The Halloween festivities here in Madison are a draw for college students from all over the country. Every year, tens of thousands of people converge on State Street, a popular hang-out running from campus to the capitol building, to party. This has led to trouble in the past, which I had heard about in vague stories of riots.

I had toyed with the idea of setting up a telescope and watching the riots from afar. I went so far as to ask my parents, who had happened to decide to visit the weekend to bring an old telescope I had one in a science contest years ago. My dad also brought a pair of cheap binoculars.

Ultimately, however, I opted to go see Rocky Horror Picture Show instead, fully expecting the streets to be cleared by the time it let out around 2:30 a.m. I still got a good eyeful of costumes walking to the theater. Among the highlights were girls dressed as construction workers with phrases on their shirts like “got wood?” and mobile kissing booths. Prices for the later varied, one said, on a guy, said “free if you’re hot, $1.00 if you’re not.”

The movie was great as always, with the edition of a costume contest for people dressed as characters and a new call back, spawned by a recent news story. At one point in the movie, Dr. Frank N. Furter says the word “spark” in such a way as to make it sound like he’s saying “spark.” Every time I’ve gone, this word has been preceded by a carefully timed chant of “Who – give – Captain – Kirk – blowjobs?” This time, the exchange was followed by a shout of “I thought it was Sulu.”

When I left the theater, I discovered the state street festivities still in full swing. I thought I’d walk around awhile, then go home, but then I noticed mounted police patrolling the street (in an attempt, I later read, to keep traffic flowing). This caught my interest, so I decided to stay and watch. The basic tactic was to sweep the streets with a line of mounted police in front to get people out of the way, and a cluster of regulars in back to keep people from rushing back right away. The cluster wasn’t large enough to hold much ground, however, and people were quite happy to be able to return to any area the police left.

Some people were clustering around the police, taunting them with a chant of “Fuck the police” and something that’s considered a standard football cheer here, “fuck you, eat shit.” Occasionally, I saw some object fly though the air, but the cops mostly responded with stoicism. They never tried to fight their way though the crowd to get at bottle-throwers. One even seemed to smile in amusement at the taunts. It was a rather odd coward’s game, where many people were trying to start a riot, but no one quite wanted to be the one to do so. An older bystander, who struck me as a bit drugged out, told me “I want it, man” – i.e., a riot, but that I should also be ready to jump the fence when this happens.

Rumors of tear gas being deployed to no effect ran through the crowd. One guy I met said he had seen it. I encountered some irritating fumes, but didn’t know if it was gas or cigarettes.

At one point, a different chant got started: “Show some tits, show some tits.” It was directed at girls looking out the window of an apartment building. They didn’t comply, but just kept looking down on the crowd, enjoying the attention.

Then came a point at which I was sure a riot would break out. The foot police got separated from the cavalry, and were surrounded by the jeering crowd. They didn’t even need cavalry rescue, however, and made reunited with their comrades by their own effort.

A new touch in riot control techniques this season were concert-style loudspeakers which played first of “The city of Madison thanks you for your patronage of the State Street area and wishes you safe travel to your next destination,” and then, “The Madison Police Department hereby declares this event on State Street to be an unlawful assembly. In the name of the people of the state of Wisconsin, we command all those assembled on State Street to immediately disperse. If you do not leave the area, you will be subject to arrest.” Both these messages, however, took a great deal of straining to hear over the roar of the crowd. When the second one was playing, the trailing foot police began spreading out in a perimeter, trying to hold more territory. Then the perimeter collapse, bringing another borrowing from football games: “You fucked up! You fucked up!”

After this, the mounted police left one way, and the footmen did a straight line jog in the other direction. Then came the tear gas. Everyone who had bravely taunted the police before fled at top speed. At one point, I decided to look back to see get a clearer view of who was doing it (police in riot gear) and how (never figured it out). I meant to see from a distance, but got close enough for a taste of the stuff. The burning on my tongue convinced me what I had encountered before was mere cigarettes, but I didn’t get it as bad as one guy nearby, who was on the ground shouting “oh God, I can’t berate!”

The police seemed to stop before library mall, the far edge of campus. A hardcore remnant returned for a standoff. Then, some motion from the police sent them scurrying. But the police were only setting up a tape line. A self-appointed general of the jeerers began trying to rally people. Some responded, I stayed farther back on library mall. I walked around a little, watching from various angles and talking to people. One guy said one of his friends had been in the military and trained to deal with the stuff, so he was able to run backwards and close range, unfazed as long as they didn’t physically grab him. The military guy, I was told, had been to jail six times and didn’t care because he had no other life. I asked a guy in a cow costume what would happen now with the remaining jeerers. He commented on their stupidity and said he only wanted to watch from a distance. The police, he explained, were just there to deal with the drunks that would be coming from frat parties. So the action was over.

