William has taken exception to the current state of science and its ‘overreach’.
He claims, “IMO, all that is left of materialism/physicalism/naturalism is really nothing more than a hidden (even subconscious) anti-theistic agenda.”
This is a thread for William to guide us in a detailed exploration of the alternatives, their mechanisms, how we might test them and how we might benefit from them.
William, we can use statistical methods like Bayes’ Theorem or LaPlace’s induction to examine the statement “Ghosts do not exist” and guess what, we’re very very confident that they do not . it is true. Functionally confident. Possibly > UPB confident. Now science being awesome and not made by you can of course correct that should conflicting data come along.
Only with an ID mindset could you list triumphs of Naturalism as arguments against naturalism.
Let’s go the only kind of experiment ID does, a thought experiment:
For all the phenomena we know, what percentage do you think fall into each bucket:
1) Things that can be explained naturalistically
2) Things that can’t be explained naturalistically or otherwise
3) Things that have non-naturalistic explanations
4) Other categories (please explain).
I’ll go first (personal estimates)
1) 99.9%
2) 0.01%
3) 0%
Bruce,
Bwahahahaha…
P.S. Richard, check your math. 99.9 + .01 = 99.91. 🙂
keiths,
Thanks.
2) 0.1%
Er, my eyes are old and weak is it?
I’ve argued elsewhere that methodological naturalism is a philosophical mistake and a poor tactic in the ongoing battle against ID and other forms of pseudoscience.
But as a purely practical matter, MN has worked just fine so far as a way of doing science. There’s a simple reason: The difference between MN and other more inclusive methodologies matters only if
1) someone discovers a phenomenon that actually requires a supernatural explanation, or
2) the inclusion of supernatural hypotheses causes science to advance faster than it would otherwise.
William writes:
How embarrassing that William can’t name one scientific discovery that requires a theistic explanation (category #1 above), and the only examples he names from category #2 are ideas that were readily accepted by mainstream science when the evidence accumulated.
Also, methodological naturalism has never been mandated by law (except perhaps in the Communist world). If other methodologies are so much more fruitful, why aren’t we being blown away by the discoveries made by the renegade scientists who adopt them? Why is ID “research” in such pitiful shape if it is unbound by the shackles of MN?
keiths,
Ironic that William claims to advance pragmatics / “what works” when MN is the only thing that has been demonstrated TO work.
William,
You speak of science’s caution in embracing new ideas as if it were purely a bad thing. It’s actually one of science’s greatest strengths.
If the goal were to adopt true new ideas as quickly as possible, then the best strategy would be to believe everything, with no reservations. Then every correct hypothesis would be embraced the moment it was conceived.
Why don’t we follow this wonderful strategy? The answer should be obvious. In no time at all, we would be buried in crap. Incorrect hypotheses outnumber correct ones by a huge margin. Time and resources are finite, so we have to limit the number of incorrect hypotheses we entertain.
If your methodology is too loose, you get buried in crap. Too tight, and you fail to make the advances that come with revolutionary new ideas. Scientists compromise, and the compromise has been spectacularly successful.
You’ve offered no evidence that your looser methodology would be better. You have focused only on hypotheses that later turned out to be correct, while neglecting all of the crap hypotheses that turned out to be incorrect, but that your methodology would have welcomed with open arms.
Scientific rigor is a good thing, even when it delays the acceptance of true hypotheses, because it prevents even more time and energy from being wasted on crap.
In technical terms, it increases the latency, from proposal to acceptance, of new hypotheses; but what it sacrifices in latency it more than gains back in bandwidth, by wasting fewer resources on garbage hypotheses and leaving more to be spent on the promising ones.
keiths,
Reminded me of this:
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T69TOuqaqXI
Richard,
I hope William will watch that video.
God knows (so to speak), he could use a little more skepticism in his life.
If he had been a little more skeptical, he might have avoided writing two of his books, of which he now says:
Or his third book, Instant Enlightenment. From an exchange we had with William last year:
William:
Richard:
William:
Richard:
keiths:
Your ‘methodology’ doesn’t seem to have worked very well for you, William.
@ Keiths
I think this is the link to the exchange you cite.
@ Rich
Excellent video.
@ William
I do hope you can find time to watch it. It seems to have been written for you.
Alan,
Isn’t my link working for you? It works for me.
