Respecting People with Different Beliefs

This post has a similar message to The Stigma Against Being Wrong

At my brother’s wedding last weekend, I shared a table with some good, interesting people. During the course of the conversation, one of them asked another, whom she had just met, what his religious beliefs were. He gave the standard American Protestant response, that God and Jesus were real, and so were Heaven and Hell, and you would go to one or the other based on whether you believed Jesus was God, and was resurrected from the dead, and you pledged your life to him. The questioner asked, “what about people who never hear the message?” To which he replied, “if they just look around at life, they’ll know. Because how did it get here?” The questioner responded, “Well it’s all evolving, isn’t it?” To which the person being questioned said, “I don’t see how that’s possible. After all, everything tends to break down over time, not get more complex.”

At this point in the conversation, I was itching to jump in. He was getting close to a concept in thermodynamics called entropy, but was under a common misconception. In a nutshell, entropy is the measure of whether energy is usable or not. Over time, energy goes from a low entropy state to a high entropy state, and the higher the entropy, the less usable the energy. But this does not mean that everything breaks down over time. While the energy is in transition from low entropy to high entropy, all kinds of complex processes can happen.

Our computers do all kinds of complex things like play games and generate text documents, by taking in electricity, low entropy energy, and converting it into heat, high entropy energy. Life takes in food, low entropy, and releases high entropy heat, and by doing this it is able to metabolize and think and exercise and heal and reproduce. The Earth’s biosphere has low entropy energy coming in as sunlight and geothermal heat from the mantle, and releases high entropy energy as infrared light radiating into space. This energy cycle powers most of what happens naturally on Earth, including evolution. Evolution works perfectly well in the context of thermodynamics, because although the organisms become more complex over generations, the overall entropy of the thermodynamic system they are a part of increases.

But I said none of this, and when the person asking the questions turned to me for my expertise as a physicist, I said no. I wasn’t going to gang up on this guy and try to talk him out of his beliefs. Especially not here at a wedding, where everyone was happy and getting along. But oh man, I was so eager to tear his misconceptions to pieces, that the only way to keep myself from the temptation was to put up my hand and shy away, saying, "no, no!" It wasn't dignified, and a more mature thinker would have been able to decline with grace, but it was what I needed to do in the moment to keep things peaceful and positive.

In the end, we are all human. We are all wrong about many things. We may become wiser and gain knowledge, but we will never be perfect. It is liberating to realize that other people's beliefs really aren't that important; it's how we act that matters. So when we meet someone who has different beliefs from us, even if we are experts and they are not, there is no need for us to correct them. Instead, we should respect them, and allow them to have their own beliefs, trusting that if and when they are ready, they will seek out a deeper understanding of the subject of their own free will.

Building an Economics View: Basic Needs

Building an Economics View:
The Purpose of the Economy
Problem-Solving Mindset
Production and Distribution
Motivations and Incentives
Inequality

I’ve recently noticed that when people say things I disagree with about economics, I find myself tempted to reply with an angry rant. I have no idea why any reasonable person would say something so obviously incorrect, so I feel it must be because they are a bad person, and I treat them as such. But when the fire dies down and I look at what I have said, I realize this is counter to my own philosophy of assuming people are good and peacefully allowing them to disagree with me. This suggests that the problem lies with me, not them.

So what is going on? When I think about it, I realize I’ve been through this before. This anger is a result of cognitive dissonance between my intellectual pride and evidence that one of my views is not well thought out. When I examine my views of economics with a clear head, I find an incoherent jumble of ideas mashed together from all kinds of different sources. One moment I will say something capitalist, the next something socialist, and the next something anarchist, without any notion of how they might fit together or contradict. Clearly this is no good.

With this realization, I have decided to do with economics what I have done in the past with religion and morality, and that is to break apart my crumbling views, sweep aside my cultural influences, and start over from a clean slate. This time, though, I am going to write up the process here on A Scientist’s Fiction, so that you, dear readers, may see my thought process as I go.

