Guides for Choice
A favorite question to pose to gurus is, “What is your philosophy of life?” On rare occasions, I have been incautious enough to answer the question. A philosophy of life surely involves a set of principles. But principles for what purpose? Principles can provide a book of heuristics to guide choice at life’s branch points, a thread to keep one on the right path in the maze. Principles can also rationalize, explain, or provide excuses for choices one has already made. It’s not easy to distinguish between these two uses of principle; perhaps it is not even necessary. A philosophy of life can contain both.
In either case, it would appear to be a lot easier to have a life philosophy at age sixty-eight than at age eighteen. Or is it easier? Perhaps the process of living confuses as often as it clarifies. Perhaps one should write down a life philosophy at eighteen, before the complexities have emerged, so that one can produce it, on request, when one is sixty-eight. But that is dangerous too. One’s readers would be tempted to compare the philosophy with the life. Safer to write it at sixty-eight, or even later.
The phrase “life philosophy” sounds solemn. We must distinguish between its two different meanings. In one sense, a life philosophy is a statement of your raison d’être in the midst of your cosmic and human environment. In a second sense, your life philosophy is your picture of this cosmos, including, in center foreground, your picture of the human condition.
As to the first sense, the creature of bounded rationality that I am has no illusions of attaining a wholly correct and objective understanding of my world. But I cannot ignore that world. I must understand it as best I can, with the help of my scientific and philosophical fellows, and then must adopt a personal stance that is not outrageously incompatible with its apparent conditions and constraints. I must eschew personal goals that require gravity shields or the perfection of humankind for their success.
I am an adaptive system, whose survival and success, whatever my goals, depend on maintaining a reasonably veridical picture of my environment of things and people. Since my world picture approximates reality only crudely, I cannot aspire to optimize anything; at most, I can aim at satisficing. Searching for the best can only dissipate scarce cognitive resources; the best is enemy of the good.
Already, you have learned something about my life philosophy, both the cosmological and the personal one. Let me now describe the former a little more systematically. I am a creature of the twentieth century, thoroughly immersed in its science and its empiricism. My cosmos began (probably) with a Big Bang, and has been evolving inexorably ever since through astronomical, geological, biological, and anthropological ages, the timeline magnifying gradually, perhaps exponentially, as we approach the present, and shrinking again, perhaps exponentially, as we peer into the future. Parts of the picture change from time to time, especially the parts most distant fore and aft, but not (at least in the past quarter-century) in ways that are important for a personal life philosophy.
This cosmological machine has laws, but I cannot detect in it any purpose. In this respect, also, I am a creature of my century, needing, like logical positivists and existentialists, to postulate my own goals because I cannot see that they have been given to me by any external donor. The world is vast, beautiful, and fascinating, even awe-inspiring—but impersonal. It demands nothing of me, and allows me to demand nothing of it, a little like some people’s conception, today, of a house-sharing or bed-sharing “relationship.”
But if the cosmos is indifferent to me, I need not be indifferent to the cosmos. I can seek to live in peace with it. Nor need I put the matter so negatively. The cosmos can be the source of some of my deepest pleasures. Gazing at it, outdoors at night or in a forest or through a microscope, I find inconceivable variety, pattern, and beauty, beyond the competence of human artists.
Some of the beauty of the cosmos is hidden, to be revealed only by the code-breaking activity we call science. Catching glimpses of new patterns, never before seen by the human eye, bringing them into the open, provides the scientist with his or her most moving experiences. And though we can have such experiences directly only a few times in a lifetime, we can have them vicariously as often as we wish by studying the work of our fellow scientists, present and past.
I suppose that is why I am a scientist. But why a social scientist? How did I choose that path? To explain why (if, indeed, I know the reasons), I must return to the cosmological stage, this time the part occupied by human beings. Neither Aristotle’s “featherless biped” nor “rational animal” seems to capture it all, though the latter is closer if we place equal emphasis on both noun and adjective. We humans are minds (and consciousnesses) in bodies that move in a physical world. We are subject, without exemption, to physical and biological laws. If we fall, our bones break; if we cannot find food, we starve.
We have become the species we are through a long process of evolution. As a result, we come into the world equipped with at least some of the requisites of survival (including supporting adults who nurture us). The newborn child is ready to breathe, to suck, to defecate. It doesn’t need a life philosophy to do those things or to want to do them. It is ready, also, to learn. And whether through learning or because of the equipment it brings with it into the world, it is soon able to empathize with other members of its species: to feel their hurts as its hurts and, later, their poverty as its poverty. I don’t need to recite a full list of human traits, inborn or acquired; I have mentioned some of the more positive ones. I could equally well have mentioned human propensities for predation against our own species, and the deeply ingrained selfishness that was surely one of the prime conditions for our survival.
The human condition is often described as absurd. Surely the term is appropriate: a body shackled to a self-conscious mind—or is it the mind that is shackled to the body? The wants and needs of the two parts are absurdly disparate. Can the body regard as anything but absurd the mind while it is gazing at the stars or, worse, wrapped up in its own thought? Can the mind regard the act of sex or the savoring of food as anything but absurd?
