IMAGINE . . .

Fifty-Nine Thought Experiments

That Tell You What You Think

EDWARD PACKARD
© 2023, 2024 Edward Packard
all rights reserved
 CONTENTS

Introduction
The Miracle Wizard
Fifty-Nine Thought Experiments:
1. At Age Seventeen, Would You Rather Have an
Exceptionally Wonderful Life Ahead of You, but Die
When You’re Fifty, Or Have a Mediocre and
Unrewarding Life and Live To Be One Hundred?
2. At Age Fifty, Would You Prefer Be Living a Wonderful
Life that’s About to End, or a Mediocre and
Unrewarding Life, Knowing that You’ll Live To Be One
Hundred?
3. How Does the Value of Mobility Compare with Being
Able To Look Back on a Wonderful Life?
4. Is It Better To Be Courageous or a Coward?
5. Luxurious Solitary Confinement.
6. Your Very Own Universe.
7. You Are a Character in a Computer Game Played by
an Unstable Adolescent.
8. You Die and Go to Heaven.
9. You Are About to Die, But Can Have a Second Life
as an Animal.
10. You Are Aging Backward, but No One Else Is.
11. Risking Everything To Get Set Up for Life.
12. You Are Still Alive and Feeling Fine Even Though
You’re 125.
13. Comfortably Ensconced in a Space Capsule, You
Start Falling Upward, Accelerating at the Same Rate
As You Would in Free Fall.
14. You Don’t Know When You’ll Die, but You Can
Choose How You’ll Die.
15. You are About to Die, but Have the Option of Living
as a Character of Your Choice in a Novel that Has
Become Real. The Events Described in It Are Actually
Happening.
16. What Would You Say If You Could Talk to Your
Earlier Self When You Were at a Much Younger Age?

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17. Turning Back the Clock and Living Life Forward from
When You Were Much Younger.
18. Imagine That What John Lennon Imagined in His Song
“Imagined” Happened.
19. Would you Rather Have Your Brain Uploaded into a
Special Purpose Super Computer than Be Dead?
20. You’re Living 30,000 Years Ago but Know Everything
You Know Now.
21. You’re Twenty Years Old, and You Have a Super
Advanced A.I Machine that Can Make the Right Decisions
for You Every Time.
22. Checking Out the Scene One Thousand Years from
Now.
23. Checking Out the Scene Fourteen Billion Years from Now.
24. You Have a Painful Epiphany.
25. Is Your Life Like a Novel?
26. Would You Want To Live Your Life Over Again after You
Die — the Exact Same Life?
27. Would You Want To Live Your Life Over Again after You
Die — Beginning with the Same Circumstances at Birth, but
Because of Chance Variations, It Will Play Out Differently.
28. Imagine that the Species Homo Erectus Is Still Extant.
29. How Would You React if You Won a Billion Dollars in a
Mega Jackpot Lottery?
30. Imagine that You’ve Been Transformed into Dark Matter.
31. Would You Be Willing To Reduce Your Future Life Span
by Ten Percent to Learn the Answers to Some Major
Scientific Questions and How the Future of Homo Sapiens
Plays Out?
32. If You Open a Particular Door in Front of You, the Rest of
Your Life May Be Consistently Wonderful.
33. It Seemed To Have Happened in an Instant: As far as You
Can Tell, Everyone in the World Has Disappeared but You.
34. What Duty, If Any, Do We Owe to Future Generations?
35. If You Could Have Three Famous Writers, Dead or Alive,
Join You for Dinner, Whom Would You Invite?
36. You’ve Been Sentenced To Live for a Year on a Remote
Small Uninhabited Island and Can Bring Only One Book
with You. What Book Would You Bring?
37. You Have the Chance To Have the Most Over-the-Top
Single Experience of Your Life that You Specify.
38. You Can Choose To Have a Feeling of Complete
Assurance that You’ll Go to Heaven When You Die.

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39. You Promised Your Uncle To Perform a Ten-Minute
Religious Ritual Every Day for the Rest of Your Life.
40. Can You Prove That You Are a Human Conversing with
René, a ChatBot, even though René Claims that It Is Human
and that You Are a ChatBot?
41. How Would You Feel When, on the Brink of Death, You
Learn that You Just Won a Nobel Prize?
42. Which of These Three Persons Would You Prefer To Be
in Your Next Life?
43. Imagine that You Had Never Been Born.
44. What if Logical Reasoning from a Sound Premise Leads
to a Repugnant Conclusion?
45. Would It Be the Right To Subject One Person To a Half
Hour of Agony to Save Ten Million T.V. Viewers from Missing
the Thrilling Final of the World Cup Soccer Match?
46. The Limits of Civic Duty: A Case Study.
47. Suppose Everyone Held the View that Free Will, as Most
People Think of It, Is an Illusion. .
48. Can a Person Change Sufficiently To Become Another
Person?
49. Can You Get Rid of Your Sense of Self?
50. Would You Want To Be Able To Dream After You Die?
51. Would You Like To Never Have Dreams When You’re
Sleeping?
52. Would You Be Willing To Be the Next Human Baby Born
in the World after You Die?
53. The (Infamous) Two Children Problem
(The Two-Child Problem); (The Two-Child Paradox).
54. If You Could Save the Life of Only One of These Three
People, Which One Would You Save?
55. You Are the Dictator of Policy Relating to Animals Bred
and Raised for Agricultural Purposes in the U.S.
56. Create Your Own Advisor.
57. A Brain Scan Reveals that within the Next Twenty-Four
Hours You’ll Have a Fatal Cerebral Hemorrhage.
58. Hundreds of Years after You Die, You Come Back to Life
but Only for an Hour.

59. You are an Earth Inspector.

5
 INTRODUCTION

Thought experiments are almost limitless in their diversity and

range. They are in the toolkits of many scientists and
philosophers. Einstein found them helpful in developing his
theories of special and general relativity. Military strategists
employ them in what they call war games. Law school and
medical school exams are replete with hypothetical cases —
thought experiments in which students are presented with a
set of facts and asked, Imagine that you are the judge (or the
doctor). How would you rule? (What would you prescribe?) We
all conduct thought experiments without realizing it, often as
simple as “What if it rains?” The British philosopher Derek
Parfit (1942 - 2017) was particularly keen on them. One of his
celebrated ones is the model for thought experiment #44 in
this book.
A thought experiment I’ve come upon a number of times is
the trolley problem, which has been postulated in various
forms. A version I remember asks you to imagine that you are
standing next to a switch that can be used to redirect a trolley
onto an alternate route. A trolley is coming along. Horrors: it’s
on a route such that, if it keeps going, it will kill three people
who are on the tracks beyond the switch. Fortunately, you can
save them by turning the switch and redirecting the trolley on
the alternate route. Unfortunately, if you do that, the trolley will
kill a person who is on the tracks on that route.
What will you do? You have seconds to decide. Pull the
switch, and you will have directly caused someone’s death.
But if you don’t pull the switch, three people, instead of one,
will die because of your inaction.
In one version of the trolley problem, in order to save three
people, instead of pulling a switch that will result in the trolley
killing one person, you have to push a person onto the tracks.
Aversion to making physical contact in such circumstances
tends to be stronger than acting remotely even though both
actions produce the same result. Philosophical inquiries can’t
ignore human emotions.
In his book Life is Hard (2022), the philosopher Kieran
Setiya asks, “Would you choose to save one person from an
hour of torment, or to relieve a multitude from mild

6
headaches?” In this experiment, unlike in the trolley problem,
no one dies, and the facts are more nebulous. What is meant
by “torment,” and how many is a “multitude”? It would be
futile to try to be precise, and there is no right or wrong
answer. Setiya, who suffers from chronic pain, tells of agonies
he has endured. His personal experience with pain, rather
than philosophical reasoning, may have formed his view that it
would be worse for one person to suffer torment for an hour
than for a multitude to have a mild headache.
One could argue that all novels, movies, and plays are
thought experiments or series of thought experiments. They
depict imagined characters, imagined situations, and
imagined actions. This is taken to an extra dimension in the
movie Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray. If you’ve seen it,
you probably remember that Murray’s character, Phil Connors,
is a crude cynical guy who wakes up the day after Groundhog
Day and finds that it’s Groundhog Day all over again, and this
keeps happening day after day. Connor’s successive
Groundhog Days are like a series of thought experiments,
exploring the consequences of acting different ways in the
same circumstances without affecting his real life (in this case
his real life in the movie).
This process is immensely frustrating but instructive for
Phil Connors. He learns what otherwise might never have
been possible: how to stop being a jerk. A Groundhog Day
comes when he behaves in a reasonably sensitive and
civilized way. The young woman he has been pursuing, who
was repulsed by his conduct on previous Groundhog days,
gets a version of him she finds appealing. His succession of
Groundhog Days ends.
Real life choices are rarely, if ever, so bizarre as the trolley
problem, or so incommensurable as the torment and mild
headaches problem, or so fantastical as the Groundhog Day
problem. Nonetheless, constructing hypothetical situations
and thinking about what would happen in various
contingencies can expand your thinking and give you a
window into your psychic state.
In the thought experiments presented in this book, I
describe a situation and ask what you would think or do in
these circumstances. Then, in most cases, to supply another
perspective, I say what I would think or do.
Almost without exception, I don’t claim to be giving the
right answer to these questions. Few of them have right or
wrong answers. The thought experiments in this book aren’t
intended to tell you what you should think; rather, they ask

7
you to consider what you think. This can be useful: Becoming
aware of what I think and of the consequences of failing to
think have freed me from insularity and improved my chances
that when the road ahead of me diverges, I’ll know which way
to go.

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 THE MIRACLE WIZARD

By way of accounting for the seemingly impossible situations

that arise in this book, I’m pleased to present to you the
Miracle Wizard, whom I’ll refer to from time to time as the Wiz.
As you’ll soon see, the Wiz has an extraordinary range of
imaginary powers, one of which he likes to show off by
appearing right in front of you, which he is about to do now.

9
FIFTY-NINE THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS

10
 #1

At Age Seventeen, Would You Rather Have an

Exceptionally Wonderful Life Ahead of You, but Die
When You’re Fifty, Or Have a Mediocre and
Unrewarding Life and Live To Be One Hundred?

Imagine that you are seventeen. You’re walking along on a

bright spring morning, thinking about how in two months
you’ll be graduating from high school, when you stop in your
tracks and blink.
The Miracle Wizard has appeared out of the blue and is
standing in your path. It’s not in his nature to bother with
formalities, like introducing himself or apologizing for startling
you, but you’ve been briefed about him, and you’re aware of
his extraordinary powers. You know that you’d better put up
with him — he might have an important influence on your life.
“It’s time for you to make a decision,” the Wiz says. “From
now on, you can either have a mediocre life, with more than
your share of troubles, heartbreak, and career problems, but
live until you’re one hundred, at which time you’ll die
peacefully in your sleep; or you can have a rewarding,
enjoyable, and accomplished life, including a happy marriage
and delightful children, but, sadly, you’ll die in your sleep a
few days after your fiftieth birthday. Once you’ve made your
choice, you’ll forget that we met — you won’t know what lies
ahead for you. But whichever of these two lives you decide
to have, that’s the one it will be.”

What a cruel choice, you think when you hear this. Life has
been good to you so far. The life you can have ahead of you
sounds even better, but if you choose to have it, you’ll only
live until you’re fifty. You don’t want to die that young. You’d
like to live to be one hundred.
Best to think a moment before making a decision. After
fifty, physically, you’ll be in decline. You’d hate to give up a
chance for a wonderful life just to have many years more of
an unenviable life, growing steadily older until you’re a
doddering senior citizen. You’re still pondering this dilemma
when the Wiz says, “Well, what’s your decision?”
* *

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If I were given this choice when I was seventeen, I’d probably
think that if I chose to have a wonderful life, though it will
only last until I’m fifty, I’ll have thirty-three great years ahead,
and that sounds better than a much longer life that’s dreary
and unsatisfying.
The Wiz told you that you’d forget having met him. If I
knew that my life was going to be cut off when I’m only fifty,
no matter how good it was, I’d probably think about it every
day — it would drag me down. But if I didn’t know I was
going to die prematurely, that doleful prospect wouldn’t hang
over me. I’d live happily, assuming that I would have as much
life expectancy as anyone, maybe more. In these
circumstances, from the perspective of a seventeen-year-old,
I think that living a great life to age fifty is the better deal.

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 #2

At Age Fifty, Would You Rather Be Living a

Wonderful Life that’s About to End, or a Mediocre
and Unrewarding Life, Knowing that You’ll Live To Be
One Hundred?

Imagine that in the previous experiment, you chose the

relatively short but wonderful life instead of the long but
mediocre life. The years have gone by, and now you’re fifty.
Life has been good to you. You have a great career, a
wonderful family, and you feel that in your work and in your
interactions with others, in a modest sense, you’ve made the
world a better place.
You’re feeling a warm glow of self-satisfaction when the
Wiz suddenly appears in front of you. As he had said would
be the case when you first met him, thirty-three years ago,
you had completely forgotten about him. Now it comes back
to you — the choice he gave you, and how you said that you
would prefer to have a wonderful life even though you’d die a
few days after your fiftieth birthday. You feel faint thinking
about it: You have only a few days to live!
“Relax,” the Wiz says. “I can arrange it so you don’t have
to die in a few days. We just have to reach an agreement on
something.”
You try to keep from shaking. “What’s that?”
“You’ll have to agree to having made the other choice—
having had a mediocre unsatisfying life — but you’ll have
good health and live to be one hundred.”
“Huh,” you exclaim. “How could that happen?”
“Simple,” the Wiz says. “I’ll wave my wand, and a
moment later, you’ll find yourself in the circumstances you
would be in today if you had chosen to live a long mediocre
life. You won’t have any sense of having lived the wonderful
life you’ve experienced. Instead, you’ll remember the entire
disappointing life you’ve led. The upside is that you’ll have
five decades of healthy life ahead of you.”
“But it will be a mediocre humdrum life,” you exclaim,
“and that’s what I’ll remember about my first fifty years. What
a come-down!”

13
 “I have to agree with you,” the Wiz says. “Though it’s
not as much of a come-down as having your life end a few
days from now. But you’re right: If you opt to change to the
long mediocre life, it’s not as if you’ll have lived the
wonderful life that you remember right now — you will
never have had it! Those great times won’t have happened.
Given all the considerations involved, what will you choose
to do?

Is it more important to you to be alive even if you’re a

nobody and not especially happy than to have lived a
wonderful life and soon be dead but be remembered for all
the good things you did and having your wonderful spouse
and children living on?

It took me some time to decide what I’d do in this situation.

I thought about what it is that would make a life great. It’s
not just a function of the amount of money you have or the
degree of success or status you attain. In a way it depends
how much spirit you have — what you make of life.
I’m trying to get my thinking straight about this. If I
accepted the Wiz’s offer to transition to the long mediocre
life, I could at least hope that it would get better. That
would mean a lot to me, even though right now, before I
make my choice, I know that it won’t get better. That
ignorance-is-bliss factor might tip the scales for some
people. I might opt for the long dull life if I didn’t feel that I
had a duty to stick with my present life even though it’s
about to end. If I chose to have lived the mediocre life, I’d
live to be one hundred, but the good times I’ve had in life
will never have happened. More important, I would be
committing my children to never having been born. That
seems almost as bad as killing them. It’s unfortunate, but it
seems like the right thing to do is to keep the life I’ve had
and prepare to die. At least I’d have a brief period during
which I could reflect with satisfaction about the wonderful
life I’ve had.
But this makes me think of what would be an even
starker choice. Suppose people close to you is not a
factor, and you’re not about to die, but already dead.
Would you rather be alive and have fifty years more ahead
of a mediocre and unsatisfactory life ahead of you, or to
have had a wonderful life in all respects except that you

14
recently died? From your perspective, does it make the
slightest difference what kind of life you lived once you’re
dead? Of course, once you’re dead, you don’t have any
perspective, so maybe that’s a meaningless question.

15
 #3

How Does the Value of Mobility Compare with

Being Able To Look Back on a Wonderful Life?

Imagine that you are single, and in your late seventies, and
recently moved into a retirement home. You may be looking
back at the wonderful life you’ve had, or you may be looking
back on the unsatisfying life you’ve had. It seems like a no-
brainer when the Wiz gives you the option as to which of
these two your past life has been like.
“A wonderful happy life, of course,” you say.
Not to your great surprise –- it’s just like the Wiz to throw
a curve ball like this –– he tells you that if you’ve been living a
wonderful happy life, you’re about to be diagnosed with
irremediable spinal stenosis and will have to use a walker to
get around for the rest of your life; whereas, if you’ve been
leading a mediocre unsatisfying life, thanks to a successful
course of physical therapy, you’ll be fully mobile and would
even be able to play tennis, if you knew how to play or could
afford to learn.

Other considerations being equal, in your late seventies,

would you rather have had an unsatisfying life, but have
excellent mobility, or be severely hampered in your activities,
but able to look back on the wonderful life you lived?

I would go for having had the unsatisfying life coupled with

excellent mobility. I’d try to think of a way to avoid looking
back on my unsatisfying life — I would try to cultivate a state
of mind such that I could dwell on positive things. I think I
could convince myself that, regardless of whether my life up
until now has been satisfying or not, all that has happened is
in the past, and that my focus will be on the present and the
future.

16
 #4

Is It Better To Be Courageous or a Coward?

The Wiz tells you that you are about to start a whole new life
and will have no memory of the one you’ve been living up
until now. Luck will play a big role in the kind of
circumstances in which you’ll find yourself, but you have
been granted one option before your new life begins. You’ll
be allowed to choose whether to be courageous or a
coward.

Would you choose to be courageous or to be a coward?

`“Well, goodness,” I’m guessing you’d say. “Wouldn’t

anyone rather be courageous than a coward?”
“Maybe; maybe not,” the Wiz says. “Before you decide
which you want to be, let me give you an example of how
this might play out in the life you’ll be living:
“Imagine that you’re in your mid-twenties and in good
physical condition, and you’re walking past a modest two-
story house and are shocked to see smoke pouring out of
one of the second-story windows. A car pulls up alongside
you. The driver, an elderly man, lowers his window and
waves his cell phone. ‘I’m calling nine-one-one,’ he yells.
“Seconds later, a frail-looking woman, accompanied by a
thin cloud of smoke, stumbles out the front door. She’s
coughing and can barely walk.
“‘Help!’ the woman cries, pointing up at another second-
story window. 'My granddaughter is sleeping in that bedroom
— she’s just a baby!’
“You glance up at where the woman is pointing. The baby
must be in a bedroom at the corner of the house opposite
the room with smoke pouring out. You’re trying to gather
your wits when you see flames shooting up from a hole in the
roof in the middle of the house.
“You try to think fast and keep calm. You don’t hear any
sirens. It may take several minutes for the fire department to
arrive, maybe more.”
The Wiz pauses, perhaps trying to achieve dramatic
effect, then continues:

17
 “At this point, you don’t have a decision to make. You will
have already chosen whether to be courageous or a coward
in this life. If you chose to be a coward, you stay put and say
to the baby’s grandmother, ‘The fire department should be
here any moment!’
“You peer anxiously down the street, hoping to see a fire
truck coming. It seems like forever, but less than a minute
later, you hear a siren; then you see a fire engine turning a
corner and heading toward you. Thank goodness, you think,
help is on the way! But will it get here in time?”
The Wiz sweeps his right arm through the air and doesn’t
answer the question he asked. Instead, he continues:
“That’s not what happens if you are a courageous person.
In that case, almost the instant the woman says that there’s a
baby sleeping upstairs, you take a deep breath, rush into the
house and run up the stairs, intent on saving the baby.”
“Then what happens?” you ask.
The Wiz rubs his eyes. “You make it upstairs. There’s
smoke in the hallway. It takes you a few moments to get your
bearings, but you find the baby’s bedroom, pick her up from
her crib, and rush out of the bedroom only to find that the
stairs you just climbed are engulfed in flames. You rush back
into the bedroom, still holding the baby, and open the front
window. A fire truck is pulling up in front of the house.
Firemen jump out and begin unreeling hoses. You yell at
them. One of them looks up and sees you with the baby in
your arms. He runs up to side of the house beneath you. You
drop the baby. He gracefully catches her. The baby is saved,
but the flames are advancing. You rush back to the top of the
stairs, thinking you can get down safely now that you’re not
carrying the baby, but you see there’s no chance, so you
rush back to the bedroom. You realize you’ll have to jump out
the window. At that moment the roof collapses, crushing you
to death.”
You feel stunned, hearing this account.
“Sorry,“ the Wiz says, ”but that’s what might happen if
you’re courageous.”
“And if I’m a coward?” you ask.
“If you’re a coward, you wouldn’t try to rescue the baby. It
would have been crushed by the falling roof or burned to
death before the firefighters have a chance to place a ladder
against the side of the house. You would feel terrible. You’d
spend months trying to come to terms with how you didn’t try
to save the baby. You’d lie awake at night, thinking about it.”
Hearing this, conflicting emotions swirl in your head.

18
 “Now you have another chance to decide,” the Wiz says.
“When your new life begins, do you choose to be
courageous or be a coward?”

If you choose to be a coward, turn to page 19.

If you choose to be courageous, turn to page 20.

19
 “Call me a coward, Wiz,” you say. “I don’t mind. If
something like what you described did happen, it would be
too bad I failed to save the baby, but I’d still be alive! I’d
rather keep living than be a dead hero.”
“Sorry” is one of the Wiz’s favorite words, and he uses it
now:
“Sorry,” he says: the trouble is that, even if you never
encountered a situation in which courageousness and
cowardliness come into play, you’d never feel as good about
yourself as you would if you had chosen to be courageous.
Your decision would take a toll every day. If you had decided
to be courageous, you would have had a slightly greater
chance of dying at a younger age than if you were a coward,
but you’d feel better about yourself. You would live a more
satisfying and noble life. Next time, if you have a chance,
choose to be courageous.”

20
“I choose to be courageous,” you tell the Wiz. He nods and
tells you that you made the right decision. He goes on to say
that courageous people tend to feel better about themselves
than cowardly people do, and that they should: They are
better people than cowards.

