Peanut Gallery

All we have seen is ambiguous statements about "experiences". In three years on this same subject RAZ has yet to give a single example directly relevant to anything supernatural. Since when did "empirical" mean the same as "objectively verified"....?If someone claims to have seen Big Foot or the Loch Ness monster they are claiming an unverified empirical observation.If someone claims a "religious experience" then frankly it seems to entail whatever they subjectively consider to have been caused by some god or other. Absolutely anything can be cited.If I suddenly feel a wave of nausea and choose to attribute this to Digby the magic hamster who causes nausea in those whom he doesn't like then I have as much evidence for the existence of Digby as most seem to have for their chosen entity on the basis of these much cited "religious experiences".Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

Chuck how are you differentiating between a supernatural experience and a non-supernatural experience? OK. So how do I know if a particular experience is being caused by a supernatural entity then? I have had dreams about all sorts of things. Including the sort of entities we discuss on this forum. Were these "supernatural experiences"? Our imagination.....? Chuck you pseudoskeptic you!!! How do you know they aren't being caused by Aphrodite? Repeatedly. Do you have an answer? So whatever subjective experiences I have are subjective evidence of whatever I choose to believe caused that experience. Any experience is "evidence" of anything I choose.So not actually a form of evidence at all. Just an extension of belief dressed up as something more profound.

The Matrix is in principle no more supernatural than Gears Of WarHow do non-material things influence material brains or other aspects of the material world? I've told you about my wonderful Ford but I can't demonstrate it's existence to anyone. Nobody has ever seen me drive it and there isn't even any evidence that I have actually driven this Ford anywhere. It isn't registered. I don't know what it looks like because it's invisible and I have a long history of inventing cars that demonstrably don't exist. This is the latest in a long line of such concepts. All the indications are that I genuinely believe in the existence of this thing but aside from my conviction there is absolutely no reason to think it is anything other than that which the past record of delusion suggests.If you told me I was "full of it" you should be shaken by the hand and commended you on your sensible approach. Then you should be able to point me to one of them. Please do.

Straggler begins his reply with: Repeating your inability to accept my agnostic answer is not furthering your position.Continuing: Because you had already narrowed down the field of possible replies to your question to be "supernatural". You are correct that many other things that would not be supernatural could be characterized this way - and in fact, that is what "learning something new everyday" means, isn't it? But you have already ruled the natural world out of bounds when you ask me to give you an example of something supernatural. This would be an overlapping Venn Diagram.More: An interdicticon flies in here to remind us:My Unexplainable expands out to: continuing.... Temporary? You mean the scientific community could change it's mind? Oh the horrors! To think that those young whippersnappers wanted to enact a Speed Limit (c) on the entire universe. The nerve of them. Don't they know Newton is Inviolate???Just what do you mean by "inherent". Was the Sun going around the Earth an "inherent" property? Not as we see it now - but how would they have known at the time? Back then it was certainly considered an "inherent property".Gosh! - I hope you are not saying that, now, finally today, in the light of the best science we obviously have at last, that things are finally cool & all set - that now we Know all the Turtles all the way down....Inherent???? Are you still stuck back in the sixties, in Plato's time? There is NOTHING inherent evidenced by objective observation. There are only observations that get interpreted and analyzed by the current scientific community's...(oh shit, here comes that pesky RAZD again)..."worldview".In fact!!! One might even conjecture that every inherent property of anything is only but a mere figment of human imagination. One might even go so far as to propose a theory....Of course everything is in a temporary state of affairs. Everything changes, everything passes.

Straggler asks: Ah - I see...stupid semantics again. I back off here. My understanding of empirical was different from the common, more vulgar meanings seen at, say, Dictionary.com. It was my understanding that "empirical" meant conducting the observation with equipment in a manner that could be reproduced, even if it was never actually later reproduced.Sorry - let me pull that one back. I think I was caught up in thinking that "empirical evidence" was "objectively verifiable", not necessarily "objectively verified", but that "detection" didn't need such a strength of evidence.Edited by xongsmith, : addendum

Your "agnostic" answer?I am apparently (according to RAZ) an irrational, illogical pseudoskeptic because I consider concepts like Thor more likely to be human inventions than real entities.You however are unable to cite even a single supernatural entity which you can conceive of as actually existing. You even go so far as to suggest that your degree of certainty is in some cases equivalent to mathematical disproof. And yet you are the agnostic here......? Atheism by definition turns into agnosticism by assertion. That is kinda the idea of asking for an example of a supernatural entity that might conceivably exist. I mean that the "scientific community" don't define what is or is not supernatural. No. The Earth going round the Sun is not, and never was, supernatural. If any experts labelled it as such they were simply wrong weren't they?

