Achievement in a quantum world

Suppose Alice gives Bob a gift of five lottery tickets, and Bob buys himelf a sixth one. Bob then wins the lottery. Intuitively, if one of the tickets that Alice bought for Bob wins, then Bob’s win is Alice’s achievement, but if the winning ticket is not one of the ones that Alice bought for Bob, then Bob’s win is not Alice’s achievement.

But now suppose that there is no fact of the matter as to which ticket won, but only that Bob won. For instance, maybe the way the game works is that there is a giant roulette wheel. You hand in your tickets, and then an equal number of depressions on the wheel gets your name. If the ball ends in a depression with your name, you win. But they don’t write your name down on the depressions ticket-by-ticket. Instead, they count up how many tickets you hand them, and then write your name down on the same number of depressions.

In this case, it seems that Bob’s win isn’t Alice’s achievement, because there is no fact of the matter that it was one of Alice’s tickets that got Bob his win. Nor does this depend on the probabilities. Even if Alice gave Bob a thousand tickets, and Bob contributed only one it seems that Bob’s win isn’t Alice’s achievement.

Yet in a world run on quantum mechanics, it seems that our agential connection to the external world is like Alice’s to Bob’s win. All we can do is tweak the probabilities, perhaps overwhelmingly so, but there is no fact of the matter about the outcome being truly ours. So it seems that nothing is ever our achievement.

That is an unacceptable consequence, I think.

I think there are two possible ways out. One is to shift our interpretation of “achievement” and say that Bob’s win is Alice’s achievement in the original case even when it was the ticket that Bob bought for himself that won. Achievement is just sufficient increase of probability followed by the occurrence of the thus probabilified event.

The second is heavy duty metaphysics. Perhaps our causal activity marks the world in such a way that there is always a trace of what happened due to what. Events come marked with their actual causal history. Sometimes, but not always, that causal history specifies what was actually the cause. Perhaps I turn a quantum probability dial from 0.01 to 0.40, and you turn it from 0.40 to 0.79, and then the event happens, and the event comes metaphysically marked with its cause. Or perhaps when I turn the quantum probability dial and you turn it, I embue it with some of my teleology and when you turn it, you embue it with some of yours, and there is a fact of the matter as to whether a further on down effect comes from your teleology or mine.

I find the metaphysical answer hard to believe, but I find the probabilistic one conceptually problematic.

The good of competent achievement

One of the ways we flourish is by achievement: by successfully fulfilling a plan of action and getting the intended end. But it seems that there is a further thing here of some philosophical interest: we can distinguish achievement from competent achievement.

For me, the phenomenon shows up most clearly when I engage in (indoor) rock climbing. In the case of a difficult route, I first have to try multiple times before I can “send” the route, i.e., climb it correctly with no falls. That is an achievement. But often that first send is pretty sketchy in that it includes moves where it was a matter of chance whether I would get the move or fall. I happened to get it, but next time I do it, I might not. There is something unsatisfying about the randomness here, even though technically speaking I have achieved the goal.

There is then a further step in mastery where with further practice, I not only happened to get the moves right, but do so competently and reliably. And while there is an intense jolt of pleasure at the initial sketchy achievement, there is a kind of less intense but steadier pleasure at competent achievement. Similar things show up in other physical pursuits: there is the first time one can do n pull-ups, and that’s delightful, but there is there time when one can do n pull-ups whenever one wants to, and that has a different kind of pleasure. Video games can afford a similar kind of pleasure.

That said, eventually the joy of competent achievement fades, too, when one’s skill level rises far enough above it. I can with competence and reliability run a 15 minute mile, but there is no joy in that, because it is too easy. It seems that what we enjoy here has a tension to it: competent achievement of something that is still fairly hard for us. There is also a kind of enjoyment of competent achievement of something that is hard for others but easy for us, but that doesn’t feel quite so virtuous.

There is a pleasure for others in watching an athlete doing something effortlessly (which is quite different from “they make it look effortless”, when in fact we may know that there is quite a bit of effort in it), but I think the hedonic sweet spot for the athlete does not lie in the effortless performance, but in a competent but still challenging performance.

And here is a puzzle. God’s omnipotence not only makes God capable of everything, but makes God capable of doing everything easily. Insofar as we are in the image and likeness of God, it would seem that the completely effortless should be the greater good for us than the challenging. Maybe, though, the fact that our achievements are infinitely below God’s activity imposes on our lives a temporal structure of striving for greater achievements that makes the completely effortless a sign that we haven’t pushed ourselves enough.

All this stuff, of course, mirrors familiar debates between Kantians and virtue ethicists about moral worth.