I was fascinated to watch as the world's leading and probably most wealthy fantasy writer, Jo (JK) Rowling investigated her family heritage in the documentary series "Who do you think you are?" What separated JK Rowling from others I have watched is the juxtaposition of three traditions - the making of fantasy (I use that word 'making' deliberately, rather than 'creation', to indicate a kind of 'making' akin to 'making a sandwich'), the evolution of myth and the forensic investigation of myth.
First, I disclose that I despise Harry Potter and I have not been able to stomach more than a couple of pages of reading Harry Potter and the movies are only as interesting as the special effects. I find the characterisation thin, the plot formulaic and the settings overly romantic (in a kind of English way also found in those other famous fantasy writers, Lewis and Tolkein).
Don't get me wrong or cast me too thinly. If Harry Potter had emerged from somewhere 30 years early when I was a child, I would have gobbled it up, as I did the Narnia series and the Lord of the Rings tome. To live in a fantasy world is blessed; a childish indulgence that switches time off and takes you away from the pressing concerns of the world. We must, I fear, have fantasy to keep us sane. It is the refuge that we can no longer find in many quarters.
A fantasy character must not be too real. They must not be sordid. No addiction, no homelessness, no hopelessness. How delightfully ironic is it that Kirsten Stewart, star of Twilight, was recently sacked from a film because her 'real' life (or the life that the media spun) become too 'sordid' because she (gasp!) become someone's mistress? Heavens! How could wowser Stephanie Meyer ever approve of a character that, well, was sexually flawed?
No, authors that nuance characters to resemble real life just don't sell. They just aren't fulfilling our lust for escapist serenity; of our timeless moment with a two-dimensional world. And here I disclose again, in the interests of fairness. I spend far too much time in a two-dimensional world of Age of Empires.
But, back to someone genuinely interesting - JK Rowling. According to the documentary, she inherited a family myth of a war hero amongst her ancestors, a young man who came to England in the 19th century and made his way in world of hospitality, working his way through the ranks at the Savoy Hotel. Later, in the war, he performs acts of bravery for which he is awarded France's equivalent of the Victoria Cross.
The story of her ancestry twists and turns, but her attention is caught by a young girl from Alsace who loses her father at a young age and struggles in poverty in a large family to make her way in the world, eventually falling pregnant while working as a maid (as many maids did, too often to their masters). The characters are large, alive and compelling. At times, despite editing, JK Rowling is visibly overwhelmed and at other times exuberant. These people provide a satisfaction incomparable to Harry Potter.
Even more compelling, however, is Rowling's journey through myth. In crude terms, all myth is the embellishment of the truth of events with details that make the narrative flow, thus making it accessible and transferable. We add fantasy to experience. But myth does not suffer the 2-dimensionality of fantasy. Myth must have concrete referents, objective evidence that can be verified. No-one inherits a family myth about ancestors who lived on the moon, nor one where Texas has ceded from the US, despite both of these being credible elements of fantasy.
Rowling is surprisingly relentless and forensic in uncovering that the Louis that she has down as a war hero is actually, incredibly, a man of the same name but a different person to her forefather. This 'imposter' to her myth is certainly a war hero, but certificates prove conclusively he is not related to Rowling. Laughably, the 'war medal' that the family has carefully harboured turns out to a badge that identifies his membership of a trade union. You can see that this revelation has a kind of crushing effect on Rowling. Her spontaneous reaction (laughing) is then matched by a resolve to pursue the family myth deeper; to validate her family's memories.
Myth does this. When we discover that a cherished element of myth is quite plainly 'bullshit', our reaction is not to set it aside and move on. It gets under our skin. We are determined to separate truth and fantasy for the sake of our identity. It drives us to scientific endeavour - to uncovering, systematically, those primary historical sources which either add to or deny the narrative we have inherited.
In an unimaginable coincidence (one no novelist could conceive), Rowling's Louis, after being raised first as the illegitimate son of that maid, and leaving the family to find his way in England, living for years in England and raising a family from which he is alienated by sad circumstances, but returning in his thirties to serve in the French army in WWI, turns out to be a reluctant hero when the war came unexpectedly to a part of France defended only by 'old men', poorly trained and reserved to defend bridges. Rowling's delight at finding that her Louis is, in fact, a hero of greater standing than the 'imposter', is palpable. The family myth is validated beyond expectations.
But some curious elements of Rowling's investigation of her family myth are just as telling as this evidentiary support for the myth. Rowling is determined not to be German. Rowling is clearly fluent in French, reading it and translating from historical documents with surprising ease and fluency. Her blunt reaction when encountering an offcial document written in German is, "Oh. What's this language!", betraying a deep animosity towards anything German.
Despite the maid's surname being Schuch, there being a real possibility that she spoke German and the national identity of people of Alsace being somewhat blurry, Rowling seeks to 'ethnically cleanse' her heritage of Germans. Shades of "don't mention the war". A Prussian army marching through the village of Schuch's youth is considered sinister. Fantasy, it seems, continues to be layered upon that forensic evidence to bolster a sense of deep seated tribalism.
I confess to be entirely taken with Rowling. She is intelligent, engaging and not at all arrogant, despite her fabulous success. Her polished English accent occasionally lapses and we hear some the accent of her youth, especially in her emotional reactions. Most certainly, she is English, through and through, yet identifies so determinedly as French.
Myth can never really be 'untangled' nor properly analysed to determine what might be claimed as historical and what as gratuitous embellishment. Rowling's quest was never really going to myth-busting. Instead, the already rich mythology of the family narrative was further enriched and expanded and new, more provocative and endearing characters were added.
As humans have journeyed through space as a curious species on a lonely island in our galaxy, the trillions of narratives have been woven into the fabric of myth. No surprise, then, that religion, with its formidable arsenal of cultural mechanisms, was able to distil myth into a coherent world view by which humans could contextualise their personal narrative. As surely as the Internet and social media, this curious social animal was going to create the myth of 'the universe and everything' and this myth was going to be carried along through generations of telling and further creative embellishment.
Of course, embellishment had to serve tribal prejudice. It was not sensible to add aliens from the cosmos who came to earth to erect communication beacons. Embellishment must reinforce that others are 'baddies' and we are good. Embellishment must establish our eating practices as clean and others as dirty. Religion as systematic mythology settled into codes of conduct and became a handy mechanism for opportunistic despots to rule. In Constantine's quest to become the one emperor, the pervasive theology of One God was fortunate 'grist'.
But to dismiss myth as a kind of plague on culture or historical memory is to neglect the baby kicking and screaming in the bath water. Myth, and its aggregating mechanism, religion, creates in us a most compelling drive for verification. As Montgomery discovered in debunking creationism in The Rocks Don't Lie, the very engagement with myth drives humans to search for objective verification. We are never properly satisfied with myth without some 'hard evidence'. Rowling's quest is an entirely human quest.
Of course, such engagement leads inevitably to scientific method as the means of verification. Science grows directly from myth. Ptolemy's precursor to the heliocentric model of the solar system, buried so comprehensively by Christendom, is most certainly resurrected by someone driven to claim an objective truth behind the story they have inherited, whether it be about stars or conquerors. As surely as myth breeds fantastic embellishment, so myth drives our deep seated desire to 'know the truth'; a truth, that Colonel Jessop reminds us in A Few Good Men, we are deeply uncomfortable with.
In the twilight years of the tradition of myth-making, people today are clinging to religion to quench their thirst for that narrative. Unfortunately, most religions carry huge embarrassing baggage of codified savagery and cruelty and breath-taking bigotry. Despite the sanitising of this baggage (keep "Thous shalt not kill" but omit "God hates fags"), it is increasingly an unwanted side-effect of maintaining a yearning for myth. In nail-clinging desperation, religions are spinning these myths into a myriad of directions.
Thus, we witness the rise and rise of clumsy paradigms driven by spin. Science and religion, cultural cohabitants, are driven into conflict by increasingly shrill voices. You must choose a side. Either you are for the war in Iraq or against. You cannot complicate nor nuance your position. The army of the Lord or the army of the secular horde. Choose now, pilgrim!
Ironically, notable atheists like Sam Harris have enlisted on the side of rank tribalism. Islam is a religion of violence, unmistakably. We should, he posits, profile people for security checks, premised on their religion. Of course, the logical extension is that every Islamic person is suspect and we have good reason, as sensible Americans, to maintain a vigilance that could well justify vigilantism and perhaps even the horror of 84 shot dead on Utoya Island.
The spin that virally infects the WWW is that the average Islamic person actually subscribes to violent jihad. Simply ignore the hundreds of millions of Muslims who daily go about their life with not much more malice than one might reserve for a mother-in-law. Spin, unlike myth, cannot afford to admit either objective investigation nor doubt about the narrative. You are either with us, or against us. You either believe or you don't. It has no positive off-shoot in driving people to science, as myth has so long provided. It plays only on the guilt of betraying one's tribe; it throws the 'traitor' starkly into relief.
We may be in awe of Julia Gillard's recent Canute-like stance against the sea of spin, but, in the end, this bravery may go unrewarded. Rowling's Louis may have stood against an overwhelming enemy and triumphed, despite personal injury, but Julia has no hope. The very viral nature of social media and the WWW has put myth, science and religion firmly into their death-throes. We may be the last of the human myth makers. We may be the last real humans.
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Sunday, May 27, 2012
A study in memetics (or how to Chinese whisper)
I didn't know until today that my sister had a blog. Its called Alice-Mutton and I wonder if that inadvertently describes what its all about. There certainly is some Wonderland stuff in there. One post caught my eye. Its on Global Warming.
Now I know its against the rules to criticise one's sibling, but there is a tale for the telling in this one.
Quite by reflex, the English teacher in me noticed a jarring attempt at what is called parallelism in writing. You repeat a structure using an antonym of synonym. Poets use it to great effect. Its quite compelling. "I am Australian" overuses it.
"Anthropogenic or heliocentric."
Now, if you are using the literary device properly, you say:
"Anthropogenic or heliogenic."
If you were thinking "heliocentric", you might be discussing world view of the Middle Ages.
Odd, indeed. This led me to wonder if my sister had written that at all. So, I Googled the next bit, which seemed to suggest that 8000 scientists were challenging climate change. 8000. That's a lot. And from CERN. That gives it a bit of a clout.
So the first item in the search comes up with a tasty conspiracy theory site called Red Ice Creations. Amongst its recommended sites is The Conspiracy Archive. Scroll down to the bottom of the page on Red Ice Creations. Don't laugh out loud. This is serious. The FBI is out to get you. If they don't, the United Nations will.
