Mr. Spock, the Revolutionary:
A lot of progressive activists I meet wrinkle their noses and gag and get sick to their stomachs whenever I start talking about how science and logic can—and must—be applied to humanity. But considering that I’m trying to agree with you and help you succeed at your own goals, I can’t help but think that maybe you don’t understand what the words science and logic actually mean, or why the things they refer to are relevant to your goals.
The word logic was probably introduced to our collective vocabulary by Mr. Spock more than by anything else. He would say things like, “Captain, logic dictates that you should exercise caution when making out with green alien women,” and “Captain, arming our photon torpedoes while surrounded by five Klingon battle cruisers would be highly illogical.”
So based on the way Mr. Spock used the word logic, what does it mean?
If you didn’t already know the definition, but you were logically minded enough, you could deduce that out of all the possible meanings it had each time he used the word, there was one meaning that was always a constant. But most people aren’t that logically minded.
You’re trying to figure out what a word means based on how a person is using it. And remember, 80% of interpersonal communication is conducted emotionally. It seems awfully ironic that I should say that 80% of interpersonal communication is conducted emotionally when I’m talking about a Vulcan who has learned to control his emotions and act upon logic exclusively, doesn’t it? Well there’s the catch…
The fact that 80% of interpersonal communication is conducted emotionally means that 80% of interpersonal communication would have no effect on Vulcans. But Vulcans can’t possibly talk without talking in a certain tone of voice. Since 80% of interpersonal communication is conducted emotionally, you naturally interpret 80% of interpersonal communication emotionally, even when it’s a Vulcan talking.
So now the question is: How did you perceive Mr. Spock to be communicating emotionally whenever he used the world logic? Whenever he was talking about logic, he was always talking about something that was very important to him, and he always talked about it in a calm, steady voice that made it seem that this thing he was talking about made the world make sense to him.
Everything Mr. Spock ever said he said in a calm steady voice as though the whole world made sense to him. That is, except maybe when the ship was under attack and half the bridge was blowing up and he had to yell to make himself heard over the noise. Well he always talked as though the whole world made sense because he always perceived the world in terms of logic. He was the perfect scientist. He always knew what he knew about the situation, and he knew the limits to his knowledge of the situation. He always talked as though the whole world made sense to him because the whole world did make sense to him. That includes knowing that there were some things he didn’t know, so he couldn’t explain or anticipate them.
When he talked about logic in the way he talked about it, based on your emotional interpretation of the way he talked, it seemed to mean that the word logic meant “whatever makes sense to Mr. Spock.” Then if you heard anyone else use the word logic, it would seem to mean that the person was talking like Mr. Spock to try to make you think they were Mr. Spock—or at least, to try to get you to react to them as though they were Mr. Spock. Of course, you could tell that they were not Mr. Spock, so that reduced your interpretation of the word to “whatever seems to make sense to this person”. Then parents of Star Trek fans would try to use the word on their kids in order to try to make themselves sound intelligent and sound like role models their kids would look up to, and say things like, “But having a messy room isn’t logical,” or whatever. So now your interpretation of the word has been corrupted to the point that you think it means “someone’s opinion about something”. Hence the argument I hear all the time about “Well evolution seems logical to you…”
A jigsaw puzzle is a logic puzzle. If a piece fits in one place, then it doesn’t fit in any other place. If a piece fits in one place, then no other piece fits in that place. If a piece has a certain color on it, then it could fit in some parts of the puzzle but not in other parts. If the piece has a second color on it, then it can only fit into a part of the puzzle that has both of those colors in it. If the piece is a certain shape it can attach to some pieces but not to other pieces. And so on.
The whole world is a giant puzzle, in which all the pieces fit together in some way or another. If A then B. If B then C. If C and D then E. If E but not F then G. If G and H but not I then J. And so on.
Logic is the study of systems of cause and effect. If you have some of the pieces to work with, then you can try to figure out what the other pieces are and how they fit together. If you use what you know about a system to develop an understanding of that system, then you necessarily develop your own predictions of what results that chain of cause and effect will produce. The proof of whether you were right or not will be whether the effects you predicted come about. If they do, that supports the possibility that you were right. If they don’t, that proves that you were wrong.
Science is the application of logic to the physical universe. The universe works in a certain way, and all the pieces of the universe fit together in a certain way. The universe works in the way that it does because of the way the pieces of the universe interact with each other. So just as with any other logic puzzle, if you can find some of the pieces, you can try to fit them together to figure out what the other pieces are and how they fit together. Then the proof of whether you were right or not will be whether or not the effects that you predicted come about. If they don’t, then your logic is proven to be faulty. If they do, then your logic is supported. It isn’t guaranteed, because you might’ve made a mistake but got lucky and came up with an effect that happened anyway, although not for the reason you thought it would. But if your logic continues to yield accurate predictions consistently over numerous tests, then that proves that your logic is correct. (Or at least, it does in layman’s terms. In science, technically there are no truths, only discoveries that haven’t been disproven yet.)
