Daniel Dennett - How to Tell If You're an Atheist

The human mind is both beautiful and frustrating. We have minds that can contemplate the meaning of infinity and consciousness, on the one hand, and we can be blind to what's right in front of us, we can lie to ourselves, we can simultaneously embrace mutually exclusive beliefs, and we can be in complete denial about the most obvious of things, especially when those things have something challenging to say about our identity.

There's a clinical condition called anosognosia. Patients with this condition have suffered some sort of disability, but are completely unaware of it (you can watch V.S. Ramachandran to learn more). But it doesn't have to be only a medical condition. Anosognosia, or some variation thereof, affects us all in various ways and to varying degrees. At bottom, it's a question of self-knowledge and whether our beliefs about ourselves are consistent with the available evidence.

So, philosopher Daniel Dennett started to wonder about a possibly related condition: atheism-denial :)  Are you one? If you're not sure, here's how you can tell (and learn some philosophy along the way, like the use-mention fallacy, thanks to the funny examples he uses to make various conceptual points). And before you dismiss the idea, just consider that if there's a good chance your own pastor (rabbi, mula, swami, take your pick) might be an atheist, maybe you are too...

You know what I would be surprised to find? A redneck atheist :)

Woody Allen reads "My (Socratic) Apologies"

If you follow me on Google+, you may have noticed that there was recently a new trial for Socrates in which the previous verdict of guilty was overturned (by an impressively small margin). Philosophy was just barely vindicated by the new ruling. And people say we don't make progress :)

If that's too much seriousness, however, you may enjoy the following short story, written and read by none other than that philosophically-minded comic, Woody Allen, about certain dreams he's been having recently:

Hat tip to Tony!

Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity - Spark

The ancient Greeks knew that if you rubbed two pieces of amber, you'd produce static electricity, but apart from that, it would be another two thousand years until this weird, invisible, ephemeral, mysterious and (literally) shocking phenomenon would be systematically studied, controlled, stored, understood and made to flow continuously. But as with any nascent science, there were false starts, one question answered only leading to more questions.

In this first installment of the documentary series Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity, professor Jim Al-Khalili explores the history of the scientific exploration of electricity through the work and incredible creativity and experimental rigor of luminaries such as Pieter van Musschenbroek with his Leyden Jar; Benjamin Franklin's famous explanation of electricity as a liquid with positive and negative charge,  and yes, even the apocryphal kite story, demonstrating, like Newton had done before, that phenomena previously presumed to be heavenly in kind (thunder and lightning) were actually just instances of the same general laws that apply to mundane objects here on Earth; Henry Cavendish's experiments with the torpedo fish, which gave rise to the distinction between electric charge and voltage; Humphrey Davy's popular demonstrations at the Royal Society; the fascinating (and somewhat gruesome) dispute between the "animal" electricity of Galvani and the "no-nonsense" secular electricity of Volta; ; the isolation of chemical elements; and the prospect of resurrection and life after death...

Pure awesomeness :)

Five Historical Misconceptions Busted

If your knowledge of history comes from movies and popular culture, chances are that your historical understanding is probably more of a misunderstanding.

Admit it: you think of Vikings wearing horned helmets, you can't not picture Lady Godiva riding naked through Coventry, you pity Napoleon's shrimp-like height and assume his quest for conquest was just compensation for being short, etc. And let's not get into the Roman vomitorium or Christopher Columbus... As it turns out, we have poets and artists to blame for a lot of this crap :)

You know what would have been awesome?
If Lady Godiva had ridden naked wearing a horned helmet :)

Hans Rosling - Religion and Babies

When Hans Rosling speaks, I listen. The nice thing about him is that he much prefers to base his beliefs and opinions on data and evidence than on ideology. So, when I saw the title of this talk about the relationship between religion and babies, I was sure he'd have something mind-blowing to say, something that few of us, if any, would have imagined based on prior presuppositions.

