And Slaters Go Plop

Neil deGrasse Tyson succinctly sums up the scientific method:

Do whatever it takes to not fool yourself when trying to understand the world around you.

(Thank you Ken!)

This video gives a reasonably good summary of the content of Peter Singer’s new book, The life you can save – Acting now to end world poverty.

See the book review below.

I’ve just finished reading Peter Singer’s new book, The life you can save – Acting now to end world poverty. In it he presents his arguments for why we ought to be acting to help those below the poverty line, discusses the obstacles and suggests methods for making sure that the money you give is effective.

Singer is a philosopher and an ethicist and, as such, presents a robust case for the need for charity as well as the wrongness of withholding aid when it is within our means.

He sets the scene with a scenario where you are passing by a pond and notice a toddler drowning in it. Most of us would be prepared to ruin our new shoes and clothing as well as make ourselves late for work in order to save the toddler. This would indicate that we actually value the life of this child over the cost of our clothing and over the interruption to our everyday lives.

But why don’t we act with the same urgency when we know for a fact that for a similar cost and/or inconvenience we would be able to save the life of a real child in, say, Africa?

Here Singer addresses many of the psychological issues that surround immediacy, perceived unfairness when others don’t give, balancing our legitimate selfish urges, being more vocal about our charity to create a better culture of giving and much more.

Having established that if we are able to help and we have no good reasons not to he then goes on to examine how to invest your aid wisely and ensure that your money is being used for what you intended. (I’ve often chosen my charities based largely on how little is wasted on administration – he deals with this and shows that it is more complicated than that).

The last part of the book is dedicated to establishing how much it is reasonable to expect us to give without turning us all off. Singer holds himself to his own standards and admits that even he can’t live up to them (he doesn’t mention it in the book but according to a radio interview I listened to he gives around 30% of his income). Think of it; if you can afford to buy a coffee when you could have had tap water then you have diverted potential aid from those who clearly need it more than you. Instead, he suggests a more realistic scale of percentages which, for most reading this, would be between 1-5% of our incomes before tax.

And all is not lost as he points out: in 1981 there were 1.9 billion people below the poverty line whereas today there are only 1.4 billion. Those numbers may seem close but consider that the fact that the world population has increased in the time and what this amounts to is that we have almost halved the percentage of people living below the poverty line in 30 years. Ending world poverty is achievable.

I thoroughly recommend you read this book.

The Golden Rule. Treat others how you’d like to be treated. Almost every culture in the world has a version similar to this and the only real variation is in the definition of who the ‘others’ are. In most primitive cultures, ‘others’ didn’t include the tribe over the mountain but, as we have formed larger and more inclusive societies, we are extending the boundaries of who qualifies as an ‘other’.

Most people reading this will likely have a boundary that now includes all humans. Some may extend this boundary to other animals capable of suffering to various degrees. Everyone I’ve met agrees that The Golden Rule is a good rule to live by but there are a large range of interpretations as to who the ‘others’ are.

A question I have is, should chimps and orangutans belong to this group we call ‘others’? What about other animals such as cows and sheep? Should we treat them as we would like to be treated? If not, why not?

This is a touchy topic and one I’ve given a bit of thought to over the last few years in examining whether I ought to become a vegetarian. In short, I still eat meat. I’ve decided that my boundary for ‘others’ is largely dependent on the issue of suffering. This is a fuzzy line however and roughly translates to an unwillingness to eat the meat of animals who, in killing them, has caused unnecessary suffering to either them or to others. I’ve found that there is no easy answer and that much of this is because we expect to be able to draw nice, clear-cut lines in what is (as is usually the case in matters like this) essentially a gradient. And I’ve found that it’s a good idea not to even try to draw too distinct a line and to be prepared to shift it regularly depending on the many factors that can apply (i.e. I would kill and eat a chimp if I were starving to death and had no other option but wouldn’t dream of it in my current status.)

In my current status I don’t like animal experimentation that causes suffering. I prefer to eat chickens that have had freedom to roam. I don’t mind eating sheep and cows so long as they are treated well. I don’t want to encourage cramped pig pens so avoid pork unless it’s free range. Chimps, orangutans, elephants, whales and dolphins (to name but a few) are very much in my group of ‘others’ and I would see the hunting and killing of one as causing similar suffering to killing a human.

Roughly, where is your boundary and why?

