book review: The Moral Landscape

ever since Harris’ TED talk, there has been a lot of buzz and a fair amount of debate about this project, and for good reason. Harris’ thesis is that, despite the liberal, educated consensus in the West that science can only tell us how things are, not how they ought to be, there are certain things that we can know absolutely about human well-being and flourishing. in fact, there are many things that we already know.

to this end, Harris succeeds very well. The Moral Landscape is bound to be a game changer in many ways, at least insofar as it presents a great challenge to the consensus of moral relativism that prevents so many intelligent and well-meaning people from speaking out against systems that do a terrible job at promoting human well-being. this reluctance is perfectly understandable as a reaction to the chauvinism and colonialism of the past, against which academic disciplines had to emerge to demonstrate the complexity and value of other societies. but has Harris argues (and many others previously have argued), this is an overreaction.

one of Harris’ goals in the book is to demonstrate that even if we never arrive at a complete science of morality, it doesn’t matter–just acknowledging that answers are to be found in principle is enough to allow us to begin the process of evaluating what conditions move us higher up “the moral landscape” and which ones drag us farther down.

another goal of TML is to demonstrate that even if there are many ways to arrive at peaks in human well-being, there are many more ways that will not–and this is something that we can know objectively. as he asked in his TED talk, who are we to pretend that we know so little about human flourishing?

to illustrate these two goals, Harris draws on the example of economics at the end of his book. is economics a genuine, complete science? hardly. however, admitting this fact does not amount to a denial that we can’t know anything at all (in principle or in practice) about the necessary conditions for a successful economy. and it certainly doesn’t mean that we can’t know which ideas do not deserve to be taken seriously. not every idea, about economics or physics or morality, needs to be entertained.

where Harris is most successful in this book is in setting the stage for a new discussion about human morality, and of course in his comments on religion. however, I felt that even though the book is relatively short (190 pages plus notes and bibliography), he wandered a bit in a few of the chapters when discussing free will or Francis Collins, without pulling back and driving home his thesis effectively enough. nevertheless, I understand the importance of his discussions and am excited about the effect this book will have on widespread discussions of morality and well-being.

overall, I highly recommend this book. even disagreeing with it (intelligently and thoroughly) will do us all a service insofar as many of the assumptions that we make about the relationship between science and morality, or between facts and values, can be seriously challenged–and that is exactly what Harris has done.

more treachery

as a sort of follow up to the Bertrand Russell quote and video from the other day, I thought I’d add another from Sean Carroll.  this comes in the context of the incessant debates among scientists about whether or not scientists and, more importantly, science institutes (such as the National Center for Science Education) should engage in any amount of theology — that is, whether official representatives should weigh in on science vs. religion debates, and whether they should do any more than promote scientific education and, at most, acknowledge the fact that there are scientists who are religious.  do they have any business in theology, speaking of the compatibility of various beliefs with the cores of modern science?  Carroll thinks no.  He writes,

If science and religion are truly incompatible, then it would be dishonest and irresponsible to pretend otherwise, even if doing so would soothe a few worried souls. And if you want to argue that science and religion are actually compatible (not just that there exist people who think so), by all means make that argument — it’s a worthy discussion to have. But it’s simply wrong to take the stance that it doesn’t matter whether science and religion are compatible, we still need to pretend they are so as not to hurt people’s feelings. That’s not being honest.

he is open to the possibility that the two are compatible — he’s just unpersuaded by any of the arguments made so far, and he believes that science and religion, generally defined, are not compatible approaches to understanding the world.

in any case, his point here about pretending that science and religion are completely compatible without first establishing the validity of the claim — and how this is a dishonesty — is akin to Russell’s point about “a fundamental dishonesty, and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity, to hold a belief because you think it’s useful and not because you think it’s true.”  it is (intellectually) dishonest to believe something that isn’t true (merely useful), and it’s dishonest for anyone — especially a national institute — to make claims about the ultimate compatibility of scientific and religious claims without first bothering to establish whether it’s true or not, regardless of how many people it would please.  in my mind, those who argue for incompatibility win the day (day after day) — and those who hold up “non-overlapping magisteria” shouldn’t at all be concerned with whether they are compatible (or overlap)!  so again, silence would be golden.

what’s the big idea?

over at Edge, this year’s big question, which will be weighed in on by a number of important thinkers — from evolutionary biologists to psychologists, from law professors to tech innovators — is, “How has the internet changed the way you think?”  for anyone unfamiliar with this website and its attempts to create forums (well, not technical forums) for cutting-edge ideas across various disciplines, I suggest you check it out.

