An Exoteric (and Admittedly Dissatisfying) Approach to the "Liar's Paradox" and Its Significance

 

My favorite aspect of philosophy is how some time-honored problem that supposedly defines the parameters of the human condition can be rephrased in such a way that defies our ability to predict.  I like to think of philosophy as a unique conversation that probably will never stop: wherever there is unbounded curiosity, there will be the same kinds of conversations.

One such example, the much discussed “Liar’s Paradox”

The Liar Paradox - Stephen Read - Bing video

a problem that is universally appreciated from the intentionally obscure Zen Koans to Sancho Panza of Cervantes' imagination (For students of literature, Panza famously approaches the Paradox at the bridge in the castle gallows by hanging the “bad” half of the man who lied and allowing the “good” half to live!)

While often amusing and at times bewitching, these semantic "insolubles" are rather troubling, Pr. Read points out.  

How are we to resolve the postcard that says two opposing things on either side (see the video)?  More pressingly, what do paradoxes ultimately suggest about truth and its opposite?  Are we to believe as do some ancient sages that “truth” and “false” are transitory distinctions that rest upon what people are willing to believe in any moment?  Epistemically, can we step into the same river of Truth twice?

Eubulides  (4th century BCE) is the first in recorded history to write about these concerns, we are told, but this issue has not been resolved since his days.  

The problem instead has just migrated to other geographies of the intellect, including the logical foundation of mathematics itself.

Since then, many such puzzles are increasingly sophisticated and formal in the past century (with the hope that a mathematical approach would lend clarity), but we forget that we often use “paradox” in non-technical ways too:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4214609/

This article above by the NIH tries to resolve a “stress-eating paradox”: namely, that “stress can lead to BOTH hyperphagia AND hypophagia.”  

You don’t need to know Greek that stressed-out people can obviously either eat too much or too little— the common element being a deviation from their dietetic norm (and presumably, the happy medium that is health).

In practice (where it counts most), this case of over- or under-eating suggests that paradoxes usually belie oversimplifications.  That hyperphagia and hypophagia can result from stress might seem contradictory (and thus unhelpful pseudo-“knowledge”) only if you assume everyone’s bodies and genetic makeup, environment, or what have you were the same.  However, once you recognize a multitude of variables that shape outcomes, including hunger, then apparent “paradoxes” are really just a misunderstanding of the situation.  To use a ten-dollar word, it’s the sign of reductionism.  Paradoxes usually indicate that one’s model of this slice of reality is probably a bit too simple.

Now, if this is true of medicine, then what of paradoxes at their more abstract?  How should we encounter or anticipate them in general?  

Medieval minds typically understood paradoxes as symptomatic of unsound approaches to reasoning per se.  One camp even believed that paradoxes were non-propositions that had grammatical content without any logical assertion behind them: to use a more modern example, try to imagine “colorless green ideas.”  Instinctively, you must realize that you can’t.  In this instance, you are abusing grammar to say something semantically nonsensical.  The Liar's Paradox, according to certain medieval thinkers, is committing a similar kind of abuse but not on the grammatical level, but on the logical level of propositions.

This medieval approach to the problem is similar to how modern philosophers approach tautologies.  If the liar in our paradox asserted “p and ~p”, then that is similar to a weatherman saying “tomorrow, it will either rain or not.”  That much is true because, well, it is always true (regardless of either facts or situations): how could it be otherwise?  Now, if something is always true (say, that “a being is something that exists”), then it doesn’t NEED to be said.  It is, in short, unrelated to our concerns and unproductive to say the least.  It tries to use logic in ways that it should not be used. It fails to track onto reality at the level of propositions, or assertive statements of fact (as opposed to mere sentences).  It is fundamentally unserious.  What moderns have said about tautologies applies to what the Cassationists said about paradoxes.

Of greater consequence: The supposed “liar” in the “Liar’s Paradox” is also *necessarily* incapable of lying just as he is incapable of telling the truth.  He enjoys neither the virtue of truthfulness (gaining the confidence of others) nor the vice of deceit (that is, temporarily tricking others for some gain), but nonetheless puts to test society’s willingness to tolerate useless speech.  Logic is a tool that he is choosing not merely to implement for personal gain, but to misuse completely and openly. While unrelated to truth and falsity, this netherworld in between is indeed a problem if taken as a broader statement about reality (as opposed to being what the medievals treated it as: namely, a teaching tool).

To be a good liar by contrast is to be consistent in the lie (ironically, by respecting all other truths, the lie is better preserved!  And leaving them in place so as to seem convincing); aside from this task, a good liar aims to mask the contradiction between statement and fact as best as he can.  This is why a society should appreciate evidence that ties fact to statement both in courtrooms and beyond.  To not care about evidence in itself as it relates to propositions of various kinds is a sign of an ideologically sick society that has broadly rendered truth into a means more so than an end.

That is why it is encouraging to see a society where “liar” is a grievous insult.  Indeed, one could say that the more grievous, the healthier the society.

So, all that said, where do we find ourselves today?  Would our leaders even blink at being called out for their dishonesty?  The casual reader might think there are far worse indictments given what we know of the dealings of certain politicians.

