Time for a bit of the old Fisking. Now, I’ve met Andrew Hickey and think he’s a nice guy, but his ‘ten things you’re going to disagree with‘ definitely hit the mark in terms of accurately labelled. I thought he was joking – turns out he’s not.
1) Much (but by no means all, or even most) so-called ‘alternative medicine’ is actually effective. Conversely much (but by no means all, or even most) conventional medicine is pseudoscientific quackery.
… which is a really dangerous point of view, creating equivalence between medicine and bullshit. Bullshit medicine cures bullshit illness and little else.
2) Government intervention in the economy can often be a good thing.
Sorry Andrew, you’re wrong. Everything the Government does has knock on consequences that it cannot predict, and it’s constantly chasing it’s tail trying to correct the imbalances their actions create – they cannot do it – it’s an infinite cycle of breaking the economy while trying to fix it.
3) Art should be measured primarily by how novel the ideas it communicates are, secondarily by its moral tone, and lastly by the technical skill with which it communicates them. By this measure the works of Jane Austen, for example, are of considerably less merit than even most potboiling bestsellers.
Which, I think proves that you need to go back and rethink how you evaluate the merit of art.
5) The scientific method is the single most important thing children could possibly be taught, and should take priority over everything else.
That’s what I’d teach my children, sure – it would be nice if all children were taught it too. Whether or not we have the right to dictate to everyone else what their priority should be? And how do you reconcile point 5 and point 1?
6) That said, spelling and grammar *matter*. The written word is a means of information transfer, and bad spelling and grammar add noise to the signal. Linguistic rules are arbitrary, but that doesn’t matter – what matters is that everyone abides by the same conventions.
Depends what you mean by conventions, doesn’t it? Language is organic – it’s not something you can set in stone forever.
The term ‘free will’ is literally meaningless, and the hoops physicists jump through in order to reconcile it with experimental and theoretical results are ridiculous.
Are you saying you believe in destiny? That the future’s already set? Cos, you know, I’m going to really disagree with that one.
9) The ‘new atheism’ of Dawkins, Hitchens, et al. is dangerous. It is entirely possible to hold religious beliefs and be a rational person (though probably not to be a dogmatic follower of any major religion while doing so). The battle they should be fighting is not religion vs atheism, but dogmatism vs secularism – a battle on which many religious people of goodwill would be on their side.
No, it’s not possible to hold religious belief and be a rational person. Any belief that depends on faith rather than evidence is the abandonment of reason. There’s nothing rational – at all – about accepting that one of Earth’s religions has more basis in reality than any of the others. They’re all garbage. You can be a nice person. You can be an intelligent person. You cannot, however, be a rational person without stretching the meaning of the word ‘rational’ so that it includes things that aren’t. Like religious belief, for example.
10) The lending of money at interest is immoral.
Right. So, I’m assuming you’ll accept that without being able to make a profit from lending money, no-one’s going to lend money, right? Is that what you hope to achieve?
My friend wants to borrow some money off me. For me to lend them money, I will have to go without it. I will also have to risk never seeing it again. While they have the money, inflation will mean that even if I got it all back I’d still have lost money.
Why should I give money I have to someone else? The obvious and only answer is that I’d do it because I could make a profit. What’s immoral about it? I get something I want, they get something they want – everyone’s happy, right?
In fact, say you managed to ban interest because it’s ‘immoral’ then you’re effectively signing the complete total collapse of the economy. The Government, any and all businesses and any and all individuals would suddenly find themselves unable to buy money for money – they’d have to buy money for favours or for goods or for something else. Loans would go underground, into the hands of the loan sharks – who, because they’re now engaging in criminal activity would charge astronomical rates of interest. Imagine the credit crunch except permanent and forever, with every business slowly crashing, and no-one other than those with inherited wealth or enormous salaries able to get the capital together to start their own business.
Interest is immoral? You’ve got to be joking, right? Right?
Martin said...
18 Jul 09 at 7:03 pm
What do you call alternative medicine that works?
Medicine.
Mark Reckons said...
18 Jul 09 at 7:20 pm
I can’t believe that points 5 and 1 are written by the same person. They are fundamentally incompatible with each other. If Andrew understands how important the scientific method is then how can he possibly think that anti-scientific horseshit largely works?
I think he might be having a giraffe here.
Andrew Hickey said...
18 Jul 09 at 7:37 pm
Some of these I may expand on at a future point, but anyone who thinks points one and five are incompatible knows very little about either medicine or the scientific method… most people who talk about alternative medicine as ‘bullshit’ tend to be getting their ‘information’ from Ben Goldacre, who is very often wrong. I may write more on that at some point, but I am not writing from a perspective of ignorance of the science…
(BTW note I said nothing about dictating how children should be raised, nor about banning things I think are immoral – another thing I think is that in general people should be allowed to make their own mistakes, and if we went around banning things just because I disapproved of them there’d be very few things left).
As for whether you can be rational and be religious, you’re assuming that all religious people are believing based on blind faith. Many religious people claim to have reached their views based on evidence from their own experiences, and I know several religious people (mostly Buddhists, but a few Christians too) who say that were they ever presented with evidence against their beliefs, they’d change them.
There are plenty of rational people who hold individual irrational views – in fact I can’t think of anyone who *doesn’t* have some…
Martin said...
