Andrew Bolt: still an alarmist idiot

Just for old time’s sake, I’m going to quickly take apart Herald Sun hack Bolta’s most recent cry for help. It’s a blog entry entitled “Signs that warming scare is all hot air“. Easy shit.

Since most of today’s digitised sputum is typical quote-mining and astonishing inability to differentiate between what’s been peer reviewed and what’s been extemporaneously speculated (typical hack fair, basically), I’m just going to address each of Bolta’s Ten Seals of the Warmist Illuminati Conspiracy.

1st sign: The world isn’t warming

At least he begins by making it clear that his world is not the real one.

Anyway, yes, the world is warming. In science, we tend to use this thing called mathematics. To find trends in data, we use statistics. To find out if an average changes with the addition of new variables, we use a thing called a moving average. It’s a pretty rudimentary stuff, generally just involving a little data collection and arithmetic.

What Bolta is doing is picking a nice, hot year, and drawing a line to the most recent temperature. Apparently, in Bolta’s world, ENSO doesn’t exist and everything is linear. That’s because Bolta’s world doesn’t contain complicated things that you need to break out the calculator for.

Anyway, without boring you with statistics, here’s a lovely graphic that demonstrates beautifully why Bolta’s approach doesn’t work.

The escalator, courtesy of SKS.

The escalator, courtesy of SkS.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with not knowing how to do science; but there’s a lot wrong with pretending you do to push a political agenda.

2nd sign: The warming models are wrong

Seriously? Boring. Let’s unpack.

The weekend papers screamed alarm: “The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has surpassed 400 parts per million for the first time in human history.”

But wait. Lots more carbon dioxide, but no more warming? This isn’t what we were told to expect.

My FSM, this is how you know that the Herald Sun is a piece of shit paper. See above.

See, predictions the world is heating dangerously are based on mathematical models of how the climate is meant to work. Add our emissions to the equation, and scientists are meant to figure how much the world should warm.

Bolta doesn’t like maths very much.

But as Professor Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told a US Congressional committee last month, those models guessed too high, and didn’t predict pauses in warming longer than 17 years.

Which models? There’s a lot of them. Let’s test this claim though. It makes sense, then, to check measurements against predictions made by some models, and then see if the predictions of any models match the real-world data we’re accumulating. That gets done all the time. Here’s a quote from one such study, from 2012:

“…the results strongly suggest that the more sensitive models perform better, and indeed the less sensitive models are not adequate in replicating vital aspects of today’s climate.”

Next! Oh shit, another paragraph from Bolt.

Ed Hawkins, of the University of Reading, found the global temperature since 2005 on the very lowest end of the widest range predicted by influential climate models.

…it was a bit more complicated than that. Nice try, though.

3rd sign: Warming disasters aren’t happening

Wat.

Ignoring the usual Tim Flannery quote-mine (apparently Tim Flannery is Bolta’s favourite climate expert), let’s move on to the specifics.

In 2001, the IPCC predicted “milder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms”.

Because science in 2001 in a burgeoning, complex field is still relevant today.

But the US National Snow and Ice Data Center this year tried to claim global warming had now increased snowstorms in the US.

The US isn’t the whole world. Warmer regions on the planet will get less, colder reasons will get more.

Same story with so many other scares. Al Gore was wrong – the critical glaciers of the Himalayas are not vanishing…

That’s not true.

Nor are we getting more cyclones, bigger floods, worse diseases or greater famines, as some predicted.

Bigger storms? Check. Bigger floods? Dude, you can’t do maths, let alone address something like this. Worse diseases? Check. Greater famines? Ask Somalia.

4th sign: People are relaxing

And that matters how?

5th sign: The rest of the world is chilling, too

Delusion and apathy are causes for celebration?

6th sign: Even Labor hardly seems to care now

 *facepalm*

7th sign: A bit of warming seems good for us

 Just no. Idiot.

But more warming also means more rain in most places,

And rain totally has nothing to do with flooding, hey.

