In this dialogue, Socrates and José talk about, among other things, unlikely coincidences, the scientific method, and whether it is ever beneficial to knowingly accept irrational beliefs.
Personae: Socrates, José
J: O Socrates! What a nice coincidence to bump into you! Are you headed to the agora
as well?
S: Hola, José! Yes, I am indeed. What brings you there?
J: Well, to be honest, I had hoped to find you there because I must tell you about this most extraordinary experience I’ve just had. You see, this very morning, I read your name in the newspaper, right on the front page. It wasn’t about you, but about another Socrates, from Samos, if I recall correctly. I thought nothing of it when my wife entered the kitchen and exclaimed, without having seen the paper, mind you: “This damned scoundrel! If he doesn’t stop rambling about the definition of truth and virtue, they’ll surely execute him some day!” Asked whom she meant, she replied, “Why, Socrates of course!”
S: Ah yeah? How charming of her. What else?
J: I’ll tell you what else! I was leaving the kitchen when I heard a knock on the door. The postman had a letter for me and guess who had sent it!
S: Me? So, you got my letter? Great, I was already afraid that…
J: But Socrates, do you really fail to grasp the significance of it all?
S: What do you mean?
J: Well your name popped up three times this morning in short intervals and in completely different contexts. You don’t think that’s a bit weird?
S: What are you saying, dear José? Weird coincidences happen all the time, it could just as well…
J: No, but how could this be a coincidence? I don’t believe in coincidences; I think there is a deeper meaning to this. In my opinion, the universe itself is in a way communicating with me, if you will. There’s something related to you that I must do or that is going to happen, and I need to figure out what it is.
S: Okay, hold your horses, my friend. Don’t you think there is a very straightforward explanation to this phenomenon?
J: Ah yeah? Like what?
S: I mean, your brain is basically a survival machine that tries to figure out how the world works so the world doesn’t kill you, right? And how does your brain do this? I’d say, it does it by figuring out the regularities that exist in this world. For instance, night follows day until the sun implodes and if you learn this regularity, you can prepare for the cold of the night while the sun is still shining bright and warm.
J: Right, right. Where are you going with this?
S: You’ll see in a second. First, let’s note that these regularities always take the same form. You observe that the event A (daylight) is always, or in a significant number of cases, followed by the event B (twilight). After having observed this for a couple of times, you begin to expect B as soon as you observe A.
J: Yes, you do. So what?
S: Well, would it not be plausible to suppose that this pattern recognition mechanism sometimes goes berserk? That is sees connections where there are really none? And isn’t this the case with the trifold occurrence of my name this morning? Your brain is maybe just overly eager to predict its future and thus overinterprets what is really just a coincidence. So, there is probably nothing for you to figure out with regards to me after all.
J: Okay but hold on. So, you’re saying that this connection that I saw this morning is really a mere construction of my brain, right? But is this not always so? Is it not always the brain that interprets these patterns? How can we ever be sure that there is a real pattern in the objective world and what would this even mean?
S: You’re making a good point, but I think I can defend the position I just embraced. So, as I have already said, pattern recognition is basically about predicting the future. Therefore, when you recognise a pattern between A and B, you basically are able to predict that B occurs in the future by basing yourself on your observation of A in the present.
J: Okay, that just seems like a complicated way of saying if you know the pattern A-B, as soon as you observe A, you know that B will follow.
S: Precisely. And this is how I would invalidate your objection: You basically asked what’s the difference between real patterns and illusory patterns if both are constructs of the brain.
J: Yes, I did.
S: Well, if patterns are about prediction, we have a very direct way of telling whether any given pattern is real or not, right? If we observe some instances of A occurring without B occurring afterwards, we conclude that the pattern we had supposed to exist doesn’t exist after all. This is all what science does, it takes certain claims about patterns, it makes explicit what these claims predict, it observes the world systematically to see if the predictions come true and then it concludes that some of these patterns are real while others are illusory.
J: Okay, but this raises a couple of issues, doesn’t it? I mean, first of all, what do you do with a one-time pattern? This applies to the case at hand. I have never heard your name thrice in three distinct contexts and now that I did, I conclude that I must do something that is in some way connected to you. In this case, hearing your name would be our A and my felt need to act in some way that is connected to you would be our B.
S: Yes, although it doesn’t fit our general model of a pattern perfectly, right?
J: You mean because “my felt need to act” is not exactly an observation?
S: Exactly.
J: Okay, but maybe we can make it fit. Let’s say that tomorrow you are executed as an impertinent scoundrel that simply wouldn’t shut up about different definitions of virtue. Then I would make an observation, wouldn’t I? I would observe that I should have performed a certain act with regards to you. I should have helped you escape from Athens for instance.
S: Yes, now it seems to fit or at least to fit better than before.
J: But what do you make of this pattern then? You’ve said that we recognise patterns by observing several instances of A being followed by B. And then after having made these several observations we conclude that there’s a pattern and we make a prediction. But in my case, there has only been one observation.
S: Yes, but this supports exactly my point! If you only observe one instance, how could you ever know whether there was a connection between hearing my name and a need to take an action? I mean, even if I were executed tomorrow, Zeus forbid, would it be rational for you to say, “I knew it! I heard his name three times in the morning, so I could have prevented his execution”? I don’t think so. If it is a one-time occurrence, how could you ever learn what you can predict on the grounds of your A? You hear my name like that, I’m executed next day, what did you learn? Suppose you’ll never hear anyone’s name three times in one morning again. Did this one-time occurrence grant you any predictive knowledge? It doesn’t seem so.
J: But you have to grant that it would be a huge coincidence!
S: I’m not denying that it would be. But such coincidences occur from time to time. I tell you what. If this thing had happened to you every single morning for the past month with the names of different people and each time, they would have been executed the next day, then I would get that you’re concerned about me right now. But it didn’t. So, what’s the fuzz about?
J: I’ll grant your point but these weird “coincidences”, as you call them, happen to me quite sometimes. For example, once as a kid I dreamed that my school had caught fire overnight and the next day it was announced that a pipe had burst and that we couldn’t go to class. You see, water and fire are opposed elements in many traditions so there’s a link there and also, the school really had to be closed. How do you explain that?
S: I rest my case; it was almost certainly a coincidence.
J: “Almost certainly”? So, you’re not one hundred percent convinced?
S: I mean, there is always the logical possibility that things are really different but so what? There is also a tiny probability that this universe is actually made of little gnomes that behave as elementary particles as soon as we look but that are going about their gnome business as soon as we don’t. You can’t exclude that scenario with perfect certainty. But this makes it hardly a viable alternative to the standard model.
J: I agree, but back to the topic, this other time, I read an article about diabetes and later found out that my mother independently of me had read the same article and then later that month, my uncle was diagnosed with diabetes.
S: Okay José, where are you going with this?
J: Well, this clearly shows that sometimes these strange coincidences can really foreshadow things to come.
S: No, you’ve just named more coincidences as if to convince me with the quantity of your arguments and not their quality. This proves nothing. One of the problems I’m having with this is that these events don’t make precise predictions, right? I mean, let’s come back to the example of before. You hear the name of a person three times and they are executed the next day. This happens to you a couple of times until you suspect that there might be a pattern to it. Here, we have a pretty clear prediction that allows us to do rigorous reality-testing. If they don’t die next day, it was a coincidence. But what about the fact that your mother and you had read the same article? Let’s suppose this article wasn’t about diabetes but about butter. If you take this to be a foreshadowing of some kind, what would your prediction about the future be? In other words, what would have to happen for you to look back and say, “Wow, the fact that we read the same article really had a deeper meaning to it.”? I claim that a huge variety of events could make you say that: Your father could be hired by a butter factory, a colleague at work might choke on a piece of bread with butter and so on. Your prediction is so vague that it is confirmed by anything or at least by an awful lot of things.
