New Skeptics’ Circle is up

It’s at Aardvarkology. For more on Skeptics’ Circle, a biweekly blog carnival about all things skeptical, go to It’s this Blogger site.

World-renowned scientist wants new 9/11 investigation, but unfortunately appears to be adding to conspiracy thinking

Now, Lynn Margulis is a biologist, not a structural engineer. But, she’s also a world-class scientist whom I think would not be given to non-scientific thinking, including conspiracy theories. So, should her call for a new 9/11 investigation should be taken at least somewhat seriously?

“I suggest that those of us aware and concerned demand that the glaringly erroneous official account of 9/11 be dismissed as a fraud and a new, thorough, and impartial investigation be undertaken.”

But, no, her call shouldn’t be taken too seriously. She immediately shoots herself in the foot:

(Margulis) compared 9/11 to several self-inflicted attacks that had been used in the past to arouse people's fear and hatred and justify war, including the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, the Reichstag Fire, and Operation Himmler, which Germany used to justify the invasion of Poland, the trigger for World War II.

First, the verdict of history on the Maine is pretty damn clear: accidental explosion. The verdict on the Reichstag fire is almost as clear: the Communists started it, although the Nazis apparently hindered firemen from immediately dousing it.

She then goes on to further plunge headlong into, you guessed it — conspiracy theories.

The fact that she’s also influenced by David Ray Griffin’s book “The New Pearl Harbor” (which I assume starts from the idea that FDR knew in advance of the original Pearl Harbor), a book endorsed a by a certain post-9/11 conspiracy-minded slice of liberalism, is more disquieting. Griffin, who is a professor of philosophy, relies heavily on the thoroughly debunked “The Big Lie” of French writer Thierry Meyssan. (A full 80 percent of non-five star reviews at Amazon one-star Griffin’s book for its conspiracy thought.)

Far more sober was the call for further study by British war correspondent/investigative journalist Robert Fisk, who specifically separated himself from conspiratorial thinkers a few days ago. (Fisk’s questions of disbelief about how the jet fuel could have burned hot enough have already been refuted multiple times; at the easily accessible popular level, the magazine Popular Mechanics had an excellent conspiracy debunking about two years ago.)

Beyond that, the best counterthought for this being a government conspiracy?

It’s the same one mentioned by Fisk. The government of George W. Bush has shown itself to be too inept to pull off such a thing.

On the bonus side, fellow skeptics, I haven’t seen such a clear illustration of the fallacy of appeal to authority (should anybody cite Margulis as a reason to open a new, “we did it” 9/11 investigation) in a long time.

Update: A blogger acquaintance informs me that Margulis has also jumped on the bandwagon of deniers that HIV causes AIDS, with the certain amount of conspiracy thinking that goes with that, as well.

Religious liberalism hits a mix of social conservativism and need

At least one of the United Methodist churches in rural portions of Grimes County, Texas, has a woman minister. I’m not going to nose around for opinions in my last 2.5 weeks here, but I do wonder how members there, in this conservative, Deep South part of Texas, feel about that.

Question yourself

To “know yourself” (Socrates), in order to “be true to yourself” (Polonius in “Hamlet”) you must first question yourself.

Question authority? Above all, question the authority of your own conscious ego and its attendants.

Question above all the tyranny of social authority and expectation, especially as you have internalized it, then the authority of internalized family messages, and then the tyranny of unquestioned self-expectation.

Question not, though, in the style of a harsh interrogator, but that of a young child discovering the world anew. I hope to throw questions at my own self and life like that every day.

A very “unlucky” non-Friday the 13th looming?

I wouldn’t want to be in the West Bank or Gaza Sept. 13. Why?

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, starts the evening of Sept. 12, according to the modern Western/Christian Gregorian calendar, and runs through the daytime hours of Sept. 13.

Ramadan, the Muslim month of daytime fasting, starts Sept. 13.

Can you say “potential for explosiveness”?

“Out of body” experience induced — no soul or God needed

Scientists have found a way to induce “out of body” experience in a purely naturalistic manner, simply by using virtual reality goggles.

In the studies published in Thursday’s Science journal, two teams of researchers managed to induce the effect in healthy people by scrambling their senses of vision and touch with the aid of the goggles.

“We ... describe an illusion during which healthy participants experienced a virtual body as if it were their own, and localized their ‘selves’ outside their body borders at a different position in space,” wrote Olaf Blanke, a researcher at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

One team, led by Henrik Ehrsson at University College London, had volunteers sit in a chair in the middle of a room wearing virtual-reality goggles showing the view from a video camera placed behind them.

A researcher moved a rod up to the camera at the same time as the person's chest was touched, and then the rod disappeared from view.

This created the illusion that the person was sitting a few steps back, where the camera stood.

In Blanke's experiment, subjects wearing virtual-reality goggles watched an image of a mannequin representing their own body placed directly in front of them while a researcher scratched their back.

Afterwards, the volunteers were blindfolded and guided backwards. When they were asked to return to their original positions, they went toward the place where they had seen their virtual body — the mannequin.

The researchers said mixing up the senses of sight and touch was key to the experiments.