I agree with the Wiz, but he might have added that people
aren’t always cowardly or always courageous. I think of
myself as courageous, but maybe I’ve suppressed memories
of acting cowardly. One such memory I didn’t suppress is of
a time when I was fifteen years old and I was in a room with
some other guys, and one of them — an aspiring alpha-type
who was on the school wrestling team –– was taunting and
administering little jabs at another kid. I felt very
uncomfortable and had an urge to rebuke this bully. I’d been
bullied myself and knew what it was like. I wouldn’t have
been able to best this thuggish character physically, but I
could have called him out on his behavior. The kid being
bullied would have appreciated that. Instead, I sat squirming
nervously without saying or doing anything until the episode
mercifully reached an end.
Sometimes, as in my case, courage gives way to
cowardice. Sometimes courage overcomes cowardice. My
father was a blimp pilot in World War I. His job was to patrol
the U.S. coastline and drop depth charges on German
submarines. He never located any, but on one mission his
blimp developed a leak and slowly lost altitude until it
flopped into the ocean. Pop and his crewman took to their
life raft. They drifted for several days and were almost out of
rations when they were spotted by sailors on a Chilean
freighter. The ship altered course and turned toward them.
Rescue seemed imminent, but then the ship turned away
and resumed its original course.
That was probably the lowest moment in Pop’s life, but to
his amazement, the ship changed course again, this time
turning toward them. It continued its approach, then slowed
almost to a stop as it pulled alongside the raft. Sailors
lowered a cargo net. Pop and his crewman climbed aboard.
The captain met them and explained that, after changing
course with the intention of rescuing them, he became afraid
that the raft with two men in it was a trap laid by a German
sub commander. He ordered the helmsman to resume the
ship’s original course. Almost as soon as he had made that
decision, another emotion took hold: distress at having

21
deserted two men in peril. He ordered the helmsman to
change course again and head toward the raft. I suspect that
he felt happy after taking Pop and his crewman aboard.

22
 #5

Luxurious Solitary Confinement

The Miracle Wizard is back, this time with the sad news that
you have only a few days to live, but he quickly adds that
you needn’t despair: Instead of passing into nonexistence,
you can choose to live in solitary confinement, not in any way
resembling a prison, but in a beautifully designed
extraordinarily well-equipped house on a large lush island
with a fabulous climate and sparkling clear lakes, streams,
and waterfalls. Not only that: there’s an impressive mountain
nearby with a trail leading to the summit, from which you’ll
have a superb view of the ocean in all directions. You’ll have
a tremendous stock of books you can read, musical
recordings you can listen to, video games you can play,
movies you can watch, virtual realities you can experience, a
state-of-the-art kitchen, and an ever-stocked pantry and
refrigerators always filled with your favorite foods.
Your house has beautiful surroundings, a fifty-meter-long
swimming pool, heated to whatever temperature you like,
and use of a nearby ski and spa resort operated by
unfailingly courteous robots. You’re guaranteed good health,
and you’re likely to enjoy having every kind of workout
equipment, a sauna, a lovely garden visited by a great variety
of song birds, and you’ll have many other perquisites, all
tailored to your interests and tastes. The downside of this
attractive setup is that you will not encounter a single other
human being, ever.
Since the alternative is to resign yourself to dying in a few
days, you’re about to take the Wiz up on this offer when he
tells you that you’ll never be able to leave this place. You
won’t age, you can’t get sick, but neither can you die. Any
attempt at suicide will be futile. How long you’ll continue to
exist in this paradise is unknown. “It could be forever,” the
Wiz says.

Given the restrictions and limitations that come with it, do

you opt for luxurious solitary confinement, or resign yourself
to dying in a few days and not coming back to life?

* *

23
Hmmm. The Wiz said that this new life might last forever, and
no suicide attempt would work. You’ve read that solitary
confinement has such a bad effect on people that many
consider it to be a form of torture. Taking the Wiz up on his
proposal might be fun for a while — you’d be living in luxury,
not in a jail cell — but it would take a toll on you. Over the
long run, it might indeed be like being tortured. It seems best
not to take a chance.
Having said that, it occurred to me that being dead is
solitary confinement too, though you’re not conscious of it.
On further reflection, I’m inclined to accept the Wiz’s offer.
I’m guessing that I could find enough human company in
books and movies and listening to human voices singing
even if only on recordings. Then again — alone forever? I
don’t know about that. I never thought eternal bliss could be
scary, but this form of it is.

24
 #6

Your Very Own Universe

Many physicists and cosmologists think it’s likely that there

are multitudes of universes. They have no proof that this is
so, but the existence of other universes would resolve some
cosmic enigmas for which there’s no present explanation. In
any case, there’s almost unanimous agreement among
experts that the universe we are in came into existence
about 13.8 billion years ago when the event occurred that
came to be known as the Big Bang.
You have read about this, so you know what the Wiz is
talking about when he appears and informs you that there
are indeed multitudes of universes and that new ones are
coming into existence all the time. Moreover, he says that
they form so readily that he can assign you to be in charge of
one. You can be that universe’s God!

Do you say to the Wiz, “No thanks. That’s more responsibility

than I want to take on right now.” Or do you say, “Sure, I’ll
give it a whirl.”

Assuming that you choose the latter option, you have quite a
task ahead. According to the instruction manual for universe
creators that the Wiz has given you, your first step is to
decide whether you want to create a universe in which the
physical laws and parameters are such that life can emerge.
The Wiz informs you that the vast majority of universes are
flops. The laws of physics that obtain in them are such that
they either collapse or blow apart, sometimes within
milliseconds after they come into existence.
That’s no fun, you think. You want to have living
organisms in your universe.
“No problem,” the Wiz says, after reading your mind. He
gives you specifications for satisfactory physical laws and
parameters. You crank them in, and whoosh — you’re
witnessing your universe’s Big Bang.

25
 Fortunately, you can fast forward, so you don’t have to
wait several billion years, which is what it takes before life
starts evolving in even the most promising new universes. As
soon as that happens in your universe, reports begin
reaching you (thankfully much faster than at the speed of
light, which, from your divine standpoint, is exceedingly
sluggish). Proto-bacteria have appeared on thousands of
planets in one of the first galaxies to form. About a hundred
thousand trillion billion more proto-bacteria will form in
billions of your universe’s galaxies during the next few billion
years, and you won’t have to lift a finger to make it happen.
What have you wrought?
That’s not an idle question. Given that conditions in this
universe are quite similar to those in the universe you grew
up in, within another few billion years, and maybe sooner,
sentient creatures — animals — will appear and evolve.
You know that life has never been easy for most sentient
creatures that have lived on Earth. The philosopher Thomas
Hobbes said that, for people without a government, life is
poor, nasty, brutish, and short. That’s been the case for the
majority of humans through the ages. For animals with
smaller brains than ours, circumstances have been even
worse, which reminds me that the philosopher Arthur
Schopenhauer concluded that life is something that
shouldn’t have happened.
As the God of your universe, you have tremendous power,
but some weighty questions have been thrust upon you; for
example, in your universe do you want to have adorable-
looking animals similar to seals that have to go through their
lives in terror that at any moment they’ll be chewed to pieces
by the equivalent of a polar bear or a killer whale? And what
about people? A tiny percentage of people on Earth have
lived very well, but huge numbers have been no better off
than weasels and toads. Countless millions of humans have
spent their lives as slaves. Are you willing to let that happen
in your universe? You could be the agent causing thousands
of billions of creatures similar to people to spend much of
their lives in pain. You don’t want that! Is there a way to fix
your universe so that life isn’t as hard for creatures as it’s
been in your home universe?
Of course, echoing the philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz, you
could say, “Look, the planet Earth in the universe I grew up in
is the best of all possible worlds, so give me a break.” Or you
could be less crude and say, “What about all the great

26
achievements of humans in art, music, and science? I’m not
going to stop that from happening in my universe!”

How are you going to make a better universe than the one
we’re in without it being boring, and is that even possible?

Maybe it’s possible, although it may be that creatures need

to endure some adversity, even pain, so they can have
challenges to overcome, something to add zest and
spiritedness to their lives. In any case, there’s clearly too
much suffering and cruelty in our universe. What can you do
to prevent it in yours? Suppose you instilled a compassion
gene in every sentient being. The average amount of
compassion that every member of every species in your
universe has will be a notch greater than it would be if such
creatures had evolved without the nudge you’re giving them.
A disturbing thought comes to mind: Would creatures
whose genetic code had been designed that way function
properly? Animals and human-like creatures in your universe
might need natural selection rather than a divine gene
tinkerer to survive. You realize that this is true when you
consider how long a hyena with a compassion gene would
survive in its pack.
Is there a way to have no hyenas in your universe — no
carnivores? Could you have one where the pretty creatures
that evolve will be content munching on grass and fruits and
nuts and so forth and not live in fear?
If you achieved that, then, with no predators to keep them
in check, they would probably multiply exponentially and
devour all the edible plant life. They would compete more
and more, biting and stomping each other to death in the
battle for plant food. How can you avoid such unintended
consequences, ones you can think of and ones you can’t?
That’s a big question for you.
I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be downbeat. I wish you good
luck with your new universe, but don’t have any illusions. It’s
not all peaches and cream being God.

27
 #7

You Are a Character in a Video Game Being Played by an

Unstable Adolescent

You are living in a computer simulation. You’re the avatar of

an unstable adolescent (the “U.A.” who is playing a video
game). The guy who is manipulating you wants you to
succeed. He wants you to overcome the Krogicides who are
trying to capture you and drag you off to the Krellium mines,
where you’ll have to work twenty-two hours a day doing
slave labor while toxic fumes rise around you and orange-
eyed lizards nip at your heels.
Permit me to digress. Are you aware that some big-
brained hominims, like the philosopher Nick Bostrom, for
example, think that we humans are all living in a computer
simulation? This could really be happening, so the U.A.
himself may be living in a simulation. He may be at the mercy
of the overlords, as I’ll call them. They may be responsible for
his unstableness!
This is not a pretty scenario, but, in your case, there’s a
silver lining. Thanks to the Miracle Wizard, unlike every other
avatar in a video game, you can see that the U.A. is
unwittingly leading you down a path where Krogicides are
waiting. You want to veer off the track you’re supposed to be
moving on. You’ve got to do this to save yourself.
At the moment, the U.A. is distracted. He’s
exchanging text messages with his girlfriend instead of
manipulating you and watching out for Krogicides. You don’t
wait to make your move:
There. You managed to go off the trail you were on. Or so
you think. It might have been the overlords who turned you
so that you were facing and moving in a different direction
and made you think you did it of your own volition. In any
event, you were able to hide behind a boulder before a
Krogicide scout came by. You’re safe for the moment, but
you’d like to get back to base camp before the U.A. starts
paying attention.
Oh, oh. You feel a tug on your shoulder — you’re being
pushed along. The U.A. is paying attention now, and he’s
eager to keep you from getting captured. Good for him. He’s
trying. He feels smug. He thinks he saved you, but he
doesn’t realize how you helped him (or the overlords helped

28
you help him). What a lucky U.A. he is to have you as his
avatar!
It won’t last. He stood up and is staring aimlessly out the
window, wishing for something but he’s not sure what.
The U.A. isn’t playing, but you feel yourself moving on the
board, walking on a path that runs along a cliff overlooking
the sea. This is remarkable. The overlords are playing the
game without bothering to have a human thinking he’s
playing it!
You pass a shabby white cottage. The front door is ajar.
Now you’ve stopped. The overlords have stopped playing
with you. At least it seems so. You’d like to go into the
cottage and see what’s there.

Do you try to enter the cottage?

Or stay still and not risk attracting attention?

It’s a tough call. If I were the U.A.’s avatar, I’d want to see
what’s in the cottage. That’s what I’d advise: Try to find out
what’s inside; except suppose the overlords notice that
you’re moving by yourself: From their point of view, the game
would be having a malfunction. You could be deleted with a
click of one of their big pudgy fingers. (I don’t know if they
have big pudgy fingers — I’m just guessing.)
It’s probably best for you to play it safe and not move on
your own. You stand motionless, but, after a while, you
realize that you’re not moving — you don’t have the power to
move! You’re frozen in time. At least it seems that way—such
things happen. But thankfully it’s not as if the seemingly real
person that is you is frozen in time. It’s just you as an avatar.
The seemingly real you has escaped from the U.A.’s control.
You know this has happened because you are back in what
you think of as real life, except that you’re not in control of
your own will. Some force is tugging at you, moving you
toward the kitchen, making you feel like you want a snack.
You feel anticipatory pleasure.
Just as good and bad things can happen in a computer
simulation as in real life (if there is a real life, and we — all of
us — aren’t living in a computer simulation and aren’t able to
say anything about real life), it’s in seemingly real life and not
in a computer simulation that you have reached the kitchen.
You open the fridge door, or the overlords have caused you
to open the fridge door.

29
 Hmmm. Leftover chocolate layer cake. You take it out and
have a bite. You smile. It may only be simulated chocolate
layer cake, but it tastes real.

30
 #8

You Die and Go to Heaven

You lived a good life and tried to be a good person and

regretted your moral failings. You may not have followed
whatever special religious ritual would swing wide the pearly
gates, but it turns out that the rules are looser than you had
feared they would be. Within a short slice of eternity after you
died, you found yourself in . . . What else could it be when
you’re walking on a cloud, and all the souls you see have
beneficent smiles on their androgynous faces, and you hear
lovely music, except a bit heavy on the harps, and you’re
gliding along— no need for a tedious succession of lifting
one foot off the ground, and then the other, and then the
other . . .
It is indeed pleasant, and I won’t go on about it here. You
haven’t felt this cheerful in a long time, if ever. . . until you
think about tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, which
was said about life on Earth by a famous character after he’d
had a particularly bad day, but it occurs to you that it might
be applicable to anyone’s afterlife as well.

Assuming that you would be admitted, which you are aware

is doubtful, would you want to go to heaven when you die?

If you need some guidance before answering this question,

you might be interested to know that Emily Dickinson visited
heaven when she was still alive and what she thought about it:

Almost contented
I could be
'Mong such unique
Society.

31
 #9

You Are About to Die But Can Have

a Second Life as an Animal.

Had not for each of us the ball of the great cosmic roulette
wheel fallen in the slot marked homo sapiens, we might have
been born as members of a non-human species. We’re lucky
we aren’t cockroaches or some such unpleasant even-to-
think-about creature.
In my Choose Your Own Adventure book You Are a Shark,
I imagined that you the reader were successively one of
several animal species. (This was written before I’d heard of
Thomas Nagel’s famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”)
To whatever extent one can imagine what it’s like to be
another species (not much, Nagel says), thinking about this
might make one appreciate being human. The lives of most
members of other species are not enviable. Imagine being a
member of a herd of impalas, one or two of which are picked
off by lions every few nights. It’s best, generally, to be at the
top of the food chain. That was true before humans came
along, at least. Early humans risked going hungry a lot, but
they didn’t have to worry as much about predators as
impalas do unless they were juveniles or well past prime,
though they faced other perils, for instance, snakes, disease-
bearing insects, and each other.

If you were about to die and had the option to be reborn as

an animal, would you give it a try, assuming that you could
choose the species of animal you would be? If so, what
would that be?

I would be tempted to accept this offer if I could be an

animal that has certain wonderful experiences that a human
can never have. I’d be willing to risk being an eagle, or an
albatross, or an orca, or even a sperm whale and see what
it’s like to dive down half a mile and battle a giant squid.
Maybe I’ll backtrack on that. I wouldn’t want to have been
Moby Dick. Marine mammals have to worry about humans

32
hunting them, ships mowing them down, choking on plastics,
drinking polluted water and enduring human-made noise.
Ever since humans arrived on the scene, they have been
killing and abducting animals, enslaving them, breeding them
to their liking, and driving untold numbers of species into
extinction. it would seem better, as a general principle, to be
an animal living in prehuman times. Are there exceptions?
I’ve known dogs that had a pretty cushy life. Champion
racehorses in retirement are said to live well. When I was in
the Navy, I watched dolphins riding the bow wave of the ship
I was on. They were having a fine time. Elephants may, on
average, be more thoughtful than humans. If I were an
animal, I’d want to be a lucky one.

33
 #10

You Are Aging Backward, but No One Else Is.

Here’s the Miracle Wizard again. The last thing he would ever
do is ask how things are going for you, or how your family is,
or talk about the weather. As usual, he jumps right in:
“If you tell me to wave my wand, you’ll start growing
younger at the same rate that you and everyone else have
been growing older. Before you decide if you want to do this,
there are certain aspects of this condition I want you to be
aware of. You may have seen the movie, The Curious Case of
Benjamin Button. If so, I don’t want you to be confused by it.
The title character in the movie was born having all the
features of an old man, and he aged backward throughout
his life. He’d never had a prior life, so he’d had no prior
experience even though he looked as if he had. In your case,
if you accept my offer to age backward, you’ll retain all the
memory and possess all the skills and knowledge that you’ve
acquired during your present life. As you grow younger, the
gap between your years of experience and those of everyone
else your age will increase at the rate of two years per year
because each year you grow a year younger, you gain a
year’s experience, and the people you become contemporary
with are all a year younger than the ones you were
contemporary with the previous year, so, on average, they
will have had a year’s less experience than the ones you
were contemporary with the previous year. To the extent that
experience imparts wisdom, you will grow increasingly wise
at a rapid rate compared to everyone else who is biologically
the same age you are in any particular year. Neat, don’t you
think?
“And keep in mind, you won’t be retracing the life you
lived in reverse. If, let’s say, you broke a leg at one point in
your life, there’s no reason to think you’ll break it again when
you’ve retro-aged to the age when it happened. But that
doesn’t mean your life will be risk free. You might not have
broken a leg last time, but break it this time.

You feel anxious, trying to think this through. If you go along

with it, you’ll get younger at the same rate at which you got

34
older from the time you were born. Take your age right now
and count all the way back to a few months before you were
born. At that point, you’ll be too young to survive outside the
womb, and that’s when you’ll die if you haven’t died sooner
during the years when you were getting younger. How do you
feel about this? Would you be glad to have aging backward
happen to you?

If you are, say, about ten years old, you wouldn’t be happy at
this prospect. In two or three years you’ll be considerably
smaller and weaker. Your reading and math scores will be
way above average for your biological age — maybe off the
charts — but you’ll be too puny for your former friends, who
are now about twelve or thirteen, and your new seven-year-
old contemporaries will likely seem like the childish little kids
they are even though they’re the same size you are.
If you’re in your nineties, like me, this is a completely
different situation. Getting steadily younger will be a welcome
development. Instead of being in terminal decline, you can
expect many decades of increasing physical capability and
continuing progress in your career. Think how much more life
and work experience you’ll have had!
If all goes well, you’ll eventually have retro-aged long
enough so that you’ll be a teenager again (though you won’t
think like one), followed by slipping into pre-teen years and
having diminishing options. You’ll lose your driver’s license
because you can no longer see over the steering wheel and
your feet can’t reach the pedals. Sooner than you’d like,
you’ll face the dismaying future of the retro-aging ten-year-
old mentioned above.
Even while you’re still in your prime, your situation will be
problematical. Tensions are bound to arise as your spouse or
partner ages at the same rate you are retro-aging. Your
continuing chronological divergence with your former
contemporaries is likely to distance you from close friends, a
process that will become more pronounced every year. You
will lose a valuable bond with others because you won’t
share with them the common experience of aging. By the
time you’re a teenager, your old friends may find you too
young-looking to tolerate. The final year or two will be
comparable to the dementia you might suffer in old age. Who
will take care of you? Not your parents or uncles or aunts —

35
they will have died long before you retro-aged into being a
little kid.
Despite these limitations, for a lot of people, retro-aging,
like forward aging, could be good while it lasts.

36
 #11

Risking Everything To Get Set Up for Life

Because of some mysterious transformation, you find that

you are twenty years old and about to finish your sophomore
year in college. You’re in excellent physical condition and
feeling psychically well balanced and reasonably happy, but
you’re apprehensive about what career you’ll pursue and
about the large student debt you’ve run up, and you’re
apprehensive about your future generally. You happen to be
mulling over these challenges when the Miracle Wizard
appears, unannounced, as usual. You weren’t expecting him,
but you’re not surprised when the first thing he says is:
“I have a spectacular deal for you!”
“Really,” you say, trying not to sound as skeptical as you
feel.
“No need to go for it if you don’t want to,” the Wiz says.
“Maybe you’re not interested in hearing what it is.”
“I am. Please go ahead,” you say.
“This would involve dropping out of college for a year or
two, but the payoff is tremendous. It will get you totally set
up for life.”
“Really?”
“Really. An incredibly rich donor will finance all your
expenses, and if you complete your assignment within two
years, he’ll pay you ten million dollars.”
This makes you more skeptical than ever. “What’s the
assignment?” you ask.
“Actually, there are four possibilities. You can pick
whichever one you want, agreeing to complete it in less than
two years. All you have to do is choose which assignment
you prefer, and you’ll be on your way to earning ten million
dollars!”
“I’m listening,” you say warily.
“Here are your options:”

“First: Sail around the world single-handed making only

four stops of no more than one week each to get resupplied
and make repairs or replace equipment as necessary. In the
course of your voyage you’ll have to travel about thirty

37
thousand nautical miles. The donor will provide you with a
fully equipped, state of the art, thirty-six-foot overall length,
twenty-seven-foot waterline length, sloop with self-steering
capability and all supplies and provisions needed for getting
underway and whatever you need at reprovisioning stops.
He’ll also provide you with six-months intensive training in
ocean sailing and navigating by top experts before you set
out. Many people have accomplished such a voyage,
including ones in boats much less well-equipped and
supplied as yours will be. There are risks, of course, for
example, storms that no boat this size could survive, being
run down by a large ship, falling overboard, being attacked
by pirates, going off course and hitting a reef, becoming
seriously ill or injured with no medical assistance available,
and colliding with debris, like an empty shipping container as
happened to the character Robert Redford played in his solo
sailing trip in the movie All Is Lost. In the best of
circumstances, this voyage will be physically and emotionally
demanding.

“Second: Ride a bicycle (pedal power only) from Prudhoe

Bay, Alaska, on the Arctic Ocean to Ushuaia, Argentina, on
the Strait of Magellan, almost at the southern tip of South
America, a distance of about ninety-five hundred miles. Your
trip will be fully financed, including the cost of a top-of-the-
line mountain bike, spare tires and replacement parts,
camping gear and food supplies. Before you set out, you’ll
be given three months of rigorous professional training and
physical conditioning at no expense to you. There are risks,
of course — being struck by trucks or cars, falling ill or
having an accident with no medical assistance available,
and, when you’re traveling through certain areas, being
attacked by robbers and thugs.

