If you've ever spent any time on message boards or discussion groups, you're no doubt familiar with the peculiar format debates adopt on the internet: every poster but the very first quotes the previous message nearly in full, chops it down to chunks of one or two sentences, and inserts point-by-point rebuttals of everything the previous poster said. I don't like it very much. It encourages people to focus on minutiae, unfairly punishes the smallest mistakes, and most often leads to overly tedious, ridiculously long posts devoid of any substance. So I try to avoid being sucked in these kinds of debate most of the time.
Sometimes though, it is simply way too tempting. As when, for example, someone feels the need to insert the following in his "rebuttal" of one of my posts:
Warning: I’m going to wreck these arguments with cold, hard facts. If this offends you, please stop reading. It is not my intention to offend you, but as one would say: you are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.
Setting aside the almost superhuman arrogance of someone who is so convinced he's right he feels the need to soften the blow for the poor souls who might be hurt by his razor-sharp logic, to me this kind of boastful "disclaimer" is a sign of weakness. It's just like when someone says at a party: "We're having so much fun!". That's the kind of thing people only say out loud when they're in serious doubt inside. 99% of the time, when someone feels obligated to say otherwise, the party sucks, and so does the logic.
Only one reaction to my previous post addressed the science/facts of the talks under dispute. […] most people find the actual science far to difficult to address directly. […] Looking at Tipler alone required me to go through endless papers […] Not many people will make time for something like that.
Indeed most people don't make time for that, but they're right not to do so. Thomas Goorden is no doubt aware of the vast difference in understanding between him and those who gave up physics after high school. The latter have vaguely heard of orbitals and they've seen Young's slit experiment and they think they know what quantum physics is all about, but compared to someone who has an undergraduate or master's degree in physics, they know nothing. Mr Goorden, on the other hand, seems to know a few things about theoretical physics, certainly more than most people, including me.
However, in my experience, an understanding gap just as wide exists between people who merely hold a master's degree, and the PhD students who are actually publishing papers in the field. Just like a master's degree teaches you that most of what you learned in high school is wrong, getting a PhD makes you realize that most of those master's level courses were incomplete, and what you thought you understood was wide off the mark. It seems to me the PhD is the first level of education where you can genuinely claim to know something scientifically. The scope of what you know is very, very small, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot on the sphere of knowledge, but for the first time you genuinely understand it. Everything you were taught in high school, and most of what you learned as an undergraduate, on the other hand, are mostly lies-to-childrens.
But the line doesn't even stop here: a third gap exists, again just as wide, between young researchers and seasoned professors, who have done research in their domains of interest for twenty years or more. Thusly they have gained a deep knowledge of a given scientific field, and its interconnections with surrounding disciplines, which is likely the bare minimum for having intelligent thoughts about something so mind-bogglingly complex as a Theory of Everything. Mr Goorden is right in saying that quantum mechanics is harder than most people think, but cutting edge research in cosmology is yet orders of magnitude more complex than even he seems to realize. His suggestion that the couple days he spent skimming papers is enough to have an intelligent discussion about the underlying science is frankly comical. That would take twenty years, and there are no shortcuts.
Even a casual reading of the "scientific" debate between Mr Goorden and James Redford confirms that this is indeed the case. It reads very much like a dialogue between two people who think they know what they're talking about. I can't really blame them for that: the physics of the current proposed theories of everything are some of the most intricate and unintuitive pieces of knowledge ever devised by mankind, and it is impossible for anyone but a seasoned expert in this field to even attempt to understand what is going on, never mind discuss it intelligently. And that is precisely my point: Mr Goorden, like everyone but a handful of humans on this planet, simply doesn't know enough to discuss the underlying physics.
To his credit, he seems somewhat aware of this fact. By his second reply in the aforementioned email exchange, he apparently realizes he can't win on physics, so he chooses to attack Omega point cosmology on the basis that Mr Tipler lives in the United States. (I swear that's what he's saying. Check for yourself if you don't believe me.) This is, of course, a complete non sequitur, but some people might find the underlying argument Mr Goorden is trying to set up superficially attractive:
- Frank Tipler's theory supports Christian theology
- Christian theology is false
- Therefore, Frank Tipler's theory is false
Well, I hate to be the one who has to break this to Mr Goorden, but you cannot do that. The argument uses a reductio ad absurdum, i.e.: if a proposition logically entails a contradiction (a statement known to be false), then it follows that the proposition itself is false as well. It is structurally sound (logicians use it all the time), but, in this case, using it against Mr Tipler theory requires that either:
- you prove, from first principles and observation only, that God doesn't exist, or at least that if He exists He cannot be described as a trinity. (Good luck with that.) Or,
- you accept the above as self-evident, i.e., on faith.
In short, as he realizes he cannot win the rational argument, Mr Goorden falls back on the exact sin he's accusing Mr Tipler of: letting personal beliefs (in this case, apparently, strong atheism) creep into what is supposed to be a scientific discussion.
