COVID-19 Conspiracies

Posted on April 25, 2020 by James Cross

Josh Mitteldorf at Aging Matters has a series of posts with some bizarro views on COVID-19. First, he argues that we have hugely overreacted to COVID-19. That was written ten days ago when about 2,000 people per day were dying in the United States from it and they were digging trenches for temporary burials in New York. We are now over 50,000 deaths in a little more than a month. Despite his argument that we are overreacting, he then in two additional posts argues that COVID-19 might have the result of genetic tinkering at either at the Wuhan Institute of Virology or at the American virology lab at Fort Detrick. Or, even more bizarrely, the United States has been working with the Chinese on bioweapons research. He elaborates the theory in a third post.

I’ve liked many posts, primarily on aging,  on the Aging Matters blog, but I do think he may have jumped the shark with some of these recent posts.

Is there any merit to these claims?

I would say some but not enough to persuade me. It is easy to string together some facts, conjectures, and theories, draw some tenuous connections and come up with a superficially persuasive theory.

It is true that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been doing research with bats and coronaviruses. It is in the area of the world when human and bat contact is common, because people extract guano from bat caves for fertilizer and bats are caught and sold for human consumption. Naturally they would be working with bat viruses. Scientists there also have apparently engaged in some genetic manipulation of coronaviruses.  If we combine those facts with some miscellaneous facts and interpretations from elsewhere, we can generate a full-blown conspiracy theory.

Fact Check has thoroughly debunked the claims. Peter Daszak has been working with the Wuhan Lab said in an interview.

Look, first, the idea that this virus escaped from a lab is just pure baloney. It’s simply not true. I’ve been working with that lab for 15 years. And the samples collected were collected by me and others in collaboration with our Chinese colleagues. They’re some of the best scientists in the world. There was no viral isolate in the lab. There was no cultured virus that’s anything related to SARS coronavirus 2. So it’s just not possible.

And like you say, it’s really a politicization of the origins of a pandemic, and it’s really unfortunate. The stories, as President Trump said he’s been hearing, have been around since day one of the outbreak, and they’re around in every outbreak. Every single outbreak of a novel virus, somebody somewhere says, “Well, this has been manufactured in a lab.” In fact, a few weeks ago, when this started circulating, I googled ”HIV is man-made.” Do it yourself and see. There are people out there who still believe this is a bioengineered virus that spread around the world. It’s just really unfortunate. And I don’t really know why these conspiracy theories get such traction. I think the people just have trouble understanding what’s going on on the planet.

Are there strands of identical genetic material between HIV and COVID-19? This is a key part of the theory. No. The complete genome of both HIV and COVID-19 have been identified and there is a software program that can look for matches. “Per BLAST, ‘no significant similarity was found’. In plain English, SARS-CoV-2 is not made of the bat coronavirus and small bits of the HIV virus”.

Are there similarities between HIV and COVID-19. Yes. They are both viruses with “have a glycoprotein envelope. Even though if they belong to two completely different families – HIV is a lentivirus while SARS is a coronavirus – the two viruses are bound to have ‘something’ in common”.

So I would still not say the possibility that COVID-19 escaped from a lab is zero. I would just say the odds are much better that it arose naturally from a mutated bat virus. To quote Daszak: “And we estimate there are 1.7 million unknown viruses in wildlife, so there’s a lot of diversity out there that could emerge in the future.” That’s a lot of rolls of the dice that could produce a virulent flu.

Adding to the conspiracy theory is an ABC News report that ““Concerns about what is now known to be the novel coronavirus pandemic were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), according to two officials familiar with the document’s contents.” November was well before anybody had identified a new contagion. So, how did they know? The report, however, specifically does not say that Intelligence knew that whatever was happening in Wuhan in November was a coronavirus.

That Intelligence could pick up signs of a epidemic before it comes to attention of authorities is not at all surprising. I believe trend analyses on Google searches can often provide warning of normal flu outbreaks. There is also the Kinsa thermometer which has been used to track trends here in the United States. In a country like China, likely all or most Internet and phone traffic is tracked. So Chinese Intelligence would likely have known about it from key words in social media, emails, and chats and, if they knew about it, most likely we would have known about if our Intelligence is any good.

