Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
I’ve posted fairly often on the videos of German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder , who posted YouTube videos dealing not only with her heterodox approach to modern physics, but also with subjects like consciousness, free will, and transsexuality. According to Wikipedia, her most recent academic positions were at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (until 2023) and since then at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich’s Center for Mathematical Philosophy. (Her personal website is here.)
No longer. In this 14-minute video called “I failed,” Hossenfelder explains why she now has no formal academic job but is doing only YouTube videos.
The story is familiar to many Americans. Unable to secure a permanent, tenured position, Hossenfelder was told that because she was a woman, she should apply for female-limited scholarships that weren’t tenured and depended on getting grants to get a salary. So, as for many academics in America, that academic job depended on getting grants. And those grants come with substantial “overhead” given to the institution: money that can be used to support other endeavors of the institution. (In America, federal grants can come with 50% or higher overhead, so if you get a million bucks for your own research, the institution gets $500,000+ on top of that. It’s supposed to be used to support the infrastructure of your lab, like water, electricity, maintenance, and the like, but the university simply puts it in a big pot and uses it for nearly anything.)
This system is a way to turn untenured faculty into money earners to support the institution, and explains why so many faculty, tenured or otherwise, are under constant pressure to get grants. Even if you have tenure, in many places your promotion and salary increases depend getting grants, though the University of Chicago is one of the few places I know of in which discussion of grants is forbidden when the tenure and promotion committee decides your fate. Research accomplishment, service to the university, and teaching are all that matters.
As an untenured academic, Sabine had no security, and on top of that she became part of the system (also prevalent in America), in which a senior professor heading a lab simply tells his minions what to do and then slaps his or her name on whatever papers come out of the lab. This “paper production machine,” as Sabine calls it, is a way for the Boss to get a c.v. bloated with many papers on which he or she didn’t do any work, but procured the money to support. In other words, the Boss writes the grants and the minions do the work that helps the Boss advance and get further grants.
I have to say that I find this system repugnant, but it’s what both Americans and Sabine have to deal with. I avoided it by doing my own research with my own hands—after all, that, and not writing grants, was the fun part—and by not putting my name on papers in which I didn’t actively participate (correcting a student’s paper or just funding the work doesn’t count!). But I also discovered that the NIH, which funded my research throughout my career, didn’t care whether or not my name was on the papers I listed as “accomplishments” in my grant proposals; they wanted only to see what you had done with the money (i.e., how many decent papers came out of my lab, whether or not I was an author). Thank goodness for that! But see below for its effects on my psyche.
But I digress. Sabine went through a series of jobs and grants, constrained by the German system to do research that was a bit “edgy,” but not the kind of research she wanted to do. Caught up on this grant-and-paper recursion, unable to do the research she loved, and married (with twins) to a man who worked in Sweden (e.g., commuting), she became unhappy and depressed. Eventually, as she says, she applied for grants in areas where she did want to work, but she didn’t get grant funding. Without that money, she didn’t have a job. And so she had to leave academia.
As she says matter-of-factly (but clearly distressed), her academic career finished as “the story of a young scientist whose dreams died” and “the story of an old scientist who thinks they a who could have made a difference if it hadn’t been necessary to get past five reviewers who didn’t share [her] interests.” She tries to put a good face on her tale by saying that she found on YouTube “a community of people” who share her interests. In the end, she says she’s found an honest trade by swapping knowledge for viewers’ attention.
The video ends with a bump as she says, “I’m not sure if I’m going to post this video. It’s a bit too much, isn’t it?” She did post it. No, it’s not too much, though it’s sad and it tells you how the system works for both tenured and untenured academics.
Watch below, and then I’ll say a bit more afterwards.
I want to tell a personal story that buttresses Sabine’s tale of the importance of grants. From the beginning of my career, it was necessary to get federal grants, and for two reasons. Most important, I was an experimental evolutionary geneticist, and needed money to support my lab and my students. Your “setup” money that they give you when you begin a job (my first position was at the University of Maryland) runs out after a year or two, and you have to start writing grants as soon as your butt hits your first office chair.
Second, at Maryland grants were important to do the research that would get you promoted to tenure. Even at Chicago, I couldn’t do lab work or support my Ph.D. students unless I had a grant. And without research and publications, one couldn’t do the work you wanted, and your career would tank.
Fortunately, I was funded by the NIH from the outset, and was lucky enough to keep the same grant for 33 years without an interruption of funding. (There was pressure to get more than one grant, but I resisted it; I was happy with a single grant that could fund the work I wanted to do, and didn’t want to spend my life writing grants so I could be part of “the paper production machine.”) Grants are hard to write, and I usually began writing one six months before it was due.
The way the NIH informs you of your fate is first via a letter—a letter in which there is a pink piece of paper that gives you your rating: at that time ratings went from 100 (best) to 500 (worst). That number give you an idea if your grant fared well, but whether or not you get funded came via a subsequent phone call. I remember how my hands shook when I opened the NIH letters, and how pleased I was to see a good score (my last one was 103, nearly perfect). From the score, you had a good idea if you’d get funded, and, after the phone call confirming that came, I was very happy that I had another 3 years of funding (I had 11 straight funding bouts).
But, as a lugubrious Jew (is that redundant?), my happiness was ephemeral. For I almost immediately began worrying about the NEXT grant. Would I be able to do the research I was just funded for so that I could get the grant renewed again?
The day I decided to retire, I felt a great weight lift off my shoulders, but I didn’t understand why. Then I realized: I never had to apply for another grant again! It turns out that during my whole career, the fear of losing my grant had gnawed silently at my insides, like a tapeworm. Now there was no more fear, and for several years I simply enjoyed my research and stopped worrying about grant deadlines and renewals.
The upshot is that I fully understand Sabine’s malaise. The academic grant-and-paper system isn’t great, but I don’t see an alternative right now. But I do know that grants should be given for research accomplished rather than research proposed (the latter, occupying about 15 single-spaced pages, is what took me so long to write a grant). If this alternative were the case, I wouldn’t have had to spend six months planning what I would do in advance—a nearly impossible task anyway. I understand, although I may be wrong, that this is how the Canadian granting system works: everyone gets some money for their first grant, and then for subsequent grants you write a very short proposal whose kernel is describing what you did (and published) with the last grant. If you keep your record of accomplishment going, you keep getting your grant. That system saves an enormous amount of time.
I’ve been critical of the papers and views of Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, an American cosmologist and particle physicist at the University of New Hampshire, with appointments in both physics and gender studies. You can see some of my critiques here, here and here, but my most severe criticism involved the paper below, published in the University of Chicago journal Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Click on the screenshot to see it, or get the pdf here.
