Year: 2015

Dick (ie Baron) Taverne came along to the CLHG book club discussion of his “March of Unreason” last night. Interesting to meet and spend time talking with him.

Since his book is now 10 years old he gave us a 10 minute update on how he saw things different now. I actually thought all his main points were valid anyway – clearly his focus on topical issues was of its time, and limited by the evidence then available – that’s the point – but the underlying points are really unchanged for me. Perhaps because we were an atheist / humanist audience the politician in him gave us what he thought we wanted to hear – rising theistic religious fundamentalism as the main dogmatic threat to rational science (though he cited Pinker’s Better Angels to remind us to keep a sense of proportion and progress.) In his book the rising fundamentalists were the back-to-nature eco-warriors – those who saw science as either unnatural or driven by big business or both. Some so-called “science” is alien to humanity – feeding ground-up animals to herbivores in the BSE scandal for example, though the risks were always tiny and managable when it came to empirical evidence.

I have a counter point to the Sense About Science “show me the evidence” campaign. It’s an error to think everyone should be informed on all the technical nuances of every science-based issue affecting life enough to actually recognise good evidence and spend the time to consider it. We have lives to live. The mantra should be show me the evidence that you have considered enough evidence that I should trust you. If you’re selling “scientific” cosmetics products – I already know you’re selling product. I’ll find my own evidence thanks, by trial and error, if I care. If you want funding for a multi-billion particle physics project, I want to know I can trust who is advising you. Outside of laboratory conditions, evidence is about trust; trusting authority. After the size of the human population of the planet, trust is the no.2 issue for us all. Risk aversion (Taverne’s take on the stultefying “precautionary principle”) is a part of the optimism / pessimism balance of trust. – Nuclear Power, GM crops / technologies, Animal testing. etc.)

Interestingly Taverne is a staunch supporter of the BBC, as I am, and cited recent improvements – whether as a result of “Sense About Science” or otherwise – one example being that the meaningless idea of having balanced reporting by simply giving equal time to any counter spokesperson on every issue was a thing of the past. Based on a recommendation from Prof Steve Jones, it was now normal for producers and editors to take scientific advice on the “weight of evidence” before deciding on balance. Simple but effective stuff. Again it may be a right, but shouldn’t be a necessity, for the public to assess all evidence, when there is an authoritative institution we can trust. We should focus on building trust. Confidence. Living.

I’ve used the idea of focussing on demands for quantifiable objectivity as a fetish previously, akin to autism in economics. Taverne referred to Merkel as a deficit fetishist (quoting another source) in the Grexit saga, focussing too narrowly, applying a rule, without vision or imagination. Rules being for the guidance of wise men, and the enslavement of fools. It’s obvious to anyone that the Greek situation is not really about the debt as a number – some large proportion of it will obviously be written-off – once the fuss dies down. Hands-up anyone who conceived it would ever be repaid. The negotiations should be a game to encourage tackling of previous productivity and corruption problems in public services, with the threat of a little austerity as an incentive. It’s not about using austerity as a punishment, a big stick to achieve a zero deficit. That’s dumb. Wiser and less-public negotiations would achieve the right result. Public pronouncements on numbers are mere hostages to fortune. Naive. Autistic. Counterproductive.

Some discussion on Daniel Kahneman followed; the psychologist with the Nobel prize for economics. Economics has always been about psychology to its practitioners; about perception, sentiment and confidence. I think this was confirmed for me back in my 1980’s MBA days, budgetting and accounting as psychological games. The simplistication (dumbing down) in the media, and thence in public pronouncements by the politicians and Robert Pestons of this world, create a focus on numbers we can fight about – wars make for media-selling headlines (see “fuss” above). Someone also previously coined the idea of “autistic economics” for this problem. We can all do arithmetic, right? Jeez. Come back Stephanomics.

Finally, joining up the German and Greek dots with a conversation about Egyptians specifically and Africans generally, leading naturally to Scots and Brits, Taverne reinforced his aversion to “national” identity and support for the “federal” post-WWII European project – powers delegated upwards by member agreement –  notwithstanding massive problems with the current EU arrangements. The US wants, we and the world need, us (all) to be bigger than little-Englanders.

A man after my own. A fascinating evening.

(Will add more links to the implied references in due course if asked.)

Identity Politics

It is increasingly topical that names used to identify “groups” become contentious topics. Muslim vs Islamist, Humanist vs Christian Humanist, Race vs Ethnicity, Gay vs Straight, CIS vs Trans, Sex vs Gender, Ukraine vs Crimea, Greece vs Europe, UK vs its parts, Locations vs Communities, even species of Monkeys vs Humans. (Post Note – Feminist vs “TERF” didn’t yet exist when I wrote this, but add it to the list above). As soon as you want to tie any of these to actual ethical policy you’re into the minefield of identity politics – “bogus identity politics” some would say. A topic I’ve been promising to say something about for some time.

