If you’re having girl problems I feel bad for you, son I got ninety-nine problems But [derogatory term for a woman, comparing her to a female canine, which indicates I may, in fact, have a problem with women in general, but not one specific woman, so one specific woman I disrespect] ain't one!
-Jay-Z, “99 Problems”
A True Short Story
My home, several months ago:
Wife: Dear, what would you like for your birthday? [one month away at this point]
Me: Hmmm, I hadn’t thought about it. I’ll try to let you know soon.
My home, several months ago, less a few days:
Wife: Oh dear, inflation is starting to get bad.
Me: Hmmmm.
Rapid train of thought: “Inflation is rising at a more rapid clip than at any period in my lifetime.
Inflation is an increase in the cost of basic goods and services, and can spiral rapidly.
Inflation will (hopefully) be brought under control by aggressive interest rate hikes by central banks – or so the theory goes.
I hold no debt, so interest rates are no concern of mine. That correction, if it happens, is likely to take a while though.
My wife and I both have unionized public sector jobs so are likely to be cushioned from inflation by negotiated pay raises in the coming year or two. Also, even with two kids, we live below our means.
Me: Sweetheart, how will the projected rise in the costs of goods affect our grocery and other bills?
Wife (after checking budgeting software): Not much. It will sting, but not badly.
Me: Phew...
Thought train continues accelerating: With two kids and two adults, we eat a significant amount of bread. Bread is made primarily from wheat. Wheat prices are going up globally for many reasons, but notably the brutal war currently ravaging the Ukraine. That likely won’t end soon.
How much are we paying per loaf of bread?
(Checking figures...) Hmm. Figure that the margin on each value added step from sowing the wheat to baking the flour is greater than the one before. So, if the margins stay the same (and firms would need to keep them there to remain profitable/viable), a small increase at the first step will lead to a much greater increase at the final step. So an X percent increase in the cost of a bushel of wheat may be a 5X percent increase in the cost of the loaf we buy at the store.
How much would it cost me to bake a loaf of bread myself?
(After creating spreadsheet) Okay, so the inputs to make a loaf of equivalent weight bread are substantially cheaper than the store-bought loaf. But the labor time … I like cooking and baking, but I don’t want to slave over the oven all day to ensure we have enough bread. It’s not like we can’t afford the price to increase – even double. But what if...
(After checking the price of bread machines) Wow, those are less expensive than I had thought. And they make larger loaves of bread.
(Scale up input prices to match larger loaf) Still cheaper. Take the difference in cost between the storebought loaf and the homemade loaf in cents per gram as the capital amortization of the bread maker. How long till pay off?
(Further figuring) Wow, not bad, only four months.
Me: Sweetheart, I know what I want for my birthday.
Wife: Oh, what is it?
Me: I would like a breadmaker, please.
And that’s the true story of how I countered rising inflation, got better tasting bread, and figured out what I wanted for my birthday. Not exactly riveting, I know, but it illustrates what I want to talk about: all life is problem solving.
The Problematic Problems Problem
During my undergrad and graduate studies, we talked endlessly about philosophical problems – what were the major philosophical problems, what made a problem a specifically philosophical problem, whether there even were philosophical problems (the asking of which would seem to answer its own queston – for if anything is a philosophical question, then “are there properly philosophical problems” surely is one). It was all great fun – but nonremunerative, so I left for information technology.1 But we never once talked about what problems simpliciter are. That is what defines problems in the broadest sense.
Which is surprising. Because once you start to consider the world through the lens of problem solving, almost everything human beings think, do, and feel can be conceptualized this way. This essay is the first in an ongoing series I will be writing about problems – what they are, where they come from, how we solve them, and what problems we are actually solving when we pretend to be solving others.2
Forgive the following, possibly tedious, technical exposition. In this one place I feel the need to be clear and explicit, the way I was taught to be by studying analytic philosophy, rather than cute and flippant, the way Substack essays seem to be composed.
A problem is the potentially perceived gap between the current, observed state of the world and the way an agent would desire it to be, and capable of being resolved (the gap between current and desired state closed) by some conceivable, even if not possible, action or sequence of events.
To break this down:
“potentially perceived” - means that the problem has to be conceivable by some agent, even if not the agent in question. The agent in question might be incapable of perceiving the problem, conceptualizing the cause, or bringing about the desired state of the world. But another agent can (or could potentially) conceptualize the problem.
