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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Dec 29, 2015 - 04:30pm PT
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"You can call me anything if it helps you understand. I’d say that I don’t know anything other than my own existence as experience. (How about you? What are you sure of?)"
I didn't call you a Solipsist. You did. There are many things that I'm not sure about. I am sure that there is more than my own existence.
"There’s no “deep insight” if there is nothing that can be grasped onto. If there is any insight, it’s more that all the so-called sh#t (your word) that everyone throws around (i.e., beliefs) is just that, and nothing more."
I did use the word sh#t to trigger the reset button. Just keep in mind there is a lot of sh#t in the world and it's not all bad - some of it's good sh#t. Seems like you might have placed a bias on sh#t. Isn't that incongruent with your philosophy? :-)
"As for “actually nothing is happening other than light,” tell me . . . what is it that you actually see with your eyes only—without your imaginative interpretations? The eye only perceives light, I believe."
The mechanics of light alone is an incredibly complex and wonderful phenomenon. Give the physical universe and cause and effect their due. A nerve within the eye transmits/"fires" when light reaching it has crossed the threshold of depolarization for that nerve. There is no inherent meaning perceived at that level of neurological function. Yes, I understand the argument that our ability to perceive reality is imperfect and fuzzy (fuzzier for some than others).
To take that reasonable observation to the extreme of solipsism is illogical.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 29, 2015 - 05:26pm PT
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When one gets a glimpse of how everything is inextricably connected, then it’s sort of like watching a TV: there are all those things seemingly moving around, great drama, emotions welling-up, and concepts swirling all around, but actually nothing is happening other than light.
It's funny how by the end of that sentence he seems to have already forgotten the glimpse of how everything is inextricably connected.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Dec 29, 2015 - 06:28pm PT
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Mark Force: Yes, I understand the argument that our ability to perceive reality is imperfect and fuzzy (fuzzier for some than others).
Quit nitpicking.
(Good grief, Mark, you’ve completely missed the point. I assume the eye works exactly as it is conceived.)
Get into the meat of the conversation. Tell me what you know unequivocally.
“Solipsism” is just a concept. It (and all other concepts) means nothing. Not really. You think they point to real things, but the thing, the concept that you have of it, is only a model. Your world is a world of models.
Think and observe directly for yourself. Quit all of that discursive assuming, and see what’s right in front of you at this very moment. LOOK! See experience and nothing else.
MH2:
Nothing is moving, MH2. It just looks like it. You can actually experience that.
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Dec 29, 2015 - 06:50pm PT
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Get into the meat of the conversation. Tell me what you know unequivocally.
I know unequivocally that if I keep walking into a door and don't open it something's gonna hurt (at least that's been my direct observation and experience thus far)!
Is that being nit picky?
Properly done science is all about astute and critical observation. Dogma is the antithesis of properly done science. Modeling and theory and investigation when done properly respond fluidly to continued observation in order for them to conform as closely as possible to the evidence. The ideal of science is all about astute, careful, and direct observation and thinking for yourself. In the ideal of science the standards you have to meet to be taken seriously are high. Corporatocracy has undermined the integrity of the ideals of science, but the ideals themselves are sound in use.
You seem to have a problem with "the map is not the terrain." Maslow didn't, but he did observe around him people having trouble distinguishing them. There is nothing wrong with a map (symbol, language, concept, model, theory, method) as long as you are clear about what they are and what they are not. I'm not going to call a map bad or wrong when it represents the terrain reasonably well and has utility in helping get to where I want to go. You seem to have a problem with the map not actually being the terrain. That isn't a maps' job. You seem to have some serious bias about this. Though many people do have trouble discerning these distinctions it isn't the fault of the tool - it is operator error.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Dec 30, 2015 - 12:08am PT
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Because Planned Parenthood provides fetal tissue samples from abortions to scientific researchers hoping to cure diseases, from Alzheimer’s to cancer. (Storing and safeguarding that tissue requires resources, and Planned Parenthood charges researchers for the costs.) It’s clear that many of the people protesting Planned Parenthood are opposed to abortion on religious grounds and are, to varying degrees, anti-science. Should this cause scientists to clam up at the risk of further offending or alienating them? Or should we speak out loudly to point out that, independent of one’s beliefs about what is sacred, this tissue would otherwise be thrown away,
This would be the fine argument from;
The great Lawrence Krauss
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Dec 30, 2015 - 08:38am PT
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^^^^Just because a technology is scientifically sound doesn't make it ethically valid!
