Month: August 2014

I came to be reading Thomas Nagel’s Mind & Cosmos. because I came across this review, which was itself a balanced comparative review of Nagel alongside Max Tegmark’s mathematical take on reality, but it was clear Nagel had ruffled a few orthodox scientific feathers with his heretical ideas. Coincidentally when I ordered Mind and Cosmos I’d already obtained and started reading Sheldrake’s Science Set Free. So many feathers ruffled there that Sheldrake (a real scientist) is practically an outcast from the orthodox house of science, for making too many “supernatural” topics valid game for scientific enquiry. Nagel on the other hand is a philosopher, so all too easily dismissed by hard-core scientists to start with.

Since picking up on Nagel for his universally referenced “What’s it like to be a bat?” and his “View From Nowhere” I’d never really thought of him beyond his “what’s it like to be …” alternate take on Chalmers’ “hard problem” of consciousness – explaining the subjective experience, so it was a great pleasure to get acquainted with more than a single paper of his.

Mind and Cosmos is very carefully written, painfully avoiding too-inflated claims for alternatives, but nailing the failings of overly-reductionist physicalist scientism. Painful because his arguments so carefully pick-off one aspect of each topic at a time, comparing each with distinct alternatives, and commenting on the quality of potential arguments rather than necessarily coming to firm conclusions. For that reason alone, anyone interested in getting to grips with what is wrong with scientific reductionism, starting with perhaps a nagging belief only, will find his arguments valuable. A couple of chapters – particularly the one around cognition and its evolution – are so painstakingly argued that the subtleties are hard to follow, but I wouldn’t be put off by that. The writing itself is beautifully simple.

Without too strongly recommending his preferred candidate alternate model to reductionist materialism, Mind and Cosmos is a plea that alternatives are seriously considered by scientific researchers. In that sense he is strongly aligned with Sheldrake. Also like Sheldrake the alternatives are “kinda” panpsychic. Proto-concsiousness being at least part of the fundamental elements of the cosmos – a neutral monism of neither mind nor matter exclusively, though mind more primarily than matter if forced to back one side. Unlike Sheldrake, Nagel doesn’t nail his colours to any particular mast, theist or otherwise.

I do not find theism any more credible than materialism as a comprehensive worldview.

Nagel is opposed to reductionism – everything explainable both functionally and historically from their parts, but is not wedded to emergence either. Personally I can still use emergence, nevertheless with Nagel’s reminder of two-way causation from pattern to parts as well as the orthodox conception of efficient cause.

A key aspect of Nagel’s line  of argument is always to compare intentional reasons, and teleological reasons with reductionist / constructionist approach of orthodox scientism. Not simply – that’s just the way it is or  the laws of nature couldn’t be any other way and the results are the “chance” causal outcome of the component level constraints and laws only.  His arguments dispense with any strong need for the intentional – the intentional designs of an intelligent mind – but the teleological – the causally directed effects of patterns on the parts, creating propensities and tendencies towards patterns in the outcomes (but not specific outcomes or “goals”) – remains very much part of his possible, plausible mode.

“These teleological speculations are offered merely as possibilities, without positive conviction.”

Yeah, right. One thing Nagel doesn’t buy from orthodox science is arguments of something from nothing, not the literally anything from literally nothing – which any philosopher recognises is a metaphysical question anyway – but the conveniently complex from the presumed simple. No “life from chemistry” any more than intelligence from cosmos or cosmos from quarks without his injection of teleology and his neutral monist foundations. Here he is of course pretty controversial, but his arguments suggest he’s at least as much chance of being right as the reductionists. [Here a recent reference that suggests emergence (of bio molecules from simple chemistry) isn’t so far-fetched.]

The concept of “value” looms large, particularly “pre-reflective impressions of value” and “pre-rational data” (very much “radical empiricism” a la James) and a great part of Nagel’s evolutionary arguments acknowledge Sharon Street’s “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value” Philosophical Studies 127 Jan 2006. That seems to become essential reading. [Not  fully read yet, but she references Gould & Lewontin (1979) without referencing any 21st century Dennett – sigh.]

Overall – very impressed with Nagel’s latest and believe it could be a very important piece of work. Certainly orthodox scientists needn’t run away screaming. They should take up Nagel’s careful arguments and proposals for what they are, and see what difference they make to existing explanations. A recommended read.

[Post Notes:

Mentioned upfront that Nagel had been rejected by orthodox science – even Dennett, though I must dig up the context. As I said painfully inconclusive arguments, relying on philosophical questioning and only a couple of main sources. This review is pretty balanced in reviewing his critics as well as Nagel’s own case. “Non-committal” is the tactical criticism. I think he deliberately avoids scientific support in his brief book – satisfied that his job is the philosophy, to point out the unanswered questions that orthodox science should consider, after all, he’s not the scientist.