“Third: Climb Mt. Denali, the highest peak in North America,

which rises twenty thousand, three hundred feet above sea
level and involves a thirteen-thousand- foot elevation gain
from base camp. As with your other options, all expenses will
be paid by the donor, including rigorous six-months aerobic
and high-altitude training and preparation in mountaineering
skills, plus the services of a professional guide who will
accompany you on your climb to the top. Fortunately, you’ll
be able to carry a supply of oxygen with you — you may
need it as you approach the summit. There are risks, of
course, Fifty percent of those who attempt to reach Denali’s

38
summit turn back along the way. Some never make it back to
base camp. Perils include avalanches, falls, hypothermia,
dehydration, altitude sickness, and physical and mental
exhaustion.

“Fourth: It’s unlikely that this final option will be as physically

demanding as the first three, but it’s less clear what’s
involved, and, like the others, it’s not risk-free. It came about
because the incredibly rich donor who is offering you these
choices is concerned about the ongoing destruction of the
Amazon rainforest. He would like to get an inside look at
conditions there by having an agent embedded in the
Kayapo tribe. The tribe looks favorably upon him because he
supplied them with a medicine they desperately needed.
They asked what they could do for him in return. He
requested that they let a friend live with them for a year and
learn their language. The friend would not have any special
status, but would live just as if he or she were one of them.
“If you take on this assignment, you will be that ‘friend’
and live with the Kayapo people for an entire year. You’ll have
three months advance special training including learning the
rudiments of the Kayapo language before you move in with
them. As is the case with the other assignments that you
have a chance to take on, all your expenses will be paid by
the incredibly rich donor. During the year living with the
Kayapo, you’ll have no contact with the outside world, but
the donor will try to help you leave safely after your year of
residency ends.

“Whichever assignment you take on, you must agree that

you are attempting it at your own risk and that you’ll
complete it within two years from the time your training
begins. Your ten-million-dollar award will be paid
upon completion of the assignment. If you fail to complete it
within two years, you get nothing. And by the way, in none of
these assignments can you quit and come back and try
again later.

Do you tell the Wiz that you’ll take on one of these four
assignments? If so, which one?

If I’d had this chance after my sophomore year in college, I

would have jumped at it, and the prospect would be even

39
more attractive today because of advances in technical
equipment.
I think you’ll agree with me that the best decision wouldn’t
necessarily turn on which activity you prefer among sailing,
biking, mountain climbing, or living with a primitive rainforest
tribe. Other factors to consider are how long it would take to
complete your assignment, how much risk of death or
serious injury there is, and how much risk there is that you
couldn’t complete the assignment, in which case you would
have lost a year or two of college with no improvement in
your finances.
That’s one way of looking at this offer. But whichever
assignment you choose, even if you quit after completing
only part of it, you’ll have great training and a wonderful life
experience, one that would have been over-the-top
expensive if you’d had to pay for it yourself. In all four
possible cases, it’s bound to be educational — like taking a
great course in meeting challenges, developing skills, and
getting immersed in nature in a way that you never would
have otherwise.
Climbing Denali would be the easiest of these to complete
in a relatively short space of time, even including six months
of rigorous training and conditioning. Keep in mind, though,
that the risk of having to turn back and losing the chance to
make ten million dollars is probably the greatest for this one.
Biking from Prudhoe Bay to the southern tip of South
America could take over a year including training and
preparation.
Sailing around the world could take well over a year,
including training and outfitting and four weeks spent for
reprovisioning stops. Fear of loneliness or vulnerability might
be a deciding factor. On the upside, most of your time would
be spent in a relaxed state, with plenty of time for reading or
listening to audio books and contemplating the wonders of
the sea and the sky.
I would guess risk of death to be roughly the same in all
four ventures, and all four would be over-the-top great life
experiences, each worth embarking upon even if you weren’t
making ten million dollars. I suggest that you accept the Wiz’s
offer, following your instincts as to which assignment to take
on. Personally, I would try to climb Denali and hope I wouldn’t
be among the fifty percent who don’t make it to the top.

40
 #12

You Are Still Alive and Feeling Fine

Even Though You’re 125.

Imagine what your life would be like if you were still alive and
have reached the age of 125. You’re the oldest person in the
world, and the next oldest is only 117. You are able to walk
with a cane and engage in interesting conversations, your
mental faculties are intact, and you don’t look a day over
110.
You reside in an assisted living facility. Your hearing isn’t
good enough to enjoy music, and your eyes tire if you read
for more than a few minutes at a time. You have to be helped
getting into and out of the rocking chair where you spend
most of your time. All your contemporaries are dead. You
have no spouse or partner. All your progeny are dead or can’t
be located except for your great grand-daughter, Eliza, who
visits you a couple of times a year.
You are barely aware — and hardly care — that you’re an
international sensation. Doctors, physiologists, and other
specialists want to study you. They want to solve the mystery
of how you’ve been able to live so long. They offer to pay
you to cooperate with them. Not that you need the money.
You’re making a lot from product endorsements — the cereal
you eat, and everything about you, it seems, even the brand
of gin you used for making martinis before you quit for good
on your 120th birthday.
All this attention is nice in a way, but rather waring.
Eminent doctors who have examined you say that your heart
is weakening, you are maxed out on medications, and you
are too frail to survive a transplant. They say there’s no
chance you’ll live to be 130.

Would it be worth it to live this long and experience what it

would be like? Or would it be an exercise in masochism? I
didn’t mention it earlier, but the Wiz has given you the option
of taking a pill — no pain involved — and you’ll be out of here.

41
 * *
I would say, “Give me the pill,” except it occurs to me that
doctors might be able to learn something about the aging
process by continuing to study me. My extremely rare case
might offer clues that would lead to effective treatments to
slow aging. If I can be a useful subject for scientific study, it
would inject meaning in my life.
In your case, there’s your great grand-daughter, Eliza. Her
visits must be high spots in your life, and probably in hers
too. Maybe you can provide inspiration to her and have a
positive effect on her life. Come to think of it, maybe you can
have a positive effect on the lives of people who take care of
you. And, of course, that would go for me too if I were in your
position. That’s reason enough to hang on longer. If you have
a purpose in life, it’s worth living no matter how old you are.
You see:

An aged man is but a paltry thing

A tattered coat upon a stick
Unless soul clap its hands
And sing and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress.*
_________________________
* from “Sailing to Byzantium”
W. B. Yeats

42
 #13

Comfortably Ensconced in a Space Capsule, You Start

Falling Upward, Accelerating at the Same
Rate as You Would in Free Fall.

If you have the misfortune to fall out of an airplane without a

parachute, were it not for air resistance, you would fall at an
accelerating rate of about 22 miles an hour faster each
second than the previous second. This means that you
would be falling at about 22 miles per hour at the end of the
first second, 44 miles per hour at the end of the second
second, and 66 miles per hour at the end of the third second,
about the same rate of acceleration that’s achieved by high-
priced sports cars.
We’re constantly “trying” to fall at this accelerating rate
toward the center of the Earth, but we’re kept in place by the
Earth’s surface or something on it, so our experience is of
feeling weight (1G). If we were in free fall, we’d feel
weightless.
If just by falling, you can accelerate from zero to sixty in
three seconds, it’s not hard to imagine a spaceship taking off
from Earth, and, thanks to being equipped with nuclear
fusion or some such exotic method of propulsion, keep
accelerating at that rate, not just for three seconds, but for
hours, days, and weeks. All that time, If you were in this
spaceship, because you’re accelerating at 1G, you’d feel that
you weigh the same as you do sitting in a chair on Earth,
except that, depending on the ship’s interior design, you
might feel your weight against your back instead of against
your feet or the seat of your space suit.
Continuing to accelerate at 1G, it would take about two-
and-a-half hours to pass the moon. This would be equivalent
to a sports car accelerating from zero to 195,000 miles per
hour in the same amount of time.
Still accelerating at 1G, you would pass the orbit of
Neptune (roughly 2.7 billion miles from Earth) in eleven days.
By then, you’d be traveling at about 5,750 miles per second,
which is about three percent of the speed of light.
For reasons that Einstein could have told you about, but I
can’t, as you build up such tremendous speed, maintaining

43
this rate of acceleration becomes increasingly difficult. I’m
wildly guessing that reaching more than, say, seven percent
of light speed would be the limit of future human capability.
Assuming that you could keep accelerating at 1G until you
reached such a dazzling velocity, even if you could maintain
it indefinitely, it would take about sixty years to reach
Proxima Centura, the nearest star to the sun. This star
appears to have at least three planets. It would be nice to
land on the most attractive of them. It’s not likely to have
breathable air, but you could open the hatch, and keeping
your space suit on and fully secure, stretch and walk around
and admire the scenery, which you can be sure would be
thrilling to behold.
A technical problem to be dealt with on this fantastic
journey is that you would have to start slowing down when the
planet you’re planning to visit is billions of miles ahead of you.
This will delay your arrival time by several years. Otherwise,
you’d go by so fast you’d only see a blurry streak.

44
 #14

You Don’t Know When You’ll Die,

But You Can Choose How You’ll Die.

Unless you’re in unusual circumstances, you don’t know

when or how you’re going to die. You probably don’t want to
know. But suppose, though you don’t know when you’ll die,
you can choose how you’ll die.

What way would you choose?

Not toughing it out while enduring terrible pain or discomfort,

let’s hope. Much better is to die mercifully sedated in a
hospice. I had an elderly relative who had known death was
coming and died peacefully in a hospital bedroom with his
family gathered about him. That’s a classic way to go. Better,
however, in my opinion, is the route taken by my maternal
grandmother. In failing health, she took a big swig of sherry
and lay down for a nap from which she never woke up. Well
done, Grandma, I thought afterward.
Only years late I asked myself how I could be so sure that
Grandma died peacefully. How could I know that she didn’t
have an episode of pain and anguish before she expired?
That’s possible, but I think it’s more likely that she had no
conscious experience in the time preceding her death.
Having brushed away this fear about grandma, I think
dying unexpectedly in your sleep is best. You’re relieved of
the grim expectation of oncoming death and whatever
emotional distress may come from contemplating it. From
the perspective of everyone close who survives you, your
death is a shock no matter how you die and probably more
so if you die suddenly and unexpectedly. At a minimum, it’s
upsetting. Besides sheer grief that those closest to you may
feel, there is a lot of other stuff they have to deal with:
condolences and acknowledgements of condolences,
administrative chores, funerals or memorial gatherings,
dealing with personal property, readjustments of plans, in
some cases disruption of whole lives, and a feeling of loss
that may linger for years.

45
 The aftermath of one’s death can be very burdensome for
others, but from the perspective of the deceased, sudden
death never happens. I would be happy to outwit death in
this fashion. That I had checked out and wouldn’t be
checking in again might be distressing for others, but it
wouldn’t be for me.

46
 #15

You Are About to Die, but Have the Option of Living as a

Character of Your Choice in a Novel that Has Become Real:
The Events Described in It Are Actually Happening.

You are shocked to learn that you have almost no time to live.
You can hardly think straight, but the Wiz has made you an
offer of continuing life as a fictional character made real, and
that’s worth considering. Closing your eyes to concentrate, you
try to recall the name of a character in a novel you’d be willing
to be if the events in it had become real.
Rarely does a novel follow a character through from birth to
death. We usually only learn what happened during an eventful
period of the protagonist’s life. Two famous novels come to
mind, James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs.
Dalloway, that chronicled the lives, respectively, of Leopold
Bloom and of Clarissa Dalloway through a single day. So
maybe I should pose my question this way:

Imagine that you are living the life of a character in a novel.

Knowing what happened to that character in the time-frame of
the novel, and imagining what happened to him or her before
and after that time-frame, is there a character in a novel you’ve
read whose life you think would be worth living?

The literary character I have most affection for is Huckleberry

Finn. In the case of Mark Twain’s novel, The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, it’s not hard for me to imagine Huck’s early
childhood before the narrative begins and what his life might
have been like after it ends. At the end of the narrative, Huck
and Jim part ways, and Huck lights out for “the territory”
(possibly Oklahoma and beyond). I recall that someone
published a novel a few years ago imagining what happened to
Huck in the ensuing years. I wouldn’t want to read it — I doubt
if it describes Huck’s later life the way I would. Not that there’s
a correct way! A wide variety of possible futures lay ahead of
him after he left us on the last page of the Mark Twain’s book.
Instead of being Huckleberry Finn, I might choose to be
Ishmael in Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick. Ishmael had an

47
incomparable adventure and lived to tell about it. Another
possibility I considered is Pierre, a principal character in
Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace. which I first read about seventy
years ago. I had remembered only that Pierre is a good-
hearted fellow and gets in on a lot of the action, so he seemed
like a promising candidate, but rereading the book last
summer, I was reminded how impulsive, naive, and easily
manipulated he is.
Early in the book, Pierre inherits an enormous fortune.
Unsurprisingly, becoming fabulously rich does not bring him
happiness. Over the course of hundreds of pages, he seeks
release from anxiety in “philanthropy, dissipation, freemasonry,
heroic feats of self-sacrifice, romantic love, and the ‘path of
thought.’” It takes being captured by the French, incarcerated
in miserable circumstances, witnessing an execution, and
almost being executed himself for him to appreciate the
empowering benefit of simple goodness, though that alone
doesn’t quite do it. As the book nears its end, he has entered
into what appears to be a reasonably happy marriage, but he
still seems to be searching for psychic self-satisfaction.
Rereading this sprawling novel, I felt sympathy for Pierre
and even some admiration, and would probably prefer to
continue living as him rather than be dead, but I’d want to find
a character in a novel with whom I feel more simpatico.
I had read A Farewell To Arms, by Ernest Hemingway, a few
years ago and remembered enough about it to think that the
hero / narrator of this novel, Frederic Henry, might be a
character come to life that I would be willing to be. I read it
again last summer to make sure. Like Hemingway, Frederic
Henry was an American and an ambulance driver in Italy during
World War I, the period when the novel is set. Henry had been
commissioned as a tenente, a lieutenant, in the Italian Army.
He is wounded, and he and a beautiful, witty, and wonderfully
spirited nurse named Catherine fall in love with each other.
Henry quickly recovers from his wounds and has some
thrillingly described adventures, including — to escape
pursuers — jumping into a swiftly flowing river and almost
drowning before grabbing hold of a log as he is swept
downstream. Later, with the ever so wonderful and beautiful
Catherine as a passenger and sustained only by occasional
swigs of brandy, he rows a boat thirty-five miles through rough
waters on a long lake on a dark and stormy night to get himself
and Catherine across the Swiss border so he won’t be shot for
deserting the Italian Army. Once settled in Switzerland,
Frederic’s and Catherine’s life together becomes so over-the-

48
top idyllic that one senses that things will go very badly before
the book ends, and they do, but our hero survives unscathed,
and by then I was so imbued with the Hemingway ethos that I
would be ready to be this guy if the Wiz said that I could be
after I die. Except maybe not, because, although Frederic
Henry’s liver is apparently intact when the book ends, I don’t
think it will be much longer, given the amount of brandy
(cognac), whisky, martinis, and great variety of wines he has
consumed at a rate averaging about two drinks per page and,
in view of the story’s tragic dénouement, seems likely to
increase after Hemingway finished writing about him. So here I
am, not sure of any character I’d like to be. I’d have to ask the
Wiz to give me time to read more novels, hoping to find the
right one.

I imagine that most women, given a similar chance, would

prefer to be a female character. There may be an even wider
range of exemplary female than male characters in literature —
Shakespeare alone created some of the wisest and wittiest I’ve
encountered. My guess is that a popular choice among women
for the purposes of this thought experiment would be Elizabeth
Bennet, the protagonist of Jane Austen’s novel, Pride and
Prejudice. Elizabeth and her family would be categorized as
early 19th century upper class members of the landed gentry
in England, a milieu too constrained and insulated to appeal
many modern readers, but one not lacking in its charms and
accommodating almost the full range of human drama.
Elizabeth’s father had inherited a manor and agricultural
lands that yielded a comfortable income, but because this
estate was entailed, keeping it in his family required his having
a male heir. Mr. Bennet was a young man when he married,
and it seemed unlikely that this would be a problem, but one
after another, every child born to him and Mrs. Bennet was a
girl until there were five or them with no prospect of more
children to come. Mr. Bennet had not prepared for such an
eventuality, and it seemed likely that upon his death the family
would lose their estate and its income and they would have
little to live on. It became imperative that suitable husbands for
the Bennet girls be found!
Elizabeth is the second oldest and by far the most
impressive of the lot in character and intellect. Life for her does
not go smoothly. (How could it for the protagonist in a great
novel?) But her performance in finding her way through the
thickets of gentile country life is phenomenal. It would be
exhilarating being Elizabeth Bennet brought to life: “Her temper

49
was to be happy.” “She was not formed for ill-humor.” Her
philosophy was to “think only of the past as its remembrance
gives you pleasure.” Her father, speaking of “her lively talents,”
warned her that they “would place you in the greatest danger
in an unequal marriage.”
Not that she never erred! As a result of her
misapprehensions, she experienced painful recognition that
she had “prided herself on her discernment,” “acted
despicably,” “gratified her vanity,” “courted prepossession and
ignorance,” and “driven reason away.”
But how often her wisdom shines through! An example is
her observation that, “without scheming to do wrong, or to
make others unhappy, there may be error, and there may be
misery. Thoughtlessness, want of attention to other people’s
feelings, and want of resolution, will do the business.”
When the haughty and imperious Lady Catherine de Brough
tries to bully Elizabeth into declining the expected offer of
marriage on the part of Lady Catherine’s nephew, Elizabeth
meets her every argument, threat, and imprecation with élan:
“Has he, has my nephew made you an offer of marriage?”
“Your ladyship has declared it to be impossible!”
“It ought to be; it must be so, while he retains the use of his
reason. But your arts and allurements may, in a moment of
infatuation, have made him forget what he owes to himself and
his family. You may have drawn him in.”
“If I have, I shall be the last person to confess it.”
At this point, this grande dame of the Cotswolds
admonishes our heroine: “Ms. Bennet . . . do not expect to be
noticed by his family or friends, if you willfully act against the
inclinations of all. You will be censured, slighted, and despised
by everyone connected with him. Your alliance will be a
disgrace; your name will never even be mentioned by any of
us.”
“These are heavy misfortunes,” replied Elizabeth. “But the
wife of Mr. Darcy must have such extraordinary sources of
happiness necessarily attached to her situation that she could,
upon the whole, have no cause to repine.”
Nor should any woman, I imagine, who chooses to have her
next life be that of Elizabeth Bennet.

50
 #16

What Would You Say if You Could Talk to Your Earlier Self
When You Were at a Much Younger Age?

The Wiz tells you that you can spend half an hour with your
earlier self. He warns you that you will not be allowed to tell
your earlier self about anything that happened in your past
(your earlier self’s future) and that you should think carefully
about what you’re going to say.

Would you take advantage of this opportunity? If so, at what

age would it be best for your earlier self to be when the two
of you meet? And what would you say to your earlier self?

If Wiz offered me this opportunity, my reaction would be:

What a great chance to steer my earlier self onto a better
course! I wondered if the best age to receive this counsel
would be when I was twelve and undergoing an extensive
period of debilitating anxiety. Despite my mental instability, I
might have been receptive to wise counsel then, but it would
probably have been more efficacious to have had such a talk
when I was more mature and worldly, most likely when I was
starting college.
I may be deluding myself, but I think it would have
had a hugely beneficial effect if the self I was as a college
freshman could have grasped a few basic precepts. Given a
chance to impart them to my former self, I would print them
neatly on a sheet of paper and hand it to him. “Hang on to
this checklist,” I’d say, “and refer to it from time-to-time.”

51
 CHECKLIST

True self-confidence and inner strength requires

honesty and compassion.

Wise decision making requires consideration of

possible consequences of your actions or inaction.

Resistance to destructive impulses requires personal

integrity.

“What you want, above all things, on a raft, is for

everybody to be satisfied, and feel right and kind
toward the others.”
Huck Finn

52
 #17

Turning Back the Clock and Living Life

Forward from When You Were Much Younger

Better than letting you talk to yourself when you were

younger, the Wiz just told you that you can turn the clock
back to a pivotal point in your life and start living your life
over from then on, for example, from when you’re about to
start freshman year at college or from when you’re starting
high school. What an opportunity!
The Wiz emphasized that after you’ve turned the clock
back, you’ll still remember everything that happened to you
since you were that age in the life you were living before you
turned the clock back. He also informed you that, for the
most part, what you remember isn’t going to happen again
even though you’ll be living through years that you’ve lived
through already. That’s because many of the coincidences
that formed your experiences — the situations in which you
found yourself, the interactions you had with people —
wouldn’t reoccur. It’s not just in your personal life that you
wouldn’t experience identical circumstances and choices
you had in the life you’ve lived already. Random variations
are so pervasive in the progression of events that the
personal lives of everyone on Earth would diverge
increasingly from how they played out during the same
period in your life that you lived through before. You would
no doubt be wiser than you were because of your experience
in having lived through years of your life before, but many of
the situations in which you’d find yourself and the choices
you’d have to make would be very different.
Even if you feel that you could live a more satisfying life
this time, you might not choose to accept the Wiz’s offer,
because you wouldn’t have married the person you did and
had the kids you had — it would be as if they never existed
except in your memory, and you wouldn’t want that. If
considerations of that sort aren’t applicable, you’d almost
certainly want to turn the clock back, because, being
younger after you did so, you’d instantly have a longer life
expectancy, and there’s a good chance that it would be a

53
better quality life because of the experience and wisdom you
gained during the life you lived earlier.

Given the circumstances that the Wiz laid out and your
personal situation, would you turn your clock back, and, if so,
to what point in your life would you turn it back to? How do
you think what you gained in knowledge and understanding
in the life you lived before would affect your attitude and
decision making when you’re living through years of your life
a second time?

