Truth part 2 -- what is truth?

Soon after I started skipping grades I had one of the many, many arguments that I've had with student teachers throughout my years. This particular young woman distributed a "True/False" test, but instead of a list of statements that could be marked true or false there were a list of questions, with question marks after them, something along the lines of:
Whiskey has a higher alcohol content than beer? True False

I objected that the choices weren't valid: questions framed in such a way could be answered yes or no, but that true and false applied to statements, and there were no statements on the test.

I might not have been such a jerk about this if the "teacher" hadn't tried to fun of me for correctly pronouncing "liquor" and "liqueur" in an early incident, causing me to a) question her age b) question her upbringing as a source for her ignorance and c) carry a grudge that expressed itself with all the vigor of a vindictive 11 year old.

In any event, Pontious Pilate cavalierly tossed off "what is truth?" and I'll just as cavalierly answer that truth is a statement that corresponds, as closely as currently possible, with all that is known of the objective universe.

The best method that we have at the moment for discovering truth is the scientific method: observe, hypothesize, predict, experiment. Like any field or method, there are fine details involved at each of the stages, and lay people are often mistaken about how to use the scientific method or how to interpret results.

The key feature to the scientific method, at least in my mind, is the fact that all parts of the scientific method are viewed in context and iterative, leaving the door open for correction at a later date. This is absolutely vital. I was once accused of being closed minded by a management type when (of course) the results of my team's experiments weren't what this VP wanted them to be. "I'm not close minded," I said, "I just only open my mind in the presence of evidence about my methodology or my results. Your single, biased opinion is one tiny, biased data point."

Since all of our interaction with the objective world (yeah, yeah, either it is there or it isn't, haven't seen a good argument for assuming that it isn't there) takes place through subjective interpretation, the scientific method (and associated ways of using it such as heterophenomenology) provides as much of a reality check as we can get, and being in touch with reality is pretty much the most objective definition of sanity that I can think of. Truth is something which we must always attempt to approach.

So when I talk about AGR (attenuated grasp of reality), I'm talking about having a declared position or action contrary to the current state of some truth. As an example: you send someone a letter stating X. That person then writes a bunch of people saying, "Pompotous said Y!" This is most likely AGR because "Pompotous said Y!" appears to be false statement. Evidence might be gathered showing that X and Y, whatever they may be, are functionally or semantically identical, but that's something that the Pompotous normally does to other people, not something that normally happens to himself.

I don't get adultery

For those of you who know the Pompotous personally the title is a bit of a joke. Prior to meeting my lovely wife I spent most of my adult life, as someone once put it, "serially monogamous with the significant others of others." Let me be clear: I didn't go looking for affairs with married or engaged women, they came to the Pompotous, I wasn't the one breaking any marriage vows, and there were no children in any of the marriages. I was just instrumental in helping the women break vows they made to someone else. (In an amusing similarity, all 3 of the wives showed me pictures or videos of their wedding day right before moving to Stage 3 of the adulterous affair (the sexual intercourse bit)).

In the 15 years that these relationships happened I was manipulated and lied to and used and, oddly enough, ultimately blamed for the affair by all of the women involved, who somehow seemed to forget the effort they put into seducing me. Particularly by the last one, the one who had to manipulate and work on me for months to seduce me, and only managed to get sexual intercourse out of me the first time by encouraging me to take a nap and then having at me so that I woke up with the process already begun. From a purely physical standpoint, not a bad way to wake up, but from a question of responsibility viewpoint I never did figure out how that one was initiated by me.

Anyway, in addition to having the "it's not my fault" trait in common, all of the women had been married for 4 years when the sexual aspects of our affairs began. Perhaps because the 4th anniversary gift is supposed to be a household appliance. Well, I've been married longer than that and I have to say: I don't understand adultery.

Which isn't to say that I can't predict it. I pegged that third wife as an adultery risk the first night I met her: she was having to commute a long way because of her husband, she described him as a saint to whom she was totally devoted, the nicest guy in the world, yet there were undertones of resentment and need. No, I know the behavior back and forth, I know the tells that give away intentions, but I still have no clue as to why these women would deliberately set out to screw over their husbands by screwing someone else.

I've now been married as long as they were back then. My wife is my partner, my helper, the one who can drive me crazy in ways both good and bad. She's certainly not perfect nor a saint, nor am I, but if she wasn't like that I wouldn't have married her, if for some reason that went away, well, why wouldn't I divorce her?

At this point, my understanding of adultery has changed, and joined together with my understanding of rape: I don't get it. Why would anyone want to stick their dick into someone who didn't want it? What's the point, what are they getting that they couldn't get with some vaseline, a hand of choice and a good fantasy? Why would anyone want to screw around behind their spouse's back? What are they getting that they couldn't get with either working on their marriage or abandoning it all together? I know what I got out of these affairs: I got the illusion that someone cared about me while at the same time indulging in my self destructiveness. But these women had people who already really cared about them. If I'd had that (and I do now), no way would I deliberately betray that.

