Not proved wrong

I glossed over the two terms last week, but the linchpin of Thomism is its distinction between efficient causes and final causes, which together and only together explain change.

An efficient cause is that which actualizes a thing's potential property. For example, cheese melts when heated, with melted-ness being the cheese's potential property made actual and heat being the efficient cause, or actualizing agent, of the change. A final cause, on the other hand, is the end purpose of such actualization. In the same example, cheese melts when heated because the end purpose of heat as applied to cheese is for cheese to melt.

A lot more can be said about efficient causes and final causes, and usually a lot more is, but the previous paragraph provides the gist. As for efficient and final causes' place in modernity, science of the last few centuries conditionally accepts the notion of efficient causes, though in the jargon they're referred to as causes, but it dismisses final causes, regarding them as lying outside science's domain. And this brings me my main point.

Falsifiability

One problem with beginning a book with a chapter on metaphysics is that the author alienates most readers who don't start the book already agreeing with most of what the author has to say. It turns out metaphysical reality is a lot like pornography: we know it when we see it, but when pressed for precision, our opinions often differ. That's to say we each have our intuitive notions how the universe works, but nature at extremely small and big scales, as measured either in size or complexity, eludes descriptions that are both exact and predictive. And if you make a claim that's inexact or non-predictive, then you invite people who disagree with you to continue disagreeing.

Another word for predictiveness is falsifiability. Thomism is non-falsifiable, and I gather as much from the first dozen pages in Edward Feser's book. This doesn't surprise me; a key attitudinal difference between religious-minded folk and science-minded folk is how important they think it is for claims to have the capacity of being proved wrong. Religion values falsifiability little or none at all while science depends upon it. The end. It's not even worth getting into a discussion about the value of falsifiability itself because values are themselves non-falsifiable. Suffice it to say, either you think falsifiability is important or you don't. Those who think it is start with that as their axiom—albeit, one that's a self-referential paradox—and run with it as far as the evidence goes. Those who think falsifiability isn't important run even further.

Let's take an example. Suppose I claim there exists alien intelligence on the other side of the galaxy. My claim is, practically speaking, not a falsifiable claim. Though it can be shown to be true by way of evidence—for example, by receiving an alien radio transmission or by being visited by green men in flying saucers—it's beyond our ability to prove the claim false. Despite any lack of evidence for alien intelligence, there remains the possibility that the alien intelligence remains unobserved because it's well hidden though nevertheless out there somewhere. So in a way my claim is safe. When asked to defend it, I might say, You can't prove me wrong, or No one has ever proved me wrong. That ends the conversation—or the useful portion of it, anyway—because you can't prove me wrong. Whether alien intelligence exists across the galaxy from us is doomed to speculative judgment so long as (1) humankind hasn't yet observed positive evidence and (2) humankind hasn't ruled out every possible alien-intelligence-sized happening 100,000 light years away—and we can't do that even for the nearest stars.

Is not being proved wrong a defense? I don't think so. That's because I value falsifiability. Unless already interested in the topic, I don't care about the validity of your claim X, any X, if it doesn't predict some future, testable event. Claiming there exists intelligence across the galaxy from us doesn't tell us anything about the future: the aliens may remain hidden forever or tomorrow they may show up and solve our nonrenewable-resource crisis with their Mr. Zero-Point Energy devices. The claim about aliens works with any possible tomorrow because the claim doesn't say what tomorrow will look like.

But a lot of people do think not being proved wrong constitutes a valid defense. You who're reading this post may very well be one of them: someone who sees things differently than I do and who cares about non-falsifiable claims—or at least a few specific ones. That's OK. I doubt valuing falsifiability as I do is the best choice for all people because I doubt it allows an individual on average to live his or her life better. In any event my goal with these Monday religion posts isn't to change opinions but rather to sharpen them; my goal today is for you to understand the distinction between falsifiable claims and non-falsifiable claims. Just as you wouldn't expect to be understood if you continued speaking English to someone who doesn't understand English, you should recognize when you're talking to someone who values falsifiability and alter your expectations for the conversation accordingly. It's up to you whether that means saying something different than what you would say when around like-minded people or instead forcing no replacement upon silence. But rarely if ever will insisting the other person stop caring about falsifiability do either of you much good.

