The Time Being

Suppose you were convicted of a capital crime by a future dystopian government, and you get to choose one of three fates:

1) The government painlessly kills you, obliterating your consciousness for all of eternity

2) The government injects you with a disease that hijacks all of your thoughts, feelings, and desires. Your consciousness continues, but your previous self is destroyed. Any mental state that occurs is the product of the disease and any memory of a mind before the infection is forgotten.

3) The government surgically attaches a small slug-like thing called a Yeerk to your brain. The Yeerk completely controls your actions according to its will, but your mind is kept intact. You are forced to live out your life as a passive passenger in your own body.

Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of real-life mid-1800’s astronomers observing the planet Uranus. Both past and contemporary astronomers have had tremendous success predicting the locations of planets using Newton’s laws of planetary motion. By plugging in information about a planet’s speed and the location of other planets, astronomers can pinpoint the location of a planet in the following night’s sky. We, the astronomers in the 1840’s, want to gather information about Uranus, so we plug in the speed of Uranus with the orbit of the six other planets in our solar system into Newton’s formulas. When we look for it a few days later where the equations say it should be, we don’t find it. We look around through the telescopes and find Uranus a significant distance from where we thought it should be. We repeat the process a few days later to the same effect—Uranus isn’t where our hypothesis predicts it should be.

So what happened? When we make any sort of prediction about the world using a hypothesis, we employ a fairly vast number of other theories, sometimes called auxiliary hypotheses. When astronomers were predicting the future location of Uranus they were employing quite a few. The most obvious hypothesis at play was the motion of Uranus, which was based on observation, but that one hypothesis barely scratches the surface. Other hypotheses/theories include: 1) Newton’s laws of planetary motion, 2) there are only seven planets in the solar system, 3) the telescope is an accurate way to observe celestial movement, 4) the formula that converts movement of planets in a telescope into information about the planet’s orbit, 5) planets exist.

Up until the problem with Uranus, the hypotheses used by mid-19th century astronomers worked fine. But the astronomers looking at Uranus had a problem. By conjoining all of the hypotheses they had about celestial movement, they had very clear predictions about the future location of Uranus—predictions that turned out to be false. If we were following the scientific method in another setting, we would probably reject our main hypothesis and formulate a new one. However, there is no good way to determine which hypothesis should be rejected. When a whole set of hypotheses yields a false prediction we are only logically justified in claiming that some of the hypotheses are wrong. The failure of the prediction, however, does not tell us which ones or how many.

As it turns out, at least two of the hypotheses used by the astronomers looking at Uranus were wrong, but astronomers wouldn’t know that for almost 80 years. The astronomers adjusted their hypotheses to allow for an undiscovered 8th planet, named Neptune, orbiting somewhere beyond Uranus. They plugged the numbers into Newton’s laws, and viola! They were able to accurately predict Uranus’ orbit and discovered Neptune based on their adjusted calculations.

Fast forward 20 years, and astronomers discovered Mercury’s orbit wasn’t what they predicted either. Astronomers, eager to discover a new planet, predicted the existence of a planet orbiting between Mercury and the Sun called Vulcan. They looked and looked and looked and could not find the new planet. The mystery sat unanswered for years until Einstein overturned Newton’s laws of planetary motion. It turns out Newton’s laws, the bedrock of modern astronomy, was an incorrect hypothesis. The differences between Einstein’s predictions and Newton’s predictions were usually negligible, but Newton’s laws were wrong enough to throw off predictions about Mercury.

Contrary to popular opinion, it is possible to answer whether the chicken or the egg came first. Like when, a few weeks ago, I answered whether a tree falling alone in the woods makes a sound, the answer is messy and not particularly satisfying. Often when questions like this appear unanswerable, it is because the question itself is misleading and needs to be side-stepped.

At least as far back as David Hume (1711-1776), philosophers have distinguished two different ways a theory or worldview can be false. An externally incoherent theory is contradicted by fact and an internally incoherent theory contradicts itself. External incoherence is fairly straight forward, and is shown any time evidence disproves a theory. Internal incoherence is less commonly noticed, but is often found among people’s beliefs. For example, a study by Michael J Wood found that "the more participants believed that Osama Bin Laden was already dead when U.S. special forces raided his compound in Pakistan, the more they believed he is still alive." In other words, conspiracy theorists sometimes adopt conflicting beliefs about certain events.  

Whether or not a theory is externally coherent sometime depends on a point of view. Two sides of an argument often approach the world with different explanatory tools at their disposal, and incoherence sometimes depends on which tools are accepted as valid. Creationists believe in the supremacy of God's word, specifically the bible, and scientists believe in the supremacy of science's self-correcting investigations. To the secular scientist, the existence of a 7000 year old tree is proof of young-earth creationism's external incoherence, but to the creationist, the belief of the tree's age is just a misinterpretation of God's creation.

