A critique of my views on free will and the humanities by the man formerly known as “Uncle Eric”

October 21, 2013 • 7:41 am

Yes, I’ve been forced to de-avuncularize Eric MacDonald—not on the grounds that he goes after me hard in his latest post, but because his criticisms seem to me manifestly false and even a bit unfair.

It’s sad to lose an uncle: first it was Karl Giberson, and now Eric.  And there are no candidates waiting in the wings.

But on to business.  Eric’s post, called “A bit more on Jerry Coyne,” is basically a critique of my views on free will and of the consequences of seeing it as an illusion. His subject is a short post I made recently called “A bit more on free will.”

In that post, I affirmed my opposition to libertarian free will and decried the tendency of philosophers to forge a form of “compatibilist” free will which, though keeping those philosophers off the streets, accomplished almost nothing. Indeed, I saw compatibilism as a huge distraction from an important topic: physical determinism of human actions and its dissolution of the “ghost in the machine” view of human behavior. That determinism has enormous implications for how we reward and punish people. In particular, it should be a view that is incorporated into the justice system (it already is in some respects), and, when it is fully appreciated, we’ll have a system of justice that is better for society.

Eric has two objections to my piece:

1. We don’t really know that there’s no libertarian free will because physics is “incomplete.”

2. My form of determinism guts a large portion of what humanity sees as important: poetry, music, emotion, and the whole nexus of social interactions in which we’re embedded.

I see both of these objections as wrongheaded.

While I think most of us reject the notion of contracausal free will (although many of us accept other forms of “free will”), Eric refuses to do so.  Because we don’t fully understand physics, he sees the acceptance of determinism as unscientific—indeed, metaphysical:

There is not a shred of evidence for the claim that physics is complete, so that we can simply say that the whole of reality is tied up in a causal nexus such that all our “actions” are determined. Indeed, as John Dupré points out in his book Human Nature and the Limits of Science, science, and therefore, empirical demonstration, only works on very carefully isolated phenomena, where the effects of each underlying particle or force are known, and all extraneous (and therefore incalculable) causes are excluded. Science works by means of models and abstraction, and does not provide a unified theory of reality.

But physics does not have to be complete for us to accept determinism on a macro level.  Although I don’t know many physicists, the two I’ve spoken to about this at length (Sean Carroll and Steve Weinberg) agree that we know enough about the physics of “everyday life” to provisionally accept that human behavior is indeed determined by the laws of physics. Even if quantum mechanics produces some fundamental unpredictability in our neurons and hence in our behavior, that gives no leeway for “free choice”. Such choice would be equivalent to tossing a coin, and nobody wants to think of free will as anything like that.

What Eric is doing here is opposing not just physics, but also materialism. In that respect, then, he’s converging with theologians and intelligent-design advocates. If our minds can exert and be affected by something that’s not physical at all, there’s no evidence supporting such a claim.  One might as well say that there are hamsters living in our head that control our behavior, and we can’t rule this out because “physics is not complete.” Maybe those hamsters are invisible, like Carl Sagan’s dragons.

The part that upset me the most was Eric’s claim that I know nothing about how societies function, and so even determinism on an individual level could somehow be overridden when a lot of people are deterministic en masse. That puzzles me:

However, Jerry Coyne’s determinism depends upon precisely this unified science. Nor, to be truthful, does he seem to have any idea of how societies function, so that he thinks we can think in terms of a strict mechanistic determinism when it comes to human behaviour, and yet retain the substance of a human society. He claims, on no empirical basis whatever, that “if we truly grasp determinism, then the consequences are profound—and largely good.” Yet he gives us not one single piece of evidence to suppose this true. This is certainly a piece of metaphysical assertion, but it has no relation whatever to science, nor to anything that can be substantiated by science. It is as theological an assertion as the claim that God was incarnate in Jesus.

. . . Jerry Coyne’s position is no more securely grounded in empirical observation and confirmation. It is a philosophical-metaphysical claim for which he has no evidence whatsoever. Indeed, though he says he wrote his post because “physics made him do it,” that is an implausible reason to give for making such bold pronouncements without an empirical leg to stand on. He wrote the post because he believes he knows the truth, and the truth, as he points out, would have valuable social consequences. But the truth that he knows is not scientific. How did he come to know it? (if, that is, it is something known).

