Too Much Communication

This is surreal and ironic on many levels.

Sam is probably my second favourite amongst the four horsemen, a real moral philosopher. No prize for guessing my least favourite, but it was he who tweeted the link picked-up by Ricky. (Dan, Sam, Hitch and the Dawk in that order in case you’re interested.)

Fact : internet enabled comment on blogs directly and via social media is a major source of miscommunication – an insidious spread of misinformed ideas. (aka The Memetic Problem). Apart from comic entertainment value – most are without value or with meta-value only or, more importantly, with negative content value, unless they can be editorially moderated. Life’s too short.

Weird : Sam reckons PZ Myers “shepherd of trolls” (Pharyngula Blog) to be odious. PZ is clearly on the side of (evolutionary) science in the god debates, so you might think an ally of Harris, along with the other three horsemen. But I’ve noted before the “baying mob” mentality of PZ and his commenters (similar to Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science and many Guardian “Comment is Free” contributors.) Makes intelligent debate hopeless. The baying mob is odious – see the memetic problem.

As I say, I have a lot of respect for Sam, but I have taken exception to some of his “narrow” rationality – a recent example here. I am really intrigued as to the reality of Sam’s take on PZ. Must have missed a significant spat or irony here?

The Memetic Problem ? Sam says:

The Internet powerfully enables the spread of good ideas, but it works the same magic for bad ones”and it allows distortions of fact and opinion to become permanent features of our intellectual landscape.

I say, it’s even worse than that, because the ideas that spread more easily tend to be the inferior ones. Too simplistic, too reductionist, too comfortable fit with existing prejudice and fashion, etc. all make such ideas easier to communicate and receive and re-communicate, and “stickier” when received. Evolutionary fidelity and fecundity both benefit from simplistication of the message and its fitness.

Jesus Christ

Says Ricky – “Jesus Christ !! – and I’m an atheist.” and later when comparing the death penalty with abortion, Jerry says, “so you can arrange these things to suit – when you’re wealthy ?” Comedians in Cars, getting Coffee.

Lords Spiritual

Here we go again. BHA and its negative campaigning. Removal of Bishops from the Lords this time.

The second (revising / conservative) chamber needs a cultural heritage component and a constituency representation component that is separate from “popular voting”, and – being political  – reflecting human psychology separate from “scientific” fact. When the churches have crumbled into the ground and church asset dwindled away in a hundred years or two, then sure, there will no longer be church representatives in the second chamber.

Ban this, ban that – BHA fascists.
We need to get the horse before the cart here.

One for Later

No time for review now, but thanks to David Morey for the link to this piece including Hillary Lawson.

Post Review: Contrary to the blurb, Giles Fraser (the theologian) is not really against the three metaphysicians, he’s just against Plato’s narrow metaphysics. Join the very large club.  Not listened to the “particle physics” section yet, but the only part of this I see differently is the idea of “ultimate map” I see “best available map” of reality – so it’s always the story of the journey, never the final destination. So many of the issues are linguistic and semantic (definitional), they’re not problems with reality or its map. Looks like the main areas of contention are the atomism / reductionism / upward-causation from “physics” being the one true story …. continuing …

Life After Death

A recurring theme, and target in the various naive God vs Science debates, I last mentioned it here, but it’s just not an issue for this atheist /scientist. It’s like this:

We are our minds; “our” minds are concentrated in our brains but distributed throughout “our” bodily electro-chemical systems; the content and consciousness of our minds is the sum total of our memes. Our memes live on in recorded copies, physically, including in the minds of others, even if we never create our own magum opus for posterity. We have a duty of care to the next generation for these memes, how we create, acquire and modify them, how we hold, express and communicate them. They live on when our body dies. No argument.

