Monthly Archives: September 2010
God, the Universe, & Everything Else
Stephen Hawking – God, the Universe, & Everything Else / Carl Sagan, Arthur C. Clarke (1988)
British journalist and TV host Magnus Magnusson tackles big questions about our universe in this educational colloquium that brings together three of the 20th century’s leading scientific thinkers: theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, astronomer Carl Sagan and author Arthur C. Clarke. They explore everything from the Big Bang Theory to the expansion of the universe, black holes, extraterrestrial life and the origins of creativity.
NOTE: Becasue this is a copyrighted program, I can only post a few clips. But here are a few links on where you can rent or buy it.
http://www.netflix.com/Movie/70062143…
http://www.amazon.com/Stephen-Hawking…
http://www.cduniverse.com/productinfo…
A Skeptic’s Thoughts on Belief and Reason
Since I started really thinking about what I believe over and prior to the past several years and examined my reasons for much of what I held to be true despite their now-obviously questionable nature, I’ve been forced to discard many of those beliefs — and good riddance to them I say.
I have my sacred cows, my little irrational beliefs and habits, of course, as do we all, but I know what they are and accept at least on an intellectual level that they are simply not true, that I hold to them for relatively poor reasons at best, and contrary to my most rigorous rational thinking. I am, like everyone, ruled by both thought and by emotion to varying degrees.
I believe that this supports an observation by Dave Hume, who said that, “Reason is and only ought to be the slave of the passions,” or something like that, and anyone with the cognitive ability to interact with reality fits that observation, yes, even the most skeptical of us all must obey this rule, for nobody can be completely skeptical about absolutely everything and still be functionally human.
Yes, I’m biased… You’re biased… We’re all biased… Get over it and move on…
It’s human nature to reflexively suppose that if we don’t know about something then it doesn’t exist, including an explanation for anything we see which we lack direct and immediate understanding of at the time we see it. It’s a common error, a logical fallacy called the argument from ignorance — the making of a false inference from negative evidence, from a lack of data. This we can all do if we aren’t wary.
This is one of those little things that makes critical reasoning so useful — It gives us a motivation to seek out and learn things, to add to our knowledge and correct our personal misunderstandings and misgivings about what really is over what merely serves as a paliative for us.
Every one of the more than 6 billion people on Earth has the same general sort of evolved ape brain, regardless of the individual quirks, functionality, conditions, and experience of a given brain…
But critical thinking skills are not only for the use of an exclusive intellectual minority — they are for anyone and everyone who is willing to learn to ponder more even about things we ordinarily take for granted.
The only person I can ever surpass is myself, and I’ve come to think about things a bit more deeply and learned to think them over more carefully than I have prior to the last four years.
Questioning yourself will do that, and that’s a good thing. I’ve always been argumentative, even with myself as a youngster, even as a believer of certain claims that long ago I held quite dogmatically.
It was good to free myself from having to know things for certain, good to get it through my head that I didn’t have privileged access to metaphysical certainty. Reason and truth can come from any source, not just the ivory halls of credentialed academic researchers, as I’ve learned over the past few years.
Do I hate anybody’s god?
Do I fear the paranormal?
Poppycock to both. Absolute rubbish. Garbage.
I no more hate or fear such things any more than I loath or dread pixies, green-skinned Orions, dragons, purple people-eaters, or the alien gods of Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
It is simply not possible to hate or fear anything not part of my reality equation.
I may as well quake in terror of the the terrible implications of thunderball-farting orange intangible leprechauns with horns sneaking up invisibly from behind me and goosing me with etheric toothpicks.
I know — that was really pushing it — but it illustrates my point.
I’m a non-believer in anything which cannot be shown real, not a disbeliever in that which can. When it’s shown to be real, when it’s shown to be true, I’ll believe it, and not before — No goalposts need be kept out of reach or moved.
Abject denial out of hatred or fear strikes me as being absurd, contrary to the mode of inquiry practiced by other skeptics, those more expert, much better at it than me.
Now and then in the skeptical literature, the question of fraud comes up. What is my position on this?
From my present understanding, most alleged reports of paranormal events are just instances of the mistaken perception of, identification of, and inadequate documentation of ordinary phenomena by untrained witnesses in unfamiliar observation conditions.
Purposeful deception is a very serious accusation, and one I try very hard to avoid making. It should never be leveled until evidence for it is apparent. And it doesn’t matter whether the accused is a skeptic, scientist, fringe-proponent or anyone else — Any such accusation is equally fallacious, and possibly libelous as well, when assumed a priori before an inquiry is even made, and this is true regardless of the attitude, views, beliefs, or position of the accused or accuser.
