Doubting Marcus

Hidden Gods and Billionaire Bachelors

For millennia humans have pondered the most profound of all questions: What do Bill Gates and god have in common? If you, like me, guessed being a retired monopolist then according to Michael Rea, and cosigned by Victor Reppert, you are wrong:

Suppose Bill Gates were to go back on the dating scene. Wouldn’t it be natural for him to want to be with someone who would love him for himself rather than for his resources? Yet wouldn’t it also be natural for him to worry that even the most virtuous of prospective dating partners would find it difficult to avoid having her judgment clouded by the prospect of living in unimaginable wealth? …But, of course, Bill Gates’s impressiveness pales in comparison with God’s… Viewed in this light, it is easy to suppose that God must hide from us if he wants to allow us to develop the right sort of nonself-interested love for him.

You see, god can’t make it too obvious because we might all be golddiggers. The problem with this analogy, other than Gates generous philanthropism making god look bad, is that it conflates believing in god and accepting god as just or worthy of worship. Rea highlights Biblical passages supporting his cause while ignoring that, depending on a believer’s individual theology, Cain, Lucifer, demons, etc. knew of god but chose not to obey even in the slightest way. Clearly then these are these are separate issues.

Besides making for easy bad jokes, arguments like this reveal the ubiquitous plague in theology that is failing to think probabilistically. Rea argues divine silence isn’t a problem because divine silence “might just be an expression of God’s preferred mode of interaction” which could actually be true. Accepting for the moment that Rea’s version of god is possible, it could be true that such a being exists, wants us to love it but refuses to provide substantial evidence but if you are being rational you can’t just assume that because it’s possible it’s true.

You must weigh this “or else it wouldn’t be true love” response to divine silence against competing hypotheses like a god exists but doesn’t want a relationship with humans and—gasp—that no gods exists so divine hiddenness is really just an expression of there being no gods. Without a strong reason to believe Rea’s counterfactual is true, divine hiddenness must lower the probability of his particular god hypothesis in relation to these alternatives because his theory doesn’t predict that evidence and other theories are far superior at accounting for this evidence.

I am a Simpleton, Therefore Your Argument is Invalid

Shorter Hans-Hermann Hoppe: “If you feign ignorance of basic economic concepts you can win debates by appealing to the stupidity of the audience.”

This is (dated) via Noah Smith who explains the the economic problems with Hoppe’s tactic but belief in the prowess of ignorance to win an argument is not exclusive to Hoppe and certainly not to economics. Normally though this type of ignorance isn’t advocated by a professor emeritus rather it’s shouted by heckling creationists saying “If evolution is true how come you can’t put a gorilla in a cage and turn it into a person?” (Which, by the way, I was once asked by a relative).

As Smith points out if all knowledge must conform to common sense you could also say:

“Explain how you can possibly float just by heating up the air in a balloon. If this were the case, couldn’t our tea kettles levitate?”

“Explain how you can possibly stay healthy by washing your hands with water. If this were the case, wouldn’t people who drank out of rivers never get sick?

This is a similar to the often deliberate misunderstanding which leads some people to conclude we must accept arguments with intuitive premises. It’s as if some people think “If a child wouldn’t believe it, then reality can’t be that way.” is a valid argument.

But I Can Explain That

If ever there was a central thread that tied proponents of the pseudoscientific method it is in their ability to ignore or discard and disconfirming evidence by changing their theory. You hear this every time someone says “I swear my theory is true except when you are looking, except the aliens confused you into thinking otherwise, except look over there!”

The problem with these types of excuses is that proponents seem to be thinking  “Can you come up with a reason that would make it logically possible for this theory to be true and the evidence we have to exist?” instead of “Is the evidence likely on the theory and how plausible is the theory?” This amounts to an attempt to make a theory consistent with the evidence while ignoring the prior probability of the theory.

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What if I Told You This Post Isn’t Real?

What if everything you ever experienced was just an extremely clever deception? So goes the story of solipsism, the idea that all one can be sure of is that one’s own mind exists.

People demanding we take seriously such radical skepticism often point Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, usually translated I think, therefore I am but better translated “there is a thought now, therefore I exist,” and claim this is the only fact of which they can be certain.* When this phrase is translated “there is a thought now” it’s harder to make the mistake of believing this guarantees continued existence. Yes, it’s trivially true that if there is a thought something must exist to think it but this because existence is already presumed by what we mean by “thought.” Further, simply because there is currently a thought doesn’t grant the conclusion that there is an “I” which has existed in the past or will exist in the future.

However, this focus ignores the glaring problem with “cogito” and other claims that all we can be certain of is that our mental events exist, as this claim is truly unfalsifiable. It is logically possible that you are a brain in a vat being continuously deceived, or the product of an alien’s dream, but what does such a theory predict? Are there any predictions of any kind about the differences in the kinds of experiences you would have? Are there even expected differences in your reasoning process if this is true as opposed to if it is false?

If not, and there doesn’t seem to be a way even in principle such a claim could be demonstrated, then solipsism is truly unfalsifiable speculation and as such shouldn’t be given any more credence than any other unfalsifiable theories about the world. The fact that solipsism isn’t logically impossible doesn’t mean it’s a reasonable option. It simply does not follow from the fact we could be deceived about all sensory experiences that we must consider it a reasonable option that we are in fact being deceived at all times.

The folly of advocating solipsism, then, lies in thinking “I can think up a scenario which fits with all possible evidence, therefore we must take it seriously.”

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*Admittedly some, including Decartes himself, use this as a starting point for arguments for the existence of god which would then grant them certainty of the outside world and of their rationality. However, refutations of such arguments are for another time and place… like here.

Some of my thoughts are hoisted from the comment section of, and this post largely inspired by, this post at Dangerous Idea.

Logic and “Necessity”

Can you demonstrate the existence of anything in reality purely through logical argument? No.

At this point I am slightly tempted to brush my hands together and walk away as this seems quite obvious to me but it wasn’t always this way. If you don’t think carefully about what logic is, it’s easy to be think logic can prove something, say a god, exists.

However, logic is not the ultimate guide of what really is, it’s an abstraction about reality. Like any abstraction, there’s no guarantee that something that seems to fit within the system is representative of reality. This is perhaps most clearly seen in the way we commonly demonstrate a logical statement is wrong, not by offering another logical argument, but by pointing to a counterexample in reality. The reason we know “The sidewalk is wet, therefore it rained” is wrong is because of possible counterexamples which could occur in reality. Likewise, the generalities derived from valid arguments, which have become the building blocks of logic, are just those which withstood attempts to deliver counterexamples from reality.

As such logic itself can’t necessitate anything about reality. Any attempt to say “x must necessarily exist” purely because of a logical argument is an attempt to use our abstractions about reality to dictate the truth about reality. This is exactly backwards. Reality has no obligation to match our abstractions.

The only way to know if logical arguments matches reality is to actually look and see. So, for example, even if we were to take seriously the claims of proving the logical necessity solely through logical arguments of some being this would still only be one bit of evidence in its favor, we’d still have to look and see if what such a entity matches up with our observations of reality. To argue that once something was “proved” we have no need to look and see would be to argue that the only thing that is evidence is logical arguments.

…See also James Lindsay.

‘Mind and Cosmos’ and Teleology

In his recent book Mind and Cosmos the philosopher Thomas Nagel had the ambitious goal of demonstrating, as the subtitle suggests, “Why The Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.” Instead he ended up demonstrating exactly why we’ve stuck with the mechanistic framework he dismisses despite its flaws.

In this work he argues the pervasive understanding of evolutionary science and materialism must be false because they can’t account for moral realism, reason or consciousness. Given the extensive problems with those claims (including those I’ve outlined myself) which Nagel never makes much effort to address it’s no surprise I found his arguments very unconvincing, but even less convincing was his proposed alternative to this mechanistic conception of reality, which was to appeal to teleology.

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The Mind Projection Fallacy: Confusion is in the Mind

Before the holiday I was discussing the mind projection fallacy which is the mistake of projecting your perceptions of the world to be inherent properties of the world. There are many ways we make this error but a particularly troubling variation is the mistake that is thinking your ignorance represents something inherent in nature. Among other stumbling points this slip has led some to believe probability is independent of human judgments as opposed to in the mind.

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The Mind Projection Fallacy: Perception is Not Reality

I often joke, and sometimes lightheartedly debate, about the superiority of my subjective judgments. After all, if you do not believe Quentin Tarantino is the best director alive then surely you are mistaken about the facts of reality (If you’ve seen Pulp Fiction, how could you disagree?). However, while it may be clear to me that my perception of the greatness of films doesn’t indicate that such “greatness” is an inherent property of the films I enjoy, the failure to distinguish between perceptions of reality and reality itself is a persistent problem for many people in fields ranging from philosophy to quantum mechanics.

The basic error is to think that the way you see the world must reflect the way the world actually is and as a result subjective judgments are incorrectly projected onto objects. E.T. Jaynes dubbed this mistake as the mind projection fallacy. This mistake takes two basic variations, the first is when a person believes their perception determines properties of nature while the second is the belief that your ignorance or confusion reflects inherent indeterminacy (or confusion) in nature.

Perhaps the most common occurrence of the first version of this mistake occurs during discussions of morality when an act itself is said to be “good” or “bad” independently of what anyone thinks. However this error is wide-reaching and, to take Jaynes’ example, embodied in the difference between saying “the room is noisy” and “there is noise in the room.” The latter statement is a claim about physical properties in the room, while the former is a epistemological declaration of personal perception. Failing to comprehend this distinction is what let’s some people, usually children, to get into serious debates about which film or musical act is truly the “best.”

The second version of the mind projection fallacy, while perhaps less common, is nonetheless extremely problematic as it significantly muddles the discussion of probability. And that is what I’ll address next time.

Nessie, Gandalf and Supernatural Explanations

As a high school student, long before I’d ever heard of skepticism or considered arguments for or against naturalism, I wrote a paper on the Loch Ness Monster. Suffice it to say in all my work on that paper I didn’t uncover single credible shred of evidence that Nessie existed yet then I had, and today I still have, a good idea of what it would take to convince me that such a creature does exist. And while the same could be said of most, if not all, cryptozoological creatures the same can not be said for many proposed supernatural creatures or entities.

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