The first step, when constructing a view, is to define what we’re talking about. What is economics? The first thing that comes to mind is money, but that is an emergent feature of economics in practice. At a more basic level, economics is the study of the production and distribution of resources. It would be good to have a term that means a specific rule, tradition, or regulation that affects how things are produced and distributed, so let’s call those economic mechanisms. An economic system is a collection of economic mechanisms that work together as a whole.

There are two parts to economics. The first is to study economic mechanisms and systems to find out how they work and what they do. But before we do that, we need to ask ourselves what separates a good economic system from a bad one, or in other words, for what purposes we are producing resources.

About a year ago, we did a series on morality, in which I argued for a version of Utilitarianism that can be summed up as “more good is better.”  Good is defined in another post as the perceptions we get through our moral sense, which is the same kind of sense as our most well-known five senses. The moral sense can be stimulated by circumstances, actions, states of being, etc. These things are not themselves good or bad, but take on a level of goodness when they are paired with someone's moral sense. In line with Deontology, everyone's individual good is equally valid. This gives us a context in which to construct our economics views. We are looking for systems and mechanisms that do as much good for as many people as possible.

Here we run into a problem. Economic mechanisms do very specific things. If “good” is different for everyone, how is it possible to know what kind of economic system will maximize it? What we need is an environment where people can pursue good in whatever form it takes for them. This is the motivation for the idea of basic human rights. The United States Declaration of Independence says “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but I am going to be pedantic and say it should have been the pursuit of a good life, because there are other forms of good besides happiness. The measure of an economic system, then, is how easy it makes exercising these rights to as many people as possible.

Some people believe that human rights are a government responsibility, and economics has nothing to do with it. But that view is misguided. If someone does not have enough food, they do not have liberty, because they must spend all of their energy to get food, rather than pursuing a good life. Sure, some people may find good lives by the same actions that get them food, but even for them there is no liberty if there is no choice.

In order for someone to be free to fully exercise their fundamental rights, they require a basic set of needs to be met. What are these basic needs? Well, in order to pursue a good life, people need food and water, shelter, healthcare, transportation, and information. With these five needs covered (I count food and water as one), people have all that they require in order to pursue their own good, whether that be to earn money and live in more luxury, to volunteer for service projects, to plant and tend a personal garden, to contemplate the nature of existence, or any of a billion other ways for people to find meaning in life.

But what determines how much of the five basic needs is enough? After all, a person can live, albeit uncomfortably, on one meal a day. This question is not easy to answer, but at the very least, people should not have to spend energy worrying about how they are going to remain healthy and whether they will have sufficient options available for pursuing purpose. Perhaps we will examine this question more deeply in the future.

We now have a foundation for our views: an economic system or policy is good in proportion to the percentage of people to whom it provides sufficient food, shelter, healthcare, transportation, and information. Of course, a system that adequately provides all of these things to everyone will have its own problems, and maybe we'll have a discussion about them in the future, but for now it makes sense to focus on the problems we face right now.

You may notice that we have not actually talked about any particular economic system or mechanism yet. That is because if we hadn't set up the moral foundation, we would have no way to evaluate it. I am not sure where this series will take us from here, but that is the beauty of constructing a new view. Maybe we will talk about work and purpose. Maybe we will talk about taxation and redistribution. Maybe we will talk about the strengths and weaknesses of the market. Whatever it is, it will be explored in the spirit of curiosity and of making the world better for everyone.

What is Good?

About a year ago, we did a series on morality, and concluded with Utilitarianism as a meta-ethical framework by which to decide which personal moral system is most appropriate for each circumstance. But when talking about Utilitarianism, I made the same mistake that most Utilitarian advocates make, and that is to define good by a word that means something else. Whether this word is happiness, pleasure, fulfillment, wellbeing, eudaimonia, or, in my case, satisfaction, it feels too limiting, like we’re shifting the definition of good to mean something else. So today, I am going to explain what I mean by “good,” and in the future, I will simply call it “good,” rather than any of those other less satisfactory labels.

