Knowing in your heart

I was thinking a bit today about the idea of knowing something in your heart. I find this idea to be one of the most difficult obstacles to overcome when trying encourage people to think critically. Especially with regard to the unknowable.

The problem of trying to overcome the perception of something being true because it feels true has many layers. The core of this ideas strength is the fact that it is immune to logical inconsistency. It plays on the idea that our human weakness can allow us to deceive ourselves from what deep down we know to be true. This creates a situation that completely sabotages rational argument in regards to determining the validity of instinct as a means of determining truth. Whenever you make a prediction based upon your instinct or what your 'heart' tells you and that turns out to be incorrect you can immediately claim that you misunderstood or deceived yourself about what your heart was saying and so avoid having your means of acquiring knowledge appear flawed.

This method of reasoning can also be used to dismiss the opinions or augments of others. You can use the line of reasoning that deep down they know their wrong, like a drug addict might feel in the back of their mind they have a problem but can't fully bring themselves to admit it.

It seems this is probably the main method by which people of different faiths can be aware of each other and not be given cause to question their own beliefs. On the face of it it would appear that their is no more justification for one persons supernatural belief system than another. However if your are armed with the premise of the infallible heart you can simply dismiss the beliefs of others by saying deep down they know you're right. They're just trying to rationalize their position because their human weakness prevents them from just accepting what they already know.

Someone with very good instincts is likely to be especially susceptible to the idea of the infallible heart because they will consistently make good decisions without really knowing why they were good. If you combine this with experiences of making perceived bad decisions based on what they perceived to be rational argument that went against their instincts you could imagine that such a person might be quite prone to put instinct above reason.

The feeling of taking an action that goes against your instincts is not a comfortable one and can be truly traumatic if latter you conclude that your instincts were right. There is nothing quite like the regret of betting against your instincts and being wrong to drive you away from reason.

It’s not what you know, it’s how you know it.

When it comes to knowledge there is an important concept that seems either not understood or easily forgotten in the court of public opinion. It is the idea that a person can be wrong to believe something even if later it turns out to be true. This is an idea that can seem quite counter intuitive. It seems natural to think that if someone makes a prediction that turns out to be true they knew it was going to happen. Having a blind spot for the idea of being right by chance seems to be something that is quite common.

The idea of being right but wrong to believe it can be illustrated through an example of someone playing roulette. For this example the person playing noticed the number 25 twice in one day and took this as an omen. So they withdrew all their money from the bank, mortgaged their house and headed to the casino. They place their bet on 25 and watched the ball completely confident of the result and then there it was, 25. They’re set for life, they quit their job and move to the tropics where they meet a lovely person get married and live happily ever after. The question is, did this person make a good decision when they bet their money at the casino? Were they right to believe they would win? This is where our brains really work against us, we find ourselves focusing on the fact that they did win. Before the outcome we may have felt quite confident that the person was making a mistake, however, after an outcome that is so positive we may find it more difficult. Perhaps we would feel we would have robbed them of their fortune had we advised them against it. To clarify things we have to think whether we could recommend to someone else they use this persons method for getting rich? If they were fated to win would they be wise to use this method of determining their fate to make future predictions? When you look at this situation with a clear head you can see that this person had very poor odds of success and the risk they took was entirely unwarranted. To notice the same number twice in one day is not significant evidence to suggest a change in their odds of success. This means they made a bad call when they chose to take the risk they did based on the information they had available, regardless of the outcome. If they had ended up loosing all their money their decision would have been no worse.

One of the commitments we must make if we wish to call ourselves rational agents who seek the truth is that we commit ourselves to making our decisions based on the evidence we have available and accept the consequences no matter how dire of being wrong. We must commit ourselves to making good decisions based upon that which is most probably true rather than which we would like to be true or that which we fear being true.

There are many ideas out in the world that do not pass the test of being the most probable answer yet they are widely accepted. People hold onto these beliefs under the guise that they might be true or we cannot prove them false. They do not understand that it is not that what they claim is necessarily false that makes them wrong, it is the grounds on which they believe their claim that makes them wrong.

We are always correct to reject and wrong to believe claims that are not supported by evidence . Even if later we find the claim to be true, our decision to reject the claim prior to the evidence is still correct. A disciplined adherence to rational thinking will not guarantee we are always correct and opportunities will be missed , disasters will be allowed to happen. However, rational thinking gives us the best chance we have of being right and the capacity to understand why we are wrong. Maybe sometimes with faith and instinct you’ll be right but at the end of the day you’re right because of luck, not because you have any understanding about what’s going on.

You really have two choices when it comes to knowledge, a system that is capable of change and adaptation which becomes more accurate in it’s predictions over time or an instinctive approach where you just trust things because they ‘feel’ right. The second approach doesn’t stop you from being right, it just prevents you from developing any coherent understanding of why you’re right and provides you with no means to improve your odds.

What can we trust?