Back to the 8000. Of course, CERN employs a lot of scientists. How many have been involved in the CLOUD research? There they are, smiling at you, all 14 of them. So why say 8000? Oh, well, that's to get your attention. If the meme is to get traction, it has to have big numbers. But, to be fair, this is a fairly large scale international collaboration, as this CERN publication shows.
So what did they actually say? You know that someone is hiding something when they won't link to the original work, but selectively quoting instead. Its a sure sign of memetics at work. Andrew Orlowski at Red Ice Creations doesn't want you to read:
"Atmospheric aerosols exert an important influence on climate1 through their effects on stratiform cloud albedo and lifetime2 and the invigoration of convective storms3. Model calculations suggest that almost half of the global cloud condensation nuclei in the atmospheric boundary layer may originate from the nucleation of aerosols from trace condensable vapours4, although the sensitivity of the number of cloud condensation nuclei to changes of nucleation rate may be small5, 6. Despite extensive research, fundamental questions remain about the nucleation rate of sulphuric acid particles and the mechanisms responsible, including the roles of galactic cosmic rays and other chemical species such as ammonia7. " (Article in Nature, Kirkby et al., Nature, 25 August 2011, my red highlight added)
Note the proper scientific wording using the appropriate modality of certainty. That's because their conclusions are tentative. As Kirby explains:
“It was a big surprise to find that aerosol formation in the lower atmosphere isn’t due to sulphuric acid, water and ammonia alone,” said Kirkby. “Now it’s vitally important to discover which additional vapours are involved, whether they are largely natural or of human origin, and how they influence clouds. This will be our next job.”
The Royal Society of Chemistry had a somewhat different conclusion to Orlowski.
"Scientists have studied in detail how human activity influences global warming, but humanity also contributes to cooling effects, for example releasing light reflecting aerosols. Kirkby says that aerosols are the biggest gap in our understanding of humanity's contribution to climate change.
'I think these are quite exciting results, it's certainly a step change paper,' says Christian Pfrang, an atmospheric aerosol specialist at the University of Reading, UK. 'What we have here is a capability of bridging the gap between laboratory experiment and field measurement in the environment. It's a unique facility which can address a number of controversial and longstanding issues.'
The CLOUD team will now try to identify which organic species are responsible for aerosol nucleation. Kirkby says they have already been conducting experiments which might answer this question and are analysing the data now. "
But, then again, they bypassed the meme. Must have been immunised against its invasion by reason and logic.
And Kirby, in another Nature press release says:
"But, Kirkby adds, those particles are far too small to serve as seeds for clouds. "At the moment, it actually says nothing about a possible cosmic-ray effect on clouds and climate, but it's a very important first step," he says."
Just for your edification, here's the CERN release. Read it and see if you think you agree with the chinese whisper propogated on my sister's blog.
Scientists modify current thinking in the face of new data. Skeptics pounce on any doubt to make it seem as if the whole theory is in doubt. This is the insidious nature of the meme.
Cheshire Cat: Oh, by the way, if you'd really like to know, he went that way.
Alice: Who did?
Cheshire Cat: The White Rabbit.
Alice: He did?
Cheshire Cat: He did what?
Alice: Went that way.
Cheshire Cat: Who did?
Alice: The White Rabbit.
Cheshire Cat: What rabbit?
Alice: But didn't you just say - I mean - Oh, dear.
Now I know its against the rules to criticise one's sibling, but there is a tale for the telling in this one.
Quite by reflex, the English teacher in me noticed a jarring attempt at what is called parallelism in writing. You repeat a structure using an antonym of synonym. Poets use it to great effect. Its quite compelling. "I am Australian" overuses it.
"Anthropogenic or heliocentric."
Now, if you are using the literary device properly, you say:
"Anthropogenic or heliogenic."
If you were thinking "heliocentric", you might be discussing world view of the Middle Ages.
Odd, indeed. This led me to wonder if my sister had written that at all. So, I Googled the next bit, which seemed to suggest that 8000 scientists were challenging climate change. 8000. That's a lot. And from CERN. That gives it a bit of a clout.
So the first item in the search comes up with a tasty conspiracy theory site called Red Ice Creations. Amongst its recommended sites is The Conspiracy Archive. Scroll down to the bottom of the page on Red Ice Creations. Don't laugh out loud. This is serious. The FBI is out to get you. If they don't, the United Nations will.
Back to the 8000. Of course, CERN employs a lot of scientists. How many have been involved in the CLOUD research? There they are, smiling at you, all 14 of them. So why say 8000? Oh, well, that's to get your attention. If the meme is to get traction, it has to have big numbers. But, to be fair, this is a fairly large scale international collaboration, as this CERN publication shows.
So what did they actually say? You know that someone is hiding something when they won't link to the original work, but selectively quoting instead. Its a sure sign of memetics at work. Andrew Orlowski at Red Ice Creations doesn't want you to read:
"Atmospheric aerosols exert an important influence on climate1 through their effects on stratiform cloud albedo and lifetime2 and the invigoration of convective storms3. Model calculations suggest that almost half of the global cloud condensation nuclei in the atmospheric boundary layer may originate from the nucleation of aerosols from trace condensable vapours4, although the sensitivity of the number of cloud condensation nuclei to changes of nucleation rate may be small5, 6. Despite extensive research, fundamental questions remain about the nucleation rate of sulphuric acid particles and the mechanisms responsible, including the roles of galactic cosmic rays and other chemical species such as ammonia7. " (Article in Nature, Kirkby et al., Nature, 25 August 2011, my red highlight added)
Note the proper scientific wording using the appropriate modality of certainty. That's because their conclusions are tentative. As Kirby explains:
“It was a big surprise to find that aerosol formation in the lower atmosphere isn’t due to sulphuric acid, water and ammonia alone,” said Kirkby. “Now it’s vitally important to discover which additional vapours are involved, whether they are largely natural or of human origin, and how they influence clouds. This will be our next job.”
The Royal Society of Chemistry had a somewhat different conclusion to Orlowski.
"Scientists have studied in detail how human activity influences global warming, but humanity also contributes to cooling effects, for example releasing light reflecting aerosols. Kirkby says that aerosols are the biggest gap in our understanding of humanity's contribution to climate change.
'I think these are quite exciting results, it's certainly a step change paper,' says Christian Pfrang, an atmospheric aerosol specialist at the University of Reading, UK. 'What we have here is a capability of bridging the gap between laboratory experiment and field measurement in the environment. It's a unique facility which can address a number of controversial and longstanding issues.'
The CLOUD team will now try to identify which organic species are responsible for aerosol nucleation. Kirkby says they have already been conducting experiments which might answer this question and are analysing the data now. "
But, then again, they bypassed the meme. Must have been immunised against its invasion by reason and logic.
And Kirby, in another Nature press release says:
"But, Kirkby adds, those particles are far too small to serve as seeds for clouds. "At the moment, it actually says nothing about a possible cosmic-ray effect on clouds and climate, but it's a very important first step," he says."
Just for your edification, here's the CERN release. Read it and see if you think you agree with the chinese whisper propogated on my sister's blog.
Scientists modify current thinking in the face of new data. Skeptics pounce on any doubt to make it seem as if the whole theory is in doubt. This is the insidious nature of the meme.
Cheshire Cat: Oh, by the way, if you'd really like to know, he went that way.
Alice: Who did?
Cheshire Cat: The White Rabbit.
Alice: He did?
Cheshire Cat: He did what?
Alice: Went that way.
Cheshire Cat: Who did?
Alice: The White Rabbit.
Cheshire Cat: What rabbit?
Alice: But didn't you just say - I mean - Oh, dear.
Saturday, May 26, 2012
Take a cold shower, Paul
Paul Howes, arguing from the secure point of personal incredulity, has suggested that the employment of foreign workers by Gina Reinhart violates every principle of common sense, let alone proper industiral relations. Although the union movement has a long history of xenophobia, this is perhaps the most ludicrous. Amongst the splutterings that somehow connected EMA with the loss of industrial employment opportunities (which Paul Howe has claimed is mostly related to the Australian dollar), Howes managed to give the union movement a fairly bad look.
It does not take a genius to realise that the Australian labour market is not the sole provider of workers for projects in Australia. Every major mining undertaking in Australia, not to mention dozens of other industries, including aviation, defence, and transport, indirectly employs overseas labour to do work for them, in the form of consultants and contractors. So, let's get over this delusion that Australian labour is sacred.
Of course, such arrangements are not ideal and, in many industries, Australians are the only practical source of labour - for example, primary education. You can't have FIFO early childhood teachers. Of course, you can have resident Australians born overseas teaching little kids, and that's just fine. Of course, everybody working in any industry deserves and should have industiral protection. Hence, the fundamnetal issue in the labour market is industrial protection. Even if you bring workers from another country, they must have the protection of proper employment agreements and awards.
If the Gina Reinharts can be demonstrated to be flaunting proper industrial relations, then this, not their choice of the country of origin of the workers, should be the grounds for a public lashing. This is what should be exicting Paul Howe. Unfortunately, he has drawn a crude line between foreign workers and Australian workers, not Gina and the rest of us. Now, when we rightly ask Gina et al to cough up their share of Australia's riches to benefit the rest of the nation, we will already have a public that thinks unions are simply selfish.
The typical reaction of most Australians to this decision is based on a confusion of issues, illustrated in this article: http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/news/13787412/fury-as-thousands-bid-for-mining-jobs/. The other side of the story can be understood through this article: http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/news/13776783/rinehart-mine-gets-special-employment-deal/
Of course, we must remain vigilant that the EMA doesn't become a mechanism for driving down Australian wages or a mode of exploitation of immigrant workers. But these are the real issues, not the threat to Australian workers or the country of origin of workers.
It does not take a genius to realise that the Australian labour market is not the sole provider of workers for projects in Australia. Every major mining undertaking in Australia, not to mention dozens of other industries, including aviation, defence, and transport, indirectly employs overseas labour to do work for them, in the form of consultants and contractors. So, let's get over this delusion that Australian labour is sacred.
Of course, such arrangements are not ideal and, in many industries, Australians are the only practical source of labour - for example, primary education. You can't have FIFO early childhood teachers. Of course, you can have resident Australians born overseas teaching little kids, and that's just fine. Of course, everybody working in any industry deserves and should have industiral protection. Hence, the fundamnetal issue in the labour market is industrial protection. Even if you bring workers from another country, they must have the protection of proper employment agreements and awards.
