Are Beliefs Practical?

Beliefs are slippery little buggers. On the one hand, they are tools for navigating life. We believe certain things so that we can get around in the world. We need some way of dealing with the complexities of reality. I believe that western medicine by and large works and that it works far and away better than the alternatives. Therefore, I go to doctors trained in Western medicine rather than homeopathy or Ayurveda.

The belief is a means to an end: namely, my getting better. If I didn't need to get better, why would I worry about different medical practices? We have finite lives. We can't spend all of our time trying to make sure that our believes are correct, so long as our lives are running well. If I pick a shoddy medical practice that works for me, even as a mere placebo, I still feel better. What's the harm?

Sometimes, the belief can even change the result. William James talks about a person who is about to jump across a chasm. If this person believes that they can make it, they will have a higher chance of doing so than the persons that doubts themselves and hesitates. So believing something simply because we want it to be true can sometimes make it true.

But beliefs aren't merely tools. Having a belief means that we take something to be actually true about the world already. I take it to be the case that most of my sicknesses are caused by microscopic bacteria, viruses, and so on. The world is not made up of either 4 or 5 elements. Theories based on balancing these elements are just plain false, despite occasionally producing useful results. I can't believe that balancing the fire and water in my body will heal me without also believing that this is actually how things are; the very idea that I could is just nonsense, though some people have astonishingly high skill at self-delusion which allows them to get around this logical nicety.

So how can we take something to be true about the world and not care about whether it is true? How can we believe something, but then be unwilling to put it to critical analysis and to search out whether it is true? But is this really a problem? Why not just take it all with a grain of salt? Use beliefs as tools only. Believing something becomes like watching a movie – we suspend disbelief rather than take the plot to be actually true. It's a story to guide our actions, but merely a story.

This helps with local events: both local in space (affecting me and those closest to me) and in time (short-term goals). Sure, if I follow the medical tip from some random second cousin and it makes me feel better, then it works for me. I don't have to believe anything more than that it has been personally useful. However, it is not clear that this approach deals effectively with broader issues, such as those affecting other groups or calling for short-term sacrifice for the sake of long-term gain.

Take climate change, for example. There does seem to be some truth to the matter as to what will happen in the future if we continue to live as we do. Either humans beings are actually causing climate change, or we are not. Either this will produce a wildly out-of-whack world, or it will not. Either changing emissions in certain ways will help us deal with the problem, or it will not. (There appears to be little actual evidence against the notion that (a) there has been climate change over the past century of alarming proportions, and (b) that it is in large part caused by human beings. However, there is still a lot of discussion over what that entails for the future.)

There is potentially a disaster coming up within a couple generations, and adjusting ourselves to meet it could result in short-term sacrifices. We cannot merely look at what is practical for ourselves here-and-now in our own country to decide what would be better overall in the longer-term. Even if we were to decide that large-scale changes would not need to be implemented, it would have nothing to do with the fact that such changes would be hard right now – it would have to do with our best scientific research telling us that climate change won't be mitigated by our efforts. People arguing from local practical concerns alone, such as loss of jobs and increase in price of goods, completely miss the point, regardless of what our best plan of action will be.

I do not pretend to have an answer to this problem; I merely point out that there is a problem which must be dealt with based on matters of truth beyond what is recognizably practical to us now. (I thought I would give religion a break for a blog post, so I went with science instead.) So beliefs about what are practical to me and those close to me for the short-term can be decided through purely practical means, with little regard to overall truth. But those beliefs are also only suited for these very particular circumstances. Change the context, and the validity of such practical beliefs also changes. So for more far-reaching goals, concern over truth and the theoretical value of beliefs becomes more important.

Politically, this is problematic. Democracy and a democratic voting system is based on people being able to know where their interests lie, and trusting that people overall are smart enough to figure this out on their own. And this might be well enough for locally practical beliefs, for those that guide people through their own day-to-day experience. But people also vote based on issues impacting their communities, their country, and even the world, and it is not at all clear that their experience is useful here; in fact, it might even cloud their judgment in such matters without proper education showing them the bigger picture (and taking a couple science classes hardly instills scientific literacy).

Vampire Ethics

After watching the Dracula ballet last night, I got to thinking: if someone got turned into a vampire, is it best for them to be killed or not? On the one hand, we would think of them as a moral abomination now. We think that if we ever reached that point, we would want somebody to off us. So too should we kill the new vampire, for their own sake.

But on the other hand, they are no longer human. The standards for human flourishing (which, although this is controversial, would probably include not killing off friends and family to feed your lusts) are not the standards for vampire flourishing. A human-turned-vampire would be like a rabbit-turned-lion. You may be surprised at what happened, but you should not feed this new being hay if you want it to be happy (and I would prefer happy lions around, if I had to have any at all). This new vampire then should also be judged according to vampire standards. The human would not have liked this new life, but that is irrelevant to whether it is best for the vampire to live.

This then gets at one moral dilemma, similar to if a young person makes a promise that she later regrets when older - "whose" moral standard becomes relevant in deciding whether she should be held to that promise? What about if I say that I would rather be euthanized than be a vegetable in a hospital bed?

Of course, even if it is worse for the vampire, we could still just stake the sucker for our own sakes. We don't want creepy supernatural predators preying off of us, as human beings. So we can fight for the human good, against a world that sometimes just doesn't care about us.

But, at the same time, part of being human is that we can transcend our own local interests for other things in the world. We can identify ourselves with causes that may have no direct human benefit. (The one point on which radical deep ecologists and conservative Calvinists can come together?) So simply doing something because it is a human good is not necessarily the same as doing something just because it is good overall. And we as humans can think about this distinction. So then should we let vampires live out of respect for life (er, un-life) as long as they don't prey on us too much?

This dilemma comes up too in both the Greek and Chinese traditions (and I'm sure many others). We have the debates between the philosophers and rhetoricians in Greece and Rome, where the rhetoricians and sophists favored a purely human-centered life concerned with building human communities. Search for "truth" is secondary to these matters of practice. The philosophers favored finding what is true, even if it goes completely against what people around them took to be good. And part of this could even be for the sake of humans: current values concerning what is "good" can be revised. The Daoists and the Confucians have had similar struggles, with the Daoists focused on the Way of Heaven even when it completely called into question all typical human values while the Confucians focused more on starting with human beings and only dealing with what is relevant to them. Of course, this was not always a pitched battle; sometimes the two sides in both traditions have complemented each other, since human beings are not actually separate from the world in which they live - another tricky ethical point to work through.

