Missing Evidence | Full Debate | Rupert Sheldrake, Tara Shears, Massimo Pigliucci, Philip Ball

well good evening everyone a question we're looking at is the the idea of what evidence means or should mean in science the standard view of course is that science relies on evidence and on facts but increasingly in some areas of cutting-edge science particularly in physics we seem to find ideas put forward that not only lack evidence but lack any clear way of collecting evidence about them so ideas about string theory for example about multiverse is about many worlds in quantum mechanics does this mean that perhaps evidence needn't have the crucial adjudicating position that it's traditionally been given in science or does it mean that science or this area of science in particular is in danger of drifting into sheer fantasy or philosophy which I don't think of the same things well first of all I've got three distinguished speakers who have I think quite different views I hope they'll be quite different views about this question on my right Rupert Sheldrake who's a biologist whose research into parapsychology and evolution led him to formulate the theory of morphic resonance first on my left Terra fears who is a particle physicist and a professor of physics at University of Liverpool and next to her Massimo Pigliucci and our professor of philosophy at the City University of New York so first of all I'm going to give them their three minutes beginning with Rupert a lot of science is based on assumptions that have no evidence in their favor in my most recent book the science delusion I described 10 of these assumptions which most scientists take for granted they don't realize their hypotheses they have they're just assumed to be true and these lead science into complicated tissues of speculation I'll take first the assumption the laws of nature are fixed this is something built into the foundations of science partly because of the Platonic influence on the founding fathers of modern science who thought the ID laws of nature were ideas in the mind of a mathematical God and therefore fixed eternally and now just built into the general platonic assumption that most physicists and theoretic and mathematicians have that there's a kind of platonic mathematical realm beyond space and time so the assumption is the laws of nature as we know them and the constants were all fixed at the moment of the Big Bang then they have to explain why were they fixed the way they are so that we exist and so forth and there's two main theories either some intelligent designer fine-tuned them to get them exactly right but since that might involve something like God reentering the picture the more popular alternative is that we live in a multiverse with countless universes that actually exist of which we only can know the one that's suitable for us and this is one of the tissues of speculation but what if the laws of nature aren't fixed what if they're not there in an evolutionary universe totally fixed forever what if the laws evolved after all law is an anthropocentric metaphor only humans have laws it's one of the ways in which we project our human concerns onto the universe in the 18th 17th century it made sense God was a kind of Emperor so if the universe is radically evolutionary which it seems to be why shouldn't the laws evolve because human laws evolved or better a better metaphor in my view is that there may be more like habits if they like habits that could be a memory in nature they don't all have to be fixed at the beginning so this whole debate about why are they exactly right becomes a non debate the whole of this vast issue of space halation evidence free speculation can just be dissolved away by actually asking the question are the laws more like habits you can do experimental tests to see if there's a memory in nature so that's one assumption that hasn't been tested but is taken usually for granted another is that that nature is purposeless this is simply follows from the machine metaphor on which science was based in the 17th century machines have no purpose therefore the universe has no purpose evolution has no purpose the second point I want to make in my remaining 90 seconds is that evidence the facts don't speak for themselves you can have evidence that's plain for all to see and if it doesn't fit someone's theory they'll deny it in the 18th century when peasants saw stones fall from the sky meteorites and describe them to the Academy of Sciences they simply said it's impossible these must have just been ordinary stones as were struck by lightning which is why they were hot it was impossible because there are no stones in the sky they simply denied the evidence and the other way in which evidence is distorted is by selective publication drug companies are now known to publish selectively the results that favor their drugs and not publish the ones that don't then evidence based medicine which looks so impressive on the surface peer-reviewed journals review all the evidence then these drugs turn out to be very good it's based on highly selective publication of evidence this is now endemic in science the so called replicability crisis which was recently in the last two or three years cropped up something in some studies up to 90% of papers in the biomedical sciences and about 50% in psychology turn out not to be replicable why largely because people just publish their best results and don't publish the others because it's important to get ahead in science by publishing good results then we come to the problems that my colleagues here will be talking about the in physics where concepts like darkman multiverses and i put forward and widely believed as theories but which have left behind normal scientific criteria of evidence but at this stage I hand over to others first well I like to make a distinction