Daniel Dennett, The Evolution of Confusion

Daniel Dennett's talk from the 2009 Atheist Alliance International convention (link is to my summary) is now online:

Skepticism, belief revision, and science

In the comments of Massimo Pigliucci's blog post about the scope of skepticism (which I've already discussed here), Skepdude pointed to a couple of blog posts he had written on similar topics some time ago, about what atheists have in common and skepticism and atheism. He argues that skeptics must be atheists and cannot be agnostics or theists, a position I disagree with. In an attempt to get to the bottom of our disagreement after a few exchanges in comments on his blog, I wrote the following set of questions which I first answered myself, so we can see how his answers differ.

Do we have voluntary control over what we believe?

In general, no. The credence we place in various propositions--our belief or rejection of them--is largely out of our voluntary control and dependent upon our perceptual experiences, memories, other beliefs, and established habits and methods of belief formation and revision. We can indirectly cause our beliefs to change by engaging in actions which change our habits--seeking out contrary information, learning new methods like forms of mathematics and logic, scientific methods, reading books, listening to others, etc.

How does someone become a skeptic?

People aren't born as skeptics--they learn about skepticism and how it has been applied in various cases (only after learning a whole lot of other things that are necessary preconditions--like language and reasoning). If skepticism coheres with their other beliefs, established habits and methods of belief formation and revision, and/or they are persuaded by arguments in favor of it, either self-generated or from external sources, they accept it and, to some degree or another, apply it subsequently.

When someone becomes a skeptic, what happens to all of the other beliefs they already have?

They are initially retained, but may be revised and rejected as they are examined through the application of skeptical methods and other retained habits and methods of belief formation and revision. Levels of trust in some sources will likely be reduced, either within particular domains or in general, if they are discovered to be unreliable. It's probably not possible to start from a clean slate, as Descartes tried to do in his Meditations.

Is everything a skeptic believes something which is a conclusion reached by scientific methods?

No. Much of what we believe, we believe on the basis of testimony from other people who we trust, including our knowledge of our own names and date and place of birth, parts of our childhood history, the history of our communities and culture, and knowledge of places we haven't visited. We also have various beliefs that are not scientifically testable, such as that there is an external world that persists independently of our experience of it, that there are other minds having experiences, that certain experiences and outcomes are intrinsically or instrumentally valuable, that the future will continue to resemble the past in various predictable ways, etc. If you did believe that skeptics should only believe conclusions which are reached by scientific methods, that would be a belief that is not reached by scientific methods.

Mirror neurons and the study of science

Tony Barnhart was kind enough to invite me to a psychology seminar yesterday afternoon that was a discussion of mirror neurons, at least partly inspired by (or inflamed by) Marco Iacoboni's August 27 talk which I attended and summarized.

I found the discussion particularly interesting in light of my current studies, as it touched repeatedly on issues of what's appropriate in science--what does and does not conform to the norms of good science.

The discussion leaders began with quotes from V.S. Ramachandran and Marco Iacoboni:

"The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain evolution…is the single most important ‘unreported’ (or at least, unpublicized) story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments." (Ramachandran, 2001)

and

"We achieve our very subtle understanding of other people thanks to certain collections of special cells in the brain called mirror neurons. These are the tiny miracles that get us through the day. They are at the heart of how we navigate through our lives. They bind us with each other, mentally and emotionally." (Iacoboni, Mirroring People, p. 4)

The immediate objections were to the trumpeting of the importance of mirror neurons prior to the discovery of supporting evidence, as well as to the use of the word "miracle" to describe something that's supposed to be science. These objections ran through the seminar, much of which confronted the issue of whether or not mirror neuron claims are scientific at all.

This first objection is closely related to the first red flag of Robert Park's list of "Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science" (2003)--that a claim is pitched directly to the media (or general public) rather than to scientists, and that specific objection was raised about Iacoboni's talk, that he was making grandiose claims to a general (or "naive") audience. This has been a common issue raised in defining the boundary between science and non-science, traceable at least back to the debate between anatomists and phrenologists in Scotland in the early 19th century, where "anatomists accused phrenologists of relying on popular opinion to validate their theories while ignoring opinions of scientific 'experts'" (to quote sociologist of science Thomas Gieryn's 1983 paper on "Boundary-work and the demarcation of science from non-science," p. 789). While it wasn't stated in this case that mirror neuron advocates are appealing to the general public to the exclusion of scientists, they were explicitly criticized for their appeals to the public in order to raise interest in their work, make it easier to get funding, and so forth, and, in the case of Iacoboni's book, for using different language in his book aimed at a popular audience that eliminated qualifiers and wasn't appropriately skeptical.

In my opinion, Iacoboni shouldn't be faulted for popularization of his work or his generation of excitement and funding from public interest--the former criticism seems a bit like sour grapes--but only for the latter, any cases where he presents arguments without proper supporting evidence, or fails to identify theoretical speculation as such. What should be significant is not the mere fact of public appeal, but the extent of the gap between the scientific evidence and the public description. Note that there will always be a gap between evidence and any scientific theory, even where a theory is firmly established, since scientific theories are always subject to further revision--they're not logical proofs. "Tiny miracles," though--I have to agree that's over the top.

Another objection raised to mirror neurons is the wide variety of human behavior that they've been proposed to explain (from the presenters' slides):

"Since their discovery, mirror neurons have been invoked to explain imitation, speech perception, empathy, autism, morality, the appeal of porn, sports team activities, social cognition, self-awareness, yawning, mind reading, action understanding, altruism, etc."

A list of neuroimaging studies purported to provide evidence for a human mirror neuron system was shown, and the question asked was how many of these studies looked at both observation of an action and execution of an action? The answer was very few, likely because observation is much easier to test in an fMRI machine compared to execution. Of those, which found evidence of activation for both observation and execution? The answer was only a single study (Gazzola, et al., 2007).

Further questions raised for discussion (from slide):

• Is there any conceivable way to falsify MN theories?
• As Iacoboni claimed, MNs are not anatomically-defined, and can fire in response to the same, similar, and opposite observations/actions. The whole brain, therefore, comprises the MN system. How is that useful?
• Many researchers have moved away from hypothesizing about “mirror neurons” to “mirror systems.” Must mirror systems necessarily be composed of mirror neurons?
• If not, are mirror neurons the most parsimonious explanation for [insert favorite behavior here]?
• Can you generalize findings from one species to the next when one of the species possesses cognitive capabilities that have never been demonstrated in the original species? Yes, this is a “monkeys don’t have language, nor do they imitate”-based question.
• Can individual neuron activity logically be used as an explanation for higher-order cognitive abilities?
• How do mirror neurons handle sarcasm?

And, though not on the slide, the following claim was noted:

Similarly, a baseball pitcher’s windup is chock full of similar kinetic clues that can activate the batter's mirror neurons and help him predict the kind of pitch he will get. "This may help explain the fact that a great pitcher, Babe Ruth, was also one of the greatest home run hitters of all time," writes John Milton in Your Brain on Cubs.

and the question was asked--if mirror neurons activation is involved in imitation, rather than a complementary activity in this case, why wouldn't the mirror neuron activation interfere with Babe Ruth's ability to hit, rather than improve it? (The answer, it would seem to me, would be a suggestion that his pitching knowledge would allow him to recognize cues about the type of pitch before it happened, that would produce a benefit in hitting performance--but this is a more abstract description that doesn't necessarily require a mirror neuron explanation--another common theme of the discussion.)

This led to a lively discussion, and it seemed to me that the following were some of the most significant arguments, with my commentary on them:

1. It seems highly implausible that single cells are involved in mediating or controlling this behavior, and neither transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) nor fMRI is capable of isolating individual neurons. It is particularly implausible that single cells are implicated regarding a relationship to an action that is similar in that it's directed to the same goal (i.e., a semantic property). I agree, but I'm not sure why mirror neuron advocates should be taken as insisting that single cells are involved, as opposed to the "mirror neuron systems" described in Iacoboni's talk.

2. If assemblies of cells are involved instead of individual cells, how is this a distinctive or interesting theory? Doesn't it then just become a restatement of "neurons work together in the brain to make things happen?" Several people (including the person who asked that question) noted that it's still potentially interesting if these assemblies participate in both observation and action, and may provide support for theories that implicate motor programs of speech generation in speech perception.

