I am not good at philosophy so maybe you could improve on these two thoughts:
(1) Disproportionate Weighing I can't remember the name of the bias, but the human mind can weigh the probability of an even disproportionately high if the impact is largely negative. Thus we think death by air plane crash are far more probable to occur than death by car crashes. This would mess up the Humian calculus, it would seem.
(2) Ancient Post-Modernists I don't know how to phrase this, but many Christians argue that the ancients did not have the literalists view that we have today. So that shows that Humes argument was against a straw man.
1. Yes. We are terrible at calculating odds most of the time. Which is why casinos are so profitable. It would not mess up Hume, but it would be a bias that would be hard to eliminate. But you know my elephant story is true! I did meet 3 elephants on the road in Kushinagar.
Science makes a difference these days. For instance if someone says that they detected a neutrino going faster than c (speed of light in a vacuum) I know this is extremely unlikely, and like others I wonder what the experimenter did wrong. It's too unlikely to be plausible on face value. However if it is confirmed by another source it becomes a lot less unlikely. At some point someone may make the falsehood more miraculous, or not. But until then I doubt it.
2. One can't be an ancient post-modernist, it's a contra-diction in terms. I haven't understood what you're getting at with this. But, for the sake of conversation, look at Socrate's attitude to the gods (There's an interesting summary here). Already at that point he is doubtful about a literalistic reading of the Greek gods. But even today some people are literalists about gods - so are they modern ancientists?
See also chapter 6 in "What the Buddha Thought" by Richard Gombrich. He goes into the more and less sophisticated approached to god in religion, and suggests that Buddhists used this against the Brahmins. I actually think he might be wrong about this because there is every indication that the Brahmins the Buddha met did believe in a creator god called Brahmā and not in a universal principle called brahman.
Great points, Jayarava. I will work on organizing my thoughts more and read the Socrates thing. I essentially agree with you and think your emphasis is important. I am just trying to imagine how those who disagree address this would respond. I know you are not interested in comparative religious stuff (well, certainly not with Christianity), but this dialogue happens there too. So your writing helps me think about that dialogue. You bring up important points. I will get back to you later after I have done some homework!
Seasons greetings! This reminds me of a line of thinking articulated by French philosopher Giles Deleuze which I'm pursuing in my work vis-a-vis Buddhist understandings. In the book Empiricism and Subjectivity, Deleuze suggests that Hume, widely regarded as one of the most rigorous empiricist of modern philosophy, could be far more radical than he is normally considered to be. Through a reading of Hume, Deleuze:
...considers the mind to be a system of associations alone, a network of tendencies (ES 25): “We are habits, nothing but habits – the habit of saying ‘I’. Perhaps there is no more striking answer to the problem of the Self.” (ES x.)
This passage is taken from this overview of Deleuze's work: http://www.iep.utm.edu/deleuze/#SH3a
I highly recommend reading the section on Hume in the link; hope it would be helpful as there appears to be possible associations between what you write here and Deleuze's reading of Hume that are just calling for further investigation.
Also, the following article by a philosopher and Buddhist practitioner at the University of Liverpool, considers the doctrine of anatta alongside Deleuze's Humean reading of habit-subjectivity, and might be of interest too: 'Becoming and Unbecoming: the theory and practice of anatta.' If you like, I could email you a copy of the article. :)
Deleuze's reading of Hume partly informs his attempts to radically reconfigure 'belief', his articulation of an ethics of engagement with this world 'as it is'. I only have a very general understanding of Deleuze's work and am slowly looking into it, but I've attempted to draw some associations--tenuous and preliminary, at this stage--between his thinking and Buddhist understandings here:
Hi Jayarava (as you see, I had to catch up on your posts of the last weeks), as for:
In the case of a dead Jesus being reanimated the report is scarcely credible at all, and is most likely false. At least there is no evidence presented which outweighs the breaking of the laws of nature.
As it is often the case between us, I would say that there is a change of perspective involved. You surely know Dovstojevskij's "Great Inquisitor" (within the Brother Karamazov). Well, the Inquisitor needs miracles to subjugate people, whereas Jesus (Dovstojevskij argues) wants to be believed by faith and not as a Law of science. What would be the religious merit of believing in God's resurrection if this could have been proven?
Yes. I've been reading your account of the conference with interest, though not much to say.
I'm never read the Brothers Karamazov, but I'm pretty sure that the conditions have changed since then so I'm not sure about this idea. I think the debate, especially in the US, has become one in which we are frequently asked to believe in the literal truth of miracles. For instance both Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II have been accused of performing miracles.
One of the features of Jesus in the Bible is the miracles he performs, not least of which is rising from the dead, but including the loaves and fishes for instance, or turning water into wine.
In any case I was more thinking of the miracles performed by the Buddha! Just like Jesus the Buddhist tradition is ambivalent about miracles: both preserving stories about the Buddha and other people performing miracles as proof that they are special, and playing down the importance of miracles which can be deceptive. Wanting people to have faith, but also wanting to show off a little bit.
One of the particular miracles that I had in mind is surviving death to be reborn. I will be saying more on this in a couple of weeks.
