Science Always Has an Agenda: Sabine Hossenfelder and the Human Ego.

my concern is that in the 21st century
science to a much greater extent than religion becomes a mask for self-righteous stupidity today i want to talk about an issue that must have occurred to everyone who spent some time thinking about physics which is that the idea of free will is both incompatible with the laws of nature and entirely meaningless this means in a nutshell that the whole story of the universe in every single detail was determined already at the big bang we're just watching it play out these deterministic laws of nature apply to you and your brain because you are made of particles and what happens with you is a consequence of what happens with those particles i feel like i must add here a word about the claim that human behavior is unpredictable because if someone told you that they predicted you do one thing you could decide to do something else this is the rubbish argument because it has nothing to do with human behavior it comes from interfering with the system you are making predictions for it is easy to see that this argument is nonsense because you can make the same claim about very simple computer codes there is neither good nor evil but thinking makes it so there is neither science nor pseudoscience in this world but thinking makes it so in examining science we are largely examining our own conceptions misconceptions and desires the various agendas we have that we seek to legitimate through this notion of science and what science means to you if you stop and reflect on it for a moment you've probably engaged in a kind of cherry picking a kind of selective narrowing of the notion of science to suit your agenda some people in this audience right now may think of science primarily in terms of physics some primarily in terms of chemistry you know the behavioral sciences are also scientists computer programming counts as a science these days economics anthropology if you think of science first and foremost in terms of the study of the behavior of animals and then you apply that paradigm to the behavior of humans you come to very different philosophical conclusions about some of these same questions like the nature of free will and determinism then someone's notion of science comes out of theoretical physics chemistry or someone who sees the whole world in terms of a protracted allegory of explaining the human mind in terms of its supposed resemblance to how a computer system reads a hard drive and as i've said in earlier videos actually the resemblance to how your mind works and how a needle reads data off a hard drive it's just not that convincing an allegory it doesn't have that much explanatory power scientists have to make really difficult decisions in the interpretation of animal behavior you may or may not have seen videos here on the internet of ravens engaged in play one of the most common misconceptions about animals is that only animals with the most advanced intelligence engage in play no that's that's a crass superstition i must say no i've seen videotape evidence of ants apparently engaged in play now what is play and how can a human observer determine whether an ant is playing whether it is doing something for fun doing something imaginative to cope with boredom doing something inventive and silly or if that ant is trying to get rid of parasites that may be invisible to the human eye but not to the ant's eye or something what if the ant has some very specific instinctual behavior that we're observing and misinterpreting as play well even in looking at a videotape of a raven or group of ravens doing something that you and i now may just casually evaluate being just for fun being silly being invented being played as such take a look into it and this is a very difficult area of the sciences what is the checklist we go through how can we determine whether or not an animal is doing something as play or and of course this is the other thing what's the opposite of playing [Music] do ravens seemingly mocking one another as they roll over in the snow to see which one of them can roll down a hill further apparently in terms of what we see with the naked eye to sit there and challenge yourself as an observer and say okay to what extent am i as a human just ignorant of what these birds instincts are or what their objectives are what the purpose of this activity is and to what extent am i comfortable making the decision yes right now this raven is just playing this is just silly this is just fun going back to the most ancient of ancient greek sources we have human beings observing dogs primarily dogs engaged in hunting cooperatively with humans dogs that have been trained to hunt prey hunt other animals but also sometimes they're dogs being used to track down humans by their scent you know you have these dogs working closely with people and people can observe the dog being engaged in a rational decision-making process in ancient greek do dogs have dialectic it's actually a common staple for debate they watch what the dogs are doing they can see for example that the dog has two different paths that based on the scent the dog is not sure which way let's say the person has gone the prey that the dog is pursuing is gone and so it goes down a certain path a certain distance it goes a little ways sniffing carefully and then decides no this isn't the path it runs back to the the fork and the road so to speak and then heads off down the other path human beings had not just years but centuries of working closely with animals and observing the ways in which they make decisions and discussing and philosophizing with the role of reason and intelligence in animal behavior such as we could see it now the question we're asking compared to the complexity of determining whether or not an animal is engaged in play is mind-blowingly