The Certainty of Uncertainty

Posted by Keith Tidman 

We favour certainty over uncertainty. That’s understandable. Our subscribing to certainty reassures us that perhaps we do indeed live in a world of absolute truths, and that all we have to do is stay the course in our quest to stitch the pieces of objective reality together.

 

We imagine the pursuit of truths as comprising a lengthening string of eureka moments, as we put a check mark next to each section in our tapestry of reality. But might that reassurance about absolute truths prove illusory? Might it be, instead, ‘uncertainty’ that wins the tussle?

 

Uncertainty taunts us. The pursuit of certainty, on the other hand, gets us closer and closer to reality, that is, closer to believing that there’s actually an external world. But absolute reality remains tantalizingly just beyond our finger tips, perhaps forever.

 

And yet it is uncertainty, not certainty, that incites us to continue conducting the intellectual searches that inform us and our behaviours, even if imperfectly, as we seek a fuller understanding of the world. Even if the reality we think we have glimpsed is one characterised by enough ambiguity to keep surprising and sobering us.

 

The real danger lies in an overly hasty, blinkered turn to certainty. This trust stems from a cognitive bias — the one that causes us to overvalue our knowledge and aptitudes. Psychologists call it the Dunning-Kruger effect.

 

What’s that about then? Well, this effect precludes us from spotting the fallacies in what we think we know, and discerning problems with the conclusions, decisions, predictions, and policies growing out of these presumptions. We fail to recognise our limitations in deconstructing and judging the truth of the narratives we have created, limits that additional research and critical scrutiny so often unmask. 

 

The Achilles’ heel of certainty is our habitual resort to inductive reasoning. Induction occurs when we conclude from many observations that something is universally true: that the past will predict the future. Or, as the Scottish philosopher, David Hume, put it in the eighteenth century, our inferring ‘that instances of which we have had no experience resemble those of which we have had experience’. 

 

A much-cited example of such reasoning consists of someone concluding that, because they have only ever observed white swans, all swans are therefore white — shifting from the specific to the general. Indeed, Aristotle uses the white swan as an example of a logically necessary relationship. Yet, someone spotting just one black swan disproves the generalisation. 

 

Bertrand Russell once set out the issue in this colourful way:

 

‘Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken’.

 

The person’s theory that all swans are white — or the chicken’s theory that the man will continue to feed it — can be falsified, which sits at the core of the ‘falsification’ principle developed by philosopher of science Karl Popper. The heart of this principle is that in science a hypothesis or theory or proposition must be falsifiable, that is, to possibly being shown wrong. Or, in other words, to be testable through evidence. For Popper, a claim that is untestable is no longer scientific. 

 

However, a testable hypothesis that is proven through experience to be wrong (falsified) can be revised, or perhaps discarded and replaced by a wholly new proposition or paradigm. This happens in science all the time, of course. But here’s the rub: humanity can’t let uncertainty paralyse progress. As Russell also said: 

 

‘One ought to be able to act vigorously in spite of the doubt. . . . One has in practical life to act upon probabilities’.

 

So, in practice, whether implicitly or explicitly, we accept uncertainty as a condition in all fields — throughout the humanities, social sciences, formal sciences, and natural sciences — especially if we judge the prevailing uncertainty to be tiny enough to live with. Here’s a concrete example, from science.

 

In the 1960s, the British theoretical physicist, Peter Higgs, mathematically predicted the existence of a specific subatomic particle. The last missing piece in the Standard Model of particle physics. But no one had yet seen it, so the elusive particle remained a hypothesis. Only several decades later, in 2012, did CERN’s Large Hadron Collider reveal the particle, whose field is claimed to have the effect of giving all other particles their mass. (Earning Higgs, and his colleague Francis Englert, the Nobel prize in physics.)

 

The CERN scientists’ announcement said that their confirmation bore ‘five-sigma’ certainty. That is, there was only 1 chance in 3.5 million that what was sighted was a fluke, or something other than the then-named Higgs boson. A level of certainty (or of uncertainty, if you will) that physicists could very comfortably live with. Though as Kyle Cranmer, one of the scientists on the team that discovered the particle, appropriately stresses, there remains an element of uncertainty: 

 

“People want to hear declarative statements, like ‘The probability that there’s a Higgs is 99.9 percent,’ but the real statement has an ‘if’ in there. There’s a conditional. There’s no way to remove the conditional.”

 

Of course, not in many instances in everyday life do we have to calculate the probability of reality. But we might, through either reasoning or subconscious means, come to conclusions about the likelihood of what we choose to act on as being right, or safely right enough. The stakes of being wrong matter — sometimes a little, other times consequentially. Peter Higgs got it right; Bertrand Russell’s chicken got it wrong.

  

The takeaway from all this is that we cannot know things with absolute epistemic certainty. Theories are provisional. Scepticism is essential. Even wrong theories kindle progress. The so-called ‘theory of everything’ will remain evasively slippery. Yet, we’re aware we know some things with greater certainty than other things. We use that awareness to advantage, informing theory, understanding, and policy, ranging from the esoteric to the everyday.

 

Is Technology ‘What Makes us Human’?

Posted by Keith Tidman

Technology and human behaviour have historically always been intertwined, defining us as the species we are. Today, technology’s ubiquity means that our lives’ ever-faster turn toward it and its multiplicity of forms have given it stealth-like properties. Increasingly, for many people, technology seems just to happen, and the human agency behind it appears veiled. Yet at the same time, perhaps counterintuitively, what appears to us to happen ‘behind the curtain’ hints that technology is fundamentally rooted in human nature. 

Certainly, there is a delicate affinity between science and technology: the former uncovers how the world happens to be, while the latter helps science to convert those realities into artefacts. As science changes, technologists see opportunities: through invention, design, engineering, and application. This restlessly visionary process is not just incidental, I suggest, but rather is intrinsic to us.

