We really need to figure out how to create more cultishness. If you could build a cult around known science, which happily describes everything in human experience, and spread it, you’d do more good in the world than “rationality” or “overcoming bias” ever could.
poke
It’s amazing how many supposedly rationalist movements fall into the trap of crippling “reverse stupidity.” Many in the atheist movement would not have you make positive pronouncements, not have you form organizations, not have you advocate, not have you adopt symbols or give the movement a name, not have you educate children on atheism, and so on, all because “religion does it.” I think in the case of atheism the source is unique: every (modern) atheist knows his or her atheism is a product of scientific understanding but few atheists are willing to admit it (having taken up also the false belief that some things are “outside science”), so they go looking for other reasons, and “reverse stupidity” offers such reasons in abundance.
Nice essay but I think you’d benefit from studying the history of science a bit more. Thomas Kuhn’s view of paradigms overturning one another is not supported; since Kepler and Galileo it has been almost wholly cumulative. You get can get Kepler’s and Galileo’s laws from Newton’s and you can get Kepler’s and Galileo’s and Newton’s from Einstein’s; the surprises have largely been interpretive. Most of the limitations of Galileo’s and Newton’s and Einstein’s laws were known within the framework of those systems. The sense in which the contemporaries of, say, Newton thought that the Newtonian system was “certain” was as a philosophical extension of his science: they thought the necessary extensions needed to address the problems would be broadly “Newtonian” in nature. Theirs was a failure of speculation and not science.
The “revolutions” have only been from systems of folk belief (sometimes sophisticated derivatives like Aristotelian thought) to modern science. Aristotle was not a mathematician of any sort or an experimentalist of any sort; that is, he was not in any way a scientist. His system was subject to sophisticated extension by the Alexandrian Greeks (notably Ptolemy used it to create a mathematical system for astronomy) and the Scholastics. For them, mathematics meant Euclidean geometry, and the Scholastics had only parts of it: they did not have the means to do quantitative analysis of any sophistication. No experiments were performed. There are many books published about Greek “science,” Islamic “science,” Medieval “science”; they’re all talking about Aristotle’s “physics” (the only relation with modern physics is the word), which contained no mathematics, no experiments and virtually no observations (although Aristotle extolled the virtues of observation in his methodology, he did not practice what he preached, and neither did his followers).
What Kepler and Galileo brought to the table was a taste for precision in measurement and the willingness to move straight from measurement to mathematical manipulation without taking an unnecessary detour through Aristotelian philosophy (or any philosophy). (Note that Copernicus was still operating in the Aristotelian tradition; he simply moved us out to one of the rotating spheres from our place in the center. Many people overlook Kepler’s achievement because they don’t realize there was then no concept of an orbit; the circular motion was due to astronomical objects being implanted in spinning spheres. Moving to elliptical motions was probably a bigger conceptual leap than moving away from geocentricism.) Given that their contemporaries were measuring nothing (except astronomers), and rarely creating mathematic models at all, this was a huge leap. But the leap was from a (sophisticated) system of folk belief to science. Similar leaps were taken in chemistry and biology much later and these too were from systems of folk belief (albeit less sophisticated) to science. None of them were instigated by the works of Francis Bacon.
Let’s say my friends and I make crass jokes about our Hated Enemy: stupid people. If we don’t find similar jokes made by our Hated Enemy about People Like Us funny, is that because we’re cultish or because jokes about scientists being stupid simply don’t work? Would that explain why I’d find Godzilla Bush stomping on Science funny but not Scientist Godzilla stomping on Truth? (I’d find the latter funny if Scientist Godzilla was stomping on a Truth church; that would be adorable.)
I think the Taoists (in your simplified version) won the day here. Obviously you can’t not act according to your nature but, as you proved with your efficient movement experiment, you can act according to horribly incoherent theories about your nature or not act according to them and do better. What the world is trying to tell you (screaming, shouting) in all the examples you gave is that “intelligence” is a horribly incoherent theory about your nature. It means “doing less” exactly insofar as it is just identical with the human behavioral repertoire; it means having greater resources (memory, processing power) exactly insofar as it is a misplaced analogy with the properties of an mechanical artifact. The human behavioral repertoire cannot be improved upon because there is nothing but itself with which to compare it; it is simply a product of evolution. (Overcoming bias is self-annihilation.) What the Taoists grasp is that you do better to recognize this than not (and that’s the only way to do better).
