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Response to Thought Experiment 66: The Forger

9/30/2016

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...van Gogh

...van den Berg

Can you feel the hidden message behind each of these works of art? This week's thought experiment wonders if you can.

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Avenue of Poplars at Dawn was set to join the ranks of van Gogh masterpieces. This "lost" work would sell for millions and generate volumes of scholarship comparing it to the two other paintings van Gogh made of the same scene at different times.
This pleased Joris van den Berg, for he, not van Gogh, had painted Avenue of Poplars at Dawn. Joris was an expert forger and he was certain that his latest creation would be authenticated as genuine. That would not only increase his wealth enormously but also give him tremendous satisfaction.
Only a few close friends knew what Joris was up to. One expressed very serious moral misgivings, which Joris had brushed off. As far as he was concerned, if this painting was judged to be as good as a van Gogh original, then it was worth every penny that was paid for it. Anyone who paid more than it was really worth just because it was van Gogh's own work was a fool who deserved to be parted from his money.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 196.
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The forger is obviously wrong, right? But why? Deceit itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, as illustrated by the common philosophical example that you shouldn't tell an inquiring murderer where his intended victim is. Baggini points this out before closing his discussion of this thought experiment by posing a challenge to us.

What seems to matter, therefore, is whether the lie serves a noble or base purpose, and what the consequences of the deception are. ... Could it be [the forger is making a point that] prices on the art market are not determined by aesthetic merit but by fashion, reputation, and celebrity? ... In this light, the forger can be seen as a kind of guerrilla artist, fighting for the true values of creativity in a culture where art has been debased and commodified. It is true that he is a deceiver. But no guerrilla war can be waged in the open. The system has to be picked apart from within, piece by piece. And the war will be won only when every work of art is judged on its own merits, not on the basis of the signature in the corner. That is, unless anyone can provide good reasons for believing that the signature really does matter...

So, are there good reasons for the signature to matter for a work of art? When I wrote about The Purpose of (My) Art, I said:

Art is knowledge applied to the emotions. Science finds knowledge; art uses knowledge to inspire. Art causes emotional responses, so it often draws emotional people to it, but great art is created by rational processes, filled with knowledge, fueled by emotion, and executed with skill. Bad art is blind emotion that purports falsehoods for truth.

From this, it is clear to me how Joris' forgery is bad art: he is literally purporting falsehood for truth and his work is fuelled by emotions that are totally at odds with those coming from an original and sincere artist. This is why the signature really does matter. A true connection to the emotions and knowledge of the artist undoubtedly adds an extra dimension to any work of art, and that dimension can even become priceless whenever such a connection is deemed irreplaceable and full of inspirational beauty. Of course, if someone wanted to buy Joris' forgery with the goal of spreading his guerrilla message of snark, which attempts to undermine artistic integrity, then they are welcome to do so and pay for that what they will. But to me, that's a cheap message which does nothing to inspire.

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Thought Experiment 66: The Forger

9/26/2016

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...in Autumn

...at sunset

...at dawn?

This week's thought experiment sure seems like a straightforward case of right and wrong. Take a close look:

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Avenue of Poplars at Dawn was set to join the ranks of van Gogh masterpieces. This "lost" work would sell for millions and generate volumes of scholarship comparing it to the two other paintings van Gogh made of the same scene at different times.
This pleased Joris van den Berg, for he, not van Gogh, had painted Avenue of Poplars at Dawn. Joris was an expert forger and he was certain that his latest creation would be authenticated as genuine. That would not only increase his wealth enormously but also give him tremendous satisfaction.
Only a few close friends knew what Joris was up to. One expressed very serious moral misgivings, which Joris had brushed off. As far as he was concerned, if this painting was judged to be as good as a van Gogh original, then it was worth every penny that was paid for it. Anyone who paid more than it was really worth just because it was van Gogh's own work was a fool who deserved to be parted from his money.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 196.
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While Joris is clearly deceiving the world in a problematic way, does this say anything interesting about the nature of art and how it is bound to the artist? I'll be back on Friday to share my own genuine thoughts on this.

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Response to Thought Experiment 65: Soul Power

9/23/2016

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Portrait of the artist as a young pre-man.

