Video from Wednesday’s debate over “Death Is Not Final” is now up.
You’ll be happy to hear that the good guys “won.” In scare quotes because helping the world’s population understand that naturalism is the right way to view the universe is a long-term project that won’t be settled with a single debate. But Intelligence Squared does a fun thing where they ask people to vote before the debate starts, and then again afterward. We started out the night slightly behind in the polls, and by the time we were done we were slightly ahead. Mostly by peeling away the undecideds, as any savvy politician strives to do. [Update: oops, not right. See below.] So that counts as a victory — especially when the topic is one where many people (not all!) have fairly fixed opinions.
It was a pleasure to have Steve Novella as a partner. The man knows his neuroscience, as well as his debating. He did a great job making the single most important point for an issue like this: the mind is the brain, full stop. It’s hard to hear the case he makes and hold on to any contrary view.
I was slightly disappointed in the folks on the other side. Eben Alexander basically relied on two things. One was his personal story of having a Near-Death Experience while in a coma. Anyone who accepts that people can experience dreams or hallucinations will not be overly persuaded by that alone. The other was to throw up ideas like “quantum mechanics” and “the hard problem of consciousness” in an obfuscatory way, to give people license to believe that science doesn’t understand everything. Which is true! Science doesn’t understand everything. Which doesn’t change the fact that no serious researcher in quantum mechanics or the hard problem thinks that those ideas provide an excuse for believing in life after death.
Ray Moody was a very pleasant gentleman, someone you’d be happy to have a beer with and talk philosophy. But he did almost nothing to defend the proposition. I was expecting him to broaden the evidence from Alexander’s own case to many others, but instead he spoke in generalities about science and philosophy and logic, concluding essentially that it’s “conceivable” that a realm exists where souls can persist after death. Indeed it is. Many things are conceivable.
At the end of my opening talk I said that the choice here basically comes down to two options we can believe:
- Everything we think we understand about the behavior of matter and energy is wrong, in a way that has somehow escaped notice in every experiment ever done in the history of science. Instead, there are unknown mechanisms allow information in the brain to survive in the form of a blob of spirit energy, which can then go start talking to other blobs of spirit energy, but only after death, except sometimes even before death.
- Physics is right. And people under stress sometimes have experiences that seem real but aren’t.
In the light of the evidence, the choice is pretty clear. We’ll get there, a couple of percentage points at a time.
Update: I was too hasty in presuming that most of our increase came from swaying undecided voters. Here are the actual data:
As you can see, the undecideds actually broke almost equally for the two sides. Our glorious victory actually came from a combination of factors, including persuading some of the “For” voters to switch.
@kasyap
Class of 1974. They had a cyclotron then, six stories under the math building. One of those beasts Don Lederman pointed out, didn’t really have much raw beam power; about as much as striking a typical match.
Dr. Seymour Goldberg, my thermodynamics prof, let us go down and get a gander at the beam tube when it was turned off for maintenance. It’s a shame those weren’t really upgradable, like the LHC is, at least. Their attempt at building a synchrotron there failed (electron ring accelerator), due to a flaw in the design of the focusing magnets (which they now do with superconducting quadrupoles).
It was a pretty good school for physics, but I only have a BS. Most of my career I spent as a telecom engineer at the former Comsat Laboratories in Clarksburg.
@Robert: Yes. Free will is controversial. At first, one would think that quantum mechanics, being probabilistic in nature, would surely support free will. But I hear that a Nobel Prize winner physicist t’Hooft and a physicist blogger Sabine Hossenfelder believe in super determinism (in simple words destiny!!) .Personally I still think belief in free will, would be good for the society , but who knows?
@Robert
So, you believe there is no such thing as either determinism or free will? Aren’t you at all bothered about omniscience vs. omnipotence? I know of at least one very bright individual (also a “free will” worrier) who nearly chewed off a leg wrestling with that idea.
Suppose that there is a supreme being who is both all knowing and all powerful. Does this mean he (or she) can by sheer force of will make a black hole so large that he can’t move it? Where’s the free will in that universe? If a supreme being that is omniscient and omnipotent can’t have free will, what chance do we mortals have?
