SGU Episode 123

Transcriber's notes: This is a pretty liberal transcription. I leave out most "you know" and "I think", and half-formed sentence fragments. I take liberties to convert actual utterances into grammatical sentences. -- Steve Bennett

Introduction

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptic's guide to the universe. Today is Wednesday November 28th 2007, and this is your host, Steven Novella, president of the New England Skeptical Society. Joining me this evening are Bob Novella

B: Hey everybody

S: Rebecca Watson

R: Hello everyone

S: Jay Novella

J: Hey guys

S: And Evan Bernstein

E: Good evening, everybody

S: How is everyone tonight?

B: Good, Steve

E: Quite fine

R: Couldn't be better

J: Very good but apparently, you're not good, Steve?

S: Oh, we'll get to that a bit later. (laughter) Jay's referring to a recent Skeptiko podcast which talks about the Skeptic's Guide specifically. We'll be getting into that in the beginning of the email section of our show. But first let's do some news items.

Science and faith

S: Several of our listeners referred us to this New York Times editorial by Paul Davies - this past Saturday's edition of the New york Times - in which he claims that science is based upon faith. Have you guys had a chance to read this?

Yes

S: This is a claim that we hear frequently. Davies, for example, writes

the problem with this neat separation into non-overlapping magicisteria – as Steve Jay Gould describes science and religion – is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn't be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far, this faith has been justified.

So, you know, this is a claim we hear frequently and I think Davies is making the really common mistake of confusing methodological naturalism with philosophical naturalism. What he's saying is that science assumes that the laws of the universe are stable, and that they make sense. And he says that science requires faith in that. And that is absolutely not correct - that is a complete misunderstanding of science. Science doesn't really require anything, because science is just a system of methodology. It assumes methodological naturalism, the idea that effects have causes, that the system internally functions together and makes sense - the system meaning nature - because it has to assume that. It takes that as a premise only because the methods of science only work within that framework. So it's actually not an assumption about reality, it's not faith in any particular metaphysica ultimatel reality; it's just saying "these are the methods that work, and therefore these are the methods that science is going to use", because it's the only ones in which you can proceed with empirical hypothesis testing. It actually is agnostic towards the ultimate metaphysical realities of the universe. So his entire premise is false.

J: So, Steve, would you say that the following statement is wrong: "I have faith in the scientific method"

S: Well, it depends what you mean by that. I think we use the term "faith" differently. If that means that it has worked so far and therefore I think it's highly probable that it will continue to work in the future, then I think that that's a legitimate statement. But if you're saying that you believe something that's a choice without justification, then I think that that doesn't apply - the term "faith" doesn't apply.

J: Ok, because I say that, "I have faith in the scientific method" because from my perspective I'm saying that I'm banking on the proof upon proof that science has delivered over the years...

S: Right, so we hear this a lot from the intelligent design crowd and I'm sure they love this kind of editorials, because this is their mantra: the notion that you have to have faith in science or faith in evolution, and that they've been complaining endlessly. And this is Phillip Johnson who basically started the Intelligent Design movement, this was his core premise: that science should not be based upon the assumption of naturalism, because that's rigging the game. That's rigging the game against supernatural or spiritual explanations. And they're continuing to make that case. In fact, in preparation for our show tonight I was listening to an episode of Skeptico - the podcast Skeptico - from a few episodes ago where he interviewed an Intelligent Design proponent, and that's what it was all about. It was all about "scientists are assuming philosophical naturalism and they're not following the evidence where it goes, they're only restricting their enquiry to naturalistic explanations and that's not fair, that's rigging the game". What that misses is that methodological naturalism is not a choice, it's a necessity. Without limiting the answers that we're willing to consider to the ones that fit our paradigm we're limiting the questions to ones that can be answered scientifically. If you can't formulate your hypothesis in a way that can be tested, it can be falsified, then it doesn't meet the minimum criteria for being considered as science. They totally do not get that, and that's true at the spiritual end, like the Intelligent Design proponents, and it's true on the New Age end, like Alex from Skeptico. Because they were in complete agreement on this point, that skeptics and scientists are feeding into their own assumption of philosophical naturalism and it's completely untrue.

J: What I don't understand is they're going back to what Carl Sagan said so eloquently: science delivers the goods. Science in and of itself is a system that has been proven over and over and over again to work.

S: That's a good point, Jay, and I often refer to that as the meta-experiment of science. If methodological naturalism didn't work because our universe was hopelessly not rational, or not naturalistic...

