The incoherence of free will

I recently re-read a classic piece by J.L. Mackie (April 1955), entitled “Evil and Omnipotence,” a stupendous philosophical essay about why theologians like Richard Swinburne are forced by their belief in an omnipotent, omnibenevelont and omnipowerful god into incredible and rather painful feats of mental gymnastics. One of Mackie’s minor points in the essay is that the so-called “free will defense” for the existence of evil in the world is problematic because the concept of free will itself is incoherent. Although, sometimes accusations of incoherence are thrown around a bit too easily in philosophy, I think this one has the potential to stick. (Mackie goes on with a devastating critique of the free will defense, a critique that remains effective even if the core concept should in fact prove to be coherent.)

Philosophically speaking, I still think that the best treatment of free will is the one given by Dan Dennett in his Elbow Room, which is a delightful book to read in its own right. Nonetheless, one may wonder whether the concept that emerges from Dennett’s analysis is in fact what most people would recognize as “free will.”

Of course, both words making up the term have the potential to be problematic, since it is not necessarily clear what we might mean by “will.” However, for the purposes of this discussion I will simply say that the will — insofar as human beings are concerned — is whatever set of motivations (and underlying neurological mechanisms) are behind the fact that we do certain things rather than others or, indeed, that we do anything at all. (Indeed, patients affected by severe damage to their amygdalas, for instance, seem to loose the will to do anything, likely because they've lost any emotional attachment to themselves and to things in the world: just like David Hume famously predicted, without emotions “It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”)

Moreover, I do not see a problem in, for instance, the Aristotelian concept of “akrasia,” or weakness of the will. Some people find it contradictory, because if I end up doing something out of my own volition — like eating a piece of chocolate cake — I cannot simultaneously claim that I did this “against my will,” because I knew that eating chocolate cake isn’t healthy. However, any human being who has struggled with food, sex, and other desires can make perfect sense of the idea of a weak will that makes you act against your own best interest even when you know perfectly well where such interest lies.

Anyway, back to the “free” part of free will. The obvious question is: free from what? That’s where coherence quickly becomes a problem. Unless you are a dualist — a thankfully dying breed among philosophers — you can’t possibly mean free from causal interactions with matter/energy, i.e. independent of the laws and materials of the universe. The will, whatever it is and however we like to conceptualize it, is grounded in the biological activity of our neurons. And last time I checked our neurons are made of matter, exchange energy (in the form of electrical currents and chemical reactions), and are subject to the laws of physics. So if that’s what you mean by “free,” it’s a no starter.

The next popular argument for a truly free will invokes quantum mechanics (the last refuge of those who prefer to keep things as mysterious as possible). Quantum events, it is argued, may have some effects that “bubble up” to the semi-macroscopic level of chemical interactions and electrical pulses in the brain. Since quantum mechanics is the only realm within which it does appear to make sense to talk about truly uncaused events, voilà!, we have (quantistic) free will. But even assuming that quantum events do “bubble up” in that way (it is far from a certain thing), what we gain under that scenario is random will, which seems to be an oxymoron (after all, “willing” something means to wish or direct events in a particular — most certainly not random — way). So that’s out as well.

It now begins to look like our prospects for a coherent sense of free will are dim indeed. If it ain’t random-quantistic or independent from causal interactions with the rest of the world, in what sense is it “free”? But if the will is not free, are we then not simply lumbering robots at the mercy of a mechanical, uncaring universe? (Or, worse yet, puppets in some god’s hands?) This conclusion strikes most people as intuitively deeply unsatisfactory. Moreover, wouldn’t that mean that human behavior would be predictable, at least in principle, if reductionist/mechanistic science became sufficiently advanced? That also strikes many as clearly off the mark.

One possible response is that, frankly, if the conclusions of a rational analysis go against your deepest held intuitions, so much the worse for your deepest held intuitions. But of course we also know that there are in fact non-deterministic physical systems (the time of decay of an individual atom, for instance), and we even know of perfectly deterministic systems whose behavior is for all effective purposes impossible to predict (chaotic, i.e. highly non-linear systems whose status at any given point in time is highly sensitive to initial conditions). So having a will that is causally connected to the rest of the physical world does not imply that our behavior is rigid or predictable.

