How can I know when I am wrong?

 Simple answer: I can’t. But this goes to the heart of a dilemma that seems to plague the modern world. It’s even been given a name: the post-truth world.  

I’ve just read a book, The Psychology of Stupidity; explained by some of the world’s smartest people, which is a collection of essays by philosophers, psychologists and writers, edited by Jean-Francois Marmion. It was originally French, so translated into English; therefore, most of the contributors are French, but some are American. 

 

I grew up constantly being reminded of how stupid I was, so, logically, I withdrew into an inner world, often fuelled by comic-book fiction. I also took refuge in books, which turned me into a know-it-all; a habit I’ve continued to this day.

 

Philosophy is supposed to be about critical thinking, and I’ve argued elsewhere that critical analysis is what separates philosophy from dogma, but accusing people of not thinking critically does not make them wiser. You can’t convince someone that you’re right and they’re wrong: the very best you can do is make them think outside their own box. And, be aware, that that’s exactly what they’re simultaneously trying to do to you.

 

Where to start? I’m going to start with personal experience – specifically, preparing arguments (called evidence) for lawyers in contractual engineering disputes, in which I’ve had more than a little experience. Basically, I’ve either prepared a claim or defended a claim by analysing data in the form of records – diaries, minutes, photographs – and reached a conclusion that had a trail of logic and evidence to substantiate it. But here’s the thing: I always took the attitude that I’d come up with the same conclusion no matter which side I was on.

 

You’re not supposed to do that, but it has advantages. The client, whom I’m representing, knows I won’t bullshit them and I won’t prepare a case that I know is flawed. And, in some cases, I’ve even won the respect of the opposing side. But you probably won’t be surprised to learn how much pressure you can be put under to present a case based on falsehoods. In the end, it will bite you.

 

The other aspect to all this is that people can get very emotional, and when they get emotional they get irrational. Writing is an art I do well, and when it comes to preparing evidence, my prose is very dispassionate, laying out an argument based on dated documents; better still, if the documents belong to the opposition.

 

But this is doing analysis on mutually recognised data, even if different sides come to different conclusions. And in a legal hearing or mediation, it’s the documentation that wins the argument, not emotive rhetoric. Most debates these days take place on social media platforms where people on opposing sides have their own sources and their own facts and we both accuse each other of being brainwashed. 

 

And this leads me to the first lesson I’ve learned about the post-truth world. In an ingroup-outgroup environment – like politics – even the most intelligent people can become highly irrational. We see everyone on one side as being righteous and worthy of respect, while everyone on the other side is untrustworthy and deceitful. Many people know about the infamous Robbers Cave experiment in 1954, where 2 groups of teenage boys were manipulated into an ingroup-outgroup situation where tensions quickly escalated, though not violently. I’ve observed this in contractual situations many times over.

 

One of my own personal philosophical principles is that beliefs should be dependent on what you know and not the other way round. It seems to me that we do the opposite: we form a belief and then actively look for evidence that turns that belief into knowledge. And, in the current internet age, it’s possible to find evidence for any belief at all, like the Earth being flat.

 

And this has led to a world of alternate universes, where the exact opposite histories are being played out. The best known example is climate change, but there are others. Most recently, we’ve had a disputed presidential election in the USA and the efficaciousness of vaccines in combatting the coronavirus (SARS-Cov-2 or COVD-19). What all these have in common is that each side believes the other side has been duped.

 

You might think that something else these 3 specific examples have in common is left-wing, right-wing politics. But I’ve learned that’s not always the case. One thing I do believe they have in common is open disagreement between purported experts in combination with alleged conspiracy theories. It so happens that I’ve worked with technical experts for most of my working life, plus I read a lot of books and articles by people in scientific disciplines. 

 

I’m well aware that there are a number of people who have expertise that I don’t have and I admit to getting more than a little annoyed with politicians who criticise or dismiss people who obviously have much more expertise than they have in specific fields, like climatology or epidemiology. One only has to look to the US, where the previous POTUS, Donald Trump, was at the centre of all of these issues, where everything he disagreed with was called a ‘hoax’, and who was a serial promoter of conspiracy theories, including election fraud. Trump is responsible for one of those alternative universes where President Elect, Joe Biden, stole the election from him, even though there is ample testimony that Trump tried to steal the election from Biden.

 

So, in the end, it comes down to who do you trust. And you probably trust someone who aligns with your ideological position or who reinforces your beliefs. Of course, I also have political views and my own array of beliefs. So how do I navigate my way?

 

Firstly, I have a healthy scepticism about conspiracy theories, because they require a level of global collaboration that’s hard to maintain in the manner they are reported. They often read or sound like movie scripts, with politicians being blackmailed or having their lives threatened and health professionals involved in a global conspiracy to help an already highly successful leader in the corporate world take control of all of our lives. This came from a so-called ‘whistleblower’, previously associated with WHO.

 

The more emotive and sensationalist a point of view, the more traction it has. Media outlets have always known this, and now it’s exploited on social media, where rules about accountability and credibility are a lot less rigorous.

 

Secondly, there are certain trigger words that warn me that someone is talking bullshit. Like calling vaccines a ‘bio-weapon’ or that it’s the ‘death-jab’ (from different sources). However, I trust people who have a long history of credibility in their field; who have made it their life’s work, in fact. But we live in a world where they can be ridiculed by politicians, whom we are supposed to respect and follow.

 

At the end of the day, I go back to the same criteria I used in preparing arguments involved in contractual disputes, which is evidence. We’ve been living with COVID for 2 years now and it is easy to find statistical data tracking the disease in a variety of countries and the effect the vaccines have had. Of course, the conspiracy theorists will tell you that the data is fabricated. The same goes for evidence involving climate change. There was a famous encounter between physicist and television presenter, Brian Cox, and a little known Australian politician who claimed that the graphs Cox presented, produced by NASA, had been corrupted.

 

But, in both of these cases, the proof is in the eating of the pudding. I live in a country where we followed the medical advice, underwent lockdowns and got vaccinated, and we’re now effectively living with the virus. When I look overseas, at countries like America, it was a disaster overseen by an incompetent President, who advocated all sorts of ‘crank cures’, the most notorious being bleach, not to mention UV light. At one point, the US accounted for more than 20% of the world’s recorded deaths.

