Misuse of language Law Belief Signaling that I am a member of the group Do Biologists "believe" in evolution like Fundamentalists don't? Ordinary "belief" depends on a structure of related inferences - "evidence" as opposed to motivated reasoning - totally linguistic. Scientific "evidence" refers to real experience. Religious "evidence" is based on philosophical reasoning (at best). "Survival of the fittest" is a circular concept. "Variation" is the mechanism of evolution. Hard to refute that variation exists... What does it mean to "believe" in God? At its base, it's a system of appeasing spirits through traditional ceremonies. If you don't believe in prayer, what kind of "God" remains? If you don't think God is active in history, are you misusing the "God" concept? Do you mean God=physics? The ground of all Being - Tillich . Video here . Is "ground of all being...

We all know what we are saying when we talk about what is meaningful to us. These are first-person statements. If the Universe is imagined as "outside" and the mind is "inside", meaning is on the "inside". Einstein remarked that he was amazed that the fundamental laws of nature are discoverable and, by the way, beautiful. There is something behind this observation that seems almost spiritual - in fact, people talk about " Einstein's God ". Wilczek asks the same question on " A Beautiful Question ". He's noting the same deep beauty Einstein is talking about and asking the subtle question - is the Universe "really" beautiful? So here's a possible road to a "solution" to the hard problem: How do we experience meaning in the Universe? How does it feel to find meaning? Damasio builds his account of "mind" on this very question. This is not merely an "outside" mechanical idea. It...

For the moment, let me talk about the world of human experience as "E". The world that Science investigates is assumed to exist a part from human experience , although we can only know it through human experience. Without really thinking about it, we imagine the "real world" to be about the shared experience: verifiable, consistent and augmented by what we call "reason". But we have long admitted that Universe, which I will call U, is not the same as "E". In fact, we assume that we can never know "U" entirely, directly or completely. We all know that "E" is not the same for each of us. In fact, it is quite remarkably different between different cultures and different times or even for a single individual throughout his or her lifetime. The question at hand is, is there anything "out there" apart from E and U? In most religious traditions the answer is "yes".  Most religions postulate a universe in ...

Darwin got a lot of miles out of noticing a few things and documenting them in excruciating detail: Tremendous natural variation among and within species and even "races" or varieties. This is the "engine" of change. That's just a fact. Today we know about DNA mutations, transcription errors and many other reasons for variation. Variation itself is "in your face" -- obvious. The mathematical fact that left to themselves, any species would reproduce to cover the Earth . There must be some reason this doesn't happen. Darwin mentioned a lot of reasons, including scarcity of resources, predators, environmental change and more. Descent with modification - the "family tree" of life that is the basis of modern biology. " Natural Selection ", to Darwin, simply meant the fact that every animal is put to the test along with all other members of its species - indeed all occupants of its environment in the contest for survival. It...

In this blog, I introduce two categories of "life" that may be regarded as controversial or "merely" a matter of definition. "Supermind" is at the "high" end. At the low, primitive, "old" end is "proto-life" - life before (or simply without) DNA ("before" being evolutionary speculation I avoid). Here is a good presentation on work on "proto-life". I'll try to add more examples as I come across them. Current work in this field can be regarded as an "existence proof": if there is any way we can make "life" out of non-living molecules, there may be others, one of which presumably actually happened. For my purposes, it's sufficient to see how such systems are possible, at least in theory. I leave the discovery of actual evolutionary processes to others. I avoid using "evolutionary fairy dust" to support the ideas put forward here. This blog does not put forward or support...

I'm wary of the term "evolution" - especially when it is used in a vaguely Darwinian sense to sprinkle scientific fairy dust over wild speculation. I think it makes sense to use "evolution" in a fairly narrow sense, in which we can see that some object, "thing" or situation exhibits the following qualities: It's in some "state" of current interest. The analysis of the "state" has some non-trivial explanatory power over the thing in question even when it is considered as a current, static object. The "thing" has obviously, necessarily undergone change over time - it wasn't always the same as it is now. It must have been in some other state, usually a simpler state, at some time in the past. There is strong evidence that the thing has undergone versions , where one version incorporates design features of previous versions. It is legitimate to ask what changes have taken place over time to get from the "simpler...