And the relationships he shows really are impressive and somewhat surprising, but it seems to me that he screwed the pooch on this one. I say this, and am fully aware that I'm no statistician, but I'm seeing methodological flaws everywhere in this study that a first-year student should easily be able to pick up on. See if you can spot those problems:

Even if I didn't dispute the conclusions he draws from the data he uses, I would definitely question the validity and reliability of said data. Many people, for instance, and especially in developed nations, claim membership in particular religions only nominally. In such cases, religion almost certainly does not play any kind of causal role in their family planning decisions. But when you include these people with those for whom religion actually is an important motivating factor, you wash away the actual impact of the latter's religious beliefs and the causal influence on those choices. If there were some reliable way to distinguish religious believers from religious nominalists, I would not be surprised if the results of Rosling's studies changed quite dramatically.

Cameron Diaz Flirts with Sir David Attenborough

If you've been spoiled by multiple BBC documentaries narrated by Sir David Attenborough, as I have, then you've probably experienced the cringing sensation that it is watching those documentaries when they're narrated by other people, like Sigourney Weaver or Oprah, for instance.

And if you're Cameron Diaz, and you get a chance to meet Sir David, you'll probably get your panties in a bunch and basically offer yourself to him, as she did :)

And just as things seem to be cooling down, the sexy comes right back up again:

Brian Greene - Why Is Our Universe Fined-Tuned for Life?

Have you noticed that wherever Brian Greene goes, computer animations go with him? Well, this TEDTalk presentation is no exception :) I'm starting to wonder whether this might be the physicist equivalent of a comfort blanket...

In any case, and as you may expect if you're familiar with him, he lays down the case for string theory, and explains some of the fascinating implications if string theory and the cosmological theory of inflation were true. Even as mere hypothetical possibilities, these ideas merit our attention.

What I do have a major problem with, however, is his "explanation" for why our universe is fine-tuned for life. It's a version of the anthropic principle that is either completely backwards or completely question-begging (circular)... or both... I'll let you be the judge:

The analogy with our distance to the sun doesn't quite work because, despite his explicit claim to the contrary, it's asking one question but answering another. Our distance to the sun doesn't explain why Earth is  x-number of miles away from the sun (see what I mean by circular?). It doesn't tell us anything about astronomy or physics.

What it explains is why we live on Earth and get to ask that question, but it tells us nothing about the conditions that led to our planet being where it is... Similarly, the fact that we happen to inhabit the particular kind of universe that contains the conditions that allow for life-forms such as ours tells us nothing about why this particular universe happens to have those particular features.

In other words, you can't answer the question of why is our universe fine-tuned for life by answering that it's because our universe is fine-tuned for life... or am I missing something here?

The Center of All Things

Historically, it is perfectly understandable why our ancestors believed that we were the center of the universe: it really looks like we are!

What naturally happens during the development of an individual in infancy, absolute ego-centrism, is mirrored at the collective level during the infancy of a civilization. But just like children grow up and become disabused of their former ego-centrism, civilizations also have to grow up and give up childish fantasies about holding some special place in the grand scheme of things. The upshot is that instead of being surrounded by the universe, we actually get to be a part of it :)

And if you feel some Carl Sagan nostalgia on this chilly and rainy morning, knock yourself out with these entries.

Manuel Lima - The Power of Networks

The art and science of formal classification owes its origin to the great philosopher Aristotle, who conceived of a conceptual tree whose trunk and branches denote different divisions of ontology, hierarchies of being, logical and natural relations, etc. This tree metaphor became ubiquitous until very recently. It's been used to map historical and genealogical changes and hierarchies among subjects ranging from family blood lines to languages, the history of religious evolution, biological taxonomies, scientific branches, corporate maps, etc. Darwin, of course, famously used such a tree to explain his idea of common ancestry.

Helpful as it's been, and given current levels of computational power, the traditional genealogical tree may no longer be the most useful took for mapping out various sorts of relationships. In the following fascinating RSA Animate presentation, Manuel Lima explores the power of network visualization.