In my opinion, the point of studying philosophy is not to be brought closer to the truth—whatever that means!—nor is it to argue a few particular points better. Rather, the point is to be able to argue all points better, not because you believe any of them, but because by being able to better argue for something you don't believe, you enter the minds of people who disagree with you and thus improve at communicating with them—at teaching them and learning from them. Can one love wisdom any more?

Some people may say, Yes, Craig, rah rah empathy sounds goods, but the question whether there exists alien intelligence on the other side of the galaxy has a definite, true-or-false answer. Falsifiable or not, there's a decision to make here. By now if you can't see how I see such a question as irrelevant, then probably nothing I write about these matters will ever make much sense to you. That's OK. That needn't end the conversation just yet: next week I'll write specifically about Thomism metaphysics.

Go hack

I didn't post either of the last two Thursdays because each day I was too engaged with my hobby-work in the Go programming language to care about blogging. So it goes. After working with Go for a few months, I feel I've attained a feel for the language and can offer insights about what it does well and what it doesn't. In this post, I'd like to focus on one thing it does well: It makes hacking on the standard library easy.

That first Thursday I didn't post I was busy finding and fixing a nasty Go problem that suddenly manifested up on my laptop. In short, Go's WebSocket support stopped working. One minute my prototype web server handled WebSocket connections flawlessly, several minutes later WebSocket connections in Chrome failed to connect. In the minutes in between, I upgrade Chrome, so it looked like the problem was due to the browser. This surprised me. First of all, like many people, I've come to expect Google products to work as is (unlike certain other tech companies' products). Secondly, I upgraded Chrome as a regular apt-get update && apt-get upgrade Ubuntu update, which should include only fixes, not new features. Why then was Chrome upgraded from version 12 to 14?

In any event, I debugged my code and confirmed that the problem was indeed somewhere in the Go standard library websocket package, undoubtedly manifested because of a change in Chrome. WebSockets are new and not yet standardized, so such breakages are to be expected. The new Chrome implements a newer draft of the WebSocket protocol, and so Go needed a corresponding upgrade.

This is routine stuff for Go. You first install Go by pulling a local copy of the upstream Mercurial repository and locally building the compiler, library, etc., so updating the Go standard library is straightforward, entailing pulling new content from upstream and running a script to rebuild everything. However, pulling the latest from upstream failed to fix my WebSocket problem, so I had to switch from the stable release head (r60) to tip, which is where newest, experimental Go development occurs. I'm not a Mercurial user, having only recently gotten into learning distributed source control by way of git, so I'm a little shaky at switching heads. This time, after switching to the tip head, Go did not build. One of the standard library tests broke. What to do? The r60 head's WebSocket support was broken, and tip failed a test that maybe doesn't matter. I decided to play it safe and make a Frankstein Go. I copied the tip's websocket package into the r60 head and rebuilt everything. It worked: all tests passed, including the websocket's. And my prototype web server program worked again, too, now with the newer version of Chrome.

My point here is Go makes its internals easily accessible. I can't imagine making such a copy-and-paste-between-versions change to the C standard library and not end up spending a few days working through problems. Nor do I imagine this kind of fix would be easy in Python or many other nice languages. Partly Go benefits because nothing on my laptop uses it other than the few programs I write, so I can tinker with the Go standard library all I wish without system consequences. However, even if most of my OS were written in Go, Go makes it easy to sandbox development by having simultaneous Go installations.

But there's more to this. In no other language have I found myself daily reading through the language's source code to figure out how it makes things work. With Go I find it's useful to look inside the standard library. It's also easy and fast to insert Printf()'s inside the standard library to debug problems and work around incomplete documentation. Between the ease of (1) hacking on the standard library and (2) having a runtime that catches most runtime errors and prints stack traces and useful error messages, Go is unusual in that it uses pointers and bare access to memory heavily and yet I rarely find myself wishing to use a traditional debugger like gdb.

So the standard library and the development environment is something Go does well. But there are things it doesn't do well, too, and I've now spent enough time with the language to come to understand many of its limitations. (You don't really know a language until you can list a dozen problems with it.) Perhaps I'll write about those in the future.