Carl Sagan once asked the Dalai Lama what would happen if reincarnation--a fundamental tenet of his religion—were definitively disproved by science. The Dalai Lama answered, "If science can disprove reincarnation, Tibetan Buddhism would abandon reincarnation… but it's going to be mighty hard to disprove reincarnation." Fortunately, we don't face the impossible task of disproving unfalsifiable claims a la Russel's teapot. Instead, the burden of proof is on those who want us to change our lives for no good reason. Or on those who ask us to hand over our hard-earned money to them, like the "medium mystic" in this week's thought experiment:

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Faith had believed in reincarnation for as long as she could remember. But recently, her interest in her past lives had reached a new level. Now that she was visiting the medium mystic Marjorie, for the first time she had information about what her past lives were really like.
Most of what Marjorie told her was about her previous incarnation as Zosime, a noblewoman who lived at the time of the siege of Troy. She heard about her daring escape first to Smyrna and then on to Knossos. She was apparently both brave and beautiful, and she fell in love with a Spartan commander, whom she lived with at Knossos for the rest of her life.
Faith didn't check the real history of Troy to try to verify Marjorie's story. She did not doubt that hers was the same soul that had lived in Zosime. She did, however, have a nagging concern about what this all meant. Much as she enjoyed the idea of being a Greek beauty, since she didn't remember anything of her life in Knossos or have any sense of being the person Marjorie told her about, she couldn't see how she and Zosime could be the same person. She had found out about her past life, but it didn't seem like her life at all.

Source: Book two, chapter XXVII of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke, 1706.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 193.
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If you're reading this blog, and especially if you've read my post on The Truth About Souls, I take it we can quickly get through the dismissal of unfounded and unscientific beliefs in reincarnation. Despite being a part of ancient religions for billions of people, there's just no evidence that it exists or affects our lives in any meaningful way. So, unlike Faith, we really should just give up on the idea already. Baggini brings this up, however, because of Faith's "nagging concern about what this all meant." What it all means is part of a broader discussion of personal identity, which I first took up in my original evaluation of John Locke, and have since covered multiple times in other thought experiments, but which still requires just a bit of further clarification. First, let's note what I said in my original post on Locke**:

(**As a reminder, these evaluations from the survival of the fittest philosophers take their italic text from wikipedia summaries of the philosophers, which are then followed by my own critique of their ideas.)

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Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self. He was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. Locke defines the self as "that conscious thinking thing, (whatever substance, made up of whether spiritual, or material, simple, or compounded, it matters not) which is sensible, or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends.” He does not, however, ignore "substance," writing that "the body too goes to the making of the man.” The Lockean self is therefore a self-aware and self-reflective consciousness that is fixed in a body. Destruction of the body in the form of Alzheimer’s, amnesia, or stroke, leads one to lose that continuity of consciousness by the self. That doesn’t change the identity of the individual. Identity is therefore independent from consciousness. Identity lies at the Mind x Body intersection. One helpful analogy is to say identity is like a river. Not the water that flows through it, but the channel that actually forms the river. When storms occur and water is high, the river is deepened. When drought occurs, the river slows and silts up. When earthquakes or glaciers reshape the landscape, the riverbed may hold no water at all. If we know the events that carved the river, we can recognize its identity no matter what state it is in. Likewise, we can recognize identity when we know the events that shaped it. If you know the river and are told the volume of water that will flow its way, you know what the river will look like. If you know a person and are told the events that will occur to them, you will recognize how they handle it. This is how we know people after long absences, and this is how changes during brief separations can surprise us.
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In the original book where Locke explains how his definition of identity is tied to consciousness, he actually does acknowledge the types of instances I raised where consciousness or memory is lost or impaired. However, rather than admit that this forces him to locate identity outside of consciousness, he says, "To this I answer that we must be careful about what the word ‘I’ is applied to." Locke's position is that whenever consciousness is lost, this changes or splits the identity of the self. Locke says that this is what allows us, for example, to write laws that do not "punish the madman for the sane man’s actions, or the sane man for what the madman did, because they treat them as two persons." It allows us to say someone was "not himself" or "he was beside himself." For Locke, the change in consciousness causes a change in person, and he uses this line of thinking to attack people who believe in reincarnation because they must believe there is no separation between "same person" and "same consciousness." Locke finds such a joining problematic on the grounds that:

"In our present state of knowledge it is hard to see how it can be impossible, in the nature of things, for an intellectual substance to have represented to it as done by itself something that it never did, and was perhaps done by some other agent. . . . Until we have a clearer view of the nature of thinking substances, we had better assume that such changes of substance within a single person never do in fact happen, basing this on the goodness of God. Having a concern for the happiness or misery of his creatures, he won’t transfer from one substance to another the consciousness that draws reward or punishment with it. . . ."