 

And it’s the same with climate change where, again, the country I live in faced record fires in 2019/20 and now floods, though this is happening all over the globe. The evidence is in our face, but people are still in denial. It takes a lot of cognitive dissonance to admit when we’re wrong, and that’s part of the problem.

 

Philosophy teaches you that you can have a range of views on a specific topic, and as I keep saying: only future generations know how ignorant the current generation is. That includes me, of course. I write a blog, which hopefully outlives me and one day people should be able to tell where I was wrong. I’m quite happy for that, because that’s how knowledge grows and progresses.

Our eternal fascination with Light and Dark

 Someone on FaceBook posted one of those inane questions: If you could delete one thing in the world what would it be? Obvious answers included war, hate, evil, and the like; so negative emotive states and consequences. My answer was, ‘Be careful what you wish for’.

What I find interesting about this whole issue is the vicarious relationship we have with the ‘dark side’ through the lens of fiction. If one thinks about it, it starts early with fairy tales and Bible stories. Nightmares are common in our childhood where one wakes up and is too scared to go back to sleep. Fear is an emotion we become familiar with early in our lives; I doubt that I was an exception, but it seems to me that everyone tries to keep children innocent these days. I don’t have children, so I might have it wrong.

 

Light and dark exists in the real world, but we try to keep it to the world of fiction – it’s a universal theme found in operas, mythologies and TV serials. I write fiction and I’m no exception. If there was no dark in my stories, they’d have no appeal. You have to have nemeses, figures of various shades of grey to juxtapose the figures of light, even if the light shines through flawed, imperfect glass.

 

In life we are tested, and we judge ourselves accordingly. Sometimes we pass and sometimes we fail. The same thing happens with characters in fiction. When we read a story we become actors, which makes us wonder how we’d behave in the same situation. I contend that the same thing happens in dreams. As an adult, I’ve always seen dreams as what-if scenarios and it’s the same with stories. I’ve long argued that the language of stories is the language of dreams and I think the connection is even stronger than that. I’m not surprised that storytellers will tell you that they dream a lot.

 

In the Judaeo-Christian religion I grew up with, good and evil were stark contrasts, like black and white. You have God, Christ and Satan. When I got older, I thought it a bit perverse that one feared God as much as Satan, which led me to the conclusion that they weren’t really that different. It’s Christ who is the good guy, willing to forgive the people who hate him and want him dead. I’m talking about them as fictional characters, not real people. I’m sure Jesus was a real person but we only have the myth by which to judge him.

 

The only reason I bring all this up, is because they were the template we were given. But fearing someone you are meant to love leads to neurosis, as I learned the hard way. A lot of people of my generation brought up the next generation as atheists, which is not surprising. The idea of a judgemental, schizophrenic father was past its use-by-date.

 

There is currently a conflict in Ukraine, which has grabbed the world’s attention in a way that other wars have not. It’s partly because of our Euro-centric perspective, and the fact that the 2 biggest and world-changing conflicts of the 20^th Century both started in Europe. And the second one, in particular, has similarities, given it started with a dictator invading a neighbour, when he thought the world would look the other way.

 

There is a fundamental flaw in the human psyche that we’ve seen repeated throughout history. We have a tendency to follow charismatic narcissistic leaders, when you think we should know better. They create an army (not necessarily military) of supporters, but for whom they have utter contempt. This was true of Hitler, but also true of Trump and Putin.

 

Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, like Trump, became a TV celebrity, but in a different vein. He was a satirical comedian who sent up the country’s leader, who was a Russian stooge, and then ran for office where he won by 70%. I believe this is the real reason that Putin wants to bring him down. If he’d done the same thing in Russia, he would have been assassinated while still a TV personality. It’s well known that Putin has attempted to assassinate him at least twice since the invasion, but assassinating opponents in a foreign country is a Putin specialty.

 

Zelenskyy and Putin represent, in many Western people’s minds, a modern day parable of good and evil. And, to me, the difference is stark. Putin, like all narcissists, only cares about himself, not the generals that have died in his war, not the barely out of school conscripts he’s sent into battle and certainly not the Russian people who will suffer enormous deprivations if this continues for any length of time. On the other hand, Zelenskyy doesn’t care about his self-preservation, because he would rather die for a principle than live the rest of his life in shame for deserting his country when it needed him most. Zelenskyy is like the fictional hero we believe in but know we couldn’t emulate.

 

It's when we read or watch fiction that the difference between right and wrong seems obvious. We often find ourselves telling a character, ‘don’t do that, don’t make that decision’, because we can see the consequences, but, in real life, we often seem to lose that compass.

 

My father was in a war and I know from what he told me that he didn’t lose that particular compass, but I also know that he once threatened to kill someone who was stealing from the wounded he was caring for. And I’ve no doubt he would have acted on it. So his compass got a bit bent, because he’d already seen enough killing to last several lifetimes.

 

I’ve noticed a theme in my own writing, which is subconscious, not intentional, and that is my protagonists invariably have their loyalty tested and it ends up defining them. My villains are mostly self-serving autocrats who have a hierarchical view of humanity where they logically belong at the top.

 

This is a meandering post, with no conclusion. We each of us have ambitions and desires and flaws. Few of us are ever really tested, so we make assumptions based on what we like to believe. I like something that Socrates said, who’d also been in battle.

 

To live with honour in this world, actually be what you try to appear to be.

What is existentialism?

 A few years back, I wrote a ‘vanity piece’, My philosophy in 24 dot points, which I admit is a touch pretentious. But I’ve been prompted to write something more substantive, in a similar vein, whilst reading Gary Cox’s How to Be an Existentialist; or How to Get Real, Get a Grip and Stop Making Excuses. I bought this tome (the 10^thAnniversary Edition) after reading an article by him on ‘Happiness’ in Philosophy Now (Issue 147, Dec 2021/Jan 2022). Cox is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK. He’s written other books, but this one is written specifically for a general audience, not an academic one. This is revealed in some of the language he uses, like ‘being up shit creek’.