It works but takes me to an OP written by WJM with no comments. My link goes straight to the exchange you quote. What I was really trying to find was this oeuvre Instant Enlightenment. I tried searching Lulu Books but all I can find is a fantasy colouring book.
Oh, I see. You were talking about the third link in my comment, not the second, but the link you gave goes to the same place as my second one, which is actually working. Hence the confusion.
Anyway, I figured out the problem with the third link and fixed it.
FYI, the first link below is the broken one and the second link is the working one. The only difference is the cpage number. It appears that the number of comments per page has changed. It’s now 100; did it used to be 50?
If so, there are probably a lot of old comments with links that are now broken due to bad cpage numbers. WordPress should ignore the cpage number and just use the comment number to identify comments, but apparently it doesn’t.
Alan,
Instant Enlightenment it is no longer for sale on Lulu (or anywhere else, as far as I know).
I’d be happy to send you a copy (it’s a PDF, if I remember correctly) if William will grant me permission to do so.
As I have reiterated many times here, my methodology has worked extremely well for me – far surpassing anything I had ever hoped to accomplish through it. In the beginning I had every expectation that it would fail. All along the way I had every expectation that at some point the “coincidences” and bizarre chains of events would revert back to the “norm”. I’ve even described that success both generally and in some specific instances.
I really don’t understand where you get the notion that it hasn’t worked out for me.
keiths said:
No, I don’t. Never even said anything remotely like it. Most of the rest of your comment stems from this straw man.
I never advocated a “looser methodology”. I advocated what is a conceptually different kind of methodology, one that doesn’t impose and invite a priori metaphysics to generate problematic narratives and paradigms.
No, I mentioned a few crap theories that were later discarded as crap, but only after being more or less embraced by the scientific community because they fit the narrrative – in some cases, they were demanded by the narrative.
My methodological pragmatism only welcomes that which can be shown to work, and only replace other models if they work better. I don’t see how that could possibly be a case of welcoming “crap” into science.
That would be relevant had I argued against scientific rigor.
Actually, now that I’ve gotten to this point of your post, I can see it’s nothing but a series of straw men built upon a straw man.
Yet you have not shown that Psi is real, nor that it is possible to talk to the dead or heal cancer with the power of the mind yet you welcome those.
Richardthughes said:
Calling a process “MN” doesn’t mean that what is actually working in that process is the “naturalism” aspect of it. As example after example has shown, it is the pragmatism of what works that eventually trumps whatever blind alleys the metaphysical narrative leads science down – whether that narrative is materialist or theistic.
IOW, yes, the only thing that has actually worked in keeping science on track is the pragamtic aspect of it. Naturalism offers nothing but an increased capacity to go astray and generate appealing narratives that the establishment is loathe to let go of when a better model – especially one that seems to contradict their materialist views – comes along … such as the big bang.
Then it’s a good thing that I never claimed that I could show that any of that is real.
BruceS said:
No, I don’t think science actually progress through MN, but rather through MP. MP eventually trumps any naturalist narrative. The history of science is really nothing but a long line of false metaphysical narratives. Science only achieves progress because of the pragmatic restrictions on its activities. Otherwise, it’d just be another esoteric philosophy without much use at all.
Causal closure is a tautology that can only be considered valid if one utterly ignores or dismisses the testimony of billions of people throughout time and assumes that everything that occurs and has been reported to occur can be explained via a naturalist narrative.
I think causal closure would have a hard time explaining the human capacity to generate, for all practical purposes, unlimited functionally specified complex information on demand, virtually instantaneously, via any remotely plausible naturalist narrative.
William, all of your ‘what works’ examples have been MN based. Moreover, the method that works is the method that works is a tautology.
Watch the video, William. You need it more than most.
So science actually follows a path that you approve of, but is mislabeled?
Lucky for us, science is steered by results rather than by philosophy or ideology. And has been since at least Galileo.
Now perhaps you could leapfrog the 211 year old ID movement and suggest some pragmatic ways to investigate things you believe are being neglected.
Hi William.
Looking at the link from a year ago that Keith supplied and Alan updated, I see the content of the conversation really has not changed, there are just fewer people participating.
That’s kind of sad, I think.
All the best.
Please note that in keiths lengthy post above, he quotes characterizations that others made about my mental state and/or motivations as if they were evidence against my views that ultimately I manifest my own reality, or that I have done so in a successful manner.