We (our mind) can rest when that happens, in the sense that “we” no longer have any role in how those memes are marshalled and used in the afterworld. Our minds are no longer a coherent set managed by us, but they are out there distributed in the world, living on from the state we left them in. Is that a reward,  an escape from responsibility in this life, a credit to wipe the slate clean the moral failings of our memes and deeds in this word, an excuse not to take that moral responsibility in this world?

Hell no, quite the opposite, but at death “we” can at last rest in peace, our job is done.

Just not a source of debate or argument worth any major disagreement, ‘cept maybe a few details for sure. This is good science – and consistent with the history of human psychology – start with Dennett if the idea is new to you. Co-create, onward and upward.

Which brings us to “we” as opposed to “us & them”, “me & other” …. Copernican revolution ? Pah!

[Post Note : http://rorysfindings.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/secular-humanism-and-life-after-death.html ]

Real Humanism

This latest piece by the BHA is at last a balanced collection of views from notable humanists – about what humanism is about. (I made a plea for balance earlier.)

A little too much focus on the “life after death” issue maybe – surely a non-issue to a humanist. The “why we hold science in high regard” section is pretty balanced too; emphasising the contingency of layers of knowledge built up over time, and the open-mindedness to correction. But yet again the high priest of science put his foot in it. This was my comment on the video:

As a long term humanist / atheist I have no problem holding science in high regard. Bronowski inspired me 35 40 years ago to the massively important – awesome – place of science in human civilisation, and humans in the cosmos. BUT the self-importance of scientists who say

“science is THE poetry of reality”

are as closed-minded and deluded as any religious believer.

It’s a very important poetry (and rhetoric and logic) of the presumed “out there” reality, sure, probably the most important from that presumption, but poetry and reality are far more than that to a humanist. So much more to human nature and human reasoning in the world than science. Science is full of human creativity, and human creativity extends well beyond science, thank goodness, as Bronowski knew.

Humans – the A in AGW

The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic (Richard Muller) in the NYT, via BBC.

Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct.

I’m now going a step further:
Humans are almost entirely the cause.

Never any doubt, but some people prefer “proof” whatever that is.

The Cult of Science

Great piece by Jonathan Ree in the New Humanist reviewing the work of Bruno Latour particularly his latest “The Modern Cult of the Factish Gods” (Hat tip to David Morey on Facebook)

But who in this great brawl is really believing naively? Not the religious believers, according to Latour, but the modern atheists, afflicted as they are by the “naïve belief … that ignorant people believe naively”. Indeed the much-loved contrast between the so-called “facts” that provide a foundation for enlightened knowledge and the “fetishes” that animate the beliefs of fools is itself a superstition ” a delusion which Latour proposes to commemorate with his new hybrid word “factish”.

Factish, in short, is what happens when our own “facts” turn out to be fetishes, and the “fetishes” of others turn out to be facts.

But who is the image-worshipper at this table? Not the believers, surely, because however much they treasure their icons, they know very well (most of the time at least) that they are human artefacts. If superstition is at work here, it seems to be on the side of the idol-smashers, however modern they may be and proud of their dispassionate rationality; otherwise how could they get excited about destroying something that is after all no more than an image? Icons are thus the idols of the iconoclasts, making a cult of their anti-cultism.

(My emphasis) Has all the feel of a Foggy-Froggie / PoMo – he is French, but look at that jacket! Indeed he was one of the targets of the great Sokal hoax, but he has nailed the superstition – the psychological disease I call scientism – the delusion he calls factish and Maxwell calls scientific neurosis.

Value-free science is a superstition.

(PS Looks like the New Humanist / Rationalist Association is the antidote to the naivete of the BHA. Time to switch subscriptions.)

NRA Ban Movies

Andy Borowitz in The New Yorker.

In the aftermath of Aurora,
the NRA propose sweeping ban on movies.

(Hat tip to David Lavery)

Gotcha

Nice one from Pharyngula.

And nice to see that PZMyers has lightened up his style of late. Some hope for intelligent debate. (Check out atheist inspired by eloquence etc. Less than scientistic.)