between science and the scientific method so by science I mean the clock the collection of facts and laws that we have used to govern behavior I don't mean laws as in habits as Rupert has been talking about I mean mathematically defined precise rules of behavior that seem to be obeyed again again again as often as we test them now science in that sense is our best description of the universe from my point of view and how it behaves because it's a replicable one you've given examples of bad practice in science but I don't think they describe all science but the scientific method is the process by which we get to that understanding and it's that's where evidence comes in so the scientific method proceeds by having a hypothesis an idea that you can use to make predictions about the world around you using that prediction you design an experiment that gives you data and that data is your evidence that you confront against the hypothesis to see if it fits or if it doesn't fit and decent science if it doesn't fit should then reject the hypothesis both inputs are really important you need to have theory and hypotheses to give context to explain the data that you're seeing but you need to have the evidence to tell you which hypotheses describe reality you can't have one without the other so evidence is incredibly important in enabling us to understand the universe but it's not the only ingredient if we just had evidence how would we make sense of it that's the point I want to make I want I was going to give you an example of the scientific method but being a particle physicist I was just gonna give you a particle physics example of the discovery of the Higgs boson which is a really nice example we have a hypothesis dreamt up in the 1960s of this strange field this energy field that permeates throughout the universe it sounds science-fiction Airy it's invisible it just seals one prediction which is the existence of a particle you should be able to see and it took 50 years to be able to design the experimental equipment to actually obtain the data to then see if that was indeed the case which brings me on to the second point I want to raise so we've talked about theories that don't seem to have experimental evidence like multiverse is like string theory we've got to remember that the scientific method is a continual process our ability to find out knowledge in advanced science is a continual process and to do that you have to advance your theories beyond your current understanding to try and understand more you have to push your experimental facilities beyond your current technology in order to be able to find out more and at any stage in that cycle you will have theories that haven't yet progressed to the stage of yet being testable either because they are not mature enough like string theory to yield predictions that are currently testable or because they're your predictions which experiment hasn't caught up with to make predictions yet and so to test those predictions yet you're in a sort of limbo in the scientific process at that point so I would claim that the role of evidence coming in defines what we would say as science and scientific knowledge it's the testable part and then the scientific process a scientific method of these examples that you've given of theories coming in that don't have evidence at the moment is part of our process for extending science that's that's my take the the first thing I want to make clear is for myself at least as both philosopher of science and a scientist this simply is no such thing as science without empirical evidence now in particular we can discuss what is the relations between empirical evidence and theory we can discuss whether you know at one point a theory becomes not particularly interesting as a research program because it's not yielding anything that can be tested so all those things can be negotiated and they need to be negotiated by the properly competent scientific community you know I'm a biologist I'm not gonna tell the string theorist well you waited long enough dudes move on right they're gonna be the ones to decide when that time has arrived but I think that it is simply non-negotiable that empirical evidence no science without empirical evidence and there's no science more particularly without a good match between the empirical evidence and the theory but that's one of the things that probably will be to have to flash out now often we have this issue of scientists or some scientists at least are dogmatic well yes and no there's two ways of looking at the issue of dogmatism here on the one hand there are certain things that have been so well-established and so well understood that yeah I'm gonna be go mad about it if somebody tells me you know Darwin was fundamentally wrong natural selection is not a real process in nature I'm just not even gonna look at that person because that is something that has been established over a hundred fifty years plus experimental results theory and so on and so forth I'm simply not I don't have the time to renegotiate it okay but if you're telling me well I don't think string theory is well-established them sure of course yes that's true and in fact the relevant epistemic community that is this fundamental theories themselves are actually not in agreement on what's going on there so I'm gonna wait until they figured it out that's one sense in which scientists can be dogmatic the other sense is science scientists can be dogmatic in the sense that they can be resistant to new ideas and sometimes improperly so or maybe they be they can push their own agenda their own ideas and in a way that it's inappropriate well welcome to the world I mean you you know scientists are human beings whatever makes anybody think that they're different you know qualitatively from the rest of humanity I mean that's that