Well, I wasn’t an Anglican priest like Eric, so I may have missed something about how societies (including religion) function, but determinism writ small, in one human, equals determinism writ large, in a society of humans. Unless there is some numinous force that makes human interaction qualitatively different than the interaction among billiard balls on a table, then determinism must reign in society.

As for “lack of evidence”, he’s wrong, too. The evidence for macro determinism is the observed determinism of physical objects in everyday life (a staple of physics), and the new evidence from the neurosciences that our “decisions” are made before we become aware of them. It is no more a metaphysical claim than asserting that if you give testosterone supplements to a female, she will become masculinized in behavior and morphology.

The last card Eric plays really stings: he lumps me together with Dawkins as people who simply don’t understand art, emotionality, and poetry, for crying out loud! That is, he implies there is something to these phenomena that defies understanding by physics.

Well, yes, of course physics can’t understand why people make poetry, what kind of poetry they make, and how that poetry affects us emotionally. In principle it could, but I doubt we’ll ever have the knowledge—at least within the next few centuries—to explain the genesis and effect of poetry by invoking molecular interactions.  And until then—and even after then—I’m happy to enjoy the arts as everyone else does, on an emotional level, a subjective level, and in great awe of those who can produce great art. I know why flowers evolved, and often why they look like they do, but that doesn’t detract at all from my appreciation of their beauty. It enhances it, but the emotionality is still there.

Referring to C.P. Snow’s ignorance on why the humanities are important in a science-dominated culture, Eric says this:

Some of that ignorance, I regret to say, I sense in some of the things that Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, and other new atheists say. For example, sorting through some video downloads the other day, I came upon one by Dawkins, in which he says, rather grandly, if inconsequently, that “science is the poetry of reality.”

. . . The point to be made is that the collection of scientific facts, interesting and important as this may be to an understanding of our world, does not even begin to describe the importance of the more rounded humane understanding of the human world that can be derived from the humanities, and, for Leavis, in particular, from English literature. And it is precisely this that is missing in Dawkins’ suggestion that “science is the poetry of reality.” For reality includes so much more, and at so much greater depth of human engagement, than can be provided by science.

The irony here is that both Richard and I are huge fans of poetry (Richard knows more than I, but I’m no slouch for a scientist) and, more important, although we do see science as a form of beauty, we also appreciate poetry qua poetry. Of course we see great value in the humanities, and are moved by the emotions aroused in us by poetry, music, art, and literature.  They may not be profound “ways of knowing,” but they engage our emotions by helping us see things in new ways, tugging on our heartstrings, affirming our common humanity, and allowing ourselves to be immersed in situations that are new and engaging. They exercise our imagination in ways that science doesn’t.

I’ve recently been reading two of my favorite poets, Yeats and Dylan Thomas, and so I find it almost humorous when Eric says stuff like this:

The problem is that [Dawkins] does not seem to understand what poetry does or is for. Does he understand why, say, Blake, wrote about “dark Satanic mills”? Or why Lawrence made fun of figures like Lady Ottoline Morell and Bertrand Russell in Women in Love?

. . . Dawkins himself is, of course, a poetic writer, but is what he writes about reality? Certainly, he is a master at describing, almost transparently, the nature of the world discovered by science. This, for him, seems to be the only reality that there is. However, does he not recognise that science creates problems as well as solves them? Does he not recognise that science is a part of the human world to which so many other discourses belong?

I proudly count myself lumped with Dawkins in that critique and, in fact, I’ve read nearly everything written by Blake and Lawrence.  And yes, I understand why Lawrence made fun of Ottoline Morell and Russell in Women in Love.  I would claim, in fact, that I know more about the machinations and philosophies of the Bloomsbury Group than 98% of scientists. I’m not trying to brag here, but simply making the point that a love of science, and a form of principled reductionism that does not claim (yet) to include the humanities in its ambit, does not preclude our seeing the value of, and benefiting from, the humanities.

