Last night, my father-in-law and I were discussing the notion of truth, and in particular, how the anti-Vax movement exists and why is the truth is so malleable.
And what I observed, and thought may be worth sharing, is that the human-made world is as magical as the natural world. And that has profound implications for us as human beings.
What do I mean by magical?
If we consider something like math, there are fundamental axioms that allow us to create or discover theorems. Those axioms make it possible to understand the world more deeply. Those axioms are not provable.
As mathematics is layered, a typical mathematical proof will have some reference to some theorem that has been proven elsewhere, that the paper hinges on.
And mathematicians assume that a theorem is correct. It is right because it both can be used to derive more math, and because it has resisted the assault on its correctness from other mathematicians.
Every so often, however, a theorem is proven to be wrong, or unproven. When that happens, a whole sub-branch of mathematics that depended on that theorem dissolves into nothingness.
In short, mathematicians rely on the assumption that the other parts of mathematics are correct.
They believe the theorems are correct, without necessarily understanding the entire depth of their correctness. Mathematicians also simultaneously understand that at some fundamental level, their truth depends on unprovable but useful axioms.
And that faith is magical thinking. We believe that the system works; therefore, it works, while realizing it may not.
And is this fundamentally different from the Ancient Greek perspective on Helios? After all, they believed that a titan dragged the Sun was dragged across the sky. And that explanation, although absurd, had sufficient predictive power that the farmers of the time could make other inferences and assumptions. And it was a perfectly workable model of the Sun. Absurd, but workable.
In short, the mathematicians’ faith in a theorem is the same faith of the Ancient Greek farmer in a titan who drags the Sun across the sky. Both could be proven to be absurdly incorrect, and both useful.
My intent is not to suggest that mathematics is not rigorous, but to illustrate how the most stringent of intellectual disciplines is also based somewhat on faith.
But why do I say that the world is magical?
Because, in the past, the human-made world was not magical. A person could understand everything about his house. They could understand how to build it, and they could understand how to make the tools they used, he could understand why some tools worked better than others. The natural world was magical, but the person-made world was rational.
The triumph of modern science is a person-made world that is as magical as the natural world.
The rationalist project to reduce the natural world to the well understood human-made world failed. We know that we don’t know and must make assumptions.
And if it only ended at science, the rest of us could live in a perfectly rational and understood world.
But the engineers created a magical world that defies understanding. Consider the micro-processor. It represents several hundred thousand person-years of engineering and science (if not millions). No one can understand every piece of it, because there is not enough time in a human life-time to understand it.
Or consider the reader of this blog, that the set of technologies and science to make reading this blog possible, make the Apollo project look like a ten-person startup.
So engineers must rely on faith. Things work, so we continue to use them. And we build stuff on top of them.
But unfortunately, this faith has destroyed the truth. Since no one can understand the human-made world, based on a natural world we don’t understand, then everything is based on faith.
And if we base everything on faith, then everything is magical. We believe things to be true, because they work and because no one has disproved them or because they are useful. And if some truths are useful, then others are also useful. And if all truths are contingent and based on assumptions, then …
Why then it becomes a natural slippery slope to anti-Vaxers. Their truth is just as valid as anyone else’s in their minds; they have a different faith. They have a particular faith that science is wrong. They have a particular belief that big-pharma is evil. They have a particular faith that they have been lied to.
Because it turns out that everything about our world is magical. Everything we touch works because we believe other parts work, and as long as all of our assumptions hold, things hold. But, deep down, we all know that these assumptions are fragile things, like the mathematician and their axioms. And we know that something we don’t understand could up-end them, like the Ancient Greek farmer and his belief in Helios.
