Category: epistemology

Indifference and the Cosmos

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I am a political independent, though that does not mean that I vote willy-nilly. I have, in fact, been reliably center left for most of my adult life, save one youthfully rebellious moment when I voted Libertarian, more as a statement than a commitment to the principles of libertarianism per se. I regret that vote now, given additional exposure to the party and the kinds of people it attracts. To me, the extremes of the American political system build around radical positions, and the increasingly noxious conspiracy theories and unhinged rhetoric is nothing like the cautious, problem-solving utopia that might make me politically happy, or at least wince less.

Some might claim I am indifferent. I would not argue with that. In the face of revolution, I would require a likely impossible proof of a better outcome before committing. How can we possibly see into such a permeable and contingent future, or weigh the goods and harms in the face of the unknown? This idea of indifference, as a tempering of our epistemic insights, serves as a basis for an essential idea in probabilistic reasoning where it even has the name, the principle of indifference, or, variously, and in contradistinction with Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason, the principle of insufficient reason.

So how does indifference work in probabilistic reasoning? Consider a Bayesian formulation: we inductively guess based on a combination of a priori probabilities combined with a posteriori evidences. What is the likelihood of the next word in an English sentence being “is”? Indifference suggests that we treat each word as likely as any other, but we know straight away that “is” occurs much more often than “Manichaeistic” in English texts because we can count words.… Read the rest

Incompressibility and the Mathematics of Ethical Magnetism

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One of the most intriguing aspects of the current U.S. border crisis is the way that human rights and American decency get articulated in the public sphere of discourse. An initial pull is raw emotion and empathy, then there are counterweights where the long-term consequences of existing policies are weighed against the exigent effects of the policy, and then there are crackpot theories of “crisis actors” and whatnot as bizarro-world distractions. But, if we accept the general thesis of our enlightenment values carrying us ever forward into increasing rights for all, reduced violence and war, and the closing of the curtain on the long human history of despair, poverty, and hunger, we must also ask more generally how this comes to be. Steven Pinker certainly has rounded up some social theories, but what kind of meta-ethics might be at work that seems to push human civilization towards these positive outcomes?

Per the last post, I take the position that we can potentially formulate meaningful sentences about what “ought” to be done, and that those meaningful sentences are, in fact, meaningful precisely because they are grounded in the semantics we derive from real world interactions. How does this work? Well, we can invoke the so-called Cornell Realists argument that the semantics of a word like “ought” is not as flexible as Moore’s Open Question argument suggests. Indeed, if we instead look at the natural world and the theories that we have built up about it (generally “scientific theories” but, also, perhaps “folk scientific ideas” or “developing scientific theories”), certain concepts take on the character of being so-called “joints of reality.” That is, they are less changeable than other concepts and become referential magnets that have an elite status among the concepts we use for the world.… Read the rest

Bolt, Volt, and Tesla: The Experience and Ethics of Electrified Transportation

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I have now owned a triumvirate of electric/hybrid vehicles since 2012. The quest began with a Chevy Volt in 2012 that we still own but that is used by our son in college. I recently worked with him to replace tires and windshield wipers on the vehicle, which is otherwise still rolling along despite a mild fender bender when he slid into another vehicle on a snowy night. The Bolt is the newest member of the grouping, serving as my wife’s daily driver but only accumulating 1500 miles since arriving via flatbed last October. And then there are the Teslas. The first, a Model S P85, was around number 4000 off the Fremont assembly line in early 2013, with the second taking its place in early 2016.

So has it been worth it? Yes, absolutely, but with caveats, operationally and ethically, as you will see.

First, the vehicles have been paired with photovoltaic systems, a 10kW system with microinverters in Cali and now an 8kW system at our remodeled southwestern abode. This helps to offset any concerns that grid electricity may be less clean than modern, high-efficiency gasoline engines.

Second, there is range anxiety. As the name implies, it’s the fear of running out of charge that is just like running out of gas but with far fewer places to recharge than are available in the modern ecosystem of gas stations throughout the nation. Mostly, when doing everyday errand-running and brief trips out of town, range anxiety is not an issue. Freeways are manageable in the Tesla now that superchargers are available for large swaths of the United States, including recent arrivals near the relatively desolate area where I now live.… Read the rest

Zebras with Machine Guns

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I was just rereading some of the literature on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) as a distraction from trying to write too much on ¡Reconquista!, since it looks like I am on a much faster trajectory to finishing the book than I had thought. EAAN is a curious little argument that some have dismissed as a resurgent example of scholastic theology. It has some newer trappings that we see in modern historical method, however, especially in the use Bayes’ Theorem to establish the warrant of beliefs by trying to cast those warrants as probabilities.