3. Some other evidence for mirror neurons from TMS experiments in speech production. Two parts of the speech motor cortex, one active when people produce labial phonemes, and another part active when they produce dentals, were stimulated with TMS in the form of a double-pulse, which tends to provide a stimulative effect similar to priming. The result was that double-pulsing the region associated with labials facilitated the perception of labials, and double-pulsing the region associated with dentals facilitated the perception of dentals.

4. The inference to mirror neurons from fMRI evidence is choosing a single possible explanation without sufficient discriminatory evidence to exclude other explanations, such as priming. This seems like a quite reasonable objection, but one which doesn't preclude further research both within a mirror neuron framework and from outside--a battle between camps is probably a good way to provoke fruitful experimentation and mutual criticism until discriminatory evidence or arguments are obtained. There was some disagreement in the discussion about whether such discriminatory evidence could ever be obtained, but I'm inclined to think that someone will come along and provide some strong reasons to prefer going down one path rather than another.

5. In the cases where only a single or very few cells are measured, isn't that "a colossal sampling error"? One response was that the single-neuron measurement studies may have recorded from as many as 200 neurons, of which 75 showed mirror properties, of which 2/3 showed mirror properties in general (i.e., they matched individual actions and related actions directed at the same goal) and 1/3 only showed activation in response to the same exact action. I think this still presents a significant sampling issue in that there are likely hundreds of thousands of connections implicated for each neuron; I'm also a bit wary of the claims of mirror properties for related actions, where the relations may be semantic rather than simple associations, as there seems to be a potential for creative interpretation in determining what counts or doesn't count as related. That's independent of the implausibility of such properties at the individual neuron level.

6. The mirror neuron evidence and arguments seem to be like a cartoon version of science being presented to scientists and to the public (a criticism that explicitly excluded the original monkey studies). The use of the term "mirror neuron" seems like "a romantic notion that's taken on a life of its own," even though it is descriptive--you see someone else performing the same action, it's like looking in a mirror.

7. This is an unusual case in which, rather than psychology observing a behavior and theorizing neurological activity, the concept has been derived from observed neurophysiological behavior and "pyramided up," presenting challenges for theory comparison. Other competing theories don't have neural-level predictions. Are mirror neuron theories even falsifiable?

The seminar was closed with another quote from Iacoboni's book, from the end: "Mirroring People also ends on a hopeful note, the hope that science and scientific thinking may play an important role in our society."

I found it a fascinating discussion to observe, especially as issues came up pertaining to the norms of science and the demarcation between science and non-science, where scientists often appeal to criteria such as Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion. Most philosophers of science today agree that there is no sharp boundary between science and non-science (though there are certainly things that are clearly science or clearly not science), that the falsifiability criterion doesn't provide such a demarcation (and isn't strictly feasible given the nature of background assumptions and clusters of propositions involved in theory testing), and that the Mertonian norms of science are more of an ideal than reality. Science is a bit messier than that, and it seemed that some of the social aspects of "boundary-work" were in play in the discussion.

UPDATE: I should note that there were two papers of recommended reading for this discussion, which were:

Gregory Hickok, "Eight Problems for the Mirror Neuron Theory of Action Understanding in Monkeys and Humans," Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21:7, pp. 1229-1243 (2008).

Giovanni Buccino, Ferdinand Binkofski, and Lucia Riggio, "The mirror neuron system and action recognition," Brain and Language 89 (2004) 370-376.

I didn't get a chance to read those before the seminar, but may update this post with further comments after I do.

UPDATE (September 5, 2013): Alison Gopnik piece on "Cells That Read Minds? What the myth of mirror neurons gets wrong about the brain" on Slate.

Marco Iacoboni on imitation and sociality

Thanks to a tip from Tony Barnhart, I learned this morning of a talk at ASU today relevant to my last post ("Imitation, isolation, and independence") by UCLA neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni. Although I wasn't able to stay for the Q&A session, I did get to hear his entire presentation, titled "Imitation and Sociality: The Role of Neural Mirroring." His talk covered the following points (from his initial agenda slide):

• Imitation in human behavior
• Potential neural precursors in primates
• Neural mechanisms of human imitation
• Neural circuitry for imitation and language
• Imitation and empathy

Dr. Iacoboni was introduced by new ASU prof. Art Glenberg, who started right off by pointing out that the existence of mirror neurons is itself controversial, and some "don't think there's much of interest proved about mirror neuron systems." Dr. Iacoboni thanked Prof. Glenberg for beginning with the "elephant in the room," and said that the question has never been raised about the existence of mirror neurons in monkeys, and suggested that some people don't want there to be homologous systems in humans, e.g., for the sake of human exceptionalism or denial of evolution. (Has your blood pressure gone up yet, Tony?)

Imitation in human behavior
He started by briefly discussing the role of imitation in human behavior, citing Andrew Meltzoff's 1977 article in Science ("Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates," (PDF) 198:75-78), noting that Meltzoff is probably the only guy to publish a photograph of himself sticking out his tongue in Science. Imitation, the copying of the behavior of another, is pervasive by humans. People copy body positions and movements, and such imitation promotes liking. (As an aside, he said that he has been interviewed by Glamour (July 2003) about his work, and can have a second career as a consultant to Internet dating services if mirror neurons turn out not to exist.) Imitation facilitates communication and conversation, and people tend to even synchronize the way they talk. (I know I've heard multiple stories of people whose accents have been changed by being around people with different accents.)

Potential neural precursors in primates
Mirror neurons were first discovered in macaque monkeys, in the ventral premotor cortex. It was found that neurons in this area fired when monkeys engaged in grasping behavior, and also fired to a lesser extent when those monkeys observed other monkeys engaged in grasping behavior. (Here, Iacoboni cited Gallese et al., Brain, 1996.)

Neural mechanisms of human imitation
Iacoboni said that the term "mirror" may be good for marketing, but may also be misleading. Mirror neurons are defined physiologically rather than anatomically, by behavior rather than location in the brain. They have motor properties, and are specialized for actions, including sensory attributes of actions, but not mere peceptions. They are not simply "monkey-see, monkey-do" cells--while 1/3 tend to fire for very specific actions, 2/3 fire for other sorts of complementary actions. Mirror neurons have abstract codings for hidden actions, action sounds, and intentions, not just specific actions. Mirror neurons that fire in response to a grasping action of picking up a laser pointer would also fire if the details of the action were obscured by a screen. The sound of tearing paper can fire mirror neurons that fire when observing paper being ripped. And if there are variant actions that achieve the same purpose, such as bringing food to the mouth, the same mirror neurons can fire. Mirror neurons learn and have some degree of plasticity.

Iacoboni's model predicts that observing an action should have the lowest level of activation for mirror neurons, performing a motor task should have a medium level, and imitation--both seeing and doing an action--should have the strongest level of activation. And that is what his research has found.

At UCLA, they've done parallel work with monkeys and humans, and identified apparently homologous brain regions between the two. The specific region where mirror neurons were first discovered, the F5 region, appears to be homologous to the BA44 region of the human brain. The "BA" stands for Brodmann Area, a part of Broca's area associated with language--those with lesions to that area have Broca's aphasia, which reduces language fluency and makes speech slow and difficult. This raises the question of whether the mirroring is effectively covert verbalization in humans.

Experiments with transcranium magnetic stimulation (TMS), where a magnetic copper coil placed against the head creates an electrical flow in the brain, interfering with the underlying electrical activity in the brain--essentially adding noise and causing disruption--have enabled a way to demonstrate causation where functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) could only show correlation. Iacoboni called this a shift "from brain mapping to brain zapping." If you zap an area and cause a deficit in a particular behavior or function, you show the causal involvement of that area in the production of that behavior. Doing experiments with TMS of Broca's area vs. a control site, using an imitation task and a control task, show the essential role of Broca's area in imitation. (Here, Iacoboni cited Heiser, et al., Eur. J. of Neuroscience, 2003.)

Iacoboni showed a diagram that he labeled the "core imitation circuit" which involved three locations of the brain--the superior temporal surface (STS), which manages visual input to the system via a visual or pictorial description of an action, which then feeds to the parietal mirror neuron system (MNS), which has the motor details of an action, which then feeds to the frontal MNS, which deals with the goal or intention of an action. (There were two-way arrows between STS and parietal MNS, and between parietal MNS and frontal MNS.)

