Sentient Developments

Deus Sex Machina

2009-11-19T18:21:00.006-05:00

[Linda MacDonald Glenn is guest blogging this month] (cross-posted on the Women's Bioethics Blog)

(Roughly translated from Latin as Sex God in the machine) We all know that technology can improve our lives (sometimes....well, at least when it's working properly), but who'd have thunk that nanotechnology could improve your sex life?

In yet one more 'tool' in the arsenal against dreaded erectile dysfunction, nanotechnology to the rescue! Scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have developed a foam with nanoparticles encapsulating nitric oxide for the topical treatment of erectile dysfunction (ED). Why is topical better? Because ED medications such as sildenafil , vardenafil, and tadalafil have limitations -- they can cause systemic side effects such as headache, facial flushing, nasal congestion, upset stomach, and abnormal vision. Might this have implications for Female Arousal Disorder for which there remains little, if any, treatment? One can only hope....perhaps the announcement of the new 'female viagra' for pre-menopausal women can benefit from this new delivery system.

On balance, though, Blue Cross Biomedical has developed a new foam condom for use by women, that looks like a vaginal inhaler. The Blue Cross Foam Condom uses a “formulated condom concentrate” comprised of nano silver particles as well as 'surfactant octyl phenoxy -RH4,tween-20, sapn-60,polyethylene glycol 400, deionized water'. Perhaps a male contraceptive can be advanced utilizing a nano-delivery system?

My humble request to scientists and researchers: Equal time for both sexes, please!

You can check out Linda's original blog at the Women's Bioethics Blogspot.

John Hodgman pulls off Fermi Paradox schtick

2009-11-19T18:07:00.003-05:00

I totally love geek humor -- and this TED Talk by John Hodgman has plenty of it, including a bit about the Fermi Paradox and the ultimate question, "Where is everybody?"

IBM's claim to have simulated a cat's brain grossly overstated

2009-11-19T16:18:00.004-05:00

This is not a brain.

I'm a big fan of IBM's Brain and Mind Institute (BMI) and the Blue Brain project. Initiated in May 2005, the Blue Brain project is an attempt to to model the mammalian cerebral cortex with computers. The intention is not to re-create the actual physical structure of the brain, but to simulate it using arrays of supercomputers. Ultimately, the developers are hoping to create biologically realistic models of neurons. In fact, the results of the simulation will be experimentally tested against biological columns.

But I take exception to the recent claim that IBM has created a simulation that is supposedly on par, in terms of complexity and scale, with an actual cat's brain. The media tends to sensationalize these sorts of achievements, and in this case, grossly overstate (and even misstate) the actual accomplishment.

Contrary to what some people may believe, IBM has not created a virtual cat. There's no simulated cat somewhere pouncing around simulated fields chasing simulated mice inside a supercomputer. All IBM has done is replicate the power of a cat's cebebral coretex using a bunch of powerful computers. Nothing more -- there's no psychological or AI element involved whatsoever. They're merely creating a physical power structure and computational infrastructure that may someday run a properly engineered mind.

But credit where credit is due.

IBM has made incredible progress in the sophistication and detail level of human brain mapping. By reverse engineering the human brain, IBM hopes to bring about the era of "cognitive computing," -- a development that would bring about new ways for building computers which mimic natural brain structures.

Essentially, IBM is hoping to simulate a neocortical column, which is the smallest functional unit of the neocortex. This is the part of the brain that is responsible for higher functions such as conscious thought. In humans, the neocortical column is 2mm tall, has a diameter of 0.5mm and contains 60,000 neurons. Project developers initially worked to replicate the neocortical column of a rat, which has only 10,000 neurons, and now they've achieved the same thing with the cat brain. Developers hope to model the human brain in about seven to eight years.

To model these components the developers use a Blue Gene supercomputer that runs the MPI-based 'Neocortical Simulator' combined with 'NEURON' software. Blue Gene is a computer architecture project that has will spawn several next-generation supercomputers -- computers that will reach operating speeds in the petaflops range, and are currently reaching speeds over 280 sustained teraflops. Its 8,000 processors will crunch away at 23 trillion operations per second.

I don't want to take away from IBM's accomplishment, but it's important to note that we are extremely far off in terms of our ability to emulate the true complexity of a mammalian brain. Creating an array of supercomputers that mimics the brute force of a biological brain and then claiming that it matches the 'complexity' and 'scale' of the real thing is pure hyperbole. True whole brain emulation (PDF) is still a far ways off.

Call 1-800-New-Organ, by 2020?

2009-11-16T05:00:00.000-05:00

[Linda MacDonald Glenn is guest blogging this month]

Growing a set of new teeth, or new kidneys, or new eyes, or whatever it is you need, is something we could do as soon as 2020, according to a report that w as issued by the Department of Health and Human Services a few years ago. In a follow-up to George's previous post, I'll be following and reporting on issues in regenerative medicine, with a focus on nano-scale materials and technology. The NIH uses the term 'regenerative medicine' interchangeably with 'tissue engineering' and defines it as "a rapidly growing multidisciplinary field involving the life, physical and engineering sciences that seeks to develop functional cell, tissue, and organ substitutes to repair, replace or enhance biological function that has been lost due to congenital abnormalities, injury, disease, or aging.” And researchers are doing amazing things: Gizmodo has posted videos from Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, about how lab grown tissues are benefiting patients now.

Regenerative nanomedicine will, understandably, likely be embraced for all the promise it holds -- but there have been concerns expressed about the ethical, legal, and social implications, particularity the nano part. Nanotechnology has the potential to have the greatest impact in three areas: energy, medicine, and environmental remediation. Of these three areas, nanotechnology in medicine is the most likely to be accepted by the public, starting with therapeutic treatments and then moving over to enhancements. But it does raise some interesting questions, such as can nanomedicine be considered separate and apart other nanotechnologies? And what does 'nanotechnology' encompass anyway? Pinning down a usable definition of nanotechnology has been harder than anticipated.

For a quick peek into some of the issues, you can check out the series of YouTube videos my colleague and I did at the Human Enhancement Conference in Kalamazoo earlier this year, which I'm hoping to post on Vimeo shortly. I'm also following Gizmodo's feature This Cyborg Life and am intrigued by the question, what is the enhancement that you would like to have the most? (and keep it decent, folks, comments are moderated here!) For the readers of Sentient Developments, I'll tell you mine, if you tell me yours....

You can check out Linda's original blog at the Women's Bioethics Blogspot.

Link dump for 2009.11.15

2009-11-15T19:36:00.000-05:00

From the four corners of the web:

Ranking scientists | Physics
An analysis of the citation network leads to an alternative way to quantitatively assess the impact of a scientist's work.
Your Next Body Is Growing In a Lab Right Now | Gizmodo
At TEDMED, I witnessed video clips showing science I never knew was so advanced. Dr. Anthony Atala has been growing human tissue and organs, in a lab, for nearly two decades. He's even printed kidneys from a cell-stuffed inkjet printer.
Google Flu Shot Finder Goes Live | Medgadget
Google has released a new tool to help Americans find local pharmacies and clinics offering seasonal and H1N1 flu shots. So far the database is far from complete and Google hopes providers will share information about availability once they get word of the service.
EEG leads to murder conviction | Mind Hacks
Wired UK has a fantastic investigative article concerning a recent case in India, where, for the first time, an 'EEG lie detector' was used to convict a 23-year-old woman of murder.
Aimee Mullins: Racing on Carbon Fiber Legs: How Abled Should We Be?

Linda MacDonald Glenn guest blogging in November and December

2009-11-15T15:12:00.006-05:00

I'm pleased to announce that bioethicist Linda MacDonald Glenn will be guest blogging at Sentient Developments over the next four weeks.

Linda, who studied biomedical ethics at McGill University in Montreal, is a healthcare ethics educator, attorney-at-law and a consultant. She is an Assistant Professor at the Alden March Bioethics Institute, Albany Medical Center, a Women’s Bioethics Project Scholar, a Fellow at the Institute for Emerging Technologies and a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. Linda also completed a fellowship at the American Medical Association Institute for Ethics.

Her research encompasses the legal, ethical, and social impact of emerging technologies, evolving notions of personhood and informed consent in public health research.

Linda has advised governmental leaders and agencies and she has published numerous articles in professional journals. Some of her better-known articles include "Biotechnology at the Margins of Personhood: An Evolving Legal Paradigm" in the Journal of Ethics and Technology, "Ethical Issues in Transgenics and Genetic Engineering" at Actionbioscience, "Keeping An Open Mind: What Legal Safeguards are needed?” in the American Journal of Bioethics, and "When Pigs Fly? Legal and Ethical Issues in Transgenics and the Creation of Chimeras".

She also is the Editor-in-Chief of the outstanding and progressive Women's Bioethics Blog.