Human beings are sufficiently capable of making errors in perception, memory, introspection and reason that it is usually not necessary to invoke dishonesty as regards claims made. Usually.
Fraud, in intent as well as deed, is typically uncovered by insiders of a given field rather than those without — Most of the evidence of purposeful deception in parapsychology research was uncovered by other parapsychologists, and every incident of fraudulent research in even mainstream science was likewise revealed by (*gasp*) scientists, never non-scientists.
Neither science, nor skepticism, nor any other valid and useful approach to seeking the truth is served by making truly unfounded aspersions on the honesty or character of others. Rule #1: Avoid overvaluing the fraud or ulterior motive hypothesis without obvious cause — Use with caution.
Perhaps I’m being naive, but I find it more useful to lean towards the “sincere but mistaken” hypothesis unless it is evident that the one under scrutiny really is an intentional fraudster, or an example of the well-known phenomenon of the pious fraud — someone who really believes their claims, but is willing and self-deceived — and deceiving — enough to cut a few corners to support their belief.
I’ve found that I can never honestly suppose myself to know all that I need to, to deceive myself to think that what I know now is all that there is, and that my final understanding of anything that can be known is complete. Why should I want such a tiny, parochial view of the world, a universe restricted by my own cognitive limits rather than wryly thumbing its proverbial nose at my incredulity and ignorance?
I’m quite aware of the fact that there are things undreamt of in anyone’s and everyone’s philosophy, especially mine.
O Noes… I believe that edification and growth as living stardust given the gift of thought through chemistry and evolution should happen throughout life, and should only end when our last spark of life has been extinguished.
A reality in which what is is not defined by what I can believe or imagine or observe is much more interesting to me, because as time passes, I find the curve-balls the universe tosses my way much more entertaining. If I were to make one wish, whether seriously or in jest, it would be this: May final knowledge of anything and everything forever remain out of reach.
James Randi: Can’t Fool Me!
James Randi Speaks Video 6
Recorded: 2/13/2009
Lighting, Camera and Editing by: Richard Montalvo (rmontalvo23@gmail.com)
Parapsychologists, Ghost Hunters, PHD’s with whacky ideas. What else is next?
Info on Gary Schwartz: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drrciH…
Info on Colin Ross: http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfai…
What is PEAR: http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/index….
Sanity Roll… Unspeakable Horror…
I first saw this one on Wil Wheaton’s blog after a Twitter friend of mine pointed me at it (Thnx Kat!). Considering the Weird Tale approach of my online persona and some of the other material on this blog, an Old Spice commercial featuring the Dread Lord of Rlyeh himself, Great Cthulhu would be just perfect…and hilarious as the Outer Void, especially the references to the Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu RPG. Try not to drink or eat anything while watching…
…I’d hate to have you spew onto your keyboard from laughing after failing your sanity check.
Cthulhu Ftaghn!
The First Measurement Of Intergalactic Magnetic Fields « D.669: Neopallium
A recent discovery made earlier this month by astrophysicists based in Californian institutions has provided the first strong evidence for what they call ‘the signs of primordial magnetic fields in deep space that have permeated between galaxies since the very earliest moments of the Universe.’ It is hoped that these discoveries will help improve the knowledge of astrophysicists, especially in the fields of gamma ray charged-particle astronomy.
The two-man team, comprising of Alexander Kusenko from UCLA and Shin’ichiro Ando from the California Institute of Technology have reported evidence of gamma-ray halos in the stacked images of the 170 brightest active galactic nuclei (AGN) in the 11-month source catalog of the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope which is due to be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Entry at D.669: Neopallium
Puny Humans, Your Conceits are now Demoted
I found this neat little video on Atheist Climber’s cool blog (Click Me Here) on this Page (Click Me Here). Enjoy.
There are several videos circulating showing a comparison of the largest stars. I like these kind of things, and I wanted to try one myself. Probably because I also watched “Cosmos” by Carl Sagan as a kid. Actually my first Youtube upload. Hope you like it…
Like this:
…an teh purrsoot uf teh troofs n’ stufs…Srsly
This post’s title, besides being a pitiful attempt at Lolspeak, is derived from the reading of an essay on NPR mentioned by Steve Novella in the very first episode of The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, in which the essay’s author made the statement, “I believe in truth, and the pursuit of truth.”
