"Post-fact" Foolishness

             I came across a "Guest Blog" in Scientific American that fully exposes a certain utter foolishness about science and facts that I have been thinking about lately.  The blog is titled "I'm a Scientist, and I Don't Believe in Facts", written by Julia Shaw, December 16, 2016.  Dr. Shaw is (or was?) a Research Associate at University College London.  She has written a book called The Memory Illusion about how unreliable our memories really are.  Fair enough - my memory is terrible!  But, anyway, her blog is about how, as she says, "facts are so last-century."  Here are a few comments - condensed a bit from the blog:

 

"I’m a factual relativist. I abandoned the idea of facts and “the truth"... much like Santa Claus and unicorns, facts don’t actually exist."

 

"We think of a fact as an irrefutable truth. According to the Oxford dictionary, a fact is “a thing that is known or proved to be true.” And where does proof come from? Science?"

 

"...science [is] inherently self-critical and self-correcting. ... Scientists want to know more, always. And, lucky for them, there is always more to know."

 

"...let’s make it our job as a society to encourage each other to find replicable and falsifiable evidence to support our views, and to logically argue our positions. In the process, please stop saying “because, science” to justify your argument, and using “FACT” as a preface to your statements. These are just the grown-up versions of “because I said so.” "

 

             First, I think one point that she is making, which is that science doesn't deal in facts but rather probabilities (because everything is science is subject to testing and refutation), is something I basically agree with.  If you accept the concept that the critical aspect of scientific theories is that they must be falsifiable, then you can't ever achieve 100% certainty.  Something that is 100% certain is no longer falsifiable.  Of course, there are theories in science that have so much evidence that even skeptical scientists treat them as if they were certain.  But, if you cornered them, they'd admit that they are just "99.9% certain" of any particular theory.  If that was the only point that Dr. Shaw was trying to make, then that would be fine - boring but fine. 

             However, she does not stop with the simple principle that science is falsifiable.  Instead she makes statements such as "facts don't actually exist."  To me, that is embarrassingly sophomoric.  Yet another example of scientists thinking that, since they are trained in the "hard sciences", they are allowed to declare themselves experts in all things.  Philosophy?  History? Ethics?  Apparently a PhD in neuroscience qualifies you as an expert in all fields.  But, ok, that's really not that big of a deal.  We all do that.  I write a blog about things I shouldn't be qualified to write about.  But it's my personal blog.  This was published in Scientific American, as if it had some quality to it.  That's what is embarrassing, in my opinion.

             OK, so first let's quickly state and move past the obvious fundamental act of foolishness:  is she really claiming that the statement "facts don't actually exist" is a fact?  Really?  Let's move on, though.

             A second point to observe but move on from is how Dr. Shaw acts as if science is the only possible arbiter of anything worth knowing.  She asks the rhetorical question "...where does proof come from?"  I say rhetorical because she treats it as rhetorical and gives the "obvious" answer:  science.  She is essentially saying that, of course, everyone knows that the only place you'd turn to for proof of anything is science.  What else could there be?  Well...um...that is so shockingly bigoted that it is hard to know where to start!  There is more to human experience than just science.  Even scientists have lives that are lived outside of science, whether they admit it or not.  There are whole fields of study that just might have something to say about truth - like philosophy and sociology and ethics and so on.  And that's ignoring religion, which has a lot to say about truth.  Humans have all sorts of experiences, such as love and grief, joy and sorrow, irony and irony, that are not grounded in science.  Is it certain that truth is not to be found in those experiences?  Ask the poets and songwriters.  I guess it would be one thing if Dr. Shaw acknowledged that there might be other fields that would have something to say about truth, but then discuss the reasons she rejects them all.  But she does not do that.  She poses a rhetorical question with a single clear answer.  The audacity and pride and, frankly, complete blindness of scientists to think that science is the only real field of study, and that all other fields are irrelevant to any discussion on truth, is shocking.  Except that it is common.  Even non-scientists are taken in by it.  But...even this issue is not the main problem with this blog!

             The fundamental foolishness perpetrated in this blog is the main point:  there is no such thing as a fact.  There is no such thing as truth.  You can't know anything for certain. 

             She seems rather certain about that!

             It is reasonable to argue that statements about the natural world made in the realm of science might not be considered "facts" in the sense that, if everything in science must be falsifiable, then we can't know it with 100% certainty.  That's a very robot-like definition of facts.  But it's not unreasonable to consider that line of reasoning if the discussion is confined to science.  But I know lots of facts that sit outside of science.  And I know them with 100% certainty.  You do to.

             I will take one example of a fact I know:

 

             It is morally wrong to kill a one-year-old child just because you're tired of the child being around.