That blithely romanticized ending didn't quite do it for me, but the entire presentation did get me thinking about the mathematical explanatory power of fractals...

Ring of Fire Eclipse Moon Shadows

I've always loved (and been curious about) how leaves distort the path of light waves. If I were to speculate, I would guess that maybe they... actually, who are we kidding? I have no idea, plain and simple. Anyone out there who can help?

So I'll admit that I don't quite get the mechanism, but when you combine that weirdness with the Ring of Fire eclipse that occurred a couple of days ago, what you get is a thing of beauty:

The Section Quartet covers Muse's Time Is Running Out

Just a little bit of musical deliciousness to pick you up on this rainy day.

And if you like Apocalyptica, you'll love this:

The Banned TED Talk - Rich People Don't Create Jobs

Over the past few years, TED has grown into a household name due to the amazing lectures and presentations that they've made publicly available to the entire world. TEDTalks are presentations about ideas that are worth spreading.

Well, Nick Hanauer decided to give a talk about an idea he considered worth spreading: how we've been brainwashed to believe, despite all the massive evidence to the contrary, that taxing the wealthy is what drives unemployment and economic collapse, and that therefore we should actually give the so-called 'job creators' big tax breaks. I think he's exactly right, but for some strange reason that they've been getting into pretzels over the past week, TED made the strange choice not to share Hanauer's talk, and when the story hit the light, it hit the fan...

The rationalization was that it was too politically charged, partisan and controversial, but when you consider previous presentations they've aired, controversial is not something that's ever been a problem for them. Anyway, here is the 'banned' presentation:

And here are The Young Turks discussing this weird turn of events.

What kind of weird world do we live in when stating facts is considered controversial or partisan?

Update: The story seems to be more complicated and overblown than at first appeared (thanks Xavier!). Here is Chris Anderson defending TED's decision not to air the video (and making a distinction between not airing and censoring or banning), and clarifying the issue, as he sees it. It is worth saying, however, that when Anderson claims that the audience wasn't particularly impressed with the presentation, that doesn't sound quite genuine since the video itself shows that a number of audience members did give him a bit of a standing ovation, but whatever.

For what it's worth, my interest in posting the video is about spreading the idea itself rather than with focusing on whether it was banned or censored.

Richard Feynman - The Essence of Science (in one minute)

I'm shamelessly stealing this from Robert Krulwich's blog, and verbatim at that (remember, shamelessly), but simply because the original is so eloquent and poetic that I would not presume to improve upon it:

"Here it is, in a nutshell: The logic of science boiled down to one, essential idea. It comes from Richard Feynman, one of the great scientists of the 20th century, who wrote it on the blackboard during a class at Cornell in 1964.

Think about what he saying. Science is our way of describing — as best we can — how the world works. The world, it is presumed, works perfectly well without us. Our thinking about it makes no important difference. It is out there, being the world. We are locked in, busy in our minds. And when our minds make a guess about what's happening out there, if we put our guess to the test, and we don't get the results we expect, as Feynman says, there can be only one conclusion: we're wrong.

The world knows. Our minds guess. In any contest between the two, The World Out There wins. It doesn't matter, Feynman tells the class, "how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is, if it disagrees with the experiment, it is wrong."

This view is based on an almost sacred belief that the ways of the world are unshakeable, ordered by laws that have no moods, no variance, that what's "Out There" has no mind. And that we, creatures of imagination, colored by our ability to tell stories, to predict, to empathize, to remember — that we are a separate domain, creatures different from the order around us. We live, full of mind, in a mindless place. The world, says the great poet Wislawa Szymborska, is "inhuman." It doesn't work on hope, or beauty or dreams. It just...is.""

View with a Grain of Sand 

We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect or apt.

Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.
It doesn't feel itself seen and touched,
and that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is no different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn't view itself.
It exists in this world,
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake's floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelssly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.

A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they're three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like a courier with urgent news
but that's just our simile.
The character is invented, his haste is make-believe,
his news inhuman.

