Day 175
Played a fun game of poker last night. 10 dollars was the buy in, 11pm was the start time, and a 40 of vodka was the drink of choice for Colin, Jordan and I.
The first act of the game ended with myself up significantly, Colin down significantly, and Jordan breaking roughly even. Conversation was good, spirits were high, and times were fun.
The second act changed things. My luck turned, and a string of bad hands and decisions put me back to even, then down. Colin made a slight comeback, and Jordan pulled into the lead. The agreed-upon end time of 1am flew by, ignored by all.
The conversation, as per usual, turned to philosophy: this time we ended up on faith, debating with an increasingly adversarial tone as to how much of our belief systems fall into such a category, and whether the distinction between faith and reason is absolute, or a simple matter of probabilistic degree. Jordan wanted to push the position that faith is always to a certain degree a part of our belief systems, regardless of how hard, factual, and supposedly reasonable they may be. All empiricism is in the end based around inductive likelyhoods, and since therefore any outcome (up to and including the statue of liberty dancing the jig) is on the bell curve somewhere, out beliefs are always to at least some small degree a matter of faith. The pragmatic outcome of this argument (always a hit) is thus: we clearly don't calculate the odds of how things will turn out in every action we make; what we do is operate under sets of big assumptions which in turn are typically based on probabilities and highly generalized risk assessments. We are in effect living highly faithful lives.
I was of the another mind. In a sense the disagreement was semantic, but I had a big problem with the injection of "faith" into every belief the likelihood of whose correctness is anything other than 100%. Let's take for granted that physical laws are based on high likelyhoods (the reason the statue of liberty doesn't dance the jig is because trillions of molecules would have to shift the same ways at identical times, which while possible is so unlikely that even a universe full of statues of liberty for billions of years would almost surely never even see one budge a millimeter on its own volition). Some unlikelyhoods are so unlikely that I don't think the word faith enters into the equation. As well, nor do I believe that the things we call first principles are matters of faith: Leibniz' Principle of Sufficient Reason for example. While it is a first principle, and therefore by its nature unprovable (as it is the thing upon which proofs are build), it is not a matter of faith because it is in my mind a necessary belief.
I almost want to say that necessity is a third category aside from reason and faith. A belief by necessity is neither reasonable nor faithful.
So to sum I wanted to say that if my belief is highly likely, to the point where not only can I convince other people it is true purely on merit (and not on personal appeals of any sort), and I can synchronize it reliably with other truths and use it to predict future events, it is a belief founded in reason and not in faith (at least not meaningfully).
So the debate heated up, and cooled back down as Colin attempted to convince us we were arguing over nothing. I suspect Colin feels this way whenever Jordan and I get esoterically deep into philosophy, and hell he may be right.
What enraged me was that during this whole debate Jordan managed to find himself on a lucky streak that was, to say the least, uncanny. He had winning hand after winning hand, straits here, flushes there, double pairs here and high pairs there. For the last 25 hands of the game he must have had the high hand in 20 of them, which is infuriatingly unlikely for any player. It was to the point where I couldn't even bluff, because his hands were consistently strong enough to call any bluff. It was to the point where Jordan himself lost his sense of victory and began to feel guilty for taking our money over and over and over again by sheer luck.
Weather the storm, when things get stormy. I tried my best to bet conservatively, and threw in a 10% bet on the final hand on order to break even. I had a mid pair, and jordan a low pair. I thought I had broken even (Colin was down about half, jordan up about half), and as I pulled my chips over and began to count, Jordan suddenly realized his hand was in fact a(nother) flush.
"Oh it's a flush. Oops!"
I nearly lost my wits. My argumentitive position on reason and faith was being tested not on a philosophical level, but on an emotional level. I had to use every drunken ounce of dignity left to prevent myself from screaming aloud how unfair it all was.
So we called it at 3am. As we finished and got up from the game, tensions melted and the realization only a few dollars had passed hands sank in. The night ended well.
The first act of the game ended with myself up significantly, Colin down significantly, and Jordan breaking roughly even. Conversation was good, spirits were high, and times were fun.
The second act changed things. My luck turned, and a string of bad hands and decisions put me back to even, then down. Colin made a slight comeback, and Jordan pulled into the lead. The agreed-upon end time of 1am flew by, ignored by all.
The conversation, as per usual, turned to philosophy: this time we ended up on faith, debating with an increasingly adversarial tone as to how much of our belief systems fall into such a category, and whether the distinction between faith and reason is absolute, or a simple matter of probabilistic degree. Jordan wanted to push the position that faith is always to a certain degree a part of our belief systems, regardless of how hard, factual, and supposedly reasonable they may be. All empiricism is in the end based around inductive likelyhoods, and since therefore any outcome (up to and including the statue of liberty dancing the jig) is on the bell curve somewhere, out beliefs are always to at least some small degree a matter of faith. The pragmatic outcome of this argument (always a hit) is thus: we clearly don't calculate the odds of how things will turn out in every action we make; what we do is operate under sets of big assumptions which in turn are typically based on probabilities and highly generalized risk assessments. We are in effect living highly faithful lives.
