The null hypothesis as the base hypothesis for statistics. Usually along the lines of "there is no correlation" or "this does nothing" or sometimes in the medical community "about the same as conventional treatment".
The default hypothesis serves a similar role in philosophy. As a debate ending with both sides claiming the other need produce evidence is unsatisfactory; some base is required. Sometimes, a hardwired default is available to settle it, and sometimes it isn't. It is important to understand what the default hypotheses are, and what they are not. They are defaults. They should be assumed until proven otherwise. However, they are not particularly right. They are, however, essentially hardwired. A successful cultural attempt to change them would not be sticky; within a couple of generations they would revert unless the changes were actively defended in education.
Confused? Read the first entry under Cosmology.
Here follows as many default hypotheses I could find, and why they deserve to be treated as defaults.
The default hypothesis is hardwired that mankind is infinitely more important than any animal.
- This is so strong that it is no stain upon mankind to have the tendency to genocide a major pest. We greave the loss of the Tasmanian tiger, but not the loss of the Guinea worm.
'Nuff said
It is plausible that the strong anthropic principle is true; however any attempt to use it as a base of reasoning is not safe.
- This taken to an extreme leads to the phenomenon known as "magical thinking".
- An athiest should defend this by an evolutionary argument. Use of the strong anthropic principle is likely to get one killed of the "reality ensues" trope.
There is a single coherent reality. What is true for a person (not of a person) is true for another person.
- I have been privileged to be able to test this. If even a small amount of subjective reality is allowed to be, the result is divergent.
The converse is too hard to reason over. Plato's cave is tame as compared to the actual converse of this.
You are not a Boltzmann brain.
- This is not talking about memory loss. This is talking about can you hallucinate a world so detailed you can't tell it's a hallucination (without severe brain impairment.)
Some measure of good exists. Note that "evil exists" is not actually a default hypothesis.
- Seems to be direct observation
- The counter-position requires a rather baroque twisting of the mind to generate.
- "Evil exists" isn't a default hypothesis because there's no wedge to start from to divide objective evil from the absense of good; that is, evil might not be a thing at all but rather the darkness to good's light.
The ancient peoples knew this. They did what we could not and journied across the world for the first time. The horizon of expansion did not end until about AD 1000.
- This is a direct consequence of the second law of thermodynamics; of which our experiences provide a rough approximation to interpet from even if we didn't read the ancient histories.
Note hovever "the future history is finite" is not a default hypothesis.
- Again a direct consequence of the second law of thermodynamics.
Because that would be a catastrophy to me.
- Also, the speculative writings of the past all suppor this. "Not with a bang but with a whimper" is still close at hand.
Hardwired without evidence.
- We know this is a default hypothesis by talking to young children.
- An athiest will eventually disprove this because it can't be true if the philosophy of an athiest is true.
- A theist will almost always keep this.
This is known as the doctrine of uniformitarianism.
- This is supressed when "the prior history is finite" is being used. Which makes sense.
- This default is false; but it is true enough to be a guide of deeds.
When the child says the true thing unexpectedly.
- No politeness filter can be a good thing.
- Feels like there should be more to it, but getting there is very deep into religion and that's not the point to this page.
I can't determine if "The earth is round" is a default or not but "The earth is flat" definitely isn't.
No, no it dose not. But this is what you would believe until you learned better.
Here is the first one I cannot back directly but must search the histories. The Greeks got it wrong but most other cultures got it right.
This feels like a self-importance syndrome. Too bad. It's real enough anyway.
- Turns out to be true because of the weak anthropic principle.
Consequence of small mind
- Defeated in the twentieth century. Current debate: is it infinite or not?
- Any level of truth this avoids a singularity in probability calculations over the anthropic principle.
Note that you only get this as soon as you know the sun is an average-ish star. But as soon as you know that, this default hypothesis appears.
- This too is a consequence of the doctrine of uniformitarianism.
- People used to think Venus was a swamp planet because of its cloud cover.
- Probability calculations for planets with oceans result in not many per galaxy. I'm having trouble determining if more than 1 ocean planet per galaxy is plausible or not. In any case, most star systems do not have an earth like planet, so this is a false default.
Wave effects escape our notice until we look for them.
The brain has a bunch of hardwired physics lookup tables. We think these work under the principles described by Aristotle.
- No, no they don't.
- This is a great example of a definitely false default hypothesis.
An amazing default hypothesis; materials can only be divided so far before dividing them makes them not that material anymore.
- I can't account for why this would be a default, even knowing that it is. Is this some dumb child reasoning that turned out to be true?
- Seems to be related to reaction time limitations
- Plausibly true in Quantum Mechanics; effectively doesn't matter
"Nothing unreal exists" is not a default hypothesis despite being true. Too bad.
As far as I can tell, this is a back-application of observing massive diversity of biology to metaphysics.
- This is the basis of fine tuning of the universe arguments.
Result of combining "The world's future history is finite" with "My mind shall live forever"
- Follows directly from the first, second and third laws of thermodynamics.
No spooky action at a distance / power falls off with distance
- In three dimensions this is the equivalent of "the inverse square law is in effect for all forces on large enough scales."
If you have nothing you get nothing.
- It's very difficult to write down a coherent set of laws of physics for which this is false. (The current big bang model starts at zero energy but a really high entropy. [I find it convenient to measure entropy as a measure of order and thus the second law says entropy decreases. With this model, graph of entropy with respect to time would look rather like exponential decay.])
Note that this is statement dosen't say there is exactly one god.
- By history, atheiesm is not the default.
- Second law of thermodynamics is in play here.
At least for some amount of good
- Trying to tighten this one down gets into trouble because of defining good as god's character.
- If you have "good exists" and "there is a god", it's really hard to not get "There is a good god".
- Building up a religion will replace this default with a better defined version of it.
See "We can generally trust our memories".
- Coming to any other conclusion requres building up a religion first.
Makes handling of categories easier.
- Atheism is the religion that says "There is no God".
- Giving atheism special treatment breaks a symmetry. Therefore, the true case of "has no religion" is the agnostic who says "I don't know if there's a God or not."