Judging from the questions people ask scientists who are also Christians, I take it that popular opinion holds that modern science and belief in miracles are fundamentally incompatible. I don't know why this is exactly, but I'm sure it's all David Hume's fault.
The argument seems to go something like this. Science is based on the understanding that all of nature exhibits certain regularities, called laws, and that by examining its parts through repeatable experiments, we can learn more about it. If miracles exist, then this regularity doesn't hold. Yet we know that science keeps telling us more and more about the way the universe really is. So miracles don't exist.
But that doesn't follow. If science is based on studying things which are repeatable, then science will tell you about those aspects of the universe which tend to repeat themselves. One will find it extremely difficult to prove that the whole universe follows (and always has followed) certain laws without any irregularity. If you say that we have not found any such irregularity yet, you are begging the question. First of all, a lot of people disagree with you, based on the amount of testimony that exists claiming miracles have occurred. Secondly, your sample size is vanishingly small--especially if modern science is in fact correct about the size and age of the universe. The only way you could possibly extrapolate from such a small sample size is to assume what you want to prove.
On the other hand, I confess that despite my religious affections (or perhaps because of them, as I'll explain shortly), I am attracted to the idea of a globally regular universe--that is, a universe without miracles. This would appear to put me in quite a predicament, and I'm not always sure how to overcome it.
My reason for being attracted to this idea is entirely aesthetic. The most incomprehensible thing about the universe, Einstein said, is that it is comprehensible. That is, the most incomprehensibly beautiful thing. You start with a very short list of axioms, you derive a mathematical theory, and then you watch in awe as physical objects actually seem to obey this theory, as if the Creator of the universe were some sort of divine mathematician. And you realize that whatever inherent limitations this puts on you and your life--for instance, I suppose it means death for us humans is probably inevitable--it is simply pure joy to see that at the heart of all reality is supreme rationality, such that only through the slow and painstaking efforts of the greatest minds can human beings start to glimpse the underlying principles. If we have a purpose in this world, it is to be the products of such a divinely rational order.
Aside from sheer awe, however, there is a big payoff to living in a world guided by universal, comprehensible laws. Through science, we can master the world, creating technologies which push back against death and disease, increase our comfort, and allow us to live more fulfilling lives. If this is starting to sound like some sort of modern secular religion, is that at all surprising? Haven't we, thanks to the scientific revolution, in fact stumbled onto something quite extraordinary? All religions have features both attractive and repulsive, and this new scientific religion is no different. It may not promise eternity or redemption, but it promises both awe of the transcendent and practical means by which we can live meaningful lives. That is hardly something to scoff at.
Now if miracles are real, then this glorious vision is tainted, if not shattered. Not only does it ruin the idea of perfectly uniform mathematical laws governing the universe, but it even makes us wonder why we put so much effort into understanding the universe when there is a much easier way. If God can simply cure diseases and raise the dead by the uttering a word, why doesn't he? Why do we slave away trying to understand laws which are not really laws at all, when all the while God could step in and just fix everything whenever he likes? It seems both sacrilegeous and immoral. Only a divine bully with no respect for transcendent beauty could possibly intervene at such irregular intervals, while hiding in the dark the rest of the time.
Thus the problem of miracles reduces to the problem of evil: how is God's existence compatible with the presence of suffering, death, and disasters in this world? These latter are most certainly consistent with the laws of the universe--laws cannot be broken, even if it would suit our purposes to do so. But a personal God, capable of intervening--how can he allow it?
The other side is not without objection. There is, for instance, the problem of good: how can we make the concept of goodness intelligible in a world governed entirely by impersonal, unyielding laws? We can push back against suffering and death, yes, but to what end? Short life and disease do not threaten modern people nearly as much as boredom, depression, and even suicide. Try as we might to create our own meaning, anything we invent without any reference to a transcendent source eventually appears, well, meaningless.
I am inclined to think that neither of these problems can really be "solved." So I find my reflections on this matter humbling, both as a mathematician and as a Christian. On the one hand, as much as many of us would love to claim science as the banner of objective truth, the reality is that the vision driving us is every bit as religious as Christianity or any other major world religion, with just as many weaknesses. On the other hand, as a Christian I need to consider this modern, secular religion to be a real contender for my heart and soul. When Einstein spoke of a "cosmic religious feeling," he wasn't kidding.
Whether one of these religions will ultimately succeed in shaping our civilization in the future surely depends in part on how we answer serious philosophical questions like that of miracles. But I believe the more important factor is the human heart, which, once it receives and adopts a certain of vision of the world, will follow it far and wide, for reasons far beyond the intellect's comprehension. For the Christian's heart, of course there are miracles. And for the modernist's, of course there are not. And for those of us somewhere in between, I suppose there is the hope that one day we'll know for sure.
Friday, May 8, 2015
Monday, May 4, 2015
Evolution, tradition, reason, faith
To me the Bible is the greatest book never written. Its contents were collected and edited over centuries until finally becoming the self-contained cornerstone of Judeo-Christian tradition that it is today. Like any great institution, the Bible was grown, not designed.
As a result of its history, the Bible carries around it now a sort of magical fence which, Catholic-Protestant debates notwithstanding, prevents any serious changes to be made to its contents. There is a marvelous double effect of the Bible on the community of Christian believers: on the one hand, conservative Bible believers are forced to confront a wealth of confusing, frustrating, and downright bizarre stories and passages which, by their own standard, cannot be erased; and on the other hand, liberals are forced to confront the reality that faith is not the result of pure reason, that rationalistic belief can only be something other than Christianity, and that it is in ancient tradition rather than current that the mind continues to receive its greatest stimulation and challenge.