 

             I know this with 100% certainty.  It is a fact.  And it's not just a fact for me.  It is a fact for every human being that is living now, has lived in the past, or ever will live in the future.  It was a fact even for societies that practiced child sacrifice.  In fact, even if some society in the future passes a law saying it is "legal", it still remains a fact that it is morally wrong. 

             That's one fact.  So facts do exist.  There's a second fact!

             There are, of course, an infinite set of such statements.  Some we would all agree on (like the statement above, I hope!) and some we would disagree on.  But even with the statements we disagree on, we would all accept that our view is a fact, not an opinion.  Take abortion, for example.  We don't say to ourselves "there's probably a middle ground that we will figure out in the future."  No - to some, "abortion is wrong", is a fact.  To some, "abortion is a woman's right", is a fact.  Of course we call the other side's view an "opinion."  But we also say that their opinion is false.  But just because we disagree on something does not mean that there is not a morally right answer that is a fact.  Slavery was wrong and it doesn't matter if some in the past thought it was acceptable.  Even if a majority of people thought it was right, it does not change the fact that it was, and is, wrong to enslave other human beings against their will. 

             There are more facts that I know.  Justice is good.  Injustice is wrong.  It is wrong to make fun of someone because of their appearance.  It is good to try to help people in need.  Everything is not relative.  There are absolutes, and they are absolute truths in every sense of the word absolute.

             No, Dr. Shaw, facts are not at all like Santa Claus and unicorns.  Facts do exist.  We encounter them constantly in our everyday lives.  By the way, is the statement "unicorns do not exist" a fact?

             If you are such a relativist that you cannot bring yourself to admit that the statement about the immorality of killing a one-year-old is a fact, then just consider the corner you have painted yourself into.  Do you seriously believe that, sometime in the future, we might realize that it is actually fine to kill one-year-old children so they aren't a bother anymore?  If you find yourself defending such an indefensible position, I suggest re-thinking your life philosophy.  Somewhere you've gone off the tracks.  That's also a fact.

 

13. Does the flesh change at conversion?

Linkage:  This is part of the study "Scriptural View of the Body, Soul and Spirit".  You should read that Introduction first.

 

Quick Answer:  No - and that's what makes living the Christian life such a challenge!

 

Key Passage:

             Rom 7:18  "...in my <sarx> dwelleth no good thing."  If you believe, as I do, that Romans 7 is describing the Christian experience from the perspective of someone who is a Christian, then this passage is clear:  the flesh does not change at conversion.  It cannot change.  It is material.  Note that the "body" (i.e. <soma>) is not the same as "flesh" (<sarx>) - (see discussion here).  To be very specific on this point:  the molecules in the brain (or elsewhere in the body) are not changed at the point of conversion.  Conversion changes our whole "us", and changes our destiny, but we are much more than flesh.  The flesh is certainly impacted by our conversion because the flesh is impacted by our <psuche-pneuma>. 

             I Pet 2:11 "...abstain from sinful <sarkikos> desires, which wage war against your soul <psuche>."  Our flesh just pursues self-preservation and pleasure.  It is inherently selfish.  To live the Christian life, we must be selfless.  Thus it is a full out war.

 

Caveat:

             I Cor 6:13-20  Even if the flesh does not change, this does not mean that Christians can just ignore the flesh and say "oh well - that's just the flesh doing it."  We are responsible for our flesh and our flesh is part of us as long as we are alive as material human beings.  We cannot escape that.  Though Jesus taught us to see that the spiritual was of prime importance, He did not ignore the flesh or ever say it was of no account.  He just kept the flesh and the physical world in its rightful place.  This is why the practice of spiritual disciplines is useful.  These disciplines build habits into our flesh that allow us to live the Christian life easier. 

 

Related Scriptures and Thoughts:

             Phil 3:3  "...we worship God in the <pneuma>…no confidence in the <sarx>."  There is no confidence that the <sarx> can serve God. 

             I Thes 5:23  "I pray God your whole <pneuma> and <psuche> and <soma> be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ."  Paul does not use <sarx> here, and if <soma> means "container of you" (see here), then this verse makes sense.

             Ro 2:29 "No, a man is a Jew if he is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code. Such a man's praise is not from men, but from God."  This seems pretty clear that salvation affects the <psuche-pneuma> - the inward man.  The law is outward.  It has to do with the things the flesh does.  And if our flesh could keep the law, then we would have been justified through it.  But it does not and it cannot.  Only death releases us from the flesh - that is the only way to get rid of the body of death.