8th sign: Warming seems worth the price of getting richer

 …yes, this is progress.

9th sign: “Stopping” warming isn’t working

Emissions have dropped.

Australians pay a $9 billion-a-year carbon tax and billions more in subsidies for “green” technology.

We also pay for fossil fuel subsidies. Yes, the plan sucks, but the carbon tax is working.

If we keep paying these billions for the next seven years, what difference will we make to the world’s temperature by the end of the century?

Australia’s Professor Roger Jones, a warmist, says no more than 0.0038 degrees, and that’s even assuming the climate models are right.

Which models? And yeah, the tax needs to be fixed. We also need to tax the living shit out of what we export. But this isn’t the point. The point is one of the most stable economies in the world setting an example for the rest of the world.

10th sign: Sceptical scientists now get a hearing

 Denier scientists always get airtime. Fox News, anyone? The Bolt Report?

In 2007, ABC staff protested when the ABC decided to finally show one documentary questioning the warming scare, The Great Global Warming Swindle.

The ABC compromised. The screening was given a hostile introduction and was followed with an even more hostile panel session.

Umm, well, it was a fine example of bare-faced bullshit artistry.

That’s how hard it was for sceptical scientists to get a hearing.

Boo-hoo. He’s right y’all. We should so listen to creationists and anti-vaxxers too.

That wall is now breaking. Dissent is being heard, with Professor Ian Plimer’s sceptical Heaven and Earth alone selling more than 40,000 copies here.

Anyone who has ever waved one at you might profit from reading this.

But, no, this great scare is unforgivable. It’s robbed us of cash and, worse, our reason.

Andrew, you’re so right. The alarmist campaign you and your friends are running is unforgivable. It has robbed us of our cash, and it actively wages war on our reason.

Go fuck yourself.

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God, metaphysics and Wittgenstein

In a science and philosophy forum I frequent, a non-believer decided to rile up the scarce believers by asking what God’s first thought was. A good question, but the ensuing discussion bored the life out of me. I decided to throw a spanner into the works. Here was my (grammatically fixed) take on the issue:

Since God created man in His image, we can infer that we think as God does. Therefore, God’s ability to think, must be contingent on the existence of spacetime.

God can’t have had a thought because thoughts require matter and energy, and matter and energy only exist in spacetime, according to the law of causality. Brains (and other computing devices) consume energy to operate, thereby moving the universe closer to maximum entropy; so yes, thinking is contingent on spacetime.

If God created the universe, then He must have created time and space, which is required for him to even begin the act of creation. It’s an oxymoron.

If God was created at the moment spacetime came to be, then God obviously can’t be the creator. If God is outside spacetime, then God can’t think. If God is in spacetime, and there are no measurable effects of God, then God is powerless. If God can’t have created the universe, must exist within spacetime but doesn’t do anything, then something that fits the definition of “God” as conceived in the major monotheisms doesn’t exist.

This all follows from the conventional inflationary model of cosmology and popular theology, of course. (Not that the sophist brands of theology does any better.)

And my reply when the brave conservative Catholic present replied that I’m assuming materialism is true:

Ah, Edmund, alternatives to materialism inevitably meld incommensurable language games. This melding is the root of theology and all other forms of sophistry. Here’s a refutation of the metaphysics assumed by theism which serves as an argument for materialism:

If an effect can be physically modelled, we can work backwards from the model to uncover the cause. This is how physics works. Therefore, effects and causes are equivalent in scientific descriptions of reality.

Linguistic demarcation is a part of the manifest image (everyday language, but when we use it alone to inform an epistemic approach, we get the Sun orbiting the Earth), to ease communication in languages that aren’t designed for science as math is (describing reality requires we use what’s known as the scientific image), and we have to be careful about our language games; we shouldn’t mindlessly meld the manifest image with the scientific image. They’re not readily compatible (without serious finessing).

