The Amateur Thinker

The following is from the book Revelations by Jacques Vallee. The book, which was published in 1992, is about UFOs (it debunks many of the strange conspiracy theories held by UFO enthusiasts and discusses some of the more notable UFO hoaxes). In one section, Vallee discusses the Ummo UFO phenomenon in Europe, which lasted for decades and involved people all over Europe and elsewhere receiving letters from unknown authors claiming to be aliens from the planet Ummo.¹ To illustrate how the Ummo hoaxers could have created thousands of pages of internally consistent documents describing the purported civilization and science of Ummo, Vallee discusses a case study which illustrates how someone could construct an elaborate, and internally consistent fantasy, delude himself into believing it, and even convince a psychiatrist who was hired to help him overcome his fantasies that the whole thing was true.

The passage has nothing to do with UFOs – I’m quoting it because it is a fascinating illustration about the power of the human mind to create internally consistent fantasy worlds, and about every person’s susceptibility to being fooled by such fantasies. What’s the moral of this post? The human brain is absolutely amazing; it has an almost infinite capacity for invention, and it can construct believable and consistent stories which are completely false. Always be careful about what you believe; a story or idea is not true just because it is complex or internally consistent. How can you evaluate whether something is true? Think critically and carefully. Apply the scientific method, along with the other methods for discovering truth which I discussed in my five-part series on discovering truth.² Don’t let yourself get sucked in to the point where you let confirmation bias take over such that you only look for confirmatory evidence. And for your already-held beliefs, watch out for confirmation bias – don’t reject evidence which contradicts your view, and always be willing to change your ideas (even if they are deeply held), when the facts don’t match your beliefs.

If we listen to the adepts of UMMO, like Jean Pierre Petit, a major argument against the idea that a single man, or even a small group, could have manufactured the UMMO material resides in the very weight of the documents. How could one person have manufactured the hundreds of reports, some containing hundreds of pages, which comprise the UMMO corpus? What about the maps, the tables, the mathematical system, the formulas, the codes? Clearly, the believers say, what we have here is the product of an entire civilization.

The people who say this have never studied the psychiatric literature. They have never heard of Kirk Allen.

On a sultry June morning in Baltimore a successful psychiatrist named Dr. Robert Lindner received a phone call that would initiate the most remarkable case in his career, a case he would later summarize in his book The Fifty-Minute Hour: A Collection of True Psychoanalytic Tales.

The phone call was from a government physician at a classified installation in New Mexico, an installation where research on the H-bomb was in progress (although Dr. Lindner does not mention the fact). The physician wanted to refer a patient to him. He was a brilliant research scientist in his thirties who was “perfectly normal in every way” except that he seemed to have acquired an amazing amount of detailed information about another world—a world with which he seemed to become increasingly preoccupied to the point of neglecting his work.

When he was asked by his superiors about the drop in the efficiency of his department, Kirk Allen apologized profusely and said he would “try to spend more time on this planet.” It is at that point that the government decided he needed expert help. They would fly the scientist to Baltimore as often as necessary, all expenses paid.

Kirk Allen arrived in Dr. Lindner’s office three days later.

“Any speculations I had had about him as a mad scientist evaporated when I saw him in my office,” writes the physician. “A vigorous-looking man of average height, clear-eyed and blond, his seersucker unwrinkled despite the long trip and the humidity . . . he looked like a junior executive . . . He spoke with just enough diffidence to let me know that the situation he now found himself in was slightly embarrassing.”

During the first session, Dr. Lindner elicited detailed information about his patient’s background and childhood. He learned that Kirk Allen was an avid reader of science-fiction and had somehow become convinced that a series of stories in which the main character had the same name as himself were really parts of his biography! The stories had to do with the faraway world of other planets. It became an obsession with him to complete this biography, to establish the continuity of his life, to resolve the contradictions between various parts of what he called the “record.” He succeeded in doing it when he discovered that he had the ability to travel psychically to the world of the other Kirk Allen.

Dr. Lindner soon realized two things—first, that his patient was utterly mad; second, that his psychosis was life-sustaining and would be very difficult to manage. He requested that Kirk turn over to him the documents on which his research was based.

It is impossible to convey more than a bare impression of Kirk’s records . . . There were, to begin with, about twelve thousand pages of typescript comprising the amended biography of Kirk Allen. This was divided into some 200 chapters and read like fiction. Appended to these pages were approximately 200 more of notes in Kirk’s handwriting, containing corrections necessitated by his more recent “researches,” and a huge bundle of scraps and jottings on envelopes, receipted bills, laundry slips, sheets from memo pads, etc.; these latter were largely incomprehensible since they were written in Kirk’s private shorthand, while some of them were little more than hasty designs or sketches, mathematical equations, or symbolic representations of something or other: each, however, was carefully numbered and lettered with red pencil to indicate where it belonged in the main script.