It was also the very podcast that introduced me to the fascinating world of logical fallacies and a lot of other coolness.
All knowledge can be thought of as belief, or more accurately, involves the belief of a given proposition as one of its major components.
Full knowledge involves at least two more elements: actual truth content and that great bugaboo of antiscience — evidence — anything you can perceive by which you can tell that something is true.
That last element of knowledge, evidence, is not to be lightly dismissed, though it often is with mystical doctrines. For if you only believe something to be so, even if it is, without evidence you have done nothing more than come upon a fortuitous hunch, for there is no way to really know that your supposition is correct.
Carl Sagan put it well in an observation on adherents of irrational beliefs: “You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep-seated need to believe.”
One thing that I find interesting about the nature of belief is the tendency toward looser criteria for the sufficiency of evidence, uncritical reasoning and increasingly rigid dogmatism in belief systems, all of these in direct proportion to the fervency with which the belief system in question is held.
But what do skeptics believe?
To be honest, I don’t know unless one tells me what he or she believes. So I speak only for myself.
There are those things that I know at present, and I’m fully cognizant of their provisional nature, there are those things I have come to emotionally accept as some of my own personal values rather than on a strictly rational basis, and there are those things I would like to believe if I had good reason to.
In a recent article on a psychic’s website (I’m not going to say ‘alleged psychic’ since that’s redundant – I don’t think that there are any real psychics, though many pretenders to that status), the author was discussing the subject of subconscious beliefs, and claimed that, [A] having rigid subconscious beliefs makes you more biased, and further, [B] that skeptics have more rigidly dogmatic subconscious beliefs than psychic people do (he’s constructed an interesting and elaborate mythology around his idea of ‘the psychic person’ i.e, anyone who claims and/or believes they are psychic – like himself), and skeptics are therefore of course more prone toward undue bias and closed-minded thinking. *Yawn*
I’ll provisionally grant him claim [A], but I have questions about claim [B]. For one thing, he provides no evidence for this but his own say-so, and he used to be so careful to provide citations in his posts.
How does he know what he’s claiming, when he has a history of making the same sort of claims about skeptics on a lot of his posts? Even then, the sources he cited as evidence were known and vocal critics of the skeptical community, hardly unbiased, who just cited each other without checking their facts, and were just repeating their prejudices, feeding each other the same misinformation in an endless cycle…
…something referred to in the Captain Disillusion videos as “psychological inbreeding.”
I suppose it’s not that important, though it does make me a wee bit angry: Those who propagate claims like this often don’t know what they are talking about, however ingeniously contrived and superficially compelling their arguments, some of them know that they don’t know what they are talking about, & a few have the academic training and background to know better and just don’t care.
It’s unethical, and it’s dishonest.
Then again, many paranormal proponents are not renowned for concern with the veracity of their sources, though they’re brilliant in polishing their arguments and knowing their own topic of interest backwards and forwards.
I suspect he’s trying to score shots in favor of what he perceives as the unique and persecuted subset of humanity he’s privileged to belong to. Lots of people want the thrill of being a part of an embattled minority. I suppose that deep down, we all want to feel special.
His resentment for skeptics is sometimes palpable in his articles. My experience in reading his posts reveals a deep dislike for those he perceives as his (and his fellow psychics’) unfair critics.
I’ve never been able to find — despite looking — any publicized demonstration by anyone claiming to be psychic, paranormally intuitive or sensitive that couldn’t be more plausibly and easily explained as the result of the trickery of a professional conjuror or mentalist… And demonstrations by celebrity psychics are typically plastered all over the mass-media.
The evidence for the paranormal, mostly composed of statistical anomalies, unsubstantiated anecdotal accounts, and easily faked or otherwise unreliable physical evidence, despite claims of the impending revelation and scientific acceptance of The Truth™ by believers, just doesn’t seem to get any better with time, only bigger in size, not quality.
This mountain of evidence, though superficially impressive from it’s sheer volume and seeming (but spurious) statistical significance, doesn’t necessarily imply anything paranormal and much of it is worthless.
Sorry, but uncritically swallowing someone’s extraordinary pet claim, even if they don’t think it’s that extraordinary, is just not my thing.
But enough rambling on what I don’t believe…
What do I believe?
Well I’m as many of you probably know, a skeptic, but I’m also a believer in the wonder and usefulness of science, in the the beauty and genuine mystery of the real world.
Manufactured and otherwise imaginary mysteries need not apply…
Why?
