How to defend the Enlightenment:
On the publication of his new book In Defence of the Enlightenment, Tzvetan Todorov tells British philosopher AC Grayling why the Enlightenment must be separated from scientism and cultural chauvinism.
Nicholas D. Kristoff, writing for the New York Times:
Researchers have found, for example, that some humans are particularly alert to threats, particularly primed to feel vulnerable and perceive danger. Those people are more likely to be conservatives.
Professor Colin Blakemore assesses the intriguing implications of advances in neuroscience that have made it possible to communicate with those in a vegetative state:
Astronomy, from Copernicus on, has transformed our view of the place of the earth in the heavens. Darwin changed forever our view of the status of humanity. Neuroscience is likely to challenge our very understanding of what it is to be a person.
I watched The Diving Bell and the Butterfly the other night, a film based on real events about a man that is totally paralysed and can only communicate by blinking his eye.
But this is something else, amazing:
For seven years the man lay in a hospital bed, showing no signs of consciousness since sustaining a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. His doctors were convinced he was in a vegetative state. Until now.
To the astonishment of his medical team, the patient has been able to communicate with the outside world after scientists worked out, in effect, a way to read his thoughts.
They devised a technique to enable the man, now 29, to answer yes and no to simple questions through the use of a hi-tech scanner, monitoring his brain activity.
To answer yes, he was told to think of playing tennis, a motor activity. To answer no, he was told to think of wandering from room to room in his home, visualising everything he would expect to see there, creating activity in the part of the brain governing spatial awareness.
His doctors were amazed when the patient gave the correct answers to a series of questions about his family.
Iraq’s Ministry for Human Rights will file a lawsuit against Britain and the US over their use of depleted uranium bombs in Iraq, an Iraqi minister says.
According to Iraqi experts, the U.S. and Britain, being the lovers of freedom and democracy that they are:
… bombed the country with nearly 2,000 tons of depleted uranium bombs during the early years of the Iraq war. Atomic radiation has increased the number of babies born with defects in the southern provinces of Iraq.
Climate change denialism fascinates me. How does one become a denialist in the face of scientific consensus? Having talked to people who exhibit various levels of denial and scepticism my hunch is that it’s an inherit psychological defect of humans. People can’t bring themselves to accept that they might be partly responsible for a crime of such enormity, so they deny. A classic psychological response.
But while this might explain why so many are ready and willing to be duped into thinking man-made climate change is a conspiracy, it doesn’t seem to explain why so many are duped. Turns out there’s an explanation for that:
Think environmentalists are stooges? You’re the unwitting recruit of a hugely powerful oil lobby – I’ve got the proof.
I have placed on the Guardian’s website four case studies; each of which provides a shocking example of how the denial industry works.
Remember this the next time you hear people claiming that climate scientists are only in it for the money, or that environmentalists are trying to create a communist world government: these ideas were devised and broadcast by energy companies. The people who inform me, apparently without irony, that “your article is an ad hominem attack, you four-eyed, big-nosed, commie sack of shit”, or “you scaremongers will destroy the entire world economy and take us back to the Stone Age”, are the unwitting recruits of campaigns they have never heard of.
Australian Prime Minister on climate change sceptics:
… these do-nothing climate change sceptics are prepared to destroy our children’s future … climate change skeptics in all their guises and disguises are not conservatives. They are radicals. They are reckless gamblers who are betting all our futures on their arrogant assumption that their intuitions should triumph over the evidence.
My message to the climate change skeptics … is this: You are betting our children’s future and the future of our grandchildren. You are betting our jobs, our houses, our farms, our reefs, our economy and our future on an intuition – on a gut feeling; on a political prejudice you have about science.
George Monbiot speculates on reasons for the spread of climate change denial.
There is no point in denying it: we’re losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease.
There are some obvious answers … But there might also be a less intuitive reason, which shines a light into a fascinating corner of human psychology ..
Amy Wallace writing for Wired: An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All:
The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” Decades later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion: Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort. “A great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society,” Sagan wrote of certain Americans’ embrace of reincarnation, channeling, and extraterrestrials. “There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community.”
Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.
And an anecdote from Brent Simmon’s in response.
Via Daring Fireball.