Neural circuitry for imitation and language
Iacoboni said that an old theory of speech perception which had been abandoned has now been brought back by mirror neurons. That theory is the motor neuron theory, which says that to perceive speech sounds, you simulate the generation of the same speech. Speech perception involves speech simulation. In experiments that compared brain activation of speaking and listening, he suggested that he found evidence to support this. (This must be complicated by the fact that when you speak, you hear yourself. He cited Meister, et al., Current Biology, 2007.)

He discussed hemispheres of the brain and action sounds, where the right and left motor cortexes were subjected to TMS stimulation. I didn't quite get the details of this, but apparently a response was stronger for the left hemisphere, which is dominant for language. (He cited Azir-Zadeh et al., Eur. J. of Neuroscience, 2004.) He also referred to research of somatotopic maps, indicating that even when you read sentences about hand and foot actions (as opposed to seeing them), you get activation of the motor neurons for those areas.

He then spoke about how meaning is encoded in the brain, distinguishing a symbolic approach to "embodied semantics," favoring the latter view. In the embodied view, the meanings of words are grounded in sensorimotor experience and meaning is given by associations with sensorimotor activation.

He described an experiment in how mirror neurons code intentions, where subjects were shown short videos. There were first contexts, such as a set of cookies, a teapot, gnutella, etc., set up as though someone was going to have a snack; contrasted with this was the same items, with just cookie crumbs, and empty cup, and so forth, as though someone had already had a snack. There were contrasting actions--a hand grasping the edge of a cup (as though putting it down or picking it up to serve someone else), vs. a hand grasping the handle of a cup, for the action of drinking. And then there were intention conditions, with each combination of actions embedded in a context. The result was to find a difference in activation between the intention settings, as well as between action and intention; with the act of drinking generating more activation in the inferior frontal gyrus. (Here he cited Iacoboni, PLoS Biology, 2005, "Grasping the intentions of others with one's own mirror neuron system.")

He next showed a diagram of MNS interactions, showing imitative learning and social mirroring (or empathy, or "emotional contagion"). Imitative learning involves the MNS interacting with the pre-motor cortex, while social mirroring involves the MNS interacting with the insula and the limbic system.

Imitation and empathy
He spoke about "the chameleon effect"--some people are more imitative than others, and a tendency to imitate is correlated with a tendency to be more empathetic. He showed two photographs of President Jimmy Carter and his chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, at two different times at the same event; in both cases the chief of staff was in the same physical position as Carter, standing next to or slightly behind him.

When feeling what others feel, the mirror neurons simulate facial expressions, which then feed through the insula to the limbic system, where you feel the emotion. He referred to research on imitating and observing facial expressions proposing a neural model of empathy in humans (Carr et al., PNAS, 2003).

We are "wired for empathy," he said, and notes that he used to quote a French phenomenologist on this point, but since that's not popular among U.S. philosophers he needed to find a champion of the analytic school of philosophy. He offered two quotes from Ludwig Wittgenstein, one which began "We see emotions. We do not see facial contortions and make the inference that he is feeling joy, grief, boredom. We describe a face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any other description of the features." (From Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 2, p. 100.) The other began "'I see that the child wants to touch the dog but doesn't dare.' How can I see that? - Is this description of what is seen on the same level as a description of moving shapes and colors? Is an interpretation in question?Well, remember that you may also mimic a human being who would like to touch something, but doesn't dare. And what you mimic is after all a piece of behaviour." (From Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, p. 177.)

He then spoke of experiments with facial expression photos shown to kids and asked to imitate them, where they used fMRI and compared to measures of social competence, number of play dates, number of friends, etc., and found a high correlation between mirror neuron activation and social competence. (He cited Pfeifer et al., NeuroImage, 2008.)

This then led to the issue of autism, which he described with a slide heading titled, "Broken mirrors in autism?" He spoke of observation/imitation tasks with two groups of kids, those with autism spectrum disorder and a control set, which yielded differential activity in motor neurons. (He cited Dapretto et al., Nature Neuroscience, 2006.)

After a quote from Eric Hoffer ("When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other"), he spoke about human single-neuron recordings done with depth electrode readings on epilepsy patients undergoing very invasive methods to identify the focal points of seizures for surgery to remove or destroy minimal amounts of brain tissue to stop the seizures. They have studied about 10 patients per year over the last three years, using modified depth electrodes that each have 9 microwires, extending from them into the brain, one ground, and eight which each record for a single cell. On these patients they've done experiments with observation and execution of a grasping task, and with observation and imitation of facial expressions. They've taken records from the temporal lobe, amygdala, hippocampus, and other parts of the brain, and found that about 8% of cells measured have mirroring properties.

He then described some differences between human and monkey mirror neurons, the key one of which is that in some cases where mirror neurons show an increase in firings from an execution or imitation, a decrease is seen when observing. For monkeys, by contrast, the activations always go up for both observation and execution. He suggested that this may be due to a human differentiation between self and other. Humans have cases where there are excitatory effects, inhibitory effects, and opposite effects between observation and execution. There are mirror responses in humans in areas where they are not found in monkeys, the results appear to be more flexible, and there can be more prolonged responses, perhaps due to greater complexity (e.g., the language and meaning aspect?).

He ended by saying he was proud to say that his work falls within the tradition and support of Darwinian evolution--that his book, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others (I think you should always be skeptical of any book with a subtitle that starts with the words "The New Science of ..."), argues that mirror neurons have been selected (naturally) to facilitate social interactions. He asserted that this solves the problem of other minds, and provokes a major revision of long-standing beliefs--that we need to change the idea that we've evolved for self-preservation, and instead we're "wired for involvement and care." He concluded that he is a believer in the importance of neuroscience to society, and that rather than being isolated in an ivory tower, scientists have a responsibility to go to society and communicate their work. (And his book is written for a popular audience.)

Imitation, isolation, and independence

This post is going to be highly speculative, based on a few things that I've coincidentally just read over the last 24 hours and some past wonderings.

Last night, I read an article in the ASU State Press newspaper from Tuesday, August 25 about Robert Cialdini, professor emeritus of psychology and marketing who I had been interested in working with in my Ph.D. program because of his fascinating work on the subject of influence and persuasion. (He just "retired," though the article notes he is still working 60 hours a week on his research.) That article noted the phenomenon of "social proof," where people are more likely to do something if they think that other people do it:

Social proof is a simple way for people to decide what actions would be appropriate in a given situation, based off what others like them have done in similar situations, Cialdini said. Those kinds of norms have been very powerful in moving people to conserve energy, recycle and refrain from littering, he said.
...

Cialdini and his colleagues have recently done research on energy conservation in several hotels in the Phoenix area. The hotel managers allowed Cialdini to place different signs inside hotel rooms and depending on what the signs said, the colleagues were able to significantly increase the willingness of people to hang up their bath towels.

By simply stating that the majority of guests who stay in the hotel hang up their towels at least once during their stay, Cialdini and his colleagues were able to get 28 percent more people to follow that suggestion.

This morning, I read the following passage in Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate (p. 63):

Social psychologists have amply documented that people have a powerful urge to do as their neighbors do. When unwitting subjects are surrounded by confederates of the experimenter who have been paid to do something odd, many or most will go along. They will defy their own eyes and call a long line "short" or vice versa, nonchalantly fill out a questionnaire as smoke pours out of a heating vent, or (in a Candid Camera sketch) suddenly strip down to their underwear for no apparent reason.

Here, Pinker is referring to the Asch conformity experiments. He notes that there are two reasons for this kind of imitative behavior, "to benefit from other people's knowledge and judgment" and "the desire to follow the norms of a community."

A few more data points, and then I will do some speculative dot-connecting. In Pascal Boyer's book, Religion Explained, he devotes chapter 8 to answering the question of its title, "Why doctrines, exclusion, and violence?" He argues (pp. 292-296) that fundamentalism arises as a mechanism to increase the cost of defection from a group, in reaction to the cultural diversity of the modern world:

... the modern world is one of strident cultural diversity, where you are constantly made aware that people live in different circumstances, have different values, worship other gods, have different rituals. ... fundamentalists want to return to a (largely mythical) past when local values and identity were taken for granted, when no one was aware that there were other ways of living. (p. 293)

This could also explain the creation of distinctly Christian media (music, books, clubs and groups arranged around particular interests offered by megachurches) offered as a substitute for their secular counterparts, as a mechanism to insulate believers from contrary ideas. By keeping the believer in a community that is, at least to some extent, isolated from the broader world, the danger is reduced that a believer will be exposed to alternative views and practices which he might be likely to imitate through peer pressure, social proof, or social conformity.

