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An Extraordinary Submergence

Posted March 18th, 2014 by Lesley Hazleton

Submergence-356x535I don’t remember ordering J.M.Ledgard’s novel Submergence from the library.  I do remember getting the email that it had arrived, and wondering what it was. Then picking it up a couple of days later, looking at the cover — “huh?” — and asking myself if I even wanted to read it.

I still know nothing about Ledgard aside from the capsule bio on  the back cover:  Born in Scotland, lives in Africa, political and war correspondent for The Economist.  Nothing, that is, but the fact that he’s written an astonishingly ambitious, beautiful, and haunting novel.  So much so that the moment I finished it — and I mean the precise moment, with no hesitation — I turned back to the first page and began reading it again, with even greater admiration.

The ‘plot’ is simple enough:  a man and a woman meet in a French hotel, have a brief affair, and continue thinking of each other as they go on with their separate lives.  He is an intelligence agent gathering information on militant extremists in Somalia.  She is a deep-ocean scientist obsessed with the strange life forms in the deep-water fissures of the earth’s mantle.  He is captured by jihadist fighters, badly beaten, held hostage.  She dives in a submersible 3,000 meters under the north Atlantic.  Separate lives indeed, yet somehow, and with extraordinary grace, Ledgard pulls them together into a magnificent evocation of the complexity of life on earth, human and otherwise.  And of its intense fragility.

Life in the deep turns out to be extraordinarily stable.  Life on the surface, terrifyingly unstable.  The hardship of Somalia comes as alive here as the shimmering life forms (I had to look up ‘salp’ on Wikipedia) in the hadopelagic — ‘hado’ from Hades, the deepest depths.  The jihadist captors are drawn with rare understanding even as there’s no stinting on their cruelty (including an all-too-vivid scene in which a young teenage girl who has been raped is stoned to death for adultery).

Here’s an extract from toward the end:

We cannot talk with definition about our souls, but it is certain that we will decompose… What is likely is that sooner or later, carried in the wind and in rivers, or your graveyard engulfed in the sea, a portion of each of us will be given new life in the cracks, vents, or pools of molten sulphur on which the tonguefish skate.

You will be in Hades, the staying place of the spirits of the dead.  You will be drowned in obliviion, the River Lethe, swallowing water to erase all memory.  It will not be the nourishing womb you began your life in.  It will be a submergence.  You will take your place in the boiling-hot fissures, among the teeming hordes of nameless microorganisms that mimic no forms because they are the foundation of all forms.  In your reanimation you will be aware only that you are a fragment of what once was, and are no longer dead.  Sometimes this will be an electric feeling, sometimes a sensation of the acid you eat, or the furnace under you.  You will burgle and rape other cells in the dark for a seeming eternity, but nothing will come of it.  Hades is evolved to the highest state of simplicity.  It is stable.  Whereas you are a tottering tower, so young in evolutionary terms, and addicted to consciousness.

And as an eerie footnote to this, here’s Ledgard in an interview last year on the blog of The New Yorker.  The novel “juxtaposes land with ocean and enlightenment with fanaticism,” he acknowledged. “I felt impelled to write it in this way, but it is odd, I can see that. But sometimes life is even odder. It was the strangest moment for me when Osama bin Laden was killed and buried at sea. Everything came together in the abyss. I have often thought about it since, not just bin Laden’s weighted corpse sinking down to the sea floor, but also the processes done on his body, the creatures, the crushing dark, and that’s what I am talking about — there is another world in our world.”

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The God Particle. Sort Of.

Posted October 9th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

I love the fact that yesterday, the day he won the Nobel Prize in physics, Peter Higgs couldn’t be found.  He was off “somewhere in Scotland” with no cell phone, no email, no address.  That, I think, is winning in style.

Higgs is the father, as it were, of the Higgs boson, aka “the God particle.”  As you might suspect, it wasn’t him who gave it so grandiose and eye-catching a nickname.  That was a colleague in search of a selling book title, who later said that what he really wanted to call it was “the goddamn particle.”

Not being a physicist, I’ve had trouble figuring out exactly what this boson is — in fact, what any boson is.  (Not that physicists have had it any easier:  it took ten thousand of them 53 years to follow up on Higgs’ first theoretical paper until they proved the boson’s existence just last year — after sifting 2,000 trillion subatomic fireballs through CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.  Yes, two thousand trillion — that’s why it’s large.)

