March 26, 2010
 ABC News’ Nightline recently sponsored a Faceoff debate with Deepak Chopra & Jean Houston on one side and Sam Harris & Michael Shermer on the other. The topic: Does God have a future? This is a bit like debating whether Bugs Bunny will continue to be fond of carrots. It’s not a meaningless question, but perhaps it’s one best left to future rabbit scholars who’ll be around to observe the matter first hand. Still, if God’s advocates these days are the likes of Deepak Chopra and Jean Houston, then I have to feel a little sorry for the Perfect One.
Deepak Chopra is a brother, so it was somewhat painful to watch the man’s passionate incoherence. He spoke in aggrieved fragments, choppy phrases circling the wagons of his non-argument. Chopra-bhai had it in for Shermer, which is understandable, since Shermer has made it a point to ridicule him as Dr. Woo-Woo. Sample exchange:
Chopra: For people like Michael– not you so much [Sam Harris]– for people like Michael, to take all of the inner experience, all of the rich inner experience and try to codify it in a graph with data is absurd.
Shermer: As opposed to what? Just calling it fuzzy words? How does that help us understand it?
Chopra: That’s such an OUT, Michael. That’s such an out.
Shermer: And–
Chopra: You use the word ‘fuzzy’. Use the word ‘woo-woo’ and you’re out of the argument.
Indeed. What was the argument again?
But it doesn’t really matter. The debate wasn’t a debate because the two sides were using words very differently. Harris & Shermer were using reason, that is, using language with its usual adult conventions of having to make sense. The other side seem to use words to evoke cosmic feeling. Dr. Houston writes things like: “That is you — the human being that is the microcosm or, if you will, the fractal of the Infinite self. The human Selfing game may be what Infinity does for fun.” It seems to me that such speech-acts have a certain ritualistic role. It’s not too far removed– in emotional affect anyway– from shamanic chants, motherese, and the nonsense rhymes of children.
Jean Houston seemed more aware than Chopra-bhai that the place and time weren’t suited for chanting. Or perhaps it was simply that she wasn’t allowed to speak. Every now and then she’d raise her hand to indicate she wanted to speak, but her attempts were ignored by the three men. Pretty brutal.
It’s easy to make fun of Chopra-bhai and Dr. Houston. But they make life more interesting, not less. So a little sympathy may not be out of order. We need them around, if only to remind us there’s no curing the imagination. Perhaps they truly believe the woo-woo they claim to believe. And what’s the harm? At best, it’s only the stuff of foma, wampeters and granfalloons. At worst, it only further delays a serious study of Bugs Bunny and his inexplicable passion for carrots.
October 22, 2008
All right, let's all calm down. Mars is still a few weeks away and the center of the galaxy will take at least a month. Maybe even two.
Who cares!!!!! Chandrayaan I of 2,4,5, 10 Million buts and bolts is on its way to the moon. The moon! The moon. The goddamn moon! I'm so thrilled I could bark. I am, actually.
It seems the payload has to be under 1500 kg, which worried me. 1500 kgs means there's space for about 18 dancers (80 kgs/dancer), and with eight dancers for the hero and eight for the heroine, that leaves a total of just 80 kgs for the 11 scientific payloads. Tight. Very tight. Still, if the damn vehicle managed to crawl through the Indian bureaucracy, anything is feasible.
What a long, long wait it has been. The Sanskrit poets had been tempting us for centuries. Just listen to Sarva:
The moon that spreads its rays jasmine-white
as lovely as the breast of a Kashmiri girl
and its mark, as waterlily-dark,
is like the painting of her breast with musk.
I can't confirm the accuracy of the simile, alas, but the man sounds like he knows what he's talking about. At any rate, if that doesn't motivate an astronomer to fiddle with his astrolabe, I don't know what will.
"Chandrayaan," as the newspapers tell us, is "ancient" Sanskrit for "moon vehicle." Ancient Sanskrit is Vedic Sanskrit, and Chandrayaan is probably more like "post-vedic" Sanskrit usage, even though both pieces (Chandra and yaan) do appear in the Rig-ved. The word "Soma" is often used as a synonym for the moon (sometime visualized as the cup containing soma, the ambrosia of the Gods, namely, Heineken beer) so perhaps Chandrayaan could also be converse-translated as "beer-vehicle" in ancient English.
And Soma is what our ancients should be tippling at the moment. That Chandrayaan is making its way towards the vaulting arch of heaven is due in part to all those long centuries of slokas, sutras, shastras and smritis. Let a poet (Dharmakirti) have the last say:
The East has borne the Moon.