We start by observing that we feel that some things are worthy of happening more than others. These things can take the form of circumstances, actions, attitudes, and plenty of other types of things. When presented with two of these things, we will judge one to be better than the other. Unless we are contemplating philosophy, this judgment is made by observing how we feel about it, and this feeling is stimulated by the comparison, just like our vision is stimulated by the light entering our eyes, and our hearing is stimulated by the sound entering our ears. In other words, we have a sense of right and wrong.

You might think, like a lot of philosophers throughout history, that having a sense of good means we must be perceiving some objective good that is out in the world and is independent from our perception. But there is no reason to believe our perceptions always show us objective things. For instance, the objects we see have no color, they just reflect different wavelengths of light. The colors come into being when our brains interpret the signals from the wavelengths of light enter our eyes. Similarly, good is not an inherent property of the circumstances, actions, etc. that exist in the world, but comes into being as the interpretations our brains make of those things. So then what is good? Good is when the sense of good is stimulated.

But there’s a problem that immediately jumps out at us. Different people perceive different things as good and bad. We see this all the time. People argue and fight because they disagree about whether something is good or bad.

There are three approaches to resolving this. The first is to look for universal moral goods, things that cause everyone’s sense of good to signal the same thing. The idea is that these are truly good, and everything else is conditional. The second approach is Relativism, the idea that there is no real good or bad, and it just depends on your point of view. The third approach is Deontology, which says everyone’s sense of good is equally valid, and no one’s good should be given more weight than anyone else’s. Building upon Deontology, we get Utilitarianism, which says when you add up everyone’s individual good, we get an objective total good.

One person’s sense of good is most strongly stimulated by learning about the universe. Another’s is most strongly simulated by training their body and working together with a team to rise through competitive ranks. Another’s is by doing work with their hands that has practical value to those around them. Deontology and Utilitarianism say that none of these are good intrinsically, but they are all good when paired with the people they are good for.

Why I Changed My Mind about the Quantum Multiverse

Recommended Pre-Reading:
Quantum Entanglement
Multiverses (Quantum Many Worlds section)

A truth seeker must always be open to new evidence. The new evidence must be added to the old, and all of it re-evaluated together. Sometimes the evidence in its greater context points in a direction other than what you thought was true, and when this happens, the wise person adjusts their beliefs accordingly. As a case in point, we’ll look at something I have had a strong opinion about on this blog, the quantum multiverse.

By Paul Anglada on Flickr

If you’ve read a lot of my science posts, you know I’ve been pretty hard on the quantum multiverse, also called the Many Worlds Hypothesis. In the multiverses discussion, I said I thought it was the least likely to be true out of the hypothetical multiverse types that come from physical theories. Since then, however, I have learned more about the arguments for its existence, most importantly the story of how the hypothesis came to be, and now I think it is reasonable to believe it exists.

Before we go any further, though, let’s remind ourselves what we are talking about. When quantum physics is mentioned, the layperson might think of the science of consciousness, or of parallel realities where events that were important to individual people or to human history played out differently. These are not quantum physics, they are purely science fiction, playing to our human bias that the universe revolves around us, and where “quantum” is used as a sneaky replacement for “magic.” Quantum physics, the real science, is the study of matter and energy at the scale of molecules and atoms and smaller.

When enough quantum particles interact together (millions, billions, trillions, and more), we get the classical physics that we know in our everyday life. We says that classical physics emerges from quantum physics. But classical physics is not the only thing that can emerge from quantum physics. Any property of quantum physics, when scaled up, can affect the macroscopic realm. Because of this, scientists and inventors have come up with technologies that use the unusual properties of quantum physics in technology, the most well-known example being the laser. Our experience of reality comes from the deeper reality of quantum physics, not the other way around. If quantum physics has implications that are counter-intuitive, we have every reason to take those implications seriously.

We’re going to talk about interpretations of quantum physics, so first things first, what exactly needs to be interpreted? It comes down to why we say quantum physics is weird: a quantum-sized particle can be in two states at once. What does that mean? Well, for example, an electron can be 50% spin up and 50% spin down at the same time. This is called superposition of states. It is like saying a basketball is spinning both clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. It seems like a contradiction, and for macroscopic objects like basketballs it is, but for subatomic particles, it is normal. If you measure the electron’s spin, you will find it to be 100% either spin up or spin down, and then it will behave differently. But it was not 100% up or down before the measurement; the very act of measurement has changed the particle’s properties. This is called “collapsing the wave function,” and it is what needs interpreting.