Note, too, that Eric is allying himself even closer to theology in emphasizing the “problems” caused by science.  Would he rather live in a world without science? Sure, we wouldn’t have those “problems”, but most of us would have died years ago from tooth problems, infections, or other maladies. The dissing of science is simply gratuitous.

In the end, I simply don’t understand what Eric is on about here. His piece, it seems, boils down to the claim that “there’s got to be something more than molecules out there”, and that that “something” verges on the numinous. The criticism that people like Dawkins and I don’t appreciate the humanities, or understand what they’re trying to accomplish, is simply wrong, and Eric should know that.

A while back Eric was on the front lines of atheism, dissecting the follies of faith with an ardor possible only in former pastors.  Now, it seems, he’s slowly lurching his way back to—well, not religion, but something close to it.  It’s the view that “there’s more than materialism” out there.  Well, we have no evidence for those invisible dragons, and for now I’ll do my science during the day and read my Yeats at night.

Guest post: Linda Calhoun reviews “The Authoritarians”

October 21, 2013 • 5:01 am

A while back I asked reader Linda Grilli Calhoun, who had informed me about this book, to furnish me with a brief review for this site. Well, the goat-raising business is onerous, so it took a while, but here it is, with thanks to Linda from Professor Ceiling Cat.

The book is The Authoritarians, and is, as you’ll see, about the pathology of extreme conservativism.  One of the reviews on Amazon describes it as “a must-read book for liberals, moderates, and conservatives alike who are troubled by the extremism and corruption of modern neoconservatives.”  Although the book came out in 2007, it’s more timely than ever given the confluence of right-wing Christianity and politics in America, as well as the noisy irruptions of the Tea Party.

The Authoritarians, by Bob Altemeyer – A Review

by Linda Grilli Calhoun

Many of us who frequent this website have had the experience of encountering fundamentalist/evangelical/conservative people who, during what initially appears to be a basically civilized conversation, suddenly display jaw-dropping illogic, or unprovoked hostility, or paranoia, or sometimes all three.  They start in on what I have come to think of as The Rant, straight out of Limbaugh or one of his imitators.

The people who show this behavior often seem pretty normal until suddenly, they don’t.  As a retired shrink, I’m always interested in where this stuff comes from, especially given the abruptness with which it often appears, usually (but not always) as a complete non sequitur to the flow of conversation.

So, when I happened upon a link to Bob Altemeyer’s book The Authoritarians, I followed it.  I was not disappointed, and neither will you be.

Bob Altemeyer believes, based on his research, that the political right wing in its current incarnation poses a danger to our democracy.  He describes himself as a moderate (much to the consternation of his more liberal associates), but states that the makeup of that group as it stands right now does not provide a balance to more liberal views; rather, the right wing is a dogmatic threat which potentially limits our basic freedoms.  He wrote this book as a warning.

Altemeyer is a retired professor of psychology who taught for his entire career at the University of Manitoba.  He spent his research life studying the authoritarian personality, published many articles in journals as well as a couple of books aimed at fellow psychologists.  Because of his research, he was contacted by John Dean, who used Altemeyer’s findings extensively in his own book [JAC: yes, the White House Dean, who wrote Conservatives Without Conscience].  Dean encouraged Altemeyer to publish a lay version of his work, and The Authoritarians is the result.

For his research, Altemeyer developed and refined personality inventories to measure the traits he wanted to study.  Although this book doesn’t go into the specifics of that development, statistics wonks can find links to all of the underlying procedures on his website or in his other writings.  He does give a brief summary of his procedures in the chapter endnotes of The Authoritarians. I’m not as much of a statistics wonk as Altemeyer, but I was interested enough to follow several of his links, and the cleanliness of his research is impressive, to say the least.

The inventories focus on what he terms “Right Wing Authoritarianism” and “Social Dominance”.  He uses “right” initially as “correct”, rather than “politically right wing”, but it becomes obvious during his studies that the politically right-wing subjects see themselves, to a highly dogmatic level, as correct in their beliefs, even when evidence stands in contradiction.

Altemeyer describes the personality traits of high RWAs as submissiveness, fear, self-righteousness, hostility, lack of critical thinking, compartmentalized thinking, double standards, and feeling most empowered when in groups.  He describes the lack of logic in their thinking; when they like the conclusion, how that conclusion was arrived at is irrelevant.  When they like the behaver, the behavior is acceptable; when they dislike the behaver, the behavior is not.

