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disobey the Supreme Court (and Congress!) under certain circumstances. This would
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create a new court case, and would throw the whole system into disarray, because it
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would be so unexpected, so Tangled-so Strange!
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The irony is that once you hit your head against the ceiling like this, where you
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are prevented from jumping out of the system to a yet higher authority, the only recourse
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is to forces which seem less well defined by
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rules, but which are the only source of higher-level rules anyway: the lower-level rules,
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which in this case means the general reaction of society. It is well to remember that in a
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society like ours, the legal system is, in a sense, a polite gesture granted collectively by
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millions of people-and it can be overridden just as easily as a river can overflow its
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banks. Then a seeming anarchy takes over; but anarchy has its own kinds of rules, no less
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than does civilized society: it is just that they operate from the bottom up, not from the
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top down. A student of anarchy could try to discover rules according to which anarchic
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situations develop in time, and very likely there are some such rules.
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An analogy from physics is useful here. As was mentioned earlier in the book,
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gases in equilibrium obey simple laws connecting their temperature, pressure, and
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volume. However, a gas can violate those laws (as a President can violate laws)-provided
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it is not in a state of equilibrium. In nonequilibrium situations, to describe what happens,
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a physicist has recourse only to statistical mechanics-that is, to a level of description
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which is not macroscopic, for the ultimate explanation of a gas's behavior always lies on
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the molecular level, just as the ultimate explanation of a society's political behavior
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always lies at the "grass roots level". The field of nonequilibrium thermodynamics
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attempts to find macroscopic laws to describe the behavior of gases (and other systems)
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which are out of equilibrium. It is the analogue to the branch of political science which
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would search for laws governing anarchical societies.
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Other curious tangles which arise in government include the FBI investigating its
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own wrongdoings, a sheriff going to jail while in office, the self-application of the
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parliamentary rules of procedure, and so on. One of the most curious legal cases I ever
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heard of involved a person who claimed to have psychic powers. In fact, he claimed to be
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able to use his psychic powers to detect personality traits, and thereby to aid lawyers in
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picking juries. Now what if this "psychic" has to stand trial himself one day? What effect
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might this have on a jury member who believes staunchly in ESP? How much will he feel
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affected by the psychic (whether or not the psychic is genuine)? The territory is ripe for
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exploitation-a great area for selffulfilling prophecies.
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Tangles Involving Science and the Occult
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Speaking of psychics and ESP, another sphere of life where strange loops abound is
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fringe science. What fringe science does is to call into question many of the standard
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procedures or beliefs of orthodox science, and thereby challenge the objectivity of
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science. New ways of interpreting evidence that rival the established ones are presented.
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But how do you evaluate a way of interpreting evidence? Isn't this precisely the problem
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of objectivity all over again, just on a higher plane? Of course. Lewis Carroll's infinite-
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regress paradox appears in a new guise. The Tortoise would argue that if you want to
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show that A is a fact, you need evidence: B. But what makes you sure that B is evidence
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of A?' To show that, you need meta-
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evidence: C. And for the validity of that meta-evidence, you need metameta-evidence-
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and so on, ad nauseam. Despite this argument, people have an intuitive sense of evidence.
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This is because-to repeat an old refrain-people have built-in hardware in their brains that
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includes some rudimentary ways of interpreting evidence. We can build on this, and
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accumulate new ways of interpreting evidence; we even learn how and when to override
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our most basic mechanisms of evidence interpretation, as one must, for example, in trying
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to figure out magic tricks.
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Concrete examples of evidence dilemmas crop up in regard to many phenomena
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of fringe science. For instance, ESP often seems to manifest itself outside of the
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laboratory, but when brought into the laboratory, it vanishes mysteriously. The standard
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scientific explanation for this is that ESP is a nonreal phenomenon which cannot stand up
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to rigorous scrutiny. Some (by no means all) believers in ESP have a peculiar way of
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fighting back, however. They say, "No, ESP is real; it simply goes away when one tries
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to observe it scientifically-it is contrary to the nature of a scientific worldview." This is
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an amazingly brazen technique, which we might call "kicking the problem upstairs".
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What that means is, instead of questioning the matter at hand, you call into doubt theories
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belonging to a higher level of credibility. The believers in ESP insinuate that what is
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wrong is not their ideas, but the belief system of science. This is a pretty grandiose claim,
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and unless there is overwhelming evidence for it, one should be skeptical of it. But then
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here we are again, talking about "overwhelming evidence" as if everyone agreed on what
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that means!
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The Nature of Evidence
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The Sagredo-Simplicio-Salviati tangle, mentioned in Chapters XIII and XV, gives
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another example of the complexities of evaluation of evidence. Sagredo tries to find some
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objective compromise, if possible, between the opposing views of Simplicio and Salviati.
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But compromise may not always be possible. How can one compromise "fairly" between
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right and wrong? Between fair and unfair? Between compromise and no compromise?
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These questions come up over and over again in disguised form in arguments about
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ordinary things.
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Is it possible to define what evidence is? Is it possible to lay down laws as to how
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to make sense out of situations? Probably not, for any rigid rules would undoubtedly have
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exceptions, and nonrigid rules are not rules. Having an intelligent AI program would not
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solve the problem either, for as an evidence processor, it would not be any less fallible
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than humans are. So, if evidence is such an intangible thing after all, why am I warning
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against new ways of interpreting evidence? Am I being inconsistent? In this case, I don't
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think so. My feeling is that there are guidelines which one can give, and out of them an
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organic synthesis can be made. But inevitably some amount of judgment and intuition
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must enter the picture-things which are different in different people. They will also be
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different in
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different AI programs. Ultimately, there are complicated criteria for deciding if a method
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of evaluation of evidence is good. One involves the "usefulness" of ideas which are
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arrived at by that kind of reasoning. Modes of thought which lead to useful new things in
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life are deemed "valid" in some sense. But this word "useful" is extremely subjective.
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My feeling is that the process by which we decide what is valid or what is true is
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an art; and that it relies as deeply on a sense of beauty and simplicity as it does on rock-
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solid principles of logic or reasoning or anything else which can be objectively
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