Muhammad Ali (credit: Ira Rosenberg, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                              The Reality of Sport

An interesting way to apply moral realism to everyday life is in the realm of sports. Sports of some kind are found in all human societies, and the ways in which people play games reveal deep things about individuals, whole cultures, and even our whole species.

Let’s consider first the epistemology of sports that is implicit in the ways in which we play them. There are no athletes who, in the middle of a match, have any questions about whether the ball, or puck, or opponent’s fist they are seeing is real. There’s no time during competition for such thinking. The player hits the ball with the bat in his hands if he judges that he can, or he takes the puck passed to him onto his stick as smoothly as he can. The boxer ducks the oncoming fist.

   

               Kevin Pillar bunting (credit: Terry Foote, via Wikimedia Commons)

Could the sense data telling the player the rate and angle of approach of the ball, puck, or fist coming toward him be mistaken? Yes. Just as much as Descartes could be seeing men walking away that are really just clockwork men, or Gilbert Harman could be a brain living in a vat and seeing only an illusion, the athlete could be perceiving a set of sense data that seem to fit the reality he thinks is happening, when in fact, there is no real ball, puck, or fist at all. The sense data the athlete thinks he’s seeing could be complete illusions.

                        

              Martina Navratilova (credit: robbiesaurus, via Wikimedia Commons)

But the athlete in that situation does not care. He will try to his utmost ability to catch the ball, or receive the passed puck, or duck the fist as well as he can. Why? Because he doesn’t want to get knocked out. If you make the case to him, before the match, that what he is about to see could all be an illusion, he will probably reply with something like, “What difference does this ‘could be’ make? Even if I can’t prove that what I’m seeing is real, I’m going to gamble that it is and react accordingly anyway. In the end, philosophical speculations about whether what I am seeing is real will not make any difference to how I, my teammates, or our opponents are going to act. We will gamble that what we are seeing is as it appears to be. We want to get on with the match.”

   

                 Hideo Nomo (credit: Ryosuke Yagi, via Wikimedia Commons)

Why do I bring such an example up? Because it captures in a short space the epistemological view not just of athletes, but of people living ordinary lives. They can’t prove that a fly ball in a baseball game is arcing toward them in the way their eyes tell them it is. The fielder could be tricked by the stadium lights; he could be seeing a ball coming at him on a high parabolic trajectory when in fact it is coming at him via a totally different line of approach. A line drive, hard, flat and dangerous. He may even suspect that what he thinks he is seeing may not be what is actually there if he has been fooled by the lights in this stadium once before. But he will gamble on the best probability-of-success action he can calculate. And if he’s been fooled before in this stadium, it likely is also true that he has caught over a hundred fly balls successfully here too. He may be about to get hit in the teeth by a line drive. But what else can he do except go with what his judgment tells him is his best gamble: “the ball is most likely coming at me in the way that it appears to my eyes to be doing.”

If he catches this high fly ball (if that’s what it really is), his team will win the game. So he chooses what he believes is his best option, based on an analysis of what his senses are telling him right now combined with his memories of past catches. He chooses to attempt the catch, rather than cringe behind his glove. Then, he chooses what looks to him like his best gamble and executes it.

And so goes life. I can’t prove beyond all doubt that the car coming at me is straying across into my lane. But my visual sense data are telling me that is the case. I choose now to swerve out of the way of the imminent collision. My perceptions are also telling me that a small edge of my left index finger is in the line of travel of the knife that I am using to cut my sandwich. So I move my hand. Even making lunch contains philosophical assumptions.

Bottom line? Sport reveals to us that we gamble on our best judgments of our best sensory impressions and clearest, most trusted memories all the time. Life is happening. If I am to win, eat, and save my teeth, I gamble on what looks to me like my best bet. Is that gamble ever a perfect certainty? No. But it is good enough for now, which is all I ever really have anyway.  

Moral realism begins from the assumption that all of the actions of life are but rational gambles based on our best perceptions of our surroundings and our best odds-calculating, memory-scanning mental programs. We do our best to update our odds-calculating programs all through our lives right up until the moment of action. We try to learn from our mistakes and from other humans. But there are no certainties. We take gambles and do actions most of time because we must do something. Or else get hit in the mouth by a baseball.

I’ll gamble. And act. So will you. Life contains worse hazards than baseballs.

The ontology of everyday life: what appears to our senses and our judgment to be real, most of the time …is. If it’s not, sooner or later, pain will teach us what the real situation is. Pain is a harsh but effective teacher.   

The epistemology of everyday life: I use my memories and reasoning program as well as I can to learn which actions work and which ones don’t, and I use what I have learned to make choices and act. Can I prove my ways of knowing and acting are foolproof? No. Am I going to use them anyway? Yes.

Rational gambling. This is Bayesianism, the starting point for moral realism.

I also try my best to update my memory and reasoning programming day by day, based on what I see works. (“This stadium again!”) Even though I’m mistaken sometimes, I take the gamble, learn from the pain, re-write parts of my programs and move on. My only other choice is catatonia. I’d rather live. Actively. Here. Now. In reality. (Roughly, Neo’s choice in “The Matrix”.)

Rational gambling is the policy in real life that makes possible real life.

And that’s enough for today. Next post, we’ll go on to the assumptions about free will that underlie the thinking of sport.

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, for at least some of today, throw, catch, run, and jump. Do life and feel that you are.