4,000 Hits and Counting!

Congratulations are in order for everyone at Redefine God, the worlds Religion 2.0 hub. Tonight we claim 4,000 hits of traffic per month. It was only about a month ago I was becoming proud of our 3,000 marker. The next 1,000 seemed to explode in no time.

So congrats to everyone at RG for a year of growth, focus, and meaningful content. Special thanks are in order to those contributing thoughtful blogs and discussions, which not only provide the fiery, involved dialogue, but which the God of search engines, Google, smiles happily upon (improves our site ranking).

At this point I’d like to invite everyone to join the RG group Quest for RG! It’s basically a directory of things you can do to help improve and sky-rocket your favorite social network into the public eye. Please give feedback there as well.

Lastly I’ll mention, as I have before, great things are in store for our network. Fun social stuff, cool trailers and (hopefully) videos, and tools for spiritual development. More power to us.

A Casual Disregard for Facts

A post from Evolving Thoughts.

A little while back I linked to Sahotra Sarkar’s review of Steve Fuller’s Science versus Religion. Now Fuller has put up a defence at the Intelligent Design website, Uncommon Descent, under the gerrymandered image of a bacterial flagellum (if you want to know what a real flagellum would look like at that scale, see this).

While I haven’t yet read the book (I’ll be reviewing it for Metascience), a couple of points that Fuller’s post make clear:

1. He has a really casual dismissal of factual accuracy so long as the “spirit” is right

2. This explains why he’s allied himself with ID.

Intelligent design is (as the link above showed) very cavalier with details and facts. The “impression” of design is reason enough to ride roughsod over the details. In fact, as the flagellum indicates, mostly their argument is argument ab cartoon – if you squint hard, then it looks like a machine. Imagine a physicist doing that and coming up with a cartoon physics!

Fuller derides Sarkar for caring about factual claims in detail, when the point is that… what? That you can make history say anything you like if you ignore historical data? Here is his defence of a few claims:

Let me take the following two criticisms together:

“Logical positivists, and not just Popper, are supposed to have labeled Darwinism a “metaphysical research program” (p. 133). I am not aware of a single logical positivist (or logical empiricist) text that supports this claim. Given that for the logical positivists (in contrast to Popper) “metaphysical” was a term of opprobrium, it is unlikely that any of them would have embraced this formulation. The logical positivists may well have believed physics to be of more fundamental importance than biology, but the latter science nevertheless belonged to the pantheon. The foundations of biology were intended to be part of their Encyclopedia of Unified Science.”

“Around the same time, Lamarck is supposed to have held that “lower organisms literally strove to become higher organisms, specifically humans, who at some point in the future would be Earth’s sole denizens” (p. 146), a view to be found nowhere in the Lamarckian corpus.”

These criticisms illustrate what I have called the ‘New Yorker magazine view of the world’ that afflicts some analytic philosophers. (I originally made this claim against a philosopher who actually began his career as an editor. Oops!) It basically reduces the history and philosophy of science to checking for facts and grammar, respectively. However, as so often is the case when dealing with editors, the fact-checker goes astray when he decides to venture opinions of his own. So even if it is strictly true that only Popper called Darwinism a ‘metaphysical research programme’ and the official logical positivist line was anti-metaphysical, it is equally true that the positivists themselves did metaphysics in everything but name (e.g. Carnap’s Aufbau), not least in the IEUS volume on biology that attempted to lay down the discipline’s axiomatic foundations. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that Popper wrote the obituary for its author, Joseph Woodger, in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science in 1981.

On the point concerning the ‘Lamarckian corpus’, again I am happy to concede that the man himself never explicitly stated the thesis I attributed to him. As it turns out, the passage Sarkar quotes refers to Lamarck and Comte together as representatives of a pro-human line of evolutionary progress that was opposed to the more ecocentric line taken by Darwinists attempting to influence British sociology in its early years. Whatever Lamarck’s actual views on the ultimate fate of humanity (which are up for debate), it is clear that the Lamarckian tradition has been generally committed to what the historian Charles Gillispie called an ‘escalator of being’ on which all creatures were moving, with humans currently on the top floor. A clear expression of the view I attributed to Lamarck can be found in his most visionary 20th century follower, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who envisaged the Earth as someday becoming one ‘hominised substance’.