In addition to this bulky manuscript and its appendages there were:

1. A glossary of names and terms that ran to more than 100 pages.

2. 82 full-color maps carefully drawn to scale, 23 of planetary bodies in four projections, 31 of land masses on these planets, 14 labeled “Kirk Allen’s Expedition to —,” the remainder of cities on the various planets.

3. 61 architectural sketches and elevations, some colored, some drawn only in ink, but all carefully scaled and annotated.

4. Twelve genealogical tables.

5. An eighteen-page description of the galactic system in which Kirk Allen’s home planet was contained, with four astronomical charts, one for each of the seasons, and nine star maps of the skies from observatories on other planets in the system.

6. A 200-page history of the empire Kirk Allen ruled, with a threepage table of dates and names of battles or outstanding historical events.

7. A series of 44 folders containing from two to twenty pages apiece, each dealing with some aspect of the planet . . . typical titles, neatly printed on these folders, were “The Fauna of Srom Olma I,” “The Transportation System of Seraneb,” “Science of Srom,” “Parapsychology of Srom Norbra X,” “The Application of Unified Field Theory and the Mechanics of the Star Drive to Space Travel,” “The Unique Brain Development of the Crystopeds of Srom Norbra X,” “Plant Biology and Genetic Science of Srom Olma I,” and so on.

8. Finally, 306 drawings, some in watercolor, some in chalk, some in crayon, of people, animals, plants, insects, weapons, utensils, machines, articles of clothing, vehicles, instruments, and furniture.

It is a catalog that dwarfs anything in the UMMO literature, anything in Urantia or the other fringe areas of the UFO field. As Dr. Lindner writes:

The reader can imagine for himself my dismay at the sheer bulk of this matter: I do not know if he can appreciate with what misgivings I approached the task of weaning this man from his madness.

The roots of Kirk Allen’s fantasies were evident from the story of his childhood and adolescence. The son of a naval officer who was assigned as governor of a remote Pacific island where they were the only white family, his mother abandoned him to a series of governesses, one of whom seduced him when he was eleven years old before running away with the husband of the island’s only schoolteacher. From then on the boy, who was gifted with unusual intelligence, spent his time reading every book he could find and fantasizing about remote worlds.

Dr. Lindner considered several strategies to try and cure Kirk Allen. He rejected shock therapy as inhumane and extreme. He also rejected the use of hypnosis, a technique he had used often in other situations, for reasons today’s ufologists would do well to consider:

Kirk’s hold on reality was tenuous enough as it was, and I frankly feared to break the thin thread by which his connection with this world was maintained.

Dr. Lindner decided the only alternative was to enter his patient’s fantasy and to try to pry him from the psychosis from that position. By then Kirk Allen had moved to Baltimore. The physician steeped himself in his records and became increasingly fascinated as he worked on them, hour after hour, with Kirk Allen as his mentor. Whenever he would detect some gap in the data, he would “send” his patient to get the missing information psychically. At first this was just a convenient technique for Dr. Lindner—but he became caught in the game and often found himself anxiously awaiting the requested answers.

One day the doctor noticed a major discrepancy in the star maps, which used a scale measured in ecapalim, an Olmayan unit equivalent to a mile and five-sixteenths. They worked on the discrepancy, and Dr. Lindner insisted that Kirk go back to his interplanetary institute to check the original records.

There were several such incidents, in which the therapist sought to displace Kirk’s obsession by sharing it with him. As he did so, however, he found himself increasingly immersed in the fantasy. He actually reversed roles with Kirk, often solving by himself the discrepancies he found in the Olmayan records!

One day when Dr. Lindner was expecting Kirk Allen with special anxiety because he had sent him on a key mission to retrieve more data, he found his patient strangely uninterested in the results. When he queried him eagerly, Kirk shrugged and finally confessed that for the last few weeks he had been lying to the physician.

“I’ve been making it up,” he sputtered, “inventing all that . . . that . . . nonsense!”

“What about the trips?” asked Dr. Lindner with what he describes as a mixture of disappointment and triumph, of concern and relief.

“What trips?” asked Kirk Allen. “Why, it’s been weeks since I gave up that foolishness.”

The patient in this case had continued to pretend that the trips were real for the sake of his therapist, who was now so utterly caught up in a fantasy that was fulfilling a need in his own life.

Kirk Allen returned to his research work with the government, leaving Dr. Lindner with the problem of curing himself. That section of his book is perhaps the most remarkable part of the record:

Until Kirk Allen came into my life I had never doubted my own stability. The aberrations of mind . . . were for others . . . It has been years since I saw Kirk Allen, but I think of him often, and of the days when we roamed the galaxies together.

On long summer nights on Long Island when the sky was filled with stars, Dr. Lindner would look up, smile to himself and whisper: “How goes it with the Crystopeds? How are things in Seraneb?”

