Science news roundup: Brains and neuroscience; cancer, microbes and contagion

Per a piece by Carl Zimmer, we know that there are, at a minimum, more than 3,000 different types of cells in the human brain. This is reinforcement for what I said years ago: That neuroscience, and related science and science-philosophy fields like cognitive science are still in the Stone Age. We maybe Neolithic rather than Paleolithic now, but still the Stone Age. Here's the biggie further reinforcing that:

The researchers found many new types of neurons, cells that use electric signals and chemicals to process information. But neurons make up only about half the cells in the brain. The other half are far more mysterious.

Astrocytes, for example, appear to nurture neurons so that they can keep working properly. Microglia serve as immune cells, attacking foreign invaders and pruning some of the branches on neurons to improve their signaling. And the researchers found many new types of these cells as well.

We just don't know what these cells do. And, we don't know how they interact with each other. 

So, there's all this to ponder and study:

Megan Carey, a neuroscientist at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Portugal who was not part of the brain atlas project, said that the research provided a staggering amount of new data for researchers to use in future studies. “I think this is a tremendous success story,” she said.

Yet she also cautioned that understanding how the human brain works would not be a matter of simply cataloging each and every part down to its finest details. Neuroscientists will also have to step back and look at the brain as a self-regulating system.

“There will be answers in this data set that will help us get closer to that,” Dr. Carey said. “We just don’t know which ones they are yet.”

Adam Hantman, a neuroscientist at the University of North Carolina who was not involved in the study, said that the atlas would be a big help for some kinds of research, like tracing the development of the brain. But he questioned whether a catalog of cell types would elucidate complex behavior.

“We want to know what the orchestra is doing,” he said. “We don’t really care what this one violinist is doing at this one moment.”

There you go.

'Animals can't do X,' ethics division

Perhaps I'm overstating the opposition, but that's my takeaway from the most recent posting of philosopher and biologist Massimo Pigliucci.

I'm not sure how strongly he holds that idea, but Dan Kaufmann, who joined him for one of their bloggingheads-type talks, does in spades.

The old idea that "animals can't do X" or "aren't X" or similar has its modern roots after 1859.

The first claim was that humans aren't animals subject to evolution by natural selection. Then along came the "Ascent of Man" in 1871, the first scientific claim to say, no they are.

The battle lines heated up in the second half of the 20th century, with research developments in neuroscience, the development of cognitive science as an interdisciplinary new discipline, and the articulation of evolutionary psychology. I have issues with all three, especially the last, but at the same time have stated that ev psych, when done right, already has things to teach us.

The lines of resistance against a mix of legitimate findings and provocative interpretations from these and related areas has also been sharply drawn, per the header.

Some of the claims:
1. Animals don't have consciousness;
2. Animals don't have a theory of other minds;
3. Animals don't have true emotions.

Have all had to be, at a minimum, modified. Humans still have a degree of consciousness, TOM, and non-instinctual emotions well beyond many other animals and a fair degree beyond even those closest in connection to us.

But is this merely a difference in degree, or a difference in kind?

On all three, at a minimum, I say it's halfway a difference of degree.

And, now comes the issue of ethics and morals?

My initial hot take is that it's at least possible that the difference between humans and other animals is 50 percent one of degree.

And, at a minimum, we don't need philosophers, or scientists with philosophical-type presuppositions, drawing Venn diagrams that have "human morals" and "animal pseudo-morals" in two totally non-overlapping circles.

I don't expect better versions of ev psych or neuroscience to give us 100 percent definite answers Nor do I expect them even to give us a lot of additional guidance in less than 40-50 years from now. But, at that or some other future point, I do expect that additional guidance on empirical information and how to think about these issues to start emerging.

Chimerism causes problems for souls, life forces and other metaphysics

I had originally titled this post, pre-publication, as "How many individuals are inside each of us?" But, as I later expanded it more, I decided I wanted the change, especially when I, like one of the few good things Christopher Hitchens did as a Gnu Atheist, took Eastern as well as Western religion into my gunsights.

That first sentence? That's a rhetorical question, as regular readers of this blog might guess. But, it's one based on hard science, and this time, it's not based on neuroscience or philosophy ideas of Dan Dennett.

Carl Zimmer's latest science piece in the New York Times is simply fascinating. It appears that many more humans than previously recognized are chimeras.

That is, whether you were part of a twin birth or not, you were part of a twin conception, and you either absorbed some cells from your twin or, in many cases, you absorbed the entire twin.

Or, some of us may be a mosaic, just like the mosaic cats you see with two halves of their faces with definitely different colors. In humans, it seems the mosaic patterns don't show up in outward appearance; rather, more insidiously, they may be behind the formation of some cancers.

A mosaic is not a blend of two different persons' DNA, as one twin absorbing another. Per this new piece by Zimmer, rather, a mozaic is when one zygote undergoes mutations early in cell division, before any differentiation, and both (or three or more!) cell versions are preserved. Result? Part of the cells of a heart may be defective, but not all.

As regular readers of this blog know, I'm also an atheist. And, not just an atheist in the way the Dalai Lama is, or some New Agers claim to be. Rather, I'm also an anti-metaphysician.

And, while I'm not a Gnu Atheist, generally poking fun at Christians liberal and fundamentalist alike just because they're Christians, nonetheless, to anybody who believes in an immaterial, metaphysical soul, the fact of chimerism (and other issues of human conception behind it) present stark challenges to your belief. As they do to religious-based prolife stances. (What a Nat Hentoff does with information like this, I have no idea, but he may "elide" it too.)

My answer to the rhetorical question is that there's quite posssibly more than "one" inside of me, if we're talking about DNA. It's also that, Dennett's multiple-drafts theory of consciousness, and ideas of subselves, aside, that there's only one inside of me if we're talking about core personalities. That's because I have only one brain, and only one body to embody the consciousness that's inside me, and zero souls, no matter whether my DNA is from one fertilized zygote or two, representing that consciousness. 

This is why that, though my move from conservative-to-fundamentalist Lutheranism to eventually land in atheism, or secular humanism, began over psychological and philosophical issues related to the problem of evil, as well as doing intellectual judo on my religious upbringing from my own religious graduate school training, eventually, science issues also came into mind.

Now, liberal versions of Christianity can find themselves perfectly compatible with, say, evolution. But, any religion that believes in an individualized, metaphysical soul? I simply don't see how you reconcile these scientific findings with your beliefs. And, under "individualized, metaphysical soul" I include the likes of the Dalai Lama and millions of other Buddhists who believe that some individualized life force is reincarnated. If it's an item tied to an individual person and it's metaphysical, it fits the bill here.