But now to make a greater leap of speculation. Neurologist V.S. Ramachandran has argued that "mirror neurons" or "empathy neurons" play a major role in human (and other primate) imitative behavior that drives learning. Those neurons (if they exist, and there is some doubt) are in the inferior frontal and parietal cortex. Caltech neuroscientist John Allman (who spoke at the Skeptics Society conference on mind, brain, and consciousness in 2005) has argued that spindle cells in the anterior cingulate cortex play a role in sensitivity to social cues, and a deficiency of such cells may be a cause of autism. Perhaps there is a neurological explanation for some kinds of independent thinking that involves a lessened degree of sensitivity to social cues, or a lessened drive to imitation and conformity, that yields doubters and skeptics?

Now, this can't be the whole story--it may be more important that there are other positive drivers of independence and willingness to be an outspoken dissenter, and I suspect that leaders of dissenting groups tend to have a very high degree of sensitivity to social cues in order to be successful in persuasion. Further, once you have some dissenters in the population, they themselves can be exemplars to be imitated by people with high sensitivity to social cues. But the speculation it would be interesting to investigate is: are people who are skeptics about commonly held beliefs in the general population about the supernatural and paranormal measurably different in some critical way, psychologically or neurologically, that makes them less susceptible to such social pressures that provoke imitation and internalization of those views? Are the initial participants in such groups different from later joiners? Could this have anything to do with why organizing skeptics and atheists is like herding cats? Or why there's a high percentage of IT professionals in skepticism? Are skeptics and atheists less emotionally engaged and driven than religious believers? Is there a tendency towards Asperger's among skeptics and atheists? (Disclosure: I scored a 32 on this Asperger Test.)

Religious believers sometimes argue that there is a sensus divinitatis, a human faculty for perceiving God, and Dean Hamer has argued that there's a "God gene." It's possible that there's something to this, but that it's a bit simpler and a more of a matter of susceptibility to social conformity.

(Possibly related posts: "Unconscious decision-making," "The Rise of Pentecostalism and the Economist Religion Wars issue"; "An empirical test of the existence of sensus divinitatis in atheists" at the Secular Outpost.)

The Arizona Skeptic online: vol. 6, 1992-1993

Continuing the postings of The Arizona Skeptic; you can find volume 1 (1987-1988) here, volume 2 (1988-1989) here, volume 3 (1989-1990) is here, volume 4 (1990-1991) is here, and volume 5 (1991-1992) is here. Volume 6 was edited by Jim Lippard and has been available online since original publication as ASCII text. An index to all issues by title, author, and subject may be found here. The Arizona Skeptic, vol. 6, no. 1, July/August 1992 (text version):

• "Science and Dianetics" by Jeff Jacobsen
• "A Healthy Dose of Sarsaparilla" by Jerome L. Cosyn
• "Book Review: Combatting Cult Mind Control by Steven Hassan" reviewed by Chaz Bufe
• "Michael Persinger and Tectonic Strain Theory" by Jim Lippard
• "Rutkowski's Work" and "Other Critical Works" (bibliography of papers critical of TST assembled by Chris Rutkowski)
• "Book Review: Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric by Howard Kahane" reviewed by Jim Lippard
• "Book Review: Sai Baba's Miracles by Dale Beyerstein" reviewed by Jim Lippard
• Media Update
• Newsletter Production Volunteers Needed
• Electronic Version of the Newsletter
• Upcoming Meetings: September speaker Chaz Bufe on Alcoholics Anonymous
• Articles of Note

The Arizona Skeptic, vol. 6, no. 2, September/October 1992 (text version):

• "How Much of Your Brain Do You Use?" by Mickey Rowe
• "Phoenix Skeptics and the Sedona Harmonic Diversion" by Mike Johnson
• "Jehovah's Witnesses and Earthquake Frequency" by John Rand (pseudonym for Alan Feuerbacher)
• "The Institute for Creation Research and Earthquake Frequency" by Jim Lippard
• "QUAKE DAY - Minus 7" by Mike Jittlov
• "New Skeptical Group/Magazine" (Skeptics Society/Skeptic magazine)
• Upcoming Meetings: October speaker Peter Lima on the search for the historical Jesus
• Articles of Note

The Arizona Skeptic, vol. 6, no. 3, November/December 1992 (text version):

• "Report on the 1992 CSICOP Conference: Part One" by Jim Lippard
• "A Visit to Dinosaur Valley State Park" by Richard A. Crowe
• "The End of Crop Circles?" by Chris Rutkowski
• Next Issue
• Upcoming Meetings
• Articles of Note

The Arizona Skeptic, vol. 6, no. 4, January/February 1993 (text version):

• "Predictions for 1993"
• "Jeane Dixon Predicts Bush Victory"
• "Report on the 1992 CSICOP Conference: Part Two" by Jim Lippard
• "Book Review: Impure Science: Fraud, Compromise and Political Influence in Scientific Research by Robert Bell" reviewed by Jim Lippard
• "Book Review: Taking Time for Me: How Caregivers Can Effectively Deal with Stress by Katherine L. Karr" reviewed by Michael A. Stackpole
• Upcoming Meetings
• Reader Survey
• Articles of Note
• Magazine/Journal Subscription Information

The Arizona Skeptic, vol. 6, no. 5, March/April 1993 (text version):

• "CSICOP Questions Truth of Movie Based on Travis Walton UFO Abduction"
• "MIS-Fire in the Sky" by Chris Rutkowski
• "Linda Napolitano UFO Abduction Case Criticized" by Jim Lippard
• "Book Review: The Retreat to Commitment by William Warren Bartley III" reviewed by David A. Snodgrass
• "Camille Paglia: Astrologer"
• Skeptical News
• Upcoming Meetings
• Books of Note
• Articles of Note

Volume 6 concluded my editorship, and volume 7 returned for one more issue edited by Mike Stackpole.

The Arizona Skeptic online: vol. 5, 1991-1992

Continuing the postings of The Arizona Skeptic; you can find volume 1 (1987-1988) here, volume 2 (1988-1989) here, volume 3 (1989-1990) is here, and volume 4 (1990-1991) is here. Volume 5 was edited by Jim Lippard and has been available online since original publication as ASCII text. An index to all issues by title, author, and subject may be found here. The Arizona Skeptic, vol. 5, no. 1, July/August 1991 (text version):

• "Rosenthal Lecture" by Jim Lippard
• "Book Review: Philosophical Essays in Pragmatic Naturalism by Paul Kurtz" reviewed by Bill Green
• "Book Review: Pitfalls in Human Research: Ten Pivotal Points by Theodore X. Barber" reviewed by Jim Lippard
• "Book Review: They Call It Hypnosis by Robert A. Baker" reviewed by Jim Lippard
• Editor's Column
• CORRECTION: To "Dissension in the Ranks of the Institute for Creation Research"
• Upcoming Meetings

The Arizona Skeptic, vol. 5, no. 2, September/October 1991 (text version):

• "Dianetics: From Out of the Blue?" by Jeff Jacobsen
• "Book Review: Bryant's Law and Other Broadsides by John Bryant" reviewed by Jim Lippard
• "Hypnosis and Free Will" by Jim Lippard
• Next Issue
• Upcoming Meetings: October speaker Don Lacheman of Sun Magic, November speaker Louis Rhodes of the Arizona Civil Liberties Union
• Articles of Note

The Arizona Skeptic, vol. 5, no. 3, November/December 1991 (text version):

• "Postscript to 'Some Failures of Organized Skepticism'" by Jim Lippard
• "Book Review: The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie" reviewed by Hans Sebald, Ph.D.
• "Book Review: The Unfathomed Mind by William R. Corliss" reviewed by Jim Lippard
• "Book Review: Labyrinths of Reason by William Poundstone" reviewed by Mark Adkins
• Letters (from Mark Adkins, Beth Fischi)
• "Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? An Episode of Human Folly" by Mark Adkins
• Articles of Note
• "October Meeting: 'Magical Moments'" by Ron Harvey: speaker Don Lacheman
• Next Issue
• Upcoming Meetings: December: 1992 predictions, January: Rene Pfalzgraf on neuro-linguistic programming

The Arizona Skeptic, vol. 5, no. 4, January/February 1992 (text version):