 

Discussion:

             From a scientific perspective, the point is this:  if you could have a measure of the status of all the molecules of the body of someone as they become a believer in Jesus Christ, you would not necessarily detect some instantaneous difference.  However, the mind is transformed - our perspective on everything is different - and thus the patterns of thinking in the mind are transformed.  There might be a difference in the pattern of neural firing in the brain of a Christian, but that is an effect that generally takes some time.

             The composition of the Christian brain or the Christian flesh is the same as the composition of the brain and flesh of any other person.  If we could measure the status of the <psuche-pneuma>, the story would be different and we would expect to see changes at, and beyond, conversion.  Further, we expect that changes in the <psuche-pneuma> should "work their way out" in our flesh and become evident over time.  Christians should live a transformed life.  Christians should not be using the flesh as an excuse for bad behavior.  Sin is still sin.  When Christians sin, it is a stain to the reputation of Christ and it should not happen. 

             I can imagine that, at some point in the future, scientists might discover neurons, or subcomponents of neurons, that appear to be influenced by some outside force.  But science will not consider this to be evidence of the soul because the soul is not material.  Instead, I think the hypothesis will be that the influence is due to something material, like electromagnetic waves.  This whole concept is explored in a lot more detail in my series on "Theory of the soul."

             My goal in this series of entries on the "Body, Soul, and Spirit" is to help Christians see where their beliefs begin and end, and where science begins and ends with respect to this topic.  In this case, the two areas do not mesh.  Christian belief rests heavily on the concept of a soul-spirit in every human being.  Conversion happens in the soul-spirit.  Science can only look and observe the material world, and thus will always only see the flesh.  The tools of science are not designed to detect anything non-material (i.e. spiritual).  If science ever claims that there is no soul, it is clearly out of bounds. 

Consciousness, Free Will, and the Orchestra

             In the world of science - neuroscience in particular - there is something called the "hard problem of consciousness."  I love that phrasing.  It's called a "hard problem" because we can't explain it and, frankly, if you've tried to read Roger Penrose's "Shadows of the Mind", you realize that we don't even know where to start.  There isn't really even a field of study in which to place consciousness.  Will it be answered from the field of biology?  Physics?  Metaphysics?  We don't even know if it belongs in the hard sciences or liberal arts.  It really is a hard problem!  In fact, we can't even come up with a good definition of consciousness, even though we all experience it.  Consciousness is defined as "awareness of existence."  Great.  What is "awareness"?  "Awareness" is defined as the "state of being conscious of something."  That's a textbook example of a circular definition.  We don't know how to define it and we don't know where to study it.  So, yes, consciousness really is a "hard problem"!

             However, to me, consciousness is just one side of the issue.  The other side is our ability to make decisions - what some of us would refer to as our "free will."  I have discussed free will in other entries, so I am not focusing on that here, except to say one thing:  compared to the problem of free will, consciousness is easy!!  Free will is an 11 on the Mohs scale.

             Just one more thing:  in my view, consciousness and free will are two aspects of the same thing.  Consciousness correlates to the "sensory" system and free will correlates to the "motor" system.  Consciousness is an input.  Free will is an output.  To go further, since I hypothesize that consciousness and free will reside in the "soul-spirit" (or the Greek "psuche-pneuma" - see here for general discussion), consciousness is the part of the soul-spirit that is acted upon by the physical brain (senses the brain's status) and free will is the part of the soul-spirit that acts upon the physical brain.

             I said all that to say this:  I'm proposing using the idea of an orchestra as an analogy to consider the mind/brain/soul/consciousness/free will problem.  With this analogy, I hope to show that consciousness and free will cannot be physical, material structures in the way we currently classify things as being material. 

             For starters in this analogy, let's correlate each musician in the orchestra with a neuron.  Of course there are a lot more neurons in the brain than musicians in an orchestra.  So you have to imagine a really huge orchestra and an incredible array of instruments.  Some instruments play very few notes - like specialized percussion instruments.  Other instruments are like violins - almost always playing.  But each musician is primarily responsible for their own instrument.  In the brain, neurons may have an effect on other neurons and multiple organs.  In a very loose way, each musician is affected by the musicians around them.  If they play faster or slower or so on, they can be influenced in a way that might affect their play.  Granted, it's not a perfect analogy:  orchestras lack "feedback loops" and "reflexes" and other features of the nervous system.  And a musician is, of course, much more complex than a single neuron and maybe each musician should be thought of as more of a network of neurons.  But, really, that's not the point of this analogy.

