Philosophy catfight!: Pigliucci vs. Krauss

April 25, 2012 • 9:16 am

One thing that really angers Massimo Pigliucci is when a scientist either criticizes philosophy or (in Pigliucci’s mind) practices philosophy in a “simplistic” way, particularly if said scientist doesn’t have at least one Ph.D. in philosophy.  So Massimo is really peeved at Larry Krauss’s new profile/interview in The Atlantic.  Some of Krauss’s statements are to Massimo as a juicy antelope is to a hungry lion. Pigliucci writes, for example:

Here is another gem from this brilliant (as a physicist) moron [Krauss}: “Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, ‘those that can’t do, teach, and those that can’t teach, teach gym.’ And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; the only people, as far as I can tell, that read work by philosophers of science are other philosophers of science. It has no impact on physics what so ever. … they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn’t.”

(NB: I haven’t yet read Krauss’s interview, though I will.)

Note that Pigliucci calls Krauss a “moron,” a term that Krauss himself applied to philosophers like David Albert, who unfavorably reviewed Krauss’s book in the New York Times (Albert, however, is also a physicist!).

But name-calling aside, Massimo makes some good points.  First, Krauss was wrong in saying that philosophy doesn’t progress. It has, not—and Massimo admits this—in the sense that philosophy gets us closer to the truth about nature, because that’s not the business of philosophy. Rather, philosophy sharpens its arguments over time, and finds errors with other people’s arguments in a way that can inform science (I’m particularly fond of ethical philosophy, at least that part that helps us understand what we really think about morals). Unlike theologians, philosophers don’t repeat bad arguments once they’re decisively refuted.

Also, as Massimo notes, logic can be considered a branch of philosophy, and there’s no doubt that logic, or at least the ability of philosophers to think more logically than many scientists, has also contributed to science.  One example is the work of Philip Kitcher, a philosopher at Columbia who continues to use logical tools to attack flawed science (two of my favorites are his dissection of creationism, Abusing Science, and his critique of sociobiology, Vaulting Ambition).  And I’d be remiss if I didn’t add Dan Dennett, who has clarified for many of us (including scientists) the importance of Darwinism and the formidable problems involved in studying consciousness.

Finally, Krauss appears to have made some statements that look simply silly, and Massimo calls him out on them.  One is this:

Krauss also has a naively optimistic view of the business of science, as it turns out. For instance, [Krauss] claims that “the difference [between scientists and philosophers] is that scientists are really happy when they get it wrong, because it means that there’s more to learn.” Seriously? I’ve practiced science for more than two decades, and I’ve never seen anyone happy to be shown wrong, or who didn’t react as defensively (or even offensively) as possible to any claim that he might be wrong.

Yep, Massimo’s right.  I’ve never seen a scientist be delighted to be wrong (fortunately, I’ve never had that experience 🙂 ), though some are more gracious than others in admitting error.

More important is the oft-discussed question about whether a quantum vacuum, which to Krauss was the starting point of the universe, can be described as “nothing.”  The Atlantic interviewer, Ross Andersen, asks Krauss whether that’s justified, since a quantum vacuum has “properties.” Massimo’s take:

. . . in my mind’s eye I saw Krauss engaging in a more and more frantic exercise of handwaving, retracting and qualifying: “I don’t think I argued that physics has definitively shown how something could come from nothing [so why the book’s title?]; physics has shown how plausible physical mechanisms might cause this to happen. … I don’t really give a damn about what ‘nothing’ means to philosophers; I care about the ‘nothing’ of reality. And if the ‘nothing’ of reality is full of stuff [a nothing full of stuff? Fascinating], then I’ll go with that.”

But, insists Andersen, “when I read the title of your book, I read it as ‘questions about origins are over.’” To which Krauss responds: “Well, if that hook gets you into the book that’s great. But in all seriousness, I never make that claim. … If I’d just titled the book ‘A Marvelous Universe,’ not as many people would have been attracted to it.”

In all seriousness, Prof. Krauss, you ought (moral) to take your own advice and be honest with your readers. Claim what you wish to claim, not what you think is going to sell more copies of your book, essentially playing a bait and switch with your readers, and then bitterly complain when “moronic” philosophers dare to point that out.

