Tag Archives: philosophy

Before We Leave Descartes

13 Monday Jan 2014

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One of the classes I took was on skepticism.  In that class we really dove into Descarte’s notion that we could be dreaming or deceived by a “deceiver god.”   We even took the idea further, that we are just a brain in a vat that some evil genius on a far away planet is tweaking to give us the ideas we have about our whole life.    How do we know this isn’t happening?  If we don’t know this is not happening then can we know anything about the external world?

I took this problem seriously with my oath to follow logic.  I was sure I would be able to solve such a fundamental problem which threw into doubt so much of what we take for granted.    But in following that oath to logic I had to admit in the end that we really have no evidence to think it is not happening.

Several very intelligent people took a stab at it.   For example could we presume that because things seem coherent over and over therefore perhaps they are.  Again and again I walk on a floor and don’t fall through so that means it’s solid.   Sadly, that doesn’t work because the evil genius could just give us that thought that things are the way they are.  Every time we walk through a wall as in a poorly programed computer game, he might just have us forget it or give us the thought that it was only a dream.  He might just be tweaking the brain to force the belief that we the world is coherent even though it’s not.

Another writer basically proposed that what we perceived even if it is the product of an evil genius is actual reality.  But that is just believing the shadows on the wall from Plato’s allegory of the cave is reality.   There were several other attempts and failures along the way.

Some people might think wracking your brain over such issues is just a waste of time.  But I strongly disagree.   I did not learn that I could start walking in front of buses because maybe it was just a dream, but that does not mean I didn’t learn anything.    I think I learned a lot from the experience.

1)    That we live in an uncertain reality and we just need to deal with it as best we can.

2)    That even science which is based on empirical evidence (perceptions) is based on assumptions that have no evidence to support them.  That does not mean I am anti-science.  I am not anti-science.

3)    That to a certain extent we are captive to our beliefs/mind.  In that we can’t really step outside our beliefs/mind to objectively examine them.

4)    I also learned allot about what it means to “know” something.       And in relation to this problem I realized that we don’t need to know we know something to know it.

The traditional understanding of knowledge is this:

Subject, S, knows proposition, P, if and only if:

1)    P is true

2)    S believes P

And

3)    S has sufficient reason to believe p.

In later blogs we will get back to this definition, how it was refuted by a philosopher named Gettier, and how Robert Nozick tried to revitalize it.  Nozick’s ideas are important for a key argument made by another philosopher on a very different and important issue.   But this blog is long enough already so I will just end it with the traditional definition.

Explanations and their Logical Baggage

06 Monday Jan 2014

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Before Darwin nonbelievers had more difficulty explaining how we came to be here. Darwin’s theory of natural selection filled out an explanation. By and large this has been viewed as helpful to the atheist’s position. But when you start attaching explanations you start making affirmative claims. And once you start making claims you open yourself up to the possibility of logical inconsistency.

For example, Christians explain certain qualities God has: Omnipotent, Omniscient, Creator of everything, Good through and through etc. Doing this opened them up to the argument concerning the problem of evil. I think there are valid ways around the problem of evil but there can be no question that this problem was created because Christians offered explanations of what God is. Having the problem of evil to contend with is logical baggage from the claims that God has these attributes. If Christians just continued to shrug when asked if God was all knowing, all powerful, etc then they wouldn’t have this problem.

So now the atheist no longer just shrugs when the theists ask how we came exist. They have an explanation of how humans could come about from other life without God. On the surface it seems good for them. But when we start to understand what that process is we start to see that problems can arise.

I think Descartes was anticipating problems long before Darwin. He noticed that to the extent one were to say we are the product of something less than a perfect being then we would have more reason to suspect the reliability of our beliefs:

“Some, indeed, might perhaps be found who would be disposed rather to deny the existence of a Being so powerful [God] than to believe that there is nothing certain. But let us for the present refrain from opposing this opinion, and grant that all which is here said of a Deity is fabulous: nevertheless, in whatever way it be supposed that I reach the state in which I exist, whether by fate, or chance, or by an endless series of antecedents and consequents, or by any other means, it is clear that the probability of my being so imperfect as to be the constant victim of deception, will be increased exactly in proportion as the power possessed by the cause, to which they assign my origin, is lessened.”

It is clear this concern was not baggage from natural selection since Descartes wrote this over 200 years before Origin of the Species was published. But it clearly anticipates logical problems that any unbeliever will face. What baggage natural selection actually creates with respect to the reliability of our beliefs will be the topic of several of these blogs.

End Note: I should clarify that by “natural selection” I mean “natural selection and naturalism” – ie, no God. However, there is no reason to think that Christians can’t understand that they have evolved from a system along the lines of natural selection any more than we need to deny that we came about from the interaction of sperm and egg. Some people would want to claim it is incompatible with Christianity due to randomness natural selection presupposes. But really there are all sorts of things that are random to us but not to God and Christians always understood God might be acting in the world in ways we don’t know. This would including which sperm reaches which egg. So, natural selection really raises nothing new.

True and Rational

05 Sunday Jan 2014

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Rational:
What is rational is subject to a bit more controversy than how truth is understood. Accordingly I am just going to gloss over some ideas that I tend to believe about what it means to be rational.

First I think I would distinguish the irrationality of people who are insane. It seems to me that this sort of irrationality is beyond the person’s control. We are trying to be rational. To the extent we are trying to become rational we to some extent believe we have some control over this. Indeed I would say that an important part of being rational is recognizing what is beyond our control and acting accordingly.
I also tend to think of being rational in terms of game theory. That is make rational or irrational choices. This I think can extend to what beliefs we hold – to the extent we can choose them.
So just a quick outline of what it means to be rational would be:
1) Not be illogical
2) Not be overly concerned with things beyond your control
3) Make choices based on analysis of the risks and benefits of your alternatives
4) Rational people tend not to go on emotion.

Some people will notice that I do not include Clifford’s claim “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” Frankly this claim has always seemed self-defeating and therefore in violation of the first principle I outlined – don’t be illogical.

That is, I do not have sufficient evidence to believe “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence” and so believing that principle would violate it.

This is just an off the cuff outline. Perhaps we could add some other concepts to this outline. For example I think rational people consider evidence for and against their position. But I think to the extent there is a difference between being “rational” and being “reasonable” I would say that belongs more along the lines of being reasonable, but think it could fit here as well. And the terms reasonable and being rational are very close anyway.