Biology and Metaphysics

Again, thinking about nature & stuff: how do biology & sociology differ? On the one hand, there seem to be conflicts and divergences between them. Let us take standards of beauty. To some extent, these are given to us biologically. We are hard-wired to find certain features attractive. Those who are attracted to females like human female breasts and are not looking for peacock tails instead. But at the same time, society can work with that and present differing ideals of beauty. Sometimes these even conflict. The American obsession with thin women goes against what seems to be a overall global trend, which is about 20 lbs heavier (or so I remember from an undergrad psych class. If anyone has the actual scientific data on hand to back this up, that would be appreciated, but the whole point of my writing a blog instead of a journal article is that I don't feel like looking that up to have a chat :p .) On top of that, it would seem that sociology could in turn affect biology: sociological constraints give new standards of fitness for evolution.

But at the same time, sociology is biology.¹ Even as we can talk about these conflicts in ideals of beauty, these conflicts are differing parts of biology. We are social beings by nature, and the social dimensions of beauty and sexuality are written into our genes.

So there is a sense in which it is all biology which is interacting with itself. Some biological features develop and turn around to influence the features already there; some of which gave rise to the "higher order" features in the first place. This feedback loop creates the domain of sociology, which has its own principles and objects as distinct from bilogoy, even though it is also explained by biology.

This seems to be what is going on with the Neoplatonic principle of emanation. There are higher orders of reality, more "real" levels, that give rise to lower levels of reality.² The lower levels, though, do really exist in their own way. (Some indian philosophy has similar stuff, but there seems to be less value give to these lower levels, to the point that they are all equally "mâyâ" or play/illusion.)

There is a possible study of societies as such. But at the same time, sociology is an "emanation" of biology (as chemistry is of physics and biology of chemistry). Similarly, the search for a Grand Unifying Theoroy of Physics would be a search of a originary principle, motion, force, or whatnot, from which the other features of the physical universe emanate;³ that is, whatever the originary principle is, it is a dynamic one which interacts with itself. Considered as itself alone, it is one. Considered as interacting with itself, as "stumbling as from a drunken slumber" as Plotinus describes the descent of Being from the One, it is regarded as multiple forces, and ultimately as the innermost essence of every existing thing.

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¹ Which is not necessarily to say that human nature is reducible to biology - that is a separate question. But it would seem that, insofar as societies can be studied scientifically and as mired in natural causes, it produced by biology. But if you still don't like this, than take physics and chemistry for the illustration instead.

² One might argue that Neoplatonism would go in the opposite direction, however - from the wholes to the parts. One admittedly cannot simply assume Proclus' entire metaphysical scheme and apply it to modern science. However, if we look at physics as describing the fundamental principles of the world, and so that which unifies it the most, instead of as all the quintillions of atoms rushing around forming everything, there is something to be said for a Neo-Neoplatonism.

³ I have been going through easy examples, in which we merely have concentric circles: physics emanates chemistry, which emanates biology, which emanates sociology. Of course, it could be (and probably is) more complicated. For example, at least restricting ourselves to scientific psychology (which is not in itself a slam against other types), biology would then give rise to psychology, which together with biology would give rise to sociology, or something like that (insofar as there are features of society which are not mediated by direct mental processes).⁴

⁴ Now, where would consciousness fit in? We can see how chemical rules follow from physical ones, and can have an inkling of how sociology follows from biology. However, it is hard to see how consciousness would follow from biology or whatnot except insofar as the latter provides a suitable base of neurons (and by "hard to see," I mean that I don't feel like going through the arguments right now, but I have them). In other words, biology provides the material and formal causes for sociology, but only the material causes for consciousness. It might be that the elusiveness of any Grand Unifying Theory is that such theory does not merely provide unify physics, but would also explain other features of the world; in other words, it would always be underdetermined by purely physical data. This is mere speculation, but it does present a possibility, akin to Spinoza's God.

Essential Futility

I was reading a book on evolution (Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth), and it made the point that an awful lot of nature is futile, if we look at it from the perspective of design.¹ Take trees: they don't actually get any more sunlight by being taller than if all of them were equally short. If every tree were 10 feet tall, they would be just as well off - better even, because they would not have to spend so many resources on what amount to mere stilts. But once one tree grows taller, it blocks the sun for others, and the race is on.

So this seems to be futile - futile because so much energy is expanded simply for the sake of competing with others when everyone would have been better if they hadn't entered into the competition in the first place.² My concern here is in what exactly "futility" is.

My impression is to regard this race as futile because the trees are merely reacting to each other and to their circumstances. Each response is deflected away from what "really" needs to be done and toward those other trees and their contingent actions. If only these trees could get on with living instead of pointless tasks!³

But what would it mean for the tree to get on with the task of being a tree? We might have a picture in mind of trees taking care of real tree stuff, like getting light using as few resources as possible, and not getting distracted by the pine race. But whatever this hypothetical entity is, it is no longer a tree. Trees are what they are because of other trees. This competition they are locked in is just as much a part of them as the need for light in the first place. Conversely, the need to survive by taking in photons and synthesizing them into nutrients is just as much a "futile" race as growing taller than the other trees. The replication of DNA in all of its myriad manners is its own race, in which each set of genes is "competing" against the others.⁴

So there would be no reason to think that the race of the trees against each other is any more or less futile than anything else going on in the trees' lives. There is no core essence to "being a tree." This other race against other trees is not extrinsic to the tree's true nature, a race to be avoided if possible so that it could live a more tree-ish life.⁵

Things are what they are because of their causes, or to put it more mystic-sounding-like, things are what they are not. The tree is what it is entirely because of its relations to other trees, to other plants, to animals, and so on. It is meaningless to dismiss any of this as "futile" as opposed to some other possible existence. If it had a different existence, it would be something else. Taken to the extreme, we have the Buddhist notion of "emptiness" - everything simply is its relations to everything else, with no ultimate underlying substance or essence to anything. There is no core "tree" that can be separated from everything else. There is no firm division between "this" and "not this," between "this kind of thing" and "that kind of thing."

How might this relate to human life? Let us return to the Prisoner's Dilemma again. If there were a well-defined human nature, we can say certain things are good, and it would be better for everyone if we had some agreement that no one should be a jerk. But given the current considerations, there is no well-defined good. Things are what they are, and what they are is defined by their competition and relations to everything else. Also, in the Prisoner's Dilemma, we see that short-term gains lead to long-term losses. But now we also see that there are even longer-term changes which alter the rules of the game.

How do we put these sundry ethical views together? On one level, maybe we can just acknowledge that different considerations lead to different conclusions, and that there has yet to be a single system to unify all of this. But these different views may not be contradictory. Human beings are what they are, both as biological beings striving to copy their DNA (whether or not they are aware of this) and as rational beings able to look at the big picture. The interaction between these aspects is not a theory to be solved.

