Tag Archives: Experience

Why Discrimination Is Reasonable, According to Karl Popper

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A while ago, I had a discussion with a friend of mine: we were talking about how people from different cultures interacted with each other. My friend claimed – and he was quite serious about it – that ‘All Moroccans are aggressive’. ‘How do you know?’ I asked him, ‘Have you met all Moroccans?’. ‘No’, he said, ‘but the ones I’ve met, were all aggressive’. Well that seems discriminating, doesn’t it? But while he said this, an idea popped into my mind: Karl Popper’s falsification theory. And I came to a rather unexpected conclusion…

You might have heard of Karl Popper. He is a big name in (the history of) philosophy of science. Popper was a proponent of a tenet called ‘critical rationalism‘, and he is best known for the notion of ‘falsifiability‘ he came up with, in which falsifiability refers to ‘the inherent testability of a scientific hypothesis’. Popper used the notion of falsifiability as a criterium to distinguish science from what he called ‘pseudo-science’, in which a pseudo-science would be any possible ‘science’ that makes unfalsifiable claims – claims that cannot be refuted. An example of an unfalsifiable claim would be: God exists. It is impossible, by means of empirical investigation, to falsify this claim. Therefore, according to Popper, religion – or at least this religious claim – is not scientific.

Given that there are unfalsifiable claims, there must also be falsifiable claims. An example of the latter would be: All swans are white. You can see why this claim is falsifiable: if you would come to see one swan that is not white, this claim has shown to be false. And even though you are unable to prove that the claim ‘All swans are white’ is true, you can prove that it’s not true – thus falsify it. The assumption underlying the notion of falsifiability is that, as long as a falsifiable claim is not falsified, it should for the time being be accepted. There is after all no reason to say it is false.

Now, let’s go back to my friend and his seemingly discriminatory beliefs. Because if you take a closer look, it appears that discrimination and falsifiability are two sides of the same coin. Why is that? Well, let’s assume that we would state the claim ‘All Moroccans are aggressive’ – like my friend did. This claim is clearly falsifiable: one not aggressive Moroccan is sufficient to prove the claim to be false. Now, let’s assume my friend and I go to a bar and meet a few Moroccans. And, as my friend expected, they are indeed aggressive. Thus far, Popper couldn’t blame my friend for holding on to the claim ‘All Moroccans are aggressive’. After all, the claim hasn’t been falsified yet.

The point being: doesn’t my friend apply the same method as is used in the sciences? Making bold conjectures and, based on data, either refute them or not? We don’t seem to have a problem with claiming that ‘All Swans are white’, until it has been proven to be false. So why would a claim applying the same ‘scientific’ methods, when applied to members of our own species, suddenly be discriminating? Isn’t it utterly reasonable to hold on to your claims until they’ve proven to be false? Or in the case of my friend: to hold on to his unfalsified ‘discriminatory’ belief?

Note that I am not claiming that discrimination is reasonable in itself. What I am claiming however is that we cannot accuse people of holding unreasonable beliefs if they (these people) haven’t been proven wrong in holding this belief. For example: although we might have had good experiences with Moroccans, they – my friend, for example – might not. And, given Popper’s theory, this makes their beliefs no less reasonable to hold than ours.

What do you think?

Free Will and Why Determinism Would Not Change a Thing

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I want to take a look at what – at first sight – might seem to be a dichotomy between free will and determinism. I’ve written a couple of articles dealing with the question whether there actually is something that can reasonably be called ‘free will’, and – if so – what this might consist of. These are important questions, for if it turns out that there is no fee will – or that there’s nothing ‘free’ about our free will – then we are left with determinism, a position many people are uncomfortable with. I want to look at what the implications might be of assuming determinism to be true, and in particular at what this assumption would imply for our experience of free will.

