Lifesaving

Using this technology, the entire world can have access to clean drinking water for $20 billion every 3 years (less, presumably, as the technology improves over the years). For $8 billion every 3 years, half of everyone can have clean drinking water, which would at least meet the UN Millennium Development Goals. The UK alone already spends £12 billion in foreign aid every year. Does this sound like a good idea to anyone else?

The bubble-up theory of everything

Oh, Dan Dennett, you know how to push all my happy buttons. In this extended interview by Richard Dawkins (another likable, if occassionally wayward chap) from The Genius of Charles Darwin, my favourite philosopher talks about his bottom-up or bubble-up view of complexity and consciousness, the opposite of the trickle-down conception held by most people. Bubble-up theories use cranes, rigorous explanations that work from a very simple level upwards, whereas trickle-down theories rely on skyhooks: usually one big miracle to start with and let all explanation follow from that. The classic example is explaining the complexity of the biosphere through the behaviour and interaction of simple chemical replicators (evolution by natural selection) rather than invoking a supernatural designer.

In this interview, Dennett and Dawkins also discuss death and consolation. It's interesting to see how both have developed a secular life stance that is emotionally, and not only intellectually, strong. Since the footage is uncut, you can also see them bumbling around and talking behind the scenes starting at 35:47. It made me laugh seeing how some of the different segments of conversation were contrived, with Dawkins getting slightly annoyed at being asked to repeat himself. What follows 43:30 is an extremely cute Dennett moment. Stay tuned as well for the nurse crop/religion metaphor at the end.

What's wrong with incest?

As with many other realms of inquiry, relying on gut feelings or "ick factors" to decide moral verdicts is bound to be a mistake. It makes sense that our moral intuitions would lead us astray, since they evolved in a world radically unlike 21st century Earth. When you live in a small, nomadic band of hunter-gatherers, you have to play by different rules than when you live in a city of millions, in a world with biotechnology, globalization, nuclear weapons, and YouTube. Here's an example: I imagine it would be much easier for someone to kill ten people by pushing a button than by killing a single person by strangling or stabbing her to death. This is because when our moral minds were being shaped by natural selection, killing was something you did by brute, physical force; there were no lethal buttons to push or triggers to pull. Our brains make a vivid connection between strangling-to-death or stabbing-to-death and its moral implications, whereas with button-pushing or trigger-pulling the connection is remote and abstract.

It's always a bad idea rely on intuition alone to make a moral decision. While some moral intuitions may be sound, others (like the above example) are amazingly backward. We can never know which intuitions are the sound ones and which are the backward ones until we evaluate them rationally. We need to look under the hood so we try to "override" the gut instincts that would lead us astray with our rational minds. Many people have strong moral intuitions when it comes to sexual taboos like incest. It makes them squirm. The idea gives them a queasy, "icky" feeling. It feels wrong. They're likely to say call incest "totally disgusting" or something similar. (Explaining this sexual and moral disgust isn't too hard. It's probably a relic of our evolutionary heritage: nature selected for a strong psychological aversion to mating with relatives because mixing genes in this way tended to be more harmful to offspring than finding more distantly related mates.) But what is so bad about incest? We need to take a hard look at the incest taboo and we can't decide this verdict with our gut; we have to use thinking and evidence.

It's a tricky issue because of the number of scenarios to consider: siblings separated at birth who marry in adulthood, siblings raised together who are romantically attracted, teenage cousins who experiment with each other, a son who in adulthood has a consensual sexual relationship with his mother, etc. There are also the scenarios of rape, molestation, and abuse which we are rightly horrified by, but I don't think these need further consideration. It is the taboo against consensual incest that I want to examine. The distinction between genetic relatedness and "psychological relatedness" is critical. We'll start with the genetic side of things. I don't know how you could argue that a daughter nonreproductively sleeping with her biological father is somehow worse than sleeping with her adoptive father. Or if it helps to pump your intuitions, compare a daughter sleeping with her biological mother versus her adoptive mother. I can't think of any difference between the two scenarios. If there's no reproduction involved, genes don't mean a thing. In cases of (nonreproductive) incest where relatives are separated at birth and reunited obliviously, by accident in adulthood, what could it possibly matter that they have genes in common? The couple have some eerie similarities, but that's not necessarily going to prevent them from having a happy, healthy romantic relationship. (If they are reunited knowing they are related, a purported phenomenon called genetic sexual attraction may come into play.) Aside from the issue of reproduction, I think it's fair to say we should treat cases of purely "genetic incest" – where there is no psychological relatedness at all (unlike the example I just gave) – as we treat all other sexual relations and romantic relationships. Gay, lesbian, and infertile couples are off the hook entirely. But of course reproduction can't be ignored.

