Category: Uncategorized

Example of the Species

Political correctness that is.

Jon Butterworth reacts to being branded a “cockwomble” after an event is relocated from his home institution (UCL) on his advice. (Using his own WordPress blog rather than his Grauniad outlet.) As public scientists go, I find Jon one of the most grounded.

More on the Court Jester from David Mitchell

Grauniad piece by David Mitchell, on my recurring topic of offence in free speech generally and comedy specifically – (ie  The Court Jester. See also Frankie Boyle generally.)

The David Mitchell example is in defense of the real case that led to Mike Ward being fined for offense!

We need to separate case of the general public (and authorities) from those of our court jesters.

Hat tip to Sarah Brown.

Me & My Free Will

I gave a very brief presentation (total 15 minute slot including Q&A) at Teesside’s Skeptics in the Pub (SitP) open-mike night last Thursday. Since it was my first such outing I gave a couple of minutes intro to what I’m doing here in and around Psybertron, before choosing to major on Free-Will.

A PDF of the presentation MeAndMyFreeWill is here with all the links to the reference sources.

It seemed to go down pretty well and going last of 6 presentations left me with the advantage of an audience able to continue the Q&A into discussions. Having the “hooks” in the introductory slides on my many interconnected topics and sources was not only useful to the discussion, but the entire exercise of condensing my whole interconnected agenda into a few bullet points and slides was useful too.

Thanks to Teesside SitP and the audience, and appreciation to the other presenters on the night. See here for a fuller post of my notes on the other presentations that evening.

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[Post Note: The most up to date / topical stuff – the continuation of the Harris / Dennett conversation happened only the week before so not had chance to review and comment in detail. From my initial notes – despite now returning to respectful dialogue, the differences remain great and real. From my notes Dennett is still on the right track. More later.]

[Post Note: And so up to date & ever-topical this piece from the Grauniad the following day – Oliver Burkeman with reference to Jonah Berger. Hat tip to Sue Whitcombe from the audience on the night.]

[Post Note: Also worth contrasting with my reaction to Graham Bell’s opposing talk at London Active Atheists Group last year. Lots of other reference links.]

[Post Note: Some later research alternatives showing that even Libet was a conservative overstatement of reality when the decisions actually have subjective value beyond mere test participation. Hat tip to Massimo Pigliucci who, like me, already believes even with Libet the real interpretation of mental events is nevertheless clear.]

[Post Note: And another recent John-Hopkins research result on evidence of free-will pre-meditation in the brain. Hat tip to @JudyStout.]

More on the Myths of Science

Further to the rant by Jerry Coyne about James Blachovicz piece which I reacted to here, there’s more. Forbes’ Ethan Siegel responded and so did Bill Storage at The Multidisciplinarian. Hat tip @chrisoldfield in all cases.

Where to start? It’s still all about turf wars over broad and narrow definitions – and I’ve said what I needed to say. Science (broadly) has many methods it shares with many other rational and creative disciplines, but (narrowly) has one specific distinguishing feature that makes it scientific – science as a species. Framing it’s hypotheses logically-objectively and empirically-falsifiably.

The recurring problem though is the turf-war, the arrogance of (some) scientists believing there are no bounds to what (narrow) science can speak about authoritatively. Obviously anyone can (broadly) speak about anything they like, but if we’re staking claims, good fences make good neighbours, and narrow definitions have their place.

The problem arises with the so-called “priviledged” position of science, in the minds of some scientists. Bill Storage in his piece opens with what he sees as a given:

“[S]cience deserves the special epistemic status that it acquired in the scientific revolution. By special epistemic status, I mean that science stands privileged as a way of knowing. Few but nihilists, new-agers, and postmodernist diehards would disagree.”

And he makes that claim from authority – that the history of science has been so successful – so it must be true.

Priviledged as “a” way of knowing. Sure. But not “the priviledged way” of knowing anything and everything across the broadest purview of scientific interest just because of its interest. Not all of science’s interest is science. The particular point in my response to Coyne’s rant was science’s fence with its philosophical neighbours. It needs to satisfy the standards of both camps. Coincidentally, today Nassim Taleb also tweeted this:

The graphic is from this post by The Logic of Science, which I haven’t fully digested yet, but it’s on the side of defending science against the accusations of arrogance (that I am making). But on this point it is wrong, a category error about the species that makes it special or priviledged. Several very astute comments in the various threads following from those two tweets above. Not all accusations of arrogance are spurious or ad-hominem.