When we think of free will, we usually think of a certain autonomous power, residing within our minds, that is capable of initiating (our) actions. Whether it is picking up a teacup or stroking a dog, if we want to perform an action, we seem to be able to decide (consciously or unconsciously ) to execute this action. Now, let’s ask ourselves: how would this picture change if it turned out that we are not fully autonomous in deciding to pick up the teacup or stroking the dog? What if it turned out that our brains are just responding ‘automatically’ (that is, by triggering evolutionary developed neural networks) to the stimuli received from our environments? What if – in case of you picking up the teacup – the stimuli of (1) you being in the living room and (2) it being cold, trigger your neurons into making you believe you want to pick up the teacup and making you in fact pick up the teacup? Note the ‘what if’ in the former sentence, because theoretically it is possible that this is how we come to ‘decide’ on what actions to perform; just by means of nerve cells responding to external stimuli.

The truth of the matter is that we don’t know – and we might never know – whether this is the way our actions come about. It might indeed be that our actions – and thus our decisions – are fully deterministic in nature. However, it wouldn’t make a difference if this would be the case: not as long as we keep on having the perception of having a free will. Even though we might come deterministically to the actions we perform, we still experience the sense of free will. And this experience will not change, not even if we’d come to know that our actions come about fully deterministically.

Because think about it: what if it would turn out that you – who considers him- or herself to be a creative person – depend fully upon the aforementioned neural networks and stimuli for coming to your ‘creative’ ideas? Although you believe you came up with the ideas ‘all by yourself’, fully autonomous and purely free, it turns out that your ideas are a logical result of the environment you’re in and the configuration of your neural networks.

At first you might feel a little hurt in your ego, but when you start thinking about it, you quickly come to realize that this observation doesn’t change a thing. After all, your experience of having a free will is exactly the same as it was before – when you truly believed to have free will. You can still do anything you want to; you’ve merely come to know where this “want to” finds its origin. You have come to know that you don’t have a free will; but you still experience having a free will. And since experience is all we have, nothing has practically changed.

But what do you think?

We Are the Masters of Time

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I am sure you know the feeling: you have been focused at completing a task – let’s say studying – and then, when you look up from your desk and take a look at your watch, you see that a couple of hours have passed. A couple of hours! It feels like you have just started. But, when you take a closer look at the situation, you come to realize that it is not just that time seemed to go faster while you were deeply involved in the activity: it is more like the entire notion of time did not exist at all.

While you are 100 percent focused on doing something – whatever this ‘something’ might be – nothing outside of that something seems to exist. No outer world, no expectations, no time. Not even you. Only the world of the something ‘you’ are immersed in seems to exist. But what are the implications of observing this momentarily ‘non-existence of time’ for our common perception of time?

Let’s start by picking an activity in which your consciousness is put outside of the scope of time: sleeping. When you wake up from a good night of sleep, you have no idea – given that you did not look at the clock – how long you have actually slept. A period of time that in reality might have spanned a couple of hours might feel like it spanned only a couple of minutes. An even more extreme example would be a comatose patient: patients who awake from a coma usually have no clue how long they have actually been in the coma.

But it is not only while you are sleeping that time seems to play tricks on us. Also in our daily lives we are constantly bothered by its remarkable properties. For think about it: how slow does time go when you are waiting for your dentist, and he is already ten minutes late? Ten minutes can feel like eternity, right? But what if you are hanging out with your friends, laughing and having a good time, but you know that you have to leave in ten minutes? Then ten minutes might feel like a second. And you know who also pointed out this weird feature of time? The same man that shocked the world with his theory of relativity: mister Albert Einstein. This is what he had to say about our experience of time:

When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder, a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.

Although our experience of time – and even time itself – might be relative, there is one aspect that remains constant throughout all frames: the seemingly uni-directionality of time. For it seems like time is always going forward, to the future. But even though nature pushes us forward in time, we can decide where in time we want to be: do you want to be in ‘the now’, or would you rather dive into your past or dream about the future? It is your consciousness that determines where in time you are situated mentally. It is pretty much like the movie The Matrix: your body stays put on planet earth, while your mind lives a life on its own. What this observation shows is that time does not equal the hands on the clock. Our perception of time is not always moving in fixed units in a fixed direction. The fact that we have invented the notion of time because it is convenient within our daily lives does not prevent us from experiencing time in any form we want.

