Quotes
A person finds the arrangement of cards remarkable because it is one that is already familiar, which has special significance for him. We find it remarkable that the conditions for life are satisfied in our universe, because we are already intimately familiar with life. We think there is a contrary-to-chance match, but what we are familiar with is a consequence of these fundamental conditions. No one has given an advance characterization of a universe and then found that, contrary to chance, this universe conforms to the characterization, the characterization invoked being one derived from the given universe. But if no order has been initially specified to which things are found inexplicably to correspond, there is no call to postulate an intelligence to account for this otherwise inexplicable match.
Bede Rundle, Why there is something rather than nothing, Oxford, 2004, p. 36
It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of sceptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish useful ideas from the worthless ones. If all ideas have equal validity then you are lost, because the, it seems to me, no ideas have any validity at all.
Carl Sagan, The Burden of Skepticism, 1987
Some people should not have been born; and as there are other people whose existence is a good thing, we may say of the that they, in the same sense, “should have been born”; though of course they were, and it is not a point of much practical importance so far as it concerns the individual the desirability of whose birth is in question. Hitler should not have been born, Churchill should have been born, and there are other cases where it is debatable—though I admit that all such questions, are, as we say, “merely theoretical”. What I am claiming is that, if we regard ‘Hitler’ and ‘Churchill’ as proper names, Hitler’s mother and Churchill’s mother could not have presented themselves, prior to their conception, with sensible questions of the form, “ought we to give birth to Hitler?”, “Ought we to give birth to Churchill?” The latter appear to be parallel to, “ought I to spank Adolph?”, “Ought I to spank Winston?”; but they plainly are not.
Jan Narveson, Utilitarianism and new generations, Mind, vol. 76, no. 301, 1967, pp. 62–72, p. 64
Whereas many philosophers and theologians appear to possess an emotional attachment to their theories and ideas which requires them to believe them, most scientists tend to regard their ideas differently. They are interested in formulating many logically consistent possibilities, leaving any judgment regarding their truth to observation. Scientists feel no qualms about suggesting different but mutually exclusive explanations for the same phenomenon.
John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The anthropic cosmological principle, Oxford [England] ; New York, 1986, p. 15
I try not to think with my gut. If I’m serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it’s okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.
Carl Sagan, The marriage of skepticism and wonder, in Carl Sagan (ed.) The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, London, 1996, pp. 277–289, p. 170
Are the conclusions true? Before I address this issue, I want to observe that it is not clear that they are always intended to be true, that is, to correspond to the actual world. Rather, they sometimes represent a form of science fiction—an analysis of the action and interaction of ideally rational agents, who have never existed and never will. The analysis of ever-more-refined forms of strategic equilibria, for instance, is hardly motivated by a desire to explain or predict the behaviour of actual individuals. Rather, the motivation seems to be an aesthetic one. Two of the most accomplished equilibria theorists, Reinhart Selten and Ariel Rubinstein, have made it quite clear that they do not believe their models have anything to say about the real world. When addressing the workings of the latter, they use some variety of behavioural economics or bounded rationality. To cite another example, social choice theory—the axiomatic study of voting mechanisms—became at one point so mathematically convoluted and so obviously irrelevant to the study of actual politics that one of the most prominent journals in economics, Econometrica, imposed a moratorium on articles in this area.
An interesting question in the psychology and sociology of science is how many secret practitioners there are of economic science fiction—hiding either from themselves or from others the fact that this is indeed what they are practicing. Inventing ingenious mathematical models is a well-paid activity, but except for the likes of Selten and Rubinstein payment will be forthcoming only if the activity can also be claimed to be relevant; hence the incentive for either self-deception or deception. To raise this question might seem out of bounds for academic discourse, but I do not see why it should be. Beyond a certain point, academic norms of politeness ought to be discarded.
Jon Elster, Explaining social behavior: More nuts and bolts for the social sciences, Cambridge, 2010, p. 461
Apparently, beliefs are like clothes. In a harsh environment, we choose our clothes mainly to be functional, i.e., to keep us safe and comfortable. But when the weather is mild, we choose our clothes mainly for their appearance, i.e., to show our figure, our creativity, and our allegiances. Similarly, when the stakes are high we may mainly want accurate beliefs to help us make good decisions. But when a belief has few direct personal consequences, we in effect mainly care about the image it helps us to project.
Robin Hanson, Enhancing out truth orientation, in Julian Savulescu and Nick Bostrom (eds.) Human Enhancement, Oxford, 2009, pp. 357–72, p. 358
Because philosophy operates at a presuppositional level by clarifying and justifying the presuppositions of a discipline, philosophy is the only field of study that has no unquestioned assumptions within its own domain. In other words, philosophy is a self-referential discipline, for questions about the definition, justification and methodology of philosophy are themselves philosophical in nature. Philosophers keep the books on everyone, including themselves.