Choosing which group to talk about is a political choice; what is the point I want to make and why? And this becomes one of the reasons why not only the group chosen as your subject, but its relationship to the name you use for it also becomes so contentious. That names come with baggage is the passive, relatively innocent end of the spectrum, but such choices carry intentional rhetorical force too – as a means of isolating or uniting one kind of identity from or with another. We all have agendas beyond our immediate point. Naming is politics, so whilst individual freedom is a good starting point, social agreement beats ideological imposition of one person’s freedom over another’s rights.

As with the causes, responses to the problem come on a wide spectrum too, from the careless calling of a spade a spade or tarring all with the same brush, to efforts to create tight definitions and carefully chosen labels or invented neologisms to support the particular issues and conversations. Further extreme is the adoption of particular existing terms, that may once have been carefully thought out names and definitions, but whose original purpose becomes lost in the paralysing euphemistic short-hand of political correctness. Both extremes – careless and PC – are effectively ways of ducking or ignoring the problem. The illusion is that careful use of terms with sufficiently tight definitions is the only real solution – it’s certainly the “scientifically rational” solution. But, that’s actually a fools errand.

Defining Identity

The underlying problem whether identifying some topic with or beyond yourself is just that; using a subject-object basis for identity (objective things distinct from each other and your subjectivity). Whether you are identifying with a group to make a point about its distinction from other groups, or identifying another group distinct from yourself or your chosen group, you are objectifying both subject and object. Me / We as opposed to You / They / Other as opposed to Another.

In science, or any endeavour blessed with scientific endorsement, it is pretty much essential that objects and terms are so defined. Repeatability by anyone, anywhere, anytime, with all extraneous effects accounted for, subjectivity specifically excluded, and amenability to mathematical and logical manipulation demands well formed objects and evidence. Even if their definitions are statistical or stochastic, are all fundamental to conventional scientific endeavour. Even when “being objective” in a non-scientific context, it’s about recognising your (subjective) position in relation to the object (subject matter), however much you try to discount it. The concept of knowing a truly neutral god’s-eye view from nowhere really only exists in an abstract model, not in the real world.

This is true of any model of reality, if it is to be amenable to rational analyses.

And science, the body of knowledge and its processes, is exactly that – a model of reality. The best model we have for extending rational objective knowledge of natural reality. There are two points to note. Firstly, the model is not the reality; the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. Secondly, the model chosen is abstracted for a purpose; it’s a political choice based on the ends you’re aiming for, and in that way science is the model chosen to extend knowledge of the natural world. A good choice for science, and for the most part non-contentious.

A model of what exists is an ontology, and it’s normal for such a model to use classification, usually a hierarchical taxonomy to define all the things and groups or sets of things that make up your world model. Since the groups may be overlapping and nested hierarchically, things may be members / instances of more than one group / set, but each set is defined by its membership. Meet the definition and you’re in, fail to meet it and you fall outside that set. By definition (literally, by means of definition) the model cuts the world into useful pieces distinct from one another; definitively distinct. It’s what analysis means, it’s more ancient than Aristotle and it’s the old battleground of the romantic poets taking issue with classical science. It’s not new that we “murder to dissect”. Even contemporary philosopher Dan Dennett is at pains to urge his scientist friends, amongst whom he has many, to delay establishing definitions. Hold your definition, he says. Your definitions are not a fundamental aspect of the world, but an emergent part of the scientific model you are developing and extending. Accept that definitions are loose until fitted into your model, only then when usefully forming part of your model are they definitive. Though even there, they’re also contingent of course – they are definitive only for the purposes of the current model, until you find a better one.

If you’ve spent significant time in business and technology, as I have, working on information models, you’ll also realise that even in good functional models, definitions used to identify “business objects” are much less definitive than they might appear. The more you broaden the model to cover wider and wider contexts of life, the closer you get to a generic dictionary of terms independent of context, the more such definitions either include terms like typically or usually used for, or terms that contrast the definition of one object with another. Calling a spade a spade? Try defining “spade”. Seriously if you doubt me, try that exercise before googling or wiki-ing it. You won’t find a comprehensive one that doesn’t say what it’s usually used for, or contrasts it with not being a shovel, nor recognises that the name applies to many unrelated objects from which it has inherited the same name by metaphorical or shape association. If you turn up to work and simply have to choose between a shovel and a spade, the problem is trivial. Then imagine the kind of definition you might need if you had to frame a piece of legislation or policy on what a spade can or cannot be used for ever, anywhere, by anyone? Inconceivable? Don’t even think about it.