Still, does that mean that we are in fact lumbering robots, whose illusion of being free is a combination of our ignorance of the causal web within which we are embedded and of our limited ability to compute our own future status? I think the best answer here comes from research in the cognitive sciences, which increasingly points to (at least) two levels of decision making in the brain: on the one hand, we now know that our subconscious makes a lot of decisions before we are consciously aware of them (think of those experiments showing the time-delay in electrical potential between when a muscle is being activated to perform a given action and when the subject becomes aware of having made the decision to perform that action, for instance). On the other hand, consciousness still seems to be a bit more than just a “rationalizing” process, taking on instead the role of high-level filter, or moderator, of unconscious brain processing (e.g., we can still stop an ongoing action if our conscious attention becomes focused on it).

What all of this seems to suggest is that the undeniable feeling of “free will” that we have is actually the result of our conscious awareness of the fact that we make decisions, and that we could have — given other internal (i.e., genetic, developmental) and external (i.e., environmental, cultural) circumstances — decided otherwise in any given instance. That’s what Dennett called a type of free will that is “worth having,” and I consider it good enough for this particular non-dualist, non-mystically inclined human being.

Massimo's picks

* xkcd's take on the vacuousness of some academic specialties...

* One more from xkcd, on the meaning of life, if you will.

* A New York Times article about the possible physiological function of dreams.

* In defense of metaphysics (though not entirely in a convincing way).

* A UK judge ruled that belief in climate change has the same protection as religious belief. Not a good move, in my opinion.

* Austin Dacey on why religion has nothing to do with ethics.

* Why did 30 Republican Senators vote against a bill that gives rape victims the right to sue when the crime happened outside the US? Because they take money from the corporations that would be sued.

On the difference between science and philosophy

Attentive readers of this blog may have noticed that those who post comments to my entries often show two interesting and complementary attitudes: a fundamental distrust of (if not downright contempt for) philosophy, coupled with an overly enthusiastic endorsement of science. Take, for instance, my recurring argument that some (but not all!) of the “new atheists” engage in scientistic attitudes by overplaying the epistemological power of science while downplaying (or even simply negating) the notion that science fundamentally depends on non-empirical (i.e., philosophical) assumptions to even get started. Since my personal career, first as a scientist for 27 years, now as a philosopher, has been marked by experience in both fields, and moreover by a strong belief that the two enterprises are complementary and not adversarial, I feel it is time to make some extended comment on this general issue.

It is perhaps appropriate to tackle the problem at the end of 2009, the year that marks not just the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the arguably even more momentous On Liberty by John Stuart Mill), but also the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow’s famous essay “on the two cultures,” on the intellectual divide between the sciences and the humanities.

In his essay, Snow (rightly) chastised what he saw as an unjustifiable attitude of intellectual superiority on the part of people from the humanities’ side of the divide: “A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?” Indeed, it ought to be indefensible that someone is considered ignorant for not having read Shakespeare, and yet the same charge is unthinkable when it comes to fundamental scientific concepts, like the second principle of thermodynamics.

But the problem cuts equally deeply on the other side, just consider the following quote from physicist Steven Weinberg (in his Dreams of a Final Theory): “The insights of philosophers have occasionally benefited physicists, but generally in a negative fashion—by protecting them from the preconceptions of other philosophers ... Philosophy of science at its best seems to me a pleasing gloss on the history and discoveries of science.” Here Weinberg makes the all-too common mistake of thinking of philosophy as of an activity whose entire worth is measured by how useful it is to solve scientific problems. But why should that be so? We already have science to help us solve scientific problems, philosophy does something else by using different tools, so why compare apples and oranges? By the same token, why not ask why art critics don’t produce paintings, for instance, or editors write books?

