A Premise We Can’t Do Without

     I subscribe to a service that presents me with some inspirational Catholic reading each morning. It’s a “game starter” that’s served me well. (Among other things, it reminds me to pray.) This morning it led off with a quote that immediately got my gears turning:

     "I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but rather, I believe in order that I may understand." — St. Anselm of Canterbury

     This is more than merely a statement of faith. It goes to the heart of all human reasoning: the unavoidable requirement that we accept certain unprovable propositions as true, simply because without them we can do no reasoning at all.

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     In response to the St. Anselm quote above, the scrap-lumber room of my often annoying but sometimes useful memory has just tossed up two fragments of unusual relevance. The first is from that perennial visitor to this site, the late, great Clive Staples Lewis:

     From propositions about fact alone no practical conclusion can ever be drawn. This will preserve society cannot lead to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be preserved. This will cost you your life cannot lead directly to do not do this: it can lead to it only through a felt desire or an acknowledged duty of self-preservation. The Innovator is trying to get a conclusion in the imperative mood out of premisses in the indicative mood: and though he continues trying to all eternity he cannot succeed, for the thing is impossible. We must therefore either extend the word Reason to include what our ancestors called Practical Reason and confess that judgements such as society ought to be preserved (though they can support themselves by no reason of the sort that Gaius and Titius demand) are not mere sentiments but are rationality itself; or else we must give up at once, and for ever, the attempt to find a core of 'rational' value behind all the sentiments we have debunked. [From The Abolition of Man]

     Long-time Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch have surely seen this quote before. It goes to the heart of human ratiocination, the process by which our conscious minds approach decision-making. We cannot reason without premises: statements of fact that, while not provable, are not disprovable and have survived attempts to contradict them in observation. Even completely formal systems, derived entirely from the mind of Man, require premises, despite Giovanni Saccheri’s refusal to accept it.

     The second fragment is from the late Dr. Clarence Carson, in discussing the effects on philosophy of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason:

     What Kant took away with one hand—the Pure Reason—he returned with the other—Practical Reason. What we cannot know—that is, God, freedom, immortality, moral imperatives, principles, ideals—must be assumed. To accomplish this intellectual feat, Kant resorted to the traditional distinctions between appearance and reality. The phenomenal world, the world accessible to the senses, the only world that can be known, is only an appearance. The real world is unknown and unknowable, as Kant had earlier demonstrated to his satisfaction. Yet it must exist. No, that is not quite right. We must act as if it existed.

     Kant affirmed the traditional morality, insisted upon the necessity of faith, and proclaimed that man participates in a moral order. Practically, Kant would have it, we do seem to know that there are moral imperatives. There may even be generally accepted beliefs about what many of these are. They can even be "proved" by the Practical Reason, by which Kant means reason operating upon assumptions about what reality must be like in order for appearances to be as we perceive them. Yet this kind of reason operates upon possibilities, not certainties, so far as philosophy is concerned. Kant said as much himself:

     It is just the same as if I sought to find out how freedom itself as causality of a will is possible; for, in so doing, I would leave the philosophical basis of explanation behind, and I have no other. Certainly I could revel in the intelligible world, the world of intelligences, which still remains to me; but although I have a well founded idea of it, still I do not have the least knowledge of it, nor can I ever attain to it by all the exertions of my natural capacity of reasons.

     This stolid German, this resolute metaphysician, this determined moralist, had left the house of philosophy in ruins: of this there should be no doubt. Let us review the "achievement." Kant had changed the meaning of "objective" from something which exists outside the mind to make it refer to a property of mind itself; he had brought it into the interior world of consciousness. He had taught that mind can only know phenomena. Reason can only deal with reason. Then he declares that phenomena is only appearance, that reality is unknown and unknowable.

     [From The Flight from Reality]

     In other words, Kant refused to treat the indispensable premise of the Christian Enlightenment – that the universe is inherently lawful, that its laws impose a moral order on us, and that this order is independent of human conceptions and norms — as sufficiently demonstrated and without counterexamples to be treated as a fact. He is unwilling to concede it the status of a fact, but mealy-mouths around the matter by claiming that “we must act as if it existed.”

