Regular commenter Publius and I have been mixing it up in the comments section of an old post about being an AI in a box. In it, Publius asked:
Even Michelson & Morley looked for the Luminiferous Ether. You replicated that, right? Just didn't read about it in a book?
The answer, of course, is that no, I have not personally tried to replicate the Michelson-Morley experiment. And yet, I believe the extraordinary claim that the speed of light is the same for all observers (with a few caveats). So why do I believe that even though I "just read about it in a book" but I don't believe in Jesus despite the fact that I can read about him in a book too?
The glib answer is that I don't believe in Harry Potter either, despite the fact that I read about him in a book too. But the real answer is much deeper than that. It's "obvious" that Harry Potter is fiction and the Michelson Morley experiment is not. But the reason this is obvious is not at all obvious.
The first-hand evidence I have for Harry Potter's existence is actually much, much stronger than what I have for Michelson-Morley. I have seen actual photos of Harry Potter. Not just still photos, but high-definition video. Hours and hours of it. And all of it is consistent with the written accounts, of which there are seven volumes written in my native language (so no concerns over mistranslations). By way of contrast, I have no idea what Michelson or Morley looked like. I wouldn't even know their first names if I hadn't looked them up. I have never read their original paper, only second-hand accounts in text books and Wikipedia. I have no idea whether the people who wrote the accounts upon which I rely ever knew Michelson or Morley (I suspect they didn't) or even read their original paper (I suspect they did, though I would not be totally shocked to learn that they didn't).
So it would seem that the actual evidence I have in hand even for the existence of Michelson and Morley is pretty thin, let alone that they actually performed the experiment they are purported to have performed, or that it had the outcome it is purported to have had. After all, special relativity at first blush seems to border on the miraculous, and my acceptance of it on such thin evidence does indeed appear to be a leap of faith.
But it's not.
To see why, let's go back to Harry Potter. I reject the proposition that Harry really exists (or existed) despite the overwhelming evidence that he does (or did) because there is a theory that explains the (apparent) evidence for Harry's existence better than Harry's actual existence. That theory is: Harry Potter is a work of fiction. It was originally written by J.K. Rowling, and then turned into films as a commercial venture.
Why is the Harry-is-fiction theory better than the Harry-is/was-real theory? Let me start with a bad argument: Harry is fiction because there is no evidence of the wizarding world outside of the books and the movies. The reason this is a bad argument is that this lack of evidence is actually explained by the Harry-is-real theory: the wizarding world takes great pains to keep itself concealed from the muggle world, so it is not at all surprising that there is very little evidence of it in day-to-day life. Moreover, the reason that the wizarding world conceals itself has a plausible explanation: if the muggle world were to learn of the reality of the wizarding world, social order would collapse.
A better argument for the Harry-is-fiction theory is that it's consistent with our current understanding of the laws of physics. If Harry Potter really exist(s/ed) that means that magic really exists, and all of our understanding of physics goes out the window. This is a stronger argument, but it is still weak because it is in fact possible for our understanding of physics to be wrong. But the ways in which it can be wrong are not open-ended. For example, the odds that even the most radical revolution in physics would permit a violation of the law of conservation of energy are indistinguishable from zero. And yet, that is exactly the sort of change that the reality of magic would require. In every nook and cranny of Harry's world there are vast quantities of energy being employed with no apparent source. (Indeed, that is almost the defining characteristic of magic.) But even that is not really the slam-dunk argument.
The slam-dunk argument for the Harry-is-fiction theory is that it explains a lot of additional observations that the Harry-is-real theory does not. It explains the fact that everyone -- including J.K. Rowling, her publishers, the filmmakers, the booksellers -- all of these people insist that Harry Potter is fiction. It explains the fact that all known photos of Harry Potter bear a striking resemblance to the actor Daniel Radcliffe. It explains why none of the Harry Potter films were ever nominated for an oscar in the "best documentary" category. It explains why no university in the world has a department of wizardry. It explains why even on the fringiest fringes of tinfoil hattery you will not find anyone who seriously advances the theory that Harry is/was real. The scale of conspiracy you would have to envision to explain all that in the face of the proposition that Harry Potter is/was real surely boggles even the most credulous mind.