Before I left, though, a buddy of the cow guy made this comment: “Stupidity will end the human race, and this is the beginning of it.”

So what is free will? I don’t know. You see, a lot of the philosophical debate over free will has been over not whether free will exists, but rather what free will would be, if it existed. There are two basic positions on this issue, and they split over the issue of determinism. If you want to know what determinism is, here you don’t have to worry, because I can define that. Determinism is the view that given the state of the world at any given time, and the laws of nature or whatever principles it is that govern the world, only one future is possible. The deterministic view of the world is the view contained in the Newtonian physics you likely studied in high school: in a common sort of high school physics problem you’re given some objects in some initial condition, and you have to figure out what will happen to them. It’s taken for granted that only one possible outcome is given.

Nowadays, you should be aware, many physicists are convinced that determinism isn’t true, that at the level of quantum mechanics there is some irreducibly random element in the world, such that a given situation could genuinely turn out multiple ways. It’s essential here, though, not to confuse determinism with mathematical chaos. Who here is familiar with fractal geometry, perhaps the Mandelbrot set? That’s mathematical chaos. Chaos, in this sense, isn’t opposed to determinism, but is a special type of deterministic system. In a chaotic system, any given starting point can only turn out one way, but an arbitrarily small change could cause things to turn out another way.

One of the most famous representations of chaos is the “butterfly effect”: the suggestion that a butterfly flapping its wings could cause a hurricane on the other side of the world. I don’t know if this is really possible, in terms of how the weather actually works, but if it were possible it would be consistent with determinism. Any given initial conditions will yield the same result every time. Add a butterfly, you get an entirely different result. However, if you add the exact same butterfly moving in exactly the same way many times, you’d get the same result every time in each butterfly trial, even if the result differed radically from the non-butterfly trials.

If you’re interested in learning more about this in depth, I recommend running some Google searches for chaos, fractal geometry, and the Mandebrot set. Here’s a short summary: the Mandebrot set is an instance of a fractal, an infinitely complex geometric figure. It ties in with chaos in that if you look at some area of the figure closely, and then move the area of focus just a little, you can get something entirely different. I can’t give you the full effect here, it really has to be seen live–or at least with the help of a Java web applet.

Now we get to understand the big divides among philosophers regarding free will: is free will compatible with determinism? Philosophers who say “yes” are compatiblists. Philosophers who say “no” are incompatiblists. Among the incompatiblists, there are those who think we have free will, “libertarians” (same word as the political position, different meaning) and those who don’t, the “hard determinists.” Finally, there are those who think the whole concept of free will doesn’t make any sense, who have been called “hard incompatiblists.” Incompatiblists are going to say “hey, of course if your actions are determined by the prior state of the world, you aren’t free.” Compatiblists, in contrast, argue that for an action to be freely chosen, it must be causally determined in the right way.

Which position should we hold? The logic of the situation is a little complicated. I think the starting point for most people is that we have free will. Starting from that point, we can ask three questions:
1) Do we have good reason to think determinism is true?
2) Do we have good reason to doubt that the compatiblist account of free will makes sense?
3) Do we have good reason to doubt that the libertarian account off free will makes sense?

If we can say “yes” to (1) or (3), but not (2), we’re forced into compatiblism. If we say “yes” to (2), but not (1) or (3), we’re forced into libertarianism. If we say “yes” to (2) plus (1) or (3), only then would we reluctantly give up our initial belief in free will. “Yes” to (1) plus (2) yields hard determinism; “yes” to (2) plus (3) yields hard incompatiblism.

Now let’s look at our questions. Do we have good reason to think determinism is true? The standard line you’re likely to hear from the physics department is that determinism is false. More specifically, you’re likely to be told that in quantum mechanics, a system can exhibit two states at once, but when an observation is made, you get a collapse of the state and one of the two possible states is selected randomly. Famously, physicist Erwin Schrödinger suggested that it should in theory be possible to build a box containing a cat that would be both alive and dead–the idea is that you get some small-scale system in two states at once, and then make whether the cat is given poison dependent on the small-scale system. Only when you look in the box would the cat be alive or dead.

I’ve just taken you into a world of absolutely crazy ideas which we, unfortunately, will not discuss in detail because I don’t understand physics as well as I’d like. But I want to throw you something to chew on: some have argued that the most reasonable interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn’t involve randomness. Rather than say that the cat is randomly selected to be alive or dead, why not say–since you’ve already accepted the crazy notion that the cat is both alive and dead–that the when the scientist opens the box, the cat is seen to be simultaneously alive and dead? Crazy, but no crazier than the initial idea now widely accepted by scientists.

