We Should See Other Blogs

Tyler Cowen makes a good point about bias:

People who believe that ethics is objective and intuitive are often quite keen to make a lot of detailed pronouncements about the content of those ethics. The agnostics tend to be relativists or subjectivists. It seems to me that people are first choosing a mood or attitude, and then finding the disparate views which match to that mood and, to themselves, justifying those views by the mood. I call this the “fallacy of mood affiliation,” and it is one of the most underreported fallacies in human reasoning. (In the context of economic growth debates, the underlying mood is often “optimism” or “pessimism” per se and then a bunch of ought-to-be-independent views fall out from the chosen mood.)

I think this is fairly robust. But not just in economics or picking what you think is common sense, but also in things like Calvinism vs Arminianism, choosing between different types of eschatological viewpoints, adult or infant baptism, etc.

I wonder how often we choose our views based on our existing biases. Am I the type of person who is inclined to believe in free will? Excellent, Arminian I am. Am I the sort of person who likes an ordered universe with no loose ends? Calvinist all the way.

Mind you, I’m not saying that no-one comes by their views honestly. That very well may happen. What I’m saying is this: No one thinks they arrived at their views dishonestly, because everyone has this inherent mental bias that prevents them from seeing their own motivations.

After all, no one operates under the assumption that they’re wrong. Even if they say they do. They don’t. And no-one operates under the assumption that they stumbled lazily into their philosophy.

When I was growing up (and to my embarrassment I didn’t do that until my 20s), I had a few friends who found great assurance in how logical they were. Now, not to knock them, and not to be crude, but who gives a shit?

I’ve always kind of nibbled at the edges of philosophy. I once bought the book “Warrant & Proper Function” and tried my darndest to understand what it meant. I failed miserably. I think I kind of grasped a few straws of meaning out it, but most of what I understand about Warrant and Proper Function are definitions of the words in the title. And something about a stopped clock, truth, and epistemology. That’s about it.

So yeah, I’m not so much made for the deep thought on the nature of truth and why we’re justified in believing a certain thing is true (or not), but there are a few simple concepts I think anyone can get their head around.

Among these is that logic does not equal truth. Ironically, the only way I can prove this is with logic. Let’s try some nested syllogisms, shall we?

1) A perfectly valid syllogism can contain no truth.
2) The following is a valid syllogism:
    a) All flurgen are splegafem.
    b) Flemboram is a flurgen.
    c) Therefore, Flemboram is a splegafem.
3) The preceding syllogism makes no sense and contains no truth.
4) Therefore, syllogisms do not necessary lead to truth.

I’ve always found talking to these sorts of people extraordinarily frustrating, but thinking back I can’t remember a time we ever talked about the foundations of our thinking. We didn’t talk about the assumptions we made about truth.

I can remember talking about faith, though. How do you prove to someone so enamored of logic that faith is valid? No logic can approach that sort of conclusion (sorry, Aquinas). The scientific method can’t (thanks, Hume).

Yet here I am with knowledge of God, belief that he exists, and faith that Christianity is true: This is another kind of knowledge, I think, that exists apart from the kind of knowledge that can be tested by experience or logic or science.

1) Your choices determine your destiny. That is to say your choices resonate through time, both now and for eternity. Your destiny in this sense is both your subjective temporal condition and your objective eternal condition.

2) Choices, when examined from a collective perspective as opposed to an individual perspective, exist as a chaotic system (if you plot choice, you can find topological mixing and dense periodic orbits).

3) Chaotic systems are sensitive to initial conditions. This isn’t to say a chaotic choice system is deterministic. That is to say, a chaotic choice system doesn’t exclude free will, but also doesn’t exclude predestination.

4) God determines initial conditions. God created the universe and breathed his breath into the first man. He set the system in motion and as such determined its initial conditions.

5) Your choices are (at very least) strongly influenced by God.

This is a terribly deist way of looking at things and probably abuses the idea of chaotic systems past its breaking point. But it’s at least some cool sophistry, right?

I’m 26, which is pretty old in the grand scheme of things. I used to look up at 26 year old people when I was maybe 10 and think how old and mature they seemed. Of course, I was 10, and when you’re 10 you don’t exactly have an accurate outlook on the world. I was probably mistaking the confidence that generally comes with age for maturity or something.