Of course only the mind, not the body, can make judgments about absurdity. And so, given the range of human needs and wants, the mind creates myths reconciling it with the body, thus turning absurdity into pleasure, beauty, and tenderness. The mind sometimes even tries to find a common denominator for all the claims of the body, of itself and of the surrounding environment. It gives this common denominator impressive names like the Good, or utility. But the notion of a single, overarching goal is an illusion. We, the mind and the body, have many needs, many desires, fortunately not all clamoring at once (I refer you back to my story, “The Apple,” and its crude picture of this symbiosis of needs and wants [see pages 180–88]). Stamping them all with the label of “utility” would be futile. The plurality is real; there is no monolithic goal.
In this committee of urges, wants, and needs, housed in body and mind, there is no consensus about the purpose of life. Mark Twain told a story of Siamese twins who agreed upon alternating time slots during which one or the other would be in full charge. The story did not end well: Both twins had reason to regret the murder one committed while he had control. But the absurdity of the story is the human absurdity. Each of us “time-shares,” alternating our many selves. Some parts of life are spent in the enjoyment of music, others in the enjoyment of sex, yet others in the enjoyment of food, leaving lots of time for the enjoyment of mountains, the enjoyment of friends, and, for some fortunate ones of us, especially the enjoyment of science.
Of course this list is not complete; I mean it only to be illustrative. Moreover, I have left out everything except the time spent in consuming. There is work, too, and obligation and duty; a great deal of them in most of our lives. And there are sorrow and grief, which we do not count among life’s blessings, but which deepen our other experiences and give them meaning and sometimes a poignancy they might not otherwise have.
So—I am describing a human life with many goals but without a goal. Who would want it otherwise? Who would want to be free from the hundred desires that are always making exigent demands on a day that will not stretch beyond twenty-four hours? And who is capable of fashioning that master plan, that comprehensive utility function that allocates to each want precisely its proper slice of time?
HOMO RATIONALIS
In this chapter, I have been describing my life, and also my personal life philosophy, but I have also been describing the life of Everyperson. My interest in Everyperson began in 1935 as an interest in human decision making, especially in people coping with the complexities, the uncertainties, and the goal conflicts and incommensurabilities of everyday personal and professional life.
You have seen me following that interest in these pages over more than fifty years, an interest that has never left me. I no longer feel as ignorant of the answer as I did in 1935; I and others have made considerable progress toward understanding the conflict and providing solutions. But the allocation of individual or organizational resources—how it is done and how it ought to be done—remains a central problem of the human condition.
Pursuing the answer has led me on a long but pleasurable search through the maze of possibilities. To understand budget decisions I had to study decision making and, more generally, the processes of human thinking. To study thinking, I had to abandon my home disciplines of political science and economics for the alien shores of psychology and, a little later, of computer science and artificial intelligence. There I have remained, except for occasional brief visits to the home islands.
At least that is one version of the story: a single-minded search that has persisted for a half-century. Perhaps it is even the true version. Another possibility is that excitement lit the path: first the excitement, after World War II, of game theory, linear programming, and the use of mathematics in economics and operation research; then the excitement of the computer, the machine that taught us how a mind could be housed in a material body.
What significance should one attach to coincidences? The demands of the problem and the excitement of the new tools lured me down the very same path of the maze. And so I was able to spend my scientific life pursuing a problem I thought central to understanding the human condition, while indulging myself in the mathematics and computer formalisms that gave me so much pleasure just in the doing. Nor was I denied the pleasures of friendship, even in professional life, for we have seen that most of my work has involved warm partnerships.
The pictures of Homo economicus and Homo cogitans that emerged from this quest have already been sketched. When, abandoning the a priorism of neoclassical economics, I looked at actual decision making and problem solving, I saw a creature of bounded rationality using heuristic search to find satisficing—“good enough”—courses of action. And with the help of computer simulation, my colleagues and I were able to account for the facts of human problem solving in a range of both simple and complex situations.
Economists did not flock to the banner of satisficing with its bounded rationality. These ideas still remain well outside the mainstream of economics—but not indefinitely. For they provide a realistic picture of human choice, a picture that may instruct us about some of the puzzling problems of economics today: decision making under uncertainty, business cycles with their accompanying natural or unnatural unemployment, the role of entrepreneurship in investment, and others. But there is backbreaking empirical work ahead, for the theory of bounded rationality does not permit all one’s theorems to flow from a few a priori truths. Fixing the postulates of such a theory requires close, almost microscopic, study of how people actually behave.
Science, viewed as competition among theories, has an unmatched advantage over all other forms of intellectual competition. In the long run (no more than centuries), the winner succeeds not by superior rhetoric, not by the ability to convince or dazzle a lay audience, not by political influence, but by the support of data, facts as they are gradually and cumulatively revealed. As long as its factual veridicality is unchallenged, one can remain calm about the future of a theory. The future of bounded rationality is wholly secure.
