FreThink

A rather thought-provoking article in the L.A. Times:

Caltech physicist Sean M. Carroll has been wrestling with the mystery of time. Most physical laws work equally well going backward or forward, yet time flows only in one direction. Writing in this month’s Scientific American, Carroll suggests that entropy, the tendency of physical systems to become more disordered over time, plays a crucial role. Carroll sat down recently at Caltech to explain his theory.

What’s the problem with time?

The irreversibility of time is sort of the most obvious unanswered question in cosmology.

Time has been talked about in cosmology for many years, but we have a toolbox now we didn’t used to have.

We have general relativity, string theory, discoveries in particle physics that we can use to help us find the right answer.

What does entropy have to do with all this?

The most obvious fact about the history of the universe is the growth of entropy from the early times to the late times.

The fact that you can turn eggs into omelets but not vice versa is a thing we know from our kitchens.

You don’t need to spend millions of dollars on telescopes to discover it.

Can you give me a simple explanation of entropy?

One way of explaining entropy is to say it’s the number of ways you can rearrange the constituents of a system so that you don’t notice the change macroscopically.

If you mix milk into a cup of coffee, the more mixing that occurs, the more disordered the milk molecules become and the more entropy builds.

If all the milk was somehow separated from the coffee, that would be low entropy.

So what’s the problem?

If you really believed the conventional story that the Big Bang was the beginning, that there was nothing before the Big Bang, I think that’s a very difficult fact to explain. . . .

There’s no law of physics that says it should start at a low-entropy state. But the actual universe did that.

From a layman’s standpoint, it seems perfectly rational that things would start small and grow apart. You’re saying that’s wrong.

Many of my very smart colleagues say exactly the same thing. They say, “Why are you thinking about this? It just makes sense that the early universe was small and low-entropy.”

But I think that is just a prejudice: . . . Because it is like that in our universe, we tend to think it is naturally like that.

I don’t think there is an explanation for that in terms of our current understanding of physics. I’m just saying it’s not a fact that we should take for granted.

Are you saying that our universe came from some other universe?

Right. It came from a bigger space-time that we don’t observe. Our universe came from a tiny little bit of a larger high-entropy space.

I’m not saying this is true; I’m saying this is an idea worth thinking about.

Does God exist in a multiverse?

I don’t want to give advice to people about their religious beliefs, but I do think that it’s not smart to bet against the power of science to figure out the natural world. It used to be, a thousand years ago, that if you wanted to explain why the moon moved through the sky, you needed to invoke God.

And then Galileo and Newton came along and realized that there was conservation of momentum, so things tend to keep moving.

Nowadays people say, “Well, you certainly can’t explain the creation of the universe without invoking God,” and I want to say, “Don’t bet against it.”

{a reply in a Volconvo forum thread on intelligent design}

If “design”, whatever you mean by that, is an absolute state (everything that exists is designed by a designer) then the designer is not exempt. The designer would be a product of a design, which implies another, previous designer, and one before him and so on. Any implied “purpose” to this universe requires the one whose purpose is being expressed. The only way to avoid the infinite regression is to maintain that there is no purpose, no design, no rhyme, no reason, no philosophy to the universe. Stuff happens.

We humans can think abstract thoughts. We don’t know if that’s unique to humans, but we can be sure we can do it. Purpose, design and all the rest are abstractions. They aren’t physical realities. You can’t buy me a package of purpose at the store. Being able to think abstractly has its benefits and its liabilities. One liability is our tendency to confuse the abstract with the tangible.

I see no reason to take ID or any variation of it seriously. It’s an idea that’s been poorly defended. It fails to validate. It isn’t credible.

From Wired:

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don’t have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don’t have to settle for models at all.

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.

At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn’t pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.

The big target here isn’t advertising, though. It’s science. The scientific method is built around testable hypotheses. These models, for the most part, are systems visualized in the minds of scientists. The models are then tested, and experiments confirm or falsify theoretical models of how the world works. This is the way science has worked for hundreds of years.

Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation, that no conclusions should be drawn simply on the basis of correlation between X and Y (it could just be a coincidence). Instead, you must understand the underlying mechanisms that connect the two. Once you have a model, you can connect the data sets with confidence. Data without a model is just noise.

