Leif on Philosophy and Climate Change

Tonight while I was looking for some other information I happened again, after all these years, on this short essay that Leif wrote to on the MySpace blog of the love of his life, J. He sent it to me for comment on February 16, 2008, just over seven weeks before he died. He took a very cynical view of humanity. I found it interesting that he took on what he saw as a coming apocalypse caused by global warming.

The photo was actually taken in August 2003, long before he wrote this piece, but the direct stare seems to me to go with his statements. He was wearing his new SCA armor.

I hope his vision of the future of humanity does not come true, and I am not so sanguine about the survival of the industrial world, but I do think we are in for a lot of horror.

Leif on Philosophy & Climate Change

Read Kant. He has many ideas, some a bit unrealistic, but among his best thoughts is  his idea of peace through conflict, that  eventually through war and competition and  resolved conflict world peace will be achieved because the costs of war with a trading partner will be too great to bear and it will be  unacceptable.

Over the years I have studied philosophy, history, political science, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, and have learned one thing. None of these guys had the answers. Truth is a jig-saw puzzle, and at best Marx, Kant, Freud, Locke, Montesquieu, Madison, et al, contributed a piece.

Another is that truth is very subjective. What you might find appalling is just fine to others, and those others might find your ideas equally appalling. I have always enjoyed the stark contrast between your excessively compassionate quest to save the world and my ruthless Machiavellian disregard for it. 

Being a bit of an evolutionary and social darwinist, I look forward to the coming apocalypse of global warming. It will be a glorious catastrophe which will either doom mankind or propel us into the next level of enlightenment. I see this as quite possibly the greatest thing that can happen to man, a mass extinction which will disproportionately affect the parts of the world which are least able to embrace a more intelligent way of living.   

The industrialized world, which is principally in northern latitudes, is already pushing to go green and is more likely to survive the climate change. Many of the corporations which plague the industrialized world will go bankrupt as the economy collapses. 

The humans which survive will be smarter and, most importantly, FEWER. Billions will die in China, India, Africa, the Middle East and South America. Oil will quickly become unimportant and religious conflicts with oil-rich Muslims will become a thing of the past as they cease to matter. The survivors will be in a position to continue the next chapter of human development from a much more enlightened perspective.

This is, of course, very politically incorrect, but then the PC are like idiots playing chess. They can't see the pieces on the board for the game itself. People can't see past what’s right in front of them. Like my 12-year-old niece playing chess with me at Christmas was fully convinced that she had defeated me and that I was either not trying or not very smart when I allowed her to take my queen early in the game. Later, when I mated her king she could not understand where she went wrong. The difference is the long view. When considering any action you must look down the slippery slope and see how it may snowball into other changes covered by the law of unexpected consequences.

Anyway, enough dark proselytizing for one day. - Leif (February 16, 2008)

Leif and USF - Fall 2007

All of Leif's adult life he was in financial difficulty, sometimes due to circumstances beyond his control, but often due to his spending on many things he couldn't really afford, from fancy cell phones to computers, from motorcycles to guns, or even a car that got poor mileage resulting in high gas bills. When he got money, such as a tax refund, he either had to pay bills he was behind on, or he would spend it on new gadgets. He seemed incapable of saving money.

The summer of 2007 when he broke up with Donna, he was in worse difficulty because he no longer had her contributing to the household income and he wanted a way to supplement his Humana salary. He decided that the best way to do that was to go back to school and use his remaining GI Bill benefits. I thought this a constructive and creative way to do it, but I was also concerned that he would spend the money, not save any, and get used to the extra income and have even greater difficulties when it ran out. My fears proved to be true.

Leif got admitted to USF for the fall 2007 semester, which started while he was still healing from his motorcycle accident on July 12th and his operation on July 27th. He determined to major in philosophy, a subject he had very much enjoyed as a student at KSU, and enrolled in two courses. He had to enroll in classes that met in the morning, because at the time he was working the afternoon-evening shift at Humana until 11:00 p.m. He felt he would be able to study some during the evening because while they were mandated to be open for calls, few came in during the later hours. He found this to be generally true.