Definitions are only definitive within the limits of some model – an abstraction – fitted to a specific purpose. The defined objects are certainly not a fundamental aspect of reality.

The “aha” moment?

So how are we to “discern” different things of different “significance” in the real world, if we accept that objective distinction and definition are simply artefacts of our model, not the world itself? A two-pronged answer. Firstly until people reach an “aha” moment in recognising how significant this objectification problem really is, and how a fundamentally different model might look like and how it would improve life, the answer is one of guidance only.

So, for now, beyond the confines of science, and even within it, don’t get too hung up on definitions as the means to identify your objects & subjects of interest. Certainly in human situations beyond scientific contexts or specific applications, don’t be fooled into thinking you can solve your problem by seeking more definitive definitions. That’s the fools errand. In “identity politics” where waging rhetorical arguments on behalf of or between groups of humans, accept that no such definition can get beyond being a “working definition” for the current conversation. The only reliable identification of a group is mutual self-identity. What does the individual identify as? Even then, there are extreme subjective cases. The individual who refuses any (useful) labelling in order to reject or game the system you’re suggesting, or the individual who chooses perverse identity either for the same reasons or (say) to play the victim card, to claim some freedom conflicting with others, or in order to pursue some other rhetorical or political ideology.

In identity politics, definition of one’s identity is political, subjective, and psychological. It won’t fit your prior objective definitions usefully for long, no matter how carefully you work out such definitions.

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A speculative coda:

Might there be a better solution for identity?

For a more comprehensive and fundamental solution if, as I do, you believe the problem is real (see “aha” above), real in the natural world described by science, then I’m guessing you’re going to need a better solution than a science based on politics and psychological games. You’d also have to believe a little metaphysical consideration is worth the effort. Ironically fundamental physicists, imagining some as yet unknown particle or field underlying their model-so-far are doing exactly that. It was Max Born no less who said “theoretical physics is actual metaphysics”. Sure, they will want to turn their imaginings into definable and testable components of their scientific model of physics but, until they do, such imaginings need not be limited by their existing models. The what-if’s can be as creative and imaginative as you like.

There is nothing supernatural in reality; that’s a naturalistic definition of reality. Anything imagined must be naturalistic and expected to stand the evidential tests of empirical experience. However, in order to have even a conversation about a world model with alternatives to objects (defined objectively, distinct from subjects and from each other), it’s going to be a struggle to fit existing language and rationale and remain intelligible. I’ve many times referred to this as the Catch-22 of making any progress here.

Identity and definition and the idea of identity as something objectively definable (or not) is a long-standing issue here, and the growth of this as a political topic in both the party-political sense, and the wider ethical sense of freedoms and responsibilities, are not new either. What may be new is the increased topicality of free-thought vs ideological extremism. In fact the prompt for this longer post arose from a conversation a couple of weeks ago with one scientist friend, a mycologist, who has his own very particular take on a solution to the problem that the real world is not as definitely objective as our traditional scientific models have led us to accept.

A natural solution – an inclusive and informative view of identity.

Alan Rayner’s metaphysics (or his “non-definitive physics” as he would have it) is called “Natural Inclusion” (NI). Not exactly a monism, since it doesn’t even recognise a single “substance”, but like many monisms it starts with the idea that the subjective (me and my mind) stuff must comprise the same as the objective (other, out there, physical) stuff. That’s a view not inconsistent with scientists who would hold that me and my mind stuff are the “happenings” of my brain and bodily systems and energy stuff; not something else, not fundamentally distinct, and certainly not “woo” or supernatural. However, NI goes further and says even space and stuff are not a fundamentally different presence. Like a number of metaphysics, it uses the language of flow and dynamic patterning as more fundamental than any of the objects we consider significant, but since space itself is included in the flow, rather than flows of stuff contained in space we get flow-forms in and of the space-stuff.

And the language becomes – distinct but mutually inclusive presence, receptivity and permeability, separation as abstraction, dynamically distinct manifestations of informative energy flow …. and so on …. natural inclusion. The language is necessarily alien – unintelligible – if your mind-set is the traditional objective rationality, and I do not attempt to provide a full description of NI here, just a flavour. And, as I say, there are alternative flavours of metaphysics if you prefer. The only sin here would be to assume a metaphysics based only on your existing physics.

No, my purpose here was to illustrate a point about identity without definitions.

Think of two entities A and B, which we can clearly discern (you can see them, right?) as two different things from their (fuzzy red shape) appearance of “space-stuff”, even though their boundaries may appear confused and dynamic. In our “model” – necessarily an abstract model remember – we might choose to define B narrowly or A more widely (say) but equally tightly definitively (blue dotted circles) or we might simply need to draw a line D that clearly distinguishes the spade (A) from the shovel (B). But note that however we might choose to make the distinction between A and B definitive in our model, we can still discern our experience of A from that of B quite independently from those definitions, however narrow, wide, tight, loose, specific or generic.

