Rational Philosophy

Just because we’re superstitious doesn’t make it rational, or does it?

It’s been a wet week here in New York. On days when it might rain, I like to take along an umbrella to reduce, I hope, the chance that it will rain on me. This week I took an umbrella and still it rained. It hasn’t shaken my faith in my superstition.

John Tierney’s “Why Superstition Is Logical” makes a muddled and perhaps incomplete attempt at explaining the rationality of superstition. He begins with the example of a rational person irrationally resisting the temptation to set her watch to the correct time zone until the plane lands. He then discusses some circumstances in which superstition induces a positive psychological boost to “do the right thing.” To wit:

1. Students think that not doing their reading makes them more likely to be called on in class… so they do the reading.

2. People think that trading away a lottery ticket makes that ticket more likely to win… so they hold onto the ticket… obviously with much more of an upside potential than a trade.

3. An applicant to Stanford graduate school is less likely to get in if he goes around wearing a Stanford T-shirt… he may or may not get in, but he’s less likely to look like a jerk.

I couldn’t quite figure out how not having set one’s watch before an airplane disaster fell into the same category as these examples.

Interspersing these sets of seemingly divergent examples, Tierney inserted yet another intriguing piece of data related to superstition. He mentioned that negative outcomes have a subliminal tug. We recall the day we got caught in the rain much more readily and with much more emotion than we recall the days when we didn’t get caught in the rain. This leads us to believe that getting caught in the rain is the more likely outcome.

To all of which I have a couple of thoughts to add.

Let’s say that there’s a 50/50 chance that we’ll get rained on when we think we might get rained on. And let’s say that if we’re neither overly optimistic nor pessimistic we’ll sometimes take precautions against the chance of getting rained on and sometimes not. Naturally, if it looks like rain our precautions might include avoiding going outside, or taking the car instead of walking. On the remaining days, when we stick to our plan of going out and walking not driving, we’ve therefore, without superstition, increased the likelihood that we will get caught in the rain.

Here’s how that works:

Start with ten days. Five will be rainy, five won’t. Five days we’ll be optimistic and risk the rain. Five days we’ll be pessimistic and won’t risk the rain. Of the five pessimistic days, we’ll stay in one day, drive another day, leaving three days that we’ll carry an umbrella. This means that out of ten days, we avoid the risk of rain entirely on two days, (on average one of these will be rainy). This leaves eight days, four of them rainy four of them not rainy. But we’ll have our umbrella with us on just three of those days…

Even to get to an even chance, we need a little superstition.

Now to the other thought.

We recall negative outcomes for an evolutionary reason. They are learning experiences, cautions. All animals have evolved with this feedback mechanism. Or, perhaps more precisely, those that didn’t have died.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On lying, fibbing, tricking and kidding.

My four year-old son is learning the nuances of deceit. When he’s caught claiming that he didn’t eat that piece of candy you said he couldn’t have he says he was “just joking.” His deceptions have a straightforward purpose — to get something that he wants which would otherwise be denied him, or to avoid responsibility for something that would incur his parents’ displeasure. Transparent and predictable, his lies seem to come with the territory of being human. He’s learning about the commodity of untruth, and its cost.

One would think that by the time a person has grown to adulthood he or she has learned that obvious, easily uncovered untruths have little value and come at a high cost, especially when you live in the public eye.

Hillary Clinton, one can presume, must understand, abstractly at least, the high cost of silly lies. And yet she trots them out as if she were a four year-old. (I’m not exculpating Barack Obama, but his lies at least seem to be in keeping with his general philosophy and purpose, whereas Clinton’s sometimes confound us with their preposterous posturing.) Claiming to George Stephanopolous, for instance, that her support for summer gas tax relief was something other than just political pandering insults the intelligence of those who would vote for her.

Recent research into the psychology of lying suggests that people lie to deceive others or to deceive themselves. This research also suggests that lying to deceive oneself has an aspirational quality — the student who inflates his grade point average aspires to that grade point average, and, more often than not, will get closer to it over time.