Now Massimo and I have had our differences, and I’m generally a fan of Krauss (though I didn’t much like Krauss’s new book), but I’m on Massimo’s side in this one.  Despite the famously dismissive statement by Feynman, I think philosophy can be of real value to scientists.  It has helped me, for example, rethink and clarify my notions of “free will.”

But it’s also true that areas previously only the purview of philosophers, like the notion of “free will,” are increasingly coming into the ambit of science.  Philosophy, like religion, will have to yield to—or at least deal with—the facts.  And it won’t pay philosophers to be dismissive. It would have been much better for Massimo to have left out the last part of this paragraph in his critique:

Nonetheless, let’s get to the core of Krauss’ attack on philosophy. He says: “Every time there’s a leap in physics, it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered away to themselves, and so then you have this natural resentment on the part of philosophers.” This clearly shows two things: first, that Krauss does not understand what the business of philosophy is (it is not to advance science, as I explain here); second, that Krauss doesn’t mind playing armchair psychologist, despite the dearth of evidence for his pop psychological “explanation.” Okay, others can play the same game too, so I’m going to put forth the hypothesis that the reason physicists such as Weinberg, Hawking and Krauss keep bashing philosophy is because they suffer from an intellectual version of the Oedipus Complex (you know, philosophy was the mother of science and all that… you can work out the details of the inherent sexual frustrations from there).

No, I don’t agree that Weinberg, Hawking, and Krauss suffer from some jealousy of philosophy (the Oedipus complex, for those of you who have forgotten, is Freud’s notion that boys often desire to sleep with their mothers and kill their fathers). So I think Krauss has hit a nerve here: yes, philosophy, insofar as it deals with facts about nature, can be subservient to science.

On his website, Massimo all too often devalues his arguments by being so obviously defensive about his turf. In this case, Pigliucci should have deep-sixed the Oedipus argument, which makes him look a bit petty. Stick with the critique and forget the psychoanalysis. Still, I think we do need to take seriously Massimo’s defenses of philosophy. After all, the man has degrees in both science and philosophy.

Scientology’s fundamentalism

April 25, 2012 • 3:34 am

I was amused to discover that Scientology, like Christianity, has its fundamentalists—in the former case, those who adhere scrupulously and literally to the loony writings of L. Ron Hubbard.

A friend sent me an article from the Independent about Mark (“Marty”) Rathbun, an apostate Scientologist who left the Church because he found its methods and financial misdeeds insupportable. Rathbun was a high official in the Church: the Inspector General of the Religious Technology Center, responsible for enforcing Church discipline and order.  After he left, he helped journalists expose the Church’s questionable activities and was, of course, subject to severe harassment by Scientologists, who can’t abide people leaving their organization and revealing its dark side (the apostates are called “squirrels”).

Rathbun now runs a “halfway house” for disaffected Scientologists and a well-known website, “Moving on up a little higher,” which provides succor and information to ex-Scientologists.  Curiously, he still believes in much of what Hubbard wrote, and continues to practice some Scientology activities, like auditing with the e-meter.

Anyway, that’s a long prologue to one bit of the article that struck me:

Marty argues that “corporate Scientology” is dominated by fundamentalists who mandate literalist readings of its theological texts, including a famous piece of literature by Hubbard which argues that mankind’s problems are the work of a despotic alien called Xenu who fought an intergalactic war 75 million years ago. Marty would prefer to see that story as allegorical, in the same way many Christians view the Old Testament.  The Church counters: “This shows he is no longer a Scientologist. Scientologists are true to the writings of Mr. Hubbard.”

I wasn’t aware that there were both literalist and “metaphorizing” Scientologists!  Don’t forget, though, what the literalists have to believe about Xenu (from Wikipedia) if they are to be “true to the writings of Mr. Hubbard”. Have a gander at this nonsense:

Hubbard wrote that Xenu was the ruler of a Galactic Confederacy 75 million years ago, which consisted of 26 stars and 76 planets including Earth, which was then known as “Teegeeack”. The planets were overpopulated, with an average population of 178 billion.The Galactic Confederacy’s civilization was comparable to our own, with aliens “walking around in clothes which looked very remarkably like the clothes they wear this very minute” and using cars, trains and boats looking exactly the same as those “circa 1950, 1960” on Earth.