18 Jul 09 at 7:40 pm
“There are plenty of rational people who hold individual irrational views – in fact I can’t think of anyone who *doesn’t* have some…”
I actually think you were on to something with number 10; Having read The God Delusion (and being less than impressed), I can’t help but get a sense of “Religion is a bad thing and so should be discouraged and made a mockery.” from it.
Andrew Hickey said...
18 Jul 09 at 7:42 pm
Adding another comment because I forgot to tick the comment notification tickybox
Andrew Hickey said...
18 Jul 09 at 7:46 pm
Martin, for a very convincing takedown of The God Delusion by a rational Christian, try Andrew Rilstone’s writing about it
Mark Reckons said...
18 Jul 09 at 8:00 pm
Andrew – I am a fan of Ben Goldacre but I have been interested in this sort of area for years. In fact I have come to it more from the sort of scepticism inspired by James Randi and his ilk.
As far as I am concerned, and as Martin said above, if “alternative medicine” can be proved to work then it becomes “medicine”. This is why I consider it to be largely bullshit as if remains alternative it is because there is no evidence it works.
However I am certainly interested to read the further stuff you hint that you may write in the future.
Roger Thornhill said...
18 Jul 09 at 8:05 pm
Andrew Hickey does not have free will, so the post is not his, but just some product of a chemical reaction and/or collection of random events over time in the proximity of the biological infestation called “Andrew Hickey” which has somehow triggered the production of the post.
If you do not have free will you are surely not actually capable of informed choices nor of giving informed consent. You are not Sovereign but CHATTEL or CLAY. I suspect Lefties will prefer to consider that “the people”* do not have free will. It makes their disgusting ideology appear a little less bankrupt.
* as distinct from themselves – remembering that Lefties live in permanent dissonance and can keep multiple “realities” (I use the term very loosely!) in play at the same time. Why not? They are not sovereign but just a product of the experiences…
DavidNcl said...
18 Jul 09 at 8:18 pm
Fisking random dumbasses on teh interwebs is a bit 2001.
This guys just a clueless oaf. Honestly, this twaddle isn’t worth engaging with.
Andrew Hickey said...
18 Jul 09 at 8:43 pm
Mark, the problem with that argument is too difficult to summarise in a single comment, but to start with the concept of ‘proof’ has no part to play in proper science.
However, firstly, the type of ‘evidence’ used in medicine is, frankly, risible ( I tried to find an online copy of a paper I co-authored with the entertaining title “Implications and insights for human adaptive mechatronics from developments in algebraic probability theory” which shows this, but alas only the abstract seems to be online). To put it bluntly, though, Goldacre and his kind talk about “Evidence-Based Medicine” in much the same way that Mao Zedong called China a “People’s Democratic Republic” – if you have to shout about what it is you’re doing, you’re probably not doing it. (If you’re interested enough in why I say that to wade through several pages of turgid prose and numerical analysis, I could email you a pdf of the paper, or you could just wait til I get round to writing the inevitable blog post).
On top of that, despite what you might think, the *vast* majority of medicine has never been subjected to even the minimal evidentiary standards that ‘evidence based medicine’ calls for. Most medicines developed before about 1980 never went through anything like the scrutiny process they do now, and while medicines developed since that time have supposedly at least to prove their superiority to placebo for the use they’re approved for, a large proportion of medicines are prescribed for conditions they’re not actually tested for (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-label_use for a brief description of how this happens). For example, I read in New Scientist yesterday a suggestion to doctors that they may wish to try statins on obese swine ‘flu patients – statins of course having never been trialled as a flu drug, and their effect on it being entirely anecdotal…
There’s also the fact that the medical profession is – quite rightly – far more conservative than is normal for a scientific profession. As a result, it can take decades or longer for a scientific discovery to filter through to becoming ‘best practice’. For example, more than twenty years went by between the discovery that antibiotics could treat ulcers and their acceptance as medical ‘best practice’. During the intervening time, that treatment was an ‘alternative medicine’.
And finally there’s the fact that the term ‘alternative medicine’ lumps together a huge continuum of subjects from homeopathy (for which there is no evidence whatsoever, and no known mechanism by which it could work, so one can safely dismiss it as bunk) through acupuncture (which seems to have some slight experimental evidence for its efficacy, but the theoretical basis for which is very badly wrong, so should be viewed with caution) through to orthomolecular medicine (which to my mind has overwhelming evidence in its favour and has mostly not been adopted because of the aforesaid conservatism).
I will be writing a proper post about this at some point, and feel bad for writing this much – part of the point of my post was to see what the reaction would be to blunt conclusions given without the evidence for them
Andrew Hickey said...
18 Jul 09 at 9:09 pm
BTW a bit I badly worded in a previous comment – “knows very little about either medicine or the scientific method…”
The either there is meant to say one *or* the other, not one *and* the other. In other words one could know little about medicine *or* the scientific method…
Richard said...
18 Jul 09 at 9:16 pm
Andrew, if you think points 1 and 5 are compatible then you really need to spend about half a day looking around the James Randi Educational Foundation website. There is a lot on there about the issue, about the strong evidence that modern medicine works and alternative ‘medicine’ does not.
You might also want to check out What’s The Harm? for dozens of cases where alternative medicine has caused harm, suffering and often even death. That is only the well-documented ones, mostly in America.