J: But didn’t you say before that it’s a good thing when a prediction is confirmed by future events?
S: Only if it narrowly defines what it predicts. If I make the prediction, “Someone is going to talk to you tomorrow.”, this will most probably turn out to be true. But at the same time, it’s utterly useless. My prediction would be so general that it almost doesn’t hold any information. The same holds true for the predictive value of your weird coincidences. If you were to make your prediction explicit, it would amount to saying, “Something related to the content of the article is going to happen to someone at some point in the near or distant future.”, or, “Something is going to happen to Socrates or Socrates will do something of significance in the near or distant future.”
J: But how can you dismiss it like that? The probability of your name showing up three times in one morning must be incredibly low.
S: It must be low indeed but think of all the coincidences that didn’t happen. At any given moment in time, there are countless phenomena happening all around you. An unfathomable number of phenomena. It is surely improbable that this particular coincidence happened. But it is very probable that some unlikely coincidence happens sometimes.
J: So, these coincidences are not significant to you in any way?
S: Mh, actually that might be too strong of a claim.
J: But that is what you just said, isn’t it?
S: No, I said that there is no objective meaning to this sort of coincidence. But it can have a subjective meaning. A psychoanalyst, for instance, would try to find out why it is that you noticed the occurrence of my name as opposed to some other coincidence that has maybe also happened this morning but that you completely overlooked.
J: So, if I notice one coincidence and not another, the first one holds some sort of meaning?
S: Exactly or so the psychoanalyst would claim.
J: But this meaning is subjective?
S: Precisely.
J: How so?
S: Well, I’m not a psychoanalyst myself but they would probably conclude that you noticed my name because it is in some way related to an unconscious conflict. This conflict can manifest itself in different ways, in pathological symptoms of course but also in more subtle ways, for example by directing your attention to stimuli that are in some way connected to the conflict. But the stimuli themselves would not have any deep meaning as such. It would rather be you who projects meaning onto them.
J: I see. But let me come back to what you said before about science and reality testing. When you say that science systematically tests which patterns are real and which ones are illusory by testing their predictions, you basically say that there is a real world independent of our perceptions and theories, no? How can you be so sure about that? Let’s suppose we examine some pattern A-B and we want to know whether it is real in your sense of the word. Let’s suppose furthermore we do indeed observe B occurring after A in all circumstances. How can we know in the first place that there is actually an A and a B in the world in itself, as it is independently of its being observed? All we ever know of the world is what we perceive. But what if there is no world behind our perceptions?
S: That’s a good question. But I claim that science doesn’t make the presupposition that there is a real A and a real B in a world independent of any perceiving subject.
J: What? But this doesn’t make any sense!
S: Yes, it does. Suppose we knew for sure that there is no real world independently of our perceptions. Suppose it is all a matter of perception. Irrespective of this, it would still make sense to do science and science would still be able to distinguish between real and illusory patterns.
J: But how? What could be the sense of the word “real” in the expression “real pattern” if we don’t take it to mean “actually existing in the world”?
S: Well, just think of an example. Water freezes at 0°C. This is a pattern that we can test by observing water under different temperatures several times. If it turns out to be correct, we can make predictions about what’s going to happen to water when we decrease its temperature. If none of this actually pertains to any object as it is independent of our perceptions, the sentence “Water freezes at 0°C.” would still be informative. We would know what observations to expect in the future.
J: Although they wouldn’t pertain to real water?
S: Well, they would in a certain sense pertain to real water. They would pertain to water as it appears to all of us. However, they would not pertain to real water as it is independently of its appearing to all of us. Do you understand the difference?
J: Yes, I think so. So, science in this picture is not talking about the water that is behind our perception of water?
S: I mean, there are strong reasons to think that there is actually water behind our perception of it. Therefore, we should take our sentence to pertain to real water. All I’m saying is that even if there were no such real water but only our perception of it, our prediction about water at lower temperatures would still serve a purpose. You can make your metaphysics as crazy as you want, as long as nature is regular, and this very much seems to be the case, it makes sense to do science in order to predict the future. And by this, I mean predict future observations. Even if we were all just part of one big dream, dreamed by a slumbering god, even if we were all hallucinating reality collectively while there is no real world behind the veil of the manifold appearances, we could still do science, we could still distinguish real from illusory patterns and you, José, would still be wrong.
J: So, the notion of a real pattern does suppose that the world appears to all of us the same way? That seems to be false. And I’m not talking about the obvious cases of hallucination and delusion. Take a heated conversation between friends for example. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call them Appollodoranthropopotamos and Franc. Let’s say Franc hasn’t called Appollodoranthropopotamos in quite a while because he feels Appollodoranthropopotamos is showing off his superior badminton skills each time they meet. Appollodoranthropopotamos on the other hand is unaware of this. From his perspective, he (i.e. Appollodoranthropopotamos) is just very much into badminton and feels like Franc is overly envious of his (i.e. Appollodoranthropopotamos’) superior level of skill. Now Appollodoranthropopotamos feels like Franc is a bad friend because he doesn’t call him anymore. Who is at fault here?
S: That is indeed a difficult question because the phenomena described are mainly subjective ascriptions.
J: So, you admit that there is possibly no common ground between them with regards to this issue?
S: Tough to say. If all of their common acquaintances agree that Appollodoranthropopotamos is overdoing it with his badminton, then it would appear that he is really the one at fault in this situation. But I want to make something very clear here: Just because there are some phenomena that are an issue of subjective interpretation doesn’t mean that all phenomena are such issues.
J: What exactly do you mean?
S: Well, regardless of who is right, it still holds true for both that water freezes at 0°C.
J: I’m sure they don’t care about the freezing point of water in their situation.
S: True, but my point still holds. Just because we can’t reach objective consensus on some issues doesn’t mean it’s all subjective and everyone can do and think whatever they want. You can’t tell who’s right in a heated discussion between friends. Granted. What do you conclude from this? That it is possible that the universe is communicating with you by making my name appear a couple of times the same morning? Here, you would be grossly mistaken. We can still rule out a whole lot of patterns as illusory and we can do this even though we haven’t reached objective consensus on all issues. In other words, whoever of these friends is right, the universe is almost certainly not communicating with you.
J: Well, maybe I didn’t claim that.
S: Claim what?
J: Claim that the universe is communicating with me.
S: But didn’t you say that…
J: I know what I said but what I mean is that there might not be this divide between the universe and ourselves. When you say, “The universe is not communicating with you.”, you’re implying that the universe is on one side and you on the other as separate entities. But both from a physical and from a Buddhist point of view, this doesn’t make much sense. It would be more accurate to say that the universe is just one big unfolding process and that there really is no boundary between us and it because we are part of it.
S: And what would follow from this for the discussion at hand? I don’t see how this solves the problem. You see, I fundamentally agree with this view that there really is only one process in which everything is causally connected. But this doesn’t help you.
J: Why not?