So now the big question people always ask is: But why is it necessary to make accurate predictions about other people? Why can’t we just deal with each other and see what happens and let everyone figure it out on their own?
Well to answer the second question first, we can’t just deal with each other and see what happens and let everyone figure it out on their own because the world is not governed by political correctness, the world is governed by survival of the fittest. Making accurate predictions about what other people are going to do is not only necessary it is so critical that you do it all the time without even realizing it. Every single time you see another person, subconsciously you ask: Based on everything you know about that person, are they going to try to kill you?
Once upon a time, some people didn’t ask that question, and now they’re all dead. We aren’t descended from those people; we’re descended from the other people.
Familiarity breeds amicability. You can see this happening whenever you see the same people on a regular basis, even if you never interact with each other. The more times you see each other without interacting, the better you feel like you know them and the more you feel like you can trust them anyway. If either one of you started talking to the other one day, the two of you would feel like you knew each other in a way, even though you’d never talked to each other before and knew virtually nothing about each other.
I ride the same bus to my job at the same time every morning. On my bus there’s the kid in the red sweatshirt who listens to his headphones all the time, there’s the university chick who reads books about herbology, and there’s the guy with the facial piercings who works in the laundry room of the hospital. After 20 or 30 or 50 or 100 times or whatever of riding the same bus, those all seem like people I know, even though I don’t know them.
When I was about to move out of my last apartment and didn’t think I’d be riding that bus anymore, one morning I said to the guy with the facial piercings, “I’m curious—you dress like you work at a hospital, but what kind of a job do they let you have at a hospital with all those facial piercings?” He said he worked in the laundry room.
As it turns out, I still take that same bus partway to work in the morning. Now whenever I see the guy with the facial piercings, we say hi to each other. But the familiarity in our voices is noticeably greater than what you would expect it to be after our having had one four-sentence conversation or whatever it was. The difference is that we had also seen each other about a hundred times before that or something, and not once did either of us try to kill the other—or mug each other, or beat each other up, or anything of the sort. That’s a pretty important thing to know about each other. Hence the increased familiarity with which we greet each other now.
This phenomenon was studied officially by psychologists sometime after World War II. Out in those fake countryside Disneyland suburbs, a cheap way to the make the houses look different from each other is to use identical blueprints but reverse them from one house to the next, so that each house is a mirror image of the house beside it. (That’s how the house I grew up in in Maine was built—and so were the three houses around it.) The result is the driveway of one house is adjacent to the driveway of the house beside it, and so are the side doors of the houses. As a result of that, people with adjacent driveways would see each other a lot more often than either of them would see their next-door neighbors to the other sides. The result of that was that people with adjacent driveways would talk to each other more, be friends with each other more often, watch football and drink beer together more often, borrow each other’s drills and lawnmowers more often, help each other rake their leaves more often, or even just feel like they knew each other better even if all they did was wave to each other when they both came out of the house to go to work at the same time every morning. People could’ve been doing all of those things with their neighbors who lived to the other side of them, but they weren’t doing those things nearly as much. So why would the simple act of seeing each other more often lead to all of that?
Simply put, if you’ve seen a person 100 times and all 100 of those encounters passed by without the other person doing anything harmful to you, that’s a much bigger, much more important, and much more useful piece of information that you have to work with than if you had only seen the person 20 times, 5 times, once, or never. If you’ve seen one stranger 100 times before and another stranger you’ve never seen before, you have a lot more information about the first to use to predict what he might do this time around than you have for the other person.
The next question people always ask is: But why does it have to be a mathematical prediction? Why can’t we just feel it intuitively or something?
All predictions are mathematical predictions. The only difference is that I’m consciously aware of that and you’re not. Any attempt by you to figure out what the other person is going to do is a mathematical prediction because you are attempting to predict the effect that person’s presence is going to have on your ability to preserve the survival of your DNA by the most effective means perceivable. If the presence of the other person reduces the number of your children that are going to grow up to have children of their own, that’s something really important that you need to know. And so it goes for every other evolutionary motivation and the effects it will have on the survival of your DNA.
All of evolution is governed by statistics. Every single one of your ancestors, and mine, and every single ancestor of everyone else in the world, for the past 7,000,000 years, had the brain power to make enough accurate predictions to have at least one child who grew up to have children of their own. And no amount of touchy-feely political correctness on your part is going to change that.
