Miracles and Black Swans
The Blindspot
The standard modern scientific worldview cannot admit miracles and cannot admit
the paranormal.
That’s not the same as saying the scientific worldview disbelieves in
miracles or the paranormal (although most modern science fans do).
Nor is it the same as saying that the scientific worldview refutes or
disproves miracles or the paranormal.
People get all of these confused, but to state it clearly:
If there are paranormal or supernaturally miraculous events which actually do
occur in the universe, modern science, by its very set of assumptions cannot
allow or admit their existence.
This is because a narrowly “scientific” worldview bases all beliefs about the
world in controlled experimentation and replicability. If there are events that
are non-replicable or not subject to predictable physical cause and effect, they
therefore cannot be accounted for by the way modern people look at science.
I’m using words like “miracles” and “paranormal,” which assume something
other-worldly, but these are functionally the same as any “black swan”
phenomenon.
For example, if the whole known universe were contained in water droplet on a
leaf in another larger universe, and at some time a creature in that higher
universe walks by the leaf and brushes against it, disturbing the droplet, our
universe would undergo a stimulus so unique, unprecedented and unrepeatable as
that it would not be possible for those living in the the droplet to even
concoct a testable theory as for its happening.
But nonetheless it would have happened.
Our mechanisms for science would be utterly unable to understand what happened
and why, even if some of the effects might be obvious and measurable. This
inability, of course, is not a disproof of the event of the distruption of the
water droplet.
This ultimately means that to be a fervent scientific rigorist—a positivist in a
way, you have preemtively committed to a particular view of what is possible in
the observed universe. If you truly and erroneously believe that the modern
system of “science” is capable of understanding the universe in its fullest and
truest sense, you must assume that all such black swan phenomena are impossible
(which they are not).
Stable or Chaotic Universes?
Carl Sagan’s Cosmos documentary is probably the purest distilled narrative
of mainstream science ever put together. It is the standard of inoffensive
academic consensus in the post-war American world.
I remember very distinctly a statement Sagan made about how glad he was for
science’s sake that we live in a universe with some change and variation, but
not too much. (This was in the episode of “flatland.”)
Sagan said that some imaginable universes could be highly stable, so stable that
nothing changes and there is nothing to learn or experiment with. There would
be no “science” to speak of, and probably no life which could emerge from the
absolute stasis.
Other imaginable universes might be so chaotic and changing and inconsistent as
to be impossible to experiment with. No science could be done because basic
interactions might be too difficult to study. Everything might be capricious,
and life too would be too delicate to emerge.
We live in both universes.
Now the truth is that change is not really something set at a cosmic level. In
truth, we live in a cosmos where certain sectors are highly variable and others
are highly stable.
Sure, there are a lot of domains where we can do Sagan’s style of “science,” but
there are many, many more that are too chaotic or unpredictable as to even
bother doing science. There are other portions that are so stable as to be
trivial for scientific analysis.
So-called Soft Science
There is also a lot of “parascience” or “soft” sciences where although people
constantly praise the scientific method, they cannot even begin to approach it
with rigor. In economics and psychology, there is no way of doing real
experiments. Economics requires an entire separate society as a laboratory,
which can never be distinguished scientifically by one and only one controlled
variable.
You might say, “Ah, but they do experiments in psychology,” but they are very
different animals despite going by the same name. If you do the experiment of
dropping a bowling ball on earth, there is absolutely no notable variation under
the given stimulus. In psychology, behavior is nowhere even approaching that
level of consistency, so people trying to do “science” in psychology do a kind
of “hack:”
Instead of one controlled experiment, they take huge amounts of varying data,
and then run statistical analyses to boil down complexities creating by even
more complex unseen cognitive data into single numbers to create the illusion
that there is single operant force which, although not consistent, seems to be
statistically active.
In the experiment of dropping a bowling ball, we are ultimately evaluating the
force of gravity, which we allege to be a singular force and it is really the
only force active on the ball. I.e., the gravitational force of the planet
Mars on the ball is negligible. In psychology, however, supposing we are testing
how quickly a person remembers a word, there might be hundreds of very
effectual things that affect a person’s recall of a word, from emotional
associations to memories of the word’s meaning to its spelling to the appearance
of dust particles on the computer screen to the random stream-of-thought
present partially due to happenstance, but also due to the exposure to previous
words in the experiment. None of these are easily severable and all of them are
embedded in some way in the reaction time—and they might even vary so
significantly from one reaction to the next.
There are so many variables, and many more ways to interpret them that, even if
we keep the study of “psychology” at the very superficial things it attempts to
control in experiments, we will really never be able to understand much.
