101 Interesting Things, part fifty-four (b): The WizKID Epistemic Framework - Theory & Practice

Last time, I introduced the information science department's WizKID epistemic framework and listed a few advantages it has over the philosophy department's JTB model of knowledge.  Today I'll be talking for a somewhat long time about some theoretical weirdness that comes up from the structure of the framework, and then for a considerably shorter time about some practical consequences and what they mean for our own knowledge construction.

101 Interesting Things, part fifty-four (a): The WizKID Epistemic Framework - Intro & Advantages

Philosophers as a discipline are still stuck on the Justified True Belief (JTB) model of knowledge, even though Gettier showed pretty effectively where that breaks down.  But even better, information scientists have made a replacement model that works, is quantifiable, and more accurately reflects how we construct and use knowledge in real life.  I hope that one day philosophers manage to bring this better model over to their side, but I'm not interested in doing that because I'd have to fight against the tide and I'd really rather just do my own productive work.

But if you wanna know how knowledge really works, and get in on the ground floor of cutting-edge epistemology, then have I got something for you!

How Can Science Be Objective?

This is a paper I wrote in my philosophy of science class.  The instructor told us that the class would be "one long argument," and at this late point in the course, our task was to summarize and synthesize the material presented thus far, and evaluate it.  The question was, "Can science be objective?  And if so, how?"  We were given six pages to answer (my bibliography was page seven).  This is another paper that I'm pretty proud of, so here it is for your enjoyment.  Links to the cited articles are given at the end, except for two which I couldn't track down (I'm not counting Locke, I only used him for a money quote at the end).  They're all good reads, so feel free to take a walk on the web if you're unclear on a point and want it in the author's own words.

Much ink has been spilled in the attempt to characterize science, both its process and its products, in a way that both is accurate and preserves at least some of our notions of what science is “supposed” to be about. Logical positivism has been rendered untenable by the ubiquity of underdetermination and the nature of observation as fundamentally theory-laden. Is there any way for science to be objective in this light, or is it just a highly political free-for-all? This depends on what we mean by “objective,” for some definitions of the term shall certainly fail. Yet there is an important way in which science can be seen as objective, and in a satisfyingly progressive way.

On Faithlessness

There's this YouTube guy, Philhellenes, he's made some sweet videos like a scientifically accurate rewrite of Genesis and an account of science saving his soul.  One of his other videos is on admitting error, and it's also really great:

Why does he need the contrast so high?  Is he in a library's

after hours?  He must be The Phantom of the Library!

It got me to thinking about walking in doubt, a phrase I use from time to time when I need to establish that the brand of atheism I practice is not in fact another kind of faith.  I have a lot of beliefs, but no faith, because I've spent a great many years doubting everything systematically, like René Descartes.  What I've ended up with is a bunch of things I endorse as facts with varying levels of confidence, and a whole bunch of inferences between them of varying strengths, which is rather difficult to keep track of.  It's not perfect, by any means, and I still screw up from time to time, which keeps me humble - but beneath it is an attitude of readiness to admit error.  I try not to think, "What do I know for certain," but instead, "How much doubt am I dealing with here?"  If I'm ever not dealing with an amount of doubt, then I've got certainty, and certainty is dangerous.

Pascal's Scantron: an atheist parable (part two)

Click here for part one.

The grading machine was small, discolored with age, covered in dust like most of the things in the English department storage room. It had a cracked digital readout, a few buttons with the labels missing, and a slot with "INSERT FORM HERE" stamped next to it. I didn't care when I heard we found it, because I don't care about the forms anyhow - everyone else seemed to think it was some kind of miracle, though. A fight broke out over who would get to use it first, and Jimmy Dempster's nose got broken. We were finally able to agree that it had to be used in public, in plain sight of everyone, and what we'd cast votes to see who would get to go first and all of that. It took us two whole days just to decide how we were going to use it, for crying out loud. I stayed and watched because even though it wasn't important to me, the way everyone reacted would be very important to everyone.

Well, we all decided that someone from E-column could go first, since they were clearly the most excited about it. It seemed fair. Then one of those upside-down A-column kids could go, because they seemed like the most opposed group to the E-column crowd. Then we'd let a C-column kid go, then one of the "ABCDEABCDE" folks, then one of the kids who filled out every bubble, and then we'd go in alphabetical order by name from there (most everyone knew everyone else's name, so there wasn't any concern about cheating). Everything was fine, we were all agreed that we had found a fair way to resolve this little dispute, and somehow everything still managed to go straight to shit.

Brandon Anderson was the E-column kid who went first, since he was first alphabetically. We plugged the machine in, turned it on, made sure it didn't break down straightaway, and then Brandon put his form through. There was some humming and whirring, and then his form came out just like he'd put it in. He even asked, "So did I pass?" Nobody said anything for a while. Someone said he must not have gotten anything wrong, but then another person said that we didn't know if he got anything right either, and then another fight almost broke out. We decided to keep feeding the forms through, and then figure out what to do.

Jill Becker was next, the upside-downers' first pick. She fed her form through and nothing happened again, and this time we were a little calmer but still nobody said anything. A couple people started to say that maybe the machine didn't work right, but everyone else shushed them. I was starting to hope that everyone would just feed their form through and things would be nice and boring. Silly me.

