Archive for May, 2021

FREE WILL & COMMON SENSE

May 21, 2021

The hoary old hypothesis that ‘There is no such thing as Free Will’ has fired up public debate yet again thanks to a recent article by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. And once again, to judge from the many letters and comments it has aroused, the result is inconclusion, if not total confusion.

But there’s no necessity for that if you appeal to The Scientific Method. At its very heart lies a technique for Hypothesis Testing called ‘Bayes’ Rule’. What it offers to do is alter one’s Odds on any hypothesis H by appealing to any evidence E consequent on that hypothesis. But if there is no such consequent evidence, as there appears not to be in the Free Will case, Bayes’ Rule is helpless, and any debate about the matter is therefore fruitless. The mediaeval scholars who didn’t understand that wasted their lives discussing such arcane matters as ‘How many angels could dance on a pinhead.’ Why don’t so many modern scholars realise that Inconsequential Hypotheses are undecidable and so a waste of their time, and everybody else’s?

I would suggest it is because Western Philosophy is rooted in a quest for Certainty. On the one hand the Ancient Greeks thought that Certain truths could be arrived at solely by Deductive, even mathematical, Logic. On the other hand, Abrahamic religions held that Man, who sat on the right hand of the only true God, could find Certainty in Holy Scripture. The idea that Certainty was unavailable, except in trivial circumstances, as we recognise now, and that gambling Odds would have to do instead, was anathema to both schools.

The sad result is that the Education Establishment, even today, largely ignores Bayes’ Rule, and thus Common Sense Thinking in general, because of its abhorrent roots in gambling. It’s not so surprising though when you recall that Oxford and Cambridge for instance were set up by papal bulls in the thirteenth century to train priests. Gambling was certainly not on their curricula. Nor did they even teach Science until forced to do so by the Government late in the 19th century.

Thus the Free Will debate brings to light an extraordinary situation. The academic world largely ignores Common Sense Thinking because it lies outside a 2,500 year old tradition rooted in unsound philosophy and Abrahamic theology. Science has only progressed by ignoring both.

Equally though it highlights a quite extraordinary opportunity. We could now teach Common Sense Thinking , with its key principles: Bayes’ Rule, The Detective’s Equation, Ockham’s Razor, the Principle of Animal Wisdom and Provisionality to everyone over the age of 13. It will probably lead to advances far greater than did either Industrialisation or Electricity. And importantly, it would teach us Tolerance, because provisional (i.e measured) thinking and Tolerance for alternative ideas, are opposite sides of the very same coin.

Anyone interested in these matters might like to read Thinking For Ourselves, a 20 year study of The Scientific Method and Common Sense Thinking, discussed here under the My Books Category. And look under the Thinking Category for many other allied Posts.

LYING ABOUT HISTORY

May 7, 2021

It suits a lot of people’s private agendas to claim that the British Empire was an evil one. But was it? When I went to work in India I was confronted by a six foot, broad shouldered American in a sari who bellowed: ” You Briddish ought to be ashamed of what you did in India, cutting off the thumbs of all the weavers in Madras to protect your Lanka Shire cotton industry!” Naturally horrified I looked into the alleged crime.

I hope readers won’t be surprised to find it was nonsense, a canard put about by the Indian Congress party to win an election. But the point of this Post is to warn readers to be very careful before acting or voting on the basis of emotive historical narratives which could easily be lies, and to suggest a way to check them.

This is no small matter The Second World War was started by ‘Ludendorff’s Lie’ which Hitler and many other Germans chose to believe, while Scotland could vote to leave the United Kingdom because of a false historical narrative put about by The Scottish Nationalist Party.

As a Space scientist is wasn’t wise to take complex decisions on the basis of emotive tweets, but how were we to take them, winnowing the grain away from the chaff?

I have tried to apply the ‘Scientific Method of History to the hypothesis ‘Scotland would have fared better outside the United Kingdom’ and come up with odds of 250 to 1 against. see:

https://mjdisney.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/SCIMETHHIST.pdf

and have recently published ” HISTORY OF THE BRITS (From a scientists point of view)” 2020,Amazon, paperback £10, in which these ideas and techniques are discussed in a much wider context.The above url is extracted from it .

I would go far as to say that false history is very often a murder weapon far more deadly than shells or mines because it can stir up whole populations to set upon one another. One third of the German population is believed to have died during the religious Thirty Years War. At the present day Putin, Chi, Modi…… are all trying to use it to make their ‘countries great again’ with consequences which might be quite dreadful, even fatal to all of us. If you don’t believe me find out about ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion‘ , a historical falsehood which lead to tens of millions of deaths because decent people didn’t bother to check its veracity.