James Porter Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical foundations for a Christian worldview, Downers Grove, Illinois, 2017, p. 13
[T]here is a fundamental paradox in the search for such a complete unified theory. The ideas about scientific theories outlined above assume we are rational beings who are free to observe the universe as we want and to draw logical deductions from what we see. In such a scheme it is reasonable to suppose that we might progress ever closer towards the laws that govern our universe. Yet if there really were a complete unified theory, it would also presumably determine our actions—so the theory itself would determine the outcome of our search for it! And shy should it determine that we come to the right conclusions from the evidence? Might it not equally well determine that we draw the wrong conclusions? Or no conclusion at all?
The only answer that we can give to this problem is based on Darwin’s principle of natural selection. The idea is that in any population of self-reproducing organisms, there will be variations in the genetic material and upbringing that different individuals have. These differences will mean that some individuals are better able than others to draw the right conclusions about the world around them and to act accordingly. These individuals will be more likely to survive and reproduce, so their pattern of behaviour and thought will come to dominate. It has certainly been true in the past that what we call intelligence and scientific discovery have conveyed a survival advantage. It is not so clear that this is still the case: our scientific discoveries may well destroy us all, and even if they don’t, a complete unified theory may not make much difference to our chances of survival. However, provided the universe has evolved in a regular way, we might expect that the reasoning abilities that natural selection has given us would also be valid in our search for a complete unified theory and so would not lead us to the wrong conclusions.
Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, A briefer history of time, New York, 2005, p. 17
[O]nce space travel begins, there are, in principle, no further physical barriers to prevent Homo sapiens (or our descendants) from eventually expanding to colonize a substantial portion, if not all, of the visible Cosmos. Once this has occurred, it becomes quite reasonable to speculate that the operations of all these intelligent beings could begin to affect the large scale evolution of the Universe. If this is true, it would be in this era—in the far future near the Final State of the Universe—that the true significance of life and intelligence would manifest itself. Present-day life would then have cosmic significance because of what future life may someday accomplish.
John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The anthropic cosmological principle, Oxford [England] ; New York, 1986, p. 614
Professor [Benjamin] Jowett […] is one of the lions of Oxford. That town is subjected to constant inroads of tourists, all of whom crave a sight of the famous professor. It so happened, while he was engaged on his translation of Plato, that a guide discovered the professor’s study-window looked into the Broad Street. Coming with his menagerie, the guide would begin: ‘This, ladies and gentlemen, is Balliol College, one of the very holdest in the huniversity, and famous for the herudition of its scholars. The ‘head of Balliol College is called the Master. The present Master of Balliol is the celebrated Professor Benjamin Jowett, Regius Professor of Greek. Those are Professor Jowett’s study-windows, and there’ (here the ruffian would stoop down, take up a handful of gravel and throw it against the pain, bringing poor Jowett, livid with fury, to the window) ‘ladies and gentlemen, is Professor Benjamin Jowett himself.’
William Shepard Walsh, A Handy-book of Literary Curiosities, Philadelphia, 1893, pp. 640-641
Revisions are the food additives of theory construction. In the case of utilitarian revisionism the junk theories which have flooded the market have been particularly indigestible.
L. Wayne Sumner, Classical utilitarianism and the population optimum, Philadelphia, 1978, p. 96
That suicide harms those who are thereby bereaved is part of the tragedy of coming into existence. We find ourselves in a kind of trap. We have already come into existence. To end our existence causes immense pain to those we love and for whom we care. Potential procreators would do well to consider this trap they lay when they produce offspring.
David Benatar, Better never to have been: The harm of coming into existence, Oxford, 2006, p. 220
Consequentialism may be able to provide reasons for why their theory does not, in fact, entail some counter-intuitive outcome in the world in which we happen to live. But in relying on some contingent feature of the world, their theory, when it rules our such counter-intuitive outcomes, does so for the wrong reason.