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¹ Dawkins himself does not say that it is futile; his view I think at least dovetails with the one I put down here. He just points out that if we were to take as a hypothesis that there were a designer of the universe, many things that would see would be futile from that perspective.

² I won't go into whether this futility is evidence against design. I don't think that the example of trees settles it, but many other examples seem to me to present a rather sound case.

³ To some extent, of course, this is anthropomorphizing them, but there is no need to equate end-directedness to intent; more in another post.

⁴ Some readers but balk at the physicalism here. It seems to me that there needs to be a whole lot of work down to show that nature in any way, shape, or form demonstrates any sort of final cause beyond itself. Saying that it needs to be that way in order for there to be any hope in the world is an admission that any such view is wish fulfillment, pure and simple (not to mention the fact that many people find such a non-goal-oriented view of nature nevertheless inspiring and beautiful gives the lie to the assertion). Now, whether or not human beings can be reduced to such a physicalistic picture is a separate issue, one that is more complicated – all I am pointing out is that by our natures as human beings we have at least one foot in the same world as all of these physical going-ons.

⁵ Granted, trees that are planted all by their lonesome do not grow like trees in a forest, but a) they do not completely become like they would have had they not been the descendants of the other trees in the competition, & b) we can still talk about individual trees in the forest as being products of their environment.

Essentialism and Math

Many times, when we abstract pieces of information out of the world, we are trying to hold that little bit steady in order to have a fulcrum for moving everything else. When ask about what gravity is, we like at all of the things that move by gravitation - that is, everything gravity isn't. The apple that falls is not gravity itself, but what gravity acts upon. We ask what it is to be a cat, taking it as given for the moment that there is some roughly well-defined concept "cat" that interacts with the rest of the world.

Views that try to do away with this are considered sometimes to be incoherent. If I say that there are no individuals, that you are I are are really existent but are mere social constructions, that there are no stable selves, I must assume that there are stable selves in order to say this. I think that it is I who am thinking the thought "There are no stable selves," for example. And any view that denies that there is an ultimate truth takes this denial to be an ultimate truth.

It seems like we have to have two different views at the same time to make statements like these. We look at the world and see stable things, and then we look at the world and see flux. Problems like this abound in philosophy, and I will leave it to the audience to turn up more.

I want to look at mathematical functions & equations as an analogy. A mathematical function, as a function, has a dependent variable and at least one independent variable. Take a line, for example: that classic formula y = mx + b. Let us take in particular the line y = x + 5. x is the independent variable. It is what we control, the equivalent of these stable spots we make in the world. y is the dependent variable, which is everything else that we are explaining. If I set x to 1, y must be 6. If x is 200, y is 205. y is thus explained by x.

This is fine in many cases. y = x² + 2x + 1 makes a fine parabola. y = cos(3x/2 + π) makes a nice little wave. But what about a circle? The equation for a circle with a radius of 1 would be x² + y² = 1. But that is not a function. There is no longer an independent variable and a dependent one; we have to take it in all at once. If x is 0, then this does not explain y - there are the two possible values of 1 and -1. y cannot be the independent variable either for the same reason. No set of independent variables explains everything else.

We can describe a circle using two different functions: y = √ (1 - x²) and y = - √ (1 - x²). But there is no one function which does the job. It is not even in principle possible to describe a circle in a single function - we have to keep going back and forth between these two. If you want to set one variable constant, you can't have a unified grasp of the situation.

It were as if we were trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle of the world. We have to set down a couple of pieces. However, this puzzle is odd in that, whenever we start with any pieces and then add the others, we can never get the whole puzzle. The only way to solve the puzzle is to set it down all at once.

There may yet be a way out. Take the equation r = 1. This describes the same circle, but in different coordinates. "r" is a variable representing radius, so r=1 is the function which captures all points at a distance of 1 from some central spot. Voila - a simple equation for a circle.

But just as it is hard representing a circle in rectangular coordinates, so too is it difficult to represent straight lines with polar coordinates (coordinates which describe shapes in terms of r, the radius or the distance from the origin, and θ, the angle of the line going out from the origin). So again, we can describe circles and spirals (r = θ) and other stuff like that at the cost of describing straight lines, or we can describe straight lines at the cost of describing circular curves. (I suppose we should talk about parametric functions here too, but I'm giving an analogy, not a full mathematical treatise). By making one thing set and settled, we have limited our options of what we can describe, even though at the same time there is something beyond what can be captured through independent & dependent variables.

This is not an argument for anything, but just a thought experiment to show that it is at least possible to say that we use our views of essences and substances, of fixed individual and set kinds, of steady states of whatever sort, to describe the world, even though they themselves are not in the end real constituents of the world. It is coherent to say that everything is dependent on everything else, without any first cause starting the chain. Or I can talk about myself as an individual being, as some set metaphysical reality with this particular "soul," even while at the same time acknowledging that there is some other "function" which does goes in a completely different direction. There may even be some grasp of the universe which must take things all together and not piecemeal (such as Platonic Forms & Neo-Platonic Nous), like how there is a equation for a circle in rectangular coordinates but no single function. But I'm more interested in leaving this as a playground of thought than any settled metaphysical view for now.

Reverse Prisoner's Dilemma

Often times in ethics, we are trying to give a reason why people shouldn't do bad things, and why doing the right thing is actually good for them. One way of doing this is using the prisoner's dilemma: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1899#comic. Basically, if only one person were a jerk, they could get off the hook. But if people start being jerks, everyone will be jerkish to compensate, and everyone ends up worse off.

But what about people being too nice? What sorts of ethical dilemmas does this raise? Let me give an example. I was biking up a (rather steep) hill the other day. Toward the top of this hill is a 4-way stop. Now, as I was nearing this hill, there was a car which had been fully stopped long before I reached the stop sign. They tried waving me on instead of going themselves.

If they had just gone as the rules dictated, without paying attention to me, they would have gone all the way through the intersection before I arrived. I would have slowed down, looked for traffic, and continued going through the intersection without having to come to a complete stop and start up again on a hill. Instead, they waited longer, and I had to completely regain all of my momentum. Everyone ended up worse off because of one person's niceness. (Admittedly, the world did not end for this egregious affront, but it does illustrate the point.)

A possible principle here seems to be this: special consideration for anyone throws off everyone. It doesn't really matter whether this is consideration for oneself or for another. It really ends up being the same, completely regardless of intention. Individuals are parts of some bigger whole because they interact with each other and affect each other; we are social animals and have to rely on others. The whole, in turn, is best off when order is preserved. Individuals may benefit short-term from acting disharmoniously (or from others doing such in mistaken niceness), but such behavior leads to long-term loss for everyone (of course, this “long-term” may be beyond the life of the particular individual, which is why asshole CEOs don't necessarily get what is coming to them, but that is yet another issue). (I would like to tie this to Kant's ethics, in particular to his “kingdom of ends” interpretation of the categorical imperative, but that is a different discussion.)