‘Free will’ folks usually have fun with that scenario. Paradox happens. Deal with it.
Daniel: I do believe in determinism – tho´ it would take a god to work out the future from the present. I read somewhere recently that even calculating exact orbits where there are three bodies involved is, practically speaking, impossible. It´s also impossible, apparently, to work out the exact time of sunrise or sunset – but that´s less surprising.
I must have something missing in my mind, as I really do find it impossible to understand how anyone can believe in free will, other, of course, than in the simplistic sense that no-one knows what I´ll do if I´m presented with a choice. I don´t even know what “free will” really means! Minds make choices and minds are attributes of brains, which are physical things that people are born with. At what point does anyone get to decide the qualities of their brain? It seems clear to me that minds will always make the same decisions in the same circumstances when presented with decisions to be made. The only alternative to this would be if decisions are random.
@Robert;
So, you believe in omniscience (God works out everything in great detail), but not omnipotence (can’t necessarily do ‘anything’ or even make a choice). That’s a new take on the problem.
Most people do believe they have a small measure of free will. If it’s a bit smaller than they realize, that’s probably OK.
You are correct about the three body problem in the sense that there is no general solution to the problem that is known to physics, even ‘perturbative’ ones. However, a few mathematicians have managed to work out a number of discrete 3-body orbits that are stable (and so, the math works out for those; about 30 or so cases). It is partly because of this that ideas like MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics) are generally in disfavor to explain the 1/r dependence of velocities for spiral galaxies, which means the outer 1/3 of the mass has already achieved escape velocity unless there is something more massive (like dark matter), or alternatively, that the Higgs mechanism leaves some unknown extra residual, unseen mass/energy within the fabric of space itself. We know that something else is there to bend the light, at least, thanks to general relativity.
Which brings us back to the omniscience problem. Can a mass ever become so big, that the event horizon is everywhere outside of the singularity, and so the Higgs mechanism and time itself stops? What would a supreme being be able to do then?
Daniel: You certainly know far far more of the relevant science than I do! (I think I came across the 3-body problem in a slim little book called: The Universe and the Teacup – The Mathematics of Truth and Beauty by K.C.Cole. I bought it years ago, but still I go back to it for a dip quite frequently. It´s even got some errors which I managed to spot!)
I´m afraid I don´t basically believe in the existence of God, though I do sometimes waver on the possibility of the Universe having been created – just not by God. If God did exist, then I would assume he could do anything at all, as clearly he would have not merely extraordinary powers, but magic ones too. Christianity, which is the only organised religion of which I have a small knowledge, strikes me as raising more questions than it answers and, in any case, has what I consider absurd rituals. Neither does it answer the question I ask myself: Why should I believe this stuff?
I´m going to read up a bit on Hinduism, in which kashyap has raised my interest.
@Robert and Daniel: Interesting debate you have. I am sorry to bring in Hinduism again and again!!! But Hindu God (Brahman) is synonymous with laws of nature. So the question whether he can create a black hole which he cannot move does not arise. As for three (or more) body problem, according to my understanding: yes it becomes chaotic (very sensitive to initial conditions) and unpredictable after some period. The fact that keeps solar system fairly stable is that the sun has most of the mass of the solar system. But even here people expect it to become unstable or at least unpredictable after a long time, say billions of years. Of course sun may become a red giant before that and life on earth will be gone .So nothing to worry and lose sleep over!!
@Robert
That seems like an excellent exercise of free will, Robert, whether you believe in a supreme being or not.
It helps to get ideas about morality from somewhere (and most religions are usually fine for this), and to follow as best you can, in moderation. It is dangerous to be obsessive about religion, big time– the first one of 10 or 613 general rules, depending. For a lot of people, the golden rule (which was appropriated by Christianity from an earlier faith), is simply not enough to guide us, particularly when we feel that others may be taking some liberties with that particular rule. Happens all the time, free will or no.
Physics apparently can be a religion too (complete with its own OCD adherents to sectarian sub disciplines), but lately it seems to be a little weak on the golden rule thing.
