Mainstream Media Debunks ESP with a Study that Doesn't Have Anything to Do with ESP

Imagine you are taking a quiz on the latest on scientific results or edge philosophical thinking, and you were asked the following multiple-choice question.

Recent scientific experiments provides evidence for which of the following:

      A)   Countless parallel universes.

      B)   Artificially intelligent robots are on the verge of sentience.

      C)   The world as we know it is actually a simulation (like in The Matrix).

      D)   Mild forms of telepathy between minds.

Recently there have been various articles posted on A, B, and C (and especially A).  While such articles in the mainstream press don’t provide much in the way of concrete evidence, they often give sympathetic views of such speculations.  Nothing wrong with being open minded.  And even if we’re a long way from real evidence on the table, the ideas are interesting and provocative, and likely to attract readers.  Nothing much wrong with that either.

But there is evidence on D.  You can find some papers published in refereed journals here.  Skeptic Richard Wiseman has even admitted that by the conventional standards, some forms of telepathy could be accepted as real..  (However, Wiseman doesn’t believe that such phenomenon should be held to merely conventional standards.) So how does the mainstream press handle that one?

David Metcalfe and Dean Radin have recently posted an interesting recent case on their blogs.  They reference a recent study conducted at the University of Melbourne examining people’s ability to process certain types of perceptions that occurred below their threshold of immediate awareness.  For example, the reactions of participants who were asked questions about pictures when certain details in the background were changed.  The authors of the paper speculated that the results could give some insight into people who believe they are experiencing a sixth sense.

However, as Metcalfe and Radin note, the authors did not attempt to test anything like anomalous transfer of information (like telepathy).  They did not cite any of that literature.  Whatever its merits, the study does not tell us anything about the extant literature on such examples of psi as ganzfeld, card guessing, or dream telepathy.

Yet this seems to be cited all over the place as (yet another) demonstration that ESP is pure bunk.  Here is an example in  National Geographic by Susan Brink.  She even posts a picture of Dr. Rhine of Duke University who famously conducted ESP card experiments, as if the study at University of Melbourne had something to do with Rhine.  George Dvorsky at io9 does the same thing with headline that says: "Breaking: ESP still bullshit, say scientists."   Here’s a video at Discovery News, again pushing the conclusion that this study means claims of ESP is bunk.

As one of the commenters at io9 put it, citing this study as evidence against ESP "amounts to saying there are no UFOs because some can be ascribed to aircraft lights."

You can see here how this ripples across multiple websites.  It’s as if everyone’s just cutting and pasting each other without bothering much to read the article or think about it too much.

It’s so interesting.  There appears to be a lot of hostility across the web for claims for telepathy, as well as ignorance of the research.  In much of mainstream media, the bar for matters of psi appear to be absurdly high.  But for the other topics, such as multiple universes, not so much.

What gives?  What’s the answer here?

Does Artificial Intelligence Mean the End is Near?

            

            Will artificial intelligence mean the end of humanity someday?  That’s the rather speculative argument in Matt Miller's Washington Post column last month.  Miller suggests that indeed many of our brightest technological gurus are arguing that computer intelligence is on the cusp of surpassing our own.  He takes his main case from Ray Kurzweil, the best known promoter of the Singularity, when computers are powerful enough to blend in with our own and forever change our nature. Lately a number of columns have sprouted, that suggest that the truly eventful, if not terrifying, technological change in our time will be the shift when computers become truly intelligent.    Blogger Kevin Drum echoed similar ideas similar ideas just the other day.

Kurzweil, the most famous and well-known technological seer embraces Turing’s argument that while we cannot be sure that computer’s will one day be sentient, the question will fade in importance once the power of computers enable them to perform any task we can, including creating art and novels.   Miller, rather early in his column poses the question:  “What happens when we share the planet with self-aware, self-improving machines that evolve beyond our ability to control or understand?  Are we creating machines that are destined to destroy us?"

