You find yourself searching an unfamiliar building. You will need to search every floor. In front of you are two staircases, one headed up, the other going down. Which direction do you go?
I’m less intrigued by this idea than I am that I had this idea -- and that I paid attention to it for much longer than was necessary. It was prompted at the start of Dan Floyd’s Dark Souls II playthrough (#59). What started as a gut instinct led to me questioning why I believed it, prompted a justification based on efficiency. (Eventually you will want to exit the building, and you may as well save the lower-level checking until that time since you will need to head in that direction.)
But of course, efficiency is not always necessary. I could not think of a situation where it would be harmful either, however; a few scenarios came to mind where you would want to check below before above, but they all involved stopping before needing to visit all the floors. Can you dream up one?
Regardless, I was struck by how quickly the impulse came to me, and how I was immediately driven to give an explicit justification. Did this justification exist before I put it into words? Or was it a post-hoc addition to my reasoning mechanism, evoked by a memory systems eager to perpetuate a feeling of rational order for the world? These questions fall into the epistemology of a priori justification, prompted a search which found the appropriately named A Priori Justification by Albert Casullo (Professor of Philosophy at University of Nebraska-Lincoln). Alas, my local library does not hold a copy, but Casullo’s university webpage has a few pdfs on related topics.
In a related thought, the question also prompted a memory from my childhood of the Slylock Fox comic series. One strip had Slylock Fox encounter an office which had been broken into. Desk and chair were askew, and papers stuck out of the open drawers in the file cabinet. It was clear the criminal had been searching for something. I was not able to find this strip, but relying on memory the question Slylock was able to answer might have been “which drawer did the thief search first?”
The answer is the bottom drawer. Opening the top drawer obscures the view of the second, so it would have been necessary to open the bottom-most drawer first.
(Aside #1: There’s an illustration there of the Well-ordering principle from set theory. #newmath1960s)
(Aside #2: Yes, I learned at a young age the very important lesson that when pursuing corporate espionage one should always start with the lower drawers.)
What’s your reaction? Did I bias you towards instinctively thinking to search upstairs first? Or against that thought? How do you reconcile “random” thoughts with the cause-and-effect nature of our visible world? Do you remember Slylock fox? What do my thoughts prompt for you?
Dark Souls II #59 (YouTube, ExtraPlay): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6OtOuV7UkM
A Priori Justification (WorldCat): http://www.worldcat.org/title/a-priori-justification/oclc/61130511
Epistemological Problems of Memory (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/memory-episprob/
Slylock Fox (TvTropes(!)): http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ComicStrip/SlylockFox
Well-Ordering Principle (ProofWiki): https://proofwiki.org/wiki/Well-Ordering_Principle
Tom Leher’s satirical song New Math (Youtube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIKGV2cTgqA