It's a delicious irony. Conservatives, who hate evolution because they love the idea of God the designer of all things, are in reality relying on an evolved tradition, while liberals, who love evolution because they love the process of reason which discovered evolutionary theory, have in reality found the very principle which destroys their own rationalism.
If you really want to be a rationalist, the logical belief is not that the creation story was too short (thousands of years vs. billions of years) but rather too long, as Origen pointed out. Everyone knows God the great architect really created everything at once. Those seven days are all just metaphors.
Indeed, it's hard to accept that God might just like watching things grow. Evolution requires both patience and spontaneity; that is, one must go into it knowing it will take a very long time but not at all knowing the final outcome. And the really strange thing is that the conservative hates this because he is too impatient, while the liberal hates it because he isn't spontaneous--when it should really be the other way around.
As a result of its history, the Bible carries around it now a sort of magical fence which, Catholic-Protestant debates notwithstanding, prevents any serious changes to be made to its contents. There is a marvelous double effect of the Bible on the community of Christian believers: on the one hand, conservative Bible believers are forced to confront a wealth of confusing, frustrating, and downright bizarre stories and passages which, by their own standard, cannot be erased; and on the other hand, liberals are forced to confront the reality that faith is not the result of pure reason, that rationalistic belief can only be something other than Christianity, and that it is in ancient tradition rather than current that the mind continues to receive its greatest stimulation and challenge.
It's a delicious irony. Conservatives, who hate evolution because they love the idea of God the designer of all things, are in reality relying on an evolved tradition, while liberals, who love evolution because they love the process of reason which discovered evolutionary theory, have in reality found the very principle which destroys their own rationalism.
If you really want to be a rationalist, the logical belief is not that the creation story was too short (thousands of years vs. billions of years) but rather too long, as Origen pointed out. Everyone knows God the great architect really created everything at once. Those seven days are all just metaphors.
Indeed, it's hard to accept that God might just like watching things grow. Evolution requires both patience and spontaneity; that is, one must go into it knowing it will take a very long time but not at all knowing the final outcome. And the really strange thing is that the conservative hates this because he is too impatient, while the liberal hates it because he isn't spontaneous--when it should really be the other way around.
Sunday, May 3, 2015
Ellis Island
Last week I was in New York to give a mathematics presentation at NYU. On the side I did a little tourism, in particular a day at Ellis Island. These days the immigration issue, a hot button in politics, has become far more personal to me. My wife is not American, and it turns out these days you don't just show up on a boat to immigrate like you did back in the day--even if you're married to an American! But anyway, I've always been attracted by the story of America's great hey day of immigration. People left poverty and oppression seeking opportunity and freedom--there's nothing more beautiful to me than that, especially when there's a happy ending.
Ellis Island wasn't a completely open border in the sense that they let literally everyone in, but it was enough to satisfy me. About 2% of all people who showed up were eventually turned away, for health reasons or political factors (mostly unspecified by the tour). Still, that's only 2%. Today's system seems to make it the other way around--only a small fraction of people who would like to come here ever get the chance (legally). By comparison, the old way was far more welcoming.
Not that it was a picnic. You showed up on an overcrowded boat, you got in line with hundreds of other immigrants, you spent all day answering questions, getting a medical examination, and sometimes being examined further (to see whether you were insane, to see whether you were illiterate, to see whether you were a pauper...). Sometimes the immigration officers were kind, other times not so much. But again, you still had a 98% chance of making it out of that process (an 80% chance, if I understood correctly, of making it out in a single day) to live your new life in America.
And of course life was hard for new arrivals. There was a story commonly recounted by Italian immigrants that went something like this: "I came to America because I thought the streets were paved with gold. When I arrived, I learned three things: one, the streets of America were not paved with gold; two, the streets were not paved at all; and three, that I was expected to pave them." Just because there was more opportunity in America doesn't mean that wealth would be automatic.
I was highly impressed by the number of associations set up to welcome new immigrants. From the YMCA/YWCA and the Salvation Army to an array of organizations representing every ethnic and religious group you could think of. These groups took care of their own. Assimilation was not immediate; the first people you met in your new country were people who spoke your language and believed the things you believed. Yet there's no question that the immigrants loved America. How could they not, considering what they left to be here?
It was probably inevitable that Ellis Island be shut down at some point. Transportation has changed in the modern world--there's no reason to received everyone by boat on an island. Yet the real reason the center shut down when it did is that the laws become more restrictive. After World War I, America stopped welcoming newcomers. This seems to have been because of a confluence of economic protectionism together with anti-foreign bias that was aggravated by the Great War and the rise of communism in Russia. The 1920s may have been roaring, but they were not welcoming, and things only became worse shortly after. After 1924 Ellis Island went from processing new arrivals to detaining and deporting illegal immigrants. It finally closed in 1954, falling into disrepair.
I am glad to see the restorations they have done since the 1980s. It truly was a magnificent building, and, as they emphasized on the tour, this was not for kings but for the people--the rabble--who came here looking for a better life. It really makes my heart ache when I think of the difference between then and now. If I remember correctly, 40% of Americans can trace their ancestry back to someone who immigrated at Ellis Island. What would we be today if not for this amazing place? How can Americans despise their own history in accepting today's agonizingly restrictive immigration system?
