Julia's Picks

* A deceptively simple question: "I have two children. One is a boy born on a Tuesday. What's the probability that the other one is a boy?"

* You may have been lucky enough to avoid the wildly popular Facebook game "Farmville", but it's still interesting to see how it taps into people's psychological weaknesses in order to entrench itself in their lives.

* The reason women are more selective than men in the world of dating may be partly because of the convention that men are expected to ask women out, and not vice versa. Flip that convention and the difference in selectivity shrinks.

* Why a bad memory might be evolutionarily advantageous.

* On Jeopardy, a computer was given this complex prompt: "Classic candy bar that’s a female Supreme Court justice" -- and successfully got the right answer: "What is Baby Ruth Ginsburg?”

* A clever Venn diagram.

* A good comment thread on Less Wrong about an ethical conundrum for utilitarians: which is worse, a large harm for a few, or a tiny harm for many?

The delicate issue of the burden of proof

The other day I was picnicking in Central Park with my 13-year old daughter, when the issue of burden of proof came up. Yeah, I know, what sort of a geeky daughter and overly-intellectual father are we talking about? Nevertheless, Caley (my daughter) knows very well that I am both a skeptic and an atheist, and we occasionally have good humored conversations about these issues.

Specifically, the discussion was about how do I know that there are no ghosts (or other paranormal phenomena). I explained that I don’t know in the sense of certain knowledge, but that there are two major reasons I don’t believe in ghosts: a) Their existence would be at odds with much of what we know from science; and b) I haven’t seen any positive evidence (that has withstood scrutiny) that ghosts exists.

Caley’s response focused on (b) above: “yes, but you also don’t have evidence that ghosts don’t exist, so there.” This is, of course, a classic example of shifting the burden of proof, which is a well known logical fallacy usually described under the heading of “appeal to ignorance.” The idea, as I tried to explain to my daughter, is that the statement “I don’t believe in ghosts because there is no evidence” and the statement “I believe in ghosts because there is no evidence that they don’t exist” are not epistemologically equivalent, so that it is much more reasonable not to believe in ghosts (given the lack of positive evidence).

Although Caley listened to what I was saying, and she is a smart girl, it was clear that I wasn’t getting through. It just seemed logical to her, that it is okay to believe in ghosts if there is no proof that they don’t exist. I then switched tactics and used an example that she could follow more easily. I reminded her of what happens in courts of law (of non fascist countries): the burden of proof is always on the part making a positive claim, not on the one making a negative one. Most especially, one is always presumed innocent unless proven guilty (beyond reasonable doubt, another concept that also nicely fits with skepticism). It would be grossly unfair if we went around presuming people to be guilty of crimes with no other “evidence” than the fact that they can’t prove that they didn’t do it.

Caley paused, clearly understanding the example. But just when I thought I scored one for critical thinking, she went back to her original position: “well, you are making a claim too, that ghosts don’t exist, so don’t you have the burden of proof either?” No, I don’t , but by then it was really time to slice the bread and make our salami and provolone sandwiches, so that was the end of the conversation.

However, I have in fact had similar discussions over and over again — with adults — and have experienced the very same difficulty getting through regarding this concept . Why is it that few people seem to have problems with the burden of proof when it comes to the innocence or guilt of a murder suspect, but then cannot apply the same exact logic to more esoteric issues, such as the existence of ghosts, gods, and the like?

I suspect part of the answer is that in the latter cases most people are attracted to some intuitive (and wrong) notion of epistemic fairness: well, you are making one claim, the other guy is making another claim, the two of you are therefore on equal footing. This seems also to be the underlying philosophy — if there is any — behind the infamous practice by much of the media to “present the two sides,” regardless of how inane one of the two sides actually is. (Incidentally, the latter case is an example of an additional logical fallacy, the false dilemma: why, exactly, would we expect there to be two sides, as opposed to a number of possible, more nuanced, alternatives? Remember “you are either with us or with the terrorists”?)

But if this explanation is correct, then why don’t people also apply the same logic to the legal system? I think that’s because it is our very concept of fairness that shifts in that case: apparently, what is epistemologically fair for impersonal situations is suddenly unfair when people are involved. This may be similar to the case of trolley dilemmas-type thought experiments, which show that people shift from a utilitarian to a deontological ethical system depending on whether they have to make relatively impersonal or very personal decisions about somebody else’s fate (apparently, it’s okay to throw a switch to save five people while killing an innocent bystander, but not okay if you have to physically throw the innocent person in front of the trolley).

The job of the skeptical critical thinker is to convince people that these seemingly different situations are logically equivalent, and that it is therefore not rational to believe in ghosts without evidence at the same time that one wouldn’t dream of convicting a person of a crime just on the basis that she cannot prove her innocence. But as is often the case, human psychology gets in the way of rational thinking.

Massimo's Picks

* The latest Rationally Speaking podcast is out, featuring National Center for Science Education's Eugenie Scott.

* Massive update of my PlatoFootnote site. You'll find lots of downloads of both technical papers and general articles, as well as links to recent media appearances.

* Here is my little discussion with Skeptico, a apropos of, among other things, near death experiences.

* Maureen Dowd on gay marriages. Such a no brainer, really.

* A brief philosophical analysis of why treating corporations as persons is a bad, bad idea.

* Are the New Atheists the New Martyrs?