• "Predictions for 1992!" compiled by Mike Stackpole
• "Comments on Lippard's Review of They Call It Hypnosis" by Robert A. Baker
• "Book Review: Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure? by Chaz Bufe" reviewed by Terry Sandbek, Ph.D.
• Next Issue
• Upcoming Meetings

The Arizona Skeptic, vol. 5, no. 5, March/April 1992 (text version):

• "About 'The Vitality of Mythical Numbers' and 'Truth Almost Extinct in Tales of Imperiled Species'" by Jim Lippard
• "The Vitality of Mythical Numbers" by Max Singer
• "Truth Almost Extinct in Tales of Imperiled Species" by Julian Simon
• "Book Review: Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events by Michael A. Persinger and Gyslaine F. Lafrenière" reviewed by Jim Lippard
• Next Issue
• Upcoming Meetings
• Request for Submissions
• Articles of Note

The Arizona Skeptic, vol. 5, no. 6, May/June 1992 (text version):

• "An Observation of the Famous Marfa Lights" by James Long
• "The Marfa Lights" by Hal Finney
• Letters (from John Bryant)
• Editorial Note Regarding the "Mars Effect"
• "Book Review: The Mind Game by Norman Spinrad" reviewed by Jim Lippard
• Upcoming Meetings
• Articles of Note

Volume 6 continued for just short of another year under my editorship, with five issues published for 1992-1993.

The Arizona Skeptic online: vol. 2, 1988-1989

Continuing the postings of The Arizona Skeptic; you can find volume 1 (1987-1988) here.

An index to all issues by title, author, and subject may be found here.

The Arizona Skeptic vol. 2, no. 1, July/August 1988:

• "Lippard Disgraced!" by Ron Harvey
• "A Visit to the 'Psychic Showcase'" by Jim Lippard
• "Color it Absurd" by Ken Morse
• "Handwriting Analysis" by Jim Lippard
• "Recognizing Destructive and Manipulative Groups" by Al Seckel
• Upcoming Meetings
• "Ghost Busters or Lease Breakers" by Ken Morse
• "June PS Meeting" by Judy Sawyer: speakers Craig Nichols and Lee Earle of Manifestations
• "July PS Meeting" by Judy Sawyer: speaker Anita O'Riordan of the Arizona Attorney General's Elderly Abuse Project
• Correction (of omission to "Psychic Detectives" article in previous issue)
• Editor's Ramblings

The Arizona Skeptic vol. 2, no. 2, September/October 1988:

• "Hype-nosis" by Jim Lippard (title typoed in published copy)
• "Recipe for Successful Local Group" by Kent Harker
• "Book Review: Nostradamus and His Prophecies by Edgar Leoni" reviewed by Jim Lippard
• Upcoming Meetings
• August PS Meeting: speaker Michael Preston on hypnosis
• "September meeting" by Mike Stackpole: speaker Gary Mechler on astrology
• "October meeting" by Judy Sawyer: speaker Janet Lee Mitchell on out-of-body experiences
• Editor's Ramblings

The Arizona Skeptic vol. 2, no. 3, November/December 1988:

• Predictions for 1989 and Beyond
• "Psychological Factors Conducive to Paranormal Belief" by Jim Lippard
• "Book Review: The Art of Deception by Nicholas Capaldi" reviewed by Ted Karren
• "Book Review: Hypnosis, Imagination, and Human Potentialities by Theodore X. Barber, Nicholas P. Spanos, and John F. Chaves" reviewed by Jim Lippard
• Upcoming Meetings
• November PS Meeting: skeptics' predictions
• "December PS Meeting" by Judy Sawyer: speaker David Alexander on faith healers
• "TUSKS Lecture" by Ken Morse: speaker Conrad Goeringer on "Bimbos for Satan"
• Editor's Ramblings

The Arizona Skeptic vol. 2, no. 4, January/February 1989:

• "Let's Be Serious: Defensive Skepticism" by Mike Stackpole
• "Behaviorism and Consciousness" by Jim Lippard (on January speaker, Erv Theobold)
• "In Response" by Erv Theobold, Ph.D.
• "Book Review: Mindspell by Kay Nolte Smith" reviewed by Judy Sawyer
• "Book Review: Science and Earth History by A. N. Strahler" reviewed by Roger Mann
• "Book Review: Eyewitness Testimony by Elizabeth Loftus" reviewed by Jim Lippard
• "Book Review: ESP and Psychokinesis: A Philosophical Examination by Stephen E. Braude" reviewed by Jim Lippard
• Upcoming Meetings
• January PS Meeting
• Editor's Ramblings

This volume had only four issues, and marks the end of Ron Harvey's editorship. The next volume picks up in January 1990 with Mike Stackpole as editor.

Evolution, religion, schizophrenia, and the schizotypal personality

Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky giving a lecture on the evolution of schizophrenia, and how schizotypal personality and its associated "metamagical thinking" may be adaptive, and a source or driver for religious belief in a community.



(Via boingboing.)

Greater percentage of nonreligious join religion than vice-versa

In an op-ed at the New York Times, Charles Blow offers a rebuttal to the claim that most people follow particular religions because they are raised in those religions with the following:

Maybe, but a study entitled “Faith in Flux” issued this week by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life questioned nearly 3,000 people and found that most children raised unaffiliated with a religion later chose to join one. Indoctrination be damned. By contrast, only 14 percent of those raised Catholic and 13 percent of those raised Protestant later became unaffiliated.

(It should be noted that about a quarter of the unaffiliated identified as atheist or agnostic, and the rest said that they had no particular religion.)

I don't think this is particularly informative or much of a rebuttal, given that most of those "unaffiliated" were not actually raised atheist or agnostic, and that it would not be particularly surprising that someone raised in an unaffiliated-but-religious environment would end up joining a particular church that they found compatible with the views they were raised with. Without more specific data, I don't think this at all refutes the claim that most people follow the religious traditions and views they are raised with, which I think is very well supported by the geographical distribution of religious belief.

It is still interesting, however, that a majority of the unaffiliated become affiliated, and that the number one reason for that, according to Blow, is that "Most said that they first joined a religion because their spiritual needs were not being met." Blow writes:

As the nonreligious movement picks up steam, it needs do a better job of appealing to the ethereal part of our human exceptionalism — that wondrous, precious part where logic and reason hold little purchase, where love and compassion reign. It’s the part that fears loneliness, craves companionship and needs affirmation and fellowship.

Here, I think he makes a good point, though I think the label of "spiritual needs" is a misnomer. This is, I think, the same point I've made in a few posts at this blog, including one on April 29 where I wrote that an overly intellectualized understanding of human beings is a mistake that some atheists make, and one on how Pentecostalism has been tremendously successful with its focus on these other aspects of humanity.

By the way, it's important to note that even if a greater percentage of the nonreligious join religion than vice versa, that doesn't mean that a greater number of the nonreligious join religion than vice versa, and in fact we know that isn't the case from the data that shows that the "unaffiliated" group is the fastest growing group in the U.S.

Unconscious decision-making

Evidence continues to mount that human decision-making occurs in the brain prior to conscious awareness of the decision, which is evidence against the common religious view of a soul, separate from the brain, which is the seat of all of our mental capacities. It's also at odds with an overly intellectualized view of human beings held by some atheists (as well as all Scientologists, who consider unconscious decision-making by the "reactive mind" or festering "body thetans" to be the cause of human unhappiness), on which we must strive to make all of our decisions based on conscious, deliberative reason. I don't think this is a very common view among atheists today, who tend to have some familiarity with evolution and cognitive science, but there are still some out there who have an overly idealized view of what a rational human being should be.

A view of human beings that focuses solely on the intellectual and reason is not only at odds with the facts about how our cognition works, it gives short shrift to the importance of social bonds and emotion, which are areas that some religions focus on to the exclusion of the intellectual--with great success in expanding their memberships, at least over the short term.

Blindsight

At Not Exactly Rocket Science is a video of a man navigating a hallway filled with obstacles, even though he's completely blind--he has zero conscious awareness of visual perception and his visual cortex shows no activity when given visual tasks (most of which he fails), but he does have an ability known as blindsight. He became blind as a result of strokes which caused damage to the occipital lobe of his brain, including his visual cortex. Yet his eyes still function and there is still some visual processing occurring without rising to the level of conscious awareness. He can perform a number of visual tasks with perfect accuracy, even though his conscious perception is that he is simply guessing.

(Hat tip to Dan Noland for the link.)

Hallucinatory near-death experiences

Keith Augustine's "Hallucinatory Near-Death Experiences" article on the Internet Infidels website has been updated to reflect its publication as a three-part series of articles in the Journal of Near-Death Studies, where it was published along with commentary from leading researchers of near-death experiences. The online version of the article includes content that was not published in the JNDS due to space considerations.

Keith has done a great job of reviewing the evidence that near-death experiences contain elements that are demonstrably hallucinatory, and therefore not evidence for survival or for consciousness leaving the body.

New Yorker article on magic

Via Podblack Cat, I read Adam Gopnik's fascinating account of magic as practiced by Jamy Ian Swiss, David Blaine, and with a few remarks from Teller and a visit to David Copperfield's private museum of magic. Gopnik discusses the history and psychology of magic, and the only false note I encountered was at the end, where he writes:

The magicians have the boys for a moment, between their escape from their fathers and their pursuit of girls. After that, they become sexual, outwardly so, and learn that women (or other men) cannot be impressed by tricks of any kind: if they are watching at all, they are as interested as they are ever going to be, and tricks are of no help. You cannot woo anyone with magic; the magic that you have consciously mastered is the least interesting magic you have.

That's a statement that seems to suggest that the general public can't be fooled by slick politicians using Machiavellian methods, that there's no such thing as effective marketing techniques, and that the methods of pick-up artists don't really work. But you really can fool all of the people some of the time.

David Byrne's singing robot

David Byrne has collaborated with David Hanson, the guy who made the Philip K. Dick robot at NextFest in 2005, to make a robot named Julio that sings, for a show titled "Machines and Souls: Digital Art" at the Museo de Arta Reina Sofia in Madrid.

Byrne writes:

I love where this is going. It brings to mind an image of someone sitting in a comfortable chair, maybe with friends, and maybe they’re having drinks—and at the same time Jentsch posits that layered over or under this image is the profoundly creepy, the deeply strange and disturbing. We’re in the land of David Lynch and Hitchcock. ET landing in the familiar U.S. suburbs could be viewed this way, or the various living dead and vampire movies.

More recently Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori proposed the existence of something called the uncanny valley. This “valley” is an area of emotional uncertainty and often revulsion experienced by an observer when a robot or computer animation (for example) approaches being human, is almost believable, but not quite.

He suggests that our emotional empathy with animations and robots increases as they get closer and closer to being human (or animal)—but then, at a certain point, they fall into the valley, and our empathy turns to disgust. In his view they switch from being a cute thing approaching humanity to a bad or faulty version of humanity. It is at this point that we see them as not merely slightly strange, but as a human with serious problems. If the creation can succeed in being a little bit better as a believable creature the feeling of revulsion disappears. For some viewers, recent films like Beowulf fall into this valley, while others find the almost humans acceptable.

Mori further suggests that this reaction might be innate—that it might be linked to our biological reactions to people who are physically or mentally ill—or to corpses. Evolution would have ingrained this reaction as a way of weeding out sick people from the social group. Hanson and others dispute the scientific veracity of the uncanny valley, but I think no one can doubt the strange and weird emotions that well up when confronted by one of these entities.

The point about disgust brings to mind Antonio Damasio's work on emotions, as well as Pascal Boyer's comments about religious rituals for corpse disposal in Religion Explained.

In a subsequent post, as Julio nears completion, Byrne writes:

Like many animals, humans sing for pleasure, for sex, for attention, to express pain, to relieve angst and to join and participate in a social group. All of these urges seem, if not uniquely human, at least not at all machine like. To see machines mimic these aspects of human life, is to watch some part of our imagined souls being appropriated.

To see and hear video of Julio singing, check out Byrne's blog. The show "Máquinas y Almas: Arte digital" ("Machines and Souls: Digital Art") opened on June 25.

The Amazing Meeting 6 summarized, part three

This is part three of my summary of The Amazing Meeting 6 (intro, part one, part two, part four, part five).

Friday night was my one late night out, as I went with a group of Denver and Boston skeptics (and one local friend) to Gallagher's Steakhouse at the New York, New York Casino. On the walk down the strip, we passed some 9/11 truthers holding signs promoting a website promoting their views. I told one that he should check out 911myths.com, to which he responded, "That's funny." He ended up going off on a rant about how I was sticking my head in the sand, to which Iunproductively responded in an off-color manner about where he was sticking his head. We had a fantastic, though expensive, meal, and I ended up leaving my camera at the restaurant. Fortunately, I was able to retrieve it even though the restaurant had closed.

Saturday morning I had breakfast with an attorney from Florida and a regular attendee of hacker's conferences from Pennsylvania; we talked a bit about criminal hacking on the Internet and copyright law.

Michael Shermer on the Skeptologists and why people believe in unseen things
Michael Shermer gave the first talk of the day. He began by talking about how he recently accepted some money from the Templeton Foundation in return for editing a booklet of thirteen essays on the question "Does science make belief in God obsolete?", which he agreed to do on the condition that he could pick at least some of the people to write answers to the question. Respondents included Kenneth Miller, Victor Stenger, Christopher Hitchens, Stephen Pinker, and Stuart Kauffman.

He then showed a segment from a TV show pilot, "The Skeptologists," that is now being pitched to the TV networks. The show features Yau-Man Chan, Mark Edward, Steven Novella, Phil Plait, Kirsten Sanford, Michael Shermer, and Brian Dunning investigating claims using the tools of skepticism. The segment shown was of Shermer, Sanford, and Novella investigating health claims made for wheat grass, such as that because it contains chlorophyll which is molecularly similar to hemoglobin, it turns into hemoglobin when you consume it.

Shermer then went on to give a talk about "why people believe in unseen things," arguing that we engage in learning by association (something illustrated by Banachek's memory workshop) and have a tendency to make type II errors (incorrectly accepting a belief in something false) over type I errors (incorrectly rejecting a belief in something true). He gave a brief review of some evidence that when we process a sentence in order to understand it, we go through the same steps as entertaining that it is true, and to exercise skepticism about it requires additional effort; disbelief requires a subsequent process of rejection after the process of comprehension. This kind of acceptance of knowledge presented by others makes sense for a child growing up, especially in a hostile environment where survival is at stake.

Humans also tend not to be persuaded by or even remember being told that something is false--the negation can be forgotten while the statement being denied is remembered as true. A flyer put out by the CDC to rebut myths about flu vaccines turned out to have the opposite of the desired effect, at least by certain groups of people--after 30 minutes, they remembered 28% of the false statements as being true, and after three days the percentage jumped to 40%. (Also see Sam Wang and Sandra Amodt's op-ed in the June 27, 2008 New York Times, "Your Brain Lies to You.")

Shermer didn't mention the study I've linked to, but rather later near the end of his talk referred to some fMRI studies by Sam Harris, Sameer Sheth, and Mark Cohen (PDF) about evaluating statements as true, false, or undecideable, comparing reaction times to different types of statements.

Agency and the intentional stance
Shermer talked about the work of Pascal Boyer and Daniel Dennett on agency and the intentional stance--that we tend to assume by default that everything that happens not only has a cause, but is caused by an agent, and particularly one that means us harm. Such an assumption may make evolutionary sense to enable survival, though it clearly doesn't work well for accurate explanations of the world. But such appeal of agency lies behind intelligent design theory, and attributing supernatural intentions to natural phenomena. Shermer called this "The God Illusion" rather than "delusion," because he, like Boyer and Dennett, see it as a normal cognitive illusion rather than something delusional or pathological.

He went on to talk about folk intuitions as being the engines of all sorts of beliefs. He gave examples from folk astronomy, folk biology (the elan vital), folk psychology (mind/brain dualism), and folk economics (centrally planned economies). He compared natural selection and Adam Smith's invisible hand, observing that many people misconstrue one or the other as being something magical or directed. He observed that we have folk intuitions that have evolved for a particular environment, yet do not work well at the huge or tiny scales.

Then, more controversially, he referred to folk politics, viewing societies as an extension of the family, and referred to "intelligent government theory," the "God of the government" theory, and "the government illusion," drawing an analogy to intelligent design, God of the gaps, and the God illusion, respectively. But where intelligent design says "I can't imagine how X could have evolved, therefore it must have been designed," he described "intelligent government theory" as based on the faulty reasoning that "I can't imagine how X could be done privately, therefore a government must do it." The difference here, as I've already mentioned, is that we know that governments exist and do provide services. The libertarian argument about private provision of services vs. government provision of services is one about whether government is necessary, or moral, or more efficient than private provision of services. To my mind, such arguments are well worth having, but come down to questions of competing values (e.g., liberty vs. justice) and empirical evidence about costs and benefits of competing approaches. It's not really analogous to the question of the existence or nonexistence of gods, unless perhaps one takes that to partly be an issue about the pragmatic value of belief in an illusion vs. truth.