Now, what about compatiblism? When I introduced the concept, I suggested some people will think it just obvious that if your actions are determined by things beyond your control, then you’re not free. This idea has been formalized by Peter van Inwagen as follows: If you have no choice about the fact that P, and you have no choice about the fact that P will result in Q, then you have no choice about Q. Call this “van Inwagen’s principle.” On determinism, you have no choice about the distant past, and no choice about the fact that the distant past can only give rise to a single unique future, therefore you have no choice about the future.

Van Inwagen, here, is relying on the notion that his principle has a good amount of intuitive attractiveness. But it’s not a logical axiom. Not everything works the way van Inwagen claims choice works. If I drop a pencil, the fact that it fell is due to gravity, but its initial position and the fact of gravity aren’t due to gravity. On compatiblism, choice would be something like this. An action can be chosen by you even if the things which contribute towards determining your choice–such as your initial psychological dispositions–aren’t your choice.

What about libertarianism? The basic worry here, I think, is that we don’t call random events acts of free will. If my hand suddenly flails out for literally no reason at all, we wouldn’t call that a free act. It seems like if an event isn’t determined, it must be random, so a non-determined event couldn’t be free. Free will would actually require that determinism be true, at least to a significant degree. Libertarians have responded to this argument by saying that the options aren’t limited to determinism and randomness. This raises the question of what the other option would be. The typical response, especially from van Inwagen, is to claim this as a great mystery, and say that they needn’t have a full-fledged account of free will to know that compatiblism is wrong.

It’s rather hard, then, to get a knock-down answer to any of the questions in my list of three. But still, many people are tempted to give a “yes” to at least one of them. It’s a very puzzling issue. We are tempted to say that when we know the neurological causes of a homicide, the killer is no longer morally culpable in the sense of being able to be sent to prison, so they are committed to a psychiatric institution instead. And there seems to me to be a very strong temptation to think of our own choices as happening outside the chain of causality. It’s a genuinely puzzling issue, and I’m curious to hear what you all have to say about it.

Yesterday evening, I got hypnotized. Well, not really. It happened like this.

This week, Madison put on several of events in order to welcome new students – not that there are likely to be many at semester, but it was nice entertainment for the rest of us. One of those events was a hypnotist’s performance. I had heard claims that hypnosis was not a special mental state, and decided to go get hypnotized myself. My plan was simple: follow all instructions for getting into the “hypnotic state,” but do something contrary to given commands. Pretend to be Weird Al when I’m told I’m Fran Sanatra. Whatever.

The hypnotist, “Magic Mike,” began by telling us about awards he had won for comedy and doing a stage magic routine. It was a rope trick I had done myself, but with several different variations such that I couldn’t always keep track of what was happing. This introductory phase was peppered with bad jokes, and Magic Mike’s own observations about how bad his jokes were.

When the hypnosis part began, he had people who wanted to be hypnotized stand up, clasp their hands, and point their index fingers up. On his command, he said, they would become like magnets, impossible to take appart. Knowing full well this was a test of suggestibilty, I kept my fingers together. Then he got us on state: 20, 30 college students sitting in an arc of chairs going from one end of the stage to another. Before the full hypnosis, he did one further test: had us clamp our hands together, and told us that when he counted to five, we’d be unable to pull them apart, and the harder we tried, the harder they’d be stuck together. As he counted slowly, he told us to squeeze hard. I didn’t make a real effort to pull them apart, though it felt weird to do so when he said we could – likely from squeezing for so long, an effect that probably set in with some people after 10 seconds of hard squeezing.

Then came the full hypnotism. In They Call It Hypnosis, which I had begun reading earlier this week, Robert Baker mentions the similarity between relaxation techniques and some hypnotic proceedures. The instructions we got was essentially the same as those on some relaxation tapes my high school psych teacher had the class listen to one day: you’re going deeper, waves of relaxation spreading through your body, etc. At the end of the proceedure, I was no more or less hypnotized than I had been after listening to the relaxation tapes, though I was less relaxed, as I had to sit back in an uncomfotable chair.

In general, the peformance wasn’t all that different than a typical improve comedy routine, just with less improve and more outright silliness. At first, I thought I’d wait on big antics until singled out for some performance, though I never was. When he told us we were all children in a classroom who would make faces at him, the teacher, when he had his back turned. I stuck out my tongue and kept it out whether or not he was looking at me. Eventually, he came to me and asked what I was doing. I replied that I was pickinig my nose. In another part, he informed a few subjects (not including me) that they would be unable to remember their names. He asked others for their names for comparison, when he got to me, my name was George Bush. Then he told us we were all in a beach in Cancun, and there were birds that would sit on our fingers if we held out our hands. He went around asking us what kinds of birds we had; I declared I had a penguin. After that, one girl – following my example? – revealed that she was petting an ostrich.

