Is My Hypothesis Valid???

pardon me.
this is more an exercise in quoting for me than anything else...Straggler writes: no - they have a scientific quality, but not quite as well-founded, possibly, as the nutjob consensus concerning visitations. i think you are getting a tad hyperbolic. he didnt say they were not. he merely said he didnt want to discuss them here:
(RAZD) he's just clarifying what he's been talking about all along in that sentence....you add: so, for example, subjective testimony in a murder trial, in order to be considering relevant, must stay within the norms of ordinary experiences. you can't have the witness claim to have seen the murderer committing the act in the presence of 2 Immaterial Pink Unicorns. ...okay, what about 2 zebras? well - that could happen...but the Defense would probably want some corroborating evidence about these 2 zebras. 2 Ivory Billed Woodpeckers? lots more corroborating evidence, your honor. 2 cats? no objection. it seems the demand for corroborating objective evidence is proportional to the fantasticalituditiousness of the phenomenon.i think it was Dr. Carl Sagan who said extraordinary claims will require extraordinary evidence. it's the term "unevidenced" that is smuggled in here. "truly fantastical" was sufficient to separate the cats from the IPUs. "unevidenced" didn't need to be mentioned, but you had to mention it to stay on your point. did you mean "un-objectively-evidenced"?what is the historical body of objective evidence for extra-terrestrial life?we do have a lot of objective evidence that there is none. many attempts to observe extra-terrestrial life have been made. none have found any that stand up and are convincing. let's compare this to Nessie. many attempts have been made to observe, none have succeeded in a manner that is convincing. now, personally, i think the chances of extra-terrestrial life are better than the chances for Nessie existing, but that is only me.however, i did not want to address those points.here it is: i guess we might be talking about the similarities of stories of alien abduction (i.e. - not a random pattern). we know that the commonailty is in large part self-reinforcing with new stories feeding on old stories. people could hallucinate or have lucid dreams that conform to the general notion in this culture of what such an experience would be like. so this non-randomness can be explained away.infact, the whole subject is inundated with nutjobs & deluded loonies. if there were any reality to it, it would be very hard to ascertain amid the noise signal. probably harder than a SETI filter on a Gamma Ray Burster. but just because it's hard, doesnt mean it's not there. i would have to see some major objective corroborating evidence to be convinced, but i'm sure there are others who have seen such evidence in their mind. i cant rule it out. but i wont bet a single penny on it.and then there's the Von Daniken(sp) side of this issue (maybe visitations happened long ago?) that starts out with a much more plausible argument (suggestive figures in artwork and architecture in different continents, in different civilizations), but in the end is also hard to believe by me. this kind of pursuit has eventually led people to actually go through the trouble to calculate the odds on a pile of dirt on Mars being shaped like a human face when viewed from space, calculations that must be very difficult to make, so strong is the desire to believe. if lots of people think the shots came from the grassy knoll, isn't that better subjective evidence than if those same people had the shot origins scattered all 360 degrees around Daly Plaza and from all angles up in the air?ignoring the Zapruder film and physics analysis on one side and Posner's watermelons on the other, of course.one person saying something doesn't carry the weight of 50-100 people saying the same thing, even if it's all subjective testimony. but one person can testify and put a suspect in jail with no corroborating objective evidence as long as there is no convincing contradictory objective evidence. just their word against his.