If causes and effects are equivalent when described in the language of physics, then they are necessarily physical. There can be no metaphysical causes, which means that a metaphysical entity that affects anything in our universe doesn’t exist.

This just annihilates dualism, and it leaves no room for God.

Here’s my elaboration, following a prompt:

OK. Cause and effect described being distinguishable from one another in the way a theist who accepts the cosmological argument must assume is a classic example of this. It makes a claim about physics using the language of the manifest image, which is, as I described, pointless. In physics, cause and effect are mathematically equivalent (ie, are theoretically described with the same equation in a given circumstance) so demarcating the two to make a claim about physics will yield a categorical error.

(Just FYI: I don’t see how this argument is hurt by Kuhn’s description of Newtonian mechanics and General Relativity. They’re both used for different things today. Different theories, different language games. Some do a better job than others. Newton’s math is used for space exploration, but Einstein’s is used for describing the cosmos. Science progresses, so theories that can better map reality will supplant the less powerful ones. Also, I’m basing my claim about physics on concerns frequently aired by theoretical physicist Lee Smolin. I might be entirely wrong about this, and in my opinion, it’s the weakest point in my argument. But I don’t think I am wrong: there’s a difference between datapoints and a description of what actually happens.)

I think my inner Wittgensteinian is beginning to show.

What pushed me into looking at philosophical problems in terms of language games is discussing those problems extensively, in various forums. The concept of a “language game” is misunderstood in many quarters, particularly in postmodernist ones. Often people equate the concept with relativism, which implies that the idea of philosophical skepticism is justified. I disagree. Just before Ludwig Wittgenstein died, he worked out a novel refutation of philosophical skepticism, which was posthumously published in a book entitled On Certainty.

Taken with the rest of Wittgenstein’s scribblings, I don’t think it’s fair to brand Wittgenstein a relativist. He was a type of realist, just one concerned with different levels of description that involve often mutually exclusive uses of coherent language games; that’s where the Wittgensteinian concept of a language game comes from. Wittgenstein believed that the problems of philosophy could be resolved by sorting out language games. As someone who argued for the existence of an external reality that necessarily could be described at various levels, then you can’t call him a relativist.

The sciences each get their own language games (some mathematical, some less so), so if you want to do science, you must master the relevant language games. What’s interesting about science is that more of those language games are melding and the some of the differences are becoming wholly superficial (in physics and pure mathematics, the square root of -1 is denoted i, whereas in engineering, it’s denoted j).

My distinction between the manifest image and the scientific image comes from Wilfred Sellars via the self-described Wittgensteinian philosopher Dan Dennett. I don’t think of them as distinct language games, but rather as distinct classes of sub-language games. Those in the scientific image aim to describe close, scientific approximations of aspects of reality; while the manifest image is what we use for everyday communication. Dennett’s contributions to philosophy are largely about attempting to reconcile the manifest image with the scientific images. That’s where Dennett’s compatibilism comes from, as well as his comfort with re-defining consciousness radically based on his counter-intuitive scientific theory (which, if philosophers of mind would care to notice, is doing pretty damn well in the brain sciences literature). Ironically, Dennett’s critics readily conflate the manifest and scientific images when they dismiss Dennett’s Consciousness Explained as Consciousness Explained Away.

Popular science can be thought of as a way to bridge the gap between the two classes of language games; but when we start trying to do philosophy popular descriptions science books, we get confusion. This is because popular science books often tacitly create their own language games, which will involve elements of the manifest image, the scientific image, metaphorical language and elements borrowed from other popular science books.

Generally speaking, and outside of precise discussion of science and philosophy, the study of language games isn’t supposed to be prescriptive. They can be (and are) tangled at will in normal discussion and most people will still know what’s going on. Tangling them is essential to everyday communication, and it is a brilliant source of entertainment (George Carlin was a master of this), but also of anguish. An awareness of them should theoretically make communication easier when we aren’t joking around and we want whoever we’re communicating with to understand us. It should also help us from being taken in when language games are manipulated to decieve, as politicians get paid to do.

