Buridan's ass


Buridan's ass is an illustration of a paradox in philosophy in the conception of free will.
It refers to a hypothetical situation wherein a donkey that is equally hungry and thirsty is placed precisely midway between a stack of hay and a pail of water. Since the paradox assumes the ass will always go to whichever is closer, it dies of both hunger and thirst since it cannot make any rational decision between the hay and water. A common variant of the paradox substitutes two identical piles of hay for the hay and water; the ass, unable to choose between the two, dies of hunger.
The paradox is named after the 14th-century French philosopher Jean Buridan, whose philosophy of moral determinism it satirizes.
Although the illustration is named after Buridan, philosophers have discussed the concept before him, notably Aristotle who used the example of a man equally hungry and thirsty, and Al-Ghazali who used a man faced with the choice of equally good dates.
A version of this situation appears as metastability in digital electronics, when a circuit must decide between two states based on an input that is in itself undefined. Metastability becomes a problem if the circuit spends more time than it should in this "undecided" state, which is usually set by the speed of the clock the system is using.

History

The paradox predates Buridan; it dates to antiquity, being found in Aristotle's On the Heavens. Aristotle, in ridiculing the Sophist idea that the Earth is stationary simply because it is spherical and any forces on it must be equal in all directions, says that is as ridiculous as saying that:
However, the Greeks only used this paradox as an analogy in the context of the equilibrium of physical forces.
The 12th-century Persian scholar and philosopher al-Ghazali discusses the application of this paradox to human decision making, asking whether it is possible to make a choice between equally good courses without grounds for preference. He takes the attitude that free will can break the stalemate.
Moorish philosopher Averroes, in commentary on Ghazali, takes the opposite view.
Although Buridan nowhere discusses this specific problem, its relevance is that he did advocate a moral determinism whereby, save for ignorance or impediment, a human faced by alternative courses of action must always choose the greater good. In the face of equally good alternatives Buridan believed a rational choice could not be made.
Later writers satirised this view in terms of an ass which, confronted by both food and water, must necessarily die of both hunger and thirst while pondering a decision.

Discussion

Some proponents of hard determinism have granted the unpleasantness of the scenario, but have denied that it illustrates a true paradox, since one does not contradict oneself in suggesting that a man might die between two equally plausible routes of action. For example, in his Ethics, Benedict de Spinoza suggests that a person who sees two options as truly equally compelling cannot be fully rational:
Other writers have opted to deny the validity of the illustration. A typical counter-argument is that rationality as described in the paradox is so limited as to be a straw man version of the real thing, which does allow the consideration of meta-arguments. In other words, it is entirely rational to recognize that both choices are equally good and arbitrarily pick one instead of starving; although the decision that they are sufficiently the same is also subject to Buridan's ass. The idea that a random decision could be made is sometimes used as an attempted justification for faith or intuitivity. The argument is that, like the starving ass, we must make a choice to avoid being frozen in endless doubt. Other counter-arguments exist.
According to Edward Lauzinger, Buridan's ass fails to incorporate the latent biases that humans always bring with them when making decisions.
Social Psychologist Kurt Lewin's Field Theory treated this paradox experimentally. He demonstrated that lab rats experience difficulty when choosing between two equally attractive goals. The typical response to approach-approach decisions is initial ambivalence, though the decision becomes more decisive as the organism moves towards one choice and away from another.

Buridan's principle

The situation of Buridan's ass was given a mathematical basis in a 1984 paper by American computer scientist Leslie Lamport, in which Lamport presents an argument that, given certain assumptions about continuity in a simple mathematical model of the Buridan's ass problem, there is always some starting condition under which the ass starves to death, no matter what strategy it takes. He further illustrates the paradox with the example of a driver stopped at a railroad crossing trying to decide whether he has time to cross before a train arrives. He proves that regardless of how "safe" the policy the driver adopts, because indecision can cause an indefinite delay in action a small percentage of drivers will be hit by the train.
Lamport calls this result "Buridan’s principle":
He points out that just because we do not see asses or people starving to death through indecision, or other examples of Buridan's undecided states in real life, does not disprove the principle. The persistence of a Buridan's undecided state for a perceptible length of time may just be sufficiently improbable that it has not been observed.

Application to digital logic: metastability

A version of Buridan's principle occurs in electrical engineering. Specifically, the input to a digital logic gate must convert a continuous voltage value into either a 0 or a 1, which is typically sampled and then processed. If the input is changing and at an intermediate value when sampled, the input stage acts like a comparator. The voltage value can then be likened to the position of the ass, and the values 0 and 1 represent the bales of hay. As in the situation of the starving ass, there exists an input on which the converter cannot make a proper decision, and the output remains balanced in a metastable state between the two stable states for an undetermined length of time, until random noise in the circuit makes it converge to one of the stable states.
In asynchronous circuits, arbiters are used to make the decision. They guarantee that up to one outcome is selected at any given point in time, but may take an indeterminate time to choose.
The metastability problem is a significant issue in digital circuit design, and metastable states are a possibility wherever asynchronous inputs occur. The ultimate reason the problem is manageable is that the probability of a metastable state persisting longer than a given time interval t is an exponentially declining function of t. In electronic devices, the probability of such an "undecided" state lasting longer than a matter of nanoseconds, while always possible, can be made negligibly low.

In popular culture