Religion and Ethics Forum
Religion and Ethics Discussion => Philosophy, in all its guises. => Topic started by: Sriram on August 20, 2018, 06:03:15 PM
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Hi everyone,
Here is a very interesting video about reincarnation. It is a speech, with a case study, by Dr.Jim Tucker, Professor at the University of Virginia, US.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l7bcb3aoGc
Hope you like it.
Cheers.
Sriram
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Thanks, will defo watch.
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By default reincarnation does not exist, so nothing to discuss.
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By default reincarnation does not exist...
What does this mean, other than "I don't believe in reincarnation"? Why, in any case, does that leave nothing to discuss?
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With no theoretical underpinning of how this could happen, curious anecdotes are going to remain just curious anecdotes.
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Here is one more good video...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6M-nXjh_9I
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By default reincarnation does not exist, so nothing to discuss.
This is just gibberish. There is a set of evidence, no matter how weak it might be, which related to the philosophical idea of reincarnation. You can examine and dismiss the evidence, or decide it is insufficient to justify beluef but something either does happen or it does not (exists isn't really a useful verb for a process).
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With no theoretical underpinning of how this could happen, curious anecdotes are going to remain just curious anecdotes.
Which can be bound together with a hypothesis, however weak, of reincarnation. I would suggest that what we have is 'almost no theoretical underpinning off f how this might happen' but that we cannot dismiss a possibility that some underpinning could be developed if it were investigated. Note Sriram posts from a viewpoint that all such things are at least 'nature's so can be subject to naturalistic methods of investigation in theory.
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What does this mean, other than "I don't believe in reincarnation"? Why, in any case, does that leave nothing to discuss?
The default position is that reincarnation is a myth.
To change the default position the person making the claim has to demonstrate that it is a real thing.
Until this happens, there is nothing to discuss.
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Which can be bound together with a hypothesis, however weak, of reincarnation. I would suggest that what we have is 'almost no theoretical underpinning off f how this might happen' but that we cannot dismiss a possibility that some underpinning could be developed if it were investigated. Note Sriram posts from a viewpoint that all such things are at least 'nature's so can be subject to naturalistic methods of investigation in theory.
It can be dismissed until it is demonstrated.
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It can be dismissed until it is demonstrated.
If it is dismissed, then it can never be demonstrated. You can't form a hypothesis and then say because it isn't demonstrated we just dismiss it. That way no progress could be made.
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If it is dismissed, then it can never be demonstrated. You can't form a hypothesis and then say because it isn't demonstrated we just dismiss it. That way no progress could be made.
The null hypothesis is that reincarnation does not happen.
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The null hypothesis is that reincarnation does not happen.
And again, you can't demonstrate something is you assume that it doesn't happen. In this case we have some unexplained events for which Sriram suggests a hypothesis of reincarnation. In order to demonstrate it, there needs to be formulation of how it would be demonstrated and falsified. If you just dismiss it, then no demonstration can take place.
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And again, you can't demonstrate something is you assume that it doesn't happen. In this case we have some unexplained events for which Sriram suggests a hypothesis of reincarnation. In order to demonstrate it, there needs to be formulation of how it would be demonstrated and falsified. If you just dismiss it, then no demonstration can take place.
He has to show the null hypothesis to be wrong.
That is his job, not mine.
Quoting anecdotes will NEVER change the null hypothesis. He needs to demonstrate it.
There are an infinite number of things like this. Do you want to waste your time discussing them all?
Unicorns do not wear hats on Sunday!
Now what?
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He has to show the null hypothesis to be wrong.
That is his job, not mine.
Quoting anecdotes will NEVER change the null hypothesis. He needs to demonstrate it.
There are an infinite number of things like this. Do you want to waste your time discussing them all?
Unicorns do not wear hats on Sunday!
Now what?
You seem very confused. My post makes clear that it for a hypothesis to progress beyond being simply that then it has to be demonstrated. At no point does it suggest that you have to do it. The proponents of the hypothesis need to formulate how it can be shown, and how it might be falsified. If everyone dismisses a hypothesis though, until it is demonstrated, it can never be demonstrated since it will have been dismissed and no effort will be made to demonstrate it.
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He has to show the null hypothesis to be wrong.
Not quite, since the 'null hypothesis' is really a statistical approach: that there will be no significant differences between things that have been measured or in associations between groups.
The null hypothesis isn't a statement of agnostic assumption that 'something' doesn't exist because there is no evidence since there needs to be at least two 'somethings' that can be measured so as to test the null hypothesis that these 'somethings' aren't significantly associated with each other in some way.
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The null hypothesis is that reincarnation does not happen.
That is a claim and not a null hypothesis.
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You seem very confused. My post makes clear that it for a hypothesis to progress beyond being simply that then it has to be demonstrated. At no point does it suggest that you have to do it. The proponents of the hypothesis need to formulate how it can be shown, and how it might be falsified. If everyone dismisses a hypothesis though, until it is demonstrated, it can never be demonstrate since it will have been dismissed and no effort will be made to demonstrate it.
It is not our job to endlessly look at stupid propositions.
Nothing is dismissed, it is just ignored until such time as he can provide evidence.
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That is a claim and not a null hypothesis.
Really?
I may be wrong, but I thought we are trying to show that reincarnation DOES take place?
Like the null hypothesis would be that the world is flat.
You then have to work to show that the null hypothesis is wrong, but showing that it is in fact round.
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It is not our job to endlessly look at stupid propositions.
Nothing is dismissed, it is just ignored until such time as he can provide evidence.
And again I didn't say it was your job to demonstrate it, indeed I specifically said it wasn't. And calling it a 'stupid proposition' is begging the question. If nothing is dismissed, why did you write 'It can be dismissed until it is demonstrated.'?
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Which can be bound together with a hypothesis, however weak, of reincarnation. I would suggest that what we have is 'almost no theoretical underpinning off f how this might happen' but that we cannot dismiss a possibility that some underpinning could be developed if it were investigated. Note Sriram posts from a viewpoint that all such things are at least 'nature's so can be subject to naturalistic methods of investigation in theory.
I don't think we can call reincarnation a hypothesis until there is at least some definition of what it is that is being reincarnated; if we don't know what it is we are testing for, we cannot test for it.
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Really?
I may be wrong, but I thought we are trying to show that reincarnation DOES take place?
Like the null hypothesis would be that the world is flat.
You then have to work to show that the null hypothesis is wrong, but showing that it is in fact round.
Nope - that the world is flat isn't a null hypothesis.You need to understand that the 'null hypothesis' has a specific meaning that involves measuring things and then using statistical tests.
For example: 'there will be no significant difference in the mean weight of 5th year pupils in School A compared with 5th year pupils in School B' is a null hypothesis, and from that measurements would taken and analysed to see if the data supported the no difference claim, where 'significant' means calculating the risk of random chance, where the convention is that this should be less than 5%.
The usual approach is for a researcher to show the null hypothesis to be wrong and that there is a significant difference, where this is usually in favour of an alternative hypothesis. There is then the risks of Type 1 errors (rejecting the null when it should be accepted) and a Type 2 (accepting the null when it should be rejected).
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Nope - that the world is flat isn't a null hypothesis.You need to understand that the 'null hypothesis' has a specific meaning that involves measuring things and then using statistical tests.
For example: 'there will be no significant difference in the mean weight of 5th year pupils in School A compared with 5th year pupils in School B' is a null hypothesis, and from that measurements would taken and analysed to see if the data supported the no difference claim, where 'significant' means calculating the risk of random chance, where the convention is that this should be less than 5%.
The usual approach is for a researcher to show the null hypothesis to be wrong and that there is a significant difference, where this is usually in favour of an alternative hypothesis. There is then the risks of Type 1 errors (rejecting the null when it should be accepted) and a Type 2 (accepting the null when it should be rejected).
I got the example of the flat Earth being used as an example from here:-
http://www.statisticshowto.com/probability-and-statistics/null-hypothesis/
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I don't think we can call reincarnation a hypothesis until there is at least some definition of what it is that is being reincarnated; if we don't know what it is we are testing for, we cannot test for it.
The problem there is that I would suggest that Sriram would argue that there is 'some definition' of what is being reincarnated. I think also Sriram would point out that there is a lot of ideas in physics currently which have similar issues but we don't just dismiss them. I would argue that the reasonable reaction to Sriram's claims are how do you progress to show that the claims are true, and ask for further definition rather than simply write it off if you find the idea of sufficient interest to do so. I'll be honest here and say I have no interest in going to youtube to watch a video on this, but that applies to a video on String 'Theory' as well.
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I got the example of the flat Earth being used as an example from here:-
http://www.statisticshowto.com/probability-and-statistics/null-hypothesis/
You aren't expressing it as hypothesis since you are just saying 'the world is (or isn't) flat'. If I say 'there are no pink unicorns' that is just a claim as well.
It needs more that a simple statement since it requires measurement and analysis: a method is required, in this case involving a basis to accept or reject reincarnation since a null hypothesis is still a hypothesis.
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You aren't expressing it as hypothesis since you are just saying 'the world is (or isn't) flat'. If I say 'there are no pink unicorns' that is just a claim as well.
It needs more that a simple statement since it requires measurement and analysis: a method is required, in this case involving a basis to accept or reject reincarnation since a null hypothesis is still a hypothesis.
In the site is says the null hypothesis is the current accepted position.
So, could I say the accepted position at the moment is that people do not get reincarnated.
H0 = 0
Then H1 > 0 would be the alternate.
Then to show the null hypothesis wrong, all someone has to do, is show 1 example of it happening.
Is this closer?
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In the site is says the null hypothesis is the current accepted position.
So, could I say the accepted position at the moment is that people do not get reincarnated.
H0 = 0
Then H1 > 0 would be the alternate.
Then to show the null hypothesis wrong, all someone has to do, is show 1 example of it happening.
Is this closer?
The issue here is that you are seeing reincarnation as something around which you can frame a hypothesis. If you have a hypothesis (null or otherwise) then it implies a method to test and either accept or reject your hypothesis (null or otherwise).
You can certainly measure so as to show whether the world is flat or not but how do you propose to measure reincarnation. I suspect that like me you will reject it on the basis that there is no credible evidence without you needing to frame a hypothesis at all.
So I suspect you are using 'null hypothesis' instead of just saying there is no credible evidence.
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The issue here is that you are seeing reincarnation as something around which you can frame a hypothesis. If you have a hypothesis (null or otherwise) then it implies a method to test and either accept or reject your hypothesis (null or otherwise).
You can certainly measure so as to show whether the world is flat or not but how do you propose to measure reincarnation. I suspect that like me you will reject it on the basis that there is no credible evidence without you needing to frame a hypothesis at all.
So I suspect you are using 'null hypothesis' instead of just saying there is no credible evidence.
Yes I agree.
But in the example on the site it said the null hypothesis is the currently accepted position (like the world is flat).
The advocates of reincarnation have the burden of proof to come up with a demonstration and some method to show that the accepted position is wrong.
All we ever get though is anecdotes, and someone stating a sincere belief, none of which is ever going to be good enough.
In the same way that no matter how many people say they have been abducted by aliens, simple anecdotes alone will never suffice.
I think we agree on this.
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Just to get back to Sriram's original post, and in the interests of balance, it might be illuminating to read these skeptical comments about an interview which Jim Tucker gave in 2014, and also what J. I. Swiss(the blogger) regards as good scientific evidence.
http://archive.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/2310-evidence-for-reincarnation.html
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Just to get back to Sriram's original post, and in the interests of balance, it might be illuminating to read these skeptical comments about an interview which Jim Tucker gave in 2014, and also what J. I. Swiss(the blogger) regards as good scientific evidence.
http://archive.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/2310-evidence-for-reincarnation.html
Yeah right! Skeptics!! ::)
There are skeptics about the String theory, about Dark Matter, about Dark Energy, about the Big Bang, about Evolution....even about the moon landing and the spherical earth....
There are no end of skeptics in this world and that does not in any way dilute the validity of any theory or hypothesis.
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In this thread, I wanted to bring out the fact that serious research is going on is such areas as reincarnation and not every science professional regards them as 'woo'...or dismisses them as invalid. There are a growing number of people in the world who are taking these matters seriously and accepting them as possibly a part of our normal and natural lives.
I am happy that NS is boldly defending my ideas after all these years. Thanks NS. It is a welcome change and will hopefully break the psychological barrier that seems to have been created artificially by some people who have a problem with religious matters and who are unable to separate natural exotic phenomena from religious mythology.
I hope this will make future discussions more meaningful and constructive....instead of the standard response of ...'woo'...'confirmation bias'...etc...etc...etc.
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In this thread, I wanted to bring out the fact that serious research is going on is such areas as reincarnation and not every science professional regards them as 'woo'...or dismisses them as invalid. There are a growing number of people in the world who are taking these matters seriously and accepting them as possibly a part of our normal and natural lives.
I am happy that NS is boldly defending my ideas after all these years. Thanks NS. It is a welcome change and will hopefully break the psychological barrier that seems to have been created artificially by some people who have a problem with religious matters and who are unable to separate natural exotic phenomena from religious mythology.
I hope this will make future discussions more meaningful and constructive....instead of the standard response of ...'woo'...'confirmation bias'...etc...etc...etc.
I'm not defending your view, I'm saying that I won't just dismiss an idea in itself without reason to do so. That doesn't mean I give any credence to your claims here. This has been a position I've consistently taken.
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Yeah right! Skeptics!! ::)
There are skeptics about the String theory, about Dark Matter, about Dark Energy, about the Big Bang, about Evolution....even about the moon landing and the spherical earth....
There are no end of skeptics in this world and that does not in any way dilute the validity of any theory or hypothesis.
Skepticism is a good thing and stops us simply believing anything we are told.
Please do not confuse this with people who just will obstinately not believe.
I am open to believe anything, given the relevant evidence.
Anecdotes, and personal incredulity simply do not count as valid evidence.
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I'm not defending your view, I'm saying that I won't just dismiss an idea in itself without reason to do so. That doesn't mean I give any credence to your claims here. This has been a position I've consistently taken.
In fact, that is my point too. It is not about reincarnation or Self or after-life per se. It is about the natural nature of these phenomena and the need to analyse them and understand them in that context instead dismissing them as religious beliefs.
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In fact, that is my point too. It is not about reincarnation or Self or after-life per se. It is about the natural nature of these phenomena and the need to analyse them and understand them in that context instead dismissing them as religious beliefs.
So what scientists are looking at this, and what evidence do they have that this is a real thing?