* David Brooks' commentaries in the NYT belong to the realm of magical thinking...

* My genes made my cholesterol bad, it wasn't the triple cheese burgers!

* Not recent, but very good, commentary by Daniel Loxton about the limits of skepticism.

* Why American self-described deficit hawks are actually hypocrites.

* Insightful commentary about certain unquestioned assumptions in the media, the result of buying whole sale the Republican's "framing" of certain issues.

* Good philosophical analysis of the tea party in the NYT.

* Peter Singer makes a contribution to the NYT's philosophy blog.

Podcast Teaser: Superstition, is it good for you?

The next Rationally Speaking podcast will tackle the topic of superstition, in honor of that being our episode 13... We are going to talk about it from a slightly different angle than usual. There is of course a consensus within the skeptic community that superstition is bad, and indeed the point of having a community dedicated to skeptical inquiry is precisely to fight superstition (though, curiously, skeptics disagree on whether religion falls under this heading or not).

A recent post by our friend Steve Novella, over at NeuroLogica, however, brought up the possibility that superstition may, at least some of the time, have beneficial effects (just like religion, not to keep pushing that button too much). Steve refers for instance to a paper published in 2008 in Science, which suggests that lacking control over a situation increases people’s propensity to see illusory patterns — the implication being that the latter (a typical component of superstition) ameliorates stress when we feel that things are out of hand.

Sure enough, a very recent study published in Psychological Science shows that superstition improves people’s performance on certain tasks, presumably by making them more self-confident than they would be otherwise. Add to this a recent article in Scientific American to the effect that people with Asperger’s syndrome (increasingly considered to lie along the autistic spectrum) are less likely to project agency onto life’s events (and hence tend to be less superstitious), and suddenly the skeptic might not feel so cocky about being skeptical.

Of course, just like Steve Novella, I don’t think we’ll end up advocating in favor of superstition on the sole ground that it may be psychologically helpful. Still, what happens when something that we devote so much time fighting against turns out not to be entirely bad after all? And incidentally, why are so many people superstitious? Is it because this peculiar habit of mind has been selected in favor due to its positive effects, or is it rather a byproduct of complex brains that are capable of uncovering (real) patterns and dealing with (real) agency?

Performance art without the performance, or the art — part deux

My previous post on Arthur Danto’s New York Times article about the performing art of Marina Abramovic has generated quite a discussion on Rationally Speaking. Apparently, Danto got quite a reaction also on the NYT’s web site, so much so that he has felt compelled to do a follow-up post to answer some of his readers’ questions. Unfortunately, the new post doesn’t really shed much light on Danto’s thinking about art, except for a single hopeful paragraph, which the author himself immediately, and unwisely, dismisses (more on this in a moment).

Let me start with a few comments on Danto’s second piece, and then broaden the scope of this post by addressing some of the remarks posted on RS. In response to the obvious question posed by one reader, “is performance art really art?” Danto launches into a brief — and somewhat idiosyncratic — history of the philosophy of aesthetics. He starts out, predictably enough, with Plato’s theory that art is a form of imitation. While initially influential, just like pretty much everything Plato wrote, that view has gone out of favor in philosophy a long time ago.

Danto then moves to where I think the answer actually lies, citing Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance concepts,” the idea that many concepts do not admit of a small set of necessary and sufficient conditions that provide a sharp definition of the concept itself. Wittgenstein’s famous example was the concept of games: it is surprisingly difficult to define, as you will discover for yourself if you spend a few minutes trying. (Games are not defined by having rules, because plenty of non-game activities have rules; or by being competitive, because not all games are competitive; or by a scoring system, because not all games have scores; and so on.)

Danto correctly says that “yet not having a definition does not stand in the way of our picking out the art works from a pile of assorted things.” Indeed! But then he goes on to dismiss Wittgenstein and to tell us that art can be just a pile of things (Duchamp’s famous urinal, Warhol’s Brillo boxes), because, you see, “the work of art has meaning; it is about something.” Ah, but by that definition, pretty much everything human beings do is art, because everything we do has meaning (for us). Not good enough, methinks.

Danto then goes back to defending Abramovic’s specific work (remember, she was just sitting on a chair staring at whoever happened to be sitting across from her). He says that “it was in a sense a sacrifice on the artist’s part, an ordeal, an immense favor conferred on those who sat with her ... The sitters are honored to be in the presence of the artist. It is a ritual moment, and understood as such by their own ordeal of waiting ... These are some of the hermeneutical aspects that the artist understood.”

Oh boy, you know you are in trouble when someone brings in hermeneutics (the theory of interpretation, which has gone down the drain ever since Heidegger). I seriously doubt that Abramovic went through an “ordeal” for her performance (except for the self-imposed, and rather silly, rule of not getting up to go pee when nature called). As for a paying customer at the museum being “honored” by her still presence, well I guess that truly is a matter of taste. None of this, however, answers the question of whether this particular instance of performing art was either art or a performance in any non-trivial sense of those terms.

Danto does attempt to define performance art more broadly: “what distinguishes performance art from the rest of art is the presence of the artist’s body.” Okay, but is the mere presence of that body art? Is it a performance? Which brings me back to the broader issue. I do not pretend to have a precise answer to what art is. Indeed, I fully subscribe to myself a Wittgenstein-type family resemblance concept of art, which means that it intrinsically does not admit of precise definitions. But as Danto himself acknowledges, this doesn’t mean that the concept is either meaningless or arbitrary.

