What God Knows

 

Even though I can’t even know 0.000001% of 1% of what it’s like to be God, I do get intrigued sometimes by peculiarities understood through my limited, finite human brain. For example, God is omniscient, omnipotent and a perfect Being – so what does that mean in terms of some of the supposed limitations of mathematics, logic and information? For example, we know that there cannot be a set of all truths (especially in mathematics or logic), because Tarski proved that truth cannot be defined within the same language in which the statements are expressed. Suppose you try to form a set of all true sentences in a formal system (like arithmetic). Then you would need a truth predicate that determines whether a sentence is true – and such a truth predicate cannot be defined within the same system - it leads to contradictions, like the liar paradox.

Ok, so, I actually don’t think that is a wholly unsolvable problem in this context, as I explained in this blog post. It says more about our own human limitations. But I do not know what a set of all truths could mean for God, because if each set of truths entails further propositions about those truths, then a set of truths is a problematic concept, even if presumably this must be contained in God’s mind somehow. This recursive, self-expanding structure creates an essential tension in the idea of omniscience when it's imagined in my limited human logic, but perhaps that’s because semantic hierarchies are also a phenomenon attached to being human. I don’t know what it means for God to know a set of all truths that entail no further propositions or any kind of semantic hierarchy. This process isn't set-like - it seems more like a dynamically unfolding, internally structured totality – at which point, we humans cannot compute it.

Maybe this means that the idea of a set of all truths is a human limitation not a Divine reality. Sets are static mathematical objects, but God must be a unified act of understanding where He intuits all relations and truths simultaneously. I suppose it’s a bit like trying to write a complete dictionary, but for every definition, you also have to include; 1) the fact that it’s a definition, 2) the implications of its use, 3) the relationships it has with every other definition, and 4) the meanings of those implications… it would loop back and extend outward endlessly. Maybe that’s what such a dictionary would be like for God, but obviously even more complex than mere words.

And, next, what about Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, which shows that for any sufficiently powerful, consistent formal system (like Peano Arithmetic), there are true statements about natural numbers that cannot be proven within the system. So even we try to gather all provable truths, we miss some that are true but unprovable. Therefore, even the idea of a set of all provable truths doesn’t capture all truths. Or consider Russell’s Paradox - the set of all sets that do not contain themselves, which leads to contradiction. A universal set (the set of all sets) is not allowed in standard set theory because it also leads to paradoxes. Moreover, the set of all true sentences in arithmetic is not recursively enumerable, because there’s no algorithm that can list all and only the true statements, even in principle. This again means the "set of all truths" isn't just seemingly impossible to construct, it’s not even properly definable.

With God’s omniscient mind, does He know all truths, or only all knowable truths? I assume there is nothing God doesn’t know, although His truths have to remain within the internal consistency of their own logic – so He can’t create a rock so heavy He can’t lift, because that’s just a human nonsense, just as it would be if I said, “My dog is half past three steps into next week”. For us, the set of all truths is not well-defined or not formally capturable - but again, that is presumably a human problem connected to being human (like cause and effect), not a God problem connected to being God.

Consequently, we’re left with what we kind of know already – that God's knowledge must transcend formal systems, and He must know truths that no human language or formal system can express, which means the human mind reaches the level of analysis here where it goes blank. The way I picture it is like light before it breaks into colours. In a sense that we might be able to sparsely capture for our own illustration, what we call "truths" are to God as colours are to unbroken light: distinctions that arise only when unity is filtered through the prism of human limitation, but still absolutely glorious for our having done so.

Efficient Use Of Knowledge

It would be remiss here if we didn't elaborate on yesterday’s blog post The inefficiency Trap and tailor the content to one of the most important works in the whole of economics - Hayek's The Use of Knowledge in Society, which is the most natural bedfellow to the inefficiency trap. This essential work by Hayek is a foundational essay in economic and political philosophy. It challenges the idea that central planning can efficiently allocate resources, and argues that the real economic problem is not just resource allocation but the efficient use of dispersed knowledge.

Hayek makes the case that decentralised decision-making through market processes is superior to central planning because it best utilises the knowledge that exists in society. His argument emphasises the role of prices as a communication mechanism that helps coordinate economic activity without requiring any single individual or entity to possess all relevant information. This is standard economic fayre now, and has been for many decades, but it's important to acknowledge how innovative this work was in its day, and how influential it has gone on to be.

Hayek helped challenge the traditional economic problem as framed in classical and neoclassical economics. One of the main issues in economics is how to efficiently allocate scarce resources among competing uses. But we cannot, of course, assume that all relevant information about available resources and technological possibilities is already given to a central planner or decision-maker. In reality, as Hayek argued, knowledge is fragmented and dispersed among individuals - and the key challenge is how to make use of this scattered information effectively.

So, Hayek talked about the role of decentralisation in knowledge utilisation, and he distinguishes between two types of knowledge:

Scientific Knowledge - this includes general rules, principles, and data that can be formally studied and documented.

Local and Tacit Knowledge - this consists of specific, often unarticulated knowledge possessed by individuals, such as an entrepreneur's awareness of local supply constraints or a worker's skills acquired through experience.

The big limitation of central planning is that the planners cannot effectively capture and utilise local and tacit knowledge. The challenge is how to coordinate this dispersed knowledge in a way that leads to efficient economic outcomes. Hayek argues that decentralised decision-making is the only practical way to make use of dispersed knowledge. When decisions are made at the local level by individuals who have first-hand knowledge of their specific circumstances, the economy as a whole can adjust dynamically to changing conditions.

On top of that, one of Hayek's most important contributions is his explanation of how the price system functions as a communication mechanism. Prices convey crucial information about the relative scarcity of goods and services. When a resource becomes scarcer, its price rises, signalling producers to conserve it and consumers to use less of it. Conversely, if supply increases or demand falls, prices drop, signalling increased availability. Each individual reacts to price signals based on their local knowledge and needs. This allows the economy to coordinate millions of independent decisions without any centralised control. This spontaneous order, or 'catallaxy' as Hayek calls it, emerges naturally from market interactions.

Moreover, markets not only distribute existing knowledge, they also help generate new knowledge. Entrepreneurs experiment with different products, production techniques, and business models. When some strategies prove successful, they are imitated and refined, leading to continuous economic innovation and progress. Central planning can stifle this discovery process because it does not allow for optimal decentralised experimentation. As we know from our own successive government top-down failings, over-interference means resources are allocated based on short-sighted directives rather than market signals, leading to inefficiencies, shortages, and surpluses.

Of course, while most of us don't advocate for a completely laissez-faire economy, we can all heed warnings from sound economic principles against excessive government control - especially around price theory; knowing that policies that interfere with the price mechanism - such as price controls, excessive regulations, and subsidies - distort information flow and lead to inefficiencies. This is obvious even to most laypeople with a basic grasp of economics - but the application of the use of knowledge in society is perhaps less obvious, but just as vital a thing to understand.

In the notion of spontaneous order - the idea that complex social and economic systems mostly evolve naturally without central design - economies function best when individuals are free to act on their knowledge and incentives. To that end, Hayek's work The Use of Knowledge in Society remains one of the most profound economic works in demonstrating that the key economic challenge is not merely resource allocation, but the utilisation of dispersed and tacit knowledge. The market system, through the price mechanism, most efficiently coordinates this knowledge - and that is just as important as efficiently allocating resources, because the two go hand in hand.

