Your Meditation Guide Blog

Tear Down The Wall: Psychoanalysts Suppress Documentary on Autism

Massimo Pigliucci — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:17:00 +0000

by Maarten Boudry

[This is a guest post by Maarten Boudry. Maarten is a fellow of the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research at Ghent University. After earning a Master’s degree in Philosophy, he followed a postgraduate program in Logic, History and Philosophy of Science. He has defended a PhD thesis on irrationality and the structure of pseudoscience, and has published papers on that subject in Philosophia, Foundations of Science and Quarterly Review of Biology. His other research interests include the conflict between science and religion, skepticism, scientific naturalism and the philosophical implications of evolutionary theory. He is co-editor, with Massimo, of the forthcoming The Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem, to be published by the University of Chicago Press.]

The French documentary film The Wall (Le mur), which takes issue with psychoanalytic views on autism, has caused some uproar over the past few months, even drawing attention from The New York Times. France is one of the last remaining bulwarks of psychoanalysis, the theory and therapy devised by Sigmund Freud and further developed by his countless acolytes. In most of the Anglo-Saxon world, the influence of psychoanalysis has steadily waned over the past decades (except in the humanities and cultural studies), but the public health sector and academic psychology departments in France are still largely dominated by psychoanalysts, particularly the followers of the charismatic Jacques Lacan, who was one of the major targets of Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s book Intellectual Impostures. In most other countries, different variants of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) are regarded as the standard treatment for autism (and for several other psychological afflictions). French psychoanalysts continue resisting this approach, because they (falsely) regard it as a reductionist approach that solely focuses on behavior change and neglects the subjective dimension of psychological illness. In The Wall, we see a number of psychoanalysts explaining the onset of autism, a neurological condition with an important hereditary factor, in terms of unresolved oedipal dramas and intersubjective struggles.

Three of the dozen or so analysts who appear in The Wall (Alexandre Stevens, Esthela Solano and Eric Laurent), all of Lacanian stripe, have sued filmmaker Sophie Robert for defamation, claiming that The Wall’s depiction of their views is tendentious, that their views have been distorted through editing, and that the film is a diatribe against psychoanalysis instead of a sober assessment of the theory and therapy. Surprisingly, a court in Lille has partly put the analysts in the right, banning The Wall and sentencing Robert to cough up a compensation fee of hundreds of thousands of euros.

If you think The Wall is manipulative propaganda, you’ve never seen manipulative propaganda. The 9/11 conspiracy film Loose Change, for example, is a typical piece of cut-and-paste work: mostly snippets of a few seconds, taken out of context and disingenuously strung together to serve the needs of the filmmakers. The distortions of Loose Change were well documented on the blog Screw Loose Change and by other conspiracy debunkers. What we see in The Wall, however, are psychoanalysts answering questions and holding forth about autism at length, sometimes in uninterrupted sequences of almost a minute. The followers of Freud and Lacan have been remarkably unforthcoming about the alleged misrepresentations of The Wall, complaining mainly about the “polemic” tone of the film and only vaguely referring to misleading editing work.

The judge’s motivation does not provide a smoking gun either. In fact, it would simply outlaw any form of creative post-filming editing. Ironically, the judge charges Robert with leaving out material that even further attests to the bizarre views of Lacanian psychoanalysts. For example, one of the three psychoanalysts is shown saying that sometimes autism is caused by the mother being depressed at birth or while the child is in utero. Misrepresentation of his views, says the judge, because off-screen he adds that autism is foremost a “choice” made by the child itself. Apparently, parents do influence this flight into autism, but only the child itself takes “responsibility.” Such a bizarre position goes out of the frying pan into the fire. The judge, however, thinks it is a “very nuanced view” that gets insufficient attention in The Wall (one wonders why a judge pronounces on such matters). Should we blame Sophie Robert for failing to unearth even more pseudoscientific speculations?

In spite of Robert’s editing work, anyone who bothers to sit through the whole documentary will see a prime example of self-incrimination, with all sorts of bizarre pronouncements that are really self-explanatory, and that derive from a long psychoanalytic tradition of blaming autism on flawed relationships with parents (Bruno Bettelheim, Jacques Lacan, Françoise Dolto). For example, we learn that fathers need to intervene in the mother-child relationship in order to prevent their sexual fusion; that all mothers experience a period of “maternal madness” after pregnancy; that every mother-child relationship is intrinsically incestuous; that the autistic child “refuses” to enter into the world of language because it is “sick of language”; that some fathers are impotent and pathogenic; that one function of the placenta is to mediate between the murderous desires of mother and fetus during pregnancy (!); and that the psychological damage of father-daughter incest is not much to worry about.

Not all of those exotic views are shared by all the interviewed analysts, of course. Indeed, if you consult two psychoanalysts on any given subject, you usually end up with three different opinions. The analysts in The Wall have one thing in common, though: they revel in the same baseless and gratuitous psychoanalytic method, and they display the same cavalier disregard for careful scientific theorizing about the human mind. Particularly harrowing is the bleak view expressed by many Lacanian analysts about the expected benefits of their (or any form of) therapy (“the pleasure of taking interest in a soap bubble,” says one analyst after an embarrassing silence). This reflects another central tenet of Lacanian psychoanalysis: we cannot be cured from the human condition, and the symptoms developed by a patient constitute his or her way of coping with the ineluctable “knot” into which we humans tie ourselves (hence the “choice” for autism). Instead of fostering false hopes, or so the Lacanians claim, we should resign to this state of affairs. To try to get rid of debilitating symptoms, as cognitive behavioral therapists try to do, is to eradicate the dimension of human subjectivity. Such defeatism is appalling in view of the evidence-based therapeutic interventions for dealing with conditions such as autism.