If the Gina Reinharts can be demonstrated to be flaunting proper industrial relations, then this, not their choice of the country of origin of the workers, should be the grounds for a public lashing. This is what should be exicting Paul Howe. Unfortunately, he has drawn a crude line between foreign workers and Australian workers, not Gina and the rest of us. Now, when we rightly ask Gina et al to cough up their share of Australia's riches to benefit the rest of the nation, we will already have a public that thinks unions are simply selfish.
The typical reaction of most Australians to this decision is based on a confusion of issues, illustrated in this article: http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/news/13787412/fury-as-thousands-bid-for-mining-jobs/. The other side of the story can be understood through this article: http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/news/13776783/rinehart-mine-gets-special-employment-deal/
Of course, we must remain vigilant that the EMA doesn't become a mechanism for driving down Australian wages or a mode of exploitation of immigrant workers. But these are the real issues, not the threat to Australian workers or the country of origin of workers.
Pompous arse-ism
I've learnt from those who are most pompous in our society that the way to disparage something is simply to add "ism" on the end of its name and immediately the reader must recognise that this is a form of extremism that must be avoided and, most definitely, derided. Thus, when people overthrew the privileged class who were milking them of their very lifeblood, this was not a revolution against injustice, but simply "communism". This single word could then take on a myriad of negative connotations and the work of the reactionaries became so much easier.
Not to be outdone, I am proposing a new movement in intellectual circles called "pompous arseism". Since this is too long, I'll simply abbreviate this to "arseism", since those subscribing to this movement eventually spend copious amounts of time gazing up their own arses.
Arse-ists are generally philosophers, but more often philosophisers, engaging in philosophy not so much to develop a coherent way of thinking about difficult topics, but to simply keep some topics from ever becoming so mundane and pedestrian that the common man might understand.
The Chief Most Holy Bishop of Arse-ism is Alvin Plantinga. Why he isn't more frequently referred to by his proper title is a mystery to me - being a professor of philosophy seems, well, so ordinary. Plantinga, in tones only achievable in a very large cathedral, declares war on Dawkins for daring to mention God in the title of his book without proper authorisation. Dawkins, he helpfully notes, is a biologist and therefore ought to just keep his nose out of philosophising. (http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/04/12/3475939.htm)
Where I might have criticised The God Delusion for its singular lack of evidence that religion really does anything except provide some manner of coherence to social, cultural and psychological behaviours - its a long shot to start counting it as a causal agent in behaviour - Plantinga's blood boils because Dawkins supposedly belongs to the opposition Church of the Great Naturalism. There is no-one quite so pompous as a theist defending his God against the idolater.
Suppose I took our friend the CMHB Plantinga to a seance. As we sit there listening to the silly knocking, I can imagine a kind of smug self-confidence coming over his face. At the end of the seance, he will reflect that the great Harry Houdini long ago debunked this nonsense. His assurance that all those spooky events observed had natural explanations will make you believe, just for a moment, that he has adopted that philosophical posture of believing, first and foremost, that events have natural explanations. It is, after all, a perfectly human posture.
However, later, when we stand at the bedside of his friend who is dying of cancer, he will be tempted to participate in 'praying over' this friend, despite his almost certain knowledge that the natural qualities of the drugs administered by the palliative care staff will do their work and provide real comfort at a very chemical level.
But, despite this heavy subscription to naturalism, the CMHB will later write of the curse of "naturalism" spreading rife throughout the world like a vile plague. All in defense of his stature amongst his sub-cultural religious group. It is a breath-taking kind of translation that he manages, but not uncommon.
Not uncommon also, is the tendency, as one lambasts the 'illogicality' of the opposition, to lapse into pompous arse-ism. Its not really necessary to relate anything back to the real values you live by, only to pontificate about the real meaning of everything. Thence to "The naturalism that Dawkins embraces, furthermore, in addition to its intrinsic unloveliness and its dispiriting conclusions about human beings and their place in the universe, is in deep self-referential trouble. There is no reason to believe it; and there is excellent reason to reject it." First class arse-ism.
Of course, you can only be that pompous if you have already dug yourself a large enough hole in which to fit it. Dawkins is derided for failing first year philosophy. Oh dear. The one sentence version of Plantinga's hole is: "If the brain is evolved, and the brain is what we do our believing with, then, as is observed with those who believe in delusions like God, the brain is capable of delusion, then it certainly is capable of the atheist delusion, which makes it untrustworthy and therefore not a good arbiter of the truth and therefore believing in God or atheism is pretty much roulette and there, I win."
Of course, if you say stupid things fast enough they sound convincing. But, for the statement above to have any kind of sense, you have to suppose, from the outset, that there is a truth that hovers outside human consciousness in the universe somewhere. (So that we can come to the conclusion that the brain is pretty hopeless at getting to that truth) Of course, this is a fine premise, except Plantinga and others want to start making categorical statements about this truth. Apparently, it is inherently natural to believe that this truth is owned, established and revealed by God. Why?
Its the Philosophy 101 conundrum. If a stone didn't make those ripples in the water, what did? Well, just about anything is the answer. In fact, the number of possibilities approaches infinity. Because, in practical terms, we do not have any other mechanism for generating a short-list, we use probability. Probability, not premised in experimental observation, but based on our experience of what is likely. Yes, we employ that unreliable brain to do that clever guesswork. Later, we employ that secure process called science to verify this, but let's not go there.
Now, Dawkins, in a measured British kind of way, is very patient with his short-listing, giving necessary complexity as the grounds for rejecting a supernatural (revealed) explanation for a natural (observed) explanation for complexity, at least in the world of living creatures. Now, regardless of whether that argument can be generalised to the universe (maybe something as simple as my anus created the laws of physics) and setting aside the very real problem that the complexity of God calls for an explanation in itself, we (the unwashed masses) need never allow supernatural explanations to get to the short-list.
In the Dawkins taxonomy, I am a 7 out of 7 atheist. This places me is the extremist category and thus, I am almost certainly about to blow up your house. But stay calm. It is our duty, as humans, to reject spin wherever we find it. It is a political duty, not a scientific one. It is our political duty to stop stupid ideas becoming generally accepted such that our society is in danger.
Consider the idiots who live hippy lives in and around Byron Bay who we stupidly allow the indulgence of not immunising against preventable diseases. In the year where India may finally see the last case of polio, in a dreadful irony, Australia may become the place where it re-emerges. Who knows when some un-immunised hippy may trek around some country in which eradication has not been total and then returns to a clutch of un-immunised hippy friends. No, its not science fiction.
The stupid, dangerous idea that immunisation causes conditions such as autism should have been rejected by those whose duty it is to politically protect our society. In a democracy, that is us. We all have a duty to take stupid ideas and reject them in the short-list. There are a hundred reasons why that duty has not been exercised in relation to theism, most of them to do with the insidious integration of religion into every corner of our society and psyche.
But let us return to the Chief Most Holy Bishop of Arse-ism. What is our duty? We need to look beyond his languid, pleasing voice (he writes so clearly and so well) from the pulpit and start to reject his ideas for good reason - they just don't stack up (the layman's way of saying the probability is so remote as to be considered zero).
The Goldilocks hypothesis is an example of where clear thought can just blitz waffley wankerism. The notion that the fine tuning of the constants in the universe incorporated in the laws of physics are 'just so' and incredulously 'just so', since a tiny variation would arrive at another universe, points to someone tuning the universe, is just plain stupid. I pick up a pack of cards. I deal them one by one. Out comes three Aces in a row. Of course, the standard "these were poorly shuffled" is the 'golden oldie' of excuses for playing badly, but, in reality, most people accept that that's just how the cards fell. No-one snuck in during a break in the dealing and set up the cards. They just fell out that way.
A mathematician will do the maths to give you a sense of the incredible odds against the way that these 52 cards 'fell out'. So infinitesimal is the chance of that order of card emerging that we should find it unbelievable. But we don't. Why? Because we accept a fundamental principle of naturalism that some things just 'fall out that way'. But not in a weird way. We do not often see the 23 of hearts emerge, nor the Ace of Pigs Bottoms. Certain constants are there and they are, well, just there. Yes, you can philosophise all you like about how convenient it is that no Pigs Bottoms and numbers in the 20s emerge out of the pack, but in the end, you are just spouting so much pompous arse-ism.
I feel I must leave you with the master of pompous arse-ism, Conor Cunningham. If you ever really get to the bottom of what this actually means, send me a postcard.
"In other words, persons naturalize nature, which is to say they actualize nature. They reveal nature to itself, doing so in all its forms, colours and structures, for without them all is dark, or at least shadow. Thus they do not flee nature, as do the philosophical naturalists who destroy all that is natural." (http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/05/22/3508607.htm)
Not to be outdone, I am proposing a new movement in intellectual circles called "pompous arseism". Since this is too long, I'll simply abbreviate this to "arseism", since those subscribing to this movement eventually spend copious amounts of time gazing up their own arses.
Arse-ists are generally philosophers, but more often philosophisers, engaging in philosophy not so much to develop a coherent way of thinking about difficult topics, but to simply keep some topics from ever becoming so mundane and pedestrian that the common man might understand.
The Chief Most Holy Bishop of Arse-ism is Alvin Plantinga. Why he isn't more frequently referred to by his proper title is a mystery to me - being a professor of philosophy seems, well, so ordinary. Plantinga, in tones only achievable in a very large cathedral, declares war on Dawkins for daring to mention God in the title of his book without proper authorisation. Dawkins, he helpfully notes, is a biologist and therefore ought to just keep his nose out of philosophising. (http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/04/12/3475939.htm)
Where I might have criticised The God Delusion for its singular lack of evidence that religion really does anything except provide some manner of coherence to social, cultural and psychological behaviours - its a long shot to start counting it as a causal agent in behaviour - Plantinga's blood boils because Dawkins supposedly belongs to the opposition Church of the Great Naturalism. There is no-one quite so pompous as a theist defending his God against the idolater.
Suppose I took our friend the CMHB Plantinga to a seance. As we sit there listening to the silly knocking, I can imagine a kind of smug self-confidence coming over his face. At the end of the seance, he will reflect that the great Harry Houdini long ago debunked this nonsense. His assurance that all those spooky events observed had natural explanations will make you believe, just for a moment, that he has adopted that philosophical posture of believing, first and foremost, that events have natural explanations. It is, after all, a perfectly human posture.