The paper’s thesis was that black women (more than black men; it’s intersectional) face huge bigotry in physics which keeps them not only out of the field, but also from contributing to the canon of knowledge in the field. The bigotry supposedly reflects the hegemony that knowledge claims in physics reflect a “white spistemology”, and that soon after black women enter the field in substantial numbers, our ways of doing physics, as well as what we learn, will change dramatically. Here’s the paper’s abstract:
In this article I take on the question of how the exclusion of Black American women from physics impacts physics epistemologies, and I highlight the dynamic relationship between this exclusion and the struggle for women to reconcile “Black woman” with “physicist.” I describe the phenomenon where white epistemic claims about science—which are not rooted in empirical evidence—receive more credence and attention than Black women’s epistemic claims about their own lives. To develop this idea, I apply an intersectional analysis to Joseph Martin’s concept of prestige asymmetry in physics, developing the concept of white empiricism to discuss the impact that Black women’s exclusion has had on physics epistemology. By considering the essentialization of racism and sexism alongside the social construction of ascribed identities, I assess the way Black women physicists self-construct as scientists and the subsequent impact of epistemic outcomes on the science itself.
I won’t go through that word by word; you can see the problems.
This paragraph from the paper sums up its repeated conflation between physics and social justice. I’ve bolded an especially bizarre part:
Yet white empiricism undermines a significant theory of twentieth-century physics: General Relativity (Johnson 1983). Albert Einstein’s monumental contribution to our empirical understanding of gravity is rooted in the principle of covariance, which is the simple idea that there is no single objective frame of reference that is more objective than any other (Sachs 1993). All frames of reference, all observers, are equally competent and capable of observing the universal laws that underlie the workings of our physical universe. Yet the number of women in physics remains low, especially those of African descent (Ong 2005; Hodari et al. 2011; Ong, Smith, and Ko 2018). The gender imbalance between Black women and Black men is less severe than in many professions, but the disparity remains (National Science Foundation 2018). Given that Black women must, according to Einstein’s principle of covariance, have an equal claim to objectivity regardless of their simultaneously experiencing intersecting axes of oppression, we can dispense with any suggestion that the low number of Black women in science indicates any lack of validity on their part as observers.
Remember this statement, as it will be examined again by Alan Sokal (below).
I wrote this about that:
Statements like that make me wonder if Prescod-Weinstein knows that she’s distorting science in the service of social justice. Einstein’s principle simply states that the laws of physics are invariant under frames of reference, not that “all observers are equally competent and capable of observing the universal laws [of physics].” To say that the theory of relativity shows objectively that racism against black women is unscientific is to mistake the laws of physics with a moral dictum. In other words, Prescod-Weinstein is committing the naturalistic fallacy. Certainly all groups get the same opportunity, should they wish to become physicists, to study the laws of nature, but not everyone, least of all me, is “equally competent.” What Prescod-Weinstein should be arguing is not that Einstein’s theory explicitly makes all people morally equal and with equal claims to objectivity, but that considerations of well-being and empathy make all people morally equal. Dr. King didn’t need Einstein to convince America that segregation was wrong.
Here’s another quote from Prescod-Weinstein arguing not only about pervasive and pernicious forms of racism exist in physics, but that admitting more black women might well get rid of the doldrums that string theory finds itself in:
In effect, white physicists are considered competent to self-evaluate for bias against other epistemic agents and theories of physics where there is no empirical grounding to assist in decision making, while Black epistemic agents are considered incompetent to bring a lifetime of knowledge gathering about race and racism to bear on their everyday experiences. This empirical adjudication is the phenomenon of white empiricism. It is reflected in string theorists’ ability to actively argue for continued investment in their ideas via funding and faculty hiring while at the same time Black people—particle physicists or not—are often considered to be making controversial or “evidently wrong” statements about racism.
And my take on that:
These statements, particularly the last one, show Prescod-Weinstein’s confusion between empirical studies of physics and evaluation of the “lived experience” of racism by black women. I’m not denying, of course, that some physicists have racist attitudes. But to say that one must accept a black women’s views about racism because science says you must is to equate subjectivity with objectivity, anecdote with scientific consensus. And, in fact, Prescod-Weinstein gives no examples of white male physicists rejecting black women’s views about racism.
Well, I didn’t have much space to do a complete analysis, but Alan Sokal, mathematician at University College London and famous (and infamous) for his Social Text hoax, has done a thorough critique of the same paper in Peter Singer et al.’s new venue, The Journal of Controversial Ideas. (This journal is where a bunch of us published published our paper “In Defense of Merit in Science,” and I predict that the journal will increase in quality and visibility as authors objecting to au courant nonsense, mostly of the Leftist social-justice variety, place there papers there, for woke journals will not accept “controversial” and often antiwoke discourse. Sokal, by the way, has a whole history of debunking nonsense, as in his book with Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science.)
At any rate, in the journal Sokal has a long and devastating takedown of Prescod-Weinstein’s “White Empiricism” paper, and you can see it by clicking on the screenshot below (you can find the pdf here):
Sokal first notes the wide approbation the paper got, but with a footnote that I (along with John McWhorter!) was one of only two people who actually criticized it:
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s article, “Making Black women scientists under white empiricism: The racialization of epistemology in physics” (Prescod-Weinstein 2020), has been widely cited and praised. It is #56 in the Altmetric ranking of the Top 100 Most Discussed scholarly articles for 2020.It has been cited 37 times in the scholarly literature – including 14 citations in the Science Education literature – all of them completely uncritically.(footnoter 2). There has not, to my knowledge, been any detailed engagement with the content of the article’s reasoning.
And footnote 2, just to be self-aggrandizing:
2. Web of Science as of 1 March 2023. I have checked all 37 articles (except one to which I was unable to get access), and none of them contains even the slightest critical commentary on, or critical analysis of, the reasoning in Prescod-Weinstein (2020). The only critical citations of which I am aware are a blog by biologist Jerry Coyne (2019) and a brief comment in the book of linguist John McWhorter (2021, 109–110). Google Scholar, which has a wider scope than the Web of Science, shows 90 scholarly citations as of March 2023.
Enough bragging: where else can one criticize such a paper except on a website? (Surel the journal would reject criticism!). This is why The Journal of Controversial Ideas is so essential.
I don’t want to summarize the entire critique of Sokal, as it’s very detailed and you can read the paper itself, which is straightforward, clear, and sometimes funny. Sokal avoids any nasty or ad feminam remarks, though in my view he bends over backwards too far trying to find merit in Prescod-Weinstein’s thesis. (Well, my Ph.D. advisor Dick Lewontin told me that a good critique involves “giving with one hand and taking with the other”, so Sokal’s method is probably more efficacious than mine.)
Here’s his own preface and rationale:
There has not, to my knowledge, been any detailed engagement with the content of the article’s reasoning.
That detailed engagement is the purpose of the present article. I will argue that the reasoning, both scientific and philosophical, in Prescod-Weinstein (2020) is deeply flawed. I will also argue that the article’s main contention – that “race and ethnicity impact epistemic outcomes in physics” – is valid, if at all, only in an extremely limited sense. I will finally argue that the flawed reasoning in this article, together with its uncritical acceptance in many progressive educational circles, threaten to have negative practical consequences both for science and for science education, and in particular for the goal of attracting more women and Black people (and especially Black women) to scientific careers. For all these reasons, I believe it is of some value that the reasoning in this article be openly and rigorously debated
I can give but a flavor of Sokal’s article through quotes (but again, there’s no substitute for reading the paper).