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Dec 30, 2015 - 09:03am PT
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Not everyone has the same ethics. If we don't do the research, someone else in the world will and will have the patent on the molecular cure for particular diseases. If you want to buy your gene therapy from China for example, instead of America, prohibiting fetal cell research would be the way to ensure that. If you want to be really pure, then you could then deny a family member life saving medicine based on that research. However, if you believe in shades of gray, you can think that the U.S. pioneering such research will mean that higher ethical standards will apply than if we turn it over to somewhere else.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Dec 30, 2015 - 09:46am PT
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Jan: If we don't do the research, someone else in the world will . . . .
This is an instrumental argument of expediency, Jan, not ethics.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 30, 2015 - 10:18am PT
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I think that there is a huge range of methods employed to do science. Perhaps the most important of the attributes is openness about the research. In particular, the reporting of what was done as a sufficiently detailed level to allow someone else to reproduce the work independently.
Scientists are careful because they don't want to report research that is wrong by this standard, irreproducible. And the standards are high because scientists as a group would like to spend less time checking other's results, so reliable research is held at a premium. This becomes important when scientists judge the "strength of the research team" reviewing grant applications for funding agencies. Research teams with a history of irreproducible results get "weeded out" of the funding gardens.
Note that the result of a research program that runs contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy at some time is not the same thing as doing poor work. It may be that such results are subject to intense scrutiny, but the checks allowed by the openness and the subsequent corroboration of other researchers who independently obtain the same results allows science to make progress beyond commonly held scientific beliefs.
The major challenge to science is the notion of intellectual property. It is argued that, for a business to succeed, the basis for the provided product has to be owned by that business. When the product is based on an idea, it is argued that that idea can be held in secret and not revealed to the public as releasing the idea allows anyone else to use it, or modify it in such a way as to satisfy the requirements of law that it be a demonstrably different idea.
As such scientists at various institutions are required to vet their public discussions of their research to establish the IP content, and whether or not the discussion constitutes a potential of revealing information regarded as "valuable" before the institution has put legal protection in place for that information (usually as a patent, or first as a "record of invention").
This process has a spectrum of implementations depending on the institution that is doing the research, commercial research may be treated quite different from public research, or academic research. But in all cases, the idea of IP is a factor.
Paradoxically, publicly supported research, as is done at the national laboratories, has to both provide information to the public who support the research, but also protect that research as IP, which inhibits the access to that information. This is largely because the laws protecting IP are derived from old invention law which centers on an actual item (the Patent Office used to require a working model of the invention to be submitted...).
The restriction of communication that usually accompanies the protection of IP certainly greatly complicates the idea of independent corroboration of research results. Even for publicly funded research this is an issue as providing for the "public welfare" weighs the free access to the results against the interest in commercial ventures to market products based on the results. It is argued that no company will develop a market for a product whose IP is in the public domain. The reason being that any other company could then produce a similar product and exploit that new market.
So what is ethical in this regard?
This discussion becomes even more complicated when the research has national security dimensions, where adversaries are denied the knowledge of the research, the dissemination of the results is restricted. The levels of restriction are generally established by the presumed consequences to national security. Doing science under these restrictions can be a daunting task given the essential aspect of having the research checked independently.
Once again, the ethics of doing secret research are weighed against the consequences of opening up the discussion.
This is not an easy issue to resolve. I.I. Rabi wrote an interesting article in The Atlantic Monthly during the 1960 presidential elections arguing that all of our research on nuclear weapons, including the deployment and the intelligence regarding the Soviet program should be open. The price of this openness would have been increased support of our program to keep it ahead of ("competitive") with the Soviets. What you buy with that is the ability to have an "open discussion" of the policies, this was deemed necessary for a democratic process. Most will forget that the "missile gap" was a major election issue, but the public was left out of the details which were "top secret;" how does an electorate make an informed decision?
But by the late 1970's Rabi had formed the opinion that disclosing information on nuclear explosives was a bad thing, that they should be kept secret. He strenuously objected to the McPhee book The Curve of the Binding Energy and especially with the campaign of Ted Taylor, who discussed nuclear explosive designs to argue for stronger non-proliferation policies, including nuclear disarmament. Rabi's later view was based on his assessment of the possible ability of non-state actors to acquire nuclear explosives based on public information.
So the arguments for and against open science, once again, become a difficult dilemma weighing the consequences of the policy of openness.
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Dec 30, 2015 - 11:46am PT
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Ed, nicely done as usual!
