Of delusional believers and naive positivist scientism

Yes, yes, this!

I appreciated what you wrote about direct experience, as well as what the Hamster King wrote about the problems with using, you know, words and all. I love it when people here are able to articulate thoughts I’ve had which I have not been able to articulate myself. And sometimes even give them names or identify a particular philosophy for me.

More, please.

How about this…Is it reasonable to think that, when millions of people believe something, there might just be a grain of truth buried in there somewhere? And by truth, I mean something along the lines of a common feeling or experience that most of that group have had? It seems to me that the fact that the conclusions folks might draw from this type of experience could be argued as illogical, but that doesn’t mean that the original experience they might have had was imagined or a result of mental illness, hallucination, or “imagination”.

Here’s a made up example to try to make what I’m saying more clear. Lots of people have said they had the “experience” of being abducted, taken away, and “probed” under bright lights by beings with big heads and tiny mouths (or none at all). Many described these beings as talking without moving their mouths. These individuals relate these experiences and say that they were “abducted by aliens” (as their conclusion). Well, I’m not gonna sit here and say with complete and utter certainty that they weren’t, but it seems highly unlikely (seems like somebody official would’ve noticed alien spacecraft or someone might have had a decent camera handy). But what if what these folks are actually remembering is the moment of their births? Being “abducted”, laid out on a table, bright lights overhead, surrounded by figures that all look alike, whose mouths are all covered with masks, and getting something stuck up their butt (rectal themometer)? I’m not saying that I believe this either, but it seems far more likely to me.

I just think when we throw out personal experience, we mebbe are throwing out the baby with the bathwater (which is likely to give the baby traumatic memories that will arise and go on Jerry Springer later). hee hee.

In other words, is it possible that the science-minded might be missing out on a few possibilities?

I would think part of your OP would be if reality is objective or subjective. Are human minds really incapable to record events as they happen, or are they capable but able to be coaxed to accept a single ‘group reality’ for the sake of being accepted, which is a strong human desire.

Yes and no. Meaning that while it is true that for mainstream religious beliefs there are in fact, enough people involved that labeling them “delusional” loses its intended meaning. OTOH, I’d think you’d agree that Jim Jones’ followers were indeed delusional – even if there were more than 900 of them.

I agree but nor for the reasons you give. For if two million people thought the same way they’d still be delusional.

Again, you’re using flawed logic here – it’s called an Appeal to Belief, close cousin of Ad Populum.


First off, it is now obvious that the second topic in the OP is not what I thought it to be. So for that, apologies. But I’ll repeat what I wrote upthread: I have no interest in pseudoscience, New Age, woo, or whatever else you’d like to call it. If you want to talk about chi (Vitalism) or whatever other flights of fancy you have, open yet another thread – I assure you I won’t be posting to it thus you’ll need no cross to climb.

As magellan suggested up-thread, believers = theists. No others need apply.

Ahh I see, you want the thread to be so narrowly defined that it reinforces your beliefs. I apologize I will not sully it any longer.

Maia’s Well if you want to start another thread, I will come and speak with you or you can PM me.

Jackmanii It’s hardly climbing on a cross to believe that when someone Pits you all they want to do is make fun of you.

As for your bit about having a problem with the scientific method that’s complete and utter bullshit. Unless you mean problem with the scientific method in that I have experienced a phenomena that I personally cannot explain using it. I have no problem with it in the idea that it is very useful in explaining how the material world works.

This of course is simply your own projections upon me and shows that you aren’t even willing to discuss what I wrote preferring to fixate on my comment regarding Shiatsu.

Rendering this: I have no interest in trashing poor mswas .

an absolute falsehood. That is your entire motive. Otherwise you’d talk about the substance of what I said, and not fixate on Shiatsu. My point about Shiatsu is that I cannot explain how it works, only that I have experienced that it does. Your use of the word ‘woo’ belies your agenda.

So as the thread is going about the way I thought where my argument is summarily dismissed and ignored so that people can bash the woo, and as the OP has asked me not to post in his thread, this will be my last post here.

Good day.

Yes, very much so. In fact I wrote as much in my second response to this thread.

I think that is the one issue we need to agree on before proceeding. And if we can’t – game over.