simple when you're looking at that dog or you're looking at that raven or you're looking at that ant the question of so-called free will versus determinism is really just of whether or not that dog is making a decision at all if the dog is deciding for itself then that dog is determining its own course of action and there is nothing further to be debated in this pseudo-scientific pseudo-philosophical debate now if the dog is not making its own decision that gets into quite a philosophically interesting area of discussion parallel to what i alluded to before what is not play what are our assumptions if we're saying that no i'm certain that animal is not playing i'm certain that animals not having fun that it's acting you know uh in the interests of its own survival most scientists are willing to accept that hypnosis is a real phenomenon for human beings right and actually for some animals animal hypnosis uh people are aware of the phenomena of a deer are trapped in the headlights so-called mesmerism in the animal kingdom rarely talked about but sure sometimes they seem to be in a hypnotic trance all right most people not all would accept that hypnosis is something other than making decisions for yourself that if someone has hypnotized you to commit murder and we again you can see this on camera in tv studios this is fairly common i myself have seen videotape of someone who there wasn't a real it was a the gun wasn't really loaded but a hypnotist brought them through step by step committing an assassination so this can be demonstrated on camera or in laboratory conditions most people would accept that if someone is in a state of hypnosis they're not responsible for their own actions so here we have a clear dichotomy between what what you decide for yourself what you can call free will and what you do not decide for yourself some people not all except that if you're sleepwalking you don't make decisions for yourself right some people accept that if you're in a disassociative state you do not make these decisions yourself and point out i keep saying some people believe this for the convenience of the courts for the convenience of the ethical and legal system that rules our society as a whole uh very often we choose not to accept these excuses many societies around the world will just say look oh we don't care if you were in a disassociative state we don't care if you were drunk we don't care if you say you were sleepwalking we don't care if you say that you visited a hypnotist earlier that day and you lapsed back into a hypnotic state when you committed this murder if there wasn't somebody else in the room who pulled the trigger instead of you if you were the one holding the gun you're legally responsible and that is a legal fiction we're going to live with because we don't want to have a jury having having to determine to what extent you were not in control of your actions so even if that's completely insincere this is the kind of legal fiction we may deal with to have our systems of morality make sense in the society and i do think there would be a few people here and there amongst scientists to give you an example i remember reading a genuinely skeptical article from a a scientist questioning whether or not amnesia exists and he was pointing out movies and soap operas tv shows they very often feature characters who have an emotional experience and then forget parts of the plot and um he was really arguing that in terms of empirical evidence although a lot of people engage in wishful thinking a lot of people have a fantasy that they want to start a new life and pretend that they forget that really forgetting in this sense amnesia as depicted in movies that this doesn't exist in the absence of a massively traumatic brain injury and other interruptions of the function that actually no people don't just lapse into amnesia this way so now i think many scientists would disagree with him also i mean there's more than one perspective in this debate all right if we were to approach this question of free will or determinism from the perspective of the sciences but which sciences you see from the perspective of the behavioral sciences applied to animals right doesn't this all seem ridiculous to be insisting that the posing of the question and the answer to the question is going to be determined through the laws of physics and the incredibly abstract claim that cause and effect as such the relationship between molecules as such renders the research question invalid renders both hypotheses impossible to pursue or prove oh oh okay so um the laws of physics you're talking about here the laws of cause and effect does that mean it is impossible to determine whether a raven is at play or is not at play is pursuing a particular objective an instinct when it's rolling around the snow does that mean we're incapable of examining the behavior of a raven a dog an ant and evaluating and determining whether or not that animal is making its own decision oh does that mean that there's just no point ever having a debate in a court of law about whether somebody was in a state of hypnosis or not in a state of hypnosis whether someone made a decision for themselves or if there really was some circumstance some kind of uh impulsion shall we say some kind of relationship of cause and effect like billiard balls on a table that forced them to do the thing that they did i use the example before of actually being electrocuted and your your nerve ending seizing up in your hands where you say no i didn't decide to clench my fist and maybe you were holding a gun and you clenched your fist inside of the gun you stepped on an electric wire the electricity went through your body so your muscles contracted and that wasn't a decision you made that wasn't something voluntary that was something involuntary that was something you didn't decide that