A Poorly Illustrated Guide to Genetically Modified Organisms

Anybody in the mood for a tasty meal? I’ve been slaving over a hot stove all morning working on the main course: a heaping casserole of haute SCIENCE! On the side, I’ll be serving up a generous spread of odiferous fruits, sinfully steamed vegetables, and decadent meats… but there’s a catch! All of my splendid victuals hold a dark secret: someone has been tampering with their very DNA. That’s right, I’m inviting you over for a dinner of Genetically Modified Organisms. I hope you’re hungry.

These chimeras of the kitchen, these degenerates of digestion, are showing up in produce departments worldwide. But what exactly are they? GMOs are creatures whose genetic makeup has been altered in order to confer a useful change in anatomy and physiology. These organisms are created by taking existing genes from one critter and inserting them into the genome of another, usually by means of a viral vector. Examples include corn that produces its own pesticide, cows with increased milk production, glow-in-the-dark kittens, soybeans immune to certain herbicides, and bacteria that synthesize pharmaceuticals.

Did you say glow-in-the-dark kittOHDEARGOD.

Genetic engineering isn’t all recombinant kittens and spliced rainbows; there is a vocal group of concerned individuals ardently opposed to the proliferation of GMOs. These organisms are despised by many, especially within the organic and natural foods movement. Yet there are many that hail GMOs as nearly miraculous boons to society. What are you to make of this discord, Dear Reader? Are GMOs a blessing, a curse, or more complex? I’ll do my best to stir this pot of biological soup and explore the many flavors of this very issue over the course of my next 3 articles, hopefully adding a subtle note of Skepticism to the bouquet. In this series, I’ll be looking at the potential impacts of GM technology. Specifically, I will be addressing the many criticisms leveled against GMOs. These arguments fall into 3 broad categories, and I’ll be dealing with each in separate articles. The categories are:

1. Hazards to human health

2. Effects on the environment

3. Offenses against Nature and Decency

Won’t you join me, Dear Readers? I’ll even let you take home the leftovers.

Part 1: GMOs and human health

Are you scientifically literate? A quiz from CSM

Hey all!

The Christian Science Monitor has posted an interesting quiz about scientific literacy. It’s really more about scientific trivia, but nonetheless, I had a good time taking it. I got 41/50, but I guessed on a few, and really appreciated my background in Latin & Greek! Haha. There are quite a few questions about cosmology, particles, chemistry, and some other great topics.

Are You Scientifically Literate?

William & Mary professor Elizabeth Harbron displays vials with merocyanine and rhodamine dye in her lab in Williamsburg, Va. (Steve Helber/AP) – from the quiz page

Post a comment and let us know how you did!

Until next time,

Dave

Dave Muscato is the 2012 Writing Intern for the Secular Student Alliance in Columbus, Ohio. He is also Vice President of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. A junior at Mizzou studying economics & anthropology and minoring in philosophy & Latin, Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday and twice monthly for the Humanist Community at Harvard. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com. Opinions posted here do not necessarily reflect the views of MU SASHA, the Secular Student Alliance, nor the Humanist Community at Harvard.

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and don’t forget… other SASHA members! We are here for you, too!

Columbia, Missouri-area named 22nd “Brainiest City” by The Atlantic

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Hello all, Dave here!

Universities tend to draw in brains, and the University of Missouri is no exception.

Jesse Hall, University of Missouri-Columbia

What makes Columbia different is that, for a Midwestern town, we’re very liberal: We’re a city of about 110,000 with a Planned Parenthood clinic, a strong LGBTQ advocacy presence, and lots of other great stuff. Around 50% of adults in Columbia have bachelor’s degrees, and about 25% of adults have master’s degrees. Go 20 miles in any direction and things are very, very different. According to our Wikipedia page, we’re known as “The Athens of Missouri,” which is weird, because there actually IS a small town called Athens, MO. I’ve never heard anyone call us that in person, but it fits, I think. We’re a blue island in a sea of red.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/06/americas-brainiest-cities/2132/#

I was born and raised in Columbia, and although I also lived in Philadelphia and travel a lot, I think it’s a great town and I keep finding myself ending up back there. What makes Columbia so different? It has a strong secular mindset, even if all its citizens aren’t nonreligious. It has a lot of scientists and a lot of doctors, people who value and are good at critical thinking. And this are very positively linked with brains.

I’m glad Columbia made the list!

- Dave

Dave Muscato is Vice President of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. A junior at Mizzou studying economics & anthropology and minoring in philosophy & Latin, Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday and twice monthly for the Humanist Community at Harvard. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com.

Follow Dave on Google+
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Helpful resources:

Godisimaginary.com – Iron Chariots Wiki – Skeptics’ Annotated Bible / Skeptics’ Annotated Qur’an – AtheismResource.com – TalkOrigins.org

YouTubers: Evid3nc3, Thunderf00t, TheAmazingAtheist, The Atheist Experience, Edward Current, NonStampCollector, Mr. Deity, Richard Dawkins, QualiaSoup

Blogs: Greta Christina, PZ Myers, The Friendly Atheist, WWJTD?, Debunking Christianity, SkepChick

and don’t forget… other SASHA members! We are here for you, too!

The Intuitive Response to Criticism of Religion

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Hi, I’m Seth Kurtenbach.  Some hubbub recently developed regarding a recent Science article, or rather, its title.  Like most of the respondents, I haven’t read the article, but that’s okay, because I mean to comment only on the responses to it.  I’m told by a very reliable source that the study itself, consisting of five experiments approaching the issue from a variety of angles, was well-designed and well-executed, and that in the article the authors carefully discourage overly-zealous inferences from the results.  I want to focus on two things here.  First, I’ll seek an explanation for why Professor Ernst, the very reliable source, is so accommodating to religious belief, while elsewhere in his blog he is confrontational toward political positions rather than religious ones, appealing to similar rhetorical techniques as the atheists he decries.  I think this difference among his treatments of positions with which he disagrees is explainable in terms of social taboos.  Second, I will take a look at this theist’s intuitive response to Scientific American‘s report on the Science article.  His response is a good illustration of why intuition is a poor guide to critical thinking.

In his article on the religious belief stuff, Ernst writes,

But I also don’t come down on the side of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and the rest who often resort to rhetoric when it comes to questions of faith. I think they do everyone a disservice, and that a lot of people on all sides of this issue deserve a lot more respect.

This is interesting for two reasons.  First, earlier in his blog, Ernst explains that he’s an atheist, and that he’s not one of those “what’s true for some may not be true for others” sort of atheist,

I’m an atheist, and have been for all my adult life (and much of my life before that, too). I’ve never been shy about being an atheist, and I definitely don’t take the view that atheists and religious believers can both be “right” in any meaningful sense. If anything is true, it is that God either exists or does not exist, and there’s no middle ground to be had. Someone has to be wrong about the question of the existence of God. My opinion is that people who believe in God are wrong…

Now, I know Ernst personally, and I bet he’s got some pretty damn good reasons for being an atheist, and for disagreeing with the conclusion of theists.  I bet his reasons against theism are about as good as, if not better than, his reasons against free-market libertarianism.  He describes his position in that debate thus [his emphasis],

Of the people who profess to believe in the efficiency of unfettered free markets, there are actually two types: wingnuts and hypocrites.

Of course, after making such a strong rhetorical claim, he proceeds to give reasons backing it up.  They are good reasons, in my opinion, and I agree with him on the issue.

So, why the difference in treatment regarding theists and free-market libertarians?  Why so polite and respectful to theists, but so rhetorical and confrontational to free-market libertarians?  I think the explanation is simple:  it is still somewhat socially taboo to criticize religion, but political beliefs are perfectly fair game.  Dawkins and Dennett are often quick to point out this inconsistency of behavior.  There’s no reason that religious beliefs should be free from the exact same type of aggressive criticism that political beliefs receive.  I know Ernst thinks that there are at least two types of theists: dishonest (Plantinga) and deceived (Plantinga’s acolytes); why not give them the royal treatment as well?  It would make people feel uncomfortable, and probably hurt some feelings, but why is that a reason against such rhetoric, when exactly that type of rhetoric is used in political discourse?

Speaking of hurt feelings, let’s take a look at Trent Dougherty’s response to the title of the Scientific American article. Trent tells us that the article in Scientific American caused him to become angry and annoyed, and that these emotional responses prompted him to write a rhetorical, snarky response.  He also tells us that he’s writing the article in a rush, as he’s on his way to a conference (perhaps ironically, the conference is called LOGOS), so he doesn’t have time to remove the emotional snarkiness.  However, he also indicates that he deems his angry response appropriate after giving it some reflection.  I’m not sure how he had enough time to reflect on his anger’s appropriateness, but wrote the resulting article in a rush, late for a LOGOS conference.  Due reflection tends to calm me down considerably.  But then, I’m on quite a bit of Prozac.

It seems like Trent is primarily reacting to the title of the article, “How Critical Thinkers Lose Their Faith in God: Religious belief drops when analytical thinking rises.”  My limited knowledge of magazines suggests that titles are often the work of editors, interested in generating attention and controversy. Trent also notes that most of his anger is due to the stuff

“around” the article: that the study would be run the way it was, that so many important questions go unasked, the propagandistic title, the responses to and uses of it etc.

But, Trent mostly directs his anger at the article itself, primarily because it does not support the zeal of the title,

Now look back at the title. What a joke. There is not even a suggestion in the SA article about loss of faith in God. It is not even mentioned.

So, he’s mostly mad about the title, because it is about God and the article is not about God, yet nonetheless he’s determined to

go through [the article] line-by-line to keep focus during the rage.

I’m not sure Trent actually read the original article in Science, but he nonetheless critiques it in virtue of Scientific American‘s report on it (or at least the title of the report).  It seems his emotional response is causing him to completely lose focus on the proper target of his criticism.  This is a potential side-effect of intuitive thinking, I’d say.

Part of Trent’s critique defends theism in virtue of its intuitive appeal, asking, “Don’t we *want* people to think intuitively? Isn’t that better than the alternative?”  Given that the alternative is discursive, analytical thinking, I’d say ‘no’, intuitive thinking is not better, especially with respect to fundamental questions of reality.  I think Trent’s article is the result of mostly intuitive thinking, and it seems to highlight the problems with intuitive thinking.

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Seth Kurtenbach is a philosophy Master’s student and computer science PhD student at the University of Missouri.  His research focuses on applications of formal logic and game theory to questions about knowledge and rationality.  He is growing a mighty beard, in order to increase his philosophical powers.  Feel free to contact Seth at seth.kurtenbach@gmail.com with inquiries about philosophy, logic, guest blogging, or visiting to give a presentation!

Helpful resources:

Godisimaginary.com
Iron Chariots Wiki
Skeptics’ Annotated Bible / Skeptics’ Annotated Qur’an
AtheismResource.com
TalkOrigins.org

YouTubers: Evid3nc3, Thunderf00t, TheAmazingAtheist, The Atheist Experience, Edward Current, NonStampCollector, Mr. Deity, Richard Dawkins, QualiaSoup

Blogs: Professor Zac Ernst,  Greta Christina, PZ Myers, The Friendly Atheist, WWJTD?, Debunking Christianity, SkepChick, Rationally Speaking.

SASHA Guest Post: “Consciousness, Lost & Found” by Benjamin Schulz

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Today’s article is a guest post by computer scientist, graduate research assistant at the University of Missouri, and friend of SASHA, Ben Schulz.

People say consciousness is a problem. The origin of the problem, as posed to philosophy and science, is actually quite straightforward. We live at a point in history where no facet of the universe seems to lie beyond the reach of scientific explanation, including consciousness itself. There is something about the subjective experience of consciousness, however, that makes these explanations deeply unsatisfying. Satisfactory explanations are thus pursued through various alternative theories of mind that are difficult to ground in the scientific tradition, and the problem thus arises.