So what does RAZ mean by "detectable but not in an empirical manner"......?Is he making the same mistake as you?Why don't you ask him?

Straggler writes, astonishingly: WTF!!! Who does? The Catholic Church? What higher authority are you insinuating would be in a position of authority to make such a ruling??Edited by xongsmith, : sentence got chopped off into the aethernet...

Straggler adds: Holy shit Batman! I fucked up again!First off, the AUTHORITY on what IS and IS NOT supernatural, when we are in the purview of evaluating a proposed scientific theory, is IN FACT none other than the scientific community. Who else would it be? Who would outrank the scientific community?If you think there is some higher authority, then you would have to give up your precious 6.0d rating for something closer to a 2.0d - even higher than RAZD's 3.0d.Before the evidence of the Earth going around the Sun was accepted, such a notion would go at odds with the reigning scientific community at the time and be equivalent to a supernatural concept. Yes they would have been wrong. But that is why science trumps everything else, because when they find something wrong, they change the scientific description of the phenomenon. The explanation is altered to match the objective repeatable empirical evidence.Remember: None of the geocentric body of scientific natural laws held in force at that time would allow for the derivation or subjugation of a heliocentric view - it would have been inexplicable. The Earth was the Firmament. It did not move! This was fundamentally self-evident to everyone, from King down to pauper.Let me ask you this: If, right now, evidence started pouring in that the Sun has started moving around the Earth - would you consider that a supernatural event? (Ignoring barycentric solar system corrections.)Edited by xongsmith, : Fix egregious mistake again.

Nothing, I guess. It seems to be all about those "religious experiences".....Probably did. EXCEPT that you have a lot of cheek to use a stupid, inexact colloquial definition that really doesn't work in the world of scientific investigated.Not on my agenda now.

Hi PaulK Certainly if you base your conclusions on your assumptions and opinions, and find that your conclusions conform to your assumptions and opinions, you would not see that there is a problem -- this is a process called confirmation bias. This does not mean that there is no problem. I had to parse this run-on word salad this way to make sense of it:{that the alleged method of detecting supernatural beings is not detecting supernatural beings}{is not a good reason to conclude}{it is not detecting supernatural beings because we don't have a way of detecting supernatural beings.}If your {alleged method} - which relies on the assumption that you will somehow recognize a supernatural presence - fails to detect supernatural presence then either

• there was no presence
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• the method of detection is faulty

Either result is possible, and one cannot be assumed to be true vs the other.Again, it is like Ben Franklin flying a kite in a storm, with the kite being hit by lightening, and now he just assumes that he will recognize if electricity is present? If he measures everything else and the measurements are all "naturally occurring" phenomena (light, heat, sound, etc) and nothing is not explained about the "naturally occurring" phenomena -- is he justified in assuming that electricity is not present?Now we look at what Ben Franklin had: to detect electricity he used a leyden jar and a spark:

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... Ben hypothesized that lightning is an electrical phenomenon, and that the electrical effect of lightning might be transferable to another object and cause an effect that could be recognized as electricity. He set out to prove it in an experiment.

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In 1752, on a dark June afternoon in Philadelphia, the 46 year-old Ben Franklin decided to fly a kite. With the help of his son, William, they attached his kite to a silk string, tying an iron key at the other end. Next, they tied a thin metal wire from the key and inserted the wire into a Leyden jar, a container for storing an electrical charge. Finally, as the sky darkened and a thunderstorm approached, they attached a silk ribbon to the key. Holding onto the kite by the silk ribbon, Ben flew the kite and once it was aloft, he retreated into a barn so that he would not get wet. The thunder storm cloud passed over Franklin's kite, whereupon the negative charges in the cloud passed onto his kite, down the wet silk string, to the key, and into the jar. Ben however, was unaffected by the negative charges because he was holding the dry silk ribbon, insulating him from the charges on the key. When he moved his free hand near the iron key, he received a shock. Why? Because the negative charges in the key were so strongly attracted to the positive charges in his body, a spark jumped from the key to his hand. Franklin's experiment successfully showed that lightning was static electricity. ....