The only reason relatives having children might be morally wrong is through birth defects of genetic diseases that might come as a result of inbreeding. According to a Slate article by William Saletan, "having a child with your first cousin raises the risk of a significant birth defect from about 3-to-4 percent to about 4-to-7 percent." (Saletan also observes that the great scientists Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein both married their first cousins.) The increase in risk is pretty small. Five U.S. states allow first cousins to marry, but only if one partner is sterile. To me, that seems excessive. Maine requires cousin couples to get genetic counselling before marrying. That's probably a better compromise. It's also a double standard, as Saletan observes, because we don't require genetic testing for people for high-risk categories like feritle women over 40, we don't ban people with genetic diseases from having children, and we allow blacks and Jews to marry within their ethnics groups even though it promotes sickle-cell anemia and Tay-Sachs disease.

The risk of a birth defect if you have a child with your sibling is much more substantial than in the case of coupled first cousins. We might be tempted to say sibling couples should need to be infertile or sterilized before they marry and only allowed to have adoptive children, but that takes us back to the double standard. What about people who have the same chance of passing on their genetic disease to their children as sibling couples have of producing a birth defect? No one is eager to advocate eugenics.

Things get a lot messier when you get into incest between people who are "psychologically" related, who fill a particular family role, whether or not they are genetically related. While I think the taboo against purely genetic incest is nonsense, I can imagine that consensual "psychological incest" might be harmful to those involved, depending on the scenario. When a parent uses her authority as a parent to convince her adult child to consent to sex, that's abuse. But what if it's the child's idea and both parties are equally enthusiastic? Is it still harmful then? I don't know. I don't know that it's a settled issue. On the flip side, there are instances of "psychological incest" (whether or not it is also genetic incest) that don't seem unhealthy to me and might even be beneficial, like the scenario of teenage cousins hooking up. Again, the psychological factors are much stickier than the genetic ones, so it's hard to say. It's important for us to recognize that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with psychological incest (take a moment to consider whether "intrinsic wrongness" is even a coherent idea) and that it can only be right or wrong based on its actual consequences. We should distinguish between different scenarios and consider factors that might make individual cases harmful or not. The real trouble with psychological incest is the overlap between different kinds of relationships. A romantic or sexual relationship will doubtlessly disrupt the familial relationship between two people. It will also create some tricky situations within the family.

This is Saletan's sagely warning:

This is the problem with sleeping with your cousin. You can move on from an ex-spouse or ex-lover, but there's no such thing as an ex-cousin. How are your parents and your ex's parents supposed to handle a nasty divorce or a breakup? How can they support their kids without antagonizing their siblings and their siblings' kids? You've wrecked your whole family. It isn't as bad as if you'd slept with a sibling, but it's a lot worse than if you'd slept with a friend or an officemate. We don't ban you from dating people at the office, but we don't tell you it's a great idea, either.

The issues are far from clear, but at least we can start the conversation.

Countdown to Singularity

I just whipped up a webpage for Singularitarians to stare at obsessively. Huzzah!

Brain worship

Philosopher Alva Noë has an interview in Salon that is well worth reading. The general thrust of the interview, as I understand it, is that consciousness exists in more than just the brain. It also exists in the environment, in language, in culture, and other physical locations (Noë is not a dualist). I've written before about consciousness existing in the body, as well as the brain. Noë takes it up a notch. I think it is a challenging shift in perspective, but I'm inclined to agree with him. It is important to realize that, as Victor Vinge says, what makes humans unique is that we outsource our cognition to the world around us. 

Dan Dennett, my favourite philosopher of consciousness, takes the interdisciplinary approach to consciousness that Noë encourages; in a radio discussion (which unfortunately I can't track down), he agreed with a man who wrote a book about "brain worship" that it's important to focus on more than just the brain, but also the head. Dennett, however, unlike Noë, will tell you that the taste of an apple is in your brain, not in the apple.

