Conceptualize This

This is the first part of a series on concepts.  In this series, I will talk about the way in which people use and misuse concepts, as well as a few things you can do to help aid in the appropriate use of your concepts.  This series is ongoing (so stay tuned for more!)  To start, I’m going to outline what I mean by ‘concept’ and why it is we have them.

What is Your REAL Objection?

Here’s the basic gist of what actually goes on in most people’s heads.  You hear some proposal, say someone suggesting that gay people should be allowed to marry, and for whatever reason, your subconscious doesn’t like the proposal.  But your subconscious never tells your mind the actual cause of this dislike, it just tells you that the proposal royally sucks.  So you voice your opposition.

How Wrong is "Wrong"?

WARNING: Here there be PHYSICS!

(And math too, of course).

Beating Religion: Seekers and Defenders

In this post, I am going to highlight what I think is a very important difference between skeptics and dogmatics (by which I mean “those who follow a dogma which is not supposed to be questioned”).  The two groups tend to have two very different mindsets when it comes to the concepts of truth, knowledge, and morality.  I am terming these two highly distinct mindsets as the “Defender” mindset and the “Seeker” mindset.

Lack of Evidence IS Evidence of a Lack

I once watched a random youtube video which claimed, rather offhandedly, that a lack of evidence was not evidence of a lack. At this point, the physicist in me cringed. I thought about the luminiferous aether, and how the lack of evidence led physicists to conclude that it didn't exist. I thought about string theory, and how it is starting to become somewhat of a joke amongst many precisely because it has yet to produce any solid evidence. It seems to me that in physics at least, a lack of evidence is evidence of a lack. But is this a defensible position to hold, or are physicists just crazy? The track record of physics tells me that there's probably something to this claim.

With All Due Disrespect

This post probably should have been written much earlier, but here it goes.

Generally speaking, black people just aren’t as intelligent as white people, and women are way too emotional for the public sphere.

Now before you go all flame war on me, I’m not actually supporting either of those claims.  I’m just using them as an example.  But if I’d told you that beforehand it would have ruined the effect.  So now that you’ve had the full effect, was your gut reaction to cry foul?  If so, ask yourself why you have that urge.  What is it about the statements that makes you want to call me out?

A Crash Course in Probability: Primer for Discrimination Discussion

I’ve got some ideas for a few articles I want to write, mostly about the topic of discrimination.  But I’ve realized that in order to understand what I’m trying to say about these topics, you’re going to need to know at least a little bit of probability and statistics.  This is because a lot of discriminatory ideas rely on very flawed thinking about the nature of statistics.  So in order to address these flaws, I am going to have to talk about the statistics behind the flaws, and that will require you guys to know enough statistics to get by.

Convergence

       Now, at long last, I am ready to begin explaining why faith does not work as means of obtaining knowledge. I apologize for the lengthy detour, but I did not want to skip over the foundations and risk confusing you. The way in which I will argue, and the points I will make, are very different from what you are likely to have heard before. This is partly because anyone who wasn’t convinced by an argument the first time is unlikely to be convinced the second, third, or even hundredth time. But it is also partly because I am going to be avoiding hazardous terms, words with very strong connotations but not much agreed upon meaning.

Doubt: Everything or Anything

       I’m not sure if Descartes was the first, but he was certainly the most famous philosopher who attempted to doubt everything. As anyone whose studied any of Descartes work would know, this was not a very successful tactic. But most people seem to think that the alternative is to hold some things to be beyond doubt. This is (sometimes) where you hear the “science requires faith too” ideas. So it may sound strange when I say that I do not doubt everything, and yet I do not hold anything beyond doubt. The fact is that I have taken a third option. Instead of doubting everything, I doubt anything.

Word Play Part V: Profoundly Vague

        Continued from Part IV.

Have you ever heard claims about how ancient Eastern philosophies are rife with ideas that mesh remarkably well with new insights gained form quantum mechanics?  The world is riddled with claims that newfound scientific knowledge supports this that or the other ancient, religious, or pseudo religious claims.  The concept of entanglement and the idea that everything is inherently entangled with everything else sounds a lot like the “all is one” ideas that were floating around Asia many centuries ago… if you’re not a physicist.

Word Play Part III: Philosophistry

      Continued from Part II

Let X be any set and let T be a family of subsets of X.  Then T is a topology on X if (and only if):

-Both the empty set and X are elements of T

-Any union of arbitrarily many elements of T is an element of T
-Any intersection of finitely many elements of T is an element of T
_____________________________________________________________________________

Now it’s okay if you don’t really understand most of the above.  Just know that it makes perfect sense if you have a basic knowledge of set theory.  The important thing is that this is the definition of a topology.  You will find it day one in nearly any topology course.  It will be in the first chapter of any topology textbook you read.

