when distinguishing between truth and lies is a lost choice among too many people

or  When An Articulate Particle Physicist Inaptly Simplifies "The Hard Problem"

AFTER READING MORE of the reaction to Sabine Hossenfelder's debunking of "free will" and, in the second indictment of Trump, thinking about the events in the United States over the past decade, I'm going to bend my resolution about the once a week hate mail post.  I'm also going to get personal about it.

After going through an undetailed and extremely short description of the elementary particles that she believes - that is BELIEVES, DOESN'T KNOW - that everything is made of, Sabine Hossenfelder claims that everything we do is described in the enormously complex series of equations that physicists use to partially describe the actions of the particles in the standard model of physics.  Then she, truthfully, declares that for any of us or our actions those equations couldn't possibly be solved because of the impossibility of doing that for all of the particles contained in our bodies or, I'd guess, as she might think of it, "our brains."  But she skips over that problem for making a scientific evaluation of that claim that those would explain our actions, including, I guess, the choices we make or  conclusions we come to would be of unknowable truth because it is untestable.
 
Ok, so humans are one big collection of particles [and, according to her ideology, noting else].  What the particles do is described by the mathematics of the standard model. It's a lot of math and you need math if you want to answer difficult questions like what's going on in nhc [I'm not sure I heard her] collisions.  For simple questions like whether free will exists we don't need to know much about the math, relevant is just that ultimately what you and I do is also described by the standard model, and that means, yes, we know the equations for human behavior, we can write them down.  In practice that's a completely useless statement because we can't solve the equations for these 10 to the 30 or so particles that humans are made of.

That is a violation of so much of what she has said in her critique of things like string theory, that there is no way to test the claims made by it and so it isn't a legitimate scientific theory.  I am also struck at her doing in a shockingly obvious way exactly what her critique of so much of the recent detour into the cul de sac of string theory and its related fields as nothing but  mathematical speculations .  It is a basic inconsistency in her critiques of physics and cosmology that have made her, rightly, somewhat famous.

Of course what she is claiming is unproved, it is an ideological claim made on the basis of her chosen materialist ideology which cannot only not be verified mathematically and matched with observation of what she is claiming it explains but which, if you want to claim it as a scientific finding, is inherently self-impeaching.  If she wants to limit the products of human thought into mere results of physical and chemical reactions that can be fixed into mathematical equations relevant for a partial understanding of subatomic particles then she would very soon run into the fact that in the movements and interactions of organic chemistry, the efficacy of mathematics for even that quickly fade in their effectiveness.  

She later in the video brushes off the idea that minds are not material entities because that idea can't be used to make testable predictions of the kind that are supposed to be the legitimate substance of science, very simple observable material objects.  In other words, minds would escape the confined field of her professional competence and SHE CHOOSES TO REJECT THAT IDEA because she doesn't fancy it. Of course, there's no reason to suspect that anything outside of the things science was designed to study would make predictable predictions about those very limited things which science has successfully studied.  

Then there are those  who just insist insist that free will just exists but it is non-physical, the latter is a well trodden road for example Rene Descartes and Emanuel Kant were both in that camp. I say the idea is not wrong but I never understood the point because if free will is not physical it doesn't explain anything in the physical world so why bother inventing it.

SHE HERSELF ADMITS THAT THE CALCULATIONS SHE CLAIMS WOULD WORK THE WAY SHE CLAIMS THEY WOULD IN REGARD TO HUMAN THOUGHT CAN'T DO THAT SO THEY CAN'T BE USED TO DO WHAT SHE CLAIMS THEY COULD DO. So her very chosen framing can't do that, either. So why bother inventing that model of minds?  In this regard, she does exactly what the proponents of string theory, etc. do.  As to explaining anything in the physical world, any explanation of the physical world depends on consciousness which, under her very terms, cannot be demonstrated by the equations she bases her argument on.

I'd start by saying that her dependence on the current scheme of the standard model in support of her ideological materialism doesn't explain anything about the human experience of consciousness, not only the experience of us making choices and coming to conclusions as to what we will believe but also our ability to conclude that something is explained, including everything she presents as settled explanation.  The very framing of her entire public presentation is not explained by her claim that the equations that partially explain the evident motions of and even existence of the particles of particle physics could explain how that is related because of her truthful statement that the calculation of that couldn't possibly be done and so there is no actual evidence that her claim is true.

