The Eternal Questions

I've had a text file by this name sitting on my desktop for a while. It's a big list. Here's an excerpt:

• love and hate. how do you explain them? what inspires them?
• humility and selflessness, and evil, sin, and pride
• knowledge, and wisdom
• what is god? christianity, spinoza/buddhism, hiduism, taoism and pantheism
• faith as something reassuring
• free will and determinism
• redemption and salvation
• suffering and misunderstanding
• epistemology: what is the foundation of logic? does every epistemology making a negative claim contradict itself? what axioms do we start with? do we take in everything, or a subset?
• desire
• can we overcome confirmation bias?
• what can we do? for the starving? the hurt? the egotistical?
• interdependence and independence: is one an illusion?
• do we have an essensce? why do we feel like we do?
• morality/shoulds/"supposed to". origins and humanism
• the nature of time. cosmological origins and the present (is time an illusion?)
• evolution
• the brain and consciousness
• government and anarchy
• originality and newness
• naivete and optimism
• sincerity
• do people change? what causes people to change?

Truth Seeking as Contradiction Resolution

For a while, this is all I've had:

• Questions are worth asking.
• Every mode of understanding is worth acknowledging.

The first one should be relatively clear. The second I realized first — by "mode of understanding" I mean intuition, experience, and reason. There may be more or less modes — maybe I should include emotion, or combine experience and intuition, I'm not sure. The principle is the important part.

Today I realized there's an assumption I've been making unconsciously:

• Actions and beliefs requires justification.

This assumption is revealed when I ask "But why are questions worth asking?", only to produce: "Without answers, we cannot justify action or belief." What if this assumption is false?

I think I've misunderstood justification. In Jain epistemology, they recognize every truth claim as coupled with a perspective; making it silly to talk about the truth claim apart from the perspective. If we look at each mode of understanding as representing a perspective, the issue is no longer justification. Each of the Jain blind men gathered around the elephant has a justification — their perspective is the justification.

• The man by the leg says the elephant is a pillar.
• The man by the ear says the elephant is a fan.

In the same way:

• My intuition says there is hope for all things.
• My experience shows that some things are hopeless.

Since all these claims are justified, the question turns to resolving the contradictions. We understand how contradictory kinesthetic perspectives fit together in the case of the elephant, but I don't know how different "understanding perspectives" might fit together. Can we formulate a similar principle? Maybe the the modes of understanding have well-defined relationships to each other in the same way spatial perspectives do.

Without a general principle to resolve the contradictions, what should I do? The same thing the blind men do: discuss. They discuss because there is a contradiction, and act/believe when they have a resolution.

So now I have two axioms and a consequence:

• Every mode of understanding is worth acknowledging.
• Contradictions are worth resolving.
• Questions are worth asking.

Truth (as far as we can understand it) can be defined negatively as noncontradiction. Now when I ask "Are these things important: compassion/love/selflessness, truth/trust/honesty, and passion?", and my intuition and experience say yes, while my rationality has no way of saying anything — there's a truth there.

At first it seems strange to see truth seeking as contradiction resolution, but I think it's just because I was distracted by justification and failed to realize that each mode of understanding is already justified in itself.

Computability, Ad Hominem, Faith and Reason

Consider the function:

Π(n) = { the position of the first occurrence of n consecutive zeros in the decimal expansion of π if it exists, 0 otherwise }

For example, "0" first occurs at position 32, so Π(1) = 32; the first few values are: 32, 307, 601, 13,390, 17,534... (according to the Pi-Searcher). This function is "computable" in a sense, for a trivial reason: for any given n, it is possible to output the correct integer (because it's possible to output any integer). But this function doesn't really teach us anything — it doesn't demonstrate a necessary relationship between the input and output values.

Now consider ad hominem, one of the most popular logical fallacies. In essence, it works by citing the origin of a belief as evidence against the belief. Sometimes it's just delicate slander, but other times the attack is on the argument itself. If I say "I'm alive because Andy Warhol walks among us.", you might respond "That's ridiculous, there is no relation between those two claims — and furthermore, Andy Warhol has most certainly kicked the can..." It's fine to argue with the soundness of my argument, but the problem lies in the conclusion of ad hominem: "...therefore, you are not alive." (a negation of my conclusion). This might sound silly, but it happens constantly. This would be as ludicrous as claiming that 32, 307, 601... could not possibly be the first three values for Π(n) simply because I haven't provided an algorithm associating those values with the function definition.

This all comes back to the question of where faith is justified. Imagine I've just given you 100 arguments for the existence of God. If you go through each one and explain why the argument is unsound, you haven't disproven God's existence (that would be a case of denying the antecedent — which Popper brings up when discussing falsifiability). Unfortunately, too many atheistic arguments are based on this fallacy. For example, Bertrand Russell employs one of the most subtle forms of ad hominem:

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly... the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing -- fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death...

For another example, see this previous post.

In short, there's some interesting symmetries between computability, ad hominem, denying the antecedent, falsifiability and questions about the justification of beliefs... maybe it's just me, but I think symmetries help me see more clearly.