Aquinas

Three clicks away from John Michael Greer's blog I found Edward Feser and his blog. Feser isn't someone I'd likely read past the first paragraph, owing firstly to his material and secondly to his polemic style, but the first post I read on his blog caught my attention. In it Feser made an analogy between the history of philosophy and the Godfather trilogy of movies. Suppose you knew someone who has seen half of the first Godfather movie, none of the second, and the third fifteen times. How would that person's opinion of the trilogy compare to someone who's seen all three movies? Answer: their opinion would be skewed. Not only would they know little about the first two movies and what made those movies great, but they'd probably be confused about many parts in the third movie as well, despite having seen the third movie many times.

So it goes with philosophy. Western philosophy divides into three eras: the classical era of the Greeks and Romans, the medieval era of the Scholastics and of classical theism, and the modern era consisting of a hodgepodge of poorly written nonsense. And yet most people's knowledge of philosophy is as warped as the previous paragraph's Godfather fan's knowledge of the Godfather trilogy: most people's understanding of philosophy includes a little about the classics, little beyond a caricature of the medieval period, and a whole lot of the modern period, usually starting with Descartes and I think therefore I am. And so it goes that we should stop re-watching the third movie and get busy learning what makes the first two movies masterpieces.

Feser's analogy sold me: I ought to learn more about medieval philosophy. Years ago in college I took two philosophy classes, one a generic intro and the other an ethics class (which gave me more questions than answers), and from those courses, as well as my ongoing interest in loving wisdom, I can't say I know more than a shadow of what was going on in the minds of learned Europeans one thousand years ago. Feser's academic specialization is St. Thomas Aquinas (13th century, in case you're wondering), who is to classical theists as Adam Smith is to modern free-market supporters: often cited, rarely read. But Feser has made a career out of Aquinas, and he knows his topic—or purports to know, for I'm in no position to judge. He's written a few books, and he says that few people really know what Aquinas is all about. Aquinas has never been refuted, only neglected. If only more people watched the first two Godfather movies in whole, we'd realize how special classical theism is.

The book I'm reading is titled simply Aquinas. It's a beginner's guide and fulfills one of my requirements for reading about other religions: it's short, just around 200 pages. I was pleased to discover the book is also clear and mostly devoid of clutter. What will follow on Mondays here at JEC for the next few weeks are my thoughts and impressions of the book's content.

Metaphysics, briefly

Feser begins with a chapter on metaphysics, that quagmire of a topic useful for transforming conversations from evocative to provocative. I'm halfway through the chapter, which makes up nearly a third of the book, so I can't conclude on the matter just yet, but so far Aquinas's metaphysical framework looks much the same as the classical ones I learned in school—mainly, the Forms.

I admit to never making much sense of Platonic and Aristotelian forms while in school and learning only enough lingo to get by on exams. In his book Feser makes something clear that would have helped me as a student: the primary difference between Plato's forms and Aristotle's forms is that Plato's forms existed as real things in a heavenly realm of forms, whereas Aristotle's forms are merely the yin to the yang of tangible matter. Take as an example my touring bicycle. It comprises matter by way of steel, rubber, aluminum, plastic, cork, and so on, and its form is of bicycle-ness. According to Plato, you could destroy the matter and the bicycle-ness still exists, somewhere out there, but Aristotle—and Aquinas, who takes Aristotle's side—argues that if you destroy the matter then you've destroyed the bicycle-ness, too.

In addition to the forms, there's the duality between actuality and potency, and there are the four causes. Actuality and potency pertain to an object's properties: actuality being the set of properties the object has, and potency being the set of properties the object may attain through change. The four causes then explain change. The first two causes, the material cause and the formal causes, are matter and form restated. The other two causes are the efficient cause and the final cause. The efficient cause transforms a potential property into a actual property, and the final cause is the teleological end, or purpose, of a change.

I'm rushing the descriptions of these concepts because I expect most people will skip past them no matter what I write, with maybe one person interested enough to read about them elsewhere. So far Feser's book reads much like any other I'd expect to see in an intro philosophy course, so I'll wait at least another week before giving any commentary.

Not to scare away further comments, but...

According to the schedule, today I'm supposed to write about St. Thomas Aquinas. But according to the schedule, I was supposed to post something last Thursday. Let's just say I haven't been well taken with schedules lately, and this week I'm going to shirk Aquinas and instead respond to Shafik's long comment to last Monday's post.