Well, let’s slow down and pause on the vision of Terminators offing humanity.  Asking what happens with machines become self-aware is kind of  like asking what happens when we eventually invent a time machine where we can go back in time and enable white supremacists to give Hitler the bomb.   Why aren’t we worried about that?  Well, while it might work as a plot for science fiction, there is nothing we know from physics that suggests that’s remotely possible.  And similarly, there is nothing in physics that suggests that computers will one day soon be sentient.

            I doubt that these authors (and even Kurzweil) believe that their current desktop computers are sentient.  Yet these use fundamentally the same technologies as those in Alan Turing’s day.  They are much faster and hold much more data, to be sure.  And of course there is much more interconnectivity between computers today, ranging from your desktop to your cellphone to the webservers that create the internet.  When you ask Siri on your iphone for directions to a nearby coffeeshop, it can even seem like an intelligent entity is giving you directions.  But the Apple engineers who designed Siri do not argue that Siri is sentient in the least.  Not even a little sentient. 

            The only way computers will someday experience true sentience is if a radical new technology is developed and implemented that is currently nowhere on the books.  That is, no one truly has any idea how consciousness emerges from matter.  This is what philosophers of mind call the Hard Problem of consciousness.  Nothing in the laws of physics as we know them today suggests how vast, complex collections of non-conscious particles can somehow become conscious.  Computers are becoming more powerful tools.  One day soon, we might have sophisticated robots that seem intelligent.  However, they will not be any more truly sentient than Siri. 

            Computers will continue to advance and become more powerful tools that chance our world in profound ways.  This is an important trend that does justify much careful thought.  But computers will not be writing plays that rival Shakespeare because, among many reasons, they do not possess emotion.  And that’s because they do not and cannot experience anything.

UPDATE: Well, robots may not become sentient, but they are advancing.  In South Korea, they will soon have their own themepark!!  Check it out!

            

The Burning Question of our Time

When will we find the answer?

Chinese Medicine, Pseudoscience, and the Demarcation Problem

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times posted something of a debate concerning Chinese medicine in its Stone philosophy series.  At issue was whether Chinese medicine, with it's references to "qi" and use of acupuncture, can be taken seriously as science.  And both columns took the opportunity to discuss the demarcation problem in philosophy, which is concerned with distinguishing between science and pseudoscience.  The first was a column by Stephen Asma who offered a rather cautious, neutral take on Chinese medicine.  He testified that his experience with acupuncture suggested that it was effective, but he also doubted that a theory based on the force called qi, which no one has observed, could be made into a rigorous scientific theory.  Asma ended his essay speculating that many people take a pragmatic approach in health matters, following some methods that seemed to work but where the science was uncertain, and that might not be all bad.

Authors Massimo Pigliucci and Martin Boudry responded to this in their column The Dangers of Pseudoscience.  They sharply criticize Asma's relatively balanced take as well as his argument that the demarcation problem is rather murky.  They have a good deal to say about the danger of using alternative medicines or sham treatments: "Most importantly, pseudo-medical treatments often do not work, or are even positively harmful. If you take folk herbal “remedies,” for instance, while your body is fighting a serious infection, you may suffer severe, even fatal, consequences."

Unfortunately, Pigliucci and Boudry do not consider the cost of ignoring the possible benefits of alternative methods such as acupuncture might have over more conventional medicines.  After all, acupuncture is far cheaper and considerably less likely to result in complications or side effects.

More revealing perhaps is that to make their case that acupuncture has dubious benefits, they cite a recent study that appears to demonstrate that needles applied at random places are just as effective as acupuncture.  However, in the study's conclusion, the authors acknowledge "The study is limited by the number of patients lost to follow-up. We also cannot exclude the possibility that a more intensive treatment regimen may be more effective."  The fact that the authors needed to include a caveat on their findings suggests that it perhaps is not the strongest piece of evidence to make a good case.   On the other hand, a simple google search will reveal meta-studies (such as this one)  that demonstrate acupuncture is more effective than sham treatments with statistical significance.

In other words, the evidence suggests that acupuncture as an effective treatment has not been falsified, at least for some areas of treatment such as back pain.  This does not prove that there really is a system of meridians carrying qi energy, as Chinese medicine argues.  But at the moment it looks like something is happening that our current scientific understanding cannot account for. 