B: Acausal

S: ...it was acausal or retro-causal, or the rules, the laws of the universe changed frequently or could be suspended at random, or by the whim of some being. If these things were true, or if our universe were part of a larger universe that we could not access but that influenced our universe - whatever - if any of those situations, then science wouldn't work very well. We would be constantly running up against enduring anomalies that we could never resolve, we couldn't make sense out of. Things that we thought were well-established would be overturned chaotically and at random, and that's just not the case: science has been working quite well over the last few hundred years: slowly, methodically building an ever-improving model that is very, very powerful in its ability to predict the future, to predict what's going to happen. That is the only criterion by which science is really judged - how well does it predict the outcome of future observations. That doesn't prove philosophical naturalism just like you can't really "prove" anything in science, right? Nothing is proven metaphysically in science. All we can say is that so far, all the evidence is pointing in that direction.

Computer Brain

S: Bob, you sent me the next item on a new computer brain. Why don't you tell us about that?

B: Yeah, pretty interesting. One of the holy grails of neuroscientists, I think, since its inception is the creation of a simulation of a human brain. Of course with the advent of computers it's obvious that the best way to embody that simulation would be in a digital computer. Scientists in Switzerland working with IBM researchers have shown that a computer simulation of a part of a rat brain called the neo-cortical column, which is arguably one of the most complex parts of the mammalian brain, it appears to behave like its biological counterpart, which they're calling a pretty big milestone. Now, up until yesterday I'd never even heard of neo-cortical columns, not specifically. And apparently, they're the basic building blocks of the cortex - the outer part of the brain, specifically the neo-cortex, which is the most recently evolved outer folded part of the brain. They consist of, in humans, about 60,000 neurons and they're pretty small. They're about half a millimetre wide and about two millimetres long, so they're pretty tiny. But they're the fundamental functional unit of the brain, and they're extremely complex. They've figured that if you have a goal of duplicating or simulating the brain, that's the one thing you really need to nail, so that's what they've been trying to do. Also, another thing about the neo-cortical columns: apparently that was a milestone in human brain development about two hundred million years ago, Steve, when mammals split from reptiles and the neo cortex started to grow at that point.

S: Yeah, that's true, the reptillian brain is what in mammals you actually call the reptilian brain, that's the deep primitive brain structures. And reptiles have only a very minimal cortical ribbon on top of that. In mammals that became the bulk of the brain.

B: Right, I think it's about 80% of the brain, now, the neo-cortex is about 80% of the brain.

S: Yeah, and it's the more primitive, reptilian part of it. It functions for more automatic kinds of reflexes as well as basic emotions, things like that. But the thinking part of the brain is the cortex, is the mammalian-

B: The so-called higher cognitive functions. Well, it's these columns that have been multiplying for millions of years. And as they've multiplied, our brains became more and more sophisticated. And they're actually responsible for the folds you see in the brain because there's obviously selective pressure to have more of these columns in the cortex. In order to make room, they kind of just expanded any way they could, and that's actually why we have all the folds in the outer part of the brain, because it's the classic-

S: It's not just the volume, it's the surface area, because this vertical organisation – the bulk of the connections in the cortex run vertically, of course there's also horizontal cross-connections, but the primary processing unit, if you will, is this vertical column – so to get more vertical columns in, you need more surface area, and therefore you need more wrinkled folds of the brain, not just an expanding balloon, for example. So, this is really cool. I like [how] in the title it says "a computer simulation could eventually allow neuroscience to be carried in silico". I like that term "in silico".

B: Yeah

S: I've been thinking about this a lot, actually, because as we reverse-engineer the brain, we start to actually see that this piece of the brain is doing this, and connects to this other piece which has this other specific function: this is how they interact. You know, we're definitely going to be moving in the direction where this line of technological development – actually computer modelling the brain – is then going to start working alongside of the neuroscience which is modelling the pieces of the brain. So, imagine in five, ten, twenty, thirty years, when these computer models are actually not just duplicating the raw structure of the brain, but actually in greater and greater detail, and we can actually test our models of how the brain works, by simulating them in a computer. And then do things like say "well what happens if we turn off this nucleus or this part of the brain" and then see what the net result is. I think that these two parallel lines of research are going to play off each other in very, very interesting ways, over the next couple of decades.

B: Now, Henry Markram, the co-director of the Brain-Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland – I probably mangled that pronunciation – he said what you said: "what we're doing is reverse-engineering the brain".