To be sure, some parts of The Wall have been substantially edited (as is the case in any documentary film), but the three psychoanalysts have not given a single instance of editing work that has led to gross misrepresentation. Examples where questions and answers have been shuffled to improve the flow of the storyline hardly make a difference to the arguments presented. In one or two instances, the editing process may be regarded as glancing over some nuances, or insufficiently discriminating between different viewpoints. In a theoretical mess such as Lacanian psychoanalysis, however, with its obscure and byzantine doctrine about subjective development, one can always blame the critic of missing such or such theoretical subtlety. To Robert’s credit, she has taken pains to clear away the fog surrounding (Lacanian) psychoanalysis, and to crisply demonstrate what the psychoanalytic view of autism comes down to.

The other charges against Sophie Robert are simply ridiculous. The film is accused of being “polemic,” as if this was a thought crime in itself. A film maker has the right to express his or her views on a subject, and to take sides if (s)he feels morally obliged to do so. Would any sensible person be able to make a documentary about homeopathy, astrology or Scientology and manage to remain studiously evenhanded about the subject matter? The polemic tone of the film is perfectly justified in light of the outrageous claims made by the Lacanian psychoanalysts themselves. And even if Robert had seriously misrepresented the views of some of her interviewees, the latter could have written a formal response instead of dragging a young filmmaker into court and demanding exorbitant compensation fees (€ 300,000 in total).

This ruling is a blatant violation of the right to free speech and free dissemination of information. All interviewees had signed an agreement disowning their rights to the footage and acknowledging that the material would be edited. Although freedom of speech ends where libel and slander begin, psychoanalysts have not even come close to showing that such is the case. Naturally, Sophie Robert has appealed against the judge’s ruling. In the meantime, Lacanian psychoanalysts who (understandably) have tried to ban this 52-minute long embarrassment for their discipline, will have to countenance the so-called Streisand effect: attempts to censor information on the internet will almost inevitably backfire, by attracting more attention and furthering its dissemination. And you, dear reader, are complicit in this strange phenomenon!

—
Visit the website ‘Support the Wall’

Michael’s Picks

Massimo Pigliucci — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 12:00:00 +0000

by Michael De Dora

* Many religions require adherents to donate a fixed portion of their yearly income, usually ~10 percent, to their religious organization. Yet one need not believe in the supernatural to help others, so why don’t we all try to give 10 percent? That’s the idea behind a new British campaign called Giving What We Can.

* The European Union (EU) might soon consider tougher measures on banker bonuses that go against “all reason, common sense and morality,” according to EU financial services commissioner Michel Barnier.

* Good news: Harvard University political philosopher Michael Sandel is back! Sandel has authored several of my favorite books, including Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics, and most recently, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? His new book, coming out this spring, is titled What Money Can’t Buy: the Moral Limits of Markets.

* There are many instances of the government improperly exerting its control over individual choice, but perhaps the most glaring is its making marijuana illegal. That’s the topic of a new article by Jonathan Miller, who writes that there is a compelling scientific, economic, and moral case for the legalization of marijuana.

* Here’s an intriguing thought experiment from Richard Dawkins: “suppose every trial had two juries, sitting in the same courtroom but forbidden to talk to each other.”

* Are babies amoral animals who depend on parents, friends, and society to learn how to be moral agents? Not according to modern science, says Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom. For a look at Bloom’s thoughts, check out this essay in the New York Times.

* Purdue University philosophy professor Daniel Kelly recently sat down for a brief interview on his forthcoming book Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust. I’d not previously heard of Kelly’s work, but it looks interesting. Take a look.

* Should the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlaws slavery and involuntary servitude, apply to non-human animals? That’s the question raised by a new lawsuit filed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Many have dismissed this case as frivolous, but James McWilliams warns that it raises important questions, and has wide ranging implications — including the potential end of factory farming.

Massimo’s Picks

Massimo Pigliucci — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 12:00:00 +0000

by Massimo Pigliucci

* US voters not as partisan as their parties.

* The ethics of brain boosting.

* Philosophy & Theory in Biology: what is the twofold cost of sex?

* On the use of philosophy.

* A good argument in defense of teachers' unions.

* (More) reasons not to trust your banker.

* The important thing about dishonesty is that we should try to be honest about it.

* Scientists boycotting Elsevier.

* The hypocrisy of the American Supreme Court, politicians and the media, all in one clip.

* Is there a god gap for atheism?

* Religion for atheists? de Botton says so.

* How the Government intimidates journalists and bloggers.

* Frank Cioffi, critic of Freud.

The mismeasure of neuroscience

Massimo Pigliucci — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:24:00 +0000

by Massimo Pigliucci

blog.lib.umn.edu

These days you can’t turn around without bumping into yet another news story about “the neuroscience of X.” Some of it is fascinating, some controversial, and quite a bit of it is, well, let’s say at the very least, misguided. Julia and I have already done a couple of Rationally Speaking podcasts touching on this subject (one on Cordelia Fine’s “Delusions of Gender” and one on what we term “neurobabble”), and no doubt there will be plenty of occasions to do more.

On the blog, I have criticized Sam Harris for making unwarranted statements concerning alleged scientific solutions to moral issues, which he largely bases on new findings from neurobiology (I know he has a new book on free will! Can’t wait!). And of course I keep promising an in-depth analysis of Alex Rosenberg’s new book on atheism and reality (a review will soon appear in The Philosopher’s Magazine, stay tuned).

