Socrates would hate self-help

At the birth of Western philosophy lies Socrates who preached that, ‘the unexamined life is not worth living.’ As philosophy has continued to develop from traditions largely put forth by this man—fallibilism, philosophy as a critical dialogue, and a need to understand and question the concepts we take for granted—it has in an important sense moved away from the examined life. This is very unfortunate.

So concerned with fundamental truths about the world and about human nature (and as it should be) philosophy has evolved almost a distaste for the personal. Even ethical and political theories only touch upon what could be considered guidance. They dampen their feet at the pool but don’t dive in.

There will on trend be more talk of what an individual owes society, than what you owe your friend, or your family member, or your lover, or your colleague. Philosophy is more interested in what counts as knowledge, then how one makes discoveries. Whether happiness is a value is of more interest than if there are good or bad ways to be happy and if so what they are.

These questions are less fundamental, but they are still very general and very important question about humans and about reality, and so they are undoubtedly philosophical.

I suppose the assumption for many of these more personal matters is that they belong more to the realm of psychology. Discovery is psychology. Happiness is psychology. Healthy relationships are psychology. Particularly self-help gets given a lot of these questions. But it would be a mistake to think that Socrates examined life lives on in psychology and self-help.

The problem with putting these questions in this domain is that we don’t get deep enough answers.  Self-help is very subjective. The individual isn’t so much searching for truth as identifying their current goals and reorganising a few mistaken methods to arrive at those goal. Socrates would disapprove.

Socrates would want to question our goals and learn about why some of them were in error. Socrates would want to question if we should even have goals. Socrates would want to scan through and examine as close to every thought and assumption motivating every single piece of the puzzle on the table. (at least the spirit of Socrates would, whether the man himself was capable of doing this is a difficult question given we can't even guarantee he ever existed). 

Self help is just too lazy for this end. Self-help mirrors the guru style of Eastern philosophy. Western philosophy can do better. And so I pledge: let us bring the examined life into the world of high standard truth seeking of western philosophy.  

  

The Induction Myth

Induction has been held in high regard as the spirit of scientific enquiry. Science is in the business of going from the known to the unknown, and indeed, these are the kind of inferences that are what we mean by induction. 

We have, for instance, general relativity, a theory that gravitation is a geometric property of spacetime. This is ‘unknowable’, but as an explanation fits with ‘known’ data most strongly, such as the observed light deflection during the Eddington Eclipse. Similarly, biological variation (known) supports evolution (unknown). Hubble-type expansion (known) supports the big bang (unknown). And so on and so on. 

On the other hand, however, we have the rather concerning news that induction is unreliable!

Russell famously asked us to imagine a chicken that noticed every day the farmer came and fed him like clockwork. The chicken therefore assumed the farmer must be a benevolent man, and predicted he would continue to bring food every day. According to an inductive line of thinking, the chicken had ‘extrapolated’ observations into a theory, and each feeding time added further justification. Until one day, the farmer came and wrung the chicken’s neck. 

How can it be that induction cannot be justified as being reliable, and yet it reliably gets such great results for us in science? 

This apparent dichotomy is the essence of the 'problem of induction', however, it is based on an equivocation.

Notice that the kind of induction that Russell (and incidentally other critics of induction) are referring to, is what can be known as 'more of the same' type inferences. e.g. if the sun has always risen, it will continue to rise. It's this expectation that reality is uniform that is in error.

When I referred earlier to certain prized theories in science that go from the known to the unknown, however, they were not more of the same type inferences. They were a different kind of 'going from the known to the unknown', one where the unknown is the best explanation for the known (this is called inference to the best explanation). In fact, look to any prized scientific theory and I suggest you will on trend find this kind of inference.

They are called narrow induction (more of the same type inferences) and broad induction (inference to the best explanation).

Through our distinction then we can dissolve the dichotomy. Narrow induction bears inconsistent and unreliable results, but it is not needed by science. We can throw it out and it appears we can do fine with broad induction alone.

Now, I may here appear to abandon an expectation of uniformity too quickly. What about laws of nature such as 'all copper conducts electricity' surely here narrow induction has it's place? But no. The scientific explanation for why copper conducts electricity is that we have a theory that copper contains electrons, which is evident in its physical characteristics. This too is broad induction.

I purpose that the importance of narrow induction is nothing but a myth, kept alive by nothing more than an equivocation  Let's be done with it and give the credit where it's due.

Kant on the good of monogamous marriage

Kant thought that the only way for two people to have sexual relationships without the risk of reducing themselves to objects was if they were in a monogamous marriage.