But of course: we cannot live our lives totally detached from the ordinary – constantly forward moving – property of time. After all, our human bodies are earthly constructs and will break down after a quite predictable period of time. However, within the fixed time frame we have been offered, the unit of time is variable: within this fixed time frame a minute does not have to feel like a minute and a couple of hours can feel like a couple of seconds. Within this fixed time frame we are the masters of time.

What is your notion of time?

Renovation of High School Education

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What have you actually learned at high school? I mean: not while you were attending high school, but while you were literally physically present at high school? Not that much, right? For the most part, you were just sitting there from 9 AM tot 5 PM, waiting until you could go home and finally start doing something useful with your time: like learning something for instance. But isn’t that a little weird? That you actually want to go home so that you can start studying and really learn something? And what can we do to turn this ineffective high school-picture around?

First of all: we have got to realize why children are learning so little while they are at high school. Maybe it is because children of the high school appropriate age are, besides developing themselves intellectually, learning how to behave themselves in social surroundings. This is a perfectly normal for high school children. It is even required for them to develop themselves socially. However, as you can imagine, it doesn’t necessarily create the right atmosphere for a child to be able to develop themselves on an intellectual level. The distractions are killing them.

Furthermore, the things being done in the classroom are – most of the time – not time or space dependent. Hence they can in principle be done at home. By that I mean that a child doing the algebra assignments from the algebra textbook is not doing something that necessarily has to be done in class. These are individual tasks for which being located in a classroom is in no sense conducive to learning to do the task at hand. That is not to say that children might not have questions they would like to ask a teacher or their fellow class members about. However, the act of questioning in itself is in no way dependent upon the children sitting in a classroom-like configuration for most of their time. There are many other ways – think about e-mailing, Skyping and office hours – by which mandatory presence can be avoided while still giving children the opportunity to ask questions.

As you know, governments worldwide have to cut back on expenses, including educational expenses. So – and you might see where this is going – what about significantly restricting the amount of time children need to sit in class? This could reduce housing costs by having different classes at different times making use of the same classroom. Also, it would mitigate the need for high school teachers, which would neutralize the problem of there being a shortage of them. And – most importantly – it would improve the intellectual environment for children so that they can focus on studying instead of being distracted by their allegedly funny classmates. A win-win-win situation.

Surely, we should not do away with classroom teaching completely. There are cases in which being together in a classroom-setting would be the only – or at least the best – option for children to learn something. Examples would be the development of socials kills through presentations, and lectures that are explicitly intended to convey information to the children. For the remainder of the cases, teaching via the internet might very well be more beneficial for the children’s development. I would like to make you aware of the Khan Academy, which is a free online learning platform to which entire classes can subscribe. By doing so the teachers are able to obtain very detailed information about the performance of each student individually and – consequently – help the ones who need it most. Also, there are plenty of tests and other assignment available in order for children to maximize their learning potential.

So, what do you say? Shall we make the jump?

There is No Life without Death

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What would life be like without death? Would there even be such a thing as ‘life’ without death? And why do we die? What’s the purpose of it? Is there even a purpose of it? Is there some kind of masochistic creator who likes to hurt us? And if so, wouldn’t making people die contradict its notion of creating? Or maybe even the creator became confused about the notions of life and death, and in the end decided just to go with it? Whatever the explanation is, death remains a mysterious, yet inescapable, destination we all share.

Let’s see: what causes us to die? Well, death might just come about because of a flaw in our biological make-up; an unintended by-product of the designer of humanity. It might only be due to physical decay that our bodies will – eventually – perish. Death is just another obstacle to overcome in our human struggle with nature, a struggle that we will inevitably come to win. Within a couple of decades from now, people will be able to change their cancerous limbs for platinum replicas. Plastic surgery will be outdated; instead of getting a face-lift at the age of 55, people will get an entirely new face. That’s how we will fight nature. We know after all from history that humans are prepared to do anything in order for them to stay alive; even if their opponent is Mother Nature herself.

