John Loftus

Employer and Employee Model: Truth

entirelyuseless Ethics, Religion, Science, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , ,

In the remote past, I suggested that I would someday follow up on this post. In the current post, I begin to keep that promise.

We can ask about the relationship of the various members of our company with the search for truth.

The CEO, as the predictive engine, has a fairly strong interest in truth, but only insofar as truth is frequently necessary in order to get predictive accuracy. Consequently our CEO will usually insist on the truth when it affects our expectations regarding daily life, but it will care less when we consider things remote from the senses. Additionally, the CEO is highly interested in predicting the behavior of the Employee, and it is not uncommon for falsehood to be better than truth for this purpose.

To put this in another way, the CEO’s interest in truth is instrumental: it is sometimes useful for the CEO’s true goal, predictive accuracy, but not always, and in some cases it can even be detrimental.

As I said here, the Employee is, roughly speaking, the human person as we usually think of one, and consequently the Employee has the same interest in truth that we do. I personally consider truth to be an ultimate end,  and this is probably the opinion of most people, to a greater or lesser degree. In other words, most people consider truth a good thing, even apart from instrumental considerations. Nonetheless, all of us care about various things besides truth, and therefore we also occasionally trade truth for other things.

The Vice President has perhaps the least interest in truth. We could say that they too have some instrumental concern about truth. Thus for example the VP desires food, and this instrumentally requires true ideas about where food is to be found. Nonetheless, as I said in the original post, the VP is the least rational and coherent, and may easily fail to notice such a need. Thus the VP might desire the status resulting from winning an argument, so to speak, but also desire the similar status that results from ridiculing the person holding an opposing view. The frequent result is that a person believes the falsehood that ridiculing an opponent generally increases the chance that they will change their mind (e.g. see John Loftus’s attempt to justify ridicule.)

Given this account, we can raise several disturbing questions.

First, although we have said the Employee values truth in itself, can this really be true, rather than simply a mistaken belief on the part of the Employee? As I suggested in the original account, the Employee is in some way a consequence of the CEO and the VP. Consequently, if neither of these places intrinsic value on truth, how is it possible that the Employee does?

Second, even if the Employee sincerely places an intrinsic value on truth, how is this not a misplaced value? Again, if the Employee is something like a result of the others, what is good for the Employee should be what is good for the others, and thus if truth is not intrinsically good for the others, it should not be intrinsically good for the Employee.

In response to the first question, the Employee can indeed believe in the intrinsic value of truth, and of many other things to which the CEO and VP do not assign intrinsic value. This happens because as we are considering the model, there is a real division of labor, even if the Employee arises historically in a secondary manner. As I said in the other post, the Employee’s beliefs are our beliefs, and the Employee can believe anything that we believe. Furthermore, the Employee can really act on such beliefs about the goodness of truth or other things, even when the CEO and VP do not have the same values. The reason for this is the same as the reason that the CEO will often go along with the desires of the VP, even though the CEO places intrinsic value only on predictive accuracy. The linked post explains, in effect, why the CEO goes along with sex, even though only the VP really wants it. In a similar way, if the Employee believes that sex outside of marriage is immoral, the CEO often goes along with avoiding such sex, even though the CEO cares about predictive accuracy, not about sex or its avoidance. Of course, in this particular case, there is a good chance of conflict between the Employee and VP, and the CEO dislikes conflict, since it makes it harder to predict what the person overall will end up doing. And since the VP very rarely changes its mind in this case, the CEO will often end up encouraging the Employee to change their mind about the morality of such sex: thus one of the most frequent reasons why people abandon their religion is that it says that sex in some situations is wrong, but they still desire sex in those situations.

In response to the second, the Employee is not wrong to suppose that truth is intrinsically valuable. The argument against this would be that the human good is based on human flourishing, and (it is claimed) we do not need truth for such flourishing, since the CEO and VP do not care about truth in itself. The problem with this is that such flourishing requires that the Employee care about truth, and even the CEO needs the Employee to care in this way, for the sake of its own goal of predictive accuracy. Consider a real-life company: the employer does not necessarily care about whether the employee is being paid, considered in itself, but only insofar as it is instrumentally useful for convincing the employee to work for the employer. But the employer does care about whether the employee cares about being paid: if the employee does not care about being paid, they will not work for the employer.

