DocBug

Advertising as a form of violence 

Remember the future depicted in the movie Minority Report, where every last inch of real estate is covered by advertisements that demand your attention by any means possible? I couldn't help think about that as I flew home on US Airways after Thanksgiving. First there was the TV screens, which after the safety take-off script started extolling the virtues of their Skymall shopping opportunities. Then there was the flight attendant who, having just given me potential life-saving information about the flotation abilities of my seat cushion, came through the cabin explaining how we could have a free flight if we just signed up for their co-branded credit card. Finally, just as I thought the barrage was over, I brought my tray table down only to find it was painted with yet more advertising. Good thing I've developed a strong stomach to all this advertising, because even their barf bag had ads printed on it!

It seems like everywhere there's a captive audience nowadays you'll find it stuffed full of advertising. Movie theaters have finally branched out from advertising movies and concessions to full-on TV-style ads, Wal-Mart has their Checkout TV (designed to "entertain shoppers as well as inform them about new products"), my local Longs pharmacy even has a flat-panel TV showing continuous infomercials. These ads are always delivered with the pleasant-sounding lie that they're for our benefit. If that's the case, why do they always make me feel like the airline, theater or store I'm patronizing has just punched me in the stomach?

I've tried looking past my gut reaction and thinking about the situation rationally, but oddly enough when I do that I become even more convinced that, at least most of the time, advertising is a direct form of violence. I don't mean violence in the most limited physical definition — I don't get a bloody nose from the Trix Rabbit. But consider the following points:

1. While we like to think we make all our own choices based on the information we have at hand, in fact we humans are highly susceptible to manipulation. (In fact, there's good evidence that people who think they're not easily manipulated are the most susceptible.)

2. Sometimes manipulations are to our long-term benefit. Education is all about changing how someone thinks; so is love. Sometimes we'll seek out ways to manipulate ourselves directly, be it by throwing out all our cigarettes so we won't be tempted to smoke or by getting drunk at a party to get over our shyness and meet someone new. Other times we won't recognize the benefit of a manipulation until much later, like the addict who denies he has a problem until his friends intervene and force him to go into detox.

   That said, commercial advertising is at best neutral about whether its message actually improves our lives. Advertisers often claim they just inform the public about products they want (if only they knew it), but their main job is to install a need for their product regardless of whether the need was there beforehand. And since creating a need where one didn't already exist takes more repetition than simply informing someone about a solution to an existing problem, most advertising we see is designed to create new needs.

3. People are naturally resistant to having new needs installed in them. Sure it feels good when we scratch that itch by buying their product, but at some level we also know that it's the ads that made us itch in the first place. Because of this, the techniques used by advertisers are subtle and deliberately designed to manipulate our desires without our knowledge or consent.

In other words, most advertising is a deliberately deceptive manipulation of our person and our mental state, without our consent or regard for our interests. I can't see any way how that's not a form of violence. And they've been doing it all our lives, from the first toy we couldn't live without to the makeup, gadgets and junk food we crave today.

I suspect if you were punched in the stomach every day since you were a toddler, you'd think it was normal. You wouldn't like it, and no doubt you'd complain about the ones who punched especially hard or always punched you right as you were sitting down to dinner. But but somehow it'd still be seen as a price of living, nothing that could be done about it.

Only there is something we can do about it. The next time your flight attendant runs down the aisles with credit card applications shouting Who wants a roundtrip flight, absolutely free?!?, stop him and very politely explain how horrible you think it is that his company treats paying customers that way. Do the same with your local stores, and write letters to the company heads. Then take your business to those that don't have such distain for their customers.

There's no way a corporate policy of "Service with a smile and a punch in the belly" would fly. Why should advertising be given a free pass?

Games we materialists play when you aren't looking 

Living in California as I do, I have a lot of friends who have ideas about the physical world that on their face seem ludicrous to a scientifically-minded materialist like myself. For example, people I love and respect think that some people have the ability to heal by adjusting a patient's "energies" without touching him, others think that spells and witchcraft have power beyond the psychological, and even more think there's some "guy" up in heaven that controls what happens here on Earth and that 2000 years ago His son rose from the dead. Since I respect these friends a great deal I've been looking for common ground, and have started playing a game with myself where I try to translate these beliefs into a form that a philosophically-minded but skeptical materialist like myself can accept.

I mean translate literally — I look for meanings of the words my believer friends use that make the belief plausible in my own world-view while compromising their actual beliefs as little as possible. There are some limits to the game — no amount of translation is going to make the claim that one can change the weather just with one's mind any more palatable to me. But there is a surprising amount of room to maneuver. For example, I've heard some describe the energy manipulated by reiki practitioners as "electricity," but when pressed it's clear that's just a metaphor for something else — they don't actually mean that this energy can be measured with a voltmeter any more than a physicist talking about an electrical "current" thinks you could steer a boat down a river of the stuff. The goal of my private game then is to answer the question, "a metaphor for what?"

The fun part of this game is that when I'm being honest with myself I rapidly wind up at logical impasses in my own philosophy as well. My latest conundrum has to do with belief in some sort of soul, a "thing" that is a fundamental part of and unique to every living being (or at least every person), and that persists after that person has died. So the game is to come up with something that is (a) something fundamental to the identity of an individual person and yet (b) still exists after the body has turned to dust. As I cast about for things in my own world-view that might fit the bill (including things like "the patterns of memories left in surviving friends and family" and "the combination of genes and upbringing one leaves in one's own children") I started to recognize that the idea of a soul is an answer to a basic philosophical question left unanswered by materialism, namely "when we see an object at two points in time, what features are necessary such that we recognize the two viewings as the being of the same object?" I've always heard this called the Granddad's Axe problem:

I've got my Granddad's old axe. I've replaced the handle twice, and the head three times, but it's still my Granddad's old axe...

