Steve asked:

In the scientific debate over anthropogenic climate change, there are two opposing views. Advocates and deniers with attitude polarisation occurring on both sides. How do I decide which group are ‘victims’ of confirmation bias and where do I place my confidence?

Answer by Shaun Williamson

There is no scientific debate over climate change. The vast majority of the world’s climate scientists are on the advocates side. The oil and coal industry may try to persuade you that there still is a debate but there isn’t.

There are some things you need to keep in mind about this.

1. This isn’t just a fun debate, if we get it wrong then we may make the planet uninhabitable. It might be best to err on the side of caution.

2. Just as the tobacco industry was prepared to swear to Congress that they didn’t think smoking caused cancer (even though later evidence showed that they didn’t believe this), so the oil and coal industry are prepared to spend vast sums of money to bribe politicians not to do anything about climate change and they will do anything to persuade you that this is still an open debate.

If you really need to know the truth then become a climate scientist. If you just want to be a reasonable human being then err on the side of caution and go with the vast majority of the world’s qualified climate scientists.

Answer by Craig Skinner

You say two opposing views in the SCIENTIFIC debate. This is a bit like claiming two opposing views in the scientific debate about evolution.There aren’t. Rather there is an overwhelming PRO consensus and a fringe CON view. And I suspect such is the case with climate change, albeit the scientific PRO view is less overwhelming than with evolution.

The opposing views occur in political or popular debate, although here protagonists typically try to represent slight contrary evidence as an opposing scientific view, such is the prestige of science.

How to decide which groups are victims of confirmation bias?

The latter is a hard-wired feature of normal human cognition, presumably because it was a mindset of survival value in our ancestors. We are all ‘victims’. The brain is a belief organ. It looks for patterns, gives them meaning and forms beliefs. Then we subconsciously seek out confirmatory evidence to reinforce them.

Science is the best tool we have devised to determine whether our beliefs match reality. It systematically deals with confirmation bias, particularly by recognizing the power of refutation (note the asymmetry between confirmation and refutation – many ‘confirmatory’ instances merely give further support to a view; a single refuting instance falsifies the view). So, testing against the empirical world systematically roots out error (refutation) while ‘confirmation’ never quite reaches certainty (although doubtless many scientific views are in fact true).

I say science does this rather than scientists. The latter are as prone to confirmation bias as anybody else, but at least are signed up to a method of dealing with it.

So where do you place your confidence? You have two choices:

1. Gather and assess the evidence yourself. This is fine for limited areas where you have expertise or are willing to work to acquire it.

2. Accept the assessment made by people you trust to make a fair job of collecting and interpreting the evidence.

Not politicians, who are in the business of persuasion and mostly cast around for selective evidence to support pre-existent views.

Although Individual scientists may be cranks with idiosyncratic views (but are occasionally right), a scientific consensus is a reasonable basis for provisional belief and, importantly, for action.

On a practical level, scientists only occasionally write a consensus view which is a page-turner (eg Steve Jones, Sagan, Dawkins, Rees). This job is usually better done by science writers (eg Gribbin, Singh, Matt Ridley)

‘A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence’. Such was the dictum of the greatest English-speaking (Scottish) philosopher David Hume. A sound maxim, even, in suggesting degrees of belief, foreshadowing the Bayesian approach of prior probability adjusted to posterior probability by new evidence.

Vishaka asked:

Is travelling back in time really possible? do time machines really work?

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to research this question when I was asked to write an Afterword to a new edition of David Gerrold’s sci-fi classic The Man Who Folded Himself published by Benbella Books. (See http://klempner.freeshell.org/articles/afterword.html.)

I started by reading H.G. Wells The Time Machine which gives the traditional view of time travel that generates the so-called ‘time travel paradoxes’. For example, if travelling back in time was really possible you could accidentally kill your grandfather in which case, logically, you ought to cease to exist.

H.G. Wells chooses simply to ignore the paradoxes. His novel is no less entertaining for that. Other science fiction writers have come up with dubious fixes. For example, as my jeep runs over a boy who turns out to be my grandfather, I gradually fade away into nothing as the ‘time lines adjust themselves’. Or my grandfather miraculously comes back to life. Or, supposing that I deliberately tried to kill my grandfather, every attempt fails for one obscure reason or another.

Time travel is illogical. The impossibility of a time machine has nothing to do with technology. It requires contradictory propositions to be true (for example, ‘My grandfather lived a long and uneventful life,’ ‘My grandfather was run over and killed by a jeep when he was 9 years old’).

One of the things that makes Gerrold’s novel so interesting is his solution to the paradoxes. Time travel isn’t really time travel at all, because every time you ‘hop’ to a time in the future or the past what you are really doing is creating an alternative ‘future’ or ‘past’. In that way, you can meet alternative versions of you, change the history of ‘the world’ to meet your requirements or aesthetic taste. The one thing you can’t do is go back to where you started, as H.G. Wells’ time traveller did, because ‘where you started’ is also a different world.