With Linda onboard for the next four weeks we can be guaranteed some interesting and provocative content; I'm very much looking forward to Linda's posts.

Let’s get metaphysical: How our ongoing existence could appear increasingly absurd

2009-11-11T22:00:00.010-05:00

So the Large Hadron Collider has been shut down yet again – this time on account of a bird dropping a piece of a bagel onto some sensitive outdoor machinery. The incident is not expected to keep the LHC out of commission for too much longer, but it represents yet another strange event that has kept the world’s most infamous particle accelerator out of service. In fact, the LHC has yet to function at full operational capacity since its completion over a year ago.

What makes this all the more interesting is that the Hadron Collider has been dubbed by some observers as a doomsday device on account of its unprecedented size and power. A minority of scientists and philosophers believe that the collider could produce a tiny black hole or a strangelet that would convert Earth to a shrunken mass of strange matter.

It's worth re-stating, however, that this is a fringe opinion. Several years ago, Max Tegmark and Nick Bostrom wrote a piece for Nature in which they concluded that a civilization destroys itself by a particle accelerator experiment once every billion years.

Okay, admittedly, one in a billion seems excruciatingly improbable. But not impossible. And it's this 'shadow of doubt' that has got so many people in a tizzy -- especially when considering that this so-called doomsday machine keeps breaking down. Seems awfully convenient, doesn't it? Are we to believe that this is mere co-incidence? Or is there something more to what's going on?

Now, I'm not talking about conspiracies or sabotage, here. Rather, a number of philosophers are making the case that something more metaphysical is going on.

Take, for example, the quantum immortality theory, which argues that you as an observer cannot observe your non-existence, so you will keep on observing your ongoing existence -- no matter how absurd. Aside from a large grain of salt, you also have to buy into the Everett Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics for this to work. As the universe splinters into probability trees, there are new trajectories that are forced into existence by your ongoing presence; in an infinite universe all observations must be made, no matter how improbable.

Now, at any given time we have to assume that we are living in the most probable of all possible habitable worlds. But that doesn't mean it's true -- it's just an assumption given the absence of sampling data. As quantum probability trees diverge, those that tread into more improbable spaces will begin to splinter with less and less frequency and diversity; there will be a limited number of escape routes given absurd and highly complex (but survivable) existence spaces.

All this can lead to some rather bizarre conclusions -- including the thought experiment in which you attempt to obliterate yourself with an atom bomb, only to have some kind of force majeure get in the way that prevents you from acting on your suicide.

It's important to remember that this only works for your ongoing existence. The rest of the world can burn around you; what matters is that you continue to observe the universe.

Okay, back to Hadron. Let's assume for a moment that quantum immortality is in effect and that the LHC is in fact the apocalypt-o-matic. It can therefore be argued that, because we are all collectively put into peril by this thing, we will never get to observe it working properly. There will always be something that prevents the device from doing what it's supposed to be doing -- everything from mechanical failures through to birds dropping bagels on it.

What's even more disturbing, however, is that these interventions could get increasingly absurd and improbable. It may eventually get to the point where we have to sit back and question the rationality of our existence. The world may get progressively screwed up and surreal in order for our personal existence to continue into the future.

One could already make the case that our collective existence is already absurd on account of our possession of apocalyptic weapons, namely the nuclear bomb. We've already come alarmingly close to apocalypse, including the Cuban Missile Crisis and the infamous Stanislav Petrov incident. Would it be unfair of me to suggest that we should probably have destroyed ourselves by now? I would argue that the most probable of Everett Many World Earths have destroyed themselves through nuclear armageddon, but we happen to observe a version of Earth that has not.

This said, our ongoing existence does not seem ridiculously absurd. There are rational and believable reasons that account for our ongoing existence, namely self-preservation and a rigid safety-check system that has prevented a nuclear accident from happening.

But will the same thing be said a few years from now if the Hadron Collider keeps shutting down? What will happen to our sense of reality if stranger and stranger things start to intervene?

And what about the more distant future when we have even more apocalyptic devices, including molecular assembling nanotechnology and advanced biotechnologies (not to mention artificial superintelligence)? It's been said that we are unlikely to survive the 21st Century on account of these pending technologies. But given that there are some probability trees that require our ongoing existence, what kind of future modes will that entail? Will it make sense, or will the succession of improbably survivable events result in a completely surreal existence? Or will our ongoing presence seem rational in the face of a radically altered existence mode -- like totalitarian repression or the onset of an all-controlling artificial superintelligence?

Hopefully I don't need to remind my readers that this is pure philosophical speculation. Metaphysics is often fun (or disturbing as in this case), but it is no substitute for science. I think we should think about these possibilities, but not to the point where it impacts on our daily life and sense of reality.

But I'm sure we'll all want to keep a close eye on that rather interesting particle accelerator in Switzerland.

IEET's Biopolitics of Popular Culture Seminar

2009-11-05T17:11:00.005-05:00

The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies is holding a seminar on the Biopolitics of Popular Culture at Eon Reality in Irvine California on December 4, 2009. This seminar will precede the Humanity+ Summit, December 5-6 at the same venue.

The IEET has put together an impressive groups of speakers, a list that includes io9's Annalee Newitz, Jamais Cascio, film maker Matthew Patrick, Natasha Vita-More and science fiction writer Richard Kadrey.

From the IEET website:

Popular culture is full of tropes and cliches that shape our debates about emerging technologies. Our most transcendent expectations for technology come from pop culture, and the most common objections to emerging technologies come from science fiction and horror, from Frankenstein and Brave New World to Gattaca and the Terminator.

Why is it that almost every person in fiction who wants to live a longer than normal life is evil or pays some terrible price? What does it say about attitudes towards posthuman possibilities when mutants in Heroes or the X-Men, or cyborgs in Battlestar Galactica or Iron Man, or vampires in True Blood or Twilight are depicted as capable of responsible citizenship?

Is Hollywood reflecting a transhuman turn in popular culture, helping us imagine a day when magical and muggle can live together in a peaceful Star Trek federation? Will the merging of pop culture, social networking and virtual reality into a heightened augmented reality encourage us all to make our lives a form of participative fiction?
During this day long seminar we will engage with culture critics, artists, writers, and filmmakers to explore the biopolitics that are implicit in depictions of emerging technology in literature, film and television.

Other speakers include:

PJ Manney
Alex Lightman
Kristi Scott
J. Hughes
Mike Treder
Michael LaTorra
Jess Nevins
RJ Eskow
Brian Cross
Edward Miller
Michael Massuci
Jeannie Novak

Learn more and register today.

Link dump for 2009.11.05

2009-11-05T11:02:00.000-05:00

From the four corners of the web:

J.D. Trout - The Science of the Good Society | Point of Inquiry
J.D. Trout is a professor of philosophy at Loyola University Chicago, and an adjunct professor at the Parmly Sensory Sciences Institute. He writes on the nature of scientific and intellectual progress, as well as on the contribution that social science can make to human well-being. He is the author of Measuring the Intentional World, and co-author of Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment. His most recent book is The Empathy Gap: Building Bridges to the Good Life and the Good Society.
Promises, Promises | The Scientist
Ill-judged predictions and projections can be embarrassing at best and, at worst, damaging to the authority of science and science policy.
Data Suggests Amputee Sprinters Not at a Biomechanical Advantage | MedGadget
Interest has risen significantly in studying the biomechanics of amputee athletes since Oscar Pistorius's historic bid to be a part of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. Oscar Pistorius is a double below the knee amputee who runs with the aid of Cheetah Flex-Foot prosthetic feet.

Link dump for 2009.11.04

2009-11-04T18:47:00.000-05:00

From the four corners of the web:

Toward a meaningful definition of posthuman sentience | Machines Like Us
As we get closer and closer to developing artificial general intelligence, I feel it is necessary to highlight an important limitation of our anthropocentric perspective. While we sometimes have the capacity to treat other species of life in humane ways, we often stumble when it comes to categorizing non-human intelligence. We cannot help but ascribe anthropomorphic qualities to that which we view to be intelligent, and we are virtually unable to imagine intelligence that lacks such qualities. In the relatively near future, however, we're going to live in a world with intelligent robots, uploaded minds, and other transhumans; it will be necessary to alter our perceptions of what those entities represent.
Resilience Fail | Open the Future
The use of URL-shortening services is a classic example of short-term need trumping long-term resilience.
Singularity Summit 2009 Videos Now Available | Accelerating Future
The videos for Singularity Summit 2009 are now available at Vimeo. The few that are missing are either still awaiting confirmation of permission or the speaker asked for video not to be posted of their talk.
How to Stop Being a Workaholic | Zen Habits
Reader Carolyn recently asked, "How can an achievement-motivated workaholic learn to back off, relax, de-stress, and feel good about doing it? I am too driven!"
Keeping the Door interviews Greg Egan about his upcoming book, brain mapping and AI
Greg Egan is one of Australia's top science fiction authors, with seven novels under his belt and a slew of collections and short stories under his belt. His 1998 novella Oceanic won the 1999 Hugo Award for Best Novella.
AI Spacesuits Turn Astronauts Into Cyborg Biologists | Wired Science
Equipped with wearable AI systems and digital eyes that see what human eyes can't, space explorers of the future could be not just astronauts, but "cyborg astrobiologists."
Robot Armada Could Explore Alien Worlds | Astrobiology Magazine
Some scientists believe that we are on the brink of big changes in planetary exploration. Future robotic explorers might be nothing like what we see today, and the new technologies could have benefits for astrobiologists.
$39B needed to cut child pneumonia deaths: UN | CBC News
It would take $39 billion US to save the lives of 5.3 million children who will otherwise die of pneumonia by 2015, the United Nations said Monday.

