bah
SOMETHING that annoys me about this open/closed mindedness business when levelled as a criticism against scepticism, rationality, etc, which I didn’t say before, is that it is encouraging bad science.
It is all very well to say “if you were truly open minded you’d have no preconceptions” when referring to investigating the supernatural, but in this sense open mindnedness is overrated. Claims of the supernatural are very open to being tested; they tell us about something we can allegedly access in the empirical world. But to remain ‘open minded’ while investigating is in effect misjudging the extraordinary conclusion as being reasonably probable, which is likely to affect the integrity of your investigation. If you say “I had a sandwich for lunch” then this is fairly ordinary claim and I’m not going to doubt it. If you say “I had a sandwich for lunch and it cured me of my rabies” then suddenly a little more evidence is required, because it is a claim which is extraordinary. ‘Open mindedness’ however would have you shed any preconceptions of probability, at which point the two claims become roughly equivalent. If you take one at face value you are obligated to take the other at face value too. This is clearly not a line of thought which concerns itself with sense.
When applied to any kind of investigation, open mindedness just isn’t how science works. It’s supposed to be that you find something interesting, you propose a hypothesis to explain it then you have a go at finding ways in which your hypothesis fails. Then after you’re out of ideas you invite other people to try. Pseudo-open-mindedness doesn’t work like this, it says “here’s an idea, you’re not allowed to disagree because if you do you’re being closed minded”.
It’s an ad hominem attack of the emperor’s new clothes level of sophistication.
These people are probably largely well meaning and just don’t understand science or rationality or thinking in general, and to them it seems reasonable that being sceptical of something they believe in equates to closed mindedness, but it’s not really an accurate usage of the phrase. There are two issues they have attributed to open/closed mindedness and they are bias and honesty. The bias scale runs -1 to 1 and we are just two equivalent opposites, but the honesty scale runs 0 to 1.
the god delusion chapter 3
Continuing my exciting following of the God Delusion, chapter 3 concerns common arguments for god’s existence and rebuttals. I quite liked this chapter, although anyone with an interest in the subject will already have heard the main arguments listed here.
The most interesting of these arguments are the ontological proofs, which are clever mathematical/logical (I’ll treat these two words as interchangeable in this entry) arguments which proceed as follows:
1) Imagine a super perfect who cannot be any more super-perfect
2) Suppose said god does not exist
3) Said god would be even more perfect if he did exist
(3) contradicts (1), meaning (2) lead to a contradiction so it must be false. Therefore god must exist.
Dawkins ridicules this a bit, which I find pretty weak, because he can’t actually find a flaw in it. If you study maths at all you’ll see proofs like this all the time, it’s a perfectly valid proof and technique, although Dawkins seems to dismiss it as immature. Even so, this proof isn’t awfully convincing. I think the problem with this particular one, which makes it distinct from ones we are happy to see as valid, is that we are granting a mathematical proof the power to tell us things about our world. This is not what they are supposed to do. They are supposed to tell us things about a mathematical system. Many people think that maths is somehow woven into the fabric of the universe, but I think this is just a fairly naive Platonist interpretation.
The result (god does exist) is actually contradicted again by the fact that being ‘perfect’ in every way is impossible. One cannot be perfectly evil and perfectly good, and if you’re not both, you’re not perfect. Nobody claims god is perfectly evil (of course), but they do claim he is omniscient and omnipotent, and these two properties seem necessary for perfection. These two properties also imply a contradiction: if god is omniscient he already knows the course of the universe which means he cannot later change it, which means he is not omnipotent (as mentioned in the book). As does perfectly merciful and perfectly just: just implies punishing everyone as they deserve, merciful implies being a bit soft and not (as mentioned on Wikipedia). The fact that our system apparently allows two contradictory theorems shows that there’s something a bit wrong. [Or actually that's being a bit generous. Since overall perfection is contradictory and the above argument depends upon it, the argument is vacuous anyway. Although you can loosen your definition of perfection]
I think the actual fallacy in these arguments is in the word ‘imagine’. If you imagine a god who does not exist then you’re not imagining the best god possible. I can imagine an elephant that flies, but that doesn’t bring it into existence, not even if I set up an argument analogous to the above where its nonexistence is contradictory … imagine a super perfect elephant, suppose elephant lacks the ability to fly, uh oh then it’s not perfect so it must be able to fly, now suppose the elephant doesn’t exist, uh oh then it’s not perfect so it must exist. So where’s my flying elephant? Just for geographical clarity I can define that ‘being in my room’ is necessary for perfection. And yet still no flying elephant. An exercise to the over-enthusiastic reader is to investigate what happens when you want to introduce a second god who’s better than the first.
