[lit-ideas] Re: Conscious after the fact?

[Some worries about 'satisficing.']
Almost fifty years ago, my friend, the late George Lear, and I were sitting next to each other at a table around which the other members of a class taught by (the late) D. A. T. Gasking, were arranged. Gasking was going on (and on) about the criteria for something's (I forget what) being identical to something else (also forgotten). George leaned over to me, and whispered, 'Ask him if he'd accept "roughly similar".'
I've had occasion to remember this useful comment many times in the course of (what else?) philosophical discussions, especially those that involve perfection. essentialism, identity, and the like.
A theory of 'satisficing' purports to show how people arrive at decisions that are 'good enough'—'good enough, but not 'optimal.' It seems to involve some sort of folk induction (past satisfaction) and other excruciatingly difficult concepts. Its major benefit seems to be that often a solution that is 'good enough,' can be found by a process or processes that are more 'cost-effective' than a search for an 'optimal' solution would be.
That this is accepted as self-evidently true is odd. There's no a priori reason why an 'optimal' solution to a problem should take any more effort or cost more than a solution that's only good enough. Of course, it does, in a loopy kind of way: if you want to win a marathon, you will probably have to train harder and more frequently than if your goal is merely to finish. However, these are not the same goals. If your goal is merely to finish, then if you train in such-and-such a way, and you do indeed finish, this isn't just 'good enough,' it's optimal, by definition. There's no such thing as 'merely finishing' in a 'good enough' manner. Perhaps this is unclear.
Suppose I want to save enough money to have sufficient funds during my retirement (something I should have thought about before now). If I save enough so that my life in retirement is 'good enough' (given my way of life and allowing for future contingencies) why isn't this 'optimal'? 'Optimal' is too often left undefined by satisficionists, and this isn’t surprising, unless satisficionists sneak value judgments into the equation, such that my being satisfied isn’t a sufficient for what I’m satisfied with’s being ‘optimal.’
A clearer example. Ask a mathematician what a proof is, and he or she will almost always answer, 'what satisfies me.' What more could one want? (In the case of asking someone what counts as a good performance of la Traviata, it isn’t clear that ‘one that satisfies me’ is the end of things.) Different schools of mathematics will give different answers when asked what _kinds- of proofs satisfy them (constructivists and intuitionists apparently don’t accept reductio proofs), but the general answer will be the same. Does the Omniscient Observer have anything to add?
I’ve been wondering here about the relationship between something’s being ‘good enough’ (where satisfaction is the criterion of its being so) and something’s being optimal, and what I’m suggesting is that not only does the former often entail the latter, but that to draw a distinction between them may require an illicit value judgment on the part of someone other than the agent. 

Robert Paul


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