Regarding the conflation between Einstein’s theory and the neglect of black women as objective observers, Sokal says this (see paragraph above):
The first step in this reasoning is the elision between “frame of reference” in physics and “observer”. This elision is common in expository accounts of special relativity, beginning with Einstein’s original paper (Einstein 1905); the elision is harmless provided that one understands that the “observer” need not be a human, but could well be a machine (and in contemporary experimental physics most often is). What is relevant in relativity is not the identity of the “observer”, but rather its state of motion. Discussions of special relativity (especially in textbooks) refer frequently to the “earth frame of reference” or the “train frame of reference”; it is irrelevant whether the “observer” (if any) located on the ground or the train is a white man, a Black woman, or an automated particle detector.
Secondly, in general relativity (Einstein 1915) the relevant concept is general covariance, i.e. the covariance of the equations under arbitrary smooth changes of coordinates. It is dubious whether most of these coordinate systems can be associated in any sensible way to “observers”.
But the fundamental and glaring flaw in this passage is, once again, the series of elisions from physics to social epistemology. In the first sentence, “there is no single objective frame of reference that is more objective than any other”, the second use of the word “objective” is not wrong – the accounts of a particle collision from the earth frame of reference and the train frame of reference are indeed equally objective – but it paves the way for a more tendentious interpretation of this word in what follows. The second sentence, “all frames of reference, all observers, are equally competent”, explicitly elides “frames of reference” to “observers”, and then introduces the new adjective “competent”: an adjective that would be bizarre for describing a frame of reference (earth or train) or an automated particle detector; it can now only be intended to refer to a human observer, contrary to the meaning of “frame of reference” in physics. The conclusion, “Black women must, according to Einstein’s principle of covariance, have an equal claim to objectivity”, is then a pure non sequitur: Einstein’s principle of covariance says nothing whatsoever about any humans’ claims to objectivity. Indeed, Einstein’s principle of covariance says nothing whatsoever about any human social issues. But – it goes without saying – one doesn’t need general relativity to argue that all humans, regardless of race or sex, are potentially capable of doing physics, with their work being evaluated on its merits.
This is of course a far better and clearer analysis than mine.
Below is Sokal’s reaction to Prescod-Weinstein’s claim that native Hawaiian opposition to constructing the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, reflects a pushback against “White Empiricism” by indigenous “ways of knowing”—in this case the native Hawaiian system of ethics, land use, and religion/spirituality. I’ve bolded one sentence I love:
But one thing should be clear: nothing is gained by mixing these ethical, political and legal debates with flawed philosophical and scientific arguments. Whatever can be said in favor of the “cultural knowledge” of the Indigenous Hawaiian communities – and undoubtedly much can be – that knowledge certainly cannot compete with modern science in the domain of astronomy and cosmology. To point this out is not to engage in cultural arrogance; it is simply to state facts. No premodern belief system – whether Western (e.g. fundamentalist Christianity) or non-Western– can compete with modern science as an account of reality. Indeed, even modern science 100 years ago – after the development of general relativity (1915) but before the modern understanding of galaxies (1920s), the discovery of the expansion of the universe (1930s), of the cosmic microwave background radiation (1965), and of the accelerated expansion of of the universe (1998) – is vastly inferior to our present-day understanding of cosmology.
One more quote on Prescod-Weinstein’s claim that black feminist theory can change the content of physics knowledge (and the ethnicity of physicists):
Finally, what about the more ambitious claim, made by Prescod-Weinstein in her conclusion, that “Black feminist theory intersectionality should change physics – and not just through who becomes a physicist but through the actual outcomes of what we come to know”? Alas, this claim is simply plucked out of the blue in the conclusion; not the slightest argument or evidence is provided, in the body of the article, that Black feminist theory, or indeed any feminist theory, has had or will have any consequences for the content of physics. And why on earth should it? The subject matter of feminist theory is human relations; it is very remote from the subject matter of physics. The relation between the two subject matters could be, at best, one of distant analogy. In fact, Prescod-Weinstein concedes that, despite four decades of trying, feminist ideas have not yet had any significant effect on the substantive content of physics (Schiebinger 1999, 178–179; Rolin 1999; Bug 2003). The claim that feminist theory (intersectional or otherwise) will in the future change the content of physics – and not merely the social structure of the physic community – is nothing more than a promissory note, unbacked by any assets.
At the end, Sokal asks why on earth should we care about critiquing a slight and deeply misguided paper conflating science and social justice? Because, he says, it has three bad side effects. The first is that it will “engender sloppy thinking”, promoting the idea that it’s okay to reject sound reasoning if its conclusions are not “politically congenial.” (This is a point that Luana and I made in our paper on the ideological subversion of biology, and it was also made by Orwell in his famous and essential essay on “Politics and the English Language“.) Second, the sources cited by Prescod-Weinstein often don’t say what she says they do, and this again reflects sloppy thinking as well as a tendency of social-justice advocates to support their arguments with either flawed data or other people’s misguided arguments. Most important, Sokal argues that Prescod-Weinstein’s repeated assertion that physics is strongly and systemically racist may well discourage black students from going into physics:
Beyond the purely intellectual flaws of half-baked philosophies of science, these “antiracist” screeds may also have a negative practical effect: namely, discouraging some talented Black students from entering or remaining in physics. Obviously, any exaggerated portrayal of racism in a particular community is likely to deter Black students from entering such a purportedly inhospitable environment.
When all is said and done, Prescod-Weinstein (2020) does contain some correct claims, even if they are correct only in a very limited way and are anyway not novel.
As I said, I think Sokal’s paper is an excellent critique, marred only slightly (and perhaps not at all) by Sokal’s bending over backwards to be charitable to Prescod-Weinstein. But he’s adhering to Dan Dennett’s tactic that if you’re going to take down a paper, first try to see what merit there really is in the paper’s arguments, and lay that merit out. That is supposed to give your own views more credibility, and it probably does.
It seem, at least for me, that Prescod-Weinstein’s paper has very little merit, if any. Her claim of widespread and strong racism in physics is not supported, and neither is her view that the presence of not just black people, but black women in science will cause a sea change, expanding our knowledge of the universe and, perhaps, finally allowing us progress in seeing if string theory is true. Yes, more diverse people in physic—increasing “viewpoint diversity”—will certainly expand the way physicists approach problems, but Prescod-Weinstein’s argument that the important diversity is black women espousing intersectional feminism has no support.
It is shameful that such a misguided paper has accrued so much uncritical support. The widespread citation and approbation for the paper surely reflects the inability of people to think rationally about arguments when they involve ideology, and also the tendency of people to not look too hard at arguments that are politically congenial. The paper is a good example of the ideological erosion of physics.
Cartoon by Tony Auth, used with permission
h/t: Alan Sokal, for calling my attention to his paper
In April of last year I posted about the paper below, “Observing whiteness in introductory physics: A case study” (published in Physical Review and Physics Education Research). and I wrote this (tweaked a tiny bit for publication now):
I cannot emphasize enough how bad the paper is. Have a butcher’s [look]. First, read the abstract above, and then have a look here [there was a link to the preliminary version, which is gone now].