It’s not that I don’t like neuroscience, on the contrary, it is precisely because I’m fascinated by the new discoveries, and because of the respect and love I have for science, that I think people do a disservice to the whole enterprise when they make claims that are simply unsubstantiated by the available evidence (or, worse, when they incur category mistakes, like Harris’ confusion between facts and values).

Fortunately, not everyone falls prey to easy sensationalism about neuroscience. For instance, I am in the process of reading (for a forthcoming review in Skeptical Inquirer) Michael Gazzaniga’s new book, Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain (yes, I know, free will!), and I find the author to be eminently sensible about the whole thing. Not only does he knows his stuff, he also knows where to draw the line between science and speculation, and the book is peppered with a good dose of philosophically sophisticated reasoning (just like another of my favorite neuro-authors, Antonio Damasio).

Nevertheless, there are two general issues that I’m concerned about whenever discussions of “the neuroscience of X” come up: one has to do with an apparent confusion (in some people’s minds) regarding what exactly one establishes when one discovers a neural correlate for a particular human behavior; the other has to do with what can (and cannot) be learned from studies of brain damage, be it accidental or as the result of surgery to alleviate neurological problems.

Let’s begin with what exactly follows from studies showing that X has been demonstrated to have a neural correlate (where X can be moral decision making, political leanings, sexual habits, or consciousness itself). The refrain one often hears when these studies are published is that neuroscientists have “explained” X, a conclusion that is presented more like the explaining away (philosophically, the elimination) of X. You think you are making an ethical decision? Ah!, but that’s just the orbital and medial sectors of the prefrontal cortex and the superior temporal sulcus region of your brain in action. You think you are having a spiritual experience while engaging in deep prayer or meditation? Silly you, that’s just the combined action of your right medial orbitofrontal cortex, right middle temporal cortex, right inferior and superior parietal lobules, right caudate, left medial prefrontal cortex, left anterior cingulate cortex, left inferior parietal lobule, left insula, left caudate, and left brainstem (did I leave anything out?).

I could keep going, but I think you get the point. The fact is, of course, that anything at all which we experience, whether it does or does not have causal determinants in the outside world, has to be experienced through our brains. Which means that you will find neural correlates for literally everything that human beings do or think. Because that’s what the brain is for: to do stuff and think about stuff.

This does not at all mean that I don’t find these studies fascinating, they surely are. But they are answering a different question from the one that often gets pushed in news stories. Specifically, what neuroscientists are finding is how the brain does X, which constitutes an explanation of X only in a very limited and specific sense of the word “explanation.” Take moral reasoning as an example. What “explains” it? Well, at the neurobiological level, it is the result of the action of the above mentioned brain areas (and probably many more). Evolutionarily speaking, a sense of morality probably evolved to help large-brained primates deal with their social environment. Culturally, our sense of morality has evolved in different directions at different times and in different places (though with some interesting convergences). Sociologically, what is moral depends on a complex interaction between fundamental human needs (like the need to feel safe) and idiosyncratic rules adopted by certain groups of people for entirely arbitrary reasons (like those regulating the Sabbath). Which means that the neuroscience of X is a fascinating but very limited part of the larger puzzle comprised by the broader question of “what is X?” And it behooves us to keep this distinction in mind.

The second issue that I see recurring in news or popular coverage of neuroscience is the one about what exactly we learn when the brain malfunctions. V.S. Ramachandran has written a whole mind boggling book on this sort of research, but perhaps the most spectacular of these case studies are those concerning so-called split-brain patients. As is well known, these are situations in which the corpus callosum, the tissue that normally mediates communication between the right and left hemispheres of the brain, is severed because of accident or surgery (usually to ameliorate epilepsy).

The above mentioned Gazzaniga is one of the leading experts on split-brain research, and he is very careful when he draws conclusions from what he observes in these patients. Nonetheless, it is not at all uncommon to hear people jump to the conclusion that these experiments show that the unity of consciousness is an “illusion” (a word which Rosenberg, for one, is surely fond of: it recurs a whopping 100 times in his book, in different but related contexts), and that our much vaunted rationality is really rationalization. These two notions arise from the experimental observation that split-brain patients are literally “of two minds,” since the experimenter can communicate with the right and left hemisphere separately, often obtaining contradictory or incongruent answers. Moreover, when the left hemisphere (which is in charge of spoken language) is asked to explain the incongruities, it simply makes stuff up by connecting the available evidence in an apparently coherent story. Gazzaniga refers to the left hemisphere as “the interpreter,” the structure that is in an important sense in charge of our conscious view of the world.

But observations of split-brain patients — as captivating and scientifically informative as they are — do not at all warrant the above mentioned conclusions. Remember that split-brains are not normal, they are a pathology. Pathologies do tell biologists something about how things work, but they certainly do not tell them the “real” nature of a biological process any more than a mutation tells geneticists the “real” structure of an organism’s trait. Let’s try to draw the analogy in a bit more detail. Biologists have discovered that a mutation in a particular gene causes a condition known as phenylketonuria. If you are affected, you absolutely need to stay away from the amino acid phenylalanine, which is found in a variety of foods, including soda drinks (next time you drink one, check the label, it has a warning to phenylketonurics).

Now imagine how ridiculous a geneticist’s statement would be if he said that the biochemical pathway that metabolizes phenylalanine is “really” an illusion, as demonstrated by the phenotype (the manifestation of phenylketonuria) that we observe in patients with the mutation. If you think this analogy is outrageous I’d like you to explain to me exactly why. In both cases one takes an individual with a pathology and uses his behavior to conclude that what appears to be normal is actually illusory, and that the pathology is a better guide to what’s “really” going on.