Link dump for 2009.02.02

2009-11-02T18:32:00.001-05:00

From the four corners of the web:

The Next Hacking Frontier: Your Brain? | Wired Science
Hackers who commandeer your computer are bad enough. Now scientists worry that someday, they'll try to take over your brain.
What's your place in the brave new future? - Times Online
Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, it was easy enough to track down Paul Saffo, Silicon Valley's favourite futurologist. He suggested a restaurant in leafy Burlingame, a plush little town south of San Francisco.
Coming up next: The super-rich cyborg overclass - Salon.com
Is the next stage in human evolution a great leap forward for the wealthy? Maybe so, if we don't fix healthcare
Possible Link Between Autism And Oxytocin Gene Via Non-DNA Sequence Mutation
Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have uncovered a new genetic signature that correlates strongly with autism and which doesn't involve changes to the DNA sequence itself. Rather, the changes are in the way the genes are turned on and off. The finding may suggest new approaches to diagnosis and treatment of autism.
A Catalogue of Extinct Experience: Renewing Our Disappearing Connections to Nature | Worldchanging
Our experiences shape our consciousness: who we are, who we become, the choices we make about how we spend our lives. But our range of experiences — from drinking from a clean, clear Sierra stream to beholding a star-filled night sky — is diminishing. With the disappearance of unmediated experiences in nature, the opportunity to know what it means to be human in the world is compromised and our awareness of the fundamental truth of the interdependent and interconnnected nature of our existence becomes more and more attenuated. This obscured perception has personal, social and global consequences.
Gwynne Dyer's Climate Wars: Now a Radio Series
The security dimensions of climate change provide the backdrop for Dyer's Climate Wars, an unflinching look at potential geopolitical consequences of rising seas and falling water and food supplies. The core text is interspersed with scenarios from the future about tensions evolving into conflicts. Reads near-apocalyptically in places, but gets realpolitik-oriented readers to take the climate issue seriously.
Do fish feel pain? | Slate Magazine
Here we go again. There is a new study out that contends fish feel pain.
7 Secrets to Raising a Happy Child | Zen Habits
Nature and nurture are in a never ending battle to claim the disposition of our children. While it's true that the apple rarely tumbles too far from the tree, it is also true that there are a multitude of things we as parents can do to safeguard the childhoods of our children, limit their exposure to the more damaging elements the world will see fit to introduce in time, and do our best to raise a healthy and happy child.
The search for ET just got easier
Astronomers using the Science and Technology Facilities Council's (STFC) William Herschel Telescope (WHT) on La Palma have confirmed an effective way to search the atmospheres of planets for signs of life, vastly improving our chances of finding alien life outside our solar system.
The Technium: Infinite In Some Directions
Where are we headed? Where does technology want to go? We frequently evaluate a questionable practice by extrapolating it into the future. If a phenomenon continues as it has been, then where does it lead? Where does the daily use of antibiotics on farms get you in 100 years? Where does hourly use of cell phones for everyone get a society in 500 years? If the technium continues another thousand years as is, is it a world we want or not? Indeed can it even continue another 1000 years as is?
Want to Avoid Traffic Jams? Study Ants.
Solving the nation's transportation woes will take some big ideas, but it doesn't hurt to think "small" in this case. GOOD magazine picked the brain of Audrey Dussutour, whose countless hours of ant-studying (and even sabotaging) taught her that the tiny travelers are über-skilled when it comes to avoiding traffic jams.
Andart: Is the biosphere unsustainable?
Peter Ward's The Medea Hypotehsis is interesting, disturbing and a bit annoying. Most of all, it is an antidote to naive Gaianism. Ward argues that the Earth's biosphere is not a self-regulating, self-improving or self-preserving Gaia but something more sinister: a system prone to crashes, declines and a lifespan shortened by its own activity.
The unromantic truth about why we kiss - to spread germs | Mail Online
It is an international symbol of love and romance. But the kiss may have evolved for reasons that are far more practical - and less alluring. British scientists believe it developed to spread germs. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1224249/The-unromantic-truth-kiss--spread-germs.
NASA to Start Irradiating Monkeys | Discovery News
NASA is stepping up its space radiation studies with a round of experiments that for the first time in decades will use monkeys as subjects.

NASA Shuttle-derived Sidemount Heavy Launch Vehicle Concept

2009-11-01T20:09:00.001-05:00

This video depicting NASA's Shuttle-derived Sidemount Heavy Launch Vehicle concept was shown at the 17 June 2009 meeting of the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee in Washington DC by NASA Space Shuttle Program.

Dog gets osseointegrated prosthetic

2009-11-01T19:53:00.003-05:00

Osseointegrated prosthetics, artificial limbs that fuse to the bone, have been touted as the future of prosthetics -- and rightly so. There are a number of possible benefits, both for humans and animals, including prosthetic limbs that attach without chafing or irritation and limbs with more natural ranges of motion.

Pictured is a male German Shepherd mix named Cassidy -- the first canine to receive the pioneering surgery. Cassidy was born with a defect in his left hind leg. Much of this work is being performed by the Carolina State University's School of Veterinary Medicine.

Mass produced artificial skin to replace animal testing

2009-11-01T18:28:00.006-05:00

Doctors have been using synthetic skin for grafts and repairs for years now, but the process to create synthetic skin is expensive and time-consuming.

Now, a team from Germany's Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft science institute have created a way to mass-produce artificial skin (complete with blood vessels) that can be used for grafts, plastic surgery, or even cosmetics testing.

Indeed, in addition to providing new skin to burn victims, these swatches of artificial skin can take the place of animals in medical and cosmetic testing. And since the swatches can be made to contain blood vessels as well as skin cells, scientists can run circulatory as well as skin-related experiments on them.

The system is fully automated, with computers controlling the solution that the skin grows in, monitoring the vats for infection, guiding the blade that cuts the swatches, and even testing the quality of the final product.

The basic skin production system, which may be available as early as next year, can produce 5,000 swatches of human skin a month, for a total of over 600 square inches of mass-produced tissue. Each 0.12-square-inch section of skin would cost around US$49 to produce -- considerably less than the current cost.

More.

Elephant prosthetic

2009-11-01T18:08:00.002-05:00

Several years ago, Motala, a 48-year old former working elephant from Thailand (she moved trees for a living), wandered into the forest to look for food and accidently stepped on a land mine left over from the Burmese-Thai War. The blast destroyed her left front leg and had to be amputated below the knee. In 2006, Motala got a temporary prothesis to help her learn to walk on what would be a more permanent artificial leg.

This past summer she was finally fitted for that leg in Thailand. It's a state-of-the-art upgrade to the artificial leg she's had for the last three years.

Accordingly to early reports Motala is taking to it quite well.

Grieving chimps

2009-11-01T10:10:00.005-05:00

This image was shot for National Geographic by Monica Szczupider and shows chimpanzees at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center in Cameroon. The chimps are observing the body of an elder troop member named Dorothy just prior to burial. She died at 40 years of age, which is quite old for chimpanzees. The photo appears in the November issue of National Geographic Magazine in the "Visions of Earth" section.

[via BoingBoing]

The Bright Side of Nuclear Armament

2009-10-29T17:37:00.004-04:00

Casey Rae-Hunter is a guest blogger for Sentient Developments.

Today's e-edition of the always thought-provoking Foreign Policy magazine had the usual roundup of articles on America's dicey diplomacy with Iran and the Afghanistan Question, which at this point can be summarized by the famous Clash song. The news roundup also featured a couple of articles on nuclear proliferation, including a contrarian piece by John Mueller called "The Rise of Nuclear Alarmism: How We Learned to Start Worrying and Fear the Bomb — and Why We Don’t Have To." How could I resist a provocative title like that?

The article posits that history would've dumped us in more or less the same place with or without the Bomb. That statement alone is sure to ruffle some feathers. But Mueller's assertion that nuclear weapons didn't even serve as a deterrent is in direct defiance of conventional military-historic wisdom.