 

Our species comprises enthusiastic toolmakers. The coupling of science and technology has led to humanity’s rich array of transformative products, from particle accelerators to world-spanning aircraft, to magnetic-resonance imaging devices, to the space-station laboratory and universe-imaging space telescopes. The alliance has brought us gene-editing technologies and bioengineering, robotics driven by artificial intelligence, energy-generating solar panels, and multifunctional ‘smart phones’.

 

There’s an ‘everywhereness’ of many such devices in the world, reaching into our lives, increasingly creating a one-world community linked by mutual interdependence on many fronts. The role of toolmaker-cum-technologist has become integrated, metaphorically speaking, into our species’ biological motherboard. In this way, technology has becomes the tipping point of globalisation’s irrepressibility.

 

René Descartes went so far as to profess that science would enable humankind to ‘become the masters and possessors of nature’. An overreach, perhaps — the despoiling of aspects of nature, such as the air, land, and ecosystems at our over-eager hands convinces us of that — but the trend line today points in the direction Descartes declared, just as electric light frees swaths of the world’s population from dependence on daylight.

 

Technology was supercharged by the science of the Newtonian world, which saw the universe as a machine, and its subsequent vaulting to the world of digits has had obvious magnifying effects. These will next become amplified as the world of machine learning takes center stage. Yet human imagination and creativity have had a powerfully galvanizing influence over the transformation. 

 

Technology itself is morally impartial, and as such neither blameworthy nor praiseworthy. Despite how ‘clever’ it becomes, for the foreseeable future technology does not yet have agency — or preference of any kind. However, on the horizon, much cleverer, even self-optimising technology might start to exhibit moral partiality. But as to the point about responsibility and accountability, it is how technology is employed, through users, which gives rise to considerations of morality.

 

A car, for example, is a morally impartial technology. No nefarious intent can be fairly ascribed to either inventor or owner. However, as soon as someone chooses to exercise his agency and drive the car into a crowd with the intent to hurt, he turns the vehicle from its original purpose as an empowering tool for transportation into an empowering weapon of sorts. But no one wags their finger remonstratively at the car.

 

Technology influences our values and norms, prompting culture to morph — sometimes gradually, other times hurriedly. It’s what defines us, at least in large part, as human beings. At the same time, the incorporation and acceptance of technology is decidedly seductive. Witness the new Digital Revolution. Technology’s sway is hard to discount, and even harder to rebuff, especially once it has established roots deep into culture’s rich subsurface soil. But this sway can also be overstated.

 

To that last point, despite technology’s ubiquity, it has not entirely pulled the rug from under other values, like those around community, spirituality, integrity, loyalty, respect, leadership, generosity, and accountability, among others. Indeed, technology might be construed as serving as a multiplier of opportunities for development and improvement, empowering individuals, communities, and institutions alike. How the fifteenth-century printing press democratised access to knowledge, became a tool that spurred revolutions, and helped spark the Enlightenment was one instance of this influential effect.

Today, rockets satisfy our impulse to explore space; the anticipated advent of quantum computers promises dramatic advances in machine learning as well as the modeling of natural events and behaviours, unbreakable encryption, and the development of drugs; nanotechnology leads to the creation of revolutionary materials — and all the time the Internet increasingly connects the world in ways once beyond the imagination.

 

In this manner, there are cascading events that work both ways: human needs and wants drive technology; and technology drives human needs and wants. Technological change thus is a Janus figure with two faces: one looking toward the past, as we figure out what is important and which lessons to apply; and the other looking toward the future, as we innovate. Accordingly, both traditional and new values become expressed, more than just obliquely, by the technology we invent, in a cycle of generation and regeneration.

 

Despite technology’s occasional fails, few people are really prepared to live unconditionally with nature, strictly on nature’s terms. To do so remains a romanticised vision, worthy of the likes of American idealist Henry David Thoreau. Rather, whether rightly or wrongly, more often we have seen our higher interests to make life yet a bit easier, a bit more palatable. 

 

Philosopher Martin Heidegger declared, rather dismally, that we are relegated to ‘remain unfree and chained to technology’. But I think his view is an unappreciative, undeservedly dismissive view of technology’s advantages, across domains: agriculture, education, industry, medicine, business, sanitation, transportation, building, entertainment, materials, information, and communication, among others. Domains where considerations like resource sustainability, ethics, and social justice have been key.

 

For me, in its reach, technology’s pulse has a sociocultural aspect, both shaping and drawing upon social, political, and cultural values. And to get the right balance among those values is a moral, not just a pragmatic, responsibility — one that requires being vigilant in making choices from among alternative priorities and goals. 

 

In innumerable ways, it is through technology, incubated in science, that civilisation has pushed back against the Hobbesian ‘nastiness and brutishness’ of human existence. That’s the record of history. In meantime, we concede the paradox of complex technology championing a simplified, pleasanter life. And as such, our tool-making impulse toward technological solutions, despite occasional fails, will continue to animate what makes us deeply human.

 

‘Mary’s Room’: A Thought Experiment

Posted by Keith Tidman

Can we fully understand the world through thought and language—or do we only really understand it through experience? And if only through experience, can we truly communicate with one another on every level? These were some of the questions which lay behind a famous thought experiment of 1982:

A brilliant neurophysiologist, Mary, knows all there is to know about her academic specialty, the science of vision: the physics, biology, chemistry, physiology, and neuroscience. Also how we see colour.

There’s a catch, however: Mary has lived her entire life in a totally black-and-white room, watching a black-and-white screen, and reading black-and-white books. An entirely monochromatic existence. Then, unexpectedly, her screen reveals a bright-red tomato.

What was it like for Mary to experience colour for the first time? Or as the Australian philosopher Frank Jackson asked, who originated this thought experiment, ‘Will [Mary] learn anything or not?’ *

Jackson’s original takeaway from his scenario was that Mary’s first-time experience of red amounted to new knowledge—despite her comprehensive scientific knowledge in the field of colour vision. Jackson believed at the time that colour perception cannot entirely be understood without a person visually experiencing colour.