He then goes on to describe high Social Dominators.  These people want power, and they don’t much care how they get it.  “The end justifies the means” is their guiding principle.

And then, the double whammy:  these two groups fit together beautifully, which, in Altemeyer’s opinion, is how we have arrived at our current political state of affairs.  High SDs have co-opted high RWAs, and the vast majority of moderates have gone about our lives until these groups are threatening to take over, even though they don’t represent anywhere close to a majority.

Throughout the book, Altemeyer is careful to point out that these descriptions do not fit the groups one hundred percent, that there are outlier datapoints, and exceptions to every conclusion.  But his levels of predictive validity are high, and his descriptions are not opinions but demonstrable facts.  His work has been replicated by other researchers, and he cites them in the book. (He is also secure enough to cite his critics, but their criticism is pretty lame.)

The end of the book contains strategies for combating the craziness that the right wing is currently promulgating.  If I have one criticism of the book, it is that I wish this section had been more extensive.  But if you want a great description of exactly what we’re up against, this is definitely it.

The Authoritarians, by Bob Altemeyer, is available as a free downloadable PDF at this site.

It is also available as an audio CD from Amazon.com.    

The worst songs ever: 4. “An Open Letter to My Teenage Son”

October 20, 2013 • 3:01 pm

I suspect that few of you know this song. Sure, we all know that MacArthur Park was the absolute worst song in the history of pop music, but I’m not going to put that one up. We all know about the cake left out in the rain. Today’s song is not only execrable, but obscure—at least to those of you not alive in the late 50s.

Victor Lundberg was a radio announcer and a political conservative who wrote and released this “talking” song in 1967.  Now imagine yourself a long-haired hippie, deeply opposed to American’s unconscionable war in Vietnam—much like the boy below, who was granted draft status as a conscientious objector.

Jerry at Rockefeller_2

And then imagine how this song would strike you:

Yep, that’s pretty much the reaction I had.

Here are some of its LOLzy lyrics (my emphasis):

You ask me if God is dead.
This is a question each individual must answer within himself.
But a warm summer day with all its brightness, all its sound, all its exhilarating breathiness just happened?
God is love. Remember that God is a guide and not a storm trooper. Realize that many of the past and present generation,
because of a well intended but unjustifiable misconception,
have attempted to legislate morality.
This created part of the basis for your generation’s need to rebel against
Our society. With this knowledge perhaps your children will never ask Is  God dead?
I sometimes think much of mankind is attempting to work Him to Death.

If you are not grateful to a country that gave your father the
Opportunity to work for his family to give you the things you have and you
Do not feel pride enough to fight for your right to continue in this
Manner then I assume the blame for your failure to recognize the true
Value of our birthright. And I will remind you that your mother will love
You no matter what you do, because she is a woman. And I love you too,
Son. But I also love our country and the principles for which we stand.
And if you decide to burn your draft card, then burn your birth
Certificate at the same time.
From that moment on, I have no son!

This dreadful song was actually a hit. As Wikipedia notes:

“An Open Letter” became a surprise hit in Michigan and was released nationally by Liberty Records, jumping onto the Billboard Hot 100 at #84 on November 11, 1967. Within three weeks it went #58 – #18 – #10, making it one of the dozen or so fastest-climbing records in Hot 100 history up to that point, and Lundberg made an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. After another week at #10, the record slipped to #22 for the week ending December 16, 1967, then vanished from the Hot 100 completely, after a total run of just six weeks. Few other records have ever been ranked so high in such a short chart stay on the Hot 100 (Napoleon XIV’s “They’re Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” peaked at #3 but was only on the Hot 100 for six weeks; Kenny G’s “Auld Lang Syne” (The Millennium Mix) peaked at #7 but was only the Hot 100 for five weeks). However, it sold over one million copies within a month of release and was awarded a gold disc.[3] “An Open Letter” also received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Spoken Word Recording.