The first paragraph sets the tone:
Critical Race Theory names that racism and white supremacy are endemic to all aspects of U.S. society, from employment to schooling to the law [1–7]. We see the outcomes of this in, for example, differential incarceration rates, rates of infection and death in the era of COVID, and police brutality. We also see the outcomes of this in physics.
. . . and in the short incident analyzed at great length in this paper. The entire paper is, in fact, a lengthy and tendentious exegesis of six minutes of observing a presentation by three physics students, seen as “a case of whiteness”:
In this paper, we analyze a case of whiteness as social organization from an introductory physics course at a large public institution in the Western United States. We use the analytic markers from Sec. II to illustrate how whiteness shows up in this context, and we identify and discuss a number of mechanisms of control that co-produce whiteness in the six-minute episode of classroom interaction. We draw on tools of interaction analysis [59], including discourse, gesture, and gaze analysis, to unpack how whiteness is being constituted locally or interactionally. Our hope is that illustrating whiteness as social organization can contribute to readers’ awareness of and vision for disrupting and transforming this social organization in their own contexts [56,60] and support other researchers who want to do similar analyses.
You can read it for yourself by clicking on the screenshot below, and I used it as an example of how “critical studies” was pushing science toward the drain, or at least coopting science for ideological purposes.
That this got published in a peer-reviewed physics journal is what makes this so surprising. It means there is something fundamentally wrong with the system, and it isn’t systemic racism. It is sheer stupidity combined with lethargy.
The natural tendency of academics, and scientists in particular, is to ignore this kind of nonsense and focus on their own work. But once the bar gets this low, and the flood waters are rising, you can be certain a lot of nasty effluence will be flowing out as well. And with the pressing need for better physics education at all levels (that is, better ways to actually teach physics), this garbage filling up journals and taking away precious research resources means that there is less room for the good stuff.
The standards of a field are determined by the practitioners in the field. That means it is about time that physicists started doing something about it.
But rebuttal on our websites isn’t as powerful as rebuttal in a peer-reviewed journal. And that has finally happened. Three authors wrote a critique of the article, but of course the original journal wouldn’t even look at it. They then added to the critique of Robertson’s and Hairston’s paper their own analysis of the difficulties they getting the rebuttal published.
And, mirabile dictu, it’s now published. The author said:
We spent a long time trying to get a critical comment published in the journal to no avail. However, with the help of Anna Krylov we managed to get an article published in European Review, discussing the “whiteness” article, our critique of it, and the journal’s resistance to our critique.
Anna is a real force in pushing back against ideologically-tainted science! And now you can read the rebuttal/recount, published in European Review, for free by clicking on the screenshot below:
And the abstract:
Research framed around issues of diversity and representation in STEM is often controversial. The question of what constitutes a valid critique of such research, or the appropriate manner of airing such a critique, thus has a heavy ideological and political subtext. Here, we outline an attempt to comment on a paper recently published in the research journal Physical Review – Physics Education Research (PRPER). The article in question claimed to find evidence of ‘whiteness’ in introductory physics from analysis of a six-minute video. We argue that even if one accepts the rather tenuous proposition that ‘whiteness’ is sufficiently well defined to observe, the study lacks the proper controls, checks and methodology to allow for confirmation or disconfirmation of the authors’ interpretation of the data. The authors of the whiteness study, however, make the stunning claim that their study cannot be judged by standards common in science. We summarize our written critique and its fate, along with a brief description of its genesis as a response to an article in which senior officers of the American Physical Society (which publishes PRPER) explained that the appropriate venue for addressing issues with the paper at hand is via normal editorial processes.
Read and enjoy!
In fact, this is only one of a bunch of papers in a special issue of the European Review, derived from a symposium in Israel on the dangers of ideology and politics to science. Here is the screenshot of the contents, and you can see all the papers (and read them) by clicking anywhere below. The title of the issue is right at the top:
I’ll single out three papers of special interest, to me at least. First, the paper by my Chicago colleague Dorian Abbot at the bottom is about the three “foundational” principles of the University of Chicago, which Dorian calls the “Chicago Trifecta”. Its abstract:
The purpose of this article is to discuss practical solutions to the threat to free inquiry at universities coming from the illiberal left. Based on my experiences at the University of Chicago, I propose that all universities should adopt and enforce rules requiring that: (1) the university, and any unit of it, cannot take collective positions on social and political issues; (2) faculty hiring and promotion be done solely on the basis of research and teaching merit, with nothing else taken into consideration; and (3) free expression be guaranteed on campus, even if someone claims to be offended, hurt or harmed by it. Faculty need to work together with students, alumni, journalists and politicians to get this done.
Second, the article by Ahmad Mansour points out the dangers of authoritarianism in science using his own tortuous biography, involving growing up in Israel and Palestine, and connecting that with the “cancel culture” of Germany. It resonates with the present situation going on there, and is a courageous article.
The politicization of science – the infusion of ideology into the scientific enterprise – threatens the ability of science to serve humanity. Today, the greatest such threat comes from a set of ideological viewpoints collectively referred to as Critical Social Justice (CSJ). This contribution describes how CSJ has detrimentally affected scientific publishing by means of social engineering, censorship, and the suppression of scholarship.
Just peruse the titles, click here or on the screenshots, and download what you’d like (or read on the screen, which I can’t do). If you think that science is immune to corruption by ideology (and it’s always been, but rarely more than now—except perhaps in the Soviet Union), then you should definitely read all the pieces.
Well, Scientific American has published an article that, while on a subject of questionable interest, is at least neither woke nor wrong. The topic is panpsychism, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines this way:
Panpsychism is the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world. The view has a long and venerable history in philosophical traditions of both East and West, and has recently enjoyed a revival in analytic philosophy.
The old and new forms of panpsychism were advanced because of our present failure to completely understand where consciousness comes from. Thus panpsychism offers an easy way out: we’re conscious because everything is conscious. That, of course, doesn’t solve the “hard problem” of how a brain-carrying organism can be conscious. Our failure to completely understand where consciousness comes from, say the panpsychics, is because we’re working on the wrong level: we just need to show that all bits of the universe are inherently conscious. Problem solved!
No, not solved!
First, a failure to understand something doesn’t mean that we’re taking the wrong approach; it could just mean that the problem is a difficult one. We don’t know where and how the first self-replicating organism evolved, but we don’t say that every bit of the universe has a form of replication, and thus the problem is solved.
In the “revival” forms of panpsychism (about which I’ve written many posts), promulgated most vociferously by Philip Goff, the claim is that every bit of the universe has some form of consciousness, however rudimentary. This includes particles like electrons. (They never specify the form of consciousness enjoyed by, say, electrons.) When the particles, though evolution, are assembled into a creature like a human, this assembly somehow makes the entire creature “conscious” in the way we think of (go here for a discussion of what consciousness is; I’m just referring to the common construal: self-awareness and the ability to perceive sensations).