Best Wishes Jayarava
Thursday, January 12, 2012
[Image]DAVID HUME is perhaps the greatest thinker to write in the English language, or so everyone says. I've been looking at his 1748 essay Of Miracles [1] which is very readable and couched in English not too different from my own. I think it is still relevant to the kinds of discussions that religious people still have about unusual experiences. The crux of the argument is this: "...no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish..." (p.32) Hume begins by establishing how we make decisions about reported facts. He argues that when we hear a report about something we weight it against experience. So if I tell you that I met an elephant on the road, you might immediately be doubtful because their are very few elephants wandering the streets of Cambridge. If I add that I was India at the time, my report becomes more credible because India is the kind of place on might expect to meet an elephant on the road. (It was in Kushinagar)
One of Hume's great insights is that we do not see causation per se. If we roll two billiards balls toward each other, they collide and continue on in different direction. The inferences we draw about the nature of their interaction is not based on observing causation, but "...are founded merely on our experience of their constant and regular conjunction." In other words the collision of two balls has a predictable sequence. Hume is not, of course, the last word on this observation - probably Kant had the last word (to date), but Hume's is a very important observation. We do not see causation, we see a sequence of events, and it is the regularity of our observations which gives rise to the idea of causality.
However none of us will only believe things that seem likely. Unlikely things do happen. People win billions-to-one lotteries, are struck by lightening, etc. But, Hume argues, we do require stronger evidence in order to establish the veracity of and extraordinary claim. It is reasonable to entertain doubts about unlikely events. Hume sums up the reasons why we might doubt a report: "We entertain a suspicion concerning any matter of fact, when the witnesses contradict each other; when they are but few, or of a doubtful character; when they have an interest in what they affirm; when they deliver their testimony with hesitation, or on the contrary, with too violent asseverations." (p.28)So we must weigh up evidence when deciding whether what some says is true, or whether they have been deceived, or are trying to deceive us. With regard to miracles, these are all extraordinary because they defy what Hume calls the "laws of nature". Hume is not using this phrase in the scientific sense; nor, notice does he absolutise the idea by capitalising the words. He means such things as are observed with universal regularity: "that... all men must die; that lead cannot, of itself, remain suspended in the air; that fire consumes wood, and is extinguished by water". (p. 31) This might these days be seen as a quaint definition, but in fact it still carries a lot of authority. We might quibble with the notion that the sun rises everyday - by saying that actually the earth turns; or that the sun will die in 5 million years; or by saying that it does not rise in the high Arctic during winter - but in everyday life the sun is observed to return each day by everyone on the earth, and the exceptions are do not deny the regularity of the observations of billions over thousands of years. The sun always rises. A miracle, according to Hume, is "a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent". The example he uses is the raising of a man from the dead. It would be extraordinary for a healthy person to drop down dead. But it would not be a miracle because we know that such things have been observed in the past, and that it breaks no law of mature. But the opposite, the raising of a person from the dead into life, does break the laws of nature. Hume probably chose this example to directly irritate Christians whose religion centres on the belief that Jesus died and was resurrected, and that they themselves will have everlasting life after death.
But note that Hume is not denying that miracles can happen. What he is doing is trying to establish the basis on which a reported miracle might be credible. And in Hume's mind a miracle would only be credible if other explanations were less believable, less consistent with experience, than the miracle itself. In the case of a dead Jesus being reanimated the report is scarcely credible at all, and is most likely false. At least there is no evidence presented which outweighs the breaking of the laws of nature. In which case Christians have most likely been deceived in the first place, and are deceiving us when they insist it happened.
Hume sets the bar for credibility rather high. And this will be a difficult bar for Buddhists, let alone Christians to reach. One of the ways we escape it comes from the psychoanalytic movement. We can see miracle stories as allegories for how our mind functions. Dreams, and fantasies need not obey the laws of nature. In stories we can do whatever we like. But traditionally religieux have taken miracle stories as literally true, and this modern view, while rescuing us from literalism is not necessarily one that was available before Freud and company. In any case Hume hoped: " [this argument will] ...be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently will be useful as long as the world endures; for so long, I presume, will the accounts of miracles and prodigies be found in all history, sacred and profane." (p.25)I would say that after 263 years the argument has stood up well to the test of time.
~~oOo~~
Notes Hume, David (1985) Of Miracles. Illinois: Open Court. [first published 1748]
For a slightly chaotic, but none the less fascinating introduction to Hume try listening to the BBC's In Our Time podcast. A more thorough online introduction can be found in the excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
7 Comments
Close this window Jump to comment formI am not good at philosophy so maybe you could improve on these two thoughts:
(1) Disproportionate Weighing
I can't remember the name of the bias, but the human mind can weigh the probability of an even disproportionately high if the impact is largely negative. Thus we think death by air plane crash are far more probable to occur than death by car crashes. This would mess up the Humian calculus, it would seem.
(2) Ancient Post-Modernists
I don't know how to phrase this, but many Christians argue that the ancients did not have the literalists view that we have today. So that shows that Humes argument was against a straw man.