Assuming an opponent’s position to show its incoherence is quite possible. Sticking with the debate over creationism, Bill Nye once argued that the creationist believe that all existing animals trace back to Noah's Ark which landed on Mt Ararat is externally incoherent with the fact that marsupials are only found in Australia. Marsupials currently only exist in Australia, so if creationists are right, there should be fossils between the Ark’s landing spot and Australia. As Bill Nye observed, no one has ever found any such fossils. On the other side of the debate, science's inability the very existence of universe can be taken as an argument for the external incoherence of science. Science assumes that every event has a cause, the argument runs, but this is at odds with the fact that we are standing around and asking the question. In other words, science is incompatible with the fact that there was an initial cause to the universe.

http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_07_4_stevenson.pdf

If some of the terms are unfamiliar or unclear to you, I suggest reading part 1 and part 2 of this series.

In what I think is one of the coolest and ingenious theories in the history of philosophy, German philosopher Karl Popper (1902-1994) tried to take messiness of induction out of scientific advancement. He created an account of the scientific method that only used deduction and would therefore not have to hedge its discoveries with probabilities. Induction requires placing a probability on a conclusion’s truth because even if we observe a million ravens and inductively conclude that all ravens are black, a white raven may be born tomorrow.

Popper's theory, often called deductivism, is based off of a simple observation. While we can't prove a general theory like "all ravens are black" with certainty, we can disprove it using logically certain deduction. An albino raven completely annihilates the hypothesis that all ravens are black.

At the end of part 1, we were left with a puzzle. Sherlock Holmes indeed uses deduction to come to his fantastic conclusions, but deduction isn't the most impressive part of his conclusions. Deduction is just a set of rules that guarantee a conclusion's truth given the premises’ truth.  Garbage in, garbage out. An example:

Either Sherlock Holmes ate a Cornish hen for dinner, or I'm a genius

Sherlock Holmes did not eat a Cornish hen for dinner

Therefore I'm a genius

There you go. I'll accept my MacArthur genius grant in cash.

Here is an example of deduction at work:

Premise 1: Sherlock Holmes was wrong to think his conclusions were arrived at by deduction.

Premise 2: If Sherlock Holmes was wrong to think his conclusions were arrived at by deduction, then Sherlock Holmes does not know what deduction is.

Conclusion: Sherlock Holmes does not know what deduction is.

Here's the controversial claim at the heart of this post: a sufficiently advanced science may be able to explain what happens to consciousness after death. This is not to say that the path to such understanding is clear. The study of the brain and consciousness is in such an early stage that it is hard to predict how a future science could discover what happens to a consciousness after death. I only want to claim that we shouldn't rule out the possibility.

We have plenty of historical evidence suggesting that science will surprise us in the future. Some of history's most spectacular scientific discoveries, like evolution and heliocentrism, flew directly in the face of humanity's conception of the world. Who are we to say that a future science won't be able to answer some of our contemporary "deep" questions about existence? We can now explain the origin of humanity, a "deep" question of past eras. Claiming we know what happens after death is the historical equivalent of the ancient Greek Heraclitus's atomic theory. Heraclitus might have ultimately been sort-of right, but Heraclitus got what he got right mostly by accident—not because he based his view on good science.

Atheism is supposed to be rationalistic—it is a worldview based on reason rather than faith or oral tradition. By making a claim about the afterlife, atheists jump the gun on scientific advancement and make a claim comparable to the existence of heaven. Believing wholeheartedly in any account of the afterlife is patently irrational because the belief is not based on fact. Given the current state of science, it can't be based on evidence. By claiming that oblivion follows death, atheists make a faith-based claim based on nothing more than intuition, which is the very thing they denounce about religions.

Most, if not all, atheists I know are materialists about the mind—they think consciousness is entirely explainable in terms of brain structure and function. Materialists have more reason than anybody else to believe science can explain the fate of consciousness after death. If we can ultimately explain human consciousness in terms of brain states, then we will probably be able to uncover the character of consciousness of other things—bats, worms, octopuses, rocks, and yes, the brains of dead people.

Probably the best known argument for believing in God, Pascal's wager argues that, statistically speaking, we are best off believing in God whether or not God exists. As Pascal, the inventor of statistics, saw it, there are two distinct possibilities regarding God—he exists or he doesn't—and we can place two distinct bets—we believe in him or we don't. If God doesn't exist, Pascal argued, then at worst we waste a few hundred hours of our life and some money at a church. But if God exists, our bets have real payoff. For the low price of believing in an existing God, we get infinite pleasure after death. But if we don't believe in a real God, he sends us to an eternity of torment in hell. Here it is in a chart:

According to Pascal, our course of action is clear: we should hedge our bets and believe in God because we open up the possibility of infinite pleasure and eliminate the possibility of infinite pain.

