Moving Naturalism Forward: my summary

October 29, 2012 • 8:35 am

This is part 2 of today’s summary of the Moving Naturalism Forward workshop (Part 1 is my Powerpoint presentation given below), a meeting that ended yesterday. It makes no attempt to be as complete as Massimo Pigliucci’s account of the conference which he’s posting in bits on Rationally Speaking. (Kudos to Massimo, who was “live-blogging” the conference—or rather, taking copious notes during the discussion that he’d turn into website posts overnight—while also making substantive contributions to the discussion.) My account is more idiosyncratic and personal, and will concentrate on the discussion of free will (see my presentation in the preceding post), and on my own reaction to the meeting.

Massimo’s website gives a pretty accurate account of the discussion of free will two days ago, though he erroneously claims, I think, that the Libet experiments (misspelled “Libbett”) on when “decisions” are made in the brain have been discredited both philosophically and scientifically. In fact, they have been repeated scientifically: one recent study that has been claimed in the press as a failure to repeat Libet et al. (and as a vindication of the notion of “free will”) doesn’t show any such thing; it shows that in one study the “action” potential in the brain indicating an upcoming decision may occur closer to the event than Libet showed (though others have shown, in other cases, that it can occur farther in advance than Libet et al. showed). And, in any case, the “disconfirming” study also showed, like Libet, that one can predict with reasonable accuracy which of two buttons one will press before that decision is reported as being made consciously. This predictability can precede the conscious decision by as much as ten seconds! In my take, that study (I don’t have the reference at the moment as I’m in Boston) does nothing to discredit the Libet and Soon et al. experiments (Soon et al. confirmed Libet’s result using a different form of brain-scanning). And instead of taking the implications of that work seriously, compatibilists do all they can to discredit it.

Massimo’s account of the free-will discussion is fairly accurate, though I think a wee bit self-serving in a few respects, like claiming that Libet’s experiments are no longer credible and say nothing about so-called “free will”. I disagree. But his summary of what agreement transpired is accurate:

Terrence Deacon asked why we insist in using the term “free” will, and Jerry had previously invited people to drop the darn thing. I suggested, and Owen elaborated on it, that we should instead use the terms that cognitive scientists use, like volition or voluntary vs involuntary decision making. Those terms both capture the scientific meaning of what we are talking about and retain the everyday implication that our decisions are ours (and we are therefore responsible for them). And dropping “free” also doesn’t generate confusion about contra-causal mystical-theological mumbo jumbo.

I agree in general with deep-sixing the definition, though the saying that “our decisions are ours” seems to me tautological, and doesn’t buttress any meaningful form of free will.

I add that Dan Dennett himself said he was willing to drop the term “free will” if it were replaced by the term “morally competent volition.”  I can’t sanction that one, because I think the term “morally competent” is irrelevant: if we can’t really choose what we do, but are totally constrained by our genes and our environments (something everyone agreed on), then nobody is any more “competent” than anyone else in making decisions. Further, the value of “morality” goes out the window, becoming a shorthand for “how society wants us to behave.”

There are just different strategies for to sanctioning and rewarding those who do good or bad acts depending on which factors motivated those acts, and how punishment, for instance, affects the person’s susceptibility to be rehabilitated, protects society from future bad acts, and deters others from committing them. These are empirical matters that can be decided independently of “competence” and “morality.”

At the end of the meeting we were all asked to give our take on it: did we really move naturalism forward, did we change our minds about anything, and what are the exciting questions that remain?  I will speak only for myself here (Massimo will likely give a more complete summary of everyones views soon).

I found the conference interesting but inconclusive. We did not even agree (or much discuss) what naturalism really is, and most people agreed that we disagreed in general: we didn’t come to many conclusions about anything. Nick Pritzker, who sponsored the meeting, agreed with this take. (My slide on “where we agree” below didn’t meet with much disagreement except from Steve Weinberg).

