Is My Hypothesis Valid???

On one side we have it black and white; that something is either empirically evidenced or it is imagined: And: On the other side we have a grey area: Now, I don’t see why is true that they remain identical.I can imagine hearing something, I can involuntarily hear something, two of us alone can hear something, a whole city can hear something, or it’s something that we have all heard, etc.At what point does something become validated and no longer be imaginary? If by inherently non-empirical concepts you mean that there is no possibility that the "evidence" in question can possibly be objective, then you’re just stating a tautology.But if you’re talking about the same thing as Stile, where things become empirical as they become validated, then why is there no room for things that have not been validated yet but aren’t imaginary nor wholly subjective?If I hear a noise, I can tell if I’ve imagined it or not (although I could be wrong if I’m going crazy). If two of us hear it, then it’s not in my head alone. As more and more people have heard something, then we have more confidence that it is empirical, right? Isn’t that how you’re using the word?I don’t agree that things are imaginary until they become empirical and that’s not how I experience things. I can pretty much tell what’s real or not by myself. Sometimes, it’s not so easy to tell though. If other people have the same experience, then I can be more confident that it was real. But just because nobody else heard it doesn’t tell me that I imagined it. I may not be so sure, but I do have confidence in my sanity and my ability to tell reality from imagination. So if I hear a noise by myself, I must conclude that I imagined it? Why? I think you have it backwards. I don’t think that the key claim is there to allow for non-empirical concepts, I think that the experiences of non-empirical concepts are the reason that the key claim is there.

I agree that it can be flawed but not that it must be flawed. Not necessarily. Neither is that necessary.You’ve shown how the top down approach can be flawed, but you haven’t shown that it must be. You didn’t really answer me on what you mean by empirical, but I don’t agree that non-empirical has to be inherently unjustifiable. If I’m all alone and I hear a noise behind me, it not being empirical doesn’t mean that it doesn’t justify me turning and looking for what made it.And I don’t see how this leads to a contradiction as to what is evidence (Message 145 didn’t really explain much for me). You seem to be stuck in the black and white view that something is either empirical or imaginary but the discussion relies on the grey area in between. I don’t see how allowing for the grey area leads to a contradiction other than we can’t really draw the line between real and imaginary (but that seems acceptable). Of course I agree it’s a tautology.Do you agree with this statement?:If something is inherently a non-rock, then it cannot be a rock.

I'm replying to this message but the quotes are fromm Message 200. For one, it’s impractical for everyday use. And for two, it could be turning a blind eye to an entire aspect of reality and you would never even know it. But not all unknowns are imaginary But what about the shared experiences that have not been verified yet? Like what? But what about a singular private experience. If I hear something and don’t know what it was, that doesn’t mean that I imagined it. Assuming that it does is a huge flaw. I can understand assuming something isn’t real until it is validated as real, especially for second hand knowledge. But I also trust my own sanity and my ability to tell reality from my imagination. If you are sitting alone somewhere and you hear a noise that you don’t know where it came from, do you really assume that you must be imagining it and not turn to look and see what made the noise?

Hrm, I dunno. I don’t think that it’s that it cannot possible be true, it’s that he doesn’t take it as evidence.Which I don’t really believe. Let’s put him in a dark old scary haunted house and see if when he hears strange noises if he stands by his guns that those noises are not evidence of anything or if he comes running out scared It makes me think I’m misunderstanding him, because who in their right mind thinks that they cannot tell, and should not use as evidence, something that they have sensed themselves, even though it has not been verified. I think it’s fairly easy to tell if something is real or imagined. And when it is difficult, I turn to the guy next to me and ask: Did you hear that? If they say yes, then I’m pretty sure it wasn’t just all in my head. If I’m all alone, then I won’t be as confident but I don’t think I’m some bumbling moron who cannot distinguish what is real or not. No, he’s not saying that it cannot be a possibility, he’s saying that it cannot be evidence.And by that I think he means empirical evidence (although I’m not entirely sure what he means by ‘empirical’). Which he’s right that one experience cannot be considered empirical in the scientific sense, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t really happen, was imaginary, or just doesn’t mean squat. Again, if I’m all alone and hear something that I realize wasn’t just in my head, then I take that to be evidence of something out there making a noise. Just because I can’t verify it, and just because it isn’t empirical in the scientific sense, doesn’t meant that I can’t use what I heard to try to figure out what made the noise (thus making it evidence). So, it is evidence, it’s just not empirical evidence.At least that’s one distinction. And he seems to be saying that if it isn’t empirical evidence then it isn’t evidence at all, which I don’t agree with.