But then lo and behold, this morning:  epiphany!  Denis Overbye at the NYT described the Higgs boson in terms I can almost grasp, along with a short video he begins this way: “The Higgs boson is not for the faint of heart.  It’s tough stuff, even for physicists.”

Gulp.  But gird up your loins, because this is worth it.  It brims with enticing ideas to play with — a grand portal to the intersection of physics and metaphysics.

The Higgs was the last missing ingredient of the Standard Model, a suite of equations that has ruled particle physics for the last half-century, explaining everything from the smell of a rose to the ping when your computer boots up.

According to this model, the universe brims with energy that acts like a cosmic molasses, imbuing the particles that move through it with mass, the way a bill moving through Congress attracts riders and amendments, becoming more and more ponderous and controversial.

Cosmic molasses.  Am into that.

Without the Higgs field, many elementary particles, like electrons, would be massless and would zip around at the speed of light. There would be no atoms and no us.

For scientists, the discovery of the Higgs (as physicists call it) affirmed the view of a cosmos ruled by laws of almost diamond-like elegance and simplicity, but in which everything interesting — like us — is a result of lapses or flaws in that elegance.

You can see why I love this.  It’s an intensely esthetic idea — an intensely existential, philosophical and psychological one too — in which flaws and imperfections are exactly what makes life interesting. There’s a touch of kabbala in it (real kabbala, not Madonna red-string theory).  A good dose of Spinoza, perhaps.  And a marvelous challenge to the naive and pernicious idea of human perfectibility.

At the heart of the physicists’ quest, Overby continues, was

an ancient idea, the concept of symmetry, and how it was present in the foundations of physics but hidden in the world as we experience it. In art and nature, something is symmetrical if it looks the same when you move it one way or another, like a snowflake rotated 60 degrees; in science and math, a symmetry is something that does not change when you transform the system, like the length of an arrow when you turn it around or shoot it.

All fundamental forces were the result of nature’s trying to maintain symmetries, physicists realized — for example, the conservation of electric charge in the case of electromagnetism, or the conservation of momentum and energy in the case of Einstein’s gravity. But…

By a process called symmetry breaking, a situation that started out balanced can wind up unbalanced.  Imagine, for example, a pencil standing on its tip; it will eventually fall over and point only one way out of many possibilities. The mass of the boson can be thought of as the energy released when the pencil falls.

“The energy released when a pencil falls.”  There’s poetry here, and I’ve only sampled it, so read the whole article (it’s misleadingly headlined — hello, NYT editors? — so scroll down to paragraph 10 and read on from there), and let the imagination soar…

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File under: agnosticism, light, science | Tagged: Tags: energy, Higgs boson, metaphysics, Nobel prize, Peter Higgs, physics | 9 Comments
  1. Everett Moran says:
    October 9, 2013 at 10:32 am

    Lesley, if you have not read “The God Particle” by Leon Lederman, I highly recommend it. Not only is it quite understandable (Lederman is an experimental physicist, rather than theoretical), it is very funny in places, so quite an entertaining read as well.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      October 9, 2013 at 11:18 am

      I haven’t, but now see that he’s just published a new book called — appropriately? — “Beyond the God Particle.” The meta-God particle?

  2. Ross says:
    October 9, 2013 at 7:02 pm

    Now, how can this be turned into a weapon? Just kidding I’m sure no-one would do that…

  3. Bushra Zafar says:
    October 9, 2013 at 9:19 pm

    There is an even simpler way of understanding the God particle. It is what gives everything the mass that they need to exist, meaning that it surrounds everything and touches everything yet is itself elusive. That is the definition of God as we understand from the Quran,
    He is everywhere and touches everything, yet Himself is Elusive.

    • Nasir says:
      October 10, 2013 at 1:10 am

      Yes Bushra, you are on the track. Although difficult to propound on the issue being a non physicist but still will throw in my bits. The mention of ‘God’ here may not go well with agnostics but it is necessary here. The Qur’an 1400 years ago says that God created the Heavens and the Earth (plain to see) and ‘everythings between them’ (Invisible), when there was nothing before except a little smoke like substance. (Qur’an was also the first to point out that Earth is not flat as earlier supposed, but round like the ‘egg of an Ostrich’ and spinning on its axis and going around the Sun, many centuries before the Europeans. It contains many scientific facts proven right by science only today.) The greatest scientist the world has ever known -Albert Einstien said, ‘Religion is blind without science and science is lame without religion’.