For the purposes of this discussion, I assume that most people have at least some idea of what science is, if not of the intricacies of the epistemological and metaphysical problems inherent in the practice of science (and there are many: as Daniel Dennett put it in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, “There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.”) Science, broadly speaking, deals with the study and understanding of natural phenomena, and is concerned with empirically (i.e., either observationally or experimentally) testable hypotheses advanced to account for those phenomena.

Philosophy, on the other hand, is much harder to define. Broadly speaking, it can be thought of as an activity that uses reason to explore issues that include the nature of reality (metaphysics), the structure of rational thinking (logic), the limits of our understanding (epistemology), the meaning implied by our thoughts (philosophy of language), the nature of the moral good (ethics), the nature of beauty (aesthetics), and the inner workings of other disciplines (philosophy of science, philosophy of history, and a variety of other “philosophies of”). Philosophy does this by methods of analysis and questioning that include dialectics and logical argumentation.

Now, it seems to me obvious, but apparently it needs to be stated that: a) philosophy and science are two distinct activities (at least nowadays, since science did start as a branch of philosophy called natural philosophy); b) they work by different methods (empirically-based hypothesis testing vs. reason-based logical analysis); and c) they inform each other in an inter-dependent fashion (science depends on philosophical assumptions that are outside the scope of empirical validation, but philosophical investigations should be informed by the best science available in a range of situations, from metaphysics to ethics and philosophy of mind).

So when some commentators for instance defend the Dawkins- and Coyne-style (scientistic) take on atheism, i.e., that science can mount an attack on all religious beliefs, they are granting too much to science and too little to philosophy. Yes, science can empirically test specific religious claims (intercessory prayer, age of the earth, etc.), but the best objections against the concept of, say, an omnibenevolent and onmnipowerful god, are philosophical in nature (e.g., the argument from evil). Why, then, not admit that by far the most effective way to reject religious nonsense is by combining science and philosophy, rather than trying to arrogate to either more epistemological power than each separate discipline actually possesses?

Another common misconception is that philosophy, unlike science, doesn’t make progress. This is simply not true, unless one measures progress by the (scientific) standard of empirical discovery. But that would be like accusing the New York Yankees of never having won an NBA title: they can’t, they ain’t playing the same game. Philosophy makes progress because dialectical analysis generates compelling objections to a given position, which lead to either an improvement or the abandonment of said position, which is followed by more critical analysis of either the revised position or of the new one, and so on. For instance, ethical theories (moral philosophy), or theories about consciousness (philosophy of mind), or about the nature of science (philosophy of science), have steadily progressed so that no contemporary professional philosopher would consider herself a utilitarian in the original sense intended by Jeremy Bentham, or a Cartesian dualist, or a Popperian falsificationist — just in the same way in which no scientist today would defend Newtonian mechanics, or the original version of Darwin’s theory.
It is also interesting to note that the process I just described may never reach and end result, but neither does science! Scientific theories are always tentative, and they are always either improved upon or abandoned in favor of new ones. So how come we are willing to live with uncertainty and constant revision in science, but demand some sort of definitive truth from philosophy?

Now why is it that so many people take sides on a debate that doesn’t make much sense, rather than rejoice in what the human mind can achieve through the joint efforts of two of its most illustrious intellectual traditions? I think the answer here is no different from the one available to Snow fifty years ago: people in the humanities are afraid of cultural colonization (which is actually the expressed agenda of scientistic thinkers like E.O. Wilson, see his Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge), while scientists have been made arrogant by their recently acquired prestige and enhanced financial resources, so that they don't think they need to bother with activities that don’t bring in millions of dollars in funding every year.

It’s a rather sad, and indeed positively irritating, state of affairs, which is being fought by a handful of activities (usually, though not always, initiated by philosophers), like my own “sci-phi” effort, or like the Permanent Observatory on Integration between the Human and Natural Sciences in Italy. It’s an uphill battle, especially in an era of ever increasing academic specialization, not to mention the ease with which people can now customize their intellectual experiences online, reading only the sort of things they are already interested in, or authors with whose positions they already agree. Which is actually one of the things that make this particular forum somewhat unusual and, to me at least, stimulating. So fire away your opinions, let the sci-phi discussion begin!