Word Play Part II: Don't Be a Douchebag

      Continued from Part I

As I said last week, there are good ways to use words, and there are bad ways to use words.  There are also some wrong ways to use words.  This week is all about how to tell the difference between good, bad, and wrong.  But before we can get to that, I need to explain the fallacy of equivocation.

Word Play Part I: Don't Be a Douche

As I said last week, there are good ways to use words, and there are bad ways to use words.  There are also some wrong ways to use words.  This week is all about how to tell the difference between good, bad, and wrong.  But before we can get to that, I need to explain the fallacy of equivocation.

Benchmarks

As I mentioned last week, being a skeptic is really quite simple.  It’s a one-step method, and a crucial part of a good, self-correcting epistemology.  Yet there is one glaring problem.  To see this problem, imagine that the entire world was completely skeptical in every area.  Imagine that everyone followed the basic principle of asking a question whenever they were confused or doubtful.  Not imagine how many questions that entails.  Billions at least, maybe even trillions depending on just how curious people get.  Now who’s going to answer all those questions? 

And more importantly, how?

How to be a Skeptic

This blog is (mostly) about being a skeptic, so I guess it's high time I explained what that means.  It's really simple though.  In fact, it's so simple that most of this article will actually be devoted to raising awareness of the anti-skeptic tendencies inherent to many religions.  So, without further ado, I present to you the simple, one-step method for becoming a skeptic.

Open Your Mind

This article is a companion piece to Falsifiability.

Here is a simple question that everyone should do their best to answer before engaging in any kind of discussion, debate, or experiment.

Falsifiability

   This article is a companion piece to Open Your Mind.

I have an important question for theists out there. Really, the question can be applied to most any belief, but it’s especially important for theists because it’s a question they always have so much trouble answering. Here goes.

What conceivable observation or set of observations would, if they were made, demonstrate that your god or gods do not exist?

I doubt many theists have ever really asked themselves this question before, and most will have great difficulty in providing an answer. However, answering this question is essential for honest discussion of theists’ claims. I’ve heard too many people insist that you can’t prove that their gods do not exist. They do this as a defense, often in conjunction with NOMA to make their gods non-scientific. They think that by placing their gods beyond analysis they can protect them from criticism. Many will also say that because you can’t prove their gods’ existence or nonexistence, the atheists’ position requires every bit as much faith as the theists’. Such people are wrong on both counts.

Religions make a wide variety of claims that go beyond the existence of some sort of god. Many of these claims involve ideas about what kind of actions will lead to the best life or afterlife. They also frequently use their gods to explain things that have not yet been explained through science. But in using unfalsifiable gods to make such claims, the theists remove key requirements for good explanations and predictions.

Let’s suppose we have some phenomenon that we wish to explain, such as a blue sky. The god of the gaps proponents swoop in and say “the sky is blue because God made it so.” Many people seem to think that this qualifies as a good explanation. After all, it offers a reason (God) that the sky is blue. However, the clever skeptic will then ask “but why is the sky blue and not green?”

This second question poses a problem to the unfalsifiable gods. After all, if there is no conceivable observation that would demonstrate such a god to be false, then there is also no reason we couldn’t have a green sky instead of a blue sky. In light of this second question, we see that the god of the gaps explanation only goes part way. It tries to tell us how the world got the way it is, but it fails to give a reason for why the world is not the way it is not.

An easy way to tell the good explanations from these bad explanations is that good explanations are effectively post-dictions of the phenomenon in question. In other words, a good explanation would predict the explained phenomenon had it not yet been observed. Again, we see that the god of the gaps is a poor explanation because it does not post-dict the phenomena it claims to explain. The unfalsifiable God is consistent with both a green and a blue sky, so it could not have been used to predict a blue sky had the sky not yet been observed.

And of course, this segues quite nicely into my next point. Unfalsifiable gods provide no predictive power. After all, predicting that something will happen must entail that other, mutually exclusive things will not happen. If I predict that we will have a full moon tomorrow, then I’m also predicting that we won’t have a new moon, or a waning crescent, or moon chunks falling to earth. Yet all these mutually exclusive occurrences are equally consistent with an unfalsifiable god, so such a god cannot tell us which of these phenomena will actually occur.

As a gnostic atheist, I deny the existence of all meaningful gods. Of course, it is by definition impossible to demonstrate the non-existence of an unfalsifiable god. But the point is that nobody needs to demonstrate such non-existence. Unfalsifiable gods are self-defeating not because they cannot exist, but because the very concept is useless. Such gods cannot be used to explain what we see. They cannot be used to predict what we do not yet know, nor to tell us the best way to achieve our goals. Such gods are merely unnecessary assumptions that provide no additional explanatory or predictive power. I reject them not due to conflicts with evidence or logic, but because using the word “exists” in such a manner is utterly pointless.