Clifford’s Solution

William Kingdon Clifford, a great British mathematician and also a philosopher, wrote in his essay “Ethics of Belief”:

To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

Even if we accept the above, then we have the next pending question: when can – or should - the evidence be considered as sufficient? Suppose we do want to know the Truth, how do we get to it? Perhaps Truth is so far away that we will never get there? Perhaps it is impossible? We are human beings, with our limited senses, our limited capacities, limited time and limited resources.¹ Can we ever really get to the Truth? Isn’t it better, simpler, more efficient, to stay with just what “resonates with us” – as many New Agers declare – and be done with it?

Somehow it is almost automatic that when we meet two opinions on a given subject, one contradicting the other, then we tend to think that the truth is somewhere in the middle. But is that always the case? What if one person is lying? What if one of the persons has mental problems, or is being somehow rewarded for distorting the truth, while the other one is totally honest? In order to avoid making errors in our judgments we should always ask the question “Who says so? And go to the very sources, check their reliability, collect as much information as possible.

Nowadays, thanks to the internet, this is possible for even ordinary people as it never was before in history. At the same time, perhaps those who do not want the truth known are just as busy confusing the matter by publishing disinformation? Yet with patience and some experience, with a will, and sometimes helpers, there is a way. The key is in going to the sources and checking them carefully. Of course sometimes there will be a language barrier, but with automatic translators even this difficulty can be dealt with.

While we may not be able to get to the whole Truth, quite often, with a little effort we can do much better than we usually do. As I wrote above: First of all we should always try to check the sources rather than be satisfied with second hand information.

Consider the example of Encyclopedia Universalis and its erroneous image of Alfred Wallace’s scientific interests.² At the end of the article we find the source citation: “En 1905, il écrit son autobiographie, My Life.” We then go to the Google website archive.org, and search there for “Alfred Wallace My life”. The text is available on the internet and the search for “spiritual” brings us to the sentence: “In 1866 I wrote a pamphlet, entitled "The Scientific Aspect of the Supernatural," which I distributed amongst my friends.” In 1866 Wallace was 43 years old and he lived 90 years. Evidently Encyclopedia Universalis is spreading false information when it states that it was only at the end of his life that Wallace became interested in “esoteric” phenomena. How many other instances are there like this? Millions? Billions? What does that mean for truth when the so-called arbiters of truth are shown to actually lie?

We are living in the age of Internet, with easy access to many sources. Always check sources, and when you see a piece written by someone, even by an “authority”, whether or not they quote or cite sources – consider it as just an opinion, not as a “proof”. If there are sources listed – check them, because it often happens that only selective information is being presented, not the whole picture.

1Just how limited our resources are, and how hard it really is to get to the truth, is exposed scientifically by Nobel Laureate, Daniel Kahneman in his previously cited book, “Thinking, fast and slow”.

2http://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/alfred-russel-wallace/

Coming next: Language Barriers Make Knowledge Barriers

P.S.1. This morning I received email from  Dr Gina Langan inviting me to " become a Guardian of Logos, protector of Absolute Truth." 

I followed my own advice "when you see a piece written by someone, even by an “authority”, whether or not they quote or cite sources – consider it as just an opinion, not as a “proof”." 

What I have found is that Dr. Gina Langan won the 1989 Belgian Women's Championship and she  completed bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in clinical psychology at Wayne State University in less than five years. 

Not enough information for me to decide if I want to join the "Guardians of Logos and protectors of Absolute Truth". But I am seriously considering the offered seven days free trial.

P.S.2.  Finished reading “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand. What I liked is the “happy end”. What strikes me is the evident dislike of any kind of mysticism - indiscriminately. At the end the group of co-linear “good”, “thinking” and “creative” people” escapes the fate of  the totally corrupt system. I wander what would Ayn Rand say about today's political and economic reality that would have yo include China?

Chris Langan seems to be more careful when talking about mysticism. For instance he writes:

"One cannot be an enemy of Truth and a servant of God. By hating truth and serving evil even under the aegis of organized religion, one earns the same fate as that of atheists who misidentify God as a misdefined version of "science". Worshipping a false God is as bad as, or worse than, worshipping no God at all."

But for him God stands for "Global Operator-Descriptor (GOD)”"

P.S.3. 29-03-23 9:11 Reading E. Prugovecki, "Dawn of the New Man". I had no idea what kind of a book it will be. Surprise-surprise! Here is a piece:

"As Kant had pointed out in his Critique of Pure Reason, there are synthetic judgments that transcend reason and empirical proof. One had to undergo the kind of mystical experience that Anita had allowed me to share with her in order to achieve such deep faith in the Destiny of Man as she already had.

