Category Archives: Philosophy

General Science, Philosophy, Political Commentary

The Flat-Earth Theory

52 Comments

In comments over at my PJM piece today, I find this:

I agreed with Rand’s article, except for this point:

“But every scientist worthy of the name should be a skeptic. Every theory should be subject to challenge on a scientific basis.”

It is true that every “theory” should be regarded skeptically if there is *cause* to do so (ie evidence for doubt). But not every idea about reality is still a theory. For instance, it is no longer a “theory” that the earth is round (rather than flat). That fact has now been established. The idea is no longer a theory, but is true. There is no basis for being skeptical – for doubting – this conclusion.

The question which gets ignored here is at what point does a theory become a truth? At what point does a conclusion go from being possible, to probable, to certain?

To suggest scientists must -always- be skeptical is to claim that certainty can never be reached – about anything. That is simply a false statement. That is not science. That is the acceptance and practice of a particular philosophy – Skepticism – which is something -quite- different from reason.

The actual problem here is that many people are treating an idea which is (at best) a flawed *hypothesis* as if it were not just a theory but an actual certainty – ie as if they somehow know it to be true. In other words, they hold their conclusion not based on the methodology of reason, but by means of faith.

I think there are some nomenclature issues here. There was a time that the notion that the earth was round (or flat) was a theory. There was no direct evidence either way. That is no longer the case not because the “round-earth” theory has been somehow refined, but because we have actually been able to see pictures of a round planet, from various angles. That the earth is round is a fact, not a theory (one of the reasons that Flat-Earth societies are a literal joke). Gravity, however, remains a theory that explains the physical behavior of every object in the universe (as far as we know). It will never become a fact. It will never be more than the best explanation, and something (in theory…) better could still come along. The same thing applies to evolution, which is the best theory (currently) that explains the facts (the fossil record and DNA relationships). Intelligent design is not a theory — it is a critique of a theory (evolution). But one doesn’t have to propose a better theory in order to shoot one down. If the climate data has been tampered with, it makes their theory suspect, regardless of any alternatives that the critics may have.

Humor, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Weird

Focusing On The Important Issues

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Thoughts on the utility of international cooperation and law in the event of a transnational zombie uprising. This will be important once they start crossing borders.

[Update a few minutes later]

I’m compelled to believe that the first thing that this president would do is ask, “Why do they want to eat our brains?” and apologize to all of zombiedom for our previous imperialistic aggression against the undead.

Philosophy, Science And Society, Space Science

What If?

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Thoughts from Lileks:

I love new galaxy stories. I love learning that someone pointed a telescope at an empty patch and found 1000 new spiral galaxies, each of which no doubt teems with life. Yes, I think that’s so, and no, I’ve no good explanation for why we haven’t been visited by Vulcans. I’m a fan of the multiverse theory, and I’d also be comfy with the notion that this is one of an infinite number of iteration of the universe, each with their own laws. It would be a pity if we ended up in the one whose laws were A) everything’s far apart, and B) you can’t get there, but them’s the breaks. Some galaxies, however, have it worse off. You get those peculiar ones with enormous rapacious black holes in the middle and just a smattering of stars, you think: bad neighborhood. Imagine being a sentient being in a system that evolves sufficiently to figure out it’s going to be eaten by a black hole in a few thousand years, and how this would affect society. If you knew it would be all over in 2000 years, who would build? Would anyone try to escape if there were no systems to which you could flee? Futility would be the handmaiden at every act of creation. Or it might make everything precious. Or, most likely, both, and neither. Some people would still live their lives, go to work, make what they could for their ration of time. A great many would use the expiration date as the validation of the standard-issue nihilism that affects those with attenuated adolescence, and clothe their selfishness in philosophy.

More where that came from. By the way, the few Mayans still around say that the calendar thing is hogwash. But what would they know?

Philosophy, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The Ends Of Life

5 Comments

National Review has come out with an editorial against a recent editorial in Nature, advocating a change in the legal standards of death to facilitate organ donation. While I agree that we should be very careful in doing so, and I also agree that this could actually reduce the number of people willing to donate, I disagree that it’s not worth discussing, or considering, as the NR editors believe. Here’s the key point that I think both sides miss:

The editorial asserts that current law misunderstands death as an event rather than a process — which hardly justifies refusing to wait until the process is over. This argument merely puts a “scientific” gloss on a value judgment. Nature argues further that current law supposedly pushes doctors to lie about when death has occurred to get organs. But it is the utilitarian, parts-is-parts attitude toward human life that pushes some doctors this way, and that this proposal exemplifies.

…The editorial concludes that “concerns about the legal details of declaring death in someone who will never again be the person he or she was should be weighed against the value of giving a full and healthy life to someone who will die without a transplant.” Whether someone is actually dead is not a “legal detail.”

The problem is that death is a process that the law doesn’t recognize and that yes, whether someone is actually dead (at least in conventional terms) really is a legal detail (for instance, it varies from state to state — what is legally “dead” in CA may not be in NY). This is the problem that cryonicists have had for decades, except in their case, they want to donate their own organs to their future selves, and thus they tend to have a self interest in getting a legal declaration of death as soon as possible, even if not clinically dead.

As I wrote years ago during the Ted Williams controversy (one that has, unlike Ted himself, become recently resurrected in a macabre way):

The popular and conventional view of death is that it’s a discrete condition; now you’re living — now you’re dead. The weary declaration of the sawbones is just a formality — we all know from the movies that when the bad guy has been shot down violently, screaming or groaning, or breathed his last, he’s dead, or when the heroine gently closes her eyes, she’s gone to a better place, never to return.

But real life, and death, is a bit more complicated than that. It is not an objective, scientific condition, but a legal one, declared by a doctor or coroner. It’s like baseball. A ball thrown over the plate is not a ball or a strike until the umpire calls it.

The reality is that life and death are not binary states — from one to the other is a gradual transition. Rather than an instantaneous transformation from living to resting eternally, the body gradually shuts the plant doors and turns out the lights, one by one. Cells die individually, and the rhythm of life slows steadily to a halt.

But even that halt can be restarted with defibrillators and enthusiastic inflation of lungs with oxygen. In fact, modern hypothermic surgical techniques take a patient into what most would think a state of death (no heartbeat, flat-lined electro-encephalogram, no respiration) and then return them to life. In fact, during the properly performed cryonic suspension, such resuscitation is done (after a legal declaration of death), though under deep anaesthesia, to allow proper circulation of the cryoprotectant fluids throughout the body and particularly to the brain.

There’s no point at which we can objectively and scientifically say, “now the patient is dead — there is no return from this state,” because as we understand more about human physiology, and experience more instances of extreme conditions of human experiences, we discover that a condition we once thought was beyond hope can routinely be recovered to a full and vibrant existence.

Death is thus not an absolute, but a relative state, and appropriate medical treatment is a function of current medical knowledge and available resources. What constituted more-than-sufficient grounds for declaration of death in the past might today mean the use of heroic, or even routine, medical procedures for resuscitation. Even today, someone who suffers a massive cardiac infarction in the remote jungles of Bolivia might be declared dead, because no means is readily available to treat him, whereas the same patient a couple blocks from Cedars-Sinai in Beverly Hills might be transported to the cardiac intensive-care unit, and live many years more.

So it’s not as clean cut as the NR editors might like it to be. Doctors have to make a decision in order to save lives, and sometimes they have to confront ugly choices about which life to save, in a real-life lifeboat dilemma. There is only one death that is real and irreversible, and that is (as I describe at the link) information death (and some people think even that may be ultimately overcome through quantum mechanical dervishes of one sort or another). If we’re going to have a useful ethical discussion on this issue, we have to come to terms and some kind of agreement on basic assumptions, not about when death occurs per se, which will always be somewhat arbitrary, but when we can consider someone available to be a donor. It’s not a pleasant conversation, but it’s a necessary one, unless and until the NR editors can come up with a better and more objective definition of their own.