Michael’s Picks

By Michael De Dora

* The Web site Patheos is featuring a collection of essays on the future of humanism. Contributors include Hemant Mehta, Greg Epstein, Ron Lindsay – and me. Click here for my entry. 

* New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg appeared on The Daily Show with John Stewart and did a wonderful job distilling down the position in favor of allowing the Islamic cultural center to be built near Ground Zero.  

* A short but great three-minute clip from a 1959 interview with Bertrand Russell, who discusses God and religion. 

* An essay in the New York Times by Tim Egan on uncritical thinking and its impact on society. 

* Glenn Beck says that Charles Darwin is the father of modern-day racism. 

* Firebrands vs. diplomats; accommodationists vs. New Atheists. Lucy Gibbins says there’s room for both in the secular movement. 

* Innocence Project founder Peter Neufeld speaks about injustice in our criminal justice system in an interview with Slate.com. 

* The Economist reports on a group of Moroccans fighting for the freedom to not observe Ramadan in public. 

Podcast Teaser: Transhumanism

By Julia Galef

What's so great about being human, anyway? Yeah, sure, we've got a lot of neat stuff — art, literature, love, digital watches — but there are some pretty serious downsides to the human condition, too. Being made of flesh is no picnic; we're easily maimed, mutilated, and hijacked by microorganisms who have no qualms about making us miserable. For that matter, we have a seemingly bottomless capacity to make each other miserable, too, through our own short-sightedness, hot-headedness, and other foibles that evolution built into us, or couldn't be bothered to fix. And even if we avoid all those ills, we still have an annoying tendency to shrivel up and die after just a few decades. 

But we don't have to settle for the human condition as it currently is, say the transhumanists. Why not instead strive to make ourselves smarter, better, faster, stronger? And instead of meekly accepting our death sentence, why not try to finagle a stay of execution — either by understanding the causes of death and preventing them, or through more unorthodox means such as replacing parts of our bodies or brains with inorganic parts?

Not so fast, some say. Tampering with human nature could have dire social consequences, such as heightened inequality and an overcrowded Earth. Or maybe death and suffering are an essential part of a meaningful life. What if, in trying to improve the human condition, we end up becoming inhuman? And finally, there's the sizable contingent who think that all these doomsday scenarios are beside the point, because the transhumanist aspirations are wildly unrealistic anyway, simply the product of wishful thinking and a diet of too many science fiction novels.

In episode #17 of the Rationally Speaking podcast, we'll discuss some of the basic ideas of transhumanism, the accusations made against it, and whether — rationally speaking — it's something worth pursuing. Kick off the discussion in comments below!

Between Spock and McCoy (via Aristotle)

By Massimo Pigliucci

Spock: Logic and practical information do not seem to apply here.

McCoy: You admit that?

Spock: To deny the facts would be illogical, doctor.

This dialogue seems to me like a good summary of my own struggles during the years to reconcile reason and emotion, a problem that without much exaggeration can be said to vex all of humanity by the very nature of what it means to be human.

As many young people attracted to reason, I started out as a self-professed son of the Enlightenment, predictably one of my favorite periods in human history (the other, equally predictably, being Athens in the 5th century BCE or thereabout). Accordingly, when it was time to go to college, I chose a career in science, which I was lucky enough to be able to pursue from 1982 (when I first set foot in a lab as an undergrad in Rome) to 2009 (when I closed my lab at Stony Brook University).

Later in life came the onset of philosophical reflection (which could probably have been anticipated from my very early interest in Bertrand Russell, dating back to high school), which eventually led me to go back to graduate school to actually get a degree in philosophy, and finally culminated in switching careers and becoming a full time philosopher (of science) at the City University of New York last year.

In a sense, I started out under the influence of Spock and with a certain degree of disdain for McCoy, and it took me some time to appreciate both Spock’s own inner struggle with his half-human half-Vulcan nature, and McCoy’s humanity and delightful sense of humor. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you may be reading the wrong blog, or you may want to check here and here.)

Of course, Spock’s continuous attempts to control his emotions and to put reason firmly in charge are reminiscent of Plato’s theory of the soul, where the rational part ought to be in charge, keeping the “spirited” and “appetitive” parts in check. The idea is that we share emotions with other animals, but that what distinguishes us from the rest of the biological world is precisely our ability to reason through things before making up our mind about what to do.

The again, McCoy’s character is also complex: he is a trained physician, a man of science, and yet his emphasis is on the primacy of emotion. His philosophical equivalent was, of course, David Hume — a skeptic, a friend of major figures of the Enlightenment, and yet one who famously said “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Notice that this isn’t just a description of how things are for human beings, “ought” here is prescriptive.

For Hume, we do things — including writing about philosophy — not because they are eminently rational, but because we care about them. Accordingly, he also said that “It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger,” meaning that reason can only be instrumental toward achieving objectives that we already care for, it cannot tell us what to care for.

Modern neurobiology tells us that both the Platonic and the Humean programs are doomed to failure. As Antonio Damasio put it in a series of three highly philosophically informed books on the science of consciousness (check this one, for instance), a healthy human mind is one that constantly negotiates between the excesses of reason and those of passion. Too much leaning on one side, and one becomes incapable of empathy, possibly embarking on the destructive route to psychopathology. Too much on the other side, and we join the long history of destructive irrationality against which the Enlightenment was a valiant, if flawed, reaction.

