B. Alan Wallace and his Criticism of Skeptics

Hi, I hope you've all had a good weekend. It was my birthday over the weekend and I had a pretty good time, but at the same time found something I had to post about. Criticism of skeptics always interests me, whether it is someone saying that they aren't open minded or that they are really denialists, but B. Alan Wallace takes aim at skeptics 'faith' in what science has already proven. A quote from him that he used on Skeptico episode 23, is that, " They [skeptics] are skeptical of other things but not of their own beliefs, scientific materialists are as skeptical as religious fundamentalists."

Well I'm really not afraid to characterize myself as both a skeptic and a scientific materialist, given what the evidence has shown so far and as soon as some evidence, that meets the burden of proof, comes along to show that there is more than materialism to the universe than I will consider it and possibility change my opinion on the matter. Now that that is out of the way, I'll just summarize Wallace's opinion that he presents on Skeptico episode 23, and on The Skeptics Guide to the Universe Episode 73.

Wallace's main point can be summed up by the quote on the Skeptico episode 23 page where he is noted as saying, " This is what bothers me about many of the so called skeptics, they are defending the status quo, which doesn’t take a whole lot of guts frankly. They are about as skeptical as Billy Gramm.” He goes on to further say that, " The greatest impediment to scientific progress is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge, the belief that something is known."  

Before I talk about those quotes I'll just reference part of the conversation Steve Novella had with Wallace on the Skeptics Guide to the Universe, that really goes along the same lines as what has already been stated. Some parts of the conversation have been skipped and some ideas have been slimmed down, but I haven't changed the meanings of anything either person said.

Novella – No one has demonstrated the quantum effects are meaningful at the level of the brain.

Wallace – I thought you folks were skeptics and you should be skeptical of that point.

Wallace – You demonstrated a complete lack of skepticism when you said that we know that quantum mechanics doesn’t play a part in brain function.

Novella – I did not say that. I said so far no one has demonstrated that quantum mechanics have any effect on brain function. There are no mysteries that we need to go beyond the brain model to solve.

Wallace – I find that profoundly unskeptical.

Novella – It’s not unskeptical. What’s the mystery?

Wallace – I’ll go back a bit and you call tell me what demonstrates an equivalent rather than a causal relationship between brain function and subjective experience.  

Novella – That is inappropriately shifting the burden. Can you show me an example where consciousness can exist outside of brain function?

The topic then is shifted, and gets more in depth about brain function and I encourage it to be listened to but those are the points I really want to talk about. 

What is really telling from the summation of what Wallace has said is that he has either taken the view that 1. That the past evidence doesn't mean anything or 2. That people should surround themselves in hyperbolic doubt rather than a reasonable level of doubt. 

I say this because with 1. he can write off the fact that Steve Novella asks him constantly about evidence and he either changes the subject or fails to provide that evidence, but still holds his view. This first position would also allow him to say you aren't being skeptical, not questioning that idea, because the evidence for that idea is besides the point for Wallace. No amount of evidence would convince Wallace of anything.

Which really leads into the second point that Wallace may live in a world of the hyperbolic doubt described by Descartes. This means that it is possible that everything we know is wrong and you really can't trust anything, so any beliefs you come to are just as likely to be true. 

The problem with either Wallace view is that science has been able to make predictions about the future, and has proven to be reliable enough to put trust into. Evidence does matter and hyperbolic doubt isn't necessary. This is not trust in any individual scientist, but trust in scientific consensus and the methods of science.  

That leaves Wallace's criticism that skeptics aren't being skeptical of scientific evidence, really without warrant. Skeptics have found the most reliable knowledge and method and have taken that as a starting point. They can still doubt science, especially where there is some controversy between the results/interpretation of results, but they don't have to have hyperbolic doubt about every fact just like people trust gravity by not leaving their homes via the window.

