Sep 11 2009
This xkcd comic is a riot.
Am I mistaken to think that in previous times philosophical and scientific discourse was dominated by the few who had risen to the lofty stage of widespread exposure? Has the Internet changed all that? By lowering the threshold of exposure, is public discourse more of a roar of many, many voices? And, very importantly, is this a good thing? Can/will it be?
Jul 24 2009
In a freethought essay by Valerie Tarico, Christian Belief Through the Lens of Cognitive Science: Part 5.5 of 6, I came across a quote that caused me to emit a silent huzzah!
The scientific method has been called, “What we know about how not to fool ourselves.”
No, science is not one belief system among many. In fact, it may just be an antidote to belief. At least bogus belief.
What is science? Too often science is presented solely as the products of a process/enterprise. This strikes me as akin to pointing to a sack of rice and calling it agriculture.
We need more words!
There are the products of science and there is the enterprise or process of doing science.
Here is my spur-of-the-moment definition of “science.” At least the part I think needs to be emphasized.
Science is a set of thinking and information-gathering strategies developed to reduce error.
What differentiates science from non-science? The types of thinking and information-gathering processes used to come to a conclusion or form a belief.
Some fundamentalists view science with hostility, claiming it leads to atheism. There may be something to this, actually. In a sense, science is the process of subtracting the bogus to arrive at the more real (what we can more confidently know). When you apply scientific thinking to religious claims . . . they tend to fall away. In the area of supernatural belief, the atheist is one who has let fall away ideas unsupported by the best methods and technologies of thought.
The audacity! Dropping to the cutting floor another person’s cherished ideas!
Scientists aren’t arrogant or close-minded. They are confident that their cognitive tools are a prophylactic against bogus belief. And they are willing to put ideas to the test! And so they continue to advance, in part, by subtraction.
Jul 12 2009
In the past post, No Solitary Creator, I argued that the Paley’s Watch argument is bogus. In fact, the analogy that biological life is as obviously designed as a watch better supports evolutionary theory.
This paragraph tells it in brief -
No individual stepped into an empty room, drew up a design, and then fashioned my Casio from scratch. Instead, countless people played a role in the design and construction of it: from the plastic wrist strap to the glass face, LCD display, tiny gears and lithium battery.
Similarly,
Is a Mercedez-Benz automobile evidence of “a” creator. Absolutely not. Ask Mercedez. Ask Benz. The truth? Automobiles and watches are the product of many, many individuals working alone and in concert over decades if not centuries.
To read the entire article, click here.
Jul 11 2009
Math is a very powerful tool that can be misused. Also, to the extent that it exists in people’s minds only, it is unreal. We shouldn’t forget that. There is math and there is reality; one can be used to explain and predict the other. Even as a tool math is imperfect. Why? Those who wield it — human beings — are imperfect.
This cartoon from xkcd perfectly illustrates my point:
May 27 2009
A recent technological advance has once again got me thinking about the term, dimension. What an advance it is.
‘Five Dimensional’ Discs With A Storage Capacity 2,000 Times That Of Current DVDs
Cool. Gold nanoparticles were incorporated into a disc surface, without adding to the physical size, yet increasing the storage capacity immensely.
How did they do it? Perhaps they used some String Theory, which “implies” that our universe has a number of dimensions beyond the standard three-plus-time available at Wal-Mart.
Discs currently have three spatial dimensions, but using nanoparticles the Swinburne researchers were able to introduce a spectral – or colour – dimension as well as a polarisation dimension.
Here’s my semantic-slash-metaphysical beef with talk of extra dimensions. Is the polarization dimension the same sort of dimension that is length, width, or height? Does it really belong in the same category and thus appropriately represented with the same word? I kinda doubt it.
Is that also the case with String Theory? I don’t know. When we talk about extra dimensions, what we are often referring to is additional scalar variables. And if variables provide us with additional information about something, a new type of information, is it wise to imbue this type of information and measurement with spatial connotations? In other words, with the information provided by a new variable and data, is there really a there there?
As for my brain, sure, you could put it on a stainless steel table and measure just it’s height and width and length. But there is so much more to my brain than that. Are there thus more dimensions?
May 01 2009
A recent study on the influence of cognitive priming on financial decision-making resulted in the priming of my memory to recall a related study.
In the first, a group of investment advisors and accountants read an article either about a successful outcome to a risky investment or an opposite outcome. When asked to then rate a traded stock, those that had read the positive article rated the stock more highly than those that had read the negative. While the investors/accountants believed they were freely making an objective decision, their previous experience influenced their thinking without their awareness of it.
Another study found that the temperature of a beverage briefly held influenced a subject’s impression of a hypothetical person later read about and evaluated. In this clever experiment . . .
Williams [the author] enlisted the help of a confederate, who escorted the test subjects from the lobby of a psychology building and rode the elevator to the test area with them. The confederate carried a clipboard, two textbooks and a cup of hot or iced coffee and knew nothing of the hypothesis being tested. During the trip to the test area, the confederate asked the subject to hold the cup of coffee while she recorded their name and the time of their participation.
Simply holding a hot cup of coffee for a brief period caused the subjects to later rate an individual as more “warm.” Again, the person’s “free” thinking was influenced without their awareness by previous experience.
