Café Philos: an internet café

On a forum I frequent is a person who wants to be your guru. He's had some mystical experiences (He claims they are beyond counting), and has reached firm conclusions about the nature of god, the self, and the universe.

Whoever doesn't agree with him is a fool, he says, because he has had so many more profound experiences than they. Better yet, he's even brighter than they are too. How can you beat such reasonable qualifications?

Some of the people on the forum are even impressed by this man. He's witty in his put-downs, you know. A sure sign he's the Buddha.

Some years ago, I did a stint as a firefighter. In the ready room, the room where we waited for the calls, the men would bullshit. "Captain, what do you think of abortion?"

"Simple! Abortion is always wrong."

"Lieutenant, what do you think of abortion?

"It's murder, plain and simple."

"Anderson, what do you think of abortion?"

"There's no two ways about it: A woman has a right to choose."

The men would bullshit like that until a call came in.

Then they'd get real.

A fire does not favor firm conclusions. Fighting a fire is a game of odds. A game of probabilities. You cannot be certain what the fire is going to do. You can't bullshit a fire.

In a fire, you calculate the odds, take your best chance, and go with it. You don't look for absolute truth. There is none. You don't reach absolute conclusions because you're not a fool. You stay alert. You remain open to the changing reality.

Reality is always changing. It's just that most of our time is spent in the ready room where we don't notice it changing. So, we relax and bullshit. We speak with absolute conviction. We even call that kind of talk, "being serious". But it's light years from being serious. It's light years from reality.

I suppose it's possible that "seeing god" somehow leaves a person with absolute convictions about god, the self, and the universe.

But if I had to bet on that, I'd bet those absolute convictions are simple, fundamental misinterpretations of what he or she experienced. I'd bet what they really experienced was just as uncertain as dancing with fire.



(Photo courtesy of Ernest von Rosen, www.amgmedia.com)

A couple hundred years ago, it was widely believed in Europe and America that overexposure to moonlight would cause insanity. Hence, people living back then said of an insane person that he had been "moonstruck" or that he was a "lunatic". Of course, most folks no longer believe that insanity is caused by moonbeams. But they might want to reconsider their views once they hear this next story, reproduced here from ParentDish:

Bill Nye the Science Guy usually gets the biggest reaction from the experiments he performs on stage, but when speaking at McLennan Community College near Waco, Texas, he got quite a reaction when he brought up the Bible's description of the heavens. The scientist with a background in stand-up comedy who entertained millions for six years with his television show brought up the book of Genesis as an example of why the Bible should not necessarily be read literally.

Nye focused on Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.” Nye pointed out that the sun, the “greater light,” is but one of countless stars and that the “lesser light” is the moon, which really is not a light at all, rather a reflector of light. At that point, a number of audience members stood out and dragged their kids out of the auditorium. “We believe in a God!” screamed one woman as she left the room with three young children.

It seems obvious at this point that shedding light on the moon is quite likely to drive Fundamentalists nuts, even if no one else. That seems to be the only reasonable explanation for why several members of the audience couldn't handle hearing the truth about moonlight from a reputable science figure. So, maybe it's time to redefine the word "lunatic" as meaning, "Someone who believes, in defiance of all evidence to the contrary, that the moon makes its own light." Yup, that's a lunatic.

Yet, there's a broader lessen in all of this. Anyone who insists on believing the Bible is literally true, condemns themselves to irrationality. We have already seen that in the irrational ways in which Fundamentalists dismiss the theory of evolution, the Big Bang, and even at times the round earth and the sun's central place in the solar system. Once a person chooses to be irrational there is no telling where their lunacy will stop -- if it ever stops.

“This is a valuable program with proven results..."

- Senator David Vitter on the Federal Government's abstinence only sexual education program.


As everyone knows, politicians seldom tell the truth. Why should they? Much of the electorate refuses to believe the truth and would resent -- perhaps even hate -- the politician who told it. I know all that.

But some lies still have a dizzying ability to floor me. Like Vitter's statement that abstinence only sexuality education (can it really be called "education"?) is "a valuable program with proven results." All the facts line up against that statement. Worse, abstinence only leads to irresponsible sex which leads to teen pregnancies which leads to abortion. It simply astounds me a person in a position of trust could spout the lie Senator Vitter did. Or, more precisely, the lie itself is what astounds me -- I pretty much expect our esteemed leaders to be liars.

