What Have You Changed Your Mind About?

But we tend to not know what we know. We can speak properly without knowing how we do it. We don’t know how we comprehend. We just do.

Finally, I’ve come to think that identifying scientificality with falsifiability lets certain nonscientific theories off the hook, by saying that we should try to find good reasons to believe whether a theory is true or false only when that theory is called “science.” It allows believers to protect their pet theories by saying that they can’t be, and shouldn’t be, subject to falsification, just because they’re clearly not scientific theories. Take the theory that there’s an omnipotent, omniscient, beneficent God. It may not be a scientific hypothesis, but it seems to me to be eminently falsifiable; in fact, it seems to have been amply falsified. But because falsifiability is seen as demarcating the scientific, and since theism is so clearly not scientific, believers in religious ideologies get a free pass. The same is true for many political ideologies. The parity between scientific and nonscientific ideas is concealed by thinking that there’s a simple test that distinguishes science from nonscience, and that that test is falsifiability.

These are described as “subjective”—that is, experienced by a living organism—because they cannot be isolated from the subject experiencing them and measured quantitatively. What is often suggested as an explanation of this is evolutionary complexity: When an organism has a nervous system of sufficient complexity, subjective experience and feelings can arise. This implies that something totally new and qualitatively different can emerge from the interaction of “dead,” unfeeling components such as cell membranes, molecules, and electrical currents.

But this implies getting something from nothing, which violates what I have learned about emergent properties: There is always a precursor property for any phenomenon, and you cannot just introduce a new dimension into the phase space of your model to explain the result. Qualities are different from quantities and cannot be reduced to them.

So what is the precursor of the subjective experience that evolves in organisms? There must be some property of neurons or membranes or charged ions producing the electrical activity associated with the experience of feeling that emerges in the organism.

Pan-sentience shifts science into radically new territory. Science can now be about qualities as well as quantities, helping us to recover quality of life, to heal our relationship to the natural world, and to undo the damage we are causing to the Earth’s ability to continue its evolution along with us. It could help us to recover our place as participants in a world that is ours not to control but to contribute to creatively, along with all the other diverse members of our living, feeling planetary society

As Imre Lakatos, a less-cited (but more subtle) philosopher of science, points out, all scientific theories are unfalsifiable. The ones we take seriously are those that lead to “progressive” research programs, where a small change accommodates a large swath of past and future data. And the ones we abandon are those that lead to “degenerate” ones, where the theory gets patched and repatched at the same rate as new facts come in.

If you’ve spent a long time thinking yourself into a certain intellectual position, you are naturally resistant to letting it go: A lot of work went into it. If it “felt right” to you for whatever complex mesh of personal reasons makes an idea “feel right,” then to abandon it isn’t just a question of rationality but also a question of self-esteem. For if that feeling was wrong, how many others might be? How much of the rest of your intellectual world are you going to have to pick apart? And if everyone has watched you thinking your way there and seen you building your city around it, there might also be the simple issue of losing face.

If we are ever going to achieve a rational approach to organizing our affairs, we have to dignify the process of admitting to being wrong. It doesn’t help matters at all if the media, or your friends, accuse you of “flip-flopping” when you change your mind. Changing our minds is our hope for the future.

We aren’t without investments in our ideas—and for academics, ideas are rarely just academic.

Science is an extraordinary intellectual invention, a construction designed to neutralize the universal human tendency to see what we expected to see and overlook what we didn’t expect. It is designed in many ways to subtract data—to create experiments sufficiently insulated from externalities that we can trace a clear connection from a cause to an effect. It seeks to cancel out prejudices, environmental contingencies, group-think, tradition, pride, hierarchy, dogma—to subtract them all and to see what this or that corner of the world looks like without their effects.

familiar but wrong conclusion is more likely to be reached than an unfamiliar one.