However, not everyone agreed. Some proposed that Mary’s knowledge, in the absence of first-hand experience, was at best only ever going to be partial, never complete. Indeed, renowned philosopher Thomas Nagel, of ‘what is it like to be a bat’ fame, was in the camp of those who argue that some information can only be understood subjectively.

Yet, Mary's complete acquaintance with the science of vision might well be all there is to understanding the formation of knowledge about colour perception. Philosopher and neurobiologist Owen Flanagan was on-board, concluding that seeing red is a physical occurrence. As he put it, 'Mary knows everything about colour vision that can be expressed in the vocabularies of a complete physics, chemistry, and neuroscience.

Mary would not have learned anything new, then, when the bright-red tomato popped up on her screen. Through the completeness of her knowledge of the science of colour vision, she already fully knew what her exposure to the red tomato would entail by way of sensations. No qualities of the experience were unknowable. The key is in how the brain gives rise to subjective knowledge and experience.

The matter boils down to whether there are nonphysical, qualitative sensations—like colour, taste, smell, feeling, and emotion—that require experience in order for us to become fully familiar with them. Are there limits to our comprehension of something we don’t actually experience? If so, Mary did learn something new by seeing red for the first time.

A few years after Frank Jackson first presented the ‘Mary’s room’ thought experiment, he changed his mind. After considering opposing viewpoints, he came to believe that there was nothing apart from redness’s physical description, of which Mary was fully aware. This time, he concluded that first-hand experiences, too, are scientifically objective, fully measurable events in the brain and thus knowable by someone with Mary’s comprehension and expertise.

This switching of his original position was prompted, in part, by American philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett. Dennett asserted that if Mary indeed knew ‘absolutely everything about colour’, as Jackson’s thought experiment presumes, by definition her all-encompassing knowledge would include the science behind people’s ability to comprehend the actual sensation of colour.

To these points, Mary’s factual expertise in the science of colour experience—and the experience’s equivalence and measurability in the brain—appears sufficient to conclude she already knew what red would look like. The experience of red was part of her comprehension of human cognitive functions. Not just with regard to colour, but also to the full array of human mental states: for instance, pain, sweetness, coldness, exhilaration, tedium—ad infinitum.

As Jackson ultimately concluded, the gist is that, given the special particulars of the thought experiment—Mary acquired ‘all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like red and blue’—Mary did not acquire new information upon first seeing the red tomato. She didn’t learn anything. Her awareness of redness was already complete.

---

* Frank Jackson, 'Epiphenomenal Qualia', Philosophical Quarterly, 32, April 1982.

And the Universe Shrugged

Posted by Keith Tidman

It’s not a question of whether humankind will become extinct, but when.

To be clear, I’m not talking about a devastatingly runaway climate; the predations of human beings on ecosystems; an asteroid slamming into Earth; a super-volcano erupting; a thermonuclear conflagration; a global contagion; rogue artificial intelligence; an eventual red-giant sun engulfing us; the pending collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. Nor am I talking about the record of short-lived survival of our forerunners, like the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo erectus, all of whom slid into extinction after unimpressive spans.

Rather, I’m speaking of cosmic death!

Cosmic death will occur according to standard physics, including cosmology. Because of the accelerating expansion of the universe and the irrepressibility of entropy — the headlong plunge toward evermore disorder and chaos — eventually no new stars will form, and existing stars will burn out. The universe will become uninhabitable long before its actual demise. Eventually a near vacuum will result. Particles that remain will be so unimaginably distanced from one another that they’ll seldom, if ever, interact. This is the ultimate end of the universe, when entropy reaches its maximum or so-called thermodynamic equilibrium, more descriptively dubbed ‘heat death’. There’s no place to duck; spacefaring won’t make a difference. Nowhere in the universe is immune.

Assuredly, heat death will take trillions of years to happen. However, might anyone imagine that the timeframe veils the true metaphysical significance of universal extinction, including the extinction of humans and all other conscious, intelligent life? And does it really make a difference if it’s tens of years or tens of trillions of years? Don’t the same ontological questions about being still searingly pertain, irrespective of timescale? Furthermore, does it really make a difference if this would be the so-called ‘sixth extinction’, or the thousandth, or the millionth, or the billionth? Again, don’t the same questions still pertain? There remains, amidst all this, the reality of finality. The consequences — the upshot of why this actuality matters to us existentially — stay the same, immune to time.

So, to ask ‘what is the meaning of life?’ — that old chestnut from inquiring minds through the millennia — likely becomes moot and even unanswerable, in the face of surefire universal extinction. As we contemplate the wafer-thin slice of time that makes up our eighty-or-so-year lifespans, the question seems to make a bit of sense. That select, very manageable timeframe puts us into our comfort zone; we can assure ourselves of meaning, to a degree. But the cosmological context of cosmic heat death contemptuously renders the question about life’s purpose without an answer; all bets are off. And, in face of cosmic thermodynamic death, it’s easy to shift to another chestnut: why, in light of all this, is there something rather than nothing? All this while we may justifiably stay in awe of the universe’s size and majesty, yet know the timing and inevitability of our own extinction rests deterministically in its hands.

A more suitable question might be whether we were given, evolutionarily, consciousness and higher-order intelligence for a reason, making it possible for us to reflect on and try to make sense of the universe. And where that ‘reason’ for our being might originate: an ethereal source, something intrinsic to the cosmos itself, or other. It’s possible that the answer is simply that humankind is incidental, consigning issues like beginnings to unimportance or even nonsense. After all, if the universe dies, and is itself therefore arguably incidental, we may be incidental, too. Again, the fact that the timeframe is huge is immaterial to these inquiries. Also immaterial is whether there might, hypothetically, be another, follow-on Big Bang. Whereby the cosmological process restarts, to include a set of natural physical laws, the possible evolution of intelligent life, and, let’s not overlook it, entropy all over again.

