How Not to Prevent AIDS

How Not to Prevent AIDS (Crisis 4-20-12)

In July the U.S.will host the International AIDS Conference and there is promising news. The experts are now convinced that treatment is prevention. If those who are infected are identified quickly, treated so that their viral load is lowered, not only do they have a good chance of remaining relatively healthy longer, the risk that they will pass the virus on to others is greatly diminished. There has already been a dramatic drop in mother-to-child infection. Transmission among all risk groups—except men who have sex with men (MSM)—has dropped. However, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “MSM account for just 2% of the U.S. population, but accounted for 61% of all new HIV infections in 2009.” There were 28,800 new HIV infections among MSM in 2009, and “a 10% increase in the number of HIV diagnoses among persons aged 15-19 years and a 33% increase among persons aged 20-24 years.”

Why is this happening when HIV is a totally preventable infection?

The Case Against Kids

The Case Against Kids (The New Yorker 4-9-12)

In “Why Have Children?: The Ethical Debate” (M.I.T. Press), Christine Overall tries to subject that decision to morally rigorous analysis. Overall, who teaches philosophy at Queen's University, in Ontario, dismisses the notion that childbearing is “natural” and therefore needs no justification. “There are many urges apparently arising from our biological nature that we nonetheless should choose not to act upon,” she observes. If we're going to keep having kids, we ought to be able to come up with a reason.

David Benatar, a professor at the University of Cape Town, also turns to philosophy to determine the ideal family size. He gives away his answer in the title of his book, “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence” (Oxford). The volume is dedicated to his parents, “even though they brought me into existence,” and to his brothers, “each of whose existence, although a harm to him, is a great benefit to the rest of us.” (It's fun to imagine what family reunions with the Benatars are like.)

Scientology's 'heretic': How Marty Rathbun became the arch-enemy of L Ron Hubbar

Scientology's 'heretic': How Marty Rathbun became the arch-enemy of L Ron Hubbard devotees (UK Independent 4-7-12)

Marty says he left the Church for two reasons. The first is what he calls the increasingly onerous financial demands it places on followers. The second is a series of personal disagreements with its leader David Miscavige, a charismatic former associate of Hubbard who has reigned over Scientology since the mid-1980s. Over the years, Miscavige has built ties to a string of Hollywood personalities. When Cruise married Katie Holmes in 2006, he was best man.

Metaphysical Kit--Kit Fine interviewed by Richard Marshall

Metaphysical Kit—Kit Fine interviewed by Richard Marshall
(3:00AM Magazine 3-23-12)

Metaphysics is the philosophical study of the general nature of reality. It asks questions like: what is the nature of space and time?; what is the relation between mind and body?; do abstract objects exist or is everything concrete? I believe that metaphysics is like mathematics in being a priori; it comes to its conclusions without the benefit of any particular experience but, in contrast to mathematics, it is concerned with the general categorical features of reality and not with the purely mathematical or 'structural' features. It is a mystery how we can acquire knowledge of this sort from the armchair and perhaps even a mystery how we can acquire mathematical knowledge from the armchair, but I am in little doubt that we can in fact obtain such knowledge.

At the very least, for many of the questions of interest to metaphysics-such as the existence of abstract objects-it is unclear how empirical inquiry of the sort with which we are familiar in science could be even remotely relevant. In my monograph The Limits of Abstraction, I did employ mathematics. But the mathematics there is in the service of metaphysics and of philosophy more generally. The questions ultimately of interest to me are philosophical, such as: what is the nature of numbers?; how do we refer to them?; how do we know they exist?.

Richard Dawkins, Unreasonable Atheist? by Robert Wright

Richard Dawkins, Unreasonable Atheist? by Robert Wright (The Atlantic 3-26-12)

But is Dawkins really pursuing our common goal in a reasonable way? At the Reason Rally he encouraged people not just to take issue with religious teachings, but to “ridicule” religious belief and show “contempt” for it. Now, suppose you're a conservative Christian in Tennessee, and a fellow conservative Christian is trying to convince you of the merits of that anti-evolution bill. You're on the fence—you'd never really given much thought to whether your child's religious beliefs would be threatened by the teaching of Darwin. Then you hear Richard Dawkins, probably the most prominent Darwinian in the world, advocating displays of contempt and ridicule for your religion.