He seemed to be enjoying being on campus and in his classes, and would send me text messages about them during the evening sometimes. One of the classes apparently had a profound impact on him, or at least his thinking about the subject matter did, as he sent his final paper to me and some others and it was the thing he left on his computer the night he died.

Leif was always a procrastinator and enrolling in school was no exception. I well remember that I was chatting (through Yahoo Instant Messenger) with him late one evening in January and asked him what classes he was taking second semester. He said he hadn't enrolled yet. I told him that he'd better get it done or he wouldn't even find any open classes during the hours he could attend. So, he got online right then and found out the deadline was midnight that night . . . about 15 minutes away. He chose two classes he thought would be interesting and that seemed to him to fulfill degree requirements. One feature of the GI Bill is that students must be enrolled in classes that lead to a degree.

He hadn't had an advising appointment and thought he knew what classes would be acceptable. He hadn't had one the fall semester, either, after convincing his adviser in email that after being a student at KSU he knew what to do.

He paid his tuition and got his books, and took classes for a month and then was shocked to get a notice that the classes he was taking were NOT approved for his degree program. He didn't tell us about this until after it occurred or we might have been able to help him fight the decision, since Peter W. had had a similar experience when he was taking classes at KSU and using his GI BIll benefits and had appealed the decision and won. However, Leif didn't get anywhere with the officials at USF and got mad and discouraged and withdrew from school, losing his tuition. His last GI Bill benefit was paid, I believe, on March 1st, although it's possible it was on February 1st.

If this wasn't the last straw for Leif, it was certainly close to it. He had been managing with the extra money during the fall semester, but also spending whatever he didn't need. Again, no savings. So, when they pulled the rug out from under him and he lost the monthly stipend, he had no savings to see him through and pay his bills. By that time, he had run up large credit card debts, too, which we didn't know about. He had paid his previous ones off and had no outstanding credit card debt when he moved out of our house in February 2006. In just two years he had amassed $12,000 of credit card debt, added to his car loan, and his longstanding previous debts to us for bailing him out twice before and buying the car he wrecked. He tried applying for personal loans but he didn't get them because of his terrible credit to debt ratio. He received the loan rejection letters just days before he killed himself, as they were dated March 23. He could have come to us, but that would have been a bitter pill to swallow, both because of his pride and because he knew we would be very dismayed at what he had done. He had not admitted to us that he had run up such debts, even when we had asked him how he was doing financially and whether he needed help.

I often wonder if just one thing had gone right for Leif if he would still be here; if he had continued to get the GI Bill; if he had gotten one of the promotions he was interviewed for; if he had found the right woman; if he had been able to control his spending; if he had seen an advisor about what classes to take.

We will never know, but we do know that the sudden withdrawal of the GI Bill stipend probably had a big impact on his decision to end his life. It may not have been the precipitating factor in the wee hours of April 9, 2008, but it was one of the factors that set it in motion. How sad that his quest for money and intellectual stimulation ended that way.
----------------------
The photo is of Leif's USF ID card, fall 2007.

Leif's Science and Society Paper #2 written in the fall semester 2007

Leif Garretson
10/31/2007
Science and Society paper #2

When considering the scientific validity of a hypothesis we must examine it for a few key characteristics. These characteristics are things which are either empirical in nature and which can be definitely demonstrated to be true or false, or they are constantly changing to accommodate new data. This difference or criterion was best summarized by Karl Popper when he said, “ One can sum up all of this by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability. In the simplest of terms this means that if the theory cannot be definitively proven to be either true or untrue its is not scientifically valid.

Popper came to this conclusion after analyzing the theories of his contemporaries such as Einstein and Adler. In the case of Adler the conclusions he drew could not be clearly proven to be correct or false. His theories of human motivations could be so flexible as to be congruous with any human behavior. No matter what he witnessed it always made sense within the tenants of his theory and there was no conceivable human behavior, actual or hypothetical, which could conclusively demonstrate him to be wrong. No matter what happened Adler could explain it within the framework of his model. Popper would claim that this is not true science but pseudo-science as it cannot be falsified by any event.

