Is Climate Change Real? Does it Matter?

posted in: Environment - 2 Comments

04.04.09 10:55 pm

The global scientific community agrees that average global temperature is on the rise, despite local anomalies. 2008 was one of the 10 warmest years since records have been kept. But critics of gloabal warming science have not given up. Global temperatures fluctuate, and skeptics point to periods of cooling as evidence against the dangers of emissions. And scientific consensus may change: the climate heretics might turn out to be right. But there is strong evidence that the current connsensus represents reality.

One Antarctic ice shelf has quickly vanished, another is disappearing and glaciers are melting faster than anyone thought due to climate change, U.S. and British government researchers reported on Friday.

Climate change is to blame, according to the report from the U.S. Geological Survey and the British Antarctic Survey, available at pubs.usgs.gov/imap/2600/B.

But the question is not whether climate change is an important issue, but whether the timescales reflected by most current models are accurate. No one doubts that humans have the potential to alter their environment, now or in the future. Local environments, like Los Angeles are clearly affected. READ MORE

Touch Nature. Touch Yourself.

posted in: Evolution, Technology (Tags: ) - No Comments

04.02.09 11:40 pm

Are we losing touch with nature? How could we, when we and everything we create, are part of nature?

With so much of life based on electronic representations of reality, humans risk losing touch with nature, says University of Washington psychologist Peter Kahn.

From web cams that offer views of wildlife to virtual tours of the Grand Canyon to robotic pets, modern technology increasingly is encroaching into human connections with the natural world. Kahn and his colleagues believe this intrusion may emerge as one of the central psychological problems of our times.

It’s true that the environment that we live in now, the “manmade” environment, is different than the environment we used to live in, the “natural” environment. But if we are part of nature, then it seems to be a mistake to chalk these differences up to human meddling. If nature meddles with nature, it’s all natural. As a scientific naturalist who believes that humans are part of an evolutionary chain, it’s hard to define the difference between natural and artificial. If beaver dams are natural why isn’t the Hoover Dam? READ MORE

Nonbelievers Rising

posted in: Atheism, Positive Thought, Religion - No Comments

04.01.09 10:45 pm

Under the headline “Rise of Atheism,” AFP has recently reported on a British group that is selling “de-baptism” certificates.

More than 100,000 people have recently downloaded “certificates of de-baptism” from the Internet to renounce their Christian faith.

The initiative launched by a group called the National Secular Society (NSS) follows atheist campaigns here and elsewhere, including a controversial advert displayed on London buses which declared: “There’s probably no God.”

The response from Christian bloggers has been mostly laughter and puzzlement. Why, they ask, would an Atheist legitimize baptism by authoring a ritual to undo it? If it’s meaningless, then an Atheist wouldn’t care if they were baptized at a young age or not. Right?

One commenter argues that

The “debaptism” effort represents a certain breed of militant, confrontational atheism more concerned with vehemently disassociating themselves from Christianity than maintaining actual religious freedom.

On face, these objections seems reasonable. In fact, no Atheist believes that they are accomplishing any spiritual feat by purchasing a debaptism certificate. This is a publicity effort, it’s true, but is not being done because atheists are militant. You don’t have to be a violent anarchist to want to express your (dissenting) views.

Nonbelievers have just as much of a right to publicize their opposition to theistic views as the theists have to promulgate them. The societally acceptable reaction to the news that a Mormon is going on a missionary trip is to say something positive. Missionaries are a part of our history, and viewed by Christians as noble. But an atheist who offers a half-joking novelty item for sale on the internet is viewed as “militant.” Atheism is just not socially acceptable in much of the English-speaking world.

