How We Know What We Know -- Chapter Two

When I was in my early twenties I was in love.  It was unrequited, but we still got along well and to this day I still say that she is one of the finest persons I have ever met.  I won’t say it wasn’t painful – as an aspie I probably just didn’t have the knowledge and maturity to win her heart (or maybe it just wasn’t “meant to be”, whatever that means) – but I have always been glad that I knew her.  She was a  terrific friend and companion.

One day, we were discussing ancient pyramids, of both the old and new worlds. You might have noticed that among the very large structures built by these ancient cultures (Maya, Mesopotamia, and Egypt mainly) were a variety of pyramids, from step to flat-faced, with the smaller step ones coming first because they are easier to build, and often evolving, as in Egypt about 2500 BC, toward the huge, flat-faced structures (e.g., Giza).  That this came about by improvements in the needed engineering skills is fairly certain (I doubt they needed ancient astronauts, though of course it is possible), and probably also by larger populations, a decreasing portion of which didn’t have to grow food and so were available as necessary labor.  Better political and cultural organization no doubt played a role too.

In chatting on the subject, she made a claim which I immediately found hard to swallow.  I can accept the Egyptians and Mesopotamians influencing each other; the areas are nearby in the Middle East, while excursions (and even conquests) between the two are common in history.  It’s quite reasonable to imagine (though I am not certain) the two cultures shared and contributed to each others’ pyramid construction techniques and strategies.  I am ignorant of whether this really happened, but it is plausible and easy to believe.

But Egypt/Mesopotamia influencing the Maya?  She was quite sure of this; but it was only because she couldn’t imagine two separate cultures building such common structures, especially such massive ones, without their being a physical connection.  To be fair, the idea sounds superficially reasonable and even compelling, this idea of Egyptian boats making the trans-Atlantic voyage to the Yucatan peninsula and instructing the Mayans on the time-honored art of pyramid building.

What a minute, though.  Ancient Egyptian boats making trans-Atlantic voyages?  In fact, this is a real problem.  As the Europeans were to find out in the 15’th and 16’th centuries AD (and the Chinese about the same time), there are huge differences between large ocean-traversing vehicles and those who stick to rivers, bays, and small seas and lakes.  You need deep, complex keels in the ocean variety to handle the higher and more violent waters and storms, deep harbor ports to handle such vehicles, which are larger, sturdier boats (made with hard wood at least, which Egypt had little of) with more men and much more supplies (to handle journeys of months instead of days or weeks at most), and so on.  Now, I have never heard of any discoveries of these things being made in Egypt through the many centuries she was a great power in the western world; and we certainly would have found them if they’d existed, for there is no lack of archeological exploration there.  What we do know is that Egyptian boats were mostly made from papyrus and other reeds, hardly up to ocean travelling needs.  Indeed, these ancient, (mostly Mediterranean and Black) sea travelling boats stuck close to shorelines for safety, something you couldn’t do in a large ocean.

This would seem to make it virtually impossible for any ancient Egyptians/Mesopotamians to reach the Yucatan Peninsula in Central America.  Even if one did, by accident say (this is possible, with incredible luck), why would they carry pyramid builders and technology with them?  They would have had no ideas what to expect, besides, perhaps, an end of the world to fall off (the ancient Egyptians didn’t know Earth was spherical, a fact that was discovered by the Greeks many centuries later).

I think all this alone destroys this hypothesis, though it is not always easy to make such statements with certainty.  For there is still the fact of similar pyramids in old and new world cultures, something that still needs explaining.  To be complete, the one fact that fits poorest for my friend’s idea (perhaps even worse than the ship dilemma) is that the new world pyramids were built many centuries and even millennia after the old world ones.  If an Egyptian boat were to somehow cross the Atlantic at its pyramid building times it would not have encountered a culture that could imitate much of the Egyptian/Mesopotamian technology/political/cultural levels even to save its life.  Yet by the time the Mayans (and some other Central American cultures) were ready for it, the old world was far beyond pyramids, having acquired the ability to build more complex and useful structures (oh, say, like the Valley of the Kings, the Greek Parthenon and Roman aqueducts, maybe even medieval castles).

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Think about it.  You are a well organized, powerful, and highly command-centered Neolithic stone-age culture, with a good supply of available manual labor (including, no doubt and, alas, slaves) and rock.  Time, as in decades, you have in abundance too, or so you hope.  As the leader of this culture you want to construct huge monuments to your greatness, both to intimidate the masses and your neighbors, and to make you remembered for “all of time.”  What would you construct?

Your engineering skills are still pretty primitive for such tasks, so you need the easiest to build, strongest, and most sturdiest structure you can manage.  Is it hard to see that this would be a pyramid, starting off with small, steps ones and building them larger, with smaller steps, as your engineering and architectural skills were acquired over decades and centuries?  A pyramid is in fact very strong, with a stable, a broad, flat bottom combined with tapering construction above it.  I’m sure it requires the least engineering and architectural mastery, as you are just basically carving out (shaped) stones from a quarry, dragging them to the pyramid, and using scaffolding or levering to get them on top of the existing stones.  You may or may not have wheels (as in logs?) and animal power to help you, but that just increases the time it takes.  Enough people, time, and sophisticated enough stone carving tools, and it can be done in a lifetime or less, maybe a decade or less.