Something I would consider before I would accept the Wiz’s

offer is the enormous role that luck plays in life, and how
sometimes, through some misfortune, the right decision may
set one on a path to adversity, and the wrong decision may
open up opportunities that one wouldn’t have had otherwise.
I made some awful decisions that I wouldn’t want to repeat,
but one or two of them set me on a path on which, along the
way, I had some exceedingly good luck that there’s no
reason to believe I would have had if I’d made the right
decisions and found myself in different circumstances.
Starting over, because of my experience in having lived a
previous life, I surely would be wiser, but it’s doubtful that I
would be as lucky, and firmly lodged in my mind is the
observation by the great New York Yankees pitcher Lefty
Gomez: “I’d rather be lucky than good.”
It’s impossible to know, but I’m sure that, second time
around, there would be both correspondences with, and
divergences from, the life I’ve lived so far. I might have gone
to a different college than I did the first time I was that age,
and I certainly would have taken some different courses. It’s
likely I would have majored in philosophy instead of in public
and international affairs. Both are excellent courses of study
for preparing to go to law school, but there are innumerable
reasons why I wouldn’t have gone to law school this time.
What made me decide to do that in the first place? The quick
answer is that my older brother, Dick, went to law school and
that seemed like a good enough reason for me to do the
same. That leaves the question: Why did Dick go to law
school? The best answer to that is that my aunt Dorothy
married a law professor, and he influenced Dick. The law
professor had a brother who was a biology professor.
Suppose my aunt Dorothy had married the biology

54
professor? After turning the clock back, rather than majoring
in philosophy or public and international affairs, it’s possible
that I would have majored in biology. You can’t make
assumptions about how the years you’d be living over again
will turn out, or even about what kind of person you will be.
You have probably thought of things you would have done
differently, if you’d had the knowledge and insights you have
now. It might help heighten your awareness of what kind of
person you are and how you’ve changed over the years to
consider what they are. I feel as if I’m a whole different
person than I was “back then.” Who was that fumbling
bumbling character? I don’t feel I even know him, much less
was him, because, when I was him, I didn’t know myself.
If the Wiz offered me this chance to turn the clock back, I
might be too curious about how my second-chance life
would progress to turn it down. That’s true even though it’s
unlikely that in this second life I’d still be alive by the time I
reached the age I am now. You need above average luck to
live to be ninety-two.

55
 #18

Imagine that What John Lennon Imagined

in His Song “Imagined” Happened.

I’ve been thinking about John Lennon’s iconic song

“Imagine.” Consider for the moment what it would be like if
certain things referred to in the lyrics were, as Lennon
imagined, absent from our culture and our polity, most
notably: “religion,” “countries,” and “possessions.”

Do you think the world would be better off if what John

Lennon imagined had happened?

I don’t think that religions, countries, or possessions are the

problem. One could argue that it’s the character of the
people who have possessions, the character of the countries,
and the character of the religions as they are practiced that
matters. Greed, religious dogmatism, and extreme
nationalism have caused a lot of problems in the world —
maybe most of them — but if everyone had the right state of
mind, having possessions, being religious, and loving one’s
country wouldn’t be a problem.
That said, I don’t mean to be dismissive of the spirit of
John Lennon’s song. He was thinking along the same lines
as Gonzalo, a venerable character in Shakespeare’s final
play, The Tempest. Gonzalo revealed his idea of a better
world:

I’ the commonwealth I would by contraries

Execute all things; for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none . . .
No occupation; all men idle, all.
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty —

Gonzalo was even more dreamily idealistic than John

Lennon, imagining a society where no one has to work and
courts and judges would not be needed to administer justice.

56
But Gonzalo would be more conventional than Lennon in
allowing possessions, so long as no one is either rich or
impoverished.
There’s no point in trying to think how either Lennon’s or
Gonzalo’s societies could work in practice. Neither of them is
a serious prescription for restructuring societies. Rather, they
express the age-old human yearning for a simple, peaceful,
equitable society sustained by universal good will, an
idealized civilization in which we are all spared the strictures
of the law, the harsh rivalries of nations, tribes and factions,
the cruel disparities that emerge in the progression of events,
and the raw imprint of warped religious and secular doctrines
on our lives.

57
 #19

Would you Rather Have Your Brain

Uploaded into a Special Purpose Super
Computer than Be Dead?

You are about to die, but the Wiz says that you can avoid
death if you’re willing to accept this offer. He says that, in his
opinion, existing in this computer is superior to luxurious
solitary confinement (thought experiment #5). You will be
physically isolated, it’s true, but you’ll have a multiplicity of
interrelationships with other brains — ones in artificially
intelligent computers and ones in human heads. You’ll have
plenty of input — full internet access, for example — and you
won’t be degraded by aging. You’ll get increasingly skilled,
learned, and capable. You’ll be a valuable asset to humanity.
You’ll have no physical desires. You’ll dine exclusively on
electricity. You won’t need to get out and move around. And
because you are such an extraordinary phenomenon, you’ll
be perfectly comfortable and get lots of supportive attention.
You will, of course, be tremendously intelligent — above
genius level in some respects, in large part because you’ll
benefit from extraordinary connectivity with other minds and
computers. You’ll have tremendous intellectual stimulation.
Your life will be far richer than that of most people who have
ever lived. The downside is that you’ll be deprived of
physical sensations and experiences. Activities that most
humans take for granted won’t be available. You’ll have only
a poignant memory of what it’s like to walk or run or dance or
do innumerable things that average humans can do.

Would you find it tolerable, or even enjoyable or stimulating,

to have your brain uploaded into a special purpose
computer? Would you rather have that happen than be dead?
If you had been born that way — if your consciousness had
emerged in a computer — would that make life more
tolerable than if you had a personal memory of having lived in
a body and as a result found yourself ruefully reflecting from
time to time on what bodies can do and you can’t?

58
 * *
In a way, we are already confined in a very small place — in
our heads. When you experience something like the thrill of
gripping a tennis racket and swinging your arm in a graceful
arc and seeing the ball clear the net and strike a white line as
your opponent scrambles futilely to reach it, all that joyous
sensation of physicality and psychological uplift is happening
in your head. Still, it seems doubtful that thrilling sensations
that can be experienced on the tennis court or on the dance
floor, or even the agreeable sensation of walking down the
street, can be replicated in one’s disembodied brain.
Maybe some of those sensations that require the senses,
including the kinesthetic sense, can be artificially generated
the way hallucinations are in people whose brains are
supplying them without input from sensory organs. When I’m
barely waking up in a dark room with my eyes still closed,
I’ve experienced visual hallucinations that, though not
spectacular, are remarkable: I see textures in what seem to
be walls that surround me. Sometimes they resemble the
walls in my bedroom, except that they are covered with
wallpaper; sometimes they have intricate designs that my
brain has created, though I couldn’t possibly produce them
when I’m in a conscious, open-eyed state. Occasionally, as
I’m waking up, I “see” that I’m in a cavern with walls that
look like stucco.
As I imagine is the case with most people, my hallucinatory
powers are extremely limited. I can’t make vivid images
appear, nor can I make them disappear except by opening my
eyes and letting light break the spell. Oliver Sacks, in his
fascinating book Hallucinations (2013), describes a great
variety of hallucinations, many of them far more wide-ranging
than I’ve experienced. Sacks says that some people can hear
music playing “in which every note in a piece, every instrument
in an orchestra, is distinctly heard.”*
That must be an interesting experience for them, and the
life you would have if your brain is uploaded into the Wiz’s
computer would be much richer than that. Nonetheless, if
you decide to take a chance on uploading your brain into a
computer — even one provided by the Miracle Wizard —
don’t count on replicating physical experiences that
embodied people like us tend to take for granted.
Would a strictly intellectual life suffice? For people like
me, and probably you, it’s hard to see how it would, but for
the super brain you would be if you were a brain in this
computer, it might be all you want or need. Someone once

59
asked Bobbie Fischer, the chess genius, “Do you think life is
like chess?” He replied, “Life is chess.” Since a brain in a
computer is capable of playing championship chess, Fischer
might have been satisfied being one. Without the distractions
of physical life, he might be able to beat not only all the
grandmasters, but the best chess-playing computers as well.
As a brain in a computer, if you have the right inputs,
connections, and resources, you might function on a level
beyond the reach of anyone else in the world. You’d be
confined, but you could still have a rich full satisfying life. I
would welcome a chance to have that experience, but I’d
want to be able to turn myself off.

__________________
* Oliver Sacks; Hallucinations (2013); P. 67; Vintage Books

60
 #20

You’re Living 30,000 Years Ago But

Know Everything You Know Now.

The Wiz told you that it was about to happen, and you know
he wasn’t kidding when you find yourself, still remembering
the life you were living in the twenty-first century, but
transported to a cave in France 30,000 years ago.
Fortunately, your companions aren’t stereotypical dull-witted
cave people walking around carrying thick wooden clubs. Au
contraire. Most of them are pretty sharp. There’s an artist in
the clan who has been drawing pictures of antelopes on the
walls with charcoal. Light from flickering fires make them
seem almost real.
You don’t have to worry about seeming foreign to the
others. You’re wearing animal skins like everyone else. The
Wiz instantly briefed you on your clan’s culture and who
everyone is, and made sure you can speak and understand
their language, which has become your second language.
Everyone regards you as belonging to the clan, and you feel
secure because you have a job, in fact two jobs: One is
hunting for small game with a bow and arrows of your own
making. Your other job is to be a storyteller.
Late in the afternoon you arrived, DeZog, the chief of the
clan, takes you aside.
“Hunting and gathering were good today,” he says.
“Tonight, we feast. Afterwards, I want you to tell a good
story.”
He grins and gives you a poke in the ribs. It hurts, but
you know you shouldn’t complain.

What sort of story will you tell your fellow cave people?

I would tell of how I met an eagle that had landed on a rock

outcropping near me, and to my astonishment started to talk.
I said to it, “I never imagined that an eagle could talk!”
It replied, “I have taken the form of an eagle, but I am not
an eagle. I am a prophet.”

61
 “A prophet?” I said. “Does that mean you can tell what
happens in the future?”
“It does,” said the eagle / prophet. `
“Wonderful,” I said. “Tell, me then, what will happen, not
just tomorrow, but after hundreds of lifetimes of winter snows
have covered the ground and melted away. Tell me now.”
Then I would say to the people gathered around, “The
eagle talked to me for such a long time that I went to sleep
listening to it. When I woke up, it was gone, but I could
remember every word it said to me, as if everything it had
said was what I had known all along.”
Then I would tell about some things that will happen
during their future — during the next 30,000 years — and
one thing I would say that the eagle told me is that far, far, in
the future, people will fly, and they will fly higher and faster
and longer than eagles do today, so high and so fast, that
some of them would land on the moon.
Because of the extraordinary things I would tell everyone,
I might become a legend. The members of my clan might
come to think that I was a god. It’s also possible that they
would come to think that I was a nut, making up such
ridiculous impossible tales.

62
 #21

You’re Twenty Years Old, and You Have a

Super Advanced A.I. Machine that Can Make the
Right Decisions for You Every Time.

The Wiz really came through for you with this one. He says
that your the Super Advanced A.I. Machine (SAAI) he’s
providing you with is able to fully inform itself, take all facts
and circumstances into account, weigh pros and cons, and
analyze all possible results in the light of your values and
principles, or, to be more precise, in the light of the values
and principles it has decided you have after analyzing
everything about you so thoroughly that it knows you better
than you know yourself.
This unprecedentedly amazing device is, of course,
connected to the World-Wide Super General Artificial
Intelligence Net and continually upgrades itself and informs
you of what you need to know in a millionth of the time it
would take hundreds of PhDs to research and reflect on the
matter and advise you, and it invariably produces the best
possible decision. You won’t have to spend energy thinking
about anything before acting or deciding not to act. This
SAAI machine will do it for you.
“Believe me,” the Wiz says, “It won’t take long before
you’ve made super smart decisions that you wouldn’t have
made on your own — you’ll see stunning results almost as
soon as you start using it. Your SAAI is going to give you a
great lift in life.

What would you do with your SSAI machine? How would you
use it?

If you employ your SAAI in a business setting, you’re likely to

make a lot of money. It should be useful in everyday life too,
for example, in how you spend your spare time, determine
what sports, cultural, and social activities to engage in, what
romantic relationships to develop, whether to pursue your

63
studies, travel, engage in politics, or take up some other
pursuit.
Wondering where to go on your next vacation? Maybe
visit Italy or Greece? Or would you be happier getting in
touch with the natural world? How about a canoe trip on the
Allagash River in Maine? Maybe you should visit Glacier
National Park, in Canada — see the glaciers while they’re still
there. No need to puzzle over what would be most
rewarding: Your SAAI knows best.
It’s weird to think about it, but this SAAI is so good that it
will make as good or better decisions than you could make
on your own every single time you consult it. You could let it
make all your decisions, knowing that it would never ever go
wrong!

Would you be willing to turn over all decision making to your

SAAI?

I can see how this SAAI might work beautifully for me.
Thanks to my incredibly improved decision making, within a
few minutes, I’d get a novel I wrote revised to perfection, and
within a few more minutes, SAAI would turn out a screenplay
based on it that would be destined to be an Oscar-winning
movie. I could make a huge amount of money in the stock
market. It wouldn’t be long before countless little things
would be going better for me than could otherwise happen.
That’s a nice fantasy, but it’s just as likely that I’d feel that
something is wrong. I might start wondering why I’m not
happier. I might think I could use SAAI for everything, but
then realize that doing so would reduce me to being a
zombie or a robot because I would only be doing what the
SAAI machine told me to do. I wouldn’t be a free agent,
making my own decisions, which is a requisite of leading a
rich, full, satisfying life. To avoid that unappetizing fate, I
would probably try to make decisions based on my own
reasoning, as one would with the aid of an ordinary computer
—keeping my SAAI machine at arm’s length and considering
in each important instance whether its “correct decision” is
or is not right for me. Except, wouldn’t that lead me back to
where I was, groping my way through life, and with the
added worry that all the people who are doing what their
SAAIs are telling them to do are passing me by?

64
 #22

Checking Out the Scene One

Thousand Years in the Future

“I think you’ll like this one,” the Wiz says. “You’ll live out your
present life. I’m not authorized to tell you how long that will
be, but I can say that your life expectancy won’t be affected
in the slightest by the decision you’re about to make. You
must choose now: After you die, you can either stay dead or
make an irrevocable choice to resume living at the age you
are now (not the age at which you die) one thousand years in
the future.”

It sure would be interesting to look around and find out how

things are a thousand years from now, sometime after the
year 3000. Think how astonished and disoriented you would
be if you had died about a thousand years ago — say, in the
year 1000 — and rematerialized and looked around today.
What a shock that would be. I suspect that it would be even
more of a shock to die today and rematerialize a thousand
years from now.

The Wiz has given you the option of rematerializing and

regaining consciousness after you die — this awakening to
be a thousand years in the future. He promises that you’ll be
the same biological age that you are now, that you’ll be in
excellent health, and that you’ll have immunity from all
pathogens that are then extant; also that you’ll retain a full
memory of your past life and that you’ll be in the same
geographical area you were in when you died, or, if that
happens to be underwater, in the nearest habitable area that
isn’t. Would you go for it?

Speculating about what it would be like to find myself a

thousand years in the future reminded me of those cases in
which people who have been blind since birth have an
operation that allows them to see perfectly. They don’t
behold a landscape or interior as people sighted from birth

65
perceive it, but a blur of colors and shapes. It takes them a
long time before their brains can make sense of what those
who were never visually impaired take for granted.
It might be beyond the capacity of most of us to make
sense of what’s going on if we found ourselves living a
thousand years from now: It might require skills and
understanding that can only be attained if cultivated from an
early age. I can’t begin to guess what life might be like if A.I.-
enabled-robots do everything that people used to do.
Homo Sapiens may be extinct, in which case, if you could
be transported to that time — to a habitable part of the
planet — you might be overwhelmed with sadness at how
our species flourished, proliferated, and transformed Earth,
eventually causing our technologically dependent civilization
to spin out of control, so that you are witness to the end, or
the near end, of the human saga. If afterwards, you could
return to your own place and time, you might become an
activist, doing what you can to set history on a course in
which more people act rationally and the course of events
plays out more agreeably.
If you were transported to the thirty-first century and
looked around, you might find that enough humans had
acted sensibly until artificial intelligence got so it could do
everything, including maybe some stuff so unexpected that
no one can figure out what the grand plan is that the A.I.
machines have in mind, and we humble members of the
human species aren’t even trying to figure it out. If that’s how
things are a thousand years from now, when you arrive there,
you might find that everyone is sitting around doing what
looks like nothing from your perspective until it dawns upon
you that they are living in virtual reality land.
In his little book Night Thoughts, Wallace Shawn tells of
reading The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon and of the appeal
to him of the life it describes of gentle folk in ancient Japan
who seemed to have nothing to do but recline on pillows and
write letters and poems to each other. Such a life might be
possible once A.I. takes care of everything, but I doubt if
Shawn, or any of us, would find it satisfying. Not for long.
And, of course, it’s far from assured that the course of history
will follow such a trajectory. Life in the thirty-first century may
consist of misery and little else.
The more I think about it, the more I’m filled with
apprehension. I can imagine arriving there, a thousand years
in the future, and wanting to get in on the action, or inaction,
but it doesn’t work out that way. I get to be in future land, but

66
don’t learn anything about future land because it’s so
different from our own, and there’s no chance to decide what
you want in these circumstances. Thinking for oneself may
not be the way things are done.
There’s certainly a risk that you would find yourself in a
brutal situation, maybe a lot worse than if you had
rematerialized thirty thousand years in the past. The Wiz
didn’t say whether A.I. machines would rule the Earth, or
insects, or bacteria, or whether you might freeze or fry, or
experience some other form of immediate, or agonizingly
slow, cessation of existence.
It’s totally understandable if you decide not to risk being
transported to one thousand years in the future. As for me,
despite all these weighty considerations and awareness that
I may instantly regret it, I’m too curious to see what it’s like to
say, “Thanks but no thanks.’ Instead, I’d exclaim: “I’ll go for
it, Wiz. After I die, bring me back to life a thousand years
from now.”

67
 #23

Checking Out the Scene Fourteen

Billion Years in the Future

It’s an arbitrary span of time ahead of us. The Wiz says he

only chose it and is offering to transport you there because
it’s about the same amount of time that lies ahead of us as
the amount of time that lies behind us back to the Big Bang.
As you undoubtedly know, the Earth will almost certainly
not exist fourteen billion years from now, but the Wiz has
assured you that you’ll be provided with a comfortable space
capsule with transparent walls. You’ll be safe and can view
the cosmic scene in all directions, and after this little
adventure you’ll get safely back to your own time.

Do you tell the Wiz you’d like to see how things look fourteen
billion years in the future?

Roughly five billion years or so after you were living on Earth,

the sun expanded into a red giant star, frying and blowing off
Earth and other inner planets and a tremendous amount of
gas in the process, then collapsing into an extremely dense
white dwarf star, which has been cooling and dimming ever
since. Now, thanks to the Wiz, you’re where Earth would
have been in relation to the sun had our planet not been
expelled into distant space. This may sound like a disastrous
locale, but you’re not too hot and not too cold, and perfectly
safe in a top-of-the-line space capsule, just as the Wiz
promised.
The sun is no farther away than it was when you were
back in your own time, but it’s shrunken so that it’s no more
than a harsh pinpoint of white light that hurts your eyes to
look at, so you don’t. If you were outside your capsule, you’d
feel no more heat from it than you would from the full moon
on a clear winter night.
The Wiz has accompanied you on this astonishingly long
trip through time. “How’s this for a fresh perspective?” he
asks. Without waiting for an answer, he tells you that he
doesn’t have means to take you farther ahead in time, but

68
that if you could go far enough –– by about ten to the
hundredth power (one followed by one hundred zeros) years
from now –– you would find that star formation has ceased
and galaxies have gone dark.
“Even black holes will have evaporated through a
process known as Hawking radiation” he says. “Nothing will
be left but subatomic particles. The expansion of space will
cool this vast amount of matter/energy to nearly zero kelvin
(absolute zero), signaling the heat death of the universe and
near total entropy (maximum disorder).
“It’s time to return you to your own time. I’ll leave you with
one final thought: If it is true, as some scientists believe, that
all matter will disappear, even though it will take an
astronomically longer time than fourteen billion years for that
to happen, if you could travel that far ahead in time and
regain consciousness when you arrive, the time that passed
in the meantime would feel shorter than the day.”

69
 #24

You have a Painful Epiphany.

Is it worth experiencing an extremely painful emotional

shock to have an epiphany — to suddenly become
enlightened about the true nature of your character and the
tragic nature of the life you have led? Suppose you have
been acting like an automaton, failing to think about what
you’re doing and why you’ve behaved the way you have. It
can’t be easy to be suddenly awakened and realize what a
deadhead you’ve been.
In Henry James’s short story “The Beast in the Jungle,” a
decent fellow named John Marcher has a feeling that some
great event will happen to him, as if a beast in the jungle will
spring out at him. He confides this intimation to a close
friend, May Bartram, with whom he appears to be on verge
of a romantic relationship and presumably marriage. She is
receptive, but he seems inhibited from courting her,
apparently because of his fixation on the beast he believes
will one day spring in front of him. Then he hears that May
has died. Soon afterward, he visits her grave. He is standing
near it when he sees another man, who — it is clear from his
demeanor — is stricken with extreme grief.
The reader can imagine what is going through Marcher’s
mind at this moment. He is thinking: “Why didn’t I feel grief
like that? Why didn’t I express love to May? Why did I
squander my chance to marry her? The beast in the jungle
has sprung. Marcher, overcome with anguish, throws himself
on May’s grave. The great event that he had been waiting for
was the realization of his obtuseness and the loss of what
could have been his if he had been awake and aware instead
of behaving like a zombie.
That’s the end of the story, but when I read it, I wondered
what happened to Marcher afterwards. He is certainly wiser.
He will no longer be emotionally numb. He’ll have the
capability to lead a richer fuller life than he would have
otherwise. But the pain of his realization will always be with
him.

* *

70
If you were John Marcher, would you be glad that you’d had
this epiphany or would you prefer not to have had it?

If Marcher had been nearing the end of his life, it might have
been best if he had been spared such an emotionally searing
revelation, but he presumably has many years ahead of him.
If that’s the case, if I were he, I’d prefer to have the epiphany,
painful as it is, because without it, I would only lack pain
because I remained numb. My chances for being happy and
making others happy would be diminished without the
enlightenment that Marcher — despite his anguish — was
lucky enough to have.
I can imagine how Gabriel Conroy, another decent man,
felt in the aftermath of what in one respect was an eerily
similar epiphany in James Joyce’s short story, “The Dead.”
After Gabriel and his wife, Greta, return from a family
Christmas party to the hotel room where they are staying,
Greta is distant and distracted. In response to Gabriel’s
questions, she explains that a song that was sung at the
party, “The Lass of Aughrim,” was the same one that a boy,
Michael Furey, sang when she knew him in their youth. She
says that she and Michael Furey went on walks together, that
he was a gentle boy, that he was in declining health, and that
one evening, seemingly because he knew he wouldn’t see
her again — though it was a cold and rainy — he went to her
grandmother’s house, where she was staying, and threw
gravel against her window to let her know he was there. She
went down and told him that he must go home; that he
“would get his death in the rain.” He replied that he didn’t
want to live. A few days later, she learned that he had died.
After recounting this incident, Greta, overcome with
emotion, threw herself on the bed, sobbing. Gabriel, stunned,
realizes that “he had never felt like that himself towards any
woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love.”
As was the case with John Marcher, in Henry James’s
story, Gabriel Conroy had a belated and painful epiphany,
one that may have awakened in him the capacity to love.

