Brian Greene: We don’t have free will: one idea in a wide-ranging book

July 8, 2022 • 9:20 am

Physicist Brian Greene published the book below in 2020, and it appears to cover, well, just about everything from the Big Bang to consciousness, even spiritually and death. Click image to go to the Amazon site:

Some of the book’s topics are covered in the interview below, and its breadth reminds me of Sean Carroll’s book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. I’ve read Sean’s book, which was good (though I did disagree with his free-will compatibilism), but I haven’t yet read Greene’s. If you have, weigh in below.

I’ll try to be brief, concentrating on Greene’s view of free will, which is that we don’t have it, we’re subject only to the laws of physics, and our idea of free will is an illusion stemming from our sense that we have a choice. The interview with Greene is in, oddly, the July 1 issue of Financial Review, and is paywalled, but our library got me a copy. (Judicious inquiry may yield you one, too.) You might be able to access it one time by clicking below, but otherwise ask or rely on my excerpts:

Greene also dwells on the fact that we’re the only creatures that know that we’re going to die, an idea that, he says, is “profoundly distressing” and in fact conditions a lot of human behavior. More on that below. Here are a few topics from the interview:

Free will: Although Greene, as I recall, has floated a form of compatibilism before (i.e., our behaviors are subject to natural laws and that’s all; we can’t have done otherwise by volition at any given moment, but we still have free will), this time he appears to be a rock-hard determinist, which I like because I’m one, too. Excerpt from the interview are indented:

What’s more, beyond thoughts of death, my colleagues, according to Greene, are mistaken in their belief they are making their own choices to change their lives. Thoughts and actions, he argues, are interactions between elementary particles, which are bound by the immutable laws of mathematics. In other words, your particles are doing their thing; we are merely followers.

“I am a firm believer,” he says, “that we are nothing but physical objects with a high degree of order [remember these words, “high degree of order” – we’ll circle back to that], allowing us to have behaviours that are quite wondrous, allowing us to think and feel and engage with the world. But our underlying ingredients – the particles themselves – are completely, and always, governed by the law of physics.”

“Free will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.”

So then, free will does not stand up against our understanding of how the universe works.

“I don’t even know what it would mean to have free will,” he adds, “We would have to somehow intercede in the laws of physics to affect the motion of our particles. And I don’t know by what force we would possibly be able to do that.”

Do you and I have no more options than say, a fish, in how we respond to the world around us?

“Yes and no,” says Greene. “All living systems, us included, are governed by the laws of physics, but the ways in which our collection of particles can respond to stimuli is much richer. The spectrum of behaviours that our organised structure allows us to engage in is broader than the spectrumof behaviours than a fish or a fly might engage in.”

He’s right, and there’s no attempt, at least in this interview, to be compatibilistic and say, well, we have a form of free will worth wanting.

Death: From the interview:

“People typically want to brush it off, and say, ‘I don’t dwell on dying, I don’t think about it,”‘ says Greene via Zoom from his home in New York, where he is a professor at Columbia University. “And the fact that we can brush it off speaks to the power of the culture we have created to allow us to triumph over the inevitable. We need to have some means by which we don’t crumble under the weight of knowing that we are mortal.”

. . . Greene believes it is this innate fear of death twinned with our mathematically marching particles that is driving my colleagues to new horizons, and driving my decision to write this story, and your choice to read it, all bolstered by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Greene’s view appears to be that a substantial portion of human behavior is driven by a combination of two things: the “naturalism” that deprives us of free will, combined with our learned (or inborn) knowledge and fear of death. The death part is apparently what, still without our volition, forces us into action. I’m not sure why that’s true, as the explanation’s not in the interview but perhaps it’s in the book. After all, some people argue that if you’re a determinist doomed to eternal extinction, why not just stay in bed all day? Why do anything? If we do things that don’t enhance our reproduction, it’s because we have big brains and need to exercise and challenge them. Yes, we know we’re mortal, but I’m not sure why this makes me write this website, write books, read, or do science. I do these things because they bring me pleasure. What does mortality have to do with it?

Natural selection: According to the writer and interviewer Jeff Allen (an art director), Greene thinks that the promulgation of our mortality, as well as much of our communication, comes from storytelling, which has been instilled into our species by natural selection. Things get a bit gnarly here as the interview becomes a bit hard to follow. I’m sure Greene understands natural selection better than Allen, but Greene’s views are filtered through the art director:

Natural selection is well known for driving physical adaptation, yet it also drives behavioural change, including complex human behaviours such as language and even storytelling. Language is a beneficial attribute that helps us as a species succeed, as is the ability to tell stories, which prepare the inexperienced with scenarios that may benefit them in the future.

“Evolution works by tiny differentials in adaptive fitness, over the course of long timescales. That’s all it takes for these behaviours to become entrenched,” says Greene. “Storytelling is like a flight simulator, that safely allows us to prepare ourselves for various challenges we will face in the real world. If we fail in the simulator, we won’t die.”

Darwin’s theory of evolution is one of the recurring themes of Greene’s book.

