05.28.11

We have had a huge number of posts on the ‘rebirth’ issue in Buddhism: here is a set of links to most of them.
We can take a partial breather for a day or so, and then put the discussion in context, with a summary. The new material suggested from Sean Carroll’s remarks can also be brought in.
We need a day or so to reflect on the discussion. The comment series at ‘a secular buddhist’ is a one of the best in a long time.

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Carroll article on soul question

Posted in General at 1:34 pm by nemo

Physics and the Immortality of the Soul WEIT blog also posts on this today.

Sean Carroll takes up the soul question, and succumbs to the temptation of reverse certainty. I remain unconvinced, but actually I have a sneaking interest in this kind of speculation.
It is important to challenge this ‘intelligent nonsense’ from Carroll. Nothing he says has much status. Nevertheless it might help to start to consider the issues as to specifics.
Experts in physics are not going to get the soul question straight, so read with interest, but no kowtowing to science popes.

But if we do that it is important to not be the victims of ‘expert snowjob’. Ironically scientific efforts to elucidate the question show up everyone’s ignorance.

We can consider this essay over a few days: and also post some remarks on ‘sufism and the soul’ at The Gurdjieff Con: Carroll asks for evidence. Maybe he would like to explore (for two to five decades) the realm of Islamic sufi land where the ‘baraka factor’ in the ‘seeding of souls’ is an experiential fact. This very hidden sufi groups know something about soul that is experiential (as a distant relative of kundalini phenomena, but different). Note: you already have a ‘soul’ (cf below) so this ‘soul’ tradition is something different.
This is an additional problem with the issue: those who know never speak of what they know, and the debate is left to those who are believers in fancies. The realm of sufis and the ‘soul’ has been discussed here many times over the past five years. I forget which posts!

We need, in subsequent posts, to distinguish the occidental soul tradition, and the Eastern (Indic) reincarnation tradition. How do we square these different canons?
The afterlife has been described very spefically in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, so, some evaluation of that legacy might help. The empiricism here is relative: ordinary man is ignorant here, but an advanced student of meditation has a different perception of empiricism.

More later. But the issue might benefit from a look at Schopenhauer’s (thence Kant’s) transcendental idealism. There the mind-self is the source of the categories of space and time. By definition, with no reference to a soul, therefore, something is timeless and spaceless with respect to life and death, which are therefore illusory, since the source mind-self is never born, and therefore never dies. The defaul question therefore suggests that the ‘soul’ is something different, and that reincarnation is simply the oscillation of mind-self in and out of space-time. This version of ‘soul’ is not the same as the usual question of soul, which is something different built on this.
And the Buddhist perspective is to move beyond the soul factor. All these different things are muddle in most discussion.

Carroll’s energy considerations are most interesting, but don’t prove anything. They remind me of proofs that airplanes cant fly.

The topic of “Life after death” raises disreputable connotations of past-life regression and haunted houses, but there are a large number of people in the world who believe in some form of persistence of the individual soul after life ends. Clearly this is an important question, one of the most important ones we can possibly think of in terms of relevance to human life. If science has something to say about, we should all be interested in hearing.

Adam Frank thinks that science has nothing to say about it. He advocates being “firmly agnostic” on the question. (His coblogger Alva Noë resolutely disagrees.) I have an enormous respect for Adam; he’s a smart guy and a careful thinker. When we disagree it’s with the kind of respectful dialogue that should be a model for disagreeing with non-crazy people. But here he couldn’t be more wrong.

Adam claims that “simply is no controlled, experimental[ly] verifiable information” regarding life after death. By these standards, there is no controlled, experimentally verifiable information regarding whether the Moon is made of green cheese. Sure, we can take spectra of light reflecting from the Moon, and even send astronauts up there and bring samples back for analysis. But that’s only scratching the surface, as it were. What if the Moon is almost all green cheese, but is covered with a layer of dust a few meters thick? Can you really say that you know this isn’t true? Until you have actually examined every single cubic centimeter of the Moon’s interior, you don’t really have experimentally verifiable information, do you? So maybe agnosticism on the green-cheese issue is warranted. (Come up with all the information we actually do have about the Moon; I promise you I can fit it into the green-cheese hypothesis.)

