Philosophy and science

I gotta add to this.IMHO the scientific method is based on a culture of ethics and ethics is important to every stage in science.You cannot exclude data simply because it does not fit your hypothesis.You cannot withhold data.You cannot fudge data or results.You must disclose your process, data and methodology.Those who do not follow those rules of ethics get sanctioned.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Mod, good to see you again. Here to teach me some more philosofickleness? Were you making more of a general-post? I think so, and I pretty much agree with everything you mentioned.To clarify my position, I haven't been attempting to show that philosophy as a whole is entirely useless or anything like that. My posts have only been centered on one specific idea: Showing that philosophy is not required in order to objectively detect the existence of something.It sprang from the older topic, where Bikerman claimed: I think I've shown how people can understand an actual, real, objective table (or table underwater, or table with drawers, even) while entirely avoiding philosophy. I agree. I certainly don't think philosophy is entirely useless... in conjuction with the points you raised, it can also serve a purpose along the lines of brainstorming, which has it's own importance in new discoveries and expanding human-thinking and curiosity. I just don't think it's required in order to objectively detect the existence of things.

Yeah kind of a general post really. Just kept reading the thread and wanting to say something but not having the time. Eventually I cracked and made some time. Well that's trivially true. Detection can be a completely passive activity.If all you wanted to say was "I am presently having an experience that involves a table.", that's not really going to require philosophy.However - if you want to say "I know there is a table in front of me", you require philosophy. If you want to say "This table objectively exists", you need philosophy. Most people won't consider naive empiricism to be philosophy - but that's by the by.Not very interesting philosophy, but it is philosophy nevertheless. What do you mean by 'know'? How does one come to 'know' something as opposed to believing it or being deluded about it or being in simple error (eg turns out it is a picture of a table)? True - my camera can detect things without philosophy. But it doesn't know anything On the other hand: Understanding something seems to invoke philosophy - but that depends on what we mean by 'understand' - and answering that is definitely philosophy!

What is the difference between knowing, believing, imagining....etc?I think these questions are absolutely fundamental to what science is and impinge (in one way or another) on practically every topic that EvC forum was setup to cover. Yay!!!

It's a bit simplistic but it gets it going.
A proper debate on this will split very quickly between cognitives and behaviourists.
The Cogs generally go with representation and the Bevs reject that. So a cog model would be something along the lines of :
imagining and believing are both to be described as representational states in the brain and then there are functions on those representations to produce (behaviour).
Thus if you are daydreaming imagining you are someone else, then you have a representation of that person (p) which is a pretence. So far so obvious. But the cogs then think that if you have a belief, then the belief sits in the same representation space as the pretence does. More accurately they think the two share a representational code. The implication is, of course, testable and therefore scientific. If they are right then the same psychological mechanism (say Fear) should process belief and pretence in similar, if not identical ways.
It passed the first test - the fiction paradox.
For anyone who doesn't know this one: basically it apparently shows that our reaction to fiction is irrational. Consider:
a) We normally require personal knowledge to trigger deep emotions (crying, fear, excitement). This is why (most) people can happily deal with the knowledge that 10,000 people have been killed in a Tsunami/earthquake but may crack up when one person they know dies. The assumption is, therefore, that we need to know that the people and events are real, otherwise it will not hit the limbic system and will be filtered out by the cortex. But we also know that people are frequently moved to tears or joy from reading a book, watching a play, film or TV programme. So this seems wrong.
There are a number of proposed solutions but all of them have problems. The cog solution is to say - the code is the same for belief and pretence and it is only the context or the functional role which makes the difference. This would certainly explain the emotional response to fiction - we pretend using the same representational code which is used for beliefs - thus it is able to generate similar responses when we are pretending and when we believe it is real.That's a really basic introduction to one part of this...not very articulately expressed but you might get a hazy outline between the smoke and clouds...

Except that I will disagree with both camps. No, this is not at all testable, so it is pseudo-science.

posted in errorEdited by Bikerman, : No reason given.

Of course it is testable. If you watch the MRI and see the same areas of the brain light up with the same intensity/blood flow, the same reported response from the subject and the same observed response then that gets a tick. The ideal case is where a belief and pretence are the same.
It is easy with young kids* but not so easy with adults.*One classic experiment has the kids pretending and believing that the cups for a teddy-bear picnic are full of pop. an adult takes one of the cups and inverts it so the kids can see it must now be empty. They are then asked to point to the full and the empty cup and they always go the same way - inverted up empty, other empty cup full.
They believe and pretend at the same time that the cup is empty.

Earlier post: Current post: You are implying that the MRI output is the exact representational code. But in that case, you ought to be able to accurately read minds using MRI output. As far as I know, that is not possible. At best you can get broad imprecise correlations.

To believe something is to have the state of mind that a thing is true.To know something is a bit more difficult to describe. As Bikerman's diagram shows the simplest thing to say is that you know something when your belief is correct - but that's massively too simple.For instance, if you pull a random card out of a pack and you say "It's a Jack" I might believe you - but does it make sense for me to say that I now know that it is a Jack even if it turns out it is? For instance you look at the card and you know it is a Jack so you know my belief is true. But can you say that Mod knows what rank of card you have?So in short - to say you know something implies you have a criteria for knowledge. The criteria for belief is itself.As for imagining - it is just holding a concept in one's mind while not necessarily holding the belief that it is true (though sometimes acting as if it were, for fun). It's EvC Forum that drove me to philosophy - trying to find the things that underpin the discussion themselves so that they can be addressed directly.

So when a physicist describes a relationship mathematically, it really looks like that in nature does it? So we really do have a photon crossing every possible path do we? Interesting...I am not saying anything about the MRI code being the same - that is a rather stupid suggestion I'm afraid - of course it won't be the same.
If you see similar patterns of activation when a pretence state is enacted as when a believe state for the same proposition, and the subject displays similar behaviours then it is perfectly reasonable to deduce that the hypothesis is both tenable and supported to some extent. The patterns you get from the MRI just tell you which regions of the brain are in use - they don't speak a secret brain code.

That seems to be a diversion.When a scientist provides a scientific theory, that theory defines how to determine the values of the various variables that are mentioned in the theory. Sometimes it might be impossible in practice, such as when we are talking about what happens in the core of a star. But the way of determining the values in principle is spelled out in the theory.If you want to have a theory where beliefs and representations are the main variables, then you need to give definitions of those variables that are sufficiently precise that you could in principle go and measure them. We are not even close to being able to meet that requirement.

They are defined, but I'm not a neuroscientist and the maths is different.
Shaun Nichols gives an outline, but you'll need to go to the referenced papers for the rigour...
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If you want to have a theory where beliefs and representations are the main variables, then you need to give definitions of those variables that are sufficiently precise that you could in principle go and measure them.

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LOL...tell that to physicists working in cosmology. Most of the variables are unknown, never mind measurable. This is a characterisation of working science - science as engineering, not of a great deal of research in physics where the right questions are still hazy, let alone a precise statement of variables. Compared to neuroscience, physics is simple sums.Edited by Bikerman, : No reason given.

That's along the lines of typical cognitivist thinking, and probably way off target.