One conclusion, though—one that gratified me immensely—is that several people who did change their minds on an issue said something like: “I decided during the workshop that free will is a philosophical black hole (something that Owen Flanagan asserted at the meeting’s outset) and that we shouldn’t discuss any longer whether it exists.”  I think by this they meant that since we are all determinists, discussing whether we have free will becomes a semantic game. Dan Dennett’s claim (see Massimo’s summary) that society will fall apart if we don’t retain some notion of “free will” was not widely shared. I don’t believe it for a minute. That was the claim made for religion, too, but largely atheistic societies, like those in Scandinavia, are pretty damn harmonious!

We all agreed that dualism (often called “nonphysical libertarian free will”) is dead, and that our decisions are determined largely before we become conscious of “making” them.  Surprisingly, Steve Weinberg was the one person who seemed to disagree with this, saying that his consciousness had a “role” in making his decision. I claim that consciousness of making a decision may be merely a phenomenon that follows a decison made unconsciously, and, indeed, may have evolved just for that purpose. That is, confabulating may be an adaptation.

At any rate, most didn’t think that we should continue debating whether or not we have free will. I consider that as a small personal victory of sorts. As I noted in my presentation below, that doesn’t mean that substantive, interesting, and socially relevant questions about the illusion of “personal agency” don’t remain.

For me the main value of the meeting was meeting: getting together with some of my intellectual heroes and making contact with them in a way that will help me interact with them in the future. I liked everyone at the meeting and hope to continue discussions with several of them, particularly about the relationship between theology and science (something I’m much interested in, but wasn’t discussed at the workshop). I greatly enjoyed Alex Rosenberg’s hard-core determinism, which has given me much food for thought, and thought Steven Weinberg was an awesome intellect—and not just in science. I am now in contact with physicist Janna Levin, and hope in the future that she’ll help me understand the thorny questions of modern particle physics and cosmology (Sean Carroll has been helping me here as well for a while.) Sean did a terrific job of organizing the meeting and doing interim summaries of where we were in each discussion.

What I wished we had talked more about:

  • What is real? Weinberg at one point said “Santa Claus is real.” (This was in response to him saying that everything was real, whereupon I asked him whether God was real. His response was “Yes—in the same sense that Santa Claus is real.”) That is confusing; I think: what Weinberg clearly meant was that “the concept of Santa Claus (and God) are real.” That’s a big difference.
  • What is naturalism? How can we move it forward if we don’t know what it is? My own take is that the lucubrations of academics can move naturalism forward only slightly, and I argued was that really moving it forward involves changing society in a way that won’t enable or strengthen superstition, which truly impedes the advance naturalism. In other words, vote for Obama, lessen income inequality, give everyone health care, and so on.
  • Are there ways of knowing other than science? In his presentation about “scientism” on the last day—a presentation, by the way, that was admirably clear—Massimo talked about ways of knowing that come from areas other than science. I don’t recall them all, but think that they include mathematics and logic. I am open on this issue (except that I don’t thing religion and revelation are “ways of knowing”), but, sadly, we had little time to discuss these issues. I am particularly interested in whether mathematics is a way of finding out things that are true about the universe, i.e., whether math is continuous with science, and will be thinking more about that in the future. Dan recommended that I consult a philosopher of mathematics on this issue (I didn’t know such a field existed!), because it was not in his realm of expertise.

What did I change my mind about? On the morning before the last day of the conference, I wrote on this site that I didn’t think the formal philosophy of science had made any contribution to the progress of science. I now think I was wrong, because I raised that question in the meeting shortly thereafter. Folks like Janna Levin, Sean Carroll, Rebecca Goldstein, and Dan Dennett convinced me that philosophical interpretations of quantum mechanics have influenced work in physics, philosophical speculations about “the arrow of time” have influenced cosmology, and philosophers like Peter Singer have inspired work on the consciousness and behavior of animals. We all agreed that most science proceeds completely independently of the work of philosophers, but, as Massimo said in his presentation, “Philosophy is not in the business of advancing science.”

Finally, some of my best intellectual times occurred on the drive to the conference with Richard Dawkins and Dan, since we had lively discussion of many things (including theology), and the drive back to Cambridge with Dan which, as I noted yesterday, helped me sharpen my thoughts on the value of morality.

It was a good time, but my brain needs to recover for a few days. Sadly, I have more theology to read.