However, later, when we stand at the bedside of his friend who is dying of cancer, he will be tempted to participate in 'praying over' this friend, despite his almost certain knowledge that the natural qualities of the drugs administered by the palliative care staff will do their work and provide real comfort at a very chemical level.
But, despite this heavy subscription to naturalism, the CMHB will later write of the curse of "naturalism" spreading rife throughout the world like a vile plague. All in defense of his stature amongst his sub-cultural religious group. It is a breath-taking kind of translation that he manages, but not uncommon.
Not uncommon also, is the tendency, as one lambasts the 'illogicality' of the opposition, to lapse into pompous arse-ism. Its not really necessary to relate anything back to the real values you live by, only to pontificate about the real meaning of everything. Thence to "The naturalism that Dawkins embraces, furthermore, in addition to its intrinsic unloveliness and its dispiriting conclusions about human beings and their place in the universe, is in deep self-referential trouble. There is no reason to believe it; and there is excellent reason to reject it." First class arse-ism.
Of course, you can only be that pompous if you have already dug yourself a large enough hole in which to fit it. Dawkins is derided for failing first year philosophy. Oh dear. The one sentence version of Plantinga's hole is: "If the brain is evolved, and the brain is what we do our believing with, then, as is observed with those who believe in delusions like God, the brain is capable of delusion, then it certainly is capable of the atheist delusion, which makes it untrustworthy and therefore not a good arbiter of the truth and therefore believing in God or atheism is pretty much roulette and there, I win."
Of course, if you say stupid things fast enough they sound convincing. But, for the statement above to have any kind of sense, you have to suppose, from the outset, that there is a truth that hovers outside human consciousness in the universe somewhere. (So that we can come to the conclusion that the brain is pretty hopeless at getting to that truth) Of course, this is a fine premise, except Plantinga and others want to start making categorical statements about this truth. Apparently, it is inherently natural to believe that this truth is owned, established and revealed by God. Why?
Its the Philosophy 101 conundrum. If a stone didn't make those ripples in the water, what did? Well, just about anything is the answer. In fact, the number of possibilities approaches infinity. Because, in practical terms, we do not have any other mechanism for generating a short-list, we use probability. Probability, not premised in experimental observation, but based on our experience of what is likely. Yes, we employ that unreliable brain to do that clever guesswork. Later, we employ that secure process called science to verify this, but let's not go there.
Now, Dawkins, in a measured British kind of way, is very patient with his short-listing, giving necessary complexity as the grounds for rejecting a supernatural (revealed) explanation for a natural (observed) explanation for complexity, at least in the world of living creatures. Now, regardless of whether that argument can be generalised to the universe (maybe something as simple as my anus created the laws of physics) and setting aside the very real problem that the complexity of God calls for an explanation in itself, we (the unwashed masses) need never allow supernatural explanations to get to the short-list.
In the Dawkins taxonomy, I am a 7 out of 7 atheist. This places me is the extremist category and thus, I am almost certainly about to blow up your house. But stay calm. It is our duty, as humans, to reject spin wherever we find it. It is a political duty, not a scientific one. It is our political duty to stop stupid ideas becoming generally accepted such that our society is in danger.
Consider the idiots who live hippy lives in and around Byron Bay who we stupidly allow the indulgence of not immunising against preventable diseases. In the year where India may finally see the last case of polio, in a dreadful irony, Australia may become the place where it re-emerges. Who knows when some un-immunised hippy may trek around some country in which eradication has not been total and then returns to a clutch of un-immunised hippy friends. No, its not science fiction.
The stupid, dangerous idea that immunisation causes conditions such as autism should have been rejected by those whose duty it is to politically protect our society. In a democracy, that is us. We all have a duty to take stupid ideas and reject them in the short-list. There are a hundred reasons why that duty has not been exercised in relation to theism, most of them to do with the insidious integration of religion into every corner of our society and psyche.
But let us return to the Chief Most Holy Bishop of Arse-ism. What is our duty? We need to look beyond his languid, pleasing voice (he writes so clearly and so well) from the pulpit and start to reject his ideas for good reason - they just don't stack up (the layman's way of saying the probability is so remote as to be considered zero).
The Goldilocks hypothesis is an example of where clear thought can just blitz waffley wankerism. The notion that the fine tuning of the constants in the universe incorporated in the laws of physics are 'just so' and incredulously 'just so', since a tiny variation would arrive at another universe, points to someone tuning the universe, is just plain stupid. I pick up a pack of cards. I deal them one by one. Out comes three Aces in a row. Of course, the standard "these were poorly shuffled" is the 'golden oldie' of excuses for playing badly, but, in reality, most people accept that that's just how the cards fell. No-one snuck in during a break in the dealing and set up the cards. They just fell out that way.
A mathematician will do the maths to give you a sense of the incredible odds against the way that these 52 cards 'fell out'. So infinitesimal is the chance of that order of card emerging that we should find it unbelievable. But we don't. Why? Because we accept a fundamental principle of naturalism that some things just 'fall out that way'. But not in a weird way. We do not often see the 23 of hearts emerge, nor the Ace of Pigs Bottoms. Certain constants are there and they are, well, just there. Yes, you can philosophise all you like about how convenient it is that no Pigs Bottoms and numbers in the 20s emerge out of the pack, but in the end, you are just spouting so much pompous arse-ism.
I feel I must leave you with the master of pompous arse-ism, Conor Cunningham. If you ever really get to the bottom of what this actually means, send me a postcard.
"In other words, persons naturalize nature, which is to say they actualize nature. They reveal nature to itself, doing so in all its forms, colours and structures, for without them all is dark, or at least shadow. Thus they do not flee nature, as do the philosophical naturalists who destroy all that is natural." (http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/05/22/3508607.htm)
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Speaking the Language of Evangelical Christians and Scientists, in one book
A year ago or so, I read a scathing review by Sam Harris of Francis Collins's The Language of God. Because Sam Harris writes with immense intellectual weight, I was convinced that Collins might just be another Christian crackpot, probably in the Lennox, Polkinghorne mold. Having seen Lennox deliver a broadside against Richard Dawkins and atheists that was completely unwarranted and been repulsed by his arrogant manner, not to mention his presumption that everybody shared his definitions of familiar concepts simply because he could spout them, (reviewed in this blog) and finding Polkinghorne so often completely baffling because he speaks academese, not English, I expected Collins to have little that an atheist could respect.
How wrong I was.
While most of Collin's arguments for belief have gaps large enough for a small truck, there is no doubt he is both an accomplished scientist and a pleasant person. He writes in that languid, comfortable prose so typical of Americans, especially Southerners - inviting and lucid. On matters scientific, he honours science by first stating the accepted orthodoxy, then explaining in depth where the topic is within his expertise and then refers the reader on when the going gets too deep for the layman or his area of expertise. On matters theological, he defers to Lewis, Augustine, Bonhoeffer and Polkinghorne; possibly a path that will earn him no friends amongst Christians in US.
This is a book for believers. If Collins is right and nearly half of the US has such contempt for science that it mindlessly adopts YEC (Young Earth Creationism), then the urgency of expounding a view where science and religion can share a space at the table cannot be understated. From my atheist point of view, better a believer with an unremarkable delusion but a deep respect for science, than a zealot for Christ who rejects science as a matter of course.
Unlike Richard Dawkins, Collin's style remains accessible, requiring little 'unpacking'. This makes it easier to read and understand, but ultimately unsatisfying as an apology for evolution. Dawkins' methodical exposition of evolution in Greatest Show on Earth is perhaps the limit that a non-scientist can go in delving into evolution and is brilliantly explained; both books have a key role in assigning YEC to the side-show, Collin's for believers and Dawkins for all of us.
I am tempted to consider Collin's faith as about as superficial as his atheism probably was; not a particularly well considered position. He finds spiritual satisfaction in Christian faith and dogma mostly because this happens to be the first stop in his spiritual journey. It is a kind of lazy faith; so long as I regurgitate the gurus, I'm fine. In an America so deeply polarised by religion and secularity, his search for spiritual fulfilment and subsequent discovery of evangelical Christianity are almost inevitable, but unforgivable.
Some elements of Collin's science are a little disappointing. The first is in his manipulation of probability to suggest a premise in the case for theism. Probability is a funny animal - like the law it can be a complete ass or incredibly useful. It can tell us quite plainly what the outcome of a set of events is likely to be - on this grounds, none of us would, rationally, gamble on anything. Gambling is, quite simply, the abandonment of the rational logic of probability.
Yet, I can deal you 52 cards and they fall out in an order, the probability of which occurring again is so ridiculously small that you could effectively call it 'never' without exaggeration. But there you saw it, in front of you. The fact is that a large enough series of historical events makes probability an ass and of no use whatsoever in determining whether the past is how we thought it to be. Only forensic evidence and possibility, expressed in the degree of 'reasonable doubt', can be deployed in our search for a truth now lost forever to us.
Thence, although the critical parameters of the universe may seem so unimaginably well tuned, this is qualitatively no different to noticing that all the Aces came out of the pack in the first 4 cards, an event, in rough terms, equally as likely as them appearing anywhere else in the sequence; but incredulous to us. The fine tuning of the universal parameters draws a conclusion that any card sharp could articulate and suggests a divine presence no more than irreducible complexity suggests a designer.
It is these chasms of contradiction into which Collins seems happy to fall that diminish both this book and his stature. You can't confidently rail against ID as God-of-Gaps-ism while propping up your faith on an identical premise. In The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins quotes Shakespeare's Hamlet:
Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Noticing a pattern does not suggest an author of that pattern any more than clouds create weasels. The private explanation of that pattern must be objectively tested by discussion with others to see if they see the same and then, if authorship is proposed, evidence must be brought to support this proposition. If Shakespeare's authorship of his works is controversial with texts less than 500 years old, how much more uncertain will we be of authorship at the beginning of time?
This and many similar gaffs convince me that Collins is an able and methodical scientist, a lousy theologian and a mediocre debater. Amongst the flawed arguments are:
Argument from incredulity. "I can't believe that altruism could arise out of natural selection, therefore it must be an indicator of God." (contradicting his own objections to ID that irreducible complexity does not infer a designer). At best, his scientific arguments suggest more work to be done on explaining altruism, work that is well underway, not a potted hypothesis involving God.
Argument from private experience. "I had an amazing experience which I attribute to God." Not only is there a wide range of alternative supernatural 'explanations' but science has already established quite clearly the psychological mechanisms of awe and pleasure. Private experience may be genuinely awesome for Francis Collins, but quite pedestrian to someone living that experience daily or unremarkable to a researcher. Context is everything. Such is life.