Another lie that still has the power to floor me is the lie that gay marriages will destroy the sanctity of heterosexual marriages. That lie is just as fabricated as a Playmate's breasts. It has no sound evidence for it. Yet, there it stands, more popular with politicians and the public than a cable news car chase.

I could go on, but I'm genuinely curious to hear from you whether there are still any lies that yet have the power to astound you even in this age -- and if so, which lies are those?

Bimbo talk show hosts are notorious for sloppy reasoning. Well, actually not. It would be more correct to say bimbo talk show hosts should be notorious for sloppy reasoning, but many people still swear by them -- swear by them when they are not actually parroting them.

The question I've been wondering about recently is whether, or to what extent, bimbo talk show hosts might set the pace for what people believe is good reasoning in this confused world? That's to say, I've become suspicious that, for a very large number of people, the bimbo talk show host is their primary teacher when it comes to how to reason.

Years ago, when I was attending a school with 14,000 students, I took a series of courses in logic. The classes never had more than 30 or 40 students in them. I don't know if that's typical, but it seems to me that a few dozen students willing to study logic out of a school of 14,000 might indicate that most people learn how to reason from some source other than courses in logic.

Perhaps many people these days learn how to reason from bimbo talk show hosts.

What do you think?

A friend of mine is one of those liberals to whom the word "foolish" might be applied. She is so focused on the world of ideas, she trips over the world she lives in. That's to say, her principles get in the way of her feet.

So, for instance, she loves humanity, but doesn't love very many flesh and blood people. She hates the powerful people she's read about who oppress the Latin American poor, but adamantly defends a real life friend of her's who is a cruel bully.

Another friend of mine is one of those conservatives to whom the word "foolish" might be applied. He also is so focused on the world of ideas, he trips over the world he lives in.

So, for instance, he is so opposed to public charity in principle, he even opposed Federal assistance to Katrina victims. Because the Bible tells him the Jews are God's chosen people, he cannot see the injustice of Israel's settlements on the West Bank.

Ideas are more like maps than anything else. Just like maps, their truth value is in whether they are sure guides. But some people are more in love with the maps they make than they are with the terrain the maps are supposed to be guides to. They are like undisciplined cartographers who would sooner have an especially attractive map that's wrong than they would have a plain but useful map that's accurate.

A young man recently asked me, "In a universe with no observers, would anything exist?"

I've been wondering now whether that's an epistomological question or a metaphysical one. At any rate, such questions have a way of revealing what we think truth is.

As everyone knows, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and a handful of other atheists have recently published books taking religion to task for its crimes against reason and humanity. And one of the ways some (but not all) religionists have responded to those books is to call the authors "whiners".

As you know: Besides being tacky, it's also a classic fallacy of logic to dismiss someone's arguments by attacking the author of the arguments. Yet, such is the habit of many people these days, and I sometimes think the popularity of logical fallacies must have something to do with the fact so many people listen to bimbo talk show hosts. Presumably, a goodly number of those people learn what logic is all about from listening while the bimbos routinely commit genocide against sound logic and reason. That at least is what I think some days.

On other days, I think the reason so many people employ logical fallacies must have something to do with how poorly community is felt and understood these days.

A sense of community is very likely one of the keys to moral behavior. It seems intuitive that if one thinks he or she is only in it for themselves, they are more likely than someone else to use what intelligence they have to fool others. But if you realize the truth we are all in this together, and that what happens to your neighbor in some way happens to you, then perhaps you are more likely to use your intelligence to help your neighbor understand things than you are to use your intelligence to make a fool of him or her. At least, that's what I think some days.

On still other days, I realize people have routinely massacred logic and reason since time immemorial and that nothing much ever changes about that. The person who 2000 years ago put into Jesus's mouth the words, "Whoever is not for me is against me", was just as much a bimbo as any talk show host of today. "The more things change, the more they stay the same."

So, I have at least three speculative views to dance between on the issue of why so many people resort to fallacies of logic. I suspect those three are my favorites because each in some way amuses me. Enough about me, though. Why do you think people resort to logical fallacies?

Legend has it that before Ted Turner opened the doors of CNN some many years ago, he first did something that was unprecedented for a news organization: market research. That is, until Turner came along, no news organization in history had thought to ask people what kind of news they wanted to see.

