Conviction and Humility

Should one have the "courage of their convictions"? Should one exercise humility in regards to their ideas? Are having the courage of your convictions and exercising humility necesarily in conflict with one another? How valuable do you think either of these general positions are to philosophy and life in general?

There is no conflict between humility or courage any more than there is a conflict between principle and application or skepticism and faith. Both inform each other and form a dialectical composite. In politics, the inability of leaders to examine premises leads to dams in the middle of deserts and groud wars in foreign countries. In science, the inability the think indepedently of politics leads to Lysenkoism and mushroom clouds. In faith, the inability to embrace mystery, contradiction, and transcendence leads to scientism-- science and technology that is devoid of an awareness of human costs-- whereas the inability to embrace rigor and experimentation leads to a different kind of fanaticim-- astrology and cults. In art, the inability to expose your art to the criticism of others and yourself leads to artlessness or the sterility of artistic expression. At the base of each of these areas of human endeavors must lie one irreducable principle-- that rationality-- clear, disciplined, systematic thinking-- must govern all social interactions-- and that rationality itself will recognize its own limitations and defects-- that there are limits to rationality.

Integrity, another name for humility, is integral to epistomology. In a commencement at Caltech in 1974, Richard Feynman spoke of the need to relate integrity to our search for truth. “In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land. “Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school--we never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards.”

We are the greatest obstacle to truth, Dr. Feynman suggests. Our theories take on a momentum as we invest ego, money, and time. And sometimes the most difficult thing we can do—but the one essential thing we must do—is to be utterly honest with ourselves as we look for reasons as to why our theory is not valid. “For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated“

Falsifiability

That is because if it cannot be falsified, then it means nothing for it to be true. If a proposition is unfalsifiable, then there is no difference between a universe in which it is true and a universe in which it is not true.

You give more credence to falsifiability, arrived logically via modus tollens (U --> ^O. where U = universal statement and O = observation; If O; Thus ^U, than I do in demarking between science and non or pseudo-science, or, as you say, "a universe in which it is true and a universe in which it is not true." First, the principle of falsifiability is just that-- a principle which cannot in itself be falsified as is also true with the logical positivist's verifiability principle. Secondly, the rejection of a hypnotheis due to an example of falsifiability can itself be irrational, as in the 1925 Michelson-Morely experiment relative to Einstein's Theory of Relativity. (This concept can only be challenged when applied to other theories. You might be hard pressed to falsify the Theory of Natural Selection, for example.) Thirdly, as the article also points out, there is the problem of perceived as opposed to real verifiability-- gets to the crux of what we really mean by "true" as used in your sentence.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/16478

Finally, as I stated earlier, Popper's view is that there can be no inference that given the lack of falsifiability, a theory is false, meaningless, or trivial-- only that it cannot be tested. "I thus felt that if a theory is found to be non-scientific, or "metaphysical" (as we might say), it is not thereby found to be unimportant, or insignificant, or "meaningless," or "nonsensical." But it cannot claim to be backed by empirical evidence in the scientific sense—although it may easily be, in some genetic sense, the "result of observation.""

http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/critical_thinking/Science_pseudo_falsifiability.html

It's Not Hard to Amaze Me

These factoids, discovered while reseaching something else, amaze me:

1. A black hole, five billion times as big as the sun, is in the core of the galaxy Messier 87 (M-87).

2. A 3.1 mile wide comet will collide with the Earth in 2116, and could kill off most forms of life.

3. The King James version of the Bible was completed on William Shakespeare's putative 46th birthday. In Psalm 46, the 46th word is "shake" and the 46th word from the end is "spear".

4. Solitary bees make circular cells, which become hexagonal under pressure.

5. Gout strikes the male population nineteen times for every one time it attacks females.

6. Etruscans invented false teeth around 700 BC.

7. Neutrinos are ghostlike particles that have no mass or electrical charge and can hurtle with ease through the entire earth.

8. There are no houseflies in the state of Alaska.

9. According to Lewis Thomas' The Lives of a Cell, "there are 25 million assorted insects hanging in the air over every temperate square mile, in a column extending upwards for thousands of feet, drifting through the layers of the atmosphere like plankton."

10. There are more than 1,000 rings around Saturn.

Miscellania

1. A black hole, five billion times as big as the sun, is in the core of the galaxy Messier 87 (M-87).

2. The sun is racing through space at 43,200 miples per hour.\

3. Time as no independent reality.

4. Good rule of diet: Eat only natural foods that will spoil-- and eat them before they do.

5. The Saint Bernards of the Hospice du Grand St. Bernard in Switzerland have been credited with saving more than 2,500 lives since 1750.

6. Stephen Hawkins, in his 1966 Ph.d thesis: "There is a singularity in our past."

7. Dogs may learn about 2,000 words, cats about 50 words. Cats are more responsive to sounds than words.

8. A 3.1 mile wide comet will collide with the Earth in 2116, and could kill off most forms of life.

9. The King James version of the Bible was completed on William Shakespeare's putative 46th birthday. In Psalm 46, the 46th word is "shake" and the 46th word from the end is "spear".

10. Freezing does not injure the color or flavor or honey, but it may hasten granulation.

Miscellenia

"A baby sucks on a pencil and her panicky mother fears the child will get lead poisoning. A politician argues that hydrogen can replace fossil fuels as our nation's energy source. A consumer tells a reporter that she refuses to eat tomatoes that ahve genes in them. And a newsmagazine condemns the prospects of cloning because it could mass-produce an army of zombies.

"These are just a few examples of scientific illiteracy -- inane misconceptions that could have been avoided with a smidgen of freshman science. (For those afraid to ask: pencil "lead" is carbon; hydrogen fuel takes more energy to produce than it releases; all living things contain genes; a clone is just a twin.)

