Superstition, reason and happiness...
So yes, happy new year, and so on. Despite it no longer being particularly new. Or happy. I did think about writing a review of the year, but I did that gag last year. Then I pondered turning my hand to futurology, but realised the futility of that gesture - either a collection of grandiose, but pointless pronouncements, or, even worse, a "2006 Perspectives" document, written as though by the Central Committee of some small Trotskyist group. So no, let's avoid that too. Let us, instead, go back to our favourite themes - rationality, superstition and religion.
On television tonight, the ever-excellent Richard Dawkins presented a programme entitled "Root of all evil" giving us his arguments why society can never progress sensibly with religion, since there will always be people unwilling to compromise what they "know" to be the truth, that revealed to them, and them alone, by God. Generally, of course, that they are God's chosen people, and that everyone else is unworthy to share the planet with them. So far, so uncontroversial.
He did say one interesting thing early on, though, raising a point I've thought about quite a lot, and had several discussions on, generally after a lot of beer. In a pub. Late at night. His proposition, stated without comment: that it is better to accept a harsh truth than a comforting lie. Hmmm. Is it? On what moral obligation do I need to accept the truth, if falsehood makes me happy? If I were capable of abandoning reason to such an extent that I could accept I had some imaginary friend who would look after me, so long as I did what I thought he told me, and would make everything better after I died, why shouldn't I believe that? It sounds nice. Or, to take matters on step further, if I could have a lobotomy, turning me into a drooling idiot, but a happy idiot, would it be worth taking?
I think there are several problems with this. The first one is the practical argument. How do I know I would be happy? Real life isn't a thought experiment. But surely there's a better answer than that? I think the answer comes down to the meaning of life. To live a good (ha!) life. We need to give ourselves some purpose, surely some of which would be to help others live happier lives. And, no matter how comforting the lie may be, it won't help other people improve their lives. You can't feed the starving of the world if you base your agricultural principles on falsehoods, for instance. The only way we can really make the world a better place is to understand it properly. And why is it incumbent upon me to make the world a better place? Well, it isn't. But we do need some purpose to our lives. Otherwise we may as well give up. So we carry on. Battling for reason and rationality over superstition and the comforting lie. Maybe it isn't worth it, but what else can we do?
On television tonight, the ever-excellent Richard Dawkins presented a programme entitled "Root of all evil" giving us his arguments why society can never progress sensibly with religion, since there will always be people unwilling to compromise what they "know" to be the truth, that revealed to them, and them alone, by God. Generally, of course, that they are God's chosen people, and that everyone else is unworthy to share the planet with them. So far, so uncontroversial.
He did say one interesting thing early on, though, raising a point I've thought about quite a lot, and had several discussions on, generally after a lot of beer. In a pub. Late at night. His proposition, stated without comment: that it is better to accept a harsh truth than a comforting lie. Hmmm. Is it? On what moral obligation do I need to accept the truth, if falsehood makes me happy? If I were capable of abandoning reason to such an extent that I could accept I had some imaginary friend who would look after me, so long as I did what I thought he told me, and would make everything better after I died, why shouldn't I believe that? It sounds nice. Or, to take matters on step further, if I could have a lobotomy, turning me into a drooling idiot, but a happy idiot, would it be worth taking?
I think there are several problems with this. The first one is the practical argument. How do I know I would be happy? Real life isn't a thought experiment. But surely there's a better answer than that? I think the answer comes down to the meaning of life. To live a good (ha!) life. We need to give ourselves some purpose, surely some of which would be to help others live happier lives. And, no matter how comforting the lie may be, it won't help other people improve their lives. You can't feed the starving of the world if you base your agricultural principles on falsehoods, for instance. The only way we can really make the world a better place is to understand it properly. And why is it incumbent upon me to make the world a better place? Well, it isn't. But we do need some purpose to our lives. Otherwise we may as well give up. So we carry on. Battling for reason and rationality over superstition and the comforting lie. Maybe it isn't worth it, but what else can we do?
20 Comments:
Loved your progression from 'imaginary friend' to 'lobotomy'. "A good point well made!".
Hi Puskas, and Happy New Entry!
I thoroughly applaud your scepticism regarding "revealed" religion and tend to agree with you on the value of truth, although I would contend that this is not merely instrumental (i.e. valuable merely because it helps people). Even if it hindered them, some description of "truth" is the end-point of all striving after knowledge - by defiinition - and valuable per se.
However, after Kant and especially in the light of the physics of the Copenhagen school, any claim to knowledge of the world beyond our experiences is over-ambitious, not to say altogether misplaced. The ontological scope of any "truths" we can describe is necessarily, and severely, limited.
The story of modern thought is the absence of any real meta-narratives which might serve as "truth criteria", even despite the success of modern science in providing an expedient (and highly successful) method to predict certain regularities in our everyday experience. At potentially cost as far as "helping" the species goes, I might add!
Erratum: that should say "huge cost" in the last sentence.
So, Neil, what is the point of striving after truth? You suggest that it is valuable "per se", without saying why. I maintain that a perfectly reasonable question is, "Why should I be interested in truth if I can be happier without it?" You don't even seem to think that's a valid question.