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Dec 30, 2015 - 01:42pm PT
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someone else in the world will
i find it deceiving Krauss's method for gaining support for what seems like a lobbying act for some company to make money off these dead babies which would otherwise just rot in a trashcan.
Krauss argues as a scientist on a social platform denouncing social ethics as inferior to "the hopes of scientist to maybe cure cancer".
More than that, Krauss also conflates that people holding the ethical stance that legal abortion in all instances should not be considered a societal norm, are at time same time anti-science.
Please correct me if i have misconstrued the facts. Not my intent.
Obviously it's my opinion that Kruass being anti-religious is misconstruing the facts in hopes of garnering support from the suffering cancerous families, and maybe getting a pinch out of the $30k-$100k a fetus is expected to render.
As a believer in social ethics and it's importance over money, i do see a line we must cross to enable science to continue in modern investigation and invention. After all we them to fix the problems their old inventions have caused...
Ethically the future challenge will be. If the sale of fetus' becomes the norm and start fetching upwards of 100k ea. The way to bring down the price will be through quantity. No doubt we'll see commercials on daytime soap-operas advertising to young unemployed girls a way to have fun and make a fortune.
and jesus wept
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Dec 30, 2015 - 01:53pm PT
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Ed has it right. In my field, practically all work is closely held. Things like huge land 3D seismic datasets are never released to the public or to other companies. That causes a duplication of efforts: The same area can be shot over and over and over. The data is never made public.
Geology is closely held. An idea can be worth billions of dollars to the first company to solve a problem, and you can be damn sure that it is all held secretly until it is exploited commercially. This totally stops publishing. I've had ideas that will never be seen by anyone other than the partners involved, and it is the same with others.
Academia isn't totally blind. Companies may make a seismic survey available to a geophysics department for research, but even that sometimes comes with a secrecy period.
It is a very competitive business, so a lot of work is being done. Occasionally a company will allow an employee to make a seminar presentation, but that is only after that company has totally tied up the area under study.
For instance, if I posted my working maps here for you to see, I would certainly get in a lot of trouble. Another geologist could take that work and run with it.
You have to assume that at any given time, other geologists are looking at the same thing that you are, and over time, a whole gaggle of geologists had looked at it as well. Talk about an inefficient duplication of effort.
By the way, Ed. I know John McPhee's son-in-law. I took advantage of this and had McPhee sign two books for me. One was Annals Of The Former World, a compilation of his 3 books on geology combined with a new 4th, and the book you mentioned, The Curve Of Binding Energy, a great book on nuclear weapons, as you said.
Those were my favorite McPhee books. He does a great job explaining difficult scientific concepts in a way that nigh anyone can understand, yet I can't remember reading anything that he got wrong, which is amazing if you have ever dealt with journalists.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Dec 30, 2015 - 02:47pm PT
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A snippet from Krauss's op-ed in The New Yorker that HFCS linked to:
In science, of course, the very word “sacred” is profane. No ideas, religious or otherwise, get a free pass. The notion that some idea or concept is beyond question or attack is anathema to the entire scientific undertaking. This commitment to open questioning is deeply tied to the fact that science is an atheistic enterprise. “My practice as a scientist is atheistic,” the biologist J.B.S. Haldane wrote, in 1934. “That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career.” It’s ironic, really, that so many people are fixated on the relationship between science and religion: basically, there isn’t one. In my more than thirty years as a practicing physicist, I have never heard the word “God” mentioned in a scientific meeting. Belief or nonbelief in God is irrelevant to our understanding of the workings of nature—just as it’s irrelevant to the question of whether or not citizens are obligated to follow the law.
Because science holds that no idea is sacred, it’s inevitable that it draws people away from religion. The more we learn about the workings of the universe, the more purposeless it seems. Scientists have an obligation not to lie about the natural world. Even so, to avoid offense, they sometimes misleadingly imply that today’s discoveries exist in easy harmony with preëxisting religious doctrines, or remain silent rather than pointing out contradictions between science and religious doctrine. It’s a strange inconsistency, since scientists often happily disagree with other kinds of beliefs. Astronomers have no problem ridiculing the claims of astrologists, even though a significant fraction of the public believes these claims. Doctors have no problem condemning the actions of anti-vaccine activists who endanger children. And yet, for reasons of decorum, many scientists worry that ridiculing certain religious claims alienates the public from science. When they do so, they are being condescending at best and hypocritical at worst.
