The title of this piece is pretty simple, but the motivation for it is not. Most people already believe that mice are lighter than elephants, so what’s the catch? Well, certain intellectuals will be mad at me for saying this but, some people don’t just believe the mice are lighter than elephants, they know it.
Why does it make (certain) intellectuals mad?
NOTE: This piece is in response to a recent Substack from Dr. Malone called The New Inquisition of Scientism and I highly recommend reading it. There is a cadre of self-important intellectuals who do arrogate themselves up on pedestals. We must beware of them.
There are some intellectuals who promote “scientism” — which Merriam Webster defines as “an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science … .”
Like the pharisees in the Bible, or even Catholic priests at the time of Galileo, these individuals would very much like to retain “control of the narrative” surrounding various things.
While those practicing scientism make unfounded claims, another thing they are guilty of is not accepting founded claims — if those claims come from outside of the approved centers of knowledge, whether it’s establishment Academia or government.
One of the things things that advocates of “scientism” believe is that you can’t discover the truth about things outside of orthodox venues, such as places like Harvard, or MIT (or any number of alphabet agencies of government).
Spoiler: Induction can lead to knowlege
One thing they’ll say is that induction, such as generalizing from a few mice to all mice, cannot lead to knowledge. They’ll say that you cannot get to the general from the particular.
You can’t look at a few things of a given type, to know something about all of the things of that type.
All you can do is gain more probability the more you look, while never reaching a probability of 1.00000 (certainty). This means that stating that the proposition that “mice are lighter than elephants” is not just a belief — but can instead be known to be true — gets them mad.
All mice (past, present, & future) lighter than all elephants (past, present, & future)?
Only endless experimentation inside of the laboratories of Ivy League schools would have led to something which could possibly ground that claim and, because I didn’t spend decades in those schools, I don’t get to make the claim.
Here’s a distribution of the weights of a made-up species of mice:
The bell curve shown is an idealized probability distribution of weights of mice. When idealized, the tails on each end proceed forever, without ever touching the horizontal axis where the probability reduces to zero.
Even so, finding mice above 43 grams is rare. But a small African elephant weighs 6 million grams. Can the weight of a mouse ever reach that high?
According to this idealized model of mouse weights, a weight of, say, 99 grams is “possible” but very “unlikely.” Certain intellectuals might even be so bold as to state that 6 million grams is less likely — but that “everything is possible.”
But let’s extend the reasoning in the other direction once: Is a weight of -99 grams possible?
No.
The probability of negative weight is zero. In other words, it can be known, before even looking at another sample of mice, that mouse weights will not be negative. Notice how you get to a weight of zero even within 5 standard deviations of the mean weight of 23 grams!
For the same reason that you cannot have negative weight — because it violates inviolable bio-physical laws — you cannot have a mouse that weighs 6 million grams. That claim transcends all experience, it generalizes beyond all recorded mouse weights, but it is still knowable (just like the claim that negative weights do not exist).
Another way to say this is: Reality has limits (not everything is possible).
Achilles and the Tortoise
A paradox ascribed to the ancient Greek thinker, Zeno, states that, if the fastest runner known at the time (Achilles) raced a tortoise, and the tortoise had a head start, then Achilles would never catch up.
If the time it takes to close the first distance is hypothetically one minute of race time, and the time it takes to close the second (shorter) distance is 0.1 minutes of race time, and the time it takes to close the third (bottom) distance is 0.01 minutes of race time, then an infinite series of added time develops:
(1) + (0.1) + (0.01) + (0.001) + (0.0001) + (0.00001) … or, put together, 1.1111111111111111 …
Because a positive amount of time is being added in each step — and the steps are infinite — 2,000 years of thinkers couldn’t prove that Achilles catches the tortoise. But simple logic reveals that, no matter how many additions you make, you never touch the first number.
That first “1 minute” will never, ever, reach “2 minutes” from the infinite addition shown above. But everyone knows that there will be a time when 2 minutes have passed — so it can be known, not merely “believed,” that Achilles catches up.
One issue Dr. Malone raised
In his warning about scientism, Dr. Malone talks about how intellectual materialists really do think that they can pass judgment about spiritual matters, by pre-defining them out of existence. According to their reasoning, because spiritual matters are not picked up by the 5 senses (sight, sound, touch, smell, taste) — they cannot be said to exist.
But besides our perceptual powers of awareness, we are also gifted with conceptual powers of awareness regarding intangible things. It’s how we can tell that invisible and non-physical things such as “justice” and “benevolence” have objective existence in the world.
The gatekeepers of orthodox “knowledge” would rather maintain control of the narrative regarding such things, so that they could exploit people. In old times, it was witchdoctors who kept control over a tribe and were often paid handsomely to be a keeper of knowledge.
The tribal chieftain often cut a deal with the witchdoctor behind the scenes.
People like Fauci are merely contemporary witchdoctors. We must remain wary of people who say that you cannot personally discover truths of things, because you do not have the accolades for it, or your thought patterns did not include the orthodox (generally-recognized-as-true) assumptions about things, or whatever.