The Putin Fallacy―Let’s Try It Out
A couple years ago, a thing occurred to me that I call the “Putin fallacy”.[1]
Somebody has to be born as Vladimir Putin―the man who Boris Yeltsin chooses to be President of Russia.
Putin isn’t particularly special. By all accounts he was a pretty ordinary KGB agent with a pretty ordinary understanding of how to operate in a corrupt system — and how to rule based on that. Boris Yeltsin picked Putin because he could count on Putin to pardon him for his illegal activities, and so it was that Putin’s his first official act as President was to grant Yeltsin just such a pardon.
But if you’re Putin, you may look in the mirror and think “there must be something Special about Me, that I was chosen to be the President of Russia. It must have been my destiny. I am special, and it is Right and True that I should decide who lives and who dies, and the future path of Russia. As for who dies―Ukrainians?”
This is wrong. You were just lucky. But no one can tell you that, because you’re the F**king President of Russia.
Everybody can believe what they want to believe, but surely Putin, if anyone, has the most solid of reasons to think he’s special, right? The chance of ending up as authoritarian president of a major country — without really working at it — are what, one in a billion? So if you’re Putin, president of Russia, how do you explain such an absurdly miraculous fact to yourself?
So naturally he starts thinking it’s his destiny, something special about him as a person that makes him uniquely deserving of the role, the power and the privilege.[2] But, you know―Yeltsin had to pick somebody, and since he’s not even trying to pick someone uniquely deserving, being picked by Yeltsin doesn’t mean you are uniquely deserving.
Still.
It does seem miraculous that I am me.
Who am I? I’m smart―not that smart, but smart enough to be an inventor. I was born in the U.S.A., which itself is pretty lucky. To me, my personality is completely ordinary and banal, but empirically speaking, my personality is extremely unusual. There’s almost no one else like me (and, as a result, I have almost no friends and an audience barely distinguishable from zero). I looked for nine years for someone similar to myself to marry, and never found anyone similar.
I also, uh…
So why do I inhabit a person who is so weird?
Why am I a person at all?
I could’ve been a rodent. I could’ve been an ant.
I could’ve been… a rock? A hydrogen atom in a star? There’s dramatically more Sun than Jupiter, dramatically more Jupiter than Earth, and dramatically more Earth than life!
Being a person at all is like winning a hundred-million dollar lottery. It’s not normal. It should be so absurdly unlikely that you, as a conscious monadal element, should never expect to be one. Yet here I am, and here you are.
And to be alive during one of the most important centuries in history―it’s probably just luck, but holy shit, that is some amazing luck!
So I’m one of the most unusual beings, in one of the most unusual species, in one of the rarest places in the universe, during one of the most unusual time periods. What the fuck is going on?
Yet, unusual as I am, there are many people more unusual than me―Nobel prize winners, lottery winners, people with diseases that only one in a billion people get, successful inventors, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin…
It gives me an idea about consciousness, though: maybe neurodivergents have more conscious monadal elements, and correspondingly more qualia. Given the reasonably high probability that I’m “on the spectrum”, plus evidence that autism is characterized by an overabundance of synapses, I am led to a second hypothesis that qualia/consciousness is correlated with synapses rather than neurons (which is not to claim or deny that qualia takes place in the synapses). This would mean that people on the spectrum have more qualia than neurotypicals, and in turn, humans in general have more qualia than other animals, which in turn have more qualia than rocks and stars, despite the absurdly overwhelming ratio of atoms in stars to atoms in animals.
This might just be a fallacy. We might all just be intergalactic lottery winners. But to solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness, we have to start somewhere. And these two hypotheses (about neurodivergents and synapses) readily produce a prediction. If either idea is true, then neurodivergents will be more likely to notice their qualia than neurotypicals. Well, not quite―what these ideas actually imply is that being neurodivergent, in a metaphysical sense, is far more common than its prevalence in the human population would suggest. But if being a being is correlated with noticing yourself being a being, then yes[3].
I remember very little from my childhood. But one of the memories that stands out was me being aware of qualia. I wouldn’t learn the word “qualia” for over 30 years afterward. But I remember, on one particular occasion, reflecting on the sensations of life―the wind on my skin, warmth, coldness, pain, taste, colors―and just sort of marveling at all of it. I often do that. I’m in awe that I am me, and that I feel experiences.
I’ve also reflected endlessly on death, and sometimes on the universe before I was born. Where was I before I was born? As a former Mormon, I was taught specifically to do this, of course, but I’ve come to realize that a lot of Mormons don’t do this. To a lot of people, religion is just a building you go to and socialize. I suspect the afterlife has never held much interest to my wife and her Mormon family, for example. Nominally they’re members of the church, but in reality they just live in the now. When I explained to my future wife that the church was false, she simply accepted that with suspiciously little resistance. And then kept going to church. Looking back on it now, it’s really bizarre.
And so my expectation, if this hypothesis is true, is that neurodivergents and/or people with more synapses are much more likely to think about, and therefore talk about, things like “qualia” and “phenomenal consciousness”, and since these terms are not widely known, also related concepts such as “souls”, “experiences”, or “what it’s like to be a ____”.[4]
Somebody should do a study. I’m not a scientist, so it won’t be me.
Epistemic status: wild speculation, but it’s the best mental model I have.
[1] In fact I called it the “MBS fallacy” until today, in reference to Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Prince and ruler of Saudi Arabia. But MBS probably believes he was chosen by God: “There must be something special about me, because Allah chose me to be MBS. Surely it is His Will that I be MBS, ruler of Saudi Arabia, and therefore I may choose to elevate or kill whomever I choose, for it is ordained of God.” I think this line of reasoning makes more sense for a religious person than a secular one, although it does beg questions like “why did God choose Ivan the Terrible to be Ivan IV?” which the religious will dismiss with a comment about God working in mysterious ways. So I wanted to look at this from a secular perspective instead, where the reasoning is more clearly fallacious. Plus, I learned my church was false several years ago, so the religious perspective is uninteresting to me. Obviously Putin isn’t a perfect choice since he wasn’t born into it, but he also didn’t earn the presidency through some huge struggle. It dropped in his lap. For that matter MBS is probably imperfect too, as some other prince of Saudi Arabia could’ve been ruler if not for MBS doing whatever it was he did to be picked as the next ruler.
[2] I don’t know if Putin is actually subject to Putin’s fallacy, I just think it’s a natural sort of thing for princes & lucky people to think. For an opinion on an actual fixation of Putin, see this video about Putin & tsar Alexander III.
[3] I realize this caveat greatly weakens our ability to draw conclusions if the predicted correlation does hold true.
[4] I realize this could be an obscure flavor of information hazard if true ― the most controversial thing since racism, I guess. Good thing I don’t have an audience, right? For the record, this idea doesn’t negate the value of neurotypicals, or of animal welfare. It doesn’t justify being an asshole, and I am even suspicious of questioning the principle “all people are created equal”―but if my hypothesis is right, it seems likely that it will become a point of contention in society. And needless to say, I may be wrong. But the issue of AGI sentience will probably arise in the coming decades, and we need to solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness in order to deal with it properly. Humans should not be replaced with machines―even kind, wonderful, good machines―until we can at least be assured that those machines are in fact experiencing. Also, I expect that solving the Problem will make it possible to create machines whose lives are consistently good, and certainly better than human lives. See also: Utility Monsters
