Morality, Religion & Philosophy: December 2006 Archives
I always want to understand everything, but sometimes, when looking backwards, trying to figure out "why" is impossible and overrated. The "20/20" of hindsight is often little more than after-the-fact rationalization.
Research psychologists have known for decades that it is very difficult to determine causation in mental life and thus, of behavior. For one thing, we can never perform an experiment. Take my patient Karen, 50, who spent most of the 1990s smoking crack. She is certain that the decade-long binge would never have happened had her mother not died when she was 12. We will never know if she is right because we cannot rewind Karen’s life, play it again, and see what would have happened if her mother had lived.Reconstructing the story of one’s life is a complicated business for other reasons. What scientists call hindsight bias kicks in when we try to figure out the causal chain of events leading to the current situation. We may well come up with a tidy story but, inevitably, it will contain large swaths of revisionist history. It’s not that we bias ourselves deliberately; it happens because the mind tends to make events in the past appear comprehensible and orderly. We forget the uncertainties that might have beset us as we struggled in real time.
Sometimes we can understand ourselves by looking into the past, but getting caught up in it is a fool's errand.
It is time to retire the myth that insight is a prerequisite for change. For the patients in our clinic, change without hard-won insight is the rule. And who has time to wait? Not Natalie. This past month she and I worked on getting an abusive, shiftless boyfriend out of her apartment; finding tutoring for her son; and building a new social network to replace the drug users that she used to hang out with.At this stage in her treatment, awareness of what she needs to do will get Natalie further than insight. Less chaos in her life means less anxiety and that means less risk of relapse.
Down the road she may ask, “Why did I use drugs?” But in the meantime, what’s important for Natalie and her son is that she is determined to stop.
Oftentimes the quest for "insight" is just a way to procrastinate making the changes we know we need.
(HT: My brother.)
One of my favorite celebrities, The Don, has fired Miss USA for conduct unbecoming.
Hard-partying Miss USA Tara Conner was booted out of her ritzy Trump Place apartment and fled the Big Apple to her tiny Kentucky hometown with her reputation in shambles, as reports swirled yesterday that her runner-up had already been tapped to replace her."She does not live here anymore," said a doorman at the posh Upper West Side property, where the Miss USA winner is given an apartment every year. "She is not allowed any where on Trump property. She is certainly not allowed to come back. I don't think it was her choice, really."
Great! The only sad thing is that we don't hold our elected leaders to the same standards as our beauty queens.
During the course of a discussion about whether or not God exists (my response here), Bernardo made an off-hand remark that stuck with me (bolding mine).
I prefer to live in a world where everything is following the same laws all the time, rather than in a world where everything is being guided by an unseen hand that I can't predict or understand. And, throughout history, phenomena that were initially attributed to an inexplicable unseen hand were eventually understood as the sum of forces that act the same way every time (or as a relatively predictable function of some observable initial conditions). I'm not saying the world is deterministic - quantum physics throws that out the window. I'm saying the world is probably understandable.
I don't see any reason to believe that the world/universe is understandable to us, whether or not God is pulling the strings. Even if everything is perfectly rational, does that mean mankind can understand it? A don't think anyone would argue that a dog could "understand" the universe. Humans are certainly smarter than dogs, but are we so smart that everything in the universe will be comprehensible to us?
Is there some "intelligence threshold" beyond which a being is capable of understanding everything that exists, given enough time and data? If there is such a threshold, where is it? Are all humans above it, or only the smartest? Wouldn't it be rather strange for the threshold to randomly fall within the range of normal human intelligence, with some of us above and some below?
Based on some of the stupid people I've known, I think it's fair to say that there are definitely some humans who could not understand everything in the universe under any circumstances. I also know for sure that there are some things that no human yet understands. So, either the threshold is beyond some humans, or it is beyond all humans. I see no evidence to suggest the only former, and the trends tend to prefer the latter. It strikes me as both vain and irrational to believe that oneself is above the threshold and therefore capable of understanding everything.
I'm going to respond to Randy and Bernardo's discussion about God in two parts. First, in this post I'm going to largely agree with Bernardo despite coming to the opposite conclusion. In the next post I'll veer off on a tangent and ponder whether or not there is an "intelligence threshold".
So Randy and Bernardo are discussing whether or not it makes sense to believe in God, and Randy argues that there are a lot of things in the world with no other reasonable explanation. Bernardo points out that science has come up with explanations for lots of things that used to be mysterious but aren't anymore. Fine and good; I don't see much point in listing things that are hard to explain, because I think everyone will grant that there are a myriad. Bernardo's position can be summarized by one of his final paragraphs in a long series of comments:
I work pretty hard to understand where my beliefs and preferences come from, what depends on what, rather than taking the whole thing as "true" or "the only reasonable way of looking at it". It's kinda like geometry: I want to try to see how my beliefs are the result of some "axioms", and this allows me to see that if someone starts out with different axioms, they end up with different beliefs by similarly reasonable thinking. We can then compare the validity of the axioms we started out with, if you insist, but that gets real tricky, and in the end it does seem to me that those axioms are fairly arbitrary and a result of personal preference. Either you want to live in a world that has a God or you don't, and depending on that choice, you build a world-view that interprets your observations in one way or the other.
Basically I agree, and I've written a lot about the importance of faith to Christians, atheists, and everyone else. Here are a few of the posts:
- What is "real faith"?
- Can it be proven that God exists?
- Comments on essays by the inestimable Steven Den Beste (an atheist) who explains why atheism requires faith and more.
Everyone with any intellectual curiousity should go read Den Deste's essays on belief in atheism and his response to theists.
So, to summarize my position as I've done many times in the past, coming to God requires faith, and faith is antithetical to proof. Belief that is compelled by force of reason or argument is not faith. Reason and argument can certainly lead an atheist towards faith, but like a horse to water, mere persuasion cannot make him drink.
(As a side note, I find it ironic that atheism ends up losing, even under its own rules. Show me a thriving society full of atheists: there are none. Show me a just, moral, happy, peaceful civilization built on atheism: again, there are none. Show me a country dominated by secularism that even has replacement rate fertility: none. Atheism, right or wrong, is doomed to obscurity by cultural natural selection. What advantage does the atheist have, even if they are right, other than a smug sense of self-satisfaction?)
I'm going through a period of my life in which I am closely examining why I am the way I am, and why I do the things I do. Difficult questions to answer... perhaps impossible.
I have found some interesting tools to help me think about my motivations, and one of the best is Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Though I certainly do not subscribe to the model as gospel, it is definitely a useful lens for focusing my thoughts.
I believe that many of my flaws stem from two sources: misidentifying one need as another; and failing to recognize when one need is sufficiently satisfied and that I should devote more attention to another.
