Uniqueness, similarity, difference.

Adam Frank, at NPR, in his post Things, Ideas And Reality: What Persists?, prompted the response below (which can also be found as a comment there).

There is only uniqueness. Everything is different. Then comes noticing that things are similar. An apple is different from another apple; an apple is different from an orange, but they are both fruit. People are all different, but they are all people. Abstraction is the process of noticing and using similar beginnings to predict when we will come to similar outcomes. Noticing differences is essential to know when there may be unexpected turns, and then it is useful to notice similarities amongst differences.

Science deals only with reproducible, similar events, it can say nothing about anything that is unique. Insofar as everything is absolutely unique, Science can say nothing about the world, absolutely, but insofar as we notice similarities, Science is very useful. If the similarities are only in our imagination, the "true objective world" is as tenuous, or as solid, as our imagination.

Insofar as theory is capable, we can imagine ways both to use and test that capability.

This was also prompted by a conversation at dinner on Friday night with a Episcopal minister who is wife to a colleague of my wife. Science finds similarities that are very useful, but it cannot touch anything that is unique. If everything is unique, then, without taking away from remarkable success, Science makes contact with the world of measure zero. Also, we might think that there is no separation of one thing from another.

Group identification and the Tea Partiers?

This is a comment, a long way down, on a Slacktivist post,

Empathy and epistemic closure

It's hard to know what my title should be, but here's my comment:

I think you're arguing that if we support each other, and consider what's best for other people as much as what's best for us, we will all make it. All 6, 8, 10, 12, 15 billion people, and every animal and plant, will go on into the cooperative future.

But suppose you believe that everything's going to hell. You believe that there are too many people on the earth. If you believe, deep down, that we're not all going to make it, empathy is a real problem. You start hardening yourself, preparing for riots and chaos, deciding who you will and won't support. Deciding which group gives you the best chance of survival, of making it through. Make that decision, and that group accepts you as one their own, then you're committed to that survival strategy. The closer you think the riots are, the more you can't back out, the more you have to go along if the beliefs of the group you've decided is your survival strategy start to make no sense. The more you're committed to that group as your only chance of survival, the more you want to make it strong and purge it of anything that might make it weak. Groups within the group emerge. Of course the riots and chaos are dealt with by a fundamental concept, "the end-times", which goes close to one-to-one with environmental disaster, but gives it meaning, of a sort.

Is this "stupid"? Much has been made above of "smart people can deal with complex understandings", but the bandying about of "stupid" is just the opposite. If environmental disaster leads to a good approximation of the end-times, with only a few million people left alive in the US, 50 million across the world, say, then on the liberal gold-standard of meaning, evolution, it is arguable that it is who is left who will not be stupid, as a matter of definition. Can we be sure that only empathic people will be left? Or does it seem more of those who will be left will be people who have decided to harden themselves to outsiders, but to cooperate fiercely within their little group?

If there come to be riots and chaos, smart liberals may find themselves defending their own. By writing this comment, I suppose I can't call myself a smart liberal, but since I have residual empathy, Good Luck.