For the Copenhagen Interpretation, that is the end of the story. The universe has probability baked into it, and measurements roll the dice. But the Copenhagen Interpretation has a problem: what counts as a measurement? If you try to measure the property of a particle by using another particle, the wave function does not collapse. Instead, the particles become entangled, that is, they are both in a combined superposition of states. For example, if you try to measure an electron’s spin using another electron, then both electrons will end up 50% spin up and 50% spin down. But here is where things get interesting. By using more traditional measuring devices, when we measure the electrons’ spins, we will find that one of them is spin up and the other one is spin down. We can’t know which is which beforehand, because there isn’t an answer beforehand. The only thing that is set in reality before the measurement is the fact that their spins will turn out to be opposite.

But what makes a traditional measuring device different from a particle? All measuring devices are made out of particles themselves, after all. So shouldn’t the machine we use become entangled with the electron as well? The machine only shows us one answer, not a superposition of answers, so that seems not to be the case. Why not? This is the famous measurement problem.

One proposed resolution for the measurement problem is that the collapse of the wave function happens when the experiment is observed by a conscious being. That is, the instrument used to take the measurement registers both spin up and spin down until someone looks at it, whereafter the entangled wave function of the particle and the device measuring it collapses, showing just one result. In other words, perception defines reality. However, this requires substance dualism, the idea that consciousness is fundamentally different from the rest of reality, that mind and matter are completely different things. People have had a dualistic view of mind and matter for all of recorded history. It is intuitive; our DNA comes pre-loaded with a disposition toward believing it. It just feels true. But feeling true has no bearing on whether something actually is true, and the lack of scientific evidence in support of dualism suggests that there is some kind of equivalence between consciousness and matter, which would mean the conscious observation interpretation of quantum physics is impossible.

One day in the late ‘50s, physicist Hugh Everett came onto the scene with a radical suggestion: what if the wave function does not collapse at all? What if any interaction between particles makes them entangled? This would mean that two interacting electrons become entangled; when they are measured, the instrument that measures them becomes entangled; when the scientist interacts with the instrument, the scientist becomes entangled; and when the scientist interacts with the rest of the world, the rest of the world becomes entangled. This would mean that after the measurement, the entire world exists in a superposition state, which is 50% reality where the electron is spin up, and 50% reality where the electron is spin down. Put simply, it can be thought of as if there is one universe where the scientists observe the electron to be spin up, and another universe where they observe the electron to be spin down. This is the essence of the Many Worlds Interpretation.

This sounds weird, and it’s only going to get weirder. As they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So what made me change my mind? What makes the Many Worlds Interpretation more reasonable than any other? It all comes down to consistency. When particles only interact with one another, they get entangled. This is a well-documented scientific phenomenon. The larger the number of entangled particles, the harder it is to control all of them, so the easier it is for something external to the experiment to “mess up” the entanglement. But what would it mean to “mess up” an experiment? It’s just more particles interacting with the entangled system. And we know that when particles interact with other particles, they get entangled. So we could think of it as the external world coming in and messing up the experiment, but if we want to be consistent, we should say the entanglement is escaping to the rest of the world, including the brain of the person doing the experiment.

This is extremely counter-intuitive. I certainly feel like I am in one specific state, not a superposition. But what would being in a superposition feel like in the first place? We might imagine two images playing over our eyes, like a transparent movie playing over another movie. But that would only happen if the information from both states came together in the same brain. Remember, our brain is also in a superposition, not working as a single machine in both states. So a person in quantum superposition would feel completely normal, as if they and the objects they see and interact with are in state A, and not state B. And they would also feel as if they and the objects they interact with are in state B, and not in state A. Both are true, and they would notice nothing weird at all, because the states of their brain are completely cut off from each other. In effect, the universe has split in two, and that is where the “multiverse” idea comes in. More generally, as I argued in the multiverses discussion, it is not the splitting of distinct universes, but an infinite-dimensional smear of universe-ness.