Richard said...
18 Jul 09 at 9:20 pm
“the concept of ‘proof’ has no part to play in proper science”
Are you serious? Either you have no idea of the scientific method or (ironically, considering your item number 6) you have no idea of the meaning of ‘proof’.
Proof is testing. The verb to prove means to test, hence “military proving ground” to test vehicles and “prove beyond all reasonable doubt” against the evidence in a court.
Of course testing a hypothesis is core to the scientific method.
Andrew Hickey said...
18 Jul 09 at 9:25 pm
Richard, ‘testing’ is *one* meaning of the word ‘proof’, but clearly not the meaning in such phrases as ‘proved to work’, where the meaning is closer to definitions such as:
1. evidence sufficient to establish a thing as true, or to produce belief in its truth.
2. anything serving as such evidence: What proof do you have?
(Definitions taken from dictionary.com for easy cut-and-pasting – most dictionaries give substantially similar definitions). Your usage of ‘proof’ there is archaic.
Establishing things as true *does* have nothing to do with science, where at best one can state that a hypothesis holds provisionally.
Andrew Hickey said...
18 Jul 09 at 9:27 pm
As for those links, trust me, I’ve seen them. Reread my first point, paying close attention to the qualifiers therein, and please in future don’t assume ignorance in others…
Richard said...
18 Jul 09 at 9:38 pm
“As for whether you can be rational and be religious, you’re assuming that all religious people are believing based on blind faith. Many religious people claim to have reached their views based on evidence from their own experiences”
I would suggest, Andrew, that they have misunderstood the idea of evidence. Feelings in the mind, gut, heart or anywhere else can be very misleading things. I have never heard of anyone reliable having seen anything that could constitute evidence by, oh, your number 5, the scientific method. Religion is irrational, based on blind faith and cultural expectations. History of religion tells us that.
Richard said...
18 Jul 09 at 9:46 pm
Oh, and my reading of your first point has been fine. replace both your “much” with “occasionally” and I’ll happily agree. You could argue a case for “some” if you hedge a bit. “Much” is going too far. I am perfectly willing to criticise conventional medicine where it is warranted, but in individual cases with reasons. Alternative medicine if shown to work becomes conventional medicine (digitoxin is hardly considered an alternative therapy, and neither is salicylic acid).
Andrew Hickey said...
18 Jul 09 at 9:47 pm
‘Much’ is a very ambiguous word…
Richard said...
18 Jul 09 at 10:06 pm
Not that ambiguous. So you are claiming your rectitude on the basis of ambiguity, after making point number 6. Oh, and after accusing people who oppose immigration of inconsistency!
Richard said...
18 Jul 09 at 11:32 pm
As an example of Andrew Hickey’s adherence to poor evidence:
“For example, more than twenty years went by between the discovery that antibiotics could treat ulcers and their acceptance as medical ‘best practice’”
Complete and utter balderdash. Warren and Marshall received the Nobel Prize 21 years after the experiment that most effectively proved this. Eight years before that the CDC and others made a concerted effort to publicise the facts to patients as well as health-care providers, although they were already widely accepted. So while medicine is a little conservative, considering the rapid pace of development 13 years is hardly excessive. More relevant to Mr Hickey’s credibility it isn’t “more than twenty years”.
Andrew Hickey said...
18 Jul 09 at 11:37 pm
The figure was off the top of my head, and I’m prepared to accept it was a few years off. However, you’re wrong about the Nobel Prize – they made their discovery in 1982 and got the Prize in 2005 – twenty-three, not twenty-one, years later.
Glass houses, stones, etc.
Andrew Hickey said...
18 Jul 09 at 11:41 pm
And I never said the length of time was ‘excessive’ – quite the opposite. I said medicine was “quite rightly” conservative. That conservatism is entirely appropriate. But I pointed out that during that length of time, be it thirteen years as you state or twenty as I originally and probably incorrectly stated, treatment of ulcers with antibiotics was ‘alternative’ medicine, not ‘conventional’. That’s all.
James Graham said...
19 Jul 09 at 12:10 am
“most people who talk about alternative medicine as ‘bullshit’ tend to be getting their ‘information’ from Ben Goldacre, who is very often wrong”
But Ben Goldacre wouldn’t disagree with 1. Indeed, having read most of his columns over the last few years I would have thought he’d very strongly agree with it.
Andrew Hickey said...
19 Jul 09 at 12:16 am
James – quite possibly. I’ve not read enough of his stuff to know, though a couple of times when I’ve read him on things I *did* know about he’s got my blood boiling with his wrongness (but every journalist is allowed to be wrong occasionally).
I find though that a lot of people who read him (and not saying this is the case of anyone here) tend to take away a general impression of “conventional medicine is Proper Science, everything else is ‘woo’” without really understanding the specifics. I’ve not read enough of Goldacre to say if that’s what he says (and I’ll take your word that he doesn’t) but his fans as a group are fairly dogmatic – which of course makes no sense for someone who’s supposed to be promoting the scientific method…
Not explaining myself very well here – tired and migrainey.
Obnoxio The Clown said...
19 Jul 09 at 12:19 am
I have a better title for this post:
“Andrew Hickey: get fucked”
James Graham said...
