Author: Ophelia Benson

And, not for the first time, there’s Howard Gardner.

‘In his new book Five Minds for the Future, he argues that the 21st century will belong to people who can think in certain ways.’ One of the five is ‘the respectful mind, which shows an appreciation of different cultures.’ Why is that called the respectful mind? Why isn’t it called the appreciative mind? Or why isn’t the explanatory phrase ‘which shows respect for different cultures’? (Because minds can’t show things, for one reason. Okay but besides that.) I don’t know for sure, but my guess is that it’s because unconditional respect for (undefined, unspecified) different cultures is slowly but steadily being made mandatory. Which is stupid, in a way – if it’s mandatory, it’s not really respect, is it, it’s just obedience or obeisance or slavishness. Extorted or required respect isn’t respect. It’s also not a kind of mind. It may be an idea or a way of behaving, but it’s not a mind.

Gardner believes that the education policies of today, which still revere rote-learning, are preparing children for the world of yesterday. He points to my digital recorder, the size of a cigarette lighter: “Something that small can contain every fact that you ever need to know. So what a waste of time it is to sit around learning facts! All the premium in the future is for people who can do things that machines can’t do yet. So, the capacity to ask a good question, rather than getting the right answer from a machine, becomes so much more important.”

Really. How can people ask good questions if they don’t know anything? What can their good questions be about? How can they even dig facts out of ‘machines’ if they don’t know anything?

Matthew Parris is amusing.

During Holy Week we are treated to a variety of decent-sounding people in print and on the airwaves explaining that religion – or “faith” as they now prefer to call it – is basically all about shared moral values, making the world a better place and gaining a proper sense of awe at life’s mystery…Such faith sounds so reasonable. Churlish nonbelievers like me are made to feel it is we who are being arrogant, dogmatic, closed-minded. How can we be so sure?

Beeeeecause (as Parris of course goes on to point out) that’s not in fact what religion or ‘faith’ really is all about, that’s how.

You are living, dear reader, at a watershed in human history. This is the century during which, after 2,000 years of what has been a pretty bloody marriage, faith and reason must agree to part, citing irreconcilable differences. So block your ears to the cooing voices on Thought for the Day, and choose your side. “But how can you be sure?”…Words cannot express my confidence in the answer to the question whether God cured a nun because she wrote a Pope’s name down. He didn’t.

Moral values good (if they’re the right moral values, a question which has to be decided on secular, universalizable grounds), making the world a better place good, sense of awe more a matter of taste; but supernatural truth claims, not good; the thinking that goes into belief in supernatural truth claims, not good at all, in fact bad.

It never ends. Drip drip drip; whine whine whine. Those mean fashionable intellectual mean people at their fashionable parties aren’t Christians and aren’t impressed by Christianity. It’s so unfair.I would never admit to any left-liberal social gathering that I sometimes go to church…Christians are likely to be depicted in my paper’s pages as zealots or people who inexplicably haven’t caught up with the modern world.

That could be because Christians believe implausible things for epistemically questionable reasons. It’s not self-evident that there is no problem with believing implausible things for epistemically questionable reasons.

To the average funky young columnist, Christians are as relevant as Cliff Richard, but where does that columnist think the philosophical roots of his own opinions lie?

A number of places, probably, most or all of them secular. Christianity doesn’t provide philosophical roots, it provides theological or theistic ones. Jesus is quoted as saying quite a few good things, and some bad ones, but aphorisms don’t provide much in the way of philosophical roots; for those people must and do go elsewhere. Christianity doesn’t deserve much credit for those roots.

Then there’s some wool about consumerism, then some wool about how claustrophobic Dawkins makes him feel. There’s no argument or even clarity, just some disconnected musing. That’s one reason some of us are not fond of religion: it doesn’t generally teach or encourage people to think clearly; all too often it teaches or encourages them to do the opposite – witness that discussion between Rick Warren and Sam Harris in which Warren says one confused or inaccurate thing after another and Harris does better than that. It is very difficult to avoid drawing the conclusion that Warren simply can’t think properly at all, and to blame his training for that.

A pretty story.

Naked men, women and children, some of them in chains to prevent them escaping, cower in front of the men in charge in a dimly-lit room in the church of St Mary on Mount Entoto…The church…sits above a mountain stream, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church believes the stream is holy water with the power to cure HIV/Aids…Plastic jerry cans are filled with water from a pool, and passed along a human chain to priests dressed like deep sea fishermen. The bright yellow waterproofs protect them from the drenching they administer to their congregation. They hurl the water over the mass of people kneeling in front of them who shriek and scream, either through devotion or the simple shock of the cold water hitting their naked flesh…The church claims that more than a thousand people have been cured in the past two years. And yet the head priest Father Geberemedhen admitted to me that only the newly diagnosed are likely to be helped…”We don’t allow patients to take medication if they want to receive holy water,” he told me. That means they must stop taking the antiretrovirals which prevent the disease taking hold, and prolong the life of those who carry the HIV virus.