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Lightning! | Museum of Science, Boston
He had several variations on how to show electricity was present--you could draw sparks from a key tied to the string, or you could attach the string to a Leyden Jar, which is a device for collecting electricity (a capacitor). If the jar was empty before flying the kite and full afterwards then that is good evidence that thunderclouds contain electricity.

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He had two independent tests for electricity:

1. Leyden Jar - He had already established that the presence of static electricity could be detected by the Leyden Jar from actually testing the Leyden Jar with static electricity.
   - AND -
2. Sparks - He had already established that the presence of (DC) electricity could be detected by the sparks from actually testing them with electricity.

He got positive test results from both tests.Your {alleged method of detecting supernatural beings} has not been tested or otherwise validated, so there is no reason to consider that it is actually able to detect supernatural presence. True that the failure of your {alleged method of detecting supernatural beings} to detect supernatural presence does not invalidate the concept that supernatural beings exist, just that you have failed (for either reason cited above) to detect supernatural presence.You can only detect what you are trying to detect with methods known to work, and your explanations will only incorporate what you can detect and the results of those detections. Without a means to detect electricity Ben Franklin could not incorporate electricity into his results in a scientific explanation.This is the essence of xongsmiths "analema" issue. If you only test things with methods that only detect natural effects you will not detect anything but natural effects, and your scientific explanation will be necessarily bound by the natural results, it will NOT be able to include anything that is not detected and not tested for, not because it isn't there, but because it is not (properly) tested. It is like begging the question to think such testing will actually test for the absence of supernatural presence. In other words you need to have evidence that your {alleged method of detecting supernatural beings} can actually detect supernatural presence, not mere assumption. Which, curiously, does not show that confirmation bias is not evident. I'll go futher: Confirmation Bias, Cognitive Dissonance and ide fixes, are not the tools of an open-mind or an honest skeptic, and continued belief in the face of contradictory evidence is delusion.Would you agree that one should avoid these to reach a valid rational conclusion?Enjoy.Edited by RAZD, : second linkEdited by RAZD, : sparkEdited by RAZD, : english

I'm going to bookmark this response, Straggler.

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Peanut Gallery, Message 1569: I dispute the need to test things in the way you insist upon.

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RAZD writes:

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In other words, you can't answer the question directly because you do not have a means to test for supernatural presence.

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In the same way that I don't have any means to test that the universe was created 1 second ago with completely different natural laws (specifically with regard to falling pens) than the ones that my memory has been falsely imbued with.

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Yet I still know, even before testing, that when I drop my pen it will drop as gravity predicts. Tentatively - If you insist on philosophical pendaticism. But I KNOW to all practical intents and purposes.

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And yet, curiously, you fail to demonstrate any real tentativity - the words you bolded suggest otherwise.This post I think, defines the essential difference between our viewpoints: that you claim actual knowledge of something - before testing - that you cannot have knowledge of without testing (ie - that the laws of physics are actually true). This is why you are a "6" verging on "7" atheist (a logically invalid position, as previously noted) and a pseudoskeptic (claims not sufficiently supported by evidence, among other traits). Amusingly, claiming knowledge of results before testing is a trait of pseudoscience.While I, on the other hand, would talk about confidence in the continuation of previously tested and observed phenomena in the absence of reasons to think otherwise.

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I am holding a pen above my desk. I am going to let go of it.

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• What do you think my pen will do?

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All things being equal (a common phrase expressing tentativity, and the conditions where continuation could be expected) I would have confidence in the behavior of things in accordance with and in reaction to the forces acting on them in this instance (whatever those forces are) in a manner similar to previous tests involving those forces.

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• How confident can we be of this conclusion? Is this conclusion ultimately based on just an opinion or something more?