I suppose history is full of such contradictions.
Ellis Island wasn't a completely open border in the sense that they let literally everyone in, but it was enough to satisfy me. About 2% of all people who showed up were eventually turned away, for health reasons or political factors (mostly unspecified by the tour). Still, that's only 2%. Today's system seems to make it the other way around--only a small fraction of people who would like to come here ever get the chance (legally). By comparison, the old way was far more welcoming.
Not that it was a picnic. You showed up on an overcrowded boat, you got in line with hundreds of other immigrants, you spent all day answering questions, getting a medical examination, and sometimes being examined further (to see whether you were insane, to see whether you were illiterate, to see whether you were a pauper...). Sometimes the immigration officers were kind, other times not so much. But again, you still had a 98% chance of making it out of that process (an 80% chance, if I understood correctly, of making it out in a single day) to live your new life in America.
And of course life was hard for new arrivals. There was a story commonly recounted by Italian immigrants that went something like this: "I came to America because I thought the streets were paved with gold. When I arrived, I learned three things: one, the streets of America were not paved with gold; two, the streets were not paved at all; and three, that I was expected to pave them." Just because there was more opportunity in America doesn't mean that wealth would be automatic.
I was highly impressed by the number of associations set up to welcome new immigrants. From the YMCA/YWCA and the Salvation Army to an array of organizations representing every ethnic and religious group you could think of. These groups took care of their own. Assimilation was not immediate; the first people you met in your new country were people who spoke your language and believed the things you believed. Yet there's no question that the immigrants loved America. How could they not, considering what they left to be here?
It was probably inevitable that Ellis Island be shut down at some point. Transportation has changed in the modern world--there's no reason to received everyone by boat on an island. Yet the real reason the center shut down when it did is that the laws become more restrictive. After World War I, America stopped welcoming newcomers. This seems to have been because of a confluence of economic protectionism together with anti-foreign bias that was aggravated by the Great War and the rise of communism in Russia. The 1920s may have been roaring, but they were not welcoming, and things only became worse shortly after. After 1924 Ellis Island went from processing new arrivals to detaining and deporting illegal immigrants. It finally closed in 1954, falling into disrepair.
I am glad to see the restorations they have done since the 1980s. It truly was a magnificent building, and, as they emphasized on the tour, this was not for kings but for the people--the rabble--who came here looking for a better life. It really makes my heart ache when I think of the difference between then and now. If I remember correctly, 40% of Americans can trace their ancestry back to someone who immigrated at Ellis Island. What would we be today if not for this amazing place? How can Americans despise their own history in accepting today's agonizingly restrictive immigration system?
I suppose history is full of such contradictions.
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Billions of years
This past week I saw a story about the recent discovery of the world's oldest tools, dating around 3.3 million years old. Which got me thinking again about the big picture of the evolution of life. How many generations of life are simply gone forever? They may have left behind hints and traces of their existence--or not. In either case, what are we to make of our relationship to them?
When people ask about God and Darwinian evolution, they are usually given one of three answers: atheism, creationism, and compatibilism. These are all characterized by being straightforward: the first picks Darwin over God, the second picks God over Darwin, and the third asks why we can't simply have both.
When people ask about God and Darwinian evolution, they are usually given one of three answers: atheism, creationism, and compatibilism. These are all characterized by being straightforward: the first picks Darwin over God, the second picks God over Darwin, and the third asks why we can't simply have both.
If the first two responses are too absolutist, the third response strikes me as far too easy. The question that concerns me most is not so much the interpretation of Scripture--which is theologically varied enough already, without having to worry about scientific questions. Rather, what bothers me is the basic existential question: did all of those humans (to say nothing of other creatures) live and die for nothing? Or if it was for something, is it something we can appreciate?
Christianity in many ways promotes a hatred of death. God is the God of the living, not the dead. Christ's resurrection is said to defeat death, and one day his followers believe they will also be free to death. It is only in the paradoxical way that Christ taught--that those who love their life will lose it, while those who hate their life for his sake will find it for eternity--that Christians can be reconciled to death. Only with the promise of emerging victorious over death do Christians face it willingly.
But doesn't this promise of victory over death come a little late in the development of human beings? And what about other creatures? Is there any promise for them?
It would be one thing if we could take the Christian story of the Fall quite literally. By that I don't mean word for word out of Genesis 2 and 3. I simply mean that, at a given time in history, the earth was really a paradise, that human beings could eat of the tree of life and not die, that everything was in harmony. Then by an act of disobedience against God we humans, God's chosen guardians of the earth, destroyed that harmony and lost our chance to live eternally. Then the story of redemption playing out through Israel and then through Jesus Christ would answer that. Even if one might raise legitimate doubts about this redemption story, it would be plausible.
Yet if there was no such paradise, and if there was no such cataclysmic moment that literally occurred in history, if death was always part of the natural cycle of life, then what? Are there are truly Christian answers that can be given?
These billions of years really do loom large over the Christian consciousness. Certainly one need not be a biblical literalist to feel the pressure.
Christianity in many ways promotes a hatred of death. God is the God of the living, not the dead. Christ's resurrection is said to defeat death, and one day his followers believe they will also be free to death. It is only in the paradoxical way that Christ taught--that those who love their life will lose it, while those who hate their life for his sake will find it for eternity--that Christians can be reconciled to death. Only with the promise of emerging victorious over death do Christians face it willingly.