Dick Benson stepped up, he was the "ABCDEABCDE" crowd's first pick. Not because he was alphabetically first, they also had a Chris Allen, but because they all paired off and played a rock-paper-scissors tournament and Dick won. Anyway, Dick fed his form into the grading machine, and there was this awful grinding sound. Something started to smell, and so we unplugged the grading machine from the generator and opened up the front panel. We got Dick's form out, but it was all chewed up, and we couldn't get the machine working again after that.

Pretty soon, people started arguing about what all this meant. Someone started saying that the machine ate Dick's form because he was wrong, that he should have stuck to one column instead of filling out all kinds of bubbles. I tried to point out that we couldn't be sure that Dick had anything to do with it, using one of those fallacies I learned from the logic book. I can't remember the Latin name, but what it says is that just because something happens after something else, it doesn't mean that the first thing caused it - there could have been something else going on that you didn't know about. You might as well say that Dick's form got eaten because he played rock-paper-scissors. I mean, for crying out loud, the grading machine was old and locked up in the English department closet for a reason, and that's probably because it wasn't working right in the first place, so we should see if we could fix it and then try again.

Well, nobody listened, of course. People started shouting that we shouldn't tamper with the grading machine any more, that we'd done enough by letting Dick put his form through and we saw how that went, and since Brandon & Jill's forms went through fine, we know that everyone else who filled out their form like them should be fine, too. Soon you couldn't tell who was yelling what since everyone was screaming at the top of their lungs. Then someone just reached out and punched Dick Benson right in the face. Then it was a dog-pile: some people tried to break it up, but they just got sucked into the fight, and by the end of it the bloody mess on the floor didn't even look like Dick any more.

Now, I mean, I just want to say this plainly, because I don't know how we let it happen: Dick Benson was beaten to death because a dusty old machine ate his test form. A kid fucking died over this. Some other kids got hurt, too, but cuts and bruises happen even when you're playing a game of soccer, and you get better from 'em anyhow. Dick's dead 'cuz he made marks on paper, and I think anyone who could let that happen is plain crazy, I don't care how strongly they feel about their precious fucking forms.

Well, not everyone feels the same way, I guess. Pretty soon everyone started saying that what happened to Dick was bad, but his form ruined the grading machine, so what could you expect? I tried to say that something ought to be done about it, but nobody knew who struck the killing blow, there were too many kids involved to punish all of them, emotions were running high so you couldn't really blame anyone, and it wasn't gonna bring Dick back anyhow, so who cares? Well, I care. I care about a person's life more than the way they fill out some form, and I think anyone whose priorities are the other way 'round is an idiot. And I think anyone who isn't bothered by a human life being lost because of a disagreement over unknowable matters is less than human.

So I left. I left that crazy world, and now it seems I'm in a crazier one. It wasn't just our school that forgot, apparently, but all I've found in the three days since I left are crazier and crazier people. Some of thesm have guns, and some of them are in gangs, and some of them just have some really off-the-wall ideas about how the world is. I have half a mind to try to help the school get prepared in case one of the gangs finds it, but all I can bear to do is find a quiet out-of-sight place to sleep at night. I don't know how to fix this, the world's really screwed up and I'm just one person. Maybe I can find some other people who aren't nuts, and help them. I don't know. Maybe I'm crazy, too. I don't know. But there's gotta be something good out there, and I gotta find it. Writing this down is a start.

With acknowledgment to Sam Harris, Blaise Pascal, and the Scantron company.

Pascal's Scantron: an atheist parable (part one)

Whoa! I missed a weekend. Sorry about that. But I have part of a short story here, and I hope you like it. More this weekend, double-promise!

"What if all our knowledge about the world were suddenly to disappear? Imagine that six billion of us wake up tomorrow morning in a state of utter ignorance and confusion. Our books and computers are still here, but we can't make heads or tails of their contents. We have even forgotten how to drive our cars and brush our teeth. What knowledge would we want to reclaim first? Well, there's that business about growing food and building shelter that we would want to get reacquainted with. We would want to relearn how to use and repair many of our machines. Learning to understand spoken and written language would also be a top priority, given that these skills are necessary for acquiring most others. When in this process of reclaiming our humanity will it be important to know that Jesus was born of a virgin? Or that he was resurrected? And how would we relearn these truths, if they are indeed true? By reading the Bible? Our tour of the shelves will deliver similar pearls from antiquity - like the "fact" that Isis, the goddess of fertility, sports an impressive pair of cow horns. Reading further, we will learn that Thor carries a hammer and that Marduk's sacred animals are horses, dogs, and a dragon with a forked tongue. Whom shall we give top billing in our resurrected world? Yahweh or Shiva? And when will we want to relearn that premarital sex is a sin? Or that adulteresses should be stoned to death? Or that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception? And what will we think of those curious people who begin proclaiming that one of our books is distinct from all others in that it was actually written by the Creator of the universe?"
- Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, p. 23-24.

"I sure wish this life were a test and I could reason out the right answer, so that all my wishful thinking had a metaphysical justification embedded into reality itself, and then I could finally be confident that all this speculation wasn't just me jerking off."
- Pascal's Wager (abridged)

Where to begin? At the start? Or at the present? Or with my purpose? I guess I should try to sort all that out first.

My memories start about four months ago, on the first day of February, which I call the Great Forgetting. Today is the third of June. By my reckoning, it is the year 2010, though all of these dates are in dispute. I'm writing this down in case another Forgetting happens. There. Now for details.