Now anyone who has studied logical positivism and Popper knows well that Popper resiled from the LPs’ claims to be metaphysics free. They held that metaphysics was something one ought not to do, in favour of positive knowledge. They held the famous Verification Principle, which Popper among others used as a reductio of the LP program. To say that they “were” doing metaphysics is to fundamentally mischaracterise what was going on. They claimed not to be. It was the critics, including Popper, who said they were. And so when Popper called Darwinian evolution a metaphysical research program, he clearly did not intend that as a criticism, even before his retraction. The positivists thought that was a criticism, but they didn’t make it. Post hoc assertions that they were one and the same is to completely mischaracterise what was going on then.

Fuller is well read. He should and probably does know this, so only two other interpretations are possible: carelessness, which undercuts the veracity of the argument, or mendacity, which also does. I like to think that Fuller is being careless rather than trying to deliberately mislead. But if that is his approach to the history of ideas, then I think there is a problem, Houston. Of course Popper wrote Woodger’s obit – that’s what victors do if they can. It doesn’t mean they get amalgamated with their former opponents. To say otherwise is to completely misunderstand the nature of dialectic.

Likewise the point about Lamarck. Lamarck, in what I have read (hey, the Zoological Philosophy is online in French and English; check for yourself) held that there was an impetus driving evolution “upwards” (a physical impetus, by the way – since Vance Alpheus Packard’s 1901 work, we have known that Lamarck did not mean “will” by “besoin”) but that individual lineages could not enter a filled “rung” on that ladder. And so far as I know, he never said anythign even remotely like that view that only humans would remain. Appealing to what others might have thought after Lamarck is in no way a justification of that very bad claim. And even Teilhard did not think there would be nothing but the Omega Point, merely that humanity would become one at that point in a kind of cosmic salvation.

This disregard for facts, so far from being a corrective to the “New Yorker” approach, is merely a Marvel Comics form of philosophy and history, and it’s the only kind that can support ID. I think the less of Fuller just for this one claim. I can only imagine what the full work will lead me to think of him.

Packard, Alpheus. 1901. Lamarck, the founder of evolution: His life and work. New York: Longmans, Green and Co.

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A New Day, A New Cult

A new The Daily Cultist is underway. It will be sleeker, more exciting, run on it’s own domain, and 40% more bitchin’!

Look lively!

Do They Really Think The Earth is Flat?

If you’re a flat-earther, this image is a fake

By Brendan O’Neill

In the 21st Century, the term “flat-earther” is used to describe someone who is spectacularly – and seemingly wilfully – ignorant. But there is a group of people who claim they believe the planet really is flat. Are they really out there or is it all an elaborate prank?

Nasa is celebrating its 50th birthday with much fanfare and pictures of past glories. But in half a century of extraordinary images of space, one stands out.

WORLD VIEW 330 BC Aristotle provides evidence of spherical earth 240 BC Eratosthenes of Cyrene accurately calculates circumference of globe 8th Century AD work by Bede shows acceptance of sphere idea

On 24 December 1968, the crew of the Apollo 8 mission took a photo now known as Earthrise. To many, this beautiful blue sphere viewed from the moon’s orbit is a perfect visual summary of why it is right to strive to go into space.

Not to everybody though. There are people who say they think this image is fake – part of a worldwide conspiracy by space agencies, governments and scientists.

Welcome to the world of the flat-earther.

Our attitude towards those who once upon a time believed in the flatness of the earth is apparent in a new Microsoft advert.

Photos such as this one are deemed fakes by flat-earthers

Depicting an olden-days ship sailing on rough seas, presumably heading towards the “edge of the world”, the advert is part of a $300m campaign aimed at rescuing the reputation of Windows Vista by comparing its critics to flat-earthers.