One criticism that could be made of my essay is that I don’t consider the possibility that reality itself might be malleable, that what makes a ‘world’ isn’t just a hard set of ‘facts in logical space’. Although my grandfather lived to old age, isn’t it still possible to bring about his death without simultaneously committing suicide? Can’t we just change the past a bit, while keeping other subsequent events the same?

For example, someone who believes in God might pray that they have passed the exam, while they actually hold the results envelope in their hand. This implies that whatever did happen in the past can be altered now, if only by God’s will. As an atheist, that’s not something I believe, but I can imagine someone believing it. It creates a problem for logic, to be sure, but we can still describe what such a person is thinking without obvious self-contradiction.

Just to think what God would have to do to change my ‘fail’ to a ‘pass’, or what would have to happen in order that I live even though my grandfather died at the age of 9, is mind-boggling. The world would have to be a very strange place indeed, if that could happen, more like a fluid dream than reality. But then, maybe that’s all it is?

Tim asked:

What do you think about the idea of random reincarnation? That each life is a total end to itself but matter and energy is a flexible and infinite force that will continuously grant you the ‘I’ experience.

Answer by Craig Skinner

I don’t think much of the idea of reincarnation, never mind random reincarnation.

Reincarnation, or re-embodiment, makes sense only if ‘I’ am somehow separate from my body, as with the Platonic soul or Descartes’ res cogitans (thinking substance). But I feel we are essentially embodied beings, and that my mind, soul or self is the mental activity of my embodied brain embedded in a suitable environment. Mind is the mental activity of the brain as motion is the physical activity of a car, and it makes no more sense asking what happens to the mind if the brain is destroyed than to ask what happens to the motion if the car is destroyed. My death is the end of me as regards my ‘I’ experience.

So, for me, no reincarnation, no disembodied spirit existence, and no new, incorruptible body in heaven as Christianity has it.

But I would broadly agree with your second sentence if we omit ‘and infinite’ and ‘you’ so that it reads:

‘That each life is a total end to itself but matter and energy is a flexible force that will continuously grant the ‘I’ experience.’

Just so. Matter/energy are continually forming new ‘I’ experiences as human beings are conceived, born, live and experience. But only one of these beings can ever be you. Even if the universe is infinite and all possible arrangements of matter exist infinitely many times. In such a universe there would be countless copies of you (and me, and everybody else), each with its ‘I’ experience. But none of these would BE you, even if atom-for-atom and thought-for-thought identical. They would only be your counterparts (and you one of the counterparts of each of them)

As the song says ‘There will never be another you’.

Daniel asked:

Would a deterministic universe still be determined if the inhabitants could act upon foreknowledge of future predetermined events?

For example: John is crushed to find out his universe is deterministic, he was a firm believer of free will. So using knowledge of the laws of nature and causality he constructs a Laplace demon… assuming that’s possible.

From there he uses it to learn that on Tuesday he’ll order a pizza and it’ll arrive at 8 o’clock and at 8:15 he’ll choke on the slice he was eating and die.

Could John in a determined universe act upon this foreknowledge and decide not to order the pizza? Would foreknowledge of future events and consequences endow John with free will and choice that didn’t previously exist? If not, what could compel him to order the pizza aside from relying on the metaphysical and the supernatural?

Answer by Jurgen Lawrenz

You’ve already answered your own question. If metaphysics and the supernatural don’t do the job, then there is no question.

But I may not be the best authority here. For certainty on this issue, your best bet would be to consult a clairvoyant or tarot card reader. They’re experts; and what they don’t know a philosopher could not conceivably pretend to explain.

Apart from this I think you are very confused about determinism. You’re really speaking about pre-determination or fatedness. Like: I set my alarm clock tonight to wake me up at 8 am. Circumstances may arise of which I know nothing that may present the clock from buzzing, but in every other respect I have pre-determined the fate of that clock. It must ring at the appointed time. Or else that somewhere in the universe ‘all is written’ and we are just playing out the script.

But my life is not pre-determined. I’m not a clock and metaphysical entities don’t write books.

But even if I were to believe that my will is determined (not pre-determined) by the momentary chemical conditions in my brain, it is impossible to have foreknowledge of them even a quarter of a second beforehand. This is because the chemical activity is contingent on about a million other circumstances that are active at that moment, which in turn depend on a million contingent circumstances before, and so it goes on. Laplace’s demon would go mad just keeping track of mine, let alone the rest of my family or the universe.

Anyway, he died, didn’t you know?

Some time around 1860 the thermodynamic revolution withdrew his commission. After this he became unemployable and about 30-40 years later Maxwell Clerk buried him for good.