So my advocacy of studying and understanding language games is not about a maniacal preoccupation with precision in all areas of life. Some normative projects, however, such as clarifying what words like “faith” mean when making epistemic or truth claims across language games, will be very useful for refining communication.

Human brains are complex, so the study of language games is necessarily complex, and full of nuance and uncertainties.

Wittgenstein’s insight wouldn’t just strike anyone. The everyday playing with language games, and their historical convergences (we lived in a simpler, poorly understood world), hides them from us. We used to ask questions like “what is the meaning of life?” This is an unambiguous example of muddled language games giving rise to a categorical error. You might as well ask, as Richard Dawkins did to make this point, “what is the colour of jealousy?” The question is incoherent, because while grammatically correct, it confuses incommensurable language games and tries to get an answer.  Any answer to such a confused question will necessarily satisfy nobody.

If you want to do philosophy of science as Wittgenstein would have it, you need to go back to the relevant scientific image and carefully figure out how to communicate your ideas and arguments to iron out ambiguity for an audience, which will involve yet another language game.

Neuroscientist Al Seckel has inferred from his research that different people have different perceptual systems. That is, we each have our own “language game” and the incommensurability between our language games and those of others hampers communication, and leads to echo chambers, especially where political ideologies incorporate or deny facts about reality. These perceptual systems are informed by various cognitive biases and thinking errors, as well as desires and inculcated, conditioned or otherwise determined values. Needless to say, Seckel, like Wittgenstein, is not a relativist.

Research into debiasing has shown that it’s possible to, at least to some degree, harmonise apparently incommensurable perceptual systems. Moreover, when discussing any philosophical issue, I try to make it clear which language game I’m using. If we wish to do philosophy that has relevance to reality, we must pay heed to the differences between the manifest image and the scientific image.

The whole aim of analytic philosophy is to clarify language, and I think Wittgenstein, as I read him, showed the way. If we want analytic philosophy to advance, we must follow.

We can come up with more mutual language games for our pursuit of truth, and figure out how to demarcate them so they don’t taint philosophy. Language games are memes, which breed incessantly, often to the effect of creating confusion in the minds of their hosts. The project of Wittgenstein can now be understood as an attempt to domesticate the denizens of this memeplex. Now, his work is being forwarded by philosophers like Dan Dennett and we’re finding its roots in the work of brain scientists. I’m a fan.

(Oh, and I don’t have any interest in discussing Wittgenstein’s tortured relationship with theism. After the above exchange, I’m a bit bored of theism now.)

Guns and mental illness again

I have to clarify this, because it’s a point that screams out for repeating.

Why do people’s minds get blown, or why do I get flat-out denial, when I point to studies showing that mental illness isn’t even correlated with violent criminal behaviour?

The only scary correlation here is that the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of violent crime.

If you want good reasons for immediate, massive funding of public mental health programs, I can give you a half dozen off the top of my head.

Preventing violent crime isn’t one of them.

That’s why the motivation for thia sudden support for universal healthcare by Republican gun nuts annoys the living shit out of me.

Pointing to this fabricated correlation extrapolated from a handful of cases as a good reason to fund mental health is just wrong (and anti-scientific). It’s predictably fucked up when the far right do it, but it’s utterly perverse when the left follow along like sheep.

Stigmatisation comes from false stereotypes like this.

To push it is to hurt the mentally ill and to buy into the NRA agenda. It distracts from the real problem of gun culture and the need for the United States to properly regulate firearms.

Gun ownership is actually correlated with violent crime; and a causal relationship isn’t difficult to establish. If you’re serious about stopping violent crime, tackling gun ownership should be the focus.

A cry I’ve anticipated, but thankfully haven’t yet heard, from the left (who accept the evidence) is that any delusion that brings the far right to the table on universal healthcare is OK, as long as it gets the job done.

I don’t think it’s worth throwing the dignity of the mentally ill under a bus for a deal.