Very often politicians lie because they aspire to be right. They lie to defend a position because they believe in their ability to hold correct positions. Hillary Clinton desperately wants to believe that her aspiration to the presidency is legitimate. Beyond anything else, a victory would validate her sense of her right to be center stage — politically and personally. When someone fights so desperately to win, it gives us a window into what they feel they have to lose.

Philosophically, deceit is a simple concept — the presentation of untruth in place of truth. We can quibble about what we mean by truth, about whether anything can be completely objective, but this is hairsplitting. When a student says his grade point average is 3.7 when it is really 3.1 this is deceit.

And deceit isn’t confined to humans. The natural world abounds with deceit. Animals camouflage, impersonate, dissemble, trick… all with the aim of staying alive or furthering their genes.

Early philosophers such as Socrates and Plato focused a great deal of attention on the mechanics of deception and the antidote of reason. They did this because they felt that too often people were deceived by illogic. Clear, unfettered truth was the primary battleground of their philosophy.

Amazingly, many hundreds of years later, despite great advances in so many fields, we still don’t teach our children the fundamentals of logic and reason as a matter of course. Until today, until right now, I’ve thought that this was simply an oversight. But I wonder now whether the battle that Socrates started isn’t still underway. Perhaps it’s a battle of humanity for humanity.

Here we have highly educated people fibbing like four year-olds. In Socrates’ day, the sophists were aware of their deceptions, and they succeeded because people wanted to believe them. Just so today, the Clintons of the world know that they’re dissembling, but people want to believe them. We like rhetoric. We like to think that the world might be something other than what it is. Reality is hard. The truth is unsavory. Let’s go for a drive…

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

How do imagination and logical thinking interelate, and what purpose does thinking serve?

Michio Kaku has spent some time thinking about which inventions of the imagination may be plausible in the forseeable future. He’s written a book on it called “The Physics of The Impossible.” But Kaku’s descriptions of the possible scientific implementations of invisibility mechanisms, force fields and lightsabers seem far less functional and intuitive than their fictional counterparts. This got me thinking about the power of the imagination. Which got me thinking about why we think.

After two years of study the National Mathematics Advisory Panel has issued a report on what to do about the poor state of math skills in late middle school. American students stumble in 25th in math competency out of 30 developed nations. The panel recommends streamlining math education, relying more on specialist math teachers rather than generalists, and ensuring that children memorize core math facts, a tactic that “frees up working memory for more complex aspects of problem solving.” After working with my daughter on her middle school math for the past few years, I’d agree with the panel on these points. There’s a lot to learn in middle school math, and math as a discipline relies a great deal on adding and combining concepts.

As I consider the power of the imagination alongside the power of rational or logical processing I realize that the kind of thinking we do to survive combines these two elements. Thinking entails imagining scenarios or possibilities and calculating or predicting outcomes.

The more powerful our imagination, the more options we will have. The more adept of processing of facts and likelihoods the more likely we will be to make good choices.

This brings us closer to answering the question of why we think. Working backwards, since thinking gives us the power to manufacture and select options, thinking evolved as a good way of gaining advantage through anticipation.

All of which seems rather obvious now that I’ve set it out. But I don’t think I’d ever before considered that imagination had such a powerful and important role in rational thinking.

In an individual, a healthy dose of both capabilities seems advantageous. But if we think about society as a whole, we can all benefit from the imagination of others, as well as from the logical processing power of others. In society we have a collection of minds, some more disposed to imagination, some more disposed to logical processing. If we respect the value of both, society as a whole will benefit.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On sexism, racism and any other ism: Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, Gloria Steinem; the importance of drawing distinctions, and the unfortunate side-effect of bigotry.

Gloria Steinem’s Op-Ed yesterday — “Women Are Never Front-Runners” — shows that even a fervent anti-ismist can get tangled up in her own knitting. Ms. Steinem laments that Hillary Clinton faces an uphill struggle convincing voters that she’s a viable leader just because she’s a woman. Steinem contrasts Clinton’s task with Obama’s, arguing that Clinton has it harder. Although Steinem presents no evidence, I wouldn’t try to argue that she’s wrong. Unfortunately though, her thesis swells with the rhetoric of bias, ending with what’s supposed to be a rallying cry against isms ‘We have to be able to say: “I’m supporting her because she’ll be a great president and because she’s a woman.”’ And this would demonstrate lack of bias how?

