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