Have you seen your miracle this month?

http://io9.com/have-you-had-your-miracle-this-month-472650940

Are Science and Religion Compatible? Poll of Americans

I just came across this PEW survey in preparation for some of my class lectures. There are a lot of interesting details here that deserve thought. Poll: Are Science and Religion Compatible?

Atheism is a Civil Rights Issue, argues Todd Stiefel

Raising awareness about our right to not believe

The Demise of American Religiousness?

"Religious affiliation in the United States is at its lowest point since it began to be tracked in the 1930s, according to analysis of newly released survey data by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Duke University. Last year, one in five Americans claimed they had no religious preference, more than double the number reported in 1990." http://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-03/uoc--aar031213.php

Machine Intelligence and Machine Ethics

There are lots of interesting articles here:

Singularity AI Research



But the first article, Intelligence Explosion and Machine Ethics, is embarrassing it's so fun. It's by Luke Muehlhauser and Louie Helm.  Muelhlhauser ran the remarkable blog CommonSenseAtheism.com for years before moving over into artificial intelligence research.

The abstract (makes it sound dryer than it is):


Many researchers have argued that a self-improving artificial intelligence (AI) could become so vastly more powerful than humans that we would not be able to stop it from achieving its goals. If so, and if the AI’s goals differ from ours, then this could be disastrous for humans. One proposed solution is to program the AI’s goal system to want what we want before the AI self-improves beyond our capacity to control it. Unfortunately, it is difficult to specify what we want. After clarifying what we mean by “intelligence,” we offer a series of “intuition pumps” from the field of moral philosophy for our conclusion that human values are complex and difficult to specify. We then survey the evidence from the psychology of motivation, moral psychology, and neuroeconomics that supports our position. We conclude by recommending ideal preference theories of value as a promising approach for developing a machine ethics suitable for navigating
an intelligence explosion or “technological singularity.”


And a choice passage:


5. Cognitive Science and Human Values

5.1. The Psychology of Motivation

People don’t seem to know their own desires and values. In one study, researchers showed male participants two female faces for a few seconds and asked them to point at the face they found more attractive. Researchers then laid the photos face down and handed subjects the face they had chosen, asking them to explain the reasons for their choice. Sometimes, researchers used a sleight-of-hand trick to swap the photos, showing subjects the face they had not chosen. Very few subjects noticed that the face they were
given was not the one they had chosen. Moreover, the subjects who failed to notice the switch were happy to explain why they preferred the face they had actually rejected moments ago, confabulating reasons like “I like her smile” even though they had originally chosen the photo of a solemn-faced woman (Johansson et al. 2005).

Similar results were obtained from split-brain studies that identified an “interpreter” in the left brain hemisphere that invents reasons for one’s beliefs and actions. For example, when the command “walk” was presented visually to the patient (and therefore processed by the his brain’s right hemisphere), he got up from his chair and walked away. When asked why he suddenly started walking away, he replied (using his left
hemisphere, which was disconnected from his right hemisphere) that it was because he wanted a beverage from the fridge (Gazzaniga 1992, 124–126).

Common sense suggests that we infer others’ desires from their appearance and behavior, but have direct introspective access to our own desires. Cognitive science suggests instead that our knowledge of our own desires is just like our knowledge of others’ desires: inferred and often wrong (Laird 2007). Many of our motivations operate unconsciously. We do not have direct access to them (Wilson 2002; Ferguson, Hassin, and Bargh 2007; Moskowitz, Li, and Kirk 2004), and thus they are difficult to specify.

5.2. Moral Psychology

Our lack of introspective access applies not only to our everyday motivations but also to our moral values. Just as the split-brain patient unknowingly invented false reasons for his decision to stand up and walk away, experimental subjects are often unable to correctly identify the causes of their moral judgments. For example, many people believe—as Immanuel Kant did—that rule-based moral thinking is a “rational” process. In contrast, the available neuroscientific and behavioral evidence instead suggests that rule-based moral thinking is a largely emotional process (Cushman, Young, and Greene 2010), and may in most cases amount to little more than a post-hoc rationalization of our emotional reactions to situations (Greene 2008).

