Critical Thinking Skills - In Defense of Reality - A Student Resource

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Considering my Case For Reality project is all about striving to develop a valuable resource for students who want to defend serious fact-based science against frauds using pseudo-science masquerading as fact - a formal consideration of Critical Thinking & Reading Skills is a must.

The way towards success is by studying and learning to recognize the patterns of deceptive rhetoric.  That way you become prepared for those tricks and find yourself ready and poised with effective responses.  

Don't ignore the lies, use those lies to your advantage.  Namely, by intelligently and confidently coming right back and spot-lighting the reality behind the concocted lie, with a compelling counter-story that explains what's actually happening within ourselves, biosphere, climate system, whatever the topic might be.  Also remember, there's always an audience to consider, meaning it's worth the effort to make the malicious lie, a teaching moment.

Solid evidence along with a narrative of the story behind the science, enabling people to form a better understanding.  Easier said than done, but unless we are changing minds we are losing.  

Consider the philosophy of Jiu-Jitsu, which besides being about the mental discipline of a warrior, is a philosophy about winning by yielding to an opponent's force, instead of trying to oppose force with force.  Rather than playing by the contrarian script, why not develop some intelligent rhetorical jiu-jitsu skills.

It starts with sharp Critical Thinking and Reading Skills, and for developing that we have clearly defined strategies.  Below I share from five sources;

Critical Reading and Reading Strategy

SkillsYouNeed.com

The Foundation For Critical Thinking

CriticalThinking.org

Critical Thinking

courses.LumenLearning.com

The SQ3R Method of Studying

Francis Pleasant Robinson - RememberEverything.org

21 Century Middle School Guide Student’s Guide to Study Skills

MiddleSchoolGuide.com

“Emergence” - A Handy Student Summary and Resources

 “Emergence” a students’ summary.

      

       

My appreciation for “emergence” is a natural outgrowth of decades worth of proactive learning via the flow of fascinating new findings that Earth scientists, from geology to biology, to complex systems science, share with the world.

It seems self-evident to me that we can see emergence on a grand scale throughout the history of evolution, and also on the fine scale of my own mind and watching how accumulating understanding reaches certain breakthrough thresholds that have elevated my overall thinking to entirely new levels of (previously unimaginable) appreciation.

As a youth I accepted the Biblical reassurance: “Seek and ye shall find,” with time I discovered it’s a fundamental rule of nature.  Pay attention, remember, process your experiences and findings, then, once in a while, something goes pop, a veil drops and a whole new vista of understanding opens up.  To be folded into the rest of my understanding and echoed throughout my mindscape, where it blends in and retunes the previous state of affairs. 

Or to put it more simply, it feels to me like education and increasing knowledge of Earth’s evolution produces it’s own cascade of emergent awarenesses within our minds. For those paying attention, that is.

I bring it up because while surfing Google and YouTube for this C.A.R. project, I was surprised by some of the cynicism directed towards the notion of emergence and evolution.  Seems founded on misunderstanding, often willful, sometimes not.  All of it should be vulnerable to thoughtful, tactical, constructive, intellectual confrontation.  Unless we are changing minds, we are losing.  

Figure out how to take every cynical challenge and flip it around to a learning opportunity.  (The act of doing it, will teach you more, than you might be able to teach them.)

The confusion about "emergence" inspired me to collect this selection of YouTube videos that presents a variety of people, with varying expertise, explaining “emergence” within our physical reality, in a sober constructive manner.  I’ve also added some papers, though if you’re still interested in the topic by then, it’s time to visit GoogleScholar.  

Besides informing, hopefully this introduction to “Emergence” might inspire and help some with their own assignments. 

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“Emergence” - A Handy Student Summary and Resources

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Emergence (or: How Ants Find Your Picnic Basket): Jane Adams at TEDxGallatin

September 22, 2013 - TEDx Talks - 9:24 min

Jane Adams is a graduate of the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study.  Her studies focused on the theory of emergence, the phenomenon by which simple systems governed by simple rules give rise to complex phenomena on a larger scale.

Sabine Hossenfelder in Defense of Scientific Realism and Physical Reality

I appreciate it’s one thing when I dismiss Hoffman’s rendering of physics as disingenuous pipe-dreaming - it’s quite another when someone of Sabine Hossenfelder education, career and stature underscores some of the same points that have caused my cynicism toward Donald Hoffman's "Case Against Reality" - and that's driven this project in defense of Physical Reality.

Hossenfelder has never focused on Donald Hoffman and his ideas, but she does point out the invalidity of various physics tropes that Hoffman presents as settled science and uses as building blocks for his conjectures.   

I've watched many of her videos and though we have different world outlooks 

(she comes across as seeing progress as an end-all blessing - whereas I've gotten to view our obsessive blind progress for progress sake - as a deadly Siren Song that's ensnarled us oh so short sighted, self serving, and frightfully superficial humans).  There's no disputing her knowledge and expertise and skill at explaining complex physics to lay people.  That's why I’ve virtually invited her to be an expert witness on behalf of Defending Reality.

This is for the curious, the students of deception and deeper understanding, the few who are trying to figure it out.   Have at it.   Cc

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Sabine Hossenfelder (born 18 September 1976) is a German author and theoretical physicist who researches quantum gravity. She is a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies where she leads the Superfluid Dark Matter group. She is the author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, which explores the concept of elegance in fundamental physics and cosmology.

