Philosophy

From Tasneem Zehra Husain at Nautilus: It’s not the immensity or even the inscrutability, but that it reduces physical law to happenstance. Not just a feature, a benefit. I am not alone in my ambivalence. The multiverse has been hotly debated and continues to be a source of polarization among some of the most prominent scientists of the day. The debate over the multiverse is not a conversation about the particulars of a theory. It is a fight about identity and consequence, about what constitutes an explanation, what proof consists of, how we define science, and whether there is a point to it all. … The multiverse is less like a closed door and more like a key. To me, Read More ›

From Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience: We know this thanks to a lengthy chain reaction of scientific discoveries. And according to Cobb, if there was a single man who catalyzed this reaction, it was Oswald Avery. In 1944, Avery, a medical researcher at Rockefeller University, published a paper with his colleagues Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty. The experiment they described showed that DNA carries genetic information. While that seems obvious today, back then it was a controversial conclusion, countering decades of entrenched thought. DNA had originally been discovered back in 1869, but the majority of scientists considered it to be too simple to carry meaningful biological information. That duty, they assumed, belonged to proteins. But a decade before Avery dented that Read More ›

Yet it isn’t happening, and we have no idea how it happened even once… From science writer Michael Gross at Cell: Rapid progress in several research fields relating to the origin of life bring us closer to the point where it may become feasible to recreate coherent and plausible models of early life in the laboratory. (paywall) It’s a survey article, and it concludes: on our own planet and on many others. “One of the main new aspects of origins research is the growing effort to connect chemistry to geology,” Jack Szostak notes. “Finding reasonable geological settings for the origin of life is a critical aspect of understanding the whole pathway. We’ve moved beyond thinking that life emerged from the Read More ›

Terraforming means trying to make Mars capable of supporting lots of life, like Earth. From Monash philosopher Robert Sparrow at Nautilus: Enthusiasts often advertise space exploration as an opportunity to be virtuous. “To boldly go”—as they say in Star Trek—is valuable mostly because courage is a virtue. But one can’t have the opportunity to develop virtues without the possibility of demonstrating vices, and terraforming Mars would exhibit two major vicious character traits. One is insensitivity to beauty. Mars has many features of extraordinary natural beauty. It’s is home to the tallest known volcano on any planet, Olympus Mons, whose cap reaches 13.6 miles high—two and a half times the height of Mount Everest. Mars also has arguably the most spectacular Read More ›

Maybe that explains the buzz re post-truth in science, blowing through recently. From sociologist Frank Furedi at Spiked: Consider the recently invented phrase, ‘post-truth’. It has been selected as word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries. According to the Oxford University Press, after the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election, the use of ‘post-truth’ sky-rocketed. How did the term ‘post-truth’ acquire such a large public profile? This is not a phrase that emerged from the conversations of everyday life. Most people do not use it — at least not yet. Unlike ‘awesome’, ‘chilled out’ or ‘cool’, words whose origins are in the linguistic practices of ordinary people, ‘post-truth’ is the invention of individuals who are part of the political and Read More ›

From David Deming at RealClearScience: After a grand beginning, the academic study of the history of science has largely degenerated into a caricature of itself. It is not that it is merely bad. No, it is far worse than that. The scholarship being produced by most historians of science today is not good enough to be bad. Consider a quote from a recent paper by two historians of chemistry. “We find that efforts to differentiate alchemy from chemistry prove to be anachronistic, arbitrary, or presentist.” In other words, there is no difference between alchemy and chemistry. This thesis would not only shock a modern chemist, it would be rejected by any intelligent person with no special knowledge of these subjects. 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 ›

Scooby-Doo and the Case of the Silly Skeptic (David Wood) In “Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island,” the gang encounters real zombies and ghosts for the first time. But Fred explains away the evidence by appealing to increasingly absurd naturalistic explanations. In the end, even Fred recognizes that his explanations simply can’t account for the facts. Atheists often call themselves “skeptics.” But when we consider the methodology they apply when questioning God’s existence, we find that the atheist’s methodology rules out all evidence for God’s existence even before considering what the evidence is. In this video, David Wood uses some clips from “Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island” and some clips from his recent debate with Dr. Michael Shermer to show why it’s becoming Read More ›

From Emily Conover at Science News, reviewing philosopher James Owen Weatherall’s Void: The strange physics of nothing: In Void: The Strange Physics of Nothing, physicist and philosopher James Owen Weatherall explores how physicists’ beliefs about nothingness have changed over several revolutionary periods. The void, Weatherall argues, is physics distilled to its bare essence. If physicists can’t agree on the properties of empty space, they won’t be able to explain the physics of planets or particles either. Well, they haven’t so far. Under the modern view of quantum physics, various fields pervade all of space, and particles are simply excitations, or waves, in these fields. Even in a vacuum, experiments show, fluctuating fields produce a background of transient particles and antiparticles. Read More ›

A recent article tries to tackle some important and often-missed points of social psychology. [Unbridled skepticism] has given rise to a belief that what we think about ourselves and our lives together cannot be held with any confidence until objective, scientific insight into these problems is obtained. The result of taking such a stance on our knowledge in this realm is that we become thoroughly unsure of the only seat of experience available to us: ourselves. Doubt penetrates to the deepest level such that we begin to wonder if we are merely mirages, and the scientific method is seen as the sole means of reassurance that this is not the case. In consequence, the prospect of making genuine discoveries, ones Read More ›

Over in this thread, a number of us have been having a discussion with daveS regarding the alleged possibility of an actually infinite past. DaveS seems to think that an infinite past is a perfectly viable model that does not entail any logical contradictions.  Various arguments for the necessary finitude of the past were offered in that thread by myself and others, however, in comment #187 I offered the following argument for the finitude of the past that did not rely on the impossibility of an actual infinite existing in the world: 1) The past consists of moments that were once the present 2) If the past is infinite, then for any given moment there were infinitely many moments that Read More ›

From Robert P. Crease at Nature, a review of Carlo Rovelli’s upcoming Reality Is Not What It Seems, A sceptic might react to this irksome scientism by objecting that, unlike in Plato’s image, the vistas seen through the window keep changing. One can imagine, too, a book by a string theorist offering another view out of the window — just how many exits does Plato’s cave have? Yet another problem is that Rovelli has a cavalier attitude towards philosophy. Plato’s cave is more nuanced than he makes out, and Rovelli misinterprets a passage to claim that Socrates was disappointed by scientists. He plucks a statement out of context from a lengthy autobiographical story in which Socrates is describing youthful views Read More ›

Imagine if atheistic materialism was actually true and humans are nothing more than biological automatons – complexly programmed and reactive robots that behave and think in whatever manner happenstance chemical interactions dictates at any given time.  Let’s think about what would actually mean. There would be no way for a biological automaton to determine whether or not any statement was in fact true or not since all conclusions are driven by chemistry and not metaphysical “truth” values; indeed, a biological automaton reaches conclusion X for exactly the same reason any other reaches conclusion Y; chemistry.  If chemistry dictates that 1+1=banana, that is what a “person” will conclude. If chemistry dictates they defend that view to the death and see themselves Read More ›

Just a reminder to those wanting to present at the AM-Nat (Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism) Biology conference, abstracts are due October 28th.

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