While it’s nice to have modern science validating with facts the idea that a sensible human being ought to try to steer a middle course between the Scylla of too much reason and the Charybdis of too much emotion, it was yet another philosopher who had arrived at that conclusion 24 centuries ago: Aristotle. His virtue ethics is based on the insight that we improve our happiness (in the holistic sense of the ancient Greek eudaimonia) by a combination of reflecting about what we do and why, and practicing virtue so that it becomes second nature. Not reason against emotion struggling for primacy inside us, then, but rather a continuous flow aiming at a dynamic balance between the two. (Before anybody even thinks of making the analogy, let me assure you that I do not have any eastern mysticism or new agey crap in mind.)

Okay, Massimo, could you please get off the historical-philosophical-Star Trek train of thought and give us a concrete example? I am tempted to talk about serious issues, but this isn’t a therapy session, so let me take my own lifelong struggle with weight management instead. I am now a reasonably healthy male in his mid-forties, I achieved a quasi-ideal body weight about a decade ago, and have kept it since.

This has not been easy, and still isn’t. I started out as a rather chubby kid (by European standards, don’t think of modern McDonald’s babies), who went through the standard yo-yo of various kinds of diets for many years. At some point I realized that a radical change of strategy was needed, and I discovered the basic principle of healthy living: eat everything with moderation (with almost no fried or sweet stuff) and exercise regularly. It worked, and it’s still working. But it also is a constant struggle, because I don’t particularly enjoy going to the gym, and I am constantly tempted by any kind of chocolate I encounter.

But Aristotle was absolutely right: contra Hume, I initially used my rational understanding of the problem to guide and reshape my behavior and my emotions. It worked! The more I practiced healthy living, the more I not only got used to it, but I began to enjoy it, especially the feeling of well being and of power over my own life that it gives me. But contra Plato, I no longer strive to suppress my passion for food, but instead, enjoy the variety and quality of cuisines that I find in this constantly bewildering place where I am lucky enough to be living: New York City.

My newfound situation, however, is not the end of the struggle, but merely the current point of dynamic equilibrium concerning that aspect of my life. As Aristotle thought, life is a project that ends only with one’s death (the later the better — with certain conditions — thank you very much), and eudaimonia is not a final state, but an ongoing quest. It is as if I am trying to roll Spock and McCoy into one person, not so that they can (rather amusingly, it must be said) forever fight with each other, but because the result of that mix is a most fulfilling human existence.

Julia’s Picks

By Julia Galef

* This New Yorker article from a few years ago has some very insightful points about why biographies skew our perception of reality.

* In light of some recent debates here, I think a lot of you might appreciate Paul Almond's thorough discussion of all the possible ways “supernatural” could be defined, and whether it's a fundamentally incoherent concept.

* I did an interview for the Skeptical Review, in which I talk about me and Massimo, the podcast, the NYC Skeptics, and some other random tidbits.

* Some thoughts on whether most people actually believe in God, or merely believe that they believe in God: a post from George Rey, and another in a similar vein from Eliezer Yudkowsky.

* If you happen to reside, along with me, in the intersection of the three sets {People who know more about philosophy than they have any excuse to}, {Enthusiasts of nerdy puns}, and {Former Dungeons & Dragons players}, then you will most certainly appreciate this comic by Dresden Codak. (Also, if you do reside there: Hello neighbor! Get in touch, it's lonely in this sliver of the Venn Diagram!)

* A useful breakdown by Richard Wiseman of all the ways parapsychologists nullify null results. The utility of this list goes beyond parapsychology, however; it's really applicable to all the shady corners of bad research.

Michael’s Picks

By Michael De Dora

* Can we choose what we believe? Julian Baggini argues that the more we contemplate our beliefs, the more we can say to have actually chosen them.

* InsideCatholic details for its readers five ways to talk to the Left about same-sex marriage.

* The government and government officials ought to keep their distance from the Ground Zero Islamic cultural center controversy, says Ron Lindsay.

* A federal judge has struck down a Missouri law aimed at trying to keep a religious group from protesting at funerals for dead U.S. soldiers.

* A group of young Moroccans is fighting for the right to not observe Ramadan.

* Derek Araujo provides quality analysis of the recent Perry v. Schwarzenegger case, which ended in the overturning of Prop 8.

* Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) writes about why he was so angry on the House floor recently.

* Britain is now the most irreligious country on Earth. Johann Hari helps us with the question, “Why?”

* Sam Harris has some of his “The Moral Landscape” book tour dates up on his Web site. Check it out and see if he’ll be speaking near you.

Mosque at Ground Zero: Hitchens 1 - Coyne & Harris 0

By Massimo Pigliucci

Well, three of the New Atheists have now spoken on the “issue” of the “mosque” “at” Ground Zero.” (In case you are wondering, the quotation marks are there because this really ought to be an non-issue, it ain’t a mosque, and it’s not at Ground Zero. But anyway.) Hitchens is in favor, Coyne and Harris don’t think it’s a good idea, though they seem to express different degrees of discomfort, with Harris’s being stronger than Coyne’s.

Coyne and Harris fans fear not, this isn’t yet another post where I chide their heros for not knowing their philosophy. And of course this is the sort of thing where disagreement, as Coyne puts it, shows that atheists “by no means march in intellectual lockstep” — though I doubt any additional evidence of that fact was actually necessary to make the point (you know the old adage about organizing free-thinkers being like herding cats).

Okay, so Hitchens has said that banning the proposed Islamic center in Lower Manhattan is a bad idea for two reasons. First, it would be a flagrant violation of the First Amendment. Second, it would be an action that “borrows straight from the playbook of Muslim cultural blackmail.” That is, banning the center is one (more) step toward the kind of closed society Bin Laden and his thugs actually want to establish.