I was also reminded of the metaphysical visions of Plotinus-the last of the great Neoplatonists-who more than two millennia earlier wrote that, when we are “divinely possessed and inspired,” we see not only the nous, the Spirit, but also the One, the Divine. And when we are thus in contact with the Divine, we cannot reason or express the vision in words: “At the moment of touch there is no power whatever to make any affirmation; there is no leisure; reasoning upon the vision is for afterwards.”

Could it be-I asked myself while savoring the memory of my mental and physical union with Anita-that Plotinus’s experiences of “ecstasy” were some form of precognition, rather than just the dreams of a gentle and noble mind turning away from the spectacle of ruin and misery in the world in which he actually lived?" 

and then:

"“I think that what Liu as driving at is the old mind-body philosophical question,” intervened Leonardo. “How does the mind interact with the body? And what is free will?”

Most interesting!"

Further in the same book:

"The lowest estimates on the number of civilization in our galaxy run into the millions. But many might be aquatic ones, not even fully aware of the vast Universe surrounding them. Others might be totally satisfied with their lives on the planets they inhabit. And amongst those that are not, many might be so far ahead of us that they are not interested in making contact with such a puny race as mankind still is. Among those that might be at our stage of development, the enormity of the spatial distances separating them from us and the limit imposed on space travel by the speed of light provides a very effective barrier against direct contact.”

“But what about worm holes, hyperspace, or superstring spatio-temporal dimensions that might make such contacts almost instantaneously possible?” “Ha! Ha!” laughed Ahmed. “I would have thought that as a quantum cosmologist you were well aware that all those Old Era speculations were just mathematical junk, without any firm physical foundation. I wonder why serious scientists ever published such nonsense in the Old Era, especially since their mathematics was even worse than their physics”

I shook my head sadly. “Not only published, but vigorously promoted it. That’s why I stopped being a quantum cosmologist in the Old Era: the so-call ‘leading scientists’ were selling what they sometimes called ‘sexy’ theories basically the same way whores were selling their charms in red light districts. The ‘glitzier’ an idea sounded, regardless of whether it was mathematically and physically sound, the easier it was to sell it!”

.....

"I shrugged. “Those were very different times, Ahmed. One leading physicist in those times by the name of Richard Feynman, who was more astute than the rest, talked about the ‘pack effect’: the pre-dilection of the mainstream scientists during the closing decades of the Old Era to blindly follow fashions dictated by a few self-appointed leaders, regardless of the intrinsic merits of the theories they were advancing. And, as the great physicist Werner Heisenberg noted in his very last paper, published in 1976 O.E., even when the advanced physical theories might have been good, they were ‘spoiled’ by ‘very poor philosophy.’ "

But there is a hope:

"... telepathic signals were not subject to Einstein’s relativistic laws"

...

"The prevalent theory that paranormal scientists subscribed to was that since spacetime was fundamentally quantum rather than classical in its nature, its spacetime events were not “pointlike,” but stochastically extended in their structure. Thus, strictly speaking, at the quantum level there was not a sharp dividing line between past, present and future even locally. Telepathic communication was supposed to be able to take advantage of this fact by deforming the local probabilistic potentialities into stochastically more extended forms, thus enabling meaningful, albeit sporadic and only stochastically reliable, instantaneous communication over enormous spacetime separations."

I like it!

P.S.4. 30-03-23 8:46 Finished reading E. Prugovecki, "Dawn of the New Man". Lot of "romantic" stuff there, quite unexpected! It is a pity that with so much much of stressing telepathy and "mind-merging" our Quantum Cosmologist has nothing to say about mathematics and physics of the future. society, where mind reading plays such an important role. 
Moving back to reading McGilchrist - "The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World" (2021). And to Chris Langan's Metatheories. Very important.

P.S.5. 30-03-23 12:26 Two brain hemispheres with complementary roles. To survive eat but not get eaten. Complementarity and duality. Matter-antimatter, universe - anti-verse, so below as above (but not exactly "so"), mind and matter, space and time, waves and particles, bosons and fermions ... what else? Other examples and parallels?

P.S.6 12:52: The Epoch Times: "“Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? ..."

P.S.7. 12:55 Reading E. Prugovetski "Stochastic phase space kinematics of the photon" (1978). It seems almost no one paid any attention to this paper.