Article: The Gospel According to Dixon #5: Science? Fiction!

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Posted in reply to the post by Dixon:

... For you to characterize me as being wrapped up in "winning or losing" an argument--well, let's just say it's consistent with your habit of dropping little insult bombs without logical support. You couldn't resist that little parting slap.

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:nono:

I just spent nine minutes reading over this thread. That's three times three. My two cats are in the room, plus my partner...another three! Dude, now the number three is really blowing my mind. But what confuses me is that I'm only using one computer, and accessing it with ten fingers.... oh, wait! That's 1 + 10 = 11, a prime number! Exactly like three, except different. I think I need a moment of silent awe now.

More directly, I think it's good for everyone when people debate shaky science... I mean that in a quantum way, of course....

AMAZING!! An actual conclusion and action resulting from a research study. It's also amazing that you had this handy. :hmmm:

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Posted in reply to the post by podfish:

From NIH/National Cancer Institute
New treatment improves long-term outlook for breast cancer survivors

A Canadian-led international clinical trial has found that post-menopausal survivors of early-stage breast cancer who took the drug letrozole after completing an initial five years of tamoxifen therapy had a significantly reduced risk of cancer recurrence compared to women taking a placebo. The results of the study appear in today's advance on-line edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.The clinical trial has been halted early because of the positive results and researchers are notifying the 5,187 women worldwide who have participated in the study. Women on letrozole will continue taking the drug and those on the placebo can begin taking letrozole, if they wish.

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Posted in reply to the post by Dixon:

For reasons explicated above, I stand by my assertion that whenever someone makes a claim about objective reality (such as claiming that some number is "magic") based on nothing more than their "feeling", without adducing any other evidence for it, the greatest likelihood by far is that their claim is false (i.e., a delusion in the non-psychotic sense I clearly meant). If you or anyone has a problem with that, I'm happy to hear you make your case, but it is not okay to bend over backwards trying to interpret my words in negative ways that I clearly did not mean, nor to imply that I'm lying or crazy when I tell you what I meant. That's abusive.

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Hi.

There are some things we know subjectively, but have a lot of difficulty proving or understanding. One is the theory of other minds.

By the standards of modern epistemology, consciousness is one of those things that everybody (hopefully) experiences, but is still difficult to pin down...especially if you admit the possibility of p-zeds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-zed

So with that in mind -- how do we differentiate between you and a p-zed, Sir?

In other words: Are you, indeed, conscious? If so, how do you go about giving evidence for this?

(By the way, gentle reader -- I'm pretty certain that Deity is conscious. :Clap: I'm just trying to establish that there can be things we know subjectively, and are real, but are very difficult to find scientific evidence for.)

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Posted in reply to the post by vallor:

Hi.

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Hi, vallor, and welcome to Waccoland! :welcome: I'm honored to be the recipient of your first post here.

You'll have to pardon me for giving a very brief response to your thoughtful comment. As I'm halfway through writing my latest column, which is late (Hi, Barry!), I can't justify taking much time on this.

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There are some things we know subjectively, but have a lot of difficulty proving or understanding. One is the theory of other minds.

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If by "knowing something subjectively" you mean having it directly in our mind without getting to it on the basis of reasoning from observation of the objective world, I do not agree that our theory of mind is such a thing. The theory of mind--i.e., our understanding that other people have rich internal subjective universes just as we do, rather than being empty automatons ("p-zombies" AKA "p-zeds")--is based on a type of reasoning called "induction by analogy", which works like this: You know something about Thing A and you see that Thing B is very similar to Thing A, so you conclude that the two are probably similar in other ways even if you haven't seen proof of all those similarities. With regards to our theory of mind, it goes like this: I see that you look and act like me--bipedal humanoid, two eyes, two ears, bleed when cut, behave in ways which, when I behave that way, signify internal states like happiness, sadness and ambition. From those observable similarities in structure and behavior, I infer that you have an internal subjective universe fundamentally like mine. Bingo--the theory of mind! Note that it's based on reasoning from empirical observations; it's not a case of knowing something subjectively in the sense I think you mean. The fact that such reasoning occurs automatically from infancy without our explicitly cognizing it as such may make it seem as if it's directly given in our subjective consciousness, but it ain't--it's reasoning from empirical observation.

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By the standards of modern epistemology, consciousness is one of those things that everybody (hopefully) experiences...

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I guess you didn't watch the Republican candidate debates. :lol2:

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...but is still difficult to pin down...especially if you admit the possibility of p-zeds.

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Well, in principle, anything is possible--which of course implies that it's possible that some things are impossible...

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So with that in mind -- how do we differentiate between you and a p-zed, Sir?
In other words: Are you, indeed, conscious? If so, how do you go about giving evidence for this?

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See my explanation of induction by analogy, just above. Add to that the understanding that of the two hypotheses (that I'm a human like you or that I'm just a p-zed), the most parsimonious one is that I'm human like you, since you know that at least one human exists (yourself) and there's no evidence whatsoever that any p-zeds exist. Invoking the p-zed construct to explain my existence therefore violates Occam's Razor, so is very unlikely to be true. That leaves us with only one likely hypothesis--that I'm conscious, like you.

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I'm just trying to establish that there can be things we know subjectively, and are real, but are very difficult to find scientific evidence for.

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That argument didn't do the trick. What else ya got? Or are you prepared to agree that purely subjective knowledge about the objective universe is a dubious concept? :thinking:

Thank you for the kind response.

I'm currently in a waiting room typing on my phone -- so a more in-depth reply will have to wait until I'm back on a kbd, but I thought I'd point something out:

I agree that your theory of mind reasoning is based on empirical observations...but only if we accept that our own subjective experience is an empirical observation. That is the very can of worms under discussion, and with which our current modern epistemology can have difficulties.

To put a finer point on this, please consider your reply as you wrote it out: you start with the subjective experience, and reason from there. But there are other subjective experiences -- say, kensho -- from which those who have experienced it might make inferences. But if you haven't experienced it yourself, you might question the initial subjective observation, even to the point of denying it happens.

Do you see what i'm getting at?

Maybe I should start another thread about "empirical subjective experience and conscious states".

Here is a TED video of a brain scientist who relates her experiences from having a stroke:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU

-Scott