Note in the first paragraph that evolved language and storytelling “helps us as a species succeed”. That’s undoubtedly true—though I’m yet to be convinced that storytelling is anything more than an epiphenomenon of evolved language—but whatever evolved here was undoubtedly via individual (genic) selection and not species selection. Traits don’t evolve to enable a species to succeed; they evolve (via selection) because they give their bearers a reproductive advantage. I’m sure Greene knows this, but Allen balls things up by throwing in “species success”.

Consciousness: If you’re tackling the Big Issues that deal with both philosophy and science, it’s consciousness, defined by Greene (and I) as both self-awareness and the presence of qualia, or subjective sensations (Greene calls it “inner experience”). I’ve written about this a lot, and don’t propose to do more here. We have consciousness, we don’t know how it works, but it’s certainly a physical property of our brains and bodies that can be manipulated by physical interventions. The two issues bearing on Greene’s piece are where it came from and how will we figure out how it works. (Greene implicitly rejects panpsychism by asking “”How can particles that in themselves do not have any awareness, yield this seemingly new quality?”. That will anger Philip Goff and his coterie of panpsychists.)

I’m not sure about the answer to either., We may never know whether consciousness is an epiphenomenon of having a big brain or is partly the result of natural selection promoting the evolution of consciousness. I suspect it’s partly the latter, since many of our “qualia” are adaptive. Feeling pain is an aversive response that protects us from bodily damage; people who lack the ability to feel pain usually accumulate substantial injuries. And many things that give us pleasure, like orgasms, do so because they enhance our reproduction. But this is just speculation.

Greene also thinks that natural selection has something to do with human consciousness, but it’s not clear from the following whether he sees consciousness as an epiphenomenon of our big brain and its naturalistic physical properties, or whether those properties were molded by natural selection because consciousness enhanced our reproduction:

“My gut feeling,” says Greene, “Is that the final answer will be the Darwinian story. Where collections of particles come together in a certain kind of organised high order ‘brain’, that brain is able to have particle motions that yield self-awareness. But it’s still a puzzle at this moment.”

Where Green and I differ is in what kind of work might yield the answer to how consciousness comes about. Greene thinks it will come from work on AI, while I think it will come, if it ever does, from neurological manipulations. Greene:

“That’s perhaps the deepest puzzle we face,” says Greene. “How can particles that in themselves do not have any awareness, yield this seemingly new quality? Where does inner experience come from?”

Greene’s suspicion is that this problem will go away once we start to build artificial systems, that can convincingly claim to have inner awareness. “We will come to a place where we realise that when you have this kind of organisation, awareness simply arises.”

In June this year, Google engineer Blake Lemoine said an AI he was working on, named LaMDA (Language Models for Dialogue Applications), got very chatty and even argued back.

I suppose this is a version of the Turing test, but it will be very, very hard to determine if an AI bot has “inner awareness”. Hell, I don’t even know if my friends are conscious, since it depends on self-report! Can you believe any machine that says it has “inner experiences”?

With that speculation I’ll move on. Greene also muses on the origin and fate of the universe, and whether it might “restart” after it collapses, but cosmology is above my pay grade, and I’ll leave you to read about that yourself.

h/t: Ginger K.

2022 Templeton Prize goes to Nobel-winning physicist Frank Wilczek

May 13, 2022 • 8:00 am

The Templeton Prize, now worth $1.3 million, was initiated by the hedge-fund magnate Sir John Templeton (1912-2008) to award accomplished people of faith. As its Wikipedia entry notes, the prize originally went solely to religionists like Mother Teresa (now a saint) and Billy Graham, but has recently morphed more and more into a prize given to those who unite spirituality and religion with science (Sir John’s view was that the more we learn about science, the closer we get to God—not to some apophatic and abstruse deity like “love” or “nature”, but to a real personal-type god.) Here’s a bit about the annual prize from Wikipedia:

The Templeton Prize is an annual award granted to a living person, in the estimation of the judges, “whose exemplary achievements advance Sir John Templeton’s philanthropic vision: harnessing the power of the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place and purpose within it.” It was established, funded and administered by John Templeton starting in 1972. It is now co-funded by the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and Templeton World Charity Foundation, and administered by the John Templeton Foundation.^[1]

The prize was originally awarded to people working in the field of religion (Mother Teresa was the first winner), but in the 1980s the scope broadened to include people working at the intersection of science and religion. Until 2001, the name of the prize was “Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion”, and from 2002 to 2008 it was called the “Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities”. Hindus, Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Muslims have been on the panel of judges and have been recipients of the prize.

The monetary value of the prize is adjusted so that it exceeds that of the Nobel Prizes; Templeton felt, according to The Economist, that “spirituality was ignored” in the Nobel Prizes. As of 2019, it is £1.1 million. It has typically been presented by Prince Philip in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace.

The list of prizes at the Wikipedia site shows this morphing, and the latest recipient: theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek, continues the trend (last year’s recipient was Jane Goodall). As far as I can see, Wilczek is basically an agnostic who pays lip service to “God” as meaning “everything in the world.” Wikipedia notes, “Wilczek was raised Catholic but later ‘lost faith in conventional religion’. He claims no religious tradition, and has been described as an agnostic but tweeted in 2013 that ‘pantheist’ is ‘closer to the mark’.” In other words, he’s a “none.”