And I am similarly tempted to ask: “Is there peace in IUMMA? And are the Ummites truly pleased with the transcendental function of OEMII?”³

Don’t read this and think about how you would never fool yourself into believing the fantasies of someone like Kirk Allen, or spend the time creating elaborate fantasies for yourself. While none of us may go as far as Kirk Allen, we are all susceptible to such cognitive mistakes (just look at Dr. Lindner’s eventual mental immersion in the fantasy), and our brains are very good at deluding ourselves so that we don’t even know we’re making such errors in thinking. The first step to overcoming them is to acknowledge that our thinking is fraught with potential for such errors and recognize the limitations of our minds and our knowledge. Next, we should always seek better evidence and information, and be willing to change our ideas, attitudes, and beliefs in response to new information and discoveries.

 

Footnotes

Note: This is part 4 of a five part series on how we can discover truth. Here are the other parts: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 5.

Update: added quotes from people describing their feelings during religious experiences. Update 2: added to quotes to include an atheist.

 

In this fourth post of the series of posts on discovering truth, I continue my discussion of different ways we can discover truth

6) Feelings

More often than we’d probably like to admit, we rely on emotion to shape our beliefs. We frequently use our powers of reason to justify our already-held emotion-based beliefs, rather than starting without any conclusions and reasoning our way to the best conclusion based on the available information. Oftentimes, we decide what to believe based on what “feels” right, rather than a conscious application of on any of the other five different ways for discovering truth which I have discussed above.

Eureka Moments

Research and experience indicate that emotions and unconscious flashes of insight can be important in making decisions and discoveries.¹ In his 1971 essay “The Eureka Phenomenon,” Isaac Asimov explains that many scientific discoveries are made when the scientist has a flash of inspiration which leads to the solution of a problem. Such “eureka” moments do not come from a rational conscious process, but probably from subconscious processing by the brain. Even after the conscious brain has stopped thinking about a problem, it appears that other parts of the brain continue to work on it. Einstein and many other scientists describe experiencing this effect when making some of their most important discoveries. Indeed, the very term “eureka” originates from a (likely apocryphal) story about the great ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes, who had a sudden flash of insight while visiting the public baths; when the insight came to him, he reportedly lept out of the bath, shouted “eureka!” (Greek for “I have found”) and ran home naked because he was so eager to test his discovery.²

There is much that we don’t understand about how our brain works and how we form opinions and make decisions. Each of us would like to think that we understand why we do what we do. We think that we are good at introspection and self-understanding. Much research shows however, that we may not understand our own decision processes as well as we think we do. Research shows that all of us create justifications to explain our decisions or beliefs, even though we do not really consciously understand the real reasons why our brains arrived at that decision or belief.³

Our feelings’ subconscious influence on our thoughts and decisions and flashes of insight are both a part of human cognitive function. They are probably an inescapable part of how we think, and can be quite useful. But our lack of awareness of how these processes work can lead to bias and a false level of certainty in decisions that are not rational. The scientific method has proven itself to be so powerful because peer review requires that other people critique a scientist’s work. Each of us have cognitive blind spots and biases that are impossible to see ourselves, but that others can help us spot.

Religion and Morality

In addition to the way that emotion affects how we think, it also influences our beliefs about religious and moral truth. Frequently, people form religious convictions about a religion’s truthfulness based on personal emotional experiences with the religion. Many Christian churches call this religious emotional experience “the spirit,” “feeling the spirit,” or “accepting Jesus in your heart.” This feeling is often described as a warm feeling in one’s chest; a pleasant sensation which makes a person want to do good; a feeling of peace; or a feeling of light and peace flowing into one’s mind and heart. In the Book of Galatians in the Christian New Testament, it says that “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” (Galatians 5:22-23 NIV).⁴ In the Gospel of John Jesus says that “[w]hen the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father—the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father—he will testify about me.” (John 15:26 NIV).⁵

This spiritual feeling has been studied by psychologists. Academics call it this feeling “elevation.” Elevation, as defined by psychologists, involves a desire to act morally and is characterized by a feeling of warmth in the chest.⁶ Elevation appears to be a universal human emotion just like anger or love – felt by people in all religions. Other religious experiences have also been found to be cause biologically, such as religious visions caused by temporal lobe epilepsy to the “God helmet” (a helmet which projects magnetic fields into certain parts of the brain) causing people to feel God’s presence.⁷

The behaviors we call “ethical” or “good” are generally the behaviors that make living in human communities successful (an upcoming series of posts will discuss morality and ethics in more detail). Humans who banded together to cooperate, share resources, and provide mutual protection would likely have been more successful than humans who did not band together. Because of their greater success, such bands of cooperative humans would have had the most children and thus passed on their genes to subsequent generations. There thus would have been selective pressure to encourage the spread of genes fostering personality traits like cooperation, group cohesiveness, sharing, and empathy. Elevation likely evolved because it provided a survival advantage – people who feel a positive emotional response when they act morally are more likely to continue acting morally. And such moral behavior is essential for a group of people to be able to survive and be successful. We feel elevation because modern humans couldn’t have evolved without it.

