A question has come up in another thread about the term “evidence”, and what qualifies (and does not qualify) as evidence. This particular debate has come about when Elizabeth said, in relation to an ongoing description of my model of “how things work” (free will/psychoplasm), said:
The problem it seems to me, with your model is that a) there is no evidence to support it whatsoever and b) we have a supported model that works pretty well.
I then challenged that assertion about the state of evidence with:
Can you support your assertion that “there is no evidence to support it whatsoever”?
She responded:
No, and I will qualify: I am aware of no evidence to support it, and I speak as one fairly well acquainted with the empirical literature.
Which I found odd, since I had given testimony (or, as Robin later said, “claimed”) that this model apparently worked well for me, others I know, and had in this thread and the Free Will thread pointed ouit various other similar doctrines that are chock full of such testimony (or “claims”). So, I asked:
So, my testimony, and that of others through various media, is not evidence?
Unfortunately, Elizabeth has yet to respond to that question. However, Robin contributed his/her answer:
No. Claims are never evidence of what is being claimed; they are solely evidence that someone made a claim. Why? Because anyone can make a mistake or even lie.
I think this deserves its own thread, for reasons I think will become clear. Before responding to Robin, though, I’d like for others to weigh in on the question of if testimony (not in the court sense, but in they typical “claim” sense), through various forms of media, is evidence.
I have argued that in the principles of logic must be conserved if one wishes to maintain a rationally coherent/consistent worldview.
Only if you’re applying the consensual-empiricism definition/concept of “real” and “reality”, which would be a category error.
One could run an experiment where photons are experienced as behaving like waves; in another experiment, they behave like particles. Because models of “what photons are and how they behave” might appear to contradict each other based upon one’s overall reality-concept doesn’t mean that what is being experienced is contradictory under all possible models. Obviously, there are models where such experience of apparently contradictory behavior is not contradictory.
Often, what appears to be contradictory is only a limitation of the descriptive/explanatory model being used to compare and evaluate experience. That is, after all, what I’m proposing – an entirely different, all-inclusive model of “what is real”.
Granted that we are all inescapably trapped in our own experiential models of the world, if there is an objective reality beyond us which includes harmful phenomena there can be considerable value in knowing or at least classifying phenomena as what is real and not-real. Think of it as a quick-and-dirty application of the law of non-contradiction which we use to make sense of this presumed objective reality by classifying it (taxonomy as a survival tool): there is me and there is not-me, there is food and there is not-food, there is safe and there is not-safe.
“Real” and “not-real” are perhaps not the best terms to use. A dream, while we are experiencing it, can seem just as “real” as waking “reality”. However, if I dream of being attacked by a tiger I will (hopefully) wake up unscathed, the outcome of a similar experience in waking “reality” is unlikely to be so agreeable.
Since both experiences feel “real” subjectively but differ in their consequences that suggests a qualitative difference for which we need a different label.
For what it’s worth, I would suggest ‘model’ and ‘non-model’ . In the case of the tiger attack scenario, both the dream and the “real” event are experienced as “real” within the mental model but the outcome is different because the source of the experience is different. In the case of the dream, the source of the experience is within the model, whereas in the “real” event the source is a “real” tiger that exists outside the model. One is a model and the other a non-model experience based on the assumption that there is both a model and non-model reality which are different sources for what we experience.
On this question of your power-of-positive-thinking or “psychoplasmic” worldview my own reaction is to suspect an instance of the fallacy of selective reporting but I concede that I could also be quite wrong. The question then becomes, how do we find out which of the two possibilities is actually the case – assuming you want to know, of course.
William J Murray,
But you have a flaw that is insurmountable for your position and that is your belief that “free will” allows you to believe anything you wish.
Since someone who believes in “free will” could believe A = (~A), they lose their ability to use logic.
This is a contradiction that can’t be supported but it is not material, and thus not a part of “reality”.
This is a logical flaw existing only in the subject’s mind, that precludes investigating the world around him due to the inability to reason, which is what the acceptance of A = (~A) brings.