The same reasoning can be applied to the confabulation of the left hemisphere “interpreter.” Yes, the experiments do show very clearly that if the left hemisphere doesn’t have access (because of the severed corpus callosum) to the information coming from the right hemisphere, it makes stuff up in order to make sense of what it knows. This does not mean that we confabulate and rationalize all the time, it means that when our brains are fed bad information they weave it together the best they can. This surely has all sorts of implications, including for public education, but we have to keep in mind that we are observing a maladaptive behavior caused by a malfunction of the brain. We are not therefore licensed to conclude that it also malfunctions under normal operating conditions.

So, the next time you hear someone say that moral decision making is “just” your brain working, ask them what else could possibly generate that behavior, and whether that’s all there is to know about this crucial ability shared by all non-psychopathic human beings. And when someone tells you that consciousness is an illusion because split-brain patients have lost their unity of mind, ask them if they are also comfortable in drawing the conclusion that metabolic defects are the real way human biochemical pathways function. That ought to generate some interesting discussion.

Rationally Speaking podcast: Parapsychology

Massimo Pigliucci — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:00:00 +0000

www.crystalinks.com

In this episode, Massimo and Julia take on parapsychology, the study of phenomena such as extrasensory perception, precognition, and remote viewing.

Its practitioners claim that there is more evidence for it than there is for other areas of scientific inquiry, such as string theory for which there is no empirical data at all. Yet string theory is taken seriously as a science whereas parapsychology is not.

So, what is the scientific status of parapsychology? What does the best academic literature on the subject tell us? Finally, what can we learn from parapsychology about the practice of science in general?

Some observations on the “free will” wars

ianpollock — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:49:00 +0000

by Ian Pollock

hustletronix.com/wordpress

??It has been interesting to view the exchanges on free will (more neutrally, volition) between Massimo, Jerry Coyne, and the readers of both blogs. I felt like chiming in when I read this in Massimo’s latest sortie:?

“...And there are very decent philosophical arguments against determinism (and reductionism, which is also implied by this sort of claim)”

This fits in with my impression that many see incompatibilist determinism a la Jerry Coyne as either “reductionism gone mad,” or, putting a positive spin on it, the logical consequence of reductionism applied to human brains.

I confess myself perplexed by this, because it seems to me that the intuitions driving incompatibilism stem from absent or insufficiently applied reductionism. Let me try to explain.

Let’s start with Jerry’s “practical test” of free will:

If you were put in the same position twice — if the tape of your life could be rewound to the exact moment when you made a decision, with every circumstance leading up to that moment the same and all the molecules in the universe aligned in the same way — you could have chosen differently.

To see the problem with this test, suppose we are interested in a different question: whether Alice loves Bob. I propose as a practical test of this proposition: “What you need to do is take a look at Alice’s brain and see if areas associated with Bob display amorous patterns of neural firing.”

The obvious main problem with my “practical test” of love is that although it’s couched in sciencey language, the entire question of whether Alice loves Bob has been transfered to the word “amorous,” which has still not been reduced to something well-defined and testable. Explanatorily, we are no better off than we were before. Of course, the mistake in my test is trivially easy to see, but the mistake in Jerry’s test of free will is almost as obvious. “Choice” and “free will” and “volition” are damn near synonyms, so although a dictionary may reference “choice” in its definition of “free will,” a scientific test should never do such a thing. Likewise, "could" is a concept at the very heart of the matter! Jerry’s test of free will — “you could have chosen differently” — is not nearly reductionist enough.*

So how would I tackle the issue of free will/volition?

Suppose I am driving along an undivided highway when the stray thought comes into my head that I could steer into the opposing lane, resulting in a horrible, deadly accident.

Of course, I don’t do so, because... well, I like living and I don’t much want to kill others, either. And I just washed my car. But I could have done it....

Wait, was I right to say that I could have done it?

Yes and no. As we have seen, the pivotal word in that sentence is “could,” and “could” has at least two meanings that are relevant to the question of free will.

Meaning #1 maps physical possibility, and in this case returns the clear answer “No, the physical state of the universe was such that you could not have steered into oncoming traffic, as evidenced by the fact that you did not, in fact, do so. QED.” Jerry sees this clearly, and I have absolutely no argument with him.

Meaning #2 of “could” maps counterfactual statements. To say that you “could” have done something in this sense is (roughly) to say that IF circumstances had been otherwise, a different outcome would have resulted. Meaning #2 returns the answer “Yes, you could have steered into oncoming traffic, if you had wanted to.”

Meaning #2 is what people actually mean by “could,” most of the time.

If you’ve been sleeping through this post, pay attention now, because the entire click of compatibilism lies in this realization.

Proposition #1: “No, the state of the universe was such that it was physically impossible for you to have steered into oncoming traffic.”

Proposition #2: “Yes, you could have steered into oncoming traffic (if you had wanted to).”

These two propositions are both true in my example. THAT is the essence of compatibilism.

Also note the very important fact that “wanting to” corresponds to a different physical state than “not wanting to.”

These propositions look incompatible because people (especially incompatibilists!) have an annoying tendency to forget about the implicit counterfactual “if” clause in proposition #2.**

Now we are in a position to see that incompatibilism is basically a huge equivocation fallacy. The incompatibilists prove Proposition #1, then assume that therefore, Proposition #2 is proven false. But this does not follow.