What is this “order”, though? Of course not every order will do – racist and sexist laws do not achieve what is overall best for everyone, so preserving any order simply for order's sake is not necessarily what is what will preserve the good. And there is not necessarily a single order – a 4-way stop sign arrangement seems to be reasonable and probably not oppressive, but there are other ways of managing residential intersections too. So ethics may be to some extent arbitrary, but that is not the same as saying that anything goes. (This actually was in part the view of the medieval thinker Duns Scotus: there is only one moral law which is necessarily true, i.e. that the first principle must be loved, while everything else is merely a fitting way of ordering the universe). So it might not be possible to find “the” one order to rule them all, but we can study particular ways of living to see which promote the good: which societies seem to give the best life for the most people?

Reason in Nature

I've started working with the Urban Ecology Center. It's actually nice to be out in the sun pulling weeds for a change, especially after sitting indoors in a chair all day. And, geek that I am, I am thoroughly excited to start learning about prairie plants and migratory birds (insert obligatory Monty Python joke here).

I was collecting seeds the other day, and one of the volunteers was explaining to a student about domestication and why domesticated rye has larger seeds than wild rye. I though about that, and how odd human cultivation is as a process of evolution. Normally, plants develop thorns and poisons and stuff to avoid being eaten. Here, though, under human care, they no longer resist us - they grow alongside us precisely to be eaten. We're on the same side instead of constantly opposed, as it were.

Now, I want to take this so far only as a metaphor - in reality, the rye doesn't care about having larger seeds or being domesticated, so we can't actually say that rye is "better" for the arrangement. I think that dogs and cats really do end up in a symbiotic relationship with human beings - they get regular food and shelter, lacking in the wild, and we get rid of mice and burglars, and we have funny internet memes.

But the point is this: human beings, given the sort of beings we are, can adapt to nature from within nature and rework it into an "everybody wins" sort of approach. Not always, granted, or in any way with even a modicum of grace at times. But think of how odd this is. If there are too many deer, they can't learn to cultivate grass or switch food sources. The grass gets eaten and the deer starve to death. The way to avoid this is an external force: add wolves or hunters to take down the number of deer.

That's where human beings differ. We have reason. We have an internal force for change. I don't mean by reason mere logic - that is merely one form that reason takes. Reason is the ability to take up the form of the world around us, to understand it and in so doing identify with it.

Think about this: What, in the end, am "I"? Something in some way tightly connected to this hunk of matter at particular spatio-temporal coordinates, to be sure. Certain patterns of brainwaves, yes. But I don't have to be just that. People identify with their good friends, parents identify with their children, patriots identify with their country, and so on. We all consider our "selves" to be something beyond ourselves (unless we really are concerned just with fulfilling basic needs, and honestly, that sounds like the most boring life possible to me.)

It is reason which lets us take up aspects of the world around us. If I identify with a certain task of domesticating wolves, for example, I have to know what wolves are like. I have to work with their natures as given - I have to accept the world and wolves as they are. To do otherwise will not result in the end I want nor in a dog that can benefit from my involvement. It may be an excellent way of getting mauled, however.

Of course, we also have people working with each other. When working with rye and wolves, human beings are not quite the same as the domesticated. With other humans, one might be concerned that I am giving a recipe for domination. But I am saying that we need to treat whatever we identify with as the sort of thing it is. Human beings aren't plants and can't be treated as such. If I were in a relationship, I would need to attend to my lover's needs as they in fact are. Failed and sickly relationships are the result of this not working, for any number of reasons. Good relationships are when both parties can in fact do this. Identification cannot be merely good intentions - it must involve trying as hard as possible to understand people and situations as they are in themselves. (Just trying to have good intentions usually results in trying to look good. Trying to have good results from within the world as it actually is and acting accordingly, is in itself a good intention.)

To act irrationally, by contrast, is to act counter to the way the world is, to act based on our own subjective whims and fancies, on what we "feel in our hearts" regardless of whether that stands up under scrutiny. It is, in short, to choose our current selves and our presently-limited preoccupations over what we could be, to choose deception and its short-term smothering comfort over truth. It is to become that deer that will starve to death unless it is ripped apart by wolves first. the deer that cannot even take care of itself because it could not take heed of its environment.

This is why I champion unending, thoughtful and careful analysis of our opinions and get tired of emotionalism, tribalism, and relativism of the sort that descends into mere etiquette and shuts off genuine debate. Reason is sometimes held up as the tool that divides and separates, but that is only its short term function. It must divide the true from the false, the real from the fantastic, and as long as society prefers its own whims, reason must break it. But this is for the goal of a better society, one in which the good is accessible to all in self-sustaining fashion, because people can take up themselves, each other, and the world around them as it is and as they are part of the whole. True, this is an ideal and most likely never reachable. But even though most of us will never reach the north pole, the direction North on the compass or GPS is still necessary for navigation.

Reason, ultimately, is justice.

Karma

I've been thinking through the concept of karma lately. It's a helpful myth for me in thinking about how we live in the world, even if I can't accept there being an actual moral law in the universe that punishes and rewards us. First, though, what are we as persons, as this or that individual human being with this or that personality? There are many, many factors which play a role and I don't mean to be reductionistic in my proposal. I'm not going to argue for or against the notion of a soul, or of individual existence after death, or what not. I'm just looking at how we forge our lives here and now, and the concept of karma makes sense for that.

How so? Think about this: are you a separate person from your genetics? Keep in mind, your genetics have an awful lot to do with every single aspect of your build and your brain. They give you a predisposition to be a bookish introvert or gregarious extrovert, a night person or a morning person, calm or irascible, capable or incapable of being Michael Jordan or Albert Einstein, and so on. So it would seem that you, as the person you consider yourself to be, would not be that person without your genetic printing.

Of course, your environment and upbringing also play a large role here. Would you be that same person if you had grown up in a different city? Country? In some places, how would being born a block west or east have changed your life? With different parents? With a different number of parents? In a multi-generational home, or with just your nuclear family? This would all seem to play at least as much a role in who you are as genetics.

This is the point, then: you are not you. You are these things that make you up. You might wish you had been born to a different family, but if anyone had been born to that different family, that person would not have been you. This is where karma comes in: you have inherited your karma, your situation in life with all of its implications. If you are born into one home, you'll have one set of skills and virtues. Born into another, you would have a different set, which would you helped "you" and the world around you perhaps more or perhaps less.