Sometimes puerile humor serves a purpose. Some people, apparently, still need to be shocked out of their deference for tradition.
Rationality is essentially Greek mysticism. The Greeks had a mystical interest in proportion. This showed through in their art and musical theory and in the development of geometry and logic. Logic was essentially applying rules of proportion to thought. Just as the right proportions can give you Beauty; thought in the right proportions gives you Truth. Eastern traditions share similarities; tune your mind the right way and you can discover Reality, Nothingness, whatever.
I’m not sure what Caledonian is getting at but sometimes I see arguments from immortalists about the number of lives lost (needlessly) every day (I think I’ve seen such from Eliezer) and they have the exact opposite of the intended effect on me. Momentarily I find myself a committed “pro-mortalist.” Perhaps the hardest thing to accept is that human life has no such inherent value.
I think the fallacy here is presuming that representative democratic politics could be anything other than in-group/out-group rivalry. If the choice of candidate is actually supposed to represent the will of the people then a unbiased sample of the population would have to be used to decide which candidate gains power. Obviously the electoral system is not an unbiased sample; the whole idea is for a self-selected group to vote after years of attempts by all parties to bias them. The results of elections are therefore meaningless.
So what is the point of holding elections? People have come up with all sorts of reasons—allowing the people to remove a leader without revolution, etc—but it’s difficult to see how you could establish them given that elections straightforwardly fail to represent the will of the people. Looking at other governments in the world and in history, what decides whether a country is successful or not and provides a good standard of living or not, does not seem to be electoral democracy but other practices such as rule of law, constitutional governance, rules of succession and economic freedom.
I have my doubts that holding elections gives you anything but a way to keep the population distracted and entertained, like football games.
There’s two interesting things going on here:
(1) You rescued your just-so story about the evolution of your behavior with a just-so story about how it could be scientifically established. But the same argument that knocks down your evolutionary just-so story knocks down your sociology of science just-so story; neither contains any established truth, both are products of your imagination.
(2) Science is exemplary human knowledge. If our account of how science proceeds tells us science should have proceeded differently, we cannot blame the scientists, we must blame our account of science. If Empiricism states that scientists are doing something wrong; so much the worse for Empiricism. If falsificationism states that scientists are doing something wrong; so much the worse for falsificationism. If Bayesian theory states that scientists are doing something wrong; so much the worse for Bayesian theory. Since no example of successful scientific practice in the history of science has ever relied on anything with even the slightest bit of resemblance to Empiricism, falsificationism or Bayesianism; so much the worse for them all.
Rolf Nelson,
I would just call that an example of folk psychology. Note that I can take your example, think up a bunch of experiments like Eliezer did, and argue that it’s now science. (This is done; people look for statistical correlations between violent videogames and aggressive behavior. But you can come up with the equivalent of Eliezer’s eye tracking experiments; just measure physiological correlates of heightened aggression while you have boys play with toy guns.) I think that would be crappy science.
I think Ian makes an important point: people give their ability to imagine something the same weight as evidence. The most gratuitous example of this, relevant here because it’s the impetus for inductive probabilism, is the so-called “problem of induction.” Say we have two laws concerning the future evolution of some system, call them L1 and L2, such that at some future time t L2(t) gives a result that is defined only as being NOT the result given by L1(t). L1 is based on observation. L2 represents my ability to imagine that my observations will fail to hold at some future time t. The problem of induction is a result of giving MORE weight to L2 than L1.
Paul Gowder,
I think your response is too general. How does the problem of induction being an deductive argument make the conclusion any less absurd? It’s a deductive argument that takes as its premise my ability to imagine something being otherwise. That makes sense if you’re an Empiricist philosopher, since you accept an Empiricist psychology a priori, but not a lot of sense if you’re a scientist or committed to naturalism. Further, the difference you cite between deductive and inductive arguments (that the former is certain and the latter not), is the conclusion of the problem of induction; you can’t use it to argue for the problem of induction.