S: Yeah

B: But he had another quote. He said "we're not trying to build a copy of the human brain or some magical, artificial intelligence device". I wonder why he threw, I don't like how he put "magical" in there like you need magic to get AI. "This is really a discovering of how the brain works" is how he sees it. And I agree with him, that this is what they're doing, but I don't think he can ignore the potential applications because they're at the point right now, this milestone they've passed, where the output of this simulation matches what they're seeing biologically. Now they're taking the next step and they want to start actually – extend it beyond just this one neo-cortical column and extend it into many others, and eventually the whole brain of at least the mice that they're trying to simulate here. And eventually after that, a human, obviously. But their time scale is three years for a rat brain, and actually, ten years for a human brain. But of course, some scientists scoff at that idea. They think ten years is way too soon to even be talking about that.

S: We'll see

B: Well, we'll see, and if it's actually ten or twenty or thirty years, eventually, I don't think it's inherently impossible, that we won't have this type of simulation. And imagine what can come from that. He's kind of poo-pooing that, trying to stay away from the whole AI thing, and the whole "copy the human brain" [thing] but I think definitely those are extensions of his research that will inevitably come.

S: Yeah, I agree, I think there's no question about that.

J: So, when you say they make a computer model of the brain. The first thing I think of is, is it possible that if they make a complex computer model and if it's complete enough, could it obtain any kind of consciousness, just on its own? And then you just brought the whole AI thing, but you would imagine that if they could simulate the functionality of the human brain, why wouldn't it become conscious?

B: I agree. I think that if they have a sufficient level of detail and I'm sure many other factors. I mean, I don't think neurons are some magical substrate that allows consciousness and nothing else can. I think that if you have many other different types of substrates, as long as they're connected properly and lots of other things, I think there's no reason why you can't have this in software.

S: Right. The interesting thing will be, in whatever timeframe – twenty, thirty, forty years – we have powerful enough computers and we have adequately modelled the brain. We could create a virtual human brain in silico - or whatever computers are made of. And the result of that behaves as if it's conscious and aware and artifically intelligent. Of course, I predict that will lead to the philosophical debate about whether or not it's really conscious and self-aware, or whether it just acts like it does. I don't know how we would be able to resolve that. That's interesting in terms of the dualism versus materialism debate. Of course the dualists think that the physical brain is not adequate to explain the phenomenon of mind, of consciousness. And I maintain, a lot of neuroscientists maintain that the materialist model's doing just fine, thank you. And we do not need dualism to explain any neurological phenomena. But if the dualists are right, we should run into problems. If we make a purely materialistic model of the brain, that should not result in something that acts like consciousness. There should be some mysteries, something spiritual, something missing.

B: Missing, right, a missing ingredient

S: Missing from our attempt to simulate the brain. I'm sure, you know, the dualists will have some rationalisation if and when that occurs. And if it does turn out that there is something missing, then we'll definitely have to reconsider our materialistic assumptions.

J: Steve, does the human brain have software-like programming?

S: Um, sure, I mean it's more of an analogue type of programming in the way our neurons are connected together. Sure.

R: My brain runs Unix.

J: I mean, a child is born, and genetically that brain is created with base information. There's base information in the brain. Understanding of living in a 3D world and whatnot, right? There's all sorts of things that are built into it.

S: Well, there are certain universals that all humanity shares, and the assumption is that those universals are universal because they're built into how the brain is designed and functions.

It's hardwired

S: Yeah, it's hardwired in the structure of the brain itself. This gets a little bit into the nature versus nurture debate, but I think the evidence is pretty clear that ultimately behaviour and whatnot is a complex interaction of the two things. But we're not born as blank slates, just processing machines. We're born with certain tendencies, emotions, desires, motivations and behaviours. And those interact with the environment as develop. So that's something that's coded in the genes and reflected in the hard-wiring of the brain.

S: Well this is cool research and we'll definitely be interested in following it as it develops.

Psychic Ripoff

[Transcriber's note: I can't find the blog post this refers to - can anyone else?] S: And Rebecca, the third item comes from your blog this week about another fairly dramatic psychic rip-off.

R: Yeah, yet another crazy psychic makes off with hundreds of thousands of dollars of someone's money. Her name is Lola Miller. She's a real looker. Which you can see on the blog if you head over there-

?: (laughs) That picture looks like there's... it's super low-res but maybe it isn't. (laughs)

R: Yeah I don't know maybe she just actually looks like that. I don't know.

?: What's that skin disease – not empotago – where the...some problem with the melanin so that she's got this weird funky, uneven skin colouring all over her face or is it just a bad picture?

