I’ve been given the OK to pre-announce the Internet Infidels’ “Great Debate” project, which will publish four sets of exchanges between prominent philosophers about arguments and evidence for and against naturalism and theism. For the first month each debate is posted, readers will be able to submit questions which will be responded to by the debaters. Check out the announcement I’ve posted at the Secular Outpost.
Will Wilkinson makes a nice argument for the morality more open immigration policies, and immorality of more closed immigration policies. Historical Comments Einzige (2007-06-12): Damn. I wish I knew what it was like to be that smart.
Scott Adams’ lame arguments for copyright are taken apart by Kevin Carson at the Mutualist Blog. There are good arguments to be made for some form of copyright protection, but Adams doesn’t make them. I guess it’s not just the subject of evolution where Adams goes off the rails. Historical Comments Kevin Carson (2007-04-11): Thanks, Jim.
Via Will Wilkinson, the February 12, 2007 issue of The New Yorker has a nice profile of the Churchlands (PDF) which discusses their history and views on mind and brain (without once mentioning the term “eliminative materialism”): One afternoon recently, Paul says, he was home making dinner when Pat burst in the door, having come straight from a frustrating faculty meeting. “She said, ‘Paul, don’t speak to me, my serotonin levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocorticoids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren’t for my endogenous opiates I’d have driven my car into a tree on the way home. My dopamine levels need lifting. Pour me a Chardonnay, and I’ll be down in a minute.’”Wilkinson points out that he has adopted similar use of scientific language about physical states to describe his mental states, and agrees with the Churchlands that this enhances the ability to describe what he’s feeling: I think that once one gets a subjective grasp of the difference between the effects of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, adrenaline, glucocorticoids, prolactin, testosterone, etc., monistic conceptions of pleasure and happiness become almost self-evidently false, and a kind of pluralism comes to seem almost inevitable as the trade-offs between different kinds of physical/qualitative states become apparent. Wilkinson’s blog post on the subject is here. I was also interested to see that the Churchlands are advocates of using the evidence from neuroscience in ethical and legal contexts, which brings to mind Jeffrey Rosen’s recent article in the New York Times (March 11, 2007) on “The Brain on the Stand." ...
This YouTube video is of a talk by Daniel Dennett at the TED conference in 2006, following (and commenting on) Pastor Rick Warren. jpbenney (2007-07-08): The idea that religion is a natural phenomenon is very reminiscent, oddly, of Jared Diamond in books like Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, as well as Phillip Longman. The idea of subjecting religion to serious social study, too, is nothing new. Leonard Shlain's The Alphabet versus the Goddess is a flawed if highly enthralling example.Daniel does seem an interesting person, I must say. He is very articulate and lively, so one imagine him to be a very convincing speaker. ...
Richard Bennett has an interesting post about Wikipedia and the decentralization of knowledge collection titled “Teaching the hive mind to discriminate." He argues that while Wikipedia is good at accumulating the knowledge of a large number of individuals, it also collects their “prejudice, mistaken beliefs, wishful thinking, and conformance to tradition.” It is unrealistic to expect that these erroneous beliefs will automatically be weeded out because “expertise is not as widely dispersed as participation”: So the real question about information and group scaling is this: are there procedures for separating good information from false information (”discrimination”) that are effective enough to allow groups to be scaled indefinitely without a loss of information quality? It’s an article of faith in the Wikipedia “community” that such procedures exist, and that they’re essentially self-operative. That’s the mythos of “emergence”, that systems, including human systems, automatically self-organize in such a way as to reward good behavior and information and purge bad information. This seems to be based on the underlying assumption that people being basically good, the good will always prevail in any group.Readers of this blog know that I would argue that many religious and political beliefs are examples that support Bennett’s position. On a related point, Ed Felten has a recent post about how reputation systems on the Internet can be manipulated, referencing a pair of articles at Wired by Annalee Newitz. A common flaw is that the reputations of the raters themselves is either not taken into account or is easily manipulated. If there were a way of reliably weighting expertise of raters within appropriate knowledge domains, that could provide a method of discrimination to sort out the good from the bad information. This is a subject that my planned (but never completed) Ph.D. dissertation in epistemology (on social epistemology, specifically on obtaining knowledge based on the knowledge of others) at the University of Arizona should have touched upon. One philosopher who had touched on this subject at the time I was working on my Ph.D. (back in the early 1990s) was Philip Kitcher, whose book The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions (1993, Oxford University Press) contains a chapter titled “The Organization of Cognitive Labor” (originally published as “The Division of Cognitive Labor” in the Journal of Philosophy, 87(1990):5-21). ...
I’ve occasionally remarked that I don’t care so much what people believe as I do how they act. The people I enjoy spending time with are not always those who share my beliefs, but are those who demonstrate integrity, respect, honesty, and other virtues. These virtues are associated with not just holding beliefs in the sense of a mere tendency to agree with a statement, but a deeper belief that actually has consequences for one’s behavior. When I was a born-again Christian, I heard many sermons to the effect that many Christians were Christian in name only, paying only lip service to the doctrines while not living their lives in accordance with them. Clearly, there are a lot of such people out there. (Read the rest, where I recycle an argument I originally wrote in a pamphlet called “Three Reductio Ad Absurdum Arguments Against Evangelical Christianity,” at the Secular Outpost.)
During my long plane flights this week, I used some of my time to catch up on reading back issues of The Economist. Here were a few of the stories I found particularly interesting in the January 6-12, 2007 issue: “Medicine at the Top of the World” (p. 65): LYING in an intensive-care ward is a world away from climbing Everest, but a connection will be drawn this spring when 45 scientists and 208 volunteers tackle the mountain to bring back information about oxygen deprivation. The reason they are going is that hypoxia (a lack of oxygen in cells, which can lead to death) is the one thing that links practically all patients in intensive-care wards—and there is no better place to study it than in the thin air of the world’s highest mountain.The story describes the Xtreme Everest expedition, which will take 250 people up Mount Everest, setting up mobile labs at various elevations to study hypoxia. The volunteers will climb up to 5,300 meters, and 16 climber-scientists will ascend to the summit to become the first to have blood drawn at the top of the world’s tallest mountain. The research will be used to try to identify the genetic basis of people’s ability to handle hypoxia, which couldn’t be easily be conducted on patients in intensive care due to not having enough of them in one place at the right time. “The logic of privacy” (pp. 65-66): ...
Glen Whitman at Agoraphilia points out how the common example of cognitive bias that “80% of us believe that our driving skills are better than average” can be a correct description of reality, when the median is greater than the mean. By example, the mean time to conception for women trying to get pregnant is 7 months, but 50% of such women are pregnant within 4 months and 75% pregnant within 6 months, so 75% of such women do “better than average.” ...
This is the third in a series of posts about the finances of the creationist ministries which were previously reported in Reports of the National Center for Science Education in 2000 in an article by John Cole: the Access Research Network, Answers in Genesis, the Creation Evidences Museum, Creation Illustrated Ministries, Creation Moments, the Creation Research Society, Creation Worldview Ministries, the Institute for Creation Research, the Discovery Institute, and I’ll add Walter Brown’s Center for Scientific Creation to the list. ...