Zen and the Art of /.*/

A character in Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, when told the theory of Pythagoras that the earth is round and revolves around the sun, replies:

“What an utter fool! Couldn’t he use his eyes?”

Flat-earth geocentrism is the quintessential modern epithet applied to an opponent who either can’t or refuses to see past the immediately evident phenomena and grasp the larger truth.

Despite its tired, clichéd status, it is still a great metaphor.

What escapes most people when using or hearing this epithet is that, if you do use your eyes, accurately take in the data readily available to you, and even effectively use your power of reasoning, that the sun goes around a flat earth is laughably obvious.

One could imagine a group of intelligent, modern people highly knowledgeable and skilled at architecture, economics, agriculture, music, law, literature, political science, sociology, chemistry, psychology, and biology having a serious, lively debate about the shape of the earth and its relationship to the sun.

It is only when you introduce geography, cartography, mathematics, astronomy, physics, and history that there ceases to be any reasonable debate among reasonably-educated people–the matter is settled.

Most people, in fact, likely use the epithet in quite the wrong way, conceiving of their opponent as some thick-skulled fool who can’t see the obvious. For most of us, having basic astronomy as part of our elementary school curriculum has ingrained in us the unshakable knowledge that we live on a spherical planet in a heliocentric solar system–to the point that we wouldn’t think twice about harshly ridiculing and discrediting anyone who suggested otherwise.

But how many of us truly understand the real nature of the situation–really know it in our bones? What percentage of those very same people ready to ridicule a flat-earther could accurately describe such simple phenomena as the nature of the seasons, solstices, equinoxes, eclipses, tides, length of days, sun declination, precession, seasonal changes of the stars, the north star, or the “wandering stars”?

It does not take a very vivid imagination to think that, if we stopped teaching our children about our spherical planet orbiting the sun, we would have a population of ardent flat-earthers within a couple generations.

And so it is with so many subjects of human inquiry. On the one hand you have people passionately, eloquently, defending things that are self-evidently true to anyone with half a brain and a pair of eyes.

On the other hand, you have another group of people arguing just as articulately with just as much conviction for something in direct opposition to what every fool can see with his own eyes. The tragedy of it all is that this second, often smaller, group of people are the geographers, cartographers, mathematicians, astronomers, physicists, and historians of our analogy.

So the real problem here is not the disagreement, the false belief, or even the lack of education, but the unscientific mindset. All convictions, regardless of topic, should be held in direct proportion to the amount of evidence for it (and in inverse proportion to the amount of evidence against it). When the geocentrists had their ideas challenged by the heliocentrists, rather than taking offense and re-stating their ideas more vehemently, they should have impersonally, objectively evaluated the evidence of the heliocentrists and kept or discarded their original ideas based on the new evidence and the heliocentrists should have reciprocated by considering the evidence of the geocentrists. Maybe not all of them are immediately converted one way or the other, but we should be very suspicious if, after trading evidence, nobody changes their minds.

This unscientific mindset is all too pervasive throughout the range of human endeavors. While some matters are certainly more falsifiable than others, the mindset and methods with which we approach them should not change much.

I would like to call attention to a few key features of this scientific mindset. This is definitely not a complete list, but rather a few that I often see disregarded:

First, in regards to our analogy, the scientific mind must look beyond the immediately evident phenomena and the most obvious conclusions and seek a thorough understanding that is reconcilable with all other known truths and takes into account all related side-effects and by-products. It must also be able to incorporate new and more sophisticated evidence without difficulty.

Second, predictiveness must be respected. In all cases, but particularly if we are dealing in a field in which experimentation is particularly difficult and we are left with competing theories for a given system or phenomena with little way to thoroughly test them, we must give credence to the theories that are repeatedly most accurately predictive.

Suppose that Thomas posits a theory about a phenomena for which it is impossible to construct a reliable test and John posits an opposing theory about the same phenomena. There is little we can do but wait and see, over time, which predictions, based on these theories, actually come to pass.

Suppose that, as time goes on, the predictions of Thomas begin to come true time after time and the predictions of John consistently miss the mark. The longer this situation persists, it becomes patently ridiculous for John to continue to insist that his theory is correct. The predictive powers are a significant form of evidence for the correctness of Thomas’s theory. Should his predictions cease to come true, perhaps the theory needs to be re-evaluated and improved upon, but given a lack of other forms of evidence, all other things being equal, the most predictive theory should be the generally-accepted theory.

The last feature of the scientific mindset that I would like to call out is that of logical consistency. If Thomas and John’s theories were relatively equal in their predictive accuracy, or not enough time has elapsed to produce a sample set large enough to be conclusive, but John’s theory was self-contradictory, inconsistent with other known truths, was unnecessarily complex, wasn’t sufficiently complete, or relied on a number of contingent factors and Thomas’s theory suffered from none, or far fewer, of these shortcomings, then people who value intellectual honesty would have to regard Thomas’s theory as the generally-accepted theory.

It would be easy to lament the tragic fact that, after all the progress that modern society has made, far too many people consistently fail to understand the obvious, simple truths right in front of their noses, as in fact is often the case.

But the real tragedy is that people understand all-to-well the obvious, simple apparent truths right in front of their noses, but refuse to hear any talk of what real truths lie just beyond.