In the NI approach the space-stuff (natural-flow-forms) that are A and B are “mutually inclusive of receptive space and informative energy”. They don’t “occupy” space as mutually exclusive objects. And note the word “informative” – it’s the information that gives them “form”. Inform as a verb, not just to communicate, but to give form energetically. I believe this is a powerful idea. Another good reason to investigate NI in particular, though as I say I’m not particularly holding up NI here as the solution.

[Post Note: since writing this Alan Rayner’s latest book is published “The Origins of Life Patterns – In the natural inclusion of space and flux“]

[Post Note: Markov Blanket – statistical determination of self-organising system entity / identity boundaries. Within which the entity has a subjective view of the world via that interface – see Mark Solms / Karl Friston.]

The bottom line?

For now however, whether the idea of a non-definitive physics of “natural flow form” – or any metaphysics – is something that turns you on or off, my point here has been very straightforward:

It is perfectly possible to imagine a world model that does not depend on objective definitions. But, if your current context – a scientific one, say – demands definitions, remember not to get too attached to them. If you get to feel that definitive identity of our objective world is the fundamental aspect of our problem, in conflict with subjective identities, then there are alternatives that would re-pay your investigation. For now, the only alternative is messy consensus politics.

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[Post Note : I mentioned earlier in the piece some basic concepts around models and ontologies, taxonomies of sub-classes where parent classes are being selected as significant – every two things have “a” parent class, so simply having a unique parent is rarely the point when it comes to distinguishing identity between any two related things. An interesting article here – about WordPress and WP-Theme code and licensing dependencies – that raises the exact same issues. Distinguishing or establishing a clear relation between two different pieces of code is fraught. In some sense whether one is literally (historical process-wise) derived from the other, they will share some common derivation, and however packaged and distributed, the real-time function of two pieces of code can be inextricably intertwined. Even in software, “identity” is political, subjective, beyond objective. Only case law can resolve the legalities of which definitions rule, not the definitions themselves. And this same issue of well-defined “packets of code” follows for any physical form – genetic or memetic – biological or discursive. It’s the information that is physical – geddit?]

[Post Note : Julian Baggini on personal identity.]

[Post Note : Lily Allen spots the problem with POTUS (sic pouts) as the twitter handle for Obama:

Will Obama get to keep @pouts

— lily (@lilyallen) July 11, 2016

End.]

There’s a research avenue I keep mentioning but still haven’t followed-up closely; that of “intellectuals” adopting Catholicism late in life. Some kind of dawning of “wisdom”. I think I last mentioned it when I (again) noticed this Francis Bacon quote in Nick Spencer’s book:

“a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism;
but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”

My original connection to the Catholicism theme came many years ago when reading biographies of The Inklings (at Oxford) and others at Oxbridge (J R R Tolkien, C S Lewis, Marshall McLuhan, and more … I need to assemble source links.) Two things prompted me to post this morning:

One was Stephen Law at CFI making a simple statement in a Facebook comment thread around his latest piece on “God” – which “obviously” doesn’t exist, yet apparently demands yards of screed?

“The atheist agrees belief is not a kind of knowing.”

Well this atheist doesn’t. Unlike many other rationalists, I can see rationalism (humanism, atheism, secularism) as a belief system. A pragmatic one based on scepticism, where what is believed as knowledge is always open to challenge. Belief only ceases to be a kind of knowing when it is “blind faith” or dogma. Knowledge is never dogmatic; honest scepticism is the antithesis of dogma, not belief. Belief is sufficient trust or “faith” in what you know, and the soundness of its basis, to act on it in the here and now. Always open to challenge, analysis and reflective questioning, but where justification and reconstruction of what is known is not a necessary part of the action itself. We would be inefficient and ineffective – paralysed – without belief. The problem even has a name – “analysis paralysis”.

Secondly, and thirdly, alerted by a couple of tweets this morning one to this guest post by Joe Landi on Godless Mom’s blog: “From Catholicism to Unbelief … and Back” and another to this “Einstein quote” (*) from David Gurteen:

Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling in love.
Albert Einstein http://t.co/Umy3HHTGH9
— David Gurteen (@DavidGurteen) July 8, 2015

(*) Of course, most Einstein quotes aren’t. But anyway, as Landi says, his post on rediscovering Catholicism is not semantic or dialectic, no “reasoned” argument, simply a statement of all the things he “loves” about Catholicism. Apart from this:

As Camus said, no one has ever died for the ontological argument …

The Trinity secures an epistemological position where love, not the intellect, is what will truly lead us to the truth. It, so to say, levels the playing field, putting us in a world where an uneducated cloistered Carmelite can know just as much as, lets say, Aquinas. As the proverb says: “wisdom is easy,” in the sense that you don’t need a P.H.D. to attain to it. And this is precisely what puts the “catholicus” in Catholic.

ie “And the greatest of these is Love”

And for my fellow atheists, note that there is no “god” in this – no supernatural causal agent, omnipotent, omniscient or otherwise.