Even so, more so than poverty, more so than material inequality, bigotry, or persecution, the spiritual measure of a nation is its concern for the truth.  Without a concern for the truth, none of those other problems can be taken seriously.  And yet, America is the ecumenical birthplace of “pragmatism.”  It is a place that prides itself on "doing" rather than "thinking."   It is a place that has also been flexible with, perhaps even indifferent to, ultimate concerns.

In post-sectarian Atlantic World, perhaps that was expedient when Protestants and Catholics were killing each other.  Certainly, it was understandable.  But was it right to live as if one had no metaphysics?  For the time being, I don't know how to approach the answer to such a question, but what I can say is that it is categorically untrue because it is impossible to live as if one had no ultimate concerns.  A human life is a testament to what it ultimately values and maintains to be the Truth (capital "T" intended).

"Power Lunch": A Path to Our Humanity Leads Through the Stomach?

I came to maturity, as it were, during the Financial Crisis of 2009 (As for an end date of this "Great Recession", I don't know for sure.  The answer depends on who you are talking to.  A commercial lender experienced the downturn differently than a farmer.  People come from various situations and those bear upon how they perceive any given event.  Go figure.). 

Through no choice of my own, CNBC became part of the background noise of my young adult life during those years.  For those long in the tooth, this was a time when new household names gained prominence among the American upper middle class, including David Faber, Carl Quintanilla, Melissa Lee, and many more who followed the steps of the veteran finance journalist Joe Kernen.

For those who are young to remember those names, these served as a buttoned-up counterbalance to the more flamboyant and far more memorable Jim Cramers of the world, whose gimmicks and shallow optimism aimed to keep the "retail investor" mollified with bells and whistles and shiny objects just as the sky was falling.

These were the last desperate fumes of what the fin-de-siecle Fed Chairman Allan Greenspan termed "irrational exuberance."  To this day, I can think of nothing more cynical than the peculiar insight that what was driving the problem was evidently also its own solution.

But I digress.

As much as people complain about anything from SVB to SBF, over a decade ago (which might as well be a century), people were openly having fun when entire fortunes were melting into thin air.  Even then, it was so frivolous, so absurd, yet so spectacular that an otherwise morally bankrupt Hollywood elite felt the need to enlist George Clooney to star in a surprisingly belated film satirizing Cramer and his class of pundits (Here, I am not endorsing the film, but only vaguely remembering that it was at least watchable back in....<cough>...2016!).

Back to CNBC: there was this one program that stood out in my mind; hosted by Sue Herera, it was called "Power Lunch."  

To those not in the finance world, this phrase refers to an executive-only lunch where company leaders discuss weighty matters of importance over "protein bowls" and smart water.  To my knowledge, this program is still on the air.  To my knowledge, it is still promotional rather than analytical in nature.  Par for the course with financial news shows.

Flashback to 2008-2011 when many young people were unemployed...  This motley fool, yours truly, looked to these mavins of the financial world just to make sense of what was happening: first off, why couldn't we find work?  For those who could find work, why couldn't we apply what we had learned in school to make a living? (That is, why couldn't young people start their careers?) What was in store for this future generation just out of college?  What caused this catastrophe?  How should we navigate the storm?, etc.

So many questions, so few answers.

Looking back, I am surprised I was naive enough to expect answers in the first place.  These are not the kinds of questions that financial analysts openly discuss on a for profit cable network.  Their target demographic was not 20-somethings fresh out of college.  Their demographic was not people without money.  No, this programming was for our parents and grandparents who wanted to know how much they should shore up their savings.  In retrospect, that was perfectly understandable.  CNBC is not a public network.   It is not what NPR amusingly imagines of itself.

I bring this vague memory up because through the fracas of the late 2000s, the phrase "power lunch" became forever stuck in some dark recess of my mind.  Those juxtaposed words have always filled me with disgust.  But why?  When so much had occurred during that time, why did that phrase in particular enjoy particular notoriety?  Simply because the well-to-do spoke that way?  No, they said many obnoxious things.

So, why then?

As someone who sat somewhat comfortably against the fence dividing "haves" from "have nots", my reasons were not altogether personal per se.  I came from a comfortable family, and my father was a successful entrepreneur who could help soften the descent of my downward trajectory.  I was not so desperate to live in a camp at Occupy Wallstreet.  I did not throw milkshakes at businessmen with expensive haircuts simply because they could afford to look better than me.

No, my reasoning was more philosophical: My younger self would have said that he despised the phrase "power lunch" because it manifested the entire dehumanizing enterprise of abstractionism in the modern economy, i.e. the need to put "efficiency" on a pedestal, the imperative to expand one's "margins", the "creativity" of bundling this and that "asset" together and disguise the risk, or to put a fancy euphemism on that junk asset to pass that "hot potato" to some other schmuck who turned around to do the same, etc.