It’s nice that you’re honest and open about the fact that your position presupposes an exceptionally weird sort of skepticism (hence the need to fall back on the possibility of being in The Matrix). Since humans are finite, there’s no reason to think absolute confidence in everything isn’t attainable, just innumerate the biases. Only by positing some weird sort of subjectivism can you get the sort of infinite regress needed to discount the possibility; I can never really know because I’m trapped inside my head. Why is the uncertainty fetish so appealing that people will entertain such weird ideas to retain it?
I think this is an important point but I don’t think you take it far enough. Language is for communication. One use of language is communicating science. It’s not a scientific challenge to realize you need a single word to describe breathing and fire. The words merely communicate the science; science has nothing to do with words or with “carving the world up” into words. Indeed natural language often fails to communicate science; scientists have to rely on formalizations.
The next step is to apply this to all of human psychology and realize that no aspect of human psychology relates to the world in any way; it’s convention all the way down.
Studying biology gave me endless examples of reverse cases of this supposed phenomenon (call it “disenchantment”). When I first learned of the structure of the cell, I found it incredibly edifying, I remember walking home from school and seeing everything around me with “new eyes.” Reality became “thicker.”
Studying molecular and developmental biology later in life had a similar effect. Studying perception is an obvious example too; how many poets have found fascination in their blind spot or their peripheral vision? How many even have a good grasp of the size and shape of the world on which they stand or the vastness of the atmosphere when they gaze up at the sky (let alone its composition or the variety of atmospheric effects beyond rainbows)?
When I run in the morning, all of this is very apparent to me, I often gaze up at the vastness of the clear blue sky, watch cloud formations, muse on the differences in lighting, look at the various things growing around me, and so forth, it has become an unconscious part of my experience of the world. Without this knowledge the world would be for me, as it is for most people, merely a stage on which peoples’ actions played out. As far as I’m concerned the poet can keep his insular enchantment; I’m here for the science.
One of the things missing from your analysis, although it might not change it much, is the fact that there are few mysteries in the world: most things had explanations before they had true explanations. Part of the delight in discovery (being the only person who knows why the stars shine) is probably in knowing other people are wrong. Perhaps it’s more of a humorous delight (how silly that I am the only one who knows why the stars shine).
I think this applies to your analysis of the poet’s disenchantment too: really the poet laments the loss of a prior explanation (God’s handiwork or some other literary construct) rather than the lack of a mystery. In a real sense something has been stolen from the poet; before the scientist got his hands on the rainbow people genuinely turned to the poet for explanation (or at least edification; which they’ll take instead).
I often see people state, for example, that it’s ridiculous to suggest that Newton discovered gravity: gravity is obvious! Any fool can observe gravity with his own eyes! Yet the concept of gravity was completely alien to a world in which Aristotelian physics held sway. And while it’s not entirely accurate to say Newton “discovered gravity” (it was a cumulative discovery beginning with Kepler and Galileo); there was a time when gravity was unthinkable. There was a prevailing alternate theory (namely that certain objects moved toward their “home” at the center of the universe, others moved away, etc); it’s ignorance of that theory (and its sophistication) that leads us to think that gravity is/was obvious. Science is always a problem of overcoming some other non-scientific explanation.
In that sense I think there’s a very real adversary and being the first is a genuine triumph.
I agree wholeheartedly. The other downside of popular science and the news media is that it gives the impression that very little is known. Neuroscience is a good example of this; cosmology another. By reading a textbook, even if you can’t follow everything in it, you get a good idea of the overwhelming amount of knowledge we have in a particular discipline and the kind of evidence that supports it.
For what it’s worth, I wasted years on philosophy and there isn’t a single work I find myself able to recommend, so if anyone wants to take unsolicited anonymous advice on the matter: don’t waste your time on it. The one useful thing I got out of it was realizing that most of the platitudes we usually associate directly with science (science is inherently uncertain, science is inductive, science is about falsification, science is based on skepticism, science doesn’t make metaphysical claims, etc) are premised on untenable philosophical arguments.
Z. M.,
Some do. Others are science, logic, math, advice, strategy, etc.
I wouldn’t count this current run of posts as philosophy.
I was nodding in agreement up until the end there. “Evolution is bodiless”? “Evolution” describes certain features of a physical process, a chemical process specifically, stretching from the beginning of life until the present day. The entire ecosystem of the Earth is, at any given moment, a time slice of this single chemical process. It isn’t abstract in the least. Various sorts of selection are abstract but only in the sense that they describe aspects of this chemical process at a high level.