I plan on concerning myself more this year (esp. as I start a Library and Information Science program) with questions about technology and the future of learning, literacy, techno-cultures, etc.  I also hope to enjoy some classic sci-fi and dystopian literature, just for kicks.

my immediate thoughts are that all of the innovations, esp. regarding networks and the organization — and availability — of information, are more good than bad, and the problems we face have to do not with complete upheavals of life, intelligence, values, or whatever, but with accustoming ourselves to doing things in new ways and coming up with creative solutions to new challenges, not with wallowing in our frustrations, imagining that once upon a time things were so much better (coincidentally looking a lot like what we think things should look like now), and ballyhooing our impending cultural demise.

anyway, to not get too far ahead of myself (haven’t read much yet), I’ll stop with a quote from Clay Shirky:

The beneficiaries of the system where making things public was a privileged activity, whether academics or politicians, reporters or doctors, will complain about the way the new abundance of public thought upends the old order, but those complaints are like keening at a wake; the change they fear is already in the past. The real action is elsewhere.

scientific truth in the age of Wikipedia

in February of last year, Seed magazine ran a brief article addressing the question of (concern about) scientific truth in the age of Wikipedia — that is, whether “the radical egalitarianism of the wiki undermine notions of scientific authority and consensus.”  obviously, as is pointed out, group consensus is not always the best way to arrive at objective truth.  some are concerned (indeed, outright frantic) over the extent to which this bottoms-up approach will undermine those hard-won facts of, say, scientific or historical research.

but the author of this article (T.J. Kelleher) argues that these fears are mostly unfounded, as “[i]t is not scientific rigor that is accommodating the wiki, but the wiki that is accommodating science.”  just think of areas of knowledge where no control test is possible (e.g., in historical research, where we are limited to the accident of history and the chances of discovery) or practical (e.g., large-scale scientific hypotheses about populations or, as the author proffers, the human impact on global warming).  here, consensus is often based on the best available knowledge and the most rigorous forms of analysis; often it comes down to what hypothesis best accounts for all of the data — and for this, consensus is key.

further, Clay Shirky — author of a book I’d like to read — argues that notions of authority and expertise are only “social facts,” and that works (and their writers) are considered authoritative only because everybody agrees that this is so.  and to be honest, when venturing into an area of knowledge with which I am not familiar, I will often reach out to recognizable landmarks and sources that I deem — from experience elsewhere and ongoing critique — to be authoritative (e.g., a particular author, a publisher, a university or institution affiliation, etc.).

when it comes to the scientific process, some believe that a source like Wikipedia will actually prove useful in its ability “to act as a chronicler and creator of repositories for science, to create a home for what we haven’t proved to be false and for what we think to be true.”  in other words, wikis can be beneficial to the notion of falsifiability — a key step in the scientific process.  thus bad ideas can easily set aside, and good ones can be continually refined, since the business of science, as some would argue, is more often than not establishing what is false, not necessarily what is true in some unchangeable sense.  to this end, as an MIT professor puts it, “the wiki model is ‘reasonably good’ at discerning, if not what is true, then what is false.”

one problem that remains, however, is the anonymity of the contribution and editing process.  not only is this a problem for managing the content of the site (are the contributors even qualified?), but it may also undermine the processes whereby we uphold notions of authority, “social fact” though it may be.  when someone stumbles across differing opinions or is left with an ambiguous answer to a query, how does that person go about seeking a more authoritative take on the problem?  if we cannot all become experts in the various fields of knowledge in which we might dabble — or into which we must wade (e.g., when seeking emergency medical information) — how do we learn where to invest that “capital” when it matters if knowledge production or maintenance is done anonymously?  you might feel slightly better about taking someone’s advice if they have widely acknowledge credentials and if their professional career depends on them being right.

some scientific organizations have sought to counter this problem by creating rival “wikis” that remove the veil of anonymity and involve an application and approval process that restricts an individual’s contribution to their certified field of knowledge.  and even here, the process of peer-review and consensus continues to play an important role.

personally, I don’t think that Wikipedia should be much of a threat to the scientific process or to fields of knowledge, provided that there is an understanding of where Wikipedia’s value lies.  if individuals turn to wikis for answers to every problem or as the end-all source of knowledge, unaware of how to go about verifying that knowledge and where to go for more in-depth understandings, I don’t blame Wikipedia — I’d blame any academic system that has failed to demonstrate how research is conducted.  many people in this country or woefully ignorant of the basic scientific process, not to mention principles of, say, historiography, but I don’t think that this is a new problem resulting from the development of more egalitarian forms of knowledge maintenance such as wikis.