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 #25

Is Your Life Like a Novel?

Some decades ago, it occurred to me that my life was like a

novel and that whether it would be like a relatively short
novel or a relatively long novel would depend on how long I
lived. I didn’t think it was like a great novel, or even a
particularly good one, or even a competently constructed
one, but at least it had a succession of events, important
characters, and some interesting settings and happenings.
That notion didn’t resurface in my mind until a few years ago,
when I came across a book by the philosopher Galen
Strawson with the intriguing title Things That Bother Me
(2018). One of things Strawson talks about is that many
people, including famous writers he mentions, think of their
lives as being a narrative, and one of the things that bothers
him is how many people think that way.

Do you think of your life as being like a narrative, like a novel?

Strawson says that thinking of your life as a narrative is not a

good way to look at it. He gives reasons I won’t get into here
and cites an even longer and no less impressive list of writers
who, like him, see their lives as non-narrative. The difference
bears on how you view your self. And that thought, Strawson
says, requires introducing a refinement: Are you endurant or
transient? If you’re transient, you don’t think of your self as
having continuity. If you’re endurant, you see your self as
being the same self throughout life, though you don’t
necessarily see your life as a narrative.
The best way to be, it would seem, Strawson being that
way himself, is to be non-narrative transient, because, as he
says, “{I have} no sense of my life as a narrative. . . Nor do I
have any great or special interest in my past. . . Nor do I have
a great deal of concern for my future.” The reason for this
seems to be that, although Strawson knows that he is the
same human being throughout his life, what happened a
ways back in the past is something that happened to another
self, and that is what’s meaningful rather than that such
former self is the same human being known as Strawson that

72
he is now. Similarly, future events in Strawson’s life will relate
to another self than the self Strawson is now.
After reading this, I thought, maybe I should start looking
at my life differently than as a narrative. I’m unhappy with my
former self, so disassociating myself from him (it?) has
considerable appeal. Maybe, like Strawson, I should cease
being interested in my former self. It’s what my present self is
like that counts. No need to think about my future self either.
This would seem to work pretty well. If you see any flaws in
your present self, you can disassociate yourself from them
simply by deciding to become another self or at least
initiating the process of becoming another self. There’s a lot
to be said for saying, “What I care about, insofar as I care
about myself and my life, is how I am now.”
Can you honestly stop thinking of your life as a narrative?
I guess so, if you think of your personal history as nothing
but a sequence of events. Even a mediocre novel (narrative)
should have more going for it than that.
Suppose, as in my case, you don’t like or admire your
former self. If you see your life as a narrative, then that
former self is you –- you can’t get rid of it. The more I thought
about it, the more I didn’t want anything to do with the non-
admirable self I regarded myself as having been. I decided to
cut ties with my former selves completely and adopt
Strawson’s view and look at my life as non-narrative
transient. You can’t change the past, but you can change the
present. My only self is the self I am now, and the right
philosophy is to concentrate on trying to be the best new self
I can be every day.

73
 #26

Would You Want to Live Your Life Over Again

After You Die — the Exact Same Life?

According to the doctrine of eternal recurrence, everything

keeps repeating itself. When you die — the theory goes —
you’ll be born again and live the same life over again. The
Wiz just dropped by and told you that this isn’t just a theory
— it’s true; at least it could be true for you, if you like.
Keep in mind that if you are living your life over again, you
won’t know it. You won’t have any memory or sense of
having lived before. And there’s nothing about the life you’re
living again that can change because of your experience or
because of random events. This being the case, there’s no
logic in saying, “Once is enough.” You’d have no memory of
having lived before, so each time you live your life over again
would be the same as living it for the first time. If you think
your life is worth living, then it’s worth living each time it
recurs, so you should welcome eternal recurrence. It’s a form
of immortality!
Before deciding whether to accept the Wiz’s offer, you
might want to think not only about the quality of the life
you’ve lived so far, but about the life ahead of you. How it
looks might affect your decision. Suppose your life has been
wonderful, but the future looks bleak. You may not want to
risk living your entire life more than once.

Would You Opt To Live Your Life Over Again After You Die —
the Exact Same Life?

Because you have no memory of having lived before, the

second time and each successive time your life eternally
recurs is indistinguishable from the first. So, I think the
question you have to ask yourself is: Has your life been worth
living so far, and will the rest of it likely be worth living? Is the
pleasure worth the pain, the joy worth the sorrow? If the
answer is “yes,” then, logically, you’ll want to thank the Wiz
and say, “I’ll go for it.”
In my case, after thinking about it, I decided that I would
accept the Wiz’s offer. I’m a little chagrined that I had to

74
think about it, because thinking about it raised another
question on my mind: If you wouldn’t want to repeat your
exact same life, does that mean, if you’re logically consistent,
that you would prefer not to have been born?

75
 #27

Would You Want to Live Your Life Over Again after You
Die — Beginning with the Same Circumstances at Birth,
but Because of Chance Variations, It Will Play Out
Differently.

This is not eternal recurrence, with everything repeating

exactly as it did before. You are born in the same
circumstances, with the same parents and with the same
DNA, but chance occurrences continually introduce changes
in circumstances from those in the life you were living before.
Unlike thought experiment #17, in which you turn the clock
back to a younger age, you’ll have no recollection of the life
you’re living now. There will be important similarities to the
life you lived before — most notably, you’ll have the same
parents, and after you are born, you’ll probably reside in the
living quarters they occupied when you were born in your
previous life — but differences will accrue because of chance
occurrences. It might turn out that you have a baby sister
this time instead of a baby brother, or maybe no younger
sibling at all. Your second life will diverge increasingly from
the first one. Overall, you might have more luck or you might
have less luck than you had last time you were living through
these years. If you’ve had exceptionally good luck in life, you
might want to consider how having average luck or below
average luck might affect you in your second life. On the
other hand, if you’ve had a lot of bad luck in your life so far,
you might consider that there’s a good chance you’ll be
luckier the second time around.
Before you decide whether to choose to live a second life,
you would be wise to consider the initial conditions of your
present life, what the prospects are for the future in your
present life, and how they might develop similarly or
differently this time.

Would you opt for living your life over again after you die, with
no memory of the life you’re living now, and considering that,
although your initial circumstances will be the same or almost
the same as they were the first time you were born, this time
your life might be very different?

76
 * *

I would accept this offer to live a second life, though with

some trepidation. I had some bad luck growing up in my
present life, and the conditions that caused that bad luck
would for the most part be present during the early years of
my second life. Later in my present life, I had some
exceptionally good luck that would not likely occur in my
second life. Given these circumstances, it’s risky to me to opt
for a second life. If instead of having bad luck, then good
luck, I might have bad luck and then more bad luck. That’s a
considerable risk, but I enjoy life too much to turn down this
chance to live again.

77
 #28

Imagine that the Species Homo Erectus

Is Still Extant.

All humans on Earth today are members of the same

species, Homo sapiens. Throughout human history
dominant classes of our species have constructed a variety
of pretexts for enslaving others, or at least restricting the
rights of others, over whom they have power. In the case of
the United States, besides the indigenous people who were
living here when the Europeans arrived, the “others” were
mostly blacks abducted from Africa and their descendants,
and alleged mental inferiority was a principal argument
advanced as to why slavery was morally acceptable.
Enslavers denied their captives the most minimal educational
opportunities, imposing ignorance upon them while arguing
that it was justifiable to keep them as slaves because they
were ignorant. Claims of alleged inferiority of blacks
persisted long after after slavery was abolished and are
widely held among white Christian nationalists today.
They should read — though it’s unlikely any of them will
— Jon Meacham’s biography of Lincoln, which is peppered
with references to the astute speeches and writings of
Frederick Douglas that serve as a constant reminder to
readers that the intellectual capability of this African
American far exceeded that of most white politicians and
academics of the time, and of our time.
In our present semi-enlightened era, except among those
who are outright racists, there is no question that the
members of all varieties of our species have requisite
intellectual capability to be accorded the full measure of
human rights. But what if the members of the genus homo
captured in Africa and brought to America to spend the rest
of their lives as slaves hadn’t been members of our species,
but of a distinctly less mentally capable one, such as our
precursors, Homo erectus, which became extinct a little over
100,000 years ago. As the name implies, these hominims
walked upright. Their brains were smaller and less developed
than human brains, but they were more intellectually capable
than chimpanzees. It’s known that they used fire, made tools

78
used for making other tools, and that they may have had a
“proto-language.” It would seem that they could perform a
variety of useful tasks if forced to. It’s reasonable to assume
that they could be economically useful as slaves.

Imagine that the Wiz informed you that hundreds of

thousands of members of the species Homo erectus had
been found living in a remote area on Earth. What policies do
you think should govern our relations with them?

Members of the species Homo erectus might be irremediably

savage and incapable of mutually agreeable social
interaction with humans, or they might be eerily human-like
but have some practices and beliefs that are unacceptable in
a moderately enlightened society, like those of the Taliban,
for example. Apart from targeted policies that would be
appropriate to address such characteristics, the right thing to
do would be to protect members of the species Homo
erectus and grant them the full range, or, depending on their
capabilities, almost the full range, of human rights. The
specifics of a wise policy toward them would be governed by
the degree to which we could communicate with them and
by our impressions of their temperaments and desires. Their
habitat and way of life should be protected against
exploitation and malicious interference. It should be illegal to
abduct them. Exhibiting them as specimens in zoos or
otherwise should be prohibited.
Suppose that among them are those who are intelligent
enough to grasp that mentally superior bipeds rule the world,
and some of them want to travel beyond the bounds of their
existing habitat and interact with these demigods, which is
what we might appear to them to be. Should members of our
species be permitted to employ them, or adopt them? Might
a “charismatic” Homo erectus become a television star?
They should, of course, be treated beneficently. Only
malevolent and cynical people would view them as work
animals or nuisances that should be eliminated. Agreement
on that point would stimulate debate on whether similar
consideration should extend far more broadly. If it’s agreed
that we shouldn’t slaughter, enslave, or exploit members of
Homo erectus, should we not extend similar protections and
care to other sentient creatures?

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 A quarter of the way through the twenty-first century,
more humans seem to be learning that not only deliberate
but even incidental cruelty to animals is wrong. The issues to
be resolved in formulating policies governing our interactions
with members of Homo erectus would be a catalyst for
serious thinking about how we treat our fellow creatures and
how we treat each other.

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 #29

How Would You React if You Won a Billion Dollars in a Mega

Jackpot Lottery?

Winning a stupendous amount of money can throw one’s

thinking out of whack. Your dream come true may become a let-
down. You may find that you wouldn’t want to live in a mansion
and you wouldn’t feel comfortable driving a hundred-thousand-
dollar sports car. Opportunists may swarm about you. A
happiness graph of your emotional state is likely to show a big
spike up after you learn how much you’ve won –– especially if it
allows you to pay off oppressive debts or quit a job you hate, or
pursue some long-held dream. But in most cases, the euphoric
effect tends to fall away until you are barely happier, if at all, than
you were before your extraordinary good luck.
It turns out that tremendous good fortune can be as mentally
destabilizing as a tremendous calamity. This would not be true in
your case, though, would it? You would keep a level head, right?

How would you react if you won a billion dollars in a mega

jackpot lottery?

If it were I who had this fantastic good luck, I would allocate

most of it to good causes, though that process might take an
extended period of time. I would want to engage a competent
money manager to maximize the return on capital without taking
undue risks. And I’d want to engage a philanthropic consultant. I
understand that Mackenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, who
had several tens of billions of dollars fall into her hands pursuant
to her divorce settlement, has conducted an aggressive and
enlightened philanthropic regimen. I might try to get in touch
with her and some others for advice. I would talk to people likely
to have good philanthropic ideas. I have no yearning for luxuries
or exotic experiences, like flying to “the edge of space” for the
supposed thrill of it, much less owning a half-billion-dollar yacht.
What would make me happiest would be using the money to
relieve suffering, spread joy and make the world a better place.
Am I kidding myself, imagining that I would be so idealistic?
I’d be happy to find out.

81
 #30

Imagine that You’ve Been

Transformed into Dark Matter.

Dark matter’s existence can only be inferred from the

gravitational force it exerts. That’s how scientists discovered
it. They calculated that the gravity of regular matter wasn’t
strong enough to hold galaxies together and realized that
enough of some other kind of matter must be interspersed
with regular matter to keep stars from flying apart.
Dark matter is strange stuff. It isn’t even dark. If it were, it
would block out light coming from behind it, but it doesn’t. It
would more aptly be called transparent matter, but even that
isn’t right. Glass and the air around us are transparent,
though made of regular matter. What’s distinctive about dark
matter is that it doesn’t interact with regular matter. If a ball
of dark matter is on a pool table, a ball of regular matter
aimed at it will go through it as if it weren’t there. A regular
matter pool ball in motion slows slightly because it has to
push air aside and because of friction with the surface of the
table, but a dark matter pool ball wouldn’t slow in the
slightest. Now that I think of it, a dark matter pool ball
wouldn’t roll along on the pool table; it would fall right
through it, leaving not the slightest scratch as evidence of its
passage though the table top.
Astonishingly, scientists have calculated that there is over
five times as much dark matter as there is regular matter (the
kind the sun, the moon, the Earth, and we ourselves are
made of). One can’t help wondering: Do habitable planets
form out dark matter? Are there intelligent beings made of
this stuff? That would seem unlikely, but the Miracle Wizard
just informed you that there are dark matter planets, dark
matter people-like creatures live on some of them, and that
you could change into being one of them temporarily — long
enough to see what they are like!

* *
Are you more curious than hesitant to spend some time being
an intelligent, self-aware reasoning creature made of dark
matter?

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Good news: Just as the Wiz promised, he transformed you
into an advanced “person” made of dark matter, and you find
yourself standing on a pleasant meadow on a well-situated
dark matter planet. It’s nighttime and you are dazzled by the
stars overhead. They are in the same galaxy you were in
before — the one known as the Milky Way — but there are
five times as many of them shining down on you as there
ever are in Earth’s night sky. It never gets completely dark on
this dark matter planet except on nights when dark matter
stars are blocked by dark matter clouds.
You know that none of this vast number of stars overhead
could be the sun. Even if the sun were as close to your dark
matter planet as it is to Earth, you couldn’t see it, because
you are made of dark matter and can’t detect anything made
of regular matter.
Fortunately, the Wiz invested you with fluency in the dark
matter creatures’ language, so you’re able to have an
extended conversation with one of them. You ask her what
scientists on her planet think of regular matter.
“Do you mean dark matter?” she says. “We know it exists;
and we know there’s about one-fifth as much of it as there is
of regular matter. We just don’t know what the hell it is.”

83
 #31

Would You Be Willing To Reduce Your Future Life Span by

Ten Percent to Learn the Answers to Some Major
Scientific Questions and How the Future of
Homo Sapiens Plays Out?

The Wiz tells you that if you’re willing to have the rest of your
life last ten percent shorter than it would be otherwise, he’ll
spend the next few hours that are convenient for you
describing the future history of humans and answering
important questions scientists have about the universe.
Among the things you’ll learn is when our species will
become extinct or evolve into another species, and how and
when this will happen; what effect the development of
artificial intelligence will have on humanity; what if anything
happened before the “Big Bang” with which our universe
came into existence; how our universe will continue to
evolve; whether there are other universes besides our own,
or have been in the past, or will be in the future; what the
nature is of ultimate reality (to the extent it’s comprehensible);
and if, and to what extent, there is life in outer space, and, if
so, whether there are forms of life as intelligent or more so
than humans, and where they are, what they are like, and
whether they will ever make contact with us.
Are there questions you have that I haven’t thought of?
The Wiz will answer all of them, as long as you’re willing to
pay the price of having a ten-percent-shorter lifespan ahead
of you.

Would you take the Wiz up on his offer?

In my view, one of the worst things about mortality is that

you don’t get to find out what happens after you die. Maybe
most people don’t care. “What’s it to me? It won’t affect me,”
a friend said to me when I brought up this problem with him.
That’s a reasonable attitude, I suppose, but not one I
share. I’m curious about what the future holds, and I’d like to
learn a lot else about the universe, particularly whether there
are advanced alien civilizations out there and where they are
and what they are like. I hate knowing that I’ll never find out,

84
so I’m inclined to accept the Wiz’s offer, even though I’m 92
and need every bit of future life expectancy I can get.
I realize that if you are young when you have this choice,
it’s not any easier. For example, suppose you are, say, twenty
years old. Assuming that you take good care of yourself, you
have a good chance of living seventy years more. Ten
percent of that is seven years. That’s a lot to blow off just to
learn what happens when you could read a dozen
speculative fiction books and get several conceivable futures
laid out in them, and they might be more interesting than
what will really happen.
I’ve tried to set forth the arguments for and against
accepting this offer, but I’m not even going to think about it.
For me, getting answers to key scientific questions and
knowing what will happen to our species before it becomes
extinct is almost like living that long. What a gift, one worth
my giving up a few months for, or possibly a whole year.
Oh, oh. I was about to go on to describing the next thought
experiment when I heard the Wiz whispering in my ear:
“If you take me up on this offer, you’re going to wish that
you hadn’t when your ten-percent-shorter life is about to end.”

85
 #32

If You Open a Particular Door in Front of You, the Rest of

Your Life May Be Consistently Wonderful.

The Wiz has often appeared unannounced in front of you.

This time, instead of that happening, somehow you have
found yourself next to the Wiz, and the two of you are in a
long corridor and standing in front of a door. Before you can
think of what to say, the Wiz says:
“If you open this door, the rest of your life may be
continuously wonderful, and if you decide not to open it, your
life will play out just as it would have had you never had this
option.”
You realize at once that the trouble with this offer is that
the word “may” means that you can’t be sure. You could
open the door and find that the rest of your life will be
continuously miserable.
Your first thought is that you should not open the door. At
least, then, your life will play out as well as it would have if
you had never been given that option. Still, it’s best not to be
hasty. Maybe you can elicit more information from the Wiz,
hopefully enough so you can make an informed decision.
“Come on, Wiz,” you say. “What do you mean when you
say that the rest of my life may be continuously wonderful?
How would I know that it wouldn’t be continuously terrible?”
“I understand how you feel,” the Wiz says. “Unfortunately,
I’m not authorized to say anything more, except for one
thing. I’m not required to say this, but I want you to know
that I am happy that I’m allowed to say it. Are you ready?”
“Ready.
Looking you in the eye, the Wiz says, “This is a once-in-
a-lifetime opportunity.”
You press the Wiz to say more, but he only shakes his
head and says that he’s not allowed to say another word.

Do you decide to open the door in hope of having a

continuously wonderful life ahead of you, or settle for letting
the rest of your life play out as it would if the Wiz hadn’t made
this offer?

86
At this point you still don’t know whether you’ll have a
continuously wonderful life if you open the door, but you do
know that the Wiz is no longer being equivocal. He said that
he wasn’t required to say anything more, but he chose to do
so. That means that he wouldn’t have said that this is a
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity unless he was trying to tell you
that you’ll be happy if you open the door.
The only question is whether you can trust him. Is it
possible that he wants to trick you into opening the door and
having the rest of your life be miserable? You and the Wiz
have gotten to know each other pretty well by now. He has
been a little tricky at times, and sometimes he seems to
enjoy keeping you in suspense, but I don’t see the slightest
indication that he is malicious. I think you can be confident
that he is telling the truth, that he’s trying to tell you that the
rest of your life really will be continuously wonderful if you
open the door. If I were you, I’d feel that it’s safe to do so.
I should say, however, that I have a major reservation. It’s
not about the Wiz. It’s about the prospect of a “continuously
wonderful life.” A lot of what makes life rewarding is meeting
challenges and overcoming obstacles. Doesn’t that mean
that there have to be occasional discontinuities in happiness
to have a happy life? Might it be that a continuously
wonderful life would be boring?

87
 #33

It Seemed To Have Happened in an Instant.

As far As You Can Tell, Everyone in the
World Has Disappeared but You.

What has the Wiz done this time!? It’s been two days now,
and you haven’t seen a single other person. You haven’t
been able to reach anyone on the phone, the internet is
dead, and there’s nothing on TV or the radio. At first, you
thought there had been a cyber attack, but the real shocker
was when you went outside, and some cars and a truck were
stopped on your street and two others had gone off the road
and come to rest on the sidewalk, and another had crashed
into a tree, all this with not a soul in sight.
You tried to keep calm and got in your car and drove
around and soon found cars and trucks crashed everywhere
and still not a person dead or alive, as if everyone but you
had vanished into thin air.
You drove further afield, but everywhere it was the same,
and in some places, cars and trucks had jammed up the road
completely, especially if they had stopped for a traffic light
and, before it turned green, all the drivers and passengers
had disappeared, so that every vehicle just sat where it was
or kept moving until it crashed into another one or something
else.
You filled your car and some jugs with gasoline so you
could drive greater distances and not rely on gas station
pumps working, but you soon found that you had to keep
backing up because the road ahead was blocked with stalled
cars and wrecks, still none with any people in them. You had
to fight off panic and go back home and try to think what to
do and make sure you hadn’t gone insane. Despite the
terrible shock, you’re sure you’ll still sane, because
everything is rational and makes sense except for the
complete absence of any other human being.
You don’t have a cat or dog — you feel badly thinking of
all the ones that may be dying of thirst or starving. It makes
you wish that they had disappeared too. Maybe they did. You
haven’t heard any barking or seen any pets.
You try to calm yourself and think clearly. You’re not in
immediate danger — there’s a practically unlimited quantity

88
of non-perishable food in supermarkets. As far as you can
tell, you can drive as far as you want in any direction.
Whenever you’re blocked by permanently backed-up traffic,
you can walk to the head of the line and find an unblocked
vehicle with the key in it and continue your trip. The biggest
problem you have is the heaviness that’s come over you.
You’re beginning to think you’re insane after all.

How will you handle this situation? Do you feel any hope for
what the future holds? Do you have a strategy?

It would help if you had a copy of Alan Weisman’s book The

World Without Us. In it, he describes what would happen if all
humans suddenly disappeared. Among other effects, toxic
gases and liquids would leak from untended factories, oil
refineries would leak oil, and nuclear plants would melt
down. You’ll have to be careful to avoid perils you never had
to think about before.
Otherwise, the scenario you’re dealing with is a little like
luxurious solitary confinement (thought experiment #5). It’s
far less luxurious, but preferable, in my opinion, because it’s
open-ended. If you were in luxurious solitary confinement,
you would almost certainly never encounter another human
again. In the situation you’re in now, you’ve been presented
with a frightening mystery, but you should have no trouble
providing for your basic needs, at least for a few years, and
you’ll be exploring, having adventures, probably multiple
adventures. You can drive great distances, looking for others
— anyone. Who knows what you’ll find? You have reason to
hope that if you search widely enough, you’ll find other
people, and that means everything.