If you believe someone with “free will” cannot believe this, then that is something that destroys your argument about “free will which allows the freedom to believe anything”, and anything based on it.
In order to propose “what is real”, you have to be able to reason, and your unique position on “free will” precludes that.
Do you agree a person who wishes to have “free will” cannot believe in this one thing, that A=(~A)?
Then can you give an example of an apparent contradiction that your model can resolve, thereby adding new knowledge which would otherwise be unavailable?
Didn’t you say that what you’ve been saying isn’t an argument?
Ok. This is very interesting. This means that your worldview must, by necessity of the “all-inclusive model of what is real” you practice, abandon the principles of logic. This is because it will include many propositions that are in direct contradiction to each other. Of course, you were trying to deny this in the following exchange:
However, in order to give credence to your claim that somehow many of these *real* non-consensual, non-predictable, non-repeatable phenomena are NOT in direct contradiction to other *real* phenomena, you will have to show how this is actually possible. And note that I am obviously not talking about explanatory models being adjusted to accomodate new data, as you seemed to imply here:
This is an obvious and trivial insight that is at the basis of all scientific endeavor, but not at all what I am talking about, or what you seemed to be talking about when you brought up the law of non-contradiction in previous conversations.
So, to address this directly, let’s use the nice, obvious, real world example of some people, most prominently the members of Flat Earth Society, claiming that the planet earth is a flat disc or plane. Then there is most of the rest of the world claiming (backed up by lots of consensual evidence) that the planet earth is NOT a flat disc or plane. Please explain how under the “everything is real” worldview this is not a violation of the law of non-contradiction.
Is there any room in your model for anything being not real?
Him not liking it.
It depends on the potency of the LSD.
William J. Murray: “Often, what appears to be contradictory is only a limitation of the descriptive/explanatory model being used to compare and evaluate experience.”
So, if joe jumps from a very tall tree and lands on the ground, one descriptive/explanatory model of the result could say that he’s busted up like a light bulb that’s been hit with a sledge hammer, and another descriptive/explanatory model could say that he’s not busted up and is just faking the fatal injuries, and both descriptive/explanatory models would be real to you, eh?
What if Joe falls from a tree, say 60-70′, lands on the ground and isn’t busted up at all? Knocked out, but otherwise OK?
That actually happened and no one could explain it then…
Yes, but I was referring to another thread where I did make an argument.
LoL! Creodon’t can’t follow along….
In previious conversations, I argued that if one wishes to have a rationally consistent worldview, their beliefs must be logically extractable from their premises without contradicting each other.
In my model, “not real” only applies to supposed references that cannot even be imagined, like whatever “a 4-sided triangle” would refer to. A 4-sided triangle cannot even be imagined, so while the words are real and can be spoken, what they semantically refer to is not. In normal terminology, you can’t even dream or hallucinate or delude yourself into experiencing a 4-sided triangle. That which cannot be experienced even in the imagination is “not real”.
If your point is that the world either is, or is not, flat, I can counter that under some interpretations of quantum physics and multiverse theory, observers can individually (or in groups) collapse entirely different experiential universes according to their observational perspective. John Wheeler even went so far as to say that conscious observation collapsed an entire history of the universe in correlation to its perspective. Many physicists have held the view that the universe is ordered by mind in this way. Quantum eraser experiments can be interpreted to support the idea that quantum collapse can change historical subatomic events.
So, wherever a true contradiction between experiences would occur, the multiverse can simply branch off another version that comports with the offending view, compete with supportive context and history. In one branch, one group is proven right and the other group is demonstrated wrong, the second group being a psychoplasmic configuration of those people, while in the minds of the **actual** 2nd group, they experience being proven right over the first group, who in that branch are the psychoplasmic automatons.
I’m not claiming that is what actually occurs, I’m using it as an example or hypothetical model to show that apparent contradictions may only be limitations of perspective.
Moving on to the example of a person that falls a great distance, you might google “quantum immortality”.
Under “quantum immortality”, and some interpretations of quantum theory, no individual can come to “not exist”, even by death. Extrapolated out, though in such a situation you and others might experience me or another test subject as failing and being killed or horribly harmed, that is not necessarily what I will experience from my perspective, as multiverse iterations are generated to accommodate all potential outcomes.