We compartmentalise our lives, to make sense of the bits and pieces that competitively and sometimes contradictorily impact us daily. And in the case of cosmic death and the extinction of life — ours and everyone else’s possibly dotting the universe — that event’s speck-like remoteness in distant time and the vastness of space understandably mollifies. This, despite the event’s unavoidability and hard-to-fathom, hard-to-internalise conclusiveness, existential warts and all. To include, one might suppose, the end of history, the end of physics, and the end of metaphysics! This end of everything might challenge claims to any singular specialness of our and other species, all jointly riding our home planets to this peculiar end. 

Perhaps we have no choice, in the meantime, to conduct ourselves in ways that reflect our belief systems and acknowledge the institutional tools (sociological, political, spiritual) used to referee those beliefs. As an everyday priority, we’ll surely continue to convert those beliefs into norms, to improve society and the quality of life in concrete, actionable ways. Those norms and institutions enable us to live an orderly existence — one that our minds can plumb and make rational sense of. Even though that may largely be a salve, it may be our best (realistically, only) default behaviour in contending with daily realities, ranging from the humdrum to the spectacular. We tend to practice what’s called ‘manic defence’, whereby people distract themselves by focusing on things other than what causes their anxiety and discomfort.

The alternative — to capitulate, falling back upon self-indulgent nihilism — is untenable, insupportable, and unsustainable. We are, after all, quite a resilient species. And we live every day with comparatively attainable horizons. There remains, moreover, a richness to our existence, when our existence is considered outside of extraordinary universal timeframes. Accordingly, we go on with our lives with optimism, not dwelling on the fact that something existential will eventually happen — our collective whistling past the graveyard, one might say. We seldom, if ever, factor this universal expiry date into our thinking — understandably so. There would be little to gain, on any practical level, in doing otherwise. Cosmic thermodynamic death, after all, doesn’t concern considerations of morality. Cosmic death is an amoral event, devoid of concerns about its rightness or wrongness. It will happen matter of factly.

Meanwhile, might the only response to cosmic extinction — and with it, our extinction — be for the universe and humanity to shrug?

Miracles: Confirmable, or Chimerical?

Posted by Keith Tidman

Multiplication of the Loaves, by Georges, Mount Athos.

We are often passionately told of claims to experienced miracles, in both the religious and secular worlds. The word ‘miracle’ coming from the Latin mirari, meaning to wonder. But what are these miracles that some people wonder about, and do they happen as told?

Scottish philosopher David Hume, as sceptic on this matter, defined a miracle as ‘a violation of the laws of nature’ — with much else to say on the issue in his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). He proceeded to define the transgression of nature as due to a ‘particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent’. Though how much credence might one place in ‘invisible agents’?

Other philosophers, like Denmark’s Søren Kierkegaard in his pseudonymous persona Johannes Climacus, also placed themselves in Hume’s camp on the matter of miracles. Earlier, Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza wrote of miracles as events whose source and cause remain unknown to us (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 1670). Yet, countless other people around the world, of many religious persuasions, earnestly assert that the entreaty to miracles is one of the cornerstones of their faith. Indeed, some three-fourths of survey respondents indicated they believe in miracles, while nearly half said they have personally experienced or seen a miracle (Princeton Survey Research Associates, 2000; Harris poll, 2013).

One line of reasoning as to whether miracles are credible might start with the definition of miracles, such as transgressions of natural events uncontested convincingly by scientists or other specialists. The sufficiency of proof that a miracle really did occur and was not, deus ex machina, just imagined or stemming from a lack of understanding of the laws underlying nature is a very tall order, as surely it should be.

Purported proof would come from people who affirm they witnessed the event, raising questions about witnesses’ reliability and motives. In this regard, it would be required to eliminate obvious delusions, fraud, optical illusions, distortions, and the like. The testimony of witnesses in such matters is, understandably, often suspect. There are demanding conditions regarding definitions and authentication — such as of ‘natural events’, where scientific hypotheses famously, but for good reason, change to conform to new knowledge acquired through disciplined investigation. These conditions lead many people to dismiss the occurrence of miracles as pragmatically untenable, requiring by extension nothing less than a leap of faith.

But a leap of faith suggests that the alleged miracle happened through the interposition of a supernatural power, like a god or other transcendent, creative force of origin. This notion of an original source gives rise, I argue, to various problematic aspects to weigh.

One might wonder, for example, why a god would have created the cosmos to conform to what by all measures is a finely grained set of natural laws regarding cosmic reality, only later to decide, on rare occasion, to intervene. That is, where a god suspends or alters original laws in order to allow miracles. The assumption being that cosmic laws encompass all physical things, forces, and the interactions among them. So, a god choosing not to let select original laws remain in equilibrium, uninterrupted, seems selective — incongruously so, given theistic presumptions about a transcendent power’s omniscience and omnipotence and omniwisdom.

One wonders, thereby, what’s so peculiarly special about humankind to deserve to receive miracles — symbolic gestures, some say. Additionally, one might reasonably ponder why it was necessary for a god to turn to the device of miracles in order for people to extract signals regarding purported divine intent.

One might also wonder, in this theistic context, whether something was wrong with the suspended law to begin with, to necessitate suspension. That is, perhaps it is reasonable to conclude from miracles-based change that some identified law is not, as might have been supposed, inalterably good in all circumstances, for all eternity. Or, instead, maybe nothing was in fact defective in the original natural law, after all, there having been merely an erroneous read of what was really going on and why. A rationale, thereby, for alleged miracles — and the imagined compelling reasons to interfere in the cosmos — to appear disputable and nebulous.

The presumptive notion of ‘god in the gaps’ seems tenuously to pertain here, where a god is invoked to fill the gaps in human knowledge — what is not yet known at some point in history — and thus by extension allows for miracles to substitute for what reason and confirmable empirical evidence might otherwise and eventually tell us.

As Voltaire further ventured, ‘It is . . . impious to ascribe miracles to God; they would indicate a lack of forethought, or of power, or both’ (Philosophical Dictionary, 1764). Yet, unsurprisingly, contentions like Voltaire’s aren’t definitive as a closing chapter to the accounting. There’s another facet to the discussion that we need to get at — a nonreligious aspect.