Not so, says Harris. In his opinion, “honest reasoning declares that there is much that is objectionable — and, frankly, terrifying — about the religion of Islam.” He continues: “Anyone who elides these distinctions [among Islam, Judaism and Christianity], or who acknowledges the problem of jihad and Muslim terrorism only to swiftly mention the Crusades, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, the Tamil Tigers, and the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma, is simply not thinking honestly about the problem of Islam,” concluding that “the erection of a mosque upon the ashes of this atrocity will also be viewed by many millions of Muslims as a victory — and as a sign that the liberal values of the West are synonymous with decadence and cowardice.”

What about Coyne? Along with Harris, he doesn’t “see much evidence of the friendlier, kinder Islam touted by accommodationists” and while acknowledging that it would be wrong to prohibit the building of the cultural center, he states that “it’s no better an idea than would be building an American cultural center near Ground Zero in Hiroshima. It was Islam, after all, that propelled those planes into the World Trade Center nine years ago.”

Now for my take. In this case, I pretty much completely agree with Hitchens’ view (which is not always the case, I still think he was nuts endorsing the Bush-II administration invasion of Iraq, and that he is smart enough to have known better than to so easily buy into neocon after-9/11 propaganda). Like Harris, I do find plenty of objectionable, and yes even terrifying, things about Islam. But I object to and am terrified just as much by the other two Abrahamic religions.

Harris says — without argument or evidence — that people who bring up the Crusades, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, etc. “do not think honestly.” I think what is really dishonest is to accuse people of intellectual dishonesty on the mere ground that they disagree with you. Yes, the Crusades happened centuries ago, but nothing like that is possible for Christianity today because it no longer has temporal power and armies at its disposal, not because the religion is intrinsically kinder. And the Israelis are committing systematic atrocities against the Palestinians as we speak (who, in turn, keep committing acts of violence against Israeli civilians), and those atrocities are incited and justified by orthodox Judaism.

More crucially, Harris is missing the really broad picture. If you mention 9/11 to most South Americans their thoughts will likely go to September 11, 1973, when the democratically elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende was overturned and Allende assassinated — with American support — resulting in the establishment of the brutal Pinochet dictatorship, responsible for thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of cases of unlawful imprisonment and torture. By Harris’ reasoning, then, the United States is an international terror state, and maintaining an embassy in Chile ought to be considered an affront to the dead of that country. If the latter suggestion seems preposterous to you, ask yourself what exactly is the difference with what Harris and Coyne are saying.

Coyne doesn’t see much evidence of moderate Islam. Obviously, he hasn’t looked hard enough. Has he considered, for instance, the entire country of Turkey, one of the best examples (albeit far from perfect) of how a predominant Muslim society can live in a secular fashion? Or how about the largest Islamic country in the world, Indonesia? After they got rid of the (US-backed) Suharto dictatorship, they have quickly evolved into a democracy with many peaceful ties to the West.

And Coyne’s comment that building a cultural center in Lower Manhattan is akin to building an American center in Hiroshima is both inaccurate and grossly misses the point. First, the Peace Monuments in Hiroshima web site lists nine monuments sponsored or co-sponsored by the United States. I guess the Japanese are more tolerant than we are (and they lost a lot more people to the bomb than we did in 9/11). Second, and most importantly, Coyne and Harris make the same mistake that Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich make (and I don’t mean the comparison to be flattering): Hiroshima (or the Nazis, in the case of Palin-Gingrich) was a case of a nation state bombing innocent civilians. 9/11 was caused by a (well organized) small band of true nutcases, no different in nature from domestic terrorists a la Timothy McVeigh or Scott Roeder (the miscreant who killed Dr. George Tiller) — Harris’s accusations of intellectual dishonesty notwithstanding.

All the historical and cultural caveats aside, I find it disturbing that atheists are even having this discussion at all. Hitchens is absolutely on the mark here, and it should make us feel more than queasy to find ourselves suddenly making statements that sound very much like those uttered by the most intolerant conservative voices in this country. Yes, none of us likes religion, of any sort. And a very good argument can be made that there are more than enough “places of worship” of any kind, everywhere in the world. But that’s another discussion. In the words of a leading freethinker, Voltaire, “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Amen to that.

Massimo’s Picks

By Massimo Pigliucci

* In case you haven’t noticed, I now have an “official” Philosophy & Skepticism page on Facebook.

* Jon Stewart shows — once again — how some of our politicians are not just inept, but profoundly stupid.

* The latest Rationally Speaking podcast, one full hour (!!) of Julia and yours truly answering listeners’ questions.

* There is a discussion going on over at It’s Only A Theory on “epistemic egalitarianism.”

* The Stone on the relationship between imagination and knowledge.

* Philosophy Talk: should body parts sales be regulated?

* Christopher Hitchens is “not going gently” according to the New York Times. And why should he?

* An old but always relevant essay on bridging the two cultures, New Age and Skepticism, that is.

* The relevance of William James.

On What Should Politicians Base Their Decisions?

By Michael De Dora

Whom should lawmakers follow when making decisions? This question comes up in nearly every political debate, and cuts to the very root of an elected official's responsibilities in a constitutional democracy. The two most common answers pit the public’s opinions against a lawmaker’s conscience. For instance, in recent arguments over health care, same-sex marriage, and the proposed Ground Zero Islamic cultural center, many posited that lawmakers ought to listen to the American people, especially those responsible for placing them in office. Others responded that public opinion is not everything, and that a lawmaker must employ his or her own capacity to reason about what is right and wrong. Yet the resulting question – should lawmakers make decisions based on what the public thinks is right, or what they think is right? – results in a false dichotomy. As it often turns out, the answer is more complex than it might at first appear.