So it appears Locke didn't have a problem with the dualism required to believe in an "intellectual substance" that could be transferred from one consciousness to another, but he had a problem believing God would do so because it wouldn't be fair for Him to reward or punish one part of that soul for actions taken by another part. These are the kinds of intellectual hoops one must jump through to hold onto Christian Gods and souls while rejecting the reincarnation of Eastern religions.

Looking past this feeble religious argument--and the question of whether Locke had a coherent definition for consciousness, or the fact that "he was beside himself" is a figurative rather than literal statement—we can see that Locke is only considering personal identity from the perspective of the individual, of what the word "I" refers to. But this, to me, is a narrow and one-sided view of the self. In contrast, when I state that "identity is independent of consciousness," I'm not allowing any supernatural reincarnation in the door, I'm simply taking an objective and independent view of identity as if it were composed of some composite from the perspectives of the self AND others as they develop over time. If one were to draw a Venn diagram of this view of personal identity, the entire area would contain a circle that only the self can know, and a circle that only others can know, with some overlap in the middle of what both perspectives can see. This kind of "individual + social + time" view of identity is akin to the "nature x nurture" picture we study when we look at the life of any biological organism. A full grasp of any identity must account for all the perspectives that observe that identity. I could go on and give further illustrations of this important distinction for such a "multi-level" view of identity, but I'm sure you already get it so let's save the elaboration for future thought experiments. I have a feeling this issue will rear its head again and come back to life...

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Thought Experiment 65: Soul Power

9/19/2016

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Once I was a Cossack...

Using estimates from populations and religious tenets, there are over a billion people in the world right now who believe in reincarnation. Are you one of them?

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Faith had believed in reincarnation for as long as she could remember. But recently, her interest in her past lives had reached a new level. Now that she was visiting the medium mystic Marjorie, for the first time she had information about what her past lives were really like.
Most of what Marjorie told her was about her previous incarnation as Zosime, a noblewoman who lived at the time of the siege of Troy. She heard about her daring escape first to Smyrna and then on to Knossos. She was apparently both brave and beautiful, and she fell in love with a Spartan commander, whom she lived with at Knossos for the rest of her life.
Faith didn't check the real history of Troy to try to verify Marjorie's story. She did not doubt that hers was the same soul that had lived in Zosime. She did, however, have a nagging concern about what this all meant. Much as she enjoyed the idea of being a Greek beauty, since she didn't remember anything of her life in Knossos or have any sense of being the person Marjorie told her about, she couldn't see how she and Zosime could be the same person. She had found out about her past life, but it didn't seem like her life at all.

Source: Book two, chapter XXVII of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke, 1706.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 193.
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What do you think? What kinds of links count to make some prior version of "me" actually me?

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Response to Thought Experiment 64: Nipping the Bud

9/16/2016

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(This image of Iraqi refugees heading for the Turkish border is from dw.com at https://is.gd/1TRM1Z.)

It's been 15 years now since 9/11, and the consequences of our responses to that event look worse and worse all the time. How did our political leaders get it so wrong? By making mistakes like the general in this week's thought experiment.

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The president lowered his voice and said, "What you are suggesting is illegal."
   "Yes indeed, Mr. President," replied the general. "But you have to ask yourself how best to protect the lives of your citizens. The situation is simple: Tatum is determined both to mount a campaign of ethnic cleansing in his own country and to launch military attacks on us. Our intelligence tells us that he is almost alone in this view and that if we were to take him out, he would be replaced by the far more moderate Nesta."
   "Yes, but you talk about us taking him out. Assassination of a foreign leader is contrary to international law."
   The general sighed. "But Mr. President, you must see how simple your choice is. One bullet, followed by a few more as security services clean up afterwards, will be enough to avert a widespread massacre and probable war. I know you don't want the blood of a foreign leader on your hands, but would you prefer to be drowning in the blood of thousands of his, and your own, people?"

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 190.
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So yes, there are times when morality can supercede the law, as is the case when society is not acting toward the long-term survival of all life (my objective definition of moral good). But that really doesn't seem to be the case here. It's more of a case of utilitarian math gone wrong. The general thinks he's only taking one little life (plus or minus a little "cleanup" afterwards) for the benefit of...who knows...thousands?...millions?...of good ol' Americans in the U.S. of A. I've already said plenty lately about how knowledge is probabilistic because you can't know the future so you should tread cautiously where consequences of error are large, so let's just look at the experiment again and point out all the possibilities for prediction error (highlighted in bold red).