Steven Pinker, in a review of Natalie Angier's The Canon.

Miscellania

1. Solitary bees make circular cells, which become hexagonal under pressure.

2. Tomatoes (Lycopersicon lycopersicum) were cultivate in South and Central America for centuries before they were introduce to European gardens in the 16th century.

3. Chemistry is from the Arabic kimia, whence al-kimia (alchemy), from kamai (to conceal).

4. Boyle's law: "The volume of a gas is inversely as the pressure." Robert Boyle (1627-1691)

5. More than half of all cat owners have had some college.

6. Robert Conot, author of the 1979 biography of Edison, A Streak of Luck, observes that Edison's mind "multiplied devices from a single idea like a dividing amoeba and then compartmentalized the ceations and endeavors."

7. There are: 60 minims = 1 fluid dram; 8 fluid drams = 1 fluid ounce; 16 fluid ounces = 1 point; 8 pints + 1 gallon. (apothecaries fluid measures)

8. Gout strikes the male population nineteen times for every one time it attacks females.

Miscellania

1. Etruscans invented false teeth around 700 BC.

2. Surface water, such as rivers, streams, lakes, and reservoirs, supplies 71 percent of the nation's water use, 2/3 of which returns to the ocean.

3. Neutrinos are ghostlike particles that have no mass or electrical charge and can hurtle with ease through the entire earth.

4. "Science will stagnate if it is made to serve practical goals." (Einstein)

5. Pioneer 10 became the first spacecraft to travel outside the orbit of known planets, on June 13, 1983.

6. Cut by the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon is 227 miles long and nine miles wide in places.

7. According to Indian legend, the leave in fall turn red because heavenly hunters killed a celestial bear and his blood is dripping on the trees.

8. 15 percent of the population is painfully shy.

9. Massa, a lowland gorilla, died at the age of 54 in the Phialdelphia Zoo in 1985.

10. Prostrate cancener can be treated with surgery, hormone treatment, radiation, or anti-cancer drugs.

Miscellania

1. A mildly cold temperature of 65 degrees F can trigger accidental hypothermia.

2. There are no houseflies in the state of Alaska.

3. The chemical structure of most nerve gases is related to that of methylphosphonic acid.

4. According to Lewis Thomas' The Lives of a Cell, "there are 25 million assorted insects hanging in the air over every temperate square mile, in a column extending upwards for thousands of feet, drifting through the layers of the atmosphere like plankton."

5. Arthur C. Clarke: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

6. There are more than 1,000 rings around Saturn.

7. Saphenous veins taken from the patient's legs are used to detour blood around blocked heart veins.

8. Recombinant DNA ("genetic engineering") is a process that splices genes from one organism into genes of another, producing new forms of life.

9. Immanuel Velikovsky in his book Worlds in Collision blamed a near miss of a comet for such biblical events as the parting of the Red Sea and the plagues of Egypt, and said that the comet settled into an orbit that is now known as the planet Venus.

10. Ultraviolet radiation damage ranges from wrinkles and liver spots to precancerous dark patches known as actinic keratosis and, finally, basal-cell carcinoma and malignant melanoma.

Carl Sagan

"There is (today in the West) . . . a resurgent interest in vague, anecdotal and often demonstrably erroneous doctrines that, if true, would betoken at least a more interesting universe, but that, if false, imply an intellectual carelessness, an absence of toughmindedness, and a diversion of energies not very promising for our survival.

"(such as)...astrology, the Bermuda Triangle "mystery", flying saucer accounts, pyramidology, Scientology, Kirlian photography, psychic surgery, flat and hollow earths, prophacy, astral projection, Velikovskian catasrophism, Atlantis and Mu, spiritualism ..."

"It may be that there are kernals of truth in a few of these doctrines, but their widespread acceptance betokens a lack of intellectual rigor, a need to replace experiments by desires. . . . They are mystical and occult doctrines, devised in such a way that they are not subject to disproof and characteristically impervious to rational discussion."

The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (1977)

Miscellenia

1. Dogs are more prone to nervous breakdowns than any other non-human animal.

2. Gustave Le Bob: "Science has promised us truth. It has never promised us peace or happiness."

3. Eggs contain lecithin to emulsify cholesterol and can't do you any harm.

4. The length of Pluto's year is 248 earth-years.

5. A chick hatches in 21 days.

6. An ancient Celtic rhyme puts the age of animals thusly: Thrice the age of a dog is a horse. Thrice the age of a horse is a man. Thrice the age of a man is a deer. Thrice the age of a deer is that of an eagle.

7. The wildcat is a fastidious feline. Sme won't eat meat that they did not kill themselves.

8. Falling stars are said by Mahometans to eb firebrands flung by good angels against evil spirits when they approach too near the gates of heaven.

9. Oceans and inland seas contain 97.2 percent of earth's water.

10. Scientific hypothesis gain confidence not by finding proof but by repeatendly escaping disproof in fair tests.

Miscellania

1. The Linnaean System: King Peter Came Over From Germany Seeking Fortune. (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, form).

2. Mosquitoes prefer blondes.

3. There are 332 dimples on the cover of a golf ball.

4. The average temperature in June in Phoneix is 101 and 64 in San Francisco.

5. 23 percent of all US households own at least one cat.

6. Anglican Archibishop Ussher said Creation began at 9 am, October 23, 4004 BC. The actual age, according to some scientists, is 12-13 billion years.

7. Museums use the Dermestes masculatus beetles to clean animal specimens.

8. Ounce for ouce, raw red peppers have four times more vitamin C than peeled oranges.

9. Water is 855 times dense than air.

10. Butterflies have the broadest known visual spectrum of any ceature on earth.