We also tend to underestimate the degree to which our moral judgments are context sensitive. For example, our moral judgments are significantly affected by whether we are in the presence of freshly baked bread, whether the room we’re in contains a concentration of novelty fart spray so low that only the subconscious mind can detect it, and whether or not we feel clean (Schnall et al. 2008; Baron and Thomley 1994; Zhong,
Strejcek, and Sivanathan 2010).

Agnosticism and Epistemic Caution

Nick Bostrom has some very interesting things to say about reasonable agnosticism here.  I agree with a lot of it, but I'd add a few points about theistic belief at critical junctures that, I think, tip the scales in the overall probability estimation (in favor of atheism.)  He's being too epistemically cautious, as I see it, and not acknowledge some of the most salient features of the epistemology, sociology, history, and psychology of religious belief.  The vast majority of human religious belief is much more adequately explained by a number of natural, not supernatural accounts.  So the fact that so many people believe, and that disagreement persists, should not pull our probability assessment so far into the agnostic zone.

Transhumanist Nick Bostrom on Agnosticism

The Basics Expanded

The ideas first drafted here as The Basics has been evolving in my head for a while.  I've adapted the post and incorporated it into my Philosophy of Religion courses as some background material for discussions about God.  I've been adding to it as time permits. So here's the latest version of what I take to be the basics about cosmology, evolution, and the history of humanity that we must take as our starting point in discussions about the existence of God.  That is, any reasonable person who believes in God needs, at a minimum, to give some account of how the existence of that being fits in with these facts:

The Basics

Promiscuous Teleologists

We're all promiscuous teleologists, it appears, but scientists less than others fortunately.  (And I love Epiphenom, BTW.)

Global warming? Nah, that's crazy. The Biblical Apocalypse? Absolutely!

36% of Americans believe that the severity of recent natural disasters is evidence that we are in what the Bible calls the end times.

The Gap for God

Suppose that members of a religious movement, such as Christianity, maintain that the existence of some powerful god and its goals or laws can be known through their scriptures, their prophets, or some special revelation. Suppose further that the evidence that is available to support the reliability of those scriptures, prophets, or special revelations is weaker than that God is hypothetically capable of producing.  That is, suppose that Christians maintain that Jesus was resurrected on the basis of the Gospels, or that God’s existence can be known through the Bible, or Muslims insist on the historical authenticity of the Koran.  Could God, the almighty creator of the universe, have brought it about so that the evidence in favor of the resurrection, the Bible, or the Koran was better than we currently find it?  I take it that the answer is obviously yes.  Even if you think there is evidence that is sufficient to prove the resurrection, a reasonable person must also acknowledge that it could have been better.  And there’s the problem. 

If the capacity of that god is greater than the effectiveness or quality of those scriptures, prophets, or special revelations, then the story they are telling contradicts itself. “We know our god is real on the basis of evidence that is inadequate for our god.” Or, “The grounds that lead us to believe in our god are inconsistent with the god we accept; nevertheless, we believe in this god that would have given us greater evidence if it had wished for us to believe in it.”

Given the disparity between the gods that these religious movements portend and the grounds offered to justify them, the atheist is warranted in dismissing such claims. If the sort of divine being that they promote were real and if he had sought our believe on the basis of the evidence, the evidential situation would not resemble the one we are in.  The story doesn’t make internal sense.  A far better explanation is that their enthusiasm for believing in a god has led them to overstate what the evidence shows.  And that same enthusiasm has made it difficult for them to see that an all powerful God would have the power to make his existence utterly obvious and undeniable.  Since it’s not, the non-believer can’t possibly be faulted for failing to believe.  