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The president lowered his voice and said, "What you are suggesting is illegal."
   "Yes indeed, Mr. President," replied the general. "But you have to ask yourself how best to protect the lives of your citizens. The situation is simple: Tatum is determined both to mount a campaign of ethnic cleansing in his own country and to launch military attacks on us. Our intelligence tells us that he is almost alone in this view and that if we were to take him out, he would be replaced by the far more moderate Nesta."
   "Yes, but you talk about us taking him out. Assassination of a foreign leader is contrary to international law."
   The general sighed. "But Mr. President, you must see how simple your choice is. One bullet, followed by a few more as security services clean up afterwards, will be enough to avert a widespread massacre and probable war. I know you don't want the blood of a foreign leader on your hands, but would you prefer to be drowning in the blood of thousands of his, and your own, people?"
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Pretty much every assertion made by the general could potentially be wrong, and if any of them are, then his "simple" utilitarian calculation would be wrong and the resulting mess would be (or should I say actually was) catastrophic. It seems we have to be taught this lesson at least once every generation—the lesson that simple answers to complex situations are always wrong. When will we finally learn it?

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Thought Experiment 64: Nipping the Bud

9/12/2016

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Maybe things could have been handled differently.

Not every thought experiment can be as fundamentally important as last week's. Take this one for example.

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The president lowered his voice and said, "What you are suggesting is illegal."
   "Yes indeed, Mr. President," replied the general. "But you have to ask yourself how best to protect the lives of your citizens. The situation is simple: Tatum is determined both to mount a campaign of ethnic cleansing in his own country and to launch military attacks on us. Our intelligence tells us that he is almost alone in this view and that if we were to take him out, he would be replaced by the far more moderate Nesta."
   "Yes, but you talk about us taking him out. Assassination of a foreign leader is contrary to international law."
   The general sighed. "But Mr. President, you must see how simple your choice is. One bullet, followed by a few more as security services clean up afterwards, will be enough to avert a widespread massacre and probable war. I know you don't want the blood of a foreign leader on your hands, but would you prefer to be drowning in the blood of thousands of his, and your own, people?"

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 190.
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What do you think? When is morality above the law? Could assassination ever be justified?

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Knowledge Cannot Be Justified True Belief

9/9/2016

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Time to work on some foundations...

For some time now, as I've been working my way through these thought experiments, I've begun to realise that there's a hole at the base of my philosophy that needs to be filled in. My first two tenets need to be reexamined and clarified. This is because of a hole that all philosophers share, so I've been willing to skip over it until now, but finally, after more than four years of blogging, I feel I'm prepared to address it and this week's thought experiment has given me the perfect opportunity to do so.

By my count, this is the 27th thought experiment out of the 63 I've covered so far that touches upon epistemology, aka the study of knowledge. I'm sure it has felt repetitive and excessive to address this over and over (it sure has to me!), but there's a good reason that it preoccupies philosophers so deeply. Knowledge is pretty much the core concept for the field, but philosophers still don't have an accepted definition of it.

Usually, when a question about this comes up, I like to quote that Plato defined knowledge as justified true belief, or point out that Hume said "A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence." We all pretty much get this because, pragmatically, we live our lives by these rules. It's what led me to define my second tenet like this:

2. Knowledge comes from using reason to understand our sense experiences. The iterative nature of the scientific method is what hones this process towards truth. In a large and changing universe, eternal absolutes are extremely difficult to prove. We must act based on the best available knowledge. This leaves us almost entirely with probabilistic knowledge, which means we must act with confidence and caution appropriate to the probability, being especially careful in realms where knowledge is uncertain and consequences of error are large.

Now, after covering so many thought experiments rooted in skepticism like the ones about evil demons, nightmares, rocking horses, invisible gardeners, rabbits, divine commands, colour vision, mozzarella moons, and fragmented momentary identities, I must make a few changes to that tenet in order to make it more exact. Due to the existence of hyperbolic doubt that casts its ugly shadows on all knowledge, I would change "extremely difficult to prove" to "impossible to prove now," and I would drop the word "almost" from the fifth sentence, which "leaves us entirely with probabilistic knowledge."**

(** By the way, when I say probabilistic, I don't mean probabilities that are calculable after the fact like in regular statistics, or even probabilities that are estimated ahead of time and then revised along the way as in Bayesian statistics. When I say knowledge is probabilistic, I mean like this definition of probabilism: (noun, as used in philosophy) the doctrine, introduced by the Skeptics, that certainty is impossible and that probability suffices to govern faith and practice.)

I consider these small edits simple deletions of the slight prevarications in my original text, so up till now I've been happy to keep answering previous thought experiments about knowledge by just saying it is probabilistic and then moving on. But now it's time to dig into this a little deeper. While I'm here, I should also address another potential for misunderstanding from my original tenets. In the very first one, I said the following:

1. We live in a rational, knowable, physical universe. Effects have natural causes. No supernatural events have ever been unquestionably documented.