The problem with relying solely on emotional experience when trying to find truth is that our feelings are an imperfect guide. Feeling elevation tells you when you’re doing something moral, or thinking about something moral. But it is not an absolute guide. For example, people are more likely to feel elevation when they help people in their nearby environment – people they can see. This makes evolutionary sense – there would be no reason to develop the ability to feel elevation when helping far-off unseen people, because our ancestors lived in an environment where the only people they knew about and with whom they had interactions were the people in their immediate local environment. For this reason, people in the developed world give money to things like cancer and AIDS research, because these diseases affect people they know. But their money would have a far greater effect to help the lives of other human beings if they gave it to charities that provided clean drinking water, sanitation facilities, and malaria treatments in the third world. Diarrhea and malaria are much bigger problems overall than cancer or AIDS, but they afflict people in far-off developing countries, and it doesn’t make most rich people feel as good to fight them, so they give less money to such causes.

A Systematic Approach to Spiritual Feelings

We are often wrong when we generalize from our personal experience, because our personal experience is not broad enough to make valid generalizations. Is elevation really a divinely-created emotion which leads us to truth? Maybe. If you feel elevation in a certain church does that mean that the church’s teachings are actually true? Maybe. But how can you definitively confirm this?

You would need at least three things:

1. Peer review: To overcome the problems with confirmation bias and other cognitive problems which may distort your conclusion, you would need to submit your conclusions to testing by others not of your faith, and you would need to be willing to accept their criticisms of your methods and change your conclusions and methods as a result of their criticisms.

2. Experimental controls: How can you know the meaning and import of spiritual feelings you’ve felt from one particular religion, without something to compare it to? You should test a variety of other religions and sacred texts outside of your own faith (in an unbiased way, willing to accept that those texts and religions might also be true) to determine whether they also produce spiritual feelings.

3. Good record keeping: because of confirmation bias it is likely you will remember when spiritual feelings or impressions were later confirmed true, but will tend to forget the ones that were later proven wrong. If you felt a spiritual feeling which seemingly confirmed the truth of a religion, how many times have you interacted with that religion and didn’t feel those spiritual feelings? You should keep track of all of your spiritual feelings and impressions and tabulate their success rate.

A Short Experiment – Comparing Descriptions of Spiritual Feelings from Different Religions

It is interesting to read people’s personal descriptions of religious experience. People from very different religions often use similar words to describe their spiritual experiences.

I’ve collected a sample of people’s descriptions of religious conversion or spiritual revelation. The following twenty quotes are from practicing Atheists, Buddhists, Catholics, Hindus, Muslims, Mormons, New Agers, Protestants, and Universal Unitarians. Try to guess which quote comes from which religion (some religions are used more than once). I have standardized the language (changes indicated by brackets ), so that differences in terminology between religions will not tip you off (thus, mosque, temple and church are all become a [church]; the Bible and all other religious texts become a [text] or [sacred text]).

Try to match these 8 religions to the following 20 quotes. The answer key is below:

Atheist
Buddhist
Catholic
Hindu
Islam
Mormon
New Age
Protestant
Universal Unitarian

1. “I felt a burning in my heart, and a great burden seemed to have left me.”⁸

2. “But what can I say? How can I describe an experience so profound and so beautiful? Shall I say that it was the most blessed experience of my life? Shall I say that [God] touched my heart and gave me a feeling of peace I had not known before? Shall I describe the tears that flowed freely from my eyes, affirming my . . . faith, as I . . . beg[ed] [God's] blessings for myself and for those I love?”⁹

3. “The sense I had of divine things, would often of a sudden kindle up, as it were, a sweet burning in my heart; an ardor of soul, that I know not how to express.”¹⁰

4. “As I read these books in a . . . bookstore, . . . I felt a burning in my heart that I should come and investigate.”¹¹

5. “[Even as a child], [w]ithout understanding much about the complex [doctrine] . . . he was attracted to [church]. There he often felt a strong feeling of peace flowing through his body.”¹²

6. “I was praying . . . when I felt a burning shaft of . . . love come through my head and into my heart.”¹³

7. “I truly [sic] wanted to know [the truth]. After a few weeks, I stumbled onto [texts] which . . . answered my questions in a way that I had not heard of before. I read everything . . .and I even tried the experiment of asking [God] for . . . his divine love. After about 6 weeks, I felt a burning in my chest and a sensation that was unlike anything I had ever felt. It was pure happiness and peace. I knew then that [God] had sent His love to me.”¹⁴

8. “A feeling of peace and certitude would tell me when I had found the answers and often after people would help me by pointing in the right direction.”¹⁵

