Naturalism

From Neuroskeptic at Discover: When you’re doing two things at once – like listening to the radio while driving – your brain organizes itself into two, functionally independent networks, almost as if you temporarily have two brains. That’s according to a fascinating new study from University of Wisconsin-Madison neuroscientists Shuntaro Sasai and colleagues. It’s called Functional split brain in a driving/listening paradigm. To study authors link their work to the experiences of split-brain epilepsy patients. In other words, when the GPS voice was helping the participants to drive (“integrated task”), the brain ‘driving network’ and ‘listening network’ were acting in concert, with a high degree of functional connectivity. But when the drivers were listening to the radio show (“split task”), Read More ›

From political analyst Michael Barone at TownHall: Liberal elites tell us that “the science is settled” and that people must have faith in their predictions. But science is never settled. Scientists produce theories and test them against observations. When Albert Einstein announced his relativity theory in 1905, he didn’t ask people to have faith. He claimed that his theory would do a better job than Isaac Newton’s of predicting observations in a solar eclipse in 1919. It is religion, not science, that demands that people have faith in things that otherwise seem unlikely, brands those who do not as “heretics” and “deniers,” requires participation in repeated rituals (recycling, anyone?), and permits sinners to purchase indulgences (carbon offsets for Al Gore’s Read More ›

From Clare Foran at Atlantic: The entrenchment of climate-science denial is one of the ways the United States appears to be exceptional relative to the rest of the world. A comparative 2015 study of nine conservative political parties in countries such as Canada, Germany, and Spain concluded that “the U.S. Republican Party is an anomaly in denying anthropogenic climate change.” Meanwhile, Americans were least likely to agree that climate change is largely the result of human activity in a 2014 survey of 20 countries, including China, India, Australia, and Great Britain. Scientific reality does not seem to have escaped the distorting influence of political polarization in the United States. A paper published in Environment earlier this year suggests that as Read More ›

From Joshua Howgego at New Scientist: Evolution has built bias into our brains – here are the best ways to overrule your instincts and make better decisions about everything (paywall) More. What? To the folk at New Scientist, we are merely products of evolution who probably cannot grasp reality (it is unclear that there is a reality to grasp). And therefore, even if we thought we were outsmarting anything, it would be an illusion, though whose or what’s illusion is unclear. If Darwinism, the creation story of naturalism, is taken seriously, there is no I in I. Questions of truth are irrelevant but, of course, power is forever. Don’t pay for this. Let’s spend our Christmas money on coffee and Read More ›

From Brian Gallagher at Nautilus: But perhaps the peak of admiration for Hitchens flows from those who most identify with the two following qualities: a reverence for science and philosophy, and a conviction that both should be the basis of personal belief and ethics in society. Take Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist at Arizona State University, and the author of the 2012 book A Universe from Nothing: Why There’s Something Rather Than Nothing, who confessed to being stunned and grateful to have been Hitchens’ friend. At the writer’s Washington, D.C. apartment, Krauss once winkingly said to a visitor, who asked whether Krauss was Hitchen’s agent, that he was his “personal physicist.” Krauss has said that Hitchens motivated him Read More ›

From cosmologist Larry Krauss, our favorite spokesman for scientism, at the New Yorker:  A long-form rant on a variety of subjects re the impending a-Trump-a-lypse, some of which intersect with items O’Leary for News has covered recently, including science education: And the Trump Administration is on course to undermine science in another way: through education. Educators have various concerns about Betsy DeVos, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education—they object to her efforts to shield charter schools from government regulation, for example—but one issue stands above the rest: DeVos is a fundamentalist Christian with a long history of opposition to science. If her faith shapes her policies—and there is evidence that it will—she could shape science education decisively for the worse, Read More ›

 Laughed too soon and too easily? From John G. West, author of Walt Disney and Live Action, at Evolution News & Views : Someone once quipped that Walt Disney harbored “19th-century emotions in conflict with a 21st-century brain.” The characterization was apt. Disney, who died fifty years ago on December 15, was known for championing traditional morality and promoting nostalgia for a simpler past epitomized by small-town America. At the same time, he was widely recognized as a visionary futurist who enthusiastically embraced the new horizons offered by science and technology. Disney’s idiosyncratic mixture of moral traditionalism and techno-optimism didn’t always seem to cohere, and it led people to admire him for vastly different reasons. Disney was a futurist. But Read More ›