Many people claim that the Dalai Lama has said that he'll accept whatever science says.

However, I have read (sorry, I never did bookmark it) that he has elsewhere said that if it is science vs. one of two core Buddhist principles — karma and reincarnation — then science goes and Buddhism stays. 

And I don't doubt that its true.

In other words, chimerism simply wrecks the idea of a soul being created at conception, unless one is prepared to stand by an even darker god than John Calvin was.  If you're of the ilk of Hobby Lobby,  or Catholics, then, in the case of chimeras, you have to quadruple down on the biblical myth of Jacob and Esau in the womb, and believe that one of two fraternal twins, in many births, is a cannibalistic soul-devourer. Or else, it's a physical cannibal with two souls "attached" to what on the outside seems to be one body, with one brain.

Chimerism also has other connections to the abortion debate, especially within the Western monotheistic/monotritheistic tradition.

It's another variant on the old problem of evil. How can a deity purportedly both all-powerful and all-good let human reproduction be such a minefield of problems? Beyond all the chimeras (which, to be most blunt, from the fundamentalist point of view, must be considered versions of tiny infant cannibalism) to the fact that as many as one in four, maybe even one in three, human conceptions is spontaneously aborted, it is not even close to being anything but an evolutionary minimum of success, it would seem. And, aside from the fundamentalist problems I just lined out already, it's also a vast waste of putative divine economy.

If any fundamentalist tries to do the old hand-waving about how god's ways aren't are ways and vice versa, and god is inscrutable, etc., therefore there's surely an ultimate good behind this, I answer twice.

The first is that a god who is all-powerful and all-good not only can but morally should make his plans scrutable to any sentient beings he creates. Therefore, this is just the problem of evil squred.

Second is that said god is illogical, and unless one wants to be Martin Luther and talk about "that whore, reason," not all-good and therefore self-refuting.

To any fundamentalist who says "original sin," I reply three ways.

First and second, the two answers above.

Third, that you believe in a monster who isn't even close to all-good. (And, yes, like Ken Ham, some Xns actually will attribute the cause of anything wrong in our world to original sin.)

And, speaking of "souls," maybe chimerism explains why identical twins aren't so identical, even in their brains. (Of course, this would require parental cells/DNA, or else a third, fraternal twin.)

Update, May 2, 2021: Fascinating Smithsonian piece here. If you're familiar with what chimeras are, namely a human fetus that has absorbed another in the womb, the discovery that moms can become chimeras from their fetuses is ... fascinating.

Did Elizabeth Loftus watch Clockwork Orange too much?

Elizabeth Loftus/Photo via Nature

Note: With the appearance of a second new article about Loftus, and other matters, this article has been extensively overhauled.

Note 2: With some new-to-me 2021 information about another memory claim by Loftus, there's an addendum at bottom, along with a boatload of biographical background about "where she comes from," which is itself headshaking, and may lead me to a separate new blog post, if nothing else. And there's also more on "follow the money," edited off of this new information, higher up in the post.

Nature, the British science giant, has a good profile a few years ago on the good, and not-so-good, of Elizabeth Loftus.

I won't bother going into the good so much. But, I certainly don't dismiss it. We've seen a lot of follow-up on the fallibility of eyewitness memory. We have seen how false memories can be implanted. And we've seen how that can be tied to weird movements like claims of ritual satanic abuse, an explosion in multiple personality diagnoses and more.

The story's good in that it shows Loftus isn't always right, either. And she's not. And, in fact, Pat Fitzgerald eviscerated her in the Scooter Libby trial. She has shed light on the fallibility of memory, but she's overstated things, too.

Part of the problem is that she seems to overstate her claims, in essence, believing that however memories become "repressed," even if another word gets used, they aren't "recovered." Per the Nature piece:

Ross Cheit, a political scientist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, started the Recovered Memory Project in 1995 to document and respond to what he says has been a one-sided debate. There are now more than 100 corroborated cases of recovered memory on his website (http://blogs.brown.edu/recoveredmemory), he says, including some on which Loftus had consulted.

“Loftus is often on the losing side, and she's sometimes wrong in a spectacular way,” Cheit says. Her testimonies, he adds, can be psychologically damaging for the victims. “If you're telling someone you think their memories are false, when they have corroborating evidence that they were abused, that's corrosive.”

That said, part of the problem is linguistic: Just what does "repressed" mean in terms of memory. If I don't think about a traumatic memory for years, why? Isn't it at least possible, Ms. Loftus, that some "subpersonality," even if not a conscious decision, undertook a subconscious decision to bury that memory deeper?

Loftus does not believe that Cheit's site corroborates recovered memories. “He might have some cases of people who didn't think about their abuse for some time and were reminded of it, but as for actual repression, no,” she says. “I cringe at the idea of hurting genuine victims, but when an innocent person is accused, we have a whole new set of victims, and I'm more horrified by an innocent person getting convicted than by a guilty person being acquitted.”

To be honest, I'm not sure how much she "cringes." In the courtroom, while making some notable contributions, she's also just pushed the ball a bit, just to further her ideas, whether or not they're on a totally realistic foundation or not.

And, she makes good money for doing what she does.

So, let's follow the money!  

Considering that she's been an expert witness in more than 100 cases now, according to the Nature piece's author, it has to be "something" indeed. At $1,000 a pop (and, no that's not an outrageous estimate), that's $100,000. Indeed, there is this:

She is often compensated for her expert-witness work, earning up to US$500 per hour, she says.

That would be $1,000 after two hours, and that's assuming her "billable hours" are only her actual court time. I'm probably underestimating by a factor of three, so, to be liberal, she might have made $300,000 off being an expert witness. That's not counting non-witness legal consulting. That's not counting speaking at conferences.

On the high side, Loftus may have made as much as $500,000 as "the go-to person" for debunking, or "debunking," repressed memory, or "repressed memory." Now, I'll freely admit that's on the high side. But, it's not out of the real of possibility entirely. Let's say that a convoluted case like Weinstein's involves her working with a jury coach from the defense team and other things. That plus her research, etc.? About 16 hours and change at $600 a pop? That's 20 grand right there. Per case. $300K for her last 100. Well, the Times says it was $14K for the Weinstein case. Anyway, it shows I was in the right ballpark. Knock some cases down a bit, and some a fair amount, even. $10K x 300 cases? Yes, this is seven-plus years after my original post, but she's a conservative $300K. Conservative.