Stories, and anecdotes are worthless, unless you do not care about whether your beliefs are true or not.
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In fact, that is my point too. It is not about reincarnation or Self or after-life per se. It is about the natural nature of these phenomena and the need to analyse them and understand them in that context instead dismissing them as religious beliefs.
The thread is "Reincarnation", so we are entitled to imagine it is about Reincarnation. If your claim is that the phenomena described have a natural nature, then there needs to be a description of that nature, or a description of the natural mechanism that could account for the observations; how else could we test for it.
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In fact, that is my point too. It is not about reincarnation or Self or after-life per se. It is about the natural nature of these phenomena and the need to analyse them and understand them in that context instead dismissing them as religious beliefs.
And again no. It is precisely about the concepts per se and whether there is any validity to them. Saying that they are actual phenomena in any defined sense is begging the question. What at best you have is a set of events, as yet I don't see that you can class them as a consistent phenomenon here, or indeed that any attempt to do so currently makes any sense.
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And again no. It is precisely about the concepts per se and whether there is any validity to them. Saying that they are actual phenomena in any defined sense is begging the question. What at best you have is a set of events, as yet I don't see that you can class them as a consistent phenomenon here, or indeed that any attempt to do so currently makes any sense.
No...it is not about specific phenomena per se...though we have to talk about them to get to the point. I am not here trying to prove or provide evidence for reincarnation or after life or anything of that sort. Jim Tucker and Raymond Moody are trying to do that.
I am only trying to separate natural exotic phenomena from religious beliefs....and pointing out that these cannot be dismissed as woo or religious beliefs...rather, they should be examined and efforts should be made to understand them as a normal part of our lives.
Well...and that is what I thought you were defending. If not, that is fine. We are back to square one. No problem! :D
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No...it is not about specific phenomena per se...though we have to talk about them to get to the point. I am not here trying to prove or provide evidence for reincarnation or after life or anything of that sort. Jim Tucker and Raymond Moody are trying to do that.
I am only trying to separate natural exotic phenomena from religious beliefs....and pointing out that these cannot be dismissed as woo or religious beliefs...rather, they should be examined and efforts should be made to understand them as a normal part of our lives.
Well...and that is what I thought you were defending. If not, that is fine. We are back to square one. No problem! :D
Again, you're begging the question by assuming that events equal discrete phenomena. Without a definition there is nothing to be dismissed.
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The thread is "Reincarnation", so we are entitled to imagine it is about Reincarnation. If your claim is that the phenomena described have a natural nature, then there needs to be a description of that nature, or a description of the natural mechanism that could account for the observations; how else could we test for it.
There are intelligent and focused people involved in trying to understand these phenomena. But it is unlikely that anyone is actually looking to understand it in the way you want to....what is the nature of the Self, how does it feel and smell, what is it composed of...and so on. :D I don't think anyone is actually looking to 'understand' such matters, as though it is some external stuff......
Problem with habitual skeptics is that if we have evidence, you want the theory. If we have the theory, you want the evidence. As though someone ought to provide all this on a platter!! ::)
The problem is in the Two boxes syndrome.
https://tsriramrao.wordpress.com/2018/03/03/the-two-boxes-syndrome/
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There are intelligent and focused people involved in trying to understand these phenomena. But it is unlikely that anyone is actually looking to understand it in the way you want to....what is the nature of the Self, how does it feel and smell, what is it composed of...and so on. :D I don't think anyone is actually looking to 'understand' such matters, as though it is some external stuff......
Problem with habitual skeptics is that if we have evidence, you want the theory. If we have the theory, you want the evidence. As though someone ought to provide all this on a platter!! ::)
The problem is in the Two boxes syndrome.
https://tsriramrao.wordpress.com/2018/03/03/the-two-boxes-syndrome/
Again no, if you have evidence - without some form of HYPOTHESIS, then it's just a set of events, or an event. Evidence, in terms of the methodology of investigation, needs to be in favour of something. A HYPOTHESIS with no evidence is merely an idea. It cannot be dismissed but neither is there any credence given to it. You aren't describing a syndrome, you're justifying your lack of methodology
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There are intelligent and focused people involved in trying to understand these phenomena. But it is unlikely that anyone is actually looking to understand it in the way you want to....what is the nature of the Self, how does it feel and smell, what is it composed of...and so on. :D I don't think anyone is actually looking to 'understand' such matters, as though it is some external stuff......
Problem with habitual skeptics is that if we have evidence, you want the theory. If we have the theory, you want the evidence. As though someone ought to provide all this on a platter!! ::)
The problem is in the Two boxes syndrome.
https://tsriramrao.wordpress.com/2018/03/03/the-two-boxes-syndrome/
The nature of the self is electrical impulses in the brain.
The common currency of the brain is electrical impulses, so sight, hearing, love, hate, beauty is all in this common currency somewhere.
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Yeah right! Skeptics!! ::)
There are skeptics about the String theory, about Dark Matter, about Dark Energy, about the Big Bang, about Evolution....even about the moon landing and the spherical earth....
There are no end of skeptics in this world and that does not in any way dilute the validity of any theory or hypothesis.
Don't get your knickers in a twist, Sriram. There are people who are skeptical about all sorts of things. There are people who are skeptical about a flat earth, about a pretend moon landing, about the supposed link between autism and the MMR vaccine, about the Bermuda triangle, about the illuminati, about UFOs, about the supposed other worldly origin of crop circles, about the idea that NDEs point towards a continuation of life after death. There are people who are skeptical about a naturalistic universe being all there is, about Darwinian evolution, about the idea that there is no god, about the idea of climate change.
It's often very worthwhile to challenge something rather than accept it without question. Surely you don't mind if Jim Tucker's methods, ideas and conclusions aren't put under the microscope. I thought you might welcome it. Perhaps I was wrong. :(
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Don't get your knickers in a twist, Sriram. There are people who are skeptical about all sorts of things. There are people who are skeptical about a flat earth, about a pretend moon landing, about the supposed link between autism and the MMR vaccine, about the Bermuda triangle, about the illuminati, about UFOs, about the supposed other worldly origin of crop circles, about the idea that NDEs point towards a continuation of life after death. There are people who are skeptical about a naturalistic universe being all there is, about Darwinian evolution, about the idea that there is no god, about the idea of climate change.
It's often very worthwhile to challenge something rather than accept it without question. Surely you don't mind if Jim Tucker's methods, ideas and conclusions aren't put under the microscope. I thought you might welcome it. Perhaps I was wrong. :(
I am sure Jim Tucker and his team are professional enough to know how to structure their research. Of course, their methods can be suitably reinforced or modified if and where necessary, to remove possibilities of error, through constructive suggestions. That is probably an ongoing process of fine tuning. That is fine.
But skepticism is a mental disease. It is similar to suspicion. It is a mental program that never goes away.
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But skepticism is a mental disease. It is similar to suspicion. It is a mental program that never goes away.
That's a peculiar notion. I'd say scepticism is more a necessary mental discipline for research. The number of wrong ideas is potentially infinite whereas the number of valid ideas is tiny by comparison, so we take the approach that any new idea needs to be validated. We don't just accept something unquestioningly on somebody's say so. Modern life would not be possible without these intellectual disciplines and to start disregarding such due diligence now would be a really bad idea.
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I am sure Jim Tucker and his team are professional enough to know how to structure their research. Of course, their methods can be suitably reinforced or modified if and where necessary, to remove possibilities of error, through constructive suggestions. That is probably an ongoing process of fine tuning. That is fine.
They would need to propose a theoretical mechanism that could yield those observations and then construct tests to discern whether their hypothesis was correct, or was there some other causal factors leading to the observations. I don't think they are anywhere near that; as far as I could see they don't even have a definition of exactly what it is that is being 'reincarnated'. Notions such as 'self' or 'soul' or 'spirit' are ambiguous, lacking the necessary precision and definition.
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I am sure Jim Tucker and his team are professional enough to know how to structure their research. Of course, their methods can be suitably reinforced or modified if and where necessary, to remove possibilities of error, through constructive suggestions. That is probably an ongoing process of fine tuning. That is fine.
I think the issue with Tucker, as highlighted in the blog, and in particular in the quotes of what he says, is that he doesn't have a research method (and all that this implies) at all: all he really has is a bunch of anecdotes that he'd rather like to be true.
But skepticism is a mental disease. It is similar to suspicion. It is a mental program that never goes away.
Nope - scepticism is healthy and is essential for navigating the average day.
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But skepticism is a mental disease. It is similar to suspicion. It is a mental program that never goes away.
You're thinking of cynicism, which is different. Scepticism (note correct spelling) is the correct scientific attitude to all claims, until the data confirms it.
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You're thinking of cynicism, which is different. Scepticism (note correct spelling) is the correct scientific attitude to all claims, until the data confirms it.
Absolutely.
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The trouble is that many people who proudly call themselves sceptics are really just irresponsible fuckwits - climate change deniers, for example.
Re. spelling: it appears that "skeptic" is "archaic and N. American", according to the New Shorter Oxford. However, since we are modern and mostly British, I stand by my earlier post.
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That's a peculiar notion. I'd say scepticism is more a necessary mental discipline for research. The number of wrong ideas is potentially infinite whereas the number of valid ideas is tiny by comparison, so we take the approach that any new idea needs to be validated. We don't just accept something unquestioningly on somebody's say so. Modern life would not be possible without these intellectual disciplines and to start disregarding such due diligence now would be a really bad idea.
Nothing peculiar about it. Skepticism is a mindset. There are people who call themselves...'skeptics'...which is a general nomenclature without any specific context. It is an attitude people develop during adolescence and in some people it becomes a habit. Their pride in their skepticism further reinforces and strengthens it.
Habitual skepticism is just a way of discouraging or dismissing certain activities that the skeptics are unable to understand or are not comfortable with.
I am not talking here about... 'constructive criticism'...which is a serious attempt to understand, help and encourage any endeavor by pointing out specific flaws or short comings.
Ok...Off to catch a flight...see yea.
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Scepticism gives us the scientific method and all that falls out therefrom.
Credulity gives us religion, people who think that they've been abducted by aliens, the international Jewish conspiracy, homeopathy, the Royal Family being shape-shifting lizards and people who think that reincarnation is real.
Given Dillahunty's Law ("I want to believe as many true things and as few false things about the world as possible") I'll take my chances with scepticism.
And by the way: since you don't do irony, regarding careful, critical thought as an adolescent trait is in itself an adolescent trait. I suppose we should all be thankful that at least you didn't pontificate that it's a sign of our "lower" animal nature ::)
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Without scepticism we'd believe any old tosh, surely?
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Without scepticism we'd believe any old tosh, surely?
As we already see.
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I think scepticism has its place but perhaps it is also necessary to be open to possibilities otherwise statements like these made by that eminent scientist William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, while president of the Royal Society, can thwart investigative expansion:
"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."
"X-rays will prove to be a hoax"
"Radio has no future". on Marconi's experiments.
"I trust you will avoid the gigantic mistake of alternating current".- writing to Niagara Falls Power Company."
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I think scepticism has its place but perhaps it is also necessary to be open to possibilities otherwise statements like these made by that eminent scientist William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, while president of the Royal Society, can thwart investigative expansion:
"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."
"X-rays will prove to be a hoax"
"Radio has no future". on Marconi's experiments.
"I trust you will avoid the gigantic mistake of alternating current".- writing to Niagara Falls Power Company."
Those are statements of anti-scepticism, surely?
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I think scepticism has its place but perhaps it is also necessary to be open to possibilities otherwise statements like these made by that eminent scientist William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, while president of the Royal Society, can thwart investigative expansion:
"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."
"X-rays will prove to be a hoax"
"Radio has no future". on Marconi's experiments.
"I trust you will avoid the gigantic mistake of alternating current".- writing to Niagara Falls Power Company."
scepticism isn't about being closed off from possibilities, it's simply arguing that for things to be taken beyond possibilities there needs to be some evidence and reason behind it. Kelvin's statements here are effectively the opposite of scepticism. (I see in me posting this Shaker has made the same point)
This is the point that I was making with BeRational yesterday. A sceptic doesn't dismiss reincarnation, just points out that currently there is insufficient evidence and reason to accept it. The idea that we either accept or dismiss something is not truly sceptical. Though if something has been falsified then it can be dismissed - though again as I was covering yesterday, there needs to be a sufficient claim to make it falsfiable.
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Those are statements of anti-scepticism, surely?
What makes you say that?
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I think scepticism has its place but perhaps it is also necessary to be open to possibilities otherwise statements like these made by that eminent scientist William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, while president of the Royal Society, can thwart investigative expansion:
"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."
"X-rays will prove to be a hoax"
"Radio has no future". on Marconi's experiments.
"I trust you will avoid the gigantic mistake of alternating current".- writing to Niagara Falls Power Company."
Well as the motto of the Royal Society is 'NULLIUS IN VERBA', roughly translated as 'On the word of no one' or'Take nobody's word for it'', then a skeptical approach is encouraged. Indeed, by producing these statements by Lord Kelvin, you are supporting the case for a skeptical and challenging approach.
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What makes you say that?
Well ... the short statements that you quoted. To say: "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible", or "X-rays will prove to be a hoax", or "Radio has no future", are all dogmatic statements of purported certainty, not scepticism. To say that heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible is to say that such things are ruled out of court once and for all and for ever. A properly sceptical statement in Kelvin's time would have been: "We currently have no evidence that heavier-than-air flying machines are technically feasible, and their existence is unlikely given the current state of our knowledge and technology. However, we must reserve judgement since we don't yet know what future evidence may lead us to." Last night I watched a Horizon documentary on time travel; though the general position is that Einstein was right and that the speed of light is an unalterable universal constant, some physicists are taking seriously the possibility of superluminal travel. There's no evidence for it and they're in a minority, but they're serious scientists, not swivel-eyed cranks.
That's long-winded but accurate. Perhaps that's why dogmatism appeals to people, fundamentally: it's quick, short, simple and easy, whereas reality is convoluted and complex. It's easier to say that flying machines are impossible than what I wrote, even though he was wrong and I'm right. Kelvin, by the way, died in 1907 so he lived long enough - by four years - to see himself shown to be wrong about h-t-a flight. See his Wikipedia page for a rather painful demonstration of how arrogantly wrong he was about how many things.
It's a shame that you picked a particularly egregious example, since Kelvin - just like Fred Hoyle, by the way - is principally remembered today in the history of ideas (rather than in physics, where the Kelvin scale is still widely used) for getting some very big and very important things completely and utterly wrong; in Kelvin's case, the age of the earth (because he didn't understand radioactivity), in Hoyle's case ... well, it's a long list.
