Never forget how unnatural the bird perspective is
And isn't it remarkable what lucky frogs and squirrels we are?
In my previous post, two weeks ago, I finally devoted some attention to the concept of bird perspective, after which this Substack newsletter is named. Among other thoughts, I speculated that humanity discovered the idea of random coincidence by ascending to a bird perspective. But the discovery took a long time! Bird perspectives are “unnatural”, one could say. If you are nevertheless quite fluent with them, and also are interested in the sociology or history of ideas, then the following mantra might be helpful:
NEVER ASSUME THAT OTHER PEOPLE TAKE THE BIRD PERSPECTIVE AS WELL.
Perhaps it is especially true for those bird perspectives that involve reference classes or items. Those “appear to form quite a principled category”, I mused in the previous post, and all bird perspectives in the present one hereafter belong to that category. Anyhow, jumping right in now with my favourite illustration, philosopher Neil Van Leeuwen writing on the “Evidence Game”:
Why should the Gospels, including their supernatural portions, be historical documents, but not the Quran? There is not a fair answer to this question. Rather, the Christian apologist’s r-principles of generation for her version of The Evidence Game exclude the Quran.
Let me first give some paragraphs of context to this. The quotation comes from a 2017 paper in the journal Philosophical Explorations. When people invoke evidence for their religious beliefs, they are (knowingly or unknowingly) playing a game only, Van Leeuwen claims. And there is a natural demand for this kind of theory. For example, if researchers want to define the subject of a “science of misinformation” (a forlorn project anyway), the case of religious beliefs is awkward — if those are really beliefs in the ordinary sense, which Van Leeuwen helpfully argues they are not. Similarly for psychiatrists who want to define what a delusion is, etc.
The 2014 paper introducing Van Leeuwen’s theory was titled Religious Credence is not factual belief. Notably, though, many people’s beliefs about science or medicine join religious ones in not qualifying as factual in this framework. When critics pointed that out, Van Leeuwen replied that the notion wasn’t meant to distinguish religious beliefs from those, but rather from a pervasive web of mundane and usually true beliefs about the world without which we could not function, a web that is so taken for granted that the critics apparently overlook it (he claims — it would be astonishing if they did, as his point seems rather obvious). Yet it seems doubtful whether the 2014 paper would have had the impact it had, if everyone had been aware right from the first moment that his notion of factuality excludes many beliefs about science, too.
He also claims that religious beliefs are switched off outside specific settings, like when fictional imaginings guide actions only in the setting of make-believe play. I think this claim is just false; and the correct way to look at the topic is, first, to replace his misleading notion of factual beliefs by Dan Sperber’s notion of intuitive, as opposed to reflective, beliefs (see here, also here; his 2014 paper quotes other Sperber works but not these directly relevant ones); and secondly, to observe that beliefs are like clothes in that they can have signalling functions in addition to their standard function. Many religious beliefs are reflective beliefs with considerable signalling value.
I have yet to comment on the Gospels-versus-Quran issue. Basically, Van Leeuwen’s theory is refuted by how much many religious believers apparently care about evidence for or against their beliefs. Since I find his attempt to explain that away so unintentionally funny, I can’t resist adding a second quotation from his 2017 paper on the “Evidence Game”, even though that one, about intelligent-design advocates playing the game, does not relate to a bird perspective:
The second law [of thermodynamics] resembles a law that would make a splendid piece of evidence for intelligent design, but part of it [he means the restriction to closed systems] needs to be lopped off; the post-amputation law is the r-prop. Similarly, a stick with an awkward branch sticking out might make a good sword prop [in a children’s make-believe game], as long as you rip off or ignore the awkward branch. In either case, the agent playing make-believe or the agent playing The Evidence Game is making an active choice to put something in the exclusion class that does not suit her game.
Thermodynamics is a difficult topic, so I wouldn’t be desperate for an explanation of the mistake when some people get it wrong. But the point about Gospels versus Quran looks indeed simple, he’s right about that. So how can people deny it? For one thing, as I noted in the previous post, motivated reasoners can usually come up with differences they declare relevant, and I assume this has been done with respect to Gospels versus Quran (and vice versa). But most importantly, to see the force of even this simple point you need to ascend to a bird perspective, and I submit that many people just don’t do that. The fact is, despite our new-found (in evolutionary history) ability to transcend our observer viewpoint in principle, we are particular observers in this world, each one with their own point of view, and the frog perspective is the default. Yes, I could have been any of these other observers, but at the end of the day, I am merely myself, that attitude is clearly so much closer to home.