      However, these ‘God particle’ or ‘Higgs boson’ originates from an invisible field that fills up all space even when the Universe seems empty and dark, this field is there as these particles are everywhere yet bafflingly elusive or so it remained until the discovery. (First propounded by a sage-scientist -Dr Abdus Salam of Pakistan that won him the Noble Prize and the Einstein Medal in 1979). Fundamental particles travel through this field and some interact yet some don’t. Without it, we and all other joined up atoms in the Universe would not exist, says theorists. This makes a lot of sense as it also serve as a medium of contact because it is from this contact that particle acquire mass by the Will of God He says Be! And it becomes!

      • moranpro says:
        October 10, 2013 at 2:52 pm

        At the risk of seeing this devolve into a religious discussion, I recognize that many world views incorporate the concept of an Ultimate Architect, if you will. The Einstein quote is right on. In my estimation, the most successful religions – and by “successful” I mean philosophically, not in terms of numbers of followers – evolve as the knowledge of the universe around us evolves. Although I am not a religious man, I do not hold to the notion that science and the concept of God are necessarily incompatible. Many scientists see their research as not only a means to understanding the Universe, but also as a means to understanding the mind of God. The transcendent nature of God as described by Spinoza, Lin Yutang and, apparently, in the Q’uran as well suggests that, as we refine our understanding of the Universe, we come closer to that goal.

        [Hmmmm….. if we find that ours is just one universe in an infinite soup of multiverses, will western religions still subscribe to the one god concept? No way to prove or disprove, of course, but perhaps we live in a one god per universe multiverse!]

        When Europe was muddling through the Dark Ages, the Islamic world was laying the foundation for the language of physics: modern mathematics. It is sad to contemplate such a rich tradition rejecting its own heritage, which appears to be inevitable if fundamentalists take control. I fear the same outcome in the U.S. if the Conservative Christian Right is allowed to co-opt governmental policy. Religious texts which were drafted thousands of years ago require reinterpretation by enlightened minds, as we [hopefully] continue to evolve. What good is new knowledge of the world around us and changing conditions if we neglect to incorporate them into our policies? What good is civil discourse if, in the end, the presumption is that nothing can change because of a bunch of laws written by individuals of another place and time who, necessarily, possessed a far less comprehensive view of the world than an educated 21st century individual does?

        • Lesley Hazleton says:
          October 10, 2013 at 5:43 pm

          Well, let’s call it a philosophical discussion rather than a religious one. Isn’t the crux of religion — beyond the primitive and false dichotomy of believe-or-don’t-believe — philosophical? In fact it seems to me that much of philosophy, up to today, has revolved around sheer amazement A. that we exist, and B. that we can think. Or at least, as you point out, that some of us can think. The Dark Ages is indeed where the Banana Republicans would dearly love to take us all.

          • moranpro says:
            October 11, 2013 at 7:40 am

            Agreed on all points.

  4. pah says:
    October 13, 2013 at 6:53 am

    wow, i am impressed, as someone with a non-scientific brain!

Knowledgeable Ignorance

Posted June 22nd, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

I just spent a couple of days totally absorbed in a book that celebrates ignorance.  Even better, it celebrates ignorance in science!  Or to be a tad more precise, it’s about what the author, Stuart Firestein, a Columbia University neuroscientist, calls “the exhilaration of the unknown.”

So ignore the way the cover makes the book look ominous and boring.  It’s anything but.  In fact it’s a delight.  Because of course Firestein isn’t talking about willful stupidity, that “callow indifference to facts or logic that shows itself as a stubborn devotion to uninformed opinions.”  Not that at all.  He’s talking about “a particular condition of knowledge:  the absence of fact, understanding, insight, or clarity about something.”  This he calls “knowledgeable ignorance.”  Also known as “perceptive ignorance” or “insightful ignorance.”

Essentially, Firestein’s book is a celebration of mystery.  That is, of uncertainty, doubt, and unknowability – terms which apply as much to my agnostic inquiry of religion as to his equally agnostic inquiry of science (which originally meant ‘knowledge’).   Some scientists call his approach “agnostology” – a coinage that makes me laugh out loud and imagine a bunch of angels dancing like crazy on the head of a pin.  Me, I call it accidental theology.

Knowledgeable ignorance, says Firestein, is the kind that leads you to frame better questions.  And not with any single answer in mind.  “One good question can give rise to several layers of answers,” he says.  A perfect image:  layers of answers, like layers of clouds, each one shaped and influenced by the ones above and below it, each one distinguishable and yet part of the whole most of us dismissively shorthand as “sky.”

And then this:  “Being a scientist requires having faith in uncertainty, finding pleasure in mystery, and learning to cultivate doubt.  There is no surer way to screw up an experiment than to be sure of its outcome.”

“Having faith in uncertainty” — if I believed in perfection, that would be a perfect definition of agnosticism!

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File under: agnosticism, existence, science | Tagged: Tags: doubt, Ignorance: How It Drives Science, knowledge, mystery, Stuart Firestein, uncertainty, unknowability | 3 Comments
  1. Tafacory says:
    June 24, 2012 at 9:37 am

    I love that there is an author willing to make such claims. There is no need to be absolutely certain about everything in one’s life. That’s part of life’s mystery. But authors like these have also taught me an important lesson: science is a wonderful tool but it has not uncovered anywhere near a majority of what is explorable. Great post.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      June 24, 2012 at 1:10 pm

      Thanks, T — just clicked to follow your blog too, and looking forward to reading through it. — L.

  2. Zahida Murtaza (@zmurrad) says:
    June 26, 2012 at 7:25 pm

    ” From the cowardice that shrinks from truth;
    From the laxness that is content with half-truth;
    From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth;
    O God of Truth Deliver Us!”

    A prayer by a great-grandson of the Prophet.

A Celestial Wobble

Posted January 15th, 2011 by Lesley Hazleton

Beauty salons were abuzz with the dismaying news.  Tattoo artists laid in new stocks of ink, ready for the deluge of flesh inscribed with astral signs needing to be re-signed.  Astrologists tried to assure their clients that they were still who they thought they were even if they weren’t.

For two days, the revelation that astrological signs and the actual position of the stars don’t really match up – a shocker, I know – commanded the attention of many of those who had no idea where to find Tunisia on a map, let alone the political dimensions of what was happening there.  I mean, this was cosmic.  Our planet, it turns out, has a slight celestial wobble known as a precession, and the resulting realignment vis-à-vis other planets and stars, while old news to astronomers, was devastating to devotees of the zodiac.   It meant that the dates of astrological signs would have to be recalculated so that “a Gemini” might in fact be “a Taurus,” and so on.  Talk about an existential crisis…

Three millennia ago, astrology was a grand explanatory system of the universe;  now it’s good for little more than a New Yorker cartoon or a lame pickup line.  The Pew Forum reports that only 25% of Americans believe in astrology, though that’s an oddly lowball figure given that some 75% believe in angels and demons, heaven and hell.   Perhaps Dan Brown has made angels and demons kosher, while astrology still reeks of Nancy Reagan.

My one close encounter with an astrologist came years ago as a birthday gift.  She was “the best in New York,” I was told.  In the spirit of inquiry, I turned up at the appointed hour to be confronted with a perfect cliché:  heavy eye makeup, mother-earth dimensions swathed in a purple velvet muumuu, long black hair that looked like it hadn’t been washed in weeks, and the overwhelming odor of too many cats in too small a space.

“Virgo, cusp of Libra” she intoned, nodding sagely.  “You must be in the helping professions…?”   When I tired of her amateurish probing and told her what I did for a living, she closed her eyes in ecstasy.  “Ah yes, a writer — I can just see the words flowing out of you onto the page…”

“Powerful image,” I said, gritting my teeth against the Hollywood stereotype.

“Oh but this is all incredibly powerful,” she said, “which is why so many very powerful people practice it.”  And then added, in a tone of hushed reverence:  “You know, Hitler was really into astrology…”

At which I did what I should have done at the outset, and walked out.

Yet this past couple of days, I read the reports about the possible reassignment of the zodiac with a kind of bemused interest.  I would still be “a Virgo,” it seemed (rats – the most boring of all the signs), but no longer on the cusp of Libra.  I’d go the other direction and now be on the cusp of Leo, leaving me to imagine the wow-factor significance the purple muumuu would find if she saw the book by my bedside right now:  John Vaillant’s wonderful The Tiger.

Then ABC News and others focused the full weight of their investigatory reporting on the issue, and decided that astrology already had the wobble covered (or was already wobbly enough – it wasn’t clear, as is clear from this report on abc.com, filed under Entertainment).   Cosmic crisis averted.

But I liked that realignment idea.  Isn’t that exactly what we’d all like to see?  If the whole planet can realign itself in relation to other stars and planets, maybe there’s still hope for those of us spinning on its surface to realign ourselves in relation to each other.  I just hope it happens a bit more quickly.  It seems that our particular celestial wobble takes about 26,000 years, which means that in 23,000 years the night sky will be back to where it was when the Babylonians first invented the zodiac.  It’d somehow be reassuring to think that there’d still be humans around to see it.

