What Does it Mean?
interpretation and model-building in three different sciences
My latest article is out, in ParABnormal Magazine’s March 2022 issue. It is largely about the work of Stanford anthropologist Tanya Lurhman, who wrote a series for the New York Times and several books about religion. Here is a Terri Gross interview about her first book.
I like her approach a lot. She is completely unconcerned about whether the phenomena she studies are objectively “real.” She asks detailed questions about what people experience in their lives, and how they feel about it, and there are no wrong answers. It’s completely consistent with her training as an anthropologist, regardless of the fact that the populations she studies are mostly Westerners of various modern technological and religious tribes.
Belief is a tricky thing to talk about, especially in today’s polarized “fake news” environment, and even more especially as an occasional educator who is responsible to the parents of his students. It could so easily sound like I’ve been mainlining The Matrix, taking it all far too seriously. But as a neuroscientist, the simplest way to say what I think about this stuff is that all of our perceptions — every moment, waking or sleeping or in between — is a complex mixture of filtered information coming in through our senses, combined with internal information derived from memory and imagination.
In other words, we are never experiencing all of reality, only filtered and distorted slices of it. This is not intellectually controversial, but it is emotionally controversial, because most of us believe what we experience, most of the time, without question. The entire history of science has been about teaching ourselves to doubt our personal experiences and to trust the data.
The real problem is the way in which we include other people’s experiences in the category of data. We’re social creatures, and most of the time trusting others is a valuable check on our own perceptions, and an incredibly convenient shortcut to repeating experiments to see if the results stay consistent over time. This is the departure that makes Luhrman’s work into careful academic science rather than an episode of In Search Of, or any of the modern cable/streaming equivalents. She collates and compares, looks for patterns without judging. This is hard.
Frog Pond
This little simulation is deceptively simple. It involves counting frogs to test a set of hypotheses about what causes the growth of a fifth leg. Some are easier to test than others. For instance, if the deformity is directly and only due to the parasitic worm, then moving uninfected frogs / tadpoles into “clean” ponds should eliminate it. Simple, right? Probabilistic explanations, like an interaction between the worm and some genetic vulnerability, take a lot more care to work out.
The biggest problem that students have when I let them design their own experiments is that felt need for the shortcut; they almost always get bored and make decisions before they have enough data to inform those decisions. Or they change the experiment halfway through, or layer a second experiment on top of the first and mash the data together in a way that destroys their meaning. Statistics (specifically a power analysis) can tell you how much data you need, but in my limited experience we don’t teach statistics in a practically useful way.
(All of Jon C. Herron’s educational simulations are good, by the way, even these freebies, which were essentially prototypes for his published textbook software.)
Two Science Talks
One of the benefits of the COVID pandemic is that we now consider live-streaming a normal thing to do, even where it would have been resisted before, like the internal seminar series of university departments. The size of the crowd has always been a measure of the perceived importance of the topic, and universities run on reputations as much as they do on money. So once the social inertia is overcome, live-streaming is a natural fit for those kinds of events.
On April Fools’ Day I was invited to not one but two, at two different schools — UNCG and GTCC. They’re physically close enough together that I could have easily driven from one to the other, if I hadn’t still been sick. But why take the risk of infecting anyone else, when I could just watch from the comfort of my own home?
(As it turns out, it was not a virus, but a bacterial bronchitis that knocked me on my ass for two full weeks, including the five-day course of amoxicillin. Also prednisone, which I’d never done before, and which turned off the flow of brightly colored mucus like a faucet. A hundred years ago, before antibiotics, that little infection could easily have killed me, or at least kept me in bed for months. I had a colleague at A&T who got a drug-resistant pneumonia, which required him to hang upside down for half an hour every day to drain the fluid from his lungs).
The first of those two talks, at UNCG, was by biologist turned philosopher Derek Skillings. Just like above, it was about interpretation, attempting to impose boundaries and categories on the screaming chaos of nature. From the series webpage:
"The Emptiness of Species: A Buddhist Philosophy of Biology"
The dominant view in biology and philosophy of biology is that species do not have essences. A view of the world which holds that entities have essences – like the ones found in much of Western philosophy – contrasts sharply with views that are found in the equally rich traditions of Buddhist philosophy. There we find it denied that the furniture of the world includes anything that might be thought of as an essence.
This talk presents an alternative model for the metaphysics of biological individuals inspired by Buddhist philosophy.
He hit most of the major sticking points of folk biology’s simple and intuitively appealing idea that an individual is an animal bounded by a bag of skin. Sexual reproduction means that parents and children are different individuals, genetically, in a way that clones are not. So for animals and some plants, reproduction makes a good species boundary. But the majority of the world is microbes, which swap DNA through other more promiscuous mechanisms, across “species.” So there’s no perfect answer.
Enter Buddhism, which says, fine, no problem, what you were calling an individual was an illusion anyway, just a convenient label for a bundle of processes that are usually but not always correlated with one another inside the same head. Sometimes they get correlated across heads, as has become more obvious from outbreaks of fashion and misinformation on the Internet.
You may recall this piece, “The Narrative Self,” which I wrote last year for Shannon Connor Winward’s Riddled With Arrows. It touches on the same set of issues but focused at the mental level of personal experience rather than the level of the body.
I won’t say much else about Skillings’ talk. You can watch it yourself from the departmental webpage once the link goes live, which I will announce here in the Comments.
The second was by Paul Byrne to the Stellar Society at GTCC. That’s the group or students who run the weekly public viewing sessions for the Cline Observatory. This past weekend they also hosted the local instance of the Statewide Star Party.
"(Some) New Insights into the Geology of Venus"
With three new Venus missions recently announced by NASA and ESA, attention is once more turning to the second planet. In the past few years, a view has emerged of a much more dynamic world than we once thought. The talk will present some new insights from recent studies our speaker has led regarding the planet's volcanic, tectonic, and dynamic characteristics to understand Venus' past and present — which can be tested by the new NASA and ESA missions.
This was a technical but remarkably clear talk about how people go about interpreting distant radar images taken from orbit. The data come back as streams of numbers that first have to be turned into ugly pictures, and then into prettier pictures in the mind of the interpreter.
Venus’s atmosphere is so thick that regular light doesn’t penetrate, so cameras like we use on Mars are pretty much worthless. We also don’t currently have electronics that will work at those high temperatures, so landing rovers also won’t work. But Dr. Byrne said that silicon carbide electronics are in development at NASA, and that unlike Mars, Venus would be great for balloons, which can carry all kinds of instruments.
I’ll include the links to this talk, too, when it’s available.
As always, thanks for reading!