Some Varieties of Disproof

Sometimes, we reject a claim about reality because it doesn’t fit with other claims about which we have better evidence overall.  Your aunt, who has smoked 2 packs of cigarettes a day for 20 years, is diagnosed with lung cancer.  She has a job working in a building where there has been construction that has created a lot of dust over the last several weeks and she insists that it is the dust, not the smoking, that is the cause of the cancer.  Or perhaps she, like millions of Americans, believes in hexes.  And she’s suspicious that her neighbor across the street, with whom she has had a lot of personal friction over many years, has something to do with the cancer.  The hateful thoughts radiating from the house across the street have made her sick, she thinks.  In either case, the evidence we have for the smoking being the cause of her cancer is better, and with some thought and investigation, we could conclude with confidence that the smoking hypothesis is proven, and the other theories are disproven.  Let’s call this Inductive Disproof.

A brief note about proof:  Many people who haven’t reflected on the topic much have the sense that we should reserve the term “proof” only for those cases where we have the most substantial level of deductive certainty.  We can prove, for instance, that 2 + 2 = 4, or that bachelors are unmarried.  But we shouldn’t use the term proof for other matters of less confidence.  Furthermore, their sense is that we should only use “proof” about indefeasible conclusions, claims that we would not change our minds about under any circumstances.  For other matters, like smoking and cancer, the connection between a high calorie diet and obesity, and who won last year’s Superbowl, we should describe the status of our beliefs in some other way. And many of the same people who feel this way about proof have the same impulse about “knowledge.”  We only know those things, they say, that we can prove.  No other less certain matters should be called knowledge. 

For a number of reasons, I think it is a mistake to reserve “proof” for only indefeasibly certain matters.  First, if we raise the bar on “proof” this high, then there remains little or nothing that we know.  On this view, we don’t know that smoking causes cancer, that the sun will rise tomorrow, that the sun rose yesterday, that Obama is the President, that violent crime is on the decline in the United States, that people who have a low fat, high fiber diet with lots of exercise tend to live longer than those without, and so on.  Too many things that we comfortably and normally claim to know must now be described in some other artificial manner.  Second, we can have our cake and eat it too; we can readily acknowledge that there are things we know and that we have proven, but our conclusion is defeasible.  We can say that even though the evidence supports the conclusion overall, we are prepared, under the right circumstances, to change our minds in the light of new information.  We know that the force of gravity, for instance, on the surface of the Earth is 9.8 meters/sec2.  (The extreme proof/knowledge advocate must insist awkwardly and artificially, “No, we don’t really know that, we only have a massive amount of evidence and justification for it.”)  A more natural way to proceed here is to say that we know, and have proven, many things beyond the deductively certain.  But we are always ready to incorporate new evidence into our theories about what is true and change our minds if that becomes warranted.  Third, people who press for the extreme proof/knowledge view are quite vulnerable to the Going Nuclear problem. Fourth, the extreme proof/knowledge view often fall into the Sliding Scale Fallacy.  And fifthly, to make the extreme proof/knowledge advocate happy, we can easily make a distinction that is widely accepted and acknowledged in the sciences between inductive and deductive proof/justification.

Now back to varieties of disproof.  Sometimes we reject a claim because it is internally inconsistent or logically contradictory.  We know that Smith is not a married bachelor for instance, or that a three sided figure labeled ABC is not a square, because married bachelors and three sided squares are logically impossible.  Deductive disproofs of the existence of God in this category have either argued that a single attribute that is typically given to God like omnipotence is impossible, or that some combination of properties like infinitely just and infinitely merciful are mutually inconsistent.  Let’s call these Single Property Deductive Disproof and Multiple Property Deductive Disproof.  There is an an extensive philosophical literature stretching across centuries offering these sorts of disproofs for God.  See: 

  

Bibliography of Philosophical Atheism

Divine Attributes:  The State of the Discussion

God is Impossible

Sometimes we reject a claim because the concepts that it employs and the model of reality that is embedded in the concepts has become impoverished, bankrupt, useless, or inapt at describing reality.  Consider three theories about a sick person who is exhibiting swollen lymph nodes, gangrene, fever, malaise, and seizures.