Obviously this is completely crazy. Our conviction that green cheese makes up a negligible fraction of the Moon’s interior comes not from direct observation, but from the gross incompatibility of that idea with other things we think we know. Given what we do understand about rocks and planets and dairy products and the Solar System, it’s absurd to imagine that the Moon is made of green cheese. We know better.

We also know better for life after death, although people are much more reluctant to admit it. Admittedly, “direct” evidence one way or the other is hard to come by — all we have are a few legends and sketchy claims from unreliable witnesses with near-death experiences, plus a bucketload of wishful thinking. But surely it’s okay to take account of indirect evidence — namely, compatibility of the idea that some form of our individual soul survives death with other things we know about how the world works.

Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there’s no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die. If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?

Everything we know about quantum field theory (QFT) says that there aren’t any sensible answers to these questions. Of course, everything we know about quantum field theory could be wrong. Also, the Moon could be made of green cheese.

Among advocates for life after death, nobody even tries to sit down and do the hard work of explaining how the basic physics of atoms and electrons would have to be altered in order for this to be true. If we tried, the fundamental absurdity of the task would quickly become evident.

Even if you don’t believe that human beings are “simply” collections of atoms evolving and interacting according to rules laid down in the Standard Model of particle physics, most people would grudgingly admit that atoms are part of who we are. If it’s really nothing but atoms and the known forces, there is clearly no way for the soul to survive death. Believing in life after death, to put it mildly, requires physics beyond the Standard Model. Most importantly, we need some way for that “new physics” to interact with the atoms that we do have.

Very roughly speaking, when most people think about an immaterial soul that persists after death, they have in mind some sort of blob of spirit energy that takes up residence near our brain, and drives around our body like a soccer mom driving an SUV. The questions are these: what form does that spirit energy take, and how does it interact with our ordinary atoms? Not only is new physics required, but dramatically new physics. Within QFT, there can’t be a new collection of “spirit particles” and “spirit forces” that interact with our regular atoms, because we would have detected them in existing experiments. Ockham’s razor is not on your side here, since you have to posit a completely new realm of reality obeying very different rules than the ones we know.

But let’s say you do that. How is the spirit energy supposed to interact with us? Here is the equation that tells us how electrons behave in the everyday world:

Dont’ worry about the details; it’s the fact that the equation exists that matters, not its particular form. It’s the Dirac equation — the two terms on the left are roughly the velocity of the electron and its inertia — coupled to electromagnetism and gravity, the two terms on the right.

As far as every experiment ever done is concerned, this equation is the correct description of how electrons behave at everyday energies. It’s not a complete description; we haven’t included the weak nuclear force, or couplings to hypothetical particles like the Higgs boson. But that’s okay, since those are only important at high energies and/or short distances, very far from the regime of relevance to the human brain.

If you believe in an immaterial soul that interacts with our bodies, you need to believe that this equation is not right, even at everyday energies. There needs to be a new term (at minimum) on the right, representing how the soul interacts with electrons. (If that term doesn’t exist, electrons will just go on their way as if there weren’t any soul at all, and then what’s the point?) So any respectable scientist who took this idea seriously would be asking — what form does that interaction take? Is it local in spacetime? Does the soul respect gauge invariance and Lorentz invariance? Does the soul have a Hamiltonian? Do the interactions preserve unitarity and conservation of information?

Nobody ever asks these questions out loud, possibly because of how silly they sound. Once you start asking them, the choice you are faced with becomes clear: either overthrow everything we think we have learned about modern physics, or distrust the stew of religious accounts/unreliable testimony/wishful thinking that makes people believe in the possibility of life after death. It’s not a difficult decision, as scientific theory-choice goes.

We don’t choose theories in a vacuum. We are allowed — indeed, required — to ask how claims about how the world works fit in with other things we know about how the world works. I’ve been talking here like a particle physicist, but there’s an analogous line of reasoning that would come from evolutionary biology. Presumably amino acids and proteins don’t have souls that persist after death. What about viruses or bacteria? Where upon the chain of evolution from our monocellular ancestors to today did organisms stop being described purely as atoms interacting through gravity and electromagnetism, and develop an immaterial immortal soul?