But doesn't this promise of victory over death come a little late in the development of human beings? And what about other creatures? Is there any promise for them?
It would be one thing if we could take the Christian story of the Fall quite literally. By that I don't mean word for word out of Genesis 2 and 3. I simply mean that, at a given time in history, the earth was really a paradise, that human beings could eat of the tree of life and not die, that everything was in harmony. Then by an act of disobedience against God we humans, God's chosen guardians of the earth, destroyed that harmony and lost our chance to live eternally. Then the story of redemption playing out through Israel and then through Jesus Christ would answer that. Even if one might raise legitimate doubts about this redemption story, it would be plausible.
Yet if there was no such paradise, and if there was no such cataclysmic moment that literally occurred in history, if death was always part of the natural cycle of life, then what? Are there are truly Christian answers that can be given?
These billions of years really do loom large over the Christian consciousness. Certainly one need not be a biblical literalist to feel the pressure.
Monday, April 27, 2015
Edible words
And he said to me, “Son of man, feed your belly with this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it.” Then I ate it, and it was in my mouth as sweet as honey. (Ezekiel 3:3)
And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. (Deuteronomy 8:3)I have sometimes wondered whether the Bible's prohibition against idolatry was really consistent. After all, aren't words themselves symbolic windows into God's existence, a sort of image for the ears rather than the eyes? One could argue that using words to describe God's ineffable existence is just as dangerous as trying to depict it through images.
Yet recently I was once again struck by the Bible's description of words as food. Funny thing about food: whatever you eat was once a living thing, and then it died.
And isn't that exactly how words function in reality? A single word is so short-lived. It has hardly left your mouth before it is dead, yielding totally to the words or silence which come after it. Even the written word functions this way. You cannot read by staring at a single word; you must let it die, letting your eyes advance continually in order to gain the whole idea of phrases and paragraphs.
Images do just they opposite. They impose upon you. If an image is before you, even if you want, you cannot simply let it pass away. It demands that you at least allow it a place in the background of your mind. It can change your mood without you even realizing it. It insists on immovability, a sort of immortality, if you will.
But Jesus said, "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away." The most permanent fixtures in all of ordinary human experience will die, but these words--which die as soon as they are born--will live forever.
It is the great paradox of Christianity once again. "Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it." Images insist on their own immortality, but they are in fact lifeless. Words exist only to die, and thus they feed us, and so they live forever.
I don't mean this meditation to be polemical, but I will confess that it confirms my iconoclasm, which is standard for Protestants. Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox have good arguments in favor of icons. They argue that the incarnation of Jesus, the Son of God, changes and sanctifies physical reality in such a way that to prohibit icons would be to deny that incarnation. But I think these arguments nevertheless miss the most radical part of Christ's incarnation--he came to die. It is only because he died that he can feed us with himself. And let's not forget that when he rose again, he rose with a new body that was barely recognizable to his disciples. If there is an image of Christ to be used in worship, it is of course the bread and the wine; but even these are meant to be consumed.
Saturday, February 28, 2015
When our eyes fooled us
Sometimes whatever I'm thinking about at a given moment magically comes into focus in the public sphere shortly thereafter. Such is was the case yesterday when, less than two weeks after I reflected on what it means to perceive objects, social media was abuzz about a photograph of a dress which could be mysteriously interpreted in two very different color pairings. It didn't take long for the inevitable modern reaction to play out.
Let's go back to that point 2, which, as the Wired article says, is "just another Thursday" on the Internet. A common explanation for these arguments is that people just like to be quarrelsome, especially in an anonymous setting like the Internet. That is certainly a good explanation for the magnitude of these arguments, for the eruption of emotion that accompanies them. Still, why exactly do we care enough to argue in the first place?
It really wouldn't make sense for us to argue about what our senses are telling us if our senses were separate from ourselves. To get a better idea of what is going on, I think one should take a look at a few of the hilarious customer reviews which have been added to the Amazon web page of the now infamous dress, including, "This dress is a glitch in the Matrix," "Not as described -- wrong color, ate soul," and "Carves a crooked path through perceptual reality and leaves behind it a wake of confusion and existential crises." One of my friends posted on facebook that the dress taught them how easily their world could be shattered.
These comments are funny not because they are false, but because they are true. No matter how many illusions we see, no matter how aware we become that our senses can "fool" us, we still remain attached to our sensory judgments as true experiences of the world, only to find time and time again that our vision must change as we experience things in a new way. If we could be equally honest about more serious controversies, we would say the same thing (and sometimes we do).
That is because sensory experience is not a signal being sent from my eyes and my brain to me. It is, rather, an initial vision of things, that spontaneous image created by me, using the tools I have (which happen to be eyes and a brain). This is not a mere turn of phrase. The point is that my sensory organs are not flawed sources of information. Indeed, the only way I will ever learn that I was wrong to see white and gold is by again using my eyes, not by dispensing with them. The problem is not the means with which I encounter the world, but rather the level of patience I have when doing so. If I cling to my initial conception of reality, I will later face the painful process of having that conception torn to pieces.
Modern scientific rationalization of our perceptual failures is probably dualistic for this reason. We wish to distance ourselves from our mistakes. No, we didn't fail--it's our organs that failed, and we need to learn not to trust them. Applied to more important issues, such as religion and politics, we blame difference of perception on cognitive biases. If the brain is a tool, we just need to figure out why that tool doesn't always work right. Then we will all naturally agree, because we will be able to filter out all the errors.