 

I didn’t really learn anything about existentialism until I studied Sartre in an off-campus university course, in my late 40s. I realised that, to all intents and purposes, I was an existentialist, without ever knowing what one was. I did write about existentialism very early in the life of this blog, in the context of my own background. The thing is that one’s philosophical worldview is a product of one’s milieu, upbringing and education, not to mention the age in which one lives. I grew up in a Western culture, post WW2, and I think that made me ripe for existentialist influences without being conscious of it. I lived in the 60s when there was a worldwide zeitgeist of questioning social mores against a background of a religious divide, the Vietnam war and the rise of feminism. 

 

If there is a key word or mantra in existentialism, it’s ‘authenticity’. It’s the key element in my 3 Rules for Humans post, and it’s also the penultimate chapter in Cox’s aforementioned book. The last chapter is on counselling and is like a bookend.

 

As Cox himself points out, existentialism is not a ‘school’ of philosophy in the way ‘analytical philosophy’ or ‘logical positivism’ are. There’s not really a set of rules – it’s more about an attitude and how to live a life without losing your soul or self-respect. It’s not an epistemology, nor an ideology, even though it’s probably associated with a liberal outlook, as I hope will become clear.

 

Many commentators associate existentialism with atheism, the absurd and nihilism. I agree with Cox that it’s actually the opposite of nihilism; if anything, it’s about finding purpose. As I wrote in a post last year:

 

If the Universe has any meaning at all, it’s because it created sentient beings who find meaning against the odds that science tells us are astronomical, both literally and figuratively. Existentialism is about finding purpose in an absurd universe, which is the opposite of nihilism.

 

And that’s the most important lesson of existentialism: if you are to find a purpose, only you can do that; it’s not dependent on anyone else, be they family, a spouse, an employer or a mentor. And logically, one could add, it’s not dependent on God either.

 

Cox doesn’t talk about God at all, but he does talk quite a lot about consciousness and about it being ‘nothing’ (materialistically). He very fleetingly gives mathematics as an example of something else that’s not ‘corporeal’, specifically numbers. Very curious, as I think that both mathematics and consciousness are ‘special’ in that they are distinct, yet intimately connected to the physical world, but that’s another topic.

 

He also talks about consciousness having a special relationship with time. I’ve said that consciousness is the only thing that exists in a constant present, whereas Cox says the opposite, but I believe we mean the same thing. He says consciousness is forever travelling from the past to the future, whereas I say that the future is forever becoming the past while only consciousness exists in the present – the experiential outcome is the same.

 

So how does God enter the picture? God only exists in someone’s consciousness – it’s part of one’s internal state. So, you can be ‘authentic’ and believe in God, but it’s totally an individualistic experience – it can’t be shared. That’s my interpretation, not anyone else’s, I should emphasise.

 

An important, even essential, aspect of all this is a belief in free will. You can’t take control of your life if you don’t have a belief in free will, and I would argue that you can’t be authentic either. And, logically, this has influenced my prejudices in physics and cosmology. To be consistent, I can’t believe we live in a deterministic universe, and have argued strongly on that point, opposing better minds than mine.

 

Existentialism has some things in common with Buddhism, which might explain why Eastern philosophy seemed to have an influence on the 60s zeitgeist. Having said that, I think the commonality is about treating life as a journey that’s transient. Accepting the impermanence and transience of life, I believe, is part of living authentically.

 

And what do I mean by ‘authentic’ in this context? Possibly, I never really appreciated this until I started writing fiction. I think anyone who creates art strives to be authentic, which means leaving your ego out of your work. I try to take the attitude that it’s my characters’ story, not mine. That’s very difficult to explain to anyone who hasn’t experienced it, but I know that actors often say something similar.

 

In my professional life, my integrity was everything to me. I often worked in disputatious environments and it was important to me that people could trust my word and my work. Cox talks about how existentialism intrinsically incorporates our interactions with others. 

 

Freedom is a much-abused, misappropriated term, but in existentialism it has a specific meaning and an interdependent relationship with responsibility – you can’t divorce one from the other. Freedom, in existentialism, means ‘free to choose’, hence the emphasis on free will. It also means, if you invoke the term, that the freedom of others is just as important as your own.

 

One can’t talk about authenticity without talking about its opposite, ‘bad faith’ (mauvaise foi), a term coined by Sartre. Bad faith is something that most of us have experienced, be it working in a job we hate, staying in a destructive relationship or not pursuing a desired goal in lieu of staying in our comfort zone.

 

Of course, sometimes we are in a situation outside our control, so what do we do? Speaking from personal experience, I think one needs to take ownership of one’s response to it; one needs to accept that only YOU can do something about it and not someone else. I’ve never been a prisoner-of-war, but my father was, and he made 3 attempts to escape, because, as he told the Commandant, ‘It’s my job’.

 

I’ve actually explored this in my own fiction. In my last story, two of my characters (independently) find themselves in circumstances of ‘bad faith’. I only analyse this in hindsight – don’t analyse what you write while you’re writing. In fact, one of those characters is attracted to another character who lives authentically, though neither of them ‘think’ in those terms.

Addendum: Someone asked me to come up with a single sentence to describe this. After sleeping on it, I came up with this:

Be responsible for what you are and who you become. That includes being responsible for your failures. (2 sentences)

Revisiting Donald Hoffman’s alternative theory of evolution

 Back in November 2016, so 5 years ago, I wrote a post in response to an academic paper by Donald Hoffman and Chetan Prakash called Objects of Consciousness, where I specifically critiqued their ideas on biological evolution. Despite co-authoring the paper, I believe this particular aspect of their paper is predominantly Hoffman’s, based on an article he wrote for New Scientist, where he expressed similar views. One of his key arguments was that natural selection favours ‘fitness’ over ‘truth’.

 

...we find that natural selection does not, in general, favor perceptions that are true reports of objective properties of the environment. Instead, it generally favors perceptual strategies that are tuned to fitness.