seems to be a mistaken idea scientists are not more objective than other people they're not certainly not more you know somehow capable of deciding what that's what the truth is about their own theories they have their own biases we all will go the way of every science works and it works reasonably well at least we haven't figured out a better way of investigating nature so far is that science is done by a community of people and these people have the more varied their cultural background gender politics and whatever it is the better science comes out just to give you a trivial example until not that long ago a lot of medical research was done you know only on middle-aged white men because the people that were doing the research were middle-aged white men then it turns out that certain aspects of human physiology artifacts anything is very different for women or its inventor different for people with different ethnic backgrounds but that came to the fore and was corrected only once we started having enough women or enough ethnic minorities involved in the process of science and people started looking at it and what am I missing here half of the picture you're missing a quarter of the picture that's the way work we don't when we figure out a better way of doing it yet at the moment it's science the only path to knowledge that depends on what you mean by knowledge I think it is the only path to serious understanding of the natural world i we don't have any other way we haven't figured out any other way of doing it you can try mystical insights just sit in your room and think about the universe and you won't come up with anything worth coming up with I am a philosopher I can do a lot of armchair philosophizing but I will not be discovering new facts about the world that way however if by knowledge he means something broader like understanding because as has just been pointed out but I you know it's one thing is the facts and the other thing is the understanding of those facts the theories are actually supposed to articulate and understand of things so understanding is broader than just than just science so we can have other disciplines contributing to an in particular in this case I think philosophy philosophy of science epistemology even cognitive science because cognitive scientists are the ones that actually point out the cognitive biases that scientists themselves suffer from as human beings and therefore can be addressed finally are there limits to science so sometimes you hear these these all thing is our but science is a limited enterprise yes of course it is it's a human Enterprise it's done by fallible human beings it's done by human beings that are smart but up to a point we can understand process information and so on and so forth the only opportunity to a point there's a certain way and not only that but we are clearly defined in our in the way in which we think by our particular cultural background an historical moment okay the reason both Darwin and Wallace came up with with the metaphor of natural selection because the theory is as far as we can tell correct and it describes the way the world is but the the metaphor of natural selection came out of the specific background of Victorian England okay it's it had been done at another time in another culture they would have come up with a different metaphor of a different way of looking at things that's true everywhere all the time if anybody including any scientist thinks that they can transcend their own cultural milieu they're just fooling themselves okay now I want to start burrowing down a bit into the question of what it is that we're talking about what it is that qualifies as evidence and Rupert you pointed out some respects in which pressures personal and institutional and political and social pressures can distort the scientific agenda and can distort the way that evidence is used but would you accept the general principle that evidence is looking at what what the world tells you if you like comparing that against predictions that your theory makes and seeing oh well very definitely I mean I've spent most of my career as an experimental scientist I mean I'm doing experiments with doing one just a couple of days ago I mean this is what I do and if I didn't believe in evidence I wouldn't waste my time doing it so I'm totally in favor of that I mean my gripes are really about not sufficient skepticism about assumptions selective dismissive dismissal of evidence corruption of the scientific process those are the points I'm making I'm not against evidence I think is essential to science and as a biologist which you know the biology is a very empirical subject it's very important the research I do in disputed areas of science like research on telepathy leads me into discussions where these become rather crucial issues because I've had encounters with so-called skeptics who've told me I had a debate at the European skeptics Congress with a leading European skeptic on telepathy the European skeptics Congress yes in Brussels yes those are not people I want to leave you rope or anything like that these are card-carrying members of skeptical organizations whose main purpose is to sort of discredit all these it seems their main purpose is to discredit the research research in parapsychology anyway here I was in a debate with the Europeans captured Congress I spent half an hour setting out evidence for telepathy gathered by myself and other people to epithelia animals telepathy and people my opponent gave a theoretical discussion for half an hour showing that the laws of thermodynamics and gives free energy and so forth would not allow this to be possible and therefore all my evidence was flawed so I asked him to point out what the floors were and he said oh I can't do that I didn't read your papers do you think I'd waste time on