What is truly odd, however, is that even though there are two sides to the debate over the problem, only one side seems to view the problem as problematic. Mechanists, such as Dennett, argue straightforwardly and forcefully that every aspect of consciousness can be grounded in an empirically observable phenomenon, given sufficient time and scientific resources. Proponents of the irreducibility of consciousness, such as Chalmers and Searle, argue that consciousness is the root of all immediate experiences and understandings, which are by their very nature a priori irreducible. Most of the debate seems to focus upon the problem of whether physical things, as we know them, are adequate to account for the complex and varied phenomena of consciousness. The mechanists seem to overlook the admittedly difficult-to-discern motivations that makes the anti-reductionists resist reductionist explanations so strenuously, while the anti-reductionists seem oblivious to the fact that their defenses are essentially nothing more than alternative reductionist explanations based on a non-standard metaphysics.

The debate between these two views evokes very strong reactions, and there seems to be little possibility of philosophically reconciling the two. The progress of scientific explanations of the mind suggests that they may prevail in the long run, but the persistence of anti-reductionist accountings of consciousness also seems to suggest that the anti-reductionist program has an effectively infinite space into which to retreat. (There are, it seems, always new places to which to re-locate spirits and essences.) This kind of impasse, when it appears, is often symptomatic of a fundamental difference of values, but it is deeply troubling to think that the physical or non-physical nature of consciousness should come down to a value judgment. Such a judgment would present a very unappealing choice indeed, between either a disingenuous escape into self-directed self-delusion, or a grim nihilism alienated from the very substance of the most vivid and immediate features of personal experience.

The choice, however, between a physical and a non-physical consciousness is a false one. The real question should not be what consciousness is made of, but in what sense we should think of consciousness as real.

The problem of the problem.

For thinkers like Dennett, consciousness is not a problem at all. Everything that consciousness does can be accounted for, in principle, by a biological mechanism, and the realization of this possibility is enough to make the problem vanish. Dennett’s audaciously titled “Consciousness Explained” (1991) is a meticulous, powerful, and extremely persuasive argument to exactly this effect, and I will proceed from the assumption that Dennet’s argument therein is correct. In this admirable work of philosophy, Dennett skillfully deconstructs the classical arguments against a purely physical basis for consciousness, revealing that the disassembly of their pretenses leaves little more than very subtly concealed, baseless assumptions. There is, however, an important philosophical wrinkle that even Dennett does not seem to notice, and that seems to pass by uncommented elsewhere: the very fact that anti-reductionist theories of consciousness can be engaged so effectively by a mechanist argument implies that these anti-reductionist theories are, in fact, mechanist theories in disguise.

The apotheosis of this kind of mechanism masquerading as idealism is Chalmers’ proposal for a “nonreductive explanation” of consciousness. Chalmers suggests that consciousness ought to be considered as something of an elemental physical force, comparable to gravity or electromagnetism. Certainly, the idea of an as-yet undefined physical force does make consciousness a problem, and the simultaneous elusiveness and irreducibility of this sort of ‘mind-force’ makes the problem hard. Dennett dismisses this proposal by incisively and very correctly pointing out that positing such irreducibility is completely unnecessary from a scientific perspective. If, the argument goes, all the functions and behaviors of consciousness can be elucidated in terms of physical processes, then consciousness itself has been elucidated in terms of physical processes. Beneath this argument is a fundamentally philosophical proposition: a thing is exactly the sum of its distinguishing features. This basic proposition is significant because it can be located not just in mechanist arguments, but also, perhaps surprisingly, in anti-reductionist arguments such as Searle’s “Chinese Room” and the substance of subjective experience posited in the philosophical literature under the name of ‘qualia’. Where anti-reductionists thus part ways with the mechanists is in the sorts of things they consider “distinguishing features”: anti-reductionists consider subjectivity itself, or else some hidden force, to be an irreducible, distinguishing feature, while mechanists do not.

Anti-Reductionists seem unwilling to abandon scientific explanation, but just as unwilling to abandon their assertion that consciousness itself is lodged in an elusive substance or force that is fundamentally distinct from any other kind of physical thing. This conflict is the real heart of the problem of consciousness, but the passion it generates is much more than sentimental attachment to an illogical idea. What anti-reductionists really yearn for is a consciousness as real as the other objects of scientific study.

The real and its discontents.

It deserves to be asked why the idea of an irreducible consciousness is so strongly appealing. Certainly, the anti-reductionist view presents a zoo of logical contradictions, but these contradictions nonetheless seem to be grasping strenuously at something. Dennett seems content to dismiss the anti-reductionist furor as a misguided attachment, but such dismissals do not make for a very satisfying explanation of their motive or persistence. The anti-reductionists are struggling to express something problematic in the language of science. The problem may lie with the thing being expressed, but it may just as easily lie with the language in which it is being expressed.

Science today has established itself as the powerful and very successful arbiter truth. As such, Science has become the language of truth. Inhabitants of the modern world are at great pains to argue otherwise. Every language, however, is haunted by some unutterable. The undesired consequence of the triumph of Science is that some features of human experience are not easily articulated in the language of Science, which places them dangerously near to the realm of the unreal. The subjective experience of consciousness is just such a disturbingly inexpressible thing. While prior eras of thought could attribute this most basic and immediate phenomenon to ‘spirit’ or ‘God’, the language of Science has no words for such things. The reduction of consciousness itself to simpler terms is not problematic for the language of Science, but it nonetheless represents a radical shift of worldview.

Science works in such a way that its objects of concern are public and universal. A scientifically recognizable phenomenon must be something that can be demonstrated to others in a reproducible way. This principle lies at the heart of all empiricism: real things are distinguished from unreal things (lies, hoaxes, delusions, hallucinations, flights of fancy, semantic confusions) by an experiment that situates them within the structure of already agreed-upon things. The power and utility of empiricism is quite evident, and I don’t think it needs discussion here. The modern ethos very often, however, goes beyond a mere acknowledgment of empiricism, assuming instead something much stronger: empirically real is absolutely real.

The reason that I agree with Dennett’s arguments is that consciousness does have behaviors and functions whose underlying mechanisms are, in principle, scientifically demonstrable. What the arguments of Dennett and other mechanists overlook, however, is that consciousness also has fundamentally private aspects that cannot be experimentally reproduced in the empirical sense. The anti-reductionists are mistaken to conflate these private aspects of consciousness with empirically describable features, but they are right in their intuition that some part of this bigger picture eludes even the most thorough empirical reduction. The brute fact is that there is, by definition, nothing objectively or publicly demonstrable about subjective experience. (This fact is what motivates the well-known philosophical problem of how we, as conscious beings, know that other beings are conscious.) If we adopt the view that, with no exceptions, everything real is scientifically describable, then it must be that subjectivity is not real.

Consciousness, according to the mechanist account, is scientifically describable because it can be fully characterized in terms of empirically observable features. Taking this thesis as given, a number of difficult philosophical questions clear right up. For example, the problem how one conscious being can tell if another being is also conscious is fully resolved because, in principle, one such being can go down a list of features to look for, attempt to locate them all, and reach a logical conclusion. Disturbingly, however, new and equally difficult philosophical questions appear in some unexpected places. It may be one thing, in the mechanist scheme, for you to determine whether or not I am conscious, but how can you determine whether or not you yourself are conscious? If you’re reading this sentence right now you probably see nothing particularly problematic in the judgment that you are conscious. It’s just obvious. That, however, is exactly the problem. The fact that you are conscious is so blatantly manifest that it seems to need no explanation at all.

To claim something as ‘obvious’ is not generally regarded to be a scientific explanation. Nonetheless, I find it nothing short of incredible that you, the reader, would regard your own consciousness as nothing less than obvious. Let’s suppose, however, that you really aren’t satisfied with this obvious fact: you want a real, scientific explanation. The good news is that, according to the mechanist perspective, an explanation is available or will be forthcoming in the near future. It is instructive, however, to apply Occam’s Razor at this juncture, and to ask what we actually gain by theory that over-explains the already obvious.

The mechanist state, and the zombie apartheid.

In “Consciousness Explained”, Dennett draws a fascinating connection between social justice and the idea that consciousness is fully empirical. This connection occurs in the context of a deconstruction of Chalmers’ strange philosophical device of the “zombie”, a being that is functionally indistinct from conscious beings but somehow is not itself conscious. Dennett mercilessly excoriates Chalmers’ apparent return to the strange idea of “indiscernible identicals”, and compares the arguments necessary to assert the unconsciousness of a philosophical zombie to those arguments made against the humanity of oppressed people in racist or classist societies. This line of argument is quite convincing; arbitrary and insubstantial distinctions between humans are indeed at the heart of racism and classism. If consciousness is just some undetectable, undefinable essence that can nonetheless be somehow discriminated, the door is opened to all kinds of blatant prejudice. It is interesting to ask, however, whether a radically empiricist accounting of consciousness is capable to producing its own kind of dystopias.

Suppose that you are not satisfied with the obviousness of your own consciousness; you demand scientific verification. True scientific verification, however, is not something that you can do yourself. Evidence for your own consciousness must be reproducible outside of your own personal experience of the situation, and it must be possible for others to view the results and agree on them. Taking this as given, you assemble your friends and conduct a scrupulously careful and well-designed experiment to test whether or not you are conscious. Much to your surprise, however, your friends view the results and come to the unanimous conclusion that you are not actually conscious all; feelings to the contrary must have been just an anomaly stirred up by some unusual external sources of interference. You dispute the results, and so the experiment is repeated again, and then again. Each time, the conclusion reached is the same. Your friends must conclude that, charming character though you are, you’re just not conscious.

It’s one thing to be judged unconscious by a few friends who are nonetheless quite fond of you. What if, on the other hand, the matter of the population of unconscious persons was taken up by the state? Might the state might judge the population of unconscious people to be a nuisance, like stray animals? What if the state even regarded them as a danger, considering their obvious proclivity for mistakes and their almost certain lack of any kind of moral agency? Any well organized society would certainly have a corps of professionals charged with monitoring and evaluating the consciousness of its citizens, and something would certainly need to be done with all of the unconscious people dwelling uncomfortably close to the conscious. Perhaps they could just be imprisoned, or, in a society wishing for a more flattering veneer of compassion, indefinitely institutionalized? If appearances were no object, perhaps the state could simply have unconscious people executed? Everyone has to make a few sacrifices, after all, to maintain a well-ordered society. If you yourself were judged unconscious by such a menacingly state-appointed panel of physicians, surely you would appeal desperately for the truth of your own consciousness, no matter how scientific the refutations presented.

I should be clear, at this juncture, that I do not mean to suggest that mechanist theories of consciousness bear any such authoritarian intent, nor do I mean to suggest that their necessary consequence is a dystopian state in which otherwise upstanding people are coldly adjudicated to be subhuman. What the fable of the zombie apartheid exhibits, however, is a world to which has been dealt a crushing blow to the sanctity of private mental life and to the traditional idea of individual agency. In such a world, your most immediate experiences are nothing but a hollow illusion acted out by incomprehensible, alien forces beyond your understanding and control. In such a world, each one of us turns out, under the gaze of science, not to be quite who we thought we were. Certainly, there is a very real loss in this outcome, and it is this loss that the anti-reductionists surely must sense, and it must be the horror they feel at this sensation that motivates them to struggle so fiercely against reductionist explanation.

The problem with anti-reductionists arguments is that, no matter how clever, they are doomed perpetually to retreat ever-further out of the reach of ever-newer scientific developments. The failure of an anti-reductionist explanation of consciousness is inevitable. The demise of subjective, conscious experience, however, is not.

An explanation of the explanation of consciousness.

The mechanist position proceeds from the very reasonable assertion that things are nothing other than their distinguishing features. If science can reduce those distinguishing features to physical processes, than those things are also physical processes. The fact that such a reduction is emotionally disturbing to behold is not sufficient reason to reject the deduction; it is certainly not an excuse for attempts to escape into pseudoscientific fantasy. Even so, there is something fundamentally different in the reduction of consciousness to physical processes; it appears to radically undermine the worth and veracity of subjective experience by reducing it to things that we can never quite see or fully understand. If we can’t trust our own subjective experience, what can we trust?