For the record I believe there’s an objective reality outside of subjective experience. Further, said reality applies to the natural world, and in it, there’s no room for the supernatural. Postmodern ideas stating that we create our reality leave me cold when they compare said creation to reality itself, or worse, when they deny objective reality.

In short, fantasies can feel great, but as any other reality-altering form (drugs, booze, mental-health issues), over the long run they do far more damage than good.

You can’t act as if it’s unreasonable that people misinterpreted “in jokes” with yourself. I asked for clarification, to see if you were mocking the claims in that thread that Sylvia Browne was a fraud, and you chose not to respond.

Why can’t it be both? Philosophical outlooks are often both a world view/set of beliefs and social groups based on that outlook.

I don’t think you reject science in its entirety. I think that you may be one of those people who feel that science is a fine tool in a limited scope, but it’s not any sort of authoritative source of objective truth - or at least there exist things outside of the scope which can be measured by science. Which can then be used to justify various forms of woo.

Could you give examples?

Incidentally, the people who seem more interested in calling themselves skeptics are the least skeptical people - if you watch any sort of ghost hunter or cryptozoology show they’ll always start with “I’m a skeptic, but…”

Sort of like those people who say “I’m not racist, but …”

Yeah, I’m pretty awesome.

If it actually works, then there’s some physiological mechanism behind it that doesn’t rely on woo like vitalism. I mean - a shaman from a tribe that knew the fever reduction properties of willow bark might’ve thought it was a gift from the spirits, which doesn’t mean that it didn’t work - but his reasoning was flawed and relied on the paranormal when a measurable biological effect was the actual cause.

This is like the “psychics”, who upon being asked to conduct their talents under blinded conditions, claim to be inhibited by a “negative energy field” generated by the skeptics.

Funny, that - the trick only works on people who are willing to be fooled by it.

This is the very essence of a placebo effect. No doubt that people’s expectations can change their perception of the effect of something. That doesn’t mean that there’s some nebulous hidden woo behind it - it is a well understood, well documented psychological effect.

The more introspective and rational you are, the less such things work. This can be unfortunate sometimes when you can’t fool yourself into believing something that would ultimately be pleasant and beneficial to you.

Which was part of what I was talking about in my previous post - often people feel better with a palatable reality they create for themselves and are hostile towards people who attempt as best they can to determine objective reality.

This seems like a straw man to me - maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but I can’t think of any examples of behaviors that could be described that way by rationally inclined people.

I didn’t engage a fallacy. I made a guess, based on what you’ve said on the board. I may be wrong, but I’m not claiming it to be rigidly logical or the absolute truth. I also didn’t mean to imply that you were against science entirely. I suspected (and you made it clear in this post) that you think science serves some role, but that there’s a metaphysical realm beyond the scientific.

Effectively, this allows you to believe anything you want about existance while still claiming to believe (and probably actually believing in) the scientific process and scientific knowledge. So I was right - you don’t reject science, but you’ve decided whatever you believe is beyond the scope of science superscedes it in your world view. This can be used to justify lots of unscientific beliefs.

I partially agree with this statement. There is a tendency to relate to those with similar beliefs. And religion does serve as a way to socially bond and form communities. Atheists are left out in this regard - so it makes sense that they group with other likeminded people to form the same sort of social bonds.

However, because they may be forming groups along the same lines for the same reasons does not mean the rationality of their beliefs is equal. If a group forms based on mutual interests in science and skepticism, it’s not like they suddenly lose their focus on rationality and empircism and blindly adhere uncritically to a group of beliefs. This, again, was what I posted about in my last post - trying to say “oh, those skeptics are the same as any believer, just with a different set of beliefs”

I might be able to agree or disagree if you provided examples. In general, I don’t see a lot of what you’re describing on this board.

If anything, your post describes people who try to integrate scientific sounding language into their woo - like all the new age movements that attempt to use “quantum physics” to describe how their belief works - based on it sounding scientific and yet being confusing to almost everyone.

Science is not a collection of facts, it’s an ideology and a method. It’s the best method we’ve devised to understand nature. Our information is incomplete and imperfect, and scientific knowledge changes to reflect that as we gain more information. I don’t think people who appreciate science essentially worship a set of facts and knowledge as sacred - I think they tend to be interested in knowledge and critical thinkers.