Love dances and the nymphs of the directions laugh,
while the wind scatters holi,
the pollen of waterlilies, through heaven's court.
Shubh yatra, Chandrayaan.
September 15, 2008
Social evolutionists Kevin Foster and Hanna Kokko, in their recent paper in The Proceedings Of The Royal Society, set themselves the following problem:
“…under what conditions might a tendency for performing behaviours that incorrectly assign cause and effect be adaptive from an individual fitness point of view?”
It’s puzzling why the authors think there is anything to explain. Is superstitious reasoning an inheritable, evolutionary feature? Take woodcutting. Amateurs will work wood in incorrect and erroneous ways. That’s not to say there isn’t an efficient and systematic way to work wood that can be taught and encouraged. Do we really need an evolutionary explanation why we evolved to have babies who don’t know the difference between an adze and a maul?
Foster and Kokko’s real motivation is revealed, I think, in an earlier paragraph:
“In a world increasingly dominated by science, superstitious and indeed religious thinking typically take a back seat in academic affairs. However, superstitions play a central role in many small-scale societies, and indeed remain prevalent in the popular culture of all societies. Why is this? Can science rationalize this seemingly most irrational aspect of human behaviour?”
Needless to say, the authors’ rationalization is that superstitious reasoning may have some adaptive value. It’s a curiously Victorian attitude to human cognition; as if irrationality were somehow taboo, and town and manor had to be reassured that the phenomenon only appeared to be irrational.
One of my irrational habits, while reading papers on evolutionary models, is to substitute the key word– in this case, “superstitious reasoning”– with something else, say, “a fondness for weevils.” I’m glad to report that applying the technique to this paper produced an equally cogent explanation of why weevil-lovers roam the planet Earth.
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February 17, 2007
One of the privileges of having cogitated our way to the top of the food chain is that we now have the luxury to cogitate on how we got to the top. Or whether other critters cogitate like us. Or not. We make rats scurry around mazes to help us understand how we think. Pigeons get OCD trying to resolve whether we make decisions before we form preferences or after. The Drosophila fly used to be a fly; now it’s basically a test tube with wings. Monkeys are always complaining that the only reason they exist is because Steve Pinker needs to write books on languages. And Mr. Toad of Toad Hall would sue for libel were he to read Lettvin et. al.’s classic description of frog life:
"The frog does not seem to see or, at any rate, is not concerned with the detail of stationary parts of the world around him. He will starve to death surrounded by food if it is not moving. His choice of food is determined only by size and movement….His sex life is conducted by sound and touch. His choice of paths in escaping enemies does not seem to be governed by anything more devious than leaping to where it is darker. Since he is equally at home in water and on land, why should it matter where he lights after jumping or what particular direction he takes? He does remember a moving thing providing it stays within his field of vision and he is not distracted."
I couldn’t have described my teen years better. But seriously, animal research does throw light on the oddest things. Fish, for instance.
Apparently, fish can figure out that if fish A can outfight fish B, and fish B can outfight fish C, then very likely, A will be able to outfight C. This kind of reasoning is called transitive inference. It works for some relationships ("taller than", "older than", "darker than", etc.) and doesn’t work for others ("married to", "son of", "is a friend of," "loves," etc.).
Piaget had studied transitive inference in children and found that age 7 marked a turning point; kids under 7 could not, in general, figure out that if stick A was longer than stick B was longer than stick C, then stick A was longer than stick C. There were two immediate criticisms of Piaget’s work. The first was that if he’d used pizza slices instead of sticks, the results would’ve been very different. The second, more valid complaint, was that his sample was flawed. He’d used humans, and every self-respecting Skinnerian knew that one didn’t learn about humans from experiments on humans. Especially, the French variety! What was Piaget trying to do? Put the rats and pigeons out of business?
So the other species were signed up, per usual, to study the problem for us. And over the decades, just as the Skinnerians had foreseen, primates, rats and birds all showed they too could get transitive inference. Of course, the problem had to be phrased right, that is, it had to be relevant to the lives of the species involved. Given this, it could be shown that the ability to do transitive inference wasn’t unique to humans. But what about fish? Were they "in da club," as 50 Cents phrased it?
Yes, says Logan Grosenick, in a recent Nature paper. He and his colleagues, Tricia Clement and Russell Fernald, set up an elegant experiment in which they showed Astatotilapia burtoni fish acting as if they’d made a transitive inference. D. Balasubramanian has a great article in the Hindu on this experiment, and so I’ll skip the details. But briefly, the idea is this. Normally, dominance hierarchies in the highly territorial A. burtoni are determined by who wins the fights. Grosenick and his team set up a series of staged fights between A. burtoni fish. These fights were witnessed by "bystander fish," also from the same species. The outcomes of the fights were known to the researchers, but not to the bystander fish. Suppose a bystander fish watched fish A beat fish B, which in turn beat fish C. Then the researchers found that the bystander fish would treat fish A as dominant over C even though it had never witnessed an actual fight between A and C. In other words, as Grosenick explains:
"We were able to create an artificial dominance hierarchy for the bystander fish."