But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. Consider physics: Newtonian models were crude approximations of the truth (wrong at the atomic level, but still useful). A hundred years ago, statistically based quantum mechanics offered a better picture — but quantum mechanics is yet another model, and as such it, too, is flawed, no doubt a caricature of a more complex underlying reality. The reason physics has drifted into theoretical speculation about n-dimensional grand unified models over the past few decades (the “beautiful story” phase of a discipline starved of data) is that we don’t know how to run the experiments that would falsify the hypotheses — the energies are too high, the accelerators too expensive, and so on.

Now biology is heading in the same direction. The models we were taught in school about “dominant” and “recessive” genes steering a strictly Mendelian process have turned out to be an even greater simplification of reality than Newton’s laws. The discovery of gene-protein interactions and other aspects of epigenetics has challenged the view of DNA as destiny and even introduced evidence that environment can influence inheritable traits, something once considered a genetic impossibility.

In short, the more we learn about biology, the further we find ourselves from a model that can explain it.

There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: “Correlation is enough.” We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.

Never before have such vast quantities of data been accessible to anyone anywhere.  Search is a far more useful tool than the scientific method for sorting through mountains of data.

Will correlation be enough?  Can it productively replace the scientific method?  Will the way we “do” science alter dramatically in the coming years?

No one can say it more clearly, more plainly, more concisely than Carlin.

Training can increase fluid intelligence, once thought to be fixed at birth

Training a person’s working memory may increase his or her general intelligence.

Can human beings rev up their intelligence quotients, or are they stuck with IQs set by their genes at birth? Until recently, nature seemed to be the clear winner over nurture.

But new research, led by Swiss postdoctoral fellows Susanne M. Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl, working at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, suggests that at least one aspect of a person’s IQ can be improved by training a certain type of memory.

Most IQ tests attempt to measure two types of intelligence–crystallized and fluid intelligence. Crystallized intelligence draws on existing skills, knowledge and experiences to solve problems by accessing information from long-term memory.

Fluid intelligence, on the other hand, draws on the ability to understand relationships between various concepts, independent of any previous knowledge or skills, to solve new problems. The research shows that this part of intelligence can be improved through memory training.

“When it comes to improving intelligence, many researchers have thought it was not possible,” says Jaeggi. “Our findings clearly show this is not the case. Our brain is more plastic than we might think.”   (Read More…)

There is no pain

There’s only gain

When you can train

Your plastic brain.

By Carey Burtt (2000) Thanks, Mark Frauenfelder (BoingBoing)

One of the more interesting periods of my life occurred when I was in the Army, the Army Security Agency to be precise.  The ASA was, on the military intelligence (no, not an oxymoron, but I appreciate the humor in that old joke) side of the Army what the special forces on the infantry side.  I was assigned to the National Security Agency (NSA, also known as No Such Agency) at Ft. Meade, Md.

This was in the 1970s, when intelligence in the U.S. was divided into categories, and there were agencies under the State Department, Department of Defense and cabinet-level departments, each responsible for a particular category.  There wasn’t supposed to be much overlap, and as a result there was little inter-communication.  So while the CIA was supposed to run the HUMINT (human intelligence; spies, defectors, traitors, blackmail, social instability) side of intelligence the NSA was tasked with the COMINT (communications intelligence; phone taps, line traces, listening devices) and SIGINT (signal intelligence; radar, data communications, internet) sides.  Now, thanks, rather no thanks to the Patriot Act, the agency’s tasks have all been reorganized, so the above is quite dated.

Because the agencies didn’t share much of anything, each tended to duplicate the efforts of other agencies.  This sometimes worked to our advantage, but more often than not it was just a waste of time and effort.  So NSA, while primarily focused on electronics, also made sure we knew as much as reasonable about the HUMINT aspect of intelligence gathering.  So I believe I know a bit about the application of them.

The video above is generally true.  It accurately outlines the more common tactics of cult groups.  Upon further consideration, though, it should be obvious that it can also be applied to religious groups (any of them), the military itself, hate groups, environmental organizations.

