Pragmatic Provisional Perspectivism

 

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A person's sense of reality is established by their upbringing, their education, their experiences, their culture, society and community, their friends and family, their idols and enemies, their values, beliefs, politics and religion, the books they read, the programs they watch, the people they listen to, the knowledge they have accumulated and the questions they ask, their fears and joys, their feelings, intuitions, hunches and reactions, the wisdom of their soul, intelligence of their mind, and awareness of their body through touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing and all the other senses, by their health, their habits, their diet, their dreams, by what must be said and what goes without saying, by those things not mentioned, and to some extent, by reality itself.

The fuddy-duddy fundamentalists are no fun.  A youth still discovering their world may do well to push against the edges, to think new thoughts and create new conceptions.  That's where great art and ideas are born.  The old ideas can be too constrictive and conservative for an optimistic young person without the information or experience to place them in context.  Why can't we have candy for dinner?  It's because the grown-ups are mean, they hate you, and they lack the imagination to conceive how great a plate full of candy would be. 

What happens when the objective pretentions of a society come to answer to the whims of the uninformed and unreflective?  What happens when our collective efforts to dwell in the same reality are stymied by conflicting experiences, definitions, protocols and ideals?  The danger is an appeal to subjectivity, a defeatist surrender to incommensurable contradictions that borders on solipsism.  We see things differently, therefore we cannot know the truth.  I can't see your point of view, therefore I can't see you.  You're so wrong as to be effectively unreal, and I'm under no obligation to grapple with phantoms.

It would have been relatively easy when things were boring.  When everyone had the same information, the same experience, and the same faulty reasoning, everyone was wrong together, and there was no trouble.  Divisions of caste and class were stifling to the odd outlier, but they ensured that no one pretended to know everything.  As long as the priest was mumbling in a dead tongue, it was much harder to dispute his points by using the same words.

Print a copy of the good word for everyone in their own language, then tell them they all have an equal capacity to understand it, and you have created a recipe for discord.  Send all human knowledge through the air into the palm of an incurious idiot who believes the ideal of equality is a measurable fact, therefore they're not an idiot, and you stand the risk of breaking down reality itself.

Undoubtedly there is an objective reality beyond human perception.  It may rely on the attention of God or spirits in order to establish and maintain itself within the quantum soup, but it's there in a way that sympathetic parties can agree on.  Even when different perceptions of reality conflict, the fact of their disagreement attests to some fundamental reality.  The disagreement itself may be the only real thing that can be agreed upon.

It just doesn't follow from the purported existence of objective reality that anyone should be able to observe it accurately.  To think so is a pleasant fiction to ward off madness.  As such, a common perception of things is not presently a viable goal.  It was easier when we knew less.  We know more now, and we don't all know the same things.

There are in fact limits to the powers of reasoned empirical science, of logic, and of fact, but the greatest limitation may be different understandings of what constitutes science, and different valuations of that project.  Something being illogical means nothing to someone who doesn't know what logic is, but then blasphemy means nothing to someone outside the religion.

It seems inevitable that we will all be very offended for the foreseeable future.  It's the inevitable consequence of a fractured society that can't agree on the operative criteria of what constitutes truth.  Is it fact or feeling, subjective or objective, collective or individual?  At a time when there seems to be more disagreement than ever before, merely stating one's own perception of what is can be received as a personal attack, to say nothing of an attack on the world itself.  It is actually the means of interpreting the world that is being threatened, a worldview that the person has come to identify with personally.  The ego is threatened along with the idiom.

As long as it's the case that even the best of us are bound to some extent by our perspectives, and our infinitely divisible society is still up in the air about what we collectively can believe, being right won't be enough.  Winning the argument logically is of no use if your counterpart murders you in a rage. 

Understand that the people in this place have strange ideas and customs.  They do this weird dance, and everyone always wears these hats.  They have a litany of taboos you want to stay away from.  They're good people, though, for the most part, just a little superstitious.

We must become anthropologists of each other.  Beyond all differences real and imagined, we are all human.  Mastering one language does not mean you can speak to all people.  The more humanity fragments, the more facility in different conceptual languages will become valuable.  The greater the multiplicity of perspectives, the more it is incumbent on those sure of their own ground to venture elsewhere.  One must not simply refute the other, but learn the language well enough to understand how a nonsense statement sounds to a native speaker.