Xenu was about to be deposed from power, so he devised a plot to eliminate the excess population from his dominions. With the assistance of psychiatrists, he summoned billions of his citizens together under the pretense of income tax inspections, then paralyzed them and froze them in a mixture of alcohol and glycol to capture their souls. The kidnapped populace was loaded into spacecraft for transport to the site of extermination, the planet of Teegeeack (Earth). The appearance of these spacecraft would later be subconsciously expressed in the design of the Douglas DC-8, the only difference being: “the DC8 had fans, propellers on it and the space plane didn’t”. When they had reached Teegeeack/Earth, the paralyzed citizens were unloaded around the bases of volcanoes across the planet. Hydrogen bombs were then lowered into the volcanoes and detonated simultaneously.Only a few aliens’ physical bodies survived. Hubbard described the scene in his film script, Revolt in the Stars:

“Simultaneously, the planted charges erupted. Atomic blasts ballooned from the craters of Loa, Vesuvius, Shasta, Washington, Fujiyama, Etna, and many, many others. Arching higher and higher, up and outwards, towering clouds mushroomed, shot through with flashes of flame, waste and fission. Great winds raced tumultuously across the face of Earth, spreading tales of destruction …”  — L. Ron Hubbard, Revolt in the Stars

The now-disembodied victims’ souls, which Hubbard called thetans, were blown into the air by the blast. They were captured by Xenu’s forces using an “electronic ribbon” (“which also was a type of standing wave”) and sucked into “vacuum zones” around the world. The hundreds of billions of captured thetans were taken to a type of cinema, where they were forced to watch a “three-D, super colossal motion picture” for thirty-six days. This implanted what Hubbard termed “various misleading data”‘ (collectively termed the R6 implant) into the memories of the hapless thetans, “which has to do with God, the Devil, space opera, et cetera”. This included all world religions, with Hubbard specifically attributing Roman Catholicism and the image of the Crucifixion to the influence of Xenu. The two “implant stations” cited by Hubbard were said to have been located on Hawaii and Las Palmas in the Canary Islands.

In addition to implanting new beliefs in the thetans, the images deprived them of their sense of personal identity. When the thetans left the projection areas, they started to cluster together in groups of a few thousand, having lost the ability to differentiate between each other. Each cluster of thetans gathered into one of the few remaining bodies that survived the explosion. These became what are known as body thetans, which are said to be still clinging to and adversely affecting everyone except those Scientologists who have performed the necessary steps to remove them.

A government faction known as the Loyal Officers finally overthrew Xenu and his renegades, and locked him away in “an electronic mountain trap” from which he still has not escaped. Although the location of Xenu is sometimes said to be the Pyrenees on Earth, this is actually the location Hubbard gave elsewhere for an ancient “Martian report station”. Teegeeack/Earth was subsequently abandoned by the Galactic Confederacy and remains a pariah “prison planet” to this day, although it has suffered repeatedly from incursions by alien “Invader Forces” since that time.

Sound ridiculous? But really, is it any more so than the tenets of Catholicism? If ever a religion was palpably man-made, it is Scientology, drawn directly from the science fiction fantasies of L. Ron Hubbard.

And don’t forget that Scientology, complete with the dogma above, is now a religion officially recognized by the United States government, ergo its enormous income is exempt from taxation.

Kitteh contest: Spencer and Little Big-foot

April 25, 2012 • 3:21 am

Reader David Mustoe sent a picture of feline harmony, as well as of a boneless cat. The first photo was labelled “The Peaceable Kingdom” (the title, of course, comes from pictures by the colonial American painter Edward Hicks).

I thought you might enjoy these.  That’s Spencer (the smaller cat with white fur) and Little Big-foot in two of those pictures and a picture of Spencer practicing yoga (I believe that’s the kitten asana that he’s in there).  Both cats belong to my friends Kate and Jerry.

Andrew Sullivan gets all militant about religion and creationism!

April 24, 2012 • 12:19 pm

I can’t believe this: first we hear the guy is going to give up his blog and become a monk, and now Andrew Sullivan has become strident and militant against religion—well, some religions.  In a Daily Beast post called “Creationists’ abuse of fossils,” Andrew Sullivan says this after discussing creationists’ claims that dinosaur tracks are preserved alongside human footprints near Glen Rose, Texas (the “human footprints” are really more dino tracks):

What do you do when people use religion to perpetrate empirical untruth? In a free country not much. But on this kind of issue, it seems to me that Hitchens was right. These people need to be mocked mercilessly for ignorance and stupidity. This isn’t faith. It’s bullshit. And yet in this advanced country, it’s everywhere – and one political party panders to it.