Just remember; it’s turtles. Turtles, and Higgs, almost all the way down.
A personal friend is a neutrino physicist who worked with Nobel Laureate Ray Davis (sorry about the name dropping) on what became a 30 year mystery of the missing 2/3 of the solar neutrino flux.
This friend recently attended a presentation I gave about Sean’s book.
Part of what was later discovered with improved neutrino detectors like SNO (Sudbury, Ontario), and Super Kamiakande (Japan) was that neutrinos start to oscillate between three states after interacting with a sufficient amount of matter and the electroweak force. Only 1/3 of the flux was detected by the perchloroethane tanks of Ray Davis’ design because that is the only type of neutrino which can change a chlorine atom into an atom of Argon (which Ray’s detector counted).
The supercomputer model of our Sun can therefore predict with some amazing accuracy exactly when our sun will begin transitioning to a red giant star. It has about 5 billion or so years to go unless something disruptive like a neutron star pops in. So it will still be burning when the nearby Andromeda galaxy starts to look a whole lot bigger.
But each time we lose fear and worry about one superstition, (the way Newton showed us, our orbit will not decay or leave the solar system; Ray Davis eventually showed us, the Sun has a ways to go before becoming a red giant), it always seems like it is replaced by another. We now have two more to add to the list:
1) a Higgs cascade event, transitioning the phase / vacuum expectation value from 245 GeV to some lower value across all of space. It either disintegrates the universe entirely or else changes into some other structure or phase in which atoms cannot exist.
2) Entropy death, suggested by accelerations being measured at the fringes of cosmological distances. These observations, like BICEPs, are currently in flux.
Daniel: You know – I think we disagree on the meaning of the term “free will”! What you refer to as my exercise of free will, I regard as something over which I have no choice. There is no “I” outside my mind to exercise free will. In the same circumstances, I will always repeat the same opinion – at least, until something happens to alter my mind. The passage of time, say, or some great trauma.
My outlook is pretty bleak, since effectively I´m saying that we´re all just very complicated machines. I think if a creator exists, he/she/ it might well regard humans as an unexpected by-product, like the mold on a tomato if you leave it too long.
I agree with you that physics sometimes seems like a sort of religion, with its adherents believing they know the truth, without, in fact, knowing the answers to any of the important questions. I´ve noticed on blogs, how upset they get if I refer to what I presume to be their belief – that the Universe created itself from the absolute and total nothingness, for no reason and with all the necessary physical laws to develop and eventually produce human beings. I got chucked off a Richard Dawkins blog, because they thought I was being sarcastic.
Daniel: I´m not worried about the Sun starting its expansion soon, making our summers too hot, nor even about the Moon which is slipping away and which might make the Earth´s orbit unstable and would ruin romantic evenings. I find the series of other potential disaster worrying, though. The next disaster, one that will wipe out most life on Earth, is surely long overdue. There´s the obvious one – Yellowstone, 20.000 odd years late, together with half a dozen other super volcanoes. Then catastrophic asteroids, which could shatter the peace on a sunny afternoon with very little warning, and don´t need to be very big to finish us all off. There´s a giant chunk of one of the Canary Islands that´s going to fall off into the sea any day soon, with dire consequences. A solar flare. An epidemic with no known cure, of which there´s a promising one floating around now. Climate change – are we already past the tipping point?
I must be in a down phase this afternoon – nothing but gloom and doom!
@Robert;
I can identify with both of those issues (robotic humanoid and getting chucked from forums).
I’m trying to apply what moral principles I can where applicable.
First, if I begin to annoy anyone in a forum, I simply leave, and either don’t come back until I’m sure I’m in a better mood, or if I’ve written something that upon reflection I feel was inappropriate and/or offensive, I don’t go back at all.
I do listen; but sometimes, that’s the toughest part of all.
I was part of team ENSCO for the DARPA Grand Challenge 2005, and came in sixth of a field of 23 that eventually qualified. If you don’t think I learned a thing or two about humans vs. robots from that experience, well let me tell you; it was a real eye opener.