Satellite era

But are there any genuine flat-earthers left? Surely in our era of space exploration – where satellites take photos of our blue and clearly globular planet from space, and robots send back info about soil and water from Mars – no one can seriously still believe that the Earth is flat?

Circumnavigation is a case of travelling in a very broad circle across the surface of the Earth James McIntyre Flat-earther

Wrong.

Flat earth theory is still around. On the internet and in small meeting rooms in Britain and the US, flat earth believers get together to challenge the “conspiracy” that the Earth is round.

“People are definitely prejudiced against flat-earthers,” says John Davis, a flat earth theorist based in Tennessee, reacting to the new Microsoft commercial.

“Many use the term ‘flat-earther’ as a term of abuse, and with connotations that imply blind faith, ignorance or even anti-intellectualism.”

Mr Davis, a 25-year-old computer scientist originally from Canada, first became interested in flat earth theory after “coming across some literature from the Flat Earth Society a few years ago”.

“I came to realise how much we take at face value,” he says. “We humans seem to be pleased with just accepting what we are told, no matter how much it goes against our senses.”

Mr Davis now believes “the Earth is flat and horizontally infinite – it stretches horizontally forever”.

“And it is at least 9,000 kilometres deep”, he adds.

James McIntyre, a British-based moderator of a Flat Earth Society discussion website, has a slightly different take. “The Earth is, more or less, a disc,” he states. “Obviously it isn’t perfectly flat thanks to geological phenomena like hills and valleys. It is around 24,900 miles in diameter.”

Mr McIntyre, who describes himself as having been “raised a globularist in the British state school system”, says the reactions of his friends and family to his new beliefs vary from “sheer incredulity to the conviction that it’s all just an elaborate joke”.

So how many flat-earthers are around today? Neither Mr Davis nor Mr McIntyre can say.

Disappearing ships

Mr McIntyre estimates “there are thousands”, but “without a platform for communication, a head-count is almost impossible”, he says. Mr Davis says he is currently creating an “online information repository” to help to bring together local Flat Earth communities into a “global community”.

“If you will forgive my use of the term ‘global’”, he says.

Aristotle knew the earth was not flat

And for the casual observer, it is hard to accept that all of this is not some bizarre 21st Century jape. After all, most schoolchildren know that ships can disappear over the horizon, that satellites orbit the earth and that if you head along the equator you will eventually come back on yourself.

What about all the photos from space that show, beyond a shadow of doubt, that the Earth is round? “The space agencies of the world are involved in an international conspiracy to dupe the public for vast profit,” says Mr McIntyre.

John Davis also says “these photos are fake”.

And what about the fact that no one has ever fallen off the edge of our supposedly disc-shaped world?

Mr McIntyre laughs. “This is perhaps one of the most commonly asked questions,” he says. “A cursory examination of a flat earth map fairly well explains the reason – the North Pole is central, and Antarctica comprises the entire circumference of the Earth. Circumnavigation is a case of travelling in a very broad circle across the surface of the Earth.”

Ultimate conspiracy

Mr Davis says that being a flat-earther doesn’t have an impact on how one lives every day. “As a rule of thumb, we don’t have any fears of aircraft or other modes of transportation,” he says.

Christine Garwood, author of Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea, is not surprised that flat-earthers simply write off the evidence that our planet is globular.

“Flat earth theory is one of the ultimate conspiracy theories,” she says.

“Naturally, flat earth believers think that the moon landings were faked, as were the photographs of earth from space.”

When Columbus sailed, it was known the world was not flat

Perhaps one of the most surprising things in Garwood’s book is her revelation that flat earth theory is a relatively modern phenomenon.

Ms Garwood says it is an “historic fallacy” that everyone from ancient times to the Dark Ages believed the earth to be flat, and were only disabused of this “mad idea” once Christopher Columbus successfully sailed to America without “falling off the edge of the world”.

In fact, people have known since at least the 4th century BC that the earth is round, and the pseudo-scientific conviction that we actually live on a disc didn’t emerge until Victorian times.