Another factor to consider is that these methods can be adapted to work in positive ways.  The goal needn’t always be evil.  Still, I suspect the number of instances where these behaviors have been misused far outnumber the instances where they’ve been applied with a noble intent.

The goal of all these “tricks of the trade” is to get you to think like I do, or at least as I want you to.  It’s in direct contradiction to the goals of free thinking.  Awareness of the attempts made every day to manipulate your thinking is the first step toward defending yourself against them.

Think for yourself.

It’s unfortunate that many people prefer to let their religion or their nationalism or any sort of group think community (any group, including rationalist and humanist groups) tell them what to think.

Neither I nor atheism is a religion. I do not think that my particular point of view is superior to anyone else’s nor is it going to apply to anyone else. It has developed, evolved, over the course of my life in response to the experiences I’ve had. I am aware that I hold several contradictory opinions. I make no apology for them.

Telling others they should think as I do is as anathema to me telling them what they can and can’t think. None of us has the right to tell another what to think. We explain our point of view as best we can and leave it for them to ponder it or ignore.

I’ve had other atheists insinuate, and in one case come right out and say, that I’m not atheist enough. Their attitude is that there’s a right way and a wrong way to be atheistic. How absurd. I could disbelieve in gods but believe that stuffed teddy bears were alive and be an atheist. That’s one of the things that separates atheism from theism, the lack of a standard statement of belief. There’s no atheistic dogma to which we all pledge our allegiance.

Some atheists contend that a philosophy of life that doesn’t include gods alone is insufficient reason to be an atheist. A true atheist must also believe that Jesus was an allegory based on preceding models. A true atheist must also believe that it’s significant whether or not Hitler was a Catholic (and that it mattered to him). If you don’t present an argument every time you see a theist mention that Hitler was an atheist you’re not really “one of us”. And you have to mention that Einstein was at best a deist as were the founding fathers. I’m sure I’m missing a few other examples of the articles of the unfaith.

It wouldn’t matter a bit if it were discovered that Adolph was a raving atheist. It wouldn’t matter in the least if Alfred was an Orthodox Catholic. I don’t consider myself an ambassador for the non-existent Christ. It’s an interesting historical mystery, but in the overall scheme of things it matters not if Jesus was a guy who got the best postmortem PR of any man in history or if he was nothing more than another god-man story based on earlier mythology. My rejection of the arguments theology offers has nothing to do with whether Jesus existed or not. Was Moses real or myth? Who cares?

Do you see my point? Even atheism can turn into a system similar to theism if it starts to add point after point of commonality to the bare-bones definition of an atheist. Those who attempt to do this are being unreasonable. Atheism is the product of being able to think for yourself. I can say with near certainty that no one comes to the conclusion that they don’t believe in gods until they reach a point where they change their own minds about theology. They have started to think for themselves and are learning how to ignore the voices coming at them from every side trying to tell them what to think. It’s not easy and the rewards dubious. I recommend it, but with reservations.

Think for yourself. And I’m just saying that. You have to decide whether or not you’ll pay attention and give it some thought.

<originally posted as a reply in this forum thread at Volconvo. com regarding a Marine accused of killing a puppy. I thought the preceding comment, which mentioned trained killers and innocent civilians, was inconsistent in my experience.>

In defense of those of us who have served in the military, I feel a need to object to this bit of hyperbole.

Yes, soldiers are trained to kill. They are also taught how to injure without killing and how to disengage from a situation without injury to anyone. They’re also taught first aid skills so they can tend to those who are injured, even if they’re the enemy.

Soldiers are taught how to recognize the enemy and to only direct fire at them, but when insurgents disguise themselves as citizens and use children and other innocent civilians as defensive shields, they increase the risk that our soldiers will kill innocents. Is that the soldiers fault or are the insurgents to blame? Soldiers in the field are never taught or lead to think that killing civilians is approved. It happens all too frequently in this current conflict, but in the vast majority of cases where it does I have no doubt that it was both accidental and deeply regretted by the soldiers responsible. Collateral damage is to be avoided whenever possible, and minimized when it isn’t. Anyone who enjoys killing others is an anomaly, whether civilian or military. They are malformed humans. They contribute nothing to the advancement of our species.

