The Ring of Gyges

I'm here. Yeah, yeah, okay, it sounds good, you me, m. I feel like I would just want to walk around for a little bit, you know, just sort of observe. But nothing would just you know, just the street, you know, people going about their daily business outside of their homes. Yeah, but I mean webcams, that's what those are for. Yeah, but I mean, you know what I'm saying, not way Yeah, yeah,

I don't know. This is where the topic gets gets interesting, right, And that's why we can't help but but love the idea of invisibility in fiction and in myth and why we've had it around for so long. I mean, it dates back, you know, at least a classical mythology at the cap of Hades, the helm of Hades, that turned the where invisible. And I'm sure a number of different invisibility gadgets or artifacts come to mind with our popular

culture as well. Well. I was thinking about this, and I was thinking about J. K. Rowlings once imaginary book now actual book, The Tales of the Beetle Bard, which takes on this invisibility trope, and one of the brothers is granted deaths invisibility rope. I won't go through the whole story, but just no, this is what happens right when the brothers gets the rope, which allows him to escape death. And what I love about this use of the invisibility cloak is that it shows the other aspect

to invisibility, which is a kind of immortality and escape. Right. If you're not observed, then you can't be uh, you can't be removed, right. Yeah, It's kind of an escape of freeing of the physical form. You almost become pure

thought and observation, which is tantalizing. Yeah, And I guess it speaks to your desire to perhaps just go about people's daily lives and watch what's happening, the mechanations behind the scenes of life, yeah, or just sort of it almost be like just sort of hitting the off switch on things for a little bit, like the almost like getting a massage, you know, just go invisible for a little bit. I don't know. But but but but of course,

with the power of invisibility becomes the threat of corruption. Right, That's the other great trope with this, The big one, uh for for modern listeners is of course J. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and the one ring that turns the where invisible but also drives that that where increasingly towards the dark side and into an evil natured and into enslavement by diabolical forces or H. G. Wells invisible man who takes more of a certainly a

scientific chemical approach to ultimately turning himself invisible. And and he's already kind of a semi rotten person before he turns invisible. But then it just gets even worse and more tragic once he transforms. And it doesn't give him the kind of power that he imagined, right, I mean, it does truly render him invisible in his actions, and it doesn't and actually like impotent, right yeah, Like he's

cowering and naked on the streets of London. Uh, he's invisible, but he and he has the grand designs eventually about how he's going to have his reign of terror, but none of that comes to fruition. Ah, that's the invisibility cloak for you, or rather just invisibility in general. Indeed, now in this episode, though, we're going to talk about one particular invisibility in abling artifact from from myth but but also from philosophy, that being the Ring of Gyges.

This dates back more than two thousand years to work by Plato titled The Republic. Yeah, The Republic is arguably the most popular and most widely taught of Plato's writings. It's not quite an essay, but it's not quite a novel or a play, although it does borrow from from fictional techniques. Right. Um, it's pretty heavy on dialogue. If you've ever seen My Dinner with Andre, you can think of it as like a twenty year old version of

that movie. This extended conversation, Um, that concerns justice. And this conversation goes on for ten books divided into ten books, and the participants in the debate are friends or acquaintances of the central speaker, who is Socrates, and they conduct their conversations in the house of one of the participants, and the main speakers are Socrates, uh Cephalus, Pole, Marcus, Cephalus's son varsimakos Um, and Glaucon and Adimantus, which Glaucon

and Adeimantus are Plato's half brothers, by the way, Yes, and of course Plato for just a reminder for anyone who's just a little foggy on it. Plato was a classical Greek philosopher who lived from four to three seven b C. And he stands, with his student Aristotle, as one of the key pillars of Western philosophy, science, and arguably even Western culture itself. Now, his dialogues covered philosophy, logic, ethics, rhetoric, religion, mathematics, and his work is as potent today as it ever was.