I responded in two immediately previous posts to stories of (or about) mis-representation of science. Most directly in response to Jon Butterworth’s Guardian piece on science crying wolf (or not).

Listening to Dorothy Bishop this morning with Jim Al Khalili on BBC R4 The Life Scientific, we discover she has campaigned against over-hyped scientific reporting – the “Orwell Award for Scientific Journalism”. Ostensibly, for journalists mis-representing science “news”.

Of course, as Jim and Dorothy go on to discuss, it’s not just the journos and their editors egging them on with briefs designed to sell copy. The scientists themselves hype and mis-represent their findings, exaggerated further in press-releases from their institutions and of course. So many applications start with “impact statements” to justify work to managers and funders, who then want to see the evidence reported.

BUT the key point as Dorothy says scientists should not want to attract attention to all their potentially valuable results – not when it’s part of the scientific churn, work in progress or blue-sky research. Sure some potential, contingent work – eg in Jim’s quantum physics – is tremendously exciting to those close to being “in the know” – but that doesn’t make it newsworthy. ie scientists (and journalists) need to be sensitive to different sorts of science and scientific knowledge. Hear Hear.

[Post Note : Interesting take on Science 1.5 – internal publishing for wider science community reviews – before 2.0 “public”-ation of wider public significance.

This is not a journal publication, it’s a “preliminary” measurement, to be presented at conferences. Hence the 1.5 in my title — we are working on 2.0, which is intended for a paper. But it is public, and it is useful to put it out there so it can be discussed by physicists who are not on ATLAS. And it does tell us something new.

From John Butterworth in 2010, but linked in July 2015 LHC news. My sense is no science should make mainstream media news before it’s “Science 4.0”. John, a scientist first, journo second, is OK publishing 1.5, 2.0 stuff, and previews of 3.0 stuff, but journo’s – selling media – should keep out of it. Anyway, I was following-up the “minimum-bias” topic. One of my main scepticisms of LHC work is the “selection” of significant results being biased by what they’re looking for – potentially self-fulfilling.

[And in Minimum Bias 1.0] “But you can’t possibly be truly unbiased.” “This means that what you are measuring is only defined within a theory.”

Not sure if “minimum bias” is really addressing this issue. Interesting admission of selection bias in measurements and results, given the SAS #AllTrials “show me the evidence” campaign, No?]

In the words of Adam Rutherford, Linnaeus was a twat.

@aoifemcl Can’t be any other way. Linnaeus was a twat.
— Dr Adam Rutherford (@AdamRutherford) June 24, 2015

Well I’ve got news for Adam; Rutherford is a twat. The standard of BBC science journalism and broadcasting has come to this. Adam previewed and then followed-up after his broadcast of BBC R4 Inside Science with smart-arse quips about no such thing as a species and “Chimps are monkeys, so suck on that.” And a few people picked up on the new “factoid”. Mercifully few so far. 

Chimps are Monkeys, so suck on that: @PaoloViscardi on #bbcinsidescience now. — Dr Adam Rutherford (@AdamRutherford) June 25, 2015

This is just so much politically motivated bollocks. Science is everything so we can say what we like and you can’t touch us. We don’t really care about the consequences, evolution will take care of things, we’re all dead, ultimately extinct, in the long run. Oh, how we laughed, not.

It’s not news that biological species are not what they appear. Scientifically speaking it’s about choosing your definition(s) and there are plenty to choose from. And, more and more genetic indicators give us more possible definitions, not fewer. And that blurring is compounded by the fact that the genes we are using as indicators are less and less objectively defined the closer we look too. More information equals less definition. Get used to it.

Moreover, choosing definitions is a political act. Always driven by your purpose, and how useful a given definition is to your purpose. This is Modelling 101. Taxonomy 101. Science is no different. Science’s models of life are just that. Models, not real life.

Biological species? Whether you look at inherited aspects at the DNA patterning or expressed physical properties and appearances level, most useful working definitions of species involve gene transfer processes – schoolboy tittering, you know – “shagging”. Jeez, gimme a break BBC.