S: Well, what would a real pattern be in this picture and what an illusory one? As you rightly said, one part of this universe is you. And by “you” I don’t mean a separate entity endowed with free will and the power to spontaneously initiate bodily movements, I don’t mean a separate unobserved observer, a feeler of feelings, a thinker of thoughts, whatever. When I say “you”, I mean that some part of this universe is your brain in your body that is trying to figure out how the rest of the universe works. One part of the universe represents the rest which means, one part makes predictions and claims about the regularities that can be observed in the rest. Some of these predictions are right, some of them are wrong. We draw the distinction between right and wrong patterns (this won’t come as a surprise to you) by doing science. The distinction between real patterns and illusory ones still holds. I don’t see how saying that all is one really helps your point. Hearing my name three times is still insignificant in a world where all is one.
J: Okay, but you grant that in this one universe, everything is causally connected, right?
S: Yes, sure.
J: So, everything is causally interconnected such that each thing is what it is in virtue of all other things being what they are.
S: Well sure, I suppose you could put it like that.
J: But if all things are causally connected in this way, is not the mentioning of your name in the morning also causally connected to your execution the next day?
S: Ah, so this is where you are going with this. Yes, sure, in a sense it is causally connected in this way. But so is everything else in your picture, right? If everything is causally interconnected, my execution would not only be connected to the mentioning of my name but also to all the farts the queen of England has ever squeezed out of her anus over the course of her lifetime and also to all sacks of rice that have ever fallen to the earth in China and so on. If everything is connected to everything else, whatever that might precisely mean, then mentioning my name three times still doesn’t hold any special meaning.
J: Okay, I’m running out of bullets here. But why is it so important to you to find out whether it is a “real pattern”, as you call it, or an illusory one?
S: Isn’t it obvious? If I know that water freezes at…
J: Yeah, but I’m not talking about water. Right, I get it, it’s useful to know when water freezes and when wood burns and when plutonium molecules split. We should figure out what the underlying patterns of these processes are and investigate them scientifically. And I can see why getting these patterns wrong could be a problem. But why not believe that there is a connection between coincidences and future events? I heard your name three times, I went to see you, here I am, we’re having an interesting discussion, what’s the harm?
S: My dear José, as much as I like to have these discussions with you, can’t you see what the problem could be? You’re basically postulating the existence of a supernatural link between the mentioning of my name and some indeterminate future event. Can’t you think of a circumstance in which such supernatural suppositions are problematic?
J: Are you alluding to religion?
S: Also, but not only.
J: Okay look, I have a friend who thinks that she can sometimes cause future events to happen by simply wishing for them. For instance, once she knew that I was in love with someone and she wished for that someone to contact me and ask me out and then it happened. You would probably say that this is an illusory pattern.
S: Yes, I would. This is really a form of prayer, right?
J: Prayer? No, but she didn’t address any god.
S: No, but she spoke to the universe as an entity that could understand her words and make them come true. If she thinks the universe can both understand her and act on her words, she is clearly conferring the status of personhood to it. Therefore, we could just as well call a spade a spade and say that she has prayed to God.
J: Okay, I get your point.
S: And it’s also a form of magical thinking.
J: Magic? Come on, I mean, she’s not exactly summoning daemons in the moonlight. And watch your tongue, she’s a really good friend so you better not talk shit about her.
S: No, I’m not talking shit. By magical thinking I mean the belief that you can bring about some state of affairs in the real world by simply wishing for it or thinking about it.
J: Yeah… Anyway so, she derives meaning from these wishes. Her life becomes more meaningful by accepting the pattern of wish and future event. Why is this a bad thing? Does it not make her life better?
S: In that situation she felt better about herself, I agree. But it doesn’t seem harmless to me at all. Suppose a close relative of hers dies. If your friend has adopted the belief that she can sometimes manipulate the world by thinking or wishing, she might feel guilty now, might she not? Maybe her relative would not have died if she had wished more intensely for his survival.
J: Okay, but who says that she will feel responsible?
S: We can’t say for sure but either she believes she can manipulate the world, or she doesn’t. If she does, it follows from her way of thinking that she’ll feel responsible for both types of outcomes, the good ones and the bad ones, don’t you think?
J: Yeah, maybe, who knows.
S: The same applies to you: Let’s say, I am executed tomorrow. Would you not feel guilty? According to your own beliefs, you could have known in some way, after all.
J: This doesn’t convince me, maybe I would, maybe I wouldn’t.
S: You want to avoid my conclusion, I feel.
J: No, I just don’t think the irrational belief in the present examples can be clearly diagnosed as having bad consequences.
S: Okay, but do you grant me that there are many examples of irrational belief that cause a lot of suffering? Like the belief that you’ll get to hang out with God in paradise for eternity if you blow yourself up in a crowd of infidels or the belief that your daughter will burn in hell because she had sex with another woman or the belief or that you should under no circumstance consume beans…
J: Beans?
S: Yeah, I’m not making this shit up. Pythagoras is telling his disciples not to eat beans under any circumstances for whatever reasons. What if a famine breaks out and they die simply because they abstain from beans?
J: Okay, but this one is clearly stupid.
S: Or the belief that all suffering has a purpose and that god is testing you to see whether you are cool enough to hang out with him in paradise later.
J: But this one actually seems to be true, doesn’t it? I mean, not the paradise bit necessarily but suffering does indeed always seem to be meaningful. We probably wouldn’t grow as a person without any hardship in our lives, don’t you think?
S: I agree about that, but many instances of suffering clearly don’t cause any personal growth at all. What do you make of starving children? Or children with blood cancer? Or rape victims that are murdered afterwards? Do they use their suffering to the purpose of personal growth? And what about child soldiers that are tortured or killed on the battlefield?
J: Okay, relax Socrates, I get it.
S: Yeah, sorry I’m getting a bit worked up about the topic, but you see, each time someone says all suffering has a purpose to test us or to help us grow they seem to think of relatively minor cases of suffering like losing a job or going through a divorce or fighting out some other personal conflict. But they seem to forget that many instances of suffering don’t allow for such noble pursuits as self-development. These instances instead leave their victim either spiritually mutilated and irreversibly traumatised or dead. I can see how a benign and almighty god might have created a world in which people divorce each other. I cannot see how he might have created a world in with children are raped to death. And now don’t give me that “The Lord works in mysterious ways”-bullshit.
J: I get it, I get it, Jesus. Alright!
S: Yeah, anyway…
J: I feel like we got side-tracked.
S: True.
J: Or more like you got side-tracked.
S: Also, true. I slip into this atheist rant quite quickly. I’ve had this discussion one time too many. It’s like an automatic reflex response at this point. And you are quite right, let’s get back to the topic. Do you grant that there are good examples where irrational beliefs cause more harm than good?
J: Ah yes, now I remember where we left. You mean the blowing-yourself-up-in-a-crowd-of infidels-thing? Sure, some irrational beliefs lead to bad outcomes. And many such beliefs are somewhere in the middle, but surely there are some irrational beliefs that have predominantly positive consequences? But wait, before we go on, let’s make explicit what each of us means by “irrational”. Let us not get lost in the underwood of terminological ambiguity here.
S: Yes, you’re right, that would probably be a good idea. I once had an awful discussion about free will where it turned out after like an hour or so that the guy was taking it to mean something completely different. What a waste of time… So, what do you mean by rationality?
J: I don’t have a complete definition ready at hand, but in our discussion so far, by “irrational belief” we seem to have meant belief in an illusory pattern, right?