19 Jul 09 at 12:20 am
Charlotte – it is intriguing that you react so strongly against nine whilst also reacting so strongly against eight.
What scientific evidence do you have for it? We live in a consequentialist universe. Every action we make is the cause of either environmental factors or neurons firing off inside our brains. Oh, we have some vague approximation of free will and we can call it that if we like, but it is no more real than the pictures you see in an Escher painting.
What’s more, the only place where free will does exist is in theology. The only place it matters is in theology and things theological in nature.
To believe otherwise, I’m sorry, is about as rational as believing that fairies live at the bottom of ones garden and even that God exists.
James Graham said...
19 Jul 09 at 12:22 am
Andrew – Ben Goldacre is one of the most prominent critics of conventional medicine out there. He’s written far more columns over the years taking medical professionals to task for shoddy, often commercially motivated research, than about alternative medicine. And he has written plenty of articles about the placebo effect.
Andrew Hickey said...
19 Jul 09 at 12:33 am
James, on free will – precisely.
As for Goldacre, the impression I’ve formed of him from the occasional thing I’ve read and from the way many of his admirers talk is probably unfair then. I’ve only read a couple of articles, one where he was just plain *wrong* about a meta-analysis on the effectiveness of Vitamin E, and another I can’t remember, and I’m afraid I formed rather a dismissive opinion of him based on those, not helped by the attitudes of some of his admirers.
Charlotte Gore said...
19 Jul 09 at 1:15 am
James, I meant Free Will in the context that, 4th dimensionally speaking, we are not simply ‘playing back a recording’ – that history from here until the end of time is not predetermined. In that respect, we have ‘free will.’
I think the fact that people can willfully starve themselves to death, or give up addictions sort of proves that we’re not entirely slaves to biochemical signals. People are still responsible for their actions.
James Graham said...
19 Jul 09 at 1:48 am
“I meant Free Will in the context that, 4th dimensionally speaking, we are not simply ‘playing back a recording’ – that history from here until the end of time is not predetermined. In that respect, we have ‘free will.’”
The jury is out over whether anything can be said to be predetermined. It certainly isn’t in the sense that it would be impossible to predict everything that happened in this universe without creating a duplicate universe “model” and that that in itself would alter the original universe. And quantum physics would suggest that a Newtonian “clockwork” universe is a nonsense. But that isn’t the same thing as saying we have free will, and Andrew certainly claimed that.
“I think the fact that people can willfully starve themselves to death, or give up addictions sort of proves that we’re not entirely slaves to biochemical signals. People are still responsible for their actions.”
It does no such thing. All it proves is that the combination of consciousness, evolutionary pressures and environment can lead to lots of complicated situations. Again, this is a touchingly religious stance on free will. It doesn’t consider, for example, that the ability to starve ourselves to death might be related to some biological imperitive rooted in kin altruism for example. The ability to come off an addiction is an even weaker argument: there is a clear Darwinian advantage in us being able to overcome addiction.
No-one is suggesting that people can’t behave selflessly or that our brains are slaves to our genes. It’s very, very complicated and of course it vaguely resembles something like “free will”. But what you are indicating here is that human beings are capable of behaviour that is somehow not rooted in the physical world. The mind and the body are not literally seperate entities, even if it is convenient at times for us to consider them to be figuratively so. That is mysticism, not science.
Don’t let your politics blind you to science.
Charlotte Gore said...
19 Jul 09 at 2:08 am
I think you’re projecting a lot of your own prejudices about my politics onto what you think I’m saying.
When I disagreed with Andrew about “Free Will” it was in the context of predestination – he did, after all, mention physicists.
This debate about the nature of consciousness and decision making processes isn’t something I want to get into in detail. I have a friend who’s a professor of the philosophy of psychology, who does very interesting work on this subject and I’ve had long, involved conversations with him about it. I know enough to know that I’m not touching it with a barge pole. I really don’t need you to tell me that it’s “complicated” thanks very much.
Douglas Thomson said...
19 Jul 09 at 10:40 am
Only thing I’d take issue with is 9). I don’t quite buy the idea that, under the definition of rationality Charlotte sets, anyone could possibly be rational. Religious belief is not the only irrational belief that people hold – atheists hold plenty of irrational beliefs. (Not specifically because they’re atheists, just because they are normal people.) The idea of a completely rational human being is unicorn poop.
James Graham said...
19 Jul 09 at 11:48 am
“I think you’re projecting a lot of your own prejudices about my politics onto what you think I’m saying.”
Am I? Possibly. But then, I’m not the one who insists on putting capital letters in front of Free Will.
“When I disagreed with Andrew about “Free Will” it was in the context of predestination – he did, after all, mention physicists.”
But this isn’t a problem for physics. It might be a problem for physicists, who reach for cod philosophy to try and salve their consciences, but debate over predestination and free will is a philosophical one.
Laurence Boyce said...
20 Jul 09 at 4:54 pm
Charlotte, I think James is right here (always pains me to say that). Free will is a religious superstition, and a surprisingly resilient one at that. It persists among people who have no problem with the Earth not being at the centre of the universe, or the fact that we evolved from pond scum. Somehow, the idea that we have so little control over events, maybe none at all, seems a step too far for some. I would even have put James down as a believer before now.