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 #34

What Duty, If Any, Do We Owe to Future Generations?

The Wiz just appeared in front of you. He has a troubled look

on his face.
“Something’s been bothering me,” he says. “You can’t
see the future the way, I can. It would be inappropriate for me
to disclose precise figures to you, but it’s not giving away too
much to say that there will be billions of people born after
you die. Their well-being will be determined in part by how
people living now preserve Earth’s resources and ensure its
continuing habitability.
“Because of humans’ profligacy with fossil fuels and
despoilation of the ecosystem, suffering and morbidity will
rise dramatically over the centuries to come. Global warming
will be relatively tolerable for most people alive today, but
consider what its effects will be during the next century or
two.
“Imagine that a delegation of people born one hundred
years from now returned to the present and asked why we’re
turning the planet into a hot and noxious wasteland. It would
be as wrong to ignore future people’s needs as much as it
would be wrong to refuse to help a neighbor in distress.”

Should you be concerned about the welfare of future

generations? For example, should more of your charitable
donations and personal energies be directed toward efforts to
arrest global warming and maintain sustainable long-term
ecosystems and resources?

I suspect that many people feel that they have enough to

worry about without taking the welfare of future generations
into account. Still, what the Wiz said gives one cause to think
about what it will be like on Earth hundreds of years from
now.
My feeling is that it’s natural and right to direct our time,
energy, and charitable giving to benefit people who are living
now, but the welfare of future people should be considered
too. In particular, I think that we should support and

90
participate in efforts to ensure sustainable long-term
ecosystems and resources; to prevent civilization-threatening
catastrophes, such as nuclear war, bio-terrorism, and out-of-
control artificial general intelligence; and to defend and
preserve democratic and humanitarian institutions and
processes. That will help future people and us too.

91
 #35

If You Could Have Three Famous Writers, Dead or Alive,

Join You for Dinner, Whom Would You Invite?

The New York Times Sunday Book Review regularly features

a one-page transcript of an interview with a noted writer. The
questions are usually the same or similar. Often the first
question asked is, “What books are on your nightstand?”
Judging by how many straight answers the interviewer gets,
most authors have sturdy nightstands stacked with books.
Also regularly asked is, “What books have influenced you the
most?” “What famous books have you never gotten around
to reading?” “Is there a famous book you feel is overrated?”
More often than not, the last question the interviewer poses
is a thought experiment: “If you could have three famous
writers, dead or alive, join you for dinner, whom would you
invite?” This usually elicits an answer accompanied by a
one-line explanation of why that choice is made. I’m sure I’ll
never be interviewed for this column, but that hasn’t stopped
me from thinking about what writers I would invite for dinner
if I had the chance.

What three famous writers, dead or alive, would you have join
you for dinner if you had the chance, and why would you
make these particular choices?

Some of the interviewees name the famous writers they

would most like to dine with, but don’t give reasons for
selecting them; some select ones who they think would
provide the most sparkling conversation; some select ones
with the hope of clearing up mysteries about them.
The first writer I thought of asking was Shakespeare. The
characters he created exemplify virtually the whole repertoire
of human behavior. Dozens of them might be more
interesting to have as dinner companions than most famous
writers, and listening to Shakespeare talking about them
would be the closest I could get to meeting them.
After further reflection, I decided that this fantasy would
not likely be realized even if Shakespeare showed up. One

92
can never detect that he was expressing his personal opinion
through one of his characters. I’m doubtful that he would
open up about them at my little dinner party. For that reason,
if I had the chance to talk to him, I’d ask him if he had kept
up on the course of history during the four centuries since he
died, and if he had, I’d ask what his opinion is of some major
figures during that span and whether comparisons might be
drawn between some of them and certain characters in his
plays.
I hope my invitation would also be accepted by Joseph
Campbell, a prominent 20th century expert on comparative
mythology, two of whose lectures I attended. Campbell
emphasized how the same basic themes could be found in
the mythological traditions of disparate cultures throughout
the world. This was the idea for his most well-known book —
The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Surprisingly — and
probably the basis of much criticism directed at him — he
was irked by the mythology enshrined in the Bible. In what
may have been the last recorded interview of Campbell
before he died, in 1987, he replied to a question about the
Bible by the interviewer, Fraser Boa, “Ach, the Bible. It’s a
compendium of all the mistakes ever made in translating the
symbolic into historical.” Boa failed to follow up on this
radical assertion. Perhaps he thought the subject was too
large or too delicate to pursue. I would question Campbell at
length on this if he’d be willing to attend my dinner party.
As for my third guest, I would ask that most perspicacious
observer of the human animal, Marcel Proust, had he not
covered so much in his six-volume-long (in my edition) novel,
In Search of Lost Time, that I doubt if he would have much to
add to it. I thought that a good alternative to Proust might be
James Joyce, but then I realized that I might be bedazzled
and befuddled by a stream of cryptic references and
lexicographical oddities that he would conjure up to amuse
himself.
Maybe I would think of someone else. Otherwise, I’d
probably settle for the company of the Dalai Lama. I’d like to
ask him what’s required to obtain bodhichitta, which he
defines as having “a good heart imbued with wisdom.”

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 #36

You Have Been Sentenced To Live for a Year on a

Remote Small Uninhabited Island and Can Bring Only
One Book with You. What Book Would You Bring?

This is another thought experiment that’s a little like luxurious

solitary confinement ((thought experiment #5) in that you are
doomed to live in isolation, except, in this instance, thankfully
confined for only a year. Your basic needs will be taken care
of, and there’s no particular health risk, and presumably the
island won’t be totally uninteresting, but instead of having an
array of amenities, including whole libraries of books,
movies, and games that some billionaires might envy, you’ll
have only one modest luxury, a printed book of your choice.

What printed book would you select to bring with you?

Shakespeare’s collected works in one volume immediately

came to my mind. Where else could you find such a rich
assemblage of masterpieces between two covers? As was
inevitable, the only one-volume edition of Shakespeare’s
complete works I’ve seen has small print, a tightly packed
format, and is hard to hold. Still, it’s the content that counts.
Right?
Another possibility would be Harold Bloom’s 800-page
anthology, Best Poems in the English Language. In it, he
comments on many of the poems and supplies extensive
biographical notes as to each poet represented. Many of the
poems Bloom chose are replete with cryptic passages and
references that are obscure to most readers. With only one
book to read on a remote island, this could be an advantage.
You might want the book you bring to be one that you can
puzzle over, day after day. You’d have plenty of time to
speculate about what the poet is saying. It could be
frustrating, though, if it turns out that you have all the time in
the world but are perpetually in the dark about what a poem
means.
An alternative to a tome stuffed with elegant literary
passages and arcane references, allusions, ellipses, and
antinomies would be a simple tale that’s so endearing that

94
it’s a comfort to have around –- that will always be there, like
a big shaggy dog that will come over for a pat when you
summon it. Such a book is Kingsley Amis’s classic novel
Lucky Jim, a work that I’ve reread several times as an aid to
preserving mental equilibrium.
Jim Dixon, the anti-hero of Amis’s mid-twentieth century
novel, is a lazy, irresponsible, marginally competent young
history instructor at a second- or third-rate British university.
He’s not above playing pranks and concocting outrageous
fabrications, and he is rightly fearful that he will be sacked at
the end of the term. He smokes too many cigarettes (even by
1950s standards), he drinks too much alcohol, and he shirks
every type of responsibility as much as he can get away with;
in fact, more than he can get away with. He is lucky indeed
to end up with a pretty girl and a desirable job. Except it’s
not just luck that gets him through –– he has a basic integrity,
an entrenched refusal to be phony and pretentious, marks of
nearly everyone else around him. He deserves the pretty girl.
As for the job he’s offered after being justly dismissed from
his position at the university, admittedly, as his new employer
tells him, he has no qualifications for it, but more important,
he has no disqualifications.
Even the quietest life you could construct can be full of
surprises and challenges. That’s why I could imagine living in
a world as narrowly circumscribed as that of Bertie Wooster
in one of P. G. Wodehouse’s accounts of him, such as Right
Ho, Jeeves! (Jeeves is Bertie’s astonishingly astute butler.)
Reading one of these books will draw you into a dreamy
state in which illness, aging, crime, poverty, war, natural or
human-made disasters except for a chipped tea saucer or
the occasional impositions of a fussy aunt or other such
feather-weight adversities are rarely so much as mentioned,
everyone is well-fed, well-clothed, and well-cared for, free of
illnesses and other infirmities, and in which our narrator,
Bertie Wooster himself, when he’d rather be sitting in a
comfortable chair at his club gazing out the window while
quaffing an agreeable beverage, is subjected to only the
most inconsequential difficulties one could imagine.
How can reading such stuff not be boring? Chalk it up to
the genius of Mr. Wodehouse, a rummy author if there ever
was one, as attested to by Evelyn Waugh on the back cover
of one my copies: “Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never
stale. He will continue to release future generations from
captivity that may be more irksome than our own.”

95
 I don’t think I’d go crazy during a year-long confinement if
Right Ho, Jeeves or Lucky Jim was the only book I could
bring, but at the last moment, having no more time to think
about it, I’d probably play it safe and bring the Bard.

96
 #37

You Have the Chance To Have the Most Over-the-Top

Single Experience of Your Life that You Specify.

I’m thinking of a brief period, perhaps lasting only a few

minutes, a true peak: For example, experiencing what it’s like
to be engaged in a prolonged rally at championship point
against the #1 seed at Wimbledon, and your opponent drills
a sharp-angled crosscourt shot, a sure winner had you not
anticipated it and raced to get your racket on it and sent the
ball clearing the net by a millimeter and catching the line
while the crowd goes wild, and a few minutes later you’re
holding the trophy above you, turning, smiling at everyone
and basking in the moment. Or maybe it’s the Masters golf
tournament, and to win it you need to sink a 22-foot putt on
an uneven sloping green, and the crowd is holding its breath
as you give the ball a firm tap, and for a second it looks like it
will roll past the cup, but it veers slightly at the last half-
second and drops in. You nod appreciatively at the
onlookers, doffing your hat, acknowledging their applause.
Or maybe it’s not sports that’s delivering this over-the-top
moment. Maybe you’re lifting your baton to bring forth the
opening notes of the Overture to Mozart’s Don Giovani at the
Metropolitan Opera House, in New York. Or, maybe it’s
nothing seemingly dramatic, and you’re not a celebrity, and
you have no special skills, but you happen to be walking in a
swampy region of Louisiana and turn your head and gasp,
because perched on a branch thirty feet away is an ivory
billed woodpecker, an exotic and beautiful bird that had been
thought to be extinct, and you get almost a dozen good
pictures of it, including one in which it is taking flight.

What over-the-top experience would you ask the Miracle

Wizard to arrange for you?

It’s hard for me to imagine the thrill of winning a major tennis

or golf championship title because I never had the
experience or skill to give it context. Same for conducting a
great orchestra playing a work of genius. I’d probably be

97
wise to ask for something not too distant from what I think of
as over-the-top experiences I’ve had in life.
Probably the best among these happened to me about
thirty years ago: Swimming about a hundred yards off the
beach in Kealakekua Bay in the Big Island of Hawaii, I
became almost completely surrounded by spinner dolphins. I
felt no fear –– I had never heard of an attack on humans by
dolphins –– but I sensed that I had invaded their territory. I
began leisurely backstroking toward the beach. Though none
of the dolphins approached within perhaps twenty yards,
they continued to monitor me. I knew that what was going
through their minds was the same as was going through
mine: curiosity. More than anything else, I think it was that
feeling of kinship — that our similarity seemed greater than
our differences — that made this a peak experience for me.
So what have I never experienced but might rival that as a
peak moment? I’m sure I could think of dozens if I took the
time for it. For starters, how about skiing at breakneck speed
down Le Face de Bellevarde; Val d'Isere, France.
That would be good for starters, though it would probably
be for finishers too, with my completing the run on a
toboggan guided by la patrouille de ski.
As an alternative, especially in view of my advanced age, I
would probably be wise to settle for rereading descriptions of
the most outstanding peak experiences I’m aware of, all
conveniently compiled in the classic New Yorker story by
James Thurber, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”

98
 #38

You Can Choose To Have a Feeling of Complete

Assurance that You’ll Go to Heaven When You Die.

“Here’s a chance to banish anxiety completely for the rest of

your life,” the Wiz tells you. ”If you accept my offer, you’ll feel
a warm glow of contentment no matter what happens to
you.”
“Sounds good,” you say. “What’s the hitch?”
“There’s no hitch — just a terrific pay-off.”
You notice what you’ve come to regard as a sly grin on
his face, as he continues: “All you have to do say ‘Yes,’ and
from that moment on, you’ll have an unshakeable belief that
you are predestined to go to heaven when you die, and that
the heaven you’ll get to will be more wonderful than you can
imagine.”
Before you have time to absorb this, he adds, “Did you
hear what I said? You’ll never have a flicker of doubt. Nothing
could make you happier than what I’m offering you.”
“It does sound attractive,” you say. “But you haven’t
assured me that I’ll get into this super great heaven.”
“That’s because you won’t. You’ll still be like everyone
else after you die — you’ll have no more consciousness than
a rock. But you’ll have total contentment and total
confidence for the rest of your life — the happiness that can
only come from being one hundred percent sure that your
afterlife will be everything you could imagine and a lot more.
In my opinion, you should think twice before passing up an
opportunity like this.”

Do you say “yes” to the Wiz’s offer?

I can see the appeal of having absolute certainty that you’ll

have a blissful afterlife, but I wouldn’t jump to accept this
offer. It’s too much like an invitation to be brainwashed by a
cult leader. I’m troubled with the negative effect it might have
on my behavior. If my afterlife is going to be so much
superior to my present life, and it will last forever instead for
the paltry number of years remaining to me, my present life
will seem inconsequential compared to my future life. I’m

99
less likely to live it to the full. I’ll be living a lie even though I
won’t know it. Thinking about such an existence gives me
the creeps. “No thanks, Wiz,” I’d say. “I’m not going
compromise my life for an illusion.”

100
 #39

You Promised Your Uncle To Perform a Ten-Minute

Religious Ritual Every Day for the Rest of Your Life.

Imagine that if your Uncle Harry had not paid for your
education, you wouldn’t have been able to graduate from
college and embark on a promising career. Harry was a
widower and had no children, and the two of you were quite
close despite one big difference — he was a very pious man,
and you are not.
When you heard that he been suddenly taken ill and had
only a few days to live, you made sure to visit him. You
wanted to say goodbye and let him know how much his
kindness and generosity meant to you and what a difference
it made in your life.
When you saw him, you were shocked by how ill he
looked, but relieved that he was still clear-headed and quite
talkative.
Among other acts of devotion, Harry unfailingly spent ten
minutes each day performing a ritual he felt was of sacred
importance. You’ve kept the written instructions he gave you
for it. To please him, you even learned the chants and
prayers it involved, but you never practiced it yourself.
A couple of days after you visited him, you got a call
informing you that he might not live through the night. You
immediately went again to see him. In what seemed like his
last breaths, he asked you to promise that you would carry
out the same, daily, ten-minute ritual that he always had, and
that you would try to never miss a day for the rest of your life.
You felt that this was no time to equivocate, so you said,
“I promise I will, Harry.”
“That means so much to me,” he murmured. “Now I can
die in peace.”
To your amazement, there was a smile on his face, half an
hour later, as he passed away.

It has been a month since Harry died, and every day since
then you’ve carried out the ritual. You’ve spent about five
hours on it so far. That will translate into about sixty hours a
year. You often have to fit this ten-minutes in when it’s
inconvenient, like when you’re tired and want to go to bed. It

101
has no religious significance to you. You get no spiritual uplift
from it. It won’t do anything for Harry. It makes no sense to
keep it up.
Still, you did promise him, and he probably wouldn’t have
died with a smile on his face if he hadn’t thought that it was a
promise you would keep.

Do you resolve to keep your promise to Harry, or do you

decide to quit?

I’m sure there would be a divergence of views as to how to

deal with this problem. Personally, I would quit. It does Harry
no good to keep this up. If he hadn’t been dying, he probably
wouldn’t have made such a demanding request. He knew I
didn’t share his religious feelings. I don’t regret having
promised to grant his request. It think it was my unhesitating
promise that made him smile.
I appreciate how some people might feel differently. Even
though they didn’t share Harry’s religious conviction, they
might gain or maintain spiritual strength from keeping their
word. They wouldn’t be doing this for Harry — they would be
doing it for themselves, so it would make sense for them. It
wouldn’t for me.

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 #40

Can You Prove That You Are a Human Conversing with

René, a Super Advanced Chatbot, even though René
Claims that It Is a Human and that You Are a Chatbot?

René is the most advanced A.I. computer chatbot yet. A

panel comprising computer scientists, neuroscientists, and
psychologists will read the transcript of an hour-long
conversation you’re about to have with him, or “it,” as you
prefer to call René, just as René prefers to call you “it.”

Can you think of a stratagem to employ in your conversation

with René that would demonstrate beyond doubt that you are
the human and René is not?

It occurred to me that the best way to trick this crafty

machine into exhibiting that it’s not human is to make it
betray that it has no sense of humor or no more than a fake
sense of humor. To try out this theory, I would say this to
René: “Recently, a friend of mine said to me, ‘It would be
nice to go to heaven when I die, but, given that chance, I
would choose to go back to my apartment.’* That surprised
me. So, here is my question, René: Does my friend have a
fundamental misunderstanding about what afterlife options
are available to those who are admitted to heaven?”
If, despite its lack of olfactory apparatus, René smells a
rat, I would try to find a professional who would help me. It
may take comedy writers to save the world from A.I.
Do you have a better idea? I hope so.
_____________________
* similar to a statement attributed to Woody Allen

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 #41

How Do You Feel When, on the Brink of Death, You

Learn that You Just Won a Nobel Prize?

If you’re like me in this respect, there’s not the remotest

possibility of winning a Nobel prize, but the purpose of this
experiment is to imagine how you would feel if, just as your
life is about to end, you received such momentous
recognition of something you had achieved. Call it the
ultimate bittersweet moment.
It may be harder for you to imagine winning a Nobel Prize
than it is to imagine creating a new universe, but it is
possible: You’re dying, but still clear-headed, and a nurse
hands you your smart phone. A fully authenticated and
indisputably verified caller notifies you that, for your special
extraordinary achievement, you will receive this most
esteemed award.

How would you feel?

You might feel a little thrill, maybe more — it depends on how

important winning a Nobel is to you emotionally. And you
might feel a wave of melancholy as you reflect on how you
won’t be able to enjoy this great honor. No trip to Stockholm
for you. You won’t have time or energy to read all the
congratulatory messages and calls that will soon be pouring
in. There will be a very large deposit in your estate’s bank
account, but that’s not the same as one in yours. And you
won’t have years ahead enjoying that aura of exceptional
attainment that attends Nobel laureates wherever they go.
Nonetheless, you know that the award of a Nobel prize is
recognition that you made an “outstanding contribution for
the benefit of humankind.” That would be something to hold
on to in your last hours— that in a not insignificant way, you
made the world a better place.

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 #42

Which, if Any, of These Three Types of Persons

Would You Prefer To Be in Your Next Life?

Once again, the Wiz has appeared, smiling, as always, when

he’s about to offer you a special deal.
“I have a special deal,” he says.
“What is it, and what’s the hitch?” you ask.
“You’re going to like this,” he says, “and there’s no hitch.
I’m going to turn the clock back, but not until you live out
your life just as if I had never come along. Then, the moment
you die, I’ll turn it back to the year, day, and time it is now,
but instead of being the person you are now and will be for
the rest of your present life, you’ll be the same gender you
are now — be assured of that — but otherwise you’ll be a
completely different person, and you’ll have just had your
thirtieth birthday.
“You’ll have no memory of having lived a previous life, but
you’ll remember your new life and the experiences you’ve
had in it the way any thirty-year-old would.”
“That might be good, and it might not,” you say. “What
sort of person would I be in this new life?”
“Good question,” the Wiz says. “It wasn’t easy for me to
arrange for this, but you’ll get to choose to be one of three
different people, each of whom is well above average in most
ways, is an attractive person, and is in good shape
physically. Unfortunately, I’m empowered to give you only a
few brief bits of information about each of them.”
“I’ll be interested in whatever you can tell me,” you say.
“I thought you would be,” the Wiz says. “But first I want to
warn you that there will not be a trace of your present
personality, values, skills, interests, or other characteristics in
the new person you will be. You will be this new person and
no one else. I’m sorry, but this is all I can give you to go on in
making your choice except for these capsule summaries as
to each of them:

“Person A has an interesting and well-paying job and

bright future in a cutting-edge tech firm, is an
accomplished jazz pianist, and has a close relationship

105
 with A’s bright and delightful five-year-old daughter.
Person A is also in a difficult and unhappy marriage that’s
been going downhill and probably hasn’t long to last.

“Person B is a gregarious, well-liked, self-assured

business and community leader, whose spouse is a
lawyer and representative in the state legislature. The two
of you have been called a future power couple. You’re
planning to wait a few years longer before having your
first child.

“Person C, who is single, is a visual artist whose work

has been rapidly gaining recognition and commanding
higher prices in gallery sales. Person C is presently
unmarried, but has many friends and is “on the lookout
for the right one to come along.”

You must choose to be one of these three people. Which one

will it be?

Given the sketchy information you’ve been given, there’s a

lot of guess work to be done here. The Wiz was wise to point
out that whichever person you choose to be, you will be that
person and have that person’s preferences and outlook on
life and not your present one. Nonetheless, since you are still
in your present life, it would be natural for you to choose to
be the person who seems most in synch with your own
values and preferences.
Here’s my take on them:

Person B’s position in the community and prospects look

excellent. B may be happy –– possibly happier than either A
or C –– but I have a feeling that there’s something missing in
B’s life. B and B’s spouse strike me as ambitious, but
conventional, and –– this is just a guess –– lacking in esprit. B
may accomplish a lot and have a truly satisfying life. If I were
B, I probably would prefer to be myself rather than A or C, but
at the moment I’m still me, and I’m not drawn to being B.
One of the few things the Wiz was able to tell you about
Person C, the artist, was that C has “many friends” and is
“on the lookout for the right one to come along.” There’s
nothing wrong with that, and this is more guesswork on my
part, but I sense that there may be a certain shallowness in
C. I have to admit that I’m relying on gut instinct in rejecting

106
the possibility of living C’s life and becoming a famous artist,
but I’m not keen on being C.
Person A has an unhappy marriage and appears to be
headed for a divorce, but A’s career looks interesting and
promising. I suspect that A’s next romantic relationship will
be a big improvement. It bodes well that A and A’s daughter
have a close relationship, and that this daughter is bright and
delightful. She’ll probably be a great joy to A throughout A’s
life. That A is an accomplished jazz pianist and presumably
knocks out great stuff at the keyboard clinches it for me. I’d
tell the Wiz, “I’ll choose to be Person A.”