By Maria Morri on Flickr

And now, when I look back at my former self, I see a hypocrite. In the multiverses discussion, I said people are drawn to the Many Worlds Hypothesis because the idea that reality is simply probabilistic at the quantum scale is too weird. But I got it backward. The reason that people like my former self cling to the Copenhagen Interpretation is because the Many Worlds Hypothesis is too weird. But weird as it is, it is the only interpretation that solves all the puzzles of quantum physics and leaves no loose ends behind. It is the natural logical conclusion of entanglement, and it makes the measurement problem go away. Out of all the interpretations of quantum physics, those we discussed and those we did not, I now think Many Worlds is the most likely to be true.

But it’s just an interpretation, isn’t it? If it can’t be tested, then what is the point of debating it? Well first of all, here on A Scientist’s Fiction, we search for truth in whatever way we can, and if that means using pure logic, that is what we use. However, in this case, we don’t have to. We can test the quantum multiverse. After all, it’s not just parallel realities. That’s TV sci-fi. The quantum multiverse is an extension of regular old quantum entanglement, which we see in the lab all the time. It makes a prediction: if we have the right kind of experiment, we should be able to put a human being in quantum superposition. Researchers keep finding quantum properties in larger and larger systems, so it should be theoretically possible.

I don’t know how the exact details of such an experiment would play out, but it might go something like this. Imagine we send a human test subject into a room that is 100% soundproof, vibration-proof, and heat-proof. After we close the door, the subject sees either a red light or a blue light, triggered by the measurement of an electron’s spin within the room. To all outside observers, the subject would be in a superposition state of red + blue. Suppose this person was instructed to lightly touch one of two sensors, which connected to a second electron, telling it to either be spin up or spin down. The experimenters outside the room would then do tests on the two electrons, to see if they are in a superposition of states. If they are, then the human test subject is also in a superposition of states. Then they open the doors, the test subject walks out, and tells the researchers what color of light he or she saw. They then measure the particles, and indeed their spin is oriented in accordance with the prediction. This would mean that the test subject was entangled with the electrons, in a superposition of states, and now there are two universes, one where the subject saw red, and one where the subject saw blue. The quantum multiverse hypothesis would be supported by evidence from a prediction of its own.

Schrödinger's Cat

Changing my mind due to more complete evidence is something I am well-practiced at, so when it came time for the quantum multiverse, it was no big deal for me. However, for those less practiced, it can be frightening. Maybe after reading this you are not convinced that the quantum multiverse exists, and that’s fine. Skepticism is healthy, especially for topics as complicated as quantum physics. But it is also healthy to direct your skepticism toward the beliefs you already hold, and I encourage you as a fellow truth seeker to reexamine your beliefs every now and then. Whether you find them to be valid or in need of replacement, I can guarantee the practice will make you wiser and bring you closer to the truth.

Negative Morality: The Divine Hierarchy

Morality:
Intuitionism
Authoritarianism
Divine Command and Attributes
Ethical Egoism
Utilitarianism
Virtue and the Golden Rule

Negative Morality:
Divine Hierarchy

A year ago, we did a series on morality, where we looked at the philosophy of morality, and the moral systems that are discussed in intellectual conversations. Since then, it occurred to me while thinking about the viewpoints of villains and bad people, as well as some misguided people with good hearts, that there are other moral views we have not talked about. These moral systems are not widely considered by philosophers, because they cause oppression and suffering, rather than reduce it. So I have decided to do a mini-series called Negative Morality, where we take a look at these moral systems, so that we may avoid their pitfalls in our own views.

If I were to start the moral series over, I would put Ethical Egoism and Authoritarianism in the negative morality category. But the original series has a structure to it, and I don’t want to mess that up by reclassifying them.

Our topic for today is what I call the divine hierarchy. The concept is simple: the degree to which you are good or evil, holy or unholy, worthy or unworthy, is not primarily determined by what you do, but by what you are. It usually goes something like this: above all are the gods (or just God), beneath them are holy beings like angels, below them are mortal men, below mortals are the animals, and below the animals are demons and unholy monsters. Within each category, humans especially, the beings may be divided into sub-classes, which may either be stratified into discrete levels or smeared out over a continuous spectrum.