that so I mean here we have a kind of attitude that I've encountered myself only too often where I do research in disputed areas of science and where there's a taboo against this I really believe strongly in evidence that's why I do the research but I've personally encountered this extraordinarily closed-minded attitude to it so I know for me this is a live issue is evidence important or not and I certainly know some people who call themselves scientists for whom it is not important if it doesn't fit with their worldview so but wait a minute since I'm a card-carrying skeptic I guess I should I've been curious first of all who was the this person you mind telling me was the Dutch secretary of the Dutch Stichting skep says whose name will come to me yeah now that's fine I know who is okay so I'll write to him later so okay here's the thing with so-called card-carrying skeptics the skeptic community is not really the same as the scientific community there is a number of scientists such as myself who considered themselves skeptics in that in that sense but they're actually two distinct communities the skeptics as a movement or as a set of organizations or whatever it is they did come about largely over the last several decades as a way to confront what they perceive to be pseudoscience in the public eyes so these are actually people were concerned about public understanding of science they don't usually do research on their own what they do occasionally do very very occasionally but they don't do they're not professional scientists they basically are you can think of them as a sort of a grassroot version of public science they rely on what scientists do in order to inform themselves and some of them do it well some of them of course they're human beings so don't do it particularly well but I don't think one can fault them necessarily for let's say don't taking seriously research on telepathy or clairvoyance or whatever it is because what they're doing is they're looking at the pertinent epistemic scientific community right in that case we could be psychologists or it could be biologists or whatever it is and they're saying well do you guys have done anything like this you guys think there is any merit into that and if the scientific community says no we don't we don't think so then the skeptics I think are in the proper domain of thence essentially going to the public in general I said look scientists don't believe in this stuff so you should be wary of these kinds of claims this morning I talked about your mother the other appearances they have done I talked about this issue of trust right so most people in general public simply do not have sufficient technical understanding of science to settle scientific debates in their own minds we don't I mean you know even though I'm a scientist I am an evolutionary biologist I cannot possibly settle the Bates even in other areas of science you know be it quantum mechanics or or experimental psychology this is my competence I should be reading a lot of books and articles that I don't actually understand right so that's even worse for a member of the general public who does not have necessarily that technical background so it becomes an issue of trust and when you say when it becomes an issue of trust then you say well who is the expert or what is who is the expert community that I can go to and for better or worse because the certainty our flaws and there certainly Eric on it there is going to be occasional good idea that gets discarded at least temporarily the president epistemic community is the one that the people should go to and say well if you guys don't believe this or if you guys believe this that's that's a the opposite example is let's say climate change right a lot of people in the general public especially in the United States are skeptic skeptical of climate change that to me is a form of denial it's not skepticism because if 97% of climate scientists tell me yeah this this thing is happening and it is at least in part anthropogenically fueled what the hell am i to say no you guys are all wrong and I understand it better you're bringing up a really important point sorry I'm going to leap in here which is the interpretation of data as well the interpretation of evidence it's not straightforward to analyze data we've already mentioned that scientists are biased like anybody else and you have to remove that bias to the best of your ability and make your data objective and then it has value in comparing two different hypotheses and reflecting reality it's very difficult for somebody not in your field to fully evaluate if you have it understood your data appropriately I think that's now the case because we've become so specialized so this idea of trust among scientists what the truck that scientists have done the right job is tremendously important in believing that evidence is appropriate for the statements that are being made about it so that's something that we shouldn't forget as well Oh a completely agree you have to be able to interpret evidence in an appropriate way I think though that máximos point you know that you just go to the community and if they say we don't believe this there you trust them there are certain communities with there are deep prejudices and taboos in all communities and this way would be a just a reflection a way of reflecting a predominant taboo whenever I give talks on topics like telepathy to scientific audiences I have to invariably have the experience of a fairly polite reception sometimes there's a militant skeptic who tries to get me disinvited before I even speak and they boycott the lecture that's quite common action and then the people who come are usually listen politely they ask a few technical questions at the end about the statistics and so on then in the tea break afterwards what always happens