So the idea that something is “not real” just because it appears to contradict what you believe exists, or even what you experience, could only be a limitation of perspective. What is consensually repeatable could be a very small subset of what is actually, really experiencable, and only appears to be “everything” by those that choose (or must) live within and only experience that small subset of the potential of all potential experience.
William-
You are forgetting who you are talking to. The evos here cannot understand what you post but it is entertaining watching them try…
Well, I don’t expect them to understand. I just expect them to provide occasional context/commentary by which I can explore views. It’s like having a running philosophical dialogue, even if it is largely with myself.
Joe
More amusing yet is you pretending you do understand it! LOL, I believe, is the approriate acronym.
An interesting story from my past: I was in a small car with my family driving down the highway when this care in the oncoming lane simply turned right in front of me. The only thought that ran through my head was “well, here we go”. I didn’t even have time to hit the brake. We slammed into him going 75 mph.
A few seconds of grogginess later, I looked around in the car. My son had been sitting in the middle in the back seat with no seat belt on, but he didn’t fly through the windshield. The only blood I saw was a drop coming out of my daughter’s nose, who had been looking out her window and apparently hit the window with her nose on impact.
I pushed my car door open and stepped out. We all stepped out. A lot of people at a couple of bars by the road (where the guy was turning into) couldn’t believe we all stepped out of the car. Our car was virtually crushed, but no glass in the entire car had even so much as cracked. I had bruised ribs from the steering wheel (no air bags, this was about 20 years ago), my wife had a cracked collarbone where the seat belt held her, and my daughter had a bloody nose. That we the extent of our injuries.
The other guy’s car – a much larger car than our little deathtrap Ford Festiva or Fiesta – had shattered glass all over. He had 2 broken legs and lacerations all over his body. My son got my attention and pointed about 50 feet behind us. It was my hat on the road behind us. There wasn’t any wind and all our windows had been rollled up. We still can’t explain how the hat got there. As we piled into the ambulance, I was thinking … in most other universes, we’re probably all dead or at least seriously injured. When I went to look at the car later, I couldn’t even figure out how we got out of the car after the crash it was so smashed up. How the heck does none of the glass even so much as crack?
Is this conversation still about evidence? I was going to make a comment, but we seem to have been derailed into another 3rd rate pseudophilosophical argument.
I don’t think it matters “if it is actually the case” as long as some such model is useful/practical. A model can be useful, even if it isn’t true.
IMO, the only way to determine if phenomena that doesn’t meet the scientific criteria of being universally* consensual, empirically predictable and repeatable is useful/practical to apply is to personally attempt to use various models that explain how to exploit such a feature of existence, and be open to honestly and appropriately considering the results thereof.
If my model didn’t apparently produce useful results, I would have ditched it long ago.
It’s still generally about evidence, because part of my discussion here is pointing out that how many people distinguish between “evidence” and “non-evidence” is really nothing more than a self-fulfilling ideological framework that organizes “evidence” in accordance with the ideology.
As in, Elizabeth’s original, flat statement “there is no evidence to support your model” .. which she later amended after I challenged her to support such a claim. Robin then changed his/her position that testimonial evidence was never evidence, except in a court of law where it was circumstantial. I have further pointed out that all evidence acquired is first-person, subjectively empirical, even if we classify a subset of that evidence as something else. All evidence about things we do not experience ourselves directly can only come to us via the statements and claims (testimony) of others; even a scientific paper is a form of testimony.
How people sort and categorize such testimonial evidence, and how they weigh it in various situations, depends on their ideology/worldview. Elizabeth an others here favorably weigh testimonial evidence that come with a certain kind of context – the context of purportedly being sifted through the scientific method and review process. There are certain media sources, authorities, and terminologies they have come to accept as valid (more or less) sources of information, and so are accepted as “evidence” in their assessments. Everything else (generally speaking) is not termed as “evidence”.