The risk of becoming an object lies in the use of sex to satisfy an appetite. Basically, you are using a person as a means and not an end in itself. But in a monogamous marriage, Kant supposed, the way in which two people surrender themselves to one another is equal, and thus no one is asked to surrender more and so no one is victimised.

This strikes me as curious. Surely the greatest respect you can give a person in regards to treating them as an end, and not merely a means to your own purposes, is to honour their autonomy. And yet a monogamous marriage requires great sacrifices of ones autonomy! It is now someone else's business how you conduct your life. You're personal relationships are constrained by the whims of your spouse. You are in a very literal sense 'sharing your life with someone'.

Imagined and True

Consider for a moment computer programming. The program is just made up. There is a sense in which it's not 'real'. You could call it a kind of 'abstract engineering'.

Put it like this: When one engineers a physical machine, they're limited by what is possible given the resources. A software engineer is only really limited by human imagination.

But this difference between what one can create with physical resources and what one can create with imagination isn't as fundamental as it might at first appear.

Consider yourself looking up at the night sky and viewing a star. The physical constraint on your resources, as a biological being, mean that what you see is a small, slightly sparkly dot just above you. But you know that really it's not small, not sparkly, and not particular in 'your' sky. Instead it's a gigantic sphere of plasma held together by gravity at an immense distance from you. Just like the computer program, we are having to image that this is what the star is, because we don't see it that way.

Now, you could at this point try to draw a distinction between imagining what stars are into existence and imagining a software program into existence. You could say that the star is *really there*, and it's only a limitation of our human situation that we see it as a small dot in the sky. But the computer software is really there, too. If one programs it, it will 'be'. It might not 'be' at the moment, but actually neither is the star. The star used to exist, but doesn't any more.

'Being' at a particular moment is not a necessary quality of  something being true. The difference between the star that was and the program that will be is trivial, they are both really there, albeit at different points in time, and we can know about both through explanatory theories of the world.

ONE CAN DISCOVER SOMETHING THAT ONE FIRST HAS TO CREATE.

Why Do We Need Science?

In The Beginning of Infinity David Deutsch writes that no one would have ever wondered what stars are if there hadn't been expectations that unsupported things fall, and that light needs fuel which will eventually run out. Both of which made stars rather curious.

Why do we need science in the first place? This is the first question we should ask in ascertaining a philosophy of science. The answer is already familiar to us. We need science because we have explanations about how the world works and we know many of them are wrong.

If the explanation of physical phenomena were evidence in their appearance, as empiricism suggests, we would know things pretty easily. Science arises precisely because it is hard to explain the world. Or, more accurately, because it is hard for us to explain the world.

Deutsch writes about the scientific revolution being born out of a time where dogmatic, weak explanations gave way to critical search for strong, hard to vary explanations.

What does 'hard/easy to vary' mean?

People once accepted myths and these explanations were such that it was of no real consequence if you varied their details. For example, the ancient Greek myth explaining the weather stated that winter was caused by Hades, long ago, kidnapping the goddess of spring, Persephone. Persephone's mother negotiated a deal where Hades would let her go, but under the agreement that she would eat a magic seed that would compel her to still visit him once a year. This is fundamentally different to the tight explanations that we associate with science. Why a magic seed and not another kind of magic? This is a detail that could be changed. Likewise, it could be that her father made the deal. It could be that she visits once a year to get her revenge on Hades. Or he is obsessed and kidnaps her every year. They could even easily be different gods entirely. 

Scientific explanations, are hard to vary.   

When philosophy of science became prominent in the early 20th century it was in part to do with how impressed people were by science. There was an idea that it served some kind of noble function, and served it with unusual reliability. The philosophers were not interested because their passions lay with science, particularly, but because they wanted to know if there was anything philosophy could learn about itself. And indeed they were right. Science does serve a noble function. It is not just that we have expectations, and the world will occasional disagree with them by having things like stars not fall to the ground, science is important because we have a history of accepting our expectations and ignoring the problems with them. As Deutsch illuminates, science began when we stopped making it so easy to fool ourselves--when we began a trend of looking for problems and creating hard to vary explanations.

Karl Popper sums up why we need science:

“Science, one might be tempted to say, is nothing but enlightened and responsible common-sense—common-sense broadened by imaginative critical thinking. But it is more. It represents our wish to know, our hope of emancipating ourselves from ignorance of the expert, the narrow-mindedness of the specialist, or the fear of being proven wrong, or of being proved 'inexact', or having failed to prove or justify our case. And it includes the superstitious belief in the authority of science itself”

Most philosophies of science time and time again get this wrong. They treat science as almost obvious. Empiricists describe science as being something you can quite easily read in nature. Even more common is to treat scientific theories as easy to verify. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is for: to challenge what we think is obvious about reality.