Noë's arguments are thought provoking, although I really don't like how he puts an aesthetic and moralistic spin on it all. Isn't it enough just to say brain monomania is a bad idea? I spotted some strawmen in there as well, but I imagine it would be hard to voice the arguments Noë is trying to hammer home without going overboard a little bit. My main complaint is that he seems to be longing for a quasi-skyhook, although it's hard to tell if that's actually the case. Like most interesting arguments, Noë's are an uncertain mix. 

An experiment in self-reference

Lately, I've been reading the book I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter and today I got to a chapter about Hofstadter's experiences playing with video feedback. I was inspired to do a little playing of my own, so I darkened my bedroom, plugged in my webcam, and aimed it at the screen (I used a very handy piece of software called FullScreenTV for the output). I had toyed with pointing a webcam at its own output once before and was verily impressed, but that was in the midst of an online video chat, with no measures to reduce visual noise.

As soon as I pointed the webcam at my screen, a white fireball with blue edges appeared. I have no idea why it was there. I held the webcam in my hand like a baseball, so I could tilt and zoom to stir up the images onscreen. After a bit of playing around with the fireball, I intuitively came to treat it like a physical object I could manipulate, flinging my webcam around like a Wiimote. If I flicked my wrist in one direction, white/blue rectangles (formed by the edges of the screen) cascaded into a curve towards the centre of the screen, getting smaller and smaller as they went; it looked like a staircase coiling around itself. I thought of the fireball as leaving rigid, transparent ice cubes behind it that would melt a few seconds after they were formed. When too many ice cubes got too close to each other, they would light up into white fire, so when too many steps on the staircase got crammed together, the whole thing turned into a burning "tidal wave", shown below.

 

The fireball itself seemed to stop a few times and turn into a solid, white "ice cube"; I realized that the fireball was just growing and filling up the transparent ice cube it was trapped in. 

All these weird patterns and phenomena emerged from nothing more than an image turning back onto itself. Video loops are mesmerizing to play with, and cheap – I used all free software and a webcam that cost me $15 over four years ago. If you've got a webcam, or a friend you can borrow one from, try this experiment. (And if this sort of thing really intrigues you, then you'll probably like Hofstadter too.)

Let me count the gays

According to a survey published in the Ottawa Citizen (Jan. 22, 2008, page A3, "Let's talk about sex"), 11% of female Canadian teenss and 5% of male Canadian teens have engaged in gay sex.  The January 2008 issue of the journal Pediatrics and Child Health published a study on Canadian teens that revealed that "86 per cent of girls said they were attracted to boys only, while 87 per cent of boys said they were attracted to girls only." This means that 13-14% of Canadian teens claim to be attracted to a member of the same sex. Surely some subset (maybe big, maybe small) of the teenagers engaging in gay sex are merely experimenting and surely some subset (maybe big, maybe small) of the teenagers who claim to attracted to a member of the same sex are merely questioning (or maybe are simply bicurious). 

However, no matter how you slice it, it seems some sizable chunk of the Canadian teen population has got to be gay or bisexual. There is a positive feedback loop in effect here: the more acceptance queer teens meet, the more likely they will be to come out about their sexuality (case in point: statistics on same-sex couples in Kansas). And teens with more openly gay or bi peers will be more comfortable about coming out.  If queer teens in Canada learn about the high numbers of queer teens who will already admit it on a survey, that will push the numbers up, which may in turn push the numbers up again by dramatizing the numbers that teens hear. 

It's all just a matter of getting the ball rolling.

The ghost and the machine

The Future of Humanity Institute, headed by transhumanist Nick Bostrom, has released a report proposing how we might get a point where we have the technology to emulate (not just simulate) an entire human brain in a computing substrate. In its introduction (which I admit is as far as I can get in the 130 pages), this "roadmap" states that whole brain emulation would make "digital immortality" possible. I assert that merely emulating someone's brain would not be enough to preserve that person entirely. I am no dualist, but I think there is more to a human mind, to a self or a soul, than just the brain. There's also the body.

We human beings are vast networks of nerves. Although it is true that by far the largest cluster is our brains, that doesn't mean all nervous activity goes on within our skulls. (I think it was in Kinds of Minds that Dan Dennett said that a mind includes much of the body, not just the brain.) Consider this: the sound of your voice is a major element of your identity, at least to the people who know you, and your vocal timbre depends on non-neurological factors like the size and shape of your vocal cords – as well as the rest of your body. All sorts of biological factors, like your metabolism and your tastebuds, form part of your mental experience and usually your identity. More dramatically, we humans have an intimate connection to the macroscopic bodies – not that we "inhabit" – but that we are. Our sense of self is predicated inextricably on our physical existence. Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg talk about body simulation in their report, but I say that isn't enough. For digital immortality, I posit, in addition to whole brain emulation, you need whole body emulation. There may be even more requirements for full human preservation than this. For one, a simulated environment certainly wouldn't be enough. True human existence depends on a real environment or, at the least, a flawlessly emulated one.