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Am I correct in thinking that it was Hoyle who coined the phrase "Big bang", as a sarcastically dismissive name for a hypothesis he rejected in favour of the steady-state universe?
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Absolutely correct. It was supposed to be an insult, but those on the end of the insult adopted it as a sort of badge of pride (even though it's technically wrong in the specifics) and the name stuck. (Same as "Tory" by the way. Which of course remains an insult).
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(Same as "Tory" by the way. Which of course remains an insult).
:D
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Absolutely correct. It was supposed to be an insult, but those on the end of the insult adopted it as a sort of badge of pride (even though it's technically wrong in the specifics) and the name stuck. (Same as "Tory" by the way. Which of course remains an insult).
Techically wrong because it isn't a rapid expansion in space, but a rapid expansion ofspace?
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Techically wrong because it isn't a rapid expansion in space, but a rapid expansion ofspace?
Pretty much, yes. It's expansion - in fact inflation, in modern terms - rather than an explosion, and (OK, pedantry alert at this point, possibly) it can't be big because it was the inflation of everything rather than the inflation-of-something-compared-to-something-else.
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Well as the motto of the Royal Society is 'NULLIUS IN VERBA', roughly translated as 'On the word of no one' or'Take nobody's word for it'', then a skeptical approach is encouraged. Indeed, by producing these statements by Lord Kelvin, you are supporting the case for a skeptical and challenging approach.
I favour the words of the famous Inspector Clouseau "I know nothing and I know everything. I suspect nobody and I suspect everybody".
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NS and Shaker
OK, thanks. I misunderstood what was being said.
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I favour the words of the famous Inspector Clouseau "I know nothing and I know everything. I suspect nobody and I suspect everybody".
;D
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Hi...so...with all the evidence has anyone started accepting reincarnation as fact....yet??!! Why not?!
Reincarnation and NDE's are being researched by professional scientists and both areas have ample evidence. They fit in very well with the spiritual hypothesis of life. I am feeling quite vindicated...actually!
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Hi...so...with all the evidence has anyone started accepting reincarnation as fact....yet??!! Why not?!
Because the evidence you talk about isn't strong enough by far.
Reincarnation and NDE's are being researched by professional scientists and both areas have ample evidence. They fit in very well with the spiritual hypothesis of life. I am feeling quite vindicated...actually!
If these scientists had found sufficient evidence for reincarnation that was strong enough this would be world news. Its not.
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Because the evidence you talk about isn't strong enough by far.
If these scientists had found sufficient evidence for reincarnation that was strong enough this would be world news. Its not.
How much evidence would be 'world news'? 50000 cases...100000 cases...1000000 cases?
These are such numbers available for NDE's, but it has not become world news!!
In any case, I don't think it has anything to do with numbers. The type of evidence is not going to change. I mean to say that we are never going to have hard evidence in the form of a soul being identified, numbered, secret coded...and then the same soul being found later in another body..... or anything like that.
It is going to remain anecdotal.
Even climate change, with all its evidence, is not really earth shattering news...at least not to all the people. There are skeptics even now. Skepticism is a mind set that is almost impossible to eliminate.
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Morning sririam. Wanted to say I've watched half the docu you posted, I said I would comment and I will when I've seen it all. Not had much time but haven't forgotten.
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Morning sririam. Wanted to say I've watched half the docu you posted, I said I would comment and I will when I've seen it all. Not had much time but haven't forgotten.
Thanks Robbie...do watch it all. Try googling for Ian Stevenson too.
Reincarnation may be culturally somewhat strange for you but it has also been a part of western philosophy and mysticism since at least the days of Pythagoras.
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How much evidence would be 'world news'? 50000 cases...100000 cases...1000000 cases?
These are such numbers available for NDE's, but it has not become world news!!
In any case, I don't think it has anything to do with numbers. The type of evidence is not going to change. I mean to say that we are never going to have hard evidence in the form of a soul being identified, numbered, secret coded...and then the same soul being found later in another body..... or anything like that.
Did I mention numbers? No. It is the strength of the evidence which is important not numbers of anecdotes.
It is going to remain anecdotal.
And therefore weak.
Even climate change, with all its evidence, is not really earth shattering news...at least not to all the people. There are skeptics even now. Skepticism is a mind set that is almost impossible to eliminate.
Climate change has been world news because there is a huge amount of strong evidence for it. Whether it is due to human activities is debated by some.
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Skepticism is a mind set that is almost impossible to eliminate.
It's been eliminated pretty thoroughly in you and your lot by the look of it.
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Did I mention numbers? No. It is the strength of the evidence which is important not numbers of anecdotes.
And therefore weak.
Climate change has been world news because there is a huge amount of strong evidence for it. Whether it is due to human activities is debated by some.
And that is why the work of such people as Jim Tucker and Raymond Moody is admirable. They are not stuck on Physics related methods of verification. They understand the nature of the phenomenon and do what best can be done under the circumstances instead of looking for unrealistic and perhaps idiotic ways of trying to prove something.
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It's been eliminated pretty thoroughly in you and your lot by the look of it.
I am skeptical of habitual skeptics!
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I am skeptical of habitual skeptics!
Unfortunately for you.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, come to that.
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And that is why the work of such people as Jim Tucker and Raymond Moody is admirable. They are not stuck on Physics related methods of verification. They understand the nature of the phenomenon and do what best can be done under the circumstances instead of looking for unrealistic and perhaps idiotic ways of trying to prove something.
They work to lower standards of evidence. Nothing admirable in that.
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They work to lower standards of evidence. Nothing admirable in that.
Lower standards of evidence??!! LOL! Really?!! ::)
What are the higher standards of evidence in such matters, according to you?!
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Lower standards of evidence??!! LOL! Really?!! ::)
What are the higher standards of evidence in such matters, according to you?!
LOL?! Really? How old are you?
It is not 'in these matters'. You yourself said 'They are not stuck on Physics related methods of verification' & 'The type of evidence is not going to change. I mean to say that we are never going to have hard evidence in the form of a soul being identified, numbered, secret coded...and then the same soul being found later in another body..... or anything like that.' & 'It is going to remain anecdotal.' So lower standards of evidence than other fields require.
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Hi...so...with all the evidence has anyone started accepting reincarnation as fact....yet??!! Why not?!
Reincarnation and NDE's are being researched by professional scientists and both areas have ample evidence. They fit in very well with the spiritual hypothesis of life. I am feeling quite vindicated...actually!
'Ample evidence' only if you are coming at this from a position of massive bias to start with. If we can dismiss the legacy of belief systems from antiquity and how they have preconditioned us to think certain ways, then we find there is little to zero evidence. For there to be ample evidence, then these strange accounts would be the norm, we would all remember past lives. But in fact these accounts are exceedingly rare and their only substance is anecdotal claims, hardly the stuff of serious science at the best of times. When there is overwhelming evidence, then would be the time to take it seriously.
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LOL?! Really? How old are you?
It is not 'in these matters'. You yourself said 'They are not stuck on Physics related methods of verification' & 'The type of evidence is not going to change. I mean to say that we are never going to have hard evidence in the form of a soul being identified, numbered, secret coded...and then the same soul being found later in another body..... or anything like that.' & 'It is going to remain anecdotal.' So lower standards of evidence than other fields require.
Its not about 'lower' standards. Why are you attaching a value to it?! It is about 'different' standards. In fact, it is about different methods altogether considering that they are very different type of phenomena compared to physics.
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'Ample evidence' only if you are coming at this from a position of massive bias to start with. If we can dismiss the legacy of belief systems from antiquity and how they have preconditioned us to think certain ways, then we find there is little to zero evidence. For there to be ample evidence, then these strange accounts would be the norm, we would all remember past lives. But in fact these accounts are exceedingly rare and their only substance is anecdotal claims, hardly the stuff of serious science at the best of times. When there is overwhelming evidence, then would be the time to take it seriously.
If investigators are unable to accommodate very different types of phenomena within their methodologies, they are never going to be true scientists. They will be leaving out a large chunk of reality from their so called investigations. Not very conducive to understanding Life and the universe, is it?!
Secondly, unless people take something seriously they will never investigate it in the first place. Evidence doesn't fall into our laps automatically. It needs to be gathered painstakingly. Evidence for the validity of Relativity is being gathered even today.
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If investigators are unable to accommodate very different types of phenomena within their methodologies, they are never going to be true scientists. They will be leaving out a large chunk of reality from their so called investigations. Not very conducive to understanding Life and the universe, is it?!
Secondly, unless people take something seriously they will never investigate it in the first place. Evidence doesn't fall into our laps automatically. It needs to be gathered painstakingly. Evidence for the validity of Relativity is being gathered even today.
With no precise definition of what it is that is being reincarnated how could it be tested for ? Relativity theory makes numerous specific predictions that we can test for, so we can do the observational work to verify it. I don't think there is any equivalent with reincarnation. All we have to go on is claims of memories, so is it memories that are being ported somehow from individual hippocampus to individual hippocampus across space and time ? Gravitational waves make sense in the broader context of scientific knowledge, reincarnation absolutely doesn't.
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With no precise definition of what it is that is being reincarnated how could it be tested for ? Relativity theory makes numerous specific predictions that we can test for, so we can do the observational work to verify it. I don't think there is any equivalent with reincarnation. All we have to go on is claims of memories, so is it memories that are being ported somehow from individual hippocampus to individual hippocampus across space and time ? Gravitational waves make sense in the broader context of scientific knowledge, reincarnation absolutely doesn't.
Relativity is physics...so it is obviously easy to use standard methods. My point in this context was that evidence needs to be gathered and does not make itself available by itself.
Reincarnation is nowhere like physics. You cannot complain that phenomena that are unlike physics exist in this world. You might be happier if they didn't....but unfortunately for you they do exist and we do need to investigate them in whatever manner they can be investigated. If they cannot be investigated by standard methods...we have to develop methods that are suitable for them.
Don't keep trying to restrict the world to your known 'scientific knowledge'. That is the worst barrier to knowledge we can possibly have.
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Relativity is physics...so it is obviously easy to use standard methods. My point in this context was that evidence needs to be gathered and does not make itself available by itself.
Reincarnation is nowhere like physics. You cannot complain that phenomena that are unlike physics exist in this world. You might be happier if they didn't....but unfortunately for you they do exist and we do need to investigate them in whatever manner they can be investigated. If they cannot be investigated by standard methods...we have to develop methods that are suitable for them.
Don't keep trying to restrict the world to your known 'scientific knowledge'. That is the worst barrier to knowledge we can possibly have.
Physics is the branch of knowledge that describes reality at its most fundamental levels and it is an ongoing journey of discovery;it does not 'restrict' itself to known knowledge, if that were the case then science would stop. Rather, we build on what we have discovered to date, but we are not afraid to challenge or overturn previous understandings. We don't overturn an inherited body of knowledge lightly though, we must have substantial justification, to not observe this principle is to lack due diligence. We don't revise our understanding of reality at its most fundamental levels on the basis of curious anecdotal claims that cannot be verified. That would be irresponsible.
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Physics is the branch of knowledge that describes reality at its most fundamental levels and it is an ongoing journey of discovery;it does not 'restrict' itself to known knowledge, if that were the case then science would stop. Rather, we build on what we have discovered to date, but we are not afraid to challenge or overturn previous understandings. We don't overturn an inherited body of knowledge lightly though, we must have substantial justification, to not observe this principle is to lack due diligence. We don't revise our understanding of reality at its most fundamental levels on the basis of curious anecdotal claims that cannot be verified. That would be irresponsible.
You don't have to revise your understanding of reality to accommodate other types of exotic phenomena. You just have to accept that is a different facet of reality and subsequently try to integrate it with the more commonly known phenomena.
We have a certain understanding of one facet of reality does not mean we can summarily reject all other aspects just because we don't immediately see any common ground.
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You don't have to revise your understanding of reality to accommodate other types of exotic phenomena. You just have to accept that is a different facet of reality and subsequently try to integrate it with the more commonly known phenomena...
I don't think that is true. Reincarnation would imply vast areas of our understanding of life sciences are wrong. Not just different, wrong. Neuroscience, for instance, reveals that memories are stored as patterns of neural connections in cortical structures like the hippocampus. Accepting claims of memories of past lives implies that memories are not stored in biological structures at all, they are stored in the 'soul' or whatever it is that is reincarnated. This raises the obvious question, why then do we have cortical structures for memory retention ? Likewise with claims of people having OBE that they could 'see' whilst out of body, it implies a 'soul' can experience the phenomenology of biological vision systems without having biological vision systems, which raises the question, why then do we have biological vision systems ? Makes no sense, that is why such ideas aren't taken seriously.
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I don't think that is true. Reincarnation would imply vast areas of our understanding of life sciences are wrong. Not just different, wrong. Neuroscience, for instance, reveals that memories are stored as patterns of neural connections in cortical structures like the hippocampus. Accepting claims of memories of past lives implies that memories are not stored in biological structures at all, they are stored in the 'soul' or whatever it is that is reincarnated. This raises the obvious question, why then do we have cortical structures for memory retention ? Likewise with claims of people having OBE that they could 'see' whilst out of body, it implies a 'soul' can experience the phenomenology of biological vision systems without having biological vision systems, which raises the question, why then do we have biological vision systems ? Makes no sense, that is why such ideas aren't taken seriously.
No...that is not true at all. Just because one aspect is true it does not negate another aspect of reality. It only means that we don't have the complete picture. That is all.
Only some people like you seem to have such apprehensions and problems of integration. Some scientists seem to have no problems viewing different disparate phenomena as parts of a very complex reality.
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No...that is not true at all. Just because one aspect is true it does not negate another aspect of reality. It only means that we don't have the complete picture. That is all.
Only some people like you seem to have such apprehensions and problems of integration. Some scientists seem to have no problems viewing different disparate phenomena as parts of a very complex reality.
If that were true, then where is their theoretical framework for that 'very complex reality' ? This is what scientists do, take observations are induce a theoretical basis to explain the observations. Where is it ? What is it ?
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Its not about 'lower' standards. Why are you attaching a value to it?! It is about 'different' standards. In fact, it is about different methods altogether considering that they are very different type of phenomena compared to physics.
Anecdotes are lower standard and weaker evidence than that required in other areas, such as physics.
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I do hope this thread will soon die and not be reincarnated.
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I do hope this thread will soon die and not be reincarnated.
Why?