Human beings have developed an extraordinary ability to draw distinctions and categorize the world around them. Consciousness requires that we do so. The first glimmer of consciousness rests on the awareness that there is a self and a non-self. From this primary and fundamental distinction we begin to separate the world into up and down, in and out, hot and cold, blue and pink, soft and hard… This ability has been honed to a fine point because it has provided an evolutionary benefit. The better able we were to draw distinctions, the more skilled we became at identifying safe foods to eat, suitable materials for clothes and tools and shelter, etc.

In another story today, brewers pursuit of ever hoppier beers and consumers pursuit of ever more gratifying flavor, gives an example of just how far we’re prepared to go along the road of differentiation and distinction. The whole enterprise of humankind rests to a large degree on the striving for new distinctions.

But the faculty to draw distinctions, while it can be trained or enhanced, is fundamentally indifferent to the nature of those distinctions. In other words, although some of us can’t distingush Bach from Hayden we can all distinguish a jackhammer from a songbird, a pen from a pencil, and our own cell-phone ring tone from everyone else’s. We draw distinctions so naturally that they become easy pegs for our murkier judgments.

This is where isms come in. When we derive arbitrary judgments from a characteristic, no matter how well distinguished that characteristic may be, we fall into the trap of the ism.

By all accounts, Hillary Clinton is a woman. Identifiying her as a woman is not an ism. Saying she’ll make a better or worse leader because she’s a woman is an ism. There’s no rational basis for making such a connection. (We can easily find many examples of both men and women leaders who are wonderful and many who are awful.)

To get to an ism from a distinction we have to apply flawed logic and reasoning, or blind ourselves to logic and reason. Racism in all its forms, for example, requires the racist to suspend his or her faculty of reason. But why do we do that?

Isms are born of ignorance or fear. Either we are too ignorant to understand that our judgments are flawed, or we are afraid of some group that’s different from us, or of losing our power over them, or of being forced to recognize their equality.

The antidote to isms is reason and logic, persistenly, patiently, blindly, and tirelessly applied.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

PS. Of the IPAs I’ve tasted, my personal favorite is Smuttynose IPA. Highly recommended.

Applying logic to the tricky problems of bodega cats, cancer stem cells, and administrative evasion on torture tapes.

The NY Times reports that perhaps the most successful way for bodegas and convenience stores to keep mice and rats away is for them to keep a cat. The only problem being that city health inspectors regard the presence of any animal — cat or rat — as a violation (the same fines apply). As José Fernández, the president of the Bodega Association of the United States, so elegantly puts it: “It’s hard for bodega owners because they’re not supposed to have a cat, but they’re also not supposed to have rats.”

Another Times report — this one on the role of cancer stem cells in cancer malignancy — reveals that scientists disagree on whether research treatments targeting cancer stem cells is scientifically and financially warranted. The Times quotes Dr. Scott E. Kern, a leading pancreatic cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins University, as saying that the hypothesis that cancer stem cells play a pivotol role in malignancy is more akin to religion than to science. Ouch. If the treatment research doesn’t get done, we may never know whether targeting cancer stem cells can help patients live longer. If the research does get done, other more viable approaches may be overlooked or delayed.

And the judge who, in 2005, ordered the preservation of documents concerning the “torture, treatment and abuse” of Guantanamo Bay prisoners, has refused to order a hearing on the destruction of the now infamous CIA interrogation tapes, instead taking the matter under advisement. According to the Times, government lawyers argue, in part, that Judge Kennedy’s order may not cover the detainees in question, since the order applied only to those who were indisputably at Guantanamo Bay on June 10, and there is a question about the whereabouts of at least some of the detainees on that date… So, presumably the government knows where the detainees were, but won’t reveal that information, and therefore this casts doubt on the question which likewise casts doubt on the applicability of the order, which means that the government can avoid a hearing.