(For more on the theme I recommend chapter one of Beginning of Infinity and Realism and the Aim of Science by Karl Popper).

We Created Civilisation, Not Evolution

I have heard it suggested that what makes us so special as a species is our ability to empathise. That it is only because of this that we get civilisation. After all, how could civilisation work without the ability to imagine how others feel?

Implying that civilisation is a logical consequence of empathy is paramount to saying we evolved to have civilisation. But the truth is we are not evolved to be part of civilisation at all. It is something we created, and empathy has little to do with how.

The way we evolved was to be part of a much smaller group known as a band. Large enough to haunt, small enough to feed. This is typical of mammals. It was this way for us for millions of years before we created civilisation. Civilisation is relatively new. Something we created in the last 12 thousand or so years.

It began with the agricultural revolution, also known as the neolithic revolution.

There was a time when we moved from eating grass to eating meat, because eating meat took less work for more energy. This was an evolutionary change. But once the ice age was over with, we were freed up to turn our creativity to take a stab at working on the work-energy problem ourselves, and here farming began.

There are still tribes around today that live similarly to how we did when all lived in bands. They live under conditions where a baby being born a girl and not a boy can endanger all the bands futures if she is not killed. Farming meant we could facilitate large number, and so this sort of thing was less of a problem. And as the numbers got larger, trade became possible.

Through the continued invention of new technologies to facilitate trade and farming we could, in turn facilitate continually more people. As time passed entire villages and towns were born, and by this point, we were inventing not only new technologies to help facilitate the numbers, but ideas on how to govern, such as religions, moralities, and law and order.

All of this--how we trade, what technologies we had, what ideas we had on how to govern--continued to improve, and as they did villages became empires. Today we live in a global village of billions. It is nothing evolution could have ever created. Civilisation required the rapid and innovative adaptivity of human creativity alone. And we are not done.

One day, chances are, as our ideas on how to govern and our technologies only continue to make progress we will move out into space and be able to facilitate trillions. This is preventable only if we stop making progress.

It's true that civilisation is a unique thing to people, but it is not the fundenental things that is special about us, it is one of many thing, all having their roots in our unique capacity to imagine, not just what others may be feeling, but anything.

To create. To solve problems.

(For more on this theme I highly recommend Jacob Bronowski's Ascent of Man and David Deutsch's Beginning of Infinity)

Perception is theory-laden

Compare the the hot air balloon below when it is in the shade and when it is in the light. You can tell that they are the same colours in both instances even though they actually appear to be different. In the shade the white appears pink, and what is sky blue in the light is royal blue in the shade, etc.

Why do you not assume you are looking at two different hot air balloons very close to one another? Weirdly, you know they're the same thing precisely because you know they're the same colours (despite the fact that they don't actually appear to be the same colours at all).

This is because of an inbuilt process called 'colour constancy' that allows us to identify something as the same colour in a variety of different lighting conditions.

But even though it comes from certain things that are already inside our brain, it is still just one theory that guides our perception. What is most fascinating is that we need not perceive colour in this way! Say if you are a painter and you need to perceive colours as they actually do appear to be, so that you can reproduce them, one does this by changing the theory used to perceive colours. Allow me to give an example.

Below is an optical illusion that works by exploiting colour constancy.

These grey squares are actually the same, however our eyes are not looking to compare the colours themselves. What our eyes do is look for clues to what lighting conditions the colours are under, and this is how they will decide what the colours are.

I'll show you what your eyes actually look at to work out the colour, and then I'll show you how to ignore what you normally see, by using the theory of colour perception painters use to paint.

On the lower square, our eyes see the light grey shading on the top and decide that the lower square must be mostly in shadow. Your brain therefore tells you that it's really a lighter grey but looks dark because the light isn't hitting it. So you actually see it as lighter.

On the other hand, the top square appears to be tilted upwards, and so your brain assumes its in full light. Plus your eyes read the dark grey around the edges as shading, which is more verification that the top square is otherwise in full light. Your brain then tells you that the top square is actually darker than the other, but appears quite light because it has a lot of light hitting it.

Because you're brain sees them as being under different light conditions, it tells you to see them as two different shades of grey, a much darker and a much lighter.

The illusion is of course broken if you cover up the light grey shading in the middle that is the main reason your eyes think the square are under different lighting conditions.



But this isn't the only way one can change their perception of the squares. A painter will be used to understanding how to isolate colours ignoring the lighting conditions. You can try this, too. If you ignore the light and dark shading and just compare the main colour of both squares, after a moment you should be able to see they are the same colour without even having to cover the middle up.

Basically, depending on which theory you use to perceive the above, actually changes what you perceive.