Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death
James Chastek claims somewhere (I was not able to find the specific citation just now) that no one would die for a truth of mathematics; martyrdom, he claims, is only about religious doctrines or something very similar.
Is he right? Would someone die for mathematics?
In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith is tortured with the intention of getting him to believe that two and two make four (or some equivalent.)
'Do you remember,' he went on, 'writing in your diary, "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four"?'
'Yes,' said Winston.
O'Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.
'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?'
'Four.'
'And if the party says that it is not four but five -- then how many?'
'Four.'
The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston's body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O'Brien watched him, the four fingers still extended. He drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly eased.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four.'
The needle went up to sixty.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
In the novel, Winston is finally overcome. Does this mean that Orwell agrees with Chastek that a person would not die for mathematics? Not necessarily, since the implication of Chastek’s claim seems to be that the matter would not even come up; a person would not even resist in that scenario. And apart from this, it is not clear what Orwell’s personal position is. The position of the novel’s “Party,” on the other hand, is that their method works: they can not only make someone say the words, “two and two make five,” but they can make them believe them, or anything else they wish:
'The first thing for you to understand is that in this place there are no martyrdoms. You have read of the religious persecutions of the past. In the Middle Ages there was the Inquisition. It was a failure. It set out to eradicate heresy, and ended by perpetuating it. For every heretic it burned at the stake, thousands of others rose up. Why was that? Because the Inquisition killed its enemies in the open, and killed them while they were still unrepentant: in fact, it killed them because they were unrepentant. Men were dying because they would not abandon their true beliefs. Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame to the Inquisitor who burned him. Later, in the twentieth century, there were the totalitarians, as they were called. There were the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more cruelly than the Inquisition had done. And they imagined that they had learned from the mistakes of the past; they knew, at any rate, that one must not make martyrs. Before they exposed their victims to public trial, they deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity. They wore them down by torture and solitude until they were despicable, cringing wretches, confessing whatever was put into their mouths, covering themselves with abuse, accusing and sheltering behind one another, whimpering for mercy. And yet after only a few years the same thing had happened over again. The dead men had become martyrs and their degradation was forgotten. Once again, why was it? In the first place, because the confessions that they had made were obviously extorted and untrue. We do not make mistakes of that kind. All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them true.
…
Did I not tell you just now that we are different from the persecutors of the past? We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul.
The Party’s position is that they never make martyrs, even when they kill people. First they get the person to actually change.
We will return later to this point about changing or otherwise.
My unsubstantiated personal point of view
If someone literally put a gun to my head and said, “say that two and two make five, or die,” I am very confident that I would die rather than say those words in that context.
If I were tortured with the intention of making me say the same thing, I am confident that it would take pretty extreme torture to succeed, if it ever succeeded at all.
It is quite possible that no amount of torture would ever succeed. And I certainly would not specifically plan on giving in; there is not some theoretical level where I would say, “it isn’t worth it in that context, I would just say it. After all it is just words.”
Why not? Isn’t it true, even, that words said in that context would count for nothing? And if so, is the only difference between martyrdom and suicide press coverage?
What Does it Profit a Man
The above question is not merely rhetorical. There are some real similarities between martyrdom and suicide. For example, just as you can ask, “what do you gain by killing yourself?”, you can ask what I would gain by refusing say a certain set of words that, seemingly, would surely not count as making a claim, in a context where the result of refusing would simply be that I would die.
Even the answer is similar. As I said in the previous post, the true answer, the real reason someone kills themselves, is because they see it as the only way to know what they will do; the only way to know themselves.
My own answer here is rather similar. This is nothing unique about me. Many people, probably most people, have things that would induce a similar response in themselves. I heard an anecdote (sorry, I am not doing very well with citations today) about a home invasion where the burglar entered a couple’s bedroom with a gun and demanded that the man leave the room and lock himself in the bathroom. The man, reasonably presuming that the burglar intended to rape his wife, asked himself whether he would be able to live with himself afterwards, and decided that the answer was, “No.” So he refused to leave the room. The result he presumably expected was that he would be killed and that the burglar would still succeed in his plan. Thus, one could ask him what he expected to gain, for himself or for his wife. (For the record, the story actually had a happier ending; instead of shooting him, the burglar turned around and left the house.)
But as someone once said, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” The man in the story felt in some sense that it would change who he was, if he were to give in to the burglar’s demands. He would lose his own soul, so to speak. I think the same about the case of martyrdom for arithmetic (or anything along the same lines, for that matter.)
But what exactly is the problem here? Why not sell your soul, if you are paid enough?
This is where I would say the answer is somewhat similar to the answer of the one who commits suicide. If you are willing to do a thing that fundamentally changes you who are, at least without any limitation, there is simply no way to know what you might do or not do in the future. And for an intelligent being, this lack of self-knowledge is the ultimate catastrophe.
Does the Party Actually Change You?
Given the above answer, it makes sense to ask whether a person who submits to “the Party” (i.e. anyone would attempt to cause such a change) actually changes. Because if they do not, the answer does not make sense after all. Since you can submit and survive without changing, it would be wrong to claim that you cannot submit on the grounds that it would change you in catastrophic ways.
We can distinguish between what may be possible in principle, and what is likely in practice. And in practice the Party is right; giving in to them really does change a person, in the vast majority of cases. Consider the historical Japanese persecution of Christianity. As the article states, the policies diminished the Christian population from 500,000 to 20,000. Even though this happened over a period of several centuries, it does imply that the majority of Christians really did abandon their faith.
Why does this happen? Why would stepping on an image of Jesus or Mary change your opinions? Why would uttering a few words that you have no intention of actually asserting change your relationship with the truth? Why would it change your relationship with your wife if you are forced into “allowing” something that you cannot prevent anyway?
In the post, “A Visit to Morin,” I said that a Catholic who loses their faith really can get it back by going to confession, and that the reason for this is that the act amounts to the decision to believe. In a similar way, the Japanese Christian who decides to trample the image is deciding to stop believing, or at least to stop giving their beliefs any real weight. Which in practice will shortly come to the same thing.
Some conclusions
In the previous post I criticized Yudkowsky’s definition of intelligence as a specific kind of optimization. This criticism is relevant to this post as well. Under Yudkowsky’s definition, the justification I have given here for martyrdom likely cannot be sustained. Instead, “what are you getting out of this?” is a valid question with no reasonable answer. The person who undergoes martyrdom is not maximizing some goal, some property of the world; they are just acting in accordance with who they are. Nor is it possible to justify this type of definition using recursion; you cannot say, “oh, you are just trying to maximize self-knowledge.” For this explanation does not merely justify martyrdom, but also immediate suicide, in any circumstances whatsoever. Predictive processing does not “maximize” anything, just as a falling stone does not maximize nearness to the center or anything else; it just does what it does.
This is a not-so-subtle hint that Yudkowsky’s definition fails to explain the real world behavior of existing intelligence, and in a similar way I expect it to fail to predict the real world behavior of artificial intelligence.