This talk introduces a recent book by Dennett, rehashing and updating his theories on the mind. I have the hard copy of the book on order. These comments refer to his summary of it delivered as part of the Google Talks series. It is much to Dennett's credit that, as he goes along, his ideas become more precise and articulate. His examples are more apt, his analogies closer to the "essence". He never seems to say, "I was totally wrong about this", but he does make progress - partly by not taking himself too seriously. It is much to Dennett's credit that he is rarely caught in an "argument" -- he sees an element of truth in almost everything, always putting his own ideas on the table without allowing opposition to get personal. This is good because he gets a lot of opposition. " Consciousness Explained " (1991) was a serious over-reach. Rather a mess that didn't come close to delivering on the promise in its title. Yet, in the interveni...

It's worthwhile to base our understanding of the human condition on the brute and obvious fact that we are living things.  "Being alive" involves participation in a vastly complex environment - sharing that environment with all living things. This is where to start - not the illusion of individuality.  In this way, we cannot escape the most fundamental form of assimilation: participation in the drama of all life. Since Darwin, our idea about what it means to be alive has changed beyond recognition. It is fair to say that the old myths, based on simple stories about the human condition, have not kept up with what we now understand our situation to be. Especially in the West and the Abrahamic religions that are base on the fate of the individual "soul", the simple fact of our interdependence has been forgotten. The discipline of mathematics and physics can be applied to the science of life (biology) but few biologists, let alone the lay public, have been exposed t...

Both scientists and pseudo-scientists feel the need to provide evolutionary "explanations" for whatever phenomenon they study. I fact, the explanations seem more elaborate for phenomena whose very existence is controversial. Memes are the poster child for this phenomenon. Sometimes, long diversions into evolutionary story telling seem like nothing more than an effort to "sound scientific". If the average person has any idea about evolution, he'd say it's about "survival of the fittest". In the back of his mind, he's assuming that evolution has produced an unbroken chain of more and more "fit" creatures, culminating in the most "fit" of all: man. Even "white" man. Even the Aryan race. Actually, "survival of the fittest" is circular, if "fit" simply means the ability to survive and pass on one's genes. The key idea of evolution is descent with variation. There are many reasons why some varieti...

Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins share ideas on religion. The conversation is interesting because Dawkins is generally credited with the invention of the idea of the "meme" and Dennett is best known for making the idea more precise and useful. Interestingly, Dennett's grasp of evolution (and even memes!) seems to be more nuanced than Dawkins', even though Dennett is a philosopher and Dawkins' credentials are in biology. Dawkins focused originally on the idea that memes survived in a way analogous to evolution (In his preface to " The Meme Machine ", Dawkins admits that he's surprised that people took the idea seriously). The conversation struggles to keep this analogy going, trying to make the case that religion is a parasitic meme, surviving at the expense of the believer. It seems that Dawkins uses "meme" mainly as a rhetorical device -- part of his arsenal of weapons to attack what he imagines to be "religion". Dennett, on th...

Laughlin's " A Different Universe " provides a sweeping re-examination of the idea of "emergence", along with a telling criticism of the doctrine of reductionism.   Although I'm not sure Daniel Dennett would admit it, he's a poster child of reductionism. He basically claims that the "mind" can be completely understood by examining a subject (i.e., the brain of the subject) from the "outside". The mind is "nothing more" than the activity of neurons in the brain. Opposed to this view is the idea of emergence: that a system of "simple" components can spontaneously reorganize itself into something new, specifically something with properties and behavour that cannot be derived, even in principal, from laws governing the components. That's Laughlin. Laughlin's book is a bit of a disorganized mess, but it's possible to glean some very important ideas from it. He makes some powerful general observations about t...