I was getting increasingly philosophical there. The basic point is simply, again:
NEVER ASSUME THAT OTHER PEOPLE TAKE THE BIRD PERSPECTIVE AS WELL.
Does “other people” stand for “religious people”? No. Readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten, for example, are probably less religious on average than the overall population, and yet we can see how they like their frog perspectives as well. Thus, two years ago, Alexander showed in an investigation that a homicide spike in the US in 2020 corresponded to the “Black Lives Matter” protests and subsequent police pullback. He also documented that many media tried to hide this connection (with links to The Atlantic, The Intercept, The New York Times, Pew Research Center, Voice of America, Vox, The Washington Post). And then he added the following exasperated paragraph:
I won’t waste your time by speculating on why they might do this, or what the implications might be for the truth of everything else you read on these sites. I have tried this so many times and it never works. People keep saying things like “oh, I liked when he made an compelling statistical case showing that the media was completely wrong on this one thing they sounded very confident in, but then he started saying the media is often wrong and biased, and that sounded cliched and conspiracy-ish and right-wing, so I lost interest”.
Actually, Alexander’s resigned sarcasm here might have shaken more readers out of their frog perspectives (known in this case also as the Gell-Mann amnesia effect) than a patient exposition would have of how, from a bird perspective that looks down on the whole ensemble of cases, it would be an unlikely lucky coincidence if exactly those ones, presumably not a big percentage, that Alexander has time to thoroughly investigate are the foul ones.
One could even double down on the sarcasm by playing on the idea that people implicitly claim to be “lucky frogs”. For example, we are not crazy contrarians or anything like that, although admittedly there are a few instances where those with official credentials get it wrong and we have to count ourselves lucky that we happen to possess particular domain knowledge ourselves in those cases, strong enough knowledge not to be fooled . . .
I even feel this way (now we’re changing the topic considerably) with Stephen Hawking’s famous question “what is it that breathes fire into the equations”. If I understand it correctly, Hawking refers to those equations that describe our particular universe. I guess we’re really lucky to find ourselves in a universe described by equations that are “on fire”, that describe the physical universe we live in — as opposed to purely mathematical universes that, if described by sufficiently complex equations, are going to contain zombie mathematical entities. (Those unlucky entities may well insist, too, that they alone live in a physical universe . . .)
See also the “mathematical universe hypothesis” by Max Tegmark, the theoretical physicist who I took the term “bird perspective” from, as noted in my previous post. The context there was a similar one in spirit, the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, superior from a bird perspective. And if in Alexander’s writing we go another two-and-a-half years back, we can find the latter topic there as well. See here, where he invokes Sean Carroll and shows that preferring many-worlds over standard collapse theory is basically similar to preferring the standard explanation of dinosaur fossils to a theory that Satan planted them to deceive us.
Which is surely a strong and surprising conclusion! Not being a physicist himself, Alexander hedges his position, “I’m sure the reality is more nuanced”. Well, surely it must be more nuanced, given how many physicists and philosophers disagree. Surely it can’t be that simple. Or can it? Actually, I think it might be that simple. Because we remember:
NEVER ASSUME THAT OTHER PEOPLE TAKE THE BIRD PERSPECTIVE AS WELL.
Yes, “other people” includes brainy physicists and philosophers of physics.
So far I’ve shown no sympathy at all for frog perspectives in this post, but let’s end it on a somewhat different note, elicited by moving from epistemic to moral considerations:
Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.
Now that’s a beautiful bird perspective! Kant’s Categorical Imperative. And think also of the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Ethics seems to be basically the same idea as the bird perspective that treats the others as one’s reference class!
There are complications, however. A lot will have been written about this issue, and I apologise for wading in here without having perused the literature; but just to throw out a quick thought, if I were to leave my fingerprint and then state the universal maxim “anyone who matches this fingerprint is entitled to free coffee for life”, that couldn’t quite be what Kant meant, could it? I would have smuggled my particularity into the supposedly universal maxim. But then, what about a maxim that allows people to lock strangers out of their house? Surely reasonable, but still, wouldn’t it include “house-insider status” as a particularity? It seems that a compromise has to be struck here.
That makes the widespread refusal to ascend to the bird perspective more understandable. As just noticed, we can’t completely deny our particularity. Then again, I believe that a complete superiority of the bird perspective in epistemic matters still stands, in examples like those in the present post (cf. misapplied outside views in the previous one). Come to think of it, nobody should have expected that complete superiority to carry over to ethics, given David Hume’s famous separation between “is” and “ought”.