It’s hard enough seeing a psychiatrist for the first time without everyone else assuming that you’re a danger to society.

Look at the evidence and think things through, please.

What the fuck is wrong with you people?

I’m sure you’ve all seen all the repugnant things religious leader fuckheads have said in the last few days. I’m not going to comment on that because it makes me feel ill.

This post has three sections.

Gun Control

Seriously, the sheer number of American pathological gun nuts I’ve dealt with online in the last two days is staggering.

I’m finding exactly the same problems I have with religion, especially when religion is driving good people to kill and giving bad people an excuse to kill (and an excuse to get good people to kill). It’s a faith-based claim that offers no rationale except for bullshit cliched arguments that have clearly not been critically examined by someone who cares about anything other than feeding on confirmation bias.

So my problem is faith. I just typically go after religion because it’s the largest and most prevalent manifestation of this defective way of thinking; and so it just happens to piss me off more often.

But now I find myself forced to go after the American gun cult.

Something about children being killed with legal weapons just makes me fucking mad, you know? There’s also something about the callous self-justifications from trigger-happy traditionalist idiots, while families are mourning, that just begs to be called out.

So here it is.

America’s gun laws fail so hard at preventing homicides, robberies, accidental shootings and suicides according to evidence from peer-reviewed literature (not reports from “think-tanks” and other bullshit sources); but that doesn’t matter. The solution is moar guns! It’s a Second Amendment right!

Yes, more guns is exactly what America needs.

Here, by the way, is the Second Amendment:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Hmm.

The Second Amendment argument is stupid, and clearly nobody has read it — if it were still relevant it’d imply that citizens should be allowed access to nuclear weapons. Besides, interpreting the Second Amendment on an individual protection level is problematic and unsophisticated.

Then times changed, democracy got better (fine, it’s actually a polyarchy, but whatever) — making revolution less meaningful. Also, civilisation is qualitatively different now than it was at any other point in history.

Violence, all over the world, is in decline (help speed it along!), and liberalisation is rising, despite some other depressing statistics (I’ll get to them). The revolution in the United States will not be televised, because it won’t happen; it’s little more than another American Dream.

Second, guns for personal protection? Bullshit.

I looked through a bunch of my university library’s research databases and all I came up with, from reputable psychological and medical journals, was strong evidence that legally owned guns for self-defence are rarely used for self-defence; they’re more likely (22 times!) to be used in homicides, accidental deaths, suicides and to intimidate family members. This general trend of this study has been corroborated by numerous others.

(In light of those studies, which, most charitably, paint private gun-packers as highly incompetent and dangerous people, rather than autonomous agents capable of defending themselves; would a militia comprised of these people really capable of overthrowing a hypothetical tyrannical government? That might be a little too much to expect…)

Here are two charts that should hit this crime rate point home:

Number of guns per 100 people, OECD

Interesting, because “Switzerland” I hear a lot. I guess nobody bothered to look up how that actually works.

Gun-related murder rates in the developed world.

That’s another bullshit claim I hear: “What about Mexico? That’s what gun restrictions on law-abiding citizens does to reduce crime!” Yes, what about Mexico? Where do Mexican cartels get their guns from?

A more in-depth analysis can be found here. I guess facts really do have a progressive bias.

The cost-benefit analysis, if you care about protecting people, just doesn’t justify guns for personal protection.

Some might be tempted to use this against me when I advocate full drug-legalisation. They’d be wrong. Drugs are an individual choice, and you can’t use drugs to kill lots of people, only yourself (if you’re so inclined, or if you’re an irresponsible user, or by accident — but then, mountain climbing can kill you in that way). Drugs should be illegal in situations where they can play some causal role in harming others: like when you’re driving. If you drug-and-drive, fuck you. You’re a criminal because you put others at risk.

(Incidentally, in some U.S. states, car licenses are more heavily regulated than gun ownership.)