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- xongsmith

Oni asks sorry, i didnt mean it that way. i meant there is no direct evidence from out there in space.the existence of life here certainly allows us to form the conjecture that it must happen elsewhere. the Drake Equation gets its factors bracketed by improved error bars as we learn more and see more. and it also gets new coefficients added to it that were previously assumed to be 1.00 for multiplications and 0.0 for additions.in the comparison to Nessie, there is also indirect objective evidence (fossils of aquatic beasts that are similar to the descriptions of Nessie, geological events leading to landlocked isolated ecologies) that allow some people to make the conjecture that it is possible.it was the lack of direct evidence in both cases. well, to quote Fermi, where are they? (smart enough to stay far away!) ....so far it seems that we have a case of something very unlikely multiplied by an extremely large number of event trials. on the one hand, the process is very complex and fraught with perils on any primitive planet. on the other, there are so many possible planets that somewhere else it could have happened. it appears so far that Mars is sterile, Titan inhospitable and so on, but Earth was the only planet in the goldilocks zone of comfort for our solar system. so that was a long shot anyway (if other life is found in this solar system, it will vastly improve the Drake Equation by orders of magnitude).as we search out further and further away from Earth, we wind up having to examine electromagnetic radiation for all the information we can get.frankly, if there were to be intelligent life elsewhere, they probably wouldnt still be trying to use something as slow as light travel to communicate anyway. maybe they invented the Ansible? something else. i was guilty of badly constructed sentences. think and hear would be interchangeable in that i was imagining witnesses telling the police what they heard. if they all said they heard shots from the grassy knoll, that would still be subjective testimony. but it would certainly be given attention. if they all had conflicting stories of where they heard the shots coming from, scattered around 360 degrees, then the police would not have a much useful information to go on. perhaps the number of shots would be all they could use. i was trying to construct a situation of non-random subjective evidence being more useful than random subjective evidence. it had seemed to me that Straggler was trying to claim that any subjective evidence was no more useful than random evidence.sorry for the confusion.

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- xongsmith

well, ok, but different discussion.... i would think that there would be a rat's nest of Semantic Disagreements. "documented", "subjective", "evidence", "the IPU",
so better discussed elsewhere as it doesnt seem necessary to this discussion to resolve that one. i thought he made it clear that the hypothesis has to fit the facts observed so far. we dont have any hard facts on life out there. so we take what we have and make a tentative prediction, say, that there is life out there. i think RAZD is calling that a conjecture. so yeah, semantics.let's take the predictions of Einstein before they were "proved" - the amount that light bends around a star would be a good example from the General Theory. before they measured it, it was a prediction based on the Theory. was it still only a conjecture? ah, but math is math and the math predicted it in such a way that failure would be troublesome indeed. so it has to get some more sense of validity than the subconscious fallability buried in the human term "conjecture". would it be fair to say that conjectures are often proven wrong? often enough so that when it happens, it's no big deal. ah, a so-it-goes sort of shrugging of the shoulders. in the case of the light bending, this would be a bit more than a shrugging it off.now, back to extra-terrestrial life. a conjecture. if it turns out to be false (and actually that will never happen in an infinite search of space-time), there may be a great emotional disappointment, but nobody's scientific theory will collapse. science will shrug their shoulders in this infinitely distant future situation. and the bio-engineers will continue to terraform their dead planets anyway. i said no convincing contradictory objective evidence, so only the last sentence i may have missed covering. no dead body! ok, assume a dead body for the purposes of this argument. but people have been convicted without a murder weapon in the case, based only on the testimony of an eye witness - "eye" may mean any sensory capability that the witness has demonstrated is reliable. no no no - a witness who saw with good eyes, sober, reliable.but you missed the point i was after, as i did. hi. as a parting aside, i might point out that "subjective interpretation of objective reality" is the difference that rules dreams out of this thread. dreams would be closer to "subjective interpretation of subjective memory". but nevermind that.

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- xongsmith

i think "hypothesis was the correct term to put in your equation, but the hypothesis is for explaining existing facts, the objective evidence.when we confirm that it explains the existing objective evidence, then we look to see if it can make predictions that are distinguishable from the former accepted theory. these predictions, especially as less and less is currently known about the issue, are conjectures. so: this is completely off the wall. way off track....

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- xongsmith

LOL. off base.it was not the point how impaired the witness was. your example would beg for details of how this witness observed the event. probably the prosecution would have to make a demonstration of the technique to verify the reliability of the observation. but that isnt the point. we can have a 20-15 vision, perfect hearing athlete with a law degree summa cum laude from harvard say she witnessed the crime - it's still only subjective evidence. and it has been enough to convict.

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- xongsmith

Straggler says: here's a case - right now this statement is ALL the evidence i have regarding your love of your son.so wouldnt you agree that i am better off believing your testimony regarding your love of your son as valid subjective evidence versus a Random Guess?

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- xongsmith

methinks for a few seconds the island of Krakatoa was flying. might have had a big cat of some kind on it, but not likely a lion. maybe a relative of Homo Floriensis(sp) which could have been construed as a fairy by some observer......so - yes, no magic needed.