There were also at least seven “response” records: Keith Gordon’s “A Teenager’s Answer”, released on the Tower label, “A Teenager’s Open Letter To His Father” by Robert Tamlin.,[6] “Letter From A Teenage Son” by Brandon Wade [Philips 40503], “A Letter To Dad” by Every Father’s Teenage Son” [Buddah 25], “Hi, Dad (An Open Letter To Dad)” by Dick Clair [Imperial 66272] and “An Open Letter To My Dad” by Marceline [Ion 102].

How to recognize a hidebound accommodationist

October 20, 2013 • 8:50 am

Just use the Galileo Test.

It’s the test I use to discern whether people will defend religion (or “belief in belief”) at all costs, regardless of the facts, or argue that there is no contradiction between science and religion.

Here’s how the test works:  just ask someone acquainted with Galileo’s dispute with the Church what, exactly, that dispute involved.

Faitheists, accommodationists, and theists will invariably say that religion played a trivial, or even no, role in that affair. It was about politics, or Pope Urban’s ambiguous relationship with Galileo, or Church intrigue—anything but religion. People who say this cannot be trusted to render a rational judgment on the role of religion, for they are blinkered.

If someone is honest, they’ll tell you that religion played a major role in this controversy, for Galileo was explicitly persecuted because his claims about the solar system contravened those of scripture.  Without that contradiction, there would have been no problem.

Now, there’s no denying that other factors exacerbated this dispute. In his dialogue, for instance, Galileo put the Pope’s defense of a geocentric universe into the mouth of the fool Simplicio. That wouldn’t have pleased Urban! But if you read the history of this episode—and I’ve now read quite a bit—the involvement of the scripture/science contradiction is strong and palpable. Cardinal Bellarmine repeatedly warned Galileo to stop contradicting Scripture, and even Pope Urban told Galileo to lay off overt heliocentrism. If there had been no Biblical text arguing for a geocentric universe, Galileo would not have been persecuted.

Unlike the Pope, this test really is infallible.

_____

Note added in proof: Don’t forget that the Church finally admitted that it erred in condemning Galileo in 1992—359 years after they condemned him and centuries after we already knew that he was right and the Church was wrong!

Steven Weinberg discusses the mysteries of physics

October 20, 2013 • 6:45 am

A common misconception is that the major problems of physics have mostly been solved, and all that’s left is some minor sweeping-up.  I doubt that the readers here would agree, for huge surprises and mysteries continue to surface in physics. In a new piece in the New York Review of Books, “Physics: What we do and don’t know” (free download), Nobel Laureate Steve Weinberg discusses these puzzles, which occur on scales both large and small.

I found a bit of the piece tough going, as if Weinberg were writing for professionals instead of science-friendly and educated people. I had trouble with this, for example:

Speculations of this sort ran into an obvious difficulty: photons have no mass, while any new particles such as W+, W-, and Z0 would have to be very heavy, or they would have been discovered decades earlier—the heavier the particle, the higher the energy needed to create it in a particle accelerator, and the more expensive the accelerator. There was also the stubborn problem of infinities. The solution lay in an idea known as broken symmetry, which had been developed and successfully applied in other areas of particle physics since 1960. The equations of a theory may possess certain simplicities, such as relations among the photon, W+, W-, and Z0, which are not present in the solutions of the equations that describe what we actually observe. In the electroweak theory there is an exact symmetry between weak and electromagnetic forces, which would make the W+, W-, and Z0 massless, if it were not that the symmetry is broken by four proposed “scalar” fields that permeate the universe, from which the W+, W-, and Z0as well as the electron get masses. A new particle discovered last year appears to be the predicted quantum of one of these scalar fields.

But the bulk of the piece is a very nice summary of what we do and don’t know, and I recommend it warmly.  Here are some of the mysteries, with Weinberg’s take indented:

1. What is dark matter?

It turns out that particles already known to us are not enough to account for the mass of the hot matter in which the sound waves must have propagated. Fully five sixths of the matter of the universe would have to be some kind of “dark matter,” which does not emit or absorb light. The existence of this much dark matter in the present universe had already been inferred from the fact that clusters of galaxies hold together gravitationally, despite the high random speeds of the galaxies in the clusters. So this is a great puzzle: What is the dark matter? Theories abound, and attempts are underway to catch ambient dark matter particles or remnants of their annihilation in detectors on Earth or to create dark matter in accelerators. But so far dark matter has not been found, and no one knows what it is.