This is where I'd just like to make one point through an example with the use of evolution. A person can look at the topic of evolution and either believe that all the evidence is wrong for or has been misinterpreted by many different fields for evolution; They are in the midst of a conspiracy of gigantic proportions to convince people of evolution, or they can hold the view that what all the evidence points to seems to be consistent and able to make sense of all the given information. One view just seems more reasonable to me than the other. There is no reason to seriously doubt evolution given what is known today and to suggest that people aren't being skeptical if they don't doubt evolution doesn't follow. They have already taken a look into the issue and made a decision based on evidence, as any good skeptic should.

Thanks for reading

-The moral skeptic 

The Burden of Proof: And how it Applies to Near Death Experiences

Hi, I apologize for the delay in making a new post, but I want to keep the quality as high as possible. That is to say I need both to have well thought out ideas, and to have the motivation/time to write something intelligible and hopefully thought provoking. I will be able to do that on the subject of the burden of proof. I'll start by explaining the burden of proof, and demonstrating its importance then I'll give an example of its misuse through an article on near death experiences.

The burden of proof is an idea that has a great importance in argumentation, but is rarely mentioned. This is unusually because either both participants understand the concept, or don't understand it at all, which, in either case, causes it not to be brought up.

The burden of proof is simply the understanding that if you are going to make a statement about something that you can support that statement and it goes a little further to say that if you are going to say something that isn't a well established fact or interpretation then your going to have to provide evidence that what you are saying can be established by something. It's like citing a study in an essay, which isn't just done to give credit where credit is due, but to also lend credence to the interpretation being brought up.

The importance of the burden of proof means that argumentation is inherently biased agianst new ideas/interpretations, but that is a good thing. There are a few reasons why this bias is good and I will point out a couple of those reasons.

1. The Coherence Factor: This is idea that the knowledge base that is made up of a majority of data that is coherent with each other, biology works with chemistry and chemistry works with physics which is consistent with cosmology.... so when a new idea is brought up it, it has a higher standard to meet. This doesn't mean that the information has to fit with what we already know, but that the burden of proof for things is on a sliding scale, with a minimum point of proof. The minimum is that the test has to be falsifiable and repeatable (This can simply mean that anyone can look up the quote you were talking about or that someone can do the test that is being referenced). Tests that find something coherent with all the other information just have to meet the minimum standard for the most part, while something outlandish has to meet a higher standard due to its incoherence.

This idea can be shown by someone referencing different quotes. Take for instance someone trying to make the argument that Einstein believed in a Christian God, and references the quote that "God doesn't play dice." That quote meets the minimum standard, it can be looked up and attributed to Einstein, but because it is inconstant with other Einstein quotes and known beliefs it requires more to back it up and to show that the quote can be used to mean that he believes in a Christian God. Counter that with someone saying that Oral Roberts said he, "Saw a 900 foot Jesus." Given the constancy with his beliefs that quote doesn't need nearly the same support. It can just be accepted by the minimum standard.

2. The Inability to Disprove a Negative: This problem can be easily demonstrated. If I was to argue, a la Bertrand Russel, that there was a tea cup in space between Earth and Mars, but it couldn't be seen because it was too small, it would be an unfalsifiable argument. There is no way to prove that there isn't a teacup between the Earth and Mars, but that doesn't make it true nor does it count as evidence for it. Someone once argued with me that a group of people in the past had a technology (I forget what it was), that couldn't be archeologically verified. Well that's good, but through that line of thinking I could say the same thing about the Dinosaurs. The point is that because you can't show that something that has no evidence to be false, the burden is on you to provide evidence for what you are trying to say.

When those two rules are understood it really creates a bias against new ideas, but it is a fair bias. This can be shown with how people use the evidence to support the notion that Near Death Experiences point to a dualist brain/person distinction. I'll talk about The Living Dead article from the Times Online which can be found here, but as always I'll summarize their best points.   

The article starts out with a common setting of a NDE, someone is dieing, and they are described as clinically dead, but there brain still 'working' on some level. Then there is the white light, and you are seeing Jesus or whoever your god is and "Death, you now know with absolutely certainty, is an illusion."