I originally thought of tenet #2 as putting a qualifier on just how knowable the universe is in tenet #1, but I can see now that since I'm claiming all knowledge is probabilistic, someone might ask how I can claim the universe is in fact knowable at all. As I was preparing for this blog, I heard a good explanation for this from professor John Searle (he, of the Chinese Room thought experiment) in a podcast debate called After the End of Truth. During that talk, he pointed out how there is a distinction to be made between ontology (the nature of being, of what is) and epistemology (what we know, what we can know). My first tenet claims that--ontologically--the universe is real. This means there is one objective reality that does not spontaneously mutate in any supernatural ways. Unfortunately, my second tenet states that--epistemologically—all of our knowledge can only ever be subjective, for reasons I've explored in other thought experiments and will do so again below. So, my first claim, that there is one objective reality, can really only be known provisionally. It must be an assumption. I would even go so far as to call it: the first assumption. I'll come back to this at the end of the post, but now that that clarification is out of the way, let's turn to the epistemological knowledge problem in this week's thought experiment.

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It was a very strange coincidence. One day last week, while Naomi was paying for her coffee, the man behind her, fumbling in his pockets, dropped his key ring. Naomi picked it up and couldn't help but notice the small white rabbit dangling from it. As she handed it back to the man, who had a very distinctive, angular, ashen face, he looked a little embarrassed and said, "I take it everywhere. Sentimental reasons." He blushed and they said no more.
   The very next day she was about to cross the road when she heard a screeching of brakes and then an ominous thud. Almost without thinking, she was drawn with the crowd to the scene of the accident, like iron filings collecting around a magnet. She looked to see who the victim was and saw that same white, jagged face. A doctor was already examining him. "He's dead."
   She was required to give a statement to the police. "All I know is that he bought a coffee at that cafe yesterday and that he always carried a key ring with a white rabbit." The police were able to confirm that both facts were true.
   Five days later Naomi almost screamed out loud when, queuing once more for her coffee, she turned to see what looked like the same man standing behind her. He registered her shock but did not seem surprised by it. "You thought I was my twin brother, right?" he asked. Naomi nodded. "You're not the first to react like that since the accident. It doesn't help that we both come to the same cafe, but not usually together."
   As he spoke, Naoimi couldn't help staring at what was in his hands: a white rabbit on a key ring. The man was not taken aback by that either. "You know mothers. They like to treat their kids the same."
   Naomi found the whole experience disconcerting. But the question that bothered her when she finally calmed down was: has she told the police the truth?

Source: "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" by E. Gettier, republished in Analytic Philosophy: An Anthology, 2001.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 187.
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This sounds absolutely innocuous, doesn't it? From a legal perspective, Naomi is perfectly fine because her identification of the body was totally reasonable. (Reasonable being a key word in the legal definition of knowledge.) Under ordinary circumstances, with no creepily identical twin walking around out there, the matter would be over. But in this extraordinary case, the details surrounding her statement to the police means that the whole situation strikes at the heart of the definition of knowledge that had been widely accepted by philosophers for literally thousands of years. As I said above, it was Plato who defined knowledge as:

justified
true
belief.

I've written those in a numbered list to help emphasise the importance and independence of each one of those three variables. As it had traditionally been explained, you couldn't KNOW something (written in capital letters to denote the philosophical usage of the term) unless you possessed all three elements. For example, let's say you think you KNOW the Earth is round. The reason you think so, though, is because you live on a high rounded hill and the world looks like it slopes away from you very smoothly in all directions. If that's your justification, then you don't really KNOW the Earth is round. Your knowledge would leave you as soon as you grew up and walked down the hill. Next, let's be jerks and insist that the Earth is actually slightly oblong. In that case, it's no longer true that the Earth is round, so you can't KNOW that it is, because you'd be wrong. It's oblong. But finally, let's go back to accepting that the world is roughly round, and you've been taught in school that it is. However, you're the jerk now and you just don't accept that. You could pass along a justification for the truth to someone else, but you don't KNOW it since you don't believe it. You see? Knowledge is justified, true, belief.