Which brings me to free will. If our previous experiences influence our behavior without our knowing it, how could we ever be fully confident that a decision was arrived at freely? Do our previous experiences not play a role in determining our feelings, thoughts and behavior?
On campus yesterday I read this “inspirational” bulletin board message:
Our lives are the sum total of our decisions.
The graphic was one of a road/highway. “Exercise you free will wisely” was the unstated motto.
Do we in fact freely choose what we do? Even when concentrating fully and of the mindset that we are freely choosing, can we truly? I don’t think so. The “road we travel” is determined, to a very significant degree, by the terrain of our innate personality/characteristics and the subsequent experiences that shape us.
Apr 29 2009
Last weekend I read — skimmed, really — a book titled, The Bridge to Humanity: How Affect Hunger Trumps the Selfish Gene. I was interested in the topics it promised to address, namely human evolution and the role culture plays in it. Although the term “affect hunger” set off a bit of an alarm bell in my brain (what the hell is that?) the heading to the first section, in particular, seemed to hold promise: “Nature and Nurture.”
Psychology is considered a science. Is it? Can be. The book I read was not. Not really. Consider these representative passages:
Affect hunger is the motivating force for sociality, just as thirst motivates us to drink and hunger to eat.
Culture is therefore the shared perception of the universe and its contents, seen as a systematic whole, including the perceptions of self and the delineation of behavioral propriety.
Affect hunger is rooted in biology and emerges with culture. It ties the two together. Affect hunger does not leave the realm of biology, for its very existence plays a role in survival, first by contributing to the central nervous system and second by motivating us to entice the maternal care that is needed to live in a human world.
It seems that in attempting to develop a psychological theory-of-nearly-everything, the author wrote in generalities and employed numerous analogies. Data? There was none I found that directly supported unique, specific claims.
What makes a field of study science is not the subject itself, but how it examines and explains. A classic example is Intelligent Design. Although some people would like to needle it into science classes, just because it purports to be about biological life doesn’t make it a science.
If the book I read wasn’t science, what was it? Philosophy? Meta-psychology? Because I believe in precision I’m going to refrain from slapping any old term on it. Frankly, I don’t know what to call it. Maybe we simple need more words. Specific words.
Apr 24 2009
More red mums are blooming in our yard. And I don’t seem to tire of them. I’ve taken photos this year as I have in years past. I’ll take many more.
I wonder if people who don’t habituate to stimuli as rapidly have a more wonder-full life. Or maybe it isn’t a case of failing to habituate, but of succeeding at seeing at a finer grain, where things are rarely the same.
Apr 18 2009
A new, super-precise clock . . . ah, mechanism, I guess . . . has been developed. And it got me thinking about the nature of time. Here’s the news-
The new techniques make JILA’s strontium clock 50 percent more accurate than the results reported last year, so that it now would neither gain nor lose 1 second in more than 300 million years.
First, a tangential thought: If a clock “loses” a second of time, where does that lost unit of time “go”? You might not want to think too hard about it. You could lose some sleep. And you might not want to ponder where the lost sleep goes to as well.
Second, the whole topic of quantum-events-based clocks is, to me, like a metaphysical scab. Makes my mind itch and I feel there is a protruding edge. But pick at it too much and you might lose some sleep. Why? Because an atomic clock measures time without motion — at least motion in the sense of our classical understanding.
Most clocks do rely on motion to measure the events and generate the units we call time. A sundial relies upon the motion of a shadow; a pocket watch upon the motion of springs and gears; a digital wristwatch upon the vibrations of a quartz crystal. But we can’t really say an atomic clock relies upon motion to generate units of time. There is instead an oscillation between quantum states without any apparent motion between. First state one, then state two. Never state one-and-a-half.
It is said that time flows. Which implies motion. But what does it do on the quantum level? And what does it mean in terms of the nature of time? It could mean a whole lot.
Apr 17 2009
What makes science soft or hard? The temperature it is served at, of course! Soft science is all warm and melty, while cold scientists doing hard science work in refrigerated labs and never crack a smile. To do soft science you can use a spoon. To do hard science you need a very sharp knife. Or maybe even a laser.
Seriously, a blog post by Massimo Pigliucci got me thinking about the topic. In the intro to his piece Massimo included this quote by John R. Platt:
“Scientists these days tend to keep up a polite fiction that all science is equal.”
That line was written half a century ago. And I find truth in it today. In fact, even a couple podcasts I listen to regularly –one categorized as skepticism, the other science — include a quiz/puzzle feature where you must guess which of the three or four items are science and which are not. As if there is only science on one hand and not-science on the other.
No. There are all sorts of science out there, from weaker to stronger and from more empirical to more speculative.
In his piece Massimo points out that, historically, one of the ways used to differentiate hard science from soft was speed of progress. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. So allow me to cut to the chase and share how I differentiate hard and soft science, or as I prefer to speak of it: stronger science and weaker.
To me the quality of science is not speed of progress or even field of study. It is primarily an issue of how directly and precisely variables can be measured. My field, psychology, tends to be a weaker science because things such as anger are difficult to precisely define and impossible to directly measure (at least the subjective component).
Weaker science tends to have fuzzy variables that can and will lead to exaggeration and misinterpretation of findings.
Perhaps a simple way to put it is this way: Stronger science means more data, better quality data, and less speculation. Weak science means less data, worse quality data, and more speculation.
But that’s just my two cents.
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