Earth needs a virtual country:#Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence
That tweet was followed in short order by another, a picture of several people holding up signs declaring themselves to be citizens of Rationalia.
I'm not the only person who finds issue with it. It was actually quite interesting to me to see all of the people who called Tyson out on the obvious failures and weaknesses of his proposal - interesting and reassuring.
See, when skeptics, truth seekers, and logical thinkers fall too far into the comforts of evidence and reason, they forget themselves. They forget something important about the world, about humanity. Well, they forget many important things about all of those things, actually.
We'll cut to the chase with the most glaring and devastating issue - the first and foremost, absolutely most important thing that proponents of the "nothing but logic" school of thought seem to forget: there is no logical argument, no evidence to be found, and no scientific case to be made for the value of a human being's life.
Let me make myself clear: there is no non-emotional, non-moral reason to not kill other people for any reason, up to and including no reason.
Even if your moral standards are baseless - i.e., you have no higher power on which to base your moral standards, people generally still have a moral inclination toward not killing other people for no reason. Without a moral standard, we do find people finding excuses and reasons to enact violence upon other people, up to and including murder. Interestingly, those reasons are based on evidence, whether that evidence is good or bad is up for debate, but no one rationalizes killing someone else without a reason. Only the truly sociopathic find themselves on that boat.
Yes, not only is there no logical reason based off of science or evidence that would allow us to conclude that killing other people is wrong, but when you employ cold, unfeeling logical reasoning into the equation, you find yourself with groups of people rationalizing murder. The use of pure, cold logic without an understanding of moral standards or the influence of emotion, and dare I say humanity, will lead people toward murder. Eugenics, genocide, ethnic cleansing - you name it. These ideologies all use "evidence and reason" to justify their immoral behaviors. And we cannot combat these reasonings with evidence - the only objections to murder are moral and emotional.
It's not that there are not objections to murder, we simply find that any and all of them are emotional or moral. Attempting to dismiss these types of reasoning as simply not valid due to the idol-worship of the holy and sacred Logic has the same results as the reason we fear an artificially intelligent robotic takeover - nothing but logic will always result in our deaths. The first person to comment on Tyson's tweet makes this point:
This is not the only thing, of course, but it is by far the absolute most important. Indeed, Tyson's proposed Rationalia would devolve in short order into a tyrannical, emotionless murder factory. With no logical reason to not kill other people, we easily find the justification for murder of the physically and mentally disabled. What reason would we have for allowing these logically and rationally inferior people in a purely logical society? When we weigh the pros and cons of allowing those unable or unfit to work and contribute, we will have plenty of evidence showing that their lives are in fact not quite worth as much as the mentally fit and physically capable populace. Surely there would be people opposed to this plan, but unless those people can provide logical evidence that their disabled friends and family could be a benefit to society, they will see them enter the execution room.
There are plenty of reasons to oppose pure emotion in regards to decision making. However, we see that pure logic is in fact deadly. The logic vs. emotion camps have created a false dilemma - these two schools of thought at not at odds with one another. They work in tandem, they exist necessarily side by side. The entire concept of humanity is based on a working relationship between emotion and logic that allows us to see the values of vastly important aspects of life like love and friendship while maintaining the ability to make the best decisions possible - usually for what we hope to be the benefit of our friends and loved ones.
This is what we tend to forget. Even those among us who champion pure logic and reason tend to still find themselves experiencing emotions of all sorts. They have families and loyalties, they create a moral framework for themselves - with or without a higher power to hold them accountable - and they, typically, fall in love. The ones who avoid emotion and relationships tend to come out miserable. The attempts to dislodge emotions from our world and our lives always fail - we either give in or give up.
A world of pure emotion would be chaotic - poor decision making, laws that contradict each other, and rampant and indefensible inequality would result. A world of pure logic would be Hell itself, an utter dystopian nightmare. Any attempts to separate these two aspects of what makes us human is an attempt to sabotage humanity.
People are inclined toward "us vs. them" mentalities. We unconsciously put ourselves into camps, form alliances with those who think like us, and consider those who think the opposite thing to be bad, stupid, or inferior. In its extreme form, you end up with, well, extremists. What happened is that camps of people who thought logic and reason were great further and further separated themselves from everything that wasn't logic and reason. Instead of recognizing the inherent values in both logic and emotion, they saw the damage that pure emotion does and they concluded that emotion is bad. Highly emotional thinkers, valuing their emotional perspectives, were shunned and pushed away from logic by the idea that logic is more important than their emotional conclusions, and found themselves separating further and further from logic. Now we have two extreme camps of people, one who thinks it's okay to disregard emotion and one that thinks it's okay to disregard logic.
They are both dead wrong.
To emphasize, dead wrong.
To further make my point, let's clarify something about evidence based decision making. Here are some straight forward facts about what "evidence" even is:
- Evidence is unbiased.
- Evidence does not make decisions.
- Evidence does not say anything.
- Evidence does not conclude anything.
- Evidence can be incomplete.
- Evidence can be misunderstood.
- Evidence can be misused.
- Evidence can be fabricated.
That's probably enough. Basically, what is being proposed is that people - finite, biased, imperfect and influenceable people - would regard evidence as the only method through which to obtain truth. They would then use that discerned "truth" to make decisions, laws, proposals, changes, and decide who lives and dies.
The problem should be clear, but I'll elaborate. People can misinterpret evidence, indeed, they can even purposefully misrepresent it through sophistical means - as in, purposefully manipulating available evidence to make it appear as they desire, or simply making a compelling enough case for what they want you to believe the evidence shows (when it could easily show otherwise). These "higher thinkers" already do this all the time. A society run by the people specifically showcased in that earlier picture instantly makes this proposed nation sound far more hellish than it does in mere theory.
Furthermore, there is nothing on which to base the conclusions of your evidence without some sort of moral framework. Yes, an evidence-only based system could literally not even exist, as evidential conclusions require bias. People consider bias to be a naughty word, but in reality, our entire world is shaped by biases. We can't conclude anything unless we make inferences - if we had no biases, we could not come to conclusions on anything except for the most basic and obvious of things.
Think of it this way - if you are attempting to discern the likelihood of someone having committed a crime based on the evidence for the crime, unless there is definitive, corroborating video proof, you cannot conclude whether or not they are guilty without bias. You must make that leap from "it is likely/unlikely" to "they are guilty/innocent" using inference - or, biases. If we have an eyewitness testimony, but that person has been shown to lie, has a criminal record or has a strong personal relationship or loyalty to the defense or the prosecution, then we can conclude that their testimony may be biased - it might be fabricated, or simply fake.
We have to use inferences every step of the way through the process of determining the validity of a claim. We prefer witnesses unassociated with the people involved because they are less likely to be biased - this conclusion itself is based off of our biases. A witness associated with the people involved could be unbiased, but due to our own biases, we assume it is likely that they will be biased. If we have evidence showing that the accused was present at the location of the crime, but not necessarily evidence of them committing the crime, we have to use inference to determine whether or not they were just an innocent bystander who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So evidence is clearly not the end all be all of decision making - it requires inference, which is biased by the people making the decisions. In a system where decisions are only based on evidence as seen fit by the people in charge, we are left with a situation in which the only reality is the personal biases of the governing rulers.
So, pretty much the same thing we see in government anyway.
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