But all controversies are really the same. We don't simply try to receive information about the world and then attempt to filter out the errors. Rather, we imagine the world in an attempt to relate to it. Being told you are wrong is always personal, even if it's over a very trivial thing. It's like being told that a person you know isn't the person you thought they were. In the less important cases, it can be disconcerting, while in very important cases it can break your heart.
Of course I believe that we should try to eliminate bias and errors from our thinking. I am simply saying that the solution is not to distance ourselves from the "instruments" that supposedly cause these errors. Our eyes are not fooling us--we are simply clinging too tightly to what we spontaneously imagine to be real. Our brains are not the product of evolution--we are the product of evolution, that is, of history, both our own and that which has come before us. The way to correct ourselves is through humility, realizing that things are not always as we imagine them, but that there is endless joy in trying to reimagine as we experience more.
- The image went viral, and everyone immediately formed an opinion about it.
- Vicious arguments ensued.
- An investigation into the origins of the image proved conclusively what color the dress actually was.
- A scientific explanation rationalized our disagreement, supposedly revealing something about ourselves, at least to those of us enlightened enough to listen.
- The image has instantly become a cultural artifact of our time, and will be the source of thousands of sarcastic comments to come.
It's that fourth point that hit closest to home. I'm part of that large demographic that eats this stuff up:
Light enters the eye through the lens—different wavelengths corresponding to different colors. The light hits the retina in the back of the eye where pigments fire up neural connections to the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes those signals into an image. Critically, though, that first burst of light is made of whatever wavelengths are illuminating the world, reflecting off whatever you’re looking at. Without you having to worry about it, your brain figures out what color light is bouncing off the thing your eyes are looking at, and essentially subtracts that color from the “real” color of the object. “Our visual system is supposed to throw away information about the illuminant and extract information about the actual reflectance,” says Jay Neitz, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington. “But I’ve studied individual differences in color vision for 30 years, and this is one of the biggest individual differences I’ve ever seen.”Notice the language used here. Let me isolate one of those sentences with emphasis added:
Without you having to worry about it, your brain figures out what color light is bouncing off the thing your eyes are looking at, and essentially subtracts that color from the “real” color of the object.For all of the scientific materialism that permeates this kind of explanation, it remains stubbornly dualistic. There's you, and then there's your brain, and also your eyes. You, in this model, don't have access to what's "real" (in quotation marks, because how can we be sure there is such a thing?) because it's all mediated to you by something in between, namely your eyes. This is a consistent theme in modern scientific explanations of ourselves--as much as we would like to explain everything mechanistically, we can't seem to include ourselves in the explanation, even though we are clearly part of "everything".
Let's go back to that point 2, which, as the Wired article says, is "just another Thursday" on the Internet. A common explanation for these arguments is that people just like to be quarrelsome, especially in an anonymous setting like the Internet. That is certainly a good explanation for the magnitude of these arguments, for the eruption of emotion that accompanies them. Still, why exactly do we care enough to argue in the first place?
It really wouldn't make sense for us to argue about what our senses are telling us if our senses were separate from ourselves. To get a better idea of what is going on, I think one should take a look at a few of the hilarious customer reviews which have been added to the Amazon web page of the now infamous dress, including, "This dress is a glitch in the Matrix," "Not as described -- wrong color, ate soul," and "Carves a crooked path through perceptual reality and leaves behind it a wake of confusion and existential crises." One of my friends posted on facebook that the dress taught them how easily their world could be shattered.
These comments are funny not because they are false, but because they are true. No matter how many illusions we see, no matter how aware we become that our senses can "fool" us, we still remain attached to our sensory judgments as true experiences of the world, only to find time and time again that our vision must change as we experience things in a new way. If we could be equally honest about more serious controversies, we would say the same thing (and sometimes we do).
That is because sensory experience is not a signal being sent from my eyes and my brain to me. It is, rather, an initial vision of things, that spontaneous image created by me, using the tools I have (which happen to be eyes and a brain). This is not a mere turn of phrase. The point is that my sensory organs are not flawed sources of information. Indeed, the only way I will ever learn that I was wrong to see white and gold is by again using my eyes, not by dispensing with them. The problem is not the means with which I encounter the world, but rather the level of patience I have when doing so. If I cling to my initial conception of reality, I will later face the painful process of having that conception torn to pieces.
Modern scientific rationalization of our perceptual failures is probably dualistic for this reason. We wish to distance ourselves from our mistakes. No, we didn't fail--it's our organs that failed, and we need to learn not to trust them. Applied to more important issues, such as religion and politics, we blame difference of perception on cognitive biases. If the brain is a tool, we just need to figure out why that tool doesn't always work right. Then we will all naturally agree, because we will be able to filter out all the errors.
But all controversies are really the same. We don't simply try to receive information about the world and then attempt to filter out the errors. Rather, we imagine the world in an attempt to relate to it. Being told you are wrong is always personal, even if it's over a very trivial thing. It's like being told that a person you know isn't the person you thought they were. In the less important cases, it can be disconcerting, while in very important cases it can break your heart.
Of course I believe that we should try to eliminate bias and errors from our thinking. I am simply saying that the solution is not to distance ourselves from the "instruments" that supposedly cause these errors. Our eyes are not fooling us--we are simply clinging too tightly to what we spontaneously imagine to be real. Our brains are not the product of evolution--we are the product of evolution, that is, of history, both our own and that which has come before us. The way to correct ourselves is through humility, realizing that things are not always as we imagine them, but that there is endless joy in trying to reimagine as we experience more.