As I started, this is a continuation based on my reading of the indictment of Trump, the man who forced even the complicit American media -the much self-vaunted "free press"- to, briefly, notice that there is a problem when distinguishing between truth and lies is a lost choice among too many people.

I'd go so far as to say that Hossenfelder's claim impeaches the human belief that there is truth and there is untruth and what we call those is insignificant because under her framing truth would have to be, as well, a deterministic result of the merely local chemical reactions within human bodies based on the motions of subatomic particles within atoms and it would have no more truth value than any other chemical reaction.  Iron rusting, an acid and base reacting, salt dissolving in water is as significant as anything any physicist ever said. That would be as meaningful as whatever next comes out of the mouth of a Trump or a Franklin Graham or Alex Jones.  

As I've said in those who deny the existence or significance of consciousness, it is the ultimate statement of academic decadence because such a belief leaves no one any reason, whatsoever, to believe anything anyone else says has any significance.  No matter how skillfully expressed that ultimate decadence of materialist ideology is stated, it has the same result that it means truth, itself, is insignificant and likely of no more consequence than if the next digit in the operation of a random number generator is a zero or a one. If she wants to reduce everything to the particles of the standard model and the random chance of humanly invented quantum physics, her very specialty is no more a product of that chance than what she would consider to comprise the question of free will or determinacy.  

Having expressed my respect for her thinking about her professional specialty in the past, it is clear that as soon as Sabine Hossenfelder leaves it she is a case of someone who is so invested in her specialty that she doesn't much take the wider world seriously enough to think things through. I've made that critique of others such as Carl Sagan in the past. I'm going to go directly to the very real effects of her ideology in the wider world and I'm going to make it personal, in these days of waning American democracy, the consequences for me as an American facing Republican-fascism and the Trump cult and I think it's well past time to be nice and polite about it. Materialism kicks the legs out from under democracy, whether it's the vulgar materialism of a Trump or that which you'll find on university faculties and in the high overhead media.

Given her gender and her nationality I'm, frankly, shocked that she would be so unconcerned with a question so important in real life, one which in just barely living memory was a major issue of not only the Second World War but also the division of Germany into a somewhat democratic West and a totalitarian East, as well as the present  struggle between anything like a decent democracy and Neo-fascism and Neo-Nazism.  And, as I have never stopped pointing out, those systems of totalitarian ideology are derived from the claims of scientists. Marxists claim that Marxism is a materialistic scientific system and Rudolf Hess and Hitler claimed that Nazism was nothing but applied science, in that case a direct application of biological determinism as found in the theory of natural selection.  

Determinism would have pretty much guaranteed that, also within living memory and I'm confident in any places today, even an accomplished woman would be shunted off into the background of a male dominated profession.  I'm not that much older than her that I remember a physics teacher encouraging female students to drop his course because he didn't think females were biologically capable of doing the math necessary for even his preliminary course.  I don't know if he got into musing about subatomic particles in his thinking about it, I do know that among the two women he told that to, was the only one in that class who went on to have a career in science.  She was an actual research scientist, not a low-level physics teacher.

This Woman Is My Hero

 

Well, That's A New One

For the first time that I can ever recall it happening, I got a message as I posted the piece below that says, "This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content as outlined in Blogger’s Community Guidelines."

I looked at the things that are supposed to get that warning and don't see anything I wrote that would get it.  I'd welcome someone telling me if they get such a warning so I'll know what it means.   Maybe my trolls have upped the ante?

The No More Than Once A Week Hate Mail Post - Why Abiogenesis Is An Obvious Pseudoscience Founded In Ideology, Not Observation

OF THE LECTURES that I've listened to on these subjects and the things I've read, the talk Professor Nick Lane gave a while back in Geneva was probably the least dishonest exposition from, frankly, the most likeable person I've heard on the subject which is more likely to be presented by a dishonest, arrogant ideologue.  Though it was largely a sales job  I don't think even he realized that's what was going on.  

