77 lines
5.2 KiB
Plaintext
77 lines
5.2 KiB
Plaintext
What Do You Believe That You Cannot Prove?
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<p>I wrote this for John Brockman’s 2005 Edge Question. Can’t see<br />
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any good reason not to blog it as well.</p>
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<hr />
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<p>I believe that nature is understandable, that scientific inquiry is<br />
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the sharpest tool and the noblest endeavor of the human mind, and that<br />
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any “final answers” we ever get will come from it rather than from<br />
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mysticism, religion, or any other competing account of the universe.<br />
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I believe these things without being able to prove them despite — or<br />
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perhaps because of — the fact that I am a mystic myself.</p>
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<p>Science may be the noblest endeavor of the human mind, but I believe<br />
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(though I cannot prove) that the most crippling and dangerous kind of<br />
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ignorance in the modern West is ignorance of economics, the way<br />
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markets work, and the ways non-market allocation mechanisms are doomed<br />
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to fail. Such economic ignorance is toxic, because it leads to insane<br />
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politics and the empowerment of those whose rhetoric is altruist but<br />
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whose true agenda is coercive control.</p>
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<p>I believe that the most important moment in the history of philosophy<br />
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was when Charles Sanders Peirce defined “truth” as “predictive power”<br />
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and made it possible to talk about confirmation of hypotheses in a<br />
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non-circular way.</p>
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<p>I believe the most important moment in the foreseeable future of<br />
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philosophy will come when we realize that mad old Nazi bastard<br />
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Heidegger had it right when he said that we are thrown into the world<br />
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and must cope, and that theory-building consists of rearranging our<br />
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toolkit for coping. I believe the biggest blind spot in analytical<br />
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philosophy is its refusal to grapple with Heidegger’s one big insight,<br />
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but that evolutionary biology coupled with Peirce offers us a way to<br />
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stop being blind. I beleve that when the insights of what is now<br />
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called “evolutionary psychology” are truly absorbed by philosophers,<br />
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many of the supposedly intractable problems of philosophy will vanish.</p>
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<p>I believe, but don’t know how to prove, a much stronger version of the<br />
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Sapir-Whorf hypothesis than is currently fashionable. That is, I<br />
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believe the way humans think is shaped in important ways by the<br />
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linguistic categories they have available; thinking outside those<br />
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categories is possible but more difficult, has higher friction costs.<br />
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Accordingly, I believe that some derivation of Alfred Korzybski’s<br />
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discipline of General Semantics will eventually emerge as an essential<br />
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tool of the first mature human civilizations.</p>
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<p>I believe, but don’t know how to prove, that Julian Jaynes was on to<br />
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something very important when he wrote about the origin of<br />
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consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind.</p>
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<p>I judge that that “dark matter” is no better than phlogiston as an<br />
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explanatory device, and therefore believe without being able to prove<br />
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it that there is something very deeply wrong with the standard model<br />
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of cosmology.</p>
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<p>I believe, but cannot prove, that the “knowledge interpretation” of<br />
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quantum mechanics is pernicious nonsense, and that physical theorists<br />
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will essentially develop some testable form of nonlocal realism.</p>
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<p>I believe, but cannot prove, that global “AIDS” is a whole cluster of<br />
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unrelated diseases all of which have been swept under a single rug for<br />
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essentially political reasons, and that the identification of HIV as<br />
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the sole pathogen is likely to go down as one of the most colossal<br />
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blunders in the history of medicine.</p>
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<p>Much of the West’s intelligentsia is persistently in love with<br />
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anything anti-Western (and especially anti-American), an infatuation<br />
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that has given a great deal of aid and comfort to tyrants and terrorists<br />
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in the post-9/11 world. Besides these obvious political consequences,<br />
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the phenomenon Julian Benda famously called <em>le trahison des<br />
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clercs</em> has laid waste to large swathes of the soft sciences<br />
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through ideologies like deconstructionism, cultural relativism, and<br />
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postmodernism.</p>
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<p>I believe, but cannot prove, that <em>le trahison des clercs</em> is<br />
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not a natural development of Western thought but a creation of<br />
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deliberate propaganda, directly traceable to the successes of Nazi and<br />
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Stalinist attempts to manipulate the climate of opinion in the early<br />
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and mid-20th century. Consequently I believe that one of the most<br />
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difficult and necessary tasks before us in the next half century will<br />
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be to banish the influence of totalitarian nihilism from science in<br />
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particular and our culture in general.</p>
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<p>I know how to prove, or at least convincingly demonstrate, that<br />
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open-source software development produces better results than<br />
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secrecy and proprietary control. I believe that the same advantage<br />
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applies to any other form of engineering or applied science in which<br />
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the limiting factor of production is skilled human attention, but I<br />
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don’t know how to prove that general principle.</p>
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