Nuclear weapons are, of course, routinely given credit for preventing or deterring a major war, especially during the Cold War. However, it is increasingly clear that the Soviet Union never had the slightest interest in engaging in any kind of conflict that would remotely resemble World War II, whether nuclear or not. Its agenda mainly stressed revolution, class rebellion, and civil war, conflict areas in which nuclear weapons are irrelevant.

Nor have possessors of the weapons ever really been able to find much military use for them in actual armed conflicts. They were of no help to the United States in Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq; to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan; to France in Algeria; to Britain in the Falklands; to Israel in Lebanon and Gaza; or to China in dealing with its once-impudent neighbor Vietnam.

In fact, a major reason so few technologically capable countries have actually sought to build the weapons, contrary to decades of hand-wringing prognostication, is that most have found them, on examination, to be a substantial and even ridiculous misdirection of funds, effort, and scientific talent.

It's certainly difficult to disagree with his last point, particularly when backed up by the sobering fact that, "during the Cold War alone, it has been calculated, the United States spent enough money on these useless weapons and their increasingly fancy delivery systems to have purchased somewhere between 55 and 100 percent of everything in the country except the land." Basically, that money could've bought cradle-to-grave health care for my uninsured countrymen several times over. Makes me proud to be an American.

Mueller also suggests that status quo thinking on nuclear armament has led to appalling strategic blunders, including the Iraq War:

For more than a decade, U.S. policy obsessed over the possibility that Saddam Hussein's pathetic and technologically dysfunctional regime in Iraq could in time obtain nuclear weapons (it took the more advanced Pakistan 28 years), which it might then suicidally lob, or threaten to lob, at somebody. To prevent this imagined and highly unlikely calamity, a war has been waged that has probably resulted in more deaths than were suffered at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

And North Korea? Forget it. The payloads in their current weapons would, if detonated in the middle of New York's Central Park, "be unable to destroy buildings on its periphery," according to Mueller.

Though I lack the time and resources to independently verify his contentions, Mueller's central question is worth considering: What are we ultimately achieving with our nuclear fever-dream? Are we securing peace, or merely investing a long-dreaded boogeymen with an endless supply of neurosis? How big will we allow this beast to get? When will it fulfill those dark fantasies with which we keep it so well fed?

I'm not so sure that we should just kick back while Iran builds and tests a nuke. Nor should we stop using North Korea's weapons program as leverage in an international call for openness and reform. Nuclear blackmail is a two-way street. Where tyrants and theocrats seek to exploit their lust for the Bomb to create insecurity, America and its allies should be free to explore options that would limit the effect of such brinksmanship. Yet we would be well-advised to heed Mueller's message: by playing into nuclear paranoia, we add to the general shakiness of some already iffy geopolitical situations.

It may very well be the case that obtaining a nuclear weapon is, as Mueller claims, "substantially valueless," and a "very considerable waste of money and effort." Now who's gonna tell Ahmadinejad?

Casey Rae-Hunter is a writer, editor, musician, producer and self-proclaimed "lover of fine food and drink." He is the Communications Director of the Future of Music Coalition — a Washington, DC think tank that identifies, examines, interprets and translates issues at the intersection of music, law, technology and policy. He is also the founder and CEO of The Contrarian Media Group, which publishes The Contrarian and Autistic in the District — the latter a blog about Asperger's Syndrome.

Link dump: 2009.10.26

2009-10-26T23:28:00.000-04:00

From the four corners of the web:

Practical Ethics: Will Down syndrome disappear?
There are concerns about the impact of the improving accuracy and availability of low risk cheap prenatal tests such as for Down syndrome (DS). Introduction of a noninvasive maternal serum test is expected that might provide a definitive diagnosis of DS in the first trimester at no risk to the fetus. The authors report that the tests should be virtually universally available and allow privacy of decision making. The authors ask whether the new tests will decrease the birth incidence of DS even further. Indeed, might there be no more DS children born? If so, is that a problem?
Seven questions that keep physicists up at night [NS]
It's not your average confession show: a panel of leading physicists spilling the beans about what keeps them tossing and turning in the wee hours. That was the scene a few days ago in front of a packed auditorium at the Perimeter Institute, in Waterloo, Canada, when a panel of physicists was asked to respond to a single question: "What keeps you awake at night? The discussion was part of "Quantum to Cosmos", a 10-day physics extravaganza, which ends on Sunday.
Womb transplant 'years away'
The reported two-year estimate for the first human womb transplant is overly optimistic. There are several major hurdles to overcome before this could be considered ready for trials in humans. It would also involve a series of operations, carrying all of the usual risks, plus ones that are as yet unknown, for a non life-threatening condition.
An Open Letter to Future Bioethicists
I have thought about their question quite a bit. I have come to realize that the answer is not the same for everyone who presents the questions. But, the core of the answer is pretty much the same; pursue masters level training in bioethics, acquire familiarity with key social science methods and tools, learn something about a particular sub-area of the health sciences or life sciences and, seek out every opportunity to fine tune your analytical and rhetorical skills by working with others on projects, research, consulting, or teaching activities. At its heart bioethics is an interdisciplinary activity and knowing how to work with others who do empirical, historical, legal and normative work is a must.

Link dump: 2009.10.24

2009-10-24T15:00:00.001-04:00

From the four corners of the web:

Books on Science - Rethinking What Leads the Way - Science, or New Technology? - NYTimes.com
Can Drugs Make You Love Someone You Don't? | | AlterNet
Research into the chemicals that control love, lust and attachment could eventually result in drugs that would make you fall in love and bond with another person.
Technology Review: Blogs: Potential Energy: How SuperFreakonomics Gets Climate Engineering Wrong
The new book Superfreakonomics neglects the real dangers of geoengineering.
Stewart Brand: Rethinking Green
Women, Men, Logic, and Emotion
How different are men from women? And how much could those differences affect your future?
Futures Thinking: Asking the Question
In "Futures Thinking: The Basics," I offered up an overview of how to engage in a foresight exercise. Today, as the next piece in this occasional series, I'll take a look at the first step in such a process.
How The iPhone Is Blowing Everyone Else Away (In Charts)
Yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit, Morgan Stanley Internet analyst Mary Meeker did her annual data dump slide presentation, this year focusing on the growth prospects of the mobile Web. As usual, there were 3 or 4 slides that really captured the trends she was talking about, particularly the ones around iPhone adoption and how that phone in particular is catapulting mobile Web usage into the mainstream.
Google Audio music service launching soon?
So TechCrunch has it from multiple sources that a US (at least) music service launch from Google is imminent. Possibly named Google Audio, it's unclear whether the service will stream music from the major labels and/or offer it as downloadable tracks. Scuttlebutt says that the service will differ from Google's free, search and download music offering available in China since 2008. Now go ahead, kick back and imagine a Google music service tightly integrated with Android while we dig for more details.

Remembering Mac Tonnies

2009-10-23T19:18:00.012-04:00

Our relationship got off to a rather fiery start.

Back in 2006 I discovered that a prominent UFOlogist had been linking to a number of articles on my blog. Even more startling was the realization that the blog in question, Posthuman Blues, was an effort to bridge transhumanist discourse with that of the UFOlogists.

Eager to break the memetic linkage between the two seemingly disparate schools of thought, I penned the article, "Unidentified Flying Idiots." It was typical of my rants, a vitriolic diatribe directed against a group of know-nothing X-Files zealots who were giving legitimate scientific studies a bad name.

And my angst was directed at the head perpetrator himself: Mac Tonnies. In the article I wrote:

Tonnies’s legitimate content is offset by his misguided focus on UFOlogy. As a result, the transhumanist movement may have a harder time gaining public acceptance and support with this kind of negative association.

I’m sorry, folks, but you can’t have your cake and eat it to. You can’t choose and pick the science that appeals to you and then attempt to tie it in with bogus and unfounded speculations. It's like Fox Mulder in the X-Files who has a poster on his wall which reads, "I want to believe." Well, I also want to belive in UFOs. I also want to belive in Jesus and the tooth fairly, but wanting to believe in those things ain't gonna make it so.

Needless to say it did not impress the UFOlogists who reacted by hammering me in the comments and through emails -- including Tonnies who remarked, "A very poor showing, George. I'm as leery of the lunatic fringe as anyone -- probably more so than many people unfamiliar with the UFO inquiry. But the whackos -- and they are legion -- don't define the very real questions posed by UFOs and related phenomena."

You'd think that would be the end of it, but it actually marked the beginning of a three year relationship, one that ended tragically this week with Mac's untimely death.

Rather than dismiss each other outright, we maintained a civil correspondence over the years. Neither of us wavered from our positions, but we bonded over our shared passion for the answer to one simple question: What is the true nature of extraterrestrial life? Moreover, we felt that the answer to this profound question resided somewhere within futurist studies. By trying to look deep into humanity's future we both thought that we could unveil some clues about the makeup of advanced extraterrestrial life.