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Because it's tiresome and boring. I keep clicking on the 'Philosophy...' sub-forum, because the main menu indicates that there's been a new posting, only to find it's only to this or one of the other boring threads that I don't bother with. The same happens in the other sub-forums, of course.
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If that were true, then where is their theoretical framework for that 'very complex reality' ? This is what scientists do, take observations are induce a theoretical basis to explain the observations. Where is it ? What is it ?
Oh...you are actually looking for a Theory of Everything Everything!! People are yet to integrate QM and Relativity...so..we should not be too ambitious.
What I am talking about is to sincerely investigate phenomena that we can see could be actually happening, such as NDE's and Reincarnations..to the extent possible. We should not dismiss them as non issues or irrelevant or bizarre....just because we don't understand how they fit in with our limited world view.
That is all I am talking about. I am glad at least some professionals like Tucker and Moody are serious about such matters. Small blessings!
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I am glad at least some professionals like Tucker and Moody are serious about such matters. Small blessings!
Then I think, Sriram, that perhaps you are too easily satisfied by woo merchants selling books to the gullible - such as Moody. From the Wiki page on him.
Barry Beyerstein, a professor of psychology, has written that Moody's alleged evidence for an afterlife is flawed, both logically and empirically.[8] The psychologist James Alcock has noted that Moody "...appears to ignore a great deal of the scientific literature dealing with hallucinatory experiences in general, just as he quickly glosses over the very real limitations of his research method."[9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Moody
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What I am talking about is to sincerely investigate phenomena that we can see could be actually happening, such as NDE's and Reincarnations..to the extent possible. We should not dismiss them as non issues or irrelevant or bizarre....just because we don't understand how they fit in with our limited world view.
But you went beyond that, saying 'Hi...so...with all the evidence has anyone started accepting reincarnation as fact....yet??!! Why not?!' then mistaking scepticism for cynicism and criticising those who don't accept the weak evidence for reincarnation. If you'd stuck to the line that such things should be investigated then fine.
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Oh...you are actually looking for a Theory of Everything Everything!! People are yet to integrate QM and Relativity...so..we should not be too ambitious.
What I am talking about is to sincerely investigate phenomena that we can see could be actually happening, such as NDE's and Reincarnations..to the extent possible. We should not dismiss them as non issues or irrelevant or bizarre....just because we don't understand how they fit in with our limited world view.
That is all I am talking about. I am glad at least some professionals like Tucker and Moody are serious about such matters. Small blessings!
Let us know when such people propose some tentative explanatory model. That is what a 'serious' researcher would be doing, seeking an underlying explanation, not just cataloguing curious cases. We already have sufficient explanatory model to account for bizarre claims in terms of the unreliability of witness testimony generally - people can lie, people can be confused, people can have false memories, people are chock full of biases and prejudices and we have had to learn this the hard way such that blind trials for instance is now the norm for testing new pharmaceuticals. As things stand this is a far more plausible explanation for outlandish personal claims than some root and branch revision of the entirety of our understandings of space, time, matter, information and life.
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Then I think, Sriram, that perhaps you are too easily satisfied by woo merchants selling books to the gullible - such as Moody. From the Wiki page on him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Moody
Moody is not the only one. There are many other professional doctors and psychologists who have been studying this for more than 40 years now. Sam Parnia is also one of them. How you people manage to search out some obscure negative feedback about anyone doing something out of the mainstream..is remarkable.
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But you went beyond that, saying 'Hi...so...with all the evidence has anyone started accepting reincarnation as fact....yet??!! Why not?!' then mistaking scepticism for cynicism and criticising those who don't accept the weak evidence for reincarnation. If you'd stuck to the line that such things should be investigated then fine.
I have not seen you agreeing to the idea of investigating such phenomena!!!
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Let us know when such people propose some tentative explanatory model. That is what a 'serious' researcher would be doing, seeking an underlying explanation, not just cataloguing curious cases. We already have sufficient explanatory model to account for bizarre claims in terms of the unreliability of witness testimony generally - people can lie, people can be confused, people can have false memories, people are chock full of biases and prejudices and we have had to learn this the hard way such that blind trials for instance is now the norm for testing new pharmaceuticals. As things stand this is a far more plausible explanation for outlandish personal claims than some root and branch revision of the entirety of our understandings of space, time, matter, information and life.
There you go...that is your problem. Confirmation bias. Not wanting to learn anything new or out of your comfort zone.
You are paranoid about revising the entire understanding of space, matter...blah blah. I have already explained that reincarnation or NDE's do not call for any revision of understanding of the material world. They are fine as they are. Integrating the two ideas is a different and subsequent matter.
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I have not seen you agreeing to the idea of investigating such phenomena!!!
I have in the past, but have you seen me say we shouldn't investigate them and should just dismiss them as you seem to imagine?
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I have in the past, but have you seen me say we shouldn't investigate them and should just dismiss them as you seem to imagine?
Ok..then. You agree that these phenomena should be investigated. Fine.
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There you go...that is your problem. Confirmation bias. Not wanting to learn anything new or out of your comfort zone.
Absolutely not, you aren't paying attention. I am pointing out the value of the Precautionary Principle. This has given us the modern world. We don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. That is not confirmation bias, it is wisdom learned through experience.
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You are paranoid about revising the entire understanding of space, matter...blah blah. I have already explained that reincarnation or NDE's do not call for any revision of understanding of the material world. They are fine as they are. Integrating the two ideas is a different and subsequent matter.
Quite untrue; taking such phenomena seriously at face value rewrites pretty much all that we have learned about life - for instance that dead people or disembodied people can see and hear, or that information can pass through a vacuum. Such claims are no way consistent with knowledge gained to date through life sciences
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Quite untrue; taking such phenomena seriously at face value rewrites pretty much all that we have learned about life - for instance that dead people or disembodied people can see and hear, or that information can pass through a vacuum. Such claims are no way consistent with knowledge gained to date through life sciences
Are the researchers making such claims? They are recording peoples impressions, thoughts and memories. Clearly, they might be introducing bias or speculation around that data, but the data recorded is, at the least, interesting and will eventually be of some use.
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Are the researchers making such claims? They are recording peoples impressions, thoughts and memories. Clearly, they might be introducing bias or speculation around that data, but the data recorded is, at the least, interesting and will eventually be of some use.
The claim that out of body experiences involving seeing and hearing are 'real' implies that seeing and hearing, which we regard as phenomena of embodied experience, are, or can be, disembodied phenomena requiring no biological systems of perception after all, which would raise the obvious question of why we have them in the first place. I'm not sure which if any researchers are making the claims, but the implication is there to be challenged.
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Are the researchers making such claims? They are recording peoples impressions, thoughts and memories. Clearly, they might be introducing bias or speculation around that data, but the data recorded is, at the least, interesting and will eventually be of some use.
Yes, I think that in the case of NDEs there is enough anecdotal data that as a set of events it can be investigated. It's clear that if we were to take the experiences of some individuals at 'face value' then it would be a huge challenge to how we currently model the world. The investigations though only need to take place into the phenemenon, not with an assumption that the face value experience is true.
My take is that any investigations of claims of reincarnation are much harder to cart out in any sensible fashion, since there is little chance of doing the type of controlled experimentation that has been attempted for NDEs.
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Quite untrue; taking such phenomena seriously at face value rewrites pretty much all that we have learned about life - for instance that dead people or disembodied people can see and hear, or that information can pass through a vacuum. Such claims are no way consistent with knowledge gained to date through life sciences
Why? All that science has so far discovered is how the natural world works. The mechanisms in other words. Nothing more.
What we might find through investigations into NDE's and reincarnations and other such phenomena is that there are other aspects of reality that somehow mesh into the natural world. That is all it is!
Only some people like yourself who have formed a material world view based entirely on scientific discoveries, are bound to feel that some dramatic shift is taking place.
There are today billions of people all over the world who are very comfortable with what science has discovered and also with spiritual/religious philosophies. They may not understand how it all fits in but they don't see any conflict between the two.
You don't want such phenomena to be true.....so it is safer to keep them at bay. You are troubled because you perceive a conflict between scientific discoveries and such new exotic areas of investigation. You are not ready to change your world view if so called for in the future.
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Yes, I think that in the case of NDEs there is enough anecdotal data that as a set of events it can be investigated. It's clear that if we were to take the experiences of some individuals at 'face value' then it would be a huge challenge to how we currently model the world. The investigations though only need to take place into the phenemenon, not with an assumption that the face value experience is true.
My take is that any investigations of claims of reincarnation are much harder to cart out in any sensible fashion, since there is little chance of doing the type of controlled experimentation that has been attempted for NDEs.
Yes...it is not easy to investigate these areas. But that is the challenge. I am sure suitable methods will evolve as people keep trying.
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You don't want such phenomena to be true.....so it is safer to keep them at bay. You are troubled because you perceive a conflict between scientific discoveries and such new exotic areas of investigation. You are not ready to change your world view if so called for in the future.
This just suggests you dismiss the logic of my arguments by projecting a cultural stereotype on top of my posts, this allowing for easy dismissal without serious engagement with the ideas. Deal with the reasoning not some strawman cultural issue.
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This just suggests you dismiss the logic of my arguments by projecting a cultural stereotype on top of my posts, this allowing for easy dismissal without serious engagement with the ideas. Deal with the reasoning not some strawman cultural issue.
Do you have any objections to research investigations into such areas as NDE's or reincarnation?!
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Do you have any objections to research investigations into such areas as NDE's or reincarnation?!
As a matter of interest, this is an extract from a Wikipedia item on parapsychology:
"Two universities in the United States currently have academic parapsychology laboratories. The Division of Perceptual Studies, a unit at the University of Virginia's Department of Psychiatric Medicine, studies the possibility of survival of consciousness after bodily death, near-death experiences, and out-of-body experiences. Gary Schwartz at the University of Arizona's Veritas Laboratory conducted laboratory investigations of mediums, criticized by scientific skeptics. Several private institutions, including the Institute of Noetic Sciences, conduct and promote parapsychological research.
Over the last two decades some new sources of funding for parapsychology in Europe have seen a "substantial increase in European parapsychological research so that the center of gravity for the field has swung from the United States to Europe". Of all nations the United Kingdom has the largest number of active parapsychologists. In the UK, researchers work in conventional psychology departments, and also do studies in mainstream psychology to "boost their credibility and show that their methods are sound". It is thought that this approach could account for the relative strength of parapsychology in Britain.
As of 2007, parapsychology research is represented in some 30 different countries and a number of universities worldwide continue academic parapsychology programs. Among these are the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh; the Parapsychology Research Group at Liverpool Hope University (this closed in April 2011); the SOPHIA Project at the University of Arizona; the Consciousness and Transpersonal Psychology Research Unit of Liverpool John Moores University; the Center for the Study of Anomalous Psychological Processes at the University of Northampton;and the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London."
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Perhaps the most foremost and detailed research studies on NDEs was the Aware Project by Dr Sam Parnia.
The results of these studies are summarised here:
https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2014/10/07-worlds-largest-near-death-experiences-study.page
A detailed examination of the project and what it might mean is presented here:
http://neardth.com/aware-parnia.php
And a much more critical one here:
https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2014/10/aware-study-results-finally-published-does-not-prove-life-after-death/
Jim Tucker's research(mentioned by Sriram) into the idea of reincarnation was a continuation of his mentor and colleague, Prof. Ian Stevenson's work. Stevenson collected around 3000 case studies of children whose testimonies seemed to suggest remembrance of past lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Stevenson#Reincarnation_research
For me, the most interesting parts of the Wiki article are contained within the sections:
Overview, Reception and Xenoglossy, which all relate to various case studies of Stevenson.
My position on such things as NDEs and Reincarnation is quite clear. Interesting phenomena should be investigated where posssible, but any results must pass the standard of rigid scientific methodological investigation, otherwise any results and meanings are at the risk of subjective judgement only.
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As a matter of interest, this is an extract from a Wikipedia item on parapsychology:
"Two universities in the United States currently have academic parapsychology laboratories. The Division of Perceptual Studies, a unit at the University of Virginia's Department of Psychiatric Medicine, studies the possibility of survival of consciousness after bodily death, near-death experiences, and out-of-body experiences. Gary Schwartz at the University of Arizona's Veritas Laboratory conducted laboratory investigations of mediums, criticized by scientific skeptics. Several private institutions, including the Institute of Noetic Sciences, conduct and promote parapsychological research.
Over the last two decades some new sources of funding for parapsychology in Europe have seen a "substantial increase in European parapsychological research so that the center of gravity for the field has swung from the United States to Europe". Of all nations the United Kingdom has the largest number of active parapsychologists. In the UK, researchers work in conventional psychology departments, and also do studies in mainstream psychology to "boost their credibility and show that their methods are sound". It is thought that this approach could account for the relative strength of parapsychology in Britain.
As of 2007, parapsychology research is represented in some 30 different countries and a number of universities worldwide continue academic parapsychology programs. Among these are the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh; the Parapsychology Research Group at Liverpool Hope University (this closed in April 2011); the SOPHIA Project at the University of Arizona; the Consciousness and Transpersonal Psychology Research Unit of Liverpool John Moores University; the Center for the Study of Anomalous Psychological Processes at the University of Northampton;and the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London."
Yes..ekim. There are lots of professional psychologists and other scientists who are willing to go beyond the boundaries set by the old school scientists. This has been evident for a few decades now. As younger people come into the field their view of the world is unlikely to be as restricted as it has been in the last century.
And that is true science....trying to understand the world for whatever it really is.
Religious people tried to restrict our understanding to suit their beliefs...then scientists tried to restrict our understanding to suit their world view. This goes on. Humans are the same whether religious people or scientists.....unwilling to change.
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Are the researchers making such claims? They are recording peoples impressions, thoughts and memories. Clearly, they might be introducing bias or speculation around that data, but the data recorded is, at the least, interesting and will eventually be of some use.
If that is all that researchers are doing, then that is simply basic phenomenology, and so long as the immediate hypothesis used to try to relate people's personal experiences isn't immediately assumed to have mystical implications, then fine. Trouble is, most of the researches done are by people with a mystical agenda. It is however of some interest to find that the memoires of some old colonel wounded on the battle field and who claims that he appeared to be 'out of his body' - or a patient on an operating table likewise - correlate with many of the claims of mystical literature. This doesn't make the mystical claims likely to be true: it just invites explanation as to what are the common causes of such experiences, whatever they may be.