Consider a spider spinning a web between the wires of a fence. It has recently stopped raining, and the spider is back out of cover, spinning away. A man is walking by, shepherding evacuees to safety ahead of rising flood waters. The flood waters are not here yet, but they will overtop the fence and drown the spider. The man can look over at the spider and conceive that the spider has a problem, and way that problem can be solved – for the spider not to be in danger of drowning. He might even choose to rescue the spider. Or he might just consider that the spider has a problem, then forget all about it and get back to his job.
Even if we think the spider can in no meaningful way conceptualize the danger it is in, I think we can all agree that the spider has a problem in a way that a sedimentary rock or beam of sunlight simply does not – or cannot.
“gap between the current, observed state of the world and the way an agent would desire it to be” - Basically, one cannot have a problem unless one can have a lack. To the best of my knowledge, only living things (in however broad a sense) can lack things – warmth, shelter, food, a vacation, a good book to read, existential purpose. As noted above, rocks and beams of energy do not – they just are. “Would desire it to be” is packing in a lot, about which those who are curious can read this footnote.3
“capable of being resolved … by some conceivable, even if not possible, action or sequence of events.” Without getting too much into thickets of modal logic and Kripkean versus Lewisian interpretations of possible world semantics, the existence of the gap between the desirable and actual state of the world implies a solution: for the actual world to become, somehow, the desirable state of the world. How to bring that about the desirable state, or what the desirable state would be – aside from the absence of the less preferable present state – may not be clear, but problems imply solutions, even if the solutions are not conceivable – again, other than through simple negation.
An aside is in order here: when discussing entities that can conceptualize about their problems, discuss them, debate them, and experience them vicariously through direct observation, imagination, and art, there is a blurry line between what we might want to call “actual” problems and “subjective” problems. Someone could have a problem, but be unaware of it, or believe they have a problem, but be mistaken.
What all of this implies is that agents, acting beings, are the only kinds of things that can have problems. Whether those discrete entities can form larger aggregates that possess their own problems, whether we can say that corporations, nations, or civilizations “have” problems or whether those problems are just the sums of their individual components is not our question right now. That requires delving into the metaphysics of agency, which I would not rather not get too deep into just now, at least this inaugural essay.
In fact, my focus for at least the first series of these essays is going to be on deliberate problem solving, the conscious, willed activity undertaken by just the kind of beings – rational animals - that we are.
To bring it all back together, finding out I wanted to write about problems and problem solving solved a problem I did not know I had: what focus to devote this Substack to. After ~7 months of thrashing around, I have found a unifying theme.
I also had the thought: “if we’re all supposed to be so smart, why are we all competing for a shrinking pool of jobs?”
I call these last problems Hanson Problems, in honor of Robin Hanson and his work on this topic which led me to think about it for the first time in depth. If you’re looking for a starting point, Hanson’s The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life is a good one.
Incidentally, Hanson co-authored the book with Kevin Simler, but Hanson-Simler Problems just does not have the right ring to it, so I’m calling them Hanson Problems. Also, in describing their partnership, they both attribute the bulk of the ideas and their bringing them together to Hanson, and the prose and presentation to Simler – an exercise in joint problem solving, if you will, dividing the problem of how to write about a large topic into smaller sections.
What I’m drawing on here is the notion of intentionality, “directedness towards” existing outside of mental activity. Ordinarily, we think of intentionality as belonging only to mental things – thoughts, feelings, desires, beliefs, etc. To summarize way too quickly a dense philosophical topic, there are things, and then there are things (thoughts, feelings, beliefs) that can be about those things, including themselves, like self-reflective thoughts. Franz Brentano was the first to draw this distinction out, borrowing it from an older concept of intentionality existing in nature. That is, that natural beings have a directedness towards a certain state to which they attempt to move or change themselves.
For those who remember their Ancient Greek Philosophy, this is equivalent to the fourth of Aristotle’s Four Causes – the Final cause. The revolution in philosophy in the 17th century down to now, which was both inspired by and contributed to the Scientific Revolution, was the rejection of final causes as irrelevant to the study of nature, and their replacement by efficient causes, mechanical pushes and pulls. The major benefit of this replacement is that it makes the math easier – if all we need to know to mathematically model nature and understand its course (and manipulate it, which is what Bacon and Descartes explicitly wanted humanity to start doing with the new knowledge) is the position, direction, velocity, and shape of elementary particles, then efficient causation is sufficient for you.
Without going so far as the God of the Medievals, or Aristotle with his Unmoved Mover – unitary sources of Being and existence towards which all lesser beings tend – I think it is uncontroversial that any particular being, from a paramecium to a President, has states of being that contribute to or detract from their flourishing (however broadly understood). It is the gap between the present state of the living being and those states that constitutes a problem.