(Update, April 12, 2021: The LA Times says of this time, it's more than 300 cases, that it's $600 per billable hour. Update, June 7, 2022: Per this Hustle story on the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp dual defamation suit and the price of expert witnesses, this may be WAY low. In a murder case in 2017 in Couer d'Alene, Idaho, not exactly Los Angeles, and criminal not civil, one psychologist got $210K in expert witness fees. Hustle reminds us that expert witness billable hours include prep hours and depositions, not just trial time. The piece says that psychiatrists bill $575 per hour on trial time on average and psychologists [we'll put Loftus there] $531 per hour,  So, on the really high side, Loftus may be an expert witness millionaire. )
 

Now, I'm not saying that's her primary motivation, but a motivation? Sure. Especially if it fuels sales of her 26 books and her TED talks. 

In other words, she's a "brand."

Loftus hadn't always seemed so "ardent" on this issue, or quite so black and white, at least before she wrote "The Myth of Repressed Memory," with the title signifying her stance.

So, why? Well, as I've wondered, and others wonder too, coming back to that Scooter Libby trial, maybe it's in part "follow the money." And, Nature notes that she's not been shy about this.

Maybe it's also, in part, "follow the glory." Or, "follow the (alleged) martyrdom." All valid rhetorical thoughts.

That's why I wonder how much she "cringes." Stephen Ceci, a co-author with her of one report, says:

There are ways in which traumatic memories of real events can be recalled after being buried for years, he adds, but without hard evidence, it is impossible to distinguish false memories from real ones in court.

So, again, it's a gray area that she treats as black-and-white. And, if she really did cringe that much, wouldn't she, at one of her conferences, tell what she knows, or believes she has discovered, about how to tell when memories are real before cases go to court?

Let's pick up the trail of Ceci, from a new Guardian piece that a friend on Facebook shared:

"Think of some embarrassing event when you were a teenager," he says. "You're not going to dwell on it, but you can recollect it if someone reminds you. Likewise, people can have horrible experiences and not think about them for decades, but are capable of retrieving them when questioned." Another is a rare and poorly understood psychological condition called dissociative amnesia.

It is therefore perfectly plausible that memories of childhood sexual abuse could be buried for years and then recalled, and that motivated forgetting, dissociative amnesia, or some other mechanism could account for some of the allegations in cases that Loftus has testified in. But because of the way in which the entire debate has been framed around the issue of "repression" and "recovery," these nuances have been largely ignored.

Loftus is quoted there as agreeing that this issue is "a little slippery." However, she goes on, as elsewhere, to indicate that the burden should only fall on the other side, and not at all o hers, in the "slippery" gray area at center. And she's not alone. See below.

And, she's hardened her position with the passage of years. In 1997, per this Scientific American article, while she came down hard on therapists "leading on" clients, she even then didn't 100 percent reject the idea out of hand, and she addressed the same issue Ceci does. I note:

(A)lthough experimental work on the creation of false memories may raise doubt about the validity of long-buried memories, such as repeated trauma, it in no way disproves them. Without corroboration, there is little that can be done to help even the most experienced evaluator to differentiate true memories from ones that were suggestively planted.

That said, she was a fair ways down the road then. After all, she had written "The Myth of Repressed Memory" before this. Some time between then and Scooter Libby trial, her position finished hardening. And, her paychecks got bigger.

(I add here that some of her expert witness tesetimony, and talks at both legal and psychological conferences, is about memory accuracy issues unrelated to recovered memories.)

She certainly doesn't seem like a "humanist hero," even if some skeptics want to make her one.

Fortunately, not all skeptics have bought the push to put her on an unskeptical pedestal. Skeptical friend David Gluck has a good piece here at Skeptic Friends Network. Also approaching the issue in part from a linguistic and semantic angle, he notes that "recovered" memories aren't necessarily "repressed," and by Loftus' somewhat circular reasoning, obviously can't be "repressed."

He sums up:

We were right to blow the whistle loudly when recovered memory therapy was doing its damage. We are still right in asking where memories of alien abduction and satanic abuse or memories recovered in some New Age quack therapy are coming from. We must be reasonably cautious when regarding memories recovered in or out of therapy sessions. But we may have lost our way when we assert that every claim to a recovered memory is necessarily false because some claims to a recovered memory are obviously false. We may be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Indeed.

And all of this gets at another issue with Loftus. Her thinking about consciousness is kind of black-and-white, as I noted above.. She seems to have little room for a "multiple drafts" theory of consciousness proposed by a Dan Dennett, or anything even close to it.

If anything, Loftus' theories of consciousness, or her theories of what types of ideas about consciousness she thinks she needs to fight, look awfully Freudian. Well, Freud died 70 years ago, and Freudianism's been dead 50. Sorry. Time to move on.

When I first wrote this blog post, I wasn't  quite ready to say that she was strawmanning on some of her ideas, but, now I am. I'm also realizing, that, per a FB discussion, she's got plenty of pedestal-builders who are ardent supporters.

That includes assuming that only psychological research, and not readings in (non-pop) neuroscience, cognitive science, or philosophy of mind, even, are "original." Or implying, as I have inferred, that challenging her research on this issue (let along wanting to "toss out" some of it, is the same as wanting to do that to all research on malleability of memory issues done just by psychologists.

But, let me get back to the strawmanning issue.

As I read more of the Scientific American piece ... and her objections to people like Cheit, I think it's more than just semantics over the words "repressed" or "repression."

Rather, I think it's goalpost-shifting, strawmanning, or opening the old Overton Window, whichever you prefer. (That's in addition to her overly black-and-white stance on this issue.)

Having just read his article essentially denying the existence of "scientism," I'm suddenly, and strongly, reminded, of Steve Pinker.

Indeed, Ms. A., I've read original research on issues of memory by psychologists, notably Daniel Wegner, if we are going to trot out who's read what. (Update: Wegner's "The Illusion of Conscious Will" is reviewed by me here.) And, from what I've read of Loftus' own writing, and about her, I'm not aware that she's tried to tie her research to issues of consciousness, free will or lack thereof, and related issues. Wegner, on the other hand, from his point of view, combining psychology and philosophy, without going specifically into issues of false memories or recovered memories, has addressed how his ideas on consciousness and lack of conscious free will relate to memory.

Also (and not to puff neuroscience too much) she's not a neuroscientist, nor is she a philosopher of mind, so she's not researching issues in theory of mind that would have bearing on issues like this.

So, just how strong a scientist is she?

All this is more reason yet to be skeptical of some of her stronger claims in this area. As is new research on "false" memories, showing that some are not "de novo false," but rather, a conflation of two true memories into one new one.

Indeed, as Pat Fitzgerald showed in grilling her as a potential expert witness during the Scooter Libby trial, she's not even that much of a scientist in general.