But there has been no progress in understanding whether panpsychism could be true since it was proposed a long time ago, and that’s for several reasons:
We know no way of demonstrating that inanimate objects, like rocks and neutrons, have some form of consciousness.
We know no way of showing that the combination of rudimentary consciousnesses, as in the constituent particle of our brain, will somehow, when assembled in an organism, make it conscious. This is called the “combination problem.”
As far as we know, consciousness requires a complex nervous system in a living organism, which isn’t present in inanimate constituents of the universe or in dead individuals.
We are making progress in the conventional view of consciousness, e.g, it’s either a byproduct of having a sufficiently complex nervous system or an evolved condition in which the brain was selected to create the phenomenon. (In both cases it’s a material phenomenon connected with how neurons are arranged.) We can change consciousness with brain stimulation, use psychological tricks to fool people into thinking they’re doing something consciously when they’re not, or vice versa, and we can take away or restore consciousness with drugs (e.g., anesthesia).
It’s because of these issues that panpsychism has made no scientific progress while the “materialistic” view of consciousness, the one that doesn’t assume that particles themselves are conscious, has made progress. Panpsychism, in my view, is promulgated by philosophical grifters, who crave the attention they get from propounding novel and counterintuitive theories. And surely on some level they must realize that there’s no way to go any further with their scientific program. They keep singing the same old tune without adding any words, i.e., evidence.
At any rate, the Sci Am piece below, by science journalist Dan Falk, gives an account of the arguments in favor of and against panpsychism made at a recent meeting at Marist College, a college founded as a Catholic school (but now denying any religious affiliation) in Poughkeepsie, New York. The meeting was organized by panpsychist proselytizer Philip Goff, who found it all too easy to get funding from the John Templeton Foundation, which loves stuff like panpsychism because it’s anti-materialistic and conjures up the numinous (“an electron is conscious?. Weird!”)
Goff, of the University of Durham in England, organized the recent event along with Marist philosopher Andrei Buckareff, [JAC: he seems to be a philosopher of religion as well as religious] and it was funded through a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. In a small lecture hall with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Hudson River, roughly two dozen scholars probed the possibility that perhaps it’s consciousness all the way down.
You can read the article for free, though if you know about panpsychism, you don’t need to. But if you don’t know about it, it gives a good summary of the arguments against it (there are no arguments for it except its claim that everything is conscious). As usual, physicist Sean Carroll injects some sense into the discussion; he also had a big debate with Goff, as he has several times before (see below):
The crazy part of this all is that a lot of philosophers accept panpsychism, despite its numerous problems and scientific intractability. From the article (my emphasis):
Yet panpsychism runs counter to the majority view in both the physical sciences and in philosophy that treats consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, something that arises in certain complex systems, such as human brains. In this view, individual neurons are not conscious, but thanks to the collective properties of some 86 billion neurons and their interactions—which, admittedly, are still only poorly understood—brains (along with bodies, perhaps) are conscious. Surveys suggest that slightly more than half of academic philosophers hold this view, known as “physicalism” or “emergentism,” whereas about one third reject physicalism and lean toward some alternative, of which panpsychism is one of several possibilities.
How can philosophers fall for a panpsychic grift? I suppose it’s because they don’t really understand science, want to do down science (yes, some philosophers have that motivation), or apprehend the value of evidence in supporting or weakening a theory. Here’s more (my bolding):
Many philosophers at the meeting appeared to share Goff’s concern that physicalism falters when it comes to consciousness. “If you know every last detail about my brain processes, you still wouldn’t know what it’s like to be me,” says Hedda Hassel Mørch, a philosopher at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. “There is a clear explanatory gap between the physical and the mental.” Consider, for example, the difficulty of trying to describe color to someone who has only seen the world in black and white. Yanssel Garcia, a philosopher at the University of Nebraska Omaha, believes that physical facts alone are inadequate for such a task. “There is nothing of a physical sort that you could provide [a person who sees only in shades of gray] in order to have them understand what color experience is like; [they] would need to experience it themselves,” he says. “Physical science is, in principle, incapable of telling us the complete story.” Of the various alternatives that have been put forward, he says that “panpsychism is our best bet.”
First of all, those philosophers seem to be ignorant about how real scientists (as opposed to philosophers) are attacking the problem of consciousness and understanding its physical basis. More important, I think Goff would (and believe has) said that panpsychism is a physicalist theory. We just don’t know, physically, how the consciousness of electrons works. If it’s not physicalist, then it’s supernatural. But if you claim it’s an inherent property of matter, that’s a physicalist assertion, for one then needs to show how it’s an inherent property of matter. If you can’t, find another line of work.
Here’s some critique of the theory from the article (there’s no evidence offered in support of the theory except that it sounds good):
But panpsychism attracts many critics as well. Some point out that it doesn’t explain how small bits of consciousness come together to form more substantive conscious entities. Detractors say that this puzzle, known as the “combination problem,” amounts to panpsychism’s own version of the hard problem. The combination problem “is the serious challenge for the panpsychist position,” Goff admits. “And it’s where most of our energies are going.”
Others question panpsychism’s explanatory power. In his 2021 book Being You, neuroscientist Anil Seth wrote that the main problems with panpsychism are that “it doesn’t really explain anything and that it doesn’t lead to testable hypotheses. It’s an easy get-out to the apparent mystery posed by the hard problem.”
. . . During a well-attended public debate between Goff and Carroll, the divergence of their worldviews quickly became apparent. Goff said that physicalism has led “precisely nowhere,” and suggested that the very idea of trying to explain consciousness in physical terms was incoherent. Carroll argued that physicalism is actually doing quite well and that although consciousness is one of many phenomena that can’t be inferred from the goings-on at the microscopic level, it is nonetheless a real, emergent feature of the macroscopic world. He offered the physics of gases as a parallel example. At the micro level, one talks of atoms, molecules and forces; at the macro level, one speaks of pressure, volume and temperature. These are two kinds of explanations, depending on the “level” being studied—but present no great mystery and are not a failure on the part of physics.
Bringing up the gas laws was a smart thing to do, showing emergent physical properties that do not demonstrate a failure of physicalism. The gas laws may not be predictable from the laws of physics, but are consistent with the laws of physics. One more critique:
Seth, the neuroscientist, was not at the workshop—but I asked him where he stands in the debate over physicalism and its various alternatives. Physicalism, he says, still offers more “empirical grip” than its competitors—and he laments what he sees as excessive hand-wringing over its alleged failures, including the supposed hardness of the hard problem. “Critiquing physicalism on the basis that it has ‘failed’ is willful mischaracterization,” he says. “It’s doing just fine, as progress in consciousness science readily attests.” In a recently published article in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Seth adds: “Asserting that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous does nothing to shed light on the way an experience of blueness is the way it is, and not some other way. Nor does it explain anything about the possible functions of consciousness, nor why consciousness is lost in states such as dreamless sleep, general anaesthesia, and coma.”
