Philosophy

My (O’Leary for News)’s new piece at Salvo: Proving Grounded Multiverse Supporters Put the Brakes on Falsifiability … today, some scientists want to throw falsifiability overboard. They hope by doing this to protect the concept of the multiverse. Put simply, there is currently no evidence for the existence of any universes other than our own, making the theory of the multiverse unfalsifiable. But if the proposal to dispense with falsifiability were accepted, that would be very convenient for naturalist atheists. They could then argue that any stream of events that occurs in our universe may well have occurred differently in any one of an infinite number of other universes. So no inferences (other than their own) could be drawn from Read More ›

We are informed in the Chronicle Review that We have entered an age of willful ignorance To see how we treat the concept of truth these days, one might think we just don’t care anymore. Politicians pronounce that global warming is a hoax. An alarming number of middle-class parents have stopped giving their children routine vaccinations, on the basis of discredited research. Meanwhile many commentators in the media — and even some in our universities — have all but abandoned their responsibility to set the record straight. (It doesn’t help when scientists occasionally have to retract their own work.) No indeed, it doesn’t help. The mounting scandals in science make it difficult to regard many disciplines as sources of legitimate Read More ›

In “The Importance of Not Being Certain: Understanding why the science is never settled,” Charlie Martin writes There’s this thing “science” that people talk about a lot. Climate science, political science, social science, and not to leave out my own field, computer science. And, of course, areas of study that don’t need to have “science” in their names, like chemistry and physics. But what is this thing “science”? I’ve been thinking a lot and reading a lot about it, and no, I don’t have a final answer… and then it occurred to me that “I don’t have a final answer” is really the key to understanding “science.” I think the perfect example is in mechanics. In scientific terms, “mechanics” is Read More ›

From Nature: If the British public likes chemistry — at least more than the chemists believed — then it is positively glowing about science in general. Survey respondents described it with words such as ‘welcoming’, ‘sociable’ and ‘fun’. And a separate poll by Ipsos MORI this year showed that scientists are among the most trusted professionals in Britain; some nine in ten people said that they trust scientists to follow all of the research rules and regulations relevant to them. “Nine in ten people trust scientists to follow the rules. How many scientists would say the same?” How many scientists would say the same? Not many, probably, of the attendees at this week’s 4th World Conference on Research Integrity in Read More ›

Underway: Sheldrake For committed materialists, psychic (psi) phenomena such as telepathy and the sense of being stared at must be illusory because they are impossible. Minds are inside brains. Mental activity is nothing but electro-chemical brain activity. Hence thoughts and intentions cannot have direct effects at a distance, nor can minds be open to influences from the future. Although psi phenomena seem to occur, they must have normal explanations in terms of coincidence, or subtle sensory cues, or wishful thinking, or fraud. Dogmatic skeptics often repeat the slogan that “extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.” But the sense of being stared at and telepathy are not extraordinary, they are ordinary. Most people have experienced them. From this point of view, the Read More ›

Here.  (But one must admit this is at least fun.) I am Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D. Well, actually my name is John, and I’m a journalist. I do have a Ph.D., but it’s in the molecular biology of bacteria, not humans. The Institute of Diet and Health? That’s nothing more than a website. Other than those fibs, the study was 100 percent authentic. My colleagues and I recruited actual human subjects in Germany. We ran an actual clinical trial, with subjects randomly assigned to different diet regimes. And the statistically significant benefits of chocolate that we reported are based on the actual data. It was, in fact, a fairly typical study for the field of diet research. Which is to say: It Read More ›

It can insulate people from it. The Wall Street Journal article by John Horgan that reviews Darwin follower Jerry Coyne’s latest is behind some paywall. But we hear from a reliable source that it says, among other things: Mr. Coyne repeatedly reminds us that science, unlike religion, promotes self-criticism. but he is remarkably lacking in this virtue himself. … The popularity of multiverse theories, a hypothetical corollary of several highly speculative physics theories, merely shows how desperate scientists are for answers. Multiverse enthusiasts seem to think that the existence of an infinite number of universes will make ours appear less mysterious. The problem is none of these other universes can be observed, which is why skeptics liken multiverse theories to Read More ›