Incidentally—this is why there has been room for some patently non-sensical
approaches to psychology being able to survive and flourish (e.g. Freudianism or
Jungianism, which are mostly just idle imaginations of single men). These are
just new kinds of folk psychology (although folk psychology is certainly more
vouched and valuable).
Where does science end?
I am not saying that psychology or economics are illegitimate disciplines
(although their fields do have particular issues), but I just mean to emphasize
that the methodologies of these fields is not strictly “scientific” and
“experimental,” not because there is no reality behind them, but because they
are inhernently chaotic domains.
Already in psychology, we are mostly in the realm of the utterly
unclassifiable—and even if we assume that psychological phenomena are entirely
based in the material world, they are far too interactive and complex to pretend
that we are doing something similar to sliding a ball down a frictionless
plane.
Many peoples, obviously view the entire visible cosmos (by which they mean the
bottom half that was earth, and the top half that was heaven) as such. The lower
half of the cosmos was the realm of change, the upper half that of constant,
predictable and relatively unchanging celestial bodies.
Humes oft misunderstood argument
Occasionally you will see self-proclaimed skeptics extol the virtues of David
Hume’s argument *On Miracles in his Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding.
I cannot say with what awareness Hume was making his argument, but I can say
that it is not an argument against miracles, it is an argument against
believing in miracles, even if they actually occur. Here is Hume:
“When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I
immediately
consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should
either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should
really have happened…. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more
miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he
pretend to command my belief or opinion.”
Hume’s argument can be abridged to say, “It is always more likely that an
observer is mistaken than it is the law of the universe is broken.” Hume’s
intuition can be expanded to be applied even to events directly observed by a
person.
Suppose you directly observe a person deceased, even maimed raised from the
dead and made whole. It might seem like something supernatural, but for
Hume, the more economical explanation is always that you or anyone else have
misperceived what has happened.
Now to the modern atheist, this argument smells like a good deal. He assumes
that nothing magical happens in the universe, so a heuristic like this that cuts
out the supernatural seems like a good way of cutting out everything
“metaphysical” [sic].
That’s because modern people seem to assume that there is a very clear line
between the “natural” and “supernatural.” But in reality, Hume’s argument
amounts to a belief that black swans or improbable or unexpected events are
impossible: there is nothing that can occur that should not already be within
our implicit scientific understanding. Once we propose a scientific law which
seems to be vindicated by reality, we never really accumulate reason to dispose
of it. Hume here is not realizing that he is already resting on a significantly
aged scientific culture that has only achieved its current level of solvency
because it has accepted “miraculously” aberrant data and attempted to integrate
it.
Even mainstream 20th century epistemology is mostly about how “Science” (since
the Logical Positivists took over) is pretty unfit to make any systematic
changes or responses to new data. This is what Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend
speak of in one way or another. The real goal should be looking to “promote”
the misunderstood “paranormal” phenomena into the realm of the merely “normal.”
So now you have disciplines like cosmology that started putting anomalous and
unsolved data problems in their pocket, until the unexplained data in their
pocket is now greater than everything outside the pocket. We are told we are
just supposed to remain hypnotically focused on the data we can explain and
have faith that “Science” (which invariably means the most recent theory in
vogue) will eventually incrementally explain this data, even with it is
radically opposed.
The Turkey Problem
Nassim Taleb popularized what he called “The Turkey Problem” that shows the
issue with scientific consensus-making, clumsy induction, Hume’s argument, but
any mindset that categorically excludes some theoretical types of data by fiat.
Suppose a bookish turkey lives on a turkey farm. Certain conspiracy-inclined
turkeys on the farm believe without evidence (as the Jew York Times would put
it) that their beloved farmer intends to kill them. However our bookish turkey
hero says wisely that, “Each day, the farmer feeds us multiple square meals.
There’s no evidence that he intends to kill anyone. He protects us from
predators. When a turkey is ill, the farmer nurses it to health. All of this is
further proof that the farmer loves turkeys.” As the days, weeks and months roll
on, each day the turkey can input this new data into his Bayesian algorithm
that shows the increasing degree of certainty that farmers love and care for
turkeys.
Eventually, however, Thanksgiving comes and the farmer kills all the turkeys.
This is a “black swan” event. By the standard of turkey science, this is a
paranormal event—indeed a supernatural one, transcending the normal principles
of how nature has been established to function.
But if the late bookish turkey were David Hume, his ghost, hovering over the
Thanksgiving meal would still confidently be able to say:
“Look, this might look bad, but I have more reason to trust objective
science and the statistics we’ve built over years.
Sure, I have anecdotal and subjective ’evidence’ that perhaps farmers do
kill turkeys, but it is always more likely that I’ve misperceived this and I
am actually still alive and being fed well on the farm.”