     “Must act.” Must! Kant says so in letters of fire. But then C. S. Lewis, that inexorable debunker of intellectual pretense and twaddle, arises to ask the most fateful of all questions:

Why?

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     “Logic is an organized way of going wrong with confidence.” – Charles F. Kettering

     Paranoid: A logician with a fractured premise. – Arthur Herzog

     Althea: How do my accomplishments, as you put it a moment ago, bear on this realm?
     Probe: You are Hope’s first metaphysicist, Althea. You alone have thought to alter the properties of space itself. It is how you constructed your superluminal vessel.
     Althea: Then to alter the permittivity of the vacuum is an act of meta-engineering?
     Probe: Yes. It requires an assumption realist physicists would dismiss out of hand. Their assumptions are wholly incompatible with it.
     Althea: What are those assumptions?
Probe: They pertain to the undefined term existence. If asked “does space exist?” the realist physicist would decline to give a definite answer. Space, he would say, is nothing: the absence of anything real. Therefore, the concept of existence does not apply to it. You, by contrast, have treated space as having existential properties. You have treated nothing as being something, and so have succeeded in making changes to it.
     Althea: Which of us is nearer to the truth?
     Probe: Surely that question answers itself.

     [From Freedom’s Fury]

     Kant’s obfuscation of reality as an objective matter was accepted by a number of later thinkers, including a few for whom I have some regard. Nevertheless his notion that reality is a matter of belief rather than fact is fundamentally unsound as a matter of metaphysics itself. Metaphysics is the study of what is prior and superior to our reasoning processes. If nothing is prior and superior to ratiocination per natura, then there can be no objection to solipsism and all the madness that follows in its train.

     In other words, we need to accept reality as an objective fact, prior and superior to our opinions and evaluations, to construct any sound notions about what to do in it and with it.

     The moral order inherent in the laws of this universe is completely consistent with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God and the Redeemer of Mankind. (You knew I’d get here eventually, didn’t you? I mean, I did lead off with a quote from a saint.) Thus, our indispensable premise of an objective reality that’s “indifferent to what you believe or disbelieve” (John Varley) is identical to Christ’s teachings. While one may choose to remain unconvinced by the evidence for His miracles, Passion, and Resurrection, one cannot rationally object to His prescriptions:

     And behold one came and said to him: Good master, what good shall I do that I may have life everlasting? Who said to him: Why asketh thou me concerning good? One is good, God. But if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.
     He said to him: Which? And Jesus said: Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness. Honour thy father and thy mother: and, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. [Matthew 19:16-19]

     ...without denying reality itself.

     In this Saint Anselm was a forerunner to C. S. Lewis:

     “I believe in Christianity as I believe in the sun: not only because I see it, but because by its light I see everything else.”

     With this premise as its foundation was all of Western Civilization erected...and if deprived of this its foundation, all of Western Civilization will fall.

     Have a nice day.

Planning, Systems, And Epiphenomena

     There’s a pervasive myth abroad that various human activities can be planned out a priori, and that the activity can somehow be compelled to follow the plan without deviation. Many persons in the engineering fields are aware of this myth by virtue of having had it imposed upon them from above, typically in response to a nightmare such as the ISO-9000 system.

     It’s a sham and a delusion. The reason for its illusory character is simple. Let it be known henceforward as The Curmudgeon’s Pessimistic Axiom:

No one knows what he’s going to do
Before he actually does it.

     There are a few exceptions, but they all relate to the simplest of simplicities, such as arising from slumber and going to the toilet. Nearly fifty years in software engineering has convinced me of this. Would anyone care to argue the point?

     But I’m not here to talk about engineering. Not really.

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     This morning’s stimulus was provided by Mark “Mad Dog” Sherman:

     Is Income Inequality Fair?

     The point of income inequality is to give those learning to be productive an incentive and a goal. The progressive left wants to destroy these incentives because in the end some, but not all, end wealthy. At least this is the argument used. I doubt this is the underlying reason at all. I am more inclined to believe progressives want to control others and want a reason to confiscate wealth, and income for their own uses.