Massimo's picks

* How to build secular communities, by Emily Cadik, published in the New Humanist.

* My review of "Understanding Philosophy of Science," by James Ladyman.

* An absolutely brilliant satire by Jon Stewart of news networks' punditry.

* Philosopher's pick: Anthony Appiah.

* A somewhat old, and yet insightful, article in the New York Times on the historic repealing of obscenity laws in the United States.

* The "other" 150th anniversary (other than Darwin's Origin): John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty," a foundational classic of the open society.

* A commentary by National Center for Science Education's Genie Scott on the latest creationist trick: releasing a new edition of Darwin's "Origin of Species," with a few chapters mysteriously missing...

* More evidence that Einstein was right, and that the speed of light really is a universal limit (darn, no warp speed for us!).

* Kierkegaard's distinction between depression (of which he probably suffered) and despair. Not a cheerful piece, but a good thoughtful read.

David Chalmers and the Singularity that will probably not come

David Chalmers is a philosopher of mind, best known for his argument about the difficulty of what he termed the “hard problem” of consciousness, which he typically discusses by way of a thought experiment featuring zombies who act and talk exactly like humans, and yet have no conscious thought (I explained clearly what I think of that sort of thing in my essay on “The Zombification of Philosophy”).

Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing Chalmers in action live at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He didn’t talk about zombies, telling us instead his thoughts about the so-called Singularity, the alleged moment when artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, resulting in either all hell breaking loose or the next glorious stage in human evolution — depending on whether you typically see the glass as half empty or half full. The talk made clear to me what Chalmers’ problem is (other than his really bad hair cut): he reads too much science fiction, and is apparently unable to snap out of the necessary suspension of disbelief when he comes back to the real world. Let me explain.

Chalmers’ (and other advocates of the possibility of a Singularity) argument starts off with the simple observation that machines have gained computing power at an extraordinary rate over the past several years, a trend that one can extrapolate to a near future explosion of intelligence. Too bad that, as any student of statistics 101 ought to know, extrapolation is a really bad way of making predictions, unless one can be reasonably assured of understanding the underlying causal phenomena (which we don’t, in the case of intelligence). (I asked a question along these lines to Chalmers in the Q&A and he denied having used the word extrapolation at all; I checked with several colleagues over wine and cheese, and they all confirmed that he did — several times.)

Be that as it may, Chalmers went on to present his main argument for the Singularity, which goes something like this:

1. There will soon be AI (i.e., Artificial Intelligence)
2. There will then soon be a transition from AI to AI+
3. There will then soon be a transition from AI+ to AI++

Therefore, there will be AI++

All three premises and the conclusion where followed by a parenthetical statement to the effect that each holds only “absent defeaters,” i.e., absent anything that may get in the way of any of the above.

Chalmers was obviously very proud of his argument, but I got the sense that few people were impressed, and I certainly wasn’t. First off, he consistently refused to define what AI++, AI+, or even, for that matter, AI, actually mean. This, in a philosophy talk, is a pretty grave sin, because philosophical analysis doesn’t get off the ground unless we are reasonably clear on what it is that we are talking about. Indeed, much of philosophical analysis aims at clarifying concepts and their relations. You would have been hard pressed (and increasingly frustrated) in finding any philosophical analysis whatsoever in Chalmers’ talk.

Second, Chalmers did not provide a single reason for any of his moves, simply stating each premise and adding that if AI is possible, then there is no reason to believe that AI+ (whatever that is) is not also possible, indeed likely, and so on. But, my friend, if you are making a novel claim, the burden of proof is on you to argue that there are positive reasons to think that what you are suggesting may be true, not on the rest of us to prove that it is not. Shifting the burden of proof is the oldest trick in the rhetorical toolbox, and not one that a self-respecting philosopher should deploy in front of his peers (or anywhere else, for that matter).