At first I was depressed about the idea that maybe we were that limited. But my physics background eventually reminded me that our greatest scientists (Newton, Einstein) did their best work on something we still know nothing about: what, fundamentally, is a length, or equivalently, a time? This is like asking a computer or artificial intelligence: What is a number?
You see, there is a difference! Not much, I know, but it’s there.
And please let me know if anyone finds this offensive. I’m not addicted to this. I can leave and never come back. Had lots of practice!
Thanks for your indulgence.
I watched the debate and overall it was good, interesting and entertaining. The Novella-Carroll team did a great job in debunking the claim that near-death experiences give evidence (or even scientific evidence) for after-life. Debunking pseudoscientific arguments for claims of this kind can be interesting and challenging and of some public importance (but usually without scientific value). The debate was overall limited to the specific near-death claims so Sean did not express his wider views about religion which can be sometimes found over here.
I do have two remarks. The first is about an argument that Sean uses which had only a pale appearance in the debate but was presented more clearly in these quotes from an early post by Sean on this matter.
“If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter? Everything we know about quantum field theory (QFT) says that there aren’t any sensible answers to these questions…. Believing in life after death, to put it mildly, requires physics beyond the Standard Model.”
Well, the truth of the matter is that physics, quantum field theory and the standard model have very little to do with the after life question. The after life hypothesis went sharply against the rational (and scientific) view of the world around us before quantum field theories as much as it goes sharply against our rational and scientific view of the world around us after quantum field theories. Thus, specific modern physics insights and developements are fairly neutral to the question of after life. (This is in contrast to evolution theory that did change matters for another religious teachings. Evolution offered an alternative to a major religious teaching regarding the creation of mankind.)
While it is plausible to think (as Sean claims) that much of our views on the physical world are here to stay, it is even more plausible to think that even scientific revolutions of the kind we witnessed over history will not support metaphysical or religious teachings like life after death.
For the second point let me quote Isaac Asimov who wrote in the tenth anniversary issue of The Skeptical Inquirer. “Inspect every piece of pseudo-science and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold. What have we to offer in exchange? Uncertainty! Insecurity!”
In his closing two minutes Sean moved to a sort of religious-like preaching, offering some comforting words and security: The finitude of life according to Sean is a reason for a person to make every minute of his life meaningful. This is surprisingly similar to the religious teachings that also require a person to make every minute of his life meaningful. (So nobody gives us a break, it seems.) And Sean asserts his personal view that it is “OK” that death is final. Like many teachings of this sort it is not clear what “OK” means, and why is it “OK?” And how wide is the scope of this OK: is terrible sufferings attached occasionally to death OK too? And is this teaching related to cosmology or physics? And are such words of wisdom of more value coming from a scientist? And is it really needed for debunking pseudoscientific arguments used for religion to conclude with quasi-religious teachings portrayed as science?
@daniel “It helps to get ideas about morality from somewhere (and most religions are usually fine for this)” Really. Let’s try the two biggest – christianity and islam. Books written a millennia or two or three ago are a good basis for 21st century morality? Have you read them? Do you know what they say about the treatment of women, slaves, apostates and homosexuals?
Daniel & Kashyap: It is a fascinating topic we´ve been talking about though , isn´t it? I first got hooked on “space” in the 1950s, with a book by George Adamski. (I think his name was). I don´t understand how it´s possible for anyone not to be interested in the Universe, its eccentricities (“counter-intuitive” aspects), why and how it´s here and where it´s going. But I live in a rural part of Spain, where conversation topics tend to be football and the price of almonds. Probably, for that reason, I´ve “gone on” too much, for which I´m sorry!
Tonight, as a way of getting off to sleep, I´m going to ponder the question of what space is. Does it exist, if there´s nothing in it? Like the question about the felled tree in the forest, if there´s no-one to hear it fall. I´m good at dreaming up things to ponder which were actually solved long ago. But it´s healthier than sleeping pills!
Why is death being final OK?
Consider some alternatives. Ray Kurzweil tried promoting a slightly different spin on life after death not mentioned in this debate. His idea of preserving his consciousness or soul in cybernetic form landed him in the pages of The Encyclopedia of American Loons.