@aoifemcl Pretty much. I just consulted Deborah and she said I can’t substitute ‘shagging’ for ‘gene flow events’.
— Dr Adam Rutherford (@AdamRutherford) June 24, 2015

Reproduction. If two individuals are able to successfully reproduce fertile offspring they must be the same species is how the common definition goes. But there are statistics and time and geographical population movements involved in that success. How many pairs of individuals in the population(s) and how far diverged from common ancestry are those individuals and the population averages, in both time and space. It’s easy to say “if they are able to reproduce”, but much harder to model that success meaningfully, and there are many variations in how that is done too (eg so-called circle species). ie not only are there other bases of definition besides reproductive capability, but even that definition has many variations in how it might be interpreted.

Common shared genes, or genetic content, is all the rage of course – but how much is just a number, the significance of which is chosen with statistical relevance to other numbers. And a common shared-ancestor gives a basis on which to make relative comparisons on shared genetics.

You could say (Taxonomy 101): “we are all members of the class (clade) we share in having a common hierarchical parent” – a common heritage. Using that heritage as the basis for membership of the class (set). In fact every two living things shares a common ancestry with at least one other earlier living thing. It’s as meaningful to say Humans are the same species as Neanderthal as it is meaningless to say Chimps are Monkeys. Oh, you’re 5% Neanderthal, well I’m only 2%. That may tell us something about our different lineages since the ancestor we share with Neanderthals, and thence about evolutionary genetic similarities and differences – ie useful science for explaining and understanding the processes involved.

In the programme, when Adam actually says “Chimps are monkeys” he does briefly qualify it with “kinda, but not really”. This is choosing the species definition in terms of sharing a common parent. And as the expert  @PaoloViscardi points out picking the (remote) common parent as your definition isn’t right, you should always talk just one-level down as the class, or in general taxonomy a more significant “Ur-Class” or “archetype” class. It’s just not useful, outside philosophical ontology, to say everything is a thing – even though it is trivially true in real life too.

All this is lost in the takeaway one-liners. Ultimately every two living individuals – however diverse their current species – share a common parent, a representative of a third extinct species, and one that’s pretty hard to pinpoint in most cases. A useless means of classifying individuals now.

Of course, these problems with the apparent meaningless of species are as nothing compared to narrower human concepts like race, and one reason why we ultimately learn that even with ethnic classifications, it’s about self-identity with groups that matter to us as individuals, not about immediate objective definitions of groups with well-defined boundaries. That’s a fools errand.

We are all monkeys? Yeah, and in the long run we’re all dead.

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[Post Note:

Sadly, turning Adam’s “mocking twat” accusation back on himself elicited only the denial and blocking response. Public scientist, in public broadcasting, publishing his opinions and conversations on public social media, in order to promote his media output, can dish it out but not take it apparently.

@psybertron well you got my attention, and now I’m saying goodbye.
— Dr Adam Rutherford (@AdamRutherford) July 6, 2015

A couple of ironic tweeted responses to Adam’s reaction. “Capitalist conspiracy theory” particularly hilarious and wide of the mark. Do I not like conspiracy theories. No just the root issue here – the careless “arrogance” of scientific received wisdom.]  

Jon Butterworth in the Grauniad yesterday asks “Has physics cried wolf too often, or do false alarms help build understanding?“.

If you want a working understanding of the universe, which gives you the best chance of health for you and your loved ones, a stable environment to live in and cool gadgets to play with, science is absolutely the best we can do. But that doesn’t mean it is infallible. Particle physicist Brian Cox, much more of a logical positivist than a postmodern relativist, went so far as to say¹

“Science is never right.”

and he’s correct, in the sense that it is always provisional, and is never, or at least never should be, dogmatic.

The main line of the piece is the balance between over and under claiming the significance – or more often potential significance – of reported science. It is one of my recurring complaints – and the reason I’m a fan of Jon – that too many reports are over-hyped (#), for attention-and-budget-claiming reasons, particularly at the speculative boundaries of “known” science.

Cox on the other hand is reprehensible. This constant lip-service to contingency, whilst using this stuff that’s never right to take the piss out of anyone who disagrees. Cynically dishonest egotism of the logical positivist.

“I suppose the most important defect was that nearly all of it was false.”
A J Ayer erstwhile doyen of Logical Positivism.

Anyway, back to Jon and science being the best we can do?

• Best working understanding of the [physical] universe? – check.
• Best chance for our health? – check sorta – but medicine is not science (*).
• Best for a stable environment? – not even close.
• Best chance for cool gadgets [and even useful technologies]? – check.

2.5 out of 4 for science. Better science than not, but it’s not the best answer to everything.

And back to the issue of hype in science reporting. Clearly news, even of possibilities, is tremendously exciting at the cosmic and quantum boundaries of known science, but of course at these boundaries closest to the unknown, the science is at its most speculative and least accepted by scientific authority beyond the particular specialism.