Third, note the parenthetical disclaimer that any of the premises, as well as the conclusion, will not actually hold if a “defeater” gets in the way. When asked during the Q&A what he meant by defeaters, Chalmers pretty much said anything that humans or nature could throw at the development of artificial intelligence. But if that is the case, and if we are not provided with a classification and analysis of such defeaters, then the entire argument amounts to “X is true (unless something proves X not to be true).” Not that impressive.

The other elephant in the room, of course, is the very concept of “intelligence,” artificial or human. This is a notoriously difficult concept to unpack, and even more so to measure quantitatively (which would be necessary to tell the difference between AI and AI+ or AI++). Several people noted this problem, including myself in the Q&A, but Chalmers cavalierly brushed it aside saying that his argument does not hinge on human intelligence, or computational power, or intelligence in a broader sense, but only on an unspecified quantity “G” which he quickly associated with an unspecified set of cognitive capacities through an equally unspecified mathematical mapping function (adding that “more work would have to be done” to flesh out such notion — no kidding). Really? But wait a minute, if we started this whole discussion about the Singularity using an argument based on extrapolation of computational power, shouldn’t our discussion be limited to computational power? (Which, needless to say, is not at all the same as intelligence.) And if we are talking about AI, what on earth does the “I” stand for in there, if not intelligence — presumably of a human-like kind?

In fact, the problem with the AI effort in general is that we have little progress to show after decades of attempts, likely for the very good reason that human intelligence may not be algorithmic, at least not in the same sense in which computer programs are. I am most certainly not invoking mysticism or dualism here, I think that intelligence (and consciousness) are the result of the activity of a physical brain substrate, but the very fact that we can build machines with a degree of computing power and speed that greatly exceeds those of the human mind, and yet are nowhere near being “intelligent,” should make it pretty clear that the problem is not computing power or speed.

After the deployment of the above mentioned highly questionable “argument,” things just got bizarre in Chalmers’ talk. He rapidly proceeded to tell us that A++ will happen by simulated evolution in a virtual environment — thereby making a blurred and confused mix out of different notions such as natural selection, artificial selection, physical evolution and virtual evolution.

Which naturally raised the question of how do we control the Singularity and stop “them” from pushing us into extinction. Chalmers’ preferred solution is either to prevent the “leaking” of AI++ into our world, or to select for moral values during the (virtual) evolutionary process. Silly me, I thought that the easiest way to stop the threat of AI++ would be to simply unplug the machines running the alleged virtual world and be done with them. (Incidentally, what does it mean for a virtual intelligence to exist? How does it “leak” into our world? Like a Star Trek hologram gone nuts?)

Then the level of unsubstantiated absurdity escalated even faster: perhaps we are in fact one example of virtual intelligence, said Chalmers, and our Creator may be getting ready to turn us off because we may be about to leak out into his/her/its world. But if not, then we might want to think about how to integrate ourselves into AI++, which naturally could be done by “uploading” our neural structure (Chalmers’ recommendation is one neuron at a time) into the virtual intelligence — again, whatever that might mean.

Finally, Chalmers — evidently troubled by his own mortality (well, who isn’t?) — expressed the hope that A++ will have the technology (and interest, I assume) to reverse engineer his brain, perhaps out of a collection of scans, books, and videos of him, and bring him back to life. You see, he doesn’t think he will live long enough to actually see the Singularity happen. And that’s the only part of the talk on which we actually agreed.

The reason I went on for so long about Chalmers’ abysmal performance is because this is precisely the sort of thing that gives philosophy a bad name. It is nice to see philosophers taking a serious interest in science and bringing their discipline’s tools and perspectives to the high table of important social debates about the future of technology. But the attempt becomes a not particularly funny joke when a well known philosopher starts out by deploying a really bad argument and ends up sounding more cuckoo than trekkie fans at their annual convention. Now, if you will excuse me I’ll go back to the next episode of Battlestar Galactica, where you can find all the basic ideas discussed by Chalmers presented in an immensely more entertaining manner than his talk.

Massimo's picks

* There is yet another book out there on one of my favorite nut jobs: Ayn Rand.