One advantage would be that you could turn yourself off and set a timer to revive you later when or if things got better. A disadvantage is that lethal boredom would be a tough way to pass. The repair bills would probably mount up even faster than bills accumulate in our broken health care system. Be careful what you wish for, Ray.
Someone in the voting audience tried to bring up the issue of purgatory. Sean did not specifically respond, but this aspect of the afterlife is often used as a ‘stick’ to encourage people to live moral lives, and as often as not, either isn’t effective, or depresses people whom through no fault of their own have had led difficult lives in this plane.
Or were you referring to folks who have an undeserved difficult time dying? The only answer science could provide for that is for better pain management and the legal means to implement them for the appropriate patients. Some day, we may actually be able to give them better dreams to send them on their way.
@Robert
So happy to hear that you still have almonds in Spain! We’re all pretty worried about the honeybees (without which, no almonds; not even one).
Pleasant dreams.
Conceded, that social and moral code and norms also must evolve. But on the other hand, science by design has almost nothing to say on issues of morality, tradition or values other than the supreme importance of the value we collectively refer to as ‘truth’. Make no mistake; ‘truth’ is not an absolute either, even in science. What few hard truths we know from science were hard won, and there’s nothing at all that can demonstrate that any single one of them are the whole truth. That’s just not how the scientific method works. What we might inadvertently ignore in science may have more importance to the pursuit of other truths than that which we choose to observe. In this way, science is similar to a religion.
Like the faiths you mentioned, Judaism (the original Abrahmic religion) sets much store by the moral treatment of slaves, minutia and detail regarding ‘humane’ animal sacrifice, etc, mostly outmoded in the modern world for all but the most orthodox devotees. The Talmud argues even the minutia of the Torah, demonstrating an OCD style devotion that is easily the equal of any other sort of religious orthodoxy. However, the issue of the afterlife here is a non-starter. There is no afterlife to worry about; heaven or hell. No real equivalent of the devil, even though there are many examples of evil and misguided individuals.
But other religion’s strict anti-heretical interpretations and discouragement of debate of their respective scriptures is unfortunate, because without that element, a faith can never evolve in any real sense. If this is by design, it is poor in the extreme.
So I’m not disagreeing. If you profess no faith at all, I’m absolutely fine with that too.
I’m a Christian, but like Kashyap I do believe that people are reborn if they have not completed the mission that God has chosen for them. Whatever that may be. I also believe that all people will be saved. Every single one.
@Tony
Likewise, I’m with you (all people will be saved, if any of them are). However, this idea too can be carried to the extreme. Some churches, like the Serbian Orthodox, for example, believe that even though Adam and Eve were not around to have their souls forgiven in the Christian tradition, somehow the Messiah pulled off a spiritual bit of time travel or intervention to allow them to be saved anyway. More carrots and sticks corresponding to an afterlife of eternal peace and contentment vs. purgatory, as if followers were no better than stupid beasts of burden. In my book, that’s immoral.
The best reason to have a religious tradition within a community is to have resources other than your own to provide moral guidance for raising your children. Oh yes, you will definitely be needing that, so plan on it.
I don’t actually know what atheists plan to do in this respect, or how successful they are, but whatever it is, I wish them all the best of luck. They will need it. Teenagers have mostly reptilian brains, and there are consequences. Science can tell you this, but it will not help you very much, unless you are already highly skilled in caring for reptiles, that is. Most mammals have trouble with this.
If your children all grow up to be as militant as Richard Dawkins, you’ll probably regret it. Religion has its problems, but by far it’s not the source of all the evil in the world that Richard seems to believe it is. Sharing community values is usually a good thing.
Kil Galai, May 15, 2014 at 1:44 pm
This was a really nice post, I agree with you.