HOMO SOCIALIS
How do you put duty in a utility function? For a satisficing theory it’s quite easy: Simply place it among the constraints. Of course, we may also view duty as a cost we pay for society’s willingness to cooperate with us. This implies that every person has a price. Possibly so, but I prefer the satisficing view.
What duties would I impose? Starting at the weak end of the spectrum, there is general acceptance of the duty not to harm others—the negative version of the Golden Rule. A higher, and not unreasonable, standard is the obligation to leave the world no worse off than it would have been without us. Since most people, even people in rather humble circumstances, can meet that requirement, perhaps it is proper to insist on it.
A still heavier obligation, not always acknowledged, is to leave to future generations as wide and interesting a range of options as our generation inherited from our forebears. To do so, we must accept collective responsibility for securing sustainable energy sources, preserving the environment, stabilizing world population, and somehow removing or dulling the threat of the Bomb. We have no obligation to solve all the world’s problems (there is no prospect that we could); we do have an obligation to avert irreversible catastrophe and to oppose implacably every step toward it.
When we turn to obligations to do positive good, the road seems steeper and stonier. The social scientists of my generation are Depression children, and although the Depression probably had little to do with bringing me to social science, I share the values and feelings of my generation. Given the productivity of which human societies today are technically capable, I regard the elimination of poverty (at least poverty measured against basic physiological and psychological needs) as one of the Big Goods that is actually attainable, perhaps within a couple of generations.
Distributive justice? That’s more elusive. My cosmology shows clearly that the distribution of the world’s goods owes little to virtue and a great deal to the lottery that distributes families, genes, places of birth, material resources, and other forms of access by the throw of cosmic dice. Does that call for a norm of full equality? Only if you believe that people’s aspirations must be guided by comparison with the well-being of others. That belief seems highly unproductive, as it turns the whole life of society into a zerosum game in which some can win only if others lose. There must be better games. If I were to select a research problem without regard to scientific feasibility, it would be that of finding out how to persuade human beings to design and play games that all can win. Clearly neither the USSR nor China has succeeded in inventing such a game; nor have we, although perhaps we have come closer.
HOMO SCIENTIFICUS
Does a life philosophy, in addition to the cosmological and personal, include a third element, a philosophy of science? If so, you have already been exposed to most of mine, and can learn even more about it in the Afterword that follows this chapter. If the quality of a research problem rests on the importance of the questions it addresses and the availability of ideas and techniques that hold out a promise of progress, then the study of mind is a most promising research domain. The questions it addresses have puzzled humankind since the earliest times, and underlie the most fundamental questions of epistemology, including the much-discussed mind/body problem. Moreover, understanding the nature of mind is fundamental to building viable theories of social institutions and behavior, of economics and political science. Economics dodged the problem for two centuries with its a priori assumptions of human rationality. But those assumptions are no longer fruitful; they must be replaced by a more veridical theory of the human mind.
Since the 1950s we have had the tools to study the mind. We now have a third of a century’s accumulation of evidence that the digital computer is the crucial tool we had been lacking. The computer as applied in cognitive science both provides a language for stating theories of human behavior without placing them in the Procrustean bed of real numbers and, by simulation, spins out the implications of the theories. The computer allows us to plumb mind to the level of symbols; we still wait for powerful biological tools to plumb to the neural level.
My life shows that my tribal loyalties are weak. I am a social scientist before I am an economist or a psychologist—and, I hope, a human being before anything else. I believe (my third creation myth) that what brought me to the social sciences was the urge to supply rigor to a body of phenomena that sorely needed it. Physics was already too far along (I thought) for genuine adventure. The social sciences offered a field of virgin snow on which one could imprint a fresh form.
Disciplines, like nations, are a necessary evil that enable human beings of bounded rationality to simplify their goals and reduce their choices to calculable limits. But parochialism is everywhere, and the world badly needs international and interdisciplinary travelers to carry new knowledge from one enclave to another. Having spent much of my scientific life in such travel, I can offer one piece of advice to others who wish to try an itinerant existence: It is fatal to be regarded as a good economist by psychologists, and a good psychologist by political scientists.
Immediately upon landing on alien shores, you must begin to acquire the local culture, not to deny your origins but to gain the full respect of the natives. When in economics, there is no substitute for talking the language of marginal analysis and regressions—even (or especially) when your purpose is to demonstrate their limitations. When in psychology, you must be able to understand references to short-term memory and latencies and spreading activation.
The task is not onerous; after all, we acculturize new graduate students in a couple of years. Besides, it may lead you to write papers on fascinating topics that you would otherwise never have encountered. For one of the nice features of the utility function (or the committee of goals I would substitute for it) is that it can acquire ever new dimensions. Learning a new language every decade or so is a great immunizer against incipient boredom.
In describing my life, I have situated it in a labyrinth of paths that branch, in a castle of innumerable rooms. The life is in the moving through that garden or castle, experiencing surprises along the path you follow, wondering (but not too solemnly) where the other paths would have led: a heuristic search for the solution of an ill-structured problem. If there are goals, they do not so much guide the search as emerge from it. It needs no summing up beyond the living of it.