I don’t use that function so no problem. I thought we were talking about things that have not been scientifically verified but that we have experienced nonetheless. Sounds a lot like ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’. And what happens when a very familiar and seemingly unimportant experience leads to an extraordinary claim? Or when something that is obviously real to you evidences something that is not scientifically verified?Take seeing a ghost for example. It’s easy to sit here and say that it couldn’t be a ghost because they haven’t been scientifically verified so the viewer must be mistaken. But when you, yourself, actually see it, and it is a very familiar and mundane seeming experience, are you really going to just convince yourself that you must be crazy because it hasn’t been verified? I think that in itself is crazy, or at least a flawed reaction. I would have rather lefts gods out of it, but oh well.What if the mundane experiences are what are pointing to the existence of gods?I don’t think the point is about gods themselves but more onto those experiences that we cannot verify scientifically. It’s dumb to just discredit them all as imaginary.

Your position seems much more reasonable now. We have some differences of opinion though: I don’t care as much as you do to be as-objective-as-possible. Objectivity can get in the way of some interesting subjective experiences.Although, if I’m in the lab then it’s a whole different story. Once the lab coat and safety glasses go on, all bets are off. But I don’t hold my general beliefs to the same level of scrutiny that I do with my experiments in the lab. I don’t have the same control outside of the lab. I have more confidence in my ability to tell fantasy from reality than you do. And I think not being able to tell fantasy from reality is a sign of being crazy. I don’t agree with that. I’ve had experiences that I had trouble telling if they were real or not. For the ones that were mistakes, I laughed at myself for how crazy I was acting. For the ones that I realized I wasn’t going crazy, I was left to ponder just what the heck I was experiencing. But that my experience could not be ‘validated’ never led me to think that it was most likely imagination, nor do I think it should. If it did, then I'd have some great experiences that I never investigated and I'd have lost a lot of learning about myself and this reality. Presumably, I just wrote them off because I couldn't handle accepting the possibility that there might be more out there than I am comfortable admitting without a huge pile of evidence. I think your confidence is misplaced and its causing you to miss out on entire aspects of reality.

My point was that it’s not based on a decision but on ability. Outside of the lab where I cannot control all the variables, I cannot obtain the same level of evidence. But this doesn’t cause me to lose all confidence, nor even most of it. Its statements like those that make me think you’re relying too much on objectivity. There’s plenty of pictures and videos of ghosts out there. For you to say that we not been able to find anything is a stretch. Or at least a conflation of different evidences.It’s those statements that cause a problem with how we define ‘evidence’ in discussions like these. It’s that you’re putting the level of evidence for ghosts on the same level as random guessing or the IPU or whatever.To say that because we don’t have scientific evidence of ghosts then we have nothing at all is a problem in my book. We have something and it is not nothing. Huh? I don’t get it. I’m sorry but I don’t know what you’re talking about.You’re position relies on people being easily fooled into believe things so that you can place you confidence more on them being fooled than actually experiencing something in reality. My position relies on my ability to trust myself in that what I’m experiencing as reality really is reality and that I can place my confidence in my ability higher than the chance that I’m just imagining it. The entire spiritual side of existing. Learning more about yourself on the inside. Identifying how you can let your soul lead you. Learning what makes you you and how your ‘self’ comes about. Communing with god. Allowing ghosts to communicate with you. You know, all that crap

You can't and everybody knows that. You're saying that his whole point is a tautology and it takes 3 threads to say it? I doubt it.And what about those experiences where we don't know if they were empirical or not? Those aren't even touched by his point.Plus, I don't thinks its about certainty of existence. Its about whether it can even be evidence at all in the first place.