Here, from Stan Persky’s review of Barry Dainton’s Self: Philosophy in Transit: Many well-known and respected philosophers and scientists deny that selves exist in any meaningful way and suggest that our sense of having or being a self is simply an illusion. As Barry Dainton puts it in the book under review, It is worth noting that in some contemporary intellectual circles the doctrine that there exists anything resembling a self as traditionally conceived — a fundamentally mental thing that is in principle separable from a body — is widely assumed to have been wholly discredited, regardless of how most people might think of themselves. Indeed, the banishment of the self as traditionally conceived is sometimes seen as a hallmark of Read More ›

Good question to ponder overnight. John Hartnett quotes cosmologist Lee Smolin*: It is true that mathematics is not a human invention, but more of a discovery, and thus has objective existence in that sense. But to declare the magnificent edifice of Mathematics to inhabit an orthogonal dimension that is inaccessible to scientific scrutiny, is a hypothesis that cannot in principle be falsified, and thus, it is not a scientific hypothesis but more of a belief, for those who are inclined to believe it. Best read the whole thing. But is this part of the current, quite serious, war on falsifiability? If not, how not? Readers? (*see also: Should we be nicer to cosmologist Lee Smolin? ) Follow UD News at Twitter!

Yesterday, johnnyb asked whether doubt is the engine of science: The narrative goes like this: science proceeds by taking everything we think we know and hold dear and doubting it; this doubt is what allows the progress of knowledge. Christopher Hitchens said he was “a skeptic who believes that doubt is the great engine, the great fuel of all inquiry, all discovery, and all innovation.” Here’s one approach: Doubt isn’t “the engine” of anything at all. Doubt is by definition a retardant: It causes us to stop, hold back, get more advice, check the stats, read the manual again, phone someone, don’t shoot, don’t shoot, don’t shoot … wait for backup, wait for backup … As johnnyb points out, doubt Read More ›

Many people have claimed that doubt is the great engine of scientific advance. In this article, I would like to contend against that thought, and show the true virtue that lies behind science that is often mistaken for doubt.
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Jeff Leek, at the Bloomberg School of Public Health (Johns Hopkins U), writes the Simply Statistics blog, at which he noted today the tyranny of the idea in science. In business, he says, startup ideas are a dime a dozen and only winners are rewarded. In science, startup ideas are rewarded, and the people who made them matter are forgotten. He gives, as an example, Higgs Boson – Peter Higgs postulated the Boson in 1964, he won the Nobel Prize in 2013 for that prediction, in between tons of people did follow on work, someone convinced Europe to build one of the most expensive pieces of scientific equipment ever built and conservatively thousands of scientists and engineers had to do Read More ›

Just in: Through the months of May, June, and July of 2015, TheBestSchools.org is hosting an intensive dialogue on the nature of science between Rupert Sheldrake and Michael Shermer. This first month, the focus is on materialism in science. Dr. Sheldrake will defend that science needs to free itself from materialist dogma; indeed, science misunderstands nature by being wedded to purely materialist explanations. By contrast, Dr. Shermer will defend that science, properly conceived, is a materialistic enterprise; for science to look beyond materialist explanations is to betray science and engage in superstition. Animal behaviourist and former Darwinian Rupert Sheldrake vs. self-described skeptic and Darwin fan Michael Shermer. Opening statements: Rupert Sheldrake: I think the interests of the sciences are best served Read More ›

At his blog, Curious Wavefunction, Ash Jogalekar* muses on the thinking of chemistry Nobelist John Pople (1998): But one of the simpler problems with training sets is that they are often incomplete and miss essential features that are rampant among the real world’s test sets (more pithily, all real cows as far as we know are non-spherical). This is where Pople’s point about presenting the strengths and weaknesses of models applies: if you are unsure how similar the test case is to the training set, let the experimentalists know about this limitation. Pople’s admonition also speaks to the more general one about always communicating the degree of confidence in a model to the experimentalists. Often even a crude assessment of this Read More ›

From Tim Maudlin at PBS Nova blog: Many questions about the nature of reality cannot be properly pursued without contemporary physics. Inquiry into the fundamental structure of space, time and matter must take account of the theory of relativity and quantum theory. Philosophers accept this. In fact, several leading philosophers of physics hold doctorates in physics. Yet they chose to affiliate with philosophy departments rather than physics departments because so many physicists strongly discourage questions about the nature of reality. The reigning attitude in physics has been “shut up and calculate”: solve the equations, and do not ask questions about what they mean. … If your goal is only to calculate, this might be sufficient. But understanding existing theories and Read More ›