 

One way to use fewer calories is to see less truth, especially truth that is not informative about fitness. (My emphasis)

 

What made me revisit this was an interview in Philosophy Now (Issue 147, Dec 2021/Jan 2022) with Samuel Grove, who recently published Retrieving Darwin’s Revolutionary Idea: The Reluctant Radical. According to Grove, Darwin was reluctant to publish The Decent of Man, because applying natural selection to humans was controversial, despite the success of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (full title). The connection to Hoffman’s argument is that Darwin struggled with the idea that evolution could ‘select’ for ‘truth’. To quote Grove:

 

Natural selection is premised on three laws: the law of inheritance, the law of variation, and the law of superfecundity (where organisms produce more offspring than can possibly survive). Together, these laws produce selection, and over the course of time, evolution. Well, Darwin’s question was, how could evolution produce a subject capable of knowing these very laws? Or, why would evolution select for fidelity to truth or laws? Selection favours survival, not truth. (My emphasis again)

 

Darwin turned to arguments, that as Grove points out, were ‘the common garden variety racism of the time’ – specifically, ‘group selection’ that favoured Anglo Saxon groups. Apparently, Darwin was reluctant to consider ‘group selection’ (as opposed to ‘individual selection’), but did so because it led to a resolution that would have been politically acceptable in his day. I will return to this point later.

 

So, even according to Darwin, Hoffman may have a point, though I’m not sure that Darwin and Hoffman are even talking about the same idea of ‘truth’. More on that later.

 

For those unfamiliar with Hoffman, his entire argument centres on the fundamental idea that ‘nothing exists unperceived, including space and time’. For more details, read my previous post, or read his co-authored paper with Prakash. I need to say upfront that I find it hard to take Hoffman seriously. Every time I read or listen to him, I keep expecting him to say, ‘Ah, see, I fooled the lot of you.’ His ideas only make sense to me if he believes we live in a computer simulation, which he’s never claimed. In fact, that would be my first question to him, if I ever met him. It’s an idea that has some adherents. Just on that, I would like to point out that chaos is incomputable, and the Universe is chaotic on a number of levels, including evolution, as it turns out.

 

In a previous life, I sometimes became involved in contractual disputes on major engineering projects (in Australia and US), preparing evidence for lawyers, and having to address opponents’ arguments. What I found in a number of cases, was that people prepared simple arguments that were nevertheless compelling. In fact, they often delivered them as if they were a fait accompli. In most of these cases, I found that by digging a little deeper, they could be challenged successfully. I have to admit that I’m reminded of this when I examine Hoffman’s argument on natural selection favouring ‘fitness’ over ‘truth’.

 

Partly, this is because his arguments highlight contradictions in his own premise and partly because one of his key arguments is contradicted by evidence, which, I concede, he may not be aware of.

 

For a start, what does Hoffman mean by ‘fitness’?

 

He talks about fitness in terms of predators and prey:

 

But in the real world where predators are on the prowl and prey must be wary, the race is often to the swift. It is the slower gazelle that becomes lunch for the swifter cheetah. 

 

This quote is out of context, where he’s arguing that ‘swiftness’ in response, be it the gazelle or the cheetah, favours less information, therefore less time; over more information, therefore lost time. Leaving aside the fact that survival of either animal is dependent on the accuracy of their ‘modelling’ of their environment, if the animal being chased or doing the chasing ‘doesn’t exist unperceived’, then they might as well be in a dream. In fact, we often find ourselves being chased in a dream, which has no consequences to our ‘survival’ in real life. The argument contradicts the premise.

 

Hoffman and Prakash quote Steven Palmer from a ‘graduate-level textbook’ (1999):

 

Evolutionarily speaking, visual perception is useful only if it is reasonably accurate . . . Indeed, vision is useful precisely because it is so accurate. By and large, what you see is what you get. When this is true, we have what is called veridical perception . . . perception that is consistent with the actual state of affairs in the environment. This is almost always the case with vision . . .  (Authors’ emphasis)

 

Hoffman and Prakash then argue that ‘using Monte Carlo simulations of evolutionary games and genetic algorithms, we find that natural selection does not, in general, favor perceptions that are true reports of objective properties of the environment’. In other words, they effectively argue that Palmer’s emphasis on ‘veridical perception’ is wrong. I can’t argue with their Monte Carlo simulations, because they don’t provide the data. However, real world evidence would suggest that Palmer is correct.

 

I read a story on Quora by a wildlife ranger about eagles who have had one eye damaged, usually in intra-species mid-air fights. In nearly all cases (he described one exception), an eagle who is blind in one eye needs to be euthanised because they would invariably starve to death due to an inability to catch prey. So here you have ‘fitness’ dependent on vision being accurate.

 

Leaving aside all this nit-picking about natural selection favouring ‘fitness’ over ‘truth’, how does it support their fundamental thesis that reality only exists in the mind? According to them, their theory of evolution ‘proves’ that reality doesn’t exist unperceived. Can you even have evolution if reality doesn’t exist (except in the mind)?

 

And this brings me back to Darwin, because what he didn’t consider was that, in the case of humans, cultural evolution has overtaken biological evolution, and this is unique to humanity. I wrote another post where I argue that The search for ultimate truth is unattainable, but there are 'truths' we have found throughout the history of our cultural evolution and they are in mathematics. It’s true that evolution didn’t select for this; it’s an unexpected by-product, but it has led to the understanding of laws governing the very Universe that even Darwin would be amazed to know. 

Cancel culture – the scourge of our time

There are many things that cause me some anguish at the moment, not least that Donald Trump could easily be re-elected POTUS in 2024, despite deliberately undermining and damaging the very institution he wants to lead, which is American democracy. It’s not an exaggeration to say that he’s attacked it at its core.

This may seem a mile away from the topic I’ve alluded to in the title of my post, but they both seem to be symptoms of a divisiveness I haven’t seen since the Vietnam war. 

 

The word, ‘scourge’, is defined as ‘a whip used as an instrument of punishment’; and that’s exactly how cancel culture works, with social media the perfect platform from which to wield it.

 

In this weekend’s Good Weekend magazine (Fairfax Group), the feature article is on this very topic. But I would like to go back to the previous weekend, when another media outlet, Murdoch’s Weekend Australian Magazine published an article on well known atheist, Richard Dawkins. It turns out that at the ripe old age of 80, Dawkins has been cancelled. To be precise, he had his 1996 Humanist of the Year award withdrawn by the American Humanist Association (AHA) earlier this year, because, in 2015, he tweeted a defence of Rachel Doleza (a white chapter president of NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People) who had been vilified for identifying as Black.

 

Of course, I don’t know anything about Rachel Doleza or the context of that stoush, but I can identify with Dawkins, even though I’ve never suffered the same indignity. Dawkins and I are of a similar mould, though we live in different strata of society. In saying that, I don’t mean that I agree with all his arguments, because I obviously don’t, but we are both argumentative and are not shy in expressing our opinions. I really don’t possess the moral superiority to throw stones at Dawkins, even though I have.