Despite what Jerry Coyne says he’s not “anti-evolution” he’s against reductionist materialist neo-Darwinism. Jerry Coyne didn’t read the book of course, and his defensive agenda is the title of his blog anyway – a closed mind if ever there was one.

So far all the criticisms of Nagel seem to be ad-hominem, and few are from those that command my respect, except Dennett, as I say. This Prospect piece seems to get Nagel’s message.

Other than reported statements, I can’t find any critical piece by Dennett. This conference report is interesting, but don’t know anything about the agenda of Andrew Ferguson in The Weekly Standard. (Most of the Dennett quotes elsewhere seem to come from this report.)

Daniel Dennett took a different view. While it is true that materialism tells us a human being is nothing more than a “moist robot”—a phrase Dennett took from a Dilbert comic—we run a risk when we let this cat, or robot, out of the bag. If we repeatedly tell folks that their sense of free will or belief in objective morality is essentially an illusion, such knowledge has the potential to undermine civilization itself, Dennett believes.

I reckon that understates Dennett’s take on “greedy reductionism”.]

[Post Post Note : Now reading Nagel’s “The View From Nowhere” in full rather than just various second hand readings and references. Barely through the introduction and already finding it “on-message”. More later in a separate post.]

Disappointing. No secret I find Krauss & Dawkins too simplistic (reductionist scientistic) when it comes to their idea of “rational” arguments against theists or the otherwise religious. But, having bought and viewed the DVD of The Unbelievers, I was baffled how little content there was in this fairly short documentary film, and what content there is, is mostly already public in various clips. Nothing I hadn’t already heard either of them say before.

Lots of wistful shots of them travelling to and talking about the various speaking engagements, and sitting around airports, hotels and studios – very brief snips of the actual talks / debates / interviews, and as I say little of that unseen before.

The one thing that stuck in my mind, probably because it was some time since I last saw it, was Dawkins “debate” with the top Oz Catholic cleric, where Dawkins merely chuckles and ridicules him for not being too expert on practical details of evolution – confusing cousins vs parental heredity genetically speaking. Irrelevant to anything they were actually debating, but of course that’s practically the only clip you see. Highly disningenuous.

Just a big ego-trip for “The Unbelievers” the documentary itself. No content or arguments either way. We need some of the other “horsemen” to step up to more reasoned debate – Harris & Dennett say.

[Aside – saw another recent Krauss tweet, need to dig up, where he referred to others pointing out – as I have done – that arguing against something-from-nothing arguments (life and cosmos examples) on the grounds that their nothing is already something, as “nit-picking”! I have one the life examples in my Nagel post draft – upcoming.]

Interesting New Republic piece – on why democracy isn’t always the best solution for governance. It’s dogma to ram it down everyone else’s throats. (More later). Hat tip to David Morey on FB.

Interesting piece by Samira Ahmed, actually a summary of one of the sessions at WHC2014 I referred to here, but primarily making the plea against the misguided aggressive atheist stance that moderate religious expression should be attacked just as hard for simply being “cover” for barbaric fundamentalist forms.

Politics and management of the complex depend on levels of hypocrisy, and knowing who your allies are in any given battle is rational common sense. Mustn’t confuse values, aims, policies, strategies and tactics, they’re all quite distinct.

And it’s not simply a matter of Machiavellian cunning, cynical pragmatism or Sun-Tzu / Clausewitz on campaigns of war, it’s about working with your (potential) allies to uncover valuable common ground – you both learn and win friends. Doing something constructive rather than lazily invoking your knee-jerk “right” to criticise.

As I said at the time:

Tactical Aggression — [rather than] – the old misguided idea that benign expressions of religion are merely cover for militant and inhuman kinds and therefore to be challenged as aggressively as any.

Simplistic Equals Wrong – Guardian piece by Ian Birrell on responses to Foley’s brutal murder.

Just a riff of connected thoughts arising. That article is dead right – we need to maintain consistent foreign policy, and that’s complicated with the sway of political terms and public opinion in “the west”.

The recent history of the Gulf / Iraq / Afghanistan wars, followed by those arising from the Arab Spring, like Libya, meant that by the time Syria came along we’d lost appetite for considered intervention. “No boots on the ground” or “no military force” became a dogma rather than a considered conclusion based on long-term policies. So now that Israel Palestine reignites, Ukraine / Russia and Syria becomes ISIS in Syria and Iraq our foreign policy is on the back foot. (Made worse in the UK by discontinuity in the FO itself and divisive diversions of UK / Scotland and UK / EU, rather than strengthening of international collaborations.)