In a secular setting, the list of problematic considerations regarding miracles doesn’t grow easier to resolve. The challenges remain knotty. A reasonable assumption, in this irreligious context, is that the cosmos was not created by a god, but rather was self-caused (causa sui). In this model, there were no ‘prior’ events pointing to the cosmos’s lineage. A cosmos that possesses integrally within itself a complete explanation for its existence. Or, a cosmos that has no beginning — a boundless construct having existed infinitely.

One might wonder whether a cosmos’s existence is the default, stemming from the cosmological contention that ‘nothingness’ cannot exist, implying no beginning or end. One might further ponder how such a cosmos — in the absence of a transcendent force powerful enough to tinker with it — might temporarily suspend or alter a natural law in order to accommodate the appearance of a happening identifiable as a miracle. I propose there would be no mechanism to cause such an alteration to the cosmic fabric to happen. On those bases, it may seem there’s no logical reason for (no possibility of) miracles. Indeed, the scientific method does itself call for further examining what may have been considered a natural law whenever there are repeated exceptions or contradictions to it, rather than assuming that a miracle is recurring.

Hume proclaimed that ‘no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle’; centuries earlier, Augustine of Hippo articulated a third, and broader take on the subject. He pointedly asked, ‘Is not the universe itself a miracle?’ (The City of God, 426 AD). Here, one might reasonably interpret ‘a miracle’ as synonymous for a less emotionally charged, temporal superlative like ‘remarkable’. I suspect most of us agree that our vast, roiling cosmos is indeed a marvel, though debatably not necessitating an originating spiritual framework like Augustine’s. 

No matter how supposed miracles are perceived, internalised, and retold, the critical issue of what can or cannot be confirmed dovetails to an assessment of the ‘knowledge’ in hand: what one knows, how one knows it, and with what level of certainty one knows it. So much of reality boils down to probabilities as the measuring stick; the evidence for miracles is no exception. If we’re left with only gossamer-thin substantiation, or no truly credible substantiation, or no realistically potential path to substantiation — which appears the case — claims of miracles may, I offer, be dismissed as improbable or even phantasmal.

The Afterlife: What Do We Imagine?

Posted by Keith Tidman

‘The real question of life after death isn’t whether 

or not it exists, but even if it does, what 

problem this really solves’

— Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921

Our mortality, and how we might transcend it, is one of humanity’s central preoccupations since prehistory. One much-pondered possibility is that of an afterlife. This would potentially serve a variety of purposes: to buttress fraught quests for life’s meaning and purpose; to dull unpleasant visions of what happens to us physically upon death; to switch out fear of the void of nothingness with hope and expectation; and, to the point here, to claim continuity of existence through a mysterious hereafter thought to defy and supplant corporeal mortality.

And so, the afterlife, in one form or another, has continued to garner considerable support to the present. An Ipsos/Reuters poll in 2011 of the populations of twenty-three countries found that a little over half believe in an afterlife, with a wide range of outcomes correlated with how faith-based or secular a country is considered. The Pew Center’s Religious Landscape Study polling found, in 2014, that almost three-fourths of people seem to believe in heaven and more than half said that they believed in hell. The findings cut across most religions. Separately, research has found that some one-third of atheists and agnostics believe in an afterlife — one imagined to include ‘some sort of conscious existence’, as the survey put it. (This was the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture, 2014.) 

Other research has corroberated these survey results. Researchers based at Britain's Oxford University in 2011 examined forty related studies conducted over the course of three years by a range of social-science and other specialists (including anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, and theologians) in twenty countries and different cultures. The studies revealed an instinctive predisposition among people to an afterlife — whether of a soul or a spirit or just an aspect of the mind that continues after bodily death.

My aim here is not to exhaustively review all possible variants of an afterlife subscribed to around the world, like reincarnation — an impracticality for the essay. However, many beliefs in a spiritual afterlife, or continuation of consciousness, point to the concept of dualism, entailing a separation of mind and body. As René Descartes explained back in the 17th century:

‘There is a great difference between the mind and the body, inasmuch as the body is by its very nature always divisible, whereas the mind is clearly indivisible. For when I consider the mind, or myself insofar as I am only a thinking thing, I cannot distinguish any parts within myself. . . . By contrast, there is no corporeal or extended thing that I can think of which in my thought I cannot easily divide into parts. . . . This one argument would be enough to show me that the mind is completely different than the body’ (Sixth Meditation, 1641).

However, in the context of modern research, I believe that one may reasonably ask the following: Are the mind and body really two completely different things? Or are the mind and the body indistinct — the mind reducible to the brain, where the brain and mind are integral, inseparable, and necessitating each other? Mounting evidence points to consciousness and the mind as the product of neurophysiological activity. As to what’s going on when people think and experience, many neuroscientists favour the notion that the mind — consciousness and thought — is entirely reducible to brain activity, a concept sometimes variously referred to as physicalism, materialism, or monism. But the idea is that, in short, for every ‘mind state’ there is a corresponding ‘brain state’, a theory for which evidence is growing apace.

The mind and brain are today often considered, therefore, not separate substances. They are viewed as functionally indistinguishable parts of the whole. There seems, consequently, not to be broad conviction in mind-body dualism. Contrary to Cartesian dualism, the brain, from which thought comes, is physically divisible according to hemispheres, regions, and lobes — the brain’s architecture; by extension, the mind is likewise divisible — the mind’s architecture. What happens to the brain physically (from medical or other tangible influences) affects the mind. Consciousness arises from the entirety of the brain. A brain — a consciousness — that remarkably is conscious of itself, demonstrably curious and driven to contemplate its origins, its future, its purpose, and its place in the universe.

The contemporary American neuroscientist, Michael Gazzaniga, has described the dynamics of such consciousness in this manner:

‘It is as if our mind is a bubbling pot of water. . . . The top bubble ultimately bursts into an idea, only to be replaced by more bubbles. The surface is forever energized with activity, endless activity, until the bubbles go to sleep. The arrow of time stitches it all together as each bubble comes up for its moment. Consider that maybe consciousness can be understood only as the brain’s bubbles, each with its own hardware to close the gap, getting its moment’. (The Consciousness Instinct, 2018)

Moreover, an immaterial mind and a material world (such as the brain in the body), as dualism typically frames reality, would be incapable of acting upon each other: what’s been dubbed the ‘interaction problem’. Therefore the physicalist model — strengthened by research in fields like neurophysiology, which quicken to acquire ever-deeper learning — has, arguably, superseded the dualist model.