One argument is that the remedy lies in the internalization of the facts of natural science as it is understood today. If only we really convincingly saw ourselves as physical processes, the argument goes, there would be nothing disturbing or frightening about reducing consciousness to these very same processes. There is some truth to this view of things, but the truth is not quite a complete one — at least, not if science is to successfully stand in for religion, as it seems it is being called upon to do in this scenario. The lack is well-illustrated by a small thought experiment. Suppose you very successfully convince yourself of the truth that even your most intimate conscious experiences, from which are woven your very identity as a human being, are nothing other than the interplay of physical forces X, Y, and Z. You take X, Y, and Z to be almost sort of personal totems; they are the real truth of your being, even if you aren’t always able to perceive their activity. One day, a startling scientific breakthrough is announced: the theories of forces X, Y, and Z are proven to be completely wrong, and must be replaced by A, B, and C, which are strange and radically different. From the perspective of science, this is completely unproblematic; theories come and go. For individuals, though, theories of self do not come so cheaply; the new development results in a necessary trauma, as you really honestly and sincerely saw X, Y, and Z as your true self, and it turns out that you were mistaken all along. Science, by its very construction, must reject any theory that is convincingly contradicted by observation, and it is of the strongest necessity that there is no telling which theories may be discarded, or what may replace them. Humans, however, rely very crucially upon persistent, relatively unchanging ideas about themselves in which to ground their identity and orient themselves in the world. The prospect of an existence in which our most basic views of ourselves and of the world are ceaselessly rent asunder and reassembled can only be described as hellish. Such a metaphysical suffering may be manageable, but it is certainly not pleasant.

Consciousness is a special kind of problem because it represents the first and most basic fact of existence. Conscious experience is the means by which we build all of our internal models of the world. Without these world-models, we’re hopelessly adrift and helpless. If consciousness itself is just another kind of model, upon which the others are based, the picture of reality begins to look very tenuous indeed. Our models are based on consciousness, and consciousness is based, it would seem, upon a world that lies forever beyond our grasp. Doesn’t all this follow from a reductionist account of consciousness? No, actually. It doesn’t follow at all.

Ontology and metaphysics matter very much at junctures such as this one because they illuminate the foundational assumptions underlying arguments that might otherwise dazzle us with their vivid complexity. There is an irreducibly metaphysical axiom at the heart of all the despair over the reduction of consciousness to physics, and this axiom deserves a close examination. The axiom is this: there is a real world of objects that are outside of, and fundamentally separate from, subjective experience. That is not a scientific deduction. It is not even an obvious fact. It is a pure decision. If this decision is reversed, if we reject the idea of a universal, objective reality, then all the existential horror evaporates.

It will be immediately objected that such a rejection is solipsistic and fundamentally incompatible with scientific thought. This objection holds no water. The idea of a universal, objective reality is only necessary in order to prevent circular definitions. It is not at all clear why circular definitions should be everywhere forbidden, or whether their exclusion may actually prevent the description of very real and very important phenomena. It is true that circularity may introduce paradox, but no matter how confounding or strange paradox may be, there is no universally recognizable principle dictating that paradoxical statements may not be true or meaningful. While arguments to the contrary are delivered very passionately, they are nonetheless at great pains to justify themselves as anything more than axiomatic insistence.

Circularity immediately eludes the alienation of reductionist explanation by way of a beautifully simple argument. Suppose that you grasp that your consciousness is reducible to basic physical processes X, Y, and Z. What makes the reality of physical processes X, Y, and Z apparent is their empirical demonstration. Empirical demonstration is founded upon direct observation, that is, seeing for one’s self. Seeing for one’s self is conscious event. Therefore, processes X, Y, and Z depend upon your consciousness just as much as your consciousness depends upon X, Y, and Z. Since this is so, there is no reason to privilege your understanding of X, Y, and Z as “more true” or “more real” than your own subjective experience. Ergo, your conscious experience is exactly as real as it was before you conceived of it in terms of physical processes.

The mechanist solution to the problem of consciousness could avoid all the humanistic grief it causes if only it would forgo the insistence on having the last word. Consciousness is such that, properly speaking, there can be no last word.

The monstrosity of Hofstadter.

Of all the authors I know, Douglas Hofstadter comes closest to grasping these facts directly. Hofstadter is a truly unique thinker, in that he admits the mechanistic explanation of consciousness, while still acknowledging the irreducibility of the subject. What’s more, Hofstadter even seems to understand the deep relevance of circularity and self-reference to the problem of consciousness. Hofstadter’s magnum opus, “Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” (often referenced as “GEB” for short), is a vast, playfully brilliant, and strikingly original exegesis of the complex and strangely consciousness-like behaviors of self-reference as it appears in art, music, symbolic logic and other kinds of abstract systems. GEB stands alone as a truly unique work of literature and philosophy, and is well-deserving of its status as a modern classic. Even so, GEB is more poesis than analysis. Well aware of this fact, Hofstadter published “I Am A Strange Loop” (“Strange Loop” for short) in 2007, nearly three decades after the original publication of GEB, as an attempt to refine and more directly articulate the core philosophical ideas of GEB as they pertain to the problems of consciousness. While I have tremendous respect for Hofstadter as a thinker, and tremendous admiration for his intellectual works, I must humbly insist that there is more to say on the matter, and that it ties directly to the problem of an external, substantive reality.

Hofstadter clearly recognizes the importance of circularity in the development of a phenomenon like consciousness, and he even hints at something like irreducibility in his references to formal undecidability in symbolic logics, but he seems unable to break free of the idea of an external reality. While this inability in no way hampers the theoretical development, it nonetheless tinges the exposition with a faint but ineffable tone of sadness. Hofstadter himself makes this tension evident in the “teleportation to mars” scenario, which appears late in “Strange Loop”, and which I’ve discussed elsewhere. To briefly recapitulate, Hofstadter sketches a hypothetical future in which human teleportation is possible, but only in a purely “informational sense” that does not actually relocate the teleported subject, but merely reproduces a perfect copy of it elsewhere in space. Hofstadter then posits a variation on the scenario, wherein the teleportation procedure results in the death of the original subject, e.g. teleportation from Earth to Mars produces an identical subject on Mars, but results in the death of the subject on Earth. As Hofstadter tells it, this scenario reads like a tragedy of subjectivity: even though the self on Earth knows objectively that a perfect copy with all its distinguishing features lives on elsewhere, it still cannot help but feel sorrow and fear at the prospect of its own inevitable demise. The conclusion, although Hofstadter doesn’t seem to state it directly, is that objectified knowledge of the self is not a substitute for subjective experience of the self. Reflected into the problem of consciousness, a reduction of consciousness to objective terms cannot replace the subjective experience of those very terms. Hofstadter’s teleportation story is a vivid, and beautifully sensitive portrayal of exactly what kind of loss the passage from subjectivity to objectivity presents. In the telling of this story, Hofstadter directly reveals the agony of the problem of consciousness: it is none other than the agony of a world divided into internal and external parts.

It’s important not to get lost in mysticism if we’re to understand why the problem really is bound up in the internal-external division. The best way to do so is to deconstruct Hofstadter’s teleportation tale a bit further. I’ll do this by making explicit the assumption of a substantive external reality, from which a reductio ad absurdum appears. The argument is as follows: Suppose that you are the subject on Earth, who is doomed to die as a result of the teleportation procedure. Suppose also that there is a substantive external reality that exists independently of your subjective experience. Since external reality is independent of your subjectivity, it must be that only the objective changes to your circumstances (i.e. the corporeal facts of your death) will have observable effects in the real world, while the subjective changes to your circumstance (i.e. whatever your experience of death and thereafter happens to be) should make no difference. (Interestingly, this is the source of the bleakness perceived by some in the prospect of soullessness: it makes no difference to the world whether or not your subjective self is snuffed out.) Your dual self, on Mars, is a perfect copy of the you (subject and object) on Earth, and so should be functionally indistinct from the self on Earth in all situations. Quantifying over “all situations”, however, is an extremely strong generalization. “All situations”, however, is also unavoidable if the self on Mars is to be considered truly indistinguishable from the self on Earth. Since all situations must be considered, let’s consider the specific situation of how the self on Mars reacts, in terms of its objectively observable behavior, to the death of the self on Earth. Denote by S the situation in which the self on Mars is aware of the demise of the self on Earth. Denote by R the reaction of the self on Mars to the death of the self on Earth, and put aside its details beyond the requirement that it consists of some empirically discernible event. Would the reaction of the self on Earth in situation S be identical to R?

If the reaction is not identical then we’ve already derived an absurdity; the self on Mars was assumed to be a perfect reproduction, and could not be if its functional behavior differed in any way. Suppose, then, that the self on Earth would react with R in situation S. This supposition, however, presents a difficulty, because it is not clear who the subject is in the definition of S. That is, it is not clear who occupies the place of the self on Earth in: “the situation in which the self on Mars is aware of the demise of the self on Earth.” Perhaps S is obtained by the self on Earth imagining what would happen, and concluding that its reaction would be R — but an exercise of subjectivity (i.e. imagination) would be necessary in order to produce this conclusion, which would make the indistinguishability of the two selves, which has been taken as an objective fact, contingent upon an exercise of subjectivity! Perhaps it is instead the case that S is obtained by direct observation of some other objective event, i.e. perhaps the self on Earth had been produced by a prior teleportation, providing the opportunity to observe its particular reaction in that prior situation. It has already been assumed that both the self on Earth and the self on Mars react with R when contemplating the death of their predecessor-selves as a result of the teleportation procedure. The rub, however, is that the observation of R for the self on Earth was obtained by an earlier, identical teleportation procedure which, itself, produced an identical copy of the subject. If the definition of “indistinguishable reactions” is to have any veridical force, then it must be that that the situations that produced those reactions are also identical. In particular, the earlier teleportation procedure from which was obtained the observation that Earth-self’s reaction was R must also have produced an functionally identical copy. More to the point, Earth-self had a predecessor-self that also would have reacted with R! But how can this be empirically determined? Either there must be an infinite regress of observations of prior-selves, which would seem to be impossible, or there must be a prior-self whose reaction differed. If, however, some prior self failed to react with R, it must be that the teleportation procedure does not produce an identical copy, which contradicts the original assumptions — reductio ad absurdum.

The preceding argument may seem rather long, but I feel it is important to firmly ground the seemingly-mystical rejection of an external reality on a logical premise. Hofstadter’s tragedy of the subject is not mere sentimentalism, but an incisive demonstration of a logical contradiction subtly introduced by the conjunction of reductionist explanation and the assumption of substantive, external reality. It is even more illustrative, I think, to show what happens to Hofstadter’s tale when the assumption of an external reality is removed.

Reintroduce all the assumptions of Hofstadter’s original teleportation scenario, and also explicitly assume that there is no substantive, external reality that is separable from subjective experience. A direct consequence of this new assumption (or rather, the negation of the old assumption) is that life decidedly does not go on as normal for the self on Mars; this self, in all its distinguishing features, only represents a substantive object insofar as its characteristics are subjectively experienced by the self on Earth. There is no puzzle about whether it is possible for me to subjectively die on Earth while objectively surviving on Mars, for the simple reason that it is not possible to cleave one from the other. If subjectivity vanishes, then for all meaningful epistemological purposes so do all the things it experiences — the whole universe as you know it is kaput! But isn’t that just solipsism? Weirdly, no, it is not. The foundation of solipsism is the idea that only knowledge of one’s own mind is sure, and at no point did I promise or assert sure knowledge of your mind or its subjective experiences. What many people find disturbing about reductionist explanations of consciousness is that they undercut even the certainty of knowledge about one’s own mind, since mind would thus apparently be at the mercy of physical forces that are alien to direct experience. But what, then, is left if neither external nor internal knowledge is sure? Does everything really just disappear with the subject?

