The Zero-Sum Puzzle: Thought and Kindness

One of the simplest statements we hear so often that we take it for granted is the significance of beliefs. Controlling for the intensity of the belief, the depth of the belief then determines the relative relevance of the belief. This idea gives a stronger position to philosophy when considering its utility because, essentially, philosophy reduces the complex web of thoughts to premises through backward induction. The strength of the backtracking depends on the certainty of the causality relationships used to induct through the layers. But, taking it as given (which the author recognises is a strong assumption), we see that philosophy takes the perceived complex stochasticity and deems it to be deterministic, or rather takes this as a pre-condition for its existence.

Now, as we engage in the pursuit of enlarging our worldviews and modifying our beliefs so as to take them closer to the ground truth, philosophy helps us in two ways. Firstly, it helps create a feedback loop for every thought and draws a contrast with the beliefs, which ensures the beliefs are weakly held. Secondly, this introspection process also extrapolates into fielding the thought patterns in the complement, which is the entire world, thereby enhancing the pace with which we get closer to the ground truth. Thus, philosophy naturally pushes one, sometimes even inadvertently, to expand the thought with the limit tending to the universe.

Now that we have established the nature of philosophy and the path that philosophy would lead someone onto, the next pertinent question would be its impact. The impact is of two kinds, depending on the perspective. From the host’s perspective, as the boundary span of thought reaches the bounds of the universe, the area of impact of a single thought becomes very high, relatively speaking. So now, from the perspective of the complement, assuming the complement remains the same, the probability that an entity in the complement gets touched by such a thought from a host increases. Then, the judgement of the impact of this phenomenon depends on what we believe is the fundamental nature of such a thought-touch event. There are three broad paths from here. We believe it is a zero-sum game, meaning such an event causes a loss of some metric (imagine agency, for example) to the entity in the complement to some degree. Or we see it as a positive sum game, meaning such an event enhances something for both the host and entity touched. Finally, we can see it as an indifferent, neutral interaction, i.e. nothing about the entity or the host changes because of the thought-touch event.

However, here, only one possibility matters, at least in the thought realm, and we can arrive at it through mere elimination. Consider possibility two. It collapses because if it were a positive sum game, then it doesn’t explain the absence of the free rider problem in terms of expansion of thought, which is deeply intrinsic. One can argue that evolution is merely the manifestation or cause of this, depending on how you claim the causality. Nonetheless, the mere absence of even the possibility of free riding means it is not a positive sum game. The third possibility also doesn’t hold under scrutiny but requires us to consider the root of thought. If there is no change, then what triggers the origin of thought? The possibility of change should be guaranteed given that we know thought exists, which rules out possibility three. Thus, the thought-touch event is in a zero-sum environment. (The author here notes that what exactly is the feature that is zero-sum is irrelevant for the scope of this discussion because it can be as arbitrary as it can get, and the nature of the feature itself doesn’t impact the setting and for our discussion, let us call it Zero sum feature of thought or Zeft)

Now that we have established the zero-sum nature of a thought touch event let’s concretely state the flow direction in such an event. The host who initiates the event will see an increase in Zeft, and the entity in the complement, if touched by the thought, will see a decrease in Zeft. (in fact, it doesn’t even need to be strictly zero-sum as long as the direction is opposite.) By the same logic, we used to eliminate possibility three, Zeft must be significant enough (for every entity by symmetry) to warrant enough consideration at a fundamental level. If we are talking about kindness in the thought realm, then kindness essentially means the absence of thought, given that the span of thought is very close to the bounds of the universe. (which the author previously claimed as the objective for the expansion of thought) And if we look at life as the lagging manifestation or reflection of the thought realm, then the kindest thing one could do to the world is to cease to exist. Then, the existence of life requires as a pre-condition that the dial of kindness is not turned to max.

Moreover, the intensity of the desire to expand thought to the absolute indicates an absence of kindness or a bias against it. What is difficult to pinpoint, however, is what arises from what. Is it the nature of life in the manifested world that is creating these constraints on thought, or is it the constraints in the thought realm that are being realised as a zero-sum material game? Determining this would require much deeper and more careful thought.