Nobody knows how the Great Forgetting happened - or why, for that matter. Stories abound, of course, but nobody really knows. Here is what I remember: everything starts with a loud popping sound, and then I was aware of the room around me. I had a splitting headache, and a couple people screamed. Someone by the door flipped the light switch a couple times, and nothing happened. Then he stood up on a chair to open one of the light covers, and broken glass came pouring down on him. I laughed.

At some point, I became aware of the fact that I was holding a pencil. On my desk was a piece of paper, white with green markings on it. It looked fuzzy at first, like it wasn't quite anything in particular; as I stared, it became more sharply defined until I could read it. It was a form, a form for taking a test. What test, I didn't know. I had started writing my name, but I only got the first letter down: the letter D. That was all I had written on my form. It did not occur to me until much later that I was able to recognize the first letter of my name, but not my whole name. I could also recognize the names and purposes of many things, but not all things. Others seemed to be in similar situations.

It took us over an hour to figure out how to talk again, and in a few days we got settled into what our lives have now become. Within the week, we had eaten through all the school's food and started raiding local grocery stores for canned goods and clean water. Someone found a store with seeds, and now we have gardens everywhere around campus and even on the rooftops. We also built some rain caches, and there's a still being built by a few kids who know how to weld.

Even now, though, things seem poised for upheaval. Nobody really knows what's around the corner. We might get our heads screwed back on straight, but with all this craziness around, it seems a slim possibility. Somebody, thankfully, found an almanac - the latest one we could find was for 2010, and by measuring the daylight hours, we were able to pinpoint the equinox on March 20th and figure out the date and time from there. But not everybody buys it - some people insist it's the year zero, others that it's the year one, still others insist on two thousand (or even one thousand) and that the almanacs are printed in advance by benevolent outside cultures who are manipulating our brains and the world around us.

Like I said, there's a lot of craziness about.

Weirdest of all are these test forms. Everybody in the school had one, but nobody can find the test we're supposed to use the form with. None of the instructors' desks have test booklets. Every room had a television set in it, and most people think that the test was going to be delivered by some sort of broadcast. It makes sense, but there's no way to tell for sure. Everything that was plugged in or had a battery in it got fried at the Great Forgetting. Light bulbs burst, CRTs burned out, circuit boards cooked, watches melted on the inside, it's all gone. Things in packages work, as long as the batteries were outside of them - we used new stopwatches from the Phys Ed office to measure the days until the equinox. So even if the test was being delivered by television, there's no way we could tell what it was about today.

Consent is somewhat less than unanimous on this last point, to put it mildly.

It all started innocently enough, as I suppose these things tend to do. Some people filled out their forms out of habit. I can't really blame them, it probably seemed like a good idea at the time, and it certainly didn't do any harm on its own. But then people started comparing answers, and they started banding together according to how they filled out the bubbles. About half the people went straight down the C column, apparently since that was in the middle. If you ask them, they don't feel too strongly about their answers, they just seem to think that their forms ought to be filled out. Lots of people filled out the right-most E bubbles, maybe through some quirk of association - that's what's "right", after all. Some answered A, B, C, D, then E, repeating over and over; others filled out the first five in order and then stopped. Some filled out the front only, others filled out both sides - no way to tell how many today, since most of those who later filled out the backs of their forms now insist that they had them filled out all along.

A few filled out the A column, and then someone found a logic textbook and discovered that an upside-down A is the universal quantifier - it means "all". These folks turned their forms upside-down, saying that the world turned upside-down at the Great Forgetting, and now the A column is "right" and they all think this is some profound insight. Even though they didn't learn about symbolic logic until after they'd filled out their forms, they insist that they knew that's how they were supposed to fill out their forms all along, and for that reason. How the Hell do you argue with that kind of bullshit?

A tiny minority filled out all the bubbles, everywhere, and these folks say that all the answers are right and it doesn't really matter how you fill out your form, so long as you get along with everyone else. We're here in school to learn, they say, not to pick fights with each other. I tend to agree with their principles, just not with their reasoning, and these folks get along with the C-column crowd so nobody else picks on them, either.

I didn't fill out my form. I didn't write anything on it at all, except for that letter D which I had already written down. Most people who didn't fill out their forms at first later went and filled them out, usually out of pressure to fit in or avoid getting beaten up. Some of the people who still don't have their forms filled out just don't care. Some of them insist that we shouldn't fill out our forms at all, and anyone who does is an idiot. For my part, I just don't know what to put on it. I don't know, so I don't put anything. I think some of the ideas out there are interesting, but not one of them is for sure, and it doesn't really matter at the end of the day because we're here and we have shit to do that's just more important. So put whatever you want on your test forms, it's fine by me - but if you start telling people that they have to fill them out this or that way, and threaten to beat them up by the bike racks if they don't, that's when I think you're crazy.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people here who I think are bat-shit loco.

Some of these nuts say that not answering at all is a form of answering. I don't know what they're thinking, since I most definitely did not fill out any of the bubbles. That strikes me as rather like saying that an empty plate is a kind of meal - fucking stupid, in other words. "Empty form, empty head," is another common taunt I hear in the hallways - this one usually comes from those folks who safety-pinned their test forms to their shirts, or who draw them in permanent marker on their skin. If that's what you want to do, go ahead. I mean, I think it's pretty silly, but they think it's silly to not answer, so I'm comfortable with living and letting live. They say I'll be sorry when we all get graded, that I can't get a high test score if I don't answer, but I don't even think that's ever going to happen. Especially not after what happened three nights ago.