Because I’ve seen what some assert to be ‘other ways of knowing than science’ (without ever demonstrating their validity beyond just the assertion), and I’ve noticed that none of these doctrines has any way of internally correcting errors in its own claims about reality, none of these has any way of holding itself accountable for its mistakes, of telling itself when it’s wrong, no means of revising its claims with up-to-date findings on the way the world really works, no methods of correcting for the personal biases or policing the occasional dishonesty of those who practice it (indeed, some of these doctrines accentuate and encourage bias & dishonesty), and no means of purging itself of the informational and procedural clutter of its missteps and moving on.
Many of the proponents of these doctrines have argued that their claims are ‘outside of rational scientific inquiry,’ and to that I say this: Hogwash.
Science not only has the ability to improve itself, to update it’s underpinnings, methods and it’s findings internally, it can also meaningfully investigate any conceivable phenomenon that is [A] real in any knowable sense, [B] that can be meaningfully observed, whether by human beings or their instruments, and [C] it can therefore investigate any phenomenon which can be tested…
…And it doesn’t matter whether the subject of inquiry has the arbitrary and descriptively meaningless labels of either “normal” or “paranormal,” “natural” or “supernatural.”
Anyhoo…
Why to I believe in a reality that exists even when I’m not there to observe it?
For the simple, and to me obvious fact that reality is tenacious in it’s habit of biting those given to deny it intellectually or emotionally in the backside given enough time. You reap what you sow.
No matter how much you think you can walk through a solid concrete wall without injuring yourself or having to damage the wall, reality will always get in the way and keep you from doing it. You don’t believe me? Don’t take my word for it, just try this little test — convince yourself as hard as you possibly can that you can walk through solid walls and see for yourself if it works — you’re bound to be disappointed, and maybe a little bruised by the impact.
Be careful to walk, not run, at a reasonable pace or you might seriously injure yourself.
Also, because of the reality of, well, reality, science works…it gets demonstrable results and shows us both what we can know and how we can know it, to a very high degree of reliability, with a better track-record than anything else to date. And science can’t work without a reality to work in.
That’s because you can’t argue that science, reason and reality can be used to debunk themselves, either with reason and blatantly contradicting yourself, only affirming that which you argue against, or in being more consistent with yourself, without reason, arguing nothing effectively and denying yourself the right to a rational counterargument.
Those who attempt to do either show a distinct lack of concern for soundness of their argumentation and for their credibility to anyone exercising good critical reasoning skills.
Every phenomenon we’ve tested to date has proven to have a natural, normal, mundane (but very cool and often elegant) explanation, never supernatural or otherwise inexplicable. And there’s an enormous difference between inexplicable and currently unexplained.
Facts, truth, fiction, falsehoods, and those fixed false beliefs known as delusions can only exist in a reality that also exists, not independent of an observer, but independent of what anyone subjectively believes, opines, feels, wishes, hopes or fears, or is currently aware of, no matter what one’s perceptual model of reality tells them about what they see and how they interpret it.
Prove me wrong, and I’ll credit you for the proof and, as an added bonus, I’ll change my mind.
Hello? Anyone? *crickets chirping* I thought not…
I believe that none of us are godlike or have the ability to change the very nature of the universe using mere intentionality (a euphemism for ‘wishing’), only the ability to change our perspective on how we see and interpret things we think we know at a given time.
It’s not seeing that’s believing, but believing that is seeing.
Rather than an absolute reality of unqualified right and wrong, true or false, there is a continuum in which these things shade into each other, a spectrum in which we can meaningfully distinguish these things from each other the further our position from the mean, the closer to either end of this continuum we happen to move along.
I’m aware that none of this sits well with those who lack patience with the facts, who find fault with the process used to obtain them, rascals who would rather their claims be accepted without question rather than subject themselves to the inconvenience of actually proving them.
How do I, a naysaying critic of the paranormal, have any clue what I’m talking about? On pain of a potentially fallacious appeal to experience, I found out myself the hard way — first hand — as a one-time believer in the paranormal, and as a reformed reality and science denier.
To quote Brian Dunning of skeptoid(dot)com, “The truth always hurts someone,” and I would add to this, it is the truth no matter whether anyone believes it or not.
Astronomy Pictures of the Week for September 19-25, 2010
Panel discussion — Do we still need enlightenment values?
John Keane, Nigel Warburton, Robert Rowland Smith and Matthew Taylor argue for their ideal enlightenment values for the 21st century.