I mean, just consider our episode from last year on Supernormal Stimuli where we talked a little bit about Plato's theory of forms. You know, these are these are ideas that still resonates strongly with the with the modern reader. Yeah, And what is so amazing about the Republic is a it does commit this idea of justice in so many different angles and from so many different perspectives and voices, and so the speakers all represent various ways of approaching

this task at hands. So you see this office, you see the Socratic method right at play now. In Book one, section four, Socrates refute Thrasi Mukos's assertion with that justice is in the interest of the stronger or might is right, and he's arguing this kind of situational ethics fashion mucos is, he's praising the benefits of a moorlity and eventually uh

fashions and part of my grade. By the way, it takes off from the conversation, and it's left up to Glaucon and Audiomontis to really extend this idea of wit what do you mean might is right? And Glaucon actually poses a challenge to Socrates um he questions how genuine any human being's commitment to justice actually does and he does this by introducing a thought experiment, yes, a thought experiment in the form of a myth, with a little bit of a history thrown in there as well, the

legend of guys Uh. This concerns Gys of Lydia, Lydia being an Iron Age kingdom and what is now western Turkey, and Gus was a real king reigning from seven sixteen BC to BC, and by all all accounts seem to agree that he did in fact seize the throne by killing King Condallas and marrying Condallas's queen, but the details very significantly, and sometimes he's a bodyguard goaded into killing the king by the queen herself, or he's Kandallas's right

hand man, their varying levels of of conspiracy involved in different tellings, but Plato focuses on a version that involves the use of a man magical ring, a ring found on the finger of a corpse in an earthquake uncovered tomb, and then guys a shepherd. In this telling quickly discovers the power of the ring quote he contrived to be chosen one of the messengers who were sent by the shepherds to the court, where as soon as he arrived, he seduced the queen and with her help, conspired against

the king and slew him and took the kingdom. So the details are a little foggy on exactly how he used the ring and its power of invisibility to certainly seduce the queen kill the king. That's a little more straightforward. I guess. But in short, the ring gave this guy the power of anonymity. It freed him from the risks of judgment, control and punishment, and so he simply took what he wanted, the life that he wanted to take, the position he wanted to claim as his own, and

the woman he wanted to bed. Right, So Glacon doesn't just you know, tell the story then dropped from Mike, He goes on to say, Hey, I'm trying to demonstrate something here that not only do people prefer to be unjust rather than just, but it's actually rational for them to do so, because look at this guy. He indulges and all of his urges, he's honored and rewarded with wealth. But the completely just man, on the other hand, might be scorned, and I mean it might be sort of

a wretched character. And his brother Adeimantas chimes in and says, yeah, no, one praises justice for its own sake, but only for the rewards it allows you to reap, and both this life and the afterlife. And he challenges Socrates to show justice to be desirable in the absence of any external rewards, that justice for justice's own sake is desirable, just like something like joy or health. So the argument here is that anyone who put on this ring would be corrupted.

If you had a good person and a bad person who gave him each a magical ring of guys, both of them would end up at the same place, like you know, invisible and naked in a supermarket, causing havoc. Right, because that person would be rewarded with whatever they wanted, as opposed to doing the right thing. Um, but doing the right thing when you're unobserved. That's the question mark, which we'll get to. Indeed, now I'm glad that you mentioned dropping the mic, because definitely um Plato is not

a boom might dropper type of guy. Um in the Republic itself, it's a sprawling work, and we are by no means attempting to summarize it. It's not it's not a Q Q and A. It's not someone say hey, what's justice Plato and says it's this. It's um. It's not even I tend to think of it in terms of a of a war, like not a particular battle,

but a series of battles. It's a sprawling work, and in the work Socrates takes a very long form approach to tackling the issue of morality and justice, but ultimately he argues that a truly just man is not enslaved by his appetite, so the ring would not tempt him to abandon his principles. But we're humans, and humans have this overpowering tendency to be corrupted by power, leading leading to pure any abuse of power, any kind of horrible

situation you can imagine. However, he ultimately argues in this that philosophers are the most just and the least susceptible to corruption. So the ideal republic, a true utopia, would be governed by philosopher kings, which hasn't exactly turned out to be the case over history. And Uh, the reason why this Ring of God she is so such a potent image is because it's not just the invisibility, it's secrecy.