Sadly, those who wish to defend free will/volition seem tempted to deny Proposition #1, often by arguing against determinism and reductionism in very implausible ways. I think this is crazy, but I am not going to argue with them here, in the interests of maintaining a coherent stream of thought.

The main point I want to make is that incompatibilist determinists like Jerry are in some sense still in thrall to the dualistic ideas of their culture, although they have explicitly rejected them.

Dan Dennett is fond of repeating this great quote from Lee Siegel, who wrote a book on Indian street magic.

"I'm writing a book on magic," I explain, and I'm asked, "Real magic?" By 'real magic' people mean miracles, thaumaturgical acts, and supernatural powers. "No," I answer: "Conjuring tricks, not real magic." Real magic, in other words, refers to the magic that is not real, while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic.

Now consider this passage from Jerry Coyne’s USA Today article:

The ineluctable scientific conclusion is that although we feel that we're characters in the play of our lives, rewriting our parts as we go along, in reality we’re puppets performing scripted parts written by the laws of physics. Most people find that idea intolerable, so powerful is our illusion that we really do make choices. (my emphasis).

But um, Jerry, we do actually make choices, right? Don’t we? I mean, not in some amazingly deep philosophically or morally fraught sense of choice, as in “But did Hitler really have a choice to not be a monster?”, but in a basic, boring, everyday sense, as in “Do you want Froot Loops or muesli?” Surely you talk this way too, when you go home?

I think Jerry would concede that we do make such choices, but insist that they aren’t “real” choices. Well, what is a “real” choice as distinct from an unreal one? Like in the case of magic, it would appear that according to Jerry and other incompatibilists, “real choice” refers to the choices that are not real (i.e., don’t actually happen because they require supernatural powers), while the choice that is real — that can, y’know, actually be done — is not. real. choice.

And yet I would bet a large sum of money that Jerry et al. are perfectly willing to use the language of choice in their daily lives, as soon as they’ve forgotten about the day’s blogo-philosophizing. This is not just because choice is a powerful illusion (which would presumbably be their preferred rationalization) — it’s because the concept of “choice” cuts reality at the joints. Choice is one of the most important things that the human brain does; arguably, the brain’s ability to model the world and choose from alternative actions IS its survival value.

A half-reductionist would look at the concept of choice, experience the usual dualistic intuitions about it, then conclude that since dualism is false, choice must be an illusion. Hence the saying (which I just invented): a little bit of reductionism is a dangerous thing.

A good reductionist would look at this incredibly useful concept of “choice” and then try to figure out how it fits into the determined physical universe. Eventually, they would conclude that choice is a physical process like eating or breathing or thinking. As Gary Drescher says in the perfect expression of this insight:

Choice…is a mechanical process compatible with determinism... The objection "The agent didn’t really make a choice, because the outcome was already predetermined" is as much a non sequitur as the objection "The motor didn’t really exert force, because the outcome was already predetermined."

One final note: I have tried to interpret Jerry’s opinions as faithfully as possible, but I hope he will pardon me and let me know if he feels I have put words into his mouth. In truth so much has been written on this topic recently that it gets hard to keep people's opinions straight!

__________

* Unlike others, I have absolutely no problem with the fact that Jerry’s test would only be doable in principle, not in practice. Such thought experiments are extremely useful for all sorts of things.

** Of course, the counterfactual “if” can reference lots of different factors besides the desires of the agent. But this example does a nice job of showing that what prevents you from doing X is not necessarily a pernicious outside influence.

On free will, response to readers

Massimo Pigliucci — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:17:00 +0000

by Massimo Pigliucci

www.scientificamerican.com

It has been interesting reading through the (at last count) 104 comments on my recent post concerning Jerry Coyne’s take on free will. The post has been viewed (again, so far) 5,660 times, which puts it in 6th place in the all-time ranking of Rationally Speaking entries (interestingly, number 4 is also about Jerry, concerning his changing views on the relationship between science and supernaturalism). Some recurring themes have emerged from that thread which seem worthy of further discussion.

One of the things I had pointed out is that there seems to be a clear inconsistency in the writings of several people who deny free will, since they also regularly add that it is good that we realize how things really are, because this is going to improve our lives, behaviors etc. Some readers thought there was no contradiction. For instance, here is what pin pin said:

> “Haves” and “oughts” and “shoulds” are exhortations that can change the desires of the people you are exhorting. If you think a certain set of people have bad desires (i.e. desires that would make the world a worse place), you can try to use moral language to mold those desires into better desires. <

As a matter of empirical psychology this is certainly the case, but I think there is an equivocation about the word “change” here. Does this mean that people have a choice of some sort, or simply that we are all Pavlovian automata that can be conditioned to do whatever the environment (including our fellow human beings) sets us up to do? The latter — I wager — is what Coyne, Rosenberg et al. really mean, and yet their language simply doesn’t seem to be able to avoid volitional connotations.

Several readers of course brought up dualism, even accusing me of being a crypto-dualist. Here is Gadfly:

> If there's no Cartesian meaner, there's no Cartesian free willer. <

True enough, but this assumes that the only way to meaningfully talk about volition (again, my and others’ preferred term instead of the metaphysically loaded “free will”) is in dualistic terms, a position that has been rejected pretty much by all compatibilist philosophers, from Dennett down.