Those of you who haven't figured out you can save time by skipping these Monday philosophy & religion posts will remember last week's post was about how absolutism and relativism both make no sense as judged by the principles of the other. The post garnered a few comments, which makes it a successful one as measured by my validation-seeking blogging mindset, and one of those posts—Shafik's—included eight question marks, which makes it a good comment as measured by my opinion that questions are generally more interesting than answers. Shafik invited me to speculate further about the mysteries of the universe, and I'm not one to resist making non-falsifiable claims when asked. So here's my response to Shafik's comment.

* * *

Does Relativism make any sense if no consciousness is involved?

If a universe falls in a forest and no one is around, is the universe still sound? My guess is consciousness has nothing to do with relativism vs absolutism. While it's hard to imagine relativism being meaningful without a sentient entity around to use it, the same goes for absolutism, too. What does meaningful mean when no one is around to ascribe meaning? As for whether the secrets of the universe are any different only because the universe now contains small pockets of complexity capable of referencing some of those secrets—I'm skeptical.

Talk about a nature of things invites a slew of question-begging. What nature? How do you know? How are you sure? How are you sure about being sure? And so on. I've seen nothing further down those holes but faith and mysticism, and everyone's mileage varies with those. Even scientism, which is the belief that science is making progress, is merely calling the other side of the same absolutist coin. Only after starting with some form of absolutism do any of these modes of thought make any sense.

Care must be taken, however, to prevent Relativism from becoming a destructive tool against well-backed and strongly justified facts and "truths" about the universe.

Relativism and absolutism both can be taken in, muddied, and used to project rainbows and shadows onto the universe one sees. These days relativism is most closely associated with secularism, which is the socio-political equilibrium you get when you put together millions of materially wealthy, differently thinking people. It's also the system that affords people the freedom to sit at home with their laptops and trash secularism on their blogs, but that's another matter.

When I hear someone say, People ought to do X, I like to play a game with myself and speculate as to whether people alive 500 years from now will be more likely to agree or to disagree with the statement. It's my guess that little of the knowledge and material wealth we value highly now will be much valued by people then, and meanwhile they'll care a great deal about many things we value little now. I for one draw comfort from this transience, just as I draw comfort from a universe that's uncaring. It really takes the pressure off.

…Godel's theories…

I agree.

What about the strange and esoteric world of Quantum physics?

While you have to give up the old-fashioned notion of absolutes to make any sense of quantum physics, many people argue that quantum physics is merely pressing forward to an ever more accurate model of the universe—i.e., scientism and its absolutism deja vu. But quantum physics, computation theory, non-Euclidean geometry, and many other recent successes requiring relativistic thinking suggest there's merit to learning how to use relativism as a tool.

Or do they? Actually—and this is where I disagree with most atheists—I'm not at all convinced that building a more accurate model of the universe, whatever that means, is of much help to most people. In fact, I strongly suspect self-delusion is one of mankind's greatest survival skills. Some people need a deadline and some pressure to get things done. Speaking of deadlines, let's see if I can get around to that Thursday post…

The relativism that can be told

The relativism that can be told—to borrow a line from Eastern mysticism—is not the eternal relativism. But that doesn't stop people from trying.

Cutting out the jargon, many philosophical debates centering around relativism vs. absolutism reduce to a pattern like this:

Relativist: There are no absolutes in the universe.

Absolutist: On what absolute are you basing that?

Relativist: Dang, you got me.

Afterwards, the relativist holds his head low, his relativistic universe thoroughly rocked. How can relativism be defended without abandoning the principles of relativism? It can't be done.

But the absolutist's trick cuts both ways, with some other debates reducing to the following, different pattern:

Absolutist: There are absolutes in the universe.

Relativist: Yes, according to your premises. But I reject your premises.

Absolutist: But my premises are not mere abstractions. They're truth.

Relativist: So you say.