also, I think that Wikipedia is a fairly reliable source — introductory source, that is — for many of the bodies of knowledge I’ve stumbled across.  and I am pretty sure that the rules have changed so that not just anyone, at any time, can make whatever change he or she would like with little to not policing.  so far I think that there has been substantial — and satisfactory — sifting to ensure fairly reliable information — often superior to (and far more practical than) traditional storehouses of knowledge such as encyclopedias.

divine numbers

apparently there has been a new study on that most magical of numbers, 7.  researches have long known about 7 (plus or minus 2) being the number the maximum number of things we can recall with short-term, or working, memory.  in this new study, however, researchers tried to create a model of brain activity to explain how the firing and suppressing of neurons involved in this process explains why it gets exponentially more difficult (for normal minds) to continue adding to this working memory.  it seems, as has been demonstrated repeatedly with human subjects, 7 seems to be the breaking point.  as the article states,

As a sentence or a string of numbers gets longer, it becomes exponentially harder for the excited cluster to suppress the others from firing, resulting in pathways that are weak or barely there. Recalling seven items requires about 15 times the suppression needed to recall three. Ten items requires inhibitory powers that are 50 times stronger, and 20 or more items would require suppression hundreds of times stronger still. That, Rabinovich explained, is normally not biologically feasible.

now, I’m not troubling myself with the details of the study here because it’s not what is interesting me right now.  instead, I’m thinking back to all the sermons heard and lessons learned in Sunday school about how 7 was the number of God.  7 days in creation, 7 days in the week, 7 days of Passover (ignoring that these are all pretty much the same thing…), 7 spirits of God, 7 churches in Asia,

the 10 commandments are found in the 70th chapter of the Bible (ignoring, of course, the later, sometimes arbitrary origin of those divisions), 7 loaves of bread,

7 deadly sins,

and so on.

of course, 7′s magicalness extends beyond the Bible: in addition to it simply being a lucky number, we have the 7 chakras in Hinduism, 7 heavens in Islam (as well as 7 fires of hell), Judaism’s 7-branched candelabrum (of the temple, not Hanukkah),

7 lucky Japanese gods of fortune

and, of course, the 7-layer whopper released in Japan last month.

so assuming that this new study is true — heck, let’s up the ante and say that the number 7 is not just the statistical average of things that can be held in short-term memory but in fact “written” into the brain’s hardwiring — I can’t help but think about how this story could and should be interpreted in light of the importance of the number in various cultures and their myths and religions.  one the one hand, there’s the could.  some people will surely see this as evidence that God — whose number is 7, remember? — created us in such a way that his number could be found implanted within our brains.  oh, the trickster!  glory!

on the other hand, there’s the should.  that the number 7 may be found across various cultures because of the structure of our brains.  now again, this is taking this study beyond face value and assuming way more than necessary, but it’s illustrative of a larger problem of how we interpret evidence.  for instance, you often hear about how the conditions on this planet, nay, universe, are perfect for life.  if the earth moved an inch in its orbit, we would all burn of freeze (nobody really knows the physics, they just know this).  everything we need for life and health is bountifully provided on the planet by the plants (and animals, if you’re one of those ).  and when we’re not inconsiderately interfering, the planet is fairly good at balancing itself out and maintaining homeostasis.  in short, clear evidence of design and of the hand of a beneficent creator.

the problem, of course, is that this type of thinking is backward.  it involves looking at the end product, irrespective of how it developed, concluding that things couldn’t have been any other way — that this was the intended product, or even the only imaginable one — and consequently marveling at the fact that conditions or means just happened to exactly what was necessary.  it entails looking first at the nutrients we need to develop and survive and then at what’s available in the world, which, lo and behold, match up quite nicely.  what are the odds?!  this is essentially how I learned to look at the world — excuse me, creation — growing up in church.  it is, like many other un or pseudoscientific views preferred by the church over time, alarmingly egotistic.

the correct view, of course, even crudely understood, is just the opposite.  the essential nutrients and conditions of life are not there to meet our needs as we are, but rather we are the way we are — and life is the way it is — because “we” evolved as we were able to break down those nutrients for energy and as “we” were capable of surviving — better, thriving — in those environments.  God didn’t create bluish/grayish eyes — much less give them specifically to me — so that people whom he wanted to live in cold environments with less sunlight could thrive; rather, the genetic mutation spread — and in recent evolutionary memory, at that — because of benefits for those who were already living in those environments.  I mean, that’s a pithy, pathetic explanation, but it’s immediately more reasonable that the former position, as humbling as that might be.