Well, that’s good enough for me so long as he isn’t engaged in promulgating any kind of faith (belief without evidence), which he isn’t (see below for more).

Wilczek was born in 1951 and is listed as “The Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Founding Director of T. D. Lee Institute and Chief Scientist at the Wilczek Quantum Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), distinguished professor at Arizona State University (ASU) and full professor at Stockholm University.. That’s a lot of positions! But the big deal is that he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2004 for work on the strong nuclear force, but he also has distinguished accomplishments in other areas of physics. He’s somewhat of a physics polymath.

You can see a collection of videos about Wilczek and the Templeton Prize on the JTF site. They don’t show any visible strain of religiosity, conventional or otherwise, and a Scientific American interview with him, though playing up the “God” angle in its title, has nothing to say about a deity (click to read).

I’ll give just two Q&A’s from the interview here:

Congratulations on receiving the Templeton Prize. What does this award represent for you?

My exploratory, science-based efforts to address questions that are often thought to be philosophical or religious are resonating. I’m very grateful for that, and I’ve started to think about what it all means.

One kind of “spiritual” awakening for me has been experiencing how a dialogue with nature is possible—in which nature “talks back” and sometimes surprises you and sometimes confirms what you imagined. Vague hopes and concepts that were originally scribbles on paper become experimental proposals and sometimes successful descriptions of the world.

Well, when you read on, those “questions that are often thought to be philosophical or religious” turn out to be questions about science. The rest of his answer says nothing about a god, but defines Wilczek’s spirituality as the feeling he gets when his squiggles on paper that turn out to be correct representations of reality. But in that sense many theoretical physicists, like Dirac, Schrödinger, and Einstein, were “spiritual” too. The word is emptied here of any of its numinous significance.

One more.

You don’t now identify with any particular religious tradition, but in your 2021 book Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality, you wrote, “In studying how the world works, we are studying how God works, and thereby learning what God is.” What did you mean by that?

The use of the word “God” in common culture is very loose. People can mean entirely different things by it. For me, the unifying thread is thinking big: thinking about how the world works, what it is, how it came to be and what all that means for what we should do.

I chose to study this partly to fill the void that was left when I realized I could no longer accept the dogmas of the Catholic Church that had meant a lot to me as a teenager. Those dogmas include claims about how things happen that are particularly difficult to reconcile with science. But more importantly, the world is a bigger, older and more alien place than the tribalistic account in the Bible. There are some claims about ethics and attitudes about community that I do find valuable, but they cannot be taken as pronouncements from “on high.” I think I have now gathered enough wisdom and life experience that I can revisit all this with real insight.

If “God” means “thinking about how the world works and how that conditions our actions”, then we’re pretty much all religious.! I can live with that definition. His second paragraph not only disses the Bible, but touts a form of humanism as well as downgrading Earth, much less humans, as a special locus of God’s concern and action.

The rest of the interview is about Wilczek’s science, and is by far the most interesting bit.

Another black hole visualized, this one at the heart of our own galaxy

May 12, 2022 • 10:45 am

I had no idea that there was a big black hole at the center of the Milky Way, but that is indeed the case, though it seems to have been discovered not that long ago and photographed just now, as documented in the Event Horizon site below (click on screenshot).

The hole, called Sagittarius A* (or SgrA*) was discovered when several stars were orbiting around an invisible spot in the galaxy. Although black holes are themselves invisible, they can be visualized because they’re surrounded by a ring of glowing gas. The website Event Horizon Telescope (which is the group that visualized it and the first black hole) describes the finding and shows the photos, which are, after all, what we want to see. Producing them was itself a remarkable feat, as described below. Click on the screenshot below to read:

From the site:

Although we cannot see the black hole itself, because it is completely dark, glowing gas around it reveals a telltale signature: a dark central region (called a “shadow”) surrounded by a bright ring-like structure. The new view captures light bent by the powerful gravity of the black hole, which is four million times more massive than our Sun.

“We were stunned by how well the size of the ring agreed with predictions from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity,” said EHT Project Scientist Geoffrey Bower from the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taipei. “These unprecedented observations have greatly improved our understanding of what happens at the very centre of our galaxy, and offer new insights on how these giant black holes interact with their surroundings.” The EHT team’s results are being published today in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters..

Because the black hole is about 27,000 light-years away from Earth, it appears to us to have about the same size in the sky as a donut on the Moon. To image it, the team created the powerful EHT, which linked together eight existing radio observatories across the planet to form a single “Earth-sized” virtual telescope [1]. The EHT observed Sgr A* on multiple nights, collecting data for many hours in a row, similar to using a long exposure time on a camera.