James says that the only place free will matters is in theology. In fact free will matters to both theologians and libertarians, and for similar reasons. A common objection to religion is: how can a loving God send someone to burn in Hell for all eternity? The answer is: it’s free will, stupid! God gives us free will. He so wants us to turn to him and love him, but only we can make that choice. Of our own free will. Make the wrong choice, wind up in Hell, and there’s really only one person to blame.
Extreme libertarians make a similar move. It could be summed up by saying, “I left school at 14, and I’m a millionaire, so everyone else ought to be able to do likewise.” In reality, few people have the innate ability to do likewise. Once again, if you wind up on the scrap heap of life, then there’s only one person to blame. In both cases, it’s a rather cruel doctrine in which the cost of entirely predictable and inevitable human failure is laid at the door of the hapless affected individuals.
However, leaving aside such extremes, there’s a strange sense in which the free will question doesn’t change things too drastically. Losing free will is a bit like losing God. He didn’t exist yesterday, and he doesn’t exist today – nothing changes. Notions of personal responsibility do not disappear, in fact they are needed more than ever. You can certainly argue for lower taxes and a smaller state – things I agree with. Just don’t go and join the Libertarian Party, because they will be stuffed full of these dogmatic free will merchants.
On medicine . . . alternative medicine is generally a scam. The trouble is that there’s a lot wrong with normal medicine too, so this allows the charlatans to get a foot in the door. But conventional medicine can only get better, while alternative medicine will only get sillier. The real cure for alternative medicine would be that when a practitioner gets ill (I mean really ill), they should be forced to adopt their own particular brand of treatment. A bit like this.
Why are our avatars obscured?
Charlotte Gore said...
20 Jul 09 at 6:09 pm
I’m assuming you’re using Internet Explorer 6, that’s why they’re obscured.
I think I’ll do a post on free will separately. I’m genuinely surprised that there’s people willing to argue that there’s no such thing. It would, however, explain a lot about the political views that some people hold.
If there’s no free will then we’re all, in effect, already slaves to our biology, to our families, to society, to our employers, to our circumstances – that none of us really have any control over our lives, that the successful are just lucky (or privileged) and the unsuccessful just unlucky (or disadvantaged). In such a world, with pain/pleasure, success/failure being handed out by arbritrary randomness then it makes sense for human beings to try and level the playing field.
Of course, I completely, utterly disagree.
Laurence Boyce said...
20 Jul 09 at 6:40 pm
It makes a lot of sense to try to help disadvantaged people. Even better is to help them help themselves. But there are limits. The trick is to have the courage to change those things that we can change, the serenity to accept those things that we cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference. I think some religious geezer said that.
We don’t have free will. Your article on free will, Charlotte, will be entirely predictable in a sense. But that doesn’t mean it won’t be worth writing or reading. I’m genuinely looking forward to it.
I’m using IE7.
James Graham said...
20 Jul 09 at 6:40 pm
Whether free will should exist is irrelevant; the question is whether it does. I fear you are lapsing into classic naturalistic fallacy domain here.
It is certainly a philosophical problem if we don’t have free will, but that debate has to be lead by fact not dogma. Your criticisms above sound alarmingly similar to the response all too many theists make to atheists.
Laurence: you will be further distressed to learn that I almost totally agree with you (I don’t agree that conventional medicine “can only get better” – shades of Dawkins Holy Zeitgeist) and consider that comment to be one of the most intelligent things I’ve ever seen you write.
Charlotte Gore said...
20 Jul 09 at 7:12 pm
When I refuted Andrew’s original assertion that there was no such thing as free will it was in the context of ‘free will’ as the opposite of ‘destiny’, which seems like a fairly ordinary thing to say, little to argue about.
Now I’m getting into a semantics debate. You seem to think I believe in the idea of a biblical free will, which I do not.
What you seem to be asking me to believe is that human beings are entirely predictable animals which the logical consequence of choice being an illusion.
Where are the ‘facts’ that back this up? You claimed it’s ‘complicated’, but your basic premise – that free will is nothing more than a theological idea and that it doesn’t exist – implies that theoretically, with enough computing power and enough raw data you could literally predict the future. That’s what ‘no free will’ means. It means that you’re always going to make the choices you make.
I really don’t care if you think this is falling into the naturalistic fallacy, because I’m not trained in philosophy and will use whatever means I have to hand to illustrate my point.
It’s like playing a computer that will always, always, always beat you at Rock Paper Scissors because it always knows what you’re going to do, whether you play once or a hundred thousand times.
Even if this was possible it doesn’t change the fact that for all intents and purposes people do make decisions, do make choices and are capable of change for better or worse.
Is there a biblical free will? No. Are individuals capable of making choices (even if they don’t necessarily understand why)? Yes.
Charlotte Gore said...
20 Jul 09 at 7:59 pm
Ah right, okay James, I see.
You’re looking at me making an assertion about whether or not free will exists and then extrapolating that into moral considerations – or possibly starting with the moral considerations and using that to decide whether or not I feel free will exists.
And of course I *want* there to be free will.
So the two together make me sound, unusually I might add – like a theist. Curious.
Clearly there’s very little we can do to prove this issue one way or another. You would always require more data and more power to accurately predict the future (ability to predict being the only reliable indicator that at no point is a genuinely free choice being made) – nothing short of cloning a huge chunk of the universe would be ‘enough data’ I imagine.