This leads to the divine hierarchy’s biggest and most obvious flaw: it makes it very easy to justify prejudice of all kinds. In the hierarchy, men are usually placed above women, the upper classes above the lower classes, and the people of the nations whose armies conquer above the peoples who are conquered. For example, the West has a historical dark side of seeing the world as full of morally inferior savages, theirs for the conquering. History is much more complicated than that, of course, with many positives and negatives, and it can be argued that the attitude of colonialism has greatly diminished from the modern world, but that is a discussion for another time. The point is that a morality structured around a divine hierarchy makes it easy to justify racism, sexism, and discrimination by all other kinds of immutable characteristics. “Know your place” is a common phrase to hear from someone higher in the hierarchy to someone lower down who tries to exercise more freedom than is considered appropriate for them.

In some versions of divine moral hierarchy, it is possible to move up or down the spectrum by performing good or bad actions. More often than not, it’s easy to move down, but very hard to move back up. There is a set of actions, usually based on notions of cleanliness and obedience, that are identified as “bad,” not because the consequences hurt people, but because the action covers you with an invisible sludge called “sin” and makes you less holy. Once covered in sin, there is one of two ways to have it removed, depending on which hierarchy model one believes in. The first is to do penance, an action prescribed by the religious leaders as a medicine for the soul, which may or may not result in good actually being done. The second is to pray that God (or whichever of the gods views you favorably) will be merciful and “wash your sin away” instead of bringing upon you the punishment which your unholy existence deserves.

It should be noted that divine moral hierarchy is not the only context in which sin and religion can be viewed. Some perspectives are not so harsh. There are also other ways that people justify prejudice. We have talked about some of them in other contexts elsewhere on this blog, and may do so more in the future.

If used in a fantasy story, a divine moral hierarchy doesn’t have to be bad. Middle Earth, the setting for The Lord of the Rings, exists in a Divine Hierarchy, with Illuvatar the creator on top; then the Valar, which included Sauron’s master; then the Maiar, which include Sauron and the wizards; and then the elves, dwarves, hobbits, and men. It is also present in the lesser known Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis, with Maleldil (basically Jesus) on top, the Eldila (angel-like sci-fi beings) below him, the hnau (sentient creatures) below them, and non-sentient animals implicitly below them. In fiction, we can look at the downsides of a divine hierarchy, or anything really, and say “in this world, the bad consequences just don’t happen.”

If a moral system leads to more suffering than would exist without it, then it is not moral. The idea that people have moral worth based on the genetic lottery of birth clearly does more harm than good, and we should train ourselves to avoid slipping into that way of thinking. If we see others who are consciously or unconsciously influenced by a negative morality, then we should kindly and respectfully ask questions that lead them toward recognizing it.

Beware the Scapegoat Mentality

In the world today, there are a lot of negative feelings going around. People feel uneasy and resentful, and they don’t know why. It is as if there is some unseen hand quietly out to get them from the shadows. So when someone stands up, points a finger, and says, “those people are the reason you feel this way,” they are met with praise and adoration, because now the people have a name and a face to blame for their unhappiness.

The person or people at whom the fingers point is called a scapegoat. Perhaps they or a person from their group have done something awful, but it is more likely that their public actions are looked over with a fine-toothed comb for one little speck of dirt that people can use to justify believing that they are a bad person. Scapegoating is a tragedy, because at best it takes the reputations of innocent people and drags them through the mud, and at worst it results in a witch hunt. It is the easy way out, a simple solution that requires no thought. It does not solve the problem, only gives people a sense of self-righteousness and retribution.

Don’t fall prey to those who would create a scapegoat. And don’t scapegoat those who scapegoat others; that’s still scapegoating.

Immigrants. Atheists. Christians, Muslims, and Jews. The President or other national leader, current or past. Liberals, progressives, and Democrats. Conservatives and Republicans. The media. Drugs. Guns. Capitalism. Socialism. Postmodernism. The Patriarchy. These are all used as scapegoats, and while you may be able to find fault with any of them, none of them are the real problem.