What Is the Self?

If you're not used to thinking philosophically, here's a bit of a conceptual conundrum for you: you have certain personal and professional goals, projects and desires that you'd like to accomplish and satisfy. And presumably, much of what you do is, to varying degrees, something that you do for your the sake of your future self. You are used to thinking that you have a self, that you will continue to have an enduring self through time, and that there are boundaries that separate your self from others and the rest of the world.

So what is this self thing that makes you you? Is it bodily identity? Psychological continuity? Some immaterial soul? A bunch of neurons that are not themselves conscious and which are bundled together in ever-changing patterns without centralized control? There are no answers in the following short clip, just questions that may be interesting to think about and whose conclusions may imply we ought to change certain attitudes toward self and others.

Of course, if Hume was right, there is no self... it's just an illusion... and maybe our moral attitudes may have to radically change to correspond to that fact.

Inside Nature's Giants - Kangaroo

When you read the title of this entry, your first reaction might be bewilderment. Kangaroos are among nature's giants? Well, yes and no. The largest kangaroos on record, who stood at an impressive ten feet tall, went the way of the dodo a long time ago, so their present-day descendants are not as impressive as you may expect. Still, kangaroos today are the largest living marsupials, so that helps them qualify.

But you've already come to love this documentary series full of fascinating lessons on evolutionary biology, so why are we quibbling on technicalities when we can just enjoy the awesome and truly surprising lessons in evolution that studying these and other lovable Australian animals (marsupials like wallabies and koalas, and monotremes like the platypus) can teach us?

Bet you weren't expecting to see what a young Joey looks like, huh?

And in case you're curious about the plural of platypus... it's either platypus or platypuses, but not platypi (you'd have to know a little bit of Latin to understand why).

Fight Club - Chemical Burn

You've most likely watched the movie at some point. I recently also read the book. Both experiences are similarly soul-hitting, thought-provoking and existentially disturbing. Enlightenment through self-destruction? Freedom through loss? Power through lack of control? Immortality through suicide?

If you don't experience some major cognitive dissonance after watching the movie or reading the book, then either you are some Nietzschean hero or, more likely, you weren't paying attention.

And here is a short lesson about self-overcoming

I know, this is awesome, but before you go share with all of your friends, remember this:

Now what are you going to do?

David Eagleman - The Brain and the Law

There is almost universal agreement among philosophers, neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, and other mind researchers that the mind has a physical basis in the brain. Sure, we don't yet understand the particular mechanism through which the brain produces conscious experience, but most serious researchers into the field no longer buy the antiquated notion of an immaterial soul.

But as philosophers have recognized for thousands of years, if the basis of consciousness is physical, then our minds are the result of physical laws of causality, and that creates all sorts of problems for the notion of free will. Whether we have any free will at all is debatable, but there is no doubt that, at the very least, there is a lot less of it than we normally imagine.

This is an interesting intellectual question, but it's also an important practical question everyone should care about because free will is directly tied to the question of moral responsibility: are people responsible for their actions? Suppose we have no free will; what do we do about the 'justice' system? Should we let criminals go free because they're not really culpable for what they've done? That's exactly the kind of question that David Eagleman tries to explore in the following fascinating presentation

Romney to Travel Back in Time to Kill Liberal Version of Himself

If you are a Republican, you're probably not all that thrilled with your presidential candidate Mitt Romney, what with more flip-flopping on political issues than a patient with multiple-personality disorder on meth. It looks like this guy will say anything for votes.

But if you're concerned about all the inconsistencies, fear not. The Onion reports that Conservative Romney plans to travel back in time to kill younger Liberal Romney and finally escape from the liberal precedents that have been haunting him for the past few years. And if you're concerned with a grandfather paradox type of scenario (in which current Romney would cease to exist were he to kill a younger version of himself), it looks as though that will not actually be quite the problem you might have thought :)

Melinda Gates - Let's Put Birth Control Back on the Agenda

I'm really busy at the moment (grading finals and term papers), and don't have time to get into a long introduction to the fantastic TEDTalk presentation below, but suffice it to say that in a time in which the politicization of women's issues (whether they should have the right to choose or to have or not have access to medical healthcare) has clouded the real question concerning women's health and choice, Melinda Gates adeptly navigates right past the confusion and the distractions, to the questions that really matter...