is that people look nice and left and they can't see I'm so glad you talked about this I had this experience just last week I knew when my wife was calling and it was just a I'm sure it was telepathic and another one said my dog knows when I'm coming home from the lab and and they always say I can't tell my colleagues because they are so straight and they'd be so disapproving and in one sub-department in Cambridge all six members of staff came to me saying the same thing that they were really interested but they couldn't talk to their colleagues about you so I said to you I said to them why don't you guys come out you know you have so much more fun what about that say they are real to booze can I ask do you think it's a valid activity to try to do experiment to see whether there is something that seems to be telepathic some kind of telepathic communicator and it has been done for more than a century right and it hasn't convinced the relevant scientific community and therefore at the moment I'm gonna say no no no further research is warranted I mean that look the idea is that it's it's easy to paint as I said the scientific community as a bunch of rigid people who don't change their mind their head they have the truth they think that they have the truth and all that sort of stuff but that's just not the way the history of science shows things work I mean if you just pick up any book on the history of science you will see that there is always a high premium on discovering what everything else thinks is not true and convincing the rest of the community do you think that Darwin got accepted you know overnight when he published this stuff do you think that Galileo got accepted overnight I mean the guy almost died as a result of his stuff there is a high premium and there is a high stake in in sort of frontier scientific research okay but there is also a high likelihood of failure okay whenever you're doing something that is at the frontier whenever you're doing something that is at the border lines of between science and and and the unknown more likely than not you're gonna fail that's just the way science works if it were really a safe enterprise then we'd be rather boring and we would never go anywhere okay but the fact is there is a high premium a high price to be done if you actually do manage to convince the relevant scientific epistemic community and this has happened over and over and over I mean the people that we just Lee recognized as geniuses of the scientific enterprise over historical times have done precisely that so how would that happen ever it's the scientific community where that that entrenched in their own opinions and never change the mind and so on and so forth what is true however is that scientists tend to be conservative by nature and I don't mean politically conservative I mean that it takes a lot of evidence to convince of something now Carl Sagan famously put it in these terms which I'm sure nobody's familiar with extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence Sagan who was a very smart you know astronomer didn't actually come up with that however he just came up with this participant erna phrase the phrase goes back or the concept goes back to David Hume in the 18th century and Hume said in an inquiry on human understanding and in particular and an essay on miracles of all things he said that a reasonable person proportions his beliefs to the evidence right so what that means is that if I let me give you an example so if I told you that I came to the festival by taking a plane from Rome and then a car from London I doubt that anybody would seriously question my statement because like that sounds that's a pretty you know run-of-the-mill kind of thing and I'm not making any extraordinary claim you don't I don't need to provide you with the receipt for the airplane and all that so you're just gonna believe me because why would the why the hell would I lie but if I said I stepped into my office in Rome into a Pella Porter and then appeared right outside the door of the festival here you'd be a fool not to ask for serious evidence of that sort of stuff if you just believe me on it I have a large bridge in Brooklyn that I can sell you for really cheap right so so that's the issue it and there is no clear answer those those are the example just gave you is clear I hope but then there is a bunch of other situations where you just have to negotiate it over time and it's very possible I don't I don't exclude that in a 50 years down the road or a hundred years down the road somebody would have made enough inroads on let's say telepathy to convince the relevant scientific community and all of this would say and and people will point to these kinds of discussions they see those fools that didn't believe it right and they're not fools they're actually doing the right thing never being conservative they're not they're just being bigoted and prejudiced and you see you say exclusion extraordinary claims demands extraordinary evidence to say this billions of universes seems to me an extraordinary claim there's no evidence whatsoever I Dumbo and yet I read the schedule apart from Martin Gardner I don't see many people objecting to that the billions of universes it's a standard in physics you can hold down a professorship you can be president of the Royal Society you can believe this with no evidence and yet when I say telephone telepathy about 80% of the population claimed to have had the experience of thinking of someone who then rings in a way that seems to them telepathic it's not extraordinary its ordinary so then the question is are these people deluded is it just coincidence do they just forget all the times they're wrong and stuff then you do experiments to find out that's whether some of the experiments I do and how I do them if just to fill it in is have