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Are my eyes fooling me?
It's question natural enough that it has been asked by many a philosopher. Descartes always seems to be the first who comes to mind, since his whole method was based on doubting everything until he could determine which things were most certain.
In the modern world, you don't have to be in a Cartesian state of doubt to wonder. The standard example is that when you look around, you see many solid objects, but in fact physics tells us that this is mostly empty space. Or if that is too abstract, there are plenty of common illusions of a more mundane sort. Are my eyes telling me lies? It's worth probing the question a bit.
The only illusion, in fact, is the idea that there are direct experiences of things, as opposed to interpretations of them. This illusion is caused by the fact that most of our interpretations of the objects around us are spontaneous. I do not consciously invent the shape and color of the computer screen in front of me, it just happens. To imagine my computer as really a collection of atoms and empty space, or even to imagine it in terms of its constituent electronic parts, requires conscious effort based on training and contemplation.
Yet the difference is in degree, not kind. Whether I am casually observing something or rigorously studying it, my only access to a thing is to imagine it. Indeed, this applies to all of external reality, to such an extent that it is possible to understand the world as not being composed of "things" at all. There are some religions and philosophies which posit a universe which is really all one, and the separateness of the things around us is just an illusion--it is all really one thing.
Imagination is perhaps most naturally associated with fiction, but even in everyday language, we use it more generally, as when someone might say, "I imagine it is difficult to move to a new a country," when that person has never done so. That person means to state a belief, not to invent a world. So it is with all of our beliefs: they are expressions of how we imagine the world.
To clarify, the difference between imagination and merely pretending is that in the latter case we make no attempt to test or change what it is we imagine, but we leave it entirely up to our choice. The kind of imagination which leads to a greater understanding of the world might be called "theorizing" or "hypothesizing." There is a kind of naïve view of the sciences which imagines (indeed!) that a theory is basically reducible to a sentence with causal structure, as in, "If X, then Y." But most scientific theories are really based on what one might call "models," and these are really ways of imagining the world that one can test. For instance, Newton's laws of motion are far from being mere causal statements. They can be best expressed by imagining the world as a three-dimensional Euclidean space measured by spatial coordinates, and objects as points in that space whose coordinates change in time and are governed by differential equations. If you want to know what really makes Einsteinian relativity different from Newtonian mechanics, you need to start by imagining the universe in four dimensions rather than three and go from there. Certainly, what proves that Einstein was more correct than Newton is that certain testable predictions are made, and Newton is shown to be lacking where Einstein is not. But you will not truly have a theory if all you have is a set of prediction statements.
So even our most sophisticated theories about the universe are no different in kind, but only in degree, from the spontaneous images our minds produce when casually observing it. I look at the coffee mug on the table in front of me, and I spontaneously see its colors, a cylindrical shape and a little handle protruding from it. With a little more conscious imagination, I might imagine Cartesian coordinates enveloping it, so that I can more precisely analyze its geometric relation to other objects on the table. Or with a little more imagination, I imagine it as little atoms quickly vibrating against one another, and then even the air around it as atoms moving much more freely. Everything seems to change as I move from one mode to another, yet it is the same reality. There is no reason to say that, after this mental exercise, I have understand my coffee mug "better" than before. And that is because the purpose of my coffee mug is to hold my coffee, which anyone is perfectly capable of seeing even with only a limited scientific imagination, or none at all.
Why, then, should I want to imagine things in different ways? That is a good question, and I don't think there is one single response that applies to all cases. It depends on our intentions, our desires, on our relationship with the world around us. If there were never anything puzzling or difficult or otherwise problematic about the world, I imagine we would be perfectly content with the way we spontaneously envision it--a coffee mug would be a coffee mug, and that's that. And yet there wouldn't even exist such things as coffee mugs, because such an invention comes only in the face of solving a problem--namely that coffee is a hot liquid which I want to drink! Even if something had the size and shape of one, we would not call it a coffee mug nor even have any other sort of name for it were it not for our intention to drink coffee.
An illusion, then, is a way of imagining the world which damages, rather than helps, our relationship to it. This is in relation to a certain context. For instance, if you look at the Müller-Lyer illusion, you will see two lines which appear to have different length, even though in fact they have the same. The reason you are fooled is that your visual senses are calibrated to see such things in a three-dimensional world, and transported into a two-dimensional context you are fooled. I should think you would be rather thankful that your brain is incapable of "unseeing" this illusion, because your ability to navigate the three-dimensional world may very well depend on it!
So the pursuit of truth and the rejection of illusion cannot be devoid of value judgments. How you imagine the world depends greatly on how you desire to live in it. If you seek to master it and control it, you will continually be testing your theories to try to reimagine the world more accurately. If you seek to understand reality as a whole, you will be continually inventing or perfecting robust abstract concepts which capture the essence of everything.
If you seek to appreciate and enjoy the world, perhaps you will not be concerned with theories, but you certainly will be engaged in imagination. You will seek to refine your ability to notice colors, smells, tastes, sounds, and their relationship to one another. This is yet another way of imagining the world, one which often takes the form not only of observation but response, in the form of literature, art, music, and other sorts of performance. All of these are forms of knowledge, as sure as any science. All knowledge is simply a refinement of imagination.