Concern for truth in itself, apart from predictive accuracy, affects us when we consider things that cannot possibly affect our future experience: thus in previous cases I have discussed the likelihood that there are stars and planets outside the boundaries of the visible universe. This is probably true; but if I did not care about truth in itself, I might as well say that the universe is surrounded by purple elephants. I do not expect any experience to verify or falsify the claim, so why not make it? But now notice the problem for the CEO: the CEO needs to predict what the Employee is going to do, including what they will say and believe. This will instantly become extremely difficult if the Employee decides that they can say and believe whatever they like, without regard for truth, whenever the claim will not affect their experiences. So for its own goal of predictive accuracy, the CEO needs the Employee to value truth in itself, just as an ordinary employer needs their employee to value their salary.

In real life this situation can cause problems. The employer needs their employee to care about being paid, but if they care too much, they may constantly be asking for raises, or they may quit and go work for someone who will pay more. The employer does not necessarily like these situations. In a similar way, the CEO in our company may worry if the Employee insists too much on absolute truth, because as discussed elsewhere, it can lead to other situations with unpredictable behavior from the Employee, or to situations where there is a great deal of uncertainty about how society will respond to the Employee’s behavior.

Overall, this post perhaps does not say much in substance that we have not said elsewhere, but it will perhaps provide an additional perspective on these matters.

Easter for Unbelievers

entirelyuseless Catholicism, Ethics, History, Journal Entries, Metaphysics, Religion, Theology, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In the atheist blogosphere today, one finds a somewhat embarrassed acknowledgement of the feast of Easter. Thus for example Brian Leiter says, “Happy Easter… from the Antichrist,” namely himself, and John Loftus says, “Since I don’t think anything significant happened on Easter I’m not treating it as a special day.”

There are a number of problems with this attitude.

First, it is self-refuting. If Loftus thinks that Easter shouldn’t be treated as a special day, then he should not treat it as a special day, which means that he should not go out of his way to mention it.

Second, as I pointed out in an earlier post, whether you should treat the traditions of your ancestors with respect is a different question from the question of whether the beliefs of your ancestors were true. Loftus assumes that if you think the response to the latter question is negative, you should also think that response to the former question is negative. But this is an unjustified assumption, and is unlikely to be true. It is however typical of Loftus, who frequently attempts to justify his practice of ridiculing believers.

Third, there is a more basic point concerning the celebration of feasts and holidays in general. The meaning of the feast is never wholly exhausted by the historical particulars on which it is based. Francis Hunt says about the case of Easter,

In my own personal journey – for I was born and raised a Catholic – it was the realization that I did not, in fact, believe in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead which led me to stop referring to myself as a Christian, even before I was willing to admit to myself that I did not believe in God either. I still have great admiration for the figure of Jesus, for much of the message he preached, for his integrity, his courage, his gentleness, his insights into life and human nature, his radical message of how we could find a way to live as individuals and communally by following better, more noble ideals than those of competition with and dominance over each other. But none of this makes me a Christian, for I do not believe (have faith) that he was the son of God who died, was buried and on the third day rose from the dead.

All of this said, I do not believe that Easter is irrelevant, or that we should not celebrate it. One of the strengths of Christianity (as of all great religions) is its ability to take the most central human experiences and weave them into a narrative which gives us eternally sense-seeking humans some kinds of answers to the questions and mysteries which we constantly experience in living our lives. From our first emergence into (self-)consciousness hundreds of thousands of years ago up to the last handful or two of decades, our human experience has been existentially and immanently connected with the basic course of nature, the year, the seasons. Winter is that season where our survival, our very existence is acutely threatened – it is that time where it is often extremely difficult to find enough nourishment and shelter from the elements to just continue living. If spring does not come soon we will die. And when the days finally become longer and warmer, when nature finally produces enough new life to ensure that we will not starve, that is surely a reason for celebrating. Moreover, having survived a time where much of the world seemed cold and bare and lifeless, it is natural that our thoughts should turn to the cycle of dying and the birth of new life out of that death.

Although Christians like to think that their story is original, nearly all the memes which are gathered together in the Easter narrative are general human ones which can be found in many religions and philosophies; death and the triumph of life over death, the strength of weakness, the suffering of the righteous and their vindication, the belief that justice is ultimately stronger than human power constellations, the sacrifice of the gentle king for the good of the land and the people, even the incarnate god. What makes Christianity unique is its insistence on the essential historicity of its teaching and its consequent claim to universal validity and truth.