I will answer the rest of your points tomorrow, when I am more sober...
Merely by labelling it "truth", you make it seem like something inherently worth striving after, a bit like (under some broad definition) "happiness". These are generally seen as worthwhile things, and the logical end-points for certian types of enterprise.
Of course, one might ask "why should I strive after truth?" but it does seem bizarre if it's actually *knowledge* that you're after, rather than a comfortable fiction.
If you tell me, "I prefer to construct a fiction", that's a coherent point of view. But you're acknowledging it as fiction. The problem is, religious people actually consider that their belief system is "true". Sometimes they argue for different truth criteria from the normally applicable scientific ones.
In fact, there is no such entity as "the truth" or even "truths". It's a linguistic fog.
By labelling a statement "true", we are endorsing it and saying that it's intrinsically valuable because it accords, demonstrably, with how the world appears to be - after investigation. It is, by definition, what one ought to believe. No contest.
In the same way, to call something a lie is to condemn it. (Obviously, lies can have instrumental value - manipulating people being the main one.)
Other values may compete against the value of describing things as they appear: keeping yourself (or others) happy, for example, or dominating them. But the onus is always on the liar to explain why, unless lying has become ingrained.
Oh. I make a remark about wondering why it's better to be right than happy, or even if it is, and I get some extreme anti-realist on my back.
So first things first. Kant. He didn't merely point out the futility of claiming knowledge of the noumenal, he showed how even trying to talk of it was meaningless. This, when followed through in a religious way, leads to a sensible agnosticism - a belief that god is not knowable, and a sensible atheism - a lack of belief in the existence of god. Marvellous. All well and good. It doesn't follow from this that "truth" is a "linguistic fog". The concept of truth is relatively straightforward - a proposition can be said to be true if and only if the entities refered to by the proposition are in the relations to each other specified by the proposition. To use words like "endorse" and "condemn" imply that your personal preferences have some bearing on relations in the world. All many of things occur which I condemn, and yet I utter truths concerning them.
Actually, I think you'll find Kant was a theist! In fact, following Kant, you should arrive at a healthy scepticism regarding truth claims about the external world as divorced from our perceptions.
You are wrong in calling me an anti-realist. Not only do I explicitly acknowledge the success of the scientific enterprise; I also said that 'true' statements (i.e. in accord with empirical 'reality' post-investigation) are the only legitimate goal of seeking actual knowledge (rather than any old explanatory myth).
I claim a special status for this kind of 'truth' over lies or myth, taking issue with your original blog, which seemed to say it was only valuable to the extent that it helped people.
The 'linguistic fog' is merely the misledaing use of the noun 'truth' to conjure up misleadingly an entity, or entities. Calling something 'true' should be recognised as endorsing that statement with a special value, one that puts the onus of proof on the challenger.
Scientific (falsifiable) 'truth' is the best we have - if it's knowledge of the world we're after. Where Kant comes into it is that he forces us to recognise the limits of our knowledge of the world beyond our perceptions. Though I am not expert enough to comment in detail, I believe that modern physics also acknowledges the role of the observer in descriptions of 'reality'.
New point:
A cultured person should also recognise different species of truths, not falsifiable - because they come from a different field of human endeavour.
e.g. "For them that must obey authority,
That they do not respect in any degree,
Who despise their jobs, their destinies,
Speak jealously of them that are free,
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something they invest in."
I chose this entirely at random to illustrate another kind of truth, artistic truth.
You say: "a proposition can be said to be true if and only if the entities refered to by the proposition are in the relations to each other specified by the proposition." Even if it fails this criterion, I think the full lyric (certainly not fiction or a lie) is 'true', but in a different way. Because it accords with how the world seems to be - after investigation.
Certain religious texts may offer yet another. Buddhist texts deliberately use paradox when describing mystical experience, precisely to make the point that a different kind of experience is being dealt with.
I know Kant was a theist. He just shouldn't have been, if he'd have thought it through, properly.
And I wasn't saying truth didn't have a special status, I was thinking from a personal perspective - why is it inherently better to be right than happy? Other than, "It just is..."
The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics isn't universally accepted. Try reading Murray Gel-Mann's "The Quark and The Jaguar".
You're right about Kant. If he was radically agnostic about noumena, why not about God? This is precisely the problem of the religious mindset. No one goes around saying, "Look mate - I know I'm deluding myself about all this God and afterlife stuff, but it just makes me feel good, so get out of my hair." The process must surely be unconscious (though I sometimes wonder how it is possible) - they use muddy arguments about Faith, ot insist that the truth criterion is being backed by some old text.
It is better to be right than merely happy. (The essence of the argument against 'mere' happiness is well illustrated in Brave New World.) It's just that everyone thinks they're right!
I can't comment on physics, but I am genuinely puzzled by the idea, which I have heard a lot in layman's philosophy and physics books, that there is no metanarrative (in the former) i.e. no common assumptions at all and (in the latter) that the observer's consciousness somehow participates in the outcome of experiments. (Schroedinger's Cat and all that.) I have not made up my mind about the philosophical issue, but it is unsettling.