Several comments on our previous thread challenged the whole premise of my post, insisting that art is what artists do, or some variant thereof. But the only people who can coherently maintain that approach are cultural relativists — and even they would have to admit that if I declare that snoring on my couch is performing art, then so it is.

What I find interesting is that very few people would actually agree that there is no rhyme or reason at all in discussing what is and what is not art. Those same people go to museums, which means that they trust the (presumably not entirely arbitrary) considered opinions of art critics as experts (Danto wrote a long essay for the Museum of Modern Art about Abramovic’s piece). But the whole idea of expertise, or aesthetic judgment, doesn’t make any sense if art is an entirely arbitrary concept.

In some sense there are some interesting parallels (not to be pushed too far, to be sure) between this debate and the one I’ve been having here at RS with Julia, on whether ethics is a matter of entirely arbitrary taste or whether one can make rational arguments in favor of one ethical decision and against another one. Again it seems to me that many people lean toward some type of moral relativism, only to presumably recoil from it when one points out consequences like the conclusion that genital mutilation of young girls is okay. (On the latter point, at least, I agree with Sam Harris’ critique of relativism, even though I do think his answer to the question of the foundations of ethics is wrong.)

As Julia put it in the discussion thread about my previous post (where she was disagreeing with my take), “unless, Massimo, you want to try and make the case that people's positive reactions to Marina were somehow faulty — e.g., that they report positive reactions only because they were caught up in the hype and cachet around Marina.” That strikes me as a correct inference. I’m not sure about people’s reactions being “faulty,” a reaction is a reaction. But yes, I do think that a lot of contemporary art (not just Marina’s piece, and not just performance art) is in a sense a sham, a matter of hype fueled by self-important critics and artists, not to mention museum curators. It is fitting that Danto invokes Duchamp, whose “set pieces” were actually meant precisely as a not too subtle criticism of the pomposity and sometimes downright absurdity of the art world. Apparently, he succeeded far too well in making his point.

Michael's Picks

* I recently caused some heated discussion over on Ophelia Benson's blog regarding the ability of science to handle the question of the existence of God.

* If you're having a reproductive crisis, don't go to a Catholic hospital, says Angela Bonavoglia.

* Not news, but a nice reminder considering the rhetoric we often hear: none of the Ten Commandments are in the U.S. Constitution.

* Good reading on the issue of whether doctors, pharmacists, and other health care workers should have the right to refuse to provide services that conflict with their religious beliefs.

* Why does Obama consult with experts? So he knows "whose ass to kick."

* Christopher Hitchens takes Prince Charles to town for attacking science and reason in a recent speech.

* "Is the meaning of the Constitution clear? And is the task of divining that meaning easy?" Former Supreme Court Justice David Souter discussed those two questions at his recent commencement address at Harvard. Slate's Dahlia Lithwick provides analysis.

* Tim James, a candidate for governor in Alabama, wants to stop offering the state driver's license test in 12 languages, and only offer it in English. In his words: "This is Alabama. We speak English. If you want to live here, learn it."

* And finally, a touching tribute to Jay Gallagher, an award-winning journalist and author who died in late May of pancreatic cancer (obit here). Gallagher was a fantastic bureau chief at Gannett News Service's New York Capitol Bureau in Albany for 20 years. I interned under him my senior year of undergrad, in 2005.

Truth from fiction: truth or fiction?

Literature teaches us about life. Literature helps us understand the world.

I'm sure you've heard these claims before, and maybe you agree with them. It's practically a truism that one of the reasons literature is valuable -- worth writing, reading, studying, and promoting -- is that it's not just entertaining, but that it actually teaches us profound lessons about the world, and about human nature. But does it?

I recently read How Fiction Works, by James Wood, a book I strongly recommend for its analysis of writing techniques, of what works stylistically and what doesn't. But towards the end of the book Wood makes the case that fiction is a good source of knowledge about the world. A representative example: "Consider -- just to pluck one kind of struggle -- what extraordinary empirical insight the novel has given us into marriage and all its conflicts," he writes.

As far as I can tell, this belief in truth-from-fiction is the party line for those who champion the merits of literature. Eminent English professor and critic Harold Bloom proclaims, in his bestselling How to Read and Why, that one of the main reasons to read literature is because "we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are."

But why would we expect literature to be a reliable source of knowledge about "the way things are"? After all, the narratives which are the most gripping and satisfying to read are not the most representative of how the world actually works. They have dramatic resolutions, foreshadowing, conflict, climax, and surprise. People tend to get their comeuppance after they misbehave. People who pursue their dream passionately tend to succeed. Disaster tends to strike when you least expect it. These narratives are over-represented in literature because they're more gratifying to read; why would we expect to learn from them about "the way things are"?

And even if authors were all trying to faithfully represent the world as they perceived it, why would we expect their perceptions to be any more universally true than anyone else's? Just like the rest of us, authors see a limited slice of the world, made up of their own experiences and the re-told experiences of their acquaintances. There's no reason we should expect that slice of the world to be a representative one. (In fact, we might instead expect the world we see in literature to be systematically biased by the traits characteristic of writers. Not to paint with too broad a brush here, but I'd be willing to bet that writers are more sensitive and more introverted than average. And although I can't predict exactly how each of those traits would bias their representation of the world, it seems likely that they would bias it somehow.)