Considering its newsworthiness, the proposed Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan works well as an example. Most everyone believes the group responsible for the construction of the center has the legal right to have their own place of worship (to be sure, it is a cultural center). But many believe the government ought to step in and divert the building’s location elsewhere because of concerns for public feelings toward Islam. What is a lawmaker to do?

There is a strong case for politicians listening to the public. Of course, politicians have their own interest in listening, for they could be quickly voted out if the public perceives that they are not listening to, or even worse, going against their wishes. Moreover, the public elects representatives, and therefore ought to have some say in governmental affairs as they progress. The public might have an argument based on its living in a specific locale. People might know something the lawmaker is not aware of. In the case of the cultural center, some of those affected by the Sept. 11 attacks are letting the government know they do not want an Islamic building so close to the site of the terror attack.

Then again, the public cannot be followed all of the time. That would lead to terribly wrong and unconstitutional legislation. For example, if it were up to the public, gays would not have equal marriage rights, or for that matter, creationism or intelligent design would be taught alongside evolution – or exclusively – in public science classrooms. The issue gets less clear cut when it is not one of constitutionality. If it were up to the public, perhaps the health insurance reform package would not have gone through as written– but whether that is right or wrong is not a matter of what the Constitution says. For our purposes here, dependence on public opinion would surely put plans for the cultural center on ice. Or would they? Even public opinion is murky water, because “the public" is often more divided than we think. For example, most Manhattan residents are just fine with the Islamic cultural center. Compare that with polling data that suggests most Americans more broadly are against the idea. To which portion of the public should a lawmaker listen? Americans at large or the local residents who are actually affected more directly?

Here, we face a third and necessary consideration: the law. Indeed, in the case of the Islamic cultural center, if politicians listened to the broader public, they would be violating the Constitution.

There are two important points, then. One is making the distinction between listening and following. A lawmaker ought to listen to the public and to the law when making choices, but he or she need not follow either dogmatically. People have the right to lobby their lawmakers for the change they want. Lawmakers, however, have the right to go against the public’s wishes, though they should be doing so while being aware of the public’s views and the reasons for such views.

The second is that the lawmakers’ conscience and reasoning is not separate from public opinion and law, but rather, is informed by them and is the final line in the deciding process. A lawmaker does not exclusively choose public opinion or law. Rather, the lawmaker should consult the views of his or her constituents and the laws already on the books, and weigh them both against the lawmaker’s beliefs, as well as what sort of changes he or she thinks might foster a more just society. Essentially, the issue is not whom a lawmaker should follow, but to whom he or she should listen before making a decision – a determination that will ultimately be reached by way of the lawmaker's own conscience.

This level of deliberation should not bother citizens in this country. After all, we all admit that the people cannot be involved in every decision. Our system of governance, a representative democracy, is constructed to deal with this fact. We support and vote for lawmakers based on our shared ideas about governance, broadly speaking. We task them with having knowledge about politics and the issues, and trust their judgment to implement our shared ideas and make a better world – to represent our best interests and uphold the Constitution. We don’t expect them to follow us blindly.

President Barack Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope that he is “answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own conscience.” That is, at the end of the day, he cannot merely follow the public’s desires. He must feel at ease with his own contemplation of what is right. This includes considerations such as public opinion and law, but it means not all his decisions will follow popular opinion. Unfortunately, we live in a world where many politicians have a tendency to pay obsessive attention to public opinion merely as an expedient way to stay in office, while others follow their consciences despite reasonable public opinion or the law. In a better world, neither of these extremes would be the appropriate conduct of a politician. Instead, elected representatives would listen to public opinion, law, and their consciences, and follow the resulting reasoning wherever it led.

What about information?

By Massimo Pigliucci

“Information,” in some quarters, seems to be a magical word. Creationist Bill Dembski, for instance, keeps repeating that evolutionary theory cannot explain the production of new information; dualists of every stripe declare the death of “materialism” based on the idea that, you see, information is neither matter nor energy, so there; and of course “singularitarians” and transhumanists think that the key to immortality is to “upload” our consciousness to a computer because, after all, what is human consciousness except information?

There are many technical definitions of information, perhaps the most commonly cited being Shannon’s, which is related to the physical concept of entropy. At bottom, though, in order to meaningfully talk about information there has to be either an organism or a (human made) device involved. For instance, when we say that plants act on information about the position of the sun to orient their leaves, or that DNA carries information from one generation to another, or that a satellite in orbit around earth is gathering information about the weather, we mean that there is a causal input of some sort that interacts with a receiver of a given type.

Another way to put it is that information is any type of pattern of matter/energy that causes (or contributes to cause) the formation or transformation of other patterns. Again, think of the examples given above: the light coming to the plant (energy) causes the alteration of the pattern of orientation of the leaves (matter); the DNA carried by germ cells (matter) contributes to the formation of a new organism in the next generation (matter); and the photographs (energy/matter, depending on the medium) taken by a satellite influence whether you’ll pick up an umbrella (matter) on your way out the door.

Notice that if we see information this way, there is no requirement for the presence of a conscious mind. Plants are not conscious (yeah, yeah, that we know of, but we have no reason at all to believe they are, and every reason to believe they aren’t), and of course neither are segments of DNA. The satellite too isn’t conscious, but of course it was put together by conscious beings.

What, then, is the difference between having or not having consciousness involved in the process? If consciousness is involved, we don’t just have information (in the above defined neutral sense of the term), but knowledge. Plants and pieces of DNA don’t have knowledge of things, only human beings (and of course any other relevantly similar conscious being) have knowledge. (Of course, one can say that plants “know” where to turn their leaves for light, but my point is that they don’t, they are simply using information in a way that was structured by natural selection to increase their chances to survive and reproduce.)