 

I remember my father once telling me that if you admired an Australian fast bowler (he had someone in mind) then you also had to admire an English fast bowler (of the same generation), because they had the exact same temperament and wicket-taking abilities. Of course, that also applies to politicians. And it pretty much applies to me and Dawkins.

 

On the subject of identifying as ‘black’, I must tell a story related to me by a friend I knew when I worked in Princeton in 2001/2. She was a similar age to me and originally from Guyana. In fact, she was niece to West Indies champion cricketer, Lance Gibbs, and told me about attending his wedding when she was 8 years old (I promise no more cricketing references). But she told me how someone she knew (outside of work) told her that she ‘didn’t know what it was like to be black’. To which she replied, ‘Of course I know I’m black, I only have to look in the mirror every morning.’  Yes, it’s funny, but it goes to a deeper issue about identity. So a black person, who had lived their entire life in the USA, was telling another black person, who had come from outside of the US, that they didn’t know what it was like to be ‘black’. 

 

Dawkins said that, as a consequence, he’d started to self-censor, which is exactly what his detractors want. If Dawkins has started to self-censor, then none of us are safe or immune. What hurt him, of course, was being attacked by people on the Left, which he mostly identifies with. And, while this practice occurs on both sides, it’s on the Left where it has become most virulent. 

 

“I self-censor. More so in recent years. Why? It’s not a thing I’ve done throughout my life, I’ve always spoken my mind openly. But we’re now in a time when if you do speak your mind openly, you are at risk of being picked up and condemned.”

 

“Every time a lecturer is cancelled from an American university, that’s another God knows how many votes for Trump.”

 

And this is the thing: the Right loves nothing more than the Left turning on itself. It’s insidious, self-destructive and literally soul-destroying. In the Good Weekend article, they focus on a specific case, while also citing other cases, both in Australia and America. The specific case was actor, Hugh Sheridan, having a Sydney Festival show cancelled, which he’d really set his sights on, because he was playing a trans-gender person which created outrage in the LGBTQIA+ community. Like others cited in the article, he contemplated suicide which triggered close friends to monitor him. This is what it’s come to. It’s a very lengthy article, which I can’t do justice to on this post, but there is a perversion here: all the shows and people who are being targeted are actually bringing diversity of race and sexuality into the public arena and being crucified by the people they represent. The conservatives, wowsers and Bible-bashers must love it.

 

This is a phenomenon that is partly if not mostly, generational, and amplified by social media. People are being forced to grovel.

 

Emma Dawson, head of the Labor-aligned (Australian political party, for overseas readers) Per Capita think tank, told the Good Weekend, “[cancel culture is] more worrying to me than just about anything other than far-right extremism. It is pervasive among educated young people; very few are willing to question it.”

 

‘In 2019, Barack Obama warned a group of young people: “This idea of purity, and you’re never compromised and always politically woke... you should get over that quickly. The world is messy.”’

 

And this is the nub of the issue: cancel culture is all about silencing any debate, and, without debate, you have authoritarianism, even though it’s disguised as its opposite.

 

In the same article, the author, James Button, argues that the rise of Donald Trump is not a coincidence in the emergence of this phenomenon.

 

The election of Donald Trump horrified progressives. Here was a president – elected by ordinary Americans – who was racist, who winked at neo-Nazis and who told bare-faced lies in a brazen assertion of power while claiming that the liars were progressive media. His own strategy adviser, Stephen Bannon, said that the way to win the contest was to overwhelm the media with misinformation, to “flood the zone with shit”.

 

And they succeeded so well that America is more divided than it has been since its historical civil war.

To return to Hugh Sheridan, whom I think epitomises this situation, at least as it’s being played out in Australia, in that it’s the Arts that are coming under attack, and from the Left, it has to be said. Actors and writers (like myself) often portray characters who have different backgrounds to us. To give a recent example on ABC TV, which produces some outstanding free-to-air dramas with internationally renowned casts, when everything else is going into subscribed streaming services. Earlier this year, they produced and broadcast a series called The Newsreader, set in the 1980s when a lot of stuff was happening both locally and overseas. ‘At the 11th AACTA (Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts) awards, the show was nominated for more awards than any other program’ (Wikipedia).

 

A key plotline of the show was that the protagonist was gay but not openly so. The point is that I assume the actor was straight, although I don’t really know, but it’s what actors do. God knows, there have been enough gay actors who have played straight characters (Sir Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf, as well as Shakespearean roles). So why crucify someone who is part of the LGBTQIA+ community for playing a transgender role. He was even accused of being homophobic and transgenderphobic. He tweeted back, “you’re insane”, which only resulted in him being trolled for accusing his tormentors of being ‘insane’.

 

Someone recently asked me why I don’t publish what I write anymore. There is more than one reason, but one is fear of being cancelled. I doubt a publisher would publish what I write, anyway. But also, I suffer from impostor syndrome in that I genuinely feel like an impostor and I don’t need someone to tell me. The other thing is that I simply don’t care; I don’t feel the need to publish to validate my work.

Reality and our perception of it

The latest issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 146, Oct/Nov 2021) has as its theme, ‘Reality’. The cover depicts Alice falling down the rabbit hole, with the notated question, What’s Really Real? I was motivated (inspired is the wrong word) to write a letter to the Editor, after reading an essay by Paul Griffiths, titled, Against Direct Realism. According to the footnote at the end of the article: Dr Paul H. Griffiths has a background in physics and engineering, and a longstanding interest in the philosophy and science of perception. I have a background in engineering and an interest in philosophy and science (physics in particular), but there the similarity ends.

 

Griffiths gives an historical account, mostly last century, concerning problems and points of view on ‘direct realism’ and ‘indirect realism’, using terms like ‘disjunctivism’ and ‘representationalism’, making me wonder if all of philosophy can be reduced to a collection of isms. To be fair to Griffiths, he’s referencing what others have written on this topic, and how it’s led to various schools of thought. I took the easy way out and didn’t address any of that directly, nor reference any of his many citations. Instead, I simply gave my interpretation of the subject based on what I’ve learned from the science, and then provided my own philosophical twist.

