The Cheerful Insanity of Me

feanelwa recently shared this quiz about consistency of beliefs, which somehow I seem to have mostly made it through ok inspite of generally being all over the place.

Anyway before I get on with failing to accept where they tell me I'm wrong, let's add an extra question to their quiz:

[Poll #1606918]

( For those of you that would rather have a go at the quiz first, the rest is below a cut )

However, now I've have my intellectual inferiority pointed out to me, I will have to bow to the superiors and start worshiping Nessie as God.

I think this may be why I generally don't take internet quizzes...

So, a little over 2 weeks ago, I went to a talk by Bernard Carr on whether science can accommodate psychic experience.

Taking a standard reductionist view of science that everything can reduce down to physics, although it is often more useful to view things on a larger scale through the other sciences, science becomes primarily focused on matter and how matter interacts. It doesn't really consider the mind/consciousness within this (ok, this is questionable for sciences such as psychology, as it's questionable whether this is entirely about the functioning of the brain or whether an individual consciousness plays a role. Some would even say consciousness is entirely about the functioning of the brain and so this whole train of thought falls apart, but that would be less interesting, so I'll put that thought to one side).

If you want to consider things like psi scientifically, particularly for things like telekinesis, where there is a clear interaction between mind and matter, you need to consider the more general question of whether science can accommodate consciousness, which to me sounds a far more interesting topic to think about.

As a cosmologist, Carr, asked the question about this drive for a theory of everything, where we keep extending the theories to take into account other forces to the point where cosmologists are now considering things like M-theory (and we're now going well beyond my knowledge of physics with things like that). What if this could be extended further to include notions of consciousness? Would it be useful? What would it predict?

I'm fairly skeptical about the whole psi thing, although being able to move bottle tops with my mind would be quite a fun thing to do and if someone claimed it were possible and wanted to show me how I'd certainly be open to giving it a go. However, Carr, came up with the valid point that although a lot of scientists rule out this sort of stuff, some of the results predicted by string theory are equally bizarre and equally unproven and yet far more acceptable.

So, taking that further, this got me thinking (a not entirely new thought) that although scientific models at their core have a proven evidence base to show this is a good model in the scope that we're looking at, when you go beyond that scope and start making predictions outside of this, you start going into the realm of belief. Admittedly, in terms of science you then experiment and prove this belief right or wrong and adapt your model accordingly and this is how we progress.

This then gets me thinking about belief in general (particularly religion, which seems to keep cropping up in conversation lately - probably due to the time of year and the people I've been talking to) and the thought that these are just personal models of reality based on our own experiential evidence and predictions about the nature of reality based on those. In fact, I've heard a lot of very religious people say that these sort of things are beyond our comprehension and religion is just our way of understanding it, which fits this quite well. Then again, I was a mathematician and not a very religious one, so I probably would view it this way.

Whereas much of the scientific models of reality are experimentally verifiable, but only cover a narrow focus of the materialistic stuff, religious models cover everything, but generally appear less easily verifiable (after all, even if there was a god and he were to strike me down with a thunderbolt, I might just put it down to a freak weather occurrence).

So, in a way we already have several models for this sort of stuff, they're just not expressed mathematically. This doesn't mean they can't be. After all, talking to Newton about string theory would probably have confused the socks off him, he didn't have the mathematics for this.

So, whether science can accommodate consciousness, seems to me more of a question of what science is. Is it purely about the materialistic world or can it include theories on other aspects of reality?

So, on Wednesday evening I popped over to the Dana Centre for a talk on The War of the Sexes.

Bit of an unrepresentative title as the most of the research discussed was to do with inter-gender differences rather than cross-gender ones.

In short the findings of the research covered suggested:

- Men are generally better at whole arm movements then fine hand and finger movements and can generally work better with objects in far-sight.
- Women are generally better at fine hand and finger movements then whole arm movements and can generally work better with objects in near-sight.

It was speculated this was due to originally being hunter-gathers. The male hunters would need whole arm movements to use tools for hunting and defending and would generally be looking at distant objects. The female gathers would generally be using fine finger movements to pick, gather and care for the young and would generally be looking at objects close by.

There was no discussion as to how the ranges over-lapped for men and women though.

- People colour preferences can be measured as a combination of a red-green and blue-yellow scale. Women generally have a preference for the red end of the red-green scale, but the same is not true for men.

This apparently showed up in cultures where there wasn't such a strong social connection between pink and girls. Although, it was speculated that this explained the pink for girls, blue for boys thing, there didn't seem to be any strong preference for blue in boys, but then thinking about our culture the blue for boys thing doesn't seem as strong a cultural norm as the pink for girls.

It was once again speculated that this was down to our hunter-gather origins and the need for gathers to pick out red (e.g. berries) from green (e.g. leaves).

- If you put a child in a circle of toys they tend to play more with the ones stereotypical for their gender.

It was clear how much cultural expected impacted on this though. However, it was apparently also true to an extent for monkeys with female monkeys tending to play more will dolls and male ones more with cars. Obvious maternal instinct was speculated as the reason for the dolls. Apparently they had a habit of turning them upside down to find out what sex they were.


All in all it was an interesting talk, but wasn't quite what it was advertised to be. I got the impression there were a lot of people there who were expecting to be able to discuss how much gender difference should influence roles in society, which this didn't even touch upon.

There certainly didn't seem much here to argue for the traditional partitioning of roles between the genders, especially when most modern roles require less manual labour and are more service based.