Argument from authority. "Lewis says this and it sounds amazing, therefore it must be right." Lewis is unable to conceive of a cultural or social genesis for the 'words of Christ'. He rather stubbornly insists on a culturally skewed explanation based on the notion that Jesus Christ had private thoughts, unrelated to his context, and these must fall into the empircal category of insane or divine.
No matter that Jesus was a Jew, no matter that people speak the expectations of others, no matter the vast chasm of history uncertainty across which we examine Jesus's words, no matter the attribution of modern prejudice. No, Lewis insists on that wonderful propaganda tool of simple binaries typical of the "you are with us or against us" brigade. Because it is simply a stupid argument, it does not lend any credence to Collin's proposition that the historical Christ is a signpost to God. Of all Lewis's arguments, this is the weakest and Collin's falls into a deep hole by repeating it.
Argument from definition. "I label this human tendency Moral Law; therefore it exists." Following, again, the unfortunate logic of Lewis, Collins names human behaviour that he has judged moral as the Moral Law, oblivious to the fact that he himself has learned morality at the feet of his fellow Americans, his (atheist) parents and his (predominantly atheist) peers and it is this that he brings to the definition of what he considers favourable behaviour. 'Moral Law' is, at best, a loose category. Its efficacy in either guiding daily life or pointing to a being with an absolute version of morality is entirely questionable.
Argument from extrapolation. "If I observe cause and effect, it indicates that a universe requires an ultimate cause." One wonders why a scientist would fall into this hole. Collins is well aware that cause and effect are intrinsically bound up with concepts of time and space - entropy, gravity and the single direction of the universe towards a singularity are the bread and butter of physics. How then do we get to argue for their existence outside of time and space, the natural sphere in which they are fundamental, when the very import of this proposition is to show that the natural sphere is largely irrelevant to that 'outside'?
Illogical argument. At times, Collins simply lapses into illogicality. The belief in the supernatural is supposed to be simply accepted; but we later build a probability argument premised in that acceptance. More, the supernatural is meant to interact with the natural in a way that, by Collin's reckoning, cannot be natural (infrequent miracles, extraordinary idealised love), yet is perceptible via natural means.
I tried hard to make Collins argument work. In the end, I think he falls into a trap I call the Internet 2.0 trap. At one stage, when the Internet was truly a rubbish tip and was as slow as granny's progress up the stairs, half-smart corporations tried to invent an independent Internet - a parallel network. Of course, the moment that their Internet 2.0 was joined to the Internet via a portal, it immediately became the Internet, with no sensible identity of its own. Internet 2.0 was simply a set of nodes of the Internet.
The supernatural (whatever that is) is clearly a fantastic concept until such time as it clashes with the brutal hand of the natural. Supernatural events, such as resurrections, only become accessible within natural parameters and then, of course, become subject to the same exposure as natural events, where, in 100% of the cases, they are exposed as fraudulent. James Randi's money is safe.
As the practising atheist that I am, Francis Collins is my friend. In contrast to Sam Harris's objections, I can find nothing about Collins that would preclude him from holding a high office in science. The fact that his faith is delusional and inconsistent is of no greater import than any other common delusion such as the hope that my property will grow in value or that, despite aging, I am attractive to young women.
A man's particular version of a particular delusional mindscape may never participate in his scientific endeavour and for me to factor it in is simple prejudice dressed up intellectually. It leads to a dangerous conclusion that perhaps a man's skin colour might equally stymie his judgement in such a position. This is neo-conservative claptrap and Sam Harris should walk a mile to dissociate himself from it if he wants credibility amongst liberal America and liberals across the world.
Should Collins uncharacteristically declare that he supported a motion to make the human genome patented to the Vatican because it was God's intellectual property and they were the stewards of his IP, then I would be alarmed not by his faith, but by his singular rejection of the social role of science.
What was most dangerous about George Bush's faith was not that he allegedly followed the advice of an imaginary friend who spoke to him in answer to prayer, but that he followed the advice of dangerous ideologues who used his religion to gain access to his attention. Time to expose neo-conservatism and its relationship to the kind of fascism that World War 2 attempted to suppress, rather than become fixated on any particular person's version of a common delusion.
In my mind, the war on oppression is much more important than the war on terror. Science and scientists are pivotal in the battle to end disadvantage. We atheists must rejoice that we at least have someone "on the inside" who is prepared to defend so passionately the very science upon which we premise our disbelief. Francis Collins is an affable, if somewhat dillish, ally and it behoves us to recognise this book as at least something that might bring half of the population of the world's most powerful country to again embrace science and support funding for those much needed research and science based practical programs, as that most celebrated of agnostic Americans, Bill Gates, is doing.
How wrong I was.
While most of Collin's arguments for belief have gaps large enough for a small truck, there is no doubt he is both an accomplished scientist and a pleasant person. He writes in that languid, comfortable prose so typical of Americans, especially Southerners - inviting and lucid. On matters scientific, he honours science by first stating the accepted orthodoxy, then explaining in depth where the topic is within his expertise and then refers the reader on when the going gets too deep for the layman or his area of expertise. On matters theological, he defers to Lewis, Augustine, Bonhoeffer and Polkinghorne; possibly a path that will earn him no friends amongst Christians in US.
This is a book for believers. If Collins is right and nearly half of the US has such contempt for science that it mindlessly adopts YEC (Young Earth Creationism), then the urgency of expounding a view where science and religion can share a space at the table cannot be understated. From my atheist point of view, better a believer with an unremarkable delusion but a deep respect for science, than a zealot for Christ who rejects science as a matter of course.
Unlike Richard Dawkins, Collin's style remains accessible, requiring little 'unpacking'. This makes it easier to read and understand, but ultimately unsatisfying as an apology for evolution. Dawkins' methodical exposition of evolution in Greatest Show on Earth is perhaps the limit that a non-scientist can go in delving into evolution and is brilliantly explained; both books have a key role in assigning YEC to the side-show, Collin's for believers and Dawkins for all of us.
I am tempted to consider Collin's faith as about as superficial as his atheism probably was; not a particularly well considered position. He finds spiritual satisfaction in Christian faith and dogma mostly because this happens to be the first stop in his spiritual journey. It is a kind of lazy faith; so long as I regurgitate the gurus, I'm fine. In an America so deeply polarised by religion and secularity, his search for spiritual fulfilment and subsequent discovery of evangelical Christianity are almost inevitable, but unforgivable.
Some elements of Collin's science are a little disappointing. The first is in his manipulation of probability to suggest a premise in the case for theism. Probability is a funny animal - like the law it can be a complete ass or incredibly useful. It can tell us quite plainly what the outcome of a set of events is likely to be - on this grounds, none of us would, rationally, gamble on anything. Gambling is, quite simply, the abandonment of the rational logic of probability.
Yet, I can deal you 52 cards and they fall out in an order, the probability of which occurring again is so ridiculously small that you could effectively call it 'never' without exaggeration. But there you saw it, in front of you. The fact is that a large enough series of historical events makes probability an ass and of no use whatsoever in determining whether the past is how we thought it to be. Only forensic evidence and possibility, expressed in the degree of 'reasonable doubt', can be deployed in our search for a truth now lost forever to us.
Thence, although the critical parameters of the universe may seem so unimaginably well tuned, this is qualitatively no different to noticing that all the Aces came out of the pack in the first 4 cards, an event, in rough terms, equally as likely as them appearing anywhere else in the sequence; but incredulous to us. The fine tuning of the universal parameters draws a conclusion that any card sharp could articulate and suggests a divine presence no more than irreducible complexity suggests a designer.
It is these chasms of contradiction into which Collins seems happy to fall that diminish both this book and his stature. You can't confidently rail against ID as God-of-Gaps-ism while propping up your faith on an identical premise. In The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins quotes Shakespeare's Hamlet:
Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Noticing a pattern does not suggest an author of that pattern any more than clouds create weasels. The private explanation of that pattern must be objectively tested by discussion with others to see if they see the same and then, if authorship is proposed, evidence must be brought to support this proposition. If Shakespeare's authorship of his works is controversial with texts less than 500 years old, how much more uncertain will we be of authorship at the beginning of time?
This and many similar gaffs convince me that Collins is an able and methodical scientist, a lousy theologian and a mediocre debater. Amongst the flawed arguments are:
Argument from incredulity. "I can't believe that altruism could arise out of natural selection, therefore it must be an indicator of God." (contradicting his own objections to ID that irreducible complexity does not infer a designer). At best, his scientific arguments suggest more work to be done on explaining altruism, work that is well underway, not a potted hypothesis involving God.
Argument from private experience. "I had an amazing experience which I attribute to God." Not only is there a wide range of alternative supernatural 'explanations' but science has already established quite clearly the psychological mechanisms of awe and pleasure. Private experience may be genuinely awesome for Francis Collins, but quite pedestrian to someone living that experience daily or unremarkable to a researcher. Context is everything. Such is life.
Argument from authority. "Lewis says this and it sounds amazing, therefore it must be right." Lewis is unable to conceive of a cultural or social genesis for the 'words of Christ'. He rather stubbornly insists on a culturally skewed explanation based on the notion that Jesus Christ had private thoughts, unrelated to his context, and these must fall into the empircal category of insane or divine.
No matter that Jesus was a Jew, no matter that people speak the expectations of others, no matter the vast chasm of history uncertainty across which we examine Jesus's words, no matter the attribution of modern prejudice. No, Lewis insists on that wonderful propaganda tool of simple binaries typical of the "you are with us or against us" brigade. Because it is simply a stupid argument, it does not lend any credence to Collin's proposition that the historical Christ is a signpost to God. Of all Lewis's arguments, this is the weakest and Collin's falls into a deep hole by repeating it.
Argument from definition. "I label this human tendency Moral Law; therefore it exists." Following, again, the unfortunate logic of Lewis, Collins names human behaviour that he has judged moral as the Moral Law, oblivious to the fact that he himself has learned morality at the feet of his fellow Americans, his (atheist) parents and his (predominantly atheist) peers and it is this that he brings to the definition of what he considers favourable behaviour. 'Moral Law' is, at best, a loose category. Its efficacy in either guiding daily life or pointing to a being with an absolute version of morality is entirely questionable.