I suppose with free will being referenced in the bible one could logically argue that the burden of proof is on me to prove that free will exists, not on you to disprove it.
Yet, as you’re well aware, free will is not just a theological question, it is one that reaches into the scientific and ethical world – which is the context I’m talking in.
Yet I can’t help feeling we might be talking at cross-purposes. As always, your interpretation of what I say seems worryingly filtered through your politics.
SaltedSlug said...
20 Jul 09 at 10:07 pm
Jesus.
I’m off work with suspected swine flu and I casually pop along here to see what’s poppin’. First off, Andrew’s assertions caused me actual pain, and then the headache-inducing segue into the physiological reality of free will comes out of left-field and sets back my recovery by at least another day.
And apparently I didn’t even choose to be here.
What the fuck, people?
Obsidian said...
20 Jul 09 at 10:07 pm
With regards to free will, if there is a single, definable, Theory of Everything, where you can plug in the t variable for any particle and determine it’s state at that point, then free will is a fiction.
It’s one of the more disturbing outcomes of a purely Einsteinian universe, and a reason why I hope the nature of quantum mechanics is shown to explicitly preclude a Theory of Everything – of course the difficulty in proving a negative (predetermined or otherwise) may always leave it an open question for philosophers and physicists to battle over.
It’s also one of the numerous interesting points in Watchmen, and was sadly glossed over in the movie, Dr Manhattan can see the future, knows exactly what is to come and yet cannot alter it. As he says, he’s as much a puppet as everyone else, the only difference being he can see the strings.
James Graham said...
21 Jul 09 at 2:45 am
Charlotte,
You can hardly complain about semantics. Andy didn’t say anything about predestination and he was quite explicit about the context he was referring to “free will.” You’re the one who is importing all this other stuff.
And “free will versus predestination” is a false dichotomy. As I said in my very first comment in this thread, it is highly unlikely you could ever entirely predict someone’s behaviour. But that doesn’t leave you with free will. If my brain was wired up so that all my decisions were made at the roll of a die, I would be entirely unpredictable but I wouldn’t have free will.
You ask for “proof” – well, how is thousands upon thousands of accumulated scientific knowledge? We live in a closed, causational universe (you could, again like a theist, argue for some kind of quantum-get-out-of-jail-free card but that don’t wash). That is what science, from Newton to Darwin to Einstein tells us. To date, not a shred of evidence has been found for something in our brains not tied into the physical realm (whether you call it a mind or a soul), so why is the burden of proof on me?
I’m amazed anyone can dismiss the whole argument because, quite simply, the debate about consciousness and the degree to which we can be said to have free will is set to shape our politics in the 21st century in a way that it could never have done in the last one. If we can cure criminality, should we? If we can prove advertising can be harmful to children, should we ban it? If the food you eat effects your behaviour, then to what degree can you be said to be free if you eat it?
These are big, weighty issues that can’t simply be dismissed by harking back to 18th century philosophy (although no-one is denying it can inform it).
Personally, I don’t have any easy answers. They are real dilemmas. I have noticed however that libertarians are not similarly troubled and tend to always have very ready, pat responses to all these issues as they arise: if you even ask these questions you are part of the ZaNuLieBore fascist hegemony. Dismiss it as playing with semantics if you like, but I think such an attitude of steel-eyed self-assurance is utter folly.
Charlotte Gore said...
21 Jul 09 at 10:37 am
Sheesh.
James, what makes you think I believe in a soul? I’m not remotely religious. I don’t believe in any God.
Right, and? I don’t remotely dispute this. Is this what you think I’m arguing against? Why would you think that?
Ugh. Reducing human beings to the status of machines, with the state playing the role of IT support? Social engineering through biochemistry and gene therapy?
If you don’t believe that human beings are really in control of their own decision making, that they’re no more ‘free’ than subject to the whims of a dice roll, then the concept of liberty becomes academic doesn’t it?
If an individual has no free will then there’s no moral dimension to infringing their liberty or freedom, irrespective of how it impacts them.
If something is for their own good then it’s no more immoral to impose something on an individual than hunger signals. Human beings as organisms were there’s a ‘social operating system’ of a sort.
Are you surprised I instinctively recoil at this sort of thing?
I can see that, but you do realise you’re sounding like Albus Huxley don’t you? This is Brave New World territory, and you’re telling me this is the future of political debate. I really hope you’re wrong, although I think it’s safe to say that looking at the progression of where three parties are going it’s safe to assume that you are, in fact, correct.
Why not, James? Seriously? Isn’t it screamingly obvious that our flaws are what make us human? That creativity comes from fucking up, making mistakes and doing things differently than they’re expected?
Even left wing liberals are supposed to be against Freedom From Conformity, aren’t they? Why don’t you have an easy answer?
Well this isn’t a pat response. This is my own considered response. The basic premise of wanting to engineer humanity into some better ideal as decided by politicians is utterly repugnant, in and of itself.
That you frame my reaction in terms of a theocratic, anti-science irrationality dump is frightening and just a wee bit sinister.
You might think I’m making the ‘is ought’ mistake, but your ‘is’ does not automatically lead to your ‘ought’ either. I don’t understand how you got from ‘hey there’s no such thing as free will’ to ‘you know, that Plato, he was really on to something’
James Graham said...