But when Fitzgerald got his chance to cross-examine Loftus about her findings, he had her stuttering to explain her own writings and backpedaling from her earlier assertions. Citing several of her publications, footnotes and the work of her peers, Fitzgerald got Loftus to acknowledge that the methodology she had used at times in her long academic career was not that scientific, that her conclusions about memory were conflicting, and that she had exaggerated a figure and a statement from her survey of D.C. jurors that favored the defense. 

I think the "exaggerated" is key. I think she's exaggerated other aspects of her work. And I think that, not political disagreements, is why she resigned from the American Psychological Association. And, in fact, under APA bylaws, she should not have been allowed to resign. Its bylaws specify that you can't do that while you're the subject of a formal complaint.

The new Scientific American piece has her saying that she didn't know of the complaints when she resigned. To put it charitably, I don't believe her.

And, that leads to a discussion of ...

Loftus' ethical problems

And, beyond that, skeptics should be very worried about this (as should civil libertarians and others). From the Nature piece:

Meanwhile, her research has shifted into new controversial waters. Taking on board the lesson that memories can be manufactured, she has been investigating the possibility of using those memories to modify behaviour^. “We've shown that you can plant a memory of getting sick eating particular foods as a child,” she says, “and we can get people thinking they got sick drinking vodka, so they don't want to drink as much of it later on.”

There is no evidence that any of this will successfully transfer from the lab to the real world. Even if it does, it would violate therapists' code of conduct, and could have unforeseen consequences.

“Lying to children is a slippery slope that makes me uncomfortable,” says Judy Illes, a neuroethicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. “Can't we alter their behaviour in a positive way, instead of using subterfuge?” But Loftus dismisses the concerns, suggesting that even if therapists cannot do it, parents might want to. “Parents lie to their kids all the time, about Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. Would you rather have an unhealthy kid, or one with a few false memories?”

Well, skeptics, and especially atheists, whether self-identified as skeptics or not, would jump all over those last two sentences and rightfully so.

Beyond that, within parenting, this brings up issues of trust, breaking of trust, and possible trauma from that. Besides, re beliefs in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, or a god, for that matter, who defines what beliefs are healthy or not?

And, when parents get divorced and they have different ideas on child raising, this could be a nightmare. Think Michael Newdow and his daughter and the Pledge of Allegiance lawsuit.

What next? Loftus telling parents to read "Clockwork Orange"? I'm not saying that she's advocating parents use the Ludovico technique to implant false memories or otherwise modify memory, but she's not telling people, in papers linked off the Nature story, what techniques they should and shouldn't use.

I also find it weird that, given her crusade against therapists and counselors for often leading clients into exaggerating memories or worse, Loftus would still tout memory modification.

Also, Ms. A., per discussion on Facebook, I find it "interesting" that you never engaged the part of the Nature piece in my last pull quote, other than to call it "one comment."

That's "too bad," at least. Because, in a second Skeptic Friends Network piece, Loftus has other ethical problems.

Attempts have been made to show personality types that might lend themselves to false memory syndrome. Loftus thinks these women are “weak.”

That's an emotional term, not a psychologically scientific one like "pliable."

But, it's actually worse. The "weak" comes from this passage in a study paper of hers:

“Today, the accused are often men of power and success… The witch accusations… were most often leveled by men, but today the accusations are predominantly leveled by women. Today’s phenomenon is more than anything a movement of the weak against the strong.”

Well, now, we've gone from psychology to sociological presumptions.

Meanwhile, the use of the phrase "false memory" rather than "repressed memory," like Loftus' own use of the word "weak," could itself be seen as prejudicial and biased.

And per comment above about "who she reminded me of," beyond Pinker? Things like this sound Randian. And, noooo, that's not a reference to James Randi.

Psychologist Kenneth Pope, in a piece linked at the first SFN site, adds to these "presumptions" by Loftus:

Making clear her reference by quoting from Hoffer's (1951/1989) The True Believer, Loftus claims that there are two sides to the recovered memory controversy and those on the other side (i.e., those who disagree with her) are True Believers. Noting that she identifies herself as a skeptic, Loftus writes: "On one side are the 'True Believers,'. . . . On the other side are the 'Skeptics,'. . ." (Loftus & Ketcham, 1994, p. 31).  

Wow. Pope himself has no problem labeling this as an "ad hominem."

If a Gnu Atheist pulled one like that, the likes of a Barbara Drescher would surely be all over him or her. The idea that Loftus wouldn't entertain that people can recover some memories makes me think she's moved beyond "skepticism" on this one.

The above are larger ethical issues, ones in which any intelligent layperson, not a professional scientist, if given a blinded "Name X" and a description of actions, would likely raise some eyebrows.

That leads to the question of:

Does Loftus also have scientific ethics issues?

Meanwhile, Pope speculates various ways in which people can detach from memories, for want of a better word:

As noted earlier, such reported memories may be conceptualized as the result of repression, dissociation, implanting, motivated forgetting, directed forgetting, amnesia, betrayal trauma, retroactive inhibition, suggestibility, self-induced hypnotic trance states, personality disorder, thought suppression, retrieval inhibition, cognitive gating, biological protective processes, a clinical syndrome, and so on. 

That's not to say he claims he knows these mechanisms; note the use of the word "may." It is to say that he, like many others, sees the memory issue, and not just "repressed" memories, but memory formation, conflation and loss in general, as much more nuanced than Loftus does.

There's also this, which combines ethical issues with self-contradiction ones:

Loftus says, in The Myth of Repressed Memory (P. 141) “We are questioning the memories commonly referred to as ‘repressed’…” On the same page she makes clear which kind of memories “repressed” ones are. “Because the controversy over repression has become so heated and contentious, clinicians and child protection advocates often use synonyms such as ‘lost,’ ‘buried,’ or ‘dissociated’ to describe repressed memories.” OK, well let’s just take “repressed,” for now. In a study on “Remembering and Repressing” conducted at Lincoln Medical Health Center Substance Abuse Division, Loftus and colleagues, surveyed 105 women for sexual abuse. (It’s interesting that Loftus, an expert in memory, would purposefully chose a sample that might have memory problems due to substance abuse. But that aside…) Loftus and her colleagues found that 57 indicated some form of childhood sexual abuse. When surveying these women for “persistence of memory” 52 women participated in the survey. Of the 52 women that they surveyed they found that 12% claimed to remember parts of the childhood sexual abuse, but not all. And 19% claimed that they forgot the abuse for a time and then later recalled it. Loftus’ study seems to show 31% of the women that she surveyed had partially or totally forgotten their abuse and recalled memories (although, somewhat deteriorated) later (Loftus, Polonsky, Fullilove, 1994)

Ahh, David's too polite to call this cherry-picking, but it is.