Theories about the earth being flat really came to the fore in 19th Century England. With the rise and rise of scientific rationalism, which seemed to undermine Biblical authority, some Christian thinkers decided to launch an attack on established science.

Samuel Birley Rowbotham (1816-1884) assumed the pseudonym of “Parallax” and founded a new school of “Zetetic astronomy”. He toured England arguing that the Earth was a stationary disc and the Sun was only 400 miles away.

In the 1870s, Christian polemicist John Hampden wrote numerous works about the Earth being flat, and described Isaac Newton as “in liquor or insane”.

And the spirit of these attacks lives on to the present day. The flat-earth myth remains the outlandish king in the realm of the conspiracy theorist.

And while we all respect a degree of scepticism towards the authorities, says Ms Garwood, the flat-earthers show things can go too far.

“It is always good to question ‘how we know what we know’, but it is also good to have the ability to accept compelling evidence – such as the photographs of Earth from space.”

Want to Live Forever?

The human-life-extension movement sees a glorious future for us all

Thursday, August 07, 2008
By Adam Bulger

The first words in Ed Wood’s infamously awful masterpiece Plan 9 From Outer Space are, “Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.” That line has been ringing in my head for weeks. It seems to miss its own point: Time goes only one way; everything takes place in the future.

Speaking with people involved with the loosely connected movements of life extension, transhumanism and singularitarianism, I kept returning to that Plan 9 quote. Its stupidity melted away, leaving something similar to a Zen koan.

These forward-looking people think that we’re soon going to be able to extend our lives almost infinitely. And they’re working feverishly to survive into that golden age. They’re willing to pop pills and radically reduce how much they eat just to live a bit longer.

The term transhumanist was coined in 1957 by biologist Julian Huxley to describe what he saw as humanity’s coming transcendence into a new form. (Huxley’s brother, Aldous, wrote the novel Brave New World partially in reaction to ideas espoused by Julian and his social circle.) The term gained traction in the late 1980s, when it was adopted to describe and promote human technological enhancement in platforms like Extropy: The Journal of Transhumanist Thought.

“Transhumanism is the idea that it’s OK to transcend the limitations of the body and brain and take control of reproduction,” said former World Transhumanist Association Executive Director James Hughes. “And add to that the belief that it’s probably a good idea.” It’s hardly a surprise that transhumanist ideas have spread widely through the Internet. Dovetailing with its growth is a related idea called the singularity, a projection of future dramatic technological advancement. The singularity was first proposed by science fiction author Verner Vinge in a 1983 Omni magazine article. Vinge wrote, “Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly thereafter, the human era will be ended.” Like many such futurist projections, this one is unlikely to come true—we’d have to achieve all this by 2013.

But our capabilities are multiplying. Drawn from Moore’s law, which maintains that computational processing power doubles every 18 months, singularitarianism posits that once artificial intelligence develops the processing power of the human brain (by one interpretation, in 2030), everything about human life will inexorably and fundamentally change. Our bodies will be able to interface with machines in ways that seem impossible today. With innovations in nano-manufacturing technology, artificial intelligence and other technologies, people will be able to live longer and dramatically different lives.

Inventor and author Ray Kurzweil furthered the singularity concept in his 2006 book The Singularity is Near, which outlined a timetable for technological innovations leading up to the event. “You might get things in the next 10 or 20 years that would have taken 200 years before,” Hughes says.

It’s a very exciting prospect. But how do you live long enough to see it? Many singularitarians, including Kurzweil, have turned to radical methods of life extension, taking barrages of vitamins and going on Spartan diets. An international movement to prolong and improve human life has emerged, but critics worry that the whole idea of radical futurism is flawed. In short, most of us are interested in the future, but we’re not sure we want to spend the rest of our lives there.

Ben Scarlato is only 18, but has spent an inordinate amount of time worrying about staving off death. Scarlato and I sat on lawn chairs in the garden of his parents’ house in Ellington. As the wind rose around us, he told me he wants to live long enough to enjoy what he believes will be a streamlined, very efficient future.

