Psychologists let us know that the choice between an alternative which is perceived as abysmally horrible and one which is perceived as attractive, even desirable, is usually not difficult to make. When faced, for example, to allude to a well known story, of a choice between a tiger and a lady, and the choice is yours, and not that of an insanely jealous queen, you would probably choose the lady, if healthy, nonsuicidal, gifted with normal vision, and so on, though, to be sure, it might depend on the lady and perhaps, in unusual cases, on the tiger. For example the choice between, say, Clytemnestra or Medea, and an affectionate, well-fed tiger, one genetically engineered to thrive on breakfast cereal, might be less clear.
Now we come, in our perusal of the literature, to the choices between goods and between bads.
Here the researchers tell us that it is easier to choose between goods than to choose between bads. As one oscillates between goods, eventually, rather sooner than later, the closer one comes to A the better it is likely to look, and then one tends to slide toward it, rather than toward a similarly desirable B. In many situations the important thing is to make a decision, rather than not make a decision, even if you are not sure that the decision is the absolutely best decision possible. Often the routes to the same destination are not that different, but if you want to get there before dark, you had better take one of them. The Japanese supposedly have a theory of postponing decisions as long as possible while accumulating more and more data, or whatever, until the better decision of its own weight, so to speak, topples into your lap. This is not a bad way of going about things but if you want to get there before dark, you may not have time for it. People tend to admire, and follow, people who make decisions. The trick is to make a decision as if you knew what you were doing. People like that and as things are still mysterious to them, as they probably still are to you, too, actually, they will give you credit for leadership, probably correctly. Also, you can usually live with any decision, and a decision made is a decision likely to be subconsciously commended. Once made it usually seems right. Also, if it is a good decision, even if not the best decision, it should look better and better to you as you work it out.
Now the hardest decision, according to the studies, is the decision between two bads, between, say, bad A and bad B, between, say, Lucrezia Borgia or Charlotte Corday. Would you prefer to be poisoned or stabbed in the bathtub? The closer you approach one alternative the worse it looks, and this impels you toward the other which, predictably, the more closely approached, looks worse and worse, and so on. As a result many will prefer to choose neither alternative. If one is obliged to choose one or the other, of course, the dilemma grows desperate. Should one satisfy the distribution requirement by hazarding mathematical logic or mathematical mathematics?
At this point one might consider recourse to a random-selection device, say, a fair coin, an item frequently encountered in probability theory but scarce in most actual economies. Dice or cards will do, too, but not much better. Certain shamans use charred reindeer bones to direct hunters. That seems to work pretty well. It keeps the reindeer guessing. But sometimes the bones are unreliable. But then, so, too, sometimes are the coins, the dice, the cards.
This brings us to Buridan’s ass.
For those of you who might be unfamiliar with medieval animal husbandry Buridan’s ass was placed equidistant between two bales of hay, and accordingly starved to death. This is fictional of course, for an undergraduate animal-rights activist at the University of Paris stealthily made his way into the barn and nudged one of the bales a bit closer to the imperiled beast.
The point that Buridan, who was a professor, of course, for professors sometimes concern themselves with such things, was making had less to do with animal abuse than free will. A decision in his view, it seems, was purely dependent on the intellect and so, if the alternatives presented were intellectually equivalent, the will could not act. Remember that Buridan was a professor. They do things like this. An analogy would be if a fellow was poised between two equally delicious young ladies, each clamoring to bear his children, and be his abject and eternally devoted spouse, he would remain celibate, as, we suppose, did Buridan.
In the case of an ass, which is a donkey, which I hope is clear to everyone, or even a chipmunk, this sort of dilemma seems unrealistic, for both practical and theoretical reasons. Imagine the difficulty of placing bales of hay equidistant from a donkey. Consider the precision of measurement required. And what if a slight movement of the air might stir a random straw a bit closer? Or what if the donkey, fainting from hunger, could not manage to fall precisely equidistant between the bales of hay. But there are theoretical questions here, as well. Is protoplasm, or DNA, or whatever, actually all this smart, or intellectual? Do not emotional elements, accidental elements, biographical elements, historical elements, social elements, and such things, often figure in decisions? What if one of the young ladies in our previous example should wink at the fellow stranded between them? It seems unlikely he would remain stranded for long.