@Daniel Shawen : ” Religion has its problems, but by far it’s not the source of all the evil in the world” I completely agree with this sentence. If you look at the wars fought during 20th century leading to slaughter of millions of people, very few were fought because of religious reasons. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pat, Mao and others were not religious people! The only religious wars, I can think of, were between Arabs and Israelis ( there too there is a real estate problem) and on a smaller scale between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland and Hindu-Muslim riots in India at the time of partition. 9/11 was a special case of religious terrorism. But even including all these ,the ratio of people killed in religious quarrels to the ones killed in non religious quarrels would be extremely small. Most of the murders carried out these days do not have any religious reason.
@Daniel Shawen : ” Religion has its problems, but by far it’s not the source of all the evil in the world” I completely agree with this sentence. If you look at the wars fought during 20th century leading to slaughter of millions of people, very few were fought because of religious reasons. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pat, Mao and others were not religious people! The only religious wars, I can think of, were between Arabs and Israelis ( there too there is a real estate problem) and on a smaller scale between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, Hindu-Muslim riots in India at the time of partition and current battles between Shiites and Sunnis . 9/11 was a special case of religious terrorism. But even including all these ,the ratio of people killed in religious quarrels to the ones killed in non religious quarrels would be extremely small. Most of the murders carried out these days do not have any religious reason.So it seems Sean is fighting a wrong battle!!
Hi El Vez,
I think in his defence of naturalism Sean Carroll hasn’t replied to what I take to be the most enlightening part of the forum that he had with Craig which you mentioned, namely the final comment made by Robin Collin when he discussed whether the history and successes of science favor naturalism over theism. Collins argued that, contrary to Carroll, the history and successes of science have confirmed theism through the discoveries of elegant mathematical equations etc. If the universe had no Designer why should the universe be like this (i.e. possessing laws of nature describable by elegant mathematical equations), and why should humans have the capacity to make those discoveries concerning fundamental physics etc?
On naturalism there would have been no expectation that the universe should be like this and no expectation that humans would develop capacities far beyond what is needed for survival. However, on the theistic hypothesis of Galileo, Newton etc there would be such expectations, and these have been confirmed by modern science.
I agree with many of you that Sean’s side of the debate usually carries the day. Sean can easily do that with someone like Craig, or in the debate about the afterlife because science is almost enough, all by itself. For every miracle (with no answers of any kind other than prescriptive moral ones) in scripture, we instead have dozens of miraculous discoveries in science, many of which replace superstition with hard reproducible fact. When someone actually comes back from the dead and tell us what non-existence is like, the other side might have a leg to stand on. The amazing Randi still offers an unawarded prize for that, even though some of the things a human mind can actually do are miracles all by themselves.
@kalam
It’s easy to get carried away with what is perceived as elegant mathematical beauty when all you are actually seeing is the fulfillment of a predisposition toward OCD type of orderliness expressed in the language of mathematics (the most OCD science of all!). Sure, you get endorphins from understanding bits of of a problem at a time, but don’t believe that this actually puts you more in harmony with nature, other than chemically, in your own brain. It doesn’t.
What folks like Darwin didn’t convey strongly enough is that the business of life is more like an amoeba (trying everything it can to survive in every conceivable direction) than it is like anything elegant like the finely tuned unambiguous nature of mathematics. If the afterlife is anything like life on Earth but without physical restrictions, it is going to be very diluted in a universe this large and complicated.
Mind you, I’m not telling you that mathematics or the appreciation of it for its own sake has no value. But observe that like life, it is a discipline capable of growing in every conceivable direction, and not all of those are going to survive as anything that is close to the reality that life has to deal with.
@kashyap;
I wouldn’t say that Sean is fighting the wrong battle, but just to take one of the example another poster brought up, what about the Arabs and Israelis?
Their core of their respective religions are very similar in most respects, as you might expect from having similar roots, yet the conflict in that part of the world is so deep, no one yet can get through to either side to show them how pointless the conflict really is.
Land isn’t sacred, any more than ideas about absolute time or absolute space. If you continue to teach hatred of other cultures to your children, they will listen to you and act on that hatred for their whole lives, and there won’t be anything anyone can do to stop it until it ends badly. An obsession for a world with only one race (and there’s no such thing anyway) or one religion or one idea about mortality is doomed from the start. Life has never worked that way, nor should it. Period.