The answer is that nothing actually disappears at all. The assertion I’ve been driving at all along is that the subject depends on the object, and the object depends on the subject. If one vanishes, then it follows logically that other should vanish with it. The subtlety is that it really doesn’t mean anything to say that “the subject vanishes” or “the object vanishes”, since both of these tacitly presume an observer (God? The Universal Hive-Mind? The Laplacian Demon? The Leviathan of State?) before whom they appeared in the first place. Bluntly, there is no reason whatsoever to presume such an observer. (This should not necessarily be read as a declaration of atheism, but I do not wish to pursue theological matters here.) Yes, if the subject disappeared, then so would the object. Following exactly the same reasoning, the disappearance of the object should also herald the disappearance of the subject. This means, in particular, that a subject without any objective formations is just as much an absurdity as an object with no subjective content. Nothing can disappear with subjectivity or objectivity for the straightforward reason that appearance and disappearance are themselves subjective or objective functions. The very act of inquiring after what happens with the expiration of subjectivity is itself a subjective act — we are already talking about not an absolute truth, but the subjectivity of subjectivity. The result of such puzzling appears to be none other than Hofstadter’s ‘strange loop’. What is different is that there is no longer anything either inside of or outside of the loop. What is interesting is that the absence of any such thing, inside or outside, is decidedly not strange.

Consciousness is not the problem.

I assert that what I’ve developed in the above is wholly compatible with mechanist explanations of consciousness; at no point have I required any functions of the mind that are beyond the grasp of scientific explanation. What is different is that reductionist theories no longer have the last word on what is real or unreal; a loop in the reasoning has been closed, with the result that some decided-upon facts will become undecidable. Science has robbed subjective experience of its privilege as the final word on matters of truth, but acknowledgment of the subjective roots of empiricism rob it of the very same privilege The casualty of this exchange is the aesthetic appeal of a “ground truth” or a “hard foundation” from which all other truths can be systematically derived. Truth no longer comes about as a procedural matter of fact, but as a contingency of the situation itself. Some modern thinkers (Alain Badiou, in particular) seem to be already aware of this dynamic, but their work is, to the best of my knowledge, concerned with deep theoretical work in ontology and metaphysics, and has yet to be applied to the purportedly thorny problem of consciousness, which sits awkwardly at the boundary between physics and metaphysics.

The question remains: Why introduce all this extra confusion, when we could be contented with an exhaustively reductionist theory of everything, with objectivity situated firmly at the foundation of the universe? The answer, I think, is that such a universe is fundamentally alienated and bleak. I firmly believe that we should not look askance at facts just because they are unpleasant, but it is important to recognize that foundational world views are not facts — they are choices. The situation of basic views as choices, rather than self-evident facts (whatever those are), does not mean that all are morally equal. Some views are inconsistent with themselves. Some views are too impoverished or simplistic to account for the inscrutable breadth and depth of human experience. Some views are so severe and rigid that they sacrifice truth in the name of their own symbolic order and internal stability. Some views are so fantastical and diffuse as to be totally vacuous. The choice among these is certainly not easy, and there may be no reliable criteria for doing so — especially considering that new ideas are arising all the time. It is important, however, to understand that a picture of the world that makes you unhappy may not be necessary. You should not carelessly replace it with a flattering self-delusion, but neither should you grimly bear its awful weight. A persistent feeling of despair or emptiness is itself nothing other than the sign of a deep contradiction in your view of your self and your world — such contradictions can be, and must be resolved. As much as I agree with Dennett and the many others who have destroyed and discredited the strange and whimsical theories of the anti-reductionists, I also feel very strongly the urgency that drives the anti-reductionists to such baroque flights of intellectual fancy: if the world of subjective experience is smashed to lifeless atoms, then something important really is lost. There is a beauty and dignity to human experience that, no matter how well-analyzed by scientific explanation, is not and cannot be reducible to scientific terms. The tension between the status of the human being and the progress of science has become almost unbearably strong in our lifetimes, and it is important that we find a reconciliation. Such a tension is not bearable forever.

The good news is that the war between science and humanity must not be borne forever. If only we stop clinging to some very old but wholly unjustified habits of thought, the conflict disappears. In the end, nothing could be more scientific than to reject an assumption that has outlived its usefulness, and nothing could be more human than to rejoice at the freedom it brings.

Further reading.

David Chalmers. “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness”. 1995. Available here.
Daniel Dennett. “Facing Backward on the Problem of Consciousness”. 1995. Available here.
Daniel Dennett. Consciousness Explained. 1991.
Douglas Hofstadter. I Am A Strange Loop. 2007.

Benjamin Schulz is a computer scientist and graduate research assistant at the University of Missouri. His regular blog, “Hot, Cold, Sun, Rain: Practical Spirituality, Irregular Philosophy, and Personal Civics” appears here. 

Helpful resources:

Godisimaginary.com
Iron Chariots Wiki
Skeptics’ Annotated Bible / Skeptics’ Annotated Qur’an
AtheismResource.com
TalkOrigins.org

YouTubers: Evid3nc3, Thunderf00t, TheAmazingAtheist, The Atheist Experience, Edward Current,NonStampCollector, Mr. Deity, Richard Dawkins, QualiaSoup

Blogs: Greta Christina, PZ Myers, The Friendly Atheist, WWJTD?, Debunking Christianity, SkepChick, Rationally Speaking

Face blindness and mysteries

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So, today’s article is a bit more personal than most. I’ve been sick the last few days and haven’t posted much, so to make up for it, and to warn you, today’s article is hella long and not for everybody. But, I do hope it will be useful. I will of course include some cool science and tie it all back to religion. I hope you enjoy

If you’re looking for a short and to-the-point description of what face blindness is, try this link instead.

As some of you know, I have something called prosopagnosia, or face blindness. If you’ve never heard of it, you’re in the majority, and I hope that after reading this article, you’ll have a better understanding of people like me.

Face blindness is, in some ways, similar to color blindness. Color blindness is more perhaps accurately called color vision deficiency – an inability or decreased ability to perceive differences in colors. There are many excellent websites about color blindness and I don’t intend to reinvent the wheel, so I’ll just recommend this one if you’re interested. The point is that being colorblind does not mean you can only see in black & white (monochrome), nor does it mean that you can’t see colors at all, or even that you can’t see certain colors at all. Some people are affected less than others, for example, and colorblindness is more-or-less independent from visual acuity (whether you need glasses or not). Colorblind people are not stupid; they are not disabled (unless their job depends foundationally on their ability to perceive differences in colors, e.g. jewelry graders), and it’s not a matter of “trying.” They are simply physically unable to do it.

There are different types of color blindness, but let’s take one kind, protanomaly, as an example. Protanomoly is also called “red-weakness.” If a picture’s worth 1,000 words, this example by Paul Martin can probably do a better job than I can:

In the image on the left, someone with normal vision sees violet or purplish berries. In the image on the right, we see what someone with protanomaly would see. Since these people have a deficient or in- ability to see red wavelengths specifically, and because purple is a combination of blue light and red light, anything purple just appears to them as blue. An object that a person with normal vision would process as strictly red – say, the maple leaf on the Canadian flag – would appear as the commensurate shade of grey to someone with protanomaly. This type of colorblindness affects about 1% of males (colorblindness is more common all around in men than women).

It’s surprisingly common for people to live their lives just fine without ever realizing they are colorblind at all. Different saturations of red simply appear to be different shades of grey, and so they CAN tell the difference between light and dark red, etc. But from their perspective, the same shades of red vs grey are indistinguishable. Since they have never been able to see through someone else’s eyes (unless they’ve had an eye transplant), and since this is (almost always) due to a congenital birth defect, they just never know the difference and don’t realize those colors even exist. Unless someone else realizes it and points it out, they may never even notice they’re not seeing the same thing as everyone else. They more or less have to take other people’s word for it. We’ll come back to the significance of this in a moment.

So, what’s face blindness, then?

Face blindness is pretty much the same idea, except that instead of certain colors looking grey, people’s faces all look the same. And by all the same, unlike with colorblindness, I mean blurry, or perhaps more accurately, nondescript. If you want to imagine what it’s like, and you wear eyeglasses, this is actually pretty easy to simulate. Try going to a dinner party or skeptic’s meeting or some other gathering where you know mostly everyone there, and just take off your glasses. Depending on how bad your uncorrected vision is, you may not even be able to tell your significant other apart from a complete stranger until s/he says something out loud, and then you would be identifying his voice, not his face.

Face blindness is like that, except only with faces, and only with “whole” faces. If I focus on one part of your face, I can see it just fine. I can see your eyes, and your hair, and your nose, and your chin, if I look directly at them. But when I take a figurative step back and try to look at your “whole” face, it just doesn’t register very well.

You would not believe the social consequences that come along with a diminished ability to recognize faces. It is extremely common for faceblind people to lose friends, job opportunities, love interests, etc because other people don’t understand why the faceblind person is so “arrogant.”

For example, say you (reader) and I know each other – say we are Facebook friends, perhaps we have had two or three extended conversations after SASHA meetings, say we’ve even been out to dinner together with a group of friends or something. Now say you and I pass each other in a semi-crowded hallway one day – say, there are 8 people present, including the two of us. Our eyes meet briefly, and I look away and keep walking as if I don’t know you – because as far as I know, you are a stranger. You think, “What an ass! He didn’t even say hello!” You never talk to me again, and I have no idea why. And since I have no idea who you are, or even that I did anything wrong, I can’t apologize, either.

If there is one thing I hope you take from this article, here it is:

I ran across this picture on a blog article someone had written about her own face blindness, and even though I am sitting alone in this room while writing, I said, “YES! THANK YOU!!” aloud when I found it. This image so fittingly communicates what I wish people understood about being faceblind. The website author, Anni Taylor, has a pretty mild case of it. There are some people who literally are unable to recognize themselves in the mirror and freak out, thinking someone else is in the room, if they catch a mirror image of themselves unexpectedly. Like me, Anni’s case is mild enough, and her coping mechanisms sophisticated enough, that she did not realize she had face blindness until she was an adult (poking through some of her other articles, she seems to be in her 30s and just found out she has face blindness a year ago).

Because there is a spectrum of severity, it’s not uncommon for people to be unaware that they qualify as having it, if it’s not bad enough to interfere too terribly with their lives. I would say in my case, I’m about in the middle. I can say this with some confidence because several years ago, I participated in a study on face blindness through the Prosopagnosia Research Group at Harvard University (www.faceblind.org is their research site), which took about 25 hours over 6 weeks. I learned a lot from the study – mainly, that this is more common than I realized (it’s estimated that 2.5% to 10% of the population qualifies as having at least mild cases of it), and that though I have it much worse than I thought I did, I don’t have it NEARLY as bad as some people.

The main thing that struck me is to what extent my methods of identifying other people are abnormal, compared to how non-faceblind people identify each other. What also has struck me is how common my methods of identifying other people are among other faceblind people. As I understand it, the way that normal people identify each other is the same way that I identify my left hand as belonging to me: It is more-or-less effortless, instantaneous, and you rarely second-guess yourself, unless you are extremely drunk. You “just know” that you know someone. You can see someone from across a room, even someone you’re not expecting to see, and know that this person is someone you know. I’m not talking about remembering how you know them or what their name is – everyone is forgetful about those things from time to time. I mean the actual flicker of recognition when you see them and think, “Oh, you!” is thoughtless: As soon as you lay eyes on their face, your brain tells you that it’s someone you’ve met before.

This is drastically different than the way it works for me. For me, it’s more like being a detective who has to crack the case quickly, because there’s a bomb that’s about to go off or something. Every second counts, and especially in a crowd, I have less than a second to decide if I know you or not before you will feel insulted if I fail to acknowledge you as a non-stranger.

Why don’t I just treat everyone I make eye contact with as though we know each other, to be on the safe side, you ask? Tell you what: Why don’t you go to the mall for an hour, try that out, and let me know how it goes! If I smiled a big smile, waved, and said “Hi!” to literally every person I made eye contact with, I would probably look like a total nut, in addition to spending fairly all of my time saying hi to people. Being overly nice to strangers “just in case” you know them already actually makes the problem worse, and exponentially so. The reason is that if you do this, you will end up making a lot of acquaintances, whom you will be expected to remember the next time you see, as well (remember having met them before, not their names, I mean). No, the only practical solution for a faceblind person like me is to figure out, as quickly as possible, whether I need to treat a person as someone I am expected to already know, and stall while I figure out who they are, or if it is acceptable to treat them as a stranger and carry on with my day.