But the IPU is something that somebody just made up... Someone's beliefs on god come from a variety of inputs of which some could be considered some kind of empirical-type evidence, ie because they are things that a person actually feels, but they are not so empirical that they are 'scientifically verified'. So they don't have the same amount of evidence (none) but they do both lack scientific/empirical or "objective" evidence.If I'm alone and I hear something, is it empirical or not? It depends on if you're defining empirical as "able to be heard" or as "verified as heard".If you're defining it as "able to be heard", then RAZD's deity is not inherantly non-empirical as there has to be something there to bring it up in the first place but it remains somewhat non-empirical in the sense that it cannot be verified.If you're defining it as "verified as heard" then Straggler is simply being tautological. And the problem arises from Staggler's position that evidence is either empirical or non-existant butting heads with RAZD's position that not all evidence is empirical and that some evidence is less empirical than others.

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Science fails to recognize the single most potent element of human existence.
Letting the reigns go to the unfolding is faith, faith, faith, faith.
Science has failed our world.
Science has failed our Mother Earth.
-System of a Down, "Science"He who makes a beast out of himself, gets rid of the pain of being a man.
-Avenged Sevenfold, "Bat Country"

I'm not going to speak for RAZD, but the Diests' god is not "unknowable" in the sense that there is nothing empirical at all about it. A quick look at the wiki page on deism shows:

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Deism is a religious and philosophical belief that a supreme God created the universe, and that this and other religious truth can be determined using reason and observation of the natural world alone, without the need for faith.

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bold added for emphasisWhat they mean by "unknowable" is to contrast it with theism which has a god that can be communicated with or "known". How many times have you experienced this "evidence" for god and how many times have you hallucinated? If you have little experience with either then I'm not really interested in your speculative opinion on the matter, no offense. Um, the word "empirical" has broader definitions, plural, than that. I can see how it seems to mean that to someone who sees things dichotomously as either "empirical" or "inherently unknowable", but for someone who sees things as a continuum, they do not have to be the same. And what RAZD, and now I, is saying is that the feeling in our mind that constitutes evidence for a belief in god is different than that for a belief in some random mythical creature. Without a belief in god, you and Straggler are resorting to labeling all "non-empirical" evidence as "none" so that you can make the amount of evidence for god the same as that for a random mythical creature. But without the belief, how can you even compare it? Its even gotten down to quibbling about how all empirical evidences becomes feelings in your mind before they get to you and how and if we can even tell the difference between the two in first place. It comes down to differences in how much we're relying on validation of our evidences before we allow ourselves to be convinced to belief by them. There's probably a gradient from 'none to absolute' validation that different people need for being convinced of a gradient of 'mundane to important' beliefs like Stile is describing with his "Familiarity" and "Importance" factors.I don't think that labeling Evidence with either "empirical" or "none" is helping.

How do you determine if something has been empirically sensed or not? By validating it with other experiences, right? So a single isolated experience has to be considered to be imaginary? Right! Whoa, wait a minute...Any experience should be considered to be evidence!?regardless of any further considerations!?Where did that come from? Did I say that? I'm not advocating that position.You didn't reply to this from Message 198:

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Straggler in msg 197 writes:

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In the case of inherently non-empirical concepts there is no possibility that the "evidence" in question can possibly be anything but "wholly subjective".

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If by inherently non-empirical concepts you mean that there is no possibility that the "evidence" in question can possibly be objective, then you’re just stating a tautology.

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But if you’re talking about the same thing as Stile, where things become empirical as they become validated, then why is there no room for things that have not been validated yet but aren’t imaginary nor wholly subjective?

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If I hear a noise, I can tell if I’ve imagined it or not (although I could be wrong if I’m going crazy). If two of us hear it, then it’s not in my head alone. As more and more people have heard something, then we have more confidence that it is empirical, right? Isn’t that how you’re using the word?

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I don’t agree that things are imaginary until they become empirical and that’s not how I experience things. I can pretty much tell what’s real or not by myself. Sometimes, it’s not so easy to tell though. If other people have the same experience, then I can be more confident that it was real. But just because nobody else heard it doesn’t tell me that I imagined it. I may not be so sure, but I do have confidence in my sanity and my ability to tell reality from imagination.