While Shannon-type information theory tells us that information cannot be destroyed without increasing the entropy of a given system, the analysis above suggests the philosophical point that information is a type of energy/matter. That being the case, there is nothing mystical about information, and the concept cannot therefore be brought up as a way to defeat materialism.

As for Dembski’s and co.’s claims about evolutionary theory, it is well understood that biological information of the type stored in DNA is created (and destroyed) all the time. The destruction comes, for instance, with the death of a given organism (which, accordingly, corresponds to a sudden increase in that organism’s entropy level), while creation/change occurs every time there is a mutation, i.e. a chemical alteration in the structure of DNA. Again, nothing magical going on, and certainly no need for conscious agents to get involved — be they of the supernatural type or whatever. (It is, of course, perfectly possible for a conscious agent to alter genetic information, it’s called genetic engineering, and we do it all the time.)

What about the possibility to “upload” one’s consciousness to a computer? My objections to that notion have been detailed elsewhere. Briefly, though, I think the burden of proof is on the singularitarians / transhumanists to show that consciousness is just a matter of logical inputs and outputs of the type that can be simulated — at least in principle — in a computer. Like Searle, I think it more reasonable to consider consciousness a biological phenomenon akin to, say, photosynthesis: something that does have a logical structure, but that also requires certain kinds of substrates to actually work (you can simulate photosynthesis in a computer, but you ain’t getting no sugar out of it). I would note in passing that, as Searle pointed out, if one thinks that consciousness can be “uploaded”, one is committed to a type of dualism (something that singularitarians profess to abhor), because one is assuming that the “stuff” of thought is independent from the stuff of brains. (And before the flood of critical comments gets started, let me make crystal clear that this is absolutely not an argument against artificial intelligence tout court, only against a particular type of artificial intelligence represented by the strong AI program.)

To recap: information is not a third type of thing outside of matter and energy (which are, of course, just two aspects of the same type of thing), and it therefore poses no problem to materialism. Also, talk of information does not require the presence or involvement of conscious minds, unless one wishes to talk about knowledge — the latter being a fairly uncontroversial and utterly non-mystical concept.

Newcomb’s Paradox: An Argument for Irrationality

By Julia Galef

I had heard rumors that Newcomb’s Paradox was fiendishly difficult, so when I read it I was surprised at how easy it seemed. Here’s the setup: You’re presented with two boxes, one open and one closed. In the open one, you can see a $1000 bill. But what’s in the closed one? Well, either nothing, or $1 million. And here are your choices: you may either take both boxes, or just the closed box.

But before you think “Gee, she wasn't kidding, that really is easy,” let me finish: these boxes were prepared by a computer program which, employing advanced predictive algorithms, is able to analyze all the nuances of your character and past behavior and predict your choice with near-perfect accuracy. And if the computer predicted that you would choose to take just the closed box, then it has put $1 million in it; if the computer predicted you would take both boxes, then it has put nothing in the closed box.

So, okay, a bit more complicated now, but still an obvious choice, right? I described the problem to my best friend and said I thought the question of whether to take one box or both boxes was pretty obvious. He agreed, “Yeah, this is a really easy problem!”

Turns out, however, that we each were thinking of opposite solutions as the “obviously” correct one (I was a two-boxer, he was a one-boxer.) And it also turns out we’re not atypical. Robert Nozick, the philosopher who introduced this problem to the public, later remarked, “To almost everyone it is perfectly clear and obvious what should be done. The difficulty is that people seem to divide almost evenly on the problem, with large numbers thinking that the opposing half is just being silly."

Anyway, thence began my trajectory of trying to grok this vexing problem. It's been a wildly swinging trajectory, which I'll trace out briefly and then explain why I think Newcomb's Paradox is more relevant to real life than your typical parlor game of a brain-teaser.

So as I mentioned, first I was a two-boxer, for the simple reason that the closed box is sealed now and its contents can't be changed. Regardless of what the computer predicted I'd do, it's a done deal, and either way I'm better off taking both boxes. Those silly one-boxers must be succumbing to some kind of magical thinking, I figured, imagining that their decision now can affect the outcome of a decision that happened in the past.

But then of course, I had to acknowledge that nearly all the people who followed the two-boxing strategy would end up worse off than the one-boxers, because the computer is stipulated to be a near-perfect predictor. The expected value of taking one box is far greater than the expected value of taking both boxes. And so the problem seems to throw up a contradiction between two equally intuitive definitions of rational decision-making: (1) take the action with the greater expected value outcome, i.e., one-box; versus (2) take the action which, conditional on the current state of the world, guarantees you a better outcome than any other action, i.e., two-box.

So then I started leaning toward the idea that this contradiction must be a sign that there was some logical impossibility in the setup of the problem. But if there is, I can't figure out what. It certainly seems possible in principle, even if not yet in practice, for an algorithm to predict someone's future behavior with high accuracy, given enough data from the past (and given that we live in a roughly deterministic universe).

Finally, I came to the following conclusion: before the box is sealed, the most rational approach is (1), and you should intend to one-box. After the box is sealed your best approach is (2) and you should be a two-boxer. Unfortunately, because the computer is such a good predictor, you can't intend to be a one-boxer and then switch to two-boxing, or the computer will have anticipated that already. So your only hope is to find some way to pre-commit to one-boxing before the machine seals the box, to execute some kind of mental jujitsu move on yourself so that your rational instincts shut off once that box is sealed. And indeed, according to my friends who study economics and decision theory, this is a commonly accepted answer, though there is no really solid consensus on the problem yet.