But where I considered such things as Von Neuman probes and Dyson Spheres, Tonnies looked to flying saucers and little green men. To be fair, though, Mac's viewpoint was more sophisticated than that. "I'm uncomfortable with the concept of "belief" when dealing with unusual topics such as UFOs," he wrote, "Technically, no, I don't "believe" in UFOs (in the sense that UFOs require any sort of faith). But it isn't necessary to "believe" in UFOs in order to discuss them meaningfully; empirical evidence shows that UFOs (whatever they are) exist. There are plenty of professional "skeptics" who will refute this. But there remains a core phenomenon that begs disciplined study."

There's no question that his views were 'out there.' Mac argued that aliens once resided on Mars and that they currently dwell among us.

But despite these fringe views, Mac's futurism was closely aligned with that of the transhumanists (another group often accused of being 'fringe'). Tonnies contended that,

Consciousness is a potential technology; we are exquisite machines, nothing less than sentient patterns. As such, there's no convincing technical reason we can't eventually upload ourselves into matrices of our design and choosing. It's likely the phenomenon we casually call "intelligence" will cease to be strictly biological as we begin to merge with our machines more meaningfully and intimately. (Philip K. Dick once wrote that "living and nonliving things are exchanging properties." I suspect that in a few hundred years, barring disaster, separating the animate from the inanimate will probably be an exercise in futility.) Ultimately, we have two options: self-mutate by venturing off-planet in minds and bodies of our own design, or succumb to extinction.

Tonnies thought he was on the right side of science and history. "I spend an inordinately large portion of my time pursuing unpopular ideas and esoteric theories with what I sincerely hope is balanced skepticism," he wrote. The perpetual outcast, Tonnies envisioned himself as being the true skeptic.

Mac and I never really did see eye-to-eye when it came to our theories on the true nature of extraterrestrial intelligence, but our differing viewpoints didn't get in the way of our mutual respect. We became good friends via social media, with Twitter acting a great go-between. We frequently sent each other links and article ideas that didn't quite fit into our own communities and we regularly riffed off each other's sites. Deep down inside I think we both hoped that, through open and mature discourse, our ideas would eventually sway the other. But it was not to be.

I will sorely miss Mac's posts and unwavering commitment the problem that is the Great Silence.

And I'm devastated to know that he will never take part in the future he so often dreamed of.

Pigliucci on science and the scope of skeptical inquiry

2009-10-22T20:45:00.019-04:00

Russell Blackford is a guest blogger for Sentient Developments.

Over on his Rationally Speaking blog, Massimo Pigliucci has an interesting post on the nature and scope of skeptical inquiry. He is particularly keen to nail down the relationships between scientifically-based skeptical thought, political philosophy, and philosophy of religion (he actually says "atheism", but I think this is a mistake). Pigliucci is a biologist and a philosopher, and these are his three main areas of intellectual interest.

To illustrate his points, Pigliucci introduces a diagram that shows skepticism overlapping with both "atheism" and political philosophy, though they do not overlap with each other. On this diagram, all three fall into a larger realm of critical thinking and rational analysis. Although it's a neat diagram, I think that it (along with the analysis that it illustrates) is somewhat misleading, and in at least one respect even wrong.

On skeptical inquiry

First, however, let's consider something that Pigluicci clearly gets right. He says:

Skeptical inquiry, in the classic sense, pertains to the critical examination of evidential claims of the para- or super-normal. This means not just ghosts, telepathy, clairvoyance, UFOs and the like, but also — for instance — the creationist idea that the world is 6,000 years old. All these claims are, at least in principle, amenable to scientific inquiry because they refer to things that we can observe, measure and perhaps even repeat experimentally. Notice, of course, that (some) religious claims do therefore fall squarely within the domain of scientific skepticism. Also in this area we find pseudohistorical claims, such as Holocaust denial, and pseudoscientific ones like fear of vaccines and denial of global warming. Which means of course that some politically charged issues — like the latter two — can also pertain properly to skeptical inquiry.

I'm with him completely on this. Claims about ghosts, the age of the Earth, and pseudohistorical or pseudoscientific theories, are all within the ambit of skeptical inquiry as so defined. Skeptical inquiry in the sense under discussion is not about taking positions that are in the minority. It is about rational inquiry into various claims, popular or otherwise, using the means available not only to science but also to such fields as history. Accordingly, when someone claims to be a "climate change skeptic" she is using words in a different sense.

It is always possible, of course, that a view with widespread, or even consensus, support from current science is nonetheless incorrect. Still, skepticism in the sense that Pigliucci is discussing is not about challenging the majority position. It is about rational investigation, especially of extraordinary claims - extraordinary in the sense that they fit badly, or not at all, with the best picture of the world built up through science, scholarship, and ordinary observation.

In particular, we are not talking here about some kind of radical epistemological skepticism, such as Descartes wrestled with and sought (unsuccessfully) to transcend or escape. Nor are we talking about skepticism as regards the status quo of scientific and scholarly knowledge. That sort of skepticism is possible, of course, and it may sometimes be justified. However, it is not legitimate to act as a skeptic merely in this sense, while attempting to get approbation for being engaged in skeptical inquiry in the different, and quite familiar, sense that Pigliucci describes.

Accordingly, I think that Pigliucci is correct when he later denounces the practice of "using the venerable mantle of skepticism to engage in silly notions like denying global warming or the efficacy of vaccines." As he says, "That’s an insult to critical analysis, which is the one thing we all truly cherish."

Pigliucci is also quite correct to show an overlap between atheism and skeptical inquiry, although atheism is a substantive position, not a field of inquiry, so he should really have written "philosophy of religion". He is correct that what philosophers of religion do when they investigate religious claims, such as those about the existence of various gods, overlaps with scientific skepticism or skeptical inquiry. I think, however, that he unnecessarily deprecates the extent of this overlap. This I'll return to.

On political philosophy

As for political philosophy, Pigliucci sees this too as overlapping with skeptical inquiry. After all, he says, some skeptical inquiry (e.g. into the claims of holocaust denialists) has implications for political philosophy.

This seems to be correct. However, he doesn't seem to have noticed that philosophy of religion may also have implications for political philosophy, and vice versa. For example, some religious positions, if correct, have definite implications for the role of the state. After all, various comprehensive worldviews based on religion claim that the state should enforce religious systems of morality or law; these worldviews are starkly opposed to liberalism and pluralism.

Less obviously, it is at least conceivable that a political position on an issue such as social justice could have implications for whether we should accept certain religious positions. We might develop a politically-based theory of justice, then ask, "Does the world seem to have been created by a just God?" Surely the answer could feed back into at least some views about the existence or nature of God. In any event, the diagram seems to be wrong, not just misleadingly presented, when it shows no overlap between political philosophy and "atheism".

Science and philosophy

While this may be the only error, strictly speaking, there are other problems with the analysis. They emerge when Pigliucci tries to defend the view that atheism is a philosophical position, rather than a scientific one. There is a sense in which this is clearly, but rather trivially, true. The issue of God's existence is, after all, examined by philosophers of religion, and not usually by biologists or physicists, and the pedagogical and other decisions that have led to this have not been merely arbitrary. But there's also a sense in which Pigliucci's account is misleading. Here's how he attempts to persuade us:

Now, I have argued of course that any intelligent philosopher ought to allow her ideas to be informed by science, but philosophical inquiry is broader than science because it includes non-evidence based approaches, such as logic or more broadly reason-based arguments. This is both the strength and the weakness of philosophy when compared to science: it is both broader and yet of course less prone to incremental discovery and precise answers. When someone, therefore, wants to make a scientific argument in favor of atheism — like Dawkins and Jerry Coyne seem to do — he is stepping outside of the epistemological boundaries of science, thereby doing a disservice both to science and to intellectual inquiry. Consider again the example of a creationist who maintains in the face of evidence that the universe really is 6,000 years old, and that it only looks older because god arranged things in a way to test our faith. There is absolutely no empirical evidence that could contradict that sort of statement, but a philosopher can easily point out why it is unreasonable, and that furthermore it creates very serious theological quandaries.

The difficulty here should be obvious. Scientist do use logic and "more broadly reason-based arguments"; they do so all the time. Much of science proceeds by processes that include logical deduction, and there are no a priori boundaries to the kinds of "broadly reason-based arguments" that scientists can use.

Let me qualify that: there may be some claims that should be conceded as lying outside of science. These may be more a matter of the historical construction of science as a set of institutions than anything else, but I'll not press that issue. Instead, let's agree, for the sake of argument, that scientific reasoning alone cannot give us correct values or correct moral norms. Let's also assume that such things as correct values and moral norms actually exist - though there's much to be said here - but that science alone cannot provide them.