Here you go. The site also shows, visually, how different images were averaged and combined to create this “definitive” photo (click photos to enlarge them):

Caption from website: This is the first image of Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. It’s the first direct visual evidence of the presence of this black hole. It was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an array which linked together eight existing radio observatories across the planet to form a single “Earth-sized” virtual telescope. The telescope is named after the event horizon, the boundary of the black hole beyond which no light can escape. Although we cannot see the event horizon itself, because it cannot emit light, glowing gas orbiting around the black hole reveals a telltale signature: a dark central region (called a shadow) surrounded by a bright ring-like structure. The new view captures light bent by the powerful gravity of the black hole, which is four million times more massive than our Sun. The image of the Sgr A* black hole is an average of the different images the EHT Collaboration has extracted from its 2017 observations. In addition to other facilities, the EHT network of radio observatories that made this image possible includes the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment (APEX) in the Atacama Desert in Chile, co-owned and co-operated by ESO is a partner on behalf of its member states in Europe.

You may remember that 3 years ago first image of a black hole, M87*, was released. That one, called M87*, sits at the centre of the more distant Messier 87 galaxy, and is a much larger hole—a thousand times the size of SgrA*. Here’s a picture of that “first” black hole from the NYT, with the newly added visualization of polarized light.

Science “studies” helping bring down science

April 12, 2022 • 10:00 am

Those of us who want our science free of ideology can only stand by helplessly as we watch physics, chemistry, and biology crumble from within as the termites of Wokeism nibble away. I once thought that scientists, whom I presumed would be less concerned than humanities professors with ideological pollution (after all, we do have some objective facts to argue about), would be largely immune to Wokeism.

I was wrong, of course. It turns out that scientists are human beings after all, and with that goes the desire for the approbation of one’s peers and of society. And you don’t get that if you’re deemed a racist. You can even be criticized from holding yourself away from the fray, preferring to do science than engage in social engineering. (Remember, Kendi-an doctrine says that if you’re not an actively working anti-racist, you’re a racist.)

There’s no clearer sign of science’s ideological pollution than the institution of required DEI statements for getting an academic job or getting promoted, along with the elimination of standardized tests for students going into graduate study in STEM. The DEI statements violate “viewpoint neutrality” and turn science into a form of social engineering, with the engineering supposed to go in a preferred direction. But as Stanley Fish said (a book title): “Save the World on Your Own Time.”

And everybody knows, though few dare to say it, that what’s happening is the erosion of the meritocratic aspects of science, replacing them with standards of social justice determined by a small group of “progressive” people on the Left. Further, the less that merit is considered and used as a fundamental tenet of science, the slower science will progress. But I suppose the proponents of injecting Wokeism into science would say “merit is an outdated criterion; what we really need is equity.” Perhaps, but the effort is all directed at calling present science riddled with “structural racism.” And that’s not true.

But I digress. What I didn’t realize until I revisited this article—the centerpiece of a short post by Lawrence Krauss on his Substack site—is that science is being undermined not just by woke scientists, but by those in “science studies,” like the authors of the paper at hand. I had read it a while back, and intended to post on it, but decided that I can’t spend all my time calling out ludicrous Woke articles. Well, I’m glad Krauss did mention this one. First, read his short post by clicking on the screenshot below:

One of Krauss’s colleagues sent him the paper. He reproduces the title and abstract, and I will, too, but my screenshot links to the paper, which has a free pdf you can download here. Krauss notes that the paper comes from The Physics Review, but it’s actually from Physical Review Physics Education Research. It’s not a physics journal per se, but a journal about physics education.

Voilà:

First author Amy Robertson is a physicist whose job is apparently curricular development and testing; as her page at Seattle Pacific University notes,

Dr. Robertson is PI of the federally funded grant, “Collaborative Research: University Student Conceptual Resources for Understanding Physics.” This project seeks to identify student resources for understanding forces and mechanical waves in the context of introductory physics instruction and to develop and test curricular materials that build on student resources. She is co-PI of two additional grants, one that studies elementary teacher learning about energy, and one that identifies best-practices for creating inclusive physics learning environments.

Your tax dollars at work.

Hairston’s c.v. shows him to be engaged in many things—mostly in the equity business—but not in physics research:

A noted speaker, consultant, researcher, minister, and lecturer, Tali’s capacity for multi-sector work is most realized in the variety of organizations and projects that seek his involvement. His expertise is in the work of organizational culture, equity-inclusive learning, and the intersections of public policy and community development. As a researcher, Hairston is contracted to do university physics and equity research work under several National Science Foundation grants. He travels nationally and internationally advising community development and social change work.

And I cannot emphasize enough how bad the paper is. Have a butcher’s. First, read the abstract above, and then have a look here.

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.

Gaze analysis!

Three pseudonymous students, who self-identify as white (Gail), Hispanic (Paris), and Middle Eastern (Drake), are given a task to work together to present a physics problem to a class:

In this episode, Paris, Drake, and Gail have been tasked with constructing an answer to a series of questions about heat capacity. In particular, they have been asked to construct an energy interaction diagram (see Fig. 2) for measuring the heat capacity of a big bucket of water. They are then asked to use their energy interaction diagram and the definition of heat capacity to develop an algebraic relationship relating the change in thermal energy to the change in temperature and the heat capacity.