Now here's the real-life analogy I promised you (adapted from Gary Drescher's thought-provoking Good and Real): imagine you're stranded on a desert island, dying of hunger and thirst. A man in a rowboat happens to paddle by, and offers to transport you back to shore, if you promise to give him $1000 once you get there. But take heed: this man is extremely psychologically astute, and if you lie to him, he'll almost certainly be able to read it in your face.

So you see where I'm going with this: you'll be far better off if you can promise him the money, and sincerely mean it, because that way you get to live. But if you're rational, you can't make that promise sincerely — because you know that once he takes you to shore, your most rational move at that stage will be to say, “Sorry, sucka!” and head off with both your life and your money. If only you could somehow pre-commit now to being irrational later!

Okay, so maybe in your life you don't often find yourself marooned on a desert island facing a psychologically shrewd fisherman. But somewhat less stylized versions of this situation do occur frequently in the real world, wherein people must decide whether to help a stranger and trust that he will, for no rational reason, repay them.

Luckily, in real life, we do have a built in mechanism that allows us – even forces us – to pre-commit to irrational decision-making. In fact, we have at least a couple such mechanisms: guilt and gratitude. Thanks to the way evolution and society seem to have wired our brains, we know we'll feel grateful to people who help us and want to reward them later, even if we could get off scot-free without doing so; or at the least we'll suffer from feelings of guilt if we break our promise and screw them over after they've helped us. And as long as we know that -- and the strangers know we know that -- they're willing to help us, and as a result we end up far better off.

Thus dies Newcomb's Paradox, at least the real-world version of it: slain by rational irrationality.

Massimo’s Picks

By Massimo Pigliucci

* Did you know that according to some conservatives Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity is a plot by left wing liberals?

* More from the NYT’s The Stone on free will, with a note on the new atheism and so-called accommodationism.

* Philosophy of religion, or philosophy and religion?

* One more opinion on the “mosque” at Ground Zero (which is not a mosque, and is not at GZ).

* Uses and abuses of science blogging.

* The philosophy of social reality.

* eSkeptic on Hypatia of Alexandria (the movie and the historical figure).

* A great little picture I took in Reykjavik...

* And of course the latest RS podcast, featuring guest Jennifer Michael Hecht.

Podcast Teaser: Deferring to Experts

By Julia Galef

Several recent conversations here at Rationally Speaking seem to share a common thread: When, and how much, should we take someone's expertise into account in considering his claim?

Massimo argued at TAM that non-experts in a field aren't qualified to reject an expert consensus, such as that on anthropogenic climate change. I have countered that although that's often a good rule, we nevertheless need to evaluate whether a field is legitimate before accepting its experts' consensus — and that in doing so, we can't rely on the opinions of the people in the field to tell us whether it's legitimate.

And most recently, Massimo has taken Jerry Coyne to task for making a philosophical argument without having the necessary expertise. Many commenters, meanwhile, have objected that Massimo is being too strict in his criteria for how much training a person must have before being qualified to speak on a subject. [Massimo says that he actually made an argument against Coyne’s argument, and only in passing pointed out that it is no surprise that Coyne’s philosophy is bad, since he is not trained in the field.]

So we're going to tie these threads together for Episode #16, and ask some related questions, such as: If there is a lot of disagreement among experts on a topic (for example, in philosophy), should we take any individual expert's opinion less seriously? How much consensus is required before a non-expert should say, "OK, looks like this question really is settled"?

We also want to talk about whether there's a difference between these two kinds of expert opinions:

(1) "I believe X, based on lots and lots of empirical evidence which you don't have access to because you're not an expert."

(2) "I believe X, based on a logical argument which I will lay out for you now..."

It may be that it makes a lot of sense to defer to the expert in cases like (1), but not in cases like (2). After all, if the person has laid out all of his reasons for believing X, and you're not missing any relevant empirical evidence, can't you just evaluate his logic without having to take his expertise into account? Or do you need to tell yourself, "Well, I don't agree with his logic, but I'm not an expert so he's more likely to be right"?

We've already received a lot of valuable comments on those two recent posts, which we'll take into account in our discussion, but this is your opportunity to ask any additional questions or comment on the related topics we've raised. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

Michael's Picks

By Michael De Dora

* Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) went ballistic at Republicans after the GOP killed 9/11 responders’ health care legislation. 

* My latest entry on my Center for Inquiry blog: the choices we face don’t always reflect all reasonable options. 

* U.S. soldiers are now making conscientious objector pleas based on their not wanting to serve with openly gay people. 

* A good one from The Onion, funny and full of social commentary: “Nation Shudders at Large Block of Uninterrupted Text.”

* FOX News (and its featured pundits) criticizes Obama for skipping the Boy Scouts’ Jamboree to attend fundraisers and tape The View. Jon Stewart responds.  

* Denis Campbell, in The Guardian, argues that “it is right that we should be responsible for our health.” 

* New York Times columnist David Brooks reports about a recent meeting of “moral naturalists.” 

* Let’s be clear: it’s not a mosque at Ground Zero; it’s an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero.

Jerry Coyne, then and now

By Massimo Pigliucci

This seems to me a very reasonable philosophical position about the epistemic domain of science: “Science simply doesn't deal with hypotheses about a guiding intelligence, or supernatural phenomena like miracles, because science is the search for rational explanations of natural phenomena. We don't reject the supernatural merely because we have an overweening philosophical commitment to materialism; we reject it because entertaining the supernatural has never helped us understand the natural world.”