Also per the second SFN piece, there's this:

Jennifer Freyd is the author of Betrayal Abuse. She graduated from high school in three years, graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, got her doctorate at Stanford and was a research psychologist and tenured professor at University of Oregon when she was interviewed by The Oregonian regarding her accusations of childhood sexual abuse by her father. She said she always remembered things her father had done, “continual sexual talk, sitting in a robe so his genitals showed.” After a therapy session she remembered abuse. Jennifer Freyd does not believe her therapist planted her memories. “I’d try to retrieve more memories and asked her to help me. And we never got anywhere. I asked her to hypnotize me — and I couldn’t get hypnotized.” (Mitchell, 1993)

Jennifer Freyd confronted her parents. She did not attempt to sue or press charges. Fourteen months later, Peter and Pamela Freyd formed the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.

If Loftus really were a skeptic, she'd recognize the Freyd parents had "good" reason to create the foundation. So would other psychologists who call themselves skeptics. Indeed, their daughter says that when they went to the press with their side of the story (even though she had taken no civil or criminal action), her parents distorted a lot of stuff.

"Goes to motive, your honor," as to why the Freyds formed the group.

For more questions about her professional / research ethics, here's a decent starting point, though the web publisher appears to have some axes to grind. That's why I said "decent" and not "great." The key takeaways are that some Loftus research has itself uncovered forgotten memories; she fails to allow for dissociation; and, related to that, the biggie, that the "implanted" memory of being lost in a mall can in now way duplicate the trauma of rape or child abuse survivors.

From ethics and research quality issues, we go to another one.

What can we logically deduce from Loftus' findings?

Next, let's ask ... "Just what has Loftus actually 'proved,' or 'disproved'?"

Not a lot, necessarily, according to critics.

Just because the likes of Loftus have done studies about the implantation of false memories, that doesn't itself mean that true memories can't be "lost," "repressed," or whatever language one prefers. That's a logical non sequitur.

Also, Loftus has not at all proven that "lost" memories can never be recovered. She's not explicitly stated that that is exactly her current stance, but it seems close to that. And, it also seems the stance of her most ardent supporters, and the "movement" in general. Such folks seems to (conveniently?) overlook that issues of proof cut both ways in a field like this with a lot of gray area.

But, per the Nature story, admitting to shades of gray in this field would undercut her expert witness, consulting, and speaking fees.

Ms. A. accuses me of conflating stuff in discussion about this. The SFN posts aren't mine, first of all. That said, the intertwining of Loftus' own beliefs (yes, beliefs, not research, by this point) with the work of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation seems clear enough.

And, as for conflation? You... uh, "misled" when you accused me of conflating Loftus and her work with the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. In the past, at least, she was on the Scientific and Professional Advisory Board of the foundation. Oh, and I'm at the point now that I believe you knew that when you made your statement.

Meanwhile, consulting for a group like this run by someone without professional psychological training? Whoa.

Yes, I know that it has other psychologists on its advisory board, like Ulric Neisser. However, they're not the ones speaking at conferences, serving as legal consultants and expert witnesses, etc.

Hey, you don't like it? Blame Loftus or the foundation. It appears you recognize the problems the foundation has, Ms. A., and are trying to distance Loftus from it. Won't work.

I'll admit that I've not read a lot of Loftus, but I'd read a decent amount of her, as well as about her. That said, I've read enough more in the last day to make me even more skeptical than before.

And, to be honest, I've read enough that I wouldn't trust her.

Ms. A. invited a friend to comment, too.

That other person, while a Facebook friend of mine, isn't perfect. I'll stipulate that in one discussion, she misstated what a p-value is, when we were discussing p-value issues in "social" vs. "hard" sciences.

Speaking of all of that, I also note that Loftus has appeared in the past at The Amazing Meeting, a top skeptical convention hosted by the James Randi Educational Foundation. Dots get connected.

That's OK. I've said what I wanted to, and needed to. If neither of you wants to be more skeptical of someone like this, duly noted. We'll see how nuanced some of the ongoing responses are. While not totally holding my breath, for a variety of reasons. I think I'm already being told, indirectly, that faults in not creating "clear communication" is all on the end of Gluck and me.

The defense of Loftus can be ardent, especially when professionals feel their particular approach to memory issues, or their connections within a community, are under purview. Tribalism happens even among social sciences who know what the phenomenon is, after all. (Both people mentioned above have been to at least one psychology conference where Loftus was a presenter.)

And, as I get involved with more discussion on this issue, it appears that, among a certain number of Professional Skeptics(TM) or wannabes that, despite Gluck's warning, that ardent defense, even pedestal-raising, is so ingrained that ... it can't even be rationally discussed.

That's why, in the most recent times I've dropped in a blog post my statement that "Atheism is no guarantor of morality, or of common sense," I've added "skepticism" in there too.

And, Professional Skeptics(TM) have a definite history on this. James Randi overstating what he accomplished when he and Carlos first became an act. Randi quite likely not being fully honest about what he knew about "Carlos's" identity theft and when. Paul Kurtz and others refusing to face reality on Al Seckel for a decade or more. Michael Shermer, Penn & Teller, Brian Dunning and others willfully conflating libertarianism and skepticism, and having many followers sign off on this. And, on this issue, Drescher, Ahironen and others representing what's surely just the tip of an iceberg.

Should we "follow the money" again?

Loftus is certainly in line to pick up even more legal consulting feeds, as well as expert witness fees, should all the further changes she wants to see in courtroom practice go into place. (I'm not saying these ideas are wrong, but that, presenting herself as the "go-to person," she stands to benefit financially. As well as on the walk of fame.)

There's also money to be made on her idea of getting parents to deliberately play around with their kids' memories.

"Child raising and discipline, scientifically proven by the World's No. 1 expert on memory!""

How would that sound in introducing her to a talk radio program or a TV gab show?

Or as a blurb on a new book? Or at a conference where she promised to teach people inside secret skills of memory manipulation?

Now, I'm not saying she would do any of that. I am, though, saying, she easily could.

And, not just to parents and other private individuals. Combine her ideas with the likes of a Cass Sunstein's "Push" ideas, and yikes.

Why is this important?

First, per Ceci's talk about motivated forgetting, we do have particular, if still primarily anecdotal, evidence, about a clear possible mechanism.

It wouldn't fall under "motivated forgetting" in a narrow sense, perhaps, but there's solid anecdotal evidence that drug or alcohol abuse is a tool in "dissociating" from strongly painful memories, and later ending of it can be a tool in regaining them. I'm not sure how much Loftus, or other deniers of recovered memories have looked at that one at all. Sociological surveys, after all, point out the much higher than average rate of substance abuse by "survivors."