Sharon Begley
Newsweek science writer Sharon Begley gave a talk titled "Creationism and Other Weird Beliefs: The Role of the Press," with a subtitle "hint: don't get your hopes up." She was very pessimistic about the press being helpful in promoting critical thinking. She began by telling the story of the Tichbourne Claimant. In 1854, Roger Tichbourne was lost at sea off the coast of Brazil. He had been raised in France to the age of 16, then in England. He was very thin, and had blue eyes and tattoos. His mother refused to accept that he was dead, and placed ads in newspapers seeking him. Some 20 years later, a man from Wagga Wagga, Australia contacted her, claiming that he had not previously contacted her because he wanted to achieve success on his own accord, under the name "Mr. Castro," but had failed to do so. This man, the Tichbourne Claimant, was obese, spoke no French, had no tattoos, had brown eyes, and was an inch taller than Roger Tichbourne, yet she accepted him as the genuine article.

According to Begley, the role of the newspaper is not to educate. In the early years of the AIDS crisis, public health officials asked for the press to run informative stories, and they complied, but this was not helpful because:

• The scientific ignorance of the American public.
• The capacity for rational thnking is not identical to the disposition to employ rational thinking.
• There is a disconnect between factual knowledge and belief, as exhibited in the case of Mrs. Tichbourne.
• Public attitudes towards the press are negative.
• The press has a commitment to "balance."
• Common sense is not common.

She gave some statistics on polls of Americans' agreement or disagreement with the statement that "Human beings as we know them developed from earlier species of animals":

1985: 45% agreed, 48% disagreed, 7% unsure.
2005: 40% agreed, 39% disagreed, 21% unsure.

By comparison the percentage of agreement in Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden was over 80%; of OECD nations only Turkey had a lower percentage of acceptance than the U.S.

Evolution, gay marriage, and abortion are all highly politicized in the U.S. in a way that they aren't in Europe or Japan.

But if the question was "Can natural selection explain appearance and change over time of animals," 78% of Americans agreed. Yet 62% agree that "God created humans as they are today." This, according to Begley, is because Americans have a view of human exceptionalism.

She went through a list of facts that are beyond dispute, which were presented to Americans for acceptance or denial. Two examples:

More than half of all genes in humans are identical to those in mice. 33% agree
More than half of all genes in humans are identical to those in chimps. 38% agree

Only 9% of Americans know what a molecule is. Because of this, while sports writers can use abbreviations such as ERA and RBI without explaining them, Begley says she cannot assume her readers know anything at all, and recently learned that she can't even refer to DNA and expect her readers to know what she's talking about.

She observed that a disposition to critical thinking is associated with being more curious, open-minded, open to new experiences, conscientiousness, being less dogmatic, less close-minded, less authoritarian, and likely to rely more on epirical and rational data than on intution and emotion when weighing information and reaching conclusions. But you have to both have the skills and want to think critically in order to apply them. In addition to Tichbourne as an example of someone who had the skills but didn't want to apply them, she noted that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's son was killed two weeks before the end of WWI, and he went to a medium who claimed to contact his son, which he very much wanted to believe. Alfred Russell Wallace, who formulated evolution by natural selection parallel to Darwin, was also a believer in ghosts, levitation, spirit photography, and clairvoyance. And she noted that a statement Penn Jillette made the previous day sounded like he was rejecting climate change on the basis of a dislike for Al Gore. (UPDATE, July 4, 2008: Sharon Begley wrote about this at the Newsweek blog, and Penn Jillette responded in the Los Angeles Times. I think Penn more accurately reports what happened than Sharon Begley did--he really did say that he didn't know, and that people he knows and considers reliable tell him that anthropogenic climate change is real. One thing Penn gets wrong is that Teller didn't mention Gore's name when he said that carbon credits are "bullshit modeled on indulgences.")

She commented on some of the negative letters she has received any time she writes about evolution or critically about claims like alien abductions. When she wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal about the discovery of Tiktaalik, she received several letters which she read excerpts of, three examples of which were the standard argument that "evolution requires more faith" than believing that God did it, a letter asking "where are the billions of 'transition fossils,'" and one asking, "if you are terminal will you call on Darwin or God?"

Don't count on the press
The "reality-based community" must contend with contrarian politicians, the masses' distrust of elites, and new sources of news. With regard to the last point, she pointed out that Googling evolutionary biology terms often brings up Answers in Genesis sites prior to sites with accurate information.

The journalistic conceit of objectivity, she said, is imported from political disputes where there are two contrary sides. (I actually think that notion of balance is as often mistaken in politics as it is in science--there may only be one side with any valid support, or there may be more than two sides deserving of representation, though the latter is more common in politics than in science. But dualism is a misrepresentation in both circumstances.)

Uncommon common sense
Begley made the following points, which had some overlap with Shermer's talk:

• Evolution is not intuitive.
• Common sense can mislead us about the physical world.
• Our brains are driven to see patterns.
• We have a habit of imputing consciousness to inanimate objects.
• Someone is staring at me from behind. (People tend to have and respond to such feelings. I can't remember if she actually discussed Rupert Sheldrake's studies of this, or of the skeptical critiques by Robert Baker or Richard Wiseman.)
  

She gave the example of an experiment with a sweater at Bristol University. Students were shown a ratty old sweater and asked who would be willing to put it on in return for a payment of twenty British pounds. Most indicated a willingness to do so. But if they were then told, oh, by the way, this sweater belonged to a murderer, many of the hands would go down--as though evil were a property that contaminated the object. What she didn't mention is that similarly, the value of something associated with someone of status has the reverse effect--e.g., if the sweater were claimed to belong to Einstein. The effect of status on objects is one that is clearly prevalent even among skeptics, who are as likely as anyone to enjoy collecting autographs and memorabilia, or objects like ping pong balls used on a television show (see Adam Savage's talk, below).

Derek and Swoopy
Derek and Swoopy, the hosts of the official Skeptics Society podcast, "Skepticality," gave a short talk about their show and noted that they now have about 35,000 listeners per program, and that the top two skeptics' podcasts, "Skepticality" and "The Skeptics Guide to the Universe," have over 4 million downloads between them. They reported that after some successful skeptical panels at science fiction conventions, Dragon*Con 2008 in Atlanta this Labor Day weekend, a conference so large that it occurs at four hotels, will have four full days of skeptical content, a "Skeptrack" featuring James Randi, Michael Shermer, Phil Plait, Ben Radford, Alison Smith, George Hrab, and others.

Steven Novella
Dr. Novella gave a talk on "Dualism and Creationism" covering the history of dualism in philosophy of mind, evidence from neuroscience, and a discussion of modern dualism. In his discussion of dualism in philosophy, he attributed to Descartes a notion of computation occurring in the brain and a position he called "consciousness dualism." I think perhaps that gives Descartes too much credit, though he did think that "animal spirits" flowing in the brain caused signals from perception to be projected on the surface of the pineal gland, which was the seat of the soul and consciousness.

He referred to the advocacy of property dualism/epiphenomenalism by David Chalmers, and observed that his views would not be acceptable to most of those who advocate dualism. Chalmers's position is that most mental activity is physical brain activity, but there's a remaining hard problem of consciousness posed by the conscious properties of perception and feeling known as qualia, which distinguish unconscious zombies that could behave just like us from real people. He gave Deepak Chopra as an example of an individual who is essentially a denialist about contemporary neuroscience, an anti-materialist who supports "quantum woo," Eastern mysticism, and what he called "substrate consciousness," a feature of the universe itself.

Evidence from neuroscience
Novella gave the following points to summarize the evidence from neuroscience:

• Brain anatomy and activity correlates with mental activity.
• There is no mind without the brain.
• Brain development correlates with mental development.
• If you damage the brain, you damage the mind.
• Different states of consciousness correlate with different brain states.
• Turn off the brain and you turn off the mind.
• The mind does not survive the death of the brain.
• MEG (magnetoencephalography) can be used to provoke specific mental effects, including inducing out-of-body experiences at will.