My presentation on Free Will

October 29, 2012 • 6:25 am

At the Moving Naturalism Forward workshop, I gave a brief Powerpoint presentation designed to stimulate discussion (Dan had one too, and that, and mine, will eventually be on the YouTube videos. I’ll put it here as well; you can get a complete idea of what I said by looking at the slides. (Click to enlarge). The “reader comment” in one of the slides below was made by one of the readers of this website, whose name I didn’t save. If it was yours, weigh in below and claim credit.

My take on the reaction of the participants, and on the meeting as a whole, will be in the next post. The quote about the phrase that will replace free will comes from Marvin Minsky.

I have landed

October 28, 2012 • 2:38 pm

I have returned from the Moving Naturalism Forward meetings, and am now in Cambridge with friends, exhausted and needing a drink.

I drove back to Boston with Dan Dennett—just the two of us since Richard Dawkins left for Boston yesterday to avoid the hurricane. Our entire 2.5-hour drive from Stockbridge was devoted to Dan trying to convince me that humans not only have a form of free will worth wanting, but that we are also morally responsible beings. He did not change my mind: I think we are responsible beings, but that the concept of moral responsibility adds nothing and, indeed, could be detrimental to endeavors like reforming the justice system.

I’m starting to think that the whole concept of morality is an outmoded impediment that should be discarded in favor of what Nick Pritzker (who sponsored our meeting) called “good ideas about how to run society.”

Regardless, Dan is a formidable interlocutor and a ferociously smart man, and used every weapon in his philosophical arsenal on me, including his famous penchant for thought experiments.  I just wasn’t convinced, but oy, do I need some ethanol after two hours of intensive brain exercise!  But Dan is a sweetheart and I love him to bits; he’s the kind of guy who can still be your pal despite intellectual disagreement.

It was a fun meeting, but I need to recharge my batteries before I write any more about it and post my photographs. In the meantime, read Massimo’s account of Day 2 over at Rationally Speaking.

If the hurricane blows over, I’ll leave for Mexico Thursday.

Oh, and I have a book autographed by everyone there, with each person contributing an equation, drawing, or slogan.  Start thinking about loosening up your wallets and bidding for it for Doctors Without Borders. It includes a Feynman diagram drawn by Steve Weinberg showing the production of a Higgs boson! I’ll post a scan of the signatures before I put it up for bid in late November.

Thomas Friedman is pro-life!

October 28, 2012 • 11:10 am

I have to admit that I got a shock when I saw the title of Tom Friedman’s column in today’s New York Times: “Why I am pro-life.”  As far as I knew, Friedmans was what we call in America “pro-choice,” that is, a woman has the right to control her own body, referring to early-term abortions.  Did he change his mind?

No, he did something very clever—he construed the term “pro-life” properly. Let him explain:

. . . judging from the unscientific — borderline crazy — statements opposing abortion that we’re hearing lately, there is reason to believe that this delicate balance could be threatened if Mitt Romney and Representative Paul Ryan, and their even more extreme allies, get elected. So to those who want to protect a woman’s right to control what happens with her own body, let me offer just one piece of advice: to name something is to own it. If you can name an issue, you can own the issue. And we must stop letting Republicans name themselves “pro-life” and Democrats as “pro-choice.” It is a huge distortion.

In my world, you don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and be against common-sense gun control — like banning public access to the kind of semiautomatic assault rifle, designed for warfare, that was used recently in a Colorado theater. You don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and want to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency, which ensures clean air and clean water, prevents childhood asthma, preserves biodiversity and combats climate change that could disrupt every life on the planet. You don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and oppose programs like Head Start that provide basic education, health and nutrition for the most disadvantaged children. You can call yourself a “pro-conception-to-birth, indifferent-to-life conservative.” I will never refer to someone who pickets Planned Parenthood but lobbies against common-sense gun laws as “pro-life.”

“Pro-life” can mean only one thing: “respect for the sanctity of life.” And there is no way that respect for the sanctity life can mean we are obligated to protect every fertilized egg in a woman’s ovary, no matter how that egg got fertilized, but we are not obligated to protect every living person from being shot with a concealed automatic weapon. I have no respect for someone who relies on voodoo science to declare that a woman’s body can distinguish a “legitimate” rape, but then declares — when 99 percent of all climate scientists conclude that climate change poses a danger to the sanctity of all life on the planet — that global warming is just a hoax.