In the episode, Paris, Drake, and Gail work together as a small group in an introductory physics course at a large public institution in the Western U.S. The course draws extensively on physics-education research-based methods, and course meetings often alternate between small- and whole-group discussion, with students collaboratively constructing answers to questions . in their groups and then sharing out to the whole class. Whiteboards feature prominently in the course; what is represented on the group’s whiteboard is often what gets oriented to in the large-group share-out.

There’s a footnote:

4 Middle Eastern is considered white according to U.S. federally mandated race categories [71], but middle Eastern people in the U.S. are subjected to and oppressed by white supremacy and Islamophobia [72]

Then the students interact, and it seems that Drake makes himself (and is seen by the teacher) as the center of attention. This is the six-minute “centering of whiteness”:

We argue that it is whiteness as social organization that makes Paris, Gail, Drake, and Iris’ behavior sensible. Within whiteness as social organization, there is a center that has been ascribed transcendent value; all else is, in effect, marginal. In this context, it makes sense that the EID, standing in for correctness and/or physics, will capture the attention of the actors, and it also makes sense that the person closest to it (by consensus or by force) would also receive the most attention. Activity that is not seen as productive toward these ends would also be seen as less valuable, highlighting ways in which whiteness and capitalism intersect. Whiteness makes “normal” this interactional unfolding, prompting questions like, “What else could have been done?” Importantly, here, whiteness masks that: there are many ways (not just Drake’s or even the prescribed, endorsed way) to construct the EID, many representations for the energy dynamics of this scenario, many ways to understand the heating of water (including those outside of traditional physics), etc. The point is not that Drake’s EID has no value; the point is that the space has been organized such that the EID and those closest to it have value at the exclusion of all else.

When I reread the paper (it’s been a long time), I thought to myself, “No, they’re not going to use whiteboards as an example of white supremacy!” But they did (my emphasis

3. Whiteboards

Entangled with the above is the use of whiteboards as a primary pedagogical tool. Though whiteboards have been shown to have a number of affordances when they are used as a collaborative tool that all members have access to [88], in this episode, they also play a role in reconstituting whiteness as social organization. In particular, whiteboards display written information for public consumption; they draw attention to themselves and in this case support the centering of an abstract representation and the person standing next to it, presenting. They collaborate with white organizational culture [89], where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.’

I wonder what the authors would have said had the presentation been on a blackboard.

And the obligatory conclusion to the paper, flaunting virtue and mentioning the obligatory “harm” that can be caused by the observed six-minute interaction. And believe me, there are many sources of harm:

As we dream, and as we wait for whiteness as social organization to be dismantled, we can work to reduce harm in the spaces we move and work. Harm reduction, as a framework, acknowledges that white supremacy, patriarchy, classism, fatmisia, transmisia, ableism, xenophobia, and myriad other systems of oppression infuse space and structures and are a part of our socialization. Paired with real-time repair, harm reduction provides support and accountability in the midst of this reality, inviting us to be humans in process and in community and offering space and support to see and respond to harm [100]. Harm reduction, then, lives in the interstitial space between not yet, without giving up on what could be.

But Drake isn’t white: he identifies as “Middle Eastern”! It’s Gail who “presents as white.” In fact, the whole six-minute scenario, analyzed in tedious Critical Theory detail over pages and pages, is simply a post facto confirmation of the authors’ CRT biases. It is not a piece of science, for there is no hypothesis to be tested. There are only confirmation of the authors’ biases. It is tendentious, tedious, and offensive. In fact, the authors even include long statement of their “positionalities” showing their ideologies and backgrounds—and, perhaps unwittingly, devaluing any objectivity to the paper. I’ve put the entire positionality statement below the fold, but here’s the first bit of Robertson’s “positionality”:

Authors’ positionalities.—Robertson is a chronically ill and disabled, physics-Ph.D.-holding, thin wealthy white woman. Her analysis and writing were shaped by these identities, including her “insider” status in physics: because of her socialization in the discipline, she is able to name and make sense of physics values, representations, and practices.

Can’t we judge the “research”—although this isn’t research, but post facto justification—from the description of the work alone? Do we need the authors to give us their bona fides at length in the paper?

But enough. This is the second time I’ve gone through the paper, and it’s even worse than the first time. Note that although one author has physics training, this is not a physics paper but a physics study paper. Yet it’s in a physics-related journal, and could influence others who teach physics. It’s this kind of nonsense that explains why science itself, nibbled around the edges by termites, is going downhill.

Here’s a bit of what Krauss says:

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.

Well, besides the fact that this is not a physics journal but a physics education journal, Krauss is right. He doesn’t pull any punches, and I agree that this kind of craziness leads to the displacement of good stuff— including ideology-free physics teaching.

But this doesn’t just displace the good stuff, it replaces the good stuff, turning regular physics into social engineering. And it’s not just in physics: we have plenty of examples in chemistry and biology. I’ve written about some of these, but don’t want to overload this website with this kind of stuff. Still, if you’re not in the sciences yourself, you do need to know what’s going on.

Click “read more” to see the authors’ “positionalities”:

Continue reading “Science “studies” helping bring down science” →

Scientific American: What we can learn about abortion from quantum mechanics

March 28, 2022 • 9:45 am

Scientific American continues to publish dreck, and I’m not sure why anybody who’s enthusiastic about science would want to continue subscribing.