His topic was "How Can We Know Anything About The Origin of Life?" That is, the way in which the theorized first living organism on Earth arose from non-living molecules, assembling, sparked into life somehow, maintaining life and, in perhaps the most inexplicable act of enormous complexity, successfully reproducing the first time resulting in two (who knows, maybe more) living organisms on Earth which continued to live, to maintain their lives and to successfully reproduce, eventually evolving and  eventually leading to life as it is known to human beings, now.  I think the most honest part of his lecture was the very beginning of it.

I'm going to talk about the origin of life.  But you may wonder how it is possible that we can know anything at all about the origin of life.  And  perhaps by the time I'm finished speaking you'll think we really don't know anything about the origin of life.  I'm going to try to persuade you that we can know somethings.  But it's different to other fields of science.  So, in physics, for example, if we want to know the origin of the universe, well, one thing we can do is have a large space telescope like the James Webb telescope and we can look to the furthest side of the universe which is looking back in time because the further away a star is the longer it takes for the light to arrive and so we can look back in time and observe things directly that were happening close to fourteen billion years ago. That's not something we can do on Earth there is no way of knowing directly what  the Earth was like four billion years ago there are some rocks, some fossils and bits and pieces but mostly it's damaged and destroyed and nothing very much to see. And actually, there's a philosophical point as well, if we could make a time machine and go back four billion years and look for the origin of life where would we go?  And what would we actually look for? And how would we know we had found it?

I will stipulate to start with that we both start from the common ground of assuming there was one "first organism" which successfully lived, maintained its life and successfully reproduced others most likely like it (once it had come together) though that isn't a scientific position, it's one based on belief on the basis of plausibility.  That earliest life evolved into other organisms of many forms to produce the life we see today is far more certain though it is, as well, a plausible conclusion based on available evidence, fossil, genetic, etc.  We start from the same assumptions.   I will say that for the argument I am willing to explore the issue on the basis of random chance for all of the events happening as they happened, though only so long as it's admitted that is an ideological position, not one of science or really one that accounts for what we can see of life and how it works, now.

From there he went on to present a number of seemingly plausible components of how life may have arisen, though his desire to be honest made him hedge about the unknowable way in which the mechanisms and the scenarios he presented about them could have fit together and, as he said at the beginning, there is actually no way to know if his plausible seeming scenarios were, actually, how it happened in the one and only way it actually did happen.  About the only thing he said that may have answered one of my questions about the currently fashionable view that life arose in thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean was, if it happened once in the total absence of complex organic molecules that random chance could have had available to make it happen on the early Earth, why it isn't happening over and over again?  It wasn't exactly an answer to the question, it was a speculation that the free oxygen that early life saturated the atmosphere and, so, ocean with hundreds of millions of years after the first organism probably arose, has entered into the geology that gives rise to thermal vents now and, perhaps, that oxygenation prevents it happening on the present earth.  But, of course, all of that is rank speculation, too.  Don't get me wrong, a lot of what he said was interesting on its own terms, just there is no way to know if it has any relevance to his central claim that it is relevant to the assembly of the first organism on Earth.

As I pointed out to a boob with tenure from Harvard a number of years ago, the issue of life arising on the early Earth is a fundamentally different problem from the one some physicists and cosmologists, the Lords of Creation, propose to solve because that earliest theorized organism would not have possibly been accurately described or known through extending physical principles because organisms are too varied and too specific and far, far too complex to theorize.* An organism is as the organism is and to know anything about that particular organism you would have to have highly resolvable evidence of what that specific organism was like to know anything about it.  All through the lecture Lane proposed things about far, far later, most likely far, far evolved organisms which we can see alive now or for which there are somewhat resolvable remains to be had. He would sometimes hedge that by noting the original organism was likely much simpler than the ones he was referencing, though I'll bet a majority of the casual listeners to him didn't understand that as a foundational condition to any of the conclusions he presented.

The theorized original organism on Earth, furthermore, had a daunting uniqueness that would make much of later life irrelevant to how it arose.  