The trick both patterns exemplify is: both absolutism and relativism make no sense as judged by the principles of the other. Want to poke holes in the other guy's framework? Easy: use your own framework to do so. And thus legions of philosophers, professional and amateur alike, continue poking holes and begging questions. The usual strategy I observe them using is obfuscation: syllables and complexity are added to the debate until at least one of the debate's participants no longer recognizes how the debate fits into one of the two patterns above. But just as you can't change what's in one book by writing new books, no amount of adding to can get around these two points: (1) to the relativist, absolutism's objectivity remains ever yet another framework among many and (2) there's no room for relativism's infinite speculation in the universe of truths as seen by the absolutist. But this isn't the end of the conversation. The nonsense to the other relationship between absolutism and relativism is asymmetrical. Specifically, relativism is indefensible.

The relativist who disagrees with that last point is stuck in debate pattern #1, playing the part of the absolutist and by my account better labeled as such, though of a quasi-relativist kind. That relativism can't be defended is not mere sophistry: it has to do with the absolutist's monopoly on defense itself. Things are objectively right or wrong and objectively true or false only in the absolute universe. Thus relativism, unequipped with even the language of right and wrong and true and false, can't argue its own point one way or the other according to the classical standards of Western argumentation, which hold it as absolute truth that ideas should be defensible. Rather, relativism merely is, and that's about all that can be said for it.

If a conclusion is the place where someone got tired of thinking, many absolutists peter out after the previous paragraph, saying something along the lines of: What good is relativism if it can't even be defended? That's a white flag of surrender (and irrelevance) if I ever saw one! But the absolutist derives his valuation from his own premises, which are exactly what are in question: generally, whether the universe makes some degree of objective sense, and specifically, whether our attempts to make sense of the universe should be defensible. You can't bootstrap absolutism with anything other than absolutism. In all its variations it requires the universe to obey at least one bedrock claim, even when that claim is the one made by the quasi-relativist who says paradoxically but with conviction: Humans are incapable of understanding the universe.

While it's fair to call absolutism a belief or a world view, in my opinion relativism is better described as a tool. Just as there are no perfect carpenters in the world but only people with varying levels of carpentry skill, there are no perfect relativists, only varying degrees to which people are comfortable with and are capable of using relativistic thinking. To borrow again from Eastern mysticism: The relativist that can be named is not the eternal relativist. There's no such thing as an unqualified relativist.

It's little surprise to me then that relativism invites the scorn, ridicule, and bafflement it does. The relativist's world is indefensible, utterly bizarre, and commonly misunderstood. The relativist navigates his ship without longitude and latitude to dock without anchor or ropes. Knowing where you are only in relation to what you see around you sends the mind reeling, not unlike trying to keep one's sense of direction intact while doing a flip off the diving board. And just as there's no trick to doing flips off diving boards, there's no trick to adopting the relativist mindset: it just takes a lot of practice to get the hang of it. As for whether it's worthwhile to do flips off diving boards, that's up to each of us to decide.

Next Monday I'll begin posting what I learn about St. Thomas Aquinas and classical monotheism, just as I've posted about polytheism for the last many weeks. Though I'm no polytheist, I found writing about it straightforward because polytheism employs a lot of relativistic thinking, and I've felt comfortable with relativistic thinking ever since it captured my imagination for keeps in a non-Euclidean geometry class I took in college. So when, for example, the polytheist claims it doesn't matter whether different cultures' conflicting thunder gods are the same god, that makes sense to me, just as do triangles with angles summing to 180 degrees or 270.

Aquinas and classical monotheism, on the other hand, are by no means relativistic. From the start they espouse absolutism by claiming things have a true nature, and it's hard for me to see such teleology as anything other than an assumption—and one that's more misguiding than useful, in my opinion. When such a claim comes from the eleventh page of a 200-page book, time-saving heuristics in my head urge me to dismiss the whole discourse. But that's the disservice I see Internet philosophers doing to themselves daily: judging the value of the other guy's ideas using only one's own ideas. It's no random happenstance we lose a lot of mental flexibility as we age, and I suspect time-saving heuristics have a lot to do with it.

Reading about Aquinas requires a hefty mental shift on my part, but that's a shift I'll try to make here at JEC for the next month or so. Writing about classical monotheism purely by my own standards wouldn't contribute originality to the Internet, and neither would it be much fun to read. Instead I aim to write about classical monotheism according to its own standards and to see what interesting things it has to say. Hopefully you'll find them interesting too.

This

You believe this sentence is false.