S: Not quite, I think. I mean, sometimes it takes science a while to figure out which patterns obtain, and which don’t. And before science does this, you can’t expect our rational woman on the street to figure it out. For example, a doctor in the Middle Ages could have rationally believed that there is no connection between washing his hands and his patient’s survival as he couldn’t have known about bacteria yet because science didn’t have a clue yet either.
J: But then let’s say this doctor believes that a daemon from the spirit realm is responsible for the death of his patients. Would this then be a rational belief for him to endorse given the ignorance of the science of his day?
S: No, I wouldn’t say so. Even if science hasn’t reached a conclusion yet, we can still rationally rule out certain claims about patterns on which it will never reach a conclusion as a matter of principle.
J: How so?
S: I mean, some claims simply can’t be tested. If the doctor in our example thinks that an evil daemon kills his patients, how would he go about testing this hypothesis? He would have to observe several cases of daemon rage that lead to a dead patient before being justified in believing this. And there must never be a case of daemon rage without a dead person, as he would then have to dismiss the hypothesis. But how could daemon rage ever be observed if it takes place in the invisible spirit realm?
J: Okay, but we today in Antiquity know the daemon hypothesis to be bullshit. He couldn’t have known this back in the Middle Ages. Wait, what year is it again…?
S: Yes, we know it to be bullshit, but I claim we know this independently of our scientific progress. We know it because his claim itself is untestable.
J: So, what makes any given hypothesis testable then?
S: You need to be able to say under which circumstances or in the face of what observation you would give it up. Take the doctor for instance. The pattern “daemon rage – patient death” would have to be dismissed, as I said before, if and only if “daemon rage: true!” but “patient death: false!”
J: Now you’re speaking like a toddler.
S: Worse, I am speaking like a logician.
J: Okay, but from what you’re saying there is no possible observation of the world that would make us dismiss his claim, right?
S: Yes, there is no possible observable state of the world that would falsify his hypothesis.
J: Alright, but if his claim is never false, isn’t this a good thing? I mean, that basically means that he is never wrong, doesn’t it?
S: We’ve sort of discussed this question already. If his hypothesis is always right, it doesn’t hold any information about the world. Think of it this way. Let’s say you’ve been brought up in an isolated room without windows. You speak English and are intelligent and so on, but…
J: Why would you feel the need to specify in this hypothetical scenario that I am intelligent?
S: Don’t get cranky, no one is doubting your wits. So, you’re in this isolated room and you have some knowledge, you know the English language, you know some basic stuff about every day human life, but you don’t know anything about science. Does water freeze at 0°C or at 4°C? Does the movement of the moon influence the tide or not? You can imagine all these different ways the world could turn out to be, but you don’t know which of these ways corresponds to reality or which of these ways is true. In other words, you don’t know which of these possible worlds will turn out to be the real world outside of your room.
J: What do you mean by “possible world”?
S: Just this: A possible state of the world. Now, your sentence, “Water freezes at 0°C.”, will be true in some of these possible worlds and wrong in others.
J: But how could it be wrong?
S: Well, I mean, just imagine a world in which water freezes at 4°C. There you have a possible world in which the claim is false.
J: Right…
S: Yeah so, suppose you now receive the information that water does indeed freeze at 0°C. You know this to be true for sure. This will be informative to you because it allows you to look at all the possible states of the world and exclude a given subset, namely the subset of all possible worlds in which water does not freeze at 0°C. You now know for sure that none of those correspond to the world outside of your room.
J: Okay, but even if you can eliminate a certain subset of all possible worlds, you would still find yourself with an awfully large set of possible ones, wouldn’t you?
S: Yes, but each new information about the regularities of the world outside reduces this set of possible worlds further. Step by step you narrow it down and you become more and more certain which world you’re actually living in. This is pretty much the situation we find ourselves in with regards to science.
J: Seems good to me.
S: But now imagine someone gives tells you a sentence which is true in all possible worlds. In other words, you simply cannot imagine a state of the world where this sentence is false. This sentence would not help you figure out what the world outside of your rooms is like because it would not allow you to exclude any subset of possible worlds. You see?
J: So, if it’s true under all circumstances, it doesn’t hold information about the world.
S: Yes, exactly. As Popper says: Meaningful scientific hypotheses are necessarily falsifiable. And I am sure that our medieval doctor has fallen pray to such an uninformative claim, at least in your example. I, on the other hand, claim that even though he doesn’t know yet what pattern science will find some day in the distant future to be real, the good doctor can rationally know for sure already that it’s not going to be the hypothesis of the invisible daemon. Because this hypothesis is simply not of the kind that could ever be supported by science.
J: Okay, so as it seems now, being rational entails not endorsing beliefs about the world that cannot be falsified.
S: Yes, that’s how I would put it. And let’s leave the problem of quantification aside for the time being.
J: What do you mean by that?
S: By that I mean that some phenomena are difficult to measure and therefore, there can be practical issues in proving claims about such phenomena scientifically. But as long as these phenomena are observable at all, we can formulate meaningful hypotheses about them. We just haven’t figured out how to observe them well enough in order to do science on them.
J: I understand.
S: But let’s come to another aspect of rationality. Surely, we agree that it is irrational to hold contradictory beliefs.
J: Like the belief that you are mortal and that you aren’t mortal?
S: Yes.
J: Okay, but this seems like a trivial aspect of rationality.
S: No, your example is trivial. Let’s say we are discussing the pros and cons of capitalism and you argue in favour of it from the principle that any good economic system should allow the people in it to act as freely as possible. Suppose I were now to show you that the unregulated market increases the unequal distribution of wealth in your society as a matter of necessity and that, as a result of this, children born to extremely poor parents can’t really be said to have much freedom, not because they can’t chose, but because their choices are so narrowly limited. It follows from this that unregulated capitalism actually decreases overall freedom as some people enjoy a very high degree of freedom while the vast masses don’t. Now I would point out that this conclusion contradicts your initial principle, and this would not at all be a trivial case.
J: And what makes it less trivial?
S: I’d say the fact that the contradiction becomes apparent only on further reflexion whereas it lies right on the surface when you claim that I’m mortal and immortal at the same time. But in both cases, I would still apply the same standard of logical coherence.
J: Alright, so rationality is refraining from unfalsifiable claims about patterns in the world and freedom of contradiction. What else?
S: I think a rational person should always be able to justify his beliefs and actions. For instance, if I were to claim that Charles Darwin could make himself invisible by eating yoghurt in the moonlight, you would surely ask why I should believe such an outlandish thing. And if I said, “See, I don’t really have a reason. I just believe it like that.”, then you would surely think I was being irrational.
J: Okay, but what about actions? Do you really think that we can always give a good reason for why we acted in a certain way? What about the heroin addict? She can certainly give you a ton of reasons why she should not do it. And who would you call more reasonable in this example, a heroin addict that sees through her own addiction and who clearly sees that she shouldn’t do it? Or a heroin addict that presents you some bullshit reason of why heroin usage might not be such a bad idea after all?
S: You’re raising a good point. I would say that the heroin addict who sees that her action is not based on her beliefs about what the good life looks like would be the more reasonable one.
J: But there you are contradicting yourself, aren’t you? And to come back to the psychoanalytical perspective, how could we ever be sure that the reasons we use to justify our actions are ever the reasons that have actually prompted our actions?