All I know is that some revelations come disappointingly late in life. For instance, I’ve looked at the world as it were somehow binary for the longest time. It isn’t, of course, though sometimes it is. There isn’t this one great liberal political issue, and this one great conservative issue, around which entire countries revolve. The categories “liberal” and “conservative” are almost meaningless in Canada anyway. There’s no particularly sound reason a conservative can’t care about the environment and social justice, and there’s no reason a liberal can’t want sane financial management.

What I’m describing sounds a bit like a middle-of-the-road thing, but truth be told, I’m not sure that politics or life or marriage or anything can be defined in terms of roads. I used to have discussions with friends where we’d say “okay, we’ve fallen into this ditch, but we have to make sure we don’t fall in the other ditch”, as if somehow the safest thing was to stay in the middle of the road.

That’s so limiting. As if somehow everything falls into one spectrum and can be described as a point on a line. People thought this sort of thing about genetics before Mendel opened that particular door with his (apocryphal?) bean plants; you mix two things and you get a combination of two things. Yet, this isn’t true. You mix two things and you get something different, something recessive or dominant.

Biology seems aware that everything would simply fall to the median if pre-Mendelian genetics were true: diversity is good, it contributes in a large way to the health of the biosphere. In the same way when you mix liberal and conservative you don’t get some weak-kneed hybrid. You get something new, something above liberal and conservative, something that critique both and praise both and take the good from both.

Isn’t the alternative less like a position and more like a cage? As a conservative American (or even worse, a conservative American Christian), you can feel as if you positions are written for you. But are they really? Do you have to believe in trickle-down economics? Individualism? The “war on terror”? Do you have to support a neo-conservative president like Mr Bush, even when his worst excesses tower over his strengths? Are you somehow required to believe that your nation is the culmination of history, the focal point of Christianity, and the beacon for freedom the world over?

Maybe. I mean, if those things are good, by all means. I happen to think they’re not. I certainly don’t like what a lot of liberals espouse. But I don’t want to be trapped in this one mode of thinking that says “this philosophy is good” and “this philosophy is bad”.

• I feel like I just can’t get anything done at work. I can’t make promises to customers more than two days in the future, because I’m not really in control of production. If anything, I make suggestions and those higher up than me decide to ignore them. Honestly, it’s incredibly depressing, and I’m beginning to wonder why I keep trying; it’d be a lot easier and probably a lot better if I didn’t. Because if I can, every day, just, almost get what I need to get done done, I’ll never get any help. I’ll just get a snowballing workload. I’ll be my own Katamari Damacy, except at the end of the day I won’t be creating new stars. I’ll be the hollowed, burnt-out husk of one.
• I have to say that technology has taught me at least a few lessons. In view of the price drop on iPhones yesterday, in view of any version of Windows’ security and functionality before at least two service packs, and in view of the data one can lose using alpha software, I have learned that Early adopters are idiots. Sadly, early adoption is something of an internal mechanism, a natural function that can hardly be denied. Or you could put it this way: I’m an idiot, too.
• I’ll end my sentences with prepositions if I bloody well please, thank you and please come again.
• Don’t assume that anyone you know is pronouncing a Japanese word or phrase properly. According to my research, there’s about a 92% chance a Japanese person would laugh at them. Politely. On the inside.
• I like the taste of creamer. I hate myself for this.
• Interesting thought here. According to classical evolutionary biology (forgive me for accepting the premise for a moment), there is no over-arching design in evolution, there is no God meddling in the process, there is only survival of the fittest. But then, there’s no such thing of survival of the fittest, is there? It doesn’t really matter if a method of adaptation is optimal or not, only that it sucks the least. So maybe it should be Survival of the Least Awful, eh? The point is this: evolution isn’t a linear progression and you can’t say something is “better” in any real sense because it is more complex. Also, evolution can’t be said in any meaningful sense to select for truth. (Consider how your eye vibrates, for instance, and the images it ignores, it simply deletes in those moments; consider how very little of actual reality we can see with our eyes, all the spectrum that’s simply invisible to us; consider that there’s little reason that there aren’t ten senses and we’ve only evolved into five.) In that sense, we could, technically, be living in a dream world that doesn’t actually represent reality, if that dream world somehow gave humans an evolutionary advantage. What does this all mean? Well, let me put it this way: if evolution doesn’t select for truth, merely for adequacy, and your brain is a product of that process, how can you say evolution is true, since it’s a product of said possibly faulty brains? Thus you can reasonably say that classical evolution is self-defeating; any evolutionist that trusts his own reasoning tacitly believes at least some sort of a guiding force
• With that out of my head, I can finally get back to my sea of paperwork. Yay!