Jesus saves. Or not.

I’ve been thinking about things like this lately, so it interests me a lot. Though it probably would even if I hadn’t been thinking about it – it probably would have started me thinking about it.

Humans are born time travelers. We may not be able to send our bodies into the past or the future, at least not yet, but we can send our minds. We can relive events that happened long ago or envision ourselves in the future. New studies suggest that the two directions of temporal travel are intimately entwined in the human brain. A number of psychologists argue that re-experiencing the past evolved in our ancestors as a way to plan for the future and that the rise of mental time travel was crucial to our species’ success. But some experts on animal behavior do not think we are unique in this respect. They point to several recent experiments suggesting that animals can visit the past and future as well.

They have to go by themselves though. That’s what I was thinking about recently – the fact that they can’t discuss the past with anyone, or inform anyone about it, or be informed about it.

Endel Tulving, a Canadian psychologist, defined episodic memory as the ability to recall the details of personal experiences: what happened, where it happened, when it happened and so on…Episodic memory was also unique to our species, Dr. Tulving maintained. For one thing, he argued that episodic memory required self-awareness. You can’t remember yourself if you don’t know you exist. He also argued that there was no evidence animals could recollect experiences, even if those experiences left an impression on them.

Some researchers are skeptical, and have done experiments that they take to indicate something like episodic memory; other researchers are skeptical.

“Information is not really what characterizes mental time travel,” Dr. Suddendorf said…Episodic memory also depends on many other faculties that have only been clearly documented in the human mind, Dr. Suddendorf argues. He said he believes it evolved after our ancestors branched off from other apes. The advantage lay not in knowing the past, however, but in providing “an advantage for predicting the future,” he said…Daniel Schacter, a psychologist, and his colleagues at Harvard University recently studied how brains function as people think about past experiences and imagine future ones.

That interests me because I’ve long been interested in the fact that there is no real difference between remembering something and imagining it – no phenomenological difference. It’s interesting if remembering past experiences and imagining future ones are essentially the same adaptation.

Constructing an episodic memory causes a distinctive network of brain regions to become active. As a person then adds details to the memory, the network changes, as some regions quiet down and others fire up. The researchers then had their subjects think about themselves in the future. Many parts of the episodic memory network became active again.

There you go. And that’s why memory is so unreliable – it gets mixed up with imagining, and we not only don’t know how to disentangle them, we don’t even know when they’re tangled.

Bad.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is maneuvering to fundamentally weaken the Endangered Species Act, its strategy laid out in an internal 117-page draft proposal obtained by Salon. The proposed changes limit the number of species that can be protected and curtail the acres of wildlife habitat to be preserved. It shifts authority to enforce the act from the federal government to the states, and it dilutes legal barriers that protect habitat from sprawl, logging or mining…Many Fish and Wildlife Service employees believe the draft is not based on “defensible science,” says a federal employee who asked to remain anonymous…[T]he proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act should come as no surprise. President Bush has hardly been one of its fans. Under his reign, the administration has granted 57 species endangered status, the action in each case being prompted by a lawsuit. That’s fewer than in any other administration in history…Furthermore, during this administration, nearly half of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees who work with endangered species reported that they had been directed by their superiors to ignore scientific evidence that would result in recommendations for the protection of species, according to a 2005 survey of more than 1,400 service biologists, ecologists and botanists conducted by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit organization.

Also bad.

A top-ranking official overseeing the Fish and Wildlife Service at the Interior Department rode roughshod over agency scientists…Ms. MacDonald, an engineer by training, has provoked complaints from some wildlife biologists and lawyers in the agency for aggressive advocacy for industries’ views of the science that underlies agency decisions…The report, citing a lawyer in the Sacramento office, noted that Ms. MacDonald lobbied for a decision to combine three different populations of the California tiger salamander into one, thus excluding it from the endangered-species list, and making the decision legally vulnerable. A federal district judge overturned it in 2005., saying the decision was made “without even a semblance of agency reasoning.”…The inspector general also found that Ms. MacDonald had sent internal government documents by e-mail to a lawyer for the Pacific Legal Foundation — a property-rights group that frequently challenges endangered-species decisions.

And so on, and so on. The Republican War on Science rages on. Bastards.