But not a God, with moral rules. From campus pastor Peter Burfeind at The Federalist: Lacking any evidence of an actual alien, Hollywood’s aliens speak more about the modern psyche fueling the imaginations of their designers. … The aliens in “Arrival” look like tree trunks. Get it? The trees are coming to tell us to work together. (They might acquaint themselves with the rock group Rush to get the full story.) I can’t imagine that has anything to do with the dreamy fantasies of environmentalists. Or again, the alien in “Alien” (1979), fetal in appearance, antagonizes the crew and their ship’s computer, “Mother,” until it gets sucked out of the ship. Wow, can’t imagine that had anything to do with Read More ›

Here. Our goal is to consolidate the idea of fine-tuning across disciplines such as biology, chemistry, and physics. Fine-tuning is often deemed a fact and used to reach grandiose metaphysical conclusions by philosophers, theologians, and even physicists, without a proper understanding of the underlying assumptions entailed by these arguments. As a consequence the physical and philosophical literature on this subject are rather confusing, leading to esoteric topics such as Boltzmann Brains. We intend to present a comprehensive review of the physics used for deriving fine-tuning arguments, scrutinising the current ones and uncovering new examples, thereby providing a solid foundation for future efforts to interpret this fascinating facet of Nature. We will produce a field-manual for fine-tuning and create an accompanying Read More ›

Douglas Axe, author of Undeniable, debates theistic evolutionist and biochemist Keith Fox debate the question at Unbelievable (radio). Fox is Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, Cambridge. The comments are fascinating insofar as they reveal the obvious superiority of fully naturalist atheism to “theistic evolution.” If we can see no intelligence behind or within nature, that’s not only because there probably isn’t any but because, as the naturalist is happy to point out, we evolved so as not to be able to understand reality anyway. There is no intelligence in us either. There is only power and he, as it happens, exercises it. Of course, the naturalist succeeds in persuading his pop science media-driven crowd by ignoring vast Read More ›

Or the mind, or the immateriality or consciousness or the resurrection of the dead… From Helen Thomson at New Scientist: “WE’RE taking people to the future!” says architect Stephen Valentine, as we drive through two gigantic gates into a massive plot of land in the middle of the sleepy, unassuming town that is Comfort, Texas. The scene from here is surreal. … After years of searching, Valentine chose this site as the unlikely home of the new Mecca of cryogenics. Called Timeship, the monolithic building will become the world’s largest structure devoted to cryopreservation, and will be home to thousands of people who are neither dead nor alive, frozen in time in the hope that one day technology will be Read More ›

From Avi Loeb at Nature, on the achievements and limitations of Mayan astronomy: So why, I wondered, didn’t the Mayans go further and infer aspects of our modern understanding of astronomy? They determined the orbital periods of Venus, Mars and Mercury around the Sun, but Earth was at the centre of their Universe. I came to appreciate how limiting prevailing world views can be. … I noticed this bias recently while assessing a PhD thesis. The student was asked to test whether a data set from a large cosmological survey was in line with the standard cosmological model. But when a discrepancy was found, the student’s goal shifted to explaining why the data set was incomplete. In such a culture, Read More ›

By 2076. From Michael Brooks at New Scientist: Will we still love technology when robots have taken our jobs, or when insurance companies demand huge premiums because humans are the most dangerous drivers on the roads? Will people smash up self-driving taxis, just as Luddites attacked automated looms? In some small, angry pockets, the backlash is already in full swing. Former mathematician Ted Kaczynski, aka The Unabomber, has just published a book called The Anti-Tech Revolution. (paywall) More. It’s helpful that the Unabomber is an entirely average American (“Kaczynski killed three and injured 23 people over the course of an 18-year bombing campaign that often targeted universities and airlines.”) Like all the other rubes, boobs, bubbas, hicks, and hillbillies… Note Read More ›

  The millions were just “other losses,” of course. Simon Ings’ Stalin and the Scientists: a History of Triumph and Tragedy examines what happened to physics and biology under Stalin: Scientists throughout history, from Galileo to today’s experts on climate change, have often had to contend with politics in their pursuit of knowledge. But in the Soviet Union, where the ruling elites embraced, patronized, and even fetishized science like never before, scientists lived their lives on a knife edge. The Soviet Union had the best-funded scientific establishment in history. Scientists were elevated as popular heroes and lavished with awards and privileges. But if their ideas or their field of study lost favor with the elites, they could be exiled, imprisoned, Read More ›

From Johnny Bartlett at the Blyth Institute: Description of the organization and its target audience We do research and education in biology, engineering, and computer science focusing on new avenues of research. This is for a book investigating alternative approaches to scientific and academic discovery and analysis. Content details Description We need a cover for the book “Naturalism and Its Alternatives in Scientific Methodologies”. The book is the result of a conference we held earlier this year. There is a template for the cover attached. US$499. A previous book that we published is this one – https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-…283863/ref There is no need to match anything about this cover, but I thought you should see what won the last competition. I usually Read More ›