Do these problems yield to logic? Let’s see.

On cats versus rats: When I walk into a convenience store and see a cat, I know what I’m getting. I can, if I’m leaning toward the health-inspector’s way of thinking, turn around and walk out. If I don’t see a cat, I may or may not see evidence of mice and rats; but, having read the article, I’m inclined to think that I would be foolish to assume that the store is free of mice and rats. As a consumer then, I’d say that I’m logically in favor of store-owners keeping cats. As a store-owner, since my customers would favor it, I would favor it and pay the fines if they came. (I’d be foolish to go against my customers’ wishes.) This also keeps the pressure up on the city to reexamine its stance on cats in corner stores. Are they really as potentially harmful to the public health as rats and mice?

On researching cancer stem cell treatments: This one seems very simple. There are two logical possibilities. Treatments that target cancer stem cells may benefit patients… or they may not. Pursuing such treatments is logical so long as this doesn’t jeopardize or seriously inhibit more promising treatments. Bypassing such research is illogical unless it can be shown that the research is to all intents and purposes unproductive. Showing that something related to cancer research is unproductive strikes me as a difficult and wasteful exercise. The logical answer seems to be to perform the research but do so prudently.

On ordering a hearing on the destruction of the CIA tapes: First order a hearing on the whereabouts of the detainees on June 10, 2005. This will answer the question of whether the order applies to any of the detainees. Then, if the detainees were at Guantanamo, order a hearing on the destruction of the tapes. Or, if the detainees were not at Guantanamo, order a hearing on the removal of the detainees from Guantanamo. Repeat ad infinitum.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

What is reason?

I’ve probably written about fifty posts already on this blog, but it occurred to me just yesterday that I have yet to write about “reason.” Since the name of the blog is rationalphilosophy.net and since it’s my stated goal to analyze subjects of interest from a rational perspective, I think I should correct the omission.

We can encapsulate the realm of reason as follows: Reason involves the logical manipulation of abstract concepts.

To unpack this: “Reason” itself is an abstract concept that describes a mental process. This mental process is what happens when we use logic to explore and analyze other abstract concepts. “Logic” is the consistent application of definitive rules (it’s also an abstract concept).

So, when we take any set of defined rules and apply them consistently to analyze ideas, we are using reason.

Notice, we’ve said nothing about whether the rules reflect reality. Neither have we said anything about whether the ideas being analyzed reflect reality. Reason doesn’t require real objects. But as we evolved the rational faculty we first apprehended reason through our interaction with the real world, because that’s our primary and immediate point of reference. The real world also provides us with myriad situations that can be abstracted and anaylzed through reason. Reason is what we do to some extent and with varying degress of success day in day out just to stay alive.

When I was a boy I used to enjoy logic puzzles. Many of them conjured up odd worlds populated by fanciful tribes (one springs to mind about three different groups that sometimes, always or never told the truth). After setting out the rules of the imaginary world and posing a problem, the puzzles left the puzzler to figure out a rational solution. The unspoken dictat being that if the puzzler applied logic, he would find a definite solution.

In real life, we often find ourselves presented with problems or challenges for which no definite solution exists. Either the set of concepts is incomplete or the rule set to be applied isn’t definitive.

Here are some examples from current news stories:

Credit available to US business apparently shrank by an unprecedented 9% since August, perhaps pressaging a recession. The story and the information set reveal that it is impossible to deduce rationally whether the credit shrink indicates that a recession is nigh. The history that connects previous credit shrinks to recessions hasn’t established a definitive causal link, the circumstances surrounding the current credit shrink are unique, and the actions that people and institutions will take in response to the credit shrink are undetermined. But rationally we can say that we have cause to be concerned about a recession given the news about a credit shrink.