The Wisest Things I’ve Learned

 

I thought a new year might be a good time for this little reflection. Setting matters of religious faith aside for this post, I’ve learned a lot of very valuable things over the years – from parents, friends, writers and thinkers – which got me thinking about the wisest and most valuable things I think are worth knowing and have been most enriching. Given the possibilities, it’s challenging to narrow it down to a small list – but if compelled to choose, I think these would definitely make the cut: 

1} There is no better life than one spent seeking the truth at all times. 

2} Taking responsibility is the primary path to contentment, freedom, and self-liberation. 

3} Humility precedes wisdom.   

4} Wisdom is the only quality we can’t have too much of. 

5} Kindness and gratitude are like superpowers in the external lives they touch and the inward satisfaction they elicit. 

6} Suffering, hardship and challenge are necessary sources of growth. 

7} Courage is one of the most noble and beneficial qualities we should consistently cultivate. 

8} Having a balanced mind is the only way to be truly intellectually and emotionally stimulated. 

9} A few key people will meet most of your needs, but if you don’t have those key people you’re in trouble. 

10} We are always a work in progress, constantly in the process of becoming. 

11} Delaying gratification to prioritise long-term rewards over short-term pleasures is one of the cornerstones of emotional and psychological maturity. 

12} Forgive easily, because people are going through a lot more than you could ever know. 

13} Physical, mental, intellectual and emotional well-being underpin everything else you want to achieve. 

14} Work, hobbies and passions should be servants, not masters; they stop being demons only when they cease to be gods. 

15} Our ultimate internal fulfilment and external impact are measured by how well we loved.

The Circuit Board Of Mental Excellence

Minds are perhaps best thought of like circuit boards - and a coherent, consistent, accurate worldview is represented by a set of small lights that all stay illuminated in conjunction with truth and facts. Information, in the form of propositions, is like enlarging the circuit board, and increasing the assembly of data circuits and the copper that delivers electricity to illuminate the lights.

The size of the light display depends on the dimensions of the worldview, which itself primarily depends on the time, effort and intellectual rigour put in to the process of building a larger and larger circuit board that can facilitate an ever-increasing light display. A genius polymath may have a light display about the size of a football field; a highly intelligent polymath may have one about the size of a tennis court; and an average person may have one about the size of a small back garden.

Now here's the key thing. You can increase the dimensions of the light display by learning more, and by increasing the connectivity of your mental artillery - and to some extent, most people do this on their life journey. But what they don't do enough is stand back and check the light display to see how many of the bulbs have gone out. Nor do they step back and observe clusters of light patterns that have gaps because the additional bulbs required to illuminate the pattern more comprehensively are missing.

A large, light display with all the bulbs illuminated is extremely rare - but it ought to be the primary objective for anyone who strives for truth, facts, proficiency of reasoning and excellence of mind. The beauty of the light display is that its consistency of illumination is exhibition to the fact that one's ideas, thoughts, views and propositions fit nicely into the rest of the circuit board of experience. If you keep getting things right, the new beliefs operate consistently with the structural workings of the circuit board, not disrupting the electricity to other items on the board. But if you get things wrong, and introduce faulty viewpoints into the equation, you disrupt the electricity flow, both to local illumination clusters, but also to isolated bulbs elsewhere in the display.

Naturally, given the complexity of the mind, and the complexity of everything there is to know, and the near infinite ways to perceive reality, this is a really epistemologically intractable model of analysis. But it isn't that difficult to identify practical examples of how the malfunctioning of the circuit board may occur, as most people host mutually contradictory or incongruent ideas, especially due to identity-based dispositions, cognitive biases, emotional self-preservation and propensities for over-simplicity.

For example, suppose you're a Christian with a fairly comprehensive understanding of scripture, but because of your upbringing you've been infected with the cultural virus of young earth creationism, with a limited recourse for correctives. The cluster of lights pertaining to Biblical exegesis and hermeneutics is going to be affected as the connection between the conductors supplying the electrical power will be shorted. The high current flow of falsity will put out some of the theological lights, and prevent other bulbs from being added to the cluster. This will mean others see you as a Christian with inadequacies in several areas of discourse - especially when it comes to Biblical interpretation of text and other related areas of science and how the edifice operates and functions - which will have a corollary effect on the consistency of your worldview, and on the impression and influence you have on the world as a Christian.

Here's another example. Suppose you're quite economically and politically astute, but you become duped into believing that there is a systematically unfair gender pay gap in the UK, or that price controls on housing might alleviate the shortage. As with the first example, your circuit board will be negatively impacted, lights will go out in various areas across the display, and there will be patches in the clusters that never get the bulbs required for a full illumination of the pattern. You might start believing that price controls in other areas of the economy will start to do some further good; or you might start over-exaggerating the extent to which climate change alarmism is fruitful; or you might take your eye of the principles behind the law of least effort; or you might develop too much a victim-mentality, and so forth.

I could offer loads more examples, but I think the gist of this is crystal clear: there is always a price to pay for bad ideas, false beliefs and inadequate reasoning - and these things infect; first at the individual level, then at the familial level, then at the community level, and then more widely across societies and even nations as falsehoods spread memetically.

By equal measure, though, there are always rewards for building a prodigious circuit board that provides the power to a fully illuminated light display that consistently, coherently, factually and truthfully supports the ideas, views and beliefs associated with all the major and minor subjects, and the interconnectedness between them all. In fact, I'll take it further: there is no better way to live, and no more rewarding and no more necessary and no more morally and intellectually compelled pursuits for any human being.

How Humans Astound Me Most

Everyone loves consuming food, and everybody eats. Everyone likes justice, and everybody seeks it in their lives. Like food and justice, everyone loves truth, but unlike food and justice very few people seek the truth, and this is arguably one of the strangest things about being human. 

Whenever truth conflicts with long-held tribal principles, or disagrees with something protected by the false security of consensus, or challenges what is perceived to be (but isn't necessarily) ethical, or rattles the comfort zone, humans very easily disavow their relationship with it.

It has been observed humorously that this generation is the first generation ever to have the entire world's knowledge available to us at the touch of a button, but yet the vast majority of people make very little use of this facility, instead repeatedly looking at people's cat pictures and funny videos.

Now don't get me wrong, there are many interesting and entertaining things on the internet that do not come under the category of learning the world's knowledge. But given that having such easy access to the entire world's knowledge is about the most astounding thing we've ever had, I think it is alarming that so many people do so little with it.

And to take it further, given that logic, reason, truth and facts are so enduringly exhilarating, and rather resemble a map that leads us towards a world of exciting revelation and discovery and learning, it astonishes me how much of the mundane and prosaic stuff take precedence over them.

There is one obvious reason why this is the case, though - the mundane and prosaic stuff is easy and mastering the world's knowledge is hard. It's also the case that many people have never been introduced to those first glimpses of enlightenment that lead the way to the exciting broader and wider pursuits that follow.

Discipline is difficult too of course: even with all the accessible knowledge, every time we log on we are met with countless memes, compelling news stories, and many other amusing, rewarding and intriguing obstacles craving our attention.

But when all is said and done here, I do believe that if somehow the average browser could make inroads into getting a fuller sense of the exhilaration of our generation's potential, combined perhaps with a bit of an understanding of how incredibly fortunate each of us is to be here, they too will find the gap between the human potential and what we actually do on this earth quite astounding.

For Those Who Ever Thought I Sounded Uncaring....

Some people tell me that as my Philosophical Muser Blog is underpinned by economic and philosophical analysis I can appear to be slightly uncaring with regard to the emotional and ethical aspects of situations under discussion. Yet I would hope that anyone who knows me in person knows how highly I regard emotional and ethical aspects of life. Why, then, can it come across as though I don't in some of the articles I write?