And so when you look at a republic, a state, a government, you know that the increasing secrecy that that covers a politicians actions can cause that person to gain more power oh her time, and that secrecy begins to act like as some sort of invisibility cloak. And so that's why Socrates is so interested in this idea, and that's why it takes ten books to plumb the depths of it, because you know, the question what is justice

remains just as crucial today as it did years ago. Indeed, you know I can't help but be reminded of our episode on the Panopticon. Like a message of the Panopticon, it's basically saying, there is no ring of gyges. There's no ring. You're not turning invisible. You are visible at all times, so act accordingly, which is two sides of the same coin, because both exact absolute power. Right, So

invisibility you have absolutely absolute power. And then if you have omniscience right and you can see what everybody is doing, then you have absolute power, which would absolutely corrupt. And then of course there's a very corrupting element to being just completely under the boothills of a power and limited

in your your freedom. We're gonna do a little bit more still switching here on morality, and we're gonna look at Adam Smith, who was a Scottish moral philosopher, a pioneer of political economy, and a key Scottish Enlightenment figure. And he's best known for his writings on free market capitalism and the Division of Labor. But he also wrote about morality and self interest in his seventeen fifty nine book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and he argued that

morality comes from empathy. So you see someone suffer, or you think about someone's suffering, and you make a moral choice which may bolster that person's well being. Right, You're you're kind of duped into doing the right thing by virtue of imagining yourself in that person's position. And his idea is that both the individual and society benefit if

we pursue our own interest through virtuous actions. Now, Caroline grog War profiles Stanford economist Russ Roberts, who has a book about Smith called How Adam Smith Can Change Her Life, and he says that Smith's writings are the best self self help advice that no one has ever known about or written about. And he says that the four essential pieces of wisdom from Smith are one that we are all innately self interested, but we're also wired to care

about others. To the desire to be loved is universal. Three, don't waste your energy trying to change things you can't control. Heard that one before, right, uh? And number four let go of attachments, and by attachments he means anything that causes us to obsess on what we have now and what we want in the future, and violations of our expected outcomes concerning that, which is kind of he gets a little bit Buddhist there, which is interesting for this

seventeen fifty nine book. And so all of this is really well and good, but in terms of putting aside our own agendas and choosing the virtuous action, it does require a measure of empathy, which means it would be ideal if we could just last society with an empathy inducing molecule to get us all on the same ethics page. Right. I can't imagine that going wrong at all, No, right, I just just I mean it's getting piped in right now, and how stuff works as we speak, Um, you know,

I could, of course. But there is a study that relates to this kind of idea. There's a two thousand and ninth Center for Neuroeconomic Study with graduate student or Perrazza who found a direct relationship between oxytocin released in blood and the subjective experience of empathy when participants watched an emotionally charged video about a four year old boy with terminal cancer. Those who were more empathetically engaged by the video for more generous when asked to share resources

they controlled with a stranger in this lobbic speriment. So what we're talking about is I'm using synthetic oxytocin into people, which then caused them, relative to those given a placebo

by the way, to be more generous towards a stranger. Now, in a follow up study, they took a little testosterone, which inhibits empathy by blocking the action of oxytocin, and when researchers administered synthetic tster testosterone to these men in the study, they were less generous when they were asked to split money with a stranger, and they were more likely to punish those who were ungenerous towards them. So this has led some people to call oxytocin the trust

or moral molecule. But um, this is a bit of an oversimplification, right, because first of all, we're just talking about some lab experiments, and uh, second of all, there's a lot more going on under the surface of morality, because you have to consider that morality may be a situation dependent sort of thing at play. I'm talking about the sort of moral code that you might have been raised with as a child that would affect the sort of decisions that you would make. Um Also, what kind

of society do you live in? Is it stable? Is it or is it just a war torn society that has no stability? The socioeconomic environment is in shreds. If that's the case, then all of a sudden, your choices become fewer and the types of choices you would make

would be very different. And I was thinking about this in terms of our episode on politeness, because that there are some parallels here, because in the politeness episode we were talking about face threatening acts and not getting people tackles up, you know, and trying to do the right thing so that your public self was accepted right, which meant that we might do something called little bit of