It’s a clever experiment, and it took a lot of work. It’s good, solid research. I have my doubts about their conclusions though. I think the experiment demonstrates an "as if" ability, not the ability itself. These fish act as if they do transitive inference, but that doesn’t mean they do it. It’s an important difference.
For example, every time we cross a street, we act as if we’re solving complex dynamical problems. In actual fact, we do nothing of the kind. We use thumb rules, quick non-quantitative reasoning, and do clever little things like ignoring information that doesn’t have to do with crossing streets. We don’t know the details yet, but I’d bet it’s not an exercise in non-holonomic control systems. Similarly, I don’t think transitive inference is needed for the bystander fish to figure out that it’s best to stay away from the dominant fish A. If the fish are not using transitive inference, then what are they using?
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February 4, 2007
Just finished watching the debate between Sam Harris (The End of Faith) and Reza Aslan (No God But God) on C-SPAN. The topic:
"Does the Bible provide timeless prescriptions for our daily lives? Or does its inclusion of practices such as slavery preclude its ability to act as such a guide? Are Osama bin Laden’s grievances with the United States purely theological, or also social and political? Reza Aslan, author of "No god but God," and Sam Harris, author of "Letter to a Christian Nation," take up these questions in this debate at the Los Angeles Public Library. The event also includes discussion on contemporary trends in Islam– including whether or not Muslims are unique in their religious fervor– and debate over the concept of the Koran as a perfect and immutable document."
Does that sound like a perfect evening or what! Jonathan Kirsch, a bearded, soft-spoken, bear-like dude with a no-nonsense legal letter-pad, kept the men from making any sudden Tysonesque moves. Kirsch’s the author of A History Of The End Of The World. After a book like that, I guess he can handle anything.
The score? Well, Harris won. Reza circled round and round a profoundly oft-misunderstood point about profound transcendent experiences that had profoundly to do with context and interpretation sensitive to people’s transcendent experiences that profoundly need no validation external to the fact of it being a profound transcendent experience.
Okay. That’s unfair. Reza’s a smart guy. He’s articulate to a fault. He was at his best when he dealt in facts. When Harris claimed that the Israel-Palestine conflict was a religious one, it didn’t take Reza long to demonstrate Harris didn’t know what he was talking about. But for the most part, Reza tried to explain away the irrationality of religion via rational arguments. It’s the kind of contortion that’d get even B. K. S. Iyengar’s knickers in a twist.
As I see it, Reza’s main argument was that most rational questions about religion were misconstrued. He claimed that Religion wasn’t about facts, the domain of science, but about "a sacred history." "Sacred history" is a lot like ordinary history except that true/false is replaced with significance/non-significance. For example, to ask whether Moses really parted the Red Sea or whether the god Ganpati really has an elephant’s head is to miss the point. The correct question was to ask what these stories mean for their believers, why they matter. To keep harping on truth, evidence and logic was to be unsophisticated. Profoundly unsophisticated.
I was reminded of a joke in The Recruit. Al Pacino’s explaining– hoarse voice, bloodhound visage and all– to his C.I.A. protege why he decided to betray another three letter agency, namely, the U.S.A:
"There’s this parish priest, goes up to the pope, drops down on his knees, starts weeping, asking forgiveness. ‘Holy Father, Holy Father, what am I to do? What am I to do? I do not believe in God anymore. What am I to do?’ You know what the pope said? ‘Fake it.’ "
Perhaps Reza is in the position of that pope, asking the padre to defend something not because it was true but because it was important.
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September 6, 2006
The Vaio’s recent near-lobotomy experience got me thinking. It had happened because of ZoneAlarm’s inability to clean up after itself, which is nothing unusual or remarkable in the world of software. My particular situation had been well-documented, and there were only a finite set of possibilities. In the worst case, I could’ve done a clean install of WinXP. It would’ve been painful and humiliating for sure, but then, dignity has no evolutionary value. It could’ve been a lot worse.
How much worse?
