Reasons To Believe

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away -- Philip K. Dick

Brooklyn Wolf asks, Do You Really Require Proof?

I don't have any absolute proof, and, truth be told, I don't need any. Just by looking at the wonderfulness of nature, from the macroscopic to the microscopic, I am convinced that God exists. When I look at the universe and consider the possibilities that it either sprung into existence by itself or had help, I take "had help." Yes, it's only a gut feeling and yes, it falls far short of proof, but that's all I need to live my life. But I'm also honest about it. I know that it's not proof, and I state the same up front to anyone who asks. I don't require "solid proof" for my beliefs -- and, if you seriously consider what I said, neither do you.

This was my response:

"Proof" is the wrong word. What people need are reasons. For some people, the fact that they like Orthodox Judaism is reason enough to believe. For others, the fact that their parents and ancestors believe is reason enough.

And then some people just want to know what's TRUE, period. We don't want reasons to believe if those reasons don't help us believe what's true. We want to avoid the traps other minds fall into: denial, logical fallacies, and sheltering ourselves from people and ideas that might destroy our beliefs.

We see that people with Muslim parents tend to believe in Allah and people with Jewish parents tend to believe in YHWH and we realize that people who believe for the kinds of reasons that we believed basically believe whatever they want to believe.

So we become skeptics. We set out to find what's true. And we steel ourselves to face the truth even if we have to give up some cherished beliefs and even if accepting the truth means that our families and friends and communities might reject us.

I'm not saying this makes us better people, or more healthy psychologically. I'm sure the psychological reasons for believing what our communities believe evolved for a reason. What I am saying is that we're more likely to believe in what's true.

If you'd rather believe what your loved ones believe and what your parents believed and what lets you live in an Orthodox community, you should probably stick with whatever it is that lets you do that. If you want to know what's true, become a skeptic.

Words and Argumentation: Abortion

Mark and I have a longstanding argument about abortion over at his place. It generally starts like this:

Mark: Abortion is wrong because fetuses are humans and it's wrong to kill humans.
Me: You're just begging the question by overloading the word "humans." When we say "fetuses are humans," we mean it in a biological sense. When we say "it's wrong to kill humans," we are no longer talking about the biological sense, but a moral one.

Today, I came across a great post at Overcoming Bias that might be helpful. Excerpt:

In the game Taboo (by Hasbro), the objective is for a player to have their partner guess a word written on a card, without using that word or five additional words listed on the card. For example, you might have to get your partner to say "baseball" without using the words "sport", "bat", "hit", "pitch", "base" or of course "baseball"...

But then, by the time I discovered the game, I'd already been practicing it for years - albeit with a different purpose.

Yesterday we saw how replacing terms with definitions could reveal the empirical unproductivity of the classical Aristotelian syllogism:

All [mortal, ~feathers, biped] are mortal;
Socrates is a [mortal, ~feathers, biped];
Therefore Socrates is mortal.

But the principle applies much more broadly:

Albert: "A tree falling in a deserted forest makes a sound."
Barry: "A tree falling in a deserted forest does not make a sound."

Clearly, since one says "sound" and one says "~sound", we must have a contradiction, right? But suppose that they both dereference their pointers before speaking:

Albert: "A tree falling in a deserted forest matches [membership test: this event generates acoustic vibrations]."
Barry: "A tree falling in a deserted forest does not match [membership test: this event generates auditory experiences]."

Now there is no longer an apparent collision - all they had to do was prohibit themselves from using the word sound. If "acoustic vibrations" came into dispute, we would just play Taboo again and say "pressure waves in a material medium"; if necessary we would play Taboo again on the word "wave" and replace it with the wave equation. (Play Taboo on "auditory experience" and you get "That form of sensory processing, within the human brain, which takes as input a linear time series of frequency mixes.")

...