The situation with Michelson-Morley is exactly the opposite. We have a huge community of scientists all insisting that Michelson and Morley were real people, that they really did the experiment they are purported to have done, and that it really did have the result that it was purported to have had. Moreover (and this is crucial) this community insists that Michelson and Morley's results have been replicated many times since the original. How many times? I have no idea. Can I name even a single person who has ever replicated the M&M result? No, I can't. So why do I believe it?
It's because I have a GPS in my phone.
What does GPS have to do with the Michelson-Morley experiment? It's because of the way GPS works. The receiver in your phone listens for signals transmitted by a few dozen satellites orbiting the earth. By measuring the timing of those signals and comparing that with the known orbits of those satellites, a GPS receiver can figure out its location. To be accurate, the math has to take the results of not only the Michelson-Morley experiment into account (which demonstrates special relativity) but also has to make corrections for general relativity, because clocks on the surface of the earth run more slowly than clocks in orbit. If Michelson-Morley were not true, GPS could not possibly work in the way that it is purported to work.
The fact that my GPS does in fact work is something I can directly observe every single day. I can walk around my block or drive around town or even travel to distant lands and see that my GPS at all times reflects exactly where I am to an astonishing degree of accuracy. There are only three possible ways to account for this:
1. GPS works exactly as advertised, and is therefore direct, firsthand evidence available to me (and everyone else) of the correctness of the theory of relativity
2. GPS works some other way, and there is a vast conspiracy afoot to promulgate a false story of how GPS works for some nefarious reason that I cannot even begin to imagine
3. GPS does not actually work at all, and the fact that it seems to work is some kind of freakish coincidence
I leave it as an exercise for you, dear reader, to work out which of these is most likely to be true.
Now, applying this sort of analysis to God is not nearly as straightforward as most people (on both sides of the debate) seem to think. The situation is not nearly as cut-and-dried as it is in the case of Harry Potter and Michelson-Morley, where the overwhelming consensus aligns with all of the available evidence. The reason God is problematic is precisely that the majority view does not align with the scientific evidence. The result is two bad arguments, one on each side of the debate.
On the atheist side, the bad argument against God is exactly the same as the bad argument against Harry: God is not real because there is no evidence that He is real. There are two reasons this is a bad argument. First, most theories of God account for the fact that the scientific evidence for Him is thin: God doesn't want to beat you over the head with proof of His existence. He wants you to come to Him of your own free will, and you can't do that in the face of incontrovertible proof of His existence. And second, it's simply wrong. There is overwhelming evidence, even more accessible to you as a human than the GPS evidence for relativity, that there is something crucial missing from the scientific account of reality. That evidence is: the laws of physics are symmetric with respect to space and time, but you have a privileged reference frame that you call "here" and "now". The laws of physics cannot account for that. Most atheists deal with this by sweeping it under the rug and deciding it's not important. But if you choose to attach cosmic significance to your own experiences (and, ultimately, your own experiences are all you have, so it is not at all unreasonable to choose to attach cosmic significance to them) then you have no choice but to go beyond (our current understanding of) physics.
On the religious side, there are a whole host of bad arguments. Most prominent among them is the argument that God must be real because He has revealed Himself through the Bible. Or the Quran. Or the Book of Mormon. Or the writings of L. Ron Hubbard. That's the thing, there are so many versions of God's Word available, and they contradict each other, so they can't all be right.
Even if you just take the Bible and ignore all the others, it just doesn't hang together, and it particularly doesn't hang together with what most Christians seem to believe: that there is one God (though somehow made of three parts), that this God is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, all-loving, that the OT and NT describe the same God. Frankly, I don't understand how anyone who has read Leviticus or Joshua can believe that gentle Jesus, meek and mild, is the same deity.