Running (Unstoppable) - Amazing Paralympic Games Ad

Sometimes life throws shit our way. Sometimes we despair, sometimes we succumb, but every now and then some rise above the ashes and make something of themselves

Click the picture for a taste of awesome :)

And if you think that picture alone is awesome, just wait till you see the video:

Dan Savage - Standing Up to the Bible

Here in America, we loves our cognitive dissonance. If you ever watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, or The Colbert Report, you know that these are two industries based primarily on pointing out, with great humor and wit, how often we contradict ourselves on a daily basis.

One of those areas in which we collectively seem to be somewhere off in self-contradictory la-la land is the widespread belief that our moral values come from scripture, but as Dan Savage explains in the short video below, that can't be right.

Why not? Because we are perfectly comfortable ignoring, or even outright rejecting, various biblical injunctions. We don't execute women who lose their virginity pre-maritally, we don't stone to death children who disrespect their parents, we are not trying to pass constitutional amendments banning the consumption of shrimp and lobster, we think slavery is morally wrong, and we certainly do not condone holocaust or the annihilation of entire nations. And since we are happy to reject these scriptural injunctions (and they're there, look it up), then, wherever else they come from, our moral values do NOT come from the Bible (or pick your favorite holy book).

But if that's the case, then we can't justify our condemnation of homosexuality (or anything else, for that matter) simply on the basis that there is some biblical injunction against it. What we need is REASONS that justify such a view, and that requires that we do the work necessary to achieve such conclusions instead of simply assuming their truth from the outset.

Did you also get a sense that the walk-out may have been pre-emptively planned?

Brian Cox - Mars Loops the Loop

Thanks mainly to Aristotle's teleological metaphysics and the ancient idea that the heavens are a realm of perfection, it was believed for millennia that the celestial bodies moved along a perfect sphere around the Earth. Then some odd observations of retrograde motion were discovered among the planets, or "wandering stars" (as shown in the picture to the right), and the ancient astronomer/astrologer Ptolemy explained that this was actually better than we thought: it's circles upon circles! How much more perfection can you ask for of a divine geometer?

One of the problems with this fix, however, was that it only worked in hindsight: Ptolemy could explain previous instances of retrograde motion, but not make predictions about when or where we should expect to see them again. And of course, there was no suggestion of a mechanism that would be responsible for such odd behavior... until a chap by the name of Copernicus, you might have heard of him, came up with a revolutionary new way to understand the problem: the apparent retrograde motion of the planets can be understood as an illusion if we simply assume that we are not the center of the universe. If we, along with the planets, are rotating around the sun, we can go right back to the simplicity of one perfect sphere, and retrograde motion could then simply be understood as a function of the change in our position along our orbit relative to the change of the position of other planets along their own orbits. Problem solved!

Or if that seems needlessly difficult to grasp (and remember we haven't gotten into the math Copernicus used!), Brian Cox has a nice little demonstration of this revolutionary new vision that seems blindingly obvious in retrospect, but which took the genius of someone like Copernicus to think it for the first time:

Beautiful Minds - Richard Dawkins

If you've been following this blog for a while, you're probably familiar with the various documentaries, debates and lectures Richard Dawkins has delivered over the years. Sure, his fame of late has to do with the religion/atheism and creationism/evolution controversies, but he's a much more important thinker than that. Dawkins is such a prolific thinker that even when he's wrong, he manages to make you think and to reconsider your own position. The man doesn't know how not to be interesting.