So I can't see any reason to give any more weight to the implicit arguments of a novel than we would give to the explicit arguments of any individual person. And yet when we read a novel or study it in school, especially if it's a hallowed classic, we tend to treat its arguments as truths. At least in my experience, the conclusions people tend to draw from classic novels are more of the form "The Great Gatsby shows the hollowness of the American dream," rather than, "The Great Gatsby shows that F. Scott Fitzgerald believed the American dream to be hollow."

For that matter, how can we tell whether a novel's portrayal of the world is "truthful" or "realistic"? People certainly tend to feel like they can tell. Wood writes, "Kafka's Metamorphosis and Hamsun's Hunger and Beckett's Endgame are... harrowingly truthful texts. This, we say to ourselves, is what it would feel like to be outcast from one's family, like an insect (Kafka), or a young madman (Hamsun) or an aged parent kept in a bin and fed pap (Beckett)."

But whether you finish a book and say to yourself, "That's exactly what it would be like," or "That's not at all what it would be like," what are you basing that judgment on? All you have to evaluate a book's portrayal of the world by are your pre-existing perceptions. So if the novel's portrayal of the world matches what you already believe, then you deem it "truthful." But then how can a novel ever teach us something new about the world that we don't already believe?

It's also worth keeping in mind that whether or not something feels realistic isn't necessarily a good indicator of whether it is realistic. In fact, experiments have revealed a common cognitive bias that leads people to judge an event as being more likely if it's described in more detail. For instance, during the Cold War, psychologists Tversky and Kahneman asked political leaders to estimate the probability of (1) the U.S. withdrawing its ambassador from the U.S.S.R., and (2) the U.S.S.R. invading Poland and then, as a result, the U.S. withdrawing its ambassador from the U.S.S.R. People rated (2) as more likely. Of course, (2) is a subset of (1), and is therefore by definition less likely. But because it has a narrative built in, it feels more plausible.

Science fiction is especially good at making us feel like we've learned a lesson about the world, because it's perfectly suited to "What would happen if..." questions that vividly portray the consequences of a particular course of action. And it's easy to confuse "this is one theoretically possible outcome that could result" with "this is the outcome that will result."

My brother Jesse Galef unearthed a striking example of this phenomenon. George W. Bush read (uh, technically, his advisor read to him) passages from Aldous Huxley's dystopic science fiction novel, Brave New World. "'We're tinkering with the boundaries of life here,' Bush said when I finished. “We’re on the edge of a cliff. And if we take a step off the cliff, there’s no going back. Perhaps we should only take one step at a time.”" His conclusion: we should avoid stem-cell research.

But as Jesse points out:

Aldous Huxley had a vision of how society interacts with technological advances. He thought such a scenario would lead to hatcheries, deception, and nightmarish conditions. That possibility scared Bush into a position on stem-cell research. So? Huxley has no particular authority on the subject. Someone else could come along and write a story about a world in which technology creates excellent living conditions! If someone had read that story to Bush, maybe he would have gladly supported research.

I've also come to suspect that even when we're not explicitly trying to learn about the world from fiction, it seeps into our unconscious anyway, and starts to bias our sense of "the way things are." We form our general impressions of how things work in the world from a jumble of accumulated experiences -- our own, along with secondhand experiences that we've read and heard about. And my suspicion is that when we read fictional stories, our memories of them get automatically added to that jumble. Thus, when we ask ourselves questions like, "What's likely to happen when I pursue this girl who seems out of my league, or quit this job to chase my dream, or commit this crime?" we're basing our answer not just on the real examples of similar situations we've heard of, but also, unwittingly, on the ones we've read about in fiction.

I've definitely noticed this tendency in myself. A while ago I realized that I had the habit of thinking, on some not-quite-conscious level, "Let me imagine as many things that could go wrong as possible, because if I think of them ahead of time then they won't happen." Where did that superstition come from? My guess is, from fiction. A satisfying disaster, narratively, is one that is unexpected. So my brain reasoned: "Disasters tend not to be anticipated, so if I anticipate something then that means it won't happen."

I'd be genuinely curious to hear if you, or anyone you know, has actually learned something profound about the world or human nature from literature. Remember, it must be both true, and also something you didn't already know before reading the novel. It seems logically impossible to me, based on the reasons I outlined above, but perhaps I'll realize an error in my reasoning if someone can give me a counterexample.

An embarrassing footnote: I very nearly ended this essay by giving you an example of how literature skews our view of the world -- Emma Bovary, in Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary, who reads too many melodramatic novels as a young girl and proceeds to evaluate her adult life by the standards of fiction, viewing her everyday life as dull, and passion as paramount, which gets her in a heap of trouble. See? I was going to say. Emma Bovary's experience shows the problem with using fictional stories as a guide to how things really --

...and then, of course, the absurdity of my argument finally hit me, like a ton of circular bricks.

On the Enjoyment of Accomplishments

Since completing my master’s degree in political science at Brooklyn College in May, I have most often been greeted with: “Congrats. What’s next?” My usual response has been: “Thank you. I have to consider a few options.” In short retrospect, however, I just realized that over the past couple of weeks, I have never once said: “Enjoy it.”