It started a couple weeks back. We found old machines in the school's basement and in a lot of back rooms - covered in dust, but they weren't plugged in, so some of them still worked. There was a gas generator in the machine shop, where they taught automobile and manufacturing stuff, so we were able to get some of them running. First was an old record player, one of those simple dealies with the turntable and the flower-shaped thing for the sound to come out. People started recognizing some of the songs, which says to me that we can still have some of our memories jogged from before the Great Forgetting, just like we remember how to walk and how to speak and what tables and chairs are. But some people insist that it means we can know things "a priori", a word they got from one of those logic textbooks. I say the name of a song is just something you picked up somewhere, and it can be taught anyhow, so who cares?

We found more and more machines, in increasing complexity until we got to the burned-out stuff that was being used right up until the Great Forgetting. Some of the other kids, all kinds but mostly the C-column crowd, started to use the simplest machines and some of the library books and instruction manuals to figure out how some of the more recent ones must work. They're really, really smart - until they start to talk about how it was all left here as a puzzle for us to figure out, so we could re-start civilization on our own. That's when I start to roll my eyes and wish they'd stick to what they can find out and demonstrate. I mean, sure, it would be nice if there was a puzzle, if we were supposed to figure this all out (and there's nothing wrong with figuring things out, even if nobody tells us to do it), if all this was actually planned and had a grand overarching point. But I see no reason to think so. They ask how it all got here; I say I don't know, and they call me stupid for not making up answers.

I say that wanting an answer doesn't mean there is one, and making one up isn't better than admitting you don't know. I sure as Hell wish other people weren't so fucking confident in their made-up answers when we found the grading machine. I wish we never found it at all.

To be continued...

The Wrongest of Wrongnesses in the History of Wrongitude

Editor's Note: Do I count as my own editor? I mean, I edit my own stuff, but... nevermind. Look. My last post was a little vapid, pontificating as I was on an overnight webcomic kerfuffle that ended up being wiped off the face of the internet anyhow. I feel kinda bad about it. So I'm breaking my "weekends-only" rule to say something of a little more substance. This is also the third post in recent memory where I have used the word "kerfuffle" for lack of a better term. Should I consult a doctor? Or just a thesaurus?

I recently read on Pharyngula about a paper by Doug Theobald (subscription to Nature required) calculating the likelihood that the proteins shared by all organisms on the face of the planet came to be shared by a concatenation of events besides common descent. In other words, regardless of the likelihood that life came to be in this or that particular way (which Creatards frequently yammer on about, assuming evolutionary teleology and all sorts of other bullshit), what are the odds that life came to be, as it in fact did, by other means than common descent?

PZ's summary and the news coverage make for fascinating reading - really, you should check it out - but I'm going to jump right to the number at the end and play around with it. That number is 1:10^2,680 against. So, sure, the common proteins shared by all modern organisms could have come about by some other means than common descent, but the odds are real fuckin' long against it. How long? So long. Like, it's hard to think of a way to be wronger, mathematically speaking - these guys are wronger than anyone has ever been wrong in the history of wrongitude (sounds like "longitude").

I have a phrase I use to describe "as sure as I get," and that is, "As sure as I am that the Sun's coming up tomorrow." This is meant to convey pretty fuckin' sure but not quite 100% certain (because I'm not 100% certain of anything, other than the fact that I am now having some kind of experience, and that I've always got room for doubt). Sure, something could happen so that the Sun doesn't rise tomorrow, but the data so far suggest extremely otherwise. Just how much otherwise? Well, let's take every day in Earth's 4.54-billion-year history as a data point.*

4,540,000,000 x 365.25 = 1,658,235,000,000

(1.66 trillion, or 1.66 x 10¹²)

Hmm... that leaves us a shit-pot of orders of magnitude to make up. But yeah, it's settled: we're surer of common descent than we are that the Sun will rise tomorrow!

"But wait," comes the Creatard rebuttal, "You can't just count the days up like that, you have to take into account how many of us there are! After all, a large enough number of rabid IDiots can't be wrong!" Well, OK. It doesn't work that way, but we'll humor you. Let's just say that all 6.8-billion of us are Christians, and we have been since the Earth was formed. Not only is this over-generous to the literalists in giving them the actual age of the Earth rather than their Reader's Digest Condensed Books version, giving them all of the current population throughout all of Earth's history, and giving a decidedly democratic bent to our epistemology, it doesn't even come close.