* My book review of Logicomix, a graphic novel about Bertrand Russell and the quest for the logical foundations of mathematics.

* Another book review by yours truly: The Simpsons and Philosophy, The D'oh! of Homer.

* Warwick University, in the UK, has instituted a position for the public understanding of philosophy. Imagine that!

* It's time for moral class with philosopher Michael Sandel, now available on PBS and on the web.

* More Americans believe in haunted houses than global warming. Sad, but not surprising.

* Jon Stewart's commentary on the Pope's opening toward disaffected Anglicans.

* The Obama administration is supporting several Arab countries' push to enforce "anti-blasphemy" laws and make them a UN-approved standard. Why?

* Three new books about philosophy for the general public!

Cable news: who cares?

The recent news coming out of the perennial war of ratings among cable news channels was shocking, I tell you, just shocking: CNN, which three decades ago invented the whole business of cable news, is now dead last in terms of prime time viewership!

The numbers speak clearly: in October, CNN averaged 211,000 daily viewers aged 25 to 54 (the people who matter, because they have money and the inclination to buy what the advertisers sell), against 221,000 of HLN (formerly known as Head Lines News, ironically, a CNN spinoff!), 250,000 of MSNBC, and a whopping 689,000 for Fox.

Things don’t look any better for good old CNN if we look at the performance of individual anchors: Anderson Cooper’s show was dead last at 211,000, while Keith Olbermann was at 295,000, and Bill O’Reilly beat everyone at 881,000 (this is total viewership, regardless of age bracket — notice that O’Reilly is particularly popular with the old white male cantankerous crowd...). The only consolation for Cooper, but not for CNN, is that Lou Dobbs could interest only 162,000 viewers with his cheap populism and anti-immigration rants.

Now, we could be spending our time decrying the fact that Americans seem to have a strong preference for opinionated editorializing (be it Obermann or O’Reilly) over real solid news. Except of course that CNN hasn’t offered real solid news in a long time. Or we could bemoan the fact that a vitriolic ideologue like O’Really totals almost three times more viewers than the equally ideological but far less vitriolic and infinitely more sane Obermann.

But that would be missing the real story. Let me give you some other numbers for comparison, so that we can put things in proper context. The total adult population of the United States is 231 million, which means that even O’Reilly is not actually followed by more than 0.4 percent of the population. The daily readership of the much dreaded (by O’Reilly) New York Times is about 1 million, the audienceship of the beleaguered (by Republican-led budget cuts) National Public Radio is a whopping 6.5 million daily. For crying out loud, even Jon Stewart’s Daily Show beats O’Reilly hands down, with an average viewership of over 2 million, and a peak performance of 3.6 million!

So the real question is: why do we give a damn, as a nation, about what O’Reilly, Obermann, Dobbs, and company say? Why do these people have the power to affect national debates about health care, wars, and the environment, while clearly more reasoned voices actually get much more attention, and when the overwhelming majority of Americans are paying no attention at all?

The latter, of course, is the answer. Yes, O’Reilly’s power derives in part from the dollars that advertisers “invest” on his programs, and in part from the fact that we live in a society where those who shout — even when they are a small minority — get to dictate the terms of the “discussion” to the rest of us (witness the inane spectacle of last summer’s “town hall meetings”).

But it is us who let them do it, largely through apathy. Progressives in this country could count on an overwhelming majority of votes if the majority of eligible voters bothered to vote. A few weeks ago, instead, even in New York City — where there are more political activists than in almost the entire rest of the country combined — a tiny fraction of voters turned out for a runoff primary that for all effective purposes decided the election of a crucial political post like that of City Comptroller.

Republicans know this and act accordingly. Years ago the Christian Coalition devised their “12.5% strategy” to control the country. They reckoned that less than 50% of Americans go to vote, and that the fraction is about half that at primaries, which means that a candidate only needs half again of that (i.e., slightly above 12.5% of the total) to win the primary, which often means winning the general election. It worked, until recently, when the Obama machine turned out unprecedented numbers of minorities and poor to vote during the last presidential election.