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I see we're back to another one of the caged bird trained to pick out pre-written cards bearing the horoscopes of anyone that wishes to pay standard of discussion, only this time the subject happens to be reincarnation? Woo! woo! woo!
Regards ippy.
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Do you have any objections to research investigations into such areas as NDE's or reincarnation?!
Not in principle. Studying near death experiences might from a clinical point of view provide us within insights that could improve end of life care. Likewise study of reincarnation claims might yield useful insights for psychology.
I don't see how anyone could scientifically investigate reincarnation as opposed to claims of reincarnation, given there is no measurable definition of what is claimed to be reincarnated and we are unlikely to have such in the near future given the whole idea is so alien to everything else we have come to understand about life. If it is a person that is reincarnated, how do we identify a person ? It's not like we can ask for the birth certificate or the passport of the previous life. We don't have a strongly scientific workable definition of what a person is. If we were talking about pansychism, or universal consciousness, that would perhaps be less far out, but reincarnation is much more about individuals, something much more complex than matter having a phenomenological aspect.
There are 7 billion people alive today, does your philosophy claim that all of these people are a reincarnated something from a previous life ? How could that work given one generation ago there were only 5 billion persons, two generations ago there were only 3 billion persons, three generations ago there were only 2 billion persons etc and eventually we get down to tiny numbers ? Where have all the extra souls/spirits/selfs come from to inhabit the current population of the living ?
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Not in principle. Studying near death experiences might from a clinical point of view provide us within insights that could improve end of life care. Likewise study of reincarnation claims might yield useful insights for psychology.
I don't see how anyone could scientifically investigate reincarnation as opposed to claims of reincarnation, given there is no measurable definition of what is claimed to be reincarnated and we are unlikely to have such in the near future given the whole idea is so alien to everything else we have come to understand about life. If it is a person that is reincarnated, how do we identify a person ? It's not like we can ask for the birth certificate or the passport of the previous life. We don't have a strongly scientific workable definition of what a person is. If we were talking about pansychism, or universal consciousness, that would perhaps be less far out, but reincarnation is much more about individuals, something much more complex than matter having a phenomenological aspect.
There are 7 billion people alive today, does your philosophy claim that all of these people are a reincarnated something from a previous life ? How could that work given one generation ago there were only 5 billion persons, two generations ago there were only 3 billion persons, three generations ago there were only 2 billion persons etc and eventually we get down to tiny numbers ? Where have all the extra souls/spirits/selfs come from to inhabit the current population of the living ?
Your last paragraph'll give Sriram an exponential headache.
Regards ippy.
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There are 7 billion people alive today, does your philosophy claim that all of these people are a reincarnated something from a previous life ? How could that work given one generation ago there were only 5 billion persons, two generations ago there were only 3 billion persons, three generations ago there were only 2 billion persons etc and eventually we get down to tiny numbers ? Where have all the extra souls/spirits/selfs come from to inhabit the current population of the living ?
You have beaten me to the punch of a point I've had in mind for the last few days but haven't yet got around to posting.
Google tells me that the thick end of the estimates of the human world population in 1CE was 330 million. As of 2018CE we're nudging up toward 8,000,000,000. (That's nearly eight billion).
What exactly is it that's being "reincarnated" that accounts for the discrepancy in numbers, please?
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The problem with woo is that we can make anything up.
Perhaps there is large pool of souls out there waiting for a body and sometimes they get used again.
I bet you can all think of a woo answer.
Have a go, it's easy.
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Not in principle. Studying near death experiences might from a clinical point of view provide us within insights that could improve end of life care. Likewise study of reincarnation claims might yield useful insights for psychology.
I don't see how anyone could scientifically investigate reincarnation as opposed to claims of reincarnation, given there is no measurable definition of what is claimed to be reincarnated and we are unlikely to have such in the near future given the whole idea is so alien to everything else we have come to understand about life. If it is a person that is reincarnated, how do we identify a person ? It's not like we can ask for the birth certificate or the passport of the previous life. We don't have a strongly scientific workable definition of what a person is. If we were talking about pansychism, or universal consciousness, that would perhaps be less far out, but reincarnation is much more about individuals, something much more complex than matter having a phenomenological aspect.
There are 7 billion people alive today, does your philosophy claim that all of these people are a reincarnated something from a previous life ? How could that work given one generation ago there were only 5 billion persons, two generations ago there were only 3 billion persons, three generations ago there were only 2 billion persons etc and eventually we get down to tiny numbers ? Where have all the extra souls/spirits/selfs come from to inhabit the current population of the living ?
Why the population increases if souls reincarnate? This is the same question I myself asked back in 1973 while discussing the subject with someone. It is one of the first questions many people ask while discussing reincarnation.
The answer is that souls are not just human. Even animals are included in the process, as you are probably well aware. But the point is not to be able to answer all such questions. I am sure there are many questions that have no ready answer....just as in science too.
If researchers like Jim Tucker find that many children have past life memories which are also corroborated through proper investigations, then it is an indication of reincarnation. That is all there is to it.
The 'Brain of the gaps' explanation doesn't help!
I agree that there are lots of questions. I have many questions too, myself. That does not mean we should refuse to investigate such phenomena or dismiss them outright. That is clearly a result of spiritual or God phobia that many science enthusiasts appear to suffer from.
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And there we have a woo answer to get over the problem.
It's easy when there is no need for any evidence.
Why don't we all have a go to see just how easy it is to get around difficult questions, when no evidence is required?
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But the point is not to be able to answer all such questions. I am sure there are many questions that have no ready answer....just as in science too.
The general idea in science is that questions are there to be answered, not sat and looked at ::)
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Why the population increases if souls reincarnate? This is the same question I myself asked back in 1973 while discussing the subject with someone. It is one of the first questions many people ask while discussing reincarnation.
The answer is that souls are not just human. Even animals are included in the process, as you are probably well aware.
There are 'n' billion creatures alive today, does your philosophy claim that all of these creatures are reincarnated something from a previous life ? How could that work given that if we go far enough back in time there were tiny numbers involved ? Where have all the extra souls/spirits/selfs come from to inhabit the current population of the living ?
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Why the population increases if souls reincarnate? This is the same question I myself asked back in 1973 while discussing the subject with someone. It is one of the first questions many people ask while discussing reincarnation.
The answer is that souls are not just human. Even animals are included in the process, as you are probably well aware. But the point is not to be able to answer all such questions. I am sure there are many questions that have no ready answer....just as in science too.....
That doesn't really address the question. Even if 5 billion people currently alive were previously some or other now deceased person, that means two billion were some sort of animal in the last life and four billion people now alive were some sort of animal in the last but one life and so on and if we add in all the other animals currently alive is there enough previous souls to go round ? This thinking is not consistent with what we know about the branching and diversification of life, if you go back far enough in time we get back to microbial life only and before that no life, so where do all these souls come from, and by what rationale do they hop from one deceased individual into another and what keeps them attached to one individual during a life ? Does the fact that I don't have any sort of noetic experience during yogic meditation suggest that I am one of the two billion being a human for the first time ?
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#123
And there we have a woo answer to get over the problem.
It's easy when there is no need for any evidence.
Why don't we all have a go to see just how easy it is to get around difficult questions, when no evidence is required?
Sriram in his #122 did say
I agree that there are lots of questions. I have many questions too, myself. That does not mean we should refuse to investigate such phenomena or dismiss them outright.
I always find it interesting when difficulties become a barrier not to be overcome when a religious belief is involved, but is a barrier to be overcome when a similar type of problem occurs in science.
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That doesn't really address the question. Even if 5 billion people currently alive were previously some or other now deceased person, that means two billion were some sort of animal in the last life and four billion people now alive were some sort of animal in the last but one life and so on and if we add in all the other animals currently alive is there enough previous souls to go round ? This thinking is not consistent with what we know about the branching and diversification of life, if you go back far enough in time we get back to microbial life only and before that no life, so where do all these souls come from, and by what rationale do they hop from one deceased individual into another and what keeps them attached to one individual during a life ? Does the fact that I don't have any sort of noetic experience during yogic meditation suggest that I am one of the two billion being a human for the first time ?
Now, if someone took this approach to a science claim, it would be called an argument from incredulity
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Now, if someone took this approach to a science claim, it would be called an argument from incredulity
Perhaps you'd like to help Sriram out then if you agree there is sufficient reason to endorse his thinking....
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That doesn't really address the question. Even if 5 billion people currently alive were previously some or other now deceased person, that means two billion were some sort of animal in the last life and four billion people now alive were some sort of animal in the last but one life and so on and if we add in all the other animals currently alive is there enough previous souls to go round ? This thinking is not consistent with what we know about the branching and diversification of life, if you go back far enough in time we get back to microbial life only and before that no life, so where do all these souls come from, and by what rationale do they hop from one deceased individual into another and what keeps them attached to one individual during a life ? Does the fact that I don't have any sort of noetic experience during yogic meditation suggest that I am one of the two billion being a human for the first time ?
I agree that you will not be able to match the soul count and come out with some sort of an equation. That is why I said that this is not Physics. Stop thinking in terms of such equivalences.
There is no complete theory of reincarnation which gives detailed account of such matters. Nor do I think it will ever be done.
Such scornful questions can be asked about Strings, 11 dimensions, Parallel Universes, Dark Energy and so on, even though they are part of an exact science like Physics. That is what makes the universe so complex. Simplistic ideas don't work.
However, if Tucker and his team have successfully investigated 2500 cases and found suitable matches...that is evidence of reincarnation, period! How the maths works out, I have no idea.
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Perhaps you'd like to help Sriram out then if you agree there is sufficient reason to endorse his thinking....
I agree with STS that you people do adopt double standards when dealing with subjects that you consider as 'science' and those that you consider as 'religious beliefs'. This is the old 'Two Boxes syndrome'. ::)
https://tsriramrao.wordpress.com/2018/03/03/the-two-boxes-syndrome/
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Scornful questions can, and indeed are asked about Strings, and Dark energy, and long may it continue.
By default, none of these things should be believed, UNTIL there is evidence to show that they are real.
Until then it is just woo.
Reincarnation is NOT science.
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Scornful questions can, and indeed are asked about Strings, and Dark energy, and long may it continue.
By default, none of these things should be believed, UNTIL there is evidence to show that they are real.
Until then it is just woo.
Reincarnation is NOT science.
That is fine, then! Just treat the research on reincarnation with the same respect that you treat research on Strings, 11 dimensions, Dark Energy and so on......
No problem. I don't ask for anything more.
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I agree that you will not be able to match the soul count and come out with some sort of an equation. That is why I said that this is not Physics. Stop thinking in terms of such equivalences.
It's not physics though is it?
It's logic.
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I agree that you will not be able to match the soul count and come out with some sort of an equation. That is why I said that this is not Physics. Stop thinking in terms of such equivalences.
There is no complete theory of reincarnation which gives detailed account of such matters. Nor do I think it will ever be done.
no complete theory ? ahem, there isn't any theory, unless you know some and aren't sharing it. To be taken seriously there needs to be sufficient reason; all there is is a vague idea that it happens somehow and all the support for the idea is a tiny handful of curious anecdotes that might be said to support it. The concepts need to have internal consistency and there isn't any.
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Reincarnation? We've had threads about this subject before but they all died in the end...
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That is fine, then! Just treat the research on reincarnation with the same respect that you treat research on Strings, 11 dimensions, Dark Energy and so on......
No problem. I don't ask for anything more.
They are not equal!
Reincarnation is woo with nothing but anecdotal silly superstition.
Strings looks like exotica maths, as does QM (but QM demonstrates results)
Dark Energy is a label for an unexplained MEASURED phenomena.
They are not all equal. Unless you think the chances of me winning the lottery is 50/50.
Either I win or I don't, the only two options.
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Reincarnation? We've had threads about this subject before but they all died in the end...
This one came back!!!!
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no complete theory ? ahem, there isn't any theory, unless you know some and aren't sharing it. To be taken seriously there needs to be sufficient reason; all there is is a vague idea that it happens somehow and all the support for the idea is a tiny handful of curious anecdotes that might be said to support it. The concepts need to have internal consistency and there isn't any.
Well...yes. I agree it cannot be called a theory. It is actually a philosophical idea for which there is now enough evidence to make it a hypothesis. Similar to NDE's and an After-life.
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Well...yes. I agree it cannot be called a theory. It is actually a philosophical idea for which there is now enough evidence to make it a hypothesis. Similar to NDE's and an After-life.
How would you falsify it?
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Well...yes. I agree it cannot be called a theory. It is actually a philosophical idea for which there is now enough evidence to make it a hypothesis. Similar to NDE's and an After-life.
I disagree, there is nothing in there to warrant calling it a hypothesis, it is just a vague idea lacking justification. A hypothesis would be an explanatory framework that makes testable predictions. It would cover the sorts of things I posted up in reply #126 - eg what constitutes a 'soul', how would it be recognised and measured, where they come from, how they attach to bodies, how to interact with bodies, by what rationale do they select one new body and not another following death etc; when we have a coherent set of concepts proposing how all this works and hangs together then we could start to dignify it with the term 'hypothesis'.
It is a hallmark of woo, that it lacks detail. Meticulous attention to detail on the other hand, is a hallmark of those who would know truth
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That is fine, then! Just treat the research on reincarnation with the same respect that you treat research on Strings, 11 dimensions, Dark Energy and so on......
No problem. I don't ask for anything more.
That is fine, then! Just treat the research on leprechauns with the same respect that you treat research on Strings, 11 dimensions, Dark Energy and so on......
No problem. I don't ask for anything more.
Makes as much sense in my book as your post Sriram.
Regards ippy.
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I believe there is an ancient Hindu technique called prati-prasav which 'translated' in the West as 'past life regression' conducted by hypnotherapists. There was a BBC documentary in 1976 as indicated in this link: http://www.ianlawton.com/plr1.html
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I believe there is an ancient Hindu technique called prati-prasav which 'translated' in the West as 'past life regression' conducted by hypnotherapists. There was a BBC documentary in 1976 as indicated in this link: http://www.ianlawton.com/plr1.html
Or, to get a different view of the Bloxham Tapes, and especially of Rebecca the Jew, try reading this:
http://archive.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/1621-the-bloxham-tapes.html
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The general idea in science is that questions are there to be answered, not sat and looked at ::)
great quote....''questions are there to be answered, not sat and looked at''.....Yes that's very good.