     Mark’s contention about the Left is, of course, absolutely correct. What piqued me was the suggestion that income inequality, which appears to be a feature of every economic scheme, has a “point:” i.e., a preconceived purpose that partially animated the “design” of the economic system.. Granted that, as Mark states, in a largely free economy such as ours, income inequality provides a spur to learning and the acquisition of valued skills. However, even in a system planned out as rigidly as the most absolute totalitarianism would permit, income inequality would arise. It always has. There’s no reason to imagine that that will change.

     Whether or not the planners plan for it, there will be income inequality. But why?

     The key word is epiphenomenon.

     An epiphenomenon of a system is a characteristic that arises unplanned from that system. It is a consequence of lower-level characteristics of the system…sometimes, of fundamental properties built into the laws of nature. There are sometimes means by which an epiphenomenon of a human-designed system can be altered, but in the usual case, it involves altering designed-in fundamentals of the system. That will always have other consequences, not all of them desirable or benign.

     Every system of any kind will possess epiphenomena. This flows from the Pessimistic Axiom, but equally from another important law of nature:

No action is without side effects. – Barry Commoner

     Alternately:

You can never do only one thing – Marc Stiegler

     All causal reasoning must take this aspect of temporal reality into account.

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     The point of this tirade is not to discourage people and corporations against planning their activities. Planning is yet another inevitability. However, the point of planning should not be to create a rigid blueprint for the action that follows. Rather, a plan should be viewed as a guide to optimal results under optimal circumstances…which we already know will not exist. The most important function of a plan is to stimulate learning and adjustment: the constructive acceptance of our fallibility and the recognition of necessary changes as we encounter them.

     Quite a long time ago, I had an intricate exchange with the C.S.O. about metaphysical fundamentals. The details, though fascinating, aren’t really relevant here. What was most memorable was when she summed up my argument in a single brief sentence:

“So it’s ‘God did it’ or ‘shit happens,’ is that what you’re saying?”

     And that is exactly correct, albeit with a small edit: replace the conjunction or with and.

     Yes, God did it. But shit does happen. Quite a lot of it, actually. People and things change in unpredictable and therefore unpredicted ways. We must cope. Sometimes we fail to do so adequately. One way or another, the consequences will include epiphenomena we did not plan for and might have hoped to avoid.

     Hearken to Theodore Sturgeon, from his magnificent novelette “Slow Sculpture:”

     Only the companion of a bonsai (there are owners of bonsai, but they are a lesser breed) fully understands the relationship. There is an exclusive and individual treeness to the tree because it is a living thing, and living things change, and there are definite ways in which the tree desires to change. A man sees the tree and in his mind makes certain extensions and extrapolations of what he sees, and sets about making them happen. The tree in turn will do only what a tree can do, will resist to the death any attempt to do what it cannot do, or to do it in less time than it needs.. the shaping of a bonsai is therefore always a compromise and always a cooperation. A man cannot create bonsai, nor can a tree; it takes both, and they must understand each other. It takes a long time to do that. One memorizes one’s bonsai, every twig, the angle of every crevice and needle, and, lying awake at night or in a pause a thousand miles away, one recalls this or that line or mass, one makes one’s plans. With wire and water and light, with tilting and the planting of water-robbing weeds or heavy root-shading ground cover, one explains to the tree what one wants, and if the explanation is well-enough made, and there is great enough understanding, the tree will respond and obey—almost. Always there will be its own self-respecting, highly individual variation: Very well, I shall do what you want, but I will do it my own way. And for these variations, the tree is always willing to present a clear and logical explanation, and more often than not (almost smiling) it will make clear to the man that he could have avoided it if his understanding had been better.
     It is the slowest sculpture in the world, and there is, at times, doubt as to which is being sculpted, man or tree.

     Systems, especially those that include living actors, are like that: difficult to plan and filled with epiphenomena, some of which will always run counter to the preferences of the planners. For we don’t know what we’re going to do until we’ve actually done it.

     Time to go furniture shopping. Enjoy your Saturday.