Get that, people? Let me repeat: Andrew Sullivan said that creationists need to be mocked mercilessly for ignorance and stupidity, and that creationism is bullshit. This is Andrew freaking Sullivan, a devout Catholic. Take that, you accommodationists!  And yet this is the same fellow who said that the story of Adam and Eve was so palpably metaphorical that he cursed at me for thinking that anyone could taking Genesis literally (“Has Coyne read the fucking thing?“). I guess he’s finally realized that a lot of people do see it as literal truth. I spent much of last Thursday, for instance, arguing with four Christian creationists from the UK, all of whom believed the entire Noah’s Ark story, including the fact that Noah was 600 years old when he built it.

Or maybe Sullivan was just having a bad day . . .

h/t: Greg Mayer

An owl is 70% feathers

April 24, 2012 • 11:46 am

These photos are unposted remnants from Owl Week. Now I’m not going to put the full weight of my academic reputation behind these photos/diagrams, but if they’re correct it’s really cool.  This is a great grey owl (Strix nebulosa), with the fleshy parts shown in silhouette inside the feathers.  It’s from the Wikipedia article on that species.

Having bathed cats in my life, and seen them turn into large rats when they’re wet, I don’t doubt this too much.  I conclude that these birds are really parrots in owl suits.

UPDATE: Alert reader Hayden Googled “owl x-rays” and found this x-ray of a barn owl from the East Oregonian, which he’s linked to below. I thought it was good enough to put above the fold, for it proves that owls are indeed quite scrawny:

And here’s a barn owl all feathered and fluffy (photo by Nefarostock):

 

More hawk stuffz: new chick hatching

April 24, 2012 • 8:06 am

Two readers have sent in pictures from or about the Cornell Hawkcam, where you should be watching the red-tailed hawks and their offspring. Readers have noticed a second chick pecking its way out of the egg.

Reader ivy privy has taken a photo of the whole megillah, with this information (click to enlarge photo):

The active nest is dead center on the lower catwalk. You can just see a tail to the right of the pole. To the upper right is an old nest (I presume).

The comm equipment is lower down the pole, and has cables to two pieces of equipment. To the upper left is what I believe to be the webcam, enclosed in a glass dome. The second piece of equipment, with the red box, I am unsure about. (microphone and thermometer?)

And reader “P.” has sent two pictures of feeding time, taken only half an hour ago (10:15 EST). Remember that the chicks have to eat meat from animals killed by the parents:


And here’s mom (“Big Red”) with dinner.  Tastes like chicken!


How do we judge whether Jesus existed? A philosopher comments

April 24, 2012 • 5:11 am

A reader whose name escapes me recommended a paper that will interest those of us who have been following the Ehrman/Carrier debates about the historicity of Jesus. It’s by Stephen Law, a philosopher at the University of London, editor of the popular philosophy journal Think, issued by the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and Provost of the Centre for Inquiry UK.  He has his own eponymous website, has written eight books and looks a bit like Darryl Hall.

Last year he published a piece in the journal Faith and Philosophy (have any of you heard of this?) called”Evidence, miracles, and the existence of Jesus“, which he reprinted on his website (click the link, and see reference below).  It doesn’t really deal with the actual evidence for and against the existence of Jesus—the kind of stuff Carrier and Ehrman are fighting about— but rather discusses what we would consider good evidence for the existence of a man who is now claimed to have performed many miracles. Law is an atheist, and dismisses the miracles right off the bat; what he wants to know is the same thing Ehrman and Carrier are discussing: how credible is the historical existence of the man Jesus around whom the miracles stories have coalesced?

I like his discussion, and while you may not be convinced by his conclusion, that there’s no convincing evidence for a historical Jesus, you’ll want to read his piece.

Law sets out two principles that should guide us in answering the questions of both Jesus’s miracles and of his existence of a non-divine man who gave rise to the myths. The first, familiar to readers of Carl Sagan (or David Hume) disposes of the miracle stories:

P1 Where a claim’s justification derives solely from evidence, extraordinary claims (e.g. concerning supernatural miracles) require extraordinary evidence. In the absence of extraordinary evidence there is good reason to be sceptical about those claims.