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I disagree, there is nothing in there to warrant calling it a hypothesis, it is just a vague idea lacking justification. A hypothesis would be an explanatory framework that makes testable predictions. It would cover the sorts of things I posted up in reply #126 - eg what constitutes a 'soul', how would it be recognised and measured, where they come from, how they attach to bodies, how to interact with bodies, by what rationale do they select one new body and not another following death etc; when we have a coherent set of concepts proposing how all this works and hangs together then we could start to dignify it with the term 'hypothesis'.
It is a hallmark of woo, that it lacks detail. Meticulous attention to detail on the other hand, is a hallmark of those who would know truth
You do ask for lots of information, I must say. Do scientists have such detailed knowledge of Strings, Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Parallel Universes and so on. I don't think so.
A hypothesis can be a provisional conjecture for guiding investigation. Both reincarnation and the idea of an After-life are therefore valid hypotheses that guide investigations into past life memories and NDE's.
Anyone who is not a Yogi is not necessarily 'a human for the first time'. I have said many times that such practices or belief in God or supernatural belief is not what decides a persons spiritual level. It depends on ones nature, compassion, non-violence, wisdom and so on. Even atheists can be highly developed spiritually!
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You do ask for lots of information, I must say. Do scientists have such detailed knowledge of Strings, Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Parallel Universes and so on. I don't think so.
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For it to be a hypothesis there needs to be substance, detail, not just vague ideas. Compare the detail in String Theory with 'Reincarnation Theory' for instance. String theory consists in dense mathematical formulations relating mass, charge, particles to vibrational states of strings in multidimensional space. The level of mathematical detail and conceptualisation is so vast you would need years of study and training in advanced mathematics and fundamental physics before you would get close to being able to call yourself a string theorist. Where is that level of detail in Reincarnation Theory ? It's not there, the cupboard is bare, and it makes no testable predictions. It is just woo.
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For it to be a hypothesis there needs to be substance, detail, not just vague ideas. Compare the detail in String Theory with 'Reincarnation Theory' for instance. String theory consists in dense mathematical formulations relating mass, charge, particles to vibrational states of strings in multidimensional space. The level of mathematical detail and conceptualisation is so vast you would need years of study and training in advanced mathematics and fundamental physics before you would get close to being able to call yourself a string theorist. Where is that level of detail in Reincarnation Theory ? It's not there, the cupboard is bare, and it makes no testable predictions. It is just woo.
A hypothesis.... a provisional conjecture for guiding investigation. Check the dictionary. That is good enough.
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A hypothesis.... a provisional conjecture for guiding investigation. Check the dictionary. That is good enough.
How can your reincarnation hypothesis be falsified? What testable predictions does it make?
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A hypothesis.... a provisional conjecture for guiding investigation. Check the dictionary. That is good enough.
For you, maybe, but certainly not for me.
For a hypothesis to be a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis
So, Jeremy's question of how can your reincarnation hypothesis be falsified, is really important.
Remember, also, that ancedotes do not scientific evidence make.
The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition—thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-anecdotal-evidence-can-undermine-scientific-results/
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There are today billions of people all over the world who are very comfortable with what science has discovered and also with spiritual/religious philosophies. They may not understand how it all fits in but they don't see any conflict between the two.
Clearly there is conflict between the two ways of thinking, witness debates running on this board over years. We get two entirely different conflicting notions of what a person is, with your philosophy finding expression in your metaphor of a driver of a car being a separate thing to the car being driven, whereas science on the other hand gives us, to continue the metaphor, a virtual driver arising within the car itself, derived from its functioning low level software. They cannot both be right, so why not come down on the side of evidence and reason as the better and more honourable guide to truth. The scientific understanding has immense reams of multidisciplinary research and evidence underpinning it, reincarnation theory on the other hand has none, no logic, no detail and depends on a handful of curious claims as its only evidential justification. You are just trying to hand wave away a mountain with your grain of sand.
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For you, maybe, but certainly not for me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis
So, Jeremy's question of how can your reincarnation hypothesis be falsified, is really important.
Remember, also, that ancedotes do not scientific evidence make.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-anecdotal-evidence-can-undermine-scientific-results/
enki...... ::)
We have already discussed all this many times. All phenomena cannot be investigated using the same methods or even the same principles.
Don't paint yourselves into a corner with all your... 'falsifiability', 'this fallacy', 'that fallacy'....and so on...and then stubbornly declare from your little corner that your's is the only correct view of reality!
Cheers.
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Clearly there is conflict between the two ways of thinking, witness debates running on this board over years. We get two entirely different conflicting notions of what a person is, with your philosophy finding expression in your metaphor of a driver of a car being a separate thing to the car being driven, whereas science on the other hand gives us, to continue the metaphor, a virtual driver arising within the car itself, derived from its functioning low level software. They cannot both be right, so why not come down on the side of evidence and reason as the better and more honourable guide to truth. The scientific understanding has immense reams of multidisciplinary research and evidence underpinning it, reincarnation theory on the other hand has none, no logic, no detail and depends on a handful of curious claims as its only evidential justification. You are just trying to hand wave away a mountain with your grain of sand.
torridon......we have already discussed all this many times....haven't we?!
A car will always require a driver. The driver may not be sitting in the car but may be a software written by some human. I have already asked many times...if the driverless car crashes and kills someone who will you hold responsible?
In other words, there is no such thing as a driverless car. The system is different, that is all.
There is plenty of evidence for Consciousness being different from the body (like a driver and a car, like a user and his computer). The evidence cannot obviously be produced readily in the same manner that evidence cannot be produced for the solar system or the cosmos or the atom. It requires systematic study and understanding.
Cheers.
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torridon......we have already discussed all this many times....haven't we?!
A car will always require a driver. The driver may not be sitting in the car but may be a software written by some human. I have already asked many times...if the driverless car crashes and kills someone who will you hold responsible?
In other words, there is no such thing as a driverless car. The system is different, that is all.
There is plenty of evidence for Consciousness being different from the body (like a driver and a car, like a user and his computer). The evidence cannot obviously be produced readily in the same manner that evidence cannot be produced for the solar system or the cosmos or the atom. It requires systematic study and understanding.
Cheers.
We aren't as car are a computer.
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enki...... ::)
We have already discussed all this many times. All phenomena cannot be investigated using the same methods or even the same principles.
Don't paint yourselves into a corner with all your... 'falsifiability', 'this fallacy', 'that fallacy'....and so on...and then stubbornly declare from your little corner that your's is the only correct view of reality!
Cheers.
You do seem confused. Try looking up why falsifiability is important. And as for 'this fallacy, that fallacy', I think you must be thinking of someone else because I simply haven't used that line of logical argument at all to my knowledge.
I don't think that I have a 'correct' view of reality whatever that may mean. I simply go where the evidence leads, and I don't accept anecdotal evidence as particularly strong evidence. You obviously do, and, from my point of view, that is why when you find such evidence which fits your particular viewpoint, you fall for it hook, line and sinker, to the point of ignoring any other evidence or logic which threatens your position. there are many more possibilities to account for NDEs for instance, than the one idea that something lives on after we die. There are many more explanations of so called past life regression than reincarnation. Open your mind, Sriram,
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enki...... ::)
We have already discussed all this many times. All phenomena cannot be investigated using the same methods or even the same principles.
Don't paint yourselves into a corner with all your... 'falsifiability', 'this fallacy', 'that fallacy'....and so on...and then stubbornly declare from your little corner that your's is the only correct view of reality!
Cheers.
For it to be a scientific theory it has to be falsifiable by definition. For it to be a scientific hypothesis it has to be testable by definition. If it can't be falsified or tested it is not a scientific theory or hypothesis, it is something else. Definitions are important.
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torridon......we have already discussed all this many times....haven't we?!
A car will always require a driver. The driver may not be sitting in the car but may be a software written by some human. I have already asked many times...if the driverless car crashes and kills someone who will you hold responsible?
Increasingly, with AI, there will be no immediate human accountability in the loop. It's not like the old days where programmers hand coded software using their skill. With an AI product, nobody knows how it works because the software has learned and coded itself. Likewise, the software running a person has evolved over aeons of time and each new individual is born with a preconfigured learning machine in their head. It doesn't make any sense to me to imagine that the 'person' running the show might have been a sailor in a previous life, even less so an octopus or a zebra or centipede. What science has revealed is that persons derive from a combination of nature and nurture in this body in this life, not some random previous entity somehow parachuted into my body by unknown mechanism pulling the levers of my power by some unknown mechanism. The essence of me, derives totally from me, not from some previous inhabitant of this planet.
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Sriram, you must be aware reincarnation's not a viable idea anyway as explained to you by various other posters, it's also very likely this reincarnation idea was introduced into your mind at an early age and is probably not that easy to shake the idea off as is often the case.
I notice you seem to be resistant to evidence based ideas when you're trying to promote your reincarnation as something of a viable option, why's that? This doesn't make sense to me when I don't see you as a head in the clouds type of person.
Regards ippy
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Increasingly, with AI, there will be no immediate human accountability in the loop. It's not like the old days where programmers hand coded software using their skill. With an AI product, nobody knows how it works because the software has learned and coded itself. Likewise, the software running a person has evolved over aeons of time and each new individual is born with a preconfigured learning machine in their head. It doesn't make any sense to me to imagine that the 'person' running the show might have been a sailor in a previous life, even less so an octopus or a zebra or centipede. What science has revealed is that persons derive from a combination of nature and nurture in this body in this life, not some random previous entity somehow parachuted into my body by unknown mechanism pulling the levers of my power by some unknown mechanism. The essence of me, derives totally from me, not from some previous inhabitant of this planet.
You don't seem to realize that all this AI is in fact, modelling out how Consciousness and Intelligence can function remotely. As discussed many times earlier, it also brings out how evolution can happen through Intelligent intervention giving rise to Intelligence again.
Our creations show us how we have been created.
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You don't seem to realize that all this AI is in fact, modelling out how Consciousness and Intelligence can function remotely. As discussed many times earlier, it also brings out how evolution can happen through Intelligent intervention giving rise to Intelligence again.
Our creations show us how we have been created.
No, they really don't.
A man called Darwin put that childlike 'reasoning' to bed a hundred and fifty-odd years ago.
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You don't seem to realize that all this AI is in fact, modelling out how Consciousness and Intelligence can function remotely. As discussed many times earlier, it also brings out how evolution can happen through Intelligent intervention giving rise to Intelligence again.
Our creations show us how we have been created.
Intelligent things can create other intelligent things, that much is trivial, but that observation doesn't explain a first cause intelligence. The harder challenge is to come to understand how intelligence arises from first principles as an emergent phenomenon of complex interacting systems. Then we are on the road to understanding ourselves; our intelligence evolved.
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You don't seem to realize that all this AI is in fact, modelling out how Consciousness and Intelligence can function remotely. As discussed many times earlier, it also brings out how evolution can happen through Intelligent intervention giving rise to Intelligence again.
Our creations show us how we have been created.
Not at all. We are trying to reproduce the same results but that doesn't mean that the origins and causes are the same.
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Clearly there is conflict between the two ways of thinking, witness debates running on this board over years. We get two entirely different conflicting notions of what a person is, ......
....... It doesn't make any sense to me to imagine that the 'person' running the show might have been a sailor in a previous life, even less so an octopus or a zebra or centipede. What science has revealed is that persons derive from a combination of nature and nurture in this body in this life, not some random previous entity somehow parachuted into my body by unknown mechanism pulling the levers of my power by some unknown mechanism. The essence of me, derives totally from me, not from some previous inhabitant of this planet.
I have extracted some points from both of your last posts to comment on. There is not only conflict between the two ways you mention, but both conflict with a third way which is about transcending all notions, I think the Sanskrit word is namarupa. thought forms. The third way is not about defining what a person is and ending up with yet another concept. It doesn't matter whether that concept is derived from religious scripture, scientific analysis or psychology as it just adds to the barrier which the 'spiritual' initiate has to negotiate. There is another Sanskrit word, 'manas' which is basically memory in its variety of forms e.g. evolutionary, genetic, cellular, personal life. Whether 'personal life memory' results partially from a former life or not is irrelevant, it still has to be transcended by the initiate who is more concerned to discover experientially his true identity rather than a notion of it, even if that notion is called 'essence' and forms a part of scientific theory.
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Intelligent things can create other intelligent things, that much is trivial, but that observation doesn't explain a first cause intelligence. The harder challenge is to come to understand how intelligence arises from first principles as an emergent phenomenon of complex interacting systems. Then we are on the road to understanding ourselves; our intelligence evolved.
"intelligence arises from first principles as an emergent phenomenon of complex interacting systems."
Oooh...you like to coin grand sounding sentences that don't really mean much.
We don't have to explain any first cause intelligence. We just need to explain our own intelligence.
If we put together the theory of evolution, complexity, emergence.... and mix it with NDE's, reincarnation, personal mystical experiences...and add in the phenomenon of civilization and human development that we actually observe. We get a nice wholesome hypothesis of spiritual development.
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If we put together the theory of evolution, complexity, emergence.... and mix it with NDE's, reincarnation, personal mystical experiences...and add in the phenomenon of civilization and human development that we actually observe. We get a nice wholesome hypothesis of spiritual development.
... known to those of us in the reality-based community as a right steaming pile of horseshit.
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"intelligence arises from first principles as an emergent phenomenon of complex interacting systems."
Oooh...you like to coin grand sounding sentences that don't really mean much.
We don't have to explain any first cause intelligence. We just need to explain our own intelligence.
If we put together the theory of evolution, complexity, emergence.... and mix it with NDE's, reincarnation, personal mystical experiences...and add in the phenomenon of civilization and human development that we actually observe. We get a nice wholesome hypothesis of spiritual development.
"If we put together the theory of evolution, complexity, emergence.... and mix it with NDE's, reincarnation, personal mystical experiences...and add in the phenomenon of civilization and human development that we actually observe. We get a nice wholesome hypothesis of spiritual development."
Oooh you do like your pick'n'mix confections that don't really explain much, offering a pleasant pastiche in place of unbiased detailed conclusion from evidence. Evolutionary biology reveals that cognitive intelligence has evolved at least twice entirely separately on this planet - in the line of vertebrates and also in cephalopods. This tells us that intelligence is a natural consequence, ie it is a logical inevitability of sufficiently complex systems, and it is an emergent phenomenon, not a causal one. A queen bee does not control her colony because she is endowed with an intelligent brain, but rather intelligence arises out of the interactions of individual members of the colony. For a queen bee to have the intelligence to guide her colony would require her to have a bee colony in her brain, which colony would contain a queen bee that had a bee colony in her brain, which colony would contain a queen bee that had a ....... ad infinitum. The idea of first cause intelligence as an underlying axiom to an understanding of all things fails because intelligence by its nature cannot be a first cause, it emerges from simpler underlying systems of sufficient complexity.