The Mighty Mathematician You've Never Heard Of--Amalie Noether

The Mighty Mathematician You've Never Heard Of—Amalie Noether (NY Times 3-26-12)

Albert Einstein called her the most “significant” and “creative” female mathematician of all time, and others of her contemporaries were inclined to drop the modification by sex. She invented a theorem that united with magisterial concision two conceptual pillars of physics: symmetry in nature and the universal laws of conservation. Some consider Noether's theorem, as it is now called, as important as Einstein's theory of relativity; it undergirds much of today's vanguard research in physics, including the hunt for the almighty Higgs boson. Yet Noether herself remains utterly unknown, not only to the general public, but to many members of the scientific community as well.

THE ATHEIST'S GUIDE TO REALITY by Alex Rosenberg--review by Philip Kitcher

THE ATHEIST'S GUIDE TO REALITY by Alex Rosenberg—review by Philip Kitcher (NY Times 3-23-12)

The book expands the campaign of militant modern atheism, the offensive launched against religion by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Rosenberg's broadsides attack a wider horizon. Since atheism is thought to be territory already secured, the targets now in view are the Big Questions, questions about morality, purpose and consciousness that puzzle softheaded people who muddle over them. Science brings good news. The answers are now all in. This conviction that science can resolve all questions is known as “scientism”—a label typically used pejoratively (as by Wieseltier), but one Rosenberg seizes as a badge of honor.

The evangelical scientism of “The Atheist's Guide” rests on three principal ideas. The facts of microphysics determine everything under the sun (beyond it, too); Darwinian natural selection explains human behavior; and brilliant work in the still-young brain sciences shows us as we really are. Physics, in other words, is “the whole truth about reality”; we should achieve “a thoroughly Darwinian understanding of humans”; and neuroscience makes the abandonment of illusions “inescapable.” Morality, purpose and the quaint conceit of an enduring self all have to go.

The conclusions are premature.

'A Universe From Nothing,' by Lawrence M. Krauss--reviewed

'A Universe From Nothing,' by Lawrence M. Krauss (NY Times 3-23-12)

And I guess it ought to be mentioned, quite apart from the question of whether anything Krauss says turns out to be true or false, that the whole business of approaching the struggle with religion as if it were a card game, or a horse race, or some kind of battle of wits, just feels all wrong—or it does, at any rate, to me. When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for every­thing essentially human. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn't, but it had to do with important things—it had to do, that is, with history, and with suffering, and with the hope of a better world—and it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, with all that in the back of one's head, to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don't know, dumb.

Sexual assault an intractable problem across the country--Cover Up at Notre Dame

Sexual assault an intractable problem across the country—Cover Up at Notre Dame Alleged (Naitonal Catholic Reporter 2-26-12)

The most recent issue of Notre Dame Magazine includes a long piece called “Anything but clear,” about sexual assault at the university, my alma mater. Yet its 3,936 words do not include these two: Lizzy Seeberg. She was the 19-year-old freshman at St. Mary's College in Notre Dame, Ind., who committed suicide in the fall of 2010 after accusing a University of Notre Dame football player of sexual assaulting her.

“The number of sexual misconduct allegations in the 2010-11 academic year was consistent with past averages,” the alumni magazine story says near the top, “but a course of events drew widespread attention at Notre Dame and elsewhere.”

End of sentence, end of paragraph, and end of story; nowhere else does the piece even obliquely allude to what these mysterious events might have been.

Nowhere in the article, either, does it explain that the revamped assault policy it describes was negotiated as part of a settlement agreement with the federal government after the Seeberg case led the civil rights office of the Department of Education for the first time in at least 30 years to launch an investigation without waiting for a formal complaint to be filed.

Do advances in neuroscience give the lie to free will? by Julian Baggini

Do advances in neuroscience give the lie to free will? by Julian Baggini (Financial Times 3-9-12)

Advances in neuroscience have given the free will deniers new impetus. The ace in the pack is the work of the late Benjamin Libet, which neuroscientist Sam Harris says in Free Will shows that “some moments before you are aware of what you will do next … your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this 'decision' and believe that you are in the process of making it.” For the likes of Harris, evidence like this shows that the absence of free will is now scientific fact, not philosophical theory.

But as other new books on the same issue show, it's far more complicated than that. Michael Gazzaniga, one of the world's leading neuroscientists, also acknowledges the soundness of Libet's research, yet his answer to his book's eponymous question Who's in Charge? is that you are. Then you have philosopher Tamler Sommers not disputing that free will is an illusion but arguing in Relative Justice that ideas such as moral responsibility are not as threatened by this as much as we might fear. Finally, there is the eminent psychologist Roy F Baumeister, with the aid of science journalist John Tierney, making a powerful case for the Willpower of his book's title, which almost completely bypasses the whole free will debate. What's going on?