Now this guy sounds like one of those guys. And those guys are a threat to their own species. It’s not uncommon among animals for a small percentage to “loose it”, to turn on their pack mates without apparent regard. It’s perhaps the ultimate betrayal of trust in a group, the greatest threat another can face, the threat of death.

It’s the pleasure taken in the killing of anything that offends me. It also offends me that the military appears more upset over the publicity than the actual offense.

Perhaps if our perception of death were different our reaction to those who enjoy killing their own would also be other than it is. But that’s not the case. In general our species fears death; it’s the great unknown, the trip everyone makes and no one (we personally know in the flesh, which in the end is all that really counts) ever returns from, an absolute change from what we know and are comfortable with to another state, be it nothingness, judgment or virgins. At the very heart of the matter is that death means the end of this personality I’ve come to know so very well (if I’m delusional I still would think that I know myself well, though subjectively and oblivious to the persona I project to others). I know of no religion, new age group or stoned guru who suggests that after death life just picks right back up and we carry on as if nothing happened. Everyone agrees that the thing I’ve been calling [I]me [/I]for my whole life will in large part or its entirety cease to exist. I’ll either be something or someone else with no memory of this life, or I’ll be nothing. Either way, I won’t be the me I am at this moment.

And there’s no escaping it.

You can’t hide from it, you can’t elude it, you can’t buy it off, you can’t impress it with your talents and you can’t ignore it.

It’s slightly worse for non-believers. Death sucks. If what I strongly suspect happens after death is proven out, this ride will be over. I got my quarter’s worth. No second rides. Get off now, let the other kids have a chance. I happen to be a selfish little bastard. I think I deserve a few rides. Too bad. Wish all you want. Make up stories to make yourself feel better about it. None of it matters. You’re still going to die. Your cells will decide when and from what. Blindly, according to natural laws they aren’t even aware of. Your cells don’t care what happens to you or me. They’ll go on.

Anyway, people who glorify death, celebrate death, cause death with pleasure scare atheists. They threaten the only life I get.

Probably the most important conclusion we can draw is that even if the universe were intentionally created, we can discern nothing about that creator that we cannot discern of the physical universe. We cannot say anything about this supposed creator other than it is the sort of creator who would create this particular universe in all its details.

We cannot determine if this being wants to be worshipped or ignored. We can’t tell if it is friendly, hostile or completely indifferent to human, or even terrestrial life. Just believing that such a creator exists gives us absolutely no additional justification for believing that any religious scripture is inspired by this creator. (Indeed the idea that a being capable of creating such a vast universe, of actually creating physics itself, would choose to communicate with its creation by the agency of schizophrenic prophets and parasitic priests in some a remote corner of the ancient world seems vastly less plausible than that all religions are entirely human social constructs.)

We cannot even determine that the existence of life itself was a goal of this creator or a side-effect. Indeed, the relative insignificance of terrestrial life argues for the side-effect interpretation. The mold in the grout in my bathtub is more “significant” by many orders of magnitude to all of human civilization than is terrestrial life to the ~9.2×10²¹ light-year³ observable universe: that specific patch of mold has more justification for believing that all of human civilization has been created specifically and intentionally for its benefit than we have for believing that the entire observable universe has been created for the benefit of all terrestrial life.

In short, the Fine Tuning argument is speculative, probabilistically meaningless, and, even if true, doesn’t establish anything interesting. I think it’s safe to say that, after Pascal’s Wager, it’s the second worst apologetic ever. (The Barefoot Bum)

A well written and thought out exposure of one of the major weaknesses in the arguments for Intelligent Design. The whole concept of ID is poorly supported by any kind of evidence. It displays its religious roots by being illogical and internally inconsistent.

My primary argument against ID is that no one can provide an objective, absolute standard for the concept of “design”. What appears to one person to be a design appears to another as simply a pattern or even a disorganized mess. Until the ID crowd can suggest what they mean by design and offer examples of absolute design, their suggestions can be dismissed easily as nonsense.

Trying to extract meaning or purpose from nature is what philosophy is all about.

Trying to impose meaning or purpose on nature is what theology is all about.