The twin “isms” of reductionism and determinism have, of course, played a major role throughout the discussion. as Matthew Putman wrote:

> Certainly science, not just neurobiology, deals with causation all of the time, and that can be carried over to notions of freewill. ... I see no reason why a physical structure such as the brain should be any different than the filled polymer system. ... When we study the brain experimentally, either with animal models, or postmortem, we find very predicable behavior of neurons, and glia cells. <

He then goes on to invoke the specter of Descartes, again. But there are several issues lurking within the above quotes. To begin with, there is a free use of the concept of causality which, as I pointed out in my original post, is far from being clear at all, and of course is most definitely extra-scientific, meaning that science can only help itself to it, not investigate it empirically. Second, it is interesting to see that Matthew cannot conceive of a significant difference between filled polymers and brains, despite the obvious fact that brains, and not filled polymers, are alive, thinking, feeling, etc. Please do not take this as an argument for vitalism, it most definitely isn’t what I mean. But I find that that line of argument is somewhat question-begging: we are trying to figure out how chunks of matter can behave in such drastically different ways from other chunks of matter, so to point out the obvious (that they are all chunks of matter) hardly helps moving the debate forward. And of course, as someone commented in response to Matthew, it is no surprise that postmortem brains are just as inert as polymers. What interests us is what happens before they become postmortem.

Gadfly also highlighted something that I took for granted, but evidently I shouldn’t have:

> Belief in free will is ALSO arguably not a scientific proposition. It certainly is no more provable right now than is the denial of free will. <

Indeed. But my beef with Coyne is that he is the one making the strong claim that free will denial is a scientific proposition. I am not at all making the symmetrical claim that affirmation of free will is demonstrated by science, only the neutral one that science has precious little (okay, pretty much nothing) to say about free will.

Which brings me to comments questioning my view of science itself. For instance, elik says:

> If I interpret correctly, you have placed counterfactual language into the realm of unscientific metaphysical speculation. I doubt you would consider statements e.g. “were it below 20 degrees yesterday, the surface of this pond would have frozen over” to be unscientific. <

No, I do not think that all counterfactual language is non scientific (to use the term “unscientific” is pejorative, and I don’t think that only science is in the business of knowledge and understanding). But I think it uncontroversial that some counterfactual reasoning has nothing to do with science (think of purely logical or mathematical questions). To consider elik’s specific example, the reason that particular counterfactual is convincing is because established science already tells us a lot about the state transitional properties of water in relation to temperature. No such knowledge is available in the case of determinism, reductionism and their implications for free will.

Along similar lines, Matthew Clark opined:

> Of course we can’t actually perform this experiment, but the deterministic claim rests on the rather robust intuition that similar causes produce similar effects. <

The crucial part here is “we can’t actually perform the experiment,” which means that we are doing philosophy, not science. And there are very decent philosophical arguments against determinism (and reductionism, which is also implied by this sort of claim). Moreover, what is at issue here is precisely whether “the same causes” are at work. Physics would have to have established causal closure in order to argue that, and it most definitely hasn’t. (Another way to put this is that everything in the universe behaves in a way that has to be compatible with the known laws of physics. This says nothing about whether those laws as we understand them comprise all there is to know about how the universe works.)

elik, along with several other readers, also asks the recurring question:

> How does quantum indeterminacy help free will, for example? <

Well, one way it may help is through two-stage models, which have been mentioned during this and a previous discussion thread. But I am not staking my agnosticism on these or any other explanation for volition, I am simply pointing out that, contra popular (in some quarters) opinion, there are options out there. (Interestingly, very few readers took me up on another possibility: that of truly emergent properties, which is yet another question that at the moment — and perhaps permanently — cannot be resolved by science. We know that there are emergent properties, but we don’t know if they appear to be so because of our epistemic limitations or because they truly do represent novel behaviors of matter when certain complexity and organizational conditions are met.)

elik (not picking on him/her, I assure you!) also used a thought experiment to argue against free will, bringing up the possibility of The Device, a machine capable of predicting the content of an essay several minutes in advance of the essay being written. Intriguing, but besides the obvious fact that such experimental demonstration hasn’t been done by anyone (again, undermining Jerry’s claim that it is science that refutes free will), this conflates predictability with free will. As my CUNY colleague Jesse Prinz pointed out during a recent roundtable on this topic, we can already predict a lot of things about how people will behave under certain circumstances using standard psychology and certainly without having to settle the question of free will.

Why, in the end, do I think there is a problem that Jerry et al. are missing or ignoring? Again, Matthew Clark:

> What we seem not to observe, given our ever increasing ability to control for causal factors in experimental situations, are inexplicable departures from these regularities. <

Of course we do observe departures from regularities, it’s called human behavior! Yes, as I mentioned above, it is predictable to a point, but it is nothing like the movement of planets or the behavior of polymers. And there is, of course, the first person experience of making decisions after deliberation. That experience constitutes data (albeit not of the controlled fashion that would make them amenable to straightforward scientific investigation), and that data that needs to be explained, not explained away. My problem with Jerry’s position is that it is a form of eliminativism, a position in philosophy (not science!) of mind made popular by Paul and Patricia Churchland. When the Churchlands provocatively say that pain “just is” the firing of neuronal C-fibers they only begin to explain the subjective experience of pain. Yes, without the C-fibers we wouldn’t feel pain, but there is a huge difference between saying that the C-fibers are necessary for feeling pain (which we could express as: other conditions ... > C-fibers > pain) and saying that firing C-fibers are the same thing as pain (C-fibers = pain). So too with eliminativism about free will: yes, we need the laws of physics to be able to make decisions, nor can we make decisions that violate said laws. But this is not at all the same as saying that therefore decision making is an illusion brought about by physics, no more than pain is an illusion courtesy of C-fiber firing.