Alan B. Carter, Inegalitarian biocentric consequentialism, the minimax implication and multidimensional value theory: a brief proposal for a new direction in environmental ethics, Utilitas, vol. 17, no. 1, 2005, pp. 62–84, p. 71
Many of us have little tricks we play on ourselves to make us do the things we ought to do or to keep us from the things we ought to foreswear. Sometimes we put things out of reach for the moment of temptation, sometimes we promise ourselves small rewards, and sometimes we surrender authority to a trustworthy friend who will police our calories or our cigarettes. We place the alarm clock across the room so we cannot turn it off without getting out of bed. People who are chronically late set their watches a few minutes ahead to deceive themselves. I have heard of a corporate dining room in which lunch orders are placed by telephone at 9:30 or 10:00 in the morning; no food or liquor is then served to anyone except what was ordered at that time, not long after breakfast, when food was least tempting and resolve was at its highest. A grimmer example of a decision that can’t be rescinded is the people who have had their jaws wired shut. Less drastically, some smokers carry no cigarettes of their own, so they pay the “higher” price of bumming free cigarettes. In these examples, everybody behaves like two people, one who wants clean lungs and long life and another who adores tobacco, or one who wants a lean body and another who wants dessert. The two are in a continual contest for control: the “straight” one often in command most of the time, but the wayward one needing only to get occasional control to spoil the other’s best laid plan.
Thomas C. Schelling, Egonomics, or the art of self-management, American economic review, vol. 68, no. 2, 1978, pp. 290–294, p. 290
Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent; deliberation, which those who begin it by prudence, and continue it with subtilty, must, after long expence of thought, conclude by chance. To prefer one future mode of life to another, upon just reasons, requires faculties which it has not pleased our Creator to give us.
Samuel Johnson, Life of Mr Richard Savage, London, 1744, p. 282
[O]ne good testimony to one’s existence having a point is that the question of its point does not arise, and the propelling concerns may be of a relatively everyday kind such as certainly provide the grounds of many sorts of happiness.
Bernard Williams, Moral luck: philosophical papers 1973-1980, Cambridge, 1981, p. 12
Once a scholar has identified a suitable mathematical function or a suitable set of dependent or independent variables, she can begin to look for a causal story to provide an intuition to back the findings. When she writes up the results for publication, the sequence is often reversed. She will state that she started with a causal theory; then looked for the most plausible way of transforming it into a formal hypothesis; and then found it confirmed the data. This is bogus science. In the natural sciences there is no need for the “logic of justification” to match or reflect “the logic of discovery.” Once a hypothesis is stated in its final form, its genesis is irrelevant. What matters are its downstream consequences, not its upstream origins. This is so because the hypothesis can be tested on an indefinite number of observations over and above those that inspired the scholar to think of it in the first place. In the social sciences (and in the humanities), most explanations use a finite data set. Because procedures of data collection often are nonstandardized, scholars may not be able to test their hypotheses against new data. [Footnote:] One could get around or at least mitigate this problem by exercising self-restraint. If one has a sufficiently large data set, one can first concentrate on a representative sample and ignore the rest. Once one has done one’s best to explain the subset of observations, one can take the explanation to the full data set and see whether it holds up. If it does, it is less likely to be spurious. Another way of keeping scholars honest would be if journals refused to consider articles submitted for publication unless the hypotheses to be tested together with the procedures for testing them had been deposited with the editor (say) two years in advance.
Jon Elster, Explaining social behavior: More nuts and bolts for the social sciences, Cambridge, 2010, pp. 48-49
We cannot live by reason alone. This is why no quantity of reason, applied as antiseptic, can compete with the balm of faith, once the terrors of this world begin to intrude upon our lives. Your child has died, or your wife has acquired a horrible illness that no doctor can cure, or your own body has suddenly begun striding toward the grave—and reason, no matter how broad its compass, will begin to smell distinctly of formaldehyde. This has led many of us to conclude, wrongly, that human beings have needs that only faith in certain fantastical ideas can fulfil. It is nowhere written, however, that human beings must be irrational, or live in a perpetual state of siege, to enjoy an abiding sense of the sacred. On the contrary, I hope to show that spirituality can be—indeed, must be—deeply rational, even as it elucidates the limits of reason. Seeing this, we can begin to divest ourselves of many of the reasons we currently have to kill one another.
Science will not remain mute on spiritual and ethical questions for long. Even now, we can see the first stirrings among psychologists and neuroscientists of what may one day become a genuinely rational approach to these matters—one that will bring even the most rarefied mystical experience within the purview of open, scientific inquiry. It is time we realized that we need not be unreasonable to suffuse our lives with love, compassion, ecstasy, and awe; nor must we renounce all forms of spirituality or mysticism to be on good terms with reason.
Sam Harris, The end of faith: religion, terror, and the future of reason, New York, 2005, p. 43
The family went back to Greece when I was young and we returned to America when I was eight. I’m told that at school at the time I couldn’t speak English, only Greek. But the language barrier means nothing to me. Language is just a bunch of symbols. People’s emotions are fundamentally the same everywhere.
John Cassavetes, Cassavetes on Cassavetes, London, 2001, p. 4