Hossenfelder completed her undergraduate degree in 1997 at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main.^[3] She remained there for a Master's degree, and she wrote a thesis under the supervision of Walter Greiner titled "Particle Production in Time Dependent Gravitational Fields", which she completed in 2000.^[4] Hossenfelder received her doctorate from the same institution in 2003, for the thesis "Black Holes in Large Extra Dimensions" under the supervision of Horst Stöcker.^[5][6]

Physics is still in crisis

Jun 5, 2020  -  Sabine Hossenfelder  -  6:53 min

There has been no progress in the foundations of physics for 40 years. In my book "Lost in Math" I have explained why that is and what can be done about this. In this video, I briefly summarize the content of the book.

Physicists need to learn from their mistakes

Dec 6, 2020  -    Sabine Hossenfelder  -  14:58 min

In this interview, Sabine Hossenfelder details why the foundations of physics has not made any progress, why physicists need to learn from their mistakes, why they're practicing poor science and investigates the inconsistencies in some of our preassumed theories of physics.

The Case For Reality: Because Apparently Someone Needs to Make One

This essay’s content fulfills the promise made by the spot on title of, “The Case For Reality: Because Apparently Someone Needs to Make One,” and I feel compelled to supplement my meager arguments with these more substantive ones.  This is a complete and unedited reproduction of a review of Hoffman’s conjectures by an academic that knows much more than I do.  

The original essay can be found at the UCLA psychology doctoral students' Psychology In Action blog.

“The field of psychology publishes interesting, important, and potentially life-altering information at a rapid rate, but most research findings rarely reach public awareness.  Psychology in Action is an organization formed by UCLA Psychology doctoral students to help ameliorate this issue through scientific communication. Our aim is to elaborate, connect, and help explain psychological research to community members and other interested parties outside of our field. …”

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“The Case For Reality: Because Apparently Someone Needs to Make One”

Omar, April 26, 2016

This morning, I read an article on consciousness and physics ("The Case Against Reality" in The Atlantic). The beginning of the article starts off with a broad statement: That our senses aren’t completely accurate; that the world isn’t perfectly represented by them.

It's a relative statement so it’s not worth disagreeing with. That is, given the scope of our space telescopes and quantum detectors -- yeah, we do a crappy job of perceiving. But, compared to the capabilities of a jellyfish or just total blindness, we do a great job at perceiving reality.

But then the article goes on to describe: (1) that external reality simply isn't there, (2) our science is flawed for assuming so and trying to measure it, (3) that the brain doesn’t exist, because it’s "a classical object" according to quantum mechanics, and, (4) that the whole universe is "conscious observers" all the way down.

(D.Hoffman)  "I’m emphasizing the larger lesson of quantum mechanics: Neurons, brains, space … these are just symbols we use, they’re not real. It’s not that there’s a classical brain that does some quantum magic. It’s that there’s no brain!"

I will dive into why quantum doesn't imply this, later in the article. 

If there is any "larger lessons" to be drawn from the sciences, it would be that relying on intuitive argumentation (the main tool of academic philosophy) has historically ended up being wrong. 

The larger lesson of psychological sciences actually shows that intuition is easily misled and completely biased by experience.

The professor's stance is based on the idea that perfect objectivity doesn't exist, and therefore, by extension, pure subjectivity is all that exists. 

He uses physics to back up this idea.

First, let's clarify the physics details.

Paul Mealing considers Hoffman's "Objects of Consciousness."

 A few weeks back I read an excellent essay pointing out some of the issues with Hoffman’s conjectures.  At the time it was reassuring that I was on a right track.  Paul's clarity made me want to post this as an appendix item and I’m happy to finally be at that point.  I thank Paul for making it available.

Journeyman Philosopher by Paul P Mealing is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

The following is complete, unedited, (except for adding paragraph breaks and highlights), as Paul Mealing wrote it.

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From the Journeyman Philosopher blog

Philosophy, at its best, challenges our long held views, such that we examine them more deeply than we might otherwise consider.

Paul P. Mealing

November 13, 2016

When evolution is not evolution

No, I’m not talking about creationism (a subject I’ve discussed many times on this blog) but a rather esoteric argument produced by Donald D Hoffman and Chetan Prakash in an academic paper titled Objects of Consciousness. Their discussion on evolution is almost a side issue, and came up in their responses to the many objections they’ve fielded. I read the paper when I was sent a link by someone who knows I’m interested in this stuff.

Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist with a Ph.D. in Computational Psychology and is now a full professor at University of California, Irvine. Chetan Prakash is a Professor Emeritus at California State University, San Bernardino and has a Master of Science in Physics and a Master of Science in Applied Mathematics.

I should point out at the outset, that their thesis is so out there, that I seriously wondered if it was a hoax. But given their academic credentials and the many academic citations and references in their paper, I assume that the authors really believe in what they’re arguing. 

And what they’re arguing, in a nutshell, is that everyone’s (and I mean every person’s) perception of the world is false, because, aside from conscious agents, everything else, including spacetime, is impermanent.

Their paper is 20 pages long (including 5-6 pages of objections and replies) most of which are densely worded interspersed with some diagrams and equations. To distill someone’s treatise into a single paragraph is always a tad unfair, so I’ll rely heavily on direct quotations and references to impart their arguments. Besides, you can always read the entire paper for yourself. Basically, they argue that ‘interacting conscious agents’ are the only reality and that nothing else exists ‘unperceived’.