I wasn’t the only one who showed signs of not being fully in trance. One guy kept cracking smiles and the things he was being told to do, though he followed quite mindlessly. In an incident at the end of the show, the hypnotist told one guy he was from Jupiter, and another that he was an interpreter, able to speak both English and Jupinese. The hynposits asked several questions of the “alien visitor,” then let other subjects asks questions. One girl asked if she could touch him. The interpreter rendered the response as “depends where.”

When I got back, the people I had been sitting next to felt the need to inform me that I had said I was George Bush, which I remembered quite well. Other people were more suspicious. Walking back, I heard someone say “I think one or two of the guys were faking it,” and a girl I went to highschool with told me via facebook she thought I had been faking.

Overall, it was not an experience that left me thinking much of hypnosis. And yet, as I was walking back, I heard some girls telling a guy about the pictures they had gotten of him.

“You didn’t remember it?” I asked. I got an equivocal “not really” in reply. I asked for specifics, and he said he just remembered hearing the hypnotist’s voice, not what he, the subject, had done. I don’t know what research has been done on hypnotic amnesia. Baker mentions briefly that it’s a myth. I suppose I should have given the guy my e-mail adress and asked him to sit down and try to remember a few days later.

So in the end, I’m not impressed, but that few sentences of conversation makes me wonder. Who knows, in the end.

With Matt on hiatus, someone needs to make sure the poo gets flung, and I have decided to take up that role. However, this blog isn’t Pooflingers, so I will call these posts “scroll-by”s, as in the scoll bar in my browser.

Bertrand Russell once said that when a stupid man hears a smart man speak, he will translate what is said into something he can under stand. He was talking about Socrates and Xenophon, but it seems an apt description of what Joe Carter’s attempts to understand opposition to intelligent design. He explains it as follows:

Just as the resurrection is the cornerstone of Christianity, natural selection is the pillar on which neism stands. That is why neists have an apoplectic fit over Intelligent Design. The heretical notion does not just question a theory, it denys the foundation of their religious beliefs. Some even claim that their belief system must destroy other religions (see entry by Sam Harris. Neists may not have a god but their religion has retained the first commandment: Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

What in the world is “neism,” you may ask? It’s an imaginary religion dreamed up by Carter, in part on the thesis that “Hardcore materialists will eventually grow frustrated with the conservative dogma of Darwinism and its complete inability to account for ethical, epistemological, and metaphysical ‘truths.’” I have seen no signs of such frustration, but Carter has found an entirely different set of evidence that this imaginary religion is taking hold: responses to the 2006 Edge question.

I suspect most defenders of evolution don’t pay nearly as much attention to the kind of stuff delt with in the Edge survey as to solid, basic science. As it happens, I just linked to an interview with Paul Myers where he describes his work in evolutionary biology. For someone like him, seeing attacks on evolution is analogous to someone who’s spent their life studying protein folding seeing attacks on the existence of atoms. For a protein researcher to accept that atoms don’t exist means accepting that they’ve done years of reasearch that only makes sense on a false hypothesis. That evolution can be applied to keeping the peace is just a nice side effect of the basic science on evolution itself – kind of like how chaos theory, a brand of mathematics comming out of meteorology, has found wide applications in other fields.

Agknowledging the analogy between the resurrection and evolution is tempting – because of how embarrassing the analogy is the Christianity. The evidence for the resurrection consists of a few sentences of Paul’s letters and a bunch of anonymous, hearsay accounts – roughly equivalent to the evidence that the old theater in my hometown is haunted. The evidence for evolution consists of libraries full of solid scientific research.

Carter does not seem to clearly grasp the idea of something being supported by objective evidence, so he recasts it as a matter of faith:

As Richard Dawkins explained in answering last year’s question, “I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all ‘design’ anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection.” This is the core of their mystical faith system; everything rests on this claim being indubitable.

This badly misunderstands Dawkins in that Dawkins is conjecturing from the one case we know – life on earth – to all hypothetical intelligences anywhere. This is what he cannot prove. Evolution is unprovable only insofar as we cannot prove that God didn’t create the world in 1921. Carter’s willingness to get excited at the mention that science is unprovable is a classic example of the inability of fundamentalists to tell the difference between an unproven belief in one’s own hands and an unproven belief in the tooth fairy.

He further fails to understand that a scientific worldview is not built on one central fairy tale, the way religions are. Yes much science is based on evolution. There is also much science based on the existence of atoms, the roundness of the earth, and inverse square laws. What underlies all these is a belief that while the world may often seem inexplicable; rigorous, objective investigation involving testable hypothesis can help us make sense of it. The alternative is “we don’t understand this, therefore [God/psi/UFOs/ghosts/synchronity/etc].” The presuppositionalism of Carter, Johnson, and Ham denies that these questions can be settled objectively, so they instead try to force their ideas into the schools through political muscle. This makes them a whimpier version of their intellectual forebearers, who used inquisitions rather than school-board elections to enforce their faith-based beliefs.