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As confident as we can be of any scientific conclusion: that as long as all the conditions under which any previous testing was done continue to apply, that the results will be similar to those previous tests.It is based on experience and the (untested) hypothetical conjecture of continuation, and that necessarily makes it hypothetical/conjecture/guess/opinion/belief until tested. Note that what we are discussing is a hypothetical event ...

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Do we need to test all evidentially baseless propositions before we claim knowledge RAZ?

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Yes, because you don't know until you test it.

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Or just the things you don't want us to dismiss because you happen to believe in them?

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Another false dichotomy (the use of logical fallacies is also a trait of pseudoskepticism).You can have (tentative) confidence, in the absence of reasons to think otherwise, that as long as the conditions under which any previous testing was done continue to apply, that the results will continue to be similar to those previous tests. You can have degrees of confidence: the degree of confidence you can have depends on the degree to which phenomena have been previously tested - gravity being a highly tested phenomena.You can't have degrees of knowledge: there is know and don't know.

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Enjoy.

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Edited by RAZD, : fixed html for Yoda voice

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
Rebel American Zen Deist
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to share.

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As someone that has read Straggler's epistemological stance, and understood it, I can assure you that in Straggler's epistemology knowledge is intrinisically tentative.That is, one can know something, but be wrong about it. From wikipedia

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Fallibilism (from medieval Latin fallibilis, "liable to err") is the philosophical principle that human beings could be wrong about their beliefs, expectations, or their understanding of the world...Some fallibilists argue that absolute certainty about knowledge is impossible...Another proponent of fallibilism is Karl Popper, who builds his theory of knowledge, critical rationalism, on fallibilistic presuppositions.

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That is what Straggler means when he says

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I KNOW to all practical intents and purposes

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Certainly if you base your conclusions on your assumptions and opinions, and find that your conclusions conform to your assumptions and opinions, you would not see that there is a problem -- this is a process called confirmation bias. This does not mean that there is no problem.

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However, the case we are discussing is one where the evidence strongly favours one conclusion. That you might refuse to draw it based either on a principled but hopelessly impractical demand for absolute proof in everything or out of bias against that conclusion is hardly my problem. It would seem to be yours.

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I had to parse this run-on word salad this way to make sense of it:

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The writing was intended to illustrate the confusion of your ideas. It seems to have been successful. Your problem however is in failing to consider the context. The alleged method of detecting supernatural entities is religious experiences, and it is more yours, than mine. And you might have noticed that that is the ONLY possible means of detecting supernatural beings that either of us has proposed. I am afraid that your obsession is leading you into error here.

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Again, it is like Ben Franklin flying a kite in a storm, with the kite being hit by lightening, and now he just assumes that he will recognize if electricity is present? If he measures everything else and the measurements are all "naturally occurring" phenomena (light, heat, sound, etc) and nothing is not explained about the "naturally occurring" phenomena -- is he justified in assuming that electricity is not present?

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It is not like that at all. Again, we are not addressing the question of whether supernatural beings exist. We are addressing the question of whether the alleged method of detection (religious experiences) works or not. Now, obviously any proposed method of detection must distinguish between the presence and the absence of the thing it supposedly detects. If we find that it's behaviour is fully determined by other factors, we must conclude that it does not work. For instance if Jefferson chose a detector sensitive to sound, and the results it produced were entirely explained by the sound of the thunder, he could not claim that it was a detector of electricity just because electricity in the form of lightning just happened to be present.

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Which, curiously, does not show that confirmation bias is not evident.

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There is nothing curious about it. The mere observation that you resort to innuendo rather than valid criticisms is sufficient to make my point.

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Confirmation Bias, Cognitive Dissonance and ide fixes, are not the tools of an open-mind or an honest skeptic, and continued belief in the face of contradictory evidence is delusion.

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Would you agree that one should avoid these to reach a valid rational conclusion?

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Of course. I would further add that attempts to imply that an opponent is engaging in any of these - sometimes to the point of ignoring the actual point of discussion (as in your point which I answer at the top of this post) is hardly the tool of someone interested in honest discussion.

Welcome back, Modulous... What about his notion of "inherent"?In Message 1575 he says: What does he mean by "an inherent property of something"?It is an indication of some kind of underlying absolute that is 8 million light-years away from "tentative".