My notes on the last point suggest that Novella said that MEG could be used to induce OBEs. There were a couple of recent studies about two different methods for inducing OBEs, but I don't recall either of them using magnetic induction (e.g., this 2007 Science paper). I'm skeptical of Michael Persinger's claims of magnetic induction of religious experiences (also see this 2004 Nature article).

We're in the process of reverse-engineering the brain, and the materialist model of consciousness is working pretty well. The elements of consciousness are increasingly identifiable and localizable, and our ability to reconstruct them in artificial intelligence will be the ultimate test.

Novella defined consciousness as the moment-to-moment functions of the brain, when it is processing information reflectively, and presenting it to the part of the brain that is paying attention. (Is it really commonly accepted that attention is localized to a particular part of the brain?) We are trying to assess our consciousness with our consciousness.

The vitalism analogy
Novella stated, referencing Daniel Dennett, that just as life is an emergent property of living things, consciousness is the sum of the easy problems about consciousness, leaving no remaining residue of a hard problem, just as there is no elan vital for biology.

Egnorance
Novella then talked about neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, who he said makes the mistake of confusing the question of "does" with "how." That is, because we don't know the details of how consciousness is physically generated, it must not be the case. He compared this to the "God of the gaps" argument--whatever is currently unexplained must be caused by something supernatural.

Defenses of dualism
Novella then went through a few rhetorical strategies used to defend dualism. One is that any day now, evolution (or materialism) will collapse. But they've been saying this in the evolution case for 100 years. (Glenn Morton has a nice article titled "The Imminent Demise of Evolution: The Longest Running Falsehood in Creationism," which offers 178 years of such quotes.)

Another is to generate false controversy, and say that until the argument is resolved, it's legitimate to accept dualism.

Then there's the claim of impending acceptance, the converse of the imminent demise argument--that Deepak Chopra's views are about to be accepted by the entire world, for example.

The need to change science--Novella said that B. Alan Wallace, a Buddhist, has argued that we need to reintroduce subjective evidence into science. Novella suggested that subjective evidence can't be scientific evidence, which I think is a slight overstatement--a self report is a valid source of data, we just need to have a way to correlate those self reports with other evidence.

In his conclusion, Novella stated that the purpose of modern Cartesian dualism is to provide intellectual cover for a belief system--presumably including various religious views about immortality as well as Deepak Chopra's views.

It's worth noting that Keith Augustine of the Internet Infidels has done a lot of work presenting the evidence against survival of death and the possibility of immortality, as well as critical of claims that near-death experiences are evidence of survival. He has recently published a four-part series of articles in the Journal of Near-Death Studies on the subject, which have been accompanied by responses from NDE researchers. He is also working on an anthology which will respond to recent arguments for dualism. I urge Novella to contact Augustine, as he might have some contribution to make to that anthology.

Jeff Wagg
Jeff Wagg of JREF stated that there is a possibility of a future TAM in the UK, and that TAM7 will be in Las Vegas on July 9-12, 2009 at the South Point Casino. There will also be a JREF Mexican Riviera cruise in March, 2009, which still is looking for speakers.

Jim Underdown
Jim Underdown of the Center for Inquiry, Los Angeles reported that the Independent Investigations Group, a skeptical group that does paranormal investigations, would be giving an award for best TV show or movie that debunks pseudoscience to Penn & Teller's Bullshit!, and a lifetime achievement award to James Randi.

Randi came up and said that some years ago he had terminated his relationship with CSICOP because they had asked him to stop going after Uri Geller, who was suing him repeatedly (and had also sued CSICOP as a result). Randi said that Geller only won once, in the Japan case, where the judgment was lowered from slander to insult, and that while Geller was suing for millions he was only awarded a small amount. The amount was 500,000 yen against Randi, and a larger amount against the Japanese magazine which reported Randi's erroneous statement that Dr. Wilbur Franklin of Kent State University had killed himself after Randi discredited Geller, who Franklin had endorsed as genuine. Franklin had actually died of natural causes, and Randi attributed the Japanese magazine statement to a mistranslation of the phrase "shot himself in the foot," though Randi had been quoted in a U.S. publication in English making the same statement about Franklin killing himself out of embarrassment over Geller's exposure. Geller also won a case in Hungary for a statement by Randi that called Geller a swindler, though Randi was not named in that suit. After Geller sued Victor Stenger in Hawaii, CSICOP and Prometheus in England, and CSICOP and Prometheus in Miami, Prometheus Books added errata slips to Stenger's Physics and Psychics and to Randi's The Truth About Uri Geller regarding an incident where Geller was sued in Israel for breach of contract and not, as those two sources stated (Stenger relying upon Randi), "arrested." The Miami suit was eventually won by Prometheus and CSICOP on the grounds that Geller had knowingly filed after the statute of limitations had expired, and Geller paid them slightly less than half of the fees, costs and sanctions that were originally awarded and dismissed his appeal. Contrary to the impression Randi has sometimes given, the vast majority of Geller's lawsuits were not about paranormal abilities, but about accusations of other kinds of impropriety, such as fraud, criminal acts, plagiarism, and so forth. Geller gives his version of events on his web page.

Now, apparently as a result of this award, Randi said he would like to forgive and forget, and resume his relationship with CSICOP (now CSI).

The Skeptologists
During lunch was a showing of the full pilot episode of "The Skeptologists," which also included a segment on the tools used for ghost hunting, testing them aboard the Queen Mary in order to see what they actually measure. I missed all but the ending, but it was shown again on Sunday, about which more later.

There were several more speakers on Saturday--Phil Plait, Adam Savage, Matthew Chapman, Richard Wiseman, and a panel discussion ostensibly on "the limits of skepticism," but I'll save that for further summary tomorrow.

On to TAM6 summary, part four.

Fake acupuncture works better than real acupuncture

Orac discusses a recent study in the Clinical Journal of Pain that compared the effects of "real" acupuncture (with real needles) to fake acupuncture (with needles with blunt ends that retract after hitting the skin, and do not puncture it) on test subjects between 2001 and 2003.

The result:

Both treatment groups, "true" and sham acupuncture, experienced decreases in the intensity of arm pain, arm symptoms, and noted improvement in arm function. However, patients in the sham acupuncture group improved more than patients in the "true" acupuncture group in the intensity of arm pain and just as much in measures of arm function and grip strength. The difference between the two groups was not sustained at a followup visit one month after the treatment ended, although the improvement in both groups remained detectable compared to baseline. Indeed, arm pain and arm symptoms scores declined faster in the sham compared with the "true" acupuncture group.

In this study, which was the largest, best-designed trial thus far for acupuncture for arm pain due to RSI, sham acupuncture was better than "real" acupuncture!

Read the details at Orac's Respectful Insolence blog.

Proud atheists: Salon interview with Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein

At Salon, Steve Paulson interviews Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein about their relationship, their work, and their atheism.

(Hat tip to Wade Smith on the SKEPTIC list.)

Memory and the persistence of falsehood

From the Washington Post:

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either "true" or "false." Among those identified as false were statements such as "The side effects are worse than the flu" and "Only older people need flu vaccine."

When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.

The article suggests that when we hear or read a denial of a statement, we tend to remember the association of the items in the statement but not the fact that the statement was a negation. Thus nonsense tends to persist in the face of refutation.

How Jeff Harshbarger convinced himself he was possessed by demons

A piece at the 700 Club describes Jeff Harshbarger's childhood acquisition of a Ouija board, which he convinced himself was being used by demons to communicate with and ultimately possess him:

Jeff: It scared me beyond anything I’d ever experienced but at the same time, it was like a rollercoaster ride. You’re scared to death but you’re thrilled. I began to recognize that there was a presence that began to develop in my house. I would wake up in the middle of the night and literally feel somebody’s watching me. I basically felt like someone was with me. I would wake up and walk through the house in order to experience that because I liked it.

Of course, the movement of a Ouija board planchette is well-known to be caused by subconscious ideomotor movements by the people using it, as are similar phenomena like table-tipping. Table tipping was studied by the 19th century scientist Michael Faraday, who demonstrated that the forces applied to the table were coming from the people with their hands upon it.

But Harshbarger convinced himself that he was accompanied by a presence that was controlling the planchette, and then that he was freed from demons by the intervention of a woman who led him to Jesus (and who he may have then married--the story's not clear on that).

(Via The Agitator.)