Non-falsifiability (or unfalsifiability) is, in my opinion, one of the most important concepts period, and I urge the reader to struggle through the first few expository paragraphs in order to understand just how the idea of non-falsifiability can change your entire world view. Ever argue with someone, and at some point the person says something that seems so stupid... you can't even respond to it? It's so meaningless and nonsensical, that you are left dumbfounded? Generally these aren't the first arguments posited by your opponent. The first line of defense is usually rationalization, however, that is easy to defeat if you're on the better side. The arguments I'm talking about are the last lines of defense. Once a person's “reasons” have been defeated, these are the arguments they cling to when the only thing standing between reality and their delusions is their own ignorance. These are called non-falsifiable arguments, and I am constantly amazed at how many intelligent people have no idea what that means.
Let's start with the definition (wiki): Falsifiability (or refutability) is the logical possibility that an assertion can be shown false by an observation or a physical experiment. So non-falsifiability is just the negative of that, or: the logical IMpossibility that an assertion can be shown false by an observation or a physical experiment. E.g. “I was abducted by a UFO last night.” This could be falsifiable. I could say, “Well, none of your neighbors saw anything, your husband was asleep in the bed next to you and he didn't see or hear anything, and presumably nothing set off the U.S. Military's defense systems. But if the abductee were to respond, “Well the aliens are invisible and silent to everyone but me, they abducted me by teleporting me out of my bed from across the galaxy and they replace my body with a copy of me which is indistinguishable from my own real body.” Now we've entered the territory of non-falsifiability. It has now become impossible to disprove this person's claim. Even if we could go back in time and stand in their bedroom staring at them all night, we could not prove that they were not abducted. We cannot refute their statement because they've created a set of facts which make it impossible to do so. Of course most of us just write these people off, and rightfully so. But what allows us to do this, and why is it so important?
We can ignore non-falsifiable arguments because the odds of them being correct are so small that they are in effect negligible. The abductee may have been abducted since I cannot prove that they weren't, however, the odds that they were abducted are so small that it would be unreasonable to believe they were. First of all, most true things are relatively easy to prove. If aliens did come down to earth someone would have seen it, especially in today's age where almost everyone has a video camera in their cell phone and free access to millions of people through youtube. Not to mention the sophisticated equipment that the U.S. Government has. In addition, it doesn't make logical sense. The idea that an alien species so advanced that they have figured out how to teleport a human across the universe would even be interested in studying a human makes no sense. What secrets could our bodies possibly contain that would be of interest to a species whose intelligence is so vastly beyond our own that it probably wouldn't view us as any different than the house pets we live with?
This example also gives us an opportunity to see an easy and obvious use for the idea of falsifiability. Since we know that the abductee's claim is non-falsifiable, and all non-falsifiable claims should be treated as if they are not true, then we know that anyone who makes such claims is either lying or hallucinating. Of course I'm sure this is all fairly obvious to the reader, however, I feel that an obvious example will ease the reader into applying the same logic to the less obvious example that will be coming.
The interesting thing is that it is precisely the non-falsifiability of such claims that generates the interest and belief in them. Non-falsifiability highlights a pervasive flaw in reasoning that is endemic in humans. Evolutionarily speaking, it behooves us to apply the rule, “If you cannot prove someone wrong, believe them.” If someone in your clan says, “Don't eat those berries, they're poisonous,” it's much better to believe them, than to eat one and find out. Of course, you could perform an experiment on some animal, but that requires a great deal of energy and time, both of which are extremely valuable commodities in the state of nature. Better to simply not eat the berries and find something else to eat. If someone runs through the village in the middle of the night and screams, “A massive army is about to attack us!” Better to run or at least prepare to fight than to just lay in bed and assume they're lying. The problem is that many claims aren't non-falsifiable, but they are still very difficult to disprove, and the farther in time we go back the harder things become to disprove. Remember that for the vast majority of human evolution, the height of technology was stone tools. Those are the circumstance in which we evolved, not the age of DNA testing and CSI. If somebody said there was a man-eating lion nearby, believing them had a far lower cost than not believing them. After all, if you believe them you just have to be a little more careful, maybe travel in packs more frequently. But if you don't believe them you risk being killed.