I get that these married women were all looking for something. The first ended up with both a string of marriages and a string of affairs. The second eventually divorced and became an alcoholic. The third, after four years, revealed that she'd been "hiding" her intense Christianity so people wouldn't make fun of her, stayed with her husband, who sank into depression, and now home schools the kids she had with him after she ended our affair forever for the third time. I get that they were looking for something. Aren't we all? What I don't get is why any of them thought that lying -- and lies are at the base of all adulteries in my experience -- could possibly be a path to finding what they needed.

As Merlin said in _Excalibur_, "Truth! That's it, it must be truth! When a man lies he murders some part of the world."

AGR+ Militant Atheism

The Pompotous of love is married to a wonderful, intelligent, kind, patient woman. Who is a Christian of sorts, an Episcopalian to be precise, but not one of the "let's go to church because that's where the money and status congregate" types of Episcopalians I knew as a young Pompotous. She does indeed believe in some sort of supernatural something or other.

Everybody has AGR. This religious belief of hers (along with her perpetual optimism about what she can actually accomplish in a limited amount of time) rank as her high points of AGR.

But over the years of our interactions I've think I've identified some things that may be the roots of the "militant atheism" moniker that has been the topic of discussion lately. (Various blogs have touched it, the most excellent vjack's is always a good place to go.)

Here's the thing: for those of us steeped in the humanities, you go off and do history and historiography and philosophy and cognitive science and phenomenology and psychology and so on and so forth, each discipline taking itself as the lens through which the entire world can be viewed, and if you are interested in consciousness, one of the things that you eventually come across is that sanity is primarily a socially defined construct.

Yeah, yeah, almost everything is a socially defined construct, got it, when does the interesting part come in?

Well, we have all these social constructs that point out what is right and what is wrong, what is "other" and bad, what is acceptable and what isn't. (Think of homosexuality being in the DSM until what, '73? Or putting "God" into the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1950's to distinguish the US from "godless" communism. The various ways various groups (Irish, Italians, Jews) have been integrated into American society over time.) The more complicated a society is, the larger it is, the more communication and interactions between people, the more stress will be placed on competing social constructs.

As a professional interaction experience designer, additional interactions complicate things almost exponentially. If you lived in a primitive village and never knew what happened 1/2 a mile beyond the boundaries of the village the simplistic "everything not mandatory is forbidden" (with, of course, memetic variations) might be workable enough. But an empire has to be more flexible. ("Forgive him Caesar- he is a barbarian and thinks that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature," as Shaw wrote.)

Reason and the scientific method provide us with the tools to examine social constructs as objectively as humanly possible. Most people cannot use those tools. Some of them can only use those tools in limited areas (think so-called "scientists" who claim the scientific method should only be used in the job or in the lab, not in real life, where faith should prevail).

But enough people have been exposed to the scientific method and the fruits of scientific discovery to see, hey, it works! Like the cartoon, only some really fringe anti-evolutionist cases are going to take the antibiotic that worked 20 years ago instead of the one designed to combat the evolved form of the infection.

So when an atheist steps up and says, "Keep your baseless historico-social construct out of my life" what we're really saying is, "You have high AGR -- you have a disconnect with reality." If you believe in something without evidence to back up your beliefs you are, in point of fact, insane.

If some politician started making decisions based on World of Warcraft lore and trying to make policy based on Horde versus Alliance affiliation, that politician would be widely viewed as insane. But from the Pompotous's viewpoint, a politician standing up and talking about faith being a deciding factor in decisions is much the same as yelling, "Horde rules!" during a senate debate. It reveals a disconnect with reality, it reveals high AGR.

My wife knows I think she is insane. But she knows that I admit my own insanity -- everybody has AGR to a greater or lesser extent.

Religion and faith play by different rules. A religionist looks at somebody else who is a different religion and they are wrong or heretics or apostate or whatever, and you may kill them or torture them or pray for them or whatever, but the other whackos are playing at a similar level of AGR.

I've seen several atheists use the argument that religionists are atheists to every god except their own and that's just not true. A religionist's denial of other gods is not based on reason and evidence and all those other good things, it is based on faith and thus isn't atheism. Religion is not rational. That doesn't mean that any specific theist is dangerous -- not all crazy people are dangerous -- but it does mean that every specific theist is irrational on the subject of religion.

Any atheistic declaration is an attack on the theists sanity in a "you people aren't connected to reality" way. That's the attack. That's the "militant" position. It's not comparing apples to apples in a communal way of "mine is better," it's saying, "all of your apples have the same existence in reality as the 'tea' my 2-year old daughter pores for me out of her empty play teapot."

