Random thoughts and links: fine tuning, global warming, insurance

Massimo Pigliucci writes about an audiobook he listened to and suggests a thought experiment about the fine-tuning argument. This has lead me to realize that I am sometimes using two arguments that might appear inconsistent. On the one hand I hold that arguments from fine tuning or other such intelligent design are non-starters because the entity they invoke as an explanation for some presumed design (the intelligent designer) would need even more explaining than the appearance of design itself. In other words, where does god come from?

On the other hand, I have repeatedly argued in other discussions that I actually do not believe that intelligent design is, as such, a non-scientific idea. My favored thought experiment would be a human spaceship encountering an alien planet with life but no fossils older than, say, a few hundred thousand years; no phylogenetic structure to the life; no "bad design" comparable to the laryngeal nerve etc; genetics that indicate that no species may have had any genetic disorders a few hundred thousand years ago. And so on. Of course in such a case the hypothesis that life on that planet was created by some currently unknown alien intelligence would be a reasonable one. So in my eyes it is not the case that intelligent design is not a scientific explanation but that for our own planet the theory of evolution is a much better explanation given fossil, geological and genetic evidence.

But is it not inconsistent then of me to argue in one case that design is a possible explanation but to reject it for fine tuning of physical constants because it merely raises a bigger question? Is that not the same situation?

Manuscript writing: what to avoid

Previously I wrote a post about peer reviewers from hell. But of course I am not only an author of papers but also a peer reviewer myself, so perhaps I should write something from that perspective. What are the things that annoy me about manuscripts? What mistakes or faults do I appear to encounter particularly often in my field?

Botany picture #108: Eremophila longifolia

Spent all day yesterday in an internal workshop so there was no decent post to be expected.

A colleague told me that this plant we encountered during my recent field trip was Eremophila longifolia (Scrophulariaceae). Well, it is obvious that this is an Eremophila, or Emu Bush, but the species I would not know myself. The genus is very large and an important part of the flora of the arid zone here in Australia. And many of them are very pretty.

Botany picture #107: Chthonocephalus pseudevax

Another botany picture from the recent field trip, and another oddball. Just like the Isoetopsis, this one is a tiny ephemeral herb of the daisy family (Asteraceae), and its name is even more bizarre: Chthonocephalus pseudevax. I have yet to meet an Australian botanist who is sure how it should be pronounced in English. What it means is "heads on the ground that look kind of like the genus Evax but aren't". The genus Chthonocephalus has several more species but sadly I have seen only one of them so far, and that one looked very different.

The odd interpretation of election results in the media

I really have little interest to discuss party politics here but one thing that I found odd in the last few days is how election results are interpreted in the media, entirely regardless of the merits of each individual party. First we had the Australian election which was interpreted as a resounding victory for the Coalition (liberals and allies). But the funny thing is, they only got 1.9% more of the vote than the last time. So if I were to discuss this, I'd say that what mostly happened was that Labour and the Greens lost votes, and they mostly lost them to small parties instead of to the Coalition. It does not change the outcome but it gives us a better understanding of what is really going on.

But okay, due to the peculiarities of the voting system the country inherited from Britain the Coalition obviously won a vast majority of the seats, and many more than in the previous election, so it is easy to understand why the Australian media would look at those changes in the composition of the parliament and speak of them in they way they do. The same explanation is not available when discussing the very different German system.

Botany picture #106: Isoetopsis graminifolia

Time to use a few photographs from my recent field trip. Today's botany picture is already one of the oddest plants we encountered. Isoetopsis graminifolia is named after the quill-wort genus Isoetes, which is a spore plant, and after grasses. In essence, the name means something like "the grass-leaved quill-wort like thingy". But believe it or not, it is a daisy (Asteraceae), and even more bizarrely it is a member of the same tribe as very typical daisies like Olearia and Brachyscome. The species is endemic to Australia but occurs over a huge area. It is an ephemeral herb that never gets more than 5 cm tall, and usually much less.

Consciousness raiser: Things versus processes

Some time ago I wrote about my feeling that many people could use a consciousness-raiser on the topic of trade-offs, partly to put a damper on rampant techno-optimism. One of the points was that biologists are more likely to be aware of the problem of having to make trade-offs because they constantly encounter them in living organisms, ecological adaptations and reproductive strategies. Today I want to talk about another issue that many people appear to have very odd intuitions about and thus could use a consciousness-raiser for, and in this case it might be physicists, chemists and engineers who naturally have the edge.

The context in which I came to think about the issue was again a discussion of futurist hopes (although it had not started out as that), specifically "brain uploading" or "mind uploading". The hope that something like that would be possible sometime in the future is based on the following claims:

1. We are our minds.
2. Our mind is best understood as information stored and/or a computer program running on the "wetware" of the brain.
3. A simulation of a mind is a mind. Just as a simulation of a Windows environment on a Linux machine allows Windows programs to run, a simulation of a brain in a computer would allow our mind program to run on that computer.
4. Consequently, if we could scan that program and the information (memories) off the brain and simulate it in a computer, we would be in that computer, and thus could achieve immortality (until humanity cannot afford to keep cyberspace running any more, that is, which might be as soon as in a few decades anyway when fossil fuels run out).

Phrased like this, most readers will presumably see immediately that something might be wrong with at least some of these claims. I would go further and argue that they are all complete bollocks, and that some of the problems stem from the human tendency to reify processes, that is to think that processes are things that can, for example, be moved around.

In the present case the specific mistake is to think of the mind as a thing that can be moved, or perhaps at least copied, from the body into a computer, which is essentially a form of Cartesian mind-body dualism. To get over this mistake, and to raise one's consciousness about the ease with which we make it, one could consider historical instances of the same error.