It's also strongly arguable that science is unable to deliver correct statements about fundamental epistemological principles. Take, for example, a principle such as, "All truths except this one are truths that are known through science." A claim like that, whatever its other features, does not seem to be known through science. Nor does its negation seem to be known through science. I'll assume, then, that some meaningful and rational discussion of epistemological issues lies beyond the boundaries of science.

Still, this is not the sort of example that Pigliucci offers. Instead, he begins with the claim that the universe is really 6,000 years old. Science has, of course, produced plenty of evidence that this is just false, that the universe is more like 13 to 14 billion years old. Our own planet is roughly 4 to 5 billion years old. All of this surely counts against the claim that the universe is really only 6,000 years old. Pigliucci is quite correct to see this as an example of science falsifying a religious claim, and I suspect he'd think there are many such examples. Furthermore, he doesn't try to assert, in the fashion of Stephen Jay Gould, that there are some kinds of claims that it is illegitimate for religion to make. Thus, quite correctly in my view, he does not accept the principle of Non-Overlapping Magisteria.

However, what if somebody replies that God arranged for the Earth to look far older than it really is, in order to test our faith? Here, Pigliucci thinks that science (and hence skeptical inquiry) reaches a limit. He claims, in effect, that philosophers have a reply, whereas scientists must stand mute.

I disagree with this. The scientist is quite entitled to reject the claim, not because it makes falsified predictions or conflicts directly with observations (it doesn't) but because it is ad hoc. It is perfectly legitimate for scientists working in the relevant fields to make the judgment that a particular hypothesis is not worth pursuing, and should be treated as false, because it has been introduced merely to avoid falsification of a position that is contrary to the evidence.

Scientists might take some interest in claims about a pre-aged Earth if they were framed in such a way as to make novel and testable predictions, but as long as all such claims are presented as mere ad hoc manoeuvres to avoid falsification of the claim that the universe is really 6,000 years old, a scientist is quite entitled to reject it. A philosopher should reject it for exactly the same reason. Philosophers don't have any advantage over scientists at this point.

Thus, Pigliucci is unnecessarily limiting the kinds of arguments that are available to scientists. He writes as if they are incapable of using arguments grounded in commonsense reasoning, such as arguments that propose we reject ad hoc thesis-saving hypotheses.

That's not to say that the resources of science never run out. But when they do it is often for merely practical reasons. For example, it may be because of because a problem that confronts us requires that we consider points that scientists are, in practice, not well-trained to consider. If that's the problem, it's a matter of pragmatic division of labour, not of an epistemological resource that's out of bounds to scientists in principle.

Accordingly, we might have good reason to say that scientists, as a class, are not that well-trained to solve puzzles that arise within philosophy of religion. But it doesn't follow that any specific scientist - Richard Dawkins, say - is poorly equipped to do so by his training and study. Nor does it follow that whatever arguments Dawkins uses are "not scientific". They may be shared with philosophers, but it by no means follows that they are out of bounds for use by scientists. They may not be distinctively scientific, but that's another matter.

Moreover, it is possible that certain arguments that are legitimately open to scientists to develop might turn out to be decisive, one way or another, with respect to issues in philosophy of religion. Pigliucci says: "When someone, therefore, wants to make a scientific argument in favor of atheism — like Dawkins and Jerry Coyne seem to do — he is stepping outside of the epistemological boundaries of science, thereby doing a disservice both to science and to intellectual inquiry." But we can't know that in advance. It's certainly not a truism which we're compelled to accept.

Two examples

It might help to consider some contrasting examples. First, suppose that a cryptozoologist claims that a gigantic, previously undiscovered species of ape lives in the forests of New England (I'm thinking of the location in North America, not the identically-named location in Australia, or any other place with the same name). I assume that it would be pretty straightforward to work out what would be good evidence for or against the existence of this new species - what kinds of observations we would need to make to confirm its existence directly, what kinds of observations would pretty much preclude its existence, and what observations would be inconclusive. It wouldn't be too hard, at least in principle, to get together a group of zoologists, ecologists, and the like, to investigate the matter. Thus, no one doubts that the existence or otherwise of this spectacular New World primate is a scientific question.

What, however, if the claim is made that a Jewish apocalyptic prophet performed miracles during the first century of the Common Era? This looks like a job for historians - thus we immediately assign it to folks in the Faculty of Arts, rather than the Faculty of Science. The historians are likely to ask for historical evidence of the existence of this prophet and of his alleged miracles. Surely that's reasonable? This may involve (among other things) investigating various documents that supposedly record the prophet's acts, including the miraculous ones. How should the historians proceed?

Well, it will be a bit complicated, though perhaps no more so than the job of the scientists looking for the giant ape.

The historians might wish to establish, using a variety of means available to them, whether the documents were contemporary with the events described. They might examine the documents to try to determine whether they were originally created in their current form, or whether some parts are older, and perhaps more reliable than others. They might attempt to determine whether any of the events recorded in the documents are of such a nature that, if they really happened, they would have been recorded in secular texts of the time. For example, the documents might claim that on such and such a day five hundred long-dead corpses rose from a major cemetery and wandered the streets of Rome, accosting sinners and soldiers. Historians can check whether any of the secular historical texts and other unbiased records describe such an event.

They might also check carefully to see whether the documents are internally consistent and consistent with each other, and the nature of the inconsistencies if any are found. They might take into account whatever is known about the propensity for the lives of prophets to be mythologised, in the sense that the truth is embroidered with (false) accounts of miracle working. They might look to forensic psychologists, among others, for knowledge of when and how people come to believe things (and even to believe they saw things) that turn out to be false.

Many of the skills needed to do all this (including language skills) are taught in arts faculties rather than science faculties. And yet, there is nothing in the kinds of investigations that the historians will be involved in, or the kinds of arguments that they will use in attempting to settle the issue, that is conceptually remote from scientific reasoning. The same sort of logic will be employed; ad hoc hypotheses will be rejected; facts will be weighed.

It's true, of course, that the job will be assigned to people who are well trained in interpreting the nuances of language and the effects of culture, rather than in (for example) mathematics and the conduct of experiments. On the other hand, some scientific apparatus might be used, such as computers programmed to analyse texts to help determine whether they were written by the same person. Hypothetico-deductive reasoning might be relied on at various points. Most importantly, none of the techniques that I am describing are totally unavailable to scientists - it's more a question of emphasis in training. It makes sense to call the investigation a "scientific" one, even though conducted by people employed within arts faculties.

Or we might say that it's an issue for historians, not scientists, while adding that there is no radical difference between the epistemological resources of history and science. It's just that different emphases in training and skill mixes tend to be needed, for everyday purposes, by scientists and historians. If someone had all these skills, they would complement each other and mesh together just fine. When we talk about the methods of scientists and compare those of historians, there are no radically different "ways of knowing" involved. Moreover, there is no reason in a case like this why the historical evidence and arguments should be considered anything less than decisive.

What about philosophers?

Imagine that a philosopher seeks to investigate whether a divine being created the Earth. In that case, she might be faced with evidence of many kinds. For example, one item of alleged evidence, among the many, might be the claim that a Jewish apocalyptic prophet who performed miracles in the first century of the Common Era claimed to be the son of this being. The philosopher might conclude that the alleged testimony of the apocalyptic prophet would carry weight if: (1) he really existed and said what is recorded, and; (2) he really did perform the alleged miracles.

In checking into this evidential issue, the philosopher is likely to ask for help from historians, at least in the first instance, rather than from scientists, thus keeping the investigation within the Faculty of Arts. But, let's remember, the historians will not be using techniques or arguments that are radically foreign to science and scientists - they have a different skill mix but not a radically different way of knowing.

What if the apocalyptic prophet were alleged to have made various claims that are in conflict with current science, e.g. that the Sun is a ball of white hot metal circling the Earth? A philosopher might take this as evidence (perhaps not strong evidence, but still ...) that the prophet was all too human and not, in fact, the child of a divine being. Note, however, that she would depend on scientists to tell her that the claim is, in fact, incorrect, and on historians to tell her whether it is likely that the prophet really said what is attributed to him. At no stage in this inquiry - at least no stage discussed so far - does the philosopher do anything that's radically foreign to the scientific reasoning.

In the upshot, the question about a divine being who created the Earth is likely to involve input from many disciplines, with people who have many different skill sets providing relevant data and sub-conclusions. The beleaguered philosopher must sort out highly complex arguments using all this material, while (probably) not having the skills herself to undertake the textual analysis performed by the historian, or the physical experiments that were performed by scientists in the past when they discovered the true nature of the Sun. But she has not yet used arguments or evidence that are beyond those available, in principle, to scientists. It's simply a matter of division of labour within academic institutions and the availability of people with different skill sets.