someone sitting in a room being filmed on camera with a landline phone no caller ID they give us the names of four people that they know well who they might be telepathic with we pick one of the callers at random ask them to ring they have to guess who's ringing before they pick up the receiver I think it's John hi John they're right or wrong the chance level is for 25% one in four these experiments filmed experiments published in peer-reviewed journals have hit rates about 45 percent massively significant more significant than the Higgs boson actually I wanted to ask about its significance no no this is a really important point significant so I'm glad we've brought it up because it's not sufficient to just make a measurement of something once in that might not mean anything if you have backgrounds if you have systemic biases that you have to account for in your measurement you need to repeat something a lot of times before it becomes significant enough to actually claim as evidence and depending on your depending on which branch of science you're in and the sort of the statistical level can be different but the example that you've just given there my first question is a physicist would be your normal question from the audience that you've run this experiment how many times what's the statistics what are the sources of systematic error there have you taken them into account it's been repeated in other labs there's a lot of evidence when I meet psychologists from the community that Massimo's so in fluence PI and I say to them about these heavens they haven't read it they just say there is no evidence for psychic phenomena it's all been discredited I mean I hear that mantra over and over again that's why I don't trust them in their judgment in the way that Massimo seems to I I want to to look at these multiverses which of which there certainly is no evidence but I think it's probably important also to recognize that it's not an idea that someone has plucked out of the air because it seemed fat you know a nice thing to suggest that those kinds of ideas stem from extending the physics that we know at the moment into realms where it becomes very hard perhaps you know impossible to test and there's there's a clear history of doing this and Terry you were saying you know this is something that needs to happen it was in a sense something that Einstein was doing with with general relativity that you know he didn't come that idea didn't come out of nowhere it was well motivated but it took some you know there was certainly no evidence for it when he proposed it and it seems that in physics in particular there is this tradition of building on what we know building into you know regimes where it's not obvious how things should be tested to you do you think that's a valid way for science to proceed can it run ahead of its ability to produce evidence I do think so for the reasons I stated at the beginning so this this idea of physics proceeding by standing on the shoulders of giants as Newton were habit is important because it's how we make progress you don't throw everything out every generation and start from scratch because you would never get anywhere we we have an understanding that describes a lot of the universe we want to understand more of it because we know that there's so much out there that we don't yet understand and that's what motivates people to think of alternative approaches like multiverses like string theory it's to overcome problems in our existing understanding of the universe it's to try and find a solution to push our knowledge out more now these things are at the frontier and the thing about physics is that it's a really simple worldview compared to what Rupert's studying or to philosophy which are very complex systems potentially because you have a lot of variables in physics we try and slim things down identify under four underlying laws of behavior that we can then extend to find out more everything that's it's the way that's worked for us that's been very successful so these examples that you've highlighted are examples of our science in progress I don't know if they can a pan out or not be honest do you think that what nature tells us always has to be the ultimate arbiter of that question the position you you outlined at the beginning seemed to suggest that there was the case and I think it was probably Richard Feynman who said you know you can't fool nature but when Einstein came up with general relativity and it was put to the test by Arthur Eddington looking at a solar eclipse when he was told that the KIAC seems to confirm your idea he famously said you know I knew that it would and if the evident and and people said well what if the evidence hadn't supported it he would have said oh he said I would have felt sorry for the Lord because the theory is correct so it seemed to emplace into in play that he felt there was something beyond the the physical evidence you can get from from the world that can at least give you confidence in sticking with an idea do you think that's a valid thing to do yeah there are instances of that throughout the history of physics and I'm thinking of Paul Dirac who combined special relativity and quantum mechanics to come up with an equation that describe the motion of an electron whatever speed it was going and his equation had two solutions twice as many as it should have had and so him this equation was so beautiful in a mathematical sense that it really had to be real it had to describe the universe and it's that pigheadedness thinking that you you've hit upon a good solution that's really reality should be fitting in that case four years later experimental evidence to explain what this other solution was which turned out to be antimatter came along and then we saw well in that case Dirac was right but you know that's that's not always