Continuing to rethink the unrethinkable?

 

Thinking scientifically about science?

 For a Change, Science Writers Think Critically About Science

Denyse O Leary

Science writers have the sort of relationship to science that automotive writers do to cars. Readers often hear a “Thumbs up!” or “Thumbs down!” about one trend, theory, or school of thought. But in the rush and press of news, we less often hear a philosophical reflection that goes beyond cliches like “Science is self-correcting.” But, every now and again, we do. Here are three recent examples.

The “Scientific Method” is Rather Messier than We Think

Philip Ball, author of Beautiful Experiments: An Illustrated History of Experimental Science (University of Chicago, 2023), discusses the messy truth about how theories win out. He writes at Nautilus:

Scientists often assert that their practice is governed by the “scientific method,” in which one formulates a hypothesis that makes predictions and then devises an experiment to put them to the test. But this is a modern view, codified in particular by the “pragmatist” philosophers of the early 20th century like John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce. Later philosophers of science such as Paul Feyerabend question whether science has ever been so formulaic and argue that its ideas depend as much on rhetorical skill and persuasion as on logic and demonstration.

That unsettles some scientists, who insist on “experience” — observation and experiment — as the ultimate arbiter of truth. But although in the long run a theory that repeatedly conflicts with experimental observation can’t survive, in the short term theorists may be right to stick to their guns in the face of apparent contradiction. More often, supporters of rival theories might argue about the interpretation of an experiment. One party may triumph not because their interpretation is right but because they’re better at presenting their case. Or a scientist may reach the wrong conclusions from a correct and even elegant experiment just because they posed the wrong question.

PHILIP BALL, “WHAT IS A BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENT?” NAUTILUS, AUGUST 11, 2023

Politicizing Science Spurs Loss of Trust

We have been hearing for decades about the problems with shoddy research going undetected but the recent resignation of neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne as president of Stanford due to a research scandal pushed it up the news cycle a ways. At his blog, Matt Ridley, author with Alina Chan of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 (Harper, 2021), offers a look at how science has been losing the public’s trust. It’s from his paywalled interview with Tunku Varadarajan at the Wall Street Journal, where he talks about the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic:

But there’s a “tension between scientists wanting to present a unified and authoritative voice,” on the one hand, and science-as-philosophy, which is obligated to “remain open-minded and be prepared to change its mind.” Mr. Ridley fears “that the pandemic has, for the first time, seriously politicized epidemiology.” It’s partly “the fault of outside commentators” who hustle scientists in political directions. “I think it’s also the fault of epidemiologists themselves, deliberately publishing things that fit with their political prejudices or ignoring things that don’t.” …

One motivation: Pessimism sells. “You don’t get blamed for being too pessimistic, but you do get attention. It’s like climate science. Modeled forecasts of a future that is scary is much more likely to get you on television.” Mr. Ridley invokes Michael Crichton, the late science-fiction novelist, who hated the tendency to describe the outcomes of models in words that imply they are the “results” of an experiment. That frames speculation as if it were proof.

MATT RIDLEY, “HOW SCIENCE LOST THE PUBLIC’S TRUST” MATT RIDLEY, JULY 23, 2021

Politics marketed as science is probably a bigger source of loss of public trust right now than ignorance or prejudice are. People want to believe science has answers when they know that politics doesn’t. 

Can Science Really Have All the Answers?

For years I believed this claim, partly out of deference to the scientists propagating it, but also because the prospect of a final revelation thrilled me. Eventually, I had doubts, which I spelled out in The End of Science and other writings. Now I see the vision of total knowledge as a laughable delusion, a pathological fantasy that should never have been taken seriously, even though brilliant scientists propagated it.

JOHN HORGAN, “THE DELUSION OF SCIENTIFIC OMNISCIENCE,” CROSS-CHECK, AUGUST 13, 2024

At one time, as he says, it was a comparatively popular view, but stifled of late. What dampened it?

But the concept of scientific omniscience was flawed from the start. Read Brief History [of Time] and other books carefully and you realize that the quest for an ultimate theory had taken physicists beyond the realm of experiment. String theory and other major candidates for an ultimate theory of physics can be neither experimentally confirmed nor falsified. They are untestable and hence not really scientific. And more than century after discovering quantum mechanics, physicists still can’t agree on what the theory actually says about the world. 

HORGAN, AUGUST 13, 2024

He adds that we have made no progress on how life began or how consciousness exists.

On reflection, it’s not possible that science can explain everything. For one thing, what there is to know expands with what we learn and will expand again when we learn more. The 19th-century British poet Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) put it like this:

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.

“ULYSSES”

And, of course, sometimes we are searching for things that are not there. If life required an intelligent origin, then the search for the (unintelligent) origin will never succeed. If consciousness is an immaterial reality, the search for a material “explanation” won’t succeed either. That’s not the end of science; it just means that the world we live in is not quite what we thought.

