Chapter 3.                        (continued) 

Even a complete world view, learned, used, and trusted, may turn out to be a fraud. Nazism may sound logical if I am told as a boy, by teachers I trust, that every race on earth including my own must fight to survive. I may come to truly believe in their model of the workings of our planet’s biosphere. If I believe it, I may then infer that winning new land for my race and subjugating competing races is my sacred duty to my people. I and millions of like-minded comrades may march off to a war that gets millions killed before my nation loses and the war is finally over.

 

                                                        World War II cemetery, France.

The problem was that the Nazi worldview was built around a core set of lies. The Nazi ideas of race have no foundation in fact; humanity is one species. In science, there is no Aryan race. Different nations and cultures do compete and struggle to survive, and Germany was, and is, a nation that has had one of the harder struggles. But culture is not genetically acquired. Culture is learned; therefore, cultures can be amended by education and experience. In addition, war is not the only way by which cultures can evolve. Germany, as a nation, changed profoundly after WWII, but then it continued on—very successfully, in fact. It didn’t fizzle out and vanish as Nazi leaders had predicted it would if it lost the war. Millions of Germans and their adversaries died because of an illusion. But Germany as a nation proved to be programmable in the most final sense: it learned, then adapted, then went on.  

Around our basic ideas, we build more complex ideas. These eventually lead us to ways of acting and living. Once we know how ways of thinking and believing lead to ways of living, and how flawed belief systems can lead us into suffering and even death, we can then try to construct a reliable core around which we can build the rest of our thought system. In my case, that effort begins with an examination of the epistemology that attempts to build its core around not a political or religious ideology, like Marxism or Christianity, but around physical reality.

                     

 

                                                            John Locke, founder of empiricism.

                

                                              David Hume, the most famous empiricist philosopher.

In the modern world, the core belief set of most people in the West is the one called science. Under its view, what scientists seek to know is what is real. What is this ocean of stuff in which we swim and how do the things in it work? But the harder we think about this question, the more it leads us to a deeper one. The crucial question is not “What is real?” but “How can I know what is real?” How reliable is the system we use to absorb and understand the impressions our senses send us about reality? Trying to answer these questions leads us into the branch of philosophy called epistemology, which is the study of the origin, nature, methods, and limits of knowledge, and what distinguishes opinion from justified beliefs.

The epistemological view of most scientists and philosophers in the West today is called empiricism. It is a beginning point. Empiricism bases its conclusions on empirical evidence, which is information acquired by observation or experimentation. Empiricism assumes that all we can know is sensory experiences and memories of sensory experiences. This includes the concepts we have learned that enable us to sort those experiences and memories, to plan responses to events in my world, and then to enact the plans. We keep and use those concepts that in the past have reliably guided us to more health and vigour and less pain and sickness.

Our sense organs are continually feeding bits of information into our minds about the textures, colours, shapes, sounds, aromas, and flavours we experience. Even when we are not consciously paying attention, at other, deeper levels, our minds are aware of these details. For example, I know when I hear sudden noises outside of a car approaching or a dog barking. I detect headlight beams sweeping across my yard or crunching gravel in the driveway—sometimes even in my sleep. One spouse awakes to the baby’s crying; the other dozes on. One wakes when the furnace isn’t cutting out as it should be; the other sleeps. The ship’s engineer sleeps through steam turbines roaring and props churning, but she wakes when one bearing begins to hum a bit above its normal pitch. She wakes because she knows something is wrong. Empiricism is the modern way of understanding this complex information-handling system.

In the empiricist model of knowing, the mind notices how certain patterns of details keep recurring in some situations. When we notice a pattern of details in encounter after encounter with a situation, we make mental files—for example, for round things, red things, sweet things, or crisp things. We then save the information about that type of situation in our memories. The next time we encounter that type of situation, we simply go to our memory files. There, by cross-referencing, we discover: “Apple. Ah! Good to eat.” All generalizations are built up in this way.