A critical part of Plantinga’s argument hinges on the notion that evolutionary processes optimize against behavior and not necessarily belief. Therefore, it is plausible that an individual could hold false beliefs that are nonetheless adaptive. For instance, Plantinga gives the example of a man who desires to be eaten by tigers but always feels hopeless when confronted by a given tiger because he doesn’t feel worthy of that particular tiger, so he runs away and looks for another one. This may seem like a strange conjunction of beliefs and actions that happen to result in the man surviving, but we know from modern psychology that people can form elaborate justifications for perceived events and wild metaphysics to coordinate those justifications.

If that is the case, for Plantinga, the evolutionary consequence is that we should not trust our belief in our reasoning faculties because they are effectively arbitrary. There are dozens of responses to this argument that dissect it from many different dimensions. I’ve previously showcased Branden Fitelson and Elliot Sober’s Plantinga’s Probability Arguments Against Evolutionary Naturalism from 1997, which I think is one of the most complete examinations of the structure of the argument.… Read the rest

Brain Gibberish with a Convincing Heart

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Elon Musk believes that direct brain interfaces will help people better transmit ideas to one another in addition to just allowing thought-to-text generation. But there is a fundamental problem with this idea. Let’s take Hubert Dreyfus’ conception of the way meaning works as being tied to a more holistic view of our social interactions with others. Hilary Putnam would probably agree with this perspective, though now I am speaking for two dead philosphers of mind. We can certainly conclude that my mental states when thinking about the statement “snow is white” are, borrowing from Putnam who borrows from Quine, different from a German person thinking “Schnee ist weiß.” The orthography, grammar, and pronunciation are different to begin with. Then there is what seems to transpire when I think about that statement: mild visualizations of white snow-laden rocks above a small stream for instance, or, just now, Joni Mitchell’s “As snow gathers like bolts of lace/Waltzing on a ballroom girl.” The centrality or some kind of logical ground that merely asserts that such a statement is a propositional truth that is shared in some kind of mind interlingua doesn’t bear much fruit to the complexities of what such a statement entails.

Religious and political terminology is notoriously elastic. Indeed, for the former, it hardly even seems coherent to talk about the concept of supernatural things or events. If they are detectable by any other sense than some kind of unverifiable gnosis, then they are at least natural in that they are manifesting in the observable world. So supernatural imposes a barrier that seems to preclude any kind of discussion using ordinary language. The only thing left is a collection of metaphysical assumptions that, in lacking any sort of reference, must merely conform to the patterns of synonymy, metonymy, and other language games that we ordinarily reserve for discernible events and things.… Read the rest

The Ethics of Knowing

Mark Davis2 Comments

In the modern American political climate, I’m constantly finding myself at sea in trying to unravel the motivations and thought processes of the Republican Party. The best summation I can arrive at involves the obvious manipulation of the electorate—but that is not terrifically new—combined with a persistent avoidance of evidence and facts.

In my day job, I research a range of topics trying to get enough of a grasp on what we do and do not know such that I can form a plan that innovates from the known facts towards the unknown. Here are a few recent investigations:

  • What is the state of thinking about the origins of logic? Logical rules form into broad classes that range from the uncontroversial (modus tollens, propositional logic, predicate calculus) to the speculative (multivalued and fuzzy logic, or quantum logic, for instance). In most cases we make an assumption based on linguistic convention that they are true and then demonstrate their extension, despite the observation that they are tautological. Synthetic knowledge has no similar limitations but is assumed to be girded by the logical basics.
  • What were the early Christian heresies, how did they arise, and what was their influence? Marcion of Sinope is perhaps the most interesting one of these, in parallel with the Gnostics, asserting that the cruel tribal god of the Old Testament was distinct from the New Testament Father, and proclaiming perhaps (see various discussions) a docetic Jesus figure. The leading “mythicists” like Robert Price are invaluable in this analysis (ignore first 15 minutes of nonsense). The thin braid of early Christian history and the constant humanity that arises in morphing the faith before settling down after Nicaea (well, and then after Martin Luther) reminds us that abstractions and faith have a remarkable persistence in the face of cultural change.
… Read the rest

The Dynamics of Dignity

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My wife got a Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Rubicon a few days back. It has necessitated a new education in off-road machinery like locking axles, low 4, and disconnectable sway bars. It seemed the right choice for our reinsertion into New Mexico, a land that was only partially accessible by cheap, whatever-you-can-afford, vehicles twenty years ago when we were grad students. So we had to start driving random off-road locations and found Faulkner’s Canyon in the Robledos. Billy the Kid used this area as a refuge at one point and we searched out his hidey-hole this morning but ran out of LTE coverage and couldn’t confirm the specific site until returning from our adventure. We will try another day!

Billy the Kid was, of course, a killer of questionable moral standing.

With the Neil Gorsuch nomination to SCOTUS, his role in the legal and moral philosophies surrounding assisted suicide has come under scrutiny. In everyday discussions, the topic often centers on the notion of dignity for the dying. Indeed, the autonomy of the person (and with it some assumption of rational choice) combines with a consideration of alternatives to the human-induced death based on pain, discomfort, loss of physical or mental faculties, and also the future-looking speculation about these possibilities.