Let's move on to what Mr Goorden says more directly to me:
[R]oughly 3 separate arguments rose up in favor of Tipler and Hameroff[…]:
- They have published papers.
- Smart and famous people have said something positive about it.
- One should have an open mind about science and at the very least consider the alternatives.
Hoping you don't mind me starting at the end, number 3 is actually the exact opposite of what I've written. I never said science should be distrusted or that other practices can also provide good answers. What I argued for was the importance of keeping an open mind within the framework of science. I apologize for any misunderstanding, although I tried my best to make the next-to-last paragraph of my post as clear as possible on this point.
Let's move on to the other two:
The first two arguments can actually be taken together. They are so called “arguments from authority”, which is a very well known logical fallacy. It is, simply put, a rhetorical technique to be avoided, especially in this variant.
These are, again, the words of someone who almost knows what he's talking about. The argument from authority is a rhetorical fallacy, more precisely an informational fallacy. (It cannot be a logical fallacy in the mathematical sense because most formal logics have no concept of "authority".) What it means is: the fact that an authority figure endorses a given statement does not prove the truth of that statement, because even authority figures can sometimes be wrong. Had I said that Roger Penrose's endorsement (or the fact that Mr Hameroff has published peer-reviewed papers) proves his theory is right, Mr Goorden's point would have been a devastating blow.
But of course I said no such thing. I used the "authorities" only to support the idea that Mr Hameroff's theory might be worthy of attention. I didn't say the theory was entirely right. I don't think it is entirely right. However, the fact that it is deemed of interest by at least part of the scientific community suggests that it might be, at the very least, interesting. This is not fallacious. What the "argument from authority" fallacy means is that you cannot end a debate with "Superman says A is true, therefore it is." It is however perfectly OK to start a discussion with "Hey, that superman chap thinks this guy's crazy theory might be right, whaddya make of that?". Again I tried my best to make this distinction clear in my original article, by saying for example: "[Roger Penrose's endorsement] does not make Mr Hameroff's theory right, or even scientific", but in case I wasn't clear enough, I apologize for the misunderstanding.
And so Mr Goorden writes eight paragraphs giving reasons why Mr Hameroff's theory is likely to be wrong. I cannot fathom how this serves a rebuttal to my post, where I never claimed the theory to be right. My next-to-last sentence reads: "I'd say [Mr Hameroff's theory is] likely to be wrong." (Again, I humbly apologize if that sentence seems unclear to anyone.) Since Mr Goorden apparently likes to point out rhetorical fallacies, even where, as in the above, no such fallacy is present, he'll be happy to learn that what he's doing here is called a "straw man argument".
Anyway, ferreting out all the logical errors and biases in Mr Goorden's article is clearly impossible in a post of reasonable size, so I will stop here and try to weave the various strands into some kind of conclusion.
Much of this claimed rebuttal of my last post addresses Lynne McTaggart, even though I have never, to put it mildly, rushed to her defense. Mr Goorden asserts all three talks can have negative consequences, a claim he's only able to support in the case of Lynne McTaggart's. He's not above crass dishonesty, as evidenced by his pimping of one of his sources as "a co-author of Stephen Hawking" while simultaneously dismissing the opinion of another of the über-physicists's co-authors, Roger Penrose, as absolutely worthless. He expends quite a lot of copy on long digressions on climate change, intelligent design and vaccines, all completely unrelated to the subject at hand. Only in passing does he mention Stuart Hameroff, who's the only one of the trio I explicitly defended. All in all, it isn't clear what Mr Goorden's post is a rebuttal of, but clearly it's nothing I have written.
Getting down to substance, most of Mr Goorden's criticism boils down to attacks on religion, where, by the way, "religion" has an unusually broad definition. Yes indeed, Frank Tipler is a born-again Christian, but so what ? Is Mr Goorden really saying only atheists can do good science ? Lynne McTaggart can hardly be described as religious: new-agers hold many meta-physical beliefs, but they don't belong to any organized cult or religion. I could find no source for Stuart Hameroff's religious beliefs, possibly because most people don't think a scientist's religion is relevant when discussing his science. (Yeah, I know, crazy idea.) Roger Penrose is an atheist.
In the end, when you comb through Mr Goorden's arguments, getting rid of the unspoken biases and the shoddy logic, his position seems to be:
- TEDx should be a forum for accepted, validated and consensual science, not the cutting-edge stuff that is necessarily controversial and likely to be at least partially false
- TEDx should refrain from inviting any speaker who might say anything that conflicts with a purely materialistic and atheistic worldview
There is nothing wrong with holding any or both of these opinions, but one has to recognize them for what they are: expressions of taste. Write them, share them, shout them, but don't try to build up a scientific-looking argument that says everyone has to agree with you. Anyway, I doubt it's even possible to defend such personal preferences on purely objective, scientific grounds. Mr Goorden has certainly tried very hard and, as I have argued in this post and the preceding one, failed. I, for one, hopes dearly that TEDxBrussels will not follow his advice.