I think I know the answer - it's to do with the familiar distinction between positive statements (statements about how things are) and normative statements (statements about how things ought to be). The former involves matters of fact, and the latter involves matters of opinion about ethical considerations. Economic analysis is primarily about positive statements not normative ones. An economist who insists, for example, that rent controls, import tariffs, business subsidies and the minimum wage are ill-advised policies is dealing in positive science not normative values.

To make a normative statement and say what ought to happen one must combine matters of fact with how those facts affect the people involved. If for example rent controls damage the rental sector and impair important information-carrying price signals then one can suggest that politicians ought to vote against it as a policy, and that to do otherwise would be to unethically put vote-winning and popularity over factual assent. This is precisely what you should expect from economic analysis - it is the framework in which ethical statements should be uttered.

Here's an example of a common problem. Usually when there is a phenomenon or a policy change people only tend to focus on how it affects the obvious group (Note: it is absolutely vital that for every policy or topic you consider you must factor in the proper consideration of the fourfold analysis: What are the tangible benefits, the tangible costs, the intangible benefits, and the intangible costs?).

So for example, with a minimum wage rise people's first and often only concern is low-paid workers; with rent controls people's first and often only concern is tenants; with rises in interest rates people's first and often only concern is borrowers, and so on. Economists sometimes seem unsympathetic - but it really isn't the case - it's simply that economists know that in situations like the above, everyone needs to be considered - not just the most obvious group.

That is to say, minimum wage laws have to consider employers too, and people who sit just below that rung of the ladder in the employment market. Rent controls have to also consider landlords, and more widely developers and builders. And increased interest rates, while bad for borrowers, are good for lenders and savers and the value of the pound. Economics is simply about factoring in everyone in the equation.

I'm fully seized of the way economists often speak in such a matter of fact way.  It is not meant to be cold, it's just that economics very closely resembles science (it's one of the softer sciences) in that its truths are based on empirical observations and patterns distilled from data. Economics is very much concerned with human behaviour as well as mathematics and logic too. To say, for example, that labour has a value the same way that goods and services do is not to treat people uncaringly, or to dismiss their well-being (quite the contrary if you value facts and truths as essential parts of human well-being) - it is simply to make a scientific statement, not much different from saying that amino acids give our cells vital nutrients, or that recklessly printing more currency increases the probability of hyperinflation, or that a balanced diet is better for a child than a diet solely consisting of crisps and chocolate.

The other criticism economists get is that while we are good at the theoretics, we are less good at applying those theoretics to actual goings on (a popular case in point is the criticism that not many economists predicted the financial crash of 2008). Again, this is to misunderstand the situation. I'll explain by considering an analogy between economists and garage mechanics. Garage mechanics are in the business of fixing cars when there is a fault. They locate defects by asking the customer what brought them to the garage; they then look at the area of the car in question; they run the engine and listen for anomalous noises; they look for oil spillages, water leaks, structural damage, and so forth. But on top of that they have a service history book - so by consulting that they can also predict when different parts of the car might wear next, as well as forecasting potential hazards.

What they can't predict, though, are rare and unforeseeable events that might impact the car's performance. If the driver starts to drink and drive, or if he crashes on the motorway, or if a hurricane causes a tree to fall on it, then the car will be subjected to future events beyond the forecasting of the garage mechanic. In short, the garage mechanic doesn't know everything about the car's future, but he clearly doesn't have 'no' idea either.

That's a pretty good analogy for what an economist is like - but instead of cars, driving and parts, we have people, behaviour and arguments. Economics looks at how people behave, what incentives they respond to, and all kinds of associative explanatory theories. No human explanatory protocols are perfect, and there's no predicting with 100% accuracy, but that doesn't matter - there are always plenty of reasons to think as we do, and (as my Blog posts indicate) numerous ways to observe patterns, pick holes in people's arguments, see where hypotheses are in error or only half-right, and show the inconsistency between what people claim and what is actually the case.

Lastly, the other reason why people can find themselves affronted by blogs like mine is that they value their opinions - and they are not quite ready to face up to the reality that opinions are like brass when compared to the gold standard of facts, the rhodium of reason and the platinum of logic.

Unlike facts, reason and logic, which withstand all external scrutiny hurled against them, opinions merely confer a judgement that if wrong has about as strong a protective barrier as a shield made of baked camembert. It may be tasty, but it will always be carved up by the gold, rhodium and platinum utensils that penetrate it.

I wrote a whole blog post on the danger of hiding behind the protective shield of opinions (click the link to read more - No One Should Be Entitled To Their Opinions) - but to give you a brief digest if you're pressed for time, if I think that Yes Minister is the best British sitcom, that onion rings are rancid, and that George Orwell's Animal Farm is superior to his Nineteen Eighty Four, these are opinions because there is no objective standard outside of my own view by which such claims can be corroborated. Many people may agree with me, but that doesn't make them facts.

Given that this blog deals with lots of issues whereby other people's opinions are maladies that are best cured by facts, reason and logic, it is understandable that the doctor that tries to administer the medicine is sometimes seen as the knifeman trying to lacerate the flesh. But I promise you, it isn't so - I just want to place a higher premium on what's factual, reasonable and logical than on what's popular and comforting but ultimately short-sighted, misleading and damaging. On a daily basis it strikes me as strange and regrettable that so many of our politicians and social commentators are somewhat reluctant to do the same.

 
 

No Wonder We Disagree So Much

Here's an interesting neurological study in psychologist Dr. Jeremy Dean's excellent blog to which I'm subscribed, showing that although the brain is well equipped to be both empathetic and logical, it may find it difficult to manage both of those qualities simultaneously. Brain scans revealed that activation in the analytical neuronal network suppresses some of the empathetic neuronal network, and activation in the empathetic neuronal network suppresses some of the analytical neuronal network.

As you may know, I'm a firm believer (with good evidence as backup) that when it comes to objective facts there are no rational disagreements if truth-seeking is pursued with honesty and rigour, and that it is only because of flawed reasoning skills, misinformation, sensory faults, biases and incomplete knowledge that there is so much disagreement in the world.

In addition to that, according to Jeremy Dean's article it would seem that the brain's difficulty in being both simultaneously empathetic and logical is a further barrier to people agreeing on things more freely. If you're empathetic you are likely to be much more empathetic to people who already share your beliefs, which militates against your employing the necessary logical steps to see whatever weight is behind arguments from your opponents. And if you're logical you are likely to be short on empathy regarding your opponents' position.

Consequently, if all these things are stacked against us, it is little wonder that there is so much disagreement out there, and that when two people are having a debate, they are probably going to be hamstrung by being not empathetic enough or not logical enough.

Still, no need to be a Cassandra-esque purveyor of doom on this one; I believe that the brain can be trained to overcome this problem. Once we become aware that when we are being logical we may have to work that bit harder to be empathetic, and vice-versa, we should be able to surmount what is stacked against us and master an adept balance of logical output and careful empathetic considerations of the alternative propositions.

 

The Main Thing You Need To Know About Knowing History & Knowing People

I have a coin in my hand; on one side should be heads (H) and on the other side should be tails (T). I just spun my coin ten times - it returned H,H,H,H,H,H,H,H,H,H - ten heads in a row. Do you think I have a double-headed or weighted coin? One way to enquire is to ask, what are the chances of my throwing ten heads in a row?  Quite slim actually, it is (1/2)^10. That translates as one in two to the power of ten, which equals a 1 in 1024 chance.  Before you conclude that my coin was not a fair coin, let me say that I omitted some vital information - I actually spun my coin more than ten times and I returned a few tails as well. Amongst the H,H,H,H were a few Ts - but I deliberately didn't tell you about those, leaving you with the impression that I might have had a straight off 1 in 1024 experience. 

