Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 7 July 2021

 

Book of the day, you may say

N.B. Today is a variation from my normal format in that I'm taking quotes only from a single work instead of my computer-generated random selections from books that I've read. I do this because I'm writing a review of The Constitution of Knowledge and in reviewing my highlights I found so many insightful and provocative quotes that I decided to share a bunch of them in lieu of the normal potpourri. Enjoy. 

As for the power of reason, it is the servant of what today we call confirmation bias, an idea Montaigne impressively anticipated. “Men’s opinions are accepted in the train of ancient beliefs, by authority and on credit, as if they were religion and law. They accept as by rote what is commonly held about it.… On the contrary, everyone competes in plastering up and confirming this accepted belief, with all the power of their reason, which is a supple tool, pliable, and adaptable to any form. Thus the world is filled and soaked with twaddle and lies.”

. . . .

“Not that it is impossible that some true knowledge may dwell in us: but if it does, it does so by accident. And since by the same road, the same manner and process, errors are received into our soul, it has no way to distinguish them or to pick out truth from falsehood.” [Montaigne]

. . . .

“We would need someone exempt from all these qualities [of bias and passion], so that with an unprejudiced judgment he might judge of these propositions as of things indifferent to him; and by that score we would need a judge that never was.” [Montaigne]

The knowledge problem centers not on what you know or what I know, but on what we know.

“Nothing can be so dangerous as principles thus taken up without questioning or examination; especially if they be such as concern morality, which influence men’s lives, and give a bias to all their actions.” [John Locke]

Epistemic rights, like political rights, belong to all of us; empiricism is the duty of all of us. No exceptions for priests, princes, or partisans.

In the nineteenth century, skepticism—the idea that if certainty is impossible, knowledge must be impossible—was elbowed aside by a related but quite different idea, that of fallibilism, a term coined by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. “On the whole,” he wrote, “we cannot in any way reach perfect certitude nor exactitude. We can never be absolutely sure of anything,” at least when any matter involves facts and statements about objective reality. “The scientific spirit,” said Peirce, “requires a man to be at all times ready to dump his whole cartload of beliefs, the moment experience is against them.”

[Karl] Popper said, knowledge in all its glory, like the biosphere in all its glory, comes from that most unglamorous of all methods: trial and error. Science’s genius is its ability to both make errors quickly and find errors quickly. It kicks the evolution of knowledge into warp drive.

Perhaps his [Charles Sander Pierce's] most impressive contribution, however, was to lay the groundwork for network epistemology, which conceptualizes scientific knowledge not merely as the product of individual or even group effort but as an emergent property of interactions across a social network. His insights were so far ahead of his time. . . . [H]e saw more clearly than anyone before him, and also more clearly than almost everyone today, that the concept of objective knowledge is inherently social. “It will appear,” he wrote, “that individualism and falsity are one and the same. Meantime, we know that man is not whole as long as he is single, that he is essentially a possible member of society. Especially, one man’s experience is nothing if it stands alone. If he sees what others cannot, we call it hallucination. It is not ‘my’ experience but ‘our’ experience that has to be thought of; and this ‘us’ has indefinite possibilities.”

“Unless truth be recognized as public—as that of which any person would come to be convinced if he carried his inquiry, his sincere search for immovable belief, far enough—then there will be nothing to prevent each one of us from adopting an utterly futile belief of his own which all the rest will disbelieve. . . .” [Charles Sanders Pierce]

“The real, then,” explained Peirce, “is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge.”

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 6 July 2021

 

2021 publication

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

America’s founders—Adams, Washington, Franklin, Madison, and others—all warned that no constitution is worth the paper it is written on if it is not also inscribed in people’s hearts and grounded in public virtue. “Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net,” John Adams said. “Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.”

The Enigma of Reason

Hugo Mercier

Retrospective and Prospective Uses of Reasons Sometimes people use reasons to explain or to justify decisions already taken and beliefs already held. This is a retrospective use of reasons. Sometimes people use reasons as arguments in favor of new decisions or new beliefs. This is a prospective use of reasons.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

What makes people fight each other? I was especially intrigued by the processes behind “group-identity” conflicts, which involve a stark distinction between “us” and “them.” This category includes violence that centers on nationalist, ethnic, racial, or other ethnocentric identities.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Together, lots of interactions and feedbacks among the parts of a system produce what complexity scientists call “disproportionate causation.” This means there’s often no clear relationship in the system between the size of a cause and the size of its effect.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Drawing on his research on the psychological effects of the fear of nuclear war, famed US psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton discusses the “psychic numbing” that the threat of climate change can induce in people. Lifton, The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival (New York: New Press, 2017).