I would have to agree that science drew me away from religion. I had already developed the basic atheist idea in my early teens, though. Religion itself seemed to be so belief-laden that even the most cursory examination of it caused it to crumble. My later science career simply amplified what I had suspected as a child, that religion sits on very shaky ground from a logic standpoint.
So I became an atheist as a young teen, in a Bible belt small town in a reasonably religious family. I never told anyone about it, simply because it would upset them. To this day, I hold back and don't tackle the topic with my close relatives. So I haven't been a good militant atheist. I've always felt that people should believe what they wanted.
Only later did that belief gel to the point where I deeply distrusted those who pushed their beliefs on me or anyone else. I guess I am still this way to a degree. I don't go out trying to change anyone's mind. I just don't think about it much. The house of cards was so fragile that attacking it was too easy. I feel that anyone should believe what they want to believe. It doesn't bother me as long as they don't take advantage of their position in order to push it down my throat. We see the fundamentalists from all faiths doing this. It is nothing new.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Dec 30, 2015 - 02:55pm PT
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If one wants to discuss ethics, then disputing what to do with fetal remains is not the place to begin. The place to begin would be the issue of abortions and why there are so many in a society with effective means of contraception - the ethics of personal responsibility.
We have no problem with using the remains of older people for instruction in medical schools or for life saving organ transplants based on the consent of relatives, so how are fetal remains any different?
You know the Tibetans have a practice called sky burial in which cadavers are cut into small pieces and fed to wild animals and birds. It solves a practical problem in a country where fuel is scarce and the ground is frozen half the year, but it also has spiritual significance. The person who doesn't need their body anymore gives it away so others might live. Personally I think that is more ethical than spending vast sums to preserve it underground, occupying space in ever more crowded societies.
As for the commercialization of body parts, that already exists in some areas of the world, kidneys being most in demand. Surrogate mothers in third world countries is another. Interesting how we overlook the problems of the living to argue about what to do with the remains of the dead. Of course all these ethical problems could be dealt with more humanely if we had a government interested in people's welfare more than slogans to get elected.
We also have a way to grow stem cells from ordinary fat cells of adults. The real money will be in mass producing those cells. Selling one's fat cells might even be an incentive to reduce obesity?
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Dec 30, 2015 - 03:03pm PT
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I like the idea of that sky burial. I've looked into green burial possibilities in my state. You know, have my buddies put me in an old sleeping bag and bury me at the base of a big wild sycamore out in the forest, rapidly decaying and providing nutrients to the soil. Allowing vultures to feed sounds even better.
It isn't easy to do with all of the old state laws on the books. One thing is certain: I don't want to be embalmed and put in a 10,000 dollar casket. What a waste of money.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Dec 30, 2015 - 03:38pm PT
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You and I are agreed on that. I want them to take any part of me that is still usable by someone else and cremate the rest or maybe a green burial if that is feasible.
I do genealogy so I'm happy they used gravestones in the past, but we're all documented well enough now, we don't need them anymore.
The composting towers sound a lot like the Parsi towers in Bombay where bodies are placed at the top on racks and vultures pick them clean, with the bones gradually filtering downward. Their aim is to keep them above ground however, so they don't contaminate the earth.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Dec 30, 2015 - 05:12pm PT
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The place to begin would be the issue of abortions and why there are so many in a society with effective means of contraception - the ethics of personal responsibility.
say, do you have any idea how many abortions performed by Tibetans?
i think the reason christians are so negative toward abortion(besides the killing part)is because it heaps another sin atop sin. Most abortions are on young girls 25 and under,out of wedlock. Plus add all the sexual diseases that get passed around in promiscuous multi-partner sex. And the christian social ethic of saving intercourse for marriage wipes away all these problems. Sure that would be in a perfect world, and we must remember we're dealing with a bunch of "free-wheeling animals". Ha.
There's stats somewhere. But i read when they started handing out condoms in high schools. Sexual activity went up 500%. That's the kind of response expected when government tries to dictate behavior.
Heck, i wouldn't be surprised if it was the governments agenda to cause a spike in abortions and get guys like Krauss to weasel a way to further fetus stem cell research. We gotta stay ahead of those russians right?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 30, 2015 - 07:59pm PT
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Nothing is moving, MH2.
Sounds serious.
It just looks like it.
Oh. Well. As long as it also looks like you can make it to your coffee.
You can actually experience that.
Yes. Two days ago I experienced that. Everyone around me agreed that nothing was moving. Then I looked out a window of the bus and saw a person on the sidewalk going past us. I got off the bus and things started moving again. These hypotheses should be tested.
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