Possibly. I was thinking about the subjective experience of the mind though.Originally Posted by MarkBastable
Possibly. I was thinking about the subjective experience of the mind though.
Are you sure that your position is not based on 'faith'?
The reason I ask that is because it seems that you are too quick to explain away something Paulclem mentioned about his friend in India.
It is the sort of thing that I would expect a Christian to do if I said that I found Jesus' tomb or told a Muslim the Quran was wrong in some way.
I am not a member of these Abrahamic faiths and I am not trying to shake your faith in science to get you to join them or any other group, but I just want to suggest that there is no need to explain things away so quickly.
Last edited by YesNo; 12-30-2010 at 08:59 AM. Reason: typo
I simplified things by using examples which are easy to calculate probabilistically. The method remains the same, it's just harder to translate more personal 'fortune-telling' into probabilities -- especially since they can often be ambiguously interpreted.
Anyway, I'm not telling you that I know it was all mere coincidence, I certainly wasn't there and I don't know the exact wording, so I can't make a final judgement. I just wanted to make a point about contrasting isolated data -- which can seem extremely impressive on its own -- with the context of all the occasions when it fails.
Yeah I'm sure it's not based on faith, and your implying of me having faith in science is misguided. My intention wasn't to 'explain away', though I admit it might have seemed like it. Much rather, I wanted to offer a convincing, alternative explanation; what people do with it is their business.
My position is not based on faith because I just showed that there's a perfeclty valid, scientific explanation for very uncanny coincidences -- if they happen isolated to random people at a random time. In order to get conclusive evidence, the individual that approached Paulclem's friend would have to be able to produce statistically significant results over a sample of several attempts. Or the one prediction would have to be so staggering that the odds of it being true by accident were extremely small, as in 1 in billions, say.
There are two problems here, let me elaborate:
1) Paulclem seems to imply that science's methods are incapable of making sense of 'anecdotal evidence', and thus, there could be good reasons for believing in things science hasn't (yet) validated. That's wrong because anecdotal evidence isn't just impractical, it's almost always insufficient. An exception proving the rule: If a stranger approached me, asking me to think of a eleven-digit number, and he then guessed correctly what I'm thinking of, the coincidence would be so vast that I'd comply and grant him psychic powers.
By the way, it doesn't have to be that impressive. In fact, even being able to guess right what number from 1-10 someone is thinking of 2 out of 10 times on average is extremely impressive and definitely works as statistical evidence if the individual keeps that average over hundreds of answers. For even the sligthest supernatural bias, the right experiment with the right number of trials will give statistically significant results! So simply blaming an inadequacy of the scientific method is wrong and doesn't give any more credence to claims like astrology -- which, if we switch numbers with character traits and other variables, works around the same statistical lines we've been discussing.
2) People often forget about actual implications of what they believe in. If astrology/homeopathy/psychicism is true, this would mean there exists a whole new kind of force. It'd be a revolution in science (and no, that's no reason for scientists to dogmatically insist it's impossible; in fact, it's a reason for every scientist to try to be the first one finding evidence for it and become famous like Darwin and Einstein).
For instance, some people believe things like 'group consciousness' and psychic connections. The problem here is that these theories go against evolution -- a standart scientific theory. Since evolution is about the spreading of genes, not about some romantic ideal of species survival and cooperation, a thing like 'group consciousness' couldn't evolve gradually, it would be, 'irreducibly complex', to use Behe's intelligent design term. So what's more likely, some anecdotal data being a mere coincidence, or a wholly developed consciousness system being a mere accident -- for where else would it come from anyway?
Long story short: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Last edited by Dodo25; 12-30-2010 at 10:39 AM.
I agree that extraordnary claims need extraordinary evidence to change a theory or alter the worldview. That doesn't occlude the space for personal experiences which affect the microcosm of a person's life. Such events are globally insignificant, but personally important.
In fact I think many people harbour vews that would subvert the prevailing scientific worldview if they became mainstream - though I am making assumptions. I wonder what other think about that? My own are based upon my idiosyncrastic experience coloured by my attempts to make sense of it. I don' have a problem with this in that it runs alonside the strongly rational views that mainly colour my day to day expreriences. I feel I can't ignore them, though I am aware that I my understanding them better in the future may refute them as anything but natural occurrences or deluded experiences. Until that comes though, I need to keep an open mind in case they are mysterious. In the case of one man I met, the mystery is still with me 20 years later.
Interesting, I haven't thought about it that way. To me, the two are identical, yet what you're saying would explain a lot of inconsistencies in people's worldviews.
Haha, you're certainly right about that! 40% of Americans reject evolution. Then there's homeopathy, astrology, psychics, ghosts, religions, Mayan prophecies, gambler fallacies... I'd say more than 80% of 'Westeners' dearly hold views that go against science.