People’s understanding that, of course, they will die one day, has spurred search for spiritual continuation to earthbound life. Apprehension motivates. The yearn for purpose motivates. People have thus sought evidence, empirical or faith-based or other, to underprop their hope for otherworldly survival. However, modern reality as to the material, naturalistic basis of the mind may prove an injurious blow to notions of an out-of-body afterlife. After all, if we are our bodies and our bodies are us, death must end hope for survival of the mind. As David Hume graphically described our circumstances in Of the Immortality of the Soul (1755), our ‘common dissolution in death’. That some people are nonetheless prone to evoke dualistic spectral spirits — stretching from disembodied consciousness to immortal souls — that provide pretext in desirously thwarting the interruption of life doesn’t change the finality of existence. 

And so, my conclusion is that perhaps we’d be better served to find ingredients for an ‘afterlife’ in what we leave by way of influences, however ordinary and humble, upon others’ welfare. That is, a legacy recollected by those who live on beyond us, in its ideal a benevolent stamp upon the present and the future. This earthbound, palpable notion of what survives us goes to answer Wittgenstein’s challenge we started with, regarding ‘what problem’ an afterlife ‘solves’, for in this sense it solves the riddle of what, realistically, anyone might hope for.

Zen ‘Koans’: What Is the Sound of One Hand?

Busy Busy Beggar (Aizu Museum, Waseda University)

Posted by Keith Tidman

‘Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?’

The puzzle above long ago entered popular culture, and is familiar to many: The question’s origins date back to one of the most influential Zen Buddhists, Hakuin Ekaku, whose life straddled the 17th and 18th centuries.

The Zen name for such a puzzle is koan — a paradoxical anecdote, dialog, or question. The idea is that koans permit thinking to escape the bounds of rationality and instead embrace intuition-like ways to awaken enlightenment and arouse spiritual development. It’s a realm where logical reasoning is shown inadequate, to be suspended. By pondering the mystery of koans, contemplative monks absorb Buddhist teachings — letting go of the strictly analytic method to understanding, and instead learning to accept ambiguity and paradox and the absence of just one truth.

There are more than 1,700 classical koans, amassed over many centuries in China, Japan, and elsewhere (Thomas Cleary, Secrets of the Blue Cliff Record, 2002). Each one is a meditative device aimed at prompting the deep awareness that comes only from an open, freed-up mind. The interpretations of koans are often not obvious or clear-cut, their ambiguity making multiple alternative insights possible. In turn, these insights might lead to additional questions, inviting further reflection.

As far as the pursuit of open-mindedness and intuition goes, the following aphorism was offered in the Diamond Sutra:

‘Out of nowhere, the mind comes forth’. 

The observation originated in a 9th-century Sanskrit document, translated into Chinese, which was among thousands of scrolls hidden in ‘The Cave of a Thousand Buddhas’, evidently a library concealed to protect its contents.

Here’s another koan, perhaps less well-known outside of Zen circles:

Two monks were arguing about the temple flag waving in the wind. One insisted, ‘The flag moves’. The other equally insisted, ‘No, it is the wind that moves’. They argued back and forth but couldn’t agree. The Zen master Huineng was passing by and, having overheard the two monks, said, ‘It is not the flag moving. It is not the wind moving. It is your mind moving’. 

In this koan, the minds of the first two monks were riveted on the flapping flag, becoming increasingly obsessed with the issue of whether the flag was moving (the observable world) or whether it was in reality the wind that moved  (an invisible force acting on the observable world). Huineng’s point is that the two monks’ minds had become agitated over a minor distraction, consumed by binary, either-or thinking, instead of being in the restful state fostered by Zen Buddhism. Huineng reminded them to move beyond the diversionary tug of who was right or wrong — as both were seeing only partial truth — and instead calm their needlessly restless minds, caught up in the argument.

This anecdotal koan is less enigmatic, but likewise offers a valuable insight into human behaviour:

Tanzan and Ekido were once traveling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was still falling. Coming around a bend, they met a woman in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the intersection. ‘Come on’, said Tanzan, at once lifting the woman and carrying her over the mud.

Ekido did not speak again until that night, when they reached a lodging temple. Then he no longer could restrain himself. ‘We monks don’t go near females’, he told Tanzan, ‘especially not young and attractive ones. It is dangerous. Why did you do that?’

‘I left the woman there’, said Tanzan. ‘Are you still carrying her?’

The account has various interpretations. One version is not to let the past consume you, such that an out-of-control preoccupation crowds out of the mind all else of greater value, including the present — forfeiting immediate experiences. Ekido was plagued by the niggling urge to judge and conform, unable to let go of re-litigating over and over whether Tanzan had violated the literal monastic code of conduct.

In doing so, Ekido succumbs to stepping outside of mindfulness, sacrificing what’s transpiring in the here and now. Meanwhile, Tanzan had moved on. Sometimes, moral codes are cloudy, even appropriately flexible in interpretation and application in order to bend to circumstances. As in this case, the right ‘moral’ choice may have been to break momentarily with convention in order to do a kindness — a higher good.

Another ‘paradoxical anecdote’ offers a different insight: 

Nan-in, a Zen master during the Meiji era, received a university professor who had arrived to inquire about Zen. Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full, and then kept on pouring.

The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. ‘It is overfull. No more will go in!’ ‘Like this cup’, Nan-in said, ‘you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?’

Here, the need to let go of — to unlearn — long-held, unaccommodating beliefs, preconceptions, biases, expectations, knowledge, and presumed wisdom is a prerequisite to opening the mind to learn new and different things. The paradox is that arguably the professor might not be able, no matter how sincere his intentions, to disassociate from a lifetime of learning — unable to empty his metaphorical cup.