There’s no reason to be agnostic about ideas that are dramatically incompatible with everything we know about modern science. Once we get over any reluctance to face reality on this issue, we can get down to the much more interesting questions of how human beings and consciousness really work.

A complicated physics equation failed to make the cut and paste transition: check the original link source

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Scientists Issue Letter Supporting Louisiana Science Education Act

Posted in General at 1:07 pm by nemo

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/05/scientists_issue_letter_suppor046881.html

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Maori feather trade route

Posted in Evolution at 1:04 pm by nemo

http://www.stuff.co.nz/science/5062207/DNA-reveals-Maori-feather-trade-route

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NCSE news: Louisiana case

Posted in Evolution, you've got mail at 1:02 pm by nemo

Dear Friends of NCSE,

The effort to repeal Louisiana’s antievolution law was stymied in
committee. Creationism is officially unwelcome in Britain’s new free
schools. Previously in Louisiana, the Baton Rouge Advocate endorsed
the effort to repeat the state’s antievolution law, while Barbara
Forrest explained in detail why the effort is necessary. Read the rest of this entry »

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Debate over arsenic-based life enters a new chapter

Posted in General at 1:01 pm by nemo

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/debate-over-arsenic-based-life-enters-a-new-chapter/2011/05/26/AGhk7fCH_story.html

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Senators reject repeal of 2008 Science Education Act

Posted in General at 12:59 pm by nemo

Senators reject repeal of 2008 Science Education Act

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Nanoengineers Invent New Biomaterial

Posted in General at 12:57 pm by nemo

Nanoengineers Invent New Biomaterial That More Closely Mimics Human Tissue
ScienceDaily (May 25, 2011) — A new biomaterial designed for repairing damaged human tissue doesn’t wrinkle up when it is stretched. The invention from nanoengineers at the University of California, San Diego marks a significant breakthrough in tissue engineering because it more closely mimics the properties of native human tissue.

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Autism and the brain

Posted in General at 12:56 pm by nemo

Autism Changes Molecular Structure of the Brain: Discovery Points to a Common Cause for Multifaceted Disease
ScienceDaily (May 25, 2011) — For decades, autism researchers have faced a baffling riddle: how to unravel a disorder that leaves no known physical trace as it develops in the brain.

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Fossil of Giant Ancient Sea Predator

Posted in Evolution at 12:54 pm by nemo

Fossil of Giant Ancient Sea Predator DiscoveredScienceDaily (May 26, 2011) — Paleontologists have discovered that a group of remarkable ancient sea creatures existed for much longer and grew to much larger sizes than previously thought, thanks to extraordinarily well-preserved fossils discovered in Morocco.

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Buying influence in the academy

Posted in General at 12:49 pm by nemo

http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/151066/ayn_rand_u_rich_conservatives_–_not_just_the_kochs_–_buying_up_professors_and_influence_on_campus/

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Civilization and Its Malcontents

Posted in General at 12:48 pm by nemo

Truthdig

Civilization and Its Malcontents

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/civilization_and_its_malcontents_20110526/

Posted on May 26, 2011

By Mr. Fish

In post-1950s America, an average person’s concept of what might be the meaning of life was more likely than at any other time in history to draw on a wide range of source material culled from a broad swath of disciplines throughout the culture. In order to understand why peace was elusive in Indochina, for example, in addition to looking to contemporary scholarship and modern reporting on the subject, one was as likely to draw on the teachings of Gandhi, Jung and McLuhan as much as on the work of Kerouac, Coltrane and Warhol. When contributing to a conversation about baseball, transcendental meditation or political assassination, insight was as likely to stem from a passage pulled from C. Wright Mills, Samuel Beckett or Susan Sontag as it was from a musical quote excised from Charles Mingus or a visual denouement remembered from Ernie Kovacs or a publicly pulled punch line from Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. MAD magazine was in competition with The New York Times for truth-telling; female sexuality was the volatile and thrilling combustible MacGuffin created by combining equal parts Miller and Millett, and the news analysis offered from “That Was the Week That Was” and “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” was often eminently more insightful than that offered from Walter Cronkite and CBS News or Bishop Sheen or Mom and Dad.

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