Instead, the traditional news organizations had relied on the judgment of their professional news staff to determine what was newsworthy and what was not. But Turner changed all that with the success of CNN. We largely owe to him the fact that a major news organization nowadays will break away from a White House press briefing to report a car chase. It’s the market these days, and not the news staff, that for the most part decides what is newsworthy.

That’s the legend. No doubt the truth is more complex, more nuanced. There are probably several factors that play a role in what becomes news. Yet, no one living in the 21st Century can any longer doubt the news is heavily influenced by what the market wants to hear. And in an ideal world, that would be a good thing.

Consider what has happened to most consumer products over the years largely due to the attention that corporations now pay to market demand. Products overall have improved in quality and features, while coming down in price. Anyone could give examples of that. In a competitive market driven economy, the consumer is king and queen. The corporation doesn’t decide what’s good enough for you. Not if it wants a successful brand. You have choices. If one corporation won’t produce a higher quality brand with more features at a lower price, another one will. That’s the case in most industries nowadays, but is it the case in the news industry?

In an ideal world, a competitive consumer driven news industry would translate into more news, higher quality news, and all of that at a lower price to the consumer. In some ways, that’s exactly what has happened.

News is far more available today than it was thirty years ago when most people had their choices limited to three TV networks, one or two local newspapers, a handful of national newspapers, and several magazines. Today, we are flooded with news outlets. The price of most newspapers and magazines has dropped too, at least in terms of percent of income. That leaves us with quality. Has it gone up?

Of course, that depends on what you mean by quality. The news industry is no different than any other industry: Quality is what the consumers think of as quality. Quality has indeed gone up – in the minds of most consumers. And therein lies the problem.

What the market thinks of as quality news is problematic for anyone concerned with truth, for truth is not what the market thinks of as quality. If that’s the case, then what does the market think of as quality?

So far as I know, no one has yet come up with an exact term for what the market thinks of as quality when it comes to the news. The best I can do is a phrase: “comfortably entertaining”. That phrase covers the two things people most demand these days when it comes to what they will consider quality news. The word “entertaining” is self-explanatory. So, let’s deal with “comfort”.

People want their news to be comfortable in the sense they want it to confirm their existing view of the world. They certainly don’t want it to throw them to the wolves of doubt, uncertainty, and confusion. Unfortunately, the truth can do that at times. And when that happens, the truth – increasingly – gets thrown overboard to make room for what the market really wants, and what it really considers high quality news: comfortable entertainment.

None of this is going to change. On the contrary, it will almost certainly accelerate. As the news industry becomes increasingly more sophisticated in gathering data on what the market wants, we will see the most popular news brands become increasingly divorced from truth. To be sure, they will retain the semblance of truth in their reports, but the substance will be largely purged. In the end, it will only be news outlets that cater to limited niche markets that accurately and honestly report the news. Those “high-end” outlets will have nowhere near the demand for them as the mainstream outlets. At best, those high-end outlets will be just as respected for quality – and just as unpopular with the majority of consumers – as is Mercedes Benz in automobiles.

"If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it."

Isadora Duncan

"In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations."

Einstein and Infeld, The Evolution Of Physics


When I first heard such ideas as an undergraduate, I could not make sense of them. A long time and a lot of work passed before I had a more or less clear understanding of what folks like Einstein and Infeld were talking about.

The basic idea is still a strange one: Reality is inaccessible to us. In the language of Einstein and Infeld, we cannot open the closed watch to peer inside. The best we can do is make models of what we think is inside the watch. All of these models will be wrong, but some of them might be more useful than the others. What we call "truth" is no more --- and no less --- than the most useful model we have of any particular reality. Yet, we cannot be certain that the reality even exists, let alone that we have correctly described it in our model.

It is here that many artists and scientists are in fundamental agreement. Neither the astute artist, not the astute scientist thinks even for a second that he or she has created the only possible interpretation of reality. Both recognize they have created only one of what might be many possible interpretations of the reality. Neither thinks of truth as an absolute. Both think of truth as conditional.

That irks a lot of people.

The astute artist and scientist are playing the game of "What Is Reality" on the pro-level, but a lot of people play that same game more or less on the level of a bright high school freshman. Until an artist, scientist, or someone else comes along to inform them that reality is inaccessible, they are not even dimly aware of the fact. Can you blame them for being uncomfortable with such a strange idea? I certainly don't. I remember too well the hard work it took me to grasp somewhat clearly that strange idea.