It’s clear that I think panpsychism is a big philosophical grift, and although I could be more charitable, I get angry when a philosophical equivalent of creationism, which is what panpsychism is, gets popular. Perhaps Goff and his colleagues really believe it, but unless they’re thick-headed they surely realize that there is no evidence in its favor and they haven’t offered a solution to the most crucial part of their theory: the combination problem. I predict with some confidence that panpsychism will go nowhere. As the Encyclopedia notes, the theory has a “long and venerable history”. I’d disagree with the “venerable” part, but the fact that its history is long, but yet no progress has been made in documenting or understanding it, shows that it’s an intellectual dead end.
Here’s a three-year old video, which I believe I put up before, giving an audio debate between Carroll and Goff. There’s no doubt that the physicist is the winner; Goff comes out licking his wounds.
For another video dismantling of panpsychism by Carroll, go here, and you can also see a paper by Carroll on the phenomenon here.
When I first read the Sci Am piece, I had the following email conversation with Matthew, also a critic of panpsychism:
Me: Why not a symposium on flat-earthism?
Matthew: I bet Templeton funded it. Good guess. I mean, it’s right up their street. Imagine the real good they could do with all their dosh if they funded sensible things!
I hadn’t read the article when I had this exchange, but, sure enough, Matthew was right: the sticky fingers of Templeton are all over this symposium. To wit:
But I’ve had some second thoughts about Sci Am publishing this article, and don’t oppose it now. Panpsychism is not precisely equivalent to “flat earthism”, but only because a lot of people still believe in panpsychism, and if you pay attention to intellectual currents you’ll have heard about it. In my view, though panpsychism is nearly as scientifically worthless as flat earth theory or the “Loch Ness Monster” hypothesis, the public needs a place to understand what panpsychism is. Author Falk fills that bill, also showing (necessarily) panpsychism’s profound weaknesses. In that sense, Falk has done a good job, and I can’t fault Scientific American for publishing his piece.
If you think the “tide is turning” on wokeness in STEM, as a colleague of mine asserts, think again. Have a look at this headline of an op-ed from the American Physical Society (APS):
The Magellanic Clouds (Magellanic system or Nubeculae Magellani) are two irregular dwarf galaxies in the southern celestial hemisphere. Orbiting the Milky Way galaxy, these satellite galaxies are members of the Local Group. Because both show signs of a bar structure, they are often reclassified as Magellanic spiral galaxies.
The Magellanic clouds are visible to the unaided eye from the Southern Hemisphere, but cannot be observed from the most northern latitudes.
The Large and Small ones:
They’ve been called the Magellanic Clouds by most astronomers since 1847, that is, for about 175 years. Before that they had other “indigenous” names, and that is one of the two reasons the author calls for renaming them:
Yet Magellan was no astronomer, and he was not the first to document these galaxies. Indigenous peoples across the Southern Hemisphere have names and legends for these systems that predate Magellan by thousands of years. For example, the Mapuche of modern-day Chile and Argentina call them Rvganko, or water ponds, which they think are in the process of drying out; the Kamilaroi of modern-day Australia regard the galaxies as places where people go after death; and the Arimi of modern-day Tanzania see the clouds as a man and a woman who help the Pleiades bring heavy rains during the rainy season. Magellan’s crew was also not the first Western team to write about the two galaxies; Arabic and Italian explorers are known to have described the galaxies at least a decade before Magellan embarked on his journey.
But this holds true for nearly all visible astronomical features, surely including the Sun, the Moon, and Halley’s comet. Each language of an indigenous people who observed these features would give them a different name. Names get changed, and there’s no reason why the earliest names should get precedence. As for the superstitions associated with these clouds, well, that’s even less reason to revert to “divine” or numinous names.
No, the real reason Mia de los Reyes wants these clouds renamed is because Magellan did bad things:
Furthermore, Magellan committed horrific acts. A first-hand account of Magellan’s expedition describes how, in what is now known as Argentina, Magellan enslaved the native Tehuelche people. He placed iron manacles on the “youngest and best proportioned” men, telling them that the manacles were gifts. In what became Guam and the Philippines, Magellan and his men burned villages and killed their inhabitants.
Despite his actions, Magellan has been—and continues to be—widely honored by the field of astronomy. Magellan’s name currently appears in over 17,000 peer-reviewed academic articles. His name is attached to astronomical objects such as a lunar crater and a Martian crater, both of which are named Magalhaens; the NASA Magellan spacecraft; the twin 6.5-m Magellan telescopes; and most recently, an under construction, next-generation extremely large telescope called the Giant Magellan Telescope. The Magellan telescopes are all located in Chile, a country with a history of violent Spanish conquest. Indeed, Magellan’s “discovery” of the Strait of Magellan allowed Spanish conquistadors to explore Chile’s coast and led to genocidal campaigns against the native Mapuche people.
I and many other astronomers believe that astronomical objects and facilities should not be named after Magellan, or after anyone else with a violent colonialist legacy. We would like the International Astronomical Union—the body in charge of naming astronomical objects—to rename the Magellanic Clouds. We hope other astronomical institutions, particularly the consortia that manage the 6.5-m Magellan telescopes and the upcoming Giant Magellan Telescope, will also revisit the use of Magellan’s name.
As usual, I decide that names should be changed if both of these questions can be answered “no”:
a. Is the name be used to honor the good things the person did rather than the bad?
b. Was the person’s existence a net good for the world as opposed to a net bad?
The answer to (a) is clearly “yes”: Magellan is being honored for organizing and leading the first voyage circumnavigate the planet (he died halfway through), and the clouds were noted by, among other people, Antonio Pigafetta, a scholar who went on Magellan’s sail around the world in 1519–1522.
(b) is harder, but it’s not cut and dried. Some of Magellan’s warfare was due to misinterpreting the local behavior, and, indeed, he was more concerned with converting the locals to Christianity than with killing them. Indeed, that’s how he died on his voyage: he was attacked in the Philippines by a local ruler who resented Magellan’s efforts to convert the locals. Given that Magellan’s voyage “planned and led the 1519 Spanish expedition to the East Indies across the Pacific Ocean to open a maritime trade route, during which he discovered the interoceanic passage thereafter bearing his name and achieved the first European navigation to Asia via the Pacific” (Wikipedia), he had good accomplishments as well as bad.
Given this, I don’t vote for a name change. But there are Wokesters who apparently think that unless someone is nearly perfect, we shouldn’t honor them. There goes most of our Presidents, including Washington, Madison, and Jefferson: all slaveholders. JFK was a serial adulterer, as was Martin Luther King, who’s also been accused of looking on and laughing as “a fellow Baptist minister ‘forcibly raped; a woman just a few minutes walk from The White House in Washington DC.” (The evidence for this is not dispositive!)