As the story notes, the studies could shed more light on the sense of one’s self, from the basic proprioception, or knowing where one’s body is in relation to exterior space, to the grounding of a psychological self that has given rise to ideas of a “soul.”

The ignorance or cluelessness of experimental economists about music

Apparently experimental economists have either never heard of, or are totally clueless about, the old maxim de gustibus non disputandum,; otherwise, we wouldn’t have nutbar experiments like
this, trying to determine which of AC/DC’s two lead singers, Brian Johnson or Bon Scott, is better on the basis of student’s economic efficiency while listening to each one of them.

As I posted on Washington Monthly, where I first read this:

Look at the world of classical music and try this same experiment. I'm sure I would be more economically efficient listening to Leopold Mozart than to Stravinsky, due to Stravinsky's dissonance, instrumental timbre combinations, polyrhythms, etc.

Snarkily rebutting a claim that AA is “secular”

An acquaintance of mine, at a conference, ran into an apparently long-term AA member who defended, probably vociferously, the idea that Alcoholics Anonymous is a secular organization.

Just how did he defend the idea that AA is secular? Your “higher power” can be a doorknob? I know people everywhere at the end of AA meetings don’t actually pray the religious Lord's Prayer, but instead:

Our doorknob who art on the door
Hallowed be thy brass;
Thy key tumbler work;
Thy doors open quickly, at home as at work.
Give us this day our daily security;
Forgive us our fumbled keys
As we forgive others who drop theirs, too.
Lead us not into stripped-out locks,
But deliver a locksmith quickly.
For thine is the safety, and the reliability, and the universality.
Namaste.

Prayer vs. self-insight in decision-making

I’ve long and often said, in riffing on the classical Western religious description of prayer as a “heart-to-heart talk with god,” that it’s really a “heart-to-heart talk with one’s self.”

First of all, once you recognize and accept that, even if you still believe in some sort of deity, you can’t pray to him/her/it; certainly not in the way you considered prayer to be before this light went on.

The flip side, though, of losing out on the belief of being able to tap into god as “deus quam machina,” no matter how capricious this machine is, one gets the empowerment, small as it may be, of being able to look to one’s own self for insight.

But, the flip side of that is that any decisions one makes can no longer be passed off, or buck-passed, to somebody else, as in “I thought god was telling me to, …” (Of course, if you still believe in a critter “downstairs,” you still have recourse to the infamous “the devil made me do it” plea.)

For me, probably in part as a reaction to events of childhood, I have trouble decision-making anyway. In part, it’s a fear of somebody — god (in my pre-conversion days), a boss, some other authority figure, or someone else to be affected by my decision — judging or criticizing me for making that decision. In fact, often, the decision itself isn’t the problem; facing up to the consequences, including this judgment, is.

And, now, I don’t have any god as daddy the tear-wiper, daddy the hand-holder, or daddy the giant daddy to make it all go away, to comfort me.

I have me, and human friend to whom to talk these fears out.

On the other hand, a god both omnipotent and omnibenevolent by definition can’t have an experiential concept of evil, psychological pain or sorrow anyway, and so is of limited use as a hand-holder.

All in all, lumps unfortunately included, I’m better off wrestling with my decision-making on the only plane I know we actually have, with the only, limited, human help I know is actually available.

Disingeniousness alert — Martin Novak

Biologist Martin Novak likens religious statements to mathematical ones for not needing scientific confirmation:

“Like mathematics, many theological statements do not need scientific confirmation. Once you have the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, it’s not like we have to wait for the scientists to tell us if it’s right. This is it.”

Err, mathematical statements DO do need mathematical confirmation, though, in a process every bit as rigorous as the scientific process.

If Novak can point me to a “religious confirmation process” that meets the same standards, I’ll eat my hat.

Priming behavior study gaining speed

As this Washington Post story shows, priming behavior is one of the greatest illustrations of the power, depth and breadth of the subconscious mind. In other words, Dan Dennett’s “Consciousness Explained,” even if it has the right theory, explains only about 10-20 percent of the mind anyway.

Roy Baumeister compares the subconscious to the conscious as hot-wiring a car vs. using keys in the ignition.

Mark Shaller has more:

“Sometimes nonconscious effects can be bigger in sheer magnitude than conscious ones because we can’t moderate stuff we don’t have conscious access to, and the goal stays active.”

I’ve never believed the Hindu/New Age claim that we only use 10 percent of our brains. However, it might be true that only 10 percent of our mind is conscious.

Priming behavior study gaining speed

As this Washington Post story shows, priming behavior is one of the greatest illustrations of the power, depth and breadth of the subconscious mind. In other words, Dan Dennett’s “Consciousness Explained,” even if it has the right theory, explains only about 10-20 percent of the mind anyway.

Roy Baumeister compares the subconscious to the conscious as hot-wiring a car vs. using keys in the ignition.

Mark Shaller has more:

“Sometimes nonconscious effects can be bigger in sheer magnitude than conscious ones because we can’t moderate stuff we don’t have conscious access to, and the goal stays active.”

I’ve never believed the Hindu/New Age claim that we only use 10 percent of our brains. However, it might be true that only 10 percent of our mind is conscious.