Saying “science is never right” disingenuously blurs an important distinction. Sure all science is ultimately contingent, even the greatest and longest established knowledge, but there is a difference between science accepted non-contentiously as “knowledge” by scientific authority, and knowledge accepted as valid theory and significant evidence by specialists, but still considered as speculative by wider scientific authority.

Some things “deserve” to be believed, for now, by the non-specialist, as knowledge about the natural world. Others deserve to be recognised as valid theory, scientific work-in-progress, but not as knowledge. The speculative stuff helps build understanding amongst the specialists, but does not contribute directly to wider knowledge. Knowledge is never dogmatic; honest scepticism is the antithesis of dogma. Meanwhile, knowledge is useful stuff we can believe. It is cynical rather than sceptical to treat all science as falling into the same category of contingent knowledge.

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Note (*) Using science here as both the biology & chemistry-based knowledge, logic and technologies, and the mathematical and statistical analysis of objective evidence of medical conditions and outcomes, it is these “sciences” that make medicine distinctive, but do not wholly define it. Medicine would be sadly limited without love and the art of caring, not to mention the politics and economics of its organisation and provision. [Note this is quite different for the wider technology and gadget exploitation in society. If the politics is maintained to be free-market, organisation and provision can be driven entirely by objective logic, maths and stats. Customers buy it in numbers, or they don’t. Neither medicine, nor science for that matter, are free-markets, or even wholly objectively scientific.]

[Post Note : (#) Listening to Dorothy Bishop with Jim Al Khalili on BBC R4 The Life Scientific. Scientists (and journalists) need to be sensitive to different sorts of science and scientific knowledge. Hear Hear.]

I was going to say “to all humanists” but you’d have to be something other than human not to be moved by Bonya Ahmed, the person and her story, speaking to a live public audience for the first time last night at the British Humanist Association 2015 Voltaire lecture in London.

“Wife of” murdered atheist blogger Avijit Roy is how most of us will have first come across Bonya, but she is very much all of atheist, secularist, rationalist, humanist thinker, writer and activist in her own person. A full transcription of her talk last night is already available on the English-language version of the Mukto-Mona rational free-thought blogging platform they set up with other Bangaldeshi bloggers. Giving free-thought a voice in the Bangla language was fundamental to their project. But the words of her talk were only the half of it

At pains not to be drawn into simplistic responses to complex questions, she emphasised the historical perspective of all human situations. And whilst thoughtfully researching the philosophical and historical underpinnings, she also emphasised that this had limited value without political action. It takes all of us to do all of this – we each must do our part of the whole. We can’t fight machetes with pens alone. In that striving for careful thought and balanced effective action, I personally couldn’t help but see a fellow-traveller. A fellow-traveller, in my case, in the comfort of a western secular democracy as chair Jim Al-Khalili pointed out. It was all I could do not to participate whilst she was talking.

Whatever the careful content of her messages, the passionate yet slight, unassuming individual shone through. Shining through, you kept having to remind yourself, not just the horrific death of her husband and father of their daughter, an attack in which she too was savagely maimed, not to mention already under treatment for existing cancer, debilitating personal experience few of us could even imagine. Only 4 months after that event the emotion was visible, yet contained, and the humour and humanity only ever one shyly unassuming smile away.

No wonder so many Tweets used awe-struck language. Courageous and inspiring to all of us it seemed. And a spontaneous emotional standing ovation that died only when Jim persuaded her to step down and leave the stage. The effect summed-up in Phil Walder’s tweet:

I have never felt more humble or proud to be a Humanist than I did tonight. #BHAVoltaire

— Phil Walder (@WallyFlea) July 2, 2015

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[Post Note : Video of full event and talk online at BHA You Tube page.]

[Post Note : and some progress thanks to BHA and FCO.]

Interesting post from Morgan Giddings, with a Facebook response from Sabine Hossenfelder:

Morgan

I have mostly maintained a façade of being that “rational, materialist scientist” most of the time …

… it was always unsettling to think that consciousness is just some byproduct of what is a random universe made up of a bunch of bouncy-balls. I had read Roger Penrose’s books such as The Empror’s New Mind more than a decade before, and that had provided some powerful arguments against this view. But I had put that aside to pursue my “practical” ego-led science career.

I found God, by another name … I found that deep power within me — and within everything.

Sabine

I think I went down the same rabbit hole but came out in a slightly different place. See, as a theoretical physicist there’s no way to deny we are fundamentally “just” elementary particles and of course there isn’t any such thing as free will. Interestingly, this isn’t entirely incompatible with what you write. In any case, I have been avoiding the topic in my writing. I’ve written about the non-existence of free will several times, and I get a lot of responses from people who are seriously bothered. (And never read far enough to get to the point where I explain it doesnt matter.) In any case, thanks for this interesting blogpost.