S: You're thinking of vitiligo, but I think it could just be wash-out in the picture.

R: I think it's called "evil psychic disease", where the other [B: Ahhh] pigments just sort of seeps out the skin. Like if you look at Sylvia Brown, there's a similar thing going on there. But enough of the fun ad-homs (laughs) She actually is an evil person, she convinced a woman in San Jose that the woman was cursed and that her entire family was cursed and that the only way to remove this curse was by – ta-da – giving her $350,000 in cash and another hundred grand or so in furniture and gift cards and all sorts of - like a limo, and a hotel room.

S: Yeah

?: Three hundred and fifty thousand! She was liquid!

R: Yeah, there's quite a bit of cash there. [Right/Wow] Right, so of course she made off with the money. But the nice thing is that cops did get on the case and track her down to New Jersey, and brought her back to California, and now she is due in court December 5th, apparently. So, we'll see how it goes.

S: Did the mark get her money back?

R: Um, not as of yet, I don't think. I mean especially because a lot of it was in services as well as goods.

S: But [inaudible] thing is, there's $350,000 cash and $95,000 in goods and services. So it's still mostly cash.

R: Yeah, I'm not sure...I can dig up that info. [sounds like searching web]

?E?: So it's against the law to convince someone to hand over a bunch of money.

S: Under false pretenses, that's right.

R: It's such a fine line that they draw, because in this case, the woman lied to someone in order to get the money off of them. [S: Mmmm] But Sylvia Browne does that every day of her life. But she's not being tracked down and dragged to court, unfortunately. Um, yet.

S: You made a good point in your blog where you say that "if you pretend to be a psychic to steal half a million dollars from one person, that's illegal, but if you're stealing millions of dollars collectively from hundreds or thousands of individuals, then that's ok".

R: Exactly. And if you look at someone like Sylvia Browne, she's couched the whole thing as a religion that people buy into. It's kind of amazing that we allow some people to build up a whole industry around it and other people we track down and sue. But, to be optimistic about it, at least they got this one. It's always press on our end when you get this sort of thing out there. That "hey, look, curses aren't a real thing, this woman was a scam artist and don't do that" (laughs). So, I think the more stories like this we have the better.

S: Yeah, although the defendants will always say that "just because someone's abusing it doesn't mean there aren't any real psychics out there".

R: Oh, yeah.

?B?: She's just a bad apple, you know.

S: Yeah.

R: As soon as we see a real psychic, you know.

?: (laughs) right.

S: Which is true, the logic of that is true, but yeah, show us the real quote-unquote "real psychic".

R: "Trot one out", as Houdini said.

S: Yeah, until then, they're all frauds.

Wifi and Autism

S: One more news item before we go onto e-mail. And again, many of our listeners sent this in to us, so thanks for sending in these items, it does help us. This one is on wireless technology and autism. Autism seems to be a favourite target these days for quacks and charlatans. This is a press release that was sent out and dutifully repeated on many news sites, especially many techie news sites, like computerweekly.com printed the press release without any real independent journalism or skepticism. And the press release claims that electromagnetic radiation from wifi devices causes autism. For example, the article is quoted as saying the authors say that the rise in cases of autism is paralleled by the huge growth in mobile phone and wifi usage since the early 1990s, with world-wide wireless usage having reached nearly 4 billion people. Of course as I've stated before, there is no increase in the true incidence of autism. The research clearly shows that autism diagnostic rates are increasing because the definition was broadened, and because surveillance has increased.

R: Thank god, because it seems like everyone causes autism.

?B?: There are people out there that just love autism, like-

S: Anything that's been happening over the last ten, fifteen or twenty years you could say correlates with an increase in diagnostic rates of autism. So, it's just looking for correlations and then assuming causation. Although, this study that the press release was referring to wasn't an epidemiological study. It wasn't actually showing a correlation between wifi usage and autism. It was based on the assumption that heavy metals cause autism, like mercury, so it's buying into the whole mercury-

R: AC/DC

S: -yeah, causes autism thing. And then, that wifi, electromagnetic radiation impairs the brain cells' ability to clear out these heavy metals. It further assumes that treatment designed to treat heavy metal poisoning actually do help autism – which has not been demonstrated to be true – and that wifi devices keep these treatments from working. So, this is the study that they did: they looked at children with autism, and then they put the children into a zero-wifi environment, EMR-free environment. And they treated them with some treatment. The methods in the study don't actually give a lot of detail. But, some treatment designed to get the heavy metals out of their system. And they claim that the kids improved. Of course this is based upon just subjective, you know, assessment by the parents. And they measured the heavy metals in hair and urine and faeces, and towards the end of the study period, there was an increase in the amount of heavy metals that were coming out as a result of the treatment. They concluded that this means the longer they were in the EMR-free environment, so the more the cells were able to mobilise the heavy metals, and that's why it was increasing throughout the course of the treatment.