(1.66 x 10¹²) x (6.8 x 10⁹) = 1.13 x 10²²

"But... but... twenty-two isn't nearly close enough to two-thousand-six-hundred-eighty," replies the anti-science crusader. "And I believe that your numbers are wrong with every fiber of my being." You know what? That's still not good enough. I'll give you a data point for every nucleotide base pair inside of every single cell of every person now living on the planet for every day throughout all of Earth's history - and you know what that nets us? Take a look:

(3.1647 x 10⁹ base pairs) x (1 x 10¹⁴ cells) x (1.13 x 10²²) = 3.58 x 10⁴⁵

Fuck! That's still not enough! OK, but what if every atom in the observable universe, itself a number beyond ordinary human comprehension, spawned a Universe with a special Earth with seven billion humans believing in Creation with every fiber of their being? Yeah, what then?! This is what:

(1.5 x 10⁸² atoms in the observable Universe) x (3.58 x 10⁴⁵) = 5.37 x 10¹²⁷

Just to recap, we've given a data point in favor of the Sun rising tomorrow for each of 3-billion-odd nucleotide base pairs inside of all hundred trillion cells in the bodies of six to seven billion people observing a sunrise for every single day (including leap years!) across Earth's four-and-a-half billion year history, repeated for every atom in the observable Universe. And given all of that, we're still surer that all life is related by common descent than we are that the Sun will rise tomorrow.

Suck on those numbers! Tomorrow's a dark day for creationism, epistemologically speaking. Yeah, I'd say the future prospects for monotheistic creation myths are looking pretty dim. We should just turn the light out on intelligent design, and leave the real science to light our path into the future.

OK, I'm done now, for real. Man, playing around with degrees of certainty is fun!

* - Yes, OK, to calculate the actual odds of the Sun not coming up tomorrow, I would have to calculate the odds of something happening which would prevent the Sun coming up. Fine. Not the point, and that's why this entry gets the "humor" tag. I'm just going to treat it as a chance event and assume the Sun doesn't rise tomorrow, making it 1 failure out of 1.6 trillion successes. I need to keep this back-of-the-envelope compatible, after all.

Epistemology and Spiders: This is how it should be done

OK, so assessing and revising the contents and standards of one's knowledge has nothing to do with Mindless Self-Indulgence - if anything, it's mindful self-restraint. But one of my recent forays into the world of Science Blogs handed me a case-in-point so neat and pat that I just had to share.

A bit of background: there's this wonderful little program called Before the Dinosaurs: Walking with Monsters (buy!) which goes through the history of life from Anomalocaris to Lystrosaurus. It's just awesome, and you should watch it. One of my favorite parts of that program was the puppy-sized spider, mesothelae, which lived at a time of eagle-sized dragonflies because the atmosphere was so oxygen-rich that giant bugs could get away with enormous bodies and simple respiratory apparatus.

Now, I love spiders. I really do. They're nature's ninjas, out-ninjered only by certain species of squid and octopus (ninjas of the sea). So a spider the size of a small dog is, like, my new favorite fantasy pet. Excluding giant spider-steed, of course (what it loses in ninjery, it more than gains in bad-assitude). OK, now we're good. My point is that I was very fucking excited to hear about this mesothelae, so excited that I went around telling people about it for weeks.

Fast-forward to last week, and I see this Laelaps headline link while catching up on Pharyngula: Megarachne, the Giant Spider That Wasn't. My first thought: "Ooh, spiders!" Second thought: "Aww, fake spiders?" So I click through and read the whole thing, and as it turns out, Before the Dinosaurs was originally slated to include megarachne, but during production it was discovered that the giant spider wasn't a giant spider, but a sea scorpion. Well, shit on toast! But the show must go on, and so the BBC just re-cast mesothelae in the role that megarachne had been written to play and fudged a couple details (bah, details!).

If you're like me, then right about now you've got to have a tangled web in your head involving sense, reference, justification, and a couple theories of truth, all wrapped up in a package labeled, "D's beliefs about carboniferous arthropods". OK, now that I put it that way, you're probably not like me. But that's what was going through my head as I processed this article. Of course, sorting out that Gordian knot would be like trying to diagram one of Nathaniel Hawthorne's third-of-a-page sentences, so I took the Alexandrian solution:

"Huh. Looks like I was wrong."

Because at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter that a bleeding-edge breakthrough in paleobiology took a backseat to a deadline, it doesn't really matter that there was still a kernel of truth in it, it doesn't really matter how much I love the idea of giant spiders, and it doesn't really matter exactly what labels or confidence levels I had for this or that bit of belief. What matters is that I became aware of one instance wherein my picture of the world failed to match up with the best our investigations have to offer. So I fixed it, The End. As Carl Sagan wrote,

Science thrives on errors, cutting them away one by one. False conclusions are drawn all the time, but they are drawn tentatively. Hypotheses are framed so they are capable of being disproved. A succession of alternative hypotheses is confronted by experiment and observation. Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding. Proprietary feelings are of course offended when a scientific hypothesis is disproved, but such disproofs are recognized as central to the scientific enterprise.
(The Demon-Haunted World, page 20)

So I was reading about this Jesus fellow the other day... or was it Krishna? Or Mithras? Wait, Horus! Or maybe even Moses... look, you see where this is going.

The Vagaries of Interpretation, or: The Virtue of Doubt

I'd wager that just about any old Humanist - and definitely anyone likely to read this - could rattle off a whole list of reasons why this or that brand of theism is off its goddamned rocker. There's a million and ten reasons each for all million and ten religions, and in that sense, Humanism is atheistic in that it doesn't have any variant of theism woven into it. Whether or not there are gods is, quite frankly, immaterial: we Humanists are concerned with human lives, human values, human happiness, and human flourishing. Deities just don't matter, whether they exist or not.