9. “We gave up a lot of things. What did I get in return? I received a feeling of peace, hope and security. I no longer lay awake at night worrying. I stopped cussing. I became much more honest in all aspects of my life. [God] has changed my heart and my life. My husband’s heart is changing also. We pray all the time and really feel [God’s] presence in our marriage. My perspective has changed. My view of life has changed about what is truly important.”¹⁶

10. “Many women described a feeling of euphoria after they committed to following [God] . . . . One woman described a feeling of peace; she said: ‘It is like you are born again and you can start all over again, free from sin.’”¹⁷

11. “A feeling of peace seemed to flow into me with a sense of togetherness . . . . . I felt very peaceful from inside and also felt [warmth] . . . .”¹⁸

12. “I felt a burning sensation in my heart.”¹⁹

13. “That inner light, that we all have or had at some time in our existence, was nearly burnt out for me. But in the [church] . . . I found a feeling of peace, inner solitude and quietness that I’d also found in reading the [text] and pondering over its meaning and trying to practice what it tells us.”²⁰

14. “For the first time I not only felt accountable for my past sins but I had to fight back tears. I knew that I had let down [God] [and] my family . . . . However, I also knew I was forgiven! [It] gave me a feeling of peace that I have never felt it in my whole life. I felt like I had a huge weight lifted off of me and that I was finally home and free . . . . I felt like a new person.”²¹

15. “Every time I am there [at the church building], a feeling of peace overcomes me.”²²

16. “Every time I was with the [church members], I felt this warm feeling, a feeling of peace and for the first time in my life since my church-going days, I wanted to follow [God] . . . .”²³

17. “About 10 years ago, when Jenny and I decided to start a family, we began looking for a spiritual community for our kids. During my first service at [the church]. . . I was hooked. I recall the feeling of peace that I felt when I was attending [services].”²⁴

18. “The power of [God] came into me then. I had this warm and overwhelming feeling of peace and security. It’s hard to explain. I had to . . . stop myself from falling backward.”²⁵

19. “[The religious leader] looked into my eyes deeply for a moment, and I experienced a feeling of peace and love unlike anything I had ever experienced before.”²⁶

20. “[After praying,] [i]mmediately I was flooded with a deep feeling of peace, comfort, and hope.”²⁷

21. “I recently spent an afternoon on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee, atop the mount where Jesus is believed to have preached his most famous sermon. . . . As I sat and gazed upon the surrounding hills gently sloping to an inland sea, a feeling of peace came over me. It soon grew to a blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense of being a separate self—an “I” or a “me”—vanished. . . . The experience lasted just a few moments, but returned many times as I gazed out over the land where Jesus is believed to have walked, gathered his apostles, and worked many of his miracles.”²⁸

The answers are in the next paragraph. My point here is not to say that any of these people’s experiences are invalid or that they are not valuable, or that religion is bad (I am an active church-goer myself). Nor am I trying to say that this proves any certain religion to be true or false – just that spiritual experiences are a universal human emotion, and that, just like any emotional experience, they are not enough by themselves to be reliable indicators of absolute truth. This is easy to demonstrate using religious experiences, since the claims of most of these religions are contradictory. Thus, if one of the above religions were true in the absolute sense, many or most of the others would be false. Many or most of the above people’s religious experiences, therefore, could not have been reliable indicators of the truth.

Answers: 1. Protestant; 2. Islam; 3. Protestant; 4. Catholic; 5. Hindu; 6. Catholic; 7. New Age; 8. Islam; 9. Protestant; 10. Islam; 11. Hindu; 12. Protestant; 13. Islam; 14. Catholic; 15. Buddhist; 16. Mormon; 17. Universal Unitarian; 18. Catholic; 19. Hindu; 20. Protestant; 21. Atheist

Conclusions

Most of my conclusions in this section are tentative. I have not been able to find much peer-reviewed research to help me evaluate my reasoning. But my opinion in this section seem to be consistent with our current scientific understanding of evolution and biology. If you are aware of any good research or arguments, which refute or confirm what I’ve written – please share!

In the absence of good empirical information, I am forced to rely on my personal experience. In my personal experience I have had eureka moments where a sudden flash of insight provided a solution to a problem, but sometimes those eureka insights have been wrong. I have felt spiritual feelings of elevation from a variety of sacred texts from different religions. I think that feelings of elevation are very important and that they usually lead us to act more morally, but they have not had as good of a track record in helping me discover objective truth.

In the final part of this series, I will evaluate all the different methods for finding truth and give some final thoughts.

Note: This is part 3 of a five part series on how we can discover truth. Here are the other parts: part 1, part 2, part 4, part 5.

 

This is this post in this series on truth, I continue my discussion of different ways we can discover truth.

5) Empirical Rationalism / The Scientific Method.