There is a complicated but precise way to do this; it’s something that I figured out when I was very young, out of necessity. I’ve had many years of practice doing it, so I’m pretty quick about it, but the method hasn’t changed. I was in my early 20s when I learned that most people do not do this. Basically, my top priority when encountering someone in public is deciding if you are a stranger or if you are someone I am supposed to know already. The timer starts once we make eye contact, and I have roughly ½ to ¾ of a second before they will start feeling insulted if I get it wrong. This applies anywhere there are random people (malls, restaurants, campus, etc) where I might run into someone I know.

The decision tree looks like this:

Click to enlarge.

So, once I’ve established that you’re not a stranger, I can start trying to figure out who you actually are. The main thing for me here is TIME. The longer I can stall, the better my chances of figuring it out. This is a double-edged sword, though, because the longer I drag out our interaction to try to get more clues about who you are, the more insulted you will be if I don’t “remember” chatting with you later, if I fail to identify you correctly.

Sometimes I can skip the first flowchart entirely, if I already know that we’re not strangers. For example, at SASHA meetings, I know that (mostly) everyone there is someone I have met before, and even for new people, I want to meet them and I greet them warmly, so worrying about avoiding eye contact, etc does not apply. Or, if I am meeting a group of people at a restaurant (e.g. when I attend Columbia Atheist meetings, which usually have about 20-30 people), it’s just a matter of figuring out who is who.

The “Not a stranger, but who?” mental flowchart looks like this:

Click to enlarge.

Oh hey, if you think going through these steps in your head literally hundreds of times a day must be mentally exhausting, you’re right!

This is why I always go to the same restaurant (if you’ve hung out with me personally, you know which one it is) and always go to the same bar/hangout (ditto): It drastically narrows down the number of people I risk running into unexpectedly. It’s why I almost never go to malls or walk around campus without pretending I’m texting. It’s why I LOVE it when I remember to bring nametags to SASHA meetings. It’s why I like picking people up in my car when we hang out, instead of meeting them there. (By the way, the worst possible nightmare for a faceblind person is being asked to meet somewhere crowded, and you getting there before they do). Some people with prosopagnosia develop very serious anxiety problems, social withdrawal, and even become total recluses to avoid having to deal with it. I adore people; I love my friends and there is pretty much nothing I enjoy about life more than the company of people I care about, so I am very fortunate that the worst of it, for me, is the mental juggling of who’s-who and the occasional pissed-off/gone forever friend.

One of the reasons I like to travel so much (not counting perhaps a dozen day-trips to other cities, I went on 4 extended roadtrips last year) is that when I’m in a new city, I’m under no pressure to recognize ANYONE. I can treat everyone as a stranger and there are no social consequences, as far as risking lost friends. Let me clarify that this doesn’t mean I am mean to people — quite the contrary. I smile at everyone; I chat with shop-owners and locals, and I enjoy making new friends. If you know me in person, you know that I really try as hard as I can to be a sweet guy. When I say I can treat everyone as a stranger, I mean that I don’t have to hide from them, because oh, you might be someone I know, waiting to spurn me if I fail your unintentional pop-quiz. Don’t get me wrong: I do not blame people who have gotten pissed at me for “ignoring” them, and I completely understand that none of my friends actually desires to do this to me. I want to make it clear that I am not upset about the friends I have lost through misunderstandings about this, unfortunate as it is. Like the picture says above, “I am not ignoring you on purpose.”

Now, as frustrating as this is, I do recognize that it could be a lot worse. Some people who are more severely affected than I am are unable to tell if others are even making eye contact with them in the first place – the entire face simply does not register. For me, I can see your eyes if I focus my attention on them, but your face does not “click” as familiar. I do not understand and have not experienced the sensation of someone seeming familiar and recognizing someone effortlessly and instantly. I can do it if I’m expecting to see you and you’re wearing clothes I know are yours and you have a hairstyle I know is yours, etc. But as long as I can remember, identification of other people I know has always been a conscious inference on my part. And like any inference, because it is based on available evidence, I could find out that I’m very wrong as the conversation progresses.

What’s it like to be faceblind? Let me give you some examples. Once I was supposed to meet my then-girlfriend at a car dealership – there was a big Humane Society fundraiser, and several hundred people were gathered outside the building waiting for it to start (the dealership was raffling off a car). I texted my girlfriend and asked her where she was waiting, and she told me she was right inside the side door of the showroom. I went to the side door–it was a big glass door– but didn’t see her, so I thought I should check inside. There was a woman in the way of the door, so I asked (politely) for her to move so I could get in. She said, “Very funny.”

On another occasion, I was taking a Latin class at Mizzou with about 20 other students. I always try to get to know at least one person the first week, and exchange email addresses if possible, so that we can share notes if either of us is sick or has to miss a day. I generally wait until the second or third class to do this, so I can feel out who takes quality notes and who doesn’t. So, on the first day, I met a really cool woman, another student, and we had a nice chat. Later in the day, I had an English class, and met another student, who seemed really nice as well. At the end of the third Latin class, I asked my new friend about exchanging emails for note-sharing purposes. She was happy to and we did. Later in the day, I had my third English class, and asked my other new friend about exchanging emails for note-sharing purposes. Unlike the girl in my Latin class, she was visibly perturbed, and I quickly said, “You don’t have to if you don’t want to; it’s just something I do in every class. I can get someone else.” She said, “No, it’s not that. I already have your email.” We’d been chatting all week, in both classes, without me realizing that these two friends were actually the same person. That is not the only time that has happened, by the way.

Face blindness is usually congenital, although it can also develop later in life through brain injury or trauma (lesions, cancer, stroke, or other diseases that damage brain tissue, etc). Interestingly, there is a whole part of the brain, called the fusiform face area (hereafter FFA), whose only function seems to be processing visual input of faces specifically. It seems that recognizing faces is so important to our evolutionary history that humans developed a bigger and more complex version of this section. The FFA is a subsection of the fusiform gyrus, which itself is part of the temporal lobe in Brodmann Area 37.

Because the area affected is so very specialized, people who are faceblind can do things you might not expect, despite our difficulties with faces. For example, most of us have zero trouble distinguishing between, for example, photographs of very similar rocks, or types of cars, or telling pets apart, or identifying, for example, my laptop from my brother’s identical make & model laptop (well, to be fair, mine does have a huge sticker that says “ATHEIST” all across the front!). But faces, they just do not register. This has some interesting consequences: I sometimes have trouble watching television shows because it’s annoying trying to keep the characters straight. I like the show How I Met Your Mother, as one example, but I often have trouble telling apart Ted and Marshall when everyone is seated at their table at the bar – I have no trouble when they’re standing, because Marshall towers over Ted, and I have no trouble with Barney, because he has blonde hair. I sometimes confuse Robin and Lily, although Lily’s hair is longer and redder, so I’m usually okay, especially if there is dialogue and I can use their voices to help tell them apart, etc.

So, I promised I would bring this back ’round to religion. Remember when I said colorblind people, who have never experienced the color red, more or less just have to take other people’s word for it that “red” actually does exist?

The reason I bring this up is that I’ve, more than once, heard this argument used as “proof” of supernatural claims. I have heard people say things along the lines of, “Some people can feel the Holy Spirit/Allah/the Tao/etc, and some people can’t. Just because YOU can’t feel it doesn’t mean WE’RE imagining it. Isn’t it possible that we just have some sort of 6th sense, which allows us to perceive this, that you lack?”

My response is this: Yes, it’s possible. But here’s how I know you’re making it up, even though I don’t necessarily think you’re doing it with a conscious intent to deceive: If I were colorblind, I could take a rose and show it to someone and say, “I’m colorblind. Can you tell me, what color is this rose?” and that person will say, “It’s a red rose.” Then I could take that same rose and grab another random person and say, “Hey, I’m colorblind. What color is this?” And that person will say, “It’s red.” And I could bug yet another random person and say, “Hey, can you tell me what color this rose is?” And that person will also say, “Dumbass; it’s red.” Then I’d say, “Oh, sorry; I forgot to mention I’m colorblind.” Then Person #3 would say, “Oh, I’m sorry for calling you a dumbass. Still red, though.” You get the picture.

I could do this 100 times and get at least 95 people to give me the exact same answer with complete agreement. (The other 5 would be the same people who say that the Earth is bigger than the Sun, or colorblind themselves).

The way I know the religion analogy flunks is that if I ask 100 random people what the word “god” even means, it would be unprecedented, to my knowledge, if they could all agree just on that, let alone which god, how many, whether s/he/it/they require baptism, or virgin sacrifices, or meditation, or suicide via cyanide-spiked Flavor Aid . I have heard, with a straight face, religious people tell me that “everyone has their own interpretation of who God is.” You know what it means when everyone has their own interpretation? It means no one has any frickin’ clue. God is a life force? God is energy? God is love? God is justice? God is an old Caucasian man with a white flowing beard and an outreached hand? When I was really little, I used to think God looked like one of the Emperor’s Royal Guards from Return of the Jedi:

The guys in red, I mean. Don't ask me why. I have no idea where that came from. I was like 5.

The fact is, when no one can give you a straight answer, that tells you that nobody has a straight answer. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. As Lawrence Krauss said, “Scientists love mysteries.” The problem with religion is that it insists it has the answers when, in reality, it doesn’t. I’m not saying science always does, but at least science is working on it, and at least science is consistent, and at least science only trusts it’s conclusions insofar as they are supposed by the available evidence, and at least science has the self-doubt necessary to refrain from taking offense when it is subjected to critical inquiry. This is how progress is made.

I hope today’s post has been useful for you. Until next time!

For a more-thorough and more-personal treatment of today’s subject matter, try this free online e-book by a man with severe face blindness named Bill Choisser.

Links to additional articles about face blindness from the New Yorker, Time Magazine, and Wired.

And finally, to you non-faceblind folks, here are some ways you can make things easier on faceblind people like me!

- When you see us in public, just help us out with your name!
- That’s it! Really! There is nothing wrong with our memories; we just can’t recognize faces!
- If you know someone is faceblind, and you’re with a group of people, kindly help us out by quietly telling us who everyone is
-  If we see you in public unexpectedly, and we ignore you, just remember: We’re not ignoring you on purpose - you’re our friends and we love you; our brains just don’t process faces right.

Until next time!

Dave

mail@davemuscato.com

(573) 424-0420 cell/text

Dave Muscato is Vice President of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. A junior at Mizzou majoring in economics & anthropology and minoring in philosophy & Latin, Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com.

Follow Dave on Google+
Follow Dave on Twitter

Helpful resources:

Godisimaginary.com
Iron Chariots Wiki
Skeptics’ Annotated Bible / Skeptics’ Annotated Qur’an
AtheismResource.com
TalkOrigins.org

YouTubers: Evid3nc3, Thunderf00t, TheAmazingAtheist, The Atheist Experience, Edward Current,NonStampCollector, Mr. Deity, Richard Dawkins, QualiaSoup

Blogs: Greta Christina, PZ Myers, The Friendly Atheist, WWJTD?, Debunking Christianity, SkepChick

and don’t forget… other SASHA members! We are here for you, too!

A Christian and an atheist break down an argument for design

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I received a comment on a previous blog article of mine about the argument from design, and wanted to respond to it more thoroughly than a simply reply comment. Below is the submitter’s comment copied-and-pasted, with my full response.

Submitted on 1/25/2012 at 3:27 AM
Unklee writes:

Nice sounding arguments Dave, but which of the following premises do you disagree with?

1. The character of our universe is determined by physical laws and constants.
2. If these laws and constants had been different, life would probably not have arisen.
3. The laws and constants which led to this suitability for life must have been determined by either physical necessity, chance or design.
4. The laws and constants have not been determined by physical necessity.
5. The laws and constants have not been determined by chance.
6. Therefore our universe was designed.

