epistemology

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Solitary story telling in the desert

Told you, I did.  Saturday it is.  Now…there is a blog post.

That means, of course, that I am going to work today.

That’s not because of the fact that it’s Saturday, or because I’m writing a blog post, or even because I told you, though that may have some more causal input.  But otherwise the causality is very much:  I am going to work + I write blog posts on work days generally + I told you I would ⇒ I am writing a blog post.

It’s apparently been a sticking point in the history of statistics in the twentieth century that no one felt they could definitively infer actual causality by statistical testing (such as with medicine effects and so on) but only association.  Of course, this is a root problem in epistemology, not merely in statistics:  the question of how we know what we know or if we know what we think we know.  I’ve actually been dipping in and out of a book about the science of causality, called The Book of Why by Judea Pearl.  It’s good but somewhat dry, and that’s why I’ve had to keep dipping in and out of it between other things.

That latter is just an example of a frustration I’ve experienced throughout my life:  I have a hard time not getting distracted from one interesting thing by the next interesting thing, and so I don’t accomplish things I would like to accomplish.

In fact, the range of time from when I went to prison and the years following was a rare period during which I was able to commit to and follow through with (in this case) writing books and short stories, one at a time, finishing one before starting the next, which is the way I need to do things if I am to succeed.  And during that same time‒well, this started after prison really‒I practiced playing guitar and ended up writing and producing/performing/recording a total of six songs, four of which are published and streamable on all major platforms.

Since then, though, I have deviated from those habits, at least partly because of the utter lack of impact those things have had.  Telling stories while lost and alone to the struggling plants and rare animals in a desert oasis is not very fun.  Even though they don’t interrupt, they almost certainly don’t actually understand anything.  And they never give any feedback.

I’ve thought to myself many times recently that I wish I could form my own personal Tyler Durden.  For those of you who haven’t read or seen Fight Club, I will try to avoid any spoilers, but I will just say that Tyler Durden is Brad Pitt’s character in the movie (and one of the two main characters in both the book and the movie).  Those of you who have seen or read it will know what I mean when I say I need or want my own equivalent of Tyler.

In any case, I need to escape somehow.  I’m enraged by almost everything nowadays.  At least I feel rage.  It’s uncertain that rage is truly caused by the things toward which I feel it.  They may merely happen to be “there” when I’m prone to that feeling.

See what I mean about the whole causality thing?  One can sympathize with the statisticians who felt they could not firmly infer causality from association.  Human emotional states give us good reason to be cautious about drawing conclusions too quickly and recklessly.  As Radiohead sang, “Just ’cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.”  Or, as I like to remind people, just because you infer it doesn’t mean it was implied.

One may feel what seems to be anger toward another person or circumstance, but then it turns out that one’s blood sugar is just low, and the body is secreting all sorts of sympathetic nervous system hormones to trigger the release and creation of glucose in the body.  But those hormones also influence the brain, and are associated with fight and flight.  The brain may then do its usual associational thing and draw mistaken conclusions about the source or cause of one’s anger.

It reminds me a little bit of the brilliantly acted scene in The Fellowship of the Ring (and the equivalent scene in the book) where Bilbo gets angry and snaps at Gandalf when Gandalf is encouraging him to leave the Ring behind for Frodo.  In this case, of course, it is the Ring itself that’s causing Bilbo’s ire, but he feels, at least for a moment, that it is Gandalf’s “fault”.

What point am I making?  I don’t know that I am actually coherently making any point at all.  But then, I’m thoroughly unconvinced that there’s any true point to anything (though certainly people can find their own internal, subjective meanings).  I have more than a little sympathy with (Health Ledger’s) the Joker, who wants to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.

Of course, he is mistaken in one thing (well…almost certainly more than one), and that is his claim that when one upsets the established order and introduces a little anarchy, everything becomes chaos.  Everything does not become chaos; everything always has been chaos.  Chaos and order are not opposites; order is just a subset of chaos.  What we call order is just one of the things chaos does in some places, in some times, in some circumstances.

And chaos doesn’t need agents, anymore than death needs incarnations or servants, or anymore than gravity needs invisible angels to guide the planets in their orbits around the sun.  This shit is just the way things happen; it doesn’t require any agency.  It simply is.

As for why it is the way it is, well, that is an interesting question.  Actually, it’s probably a whole slew of interesting questions.  I don’t think any of these are answered in The Book of Why, despite its title, though.  It’s just not the sort of thing toward which it is addressed.

Wow, I’m all over the place, which is on brand at least.  I’m going to draw this post to a close now.  I hope you have a good weekend.  If you like football, the SuperBowl is on this Sunday.  Actually, it’s on even if you don’t like football.  The game is not conditional upon any one person liking football‒although, it requires a certain minimum number of people to like football or else it will stop occurring.  But what is that number?  Does it vary from moment to moment?

