contact@onbelief.org
About the Author: Steve Campbell
I am a Scottish-educated former scientist living in Scotland. I once tested my own IQ in the 1970's and discovered and that I had a score of 70 (idiot level, see illustration below). After practice the score reached 100. Being average has never been more reassuring. It has also been suggested by others that I might have a mild form of dyslexia, which seems to make proof reading difficult. Despite these limitations, I was a lecturer in science in the medical faculty of a UK University and before that a researcher at 3 other universities. I am now a profeesional photographer. A colleague once said that I wrote by a process of evolution through many drafts. For that reason the pages of this web site are subject to change like the editions of a book, only with a much higher mutational frequency.
Do I have any Beliefs, Personal Philosophy or Religion?
Some might describe me presently as a skeptical positivist, logical positivist or empiricist. I value the coherence of ideas. However, I believe coherence needs to be driven by an integration of theories or observations acquired through a reductionist approach. I think that without reductionism the world appears as an inexplicable muddle.
I am primarily concerned with the utility of ideas rather than any abstract sense of truth. I contend that, it is an irrelevance that you know the truth. It is merely a question of what you decide given the evidence. I am therefore a pragmatic relativist.
I probably believe in the value of negative utilitarianism (doing the least harm) as an ethical stance. Although I am a very imperfect creature I believe in the need for moral codes. I am therefore of a secular humanist orientation but nevertheless try to recognise the value of religiously inspired humanistic ideals. I recently became a member of the Humanist Society of Scotland.
It is perhaps an irony that I place emphasis on derivatives of ideas initiated by some of a religious persuasion. The 14th century Franciscan friar William of Occam, proposed what is now known as Occam's razor which is central to the philosophy of this web site. The Edinburgh-educated 18th century English Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes, who developed Bayes theorem on inverse probability, was the originator of an idea that has now evolved into the Subjective Bayesian philosophical view of probability and belief that is also adopted here. (For further reading see Bayesian Inference and Subjective Bayesian Analysis: Principles and Practice).
I believe on pragmatic and philosophical grounds that rigidity and absoluteness of belief in many domains of thinking causes unhappiness, and also restricts novelty, creativity, and intellectual progress in the world.
Acknowledgements
My apologies to those who's ideas I have used without explicit reference. Many thanks to the highly talented photographer and graphics artist Gordon Saunders of Saunders Imaging for the jocular Nobrainer image. I am flattered by his metaphor of internal illumination rather than nothingness.
Use of Wikipedia
Despite its imperfections, a deliberate decision has been made on philosophical and social grounds to use Wikipedia as the major reference source for this internet site. To understand the way Wikipedia operates see the talk by Jimmy Wales: How a ragtag band created Wikipedia. (Also see Jimmy Wales and Jimbo Wales at Wikipedia) How many other encyclopedias have you encountered where the beliefs of its writers can be openly questioned or corrected and easily cited. Given the more impecunious conditions of today's UK student, and the fact that Wikipedia, Wikiversity, Wiktionary, and Wikiquote are free, makes use of these sources desirable for students and the underprivileged of our society.
On the Nature of Belief
www.onbelief.org
Scotland, 12th October 2007 and thereafter
Copyright 2007 onwards