Hi Unklee, thanks for your comment. I’m just going to address this one after another:

1. The character of our universe is determined by physical laws and constants.

- Physics “laws” are just observed patterns of interactions. I don’t think it’s accurate to say “determined by.” The universe has them, from what we can tell, but that’s all we can conclude from that directly. We don’t know if they’re constant everywhere and we don’t know if it’s always had them the way we observe them now. We don’t even know if our observations are ultimately correct, because the only way we can check our work is by repeating the same method we used the first time (i.e. by trusting that information from our senses is a reliable path to knowledge about objective reality, under the condition that this information is consistent or within acceptable margins of error on repeated experiment, otherwise known as science). Also, what do you mean by “character”?

This came up when I googled "character." I don't know why.

2. If these laws and constants had been different, life would probably not have arisen.

It depends on how different those constants had been. It’s certainly conceivable that life would have grown up differently or possibly even not at all, depending on the chemicals available, the amount of time (if a hypothetical universe were to exist for only a few seconds, it’s pretty unlikely life would be able to develop in it), and other factors. I disagree with using the word “probably” here, as we only have a sample size of 1 observable universe and one planet with life that we know of. Since we can’t see outside of our universe, we have no one way of knowing otherwise, and can only speculate.

Even on this single planet we have everything from bacteria and archaea to fungi, blue whales, pterodactyls, humans, beetles, and trees. One study published last year estimates that 86% of species on this planet have yet even to be named. Who knows what kinds of life could be on other planets or indeed other universes? Perhaps there is even non-carbon-based life waiting to be discovered even within our own universe. Just pulling straight from Wikipedia: “While the kinds of living beings we know on Earth commonly use carbon for basic structural and metabolic functions, water as a solvent and DNA or RNA to define and control their form, it is possible that undiscovered life-forms could exist that differ radically in their basic structures and biochemistry from that known to science.”

"ALF" stands for Alien Life Form, although suspiciously, he breathes air, gets around just fine in Earth gravity, and they apparently have cats on his planet, too.

3. The laws and constants which led to this suitability for life must have been determined by either physical necessity, chance or design.

- What’s the difference between physical necessity and chance?

4. The laws and constants have not been determined by physical necessity.

- Need an answer to #3 before I can respond to this one. Do you mean that our universe would not have existed or lasted as long as it has if the laws were vastly different? I agree with that. We don’t know why our universe displays exactly the patterns of behavior that we observe it does, or indeed if these patterns have always been constant or even if they are constant everywhere now. We simply have no way of knowing that.

5. The laws and constants have not been determined by chance.

- I don’t think we have any decent way of ruling this out, but I’m very interested in your reason(s) for thinking that we do, as it seems to be the crux of the design argument in general.

6. Therefore our universe was designed.

- While it’s a possibility, I think it is remote at best, and has the major flaw of introducing an even worse question: If our universe is designed by some intelligence, then where did that intelligence come from? Now we are really getting into ad-hoc territory, speculating about the origin of an entity for which we have only circumstantial evidence of its existence in the first place!

If we’re assuming design, we’ll need to address this question of origin regarding the designer, too: Either this intelligence created itself, has always existed, or was itself created. If it was itself created, than we’re back to square one. If it has always existed, then we are violating parsimony by adding an extra, unneeded step in our logic, rather than the more-reasonable solution: that the universe itself has always existed. (Side note: We have to be careful about using terms like “always existed,” because time itself doesn’t exist without the expansion of the universe, which didn’t start happening until the Big Bang).

The Big Bang (click to enlarge)

Since the always-existed hypothesis doesn’t agree with observation—the universe appears to be about 13.7 billion years old—we can more-or-less rule that out. So, the only answer that’s parsimonious, fits observation thus far, and doesn’t answer the question with an even bigger question, is the provisional belief that the universe “created” itself, although I prefer a term more like “originated” or “initiated,” as these are fittingly less anthropomorphic.

I think the best answer to the question, “Where did the universe come from?”, based on what we’ve covered here, is this one:

“We don’t know, and we may never have enough information to say with absolute, 100% certainty, but the answer that fits all our observations the best so far is that the universe simply came from nothing.”

Lawrence Krauss recently wrote a book explaining why (and how) he believes the universe came from literally nothing, a position with which Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow, and many others agree. Seeing as they are all qualified astrophysicists, I’m inclined to take their word for it until or unless new evidence comes along that they’re incorrect, which is what I meant above when I said provisional belief.

I think ultimately, the argument from design boils down to what’s known in logic as an argumentum ad ignorantiam, or appeal to ignorance. This is a logical fallacy. Although the argument is generally stated something like, “The universe could not have come about the way it is unless some intelligence did it,” I think a more-accurate wording is, fairly, “I don’t understand how the universe could have come about the way it is, unless some intelligence did it.” In order to conclude that it must have been an intelligence, we would first have to rule out all other possibilities, including a conspicuously more-parsimonious one, which I don’t think we can do at this time.

I encourage you to read the book by Lawrence Krauss linked two paragraphs up, or watch him give this talk (see video below) about the same hypothesis. It should help you understand how the universe could have come from nothing. If, after watching it (or reading the book), you think that you have a way to disprove it, PLEASE post your reasoning in the comments below.

Something to note: As good scientists seeking the truth about how our universe works, we would never say that we accept a hypothesis, only that thus far, we have failed to reject it. This is because of the problem of induction. So even if we were able to absolutely rule out the a-universe-from-nothing hypothesis, that does NOT prove intelligence design nor even suggest it as the next-best possibility. All it would do is narrow down the possibilities from (at least) 3 hypotheses to (at least) 2. Our options are: 1) the universe originated itself through some natural, non-intelligent process 2) the universe has always existed 3) the universe was created by some intelligent entity. Again, there are problems with both #2 and #3: #2 doesn’t fit with observations and #3 just raises the bigger question of where that intelligence itself came from. Additionally, there could be even more hypotheses than these 3 that we haven’t thought of yet. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: Right now, we have a hypothesis that’s parsimonious, fits the data, and doesn’t introduce more questions than it answers. I think that’s about as close as we can get to knowledge in this area unless or until we find strong evidence that we’re wrong. Ball’s in your court, Unklee!

Aforementioned Lawrence Krauss talk:

Regards,

Dave

mail@davemuscato.com

(573) 424-0420 cell/text

Dave Muscato is Vice President of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. A junior at Mizzou majoring in economics & anthropology and minoring in philosophy & Latin, Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com.

Follow Dave on Google+
Follow Dave on Twitter

Helpful resources:

Godisimaginary.com
Iron Chariots Wiki
Skeptics’ Annotated Bible / Skeptics’ Annotated Qur’an
AtheismResource.com
TalkOrigins.org

YouTubers: Evid3nc3, Thunderf00t, TheAmazingAtheist, The Atheist Experience, Edward Current,NonStampCollector, Mr. Deity, Richard Dawkins, QualiaSoup

Blogs: Greta Christina, PZ Myers, The Friendly Atheist, WWJTD?, Debunking Christianity, SkepChick

and don’t forget… other SASHA members! We are here for you, too!

An excellent example of what’s wrong with the fine-tuning case for a creator-god

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I’ve written before on this blog about the problems with the fine-tuning argument, and last time, I took some criticism for failing to address the anthropic principle. I did say right off the bat that there are many ways to demonstrate why this argument is wrong, and rather than attempt to present an exhaustive list, I was only going to write about 3 of my favorite counters, which I did. I agree with my readers, and with Richard Dawkins as well (as discussed in The God Delusion), that the anthropic principle is also an easy way to show why fine-tuning doesn’t hold water, and it could have well made it into the top three. I’m very grateful to my readers for your honest criticism, and agree with you that this counter-argument deserves attention, which I will address now.

If you’re not familiar, fine-tuning is simply the idea that, because conditions sufficient for life to arise are (it is claimed) so narrowly specific, they MUST have come about by intelligent design. First of all, claiming certainty on this point (“must have”) introduces an epistemological problem, the problem of induction, so at best deists/theists can argue that, based on available evidence, they believe that intelligent design is the most probable explanation, not that it MUST have been intelligent design (although you will rarely hear them admit this). This is an example of the fallacy of a false dilemma, also known as black-and-white thinking, i.e. failing to recognize other possible alternatives (in this case, that the universe created itself, which is also in better accordance with Occam’s Razor; see my previous article about parsimony here).

The idea that fine-tuning is the best explanation for the conditions of our universe has been thoroughly discredited by many qualified physicists, among them Vic Stenger, Brian Cox, and Stephen Hawking, and this information is readily available on Google. However, it’s important that we continue to address the topic because I still hear this hypothesis from believers literally every time we do our Ask an Atheist table on campus. Usually their information comes from theologians, or youth pastors, or at best, mathematicians, chemists, etc, not qualified astrophysicists or cosmologists. I’m convinced it’s just a matter of ignorance and confirmation bias, which are fortunately fixable things.

Aside from the fact that the universe is not actually fine-tuned for life (quite the opposite!), the ultimate problem with this line of reasoning is that it’s backwards—it reverses the order of things. The universe was not set up the way it is with us in mind, but rather, we are the type of thing that our universe grows, given enough time. This is even more obvious when you consider that the universe was here WAY before we grew out of it. As the ancient Buddhist proverb goes, “We are the universe experiencing itself.”

So, on to the subject of today’s article: the Anthropic Principle. Simply put, the anthropic principle is the idea that the universe is set up the way it is in order that we could exist here (rather than the idea that we are set up the way we are and indeed exist all because of the way the universe is set up). There are some other, more-specific versions of this argument, but that’s the basic idea. Douglas Adams famously said in a 1998 speech:

Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!” This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for. We all know that at some point in the future the Universe will come to an end and at some other point, considerably in advance from that but still not immediately pressing, the sun will explode. We feel there’s plenty of time to worry about that, but on the other hand that’s a very dangerous thing to say.

Or, put another way:

Here’s a direct link to the website of the newspaper, the Northwest Indiana Times, where this letter appeared. Here’s a link to the comments section (some are rather amusing).

I should hope that I don’t need to spell this out, but in the interest of curing ignorance—the reason we run this blog—I want to be absolutely sure the point is made clearly: The deer about which Tim Abbott is complaining do not cross the street where they do because the deer-crossing sign is there, as if it were a crosswalk; rather, we put the sign there because that’s where the deer already tended to cross the street. The order here is important; the deer were there long before the highway, freely moving across that area. When we humans built the highway, the deer continued to move across that area, incidentally crossing the highway as they went and causing traffic accidents, and so, we put up a sign to warn drivers that deers cross there. It’s not a crosswalk, and deer don’t know or care about the deer-crossing sign—they crossed there before the highway was around, they crossed there before the sign was added, and they would continue to cross there whether we moved the sign or not.

Similarly, to the best of our knowledge—and we emphatically have no good reasons thus far to suspect otherwise—the universe does not know or care that we happened to have developed in it. The universe does not “know” or “care” about anything; the universe is not an intelligent entity capable of knowledge or feelings.

To assign human qualities like the capacity for knowledge or feelings to an object is what’s called anthropomorphism. This is incredibly common in human cultures, but it’s erroneous—other examples include thinking things like “My car hates me” or saying “Thank you!” to your computer when you are able to recover a file you thought you lost. Computers and cars, even though some people might give them personal names for fun, are not intelligent agents—they are inanimate objects (from the Latin prefix in- meaning lacking or without, and the Latin word anima meaning breath of life/life-blood).

Michael Shermer writes about this in The Believing Brain: When lightning strikes your house, it’s not because anyone is angry at you, gods or otherwise; it’s (very predictably and avoidably) because your house doesn’t have a lightning rod and is the tallest conductive thing nearby. This is why church steeples get struck by lightning so often; it has nothing to do with the Devil and God battling it out in the heavens. It’s just physics. But that’s awesome! Physics is amazing and interesting stuff, and by learning how our world works, to paraphrase Neil DeGrasse Tyson, we can improve our lives.