Argument from extrapolation. "If I observe cause and effect, it indicates that a universe requires an ultimate cause." One wonders why a scientist would fall into this hole. Collins is well aware that cause and effect are intrinsically bound up with concepts of time and space - entropy, gravity and the single direction of the universe towards a singularity are the bread and butter of physics. How then do we get to argue for their existence outside of time and space, the natural sphere in which they are fundamental, when the very import of this proposition is to show that the natural sphere is largely irrelevant to that 'outside'?
Illogical argument. At times, Collins simply lapses into illogicality. The belief in the supernatural is supposed to be simply accepted; but we later build a probability argument premised in that acceptance. More, the supernatural is meant to interact with the natural in a way that, by Collin's reckoning, cannot be natural (infrequent miracles, extraordinary idealised love), yet is perceptible via natural means.
I tried hard to make Collins argument work. In the end, I think he falls into a trap I call the Internet 2.0 trap. At one stage, when the Internet was truly a rubbish tip and was as slow as granny's progress up the stairs, half-smart corporations tried to invent an independent Internet - a parallel network. Of course, the moment that their Internet 2.0 was joined to the Internet via a portal, it immediately became the Internet, with no sensible identity of its own. Internet 2.0 was simply a set of nodes of the Internet.
The supernatural (whatever that is) is clearly a fantastic concept until such time as it clashes with the brutal hand of the natural. Supernatural events, such as resurrections, only become accessible within natural parameters and then, of course, become subject to the same exposure as natural events, where, in 100% of the cases, they are exposed as fraudulent. James Randi's money is safe.
As the practising atheist that I am, Francis Collins is my friend. In contrast to Sam Harris's objections, I can find nothing about Collins that would preclude him from holding a high office in science. The fact that his faith is delusional and inconsistent is of no greater import than any other common delusion such as the hope that my property will grow in value or that, despite aging, I am attractive to young women.
A man's particular version of a particular delusional mindscape may never participate in his scientific endeavour and for me to factor it in is simple prejudice dressed up intellectually. It leads to a dangerous conclusion that perhaps a man's skin colour might equally stymie his judgement in such a position. This is neo-conservative claptrap and Sam Harris should walk a mile to dissociate himself from it if he wants credibility amongst liberal America and liberals across the world.
Should Collins uncharacteristically declare that he supported a motion to make the human genome patented to the Vatican because it was God's intellectual property and they were the stewards of his IP, then I would be alarmed not by his faith, but by his singular rejection of the social role of science.
What was most dangerous about George Bush's faith was not that he allegedly followed the advice of an imaginary friend who spoke to him in answer to prayer, but that he followed the advice of dangerous ideologues who used his religion to gain access to his attention. Time to expose neo-conservatism and its relationship to the kind of fascism that World War 2 attempted to suppress, rather than become fixated on any particular person's version of a common delusion.
In my mind, the war on oppression is much more important than the war on terror. Science and scientists are pivotal in the battle to end disadvantage. We atheists must rejoice that we at least have someone "on the inside" who is prepared to defend so passionately the very science upon which we premise our disbelief. Francis Collins is an affable, if somewhat dillish, ally and it behoves us to recognise this book as at least something that might bring half of the population of the world's most powerful country to again embrace science and support funding for those much needed research and science based practical programs, as that most celebrated of agnostic Americans, Bill Gates, is doing.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Why random acts of kindness aren't random
My friend, supposedly part time lover and much more prolific blogger, Ted, over at Painting Fakes, threw me bait that I could not resist. In accounting for the kindness shown to me in a moment of trauma, according to Ted, I displayed confirmation bias (the tendency to explain things according to a belief already held, thereby confirming it) by attributing the assistance I was given to human qualities of altruism, contradicting, as I quite provocativingly challenged my relatives to consider, their belief that all humans are 'fallen', inherently sinful and thus prone to sin requiring both redemption and a redeemer, thus lending credence to their belief that's Jesus's mission on earth was messianic, not simply, like all the rest of us, quite pedestrian.
Of course, the only way around confirmation bias is objective testing. If more and more people can see that something is true, then the probability of it just being confirmation bias by all those people is less. Additionally, some objective measures can be agreed upon to, at the very minimum, highlight the bias, or, at best, remove the bias.
Let's establish a few things which probably won't be that controversial. First, in the midst of trauma, where your anxiety levels are high, any kind of help seems almost 'god given' - improbably fortuitous. Everybody who provides assistance seems like an angel. Second, trauma narrows your focus. The world seems to rotate around you and your injury, as do the actions of emergency services, and the opportunities for broader reflection, over a cup of tea, are limited.
These are both interesting in where they might lead. I guess, in retrospect, the fortune of the location of my injury on my body and the ready assistance at hand should have led me to believe that the 'hand of god' was present. 'He' manipulated circumstances to, perhaps, bring me to some glorious revelation. But, as Tim Minchin so ably satirises in Thank you God for fixing the cataracts of Sam's mum, such a conclusion is so massively illogical. It means that the women who suffered a massive heart attack the week before in the same park and was unable to be resuscitated must likewise have been denied the hand of god - the unsurprising conclusion is that all good outcomes are the hand of god and all adverse are the work of nature (or god's eternal plan, whichever version of god you subscribe to).
If ever there was confirmation bias, that is it. As plausibility goes, there is another thesis.
I had been riding well - feeling fit and healthy. I had just completed my favourite track and was moving onto a track that was very familiar, mainly so my son could go a little further and I would get some more fitness out of him. My confidence was high, which probably means I took more risks than I normally would. The track was familiar, which probably means I took less notice, explicitly, of features and rode it more automatically.
Recent storms had deposited loose sand at various places, especially corners, which tend to be in gullies where water flows. Since they were a 'new' feature in the familiar track, I would not be expecting them. Only minutes before, I had been shocked that a large tree had fallen on my favourite track, just around a blind corner, and its roots protruded dangerously into track space. I had narrowly averted a collision and had made a mental note to inform SEQ Water. But this new feature was 'in my face' - it came to my notice readily where excess sand might not.
I had also stopped just previous to the track where I had the accident and adjusted my son's brakes. In stopping, I got talking to a guy I saw frequently at the park and we discovered we were both teachers and had common experiences. My conversation with him had lasted almost 20 minutes and by the time I resumed riding, my muscles were cold.
On the corner that I had the accident, sand had accumulated on the side of the track that was the natural line for the corner. Sand has a significant braking effect when riding. My front wheel simply stopped and the force of cornering flicked it around so that one end of the handle bar faced my groin and, as my bike and I rotated around the stationary front wheel, the other end of the bar pierced the ground. The ground and handlebar did not give way, so my groin absorbed the impact of 90kg of weight travelling at 20km/h.
Of course, this is just conjecture - but it is at least scientific, plausible and based on objective facts that we could test. I can match my wound with the end of the handlebar, I can revisit the site and find sand, I can match the track surface with that still in my handlebar, I can interview my new friend Don and so on. All of this is verifiable.
Of course, if you must, you can still insist on the hand of god and I leave you to that if you can't live without it. Needless to say, whether the hand of god is there or not, it matters not a jot - the hand of god is eminently disposable without changing the facts.
Of course, we could then turn to the human aspect of the event and find something that might deny or affirm our beliefs. On a previous ride in the same park, I was furious when my chain broke within 20 minutes of the start of the ride and I had no means of fixing it. As a rider, I am no less determined to get a fix to satisfy my addiction than the next rider. All riders want their fix.
At least half a dozen riders that day truncated their rides to provide assistance. One pushed my bike (and his) 1 kilometre to a clearing and then rode it back to the car park and then returned on foot to get his own bike. One stayed as his partner returned to the car park so they could be in contact to give the ambulance updates on how to find me. Another encouraged me to relax and lie back - important to slow my racing heart rate (driven mostly by anxiety - my rest heart rate after rides is much lower) and stayed for a good while to makes sure I was OK.
At one time, I was rather embarrassed that Peter from Kalbar was bringing my bike and his rather awkwardly along the track as I hobbled out to a clearing that an ambulance could access. I apologised for upsetting his day. "I hope you got a good ride in." I said.
His reply is so salient to this discussion. Peter doesn't have to confirm my bias. Regardless of what I read into his actions, he is not obliged to affirm these in his words. He could have said, "I'm happy to help." He could have said, "Jesus said that we should love one another and that's what I am doing." He could even have said, "It is more blessed to give than to receive."
What he actually said might surprise.
He said, "I'd expect someone to help me if I was injured." He did what he did because of an unwritten code amongst riders that, regardless of your intentions for gratifying your addiction to riding, you stop to help those who are in need.
But such a code is not exclusive to riders. It permeates so many circumstances to the point that we are shocked when someone is so callous as to pass by someone in trauma and first-aid classes counsel participants to examine, as the first point in coming upon trauma, whether they can really be useful in assisting the person; such is the tendency of people to stop and help. Helping others is natural. We have an in-built tendency to altruism, especially when someone else is in dire straits. This is played out over and over again.
Without getting too deeply into religious argumentation, attempting to align this tendency with the concept of 'fallen' humanity, driven to sin by an inherited propensity to hate, steal, deceive and lust, just doesn't work. If Peter had stolen my bike, if Stu had asked me for a retainer for his services, if the lady giving first aid had rifled through my things, if the ambulance personnel had been casual about interrupting their New Year's Eve, if the doctor's had been aloof and uncaring instead of attentive and apologetic that I was not attended to when they rightly attended to others with higher needs, if my friends had scorned my recklessness instead of joking about it in an attempt to make me feel better, if my family had simply continued their day as intended and left me to my own devices - this might have made me convinced of a fallen world and humanity on the road to hell.
But, instead, the actions of each human I encountered affirmed, yes affirmed, my belief that humans are essentially good and that they display altruism at every possible opportunity because it feels good - it triggers a dopamine rush just as surely as flinging your body and bike around a tight hairpin. To nominate those who assisted me in the time of need as being in need of redemption is arrogance and presumption on a breath-taking scale. Likewise, to simply consider these non-random acts of kindness as just a delusion, as a perception through rose coloured glasses, is to ignore real events and real actions and devalue the efforts of others.
'Random' acts of kindness are not random at all - they are natural and expected, inherent in us all. We do not need the hand of god to explain them, nor do we need to be created in the image of a kind God. Like Peter, the next time I encounter a trauma, I will act as a human would, fullfilling an expectation of humans.
Of course, the only way around confirmation bias is objective testing. If more and more people can see that something is true, then the probability of it just being confirmation bias by all those people is less. Additionally, some objective measures can be agreed upon to, at the very minimum, highlight the bias, or, at best, remove the bias.