Erm, wait - is Humanism a religion, though? Maybe, and maybe not. Religion, like faith, or god, or good, is a word that we humans have made up. It has no truly objective meaning, and so it means a great many things to a great many people. But systems of thought that I think we all could agree are religions share a very peculiar characteristic in common: they all tout faith as a virtue. How does Humanism compare to this? Well, Humanists could be fairly said to have faith in humanity, if by "have faith" we mean "place trust" or "find hope." But religious faith goes a step further and encourages belief beyond evidence and reason (whether good or bad, religious faith does in fact go beyond evidence and reason), and championing this sense of faith is something I think it fair to say that Humanism lacks.

In fact, I plan to argue that the cardinal virtue of Humanism is doubt.

This will rely quite a bit on judgment calls that ultimately come down to matters of emphasis and perspective, but it is precisely this particular way of looking at things that I think is most Humanistic. So let's take it from the top: why is doubt virtuous? On an aretaic analysis, we human beings are fallible and so ought to embrace this fallibility - we can do this by taking the opportunity to doubt ourselves whenever it arises. On a consequentialist analysis, every doubt confers a benefit, and so we ought to spread these benefits among our fellow humans whenever we can. And on a deontological analysis, we could say that we have a duty to doubt ourselves, because we are by nature fallible and placing absolute certainty on this or that idea is likely to be ruinous to us.

More importantly than any of this, to my mind, is the fact that doubt acknowledges the fundamental ambiguity of reality. It is one of the very first things we can really recognize about the world: reality is confusing. How confusing? So confusing. So confusing, in fact, that we can't even have second-order knowledge: even if we stumbled upon the One Truth of the Universe, we couldn't know that we know that we have it. This has been proven with math, but I plan on simply illustrating the point with pictures that look like math.

Formally, this principle is entailed by the Duhem-Quine thesis, which is the idea that:

...it is impossible to test a scientific hypothesis in isolation, because an empirical test of the hypothesis requires one or more background assumptions (also called auxiliary assumptions or auxiliary hypotheses). The hypothesis in question is by itself incapable of making predictions. Instead, the consequences of the hypothesis typically rest on background assumptions from which to derive predictions. This prevents a theory from becoming conclusively falsified through empirical means if the background assumptions are not proven (since background assumptions sometimes involve one or more scientific theories). For instance, to "disprove" the idea that the Earth is in motion, some people noted that birds did not get thrown off into the sky whenever they let go of a tree branch. That datum is no longer accepted as empirical evidence that the Earth is not moving because we have adopted a different background system of physics that allows us to make different predictions.

So, yeah, hooray! We can't ever settle a question "once and for all, forever and always." Corollary to this is the idea that any finite set of data yields itself to infinite possible interpretations. However many interpretations are actually made are finite, they are "that many" and no more; but the possible interpretations for any finite set of data are, in principle, infinite. Let me show you what I'm talking about.

Suppose we have three data points, as follows:

What would you say is the best-fit line? Certainly, the most obvious one is this:

But doesn't this also fit the data?

And how about this?

Or this?

So, if we only have those three data points, how do we know which curve we're working with?

The short answer is: we don't. All of those interpretations explain the three points with perfect consistency. And the same holds true for any arbitrarily large (yet finite) set of data points. And no matter how much any one of us, or all of us, may know, we only have a finite set of data and no more than that. So how can we distinguish the possible interpretations from one another? How can we tell whether one is a better explanation than its counterpart?

Get more data points. Rule out inconsistent curves. And if you think you've got a better explanation than the most commonly accepted one, then make some predictions about data points that would be obtained on your interpretation, which would also rule out the competing status quo explanation, and then see if reality bears you out or not. In other words: do science. Test. Experiment. And fuel it with your doubt.

To carry this analogy to its appropriately awkward conclusion, faith-based traditions say, "Here is the data curve! Anything that you think doesn't fit, with your flawed mortal reasoning, is either the result of your failure to understand the perfection of the curve, or the imperfect nature of reality!" But here's the thing: even if we had a complete curve, and could demonstrate perfect correspondence at every single point, we would still need to doubt. Why?

Because what if the "received wisdom" says this:

But reality is this:

Or this?

Can we ever rule out those other possibilities? Or any permutations thereof? Or all permutations thereof?

We cannot, in the final analysis. Other interpretations will always, by necessity, be available. We must look. We must check. And so long as we must look and check, we must doubt. And so, in light of the facts that reality is under no obligation to conform itself to our expectations, and that there might always be some future discovery to upset even our most cherished beliefs of today, we must learn to walk in doubt. From doubt, we can learn humility, charity, respect, forgiveness, tolerance, and a whole host of other things that certainty would eschew. After all, if you're certain that you've got the right answer, then no deviation ought to be tolerated - but if you doubt, then deviations may not only be permitted, they may be embraced.

Walk in doubt, my friends. For if anything in this world is certain, it is that certainty is bunk.

This post was featured in the 46^th Humanist Symposium.

Arguing on the Internet: Epistemology and Truth (cl)

So yeah, cl and I are arguing on the internet. This will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me personally, but I am ruled by my passions: I do almost anything that I do in fits and starts. Arguing with cl is now, like, near the top of my list, right beneath "Don't get fired" and "Don't starve or dehydrate." But "Maintain an interesting blog" is up there, too, and I know that this will not be of interest to everyone. To that end, I shall post arguments with cl no more than once every other day, and I'll make sure to have anything else up in between - but still, that means if I post every day, this blog will be half-cl for quite some time (hopefully).