This is another classic koan:

A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger racing after him. Coming to a precipice, the man caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.

Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away at the vine. Just then, the man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

The man faces inevitable death on all sides, trapped by a hungry tiger above and one below. He also faces the two mice, whose gnawing on the vine bodes increasingly dire outcomes. The man chooses to live in the moment, enjoying the luscious strawberry. It is a moment of sublime happiness. Seeing the tigers on each side, the man sees his life similarly bracketed: Before life he had nonexistence and after life he will return to nonexistence, for eternity. He is left with the present. We might similarly conclude the best option in life is to grasp that singular moment in which we relish the ‘strawberry’.

So, what to make of the koan, at the start of this essay, asking about the sound of one hand? The point is that a koan is dynamic and transformational, in the sense that it is, to recall the words of philosopher and Zen monk G. Victor Sogen Hori (in Zen Sand, 2003):

‘…both the object being sought and the relentless seeking itself. In a koan, the self sees the self not directly, but under the guise of the koan. . . . When one realizes (‘makes real’) this identity, then two hands have become one. The practitioner becomes the koan that he or she is trying to understand. That is the sound of one hand.’

In today’s world, heavily influenced by the ubiquity of the scientific method, analysis, quantification, and logic, people are heavily swayed by this way of thinking in which society seeks insight, knowledge, understanding, and even wisdom. But despite the significant contributions such approaches make available, they overlook and even obscure key aspects of the world and life. Perspectives on what motivates our thinking, our relationships, our values, our connections to the planet, our happiness, our fundamental nature, our intent, our enlightenment, and our potential.

In this way, the ancient koans — with their emphasis on intuitiveness, open-mindedness, and spirituality — are still able in the modern era to inform, inspire, and guide these vital human interests.

The Curiosity of Creativity and Imagination

In Chinese mythology, dragon energy is creative. It is a magical energy, the fire of the soul itself. The dragon is the symbol of our power to transmute and create with imagination and purpose.

Posted by Keith Tidman

Most people would agree that ‘creativity’ is the facility to produce ideas, artifacts, and performances that are both original and valuable. ‘Original’ as in novel, where new ground is tilled. While the qualifier ‘valuable’ is considered necessary in order to address German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s point in The Critique of Judgment (1790) that:

‘Since there can also be original nonsense, its products [creativities] must at the same time be models, i.e., be exemplary’.

An example of lacking value or appropriateness in such context might be a meaningless sequence of words, or gibberish.

Kant believed that creativity pertains mostly to the fine arts, or matters of aesthetics — a narrower perspective than today’s inclusive view. He contended, for example, that genius could not be found in science, believing (mistakenly, I would argue) that science only ever adheres to preset methods, and does not allow for the exercise of imagination. He even excluded Isaac Newton from history’s pantheon of geniuses, despite respecting him as a great man of science.

Today, however, creativity’s reach extends along vastly broader lines, encompassing fields like business, economics, history, philosophy, language, physics, biology, mathematics, technology, psychology, and social, political, and organisational endeavours. Fields, that is, that lend themselves to being, at their creative best, illuminative, nontraditional, gestational, and transformational, open to abstract ideas that prompt pondering novel possibilities. The clue as to the greatness of such endeavors is provided by the 16th/17th-century English philosopher Francis Bacon in the Novum Organum (1620), where he says that:

‘By far the greatest obstacle to the progress . . . and undertaking of new tasks and provinces therein is found in this — that men despair and think things impossible’.

Accordingly, such domains of human activity have been shown to involve the same explorative and generative functions associated with the brain’s large-scale neural networks. A paradigm of creative cognition that is flexible and multidimensional, and one that calls upon several features:

• an unrestricted vision of what’s possible,
• ideation, 
• images, 
• intuitions,
• thought experiments, 
• what-if gaming, 
• analogical reasoning, 
• metaphors, 
• counterfactual reasoning, 
• inventive free play, 
• hypotheses, 
• knowledge reconceptualisation, 
• and theory selection.

Collectively, these are the cognitive wellspring of creative attainment. To those extents, creativity appears fundamental to defining humanity — what shapes us, through which individual and collective expression occurs — and humanity’s seemingly insatiable, untiring quest for progress and attainment.

Societies tend to applaud those who excel at original thought, both for its own sake and for how it advances human interests. That said, these principles are as relevant to the creative processes of everyday people as to those who eventually are recorded in the annals of history as geniuses. However, the creative process does not start out with the precise end (for example, a poem) and the precise means to getting there (for example, the approach to writing that poem) already known. Rather, both the means and the end product are discoverable only as the creative process unfolds.

Above all, imagination sits at the core of creativity. Imagination is representational, of circumstances not yet real but that nevertheless can evoke emotions and behaviours in people. The world of imagination is, of course, boundless in theory and often in practice, depending on the power of one’s mind to stretch. The American philosopher John Dewey spoke to this point, chalking up every major leap in science, as he boldly put it in The Quest for Certainty, to ‘a new audacity of the imagination’. Albert Einstein’s thoughts paralleled these sentiments, declaring in an interview in 1929 that ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge’. Wherein new possibilities take shape. Accordingly and importantly, imagination yields ideas that surpass what’s already supposed.

Imagination is much more, however, than a mere synonym for creativity, otherwise the term would simply be redundant. Imagination, rather, is a tool: freeing up, even catalysing, creativity. To those ends, imagination entails visualisation (including thought experiments, engaged across disciplines) that enables a person to reach out for assorted, and changing, possibilities — of things, times, places, people, and ideas unrestricted by what’s presumed already experienced and known concerning subjective external reality. Additionally, ‘mirroring’ might occur in the imaginative process, where the absence of features of a mental scenario are filled in with analogues plucked from the external world around us. Ultimately, new knowledge and beliefs emerge, in a progressive loop of creation, validation, application, re-imagination.

