The Good, The Bad and The Inexplicable

“Our connection to reality is never just perception. It's always theory-laden. Scientific knowledge isn't derived from anything. It's like all knowledge. It's conjectural, guesswork, tested by observation, not derived from it.”-----Karl Popper

So, were ‘testable conjectures’ the great innovation that opened the intellectual prison gates? No. Contrary to what's usually said, testability is common, in myths and all sorts of other irrational modes of thinking. Any crank claiming the sun will go out next Tuesday has got a testable prediction. Until proved, any intellectual and any simpleton has equal comportment for his declaration.

Consider the ancient Greek myth explaining seasons. Hades, God of the Underworld, kidnaps Persephone, the Goddess of Spring, and negotiates a forced marriage contract, requiring her to return regularly, and lets her go. And each year, she is magically compelled to return. And her mother, Demeter, Goddess of the Earth, is sad, and makes it cold and barren. That myth is testable. If winter is caused by Demeter's sadness, then it must happen everywhere on Earth, simultaneously. So if the ancient Greeks had only known that Australia is at its warmest when Demeter is at her saddest, they'd have known that their theory is false.

What was it that made this explanation false....its the testability, the scientific contemplation. If there is some defecting in any story that you are told (not just a logical defect....any bad explanation), what does that mean? As David Deutsch said, “Explanation is an assertion about what's there, unseen, that accounts for what's seen.”

The myth of Persephone’s forced marriage might appear poise with the logic of weather cycle...or it might appear so at the first glimpse but it fails on the scientific balance....because the explanatory role of the marriage can be replaced by infinitely many ad-hoc explanations. Why a marriage contract and not any other reason for regular annual occurrence? Here is one. Persephone wasn't released. She escaped, and returns every spring to take revenge on Hades, with her Spring powers. She cools his domain with Spring air, venting heat up to the surface, creating summer. That accounts for the same phenomena as the original myth. It's equally testable. Yet what it asserts about reality is, in many ways, the opposite.

This easy variability is a precursor of bad explanations. Until you have some strong reason to prefer any one variable over many others available.....your explanation is bad. Good explanations can’t be easily varied while still explaining the phenomenon. Our explanation of seasons connecting the earth’s tilt and sun’s inclination is a good one....because every detail in there has a functional importance and ‘hard to vary’.

Now if the Greeks would have discovered that seasons in Australia are out of phase, they could have easily varied their myth to predict that. For instance, when Demeter is upset, she banishes heat from her vicinity, into the other hemisphere, where it makes summer. But altering their theory wouldn't have got the ancient Greeks one jot closer to understanding seasons, because their explanation was bad ‘easy to vary’. If the axis-tilt theory had been refuted, its defenders would have had nowhere to go. No easily implemented change could make that tilt cause the same seasons in both hemispheres.

This ever-redolent quest for hard-to-vary theories is the basis of all progress. Two approaches blight progress. One is easy-to-vary theories and the other is explanation-less theories. If you told about some occurrence or phenomenon unarmed with a hard-to-vary explanation....its just like they’re telling you that a wizard did it.

When you are told that carrots have human rights because they share half our genes -- but not how gene percentages confer rights -- wizard. When someone announces that the nature-nurture debate has been settled because there is evidence that a given percentage of our political opinions are genetically inherited, but they don't explain how genes cause opinions, they've settled nothing.

That the truth consists of hard to vary assertions about reality is the most important fact about the physical world. It's a fact that is, itself, unseen, yet impossible to vary.—Bertrand Russell

A Little Laugh

Well, if till now you've been thinking that the theologists and philosophers are the people who've forgotten to laugh then this is gonna change your mind.....I present a few jokes which I stumbled upon recently while roaming in the 'Brobdingnagian' world of internet......have a laugh

"A philosopher," said the theologian, "it is like a blind man in a darkened room looking for a black cat that isn't there."

"That' s right," replied the philosopher, "and if he were a theologian, he'd find it."
--------------- on exam. qs and ans.------------


How many philosophers does it take to change a light bulb?

1) "Hmmm ... well this is an interesting question isn't it?"
2) "Define a 'light bulb' ..."
3) "How can you be sure it needs changing?"
4) Three. One to change it and two to stand around arguing over whether or not the light bulb exists etc.

---------- an interesting aspect of philosophy----------

Don't 'look' at anything in a physics lab.
Don't 'taste' anything in a chemistry lab.
Don't ''smell' anything in a biology lab.
Don't 'touch' anything in a medical lab.

and, most importantly:

Don't listen to anything in a philosophy department

----------- laws of philosophy-----------

The First Law of Philosophy
For every philosopher, there exists an equal and opposite philosopher.


The Second Law of Philosophy
They're both wrong.

Question:- What do you get when you cross the Godfather with a philosopher?
Answer:- An offer you can't understand

Here's an old chestnut :

By all means marry: If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher - Socrates

Here's another one :

One day the great Greek philosopher Socrates (469 - 399 BC) came upon an acquaintance who ran up to him excitedly and said, "Socrates, do you know what I just heard about one of your students?"