At any rate, science writers can be quite interesting when they allow themselves to play around with ideas a bit.

Against Roman II

Roman: A servant, I read your response, I'm not persuaded.

 You weren't persuaded to change a life long position after a very shallow reading of an alternative view ? You don't say.

Romans:if space is not a "limiting factor" then in what sense does it bound him? If he has immediate access then it IS immanent.

AservantofJEHOVAH: If you would go back and read my actual remarks you would see that I never said that JEHOVAH is bound I said that his essence is bordered but his actualised potential is not bound because he is Telekinetic

If a border does not mean X is bordered by Y such that beyond Y X cannot access Y without a medium then I don't know what a border means, if you just insist on using the term border but rob it of all its actual meaning then our language means nothing. You might as well say God has literal toe nails, but what I mean by toe nails bears no relation to what we mean by toe nails in the physical world.

Telekinesis in this instance means being able to actualise potential and thus cause change or motion at a distance without an intermediary. Do some reading on a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement for an idea on what that might seem like as a phenomenon.

Roman: tell me what you mean by "border," if it cannot be "breached" then I don't know what you mean when you say God has immediate access to it.

AservantofJEHOVAH:here is a point beyond which his essence does not extend from its center.

Romans:I also don't know what you mean by virtually immanent as opposed to literally immanent, immanent just means immediately accessable without mediation, if the holy spirit is not something seperate from God then his knowlege and powers and literally immanent.

AservantofJEHOVAH: There is literal space between him and his creation this literal space has no impact on his capacity to access his creation in whole or in part.

Romans:Space and time are not abstractions, the past really does not exist, and the future really is not yet, and things are really distanced from one another, perhaps measurements of time and space are abstractoins sure, but what they measure are not. But even if they were abstractions, prior to creation what sense does it make to talk about space, what would that be an 'abstraction' of?

AservantofJEHOVAH:In what way does any of this prove that space and time are not abstractions. Abstractions are really descriptive of concrete realities saying that a thing is an abstraction is not the same as saying that it is not real. But we ought not to conflate abstraction with the concrete realities they are used to describe. We know that though the events of the past are completed or have progressed they determine the present to a large extent and even the future and ought not to be confused with the concept of the past tense itself.

I agree his holy spirit is his actualized potential, but if that potential is literally everywhere and immediate (none mediated), then what does it mean to say he's bounded?

I don't know where you got this Idea that I claimed that he was bound. His essence is bordered his power is unbound being telekinetic he can actualise potential over distance without mediation.

Romans:You keep telling me I'm "projecting" human type insecurities .... no I'm just noting what terms mean and noting that claiming God is unlimited yet bounded is a logical and metaphysical contradiction. I'm also asking what words you use mean, if "form" is not analogous to anything we usually mean by "form" it's literally meaningless.

I really hope you go back and read my post with a little more care his essence is bordered his power is not his spirit is a quality an attempt to describe his ability to project his actualised potential over distance all the while retaining complete control of it without a mediator.

Romans:1 John 3,2 doesn't mean literally since angels and the annointed don't have literal eyes, it means that they will have immediate knowledge of God.

They do literally see and by far superior means than physical eyes but the point is that they will closely resemble him as to both inward and outward quality

On noise cancellation tech in biology.

 Noise Cancellation: A Remarkable Design Solution in Biology

David Klinghoffer

Snakes should be immune to their own poison. Electric eels should not shock themselves. And protection from self-generated noise requires a preplanned noise cancellation system.

In a Dispatch in Current Biology, Leonard Maier discussed a biological requirement many don’t think much about: how to ignore your own noise. Eliminating self-generated noise, he says, is accomplished by “Active Sensing.” 

Animals use active sensing to investigate their environment. The active sense inputs must be discriminated from those arising independently from environmental signals. An experimental and modelling study has revealed how precise control of dendritic spike backpropagation contributes to such discrimination

The study referenced by Maier was published in Current Biology by Muller, Abbott, and Sawtelle. It involves some heavy reading in neuroscience, but the basic idea is easy to understand. If you’re trying to listen to something while making loud noises yourself, you need a way to subtract your own noise.

Biological noise cancellation works at the neuron level. The basic idea of “spike backpropagation” is that the receiving neuron sends precisely controlled signals to the sending neuron with an “image” (so to speak) of its own noise profile. This negative image cancels the noise part of the complete signal, eliminating self-generated noise from the received signal, so that the brain receives only the environmental signal. 

By analogy, consider how the James Webb Space Telescope images extremely faint objects in the infrared part of the spectrum. The telescope and its instruments generate heat that would swamp any photons from the target object. One method is to cool the instruments down as far as possible to reduce self-generated heat. This is done with liquid helium. Another method is to subtract spectral lines generated by the telescope. 