However, this isn’t really even true – it’s largely a faux construct that is used in argument to bolster a position. In every-day life, everyone accepts non-scientific and non-court testimony as evidence all the time. A very large portion of our construct of our existence has nothing whatsoever to do with “scientific sources”, but rather just people we more-or-less trust telling us stuff.
It is only when they tell us stuff that conflicts with what we already believe, or that we don’t want to believe, that we start pulling out the “scientific method” and “consensual empiricism” guns to defend ourselves with, which belies the fact (IMO) that what is really going on is largely ideological rationalization and confirmation bias.
Also, it’s about how one would evidence the reality-construct I’ve modeled here and elsewhere. You really evidence it the same way you’d evidence anything else – via personal experience, only you don’t do it through the particular subset of personal experience labeled “scientifically, consensually verifiable”.
Obviously it was because of your worldview!
Duh!
WJM:
If we’re still talking about evidence, then I would agree largely with a lot of what you say in your second paragraph above (though I don’t know what you mean by “subjectively empirical”). I think it’s very important in this discussion to distinguish between the evidence itself – the observation – and the way in which it’s communicated – which you’re calling testimony.
A personal example might be useful. I record mosses and liverworts for the British Bryological Society. The main data are what species occur where. The evidence for these data are my personal observations in the field and the spreadsheets I email to the recording secretary are the medium (testimony). Now say someone made a claim about the distribution of a particular moss, and cited my records as evidence. It’s still my observations that are the evidence, and what they are effectively stating is that they accept my evidence as being genuine and trustworthy.
This brings us to the question of the validity (accuracy and truthfulness) of the evidence cited. I might have misidentified a species and be wrong, or I might simply be lying. Science usually relies on the potential or actual verification of observations by another party to improve confidence that the evidence is valid. Often, the level of verification needed depends on the significance of the evidence. In my bryological recording work, new county records have to be backed up with a voucher specimen sent in that is verified by someone else. Other significant records or species easily misidentified would need vouchers too, but not multiple records of common species already recorded from the area. I could of course be lying about the location in which I found a species, but that’s usually taken on trust. But if I claimed to find a Sphagnum (bog moss) in a city centre car park, that record would probably not be accepted unless someone else validated it in situ.
You may be familiar with the saying “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”? My example above illustrates some of the validation and checks required for unusual observations.
What I would take issue with is your statement that:
“How people sort and categorize such testimonial evidence, and how they weigh it in various situations, depends on their ideology/worldview.”
I would argue that how people evaluate second & third-hand evidence should depend on the trustworthiness of the source and the use to which evidence is being put. I’d further argue that’s how most of us here do it. Invocation of ideologies isn’t necessary. If the source is believable and the consequence of the testimony being incorrect is small, then it makes perfect sense to accept it. You tell me it’s cold outside, and I’ll bring my jacket. If the source is dodgy and the consequence of the testimony being incorrect is large, then additional checks are needed. If a developer tells me that there isn’t a sensitive wetland chock-full of rare species on the site where he wants to build a mall, you can bet that I’ll check other sources. Where’s the ideology in this approach?
Now, you may be arguing that people have a tendency to believe sources that echo their existing ideas about something, and that may be true. But everyone would agree that’s an erroneous approach and another argument entirely.
That explains your brain damage.
Dishonest word games.
Whatever you say, scarecrow…
🙂
Do you know any honest word games?
But I digress, in what way is what William said a “dishonest word game”? Or are you just lashing out because you were caught with your junk exposed?
What does the evidence say?
William J Murray,
But your “rationally consistent worldview” is not possible to attain from your definition of “free will”.
You define free will as the ability to believe whatever you choose, which leads to contradiction.
If you believe A=(~A), you lose the ability to use logic.
So someone with free will cannot believe A=(~A) which is in contradiction to your statement that someone with “free will” can believe whatever he chooses.
Try to use logic if you truly “believed” A=(~A).
If your response is that someone who believes A=(~A) does not possess “free will”, that would be evidence in support of my position that says someone with “free will” cannot believe A=(~A), which means that someone with “free will” is NOT free to believe whatever he wishes.
Scrabble, if played according to the rules.