Imagination might revolve around diverse dominions, like unconstrained creative thought, play, pretense, the arts, allegorical language, predictive possibilities, and imagery, among others. Imagination cannot, however, guarantee creative outcomes — nor can the role of intuition in human cognition — but imagination is essential (if not always sufficient) for creative results to happen. As explained by Kant, imagination has a ‘constitutive’ role in creativity. Something demonstrated by a simple example offered by 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes:

‘as when from the sight of a man at one time, and a horse at another, we conceive in our mind a Centaur’. 

Such imaginative, metaphorical playfulness being the stuff not only of absorbed, undaunted children, of course — though they are notably gifted with it in abundance — but also of freethinking adults. Adults whose minds marvel at alternatives in starting from scratch (tabula rasa), or from picking apart (divergence) and reassembling (convergence) presumed reality.

The complexities of imagination best nourish what one might call ‘purposeful creativity’ — where a person deliberately aims to achieve a broad, even if initially indeterminate outcome. Such imagining might happen either alone or with the involvement of other participants. With purposeful creativity, there’s agency and intentionality and autonomy, as is quintessentially the case of the best of thought experiments. It occasions deep immersion into the creative process. ‘Passive creativity’, on the other hand, is where someone has a spontaneous, unsought solution (a Eureka! moment) regarding a matter at hand.

Purposeful, or directed, creativity draws on both conscious and unconscious mechanisms. Passive creativity — with mind open to the unexpected — largely depends on unconscious mental apparatuses, though with the mind’s executive function not uncommonly collaboratively and additively ‘editing’ afterwards, in order to arrive at the final result. To be sure, either purposeful or passive creativity is capable of summoning remarkable insights.

The 6th-century BC Chinese spiritual philosopher Laozi perhaps most pithily described people’s capacity for creativity, and its sometimes-companion genius, with this figurative depiction in the Teo Te Ching, the context being to define ‘genius’ as the ability to see potential: ‘To see things in the seed’ — long before germination eventually makes those ‘things’ apparent, even obvious, to everyone else and become stitched into the fabric of society and culture.

Making the Case for Multiculturalism

Posted by Keith Tidman

Multiculturalism and ‘identity politics’ have both overlapping and discrete characteristics. Identity politics, for example, widens out to race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, national origin, language, religion, disability, and so forth. Humanity’s mosaic. It’s where, in a shift toward pluralism, barriers dissolve — where sidelined minority groups become increasingly mainstreamed, self-determination acquires steam, and both individual and group rights equally pertain to the ideal.

This situation is historically marked by differences between those people who, on one hand, emphasise individual rights, goods, intrinsic value, liberties, and well-being, where each person’s independence stands highest and apart from cultural belonging. And, on the other hand, the communitarians, who emphasise a group perspective. Communitarians regard the individual as ‘irreducibly social’, to borrow Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s shorthand.

The group perspective subordinately depends on society. This group perspective needs affirmation, addressing status inequality, with remedies concentrated in political change, redistributive economics, valuing cultural self-worth, and other factors. Communitarians assign primacy to collective rights, socialising goods, intrinsic value, liberties, and well-being. In other words, civic virtue — with individuals freely opting in and opting out of the group. Communitarians and individualists offer opposed views of how our identities are formed. 

But the presumed distinctions between the individual and community may go too far. Rather, reality arguably comprises a coexistent folding together of both liberal individualism and communitarianism in terms of multiculturalism and identity. To this point, people are capable of learning from each other’s ideas, customs, and social behaviour, moving toward an increasingly hybrid, cosmopolitan philosophy based on a new communal lexicon, fostering human advancement.

The English writer (and enthusiastic contributor to Pi’s sister publication, The Philosopher) G. K. Chesterton always emphasised the integrity of this learning process, cautioning:

‘We have never even begun to understand a people until we have found something that we do not understand. So long as we find the character easy to read, we are reading into it our own character’.

Other thinkers point out that cultures have rarely been easily cordoned off or culturally pristine. They contend that groups have always been influenced by others through diverse means, both malign and benign: invasion, colonialism, slavery, commerce, migration, flow of ideas, ideologies, religions, popular culture, and other factors. The cross-pollination has often been reciprocal — affecting the cultural flashpoints, social norms, and future trajectories of both groups.

Globalisation only continues to hasten this process. As the New Zealand philosopher of law Jeremy Waldron puts it, commenting on the phenomenom of cultural overlap:

‘We live in a world formed by technology and trade; by economic, religious, and political imperialism and their offspring; by mass migration and the dispersion of cultural influences’.

How groups reckon with these historical influences, as groups become more pluralistic, deserves attention, so that change can happen more by design than chance.

After all, it’s a high bar to surmount the historic balkanisation of minority cultures and to push back against the negativism of those who trumpet (far too prematurely) multiculturalism’s failure. The political reality is that societies continue to reveal dynamically moving parts. Real-world multiculturalism is, all the time, coalescing into new shapes and continuing to enrich societies.

Multiculturalism in political philosophy involves acknowledging and understanding the fact of diverse cultural moorings in society and the challenges they pose in terms of status, equality, and power — along with remedies. Yet, in this context, the question recurs time and again: has the case really been made for multiculturalism?

The American philosopher John Searle, in the context of education, questions the importance of ‘Western rationalistic tradition’ — where what we know is ‘a mind-independent reality . . . subject to constraints of rationality and logic’. Adding: ‘You do not understand your own tradition if you do not see it in relation to others’.

Charles Taylor, however, sees multiculturalism differently, as an offshoot of liberal political theory, unhampered by heavily forward-leaning ideology. This aligns with postmodernist thinking, distrusting rationalism as to truth and reality. The merits of scepticism, criticism, subjectivism, contextualism, and relativism are endorsed, along with the distinctiveness of individuals and minority groups within society.

Advocates of multiculturalism warn against attempts to shoehorn minority groups into the prevailing culture, or worse. Where today we see rampant nationalism in many corners of the world — suppressing, tyrannizing, and even attempting to stamp out minority communities — eighty years ago Mahatma Gandhi warned of such attempts:

‘No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive’.