This one, on the other hand, is philosophically very naive and pretentious: “Anybody doing any kind of science should abandon his or her faith if they wish to become a philosophically consistent scientist.”

The funny thing is that these two quotes come from the same person, and were written only three years apart. The first one can be found in an article published online at Edge.org in 2007, the second one is from a blog entry posted in May of this year. The author is evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne. What is going on?

First, some context. In the Edge article Jerry was commenting on the sad showing at a Republican Presidential debate where three candidates — may their names forever be cast in shame: Senator Sam Brownback, Governor Mike Huckabee, and Representative Tom Tancredo — raised their hand in response to the question “does anyone here not believe in evolution?” Coyne focuses mostly on Brownback’s follow up editorial in the New York Times, correctly lambasting it for its bad logic and even worse grasp of science. (Here is my own take on Brownback’s editorial.)

The blog entry is from Jerry’s own outlet, Why Evolution is True (the title of his book), and is a harsh — and from what I can see, largely well deserved — criticism of Karl Giberson, who previously had chided Coyne and other New Atheists (do they or don’t they like that label? Coyne seems to use it without trouble).

My point, of course, is that Coyne’s philosophy of science has gotten significantly worse in the past three years, ever since he has discovered activist atheism. I have commented on this topic before, using the standard distinction between philosophical and methodological naturalism, and explaining why — to use Coyne’s own example — even the appearance of a 900-ft Jesus in the streets of London would not convince him (or me) that there isn’t a natural explanation for the phenomenon (see A.C. Clarke’s famous third law and of course this classic episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation). Here I am going to take a different approach and propose two more reasons why Coyne-2007 was right and Coyne-2010 is wrong.

The first reason to stick with science as an epistemic activity aimed at discovering empirical truths about the natural world is that gods are not hypotheses, to use Dawkins’ famous phrase in his book. Coyne and other scientists often dig up falsificationism from their limited inventory of philosophical knowledge and claim that the god hypothesis is falsifiable. Besides the fact that philosophers of science have moved well beyond falsificationism (to begin with, because of something known as the Duhem-Quine thesis), even for falsification to work one has to have a reasonably well defined hypothesis.

Karl Popper, the guy who invented falsificationism, famously thought that Einstein’s theory of relativity is an excellent example of science because it is eminently falsifiable. But he also rejected both Marxist theories of history and Freudian psychoanalysis as non-scientific because they were much too flexible: any historical event could somehow be interpreted as the result of class struggles, just as pretty much any human behavior can be “explained” through one type or another of sexual repression.

Conceptions of gods are infinitely more flexible (or vacuous, if you prefer) than either Marxist or Freudian theories, and they are thus simply not falsifiable. This is often (naively) mistaken to imply that no specific claim made by these theories can be rejected on empirical grounds. That’s as manifestly not true as it is besides the point: of course modern science can firmly reject the empirical claim that the earth is a few thousand years old; but since “the god hypothesis” doesn’t behave as a hypothesis at all from the epistemological standpoint, it doesn’t matter. In the cases we are discussing there is no science-like connection between theoretical constructs and empirically verifiable facts, so to “falsify” the latter is equivalent to shooting into a cloud of gas. It unnecessarily flatters and elevates religious belief to treat it as science.

The second point I wish to make is broader. Whenever I get into these discussions, Jerry and others who think along similar lines seem to conclude that I therefore do not have reasons to reject religious belief as the nonsense on stilts that it truly is. That is because they seem to equate science with reason, yet another position that is abysmally simplistic from a philosophical perspective. Science is conducted through the application of reason to a particular type of problems and in particular ways. But reason can be applied to other problems in other ways. Philosophy, of course, is an example, as it makes progress through the analysis and dissection of concepts, not via empirical discoveries. Logic and mathematics are additional obvious examples: mathematical theorems are neither discovered nor proved by using scientific methods at all. Unless one wishes to conclude that math is not a rational enterprise, then one is forced to admit that science = reason is a bad equation.

Indeed, even science itself is far from being an activity rooted in reason alone. A standard distinction in philosophy of science is made between the context of discovery and the context of justification. The first one deals with how scientists come up with new theories or ideas, the second one on how they proceed to empirically test or establish them. The notion is that the context of justification is where science works in a rational way, by logically connecting hypotheses and empirical facts. But discoveries are often haphazard and non-rational in nature, with scientists themselves being unable to account for how exactly they came up with a particular idea (often this happens during a walk, while taking a shower, while dreaming, or while on drugs — none of which are classical laboratory settings where people sit down and rationally work through the problem).

Things get even worse, as more recent suggestions, for instance that of Thomas Kuhn (whose notion of paradigm shifts is arguably the only other piece of philosophy of science of which most scientists are dimly aware) when he questioned the sharpness of the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. This questioning would make Coyne and colleagues even more unhappy, because it goes in the direction of further reducing the relevance of reason to the scientific enterprise.

The two points I made here amount to claiming that many scientists do not understand the nature of science as well as philosophers do, and are hence prone to make exaggerated claims about how science works and what it can do. This should not surprise anybody, since the business of scientists is to do science, not to spend time thinking about its history and methods. That is why philosophy (and history) of science are scholarly activities that are legitimately distinct from science itself.

But when it comes to writing for the general public, I suggest that scientists stick to what they know best, unless they are willing to engage the literature of the field(s) that they wish to comment upon. When Coyne makes statements of the type “anybody doing any kind of science should abandon his or her faith if they wish to become a philosophically consistent scientist”, he literally does not know what he is talking about because he does not have a grasp of what it means to be “philosophically consistent” in this context. He has of course no obligation to study philosophy, but then he should refrain from writing about it as a matter of intellectual honesty toward his readers.