As a non-believer I can still be touched and moved by the powerful drama and deep insights into life and the human condition contained in the Easter story. I can find inspiration in a message which proclaims hope beyond hopelessness, vindication beyond failure, new joy beyond despair. Where I cannot journey with the Christians is their assertion that their narrative is a basically factual statement of a particular, explicit, essential intervention of an all-powerful, all-loving God into history with reality-transforming ontological consequences on a cosmic – and even para-cosmic eternal (beyond all space and time) – level. And, of course, it is precisely this assertion which is the heart of the message for Christians.

I am aware that many believers may see my position as impoverished. If their belief should be true, then they are right. I can remember my own years as a believer (or, more accurately, as one who wanted to believe), I can remember the impression of desolation and emptiness I had when the sacrament was moved to a side-altar, the empty tabernacle door left heart-achingly open, the cross on the altar draped in a purple shroud. I remember the feeling of joy and lightness spreading through a darkened church during the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday night as the Easter fire is kindled, the Easter candle lit from it and then the light springing from candle to candle in the church, accompanied by the thrice-repeated responsory, Lumen Christi – Deo Gratias. Much of this is, of course, wonderfully staged theatre, (holy) smoke and mirrors, but the feelings induced are none the less real for all that. There is a deep part of us which has a need for, and responds to ritual and solemnity and the only demand I would place on such ritual is that it should be honestly and well done.

Hunt is not using very precise language here, but his basic point is that Easter is not exhausted by the particular claim that Jesus rose from the dead, but the feast is also meant to express certain universal truths. And this would be a sufficient reason for a person to celebrate the feast of Easter, even if they do not believe the particular historical claim about Jesus.

The basic issue is that if a feast had no meaning apart from historical particulars, then there would no reason for us to celebrate it, just as I do not institute a feast to celebrate the fact that I ate breakfast on January 1st, 1990. In a similar way, in the second volume of his work Jesus of Nazareth, Joseph Ratzinger says about the resurrection of Jesus,

Now it must be acknowledged that if in Jesus’ Resurrection we were dealing simply with the miracle of a resuscitated corpse, it would ultimately be of no concern to us. For it would be no more important than the resuscitation of a clinically dead person through the art of doctors. For the world as such and for our human existence, nothing would have changed.

Ratzinger goes on to assert that the resurrection of Jesus changes the world in ways that are likely to be denied by unbelievers. And here there may be a real issue. Every feast and holiday is intended to celebrate universal truths, not merely historical particulars. But that does not necessarily imply that the purported universal truths are actually universal truths: they may be partial truths, or even complete falsehoods. And in that case, one might indeed question whether the feast should be celebrated at all.

One response is that the feast almost certainly has more than one meaning, and consequently one can concentrate on the true meanings. Thus Francis Hunt, in the quoted passage, gives his attention to things which will be likely to be accepted by unbelievers.

But I would argue instead that the principal meaning of Easter is actually true, even in a way which is accessible to unbelievers. Fr. Thomas Bolin, in a homily for one of the Sundays of Lent, explains the joy of Easter:

Today, the fourth Sunday of Lent, is traditionally called “Laetare Sunday”, for the introit of today’s Mass, which begins with the words “Laetare, Jerusalem.” This day is similar to “Gaudete Sunday”, the third Sunday of Advent. For these two Sundays, we wear rose vestments instead of violet, and each Sunday is around the middle of the season. Therefore, today, in the heart of Lent, we begin to anticipate the joy of Easter.

The texts of today’s liturgy express this joy in particular with the image of the joy of the Jerusalem freed from her oppressors. Not only the introit, but also the gradual, “Laetatus sum”, the tract, “Qui confidunt”, which the schola sang before the Gospel, and also the chant for communion, “Jerusalem quae aedificatur ut civitas” (meaning, “Jerusalem, which is built as a city”); all these make reference to Jerusalem and the joy of living there in peace and freedom.

St. Paul, in the first reading, explains that Jerusalem, the physical city, is not such a perfect and happy place. Instead, he says that the physical Jerusalem is a slave, while only “that Jerusalem which is above, is free” (Gal 4:26). Therefore, the true joy of Jerusalem is the happiness of the heavenly city. This joy is the same as that of Easter, which we eagerly anticipate, because with His death and resurrection, Jesus opened the gates of Paradise.