Looking back, I suppose that I still hate the term "power lunch" because it was and is a shameless reflection of how the spiritual vice of avarice could and did supplant the carnal venality of gluttony.  To clarify by way of analogy, the phrase itself struck me as soulless as the wife of the protagonist of 1984 whenever she alluded to marital intimacy as "duty" to the Party.  I didn't mind when rich people acted rich.  What I despised was their insatiable monomania in place of the good life that was within their reach, or that irrational drive that prevented them from considering ends rather than means.  You see, I hated the peculiar asceticism of the successful.  With certain qualifications that I hope indicate some modicum of maturity on my part, I must confess that I still hate that perverse professionalized form of self-denial.

Before the days of algorithms, social media, and A.I. bots, the phrase "power lunch" demonstrated just how alienated the monied classes were from their own bodily and social needs, or just how robotic "homo economicus" could became, to such an extent that even meals were seen as an inconvenience.  

There was something not merely sinful, but inhuman about the phrase.  What I saw was veiled contempt for the mortal body (a contempt that reached to others' bodies and bodily needs) that anticipated, oddly enough, the mass somatic dysphoria of today's younger generation and this universalized compulsive "need" to shed your skin and *evolve* into something.

For some reason or another, the phrase reminded me of a scene from Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) where the noble, yet irredeemably hot-headed criminal Santino Corleone chastises his weaselly brother-in-law Carlo Rizzi over the vulgar discussion of racketeering at the family dinner table: "We don't talk business at the table!", exclaimed Sonny.  Even Connie, Santino's kid sister and unfortunate wife to Carlo, reminded her husband how "Papa never talked about business in front of the kids."

These were our imagined criminals of yesteryear.

What of our real "thought leaders" of today? 

What does it matter to me if Jack Dorsey lives in a box of his own choosing and practices "transcendental yoga" while eating one meal per day?  What is the world-weary asceticism of a billionaire to me and you?  The Ancient Romans had their vomitoria as well, but they surely never starved...

I am not content at mockery alone of our elites.  There are people who are better equipped at insults than I am.  Rather, I champion a bolder response to imposture of our "social superiors".  What we should take from asinine shibboleth like "power lunch" is not a momentary eye roll, as with any obnoxious neologism, but instead a collective need for some soul searching.  We would do just as well to examine the concerning habits of our leaders, movers and shakers, and what they think it says about them, a far more pressing task given the power they have over us and our material destinies.  

For when people say such things, what they are really implying is why they are better than us-- and thus entitled to govern.

Again, it does not bother me in the least that there are people who have more than others.  Inequality in some way, shape, or form is inherent in our social nature.  What bothers me then is that there is so much inequality that our superiors feel the psychological need to justify it almost constantly.  What they fail to realize is that this impulse is typically self-incriminating when they fail to resist it.

As the religious know, the Lord may have dined with the influential and powerful Pharisees, but he also broke bread with society's most reviled outcasts.  And, it was there at the table of wealthy and poor alike that Christ echoed his cousin's declaration of "repentance!" from all.  The idea was that temptation alone was a sign of one's fallen state or dividedness against the world.  Being so corrupted, such as to have the ability to sin, human beings alone-- no matter who in particular-- couldn't climb their way out of this predicament.  All were thus equally in need of saving.

For the less religiously observant, what more can I say?  You may believe in the redemptive power of innovation and technology, and the urgent need to put away strange metaphysical fixations with "God" and be "practical" and "solutions-oriented", but when your arch-pragmatic demiurge known as the Singularity comes to roost on those self-same values, I suspect things might not be all that different... 

More efficient?  Absolutely.  More convenient?  Sure, in a sense.  More bountiful?  Well, A.I. certainly does not sleep.   Despite all of these "transformations" and endless permutations, you and I both know, dear reader, how inertia doesn't confuse motion with genuine change.  You will remain insatiable.  As time passes, I suspect it will prove more and more difficult to convince yourself that it is a virtue.

My point, if I may care to have one, is that the future of our elites' imagining might NOT seem all that more "inhuman" from today.  What if we already reached a "singularity" of our own design long ago?  Points of no return buried deep within such trite phrases as "power lunch"?

After all, how did we get here?  And why do you actually believe that the Next Big Thing will really make all that much of a difference inside you?  After everything you've experienced, how do you still profess a faith in such things?  It's far more curious than the religious sort's belief in the Resurrection.  Maybe, that's just me though.

I jest for the moment, but I sense something truly gloomy around this event horizon that defies measurement, where people of all kinds--- rich and poor alike (and fewer and fewer of us in between)---  would do well to prepare for their own redundancy in the face of the total reign of the inhuman.

In the meantime, there is not much one can do, is there?  If you think of yourself as caring, then do this much to satisfy your impulse to "help" others: perhaps you can do the lowly a favor and slow down when you eat?  Maybe do something as simple as enjoy your food?  As you do so, try to slow down your thinking (for a computer can outpace you) and care to have a thought for its own sake too, i.e. one that you can't maximize for the sake of some other end?  Stop confusing means with ends as a habit.  As I stated previously, if anybody is in the position to enjoy the "good life", it is you.  My only complaint is that you do so.  After all, all things must end at some point.  So, why not start now?