In fact, the whole idea of an omniscient, omnipotent deity who requires blind faith to avoid eternal damnation makes no sense to me at all. Omnipotence and omniscience are logically incompatible with free will, but free will is a pre-requisite for moral culpability. So either God punishes people for things over which they have no control, or man has the power to thwart the will of God (and hence God is not omnipotent). I see no other possibilities.
Another bad argument for God is that He must be real because the idea of a world without God leads inexorably to unbearable existential despair. That's a bad argument because the truth doesn't care what you want. The truth is the truth, and there's no reason to believe a priori that the truth doesn't suck. Even if there is a God, there's no logical reason He has to be all-knowing all-powerful all-loving. There isn't even any logical reason there has to be only one of Him. Maybe the truth is not that there is a God, but that there are many gods. Or maybe there is one God, but he's a trickster (or a spoiled brat), more like Loki or Trelane than Jesus.
An only slightly better argument is: I know God is real because I have personally experienced Him. I've never heard anyone give an adequate account of how they know that what they have experienced is (say) Jesus and not Loki. Somehow they Just Know. And again, people claim that God tells them things that are mutually inconsistent. Some people claim that God tells them to love thy enemies, others say God tells them to engage in jihad. They can't all be right. Since God has not seen fit not to reveal Himself to me in this way, I have no basis for separating the true claims from the false ones.
This same credit-assignment problem exists for ontological and cosmological arguments as well. Even if these were good arguments for some god (they aren't, but it's a moot point because...) they are not at all arguments for any particular god. Fine-tuning could be achieved as well by a super-intelligent alien as by the God of Abraham.
A final bad argument is: look at all the sacrifices made by believers for their beliefs. People would not endure such suffering if their beliefs were not true. This argument is plainly false, because people sacrifice themselves for mutually-incompatible beliefs. Early Christians martyred themselves for Jesus. Today, Muslims martyr themselves for Allah. In 1978, over 900 people died for Jim Jones and gave rise to the popular aphorism "drinking the Kool-Aid."
So there might be a good argument out there for believing in God, but I haven't found one, and it's not for lack of trying. I've read the Bible (and the Quran, and the Book of Mormon, and the Bhagwan Bible, and a few others). I've talked to Christians and Muslims and Jews. (I've even talked to a few Scientologists, though frankly they scare the shit out of me.) The theory that makes the most sense to me is that there are no gods, and people believe (or pretend to believe) because of a mixture of indoctrination, social pressure, and as a palliative against existential despair.
This theory explains most of the observed data, but not all of it. In particular, Luke is still an unexplained anomaly, and that keeps me a little humble.
Happy new year, everyone!
The glib answer is that I don't believe in Harry Potter either, despite the fact that I read about him in a book too. But the real answer is much deeper than that. It's "obvious" that Harry Potter is fiction and the Michelson Morley experiment is not. But the reason this is obvious is not at all obvious.
The first-hand evidence I have for Harry Potter's existence is actually much, much stronger than what I have for Michelson-Morley. I have seen actual photos of Harry Potter. Not just still photos, but high-definition video. Hours and hours of it. And all of it is consistent with the written accounts, of which there are seven volumes written in my native language (so no concerns over mistranslations). By way of contrast, I have no idea what Michelson or Morley looked like. I wouldn't even know their first names if I hadn't looked them up. I have never read their original paper, only second-hand accounts in text books and Wikipedia. I have no idea whether the people who wrote the accounts upon which I rely ever knew Michelson or Morley (I suspect they didn't) or even read their original paper (I suspect they did, though I would not be totally shocked to learn that they didn't).
So it would seem that the actual evidence I have in hand even for the existence of Michelson and Morley is pretty thin, let alone that they actually performed the experiment they are purported to have performed, or that it had the outcome it is purported to have had. After all, special relativity at first blush seems to border on the miraculous, and my acceptance of it on such thin evidence does indeed appear to be a leap of faith.
But it's not.
To see why, let's go back to Harry Potter. I reject the proposition that Harry really exists (or existed) despite the overwhelming evidence that he does (or did) because there is a theory that explains the (apparent) evidence for Harry's existence better than Harry's actual existence. That theory is: Harry Potter is a work of fiction. It was originally written by J.K. Rowling, and then turned into films as a commercial venture.
