5 Philosophy Problems in 3 Body Problem
This is an abridged version. Here is a fuller version of the article. Also, beware of spoilers.
The first season of 3 Body Problem has delivered a lot by way of the plot and characters. While it is undoubtedly a science fiction show — it is based on the so-called three-body problem in physics — it is also does a good job unearthing some of today’s most challenging problems in philosophy. The questions span areas including philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, ethics, and political philosophy. In this article, we’ll look briefly at five of these intriguing problems.
1. What is Truth and How Can we Know It?
Tests at the particle accelerator at Oxford starts to give unexpected results. Vera and Saul contemplate the possible reasons. Vera asks Saul, “do you believe in God?” When Saul answers in the negative, Vera’s response is, “What is left?” French Enlightenment philosopher René Descartes argued that there are three possible sources of knowledge: physical objects, God, or some other being capable of implanting ideas into the mind of the knower. Vera’s question alludes to this problem. They can no longer trust the results of physics experiments, and they do not believe in God. What is left? Long raging questions about whether these suffice are revisited within the field of epistemology.
The show does appear to be open to the utilitarian view. No one knows exactly why Saul is chosen to be a Wallfacer. Whether the choice is the right one, according to the UN Secretary-General, won’t be known “for a very long time.” Presumably, the proof will be in the pudding. If their resistance succeeds, they will know that they chose wisely.
The plan to mess up our physics speaks to another philosophical problem: the question of what reality is, regardless of how it can be known. The plan assumes that what we know from physics explains the true nature of the universe. But do we? Is nature what we perceive, or something else? Do we know reality directly, indirectly, or are our ideas the only reality there is? And if so, is reality always virtual?
But what if nature is not all there is? We do not know from science that it is. What if there is a supernatural ground to nature, or a quasi-physicalist one? These are alternative positions in the science and religion debate. According to critical realists, there is some form of metaphysical structure within which nature is observed. Theologians often reject metaphysical and epistemological naturalisms, even if they sometimes accept methodological naturalism — that is investigating nature as if natural explanations were enough. Critical realists distinguish between the real and the observable worlds. As such, they question the correspondence of explanations in any system of knowledge with absolute reality. There is a foundational ontology that science often bypasses. Theology claims access to that foundation.
3 Body Problem is decidedly in the correspondence camp. The San-Ti are not trying to distort our perception by changing the nature of the universe. That would presumably affect them too. They are doing so by distorting our perception of it. The distortion of perception would be ineffective if there were not a form of correspondence between that perception and reality. Take the following exchange between Wade and an AI representation of the San-Ti, for example:
AI: “We don’t look anything like this. This is all for your benefit.”
Wayne: “What do you really look like?”
AI: “You Wouldn’t like it.”
This shows there is a way that the San-Ti looks that is distorted in the game environment. What is broken is the correspondence relation between our perception and that reality. Furthermore, she says, “In place of truth, we give you miracles.” Miracles, of course, are based on what we perceive to be a mismatch between the actual and the perceived.
The question of what is real is related to another difficult question we won’t address here, but which is worth checking out for yourself: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
2. The Hard Problem of Consciousness — Philosophy of Science
3 Body Problem is awash with the hard problem of consciousness. It is the difficulty of explaining the fact of our subjective experience, what some have called the-movie-playing-in-our heads. This subjectivity consists of our emotions, thoughts, perceptions and misperceptions, and our sense of what it is like to have them. The property of things to be like something is known as their qualia. Consciousness, then, is comprised of qualia, which are difficult to explain with reference either to the biochemical activities of the brain or to the things that are the objects of our experience. Consciousness is the totality of what it is like to be a human. This referential feature of a thought is known as its aboutness. A thought is a mental state that is about something. It is also hard to account for scientifically.
When characters in 3 Body Problem play the game sponsored by San-Ti, the concept especially of qualia is key. For the game to be realistic, what it is like to be in the game environment must be what it is like to be in the real world. The game is designed by the aliens’ human helpers, who take liberties to represent the alien reality in terms of Earth’s own. The San-Ti appear as human, and as Jack Rooney finds out, the soil tastes like soil. What it is like to be a human is preserved in the game environment. An understanding of qualia is fundamental to the concept of simulated worlds, as encountered in movies like The Matrix.
3. First-Person Privilege
Related to the complexity of qualia is the position of experiencing the world alone. When he is chosen to become a Wallfacer, Saul refuses. Or should I say, appears to refuse. When others fail to leave him alone, he faces the difficulty of persuading them that he is not faking his refusal. For him, it is a frustrating case of being believed, but his quandary raises the deeper problem of what it means that no-one has access to another person’s own mental perspective on the world. That perspective is known in philosophy as the first-person perspective, or experiential privilege.[2] Each of us experiences the world from the perspective of an “I” that centers that experience. We are the only ones with privileged access to that “I.”
The alien race seems to exist as a form of unified consciousness. No single individual has secret experience. In other words, they lack privileged first-person access. The voice Mike Evans calls the Lord asks him, “do individuals experience fear on their own?… For us, fear is something we experience as one.” Mike Evans asks, “Can’t you lie?” The voice also says, “What is know is communicated as soon as communication takes place.” There are at least two ways to read this. The alien might mean “we always tell the truth,” or as Mike Evans seems to understand her, they communicate instantly by thought. The second version corresponds to the idea of radical solipsism, in which the first person perspective is taken to be universal. Perhaps this is why they can say, “if one of us survives, we all survive.”
