Science philosophy
pharyngula | November 9, 2013 Roland Deschane
Science is always working a tough room. It's inherently progressive — we're constantly achieving incremental improvements in our understanding, with occasional lurches forward…and sometimes sudden lurches backward, when we realize that we got something wrong. We're performing for a crowd, the general citizenry and most importantly, the funding agencies, that expect us to fix problems and make the world better, and they're a fickle bunch who will turn on us with disdain if we don't keep delivering new medical therapies and tinier electronics and more spectacular robots…
pharyngula | August 8, 2013When I heard that Steven Pinker had written a new piece decrying the accusations of scientism, I was anxious to read it. "Scientism" is a blunt instrument that gets swung in my direction often enough; I consider it entirely inappropriate in almost every case I hear it used.
Here's the thing: when I say that there is no evidence for a god, that there's no sign that there is a single specific thing this imagined being has done, I am not unfairly asking people to adopt the protocols of science — I am expecting to judge by their own standards and expectations. They are praying to Jesus in the…
pharyngula | July 5, 2011Andrew Brown does it again, and writes another clueless screed against one of those damned atheist scientists, in this case Harry Kroto. It's a common sort of objection, that these scientists are all mere logical positivists (or as Brown prefers to label them, "illogical positivists"), and as we all know, the philosophers have rejected logical positivism, therefore he's wrong. But that's only because bad philosophers and Andrew Brown only seem able to view scientists through the lens of philosophy, not as scientists, and rather consistently screw up their perceptions in odd ways. It's like…
pharyngula | July 1, 2011Weird ideas can flourish if enough people share a false preconception, and here's a marvelous article on the history and philosophy of widely held certainty that other planets were inhabited by people. Not just any people, either: good Christian people.
By the 1700s, there could no longer be any doubt. Earth was just one of many worlds orbiting the Sun, which forced scientists and theologians alike to ponder a tricky question. Would God really have bothered to create empty worlds?
To many thinkers, the answer was an emphatic "no," and so cosmic pluralism - the idea that every world is…
pharyngula | August 30, 2010When I critized Mary Midgley the other day for her sloppy critique of Nicholas Humphrey, I also pointed out that Humphrey had apparently indulged in some unfortunate hyperbole himself, saying "So successful has it been that many scientists would now say, and even fear, that there will soon be little left for them to do." Which is patently ridiculous, of course: every scientist I know is painfully aware of all the stuff that they don't know.
What I didn't take into account was that Midgley might have quote-mined him. I shouldn't have underestimated a woman who can discern the entire content…
pharyngula | August 23, 2010The indefatigable Kurzweil threads do occasionally spawn some interesting discussion, and the latest has gone down a few odd byways thanks to this comment by Cerberus:
Creating a robotic brain to "download your consciousness" into or the "I'll make a clone version of myself with all my memories" sci-fi fiction immortality ideas are kinda false immortalities.
It's at best, assuming a complete successful procedure a process of ending one's consciousness so that a puppet version of yourself can emulate your life possibly for all eternity.
Great, but what does that do for real you?
Real you…
pharyngula | February 8, 2010In my week long visit to Ireland, I only had one encounter that left a bad taste in my mouth. Everyone I talked to was forthright and willing to state their views clearly, even if I thought they were dead wrong and rather stupid (my radio interview with Tom McGurk comes to mind — he was an unpleasant person more interested in barking loudly than having a conversation, but his views were plain), and most of my conversations were fun and interesting. The one exception was with a creationist in Belfast.
After my talk, this one furtive fellow who hadn't had the nerve, apparently, to ask me…
pharyngula | February 6, 2010Oh, no. Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini have written a book and opinion piece in which they try to claim that natural selection is a dying concept, and what do they use to justify that outrageous claim? Evo devo! That's just nuts, and Mary Midgely compounds the crazy with terrible abuse of developmental biology — she seems to want to turn back the clock to the time of D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, and throw out Jacob and Monod. I really get pissed off when I see people misusing the specialized ideas of evo devo as a replacement for, rather than an addition to, the framework of modern…
pharyngula | July 8, 2009Forgive me, readers, but Madeline Bunting has raised up her tiny, fragile pin-head again, and I must address her non-arguments once more. Well, not her non-arguments, actually, but the same tedious non-arguments the fans of superstition constantly trundle out. She was at some strange conference where only people who love religion spoke and came away with affirmations of the usual tripe. It's as if the "New Atheists" have provoked a counter-attack by critics armored in pudding and armed with damp sponges.
…the Archbishop of Canterbury was brisk, and he warned, "beware of the power of nonsense…
pzminion | August 14, 2008Guestblogger Sastra checking in:
A few years back the little Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in my area asked me to give a brief talk (!) on the topic of my choice. Seems they were looking for speakers, any speaker, and had noticed that I tend to talk a lot. So I considered the sorts of things that appeal to me, and the sorts of things that might appeal to them, and decided to try to see if I could put together an interesting speech on "Science and Human Rights," based on the idea "that concepts such as human rights, democracy, and science are historically linked together through similar…