Of Miracles.

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

1. 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.

Commodification of the Self

I HAVE WRITTEN THAT I do not believe in virtual community, that the phrase itself is a misnomer, and I have been critical of the role of technology in our lives. Recently my attention was drawn to a rave entitled Pandora’s Vox: On Community in Cyberspace by Carmen 'humdog' Hermosillo posted on The Well, an early online "community" in which she talks about the commodification of the self via the Internet. If anything this phenomenon has become more ubiquitous since she wrote her essay in 1994. [1]

The self here is obviously self without any of the technical spin normally associated with a religious point of view. A single example will suffice to show how the internet commodifies and on-sells the self. This process is exemplified, and perhaps even finds it's apotheosis in Facebook and other online social networking sites. Facebook is a profit making enterprise. It exists to make the owners rich, which it has done beyond their wildest dreams, and it does this by pushing entertainment and selling advertising. The form of entertainment it uses is ersatz social relationships and commodified thoughts and emotions. Each user expresses them self by broadcasts their verbalised thoughts and emotions. This is then re-presented for our 'friends' along with a number of adverts. The friends are supposedly people we have a social relationship with, though often there is no offline relationship at all.

It is the adverts that pay for Facebook. "Free" blogs, like this one, are more or less the same business model. I broadcast my thoughts and opinions which you consume and it's paid for indirectly. I do have Google ads, and get paid about USD10 per year for them [NOTE Sept 2017 I stopped hosting Google ads some years ago, J]. Google don't mind that this is not a popular blog, as long as it's active and some people read it and see the ads. Google's business is all about aggregates of activity. There are tens of millions of blogs like mine, and 100,000s more each day, and some get massive readership. The popular ones subsidise the rest of us. If you want to write an uber blog then lists of top blogs suggest you write about celebrities, technology, politics (certainly do not write the arcane elements of early Buddhist philosophy and linguistics!)

If you don't like my opinions, you don't stop using the internet, you just go consume some other opinions that suit you better - that you find more entertaining. The Internet is an almost infinite source of entertainment. And what is entertainment? Entertainment is an activity we undertake purely in order to experience certain emotions. Emotions are the opiate of the world, which the Buddha clearly knew when he described people as intoxicated by sensory experience. We are often blind to the emotions naturally occurring in us, and only feel the kind of intense emotions evoked by more extreme stimuli. News media actively seek to stimulate our reptile brain, to induce fear, disgust and anger. Just occasionally they try to make us laugh or coo (what I call kitten stories). On the internet the range of emotional provocation is much broader. Whatever emotion you want to feel in yourself, you can turn to the internet to stimulate it. We live in environments that are highly artificial and hyper-stimulating. Modern life dulls our emotions, and so in order to feel alive we seek out artificial stimulation: we're like people who have to have chilli on every meal, and have lost any appreciation for subtle flavours.

Since these personal opinions and stories are now a product being on-sold by Facebook, Blogger, Google et al, then our inner lives have become a commodity with a commercial value. And do we ever stop to ask whether this is a good thing? Should we not be paid by social media for providing them with entertainment content for the businesses that have made them mega-rich? Facebook is basically a social parasite. It kids us that by repackaging a service we already have (email) into a broadcast medium, that we are more in touch with people. But there is no 'touch' involved in email.

In my critique of so-called "virtual community" - ersatz community would be more a more accurate name - I said that online relationships lack eyebrows, they lack the multiple dimensions of personal relationships. Psychologists have coined a term for these non-real relationships: they're called Parasocial Relationships. These can include TV and novel characters, as well as internet friends we've never met. The former are like imaginary friends. Why do we indulge in this kind of relationship? We are social primates. We thrive in small groups where we experience a sense of belonging by being involved in the lives of our community. One of the ways we express our membership of the group is grooming each other. Some people have theorised that language evolved as a form of grooming, and I imagine that language can certainly play this kind of role - especially our non-word sounds. I wonder if texting is another form of grooming.

In the absence of a community to be involved in, we find substitutes in, for example, soap operas. Even quite intelligent people can get caught up in the lives of fictional characters, or in media creations in the form of pop stars. Whether it's JR Ewing, Harry Potter, or Lady Gaga, we want to feel like they are part of our lives. We know all kinds of details about the lives of people who've never existed, because we have a faculty and a drive to be socially involved, and if we don't use it we suffer. Just like a horse or a dog kept in isolation will slowly go mad, we humans do not thrive alone. But more than this we don't thrive when we are surrounded by strangers most of the time. The individual is not the smallest viable unit of humanity. However our communities are no longer spatially contiguous, and we have begun to rely on technology to bridge the gap. For many people their "community" is a disparate group only loosely connected. Such a community may be no more than a series of overlapping sets of cellphone numbers. I suggest that this is why people will interrupt a face to face meeting to answer their phone. Community is a value we all share. But note how isolating relying on the one to one connection of the phone is in case of the interrupted personal conversation.

Our online persona becomes like a soap opera that is processed and sold as entertainment and enriches those who facilitate the process, with little or no real benefit to us despite the hype. All of our selves become commodities to be bought and sold. Nowadays our electronic identity can literally be stolen, and the selves of some celebrities are being hijacked by online impersonators. And we buy into this system, I suggest, at least in part because we are no longer embedded in a community. The whole enterprise is presented to us as a remarkable leap forward in human interactions that is facilitating closer relationships and easier communication, but it only seems attractive in a world where our neighbours are strangers and people are isolated. Accept no substitute.

~~oOo~~

Notes

1. The full text of Humdog's essay is online in many places. I consulted the version on The Alphaville Herald website.

Supplemental

"When girls stressed by a test talked with their moms, stress hormones dropped and comfort hormones rose. When they used IM, nothing happened. By the study’s neurophysiological measures, IM was barely different than not communicating at all." Wired Science. 7.1.12