Philosophical Intimations

James Hillman

Consciousness depends upon imagination and imagination holds a central place in the soul. “Imagination is the terminus ad quem of all properly human conscious experience; it is that faculty of man without which there can be no conscious experience.” (E.W. Warren)

Why Liberalism Failed

Patrick J. Deneen

A succession of thinkers in subsequent decades and centuries were to build upon these three basic revolutions of thought, redefining liberty as the liberation of humans from established authority, emancipation from arbitrary culture and tradition, and the expansion of human power and dominion over nature through advancing scientific discovery and economic prosperity.

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday the Fourth of July, 2021! Happy Independence Day!

 

Good Calories, Bad Calories

Gary Taubes

The science of epidemiology evolved to make sense of infectious diseases, not common chronic diseases like heart disease. Though the tools of epidemiology—comparisons of populations with and without the disease—had proved effective in establishing that a disease such as cholera is caused by the presence of micro-organisms in contaminated water, as the British physician John Snow demonstrated in 1854, it is a much more complicated endeavor to employ those same tools to elucidate the subtler causes of chronic disease. They can certainly contribute to the case against the most conspicuous determinants of noninfectious diseases—that cigarettes cause lung cancer, for example.

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

What makes it worth uttering is not its truth (the fact that something is true is never a sufficient reason for saying it), but the fact of its being the one truth which is important in the present situation.

Impeachment

Cass R. Sunstein

Under English law, the House of Commons took the term “misdemeanor” to refer to distinctly public misconduct, including but not limited to actual crimes.6 Thus “high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” the standard basis for impeachment, represented “a category of political crimes against the state.”

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

Blake too knew that we become what we behold, that we, as Barfield would say, participate in it.

Jung the Mystic

Gary Lachman

“Like the initiate of a secret society that has broken free from the undifferentiated collectivity,” Jung wrote, “the individual on his lonely path needs a secret which for various reasons he may not or cannot reveal. Such a secret reinforces him in the isolation of his individual aims.” Without this secret, Jung argues, we too easily fall into the herd-mind of the mass and lose our individuality.”

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 3 July 2021

 

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

But to the president [FDR], who was “unfamiliar” with Keynes’ theoretical academic work, Keynes was an impractical mystic. Though he insisted to Frankfurter that he and Keynes had a “grand talk” together and that he “liked” the British economist “immensely,” the truth was that FDR had been annoyed by the haze of high theory in which Keynes had enshrouded their conversation.

Crises of the Republic

Hannah Arendt

No doubt, “violence pays,” but the trouble is that it pays indiscriminately, for “soul courses” and instruction in Swahili as well as for real re-forms. And since the tactics of violence and disruption make sense only for short-term goals, it is even more likely, as was recently the case in the United States, that the established power will yield to nonsensical and obviously damaging demands—such as admitting students without the necessary qualifications and instructing them in nonexistent subjects—if only such “reforms” can be made with comparative ease, than that violence will be effective with respect to the relatively long-term objective of structural change.

Perennial Philosophy

Arthur Versluis

To be illuminated is to not-forget. With this parable [of the cave], Plato introduces us to the essential opening through which we must pass to enter into perennial philosophy. This doorway opens into the recognition, the re-cognition that there is truth, and that we can perceive it for ourselves.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Kissinger made a choice for stoicism, not pessimism, a willingness to endure no matter what obstacles were placed in his path, though with no ultimate ends to aim for, nothing beyond the affirmation of existence itself and the perpetuation of the United States.

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 2 July 2021

 

Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic

B. Alan Wallace

Even though they [the subtlest discursive thoughts, mental dialogues, images, memories, desires, and emotions] go undetected, they may strongly influence our minds and behavior. Unconscious mental processes, as Freud discovered centuries after Buddhist contemplatives, can actually exert deep and lasting influences in our mental lives. This practice is a path of self-knowledge, as subconscious influences are gradually identified via increasingly refined qualitative vividness.

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

History, largely experienced previously as a series of natural disasters, could now be seen as a movement in which everyone could potentially enlist. Intellectuals and artists rose as a class for the first time to lend a hand in the making of history, and locate the meaning of life in politics and art rather than traditional religion. The balance in European culture shifted from the religious to the secular – a momentous process that is still ongoing in many parts of the world.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

For whatever the historian calls an end, the end of a period or a tradition or a whole civilization, is a new beginning for those who are alive.

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

From the beginning, the clear, decisive, directed thinking that we associate with rationality is linked to aggression and force.

A Brief History of Everything

Ken Wilber

The tricky part . . . is how to do two very difficult things: one, to reasonably decide just what are the major differences between the male and female value spheres (à la Gilligan), and then, two, to learn ways to value them more or less equally. Not to make them the same, but to value them equally.

Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 1 July 2021

 

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

Because we’re unaccustomed to it, we don’t usually see that there’s a third possible logical term equal to yes and no which is capable of expanding our understanding in an unrecognized direction. We don’t even have a term for it, so I’ll have to use the Japanese mu. Mu means “no thing.” Like “Quality” it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, “No class; not one, not zero, not yes, not no.” It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is in error and should not be given. “Unask the question” is what it says.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

More knowledge, more material goods, and more leisure did not, [Georges Sorel] wrote at the end of Illusions of Progress, reliably make people happier. The mistake of thinking that they did was inherited from enlightened eighteenth -century reformers. It arose from a soft “ethic of consumption.” Happiness, Sorel suggested in a brief passage that echoed Mill’s own bow to immemorial wisdom on the topic, depended heavily on being active and having satisfying work.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

[T]he paralysis induced by thinking is twofold: it is inherent in the stop and think, the interruption of all other activities—psychologically, one may indeed define a “problem” as a “situation which for some reason appreciably holds up an organism in its effort to reach a goal”—and it also may have a dazing after-effect, when you come out of it, feeling unsure of what seemed to you beyond doubt while you were unthinkingly engaged in whatever you were doing.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

In the totalitarian interpretation, all laws become . . . laws of movement. Nature and History are no longer stabilizing sources of authority for laws governing the actions of mortal men, but are themselves movements. Their laws, therefore, though one might need intelligence to perceive or understand them, have nothing to do with reason or permanence.

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

Of the hedonic substances found in food, only alcohol, caffeine, and sugar are addictive—and these are food additives, not foods in themselves.

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

The first principle” of science, as the Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman put it so aptly, “is that you must not fool yourself and you’re the easiest person to fool.”)

Thoughts for the Day: 30 June 2021

 

An outstanding & much-needed work: Read it!

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

All three of the great liberal social systems—economic, political, epistemic—are traceable to breakthroughs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. All were pioneered by men who followed each other’s writings and doings and who sometimes knew each other personally. They and their works were flawed with the inequities and blind spots of their eras (one of which is reflected in the fact that all of them were men).

N.B. This book is a new one on the list--and I haven't even finished it yet. But it's a terrific book and one that really goes to the heart of much of our current economic, political, and epistemic malfunctions. Spoiler alert: three of the leading "men" behind "the great liberal systems" are John Locke, Adam Smith, and James Madison, while Socrates/Plato, Montaigne, Francis Bacon, and Charles Sanders Pierce get well-deserved shout-outs also.

Building a Bridge to the 18th Century

Neil Postman

When one has knowledge, one knows how to make sense of information, knows how to relate information to one’s life, and, especially, knows when information is irrelevant.

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

Mark Twain said, “Education is mainly what we have unlearned.” Yoda implored, “You must unlearn what you have learned.”

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

While cows and sheep are indeed methane producers, the methane emissions from the animals (5 percent) turns out to be a pittance compared to the rest of agriculture (10 percent), and compared to industrial methane production (35 percent) and the transportation industry (50 percent). And the climate change impact of the animals is completely dwarfed by the nitrous oxide production resulting from synthetic fertilizer sprayed on all those plant-based products throughout the Midwest grain belt.

N.B. I believe that these figures are a bit out of sync with the most recent figures in the U.S. Livestock per the EPA accounts for less than 4% of emissions and that includes a 2% contribution from cattle.

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

If imagination were sufficiently described . . . as a form of experience which presents the real and the unreal in a kind of undistinguished amalgam or solution from which, later, the work of intellect is to precipitate or crystallize the truth, art as imagination would have a genuine and important function in human life; a function analogous to that whereby a scientist envisages the various possible hypotheses which later experiment and observation will enable him to reject or raise to the level of a theory. The business of art, on this view, would be to construct possible worlds, some of which, later on, thought will find real or action will make real.

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

Anarchists were not always responsible for this unprecedented carnage across Europe prior to the First World War, even if it was inspired by anarchist techniques. The violence was aimed at different political ends. But it was inspired by the belief – fundamental to much modern terrorism – that assaults on symbols of political and social order, and the self-sacrifice of individuals, had a propaganda value that far exceeded any immediate political ends.

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

In this ‘monstrous tragi-comic scene’, as Edmund Burke warned, ‘the most opposite passions necessarily succeed, and sometimes mix with each other in the mind; alternate contempt and indignation; alternate laughter and tears; alternate scorn and horror.’

The Way of Zen

Alan W. Watts

Taoism concerns itself with unconventional knowledge, with the understanding of life directly, instead of in the abstract, linear terms of representational thinking.