S: You’re right, we can’t be sure about that.
J: And furthermore, there are actually a ton of cases in which we can know for sure that our actions are not based on reasons. If I fall in love, for example, I start doing stupid shit, shit that is in no way consistent with the beliefs and principles I would advocate in a sober state of mind.
S: Right.
J: So, in that case, I know that what I’m doing is not based on reasons.
S: Your situation would by similar to that of the heroin addict, I think. Not least when it comes to your brain chemistry.
J: Right, so what do you make of this point?
S: This is interesting. So, it seems like even when you are being irrationally led by some emotion of other, you can still in some sense live up to the standards of rationality by seeing clearly that you are being so led.
J: But does this mean that I can behave as irrationally as I want as long as I keep saying, “Mea culpa! I’m acting irrationally right now!”?
S: Okay look, how about this. Whenever you act in some way, this itself implies that you approve of your act as long as you don’t declare otherwise.
J: So, we must presume that by doing drugs the drug addict implicitly approves of her drug use? Until she declares that she doesn’t approve of it? How does this help you?
S: Bear with me for a moment here. Some such value statement seems to be implicit in her action. Therefore, it would be irrational of her to implicitly state that doing drugs is a good idea, by doing drugs, while also holding many other moral convictions that do not permit drug use. This might be the case in some indirect way. For instance, she might subscribe to the view that illness is worse than health, that family life is important, that tranquillity of mind is a goal worth striving for and so on. From these views you could plausibly deduce the conclusion that drug use is impermissible. Her irrationality would thus consist in the contradiction between the value statement that is implied in her drug use and the logical entailments of her general moral convictions. But as soon as she openly declares, “I do heroin and it’s a terrible idea.”, the inconsistency disappears.
J: So, then she would no longer be irrational?
S: That’s what I would say. You could maybe say that she has weak willpower, that she suffers from very strong disadvantageous psychological conditioning, that there is still some unresolved personal conflict inside her that fuels the avoidance strategy of drug use or whatever. But I think that her declaration redeems her irrationality.
J: Okay, but what if she still doesn’t do anything about her addiction?
S: Then this should be treated as a new action with the implicit claim that it’s a good idea not to do anything about the addiction. This, again, would be irrational of her until she declared that she is unhappy with her passivity and that she would like to do something about it but can’t.
J: Okay, but what about the case I talked about earlier? Suppose she keeps playing this game for the rest of her life, she indulged in her addiction and each time someone pointed out to her that her actions are bad for her and others, she just responds, “I know, right? I don’t approve of my behaviour either, but here I go again.”
S: I don’t think there would be a problem with her rationality then, instead she would be lacking in other virtues. Imagine a person who just goes around punching people’s dogs and urinating on their porches. If this person runs with the mea-culpa-strategy, we will soon come to suspect that the problem is not with their rationality but with their morals. If they knew full well what they’re doing and that it’s bad, I would rather think that they’re an asshole than think that they are irrational in the sense we are discussing here.
J: Alright, but let’s come back to my other objection. From the psychoanalytical perspective, it seems like we only seldomly, if ever, know the true motives of our actions. Thus, if I give you a reason for my action, we could both be pretty sure that it’s probably not the true reason or at least false to some degree.
S: I think, it remains to be demonstrated to which degree we must doubt our consciously accessible motives. You could always postulate that I am deluded with regards to my motive and that the real cause of my behaviour is some repressed conflict I am not aware of. But does it make sense to make this postulation in all cases?
J: Well, I would say that we all have some repressed conflicts that influence our actions to some degree and that are outside the reach of our conscious mind.
S: So it might be. But I claim that it would nonetheless make sense to apply the standard of rationality to each other even though the real motives may forever be hidden in the dark.
J: But why?
S: Well, what would the alternative look like? Think of the claim that Darwin’s yoghurt makes him invisible. Would you prefer to live in a world where such claims can be made without the necessity to give a reason?
J: No, but I was thinking more about justifying actions.
S: The same question applies. How would such a world look like? I’d say that for any society to work, we roughly need to agree on the same rules of how to act. This is pretty trivial. These rules will come in the form of explicit laws, but also in the form of more or less implicit social norms. Even within the boundaries of what is legally permissible, we confine ourselves to certain ways of acting and refrain from others in order to get along and cooperate. In order to cooperate, I need you to act in some way that is predictable for me. Remember the very beginning of our conversation?
J: The part where you claimed that the brain is predicting its environment in order to survive?
S: Exactly, now, you too are party of my brain’s environment and it would like to predict your actions, too. It can do this precisely because we agreed to follow the same rules. And if you act in some way, this action better be traceable to the principle rules we agreed upon. Of course, this doesn’t regard all actions. When you spit into the pond in a public parc, I might shrug it off. If you spit into Plato’s face, you might be challenged to justify your deed. And then you better be able to give a good reason!
J: But what if some inner conflict made me spit on him that is repressed and unconscious?
S: That would not matter. What I’m asking of you in that situation is to show me how your action fits with the rules we have agreed upon in order to predict each other’s behaviour. If you can show me this by giving a good justification, in some important way, I don’t care what the real reason was. My beliefs of what to expect from you in the future remain unshaken.
J: Right, okay. So, rationality is refraining from untestable claims about the world, avoiding logical contradictions, being able to give a justification for your opinions and actions… Anything else? The list is growing.
S: Yeah, it’s a term with a lot of meanings, it seems. Maybe we can leave it at that for the time being. Let’s move on.
J: What an interlude! So… Where exactly were we before? Ah right! So, you had claimed that it’s always bad to have an irrational belief and before we defined rationality, I wanted to make the claim that there are at least some cases of irrational beliefs where the positive outcomes outweigh the negative ones.
S: Yes, that’s right. Okay, so what would be an example of an irrational statement with mainly positive consequences?
J: Say your mother is on her dying bed and she is terribly afraid of the big nothingness that might follow her death.
S: If it’s nothing, it can’t be big by definition. I think death is over-rated.
J: That’s not my point. So, let’s assume she is afraid of dying so she turns to the ideas of God and a paradise in the beyond. Now under other circumstances you would probably say, “She has to look death straight into the eye, she has to stare into the abyss of her own finiteness until her priorities are in order, she has to make peace with the ever-changing nature of this universe in which every appearance comes into being only to be devoured by its successor the very next moment.”
S: Sounds about right.
J: But what do you make of your mother’s case? If you really think death is the end then looking death into the eye might only cause her unnecessary suffering from which she will not learn any of your existential truisms because, guess what, she will be dead.
S: So, you’re saying she would be better off believing these irrational things about heaven and God because she would die anyway? Therefore, believing this would increase her happiness without having any bad consequences?
J: Yes, that’s what I’m saying.
S: So, in this case, religion would function as a type of palliative medicine, right? And a much cheaper one than morphine for that matter.
J: You don’t believe in God, I get it. Now please, will you get on with the argument.
S: Alright, so first, I would disagree that it doesn’t have any negative consequences. This is because you would basically be lying to her either directly by saying, “Don’t worry, the big bearded man awaits on the other side of the tunnel.”, or by not contradicting her when she says it.
J: Yes, but it would be a benign lie, wouldn’t it?