Or at least, it was. For philosophers of epistemology, "the definition of knowledge as justified true belief was widely accepted until the 1960s. At this time, a paper written by the American philosopher Edmund Gettier provoked major widespread discussion. Gettier contended that while justified belief in a true proposition is necessary for that proposition to be known, it is not sufficient. As in the diagram [below], a true proposition can be believed by an individual (purple region) but still not fall within the "knowledge" category (yellow region). According to Gettier, there are certain circumstances in which one does not have knowledge, even when all of the above conditions are met. These cases fail to be knowledge because the subject's belief is justified, but only happens to be true by virtue of luck. In other words, he made the correct choice for the wrong reasons."

Using this to analyse our thought experiment, we see that Naomi's "knowledge" falls into the purple category. It turns out she was right about identifying the dead man, but she was only right because she was lucky—it could very easily have been the dead man's twin brother who was lying in the road. In other words, she had a seemingly justified/true/belief, but she didn't really KNOW it. And this presents a big problem for philosophers. As Baggini says in his discussion of this thought experiment:

"Naomi didn't know because her justification for claiming to know the two facts about the dead man was not strong enough. But if this is true, then we need to demand that knowledge has very strict conditions for justification of belief across the board. And that means we will find that almost all of what we think we know is not sufficiently justified to count as knowledge."

The difficulty in finding such justifications is notoriously known by two related problems in philosophy: the regress problem and the problem of induction. Both of these show that so far we have found it impossible to fully justify a solid basis for our knowledge. Going backwards, the regress problem states that "the traditional way of supporting a rational argument is to appeal to other rational arguments, typically using chains of reason and rules of logic. [But] how can we eventually terminate a logical argument with some statement(s) that do not require further justification but can still be considered rational and justified?" There have been many attempts to solve this, but to make a long philosophy story short, we can't. And the difficulty is just as bad going forward. In that direction, the problem of induction--which is most associated with David Hume—states that "from a series of observations it seems valid to infer [the observations will continue. But] it is not certain, regardless of the number of observations. In fact, Hume would even argue that we cannot claim it is 'more probable', since this still requires the assumption that the past predicts the future. [Also], the observations themselves do not establish the validity of inductive reasoning, except inductively." Hume noted that we use the inductive method to predict the future all the time, and that most of the time it works, but it is not infallible because ultimately it is just circular.

I said above in my tenet #2 that the universe is too large to know everything, but that seems like something that could theoretically be overcome. Really, the ultimate reason for the impossibility of knowing everything is because of time. The past behind the Big Bang is currently unknowable, and the future seems like it will be unknowable forever. Of all the dozens of Gettier problems that have been dreamed up by philosophers to show that justified, true, belief (JTB) is not sufficient for knowledge, the one that Baggini chose to use in this thought experiment is well suited to illustrate the futileness of our attempts to KNOW. As we see, Naomi had a reasonable JTB, but someone came along later and gave her extraordinary new facts that rendered her previous belief false. Well, since we can never know the future, all knowledge is like that. Invoking the most extreme skepticism, an evil demon is always lurking out there that could change what we think we know. In light of the two historical problems of justifying knowledge, we are forced into a position of skepticism, which questions the validity of all human knowledge. This is best known by Socrates' statement that the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing with certainty.

The fields of logic and math have lured philosophers into believing that some truths must be eternal everywhere, but even these might be dependent upon one's place in the universe. Take, for example, the perspective one would have in a black hole where the extreme force of gravity forces everything, even light, into a singularity. In such a realm, nothing would ever logically be "either/or." Everything would become "both/and" as soon as they entered the discussion. Two plus two would not equal four. Two entities would always become one. Two plus two would still end up as one. Math tests would become trivially easy as every answer would just be one! Of course, this is a slightly facetious conjecture because no philosopher or mathematician could survive in such a situation to develop these rules of math and logic, but I think this does show that even our most certain knowledge might be subject to change in another time or place in this or another universe.

So what do we do about all this?

In the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on these so-called Gettier problems, it is noted that these thought experiments, "sparked a period of pronounced epistemological energy and innovation. ... Since 1963 epistemologists have tried — again and again and again — to revise or repair or replace JTB in response to Gettier cases. ... There is no consensus, however, that any one of the attempts to solve the Gettier challenge has succeeded in fully defining what it is to have knowledge of a truth or fact. ... This might have us wondering whether a complete analytical definition of knowledge is even possible."