Why is the Harry-is-fiction theory better than the Harry-is/was-real theory? Let me start with a bad argument: Harry is fiction because there is no evidence of the wizarding world outside of the books and the movies. The reason this is a bad argument is that this lack of evidence is actually explained by the Harry-is-real theory: the wizarding world takes great pains to keep itself concealed from the muggle world, so it is not at all surprising that there is very little evidence of it in day-to-day life. Moreover, the reason that the wizarding world conceals itself has a plausible explanation: if the muggle world were to learn of the reality of the wizarding world, social order would collapse.
A better argument for the Harry-is-fiction theory is that it's consistent with our current understanding of the laws of physics. If Harry Potter really exist(s/ed) that means that magic really exists, and all of our understanding of physics goes out the window. This is a stronger argument, but it is still weak because it is in fact possible for our understanding of physics to be wrong. But the ways in which it can be wrong are not open-ended. For example, the odds that even the most radical revolution in physics would permit a violation of the law of conservation of energy are indistinguishable from zero. And yet, that is exactly the sort of change that the reality of magic would require. In every nook and cranny of Harry's world there are vast quantities of energy being employed with no apparent source. (Indeed, that is almost the defining characteristic of magic.) But even that is not really the slam-dunk argument.
The slam-dunk argument for the Harry-is-fiction theory is that it explains a lot of additional observations that the Harry-is-real theory does not. It explains the fact that everyone -- including J.K. Rowling, her publishers, the filmmakers, the booksellers -- all of these people insist that Harry Potter is fiction. It explains the fact that all known photos of Harry Potter bear a striking resemblance to the actor Daniel Radcliffe. It explains why none of the Harry Potter films were ever nominated for an oscar in the "best documentary" category. It explains why no university in the world has a department of wizardry. It explains why even on the fringiest fringes of tinfoil hattery you will not find anyone who seriously advances the theory that Harry is/was real. The scale of conspiracy you would have to envision to explain all that in the face of the proposition that Harry Potter is/was real surely boggles even the most credulous mind.
The situation with Michelson-Morley is exactly the opposite. We have a huge community of scientists all insisting that Michelson and Morley were real people, that they really did the experiment they are purported to have done, and that it really did have the result that it was purported to have had. Moreover (and this is crucial) this community insists that Michelson and Morley's results have been replicated many times since the original. How many times? I have no idea. Can I name even a single person who has ever replicated the M&M result? No, I can't. So why do I believe it?
It's because I have a GPS in my phone.
What does GPS have to do with the Michelson-Morley experiment? It's because of the way GPS works. The receiver in your phone listens for signals transmitted by a few dozen satellites orbiting the earth. By measuring the timing of those signals and comparing that with the known orbits of those satellites, a GPS receiver can figure out its location. To be accurate, the math has to take the results of not only the Michelson-Morley experiment into account (which demonstrates special relativity) but also has to make corrections for general relativity, because clocks on the surface of the earth run more slowly than clocks in orbit. If Michelson-Morley were not true, GPS could not possibly work in the way that it is purported to work.
The fact that my GPS does in fact work is something I can directly observe every single day. I can walk around my block or drive around town or even travel to distant lands and see that my GPS at all times reflects exactly where I am to an astonishing degree of accuracy. There are only three possible ways to account for this:
1. GPS works exactly as advertised, and is therefore direct, firsthand evidence available to me (and everyone else) of the correctness of the theory of relativity
2. GPS works some other way, and there is a vast conspiracy afoot to promulgate a false story of how GPS works for some nefarious reason that I cannot even begin to imagine
3. GPS does not actually work at all, and the fact that it seems to work is some kind of freakish coincidence
I leave it as an exercise for you, dear reader, to work out which of these is most likely to be true.
Now, applying this sort of analysis to God is not nearly as straightforward as most people (on both sides of the debate) seem to think. The situation is not nearly as cut-and-dried as it is in the case of Harry Potter and Michelson-Morley, where the overwhelming consensus aligns with all of the available evidence. The reason God is problematic is precisely that the majority view does not align with the scientific evidence. The result is two bad arguments, one on each side of the debate.