So what do real problems look like? Because they are real, they behave like reality, with a well-defined mechanism in which every part fits logically with every other. To find them, it takes a willingness to put in the work, and a commitment to truth, no matter what it turns out to be. Focusing on who is to blame doesn’t solve anything, so let’s put our anger and discomfort aside, and look for the real problem and real ways to solve it.

What is Knowledge?

What does it mean to know something? We have this thing in our head called knowledge, which is a collection of notions about the world and how it works, and which helps us to act in ways that make sense. But we know that it is possible to be wrong, and wrong knowledge is not knowledge at all, but false belief. At this point in history, when we are waking up from our intellectual bubbles and seeing all the different views people have, many of which seem to go against common sense, it seems like a good idea to take a look at knowledge and find out what it is and how it works.

When we are children, knowledge is simple. Our parents and other people we trust tell us things, and we believe them. For the purpose of this discussion, I will call this method radical credulity. Of course, now that we are older, we understand that this way of thinking lets incorrect ideas in just as easily as correct ones. This is one reason we keep our kids in safe environments with trustworthy people.

A simple method to filter out ideas that are probably incorrect from ideas that are probably correct is to believe things that are reliably useful. This is called pragmatism. How do we know the Earth is more sphere-like than flat? Because treating the Earth as a sphere gets our airplanes to their destinations, while treating it as flat does not. The pragmatist view is that we believe things that let us reliably predict the consequences of our actions, so that we can effectively do what we are trying to do. It’s as the old defense of the scientific method says: we believe it because it works.

But pragmatism has its shortcomings. For example, most of the time, we live as if the Earth is flat, so there is not usually any problem with believing it to be so. However, there are circumstances where this belief could be catastrophic. Of course the pragmatist will say that we should treat the Earth as flat or round depending on the situation, and the real truth of its shape doesn’t matter. However, for many of us, it isn’t good enough to believe things because they are useful; we want to believe things because they are justifiably true, and pragmatism does not do this for us.

In the middle of the last century, psychologist Jean Piaget came up with a theory of knowledge called constructivism, which says we don’t simply acquire knowledge, we create it as a logical network. When we hear a new claim, we evaluate it by how well it fits with what we already know, and if we find no contradictions, we add it to the network. If we do find a contradiction, we either toss it out or reevaluate the belief that it conflicts with. Right away, we see something in constructivism that was missing from radical credulity and pragmatism: logic. The beliefs we hold are connected to each other by threads of non-contradiction.

However, as we all know, it is possible to have beliefs that are false. Adding a new belief that doesn’t conflict with a false belief doesn’t help us come to the truth. One way to attempt to rectify this is to take the beliefs that we are most confident and passionate about as an immutable foundation, and build our knowledge of the world around them. In philosophy lingo, these beliefs are called basic beliefs.

Of course, if people just take whatever they please as basic beliefs, we will find people with all kinds of beliefs that contradict each other’s, and they’ll stubbornly yell at each other until they’re blue in the face. Faced with this problem philosophers sought what could be called properly basic beliefs, truths which are so obvious and undeniable that it is impossible for them to be false. DesCartes famously took his own existence to be properly basic, and the philosophy of empiricism holds the validity of logic, mathematics, and observation as such.

Unfortunately, we run into another problem: we cannot agree on what beliefs should count as properly basic! Take any belief that is proposed as properly basic, and you will be able to find people who doubt it. Mathematics? Can be doubted. Objective reality? Can be doubted. “I think, therefore I am”? Can be doubted! What’s more, since properly basic beliefs are supposed to be the foundation upon which all other knowledge is constructed, the only argument that can be made for a belief to be properly basic is, “can’t you see it’s obvious?” Not exactly up to academic standards!

In the absence of anything that could justifiably be called properly basic, we might, with heavy heart, be tempted to conclude that knowledge is, in fact, impossible, and that everything is just mights and maybes. This is a pessimistic outlook, and not one most of us are comfortable with. In order to avoid it, we might choose a basic belief on radical credulity, usually called “faith” in this context. Or we might revert to pragmatism, and choose a belief that has proved reliable time and again as our basic belief.