You can read more details on the philosophical history of this problem at the link in that previous paragraph (or you could also go here, or here), but rather than hash through all of the various attempted responses — which fall into three main categories: 1) undermining Gettier; 2) adding a fourth condition to JTB; or 3) revising the J in JTB — I think it's plain from my analysis above that no solution has been reached precisely because a complete analytical definition of knowledge is not possible. In ancient times, humans believed the universe (or at least their gods and their heavens) were eternal, fixed, and immutable. This is the type of environment that is required for TRUTH to exist. Pragmatically, over timespans of human existence, such an environment can seem like it exists, but over evolutionary time, we now see that our universe is temporal (not eternal), expanding (not fixed), and changing (not immutable). In this type of environment, we can never be certain that any TRUTH will survive. Knowledge, therefore, cannot be justified true belief, because there is no such thing as TRUTH. When looking at the JTB account of knowledge, It is the T that must be revised because our cosmological revolution needs to sink in to our epistemological understanding.

Before we get to T's replacement, let's look quickly at J and B. The question of Belief is a straightforward one that any honest person can answer about themselves either to themselves or to another. (Of course, changing beliefs is another matter entirely...) As for Justification, the best method we have found so far is the scientific method, which consists of systematic observation, measurement, and experimentation, in conjunction with the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses. Under modern interpretations, a scientific hypothesis must also be falsifiable, otherwise the hypothesis cannot be meaningfully tested.

As seen in the diagram above, the scientific method is repeated over and over. Just like the universe and evolution, it is an ongoing process. If a particular hypothesis becomes very well supported, then a general theory may be developed and go on to be widely accepted, but such theories are never treated as unquestioned dogma. In an excellent video produced by the British Humanist Association called "How do we know what is true?", this production of knowledge from the scientific method is contrasted with visions and revelations that are claimed to come from the supernatural realm. Those mystical outputs should be discarded. Using those methods, the number of personal observations is equal to one, but one person is fallible. (And in this case, often deluded.) By contrast, the scientific method derives its power from the use of multiple, independent people, such that the problem of a single fallible person is gradually dissolved away. It still doesn't get us to any TRUTH, but as Hume said, “extrapolating from experience was just as unreliable as other philosophers thought it was, but still more trustworthy than any other methods we might imagine we have."

So what then is the best way to define knowledge? It can't be a perfectly complete and TRUE thing. It must be an ongoing process that is forever subject to change. As long as there is no reason for knowledge to change, it can persist, it can survive. Like anything, knowledge is therefore subject to evolutionary forces. It varies. It is selected for its fit. And if the facts of the environment change, then it either adapts or goes extinct. No "truth" is ever permanently immutable. Not even that one. Some day, some evil demon might reveal itself and prove that some truths are permanent, but until then, we must live and rely on the knowledge that survives our best examinations.

When do we know that knowledge is surviving? Whenever knowledge holds up while trying to make predictions with it. Where beliefs fail to predict, they are discarded. In a process that is akin to the variation, selection, and retention model of natural selection in biological evolution, we can call this rational selection within the evolution of knowledge. For evolutionary epistemologists, all theories are "true" only provisionally, regardless of the degree of empirical testing they have survived. I believe this is the best way we currently have, or may ever have, of looking at the world. Therefore:

Knowledge can only ever be: justified, beliefs, that are surviving.

In this, my JBS Theory of Knowledge, propositions are either surviving or they have gone extinct after having passed or failed a number of rational selections. Just as billions and billions of iterations of natural selection have shaped all of life, billions and billions of iterations of rational selection have honed knowledge. The more successful passes through rational selection that have been made (e.g. over greater numbers of years, numbers of people, numbers of experiments, and diversity for all of these), the more robust that knowledge can become. However, no knowledge is ever safe from the threat of extinction. This is equivalent to the robustness of life surviving through numerous environmental conditions, but always needing to adapt if conditions change.

Finally, this brings us back to tenet #1, our first assumption. Through the eons of the entire age of life, and over all the instances of individual organisms acting within the universe, the ability of life to predict its environment and continue to survive in it has required that ontologically the universe must be singular, objective, and knowable. If it were otherwise, life could not make sense of things and survive here. As we now see, we may never know if that is TRUE, but so far that knowledge has survived. The objective existence of the universe may indeed be an assumption, but as a starting point, it now seems to be the strongest knowledge we have.

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Thought Experiment 63: No Know

9/5/2016

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You'd remember someone carrying this wouldn't you?

We've spent a lot of time so far with these thought experiments trying to explore what it is that we actually know. And apparently, we've done such a good job proving that we can't fully know anything, we have to keep repeating the lesson again and again. So, here is yet another way to consider the issue.

