Doctors debating vaccination

Dochotomy by MsLil (2021)

 

 

(This article is a L-O-N-G read, and it is incomplete. Constructive comments are welcome.)

The ground rules for the debate

Dr Provax: Greetings fellow doctor, what do you know?

Dr Novax: Afternoon doctor. What do I know? Not much. Well, not entirely true. There's one thing I know: I'm done with the continual coverage of COVID. It's been two years now.

 

Dr Provax: Agreed. And with the latest variant, and two years to prepare, it is time for nature to show the non-vaccinators the folly of their reasoning.

Dr Novax: Ah, so you're vaccinated?

Dr Provax: Absolutely. You're not?

Dr Novax: No.

Dr Provax: Oh my God, why not? You’re crazy. We need to stop you anti-vaxxers before you kill us.

Dr Novax: Whoa, whoa. We’re friends, so I’m happy to have this discussion, but only if we have ground rules.

Dr Provax: What ground rules?

Dr Novax: Let’s refrain from invoking any unproved metaphysical entities such as God who are unnecessary to the discussion here. No ad hominem -- meaning you can attack the argument, but not the person. Calling me 'crazy' is ad hominem. And try to wind back the hyperbole such as your presumption that I am an 'anti-vaxxer', and your exaggeration that non-vaccinators will kill everyone. Everyone? That seems a lot strong: for one thing, if the vaccine is protective, then the vaccinated ought not be especially threatened by the non-vaccinator’s choice.

Predicting the future imperfectly

Do humans want to know their future?

Yes, people are interested in knowing their future.

We want to know the future in terms of…

•  what the weather will be tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after…?
  
• whether our new product is likely to be a success in the market or not?
  
• whether our large investment will be go up or go down in value?
  
• what numbers will win next week’s lottery? 
• whether or not we will survive the fatal disease we have contracted (with certainty, not a probability)?
  
• can modern medicine prevent or cure the fatal disease I have contracted?
  
• can we humans live forever?
  
• do humans avert their own extinction?
  
• what is the human-experience after death (assuming our quest for human-generated eternal life fails)?
  

Can humans know their future?

The future remains uncertain. No matter how good our prediction skills, the future is uncertain, both empirically and logically.

Empirically, even if we have “big data”, massive computing capacity, and fantastic skills, the weather tomorrow may be as predicted, but it may not. There is no certainty about what the future holds, and complexity and chaos theory ensures that it remains so. 

Logically, even if the world is a series of causes and effects, there is no logic that permits us to say that many previous contingent events will occur again in the future (see Hume). Sure, the sun has ‘risen’ every day for thousands of millennia, but it does not logically follow that it will do so tomorrow. 

Even with “more data” and more skills, some of these questions about the future, especially the ones further down the list above, are likely to always remain beyond us. 

What is the human-experience after death? Who knows? It has not stopped many people developing stories of what they think, even believe, or perhaps wish will happen after death. But the truth is we do not know. And even more, that we are unlikely to ever know.

Do humans avert their own extinction? We might desperately wish it to be so, but humanity does or does not survive remains in the future, and is unlikely to be known. The problem is open-ended for even if humanity survives the current apocalyptic scenarios, the possibility of extinction in some other, currently unseen and perhaps unknown apocalyptic scenario remains.

Can we live forever? It hasn’t happened yet although it is clear that human life has been massively extended beyond the standard “three score years and ten”. Can a human live forever? Perhaps, but perhaps not. Even if we do manage to insert our mental selves into a machine, what happens if the world ends and the machine stops? 

So many unknowns. 

But there are also some confusions that get tangled with the idea of prediction.

The first is confusing possibility with prediction. It is possible that there is life after death, that humans escape extinction and that people get to live forever (or at least 200 years or more). So, yes, these outcomes might be possible, but that is not a prediction. The other outcome is also possible!

Which leads to the related issue of confusing guesses with predictions. Guessing that a tossed coin will come up heads is a guess, not a prediction. If the coin does come up heads, then it was a lucky guess, not a correct prediction.  

Predicting the future is already an uncertain game, but it seems certain that uncertainty will always plague questions about particular futures such as the human experience after death, whether humans avoid extinction, and whether humans can live forever. 

My prediction is that we will only ever be able to predict the future imperfectly.

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"The history of predicting the future" (Rees 2021, Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/history-predicting-future/

"Humans are bad at predicting futures that don't benefit them" (Beaton 2017, The Atlantic)
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/humans-are-bad-at-predicting-futures-that-dont-benefit-them/544709/

Why is time so warped?

Time has a curious essence. Unlike the other three dimensions - length, breadth, depth - we can travel in only one direction through time: from past to future via the present.

 
We cannot visit a moment in time that we have passed.

Despite the past and future being simply two ends of one dimension, we take the past as cast in stone, and the future as unknown.

Travel into the past is impossible, travel into the future a dream.

How well do we ‘know’ our past & our future?

We fool ourselves that we ‘know’ both our past and our future with stories about each.

The story we tell ourselves about our past is called history.

We put a lot of faith into this story in some ways, but it seems unjustified. If history is important because it facilitates learning, how come our own history is full of stories that are like repeats on television where at some point, often much too late, we realize that we’ve seen this before?

The story we tell ourselves about the future is called a prediction. We put less faith into predictions in general, but curiously, we do put a lot of faith into some predictions. We have many imaginings about catastrophic futures – pandemic, climate change, nuclear war, etc.

All are quite possible, but we tend to focus on one at a time, a flavour of the month (or year). While the possibilities for global annihilation are plentiful, even infinite, annihilation by pandemic is the most current scare du jour.

Before death by pandemic was imagined, we feared annihilation by climate change. Before annihilation by climate change, we feared an ending in nuclear war. Before an end in nuclear war was imagined, we feared … and so on back to various doomsday scenarios, secular and religious.

Outrage ain't right

 “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions”
  – David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Book 3, Part 3, Section 3)

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Enough of the outrage!

I hear your passion, your judgment, your indignation, your disgust. All because I'm unwilling to agree with you.

Outrage is easy to hear because it is pure passion speaking out. Loudly.