I have been in Jerusalem and can testify that St. Paul’s claims remain true to this day. Even if it is not “a slave” to the Romans, it remains a rather unhappy city. However, an objection might arise at his point. I claimed above that the meaning of Easter is accessible to unbelievers. But if the joy of Easter is the joy of the heavenly city, then it seems to be inaccessible to unbelievers, or at least to those who do not believe in the existence of heaven.

But even this depends on how you understand the heavenly Jerusalem itself. It is possible to look at this in the sense of ideal form which we strive to imitate as perfectly as possible. In this way, in chapter 6 of his work On the Perfection of the Spiritual Life, St. Thomas says that one should strive for heavenly virtue even in this life:

When St. Paul had said, “Not as though I had already attained, or were already perfect,” and, “but I follow after, if I may by any means lay hold,” he added shortly afterwards, “Let us therefore, as many as are perfect, be thus minded.” From these words we can see that although the perfection of the blessed is not possible to us in this life, we ought, to strive to imitate it as far as we can. And it is in this that the perfection of this life consists to which we are invited by the counsels.

For it is manifest that the human heart is more intensely drawn to one thing, to the degree that it is drawn back from many things. Thus the more a man is freed from the affection for temporal things, the more perfectly his mind will be borne to loving God. Hence St. Augustine says that “the desire of temporal things is the poison of charity; the growth of charity is the diminishment of cupidity, and the perfection of charity is no cupidity.” (Eighty-Three Questions, Book 83, Quest. 1). Therefore all the counsels, which invite us to perfection, aim at this, that man’s mind be turned away from affection to temporal objects, so that his mind may tend more freely to God, by contemplating him, loving him, and fulfilling his will.

It is possible to strive for perfection in this way whether or not “the perfection of the blessed” is something that exists in the real world. And it is possible for someone to view the perfection of the heavenly Jerusalem in a similar way, namely as an ideal form that the world strives for, but that it actually achieves only to a limited degree.

There are of course unbelievers who would deny even this sort of perfection, except as something that human beings invent for themselves. Richard Dawkins is a good example, since he asserts that reality is intrinsically “indifferent,” rather than ordered towards good. Someone who consistently holds such a position would indeed have no reason to celebrate Easter. But such a person equally would have no reason to do anything at all, since as I said in the linked post, if there is no purpose to life “at bottom,” there would likely be no purpose worth pursuing, even on the surface.

But in fact the world is ordered towards good, and tends to achieve it, although not perfectly, and it also tends to get better, as I have argued elsewhere. This implies that the joy of Easter has a meaning which is accessible to unbelievers, and can be a reason for them to celebrate the feast, much as Francis Hunt argues, although his argument is a bit vaguer. Of course, a believer is likely to respond that this would be a vastly diminished understanding of Easter. And this is true: as Hunt says, “I am aware that many believers may see my position as impoverished. If their belief should be true, then they are right.” But this is hardly a reason for the believer to say, “You aren’t allowed to celebrate Easter unless you believe all of it,” nor for the unbeliever to say, “Since I don’t think anything significant happened on Easter I’m not treating it as a special day.”

This is why, despite my personal opinions, I attended an Easter Vigil liturgy last night; why I just finished listening to a rendering of the Exultet; and why in general I am not embarrassed at all by the celebration of Easter.

In that spirit, happy Easter to all!

 

More on Thought and Language

entirelyuseless Ethics, Logic, Religion , , , ,

In the previous post we were considering the relationship of thought and language. There are other ways to notice the close connection. From time to time I have the experience (which I think is not uncommon for others as well) of thinking something, or perhaps being about to think something, but then being distracted before being able to internally verbalize the thought. Afterwards there is no easy way to recover the thought without going through the chain of imagination and thought that led up to that point. And if this is not done at the time, it may be impossible to ever recover the thought. This is perhaps most directly because memory depends on the imagination, and consequently we do not remember our thoughts without either some associated verbalization or the equivalent.

This can have various consequences. For one thing, thinking a thought is rather like speaking to oneself, and needs interpretation just as we need to interpret the speech of others. You might assume that you automatically understand yourself, since you are the one thinking the thought, but this is not necessarily the case. Each time you remember a thought, you are doing it through a verbalization, which is itself a vague expression which could be understood in more than one way. This implies that you may not even be thinking exactly the same thought each time.