I, however, subscribe to a third option, and that is to view knowledge in terms of probabilities instead of just yes or no. Although it may be impossible to know anything with a justified certainty of 100% with an infinite number of decimal places, we can be justifiably 90% certain, or 99.999% certain. We may not be able to calculate the numbers, but with practice we can guess the ballpark.

How is the level of certainty of a belief determined? By how well it connects into the knowledge network. Reality itself is one giant network where everything connects to everything else, so the larger a person’s knowledge network and the more interconnected it is, the more likely the beliefs in the network are to be true. To understand why, the jigsaw puzzle analogy is apt. When building a puzzle, there is a small chance that two pieces will fit, even though they don’t actually go together. But the chance that the same piece will fit incorrectly on two sides is much smaller. So to be sure you have the right piece, you want to try to connect it to the picture by more than one side. The chance of it being the right piece is even higher if there is a fourth piece connecting the two connecting pieces together, so that you have a square of four pieces. And the more pieces that can be added on to the connecting pieces, the higher the chance of each of them being the right piece.

Knowledge is like that, except there are plenty of extra pieces that don’t go to the puzzle, the chance of an incorrect connection is much higher, and the pieces can hook on to an arbitrarily large number of other pieces, which don’t have to be right next to each other. The knowledge puzzle also gets scaled up to more complex levels. With knowledge, you can have two packages of tightly-knit beliefs, but these packages only have a few connections between them. Imagine two balls of string connected to each other by three threads. Each ball is tightly connected, so they each individually have a high chance of being true, but their connection to each other is tenuous. If you discover that the two packages of beliefs contradict each other, either by learning something new or by thinking about them both in new ways, then you might have to make the tough decision to let one of them go.

When a contradiction is found between two sets of beliefs that one has, it is called cognitive dissonance, and depending on the complexity of the beliefs in question, as well as how attached we are to them, it can manifest as a physical headache. We instinctively want to get rid of the cognitive dissonance as quickly as possible. There are two ways to do this. The first, is to commit to whichever beliefs are most important to you, taking them, at least temporarily, as basic beliefs. The second takes longer, but it leaves you in a more stable place, and that is to take apart each package of beliefs and reevaluate them in the broader context of your total knowledge network, and by learning about the relevant topics from a variety of external sources.

A mind well-practiced in the art of knowledge construction will take time every so often to reevaluate the pieces of their knowledge network, to make sure it all fits together properly. There are many techniques to this, which we explore on this blog in the “Toolbelt of Knowledge” series.

There is still one teeny tiny issue with constructivism without basic beliefs, which you may have picked up on. Constructivism itself is a model, a sub-network of nodes within the larger network of a person’s knowledge. In particular, the belief that “the more solidly integrated a belief is within the network, the more likely it is to be true,” is itself a node in the network. This means that it must be subject to the same reevaluation process as everything else, or be taken as properly basic on faith.

But we don’t do that kind of faith here at SciFic. As you know if you’ve read “The Limit of Philosophy,” we prefer to race headlong into the trippy world of metalogic. So what happens when we allow ourselves to doubt the very method we use to determine what is true? Well, we just do the same thing we do with everything else: evaluate it. If it does not measure up to its own standards, then we get rid of it. If it is self-consistent, and we don’t have any alternative methods that are more self-consistent than this one, then we might as well use it. But one last question: why should we use self-consistency as a measure for whether a method of determining truth is valid? Because, as human beings, we are psychologically driven toward consistency. Of course, that’s not a logical reason, but remember, the most fundamental question is not “what is true?” but “what should we do?” and our action is driven by our unconscious psychology rather than logic.

As children, we are told all kinds of claims, which we accept on radical credulity. Then, we evaluate new things by a combination of how useful they are and how well they integrate into our networks of knowledge. A mature, practiced thinker will not take any claim as foundational, but evaluate and reevaluate every part of their network by how well it connects with the rest. That is knowledge.