His original fame derives from a fabulous book he penned over 30 years ago: The Selfish Gene, which was originally inspired by the ground-breaking work of biologists like Bill Hamilton, and which provided a powerful and eloquent new way of understanding behaviors and traits that did not originally seem to conform to Darwinian natural selection, but which, after careful consideration, turned out to be remarkable revelations that confirmed and enhanced the theory.

The following documentary is all about the man, his story, his influence, his courage, his intellect and his ideas:

For a defense of The Selfish Gene, you might want to watch Nice Guys Finish First.

The Burden of Proof

Why yes, obviously you should believe in and bow down to the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Let yourself be touched by His noodly appendage. Feel the power of his balls! What do you mean that's nonsense? Can you prove he doesn't exist? If you can't, aren't you just being dogmatic in your atheistic a-pastafarianism?

As you may already be inferring, today we're dealing with the philosophical question concerning the burden of proof. Who has the responsibility of proving her case? The believers or the skeptics? Which is more reasonable: to believe something until it is disproven (or weakened by reason and/or evidence), or not to believe something until it is proven (or substantiated with reason and/or evidence)?

Unless we're dealing with emotionally charged subjects, the answer seems pretty obvious: the burden of proof is always on the person making an affirmative claim. The skeptic is free to reject any claim that doesn't satisfy her standards of reason and evidence. When we are dealing with emotionally charged subjects, however, especially those on which our sense of personal identity depends, all this cool reasoning goes out the window and we tend to engage in some special pleading, unreasonably demanding that the skeptic disprove our assertions, but that's a philosophically unenlightened position to maintain, as the following thought-provoking animation by QualiaSoup demonstrates:

While the burden of proof is always on the person who makes an affirmative claim, insofar as such a claim is epistemic or ontological (and related only to whether something is likely true), the case is more difficult for moral questions, partly because these questions involve practical choices that have to be made (often immediately) rather than merely beliefs that can be held abstractly and without urgency. The difference, of course, is that with moral questions, we are not merely concerned with the question of whether some moral claim is true but also with the question of whether it is good or bad, and whether it is worth choosing and acting upon, or not...

Other difficult cases: instances involving imminent danger... but that, again, has more to do with caution and prudential choices than with mere truth.

Paul Ayn Rand Ryan

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

Unfortunately, some people don't grow intellectually past the age of 14, and having once read the cultish work by Ayn Rand, go on to pontificate to the rest of us how Rand was a great intellectual and "philosopher," apparently without realizing what a shallow and psychopathic 'thinker' she actually was (there's a reason real philosophers, with minor exceptions, don't take her seriously).

One of those sheepish followers is Paul Ryan, a self-professed Catholic who apparently doesn't see the contradiction between his Catholicism (including Jesus' message of charity and compassion for the downtrodden) and his devotion and worship of an asshole atheist who promulgated self-interest and greed as the highest virtues, and social responsibility as one of the worst moral crimes.

Well, the Catholic church called Ryan on the contradiction of his beliefs, and Stephen Colbert talks to the priest who sounded the wake-up call

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And here is the best part: a total takedown by MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell, who just rips Ryan apart:

Even xkcd recognizes what's up:

Hat tip to Tony!

George Carlin - The Illusion of Choice

Bow down to your corporate overlords! You don't know who they are? Just click on the picture below to see the few companies that own most of the products on which you rely, and then ask yourself what kind of freedom you have when so much of your choices depends on stuff going on behind the curtains inconspicuously serving the interests of corporate greed...

The picture kind of reminded me of some stuff George Carlin used to argue:

Boy, he threads a very fine line between a nutty conspiracy theorist and a true visionary

The Higgs Boson Explained, PhD Comics Edition

You may remember that a while ago we featured a PhD Comics animation explaining Dark Matter.

Today we have another episode dealing with those two or three words that you may have heard numerous times in reference to the Large Hadron Collider over the past couple of years, and which is the main reason the whole thing was built to begin with: the famous Higgs Boson mechanism.

You may know that it's got something to do with explaining why particles have mass, but if you don't know anything more than that, here is your chance for a fun primer: