Pharyngula Podcast #3

We had another fun Google+ Hangout this morning with Esteleth, James Rook, Tommy Leung, and Yankee Cynic, building on a couple of articles I mentioned before. Basically, we talked about the attractiveness of the premises of evolutionary psychology vs. the extravagance of their conclusions, and the unreliability of brains and how we have to work hard to overcome them. It turned into a kind of discussion about psychology, of all things.

And now you can watch it all, too.

Isn’t it amazing how you can assemble a small group of people, give them the seed of an idea, and then they can go on to talk about it for an hour, easy?

We’ll probably do another one in about two weeks. Make suggestions! I’m also planning to do the next one at sometime in my local evening, so maybe we can bring in an Australian or two.

And everyone gets a robot pony!

Oy, singularitarians. Chris Hallquist has a post up about the brain uploading problem — every time I see this kind of discussion, I cringe at the simple-minded naivete that’s always on display. Here’s all we have to do to upload a brain, for instance:

The version of the uploading idea: take a preserved dead brain, slice it into very thin slices, scan the slices, and build a computer simulation of the entire brain.

If this process manages to give you a sufficiently accurate simulation

It won’t. It can’t.

I read the paper he recommended: it’s by a couple of philosophers. All we have to do is slice a brain up thin and “scan” it with sufficient resolution, and then we can just build a model of the brain.

I’ve worked with tiny little zebrafish brains, things a few hundred microns long on one axis, and I’ve done lots of EM work on them. You can’t fix them into a state resembling life very accurately: even with chemical perfusion with strong aldehyedes of small tissue specimens that takes hundreds of milliseconds, you get degenerative changes. There’s a technique where you slam the specimen into a block cooled to liquid helium temperatures — even there you get variation in preservation, it still takes 0.1ms to cryofix the tissue, and what they’re interested in preserving is cell states in a single cell layer, not whole multi-layered tissues. With the most elaborate and careful procedures, they report excellent fixation within 5 microns of the surface, and disruption of the tissue by ice crystal formation within 20 microns. So even with the best techniques available now, we could possibly preserve the thinnest, outermost, single cell layer of your brain…but all the fine axons and dendrites that penetrate deeper? Forget those.

We don’t have a method to lock down the state of a 1.5kg brain. What you’re going to be recording is the dying brain, with cells spewing and collapsing and triggering apoptotic activity everywhere.

And that’s another thing: what the heck is going to be recorded? You need to measure the epigenetic state of every nucleus, the distribution of highly specific, low copy number molecules in every dendritic spine, the state of molecules in flux along transport pathways, and the precise concentration of all ions in every single compartment. Does anyone have a fixation method that preserves the chemical state of the tissue? All the ones I know of involve chemically modifying the cells and proteins and fluid environment. Does anyone have a scanning technique that records a complete chemical breakdown of every complex component present?

I think they’re grossly underestimating the magnitude of the problem. We can’t even record the complete state of a single cell; we can’t model a nematode with a grand total of 959 cells. We can’t even start on this problem, and here are philosophers and computer scientists blithely turning an immense and physically intractable problem into an assumption.

And then going on to make more ludicrous statements…

Axons carry spike signals at 75 meters per second or less (Kandel et al. 2000). That speed is a fixed consequence of our physiology. In contrast, software minds could be ported to faster hardware, and could therefore process information more rapidly

You’re just going to increase the speed of the computations — how are you going to do that without disrupting the interactions between all of the subunits? You’ve assumed you’ve got this gigantic database of every cell and synapse in the brain, and you’re going to just tweak the clock speed…how? You’ve got varying length constants in different axons, different kinds of processing, different kinds of synaptic outputs and receptor responses, and you’re just going to wave your hand and say, “Make them go faster!” Jebus. As if timing and hysteresis and fatigue and timing-based potentiation don’t play any role in brain function; as if sensory processing wasn’t dependent on timing. We’ve got cells that respond to phase differences in the activity of inputs, and oh, yeah, we just have a dial that we’ll turn up to 11 to make it go faster.

I’m not anti-AI; I think we are going to make great advances in the future, and we’re going to learn all kinds of interesting things. But reverse-engineering something that is the product of almost 4 billion years of evolution, that has been tweaked and finessed in complex and incomprehensible ways, and that is dependent on activity at a sub-cellular level, by hacking it apart and taking pictures of it? Total bollocks.

If singularitarians were 19th century engineers, they’d be the ones talking about our glorious future of transportation by proposing to hack up horses and replace their muscles with hydraulics. Yes, that’s the future: steam-powered robot horses. And if we shovel more coal into their bellies, they’ll go faster!

Why I am an atheist – Frode

I grew up in Norway, by default born as a member of the Norwegian State Church; a bland form of Protestantism, blissfully ignored by the vast majority of its members for the vast majority of their lives. I expect many still hold some form of belief in god and Jesus, without letting this in any way prevent them from living exactly as they please, but the churches seem to be primarily used for the family traditions that are baptisms, confirmations, weddings and funerals. The second of these is seen by most teenagers as a fantastic money making scheme, and a few months of weekly bible classes are well worth the ridiculous amount of presents and money this ritual traditionally entails.

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The carpenter and the pyromaniac

A very familiar story: a creationist is told that her views are unsupported by any legitimate science, and in reply she rattles off a list of creationist “scientists”.

Here we are told by a creationist housewife — as she describes herself — defending her belief that the Giant’s Causeway is only as old as the Bible says it is, a claim which assumes, of course, that there is a definite chronology in the Bible which can be used to date the age of the earth, and that this chronology, such as it is, supersedes all other forms of chronology, because the Bible is, after all, the inerrant word of God. In response to Richard Dawkins claim that reputable scientists all agree that the earth is billions of years old, our doughty housewife responds with: “That’s a blatant lie,” And then she lists four “scientists” who accept the creationist dating of the age of the earth (and she might well have named more, because, if you google these names, you end up on sites with many more).

The word “scientist” is simply a label, and if you ignore its meaning, you can stick it on anything. I’ve always considered a scientist as someone who follows a rational program of investigation of the real world, and that the word describes someone carrying out a particular and critical process of examination. But apparently, to people with no well-informed knowledge of its meaning, “science” and “scientist” are just tags you stick on really smart people who reach a conclusion you like, or who have done the academic dance to get a Ph.D. as a trophy to stick on the end of your name.

That’s a shame.

Let me explain the difference with an analogy.

A carpenter is a person who practices a highly skilled trade, carpentry, to create new and useful and lovely things out of wood. It is a non-trivial occupation, there’s both art and technology involved, and it’s a productive talent that contributes to people’s well-being. It makes the world a better place. And it involves wood.

A pyromaniac is a person with a destructive mental illness, in which they obsess over setting things on fire. Most pyromaniacs have no skill with carpentry, but some do; many of them have their own sets of skills outside of the focus of their illness. Pyromania is destructive and dangerous, contributes nothing to people’s well-being, and makes the world a worse place. And yes, it involves wood, which is a wonderful substance for burning.

Calling a creationist a scientist is as offensive as praising a pyromaniac for their skill at carpentry, when all they’ve shown is a talent for destroying things, and typically have a complete absence of any knowledge of wood-working. Producing charcoal and ash is not comparable to building a house or crafting furniture or, for that matter, creating anything.

You can’t call any creationist a scientist, because what they’re actively promoting is a destructive act of tearing down every beautiful scrap of knowledge the real scientists have acquired.

Why I am an atheist – Darci

As a child, I was brought up in a vaguely Christian way – my mother was raised Lutheran and my father Methodist, but neither held too closely to tradition. They read me Bible stories, the non-threatening ones meant for children, and prayed with me at night; I learned to think of God as a benign watcher who would save me from bad dreams. The only times we entered a church were weddings and funerals.I grew older, and made friends with girls who went to VBS and AWANA at the Baptist church, so I of course wanted to go too. This was allowed, and I excelled at AWANA because of my great skill at memorizing Biblical verses (I am good at memorizing in general, it’s my one talent). The father of one of my close friends became more deeply involved in the church, and by the time he went to seminary school she was all covered up even in the summer and her mother listened to Christian radio all day. She had to grow her hair and it wasn’t long before I wasn’t allowed to be her friend anymore. Nobody put it that starkly, but there was a serious sense of disapproval from her parents and I got to see her less and less. It was confusing, since I was only 11 and didn’t think I had done anything wrong. It was years before I understood that I actually hadn’t. 

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Maybe this promotion is going to work…

I just got this news from August Berkshire of Minnesota Atheists, about the upcoming godless cooption of a local baseball team:

Our baseball game is exploding in the news! I got a call today from someone in Massachusetts who wants a jersey!

• This morning (July 12) Heather heard them talking about it on K-TWIN radio 96.3 FM. They couldn’t believe it and were skeptical that the Saints would go through with it.

• “75 years of Spam; Ice cold beer here (TCF); Godless Saints” – Minnesota Public Radio
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/statewide/archive/2012/07/aroundmn-8.shtml
(With a reference and link to our Meetup page!)

• “Minor league Saints hosting night for atheists” – Fox Sports North
http://www.foxsportsnorth.com/07/12/12/Minor-league-Saints-hosting-night-for-at/landing.html?blockID=759992&feedID=3697
(With a picture of the jersey!)

• “Leave your God at home, it’s atheism night at the ballpark” – NBCSports.com
http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2012/07/12/leave-your-god-at-home-its-atheism-night-at-the-ballpark
(With a link to the Fox Sports North article. Also some great comments from readers.)

I was really surprised at that last one: he’s right, the comments aren’t the usual shrieking Christian hysterics, and are actually fairly positive. It may be because the only people bothering to read about Minnesota sports have already lost all faith in a god.

Atheists can be idiots, too

Oh, crap. You knew this was going to happen sometime: apparently, some atheists have vandalized a church with pro-“athiesm” messages.

Guys, don’t do that.

At least some atheists with integrity have set up a fundraiser to repair the damage. Chip in; I think lots of small donations would send a clear message that this was something not supported by the greater atheist community.

Hello, Washington DC and CFI!

I’m going to be doing a bit of traveling again starting in August. I’ll be in Washington DC on the 18th, to do a fundraiser lunch for CFI-DC, and I’ll also be doing a talk later that afternoon. The talk title is “Life is Chemistry“, and I’ll be explaining why material causes are sufficient to explain this phenomenon we call life — no ghosts, spirits, souls, or magic Frankensteins in the sky to make it all happen.

Sign up for tickets now! Last time I was there they sold out.

A night of unbelievable fun

Next month, on 10-11 August, Minnesota Atheists will be hosting a regional atheist conference. If you’re within driving distance of St. Paul, you should go! They’ve got a fine list of speakers, and for something completely different, are sponsoring a baseball game on Friday night, so you can join a bunch of atheists in swilling beer and eating hot dogs and watching a ball get tossed around.

I know, it’s hosted in a city called St. Paul, which isn’t so cool, and the baseball team is called the Saints. But just for this night, the team is being renamed the Ain’ts, so it’ll be OK. Also, St Paul’s original name was Pig’s Eye…and although the city hasn’t agreed to revert the name just for us, there’s no reason we can’t call it that among ourselves. So let’s meet in Pig’s Eye, Minnesota next month!

You can download the meeting registration form, and here’s a form with a coupon for a free hot dog for the baseball game.

Europe is getting a wedgie

I’m glad someone at the New Humanist is catching on: that little bit of performance art at the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, in which the creationists got their falsified myth inserted into the National Trust’s exhibits, is exactly how they operate. Every little advantage is pursued in order to falsify the existence of legitimate support. As Paul Sims explains:

The reference to creationism at the Causeway may only represent a small concession to the creationist view, but what the National Trust needs to be aware of is that winning such small concessions forms a key part of creationist strategy. By encouraging organisations such as the National Trust to acknowledge creationist perspectives, it is possible that the Caleb Foundation are following the "Wedge Strategy", a tactic devised by creationists in the United States, most notoriously the Discovery Institute, in order to "permeate religious, cultural, moral and political life" with creationism and Intelligent Design.

Aware that they can not simply convert the American public to creationism overnight, the architects of the Wedge Strategy aim to persuade politicians, journalists and educators that the correct approach to "debates" around evolution and the age of the Earth is to "Teach the Controversy", giving perspective such as creationism and Intelligent Design a hearing alongside scientific theories. Through "Teach the Controversy", creationists hope that their perspective will acquire a greater presence in educational establishments and the media. In short, once one school, or one museum, or one newspaper, starts to deal with evolution alongside creationism, others will follow.

Exactly! Creationists are not stupid. Most people don’t know much about science, and rely on the word of authorities…so when an official government agency gives even a tiny sop of acknowledgment to bogus nonsense like creationism, it legitimizes their claims, enough to cause a little bit of doubt about the science, and a little nod of approval to lies.

You can’t give a millimeter. Just present the science honestly, and don’t pander to ignorance.