No one believes that they are dogmatic. We’re all far too reasonable for that carry on. But we can all point to a number of other people who we would term as dogmatic and, with a little imagination, we should be able to understand that they probably don’t think they are dogmatic. This leaves us with a dilemma; how do we know that we are not being dogmatic ourselves? If we can see others acting dogmatically who are unaware of it then, chances are, we could be too.

By ‘dogmatic’ I am describing an absolutist kind of belief that, if I could summarise in my own words, boils down to the fact that you would really rather hold to what you believe than accept an alternative even if the alternative is true. Dogma is the belief you refuse to interrogate.

Dogmatism can get in the way of new truths. The reason for this is that if you are unwilling to honestly put a belief to the test then you will never find out if that belief happens to be false. A valid argument can be made that perhaps there are some beliefs that we’d be better off clinging to rather than risking finding out a truth that would cause you great unhappiness. Would you like to find out that your partner cheated on you all those years ago? What if we discover that we are really just a brain in a jar somewhere living a simulation? What if God really is imaginary? What if God really is real? Whether we dare to search for the truth of a particular matter is a personal decision. But if we refuse to honestly put our beliefs to the test then we ought to show a little more humility when telling others what we ‘know‘ to be true.

So, assuming we do want truth, how do we avoid dogmatism? The best way I can think of is to actually value truth over any existing belief. This can be excruciating, especially when a belief is foundational to any meaning you get out of life. I found it very difficult many years ago to say to myself in all honesty that I would hold truth higher than my belief in the existence of God. If you’ve never believed in God you’ll probably struggle to understand the significance of this but, to a believer, God is truth and so it can seem a kind of fundamental blasphemy to say that you would even challenge the idea. If you do believe in God, fear not, many respectable people have done what I did and kept their belief afterwards and I greatly respect them for it.

Other than valuing truth over existing beliefs I’ve come across another technique that can help to break the emotional attachment we often develop with our dearly-held beliefs. That is to regularly switch perspectives or, “state the opposite”. An example of this is to first say what you believe i.e. “Labour has the best health policies” and then say the opposite i.e. “National has the best health policies” or, “Act has the best health policies” and try to mean it. You can do this with just about any belief in which you are tempted to take sides and it really can help to make you more objective because it can lessen the effects of the ‘in-group/out-group’ factor.

Does anyone have any other good tips or tricks for finding truth that can be used by anyone regardless of their starting assumptions?

In a perfect world, when faced with a contentious issue, we would assimilate the facts, weigh them against each other and come to a reasonable consensus (pending further information, of course). We don’t live in a perfect world however and I’ve observed in myself and in others that we often tend to treat our existing beliefs about the way the world works as if it were our favourite football team; we’ll stand behind them through good times and bad, through confirmatory and contradictory evidence.

This is a fairly natural thing to do and if we are aware of our own confirmation bias we can do a lot to gradually eliminate those ideas we previously held to be true but which were, in fact, false.

However, I’ve noticed that when two people attempt to discuss a contentious issue from two very different starting assumptions, instead of fostering a willingness to seek the truth regardless of the impact to our existing beliefs, we are driven further toward defending them against this new ‘enemy’.

I think that if our goal is truth then we ought to spend most of our time challenging our existing beliefs in dialogue with people with whom we have much in common. That way we’ll be less inclined to go into defensive mode and more likely to gracefully discard what was previously an incorrect belief.

This would mean that in many cases there would have to be a certain level of exclusivity to discussions but I think it would go a long way toward self-improvement even though it may take a very long time to unravel long-held presuppositions.

I want to be able to thrash out what I see as difficulties to do with consciousness or first causes without having to deal with the distraction of religious dogma or new age pseudo-science and, more importantly, I’d imagine that there are many conversations that other people would like to have without me jumping in and blurting out what I know must be true.

So, for those of you who have found me an irritation in the past, I hope to be less in your face with what I perceive to be the absolute truth. If you think I’ve got something wrong and you hold very similar starting assumptions to me then please feel free to rigorously discuss your ideas with me. If you hold very different starting assumptions please try to allow for the fact that you may be wrong and I will try my best to do likewise. We may, after all, both be wrong.

In a perfect world we should be happier to learn that we have been wrong than that we have ‘won’ an argument.

Listening to a BBC podcast recently it seemed that the experts were agonising about the nature of time. But isn’t time just our way of describing change? Not a thing in and of itself but rather a description of real things going from one state to another?

Perhaps I’ve missed a trick somewhere along the way. If so, enlighten me.

Dawkins’ series The Genius of Charles Darwin is currently showing on the History Channel on Sky here in NZ. Omitted from the series was this insightful interview with Father George Coyne on the subjects of evolution, cosmology, science and faith.