Here’s the moral of the story. When we cherry pick data and leave out parts we don't want others to see we can easily give the impression of something compelling or noteworthy or unique. For years drug trials were known to be biased - medical companies would share the findings that support the drug's efficacy and omit the findings that call it into question. The same is true of our perception of the aberrations in various collective environments, as media reporters or historical interpreters often capture an extreme situation and exaggerate it out of proportion. A few Middle Eastern dissidents caught on camera burning a flag in the marketplace can be made to look as though the whole city is in civil unrest; an instance of corporate malfeasance or ignominy or sexual perversion can make it seem like the whole corporation or political group or religion is corrupt; a few isolated incidents of perversion of justice in the police force can make one question whether many police officers can be trusted; and a reputed group of inquisitors or anti-science dogmatists or heretic hunters can sometimes be felt to be representative rather than unrepresentative of a group in some point in historical time.

Given this pervasive problem of getting things out of proportion, or focusing too much on headline-grabbing cases, it’s clear that caution must be exercised when interpreting history, particularly as so much of history is written by those in power and those on the winning side. If you'd like an analogy of what recorded human history is like, it's a bit like the fossil record across vast geological time, and the evolutionary relationships between taxa, in that it very much resembles a join the dots exercise. Most of human history is not recorded, just as most of biological evolution is not found in the fossil record. Our framework of understanding is based on extrapolations of comparably sparse data, like a few dots scattered on the page, and from which we attempt to join those dots to give exhibition to a fuller picture.  

The really interesting question, I think, is to ask; what does it mean to live in a world in which most of the events, thoughts and feelings that have ever happened are inaccessible to just about everyone who has ever lived? Is it just a trivial fact of life that that is how things are, or does it give us cause to think a bit more deeply about the security of our knowledge and views?

Human beings speak with much confidence on many subjects – but I think our epistemology is more anaemic than we care to realise. Most knowledge a person has outside of their own first-person sphere is far more tentative than many would care to admit. What knowledge of human history amounts to is a set of neatly packaged general assumptions that attempt to present a fact or an opinion by shaving off a great deal of the additional data that surrounds it. 

Take the following events; Nero’s death, the Council of Nicea, the book Beowulf, the Reformation, the English Civil War, the Enlightenment, Diderot's Encyclopédie, the Scientific Revolution, Romanticism, World War 2, the film On The Waterfront and the London 7/7 bombings. What they have in common is that if you take all the recorded facts known about each of those events you are still devoid of a far greater proportion of unrecorded facts or experiences, whether in people’s minds or in surrounding events. It is only when we shave off or never become aware of a great deal of the additional data, either by not knowing it or by rendering it extraneous, that we have any simplified version of history at all. This really ought to inform us not just about how we engage with history, but most importantly, how we let our historical perceptions shape our present interpretation of things. 

Don’t misunderstand; often our interpretations of events like the ones above are reliable enough, or sufficiently well researched (if not by us, by others) to reveal clarity-inducing knowledge – but often an oversimplification leads one into too narrow a perspective that skews one’s outlook. Pick up any semi-academic magazine – The Spectator, History Today, The Economist or The New Scientist - and it will be replete with instances of this. Dip in to almost any page and you’ll find sentences that contain expressions like…

“The stone age period was a time of…”

“The inquisitors subjected people to forced conversion…”

“The Labour leader is trying to bring back socialism…”

“15^th century Islam was more about conquering than converting…”

“Iran is a very unstable country…”

“Throughout the 2^nd World War the Axis powers…"

These and many more like them are examples of what I’m talking about – the expressions tend to over-simplify a series of events and are presented as neatly packaged general assumptions that demand further investigation.

Now, let’s be fair, I think such expressions are perfectly permissible within the realms of intelligent discourse – but they must always come with the caveat that they are a compressed version of a much bigger thing, and that the content is unavoidably anaemic.

In the spirit of fairness it has to be said we don’t have much of a choice when dealing with such subjects. These pale complexion examples of presentation are not easily avoided, because we are forced to resort to such anaemic language if we are to have any meaningful discussions - after all, when talking about history, society, religion, or any of the more intractable subjects, most of the data is unrecorded, inaccessible, and patchy, and thus beyond the purview of our own first–person comprehension of the situation. Our limitations compel us to engage in those aforementioned join-the-dots type of picture-making.

For that reason, it doesn’t mean that the way we tackle complex subjects is not meaningful and that it lacks practical utility – but it should be realised that we only handle these subjects with wisdom when we realise that many historical opinions we hold are mere epigrams that leave out the majority of the full picture. We make statements about various religions and political groups in certain periods of time in history as though we are only talking about a few people; we speak of a nation of millions of people as though the description is amenable to straightforward epigrammatic adjectival terms – terms like “oppressive”, “backward”, “liberated”, “draconian”, “prosperous”.

We all do it; we talk of North Korea as being ‘oppressive’, or of America as being ‘liberated’, or of China, Brazil and India as being 'increasingly prosperous’ – and those succinct descriptions serve to convey our perception of them. But if we are being strict - how can a nation of people be any of these things?  It can’t – a nation is too large, complex, diverse and multi-faceted to be amenable to such singular descriptions. Similarly, you’ll see this candid examination cropping up all over the political sphere too; how can a political party be “progressive”, or “right wing”, or “liberal” except in terms which severely comprise the vastness of the subject or object of study under scrutiny? 

In saying all that, one can of course also recognise a sense in which ‘oppressive’ does aptly describe Iran, and “liberal” aptly describes facets of a political party. The point is, it’s ok – that’s what we humans do. There’s no harm in doing it, so long as we are able to see a picture that extends beyond our compressed descriptions.  

A similar thing applies to an interpretation of people

Clearly we find the same thing occurring when describing people too. How easily we try to reduce a person to a few simple adjectives – happy, generous and kind, or mean, uncaring and pessimistic, or moody, discontent and dismissive – or combinations of all these things.  But that’s sometimes fine too – there are some people for whom the words ‘kind’ and ‘generous’ are apt compliments, and arguably some for whom terms like 'wretched' and 'insane' paint a pretty accurate picture too.

All we must always be aware of is that when we have views, opinions and beliefs, we are shaving off lots of external factors, and that much of what we intuitively feel about a belief system, a nation, or a person, is merely an intuitive focal point on which we have chosen to concentrate our gaze. This is part of our adaptive unconscious, and it requires the short-cutting of lots of key data to enable the mind to harbour succinct ideas about the world (as per the image of the join-the dots epistemology). 

Such is human personality, of course, that even if you were to focus on just one person you know – a neighbour or a work colleague or a friend – you could not justifiably reduce them to a few dozen simple statistics. To get anywhere near to ‘knowing’ that person you would have to spend a considerable length of time with them; you would have to see them happy, sad, at ease, ill at ease, under pressure, vulnerable, confident, upbeat, dejected, successful, unsuccessful, in mourning, pursuing intelligence, in the company of many different people, and in and out of their comfort zone. And even if we grant that that can happen over several months or years – you know as well as I do how much a person changes throughout their life – so even that level of scrutiny tells only a fraction of the picture. You have, I imagine, had situations where you’ve peered into a corner of someone’s life and felt a sudden acceleration of awareness about their character – perhaps from seeing their book collection for the first time, or seeing them with their parents or children for the first time, or seeing them lose their temper for the first time, or seeing them get drunk for the first time. There are obvious tell-tale signs that help us put people’s views into perspective – but they are not the full picture.