S: It would be a lie, nonetheless. You would be concealing the truth from her, you would in a very paternalizing way decide what’s good for her and what isn’t, but most importantly, you would distance yourself from her because by lying, you create a divide between what you believe to be true inside and what you claim to be true outside. You now have to hide what is inside, you have to conceal a part of yourself, you have to put on an act and keep the other person away from you so they don’t see what you really think. I think people almost always notice when they are being lied to, they notice it precisely by this divide, by this distance that has suddenly opened up between them and you. There is no more effective way to get rid of someone from your life than telling them things that you both tacitly know to be wrong. You increase the distance by lying until they are gone. Do you think it is an act of solidarity with your dying mother to create this sort of distance between you and her? Precisely in the moment in which she would be most in need of your authentic and unflinching presence? I’ve once made small talk with a dying person because I didn’t know what to say or how to face my emotions, because I didn’t know how to be present with them at the moment of death and it is to this day one of the things I have done that I regret the most.
J: Okay, I think you’re making a good point there, but first, it is not at all clear that the positive aspects of honesty outweigh the negative aspects of existential dread she would experience and second, our discussion is not about the virtue of honesty but the question of whether some irrational beliefs are good. That is the context in which my example ought to be discussed.
S: Well, we have substances at our disposition that can help with existential dread, that rub it into your face until you drop all resistance to it and are at peace. And I’m not talking about morphine. But of course, you are right, we should come back to the question at hand. I got carried away by my emotions. So, go ahead and make your point, José.
J: Okay, so do you admit that irrational beliefs can in some instances cause more happiness than suffering?
S: I remain sceptical, I have to say.
J: You mean to say that under no circumstances whatsoever can it make sense to hold an irrational belief?
S: Honestly, I don’t know. My imagination is finite and surely there has been in the history of mankind at least one situation in which an illusion has led to mostly benign consequences. But you see, my qualm amounts to this. Most examples you could name seem to have a flip side. Your friend who believes she can sometimes change the world by prayer might feel responsible when the world turns out bad, she might think she hasn’t prayed enough. I’m repeating myself here. But take a devout Christian for example.
J: Come on, not this again.
S: I’ll stick to the question at hand, I promise. A devout Christian has the irrational belief that her good deeds will be rewarded in this life or the next. So, when good things happen to her, she will believe that she receives the rightful reward for her virtuous acts.
J: Yes, what’s wrong with that?
S: Well, can’t you see the potential flip side? What if something bad happens to her father-in-law? Maybe he is befallen by sickness or his crops perish in a drought or someone steals his iPad. If the pious Christian thinks that God is just, he might think that this father-in-law is actually getting what he deserves. Maybe he has excessively coveted his neighbours ox, who knows? I think this is true for most irrational beliefs that seem to be beneficial on the surface. They mostly have some flip side, some hidden way in which they are doing more harm than good. Or at least they are doing enough harm so that the question of whether the benefits outweigh the negatives becomes difficult to decide.
J: Okay, but it seems so obvious to me that there are at least some instances where irrationality leads to positive outcomes.
S: As I said, I wouldn’t go so far as to exclude the possibility that there are such instances. But the question of how to value these beliefs is often trickier than it seems on first sight. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that we have a continuum on which we can put these beliefs. On the left hand side, you have the pernicious examples of irrationality, on the right hand side, you have the benign cases and in the middle, you have the cases that receive mixed reviews so to say. My point now is this. How would we go about placing the cases?
J: What do you mean?
S: Well, if we consider any single one of these cases, how do we know where to put it on this continuum? How do we know whether it is mostly pernicious or mostly beneficial?
J: I don’t know, I guess, we’re weighing the pros and the cons?
S: Sure, but how do we go about that?
J: Okay, Socrates, you know what? Stop beating around the bush. My wife is right, they will execute you one day for being such a wise guy all the time. Just say what you want to say.
S: Alright then. What I mean is this. When we consider whether any single irrational belief had better be dropped, for instance the belief of my dying mother in paradise, we weigh the pros and cons, as you rightly pointed out. Weighing the pros and cons means we try to predict as accurately as possible the future consequences that holding this irrational belief will cause. Again, we find ourselves in the domain of predicting the future and, guess what, we base ourselves on some patterns we have observed in the past.
J: Now I’m curious, how will the freezing point of water come in handy here?
S: You’re quite the joker. Obviously not at all. When my dying mother clings to the idea of a paradise, should I criticise this or not?
J: How would such a criticism even look like? Psychological resistance in the face of death must be through the roof.
S: Not the point. Let’s suppose I could by some hyper-sophisticated argument convince her whenever I choose to that there is no God and no paradise. Should I do it or not? What are the pros and cons? The pros are, as I said above, that we will maybe be closer to each other in the moment of her death. The cons are that she will possibly freak out and spend the short rest of her life in existential agony. How do I know this?
J: Know what?
S: How do I know that such are the pros and cons of my action?
J: Socrates…
S: Right, right, I’ll quit the question game. My claim is this: I know that my argument might cause her existential agony because I have observed in the past on many occasions how sensitively she has reacted to the topic of death and I know that lying will separate us because, this too, I have observed on many occasions in the past with different people. In other words, I base my choice on a prediction of how she might react. Would you not agree that this prediction should absolutely be based on real patterns?
J: What do you mean here by “real patterns”?
S: The same as before. I want the pattern “mentioning of the topic of death” and “fearful reaction” to be real and not illusory because now it matters whether or not I got this regularity right in the past.
J: Yes, so it seems.
S: And the same is true of all irrational beliefs, right? In order to say whether they are mostly beneficial or mostly pernicious, I have to predict their consequences as accurately as possible. And to do this, I have to base myself on real patterns and not on imaginary ones. So, what follows from this for our discussion? You, dear José, proposed that some irrational beliefs might be admitted in virtue of having good consequences. But how do you decide for the set of possible irrational beliefs which ones are good and which ones are an evil virus of Satan? You assess their consequences. But in this assessment, you want to base yourself on real patterns and not imaginary ones. In other words, you want to form rational beliefs about the future outcomes of irrational beliefs. You see? You are already playing the rationality game.
J: But could I not play the game only for as long as it takes me to assess the consequences of these irrational beliefs?
S: And then drop all standards of rational thinking again and indulge in the irrational belief itself? Do you think this would work?
J: Why would it not?
S: Well take the belief in the Christian God for instance. Could you really hold this irrational belief on rational grounds? And by that, I mean what we’ve just discussed. Could you believe in God because you know that this belief will have beneficial consequences on your acts and on your psychology? Whether this is the case, by the way, is of course highly debatable…
J: Yeah, why not?
S: Well, people don’t generally seem to acquire their irrational beliefs in this way, right? Let’s take the following example. I try to convince you that there is a giant golden cube hidden under your house. You may not uncover it, nor ever lay your eyes upon it in any way. But, I further tell you, this cube has a magical quality in that it shields everyone in your house from sickness in at least some instances and it increases your well-being permanently to a moderate degree. If you were really strongly convinced of this belief, it would have close to no negative consequences. In virtue of the placebo effect you would certainly be sick less often and you would maybe even feel happier. If we weigh pros and cons, this belief seems to be a good candidate to adopt. But you can’t do it, can you?
J: I guess not.
S: So, the rational reasons in favour of an irrational belief are not sufficient to adopt that belief.
J: So it appears.
S: So, seemingly you can calculate the pros and cons for the irrational beliefs of someone else like your dying mother, but not for yourself. Or at least, such a calculation would have a limited effect in your own case. It could help you justifying your irrational beliefs post hoc, after you have already adopted them.