I've heard athiests and agnostics object that we can't force ourselves to believe in God. Even if we accept the conclusion of Pascal's wager, we can't flip a switch and believe. The point is valid. Belief is involuntary, but that doesn't mean Pascal's wager can't convert people to Christianity. As Daniel Dennett points out, we can desire to believe in God—we can believe in belief.

When we believe in belief we put ourselves in situations where we might convert. A belief in a belief might cause us to go to church or listen intently to a missionary, and the openness to faith might ultimately convert us. Pascal's wager might not create a belief in God, but it can definately open us up to conversion. Despite this, Pascal's wager has a big problem. It can be used to argue for atheism and belief in beings other than the Christian God. Let's imagine I am trying to decide whether or not to believe in Thomas, a divine bottle of vodka on Neptune. Supposedly Thomas watches me and only me, and when I was born, Thomas said to itself, "if he believes in me, I'm going to send him to an afterlife of eternal bliss. If he doesn't believe in me, I'm going to send him to an afterlife of eternal torment." Let's map this out on a chart:

Except for the name of the deity, this chart is identical to the first. Given Pascal's wager, I am just as justified in believing a divine vodka's existence as I am God's.

After recently explaining this to a friend, he argued that Pascal's wager gives us reason to believe in a God, regardless of which God. By believing in God, we are opening ourselves up to the possibility that we go to heaven instead of hell. We might have chosen the wrong God, but at least we might go to heaven. This argument only seems plausible because it assumes all deities have to operate with Christianity's logic about punishment and reward. Let's construct Pascal's wager around the possibility of a particularly cynical god named Nameth that sends atheists to heaven and everyone else to hell:

I distinctly remember the shock of learning that, at least in my modest Midwestern accent, the long "I" sound (sigh, pie) was the combination of "ah" (father, bother) and the long "e" (meat, street). Instead of hearing the sliding between two vowels of ah-ee, we register the sound as a single unit. In linguistic terms, such vowels are called diphthongs, from Greek meaning two sounds. In English diphthongs include "ow" (sound, found) and "oy" (coin, toil), among others.  It's a neat trick. Our brain builds a single unifying experience out of two distinguishable sounds.

I've begun to notice that various "unified" sense experiences outside language can also be broken down into constituent parts. For instance, we can trick our brains into thinking a dry gloved hand is wet by placing the gloved hand in cold water. Repeating the process with warm water instead produces the feeling of warm pressure rather than wetness.

Like how the "I" in "pie" is actually an "ah" followed by "ee", the experience of wetness is actually the separate experiences of cold and pressure. Our bodies don't have receptors in our skin devoted to sensing wetness. Instead we have receptors that recognize temperature and pressure. Lacking the proper hardware to interpret wetness, the brain takes a shortcut and uses pressure and coldness as its indicator for the presence of water.

I've since started looking out for similar "experiential diphthongs"—apparently unified experiences that can be broken down into two or more experience—parts. I've only discovered three others so far, and I'll post any you notice if you mention them in a reblog or message me.

More Experiential Diphthongs:

Satisfaction while eating: A really enjoyable meal requires three different feelings. Most obviously is the taste of the food (which can be further broken down into constituent tastes). Second is the feeling of the food being swallowed or hitting the back of the throat. This is why big gulps are more satisfying than smaller sips. Third is the feeling of satiation in the stomach. This is what is lacking after a small meal.

Sleepiness: I first noticed this one night around 2 am after drinking too much coffee. I felt exhausted but not tired. I felt a heaviness but maintained a mental clarity. The normal feeling of tiredness includes the heaviness and lacks the clarity.

Part 2 of 2 on the interplay between intuitions vs. reasoning. For a general rundown of what both are, see part 1.

Intuition (quick, clear bursts of insight) and reasoning (slow, careful analysis) are very different cognitive strategies for answering questions, but they do not operate independently from one another. Reason, while capable, is very much under the thumb of intuition. When we work our way through a tough problem, the way we choose to proceed sometimes depends on our intuitions.

Our ability to quickly drudge up answers to mundane questions is integral to our critical thought. A hard calculus problem might rely on reasoning to decide what move comes next, but intution supplies us with the answer to any simple arithmatic needed to get us there. Math has clearly defined rules and correct answers, and it's the sort of thing that can be checked by computers. When we start moving towards problems and arguments with less defined sets of rules (e.g., moral or political rhetoric), intuition is king. More often than not, reason is not forging a path of pure and enlightened rationality. Rather our thinking does little more than rationalize the caprices of intuition. In other words, we reason to justify our preexisting intutions.