In the end, it may fall on those favouring the cold rigour of reason to cultivate the empathy necessary to get us through this alive.

Disappointed Liberals

 

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George Carlin said, "Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist."

These are cynical times.  The assumption that others speak in good faith is unfashionable. The basic etiquette of rational speech isn't observed, yet these very unreflective arguers, blind to their own psychology, are happy to guess at the motivations of others.  It couldn't be that you know something I don't.  It must be that you're driven by a stupid animal urge to be a bad person.  I feel better about that.

At the risk of returning the favour, it seems safe to say that the vitriol on the left today must emanate from some deep wounding or disappointment.  Progress sounds good, but it sounds linear.  When it encounters complications, changes, cycles, or conservatives, the expectation is disappointed.  In order to hold on to the faith, the cultist must adapt their belief system to the new reality.  Heaven didn't come to Earth because someone somewhere was sinning.

But behind that steaming resentment is the hope for a better world, twisted and perverted into hatred for those who stand in its way.  A sincere wish for good things becomes transmuted into a disingenuous attack.  This reverse alchemy turns gold into garbage.  The disappointed progressive says in their heart that we will have our world of peace and love, even if we have to hate and kill to get there.

The lines are ever-shifting, but not so long ago liberals and progressives appeared to have a common cause.  Disappointment has driven them apart.  Disappointment that those who don't agree with the program of change won't get on board with it has driven progressives further to the left.  Disappointment with the dismissal of natural law, utility, and objective measures of progress has driven liberals to the right.

If we place to the side the rabid projections of their opponents, we find among the growing ranks of conservatives a good number of former liberals and libertarians.  These are people who believed in freedom, for the individual and society.  They believed in the promise of progress.  They believed that tolerance and compromise would reduce strife.  Ultimately, they believed in the power of egalitarian principles to hold everyone to the same standard, and thereby establish a common understanding. 

Instead we are at war for reality, perceiving different worlds, speaking different languages with the same words, and disagreeing on the most fundamental values.  Those who would stay out of it and go home to their families are treated as traitors or deserters.  It was never about fairness, or logic, or stability.  We all wanted to make the world a better place, but we forgot to stop and make sure we were talking about the same thing.

Some or quite possibly all are born that way, but the haters of haters should be aware that inside many a deplorable, there is a disappointed liberal.

Truth in Different Registers

 

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"The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling."

That's said to have been said by Thomas Sowell.  I have no reason to believe he didn't say it, except that the really good quotations always seem to get misattributed.  Often you can't even find who originally said something, and yet the saying persists, and the false association with whomever somehow informs the statement, lends gravity, and makes it more meaningful.  That person ought to have said that thing.  Let's pretend they did, as it gets at something that feels true.

Sowell is right to suggest that literacy extends to being literate in how to think straight, but the turbulence of unexamined emotions should not be confused with an acute instinct.  The body and the unconscious are continually collecting information to which the conscious mind is not privy. 

Absent a civilised education, without culture or knowledge, a person would be right to trust their gut.  With an education, a person may be inclined to disregard their instinctual reactions, as their brain provides chemical rewards for unintuitive conclusions. 

The educated are right to think through the first reaction to bubble up into their awareness, but if their belief structure can't accommodate the instinct, it will be tossed away as unreasonable, or perhaps immoral.  The ignorant rabble are right to know in their bones that two hundred thousand years in the wild, and ten thousand in town, have established certain patterns of predictability that can almost be depended on.  It's just too bad that the pace of social and technological change have accelerated past what we're naturally equipped to instinctively understand.

Truth is a thing that can be measured and marked down in different registers.  The objective aspirations of logic and empiricism are usually preferable, especially in any effort to establish a common understanding, but they are subjectively less true than a flash of anger or experience of grace.  As long as reason and science are an imposition that require mental work, an unsexy enterprise that can't be known by instinct, it is necessary for the thoughtful people to be aware that their objective accuracy is irrelevant.

Johnny has a feeling.  It feels true.  We think about it.  We think it's false, but that feels true too.  The same machinery is ultimately activated, but Johnny got there quicker.  He might even be right.  For all our highfalutin logic and evidence, we might still be wrong.  And Johnny knows it.