  

He might be possessed by evil demons, he might have an imbalance in his four humors—black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood—that could be rectified with leeches, or he might have a bacterial infection of yersenia pestis—Bubonic Plague.  The Bubonic Plague theory along with modern virology in which it is embedded turns out to be far better at recognizing the ailment, treating it, curing it, preventing it, making predicitions, and so on.  If we successfully cure the patient by means of virology and the Bubonic Plague hypothesis, it’s not so much that we have disproven the evil demon possession claim in any deductive or logical sense.  It’s still logically possible that there could be evil demons disguised at the yersenia pestis bacteria in his blood.  But holding onto the evil demon claim and the baggage that comes with it just becomes increasingly useless, and extraneous in our model of reality.  

At some point we leave some ideas behind because they just don’t fit with the rest of what we know about reality.  It strikes me as natural and sensible to say that we know that those symptoms are caused by yersenia pestis now.  We have proven that the illness is caused by the bacteria, and not by evil demons.   Let’s call this sort of case Theoretical Disproof. 

So on this way of carving things up, we have at least fours kinds of disproof:  Inductive Disproof, Single Property Deductive Disproof, Multiple Property Deductive Disproof, and Theoretical Disproof.  There are others, and there are different ways of mapping out the epistemological landscape.  But this will suffice for now. 

As I see it, the God hypothesis, where God is described in the ways that the vast majority of modern believers describe him, fails because of arguments of all four types.  More details about can be found in the over 300 posts on this blog written over the years, in my recent book Atheism and the Case Against Christ, and in the book I’m now working on Atheism:  Proving the Negative.  There are some other accounts of God that escape those four varieties of Atheological Disproof, but those, as far as I can tell, just end up being vaccuous, trivial, or unmotivated—God is love, God is the development of human self-awareness, God is energy, God is reality.

So the challenge for the theist, as I see it, is to first come up with a description of God that is internally, logicall coherent.  It must attribute properties to God that are individually coherent, and that are logically consistent with each other.  And this description must navigate around the broad set of Deductive Atheological arguments that have undermined the God concept.  Furthermore, the description needs to it needs to be sufficiently superlative to warrant the "God" label," and, one would hope, it would have some semblance to the supernatural being that billions of traditional believers have advocated for centuries.  Then the theist reconcile the claim that this being is real with the a posteriori facts as we know them—the theist must deal with the Inductive Disproofs for God.  The theist needs to address the problem of evil, the problem of divine hiddenness, and a host of other serious inductive challenges that have come up over the centuries. 

But even all of that wouldn’t be sufficient to justify theism, as I see it.  We could construct some account of evil demons that is internally logically consistent.  And we could add enough provisos, tweaks, and emendations to the story to accommodate all of the details of modern virology.  Evil demons are clever and sinister, you see, and part of their malevolent deception of us is that they are disguising their activities to look like bacterial infections, cancer, and so on.  How do you know, afterall, that viruses and bacterial infection aren’t just the way that evil demons do us harm?  Like evil demonology, theology has been rendered superfluous and vacuous by the rest of what we have learned about biology, geology, history, psychology, anthropology, astronomy, and cosmology. 

The theist, as I see it, has to do more than sketch out some scheme whereby it might be possible that God employed evolution to create us, for example.  The theist needs to give us some substantial positive evidence for thinking that it is true.  Possible, as I have argued many times, it not probable or reasonable or justified.  

Are we proving the negative yet?   

What Exactly Do You Want From Me?

Following Feldman, let’s define epistemic peers as two people are epistemic peers “when they are roughly equal with respect to intelligence, reasoning powers, background information, etc.” 

And let say that “When people have had a full discussion of a topic and have not

withheld relevant information, we will say that they have shared their evidence about that topic.”

Many theists appear to believe that atheists and agnostics shouldn’t be atheists and agnostics.  They are, the theist says, mistaken, unreasonable, misguided, or unjustified.  This theist will have some negative attitude of culpability towards epistemic peers who share evidence.  (And the same is true for many atheists, including myself, about their attitude towards theists and agnostics.) 

What the atheist will have to say next to the theist in these circumstances will depend upon her answer to these questions: 

Do you think 1)  that once all the relevant arguments, evidence, and background issues are adequately considered, a reasonable person is obligated to conclude that God is real, or that Jesus was resurrected from the dead, or some other central tenets of modern orthodox monotheism are true? 