the case and but it wasn't just Pig headedness indirect case was it it was a sense that there was a beauty as he saw it to his equations that gave it some sort of validity and a Massimo you you've just been to a meeting where this has been discussed our criteria like that valid criteria to judge scientific ideas when the evidence can't no they aren't and here's what happens so what would be talking about the last few minutes like Einstein making that kind of arrangement there there's a number of other examples in the history special of physics they tend to be physicists you know I really here by a biologist making that kind of claim there has to be true because my mathematics is like that we remember Jose because those actually turn out to be right and we forget that there been there will be another 90 examples at the same time of people saying something similar and we forget about them because they turn out to be wrong in fact book by least mulling that came out a few years ago the trouble with physics is a history of sociological history of 24 20th century physicists physics and it lists one theory after another that at some point in other people said this must be true because so beautiful so mathematically perfect blah blah blah blah and then it turned out to be wrong right so yes of course we want our theories to be as elegant as the simplest possible this is a human criterion however this is not a criterion imposed by nature there's nothing that says the nature has to be simple or understandable for that matter right it's a we'd like it that white because this is where static creatures as well and and it works better for us that why because we can understand better we can explain better things if it turned out to be mathematically simple and so on and so forth but that's no guarantee of anything and all we have here is a simple case of what them these psychologists will care we'll call a selective bias that is we remember the hits and forget the misses and that's why we get this impression that all a lot of scientists have actually been guided just by this almost mystical sense of being right but I want to go back if you guys don't mind for a second to the comparison between telepathy and string theory I don't actually believe in either one of them and I'm even feeling uncomfortable saying using the word belief I probably apply to those kinds of concepts I mean do I think that there is evidence or do I don't think that there is evidence in the case of string theory the case I'm sorry the multiverse the the case the answer is clear no there is no evidence at the moment period so if we're just talking about you should believe things that are that for which you have evidence you shouldn't believe in in the multiverse and that's why I don't but the difference between I think use of the word belief I mean you can believe what you want I can't sure but as a scientist as I said earlier I read a you know proportion my belief to the evidence and if there is no evidence about something I simply don't believe it but don't believe it it's not the same as dismissing it right that's what I wanted to get together the difference so not believing something is simply I can be simply agnostic about it in fact that's that that describes that better describes my position about the multiverse as well that could be a multiverse and there is interesting reasons mathematical reasons to think that might be such a thing but there is no empirical evidence at the moment and until an F that empirical evidence comes in I am going to suspend my judgment right the reason that situation is different from telepathy is twofold and it goes back to that unfortunate behavior of your skeptic opponent he's called oh okay so so here's I think however where the difference between the two cases are there are there two major differences first of all the multiverse is compatible and predicted by certain interpretations of very well-established mathematical theories that are based on very well-established physics that doesn't mean it's true but it does mean that there is very good reasons to think that it may be true on the other hand as your scalp skeptic pointed out it is in fact the case that as far as we understand something like a lot of paranormal phenomena would in fact actually undermine a lot of our current understanding of physics chemistry and biology now there's nothing wrong with that because it is possible that we don't understand well we dramatically misunderstand physics chemistry and biology but now the bar is raised okay on one hand we have a situation which is theoretically well compatible with what we know we just don't have the empirical evidence to prove it and on the other hand we have something that actually would undermine a lot of what we think we understand about the world which means that now the bar is raised higher that's one reason for the difference the second reason for the difference I'm sorry but I'm going to disagree on a factual matter researching in telepathy and other aspect other particle a phenomena has been conducted in university laboratories for decades two in particular one a Cornell University one at Princeton both of them now have closed for lack of results they published a few papers here and there in peer-reviewed journals but the majority of scientific community look at these things in now sorry this is can be interpreting a number of other ways that can be explained and um there are other ways that don't need to invoke telepathy that is a reasonable understanding a reasonable assessment of the evidence over decades of research right so it's not the case that there is no empirical research out there there is no empirical research on on on the multiverse there is empirical research on paranormal phenomenon has been going on for decades actually close to a century and it hasn't