dramaturgical analysis on people. We might look at people as performing a part in performing politeness when we're representing our public selves, and morality may operate in a similar way. Now, of course, when we talk about morality in the human sense, we we draw in all the human complications that come with it, right, and all the different associations, uh, you know, such as laws, values, the nature of altruism, the duality of right and wrong. But there's a different way to

look in morality. For instance, Dale Peterson, um science writer who wrote a book titled The Moral Lives of Animals, And this is a book that it would be easy to dismiss his core arguments here as him just saying, oh, animals are like people because they have some sense of morality. But I think the there's a deeper statement to be made about morality itself, which he uh he describes as a quote moral organ And one of the examples he makes as an elephant versus say, a human nose. Both

are essentially the same thing. One is larger, physically larger, one has a has a tremendously more more power to to sense things in its environment. But they both stem from the same purpose. They kind of grow from the same roots, right. He argues that the features of human morality differ from other animals, but it's all ultimately a part of the brains limbic system, which of course is tied to emotion, behavior, and motivation, as as well as

a number of other functions. So Peterson is arguing that the purpose of morality is to negotiate the inherent serious conflict that can exist between self and others. So again it's not about simplistic models of morality based on laws or right and wrong. It's more of a natural instinct

to guide behavior and social interaction for an organism. So on a very basic level, that would be what to eat, what not to eat, who to bite, who not to bite, how to behave in this potential mating scenario versus this conflict over food. Again that it's a it's it's a moral guideline that is just a part of our DNA, right, and some of those moral guidelines help in terms of overall species survival. Right, So all what's the term all boats,

One boat rises, all boats rise, that's the way. Yeah. Uh, point being that if you can take care of a sector of people, everybody benefits from it. So in that way, morality should be exacted. But again the question appears about whether or not people will actually engage in it when they are not being watched. And this is this again bringing in the panopticon. This sense that you're being watched

plays into a couple of these studies. Um. This is from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by see Neil McCrae, Gallen V. Budenhausen and Alan Alan B. Milne, who found the people in a room with a mirror were comparatively less likely to judge others based on social stereotypes about for example, sex, race, or religion. And boden Hausn't says when people are made to be self aware, they are likelier to stop and think about what they

are doing. Physical self reflection, in other words, encourages philosophical self reflection. And then another study in two thousand and six by Melissa Bateson at All titled quote Cues of being Watched Enhanced cooperation in a real world setting examine the effect of an image of a pair of eyes on contributions to an honesty box used to collect money for drinks in a university coffee room. And here's the deal.

You'd stick on some Google eyes on a contributions box and people will pay nearly three times as much for their drinks. Then, if it's just a regular contribution hots, why do we not see more of this at coffee shops? Stick some Google if you're listening you work in a coffee shop, Put some googly eyes on that tip jar. But already feel like I'm being watched, they have to turn around. Sometimes the money in and it feels you

to go all Seinfeld. Now, both of these are examples of quote their reminder effect reminding you of the moral codes in place, that you're being watched, that you're being judged,

and you should act accordingly. And that leads us to the work of C. Daniel Boston who has this this theory, this moral hypocrisy theory, which stems from a few studies that he conducted himself which used a mirror uh and also in one case used a coin, uh, testing just what happens when we're left alone to make this decisions in this case that the mirror playing the role of the of of of being watched, that the individual in

the mirror is watching. It sets in these previous studies, and in the case of the coin in one of the studies is presented as an s and where if you don't want to actually make the the the a moral choice, you can flip the coin and let the coin to decide so best on in his in his moral hypocrisy theory, he argues that we don't have any kind of inherent morality that as with as with the ring of guys argument, We all possess a desire to appear moral the other to We all possess a desire

to appear moral to others and to ourselves without having to bear the costs of that moral behavior when no one is watching. So that would be when you're wearing the ring of guys, when you're leaving comments in a YouTube thread, when you're writing on the bathroom wall. You name it. I mean there's it actually ties into to what some people refer to as the guys effect uh in in reference to internet trolls. Uh people leaving nasty comments or even making death threats and and other violent

threats online. Um, there's no one there to judge the morality of their actions, and then therefore they give into their own boredom, their own need for attention, with their district back against some sort of perceived oppressor. So the idea is that, given the chance, we all slipped the ring on. But we prefer to see our actions as moral, regardless of whether or not they actually are. And this