Talking “about science” – as in the content of science – scientists can be as scientific and fallibly human as they like. The content is science, of scientific quality, or it isn’t. Science has the priviledge of deciding.

But, talking “about” science – as in the fences about it and the fields beyond them – science does need to get that not everything is scientific, not everything is objectively decidable, not necessarily evidentially, not even statistically. And Taleb would know.

The metaphors substituting plumbers and mechanics for scientists (in the graphic) are completely spurious, and missing the aboutness. Wake up science. Many of us accusing you of arrogance are sincerely trying to help you, and the rest of us into the bargain.

[Incidentally though, and probably ironically, and definitely very risky given the post-modern new-agey “attack is the best form of defence” tone of the original piece, ….

… the mechanic – the careful, self-knowing, scientific, mechanic, the kind we can trust – is precisely the vehicle used by Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and in derivation by Matthew Crawford in Shop Class as Soul Craft. Just sayin’.]

Future; what future?

Continuing in the same meta-vein as the previous post from behind the great firewall, another tweeted link I had cached before I travelled to China.

This time it’s cosmologists talking about time, with a little help from a few philosophers. Dan Falk reporting from the recent Time in Cosmology conference in Waterloo, Canada.

You sense the real difference between the two camps. Those scientistic types who accept the so-called block model of space-time, where time is simply part of the physically symmetric whole, and any ideas of distinct past, now and future being merely our subjective illusions, and the rest. Those of us who accept the reality of time and causation – albeit a somewhat weird fit, given the otherwise incomplete but widely accepted standard models of physics. It’s the accepted standard models of cosmological inflation and particle physics that are unreal – they’re the models. Time is reality.

How people who believe in ethics and evolution or even history can claim with a straight face, that the progress of time is an illusion, beats me.

Good to see Unger & Smolin in there on the right side of the argument. No surprise either, to see Sean Carroll’s position being confused. But still too many relying on “but the maths works“. God help us. Hopefully someone learned something at the conference.

One thing I learned from the article is the alternative to entropy defining the direction of time’s arrow, is the idea that it’s defined by the progress towards increasing complexity – a real telos.

“defining an arrow of time that aligns itself with growth of complexity”
said Tim Koslowski

Something I recall Rick Ryals suggesting (?) in how the most efficient progress towards global entropic chaos and disorder was local pockets of increasingly complex and concentrated order.

An interesting must-read report. Recommended.

The Linguistic Turn n’all that.

Blogging today as I am, from behind the great firewall of China without any functioning VPN, my reading and linking has been limited to links already cached in my phone and tablet, without any new materials through Google, Gmail, Medium, Twitter or Facebook …. that’s very cramped for my habitual style.

Someone tweeted this Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” Electric Agora link a couple of weeks ago and it’s been sat in my must-read list of open browsers since then: The post itself, from 2015 by Daniel Kaufman, and its fascinating comment thread below.

As a fan of both Wittgenstein and Dennett, I’ve also made a point of reading Quine, hence my ready interest.

There is one set of meta-comments about style, where Kaufman begs to differ, that Quine has an elitist air. One which Kaufman clearly shares even if he doesn’t agree.

Sure, no (useful) language can be a closed (logically complete and consistent) system; context is everything, etc. I won’t repeat all the rehearsed batchelor-style arguments here. I agree already. It’s a large part of my position generally in the proper place (or otherwise) of scientific thinking in the pragmatic reality of politics and ethics – much misunderstood by the scientistic.

I particularly loved the thread debating synonymy against definition. I suspect Quine, and certainly Kaufman, does conflate the two, or at least fail to recognise the significance of their different kinds.

Sure as Kaufman says, everyday dictionaries do often list near synomyms (with contexts) as part of their definitions. These are by way of example and archetype more than definition.

But formal (attempts at) definitions must also end up expressing criteria for class membership as logically constrained relationships to other (presumed known) classes; classes whose nearness as synonyms will be increasingly remote and typically distinct as supertypes and/or Ur-classes. That web of knowledge – hence the not-really-closed tautological problem at the core of the debate.

It’s no coincidence that my hero Dennett, a student of Quine, warns any would-be analytic-scientistic-type who’ll listen to defer their obsession with definitions. One fetish infecting the meme of scientistic addiction. All definitions are (by definition) working definitions, but reify too quickly and problematically if not allowed to evolve and emerge with pragmatic acceptance in the real world. Definitions are not objectively true or real outside a closed and managed context. The working context in which the working definitions are deemed to hold, by agreement both inter-subjective and empirical.