So, being a rabid supporter of “the right to bear arms” is to buy into a bullshit faith-based enterprise, with its own mythology and various off-shoot sects. The fact that it’s about providing false-consolation and a false sense security and the fact that it’s totally contrary to the evidence makes it exactly like religion.

And, on exactness: this is exactly why I go after religion. Religion is based on faith, which is essentially pretending to know things you don’t know. Appeals to faith are used to justify tribalism, delusion and all manner of bullshit. When someone says “that’s what I believe” you’re supposed to avoid being disrespectful. Fuck that I say.

People can be wrong, and there’s nothing wrong with exercising your own free speech to hold them to account. And making light of the majority hard-headed among them in front of fence-sitters.

So fuck those idiots against gun control. There is blood on their hands.

Mental Health

This is important to me.

I have lived with bipolar disorder since my early teenage years and I’m now in recovery.

I’ve never shot anyone, but I’ve faced discrimination in personal, professional and schooling situations due to the stigma associated with mental illness.

I don’t care about it, personally, because I’ve been lucky; it hasn’t ever really gotten in my way. But discrimination affects others badly. Really fucking badly. And I totally understand why.

The mentally ill don’t need to be singled out based on the actions of criminals. It’s offensive to do so, and it doesn’t even make sense.

The amount of demonisation I’ve seen the mentally ill as a group subjected to — surreptitiously by the hard right (because it wasn’t guns!) and inadvertently hiding in articles in the PC left media (smacked down here) — since this recent mass murder in the United States is mind-boggling.

It’s quite simple: the United States has worse healthcare than some developing countries (Columbia!); but look at these fucking statistics. Now, what should the priority be following Friday’s Connecticut shooting? It’s pretty fucking obvious to me.

To start with: to demonise people with autism spectrum disorders is to demonstrate a profound ignorance of established facts about abnormal human psychology.

Second; what effect does mental illness have on crime? The first clear-cut example is psychopathy; but does psychopathy predict criminal behaviour? A bit of arithmetic carried out on Baylor College’s neurolaw-focused blog, using some estimates and some quantified statistics indicated that 15% of all psychopaths currently living in the United States are incarcerated for some crime or another. Would increased mental health funding, and more accessible high-quality treatment help these rates? No. Psychopathy is untreatable, and very difficult to diagnose.

What about the mentally ill population as a whole? That’s a point of contention too, and it shouldn’t be, because there are more of these things called facts — and they’re in. The mentally ill, as a population, are overwhelmingly more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. Check this in the peer-reviewed literature for yourself, and look through other articles.

This is the crux of my argument: if the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of violence rather than perpetrators of violence, then taking measures to reduce violence also protects the mentally ill. Tackling gun violence is a step towards protecting the mentally ill, and a step towards protecting everyone else.

Better healthcare is an absolute imperative. There are some shocking stats associated with mental illness in the United States. The one I find scariest is that only one-third of adults and one-half of children with diagnosable mental illnesses actually get to talk to a professional in any meaningful capacity.

Clearly, mental health services in the United States need to be fixed, and they need to be fixed soon; but right now, a scourge that infects American culture as a whole must be fixed. This is gun culture.

This is a hard calculation to make with objectivity, but right now, America’s progressives and concerned conservatives should try to rewrite the gun laws.

Now is the time. This isn’t an either-or thing; it should be a both thing — but smart progressives should not lose sight of the myopia of their fellow countrymen.

Help everyone first: fix your fucking gun culture.

Ethics

Now, you could say that who am I, an Australian descended from undesirable colonisers (I’m not, but that’s what I was told) — to derive morals from facts (as Hume supposedly prohibited) and moreover, how dare I use my moral standards to judge another country’s laws and culture?

Because fuck you. If ethics aren’t about minimising suffering and maximising flourishing for all conscious creatures, then ethics is a waste of everyone’s time — and anyone who believes that has no grounds to support any moral cause, or to judge the behaviours of others. That’s why.