And this basically highlights why this stuff works in maths and not in real life: because maths is pretty much imaginary. We can imagine something, whether it’s the number 14, the square root of minus one, a circle or a universal Turing machine, as long as we can define it in words or symbols, it ‘exists’ as much as it needs to for it to be a valid, usable mathematical entity. That doesn’t mean it really physically exists or that it needs to; you can argue that ’14′ exists by giving me 14 apples if you want1 but you will find it more difficult to show that (-1)1/2 exists because it’s a nonsensical operation on anything we can show physically (yet we can handle it just fine in maths), and you would definitely have trouble physically showing a number greater than the number of atoms in the universe2 really exists, but it would still be perfectly valid to use it. My flying elephant is imaginary so it exists and is usable as far as the proof is concerned, but the proof is not able to reach out and effect a flying elephant into the real world.
Therefore a proof like this can assert the existence of something and be entirely correct logically, but have no link to real life, hence you have to be a bit sceptical when someone uses supposedly infallible reasoning to ‘prove’ some less than obvious statement about the universe without worrying about empirical evidence; it’s a clear sign they have a naive view of maths/logic.
I believe this also addresses Gödel’s stronger and more rigorous ontological proof, but it’s a bit cryptic and I haven’t sat down and gone through it.
_________
1. I’d say this was rather missing the point, but we define natural numbers in terms of sets so maybe not. Although technically numbers are defined in terms the empty set so maybe it is. Actually this was a really big problem: what is a number? we have all these things and we never said what they actually were. How can our maths be truly rigorous if we’ve not addressed what these things are? The solution is bizarre, clever, and thoroughly brilliant, we define them in terms of NOTHINGS:
0 = {} [the brackets denote a set, and its contents are separated by commas. In this case, there is nothing between the brackets because the set is empty and we call it the empty set]
n+1 = n U {n} [the joining together of n and the set containing n,
e.g. {0, 1} U {2, 3} = {0, 1, 2, 3} ]
so,
0 = {}
1 = {} U {{}} = {{}} = {0}
2 = {{}} U {{{}}} = {{}, {{}}} = {0, 1}
3 = {{}, {{}}} U { {{}, {{}}} } = {{}, {{}}, {{}, {{}}}} = {0, 1, 2}
and so on. Obviously it’s easier if you start substituting in the numbers rather than keeping the indecipherable lists of brackets, but I thought it was interesting to highlight that each natural number is defined by clever arrangements of nothing. This should convince you that maths is something quite separate from real life.
2. Assume this is finite. Even if it’s not, it is sufficient that the statement would be correct if the number was finite.
who you gonna call?
I sort of enjoyed Derren Brown last night. On the one hand I was pleased to see rationality prevail, on the other hand I was sad not to see anything genuinely spooky. On the other hand (we calculate new hand indices through addition modulo 2) I was a little relieved not to, because I’m pretty sure most people, sceptical or not, don’t REALLY want to see a ghost.
It followed Lou Gentile, who before his recent death (we can only assume he died battling the forces of evil), was a demonologist. We start off by seeing him on an investigation into a woman’s home which she believes is possessed by spirits. They have set up a camera which is activated by movement. The camera turns on and records NOTHING INTERESTING. ZOMG THE CAMERA MOVED all on its own, there MUST BE GHOSTS. Oh wait the owner of the house keeps cats. How many do you have? 6? But they weren’t near the camera, we’re assured. Hmm. Oh and also she’s a 40 year old woman who has dyed black hair, tattoos, a lip piercing, 3 rings in her ears, black nails. She’s not, as far as we can tell, on her way to an Addams family convention, she dresses like this all the time. I would say she WANTS to be haunted.
It sort of went on in much the same way. There was footage of a man being possessed, which was rather disturbing, except a professor at a university watched it and said “yep, that’s a psychogenic non-epileptic seizure” (some kind of stress induced fit) thereby reducing the mysticism factor quite a bit.