First, how others characterize me is not evidence of anything except what is going on in their mind.
Second, as I explained in that thread, you are attempting to dress me down for views you apparently do not understand, or else you would know how silly your objections and characterizations are. It takes more than some excerpts out of that book to understand my views, especially when I begin the book, in the preface, by stating:
The book was written for those that already had experience and understanding of the concepts I was writing about. The idea that we can simply consciously wish for a thing and make it happen, and that if a person cannot use their “mind powers” in such a way falsifies the model, demonstrates a complete lack of understanding about the subject matter.
I think that pretty well covers things.
FFS, Mindpowers.
1) Do you still believe this?
2) If you do, please use mindpowers for good. Also I’d like another Aston Martin. I bet you would to. Why haven’t you got one then? Or why is there suffering, hunger etc.?
So to recap, science needs a reformation because although all its successes came within the framework of MN and nothing has been scientifically explained without MN (although many things have been examined), MN is bad for science. All the examples William gives of MN working just show how bad MN actually is. Full disclaimer, William is a functional naturalist / materialist.
To be fair, I think William has said you can’t use mind powers to get any arbitrary thing.
Best I can determine from his writing, you can only use mind powers to convince yourself that whatever happened was the result of making it happen.
Man I love that video! I’ve bookmarked it 🙂 Very well done.
*high fives*
I removed that book from sale at Lulu because it no longer expresses my views entirely accurately. And no, I prefer it doesn’t get spread around to other people for that reason, which is why I removed it from Lulu in the first place.
After further logical analysis, I now hold that there are indeed intrinsic limitations to to creative capacity, both universally and per identity. I don’t hold that they have anything to do with physics, but are instead limited by certain logical and necessary constraints. These are inherent logical/mental constraints, along the lines of not being able to manifest a 4-sided triangle and not being able to make GCT “good” simply by willing it to be so.
That’s pretty deep, William.
William, now:
William, in Instant Enlightenment:
And:
Those are your words, William.
Isn’t it amazing what one can accomplish, freed of the staitjacket that is MN?
Excuse me if I juxtapose the bolded statements.
I LIEKED TEH QUANTUM WOO TEH BESTS.
William’s analysis of MN’s effects vs. MP’s effects appears to be fairly simple. Any problem is caused by MN, any success is caused by MP. Scientists, of course, are hopelessly trapped by MN, but always escape via MP anyway, and only stick with MN because they’re anti-theist.
Well, it works for him.
It doesn’t work scientifically, since it merely assumes the desired result, but who cares about science’s anti-theist “standards”? By William’s assumptions, science is always wrong when it disagrees with William, so it hardly matters when it disagrees with William.
Works for him.
Glen Davidson
William, or Gregory, or Behe, or Dembski, or Hunter, or Axe, or any of the other luminaries of the ID movement, could bring all this whipping to a halt simply by providing an example of a research proposal that is free of the constraints of MN.
The people calling for the dialog should open their mouths and speak. I’m not aware that words on the internet are expensive. Nor are there thought police at this site.
So when will we see an example of some deep proposal?
The Amazon blurb for William’s book Unconditional Freedom:
William apparently doesn’t think that it’s “something worth reading” any more:
William,
This is why I say that your ‘methodology’ doesn’t work. Your life seems to be a repeating pattern of embracing new ideas wholesale and uncritically, preaching them from the rooftops, and then realizing some years later that you jumped the gun. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Why would anyone prefer your methodology to the spectacularly successful methodology already employed by science?
ID Research Proposal: To Determine Whether or not Design is Self-Evident. Research will consist of polling those not dedicated to sin and hatred of God as to whether or not they find Design to be self-evident in the world.
There, that’s really what ID’s “case” is anyway. Even determining that life is complex (which no one knew prior to ID), which is complete proof of Design, is merely a quantification of the obvious fact that life was designed, unless you’re just an evil sinner who wants to deny the Designer’s wrath at buggery and the like.
Glen Davidson
keiths said:
If my methodology’s purpose was to first find the one true idea and then preach it from the rooftops, you might have a point. Since my methodology’s purpose is to be able to freely adopt, change and discard theoretical models/ideas in pursuit of the goal of enjoying life as a good person, I’d say that my writing exactly illustrates that methodology, and the fact that I am enjoying life as a good person can only serve to support the conclusion that the methodology has at least apparently worked.