If you're not from Mars then you believe this sentence is false.

If and only if you prefer to be right about this sentence then you do believe this sentence is false.

If the previous sentence frustrated you then you believe the next sentence is false.

If you haven't yet caught on that there's something screwy about logic then you believe the previous sentence is false.

Polytheism: myth and meaning

If gas prices hadn't spiked to $4 a gallon in the summer of 2008, I wouldn't be reading Greer's opinions about polytheism today in 2011. But such strange connections make up the stuff of life. I discovered Greer through his peak-oil blog in my search for explanations about what was happening to the oil markets three years ago. What initially attracted me to his site among the many others was the historical sensibility of his stance that civil collapse is a long and messy process—not at all the abrupt end of the world so many people imagine. But what kept me reading his blog week after week was his strange way of explaining his stance through his talk of myth and meaning.

Though I find myself eager to finish A World Full of Gods and to move on to the next topic of classical monotheism, I want to include a post about Greer's ideas about myth and meaning. He raises the topic in the eleventh chapter out of thirteen, which from my point of view as a polytheist skeptic may be mistakenly too deep into the book. It's the chapter of most value to non-polytheists, as the skill of thinking-about-thinking benefits oneself in so many endeavors, both inside and outside religion. On the other hand, most people read for the confirmation of their existing beliefs, and I doubt many non-polytheists will ever crack open this book, so what does it matter how far into the book this chapter is? As it is, I'll relate some of Greer's ideas about myth and meaning here at JEC because I've intertwined his ideas into my own jargon for talking about philosophy and science, and I want to share the story.

According to Greer, a myth is a story that gives meaning to the world. This sharply contrasts from the term's common use, where myth means a falsehood. Indeed, as Greer points out, a myth that's unequivocally false would do a poor job providing meaning to anything and would thus be a poor myth. Rather, the validity and meaning of a myth lies in the ears of its listener. No one doubts Easy Rider is fiction, but how many of the Baby Boomers we see riding their motorcycles out on the open roads on any given weekend haven't found at least some meaning in Peter Fonda's and Dennis Hopper's portrayal of nomadic independence? Myths work on many levels, unlike facts.

As with trying to make sense of a Coen Brothers' movie, problems emerge when people ask what a myth is about. Myths aren't about anything; they're mere stories, building blocks for people to ascribe meaning to the universe they experience. A listener can give any story a wide range of meanings, from the literal to the abstract symbolisms we drudged through in high school English classes. Those differences in meaning stem from differences in interpretive schemes, and no scheme is right or wrong except as measured by other myths and their schemes.

Myths are not veiled presentations of some other discourse; all other discourse are veiled presentations of myth…

Thus, there's no way to escape the use of myth. The human brain hardwires us to use them as a way to understand things. Indeed, the modern man's belief that he doesn't believe in myths—that mythical thinking went extinct along with many other superstitions from long ago—follows from his very belief in a specific myth, a myth that has captured our collective imagination for the last couple hundred years, the Myth of Progress. The Myth of Progress holds that humanity, darling of the universe, moves ever onwards and upwards to bigger and better futures, that our lives are better than our parents' and our children's lives will be better than ours. There's no room in the ascent of man, as the myth goes, for the irrationality of myths.

Greer's point in all this, far from the impossible task of ending our beliefs in myths, is that we ought to know more myths. No myth makes sense of all phenomena, and our ability to make sense of our experiences is largely tied to how many myths we know.

Our problem is not that we have no myths, but rather that too many of our myths tell the same story and make sense of the world in the same way. Most of our stories end and they all lived happily ever after. We are left floundering and baffled when things do not turn out that way, and our hopes of perpetual improvement burst like bubbles—financial or otherwise.

This is where polytheism comes in. Paganism has a wealth of myths covering many possibilities and circumstances: triumph and defeat, pride and humiliation, fidelity and adultery, and so on. There's no one moral or one set of morals one can derive from Paganism. Such diversity empowers.

I take Greer's ultimate battle here to be with secularism and its linear view of history. However, Greer also criticizes monotheisms for their myths' otherness, their detachment from nature. Greer is a druid and likes his stories, on the whole, to draw from and reflect nature and its balance, limitation, and reciprocity. Greer advocates his view well, though in the end it's all just another story.