Lunch at the Labs

In The New York Review of Books dated February 7, 2013, biologist H. Allen Orr reviews the book by philosopher Thomas Nagel,

Mind and Cosmos:
Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False

A question addressed is how can consciousness be explained, and it is no surprise that a scientist and a philosopher disagree. Nagel is an atheist but he thinks something more than evolution and natural selection is needed and he suggests a natural teleology that does not depend on any agent's intentions but are just laws of nature that we don't know about yet. Similar to the reviewer I don't buy it, and I particularly like this quote that illustrates why I much prefer science over philosophy:

Instead Nagel's conclusion rests largely on the strength of his intuition. His intuition recoils from the claimed plausibility of neo-Darwinism and that, it seems, is that. (Richard Dawkins has called this sort of move the argument from personal incredulity.) But plenty of scientific truths are counterintuitive (does anyone find it intuitive that we're hurtling around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour?) and a scientific education is, to a considerable extent, an exercise in taming the authority of one's intuition. Nagel never explains why his intuition should count for so much here.

The reviewer summarizes Nagel's positions as:

Nagel is deeply skeptical that any species of materialist reductionism can work. Instead, he concludes, progress on consciousness will require an intellectual revolution at least as radical as Einstein's theory of relativity.

But I prefer the reviewer's own thoughts on the subject:

For there might be perfectly good reasons why you can't imagine a solution to the problem of consciousness. As the philosopher Colin McGinn has emphasized, your very inability to imagine a solution might reflect your cognitive limitations as an evolved creature. The point is that we have no reason to believe that we, as organisms whose brains are evolved and finite, can fathom the answer to every question that we can ask. All other species have cognitive limitations, why not us? So even if matter does give rise to mind, we might not be able to understand how.

I have felt this way for a long time and it's nice to see a scientist express it so clearly. Actually it seems so obvious to me I cannot understand why anyone would think otherwise!

Some web links I found to be of interest:

• Nassim Taleb: Understanding is a Poor Substitute for Convexity (Antifragility)

  In his latest book, the author of The Black Swan says that forecasting and risk measurement do not work. Instead what is needed is the ability to benefit and grow from volatility, errors, and disorder. Similar to how bones need stress to become stronger, stressors are needed in politics and economics and eliminating them makes these systems weaker.

• Leading Environmental Activist's Blunt Confession: I Was Completely Wrong To Oppose GMOs

  The British environmentalist Mark Lynas, an early figure in the fight against genetically modified organisms (GMO), now supports genetically modified food. He says: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.

• Perverse Economics of the Electric Grid: As Generation Gets Cheaper, Transmission Costs Soar

  In recent years the cost of generating electricity has decreased while transmission and distribution costs have increased. And it looks like the trend will continue because of a decline in transmission infrastructure investment.

• Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing

  Different activities vary in how much of success depends on skill versus luck. In any case, statistical reasoning is hard.

• History lesson: Why the Bush tax cuts were enacted

  After the Clinton tax surpluses, Republicans feared we would not have enough debt and the federal government would grow.

• How AT&T and Verizon Manipulate Your Smartphone

  The big phone companies (AT&T and Verizon) collude with the big cable companies (Comcast and Time Warner) to limit competition between wireless phone and wired internet services.

• Mythbusting: Israel and Switzerland are not gun-toting utopias

  Ezra Klein discusses with Janet Rosenbaum actual gun policy in Israel and Switzerland, both of which are often used to defend gun ownership in the United States but seemingly should not.

• Why the Pundits Are Wrong About Big Money and the 2012 Elections

  Both Democrats and Republicans receive obscene amounts of money, but more than determining who wins, it determines what gets discussed during campaigns and what the winner will do after being elected.