I have been born an American. When I look around at political debate in this country, I wish that I had been born at least a Canadian. Scandinavian wouldn't have been so bad either. But I wasn't. I was born here. This is where I actually am. The ideological debates between Republicans and Democrats is part of my karma. The myths of freedom and individualism and capitalism are part of my karma.

I have been "reincarnated" here, to pull on another myth, out of the conditions of my forebears. I am their decisions brought into concrete form, so I am them, in a sense.

So what do I do from here? This is where talk of purifying karma comes in, of dealing with it skillfully. What counts as skillful, I'll leave for other discussions. But one way or another, I need to work with my present situation. Whether or not one can transmute lead into gold, it sure isn't going to work if one doesn't use the lead at hand.

This then leads to my legacy, my own "reincarnation." Whether I deal with the world skillfully or unskillfully, I will leave imprints. These imprints will change those I'm friends with, those I teach, maybe even those I brush up against on the street for a moment. This will leave something for the next generation, one way or another, as a continuation of that karma and of my personhood.

Progress & Nature

In the course of trying to find a new course for myself, I find myself running up against two different intuitions about the world, which more or less were the content of the last post. The first is that nature simply is what it is, and there's not a whole lot one can do to change that. Human beings will be human beings and any attempt to force them into a different mold will rebound. I had wanted to get into education to change minds and so change society. But what I found was that the people who were already open-minded and engaged were the ones who, well, stayed the same. The people who really needed to turn around and look at the world, the people who will go on to vote and run things and who impact all of our lives through their “private” opinions, twisted my lectures into the exact opposite of what I said when necessary to protect their little paradigms. Really, this shouldn't be too surprising – the Enlightenment should have taught us that educated apes just do more damage in their certainty.

But at the same time, I can't shake the feeling that some sort of progress is possible, and that as someone in a privileged position, I have a responsibility to be part of that change. What good is intelligence if it can't actually provide foresight about the world's problems? When I'm planning out what to do and not already involved in something, I should be able to pick some life which would make a difference. The world doesn't seem to be merely a cycle, and I can't just hide somewhere while making my own life comfortable while things crumble around me. Maybe it's just my neurosis, but I can't just go off and till my own garden. It seems like a waste of a life, and honestly, life isn't so great that I want to live it merely for my own enjoyment.

Because of the first problem, I can't rely on naïve notions of progress, and I can't get wrapped up in idealistic projects. How can I commit myself to something that I know will probably fail? And I don't see any reason whatsoever to believe that there's any moral force in the universe, divine or otherwise, which will pick things up despite the appearances we've seen in history for thousands of years, or which will come alongside in my tasks when this force also seems to work with CEOs to build sweatshops. But we have seen that societies can change, at least somewhat, and that the way things have been is not the way they always must be, and I can't close my eyes to that either.

So there's this constraint: nature must be worked with. What are some solutions to the problem then? In martial arts, I think of how we work with natural forces to accomplish ends, so it at least seems possible in the abstract to change the world by working with nature. How does that translate into changing society, though? How do we work with the bigotry, power-grasping, tribalism, and narrow-mindedness that seem endemic to human nature (yes, including my own) to produce a society that rises above these things? At the end of the day, we still have our biology which was not built for modern life or for cosmopolitan living, but yet at the same time we can be aware of this and of the possibilities the future could hold. How do we combine the two?

I also think to the Chinese tradition, where you change the world by becoming virtuous yourself; then other people will naturally look to you. Of course, I'm skeptical about the efficacy of this. Confucius didn't seem to make much of a political difference in his day, and people studying him just made him into a new set of material to understand and a tool to demarcate the elite from the non-elite. But given the constraint that we can't just go and change other people by force, it seems like the only option would be to persuade them and let them arrive at the decision by themselves. The question is, what makes for viable persuasion.

This doesn't mean that we can't go and change material conditions as well – in fact, we need to do that. But that still only does any good if we can also change people around us and the structural forces that perpetuate the problems, and we can only do that by hacking the system, as it were. Shows of force in the end don't seem to change the situation, but merely repeat it – not that force is never justified, but that it doesn't seem to be a useful tool toward pushing the world to a different end. So what would work?

Quietism and Power

How does one best go about changing the world? On the one hand, it is tempting to take up a quietistic approach - let things be, and let nature take its course. Many times when we try to control events, we make a bigger mess of them. Let us just take care of our own garden, and then at least that portion of the world will be better. Similarly, we can cultivate ourselves, and if we succeed in becoming better people, we can naturally help people around us and inspire them.

But I'm not sure that that approach always works. I was reading an article earlier today about some presidential candidate who wants communities to decide what is best for themselves - by outlawing mosques. I might be able to convince a few people around me that Muslims are not about trying to conquer all of America, but that hardly changes the systemic problem of prejudice in this country. Nor does the quietist approach change the structures that continue poverty and racism, amongst other problems.

So trying to control things from a high-level standpoint, through laws and politics and positions of power, seems necessary to deal with some issues, but it also produces social problems to have this stuff forced on society. Plus, it's not really feasible for all of us, since few have that power.

I had thought about education as being a solution. Teach people to think critically about the world around themselves, and maybe that can help them deal with whatever problems can arise. But I'm cynical about that now. When I was teaching philosophy, the students who were already critically analytical and thoughtful about the world were the ones who benefited from studying more of the same. The ones who really needed to be reached, simply crammed whatever I said into their pre-made categories, sometimes to the point of believing that I was saying the opposite of what I actually said.

We can't actually change human nature, and it seems to be human nature to approach the world according to our pre-set paradigms and to find the opposite painful. No one escapes this, and most don't have the temper, time, talent, or opportunity to even start examining their worldview. So what do we do when these worldviews cause suffering? We can't just let communities decide for themselves, because there are no isolated communities. The communities of Muslims criss-cross the communities of Islamophobes geographically & politically, so which community wins out in making decisions? Simply being a nice person to those around me and making sure a few friends and a few students understand the world a bit better might relieve a little suffering, but does it actually change anything? How does one get people to think about things that they need to think about, for everyone else's sakes, but which they are resistant to examine?

Contingency and Intuitions

While preparing for comps, I came across a statement along the lines of "It is possible that Susan might not have been born. If you don't believe this, you are a philosopher with a theory."* But the issue seems so much more complicated than a dig at "theory-laden philosophers" would solve. I argue that our intuitions about which facts about the world are possible and which are necessary has relatively little to do with their actual status.

Take the following formula: 1,045,9879 * 230,840. What does it equal? Without stopping to work it out, does it possibly equal 2,414,557,468,360? It might seem like it could, but in fact, it doesn't and cannot possibly equal that amount. Our first intuitions about it don't mean much of anything. We must work through the chain of mathematical analysis, step by step, until we come to the answer.