Noise cancellation is also used by exoplanet searches, as done by the Kepler mission (2009-2018). The spectral signature of a transiting planet would normally be overwhelmed by the brightness of its host star. Astronomers subtract the star’s light before and after the transit to detect the planet. The orbiting solar observatory SOHO used a similar method with its coronagraph, creating an artificial eclipse that blocked the bright light of the sun so that the faint corona could be observed. Noise cancellation is performed visually in adaptive optics and photographic noise reduction, and audibly with Dolby noise reduction and noise-cancelling headphones. The latter case is noteworthy for listening to sounds outside and inside the earphone, then inverting them to neutralize the outside sounds. One tech site says it is “A bit like taking +2 outside and adding -2 inside to make zero.”

Each of these techniques requires foresight and engineering precision to pull off. Additionally, the methods require continuous tracking (active sensing) to keep the instruments aligned properly and responsive to changing conditions.

Noise-Cancelling Fish

To  find that biology uses noise cancellation is both surprising and logical. An organism’s sensors must be able to differentiate between self and non-self. Muller et al. made their discovery about signal backpropagation by experimenting on mormyrid fish. These are weakly electric fish that can generate currents as well as passively receive them. The “elephantfish” is an example of a mormyrid. 

Neuroscientists have found mormyrids useful for studying biological signal processing, because the fish sends out electric pulses that need to be attenuated by the brain, and receives signals from conspecifics and from prey. Maier explains why a noise cancellation system had to exist. Sadly, he gives credit to evolution for a system that acts with “surgical precision” — 

The electrosense is comprised of passive and active electroreception. The passive electrosense (ampullary receptors) is highly sensitive to the weak electric fields generated by movements of invertebrate prey. Activeelectroreception requires the generation of a brief (∼1 ms) electric organ discharge by an electric organ, and tuberous receptors tuned to the electric field produced by the electric organ discharge. Mormyrid fish have retained the passive sense and evolved the active electrosense essential for spatial learning and navigation that makes locating prey mor efficient. The evolution of the active sense comes at a price for mormyrid fish (specifically Gnathoneumus petersii). The brief mormyrid electric organ discharge evokes a large ringing spiking response in ampullary receptors that lasts ∼200 ms. The electric organ discharge rate ranges from 5 Hz (rest) to 60 Hz (foraging) and the ringing response overlaps the prey related sensory input. Ampullary receptors should be swamped by this noise and identification of prey obliterated. Ampullary receptors project to output cells within the medullary electrosensory lobe. Remarkably, electrosensory lobe output neurons respond faithfully to passive electrosensory input with no hint of their cacophonous input. There must be a mechanism that eliminates the ringing noise with surgical precision.

The fish’s method is just like noise cancellation in the technologies mentioned: subtract the unwanted noise to get the signal.

Cancellation of ringing noise is via learning a ‘negative image’ equal and opposite to the ringing response, followed by summation of the ringing noise and its negative image. The key to the negative image lies in a predictive corollary discharge signal that precisely times the occurrence of each electric organ discharge. The corollary discharge reaches cerebellar granule cells which, in turn, project to apical dendrites of the medium ganglion cells. The medium ganglion cells learn to precisely follow the ringing noise and their inhibitory input to the output cells summates with and cancels their ringing noise input.

It’s a clever trick, but even more remarkable in the details. The neurons along the signal path have to adjust for the propagation rate and know when to potentiate (increase) the spikes or depress (decrease) them to create the “negative image.” Width, amplitude, and timing of the spikes are crucial to success. This image (actually a backward-propagating pulse train) must be faithfully reproduced across synapses, where electrical signals are converted to chemical signals and vice versa. In addition, the precision extends to the types of ion channels (e.g., sodium or calcium) in the axons and dendrites. It’s mind boggling to read the details in Maier’s synopsis and Muller et al.’s research. But there’s more: hormones are involved, too.

Signal Prioritization

Another paper about noise cancellation in mormyrid fish appeared in Current Biology a month after the Muller paper. Fukutoni and Carlson determined that the system also relies on hormones — in particular, testosterone — to coordinate the motor output and internal prediction of sensory consequences. In breeding males, they found, “inhibition activated by a corollary discharge blocks sensory responses to self-generated electric pulses, allowing the downstream circuit to selectively analyze communication signals from nearby fish” to determine if they are juveniles, females, or non-reproductive males. “In this case, testosterone directly affects the biophysical properties of the electrocytes in the electric organ that determine the EOD [electric organ discharge] waveform.” If evolution had not thought of that set of random mutations needing selection, then the poor fish would have gone extinct. (The authors didn’t say that; just trying to be logical.)