Puzzling, I mean. Paradigm-busting.
I'm curious. On three seperate occasions "the Truth" has been equated with "being right" (twice by Pushkas and once by Neil). I don't see the immediate philosophical connection, neither do I see an actual linguistic connection. 'Truth' in English comes from "Troth" which is Old Germanic for Oath or Faith, while "Right" is a legal term (again, Germanic 'Recht'). The connection between being "Right" and it being "True" is a socio-linguistic one (see Watkins, Dumezil, et all on the linguistics side, a large body of philosophical work [Kant and Hegel onward] exists trying to tease out this relationship.) I think if one is going to ask the question "Why should I strive after truth?", we ought to have somewhat of a grounding of what we are asking. As it stands the question appears more as "Why should I strive after X?"
Thanks Neil for passing on Pushkas page!
Exactly so. To restate the question then: Puskas is asking why we should strive after a particular kind of belief system. Belief system A is a set of internally consistent statements which appear to describe the phenomenal world accurately - after investigation. Belief system B is one which is, let's say, colourful and comforting, and contains entities for which there is no evidence in the phenomenal world of their existence. e.g. The original Santa Claus!
My initial argument was that, prima facie, belief system A is inherently more valuable because, when it comes to beliefs, their appearing to describe the world accurately just IS the criterion for value, just as sharpness is the crierion for a 'good' knife.
The problem, however, is that everyone, apart from hardcore ant-realists and Romantics, pretty much thinks their belief system is of this type.
So we have to fall back on asking: is the scientific method a valid one for determining whether a belief could belong to such a system? And this forces us to consider the whole, puzzling, idea of 'metanarratives'. Is science just one - highly successful, it must be said - coherent belief system Type A among many? (This is the idea that there are no metanarratives.) Or is its method the sole arbiter of which beliefs can belong to a Type A system?
(Paradigm shifts are no objection to the validity of science, it should be noted, as they are ultimately testable by its method, whether or not they come in flashes of inspiration.)
I think that Neil, at the end of his summation, points out an interesting event, the collapsing of the (to use his terms) Belief System A into/with belief system B. While it is relatively easy to disparage competing belief systems, it is often more difficult to discover what ideological tools these systems develop (and perhaps ultimately corrupt). A problem would appear to be (and Scientism is as guilty of this as Christianity) when the system becomes totalizing and as such can *only* interpret phenomena within the structure and language of its own framework. At this point the system shudders and attempts to block out or navigate around the phenomena that clearly extends beyond the borders of the system. The clearest case of this in Science is with quantuum theory and the Large Scale Structure of the Universe (SIMPs/WIMPs, etc.) in which the phenomena simply do not conform to scientific theory (this research continues a line of Einsteinian and Schroedinger's analyses). /Truth/, whatever that may be, seems to be somewhere in-between being universal and relative, something which philosophy (especially Anglo-American) finds highly discomforting.
When the phenomena don't conform, it leads to a paradigm shift. People are conditioned to seek out an explanation that 'fits' all the phenomena. Isn't this just evolution of the Type A system?
You'll sometimes find truth when you're least expecting it.
I wouldn't say that this is so much a matter of a Type A system, or any other "Type" (I am thinking here of Russell) as these are epistemological questions. In other words, replacement of a Type is infenitely recursive if you the value you are replacing is broad enough. At which point "Truth" fails to actually be a metaphysical entity and is instead an epistemological category.
This is the point I was driving at earlier when I mentioned labelling something as 'true'. The question of evaluation of particular beliefs remains. Some beliefs are valid within the current paradigm (we say that they're true); others have the weight of evidence against them (we label them false.)
There is a third category, beliefs about God, gods, morality, aesthetics, etc that we must pass over in silence, right? Or else enter a different - not strictly epistemological - language game? (Please correct my sketchy knowledge of Wittgenstein.)
Does the postmodern idea of multiple truths apply to the third category only?
Neil,
As far as I can tell you've got your Wittgenstein right, although I am certainly not a Wittgenstein specialist and prefer the later rather than early Wittgenstein. In regards to PoMo-ism. Hmmm. Well, strictly speaking that questions would be unanswerable. :) Basically, those authors who are typically lumped into the PoMo category would strictly reject the idea of a Type in this way. So-called "Post-modernism" is strongly rooted in two traditions, Phenomenology and Philosophy of Language (via Post-structuralism). Because of this, PMism is highly skeptical of any form of categorization, even moreso when it comes to describing phenomena and ontical (think "object oriented") and ontilogical entities. The "PoMo" approach would be to approach the epistemology from within the system itself and to see how well the system's own epistemology maps onto the phenomenal world (typically through hermeneutics and "close-readings"). Derrida is very good at this and can often find the subtle ways in which the system will collapse itself internally due to inconsistency in its own stated epistemology. This is the first part of "Differance" (i.e. to differ; the second part being 'to defer').
Sorry to hog up comment space...
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