“I guess my real motivation is the desire to not have a lot of clutter around me and just have one computer or one brain interface,” Scarlato said. “The more tangible advantage of the efficiency is that you could have better emergency responses and better human experiences.”

The noticeably thin Scarlato sported a Battlestar Galactica T-shirt and two bruises on his arms from a recent doctor’s injection. He has been researching life-extension methods, most notably the radically limited diet known as caloric restriction. Scarlato believes in the science behind caloric restriction (more on that later). It certainly helps that he views food as a necessary nuisance and not a pleasure to be savored.

“[Eating] kind of distracts me from whatever else I’m doing,” Scarlato said. “I’m kind of weird that way. I’m more concerned with my health than how things taste. I’ve always cared about maximizing my happiness.”

James Hughes, an administrator and instructor at Trinity College in Hartford, is a leading transhumanist theorist. The executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, which he co-founded when he was the executive director of the World Transhumanist Association, Hughes has written several books on transhumanist ideas, including Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future.

It would appear that Hughes, a buttoned-down professor-type with a close-cropped goatee, is dealing with ideas better suited to science fiction than the real world. However, he traces transhumanist history back to old, earth-bound traditions.

“It goes back to the enlightenment, about 400 years or so,” Hughes said. “And when you go back to those original ideas, you see a number of things emerging, among them the notion that science and tech can be applied to human affairs, and things can be engineered and improved upon.”

From his office in one of Trinity’s gothic stone buildings, Hughes cites eye glasses as one of our numerous great leaps forward.

“Fire, clothing—all these things are extensions,” Hughes said. “Our Paleolithic selves had certain limitations, and invented technologies to allow us to get beyond them. For us, there’s continuity between what happened then and what we’re talking about now.”

Hughes described himself politically as a leftist, which sometimes puts him at odds with what he characterized as the mainly Libertarian transhumanist movement. And Hughes is not totally convinced, as are many of his movement colleagues, that all technological advancement will benefit humanity.

“There are some guys who put a lot of faith in the code and the engineers and guys who work on boxes,” Hughes said. “Others of us are more interested in the social dimension and global collaboration. There are a lot of different baggages we bring to these things.”

The singularity concept makes predicting the exact shape of the future impossible. Verner Vinge came up with the term “singularity” as a reference to the uniqueness of black holes. No one knows what laws of physics will be in place once we’re past the hole’s “event horizon.” Once we reach the singularity, what comes next is unknown.

“We might come to a point in the immediate future where it will be impossible to imagine what goes beyond it,” Hughes said.

Hughes said the singularity concept has had a chaotic effect on long-term technological speculation. Technologies, both large and small, could radically change the human experience. The mind reels with possibilities. Could we become cyborgs, with circuitry and metallic components seamlessly integrated into our bodies? Will there be nano-machines with artificial intelligence coursing through our bodies, fixing medical problems? Will we be able to dump our consciousness into computers or other machines? Will those machines be engineered with enough nuance to replicate the human experience?

The possibilities are endless but, at least for now, human lives are not. And that’s where caloric restriction—limiting daily food intake to the baseline of nutritional necessity—comes in. George A. Kuchel, gerontology director of the University of Connecticut’s Center on Aging, said the idea is basically sound.

“There’s been more than half a century of research indicating that caloric restriction in animal models works,” Kuchel said. “Caloric restriction works. It goes back to studies in the 1940s that show that if you feed laboratory animals less calories, they live much longer and age better. There is other data to support that.”

Kuchel said that as people get older, their bodies become increasingly damaged by the act of processing food. The digestive process, Kuchel said, creates oxidative stress that, over time, wears down critical components of the human body, causing it to break down and age.

“That’s basically the production of molecules that can damage the body,” Kuchel said. “They’re molecules that can oxidize proteins or DNA, all the major building blocks of cells and bodies. The thought is that the more we eat and the longer we live, the more we damage these cells. And if you eat less, then you create less damage.”

The UConn health center is conducting studies on caloric restriction with fruit flies. Although no animal tests have proven that caloric restriction would work on humans, people have been trying it out themselves.

“There are people who believe in this and are doing it,” Kuchel said. “The problem is they don’t appear particularly happy or healthy. On the question of quality of life, it’s very difficult. Most people would be miserable.”

New research points to a possibility of getting the benefits of caloric restriction without the unpleasantness. “The French eat all these fats—breads, cheeses, and do lots of things they shouldn’t do—and they actually live longer and have less disease than we do in North America,” Kuchel said. “And it’s been proposed that they live longer because they drink a lot of red wine. And it’s not just the wine, but the red pigment actually seems to have beneficial properties.”

“There appears to be a connection between that compound and slowing down oxidation damage,” Kuchel said. “In other words, there’s now for the first time the potential for having a drug that will mimic the effects of things that no one wants to do, like caloric restriction or severe exercise. It’ll be a drug we’ll all happily pay a lot of money to pop down. And the pharmaceutical industry will happily make a killing on it.”

Slowing body degeneration is a modest goal, and doesn’t go far enough for some national anti-aging researchers. Aubrey de Grey, an energetic Englishman with a ZZ Top-length beard, is the chief researcher and evangelist for an anti-aging movement that views aging as a disease that can be cured, and cured soon.

“I think we have a 50 percent chance of getting there in around 25 years, so long as the early proof-of-concept work in mice is well-enough funded for the next 10 years or so,” de Grey said via e-mail.

Since 2003, de Grey’s organization, the Methuselah Foundation (named for the Biblical figure who supposedly lived 900 years), has offered a Methuselah Mouse Prize for researchers who extend the lives of mice. And the cash award is at $4.5 million. Methuselah received an influx of cash in 2003 when Peter A. Thiel, co-founder of online payment system PayPal, pledged $3.5 million to its efforts. Professional poker player Justin Bonomo has pledged five percent of his winnings toward the group.

“As soon as we get that, gerontologists the world over will be on television saying, ‘Yes, Aubrey was right, the repair-and-maintenance approach to postponing aging really is feasible after all.’ And the moment that happens, Oprah and her ilk will be up there saying, ‘Well, let’s do it for humans right now!’” de Grey said.

De Grey’s basic idea, called Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), is that human cells can be engineered in a way to prevent their decay. “The SENS concept is inspired by the realization that human metabolism is far too complex and interconnected to improve bio-medically in the foreseeable future, and that an alternative akin to repair and maintenance of man-made machines is far more promising,” de Grey said.

Wendell Wallach isn’t exactly standing athwart future history yelling “stop,” but he is concerned that some necessary considerations about the future aren’t being heeded. A lecturer and consultant at Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, Wallach also chairs Yale’s technology and ethics working group, which looks at the ethical implications of a broad array of technologies. When I met with him at his home in Bloomfield, he said he was worried about what gets left out of these conversations.

“The debate is largely framed by transhumanists, who are looking for rationales for all the enhancement technologies,” Wallach said. “And it’s framed on the other side by people largely motivated by religious or conservative concerns. Those people are either fearful of this technology, or see it as a rallying cry for conservative social positions.”

Wallach questioned the underlying assumptions of the singularity. He wonders if the projection that artificial intelligence could rival human intelligence is based on a flawed correlation of how brains and computers work. The singularity supposition is that the synapse, the connection between one neuron and another, is essentially the same as computerized bits of information. “That’s based on a lot of assumptions that we really don’t know about the brain,” Wallach said.

Wallach is also skeptical about the rate of technological advancement envisioned by people like Kurzweil. “There are some major thresholds, and no one knows if we’re going to [reach] them or not,” Wallach said. But he’s trying to keep an open mind. “I don’t want to bet against human ingenuity,” he said. “I love the can-do spirit. I love the idea that we’ll try to tackle these problems. But that doesn’t mean that we’re going to tackle them in the near future.”

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