Similarly, Carter translates Sam Harris’ comments about science and religion into terms he can understand: those of the Jealous Jehovah of the Old Testament. Throughout the Bible, God is represented as a baby who can’t stand it when people don’t pay attention to him, putting him in conflict with gods ranging from Baal to Hermes. The reason scientific thinking causes trouble for religion is that science is inherently rational, while religion is inherently irrational. The only way for religion to survive in a scientifically-minded society is for there to be clear boundaries between where blind faith is applied and where reason is applied, and for people to clearly understand the difference between the two. Such a situation is dangerous for religion for two reasons, though. It may be tempted to creep into areas where reason is clearly the way to go, as in the case of Intelligent Design. Then the backlash is likely to damage religion. On the other hand, when the public is put in the habit of thinking scientifically about things like medicine and evolution, there’s a risk they’ll start thinking that way about God and immortality.

That’s a slightly longer rant than I was planning. I think I needed it.

It’s been awhile since I’ve written about epistemology, and with the next philosophy carnival fast approaching, I think I’ll take another go at it.

A common response to radically skeptical thesis (we can’t know if the sun will rise tomorrow, we can’t know whether we’re living in a Matrix-type world or not) is, “well, true, but if the sun won’t rise tomorrow, there’s nothing we can do about it.

In toyed with a broader form of that idea in a previous post on proof. The broad form is “reject possibilities that cannot be evaluated on the evidence, because if they’re true, there’s nothing we can do about it.” For example, if there’s some evidence that we do in fact live in a Matrix-world, we could consider the evidence, but we must reject the idea of a Matrix-world that is impossible to identify as such. I still think that strategy is the best one, but I’m not sure the “there’s nothing we can do about it” justification works.

The problem is one that occured to me when reading about William Dembski’s abuse of no free lunch theorems. The skinny: he claimed that the theorems show no algorithm is any better or worse than random seaching for finding the high point in a fitness function, a measure of how well something works. This means natural selection won’t work any better than random generation of organisms, and cannot generate the life forms we see. The flaw in this argument is that the theorems were for the set of all possible fitness functions – a set in which most functions are completely chaotic. The real-world scenarios that evolution deals with look more like rolling hills, however. (See the pictures in the link, they show this better than I could put it into words.) There may be lots of hypothetical random worlds where natural selection wouldn’t work, but ours isn’t one of them.

Now back to epistemology. Why not assume that worlds where “reject possibilities that cannot be evaluated on the evidence” works make up a tiny fraction of all possible worlds? Is there any a priori grounds on which we can decide whether a world of testable hypothesis has a high, 50/50, or infinitesimal chance of existing? I’m not sure.

This derives from a problem in determining a priori probabilities more generally. One person might say, “God either exists or he doesn’t, that’s a 50/50 chance,” and another might say, “The standard God (omnipotent, etc.) is only one possibility of an infinity, so that’s an infinitesimal chance.” How do you decide between them a priori? You can’t. That causes serious trouble for any theory of knowledge that attempts to start with certain probabilities.

Yesterday, I turned in a rather lengthy paper for chemistry class, the end product of I forget how many hours going to libraries, accessing online journal archives, figuring out what specialist-oriented articles were saying, and then typing the thing up. It’s something I think everyone should do, and not just because I’m a sadist who believes that if I must suffer, everyone else should too.

The assignment was to find an article in the popular press dealing with science and reasearch the science behind it by going through peer-reviewed journals. My article was from Scientific American, on memory enhancement in humans. I focused on the reaserch on NMDA receptors by Joseph Tsein and Ya-Ping Tang:

Before a neuron naturally increases CREB, certain channels on its membrane must open to allow positive ions to flow into the cell. The ions then trigger a cascade of events leading to the activation of CREB. One channel of interest is known as NMDA. In 1999 Joseph Z. Tsein, Ya-Ping Tang and their colleagues, then at Princeton University, discovered that increasing the number of NMDA receptors in the mouse hippocampus led to better performance on a spatial-memory task. Now researchers and pharmaceutical companies are pursuing NMDA receptor agonists (they combine with the receptors) as nootropes. At least a dozen new drugs of this kind are making their way toward clinical trials.

The pharse “One channel of interest” hints at a larger field of research, but one might be forgiven for thinking these were some really smart guys who made these super mice all on their own.

The truth becomes clear with a glance at the “references” section of the paper, in the September 2nd, 1999 issue of Nature where they published their results. It’s 30 items long, some of it involving the same scientists who enhanced the mice, but mostly other people’s work. What’s more, some of the things they cited were review articles, scholarly articles that bring together the work of many people in one place.