One thing we can know about even the earliest evidence of those "simple" organisms which we have to make wild speculations about is that unlike all of those an organism that arose before there was another organism on Earth didn't come from the reproduction of an organism but arose in a way not a single one of its descendants did and the division of a single-celled organism will not tell you how that original organism came about.  To think it had and used large, complex organic molecules that are of unknowable -I'll go so far as to say quite implausible- availability to that first organism and put to work by it through mechanisms that are not known to exist outside of living organisms is to beg anyone of any reasonableness to conclude that only a super-human intelligence could have made it happen.  For the "machinery" of even the simplest known cell to have arisen whole and complete by random chance chemical and physical interactions is about as incredible as expecting modern mammals to just spontaneously generate out of a vat of chemicals, even one spiked with a perfect concentration of all of the necessary proteins and other molecules which comprise the bodies of one.  

Even if scientists, today, were able to create a totally artificial organism of extreme simplicity it could not be relied on to tell you about how that first organism arose billions of years ago.  To disturb your materialist-atheist faith, as I will always point out such an artificial organism would only prove that so far as science could possibly know for certain, such an organism would need the intelligent design of the scientists who created it and so it would rightly be used by those who support the intelligent design of life to support their point. That certain knowledge of the necessity of intelligent design to its existence is practically infinity more certain than that anything learned from the experiment is knowable relevant to the first organism on Earth.   About the intelligent design that cause it to happen there is 100% certainty,  there is no way to even figure out the improbability that it is relevant to how it happened without human scientists  on the early Earth.

That's true of any science experiment that could possibly be done by abiogenesists to try to prove that God didn't do it, the philosophical problems of the materialist-atheist-scientistic quest for the origin of life on Earth start with that colossal oversight by Oparin, Miller, Urey, et al.  They cannot possibly filter out intelligent design from anything they come up with.  I don't think even that impossible direct observation that Professor Lane admits is not going to be done could have the operation of intelligence removed from whatever such scientists would publish in that high catechism of such materialist-atheist-scientism, Nature, any analysis of any science is saturated with intelligent design even by entirely non-ideological scientists.  It seems to me that the quest to expunge intelligent design from science is a dishonest denial of reality.  We are stuck with that because it is simply how our minds can work, they can't seem to work any other way.  Not even magnifying the intelligence involved to the imagined collectivity of the entire relevant bodies of scientists who could understand the paper can expunge intelligent purpose and design from the product.  Even if it can seem plausible that it works sometimes if you suspend your disbelief as science requires.  

I don't want to be too hard on Professor Lane because he is, I think, the most honest person I've heard on this subject but I think he's still playing a shell game as everyone else who goes into this game of stupendously improbable odds does.  In the life sciences, if you want to present things as the product of random chance, the odds of coming up with what you can observe dwarf those regularly proposed by that other vastly ideologized science, cosmology.  For anyone to think that they can find the right answer to the question of how life arose on Early Earth with any even general accuracy would be like someone with a blind fold floating in weightless conditions, free floating, being given a dart and insisting they hit the exact center of a a bullseye four billion light years away.  Only the bullseye may as well be invisible because, as Professor Lane admitted, there's no way to see what that goal actually looks like.  They might hit something and claim that they've hit it but there's no way to know if they really did.  And, believe me, if there's one thing you can be certain about such grotesquely speculative "science" their claims will be challenged and quickly become unfashionable. When you don't know what you're looking for and now to make it both plausible in terms of a "first organism" and how that relates to life which can actually be observed, you can probably come up with an effective infinity of such "first organisms."  You can't know which one is the right one.

Is this really any way to do science?  If it is, why figure there are any rules to it?

* I'm ever less impressed with statements by cosmologists about the origin of the universe.  I think George Ellis is probably right, at least for now, that they can't get near the actual Big Bang, if that's how it happened, because there is no way to extend what we know as physical law into such apparently unknowable conditions.  I think the Lords of Creation are a waste of funding and employment as opposed to those who are trying to keep us from destroying our planet and, so, preserve us into the future.  But, then, I have a faith that we are supposed to be part of the fulfillment of creation some time into the distant and unreachable future instead of trying impotently to prove that God isn't necessary for the creation of the universe or life. It's certainly a lot more useful to concentrate on the here and now that can be observed, measured and analyzed IN PART and so to find out helpful and reliable information. You know, to save us from our technology and our greed.   What has cosmology done to that end, or abiogenesis?  Or even the genuinely scientific study of early humans and our closest cousins?