What Do You Know

I spent the morning chatting with my colleague who teaches chemistry at Cascadia. He’s so articulate, especially when discussing teaching, that he makes me feel like a babbling fool and I’m also intimidated by his utmost confidence in the scientific method as a means to yield truths about the world.

I’m sure his confidence is well-placed, and I wish I were technically-minded and well-organized enough to reliably draw conclusions about causes and effects from careful observation and testing.

But I find that I can’t quite shake my magical beliefs about how the world works.

Even though I’m extremely skeptical that there exists an unseen realm that makes things happen in this visible one, I still seem to arrive at many conclusions wherein the causal connections between things are hard to identify. And I have a hard time letting those conclusions go even in the face of scant or nonexistent supporting evidence.

For example, I remain extremely sympathetic to rather vague notions of instant karma, at least for me. I can’t help believing that the universe pays me back pretty quickly when I do something I probably shouldn’t have. And while I also believe that this belief is probably a product of a cognitive bias that has me only noticing the evidence which supports my prior belief in instant karma, I still believe it.

Or, for instance, when I’m trying to diagnose the causes or cures of an illness or injury in myself or my loved ones, I tend to intuitively arrive at my conclusion while simultaneously rejecting evidence that would refute it—ironically mimicking, more or less, how our medical insurance company works.

As a student of philosophy, I was never that interested in epistemology, which always seemed to me to be so much intellectual hair-splitting over issues of little consequence. But in the real-world, questions of what makes something true or at least reasonable to believe are critical.

And how do I know that? I just do.