5 February 2011

Woke up this morning; my right knee was slightly achy which means that, yes, more snow is on the way.

But today, I’ll make it to the gym and do something; probably a quick short run and upper body weights.

Stuff

A Right Wing Group is caught in Deception
A right wing group called Live Action is trying to stir up trouble for planned parenthood; the idea is that they sent in some people who are posing as pimps for underage girls. They were caught doctoring the video:

The Young Turks talks about more about their scheme:

Some science
Sam Harris is attempting to, well, perhaps move morality into the scientific realm. I understand why he wants to do that; it appears that many automatically assign to religion things that science doesn’t cover. I don’t quite understand that. But Cosmic Variance weighs in:

The problem of measuring well-being is not simply one of practice, it’s very much one of principle. I know what a breath is; I don’t know what a “unit of well-being is.” The point of these critiques is that there is no such thing as a unit of well-being that we can look inside the brain and measure. I’m pretty sure that’s a problem of principle. Of course, Russell and Jerry and I (and David Hume, and a large number of professional moral philosophers) may be wrong about this. The way to provide a counter-argument would be to say “Here is a precise and unambiguous definition of how to measure well-being, at least in principle.” That doesn’t seem to be forthcoming.

Latter Harris says this:

The case I make in the book is that morality entirely depends on the existence of conscious minds; minds are natural phenomena; and, therefore, moral truths exist (and can be determined by science in principle, if not always in practice).

Taken at face value, this implies that truths about the best TV shows or most delicious flavors of ice cream also exist. My opinion that The Wire is the best TV show of all time is a natural phenomenon — it reflects the state of certain neurons in my brain. That doesn’t imply, in any meaningful sense, that the state of my brain provides evidence that The Wire “really is” the best TV show of all time. Nor, more programmatically and importantly, does it provide unambiguous guidance concerning which new programs should be green-lit by studio executives. The real problem — how do you balance the interests of different people against each other? — is completely ignored.

At heart I think the problem is that Sam and some other atheists are really concerned about the idea that, without objective moral truths based on science, the field of morality becomes either the exclusive domain of religion, or simply collapses into nihilism. Happily for reality, that’s an extremely false dichotomy. Morality isn’t out there to be measured like some empirical property of the physical world, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to be moral or to speak about morality in a rational, thoughtful way. Pretending that morality is a subset of science is, in its own way, just as much an example of wishful thinking as pretending that morality is handed down by God. We have to face up to that temptation and accept the world as it is.

Later, Cosmic Variance mentions the concept of health is similar. Sure, science is heavily used in medicine, and should be. But what does “healthy” mean anyway?

On more technical matters, Cosmic Variance has our back on the recent bit of crackpot attack on mathematics that I talked about recently.

And finally, here is an article about the physics of detecting and measuring dark matter. Upshot: things that don’t interact easily are hard to detect, and there are different ways that these particles can interact. Those with a physics background will understand this better than I do. Still, I am glad that they are putting this stuff out there. When I first took a college physics course, I was most surprised by the fact that the text books explained how some of the experimental apparatus worked; my naive view was that these things were black boxes that…well…worked by….??? Much of experimental science is finding the right way to detect what you are hoping to detect.

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