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"...intelligence by its nature cannot be a first cause, it emerges from simpler underlying systems of sufficient complexity."
You keep stating this as though it is some sort of a fundamental law of nature. It isn't.
If we take robotic intelligence or AI, as having emerged due to the complexity of robots, we can see that human intelligence is responsible for it. So, the idea that Intelligence can arise without a higher level Intelligence has no basis.
Intelligence arises from complexity which itself arises from some form of higher Intelligence. We are actually seeing this happening in AI.
There is no basis to say that Intelligence and complexity can arise in the absence of a higher intelligence.
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"...intelligence by its nature cannot be a first cause, it emerges from simpler underlying systems of sufficient complexity."
You keep stating this as though it is some sort of a fundamental law of nature. It isn't.
If we take robotic intelligence or AI, as having emerged due to the complexity of robots, we can see that human intelligence is responsible for it. So, the idea that Intelligence can arise without a higher level Intelligence has no basis.
Intelligence arises from complexity which itself arises from some form of higher Intelligence. We are actually seeing this happening in AI.
There is no basis to say that Intelligence and complexity can arise in the absence of a higher intelligence.
There is basis, and I just explained it with real world examples in the previous post. OK, smart things can themselves create smart things, so much is trivially true, but that observation cannot amount to an explanation of the fundamental nature of intelligence as that leads to an infinite regress. That intelligence arises naturally is the more profound truth of the matter. Complexity derives from simplicity, not the other way round. We find that large houses are made of small bricks; but we never find small bricks that are made of large houses as you would have us believe.
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"Intelligence arises from complexity which itself arises from some form of higher Intelligence."
"That intelligence arises naturally is the more profound truth of the matter. Complexity derives from simplicity, not the other way round."
I think you should both agree on a definition of intelligence. There is at least one Hindu school of thought that sees it as simple in nature but is present in life forms in different proportions. It is life forms which vary in complexity.
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"...intelligence by its nature cannot be a first cause, it emerges from simpler underlying systems of sufficient complexity."
You keep stating this as though it is some sort of a fundamental law of nature. It isn't.
If we take robotic intelligence or AI, as having emerged due to the complexity of robots, we can see that human intelligence is responsible for it. So, the idea that Intelligence can arise without a higher level Intelligence has no basis.
Intelligence arises from complexity which itself arises from some form of higher Intelligence. We are actually seeing this happening in AI.
There is no basis to say that Intelligence and complexity can arise in the absence of a higher intelligence.
I note your idea was also the basic form of Arthur C Clark's book 2001, where did the entity that placed the monoliths obtain their, or it's intelligence from?
It looks to me like you're up another blind alley Sriram.
Regards ippy.
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There is basis, and I just explained it with real world examples in the previous post. OK, smart things can themselves create smart things, so much is trivially true, but that observation cannot amount to an explanation of the fundamental nature of intelligence as that leads to an infinite regress. That intelligence arises naturally is the more profound truth of the matter. Complexity derives from simplicity, not the other way round. We find that large houses are made of small bricks; but we never find small bricks that are made of large houses as you would have us believe.
Infinite regress cannot be avoided, as I have explained many times. Even the Big Bang and the Singularity lead to questions about how they arose...and then further to how that something arose and so on. Science does not eliminate infinite regress. There is no 'Ultimate' answer.
So, let us stop complaining about infinite regress, please....and move further.
Since we can observe that human intelligence leads to evolutionary development in man made products leading to complexity and even intelligence, that is a perfectly valid reason to assume that biological evolution and complexity also have some kind of intelligent cause. That is the most logical assumption to make.
Ok...to begin with, you people may have problems with religious baggage because of which such thinking may seem ill advised.
Secondly, we may not be able to observe or understand the source of such Intelligence from our normal observations.
I agree these are problems, but these are issues we have to overcome rather than looking the other way and coming up with convoluted chance based explanations.
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Infinite regress cannot be avoided, as I have explained many times. Even the Big Bang and the Singularity lead to questions about how they arose...and then further to how that something arose and so on. Science does not eliminate infinite regress. There is no 'Ultimate' answer.
So, let us stop complaining about infinite regress, please....and move further.
Since we can observe that human intelligence leads to evolutionary development in man made products leading to complexity and even intelligence, that is a perfectly valid reason to assume that biological evolution and complexity also have some kind of intelligent cause. That is the most logical assumption to make.
Ok...to begin with, you people may have problems with religious baggage because of which such thinking may seem ill advised.
Secondly, we may not be able to observe or understand the source of such Intelligence from our normal observations.
I agree these are problems, but these are issues we have to overcome rather than looking the other way and coming up with convoluted chance based explanations.
None of that justifies an assumption that our present reality is a creation of some prior or higher intelligence. The best we can say is that it might be a possibility that we cannot eliminate and if it turns out to be the case then it will not be a complete picture as it leaves undefined the provenance of the higher reality. So it doesn't really get us anywhere and given there is zero evidence to support it and given there is plenty of evidence from the natural world that intelligence arises naturally wherever conditions are favourable I don't see much point in taking it seriously. It is fantasy thinking when we could apply ourselves to real thinking.
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None of that justifies an assumption that our present reality is a creation of some prior or higher intelligence. The best we can say is that it might be a possibility that we cannot eliminate and if it turns out to be the case then it will not be a complete picture as it leaves undefined the provenance of the higher reality. So it doesn't really get us anywhere and given there is zero evidence to support it and given there is plenty of evidence from the natural world that intelligence arises naturally wherever conditions are favourable I don't see much point in taking it seriously. It is fantasy thinking when we could apply ourselves to real thinking.
You are agreeing that its a possibility...and then retracting to call it a fantasy. ::)
Religious mythology may be fantasy...but some form of Intelligence giving rise to evolution, complexity and Intelligence is a real possibility. What we observe from our own lives and our creations, points to that very clearly.
We have to work on understanding it of course, but that is a subsequent matter. Not easy and not as straight forward as merely demanding evidence or designing some instruments.
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You are agreeing that its a possibility...and then retracting to call it a fantasy. ::)
Religious mythology may be fantasy...but some form of Intelligence giving rise to evolution, complexity and Intelligence is a real possibility. What we observe from our own lives and our creations, points to that very clearly.
We have to work on understanding it of course, but that is a subsequent matter. Not easy and not as straight forward as merely demanding evidence or designing some instruments.
I don't see much point in trying to understand something unknowable, particularly if it consumes out energies, then that is energy that could have been spent on trying to understand things that we know to be real. Alan Burns will solemnly tell us that intelligence is a gift from God, but merely 'accepting' that is a lazy man's way out of trying to understand what intelligence actually is; we don't then have to think about it. Given there are seven billion of us on the planet now, we need more than ever to face up to understanding our nature, we need to learn to be realistic.
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I don't see much point in trying to understand something unknowable, particularly if it consumes out energies, then that is energy that could have been spent on trying to understand things that we know to be real. Alan Burns will solemnly tell us that intelligence is a gift from God, but merely 'accepting' that is a lazy man's way out of trying to understand what intelligence actually is; we don't then have to think about it. Given there are seven billion of us on the planet now, we need more than ever to face up to understanding our nature, we need to learn to be realistic.
You are again trying to avoid the issue by talking both ways.
I can agree that the higher intelligence could be unknowable, just as the Singularity or the String or Parallel Universes are unknowable. But we can admit to their possibility and built that possibility into our hypotheses without becoming phobic about them.
It is the phobia and the reluctance to think of such possibilities that are a barrier to further understanding....regardless of how far we are actually able to go in understanding such matters.
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You are again trying to avoid the issue by talking both ways.
I can agree that the higher intelligence could be unknowable, just as the Singularity or the String or Parallel Universes are unknowable. But we can admit to their possibility and built that possibility into our hypotheses without becoming phobic about them.
It is the phobia and the reluctance to think of such possibilities that are a barrier to further understanding....regardless of how far we are actually able to go in understanding such matters.
I don't see any 'phobia's at play; that rather has echoes of Vlad and his 'god dodging' spiel. We all have a limited amount of time; with limited funds surely it is better to spend your money wisely on things we have good evidence for rather than investing in the unknowable. Wisdom is not a phobia.
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I don't see any 'phobia's at play; that rather has echoes of Vlad and his 'god dodging' spiel. We all have a limited amount of time; with limited funds surely it is better to spend your money wisely on things we have good evidence for rather than investing in the unknowable. Wisdom is not a phobia.
The 'phobia' is what prevents people from accepting it as a natural possibility and makes them dismiss the idea as another religious belief.
If there is no time for such a fundamental part of reality...what is it we should be investigating? You would also then object to research on Strings, the beginning of the universe, how dinosaurs were killed, how life began, black holes and so on? What are we going to gain by investigating such phenomena? It is all a waste of money and time.
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The 'phobia' is what prevents people from accepting it as a natural possibility and makes them dismiss the idea as another religious belief.
That's not what a phobia is. A phobia is an irrational fear. Where we invest our research efforts is not guided by phobias, it is guided by the evidence within the constraints of budget.
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That's not what a phobia is. A phobia is an irrational fear. Where we invest our research efforts is not guided by phobias, it is guided by the evidence within the constraints of budget.
My goodness torridon...! You just keep going back and forth.
I know what phobia is. It is phobia of God and religion and the supernatural that prevents 'scientists' from accepting the possibility of Intelligent intervention as a natural part of reality.
Evidence is what we have discussed already about complexity and intelligence. If you want further evidence you have to find a way and work on it.
Cheers.
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My goodness torridon...! You just keep going back and forth.
I know what phobia is. It is phobia of God and religion and the supernatural that prevents 'scientists' from accepting the possibility of Intelligent intervention as a natural part of reality.
That is wrong though. Scientists aren't driven by irrational fears; they are driven by curiosity, in the main, to find out how stuff works. And in that regard the principle is to follow where the evidence leads. That isn't phobia, it is being true to the evidence.
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Actually, if a scientist discovered evidence for a higher intelligence, he would be showered with honours, probably a Nobel prize, and it would be considered one of the greatest discoveries. But so far, zilch. Of course, the possibility of it is accepted, but that is not evidence.
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Actually, if a scientist discovered evidence for a higher intelligence, he would be showered with honours, probably a Nobel prize, and it would be considered one of the greatest discoveries. But so far, zilch. Of course, the possibility of it is accepted, but that is not evidence.
Most would agree with you Wiggs, you'll have a hard job getting through to Sriram with these, rather simple facts.
What's your horoscope got you in for this week Sriram? Need I ask any more of you?
There you go cheers, ippy.
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That is wrong though. Scientists aren't driven by irrational fears; they are driven by curiosity, in the main, to find out how stuff works. And in that regard the principle is to follow where the evidence leads. That isn't phobia, it is being true to the evidence.
They may be driven by curiosity but it is their phobia of 'supernatural' things that prevents them from integrating such matters into their world view.
If galaxies are moving apart at an accelerated rate, scientists assume that something is pushing them apart, even though we can see no evidence of any such thing. We then start looking for evidence for this something. This is Dark Energy....which is said to constitute 70% of the mass of the universe.
If we see some odd gravitational effects in the cosmos, scientists assume there is some exotic matter present everywhere that makes this happen, even though we see nothing of that sort anywhere. Then they start looking for evidence of this strange matter. This is Dark Matter....which is said to constitute 25% of the mass of the universe.
But if we see complexity and intelligence arising through biological evolution, we don't think that something should be making this arise....we attribute this to chance happenings. That's just the way things happen folks! Nothing to see here!
If we talk of a Soul or Consciousness, we are asked to outline in detail such things as the texture, chemical composition, how it bonds with the body and so on.
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They may be driven by curiosity but it is their phobia of 'supernatural' things that prevents them from integrating such matters into their world view.
If galaxies are moving apart at an accelerated rate, scientists assume that something is pushing them apart, even though we can see no evidence of any such thing. We then start looking for evidence for this something. This is Dark Energy....which is said to constitute 70% of the mass of the universe.
If we see some odd gravitational effects in the cosmos, scientists assume there is some exotic matter present everywhere that makes this happen, even though we see nothing of that sort anywhere. Then they start looking for evidence of this strange matter. This is Dark Matter....which is said to constitute 25% of the mass of the universe.
But if we see complexity and intelligence arising through biological evolution, we don't think that something should be making this arise....we attribute this to chance happenings. That's just the way things happen folks! Nothing to see here!
If we talk of a Soul or Consciousness, we are asked to outline in detail such things as the texture, chemical composition, how it bonds with the body and so on.
None of that amounts to a phobia. If you think it a phobia, that is just a skewed perception within your mind. It's not real. Science is inherently naturalistic, in the sense that anything supernatural cannot be investigated, because that flows from the definition of supernatural. We cannot investigate that which is uninvestigable. That is not a phobia, it is simple logic. We see observations that call for an explanation not yet found, such as 'dark energy' and 'dark matter'; these are in effect labels for undiscovered processes causing these observations. We will always have gaps in our knowledge, and there is no point in imagining that some supernatural agent has some agenda in pulling galaxies apart. We work on the assumption that there is some natural cause for this, if we did not, we would never come to discover the causes. This is the nature of science, it is not some aberrant phobia that for some reason afflicts scientists in particular.
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They may be driven by curiosity but it is their phobia of 'supernatural' things that prevents them from integrating such matters into their world view.
No, it's the scientific method - the only thing yet discovered which has consistently shown itself to be a reliable means of understanding the way nature is - that prevents them. No 'phobia'; reason and an evidence-based approach to reality.
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None of that amounts to a phobia. If you think it a phobia, that is just a skewed perception within your mind. It's not real. Science is inherently naturalistic, in the sense that anything supernatural cannot be investigated, because that flows from the definition of supernatural. We cannot investigate that which is uninvestigable. That is not a phobia, it is simple logic. We see observations that call for an explanation not yet found, such as 'dark energy' and 'dark matter'; these are in effect labels for undiscovered processes causing these observations. We will always have gaps in our knowledge, and there is no point in imagining that some supernatural agent has some agenda in pulling galaxies apart. We work on the assumption that there is some natural cause for this, if we did not, we would never come to discover the causes. This is the nature of science, it is not some aberrant phobia that for some reason afflicts scientists in particular.
Are you getting the point at all?! I didn't say that galaxies are pushed apart by supernatural forces.
