However, the more I thought about it the more it raised fundamental issues for me. Some were around how delusional beliefs come about and why they are so prevalent. It also raised an ethical dilemma: should those who hold dangerous delusional beliefs be regarded as victims or perpetrators? And why does society have such a high tolerance for certain kinds of illogical thinking and not others?
As I tried to find an approach to this I was infuriated by the circularity of trying to argue on the basis of evidence when the belief system being promoted had no real concept of proof and no understanding of the language of scientific method.
But maybe that should not be so surprising. The very term 'science' seems to scare many people.
The term has all kinds of associations for people, but they rarely seem to connect with an understanding of what scientific method is. So let start at the beginning – how do we know what’s true?
Is it real or is it Memorex?
Deciding what true isn’t as easy as it seems, especially when you consider that it’s almost impossible to prove what, if anything, is even real.
Descartes put his mind to the problem of trying to find out if there is anything at all that we can say that is undeniably true and came up with a single assertion of blinding elegance, ‘I think, therefore I am’. In the whole history of humanity’s pursuit of knowledge this may be the only assertion that is effectively undeniable and doesn’t require further proof. But is everything else just opinion?.
For an empiricist only the things we see for ourselves can be considered real, and an extreme empiricist like Hume would hold that we can’t even say much about that - you can describe a personal experience but you can’t look at the context of those experiences or place them in any relationship to each other because that isn't part of the experience. Effectively you can’t meaningfully say anything about cause or effect, or even if what you perceive has anything to do with reality at all.
Unhappily so far the evidence is that what we experience may have only the loosest connection to an external reality. Evolution has handed us a limited set of senses and a brain that's good enough to keep us alive on the savanna with nothing but a stick. We probably just don't have the cognitive equipment to directly interact with or understand 'out there' even if it were shown to be theoretically possible to do it (or indeed that there is an 'out there').
That’s scary stuff, anyone who’s watched ‘The Matrix’ or that great philosophical treatise ‘Total Recall’ knows that the idea that you can’t trust your own senses is chilling. There’s something about the idea that what we experience isn’t real that freaks most of us out.
Luckily most of us can leave the deepest part of this to physicists and philosophers and concentrate on which brand of beer we will give our loyalty to.
If you want to know what Albert Einstein thought about reality have a look here http://www.kostic.niu.edu/Physics_and_Reality-Albert_Einstein.pdf
And if you want to know how that’s panning out try this
However, much as you might like to, you can’t totally wash your hands of the question. In the world of our common experience we are often presented with conflicting arguments and explanations and we have to make a decision: which one is more true?
Thankfully we have a method that’s proved to be very effective indeed. There’s a way we can put things to the test. It’s called ‘scientific method’. It’s OK, don’t be frightened, there’s no maths involved. If you want a straightforward explanation of it look at the next post Hypothesis? Just a fancy word for guess.
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