But I’ll leave you the pleasure of discovering that story yourself.

Brianna asked:

The final step of the Hegelian dialectic is thesis or the synthesis?

Answer by Caterina Pangallo

You would think that synthesis must be the answer; but if the dialectical process is continuous, then the synthesis is also the thesis which continues the dialectics.

So the answer is not in fact so easy.

Look at it this way: Everything that exists is in constant process of development. Therefore every situation contains within itself conflicting elements, and these are destabilizing to the existing situation. No situation can continue forever without change.

Whatever those conflicts are, they have to work themselves out, until they achieve a resolution, and this will then constitute a new situation — and of course a situation that contains new potential conflicts.

Hegel is not concerned with outer space or even the physical situation on Earth. His philosophy revolves around the ‘Geist’, the human spirit. Among humans, this spirit comes constantly in conflict with other spirits. Ideally such conflicts should be resolved by people sitting down and thrashing out their differences.

This is a dialectical situation. How do we resolve it?

Hegel would say, let us begin with your proposition, and let’s call it the ‘thesis’.

We need to debate it, and therefore someone else has to propose a counter-thesis, or ‘antithesis’. Ideally, assuming both contestants are reasonable people, some good will come out of the conflict between these two points of view. It need not be half and half. It could be a blending of views, or the adoption of a new perspective by both parties, so that they can accommodate each other.

But whatever the new situation will be, it cannot be one or the other, but always a mingling. No one person can ever be in sole possession of the truth on any question. So when the resolution is achieved, we have made progress.

At the end of debating them, we draw conclusions or achieve a consent, and this we can then call the ‘synthesis’.

Yet even as we congratulate ourselves on having achieved consensus, it is perfectly clear that sooner or later the synthesis is bound to become the ‘thesis’ of a new conflict and a new engagement in dialectics.

Hegel is assuming that, as rational creatures, we will not relapse back into our pre-synthesis situation, but keep striving for progress.

But because we are humans, and change our situation constantly — meaning: our societies grow and change from year to year, sometimes from week to week — this dialectical process need never end. Once again Hegel is of the view that in the long run, the human spirit learns more and more things. In his philosophy the ultimate goal is to turn all knowledge into concepts, so that ultimately all theses, antitheses and syntheses issue into one grand all-embracing concept.

The philosophical dialectics is a method for examining ourselves and the state of our knowledge. In that process, we should also increase our self-knowledge and self-awareness. And now the idea of the subject as its own truth contains within itself the dialectical bifurcation. As life is growth, so it is a becoming.

And so we return to the point where your question stood. It might seem unlikely that humans will ever arrive at a stage where debate is unnecessary. So the dialectics will go on forever.

In principle, however, there is an end to all dialectics when the human spirit has attained complete mastery of itself and conceptualized all possible knowledge. This is when the last synthesis coincides with the absolute ‘Geist’.

Dani asked:

In your opinion, which is the more logical question to ask when seeking information: ‘Why’ or ‘why not’?

Answer by Eric George

Why? Why anything at all? Such a profound opening question has kept the Philosophical juices in the minds of Philosophers flowing for centuries, millenia even, if Philosophy could be viewed as a building — a skyscraper for example, surely it could be said that one of the foundation stones of such a building could be two phrases (one could argue two ideas): Why, and why not.

Why there is something instead of nothing, why does mankind often seek to find truth, or some sense of it, it seems to me that in terms of seeking information the posit of ‘why’ seems a superior basis for inquiring after information whether in the pursuit of truth or not. The very word ‘why’ within the context of Philosophy, although not tied indefinitely to such definitions, has come to mean mainly two things; firstly, an implication of an argument i.e. a premise in support of a contention such as for what purpose or reasoning. Secondly, the word itself could be wielded as a consequential bridge between two events, a causality of sorts.

Therefore, for seeking information I would say that the use of ‘why’ by nature, seems a better choice rather than ‘why not’. However, for obtaining information, that is — after one has found a resource of information to keep acquiring more information from such a deposit therein, the use of ‘why not’ seems more appropriate.

If for example to take such words and place them in a correlation to Drama and its implications, ‘why’ would be deemed as an element of monologue or soliloquy, whereas ‘why not’ would imply an exercise in dialogue. The difference being that a soliloquy is the Thespian speaking thoughts aloud in order to offer the audience a common ground relation to himself/ herself. Whereas a dialogue takes place between two or more people.

Therefore the same could be said concerning the proper usage of ‘why’ and ‘why not’. Both are useful as Philosophical mechanisms for inquiring and gathering information on a continuing level. However, understanding how and when to use such mechanisms will in turn be of determining importance in the effectiveness of how your approach to first inquiring and then gathering information turns out.