Now you must have begun to wonder if there is a point in all this.
There is, a most important point.
You see, there was once this amazing engineer who was bored, and decided to make himself some toys. After experimenting with teddy bears, dolls, toy soldiers, balls, blocks, prototype hula hoops, and such, he was still discontented. He was not a happy engineer. And unhappy engineers, as we know from the history of technology, are capable of just about anything. In any event this engineer who was lonely as well as unhappy decided to produce some more interesting, more complex toys, to while away the time, of which he had plenty, rather in the line of wind-up toys, though much more complicated. This was not as good as having a girl friend, one supposes, but we may certainly suppose it was better than nothing, at least from his point of view. Now, as he was an engineer, he did not want to produce sloppy artifacts, but things he could be proud of, objects well-tooled, shipshape, reliable, precise, and smoothly functioning.
Accordingly our engineer designed and manufactured some phenomenal little thingamajigs, dohickeys, whatchamaycallits, and so on. These little toys were on the whole active and complex. They were also responsive to their environment in a variety of ways, for example, if one tumbled off a cliff or was struck repeatedly with sledgehammers, its functions were often impaired, sometimes seriously, sometimes irremediably. The engineer became fascinated with his hobby, and constructed ever more fascinating and intricate toys. Eventually he had built a set of remarkably sophisticated machines programmed with simple rules of the sort from which surprisingly complex behavior can emerge. Some of these models worked better than others and the ones that worked less well were scrapped.
Finally, our engineer produced something which he hoped would endlessly delight and amuse him, a set of complex mobile computers. For a time the engineer was quite pleased with these toys, and rightfully so, for they were in their way masterpieces of the toy maker’s art, sophisticated, impressive wonderworks of unprecedented design. Nothing quite like them had been seen before. The engineer played with them for a time, and sat back and watched them running about. He varied their programming so they would not all be doing the same thing. But they were mechanisms, of course, and it soon seemed to the engineer that, in a way, they had been built too well. After a time, they were not that much fun to watch. The engineer had built them and so he always knew what they would do. Once again the engineer began to be bored.
Things came to a head one day when he noted one of these mechanisms poised precisely between two goals, both of which it had been programmed to seek. The machine, interestingly, was immobile, unable to function.
We do not know what the goals were, perhaps it was something as simple as being poised between calculating the sum of five plus six as opposed to calculating the sum of six plus five. One does not know. Or, perhaps it was as simple as finding itself between two equally attractive wedges of Jarlsberg cheese, or two bales of hay.
The engineer watched the machine in its predicament, until it perished, from rust, or whatever.
At this point it seemed to the engineer that he was hoist on his own petard, so to speak, that his own expertise had done him in. Not only was he bored with his toys, for he knew their every move in advance, after all, he had built them, but he now also realized that the astounding and impeccable precision of their programming bore within itself the concealed liability of cybernetic paralysis. They would, in certain situations, be inevitably doomed by the very perfection of their design.
Perfection bore inevitably within itself its own demise.
The engineer had discovered the problem of Buridan’s ass.
At this point perhaps many of us might have contemplated suicide but not the engineer, as it was not in his nature. For him this was not a viable option.
Then, with one of those strokes of inspiration which so frequently characterize the juggernaut of progress, it occurred to the engineer that if perfection necessitated imperfection, why should not imperfection necessitate perfection.
Perhaps the most perfect mechanism would be that which was imperfect!
Accordingly the engineer gathered together his toys and put in some random elements.
He had now produced machines that worked, but you couldn’t know for sure how they would work.
You never knew for sure.
They could surprise you.
Now the engineer was never bored with his toys.
And thus, too, was the problem of Buridan’s ass solved. Some random jostle or jiggle, inclination or trepidation, sooner or later, would save the beast.
The engineer was so pleased with his new toys that he thought he should give them a name.
He called them human beings.