We possibly get that problem wrong, but we don't ever think that 1+1=5. Why? Because there is only one step in the simple problem - it's almost impossible to misthink it. By contrast, there are many links in the chain of reasoning for the more complicated problem, and we don't immediately see all the links at once or how they are connected to each other.

"But," you might say, "we know that this is a mathematical problem, so we know that the answer must be necessary. But Susan's birth isn't math." Perhaps, but that doesn't mean that our intuitions about her possibly not-being are worth anything. It depends on whether physics is completely deterministic on a macro-level or probabilistic, on whether the initial state of the universal was necessary or whether it was random/intelligently designed/programmed by the great space potato/etc., on whether free human actions can alter the universe apart from deterministic laws, and so on. My intuition on Susan's birth isn't informed by the reality of any of those situations - that is, whatever makes me think of her possibly not being has nothing to do with my thoughts on these other matters. I think that her birth is merely possible, not because I actually understand anything about reality, but because I can't see the big picture to see how the complex web of causation operates. I see this little piece, and imagine it cut off from the whole, as if it actually could be, in the same way that I imagine that 1,045,9879 * 230,840 = 2,414,557,468,360 because I have not seen through all the steps.

In short, there seems to be no reason to leap from "I can conceive of x being possible/possibly not being," to "x must not be necessary." Our intuitions on states of affairs are completely bunk and should not be resorted to in our analysis of the world.

---

*: I found the quote. It is: "If Sally, an ordinary human being, says, 'I might not have existed,' almost everyone will take her to have stated an obvious truth. (Anyone who does not will almost certainly be a metaphysician with a theory.)" Van Inwagen, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaphysics/

Teaching Philosophy and Human Nature

I'm still digesting course evaluation results. It's always frustrating, and it seems like that's the case no matter how good or how bad the results are, judging by the comments I hear from everyone. If nothing else, it feels like the comments are worthless, much of the time - the students aren't even trying to learn, so who are they to judge our worth as teachers?

But I do think that there is another side to the issue, and sometimes I as a philosopher forget that. I and my field are but one moment in the totality of human life. True, Socrates was a gadfly, and he was executed for that; but let us not merely blame the crowds for doing so. I want to live in a world where everyone is open to new ideas, but new ideas also disrupt society, which creates real problems for real people. People, like our students, are trying to build up a life for themselves, and let's face it, philosophy is often a destructive process. We philosophers tear down the edifices everyone else builds for the sake of a new creation. This is important for the sake of overall progress and I certainly would prefer to have a rational, informed public. But even we need to live in a society that runs more or less stably. The skills that keep order and community are often opposed to those that encourage universal, rational considerations.

I'm not completely apologizing for the ignorance of college freshmen, nor am I proclaiming that I have nothing to work on even on my side of the debate; but I do think that I, personally, need to step back and look at the larger picture of human nature sometimes. There are different forces required in society, often forming said society only through their conflict, and I am but one moment in that flux.

Thoughts on Bin Laden's Death

It should come as no surprise to those who know me that I find the hubbub about Bin Laden irritating. "But shouldn't we rejoice that there is less evil in the world, however minute?" "Why can't you let your countrymen rejoice?" Because we get too distracted by a mere symbol to actually confront the real problems in our world.

This death is symbolic, nothing more, and possibly even harmful. We aren't going to pull out of Afghanistan or Iraq. Iraq in particular was never about these terrorists, as anyone with any clue about Middle-Eastern politics has known since the beginning, and we still have other problems in Afghanistan (the Taliban, together with the mess we, yes we, America, have made of the place). The terrorists aren't going to stop. If anything, they have a martyr to rally behind now. All we did was get the satisfaction of an all-too-expensive revenge. Are we such animals that we can only live for hormonal, emotional responses, when they come at a cost to real lives and real goods we could put to work elsewhere? Are we mere gorillas that can only pound our chests, or can we actually rationally think about matters?

Most of all, I'm concerned that this is a mere distraction. There is real evil in the world. Yes, Osama was a horrible person - I'm not going to deny that. But there are bankers in Wall Street who would let our country burn if it gained them a profit. There are companies in our very nation who have quite literally stolen money that could have fed the poor and aided the sick. And there is the utterly apathetic lack of concern about educating our public so that they would have the tools to govern themselves wisely - we spend money on bombs and bureaucracy while impoverishing the minds of our youth, all the better to be molded to the persuasions of the powerful.

There is real evil in the world which needs to be fought. Osama's defeat is a cheap victory, his death a gaudy celebration which takes no effort and no time from our lives, which ultimately gives no justice. Justice is not as simple as a shell or as easy as ammunition. It is not only a negation of what we hate, but the building up of our own lives, of putting aside the myth of our perfection and taking up our own toils, of fashioning and forming ourselves.

Dancing Tiresias

I've been swing dancing for about a year now, and from time to time I'll take classes as a follow - partially to learn the other side of the dance, and partially because we've had too many leads and I don't like standing around (btw, if any women or gender-role-dashing men want to come out and learn an awesome social dance, let me know). Because I've been on both sides of the swing-out, I started to notice something: the dance by and large doesn't come from the dancers.

When you look and see a really cool turn, you might think that the dancers are doing most of the work. But really, a lot of what is going on in dance class is learning to stop doing certain things - stop moving so much in a Lindy circle, stop cranking the follow's arm around, and so on. When I lead and I want my follow to do a certain turn, I simply lift their hand in a certain way. I thought that the follow was still doing most of the work. But then I tried following, and it felt like the lead was doing most of the work - I just followed a relatively simple direction, turned when I had to because of momentum, and kept my arm bent properly so as to keep both of us from getting injured.

So who was doing the work? No one, really. The lead gives a couple signals, the follow interprets a couple signals, both add in a couple things to keep the dance floor safe, but they aren't aware of most of what is going on in the dance. It happens. They are blind to the specific spins and twirls turning around them. A hand goes up, a foot goes forward, and there was a turn. They circle around, the hand supporting the back is removed, and the two are at opposite ends of a rubber band.

Momentum and music and the real dancers.

When we try to see what is going on, we miss it. It's already happening - we just need to know a few key touches to enter into the action. When we dance blindly, we see.

Metaphors and Particulars

What are particulars? I was thinking that the notion of a metaphor shares some similarities. What makes a metaphor, a metaphor? It is a word being used in a non-literal sense: that is, there is (1) the literal sense (the general rules and semantics of the language), (2) the current situational context, and (3) the interaction between them. A metaphor, qua metaphor, is the interaction and is not either of the interactors.