The article then references the two best cases for NDE's as representing a mind body dualism,

"The two most famous cases are Pam Reynolds and Maria’s Tennis Shoe. Reynolds, an American singer, watched and later reported on with remarkable accuracy the top of her own skull being removed by surgeons before she moved into a bright glowing realm. But it was Reynolds’s account of the surgical implements used and the words spoken in the theatre that make the case so intriguing. Maria, meanwhile, underwent cardiac arrest in 1977. She floated out of her body, drifted round the hospital and noticed a tennis shoe on a window sill. It was later found to be exactly where she said it was. The shoe was said to be invisible from the ground and not in any location where Maria could have seen it."

It goes on to talk about Dr. Parnia who has attempted to prove that people are really floating above their body's through testing. Putting an image on a high place that could only be seen by someone really floating above their body. The results of these studies in the past is that not a single person has been able to identify the image that has been hidden but downplays that evidence by saying that, "In fairness, this may be because the last thing that a floating dying person, with Jesus behind him and his body being pounded in front of him, will notice is some odd picture left on a shelf."

The article then goes on to point out how universal the experience is now and has been in the past. It evokes quantum mechanics to explain why...I think quantum mechanics is the 'universal acid' of pseudoscience more then Evolution is the 'universal acid' of evolution, because it seems every pseudoscience can be supported by it. 

Getting back to the article it then says that the world is made up of two different things, thoughts and things. In comes a laughable quote that has to be included saying, "Dualism is the default human conviction, embraced by religions, philosophies and, in fact, by everybody in their lives — if we didn’t embrace some degree of it, we’d be constantly worried about crashing our cars into other people’s thoughts." Wow..... I'll have faith that I really don't have to explain why that is crazy to anyone reading this.

Anyway it goes to to define dualism by the mind body distinction. The article implicates science as being in a plot agianst dualism, where science is actively and purposefully disproving dualism. The belief that consciousness is a product of brain function is described as, "A product of faith." It supports that statement by saying that, "Neuroscientists may be able to show what happens in the brain when we think or when we exercise “free will”, but this cannot be shown to be proof that dualism is wrong." and "For all our technology, nobody has yet seen a thought, nobody has shown how matter becomes mind."

Then Henry Stapp is brought in as someone saying that quantum mechanics works just as well at the level of the large as it does at the small and the mind could be 'non local' to the brain. (I guess we don't need to find a unified theory of physics anymore!)

The article then finally mentions some skeptics and what they have to say, but concludes that, "The hard sceptics will say that this is all nonsense, that whatever happens in your head when Clooney shouts “Clear!” is just another delusion generated by the material workings of that 1.3kg bag. However, in the present state of our knowledge, this is crude and premature. We should not only wait for the results of Parnia’s experiment, we should also consider the deep weirdness of the world revealed by Stapp and quantum theory. Hard materialism is just one more philosophical position, and the authentic sceptical reaction is not a derisive snort but a humble acceptance that there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in any of our philosophies."

This is clearly someone who fails to understand the burden of proof. Science doesn't have a plot agianst dualism. No one is actively working to show that materialism is the only way to look at the world while hiding dualistic evidence, nor is it premature to say that brain function creates a person. This isn't an assumption based on premature thinking, all the evidence from drugs effecting a person's thoughts and personality to how people change when the brain is inhibited points to the brain being the area that controls consciousness. This isn't to say that dualism can be ruled out, just that it has to meet the burden of proof, the burden that is fairly biased agianst it.

Dualism, if found to be true, would shatter the common picture of the world. It would be the first instance of the non-physical working on the physical and would cause profound changes in many areas. For that reason it would have to meet the heavier burden described in 1. It also has no real evidence for it, so it is like the tea cup in 2. As soon as it begins to meet the burden of proof, then it can be talked about seriously, until then we can be crude, but not premature in saying materialism is all there is evidence for and best accounts for what we know. Materialism is rightfully the standard.


Thanks for reading,
- the moral skeptic