I don't see why there need be a problem with "group consciousness", if I understand that correctly, and evolution. The idea of "irreducibly complex" sounds like a code phrase for "I don't like it, therefore, it's bad". But maybe I just didn't understand what you wrote.
By "group consciousness", do you mean something like what James Cameron described in the movie Avatar?
I assume you have seen the movie. What did you think of it? I thought it was fantastic. It should have won Best Picture. I showed it to one of my relatives with fundamentalist Christian beliefs and I think he was offended by the idea of consciousness going from the humans into the avatars. I know he wanted to screw my head on right.
Creationists use 'irreducibly complex' in the sense of 'I don't understand it, therefore God created it'. Yet basically, it means if you take away any constituent that make up a certain system, the whole thing will break down. And if there's no way it could have evolved gradually, where each small step (mutation) represents an improval, it's unlikely to evolve (for the whole system would have to jump into place rightly arranged out of nowhere). The thing with 'group consciousness' is that it starts top-down, from the group. In evolution, changes happen from the bottom-up, at the gene level. So how do changes in one's own body suddenly produce some new entity encompassing others as well? It strikes me as highly dubious to even begin with, not to mention that there's no evidence for it anyway.
As for what exactly 'group consciousness' is, it might well be what you said about Avatar, it sounds similar. Here's a website that attempts to explain what it is: http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
But don't buy their propaganda!I've rarely seen so much nonsense crammed together. As I understand it, the link is the 'weak version' of group consciousness, some people go much further and assert that thoughts exist independently of individual minds in some Platonic realm..
Haha, I'm addicted to watching movies, yet I haven't seen Avatar yet. I've heard that it uses the 'find wisdom in nature/native people' cliche, which, if overdone, is quite annoying and unrealistic. But I need to see the movie first to judge, it definitely looks interesting.
Last edited by Dodo25; 12-30-2010 at 07:12 PM.
I heard in the car today that the constellations in the zodiac have changed. Basically, "they" are going to add a new one: Ophiuchus
I think it should be pronounced "o-fee-yuck-cuss", but that's just my regional peculiarity.
Here are the details: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...diac-sign.html
So that means I'm no longer a Sagittarius. I'm actually an Ophiuchus.
My wife has also corrected me about my Chinese horoscope. I thought I was a dragon, but she's the dragon. I'm the tiger.
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Last edited by Emil Miller; 01-18-2011 at 11:40 AM. Reason: Double posted due to too much red Burgundy.
"L'art de la statistique est de tirer des conclusions erronèes a partir de chiffres exacts." Napoléon Bonaparte.
"Je crois que beaucoup de gens sont dans cet état d’esprit: au fond, ils ne sentent pas concernés par l’Histoire. Mais pourtant, de temps à autre, l’Histoire pose sa main sur eux." Michel Houellebecq.
Ophiuchus is a cool one. It's based on Asclepius, and I love Asclepius.
__________________
"Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six, I did. At first the brightness was overwhelming, but I had seen that before. I kept looking, forcing myself not to blink, and then the brightness began to dissolve. My pupils shrunk to pinholes and everything came into focus and for a moment I understood. The doctors didn't know if my eyes would ever heal."
-Pi
So does this mean people's character attributes changed as well, overnight? Or, if the constellations had been all wrong to begin with, doesn't that prove that believers are fools?
Well, the zodiac is just a kind of clock. So, what difference does it make if we add a 13 to it?
In my case, I could barely spell Sagittarius, so I'm not out much. How do you pronounce the new one anyway?
When it comes to "belief" in astrology, what does one actually have to believe in? You get a sign. Someone gives you some advice or a prediction. I get enough predictions and advice from fortune cookies to keep my imagination amused.
Haha yeah, I don't think anyone really knows. Least of all the actual believers!
By assuming that the signs say anything truthful about you, one assumes something along the lines of there being a force connecting arbitrary planet and star patterns (from the past) to a) ones DNA at birth (not at conception for some reason!) and b) to one's everyday happenings. This rises some interesting questions: How the hell does that work, why the hell does it work like that, and how the hell did the original inventor just figure out all these connections without doing large-scale double blind studies??
But of course, most people don't think that far. They see some vague prediction about their love life and believe it because it sounds somewhat hopeful.
Manolia how can say this! The ancient Greeks did they not create a great civilisation out of this ;-)
I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
Some letter of that After-life to spell:
And by and by my Soul return'd to me,
And answer'd "I Myself am Heav'n and Hell :"
Blog: Rubaiyats of Lote-Tree and Poetry and Tales
^^ So nice to see you back Lote : ]]
(you know i don't think that much about the ancient greeks)
Through the darkness of future past
the magician longs to see
one chance out between two worlds
'Fire walk with me.'
Twin Peaks
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