The fact is that nobody is perfect, and who among us can afford to have all our deeds made public, for many of us have done some pretty bad stuff? But perfection appears to be the gold standard for naming things, including birds and galaxies. In fact, physisicsts are still going after the James Webb Space Telescope, a pet project of Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, and a deeply misguided one (bolding is mine):
Magellan is not the first person with a questionable history that astronomy has glorified, and he will likely not be the last. As physicists Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Sarah Tuttle, Lucianne Walkowicz, and Brian Nord wrote in a 2021 essay on the naming of the James Webb Space Telescope: “There will always be complications in naming monuments or facilities after individuals. No hero is perfect.” But as they also point out, we can and should choose names of people that represent our highest ideals.
Ummm. . . . who might that be? Surely not George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, JFK, or Martin Luther King, Jr! Even King cannot be said to “represent our highest ideals.” He represented many of them, and deserves all the honors that have accrued to him, but he also did bad things, like cheating on his wife. If the rape story is true, it’s even worse.
But why was the name “James Webb Space Telescope” attacked by Prescod-Weinstein and others? Because of the accusation that, as head of NASA, Webb allowed the demonization of gay employees and oversaw a purge of them from the agency. But as even the NYT reported (October 2022), those accusations are completely false. Will the Offended Woke Physicists give up in light of the evidence and shut their pie-holes about Webb? No, they will not. They still want the name “Webb” effaced. It’s insane.
The main reason I think this is a tempest in a teapot is because this renaming accomplishes nothing: it is purely performative, which is why it’s woke, and ludicrously so. The author says this:
When we uphold the names of people, such as Magellan, whose lives and legacies have actively caused harm, we alienate the communities who have been harmed. The communities that suffered because of Magellan have rich astronomical traditions that are often less valued than Western ones.
My response to the first sentence is simply, “no it doesn’t.” If we rename the Magellanic clouds, will dozens of Filipinos or Latinos, previously alienated, suddenly flock into astronomy? If you think so, you don’t know how the world works.
Instead, the author raises a completely different point that has absolutely nothing to do with names:
Even within the field of professional astronomy, the repercussions of Spanish colonization continue to this day. For example, I am the first woman of primarily Filipino descent to become an astronomy professor in the United States, in part because lack of access to resources has historically prevented Filipinos from participating in astronomy research.
Well good for her, but Dr. de los Reyes doesn’t seem to know the difference between resources and nomenclature.
I suspect the answer to the title question is “No way!”, but the incursion of Mātauranga Māori (“MM”, or Māori “ways of knowing”) into New Zealand’s science is reaching ludicrous depths. Even in the U.S.A. we don’t see headlines like the one below. (Note that “complement” is misspelled as “compliment”.)
Why am I so sure this endeavor won’t work? Simply because there is nothing about quantum physics in MM, and I can’t envision any MM-derived insights into the discipline that could advance it beyond what modern physicists are doing already. Of course Māori physicists, like the one below, could well make contributions to quantum mechanics, but it’s hard to see that those insights would come from MM, a mixture of trial-and-error knowledge gained from living (gathering plants and fish), theology, superstition, tradition, and ethics.
Nevertheless, the termites have dined so well that we see things like this, coming from Waatea News, Auckland’s Māori t.v. and radio station.
Read and weep; I’ve reproduced the whole article (indented), including its errors in English.
The first Māori quantum physicist says he hopes more Māori join the field to incorporate mātaraunga Māori into quantum physics.
Dr Jacob Ngaha, completed his PhD in Quantum Physics at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland, becoming the first Māori quantum physicist.
He says quantum physics explains how this work [sic] on an atomic level, and mātauranga Māori is based on lived experiences and observations which could compliment [sic] western scientific discipline.
“There’s always more than one way to do things. If you’re doing an experiment, depending on what you want out of an experiment there are different methods you take, different tools you use and I think science is overruled and no different. Mātauranga Māori is definitely better at looking at certain things, especially from a Māori lens. I think also, depending on what you’re looking at and what area you’re in there’s a stronger foundation of mātauranga Māori. I think those were the sort of things our tūpuna [ancestors] were doing, you know we’re talking about biology, genetics and environmental science. Those are very lived experiences.”
Jacob Ngaha says in the western space, mātauranga Māori is very new and with more Māori in quantum physics, mātauranga can be expanded more with quantum physics and vice versa.
And. . . . ? What’s missing, of course, are specific examples of how MM can help quantum mechanics. On his Auckland Uni page Ngaha explains his thesis:
“I’m in the field of theoretical quantum optics – more specifically cavity quantum electrodynamics. I study the interactions between light and matter using quantum mechanical principles.
For my thesis topic, I’m currently studying signal processing in a quantum optics setting. Essentially I’m developing a computational model that will allow us and others to better filter frequency signals in quantum optics simulations. Experimentally this can be done quite easily but we would like a theoretical tool that can, in principle, do even better.
Although Radio New Zealand touts Ngaha as a rising star, and he may well be, their article gives us no more insight into how quantum mechanics can progress faster through the infusion of Māori-derived knowledge.
Meanwhile three critics of the educational system in NZ wrote the following article in BreakingViews.co.nz. Click to read:
One excerpt, some of which you’ve probably seen in other places:
In 2000, New Zealand was one of the top performers in the world. Our results were above the average of the world’s most developed countries and we placed third in mathematics and fourth for reading in a group of 41 countries. When the latest PISA results were published in 2018, the decline had progressed so much that in science and reading New Zealand was only marginally above the OECD average. In mathematics we are now below average. Of the larger group of 78 participating countries, New Zealand ranked low, at 27th (Hartwich, 2022).
Reading is similarly in trouble. For example, the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) shows that the reading skills of New Zealand students continue to decline. In 2021, New Zealand recorded its lowest score since the inception of PIRLS in 2001 (e.g. Scoop, 2023).
. . . . The decline has now been exacerbated by moves to centre the school curriculum on the Treaty of Waitangi, and universities declaring themselves Te Tiriti-led and prioritising the inclusion of matauranga Māori in degree courses. Left-wing ideologies, combined with post-modern ideas and a dangerous mix of Critical Social Justice theory and Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity (DEI) policies, now appear to be more important to decision-makers than teaching basic skills and knowledge (P. Raine,2023), and will exacerbate the observed steady deterioration. A more holistic approach in teaching and research is now favoured or even mandated, and merit-based assessment used internationally for many decades has been called into question on the basis that it inherently disadvantages minorities and indigenous people (Abbot et al., 2023).
When you see “holism” praised and “merit” denigrated in the same sentence, run for the hills!
And I’ll add a few examples of what’s happening in N.Z. science education. I can vouch for all these assertions save the last anecdote.
The many anti-science statements coming from the post-modern corner are best illustrated by a few examples:
– Māori May Have Reached Antarctica 1,000 Years Before Europeans (Wehi et al, 2022). This statement made it into the headlines, such as the New Zealand Herald, the Guardian and even the New York Times. It was debunked shortly after (Anderson et al. 2022).
– From the beginning of creation, to the children of Ranginui and Papatūānuku, and descending to our ancestors, all aspects of creation have whakapapa [genealogical lineages]… This allows us to consider whakapapa for each of the elements on the periodic table (NZASE resource). While this is nice storytelling that favours creationism, it does not belong in a science class. The abundance of the elements in our universe and on our planet Earth is well understood from basic nuclear physics.
