Death is a social construct
Death is a social construct
medium.com Death is a social construct
One of the most memorable episodes of Star Trek Voyager is Tuvix. Tuvok, Voyager’s chief security officer, and Neelix, the ship’s cook, are…
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It’s a problem of induction, like Hume’s sunrise problem.
Nope.
This inductive principle argument that we can’t know the sun will rise tomorrow, just that it always has before, was a cute little bit of philosophy when I was back in college.
But it has since been weaponized by religious people, arguing in bad faith, to undermine the credibility of science and legitimate their religious faith. They say we can’t know anything, therefore science is just built on faith anyway and is therefore no different than religion.
Again: nope.
The thing is, we know why the sun rises, not just that it always has. And it actually doesn’t always rise, at the poles, or during eclipses, and we can explain those too. We have a model that can predict much more minute events than the sun rising or not, in fact. We have devised experiments to strain and test our models and predictions. We throw out lots of ideas because they don’t bear out in tests.
Scientists don’t really talk about “knowing” things anyway. The bar a scientific theory must meet is being able to make testable predictions about the future. Maybe theory is always provisional and can never be proven but at some point we become fools not to accept it. Proof: prove yourself! To claim something doesn’t exist, based on the inductive principle, is to wave away the entire universe with a flick of the wrist as your opening argument.
If you still want to engage in this “we can’t really know anything” bullshit, that’s your choice. I no longer have any patience for it, having seen how it is being misused. It boils down to the “so you’re telling me there’s a chance” scene from Dumb and Dumber, where the guy chooses to focuses on the 0.0000000001% chance that something will happen, because hey it’s not zero.
We can’t know anyone is dead therefore death is social constructed? I guess life doesn’t exist either because you don’t know you are alive, you just have a lot of past anecdotal evidence that you are. Perhaps your atoms will scatter in 5 minutes from now and you will prove to have been an accidental particle fart of the universe that just happened to blow in on a breeze, and then blew out again. Who can say!!!???
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Being that this is a Star Trek post I'll just add this.
Lt. Cmdr. Data: "Sir, our sensors are showing this to be the absence of everything. It is a void without matter or energy of any kind."
Commander Riker: "Yet this hole has a form, Data; it has height, width..."
Lt. Cmdr. Data: "Perhaps. Perhaps not, Sir."
Captain Picard: "That's hardly a scientific observation, Commander."
Lt. Cmdr. Data: "Captain, the most elementary and valuable statement in science, the beginning of wisdom, is, "I do not know". I do not know what that is, Sir."
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“I don’t know” is quite different than “no one can ever know anything.”
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That's fair. But the idea of approaching the universe from a standpoint of not being able to truly "know" is kind of the basis of all science isn't it? We can have evidence of something, maybe even enough evidence to make reliable, repeatable predictions in the context of our infinitely short existences, but it will forever and always be transient knowledge. Nothing in the universe is static and unchanging forever.
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If we want to define knowing things to an extreme degree of gnostic certainty then yes. I prefer though to approach that by saying that there will always be a certain level of technical uncertainty to what we can say about the universe. Because to me this is an asterisk, not a headline. I would not come at it from the opposite angle and say we cannot know anything. It is a question of where the emphasis is, and I find the OP takes the “we can’t know anything” path for literary effect, which I object to because, as I said above, this creates some real world harm.
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Thank you for taking the time to respond, I realized very quickly that I am FULLY out of my depth with this conversation haha. You all are very thoughtful and knowledgeable.
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I believe that we can know things. I just don't believe we can know things objectively. We need a better standard for knowledge than objectivity, because objectivity is worthless.
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To claim something doesn’t exist, based on the inductive principle, is to wave away the entire universe with a flick of the wrist as your opening argument.
I would encourage you to read My antirealist manifesto, which argues that reality is a harmful social construct. I'd also like to pre-empt any accusation that antirealism is anti-science, by pointing out My articles advocating for an antirealist future to the application of the scientific method. I in fact believe that any kind of claim to the existence of absolute or objective knowledge is anti-science, and frankly comes uncomfortably close to the inappropriate application of mysticism. You are right when you say that focusing on the tiny chance that we are wrong isn't pragmatic. Which is why so much of My writing focuses on pragmatism as a better epistemological method than empiricism and rationalism applied for the sake of truth over utility. When I say death is a social construct, I am not saying it's a useless idea, simply because it's untrue. I value usefulness over truth, and death is certainly much more useful than it is true.
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“You can’t just wave away the entire universe”
“Hold my beer.”
Seriously, I’d work on the writing style. I was nearly asleep after the introductory paragraphs defining sub-schools of sub-schools of philosophy, and ten paragraphs in its still unclear where you are going.
I think you have a tendency to dress up your ideas as much as possible in order to legitimate them. You even did it in the above essay. You could have said that advances in medical science have moved the frontier of what we consider “dead” before and could again, therefore we should hesitate before considering death permanent. You didn’t have to invoke Hume at all. But name dropping an author and tying your idea to a previous framework makes it sound more legitimate. Unfortunately it also buries your idea and tethers it to any complications in the invoked frameworks, such as my general allergy to Hume.
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It's fascinating seeing the responses to this from you all who obviously know a lot about philosophy. Coming at it from a layman's perspective, and not really knowing who David Hume was, the science definitions bit was all I could really understand and I interpreted it the way that you say it could have been written. I'm now wondering if just placed my own preconceptions about the bits that I did understand onto the author without really considering the rest.
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I’m absolutely a layman myself too, and somewhat allergic to philosophy and its tautologies. I think it’s exactly as valuable as laypeople find it to be.
This point about induction happens to be an exceptional personal crusade I’ve been on for decades, ever since I saw someone use it in a college debate on “does god exist?”
The “no” debater laid out the usual standards we apply to scientific knowledge and showed how miserably religion satisfies them (it doesn’t even show up to try, of course).
His opponent tried to demolish those standards as a gold statue with clay feet, because really, we can’t know anything - it’s all faith.
I’ll keep standing up to say “fuck that” at every opportunity I get for the rest of my life.
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17 comments