?J?: Sounds like a logical fallacy.

S: Yeah, I mean, the whole study was horrendously bogus, for multiple reasons. This is a really interesting thing, I've never seen this done before. This all open label, it's not blinded, which is why it's all totally worthless. But what they did was, they did this study on one case which they called the "sentinel case". And then, whatever the result was, that was the outcome that was considered positive. And then they did the other people and they had a similar result. [pause] That's cheating! That's peeking at the results and then declaring that a positive outcome.

?: As if that's what they were looking for.

S: Right! What we find- ok, we'll call that a positive result. There was no controls, they didn't do this in an EMR-free and not free, and autism and no autism; they had no real a priori reason to predict that whatever pattern they were seeing meant anything or confirmed their conclusions. But that's actually the least of it. Everything that I just described is why the results are completely worthless. But, when you read the study, it's chock-full of pseudo-science. One of the methods that they used to assess the subjects was accu-puncture.

[knowing laughs]

?: [sarcastic] Yeah, that makes perfect sense...

S: Here's some of their methods: subjects were given intervention in a sequential protocol that included a series of non-chelation provocations – we're not told what those are – a nutritional formularies – we're not told what those are – focussed on mitochondrial resuscitation. That's pseudo-[?: gobblede-] techno-babble. Depending on the clinical profile of the [?: wow...] client, they divided them into two clinical profiles, get this: "Two general categories of subjects were defined for clinical purposes: those with liver clearance as an indicated vulnerability, and those with kidney function weakness. These determinations are critical for precision of intervention for each subject and were based on a priori laboratory analyses, acupuncture meridian tests, medical history consultations with subjects' parents and clinical observations." So, they decided which kids had problems with liver function, which kids had problems with kidney function, based upon pseudo-scientific nonsense. And get this, in order to put the kids into an EMR-free environment, they tell us in their methods, "applications of body-worn sympathetic resonance technology, energy resonance technology and molecular resonance effect technology were introduced as appropriate".

?: [disgusted] Oh my god...

S: Look those up, that's all pseudo-scientific nonsense. These are not established devices. This is just using magic to prove magic.

?: It's made up!

S: Right

?: It's fiction.

B: Well, I mean, what better to prove magic with than with magic, you know?

S: So, it was a terrible study, it was done by people who totally buy into this kind of...their credentials are all in alternative medicine crap. They're not really legitimate researchers. And the whole premise of the study was based upon...the multiple premises of the study are all not true, they're all false premises. Their methods are terrible, and they are sprinkled throughout with pseudo-scientific nonsense. And yet, the press release really doesn't give you that impression. The press release is you know, "we've shown how wifi causes autism". And it was really just credulously reproduced by many, many sites. There were a couple of sites which did ask some really basic questions, like "what is the journal in which it was allegedly published". It was published in the Australasian Journal of Clinical and Environmental Medicine. It claimed to be peer reviewed. But it's not listed on any of the peer-reviewed listing sites like the National Library of Medicine. It has nothing that indicates it's actually a legitimate journal. They link only to a website which is in construction, so there's no way to actually get your hands on it.

?: (laughs) How convenient...

S: I got my hands on the PDF because a listener in Sweden sent it to me, otherwise I would have had no way of digging it up. It wasn't on any...and I have access to everything through Yale. So if it exists in the medical literature and it's legitimate, I can get access to it. You know, a couple of people did ask these basic questions like "what's this journal, who are these guys?" and it turned out that-

?E?: Who funded this?

S: It's all, again, the journal is the official publication of an organisation dedicated to this stuff. You know, it's not like an independent scientific organisation or a university or anything legitimate. So it's just another example of this alternate universe that's being created within so-called complementary/alternative medicine. They're just creating their own pseudo-scientific infrastructure, and completely bypassing legitimate science, and this is the result. And if you're not savvy, even if you're like Computer Weekly, you can get totally snookered by this superficially legitimate-looking and sounding press release. But you gotta do the basic journalism and dig a little deeper to see that this is all just crap.

S: Well, let's go onto your emails.

Emails

[31:03]