Her defenders will dismiss this as anecdotal, but I know people who have recovered memories — traumatic memories — from well in their pasts, without therapeutic intervention that would be considered manipulative by any reasonable person. In fact, in some cases, it was without any initial therapeutic or counseling intervention at all.

And, one of those people was me.

I'm not providing details, but one of those people was me. That's why it's important, to me, as well as for issues of skepticism and ethics.

And, given the fact that Loftus' ardent defenders, not just the two above, but others, don't seem to want to engage the middle ground, there's reason I'm not providing details.

I don't trust them. And, yes, if they see this, that too is their problem, not mine.

==

Idiot, or liar?

Update, March 1, 2020: And, although Loftus is referenced in this Nautilus piece? Overall, it would seem to partially refute her. Pre-5-year-old memories may be scrambled or hidden, and thus not totally reliable. But, they're not totally lost, and not totally unreliable, either.

And, per Note 2, bigger update, April 12, 2021:

I recently read an Aeon piece, linked in a new Patreon piece by friend Massimo Pigliucci, that led me to this.

The Aeon author, a professor of philosophy, claims that no self exists, and cites Hume and the Buddha in support. Massimo says Hume is wrong (I agree) and that, according to people he’s asked, Gautama may be being misinterpreted. (I don’t necessarily agree; after all, Buddhism has splits over things like whether a personal soul exists or not, and I think Theravada trends “no” on that, which is why karma is more offensive than original sin.) 

But, I digress. 

About halfway in, Steven Hales says:

The memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus compares our memories to Wikipedia: we can go back and edit the entries, but so can other people.

Is Elizabeth Loftus more an idiot about the workings of memory, despite her professional pedigree, or more a liar for the sake of the hundreds of thousands of dollars in "expert witness" legal fees she has probably made, when she claims that?

My money is on "liar."

I've long held her in fairly low regard; this only increases it. (And, given that I think she's lying for grift, I put the "no follow" tag on her Ted Talk.)

On Twitter, I asked Massimo "where do you go" with something like that? And, he noted back: "You go nowhere."

Re Hume, at my philosophy blog, I referred a bit to his "bundle theory" and related matters. I didn't even mention genetics. Yes, I know genetic mental development, genetic neuroscience, whatever, has been oversold. But, genetics — AND epigenetics — indicate we do have heritable, and somewhat fixed, tendencies on things like conscientiousness, anxiety, introversion "vs" extraversion, etc.

Back to Loftus. This is another case of where the analogy of "mind as computer" goes astray. We don't "edit" memories. To the degree our memories do change, or are yes, in some cases, manipulated, they're still not "edited." Our minds aren't a computer program, and her thinking this way only increases my belief that yeah, maybe she HAS guzzled too much Clockwork Orange Kool-Aid.

Update 3, also April 12: I forgot that I had Tweeted about Loftus being an "expert witness" in Harvey Weinstein's trial. As with Scooter Libby's, she failed. The New Yorker looks at the background of this, and hints at what's been noted more elsewhere: further damage (too bad) to Loftus' reputation. The LA Times piece I referenced above was from the trial; fortunately, the reporter got other psychologists to talk, in general, and gave us this:

Some psychologists who study memory and trauma disagree with how Loftus frames her award-winning research in court, contending that her testimony in cases of alleged sexual misconduct tends to be one-sided and incomplete and has the potential to mislead jurors.

A review of research finds that 2% to 10% of sexual assault accusations are false, according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. Many such studies are unreliable, though, because of inconsistencies in methods used to evaluate data. 

All memories are fragmentary and incomplete and tend to fade over time. A trauma victim may incorrectly recall certain details of the event, such as the color of an attacker’s eyes, or how he or she got home that night. 

But people almost always remember the general outline, or the “gist” of what happened, according to psychologists.

Boom. The story goes on to show that the assistant DA who was part of the prosecution gave Loftus some grilling.

Next, per this Guardian piece, and following on the LAT piece which notes that only ONCE has Loftus worked for the prosecution, yes, memory fades over time. But, it fades not just for accusers but for your "porr widdle victims" like you claim Harvey Weinstein was.

Per the New Yorker piece, her own ex and her one brother are both, at a minimum, less than enamored of her decisions on who to help defend. Given the way she "bracketed" her framing of her mom's apparent suicide, and other things, I guess I'm not surprised. And, per her own psychological research on how the use of particular words can affect the interpretation of events, she has a big blind spot toward herself. The blind spot appears even more emotional than intellectual, given that she's a "survivor" herself.

No, really and holy shit:

For decades, during cross-examinations, lawyers have accused Loftus, a childless scientist, of being unable to comprehend the pain of victims. “You really don’t know anything about five-year-old children who have been sexually abused, do you?” a prosecutor asked her, in 1985, at the trial of a camp counsellor accused of molesting his campers. 

“Well, yes, I do,” Loftus responded. “I do know something about this subject because I was abused when I was six,” by a babysitter. At that moment, she later wrote, “the memory flew out at me, out of the blackness of the past, hitting me full force.” 

The defense attorney at the trial, Marc Kurzman, recalled a “stunned silence.” He said, “That was supposed to be the big finale of the cross-examination, and it pretty much shut the whole thing down.” 

Some scholars have proposed that Loftus has her own repressed memories. “She has not been able to integrate her own experience into her research,” two literary critics wrote, in 2001. “There is something split off in Loftus,” the psychologist Lauren Slater asserted in her book “Opening Skinner’s Box,” from 2004. “She is the survivor who questions the validity of survivorship. That’s one way out of a bind.”

Per above, and my dialogue with Massimo, where does one go with that?

Well, you go here, if you're a woman who sued Loftus for defamation in claiming that she had false memories (and worse, with no criminal or civil case involving Loftus immediately at hand):

Head-shaking.

Nicole was silent for a few seconds. “You know, I realized something,” she said. A few weeks earlier, she had exchanged e-mails with a woman whose memories of abuse Loftus had cast doubt on at a civil trial. “We kind of realized together that we are survivors of Elizabeth Loftus,” Nicole said. For years, she’d had intrusive thoughts. “I’m not sure if there is a greater sense of ¬outrage than that of having your own memories challenged,” she said. She had felt terror at the idea of seeing Loftus at psychology conferences. Recently, though, “I stopped wanting to hide under a chair every time I thought she might be at a conference and decided, No, I’m going to stand here and let her see me,” she said.

In addition, how Loftus conducted her research, then invaded Nicole's privacy, was highly unethical. Though Loftus, with the emotional severing she seems to have, probably would reject that claim. She's probably also reject the claim of Nicole (now a psychologist herself) that Loftus has engaged in transference, but that sounds pretty insightful.