By contrast truly scientific theories could be proven false if certain events were to take place. For example, we take for granted that gravity exists and will act on all bodies, pulling them towards the earth unless some other force acts to prevent this. However, if hypothetically we were to witness an object levitating in mid air without the assistance of some other force, we might be forced to reconsider the validity of the theory of gravity. Regarding gravity, Popper gives great credit to Einstein and his predictions about gravity and light as they were bold, risky and could have clearly been proven to be false if he was wrong.

In Einstein’s case, he claimed that strong gravity wells such as our sun could actually bend light by changing the path of incoming photons. When he made this claim there was no easy way to demonstrate this but later a scientist named Eddington discovered that if you photographed constellations around a solar eclipse and then compared those photographs to those of the same constellations at night without the sun's gravitational field in the way you could measure the distances and prove or disprove Einstein’s theory. In this case Einstein was correct but had Eddington’s work not demonstrated this phenomenon Einstein’s theory would have been falsified. The fact that this possibility of falsification exists for Einstein’s Theory but does not for Adler is the criterion which, at least to Karl Popper, separates science from pseudo-science.

Popper describes such pseudo-scientific theories as being derived from ad-hoc hypotheses. Ad-hoc is defined as, “Formed, arranged, or done for one particular purpose only.” Such hypotheses are so malleable as to be beyond reproach and thus are impossible to truly prove or disprove. Pseudo-scientists with Ad-hoc hypotheses can always amend the hypothesis to account for any data which seems incongruous with the original model. One such example is Ptolemy and his geocentric model of the solar system. His hypothesis was sound until it was falsified by the existence of retrograde motion. However, instead of abandoning the theory he added the rather ad-hoc hypothetical model of epicenters to explain the unexplainable. The truth about these epicenters could not be clearly proven or falsified for hundreds of years.

This brings us to the topic of James McConnell and his theory of the chemical transference of memory. McConnell conducted experiments on Planarian worms involving training them to respond to bursts of light by first using Pavlovian conditioning involving a corresponding electric shock. He first trained worms to scrunch up when stimulated with a burst of light they had come to associate with being shocked. This, in and of itself, is unremarkable, but when things got interesting is when he began cutting the worms in half. Because Planarian worms regenerate you can cut one in half and get two [living] worms. One half retains the brain and one does not.

One would assume that if memory is stored in the brain that only the half with the brain would remain trained to respond to the bursts of light and the other half would not respond. This, however, was not the case and warranted further study. He followed this experiment by feeding the untrained cannibalistic worms the flesh of trained worms. He then reported that worms that ingested the meat of trained worms were 50% more likely to respond to the bursts of light.

Critics and contemporaries of McConnell were unable to replicate his results. This is often a red flag for any theory as it’s repeatability is of key importance to its credibility. McConnell would claim that it is a case of "golden hands" as he simply has more experience in training worms than anyone else. This is further challenged by the fact that other possible explanations are offered, such as the presence of slime trails from previously conditioned worms passing information on rather than chemical memory.

Here it is difficult to say if his further experiments are merely ad-hoc or are legitimate examinations of potential alternatives. Initially scrubbing the troughs and removing the slime produces no results. He concludes that the worms don’t like the scrubbed troughs, which seems very ad-hoc. Popper would surely liken this to Adler’s explaining away of anything that did not seem to be immediately in sync with the base model. McConnell attempts to eliminate this variable by using naive or untrained worms to pre-slime the troughs so that he can test cannibal worms for chemical transference of memory without them being affected by either the slime trail of the trained nor a hostile environment.

Still, all of this remains rather inconclusive. McConnell’s experiments are never successfully repeated by others, nor can they be conclusively demonstrated to be false. This very fact would, according to Popper, make this pseudo-science.

Again, the criterion of scientific status is whether it is falsifiable? In this case it is at least conclusively not. Is it refutable? It also cannot be conclusively refuted. And lastly, is it testable? While McConnell himself claims to have successfully tested the theory, the fact that it has not been repeatable by any others greatly strains its validity as a truly scientific hypothesis, as opposed to a mere guess with ad-hoc explanations to account for anything inconsistent between the predictions and the data.

Leif liked the intellectual exercise of philosophy and the challenge of argument, but he didn't really like to write his analyses. He would much rather have passed an oral exam through a spirited discourse. Our academic system isn't set up for much of that, and when he got it, it loved it.