was something determined by cause and effect in this sense in summary the idea that we have a free will which gives us the possibility to select among different futures is both incompatible with the laws of nature and logically incoherent if you want to define free will in such a way that it is still consistent with the laws of nature that is fine by me though i will continue to complain that's just verbal acrobatics in any case regardless of how you want to define the word we still cannot select among several possible futures this idea makes absolutely no sense if you know anything about physics what is really going on if you are making a decision is that your brain is running a calculation and while it is doing that you do not know what the outcome of the calculation will be because if you did you wouldn't have to do the calculation why am i telling you this because i think that people who do not understand that free will is an illusion underestimate how much their decisions are influenced by the information they are exposed to looking at the intellectual contribution of people like sabina hassenfelder looking at the intellectual contribution of somebody like cosmic skeptic you know i am inclined to just point the finger and laugh you know and maybe something would be accomplished by doing that too maybe there would be something accomplished by pointing the finger and drawing attention to the extent to which these people rely on circular reasoning outright fallacious reasoning what's called patitio principii the begging of the question as a formal logical fallacy the extent to which they rely even on the outrageously misleading definition of terms and sometimes the inconsistent definition of well in one context this is what they meant by determinism or determined and then they're using a different definition just a few minutes later in the same video there's a lot of stupidity there's a lot of dishonesty there's a lot of self-deception going on there but what comes across to me most of all in those videos is their almost messianic ego trip both cosmic skeptic and sabina um they really think of themselves as extraordinarily intelligent people people who even have some sort of mission or purpose in enlightening the mure fuels the mirror fools such as you and i uh in the audience guiding us to the light of their supposedly uh scientific discoveries and what's being covered over there is the extent to which science doesn't represent something diametrically opposite to and incompatible with people pursuing an agenda all right not at all in large part the development of the sciences comes from people in a totally biased one-sided passionate way pursuing an agenda and they slant and misrepresent all the facts and support that agenda for as long as they possibly can until something cracks something breaks and somebody's willing to admit that this whole paradigm of accumulated highly systematic self-referential and consistent information um in fact is is terribly wrong uh in the admission that we've made mistakes and then in shifting to a new paradigm we start to have something you know resembling science whether you're looking at the history of development of the medical sciences physics or any other field you will see this pattern again and again it was very hard for me to accept you know um when i was working in the social sciences that christians would come to cambodia with an agenda they would pay money to do scientific research proving that the relaxed buddhist attitudes that cambodians have towards prostitution homosexuality are terrible things that instead cambodia ought to resemble much more a western christian society that represses and forbids prostitution and homosexuality this was science this is this is science this is people paying for research in pursuit of an agenda right and of course i saw other foundations in cambodia run by left-wing feminists who were paying for scientific research to prove that the best possible thing for cambodia would be to completely legalize and encourage prostitution that this is part of the upliftment deliberation of of women that you know to have as many prostitutes as possible with as few restrictions as possible and as much female empowerment through prostitution as possible very ham-fisted attempts to take what are clearly political and even religious value statements and make them seem like some kind of objective fact now cambodia might seem a long way away do you think this is healthy [Laughter] do you think a vegan diet is healthy do you think eggs are healthy do you think cheese is healthy what we call science uh is not the opposite of the sphere of human emotions human passions human beings in a completely biased one-sided way pursuing an agenda all right science consists of people paying money to present completely one-sided bias research precisely in pursuit of an agenda people prove that the eggs in cholesterol does you no harm at all they publish new studies and new magazine articles claiming that again and again and again the behest of the egg industry and i have indeed seen horrendously biased in one-sided research from proponents of veganism supporting a vegan diet and even though i'm vegan myself i have to laugh because i'm i'm not willing to live a lie not even if it's convenient for my own diet or my own political ideology what i see people doing is pointing to the word science and then not taking responsibility for their own agenda for why it is they feel the way they do for why it is they're arguing what it is they're arguing my concern is that in the 21st century science to a much greater extent than religion becomes a mask for self-righteous stupidity it becomes a way of presenting your own ignorant biases as if they're objective fact i mean really people like to disrespect my crew but the fact is that you know my name and i don't know you