I was of the another mind. In a sense the disagreement was semantic, but I had a big problem with the injection of "faith" into every belief the likelihood of whose correctness is anything other than 100%. Let's take for granted that physical laws are based on high likelyhoods (the reason the statue of liberty doesn't dance the jig is because trillions of molecules would have to shift the same ways at identical times, which while possible is so unlikely that even a universe full of statues of liberty for billions of years would almost surely never even see one budge a millimeter on its own volition). Some unlikelyhoods are so unlikely that I don't think the word faith enters into the equation. As well, nor do I believe that the things we call first principles are matters of faith: Leibniz' Principle of Sufficient Reason for example. While it is a first principle, and therefore by its nature unprovable (as it is the thing upon which proofs are build), it is not a matter of faith because it is in my mind a necessary belief.
I almost want to say that necessity is a third category aside from reason and faith. A belief by necessity is neither reasonable nor faithful.
So to sum I wanted to say that if my belief is highly likely, to the point where not only can I convince other people it is true purely on merit (and not on personal appeals of any sort), and I can synchronize it reliably with other truths and use it to predict future events, it is a belief founded in reason and not in faith (at least not meaningfully).
So the debate heated up, and cooled back down as Colin attempted to convince us we were arguing over nothing. I suspect Colin feels this way whenever Jordan and I get esoterically deep into philosophy, and hell he may be right.
What enraged me was that during this whole debate Jordan managed to find himself on a lucky streak that was, to say the least, uncanny. He had winning hand after winning hand, straits here, flushes there, double pairs here and high pairs there. For the last 25 hands of the game he must have had the high hand in 20 of them, which is infuriatingly unlikely for any player. It was to the point where I couldn't even bluff, because his hands were consistently strong enough to call any bluff. It was to the point where Jordan himself lost his sense of victory and began to feel guilty for taking our money over and over and over again by sheer luck.
Weather the storm, when things get stormy. I tried my best to bet conservatively, and threw in a 10% bet on the final hand on order to break even. I had a mid pair, and jordan a low pair. I thought I had broken even (Colin was down about half, jordan up about half), and as I pulled my chips over and began to count, Jordan suddenly realized his hand was in fact a(nother) flush.
"Oh it's a flush. Oops!"
I nearly lost my wits. My argumentitive position on reason and faith was being tested not on a philosophical level, but on an emotional level. I had to use every drunken ounce of dignity left to prevent myself from screaming aloud how unfair it all was.
So we called it at 3am. As we finished and got up from the game, tensions melted and the realization only a few dollars had passed hands sank in. The night ended well.
Comments
Your position on the nature of probability and its role in human judgment etc. is eloquently advanced, and I have nothing to criticize about it. Unfortunately, I think something was lost in translation the other night; the point I'd wanted (and was initially trying) to make about the nature of faith and human behaviour is not actually the one you thought I was making (i.e. the one you depict me making in this blog entry).
I should not have turned the discussion from the nature of probability to the nature of faith in the same breath, because that obviously led to a certain amount of confusion. We were riffing on the bizarre nature of probability and you brought up the statue example. Then I changed the subject, mentioning that the reason people are sometimes disturbed by expressions of faith (which are not their own), is that these expressions seem to fly in the face of reasonable probabilistic assessment. This is something which I expected you to find uncontroversial, but I think you may have taken the wrong way. I followed up by asserting that, in our society, the actions of most people express a great deal of faith on regular basis. But you took me to be saying that their actions are otherwise unreasonable or that I was “injecting” a “degree” of faith proportional to the theoretical uncertainty of any strictly probabilistic proposition— which is not what I meant at all!