The second, more controversial principle is the one Law uses to dispose of the historicity of Jesus. He calls it “the contamination principle”:

P2 Where testimony/documents weave together a narrative that combines mundane claims with a significant proportion of extraordinary claims, and there is good reason to be sceptical about those extraordinary claims, then there is good reason to be sceptical about the mundane claims, at least until we possess good independent evidence of their truth.

In other words, if a figure is claimed to be historical, but that history is larded with miracles (especially lots of miracles: Law claims at least 35 for Jesus in the New Testament), then that detracts from the possible that such a person really existed. One example is John Frum, the supposed American GI who is the center of the “cargo cult” on the Pacific Island of Tanna. (Read about Frum if you don’t know the story.)

Law’s point is not that miracle stories themselves testify against the real existence of someone who inspired them.  Clearly miracle stories have accreted to genuine living humans.  His point is, rather, that we shouldn’t give extra credibility to the historical existence of someone just because the miracle stories are supplemented with mundane and quotidian details of the person’s life.  That is, one shouldn’t think Jesus was more likely to have existed just because there are “regular” details of his life given alongside the divine ones.  Further, the more miracles surrounding a person per unit time, the less likely Law thinks he/she existed.

Now you may argue with the contamination principle, but read the paper before you do. Law gives two Gedankenexperiments to make his case: the “story of the sixth islander,” and the case of Ted, Sarah, and their amazing friend Bert.  Law’s paper is not dense or technical, and will make you rethink the Jesus argument.

And he summarizes his argument against the existence of a Jesus as follows:

Our two prima facie plausible principles – P1 and P2 – combine with certain plausible empirical claims to deliver a conclusion very few Biblical scholars are willing to accept.

Let me stress at the outset that I don’t endorse the following argument. I present it, not because I’m convinced it is cogent, but because I believe it has some prima facie plausibility, and because it is an argument any historian who believes the available evidence places Jesus’ existence beyond reasonable doubt needs to refute.

1. (P1) Where a claim’s justification derives solely from evidence, extraordinary claims (e.g. concerning supernatural miracles) require extraordinary evidence. In the absence of extraordinary evidence there is good reason to be sceptical about those claims.
.
2. There is no extraordinary evidence for any of the extraordinary claims concerning supernatural miracles made in the New Testament documents.

3. Therefore (from 1 and 2), there’s good reason to be sceptical about those extraordinary claims.

4. (P2) Where testimony/documents weave together a narrative that combines mundane claims with a significant proportion of extraordinary claims, and there is good reason to be sceptical about those extraordinary claims, then there is good reason to be sceptical about the mundane claims, at least until we possess good independent evidence of their truth.

5. The New Testament documents weave together a narrative about Jesus that combines mundane claims with a significant proportion of extraordinary claims.

6. There is no good independent evidence for even the mundane claims about Jesus (such as that he existed)

7. Therefore (from 3, 4, 5, and 6), there’s good reason to be sceptical about whether Jesus existed.

. . . So, our empirical premises – 2, 5 and 6, – have some prima facie plausibility. I suggest 2 and 5 have a great deal of plausibility, and 6 is at the very least debatable.

My suspicion is that a significant number of Biblical scholars and historians (though of course by no means all) would accept something like all three empirical premises. If that is so, it then raises an intriguing question: why, then, is there such a powerful consensus that those who take a sceptical attitude towards Jesus’ existence are being unreasonable?

Perhaps the most obvious answer to this question would be: while many Biblical historians accept that the empirical premises have at least a fair degree of plausibility, and most would also accept something like P1, few would accept P2.

Have a look at his case for P2 (“the contamination principle”) before you reject it.  It’s a philosophical case, and his examples are pretty convincing.

__________

Law, S. 2011. Evidence, miracles, and the existence of Jesus. Faith and Philosophy 28: 129-151

Update: cats vs. dogs vs. babies poll

April 24, 2012 • 4:18 am

The results are still coming on on Pajiba’s cats vs. dogs vs. babies poll, and the data speak for themselves:

Cats are winning paws down, and the Squidly Minions have clearly hied off elsewhere. But don’t be complacent: the poll runs until May 10.  If you haven’t voted for the Forces of Cuteness, do so.  Although I’ve already declared a winner among the voters, we’re not moral because we expect rewards, right?