"...But _This_ Story Has Dinosaurs!"

[zingerella]

I have got to stop reading Pandagon at lunch. I wind up taking far too long to draft lengthy comments on tangential points.

Case in point, a comment that I'm really quite proud of, inspired by this comment from a thread on The identity politics of atheism. So I'm re-posting the comment here, prettied up and slightly edited.

Comments

[zingerella]

Good? True? What mean these words, and where did I introduce them?
My point was that oftentimes people will default to a simpler, more comfortable story, even when evidence doesn't support it, because the story that the evidence tells is, narratologically speaking, a crappy story.

I've avoided terms like "true" or "good," because, as you wot well, in order to use these terms we must first define them, and defining "good" is something philosophers and theologians have struggled to do for millenia. It's certainly beyond the abilities of this lonely lapsed academic.

Likewise, to a lesser degree, "true." In a debate of ideology and emotion, what do we hold "true"-that which is best supported by the evidence of our senses or that which resounds best with our axia? (How we define "true" seems to be at the heart of many of the ID/evolution conflicts: those who believe in a god who created humanity in god's own image know this to be true. Therefore any nonsense about descent from apes must be false.*

This subjective nature of truth was brought home to me when I hear about the Salluit schools evolution conflict:

"There's a part of the world thinks they came from apes, but we know that we have been human," said Molly Tayara, who sits on the Salluit education committee. "We should be telling our kids that. That shouldn't be a taboo."

For Ms. Tayara, the truth is that human were created in the image of a Creator. Her story is both a good story and (for her) a true one; it is not necessarily supported by the fossil record.

[zingerella]

OK...I've edited to try to make my point more clear, and to clean up a few little gremlins. Now I feel like I'm saying the same thing too often and not supporting it enough, but it's time to pack up the computer and head home.

I'll add some links to fun stories later.

[poldy]

Good? True? What mean these words, and where did I introduce them? They seemed implicit in the final paragraph where the resistence to evidence is attributed to certain stories. That suggests that other stories, more difficult ones, are closer to the truth of the cosmos as disordered, or at least, not ordered with humans at the center.

[zingerella]

Hmmm....no, I've tried to stay away from value-laden terminology such as "good" and "true." Because I don't see "truth" as an absolute.

To badly quote a friend:

"True" is created inside people's heads.

"Factual" is created outside people's heads.

So the truth of the cosmos as disordered or at least not homocentric (is that a word? is it the correct word?), is part of another story-one created inside a human head. The events of the world outside anyone's head (at least insofar as we've perceived them) seem to support this story.

[poldy]

I suppose I am being mislead by things like "it isn't even the right story." I know you have tried to avoid value-laden terminology, but value still seems part of what you are saying even without the terminology (which is really not that important in the end). I hope I am not being too argumentative, but I am in fact not entirely sure what you are saying. If they are all just stories, then each has little or no claim to validity. If some are right (or less wrong), then why? For instance, why should statistics be prefered to poetry in the final example?

I should say I agree to the assertion (if you are making it) that a truer story of the world and our place in it is not anthrocentric (to avoid the barbarism of homo (latin) and centric (greek). But the story seems decidely partial to a scientific type of value that I would prefer to see challanged.

I appologize if I am being annoying. Incidentally, I was just lecturing on Stoic and Epicurean epistomology. They believed that one could have true perceptions of the world, but one could form wrong opinons on those perceptions.

[zingerella]

"Anthrocentric" is much better. Thank you.

No, you're not being annying. If I'm not being clear then I must strive for more clarity.

My goal was not to say that one story or one type of story is right and the other wrong, one true and the other false, but to look at why some stories are more sticky than others, culturally, and why the stories that seem to stick are often not the ones supported by the facts (or statistics, if you will) as we know them.

The short answer that I've been able to come up with is that the stories that the (admittedly scientific) evidence points to are not always very satisfying as stories.

By "it's not even the right story," I meant that the ladder version of evolution works as a story, but as a story that addresses the facts-as-we-know-them, it fails. As a story that answers the question "Given the fossil record, and the genetic record and what we know of speciation and what we know of the incredible diversity of life, how did we get here and what will become of us?", it's pretty silly, because it uses the terms of science to present a view of natural selection that's plain wrong (but makes for a good story). So it's presented as scientifical and evidence-based, but it's bad science, and isn't supported by the evidence.

To my mind statistics and poetry come from the same drive: the need to express what we know and learn of the world and its workings. Poetry works better for expressing some things (capturing perfect moments of human experience, expressing emotion, telling stories, to name a few), and statistics works better for others.

OK...it's late, and the drunk person outside my window has gone away, so I can try to go back to sleep. Perhaps sleep will bring more clarity.

[poldy]

I think I see your point, which I agree with - some stories of the world are more palatable than others.

My point is this: the epistological model used (roughly consistent with ancient scepticism) presents itself as objective when it is also a story, a story not because it misuses the evidence but because it selects from the evidence to present a view of the world. It is necessarily selective.

