Friday, November 26, 2004
I love studying how fallible our brains are. I find the study of human cognition fascinating, with particular interest in how it's broken. I've made the study of the different illusions (optical, logical, etc) of our brains something of a hobby. It's all part of my efforts to understand why people are so bad at interpreting the world, and how we come to erroneous beliefs such as theism (and other superstitions).
I may read neurology books for fun, but the following little game still surprised me. Play it for yourself, and see if it doesn't blow your mind:
1) You must read these rules in their entirety before beginning. Don't screw this up for yourself by cheating, or you'll really be missing out.
2) Watch this short video. (7MB download and Java required)
You are only allowed to watch it once. In the video you will see a group of basketball players, some wearing white and some wearing black, passing two balls around. Your goal is to count how many times the ball is passed by those wearing white shirts. It’s that simple. Remember, count just the passes of the ball by those wearing white. Once the movie is over, write down the number of passes you have counted. Do not watch the video again!
3) Go to this site and see how accurately you counted.
That's it, now begin!
[mis-nagid_AT_hush_DOT_com]
UPDATE:
Daniel Simons won an Ig Nobel award for this research! Here's the paper that he published that led to the award. Do not follow any of these links until after you've taken the test.
UPDATE 2:
Michael Shermer, he of the excellent books on scientific skepticism, wrote about this in his column in Scientific American. Do not follow any of these links until after you've taken the test.
posted by Mis-nagid @ Friday, November 26, 2004
Monday, November 15, 2004
Shaggy Maniac wrote about my last post:
Your point is well-taken but but I’m not comfortable with your usage of the term “atheistic” in reference to science.
I’d use it in reference to architecture, too. There are those who want to distort the meaning of atheist, but I will not give in to this politically-inspired recharacterization. Atheism isn’t a religion — it’s not even a belief. It’s a lack of a particular belief, and that is all. Anything that has nothing to say about God-belief is atheistic, and there no shame is saying it.
This term would seem to mean literally “without theism”.
Never mind “would seem” — that’s the definition. Anything that is without theism is atheistic. It’s not some cornered, niche idea, flitting in the shadows. Virtually everything we do and know is atheistic. Only those few things still left in the hands of the priests can still be said to be theistic, and that set is shrinking. It’s been shrinking ever since the first cities were designed with the market at the center, and not the church. The scope and domain of religion has shrunk, even as its adherents' numbers grow. Today, only the most overtly religious give more than an hour a week to the church, and have to campaign to affect politics. Compare that with 400 years ago, when the church owned the land and set the rules. It didn’t help them that entire fields slipped from the church’s grasp, such as biology and astronomy. Never let people fool you into thinking that science and religion are separate endeavors. Theism is separate from science. Religion has and is still constantly making scientific claims (virgin births, splitting seas, answered prayers). The fact that they can no longer make scientific claims about the stars is a reflection on the incorrectness of those doctrines, not on their origins in theism (or lack of).
I would argue that there is nothing about science as a human endeavor (which is what it is) that either implies or requires that the humans doing the science either are or need to subscribe in anyway to anything having to do with theism, including atheism. Saying that science is “atheistic” says, I fear, much more than saying that science properly conducted follows methodological naturalism.
On the one hand, you’re right; science does NOT imply naturalism. However, you’re still wrong, because science has led to naturalism. It needn’t have; there’s nothing in science that makes it so. It’s not science’s fault that the tools of reason and logic didn’t find anything supernatural. We could live in the world of The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. We obviously can conceive of it. But we don’t. In those worlds, science would confirm magic and fairies the way it has evolution in ours. As I said, nothing in the methods of science precludes that. However, our world, as it has exposed itself to us, exhibits no such things.
The latter is a requirement of science; the former (“atheism”) has utterly nothing to do with science and thus it is an inapproriate term to associate with science, imo.
Science is an atheistic endeavor, as is everything that is not specifically theological. It is the failings of religious claims in the realm of scientific authority that make science the enemy of religion, not the fact that science is atheistic. Were it otherwise, religion would be opposed to architecture.
[mis-nagid_AT_hush_DOT_com]
posted by Mis-nagid @ Monday, November 15, 2004
PZ Myers wrote:
“Olmsted and Mobley are under the delusion that evolution is an atheistic idea.”
That’s correct. Every scientific theory is atheistic — that is, lacks a god-belief. Heliocentrity does not invoke God, so it is atheistic. Relativity lacks a deity so it too is atheistic.
Of course evolution does not oppose theism. But its opponents are not theists, they are Christians. They do not just believe in God, they have a much larger set of beliefs that revolve around that belief. It is these auxilliary beliefs (such as Genesis) that are in conflict with the evidence that led to the theory of evolution.
The reason that religions have historically been so belligerent to science is because science is atheistic. It allows people to understand the world without invoking God. Evolution doesn’t prove that there are no Gods, but it makes Him unnecessary. Not that He ever was necessary, but the God of Gaps depends on His lacunae, and His followers resent every encroachment of knowledge into the ever-shrinking cavities of ignorance.
UPDATE: PZ Myers responded:
Good point. I was confusing the issues, too: science says nothing about god, which makes it atheistic, but the point I was really trying to address is that is not anti-theistic.
The mark of a true scientist: admitting a mistake. Now go read his blog, you menuval*, you have much to learn.
[mis-nagid_AT_hush_DOT_com]
*Props to Rabbi Pinky Schmeckelstein
posted by Mis-nagid @ Monday, November 15, 2004