Sometimes you think ahead far too quickly, imputing ideas to me and prying words from my mouth before I have a chance to catch up. It makes me feel like a lab rat in a maze, even though that probably wasn’t your intention. When you propose to tell me where I am going, argumentatively speaking, I suddenly feel at a total loss, because I haven’t been given the dignity of getting there myself, and don’t have the slightest intention of ending up in the place you think I’m supposed to. I find it hard not to get exasperated, especially when I feel like you are so hell-bent on debating someone to the ‘finish line’, that you don’t notice when your interlocutor is running in a different direction! So, I do apologize for my tired outbursts, but I hope that makes some sense of my feelings of impatience and expressions of mutinous intellectual contempt. :-P
I felt the chief misunderstanding was your assumption of my use of the word faith, especially when you put it into the kind of analytical context that I was purposely trying to avoid. The argument imputed to me on your blog contains a bizarre use of the word: at best eccentric, at worst totally inaccurate. Faith is an irreducible human capacity, a conscious expression of individual choice, and a motivation for human action, which operates independently of any probability you assign to some predictable event, no matter how high or low. Faith is not limited by any empirical laws, probabilistic or otherwise; its only limit is the reach of the human imagination (no matter how beautiful, deranged, or productive its creations). Faith is not defined negatively, as arbitrary belief in something or other in the absence of any reasons, although it can often appear to function this way. Faith is not a matter of quantifiable degree. The literal, commonplace meaning of faith is loyalty, trust, or devotion – a type of relationship to a person or persons, to an ideal, or to a set of beliefs. Faith is about the ends, rather than the means. This is the common dictionary definition, as well as its popular and literary use.
Think about the faith required for two people to marry and seriously pledge their vows when the divorce rate is fifty percent. They don’t say: “Well, I guess I’ll only invest half of my emotions in my wife/husband.”
Or think of the whistleblower who risks their career and the potential well-being of their family for the sake of justice, especially in the face of overwhelming odds.
Or the momentous decision to have a baby. Sure, there may be a million practical considerations and incentives, but the key word is still faith – in one’s spouse, in one’s own ability and/or duty to raise a child, in the society that will become the child’s cultural environment, and eventually, in the independent actions of the maturing child himself or herself.
Or the explorers who left Europe to seek uncharted coasts and passages, many of whom never returned. Or everyone involved in pioneering space flights. Just because they did everything they could in preparation doesn’t mean they didn’t require a great deal of faith.
To a lesser degree then, certain kinds of faith are implicit when we get behind the wheel of a car: we trust that parents in our neighborhood will teach their kids to look both ways before crossing the street; the repairmen, who just serviced our brakes; other drivers, to heed the rules of the road, the speed limits, and not to drink and drive. Despite doing everything we can think to avoid accidents or causing harm, so much depends on forces beyond our own control.
Or imagine someone that is extremely sick, tired, or under the influence of a strong drug: one can lose faith in the reliability of one’s own senses. Instead, one might put complete faith in the guidance of others, in judging how we should respond to certain experiences. Also, some people who have taken hallucinogens put their faith in the intellectual and spiritual value of the experience (if not the physical), that other people who have never tried drugs advise them to disregard. This is a matter of faith, not right or wrong. On the other hand, we can surely say the cumulative effects of the drugs on their overall health are a matter of fact, not faith.
Barrack Obama’s slogan is “Change we can believe in”. His campaign is practically running on the promise of renewed faith and involvement— in a political system that some people think is so corrupt that nothing good can be expected of it anymore.
I’ve gone on much longer than I needed to. Again, I’m not saying that reason is absent when events are less then 100% certain—hell! The expected measure of uncertainty in many scenarios is itself the result of the recent development of our physical theories— among the best examples of human reason you could possibly drum up! What I am saying is that faith is a necessary and integral part of the human condition, irrespective our successful application of the laws of probability to isolated events. There is no element of choice in empirical lawmaking; with faith there is always a choice, and our opportunities for applying our faith manifest themselves on a personal level, rather than an objective one. I tend to find it either mischievous or ignorant when people deny this.
It is reasonable (though difficult) to compare different cultures and point out, generally and specifically, where and how the majority of individuals in that society express their faith, and, importantly, what that means for the quality of the society in which they live. Your recent post about the credit card companies is a case in point. My 101 Economics teacher would put it in terms of diminishing “social capital”, with card companies and their drone-like minions increasing the risk that we abandon our faith in the genuine (i.e. non-exploitative) interest of strangers, to the chagrin of society at large.
A final word on reason. Reason is constrained by independent reality, and speaks to predictable states of affairs: that’s the way it should be. Also, reason is not some metaphysical substance, but a fluctuating normative consensus: a matter of pragmatic justifications for our thoughts and actions, whether empirical, logical, instinctual or otherwise. Like you said, it is a matter of appeal to justifications with “merit.” However, we are always in the process of determining what constitutes merit: it is not something that is set for all time, but something that needs to be continually discovered, refined, and confirmed (or disconfirmed) by any means available. According to biology, we evolved as organisms, from things that existed simply to survive and reproduce. The association of the mind with collecting ‘true reasons’ came way later— but it does seem to be working! I don’t think I’m going out on a limb, or being all that paradoxical, when I say that our commitment to our culture’s stories about the power of our own minds, to conceive and spell out the objective truths of the universe, is also a profound expression of faith. But it is certainly a faith that is worth cultivating, as long as we remember that what we think we know may be spectacularly insignificant compared with the nature of the universe in all its glorious, unimaginable fruitiness!