Or do you think 2) that once all the relevant arguments, evidence, and background issues are adequately considered, it is epistemically permissible for a reasonable person to believe that God is real, or that Jesus was resurrected from the dead, or some other central tenets of modern orthodox monotheism?

Endorsing 1), as I see it, will also commit a person to saying that to be an atheist or agnostic, once he has considered all the relevant arguments, evidence and background issues is unreasonable.  Evidence sharing epistemic peers who are atheists and agnostics ought not believe what they believe. 

Endorsing 2), as I see it, places no similar demand or charge of epistemic culpability on the non-believer.  If you think merely that it is not unreasonable to believe, given all of the relevant evidence, then you are allowing that a reasonable, evidence sharing peer might well draw a different conclusion and be within her epistemic rights, as it were. 

So theists, which is it?  Do you think that I have made some serious error with regard to the total available evidence concerning God and that I ought to change my mind?  Or do you merely think that your believing on the basis of the available evidence is epistemically permissible, but someone could opt not to believe and he would be similarly inculpable?    

Atheist countries more peaceful

Epiphenom is a great blog.  This post is is fascinating:  Atheist countries more peaceful.

It's well established that education and religiousness are inversely correlated.  The trick, of course, is figuring out what the cause is.  Does education cause religiousness to fall off?

And this is my 300th post!

1/6 of World Population Nonreligious

New study of world religions out from Pew Forum.  16% of world population nonreligious.

End of the World

As I read it, this cookie says to expect a catastrophic flood of milk that will wipe the Earth clean of sinners.  

Be Counted

Atheist Census.  Get yourself counted.

Sound like anyone we know?

Some random, but connected info about mental illness and religion.  Given what we know about mental illness and about the best arguments that advocates have been able to muster for God, our first thought when we encounter someone with intense religious convictions should not be to take his/her arguments or reasonings too seriously but to ask, "What are the symptoms of mental illness that she is exhibiting?"  The behaviors of the most religious among us:  hyper-religiousity, hyper-moralism, evangelism, hypergraphia, visions, voices, circumstantiality, disassociated states, states of religious ecstasy, euphoria, and moral elevation.  And when otherwise serious academics get involved in protracted and complicated defenses of religious belief, how is that not comparable to infamous Harvard psychiatrist John Mack getting swept up by the UFO abduction testimonies of his patients?



Geschwind syndrome

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Geschwind syndrome
Classification and external resources
ICD-10	None
ICD-9	None
eMedicine	Overview/1186336

Geschwind syndrome, also known as "Gastaut-Geschwind" is a characteristic personality syndrome consisting of symptoms such as circumstantiality, hypergraphia, altered sexuality (usually hyposexuality, meaning a decreased interest), and intensified mental life (deepened cognitive and emotional responses), hyper-religiosity and/or hyper-morality or moral ideas that is present in some epilepsy patients. This syndrome is particularly associated with temporal lobe epilepsy occurring in the left hemisphere of the brain. For identification, the term "Geschwind syndrome" has been suggested as a name for this group of behavioral phenomena. There has currently been both support^[1] and criticism^[2][3] in suggestion of this syndrome. Currently the strongest support arises from many clinicians who describe and attempt to classify patients with seizures with these personality features. The term Geschwind's Syndrome comes from one of the two people who first characterized the syndrome: Norman Geschwind. His associate was Stephen Waxman, who also did a great deal of work in the field. Note that Geschwind's Syndrome can be seen both in the inter-ictal (between seizures) and the ictal (during seizures) states.