Let's establish a few things which probably won't be that controversial. First, in the midst of trauma, where your anxiety levels are high, any kind of help seems almost 'god given' - improbably fortuitous. Everybody who provides assistance seems like an angel. Second, trauma narrows your focus. The world seems to rotate around you and your injury, as do the actions of emergency services, and the opportunities for broader reflection, over a cup of tea, are limited.
These are both interesting in where they might lead. I guess, in retrospect, the fortune of the location of my injury on my body and the ready assistance at hand should have led me to believe that the 'hand of god' was present. 'He' manipulated circumstances to, perhaps, bring me to some glorious revelation. But, as Tim Minchin so ably satirises in Thank you God for fixing the cataracts of Sam's mum, such a conclusion is so massively illogical. It means that the women who suffered a massive heart attack the week before in the same park and was unable to be resuscitated must likewise have been denied the hand of god - the unsurprising conclusion is that all good outcomes are the hand of god and all adverse are the work of nature (or god's eternal plan, whichever version of god you subscribe to).
If ever there was confirmation bias, that is it. As plausibility goes, there is another thesis.
I had been riding well - feeling fit and healthy. I had just completed my favourite track and was moving onto a track that was very familiar, mainly so my son could go a little further and I would get some more fitness out of him. My confidence was high, which probably means I took more risks than I normally would. The track was familiar, which probably means I took less notice, explicitly, of features and rode it more automatically.
Recent storms had deposited loose sand at various places, especially corners, which tend to be in gullies where water flows. Since they were a 'new' feature in the familiar track, I would not be expecting them. Only minutes before, I had been shocked that a large tree had fallen on my favourite track, just around a blind corner, and its roots protruded dangerously into track space. I had narrowly averted a collision and had made a mental note to inform SEQ Water. But this new feature was 'in my face' - it came to my notice readily where excess sand might not.
I had also stopped just previous to the track where I had the accident and adjusted my son's brakes. In stopping, I got talking to a guy I saw frequently at the park and we discovered we were both teachers and had common experiences. My conversation with him had lasted almost 20 minutes and by the time I resumed riding, my muscles were cold.
On the corner that I had the accident, sand had accumulated on the side of the track that was the natural line for the corner. Sand has a significant braking effect when riding. My front wheel simply stopped and the force of cornering flicked it around so that one end of the handle bar faced my groin and, as my bike and I rotated around the stationary front wheel, the other end of the bar pierced the ground. The ground and handlebar did not give way, so my groin absorbed the impact of 90kg of weight travelling at 20km/h.
Of course, this is just conjecture - but it is at least scientific, plausible and based on objective facts that we could test. I can match my wound with the end of the handlebar, I can revisit the site and find sand, I can match the track surface with that still in my handlebar, I can interview my new friend Don and so on. All of this is verifiable.
Of course, if you must, you can still insist on the hand of god and I leave you to that if you can't live without it. Needless to say, whether the hand of god is there or not, it matters not a jot - the hand of god is eminently disposable without changing the facts.
Of course, we could then turn to the human aspect of the event and find something that might deny or affirm our beliefs. On a previous ride in the same park, I was furious when my chain broke within 20 minutes of the start of the ride and I had no means of fixing it. As a rider, I am no less determined to get a fix to satisfy my addiction than the next rider. All riders want their fix.
At least half a dozen riders that day truncated their rides to provide assistance. One pushed my bike (and his) 1 kilometre to a clearing and then rode it back to the car park and then returned on foot to get his own bike. One stayed as his partner returned to the car park so they could be in contact to give the ambulance updates on how to find me. Another encouraged me to relax and lie back - important to slow my racing heart rate (driven mostly by anxiety - my rest heart rate after rides is much lower) and stayed for a good while to makes sure I was OK.
At one time, I was rather embarrassed that Peter from Kalbar was bringing my bike and his rather awkwardly along the track as I hobbled out to a clearing that an ambulance could access. I apologised for upsetting his day. "I hope you got a good ride in." I said.
His reply is so salient to this discussion. Peter doesn't have to confirm my bias. Regardless of what I read into his actions, he is not obliged to affirm these in his words. He could have said, "I'm happy to help." He could have said, "Jesus said that we should love one another and that's what I am doing." He could even have said, "It is more blessed to give than to receive."
What he actually said might surprise.
He said, "I'd expect someone to help me if I was injured." He did what he did because of an unwritten code amongst riders that, regardless of your intentions for gratifying your addiction to riding, you stop to help those who are in need.
But such a code is not exclusive to riders. It permeates so many circumstances to the point that we are shocked when someone is so callous as to pass by someone in trauma and first-aid classes counsel participants to examine, as the first point in coming upon trauma, whether they can really be useful in assisting the person; such is the tendency of people to stop and help. Helping others is natural. We have an in-built tendency to altruism, especially when someone else is in dire straits. This is played out over and over again.
Without getting too deeply into religious argumentation, attempting to align this tendency with the concept of 'fallen' humanity, driven to sin by an inherited propensity to hate, steal, deceive and lust, just doesn't work. If Peter had stolen my bike, if Stu had asked me for a retainer for his services, if the lady giving first aid had rifled through my things, if the ambulance personnel had been casual about interrupting their New Year's Eve, if the doctor's had been aloof and uncaring instead of attentive and apologetic that I was not attended to when they rightly attended to others with higher needs, if my friends had scorned my recklessness instead of joking about it in an attempt to make me feel better, if my family had simply continued their day as intended and left me to my own devices - this might have made me convinced of a fallen world and humanity on the road to hell.
But, instead, the actions of each human I encountered affirmed, yes affirmed, my belief that humans are essentially good and that they display altruism at every possible opportunity because it feels good - it triggers a dopamine rush just as surely as flinging your body and bike around a tight hairpin. To nominate those who assisted me in the time of need as being in need of redemption is arrogance and presumption on a breath-taking scale. Likewise, to simply consider these non-random acts of kindness as just a delusion, as a perception through rose coloured glasses, is to ignore real events and real actions and devalue the efforts of others.
'Random' acts of kindness are not random at all - they are natural and expected, inherent in us all. We do not need the hand of god to explain them, nor do we need to be created in the image of a kind God. Like Peter, the next time I encounter a trauma, I will act as a human would, fullfilling an expectation of humans.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
The fine art of denial
As I look out my window, I see a rich landscape of plants against a rather picturesque valley between quite imposing ridges of a mountain range. Closest to me are some familiar small trees, deliberately planted to provide a buffer from a road that is very busy on public holidays, but otherwise quiet. Beyond are a sprinkling of natives, some very large and old, some relatively young but pruned savagely to head height and other saplings finding their way into adulthood.
By happy accident, those closest to the house turned out to be a fire-resistant species and offer protection from wild-fire; those further away drop a layer of humus every year which accumulates into a tinder dry layer of fuel.
I have conscientiously grazed and cleared this areas, not just because they represent a fire risk, but I am paranoid about snakes, amongst the most venomous in the world; not because I am frightened of these snakes, per se, but because transporting someone bitten to the nearest emergency centre is a minimum of one half hour travel, not matter the transport medium - if one of my children were bitten, they would certainly die while waiting for anti-venom. I have coached my children to steer clear of snakes and this strategy has served many who live in rural areas well.
Further from the house, one can identify a line of the endemic species, the Manna Gum, along the river flats, isolated to a thin strip on otherwise completely cleared land. On the slopes even further beyond, a limited set of species of tree can be found with a distinct lack of undergrowth - you can walk freely to the top of the ridge, hindered only by your fitness in scaling slopes of between 20 and 30%.
To the untrained eye, this landscape is unremarkable. It is probably repeated in thousands of locations across Australia. With some exceptions. Few people are quite as fastidious about the trees they choose to plant. Some have little care for the native exotic divide; many do not investigate the properties of the trees they plant - their response to frost, fire, soil type and drought. I do, but only in regard to my block of land - I am not a botanical encyclopaedia.
Now imagine you came upon my block, in study mode, perhaps as a student of rural development. What might you conclude about the area in which I live? What scientific standards might you apply to your study? What kinds of evidence are more or less useful in ascertaining the truth?
From the road, you would note a species of wattle easily identified by its stone blue leaves. You would quickly observe that these are exceptional in the area - not a single instance of this tree can be observed in 20 kilometres of valley. You would quickly conclude that this is an introduced species. Since the trees are all young, you would conclude that this was recent. Furthermore, since the individuals are on private property, you would conclude that the introduction was via an agent under my control, whether it be deliberate or accidental planting. Accidental planting is less likely given the extent of plantings that are not endemic amongst the obvious signs of garden beds, selectively cleared areas and plants obviously pruned and managed.
What would confuse you, however, is the apparently random planting of these trees. Two stand close to one another, another is almost 100 metres away and another close by it. As you know the tendency of humans is to plant in clusters or rows, this might be explained by the planter having a kind of organic pattern in mind - don't plant things too regularly otherwise it doesn't look natural.
The truth is odd but not weird. Two original individuals of the same species were purchased and planted simultaneously. The intention was indeed to defy a regular pattern. One suffered from an natural ailment of wattles - old age - and rotted away. The other suffered an extraordinary event - it was hit by a car in an accident. Both (quite old) specimens had dropped seeds, some of which now flourish as saplings and came up, naturally, after a sequence of very hot then very wet weather. The rotten individual I cut down - the accident victim fell over and was eventually removed.
If you were a better student, you might have asked me about these plants and the truth would have been revealed promptly and more comprehensively. But relying on my witness is fraught with problems. First, my memory for many things is hopeless; I might just lie to you and I may be confused.Whichever way you approach it, getting to the truth is going to be difficult, problematic and laborious. You would have to find evidence of the original specimens or seeds spread in a pattern which could only indicate a mature individual reproducing.
On the contrary, putting a 'spanner' in the 'works' of your thesis is child's play. How do you know that the seeds have not been introduced by a vehicle that picked them up in their tyres and drove in both places? Could they not be an endemic species, long suppressed by grazing, emerging because of a unique set of conditions that I have imposed as custodian of this block.In terms of intellectual effort, discrediting a thesis takes almost no effort in comparison to forming and proving it in the first instance.
The discrediting or denial leans on a natural concept of justice - 'beyond reasonable doubt'. If you are going to be thrown into jail or I am going to invest billions on the basis of your thesis, I don't want to be wise after the event. I want all based covered. The science required to quench doubt is horrendous.