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File under: absurd, science | Tagged: Tags: astrology, astronomy, celestial wobble, Dan Brown, John Vaillant, precession, Tunisia, zodiac | 3 Comments
  1. Lynn Rosen says:
    January 15, 2011 at 10:08 pm

    I’m still wobbling over the purple velvet muu-muu.

  2. Phil Wilson says:
    January 16, 2011 at 1:03 pm

    In 23 millenia the wobble may be back where it was, but the stars themselves will have been wandering around the galaxy, as they are wont to do, and our own star, the Sun, will also have been wending its merry away through other stellar neighbourhoods. For these reasons, the constellations will be mostly unrecognisable.

    So perhaps that suggests other symbolic ideas. You can’t turn the clock back. Ideas, like patterns in the stars, shouldn’t be fixed in stone, otherwise efforts to shoehorn the present into the pattern of the past become increasingly problematic. And people, like distant stars, are free and independent, their courses ultimately uncontrolled by any one of us. Yet, I suppose, their light, and the shared space we all brighten, is beautiful.

  3. Robert Corbett says:
    January 18, 2011 at 4:03 pm

    I’d guess you were closer to Leo than Libra as well. Virgos aren’t boring, but they do like to keep things to themselves. As for remain, I remain a Leo, a double one just like Clinton. We’re trouble.

The Truth Problem

Posted December 13th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

The response to my TEDx Quran talk in the week since the video of it was released has been magnificent, and the comments here on the AT, on YouTube, and on many other sites, have been immensely moving, humbling, thought-provoking, and inspiring, sometimes all at the same time.

All of which means that I haven’t had much time for my usual reading.  So when I finally curled up late last night with last week’s New Yorker, I thought it would just be a relaxing break.   Instead, Jonah Lehrer’s densely argued article on scientific research called “The Truth Wears Off” had me sitting straight up in alert attention, and his conclusion left me kind of breathless:

We like to pretend that experiments define the truth for us.  But that’s often not the case.  Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved.  And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true.  When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

This article is dynamite.  I mean that almost literally, since Lehrer explodes the carefully nurtured image of scientific research as the ultimate arbiter of fact.  It demonstrates what he calls “the slipperiness of empiricism.”  And it challenges the faith in science – I use the word “faith” advisedly here – of “new atheists” like Sam Harris, Chris Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett (a foursome I think of H2D2 for short).

Lehrer focuses on what he calls “the decline effect” – the way much research across a wide range of fields, including psychology, ecology, biology, and medicine, fails the most basic scientific test, which is replicability.  If other researchers can produce the same results, then the research is valid;  if they cannot, it has to be assumed flawed.   And many, in some fields even most, cannot.  Results that initially seem ground-breaking often fade with each replication of the research, and sometimes even turn negative.

“It’s as if our facts were losing their truth,” says Lehrer.  As one somewhat depressed biologist told him:

We cannot escape the troubling conclusion that some – perhaps many – cherished generalities are at best exaggerated in their significance, and at worst a collective illusion nurtured by strong a-priori beliefs.

Citing the example of wildly divergent results for the efficacy of acupuncture in the Far East as opposed to Western Europe, for instance, Lehrer writes:

This wide discrepancy suggests that scientists find ways to confirm their preferred hypothesis, disregarding what they don’t want to see.  Our beliefs are a form of blindness.

It gets downright scary when he talks to a Stanford epidemiologist who looked at the 49 most cited clinical-research studies in three major medical journals.  “Of those that had been subject to replication, 41% had either been directly contradicted or had their effect sizes significantly downgraded.”   It gets even worse when the research is in a “fashionable” field like genetic differences in disease risk for men and women.  “Out of 432 claims, only a single one was consistently replicable.”

The Stanford epidemiologist suspects “significance chasing,” where “scientists are so eager to pass the magical test of statistical significance that they start playing around with the numbers, trying to find anything that seems worthy.”   They don’t do this deliberately, but unconsciously.  “Knowing” that something has to be true, they find ways to make it seem so.

“The decline effect” may in fact be a decline of illusion, says Lehrer.  The problem being that it’s very hard to let go of illusions:

Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in textbooks and drive standard medical practice.  Why?  Because these ideas seem true.  Because they make sense.  Because we can’t bear to let them go.

