it, like they suck at writing poetry or suck at running. It’s a complex system, too complex for them to master…currently.
I think the human brain is just a powerful computer with good heuristics and learning algorithms. Making any other argument is, in my opinion, just a argument for human exceptionalism, usually inspired by the idea that it would suck if all these emotions we felt meant nothing, and if we aren’t really special.
However, I don’t think we need our problems to be unsolvable for life to be interesting. We will always have more problems, that are harder to solve, honestly it’s exceedingly unlikely that we’ll ever have AI or fully understand the human brain, and if we do it will not be in 50 years, or 100, but tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years.
Anyways I don’t know where I’m going with this. But I dislike the idea that all modern intellectuals subscribe to human exceptionalism. It’s wrong and it annoys me.
This is (a slightly sanitized version of) the problem I spent an hour this morning solving:
I will not bore anyone with the proof I came up with.
This stuff, and other stuff like it, takes up eight hours of five days of each week of my life right now. The money I receive in exchange for occupying my eight hours of five days each week with this stuff I need in order to feed, house, and otherwise sustain myself. It is my job, this stuff, and there are very good self-interestish reasons for my doing it. But there are other jobs, and there are certainly other non-job things that I could spend eight hours of five days each week doing. Could it not also be in my self-interest to be doing these things? Clearly this is a multivariable optimization—in making a decision I need to consider things like money, location, stress, comportment with long-term aims, etc etc ad-almost-infinitum—but is it only that, an optimization problem? Is it the kind of problem that would easily admit resolution by cold calculation, assuming of course I could reasonably quantify all of these factors, or is it something just slightly more?
Atul Gawande, doing his best Malcolm Gladwell impression, proposes the following dichotomy in last week’s New Yorker:
There are, in human affairs, two kinds of problems: those which are amenable to a technical solution and those which are not.
This idea has tremendous intuitive appeal, both inside the health-care reform arena in which Dr. Gawande deploys it and outside of it. We even prefer to think about people in this way, as partitioned between those with minds for technical solutions and those with minds for finessed solutions, left-brain and right-brain, techie and fuzzy. But discovering precisely where the line is drawn—where the methods of one kind of problem cease being applicable to the other—is a tense business, one that bears thinking more seriously about than the dualism’s simplicity on first glance suggests.
Dr. Gawande again:
Problems of the second kind, by contrast, are never solved, exactly; they are managed.
It is foremost among the grand promises of economic science that technical solutions to human problems litter the world, sometimes in unsuspecting places. Everyone can enjoy a higher standard of living if capital is allocated correctly. Proper incentives can deter unsavory behavior. Tricksy financial products can effectively eliminate risk essentially because the properties of injective matrices guarantee it.
But this promise is also a massive fiction, and an admitted one, because duh modeling in the social sciences involves abstractions and simplifications and distance placed from reality. And of course even high-level social science does not begin to operate on the level of complexity of life’s most basic gnawing problems: how do I pick a mate, how do I be a good friend, how do I communicate with other people. These are problems that get managed, not solved, and even at places like my workplace, where technical solutions course through veins, the weird nagging back-of-the-mouth flavor that nontechnical stuff can leave is palpable, even in abstentia. Everybody has got to come home from work sometime, and sooner or later everybody finds himself quiet and alone, maybe in bed or maybe in the shower or maybe planted before the television, and needing to sort out the tensions and contradictions in their person and in their relationships with other human beings.
None of this I claim as novel or tremendously insightful. But the strange balance between technical and non-technical problems is one I quite deliberately straddle every day, and after a while one gets to blurring or forgetting entirely the lines that mark them. Life-type questions start to look like Nash games, and mountains of computer code start to take on the pulsing, urgent quality of real life. The richness of existence is owed in huge part to the humbling, boggling unknowables that populate our personal lives, but also what a relief that not everything is this way, that there are still problems that need only a smart algorithm or a clever bit of math to be usefully untangled.