 

I’ve covered a lot of this before when I wrote an essay on Kant. Griffiths doesn’t mention Kant, but arguably that’s where this debate began, when he argued that we can never know the ‘thing-in-itself’, but only a perception of it. Just to address that point, I’ve argued that the thing-in-itself varies depending on the scale one observes it at. It also depends on things like what wavelength radiation you might use to probe it. 

 

But, in the context of direct realism or indirect realism, various creatures perceive reality in different ways, which I allude to in my 400 word response. If I was to try and put myself in one of Griffith’s categories, I expect I’m an ‘indirect realist’ because I believe in an independent reality and that my ‘perception’ of it is unique to my species, meaning other species would perceive it differently, either because they have different senses or the senses they have can perceive other parts of the spectrum to mine. For example, some insects and birds can see in the ultra-violet range, and we can see some colours that other primates can’t see.

 

However, I never mention those terms, or even Kant, in my missive to the Editor. I do, however, mention the significance of space and time, both to reality, and our perception of it. Here is my response:

 

 

Paul Griffith’s essay titled, Against Direct Realism (Issue 146, October/November 2021) discusses both the philosophy and science of ‘perception’, within the last century in particular. There are two parts to this topic: an objective reality and our ability to perceive it. One is obviously dependent on the other, and they need to be addressed in that order.

 

The first part is whether there is an objective reality at all. Donald Hoffman claims that ‘nothing exists unperceived, including space and time’, and that there are only ‘conscious agents’. This is similar to the argument that we live in a simulation. There is, of course, one situation where this happens, and that’s when we are dreaming. Our brains create a simulacrum of reality in our minds, which we can not only see but sometimes feel. We’re only aware that it’s not reality when we wake up.

 

There is a major difference between this dream state and ‘real life’ and that is that reality can be fatal – it can kill you. This is key to understanding both aspects of this question. It’s not contentious that our brains have evolved the remarkable ability to model this reality, and that is true in other creatures as well, yet we perceive different things, colour being the most obvious example, which only occurs in some creature’s mind. Birds can see in almost 300 degree vision, and bats and dolphins probably ‘see’ in echo-location, which we can’t even imagine. Not only that, but time passes at different rates for different creatures, which we can mimic with time-lapse or slow-motion cinematography. 

 

But here’s the thing: all these ‘means’ of perception are about keeping us and all these creatures alive. Therefore, the model in our minds must match the external reality with some degree of accuracy, yet it does even better than that, because the model even appears to be external to our heads. What’s more, the model predicts the future, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to catch a ball thrown to you. *

 

There is one core attribute of both reality and its perception that is rarely discussed, and that is space and time. We live in a universe with three spatial dimensions and one time dimension, so the models our brains create need to reflect that. The reason we can’t imagine a higher dimensional space, even though we can represent it mathematically, is because we don’t live in one.

 

 

·      * There is a 120 millisecond delay between the action and the perception, and your brain compensates for it.

Will the 21st Century be a turning point in human history?

 The short answer, I believe, is Yes, but whether it will be positive or negative is up for conjecture. If history is any guide, I’d have to say things don’t look particularly promising. There have been a number of things I’ve read recently, and viewed on TV, from various sources that have made me reflect on this, and it’s hard to know where to start. 

Maybe I’ll start with something I wrote on Facebook recently, which was the seed for this rumination.

 

Humanity has always had both the capacity and inclination for self-destruction. It is our Achilles heel. One can't help but think that the 21st Century is our turning point, one way or the other.

 

There are lots of examples, the Roman Empire being one of the most cited, but also the ancient Egyptians and the Mayans, not to mention Easter Island. Curiously, I’ve just started watching Foundation, on Apple TV, based on Isaac Asimov’s famous books, which is premised on the fall of a future galactic empire founded and run by humanity.

 

But there is another TV series by the BBC called Capital, very contemporary, which I’ve also just started watching, and seems to encapsulate our current situation. I’ve only watched one episode, which centres on a single street in England, but is rendered as a microcosm of global politics and social dilemmas. 

There is the corporate middle manager whose ambition and greed is only outdone by his wife, who mentally spends his money before he’s even earned it. There is the refugee from Zimbabwe who is working illegally, therefore exploited by an ‘agent’, while she faces imminent deportation even though she fears death on arrival. Something that refugees in Australia can readily identify with. There is the Pakistani corner shopkeeper, who is a diligent neighbour, with 2 sons, one who has become religiously conservative and the other who has started, but not completed, 3 university degrees (I can identify with that). He’s the target of a stalker, covertly photographing him and his family. Like everyone else in the street, he’s receiving postcards with the ominous warning, We Want What You Have. In other words, there is an undercurrent of class envy which could fester into something more sinister. Another of the recipients is an elderly woman, whose son and daughter have all but abandoned her, and who is facing terminal illness, but she’s inherited the sin of living in a capitally inflated home.

 

Also, on TV recently, I watched a programme on (Australia’s) ABC 4 Corners, called The Pandora Papers, which is about tax havens for the ultra wealthy and powerful, and really identified an ‘alternative universe’, as one commentator described it, that the rest of us are largely unaware of. The programme showed how, in Australia, unidentified foreign investors are driving the price of homes beyond the reach of ordinary citizens who live here. There have been other programmes about corruption in the food industry in Europe, which goes beyond the borders of Europe.

 

I’ve read other stories in newspapers, and what they all have in common is inequality. Curiously, Philosophy Now (Issue 145 Aug/Sep 2021) had as its theme, existentialism, but included an article called The Stoic’s Lacuna by Alex Richardson, a History teacher at Croydon, UK. Its relevance to this topic was a reference to the Greek stoic, Epictetus, who said, “Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.” In other words, accept one’s lot in life and stop whinging.

 

Richardson’s essay extends into the modern day by referencing Katherine Birbalsingh (given the sobriquet, Britain’s strictest headmistress), Dr Michael Sugrue and Jordan Peterson as ‘modern day stoics’, who all advocate in varying degrees, that inequality is the natural order of things. Birbalsingh may be the most liberal of them, when she says, “Of course the world is run by an old boys’ network, and of course it’s not fair.” I admit I know nothing about her outside Richardson’s essay, but he puts her in the same sentence, therefore category, as former Navy SEAL, Jocko Willink, who effectively argues that a person’s day-to-day struggle with paying off a mortgage and generally making ends meet is completely disconnected from ‘political management of the economy’. 