J: Okay, but does this argument really show what it purports to show? I mean, I agree that we don’t arrive at our irrational beliefs through weighing its pros and cons. But so what? When I already have such a belief and it seem to be working fine for me, why bother? Why should I not simply keep it?
S: Because every person thinks their irrational beliefs work fine for them and some of them are wrong about this. And you want to make sure you’re not one of them.
J: Okay, two things to unpack here. First, is it really the case that everyone thinks their beliefs are benefiting them? Take a depressed person for example. Let’s say they have observed their mind and noticed that there are recurring thoughts of worthlessness and of a pessimistic outlook on life. They may know on a rational level that these beliefs are due to their condition and that they are dysfunctional, but they have these thoughts nonetheless, right?
S: Yes, you are right, and I expressed myself imprecisely. What I meant so say is this. If a person is really deeply convinced of their belief, if they would defend it in a discussion by giving a cogent justification, then they also necessarily believe that this belief benefits them. In the case of your depressed person, his beliefs have more the character of an intrusive thought, right? They know, at least in some cases, that their thought of worthlessness is irrational, that it is not based on good reasons, indeed, that it stands in contradiction to many of their other beliefs. But this thought keeps intruding on them regardless.
J: And you would say that anyone thinks that their deeply held convictions are benefiting them?
S: Yes.
J: Okay, the second problem I have with your statement pertains to how we evaluate the pros and cons of a given rational belief. You say that in this evaluation we want to base ourselves on real patterns, right? So, we take a rational stance, try to figure out how nature works, try to figure out what the consequences of the belief would be and then rate the belief accordingly. But this is obviously not how it happens in practice. A Christian who wants to evaluate his belief in God and paradise will not take a rational stance and confine his observations to the regularities of nature. Rather, he will base himself on the very same irrational beliefs he has already endorsed. Is it good to believe in God? Well, certainly! For he who believes comes into paradise. You might evaluate irrational beliefs from the outside in the way you described because your standpoint is already rational. But those who actually believe these irrational beliefs of course will take them to be true when they ponder their value.
S: You’re making an excellent point, José. But don’t you see the problem? It is a justificatory circle. Your belief in God is based on itself. You believe in God and this belief seems to you a good one to have because in a world created by God it benefits you to have this belief. Thus, the snail bites its own tail.
J: You mean the snake?
S: Yes, but apart from leading to circular justifications there is another problem with this. You’re basically saying that people who have irrational beliefs do not assess the value of these beliefs from a rational standpoint, but rather from a standpoint that already presupposes the truth of their irrational beliefs. Therefore, they can make value judgements about their belief without playing the rationality game, without making an effort to find out through observation which patterns can be found in the world. Also, this fact makes it so that endorsing the irrational belief that they happen to find themselves with always seems like a good idea. Right?
J: Right.
S: But I think it is enough that it seems like a pretty bad idea from a rational standpoint. Take a Catholic homosexual for example.
J: Boy, you really like to criticise Christianity, don’t you?
S: It’s one of my guilty pleasures. This Catholic homosexual will have been taught that if he lives out his homosexuality, he will eternally burn in hell. Now, eternity is a long time so if you think that this is indeed the fate that awaits homosexuals after their death, it would be a sensible choice to supress your sexuality during your lifetime. It will likewise be a good choice to have this belief about homosexuals and hell. It is part of the Christian doctrine, after all and if there is a God it would certainly be unwise to doubt this word.
J: Okay, but not all Christian dominations have such a tough stance on homosexuality. Protestants are much more liberal, for example.
S: No, but it’s still written in their good book, isn’t it? Anyway, from the point of our poor homosexual, he is doing everything right. From a rational point of view however, he seems to have placed his bet completely on the wrong dog. It would be much more beneficial for him to experience himself sexually.
J: But isn’t it his point of view that counts?
S: No, why should it? He is simply confused about what action will maximise his happiness because he bases his decision on the Christian delusion.
J: No, from your standpoint he appears deluded. Not from his own. Your argument works only insofar as you can show why the rational standpoint is superior to the irrational or religious one. You have to presuppose that which you’re trying to prove! This then is circular reasoning on your own part.
S: What do you mean?
J: You want to show that rationality is the way to go insofar as no irrational belief can have predominantly positive consequences. To show this you gave the example of the homosexual who suffers due to his belief in the word of God. But his suffering is not unwise from his own point of view, only from your rational position. Therefore, you must already presuppose that your rational standpoint is superior in order to demonstrate that it is superior.
S: Okay… I must admit that you’re making a good point here, I hadn’t thought about this. But I am not ready to throw my rational ideals overboard just yet. This just shows that I have to argue for rationality using a different strategy.
J: Ha, gotcha!
S: You’ve won that battle, but the war is still on, so to say.
J: I like it when my friends use such martial metaphors to describe our conversations. Makes me feel like my social relations are healthy and intact.
S: Very funny. Okay, I think I know how to go about this. Your position basically amounts to some sort of realism, doesn’t it? Anyone can have any irrational belief they want because from their own perspective, it always seems like a reasonable belief to have.
J: Well, thus is seems to me after our discussion.
S: And how about the martyr who kills himself and others in his pursuit of paradise?
J: Now, his delusion actually makes him act in ways that hurt others.
S: Yeah, but from his perspective he’s doing something virtuous, isn’t he? He’s doing the work of his god.
J: Yes, but in his case, his actions affect others so whether or not he should have his irrational belief is no longer his private decision.
S: But isn’t this always the case? As we humans are continually interacting with each other, the beliefs of each of us always affect others. Let’s say I have the irrational belief that shaking anyone’s right hand will kill a dolphin. Would this not have an influence on others?
J: Yes, but you are comparing apples and oranges.
S: Why can’t fruit be compared?
J: No, I mean the two cases are not analogous. In both cases, the belief has an influence on others but in one case, this influence is benign albeit slightly quirky, on the second case, it actually kills people.
S: And you think that is bad?
J: Of course, I think that is bad! What’s the matter with you? Don’t you think it’s bad to kill people?
S: Yes, so it appears from my standpoint and from yours, but certainly not from the martyr’s.
J: Ah, so that’s what you’re saying. But I mean, if we grant everyone the right to have the irrational beliefs they want to have on the condition that they don’t influence others negatively…
S: No, you would still have to define what you mean by a negative influence. And then I could say, “Yes, it appears to be a negative influence from your perspective, but not from the perspective of the person who has the belief that causes his negative influence on others.”
J: So, the definition of what is a negative influence and what isn’t would still be bound to the perspective.
S: Precisely, that’s why it’s a form of relativism.
J: Okay, so I now need to find a criterion to distinguish between those irrational beliefs whose consequences are permissible and those whose consequences aren’t. How about this. As everyone has the right to belief whatever irrational belief he or she wants, killing them is out of the question. Because in that case, they would not be able to hold any beliefs at all anymore.
S: This doesn’t work either. You could easily imagine a person who has irrational beliefs such that he is the only one entitled to have the beliefs he wants. So, he doesn’t acknowledge the right of others to have irrational beliefs. Maybe he doesn’t acknowledge any of their rights. If this person is a racist, a Nazi for example, who undoubtedly has many irrational beliefs, he could easily justify killing others on the basis of his own belief system. If you allow for all forms of irrationality and if you think that each irrational thought must necessarily be evaluated from the perspective of its believer, then I don’t see how you could escape this consequence.