Academic Nazis

Academic Freedom For Students

Molyneux and UFOs

Three conclusions on mysticism

Further Questions of Culture

This blog was created with the vague, perhaps competing notions of showcasing a portfolio of original creative and philosophical thought on the one hand, and venting the unspeakable on the other.  It's not impossible that an intellectual idiom can be hammered out by the white-hot fire of frustrated logic, but dissatisfaction with the discourse of peers, friends and family does not guarantee a more successful expression in angry isolation.  Highfalutin obscurantism is an inviting refuge for the disappointed intellect.  Striking a balance between the limits of the herd and the excesses of nature's dangerous experiments may be a fool's errand, but how else do society and the individual proceed forward together?

I safely and lazily retreated from either honing my craft or sharpening my knives. It seemed sufficient to simply mark the passing absurdities of our day, as if they could speak for themselves, but the pace of unbelievable things has accelerated beyond my means to document.  The things that are shocking, ridiculous, unprecedented, ingenious and idiotic have become too numerous to even point to, much less comprehensively comment upon, even less still to interpret into any sort of artistic form.

We are living in a self-generating satire, a comic construction so sublime as to offer proof of the Divine Comedian.  Parallel realities compete for dominance, gods and priests old and new battle for people's souls, and history is upended.  Opinions are cheap, truth is costly, evidence is abundant and arguments are counterfeit.  It is a comedy of errors, if only to observing disembodied eternal spirits.  It's frequently a hellish slog for those of us who must navigate it on the ground.

It's my preference and inclination to locate these incompatibilities of meaning in the airy arena of our thoughts, values, and culture. This has been my cultural and academic education.  The magic dirt of Canada makes us all Canadian.  My Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon heritage makes me see the world in a certain way, but I could see it differently, if not for the last several thousand years, and I would still be the same person.  Given enough time and the right presentation, any true idea can be communicated to anyone, once the language barrier of culture is overcome.  Right?

The idea works well enough on its own, but it does not permit expansion.  Where did the culture come from?  The people.  Where did the people come from?  The environment.  These values permitted these people to persist in this place.  Such adaptation is not arbitrary, but it may be more or less suitable to a different environment.

But what actually is an idea?  Where does it come from?  Does it bubble up from the neurons, or float down from the ideal world?

If the brain produces consciousness, and the brain is a product of evolution, and every other product of evolution expresses variance based on environment, it would be reasonable to expect different capacities to conceive, communicate and comprehend ideas among groups that have developed with different social and environmental pressures.  As an opposable thumb permits one to grasp an object, there are many heavy, slippery, misshapen ideas that one must exercise extra mental appendages in order to pick up.  Why should that capacity be universal?  The human form is highly variable in every other way.

If psyche and soul are indeed one, and all our thoughts emanate from a voice that ultimately resides in a higher realm, our truth must be found there too.  Assuming greater control of destiny attendant to a greater perception, our souls might be expected to shop for vehicles with the features necessary to satisfy our way of driving.  Speed, handling, gas mileage, all must be considered by the discerning driver.  A soul with any self-knowledge would pick the brain best-suited to its personality.  Even accounting for the possibility that we all have the same origin and destination, we are nonetheless taking different routes at our own pace.  Even the most cosmic perspective problematises universalism.

These are the further questions of culture.  Are perception and action profoundly informed by cultural differences?  Certainly.  Does that culture exist in a special space containing nothing but culture?  No.  Acceptance of either a biological foundation or spiritual roof to the house of culture forces the consideration that cultural perspective cannot be the fundamental source of difference.  Perspective comes from where you stand, and how tall, and how good your eyes are, not only where you turn your head.  You can try to walk a mile in someone's shoes, but you can't wear their feet.  If culture does not exist in a vacuum, it must be tied to things more or less tangible.

Whether biological animals invented culture to connect as a group, or God invented culture to separate into individuals, we have arrived at an impasse.  There is a traffic-jam of meaning, and road rage is getting scary.

This is very uncomfortable business.  The residues of old religions and the seeds of new ones overlap with science and politics in ways barely perceptible.  Knowledge of history and understanding of philosophy are inadequate to the volume of our rhetoric.  Passionate displays of moralising mask ignorance and apathy.  Some are emboldened, others terrified.  It is the best of times and the worst of times for truth.

It's a time for new stories, new ideas, new voices, new media.  The format will continually evolve, but this endeavour cannot continue as a quixotic catalogue.  My need to practice word-using must be brought to the task of considering the challenges of this crazy age, and to engage with them in a mode more real than bemused observation, sarcastic astonishment, or detached horror.

