Month: November 2017

STEMming the tide of ignorant science.

STEM is the acronym for those “sciency” disciplines that contribute to the (human) built environment. It was coined at least in part to provide a handle on those areas of humanity that had traditionally been very male gender biased, unlike the humanities themselves. The natural order MSTE is arranged to make STEM a pronounceable acronym, but it represents part of a useful taxonomy of human knowledge (independent of gender issues).

There is always a tendency for people to put their topic, the one they are promoting, at the centre of their world view assuming the broadest definition of their topic. One of my pet hates is the extent anything remotely technical attracts the “isn’t science wonderful” meme. Science is indeed wonderful but, as I often say, it required a lot more than science to get 500,000 rivets flying in close formation to the moon and back.

The maths, logic and the art of being scientifically rational is one thing. Everyone should have a basic horizontal grounding in tools and methods and in the model of factual knowledge supported by these. But this is just science without a vertical education in why and how the whole edifice of humanity hangs together.

Using the natural MSTE taxonomy:
Science is more than Maths and Logic
Technology applies the art of the possible to the Science.
Engineering turns the possible into reality with Human Ingenuity

Horizontally, humanity interacts as a subjective input at every level, these are all human endeavours, but in terms of the vertical stack, “STEM” is simply the point of contact between science and the rest of the edifice. Education in and about science has limited value without understanding the whole of our built environment, by which I mean the sum total of all physical and human systems humanity has co-evolved.

Did I mention I was an engineer?

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And, right on time:

What matters? What’s matter anyway …. for another time.

Web Knowledge Goes to Ratshit

Really just a holding post, but a recurring theme of mine that the memetics of sharing information freely via the web necessarily tends to lowest common denominators, degenerates to simplest polarised positions, despite the efforts of those who pursue more nuanced truths.

So-called “inventor” of the web – Tim Berners-Lee – on how The Web is Failing.
The semantics of interlinked content is indeed degenerate.

Founding president of Facebook – Sean Parker – on the Monster that is Social Media.
(Also reported by the BBC.)

More to unpick, but in the meantime, read.

And Jaron Lanier too.

Scientism

It’s not the first time I’ve mentioned scientism, nor the first time I’ve written specifically with this topic in my title. However, scientism rang positive bells with several of the audience the other night. My slides included this early bullet:

  • My Sceptical Position is For “Science and Rationality”
    But against “Scientism”, the narrow dogma – or accidental arrogance – that science with objective logic is the privileged answer to anything and everything that matters.

What follows elaborates on that, so let’s start with:

Treating science as …

… the knowledge, explanation and understanding of the natural world, including humanity within it

and that …

… the thing that distinguishes science from any other rational considerations, the thing that science alone brings to the party, is the repeatable empirical falsifiability of hypotheses suggested by theory, independent of subjective context.

(Note that none of this traditional Popperian definition limits the scope, nature, content or processes of the theories of science themselves nor of their creation, development, evolution, explanation of theory or models, nor any metaphorical representation exemplifying such models. The progress of natural understanding progresses on many fronts in many interacting disciplines, many of which may claim to be scientific in terms of the narrow definition, but the whole endeavour progresses on the broader imaginatively rational basis, science included. See also skdh.)

Given that, my position is that science explains:

Potentially, anything, eventually,
But not
Necessarily, everything, now.

The only practical limits to anything and everything in the long run are (say) Wittgenstein and Gödel. That is, sharing that knowledge between humans will always involve symbolic language, lexical or visual, and reducing such a description to some formal logical language will limit the former but never fully resolve its own bootstrapping; its own definition based on some axiomatic premise. Some sort of “first cause”. There is always this minimum representational difference between the actual real world, and our model or theories of it, and our (subjective) grasp of it, empirical or intellectual.

But, as well as this residual gap, there are of course many more gaps and unresolved mysteries here and now in our real world. And, the closer such mysteries are to aspects considered fundamental to our model, the more such mysteries might run through more accepted understanding of otherwise uncontentious levels of our physical world model.

You might argue that the residual gap – the one(s) that forever elude(s) natural explanation – can quite harmlessly be considered god-like. It is after all supernatural, by definition here. A god of the primary gap. Seriously, who cares?

But that is a million miles from, absolutely no reason for, falling back on a “god of the gaps” supernatural explanation of the current mysteries and gaps within nature. I prefer to handle these as the humanity of the gaps.

