But since infinity is impossible, the philosopher's dream is an impossible one. So why try?
Monty Hall and Paradoxes
It may seem that my brain is really waking up these days.
I feel more emotions, get struck by things more often ( not objects , I mean , thoughts - situations and their implications ), dream more and am more unstable emotionally, unpredictable as well. At the same time, I am also more detached intellectually. I have less of a taste in hanging out with friends. Or at least, my preferred company list is shrinking.
I have just finished the classes on the Monty Hall problem - variants of it include substituting the three doors for cups or for boxes - and one of the things that struck me (thank goodness for armour) is what a lot of people believe in may be quite wrong - but we are often unwilling to take the simple trouble of verifying for ourselves. We trust our intuitions far too much, perhaps because popular culture encourages it. Lots of people would not see the solution to the monty hall problem even if the game was played out right under their noses - and that's another problem.
Up at 3 am thinking about monty hall with a friend who has a genius level intellect who refused to see the answer after hours of explaining. He had utter faith in his mathematical theory - that it was correct, and that the experimental experiences of two dozen people ( times an unknown factor - plus Marilyn vos Savant! the smartest human being in the world - IQ:212 + professors of MIT & connoiseurs of brain-teasers the world over ) was wrong. He refused to do the experiment with me to prove it, saying he had no time for this and it was so clear cut as to not be worth the trouble. He further spent a good gob of time explaining why - if he were proved wrong in an experiment - the experiment was flawed.
I wondered - why bother at all, indeed. Lots of things in life seem clear cut - like the Monty Hall problem - but with the insight of philosophy turn out to be more subtle and strange than we expect - but we have to be deeply shaken first to endeavour to find out. There are lots of things that we take for granted - how many of them will turn out to be like Monty Hall? We may be living mostly in error, and worse, we wouldn't even bother to try to find out if there is anything wrong with our assumptions. If a person as smart as my friend (IQ:158) could commit such an error, and then refuse to see the solution, then what hope do i have for finding any sort of useful truth? Having an open mind demands so much more from a person than I previously thought.
Confronted with Monty Hall, the temptation is strong to just forsake the intellectual tradition and become one of the mindless masses, because a. I'm not smart enough to solve most problems anyway, much less problems of this calibre, and b. even if i discovered the solutions, i will have so much trouble communicating it to people (especially if it runs counter to their deeply seated thought habits and intuitions) that it would not be useful. Why are geniuses never recognised in their own time?
I had spent fifteen minutes in such dejection, thinking about the fruitlessness of any endeavour in thought that I might undertake - it was four am - yes I'm quite a night owl - when i suddenly remembered that I had thought about this in a different manner before. I know the answer to the question : Why bother with life? I had lost my taste in life at one point.
The answer was not simple to find, and I dropped out of school twice before I figured out the answer - talk about existential angst - but it was an exercise in the concept of sophisticated simplicity that I rever so much. The reason to keep trying with life is that there are only two choices about it that we can make. If you reject death, then the only thing to do is to start living. I've stayed in school since.
And in the same vein, we have to continue to persist in trying to think things through. Because the intellectual tradition is the only option we have. The alternative lies behind us in history - witch-hunting expeditions, wars started by religious zealots. The so called truths of those times were based on nothing but the power of rhetorical speech and oppression, which seldom led to any sort of benefits. On the other hand, real Truths, truths that are practically useful, can be found through the intellectual tradition, and only through this tradition..
By intellectual tradition, i refer to the scientific method style of truth finding that consists of performing experiments, forming theories and testing theories. Science and technology are the fruits of this intellectual tradition. The intellectual tradition happens to be the only way to verify the answer to the Monty Hall problem, and for that matter, the best way to verify the validness any sort of solution, unless there are other methods just as good that I haven't come across yet.
Most people refuse to try out the Monty Hall experiment for themselves, because they have built for themselves a most satisfactory picture of the universe. One that is taken from established truths, based on popular opinion.
They have already been told what to think, and so do not think for themselves - ergo. super bad - because accepting being told what to think all the time makes us no different from people of the dark ages. Give a man a fish, or teach him to fish - a very oblique metaphor.
Some one famous said the most common illusion about communication is that it has taken place. The Monty Hall problem has the effect of making me a hard core Humean being, pardon my crappy pun. Hume of course was that gnarly philosopher who took the idea of skepticism really really personally. Hume would probably rephrase that to read "The most common illusion about thinking is that it has taken place." Really thinking demands so much more from a person than I previously thought.
And then again of course, the solutions we have found may not be the end all and be all of it. There may be a better answer, or our answer may be just a tiny part of a very large whole. Perhaps there is no such thing as a single Ultimate Truth. Whatever, we will just have to keep plodding on, because its the only choice we got.
Paradoxes happens to be the next thing we tackle in this particular philosophy class. I came up with a seeming paradox once upon a time - and was told that I like wasting my time talking in circular ways. The paradox was - All people are unique, which makes them not unique. Haha. I know the solution to that paradox now. But young as i was, it flummoxed me. Flabbergasted me. F-word. Forget it.
But now try this - What I am now saying is false. Is what I say true or false? In the words of A. Tarski(1969), this particular paradox "tormented many ancient logicians and caused the premature death of at least one of them - Philetas of Cos."
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