It may be my fault that I didn't react in such a way. But then, the message from others was never “Congrats. What are you doing to soak in your accomplishment?” Thus, I think it is relevant to wonder why society seems to want to keep us so focused on the future when the present is pretty good – in this case, when we have one of the grander accomplishments of our lives right in front of us. Surely, it is not like this for everyone, or in every sphere of human life. When New York Yankees’ star slugger Alex Rodriguez finally won a World Series title last fall, he was not asked “what’s next?” Reporters knew the obvious reply is that he will be back next year to try to do it again. But until then, Rodriguez is going to take some time off and enjoy the accomplishment he had been working at for so long. Rather, the question Rodriguez often received was, “how does it feel?” I did receive this question a couple times. It felt great, I said. But even so, the next question was invariably and quickly, “so, now what?”

Receiving a master’s degree from a respected university (I qualify this to rule out those pesky creationists) might not compare to winning a professional baseball title. But it doesn’t seem a shabby accomplishment. Graduate students take at least 30 credits in a given field of study. Many write master’s theses, which can range from 60 to 100 pages, or more. Others take comprehensive examinations. Upon completing a master’s degree, one joins a population that makes up only 9 percent of Americans, according to Census data (meanwhile, only 16 percent of Americans receive their bachelor’s degree, while just 9 percent receive graduate or similar degrees). Yet I don't think I need to make a case for getting a master’s degree. It seems a good idea for those who can and would like to achieve it. The question is about relishing the successes of one’s life.

Philosophers for thousands of years have argued that humans ought to maximize their enjoyment of life. Some might enjoy contemplating the future endlessly, and consistently brush aside accomplishments on the way toward some higher goal. That is fine, so long as there is room for others to bask in the moment every so often. Of course, there is a limit. When one begins to endlessly fret about every single decision and its potential outcomes, life quickly becomes less enjoyable for said person and everyone around him or her. As for living it up in the moment too often, consider the line of thought put forth by Peter Singer. Singer has argued that we ought to operate on a tight budget and donate nearly all of our non-necessary funds to helping the needy around the world. Other philosophers would counter that donating is great and should be done – but that humans need to enjoy their lives, too. We shouldn’t make our lives miserable to help others, so don’t fret that every Friday you head to the movies with your wife and fork over $24 for some enjoyment (yes, it's at least $12 per ticket to see a movie in New York City). On the topic of this essay, one might argue that enjoying the master’s degree accomplishment is good, but only for a certain period of time.

This leaves us without a sense of how long that period of time should be. In the case of Alex Rodriguez, clearly he has a deadline to meet: the next season opens on a specific date, and he better be ready to go when it does. But there is no clear cut date for one who just received his or her master’s degree, right? Or maybe there is. Perhaps the answer lies in being fully aware of the present and future. While I might enjoy my graduation right now, I know I have more essays to write for this blog, goals at my full-time job at the Center for Inquiry, and PhD application deadlines this fall. Right now, I might take a couple of weeks to decompress. But then it’s back to work.

Perhaps there is a desirable in-between: the relaxed, yet driven, lifestyle that many Europeans live. I recall a study I can no longer find on the Web. It found Europeans were happy in their current standing and were reasonably sure their level of happiness would remain the same in the future. In comparison, Americans were rather unhappy in their current standing but had high hopes for the future. Quality of life in America is not so much worse than in Europe to account for this difference. One must wonder if the best path would be a sort of interplay between critical reasoning about the future and enjoyment of the present – whether in the arms of a loved one, or reveling in some big accomplishment. In this view, one can have some idea of what he or she might wish to do in the future and also enjoy the stakes one plants in the ground as they make their way through life.

But, maybe I've missed a point somewhere. Perhaps, the usual reaction should be taken as an expression of confidence. The people who have asked me “what’s next?” must believe I have something else in mind – that is, that I will not feel sufficiently learned with a master’s degree or in the current position in my life, or that I am such a fine young man that one could only expect I will go on to greater things. This is one reason why my situation is unlike the one featuring Alex Rodriguez. Rodriguez’s accomplishment was seen as the achievement of his career (though he’s still bound to take a shot at the home run record) whereas I am expected by most to continue on toward greater achievements. There is also the possibility that my options are a bit more wide open than his, and people might be interested in hearing what I am considering (Rodriguez was obviously coming back to the Yanks for another year). But -- so long as people allow me to do so -- this does not prevent me from taking some time to enjoy what I’ve accomplished so far. Indeed, that might be an important reason for wanting to accomplish more goals in the future, for if we do not enjoy our accomplishments, why should we want more of them?

Podcast Teaser: what about thought experiments?

