Doggerel #166: "Metaphysical"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

A lot of woos out there like to label their favorite ideas as "metaphysical" to put them beyond science. Most I've met use it this way to label random things as others would label things "supernatural" or "transcendent." There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason behind the labels beyond convenience for the person putting forth the argument and muddying debate for those of us who have to get the latest definition.

The best definitions of metaphysics I've seen is more along the lines of real science: Cosomology (which deals with physical objects, and where the rules for the rules come from) and genuine philosophy: ontology, and other chunks of questions dealing with "what are we talking about?" I don't get why some things like theology is included: If deities have physical effects, they're physical, and thus their existence is a scientific question, not a metaphysical one. Well, maybe it's metaphysics for theists to come up with a testable definition and predictions. Kind of pointless to debate the issue before they know what they're talking about, though.

I rarely see anything along real metaphysics with woos, however. As I said at the start of the post, they tend to just use it as a convenient buzzword, interpreting "metaphysics" as "beyond physical," so that they can claim knowledge beyond the physical, even though we use "physical" in a very broad sense when talking philosophically. Anything that has an effect on the universe is physical for the purposes of science. That includes emotions, consciousness, perception, ideas, thoughts, and so forth. If any woo claiming to have powers were right, those powers would be physical, if not yet understood.

What is Woo?

I occasionally get traffic from people asking that question, who find my previous entry, which mostly directed people elsewhere. I feel like elaborating in my own words, tonight.

Since there's a fair chance someone will click through a search with little previous experience of the term, woo, shortened from "woo-woo" is both a descriptive term for certain ideas as well as a person who holds them. A woo is someone who believes in woo. To get at the central concept, I'll define woo as the descriptive term for certain ideas.

"It is impossible to reason someone out of something that he did not reason himself into in the first place." -Jonathon Swift

That is a short description. Woo is pretty much anything a person believes without good reason. Science works in justifying knowledge with tight controls that isolate causes from confounding factors, consideration for coincidence, and intimate knowledge of all the failings us mortals can have. Woo, on the other hand, avoids all of that. I've seen a fair number of basic types of "bases" for woo:

1. Blind faith: For whatever reason, the woo has decided to believe in something knowing he has no justification for doing so. Often, it dips into "epistemological hedonism": He believes it because it makes him feel good, not because there's evidence for it. Common defense mechanisms that spring into action when these types of woos are questioned are appeals to consequences of belief (as opposed to the truth of the belief) and complaints that they can't cope with living in a world where the woo idea is wrong.

2. Ignorance of our failings: These people rely on anecdotes because they don't realize how unreliable our senses and memories can be, or various other ways how we can fool ourselves. That's one reason courts favor physical evidence over eyewitness testimony. Many of these people tend to be ignorant of statistical analysis and large numbers. Those who benefit often assume their experience is typical when it could be the result of being a lucky one. On the "alternative" "medicine" front, these people tend to think that the patient has an infallible sense of status: Feeling better one day means it works, and not that it might be the result of regression to the mean, faulty memory, being able to deal with pain, nausea, and other symptoms differently from the psychological aspects of the placebo effect. Defense mechanisms generally involve claiming special insight, pleas for us to always trust first impressions, that sloppily recorded personal experience trumps large, well documented studies, and generally assuming oneself to be incapable of being mistaken about their perceptions.

3. Deference to tradition and authorities: Trusting in what parents and authorities tell us was an important thing back in or primitive upbringing. The problem with that bit of our evolution is that it doesn't really do a good job of cleaning out bad ideas our ancestors pass on. Ideas should stand on their merits, not their age. Science tests ideas while woo is often an act of trust that those ancestors got it right somehow, through unspecified means.

There a probably more groups of fallacies that form the basis of various forms of woo, but those are three general types of woo foundations that come to mind. As for categories of stuff that falls under woo: Religion, alternative medicine, psychic powers, magic, giant conspiracy theories, alien visitation, cryptozoology, and a LOT of the "new age" stuff, which I like to pronounce to rhyme with "sewage." These things aren't woo because of any inherent nature of whatever they are. Magic, if it existed, wouldn't be any sort of opposite of science. We complain about people who claim magic exists, but don't do the footwork to test their claim.