So there was a time when the rule, “If you can't disprove something someone says, believe them,” was a good rule to follow, and so our genes began encoding the rule and telling our brain to follow it. But that time has passed. First, it requires very little energy to disprove someone today. If someone tells me something is poisonous I can google it, not to mention the fact that if I am purchasing food it is most likely in some kind of market that would be out of business, and whose owner's would be in jail, if it was in the habit of selling poisoned fruits.
Now we can get to the bit about why non-falsifiability is so important. It's important because people often allow non-falsifiable arguments to guide their perception of reality because they can't disprove them, despite the fact that this is precisely the reason why we should not believe them. People believe Barack Obama is a Muslim and or/that he was born in a different country, people believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy, people believed that there were WMDs in Iraq, people believe that Jews run the banks, that blacks are an inferior race, etc. The one thing these things all have in common is that you cannot prove the proponent wrong, and unless you want to be no different than the people who believe those things, you will have to force yourself to obey a new rule: If something is non-falsifiable, I will treat it as if it is not true. This will be harder than you think, especially if you're religious, since the idea of “god” is the king of all non-falsifiable claims.
At this point I'd like to illustrate how one of these arguments might go down. Many political arguments are non-falsifiable, like the claim that Obama was born in Kenya. I believe that Obama was born in Hawaii because I have been shown, through photographic evidence, that he was born there. People who disagree disregard that evidence. My view is falsifiable. If you show me proof that he was born elsewhere, then I would at least have to give it relatively the same weight I give the Hawaiian birth certificate. Their view is non-falsifiable because no matter what I show them, they will respond with something like, "that was forged." The problem is that by that logic, every President might have been born in Kenya! George W. Bush? His birth certificate was forged too! Prove me wrong. Obama-care creates government run death panels, I don't care if that's not written anywhere in the bill, I know that's what he really wants. Prove me wrong. Ok, but why is this dangerous?
There is no more clear proof of the danger of believing in non-falsifiable claims than the AIDS denialist community. Believe it or not, there is a group of people who deny that AIDS is a virus that causes death. Though I'm sure the consequences of this are obvious, I'd like to give a few examples, just so the importance of non-falsifiability is obvious.
The magazine Continuum, which repeatedly denied the existence of HIV and AIDS was shut down when all its editors died of the disease.
The South African government was sympathetic to AIDS denialist claims, which led to a pathetic response to the contries massive AIDS epidemic. According to the Harvard School of Public Health, more than 330,00 deaths and about 35,000 infant HIV infections were caused by South Africa's resistance to the use of antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV/AIDS. Peter Mandelson has referred to the deaths as “genocide by sloth.”
“Christine Maggiore was an HIV-positive denialist who founded the "Alive&Well AIDS Alternatives" denialist organization. She wrote and self-published the book What If Everything You Thought You Knew about AIDS Was Wrong? Her 3-year old daughter Eliza Jane Scovill died of AIDS-related pneumonia after Maggiore had refused to take medication to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV or to have the child tested for HIV. Christine Maggiore died at the age of 52 in December 2008.
What this shows is that one illogical belief creates a snowball effect that is often more harmful the belief it stems from. Even if one makes perfectly rational decisions all the time, if those rational decisions are predicated on one irrational belief, they too will be irrational. If you don't believe in the AIDS virus, it then becomes rational to not treat it. Not only that but it becomes irrational to even seek a cure. So we should be very thankful that AIDS denialist meme hasn't gained nearly as wide acceptance as certain other nonfalsifiable.
While it might be tempting to attribute these deaths to a few crazy people, the truth is that ignoring the importance of non-falsifiability was the real killer. The truth is that the people responsible for the deaths were not crazy. They had jobs and families, they took care of themselves and others. People are not selectively crazy. You cannot be a lunatic in one small (but significant) facet of your life and completely sane in all others. The sad fact is that any one of us could play host to such memes if we are not careful.
So how can we tell when someone, or ourselves, is holding a non-falsifiable belief? Simply ask yourself, “Is there anything that can convince the person holding the belief (even if it's me) that they are wrong?” If the answer is “no” then for the sake of all of us you have to at least treat the view with a healthy dose of skepticism.