is where we get into moral rationalization. Okay, we we steal from the office supplies because we feel that we've earned them, or because the boss was mean to you, or because you had a bad day, or because you just need them more than someone else needs them. And so in Beston's studies, the coin again played the played the role of an agent of choice outside of ourselves, the cultural norms that you can fall back on. Someone say, oh, it's it's okay to act like it's okay to steal

office supplies, and therefore I shall do it. And then of course the mirror is the witness. I can't steal office supplies because someone is watching me. That someone might be another person, or of course it's yourself judging your own actions. But again, the argument here is that we're all essentially moral hypocrites and that if we if we could slip on that figuratively speaking, we would all just clean out the office supplies entirely. Do you think I think so? It would just be an empty room. I

don't know. I feel at some point the office supplies become sort of when those things that you're like, how many highlighters do I really need? Right? Many? One at home? Not ten? That that would I think that would be the ultimate you know, agony that would sit in an overtime. Now I wanted to read this quote from Michio Kaku, who, in his book Physics of the Impossible rights quote morality

as a social construct imposed from the outside. A man may appear to be moral in public to maintain his reputation for integrating and honesty, but once he possesses the power of invisibility, the use of such power would be irresistible. Indeed, and that's what we've been talking about, and he talks about this also in the context of science. So, UM, if I'm to get this right, the physics of the

impossible is uh. The impossible part is a bit of a misnomer, right, because eventually almost everything becomes possible with time and technology. So, for instance, flight for humans, once an impossibility, now a possibility. And if you look at some of the technologies in place when it comes to invisibility, you begin to see this emerging body of evidence that the ability to recede into the shadows undetected is becoming

more and more possible. And indeed, um and two thousand and thirteen, a time cloak was used to hide messages and laser light. And what we're talking about is uh, photons path can be tweaked to create a brief gap where information can safely hide, and a team from Purdue University built this cloak that could transfer data at one point five gigabytes a second, fast enough to make it

theoretically useful for real communication. And of course we've seen all sorts of materials in use um and meta materials to try to bend light around an object to make it imperceptible, and we know that the military uses some of this as well. So nothing new, but new in the sense that more and more understanding is coming online in terms of invisibility cloaking technology, which means that we might be able to cruise around undetected eavesdropping on peopil's

conversations one day. Yeah, it's not not not impossible. I mean it seems like there's a new invisibility cloak headline out every six months or so, which makes it very hard to to keep the how Invisibility Cloaks article on how stuff works up to date because they're all always knew methods coming along online with the menta materials and what have you. But yeah, we could event really reach the point where a ring of gyges of sorts is

an actual possibility. Right we were talking about VANTI black not too long ago that the material that absorbs of light and if it actually has a crinkle in it, you would never know because it's just it's this black void. The black is black possible. Yeah, So it's it's the again, it's something that would have been an impossibility a hundred years ago, but now we see that it's very possible. Yeah.

And in the meantime, we still have to deal with the virtual invisibility of of our various presences on the web and and as well as sort of the old fashioned ways of just getting by with things without when people are not watching, which of course leads to the question, yes, that we will pose to you all out there, if you had the chance to click yourself in invisibility, what might you do? Yeah, and let's put a limit on it. Let's say you only have one day, one day. What

do you do? One hour? One hour? Okay, even better, one hour of invisibility, that's all you get. What do you do? Well, actually, let's let's give them more than an hour, and they've got to get to the air. Maybe afternoon. That sounds okay, you have one afternoon of invisibility, and we're not coming down or up on this. This is this is it one afternoon of invisibility? What do you do? Let us let us know you would love to hear from you. In the meantime. Check out stuff

to Blow your Mind dot com. That is the mother ship. That's where you find all of our episodes. Uh, some of these passed episopes we've been talking about, like politeness and Panopticon. You'll find links to those on the landing page for this episode. You'll also find all the other

content that we've put out there. All right, so when you have whipped up your invisibility scenario, you can send us your thoughts about it and what you would do to the email address below the mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com? Could you bead you? Group you? Could you bead you