Americans are so full of themselves that one of their favorite mantras is that they are “the best democracy in the world,” while actual comparative sociological studies show that the US only ranks below the middle of the pack in terms of quantitative measures of democracy (including, of course, voter participation). As the near certain reelection of Michael Bloomberg as mayor of New York City next week attests — despite the fact that the guy shamefully overturned a term limits law that would have barred him from running a third time — this is simply, the best democracy that money can buy. And what do we do about it? Instead of getting mad and throwing out the clowns, the ideologues and the rich people who think of politics as their personal pastime, we change the channel and watch reruns of Two and Half Men. We truly deserve, then, the little we get from our political class.

Massimo's picks

* Believe it or not, some Republicans can even vote against the prosecution of rape crimes. Watch the Jon Stewart commentary.

* Can you be good without God? A million New Yorkers are.

* The Big Apple has a new Coalition for Reason.

* Jon Stewart interviews Jennifer Burns, author of a new book about Ayn Rand.

* Plagiarism software identified a new play by Shakespeare (he wasn't cheating...).

* The year's biggest hoax is not the child in the flying balloon, it is how our money is being embezzled by White House supported Wall Street interests.

* On "suggestive evidence," a different philosophical look at what evidence is.

* The brain on e-books.

On the scope of skeptical inquiry

There has been much discussion lately on this blog and elsewhere about the relationships among skepticism, atheism, and politics. I have roundly criticized Richard Dawkins for extending scientific skepticism into areas that are more properly the domain of philosophical analysis, as well as Penn and Teller and Michael Shermer for doing the same with politics to support their libertarian views. Of course, even a cursory reader of this blog will easily find my own pieces about religion and politics, which may make it seem like I’m a sinner throwing stones at my fellow skeptics.

In reality, this debate has been going on for decades, and it has at times involved some of the great figures of skepticism. Just think of Paul Kurtz’s struggle to balance his own organizations, the Council for Secular Humanism (which publishes Free Inquiry) and what is now known as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (which puts out Skeptical Inquirer), organizations that most certainly not always see eye to eye when it comes to mixing skepticism, religion and politics. Michael Shermer, on the other hand, has been criticized on his own multi-author blogfor not making a distinction between scientifically defensible notions and political positions. And of course, Penn and Teller’s absurd denial of global warming, and recent Dawkins award winner Bill Maher’s insane criticism of “western medicine” complete this increasingly messy picture.

Before continuing, therefore, let me be clear about what it is I am trying to do. I am most definitely not seeking to tell people what to write about and what to stay away from. Not only would that be futile, but it is contrary to the spirit of open inquiry that I hold as one of my highest ideals. Besides, as I mentioned earlier, I can easily be seen as a repeat offender on this very blog, and coherence is another ideal I hold pretty high (despite one of my favorite quotes by Walt Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes”).

What I am attempting is a serious discussion of the differences and commonalities among the three areas pertinent to the topics in question: (scientific, or evidence-based) skepticism, atheism, and political philosophy. This blog is about all three because those are my interests and because I am presumptuous enough to think that I have something relevant to say in those domains. But I am in fact continuously switching among three not automatically interchangeable hats: (former) scientist, (current) philosopher, and politically-minded intellectual. All of that said, let the game begin!

First, let me define what I mean by skeptical inquiry, atheism and political philosophy. Skeptical inquiry, in the classic sense, pertains to the critical examination of evidential claims of the para- or super-normal. This means not just ghosts, telepathy, clairvoyance, UFOs and the like, but also — for instance — the creationist idea that the world is 6,000 years old. All these claims are, at least in principle, amenable to scientific inquiry because they refer to things that we can observe, measure and perhaps even repeat experimentally. Notice, of course, that (some) religious claims do therefore fall squarely within the domain of scientific skepticism. Also in this area we find pseudohistorical claims, such as Holocaust denial, and pseudoscientific ones like fear of vaccines and denial of global warming. Which means of course that some politically charged issues — like the latter two — can also pertain properly to skeptical inquiry.