Let me try to demonstrate this. Imagine we had to argue, in detail, why gay sex is moral or immoral. There are people out there capable of arguing one way or another without relying on reason (e.g., some pundits and politicians), but I, for one, would have to sit down and carefully and systematically work out defense of my opinions. But even if we use reason to make an argument over gay sex or any other similar issue, intuition has taken over from the start. Like a bolt of lightning, we instantly know the morality of gay sex, and intuition has, from the start, hijacked our reasoning.

Part 1 of 2 on intuitions vs. reasoning

Intuitions have enormous power over our decision making, but it's easy to ignore them and let them operate in the background. What exactly are they? When we think about the inner workings of our mind, it helps to experience the workings firsthand.

Here are few questions that usually elicit intuited answers: What is 2+2? Is Superman real? Are this sentences gramarically right? What color is grass? The answers to such questions come to us with the energy and certainty usually reserved by children. FOUR! NO! NO! GREEN! There is no thought behind our answers when they shoot forth immediately from our memory.

We can contrast intuitions with reason or critical thought. Instead of capriciously coming forth, reasoning carefully applies logic to a problem. To figure out the square root of 289, for example, most of us would have to take a few moments to hone in on a ballpark (say, 16), do some math, revise their ballpark (to 17), do some more math, and realize their revised ballpark is correct. There are people in our midst who work with square roots often enough that they can instantly intuit the square root of 289. Intuition depends heavily on familiarity, and what is intuitively answerable changes from person to person (and society to society and era to era).

Reason is slow, trudging, and often physically uncomfortable while intuition is quick and easy. It's easy to see why we opt for intuition when we can, and if our intuitions are right, there is no reason to laboriously work through problems we can otherwise intuit. Relying on intuition, however, has its costs, as it lacks self-reflection. Once an incorrect belief is sufficiently internalized, we can invoke the intuited belief over and over with great confidence. 

Part 2 of 3 of a series on NOMA.

Biologist, writer, and self-proclaimed agnostic Stephen J. Gould is responsible for creating one of recent history’s most influential theological positions, Non-overlapping Magisteria, or NOMA. Simply put, NOMA argues that science and religion can live in harmony if they keep to their areas of expertise. Science gets the observable universe and has authority over all things empirical. Religion gets teachings of value, and can have all things moral. While initially plausible, neither side can agree to this deal. Here’s why religion can’t. 

The problem boils down to why Christianity teaches people to follow its ethical teachings. Christians aren’t taught to follow the teachings of Jesus just because; they are taught to follow Jesus’s teachings because Jesus was the son of God. In order to teach lessons of morality, a legitimate endeavor for Christianity according to Gould, Christianity steps into the realm of science to make its point.

Assume for a moment that Jesus was alive today or we could travel back in time to the early 0000′s. Jesus’s divinity is definitely a matter of empirical evidence. We could study his behavior and his miracles, and use science to test the claims of the Gospels. Did he really turn water into wine or was it parlor trick? Was he really resurrected, or was bit added on later by early Christians trying to exaggerate Jesus’ divinity?

It’s often argued that we can’t know if God exists because its beyond the ken, the scope of what is knowable, of science. While we probably can’t totally prove or disprove God’s existence, certain events in nature can certainly lend credence to the existence of an all-powerful deity involved in our day-to-day lives. Pretty much every atheist and agnostic would instantly convert at the moment of a Left Behind-style rapture. Totally inexplicable miracles would certainly work in God’s favor, and a total lack of inexplicable miracles would certainly work against it. At the same time, we would expect to find prayer to be effective at changing external conditions if God exists.

Part 1 of 3 of a series on NOMA. 

Biologist Stephen J. Gould once proposed a way to stop hostilities between science and religion. If religion keeps to matters of morality and science keeps to matters of the observable universe, then everyone could be happy. The principle, called NOMA, has significant support among modern liberal Christians. It's easy to see why. It looks like an attractive way to sooth the conflict between the word of God and the discoveries of science. However, neither side can agree to the deal. Here's why science can't.

One of the most important assumptions to science is naturalism, the belief that everything around is explainable in terms of natural, rather than supernatural, phenomenon. Instead of assuming there is some divine explanation for the sun rising in the morning, science tries to explain it in non-divine terms.

Here's the problem. There is no part of religion falling beyond the observable realm. Social scientists can compare similarities between different religion’s moral teachings. Anthropologists can trace a given ethical doctrine from its origins to its current form. According to NOMA, all of these studies are perfectly legitimate topics for science and should be accepted by everyone, regardless of religious bent. But Gould doesn’t seem to recognize that such investigations will very likely have an impact on future moral teachings.

Even scientific studies on topics other than moral behavior have profoundly impacted our morality. Evolution claims that there is nothing special about humans. We are on a continuum with other animals rather than being something distinct. Accordingly, evolution has made it increasingly difficult to claim that humans have a privileged position on earth. We have gone from a society willing to accept, as Descartes argued, that animals are basically complicated wind-up machines, to a society that questions the morality of veal.