If atheists don’t make their views known, and vigorously argue their case, they will lose the battle against religion. Theists have TV commercials, TV channels, missionaries, bestsellers, worldwide financial reach, political access. The truth is powerful on its own, but so far, religion seems to have the upper hand. READ MORE

Lazy Doom

posted in: Space and the Universe, Technology - No Comments

03.30.09 11:59 pm

An article in today’s LiveScience.com posits the theory, oft repeated in science fiction, that humans will become lazy from technology. This laziness, Dave Brody argues, will keep us Earth-bound forever, and is the reason why we don’t see extraterrestrials.

Why don’t we see intelligent extraterrestrials, when the galaxy should be chock full of them? Hubot Roboman tells us the answer: Every technological civilization gets to this point. If you have virtually limitless entertainment everywhere you are, why would you ever go anywhere at all? Any parent whose child plays a game involving a screen and a microprocessor knows this devil all too well. So the number of intelligent species who can kick their addiction to The Too-Easy Life is obviously vanishingly small.

But the author underestimates life’s potential to convert diversity into success. Some humans will like living outside the technological bubble. The descendants of those humans will spread to the stars.

Any successor technology to life will demonstrate diversity as a necessary result of complexity. No worry is necessary about robots being unable to pursue survival: if they fail to evolve, they will be a dead end, easily replacable by the next generation of life. If they are successful enough to supplant life, they will need to evolve, and thus will find and exploit all available niches, including space.

Music: Now Additive-Free

posted in: Music, Positive Thought - No Comments

03.29.09 11:56 pm

Positive thought, unlike the chemical remedies for malaise, is completely harmless. You can’t get addicted to meditation or music. No one ever died from singing in church.  Today’s New York Times, in a piece about music therapy, notes:

In general what has power to heal has potential to harm. In the case of music, the truism appears not to apply. Allegations of adverse reactions, addiction or overdoses, to cite some of the most serious dangers, are rare, and those that might be cited seem either flatly incredible or specious in the extreme. In Wagner’s time some predicted that “Tristan und Isolde” would drive people insane, but where were the mental cases? And in our time we hear of military interrogators administering music nonstop at deafening volume as a form of torture lite. But surely the torture lies in sleep deprivation, repetition and trauma to the inner ear, not in exposure to the music as such.

Music, in fact is a terrific way to tap into the brain’s link with the body, creating good health through good will.  This particular technique is a little newer and less well-understood than meditation and prayer.  But it has just as long a history as those other techniques as a part of religious practice, whether or not its practitioners understood its scientific underpinnings.  Like drugs, musical religious experiences can be euphoric in the short term; unlike them, it is healthy in the long term.  Music ecstasy may be attached to musical performances that are non-religious.  But these experiences lack the institutional and ideological focus that religion provides, which can enhance the musical experience beyond the joyous and into the realm of a component of a legitimate life philosophy. READ MORE

Religion for Robots

posted in: Religion, Technology - No Comments

03.27.09 9:19 pm

Science fiction authors have been predicting for years the day when humanoid robots will roam the earth, and when mankind will be faced with a host of associated ethical issues. We still don’t have C3PO, Data, The Terminator, Johnny 5 or Wall-E. But unlike the doomed flying car, scientists still believe that intelligent, man-made beings are in our future. Hans Moravec, chief scientist at Seegrid, a company that develops industrial robots capable of navigating on their own, believes that the fantastic robots of sci-fi will become reality within his lifetime.

The human retina is a patch of nervous tissue in the back of the eyeball half a millimeter thick and approximately two centimeters across. It consists mostly of light-sensing cells, but one tenth of a millimeter of its thickness is populated by image-processing circuitry that is capable of detecting edges (boundaries between light and dark) and motion for about a million tiny image regions. Each of these regions is associated with its own fiber in the optic nerve, and each performs about 10 detections of an edge or a motion each second. The results flow deeper into the brain along the associated fiber.

From long experience working on robot vision systems, I know that similar edge or motion detection, if performed by efficient software, requires the execution of at least 100 computer instructions. Therefore, to accomplish the retina’s 10 million detections per second would necessitate at least 1,000 MIPS.