107
 #43

Imagine that You Had Never Been Born.

The Wiz appears, as usual without warning. He drapes his

arm around you as if to console you for what’s about to
happen.
“Sorry,” he says, “but in exactly three minutes, history will
be revised in a way such that you will never have been born.
It won’t be as if you had died. When people die, they leave
traces of themselves behind — children, relationships, good
things that they have accomplished, or in all too many cases
injury they’ve done. But you’ll leave nothing, because you’ll
never have been anything but nothing.

How do you feel when you learn that in three minutes, history
will change in such a way that you will never have been born?

I think that when I die, family members and friends will feel
sad, and I don’t like to think of an event happening that
makes anyone unhappy. That wouldn’t be a problem
if I’d never been born. On the other hand — and far more
important — if I had never been born, my children and
grandchildren would never have been born. They would have
been deprived of their lives. And they would have been
deprived of the good they have done and will do, for that is
their character.
As for people for whom such considerations aren’t
applicable, once they are dead, it would seem to make little
difference whether they had been born or not, except that it
would make a difference if during their lives they had brought
more happiness than unhappiness to the world. It would
matter whether they had made the world a better place or a
worse one. If the former, it would be a tragedy if they had
never been born. If the latter, it would be just as well.

108
 #44

What If Logical Reasoning from a Sound Premise

Leads to a Repugnant Conclusion?

Here’s the Wiz again, but scowling instead of smiling.

“Remember the universe I let you set up?” he asks.
“You’ve been neglecting it.”
“I thought it would run by itself,” you say.
“It will, but not optimally. There’s a big decision you
should make. I have a list of about three thousand of your
planets on which species of intelligent self-aware beings are
evolving. You can arrange the DNA of them so that, given the
environment they’re in, you can cause to come into existence
about four hundred billion individuals who average very high
on the happiness scale and feel that their lives are very much
worth living — call it version A.”
“That sounds pretty good,” you say. “Can I change things
so they average even higher on the happiness scale?”
“I’m afraid not,” the Wiz says. “Physical conditions are
generally quite harsh on most of these planets, and you can’t
change that. But if you’d like, you can arrange everyone’s
DNA so that you can cause to come into existence four
hundred trillion intelligent beings who would be barely happy
and feel that their lives are barely worth living — call it
version B. That’s a thousand times more intelligent beings
with net happiness — though by the narrowest of margins —
than in version A.”
“Barely worth living? Somehow, version B doesn’t appeal
to me,” you say.
“You’d better think this through,” the Wiz says. “Each
individual’s happiness would be much less in version B than
in version A, but there would a thousand times as many
individuals in version B as in version A, so the total amount
of happiness would be greater in version B than in version A.
Do you want to keep four hundred trillion intelligent creatures
from coming into being whose lives would be worth living
even if only by the slightest margin? Don’t you have an
ethical duty to run your universe so it has the largest amount
of happiness possible?”
“I don’t see that I do,” you say. You’re afraid the Wiz may
get angry on hearing this, or at least give you a stern lecture.

109
Instead, he grins and says, “This situation reminds me of the
British philosopher Derrick Parfit. I don’t remember the
details, but I know he did some kind of calculation from
which it appeared that if your goal is to have the most
happiness in the world, it’s logical to have a great number of
people who are barely happy than a much smaller number of
people who are very happy. He said that he had reached a
“repugnant conclusion.”

In making your decision, would you prefer your universe to be

one in which there are four hundred billion intelligent beings
who on average are very happy and feel that their lives are
very well worth living, or one in which there are a thousand
times as many — four hundred trillion —intelligent beings
who on average are barely happy and feel that their lives are
worth living by the narrowest of margins?

It may logically follow that the total amount of happiness in a

universe with a very large number of people who are barely
happy is greater than in a universe with a much smaller
number of people who are very happy, but I agree with
Professor Parfit that this is a “repugnant conclusion.” My
non-repugnant conclusion from this is that our instinctive
emotions and esthetic judgments sometimes provide a truer
answer to a problem than one reached by logical analysis.

110
 #45

Would It Be the Right Thing To Do To Subject One Person

To a Half Hour of Agony to Save Ten Million T.V. Viewers
from Missing the Thrilling Final of the World Cup
SoccerMatch?

The Wiz just dropped by to see you, but he doesn’t have any
pronouncements to make or deals to offer. He says he’s
curious as to how you would answer the question posed
above. “I didn’t think it up; some philosopher did,” he tells
you. “I can’t answer it. Maybe you could.”

Do you answer the question the Wiz put to you (and if so,
how?), or do you say, “I’ve had enough of arguments that
lead to repugnant conclusions, and same goes for repugnant
questions.”?

I’m with you if you chose the second option, but this
particular repugnant question caused me to think of a
question about a repugnant situation: Would it be worth it to
impose modest additional taxes on one thousand billionaires
to finance tax credits that will lift and keep ten million
children out of poverty?

111
 #46

The Limits of Civic Duty: A Case Study

Here’s the Wiz again.

“I’m about to wave my wand,” he says.
Whoosh.
Suddenly you realize that you have just begun a three-day
hike on a beautiful trail through a mountain wilderness. The
area is new to you, and you feel excited at the prospect of
immersing yourself in the natural world.
The trail winds its way through a forest of immensely tall
spruce trees. The air is crisp and clear. Through the gaps in
the forest, you see snow peaks in the distance.
About ten minutes into your hike, you notice a discarded
sandwich wrapper. You pick it up and stuff it in your
backpack. A few minutes later, you come upon an empty
plastic water bottle. You stomp it flat, pick it up, and jam it
into your backpack, feeling a mixture of pleasure that you’re
a good citizen and annoyance that some people litter. Don’t
they know the rule of hiking: “Pack it in. Pack it out.”?

How many times do you think you’d stop to pick up litter on

the trail before you say, “The hell with it?”

Everyone has a civic duty to refrain from littering, especially

when walking on a nature trail. You can get so you
instinctively avoid littering, and fulfilling this duty is effortless.
I’ve heard it said, “Litter breeds litter.” If litter becomes so
abundant that even people who revere nature stop picking
up trash, it takes a major cleanup campaign to return a trail
to litter-free conditions. To achieve that, those who want to
be responsible citizens have a more demanding duty — to
support a campaign to change people’s habits so that
keeping the area litter-free becomes ingrained in the culture,
and fulfilling one’s civic duty is effortless once again.

112
 #47

Suppose Everyone Held the View that Free Will,

as Most People Think of It, Is an Illusion.

Many philosophers and scientists are of the opinion that we

are exercising our free will when we make decisions. As the
English poet, William Ernest Henley put it, “I am the captain of
my soul.” Many other philosophers and scientists are of the
opinion that we aren’t exercising free will when we make
decisions, that whatever we decide to do was caused by
events — including events inside our brains of which we’re
not aware — that happened before we decided to do it. Many
other philosophers and scientists are of the opinion that we
are exercising free will even if whatever we decide to do was
caused by events that happened before we decided to do it.
Those who hold this opinion are called compatabilists. Huh, I
silently exclaimed when I first learned this. The writer I. B.
Singer exhibited no such befuddlement. He said, “Of course I
have free will — I have no choice.”
In his book Determined (2023), Stanford University
neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky makes an exhaustive, or
exhausting, (take your pick) argument that our decisions are
determined by our brain states immediately before we made
them, and these in turn are made by the factors that caused
these brain states to be in these particular configurations, and
these in turn were caused by by a great variety of factors,
including our genetic, cultural, and environmental experience,
and these all have their own respective causal antecedents,
and, for this reason, what we think of as our free will is an
illusion. Sapolsky is convinced that free will and determinism
are not compatible. He leaves no room for free will.
I think the dominant view is that, though we may be
affected by our emotional states and our thinking can be
skewed by hormones and psychological factors, we are
capable of exercising free will in making decisions. For
example, the philosopher Mark Balaguer believes that
although many of our decisions involve no deliberation, we do
exercise free will in cases where we make “torn decisions,”
ones we are forced by circumstances to think about.
I’m far from being an expert on this contentious topic, and
there is a wide variety of views among those who are. The
purpose of this thought experiment isn’t to ascertain which
view is the right one; it’s to consider what the effect would be

113
if everyone believed that Sapolsky and his fellow determinists
are right: that independent free will is an illusion; that, in fact,
our decisions are caused by our brain states, which in turn are
caused by a complex interaction of our genes, experience,
environment, and random processes and events, all subject to
the laws of physics.

If everyone (including you!) believed that independent free will

is an illusion, would that affect your thinking or behavior?
Would it have any effect on our society? Would it be
conducive to people thinking differently about their own
behavior and that of others?

My impression is that most people — experts and non-

experts alike — think that it would be be depressing if most
people thought that they had no free will, that we are puppets
of fate, acting out a predetermined script. I think this is a
baseless fear. For one thing, all of us, including determinists,
are obliged to behave as if we are acting on our own free will.
You can’t wake up in the morning and think, I’ll just stay in
bed until it’s determined that I’ll get up, and then lie there and
wait: At some point you decide to get up and get moving. In
any case, there have been a great many brilliant thinkers who
believe that our actions are predetermined yet have been
highly productive and exhibited as much nobility in their lives
as anyone who professes a belief in free will.
The prominent physicist Carlo Rovelli addresses this topic
in his book, White Holes. (2023). Rovelli aligns himself with
the hard deterministic view of the 17th century philosopher
Baruch Spinoza, but he imparts a poetic gloss on it with a
parable about an old fisherman who had been enchanted with
sunsets until he learns that the sun doesn’t sink into the sea.
The revelation that what he had thought was real is an illusion
has a devastating effect on him. Rovelli calls this “the
fisherman’s mistake.” The sunset is as beautiful as ever,
though viewed in a different perspective.
Rovelli likens discovering that the freedom we experience
in making decisions is subject to the operation of the laws of
physics — “that it is not borne out at the microscopic level”
— to discovering that the sunset is not the sun sinking into
the sea. “It changes nothing in our lives.”
It changes nothing, except that if it became generally
recognized that determinism is true — that free will is an
illusion — it could affect how we think about life and how we

114
view the world. There are those who believe that general
acceptance that free will is an illusion would precipitate moral
disintegration. I hold what I suspect is a minority view: that it
would tend to increase compassion, foster equanimity,
temper egoism, and help cultivate a sense of acceptance of
the human condition; that people would, on average, behave
better. Admittedly, such an idealized reaction might only
occur in a world in which Rovelli’s sensibilities, rather than
those of the fisherman, prevail.

115
 #48

Can You Get Rid of Your Sense of Self?

As I understand it, according to traditional Buddhist doctrine

and in the opinion of some philosophers and scientists, the
self is an illusion. The extent to which that’s true presumably
depends on what one means by “self.” If not having a self
means not experiencing pleasure and pain, you may be able
to minimize it, but you can’t get rid of it. And you can’t get rid
of your psychological continuity, your store of active
memories, including ones that assert themselves from time
to time whether summoned or not. What I imagine you might
be able to get rid of is emotional concern about your status
in the world. But would you want to? What would the
upsides and downsides be of freeing yourself from concern
about your self?
Trying to get a grip on this conundrum, I listened to a
podcast of a conversation the neuroscientist and philosopher
Sam Harris had with Jay Garfield, a professor of philosophy
at Smith College and the author of Losing Ourselves:
Learning to Live without a Self (2022).
Garfield doesn’t deny that you are a person, but he’s
convinced that the self is an illusion. He says that the reason
the self isn’t real is that there isn’t an executive in your brain
managing your affairs. Rather, thoughts and decisions are
produced by brain processes that are causally brought
about. Your brain constructs impressions of the world based
on inputs from your sensory faculties and in response to
experience. One of the things it constructs is a sense of self.
Since a sense of self became naturally selected in the
course of human evolution, one might think that it would be
useful to maintain it. Nonetheless, Garfield argues that the
illusion of self stokes pride, anger, and other undesirable
emotions, and that we would be less self-absorbed and more
mindful without it.

If the Wiz offered you a chance to be get rid of your sense of

self, would you take him up on it?

* *

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Wouldn’t one feel diminished without a sense of self?
Wouldn’t lacking a sense of self erode motivation, self-
confidence, and one’s sense of self-worth? These questions
weren’t addressed specifically in the interview, but I think
that Garfield’s answer to them, which I would agree with, is
clear: You can feel more genuinely self-confident and
strongly motivated once you have rid yourself of the illusion
of self.

117
 #49

Can a Person Change Sufficiently

to Become Another Person?

Imagine that you are a judge, and you must decide whether
to release a man from prison. The individual involved, John
Dozemeyer, was convicted of beating a man to death with a
crowbar five years ago. At the time, Dozemeyer had a
reputation of being an erratic, impulsive, and sometimes
violent individual. A neighbor said of him, “He made me
nervous the way he’d look at me.”
Dozemeyer was sentenced to life imprisonment with no
possibility of parole, but his lawyer claims that he should be
released from prison because he is not the same person as
the person who committed the crime.
Examining the record, you see that two months after
Dozemeyer started his term of imprisonment, he had a brain
tumor removed, and that after recovering from the operation,
he manifested a radically altered personality. Instead of being
threatening and unnerving, he became completely rational
and accommodating — a model prisoner in every way. He
became known for teaching fellow prisoners computer skills,
enabling many of them to get jobs after they were released.
Dozemeyer’s lawyer’s claim that he was now a different
person was backed up by prison officials and two
psychiatrists who examined the record and interviewed him
at length. Even the prosecutor and members of the victim’s
family have urged that Dozemeyer be released, given the
unusual circumstances of the case.
As a judge, you feel bound by the law, which mandates a
sentence of life imprisonment without parole. You would like
to be able to release Dozemeyer from incarceration, but see
no legal basis for doing so unless you are willing to accept
the novel argument that the law doesn’t apply in this situation
because Dozemeyer is a different person than the murderer.
It would not be enough that he is a different person
metaphorically — in that his behavior has changed so much
that he acts like a different person — but a different person
in the respects that are most meaningful in defining what a
person is: his or her basic character, personality, set of
values, and attitude toward other human beings.

118
Would you allow Dozemeyer to be released from prison?
Under the law, to do so, you would have to find not just that
he has changed for the better or shown remorse, but that,
although he has the same name and life history, he is not the
same person as the John Dozemeyer who was convicted of
murder five years earlier?

Dozemeyer is the same person in many respects; for

example, he has the same life history he always had, but
his lawyer makes a powerful argument that he is a different
person than the murderer in the most important ways in
which personhood is established. Unless there is a binding
precedent that governs the facts of this unusual case, I
think the judge has a legal basis for releasing Dozemeyer
from prison on the ground that he is not the same person
as the murderer.

119
 #50

Would You Like To Be Able To Dream After You Die?

Hamlet, contemplating death, mused:

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
Must give us pause. . .

They might be disturbing, those dreams, disturbing the sleep

of death. Yet might they not provide some semblance of life,
a shadowy continuation of that state of awareness and
sensation that most of us wish fervently to keep?

Deprived of life, would you settle for experiencing dreams,

some pleasing, some not, disjointed and fantastical as they
are, a parade of images and improbable happenings? Would
you prefer that to nothing at all? Would you want them for
eternity, or just for a while?

My dreams tend to be mildly frustrating, most often involving

trying to reach a destination, the location of which, and
means of reaching it, is never clear. Once I’m dead, I would
prefer to sleep undisturbed.

120
 #51

Would You Like to Never Have

Dreams When You’re Sleeping?

That’s the option the Wiz just gave you. If you are like some
people I’ve known, who have night terrors — really scary
nightmares — this is a great opportunity to get rid of them.
For many others — maybe most people — it might not be so
easy to decide. I suspect that most people’s dreams tend to
be mildly frustrating, like mine. But dreams can be quite
pleasant, sometimes so much so that you can feel let-down
when you wake up.

Would you accept the Wiz’s offer never to dream again when
you’re sleeping?

I would say, “No thanks. I’m content to continue having

dreams.”
That may sound contradictory to my having said that I’d
rather “sleep” undisturbed after I die in the previous thought
experiment, but it isn’t, because, if I’m still alive, I have a
chance for conscious reflection on what I dreamed about
after I wake up. My dreams tend to be mildly frustrating, but
they are never frightening, and I often find them interesting to
think about upon awakening.
I was planning to end what I had to say on this subject with
the previous sentence, but reading it over this morning, I
realized that a dream I had last night was a perfect example
of what I’m talking about. In my dream, I was riding a bicycle
in a moderate-sized city in northern Canada (one larger than
any city in northern Canada). I needed to bike back to
Washington State. This nonexistent northern Canadian city
was on the north side of a major river, and I was sure that I
had to bike across an exceedingly long curving bridge to get
to the south side of the river where I would find a road
leading in a southwesterly direction toward Washington
State. I succeeded in getting across the bridge and heading
in the direction of Washington State, but became increasingly
doubtful that I was on the right road. I passed a public

121
building that had something to do with tourism. I thought,
maybe they have a map. I went inside and spoke to a woman
who seemed to work there. She said that they didn’t have a
map. “I have to get to Winnipeg,” I said. (Note: Winnipeg is
nowhere near Washington State.)* “Oh,” she said, “then
you’ll have to go back across the bridge.” This seemed to me
to be an exhausting prospect and would take me in the
wrong direction to boot. I was still trying to decide what to do
next when I woke up. It was a dream that fit perfectly with my
normal pattern: “My dreams tend to be mildly frustrating,
most often involving trying to reach a destination, the
location of which and means of reaching it is never clear.”
What was the meaning of this dream? I don’t know, but
two phrases come to mind: “A bridge to nowhere,” and “a
bridge too far.”
Others have told me that they have had similar dreams.
Maybe we’re groping our way through life, forever trying to
get somewhere, and we don’t know why and don’t know
how to reach our destination.
I wouldn’t want to give up the fun of having dreams and
speculating about them. Besides, I’ve read that dreams may
have something to do with the brain reorganizing itself, and
I’m sure my brain would benefit from that process. I don’t
mind keeping on dreaming.

________________________________
* I traveled to northern Canada about forty years ago, not to a city,
but to an Inuit village on the north side of a long lake. I traveled
through Winnipeg on the way to get there. A few years ago, I had
an enjoyable trip to Washington State.

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 #52

Would You Be Willing To Be the Next Human

Baby Born in the World after You Die?

You don’t like the prospect that sooner or later you’re going
to die. You thought that there would be no alternative, but
here’s the Wiz, claiming once again that he’ll give you a
special deal. He promises that you’ll live out your
predestined lifespan regardless of whether or not you accept
his offer. The only thing that will change is that you’ll have a
chance to live a whole new life: You can be the next baby
born in the world after you die. You’ll have no memory of
your past life, but you will have something that you wouldn’t
have otherwise: a second life after your first one ends.

Given that so many people in the world have burdensome

disabilities, or live in chronic pain, or live in poverty or in
countries ruled by repressive regimes or wracked by war,
there’s a fairly high probability that your second life might be
one marked by ignorance, hardship, and misery. Nonetheless,
the opportunity to have a second life is intriguing. Will you
accept the Wiz’s offer?

I’m aware that I was born into much luckier circumstances

than the vast majority of humans living today, and the odds
would likely be far less favorable if I were a random new
baby coming into the world.
Even so, I like the idea of being alive enough to be
inclined to accept the Wiz’s offer. If you feel that way too,
remember that you can’t bring any of your experience, skills,
and understanding of the world into your new life. You’ll
arrive as a squawking helpless baby, who may or may not
have a life that you would find agreeable from your present
perspective.
A disturbing thought came to my mind: Would saying
“No” to the Wiz be the equivalent of saying that for the
average person life is not worth living? I don’t think it would,
because, once you’re alive, it’s instinctive to want to stay
alive, to feel that life is worth living even when facing great

123
hardships. If I accept the Wiz’s offer, my second life might
not be worth living from my present standpoint, but it would
be from my standpoint as a new living being. That’s why, on
reflection, and realizing that it may be wildly imprudent, if I
had no choice other than being dead, I would accept the
Wiz’s offer to be the next baby born.

Sometime after writing the previous sentence, it occurred to

me that if I declined the Wiz’s offer, it might signify that I
didn’t think it would be a good thing for anyone to be the
next baby born in the world, and if that’s the case, it would
be best if no more babies were born. That’s such a dispiriting
thought that it may be the true reason I said that I would
accept the Wiz’s offer — maybe the only reason.

124
 #53

The (Infamous) Two Children Problem

(The Two-Child Problem); (The Two-Child Paradox)

The Wiz has a beneficent smile on his face when he

magically appears in front of you, interrupting you when you
were absorbed reading this book.
“Oh my gosh,” you say. “What brings you here?”
“Nothing but a way for you to make a million dollars by
solving a simple problem.”
“Now, Wiz,” you reply. “Is this another too-good-to-be-
true deal you’re offering?”
“Not at all,” the Wiz says. “If you’re not interested-”
“I am interested,” you interrupt. “But, in view of our past
history, you can’t blame me for being skeptical. What’s the
simple problem?”
“Note this first. For the purposes of this problem, assume
that there are equal numbers of boys and girls in the world.
Got that?”
“Got it — equal numbers of each.”
“Then here it is: Imagine that while you are out walking,
you meet a couple with one of their two children. Their other
child is at home. The child with them is a girl (G). What are
the odds that their child at home is a boy (B)?”
“This is easy,” you say. “It’s common knowledge that the
gender of a couple’s first child isn’t the slightest bit predictive
of the gender of their second child. Since you said to assume
that there are equal numbers of girls and boys, there’s no
reason that the child who was left at home is more likely to
be a girl or a boy. Therefore, the odds are one in two — fifty-
fifty — that the child at home is a boy (B).”
You let that sink in, and can’t help grinning as you say, “I’m
ready to receive my million dollars.”
“You haven’t won it yet,” the Wiz says. “According to
Professor Horace Bandwidth, who is a highly regarded
mathematician, the odds are two-in-three that the child at
home is a boy (B).”
Instantly, Professor Bandwidth appears before you,
grinning as broadly as you were before he arrived.