If that is the case with just one person – you can, I hope, now see (if you couldn’t already) how foolish it is to think you know enough about a person or group of people or a nation or a historical epoch from just a few quotes or articles or books about them by people who never met the individuals in question, or people who did but were, as we all are, selective in what they recorded.

Always be on guard

Be careful out there; so many people rashly think they have nailed a subject, or they hastily develop a worldview based on a few isolated and often decontextualised bits of information. It may be the best we can do with the tools we have, and that is fine, so long as we show epistemic humility when dealing with knotty subjects that require plenty of untangling. One of the key steps to wisdom is to understand that we must always hold views and profess knowledge with it in mind that most subjects outside of our realm of first-person experience are hugely intractable, and that our knowledge of those subjects is sparse and fragmented. 

Finally, you may now be wondering, if what I've said is the case, how can we justifiably hold religious beliefs, political views and other ideas containing complex data? We can hold them, but we must do so with our old friend epistemic humility. Part of that epistemic humility is in admitting that we are only doing what the psychologists call ‘thin-slicing’ – which is the ability to find patterns and formulate tentative knowledge based on only ‘thin slices’ of experiences.  When we assess a situation and say that Iran is unstable or that North Korea is totalitarian or Britain is too liberalised, we are attempting to compress the data into a succinct form of expression – but at an accelerated and exaggerated rate. We end up with what we feel is a fairly sophisticated judgement of something far more complex than our precipitations have accounted for.

The reason complex situations can be decoded with some aplomb is, I think, down to the fact that once we package a lot of data together we find that the sociological world has stable patterns. Hence, one can read about a country (or better still visit it) and use words like ‘unstable’, ‘totalitarian’ and ‘liberalised’ as pattern distillations that aid us in forming an compressed impression of complex situations. Realising we do this all the time is not just one of the first steps to wisdom, it is one of the first steps to correcting many of the faults that stand in the way of the clear thinking that engenders wisdom.

No One Should Be Entitled To Their Opinions

When I was a young boy my parents tried to instil some wisdom in me by telling me that while I might not agree with everything I hear or read, everyone is still entitled to their opinion. When I got a bit older and found out some of the absurd and preposterous things many people believe - young earth creationism, scientology, homeopathy, astrology, and most religions, to name but a few, I soon saw that my parents were wrong; not everyone is entitled to their opinion - in fact, no one is, and it is actually better for people if they have no sense of entitlement towards any opinions.

Here's why. Regarding our beliefs, there are two kinds of legitimate entitlements, which we'll call 'rights' - and by ‘our beliefs’ I mean propositions related to facts about how the world is, not, of course, personal tastes like food, music and books (of which more in a later Blog).The two kinds of legitimate entitlements are; the right to something binding, and the right to not be restricted to hold beliefs and express them. Naturally there are grey areas in both of those entitlements, but for simplicity's sake; in the case of binding rights, we'd say that if Jack fills up a trolley full of goods in Sainsbury's with the intention of taking them home then Sainsbury's is entitled to receive payment for those goods. And in the case of the right to not be restricted, we'd say that however absurd or untypical Jack's view is, he has the right to not be restricted in being able to hold that view - but that that right comes with the understanding that others have the right to challenge that view.

What underwrites this point is that we do not choose our beliefs, nor do we choose the force behind what those beliefs are. Opinions are based on beliefs, but beliefs come involuntarily from other people, and from personal experience of the world, so our opinions are, to the greatest extent, beyond our control and cannot be changed artificially. If I point a gun to your head and tell you that I will shoot you if you don't believe that Australia borders Mexico, you still would not be able to arrive at the belief that Australia borders Mexico, however hard you tried, because it is not factual, and we can't trick ourselves into holding views we don't honestly hold. You may lie in the hope that you don't get shot, but that's not the same as actually believing it.

When you change your mind or learn something new, it is because you have been given fresh information that, in your view, yields to reason, compelling argument and evidence-based rationale. In other words, all opinions are held because they are thought to be consistent with evidence and facts about the real world. It is precisely for this reason that no one should be entitled to their opinions, because a claim of entitlement to hold an opinion is, in fact, only a claim to retain an opinion and not have it shown to be wrong - which basically means it's an entitlement to retain opinions contrary to reason, compelling argument and evidence-based rationale .

If you really were entitled to your opinion you would be restricting others from improving that opinion by reasoned argument and evidence-based demonstrations - you would be like a man who has decided to imprison himself in his own home, turn off his electricity, and live a life of self-sufficiency, not allowing himself to even 'hear' of the alternatives. By not stepping outside his front door he doesn't just consign himself to eat, drink and wear only what currently resides in his house, he denies others the ability to bring competition to his ideas by offering new potential considerations and alternative perspectives. Of course, everyone is free to reject any idea if it doesn't make sense to them, but by staying at home and being self-sufficient they only deny themselves the opportunity to hear new ideas and opinions.

If you look at the two kinds of rights I mentioned a moment ago, you'll see that neither applies to entitlement to hold an opinion. You have no binding contract with anyone that disallows them from offering arguments against your views, and you have no business claiming a restriction on others by imposing a duty on them to let you retain your views. The idea that a person is entitled to their opinion is a bit like a self-sufficient hermit being entitled to have no competition for better goods. While we wouldn't want to restrict his ability to be a self-sufficient hermit, we'd be foolish to argue that to protect this man from new ideas and fresh options is best thing for him.

Remember, this is not an insistence that he should take advantage of these options offered to him - that would be as bad as restricting him from his choices - it is simply a claim that this man is no better for having closed himself off from the options. In fact, vindication for his self-sufficiency rests on, and is enhanced by, his having knowledge of the things he chose to reject in favour of his preferred choices. Similarly, beliefs, views and opinions are not stronger by being held from behind a wall that seeks to block out intellectual and epistemological expansion, they are made stronger when they have ran the gauntlet of rigour along with all competing beliefs, views and opinions and still come out on top. For those reasons, no one is entitled to a belief, anymore than a monopoly power is entitled to operate without any competition. If beliefs are held with a sense of entitlement they are held that way to put up a wall against competing ideas, just as a monopoly power operates to eliminate the competition, and thus denies people alternative choices.

Those who want to exclaim that everyone is entitled to their opinion don't actually mean that at all - they merely mean everyone is entitled to not be forced to depart from an opinion. Those who declare that they want to be entitled to hold an opinion are pretty much always those who hold opinions that are contrary to reason, compelling argument and evidence-based rationale - hence they are the people asking to be precluded from intellectual and epistemological expansion, which is no human entitlement or right at all. As I said earlier, just like a monopoly power trying to subjugate competition, in retaining the right to not be forced to depart from an opinion, they are claiming the right to protect their opinions from reason, compelling argument and evidence-based rationale, which, for the good of the human race is something we ought to resist. Given the extent to which people with absurd and preposterous views try to pass on those views by manipulation, distortion of facts, and suppression of contra-considerations, I would argue that the right to an open and honest enquiry is much more of a human entitlement than the right to believe nonsensical things that mislead people and cause pockets of human progression to atrophy.

Far from being a vehicle of merit, the notion that everyone is entitled to their own opinions is, to me, quite socially noxious, because it is an incubator for preposterous, repressive and manifestly false beliefs to survive with less of a challenge than is required. What this notion fosters is a pseudo-politeness whereby people believe that in the spirit of good manners it is favourable to build gilded cages into which people can keep their beliefs sacred, and not have those beliefs subjected to proper scrutiny. Just about all false and stultifying beliefs retain their endurance only because of the way their most influential exponents shield off the majority of adherents from an honest and open enquiry - be they cults, marginalised organisations or religio-political groups in developing countries that are able to repress and dominate their people.

Due to this general outward pseudo-politeness this means someone can live in another country for years, even doing a university degree, without having his or her often absurd beliefs challenged (I say 'outward' because inwardly those beliefs are often felt to be ridiculous, which only foments dishonesty). If there were a greater selection pressure on beliefs that are thought to be absurd it wouldn't be an outrage on the people believing ridiculous things - it would be a helpful, sometimes life-enhancing liberation, just as saving a drowning person or rescuing someone trapped in a mine is life-enhancing. The sooner we develop a much more naturally comfortable (and socially acceptable) way of entitlement to question and enquire rather than perpetuating this entitlement to belief we’ll find increased selection pressure on the more preposterous beliefs, views and onions in the world, and the potential liberation of those who adhere to them, and by extension, the human race.

 

* Photo courtesy of teenmentalhealth.org

Letter To My Unborn Child

I think a good rule of thumb for being true to your own convictions is this; don't do or champion anything in the name of a group that you wouldn't do or champion as an individual - for if you do so, you become a chameleon that fades into the colours of group think, and you compromise the autonomy of individuation.  Before you contemplate becoming immersed in the collective, make sure you become immersed in the liberation of your own individualism.  Rescue yourself from seeking refuge in group think, or from being transfixed on the false security of cooperative agendas, and first master the essence of your own individuality.  Only then will you really be a valuable part of a collective.

James Knight

 

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                                                                                                               Saturday 10^th August 2013

My Dear Son or Daughter,

At the time of writing, you have not yet blessed your mother and me with your presence in this world.  If all has gone to plan between the time of my writing this and the intervening years that led up to the time of your reading my words, then today is your 16^th birthday, and this letter is written for you from my past to your future – intended to guide you as you approach young adulthood.  I don’t as yet know if you are a son or daughter – but whichever you have turned out to be, I know you’ll have been told countless times, with sincerity of heart, that you are loved immeasurably by us, your parents, and that you have been more of a blessing than your mother and I could have ever imagined.  At the time of writing, I also don’t as yet know whether you are our much loved only child, or whether you have any siblings – but rest assured, if we are blessed with any more children, they too will share in their own copy of these words.

As you are aware, you have always been encouraged to make the most of your life, to seize every opportunity to fulfil your potential, and focus on learning ‘how’ to think well, rather than been taught ‘what’ to think.  If my hopes have reached fruition, then you’ve always valued independence of mind and willingness to critically examine propositions, and I hope as a father I’ve achieved my goal of trying to be an encouragement to you in all you’ve attempted to do, while at the same time allowing you the latitude of volition that has enabled you to make your own choices, and learn from your mistakes.

This letter contains what I hope will be a helpful guide to you in your immediate future, as you begin to take your teenage worldview into young adulthood, and formulate your opinions further, as you face the world’s ups and downs with more independence.  So for you, precious son or precious daughter, this is the recipe-like wisdom I have to offer you in preparing your mind for what is to come in the adult world – wisdom I learned on my own journey into young adulthood.  As a child I know how greatly enriched I would have been if my future, older (and wiser) self could have time-travelled into my youth to impart all he had learned henceforth – so I offer this to you now, dear son or daughter, in the hope that it will pre-empt the regret your future self may feel when he or she has not the option of sending that retrospective wisdom back through time to you.

Regarding what you’re about to read; once you can think this way as a force of habit you'll find you're able to tackle any subject with the utmost clarity of mind.  You'll also greatly increase your chances of spotting straight away what is wrong with any argument you encounter (if indeed it is wrong) - or if it's right you'll probably be able to suggest to yourself a better or augmented way of seeing its truth.  It all takes practice, of course - but you are in a good position, with everything still in front of you. The main thing is to always remember that these things take time, and that time to mature is a point in your favour, because if you diligently feed the human hunger (however dormant or latent it is) for mental and moral excellence, then with maturity you will find a continual sharpening of the intellect, and a recurrent building of your wisdom, as the pieces in the jigsaw begin to fit and exhibit a clearer picture.

So here goes.  To start with it's important to identify just what we humans are, because this will go some way to explaining why humans are so susceptible to error. 

1) Our evolution

We may live in a world of hugely populated cities, with skyscrapers, planes, computers, and worldwide travel - but don’t let those achievements fool you.  We have brains hard-wired for hunting in the Savannah.  Humans have been around for nearly two hundred thousand years – and yet we have been technological and industrial for only a few hundred years.  I’m telling you this because the sort of brains we have and the sort of creatures we are, were, I believe, never prepared to be rushed into a world like the one we have today.  We humans have relatively primitive brains in an environment that is now not primitive.  We have brains that thrive on simplicity in a socio-personal environment that is very complex, and we have brains that seek patterns in an environment where patterns are often scarce. 

The main reason this observation is important is because it teaches us to not have unrealistic expectations of people, and hence, to not accept something as true just because a lot of people happen to believe it.  That's a strong rule I live by - because of the above, you'll find you need to attune your radar to pick up when people aren't being particularly smart or logical, and when they are lacking much of the knowledge required to have a clear picture of the topics they debate.  It is because people are a patchwork of cultural biases and bad influences and habits from others that you’ll be wise to keep sharply focused.  Don't misunderstand me - it's not something for which they should be reproached; it takes an awful lot of work to attain a highly evolved mind, and few find it; but the good news is, it is available to you (and anyone else) if you (and they) have the tenacity to work towards it.

Moreover, the realisation that humans shouldn't excite our expectations is important because it helps facilitate love, grace and understanding, and encourages kindness and generosity in realising that often people are doing the best with the raw material they have.  All this is the first step in helping people off their pedestals – because years of experience of others has taught me that pedestals are not where we humans belong – and it does us no good to be put on them.  Don’t misunderstand; be charitable with praise where you feel it’s merited, and be keen to encourage and build up others with deserved compliments and generosity of heart – but help people down from their pedestals – it will do them no good to be on them in the long run.

2) The Necessity of Unlearning

A further part of the limitation of humans is the ways of thinking that have held most people back since childhood.  I mean this; it’s clear to me that we as humans have to unlearn lots of things that are instituted in childhood, because they are the sort of things that will eventually go on to impair our conceptual abilities.  For example, from the cradle upwards parents instil in their young a very black and white mental manifold, where ideas of right and wrong and cause and effect are instituted.  This is necessary for that time in the child’s life because children don't see the world through abstract concepts or probabilistic mental models; they require straightforward, tangible truths or facts to enable them to build a model of consistency in apprehending the world. 

Now of course, it's not that parents are at fault for helping their children process information in this black and white way; these things are necessary in childhood because the deeper realms of human subjectivity, abstract thinking and complex mental models are not engaged with until children reach greater maturity - and even then many teenagers struggle to see the world in non-polarising terms.  It is a bit of a catch 22, but some of the things that were necessary to make sense in childhood are things that go on to be very bad habits that will hinder us in young adulthood and beyond. I hope as you read this you will have found I did this for you when you were young – but always with the precaution that as you got older you’d be encouraged to broaden your perspectives beyond an overly-simplistic black and white view of reality.  A lack of unlearning bad habits is largely the reason that you’ll find so many people out there with the ‘If you don’t agree with me you’re wrong’ attitude and the ‘them vs. us’ mentality. They have lots to learn, but they also have a lot of unlearning to do. 

So, in order to reach great heights with our thinking, we humans have to rid ourselves of these bad habits by 'unlearning' some of the things that served us so well in childhood - and I fancy that this getting rid of bad philosophical baggage is something that not enough people manage to do.  Again, like most things, it takes two steps; first, awareness, and second, lots of practice. 

3) Everything we learn is gained from experience

Believe it or not, this isn’t obvious to everyone, but all our knowledge, sensory perceptions, emotions, logic, and auxiliary capabilities are the result of our cumulative experience of the world (either primarily one’s own experiences, or the experience of others).  This is one of David Hume’s most significant contributions to philosophy; he showed that it is only our experiences that enable us to form impressions of the world, and that those impressions are made from within the limitation of the human ability to form those impressions.  Without experience we would know nothing.  I’ll give you an extreme illustration I once thought up, which will show why.  Imagine we grabbed a baby from birth, stuck it in a room, kept it alive with food and liquid for 18 years, but at the same time we disconnected its ability to see, touch, taste, feel, and listen. The 18 year old brain would have none of the things I mentioned - he or she would be mentally moribund, devoid of any of the concepts ordinary humans have acquired through our experiences of the world.  So whatever you do, always remember this vital piece of wisdom; our knowledge of matters of fact amounts to explanations of descriptions of the ways external reality is after we have discovered something through experience.  If you always have this at the forefront of your mind you’ll become quite acutely perceptive to the errors I’m now going to talk about in 4 and 5.

4) Awareness of human constructs

Knowing that everything we learn is gained from experience, we then begin to see human opinions and debates for what they are – they are discussions about human constructs from the perspective of human constructs.  To expand the point, think of all the things that people talk about in debates that are constructed from mankind’s incomplete ideas on what ‘truth’ might entail.  Consider the following concepts that we focus on as talking points; morality, religion, race, country, species, virus, rich, poor, progress, prosperity, infrastructure, child, adult, education, goodness, depressed and marriage.  Those are a few words that popped into my head – and if we were to debate them at length we would go on for weeks, producing thousands of pages of text as we carried it through.  But notice something here – all of those words (and many more like them) are humanly created concepts – they do not exist as objective reality beyond the conceptions of men – they are abstract ideas that we cannot touch or feel or see.  The upshot is, when debating these subjects we are debating the ideas and thoughts of men and women, and we must guard against treating them as though they are anything more.

So be wary of what you catch people preaching or pontificating, and how they try to get you to concur with their views.  If all of these things are human constructs, then naturally humans brought them into this world – meaning the authority with which these ideas are propagated originates with humans too, and they are often based on numerous misconceptions and situational prejudices.  In summary, the strength of humans’ convictions is very often circular because most things are humans talking about human ideas as though they are objectively true outside of human self-referencing.  This leads nicely to number 5

5) Be wary of how ideas are formed and how they are passed on.

This is a very important thing to keep a check on.  Whenever someone makes a claim about something being true, don’t just ask where is the evidence for this, or what are the rational grounds for this belief, make sure you ask yourself how this claim is likely to have been brought into the world.  Whether it’s scientology, creationism, tarot, astrology, superstitions, coincidences, spurious lucky streaks, faulty ideas about numbers and patterns in nature, the many hundreds of religious beliefs, or anything of that kind - you’ll soon start to notice (if you haven’t already) how absurd many of these views are.  It’s not just because humans are clumsy thinkers who will come up with attractive theories that they think can convince others, nor is it even the fact that the past is full of charismatic people (preachers, dictators, heads of state, executives, cult leaders, celebrities, radicals, political figures, etc) who went on to lead astray millions of people or have them under their thrall.  It’s that intrinsically many of things people speak about as true or factual have little or no power when subjected to analytical scrutiny, and that this fact is largely concealed by long passages of time, after which people just assume there must be something in it when usually there isn’t.    

Here’s another good rule of thumb; if what is being taught is occurring from within a hermetically sealed discourse, it is usually the kind of nonsense that appeals to the gullible or to those who will willingly divest and delegate some of their critical autonomy onto a leader or figure of self-proclaimed authority.  The dead giveaway that exposes their falsity is usually that their central beliefs are at odds with some or many of the mainstream findings of empirical studies, which is why they mostly resist external scrutiny and dissuade their group members from engaging with the outside world.  Usually people who genuinely believe what they say, and hold those beliefs with confidence, will happily have those views subjected to critical examination, open discourse, and empirical study.  Those who have something to hide do not allow this.  So, my son or daughter, please do your best to ensure you always get a sense of how open someone is willing to be in discussing their views.  Embrace openness, but be wary of closed minds – they are usually like dead fish floating along with the flow of the river. 

What makes it harder for the untrained eye to detect nonsense is that when it comes to ideas, most of them do not stay in their original form; they are copied, changed, developed, reduced, and so forth – meaning that some initially good ideas can be disfigured into bad ones (and vice versa too).  Just like mutations in DNA, ideas (often called ‘memes’) are susceptible to duplication (the copying of an idea), insertion (where something extra is added to an idea), deletion (where something is taken away) and point mutation (where a part of the idea is changed into something else).  This means you’ll need concentration in assessing which ideas are good and which are not - and further to that, whether various interpretations of those ideas are (in your opinion) good or bad ones. 

On that point, ensure too that if you are to discuss anything with anyone, check beforehand what they mean when they use certain terms in their language. This avoids ambiguity, but it also exposes the deceivers quite readily, because, as I’m sure you’ve already sensed in life, many people compose a sentence comprised of terms without really having a clear thought about what those terms mean in relation to their point.  Clear, honest and rational thinkers usually won’t mind openness. 

6 and 7 involve two more helpful tips concerning knowledge. 

6) Most knowledge is not certainty, it is probability.

Have you ever stopped to consider how peculiarly people adhere to systems they believe are rigid?  They almost forget that most of the demarcation lines we adhere to (such as legal precedents, values, and moral issues) are humanly constructed, too often with minimal consideration for the arbitrariness of their composition.  This is illustrated best in the classic ‘Sorites’ paradox often attributed to Eubulides, who had a handful of beans, and in front of his students placed one bean at a time on the table asking them each time whether that particular bean made it a heap of beans.  They continued to say no, and then when the 15th bean was laid down, they said 'yes', that's a heap'.  The whole point of the paradox is that it’s absurd to just assume 15 or any arbitrarily designated number is a heap.  Why is 15 a heap and not 14? Why not 16? What about if Eubulides did the same experiment on another group of students and they thought a heap amounted to 19 beans?  What if one or two in the group thought a heap should be 20?  The take home lesson is that although people adhere to systems they believe are assented to with rational enquiry - most often what they are actually dealing with is arbitrary classifications that were first thought up by humans.  Whether an animal is one species or another, or whether a planet is a planet, or whether a virus is classed as a ‘living thing’, and questions of that kind, all fall within the purview of humanly constructed classifications. 

Regarding the question, when does a heap become a heap?  Clearly there is no ‘out there’ true/false line as there is in other aspects of human constructed logic.  The question 'When does a heap become a heap?' can only be answered in two ways.  We can say a heap must exceed n where n equals a designated number for qualification, but that method doesn’t always help us with the more complex subjects because we could then define our evidence and facts however we wanted in the most arbitrary way (we must be particularly careful not to do this with personal experiences). 

The other way to solve the heap problem is to say that the probability of calling the pile a heap increases with every bean added.   This is the correct epistemological route to take, because the world is full of many comparable examples, where things of which we think we are certain are really feelings we have based on probability estimates.  Everything that constitutes knowledge is arrived at analogously to the Sorites situation – each increase in evidence or data increases the probability of something constituting knowledge, where in each case we’ve decided where the demarcation line should sit (often with good reason, but sometimes not).  In life you’ll find no thought process occurs in a vacuum, as our discoveries and our constructs are inextricably linked. To discover is to construct, and to construct is to discover – and epistemic humility should govern your enquiries at all times, as the current word on anything probably won’t be the last word.  Think of how marvellous the modern world of hugely populated cities, skyscrapers, planes, computers, and worldwide travel would look to a stone age man, and magnify that marvel a hundred or thousand fold when contemplating what the coming years will look like when your present culture has equivalence with the stone age for future men and women. 

