Sunday, September 10, 2017

Suspension of judgement (philosophical rant)

Two cartoons in short succession! Aren't you guys lucky? You're in for a real treat today! Today I'm going to mindlessly rant about suspension of judgement.

Every claim you believe to be true (eg I'm 27 years old, gravity is 9.81 m/s^2, the earth is round etc etc) requires evidence or rational proof to be true. This is clearly true for scientific things like proving a^2 + b^2 = c^2. But I think it's also true for "subjective" things like 'my family loves me'. Why? Well, the only way to try and pluck something true from a mysterious universe is to make hypotheses about the world (eg water evaporates) and experiment with the universe as much as possible (eg testing hundreds of buckets of water in different environments). Statistically speaking, the larger the sample size, the more confident we can be that our hypothesis is true. Mathematical statements like x = -b +-sqrt(b^2-4ac)/2a are things that we can be most confident of being true because these are generalized formulas which means they'll work for any number (an infinite sample size!). Sadly though, we can never have absolute certainty that anything is 100% true (even 1+1 = 2) because we could all be in a vat seeing a virtual world that could be fake. This means that to be entirely rational you should suspend judgement on literally everything. That's where practicality comes in; where you should believe things to be true proportional to the likely hood that they're true - but this is a rant for another cartoon.

Anywho, my whole point was to say this. At no point would it be rational to believe anything true on faith. Faith requires belief without evidence, and I think this is the most intellectually damaging approach to truth that there is. If faith was an appropriate way to discover truth then the world should bend according to my imagination - why not have faith that the world is flat? Or that orange juice is made from spider blood?

Even if something is true then it would be rational to suspend judgement until you have enough evidence to believe it.




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