This latest op-ed, to which I shouldn’t devote any attention (but the laws of physics dictate otherwise) is a prime example of the naturalistic fallacy. By looking at quantum mechanics, says author Cara Heuser, we can realize that one can hold two seemingly opposite views in one’s head at the same time. To wit: light can sometimes act as a particle, and sometimes as a wave, depending on the nature of the observation. Similarly, one can care for and about children and yet still be pro-choice. The author, in fact, holds both views of medical care, and simultaneously saves children’s lives and provides abortion care. As the author’s bio notes:

Cara C. Heuser is a maternal-fetal medicine physician. She provides full-spectrum reproductive care, including prenatal care for high-risk pregnancies and abortion care, in Salt Lake City.

It’s not that I object to Heuser’s views, for I agree with her completely. But I do object to extrapolating from quantum physics to one’s views on abortion. This is the naturalistic fallacy, and a fallacy that could be applied (or rather, misapplied) to other real or apparent instances of cognitive dissonance. (That terms is usually reserved for a conflict of views that causes mental distress, but here I’ll just refer to having two seemingly or actually opposite views). There’s simply no lesson to be learned by extrapolating from how particles behave to how humans behave—or should behave.

Click on the screenshot to read.

My own views on abortion pretty much jibe with Roe v. Wade, but go even further. For example, I think that perhaps the threshold of abortion legality should be the onset of sentience—the ability to actually feel suffering—rather than viability. (One should also realize that if viability outside the womb is the criterion for prohibitng abortion, then this criterion will eventually be pushed back all the way to conception, as eventually we’ll have the ability to rear humans from fertilization to time of normal birth—all in vitro. The onset of sentience, on the other hand, does not change with technological innovation.) But I haven’t settled on my “threshhold” yet, though I still believe with Peter Singer that if a child is born with a defect or disease that will kill them very soon, is incurable, and causes suffering, it should be legal to euthanize them with the agreement of doctors and the parents).

I also bridle when people try to shut down the abortion debate by asserting a simple “right” to abortion. Where does this “right” come from? Granted, there is a Constitutional right to privacy, but instead of seeing abortion as some kind of inherent “right”, or as “moral on the face of it”, I think abortions should be legal on grounds of pragmatism: society is better off allowing them rather than prohibiting them. (In matters of ethics, I tend to be a consequentialist.)

Indeed, the author, while several times asserting the “right” to an abortion, also argues for the procedure largely on practical grounds:

Perhaps we even have a moral compass that pushes us to provide this care. Perhaps we also value life. Many rights proponents argue that we must speak up because we value life: thousands of women have died from unsafe abortions before they were legal; multiple studies demonstrate that restrictions result in significant harm and confirm that abortion is safe; the oft-cited concern that having an abortion is detrimental to mental health has been demonstrated as false and, in fact, the opposite is true—denial of abortion care has resulted in extreme trauma to families and individuals.’

Here Heuser is arguing for “choice”, not from some abstract “right” or “morality”, but from its practical benefits. And I largely agree with that view. Unfortunately, courts would rather judge abortion from the Constitution, which says nothing relevant—and yet will probably repeal Roe v. Wade on Constitutional grounds—than from what is best for society. Courts are not ethical pragmatists.

But I digress. The author seems to think that for many, being in favor of abortion conflicts with being an ethical person. She realized this when she donated part of her liver to save the life of a sick child, and one of her colleagues was surprised, since this donation showed she cared for the life of children, while at the same time she was providing abortion care.

I don’t see this altruistic act as a fundamental conflict between ethics and a pro-choice view. In fact, I see no hypocrisy in caring for children and favoring abortion at the same time. In deed, in many cases, the best thing for a fetus that’s unwanted may be to abort it. But of course religionists do see a conflict, since they regard a fetus as the equivalent of a sentient human being.

So far so good. But then the author extrapolates the wave/particle duality of quantum mechanics to the issue of abortion. Just like that, she says, so one can be a moral person who cares for children and yet someone who can countenance abortion as well. She is, she says, one of these. Of course she is, and only a Pecksniff would call her out for hypocrisy. Yet one did:

In August of 2020, I had major surgery to donate a part of my liver to a child unrelated to me and whom I had never met. (Did you know you can do that? Find a center and/or register to be a deceased donor at www.unos.org). One month later, I petitioned our state medical society to oppose abortion restrictions, describing the harm these laws pose to patients under my care. I had no reason to think that my liver donation and my opposition to abortion restrictions were related until a colleague expressed his astonishment that I was “so pro-abortion but also donated an organ to a kid.”

Learning that I had undertaken an act that many people view as altruistic (a description that causes me discomfort, but I will at least allow it demonstrates a respect for life) presented a direct challenge to his view of abortion providers as morally bereft. My colleague found these two empirical truths difficult to reconcile. In his mind, one cannot be both an abortion provider and an ethical and thoughtful human. Pick one, says this belief system, team particle or team wave.