Until next time!

Dave

mail@davemuscato.com

(573) 424-0420 cell/text

Dave Muscato is Vice President of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. A junior at Mizzou majoring in economics & anthropology and minoring in philosophy & Latin, Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com.

Follow Dave on Google+
Follow Dave on Twitter

Helpful resources:

Godisimaginary.com
Iron Chariots Wiki
Skeptics’ Annotated Bible / Skeptics’ Annotated Qur’an
AtheismResource.com
TalkOrigins.org

YouTubers: Evid3nc3, Thunderf00t, TheAmazingAtheist, The Atheist Experience, Edward Current,NonStampCollector, Mr. Deity, Richard Dawkins, QualiaSoup

Blogs: Greta Christina, PZ Myers, The Friendly Atheist, WWJTD?, Debunking Christianity, SkepChick

and don’t forget… other SASHA members! We are here for you, too!

Ignorance, not stupidity

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A friend of mine, EBK, posted this image on Facebook, with the following caption:

I made this because it seems every time I speak out against religion, especially Christianity, someone assumes I am attacking them personally; calling them dumb or crazy or whatever... I don't look down on you if you are a Christian. I just *disagree* with you. I still ♥ you

I think there is something very important here that it’s about time we look at in detail: the difference between ignorance and stupidity.

Ignorance and ignore come from the same etymological root, the Latin present participle ignorans, from the verb ignorare, which means ”not to know, to be unacquainted; mistake, misunderstand; take no notice of, pay no attention to,” etc. It ultimately comes from the Greek word gnosis, “knowledge,” with an opposing prefix.

In modern English, the word “ignorant” simply means “unaware” or “uninformed” (source).

Stupid, on the other hand, comes from the Latin stupere, a verb meaning to be benumbed, astonished, or stupefied. In modern English, it means “slow of mind” or “lacking intelligence or reasoning power” (source).

These are very different things. All children, by definition, are ignorant. Clearly, not all children are stupid: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Isaac Newton, Voltaire, Johann von Goethe, and Marilyn vos Savant were all children once, too.

Why do Christians (and Muslims, and people of all religious stripes) become so offended by the mere mention of the word “atheist”? Why do religious people act like we are slapping them in the face, just for existing?

I have a few hypotheses. The first one comes from Greta Christina, who framed it brilliantly in a talk this past summer about the worthwhileness of debating religion. In her words, “We see religion as an idea, as a hypothesis. They see it as an identity.” That Jesus is the son of God, to Christians, is not simply one hypothesis of many about who Jesus was. It’s not a belief for Christians; it’s who they are. They don’t say, “I believe Christianity”; they say, “I am a Christian.” When they hear us say, “I am an atheist,” they don’t hear, “I disagree about who you think Jesus was,” which is what we think we’re saying. They hear, “Your life is a lie.”

Think of it this way. Say that you’re a guy, and you’re seeing a woman. Say that she tells you she’s pregnant. You talk about it & decide to keep the baby, and one day, when the little tyke is 7 years old, you find out that you’re actually not the biological father. Say that you find this out because another guy appears on the scene and says to you, “Hey, that kid you think is yours? He’s actually mine. You’re not his dad; I am. Get a paternity test if you don’t believe me.” How might you feel about this?

After getting over the initial shock, and confirming his claim with a paternity test, you might think a bit more about his statement: “You’re not his dad; I am.” Is that really true?

Well, it depends on how you define “dad.” After all, what does it mean to be a dad? If you were there through the pregnancy, if you were there at his birth, if you helped decide what to name him, if one of the kid’s first words was “Dada” referring to you, if you threw him 7 wonderful birthday parties, if you were the one who taught him how to read, if you were the one who taught him how to play Scrabble, took him on vacations, if you were the one who read him bed-time stories, changed his diapers, took him to his first day of school, etc, well, yeah, I think it’s fair to say that you are his dad.

The feeling you’d get if someone said, “You’re not his dad” is the same feeling Christians get when we say, “Jesus was not really a god.” Just because it turns out someone else provided the sperm doesn’t make you no longer a dad to your son. And just because Jesus wasn’t really a god doesn’t make someone no longer a Christian. It’s an identity. Telling a Christian that Christianity isn’t true is like telling the dad of a 7-year-old that he’s not really a parent. It might in fact be “technically” true, but it’s not something in which you can examine the evidence and accept as simply as, “Oh, okay. Guess I was wrong, then.”

When I believed Christianity was true, Jesus was very real to me. I prayed to him, I loved him, and I [thought that I] felt his love for me back. I understand now that I was deluded and that these feelings were all in my head, and that I was talking to thin air when I prayed. But at the time, before I was ready to hear it, if you had told me that Jesus died a long time ago and couldn’t hear me, I would have felt that you were calling me a fraud, not that I was simply mistaken. And nobody likes to be called a fraud, even though that’s not actually what we’re saying.

The second hypothesis is that most religious people simply do not know what the word “atheist” means. An atheist is someone who lacks faith that gods exist. That’s it. It doesn’t mean we hate your god; it doesn’t mean we think your god is a meanie poo-poo head, and it doesn’t mean that we are selfish and so in love with sinning that we have decided to disobey your god. We simply don’t believe your god is real. We feel exactly the same way about your god as you feel about unicorns and fairies. Sure, there are lots of old stories and legends about unicorns and fairies, and there are some people out there today who are kooky enough to believe they’re actually real. There are some people who actually claim to have seen or even interacted with them. Little kids tend to like these stories because they’re cute and fantastic… they’re fun. But we adults know better; we know that no one has really ever seen one, even if they wholeheartedly believe they have, and we know that if they really existed, someone probably would have documented it by now. We don’t deny that they could exist, but that’s not a good-enough reason to believe that they do exist.

There is a third word that I’d like to address in this post. That word is “irrational.” While atheists do not think that religious people are “dumb” nor “crazy,” we DO think they are irrational. Now, I want to be very clear in what I mean by that, because I can understand how it might sound insulting if you don’t take it the right way.

I want to say firstly that everyone is irrational in one way or another. We cannot avoid it; it’s just the way our brains work. I am deluded, and so are you, regardless of whether you believe gods exist or not. Our brains are irrationality factories. Irrationality is simply  ”lack of accordance with reason” (source). Some of us have fewer irrational beliefs than others, and when we use critical thinking correctly, we can help identify our unreasonable beliefs, and by acting upon these discoveries logically, we can minimize them in our thinking. But we all make mistakes in our thinking; it’s just part of being human. Our irrationality increases when we are in states of heightened emotion, which is why it’s so important to remain calm during debates and during emergencies. We literally think better when we take a deep breath and approach a problem without letting our emotions take over. (Taking a deep breath increases your oxygen saturation, the percentage of hemoglobin binding sites in the bloodstream occupied by oxygen. When our bloodstream has plenty of oxygen, our brains literally function better.)

As I wrote in my article yesterday, it is unreasonable to believe in miracles. By definition, a miracle is the least likely way something can occur. To borrow from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” Say you’re considering the miracle claim that Mary conceived without having sex. Is it impossible that she was lying? Is it impossible that she never claimed to be a virgin, and that part of the legend was added later? (Remember, neither our earliest New Testament writer, Paul, nor our earliest Gospel writer, Mark, mention a virgin birth at all). Is it impossible that she was drugged and sexually assaulted without her knowledge? Seeing as we cannot eliminate any of these three alternate explanations as impossible, it would be unreasonable and improper to rule them (and literally all other possible natural explanations) out and conclude that something miraculous – by definition, the least likely possible explanation – occurred. Believing something unreasonable is the very definition of irrationality.

So, why is it bad to be irrational? Well, often, it’s not really that bad. Sometimes it doesn’t matter at all. Say that you have an irrational belief (unwarranted based on available evidence) that you have an above-average ability to get along with companion animals, when in fact, you ability is about average. This is called illusory superiority. That’s probably not a belief that’s going to have any real effect on your life. But there are lots of irrational beliefs that people have which do have real effects on their lives. For example, what if you have an illusion of superiority about your driving ability? In one study, 93% of respondents said they had above-average driving ability (in reality, approximately 50% of people have above-average ability, and approximately 50% of people have below-average ability). This false belief could actually get you into lethal trouble, if, say, you decide to go drive to the grocery store during an ice storm, despite warnings on the news to avoid driving except in case of emergencies.

There are many other situations where it’s bad to be irrational. For example, the US government recently funded a $666,000 study through the National Institues of Health to see if prayer can help AIDS patients under controlled conditions. (It doesn’t). According to GiveWell, for less than $1,000, you can save someone’s life in a third-world country. Because of opportunity cost, that means that approximately 670 people are dead because we thought it was more important to to see if prayer has a statistically-significant effect on AIDS patients’ health (again, it doesn’t).

Let me say that again: About 670 people are dead, because we wanted to see if talking to yourself has magic powers.

Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s important to test ideas that show some promise, even if they seem wacky. That’s how scientific progress is made. It’s important to test wacky ideas repeatedly, if they show some promise, for the same reason. And prayer does show promise. Maybe people throughout history and today, billions of them, believe that prayer works. If it did absolutely nothing, we probably would have figured that out by now. Prayer does not do absolutely nothing. It actually does a lot: It can lower blood pressure, lower heart rate, improve morale, and several other pretty cool things. One thing to note: We’re talking about meditative prayer, not intercessory prayer (prayer on behalf of someone else), and these effects are for the person doing the praying. Intercessory prayer, under proper testing conditions, does nothing to help the patient (that is, when they don’t know if they’re in the control group, or if they’re actually being prayed for). Do we really need yet another study establishing this?

Yes.

Why?

Because educated, trained professionals still believe it.

But we are making progress. Two years ago, a pilot who prayed as his plane was crashing (instead of following emergency protocol), killing 16 people, got 10 years in jail in Italy. Three months ago, a nurse in the United Kingdom lost her license and was fired for praying to Jesus (instead of following emergency protocol) when a baby in her care suffered a heart attack. Apparently, the nurse begged for Jesus to help the baby 20 times before the mother told her to “shut up.”

Science is a slow, steady process. We are getting there. As advocates of critical thinking, our goal is conquering ignorance. Studies like this help us demonstrate to people that they are wrong. And although it’s frustrating, time-consuming, and costly, when the data is solid, and when we show these results to people who disagree, we’re creating cognitive dissonance. And we know from our own experience that cognitive dissonance is like a game of Jenga.

Piece by piece, science pulls out falsehoods, and you can ignore it, dig in your heels, pretend it’s not happening, make excuses, blame someone else, get angry, call it unfair, or accuse science of taking the magic away, but sooner or later, the laws of physics win, and the tower of delusion comes crashing down. Reality does not care what you wish to believe; reality only cares what is.

The best thing about ignorance is that it’s something we can help fix. Don’t write off religious people simply because they haven’t accepted the reality of what we can and can not know. Don’t assume that they know the history of their own books, or the way probability and logic and induction work. Take your time, explain, help. Direct them to resources (see all the links below for some good starting places). You are not going to change anyone’s mind in a single conversation, but as Greta Christina said, it is worth debating religion, because every time you do, it’s one more block in the Jenga tower of delusion. Think about your own de-conversion, if you used to be religious.

There’s an old saying, that overnight success usually takes about 10 years. If someone has been religious for a long time, remember the story about the guy who found out he wasn’t really his son’s “dad.” It might not be that foundation-shaking 2 months into the pregnancy, but if someone has been a dad (a Christian, a Muslim, etc) for 15 years, it’s not going to unravel after hearing one simple fact, or listening to one specific argument. Be patient, follow up, offer links, offer books, offer videos. The information is there; they just need to know what and where it is, and take time to absorb it.

It took me an entire year to come to grips with my atheism, and now, just two years later, I’m vice president of my campus atheist group. If you’d have talked to me four years ago, when I was a worship musician, I would have said, “I’ll pray for you.” I was not stupid; I just didn’t know better. But I was not a lost cause, and neither are millions of other future atheists out there. Stay positive, and stay confident! The facts are on your side.