21 Jul 09 at 12:00 pm
Well, I did give you the option of merely being a dualist. The bottom line is, to believe in “literal” free will (the very words you are claiming to oppose), you have to believe in one or the other.
You demanded evidence. I gave you an answer. Now you say you don’t understand why I’m bringing it up. A bit of consistency would be nice.
Yes, but where do you draw the line between, for instance, advertising and brainwashing? That has nothing to do with individuals “fucking up” and everything to do with being programmed to do something.
There is, in fact, evidence that advertising can do this – although it is mixed. The pat libertarian response is to advertise and be damned, but if that advertising can be shown to adversely affect an individuals’ liberty it simply won’t do.
Are you referring to Aldous Huxley or Albus Dumbledore? If the former, then yes, that is a very real threat and one that needs a response. You seem to think that when I say this is a problem, I want to go down the Huxley route. Nothing of the sort. But I do think we need stronger arguments.
It’s one of the reasons why I am so repelled by Dawkins’ invocation of the Holy Zeitgeist – his idea that, so long as we remove religion from everything, we’ll just stumble along towards ever further progress and enlightenment. Just as the discovery of Darwinian evolution lead to misguided notions about social darwinism and eugenics, so there is a danger that discovering the extent to which we are biochemical machines could take us down other dark paths. We need to be forearmed, and having a copy of John Locke in our pockets simply won’t do.
In any case, aren’t we already in Huxley’s Brave New World? All that pill popping and social stratification looks rather similar to me.
No more so than your attempt to frame the debate in terms of Free Will (sic) versus predestination.
But I haven’t given an ought, I’ve merely expressed doubt. I suspect that’s what you find sinister (as a lefty in both sense of the word, I plead guilty), not my framing.
Niklas Smith said...
21 Jul 09 at 2:45 pm
I’m wondering why, in the midst of all this discussion about Life, the Universe and Free Will, Charlotte and everyone else missed out Mr Hickey’s most outrageous assertion:
7) Most music of the Classical and Romantic periods is pap. The influence of Mozart, leading to the effective death of counterpoint for two hundred years, was the most pernicious in musical history.
Beethoven? Pap? Mozart? Pernicious?
My tongue is in cheek, but only limply – the more I listen to Beethoven the more astonished I am at his genius. Pap this is not. I suspect Mr Hickey is listening to some bad recordings of what is normally good music.
Laurence Boyce said...
21 Jul 09 at 2:45 pm
Charlotte, I so much want to come and defend you against James. He is such a bully. But he’s right. If you accept materialism, then the burden of proof lies with the free will proponents to make their case.
I suspect that the world is largely is largely deterministic, but it may also contain some genuinely random occurrences which would make it impossible to predict the future. But this doesn’t give us any free will. Look, this is random: lysjeb hhj iie s jkj laae iudffe. It’s not very good, is it? Even you would have to admit I was making more sense when I was deterministic.
But you’re right, the argument can so easily descend into semantics. Obviously it feels rather like we have free will, and it is possible to have a rational discussion predicated upon that assumption. But then you can also have a rational discussion based upon the notion that genes are selfish. (Isn’t it odd the way so many philosophers objected to that when it was such an obvious metaphor?)
The point is that nothing much changes. You can still make your political case which I largely go along with. It’s only the more extreme libertarian positions which are ruled out, but I don’t hear you making those arguments anyway. Stick to your guns, but just be wary of following the fruitcakes down their quasi-religious road to perdition.
Try giving up on free will for a bit. It shouldn’t be too hard as you don’t have it anyway. Think of it as a glorious Queen sacrifice at chess, whereby the ultimate victory will be yours. Give up on free will and then you and me can get James in an arm lock and consign the lefties to history. But at the moment, he’s throwing you to the mat every time.
Andrew said...
21 Jul 09 at 2:58 pm
Niklas, I disagree with him on that as well. Though mostly because I am listening to a lot of romantic-era Russian music at the moment.
Laurence,
but that’s not random…
Niklas Smith said...
21 Jul 09 at 3:12 pm
My personal responses to the other positions:
1) Read Trick or Treatment, then try to tell us that “much” of alternative medicine is effective (as opposed to being a placebo). The truth is that very little is worth spending money or time on.
2) Depends on how you define intervention; the statement is too short to understand Mr Hickey’s position. If intervention means setting out rules that apply to everyone, I agree. If it means favouring one person over another, I am dubious.
3) I don’t see why novelty is an automatic good, and I would like “moral tone” to be defined before I express an opinion. What I miss from Mr Hickey’s list is the ability of art to create a deep, emotional reaction to the viewer/listener (the art that moves me most is usually music). This is my measure of how good art is.
4) YES! I wholeheartedly agree.
5) Well, perhaps reading and writing should come first, but otherwise I am inclined to agree. Shame Mr Hickey didn’t apply the scientific method to 1)!
6) Yes. Why should I disagree with that?
7) See my post above.