This influences the way we learn or change our minds. Thus for example Thomas Talbott criticizes John Loftus’s book The Outsider Test for Faith:

By way of a partial answer to such questions, Loftus suggests that most religious people, even among the most intelligent and reflective, never (formally) convert to another religion or de-convert from their initially acquired religion viewed as a cultural phenomenon: “In most cases,” he says, “we rarely stray from what we were raised in but merely move around among versions of the same general religion…” (p. 83). My own informal impression, however, is that, depending upon how one might measure such things, many people travel a huge distance (in a host of different directions) over the course of a normal lifespan; and many observers, such as hospice workers who work with end of life issues, sometimes report great spiritual growth, as they interpret it, in the final days and weeks of a person’s earthly life. Beyond that, I see no reason to deny that even very small movements, as judged from the outside, can sometimes signify profound spiritual progress. Do I rest any argument of substance on such subjective matters, or expect to achieve universal agreement on them? Not at all. But I do suggest that one should not trivialize, as Loftus appears to do above, what it might mean to “move around among versions of the same general religion.”

Here is why. The Christian tradition, which is the religious tradition I know best, is so rich and includes so much diversity within it that the question of diversity between the Christian tradition as a whole and some other religious tradition, such as Islam, may have little or no coherent meaning. Put it this way: A cultural Christian has no need to embrace another religious or cultural tradition, at least not formally, in order to embrace religious views typically associated with some other tradition. Take, for example, the great Christian poet John Milton, who emphatically rejected the one substance theory of the Trinity, adopted the Arian view that Jesus Christ was on a lower ontological level than God the Father, and even set forth an elaborate biblical argument in defense of polygamy. He had no need, in other words, to embrace the Muslim religion as a cultural phenomenon in order to embrace a concept of God that was virtually identical with the Muslim concept; yet, C. S. Lewis and others (including myself) still consider him a great Christian poet. Similarly, those Christians who come to believe in reincarnation, as more than a few do despite their upbringing, have no need to embrace all the nuances of the typical Hindu understanding and certainly have no need to embrace all of the cultural trappings and conventions of some particular sect in the Hindu religion. My point is that moving “around among versions of the same general religion” may involve profound (and easy to overlook) changes in one’s religious outlook, changes that may be at least as momentous as converting to another religion (or even as adopting a kind of practical atheism). For as Loftus himself points out, “Worldviews are dynamic rather than static things, anyway. They are constantly changing with additional education and experience” (p. 97). So again I ask: Given such dynamism and so many dynamic opportunities for spiritual growth (however that should be construed) within any one of the great religious traditions, why should it even matter where one’s spiritual journey begins?

There are several reasons why things work this way. In the first place, belonging to a religion does not in itself signify a certain belief, but membership in a religious community. This implies that changing your mind about religious matters does not necessarily imply changing your religion, and it may be more reasonable not to change it, depending on various circumstances. But there is another reason. Due to the vice of pride and various other causes, we do not like to say, “I was wrong.”

Not only in religion but in almost every other matter, changes of opinion are significantly more frequent than the actual admission of having been wrong about something. One can avoid admitting this in various ways, some deliberate, some usually subconscious. Sometimes a person will say nothing for a while, then begin to voice the new opinion, hoping that no one notices that he has changed his mind, since this would be to admit that he was wrong. Occasionally a person may even assert that he always held the new opinion, and he may even believe this, perhaps since he now finds it difficult to imagine holding another position, and consequently difficult to remember doing so, since memory depends on the imagination. Or a person may wait until he leaves one social circle and joins another, before starting to say something new, so that no one notices the change of mind. Or again, one can voice the new opinion using the same words that were used to express the old opinion. In this case one may or may not even notice that one has changed one’s mind. Or one can change one’s mind gradually, in such a way that at each stage the same words are used, and it is actually reasonable to call it the same opinion, perhaps with a variation of degree or emphasis. But at the end it may no longer be reasonable to call it the same opinion, just as a color may be changed by imperceptible stages until a new color is present. The person himself, however, may still not recognize that he has ever changed his opinion at all.

The vagueness discussed in the previous post is closely related to all of this. The boundaries of a word are vague; thus there is a region where it is vague whether a person is bald or not. And likewise the boundaries of the vague region are themselves vague; at no level will complete precision be found. This makes it all the easier for an opinion to drift gradually and in an almost unnoticeable way over time.