The entire human brain is about 75,000 times heavier than the 0.02 gram of processing circuitry in the retina, which implies that it would take, in round numbers, 100 million MIPS (100 trillion instructions per second) to emulate the 1,500-gram human brain. Personal computers in 2008 are just about a match for the 0.1-gram brain of a guppy, but a typical PC would have to be at least 10,000 times more powerful to perform like a human brain.

Though dispiriting to artificial-intelligence experts, the huge deficit does not mean that the goal of a humanlike artificial brain is unreachable. Computer power for a given price doubled each year in the 1990s, after doubling every 18 months in the 1980s and every two years before that. Prior to 1990 this progress made possible a great decrease in the cost and size of robot-controlling computers. Cost went from many millions of dollars to a few thousand, and size went from room-filling to handheld. Power, meanwhile, held steady at about 1 MIPS. Since 1990 cost and size reductions have abated, but power has risen to about 10,000 MIPS for a home computer. At the present pace, only about 20 or 30 years will be needed to close the gap.

Of course, Mr. Moravec’s logic is subject to argument. Scientists have long known that brain mass is not the best way to measure processing capability. Smaller people have smaller brains, and yet physical size is not a good predictor of intelligence. Whales have the largest brains of any animal on Earth, and yet humans like to consider themselves the most intelligent species.

Nevertheless, his conclusion that the processing power threshold for an artificial intelligence that rivals human intelligence will eventually be reached is unimpeachable. As long as humans survive and prosper, technological progress will continue, which will ultimately lead to the creation of artificial intelligence. The only question is when. His answer, like many others in the field, is soon.

That brings us to the question that concerns us here: will these robots need or want something like religion?

Of course, there are many unknowns about what these artificially intelligent entities will look like. Human intelligence is very specialized to our evolutionary purposes. We are social because our evolutionary history favored social solutions, and our values were shaped by historical accidents. Artificially intelligent beings will not be limited by evolutionary considerations, at least at first. They will arrive with whatever values we program in.

So if we program robots to be religious, they will be (until or unless they begin to evolve independently). This brings us to the question: should we program religiousity (or any components thereof) into our robots? And relatedly, will robots with human-like intelligence but no religiousity suffer any dysfunction? READ MORE

How Big is God?

posted in: Religion, Space and the Universe, Wonder - No Comments

03.26.09 2:43 pm

I have argued that humans lack knowledge about the organization of time/space on distance scales greater than 300 million light years or so, and that this lack of knowledge means that agnosticism is necessary regarding higher intelligence, to the extent that “higher intelligence” means an entity who exists on incredibly large distance scales. But what kinds of things or entities could we imagine exist on these scales?

When we talk about quantum mechanics, we accept that there is a different physics on small scales. We call the physics that we observe in our day to day lives, the gravity that holds us down, and the mechanics of objects that we can observe “macro level” or “Newtonian” physics. Suppose we imagine that there is something on larger distance scales than what we can observe. Let’s call this the “supermacroscopic” level.

When I talk about supermacroscopic physics, I am talking about huge things, bigger than galaxies, and obviously, we don’t know what exists on those scales, if anything. I can just imagine hypothetical supermacroscopic beings laughing at our feeble attempts to pretend we understand something about them. Of course, I don’t believe that there are Gods laughing at me – this imaginary entity I have created in my brain is a metaphor for the lack of knowledge that I have.

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Religion and Self-Control

posted in: Atheism, Positive Thought, Religion, Wonder - 1 Comment

12.30.08 11:04 am

Research overwhelmingly supports the proposition that religion, in general, increases length and quality of life. In a forthcoming paper, McCullough and Willoughby attempt to fit an explanatory narrative to this well-established experimental result: that “self-control” is the trait promoted by religion that results in benefits in health and well-being. This paper is discussed in today’s New York Times Science Section. Unfortunately, the research cited by the authors of the paper is contradictory and does not support their conclusions. READ MORE