We also had some other stuff but nothing which was not easily explained by sleep paralysis or apophenia. He was big on electronic voice phenomenon (EVP), which is when you turn the gain up on a low quality audio recorder so it picks up and amplifies and distorts electronic noise, then say it’s a ghost speaking to you. Not really convincing evidence for the existence of ghosts because it starts with the premise that ghosts exist.
The interesting outcome of the programme was that Lou didn’t charge any money for his services because he thought it was immoral to charge people for exorcising demons. So he either did it just for fun (highly unlikely) or because he genuinely believed in all of it. And his clientele clearly believed he was helping them. So what’s the harm? Nothing, leave him alone.
All in all the series was a bit rubbish because Derren never managed to come up with anything inexplicable. I would have preferred it if he had found something interesting. But he didn’t.
–
the problem with life after death…
…is that it’s so incredbly human to want to know that you or your relatives don’t REALLY die. It’s such a huge personal bias that people want to believe in it without being objective. It probably made sense hundreds of years ago when human consciousness was a total black box mystery but now we have a better idea how the brain works, and we also have computers attempting to mimic intelligence. Okay this hasn’t got very far yet but I don’t believe there is any technical limitation to a conscious computer program and once that happens it will mostly disprove the notion that human consciousness requires something mystical, which can live on past physical death.
It might turn out that brain simulation goes a slightly less obvious route first though. We might figure out a way to essentially clone the brain into software without necessarily understanding its conceptual high-ish level workings (i.e. that area between chemistry and psychology), in which case we shall be able to clone consciousness which gives us instant artifical intelligence.
Plus let’s not forget that WE OURSELVES might be artifical intelligence living inside a computer simulation. Although personally I don’t buy into this because (assuming we would be the product of a species which evolved in similar circumstances to ours):
1) The necessary traits we have seen to become the dominant species on a planet seem to be at odds with long term existence past a certain point. Sooner or later someone’s going to bomb you to smithereens because if they didn’t have that instinct ingrained pretty strongly, they would have been eaten by wild badgers 10 million years ago.
2) Assuming a less self centred, more hive-like individual existence (like super-bees), it seems grossly unlikely that such a civilization would reach an advanced level of science research. Our achievement is driven by personal wonder, ambition, obsession and occasionally autism and lack of friends, I can’t see a hive of beings motivated more by instinct than thought ever achieving the same things. It’s not an evolutionary necessity or likelihood for such a species to gain a technology advantage, it’s more likely that, if threatened, the shortest path to evolutionary survival would be something much less elegant (like brute force).
So what I am saying is that any civilization would either destroy itself before reaching, or simply fail to reach, the necessary advancement to run such a simulation. But I am rather extrapolating on the nature of other civilizations from a pretty small sample set.
Although there’s an interesting paper on the simulation idea here: http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
oh yes, I have gone off topic. Ghosts indeed. Wooooooooooo
UPDATE: ZOMG GUYS I had sleep paralysis this morning (I think). I always kind of dreaded waking up one day to find myself paralysed, but that’s not what happened because it was in a lucid dream! I tried to move and couldn’t, and I thought “hmmm, am I dreaming”. Then two men came in and explained to me that I was paralysed and needed looking after, and I said “No it’s okay, I’m pretty sure I’m dreaming” and the one standing to the right of the bed said “no I’m sorry but you’re not” and I said “no I still think I am”. GUESS WHO WAS RIGHT. Had I been more alert I would have noticed that my bed is to the wall and there is no way he could stand on the right of it. hmm. I’m not sure if it was sleep paralysis or if I was just dreaming I was paralysed. HMM.
yes there is no there isn’t
As you may/may not know I have a love/hate relationship with Derren Brown. One the one hand I really respect him as a sceptic and overall spokesman of common sense, on the other hand he drives me insane with his pseudoscientific gimmick explanations to his own magic tricks. I don’t know if this will be visible outside the UK (and if you aren’t from the UK you’ll probably not be able to handle strong Liverpudlian accents anyway, so it may be a blessing if you can’t see it) but for the next 26 days you can watch an interesting programme on the Channel 4 website consisting of Derren doing a slightly Louis Theroux style documentary on self-proclaimed medium Joe Power.