– Mauri is an energy which binds and animates all things in the physical world. Without mauri, mana cannot flow into a person or object (Te Ara, The Encyclopedia of New Zealand). This leads to the claim that Everything has a Mauri. A life force. When we are ill, our life force has been compromised (Māori Healers) and The Mauri is the power that allows these living things to exist within their domain. It is also known as a spark of life, the active component that gives life. A critical discussion on the Mauri concept proposed by the government’s NCEA panel for chemistry teaching in our schools has been provided recently by Professor Paul Kilmartin of The University of Auckland (Kilmartin, 2021). Among other issues, Professor Kilmartin has objected to the inclusion of Mauri (a life force) in our Chemistry curriculum, because it conflicts directly with science.
– A recent article in the Guardian (Graham-McLay, 2023) on celebrating Matiriki, stated that Māori books only survived because old people hid them from the colonists, who it is implied wished to suppress or destroy them. No evidence for this claim was given and, in any case, like all other Polynesian languages (except for the Easter Island), Māori had no written form or books until the introduction of writing by missionaries (Harlow, 2007).
– And – at a very basic level, in March 2023 a New Zealand child came home from school and told their parents that they had learned two important facts in science that day, namely that water has a spirit and memory – another introduction of animist confusion into what should have been a science lesson
And there we have it brothers and sisters, comrades and friends: the upcoming infusion of teleology into all the sciences (note “mauri” above).
Several readers, knowing of my interest in free will, sent me the link to the video at the bottom by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder. Thanks to all, and to Adrian, who sent the link first. My summary and analysis precede the video.
In October of 2020, Hossenfelder declared that libertarian free will—i.e., the “I-could-have-done-otherwise-using-my-volition” form—didn’t exist. I agree with her, of course, for we’re both “naturalists” and “hard determinists.” If you think matter obeys the laws of physics, which is universally accepted in science, then there’s no room for mental lucubrations that could somehow tweak the laws of physics (Mental lucubrations are instantiations of physical law!) That’s why she (and I) think that, as far as libertarian free will is concerned, “it’s obvious that we don’t have it.”
Hossenfelder notes that some find the “freedom” in “free will” via occasional quantum jumps of particles on top of deterministic physical determinism. It’s possible that these jumps could, at any given moment, produce different outcomes in the next moment, but that of course depends on whether our behavior or thoughts are affected by quantum phenomena. (We have no idea.) But even were that true, those quantum jumps can’t come from “will”, so there is no “freedom” from physical determination of behavior. Volition is an illusion.
However, Hossenfelder is dubious about whether quantum jumps are really random phenomena: she appears to be a full-on determinist who thinks that the wave function, which includes quantum behavior, itself behaves deterministically. (This bit is way above my pay grade, but still leaves no room for some numinous “will”. I’ll let physicists argue about the “randomness” of quantum mechanics.)
Hossenfelder goes on to describe “emergent properties” like conductivity, which makes no sense unless you talk about a collection of electrons. This, however, doesn’t do away with determinism, for it is the laws of physics that produces emergent properties as the consequence of underlying laws. Emergent properties may not yet be predictable from the laws of physics, but they are all absolutely consistent with the laws of physics.
Finally, she goes on to discuss compatibilism: the view that free will and determinist can coexist happily and without contradiction. Like me, she regards this view as simply an exercise in philosophical semantics that does noting to dispel the fact that we lack libertarian free will in the classical sense. (Remember, that brand of free will is the one most accepted by people in several countries, and is of course a mainstay of Abrahamic religion as well as other forms of religion.) Compatibilism, to me, is like religion: a “little people’s” view confected with the idea that unless people believe certain creeds, society will fall apart.
Here are the forms of compatibilism Hossenfelder presents (I note with some amusement that different philosophers find many different ways to make free will compatible with the laws of physics, and some of the forms of compatibilism are incompatible with each other).
a. ) Some philosophers say that “Human decisions are to a large extent independent from external factors and are dominantly determined by internal deliberation.” This seems confusing to me because “internal deliberations” are simply examples of “external factors,” i.e. the laws of physics acting on our bodies and brains. If you say that they aren’t, then you are a dualist who accepts libertarian free will.
b.) Hossenfelder’s chracterization of Dan Dennett’s compatibilism: “Our ability to see probable futures–futures that seem like they’re going to happen, and then to take steps to make something else happens instead.” Those steps, of course, are also determined by the laws of physics.
c.) Another brand of free will is due to “The large degree of autonomy that our brain has from environmental factors.” This has the same problems as (a) above.
d.) Free will occurs because “our decisions follow from what we want”. And yes, we do make decisions according to what we want, because what we want is simply the result of our genes and environment and is and thus coded in our brain. People generally act consistently with their character, because their character is consistent with their evolved and structured brains.
Hossenfelder presents the results of a 2020 survey about philosophers’ acceptance of libertarian free will vs. compatibilism vs. determinism (what I call “naturalism”). The results of the survey are given in the screenshot below, which I lifted from her video.
Most philosophers are compatibilists, which is a view that, I think, people hold because although these philosophers really do accept Hossenfelder’s claim that there is no libertarian free will, they think that some notion of free will is essential for people to be able to function without drowning in nihilism. (That’s not true.) But at least more philosophers are compatibilists than are “regular people”. What is disturbs me is that nearly 1 in 5 philosophers (probably the religious ones) are free-will libertarians: more than are “hard determinists” like Hossenfelder and me.
She does take up the question (one I’m often asked when I lecture on why we lack free will), “Why don’t you just kill yourself since everything is more or less determined?” Her answer is a good one: those people should see a psychologist. I manage to hang onto being a hard determinist, though of course I act as if I can make free decisions. We can’t live without feeling that way because that’s just the way our brains are constructed. Perhaps the illusion of libertarian free will is an evolved trait. I can think of several reasons why natural selection, for instance, would drive us to think we make free choices, or perhaps it’s just an epiphenomenon. But I won’t wade into those waters here.
In the end Hossenfelder adds two points:
1.) The free-will problem arises because “the way we think our brain works is not compatible with the facts of science”. But the way we think our brain works is an illusion.
2.) Why does this issue matter? Because, says Hossenfelder, “free will is an inaccurate description of reality” and “makes people believe that they have more control over what goes on in their head than is really the case.” Example: “Our brains will process input whether we want to our not; once it’s in and we can’t get it out. That’s why trauma is so hard to cope with and misinformation so hard to combat”. This, she says, is a result of our physically-mandated and evolved neuronal processing of inputs. I would add that perhaps it’s possible, through therapy, to mitigate trauma. That, of course, would be the deterministic result of a traumatized person going to a therapist skilled in this art. But no determinist claims that such external influences cannot have an effect.
Sabine closes by declaring that she’s a hard determinist and that we have no free will in the commonly-accepted sense of “libertarian” free will. It’s good to hear from a kindred spirit, though this video is fairly similar to the one she put up several years ago. Still, determinism is like atheism: you have to keep emphasizing it to get the truth before new generations of people.