Our next podcast will tackle the topic of thought experiments, in both science and philosophy. Philosophers are often accused of engaging in armchair speculation, as far removed from reality as possible, inside the proverbial ivory tower. The quintessential example of this practice is the thought experiment, which many scientists sneer at precisely because it doesn’t require one to get one’s hands dirty. And yet scientists have often engaged in thought experiments, some of which have marked major advances in our understanding of the world. Just consider the famous example of Galileo’s thought experiment demonstrating (rather counterintuitively) that two objects of different weight must fall at the same speed. (Contrary to popular belief, Galileo never actually climbed the leaning tower of Pisa to do this experiment – he didn’t need to.) Galileo knew that Aristotle would have predicted that a heavy body (H) would fall faster than a lighter one (L). But, the Italian scientist reckoned, suppose we connect the two bodies by a string, thereby making the compound object H+L. Following Aristotelian physics, one would predict that H+L should fall faster than H by itself because of the compound weight: therefore H+L > H. However, it’s also possible to use the same logic to claim that the compound body should fall at a slower pace than H because of the drag created by L, so that H+L reductio ad absurdum – that really H = L = H+L. As we know, Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott showed to the world that Galileo was right in a rather spectacular fashion. Such is the predictive power of thought experiments!

Then again, readers of this blog know the pretty low opinion I have of philosopher David Chalmers' famous thought experiment about zombies and the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness. Chalmers says that he can conceive of zombies that act and behave and talk like us, and yet have no consciousness. From that he deduces a form of dualism in which consciousness does not have to be tied to a particular physical substrate. As I pointed out in my earlier post, however, conceivability is not a reliable guide to possibility. I can conceive of impossible things, such as the idea of squaring the circle, or of a god that is omnipotent and yet can make a mountain so big that she couldn’t move it, and so on. Chalmers comes up with an (admittedly ingenious) little story, and we are supposed to deduce from it the momentous conclusion that there is more than matter/energy to the universe? When things appear to be too good to be true, there is often good reason to think that they in fact are too good to be true. That is, Chalmers' thought experiment is bunk.

Still, there are plenty of good thought experiments in philosophy, beginning with the so-called trolley dilemmas meant to probe our moral intuitions. I wrote about those too on Rationally Speaking, concluding that the more I read about trolley problems the more I am intrigued by the possibility that some of our moral intuitions may not be rationally defensible, setting up an interesting area of inquiry about the relative importance of reason and emotions in ethics.

Dissolving the Ultimate Question

Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (HHG2G) series became deeply embedded in my psyche after a childhood spent reading the books and watching the TV episodes endlessly. And I'm far from alone: quotes from and references to HHG2G are everywhere, not just on the internet and in geek subcultures, but in maintream pop culture as well.

For example, I wonder how many non-HHG2G fans are somewhat  mystified by the fact that they keep seeing the number 42 everywhere they look. Pixar uses it as the name of Buzz Lightyear's space ship, and as the address of the dentist in Finding Nemo ("42 Wallaby Way"). It's Dr. House's favorite number on the TV show "House," it's the title of a Doctor Who episode, and it showed up on Lost as the last of the sequence of "mysterious numbers". And try typing the phrase "answer to life the universe and everything" (no quotation-marks) into Google.

But most of the references to HHG2G are no more than that: references. When "42" or another HHG2G reference is worked into a TV show, it rarely manages to convey why that joke was clever in the first place, and the reference simply serves as a buzzword which allows viewers to enjoy the experience of recognizing what it refers to. I realize this is starting to run the risk of sounding like a lame rant about how the "masses" don't "get" my cherished series the way I do -- so let me hurry up and get to the point, which is that I want to explain why I think the 42 joke is so brilliant and why it made such an impact on my development as a rationalist and critical thinker.

I suspect that the set of Rationally Speaking Readers is highly, if not wholly, contained within the set of People Who Know About HHG2G, but nevertheless, here's an explanation of what's so special about this particular two digit number: In HHG2G, an advanced civilization builds a sophisticated computer called Deep Thought, and asks it to finally solve the ultimate question of "life, the universe, and everything." After seven and a half million years of computation, Deep Thought announces that the answer is... 42.

In response to his audience's consternation, Deep Thought explains that the reason the answer doesn't make any sense is probably because their original question didn't make any sense. When he points this out, they are at a loss:

"But it was the Great Question! The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything!" howled Loonquawl.

"Yes," said Deep Thought with the air of one who suffers fools gladly, "but what actually is it?"

A slow stupefied silence crept over the men as they stared at the computer and then at each other.

"Well, you know, it's just Everything ... Everything..." offered Phouchg weakly.

"Exactly!" said Deep Thought. "So once you do know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means."

On one level, this is funny simply for its absurdism, for the idea of such a profound question turning out to have such a trivial answer. (Douglas Adams said he picked 42 because he considered it to be the "funniest-sounding" two digit number.) But the joke's cleverness goes deeper than that -- Adams is making a critical point about our attempts to understand the world. I think HHG2G may have been my first exposure to the idea that some questions are unanswerable not because they're so profound that they're beyond our ken, but because they're logically incoherent.

That's a lesson that comes in handy quite frequently, not least of all when you're confronted with this ubiquitous variant on the Ultimate Question: "What is the meaning of life?" This, at least, has the appearance of a proper question, complete with a question-mark at the end, which is more than can be said for Loonquawl and Phouchg's query. But although it's widely viewed as one of the great unsolved mysteries, I think our failure to solve it stems from the same problem Adams cheekily highlighted with his story of Deep Thought: the question makes no sense.

One way in which a question can fail to make sense is if it's committing what programmers call a category error. For example: "What color is geometry?" Geometry is simply not something to which the word color applies, so we can't answer the question. (This, incidentally, tends to be the solution to many a zen koan -- like "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" The act of clapping by definition involves two hands, so the question is unanswerable.)