Empirical rationalism means applying reason and formal logic to our perceptions and experiences to come to conclusions. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, and others have discovered and created the principles of formal logic, which allow us to more systematically evaluate our perceptions of the world and make accurate conclusions. Empirical rationalism is different from common sense because it involves the application of formal rules and critical thinking to our perceptions and experience, whereas common sense is based more on intuitive deductions about the world. Empirical rationalism means consciously language and logic to interpret our perceptions; it requires an understanding of logical fallacies and making the effort to avoid such fallacies.

The scientific method involves observation and experimentation. In its most basic application, a person creates a hypothesis using the knowledge they’ve gained from observation, trial and error, authorities, and previous applications of the scientific method. In other cases, scientists will start with a question, not a hypothesis. Either way, they design experiments or tests to disprove their hypothesis or to provide data to help answer the question. They then share those results with other people who examine and critique their methodology and results, and perhaps try out the experiments or tests themselves to try and replicate the results. If the results stand up to scrutiny, and are replicable, then our level of confidence is increased in the validity of the hypothesis. But the hypothesis will always be subject to further testing and attempts to disprove it. If further experiments disprove it, then it is rejected. If it stands up to further experimentation, then our level of confidence in its truth will increase.

My description of the scientific method is simplified. There are other ways of doing science (for example, statistically analyzing other people’s data, doing observational fieldwork to observe and categorize species or geological characteristics). No matter the exact approach, the distinguishing characteristics of science are 1) subjecting the results to other scientists’ review and criticism, 2) an analytic and systematic approach to solving problems and answering questions, 3) rejecting conclusions that aren’t supported by evidence, and 4) basing one’s views and opinions on the evidence, as opposed to trying to force evidence to fit a preconceived notions.

My description of the scientific method is an idealized version. In real life, things don’t happen as cleanly. Scientists can be dogmatic too. They can get set in their ways, refusing to change their opinions in the face of new evidence. Carl Sagan’s quote that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” illustrates this point. This quote is often used to imply that a claim which contradicts the current paradigm must be supported by more proof than a claim which accords with the current paradigm. A real scientist wouldn’t require a higher standard of proof for a claim which departs from his world view – to do otherwise means that the scientist is biased. An unbiased scientist would apply the same standard of proof to every claim, dispassionately evaluating the claims and giving credence to the claims which best fit the evidence. This may mean that most extraordinary claims will be rejected because the totality of the evidence better supports the current paradigm, but it will not be rejected just because the claim itself was extraordinary.

There are problems which affect what even gets presented as science in the first place. Because most scientific theories and discoveries are presented in peer-reviewed journals, a new theory will not be disseminated and get widespread acceptance unless it is published in a peer-reviewed journal, even if that theory better fits the data than the old theory,

Scientists expect new claims to stand up to criticism and review, and the system of peer reviewed journals helps provide a system of ensuring that new scientific claims have been examined. The people who decide what gets published in a scientific journal thus have the power to suppress papers presenting theories with which they disagree. These gatekeepers may have an interest in suppressing or minimizing new theories, for example when a new theory contradicts their own scientific conclusions.

The success of the scientific method relies on scientists having intellectual honesty and being willing to allow competing theories to be heard on their merits. Scientists are not pure, selfless, angelic beings. As with any human endeavor, politics, interpersonal relationships, and selfishness play a part behind the scenes. To make sure that others can police the process, good science relies on transparency so that gatekeepers cannot hide potential attempts to suppress competing theories. Having a large number of people involved in the peer review process also makes it harder to suppress research without getting caught by someone else in the reviewing process.

The peer review process can fall short in other ways too. Peer review depends on having people with the right expertise involved in the process. Scientific experiments are often complicated and generate large amounts of data which can be difficult to interpret. Peer reviewers must have the right expertise to distinguish good research from bad. For example, proper statistical analysis of data can be very difficult. Even very smart scientists can easily make mistakes in statistically analyzing their experimental results, which can lead to bad conclusions. If the reviewers of that scientist’s work lack sufficient statistical expertise, they might not catch the statistical mistakes, and will approve the publication of false or flawed conclusions.

Relying on the scientific method also means accepting that we are capable of correctly perceiving and understanding reality, which (as I discussed above) is not necessarily something we can be sure of. But does this mean there is something wrong with the scientific method? Not at all. If we adopt a “by their fruits ye shall know them” standard, the scientific method has proven itself over and over. No other approach to discovering truth has yielded better results.

In part 4, I’ll discuss the use of feelings as a way of discovering truth.

Note: This is part 2 of a five part series on how we can discover truth. Here are the other parts: part 1, part 3, part 4, part 5.

 

In this second part of my series on truth, I discuss different ways we can discover truth.

If we assume that there is some kind of objective truth, and that we can gain knowledge about it, the next step is to figure out how we may gain knowledge. Knowledge of something necessarily entails belief, but is more than just mere belief. It is possible to believe something which is not true. Pure knowledge would therefore be belief in something which is true. Since we can never be certain of anything, human knowledge is belief in something which we have a reasonable basis for believing is true.