This is not a good example of hypocrisy; one can, on grounds of societal good as a whole both allow reproductive choice and allow (and applaud) someone who donates part of an organ to save a life. Her colleague is simply muddled.

This apparent conflict still bothers Heuser, however, but she should simply forget about that colleague. And she needn’t try to satisfy “pro-life” religionists, who will never be convinced that abortion can be the right thing to do.

But, apparently, she turns to quantum mechanics—the wave/particle duality—as a way to find solace—or to convince doubters:

Instead of either/or, imagine both/and. We recognize the value placed on a desired and loved pregnancy by families and understand that ending a pregnancy is the right decision for some people some of the time. Individuals may have ethical objections to abortion and recognize that anti-choice laws can harm people. We can value human life and recognize the complexities of reproductive decision making. Attending thousands of births has been a great joy in my career and has cemented my belief that forcing a person to give birth against their will is a fundamental violation of their human rights.

Given that one quarter of women in the U.S. have an abortion, many Americans have benefitted directly or indirectly from abortion care. I implore readers to emulate previous generations of scientists who changed our understanding of the universe by their willingness to consider seemingly opposite empirical truths:

Particle and wave, abortion providers and ethical physicians, pro-life and pro-choice.

Nope, that last sentence is meaningless with those first three words.

You can see the problem here. Any kind of hypocrisy or doublethink or conflicting tendencies can be rationalized via this fallacy, and not all those tendencies are pretty. Think of a celibate priest who is also a pedophile, someone who crusades against alcoholism while drinking on the sly, a diehard atheist who thinks religion is good for others (the “little people” argument) or even, to evoke Godwin’s Law, of Hitler who was a Christian and loved his dogs.

But there’s not even any hypocrisy in Heuser’s view—at least none that I can see. Ergo she doesn’t need to grope for explanations beyond consequentialist ethnics. By trying to do so, she gives people a rationale for all sorts of bad arguments about reconciling opposite or apparently opposite views.

I admire Dr. Heuser, but Scientific American really should not have published her specious analogy.

John Horgan on free will and superdeterminism

March 11, 2022 • 12:00 pm

John Horgan’s opinion piece on the physics theory of “superdeterminism” (which we’ve encountered before in a video by Sabine Hossenfelder), and its relevance to free will, appeared in the latest Scientific American. Click to read the short piece:

Although I had (and still have) trouble understanding superdeterminism, it is, as Horgan and Sabine explain, a way that quantum mechanics becomes deterministic rather than fundamentally indeterministic. To use the jargon of Bell’s Theorem, superdeterminism is a theory of “local hidden variables”, so that factors we don’t yet understand actually determine absolutely how particles behave. As Horgan notes:

A conjecture called superdeterminism, outlined decades ago, is a response to several peculiarities of quantum mechanics: the apparent randomness of quantum events; their apparent dependence on human observation, or measurement; and the apparent ability of a measurement in one place to determine, instantly, the outcome of a measurement elsewhere, an effect called nonlocality.

Einstein, who derided nonlocality as “spooky action at a distance,” insisted that quantum mechanics must be incomplete; there must be hidden variables that the theory overlooks. Superdeterminism is a radical hidden-variables theory proposed by physicist John Bell. He is renowned for a 1964 theorem, now named after him, that dramatically exposes the nonlocality of quantum mechanics.

As I wrote in response to Hossenfelder’s video:

I’m not quite sure what “superdeterminism” means is on the level of particles, but it appears to be something like this: “What a quantum particle does depends on what measurement will take place.” And once the measurement system is specified, somehow a quantum particle is determined to behave in a certain way. That’s what I don’t get.

And Horgan seems as puzzled as I am, even though Hossenfelder says that superdeterminism may be empirically testable. Back to Horgan:

I’m nonetheless baffled by superdeterminism, whether explicated by Hossenfelder or another prominent proponent, Nobel laureate Gerard t’Hooft. When I read their arguments, I feel like I’m missing something. The arguments seem circular: the world is deterministic, hence quantum mechanics must be deterministic. Superdeterminism doesn’t specify what the hidden variables of quantum mechanics are; it just decrees that they exist, and that they specify everything that happens, including my decision to write these words and your decision to read them.

Hossenfelder and I argued about free will in a conversation last summer. [JAC: this discussion is on YouTube and I can’t watch it from down here.] I pointed out that we both made the choice to speak to each other; our choices stem from “higher-level” psychological factors, such as our values and desires, which are underpinned by but not reducible to physics. Physics can’t account for choices and hence free will. So I said.

And now, what about the effect of superdeterminism on free will? Horgan says that the relevance of physics itself to the phenomenon of free will, much less the effect of superdeterminism, is irrelevant. That’s because, or so it seems from his piece, that he does believe in a form of libertarian (“you-could-have-done-otherwise”) free will.

But as most of us know, even if there are fundamental indeterminacies lurking in quantum physics, and while deterministic physics rules macro-level phenomena, there is still no such thing as libertarian free will. Whether or not an electron jumps in an indeterminate way, and that makes you decide to do one thing or another—this does not mean you have libertarian free will. To enable that, your conscious will must have made that electron jump and, as Sean Carroll has pointed out, that itself violates what we know about the laws of physics. So long as the laws of physics are obeyed, be they deterministic or indeterministic, we cannot have libertarian free will. Yet Horgan seems to think that that kind of free will can exist; we just don’t understand enough about nature to know how and why.