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- xongsmith

but you didnt - part the face can sense things on the skin.anyway the distinction you are making between "subjective evidence" and "subjective interpretation of objective evidence" is inside something like a black box or one of those software clouds on the whiteboard - we dont need the details of what's inside, we just need the box or cloud to be there to make the conviction. it would have to be a lot of subjective evidence. for example, unlike RAZD, i'm still unconvinced that there was a God at the formation of this universe. but there are billions of people who believe in deities of some kind or another.on the other hand, i'm pretty sure you do love your son. and i hardly have any subjective evidence of that. i have ZERO objective evidence of that nor do i ever expect to encounter any.

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- xongsmith

ah, nice. i was almost going to be flippant and say i love my googlesplat, too, only i dont go around telling anybody about it.it's true that the term "son" conjurs up a whole set of objectively gathered notions of what a "son" is. we know "sons" exist.it's believable that you have a son, but given that your googlesplat is something akin to an IPU, it is not believable that you have a googlesplat. maybe you do and that's your own word for it or her or them or him. it's more likely that you made up that term for this discussion.you could even be legitimately defining it here, and here only, as a new word for your other child or spouse or even your job.this is all the evidence i have? hmm. better than a Random Guess?YES, but not much compared to the son.which group below should i put the statement
"i saw my googlesplat yesterday" in?GROUP 1:
"i saw my son yesterday"
"i saw a cat yesterday"
"i saw the defendant kill the victim yesterday"GROUP 2:
"i saw a flying saucer yesterday"
"i saw God yesterday"GROUP 3:
"i saw a Higgs boson yesterday"
"i saw a flying island yesterday"
"i saw an unassisted triple play yesterday"

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- xongsmith

of course the groupings were arbitrary. how might you group them?i saw my son yesterday
i saw a cat yesterday
i saw my googlesplat yesterday
i saw an IPU yesterday
i saw God yesterday
i saw the table in half first off, the witness did not have to be so special. we only had to create a situation where the evidence was subjective.your witness may be fine. but any witness who testified would be fine.as you fleshed out the limitations of your witness, i began to wonder what his testimony would be, but - assuming he had testimony to effect that he was certain the defendant committed the crime, the testimony would be fine. and, before you raise your hand, yes - the defense would cross-examine with everything they could bring to bear to discredit the testimony, so i have to assume in your hypothetical situation, that this testimony would stand up. i'm not sure how, but the details are something you would be able to provide should it matter.my objection was only that it was unnecessary to construct such a hypothetical witness. a policeman with 20-20 vision would be fine. it would still only be subjective evidence, and even though there may be no objective evidence to corroborate the testimony, it would be enough to convict. so my objection was only ancillary to the question. well, in my story, there is no other evidence. now it is true that we know that people commit crimes of murder, like we know that cats cross roads. we dont have an unbelievable fantasmic crime here.i'm not certain 1) you can eliminate all objective components in the world experience of the person giving the subjective testimony (i'm assuming he is NOT claiming something like he dreamed it happened); and 2) i'm not certain, once we're in the courtroom, it would matter.where you are taking this is not where i was taking it. having read RAZD's later response, he appears to be in yet a 3rd village of thought. so we seem to be talking about 3 different things. all we need now is a YECist to join in with the equivalent of irridescent quantum-hidden Elephant Wings.

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- xongsmith

Bingo, 1.6180339

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- xongsmith

i may be wrong here, but i dont for one second think that RAZD thinks they are indistinguishable.objective evidence is always superior, it's at the top of the ladder.
i think that you may be arguing that subjective evidence is no better than a Random Guess - i.e. - the ground the ladder is on, rather than one of the lower rungs. and when that's all you have, it's better than nothing (the Random Guessing ground).

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- xongsmith

your "as opposed" split is not my split.
you want to make it "subjective evidence" without the possibility of interpretation of objective evidence?at some point i'll need to have you describe our unfortunate witness's testimony for your example. i dont need it for my example. i dont care if it's subjective interpretation of objective evidence - by the time it gets to the courtroom as testimony it's only subjective evidence.

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- xongsmith

conceded. so i have "a number" of witnesses.
a single policeman's testimony can convict for smaller offenses.

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- xongsmith

subjective evidence, as in the case of "a number" of witnesses, is better than Random Guessing by a rung or 2 - which aint much. but it's not setting on the ground. i did not say it got you to the level of randomly guessing.or are you saying that it only gets you to that level (which is no level above ground at all, but setting on the ground as it is)?

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- xongsmith