Camp No Friends

Am I Enlightened or Not?

Parsley, 02/18/03

This somewhat lengthy piece first appeared a year or so ago on my old college website. I’ve been meaning to repost it just so it could be out there, and maybe there are some people reading this who didn’t catch it before. I don’t think it’s as funny as I wanted it to be, the philosophy is pretty sloppy, and it all falls apart at the end, but I still kind of like it. Hope you do too.

Am I Enlightened or Not?

A Cure for Philosophy

3/19/02

I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems. And if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in which the value of this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction
2. Methodology
3. Experimental Design
4. Complications
5. Results: Enlightenment Epistemology
6. Results: Ethics
7. Conclusions

Introduction

In the sciences (natural and social) it is common to pose a question and answer it with reasonable certainty in the space of a single paper, or sometimes a book. In philosophy, however, the questions raised thousands of years ago by the very first philosophers have not yet been answered. Or rather, they have not been answered definitively and verifiably, since there has certainly been no shortage of proposed answers to the fundamental questions of metaphysics, ethics, and so on.

In the modern world, as many observers have noted, philosophy seems to have been largely replaced by science in its position as the pinnacle of knowledge. Perhaps there is good reason for this - a well-designed and persuasive scientific experiment leaves little room for argument; facts are facts and the truth is determined by those facts. Philosophy can offer a logical proof, of course, but the kinds of problems addressed by philosophers do not often allow any data or objective observation that could verify the truth of the individual propositions in such a proof. Furthermore, as Kant demonstrates, it is often possible to offer "incontrovertible" proof of two clearly contradictory claims. 20th century thinkers have also frequently been harsh with the possibility of objective truth. While philosophy continues to subvert itself from within, questioning its own accuracy, each discovery of science adds to the explanatory power of the discipline as a whole. Is philosophy ultimately doomed to irrelevance?

Recall that many, probably most, nonscientific disciplines underwent a process of scientification at some point on their history. Compare, for example, the work of Freud to that of more biologically oriented 20th century psychologists, and it becomes apparent that the infusion of scientific theories and techniques into other disciplines can often have a beneficial effect. Philosophy, then, should not fear the encroachment of science on its claim to higher knowledge, but welcome the possibilities opened up by this new approach to the truth.

The experiment described here represents a first step towards solving, once and for all, philosophy’s most fundamental, vexing, and persistent questions through the magic of science.

Methodology

"Am I Hot or Not?" is a well-known web site, popular among drunks and the mentally enfeebled, that allows users to rate the physical beauty of individuals who have submitted their photos to the site on a scale from 1 (not hot) to 10 (very hot). The site (hereafter referred to as AIHON and currently available at www.hotornot.com) caught on with internet users very quickly after its appearance and became a true web phenomenon, enjoyed and discussed in offices, computer labs, and college dorms throughout the world. Thousands of people have visited AIHON and rated the attractiveness of its submitters. Where once the question "Am I hot or not?" was an inherently subjective and potentially awkward one, it can now be answered with the certainty of scientific truth within just a few days.

For the purposes of this experiment, several fundamental philosophical questions were examined and it was determined how each could be presented as an opposed pair of two brief slogans (for example, "Knowledge comes from a priori reason" and "Knowledge is based on sensory experience"). The slogans were digitally added to photographs of young people, which were then submitted to AIHON. At the end of the designated voting period, whichever slogan/picture combination had received the highest ranking from AIHON voters clearly represented the truth regarding that particular question, which could now be discarded in favor of new, more pressing issues.

Experimental Design

The most important step in designing this experiment was choosing the photographs in such a way that bias on the part of the AIHON voters could be prevented from confounding the results. Obviously the "model" would have to be someone who was equally attractive to a wide range of people, so that the picture’s rating would be based solely on the associated philosophical statement and not any one individual’s aesthetic preferences. Additionally, the person pictured should be one possessing approximately average beauty (a 5.0 on AIHON’s 10-pt. scale). An attractive "model" paired with a false claim might otherwise be ranked higher than a homely one with the correct statement (see inset).

Following these guidelines would reduce the influence of the "model’s" personal beauty and ensure that only the correctness of the philosophical proposition would play a role in shaping voters’ perceptions of the composite image. This is more difficult than it at first seems, however. The author admits that he is a poor judge of male beauty and that his opinions on female beauty seem to differ from those of most AIHON voters. Fortunately, individuals not associated with AIHON have created a fan website archiving past AIHON submissions, which can be sorted by a variety of properties, including final rating. Thus the candidates for use in this experiment were chosen from those who had previously received a score of 5.0, providing a double check on the author’s aesthetic judgments. Photographs from online personal ads were also examined for comparison and general hilarity.

Another potential and sinister source of error gradually became clear. If a photograph of a female was used (as was originally planned), men would perceive the composite image in a very different way than would women. Indeed, since AIHON users often opt to only view and rank pictures of members of the opposite sex, women would be unlikely to even see the female picture, and men would likewise be unlikely to see a male photo. To avoid the gender bias that has often plagues traditional philosophical investigations, some adjustments needed to be made. Since a picture of an androgynous or hermaphroditic "model" would be likely to confuse many potential voters, it was decided that for each of the two slogans associated with a problem, two photos would be used: one male and one female. Thus for each problem there would be a total of four images: male/position 1, male/position 2, female/position 1, and female/position 2.

Of course there are many other factors that could bias an AIHON voter in favor of or against a particular image - race, eye color, hairstyle, etc. - but these issues, it was felt, did not warrant the creation of even more images. For one thing, gender is the only characteristic that voters can restrict, i.e. there is no way to view only white women, blue-eyed men, etc. Furthermore, the large number of voters judging each picture should generally tend to smooth out any unusual opinions.

Using Adobe Photoshop, the chosen photos were resized to dimensions appropriate for a variety of screen resolutions, and the slogans were added in a simple, readable font. The composite images were uploaded to AIHON, and voting could begin.

Complications

The first attempt to carry out this experiment was made in early 2001. All four images were submitted to AIHON at the same time, and when the site’s moderators reviewed them (all submissions must be approved before appearing on the site), they rejected two of them, one male and one female. The slogans attached to these photos dealt with the debate between rationalist and empiricist epistemology. Since AIHON forbids duplicate postings of the same image, only one photo of each "model" was accepted. Interestingly, in both cases the image with the rationalist slogan was rejected. Whether this reveals a pro-empiricist bias on the part of AIHON is a matter for debate.

In the aftermath of this rejection, it was decided to submit one image at a time, and wait until the voting on that image had ended to submit the next - a slower process, to be sure, and possibly over cautious, but one that would not draw the ire of AIHON staff.

The traffic to AIHON doubtless changes from week to week, but the number of users permitted to vote on a given image before it leaves the rotation is a constant (just over 150 votes for males, 1500 for females), so it should not make a significant difference if images are posted at slightly different times (It would be interesting, though, to see if ratings in general are higher in the Spring, when young men’s fancies turn to thoughts of Girls Gone Wild. A topic for future research.). If anything, the chronological staggering process described here adds a layer of randomness to the experiment - few voters will rate more than one of the images.

On to Page Two: Results and Conclusions