Likewise, I would argue that life simply isn't something to which the word "meaning" can be applied. The word "meaning" has a few different standard definitions, but one of the most common refers to the information conveyed by a symbol within a system of communication, as in the question "What does this word mean?" So it would be committing a category error to ask, for example, "What is the meaning of water?" since water is not part of any system of communication. And neither is the phenomenon of human life.

Another way a question can fail to make sense is if it relies on premises that are false. For example, the question, "When did you stop beating your wife?" has no answer if you never started beating your wife in the first place. Similarly, another common interpretation of the meaning-of-life question is that it's asking about the "purpose" or "point" of human life. But using the word "purpose" carries the implied premise that some entity created us intentionally to serve some end. Reject that premise, and the question no longer makes sense. (Of course, you could also declare that you're going to pick a purpose for your own life -- like being happy, or alleviating other people's suffering. But the phrase "the purpose of life" generally indicates that the questioner is asking about the purpose of human life in general, not of his own individual life.)

As with many Big Questions, the first tricky part of approaching the question "What is the meaning of life?" is recognizing that it doesn't need to be solved -- it needs to be dissolved. The even trickier part, though, is figuring out why we felt like there was a problem in the first place. That's especially hard for me to answer because it never occurred to me growing up that life was the type of thing that could have a "meaning," so it's hard for me to put myself in the mindset of someone who started out approaching this question from the opposite direction. But until we figure out where that assumption came from, I don't think that troublesome Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything will truly feel dissolved.

Massimo's Picks

* The new Rationally Speaking podcast is about Nonsense on Stilts, we apologize for the self-indulgence.

* And here is my recent appearance on American Freethought.

* Two more about self-promotion, then I quit: interview at KERA Public Radio from Texas...

* ... and on WNYC's Brian Leher show in New York.

* How rejection of scientific findings in one area leads to general skepticism about science.

* A computer program "recognizes" sarcasm. But does it get it?

* The third installation of the NYT's new philosophy blog, The Stone, finally gets it right. Read this article about the problems with stoicism.

* David Sloan Wilson doesn't like "angry atheists."

* How parenting makes you stupid, at least temporarily.

Performance art without the performance, or the art

The New York Times has recently started a new blog, The Stone, which will present the ideas of prominent philosophers to the general public. This is a welcome experiment, given how difficult it is to talk about philosophy to a lay audience. However, if the first couple of entries indicate the general tone of the blog, this isn’t gonna be pretty.

In particular, I was disappointed by an essay by Arthur Danto, who is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University. Danto rose to fame when he endorsed the pop art culture of the ‘60s, arguing that a Brillo box, once put in a museum, becomes art (methinks not). I saw Danto give a talk at the City University’s Graduate Center a few weeks ago and was rather underwhelmed, but not as much as by his Stone article entitled “Sitting with Marina.”

The Marina in question is Marina Abramovic, and Danto waxes poetic about a “performance art” piece that she “exhibited” at the Museum of Modern Art. The piece consisted of Abramovic simply sitting in a room in the museum, with the public invited to sit across from her, one person at a time, for as long as they liked. Danto himself took part in the “performance,” and apparently most participants sat there for about 20 minutes, with one young woman pissing off everyone by sitting for the whole day!

This exercise in inanity is part of an Abramovic retrospective entitled — I imagine the pun was intended — “The Artist is Present” and is one of those contemporary “art” stunts that gives the whole art world a bad reputation.

To begin with, of course, there is no “performance,” as the artist literally stayed in place motionless. Second, if this counts as art, and if people are willing to pay to “participate” in or just to see it, then I might consider selling tickets for you to come see me snoring in front of late night TV. I assure you that it will be just as good an insight into the human soul as staring into Abramovic’s face for an entire day. And I’ll give you a discount that will beat MoMA’s prices.

Of course my point here is to ask the perennial question: what is art?, which has been addressed on Rationally Speaking recently by Julia. Danto himself is keenly aware that the question will arise in the minds of his readers, sidesteps it and attempts to address instead the “meaning” of the piece. Interestingly, he then apparently forgets even his own question and tells us instead that “the performance has brought MoMA itself to the cutting edge of contemporary artistic experiment, and has in every way proven to be a succès fou.” You know he must be right if you have to look up what succès fou actually means (French for “wild success,” though since fou also means crazy, one could instead interpret the phrase as a much more appropriate “the success of the fools”).

Here is Danto again, describing the “experience” of sitting across from Abramovic, together with my running commentary:

“Marina looked beautiful in an intense red garment whose hem formed a circle on the floor, and her black hair was braided to one side.”

Okay, though of course this has nothing to do with art. Almost every other woman you pass by in New York could answer to a similar description, the details of the garment infinitely varying.

“This performance is very much a dialogue de sourds — a dialog of the deaf. Communication is on another plane.”

There you go with the French again. Ma perchè non parli inglese? (Italian for “But why don’t you speak English?” I thought I would gain some gravitas — Latin — asking the question that way.) And on what other plane was this communication taking place, anyway? Danto doesn’t say, nor, of course, does he tell us about the content of such communication.

“At this point, something striking took place. Marina leaned her head back at a slight angle, and to one side. She fixed her eyes on me without — so it seemed — any longer seeing me. It was as if she had entered another state. I was outside her gaze. Her face took on the translucence of fine porcelain. She was luminous without being incandescent. She had gone into what she had often spoken of as a ‘performance mode.’”