Accordingly, a question about the existence of a divine creator is different, in a practical way, from a question about an unknown species of gigantic ape in New England. Whereas the latter can be assigned to scientists from a small group of relevantly related disciplines, the latter may call on data and conclusions from many disciplines, across faculty boundaries, and involving many different skill sets. The overall argument may be extremely complicated in the sense that there are many sub-arguments (from many disciplines) feeding into it. Accordingly, this kind of argument gets assigned to philosophy, the repository for arguments that involve many considerations (and sub-conclusions) from many fields.

But, while that is a reason to say that a question such as this is philosophical, it still does not follow that any of the reasoning done is unavailable to scientists who are broadly enough trained. It is simply that some of the skills depended on at different points in the overall argument come from people with training that scientists don't usually have - e.g. advanced knowledge of ancient languages.

Not only that, but some of the sub-conclusions derivable from science might turn out to be decisive. If we're told enough about the God concerned, we might be able to deduce that it doesn't exist (or that it does) purely on the basis of data and arguments that are available to scientists, without even calling in the historians to help establish what took place in the Middle East 2000 years ago. Thus, Pigliucci is wrong when he suggest that atheism cannot, as a matter of principle, be established by scientific arguments. Whether or not it can be, in respect of one god or another, remains to be seen.

For example, consider the claim that an all-benevolent, all-powerful, all-knowing God exists, and has existed from eternity. It is well within the skills of scientists to give this consideration, deduce what kinds of events would contradict the claim, and look for evidence of such events - e.g. evidence of nature red in tooth and claw, the existence of horrible pain experienced by sentient creatures, and that much of this has nothing to do with any exercise of free will by human beings.

Although there is no science that is specifically charged with investigating the existence of such a deity, there easily could be an interdisciplinary effort by various scientists, particularly including biologists, that justifiably concludes that a god of this kind does not exist. If a theist who supports the existence of a god of this kind resorts to ad hoc manoeuvres, the scientists will be well equipped to recognise them as such.

None of this is to deny that some of what goes on in philosophy is different from what goes on in any scientific discipline. But it is not known in advance that any of these things will be required to settle, decisively, the truth of a particular religious claim.

Perhaps, however, there could be religious claims that it is possible to settle only if we first settle issues of morality or fundamental epistemology that lie outside of science. Accordingly, there is a possibility that some claims about the existence of a god will require sub-conclusions that seem to lie beyond the scope of science. Thus, we can't guarantee that all questions about the existence of a God or gods are decisively resolvable by science, or by methods (such as those of historical-textual scholars) that are allied with it.

Conclusion

We should come to a weaker conclusion than Pigliucci's. Pace Pigliucci, it is not wrong in principle to put scientific arguments for atheism (or for theism). It cannot be ruled out in advance that the kinds of arguments used by scientists will be decisive.

Even if the scientific arguments are not decisive by themselves, they may be when taken in conjunction with other considerations. In that case, they may still be of crucial importance in reaching an atheistic (or, indeed, theistic) conclusion and in that case it appears unfair to criticise somebody like Richard Dawkins for overstepping the bounds.

After all, philosophers are forced to draw upon resources from other disciplines. Why can't a biologist do likewise, obtaining important data and sub-conclusions from his own field, while also relying on input from (say) historians and philosophers for the full argument? If we accept that picture, scientists in the relevant field(s) do have an advantage over people with no scientific training. The advantage will consist in a the possession of both a useful knowledge base and the skills in developing relevant kinds of arguments. While the ultimate conclusion may turn out to require assistance from, say, historians or philosophers, that does not render scientific qualifications irrelevant.

In any event, Pigliucci is surely correct about one thing: the questions relating to theism, atheism, and philosophy of religion in general, should be investigated rationally. Philosophers, historians, and various kinds of scientists may all have a role to play in that investigation (though it is still possible that one or other set of arguments by itself will be decisive). There is no "way of knowing", lying somewhere beyond the realm of rational inquiry, that can solve the problem for us. We are left with our reason and intelligence, and the ongoing advance of knowledge.

But possessing those is no small thing. It's something we must always celebrate, the only key to a (post)human future on or beyond our blue-green Earth.

Russell Blackford's home blog is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club. He is editor-in-chief of The Journal of Evolution and Technology and co-editor, with Udo Schuklenk, of 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

Oklahoma and abortion - some fittingly harsh reflections

2009-10-19T23:38:00.007-04:00

Russell Blackford is a guest blogger for Sentient Developments.

The Oklahoma legislature has passed a draconian statute that provides for personal details about women who obtain abortions to be placed online at a public website. To be fair, the information does not include actual names; nonetheless, it is in such detail that many women could be identified and harassed. What's more, even if no harassment eventuates, a woman's privacy is violated cruelly if she is required to provide such details as these:

answers to 34 questions including their age, marital status and education levels, as well as the number of previous pregnancies and abortions. Women are required to reveal their relationship with the father, the reason for the abortion and the area where the abortion was performed.

Much can be said about this despicable and cruel law, all of it in tones of fitting outrage. Over at Metamagician and the Hellfire Club, I concentrated on an important technical aspect. This is that outright criminalisation of a practice is not the only means that the state can use in its efforts to suppress the practice. There are many ways that political power can be used to attack our liberties.

In current social circumstances prevailing in Western societies, the criminal law uses punishments that can include the infliction of a range of harms, such as loss of liberty or property, while also expressing public resentment, indignation, reprobation, and disapproval (Joel Feinberg has written well on this). But much the same infliction of harm and officially-sanctioned stigma could be accomplished by means that do not involve criminalisation of an activity or even the criminal justice system as we know it.

Although civil laws do not categorise those who breach them as criminals, they, too, can be used to attach a stigma to actions and to individuals, and even to destroy reputations and careers. In fact, the state can select many hostile and repressive means to achieve its aims. These include propaganda campaigns that stigmatise certain categories of people and officially-tolerated discrimination against people of whom it disapproves, such as by denying certain categories of people access to government employment. The state requires good justification before it calls upon its power to suppress any form of conduct by any of these means.

The Oklahoma law is clearly intended to intimidate and stigmatise women who have abortions, in an attempt to deter the practice. This is no more acceptable than outright criminalisation of abortion. The legislature's action merits our contempt, and the law concerned should be struck down as unconstitutional for exactly the same reason as apply to an outright ban on abortions - it intrudes into an area of life that should be governed by personal privacy and individual choice.

Beyond this point, however, lies a further issue about the motivation for such laws ... and how are they best fought in the long term. It's not coincidental that laws such as this, which presuppose that pregnant women should have little control over their own bodies, tend to be enacted in jurisdictions where theistic religion is strong. We can insist that religious reasoning should have no authority in matters of law, but in societies where deference to religion is taken for granted that claim is likely to fall on deaf ears. It can be difficult convincing a hard-line Catholic bishop or a Protestant fundamentalist that political force should be used only in ways that are neutral between peaceful worldviews. Why accept that idea if you see your own worldview as representing the comprehensive truth about the world, morality, and the organisation of society? In societies where religion goes unchallenged, secular principles such as separation of church have no traction.

For that reason, I've increasingly, over the past few years, come to the view that there's now some urgency in challenging the truth claims, epistemic authority, and moral wisdom of theistic religion - meeting its pretensions head-on. This urgency wouldn't exist if the various leaders, churches, and sects agreed, without equivocation, to a wall of separation between themselves and the state. But that's not so likely, since many of them can find reasons, by their own lights, to resist any sort of strict secularism.

John Rawls imagined that adherents to most religions and other comprehensive worldviews could find reasons - from within their own teachings and traditions - to reach an overlapping political consensus. In Rawlsian theory, they can all find their own reasons to support a kind of secularism in which the state would not impose any comprehensive worldview; rather, it would provide a regulatory and economic framework within which people with many views of the world or "theories of the good" could live in harmony. But many of the comprehensive religious worldviews do not lend themselves to this. It's not natural for them to find reasons in their traditional teachings to embrace Rawlsian political liberalism. The more apocalyptic churches and sects do not seek social harmony with adherents of other views of the good; instead, they imagine a future time when their own viewpoint will prevail, perhaps with divine assistance.

Even the more mainstream religious groups may be sceptical about any sharp distinction between individual salvation and the exercise of political power. They may be suspicious about social pluralism, if this includes, as it must, views deeply opposed to their own - such as the view that abortion is morally acceptable, or the more radical view that it is not even (morally speaking) a big deal.

In short, I continue to advocate secular principles, including a strong separation of church (or mosque) and state. But it is not enough to stop with advocating these principles when so many people do not accept the premises on which they are based, such as the right to freedom of belief, the unvoidable permanence of social pluralism, or the need to obtain public peace by some reticence in struggling to impose private views of morality. We should go further than arguing for secularism, I think, and openly criticise worldviews that lead to travesties such as the Oklahoma abortion laws.

