Frank Speiser

You and a buddy finish your writing and make a post to the social network of choice. It felt good to get that off your chest. Still, somehow you feel like you might have crossed the line. Is it still OK to say stuff like that?

Later that night you get your answer. A muffled bang. Your door gets busted off its hinges; that creamy, acrid smoke fills the air. The smell kind of reminds you of the Fourth of July, but as you come around, you realize that this situation is about to get ironic.

You’re now surrounded by a bunch of high tech pseudo-ninjas with chronic drinking problems. You start to ask what’s going on just as the plastic handcuffs go on, and before the sentence leaves your mouth you’re out again.

The hood that has been smothering you is pulled off to reveal a brightly lit room  with buzzing lights and a two-way mirror. There’s a microphone on the table. Across the table from you, an average man in his father’s suit waits calmly for you to focus on him.

“Hello. My name is Special Agent Johnson. We have your partner in crime in the other room. The first one that talks, walks. If you hold out, we’re going to make sure you do hard time in a really bad place. Your buddy is close to cracking, so speak now or it’s prison greens for your ass.”

Most variants on the argument to invalidate the value of a moral code end up like this. What we have here is your basic game-theory setup. A real prisoner’s dilemma. Maybe even a prisoners’ dilemma.

So, let’s play this game. What’s the real story here? How should we play it?

The first temptation is to reduce this to a math problem that operates within the boundaries that were given to you.

That’s a mistake. If you play your game like that, what’s going to happen is you rat so that you avoid jail time because that’s the only option that contains any upside for you. Maybe you should rat first, pin the whole thing on your cohort and you walk. In effect, you “win”?

Except you don’t win. Sending your friend to prison has costs; real-life costs. Also, even though the scenario given to you was a “non-repeating” game, the true scenario you face is not like that at all.  This decision is different from a chess game or a trading scenario, in that your decision can deny someone else of his ability to exercise his own free will. This “game” asks you to designate a victim.

There are costs in limiting someone else’s free will. Your agency (or more strongly - free will) is what makes you human. This is the crucial difference in “game theory” being applied to human action versus asset/decision based zero-sum games.

So, life and the game goes on after that first turn. There are many things to consider. For instance, it’s probably much more likely that a “rat” will get violated in prison than someone who holds his ground. Is doing a some more prison time worth not getting raped? How much time?

These are subjective, individual choices. Looking even longer term, if you and your cohort choose not to rat on each other and just refuse to break – perhaps you both go to jail. But now, since neither of you were the rat, and didn’t break, you have empirical proof that when faced with a tough choice that you may be able to count on someone else.

Your refusal to give in might yield you some harsh trials, but it may also reward you with the chance to be able to trust someone else based on evidence.

Is that worth anything to you? Is it worth a ten percent chance that the other person has that within him? What about 50%? 90% ? How much hope do you need before you’ll take the chance ? It is an option you have that was not implied in the rules of the “game” given to you.

If you relied on the “game rules” set forth by “Special Agent Johnson” you’d probably make one choice based on your “rationalism”. However, if you followed a moral code based on what you can verify to be your belief, where you willfully choose to refuse to negate someone’s free will because it’s within your free will to do so, you create options that did not exist in the rules handed to you, and thus change “the game” by devaluing the arbiter’s authority to control your potential distribution of outcomes.

Which is more truthful? Is it more likely that the options in front of us are concrete and discrete, or might there be unobservable permutations not described in the rule sets in our “games”?

Alfred Korzybski once said, “The map is not the territory it represents.” This is true in so many ways. The rules and the options that are given to you are not “the game”. The real game is determining what you have the ability to choose, and exercising that to your full potential. That potential is different for each person, based on what he can realize as an option, and when. Not everyone is a perfect observer, and not all options are readily within reach. This is also a consideration.

If you believe we are in constant competition with reach other with no other way out, wouldn’t it make more sense to take “game turns” which increase our options in later rounds? Maybe the real game is turning would-be restrictions into weakened opposition by turning the will of the arresting agent toward automatic suspicion of any rules that inhibit free will and violate the moral code? Perhaps even with partially tolerable anecdotes. Can making people aware of their free will lessen the statistical probability that they’d infringe on someone’s ability to live their life?

In a closed-game, or single-turn games it makes sense to act in the short term. But if it is a game, life is a repeating game not just with a possibly infinite number of outcomes from existing rules, but a possibly infinite number of  functions (rules) to be observed. It would seem that short term rationalism is not any closer to the truth or life-span optimal result than an observable and verifiable moral code – and may possibly be the worse choice given the real and permutable nature of life.

The rules they give you aren’t the rules that are available. Sometimes the rules are a trap to prohibit you from seeing the real rules. Be willing to consider your options. Let me consider mine. Let’s not take that away from each other when we do not have to do it.

And math majors: don’t hate the player – hate the game.