P.S.: it may be a little while before I'm able to answer your (surely numerous and critical) comments, since I’ll be on vacation in Iceland when this runs...

The Media Does Not Exist in a Vacuum

By Michael De Dora

In the aftermath of the latest Andrew Breitbart fabrication – in which the right wing news partisan posted on his website a selected clip of a longer speech by U.S. Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod that made her look racist, leading to her firing – liberals have centered most of the blame on Breitbart himself. Breitbart, they charge, is an ideologue and a liar who cost a good woman her job (Sherrod was director of rural development for the state of Georgia). To be sure, there is much merit to these charges. Breitbart has distorted the truth before, and in this instance he once again acted unethically, posting only part of Sherrod’s full speech at a recent NAACP banquet. Without the context, she appeared to have rather questionable beliefs about race (1).

However, while it is easy to point all the fingers at Breitbart, that would be a mistake. Let me be clear: this essay is neither pardoning the behavior of Breitbart or FOX News (the latter of which used the issue for political purposes), nor excusing Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and others for reacting so quickly, and wrongly. Rather, this essay argues that while people often find it convenient to blame the media, in this case Breitbart and FOX News, for social problems, they ought to realize that it is a social problem that feeds the media. That is, Breitbart and media outlets cannot be understood apart from the social and political context in which they exist. Why does Breitbart have the power he has? Why do people listen to Breitbart? (2) Because they agree with him.

Contemplate a mirror example. Liberals often complain that FOX News essentially gives the Tea Party and, more broadly, the right wing a news platform with which to spread their ideas. Of course, every news agency has an audience, and more or less for survival purposes, they play to that audience. FOX News has been worse than other news organizations at objectivity in any sense of the word. But FOX News hasn’t made people right wing in their beliefs; they haven’t created their audience from scratch. FOX News might further the reach of the Tea Party or of the Right, but even that depends on some core group of FOX News viewers wanting to hear about the Tea Party and Right ideology. Again, this does not excuse FOX News portraying the Tea Party’s stance as correct and worth supporting (they have gone out of their way to do so, which is despicable for a “news” outlet). But it does mean the Tea Party and the Right exist for reasons outside of FOX News.

Even if Breitbart and others “create” the news – Shirley Sherrod is a racist! Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.! – people need to buy into it for it to work. As Ken Taylor recently wrote over at Philosophy Talk, “it takes at least two minds to make a social reality.” Breitbart (or FOX News, or whomever else) cannot create a social problem – only reflect, support, or reject it. After all, did Breitbart himself fire Sherrod? No. Does he alone finance his website, which he used to post the Sherrod video? No. Breitbart has a market: people who will accept much of what he throws out there as correct (this goes for all sides along the political spectrum, but this essay is focused on the recent Breitbart-related news). Even in the case of the Birthers, who deny Obama’s presidential legitimacy based on the unsubstantiated idea that he wasn’t born in the U.S., there needs to be a crowd of people who want to doubt information about Obama’s birth for the media to cover it seriously. As Gary Younge once succinctly put it, the media cannot sell Spam as steak; someone actually needs to think, or be highly open to the idea, that Spam is steak to begin with.

By blaming social problems on one man or one organization, we thus ignore the social reality that these men and organizations are backed by millions of Americans, and make the problem out to be much simpler than it really is. They would not exist in such powerful roles without the support of a sizable number of people. This is apparently hard to accept for some on the political Left. Consider, for instance, that despite the fact that poll after poll has shown that up to half of Americans believe the world is 6,000 years old, few people I discuss such polls with believe me, dismissing the idea that so many Americans believe such a crazy thing. One can only hope that people soon overcome this inability to accept reality , for the well-being of our country, indeed our world, may depend on it.

With Sherrod now vindicated, and Breitbart and FOX News looking extraordinarily bad, some are arguing that the media and others should ignore these two going forward (though one could easily argue that their true colors had been revealed long ago). But even so, they represent a sizable social contingent, and for that reason alone it seems we ought to pay some attention. Humans are not naturally skeptics, and even reasonable people will get sucked into believing lies and half-truths. Media outlets haven’t done a terribly good job helping out in this regard, leaving much of the nurturing of skepticism to philosophers, social critics, bloggers, and grassroots advocates. Yet we still need to be informed about that which we ought to be skeptical – in this case, what millions of Americans believe – and the media is an important resource. Remember, other news organizations did not ignore the Tea Party's goings-on. CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC – they all covered and continue to report on the movement. This is not because they want to give it credence. Rather, it is news about something going on in the country, and so it makes sense that it should be reported. All Americans should want to be informed about what their neighbors believe and do regarding politics, whether they agree or not.

Contrary to what many would tell you, Breitbart and FOX News did not create the Tea Party and the extreme Right which wants to disable Obama and his administration in any and every way possible. Instead of blaming them for creating social problems, we ought to consider the complex and numerous factors that influence what we see represented and supported in the media, and ponder how much of an effort we've made in the battle against that with which we disagree. Anything less would wrongly simplify our problems and let everyone off the hook too easily.

Notes.

(1) The full video soon surfaced, and Sherrod has largely been cleared, though she is still unemployed. The USDA offered her a new, different job, but it seems she won’t take it.

(2) Incidentally, this raises the issue of one of the many enormous problems with the media which is that it often desires to cater to the audience instead of telling the audience what it might need to hear, what is accurate. That is, too often news agencies seem to base their decisions on the question “is there a market for this?” But that is a topic for another essay.