Until next time,

Dave

mail@davemuscato.com

(573) 424-0420 cell/text

Dave Muscato is Vice President of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. A junior at Mizzou majoring in economics & anthropology and minoring in philosophy & Latin, Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com.

Follow Dave on Google+
Follow Dave on Twitter

Helpful resources:

Godisimaginary.com
Iron Chariots Wiki
Skeptics’ Annotated Bible / Skeptics’ Annotated Qur’an
AtheismResource.com
TalkOrigins.org

YouTubers: Evid3nc3, Thunderf00t, TheAmazingAtheist, The Atheist Experience, Edward Current,NonStampCollector, Mr. Deity, Richard Dawkins, QualiaSoup

Blogs: Greta Christina, PZ Myers, The Friendly Atheist, WWJTD?, Debunking Christianity, SkepChick

and don’t forget… other SASHA members! We are here for you, too!

Medicine: Where Real Miracles Happen Every Day

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Hello all!

As many of you know, I’ve been off the radar the past few days due to a kidney stone. Note: Some of the following will contain some explicit medical descriptions, just to let you know. I’m also still on pain meds, so I apologize in advance if this post is a bit rambling!

So, on Tuesday, I was over at my parents’ house taking a nap. Around 3:30 PM, I woke up because of some kind of pain in my abdomen. I though I just had to take a leak, so I went to do that, but didn’t have much luck. Some time passed, and the pain was getting worse, and I thought I should try defecating, but again didn’t have much luck. I waited awhile as the pain worsened further, and thought, if this hasn’t cleared up by the time my parents come home, I will talk to them about it (they are both medical doctors).

By 4:30, I knew there was no way I could wait until 6ish for them to come home, so I called my dad and explained the problem: I had some kind of pain in my belly, hard to describe, mostly in my right-front side. It was enough to wake me up an hour ago, and had only gotten worse in the meantime. Because unknown abdominal pain can turn life-threatening in a very short amount of time, he suggested that he should come home early and take me to the emergency room to find out what was wrong. I agreed, and after a few minutes of mentally pumping myself up, I stood up to go downstairs to get my shoes & glasses. I made it to the hallway before I had to start crawling, and by the time I got to the top of the stairs, I collapsed, writhing in pain.

My dad found me a few minutes later and helped my down the stairs. I have never felt pain like that in my whole life – it felt like I had been kicked in the testes at the same time someone had stabbed me in the side and twisted the knife. I do remember the drive to the hospital, but mostly because I was going back and forth between moaning and screaming the whole time.

My dad gave his medical opinion as a kidney stone, based on the fact that I had pain in my groin in addition to my belly, and that during the drive, small bumps didn’t seem to make it hurt additionally (in cases of appendicitis, jostling – like when you go over a curb in a car – makes the pain much worse).

This came up when I googled "kidney stone." I don't know why.

At the ER, I don’t remember a whole lot about checking in other than that I was hyperventilating and when they sat me down to take my blood pressure, I nearly broke the swinging arm of the chair from gripping it too hard. They lay me down on a bed and gave me IV pain meds (Dilaudid) and also an anti-inflammatory and something else (I don’t remember what). After that kicked in, they asked me to rate my pain, and I remember saying it was down to about a 7 on the 1-10 scale posted on the wall – distressing, but no longer unbearable. I remember asking who the nurse was who gave me the pain meds, and saying to him, “Thank you.” It was very important for me to do that at the time – I’m sure it was partly the drugs, but I remember thinking, THIS is who deserves the credit for my feeling better right now, and it was important to me that he knew it. I don’t remember if or how he responded, since I was kinda out of it.

The doctor saw me a little later and ordered a CT to positively rule out appendicitis, and to confirm a kidney stone. They gave me some more pain meds and wheeled me off for the CT, which confirmed a kidney stone. Around 8:30, they sent me home with a prescription for Percocet, one for an anti-nausea medication, and another for a medication called Flomax, which is usually prescribed for prostate-cancer patients – it helps loosen the abdomen to make passing the stone easier. They also gave me a thing that looked like a funnel with a screen in the bottom, with instructions to urinate into it each time I had to go, in order to catch the stone, so they could analyze it after I passed it.

A lot of human behavior makes more sense when you keep in mind that for much of our evolutionary history, food was scarce. We hunted when we could, and ate whatever we could find before other animals got to it. Whether that food was spoiled or not was a secondary concern. The purpose of the anti-nausea medication was explained to me this way: Apparently, our bodies respond to abdominal pain by saying, “I don’t know what the fuck is going on; better vomit just in case in was bad food.” I didn’t sleep at all that night, but I did manage to vomit up the first two Percocet I took (3 hours apart), as well as the anti-nausea medication and the Flomax. I’m estimating I vomited about 15-20 times that night, and was unable to keep down any water either, which – along with the vomiting itself – makes it rather difficult to work up enough urine to pass a kidney stone. The next morning (Wednesday), the pain was just as bad as the day before (since I couldn’t keep down any pain meds), and my dad took me back to the hospital so they could give me pain medication and some fluids via IV.

Since I was so dehydrated, they were unable to find a vein, and they had to stick me in the bicep. They eventually got the pain meds going and gave me two bags of saline, too. As it turned out, the reason I was in so much pain was that the kidney stone got stuck – I was too dehydrated to pass it, so they decided to remove it surgically.

Now, here’s the fun part. This is how you remove a lodged kidney stone: First, they put you under general anesthesia. Then, using a scalpel, they cut the opening at the tip of the penis open a little wider, so they can snake a flexible, tube-like instrument up your urethra. The instrument has a camera at the end, and a tool for grabbing the stone once they find it. They snake this device up your penis, find the stone, then reverse course and back it all the way out. Then they snake the instrument back up there and put in a stent (a little plastic tube thingie) and install this in your kidney where the stone was, to keep the blood flowing while your body heals. The stent stays there for about a week. Then you come back to the hospital, they put you under again, and repeat the process with the scalpel and the snaking instrument, and finally take the stent out.

When you wake up from this, the tip of your penis is bleeding and you have to urinate (since they’ve beeng giving you IV fluids this whole time). They tell you there will be blood in your urine, and that’s normal. So you get up to go pee, and you can look forward to that very same stabbing pain in your lower back, in addition to an unbelievably painful burning when you urinate – that’s the uric acid flowing over the cut in the tip of your penis. “Blood in your urine” is an understatement; it looks like you’re pissing straight blood, and feels like it, too. The same happens the next two or three times you go to the bathroom, until the tip heals. After that, it doesn’t burn from the acid anymore, but the feeling of being stabbed in your kidney is still there every time you go to the bathroom.

When I see it feels like you’re being stabbed in your back, I mean that every time you take a piss, even with pain meds, your kidney hurts such that for the next 45 minutes or so, you can barely stand up. There’s really nothing you can do about it except wait it out, and take pain meds. I’ve developed an aversion to drinking over the past few days and have had to force myself to remember to drink water so I don’t dehydrate again. I’ve lost about 8 pounds since this started, I’m guessing mostly water, although I’ve also only eaten two small meals total since Tuesday AM (it’s now Sunday AM).

I go back to the operating room on the 22nd to have the stent taken out, and I’m told that I should be okay to resume regular activities a few days after that. Whew!

Historically, we didn’t really know much about what caused disease. We still don’t really know what causes kidney stones specifically – some people believe there is a tie to drinking lots of soda (because of the phosphorous), but studies are inconclusive. Lots of people drink soda regularly and never develop kidney stones; others rarely or never drink soda and still get them. It’s rare for people to get them more than once, so it’s hard to attribute them to some sort of dietary or activity pattern, although taking excessive amounts of vitamin supplements (containing minerals) can cause them.

For hundreds of thousands of years before modern medicine, society’s best guess for things like kidney stones or appendicitis was cosmic punishment. All we knew was what we observed, which is that out of nowhere, somebody develops excruciating, debilitating pain. In cases of appendicitis, before modern surgery, it was not only excruciating painful, but fatal. Without the ability to remove an inflamed appendix, there was nothing you could do except wait for it to burst. People tended to become septic and die soon after.

It certainly does feel like punishment, considering that these things strike without warning and nobody is immune from having a few skeletons in their closet – it’s very easy to put 2 & 2 together, even if “cause” and “effect” are totally independent. That is why we have to be so careful when trying to link cause & effect – correlation does not imply causation. I’m reminded of an old “Got milk?” television ad:

Why is this man’s partner upset at him? Although she lets him in on the mystery at the end, imagine if she was an imaginary, invisible god instead of his partner. Lacking any surefire way to communicate with her, the best he could do would be try to apologize or offer sacrifices whatever he might have done to offend her. This is more or less the basis of the practice of sacrifices in various world religions, from the Aztecs and Mayas of the ancient Americas, to the deserts of the ancient (and current) Middle East, to the “offerings” of cash in churches, mosques, and synagogues around the world.

Deep down, even though we may do our best to live ethical lives, we’ve all done at least one thing we’re not proud of. Naturally, we’re seeking forgiveness for the things we wish we hadn’t done. We want to be told that we’re still a good person and that life goes on. It’s easy to anthropomorphize nature, and once you cross that line, it’s even easier to believe that some agency is keeping track of our wrongs, if we don’t know better. At that point, all we’re “waiting” for is someone to come along and tell us that this “God” is pissed, and you can make it all better by giving your money to “God” (although, of course, in practice, it really goes to the person claiming knowledge about how to make it all better). I consider this tactic the height of immorality. In the words of John B. Hodges, “Religion… gives a moral blank check to those bold enough, dishonest enough, to claim to speak for God.”

And it does feel good to do something to pay back our wrongs. When we hurt someone, we want to make it up to them. When we’re not able to do that, it feels wrong to just shrug and say, “Guess I’m off the hook then.” Somehow, it feels more moral to do something to say we’re sorry, even if we know, rationally, that they’re independent.

As humans, we like having answers to our questions. We like being right and having a sense of understanding about our environment. This makes sense – what we don’t understand is scary and potentially dangerous, so it’s in our best interest to try to figure it out as best we can. When it comes to detecting patterns in nature, evolution designed us to be paranoid, not accurate. This is, I think, one of the most important realizations in all of scientific inquiry. We have this desire to “just do something” when bad things are happening, even if our actions are useless or even when they actually worsen the situation. We don’t like feeling powerless and the idea that “things just happen” can be scary. I understand that.

But that doesn’t mean that karma is real, that fate is real, that everything happens for a reason, nor that there is a pattern to everything. We are excellent at detecting patterns – too good at it, actually.

I think as a society, we could make amazing progress on a vast array of social, political, and economic problems if we required all high school students to take introductory statistics, probability, and philosophy of science. I am continually dismayed at how few people, scientists even, understand the problem of induction, or understand basic concepts in epistemology and the philosophy of science like the difference between a fact, a theory, a hypothesis, a law, a model, and a proof. This is something we can fix, if we decide to.

In closing, I want to thank everyone out there who has paved or is paving the way for science to help us solve our problems. I certainly appreciate the knowledge and abilities of the medical staff who have helped me the past few days, and I sincerely say, thank scientists for painkillers. You guys are awesome.

- Dave

mail@davemuscato.com

(573) 424-0420 cell/text

Dave Muscato is Vice President of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. A junior at Mizzou majoring in economics & anthropology and minoring in philosophy & Latin, Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com.

Follow Dave on Google+
Follow Dave on Twitter

Helpful resources:

Godisimaginary.com
Iron Chariots Wiki
Skeptics’ Annotated Bible / Skeptics’ Annotated Qur’an
AtheismResource.com
TalkOrigins.org

YouTubers: Evid3nc3, Thunderf00t, TheAmazingAtheist, The Atheist Experience, Edward Current,NonStampCollector, Mr. Deity, Richard Dawkins, QualiaSoup

Blogs: Greta Christina, PZ Myers, The Friendly Atheist, WWJTD?, Debunking Christianity, SkepChick

and don’t forget… other SASHA members! We are here for you, too!