I’ll grant one thing about a possible conspiracy if we are looking for deliberate intent. If anybody wanted to disrupt the United States they could hardly have picked a better way to do it with this particular administration at this point in time.

What we have is almost a perfect storm of a viral agent that requires governmental action, coordination, and resources guided by science hitting a administration run by ignoramuses and completely inept at doing anything besides lining their own pockets.

Why would the culprits be the Chinese who the need the markets in the United States? There are any number of others who would have more interest in disrupting the United States – Iran, Russia (who seems somewhat mysteriously unmentioned in all of this). And what better place to release the virus than Wuhan where the blame could be placed on nature or the Chinese.

Just saying.

Posted in Uncategorized | 18 Comments

Rubber Hands

Posted on April 10, 2020 by James Cross

This is tough to see when some completely accepted bit of science seems to be in error.

Apparently the Rubber Hand Illusion experiment may have been wildly misinterpreted.

In the illusion synchronous brush strokes on a participant’s concealed hand and a visible fake hand can give the impression of illusory sensations of touch and of ownership of the fake hand. The paper has been widely cited and is a sort of foundation on thinking about how people perceive their bodies.

The problem is that the illusion may result from suggestion. What’s more, suggestion may be skewing results in numerous other psychological experiments. Hypnosis, known formally since the 18th century and used by shamans for thousands of years before that, still isn’t understood. Nor is the power of suggestibility and placebos.

 

Posted in Consciousness | 7 Comments

Does Science Need Metaphysics?

Posted on April 5, 2020 by James Cross

I’m going to say no, but let me explain before any philosophers (armchair or otherwise) jump on my answer.

Metaphysics is philosophy.  Science is, well, science. At one time, these two fields were not far apart. It could be argued that the divide between them didn’t really come until the last few hundred years. In ancient times, knowledge was knowledge. Knowledge might be about different things but there was a sort of seamless blending of knowledge about one thing with knowledge about other things. Aristotle, the father of philosophy  who wrote on almost everything, is sometimes cited as the “last person to know everything”. This was possible not only because the amount of knowledge was more limited but also because the methods and domains of knowledge were not distinct. The same methods used to address problems in philosophy could be used in biology or physics. If one understood the methods, one could apply them to any field.

Metaphysics itself is a branch of philosophy . It “is the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality”. Metaphysics works using logic and reasoning to deduct an understanding of the world. In Aristotle’s time, this was the method of philosophy and it was the method of science.

Science in our time, of course, needs to use logic and reasoning too, but it works primarily by measuring relationships in the world and inducing an understanding of the world from the relationships. Let me repeat this again. Science measures and discovers relationships. It creates models to understand the world through induction with the relationships it discovers. The measurements and relationships are not subjective but are shared within a community of other scientists that are theoretically able to make the same measurements and discover the same relationships because common measuring techniques are used.

Where is science on the question of the  “fundamental nature of reality”? Most people without hesitation would say science is materialistic or physicalistic. Many scientists would say they are materialists. For most of them, materialism is the opposite of the supernaturalism, the opposite of believing in things that can’t be measured. Most idealists think modern science is materialistic. Bernardo Kastrup, probably one of the leading idealist of this time, sees the connection.

The popularity of materialism is founded on a confusion: somehow, our culture has come to associate it with science and technology, both of which have been stupendously successful over the past three centuries. But that success isn’t attributable to materialism; it is attributable, instead, to our ability to inquire into, model and then predict nature’s behavior.

Kastrup has this much right. What contemporary science is about isn’t the fundamental nature of reality. It is about measuring and predicting. Calls for a post-materialist science, such the The Manifesto for Post-Materialist Science, or Phillip Goff’s calls for new scientific methods, as in Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, are off the mark. But so is any scientist who think that a materialistic worldview is the only possible scientific worldview.

Science is anti-metaphysical. It doesn’t care about the ultimate nature of what it is observing and measuring. Its models, its particles, forces, and fields, are not models of fundamental reality. They are useful abstractions that provide a common language for discussing relationships and measurements nothing more. They are useful until better ones come along but they are not descriptions of the reality.

Some may object that a sort of anti-metaphysical, pragmatism is a form of metaphysics. Well, perhaps, it is. But, if it is, it is a metaphysics that doesn’t care about the fundamental nature of reality, that maybe considers it a pointless question.

Posted in Consciousness, Philosophy | 38 Comments