I find working out how to determine what information we can trust when trying to determine what is real and what is not can be extraordinarily difficult. It causes me a great deal of anxiety to think about how unreliable the basis of our information is. Leaving alone the fallibility of our senses themselves when watching the media or reading articles on the net it seems extremely confusing. It seems at some point you just have to work out who your going to trust and who you’re not. I, like most people, do not have the time or energy to properly investigate every piece of information I encounter, yet we must make decisions. We must decided whether to take notice of a statement or dismiss it. To give it credibility or to ignore it. How certain do we need to be in order to make our decisions. I think society can be incredibly harsh when judging people for the decisions they make. We come down hard on people for making wrong decisions under the assumption that everyone is aware of the same information and so when they make a mistake we would not have they are suddenly a bad person or someone in need of reprimand. It seems the older I get the more difficult it is for me to take a strong opinion on any issue because of this lingering uncertainty that plagues every decision I make. Am I supporting a just cause or being manipulated by a collective madness? This fog of confusion is the only thing that seems clear to me as something we must fight. The only cause I feel I can feel truly passionate about is the quest for truth and the eradication of ignorance. I’m filled with frustration when I see people proposing clear fallacies as the truth or asserting things as fact without basis. It seems hard enough to determine what’s real without this kind of thing going on. I think one of the worst parts about this is that I feel that I myself am guilty of jumping to conclusion well before I have grounds and making assertions which are not sound. Sometimes I wonder if any of us can be completely honest. Do the pressures exerted upon us inevitably mean that we will always betray the truth from time to time. Perhaps truth telling and believing is a skill that none of us will ever truly master but a continual endeavor in which we must always improve.

Hearsay

I have started reading The Case For Christ by Lee Strobel given to me by a fundamentalist religious colleague who recently left the company i work at to go back to America. We had a really in depth debate about religion a while back and the discussion obviously had an effect on him and I presume he feels that this book is a good source for understating the grounds for his belief. I was quite touched at the thought actually, not sure exactly what it is about the gesture but just seemed nice to know that he cared enough to by me a book on the subject.

Anyway, ever since he gave me the book I've been quite keen to read it and finally got a chance to read the first chapter of it today. I'm always curious as to why people believe things that seem so obviously false to me. After reading the first chapter of this book I can't help but feel a bit disappointed. I was really hoping for a argument that would really test my reasoning and force me to clarify my opinions but I can see from this first chapter that the argument falls apart before the horses have even left the gate.

This book seems to highlight how easily people can be seduced by an idea when they what it to be true. It plays on people who either do not understand or do not what to understand that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The fact that eye witness testimony does not count as extraordinary evidence seems lost to the writer of this book. In this book however it appears he is not even claiming evidence that is a good as eyewitness testimony. The moment of apparent triumph in this chapter is when the theologian uses somewhat questionable logic to say that the earliest account of Jesus was two years after the fact and so is close enough to eye witness testimony. The so called skeptic protagonist in the story, said to be the books author seems floored by this revelation. That this flimsy case for the claims put forward has such an effect on the author immediately discredits any claim he makes of being a true skeptic or at least someone who understands critical thinking and the scientific method.

I would not be convinced if a hundred thousand people told me that they saw someone rise from the dead an hour ago. The claim that someone rose from the dead is so extraordinary that almost any other explanation is more probable. I flies so much in the face of observed reality that it opens the flood gates of premises that are more probable, some of which have actually be shown to have happened in the past, like mass hallucination or the deception of the masses with slight of hand and misdirection.

I think this book is demonstration of an all too common failure to understand why science trumps personal accounts and how someone can say what they believe to be true and still say something that is false.

I'll continue reading the book as I am interested in how people develop these massive logical blind spots but I'm a bit disappointed at just how weak the argument is.

One Reality

I have decided to start a blog to explore my ideas regarding the nature of reality. I believe having a clear understanding of what reality is and the method of distinguishing fact form fiction to be fundamental to the acquisition of all other goals. I believe that my ability to obtain a clear view of what is real is far from where I'd like it to be and I find it is all the more difficult to obtain my goal of clarity when the world around me seems to have a complete disregard for reason.

One of my pet hates is the idea that it's ok for people to believe different things to be the truth. It is a necessity of preserving liberty that we do not force people to believe as we do, however we should not allow the spread of ignorance to go uncontested. We seem to romanticize people believing different versions of reality like it is an important part of cultural diversity. This seems to be a clear misunderstanding about what is culture and what is ignorance. Culture is about a lifestyle preference where you choose to live a certain way because you feel it is the way you want to live. Ignorance comes in when you feel compelled to live your life a certain way even though you have no sound basis for that belief.

I think this is particularly a problem when we look at indigenous people. We leave indigenous people in these stone age world views completely stripped of any benefits they may gain from a 21st century understanding of reality because of our romanticism about their beliefs. They have no hope of integrating into 21st century society if we say it's ok for them to have a 10,000 bc understanding of what is real. We treat them like zoo animals rather than human beings and we make claims of protecting their freedoms as our defense. If someone has been brainwashed into believing the truth to be evil then is their choice to be ignorant truly free? In an ideal world we should take our science into these communities and debunk and discredit the nonsense espoused by witch doctor's, shamans and so called 'wise' elders. We should educate with physical examples of how wrong these people are. People complain about the disparity in the quality of life between indigenous and non indigenous people. I believe the major cause of this is the misguided belief that you protect a persons liberty by allowing them to remain ignorant.

In an ideal world we could solve these problems but unfortunately we do not. We live in a world rife with superstition and ignorance that extends far beyond isolated indigenous communities. Everyone is too afraid to debunk the other's superstition out of fear that someone will debunk theirs. It is sad that there are so few people who actually look forward to the day that their own superstitions are revealed to be false and so are able to move forward into the light of greater understanding.