Apparently, my friend didn’t think of all these objections to her “hypothesis” (better just called a belief).  She’d stumbled across one fact, the similarities between old and new world pyramids, and that was good enough for her;  there was little or no further researching, or thinking, or skepticism.  I have an unpleasant feeling that that is the way many if not most people think, especially B people (As can’t do this).  They find one or two facts (or factoids even) which suggest an exciting idea, or one that fits a pre-existing idea, and if they look or think further it is only to confirm the idea, which becomes a simple article of faith from thereon.

I have used the word hypothesis occasionally here, as though it is interchangeable with belief or idea, or even speculation, but to the scientific mind the words hardly approach each other in their meanings.  I haven’t used the word theory yet, which I will now, for again in many minds sets up an equivalency:

Belief/Idea/Speculation = Hypothesis = Theory = Truth

It’s clear to me that my friend, though quite intelligent, thought largely along these lines, while it’s a pretty standard philosophical approach for most of Earth’s population.  Unfortunately, it is wrong, dead wrong,  a mistake no scientists worth rock salt would ever make.  I also think it is why B-type people are much more prevalent than they ought to be.  I also connect it with the authoritarian thinking, mentioned in the last chapter, which can bury human curiosity under a think, wet, cold, woolen blanket; for it is seriously, and even dangerously, fallacy supporting.  My friend was intelligent, but she didn’t know how to think or question things.  Shame, though I still respect her.

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Belief/Idea/Speculation (BIS) = Hypothesis = Theory = Truth.

Is this truly the way type Bs (not all, to be fair) think?  Type As, definitely not:  they could not perform their jobs, or carry on with their enthusiams, if they did.  But is it as common as I have implied?  And if it is, what is really wrong with it?  We are pretty much all after the truth, after all, and this could be a formula for it, one I simply don’t appreciate for prejudices of my own.

Actually I don’t think it is all that too common as pessimism would suggest, at least not in so pure a form.  But people do routinely make confusions here.  This is important:  a big part of science is giving words and concepts precise, accurate meanings, ones that can then be used in almost mathematical formulations.  And so, if we are to use the words/concepts here in like fashion, we must do the same.  Then, perhaps, we can answer the question I raised at the beginning of the section.

BIS’s are what most of our minds are filled with most of the time, even, I strongly expect, most scientists.  E.g., we Believe in an Idea called God, or maybe various gods; or if we don’t, we still Speculate about whether our sentience is a soul, and whether it survives death, by becoming, say, part of some BIS called “cosmic consciousness”.  Or, to be less esoteric, we have plenty of BIS’s about the people in our lives, about politics, economics, religion, and the many, many other things we “think about without thinking about.”

I am not criticizing here.  The human mind probably has to work this way, if for no other reason that if we were as meticulous about science as we are about everything else, it would be difficult to get anything done!  Remember, too, our brains have been largely wired by genes we’ve inherit from our stone age, uncivilized ancestors.  Making “snap decisions” or acting on gut feeling, without too much asking and exploring, was, for most of our evolution, the better way to save your life and pass on your genes.  But  the result is, we’re stuck with them, at least for the time being.

I think my friend’s idea about Egypt helping with new world pyramid building is a textbook example of a BIS.  It is so easy to bring this Idea down, by being skeptical and thinking about it, that she must have never done those things.  No doubt she just liked the idea so much, and, having one fact to support it, simply assumed that meant it was true.  Man BIS’s are based on the one fact fallacy.

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Let’s focus our microscopes on the other three words of the equation:  Hypothesis, Theory, and Fact.

First thing that needs to be said is that, despite all the = signs, from a scientific view they are not equals at all, but distinctly different entities.  At the same time I’ll add up front that in fact they are also not really so distinctly different, but overlap to considerable degrees. 

Let’s start with the word hypothesis, and as usual, an example of it.  I think my counter-arguments to my friend’s idea constitute a valid hypothesis.  It is not theory, and certainly not fact, but simple hypothesis.  First of all, after all I not only attacked the idea (with gusto, of course; all ideas should be attacked with gusto), but presented counter-ideas of my own; for example why pyramid building is natural for a well organized, stone age culture at an early age, and why.

But I did not present any supporting evidence for that, other than the “it should be obvious and here’s why” implication.  Given that, you might dispute my claim to hypothesis status!  But I did give, I believe, some pretty sound logic for it; more important than that, logic that can be explored and tested to see whether it holds up to test.

“Whether it holds up to test” is a great deal of what true hypotheses, the ones in type A minds, concern themselves with.  For an hypothesis is a concept that proposes something, or explains some phenomenon, and which fits all known facts, contradicts none, and can be further tested (that is, can it make predictions).  I believe my friend’s pseudo-hypothesis has actually failed this concept (in her defense, though, she isn’t here to counter her critic, which really isn’t fair), while mine passes muster – probably; I am not an expert in the subjects and there could be facts difficult to fit into it – if only by the skin of its teeth.  And, to reemphasize, it is nowhere near to being a theory, or a fact itself.