Now I combined legal and moral in the same sentence because that is also one way to consider the way in which law is or ought to be formulated. But, in fact, one can also claim that the two don’t need to overlap; law can exist simply as a system of rules that does not include moral repercussions and, if the two have a similar effect on behavior, it is merely a happenstance.… Read the rest

Desire and Other Matters

Mark DavisLeave a comment

“What matters?” is a surprisingly interesting question. I think about it constantly since it weighs-in whenever plotting future choices, though often I seem to be more autopilot than consequentialist in these conceptions. It is an essential first consideration when trying to value one option versus another. I can narrow the question a bit to “what ideas matter?” This immediately externalizes the broad reality of actions that meaningfully improve lives, like helping others, but still leaves a solid core of concepts that are valued more abstractly. Does the traditional Western liberal tradition really matter? Do social theories? Are less intellectually-embellished virtues like consistency and trust more relevant and applicable than notions like, well, consequentialism?

Maybe it amounts to how to value certain intellectual systems against others?

Some are obviously more true than others. So “dowsing belief systems” are less effective in a certain sense than “planetary science belief systems.” Yet there are a broader range of issues at work.

But there are some areas of the liberal arts that have a vexing relationship with the modern mind. Take linguistics. The field ranges from catalogers of disappearing languages to theorists concerned with how to structure syntactic trees. Among the latter are the linguists who have followed Noam Chomsky’s paradigm that explains language using a hierarchy of formal syntactic systems, all of which feature recursion as a central feature. What is interesting is that there have been very few impacts of this theory. It is very simple at its surface: languages are all alike and involve phrasal groups that embed in deep hierarchies. The specific ways in which the phrases and their relative embeddings take place may differ among languages, but they are alike in this abstract way.… Read the rest

Subtly Motivating Reasoning

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larson-sheepContinuing on with the general theme of motivated reasoning, there are some rather interesting results reported in New Republic, here. Specifically, Ian Anson from University of Maryland, Baltimore County, found that political partisans reinforced their perspectives on the state of the U.S. economy more strongly when they were given “just the facts” rather than a strong partisan statement combined with the facts. Even when the partisan statements aligned with their own partisan perspectives, the effect held.

The author concludes that people, in constructing their views of the causal drivers of the economy, believe that they are unbiased in their understanding of the underlying mechanisms. The barefaced partisan statements interrupt that construction process, perhaps, or at least distract from it. Dr. Anson points out that subtly manufacturing consent therefore makes for better partisan fellow travelers.

There are a number of theories concerning how meanings must get incorporated into our semantic systems, and whether the idea of meaning itself is as good or worse than simply discussing reference. More, we can rate or gauge the uncertainty we must have concerning complex systems. They seem to form a hierarchy, with actors in our daily lives and the motivations of those we have long histories with in the mostly-predictable camp. Next we may have good knowledge about a field or area of interest that we have been trained in. When this framework has a scientific basis, we also rate our knowledge as largely reliable, but we also know the limits of that knowledge. It is in predictive futures and large-scale policy that we become subject to the difficulty of integrating complex signals into a cohesive framework. The partisans supply factoids and surround them with causal reasoning.… Read the rest

Euhemerus and the Bullshit Artist

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trump-minotaurSailing down through the Middle East, past the monuments of Egypt and the wild African coast, and then on into the Indian Ocean, past Arabia Felix, Euhemerus came upon an island. Maybe he came upon it. Maybe he sailed. He was perhaps—yes, perhaps; who can say?—sailing for Cassander in deconstructing the memory of Alexander the Great. And that island, Panchaea, held a temple of Zeus with a written history of the deeds of men who became the Greek gods.

They were elevated, they became fixed in the freckled amber of ancient history, their deeds escalated into myths and legends. And, likewise, the ancient tribes of the Levant brought their El and Yah-Wah, and Asherah and Baal, and then the Zoroastrians influenced the diaspora in refuge in Babylon, until they returned and had found dualism, elemental good and evil, and then reimagined their origins pantheon down through monolatry and into monotheism. These great men and women were reimagined into something transcendent and, ultimately, barely understandable.

Even the rational Yankee in Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court realizes almost immediately why he would soon rule over the medieval world as he is declared a wild dragon when presented to the court. He waits for someone to point out that he doesn’t resemble a dragon, but the medieval mind does not seem to question the reasonableness of the mythic claims, even in the presence of evidence.

So it goes with the human mind.

And even today we have Fareed Zakaria justifying his use of the term “bullshit artist” for Donald Trump. Trump’s logorrhea is punctuated by so many incomprehensible and contradictory statements that it becomes a mythic whirlwind. He lets slip, now and again, that his method is deliberate:

DT: Therefore, he was the founder of ISIS.

… Read the rest