The illusion of unity across religions can be dispelled by making the term "God" taboo, and asking them to say what it is they believe in; or making the word "faith" taboo, and asking them why they believe it. Though mostly they won't be able to answer at all, because it is mostly profession in the first place, and you cannot cognitively zoom in on an audio recording.

When you find yourself in philosophical difficulties, the first line of defense is not to define your problematic terms, but to see whether you can think without using those terms at all. Or any of their short synonyms. And be careful not to let yourself invent a new word to use instead. Describe outward observables and interior mechanisms; don't use a single handle, whatever that handle may be.

I think that's brilliant. Let's revisit Mark's argument, replacing "human" with membership criteria. The original argument:

Mark: Abortion is wrong because fetuses are humans and it's wrong to kill humans.

I'll let Mark respond for himself, but my guess is that he'd replace the first "humans" with something like [membership test: contains a certain subset of DNA or carries the potential of becoming the animal homo sapiens if carried to term.] When we get to the second "humans," though, it's clear there is a problem. Why should it be a priori wrong to kill [membership test: contains a certain subset of DNA or carries the potential of becoming the animal homo sapiens if carried to term?] Since when do we base morality on that sort of thing?

When I think "killing humans is wrong," I mean that "killing [membership test: is an animal that has consciousness and feelings and self-awareness] is wrong." (Obviously, there are exceptions even to that, like self-defense, but that's tangential to this post.) So the question then becomes, does a fetus pass that test? My answer is no. (It's also interesting to note that animals who are not biologically homo sapiens may pass that test, like intelligent aliens or possibly apes and dolphins. Mark would have to use a separate argument for why it's wrong to kill those creatures if in fact he thinks it is wrong.)

Now Mark has rightly pointed out that people in comas also don't have consciousness, feelings, or self-awareness, but we still think it's wrong to kill them (at least while there's hope of recovery.) That just gets into what we mean by "having" consciousness, feelings, and self-awareness. Coma patients have had it, and may have it again, so we treat them as "having" it, as far as the question of killing goes. Fetuses have never had it, although they may have it in the future.

It's perfectly rational then, to argue that "killing [membership test: is an animal that has consciousness and feelings and self-awareness or will have them]" is wrong as well, but then one would have to justify that claim, rather than relying on the humans-humans argument. I'm not trying to prove that abortion is okay in this post, just that the humans-humans argument is sophistry.

Single- and Double-loop Learning as Applied to Religion

LeisureGuy refers to Chris Argyris, a Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School, and his notions of "single-loop learning" and "double-loop learning." LeisureGuy smartly applies Argyris's ideas to the mainstream media and I'd like to do the same for the ways that we think about the world.

First an introduction to the terms:

Single-loop learning seems to be present when goals, values, frameworks and, to a significant extent, strategies are taken for granted. The emphasis is on ‘techniques and making techniques more efficient’ (Usher and Bryant: 1989: 87) Any reflection is directed toward making the strategy more effective. Double-loop learning, in contrast, ‘involves questioning the role of the framing and learning systems which underlie actual goals and strategies’ (op. cit.). In many respects the distinction at work here is the one used by Aristotle, when exploring technical and practical thought. The former involves following routines and some sort of preset plan – and is both less risky for the individual and the organization, and affords greater control. The latter is more creative and reflexive, and involves consideration notions of the good. Reflection here is more fundamental: the basic assumptions behind ideas or policies are confronted… hypotheses are publicly tested… processes are disconfirmable not self-seeking (Argyris 1982: 103-4).

Here is their illustration of the difference between the two techniques.



I've taken the liberty of modifying the chart to discuss beliefs:



I believe that most Orthodox Jews (and other traditionalist groups) engage only in "single-loop" learning. For example, given the assumptions that God is good and God wrote the Torah, they reasonably conclude the Torah is good. Fine. Here's where it gets interesting. Some piece of data comes along that appears to contradict the conclusion the Torah is good. To reference my previous post, I'll use the example of the Torah commanding the stoning-to-death of adulterous women. Most Orthodox Jews will not question the assumptions that God is good and God wrote the Torah. They will instead go back to the interpretation stage and find a way to reconcile the new data with the old assumptions.