He didn't send either of these papers from his Science and Society class to me and I didn't see them until recently among this computer files. He didn't find them as significant personally as the final exam in his other class, the one he sent to me and eventually left on the "desktop" of his laptop computer the night he died.

Leif claimed many times to be ruled by reason, but I think he failed to allow himself to see how often reason is colored by, even directed by, emotion.
---------------------

The photo was taken in the living room of our old stone house, probably sometime around December 2003. He is wearing his leather motorcycle cap and jacket.

Leif's Science and Society Paper #1 written in the fall semester 2007

Leif was trying hard to find a way to have more income and enrolled in USF (University of South Florida), which was not far from where he lived in Tampa, for the fall semester 2007. He took two philosophy courses. One was "Science and Society," for which he wrote two papers. This is the first one:

Science and Society paper #1

Do facts and reason settle scientific controversies or are they determined by popular convention and the ability of the scientist to persuade the scientific community and/or the public at large? That is the underlying question we must examine when considering the interplay of science and society. Many scientists would argue that the nature of the universe is absolute, filled with facts and truths which cannot be disputed and the purpose of science is to discover those truths. Such scientists, Giere for example, claim that it is facts and reason which will decide the result of a scientific controversy and that such a pursuit is objective rather than subjective. By contrast others, such as Collins and Pinch, argue that facts and reason have little to do with the way that controversies are decided and that in almost all cases it is popular opinion and convention which determines what view or result is accepted as the truth.

To examine this let us review the competing experiments of Louis Pasteur and Felix Archimede Pouchet regarding the issue of spontaneous generation. Throughout the study of biology and theology there has been a question of life’s origins and whether life will spontaneously generate if the conditions are right. Before we can explore the societal influences and implications of these experiments let us first examine the experiments themselves.

We begin with a real world observation that there are living things and these living things' origins cannot always be readily apparent. The basic question is, does life only come from other life, or is it possible that, given the right conditions and requisite materials, life could spontaneously appear without an external source? Herein lies the model they are proposing: that if organic, but inert matter is left alone in the presence of air that life will spontaneously generate.

Now we come to the Data. In Pouchet’s experiments 8/8 samples became prurient certainly suggesting the model is correct. However, in Pasteur’s study only a small percentage of them cease to remain inert suggesting that the model is incorrect. Respectively, each one has made a prediction of the outcome but those predictions are opposite each other with Pasteur predicting no spontaneous generation and Pouchet predicting there will be spontaneous generation. Now this case is interesting as both scientists got opposite results but when they compare the model with their respective data, each data set supported the predictions they had made. When comparing their work it became obvious that both could not be right so what made the difference?

When examining the experiments we must ask are their any other plausible explanations for the data? Particularly when the data is contradictory we must theorize another possible model to explain the disparity. In Pasteur’s case he examines the two methods and focuses on the fact that when obtaining their “sterile air” at high altitude his method was to snap off the end of the bottle with pincers and heat as to keep a sterile sample. Pouchet used a file on the necks of the sealed containers and Pasteur claims this is the critical error. According to Pasteur it is possible that the file could have allowed small pieces of glass to fall into the sample and those pieces of glass which had been exposed to an open and contaminated environment, might have and must have, carried some microbes into the sample contaminating it and ruining the experiment. According to Pasteur had this mistake not been made Pouchet’s results would have mirrored his.

Looking at merely the results there are compelling reasons to agree with Pasteur’s assessment but even his views were flawed as his initial experiments also became contaminated. It is clear that both scientists had their own biases. If Pasteur saw a result that supported spontaneous generation he believed he must have made a mistake in maintaining a sterile sample. If not he assumed he had proved himself right. In Pouchet’s case it’s the opposite. If he saw an inert sample he assumed he had somehow destroyed and essential property of the air which prevented the spontaneous generation. When Pouchet saw prurient samples he did not consider accidental contamination but assumed he had proved spontaneous generation was a fact.