Bottom line? Elizabeth Loftus sounds pretty sad, and now that I know that, I don't have to pull at threads of her life any more.

Dan Dennett, Doug Hofstadter get a double-barreled takedown

They've both got new books out, and one great paired set of reviews blasts both, especially Dennett.

It appears "Uncle Dan," as he suavely calls himself is being more snide than ever. And, yes (more below) he can be snide at times, and has been for some time. Hell, how do you think he got to be a Gnu Atheist "horseman"?

But, that snideness isn't just to the living. It also, per the review, includes the dead who can't speak back, like Steve Gould. For people familiar with their smash-ups over greedy reductionism, the formal structure of evolutionary theory and more, none of this is surprising:

Intuition Pumps is valuable in providing an overview of a body of recent work in the philosophy of mind, but it suffers as well from Dennett’s penchant for cleverness—no more egregiously than in his soi-disant playfulness in mapping nasty flaws on his favorite intellectual targets, like Stephen Jay Gould. It grows tiresome and tacky: He returns to a long-ago pissing match with Gould to discuss rhetorical sleights of hand, and even coins a new word to describe the tendency to advance straw-man arguments and false dichotomies—“Goulding.”

Can't believe Dennett has hit new levels of petty via-a-vis Steve Gould, for example, but he has. And, of course, he's pretty much been recycling old thoughts for more than a decade.

And, let me add that most of the time, re Gould, that Dennett was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Definitely on his claim that evolution is algorithmic. That statement's nowhere close to being provable, let alone proven. And I suspect it never will be. That statement is also an example of the greedy reductionism Dennett can see in others but never himself.

And, recycling? Hell, yes. Dennett hasn't had major new thoughts in 15 years. No, the idea of "brights" was not major. It arguably wasn't really thought, either, but just a subtler form of the polemics he seems to exhibit in this new book.

Meanwhile, beyond "Goulding," his intuition pumps sometime involve an element of straw-manning, if we're going to coin phrases.

Finally, Dennett didn't invent the concept of Cartesian theater, as philosopher of science Steve Toulmin noted 15 years ago. (After all, he wasn't the only smart student Gilbert Ryle ever had.) More, though, he failed to carry out the idea that we lack a Cartesian theater-running self to the next logical conclusion — there's no Cartesian free willer, either. Imperfectly, a Daniel Wegner has carried that ball further down the field, as have others. 

I thank Dan Dennett for giving me an introduction to modern philosophy of mind and related subjects in a nonformal way. I thank him for the general idea of intuition pumps (which he stole from Einstein's gedankenexperiment, of course). And, I thank myself for seeing how he can insert straw men into some of them. And, I thank myself for moving beyond Dennett's introduction to these modern philosophical issues.

Hofstadter gets off relatively lightly, but not unscathed.

The biggest criticism he gets is for taking the idea of analogies too far. For being too ... er, reductionistic with it! That said, it appears to be another book chock-full of his sense of word play in the service of analogies. But, with the reviewer, I think he's all wet if he really thinks analogical thinking is the core of human thinking. Ev psych is right when it points to pattern-detectors, agency-detectors, then discriminators, as being more core. And all of those are about concepts and categories first, analogies second.

This is your brain on #spirituality? Well ....

A human brain allegedly hooked on "spirituality."
Ocean/Corbis photo via Daily Mail

Not totally. Perhaps not even close to totally. So, not quite really, despite the breathless hype.

The only parts of this research that I would accept as true are:
1. That, however "spirituality" is defined, it is driven by more parts of the brain than previously believed;
2. That, speaking of the above, there are all sorts of experiences we might define as "spiritual."

Here's where the over-hyped rubber hits the road, though.
1. Various electronically-driven brain scans, whether fMRI, CAT, or SPECT, are still, to use a Photoshop word, very "bitmappy" in terms of low spatial resolution, and quite time delayed to boot.
2. This particular study, even with the allowance it was specifically designed to focus on people with parietal lobe injury, only studied 20 people. Wayyyy too small of a sampling sizes.

And, that's just on "measurement error" problems.

We haven't even talked about research bias problems. Like this, from University of Missouri researcher Brick Johnstone:

He surveyed participants on characteristics of spirituality, such as how close they felt to a higher power and if they felt their lives were part of a divine plan. 

Johnstone later tries to claim that the non-religious also experience "spirituality." But, since he's definining spirituality in metaphyiscal terms, religious ones if we count New Ageism, 12-Steppism and "atheistic" varieties of Buddhism as religion, then he's skewing his research.

That means this statement by the reporter:

The research indicated that there are all kinds of spiritual experiences that Christians might call closeness to God and atheists might call an awareness of themselves.

Simply isn't true; or at least, it's only "true" in a question-begging light. 

And, since it's bylined only as "Daily Mail Reporter," I don't even know who to blame.

But, it's simply not true. 

Even worse, neither the reporter nor the researcher mentions the likely role of the temporal lobe in generating such experiences. Temporal lobe epilepsy has long been associated with religious ecstasy and visionary experience.

Oh, and per a former acquaintance on an email list, who was from the British Isles? While US newspapers often aren't great, this is why your touting of the greatness of British journalism is pretty much wrong. 

Two twins — 1-plus brain(s); how many minds?

Tatiana and Krista Logan/NYTimes picture

This in-depth New York Times story about a pair of craniopagus, or head-conjoined, "Siamese" twins, Krista and Tatiana Hogan, raises the issues I note in the header. Here's why, in background:

Twins joined at the head — the medical term is craniopagus — are one in 2.5 million, of which only a fraction survive. The way the girls’ brains formed beneath the surface of their fused skulls, however, makes them beyond rare: their neural anatomy is unique, at least in the annals of recorded scientific literature. Their brain images reveal what looks like an attenuated line stretching between the two organs, a piece of anatomy their neurosurgeon, Douglas Cochrane of British Columbia Children’s Hospital, has called a thalamic bridge, because he believes it links the thalamus of one girl to the thalamus of her sister. The thalamus is a kind of switchboard, a two-lobed organ that filters most sensory input and has long been thought to be essential in the neural loops that create consciousness. Because the thalamus functions as a relay station, the girls’ doctors believe it is entirely possible that the sensory input that one girl receives could somehow cross that bridge into the brain of the other. One girl drinks, another girl feels it. 

Well, this gets to the question of whether a "self" exists or not, and ties in with sharing a mind, as to whether it's like pregnancy or not ... do you share a mind *all the time* with different "subminds" not shared, or do you NOT share a mind all the time?