Whatever we call them we need to deal with gaps in scientific knowledge here and now in our lives and in the politics of how we govern our lives collectively. Working to plug the gaps by extending models, or finding falsifiable hypotheses or other evidence to support applying existing models, is obviously part of our response to dealing with it. But life cannot be placed on hold whilst we wait for that happen, however much priority and resource we give to it. Here and now we must apply our humanity to the gaps. What certainty can we attach to evidence of what we do or don’t know, and it’s relevance to a given life decision. Popper, again, said all life is problem-solving.

And at this point it’s very important to recognise the nature of the gaps. Remember our working model is affected by gaps that may apply very locally in the theory, but which run through many otherwise non-contentious aspects in practice now.

When assembling relevant evidence and marshalling our rational resources to address an argument as part of such a life decision we need to remember that the whole model is imperfect, even though only small parts may be currently accepted as unknown or mysterious. It is too greedy to reduce the whole argument to only those parts where scientifically objective evidence can be brought to bear directly or by logical inference indirectly on well-defined objects, unless that inference also includes proper understanding of the risks of ignoring human subjective involvement. We all individually have skin in this collective game.

And for the benefit of true science the danger is to dogmatically deny, or to ignore the significance of, the gaps we deal with on a subjective level in real life. After all, in the eponymous title of the conference, itself after the lyric of Leonard Cohen:

There’s a crack, a crack in everything.
It’s how the light gets in.

 

E M Forster the Humanist Liberal

It was a couple of years ago I noted E M Forster quotes turning-up with increasing regularity in my blog postings on knowledge and consciousness, and I mentally added Forster to my reading list. Last night the BBC TV started broadcasting a new serial dramatisation of Howard’s End. When one newspaper review compared it to Downton (!) it drew angry responses from Andrew Copson and Peter Cave.

Yes, the whole Upstairs-Downstairs / Downton genre risks misrepresenting intelligent social commentary – even a la Jane Austen, but in our case watching Ep1 of Howard’s End last night we were more recalling Ishiguro’s “Remains of the Day”. Must correct the Forster omission in my actual physical reading list. Recommendations anyone?

The Integral Information of Pan-Proto-Psychism

Prompted by this click-bait headline on Pan-Psychism from Philip Goff in Aeon magazine.

“Panpsychism is crazy, but it’s also most probably true.”

“… physics tells us nothing about the intrinsic nature of the entities it talks about, and indeed that the only thing we know for certain about the intrinsic nature of matter is that at least some material things have experiences.”

As recently as last Wednesday my own position came up when I was talking about the evolution and nature of consciousness. Whatever nonsense(*) is talked about how the observer-effect influences physics – collapse of the wave function, n’all that – it remains certain that there is some “spooky” relationship between consciousness and physics. I made only a passing reference, but clearly it rang bells with the audience in the discussion it started. [(*) Be great if people could simply remember that Schroedinger’s cat was only ever a thought experiment intended to demonstrate how nonsensical it appears!]

It’s partly a problem of human metaphors that precede understanding in physics generally, physics as a model that works without deep understanding, but let’s stick with the specifics of this problem.

Panpsychism is a common suggestion, though it’s not always clear what is meant. It’s not necessary to suggest that highly developed consciousness itself underlies the real physical world, that might indeed be time for the men in white coats with the straitjacket, though obviously it will always underlie our subjective model of it. Consciousness itself, evolved and distributed unevenly throughout sentient species, is however only one metaphor away from the forces and other effects “sensed” by and between other otherwise non-sentient physical objects. Whatever physical objects “have” it’s quite different to our own experience of advanced intelligent consciousness, but nevertheless related it seems. There is also no need for the dualist thought that two distinct physical and psychical types of natural stuff exist and that some supernatural effect creates relationships between them.

I tend to think of the connection as a common basis in proto-consciousness, a “psychical” (non-physical) component of consciousness that is necessarily present throughout the physical world even if not generally manifested as consciousness. And this proto-conscious component is far from mysterious or supernatural. In both fundamental physics and evolved biology this common component is simply information – significant differences between points in space-time. (Points not particles notice, without any intrinsic properties of their own, but with all properties and particles, psychical or physical, deriving from information integral to these point distinctions.)

Fundamental (Shannon) information is both proto-physical and proto-psychical. Not crazy and probably true.

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[Previously on Psybertron – “significant difference” as a fundamental component is a recurring theme, first used with this integral information meaning back in 2005. And IIT is an exciting recent development in the physics of consciousness. Also a different topic on the face of it but with many more of the consciousness-as-evolved-information references and links.]

Kurt Goldstein

Hat tip to Jim Walsh for tweeting a mention of Kurt Goldstein. I frequently refer back to rehabilitation of the much-maligned Abraham Maslow, and discover that in his time as editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Goldstein was influential on Maslow and is the source of “self-actualisation”. The term is an awful “Americanism” but is nevertheless an important concept.