Source

In recent conversations with theists I’ve come across a common objection to the possibility of free will if there be no supernatural dimension to the world in which we live. The argument goes along the lines of:

P1. Materialism assumes we consist of only matter (i.e. atoms)
P2. Atoms don’t have free will
C. We experience free will so there must be more to this world than just matter

an alternative is:
P1. Materialism assumes we consist of only matter (i.e. atoms)
P2. Atoms don’t have free will
C. Under the materialistic worldview we can’t ultimately have free will

I’ve heard this argument couched in numerous ways but the essence of it is that if our smallest bits don’t have free will then we can’t explain the freedom we appear to experience.

I can think of two answers to this.

The first (which I’m not personally convinced of) would be that we only have the appearance of freedom and that, as participants, we are able to fool ourselves into thinking we have control over what we do. My analogy for this is where the desperate dog-owner repeatedly tries to tell their disobedient dog to sit and when they finally notice that the dog is about to sit of its own accord, quickly say “sit!” in order to give themselves the feeling of being in control. This would make what we experience as free will a kind of a self-deception and, like I said, I’m not convinced this is the case but it is a valid answer to the first problem pointed out above. (Although, I must say that I think there is some truth to this at times, especially when it comes to self-justification).

The second, and far more powerful, option is to look at the analogy of music. Take a CD of your favourite musician and if we look closely we’ll see that the ‘music’ is made of only on or off states. 0s or 1s. When we play a CD we experience music but when we look at what this music (on a CD) is made of we can see that it’s just binary bits. And as we all know, a 0 or a 1 is not in itself music. This second argument would suggest that both free will and music are the emergent properties of their component parts doing something.

In the second set of arguments above I italicised the word ultimately. My analogy of music also helps to address the logical fallacy of the usage of this word. I don’t believe there is such a thing as ultimate music. Nor do I believe there is such a thing as ultimate free will. I believe that both are subjectively experienced and are results of non-free and non-musical atoms and bits doing something. We experience free will just as we experience music.

The use of the word ‘ultimate’ in this argument tries to imply that there are only two kinds of free will; ultimate free will or no free will at all. This is a false dichotomy. I would argue that there is at least another type of free will and that is the kind that is experienced subjectively and is only explainable at the macro level of bundles of atoms that are doing something. A world within a world. And using the music analogy once again, you can see how silly this argument is when I say “There is only either ultimate music or no music at all”.

“Free will” is a word that we’ve made up to describe an aspect we observe of the world around us. We have a tendency to want our words and categories to clearly demarcate things we observe into black/white, on/off, etc. But sometimes the words we invent fail at a point when the thing we are describing is a gradient, like ‘red’ (when does red become orange?) or ‘alive’ (are viruses alive? is fire alive?) or ‘music’ (is a ‘chirp’ music? what about a vibration on a violin string? or wind in the trees?). Free will is one of these words. We can observe a gradient of organisms with various abilities to do things. Free will is a gradual and emergent process and to treat it as a binary state is to become a slave to a simplistic understanding of the world and to imperfect vocabulary.

I’ve observed conversations between theists and non-theists in which the theist will state that the non-theist doesn’t have a leg to stand on with regard to morality because if you don’t believe in a God then you can have no objective basis for your morals and so no moral belief can be better or worse than the other.

And I’ve watch many non-theists scramble to try to show that they do, in fact, have a basis for objective morality but I have to admit that I get a bit lost in the arguments. It’s likely that I don’t understand the finer details of what people mean by “objective” and “subjective”.

Every time I see such a conversation I think to myself that I’m quite happy to believe that there is no great measuring rod in the sky and that all such morals are evolved and subjective. To me, it seems to make sense that stealing can be both beneficial and detrimental depending on the circumstances (i.e. subjective) and that child rape is 99.9999999% detrimental (I always allow for those make-believe scenarios where you have to choose between, say, child rape and killing 1,000,000 people with a lawnmower).

I also think that when people use “wrong” and “right” as opposed to “detrimental” and “beneficial” it actually creates a circular argument for a kind of objective morality because the word “wrong” can be used in both an objective and a subjective sense (i.e. I hit the wrong key on the keyboard vs. abortion is wrong) whereas the word “detrimental” demands that you at least define a goal or framework that is being worked against.

So, theists and non-theists, is there really such a thing as objective morality? And what’s your definition of it? I’ve got no answers, only questions.