Ideas & arguments require more than just words, keiths. They require context.
William,
The question isn’t whether you get your jollies from employing your ‘methodology’. I’m sure you do, until you discover that you’ve jumped the gun and you have to start over yet again.
The question in this thread is whether science would benefit from adopting your ‘methodology’, and the answer is a resounding no. Can you imagine if scientists were actually wasting time on crap like the following?
William,
How does the context change the meaning of those words?
I read the entire book, and those quotes in context mean exactly the same as what they mean in isolation.
You really do, or at least did, believe that stuff. That kind of hyposkepticism is fatal to a scientific methodology.
So two books are no longer operative, and the third is withdrawn.
Would that other ID authors had your integrity.
But it leaves us wondering where you stand now.
I’d like to suggest that the meta framework that William works within only produces crap and holds onto it too long.
“Too long” does not need to be an extended period, of course.
Glen Davidson
I’ve already addressed this by pointing out that in the preface I explicitly stated that the book is not intended for those who are unfamiliar with or unpersuaded by the body of work on manifestation and affirmation that preceded it from other sources. The proper context is bigger than just that book; you cannot possible read just that book and have the context necessary to understand what I’m doing in it. Hence the preface.
In the manifestation/affirmation community, positive reinforcement coupled with inspirational technique is a common method for overcoming manifestation issues. Instant Enlightenment is more of an inspirational tract that is laced with subtle conceptual techniques to circumvent what is often a very difficult problem of focusing on negatives instead of on positives, one of which is the concept of thinking one is not “there” yet, not enlightened, not capable, not advanced, etc.
This is why I often use exclamation points and bolded type throughout the tract. When I say “there are no limits”, only an uninformed idiot would juxtapose that against “what works and what doesn’t” or the point that you cannot just wish a thing into existence as if they were contradictory. What every person in the manifestation community struggles with are the theoretical limits to manifestation, and that was one of the points of the book – set aside your concerns about what is possible because it only undermines the effort. Thinking that you cannot manifest X or Y because of Joe or the government or because most people are manifesting something else is setting up unnecessary internal conflicts and resistances.
Of course you cannot just “wish” a thing into existence. Of course most people face psychological issues when attempting to manifest – most people focus on what they do not have by “wanting” a thing, so manifestation is actually working against them. This is called resistance and focusing on lack in the community.
Once again keiths, as I’ve pointed out many times before, you take what I write and assume it means what it would mean if you said it. I’ve told you again and again that you and I have entirely different contextual frameworks. Even after I point this out and advise against such uncontextualized interpretation in the preface of the very tract you are quoting from, you do so anyway, and after I correct you again, you insist you have the meaning right as if I don’t know what I meant when I wrote what I wrote and even put up a disclaimer for the uninformed and the unpersuaded which you clearly are.
As far as the prior books, they can best be viewed as the philosophical path I have taken thus far. Of course there are models I have discarded, changed, invented, acquired along the say because that is the essence of my methodology, which I have reiterated over and over. I am not committed to ideology or any model whatsoever. I’m committed to living an enjoyable life as a good person.
That you call me to task for these things as if they reveal some sort of flaw in my views reveals – again – that you are considering my actions from the point of view of your own worldview, not mine. That I have dismissed those prior books and wouldn’t recommend them is evidence that I do exactly what I have said I do, according to my methodology. That I pulled that book off of Lulu because I’ve altered certain aspects of my worldview – once again – demonstrates that I am not committed to any particular model or worldview. Yet you try to insinuate that this is evidence that my methodology “isn’t working” – isn’t working by what method of judgement? Clearly, the only way to judge it as “not working” is if you judge it by some standard other than the one I have explicitly stated here many times – demonstrating that you fail to comprehend the context of what I write and you interpret my words and actions through an inappropriate lens.
My manifestation techniques and models are in a constant state of improvement. No, I no longer hold that anything is possible, but even in IE that was more of an inspirational technique for overcoming niggling problems than a claim of fact or truth – because, as you should know by now, I don’t make claims of ontological truths.
TLDR; some people have a habit of taking specific things others say, utterly ignoring the context, and use it to attempt to score “gotcha” points. I’m not going to explain it this thoroughly every time it occurs.