Those who claim that something is beyond science like the "supernatural," "transcendental," or "divinity" don't understand the problem. Simply slapping a label on something doesn't change whether or not it has testable, observable effects, which is what science looks for.

What isn't woo: Emotions like love, concepts like justice and morality, abstractions like beauty and art. Love, consciousness, and those precious things that go on in our heads are physical. They cause physical effects like behavior, so they're physical. Justice, beauty, and so forth are ideas of what we find appealing. There's no scientific test for how ethical a course of action is because science doesn't ask how things ought to be, just how they are. Those ideas have a basis in our evolution and cultures, so we can know where those preferences come from, but not whether they're objectively good.

And to close up, I'll include a link to a long rant of mine where I complain how annoying and depressing I find woos to be.

Six Random Things

Well, I got tagged with a meme from Secundum Artem's general direction.

The inviolable laws of the meme are as follows:

1. Link to the person who tagged you. (Check)
2. Post the rules on your blog. (Check)
3. Write six random things about yourself. (Coming up)
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them. (Coming up)
5. Let each person know they've been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

So, here goes...

1. I don't know if I'm exaggerating this into synaesthesia, but I like Techno, House, and pretty much everything my brother's currently liking because they have a "texture" to them. Listened to some of the mixes he's made last night, and I could feel the waves in my forearms.

2. Never watched The Godfather.

3. When I look for videogame controllers, I look for ones with different button configurations. I'm frikkin' tired of seeing everything in the stores being a recolor.

4. I've got a 5+ year old Rubik's Cube with the purple side solved. I haven't seriously twiddled it in a while.

5. I'm on page 250 of The God Delusion. I keep getting sidetracked when it reminds me of some fundies.

6. I had to have my brother sift around my room for items 4 and 5.

People who are thus tagged:
Akusai
King of Ferrets
Tom Foss
Skeptico
Infophile, to stir him from his blog's sleep, and
And, to give him something else to post on his new blog, maybe: Andromeda's Wake.

Random Recall #4: Simpsons Hated Solar?

This weekend, I saw a solar panel and had a flashback to early episodes of the Simpsons, when they said some disparaging things about solar power. It's been a while since I watched those episodes, so I can't be sure what sort of humor they were going for. Specific examples:

Thanksgiving episode (I think) where Homer thanks God for nuclear power, "The safest, most efficient source of energy on Earth... except for solar, which is just a pipe dream."

So, what were they going for? Homer's bitter towards solar because it'll displace nuclear? Solar's so unpromising even an idiot like Homer knows it? I lean towards the former, but it's not really funny.

Monorail episode: "Hey, why don't we just cut off the power?" "We can't. It's solar powered!" "Solar. When will people learn?"

So, making fun of energy propagandists who have to strain to come up with contrived scenarios to argue against solar? At least this one caused a snerk.

Palin Gets Stupider

I know it sounds impossible, but my assessment of her went down another notch. PZ's got the details.

I may be a (hopefully intelligent) layperson when it comes to biology, but even I know that fruit flies have contributed much to our knowledge of genetics and such. Even when it's pure research, you never know what that knowledge could eventually lead you to.

Isn't This Why We're Fighting Alties?

Reverend Rob brings this article to my attention. Doctors prescribing placebos, often because the patient insists on getting something. I'm currently leaning towards this being fraud. I can understand a few times for particularly troublesome hypochondriacs, but nothing extensive. One direction I'd like to spread some of the blame is all the advertisements both alties and pharmaceutical companies (but especially alties) show to imply health requires only popping the right pills.

One minor annoyance with the article itself: Labeling the placebo effect as a "mystery."

I Like This Guy

Another YouTube guy who's looking cool: Captain Disillusion. Love with your heart, use your head for everything else.

Sit! Stay! Good Blog #9

Okay, it's only got the opening post so far, but watching his videos has me wanting to plug his new place. Say hi to Andromeda's Wake.

98th Skeptics' Circle

It's up at the Uncredible Hallq's place.

Open thread as usual, but making me angry is FORBIDDEN! You wouldn't like me when I'm angry.

11# !fooW

It's that time again. For those who aren't familiar with the series, ask me a question and chances are you'll get a silly answer. How about we try something other than the Ultimate Showdowns of Ultimate Destiny this time?