The term “pro-life” should be a shorthand for respect for the sanctity of life. But I will not let that label apply to people for whom sanctity for life begins at conception and ends at birth. What about the rest of life? Respect for the sanctity of life, if you believe that it begins at conception, cannot end at birth. That radical narrowing of our concern for the sanctity of life is leading to terrible distortions in our society.

Although I get a sense I’m preaching to the choir here, there are several other pro-Obama articles in today’s Times. The other one I want to mention is the the paper’s own official endorsement of Obama for president. His policies are compared with Mittens’ in a long editorial, “Barack Obama for re-election“, discussing the candiates’ stands on the important issues of gay rights, women’s rights, the environment, the economy, medical care, and what they will do to the Supreme Court. Just one snippet:

Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, has gotten this far with a guile that allows him to say whatever he thinks an audience wants to hear. But he has tied himself to the ultraconservative forces that control the Republican Party and embraced their policies, including reckless budget cuts and 30-year-old, discredited trickle-down ideas. Voters may still be confused about Mr. Romney’s true identity, but they know the Republican Party, and a Romney administration would reflect its agenda. Mr. Romney’s choice of Representative Paul Ryan as his running mate says volumes about that.

Nullius in verba, plentius in print

October 28, 2012 • 8:58 am

by Greg Mayer

The Royal Society, founded in 1660, is the oldest scientific society in the English-speaking world. Among it’s early members were such luminaries as Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Isaac Newton, and Edmund Halley. Darwin and Wallace were both Fellows, and the Society awards the  Darwin Medal “for work of acknowledged distinction in evolution, population biology, organismal biology and biological diversity”; Wallace was the first recipient.

The motto of the Royal Society, “Nullius in verba”, can be roughly translated as “Nothing in words”, or, as the Society itself does, as

‘Take nobody’s word for it’. It is an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment.

It was at the time a revolutionary rejection of the stultifying influence of the unquestioned authority of classical and theological authors on the pursuit of natural knowledge, and remains today a revolutionary principle for the evaluation of claims about the world. The Society’s flagship journal, Philosophical Transactions, has been published since 1665, making it the oldest continuously published scientific journal in the world, and helped to establish the practice of peer review.

All this is by way of introduction to the fact that the Royal Society has made all of its journal content open access now through November 29, with downloadable pdf’s available to all users.

A recent issue of Biology Letters

The journals most likely to be of interest to WEIT readers are the Philosophical Transactions B Biological Sciences, Proceedings B Biological Sciences, Biology Letters, Notes and Records, and Biographical Memoirs (the latter two journals dealing with the history of science, the Memoirs in particular being biographies of deceased Fellows). Among the first papers you’ll want to download for your pdf library is this classic, and I might immodestly suggest this paper if your tastes run to vertebrate phylogeny (technical update: although the platypus is not a rodent, the Marsupionta turn out to probably not be a clade). There is a treasure trove of papers in the archival content of the Society’s journals (such as Newton’s first published paper), and I highly recommend that you spend some time searching through their digital stacks during the next month.

Guardian column praises CERN for accommodationist meeting

October 28, 2012 • 4:18 am

Once again we hear that science tells us how the world is, but religion answers the Really Big Questions. Sadly, this time it’s from a scientist, one at Matthew Cobb’s school.

Jeff Forshaw is a professor at the School of Physics and Astronomy and University of Manchester, and has collaborated with Brian Cox in explaining physics on YouTube (see here and here, for instance).

In a new column at the Guardian, “Science and religion are united in a sense of wonder,” Forshaw buys the NOMA line whole hog.  He’s writing about the CERN conference I described on October 15, a conference that was supposed to bring scientists, philosophers, and theologians together in productive dialogue. My take was that it was useless: philosophers but especially theologians had nothing to add to the conference—see my post for the haughty comments theologians made about how physicists weren’t doing science correctly. I still maintain that the progress of science is totally independent of (and uninfluenced by) what happens in either theology or the formal discipline of the philosophy of science. (That’s not to say that I think the philosophy of science is useless. It isn’t; it’s value just is not in helping science progress in understanding nature.)