Flat Earth Debate Heats Up

A 56-year-old Brockville man was so enraged by his son's girlfriend's irrational suggestion that the Earth is flat that he threw a propane cylinder into their campfire.  Police expect to charge the man with mischief, while there are no charges pending for the woman's heresy.

Dalai Lama Neuters The West

A giggling old man employed as a humanitarian mascot thinks that universal secular ethics and common sense will inevitably defeat regressive imperialistic theology rooted in violence and oppression--so there's nothing to worry about.  The nice man said so.

Soft and Hard Targets of Scepticism

When people like this get together, they become tribal. They pat each other on the back and tell each other how smart they are compared to those outside the tribe. But belonging to a tribe often makes you dumber.

Neil deGrasse Tyson Fucking Loves Science

‘Science’ here has very little to do with the scientific method itself; it means ontological physicalism, not believing in our Lord Jesus Christ, hating the spectrally stupid, and, more than anything, pretty pictures of nebulae and tree frogs.

Parsing Partisan Psychology

Political discussion among like-minded people polarises political opinion and retroactively alters biases.  Political psychology is so pernicious as to invisibly intensify upon exposure to consensus!

Problems are Problematic

Halifax's Chronicle Herald is apologising profusely for reporting that a refugee boy choked a little girl with a chain while yelling, "Muslims rule the world."  The prostrate newspaper admits that using the word "brutality" in association with a definable cultural group is "problematic"--at least to a totalitarian ideology that depends on the endemic equivocation between unfair discrimination and the sort of discrimination necessary for logical discernment.

JREF Narrows Challenge

The overabundance of dowsers and psychics hoping to be tested but unwilling to submit to the arbitrary, fluid, and unfairly weighted experimental protocols established by an ornery stage magician -- The Amazing Randi -- has forced the James Randi Educational Foundation to limit applicants for the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge to established psychics (sic) with a TV crew.

Believers are Dumb; Non-Believers are Evil

In the battle between conflicting paradigms of existence, two modes of experiencing truth are forced into competition by the efficient arrangement of human neural architecture.  Social and analytic thinking require different parts of the brain, a brain that will suppress the neuronal networks not useful for the problem at hand.

Empathy for others predicts spiritual beliefs, while also entailing low scores on critical thinking and mechanical reasoning.  Those more disposed to analytical thought are less likely to be religious, but more likely to express traits in common with psychopathy.  While religiosity correlates with empathic concern, non-religiosity correlates with self-centred impulsivity and coldheartedness.

It could be possible to engage both mental modules in tandem, but the percipients would have to be aware of the differing functions of the brain, and the manner in which cognition and emotion act at odds with one another in the interest of simplicity.

Bill Nye the Scientism Guy

Today's popular scientists and popularisers of science have come down firmly against the love of wisdom.  Most recently, this was done by a former children's show host, channeling Dr Johnson by dropping a hammer on your toe, and declaring, "I refute it thus!"

Why Do Some People Find Deepak Chopra Quotes Deep And Not Dung?

This kind of tendency also feeds into broadly resonating societal effects, such as the susceptibilities that led—and still lead—some people to chase false “cures” for everything from autism to cancer, to follow false prophets who promise them transformation and revelation of hidden beauty while giving them nothing, and to confuse categories of existence and believe that the material is magical. And that is deeply, deeply important to understand.

Skepticism on the couch

A Skeptic encountering evidence of the paranormal is like the stereotypical woman in a movie farce who discovers a spider in her hair. Does she pause to calmly assess the situation? No, she starts batting wildly at her head, screaming, "Get it off me!" In this state of mind, even the most intelligent and knowledgeable person will be hard pressed to think logically. Panic makes anyone stupid.

Metaphysics Is Prior to Science

The difficulty with using raw scientific evidence, untethered from a valid metaphysical framework, is that it gives free reign to ideological bias. In that sense our metaphysical framework -- whether explicit or implicit -- is analogous to train tracks, where the trains are our scientific investigations, and the destination is the truth. Our scientific investigations are restricted to the tracks that the trains run on, and if we are to understand the truth of our science we must understand the tracks that constrain our work. If our metaphysical framework is materialistic, the destination of our inquiries will always be materialistic -- we can do no other.