Furthermore, some of this stuff goes back a long way. The general principle they worked with, Hebb’s rule, was proposed in 1949. The more specific process, called long-term potentiation, was first described in 1973. The earliest review article talking about NMDA receptors I found dated 1981.

In the main paper, all the researchers had done was take an existing technique and used it to enhance an already identified gene, then test the resulting mice. This was, in other words, not a sudden brilliant accomplishment, but a small finishing brush stroke on a large body of research. Perhaps finishing is the wrong word, though, as this research will be built on further as companies try to develop drugs based on it.

This reminded me of one of Bob Park’s warning signs of pseudoscience:

6) An important discovery is made in isolation. Most scientific advances draw heavily on research by a number of scientists or groups working in related areas. Successful innovators tend to be actively involved in the open exchange of scientific ideas and results, presenting their work at scientific conferences and publishing in mainstream scholarly journals. The image of a lone genius working in secrecy in an attic laboratory who makes a revolutionary breakthrough, is a staple of Hollywood horror films, but its hard to find examples in real life. There are frequent claims by lone inventors to have made such breakthroughs, but the claims rarely if ever stand up.

Good science then, builds on other things, and is built upon. In the Nature coverage of Tsein’s research, a key point was that it helped confirm certain ideas about the workings of the brain. When countless pieces of careful research have built on an idea, each helps confirm it, and though no piece may provide any degree of certainty on its own, taken together they can constitute a nearly indubitable proof. Atomic theory and the theory of common descent are like that. Intelligent Design is the polar opposite; not a shred of research has been done based off of it. Parapsychology is better, but only to a point: they keep doing initial experiments, but it never builds.

Unfortunately, it will take quite a bit of work to get people to realize this. As I mentioned in my introduction, one might think, from reading the Scientific American article that this was the work of lone geniuses. Similarly, many people probably think that the evidence for evolution began and ended with Darwin. We might, though, work on this problem by inviting people to browse the scientific papers behind a random news report. We might, if not for the strange looks doing so would invite.

Dean has cited the comments on the further debunking of his HIV/AIDS nonsense as, “profitable.” As I read his response there, his position makes less and less sense to me. First, he accuses McBride of making the ad hominem fallacy for attacking Al-Bayati’s credentials. Then he says:

I tried reading Orac’s response, by the way, but it was so full of false accusations that I couldn’t get through it. The man argues first and foremost through attacks on others’ credibility. I do not, for example, “wave credentials” at anybody, not for my friends or detractors. I note only that credentials do matter, and that in any area of science, a qualified scientist should be respected as having the right to a dissent, even if it’s a minority position, AND, that one shouldn’t treat qualified scientists as kooks or people who can be dismissed with an airy wave of the hand. That is all I have ever said on the subject of credentials; Orac’s dishonesty in this leads me to the (admittedly ad hominem) conclusion that he can’t be trusted to be honest on anything else.

Is Dean’s position, perhaps, that credentials are important, just not important enough to be critically examined?

What really caught my eye, though, was how he describes ad hominem arguments:

It’s a logical fallacy that works like this:

1 Person A makes claim X
2 Person B makes an attack on person A
3 Therefore, A’s claim is false

When I saw Dean using strict logical form, I got excited because it meant a chance to do something useful with careful philosopical reasoning.

First, we need to understand what a deductively valid argument looks like:

1 My brother is a cat
2 Cats have fins
3 Therefore, my brother has fins

Silly, but completely valid. Why? Though all three statements are false, if the first two were true, the third one would have to be true as well. Now, a fallacious argument:

1 George Bush is American.
2 All Texans are Americans
3 Therefore, George Bush is a Texan

The problem here is that Bush could be from California even if the first two statements were true.

This should make clear exactly what is wrong with ad hominem arguments, as defined by Dean. A person can make a claim and be attacked without the claim being false.

The following however, is a valid argument:

1 Arguments made by person A are likely to be flawed
2 Person A has made argument X
3 Therefore, argument X is likely to be flawed

This can be done with a few variations. The argument may be narrowed to apply, say only when A is talking about theoretical physics or when quoting famous scientists. The first premise may be established several different ways, such as with reference to bias or past mistakes. Different initial premises may also establish different probabilities of the person being mistaken.

The usefulness of such an argument can vary greatly with the situation. Suppose someone, after refuting Thomas Aquinas’ first four ways, proceeded to attack the fifth in the following:

1 Thomas Aquinas’ arguments tend to be flawed (see refutations of 1-4)
2 Thomas Aquinas made the argument known as the fifth way
3 Therefore, chances are the fifth way is flawed

Such an argument is valid, and may be all you need to put the fifth way out of your mind when debating someone more enthusiastic about William Lane Craig’s Kalam argument. However, if there is a serious question as to whether the fifth way is sound, there is a much more certain way to decide this: direct analysis of the argument. This should be possible, assuming whoever you’re debating has presented the argument itself, and is not merely saying, “I forget the argument, but at the time I read it it sounded pretty convincing.”