On the atheist side, the bad argument against God is exactly the same as the bad argument against Harry: God is not real because there is no evidence that He is real. There are two reasons this is a bad argument. First, most theories of God account for the fact that the scientific evidence for Him is thin: God doesn't want to beat you over the head with proof of His existence. He wants you to come to Him of your own free will, and you can't do that in the face of incontrovertible proof of His existence. And second, it's simply wrong. There is overwhelming evidence, even more accessible to you as a human than the GPS evidence for relativity, that there is something crucial missing from the scientific account of reality. That evidence is: the laws of physics are symmetric with respect to space and time, but you have a privileged reference frame that you call "here" and "now". The laws of physics cannot account for that. Most atheists deal with this by sweeping it under the rug and deciding it's not important. But if you choose to attach cosmic significance to your own experiences (and, ultimately, your own experiences are all you have, so it is not at all unreasonable to choose to attach cosmic significance to them) then you have no choice but to go beyond (our current understanding of) physics.
On the religious side, there are a whole host of bad arguments. Most prominent among them is the argument that God must be real because He has revealed Himself through the Bible. Or the Quran. Or the Book of Mormon. Or the writings of L. Ron Hubbard. That's the thing, there are so many versions of God's Word available, and they contradict each other, so they can't all be right.
Even if you just take the Bible and ignore all the others, it just doesn't hang together, and it particularly doesn't hang together with what most Christians seem to believe: that there is one God (though somehow made of three parts), that this God is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, all-loving, that the OT and NT describe the same God. Frankly, I don't understand how anyone who has read Leviticus or Joshua can believe that gentle Jesus, meek and mild, is the same deity.
In fact, the whole idea of an omniscient, omnipotent deity who requires blind faith to avoid eternal damnation makes no sense to me at all. Omnipotence and omniscience are logically incompatible with free will, but free will is a pre-requisite for moral culpability. So either God punishes people for things over which they have no control, or man has the power to thwart the will of God (and hence God is not omnipotent). I see no other possibilities.
Another bad argument for God is that He must be real because the idea of a world without God leads inexorably to unbearable existential despair. That's a bad argument because the truth doesn't care what you want. The truth is the truth, and there's no reason to believe a priori that the truth doesn't suck. Even if there is a God, there's no logical reason He has to be all-knowing all-powerful all-loving. There isn't even any logical reason there has to be only one of Him. Maybe the truth is not that there is a God, but that there are many gods. Or maybe there is one God, but he's a trickster (or a spoiled brat), more like Loki or Trelane than Jesus.
An only slightly better argument is: I know God is real because I have personally experienced Him. I've never heard anyone give an adequate account of how they know that what they have experienced is (say) Jesus and not Loki. Somehow they Just Know. And again, people claim that God tells them things that are mutually inconsistent. Some people claim that God tells them to love thy enemies, others say God tells them to engage in jihad. They can't all be right. Since God has not seen fit not to reveal Himself to me in this way, I have no basis for separating the true claims from the false ones.
This same credit-assignment problem exists for ontological and cosmological arguments as well. Even if these were good arguments for some god (they aren't, but it's a moot point because...) they are not at all arguments for any particular god. Fine-tuning could be achieved as well by a super-intelligent alien as by the God of Abraham.
A final bad argument is: look at all the sacrifices made by believers for their beliefs. People would not endure such suffering if their beliefs were not true. This argument is plainly false, because people sacrifice themselves for mutually-incompatible beliefs. Early Christians martyred themselves for Jesus. Today, Muslims martyr themselves for Allah. In 1978, over 900 people died for Jim Jones and gave rise to the popular aphorism "drinking the Kool-Aid."
So there might be a good argument out there for believing in God, but I haven't found one, and it's not for lack of trying. I've read the Bible (and the Quran, and the Book of Mormon, and the Bhagwan Bible, and a few others). I've talked to Christians and Muslims and Jews. (I've even talked to a few Scientologists, though frankly they scare the shit out of me.) The theory that makes the most sense to me is that there are no gods, and people believe (or pretend to believe) because of a mixture of indoctrination, social pressure, and as a palliative against existential despair.
This theory explains most of the observed data, but not all of it. In particular, Luke is still an unexplained anomaly, and that keeps me a little humble.
Happy new year, everyone!
I think the GPS argument is a accurate description of reality – yet, it leaves me a bit unsatisfied…
ReplyDelete(And in the name of the Jovian Moons, I really really hate the captchas, they got really difficult to solve for me… Spent literally miniutes typing down nmmyyllmrlmny blobs…)
Unsatisfied how?
ReplyDeleteSorry about the annoying captcha. I've turned it off for now, but if I start getting a ton of spam I'll have to turn it back on. Note that you can avoid the captcha by logging in to a Google account.
Can you explain why the laws of physics can't explain the "here and now"?
ReplyDeleteHm, I thought I did: the laws of physics are symmetric with respect to space and time. So there is no way to get a "here and now" out of them, except with respect to a particular observer. So everyone's "here and now" is different.
ReplyDeleteDid you read the linked post?
http://blog.rongarret.info/2006/11/elephant-in-atheist-living-room.html
> Another bad argument for God is that He must be real because the idea of a world without God leads inexorably to unbearable existential despair.
ReplyDeleteIt's curious that you say this, when a justification for believing the results of science is what science has delivered, what it has done for us. And yet, the root of such an argument is that science gets me what I want. There, it's not so different from other means which also get me what I want. The best differentiator, which I can find, is Thagard's #1 and #2. Does your belief system have life—can it help you render the world increasingly intelligible over time—or has it stagnated?
Note that much Christianity probably flunks Thagard's standards. One might even connect verses such as Mt 3:10 and Rev 3:1 to such a concept of 'life'. In science you get # of citations while in doing the things Christianity values you count in other ways (e.g. # of homeless who now have housing and stable jobs), but I think one can measure 'life' or 'progress' in both domains, using each domain's internal standards. For more on the difference between internal and external standards, see Charles Taylor's Explanation and Practical Reason. Suffice it to say that getting other people to accept your absolute truths doesn't tend to work, while getting them to see how their own internal standards critique their positions is more promising.
> [...] the truth doesn't care what you want.
Correct, but what you want probably determines what truth you discover and what truth you never see. There is some 'bleed-through', like when you search for one thing on Google and find something else which you're glad you found.
When I try to test your statement, I think of the fact that if I believe in a way contrary to the truth, I get smacked upside the head. When it comes to hot stoves and silly fingers, the delay time is nice and short. It is easy to connect effect to cause. But if we look at the Bible, it is concerned with matters that have multi-generational delays. God says that Israel will get invaded and exiled if they're evil, but Israel was evil for many generations before this happened. In these cases, it seems like we need to approach this 'truth' matter more subtly. And it seems like our world has a lot of these cases, cases not at all amenable to scientific study except in certain aspects. This introduces a category of 'truth' which tends not to be thought of as such, even though people in evil Israel did make falsifiable predictions: "Our way of living is fine, we won't get invaded, so continue as you were."
> In particular, Luke is still an unexplained anomaly, and that keeps me a little humble.
Hmmm, I think I like being an anomaly. :-p Being that sucked for the first twenty years of my life, but it's much better, now. These days I have fun watching people try to pressure me, both online and in person, using nonrational means. I even suspect that societies create 'hells', which are used to coerce the majority of the population to do what it takes to stay out of their 'hell'. A few people, of course, need to exist in 'hell' to be an example to the rest. Who exactly they are, how they are selected, can be completely arbitrary (but later rationalized).
> Happy new year, everyone!
Happy New Year's to you, too! I've missed these discussions. You're quite unique among atheists, in that your post here is both direct and rigorous, but not cutting and demeaning. Sadly, I rarely find those two aspects together.