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Again, if by this: ...you are just stating the tautology, then I'd like to know how you determine if something has been empirically sensed or not?

We don't know, and how would we know if there were? How would you know that there couldn't?It also depends on what you mean by "evidenced". If you mean "detected by by our empirical senses or instruments of empirical investigation" then you're just stating a tautology. However, if there are things that are unable to be detected by by our empirical senses or instruments of empirical investigation but that people have come across as believable and/or plausible, then there should be some kind of evidence that brings them to that.Take my belief in god for example: It hasn't been detected by my empirical senses, but I also don't come to the belief just willy-nilly, so there could be something that evidenced it even though it wasn't empirically detected.Or what about a ghost-like entity. Something that is intelligent and can appear and disappear at will. If you saw one with your eyeballs one time, you wouldn't know if it was empirically detected, or if you imagined it. But if you and some other people saw it, then its doubtful that you all imagined it. If when you put the camera on it, it decides to no longer be visible, it hasn't been "empirically detected" yet (now you could say that it has because you saw it with your eyeballs, but we don't know that for sure because it still could have been mass imagination), but there has been some evidence of it.Or there could be some sixth sense like you've brought up.I'm not convinced that being unable to be detected by by our empirical senses necessitates that something cannot be evidenced. I guess not, but that doesn't mean that you cannot look at other things that are not the particular concept/being/entity/whatever but are a result of it and then come to a belief in the particular concept/being/entity/whatever in the absence of objective detection and then say that the particular concept/being/entity/whatever has been evidenced.Its like seeing design in the universe and concluding there's a designer. There still no empirical detection of the designer but there is evidence of it. Not necessarily for reasons listed above. Its a false dichotomy brought on by circularly reasoning that 'evidenced' must be defined as 'empirically sensed' so therefore if its not empirically sensed then it cannot be evidenced.

We could use logic to determine that a square ball cannot exist without the need to sense reality. Does that count as an 'experience'? Is there life on other planets?I think we can say that there is out there somewhere based on the facts that abiogenesis is plausible and there's a shit-ton a planets available but in the absense of ever sensing that life. Not if the incredulity is not what the argument comes from In the same way that we have evidence that there is life on other planets. Technically, we don't really yet have evidence for it but we can be confident that its out there somewhere so we do have some kind of evidence. I mean, its not a random guess so there has to be something there. Not necessarily. You can certainly define evidence in that way if you want to though. Fuck if I know...

Yeah, well, its two different positions. Evidence for himself, yes. For me or anyone else, no.Part of my belief in god also comes from some sort of 'internal knowing' that is difficult to describe. I don't think this is empirical nor that it comes from one of the 5 senses, but it also is not simply imagined. I wouldn't expect anyone else to consider it evidence for them that god exists, but it is certainly convincing to me and I consider it to be a type of evidence. In addition to that, there are inferences that can be made that can be used in the same way that evidence can be used so I'd consider that a type of evidence too. Or if a trusted friend has an empirical observation that I did not experience, I could use that as evidence for a belief even though I have no empirical evidence. You're assuming that because it is the only known one then it is the only possible one. But you're just going to write them off as imaginary, which will allow you to maintain that they aren't evidence at all. If he has no senses then how is he going to be a witness in the first place?Is it impossible for him to come to conclusion about his world from his own subjective experiences and you not consider them to be imaginary?

To a person who has never consider the concepts of squares and balls, can't the realization of the contradiction of the concepts be considered "experiencing reality". The contradiction is real and they have experienced it.When you go through a thought experiement with someone about concepts in physics and get that "Oh yeah!" sensation after something all of the sudden makes sense to you, can someone not consider that to be experiencing reality even though they aren't sensing objects? If a further inference is based on that new information can we not consider that to be 'evidence'? The concept is real and they have experienced it.Or are your's the only defintions that people are allowed to use? You misunderstood me. The "something there" was not referring to life on other planets. It was refering to the supposed void of where there should be evidence. And you're a prick. Nope, not at all. You misunderstood me. Not really the same, more like similiar.