In their eagerness to dismiss even the possibility that acupuncture works, Pigliucci and Boudry reveal a bias that's arguably common among many contemporary scientists and philosophers.  In the process they overlook the possibility that something outside the more orthodox view seems to be working.  What would Karl Popper say to that?

UPDATE:  The Economist recently has an article that looks at the replication problem for many fields, especially medical research.  The article, Trouble in the Lab, provides important context in the science versus pseudoscience debate.  Some of the numbers are genuinely shocking.  For example

A few years ago scientists at Amgen, an American drug company, tried to replicate 53 studies that they considered landmarks in the basic science of cancer, often co-operating closely with the original researchers to ensure that their experimental technique matched the one used first time round. According to a piece they wrote last year in Nature, a leading scientific journal, they were able to reproduce the original results in just six. Months earlier Florian Prinz and his colleagues at Bayer HealthCare, a German pharmaceutical giant, reported in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, a sister journal, that they had successfully reproduced the published results in just a quarter of 67 seminal studies.

The essay goes on to give other examples of failures to replicate and discusses some of the reasons why. It's important context to remember whenever someone is throwing around arguments about the rigorous superiority of orthodox Western medicine over the alternatives.

Here is an interesting clip with the Alex Grey, famous for paintings that have been influenced by his psychedelic experiences.  Daniel Pinchbeck asks to describe how such experiences have influenced his thoughts on a "divine intelligence."  Here is an excerpt from his answer.

“Infinite terrain of an inner world and an equally deep and profound connection with what feels like source reality….And divine intelligence exists.  It’s basis is love and you are an emanation of one node of an infinitely one intelligence.  And so you have a sense of that without speaking, and yet suddenly you have a sense of knowing, an apprehension that transcends even your life.” 

Check out the whole interview from Pinchbeck's Mindshift.

Stephen Pinker and Scientism

Recently Stephen Pinker wrote a something of a defense of scientism as well as a plea for the humanities to be more embracing of science.  The piece has received quite a bit of attention, mostly critical.

Like many scientists, and especially evolutionary biologists, Pinker believes that the best thing that professors in the humanities and historians could do for themselves is embrace all aspects of science.  Hard to argue with that, I suppose.  Of course, as Pinker notes, there has been something of a strained relationship between science (or at least the hard sciences) and humanities.  No doubt there are many aspects to the debate on the merits of embracing scientism.

For me, there is an important piece that's been missing from the debate.  Scientists and most philosophers (and perhaps most scholars in the humanities) embrace the consensus on evolution.  (Recently there was something of a dustup in the reaction to Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos, where he argues that a purely materialistic explanation of evolution might not suffice to explain things like consciousness, morality, and cognition.  Nagel was taken to the woodshed by Pinker and his allies. However  Nagel has recently responded somewhat.)  So Pinker and others believe everything in our culture can pretty much be explained (more or less) by contemporary theories of evolution.

I'm not exactly a scholar in the humanities, (most of my training has been in engineering and economics) but here is a question I'd like to post to Professor Pinker.  Arguably, one of the most important observations about human beings, if not the most important observation, is that over the centuries we have spent the vast majority of our free time (when we were not hunting or warring) reading, singing, and creating the arts.  After all, what is it that we value most about our ancestor civilizations?  Architecture, poetry, plays, novels, art, myths, and yes, religions.  And while the mediums and technologies may have changed, today we enjoy similar activities.  I would bet serious money that Pinker enjoys movies, television, or novels like the rest of us.  And what does all this mean?  Well....it means there are thousands of years of evidence that we (and our ancestors) seek activities where we experience something like a deeper meaning to comprehend our existence.  Could it be, perhaps, that we are wired to seek out such meaning creating activities?

If so, how do purely materialistic explanations of evolution account for this?  Why would selfish genes or other drivers on the molecular level lead us toward such efforts at transcendence?  I realize, I'm not citing data taken out of a laboratory.  On the other hand, I claim that thousands of years of ubiquitous human activity is far more important than the data usually bandied about by evolutionary psychologists.

In my view, it's a real puzzle.  And it may be just a bit premature to toss aside Nagel's arguments as nonsense.