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Hi Sabio
1. Yes. We are terrible at calculating odds most of the time. Which is why casinos are so profitable. It would not mess up Hume, but it would be a bias that would be hard to eliminate. But you know my elephant story is true! I did meet 3 elephants on the road in Kushinagar.
Science makes a difference these days. For instance if someone says that they detected a neutrino going faster than c (speed of light in a vacuum) I know this is extremely unlikely, and like others I wonder what the experimenter did wrong. It's too unlikely to be plausible on face value. However if it is confirmed by another source it becomes a lot less unlikely. At some point someone may make the falsehood more miraculous, or not. But until then I doubt it.
2. One can't be an ancient post-modernist, it's a contra-diction in terms. I haven't understood what you're getting at with this. But, for the sake of conversation, look at Socrate's attitude to the gods (There's an interesting summary here). Already at that point he is doubtful about a literalistic reading of the Greek gods. But even today some people are literalists about gods - so are they modern ancientists?
See also chapter 6 in "What the Buddha Thought" by Richard Gombrich. He goes into the more and less sophisticated approached to god in religion, and suggests that Buddhists used this against the Brahmins. I actually think he might be wrong about this because there is every indication that the Brahmins the Buddha met did believe in a creator god called Brahmā and not in a universal principle called brahman.
Cheers
Jayarava
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Great points, Jayarava. I will work on organizing my thoughts more and read the Socrates thing. I essentially agree with you and think your emphasis is important. I am just trying to imagine how those who disagree address this would respond. I know you are not interested in comparative religious stuff (well, certainly not with Christianity), but this dialogue happens there too. So your writing helps me think about that dialogue. You bring up important points. I will get back to you later after I have done some homework!
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Hey Sabio
Yes. Hume specifically had Christianity in mind when he wrote his essay!
Jayarava
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Hi Jayavara
Seasons greetings! This reminds me of a line of thinking articulated by French philosopher Giles Deleuze which I'm pursuing in my work vis-a-vis Buddhist understandings. In the book Empiricism and Subjectivity, Deleuze suggests that Hume, widely regarded as one of the most rigorous empiricist of modern philosophy, could be far more radical than he is normally considered to be. Through a reading of Hume, Deleuze:
...considers the mind to be a system of associations alone, a network of tendencies (ES 25): “We are habits, nothing but habits – the habit of saying ‘I’. Perhaps there is no more striking answer to the problem of the Self.” (ES x.)
This passage is taken from this overview of Deleuze's work: http://www.iep.utm.edu/deleuze/#SH3a
I highly recommend reading the section on Hume in the link; hope it would be helpful as there appears to be possible associations between what you write here and Deleuze's reading of Hume that are just calling for further investigation.
Also, the following article by a philosopher and Buddhist practitioner at the University of Liverpool, considers the doctrine of anatta alongside Deleuze's Humean reading of habit-subjectivity, and might be of interest too: 'Becoming and Unbecoming: the theory and practice of anatta.' If you like, I could email you a copy of the article. :)
http://www.scribd.com/doc/36337449/Becoming-and-Unbecoming
Deleuze's reading of Hume partly informs his attempts to radically reconfigure 'belief', his articulation of an ethics of engagement with this world 'as it is'. I only have a very general understanding of Deleuze's work and am slowly looking into it, but I've attempted to draw some associations--tenuous and preliminary, at this stage--between his thinking and Buddhist understandings here:
http://whatisthespark.blogspot.com/2011/02/we-need-reasons-to-believe-in-world.html
Metta
Ed
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Hi Jayarava (as you see, I had to catch up on your posts of the last weeks),
as for:
In the case of a dead Jesus being reanimated the report is scarcely credible at all, and is most likely false. At least there is no evidence presented which outweighs the breaking of the laws of nature.
As it is often the case between us, I would say that there is a change of perspective involved. You surely know Dovstojevskij's "Great Inquisitor" (within the Brother Karamazov). Well, the Inquisitor needs miracles to subjugate people, whereas Jesus (Dovstojevskij argues) wants to be believed by faith and not as a Law of science. What would be the religious merit of believing in God's resurrection if this could have been proven?
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Hi Elisa
Yes. I've been reading your account of the conference with interest, though not much to say.
I'm never read the Brothers Karamazov, but I'm pretty sure that the conditions have changed since then so I'm not sure about this idea. I think the debate, especially in the US, has become one in which we are frequently asked to believe in the literal truth of miracles. For instance both Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II have been accused of performing miracles.
One of the features of Jesus in the Bible is the miracles he performs, not least of which is rising from the dead, but including the loaves and fishes for instance, or turning water into wine.
In any case I was more thinking of the miracles performed by the Buddha! Just like Jesus the Buddhist tradition is ambivalent about miracles: both preserving stories about the Buddha and other people performing miracles as proof that they are special, and playing down the importance of miracles which can be deceptive. Wanting people to have faith, but also wanting to show off a little bit.
One of the particular miracles that I had in mind is surviving death to be reborn. I will be saying more on this in a couple of weeks.
Best Wishes
Jayarava
Thursday, January 12, 2012