Now consider this argument:

1 Chris Hallquist cannot tell the difference between a spoof and something said in earnest (see here, here, and the fact that I though OBJECTIVE: Ministries was real
2 Chris Hallquist has cited X as an example of something outrageous a fundamentalist has said
3 Therefore, X may very well be a spoof

Again, you may be able to get a clearer analysis by looking at the thing itself. However, if I didn’t provide the source, or you look at the source and can’t tell, such an argument is worth keeping in mind.

Now, bringing it back around to the original debate, legitimate arguments can be made involving Al-Bayati’s credentials. For example:

1 Al-Bayati is not qualified to perform an autopsy
2 The cause-of-death findings of someone not qualified to perform an autopsy should not be trusted over those of a medical examiner
3 Therefore, Al-Bayati’s findings should not be trusted over those of a medical examiner

Let me add that to say, “His credentials have been attacked, therefore the argument is ad hominem, therefore the argument involves the fallacy described by Dean” is every bit as fallacious as the original fallacy.

This also means that Dean is wrong to say his conclusion about Orac is ad hominem in the sense he laid out. He could form his argument this way:

1 Orac was dishonest in his response
2 Someone who is dishonest cannot be trusted
3 Therefore, Orac cannot be trusted

Valid, though as I stressed in my explanation of validity, a valid argument may have a false premise. Dean supports premise 1 by citing Orac’s statement about waving credentials. To my knowledge, Dean only blogs and does not engage in face-to-face debates, so he has probably never picked up someone’s diploma and waved it in the air. I think all concerned are aware of this, making it clear Orac used “waving” in a metaphorical sense. As to whether Dean has performed metaphorical waving, one might consider the time he responded to a critic solely by saying two Nobel Laureates argeed with him. Whether this counts as metaphorical waving is a difficult question, which I leave to my readers to discuss in the comments. However, I think there is room for Dean to considerably strengthen that first premise.

This is a post I delayed for a very long time, it is a continuation of my previous posts on God in philosophy class. I first waited to see how my professor would wrap up the unit, then to talk to him in office hours about it. Here it goes.

The section on the design argument started with Paley’s famous version, then sloppily transitioned into talking about philosophy of science and the Intelligent Design issue. The main argument about both the 19th-century argument and its modern ghost was the design flaws in living things. He considered that God might have created organisms with design flaws, then said this requires knowing whether God would want to give things design flaws. Such an inquiry could not be scientific, he said, because such claims about God couldn’t be independently tested. Modern Intelligent Design arugments like irreducible complexity were ignored. I think if I had been teaching the course, I would have put the philosophy of science material in the epistemology unit and examined ID more thoroughly or not at all. However, I could also imagine worse, and am quite glad no Republican legislators were interfering with his teaching.

Then came the problem of evil. He assigned two articles on it, the first arguing there is not a good solution, the second arguing there is. He discussed the first article on a Monday, shooting down every defense offered by a questioning student. Wednesday, people wanted to review for Friday’s test, so he said “Okay, I’ll summarize the other article in two sentences” and then, after a pause, said “never mind, I won’t sumarize it, it doesn’t matter.”

As I said in previous posts (see above), he had introduced the topic saying things like, “I don’t want to cause any personal crises,” and there he was trying to put forth a strong case that God did not exist. I decided to go in and ask him about that in office hours. He said he was indeed an atheist, and shot down all refutations of the problem of evil because there are no good refutations. He also explained that he was worried the article he had assigned as a rebuttal was so weak that discussing it would only get some people more upset. He said he introduced the topic the way he did because he didn’t want anyone to think they had to agree with him to get a good grade.

Some teachers are very good at hiding their opinions. My senior year in high school, I took a class called “contemporary issues” where the teacher refused to reveal her political leanings, boaster about her a bility to play devil’s advocate, and made a game out of having us try to figure them out. The strongest piece of evidence I got one way or another was that she said if we took economics from her, we’d become convinced she’s uber-conservative. I reasoned she would only say this if she was actually liberal, but I never got solid confirmation.

She, of course, is the exception. Most people have difficulty discussing controversial issues without giving their opinions on them. My philosophy prof would have been better off starting by telling everyone what he told me in office hours, that he was an atheist but didn’t want anyone to feel they had to agree with him to get a good grade. I think this story shows why its a bad idea made professors scared to state their opinions on a class’ subject matter. A botched attempt at concealing one’s opions is likely to be more intimidating than an open argument.