> a justification for believing the results of science is what science has delivered, what it has done for us
ReplyDeleteNo, that's not the justification. Belief in science is not justified by its utility. The fact that science allows us to manipulate our environment (for good or ill) is *evidence* that science is true. The fact that we can use the power that science gives us to manipulate our environment *intentionally* (i.e. towards the achievement of goals) is indeed a happy circumstance, but that is not what justifies belief in science.
The reason this argument doesn't apply to God is that the palliative effect of *belief* does not require that the thing you believe in be true (that's the placebo effect). Belief in God can (and does) have positive effects even if God doesn't really exist. But for technology to work, science has to be true.
> if I believe in a way contrary to the truth, I get smacked upside the head
Or bitten by a snake
> You're quite unique among atheists
:-)
> The reason this argument doesn't apply to God is that the palliative effect of *belief* does not require that the thing you believe in be true (that's the placebo effect).
ReplyDeleteWelcome to instrumentalism, where scientific equations can match subjective perceptions without being [metaphysically] true. (A counter to this can be found at Structural Realism: the no-miracles argument. But there are rebuttals.)
In my view, the test that multiple minds are exploring the same thing or person is if they can reach agreement by doing some independent investigation of X, reconvene and find remarkable agreement about X, and rinse & repeat. This is a sort of convergence, and it doesn't need to refer to metaphysical truth or anything like that. What matters is that the convergence cannot be explained as due to causal interaction between the people doing the exploring, which means that something, or someone else, has to be causing the convergence.
> Belief in God can (and does) have positive effects even if God doesn't really exist.
Likewise, folk theories can have some positive effects. However, it is possible to supersede them, and this demonstrates them to not be [metaphysically] true. Likewise, don't delusions always break down, even if it takes multiple generations? Doesn't their predictive power ultimately break down, for a large enough portion of the population to render the rest irrelevant?
> But for technology to work, science has to be true.
So for successful manipulation of reality, science has to be true.
But for successful manipulation of the mental realm, ___ has to be true.
What goes in the blank?
> Or bitten by a snake
I look forward to the snake-handlers explaining to Jesus how their snake-handling did anything approximately like blessing the world. You know, by means other than failing so you could post that link. :-p
> Welcome to instrumentalism
ReplyDeleteNo, I don't think this is instrumentalism. I'm not an instrumentalist. I believe in a metaphysical reality, and I believe in the placebo effect. (And, as always, I believe both of these things because there is evidence for them.)
> In my view, the test that multiple minds are exploring the same thing or person is if they can reach agreement by doing some independent investigation of X, reconvene and find remarkable agreement about X, and rinse & repeat. This is a sort of convergence, and it doesn't need to refer to metaphysical truth
But this convergence is the evidence for metaphysical truth. This convergence can only be explained in two possible ways:
1. It's a freakish coincidence, or
2. It's something else.
If you have enough digits in your calculator you can compute the odds against #1. And whatever that "something else" is in possibility #2 I call metaphysical truth.
> don't delusions always break down, even if it takes multiple generations?
I certainly hope so, but the jury is out. Some meme-complexes have evolved truly remarkable defenses against reason and evidence (e.g. the political system of North Korea).
> But for successful manipulation of the mental realm...
... we have to have a good understanding of how mental processes work, which we don't yet have. But we are making pretty good progress.
> I look forward to the snake-handlers explaining to Jesus how their snake-handling did anything approximately like blessing the world.
That's an elementary theological exercise: it demonstrates your faith, which serves as witness to others and helps them strengthen their own faith. It's a reification of the martyrs-would-not-die-for-a-false-belief argument. (Suicide bombing is much the same, except that it removes some of the randomness that comes with snake handling.)
> But this convergence is the evidence for metaphysical truth.
ReplyDeleteAll it's evidence for is that you found a good-enough approximation. But if you know anything about control theory, you know that pretty bad models can work perfectly well for manipulating systems to one's heart's desire. This, of course, assumes finite desires of the heart, but that is always true. (This is why I think those who enslave truth to pragmatic ends are extremely short-sighted. I don't think you're such a person, but I thought I might explain some of the motivation behind this.)
Remember that prior to Planck and Einstein, some very famous, very intelligent scientists thought that physics was "almost done". After all, reality was classical, and it explained so much so well. That there were a few anomalies didn't make people fear an entire paradigm shift would be required. And so, I'm very careful about one's level of confidence about what ultimate reality is like.
My phenomenological matching vs. ontological matching answer on Philosophy.SE might be helpful. I could also pull some quotations from David Bohm's Causality and Chance in Modern Physics. One of the things he points out is that apparent randomness can frequently shield further, deeper order. A reason to lean toward instrumentalism is that to assume we've now hit rock-bottom is a dangerous claim that has been shattered in the past. Why think it won't be shattered again? Why think that the wavefunction is anything but a mere approximation of a deeper reality?
Another way to think through this is that while the math can be said to be converging (I've actually read that this isn't always true—gotta look into this), the way we think about it, the metaphors we use, change drastically. Why not think they will change drastically again? I am suspicious of the idea that we'll merely always think of physics just in terms of mathematics.
> I certainly hope so, but the jury is out. Some meme-complexes have evolved truly remarkable defenses against reason and evidence (e.g. the political system of North Korea).
I wonder how much of that is really defense, and how much is isolation. (There are defenses which are not isolation.) I know someone who does missions work in North Korea, so I could get a bit of info. I've also met someone who escaped, although she's now out of the SF area.
> ... we have to have a good understanding of how mental processes work, which we don't yet have. But we are making pretty good progress.
Hitler didn't employ "successful manipulation of the mental realm"?
> That's an elementary theological exercise: it demonstrates your faith, which serves as witness to others and helps them strengthen their own faith.
ReplyDeleteOh, I understand this. One can come up with awfully consistent-seeming justifications which are based in various bits of scripture. One can still challenge such people internally, such as with Ja 1:27. And I could ask whether the snake-handling is better than all other known methods for "visit[ing] orphans and widows in their affliction". Passages such as Isaiah 58 make it blindingly obvious that the being described therein cares a tremendous amount about (i) justice; (ii) oppression; (iii) poverty; (iv) blame-shifting. I would challenge the snake-handlers to show how their snake-handling really, truly contributes to these causes in a way that is better or as-good-as other interpretations of the two (!) passages they use for justification. It isn't guaranteed to work: when Planck said (paraphrased), "Science advances one funeral at a time.", he wasn't completely exaggerating.
There's also a sobering bit from John the Baptist: "Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire." (Mt 3:10) Some people will be so convinced that they're right, so unwilling to see that maybe reality is bigger than they previously thought, so unwilling to see how they might be wrong about what really matters and how to achieve it. I think the only hope there is that they will become sufficiently sterile and irrelevant that they can be largely ignored, albeit sadly.
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By the way, I've lately been doing some reading of this "lifting off from reality" that is evidenced by seeing how people believe faith is merely mental assent, by people who must save people's eternal souls by whatever means necessary, by a belief in heaven that is 100% disconnected from earth instead of a redeemed form, and probably some other things that aren't on the tip of my tongue. There appears to be a Platonic influence going on, and also a Gnostic one. Matter (particles and fields) is being scapegoated as the evil thing, and must be escaped from. Unlike our souls, which were created good, corrupted, but will be redeemed, matter was created good, corrupted, and now must be obliterated. This seems like a pretty gaping asymmetry to me.
A project going forward will be to investigate what happens when people do this "lifting off from reality". My suspicion is that there are deep problems that can be identified as such to people who have fallen prey to this, in ways they can understand and find compelling. Indeed, there are dispensationalists at my church who believe in the pre-tribulational rapture, with whom I am in active dialogue on the matter. The key I think is to challenge them to make their way of viewing reality and the Bible in more and more intelligible ways, and see if any 'paradigm shifts' are required, shifts toward what I think is a better approximation of reality and the Bible. What distinguishes my approach from many is that I think they really have figured some things out, and want to include those discoveries, instead of merely overwrite them with my own ideas. I'll bet they have some things that are correct, just correct in smaller domains than they think, and perhaps with some things misidentified.