 

Peterson is someone I’m more familiar with, who effectively argues that inequality is an evolutionary consequence of the survival of the fittest, not only in the natural world but in human affairs. People, especially males, get to the top of the heap, where they are especially attractive to females, who copulate and subsequently procreate with them to ensure the survival of both parties’ genes. As it happens, this exact scenario is played out by one of the families represented in the aforementioned TV show, Capital.

 

Richardson believes that Peterson is a ‘follower’ of the ‘Pareto Principle’, expressed in the Bible (both Mark and Matthew): “For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have abundance, but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” In other words, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Or as Richardson puts it, “wealth and power naturally accumulate in the hands of a few exceptional individuals at the top” (my emphasis).

 

But, according to Richardson, Dr Michael Sugrue is the most blunt and dispassionate, when he said in a popular lecture on Aurelius that ‘Stoicism teaches us that the social structure is “not our problem” and that, “if God, or nature, or whatever is controlling the world makes you a slave then be a good slave.”'

 

The common thread in all these admonitions, is that they are made by people who see themselves among the privileged elite, who would never contemplate that what they advocate for others could befall them.

 

I think inequality drives injustice, corruption and an upside down economy. To give an example, Italy. It’s well known that there is both social and wealth disparity between the north of Italy, which is the capital of supercars and high fashion, and the south of Italy, which is the home of agriculture and the country’s food bowl. But this dichotomy is worldwide. The production of food, which is essential, is one of the lowest paid occupations in the world.

 

Now, let’s add another factor, called climate change. I don’t find it altogether anomalous that climate change has a dichotomous effect on humanity. It’s the consequence of all the ‘progress’ we’ve made since the industrial revolution, and it’s a juggernaut that can’t be stopped. Yet it will affect the poorer nations first. As the Prime Minister of Samoa, Fiame Naomi Mata’afa, recently said, ‘Pacific Islanders don’t want to be the canary in the coalmine for climate change’. If one looks at Italy again, one could argue that supercars have contributed to climate change and the agriculture sector will bear the consequences.

 

I recently did an online course provided by New Scientist, called Greener Living, which was ostensibly about climate change, its causes and its effects on future generations. According to the people running the course, it will require enormous changes to the way we live, including what we eat.

 

In the 25-26 September issue of the Weekend Australian Magazine (a Murdoch publication, btw) there was an interview with 33 year old Anika Molesworth, a scientist who also runs a farm near Broken Hill in NSW. She says that modelling for 2050 (based on nothing changing) would see 30% decrease in rainfall and 2 months of days above 40C, which would make the property effectively inoperable. But she also claims we have the means at our disposal to change this outcome, and she’s a founding director of Farmers for Climate Action. She’s frustrated by the missed opportunities in our country for renewable energy; we have a government that is stubbornly resistant to changes to the status quo.

 

I made an allusion before to the well known meme of evolution as the survival of the fittest, but much of evolution has occurred through symbiosis. Your body is an entire ecosystem to organisms that thrive in order for you to live, largely without your cognisance. I know from a working lifetime in engineering that successful projects are the result of people collaborating and working together. Environments, including our political environments, where people are antagonistic and work against each other, achieve little except blame and finger-pointing. A perfect example of that is the current political climate in America.

 

If we don’t want to self-destruct, we need to work together, punish corruption that erodes the wealth and agency of ordinary people, adopt sustainable economic models, not dependent on infinite consumerism and keeping people in debt for their entire productive lives. If we stick to the mantra that inequality is the ‘natural order’, we will fail and it will ultimately be catastrophic, worse than the Roman Empire, the Egyptian empire or the Mayan empire, because it will be global.

A philosophical exploration of Type A and Type B time

 This arose from a question referred to me on Quora. As part of my discussion, I wondered into philosophical territory originally posited over a century ago by a forgotten philosopher, J.M.E. McTaggart, thanks to A.C. Grayling (English philosophers seem to have a predilection for using initials). It seems to fit seamlessly into my own particular philosophy on the relationship between time and consciousness.

 

The original question on Quora, asked by Adriana Moraes (from Sao Paulo, Brazil):

 

How does the past, present, and future exist simultaneously?

 

I don’t believe they do. In fact, I contend that past, present and future are only meaningful concepts in some creature’s mind; which means that I don’t believe it’s a cognitive state unique to humanity.

 

We are only aware of the past because we have memories. In fact, without memory, you wouldn’t know you are conscious. Consciousness exists in a constant present, so time for us is always ‘now’. This, of course, applies to all sentient creatures. For all events that we witness or observe, ‘now’ is ephemeral – they become the past as soon as they happen - which is demonstrated every time someone takes a photo. We say it ‘freezes time’, when in fact, it records an event that would otherwise vanish.

 

Past, present and future require a reference point, and consciousness provides that reference point. We imagine futures, and curiously, the same part of the brain that imagines what might happen, conjures up memories of what has happened. This makes sense when one realises that we attempt to predict the future based on what we have experienced in the past. 

 

Raymond Tallis, who has a background in neuroscience and writes books as well as a regular column in Philosophy Now, makes the observation that our ability to ‘imagine’ future ‘possibilities’, and select one to make ‘actual’, is the very definition of free will, only he calls it 'agency'.

 

In 1908, an Oxford philosopher, J.M.E. McTaggart published a paper titled, On the Unreality of Time in the journal, Mind (ref: A.C. Grayling, The History of Philosophy, 2019). McTaggart argued that there are 2 types of time: Type A, which is based on using the ‘present’ as a reference point for ‘past-present-future’; and Type B, which is just the ordering of events into ‘earlier than/later than’. He contended, in effect, that because ‘now’ is constantly changing, you get contradictions with Type A and Type B (which is perceivably 'fixed'). I’ve over-simplified his argument for brevity, and given it my own interpretation, which is that you can’t have both Type A and Type B. However, I contend that Type B time is just Type A time without consciousness, which resolves that particular paradox.

 

Most physicists, if not all, believe that the past, present and future are all fixed, because, according to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, ‘now’ is totally subjective. This is the so-called ‘block universe’, which is a logical consequence of treating time as a spatial dimension, giving us space-time.