Whether or not I can trust my senses or other faculties is ultimately the same question as whether or not I can live well in this world. Is the world sufficiently inviting to my presence that my attempts to understand it will be fruitful? It is not a question that can be answered a priori; it must be explored as with any other relationship, though this relationship might be decidedly one way. I don't want to go further down this trail of thought, but I mention it only to raise an objection to the notion, common today, that questions of truth are unrelated to questions of goodness.
Now, it seems to me, one thing you can never fully understand is your own mind. Why? Because it is precisely that mind which is doing the imagining, and to imagine itself is a hopelessly recursive task. Take an analogy to some physical object. When you try to understand physical things, you imagine them not only as they are but as they would be in hypothetical situations. So you imagine not only the baseball as a round object in space but also as something being hit by a baseball bat, and you visualize its reaction. You can even quantify such reactions with physical laws (differential equations). Now suppose you try to do the same thing with your own mind. You try to imagine it in such a way that you will be able to predict its behavior. How will you test this, when it is in fact that very mind which decides how to act? Could I have predicted that my mind would formulate this question, and then would seek to respond to it? Can I predict what its response will be? It is like a dog chasing its own tail--the effect is dizzying.
There are, of course, scientific theories of the brain which are rapidly developing. But I do not think any of these can constitute a complete theory of mind, and indeed I do not think there can be any sort of complete theory of mind whatsoever. It is the mind that has theories, the mind that imagines, and the mind that tests itself against the world. The mind cannot test itself against itself.
There is nothing tragic in this. When I read the state of modern day philosophy of mind, I sense an air of sadness that there might be one thing in this universe which we can never understand. Yet this notion is based on the strange separation of our minds from ourselves. To fully understand the mind is futile, because the mind is not in fact external to itself.
Instead of lamenting this futility, perhaps we need to remind ourselves about the point of trying to understand anything at all. Things are not simply there to be understood, but to be lived with. The goal is to increasingly perfect the relationship between our minds--or rather our whole selves--and the world we live in. We cannot step outside the world to understand it is a whole, and why would we want to? If we were removed from this world, there would be no point in understanding it.
It could be objected that there would be great value in understanding another mind, which is not my own, on the assumption that my own mind is much like that other mind. There is a point to this--it is a principle which bears much fruit in fields of study like psychology. But there is still an insurmountable problem, which is that I cannot trascend my own freedom. There can never be a complete theory of my own mind which gives me the ability to predict my mind's own actions, because in fact those actions are choices--my choices. To make this clearer, perhaps one should go read about Newcomb's paradox and then ask, "Am I a one-boxer or a two-boxer?" The problem is that your answer will not simply be a prediction, but rather a conclusion of your own thoughts--a choice.
So I think I have finally articulated an explanation, however faulty or incomplete, of why I think the whole project of comprehensively explaining the mind is flawed to begin with. Of course, words like "choice" and "imagination" are sure to raise controversy, but for now I simply have no other way to see the problem.
In the modern world, you don't have to be in a Cartesian state of doubt to wonder. The standard example is that when you look around, you see many solid objects, but in fact physics tells us that this is mostly empty space. Or if that is too abstract, there are plenty of common illusions of a more mundane sort. Are my eyes telling me lies? It's worth probing the question a bit.
The only illusion, in fact, is the idea that there are direct experiences of things, as opposed to interpretations of them. This illusion is caused by the fact that most of our interpretations of the objects around us are spontaneous. I do not consciously invent the shape and color of the computer screen in front of me, it just happens. To imagine my computer as really a collection of atoms and empty space, or even to imagine it in terms of its constituent electronic parts, requires conscious effort based on training and contemplation.
Yet the difference is in degree, not kind. Whether I am casually observing something or rigorously studying it, my only access to a thing is to imagine it. Indeed, this applies to all of external reality, to such an extent that it is possible to understand the world as not being composed of "things" at all. There are some religions and philosophies which posit a universe which is really all one, and the separateness of the things around us is just an illusion--it is all really one thing.
Imagination is perhaps most naturally associated with fiction, but even in everyday language, we use it more generally, as when someone might say, "I imagine it is difficult to move to a new a country," when that person has never done so. That person means to state a belief, not to invent a world. So it is with all of our beliefs: they are expressions of how we imagine the world.
To clarify, the difference between imagination and merely pretending is that in the latter case we make no attempt to test or change what it is we imagine, but we leave it entirely up to our choice. The kind of imagination which leads to a greater understanding of the world might be called "theorizing" or "hypothesizing." There is a kind of naïve view of the sciences which imagines (indeed!) that a theory is basically reducible to a sentence with causal structure, as in, "If X, then Y." But most scientific theories are really based on what one might call "models," and these are really ways of imagining the world that one can test. For instance, Newton's laws of motion are far from being mere causal statements. They can be best expressed by imagining the world as a three-dimensional Euclidean space measured by spatial coordinates, and objects as points in that space whose coordinates change in time and are governed by differential equations. If you want to know what really makes Einsteinian relativity different from Newtonian mechanics, you need to start by imagining the universe in four dimensions rather than three and go from there. Certainly, what proves that Einstein was more correct than Newton is that certain testable predictions are made, and Newton is shown to be lacking where Einstein is not. But you will not truly have a theory if all you have is a set of prediction statements.