The analogy here is to our current lack of current understanding abut how neurobiology leads to the phenomenon of consciousness. This lack of understanding is taken by some, like Philip Goff, to mean that we’re missing something beyond current laws of physics: the ability of electrons, atoms, and so on, to have a form of consciousness (this idea is called “panpsychism,” and I consider it both foolish and untestable).

Likewise, the fact that we have emotions and consciousness and feelings that can alter the world (again, this is a fact regardless of the truth of superdeterminism) leads Horgan to the idea that there may be libertarian free will. He thinks that we just don’t understand enough physics yet:

. . . To my mind, the debate over whether physics rules out or enables free will is moot. It’s like citing quantum theory in a debate over whether the Beatles are the best rock band ever (which they clearly are). Philosophers speak of an “explanatory gap” between physical theories about consciousness and consciousness itself. First of all, the gap is so vast that you might call it a chasm. Second, the chasm applies not just to consciousness but to the entire realm of human affairs.

Physics, which tracks changes in matter and energy, has nothing to say about love, desire, fear, hatred, justice, beauty, morality, meaning. All these things, viewed in the light of physics, could be described as “logically incoherent nonsense,” as Hossenfelder puts it. But they have consequences; they alter the world.

Physics as a whole, not just quantum mechanics, is obviously incomplete. As philosopher Christian List told me recently, humans are “not just heaps of interacting particles.” We are “intentional agents, with psychological features and mental states” and the capacity to make choices. Physicists have acknowledged the limits of their discipline. Philip Anderson, a Nobel laureate, contends in his 1972 essay “More Is Different” that as phenomena become more complicated, they require new modes of explanation; not even chemistry is reducible to physics, let alone psychology.

This, and the paragraph below, are truly begging the question of naturalism and free will: assuming the existence of a phenomenon we want to prove—libertarian free will. We are “intentional agents” with “the capacity to make choices”, What Horgan is ignoring here is whether or not those choices are determined by the laws of physics. They may look like true choices that could have been made otherwise via conscious will, but that’s an illusion.

And the last paragraph seems to show that Horgan truly is afflicted with confirmation bias. To Horgan, the known and unknown laws of physics, and their relevance to free will, is a non-issue. Our wills must truly be free—and not deterministic—because because the implications are just too depressing. Horgan:

. . . Why does the debate over free will and superdeterminism matter? Because ideas matter. At this time in human history, many of us already feel helpless, at the mercy of forces beyond our control. The last thing we need is a theory that reinforces our fatalism.

What we need is the truth, not a view of science that buttresses our emotional desires.

In the end, the debate between superdeterminism or quantum mechanics is irrelevant here. All that’s relevant is whether the known laws of physics apply to all matter. There is no evidence that they don’t, and some evidence (viz., Sean Carroll’s arguments) that they do, at least to “everyday life.”

In other words, Horgan wants there to be libertarian free will, and so he thinks that we’re simply missing the physics that allow this to be true. I happen to disagree, and I think that most physicists and philosophers will agree with me. Even compatibilist philosophers, after all, still think that libertarian free will is wrong, and our “choices” are absolutely determined by the laws of physics. They just conceive of free will in a manner that is compatible with the laws of physics.

h/t: Matthew

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Why we can never reach absolute zero

January 30, 2022 • 1:45 pm

Here from Star Talk, Neil deGrasse Tyson explains why we can never attain the temperature of absolute zero (−273.15 °C or −459.67 °F). It’s the theoretical temperature in which an ideal gas at constant pressure reaches a volume of zero.

His first explanation, while delivered with enthusiasm, doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, for it’s along the lines of “we need to put something a bit colder than the ambient temperature at the place where we want to obtain absolute zero so that it will suck away the heat (molecular motion) of the target. But as we approach absolute zero, we can’t GET anything whose temperature is just a tad above absolute zero to suck away that last bit of heat. But this seems to me begging the question, for it assumes what you’re trying to prove: there’s a low temperature that we can’t obtain because it becomes impossible to get anything just a wee bit warmer than that temperature.

His second explanation, is that there is always quantum vibration, that this vibration cannot be prevented completely, and therefore we cannot go below the temperature where the quantum energy is the only energy we have. That is, quantum mechanics gives us the limit of the lowest amount of kinetic energy possible. (I wonder if the magnitude of absolute zero can be predicted from quantum mechanics alone.)

The third explanation, based on the theory of the canceled physicist Erwin S———r, explains the phenomenon as somehow connected to the Bose-Einstein condensate, but doesn’t tell me, at least, why absolute zero is unattainable (the Wikipedia article explains why this is basically the same thing as the second explanation).

So we have an entertaining video that gives three explanations for why zero degrees Kelvin is unattainable, but only the second makes a lot of sense to me. On the other hand, I’m not a physicist. But on the third hand, this video isn’t intended for physicists, but for folks like me.

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