Let’s consider some ways that we can gain knowledge. All of them have their strengths and weaknesses, but they all have a place in our quest for truth.

1) Observation

We can gain knowledge through observation. My knowledge that the sky is blue is based on my direct observation of the sky.

The problem with relying on observation is it assumes that our senses and our perceptions are always accurate. Unfortunately, this is not true. As I discussed above, our senses are imperfect. Our senses can be tricked into believing things that are impossible (optical illusions and magic tricks show how easy it is to fool our senses). Mere observation often does not tell us much about the root causes of things, without the use of some of the methods I list below. Observation is backward-looking: it can only tell us about what has happened in the past, and it limits us to only learning about what we can directly experience.

2) Trial and Error

You could also call this experimentation. It involves observation, but instead of just passively observing, a person takes action to test an idea. Trial and error means testing out different options until you come to one that works. Think of Thomas Edison inventing the light bulb by testing new materials over and over, until he found one that would work as the filament of a light bulb.

Discovery through trial and error is often time consuming. Relying on trial and error to discover new truth means that each of us is very limited in what we can discover during our lifetime. We can only personally do so much. Trial and error will not always lead to the complete truth. If we discover something that seems to work, it does not necessarily mean it is best or truest way (for example, Edison invented the light bulb, but fluorescent and LED bulbs last longer and are more efficient).

Just like with observation, if our goal is to discover truth, trial and error doesn’t always work to help us understand deeper root causes. It doesn’t always lead to an understanding of why our solution works (discovering the light bulb, or fire, or the wheel didn’t necessarily mean that anyone understood why or how they work).

3) Common sense

Based on our previous experience, we can apply intuition and basic reasoning to make inferences about things we have not yet observed or experienced. As we gain knowledge through observation and trial and error, we will notice patterns and learn to extrapolate. For example, someone might observe that every time they throw an object up at a certain angle on a windless day, then it always comes back down again the same way. They will notice the pattern that the sun rises every morning, and generalize their observation to conclude that the sun will rise every morning. We use common sense and basic reasoning to make predictions about the future based on our previous experience.

The big problem with common sense is that our basic intuitive reasoning is often wrong. Humans naturally commit all sorts of fallacies:

• we falsely attribute causation to unrelated events that happened around the same time (like the Aztecs believing that their blood sacrifices caused the sun to rise)
• we misunderstand the true causes of events (such as the belief up until the 19th century that bloodletting helped cure disease)
• we trust too much in our senses without understanding their limitations; we believe that our senses give us a completely accurate understanding of world, and then make false conclusions (like the world being flat),
• we falsely attribute personality and intentionality to inanimate objects (like people talking to their car).

Just as with observation and trial and error, each one of us can only figure out so much, so using common sense on our own means that we will be limited in how much we can discover.

4) Authorities

Our time and our ability to observe and experiment are limited. First through oral traditions, and now through written language, (made available to the masses thanks to cheap publishing costs and now the internet), people have been able to pass their knowledge onto others. We don’t have to start from scratch in our quest for knowledge. The accumulated store of human-generated information is now so amazingly vast that it would be impossible for any of us to rediscover and recreate it all on our own through observation, trial and error, and common sense. Because of this, we all rely on experts: people who have gained knowledge in a particular subject area and who then share that knowledge with others.

It is a logical fallacy, however to rely on the truthfulness of a statement just because an expert said it. Not everything you read is true. Something isn’t true just because an expert said it. But there is a difference between relying on a statement because it was made by an authority, and relying on it because of the inherent merit of the statement itself. It is not a fallacy to argue that the assertion made by an authority is true. The fallacy comes from believing that the authority is somehow infallible and that something is true because it was said by an authority. Something is not true just because a scientist said it; if a real scientist said it, you can examine their data and methods and come to your own conclusion.

A statement made by an authority is worthless unless you can independently test and evaluate that statement. Physicists tell us that matter is made of atoms, which are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. I don’t believe this because statements made by physicists are somehow entitled to greater deference. I believe it because the physicists have exhaustively documented how they came to this conclusion, other physicists have reproduced those results, and I can repeat their experiments and test their statements out myself to verify their truth

In part 3, I’ll consider another way of gaining knowledge: the scientific method.

Note: This is part 1 of a five part series on how we can discover truth. Here are the other parts: part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5.

 

Few people would claim that they prefer living in ignorance to knowing truth. It is nearly impossible, however, to find truth without first thinking about what truth is, and how we can come to know truth.