These conflicts are all connected, and connected on many levels and issues. If we don’t follow policy that actually reflects them all – their continuity and all their complexity – we have little hope of achieving stable positive outcomes. Into the vacuum flows simplistic “Islamic Caliphate for Dummies” – brutal, evil, wrong. We can do better.

(I say “the west” but of course the other Arab nations and much more also need to align concensus long-term policies more honestly rather than short-term opportunistic stances.)

I attended the “Particle Physics Evening” Hosted by Jon Butterworth (of Smashing Physics fame) at University College London yesterday evening. Altogether, including two streaming in from CERN, there were 7 speakers and reasonably lively Q&A with the 250ish audience, so I came away thinking I’d learned a bit.

[Post Note: I should add this public meeting was a part of the gathering of particle physicists at UCL for BOOST2014]

Given the more general title as advertised, I was expecting something like – forget the press banging on about Higgs, here’s the interesting stuff – but in fact the focus of this team, and hence the talk, was almost entirely on Higgs. The multiple correlation by multiple different test teams using different LHC experiments and technologies to detect Higgs-predicted multiple decay patterns meant a very high level of certainty that the new particle “discovered” was the real 126GeV mass particle predicted for Higgs. Their use of the D-word indicated this very high level of statistical certainty. They admitted that as well as planning new objectives for research when LHC restarts next year at its near doubled 14TeV capacity, there were plenty of things they still needed to test and confirm about the Higgs itself besides its mass and predicted decay patterns, and still masses (excuse the pun) of existing data to analyse before LHC restarts.

What struck me was that the “standard model” being talked about – for which the Higgs provided the missing piece – is really only “complete” for unifying Electro-Weak forces. Still nothing said about strong forces or even gravity, despite mass being the point of the Higgs interest, and therefore still less said about possible dark-matter and dark-energies and gravitational interactions between these masses. The cosmological model is far from complete, even with Higgs.

Someone did ask the question I’ve expressed many times. How logically can finding a massive particle explain why other particles have mass? The answer threw up another item I’d not recognised previously. Higg’s only explains the asymmetry of mass between the otherwise “identical” particle triplets, and it only explains how they came to acquire their different masses during the evolution of the universe, masses which no longer depend on any ongoing interactions with Higgs. Nowadays Higgs only exist in certain extreme conditions with extremely short decay life otherwise. This is the kind of explanation that depends on such a fine-tuned timing in the early post-big-bang universe, that the sceptic in me still finds it pretty far fetched. What they’re really establishing is internal consistency of their incomplete model.

Given the recognition that the standard EW model (completed by Higgs) was far from a complete cosmological model, what might exist beyond it came up only in the last throwaway remark of Jon’s closing comments. SuperSymmetry – a whole set of mirror equivalents of the standard model with complementary properties and much much higher masses. The same again and much more is still missing from the postulated model.

I did ask Jon afterwards (given the previous post) did he see anything in supersymmetry – or whatever lay beyond – that could yet unravel the standard EW model? Initially he said no, without being specific all the remaining gaps looked like things that should be confirmed and refined, but admitted that until they were (confirmed and detailed) technically it maybe could unravel. Supersymmetry was only one of the hypotheses for what lay beyond, though many of the others were as he put it, more philosophical than physical. Well said and very significant.

Two other interesting topics:

The whole question of data collection and data analysis – the algorithms used to select “interesting” data sets (few hundred per second) from the background noise (millions per second). Surely observer bias in the algorithms must skew the findings? David Miller’s role in this team was to address exactly that – ensuring sampling of the noise as well as the “interesting” signals checked they weren’t discarding significant sets. The sceptic in me again says, that since it’s patterns we’re really looking for – not standalone indications – that the results are still hugely at risk to this process. Hmmm.

And finally, meta, but maybe the most significant point: One thing I’ve been looking at creating is a forum based on moderated wisdom of real people with respect for each other, as opposed to the troll-addled offense-by-ridicule polarised threads of comments and social media. Well that was pretty much exactly how Jay Wacker described Quora. Wikipedia is great for non-contentious facts, as I’ve said many times, but Quora was set up to be a respect-mediated way to collect informed-wisdom. Excellent initiative, and a lesson to those “humanist” forums and threads that this initiative on wise opinion came from “real” geeky physicists, who clearly understand the reality of life more than either scientistic-atheist-humanists or religious-fundamentalists. Very interesting – I shall try it out and see how it works.

[Post Note : another write-up from UCL, focussing on Lily Asquith’s “sonification” of the data, which I didn’t mention above.]

[Post Note : A facebook post from Sabine Hossenfelder:

This is the same story as that from last week. (LHC Higgs Boson findings in doubt?) Again, let me say that the only thing surprising about the claim that there is some variant of technicolor that can fit the data is that hasn’t been brought up earlier. The comparison to BICEP sucks. They’re not claiming that the signal isn’t there, they’re saying the interpretation is not valid.