 

You can observe time as a dimension by looking at the night sky and seeing stars hundreds, if not thousands of years, in the past. This means that hypothetical observers in different parts of the Universe see a different ‘now’ and will observe events occurring in different sequences. This is a logical consequence of the finite speed of light. However, causally related events must happen in an objective sequence, irrespective of observers. This is Type B time, as defined by McTaggart. We are able to deduce causality of events that have happened in our past, which gives us theories of cosmology and evolution. This has to be compatible with Type A time, which is dependent on the fact that we all live in the present all of the time. 

 

Whether our present is different to someone else’s present (somewhere else in the Universe) just means that their Type A experience of time is different to ours, but Type B time occurs regardless of conscious observers.

What is scientism?

 I’m currently reading a book (almost finished, actually) by Hugh Mackay, The Inner Self; The joy of discovering who we really are. Mackay is a psychologist but he writes very philosophically, and the only other book of his I’ve read is Right & Wrong: How to decide for yourself, which I’d recommend. In particular, I liked his chapter titled, The most damaging lies are the ones we tell ourselves.

You may wonder what this has to do with the topic, but I need to provide context. In The Inner Self, Mackay describes 20 ‘hiding places’ (his term) where we hide from our ‘true selves’. It’s all about living a more ‘authentic’ life, which I’d endorse. To give a flavour, hiding places include work, perfectionism, projection, narcissism, victimhood – you get the picture. Another term one could use is ‘obsession’. I recently watched a panel of elite athletes (all Australian) answering a series of public-sourced questions (for an ABC series called, You Can’t Ask That), and one of the take-home messages was that to excel in any field, internationally, you have to be obsessed to the point of self-sacrifice. But this also applies to other fields, like performing arts and scientific research. I’d even say that writing a novel requires an element of obsession. So, obsession is often a necessity for success.

 

With that caveat, I found Mackay’s book very insightful and thought-provoking – It will make you examine yourself, which is no bad thing. I didn’t find any of it terribly contentious until I reached his third-last ‘hiding place’, which was Religion and Science. The fact that he would put them together, in the same category, immediately evoked my dissent. In fact, his elaboration on the topic bordered on relativism, which has led me to write this post in response.

 

Many years ago (over 2 decades) when I studied philosophy, I took a unit that literally taught relativism, though that term was never used. I’m talking epistemological relativism as opposed to moral relativism. It’s effectively the view that no particular discipline or system of knowledge has a privileged or superior position. Yes, that viewpoint can be found in academia (at least, back then).

 

Mackay’s chapter on the topic has the same flavour, which allows him to include ‘scientism’ as effectively a religion. He starts off by pointing out that science has been used to commit atrocities the same as religion has, which is true. Science, at base, is all about knowledge, and knowledge can be used for good or evil, as we all know. But the ethics involved has more to do with politicians, lawmakers and board appointees. There are, of course, ethical arguments about GM foods, vaccinations and the use of animals in research. Regarding the last one, I couldn’t personally do research involving the harming of animals, not that I’ve ever done any form of research.

 

But this isn’t my main contention. He makes an offhand reference at one point about the ‘incompatibility’ of science and religion, as if it’s a pejorative remark that reflects an unjustified prejudice on the part of someone who’d make that comment. Well, to the extent that many religions are mythologically based, including religious texts (like the Bible), I’d say the prejudice is justified. It’s what the evolution versus creation debate is all about in the wealthiest and most technologically advanced nation in the world.

 

I’ve long argued that science is neutral on whether God exists or not. So let me talk about God before I talk about science. I contend that there are 2 different ideas of God that are commonly conflated. One is God as demiurge, and on that I’m an atheist. By which I mean, I don’t believe there is an anthropomorphic super-being who created a universe just for us. So I’m not even agnostic on that, though I’m agnostic about an after-life, because we simply don’t know.

 

The other idea of God is a personal subjective experience which is individually unique, and most likely a projection of an ‘ideal self’, yet feels external. This is very common, across cultures, and on this, I’m a theist. The best example I can think of is the famous mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan, who believed that all his mathematical insights and discoveries came directly from the Hindu Goddess, Namagiri Thayar. Ramanujan (pronounced rama-nu-jan) was both a genius and a mystic. His famous ‘notebooks’ are still providing fertile material 100 years later. He traversed cultures in a way that probably wouldn’t happen today.

 

Speaking of mathematics, I wrote a post called Mathematics as religion, based on John Barrow’s book, Pi in the Sky. According to Marcus du Sautoy, Barrow is Christian, though you wouldn’t know it from his popular science books. Einstein claimed he was religious, ‘but not in the conventional sense’. Schrodinger studied the Hindu Upanishads, which he revealed in his short tome, Mind and Matter (compiled with What is Life?).

 

Many scientists have religious beliefs, but the pursuit of science is atheistic by necessity. Once you bring God into science as an explanation for something, you are effectively saying, we can’t explain this and we’ve come to the end of science. It’s commonly called the God-of-the-gaps, but I call it the God of ignorance, because that’s exactly what it represents.

 

I have 2 equations tattooed on my arms, which I describe in detail elsewhere, but they effectively encapsulate my 3 worlds philosophy: the physical, the mental and the mathematical. Mackay doesn’t talk about mathematics specifically, which is not surprising, but it has a special place in epistemology. He does compare science to religion in that scientific theories incorporate ‘beliefs', and religious beliefs are 'the religious equivalent of theories'. However, you can’t compare scientific beliefs with religious faith, because one is contingent on future discoveries and the other is dogma. All scientists worthy of the name know how ignorant we are, but the same can’t be said for religious fundamentalists.

 

However, he's right that scientific theories are regularly superseded, though not in the way he infers. All scientific theories have epistemological limits, and new theories, like quantum mechanics and relativity (as examples), extend old theories, like Newtonian mechanics, into new fields without proving them wrong in the fields they already described. And that’s a major difference to just superseding them outright.

 

But mathematics is different. As Freeman Dyson once pointed out, a mathematical theorem is true for all time. New mathematical discoveries don’t prove old mathematical discoveries untrue. Mathematics has a special place in our system of knowledge.

 

So what is scientism? It’s a pejorative term that trivialises and diminishes science as an epistemological success story.