The future is scary. And exciting. I'm grateful to be young so that I'll see how most of the 21st century turns out. Or perhaps – if brain-body uploads become popular in my lifetime – all of it.

Science education: you're doing it wrong

Learning about science in elementary school and in high school has been interesting and enjoyable enough. It's more stimulating and exciting than most subjects; I find myself actually wanting to learn about we talk about in class, a feeling that – now that I think about it – I don't get as often as I should. The quality of any student's learning experience depends largely on their particular teacher, peers (a class of bored students doesn't make for a very exciting time), and dispositions. However, that learning experience is also ultimately governed by what the school board mandates that students learn. The school board's curriculum sets the standard of what science class is supposed to be about and teachers have only so much freedom to diverge from that standard. 

Now, it's easy to be a critic and considerably harder to offer practical alternatives, but I feel like we – a society with kids to educate and inspire – could do so much better. The way science is taught in schools and the way the scientific enterprise is portrayed to students is, to me, greatly wanting. Sure, there are lots of fun experiments and it seems like most elementary school students are exposed to Bill Nye The Science Guy and The Magic School Bus (two wonderful wellsprings of science education), but almost all of the really important stuff is missing. The science I know from books, TV, films, and the Internet is a world of breathtaking new perspectives and mind-blowing ideas, of fascinating debates and stirring new developments. The science I know from the classroom is pH levels and cloud types, plant anatomy and polysaturated fats – interesting enough at times, but emphatically humdrum in comparison. I know not every teacher can be Carl Sagan (and perhaps not every day in even Sagan's science class would be thrilling), but the blandness of the subject matter makes it harder for good science communicators to capture the imaginations of students and it further handicaps less gifted teachers.

Students are missing out on the majesty of science. I would love a science class that challenges my intuitions, makes me marvel at the universe, and bends my mind in ways I never thought it could bend. Why don't we throw out the bland and (from all appearances) arbitrary stuff kids are pointlessly learning now and make science class about what's really important? Let's actually teach students what the scientific method is, for starters, and let kids learn how to think critically. Let's teach them how to employ skepticism in the face of uncertainty, to look for evidence and not to take any claim at face value. Let's give students a rudimentary history of human thought with all the outlandish things people used to believe, and the earth-shaking discoveries that overturned past worldviews. Most people know that our planet is round, not flat, but how do we know that? How did we learn this very important fact? In around 200 BC, the Greek polymath Eratosthenes devised an ingenious experiment to measure the circumference of the Earth by measuring the length of shadows cast by a stick on the same day of the year, in different cities. It's an interesting story, but most people never hear it. And there's one like it for every significant scientific discovery ever made. 

Let's give students an evolutionary perspective. Let's tell them about how Charles Darwin, a British naturalist, formulated one of the most powerful ideas in human history. The idea goes something like this: within any species, many more creatures are born than can survive in the world. Some of those creatures have traits – passed down from generation to generation – that help them survive better than their rivals (sharper claws, for example, or a more sensitive nose). Creatures with traits that aid in their survival will tend to have more offspring than their rivals. Wait for enough generations to pass and the entire species might now have this new trait. This same step-by-step process can generate new limbs, new organs, or as Darwin first postulated, entirely new species. Among scientists, Darwin's view is now the universally accepted explanation for how all life on Earth originated. Darwin called his potent idea, for the sake of brevity, natural selection. 

Evolution alone is rich and fascinating terrain for students to explore, but there is so much more. Let students focus more on the really interesting topics: black holes and the Big Bang, the astounding size and age of the universe, the origin of our solar system and life in it, atoms and the weird things about them (for example, they're made of mostly nothing), the human mind and brain and the evolution of both, and, for the older grades, why not learn about Einstein's relativity and time dilation, the strangess of quantum physics, extra dimensions, and fundmental ideas like space and time? This is the important stuff, the exciting stuff, along with much more I've neglected to mention – or at least it's far more important and exciting than almost everything that's currently being taught. 