Uniquely Unique – Useful or Meaningless?

I noted when doing my own “review” of Kevin Laland’s “Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony” that the main reason I was reading and reviewing it was because it was to be the subject of Massimo Pigliucci’s next “in depth book club” review. In this in depth series he tends to review in detail chapter by chapter, and Massimo’s review of Laland’s chapter 1 is now published. Interestingly the focus is precisely one of only two I highlighted. The uniqueness or otherwise of humans.

Laland – “The fact remains that humans alone have devised vaccines, written novels, danced in Swan Lake, and composed moonlight sonatas, while the most culturally accomplished nonhuman animals remain in the rain forest cracking nuts and fishing for ants and honey.” (p.10)

Pigliucci – As I reported recently I was accused of “arrogance” when I stated this simple conclusion during a panel discussion at the New York Academy of Science. But the fact remains true, regardless of pious and well intentioned pleas for getting ourselves off the evolutionary pedestal. As Kevin says later in the chapter, yes, in a trivial sense every species is “unique,” but humans are unique in a highly interesting way, which is not comparable to the uniqueness of dolphins, birds, or what else. Indeed:

Laland  – “Herein lies a major challenge facing the sciences and humanities; namely, to work out how the extraordinary and unique human capacity for culture evolved from ancient roots in animal behavior and cognition.” (p.11)

Pigliucci – As I have pointed out, even brilliant biologists like E.O. Wilson don’t get that culture isn’t going to be reduced to biology, and therefore that the humanities are not, and never will be, a branch of the biological sciences.

I agree, there is a trivial sense in which every species is unique. The numbers and distribution of hairs on the abdomen are in some sense unique for every species – drosophila or human – and indeed each may be some combination adaptive and/or vestigial. Nevertheless unique. Less trivially, I summarised it like this:

“I like [Laland’s thesis] in the sense that it does support the idea that the human mind is a qualitatively distinct and uniquely different kind in a world of many sentient species. It’s not exceptionalism in the sense that it couldn’t have been otherwise, that humans were in any sense necessarily predestined to be that species. But let’s face up to facts and responsibilities. Here we are.”

Eventually Pigliucci concludes with Laland’s assertion that

The evidence appears to point to the conclusion that human intelligence and culture evolved in a particular way.

Whether the expression “uniquely unique” says any more than unique in a particular way is semantically moot. Either way our particular uniqueness is in having a sense of responsibility for an extended environment beyond our immediate experience as individuals. As I said that’s a unique “kind” of thing – the only example of its kind – in the (known) evolved cosmos.

It’s the very opposite of arrogance. Seems we’re all in agreement?

Why “Intelligent Design” Isn’t

Was the title of a talk given by “Elliot George” to the Teesside Sceptics in the Pub last Thursday. I had done some homework beforehand and was expecting to be publishing some review. However it was so dire I can see little value in compiling my notes.

Before we even get to the content, it was marred (a) by talking to excruciatingly slow text-build slides, and (b) the speaker’s indulgence in deploying for the first time some very slow and unreliable new app to control the presentation from his iPhone that simply kept failing and resetting. So damn rude!

Content-wise it was sadly devoid of any actual knowledge. Fortunate that the audience was able to drive the subsequent “Q&A” as free dialogue.

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Epistemological naivety. Truth / thinking / knowing / believing / trust / faith / authority / the nature of evidence & residual-uncertainties. Hypothesis / testable-assertion / theory / model. Any distinction between scientific knowledge and any other kind. (Julian Baggini anyone?)

Conflation of intelligence with perfection / optimisation. Conflation of creation / infinite-regress-first-cause with intelligence in evolutionary design. Conflation of design with designer. The idea that apart from a few evangelical extremists we need to defend evolution per se from god in 2017. The idea that a group of self-identified sceptics needed that particular history lesson. Couldn’t even get Jerry Coyne’s name right! The general conflation of all things “god” with everything else. The devil really needs to be in the details.

Totally dismissive (and/or ignorant) of any current scientific ideas around information theory, complexity and variety in physics, biological evolution and conscious intelligence.

[Many detailed notes on actual content.]

Scary idea that as a retired science teacher message aimed at 8-year olds. God help us. (Coincidentally and ironically I happen to be discussing the evolution of consciousness with my own retired physics teacher for U3A education.)

Coincidentally, though not in fact part of my homework for the above talk, the connection with Discovery Institute and George’s nemesis Jonathan McLatchie turned up in this recent post.