Forshaw apparently disagrees:

Some might say that Cern should stick to science but I don’t agree. A major reason for the popularity of fundamental physics is that it is seen to tackle some pretty “deep” questions – the kinds of questions that really “mean” something – and the quest for meaning is not something best left to scientists. With the latest ideas in physics seeming to suggest the possibility of “a universe from nothing” (the title of cosmologist Lawrence Krauss’s latest book), the stakes do seem rather high. I think it makes sense to ensure that the theologians are up to speed with the science, but I also think that scientists benefit from contemplating the wider implications of their discoveries.

Well, I don’t particularly care if physicists want to tell theologians the latest finds in physics (though it will only lead to a flurry of new theology showing how cosmology or bosons prove God), but Forshaw is dead wrong in thinking that theologians will help science progress by enabling physicists to think about the Big Questions. Can he give one example of when that has happened?

Forshaw sees a Big Danger in this lack of dialogue.

By overstating science’s power and not acknowledging its limitations, we risk fostering the growth of a religion-substitute, with the scientists as high priests. Such hubris not only irritates people, but more significantly it risks promoting the misconception that science deals with certainty – and that is the very antithesis of good science. Science, which advances through the weight of evidence, is inherently uncertain.

Yeah, Brian Greene, Lisa Randall, and other popular physics writers claim that we deal with certainty. That’s a base canard: the hallmark of popular physics writing—indeed, of nearly all good science writing—is its constant emphasis on what we don’t know (read The Trouble with Physics, by Lee Smolin, for example).

Even worse, it is certainly religion and not science that is “uncertain”—and far more inherently so. There are some things in science that  we know with near certainty, like the atomic composition of water, but there is nothing about God that we know with any certainty at all. Yet it is the scientists, not the faithful, who are described as having annoying hubris! Why did Forshaw do that?

Forshaw continues with his tired old NOMA trope:

But the questions that science can tackle are nonetheless limited in scope. For most people, the deep questions of science do not shape their lives. For example, science does not touch on whether the universe has any point to it and it cannot even hope to answer the question of why there is something rather than nothing.

Perhaps (although Larry Krauss has an answer to why there is something if you accept his definition of “nothing”), but religion has never answered those questions either, and has no hope of doing so. Or, rather, different religions give different answers and there’s no way of knowing which is right. Which Big Questions, for example, has religion answered? Here’s a common one: is God good?  That’s an easy question, and we have no answer. Here’s another: is it a sin to masturbate?  No answer there, either.

Forshaw’s last paragraph is predictable:

In some people’s minds, science and religion stand in stark opposition, but is this really the case? Certainly, years of being a scientist have led me to doubt pretty much everything I thought I knew. Secure and certain knowledge is a rare thing and I am not surprised that scientists often find religious faith hard to swallow. That said, scientists do often act with what seems to me to be something like faith: a faith in scientific truths perhaps or in the humbling significance of nature’s beauty. Perhaps “faith” is too strong – enthusiastic optimism might be better. Whatever the case, the importance of science lies not only in fighting ignorance and the building of better theories – it is important too because of the way it inspires glory and wonder. In that regard, at least, science and religion are united.

Well, at least at least he thinks twice before sticking science with the accusation of “faith”. “Enthusiastic optimism” is better, because it expresses our confidence that empirical study will help uncover the secrets of the universe, but that’s a long way from faith. It’s not faith but confidence, based on experience, that science really does have the tools to answer any of the Big Questions that are capable of being answered. The use of the weasel word “faith” when it comes to science is simply to give credence to religion.

As for science and religion being “united”  in inspiring glory and wonder, well, yes, they both do, but in one case the glory and wonder are based on what is true, while in the other they’re based on lies.

I’m wondering why Forshaw descided to write such a misguided article, unless he realized the genuine public-relations advantages of osculating the rump of faith. Perhaps Matthew Cobb, who is at the same University as Forshaw, and also a friend of Brian Cox, can get Forshaw to explain.

h/t: James