Considering the consequences

Massimo Pigliucci — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:14:00 +0000

by Michael De Dora

I have never thought much of consequentialism, the moral theory which asserts that determining “the good” or “the moral” is a matter of measuring outcomes. Decisions about what is moral, consequentialists say, should depend on the potential or realized costs and benefits of a moral belief or action. There are myriad problems with this line of thought, and while I have already discussed several on this blog, I would like to use this post to examine in more depth what I think are the four strongest objections to consequentialism.

First, consequentialism says nothing about the substance of one’s ethic. While most consequentialists are utilitarians — a position I also consider vague and tenuous — one obviously needs only value consequences to qualify as a consequentialist. Yet, since everyone has different moral goals, everyone will have different views about potential outcomes. For reasons discussed below, consequentialism does not help us decide which are better or worse. Rather, one’s moral values come prior to consequential calculation, and help determine what one thinks about the consequences.

Second, consequences are often not at all predictable or in line with the actions that caused them. For example, does the fact that certain Muslims riot over the printing of anti-religious cartoons suggest that printing said cartoons is immoral or wrong in some other way? Not in the slightest. It only suggests people have some twisted ideas regarding free expression. Or, consider an exchange I witnessed at a recent Intelligence Squared debate. At the event, two sides of two speakers each debated the motion “The U.N. should admit Palestine as a full member state.” The side taking position against the motion argued that the audience ought to stand with them because of the potential military situation — probably started by Israel — that could be brought on as a result of the U.N.’s recognition of Palestine. Unfortunately, there was no discussion about whether such military action itself would be reasonable.

This gets at a third problem with consequentialism: it often ignores foundational questions of right and wrong for questions of expediency. Or, it ignores concerns about intent for pragmatic concerns. The question of whether a war might start due to the U.N. admitting Palestine as a full member state is an important and interesting one, but it does not answer the distinct question of whether it is right to admit Palestine to the U.N. as a full member state. Those are two different questions that must be considered separately.

Lastly, consequences must be weighed alongside other factors and possibilities. Let us examine a recent exchange on this blog. It occurred in the comments to the recent post, “Massimo’s Picks, special Hitchens edition.”

In the comment thread, Massimo wrote about his skepticism toward the effectiveness of New Atheists like Christopher Hitchens to better the public acceptance of atheism. I replied that:

“Hitchens might not have been the person best fit to sway the majority to our side, but he was part of a movement (the so-called "new atheists") that I think did do two things to help us get to the point where that’s even feasible. First, their out-front writings and speaking engagements put atheism on the forefront of the Western world's consciousness, and created the space for more widespread conversations on religion (like this one!) that were not happening here beforehand. Second, their public work encouraged many apathetic secularists and fence sitters to be more assertive and engage with the problem of religious dogmatism. I think both of these were productive first steps toward getting a majority to embrace secular thinking. And I think these two points can be accepted whether or not you agree with their arguments, or how they stated their arguments.”

Massimo replied:

“… for an allegedly evidence-driven community I hear a lot of claims about all the good that the New Atheists have done, with precious little backing up in terms of data. Are we seriously arguing that atheism wasn’t widely discussed before the Hitchens-Dawkins-Harris-Dennett books? And on what evidential grounds are you asserting that more fence sitters have been drawn inside the movement rather than repelled by the NA’s rhetoric?”

I replied by asking Massimo: “certainly atheism was being discussed long before the arrival of the New Atheists, but on such a widespread and popular scale? The NA all had best-selling books, major TV and magazine appearances, and auditoriums packed with sometimes thousands of people.” His reply: “Nobody doubts that the NA have had an impact. The question is whether it was an overall positive one.”

Massimo’s legitimate empirical question aside (any takers?), I think his last comment is most relevant to our discussion on consequentialism. Whether or not the New Atheists were effective in broadening public acceptance of secular thinking, Massimo raises the following questions: Were the New Atheists necessary to raise such recognition? Couldn’t atheism have been put on the map in some other form or fashion? Indeed, hadn’t atheists previously in human history tried other effective methods? If not, why?

The point here is that there are certainly other possibilities for fostering the kind of space atheists wanted, or an even better space. None of those possibilities were enacted, so we should be thankful for where we are right now. But that does not make what happened desirable.

Regardless, consequentialists could reply that ignoring what may be terrible consequences is unethical. Would they have a point? Consider this common thought experiment: you are a German hiding a Jewish family during World War II, and Nazi guards are at your door asking if you have seen any Jewish people lately. Do you lie to potentially save their lives? Or do you tell the truth and essentially kill the Jewish family? The point here is not that there is an easy answer between lying and not lying. The point is that the consequences — a dead family — are so compelling that they warrant consideration. And this is just one of numerous examples.

What are the implications of all this? That consequences are important, you might conclude? Not necessarily. Instead, I think we have realized only that we have a range of different values, some of which are or can be in tension among themselves. For example, in the case we just considered, we might be stuck between, on one hand, the value of honesty, and on the other, the value of human lives.

As such, perhaps consequentialism should not be looked at as an ethical system in itself — again, it is bare of ethical content — but as a way to figure out if our different ethical systems — based on duties, obligations, virtues, rights, etc. — are working properly or as intended. In other words, consequentialism might help us to see if we are securing the kind of consequences we want. And if we aren’t, it’s time to adjust our aim and try for better consequences.

Radical reform for peer review?