"Wait a moment," Socrates replied. "Before you tell me I'd like you to pass a little test. It's called the Test of Three."

"Three?", exclaimed the student.

"That's right," Socrates continued. "Before you talk to me about my student let's take a moment to test what you're going to say. The first test is Truth. Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell me is true?"

"Oh no," the man said, "actually I just heard about it."

"All right," said Socrates. "So you don't really know if it's true or not. Now let's try the second test, the test of Goodness. Is what you are about to tell me about my student something good?"

"No, on the contrary..."

"So," Socrates interrupted, "you want to tell me something bad about him even though you're not certain it's true?"

The man shrugged, a little embarrassed.

Socrates continued. "You may still pass though, because there is a third test - the filter of Usefulness. Is what you want to tell me about my student going to be useful to me?"

"Well it....no, not really..."

"Well," concluded Socrates, "if what you want to tell me is neither True nor Good nor even Useful, why tell it to me at all?"

The man was defeated and ashamed. This is the reason Socrates was a great philosopher and held in such high esteem.

It also explains why he never found out that Plato was having an affair with his wife.

A philosophy professor walks in to give his class their final test . Placing his chair on his desk the professor instructs the class, "Using every applicable thing you've learned in this course, prove to me that this chair DOES NOT EXIST."

So, pencils are writing and erasers are erasing, students are preparing to embark on novels proving that this chair doesn't exist, except for one student. He spends thirty seconds writing his answer, then turns his final in to the astonishment of his peers.

Time goes by, and the day comes when all the students get their final grades ... and to the amazement of the class, the student who wrote for thirty seconds gets the highest grade in the class.

His answer to the question was- "What chair?"

Supermarket and Suicide

The idea of being able to choose a sudden exit fascinates me on many levels. For example, I may be at a party having a good time and suddenly the thought crosses my mind that I could actually just walk out and leave it. Sometimes once I get this thought in my mind I become possessed by my own curiosity. Then I may feel compelled to immediately leave the party and walk to some random spot where I could not have predicted I would be at that moment. I may touch a mailbox and think to myself 'I could easily have never touched this mailbox. I could easily still be inside. But instead, because a random thought possessed my mind, I am having this completely different experience now, one which could never have been foreseen.'

In a way I guess it seems totally ridiculous that I get this amazing high from walking out of a good time and touching a mailbox by myself, but it gives me this surreal sense of being a free agent that operates my mind at its own whim, as opposed to being led into predictable patterns of behavior designed by evolved instincts or learned behaviors. And leaving in itself is so sudden - a complete change to the senses - there is something so exciting to me for a moment when an exit is made and suddenly I am standing outside in the vast wild world.

Once I was at the supermarket when I got an attack of this type of thinking. I started to fantasize about walking away from my shopping cart and going out into the parking lot and exploring the suburban streets behind the supermarket- being somewhere completely unexpected and not being in the supermarket at all. The thoughts overtook me and I abandoned my full cart of groceries to get the rush of walking out into the parking lot where the world could not have expected me to be coming- to penetrate a moment in that lot which never thought it would see me.

Standing in the parking lot I was truly heady, intoxicated by own freedom, feeling that I was seeing some secret surreal moment. For several minutes I stood there on top of the world enthralled by own consciousness and the sensation that I had been newly born by walking out the automatic doors. I was communing with the branches of the trees and the cracks in the pavement as if I was in the midst of an intense acid trip. I was thinking about making memories and making memories of making memories and the memories of doing that some more (yes, these are those very memories!)

But after these wild sensations wore down, I became more conscious of the other reality. The reality that I really did need to buy groceries in the near future was the same one that had propelled me toward the supermarket in the first place. Now that reality came back more strongly to my mind. I sighed to realize that although I was free to go off and do whatever I pleased, that it would only mean that I would have to come back to the supermarket tomorrow and start back over with all the shopping. Finally I had to concede that the only thing to do was to go back in and buy my groceries and I may as well just go back and get my cart right now so I wouldn't have to start all the way back at the beginning tomorrow.

When I went back into the supermarket, though, my cart was not in the aisle where I had left it. Because I had only been outside for a few minutes, it surprised me that my cart would have been already moved, and I searched for it in vain throughout the store. After going up and down each aisle several times in search of the work I had done assembling my groceries, I began to feel incredibly lost. At that moment it occurred to me that the entire experience was a perfect description of suicide. I had suddenly chosen to walk away from my unfinished work and jump into a different reality. Then I had experienced a euphoric freedom, which was followed by the return of the original need to perform my human duty. Then, realizing the error of my whim, I had attempted to return to my human body, only to be devastated by the loss and the finality of what I had done and forced to begin from the beginning.

After that experience I decided to resist the urge to leave at such moments. Instead I make it a point to experience suburban supermarket parking lots in a psychedelic sense during my walk in and out from the car. That way I still get to chuckle to myself in knowing euphoria without slowing down my chore in the slightest.