J: Yeah, but I don’t want to allow for all forms of irrationality.
S: Then which ones do you rule out? And on what grounds? I can conveniently rule out all of them from my point of view. In my view, this is the main problem for people who criticise rationality. They don’t want to endorse all forms of irrationality, but we could easily imagine an example of rationality so outlandish that no critic of rationality would seriously want to permit it. Imagine a person who lives under the illusion that rubbing his faeces in the faces of all the people he meets is a virtuous act as this will bring him and them eternal happiness and grant them insights into the ultimate nature of reality. However severely your criticism of rationality may be, you surely want to rule this example as irrational. And many more, for that matter. The same problem poses itself in less extreme cases. You may believe it has some higher significance when you hear my name three times like you did this morning, but you might frown upon your flatmate who puts crystals in her pitcher to purify the drinking water. But on what are you basing this distinction? Why is one instance of irrationality permissible and the other not?
J: I see… Okay then, it doesn’t seem like a good idea then to evaluate irrational ideal from the perspective of the person endorsing them. But maybe I can still make my point. Let’s say, you get to be the judge. Mr. Rationality over here evaluates every irrational belief according to its positive and negative consequences. And let’s suppose for the sake of argument that some of these beliefs will get assigned a positive value from your point of view. Would you still criticise these ideas?
S: I would indeed.
J: But why?
S: Okay, suppose a person has mostly rational beliefs and then a few irrational ones of which some are benign, and some are pernicious. You go to them and say, “Hey, so, you had better give up these beliefs because from my point of view they don’t benefit you. But you can keep those over there. In my eyes, both are equally untrue, but those seem to have some benefits for you.”
J: But this seems to be more like a practical problem, doesn’t it? Namely how do you convince them to give up some of their beliefs but not others.
S: You seem to be right. Okay, let’s say I can convince them to do that, again by means of some sophisticated argument. Now, what happens in the future when their esoteric Nazi cousin comes over and tells them that Ganesha appeared to him in a self-hypnotic trance and told him that the Jewish people are at the root of all human suffering? They wouldn’t dismiss this claim on the grounds that it is irrational, right? Because you have told them explicitly that some irrational beliefs are okay to have. Do you see what I’m getting at here?
J: Sort of…
S: I think it would make much more sense to convince them to adopt the standards of rational thought and do away with their irrational beliefs once and for all. That way, they can reject their cousin’s bigotry on the grounds of rational criticism. It gives them the tools to make up their mind for themselves.
J: That seems to be overly optimistic. Just because you have pointed out to them that this one instance of irrationality is bad, they won’t be immune to all forms of irrationality for the remainder of their life.
S: True, but it’s the best I can do. I think it is vitally important to defend and spread these rational standards because they help us get rid of an immense source of suffering. Just imagine a world in which everyone is forced to base their claims about the world on observation and critical thinking.
J: Yeah? But don’t you think that we will also loose an awful lot of things that are worth preserving? You might think this is a cheesy example but what would love look like in a world full of perfectly rational people?
S: Why would it look differently from the way it looks in this world full of superstitious dreamers?
J: Why, surely you will not claim that all aspects of love can be depicted in the medium of rational thought?
S: No, I won’t claim that but why would it have to be reducible in this way? The love I feel for my dear Xanthippe for instance is perfectly compatible with the laws of physics, but this fact doesn’t diminish it in the slightest. I don’t have to believe in supernatural entities in order to find this relationship fulfilling.
J: So, you are not claiming that rationality has all the answers?
S: It certainly has some answers. But the much bigger advantage seems to be that it can help us rule out many of the wrong answers. Take the question of how to live a happy and fulfilled life for example. Quite probably, organising your set of beliefs according to the standards of rationality will not be sufficient for you to achieve this sort of wellbeing. Learning how to establish a healthy relationship with your friends and partner, for instance, is not exclusively a question of rational considerations. It’s a lot about getting a feeling for it. However, being rational can help you clear your social life from pernicious convictions such as that your sister-in-law might have poisoned your well with her evil eye. You see? So, rationality might not always increase your happiness, but it certainly helps decreasing your suffering. A lot.
J: But wait, this seems to be false in an important way. Take the state of mind of a depressed person for example. They are plagued by a constantly recurring stream of negative thought that does all kinds of damage. Thoughts also have the power to distort our perception and cause us great suffering in the process. Indeed, one of the salubrious effects of meditation seems to stem precisely from the fact that we learn to detach from our thoughts and to not immediately buy into their representation of the world and of ourselves. These trains of thought can create hell on earth in your brain if you don’t manage to take a step back. So, this seems to be a case of being overly rational, doesn’t it? Here, your rationality seems to run amok.
S: I really couldn’t agree more with what you said, but this is clearly not a criticism of rationality as we have defined the term earlier.
J: But why not? These unwholesome thoughts are created by your ratio after all. And aren’t the forms of rationality we discussed before all dependent on your capacity to think?
S: Yes, they are. But I don’t think this causes a problem. Sometimes, the use of your rational faculties is virtuous as in the cases of critical rationality we talked about. Some other time, you must watch out for an overly eager mind that wants to solve problems that are not intellectual in nature. The mind of the depressed person, for example, is habitually trying to solve the problem of feeling bad by means of rational analysis. This is not productive because instead of an intellectual insight, the depressed person may need to practice and learn a different way of feeling instead. Therefore, the problem does not fall into the domain of the rational mind, but the rational mind thinks it does and we need to stop it from overheating and making everything worse. And there are many more pathological conditions in which the thinking mind is running wild. But could you not do both? Could you not be a skilled meditator that refrains from the unwholesome obsessions of the thinking mind and who tries at the same time to live up to rational standards?
J: To me it still seems like obsessive thinking and the different forms of rationality go hand in hand…
S: But why would they? Just imagine what goes in inside a rational person who is also a good meditator. They hear some claim about the nature of the universe, they verify whether it is falsifiable, whether it contradicts any of their prior beliefs or any of what they know the speaker to believe, they ask for a justification for the belief and adopt it only if they are themselves convinced. After doing all of this, they walk home, they clearly sense the breeze brushing their hand and see the myriad of little insects humming in the sunlight when suddenly some negative thought about their partner pops into their head. A few seconds into the thought, they notice it as a thought and turn their attention inwards to the emotional sensation that it has stirred up. Upon closer investigation, the anger transforms into a feeling of being hurt. They gently hold this feeling in attention, until it dissolves and gives way to the tranquillity of mind they enjoyed before. Does this seem to be impossible to you? Would it not, on the contrary, be much plausible that the skills acquired in meditation actually help with rational thinking?
J: Why would they?
S: Because if you cultivated these skill, you can direct your focus in a more controlled manner, you can be more aware of the inner resistance that might be triggered by a contrary opinion and deal with it appropriately and so on.
J: I am not sure I find this entirely convincing.
S: But can you say what your qualms consist in?
J: Not exactly… I might have to get back to you later, I need to think about some of this. In the meantime, don’t get yourself executed, alright?
S: I mean, this would strengthen your point.
J: Yeah, but you wouldn’t be convinced, because you would be dead, wouldn’t you?
S: True, indeed. Anyway, I got to go find Laches on the agora now. I can’t believe they made him general. I bet he doesn’t have a clue how to define courage.
J: Alright, good luck, my friend. Take care!
S: You too, José!
Comments
Post a Comment