this doesn’t provide any really satisfying answer as to why the number 7 can be found in so many cultures, playing such an important role, but I’m not interested enough right now to sift through any explanations there might be.  plus, let’s not pretend that 7 is really that prevalent around the globe, or that it’s even all that important in the Bible.  rather, this is an instance of the human tendency to look for patterns and to bias all the instances of what we’re looking for — ignoring all the other numbers that are just as important/mundane.

where’d this (vegan) apple pie come from?

a friend posted one of the various autotune renditions of a Carl Sagan clip from Cosmos in which he makes the following claim: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”  love it all over.  then I got to thinking about how representative this is of a naturalistic, scientific outlook regarding the world we live in.  and then I thought about how silly it would be (and is) to take a creationist position, looking at a delicious pie and claiming, “God did it.”

the two aren’t exactly perfect opposites, and let’s ignore some of the inadequacies of the analogy, but overall I think this demonstrates how exciting and wonderful the scientific process, as a tool box, is when compared to supernatural explanations (although those could be fun, depending on how creative we’re feeling).  I mean, sure, among the supernatural camp there’d be disagreement about exactly which steps God was involved in (sifting flour? slicing apples?), or which parts of the ingredients God actually created (grew? from scratch?), or which bakers or farmers he created or used, and so on and so forth.  insert variety from the history of religious engagements with evolution over the past 150 years.  (I recommend Darwinism and the Divine in America, by Jon Roberts.)

but this is never as much fun.  or convincing.  but lest I seem to “strident,” as they like to say, I’ll make it clear that I don’t really have a problem with someone sitting at the table, fully aware of where this pie came from, thanking God (any god, really) for it.  FSM included.

oh, I also found this recipe card, which is priceless.

book review: The Beginnings of Western Science

(Note: couldn’t find the cover for my addition.  grr.)

overall, this book does what it sets out to do, and does it fairly well.  the reader gets a grand overview of the history of philosophical thought and other currents of knowledge that can broadly be construed as precursors to modern science.  a lot of what an author would choose to cover in a book like this depends on his or her take on the continuity vs. discontinuity debates regarding the continuum of ancient and medieval “science” with what is commonly (though sometimes begrudgingly) referred to as the “scientific revolution” — and Lindberg does a good job introducing this debate and what it means in the final chapter, providing a nice summary of his views.

at times it would have been more helpful to have had this summary and argument made before reading some of the chapters, as there were always questions lurking in the back of my mind, such as, What distinguished this from a “modern” (i.e. seventeenth-century and after) approach to the subject, What were the obstacles (social or intellectual) preventing certain thinkers from transitioning over to the “modern” scientific approach — in short, what was the key difference at the end of the Middle Ages that changed the game?  knowing his take, or being better informed about the positions, could have helped weigh the material in the various chapters.

I can’t say that I learned a lot — while the book remains a cursory overview, the specific strands of thought and arguments are far too deep in themselves to successfully wrestle with them as you go, and I’m not interested in memorizing too many names and dates just for the heck of it — but I do feel more confident in the general schema I’ve had in the back of my mind; and I at least know where to go (or where to point someone else) if need be.

and although I often wished he would pass more judgment or reflect more critically on the intellectual and religious systems either promoting the advancement of knowledge or preventing those steps that would make a night-and-day difference between medieval and early modern science — in terms of how the world is envisioned and how we go about understanding it empirically — I do understand his position as a historian providing a general introduction to this history, standing by his dictum that the task of the historian “is not to grade the past but to understand it.”

a one-way street

Lawrence Krauss on whether science and religion are at odds:

“There is too much ink spent worrying about this question. Religion is simply irrelevant to science, and whether or not science contradicts religion may be of interest to theologians but it simply doesn’t matter to scientists. What matters are the important questions science is dealing with, from the origin and future of the universe to the origin and future of life.

All this talk about science and religion gives the wrong impression, as it suggests reconciling them or not reconciling them is a big issue… it isn’t. As I once put it to theologians at a meeting at the Vatican: theologians have to listen to scientists, because if they want to try to create a consistent theology (and while I have opinions about whether this is possible, but my opinions about this are neither particularly important nor informed) they at least need to know how the world works. But scientists don’t have to listen to theologians, because it has no effect whatsoever on the scientific process.”

The key point here is the one-way street regarding where new, relevant information about our world and who we are comes from. Theologians et al. can speculate about what all this emerging information means for believers, but are they doing anything more than pouring new wine into old wineskins?

Read more here.