Reporting – the story of islamist terrorism.

Getting a bit tired of the casual sarcasm and cynicism in many responses to “islamist terrorist”news stories these days.

The westernised names adopted by foreign migrants in their adopted lands. The politically-correct caution in mainstream journalism, particularly the BBC, in reporting initial facts of what, who and why. How much additional “information” circulating instantly on social media and single-issue channels isn’t reported in MSM whilst authorities deal with legal evidence and security action. Whether an Islamist is by any stretch a good (or even a bad) muslim, or simply a murderous maniac with a grudge against any symbols of western “decadence”, adopting Islamism as a badge of legitimisation of fascist intent, accompanied (or not) by the cry of “allahu akhbar”, with or without explicit “links” to extremist groups or an active conspiracy, you name it. Whether the maniac is a rationally calculating maniac or otherwise mentally ill maniac they’re still madmen. Whether the immediate target is political against western secular freedoms and economic interests, or ideological against cultural acceptance of gender & LGBTI and other social freedoms on beaches, in bars, at musical & sporting events. Whether the terrorist acts are actual weaponised mayhem or insidious threat and coercion.

None of this spectrum of details changes the facts of islamist terrorism, and apart from displaying cynical attempts at gallows humour, really not sure how making our media, our authorities, our politicians into the (immediate) story does anything to address the actual issues and causes.

Single-Issue Politics

With so much mainstream partisan politics in disarray both sides of the pond, and so many public policy issues in play at once over rights, freedoms and securities, there is no shortage of issue-groups with which to be associated as an activist or supporter. And so much easier to throw in your lot with a single issue party, when it is clear what it’s for and/or what it’s against, and thereby avoid the messier politics of a broader mainstream party. One reason why a strong “single-issue” agenda for me is proper proportional representation in as many contexts as possible, where rights and responsibilities can be shared and balanced, but I digress.

So consider for example, that LGBTI rights and freedoms figure large in many other contexts, whether it be religious extremisms (and not so extremes), or day to day politics and government, and all points between. Alice Dreger has been a “justice warrior” in the “TI” subset of LGBTI for some time – a pretty narrow single set of issues you might think. That is unless you’ve read her Galileo’s Middle Finger, where you discover how the real issue is one of fundamental academic freedoms and their dependence on the enlightenment principles shared – no coincidence – by both politics and science.

Julian Baggini writing on “animal rights” in the vegetarian vs meat-eating debate, notes that even that issue can have no simple objective ethical solution but is rather part of the bigger ethical debate on the place of humanity as part of the natural world. He concludes that the fact that the issue remains problematic – making us feel uncomfortable yet unable to find a neat solution – is in fact a virtue. It’s maybe a reason not to reject out of hand those non-secular taboos and rituals around meat slaugher and eating that have evolved culturally and been enshrined in religious practice. Disagreeing is one thing; denying their value is another.

Jonathan Sacks speaking on how we have “outsourced” much ethical decision-making, to the market of objective things we can trade for numbers, risks losing the natural “entropy-reversal” corrective of humanity’s internalised moral compass. The telos that comes with that is more than simply history as the collected memory of apparently objective facts.

“Cultures [that have an inner moral voice] stay young. They defeat the entropy, the loss of energy, that has spelled the decline and fall of every other empire and superpower in history. But the West … has externalised what it once internalised. It has outsourced responsibility. It has reduced ethics to economics and politics.”

Justice as ethical good must of course be closely connected to truth as objective fact, but there can never be a simple relationship that reduces the one to the other. Whatever a single ethical issue, it’s answer can never be a single academic or scientific fact. As Alice Dreger suggests here, the relationship between (factual) truth and (ethical) justice must remain uncomfortable, for good reason.

And, as she concludes, however good it is to espouse a single issue policy, how else would we progress change if people didn’t do so, it is equally if not more important to value the dissenters and the freedom of their arguments. Which is not an argument for absolute freedom of expresssion. However, truth will learn from differences over justice, expressed differences over right and wrong, not by being constrained by a single policy on justice, in the complementary way that justice will benefit from knowing new improved truth.

There is no easy relationship between truth and justice that can be simplified by adopting a single issue policy any more than ethics and justice can be reduced to objective truth.