Atheism based in rationality and the scientific method is utterly at odds with religionists about how reality is determined. That is a deep conflict. Imagine someone made it to 40 still believing that Santa Claus personally put his presents under the tree after coming through the chimney -- wouldn't an anti-Clausian's attempt to persuade the poor fool of reality be seen as an attack upon his world?

AGR+ Gay Marriage

The Pompotous touched earlier on the issue of gay marriage in a rather rough sort of rant. Over at Pharyngula a similar topic showed up while PZ was on a trip (the problem is we exist). And there were a few comments made about the appropriateness of a "gay" issue being on a science and atheism blog.

"Science" isn't a collection of facts and hierarchies of description. (I'm sure all of you can sympathize with the "it's JUST a theory!" crap the vomit-bags shout about evolution. Yeah, so is gravity, dimwit, how about stepping off a tall building?)

Science is about reasoning and investigating and continuing to explore the universe to reduce our inherent attenuated grasp of reality. It is a wonderful thing. The people who are "against" homosexuality suffer from AGR. Most of them (if not almost all) base their arguments on religious prejudices.

The exact same reasoning methods that demonstrate atheism to be the lowest AGR viewpoint on religion also demonstrate that gender discrimination in marriage contracts is a high AGR viewpoint, and as such should be opposed by atheists and scientists.

Attenuated Grasp of Reality

The Pompotous speaks about AGR (Attenuated Grasp of Reality). After a decade working for a Fortune 500 company in a capacity that had the Pompotous interfacing with numerous departments and executives (not a lot of love there, let me tell you!) the concept of AGR became obvious.

Let's get the freshman and or grad student objections about reality out of the way. This is a complicated subject that many have written on, but mainly the subject is one of mental masturbation -- yeah, it is fun enough, but there are more pleasurable things to be done with a partner around, so let's get on with things.

1. There either is or isn't an objective reality. If there isn't an objective reality, it is still reasonable to act as if there is an objective reality.
2. No, we don't have any "direct" experience of objective reality. We do have communication and the scientific method, which is the closest that we're going to get and, being the only game in town, is close enough for jazz.
3. My personal opinion is that we probably don't have free will -- at the same level of discussion of saying that we don't have "direct" experience of objective reality. There are many, many good reasons for acting as if we have free will, and that's good enough for the Pompotous.

So what is AGR? One of the Pompotous's buddies did a humorous chart of the "10 levels of AGR" but I'll be a bit more serious here. Everyone on the planet has some level of AGR. Both because we have no direct experience of reality and because no human is omniscient. Because of those two things everything that we do is a "best guess" at the moment, and those best guesses may be wrong.

If you keep in mind that you may be wrong, if you communicate and investigate and apply the scientific method in gathering and analyzing information, you will minimize, as much as possible, your human potential for AGR.

A couple of things can massively increase the amount of AGR you have. One is emotion. Ever been in love with someone bad for you? 'Nuff said.

The other is incompetence. Time and time again I'd run into incompetent people who would do or say things that seemed intended to actively hurt the company. Each time I'd point out their errors they wouldn't consider the matter in anything other than personal terms: I was arrogant, things had to be "my way", I just wasn't a team player -- and these are issues on which I had scientifically gathered evidence in a variety of forms.

Eventually I had to accept that the studies out there are depressingly correct: incompetents are completely unaware of their own incompetence, that is the first and foremost condition for being incompetent. And the only thing that they do well is ingratiate themselves to those like them and those people whose jobs are above the "detail" level of getting things done.

I do not know how incompetent people reach decisions. It is, I think, much like faith. The idea pops and there it is. To stay. In the decade of the Pompotous at that Fortune 500 company I usually prevailed, almost always through bitter fighting. But not a single incompetent learned a single thing. Not a single incompetent ever remembered being wrong. Not a single incompetent remembered the evidence that demonstrated that they were wrong -- sometimes they'd reverse the evidence in their heads and spread the incorrect data! And so the fights continued, year after year, with more fighting each year as I'd continually have to correct the errors of old as well as the errors of the present.

Attenuated Grasp of Reality: it is a bitch. There are people with hardware problems who have AGR because the equipment they use is damaged in some way (Oliver Sacks has a couple of good books, such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat that deal with these kinds of problems.) And it is tragic to review those cases. But when seemingly neurologically normal folks of probably average intelligence have high levels of AGR it sends the Pompotous off bellowing, "CULL THE HERD!"

Which is perhaps (and perhaps not) unfair of the Pompotous. Rational thought and the scientific method, with their built in checks and balances, are the best method that we as a species have ever had for reducing AGR, and reducing AGR is the best way to find correct answers to problems, and damn, do we have a lot of problems! In the next posts the Pompotous will speak about how the concept of AGR extends into some of the threads others have been talking about.