And, then, with use of language, this raises another issue. Do you rightly call them "twins"? Of course, per Plato, that shows the problem with language at times.

I think they are twins, but it shows that consciousness is indeed based on embodied cognition, and is more than "just" the brain, though still materialist at bottom line.

But, with a hat tip to Plato's concerns about language's sometime obscurity, just how much of twins are they? Here's this:

‘I have two pieces of paper,” Krista announced. The girls sat at a small table in the living room, drawing, their faces, as always, angled away from each other. Each had one piece of paper. So I was surprised by Krista’s certainty: She had two pieces of paper? “Yeah,” the girls affirmed in their frequent singsong unison, nodding together. It was one of those moments that a neurologist or psychologist or any curious observer could spend hours contemplating. Was Krista using “I” to refer to both her and her sister? Is Tatiana agreeing with her sister’s assessment at a cognitive level or uttering the same word simultaneously for reasons unknown to her? 

The only thing wrong with the reporting here is that it doesn't include "philosopher" along with "neurologist" and "psychologist."

That said, it should put even my comment about "I think they are twins" under the microscope itself. Maybe they are 1.9 people? Everybody this side of Peter Singer, speaking of philosophers, might flinch at that, but, what if that is the best, albeit still rough, descrip tion?

The two themselves, or 1.9 themselves, appear to struggle a bit with the issue:

Although each girl often used “I” when she spoke, I never heard either say “we,” for all their collaboration. It was as if even they seemed confused by how to think of themselves, with the right language perhaps eluding them at this stage of development, under these unusual circumstances — or maybe not existing at all. “It’s like they are one and two people at the same time,” said Feinberg, the professor of psychiatry and neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. What pronoun captures that? 

That said, the story is two years old. As they are now in school and interacting with more people outside the home, it would be interesting to see the personality development. And, then, wonder more about how many people there are ... 2? 1.9? 1.94?

On the one hand, such precision loops back onto Plato's complaints about language.

However, it also fits with my stance that there is no such thing as a unitary self. It's hard enough, in the light of modern cognitive science, to believe such a thing exists in a "singleton" like me; for these unique craniopagus twins, that's even more the case.

I can understand the parents' feelings:

To the family, questions about whether the girls are two or one are so absurd as to be insulting. They are “two normal little girls who happen to go through life sharing a bubble,” Simms said. The family sees their unusual neural connections as something “neat,” as Louise, the grandmother, puts it, providing fascinating moments they notice but hardly lie awake at night contemplating. Of far greater concern to them is the girls’ physical health. “Every day when I wake up and they’re still alive — that’s a good day,” Simms told me. 

However ... the questions aren't absurd, no matter how "protective" the parents want to be.

Dennett has new thoughts,still won't reject computational theory of mind

Dan Dennett/Edge magazine photo

Philosopher Dan Dennett has a very interesting interview in Edge.

Key takeaway? He junks a fair amount of what he's said in the past about the details of how the mind/brain is like a computer, 

BUT!

Still holds fast to the analogy that it's ... like a computer! Even though he admits that the details of this comparison or analogy simply are weak to nonexistent.

Let's look at some comments:

We're beginning to come to grips with the idea that your brain is not this well-organized hierarchical control system where everything is in order, a very dramatic vision of bureaucracy. In fact, it's much more like anarchy with some elements of democracy.  ...

The vision of the brain as a computer, which I still champion, is changing so fast. The brain's a computer, but it's so different from any computer that you're used to. It's not like your desktop or your laptop at all, and it's not like your iPhone except in some ways. ...

Control is the real key, and you begin to realize that control in brains is very different from control in computers. Control in your commercial computer is very much a carefully designed top-down thing.  I mean, with all that, there's no need to hang on to his analogy.  

I guess he simply can't admit it's a crappy analogy that just doesn't work, and walk away from it.

Because it was a crappy analogy a decade ago,. and it's in tatters now. (Ditto for his claim that evolution is algorithmic.) It's nonsensical. Yes, Dan Dennett, it's nonsensical. How can you analogize to something that nobody is used to? Especially since what we understand as a "computer" may never be like that?

That said, per the sentence in parentheses, I suspect it's all about the algorithms. He still wants to believe the human mind, like evolution by natural selection, is algorithmic. And, he's not even wrong, per Wolfgang Pauli.

This is also an example where Dennett should look in the mirror any time he uses the phrase "greedy reductionist."

That said, it's not all hubris in the interview. Dennett admits his new ideas (and it's nice to hear him have some) are speculative enough he'd "be thrilled if they're 20 percent right." And, his comments about brain plasticity, findings that maternal and paternal  inheritance genes in our cells may "war" much more than previously thought, are refreshing. 

At the same time, there IS hubris in other ways. His admissions of plasticity in the brain, combined with the "20 percent correct," should lead him to say that cognitive science, and related things such as artificial intelligence, may have advanced from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age in the last decade, but that's where they are and no further.'

Also unfortunately, his new ideas don't appear to extend to free will.

At the same time, though, the last section, about hypocrites in the pulpit, is great.

He's not talking about moral hypcrites, but unbelieving hypocrites in conservative Christian denominations. This is a follow-up to surveys and other work he and others have recently done.

Here's a sample:

How do they thread the needle so that they don't offend the sophisticates in their congregation by insisting on the literal truth of the book of Genesis, let's say, while still not scaring, betraying, pulling the rug out from under the more naïve and literal-minded of their parishioners? There's no good solution to that problem as far as we can see, since they have this unspoken rule that they should not upset, undo, subvert the faith of anybody in the church.

This means that there's a sort of enforced hypocrisy where the pastors speak from the pulpit quite literally, and if you weren't listening very carefully, you’d think: oh my gosh, this person really believes all this stuff. But they're putting in just enough hints for the sophisticates in the congregation so that the sophisticates are supposed to understand: Oh, no. This is all just symbolic. This is all just metaphorical. And that's the way they want it, but of course, they could never admit it. You couldn't put a little neon sign up over the pulpit that says, "Just metaphor, folks, just metaphor." It would destroy the whole thing. 

From personal experience with my own "coming out," I know how true this is. I also know that many agnostics or atheists in the pulpit have become wedded to the money. If you're the pastor, or senior pastor, of a decent-sized church in a mainline Protestant denomination, your total salary and benefits can easily be, say, 35-65 percent greater than that of a school teacher with comparative experience.

I just couldn't do that. And so, I'm schlepping on community newspaper editor salary, in a profession struggling even more than mainline Christianity. But, struggle it is; it's not just Catholic parishes going without priests, etc.

Anyway, that's good stuff to end on. Go read it.