Similarly, a particular thing seems to be something existing between two different levels. Take a fire burning in front of me. On the one hand, it is a bunch of universal physical laws - it is an instantiation of heat, motion, release of energy, and so on. (Of course, this is tendentious, but I think that there are good reasons for assuming the reality of at least linguistic rules.) On this level, though, where is the particular? Everything is universal. There is also the situation: the fire is part of a context, warming a room, boiling water for tea, and so on. Yet again, however, we don't have a particular, since it all gets subsumed under the situation. The particular is something liminal, something appearing only as the general laws (like the overall language and its typical meaning) interact with the completely concrete situation (like the current paragraph, piece, or poem). Like metaphors, particulars have meaning as a real interaction, but are not some object existing outside of that.

Maybe, in addition, the interaction itself is produced by us - we mix things together. We take sights, sounds, smells, and tastes with a touch of reason and spin them together. So the problem of particulars arises because we exist on different levels and navigate them simultaneously, so we need some way in which they hold together for pragmatics.

The Problem of Potentiality

How do we explain change? Maybe we remember our basic physics classes in high school: there is an object, held up in the air (by our hand or by part of some hacked-together Rube Goldberg device). It has potential energy. Then it gets dropped, at which point the potential energy is converted to kinetic energy.

This is more or less the Aristotelian notion of change (yes, I know there are problems, but it's an illustration - work with me here). We can apply this to other forms of change as well. For example, an acorn falls to the ground and resists being eaten by a squirrel. It is nourished in the soil and in time becomes a rabbit. Wait - that makes no sense. Acorns become oak trees, not rabbits. Why? We say that the acorn is potentially an oak tree and not potentially a rabbit. It is not the oak tree yet, but this is a different sort of not-being than the way in which it is not a rabbit. In time it will actually be the oak tree, given whatever there is that actualizes its potential (nutriments in the soil, water, etc.). So things potentially are certain other things (or potentially have certain other states) which can be actualized in the right circumstances.

The Aristotelian analysis requires these to be separate principles - actuality and potentiality, and we might also say the form of something (as it actually is) together with its matter (what makes it up). Matter is potential to receive a form. This makes some intuitive sense - when something changes, it both becomes different and stays the same. If I eradicated the acorn and then put an oak tree in its place, we would not say that the acorn changed into the tree. But at the same time, if nothing ever was different, there would be no change either. So the form must in some way become different (accidentally or essentially) while the matter stays the same in order for change to occur.

But here's the problem: we can never refer to matter itself. We also refer to some arrangement of that matter. We can talk about the way the acorn is currently structured to talk about how it will turn into a tree. In fact, it is difficult to see what we would need beyond its current form to explain its later form. Potentiality and matter are just roundabout ways of talking of current form and actuality with reference to latter form and actuality. It is as if we had two different coordinate systems looking at the same reality, but with the twist that actuality seems to be prior. All talk of potentiality is talk of actuality in disguise. Actuality carries monetary value, while potentiality consists of written slips of paper for a set number of greenbacks. So let's get parsimonious.

How do we explain change without potentiality then? The problem might be in thinking of "form" and "actuality" as something static. Things don't stand still, though. Everything is already caught up in some network of force. Even the earth which seems still is in tension with itself, as we discover when a tsunami hits. The actuality at any given instance is directional (or "telic", if you will) - it is what it is *doing* rather than what it statically *is*. When we talk of the potentiality of the acorn to become an oak tree, what we mean is that, given that dynamic nature of the acorn's present form, it would naturally become an oak if it follows that trajectory. But that oak tree is not now real - it is merely a way of describing what is actual through a hopeful prediction of the future. The oak tree is a hypothesis which is not now actual, and perhaps will never be, but which helps to organize our experience in the meantime. It doesn't need any separate principle beyond the fact that the acorn is currently in a state of growing, of responding to the soil around it, etc.

Potentiality has a merely pragmatic status, not a metaphysical one. The real principle, which is singular, is dynamic activity. This is resolvable into the current state and its direction of force (matter and energy?), but only as a conceptual distinction. How is this not just a return to the Aristotelian system, then? Because "actuality" is not the current state abstracted from its potential, but is the dynamic activity itself. Likewise, the direction of force is not the potential, but is just as much the actuality of the thing. In addition, these two moments are not metaphysical principles, but requirements of our minds for understanding the world. It seems perfectly possible that a perfect intellect would not need these crutches. We experience change because of who we are just as much because of how the world is.

What are the implications of this? We can still talk of potential, it serves a perfectly good pragmatic purpose, but it doesn't carry any metaphysical weight. Things don't change because some external actualizer acts on them, but have their own intrinsic power of self-actualizing (at least when I try to talk about it in Aristotelian terms, which are inaccurate; it's the best I have at the moment, though, so I have to ask readers to put aside surface incongruities and look at the meaning of what I say).

Further, it makes it easier to talk about all things as interconnected. When you have substances, they each have their own integrity, and you have to explain how they influence each other. But with an analysis of dynamic activity, everything already is by its very nature (speaking of its own "nature" in a pragmatic sense) affecting everything else. Aristotle's system is leaning in this direction with its analysis of act, but I'm going a step further - everything is completely constituted by how it fits into the overall network of forces. That is primary, and the substantial stability is an epiphenomenon - not vice versa. Substance is an abstraction from Reality (Indra's Web, suchness, shunyata, however you want to put it), not the basis. It is a perfectly good abstraction for getting around the world, which is all most people need, but common sense makes for poor metaphysics.

This also makes more sense of contemporary science in matters such as inertia (things naturally continue a line of force, whether fast, slow, in motion, or in rest, rather than going to some "natural place") and gravity (things naturally tend toward a place set by their environment, not by their own natures). Directionality, force, and environment determine the intrinsic nature of a thing; it is not always something accidental and violent.

What is Democracy?

The recent problems in Wisconsin are raising the question, What exactly is Democracy? Is it simply going with the majority? That can't be right - we say that slavery was wrong, even when the majority would have chosen it. But what is it, then? What do we do when budget cuts cost people not just luxuries, but their livelihoods? How many people must be crushed underfoot before a regime has become undemocratic, and how does their pain compare with the "majority" opinion of what is to be done? If most public school teachers make too little to be able to afford benefit cuts and still eat, is that too many people hurt? How about if a quarter of them? The handful beginning their careers in Milwaukee? Do they only have rights if the rest of the state is informed enough to vote in their favor, to realize that these people asked to "tighten their belts like the rest of us" already chose a stricter lot simply in taking up their career, their service to a community which more than ever proves the need of education? Do they only have their lives if their "representatives" in Madison pay attention to economic realities? But why stop at these budget cuts - what about those who have had these problems all along, but never had the solidarity, the security, or the space to say anything? How many have gone unheeded all along, whose lives have been so consistently hampered that they have not been able to point to a law which would change it for the worse?