We can certainly accept that Granddad's axe is still the same axe even if we paint it or sharpen it, and might even accept it's the "same" axe after we've replaced both the head and the handle if we use it in the same way, it evokes the same memories of Granddad that it did before, etc. What about people? It's been said that every molecule in a person's body is replaced after a decade or two, and certainly I'm very different in both appearance and thinking than I was when I was 12. Am I still the same person I was then, even with all those changes? If so, why do we connect the atoms that made up that child then with the person sitting here typing this now? And if not, is there some 12-year-old boy living today who, based on similarity to that boy of 24 years ago, is more deserving of the title?

Materialism (or my understanding of it at least) doesn't offer any answers to these questions, nor does it feel the need to do so. The philosophy simply suggests that there are patterns that exist in the world at different points in time, that they follow certain rules, and that any vocabulary that accurately describes those patterns is equally valid (though potentially more or less practical and comprehensible). Unfortunately, just calling such a pattern "soul" doesn't get us any further — that just amounts to saying "yes, you are the same person as you were when you were 12, and we'll call the thing that binds those two defined entities together your soul."

It's not about you 

I very much like this audio commentary by 1982-Accadamy-Award Winner Linda Hunt. (Real Audio, 3:50, broadcast on KQED's 3/3/06 California Report)

Intelligent Design 

Intelligent Design proponent Michael Behe asks us to eschew logic and evidence and instead to "trust our feelings" in a recent New York Times Op-Ed. But even when I follow this dubious advice, Intelligent Design feels like nothing more than hubris to me.

Behe looks at the complexity and grandeur of life and thinks "an intelligence must have created this." I look at the complexity and grandeur of life, and I know in my heart there is no way mere intelligence could have produced something so wondrous.

More free-will paradox 

Yesterday's post on counting votes is related to a paradox I've been thinking about for a couple weeks. This is a from-memory paraphrase of the description in Martin Gardner's Aha! Gotcha: Paradoxes to Puzzle and Delight:

Dr. Omega, brain specialist extraordinaire, is conducting a study. First, he scans your brain, has you fill out lots of personality tests, measures the bumps on your head, and looks deeply into your soul. Then he brings out two boxes, one opaque (A) and the other transparent (B). In the transparent box is a $100 bill. He then gives you two choices:

• Choice 1: Take the contents of only the opaque box (box A).
• Choice 2: Take the contents of BOTH box A and box B.

Dr. Omega explains that you that if, based on his tests, he expects that you will take Choice 1, he has placed $1000 in box A. If he expects you will take Choice 2, he has placed nothing in box A.

With that, he leaves for a vacation in Vegas.

Which choice do you take?

Assuming you believe Dr. Omega is good at what he does, I'm pretty sure this is equivalent to the Prisoner's Dilemma with you playing against your future self.

Here's the payoff matrix:

Regardless of what prediction Dr. Omega has made, your payoff is always one hundred dollars higher if you take choice #2 (A & B). The only way that can't be true is if your choice now in some way affects the prediction that Dr. Omega has already made. And yet, if Dr. Omega's prediction is correct then by choosing A & B you only make $100 rather than $1000 or $1100.

The paradox is even more clear if instead of a brain specialist, Dr. Omega is a time traveler. He jumps a few moments into the future, watches which choice you make, then pops back to the present and sets the boxes as before. If you believe in a single-timeline worldview (it's already happened, so that's how it'll happen, ala The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) then you're better off choosing A (insomuch as you can "choose" at all in this worldview). If you believe in splitting timelines (you can change the future, ala Terminator) then you're better off choosing A & B.

Vote Counting 

I've been having an email discussion about the electoral college and whether it makes your vote “count for less” in non-swing states. I think there's a fallacy in the whole “my vote doesn't count” argument — it's like saying “Nadar voters lost the election for Gore” and ignoring the possibility that the millions of people who voted for Bush might have played some small part as well.

To see where you stand on this issue, try this thought experiment:

It's the day before the election, and 100 people are going to vote in a city council race between Smith and Jones. How much will my vote count?

• A) 1/100th of the deciding power.
• B) Not knowable until the outcome of the election is known.
• C) Depends on whether Diebold machines are used.

It's the day before the same election, and a fortune teller tells me Smith will win. How much will my vote count if I vote for Smith? If I vote for Jones?

• A) 1/100th of the deciding power.
• B) Depends on whether the fortune teller can also tell me where I lost my car keys.
• C) Depends on whether the fortune teller works for Diebold.

It's the day after the same election, and 55 people voted for Smith and 45 for Jones. If I voted for Smith, how much did my vote count? If I voted for Jones?

• A) 1/100th of the deciding power regardless of your vote.
• B) Any of the following:
  • B-1) 0% if I voted for Jones, 1/55th if I voted for Smith.
  • B-2) 0% unless I were the 51st person to vote for Smith on election day.
  • B-3) 0% unless my vote was the 51st one to be counted for Smith after the polls close.
• C) Depends on whether Smith knows someone who works for Diebold.

Score:

If you answered mostly A, you're an empowered, well-balanced citizen who believes in free will.

If you answered mostly B, in your heart you believe in determinism. Stories about time travel and drug-induced insanity upset you, but you'll attribute it to an over-active basil ganglia.

If you answered mostly C, you're a well-balanced citizen who believes in free will but realizes that his vote not only doesn't count, but isn't even counted.