Gene Ray says that all of physics is wrong. It would have to for his new model of reality, which he describes as a Time Cube, to be correct. Everything from quantum theory to force being equal to mass times acceleration; it’s all just wrong according to Ray. So when his ramblings counter some established truth about how the physical world operates, he can always play the “Everything you know is wrong” trump card.
[I should probably point out that I started writing this post before I heard that Sam Harris just released a short book / long pamphlet about this subject. You’ll just have to take my word for it.]
Being a connoisseur of crazy ideas carries with it a sort of demarcation problem. Is there a clearly defined line between a belief being totally unreasonable and kooky, and a belief which is just simply wrong? What kind of method can we use to tell the difference?
Sometimes it can be tough to distinguish between one unjustified belief categorized as crackpottery while another equally unjustified belief escapes unscathed simply because it’s popular. As it goes with pornography and Supreme Court justices, we might not be able to clearly define woo, but we can know it when we see it. As hazily defined a term as it is, maybe it would help the cause to expand its definition to the point where it makes more people re-examine their positions.
When I was doing a little research to prepare for an interview with Sarah Posner a couple weeks ago, I stumbled across a blog post on her site Religion Dispatches called Dear Scientists: Please Stop Bashing Free Will! by John Horgan. Horgan writes for Scientific American, so it’s not like he’s stupid. But even smart people can be tricked into believing stupid things for stupid reasons. Free will is one of those unjustified beliefs that’s so ubiquitous that even a science writer will openly defend it using the kinds of arguments he’d be among the first to counter when used to promote creationism or cryptozoology.
After the collapse of the environment and humanity’s sociopolitical structure, lawlessness ran rampant in the few remaining Mega Cities where most human survivors lived. But then a new system of criminal justice emerged. One where elite super-soldiers act as police, jury, and executioners. We call them the Judges. That’s where I come in. I’m a Judge. The name’s Judge Dredd, and I am the law.
One of the awesome philosophical concepts David Hume articulated was the Is-Ought Distinction (or the Is-Ought Problem). It’s very similar to the naturalistic fallacy and it tries to deal with how we can derive how individuals and societies ought to act from objective, verifiable facts. Can we proceed directly from what is to what ought to be? Hume didn’t think so.
There are really two different anthropic principles; the ‘strong’ one and the ‘weak’ one. The latter is pretty much a tautology. If the most basic laws of the Universe would different, then the Universe itself would look differently. There’s not much controversy there, it’s pretty straightforward. So here I’ll be focusing on the ‘strong’ anthropic principle.
Orac at Respectful Insolence had a great post a month or so ago which really nailed some basic problems with accepting pseudoscience. Here’s a relevant excerpt:
Of course, even within New Age, skepticism seems to be without a basis. After all, if you accept astrology and fairies, really, on what possible basis can you reject channeling the dead?… Unfortunately, this is a completely predictable result. When one leaves science, rationality, and reason behind, there is no reliable way to differentiate one woo from another, one pseudoscience from another, one faith-based belief from another. When anything goes, nothing goes, and nothing can be included or excluded based on evidence. Everything is fair game.
Massimo Pigliucci, Ph D., is a professor of evolution and of philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook. He has three doctorates – in genetics, botany, and philosophy. He contributes to Skeptical Inquirer and Philosophy Now, and his musings can be found at rationallyspeaking.org . We wrote to him and he wrote back.
Atheist Hobos 