What is striking about this is that it was happening in a major international museum of art, and that it is being recounted by a leading art critic without a trace of irony.

“For me at least, it was a shamanic trance — her ability to enter such a state is one of her gifts as a performer. It is what enables her to go through the physical ordeals of some of her famous performances. I felt indeed as if this was the essence of performance in her case, often with the added element of physical danger.”

A shamanic trance? Neither one of them were even on drugs, thereby missing the major pleasure of shamanic trances. And the essence of performance is to look beyond the eyes of the person in front of you? Well, I did not know that I experience the essence of performance every time my eyes glaze over an interlocutor whose yapping becomes boring.

Of course, not all “performance art” needs to be so unimaginative and still. Last year Kathleen Neill was arrested (though a judge later dismissed the charges) because she was performing naked at the MoMA, perhaps setting the precedent for more naked live art that is now part of the very same Abramovic exhibit. Why do I have the nagging feeling that this has much more to do with exhibitionism and publicity stunts than with art?

I realize the typical objection to my reaction to Danto’s essay: well, it’s a matter of subjective taste, and if you don’t like it just don’t go see it. If one wishes to take the relativist turn in art, fine, but then explain to me two things: in what sense can anyone claim that Abramovic is — as Danto puts it — “one of the early performance artists whose works have the deep originality that justifies their inclusion in great museums”? Moreover, if taste in art is entirely arbitrary, what then is the role of a critic?

I happen to think that there is good art and bad art, and that there also is stuff that pretends to be art but isn’t. I will defend my opinion that Beethoven was a musical genius and Britney Spears a mediocre performer, and I will moreover argue that if you know anything about music you must agree with such judgment, regardless of whether you like or dislike classical or pop music. If you don’t, you are not just exercising your right to a different opinion (which, of course, you do have), you simply understand music even less than I do, and that’s saying a lot. What was Danto thinking when waxing poetic about a piece of performance art that very arguably was neither?

Podcast Teaser: Eugenie Scott

Our next podcast will feature a special guest, my friend Genie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, the premiere organization fighting for sound scientific educational standards in this country, and a permanent thorn in the ass of creationists and IDers nationwide.

Genie is a physical anthropologist by training, and enjoyed an academic career at the University of Kentucky, University of Colorado and California State, before devoting her efforts full time to a constant front-line fight against irrationalism. For this she has been rewarded not just with six honorary degrees (at last count), but also with the first Stephen Jay Gould prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution (an award that I am proud to say I helped establish when I was Secretary of the Society), and most recently with the prestigious National Academy of Science Public Welfare Medal. She has also authored the excellent Evolution vs Creationism and co-edited (with Glenn Branch) Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools.

But let me tell you about my first encounter with Genie. This was more than a decade ago, I was still at the University of Tennessee, and we were among the first to organize grassroots Darwin Days to fight back against creationist nonsense. I invited Genie, together with my friend Will Provine from Cornell, to be speakers at one of our events. At that time, the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) had just passed a controversial resolution to change their definition of evolution, dropping wording that explicitly referred to it as a “natural unsupervised” phenomenon. The resolution was in response to pressure from ID quarters (in particular the Discovery Institute), and I thought it was insanity. Then I discovered that Genie and the NCSE actually supported the move!

Since it’s not in my nature to shy away from confronting, as politely as I can, people with whom I disagree, I greeted Genie’s arrival in Knoxville with a petition to convince the NABT to reverse its decision. Needless to say, Genie wasn’t pleased, though we managed to maintain a cordial relation throughout her visit.

She tried to explain to me that the NABT may have been moved by pragmatic considerations to diffuse the controversy, but that the original definition was a bad idea to begin with. After all, we don’t define Newtonian mechanics as a theory based on naturalistic principles that describes how planets move in an unsupervised manner, do we?

Moreover, Genie told me, there actually was an intellectually sound, philosophical reason for the move: the well known distinction in epistemology between methodological and philosophical naturalism. Naturalism, of course, is the idea that natural laws and phenomena are all there is in the universe. To be philosophically naturalistic means to be an atheist: based on philosophical reasoning, one thinks that nature is it. However, science does not need to make that strong epistemological commitment (which, while philosophically sound, cannot actually be defended on empirical grounds), because it functions perfectly well within the realm of methodological naturalism: whether there is something beyond nature is irrelevant to science, because science is concerned with — and epistemically confined to — the natural world.

Of course at the time my philosophy was pretty naive, as it is in general for most scientists, so I simply didn’t buy it and thought she was being rather sophistic about the whole thing. The issue, however, kept nagging at me, and I went on to read more deeply into the philosophy of science. In particular, a thoughtful article by Barbara Forrest convinced me that Genie was right: as Barbara (whom I’ve since had the privilege to meet and chat with) puts it, “the relationship between methodological and philosophical naturalism, while not one of logical entailment, is the only reasonable metaphysical conclusion.” In other words, the reasonable position is, in fact, that of the philosophical naturalist (atheist), just like myself. But that position is not logically entailed by methodological naturalism, i.e. it is not strictly speaking a logically required metaphysical assumption in science.

At that point I sent an email to Genie telling her of my change of mind, to which she responded very graciously. We’ve been friends ever since.