2. What is dark energy?

In 1998, using the apparent brightness of exploding stars to measure the distance of far galaxies, two groups of astronomers found that the expansion of the universe is not slowing down at all, but rather speeding up. Within the rules of the general theory of relativity, this could only be explained by an energy that is not contained in the masses of any sort of particles, dark or otherwise, but in a “dark energy” inherent in space itself, which produces a sort of antigravity pushing the galaxies apart.

From these measurements, and also from studies of the effect of the expansion of the universe on the cosmic radiation background, it has been found that the dark energy now makes up about three quarters of the total energy of the universe.

3. How does gravity fit into the “theory of everything”? Weinberg got his Nobel (along with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow) for unifying the electromagnetic and weak forces. But one “force” has so far defied unification.

Even so, the standard model is clearly not the final theory. Its equations involve a score of numbers, like the masses of quarks, that have to be taken from experiment without our understanding why they are what they are. If the standard model were the whole story, it would require neutrinos to have zero mass, while in fact their masses are merely very small, less than a millionth the mass of an electron. Further, the standard model does not include the longest-known and most familiar force, the force of gravitation. We commonly describe gravitation using a field theory, the general theory of relativity, but this is not a quantum field theory in which infinities cancel as they do in the standard model.

4. Is string theory right?

Since the 1980s a tremendous amount of mathematically sophisticated work has been devoted to the development of a quantum theory whose fundamental ingredients are not particles or fields but tiny strings, whose various modes of vibration we observe as the various kinds of elementary particle. One of these modes corresponds to the graviton, the quantum of the gravitational field. String theory if true would not invalidate field theories like the standard model or general relativity; they would just be demoted to “effective field theories,” approximations valid at the scales of distance and energy that we have been able to explore.

String theory is attractive because it incorporates gravitation, it contains no infinities, and its structure is tightly constrained by conditions of mathematical consistency, so apparently there is just one string theory. Unfortunately, although we do not yet know the exact underlying equations of string theory, there are reasons to believe that whatever these equations are, they have a vast number of solutions. I have been a fan of string theory, but it is disappointing that no one so far has succeeded in finding a solution that corresponds to the world we observe.

String theory, combined with the idea of cosmic inflation, leads naturally to the concept of multiverses, “pocket universes” in which the laws of physics would differ from those of our own universe. This possibility, if confirmed, would finally dispel the persistent theological argument for the “strong anthropic principle”: the idea that the laws of physics were designed by God to make possible sentient life that could apprehend and worship Him (i.e. humans). To my mind, that argument is the last redoubt of a natural theology that’s been eroded to virtually nothing by science.

Unfortunately, multiverses may well be impossible to observe, even though they fall naturally out of existing theories of physics. Some physicists, like Paul Davies, claim that multiverses were concocted by physicists solely to dispel the idea of God, but they’re dead wrong. It’s a serious idea that’s been around for a while.

5. Are there multiverses?

Inflation is naturally chaotic. Bubbles form in the expanding universe, each developing into a big or small bang, perhaps each with different values for what we usually call the constants of nature. The inhabitants (if any) of one bubble cannot observe other bubbles, so to them their bubble appears as the whole universe. The whole assembly of all these universes has come to be called the “multiverse.”

These bubbles may realize all the different solutions of the equations of string theory. If this is true, then the hope of finding a rational explanation for the precise values of quark masses and other constants of the standard model that we observe in our big bang is doomed, for their values would be an accident of the particular part of the multiverse in which we live. We would have to content ourselves with a crude anthropic explanation for some aspects of the universe we see: any beings like ourselves that are capable of studying the universe must be in a part of the universe in which the constants of nature allow the evolution of life and intelligence. Man may indeed be the measure of all things, though not quite in the sense intended by Protagoras.

What better way to spend a lazy Sunday than contemplating the mysteries of the cosmos?

Here’s a picture I took of Steve and Alex Rosenberg at the “Moving Naturalism Forward” meeting about a year ago:

Steve and Alex