Agh, I need not to get started on questions like that right now.  It may be the question that drives us, Neo, but I’m getting too wordy for a Saturday blog post.  Hasta luego mis amigos and soredewa mata jikai, minasan.

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Dogmas are a disease, a cancer of the mind. Avoid carcinogenic thinking if you can.

I’m going to try to keep this brief this morning, so even though I brought the mini laptop computer with me when I left work on Friday*, I am writing this on my smartphone.  It does make my thumbs sore, or at least it highlights their inherent soreness and stiffness, but that’s part of what makes me tend to write less.  Or at least, I write more slowly; it is not always easy to get me to write less.

I’m choosing this partly because I am just very tired.  On Friday nights and Saturday nights, I can take a couple of Benadryl and so on to help me sleep‒I know it’s not truly good sleep, but just being unconscious for more than an hour or two at a time is such a relief‒but on work nights that’s no good.  So, especially after the artificially extended sleep on the weekend, I tend to have a bad sleep on…well, on every other night, really, but Sunday is the first such night in the work week.

Another problem, and part of my reason for worse sleep, is that I am having a bit of a flare-up of my back/hip pain, and that makes nearly every effort feel that much harder, including simply trying to sleep‒although that’s a somewhat different type of effort than many others.

So, yeah, if there’s anything noticeably different in my writing style today than in my last handful of blog posts, it may be because of the fact that I’m writing on the smartphone.  It may also be something else entirely, of course, or even a combination of things (this seems most likely).  Just because one idea seems to provide a good explanation‒a good story, if you will‒doesn’t mean it’s right.

That’s a common trap into which I frequently see people fall, and it always annoys me (especially when I’m the person).  Some situation will happen, some occurrence will occur, and someone will propose‒perhaps just to themselves‒some reason, some explanation for the event(s), and it will seem at least somewhat plausible, and at least physically possible, and it doesn’t have any glaring logical inconsistencies.  And that’s where they stop.  In their heads, that will be what they think of as the actual explanation for whatever it is they’re explaining.

Unfortunately, this is actually‒at best‒a hypothesis.

Now, if people just recognized that fact and kept the notion in their heads as a hypothesis, then this would be no problem.  All knowledge about the world is, in principle, provisional**.  There’s nothing wrong with having a hypothesis that you recognize as such.  All good science proceeds from speculation (first triggered and then confirmed or denied by observation and testing).

If one has relatively non-crucial concepts to address, one need not even be particularly bothered about confirming or denying one’s little hypothesis.  One can simply have it, tacitly implied, sitting there in potentia in the process of one’s mind.  Then if, quite by chance, one should encounter data or concepts or arguments that bear on the likelihood of that hypothesis, one can‒sometimes quite unconsciously‒adjust one’s hypothesis, or one can discard or replace it or even find oneself more confident in it.

This is all well and good.  But all too often, humans take their first plausible seeming notion and decide that they must now have the answer.  And then, depending on their emotional connection to the idea, if they encounter disconfirming evidence or argument, they twist away from it, dismiss it, seek out only pseudo-confirming ideas and evidence or even (shudder) just the company of other people who share their epistemologically suspect ideas.

These are such things as conspiracy theories are made on, or even religions (literal or figurative ones, including cultish forms of economic theories and philosophical ideas).  And when one does not update one’s ideas, when one is not aligned with reality, sooner or later, one will collide with it.  When one collides with reality, it’s never reality that is damaged.

If it were only the person who persisted in self deception that got hurt in the crash, it would still be tragic but at least at least it would be tolerable.  But as with literal crashes, the innocent are all too often harmed and made to suffer as a consequence of someone else’s poor judgment.

This is part of why I despise all dogmatic thinking.  I even coined an expression in relation to it:  Spay and neuter your dogmas!

Do not let them propagate.  Dogmas are among the most perilous of meme-plexes because they are so stiff and brittle and they tend to have sharp edges.  But even when they don’t, there is still the problem of going against reality.  One can imagine the real nature of the world as a kind of tunnel or pipe or tube‒in places it is very wide and in places very narrow.  In some regions, a fair amount of variability in course is tolerable within it, but sooner or later, if one is not moving parallel to the course of reality, one will hit a wall.

How bad the collision will be can depend on many factors; one can have a mere scrape, or a glancing blow, or one can have a true “crash and burn” situation.

Those are generally worth avoiding.

Okay, that’s it for today.  I feel a bit grumpy and curmudgeonly right now, largely because of my pain and poor sleep, but sometimes it leads to decent writing.  Whether that’s been the case today, I’ll let you be the judge.  I am not impartial.

Have a good one.

*In case it wasn’t clear, I did not work on Saturday.

**Even the old cogito ergo sum.  And don’t get me started on cogitum ergot hatto.