There's nothing about single-loop learning that makes it necessarily incorrect. In fact, if we didn't use it most of the time, we'd never be able to get anything done. However, there is a great danger to depending on it to the exclusion of double-loop learning. If one of our assumptions happens to be false and we don't know it yet, we can waste a lot of time and make a lot of incorrect conclusions if we stick to single-loop learning.

It can be scary and disorienting to question one's assumptions but it's clear that sometimes it's the only way to reach a correct conclusion. I think that people who leave their faiths (or join faiths!) for intellectual reasons are more willing to ask themselves the hard questions. (Or, in some cases, life's events practically force them to ask the hard questions.)

If we're interested in the truth and in good results, I think we must frequently do a sanity check on our underlying assumptions (to the degree we are even aware of them.) Then again, if we aren't concerned with the truth and are happy with the results, it might be reasonable to not look at those assumptions. Perhaps it's unfortunate for those of us who care more about what's true than about what's useful.

Even if we don't habitually question our assumptions, I think there are some warning signs that we are engaging in single-loop learning when double-loop learning is called for. For example:

1. We are having great difficulty coming to reasonable conclusions. (e.g. my husband loves me and he beats me so his beating me must be a form of his love.)
2. We can reach satisfactory conclusions, but the interpretation is so convoluted that it strains credibility. (e.g. the epicycles in the Ptolemaic system of geocentrism.)
3. We finds ourselves having to do a lot of interpretation too often. (e.g. my child would never use drugs and his strange behavior today was because he was stressed out. And the same was true yesterday and the day before that and the day before that...)
   

In my opinion, thinking Orthodox Jews should stumble upon these warning signs quite frequently. Just off the top of my head, I can think of an example for each of these. The problem for believers in an omnipotent and good God who causes destructive "acts of God" (tornadoes) or allows large-scale human evil (Holocaust, Rwanda) falls under #1. The day-era argument for a literal Genesis falls under #2. And the totality of Orthodox Judaism falls under #3. (For example, any Orthodox Jew active on the skeptic blogs has had to satisfy him- or herself with separate interpretations for the age of the universe, evolution, biblical authorship, the lack of evidence for an Exodus, etc. instead of the single, simple, and obvious (with a different assumption) interpretation that the Bible was written by imperfect men.)

I guess this is all just a fancy way to describe Occam's Razor, but coming at it from a new direction is pretty interesting.

What If Rabbis Were Supreme Court Justices?

From the Passover Haggadah:

Rabbi Elazar Ben Azaryah said: "I am like a man of 70 years, and yet I was never able to merit to prove that one is obligated to mention the Exodus at night, until Ben Zoma explained it thusly: It says in the Torah, 'In order that you shall remember the day when you came out of the land of Egypt, all the days of your life.' 'The days of your life' refers to the days; 'All the days of your life' refers to the nights." And the Sages [i.e all the other rabbis -JA] say: "'The days of your life' refers to this world; 'All the days of your life' indicates the time of the Messiah."

Many people, including many Orthodox Jews, ridicule the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade because of its reliance on a "penumbra" of rights in the Constitution that weren't spelled out. But how much more ridiculous are the bulk of Orthodox interpretations of the Torah?

I'd love to see what the Sages would have done with the Sixth Amendment:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Justice Ben Azaryah said: "I am like a man of 70 years, and yet I was never able to merit to prove that one has the right to a public trial in civil cases until Justice Ben Zoma explained it thusly: "It says in the Constitution, 'In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial.' 'Criminal prosecutions' refers to criminal prosecutions. 'All criminal prosecutions' refers to civil suits." And the legal scholars say: "'Criminal prosecutions' refers to criminal prosecutions. 'All criminal prosecutions' refers to military tribunals."