Why should we be interested in minimising suffering and maximising harm? Well, would you apply the same standard to medical research? How about physics? No. I didn’t fucking think so. So why do people hate it when you try to come up with a normative system of ethics? Out of respect for unjustified, unsubstantiated bullshit faith-based opinions.

Also, you didn’t read Hume properly. He used inference to the best explanation (induction) all the time, despite pointing out a “problem with induction” (that modern epistemology and philosophy of science has easily accommodated in the form of evidentialism; even verificationism), and he was an empiricist. He’d be fine with physics and medicine; and if he knew about consequentialism, he’d be fine with that too. (The problems in that BBC link have largely been resolved, it just covers naive consequentialism really, but you can find that shit out yourself. Go read some Peter Singer and even Sam Harris — neither of whom I totally agree with — and make up your own mind.)

My thoughts go out to all the families who lost loved ones last Friday. If children, a teacher and a psychologist being murdered in cold blood with legal weapons isn’t a wakeup call for America, there’s something wrong with the American leadership, and by extension, the people who elected those leaders.

Disagree?

Before you tell me, read what I wrote. Read it again. Check my sources. I don’t like repeating myself. I will approve your comments (I do that anyway), but only to enshrine you as a dunce.

Is everything conscious?

If you think so, you might be a panpsychist. I just met someone in a Facebook philosophy forum (not mine) who takes this position seriously.

I don’t. I happen to think that the computational theory of mind is the only game in town. I’m biased towards preferring evidence-based and testable hypotheses when it comes to domains of incomplete knowledge. So I ran my e-mouth off at this manifest bit of absurdity.

The response was: ‎”Did you copy and paste this from somewhere?”

I translated that statement as an affirmation that my argument rules and that I presented it with style, eloquence and clarity. Damn fucking right it rules, and that I presented it with the acumen and wit that characterises someone like me.

OK, I’m being facetious. But I am pretty proud of the argument I gave, given that I developed it from just a few seconds of thinking about the proposition seriously. I want to share it with you.

Before I get to it though, I’ll post my initial blithe dismissal of panpsychism, which my interlocutor considered a straw-man argument…

1. Consciousness is hard to understand.
2. Neurons can’t possibly be responsible for consciousness, just because.
Ergo: Everything is conscious.

So far, so good. I do think I addressed and validly mocked the rationale for the whole enterprise of panpsychism. But my interlocutor begged to differ. So yes, I bit the bullet, and I thought about it for more than a minute. Here was my “sophisticated” criticism, the one that drew that flattering accusation of plagiarism:

Here’s a slightly more serious-sounding, but valid, charge against panpsychism:

The statement that “we’re made of matter and we are conscious”, which seems to be the actual starting premise preferred by panpsychists (including Strawson, paraphrasing his position with a quote from Arthur Eddington), is true, but it’s trivial. It’s a deepity. It doesn’t mean that “matter is consciousness” — it means that we globs of matter are conscious. It’s like saying that the half-life of uranium-235 is 704 million years. That doesn’t mean that the half-life of a duck is 704 million years.

But for the sake of argument, let’s say that all matter can have this property of consciousness. That’s cool, but why consciousness? What makes consciousness separate from some other imperfectly understood property? It seems like an arbitrary thing to assign to something. So if we can say that all matter has consciousness, then we should be able to say that it has other tangible properties too.

I’m not meaning to denigrate consciousness, I’m just wondering how saying that inert gravel is conscious (on no evidence whatsoever) is any different to saying that gravel has the property of being able to reproduce sexually.

Elements of sexual reproduction aren’t totally understood either, at the molecular level especially, but we do have a very-near complete understanding of it in most species. The fact that we have nowhere near that level of understanding in regards to consciousness seems to be the only reason why we’d posit that inert gravel might be conscious. That strikes me as a pretty bad reason.

You might object, and say that “we know what sexual reproduction looks like”. Agreed. We also know what consciousness looks like — it’s the difference between a live person and a dead person — we just aren’t sure on the details.