The story so far: cl wrote a post that really piqued me (in the good way), so I responded and then things got hairy. Today I will be addressing what are, to me, the three most interesting things about cl's last salvo - knowability, a response to his argument from probability, and rhetorical gamesmanship. I'll close with a bit on truth, which I offer up as another direction in which the discussion might proceed.

First, a bit about knowability, which will touch on epistemology, the study of the nature and content of knowledge. cl posted an interesting logical argument involving this, and then clarified his meaning in a comment at my request (thanks for that, cl!). From what I can gather, cl and I agree in at least a vague way that the "awesomeness" of a claim has something to do with its grounding in experience: in his own words, "That which can be verified by experience is knowable; that which cannot be verified by experience is not." Or, as I say, "Knowledge must be grounded in empirical observation." However, cl then goes on to say,

We can make inferences about that which cannot be verified by direct experience - for example the claim that life exists in some other corner of the universe, or that George Washington was the first president of the United States - but that's it. Does this mean we can't "know" the planets revolve around the sun? In a sense, yes...

Well, I actually agree with this as stated. However, we must also infer that our direct experiences as we remember them are valid in any way at all - and they in fact might not be. For instance, I may hear a voice and believe it is God, but it might also be the Goddamned Devil, or a person in another room, or my own internal narrator, or butt-puckering insanity - and at first blush, it seems awful hard to tell how some of these possibilities might be sorted out. This puts us in an interesting position with respect to truth (see below), but for now I shall simply say that not even direct experiences are immune to the leap of inference at which cl so precisely gestures, so long as those experiences are in the past (since all experiences not currently being had are in fact remembered - or misremembered, sometimes). It is self-evident, after all, that we do in fact have experiences, and anyone may verify this with the briefest of introspection - however, the content of those experiences, and their bearing on reality, are always subject to question. This is because, in short, we cannot directly perceive causality itself and may only infer it from the constant conjunction we perceive between suspected causes and their alleged effects (thanks, Hume!).

There is no getting around this. Thinkers of all stripes have tried, and failed, and whined about it (even me!); but we must all live with this doubt as our constant companion. As I said earlier, echoing Descartes: de omnibus dubitandum. So, if even direct experience is subject to question, what are we left with? I go with testability, which moves the goalposts for knowability quite a bit.

I realize that when I encounter an argument, or even a proposition, I do not decide whether to endorse it as logical or dismiss it as ridiculous right away - I first perceive either agreement or disagreement. It took me a while to get over this, but the instantaneous reaction I have of either "OK" or "No way" is itself a matterer of perception, at least in my own mind. Hell, others might be different. At any rate, if I have trouble determining whether I am perceiving thoughts of "OK" or thoughts of "No way," that's when I start to think about the claim itself. And I have agreed too readily to a great many things which I have later gone on to regret, ranging from trivial mathematical mistakes to the embarrassing thought that my mother must hate me for feeding me vegetables (I love vegetables now, and feel like an absolute twat for ever being a child, pretty much). But if, when I think about a proposition and then have difficulty trying to sort out just why I am perceiving agreement or disagreement with it, I then feel an urge to check. In the past, I felt the urge merely to decide.

Checking is important because then I can tell whether I am remembering something correctly or incorrectly. After all, I have mis-remembered in the past. So if I have trouble justifying a particular belief I hold, and can't remember what it was that made me think that in the first place, I then go see what I can check. And if I can't check to my satisfaction, I tend to withhold belief and write it off as unimportant - after all, that which leaves no effects to check is mighty difficult to call "relevant" on several well-respected definitions. This is more or less how I live my life, with respect to epistemology, anyway - more on this when we get to truth.

Whether or not you agree with cl's argument that it is more reasonable to believe that consciousness persists after death, I see a real gem of wisdom in there, which is a matter of perspective: cl's argument shows that, depending on how we define our terms, we can get to some surprisingly different conclusions about how we ought to form our beliefs. A great many people seem to form their beliefs - or at least a great many of them - in something resembling a binary truth table: X is true, Y is false, Z is true if A is not, B is true if and only if C is also true, and so on. Whether or not any particular person does, I cannot say, but this is in keeping with the overwhelming majority of my experience among humanity. When we say, "I don't know," most people usually mean, "I haven't thought about it," or, "I haven't decided."

Not me. My truth table has "true," "false," "not applicable," "I don't know," and "it depends." Other people might include "maybe," "probably," and "not if I have anything to say about it!" When I drop my hackey-sack, it falls to the ground: true. Two plus two equals five, for extremely large values of two: false (but funny!). This statement is a lie: not applicable (or "nonsense"). There is non-Earthly life in the solar system: I don't know. The Earth goes around the Sun: it depends on your frame of reference - if we define Earth's core as the center of our solar system, then of course the Sun goes around it, but then the rest of the planets and other stuff get a bunch of weird epicycles which we can rather handily avoid by adopting a heliocentric perspective instead. God exists: I don't know. God doesn't exist: I don't know.