All of evolution, and all of life, is a gamble. We are all alive right now because all of our ancestors played the odds, placed their bets, and won.
Then there’s the argument about, “But all reality is subjective. Why do you believe you can make mathematical predictions about other people’s behavior?”
Science, as logic applied to the universe, depends on five basic things: observability, universality, self-consistency, reproducibility, and debatability.
A lot of bleeding heart liberals have a real problem with this idea, but science is an extreme form of democracy. Science is a process by which people figure out how the universe works through observation and rational discussion. The progress of science depends on people having access to information and education, and on their being allowed to talk to each other, ask questions, find answers, and disagree with each other.
It is true that everyone’s perceptions of reality are subjective, but if you with your amateur perspective on science know that, why do you believe that people who devote their careers to science haven’t thought of that too, and figured out a way around the problem? Pure conceit on your part, perhaps?
By requiring that scientific discoveries be observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, and debatable, scientists have established a process of triangulating from their subjective perceptions to see if they all perceive the same things.
Observability means that any scientific discovery begins with evidence that can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched by anyone. The only thing direct observation proves is whatever was directly observed. If you start reading meaning into the things you observe, you’re no longer talking about observability.
Universality means that any pattern of cause and effect that you identify must always happen under all conditions. If you identify a pattern of cause and effect that only happens under some conditions, you’ve only identified part of a pattern of cause and effect. You still haven’t identified why it doesn’t happen under some circumstances. Evolution is a universal pattern because evolution is always the adaptation to environmental pressures. Thermodynamics is a universal pattern because matter and energy always move from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration more than they move from areas of low concentration to areas of high concentration. The Periodic Table of the Elements is a universal pattern that relates the number of protons atoms have to their chemical properties. Friction always produces heat. Gravity always attracts matter to other matter. Electricity is always caused by the flow of electrons. And so on.
Self-consistency means that all the related evidence has to fit together into a pattern of cause and effect. If making your pattern of cause and effect work depends on ignoring some of the evidence, your discovery isn’t science. You’re just making stuff up.
Reproducibility means that other people have to be able to use your pattern of cause and effect to produce accurate results. If you discover a pattern of cause and effect that only works when you use it, again you’re just making stuff up.
Debatability means other people being allowed to look at the evidence, ask questions, find answers, and try different patterns of cause and effect. If your discovery depends on preventing anyone from doing any of those things, your discovery isn’t science, it’s dogma.
A lot of bleeding heart liberals believe that controlling the way people are allowed to think isn’t democracy. But that isn’t true. We all live in the same universe, and this process of triangulation among subjective perceptions to discover objective patterns of cause and effect for how the universe works has proven to be a successful strategy for outmaneuvering our subjectivity. It doesn’t work that way because anyone decided it works that way; it works that way because that has proven to be an effective strategy for outsmarting the discrepancy between objectivity and subjectivity.
The alternative is for people to respect each other’s beliefs, like bleeding heart liberals always say people have to do. But that is the real antithesis of democracy. When you say that people have to respect other people’s beliefs, you’re attempting to force them to do what you want them to do. And once you force people to respect other people’s beliefs, what happens then? Respecting someone else’s beliefs means not telling someone else that they’re wrong. But once you do that, you’ve imposed limits on how much people are allowed to debate. But conditional free speech is not free speech. If you believe that people have to respect each other’s beliefs, and you believe that anyone who disagrees with you is evil, you don’t believe in free speech, and therefore, you don’t believe in democracy. You believe in mental Communism, because you’re trying to maintain social stability by forcing everyone to live at equally low intellectual levels.
It is true that people who are not scientists are capable of making objective discoveries. It is also true that people who do make new objective discoveries always face an uphill battle for acceptance of their discoveries among scientists. The Niesen approach to science is the most controversial of all, because working from the bottom up has been done to death. Instead, we learn non-scientific systems of thought well enough to recognize patterns of cause and effect that are observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, and debatable. That doesn’t prove that the people discovered what they thought they discovered, but it does prove that they’d discovered something. Then all there is left to do is to figure out what they did discover. Then we put all those discoveries together, and we end up discovering things that traditional scientists assumed were completely impossible to discover. I call that folk-science. It hasn’t exactly gained a whole lot of acceptance among the scientific community, for a number of reasons. One is that basically nobody possesses the skills and abilities necessary to replicate my work. Another is because a lot of professional scientists with big-time academic credentials would have to admit that a stupid college drop-out figured out a new approach to science that they didn’t and that I made a lot of important discoveries with it that they assumed were impossible.
Anyway…