So even our most sophisticated theories about the universe are no different in kind, but only in degree, from the spontaneous images our minds produce when casually observing it. I look at the coffee mug on the table in front of me, and I spontaneously see its colors, a cylindrical shape and a little handle protruding from it. With a little more conscious imagination, I might imagine Cartesian coordinates enveloping it, so that I can more precisely analyze its geometric relation to other objects on the table. Or with a little more imagination, I imagine it as little atoms quickly vibrating against one another, and then even the air around it as atoms moving much more freely. Everything seems to change as I move from one mode to another, yet it is the same reality. There is no reason to say that, after this mental exercise, I have understand my coffee mug "better" than before. And that is because the purpose of my coffee mug is to hold my coffee, which anyone is perfectly capable of seeing even with only a limited scientific imagination, or none at all.
Why, then, should I want to imagine things in different ways? That is a good question, and I don't think there is one single response that applies to all cases. It depends on our intentions, our desires, on our relationship with the world around us. If there were never anything puzzling or difficult or otherwise problematic about the world, I imagine we would be perfectly content with the way we spontaneously envision it--a coffee mug would be a coffee mug, and that's that. And yet there wouldn't even exist such things as coffee mugs, because such an invention comes only in the face of solving a problem--namely that coffee is a hot liquid which I want to drink! Even if something had the size and shape of one, we would not call it a coffee mug nor even have any other sort of name for it were it not for our intention to drink coffee.
An illusion, then, is a way of imagining the world which damages, rather than helps, our relationship to it. This is in relation to a certain context. For instance, if you look at the Müller-Lyer illusion, you will see two lines which appear to have different length, even though in fact they have the same. The reason you are fooled is that your visual senses are calibrated to see such things in a three-dimensional world, and transported into a two-dimensional context you are fooled. I should think you would be rather thankful that your brain is incapable of "unseeing" this illusion, because your ability to navigate the three-dimensional world may very well depend on it!
So the pursuit of truth and the rejection of illusion cannot be devoid of value judgments. How you imagine the world depends greatly on how you desire to live in it. If you seek to master it and control it, you will continually be testing your theories to try to reimagine the world more accurately. If you seek to understand reality as a whole, you will be continually inventing or perfecting robust abstract concepts which capture the essence of everything.
If you seek to appreciate and enjoy the world, perhaps you will not be concerned with theories, but you certainly will be engaged in imagination. You will seek to refine your ability to notice colors, smells, tastes, sounds, and their relationship to one another. This is yet another way of imagining the world, one which often takes the form not only of observation but response, in the form of literature, art, music, and other sorts of performance. All of these are forms of knowledge, as sure as any science. All knowledge is simply a refinement of imagination.
Whether or not I can trust my senses or other faculties is ultimately the same question as whether or not I can live well in this world. Is the world sufficiently inviting to my presence that my attempts to understand it will be fruitful? It is not a question that can be answered a priori; it must be explored as with any other relationship, though this relationship might be decidedly one way. I don't want to go further down this trail of thought, but I mention it only to raise an objection to the notion, common today, that questions of truth are unrelated to questions of goodness.
Now, it seems to me, one thing you can never fully understand is your own mind. Why? Because it is precisely that mind which is doing the imagining, and to imagine itself is a hopelessly recursive task. Take an analogy to some physical object. When you try to understand physical things, you imagine them not only as they are but as they would be in hypothetical situations. So you imagine not only the baseball as a round object in space but also as something being hit by a baseball bat, and you visualize its reaction. You can even quantify such reactions with physical laws (differential equations). Now suppose you try to do the same thing with your own mind. You try to imagine it in such a way that you will be able to predict its behavior. How will you test this, when it is in fact that very mind which decides how to act? Could I have predicted that my mind would formulate this question, and then would seek to respond to it? Can I predict what its response will be? It is like a dog chasing its own tail--the effect is dizzying.
There are, of course, scientific theories of the brain which are rapidly developing. But I do not think any of these can constitute a complete theory of mind, and indeed I do not think there can be any sort of complete theory of mind whatsoever. It is the mind that has theories, the mind that imagines, and the mind that tests itself against the world. The mind cannot test itself against itself.
There is nothing tragic in this. When I read the state of modern day philosophy of mind, I sense an air of sadness that there might be one thing in this universe which we can never understand. Yet this notion is based on the strange separation of our minds from ourselves. To fully understand the mind is futile, because the mind is not in fact external to itself.
Instead of lamenting this futility, perhaps we need to remind ourselves about the point of trying to understand anything at all. Things are not simply there to be understood, but to be lived with. The goal is to increasingly perfect the relationship between our minds--or rather our whole selves--and the world we live in. We cannot step outside the world to understand it is a whole, and why would we want to? If we were removed from this world, there would be no point in understanding it.
It could be objected that there would be great value in understanding another mind, which is not my own, on the assumption that my own mind is much like that other mind. There is a point to this--it is a principle which bears much fruit in fields of study like psychology. But there is still an insurmountable problem, which is that I cannot trascend my own freedom. There can never be a complete theory of my own mind which gives me the ability to predict my mind's own actions, because in fact those actions are choices--my choices. To make this clearer, perhaps one should go read about Newcomb's paradox and then ask, "Am I a one-boxer or a two-boxer?" The problem is that your answer will not simply be a prediction, but rather a conclusion of your own thoughts--a choice.
So I think I have finally articulated an explanation, however faulty or incomplete, of why I think the whole project of comprehensively explaining the mind is flawed to begin with. Of course, words like "choice" and "imagination" are sure to raise controversy, but for now I simply have no other way to see the problem.
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