Our Senses

The first thing to think about when considering how we come to know something is to ask if there is some sort of objective truth in the universe that we can discover. Based on our experience with our senses, most of us assume without thinking much about it that there is some sort of objective reality. We should realize, however, that our perception of reality is extremely limited and imperfect. It is limited because we only perceive a small part of what we normally conceive of as being “real.” We can only see and experience a small part of the world at any one time. Our vision is limited by distance and by lighting conditions. Our eyes can see only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Our other senses are all otherwise similarly limited.

Our senses are also imperfect. Many of us wear glasses or contacts. But even those of us who have 20/20 vision have imperfect vision. The resolution of our vision is limited by the number of rod and cone receptor cells in our eye. There are holes and imperfections in the picture our eyes pick up because the distribution of receptor cells in our retina is uneven, and because there are not receptors where the optic nerve connects to the retina. We perceive that what we are seeing is complete and whole because our brains fill in the gaps in our vision. Some kinds of optical illusions work by exploiting this feature of our brain.

There are other arguments against trusting in our senses. Some scientists have hypothesized that the physical laws of the universe may not be constant – they may have changed over time, or may be different in other parts of the universe. Quantum physics indicates that it is impossible to know some things; as our certainty about a particle’s momentum goes up, our uncertainty about its position must also go up. Gaining knowledge about one aspect of the particle makes it impossible to gain knowledge about others.

Even if physical laws could have changed over time and even though quantum properties of particles are uncertain, our general experience with the consistency of our perceptions and the consistency of cause and effect lead us to behave as if some sort of objective truth exists.

Even if we are not physically capable of fully understanding reality (or even capable of verifying that there is some sort of objective reality), our continued survival forces us to act as if there is a reality and to assume that we can perceive it. On the most basic level, our personal experience and observation of other people indicates that certain actions can cause physical injury and death, and that other activities lead to physical well-being. For example, if I don’t eat, I feel weak and unwell; I am aware of cases where someone starved to death because they went without food for too long. I generalize these experiences to come to the conclusion that I must eat to stay alive.

This of course raises questions about the nature of death, existence, and reality. What does it mean to die or to live? Is this world real? Do I cease to exist as a thinking entity when I die? These are questions I cannot presume to answer in this short blog post; even people who presume they know the answers to these questions can’t really explain very much about existence, reality, and the afterlife (even assuming their answers are right). But notwithstanding our lack of understanding about the nature of existence and reality, our continued existence in this form of existence requires that we act as if it objective physical reality exists. Our perception of it may be imperfect and flawed, but the consistency of those perceptions can at least lead us to conclude that our raw perceptions of reality have a high probability of being generally accurate. And anyone who wants to continue living in this plane of existence (whatever it is) must make conclusions about his or her perceptions of cause and effect and behave in accordance with those conclusions.

Our experience indicates that there are physical laws which govern the operation of the universe (which are apparently unchanging, at least on the scale of human lifetimes). On an elementary level, we all observe that things fall toward the Earth and not away from it, or that the sun always rises and sets. This consistency in our daily experience leads us to assume that truth exists and that we can discover and understand it. Just as we learn through repeated experience from a young age that the sun always rises, we come to expect consistency in other areas, so long as we discover the rules which govern.

This experience with the consistency of reality can be contrasted with a common experience in dreams: people who are dreaming will often look at something, look away, and then look at it again, only to discover that the object has changed in some fundamental way. We perceive “real life” as being qualitatively different from our dreams because we presume that our dreams are generated by our own minds and are thus changeable, whereas our waking perceptions of the universe and the physical world are consistent and appear to be governed by unchanging laws (most people, however, do not realize while dreaming that their perceptions are inconsistent, and usually don’t even notice they are dreaming at all – within the context of the dream, these inconsistencies appear perfectly natural; the lesson we should learn from this is that perhaps we should be skeptical about our waking perceptions as well, seeking inconsistencies even in things that at first seem natural). We perceive cause and effect; we perceive the flow of time; something which has happened in the past appears to be unchangeable.

What can we learn from all of this? Because of the imperfections and limitations of our senses and our brains, we should always be humble about what we “know.” We should recognize that no matter how smart we are, our knowledge is imperfect. Because of our human limitations, we can never have complete certainty about any of our perceptions. At the same time, however, the business of living requires that we assume there is some sort of objective reality to our existence and that we can come to some sort of understanding of it. Real wisdom comes from seeking for greater knowledge and understanding, but having the humility to recognize that we’ll never have perfect understanding; as we seek with humility, the best we can hope is for our understanding and knowledge to become better and better approximations of reality.

Please understand whenever I post about something here, that when I refer to things as facts or as truths or as reality, it is because I am communicating with the normal words we use in our language, but that I fully acknowledge that there is uncertainty about everything I represent to be truth or to be real. In all of my subsequent posts, an implicit premise in all of them is that some sort of objective truth and reality exists, and that we are capable of arriving at some understanding of it, even though it may be an imperfect and incomplete understanding.

In part 2 of this series, I compare different methods we can use for discovering truth.