[edit]See also

• Temporal lobe epilepsy
• Neurotheology

[edit]References

1. ^ Blumer D (1999). "Evidence supporting the temporal lobe epilepsy personality syndrome". Neurology 53 (5 Suppl 2): S9–12. PMID 10496229.
2. ^ Devinsky O, Najjar S (1999). "Evidence against the existence of a temporal lobe epilepsy personality syndrome". Neurology 53 (5 Suppl 2): S13–25. PMID 10496230.
3. ^ eMedicine - Psychiatric Disorders Associated With Epilepsy : Article by William J Nowack

• Waxman SG, Geschwind N (December 1975). "The interictal behavior syndrome of temporal lobe epilepsy". Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 32 (12): 1580–6. PMID 1200777.

[edit]External links

• God on the Brain (BBC)
• "IS THERE AN EPILEPTIC PERSONALITY?", William Barr, Ph.D., ABPP (NYU Comprehensive Epilepsy Center, New York, NY, September 22, 2003)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschwind_syndrome

And some more serious research from Advances in Neurology:

"The Geschwind syndrome," Benson DF.  

Department of Neurology, UCLA School of Medicine 90024.

A characteristic personality syndrome consisting of circumstantiality (excessive verbal output, stickiness, hypergraphia), altered sexuality (usually hyposexuality), and intensified mental life (deepened cognitive and emotional responses) is present in some epilepsy patients. For identification, the term "Geschwind syndrome" has been suggested as a name for this group of behavioral phenomena. Support for, and criticism against, the existence of this syndrome as a specific personality disorder has produced more fire than substance, but the presence of an unsettled, ongoing controversy has been acknowledged. At present, the strongest support stems from the many clinicians who have described and attempted to manage seizure patients with these personality features. Carefully directed studies are needed to confirm or deny that the Geschwind syndrome represents a specific epilepsy/psychiatric disorder.  

Hypergraphia is an overwhelming urge to write, where patients often produce tens or hundreds of thousands of words in manuscripts, letters, fiction, or grand philosophical theories of everything.  

Philosophy departments, not surprisingly, are often a locus for people with many of these symptoms/disorders.  We frequently receive large tomes, meticulously typed, in the mail referred to our faculty for consideration.  An author, who feels the urgent need to share his profound metaphysical and theological insights, wants to be recognized for the special knowledge he has uncovered.  A hyper-evangelism, or need to share these special insights with the world and acquire converts, is also often part of the author's maladies.  In the age of emails, I'll receive 5-100 emails a week from people suffering from these disorders.

Moral elevation, or intense feelings of compassion, fellow feeling, joy, adulation, and uplift, is the subject of some recent research.  Here is Jonathan Haidt's bibliography on the topic:  http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/elevation.html

And some more useful references:  

http://www.psych-it.com.au/Psychlopedia/article.asp?id=262

And some more Oprah fans:  

What's really interesting here are the evolutionary explanations for why these sorts of moral feelings may have been selected for in human and proto-human populations.  

 

You don't REALLY believe THAT, do you?

  Stephen Pinker:  

"It might be in that America one of the two political parties seems to defiantly oppose the world science view. But I suspect that isn't the best way of understanding it, because they still look for oil using the assumptions about the age of the Earth that we all believe in; when they get sick they go to a doctor and they worry about the evolution of drug resistance just as we do. They're not Amish, they don't return to the land. So in a sense they have already bought into the scientific world, but there are just a few highly symbolic issues that define your moral and political identity that they stake out a position on, and I think that is very different from scientific ignorance. In fact, one study done by a former graduate student at my department at Harvard showed that people who endorse the theory of evolution don't understand it any better than those that deny it. We shouldn't confuse the moralisation of a small number of hot-button issues with hostility with the scientific world view in general."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/dec/02/science-writing-debate-pinker-gleick-greene-frank-foer?fb=native&CMP=FBCNETTXT9038

There are those things that we say we believe, there are those things that we think we believe, and there are those things that we believe in believing in.  And then there is what we really believe.  When it comes down to one's real life, you don't really believe in Young Earth Creationism, most likely, no matter what you say you believe.

What harm can believing do?

When we indulge the religious urge, contrary to arguments and evidence, we foster irresponsible, unreliable, and problematic believing overall.  We foster silly beliefs and set ourselves and others up for harm.  Religious beliefs are not a private or harmless matter:

Scamming Elderly Asians on the Rise