Constantly.
In the way that it’s dishonest.
Look who’s talking about junk being exposed and lashing out.
It supports what I’ve said.
Scrabble.
Edit: Note self: Must read all comments before replying.
Nope, the evidence says William was talking abpout something that he has presented as an argument. IOW the evidence says that you cannot follow along.
People cheat at Scrabble…
I agree. The question-begged problem is how one assigns “trust” to one’s source. Note how in Elizabeth’s response she said that she was familiar with the empircal literature, meaning – of course – the scientific, consensually-agreed and reviewed literature. How exactly did she think such a category of trusted source could possibly be used to evaluate a model proposed to be unavailable to such an evaluative process in the first place? Her reference to her trusted source was announed automatically, as if it could even in theory address the model I posited, which it cannot.
IOW, she trusts an arbiter of evidence that is embedded in a particular ideology of how evidence must be gathered and evaluated, and what “validated” or “falsified” means.
Additional checks of what? How one arranges by what model they will check their initial source is an indication of the structure of one’s ideology. You are getting the cart before the horse here. You can’t “check out the claim” unless you have a method of “checking out claims” already in place. What I am proposing is a model that defies Elizabeth’s (and some others here) model of just that : how to check a claim out – how to validate or falsify it, and indeed what “validation” and “falsification” mean.
The ideology that in all situations there is a single experiencable reality that is arbited by consensual agreement of facts that you can “find out” from trusted sources.
I don’t agree that is an erroneous approach, and there we have revealed the ideology you don’t recognize as ideology because you assume it as a de facto statement about the nature of reality and how to successfully navigate it.
“What if Joe falls from a tree, say 60-70′, lands on the ground and isn’t busted up at all? Knocked out, but otherwise OK?
That actually happened and no one could explain it then…”
It’s because you’re Superman, Joe. And you were wearing your XXL Old Navy ringer.
One thing you’ve amply demonstrated is that what IDiots say can’t be trusted to have anything to do with sanity.
LoL! The XXL is a Starter- anyone with normal vision can see the Starter star on the sweat-shirt.
I NOES I IS BLINDZ!!!
To be fair the shadows from your chins cut the light considerbly.
Did Richie really just say “To be fair”? Is that weak eye of yours directly connected to that weak mind?
Note how Creodant has even doubled-down on ideological bias by using a derogatory term and implying that my proposed metaphysical model is “not sane”.
I guess similarly “not sane” are physicists John Wheeler. Hugh Everett, David Deutsch, and (non-physicist) Christopher Michael Langan, once described as “the smartest man in America”, who published what is pretty much the same model in his “The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe” paper.
If you are not dealing with a frame of reference that can be arbited by consensual agreement of facts, then I’d suggest that the notion of “evidence” is meaningless. For example, I state that there is evidence that Miles Davis writes better music than Igor Stravinsky. This makes no sense. In this claim, the evidence – observations – are largely subjective and can’t be agreed on objectively by independent observers.
(You could of course make sensible appeals to evidence on some musical things like use of chord progressions, syncopated rhythms and so on.)
So, if I perceive a Leprechaun in my pocket who tells me what foods I should consume in order to cure my cancer, and I do so, and my cancer “goes into remission” afterwards, never to reappear, but that diet doesn’t work for anyone else who tries it; and this same sort of scenario occurs several times involving this Leprechaun and its advice, and no one else can see the Leprechaun and its advice doesn’t work for anyone else, then this evidence that the Leprechaun actually exists (as something) and is actually giving me good advice is “meaningless”?
I disagree. I think that such non-consensually-empirical evidence can be quite meaningful and extremely valuable. Just because I cannot prove it to others, and just because it doesn’t work for anyone else, doesn’t mean it is “meaningless” as evidence.
The evidence says that they are both dead and don’t write music- well maybe as ghost writers
Relativity- Perhaps it would be meaningless to those who cannot verify it. True, it does NOT mean it didn’t happen/ doesn’t exist.