             As described so far, the orchestra can function pretty well - especially if it is composed of a group of well-trained musicians - and this is analogous to the brain.  The instruments are the neural signals - the action potentials of each neuron or the aggregate action potentials of each neural circuit.  The orchestra is a self-contained unit just like the brain is a self-contained unit.  If you have an instrument that measures sound alone, you will only measure the results of what each musician does - the sound that comes out of each instrument.  In the same way, if all you have are measures of neuronal activity - voltage or metabolic measures - then all you will see is the neural activity.  When we record brain activity, we are listening in on each musician or each section of musicians to hear the music they are playing.  By listening in on different areas of the brain, we hope to assemble the entire "score" that is being played.

 

             But there are two things missing:  one is obvious and you probably know what I'm going to say.  The other is even more obvious, so obvious that you might not think of it.  These two things are:  1) the Conductor and 2) the Listener - the audience.

             First, let's consider the Listener.  The Listener represents, in this analogy, the consciousness of the soul.  Of course you don't have to have any listeners for an orchestra to function.  But what is the point of an orchestra if no one is listening?  Actually, though, you do have to have at least one Listener:  the Conductor.  A deaf, blind, and insensate conductor would not be able to conduct.  Even if no one else is listening, at the very least the Conductor is listening.

             Note that only the Listener hears the whole orchestra (assuming they are in a room with good acoustics).  Each musician hears the musicians around them, and probably focuses in to certain sounds (like the percussion), but they really are not sitting back and listening to appreciate the music as a whole.  It is kind of hard for an individual musician to hear everything being played (especially since, as you recall, we are talking about a really really huge orchestra), and they naturally "tune out" some sounds in order to concentrate on what they are playing.  In general, they hear their own instrument and the instruments of those around them much more intensely than anything else.  Their attention is focused on what they have to play.  But the Listener is generally listening to the entire combined sound of the orchestra.  What the Listener hears is not just a single, combined output.  For example, the Listener doesn't just hear a homogenous sound that increases or decreases in volume alone.  No, the Listener hears a richness of many different components:  volume, pitch, harmonics, beat, etc.  The components - the instruments - are all there in what the Listener hears.  They hear the whole musical piece.

             The thing about our consciousness is that we are aware of the states of multiple neurons in our brain at the same instant in time and that awareness is updated with each passing instant in time.  At each successive moment, we are tracking the status of millions of neurons.  Usually, we are just listening to the entire orchestra, although we do have the ability to "tune out" portions of our sensory inputs and concentrate on a small part of what is happening around us.  The Listener also has memory and may have a memory of familiar passages in a musical piece.  The Listener can be moved to emotions through those passages of music.  These are all characteristics of our consciousness.  Again, the analogy is not perfect, but I think it can be instructive.

             The lack of a "Listener" in the physical brain is, to me, one of the major problems confronting the idea of consciousness as a physical entity that resides in the brain.  There is nothing that physically connects all of our neurons to a single, unified point - no "Organ of Listening."  Of course there are many neurons that have electrical connections to a huge number of other neurons throughout the brain.  But a single neuron does not contain signals that can fully represent the richness of the conscious sensations we feel.  A neuron, fundamentally, either outputs an action potential or it doesn't.  A neuron is simply binary in that manner.  Even if we allow for the variation in excitatory potentials as some kind of continuum over a range, we are still left with just a single value (voltage) that is, fundamentally, discrete and cannot provide anywhere near the richness of our conscious experience.  Our conscious experience is composed of the activity of many many neurons simultaneously.  But there is no physical anatomical structure that makes such a connection.  There is nothing physical in the brain that is like a recording array, picking up the electrical signals from a large ensemble of neurons and then displaying them on a screen to be appreciated in aggregate...or, related to our proposed analogy:  converting the neuronal spikes into sounds for someone to listen to.  There is nothing in the brain (physical) that is like a PET scan, which can show neural activity across the entire brain.  There is no "uber-neuron" that is simultaneously aware of all of the states of the other neurons in the brain.  Even if there were such a neuron, it could not maintain the richness of the input because all a neuron can experience is the summation of all inputs into a single voltage level.  The anatomy is clear.  We've dissected lots of brains to trace the anatomy and there is no "Listener" in the brain - at least no listener made of a material substance. 

             I think I need to diverge here and give another analogy:  numbers.  Consider a series of numbers:  say 6, 2, 55, 17, 8.  If you sum these numbers together you get 88.  Our consciousness experiences each number simultaneously and is, or can be, aware of each individual number.  A neuron only experiences a summation and thus any individual neuron can only be aware of the number 88.  These experiences are not the same.  A single "uber-neuron", no matter how connected, cannot be the seat of consciousness as we experience it.