It’s a gap in our knowledge, and I don’t think we’re going to solve the so-called “hard problem” by donning a magician’s hat and making ghost noises whenever it comes up.

(Mild edits for clarity, extemporaneous arguments may contain weird grammar.)

I want to add here that another objection might be that maybe inert rocks are conscious in a way that humans don’t understand from our obviously limited frame of reference. Well, OK, but maybe rocks reproduce sexually in a way that we don’t understand too.

Another problem with the panpsychist position that I didn’t mention (because I just thought of it) is that it doesn’t define consciousness. It shifts the problem — literally — into the realm of the untestable. By actually broadening the very definition of consciousness to contain literally everything, it renders the term totally meaningless.

A popular ploy by panpsychists is to claim that computationalists like myself deny the existence of consciousness. Dan Dennett’s “Consciousness Explained” has been derisively called “Consciousness Explained Away” by dozens of pseudo-intellectuals who clearly never afforded themselves the pleasure of reading it. Well, no, we don’t, for reasons very similar to the ones that we give for not denying the existence of the internet. This compels one to ask: what could do more to deny the existence of a meaningful thing called “consciousness” than by rendering the term utterly useless?

Yes, it’s a reductio ad absurdum, but it’s a valid reductio.

Predictably, he didn’t like that either. So I here’s another quote from one of my more substantive follow-up posts:

So, to finish my first sentence, because panpsychism is just so divorced from science. You can’t test it — so it’s pseudoscience to the core. There’s just no reason to entertain it. It’s a dead-end. It’s a cop-out. It’s an argument from ignorance. It takes the fun out of the research. It’s a non-answer. It’s one of those stupid “theories” that “explains” everything and predicts nothing.

I think that about sums up my stance. But readers know that I don’t like to leave a victim half-conscious. I finished the job with a parting injection of scorn:

Also, it shocks me that these people get paid by under-funded universities and research institutions on ridiculously tight budgets — perhaps the most valuable things in any society — to sit around and come up with glorified God-of-the-Gaps arguments with appropriately spooky names.

It’s like theology departments in universities funded by secular things, or postmodernist critical theory departments outside of French universities.

Even Obama can be anti-science

This might come as a shock to a lot of scientifically literate progressives, but President Obama has, at the very least, pandered to anti-vaxxer hysteria. This happened in 2008, well after the MMR hoax was laid to rest. It’s still quite worrying.

“We’ve seen just a skyrocketing autism rate. Some people are suspicious that it’s connected to the vaccines. This person included [points at someone in the audience]. The science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it.”

–President Obama

“Inconclusive”?! Even The Lancet retracted Wakefield’s paper (which was horribly inept).

Studies debunking the MMR-causes-autism connection are numerous. Here’s something else.

That, friends, is a study that looks at the teratology of autism. It doesn’t actually have anything to do with the MMR thing at all — and the study’s authors have about as much to do with Big Pharma as people who shop in chemists sometimes.

In Australia, newborns are supposed to get the MMR vaccine at at least 12 months old — we do it quite quickly. Studies have demonstrated that symptoms of autism are clear to experts in children aged as young as 6 months old (check the studies cited in the paper I linked). Children simply don’t “catch” autism.

And to say that autism can be caught, well…

(Also posted on tumblr.)

Fractal wrongness

I wish to cast this image into the aether of the net.

Fractal Wrongness

You are not just wrong; you are recursively wrong. The wrongness of every possible iteration of any of your arguments is self-similar with the wrongness of your entire worldview.

This image is adapted from the demotivator poster described on RationalWiki. The caption offered there says: “You are not just wrong. You are wrong at every conceivable level of resolution. Zooming in on any part of your worldview finds beliefs exactly as wrong as your entire worldview.“

The sentiment expressed is clever, but I found the caption unwieldy, unlettered and technically incorrect. Fractals are resolution-independent. They scale indefinitely.