convinced the proper epistemic community that to me it's a fairly big failure now could it turn out to be otherwise in another 50 years sure to play devil's advocate we have dark matter I believe was first proposed in the 1930s we still have no sign of what it might be so why is it valid to continue to believe that is a again pursuing so dark matter well you had the physicists oh you should really be answering that I'm gonna give a very short answer and then if you don't mind you feel the huge gaps that I'm gonna leave so dark matter as far as I understand is essentially a placeholder since oh it's dark energy it's a question of look we know that there is something missing here we know because we can measure okay we can make measurements cosmological measurements and we know that there is something that it's not there that should be there there's none enough to account it's not enough energy not enough matter to account for the behavior of the universe as we actually observe it we're gonna call it dark because we don't see it we don't know what the hell it is you know some people have ideas but we don't know what it is so it's not that one believes that somebody believes in dark matter somebody simply believes the observation to tell us that there is something missing and then we'll call that missing thing dark matter am i completely off I hope no no no that this is it this is it so there are phenomena that are observed which are interpreted as dark matter now nobody knows what dark matter is made of there are lots of theories and there are lots of eminent theoretical physicists who claim that evidence of no absence of evidence is not necessarily evident absence of evidence if I can get that right in the right way it's not evidence of absence it's thank you it's because this stuff is invisible to us it's hard to test and hard to pin down which is why we know so little about what this phenomenon that we've observed actually is in terms of its nature but there are experimental observations of something there which have been interpreted as this so I must respond to something Massimo said first of all you said the if telepathy exists it would overturn existing physics chemistry and biology I didn't it would you know when electromagnetic fields were introduced into science it didn't overturn Newtonian physics actually extended science and telepathy concerns the nature of minds it's not as if physics chemistry and biology have been very successfully explaining the nature of minds or consciousness it's not as if this is hard science which we can rest everything on it's the it's called the hard problem precisely because you know so little about minds and consciousness a philosopher calls it the heart problem and he's wrong but the thing is that that it's not as if so first of all you said we have to raise the bar because physics chemistry and biology I saw the theory of mind is not solid it's very disputed and in consciousness studies there's a wide range of theories about the nature of consciousness and how it works some of them are field theories of minds where minds have fields that aren't just confined to the brain just like cellphones have fields that aren't confined to the phone so what this idea need a new particle no it wouldn't know so need a new particle but it would need connections at a distance of a kind that might involve an extension of the mind beyond the brain but the point is that it wouldn't necessarily imply overturn existing physics chemistry and biology there was one of your points the bar must be much higher the second point is that all this evidence whose sarin valid peoples departments get closed down in the u.s. at the moment there are current I think two full-time parapsychologists there are about 100,000 subscribers to skeptic organizations who if any parapsychology grant is made by any university if any public funding body tried to make one that'd be instant attacks so and when university to get endowments for it like the castle of charity Edinburgh the first person appointed was a parapsychologist when he died the academic committee tried to appoint a skeptic and in fact they have appointed a skeptic they've downgraded to a readership and kept the money for the psychology department this has happened over and over and over again within universities so using that as evidence for lack of prejudice it seems to me rather distorting no no no no it's just another example of it review and Prejudice in action wait a minute I've wait I never I never said that there is lack of effort I started out my remarks by saying that that scientists can be dogmatic and sometimes unnecessarily so it's it again it just comes down to as there being enough work to convince the proper community that's really the bottom line and the answer so far it's clearly no this is and this is an empirical question the answer is clearly no right and so as an outsider if I'm gonna bat I'm gonna bet against you yeah but why be why what I can't get is you know I don't go around denouncing physical chemistry or denouncing astrophysics why do people who know nothing about subjects feel so strongly they have to form organizations to denounce it and oppose it I'm going to leave it there I think I'm very glad we found some disagreement I think what we have actually found also some agreement because one of the questions we were meant to address is can we have a science without evidence and I think everyone up here has given the firm answer we can't

Channel: The Institute of Art and Ideas

Views: 40,644

Rating: 4.7377048 out of 5

Keywords: science, fact, theory, dark matter, conciousness, gravity, string theory, evidence, rational, proof, fantasy, physics, biology, philosophy, debate, think, education

Id: 4hU2JJYXA_k

Length: 47min 50sec (2870 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 27 2018