Massimo Pigliucci — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:29:00 +0000

scienceforseo.com

by Massimo Pigliucci

A recent piece by Scott Jaschik in “Inside Higher Education” pointed out what a number of my colleagues have been thinking for a while now: the peer review system for scholarly journals doesn’t work very well, needs to be reformed, and really ought to take radical advantage of new technologies. There is, of course, going to be quite a bit of resistance to any change coming from the usual quarters, beginning with older academics who still think of social networking in terms of meeting colleagues after work for a martini (well, okay, nothing wrong with that), administrators who are used to the simple (and simplistic) bean counting operations for tenure and promotion made possible by the current system, and journal publishers who make a ton of money while adding next to nothing in value to people’s publications (after all, they don’t pay for the research, don’t pay the writers, and don’t pay the editors and reviewers — which of course doesn’t stop them from charging an arm and a leg to university libraries).

Of course, since the new technologies are making an overhaul of the system possible, and since there is widespread frustration with the current modus operandi especially among younger faculty, change will happen one way or another — witness the rise of open access and online journals that bypass traditional publishers. It’s only a question of which paths to take, and that’s where the conversation gets interesting.

The most radical suggestion mentioned in the Inside article is the one by Aaron J. Barlow, associate professor of English at the City University of New York, where I work. Barlow is quoted in the article as saying that “peer review — in the sense that people work and a consensus may emerge that a given paper is important or not — doesn’t need to take place prior to publication.” He is, of course, right and as a matter of fact most peer review has always taken place after publication. A lot of bad or simply irrelevant stuff gets published and ends up augmenting someone’s c.v. by a line or two (good for promotion and tenure!), but then dies the common death of much academic scholarship: complete lack of citations by anyone other than the author.

The question that Barlow is raising is whether it wouldn’t be better to skip the preliminary step — the pre-publication filter — and simply leave everything to the community at large. I am sympathetic to that position, particularly because as author, editor and reviewer I have seen my share of unseemly behavior, gender and racial biases, personal vendettas, and so on that certainly don’t belong anywhere within a scholarly environment. But I think pretty much everyone agrees that we already have far too much pyrite to sift through in order to find the gold nuggets, and I shudder as to what would happen if anyone were suddenly able to claim “scholarship” by simply posting their papers on the web and ask people — anyone, not just the relevant expert community? — to comment, “+1” or “like.”

This is the same problem that has been faced by the publishing and journalism industries. These days anyone can self-publish a book at the click of a button, and anyone can set up an online newspaper with free or cheap software and access to a server. But I doubt these new technological possibilities will spell the demise of editors, publishing houses and newspapers like the New York Times, for the simple reason that these “classic” outlets do exercise a very valuable (if flawed, incomplete, sometimes biased) function of filtering a lot of distracting or poor quality nonsense (as the NYT’s famous tagline says, “all the news that’s fit to print,” or to pixellate, as the case may be).

Another approach commented on in the Inside piece is the one currently pursued by Cheryl Ball, the editor of an online journal on rhetoric and technology called Kairos, and an associate professor of English at Illinois State University. Her journal engages the entire editorial board in a lengthy discussion of every submitted paper, at the end of which an editor is assigned to coach the author on how to revise the manuscript to reflect the consensus of the board. This makes the system much more transparent (the author knows that all editors participated in the discussion, no anonymity on either side) and obviously immensely constructive from the point of view of the author and the community at large. But I seriously doubt this sort of model can be expanded to the whole industry. I edit a small online open access journal in philosophy of science, and even with our low number of yearly submissions it would be impossible to get my editorial board to do what Ball has been able to accomplish with hers. Again, the problem being that there are too many authors out there, and that far too high a proportion of submitted papers is simply not up to even minimum standards, or would require a huge amount of work to get there (not to mention, of course, that — again — editors and reviewers are not paid for this, nor do they get much concrete credit from university administrations for engaging in what they do).

I do not know what the solution is, and I suspect that we will see over the next few years increased experimentation on the part of younger editors to either ameliorate the problems with the current system or to overhaul the thing altogether. Some journals already make the author, not just the reviewers, anonymous, to minimize biases (it is well known, for instance, that women and minorities get fewer papers accepted if the reviewers know their names, and that the effect disappears if authorship is kept anonymous). Others publish all submitted papers that are technically correct — meaning that are written in an intelligible manner and include all the necessary documentation — while leaving to readers to judge the intrinsic value of the authors’ findings and opinions. We certainly are on the cusp of a technologically driven revolution in academic publishing, but just as in the already mentioned cases of book publishing and journalism, it remains to be seen exactly what will be left standing and what will have arisen anew once the storm has passed.

Experimenting in e-Publishing

Massimo Pigliucci — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:06:00 +0000

As readers of Rationally Speaking may know, there are two collections of essays pertinent to the topics covered by this blog that have been available at the Amazon Kindle store for a while: "Rationally Speaking: Skeptical Essays on Reality as We Think We Know It" includes all the essays I wrote for Rationally Speaking before it was a blog (it started out as a monthly syndicated internet column), while "Thinking About Science: Essays on the Nature of Science: 2003-2008" republishes all my essays in the homonymous Skeptical Inquirer column (still ongoing) during those years.

Since I'm always interested in new frontiers in e-publishing, I have just released both titles at Smashwords, an e-book "aggregator," as they call them these days, i.e. an outlet that allows people to publish and distribute their e-books in a variety of formats. Smashwords will soon send the two titles to the Apple iBook store and other outlets, but in the meantime you can download them directly at the site, in html, java (for browsers), mobi (for Kindle), ePub, PDF, LRF (for Sony Readers), and PDB (for Palm devices).

Enjoy!

p.s.: as soon as I have some time (ah!) I intend to re-release "Tales of the Rational: Skeptical Essays About Nature and Science" in e-format. Stay tuned...