Democracy must be for the people. And when the people cannot give two seconds to think about their neighbor, when they cannot bring themselves to be informed, when they cannot turn and face the world in front of them beyond their fences, it must be against the majority.

Red

"First with regard to the knowledge of sense perception, whenever an object makes an impression on our normal sense organ by coming into contact with it, we may safely believe without any doubt that it is in reality as we perceived it, provided we are sufficiently expert not to be misled by illusions...." - Saadya Gaon

What does it mean to say that something is as we perceive it? This is a difficult issue, and I want to show just how difficult it is. Let's start off with the simplistic view: I am sitting in my chair and I see a red book in front of me. Therefore, barring hallucinations, colorblindness, and so on, the book is really red, in an objective sense.

However, it turns out that it is me who makes the book red. The different wavelengths in the world are analog and continuous - there is no nice division of colors "out there." Colors get divided up in our brains. The rods and cones in our eyes divvy things up according to, more or less, the three primary colors of light (red, green, and blue; some women have a fourth set as well). Another portion of the brain (the LGN) contrasts certain colors and is responsible for that after-image you get when you stare at something too long. This opposes blue and yellow, and red and green. Linguistic systems add colors in a specific order: languages with only two words for colors talk about white/light and black/dark, languages with three invariably add red as a third, and so on. Our brains make things the colors they are, so the book is subjectively red.

But even if our brains shape the world, there is still the world to be shaped. My seeing of the book as red is as dependent on my brain shaping the world as on the world shaping my brain. There are certain wavelengths which trigger certain neurons, and both wavelengths and neurons are necessary. So the book is red in this subject-object interaction.

Of course, things get even more complicated. On the one hand, I am as much a part of the physical world as the book. The book would probably appear as a different color under the light of a different sun; is it any less red for that? But I am as much a part of this physical environment as anything else. I am here seeing the book in this way because of specific pressures of natural selection, formed in relation to the world. So my own subjective view of the world is not so subjective - it formed because of the world, in tune with the world (or else the lineage leading up to me would not have survived). So maybe the book is objectively red after all, though in a less simplistic sense than we had first considered; perhaps it is better to say that it is "materially red", since there is no longer any separation between me the subject and the book as the object.

On the other hand, everything that I see in the world is a form of consciousness. Everything sensed, thought, inferred, is all a way in which I am conscious of it. The book's being red is a form of consciousness like anything else. Everything that I figure out about natural selection or the physical structure of the world is grounded first and foremost in consciousness, and makes no sense apart from it. However, it is not just me as the subject imposing a view on the world; the world as form of consciousness is just as important. When I see a tree, the tree is just as important to that event as me. In fact, it is after the fact that I separate out the aspect of consciousness which is "I" and which is the "tree", based on the fact that they move in different directions. So the book would be ideally red, or red as a structure of consciousness (just as "I" end up being merely a structure of consciousness), and not just subjectively red.

It would seem that we need at least one more level, however. We can start from the book and then bring ourselves in as an object of natural selection, or we can start from ourselves and bring in the book as a form of consciousness. Somehow, both of these work together. We need to talk about consciousness of the world in order to let science get off the ground in the first place, but science has something to say about our consciousness of the world. There is a circle here, and so the final ground I will talk about is the whatever-it-is that is the basis for this circle which allows it to take place. In order to figure out what this basis is, I give the simple homework assignment of reading Plotinus, Proclus, Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu, Dogen, Nishida, Shankara, Schelling, Hoelderlin, Hegel, and Heidegger, for a start.

At this point, since it all works together, subject and object, matter and consciousness, maybe it is best to simply say that the book is red.

Chomsky, Math, and Politics

I was recently reading through some of Noam Chomsky's writings on politics, and I came across a comparison he made between different disciplines. He pointed out that when he talked about mathematics, all that people cared about was the content of what he had to say. He is not a professional mathematician, but this does not matter as long as the math checks out. By contrast, when he talked about, say, the Vietnam war, everyone was concerned with his credentials rather than what he had to say, at least in the American media. His explanation was that those disciplines with more intellectual substance don't need credentials, whereas those needing credentials tend to be more concerned with preserving certain power structures in society. I think there is another explanation, however.

I don't wish to discount Chomsky's worries about how the intelligentsia does misuse its position to create facades of expertise, negatively impacting critical discussion of issues. But I equally want to recognize that there is a reason why we expect credentials of people in some fields and not others. When I look at a mathematical proof, all I need to examine is there. I may need to bring in my own knowledge to understand the proof in the first place, but if I can understand it, I can assess it. Other mathematical facts are irrelevant in deciding whether the theorem checks out, so understanding of the steps in this specific proof is all that is required.

When it comes to history or politics, by contrast, there can be many views with their own inner logic, which people take to be determinative of their truth (for example, conspiracy theories, religious apologetics, and the political views of your least favorite party). Looking at whether the argument itself checks out is no longer enough, since external facts can change that picture (technical tangent: David Lewis' book on Counterfactuals comes to mind - could this difference between fields be expressed in terms of modal logic?). Is the history being taught now the same history you learned as a child, for example? And I guarantee that if you have not studied the history of Galileo's contribution to the history of science, you will find it to be much less straightforward than it is made out to be - a couple extra facts about the time make the difference between "Galileo, the destroyer of dark age dogma" and "Galileo, the guy with the interesting idea which nevertheless poorly explained various aspects of the world until Newton posited that mystical, occult force known as gravity."

No matter how certain these sorts of arguments seem on their own, they could be false. Therefore, to know that someone has something worthwhile to say, we need to know more than that their speech makes sense. We need to know that they are the sort of person to know a lot of potentially relevant background information and so able to catch external facts pertinent to the topic. If someone talks about the wars in the Middle East, they need to know something about the history of the area, the differences between the regions and peoples, the root causes for the radical movements, and so on. Otherwise, we get such nonsense as "Saddam Hussein is aiding Osama bin Laden".

Of course, two other things seem to be necessary which complicate the picture. In addition to actually having the information, one needs to have an open mind so that one can readily assess new data and change ones position if necessary - again, the already present internal logic of an historical, religious, political, etc. argument is no sign of its ultimate validity. Also, there needs to be sources for the new information, which is where Chomsky's own point seems to have its place. We need people around who can perturb the system, push back against the recognized system of credentials. No system of credentials could be perfect since the object of study can never be closed off - we never will have knowledge of the specific going-ons in society in the way that we have knowledge of mathematical theorems.