{"id":184,"date":"2005-01-06T12:11:02","date_gmt":"2005-01-06T17:11:02","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=184"},"modified":"2005-01-07T16:57:21","modified_gmt":"2005-01-07T21:57:21","slug":"what-do-you-believe-that-you-cannot-prove","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=184","title":{"rendered":"What Do You Believe That You Cannot Prove?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I wrote this for John Brockman&#8217;s 2005 Edge Question.  Can&#8217;t see<br \/>\nany good reason not to blog it as well.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>I believe that nature is understandable, that scientific inquiry is<br \/>\nthe sharpest tool and the noblest endeavor of the human mind, and that<br \/>\nany &#8220;final answers&#8221; we ever get will come from it rather than from<br \/>\nmysticism, religion, or any other competing account of the universe.<br \/>\nI believe these things without being able to prove them despite &mdash; or<br \/>\nperhaps because of &mdash; the fact that I am a mystic myself.<\/p>\n<p>Science may be the noblest endeavor of the human mind, but I believe<br \/>\n(though I cannot prove) that the most crippling and dangerous kind of<br \/>\nignorance in the modern West is ignorance of economics, the way<br \/>\nmarkets work, and the ways non-market allocation mechanisms are doomed<br \/>\nto fail.  Such economic ignorance is toxic, because it leads to insane<br \/>\npolitics and the empowerment of those whose rhetoric is altruist but<br \/>\nwhose true agenda is coercive control.<\/p>\n<p>I believe that the most important moment in the history of philosophy<br \/>\nwas when Charles Sanders Peirce defined &#8220;truth&#8221; as &#8220;predictive power&#8221;<br \/>\nand made it possible to talk about confirmation of hypotheses in a<br \/>\nnon-circular way.<\/p>\n<p>I believe the most important moment in the foreseeable future of<br \/>\nphilosophy will come when we realize that mad old Nazi bastard<br \/>\nHeidegger had it right when he said that we are thrown into the world<br \/>\nand must cope, and that theory-building consists of rearranging our<br \/>\ntoolkit for coping.  I believe the biggest blind spot in analytical<br \/>\nphilosophy is its refusal to grapple with Heidegger&#8217;s one big insight,<br \/>\nbut that evolutionary biology coupled with Peirce offers us a way to<br \/>\nstop being blind.  I beleve that when the insights of what is now<br \/>\ncalled &#8220;evolutionary psychology&#8221; are truly absorbed by philosophers,<br \/>\nmany of the supposedly intractable problems of philosophy will vanish.<\/p>\n<p>I believe, but don&#8217;t know how to prove, a much stronger version of the<br \/>\nSapir-Whorf hypothesis than is currently fashionable.  That is, I<br \/>\nbelieve the way humans think is shaped in important ways by the<br \/>\nlinguistic categories they have available; thinking outside those<br \/>\ncategories is possible but more difficult, has higher friction costs.<br \/>\nAccordingly, I believe that some derivation of Alfred Korzybski&#8217;s<br \/>\ndiscipline of General Semantics will eventually emerge as an essential<br \/>\ntool of the first mature human civilizations.<\/p>\n<p>I believe, but don&#8217;t know how to prove, that Julian Jaynes was on to<br \/>\nsomething very important when he wrote about the origin of<br \/>\nconsciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind.<\/p>\n<p>I judge that that &#8220;dark matter&#8221; is no better than phlogiston as an<br \/>\nexplanatory device, and therefore believe without being able to prove<br \/>\nit that there is something very deeply wrong with the standard model<br \/>\nof cosmology.<\/p>\n<p>I believe, but cannot prove, that the &#8220;knowledge interpretation&#8221; of<br \/>\nquantum mechanics is pernicious nonsense, and that physical theorists<br \/>\nwill essentially develop some testable form of nonlocal realism.<\/p>\n<p>I believe, but cannot prove, that global &#8220;AIDS&#8221; is a whole cluster of<br \/>\nunrelated diseases all of which have been swept under a single rug for<br \/>\nessentially political reasons, and that the identification of HIV as<br \/>\nthe sole pathogen is likely to go down as one of the most colossal<br \/>\nblunders in the history of medicine.<\/p>\n<p>Much of the West&#8217;s intelligentsia is persistently in love with<br \/>\nanything anti-Western (and especially anti-American), an infatuation<br \/>\nthat has given a great deal of aid and comfort to tyrants and terrorists<br \/>\nin the post-9\/11 world.  Besides these obvious political consequences,<br \/>\nthe phenomenon Julian Benda famously called <em>le trahison des<br \/>\nclercs<\/em> has laid waste to large swathes of the soft sciences<br \/>\nthrough ideologies like deconstructionism, cultural relativism, and<br \/>\npostmodernism.<\/p>\n<p>I believe, but cannot prove, that <em>le trahison des clercs<\/em> is<br \/>\nnot a natural development of Western thought but a creation of<br \/>\ndeliberate propaganda, directly traceable to the successes of Nazi and<br \/>\nStalinist attempts to manipulate the climate of opinion in the early<br \/>\nand mid-20th century.  Consequently I believe that one of the most<br \/>\ndifficult and necessary tasks before us in the next half century will<br \/>\nbe to banish the influence of totalitarian nihilism from science in<br \/>\nparticular and our culture in general.<\/p>\n<p>I know how to prove, or at least convincingly demonstrate, that<br \/>\nopen-source software development produces better results than<br \/>\nsecrecy and proprietary control.  I believe that the same advantage<br \/>\napplies to any other form of engineering or applied science in which<br \/>\nthe limiting factor of production is skilled human attention, but I<br \/>\ndon&#8217;t know how to prove that general principle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I wrote this for John Brockman&#8217;s 2005 Edge Question. Can&#8217;t see any good reason not to blog it as well. I believe that nature is understandable, that scientific inquiry is the sharpest tool and the noblest endeavor of the human mind, and that any &#8220;final answers&#8221; we ever get will come from it rather than&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=184\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">What Do You Believe That You Cannot Prove?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}