9) I don’t see hardline atheism as dangerous, unless its followers start blowing up mosques and churches. Though I am agnostic myself, I do agree (partially) with Mr Hickey in that I believe religous people can act rationally in the natural world even if they have irrational beliefs about the supernatural. (More to the point, who cares if people act irrationally so long as they don’t hurt anyone?) And I can also see many “religious people of goodwill” who are vital to combating the extremists who are highly dangerous. Two examples from Islam alone that pop into my head are Irshad Manji and Lebanon’s new Prime Minister, Saad Hariri (who I was fortunate enough to meet last Friday).
10) Why? Even medieval Catholics argued it was fair for lenders to receive compensation for the profit they could have made with the money had they kept it themselves (lucrum cessans to them, opportunity cost to us). How could I possibly agree with such a sweeping and unargued statement?
So, I agree (more or less) with three of the ten, and half agree with another.
Laurence Boyce said...
21 Jul 09 at 3:12 pm
Yes, I know but . . .
Niklas Smith said...
21 Jul 09 at 3:30 pm
P.S. Charlotte, nice to see that writer’s block is but a distant memory and that you are back in fine form
Andrew said...
21 Jul 09 at 3:36 pm
yeah, sorry Laurence, that was a bit pedantic.
I don’t think free will as a pure physical/neural concept exists, at least without adding in the weirdness of the quantum world. For everything happening at time t, there must have been something at time t-1 to cause it, its just the variables involved are so numerous and complex that we have a spasm if we try to contemplate them.
Think of it like this: With enough access to your brain is there anything that you think I couldn’t make you do?* Even the low-level ‘spontaneous’ activity of the brain is caused by something. A massive accumulation of variables all came together to make Laurence type “lysjeb hhj iie s jkj laae iudffe”, it’s not actually random.
As a social concept, you can convince yourself free will exists, as in “99 people may say yes, but i’ll say no”, but it is not really a true free choice, and therefore, presumably not a rational thought either…
*sorry, that sounds monumentally creepy.
Laurence Boyce said...
21 Jul 09 at 3:47 pm
Yes, I agree. Tossing a coin isn’t random either. I have great difficulty with the concept of a genuinely random event. But I won’t rule out the possibility. It’s just that randomness isn’t the “get out of jail card” which is going to give us free will. By definition, random means that nothing has any control over it, including humans.
Richard Gadsden said...
21 Jul 09 at 6:43 pm
Radioactive decay. It’s what is used to generate random one-time pads for really secure encryption software.
All the known physical processes are either determinative or random. None are under the control of an intelligent entity outside of the physics, whether human (which is what is meant by “free will” to a physicist) or otherwise.
Clearly the brain is chaotic, ie extremely sensitive to initial conditions such that moving an electron by a few picometres will have macroscopic effects within the brain, and equally clearly “mind” is an emergent phenonmenon of the brain, but that doesn’t mean that there is free will in the sense of something over and above physics.
I think the problem is the idea of what is a human being. We’re just a heap of atoms and forces and we have the same free will as any other heap of atoms and forces – none.
But we behave like we do because we’re so unpredictable and because we have a “mind” and we should be treated as such. Free will is a lot like universal morality; it doesn’t exist, but you have to work out your resolutions on the assumption it does.
Laurence Boyce said...
21 Jul 09 at 7:12 pm
“Free will is a lot like universal morality; it doesn’t exist, but you have to work out your resolutions on the assumption it does.”
I really don’t agree with this. I’m totally against assuming that things that are not true, are true. That brings us back to religion in double quick time.
I believe that there is the possibility of a universal morality, but it has nothing to do with free will and everything to do with consciousness. It is the conscious experience – specifically the capacity to experience pleasure and pain – that I believe ought to be the source of our moral intuitions.
Free will is not the same as consciousness, but they inevitably get muddled because the feeling that we have free will is experienced consciously.
But the Libet experiment would suggest this is merely an illusion. Pain, however, is not an illusion and is best minimised.
Niklas Smith said...
21 Jul 09 at 8:54 pm
“It is the conscious experience – specifically the capacity to experience pleasure and pain – that I believe ought to be the source of our moral intuitions.”
I heard Shami Chakrabarti speak at Cambridge University recently, and she made a similar point. She argued that the idea of human rights comes from the human capacity for empathy – because we can imagine how we would feel from being harmed we refrain from harming others. This is of course the famous “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, which is a very sound moral maxim.
The result of this is a universal morality that prevents coercing others in any situation where you would feel coercion would be unjust if applied to you, not banning everything you don’t agree with.
How we decide which things we personally refuse to do (whether it be having pre-marital sex or smoking) but do not want to stop others from doing is of course a more open question, especially for those like me who are not religious.
Niklas Smith said...
21 Jul 09 at 9:01 pm
P.S. It is striking how the Golden Rule/ethic of reciprocity is found in oodles of religions. I think C. S. Lewis had a point when he argued in The Screwtape Letters that it is silly to see Jesus as a moral teacher, as he was simply restating a universal morality that already existed but was being forgotten.
Ewan Hoyle said...
28 Jul 09 at 5:15 pm
On the alternative medicine subject, I once had a meeting with a scientist who was aware of omega 3 fatty acid’s effectiveness in Alzheimer’s amongst other things and was wanting to create a synthetic omega 3 fatty acid. I do feel we often throw the baby out with the bath water with alternative therapies. Omega 3 fatty acids could be prescribed for a great many ailments (so could fruit and water for that matter) but they can’t be because they’re not conventional medicines. Homeopathy is so much bull though.