             Now let's consider the Conductor in our analogy.  The Conductor represents the will of the soul.  The will of our soul is our intention to carry out decisions.  It is our free will.  It is our moral decision-making.  It is our conscience.  The conductor directs the entire orchestra, but does not play a single instrument and does not make a sound.  As a listener, you don't (at least not normally!) hear the conductor.  If you closed your eyes and listened, you would not know there is a conductor.  And yet, we afford the conductor a lot of credit for how the orchestra plays.  Of course, a lot of credit is based on what we imagine the conductor did during the practices for the performance.  But, in a good orchestra, each musician will be primarily focused in on the conductor even during the performance.  A good musician will not be affected by a sudden poor, off-beat, off-key note of the musician next to them - they will have a laser-focus on the conductor and will keep playing properly despite what is going on around them.

             However, despite the importance we place on the conductor, the orchestra can function without the conductor.  In fact, when well-trained, an observer (listener) might not know whether the conductor is there or not.  I hypothesize that this is very analogous to our brain function.  The neurons respond to inputs and create outputs via habits and learned responses and reflex loops and complicated networks and so on.  The brain can create all sorts of music without being told what to do.  It can run open-loop - i.e. apart from the soul...apart from the will...apart from the conscience.  I believe we were made to be tightly linked to our conscience just like the orchestra should be tightly linked to their conductor, but it surely is not always the case.  A musician may decide to play whatever they feel like playing and it might sound beautiful in isolation.  However, it is not what the conductor wants and is not what the listener is expecting to hear. 

             The point of this analogy is that the Conductor is not in control of an orchestra in the same way that a driver is in control of a car.  A lot can happen in an orchestra without the conductor being involved.  If this analogy is in any way correct, it explains why the "Conductor" or "soul" would very hard to detect.  If you listen to a piece of music, how can you tell if the conductor is there or not?  If the orchestra is well-trained, actually, even if it isn't...how do you know if a musician is focused in on the conductor or not - especially if you don't know what the conductor is wanting the musician to do?  By analogy, this is why it would be so hard to measure, in the physical world, the impact of the soul on the neurons in the brain.  How do you know when a neuron is "looking up at the conductor" for direction and when it is just playing its well-practiced music?  I suppose the best chance we have of detecting this effect would be during learning, but even then it would be very difficult.  Most learning is still primarily based on physical sensory inputs and feedback.  The soul probably has the biggest impact on moral learning, but that type of learning must be very subtle and rarely occurs in some concentrated training session. I don't know if it would ever be possible to directly measure this influence [see discussion here].

             With respect to the "Listener" part of the soul (i.e., what I say is analogous to consciousness):  you would never detect the existence of a Listener.  Ironically, the only way to try to detect such a thing is to be the Listener yourself.  But the Listener doesn't change the music.  So you may be conscious, but you could never measure the presence of the conscious "Listener" if you are just listening to the sounds of each musician or even if you make a scan of the whole brain.  The conscious soul...the "sensory" part...has no effect on the physical brain.  The Listener leaves no trace.  It would be like standing at a radio transmission tower and trying to figure out if anyone is listening to the radio station being broadcast.  How could you ever know?

             Finally, I just want to say one thing about brain damage and the soul.  Some argue that the fact that people's personality can change as a result of brain damage - a stroke or head injury or so on - is proof that the "soul" is not spiritual but rather is physical and resides in the material properties of the brain.  I hope that the orchestra analogy helps to understand how brain damage relates to the soul.  If a musician starts playing badly...or quits playing altogether...then the music will surely sound different.  But that has nothing to do with whether there is a conductor or a listener. We are listening (when we measure the brain or interact with a person) to the orchestra - we are not listening to the conductor.  Whether an orchestra is bad or good has nothing to do with the existence of a conductor.  The greatest conductor in the world, when conducting a group of fifth-graders who would rather be in recess, will produce music that will sound horrible.  That doesn't mean that the conductor doesn't exist or is bad.  Of course brain damage affects a person's personality and what they do.  But that does not negate the existence of their soul.

             No analogy is perfect of course, and one of the problems with my orchestra analogy is that it is kind of circular.  By that I mean that I am illustrating the mind-body problem by introducing a bunch of mind-bodies into the analogy.  The analogy includes musicians, conductors, and listeners, all of whom have their own minds and, presumably, their own souls.  We are using souls to illustrate souls, so does the analogy really help us?  All I can say is that the analogy has helped me to imagine how, and under what circumstances, the soul might be apparent and why it is so difficult to detect the activity of the soul.  Maybe it is not helpful for anyone else.  But the soul is not like anything we encounter in the physical, material world so it is hard to come up with an analogy of the soul that uses only material things.  Ultimately, the only thing like a soul is...another soul!