I am taking a conservative approach here, as should all scientists.  At heart, we’re curmudgeons who hale from Missouri and often don’t believe things even when we see them with our own eyes (not a good reason to believe just about anything, by the way).  Propose something to a scientist and the best you’re likely to get is, “That’s interesting” along with appropriate body language, or something like that.  Believe it or not, it’s a compliment.

Such are the basics behind hypotheses.  So, next time some fascinating sounding thought comes to you, wait until you’ve checked it against all the facts and logic you can find, and think of some ways it could be further tested, before you announce it to the world.  Not that the thought is automatically useless if you don’t; but then, you’ve just been lucky.  My friend was not lucky.

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Theory and fact are more difficult to pin down, because they really have multiple, sometimes interlocking, meanings.  In common parlance, and often in science too, theory just means an explanation for something, even if not a necessarily proven true one (though it must have good evidence for it); in the former, common parlance, case, but decidedly not for scientists, it is not even a necessarily clear, well-supported explanation.  So if, for example, I propose an explanation for how stars form (already been done!), and it passes the hypothesis examinations, people will call it a theory.  But they might not call it a fact because it still hasn’t passed enough testing.

Charles Darwin’s idea of evolution by natural selection was initially an idea, then a hypothesis, and is now, as it is usually called, a theory.  It’s an explanation, true; but it is also, because it has passed so many tests and has so much evidence on its side, a fully-fledged fact as well.  Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity also get similar, justified, status.  As does the atomic theory of matter.  They’re explanations and they are facts.  Nobody seriously disputes this.

At the same time, as a theory is in another sense also just an hypothesis that has stood up to further testing and observation, such that it can be a claim to fact that may or may not (though most facts do) explain other facts, or support other theories.  I’ll put Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift in this arena.  The theory says that the different continents move around on the ocean beds, occasionally joining each other and then breaking up, as shown below:

Figure II.

     In fact, for much of its existence this theory wasn’t even taken seriously even as an hypothesis by most of the scientific community.  This was partly Wegener’s fault, for he proposed causes for continental drift that were clearly absurd – I emphasize however that this really should not be regarded as evidence against an hypothesis – and mostly (I believe) that community’s fault for not supporting an out of league player (Wegener was a meteorologist by training, not a geologist).

Currently, the theory now is not only clearly true, but is a theory in both senses:  continental drift is a fact (with clear, proven causes), and it is a theory that explains many other phenomena about Earth, ones that had puzzled scientists for a long time.  We now call it rightfully  the theory of plate tectonics, after the true causes of drift.

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Fact.  Now, don’t go thinking that fact means “naked observation by the senses” or anything like that.  I already alluded to this, but this is a good time to go further.  If observation really is equal to fact, then the (fact? – maybe you’re lying, or psychotic) that you just saw someone walk through a wall of solid concrete without smashing it apart in someway a fact, or merely an observation – that is to say, a visual illusion?  I’m sure you’ll conclude the latter, even if you have no idea how the illusion was pulled off or how convincing it is.

This may put us in a pickle.  Facts aren’t observations, but don’t they have to be, somehow, supported by observations?  But how do we know whether we’re being fooled or not by these other observations?

One of the problems of science is that it really can’t make indisputable proclamations about the universe.  This makes science vulnerable to “straw men” arguments, often easy to demolish, but unfortunately inevitable if we want to keep it pure.  Yet we can still make real progress here.  For example, sticking with our concrete-traversing man scenario, what would happen if we were to view it from all viewpoints, even those slowed or speeded up in time?  Why, somewhere the illusion would certainly be revealed, for a lot of magic is based on the magician having his/her audience in a chosen viewpoint.  The brain  insists on interpreting sensory input in certain ways, another evolutionary trap which actually is reasonable but sometimes leads us to error.

This suggests a good way of determining fact (if not with infinite certainty).  We make our observations from as many viewpoints as we can, and compare the results.  If they agree, especially repeatedly, we accept them as true; otherwise, they are spurious observations, fascinating possibly but of little scientific value.  Of course, this is not always easy to do!  Do two astronomers, gazing at the same phenomenon a billion light-years in space, really constitute two viewpoints?  In some ways yes, in others certainly not.  But it is the best we can do in this case.

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One conclusion of this chapter is that the dividing line between hypothesis, theory, and fact is not always clear, in fact it can be quite broad and grey, the subject of innumerable, passionate, debates.  But, I maintain, the line between the first part of the equation, the BIS, and the others is night and day.  And, I emphasize further, this is the line that is so precise in type A’s minds, but can get so muddled in type B’s.  I think this is the main cause of why B’s (say they) don’t get science and math, beyond any natural talents in either areas.

So remember:  you can have all the ideas you want, but if you want them widely accepted as true, you must eschew the BIS approach and embrace the scientific one.  And good luck to you, for it can be and often is a hard trek.