Morgan

Sabine – “as a theoretical physicist there’s no way to deny that we are “just” elementary particles” – of course there are theoretical physicists that have different viewpoints. Read about David Bohm’s work, among MANY other alternative views.

You state with confidence that free will doesn’t exist. When you can actually show me those “particles” you think are so deterministic as to be predictable in the way you think – yes, those same ones like quarks that nobody can actually measure in a deterministic fashion – then you may have some evidence that there’s no freewill.

However, smashing particles together in a collider and then seeing various random blips, and somehow concluding from that that there is no freewill is bogus. There’s still more that we don’t know than we do about those things.

The Seth books are better than any physics book is on this subject. Especially see the Unknown Reality, Volumes I and II by Jane Roberts.

And, yes, it IS incompatible with what I write. I won’t go into why, here. But the absence of free will misses the whole point, entirely.

Sabine

Morgan: This isn’t the point. To begin with quantum mechanics isn’t deterministic, but that doesn’t mean there is free will. (Atoms decay unpredictably, but if you’d make your decisions in that random fashion you wouldn’t call that free will either.) The relevant point is that we do not know of any example in which a macroscopic (“emergent”) theory comes about in a way that is not fully derivable from the constituents’ theory.

Now note that I carefully said “we don’t know any way in which”. This doesn’t mean there is none. (We can discuss this.) But the point is that according to our best present knowledge of the laws of nature there isn’t any such thing as free will. And unless you demonstrate to me exactly in which way you think you can avoid what is a consequence of effective field theory I’m not going to buy anything to the contrary.

Sure, I know there are some physicists who deny this too. It’s kind of interesting in a sense. Also, entirely unnecessary.

PS: I wrote a paper about this at some point here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.0720

I’m actually writing another paper about this…

I pick up on the same point of Sabine’s as does Morgan

“there’s no way to deny
we are fundamentally “just” elementary particles and
of course there isn’t any such thing as free will”.

The breathtaking arrogance of the materialist scientist – “we are just …” – “of course there isn’t …” That’s the ego driven error – that given no alternative explanation of the standard model, it’s the world that’s wrong, not the model. And it’s ego-driven because it makes the mistake of seeing “me” and the particles as distinct objects.

Even though Sabine clearly includes the force-exchange particles in that “just elementary particles” claim, it’s the “just” that’s the problem. The world is far more than particles. It’s arrangements and flows of such particles. But since we objectify only the particles, we see the arrangements and flows – dynamic patterns – as “just” properties of the particles. ie it’s “just” the particles we treat as objects of reality. In fact it’s the other way around. The flows, dynamic patterns, are reality, and the particles are the pragmatic objects of our (current) model.

It doesn’t require any “woo” or “super-natural-entities” to see alternative entirely naturalistic ways of looking at reality.

Having denied all but particles and their determinism via laws, even statistically random laws, the materialist physicist is unable to explain subjective consciousness and free-will and therefor must deny the existence of the most basic empirical evidence we have available to us. We and our will.

God by any other name? The pantheistic view is a common solution, since Spinoza, and metaphorically it’s as good as any to explain the “vital” ingredient missing from the dead model, a model without evolving will or purpose, but where these are illusory epiphenomena. This doesn’t mean that the vital agency exists as a separate god-like entity beyond the standard model, it simply confirms the standard model is more fundamentally in error.

The rabbit-hole is the standard model itself.

(I’ll come back with more when I’ve read Sabine’s referenced papers, and with better reference sources – Dennett & Baggini from mainstream philosophy; Pirsig & Rayner scientists who saw the error of their earlier ways; Nagel, Unger, Smolin, Goldstein … and many more.)

[Post Note – looking at Sabine’s paper:

The Free Will Function – Free will from the perspective of a particle physicist. It is argued that it is possible to give operational meaning to free will and the process of making a choice without employing metaphysics.

Of course these examples are arbitrarily constructed and are certainly not meant to describe actual reality. Their purpose is merely to show that it is possible to have a mathematical description of reality that does allow for free will to exist and give operational sense to the act of making a decision in a world that is determined but not deterministic.

Two immediate observations:

“Without employing metaphysics” – possibly just a classical scientist’s aversion to philosophy that is not considered to be scientific. In practice, this says, “without fundamental revision to my existing physics.”

The “arbitrary construction” says it is not really an explanation in terms of existing physics, it is speculative, and doesn’t suggest a testable physical hypothesis (yet). It also places strong reliance on the physical possibility according to mathematics, as if maths were some fundamental test of reality – see Unger & Smolin.

It confirms why I have time for Sabine. She is honestly addressing – attempting to address – the issue, even if she adopts the throwaway denials of received wisdom in her professional field. That’s a tough job. Appreciated.]