Beyond the inherent flaws of the two scientists and their personal biases there is also the awarding commission which essentially decides what is scientific cannon to be held up as truth. While Pouchet would likely argue that they had a personal bias to support the more popular and connected Pasteur, there are larger more significant underlying factors in their decision to support Pasteur and his findings. To understand this we must ask the question: Were there any compelling reasons, in the 1860s, for preferring one model over the other? One cannot look at these events without considering the context. In 19th century France, which is a predominantly Roman Catholic nation, the significance of these experiments was profound. This period saw the beginning of the unending battle between Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and the traditionally accepted Christian story of creation. Scientist or not, devotee or not, a Catholic was compelled by faith or convention to accept the idea that mankind and life on Earth exists as the result of the direct action of God and not random chance. The Theory of Evolution is still widely challenged and certainly not universally accepted or popular as it contradicts the literal story of creation.

What this means is that were Pouchet’s model to be proven correct it would strike a blow in favor of Evolution, further suggesting that Mankind may have simply evolved from microbes and maggots which spontaneously generated themselves out of a pile of organic matter. This contention, by extension, would suggest that the story of creation was false, or at least potentially false, and furthermore could be used to argue that God himself might not exist as life could have created itself. By contrast Pasteur’s experiments which seemed to disprove spontaneous generation are in line with current thinking and support the far more popular and accepted world view that mankind and all life was created by God and could not simply happen at random.

So while we can now look back on this and say that Pasteur was right and that Pouchet‘s experiments obviously had flaws in them, was that really what decided this controversy? The answer, at least in the short term, is no. Popular opinion and popular support for Pasteur himself undoubtedly contributed to the acceptance of his conclusions. Collins and Pinch would have us believe that this is always the case and that facts and reason are irrelevant. Giere on the other hand would certainly argue that what matters is that Pasteur was right, as were his methods, and the fact that it coincided with popular opinion was coincidental. Giere would argue that in the end the truth wins out and had Pasteur’s conclusions later proved to be false upon further study, the truth would prevail in the end.

An excellent example of this can be observed in the comparisons of the Geocentric and Heliocentric models of our solar system. For more than a millennia Ptolemy’s Geocentric Model of the universe was accepted as fact. It was in line with popular opinion and there was not a better model to explain what had been observed. It was not until Copernicus and Galileo came along with the heliocentric model that this opinion changed. Now in support of Collins and Pinch, even when this superior model was suggested Galileo was persecuted for his assertions at first. However in support of Giere, Galileo was later proven correct and his conclusions won out in the end as popular opinion shifted.

So in conclusion, are Collins and Pinch justified in their claim that facts and reason do not settle most scientific controversies? Or, in other words, who is right? Giere or Collins and Pinch? The answer lies in how you define the word “settle.” Collins and Pinch are correct in all of their assertions that persuasion and popular opinion are more important in determining what theory or conclusions are accepted, at least in the short term. But does that mean the controversy is settled, or merely that one side is winning the battle? At any given time or place whether a thing is believed to be true is just that, a measure of how successful you are at getting people to believe you are correct. What people believe is what defines their reality and if an idea conflicts with their perception of reality they can readily ignore or reinterpret data which does not conform to their world view.

Thus while Collins and Pinch are correct, they are short-sighted in their conclusions. I would argue, as would Giere, that any conclusions, models, theories, or assertions which by chance or coincidence are not actually true from an objective view will not stand the test of time, e.g. they are not settled. Therefore what Collins and Pinch claim is relevant in the short term and important to note when separating good science from bad; societal acceptance of bad science does not negate the existence of good science. Scientists often face the challenge of changing public opinions and beliefs. History is full of flawed theories either from bad science, or good science which simply had incomplete information from which to form their models and hypotheses. These are followed by other examples of better science succeeding and superseding them. In any case few things can ever be absolutely proven and while popular belief both in the 1860s and today says that spontaneous generation does not happen, it is plausible that such a phenomenon could exist and we simply do not yet understand the exact conditions which are requisite for such genesis. Collins and Pinch may be right that persuasion and popularity may determine what is accepted as truth, but in the end, when the distortions of contemporary thinking are swept away and only the facts remain, it will be the facts themselves which reveal the absolute truth.

------------------------
The photo of Leif was taken December 20, 2004 in Manhattan, Kansas.