This may involve asking pointed questions such as whether the God who hates abortion even exists. That's okay. In a free society, we have every right to question views that we disagree with, so long as we don't attempt to suppress them by state power. In the case of abortion, you can believe it's a sin, and you can subscribe to a religion that supports your belief. But the cure for abortions is not to suppress them by the cruel use of state power. If you're against abortions, don't have one. Don't try to stop those who disagree.

If you do, don't be surprised if you are challenged on where you got your beliefs from, and whether they are well-evidenced. Maybe your religious tradition is riddled with error, and maybe your God doesn't exist. We're entitled to ask for the evidence and draw our own conclusions if it's not forthcoming.

Russell Blackford's home blog is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club. He is editor-in-chief of The Journal of Evolution and Technology and co-editor, with Udo Schuklenk, of 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

Link dump: 2009.10.19

2009-10-19T22:05:00.000-04:00

From the four corners of the web:

How to save yourself from chasing futuristic red herrings
For many people, the often outlandish proposals and predictions of futurists are just obviously impractical and are to be laughed off. This attitude, irrational is it may seem to futurists of the stripe who take outlandish ideas very seriously, is itself not to be sneered at -- automatic unbelievers in the alien save themselves from chasing many red herrings. Those who laugh at futurism because they are unimaginative dolts I will not try to defend, but those who laugh at futurism when futurists take themselves too seriously are usually spot-on.
The Top 10 Artificially Intelligent Characters in Movies
As of now, no machine has "passed" the Turing test. In the movies, however, that's a completely different story, as we've seen literally dozens of artificially intelligent characters whose programming functions at a level that is indistinguishable from that of a human brain.
Small mechanical forces have big impact on embryonic stem cells
Applying a small mechanical force to embryonic stem cells could be a new way of coaxing them into a specific direction of differentiation, researchers at the University of Illinois report. Applications for force-directed cell differentiation include therapeutic cloning and regenerative medicine.
Progress in Bioethics - MIT Press [book]
Progress in Bioethics is the first book to debate the meaning of progressive bioethics and to offer perspectives on the topic both from bioethicists who consider themselves progressive and from bioethicists who do not. Its aim is to begin a dialogue and to provide a foothold for readers interested in understanding the field.
Is My Mind Mine? - Forbes.com
How neuroimaging will affect personal freedom.
Prospective Parents and Genetic Testing
Dr. Jennifer Ashton Discusses People Turning to Science to Try to Avoid Genetic Disorders in Future Children
Need a New Heart? Grow Your Own. - The Boston Globe
The idea sounds like science fiction. But it might someday come true. A group of Boston scientists is pushing the bounds of regenerative medicine.
Drug testing could stop 'academic doping'
Students taking important exams could one day find themselves in the same position as professional athletes -- submitting to a drug test before the big event. The practice of students taking cognitive-enhancing drugs, such as methylphenidate, has become so common that those who don't "dope" are at an unfair advantage, argues a psychologist writing in the new issue of Journal of Medical Ethics.
Physicists Calculate Number of Universes in the Multiverse
If we live in a multiverse, it's reasonable to ask how many other distinguishable universes we may share it with. Now physicists have an answer

And Now, for Something Completely Different: Doomsday!

2009-10-19T20:06:00.008-04:00

Casey Rae-Hunter is guest blogging this month.

I've certainly been having a wonderful time guest blogging here at SD. In fact, it's hard to believe the month is almost up. Since I started late, maybe the boss will give me an extension?

Having talked about heavy stuff like cognitive liberty, neurodiversity and my personal stake in such matters, I figured we might want to tackle a lighter subject. Like doomsday devices.

It's probably old news by now, but I was really taken by an article in last month's issue of WIRED, called "Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine." As a child of the 1970s and '80s, I remember fondly the thrill of itemizing Soviet and American nuclear arsenals and learning cool new terms like "Mutually Assured Destruction." My parents and grandparents were not as wowed by my obsession with atomic game theory, but they put up. From forensics to German expressionist films to how many megatons are in an MX missile. . . such is life with a precocious and somewhat morbid kid.

Not to make this post purely personal, but there was another reason for my obsession. I grew up in Maine — a rural US state that one wouldn't think as having anything to do with the nuclear arms race. To the contrary: America's easternmost, northernmost province was positively riddled with backscatter radar stations, whose purpose was to detect a Soviet first strike. This made Maine more likely to be dusted in an initial attack than, say, Washington, DC. . . where I currently live.

Yet as much information as my apocalypse-obsessed mind could consume, I never encountered any tales of Perimeter — a Soviet doomsday system that came online in the mid-'80s, and is apparently still at the ready. Perimeter, also known by the more chilling moniker, "Dead Hand," is among the most secret and mystifying artifacts of the Cold War. Most perplexing is the fact that even the highest-level US officials, past and present, have no knowledge of its existence.

Yet it exists. Very much so.

The author of the WIRED piece, Nicholas Thomson, tells the tale of Perimeter with the panache of a noir novelist. He reveals, through painstaking first-person research and some rather uncomfortable interviews with Soviet and American principals, how the Ruskies devised a doomsday device that could still obliterate the US even after a devastating American first strike.

Perimeter ensures the ability to strike back, but it's no hair-trigger device. It was designed to lie semi-dormant until switched on by a high official in a crisis. Then it would begin monitoring a network of seismic, radiation, and air pressure sensors for signs of nuclear explosions. Before launching any retaliatory strike, the system had to check off four if/then propositions: If it was turned on, then it would try to determine that a nuclear weapon had hit Soviet soil. If it seemed that one had, the system would check to see if any communication links to the war room of the Soviet General Staff remained. If they did, and if some amount of time—likely ranging from 15 minutes to an hour—passed without further indications of attack, the machine would assume officials were still living who could order the counterattack and shut down. But if the line to the General Staff went dead, then Perimeter would infer that apocalypse had arrived. It would immediately transfer launch authority to whoever was manning the system at that moment deep inside a protected bunker—bypassing layers and layers of normal command authority. At that point, the ability to destroy the world would fall to whoever was on duty: maybe a high minister sent in during the crisis, maybe a 25-year-old junior officer fresh out of military academy. And if that person decided to press the button ... If/then. If/then. If/then. If/then.

Most interesting to me is the author's dead-on analysis of Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" missile defense system, which the Soviets viewed as less of a "shield" than act of sheer provocation:

Reagan announced that the US was going to develop a shield of lasers and nuclear weapons in space to defend against Soviet warheads. He called it missile defense; critics mocked it as "Star Wars."

To Moscow it was the Death Star—and it confirmed that the US was planning an attack. It would be impossible for the system to stop thousands of incoming Soviet missiles at once, so missile defense made sense only as a way of mopping up after an initial US strike. The US would first fire its thousands of weapons at Soviet cities and missile silos. Some Soviet weapons would survive for a retaliatory launch, but Reagan's shield could block many of those. Thus, Star Wars would nullify the long-standing doctrine of mutually assured destruction, the principle that neither side would ever start a nuclear war since neither could survive a counterattack.

As we know now, Reagan was not planning a first strike. According to his private diaries and personal letters, he genuinely believed he was bringing about lasting peace. (He once told Gorbachev he might be a reincarnation of the human who invented the first shield.) The system, Reagan insisted, was purely defensive. But as the Soviets knew, if the Americans were mobilizing for attack, that's exactly what you'd expect them to say. And according to Cold War logic, if you think the other side is about to launch, you should do one of two things: Either launch first or convince the enemy that you can strike back even if you're dead.

Wow, right? I mean, I don't want to spoil it for you if you haven't yet read it, which you should.

It's interesting to note that Dead Hand is still active. Still out there, its once finely-tuned sensors decaying alongside the other relics of the ex-Soviet military/tech apparatus, waiting for seismic and communications evidence of a major strike by a fiercely cultivated enemy.

Does anyone in their right mind feel safer?

Casey Rae-Hunter is a writer, editor, musician, producer and self-proclaimed "lover of fine food and drink." He is the Communications Director of the Future of Music Coalition — a Washington, DC think tank that identifies, examines, interprets and translates issues at the intersection of music, law, technology and policy. He is also the founder and CEO of The Contrarian Media Group, which publishes The Contrarian and Autistic in the District — the latter a blog about Asperger's Syndrome.

TED Talks: Henry Markram builds a brain in a supercomputer

2009-10-18T21:41:00.002-04:00

This is another remarkable TED talk -- fascinating, incredibly informative and not without controversy. I'm overjoyed to hear an expert from IBM put forth a theory of mind that tries to address the problem of how the brain projects a representation of the universe to a subjective observer. I'm fairly convinced that his framing of the issue will yield some positive results.

Henry Markram says the mysteries of the mind can be solved in fairly short order. He argues that mental illness, memory and perception are all made of neurons and electric signals -- and he plans to find them with a supercomputer that models all the brain's 100,000,000,000,000 synapses.