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No, it's the scientific method - the only thing yet discovered which has consistently shown itself to be a reliable means of understanding the way nature is - that prevents them. No 'phobia'; reason and an evidence-based approach to reality.
Yeah...yeah...I get that. The scientific method! Anything that falls outside the scientific method has no business to exist!
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Are you getting the point at all?! I didn't say that galaxies are pushed apart by supernatural forces.
OK, to take the example of souls, if you take the position that it is a supernatural phenomenon then that by definition rules it out of natural investigation. If you take the position that it is a natural phenomenon, then we ask, what then is it's nature; for example, it's substance, it's temperature, it's shape, it's charge, why doesn't it show up on scans etc. etc.
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Are you getting the point at all?! I didn't say that galaxies are pushed apart by supernatural forces.
..but they could be, couldn't they?
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Yeah...yeah...I get that.
Unlikely in the extreme.
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OK, to take the example of souls, if you take the position that it is a supernatural phenomenon then that by definition rules it out of natural investigation. If you take the position that it is a natural phenomenon, then we ask, what then is it's nature; for example, it's substance, it's temperature, it's shape, it's charge, why doesn't it show up on scans etc. etc.
Why don't you get it? You are vacillating.
Parallel Universes, Strings, Dark Energy ....are natural phenomena. Do you know their temperature, shape, charge etc. and why they don't show up on any of our instruments?!
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Why don't you get it? You are vacillating.
Parallel Universes, Strings, Dark Energy ....are natural phenomena.
How do you know that?
Maybe they are supernatural.
They could be, couldn't they?
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Why don't you get it? You are vacillating.
Parallel Universes, Strings, Dark Energy ....are natural phenomena. Do you know their temperature, shape, charge etc. and why they don't show up on any of our instruments?!
These things do show up on our instruments. Or, more accurately, they are names, or names for provisional explanations for things that do show up on our instruments. We can measure the expansion of the universe due to 'dark energy', whatever it turns out to be. It is a real phenomenon of nature, there is no doubt about that. Likewise String Theory is an attempt to explain the fundamental nature of matter at a subatomic level and is constrained by observational evidence at higher levels. Parallel worlds is an attempt to explain observations from quantum theory. All of these are explanations for real measurable phenomena. Reincarnated souls on the other hand have no observational evidence in favour of it, unless you include anecdotal claims, which are not regarded as strong evidence. We can build a picture of past life on Earth because fossils in sedimentary layers are good evidence, they do not lie. We can measure the speed of galaxies using red shift and this is good evidence because telescopes cannot lie. Humans on the other hand can and do lie, and get confused, and have ulterior agendas and prejudices, so witness testimony is considered weak evidence. There is no significant evidence that a theory of reincarnation would attempt to explain; rather it is an idea from pre-science antiquity trying to find justification in the context of modern science.
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These things do show up on our instruments. Or, more accurately, they are names, or names for provisional explanations for things that do show up on our instruments. We can measure the expansion of the universe due to 'dark energy', whatever it turns out to be. It is a real phenomenon of nature, there is no doubt about that. Likewise String Theory is an attempt to explain the fundamental nature of matter at a subatomic level and is constrained by observational evidence at higher levels. Parallel worlds is an attempt to explain observations from quantum theory. All of these are explanations for real measurable phenomena. Reincarnated souls on the other hand have no observational evidence in favour of it, unless you include anecdotal claims, which are not regarded as strong evidence. We can build a picture of past life on Earth because fossils in sedimentary layers are good evidence, they do not lie. We can measure the speed of galaxies using red shift and this is good evidence because telescopes cannot lie. Humans on the other hand can and do lie, and get confused, and have ulterior agendas and prejudices, so witness testimony is considered weak evidence. There is no significant evidence that a theory of reincarnation would attempt to explain; rather it is an idea from pre-science antiquity trying to find justification in the context of modern science.
One side of this rambling argument is willing to accept anything that's backed up by even small amounts of evidence that could be a pointer to some form of a direction.
The other side with it's rambling on about stuff, that's all it is stuff, childlike stuff that has to date been unable to even supply anything that would at the very least inspire enquiry.
Regards ippy
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I know what phobia is. It is phobia of God and religion and the supernatural that prevents 'scientists' from accepting the possibility of Intelligent intervention as a natural part of reality.
Cheers.
Complete and utter rubbish.
Scientists ignore the possibility of intelligent intervention because it doesn’t help them to understand the Universe. By ignoring the possibility that goddidit they’ve had centuries of success. Before that, they had millennia of scientific dark ages.
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I know what phobia is. It is phobia of God and religion and the supernatural that prevents 'scientists' from accepting the possibility of Intelligent intervention as a natural part of reality.
How is "intelligent intervention" by a supposed supernatural entity "a natural part of reality"?
You seem more than usually confused, which is saying something.
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These things do show up on our instruments. Or, more accurately, they are names, or names for provisional explanations for things that do show up on our instruments. We can measure the expansion of the universe due to 'dark energy', whatever it turns out to be. It is a real phenomenon of nature, there is no doubt about that. Likewise String Theory is an attempt to explain the fundamental nature of matter at a subatomic level and is constrained by observational evidence at higher levels. Parallel worlds is an attempt to explain observations from quantum theory. All of these are explanations for real measurable phenomena. Reincarnated souls on the other hand have no observational evidence in favour of it, unless you include anecdotal claims, which are not regarded as strong evidence. We can build a picture of past life on Earth because fossils in sedimentary layers are good evidence, they do not lie. We can measure the speed of galaxies using red shift and this is good evidence because telescopes cannot lie. Humans on the other hand can and do lie, and get confused, and have ulterior agendas and prejudices, so witness testimony is considered weak evidence. There is no significant evidence that a theory of reincarnation would attempt to explain; rather it is an idea from pre-science antiquity trying to find justification in the context of modern science.
Ok...lets leave it at that then.
I am glad there are some people like Moody, Tucker, Parnia.... and their numbers are growing...thankfully.
Cheers.
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Ok...lets leave it at that then.
I am glad there are some people like Moody, Tucker, Parnia.... and their numbers are growing...thankfully.
Cheers.
Do they get invited on Oprah?
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Do they get invited on Oprah?
Super duper comment/post Rhi.
Regards ippy
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Ok...lets leave it at that then.
I am glad there are some people like Moody, Tucker, Parnia.... and their numbers are growing...thankfully.
Cheers.
I think you'll find, if you look hard enough, there's still a few Zeus followers too Sriram.
Regards ippy
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I think you'll find, if you look hard enough, there's still a few Zeus followers too Sriram.
Regards ippy
Also, lots of flat Earth believers as well.
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Also, lots of flat Earth believers as well.
The Earth could of course actually be flat and it could be that supernatural forces are hiding this fact from most of us, not of course the Flat-Earthers, who can see beyond those mystical elements!
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The Earth could of course actually be flat and it could be that supernatural forces are hiding this fact from most of us, not of course the Flat-Earthers, who can see beyond those mystical elements!
What about us Zeus followers?
Regards ippy.
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What about us Zeus followers?
Regards ippy.
You must be living in a bubble.
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You must be living in a bubble.
I might be, I might not :P
Regards ippy
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Not to mention these others, to name a few.....
Thomas Huxley has written...
"In the doctrine of transmigration, whatever its origin, Brahmanical and Buddhist speculation found, ready to hand, the means of constructing a plausible vindication of the ways of the Cosmos to man....yet this plea of justification is not less plausible than others; and none but very hasty thinkers will reject it on the ground of inherent absurdity. Like the doctrine of evolution itself, that of transmigration has its roots in the world of reality; and it may claim such support as the great argument from analogy is capable of supplying".
Henry Ford......
"I adopted the theory of Reincarnation when I was twenty six. Religion offered nothing to the point. Even work could not give me complete satisfaction. Work is futile if we cannot utilise the experience we collect in one life in the next. When I discovered Reincarnation it was as if I had found a universal plan I realised that there was a chance to work out my ideas. Time was no longer limited. I was no longer a slave to the hands of the clock. Genius is experience. Some seem to think that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives. Some are older souls than others, and so they know more. The discovery of Reincarnation put my mind at ease. If you preserve a record of this conversation, write it so that it puts men’s minds at ease. I would like to communicate to others the calmness that the long view of life gives to us".
There have been some sensible wise people after all!
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Neither of whom had, like us, the benefit of modern insights into what life is and how it works.
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Neither of whom had, like us, the benefit of modern insights into what life is and how it works.
Thomas Huxley was a scientist himself and one of the first to accept the Theory of Evolution.
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Thomas Huxley was a scientist himself and one of the first to accept the Theory of Evolution.
Yes I know; I was surprised to find he believed in transmigration. I don't know enough about him to know where that came from, seems paradoxical at first glance.
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I hold no view one way or the other about reincarnation, but Henry Ford is not a good person to quote on any subject, being, as he was, viciously anti-semitic. In any case, why is his opinion on a subject he was not an expert in any more valuable than mine or anyone else's?
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I hold no view one way or the other about reincarnation, but Henry Ford is not a good person to quote on any subject, being, as he was, viciously anti-semitic. In any case, why is his opinion on a subject he was not an expert in any more valuable than mine or anyone else's?
Being anti semitic does not make you wrong about non-Jew related topics.
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Being anti semitic does not make you wrong about non-Jew related topics.
That was my first thought. The second was that somebody who built cars for a living has no more knowledge of reincarnation than any other doofus - it was just his opinion. What makes his worth quoting over that of my postman? Sriram is trying on an argument from authority here even though there's no authority to be had.
Ford accepted reincarnation - and? His expertise in building cars would be relevant if I was seeking advice on building cars, but his opinion on reincarnation means every bit as much as that of anyone else.
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That was my first thought. The second was that somebody who built cars for a living has no more knowledge of reincarnation than any other doofus - it was just his opinion. What makes his worth quoting over that of my postman? Sriram is trying on an argument from authority here even though there's no authority to be had.
Ford accepted reincarnation - and? His expertise in building cars would be relevant if I was seeking advice on building cars, but his opinion on reincarnation means every bit as much as that of anyone else.
My point exactly. His anti-semitism doesn't rule out his opinion on everything, as jeremyp says, but you wouldn't quote Hitler approvingly on any subject.
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In addition Ford is guilty of the consequences fallacy: "Work is futile if we cannot utilise the experience we collect in one life in the next." Well, what of it? Work may very well be futile then. Reincarnation doesn't become true because the absence of it is personally unappealing to you.
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My point exactly. His anti-semitism doesn't rule out his opinion on everything, as jeremyp says, but you wouldn't quote Hitler approvingly on any subject.
Ford is not Hitler and even if he was, there probably are some topics on which Hitler knew his stuff. He was a soldier throughout the First World War and was highly decorated, so he could probably give you some useful tips about surviving trench warfare.
Anyway, as Shaker says, Ford used the fallacy of adverse consequences.
I wonder if there should be a new fallacy: the fallacy of celebrity. The fallacy of celebrity occurs when you assume somebody who is a celebrity in one area of endeavour is automatically to be trusted when they talk about things outside their area of expertise. Examples would be Fred Hoyle pronouncing that aboigenesis is like a tornado in a junk yard constructing a 747, or Jenny McCarthy proclaiming vaccines are bad for you.
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Henry Ford may not be an expert on mystical matters...but mysticism or reincarnation or after-life... are not the sole prerogative of any 'experts' in the area. They are not specialized areas of study. They are life philosophies that every individual can offer an opinion on.
Henry Ford being a person with a great engineering and technological mind....can be seen as a person unlikely otherwise to dabble in such matters. And being a famous person he might not comment on matters of a mystical nature unless he is really serious about them. Therefore his opinion does matter.
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Henry Ford may not be an expert on mystical matters...but mysticism or reincarnation or after-life... are not the sole prerogative of any 'experts' in the area. They are not specialized areas of study. They are life philosophies that every individual can offer an opinion on.
Henry Ford being a person with a great engineering and technological mind....can be seen as a person unlikely otherwise to dabble in such matters. And being a famous person he might not comment on matters of a mystical nature unless he is really serious about them. Therefore his opinion does matter.
Presumably in the same way as Isaac Newton was serious about alchemy and his attempts to discover the philosopher's stone.
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And being a famous person he might not comment on matters of a mystical nature unless he is really serious about them. Therefore his opinion does matter.
Presumably then, any other famous person, if they comment on the same subject but in the opposite direction to Ford. Their opinion matters equally.
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Henry Ford may not be an expert on mystical matters...but mysticism or reincarnation or after-life... are not the sole prerogative of any 'experts' in the area. They are not specialized areas of study. They are life philosophies that every individual can offer an opinion on.
Henry Ford being a person with a great engineering and technological mind....can be seen as a person unlikely otherwise to dabble in such matters. And being a famous person he might not comment on matters of a mystical nature unless he is really serious about them. Therefore his opinion does matter.
In the face of some seriously stiff competition that really must be the shittiest line of would-be reasoning I've seen on here in quite some time.
To add to Jeremy's suggestion of a new fallacy, I would put forward the Appeal to Irrelevant Authority - the fallacy of thinking that skill or pre-eminence in one field automatically confers it in any other area. Richard Feynman I think said: "A scientist looking at a non-scientific problem is as dumb as the next guy."
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::) ::)
You people have already tied yourselves into knots with all your 'fallacies'. Why do you want to add to it? The mind will become even more microscopic and nothing at all will be understood. You will be in a mental straitjacket.
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::) ::)
You people have already tied yourselves into knots with all your 'fallacies'.
No knots - these things exist to accurately identify aberrant reasoning.
Why do you want to add to it?
I don't, but people who deploy bad arguments make it necessary.
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Henry Ford may not be an expert on mystical matters...but mysticism or reincarnation or after-life... are not the sole prerogative of any 'experts' in the area. They are not specialized areas of study. They are life philosophies that every individual can offer an opinion on.
Henry Ford being a person with a great engineering and technological mind....can be seen as a person unlikely otherwise to dabble in such matters. And being a famous person he might not comment on matters of a mystical nature unless he is really serious about them. Therefore his opinion does matter.
Famous people seem to comment on things they don’t understand all the time (see my examples above). Why would Henry Ford be any different?
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::) ::)
You people have already tied yourselves into knots with all your 'fallacies'. Why do you want to add to it? The mind will become even more microscopic and nothing at all will be understood. You will be in a mental straitjacket.
There’s only one person on this thread tied in knots. Guess who.
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There’s only one person on this thread tied in knots. Guess who.
I would think it'd be best if Sriram was to consult his horoscope to find the best moment to answer your post, before doing so j p.
ippy