Indulge me further with my analogy. In examining my property, the obvious planting of a fire-resistant species close to the house, combined with the clearing of a buffer zone, devoid of fuel, around my house, point directly at a consciousness about fire. Complementing this, the complete absence of fire scarring except in isolated burn piles demonstrates a regime of burning fuel to reduce fire risk. A line of trees of varied species, none fire-retardant, on the western side (the direction of the strongest winds), various heights in a pattern consistent with a wind break , indicate intentional planting for a purpose - thus, the fire control measures in planting are unlikely to be accidental.
The truth is, they all are. The burn piles are actually for the purpose of a New Year's bonfire - they are coincidentally useful in removing fuel. The cleared areas are snake prevention and grazing horses for recreation and coincidentally useful in reducing fuel. The fire-resistant species are completely accidental - I was dumbfounded to find that a species I planted close to the house because it grew well on our soil, was the right height, had a pleasant habit and soft leaves, turned out to be fire-resistant!
Your thesis was wrong. You might have introduced even more comprehensive proof of fire-planting and they would all have been wrong - yet, the thesis was compelling and not 'wrong' in any sense we consider erroneous. Only privileged information can strike it down. Or further science. The most comprehensive analysis of species across the block would show that several trees stand in positions which create a significant fire risk - most notably a blue gum at the corner of the garage, its fuel falling into gutters on the garage and on the ground in an area difficult to clear, creating a fire hazard.
When it comes to refuting a thesis, only more and more science can get us closer to the truth. Denialist claims, selecting just one item that breaks the thesis, may not be incorrect, as the example above illustrates. But, denial leaves no way forward. Only further theses, all equally breakable, with accompanying laborious, resource hungry science, can bring us closer to the truth.
What evidence could I muster to show that the landscape in which I live has been profoundly affected to nearly 200 years of grazing; endemic cedar and ironbark are completely absent from the landscape? What small detail could a denialist bring to show that my thesis of profound change is unfounded? Seasons have varied greatly lately, and this suggest that predicting the climate in this place over the last 200 years might be impossible, therefore making my thesis about degradation by grazing as likely as degradation by natural attrition.
Upon discovering the bones of a Diprotodon close by, a herbivore that could not be supported in a landscape so heavily wooded, could I conclude that human habitation and practices, most likely fire-stick farming by Aborigines, was responsible for a previous dramatic transformation of the botanical landscape from savannah to fire-adapted forests? Could a denialist bring evidence that humans co-existed with Diprotodons for a long time in some places as the 'chink in the armour' of this thesis?
As Andrew Bolt, that arch-denialist, adequately demonstrates in his blogs, the fine art of denial is to find one single item that throws doubt on the thesis and then let your audience's natural scepticism or self-affirming beliefs do the rest. After all, who is going to resource the science needed to support a revised thesis? And how easy it will be to find yet another vulnerable point! And how easy it is to see that, given all the right conditions, that denial could be just the right level of analysis needed to plunge an unsubstantiated thesis into oblivion, the only 'moral' path to take, in the service of us all!
In the US, science denial continues unabated. A court case was needed to establish that ID was not science and that its objections to evolution did not constitute grounds for teaching an alternative view or break evolution as a thesis. Perhaps, in the face of denialism generally, we need a Court of Scientific Integrity, established specifically to examine all claims to truth according to a standard of 'reasonable probability' based on the evidence available presented by advocates and experts.
By happy accident, those closest to the house turned out to be a fire-resistant species and offer protection from wild-fire; those further away drop a layer of humus every year which accumulates into a tinder dry layer of fuel.
I have conscientiously grazed and cleared this areas, not just because they represent a fire risk, but I am paranoid about snakes, amongst the most venomous in the world; not because I am frightened of these snakes, per se, but because transporting someone bitten to the nearest emergency centre is a minimum of one half hour travel, not matter the transport medium - if one of my children were bitten, they would certainly die while waiting for anti-venom. I have coached my children to steer clear of snakes and this strategy has served many who live in rural areas well.
Further from the house, one can identify a line of the endemic species, the Manna Gum, along the river flats, isolated to a thin strip on otherwise completely cleared land. On the slopes even further beyond, a limited set of species of tree can be found with a distinct lack of undergrowth - you can walk freely to the top of the ridge, hindered only by your fitness in scaling slopes of between 20 and 30%.
To the untrained eye, this landscape is unremarkable. It is probably repeated in thousands of locations across Australia. With some exceptions. Few people are quite as fastidious about the trees they choose to plant. Some have little care for the native exotic divide; many do not investigate the properties of the trees they plant - their response to frost, fire, soil type and drought. I do, but only in regard to my block of land - I am not a botanical encyclopaedia.
Now imagine you came upon my block, in study mode, perhaps as a student of rural development. What might you conclude about the area in which I live? What scientific standards might you apply to your study? What kinds of evidence are more or less useful in ascertaining the truth?
From the road, you would note a species of wattle easily identified by its stone blue leaves. You would quickly observe that these are exceptional in the area - not a single instance of this tree can be observed in 20 kilometres of valley. You would quickly conclude that this is an introduced species. Since the trees are all young, you would conclude that this was recent. Furthermore, since the individuals are on private property, you would conclude that the introduction was via an agent under my control, whether it be deliberate or accidental planting. Accidental planting is less likely given the extent of plantings that are not endemic amongst the obvious signs of garden beds, selectively cleared areas and plants obviously pruned and managed.
What would confuse you, however, is the apparently random planting of these trees. Two stand close to one another, another is almost 100 metres away and another close by it. As you know the tendency of humans is to plant in clusters or rows, this might be explained by the planter having a kind of organic pattern in mind - don't plant things too regularly otherwise it doesn't look natural.
The truth is odd but not weird. Two original individuals of the same species were purchased and planted simultaneously. The intention was indeed to defy a regular pattern. One suffered from an natural ailment of wattles - old age - and rotted away. The other suffered an extraordinary event - it was hit by a car in an accident. Both (quite old) specimens had dropped seeds, some of which now flourish as saplings and came up, naturally, after a sequence of very hot then very wet weather. The rotten individual I cut down - the accident victim fell over and was eventually removed.
If you were a better student, you might have asked me about these plants and the truth would have been revealed promptly and more comprehensively. But relying on my witness is fraught with problems. First, my memory for many things is hopeless; I might just lie to you and I may be confused.Whichever way you approach it, getting to the truth is going to be difficult, problematic and laborious. You would have to find evidence of the original specimens or seeds spread in a pattern which could only indicate a mature individual reproducing.
On the contrary, putting a 'spanner' in the 'works' of your thesis is child's play. How do you know that the seeds have not been introduced by a vehicle that picked them up in their tyres and drove in both places? Could they not be an endemic species, long suppressed by grazing, emerging because of a unique set of conditions that I have imposed as custodian of this block.In terms of intellectual effort, discrediting a thesis takes almost no effort in comparison to forming and proving it in the first instance.
The discrediting or denial leans on a natural concept of justice - 'beyond reasonable doubt'. If you are going to be thrown into jail or I am going to invest billions on the basis of your thesis, I don't want to be wise after the event. I want all based covered. The science required to quench doubt is horrendous.
Indulge me further with my analogy. In examining my property, the obvious planting of a fire-resistant species close to the house, combined with the clearing of a buffer zone, devoid of fuel, around my house, point directly at a consciousness about fire. Complementing this, the complete absence of fire scarring except in isolated burn piles demonstrates a regime of burning fuel to reduce fire risk. A line of trees of varied species, none fire-retardant, on the western side (the direction of the strongest winds), various heights in a pattern consistent with a wind break , indicate intentional planting for a purpose - thus, the fire control measures in planting are unlikely to be accidental.
The truth is, they all are. The burn piles are actually for the purpose of a New Year's bonfire - they are coincidentally useful in removing fuel. The cleared areas are snake prevention and grazing horses for recreation and coincidentally useful in reducing fuel. The fire-resistant species are completely accidental - I was dumbfounded to find that a species I planted close to the house because it grew well on our soil, was the right height, had a pleasant habit and soft leaves, turned out to be fire-resistant!
Your thesis was wrong. You might have introduced even more comprehensive proof of fire-planting and they would all have been wrong - yet, the thesis was compelling and not 'wrong' in any sense we consider erroneous. Only privileged information can strike it down. Or further science. The most comprehensive analysis of species across the block would show that several trees stand in positions which create a significant fire risk - most notably a blue gum at the corner of the garage, its fuel falling into gutters on the garage and on the ground in an area difficult to clear, creating a fire hazard.
When it comes to refuting a thesis, only more and more science can get us closer to the truth. Denialist claims, selecting just one item that breaks the thesis, may not be incorrect, as the example above illustrates. But, denial leaves no way forward. Only further theses, all equally breakable, with accompanying laborious, resource hungry science, can bring us closer to the truth.
What evidence could I muster to show that the landscape in which I live has been profoundly affected to nearly 200 years of grazing; endemic cedar and ironbark are completely absent from the landscape? What small detail could a denialist bring to show that my thesis of profound change is unfounded? Seasons have varied greatly lately, and this suggest that predicting the climate in this place over the last 200 years might be impossible, therefore making my thesis about degradation by grazing as likely as degradation by natural attrition.
Upon discovering the bones of a Diprotodon close by, a herbivore that could not be supported in a landscape so heavily wooded, could I conclude that human habitation and practices, most likely fire-stick farming by Aborigines, was responsible for a previous dramatic transformation of the botanical landscape from savannah to fire-adapted forests? Could a denialist bring evidence that humans co-existed with Diprotodons for a long time in some places as the 'chink in the armour' of this thesis?
As Andrew Bolt, that arch-denialist, adequately demonstrates in his blogs, the fine art of denial is to find one single item that throws doubt on the thesis and then let your audience's natural scepticism or self-affirming beliefs do the rest. After all, who is going to resource the science needed to support a revised thesis? And how easy it will be to find yet another vulnerable point! And how easy it is to see that, given all the right conditions, that denial could be just the right level of analysis needed to plunge an unsubstantiated thesis into oblivion, the only 'moral' path to take, in the service of us all!
In the US, science denial continues unabated. A court case was needed to establish that ID was not science and that its objections to evolution did not constitute grounds for teaching an alternative view or break evolution as a thesis. Perhaps, in the face of denialism generally, we need a Court of Scientific Integrity, established specifically to examine all claims to truth according to a standard of 'reasonable probability' based on the evidence available presented by advocates and experts.
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