Second, let us turn to atheism. Once again: it is a philosophical, not a scientific position. Now, I have argued of course that any intelligent philosopher ought to allow her ideas to be informed by science, but philosophical inquiry is broader than science because it includes non-evidence based approaches, such as logic or more broadly reason-based arguments. This is both the strength and the weakness of philosophy when compared to science: it is both broader and yet of course less prone to incremental discovery and precise answers. When someone, therefore, wants to make a scientific argument in favor of atheism — like Dawkins and Jerry Coyne seem to do — he is stepping outside of the epistemological boundaries of science, thereby doing a disservice both to science and to intellectual inquiry. Consider again the example of a creationist who maintains in the face of evidence that the universe really is 6,000 years old, and that it only looks older because god arranged things in a way to test our faith. There is absolutely no empirical evidence that could contradict that sort of statement, but a philosopher can easily point out why it is unreasonable, and that furthermore it creates very serious theological quandaries.

Lastly, let’s consider political philosophy. Again — just like with atheism above — it would be silly for a political philosopher to reject pertinent empirical claims: we do have some evidence from the social sciences and from history about what happens when certain economic or political systems are seen at work in human societies. But political philosophy is fundamentally a matter of values: one starts with certain “rights” for instance that one thinks ought to be safeguarded, and then builds the best political/economic system that is likely to do the job. Talk of rights is, again, philosophical in nature, not empirical. One can (and should) defend what one means by “rights” and why one considers certain rights to be more fundamental than others. But all such discussions largely transcend empirical evidence (which, again, should not be ignored).

(note: the above diagram is an improved version, not the one originally accompanying this article)

If the distinctions above are so clear, why, then, do we keep running into the mess with which I started this essay? Because the three areas in question do have a common underpinning, as illustrated by the diagram accompanying this article: atheism, skeptical inquiry, and political philosophy are all exercises in critical thinking and rational analysis. The differences among them is in the relative role that philosophical and scientific/empirical considerations play in each case.

That is why, for instance, I can coherently say that Penn and Teller are wrong about their libertarianism and about their position on global warming: in the first case, I am talking about philosophy, in the second about science. There is, of course, much more leeway in the first than in the second case. That’s also why there is no contradiction in me praising Bill Maher for his political views and yet thinking of him as a hopelessly inept commentator when it comes to his opinions on medicine. To consider one more example, this is also how I can agree with Dawkins’ and Coyne’s philosophical positions (and disagree with “accommodationists” like Ken Miller) and yet distance myself from them on the ground that I think they are stretching the tools of science beyond what is reasonable.

All of this may seem confusing and perhaps even an irrelevant exercise in hair-splitting, but it is in fact what makes discussions within the skeptic community — and society at large — so interesting and delicate. By all means, let’s continue to argue about atheism, politics and UFOs. But let us be mindful of the fact that the types of arguments and evidence that are pertinent to one area do not necessarily carry over to another one. Which means that people should refrain from using the venerable mantle of skepticism to engage in silly notions like denying global warming or the efficacy of vaccines. That’s an insult to critical analysis, which is the one thing we all truly cherish.

Massimo's picks

* A brief video discussion among a journalist, a philosopher and a scientist about what truth is.

* Thoughtful post about why religious discourse seems to be conducted in a different way from discourse about any other sort of nonsense.

* Paul Krugman on the predictably dire consequences of an uneducated America.

* Find out what happens to your brain just before you die, and why it may explain so-called near-death out-of-body experiences.

* An insightful analysis of the GOP's opposition to hate crime protections. Turns out they are in favor only of protecting that which is an "immutable characteristic," you know, like sex, race... and religion! (But not gender preferences.)

* This just in! My new book, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk, is now available for pre-ordering at Amazon.

* Interesting interview with Richard Dawkins, who sounds remarkably even tempered, and yet manages to diss philosophers anyway.

* Yet another bizarre story about the Large Hadron Collider: now two physicists think that god (or someone from the future) is trying to stop the experiment, because he doesn't like us making a Higgs boson. Hmm, sounds familiar, though the old version included snakes and apples...