Reason

An old joke, which I have not been able to adequately source, says this: "The effective IQ of a committee is the highest individual IQ divided by the number of members." This, of course, goes against memes like the wisdom of crowds or the virtues of democracy. But that is only because it is the flip side of such memes: crowds are also mobs, and democracies can be tyrannies from a majority which might be less qualified to make decisions.

I have been in meetings at which reasonable, intelligent and articulate members have cobbled together compromises which are untenable and inadequate; at which said members seem to have consumed too many cream-puffs, which seem to have gone to their heads; at which said heads have turned to gossip-churning mush incapable of strategic planning. And thus, anecdotally, the old joke can indeed seem true.

The world has invested itself in faith of a secular kind — money, machines, meritocracy. This is not surprising, since 'secular' means 'worldly'. What is surprising even though it should not be is that this faith relies on a system of the world that could only be held together by perfect knowledge delivered without mediation — literally 'immediate' — but such a system does not exist. We have put our faith in illusion, as a Buddhist might say; the ancient Israelite would say, "He hangeth the world upon nothing."

The system has never worked, but the closest approximation of its perfect working has been to benefit of those possessing the most powerful means of attaining knowledge. Knowledge is indeed power, although its sinews might be illusion and materiel.

But nobody has perfect knowledge, and that is why, as we come asymptotically closer to that point, we teeter ever more precariously at the abyss of the catastrophe. Should we fall into it, it is not singularity we will achieve, but nullity. The sky will unfold, the scroll will unroll.

And that will be an end to reason, or any pretense at reasoning.

Secular Heresy?

The word 'secular' means 'of this age' or 'of this world', from the Latin saecularis. In Atlantis, where the watchful eyes and mighty thunderbolts of the secular priesthood are ubiquitous, it is interesting to see how the population has been mobilised to partake of the responsibilities of that priesthood.

Of late, the voice that has gone out has been one of, "If you want better education, you should take more responsibility; if you want the poor to be fed, feed them yourselves; if you want religious extremism stopped, do your own self-policing or else the wrathful gauntlets of the thunder shall squeeze the neck of free expression."

Well, if we are to be self-policing, let us have public heresy trials. For opinions against science, let us be allowed to haul people up before the justiciars and examined before the experts; for religious opinions, let us be allowed to drag them in for theological sanction. And should any be found excommunicate thereafter, let them not practise their heresies either in labs or in churches, in pulpits or in classrooms. Let them be taxed, banned, or cast out. Why not?

And let no politician be immune. Perhaps in this way, we might actually cull the spirits of stupidity from among us. Or will other, more evilly daft, spirits come in to take those vacated places?

Secular Reason?

By some odd coincidence, I was going to write something about this because in the last few weeks, a lot of guff has been spewed forth about religion, lack of religion, society, religious impact on society, minimising this impact, and so on. Then Stanley Fish wrote this op-ed piece in the NYT.

It's by no means complete, and it has holes of vagueness in a few spots, but it highlights the problems of purely secular reasoning. These can be summarised like this: 1) it's not human to reason ONLY from 'what is known'; 2) 'what is known' is known only by the rules we form from 'what is known' — ahem; 3) if you reason from 'what is known', then how do you determine what to do with 'what is known', since that would mean that 'what is known' determines its own ends?

From this, one possible conclusion is that one should look for stuff that is not based on 'what is known' in order to figure out what we ought to do with 'what is known'. The problem with that is that there are many things which are by definition illogical and nonsensical (that is, they are inconsistent or incoherent with 'what is known'), and we can't know which (if any) of them actually provides the answer to what we ought to do with 'what is known'.

This leads us in the other direction. We have to figure out, if we want to reason secularly, what to do with 'what is known' based only on 'what is known'. Is this useful, or is this just saying that 'secular' is a mispronunciation of 'circular'?

George Holyoake in 1896 defined secularism in terms of 1) improving the present life by material means, 2) science determining the range of benefits available through material means, and 3) doing good for your present life is good, whether or not you can determine other forms of 'good'. Nietzsche defined it in terms of something more empirical — what is strong survives and is therefore better than what does not survive (and is therefore 'weak'). Kant said that the test of a moral assertion or maxim was whether a viable world could be imagined in which everyone behaved according to this — the 'categorical imperative' test.

Later, the idea of utilitarianism (measured numerically, statistically or economically in circles of ever-increasing complexity) was championed by people like Bentham and then J S Mill. This was Kantianism upside-down — you assess if the end is good, not bothering with the principle or practice leading to it. Marx was dead against this, pointing out that such assessment, based on humans, would change in each era and circumstance of mankind.

The latest word on secular reasoning is probably that of Ayn Rand. She said essentially that you should live for yourself only and that keeping yourself alive in certain ways, because of the pleasure of being alive, should be the main principle of existence. It provides a strong and readily-available basis for a secular life.

So it turns out that yes, there are secular reasons for doing things. Whether they are good reasons or not is arguable. They are probably the best reasons that reason can produce from what reason affirms to exist. Still, the sense of the order of the world being nothing but a circular orbit is sometimes painful. From an information science point of view, can data determine information? Can information determine knowledge? It all seems the wrong way round.