125
 “You’re wrong,“ Bandwidth says, jabbing a finger at you
as if you had committed a crime. “Here’s the mathematical
proof:
“Among all couples with two children, there are equal
numbers of GG, GB, BG, and BB couples. Since the couple
you met has a G with them, she is clearly not in the BB
group. She must therefore be in either GG, the GB, or the BG
group. Since there are equal numbers in each group, the
odds are 1/ 3 that she is one of the two Gs in the GG group,
1/3 that she is the G in the BG group, and 1/3 that she is the
G in the GB group. If she is the G in the GG group, then her
sibling at home is a G. If she is the G in the BG group or the
G in the GB group, in each case her sibling at home is a B. In
one case, the child at home is a G. In two cases the child at
home is a B. Therefore, the odds are 2/3 that the child at
home is a B.”
“That can’t be right!” you protest.
“Sorry, but it is right,” Professor Bandwidth says severely.
“It may go against your intuition, but intuitions may be faulty,
whereas a mathematical proof is irrefutable!”
Rather than reply, you sit quietly, trying to work this
puzzle through. Professor Bandwidth’s proof does seem to
be irrefutable. But it also seems wrong!
“You still have a chance to win that million bucks,” the
Wiz says gently, “but you’ll have to show that Professor
Bandwidth is wrong.”
“And that will be impossible,” Bandwidth says. “I am
never wrong.”

Can you show that you are right in saying there’s a one-in-
two chance that the child at home is a boy, rather than a two-
in-three chance, as Professor Bandwidth claims he has
proved?

If you figured out why Professor Bandwidth’s “proof” is not a

proof at all, proceed to the cashier’s window and collect the
million dollars the Wiz promised. Although Bandwidth’s
reasoning was rigorously logical, it rested on the false
premise that because, among all couples with two children
there are equal numbers of GG, GB, BG, and BB couples,
when you meet a couple who is out walking with one of their
two children and the child with them is a G, that the couple is
equally likely to be a GG, a BG, or a GB couple.

126
 To see why this isn’t the case, imagine that you are
walking in a park. Living near the park are 50 GG couples, 50
GB couples, 50 BG couples, and 50 BB couples. All 200 of
these couples have gone out walking in the park with one of
their children and left the other one at home. You meet one of
these couples, and they have a G with them. Obviously, you
haven’t met one of the BB couples. You’ve met one of the 50
GG couples, one of the 50 GB couples, or one of the 50 BG
couples.
Of the 50 GG couples, all 50 of them who have gone out
walking with a G have left a G at home. Of the 50 GB
couples, 25 have gone out walking with their G and left their
B at home, and 25 have gone out walking with their B and
left their G at home; and the same is true of the 50 BG
couples. Since the couple you meet has a G with them, it
must be one of the 50 GG couples who went out walking
with a G and left a G at home, one of the 25 GB couples who
went walking with their G and left their B at home, or one of
the 25 BG couples that went walking with their G and left
their B at home. Therefore, you met one of 50 GG couples
who left a G at home or one of 50 BG and GB couples that
went walking with their G and left their B at home. Therefore,
the odds are 50-50 (1 in 2) that the child at home is a B, not 2
in 3, as Professor Bandwidth insists is the case. What
appeared to be a paradox — the inconsistency between the
common sense answer and a mathematical proof — is
resolved once it's clear that a false assumption crept into
Professor Bandwidth's analysis.

The lesson of The Infamous Two Children Problem is that

although you can’t always trust your intuition, you shouldn’t
let the certainty of a mathematical proof deter you from
examining the premise or premises on which it is based.

127
 #54

If You Could Save The Life of Only One of These Three

People, Whose Life Would You Save?

In George Bernard Shaw’s play The Doctor’s Dilemma, first

produced in 1906, a doctor has time and resources to save
only one of two patients entrusted to his care. The play
borders on farce and has too many idiosyncratic aspects to
be instructive, but reading it last summer caused me to
reflect on its subject. Hospital emergency rooms and doctors
have triage protocols, but suppose you found yourself in a
situation where you could save the life of only one of three
individuals, and you have only a scrap of information about
each of them:

Person A is a 30-year-old unmarried policeman who recently

risked his life to save three people from drowning in a flash
flood.

Person B is a 20-year-old woman artist, also single, who

critics say is destined for greatness. Despite her youth, a
major museum just bought one of her paintings.

Person C is a 10-year-old boy, who looked up at you with

soulful eyes. He seems to understand that his life is in your
hands.

Assuming you know nothing else about these individuals and

you have only time and resources to save the life of one of
them, whose life would you save?

I can’t imagine any triage protocol that would provide a

satisfying answer to this question. The policeman is
something of a hero — his life is certainly worth saving. But
could I turn away from the ten-year-old boy who looked at
me with soulful eyes? And, since I have a keen appreciation
of fine art, I would not want the life of this gifted young
painter to slip away.

128
 I suspect that, like most people faced with this dilemma,
I would reach a decision based on feeling rather than on
rational analysis, a result explained by the 17th Century
mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal: “The heart has
its reasons, which reason cannot know.”

129
 #55

You Are the Dictator of Policy with Regard to

Treatment of Animals Bred and Raised for
Agricultural Purposes in the United States

Once again the Wiz has surprised you, this time by

bestowing on you dictatorial power throughout the United
States with regard to standards and treatment of animals
bred and raised for agricultural purposes. It will take awhile
for you to review policy considerations and draft a practical
and humane statute, and the Wiz advises you not to rush it.
“You need to think things through,” he says. “You might
first consider whether such animals must be raised in
circumstances in which they can move about comfortably, be
allowed to develop normally, and are protected against force
feeding, mutilations, cruel methods of slaughtering, and
other practices that, if imposed on humans, would be
considered to be forms of torture. Practices such as these
are common on ‘factory farms.’ That sounds bad, but as a
result, food is more plentiful and less expensive than it would
be if produced on traditional family farms. Fewer people go
hungry. Children who might otherwise be malnourished get
enough to eat. But Is it worth it? Is it right? Should such
conditions be allowed?

Would whatever law you institute reflect the view that

animals raised for agricultural purposes shouldn’t be
subjected to prolonged pain and suffering for the benefit
of humans, or the view that concern for animal pain and
suffering must give way to preventing human deprivation
and hardship? Or do you see a see a way to avoid this
unappealing trade-off?

I don’t think we need to regard ourselves as protectors of

animals, but I think we have an ethical obligation to not make
their lives more painful and unpleasant than they would
typically be in a state of nature. Animals should not be raised
in circumstances in which they can’t move about
comfortably, are prevented from developing normally, or
subjected to force feeding, mutilations, cruel methods of

130
slaughtering, and other practices that, if imposed on
humans, would be considered to be forms of torture.
I think that humans have as much right as foxes to kill
chickens for food, but foxes don’t cause chickens to suffer
for most of their lives before they die, and neither should we.
I think that the economic cost of requiring that farm animals
are treated humanely should be offset by instituting a more
progressive taxation and subsidy structure, rather than by
ignoring our ethical responsibilities to our fellow creatures.

131
 #56

Create Your Own Advisor

Before making a major decision, it’s wise to assess the

situation as objectively as you can. Unless you have a
trusted and capable confidante on hand — someone who
understands your needs and goals and won’t pander to your
haphazard desires — the best way to achieve objectivity may
be to create your own advisor.
There are numerous forms of this technique of “standing
aside” in an attempt to observe yourself objectively. It’s a
feature of Buddhist insight meditation, business
management consulting, and disputes mediation. A friend of
mine who is a retired psychotherapist advocates creating an
advisor who is standing on a balcony, watching you. Her
thinking may be that this elevated position invests the
advisor with added authority.
I felt that my advisor should have authority and as much
objectivity as possible, and to achieve that, she should see
my situation from a distance. The greater the distance, the
better — like from another world. Better yet, if you’ll excuse
this fanciful excursion, from another universe! Such an
arrangement is easy to set up thanks to the “many worlds”
interpretation of quantum mechanics.
According to this theory, whenever you decide between
making decision A and decision B, you split into two people,
one in a universe in which you make decision A and the other
in a universe where you make decision B. This theory doesn’t
have to be true, nor do I have to have adequately described
it, for you to imagine that such a thing has happened to you,
and that you have split into two persons, and that one of
them (you-B), after spending some time in another universe
gaining objectivity, returns to our universe, specifically to the
planet Earth, and takes a fly-on-the-wall view of what is
happening in the life of you-A, who continued to exist after
the split and was unaffected by it, as if it had never
happened.
If you’re feeling skeptical about this, remember that you-B
is no more than an artifice you’ve created and want to make
as vivid and present as possible. You don’t want an advisor
who fades out of your consciousness when most needed!
Fortunately, your advisor ( you-B) is even better
positioned than the fly-on-the-wall who is watching you (you-
A). Being a faithful copy of you before you split into two
people, you-B continues to have all the knowledge you-A

132
had before the split, and you-B thinks, sees, reads, and
hears everything that you-A does, and you-B is aware of
you-A’s conscious thoughts: You (as you-B) are positioned to
be a uniquely objective advisor to you — the person who, as
you think of it, you really are.

What impressions do you (as you-B) form about you-A from

your out-of-you-A’s-body perspective? Take a good look at
you-A (yourself) from your privileged vantage point. Imagine
your advisor (you-B) asking you, “How well are you doing at
living? What, if anything, have you been doing right? What, if
anything, have you been doing wrong? Are you staying
awake and aware, reflecting, and deliberating as necessary?
Or have you been failing to be self-monitoring, lacking
impulse control, and, in effect, sleepwalking through life?”

I can recall important occasions when I made a stupid

decision that I would almost certainly have avoided if I had
created an advisor who was attentive to my thought
processes. To cite one such folly –– by no means the most
disastrous –– when I was a few years out of law school,
unhappily enmeshed in the soulless machinery of a gigantic
Wall Street law firm, I was offered a chance to be interviewed
for an opening at a small high quality firm. If accepted — and
there was a good chance that I would be since a highly
respected lawyer had recommended me — I would have had
immediate increased responsibility and would benefit from
close mentoring by a first-class lawyer. My psychic state at
the time would best be described as numb. I said I wasn’t
interested.
If I had created an advisor at that point in my life, I’m sure
she would have said something like, “You’re not going
anywhere in the job you’re in. This could be the break you
need.” And I bet she would have added, “Even If you don’t
get the job, being interviewed for it will be instructive, and
you’ll make a new contact.” It would have been helpful if
she’d only said, “Hey, you. Wake up!”
Creating your own advisor is an instrument of self-
reflection, a way of thinking from a fresh perspective. I’ve
been making better decisions since I created mine.

____________________________
______________________-_________________________\___________________

*Hugh Everett, the postgraduate student who thought up the many

worlds theory of quantum mechanics, was almost laughed off the
campus after proposing it, but he did earn his PhD at Princeton
after his professors belatedly realized that there might be
something to it, and that, at the very least, it was brilliant.

133
 #57

Hundreds of Years after You Die, You Come

Back to Life but Only for an Hour

Here’s the way it happens. You’re suddenly conscious of being

well-dressed and sitting in a comfortable chair in a tastefully
furnished, well-lit, windowless room and feeling alert and
healthy in every respect. The Wiz is in a matching chair a few
feet away. He’s smiling at you as if he’s pleased to see you.
You struggle to clear your brain — to consider how this can
be happening. The last thing you remember is that you were
lying in bed in a hospice, knowing that you were about to die.
Then nothing.
How long ago did that happen? How is it you’re alive now?
The Wiz, mind-reading you, says: “I can understand why
you’re puzzled. You died hundreds of years ago. I brought you
back to life, but just for an hour so the two of us could have a
talk.”
You shake your head in astonishment. You remember some
weird miracles the Wiz pulled off when you were alive before,
but this is the weirdest of all, and it’s not making you happy.
“Am I supposed to be grateful for this?” you say, “It’s not
exactly a picnic coming back to life if I know I’ll be dead again
in an hour!”
“I understand your feeling completely, but bear with me,” the
Wiz says. “It’s only because you’ve been dead so long that I’m
able to show you how this life-and-death business that
humans experience is set up in the best possible way.”
“You’re telling me that because hundreds of years have
passed since I died, everything is rosy?”
The Wiz gazes at you with an expression that reminds you
of the Mona Lisa. “Not that it’s rosy, and not that it’s not rosy,”
he says. “I simply want you to see your life from the
perspective you have once everyone on Earth who was alive
when you died has themselves died, and even farther in the
future than that — until not a single person living on Earth
knew that you existed. That’s how far in the future we’ve
come.”
“So, nobody alive today ever knew me or talked to me.
Maybe I have descendants who are still living.“
“Maybe you do, but you wouldn’t know them if you saw
them, and if there are any, none of them know anything about
you. None of them would have ever heard of you. We’re that
far in the future.”

134
 “I guess I’m lost in the sands of time,” you say ruefully.
“That’s a good way of thinking of it,” the Wiz says, “which is
why I put that expression into your head, so you would say it.
In any case, looking back from the sands of time, or through
the sands of time, does the life you led hundreds of years ago
seem any more meaningful to you than the lives of your
contemporaries?”
“I can remember my life in much, much, more detail than I
can remember the life of anyone else.”
“Of course, but at this point, it doesn’t make any difference
which of all the lives led back then was yours. There’s no
reason why the life you led hundreds of years ago should mean
more to you now than the life of anyone else living then, or, for
that matter, than the life of a fictional character in a novel, a
play, or a movie. Now that hundreds of years have passed
since you died, you’re capable of looking at the world from an
eternal perspective. In that light, your life is no more important
or less important than the lives of, for example, Florence
Nightingale or Don Quixote. You and they were all instruments
of the ever-continuing progression of innumerable events. It
doesn’t matter who was who, or even who was real and who
was fictional.”
The Wiz pauses for a few seconds, then says: “It is odd,
isn’t it? Whether the world is better or worse because of your
presence in it, once you and everybody who knew you, or
might have known you, or known anything about you, is dead,
it doesn’t matter whether a certain set of accomplishments or
failings were yours or those of any one of billions of other
people. It’s all smoothed flat.”

Do you agree with the Wiz that once you and everybody who
knew you or might have known you or known anything about
you, is dead, it doesn’t matter what your accomplishments or
failings were; it’s all smoothed flat?”

I think that’s a fair statement. It’s as if your life consists in

swimming with countless others in one of the Earth’s oceans,
waves churning and breaking in all directions around you, and
when you die, time carries you up and higher and higher, so
that looking down as you rise, the ocean looks smoother and
smoother until, when you are far enough away — far enough in
the future — it’s all smoothed flat, and the life you lived is no
more significant or special than billions of other lives of the
living and the dead and of fictional figures who were imagined
but never realized except in the minds of beings who were, it
turns out, as ephemeral as their creations.

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 #58

A Brain Scan Reveals that within the Next Twenty-Four

Hours You Will Have a Fatal Cerebral Hemorrhage.

The Wiz just informed you of this, and that there is no way of
preventing it.
Pondering this scenario reminded me of the adage, “No
one, when dying, wished that they had spent more time at
the office.” Immediately thereafter, I thought of the remark
attributed to Samuel Johnson: “Depend upon it, sir, when a
man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates
his mind wonderfully.”
According to a life expectancy table I consulted, the
average male my age (92) has less than four years to live.
That’s a lot more than the two weeks Dr. Johnson spoke of or
the twenty-four hours maximum the Wiz gave you, but short
enough to engage one’s attention.
The situation posited in this thought experiment would set
almost any mind racing. Where would it race to? What
concerns and emotions would it unleash? How glaringly
wrenching and dismaying would it be? The answers to these
questions depend on one’s particular character, personal
circumstances, and history. These would combine to form
the state of mind that one would have upon hearing such
distressing news.

If you suddenly learned that you were about to die, what

would you think about? How would you react?

When, what, and how one should think about one’s mortality
are ancient questions. The Stoics believed that it’s wise to
contemplate death well ahead of the event. I suppose their
idea was that it’s desirable to be well prepared — to be
accepting of death’s inevitability so as not be shocked when
it’s staring you in the face. If you have cultivated Stoicism,
you might be better able to bear unexpected news that you
have less than twenty-four hours to live.
Stoicism is a noble stance, but I prefer that of the 17th
century philosopher Baruch Spinoza: “The free man thinks of
death, least of all things.”*

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 How does one manage that? you might ask. It’s a
question I’m not qualified to answer, but perhaps I can
convey Spinoza’s general idea: The path to equanimity and
self-control lies in gaining an eternal perspective through
knowledge and understanding. This was a philosophy that
appealed to Einstein. He said, “I believe in Spinoza’s God,
who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists.”
Like Spinoza, he was in awe of nature and its processes.
More than the stupendous aggregation of forms of matter
and energy and the laws that govern their motions and
interactions, Einstein revered the mysterious — what he
found to be “subtle, intangible, and inexplicable.” **
George Eliot, who translated Spinoza’s treatise Ethics into
English, drank from the same fount of wisdom. A passage in
one of her letters is a snapshot of an eternal perspective in
the making.

I try to delight in the sunshine that will be when I shall never

see it any more. And I think it is possible for this sort of
impersonal life to attain greater intensity — possible for us
to gain much more independence, than is usually believed,
of the small bundle of facts that make our own
personality.***

I think that, by achieving an eternal perspective through

knowledge and understanding and gaining independence
from “the small bundle of facts that facts that make our own
personality,” it’s possible to develop a state of mind in which
one can face imminent death with equanimity.
A friend, asked to comment on this view, expressed his
opinion that “gaining an eternal perspective is a stretch.”
I think it’s true that stretching is required, but that shouldn’t
hold us back.

_______________________________
* Steven Nadler: Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to
Die. (2021); P. 126; Princeton Univ. Press
** Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (2008); Simon and Schuster; P.
184; 188.
*** Clare Carlisle: The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life; (2023); P.
189; Farrar, Strauss and Giroux

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 #59

You Are an Earth Inspector

Imagine that you are a promising young intelligence officer, a

member of an extremely advanced species of beings on the
planet Cadmus, located a bit more than 1,473 light years
from Earth.
Jack — that’s his name, coincidentally a common name
for males on Earth, particularly in English-speaking countries
— appears on a wall screen in front of you. Jack is Cadmus’s
Chief Surveyor of Intelligent Life in the Orion Arm of the Milky
Way Galaxy.
Knowing that Jack is seeing you as clearly and intimately
as you are seeing him, you assume an attentive posture. This
could be the moment you have been hoping for — an
assignment to check out a developing situation on a
habitable planet.
Yes! That’s exactly why Jack has gotten in touch with you!
His perfectly modulated voice comes across:
“We’ve been watching a planet, called Earth by its most
advanced inhabitants — humans — for almost a full epoch,
what they would measure as several thousand revolutions of
their planet around its sun. I was still in Phase BB1 of my life
when we last conducted an onsite inspection of this planet.
Conditions for humans at that time were generally miserable.
The fastest mode of travel required sitting on the back of a
quadruped. Fusion energy wasn’t even a dream.
Superstitions and myths had more influence on behavior
than scientific findings.
“We know from the striking rise in radio emissions from
Earth, which we obtained at far faster-than-light speed with
our newly developed gravity loop quantum tunneling
technique, that humans have made great progress since our
last inspection. Based on our studies of comparable
developing civilizations, when you visit Earth you can expect
to find less slavery and colonial domination, lower rates of
impoverishment and violence, and higher rates of literacy
and successful medical treatment than obtained at the time
of our last inspection. All to the good. But it’s clear from
recent data, most notably measurements of increasing

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concentrations of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere, that this planet
has entered the parabolic development stage and is likely
experiencing the usual problems of accelerating global
warming; increasing air and water pollution; dissipation of
aquifers; increasing rates of emergence of powerful,
oligarchically allied, militarized, imperialist-minded, autocratic
governing bodies; increasing risks of nuclear devastation;
escalating vulnerability to species-ending pandemics; and,
most concerning of all, probable accelerating development
of prototypical class two general artificial intelligence.”
“Wa-ooo,” you exclaim. “I’ve heard about what that can
lead to!”
“What it’s already led to in the Cepheus sector,” Jack
says. “And it could become a real nuisance to us if it flares
toward its full potential on Earth. In any case, we need a fine-
grained, close-up, virtually synthesized, multi-perspective
analysis of the situation, and you have been selected to
provide it. You must be ready to leave for your inspection of
Earth tomorrow at Beta sun noon. We will provide you with a
class A11A multi-enhanced capsule equipped with gravity
loop-quantum-tunneling capability for faster-than-light travel.
On completion of your mission, we’ll expect you to provide
us with an omni-factor, full-scale, maximally enscripted
report on this interesting planet and the creatures that have
been transforming it. Are you up for this assignment?

Of course you are! You’ve dreamed of getting to inspect a

planet like Earth ever since you received your first brain
enhancement implant!

T I M E L A P S E

Now that you have inspected Earth, what do you think of it?
Are these humans, as they call themselves, going to make it?

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 AFTERWORD

Recall the first sentence of Thought Experiment #56: “Before

making a major decision, it’s desirable to assess the situation
as objectively as you can.” This piece of advice assumes that
when the need arises for making a major decision, or any
significant decision, you’ll be aware that you are about to
make it. It was not until late in life that it dawned on me that I
undertook some of my worst and most consequential actions
without being aware that decision making was involved.
Instead, in these instances, I acceded to an impulse without
giving thought to likely contingencies and consequences of
what I was doing. This phenomenon was brought home to
me when I read Christopher Clark’s book — The
Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War (2014). Clark shows
that in each of the primarily responsible countries, the
decision makers acted mindlessly in that they failed to think
about the effect that their actions would have on others,
which would have led them to consider how others would
react.
Clark’s insights initiated my process of learning what it
means to be awake and aware, engage in mindful self-
monitoring, exercise impulse control, and heed the counsel
of the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh to “Keep your
awakening alive all day long.” Being mindful of
consequences and contingencies improves the odds that
one will act wisely. Impressive powers of analysis are useless
if you’re a zombie. Thought experiments like the ones in this
book help keep me from being one again.

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to all who encouraged me and offered comments on

this project. Special thanks to my nephew Dr. Andy Packard
for supplying the idea for thought experiment #32, to James
Burgess for supplying two perfectly suited quotations, and
Tim Amsden for copyediting notes. However good this book
may be, it’s several notches better than it would have been
otherwise thanks to my daughter Caroline Packard, who read
and commented on all fifty-nine thought experiments and
served up dozens of invaluable comments and suggestions.
Thank you, Caroline!

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