Thursday, I went to see a magician by the name of Andre Kole perform on campus. What drew me in was the e-mail from Campus Crusade I got promoting the event:

Prepare to be amazed by Andre Kole!

World renowned magician, illusionist and investigator of the supernatural presents two mind-boggling hours of elaborate stage presentations dealing with the illusion and reality of life’s most intriguing questions:

Why am I here?
Where am I going?
Is there any real meaning and purpose to life?

A provocative magical and spiritual experience you will remember for as long as you live…and perhaps even longer!

Considered to be one of the greatest magical entertainers of our time, Andre Kole has performed in 79 countries for millions of people. His show will include his first hand investigation of the possibility of communication with the dead, the occult, and other psychic phenomena. Andre also studied the miracles of Jesus Christ to determine if his miracles could have been the work of a master magician.

Come see him at the Memorial Union Theater this Thursday, October 27, at 7:30 PM. Tickets on sale now to students for $5 at the Union box office!

With a little Googling, I found his skeptic’s credentials were, for the most part, solid. His online biography said he exposes hoaxes as part of his stage show and he apparently feels strongly that Satan can’t grant supernatural powers. He’s gone after Christian faith-healers as well. (The Taylor bit says he conceeds a tiny fraction of healings are real, but this seems to indicate by “real” he means “psychosomatic.”)

All of this makes it rather surprising that he would try to investigate Jesus’s alleged miracles. In the books I’ve read on paranormal investigation, one point comes out again and again: it is often impossible to look at a miracle-claim after the fact and figure out what happened. This point was even conceeded by one pro-parapsychology book. I made up my bring this issue up if there ended up being time for questions after the show.

Still, I walked to the show generally thinking positive thoughts about him. Previously, the most religious “skeptic” I knew of was Orac, who’s described himself as a “lapsed Catholic” and said, “I’m not an atheist. I’m not even sure I’ve reached the level of agnosticism yet.” (Does that make him a super-agnostic?) Nice to see someone on the other end of the religious spectrum fighting the good fight.

The show itself was excellent. Most of it could be divided into two categories: the mind-blowing illusions which began with his teleportation on stage and ended with his vanishing off, and audience participation stuff that, while simple, was acompanied by hilarious comic showmanship.

There was also a replica of an old spiritualist’s routine, though I imagine performed with more flair than than any 19th-century fraud. It involved him being tied up with some noise makers inside a “spirit cabinet,” i.e. cloth cylinder held up by assistants, along with first noise makers and then a blindfolded audience member. He began by making some noise, then throwing the noisemakers, the tabel they were on, and finally his guest’s shoes out of the cabinet. He also managed to put on a coat with his arms tied behind his back. At the end, he reminded everyone that it was all just a trick, and he wanted to show us an example of something that can seem quite convincing in an situation when honesty is taken for granted. I think he meant it to be obvious that the trick was some kind of escape-artistry, but he didn’t give away the exact secret.

After he was done with most of the magic, he explained he’d be going into the evangelism segment, and anyone who wasn’t interested could leave during the break he’d be taking. The main topic was Jesus and having a personal relationship with God, accompanied by a minor trick for flavor and a life story involving going to college in philosophy and psychology.

He did more railing against occultism, citing James Randi’s million-dollar challenge. Randi got air-brushed out of the picture though, here’s how he phrased it: “When Houdini came to this campus years ago, he was offering $25,000 for any proof of real paranormal powers, now it’s up to $1,000,000, and no one’s even gotten past the perliminary test.” I had to wonder if he didn’t want looking up and being led astray by the damn atheist, though maybe he just thought the name wasn’t important. He said we should only think Jesus was God if he did things only God can do, and sure enough, when he examined Jesus’s miracles from a magician’s perspective, they held up.

Then came the part that blew my mind far more than any of his tricks, though not in a good way. It was a comment made in a segment of his speech where he touted the 400 (actually, 399) scientists who have rejected Darwinism: “I know as a magician that you can’t get something from nothing, we seem to do it, but it’s really impossible.” In other words, he confused the cosmological argument with criticisms of evolution. As I walked out of the building, I couldn’t stop wondering, who the hell gave this man a philosophy degree? The Jesus thing, I could understand. He was no biblical scholar and seemed to think the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses, but I’d expect someone with a philosophy degree to avoid such an obvious fallacy. I was considering challenging him on that bit of bull rather than the miracle investigation. The point was mooted, though, when he did his vanishing finish and didn’t come back.

James Randi has pointed out that being a scientist doesn’t mean you know anything about sleight of hand. This story is a reminder being a magician doesn’t mean you know anything about science or Biblical scholarship, and having studied philosophy in your youth doesn’t mean you have the slightest skill at reasoned argument.