Also perhaps the cancer just made you think it was a leprechaun, when actually it was a wood-fairy. And maybe that wood-fairy appeared due to the cancer-caused chemical imbalance in your system. And the advice was stuff you already knew, but was lost in the bowels of your mind, that the chemical imbalance brought forth from the depths of your white and gray matter.
It would be like John Travolta healing himself in “Phenomenon”.
Just sayin’
Joe G,
Since I consider it all “god” anyway, it doesn’t matter if the information comes from a regular medical doctor, a leprechaun, a burning bush or a voice from the sky; what matters is if the information works for me in my experience.
God moves in mysterious ways. I don’t confine those mysterious ways to only those which comport with a single, specific model.
Love that movie! And yeah, it could be just like that.
William J Murray,
That’s very true, but if the method you use is based on a model that leads to contradictions, then that method is useless.
Here I am talking specifically of your definition of “free will”.
Any conclusion drawn from a method based on it would not be supportable.
WJM:
Why should we be interested in what these authorities have to say on metaphysical matters? I’m not a physicist, but I don’t think there is any direct evidence for the multiverse, or the kind of ‘backward causation’ that Wheeler likes to envisage. It seems to have caught the imagination of physicists of a metaphysical bent. And they say something congenial to your worldview, so out they trot.
Cleverness and sanity – nor even simply being mostly right – are not inevitable mindfellows. Linus Pauling, one of the greatest biochemists of the last century, espoused some wacky ideas, but we can recognise the great stuff. With the scientific method comes skepticism, not just of uncongenial opinions, but of ALL opinions, however accurate this or that leprechaun may have proven hitherto. Trust is placed not in the person, but in the scientific method – because it works, a sufficient amount of the time to make it worthy of that confidence.
Before we had language, we relied upon hard-won experience. Then people started to ‘tell us stuff’. The most useful stuff was based upon the hard-won experience of others – a useful proxy for direct investigation. A lot of bullshit ideas were incorporated as real along the way – sacrifice 10,000 whelks and it will rain, that sort of stuff. But gradually, we learnt to distinguish the reliable and unreliable testimony. Not infallibly. There will always be snake-oil salesmen, frauds and self-deluding fools. But the ‘ideology’ you mistakenly accuse the scientifically-inclined of adopting is simply healthy skepticism – of everything. We have to employ some kind of heuristic to distinguish probably-real claims from probably-unreal ones. But to accuse us of being blinded by ideology – to the extent that we don’t even perceive it as ideology – is to misunderstand the role of skepticism. You wouldn’t understand – you are blinded by your ideology 🙂
When I questioned the relevance of your clarification of Libertarian Free Will, you said that it was to argue for “the practical application of this perspective.” I responded that; “One could make an argument about the practical application of Judaism being the one true religion and Christianity an apostate error (or vice versa). What would that prove?.” Your answer implied that you were not trying to prove anything.
So I find this discussion about evidence rather odd, considering your previous remarks re: proof.
I have no problem with this whatsoever. I’m all about what works. The problem is when it is referred to as supposedly the exclusive method for determining what evidence is useful, or what is “real”. When one believes that the scientific method (or, rather, consensual-empirical predictability and repeatability) is the final and only valid arbiter of what can be “sanely” considered “evidence” (or aspects of “reality”), and the final and only arbiter of what is “real”, then they are expressing a metaphysical ideology.
When being asked to consider a model of reality that is not limited to consensual predictability, and how one would gather and validate evidence in such a scenario, if one responds by insisting that the evidence be evaluated via the very methodology presumed to not be valid in such a case, it’s safe to say that ideology is doing some blinding in the discussion.
I’m not accusing the scientifically-inclined of anything; I’m pointing out the limitations of those who are scientifically-constrained.
I’m not sure what you consider to be the evidence in your example. If you tell me about your invisible leprechaun, then your statement is certainly evidence that you believe you have him in your pocket. If your “evidence” is the outcomes of his advice, then I wouldn’t consider that evidence that the leprechaun exists (as real, imaginary or whatever). You may have read the advice elsewhere or gotten it from Dear Abby and later attributed it to the leprechaun, knowingly or unknowingly.
Maybe you could clarify or use another example?