After the latest round of middle-east peace talks ended with a commitment from both sides to work toward peace in ‘08 and a two state status quo, Ehud Olmert is quoted as saying: “If the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then the State of Israel is finished.” Olmert asserts this as rational fact, but he is inferring a future event by comparison to a similar set of circumstances. He is probably correct to draw the comparison, and he may be making a reasonable guess about the outcome, but the categorical tenor of his statement leans on emotion rather than logic.

Bill Clinton this week said that he opposed the Iraq war from the start. Records of his statements at the time indicate that he spoke in favor of completing WMD inspections rather than rushing to war. Clinton recalls that he didn’t speak out more plainly because it would have been inappropriate for a former president to question the military decisions of an acting president. Clinton could be recalling correctly and his statement may be true. Or he may be deliberately mistating his former position on the war in which case his statement would be false. But he may also be mistaken in his recollection, in which case his statement would be false in fact, but true in its own internal logic (derived from his faulty recollection). We cannot know which is the case unless Clinton kept some kind of definitive record of his true position on the war at the time.

The elusiveness of definitive information and fully understood conditions means that when it comes to real life we’re often working with approximations and likelihoods. We don’t know that something will happen (like a recession) but we try to deduce the likelihood and weigh the risks or benefits of certain actions in the face of this likelihood. This, I believe, leads to a very common mistake. When we’re faced with incomplete information, we often replace questions of “what is likely” with “what is possible.”

A striking example of this is religious belief. Religious belief is a matter of faith. We don’t have enough information to draw a rational conclusion about whether a god or supreme being exists or doesn’t exist. When many people argue about religion, they invert this logic to say that we don’t have enough information to draw the rational conclusion that a god or supreme being doesn’t exist. That’s true, but just because the two statements are true doesn’t mean that they infer the same likelihood of god’s existence.

Let’s put it this way: If I claim that a large frog lives on the far side of the moon, you cannot prove that I am wrong, but you can demonstrate with a very high degree of likelihood that I am wrong. I can also say that can’t prove that the frog doesn’t exist, and while this is true, I can’t demonstrate it with the same high degree of likelihood.

After a simple review of the world’s greatest conflicts we quickly determine that they are not caused by insolubly complex problems but by the refusal of people to engage in thoughtful, rational debate and problem-solving.

There is no certainty. Or, everything is certain.

Descartes compressed these two ideas into one when he declared “I think, therefore I am” (cognito, ergo sum). Our certainty is our awareness of our existence, and yet this certainty is based on something as elusive as our awareness.

This concept plays on my mind this evening. We live with uncertainty every day. We are frustrated by our lack of certainty, by the elusiveness of certainty. My wife and I are looking at purchasing a house. We place a bid. We want the house. We can even imagine ourselves living there. But we have no certainty that we will. This dream of living there is no more real than a dream I had two nights ago in which my unmarried friend told me that his wife was pregnant. The same friend who told me in an e-mail today, with a semblance of certainty “this will happen more and more.”

The philosophy of certainty is also elusive. Descartes with masterful ingenuity and perceptiveness, turned the target sideways on, and placed the emphasis of certainty on the perceiving “I,” rather than the perceived “it.”

Nothing other than the impression of perception is certain. And the impression of perception in a dream is no more real than the impression of perception in waking life…

But is this so? Can’t we distinguish a dream from waking life? Some have quibbled that we can’t be certain of the difference between the two. Some have been lured into the definitiveness of this perspective.

However, if we instead think about certainty as a spectrum, we can approach it differently. I expect that certain impressions will follow other impressions. The degree of predictability of these impressions can be estimated and compared to the actual progression. When I estimate a high degree of likelihood, I become more certain of the outcome.

For instance, I connect the impression of my hand upon the cold stone countertop with the impression of “coolness” against my hand. (I’m skipping the interim impressions of my hand.) It is possible that this connection, the next time I place my hand on the counter, won’t exist. However, I estimate that it will exist with a high degree of certainty, because it correlates so well to the way I’ve perceived that impressions follow other impressions.

If we follow this approach, we find that the world is not completely in focus, but neither is it completely a-jumble. We can use our perceptions and impressions to predict other impressions and predictions. On this rests the foundation for reason and logic.