Specter of Reason

Seinfeld , one of the most successful shows in television history, was purportedly about nothing .  Of course that was never true.  The show was about a few people with consistent personality quirks, a bit narcissistic and socially challenged (and challenging). Still, people like to say it was "about nothing," not taking the word too literally. When physicist and outspoken atheist Lawrence Krauss talks about the scientific concept of nothing , he isn't literally talking about nothing, either.  In his view, if nothing is a scientifically legitimate concept, then it refers to something measurable.  You can quantify it somehow.  I agree.  Science deals in the quantifiable and measurable, after all.  It does not deal in that which cannot, in principle, be measured one way or another.  Yet it's plain as day that, if you can measure some x , then x does not equal nothing .  If you can measure it, it isn't nothing.  And so we must admit ...

Philosopher Alva Noe is discussing gender and neurobiology  on the NPR blog (see  here  and  here ). His primary goal is noble. He wants to counter the cultural forces which stereotype men and women and which, in some cases, lead us to devalue ourselves and sabotage our own potential. He appeals to a work of popular science by Cordelia Fine,  Delusions of Gender , which he says draws the following conclusion: "Whatever cognitive or personality differences there are between men and women cannot be attributed, except in a few isolated cases, to intrinsic biological or psychological differences between men and women, at least not in the current state of knowledge." I haven't read Fine's work, so I cannot say how well Noe has represented her conclusion. In any case, the conclusion he attributes to her is much weaker than the three claims Noe himself puts forward in the name of science.  First, Noe says the science clearly tells us that there are " no cognitivel...

This month, physicist and popular science writer  Sean Carroll weighs in  on the everlasting debate about free will. He says it's "as real as baseball," which means that it is not the sort of thing that we would expect to find in a detailed physical description of the universe, but that we can't imagine trying to talk about humanity without accepting it as a real phenomenon. I have to criticize Carroll for failing to explain what he means by the phrase "free will" (a phrase which, he explains, does not have an agreed upon meaning) and for failing to give us a reason to think it is as real as baseball. Carroll defends a pragmatic realism--a view that we should take as  real  whatever entities we benefit from postulating in a given language, regardless of whether or not we benefit from postulating them in our widest available language. So, we benefit from postulating the existence of baseball even though there is no need for it in the language of physics, and ...

Not sure how far I'll go with this, but here's the first entry in my "Science Phiction" series. The point is to identify popular writing which mangles, misidentifies, or otherwise wrongly appropriates philosophical ideas or themes in the name of science. If I were going to award points, I'd award generously for writers who get both the science and the philosophy wrong. However, to qualify for entry, you only have to get the philosophy wrong. First up: Astrophysicist Adam Frank gets the time-lag argument terribly wrong: Where is Now? The Paradox of the Present Here's an excerpt: When you look at the mountain peak 30 kilometers away you see it not as it exists now but as it existed a 1/10,000 of a second ago. The light fixture three meters above your head is seen not as it exists now but as it was a hundred millionth of a second ago. Gazing into your partner's eyes, you see her (or him) not for who they are but for who they were 10 -10 of...