Regarding this twist on subject, Washington University in St. Louis took note that a “hormone alters electric fish’s signal-canceling trick.” It boils down to timing control.

The electric fish known as mormyrids send out electric pulses as signals; they also have developed a way to ignore or block their own messages. A system called corollary discharge inhibits the fish’s sensory perception for a brief, well-defined period of time after it releases an electric pulse — allowing it to prioritize messages from others, such as potential mates.

Other Cases in Biology

What is revealed in these papers is a remarkably effective noise cancellation technology in fish. They can sense faint electrical signals from prey and from conspecifics despite initiating electrical pulses into the water 60 times a second! Those pulses would swamp the faint signal from the target, were it not for a combination of neurons, ion channels, mathematically precise algorithms and hormones working together to subtract the self-signal and hone the target signal. The resultant signal, furthermore, must activate instinctive behaviors or it would accomplish nothing.

The principle behind this biological methodology can be extended to every case in biology where an organism, whether a cell or a fruit fly or a grizzly bear, needs to discriminate signals from self to respond to environmental signals. Grizzly bears, I have heard, give off a very strong odor. Yet their sense of smell is remarkably sensitive. They must be able to perform “smell cancellation” to subtract their own odor from the signal they wish to focus on. Echolocation wouldn’t work if the dolphin or bat was unable to discriminate between its own clicks and the echoes from the target. You can think up more examples, and perhaps curiosity about how they are achieved will generate some fruitful research projects for advocates of intelligent design.

Against Roman

Roman: So when you say "his essence is bordered" what does that actually mean? If it does not mean that beyond his border things are more and less immanent to him and thus  does not have immediate access, then what? if he has immediate access in what sense is he "bordered."

AservantofJEHOVAH:As I've explained space is not a limiting factor to JEHOVAH he is telekinetic so despite not being immanent he does have immediate access to the entirety of his creation despite being bordered.

Romans:Telekenesis doesn't change anything I said, evenodong y people who supposedly have telekenisis know things more and less immanently, and access things more and less immanently

AservantofJEHOVAH: And how many telekinetic individuals are you aquatinted with so that you can authoritatively pronounce on the nature of JEHOVAH'S telekinesis. Because of the nature of his telekinesis JEHOVAH has immediate access to the entirety of his creation despite not being immanent you are the one imposing human type limitations on JEHOVAH not me.

Romans:Also if Jehovah has immediate knowledge of anything at all times, it makes no sense to say he has a center of perception.

Why not? If there is a border between JEHOVAH'S essence and everything else the the fact that this border is not a limiting factor to his access to the creation does not make it go away.

Romans:The Holy spirit is just God in his action, it's not a separate thing.

1 Kings 8:27 doesn't imply that at all, it implies that no space can contain God because God is transcendent.

Heavens and earth refer to the creation. There is a border between the creation and its creator that cannot be breached in either direction. The spirit is a projection of JEHOVAH'S Actualised potential so I agree with you in a sense. But the spirit's effect is immediate so one can say that JEHOVAH is virtually immanent despite not being literally immanent.

Romans:1 Kings 8:39 There is no reason to take "heavens" in this regard to be a literally place (anymore than he literally hears, or literally has arms), it refers to God in his transcendence, i.e. beyond our immanent phenomenological world.

  AservantofJEHOVAH: Taken as whole the statements imply that there is a border between JEHOVAH and his creation but possessing telekinetic capabilities that give him immediate access to his creation he can immediately assess and affect his entire creation. Like I said most of these objections involve a projecting of human type insecurities upon JEHOVAH.

Romans:To say that there exists some uncreated "space" is to deny what the bible says clearly, that all things are created by God, also if God existed alone prior to creation there being "space" is nonsense, space between him and what?

AservantofJEHOVAH:Infinity Roman space and time are abstractions like numbers, colours abstractions can neither be created nor destroyed only instantiated.

Romans:If Jehovah exists "in" some "space" and is bounded, and can only act through some substance that is distinct from him called (holy spirit), then he is not self-sufficient but nor is he self-existent, but he is continent and dependent like other creatures.

AservantofJEHOVAH: No because the holy spirit is his Actualised potential and hence not a supplement to his power so he remains self sufficient in that all the information and energy manifest in his work came out of him and is not supplemented because he is telekinetic he can instantly actualise this potential at any place and time beyond the border of his essence.

Romans:Also what do you mean when you say he has a "form?" like a shape? Does he have a front and back? I mean are you seeing the problem here?

AservantofJEHOVAH:Do you believe that the holy angels have a front or a back or an up or a down. I seem to remember specifying that his form is unlike anything in the creation and that we ought not to imagine that it would be humanoid. So no his form is not humanoid. Does not consists of specialised parts and so has no front/back/left/right/up/down. Just like the bodies the angels have and the anointed expect to receive.

1Johh ch.3:2"Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is."