Thoughts of death scare us. We long for certainty, for beliefs upon which we can build the rest of our lives. However, all of our intellectual powers fall short of explaining what will happen after we have exhaled our final breath. But although we will never be able to know it, we simply cannot live with the idea that we are destined to enter an unknown world for an unknown amount of time (given that there even would be such a thing as ‘time’ in ‘the afterlife’). And there are many stories we came up with to lighten our sense of despair about death. The issue of death is the prime reason so many religions have come into existence. After all, the idea of a cozy afterlife doesn’t really seem something to worry about, right? But even non-religious people have tried to come up with ‘reasonable’ positions within this debate. Atheists proclaim that no deity exists, which is just claiming the opposite of what religious people do. And even agnostics, although their position might seem more ‘humble’ than the atheists’, find themselves to be justified in making a judgement about the afterlife by saying that ‘we cannot decide whether or not a deity exists’; thereby assuming that, although none of the others are capable of doing so, they can close this debate in a reasonable manner.

Yeah right….Well, let’s look at the counterpart of death: life. Because what would life be like without death? The obvious answer would be: there would be nothing left to call ‘life’, since life can only exist in conjunction with death. But let’s approach this issue from another angle; an experiential angle. Given that we would be immortal, which might be something different than being either dead or alive, how would we then come to value our ‘lives’? Would we still be able to appreciate the beauty of things? Would we even be capable of experiencing emotions in any sense? After all: how happy or sad would we feel if we would come to experience an event that we had experienced an infinite number of times already? Wouldn’t that downgrade the relative value of each moment of – let’s say – sadness? How sad would it for example be to experience your son dying, given that you are destined to experience countless instances of this ‘drama’ again? Or how joyful would it be to experience your son attending his first day of school, given that you’ve experienced this a thousand times already?

There is no life without death; and that not only goes for life in the biological sense of the word, but just as much in the emotional or experiential sense. The notion of value would be non-existent if we wouldn’t face death. Hence we can say that death is a beautiful invention of life. So let’s be grateful for its existence.

But what do you think?

Note: this article has been published at Shaun Rosenberg’s self improvement and motivation blog.

The Randomness of Life: Who has Chosen our Families?

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I have got a confession to make: I love my family. I love my father, I love my mother, I love my brother and I love everyone else who is part of my bloodline. But why is that exactly? Because they are family of course! That’s true, but then let me ask myself the following question: what if I would have been born in a different family? What if I, let’s say, would have been born two streets away from the actual place I was born? Would I then still have loved my family? Or – to put it more boldly – would I have even known about the existence of my family (read: my “this life” family)? Of course I would, only then it would have been a different family which I would have known and loved.

Life is full of randomness. And one of the many examples in which this randomness shows its face is in the “choice” of who becomes your family. Because think about it: why is my mother the woman who gave birth to me? Why wasn’t it the woman in the grocery store that I say hello to every day? There seems to be no reason for either of these options, besides the fact that the former “just” happens to be true and the latter “just” happens to be false.

But, when you think about it, the situation is even more absurd than “merely” this innocent little sense of randomness. Because imagine that the woman in the grocery store would indeed have been my – or your – mother. Would I – or you – in that case have known about the existence of my “real” (read: “this life”) mother? Probably not. And you know what? I most certainly wouldn’t have cared one single bit about this. After all, why would you care about not having met someone – my “true” mother in this case – whom you don’t even know exists?

As far as I’m concerned, we only live once. And by “we” I am referring to the “yous” – plural of “you” – reading this article: the collections of hair, brains, thoughts etc. A consequence of this presumption is that all what’s happening in our lives is, whether we like it or not, our truth. But although our truth is in fact what is happening in our lives, we have to realize that it might have easily been otherwise. It would have made just as much – or just as little – sense for the woman in the grocery store to have been my mother, instead of the woman that truly “has become” my mother. Thus, although we can describe our “truths” objectively and in utter seriousness, we shouldn’t forget that the reason why our truth is the truth is completely and utterly random: it “just” happens to be so.

But back to the idea of our mothers and families. In our lives as we know it, our families – often – play a hugely important role. And since this is “just the way it is”, and since this is “our truth in this life”, it isn’t unreasonable for us to love them with all our hearts, right? Because although it might be an utterly random state of affairs, it is still our family and it is still our truth, right? So let’s appreciate our truth, and love our families.

But what do you think?