Buh? Yeah. I don't know whether any sort of supernatural critter exists. I really don't. However, if some kind of supernatural critter did exist, then it would be this-or-that way, and not thus-and-such. In other words, it might be Thor-like, or Yahweh-like, or leprechaun-like, or FSM-like, or unicorn-like; and if it's one of those, then I sure don't want to pick the wrong one! But what if it's none of the ones that humans have come up with, and something totally different? What if it's aggravated by people believing in false gods, but has no "actual" religion of its own for followers to believe? What if it wrote no holy text, but instead tricked people into writing false ones? What if Richard Carrier's End of Pascal's Wager actually is the case?

I don't know.

I don't know, and so I withhold belief. In all of them, and in consciousness after death, and in live on other planets, and in parallel universes, and in any particular version of the maybe-even-not-approaching Singularity, and in a great many other things. Even if there is a supernatural critter, which there may well be, I do not believe in any particular one - and so I am not a theist. Since I am not a theist, that makes me an atheist. I am also an agnostic, because I don't know either way for sure, and so in that way I am an agnostic atheist; moreover, I'm skeptical of anyone who does think they have "all the answers" (or even a great many of them!), and so I am a skeptical agnostic atheist; and I'm a humanist, and a homo sapiens, and a house-renting-type person, and all sorts of other designations. But I am not a theist, for lack of evidence alone. I just don't know which way to go, so I don't go any way on that question. As for ethics, relationships, economics, and so on, well, my views get more complex and my "titles" keep on stacking up. But I am only an atheist because I am not a theist, I am not an atheist because I think I've "disproved God." Nobody can, that's just silly. I just won't believe until I can poke my fingers through some holes like the apostle Thomas.

A quick note on rhetorical gamesmanship before we get to truth. First, some may have noticed that I called cl a rhetorician and described his blogger's statement as platitudinous. I did each of these things for exactly one reason each: I called him a rhetorician because I thought I had discovered that the central motivating factor in his internet activity was honing his argumentative skill, and I called his blogger's statement "platitudinous" because some of his most interesting sentences sounded like platitudes to me. In the first place, I did not mean "rhetorician" as an insult, as I explained to cl in an e-mail; I think it is no bad thing to be concerned with how persuasive one is as a first priority, I think it is only bad if one then does bad things with such a skill. I mean, I want to be persuasive, for cryin' out loud, and so I too am a rhetorician. And in the second place, I was mistaken on the meaning of platitude! I thought "platitudes" were just simple-sounding phrases, more or less, some of which are trite and meaningless and some of which lend quite easily to deep wisdom. But I actually checked just now, and as it turns out, "platitude" only means the former thing (trite and meaningless), whereas I had honestly meant to indicate the latter thing (lending quite easily to deep wisdom). So yeah, foot-in-mouth for the win. Mea culpa!

So yeah, finally, on truth: there are two prevailing theories of truth in philosophical circles, the correspondence theory of truth and the coherence theory of truth. To steal Scotlyn's turn of phrase and boil a whole lot of argy-bargy down to one sentence, "correspondence" means "is the case in reality," and "coherence" means "is consistent with the greater body of true propositions." I couldn't tell you why this is a serious debate if you put a gun to my head, because both are important to me: true things ought to correspond to reality, I think, and true things also ought to cohere with one another. I think if either one of those is lacking, then you don't have truth; and if you can only get one but not both, then any claims to truth are suspect. So when I check to see if something is or is not the case, I'm satisfying the correspondence quotient; when I integrate that bit of knowledge with the rest of my knowledge, I'm roughly checking for coherence. They both matter.

So when I define "knowledge" as "justified true belief," understand that "true" means both "corresponds to reality" and "coheres with other true propositions." So for a claim to be "knowable," to me, means that I have to be able to get a justified true belief out of it. If I don't believe it, I can't be said to know it; if it's not true, then I can think I know it without actually knowing it (and even justify that thought process); and if it's not justified, then I merely believe a true thing without knowing it. That last one's sketchy, so here's a quick example: I've believed that the Earth is round as long as I can remember, but I also remember that I was told so by my teachers and parents. As I began to question my teachers and parents, I found that they were not always right on things (such as math teachers insisting that the French word macabre is pronounced "MACK-uh-bray" and not "muh-KAHB," despite the correction of a seventh-grader such as I was at the time). Yet I never stopped believing that the world was round, even after losing my justification; instead, I learned how Eratosthenes calculated the Earth's circumference while trying to check whether it was round or flat, and so found a better justification.

Sometimes I have had to revise my beliefs based on observations so that they cohere with others, as alluded to above on why "checking" is important. As an easy (and real) example, I used to have many fears and superstitions as a child, some of them based on things I was told by others. I heard from my mom that ending microwave oven cook times in zero (such as 1:30, 2:00, etc.) would result in your food getting burned, so you needed to end cook times in non-zeroes. I don't know why I ever listened, but one day I actually checked by seeing how long cookies took to burn in a microwave, and I found two interesting facts: first, that cookies burn within a few seconds of the same general time, no matter what digit is last when the machine starts cooking; second, that my mom was wrong on this matter. So I wrote off what I thought was a whole bunch of superstitious hogwash along with that, and now we fast-forward to last year when my then-roommate, Amy, tells me that cool water boils faster than warm water, and warm water freezes faster than cool water. I called bullshit, because I had tested many of the superstitious claims I'd gotten from my mom, but then I went and checked: turns out, the Mpemba effect is real!

Sometimes, bullshit-sounding claims are actually true. But you can never know for sure until you check, and you shouldn't believe if you can't check yet.