But another indication of ongoing problems – many ways to represent (and publish) large data sets, and to interpret readings as findings relevant to the hypothesis. When is it publishable news?]

Interesting pair of papers, one from this week, and one from Nov 2012, on the “failure” of the Large Hadron Collider work to find any evidence of “supersymmetry” particles to support the standard model, and the idea that mass is not a particle property, and so maybe even the Higgs field / boson is a myth. No, really? It’s been said here before.

The best thing about this is the suggestion that maybe the “wrong turn” in particle physics was taken quite some time ago, several decades, so rather than fiddling with and knocking corners off existing theories, more radical new hypotheses really are needed. The latest paper is suggesting mass and length are not even real, and that falling back on (parallel) multiverses as a reason why we find the particular properties we do in this universe, is simply not satisfactory as any kind of explanation. And a lot more. Fascinating reads.

Mass was of course a fudge ever since Newton introduced it to explain inertial resistance to acceleration; Boscovich and Mach (and hence Einstein) recognised this of course. For a true physicalist model, dynamics are much more primary than anything like matter is to a materialist. So many other possibilities if we escape the materialist dogma.

Much too hard for any lay / amateur like myself to understand all the scientific (mathematical) arguments, but the all too human quotes of the practitioners are very illuminating. Disappointment and failure. No more jobs in particle physics, time to find work in neuroscience, etc. LOL.

What is also good about the two Simons Foundation source papers is that the comment threads are not hysterically polarised attack and defence. Several pointing out that “failure” is not the right way to look at scientific progress – unless you were involved in big-science funding justifications maybe – fair enough, but most finding the reports though-provoking and joining the dots with other sources of ideas. Progress.

[Hat tip to David Morey on Facebook for the links.]

Rupert Sheldrake’s “The Science Delusion” (2012) so-called by his publisher as a pointed response to Dawkins, is called “Science Set Free” in the US. Given my agenda – alternatives to logical-positivist materialist-reductionist scientistic-dogma worldviews – it’s not possible for me to be ignorant of Sheldrake, but I’m pretty sure I’ve not read anything of his until his 2012 book. Certainly not his seminal “New Science of Life – The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance” (1981).

The 2012 book seems to summarise his previous work, and although it covers the whole range of his ideas on alternative medicine, telepathy and the “paranormal”, his main agenda is to point out dogmatic arrogant dismissive politically distorting aspects of the modern science enterprise – hear, hear. He may never recover from some of his ideas being too whacky – too new-agey – for orthodox science to take seriously, but there are attractive aspects of his morphic resonance hypothesis for the open-minded.

Much evidence for consciousness and memory as something like pan-psychism, extending beyond the physical structures of any one brain – like I heard Iain McGilchrist say recently, better to think of highly-evolved brains as the best “transducers” of consciousness, rather than its source or physical location. Similarly some of the complex behaviours of simple organisms (like Alan Rayner and his funghi) cannot just be reduced to properties of their physical structures. Also much evidence that the Cosmological Anthropic Principle casts doubt on the accepted standard model(s) and ideas of downward as well as upward causation and “natural” lines of evolution.

All the so-called “paranormal” stuff he has, like Sue Blackmore, taken seriously as a research topic for some time. Some interesting ideas about problems researching anything telepathic “under laboratory conditions” and anything like double-blind arrangements where researcher’s biases are not in play. But as he points out these problems beset much “big science” and business motivated medical science too. He actually uses several Ben Goldacre quotes positively, when I can imagine “Bad Science” easily taking a pop at Sheldrake.

I also happen to believe materialist-as-physicalist philosophy with “emergence” of patterns upon patterns of fit consistent with Sheldrake’s morphic resonance,  wouldn’t cause Dennett as much problem as Sheldrake assumes on the appearances of intention and creative purpose [ref needed] . Be interesting to hear the two together.

I’ve said before when arguing against orthodoxy it’s possible to be “too open minded” and leave yourself open to criticism based on ridicule, but for an open mind Sheldrake does cover a lot of worthwhile ground.

[Post Note:  Final conclusions reading The Science Delusion are that Sheldrake sounds frustrated and tired delivering a message he’s clearly been banging on about for a long time. His core point – that materialist reductionist science has become dogmatic and closed minded, and that society is becoming dangerously distorted by its dominance – is surely true. But the examples of alternatives he cites are too many, too personally “cause-celebre” and maybe insufficiently coherently argued to create change in themselves. I should add, I’ve now moved on to reading Thomas Nagel’s “Mind and Cosmos” – an atheist version of the same agenda it seems.]

[Post Note : Noticed I picked-up on Sheldrake morphic resonance and morphogenetic fields back here.]