I don't blame my friends who think science is dry and technical – fine for those who are into it, but boring for the rest of us. They've been deprived of something really wonderful by a tragic failure of our school system. Science can be appreciated by everyone in the same way music or literature is appreciated by everyone (and like good music or good fiction, it can be lots of fun). Yes, science allows us to build iPods and cure diseases – which are fantastic things – but it is so much more than that. It can nurture our curiosity and unlock alien ways of thinking. It can empower us to think for ourselves and distinguish reality from fantasy. It can move us to probe deeper, ask questions, and come up with hunches of our own. But most of all, it unveils a world – otherwise numbed by familiarity and clouded by ignorance – that is fuller, richer, more bizarre, more mysterious, and more beautiful than we ever could have imagined.

Creationism is not science's biggest problem

I have just finished watching Richard Dawkins' new Channel 4 documentary The Genius of Charles Darwin, about Darwin's legacy and the impact of his great idea on science and society. Dawkins is covering a lot of old territory, but he manages to keep it fresh. It was still fascinating and entertaining. The latter half of part 3 was even life-affirming to me, inspiring and meaningful in a way I predict will change my outlook on my life for years to come. In the documentary you'll also find some very funny segments and some familiar (if you're a Dawkins fan) surprise guests.

All three parts of The Genius of Charles Darwin are available for free (as downloads and streaming video) on RichardDawkins.net. They are meant to be watched sequentially, but it isn't absolutely necessary that they are.

I anticipate that Dawkins' critics will complain that he is conflating evolution and atheism and that he should stick to either being a scientist or an atheist, but not mix the two together. (Just as I thought: Libby Purves has written a review in The Times with just that complaint. Dawkins responded.) Well, what did you expect? The argument from design is dragged out every time someone wants to justify their belief in God; it is virtually the only empirical argument still used to try to support the God Hypothesis. Besides, who says that being a scientist and an atheist have to be separate things? For someone as zealous about truth as Dawkins, someone who will not let diplomacy or political correctness get in the way of facts, beliefs about God are not in some charmed circle of unassailability where science cannot hope to reach them. This is the situation many Christians imagine, but whether God is real or imaginary is as much a scientific question as whether continents drift or not, or whether homeopathic medicines work better than placebos. Why, if God is imaginary, people believe in him anyway is also a scientific question of great importance, a question that atheists bear the burden of answering (for more on this subject I direct you to a talk by Dawkins' friend the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett who is the author of Breaking the Spell: Religion As a Natural Phenomenon, one of my all-time favourite books).

It's not like science has never had anything to say about articles of faith: what about geocentrism, the Christian doctrine that Earth is the center of the cosmos? And then there's the obvious example of the Genesis account of Creation. Of course the science of evolution is profoundly relevant to the (scientific) question of whether God exists, because virtually all evidence cited to support God's existence comes in the form of the argument from design, and evolution utterly debunks that argument!

The deepest questions about the universe are not divided into neat little categories labeled "religious" and "scientific"; truth is truth. Science and Christianity are merely different ways we can use to find the answers to those deep questions. The answers from Christianity are radically different from science's answers; we cannot hope to reconcile the two without fatally compromising both. Somewhere, something must have gone terribly wrong. It must be that not all methods of inquiry are created equal, since at least one of them has got to be wrong. In fact, calling Christianity "a method of inquiry" is being too generous, since its method involves nothing more than blindly, baselessly trusting the authority of priests and pastors and the authority of the Bible. How reliable a method could that possibly be? Science, on the other hand, works. We see the success of science as a truth-finder, a question-answerer every day. Without its discoveries, you and I would probably be dead for lack of antibiotics. We wouldn't have Western civilization as we know it: we'd still be living in the Dark Ages (or maybe worse).

If creationism poses a threat to our scientific understanding of the world (and many Christians will agree on this), Christianity poses a much larger threat, being much more popular (Christians are generally less inclined to agree on this point). Therefore it is as much in the interest of science to fight Christianity as it is to fight creationism. Dawkins knows this and he doesn't arbitrarily partition his mind into the scientist Dawkins attacking creationism and the layperson Dawkins attacking God. To him, scientific questions are scientific questions, truth is truth. The truth is subverted just as much by teaching children the universe in which we live is God's divine scheme of the as it is by teaching them life started in the Garden of Eden.