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/derren-brown-investigates
The paranormal is something that supposedly has a huge wealth of totally elusive evidence for it, but I am not one of the ‘chosen few’ who has been selected to view it, so I wanted to watch this programme and see Derren quite convinced that this man could really speak to dead people. We all know that there are plenty of bad mediums around, but it would be far more interesting to find one who was really good. The programme is quite generous to begin with and shows a fairly incredible ‘reading’; could it be that Joe is going to turn out to be that elusive REALLY GOOD medium? Unfortunately not. It gets more balanced later on. In the next part Joe ‘reads’ a couple of Hollyoaks actors in which he gets a fair few misses, then Joe invites Derren to try one and through cold reading (so he claims, but he probably did some research before hand) Derren hits a couple of specifics more impressive than Joe’s. At the end Joe, who seems to feel a bit shown up (through insecurity rather than any good reason, or perhaps he hoped Derren would make a hash of it so he could use that as “see I have a gift!”), amusingly states that “I come up with facts” in a striking juxtaposition with two minutes earlier when his hit rate was about 50% and most of his hits required the other person to fill in the context. Then just to show he’s one up on Derren he casually mentions “oh you don’t know about the affair, do you” to her, but refuses to tell her anymore(!). We also see a fairly generic stage act where he throws out names and numbers and the audience occasionally says “oh you said Jean earlier, I think you meant Joan”, and lots of dead grandparents pass on exciting messages like “I’m proud of you”, but never “I forgot to tell you that I left my old service revolver under the floorboards in the bedroom”.
Things go downhill for him from this point in the programme. The one interesting hit he got with the Hollyoaks actors was when he predicted the girl drove a mini. This became less interesting when Derren’s driver goes “yeah I could have told you that, she pulled up in it while we were in the car park”. It also turns out that Joe makes a habit of going to everyone’s toilet as soon as he gets into their house to read them and suddenly his amazing ability to throw out numbers of relatives seems less impressive. Towards the end he has a reading with a woman named Roz where he gets absolutely nothing right, at which point he decides it’s all Derren’s fault and storms off (out of Joe’s earshot, Derren called it “bad cold reading”, and I agree with the ‘bad’ part, but I think the ‘reading’ part is being a little generous). Then just to ensure that his credibility really is completely shot to bits, right at the end there is the revelation that the woman whom he read to begin with with impressive accuracy (his only convincing success) is actually his sister’s next door neighbour.
Throughout the programme Derren borrows a few expressions and tones-of-voice from Louis Theroux as he tries to remain diplomatically neutral in Joe’s presence, but the overall result isn’t so much a case for Joe Power as it is Joe Powerless.
At one point Derren wishes to set up a test which involves Joe reading various people without the two of them being in the same room. Joe was initially willing to take a test but upon finding out exactly what it involves he responds with “a dog wouldn’t take that test, it was designed for failure“.
Unusual comparisons aside, this highlights something interesting I have noticed with a few people now, as my interest in the occult and paranormal (or lack of it) has grown: People who proclaim supernatural powers are often quite willing to consent to a ‘test’ but then pull out later on as more details as to what the test would involve emerge.
Naively a test is something that’ll prove an outcome. That’s an okayish definition. Even more naively, a successful test is something that proves you were right. That’s a terrible definiton, and it’s totally wrong, but it’s kind of the default view until you’ve thought about it.
Think of it like testing software; you’ve just written your program and you tested it and found no problems. Is that good? Not really; you just spent all that time testing it and your program still has the same number of errors as it has before you tested it. It was a waste of time. If it was a mature piece of software and it’s been tested extensively before then okay, you’re starting to get a picture that it doesn’t have many problems, but if it hasn’t been tested before then your test was a failure because it did not advance your knowledge past the uninformed view you originally had.
The point of a test is to find new information. If you design a test for which the only possible outcome is to be in the exact same place as you started, the only thing your test can prove is that you’ve lost the plot (if you ever had it).
In short, when a believer says they are willing to ‘test’ their beliefs/claims, they usually fail to understand what a test really is. They erroneously believe that the point of a test is to CONFIRM their beliefs by using scenarios that disallow any chance of discrediting them. Apart from this being a waste of time, in terms of being evidence of their being correct it is as convincing as building a house of cards then inviting people to look at it intently, then proclaiming its failure to fall over is proof of its invulnerability, even though you have only allowed it to be tested by the power of staring.