Well, any virus based on any regular pattern can, in principle, be killed. Given enough time– a finite amount of time– an antidote can be devised for "stable viruses." So how about a virus that morphs into different forms, that has antigenic mutability? Something like the software equivalents of retroviruses like HIV and influenza? After all, even after millions of years of human evolution, the flu still managed to kill more people in the 20th century than the two world wars combined. In fact, the scenario can be worsened. Epidemiologists worry about designer viruses, such as Edwin D. Kilbourne‘s Maximally Malignant Virus, or the MMV. As Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child describe it in their novel, Mount Dragon:
"The MMV would have, he [Kilbourne] theorized, the environmental stability of polio, the antigenic mutability of influenza, the unrestricted host range of rabies, the latency of herpes….It would be far more devastating than a nuclear war. Why? A nuclear war is self-limiting. But with the spread of an MMV, every infected person becomes a brand-new walking bomb. And today’s transmission routes are so widespread, so quickly achieved by international travelers, it only takes a few carriers for a virus to go global."
Great doomsday stuff. But inaccurate. Epidemics starve to death. No steady supply of susceptibles, end of epidemic. Period. It’s called the Kermack-McKendrick threshold theorem. And Dr. Kilbourne is skeptical of these doomsday viruses as well. As he said in a recent interview:
"Let me just say that a virus of any kind that has a mortality rate of 50 percent is killing itself, because it will have nowhere to go if it wipes out all the hosts. So it is not in the virus’s interest to kill many people."
There’s also a major difference between infected people and infected computers. Unlike computers, people don’t neatly unzip into software and hardware. We are, as the late Dr. Robert Rosen explained, fabrications rather than simulations. The analogy between computer viruses and biological viruses may be relatively accurate, but the analogy between people and computers is fundamentally flawed.
Besides, we’ll soon have far more sophisticated techniques to fight the kind of viruses we see today. (The current strategy of running our machines like totalitarian states cannot stand. Totalitarian states are brittle. Worse, they breed for virulence by eliminating the easy, the weak and the incompetent.)
So is that it? Are we safe because we can always restore-image the disk, do a clean install, no matter how deadly the virus? Or is there a virus for which the only "cure" is to trash the machine itself?
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May 14, 2006
The homepage of the Univ. of Virginia’s Division Of Perceptual Studies quotes Thomas Jefferson:
"I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led."
It is a fine quote, exactly the sort of postprandial statement one can imagine Jefferson making at Monticello, with a glass of Chateau d’Yquem in one hand and Sally in the other. They don’t make presidents like him anymore.
But perhaps they do. That is, if Dr. Ian Stevenson is right.
Ian Stevenson‘s a medical doctor (internal medicine) trained at McGill University, the author of many peer-reviewed articles, and a former chaired professor at UVa. Dr. Stevenson’s pursuit of the truth has led him into very odd territory. In the 60s through the 80s, he investigated cases in India, Ceylon, Brazil, Alaska, and Lebanon that were "suggestive of reincarnation."
There’s a rough pattern to these reincarnation stories. A child– usually between two and four years of age — begins to claim that he/she is actually so-and-so, now deceased. Parents resist said claims. Eventually, contact with so-and-so’s family is made. Dénouement follows. At some point, ranging from 3 weeks to twenty years, Stevenson shows up with his tape recorder and interpreter. He interviews the families, cross-checks claims, classifies events into a typology, and then re-conducts the interviews with a second translator. The book describes twenty representative cases. His conclusion:
"In the cases of the present collection we have evidence of the occurrence of patterns which the present personality is not known to have inherited or acquired after birth in the present life. And in some instances these patterns match corresponding and specific features of an identified deceased personality. In such cases we have then in principle, I believe, some evidence for human survival of physical death. I say in principle, because I continue aware [sic] of particular weaknesses in the present cases."
In short, there are events suggestive of reincarnation. I think he’s mistaken. But whatever one may think of his extraordinary conclusion, the book will induce respect. His case reports are painfully detailed, monumentally tedious and reassuringly detached. It’s shoe-leather research rather than arm-chair research. It’s Masters and Johnson sans lubrication. The book is a lovely testament to what empiricism is all about.
Assuming the evidence is not manufactured out of whole cloth (in which case the book ranks with great literature), there’s a neat little puzzle to be explained. Some of the cases are rather disquieting, especially the cases of Pramod and Swarnalata. Stevenson’s methodology is not that of the doctor or the physicist but that of the detective.
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September 12, 2005
It is tempting to look at a computer program and to look at DNA and come to the erroneous conclusion that Nature is the Great Programmer. It is tempting for the same reason that Descartes saw human mechanisms in Swiss puppets, and for the same reason that telegraph networks were once tempting models of our brains, and for the same reason that clocks used to tick across our cosmological models. The limits of our artifacts are the limits of our imaginations.
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