First-person privilege is pivotal in driving the plot of 3BP. For some philosophers, experiential privilege gives us some epistemic advantages. But it merges with the hiddenness of minds outside our own to produce a sense of distrust and fear. The idea that you can never fully trust another person resides in this merger. If we see the alien race in 3 Body Problem as a single “I” perspective, then collectively it does have privileged access to a single “I” perspective. It used to assume that we were the same. But if we experience qualia on our own, and hide these qualia from other human minds, then we can hide them from the aliens. They cannot read human minds, and since they now know that we are capable of hiding our thoughts, their entire plan shifts from co-existence to conquest. “We are afraid of you.”
If they get their hands on Will’s brain, they can do more than read it. As Saul explains to Will,
they want to know everything about what it means to be a human being… How do we feel exhaustion? How do we feel fear? How do we feel pain? How do we suffer?
They will want to learn, as far as an external perspective allows, what it is like to be a human being.
4. What is a Person? The Mind-Body Problem
Will’s brain is extracted from his skull and stored in a cryogenic chamber so that it can be sent to the alien ships in outer space. He will arrive there in a few hundred years and, if the plan goes well, learn something about the San-Ti that could be useful to humanity’s fight against them. At the same time, the San-Ti will want to study his mind by in some way reawakening his stream of consciousness. But will this be Will? In defiant monologue, Wade addresses the extra-terrestrial foe:
“You’ve read Wikipedia. You know all about Genghis Khan, QAnon and The Tale of Genji and the President of Bolivia and Bob Seger, but you don’t know what it feels like to be us. [Pointing to his head] All that we are is up here. What’s going on up here and here, that’s humanity.”
The idea that a person consists of their consciousness and rationality goes back, of course, the Descartes’ famous dictum, cogito ergo sum—I think, therefore I am. The realisation brings him to a point where he doubts the existence of everything except the doubt itself. This includes doubting the existence of his own body. At least conceptually, then, it is possible to abstract the person to a first-person conscious position. This idea gives rise to rationalism, which prioritises reason as a basis of knowledge. Although the idea is not very popular today, it has been the dominant approach in Western philosophy since the seventeenth century. It deeply impacts cultural notions like democracy and the rule of law, property owning rights, capitalism, and technological applications like machine learning, mind uploading, and more.
Cartesian rationalism has come under heavy fire since the twentieth century. For example, phenomenalists will refer to relationality as the true location of the self; the person is created in its relation to others and its environment. That is to say, reason itself is contingent on social and historical factors. Others worry about ethical implications of rationalistic view of the person that disregards the role of the body. They fear a disembodied view of personhood rooted in consciousness diminishes the personhood of those with impaired reasoning faculties.
For better or worse, 3 Body Problem dispenses unapologetically with embodied and relational views of personhood. The body is not so important; reason is paramount. It is how the protagonists aim to defeat the aliens. As Wade puts it,
“I would say a person is the ever-changing pattern dancing through the neurons of their brain. If that exists, the person exists.”
The rest of Will’s body is discarded; only his brain is required. If humans had figured out mind uploading technology already, Wade might as well have sent the San-Ti an electronic file containing Will’s consciousness. Furthermore, when the Wallfacers are chosen, the plan is essentially to engage a trinity of thinkers to out-think the San-Ti. The show takes on a decidedly and unapologetically cartesian outlook.
5. In the Image of God and Human Uniqueness
Few people are aware of the theological roots of the idea of a person. In fact, it is Christian theology that gave us the idea of the person as referring to a whole individual. The word was previously used in Latin literary culture to refer to the masks and personae actors would take on in a theatre performance. Theology ascribed personhood to human beings based on the personhood it saw in God. God is a trinity of rational and cognitive (a very loose usage of the term) connections. According to early patristic and medieval theologians, these relations are essentially thought based, the central thought being love. That love animates the will of God, which is manifest in a desire for communion. This is why God creates, and hence, one answer to the question why is there something rather than nothing at all.
Why is all this relevant? Human beings are said to be made in the image of God, imago Dei. Theologians have interpreted this in many different ways. One of them, known as the substantive interpretation, holds that the image of God consists of certain of God’s attributes. Primarily, it consists of possessing a mind like God’s own. This mind, some have called the soul. It gives us a conscious subjective experience and makes us beings with a moral status. God is a personal being, and humans are persons because they are created in his image.
The cartesian model adopted in the show thus inherits much from the theological tradition of Western Christianity. Today, theologians and philosophers are seized with another question. Can this image be transferred to Artificial Intelligences? Can AI attain or be legitimately ascribed moral status as persons? What would be the criteria for doing so? Theologians are generally reticent to ascribe the imago to non-humans fearing it undermines the long-cherished doctrine of human uniqueness. We can’t just give it away to the animals and the robots. But sentiments are changing, and new research in theology is beginning to seriously consider the possibility. Let us suppose theology relaxes its grip on imago-based personhood. Will it be ascribing or imparting personhood to AI machines, or will it be recognising what is already there in them? Qeustions, questions.
Conclusion
These are only a few of the questions that rage between the lines of the thought-fest that is 3 Body Problem. We have not been able to exhaust all the sides to all the questions, but that was never the aim. Rather, I hope this article helps you identify more of the philosophical, theological, and cultural commentary that is woven through the show. If you’re interested in a more deeply analytical discussion of these themes, then I encourage you to read a fuller version of the article on my Substack. You can also read 5 More Philosophy Problems in 3 Body Problem. In the meantime, did you spot any themes in the show I have not mentioned? Share your thoughts in the comments!
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Bibliography
[1] Jon Nuttall, An Introduction to Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 35–58.
[2] Michael Pauen, “How Privileged is First-Person Privileged Access?,” American Philosophical Quarterly 47, no. 1 (January 2010): 1–15.
[3] Anita Avramides, “Other Minds,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, December 2023, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/other-minds/#TheoTheoSimuTheo.