I Should Do Something For Halloween

Last year, I did a little something on a bad episode of Davey and Goliath. Not sure what I'm going to do this year. Any suggestions?

This is How They Roll

The way real medicine is practiced and should be practiced (reduced detail): Someone comes up with a drug/surgical procedure/whatever that looks promising as a means for treating a condition. Cell culture and animal tests follow, overseen by ethical review boards and similar institutions. Records are kept of all results, positive or negative. If the results come out positive enough, human trials can begin, which are monitored even more carefully, starting out relatively small and, when ethically possible, controlled to compare the treatment versus placebo. The subjects must be followed up on to make sure they don't develop any long-term problems. Appropriate regulatory bodies must approve of the treatment before it is allowed on the open market. Records continue to be kept afterward in case long-term problems show up so that the treatment can be pulled or restricted if necessary.

The typical altie way: Skip all that and "experiment" directly on whoever's desperate enough to pay. Record only positive outcomes. Never follow up. Make excuses and never admit responsibility for negative outcomes. Scream bloody murder if someone suggests regulation or testing. Scream especially loud if someone suggests rigorous pre-market testing.

*GRRRRR*

I stayed up a bit too late tonight, and now I'm likely to lie in bed angry for a while.

Hat tip to Andy.

Texas is DOOMED, Unless...

We get out and vote for the right people.

Random Recall #3

This time, it's a Saturday morning cartoon from the 80's I can't remember. Sci-fi genre. Only character I remember specifically was the human lead who I think was transplanted into the alien-heavy space station high school. He wore a red varsity jacket. Had a drug aesop episode involving some skull caps or something that would zap people happy as a fantastic substitute drug. Also remember some scene involving a "tractor beam" that literally shaped into a tractor.

I think it was on ABC or NBC.

Doggerel #165: "Beyond Logic"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

As far as meaningless goes, this strikes me as a particularly meaningless phrase. I may not have taken formal logic courses in philosophy, but I'm having a hard time imagining a universe that could have anything "beyond logic" that doesn't end up being eaten up in pure chaos, if such a thing can exist. Pardon me for being inarticulate on the matter.

I tend to doubt woos really grasp what they're saying. Sometimes they say this to mean things beyond human comprehension. They always seem so sure of where exactly those limits are, hence no need to push them by asking questions. I've seen some reference infinity and the non-termination of pi, as if I should be impressed. Yeah, it was amazing to think about when I was a kid, but it was within my comprehension even back then. Also, I may not grasp "higher" maths now, but I'm not about to presume any of my shortcomings are universal to my fellow beings.

What's worse is when I bump into woos who think we're all Randroids reading from one of Spock's bad scripts. "What's so logical about loving and protecting someone?" As if selfishness was any more "logical" a motivation than love. Goals are separate from accurately figuring out the best method for achieving them. Of course, there's plenty of rational explanations for why we have those emotional goals, usually involving evolution, and neurology's been doing steady work on how our brains produce them. The data are quite noisy, and the definitions vary, but they're within the grasp of logic and science.

Another use is when woos claim that something is "beyond science." I've covered this pretty well with Doggerel #50. The only ways I can imagine something being beyond science would be if it were completely without effect (and thus pretty much irrelevant), or completely random and unpredictable. Science studies effects and makes predictions based on the observation of those effects.

Her Name is Jenny, and She Must Be Stopped

Important site to plug: Stop Jenny McCarthy. Hope that bumps its ranking up slightly.

Random Recall #2

Less movie geek, more fundie stuff: Earlier today, I remembered a news story several years back about a Jewish kid who was forbidden to feed his little keychain virtual pet thing on the Sabbath, so it'd die every week.

A Big Fat Red Herring

Nice post from Akusai about the "Christian Nation" thing.

I generally don't go into that much detail, but I tend to get irritated when fundies use it to justify civil rights abuses, seeming to clear their conscience by assuring themselves what they want done is legal, never mind all this ethics stuff us mere mortals are concerned about.

It's Out

The Mother 3 Fan Translation project has released its first version. Get it because Chuck Norris is no match for The Flint.

If you'll pardon me, I've got some evil electric guitars to crush.