7) The truth about true and false

The second helpful tip is something that so few people realise – it is that only propositions are true or false.  You see, only propositions ‘can’ be true or false, nothing else can be – yet so many people base their views about truth on things that aren’t propositional.  By that I mean the following; for a statement to be considered true or false it must make a claim that is propositional, which means the statement must be able to be correct or incorrect when valued against some metric. 

For example, these statements are propositional; ‘All men are mortal’, ‘Sears Tower is the tallest building in America’.  These statements are not propositions; ‘It is windy outside’, ‘Blue jeans are better than black jeans’, ‘I like Casablanca’. Most beliefs, questions, observations and feelings are not true or false, because most are not propositions.  The strength of justification for believing a particular proposition to be true depends on the extent to which its truth can be demonstrated.  Propositions differ in the extent to which they can be shown to be true or false. 

Your sensory knowledge is everything derived from your senses (that is, touch, taste, smell, sound, sight), and can only be a fact or not a fact.  A further reason they are called facts is because they contain impermanence about them, or because they have the potential to be revised.  Truths are true irrespective of experience, whereas facts needn’t be, as facts change, and hence propositions about facts change.  If the Empire States building had some work done to it, it may then become taller than Sears Tower, which is why we use the terms fact, to denote its possibility of revision.  The other reason is that a perfectly viable fact can continue to remain a fact in one reference frame and yet be superseded by a more accurate fact in a more enhanced frame of reference.  For example, consider the relationship between the earth and the moon. This relationship cannot be a matter of truth, only a matter of fact, because science is only an internally consistent way of describing one aspect of reality (the physical), and remains distinguishable from the truths in real world.  This was demonstrated in the following way; Newton showed that the moon is in relation to the earth under the system F=GMm/r² - (which, as I’m sure you’ll know from your school physics classes, is a mathematical formula derived from an internal model of the mind which Einstein showed to be able to be superseded by a better matter of fact).  The Newtonian relation turned out to be approximate because it wasn't an explanation that acted at the preclusion of all other explanations (Newton didn't know about relativity or space-time curvature).  The upshot is, reality is describable in a multitude of ways, consistent with whichever lens through which we are assessing it (scientific, poetical, mathematical, theological, literary, to name but a few). 

The take home lesson here is that facts always require a context, which is why science gives us truths about reality only in the same way that chess does or language does - they are rules within a closed system we call ‘facts, and must only be called factual or non-factual on the basis that they are empirically evidential through the lens of human physical interpretation of reality.  It is the propositions about these facts that are true or false – so be careful with the language you’re employing, and watch for the way others misuse language in this way.    I have talked about ‘facts’ in a way that may surprise you – but the reality is, your knowledge of tables, chairs, buildings, and anything material is not classed as true or false, because such knowledge is also not propositional.  That’s a good golden rule - sensory knowledge isn’t true or false either – it is judgements about our perception of the outside world.  The brown, smooth left-handed crescent desk in front of me isn’t true or false – it is a medley of potential perceptions.  The colour brown isn’t true or false – for the shading changes according to my relative positions in the room, and my perception changes in accordance with where the light is shining in, and so forth.  The smoothness isn’t true or false – again, its texture depends on my reference point of observation.  From a distance I see the table as being smooth.  With a powerful microscope I see lots of pits and crevices.  That is why sense data of this kind is not true or false.  You can say that it is true that tables exist if you like, and I won’t disagree.  But you haven’t made any meaningful statement about what accounts of truth actually are.  Sadly, that is what you will catch many people doing.  Be wary of them. 

Mind in potentia

A few more points and I am done here. Time is on your side as the flowers of your mind bloom – and in the advent of bloom I encourage you to develop your interpretations of the foregoing considerations further into your years, as I have confidence that they will be immensely edifying for you.  See them not as authoritarian templates, but as recipes that require necessary input from you, as you invest meaning in them and attach them to your own personal pursuits in life. And just like food recipes in real life – they are only paper and ink awaiting culinary fruition when they are actioned into the production of wholesome food.  Recipes of the mind are no different.

That you have (I hope) had the kind of upbringing that has helped engender your already smart mind has, I believe, been in no small part down to what I’ve called the ‘six key tenets of personal development. I’ve said that we need to unlearn bad habits, but that also those learned aspects of childhood serve us well in growing up.  These are the tenets - where, from childhood to adulthood, I find that minds work best when they have had the following;

1) A mind that has been shown love and encouragement in order to will its highest intellectual development;

2) A mind that has been taught how to think not what to think, and has remained free from indoctrination, and had uninhibited access to all forms of education available.

3) A mind that has had the freedom to pursue all areas of information and knowledge it chooses, and remained virtually unrestrained in its pursuance of ideas.

4) A mind that has experienced the wide considerations of what others believe and why they believe these things.

5) A mind that is well equipped to assess complex subjects and work out the relationship between objectivity, subjectivity and relativism.

6) A mind that has been taught love for one another (even those against us), goodness, patience, kindness, and concern for one’s fellow human irrespective of their culture and beliefs.

These six tenets are the protective shield against extremism, fundamentalism and indoctrinated worldviews. If you can take the tenets into adulthood – maybe even as foresight for your own children – remember that these six key tenets do not just happen in our younger years – they are developed and enhanced right through to young adulthood, and then right throughout one’s life into old age.  You may have also noticed that these six key tenets are based more on the background, home life, culture and environment in which one was brought up rather than specific things one does.  Conversely the things we need to unlearn are not really to do with what we are – we don’t really need to unlearn our culture or environment – we unlearn the specific ways that we’ve been asked by our parents to view the world, and we unlearn by separating the epistemological wheat from the epistemological chaff.  A person who has an environment consistent with and conducive to the six key tenets, but who has gone on in mature years to unlearn his philosophical baggage from childhood, is the most likely to have rich wisdom and high intellection – and that is what I hope for you as you approach young adulthood.  . 

Closing wisdom regarding others

On courtesy, conduct and how you treat others – continue to afford value to what I’ve always taught you as being valuable – it has held you in good stead thus far and will continue to do so.  Continue to; respect authority when you feel it has been earned, but always be prepared to question what you've been told, and check if it corresponds with the facts as you interpret them. Never shy away from formulating your own views based on what seems rational to you, even if those views seem to depart from the consensus; if it turns out you're right you'll teach someone something or help them attain greater clarity of thought, and if you're wrong then someone will teach you something and you'll learn something new - so it's win-win for you.

Finally, keep faithful to what I've always taught you about treating others with love, grace, kindness, mercy, generosity, compassion and respect – and keep close to your heart the mindfulness of not discriminating against anyone on the basis of things that are beyond their control (skin colour, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation). 

While I hope this has proved a useful insight – I think that’s about as much as I should include right now without sending your mind into overdrive.  I want you to know that I write all this as a very proud father – one who delights in the fact that your love, grace, kindness, mercy, generosity, compassion and respect for your fellow humans has held you in good stead over the years.  Whenever possible, always find ways to forgive others, as you look to see the best in people – and, last but not least, always be keen to search for the goodness in others, and make it easy for others to see the goodness in you.  Leave others in a better state than when you found them and you’ll increase the likelihood that they’ll do the same for you. 

I wish for you every blessing in the forthcoming years

Lots of love

Your Father

James Knight

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