[zingerella]

I think I said that the stories of gods and the story of many more are born than can survive are both stories.

In fact that natural selection is a story is central to the point that I was trying to make.

Stories are how we organize and present the information the world feeds us through our senses. We have to be selective with the information in order to create them, and we more or less must create stories because otherwise we'd go mad.

For learning about the world-outside-our-heads, stories that allow more generally agreed-upon facts are more useful models than stories that don't. "More useful for this purpose" doesn't mean that the other stories are not useful for other purposes. I'd far rather listen to someone spin the yarn of Prometheus on a long bus ride than listen to most people tell the story of natural selection starting with primordial ooze. And if I'm looking for clues to how a group of people view themselves in relation to their cosmos, I'm going to look at their myths as well as at their science, and at the place where the two intersect and overlap.

[zingerella]

I did understand that you took natural selection as a story - this is a point on which we agree. (I am not sure if Garydon agrees with us on that point, however). What was not clear, until now, was exactly how you ranked them.

The fact that stories are necessarily limited is both true and interesting because we can learn much from what is left out. But stories, I think you will agree, are very dangerous too for this same reason. Especially stories that deny their status as stories.

[poldy]

That was me. Poldy.

[zingerella]

I wasn't really interested in ranking the stories. In order to rank, we must first establish criteria for ranking. Part of what fuels the whole origins debate is an inability to clearly define the criteria.

Of course stories are dangerous. If you look at it a certain way, most human conflict arises out of disagreements about whose story will prevail and be told.

truth is not a helpful concept for this

[zingerella]

Everybody lives in their imagination of the world; that's what our brains -- and, so far as is known, other mammal brains -- do, model the world and respond based on the model.

Since this process evolved, it's very messy; good enough to get away from the leopard most of the time, but no better, and certainly never direct. (Which means that there is no factual support for the idea of true perceptions, and lots and lots of factual support for the idea that we all exist in heavily mediated, inherently biased, and certainly incomplete models.)

Stories live in our heads; inside the magic-works universe of the mediated, biased, and incomplete model of the world that reflects the ability of the structure of our brains to model the world much more than the world.

Facts live outside our heads, in the ability of a group of people to arrive at the same conclusions without reference to the inside of any particular person's head. They're a matter of extelligence, rather than intelligence.

This is what makes science powerful; it provides a mechanism for a generally accurate model of the world.

As a model of the world, science is necessarily superior to stories; as a model of the world-modelling ability of our brains, story is likely to be superior for a long time yet.

As a tool for making decisions, in an environment with any meaningful selection in the Papa Darwin, modified descent, variable reproductive success -- which applies to ideas trying to get themselves into the future as much as to genes -- sense, science will be the more generally applicable method.

This sets up a very interesting contest between ease-of-application -- stories have a low overhead cost as a basis for decision making -- and ability to cope with multi-generational time scale disasters -- the area where science has demonstrated much greater utility.

-- Graydon

Re: truth is not a helpful concept for this

[poldy]

Facts live outside our heads, in the ability of a group of people to arrive at the same conclusions without reference to the inside of any particular person's head.

I do not believe this epistemological model will work to distinguish between facts and stories (I take it you disagree with Zingarella's point about stories). Facts are not constituted by the agreement of a group. The history of science shows this to be false. Many people have arrived a wrong conclusions and agreed to them.

I know you didn't ask for what I think makes science powerful, but I will hazard a statement nonetheless. The power of science lies in (1) its ability to describe phenomena in ways the allows one to reliably predict outcomes (or predictable repetition) and (2) the idea all truth is subject to revision. What I thought I knew can be revised in light of new evidence.

The danger of science, as I see it, is that Science gives only a partial model of the world, and mostly the physical world at that. The danger of the story science tells itself and us comes when it insists that its model is a generally accurate model of the world. It is not. That world it models is only partial and incomplete.

The other danger of science is the problem of analogy. Ideas do not obviously function by natural selection.

Incidentally, I don't see why truth is not a helpful concept for this. It seems to what we are talking about.

Re: truth is not a helpful concept for this

[zingerella]

I didn't think I was talking about truth.

"Truth" is too squooshy.

Re: truth is not a helpful concept for this

[poldy]

No, you were not (but I was not clear until now what you exactly you were saying). Graydon, however, did seem to be talking about truth. As far as I am concerned, truth is not at all squooshy but one of the most important things that exists.

Truth, as far as I am concerned, is always provisional. But I love truth and always try to seek it where I can and in any form I can. Doesn't effect your statement at all, of course. Don't really know why I am saying it but to say it.

Re: truth is not a helpful concept for this

[zingerella]

Because you believe truth to be good, very probably.

Truth is a tautology, is the problem; a creature of the absolutes of the mind-built world-model, rather than of the messy, error-barred, differing-explanatory-power land of facts where none of us have yet to go.

I was mentioning that truth wasn't a helpful concept as something of a tangential aside; like the idea of general intelligence, it's one of those Enlightenment failed-angel story ideas with poor factual support.

-- Graydon