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It was a very strange coincidence. One day last week, while Naomi was paying for her coffee, the man behind her, fumbling in his pockets, dropped his key ring. Naomi picked it up and couldn't help but notice the small white rabbit dangling from it. As she handed it back to the man, who had a very distinctive, angular, ashen face, he looked a little embarrassed and said, "I take it everywhere. Sentimental reasons." He blushed and they said no more.
   The very next day she was about to cross the road when she heard a screeching of brakes and then an ominous thud. Almost without thinking, she was drawn with the crowd to the scene of the accident, like iron filings collecting around a magnet. She looked to see who the victim was and saw that same white, jagged face. A doctor was already examining him. "He's dead."
   She was required to give a statement to the police. "All I know is that he bought a coffee at that cafe yesterday and that he always carried a key ring with a white rabbit." The police were able to confirm that both facts were true.
   Five days later Naomi almost screamed out loud when, queuing once more for her coffee, she turned to see what looked like the same man standing behind her. He registered her shock but did not seem surprised by it. "You thought I was my twin brother, right?" he asked. Naomi nodded. "You're not the first to react like that since the accident. It doesn't help that we both come to the same cafe, but not usually together."
   As he spoke, Naoimi couldn't help staring at what was in his hands: a white rabbit on a key ring. The man was not taken aback by that either. "You know mothers. They like to treat their kids the same."
   Naomi found the whole experience disconcerting. But the question that bothered her when she finally calmed down was: has she told the police the truth?

Source: "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" by E. Gettier, republished in Analytic Philosophy: An Anthology, 2001.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 187.
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Any new thoughts out there on what "truth" is? Either me or my twin brother will be back on Friday with a recap. Although you won't be able to tell which one of us is writing...

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Response to Thought Experiment 62: I Think, Therefore?

9/2/2016

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Hmm, I think I've seen this a few times now.

When I covered René Descartes during my series on the survival of the fittest philosophers, the title of the post I used for him was I Think, Therefore I Think I Think. Since that headline alone basically answers the question posed in the title of this week's thought experiment, I'll try to keep this discussion as brief as possible.

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My name is René. I remember reading once that if there is one thing I can always be certain of, it's that as long as I'm thinking, I exist. If I, David, am thinking right now, I must exist in order for the thinking to go on. That's right, isn't it? I may be dreaming or I may be mad, or maybe I don't live in Taunton at all, but as long as I'm thinking I that Lucy (that's me) exists. I find this comforting. My life in Munich can be very stressful, and knowing that I can be certain of the existence of my self provides some security. Walking down the Champs-Elysées every morning, I often find myself wondering if the real world exists. Do I really live in Charlottesville, as I think? Friends say to me, 'Madeleine, you will drive yourself mad with your speculations!' But I don't think I'm nuts. I've found certainty in an uncertain world. Cogito ergo sum. I, Nigel, think, therefore I am indeed Cedric.

Sources: Discourse on Method by René Descartes (1637), and Schriften und Briefe by G.C. Lichtenberg (1971).

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 184.
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Essentially, this experiment serves just to poke one hole in the most well known argument from René Descartes. As Baggini says in his discussion of this: "René Descartes took [cogito ergo sum] to establish the existence of an immaterial soul or self. ... The point of the monologue is to show that Descartes' famous words demonstrate a great deal less that we often take them to. The fact that we think may show that we exist, but it does not tell us anything about what kind of thing we are, or whether we continue to exist as the same person over time. The certainty we get from cogito ergo sum comes at a high price: complete uncertainty once we step outside the moment in which the thought occurs."

As I said in a long back and forth in the comment section of my Descartes post, even after I think therefore I am, "the questions of what 'I' and 'think' and 'am' are all still lingering. What am I? When in evolutionary history did 'I' first 'think'? What does it mean to exist?" The way this week's thought experiment is written makes it well suited for showing just how fuzzy the 'I' is in I think therefore I am. Without clear definitions of all its terms, cogito ergo sum is just not the solid bedrock Descartes desperately wanted it to be. Even Descartes eventually admitted this and wound up trying as a last resort "to establish that we are the creatures not of an evil genius, but an all-perfect creator who would not allow us to be deceived about what we clearly and distinctly perceive." But that's obviously nonsense, so once again we are driven back to the second tenet of evolutionary philosophy — that all knowledge is probabilistic — which is apparently something that philosophers like to remind us of on a regular basis. In a world filled with overconfidence and too much certainty, who can blame them?

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Response to Thought Experiment 66: The Forger

Thought Experiment 66: The Forger

Response to Thought Experiment 65: Soul Power

Thought Experiment 65: Soul Power

Response to Thought Experiment 64: Nipping the Bud

Thought Experiment 64: Nipping the Bud

Knowledge Cannot Be Justified True Belief

Thought Experiment 63: No Know

Response to Thought Experiment 62: I Think, Therefore?

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