Because, in short, scientists are as human as the rest of us.  And the very idea of truth — that absolute ideal of veracity — is as slippery and troubling as ever.

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File under: agnosticism, existence, science | Tagged: Tags: empiricism, Jonah Lehrer, replicability, the decline effect, The New Yorker, truth | 9 Comments
  1. Linda Williams says:
    December 13, 2010 at 12:02 pm

    This reminds me of my personal fasination (and horror) when I went from a idealist English Major to working in a bank marketing department… Given the assignment to research and write a report on the numbers presented on various accounts… I found I could make three or four different conclusions with the same numbers… ie: I had the power to make the numbers say what I wanted them to say! It scared the innocense out of me.

  2. Michael Camp says:
    December 13, 2010 at 12:07 pm

    Lesley,
    Thought provoking article. As I have alluded to in my writing, “faith” or “religion” can infect philosophy and science, not just religious institutions. As I see it, it’s not that “truth” is a problem, as much as it’s human bias that is a problem. It’s usually unconsciously applied, as you say, but so easy for people to get on a bandwagon that’s based on one source saying, “new research suggests…” before the full gamut of research has been completed.

    We tend to reinforce what we already believe, whatever side we are on. Publishers still get textbooks on evolutionary theory wrong (e.g. Haeckel’s drawings of embryos repudiated as “falsified” by Stephen J. Gould, et al, can still be found), as do Creationists who blindly follow selective “evidence” for a young earth despite the preponderance of more replicable tests.

  3. Ken Campbell says:
    December 13, 2010 at 12:38 pm

    I recommend Francis Wheen’s “How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions” as a thoughtful exploration of this sort of anti-scientific relativism.

  4. Colin Christopher says:
    December 14, 2010 at 1:54 pm

    Hi Lesley,

    Thanks for your TED talk earlier this fall! We’ve just posted a piece on it (http://insideislam.wisc.edu/index.php/archives/6109) and hope that you can spread the word on the initiative we’re doing here at the University of Wisconsin to spread voices such as yours. We look forward to your upcoming book!

    Best,
    Colin

    Blogger,
    Inside Islam

    insideislam.wisc.edu

  5. Howard Thomas says:
    December 16, 2010 at 6:02 am

    Re: “They (scientists) don’t do this deliberately, but unconsciously. “Knowing” that something has to be true, they find ways to make it seem so.”

    > This is an atrocious article. Mumbo jumbo.

    This is exactly opposite to what is involved with proper science. Scientists welcome repeated examination to disprove an assertion. This is how an assertion is either made stronger, or is rightly abandoned because of a more compelling explanation.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      December 16, 2010 at 10:04 am

      Your point being the point of Lehrer’s article, no? Plus the basic epistemological question: what is “proper” science?

  6. Ray Taylor says:
    January 5, 2011 at 3:34 pm

    I find it striking that we are still trying to kill empiricism/logical positivism 60 years after it was put to death unequivically by the new philosophers of science (Quine-Popper-Davidson-Feyerabend-Kuhn et al). Not to mention the critical realists who point out how it all comes down to how language and culture mediates between the empirical reality and the perceiver.

    Unfortunately most scientists have a very narrow field definition of what constitutes adequate criteria for their epistemic enterprise (they are mostly philosophical illiterates), and usually depend on their experimental procedures for that criteria. This is scientism, or what I call the technologization of science (a very pragmatic orientation). H2D2 fit into this category quite clearly.

    Real science is about discovery, which depends on a type of creativity that unconditions the mediated reality. It is based on conjecture, not on instrumental “proofs” that come later.

  7. paul skillman says:
    January 5, 2011 at 8:59 pm

    There are no truths, only vested interest where human relations are concerned.
    Remember the astronemer who made drawing of canals on Mars? Maybe his mind supplied him to match his intentions of wanting to find intelligent life on another planet.
    Our minds create what we want to believe, subjectively & objectively.

  8. Louai says:
    January 7, 2011 at 4:35 pm

    We see what our mind wants to see… We remember what our mind is interested in… Objectivity is always colored by our subjectivity… all what we do is a mere approximation to reality… wallahu alam…

    Below is a relevant and highly recommended read:

    http://i-epistemology.net/attachments/618_V15N1%20Spring%2098%20-%20Arif%20-%20Science%20Objectivity%20and%20Ethics%20in%20Research%20Methodology.pdf

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  • Two Thumbs-Up For “Agnostic” February 10, 2016
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