Sir, I can assure you that I can talk trash to you and make fun of you while also giving a serious effort to understand :stuck_out_tongue:

RedFury, you just got 5000 posts! (just wanted to say yay)

See, I understand what you’re saying to an extent, and I understand better what mswas was saying as well. I want to read more, so I think it’s a good idea to start with our understandings of what “reality” and “knowledge” as well.

You mentioned above that “there is no room for the supernatural.” Didn’t mswas say almost the same thing? “I actually do not believe in the supernatural. If it exists, it’s natural.” That seems like some common ground to start with right there.

If I may ask, also, when people claim to experience something which they can’t understand, certainly hallucination is a possibility (speaking from experience here). They may also be lying. In your belief system, are there other possibilities? If so, what are they?

This is a useful example to illustrate the point that I (and I think mswas) are trying to make.

You refer to the “actual cause”. However neither you nor the shaman have access to the “actual cause” of the fever-reducing properties of the willow bark. All you have are subjective abstractions that correlate to a greater or lesser degree with the observable reality. So it’s not a simple case of “shaman wrong/SenorBeef right”. The Shaman’s model of reality is not wholly inaccurate; it does have some predictive value. Your model of reality is certainly MORE accurate, but the possibility remains that some future medical researcher will develop a more sophisticated abstraction that captures elements of reality that currently elude you. So speaking of the “actual cause” of the cure is a bit disingenuous. It sets up a spurious true/false dichotomy when actually you and the shaman merely have two different abstractions with varying degrees of correlation.

Now in the case of you and the shaman, one abstraction is clearly far superior for most purposes. But it’s worth recognizing that when we, as materialists, say “the world is organized in such-and-such a way”, we’re actually constructing a fantasy. The fantasy we create may correlate with reality to a very high degree, it might be very beautiful or useful, but it isn’t reality. This extends to even the most fundamental elements of our cognition. I may say “I see a tree,” but “tree” is merely a fantasy I’ve *constructed *to encompass a particular configuration of matter. The individual molecules of the tree don’t contain any essence of “tree”. The “treeness” of a tree is a category that I IMPOSE on the universe around me as a way of dicing it up in manageable chunks. “Tree” is a human tool, not a fundamental element of reality.

Naive positivism is a form of essentialism. It’s the implicit claim that one’s preferred abstraction IS the reality, rather than merely a particularly useful tool. And it’s a failure to recognize that other abstractions can still be useful tools even if they sometimes correlate poorly with reality.

Oh come on. To come up with a less ambiguous example: Some ancient people thought the Sun God propelled the sun through the sky every day. We know it’s because the Earth rotates. Because our perception of reality isn’t completely objective then both ideas have merit? After all, the idea that the sun god propels it across the sky every day has predictive value.

I can’t say I’ve ever liked these sorts of debates because it seems like some sort of philosophical masturbation where people try to show off with their deep thoughts about the nature of reality while ignoring the practical. It’s silly to pretend that all views on how the world works have merit.

There is an objective reality. The biological nature of our minds limit our ability to see it in a completely objective way. There are cognitive biases, lack of intuitive understanding of the scope of the universe, things we wish to be true rather than observe, etc. Science is man’s best attempt at eliminating our limitations to understand the nature of reality. It comes to erroneous conclusions sometimes based on false premises or false or insufficient data, but it subjects itself to scrutiny and it’s self correcting. It’s our best attempt at describing nature with the best tools we and methodologies we know how to. It is superior to magical thinking.

Nor is it a fantasy; it’s a model. The difference is, a fantasy - like what the shaman believes - is disconnected from reality; given it’s religious nature there is an active hostility to truth in the shaman’s fantasy. A scientist’s model is imperfect, but it is going to be matched to reality as closely as possible. And when reality contradicts it, it will be changed or discarded. The two situations aren’t even close, and attempting to claim they are is simply an attempt to either make religion look less worthless than it is, or to drag science down to its level.

Only useful for predators; you are when you cut away the profound sounding language trying to claim that believing a falsehood is a good thing. It’s only good for people who want to excuse their own evil or stupid behavior, or for those who want to prey upon those who believe the falsehood. “Correlate poorly with reality” is just a fancy way of saying “wrong” or “deluded” or “lying”.

Also I would like to point out the damage that can be inflicted to a person if reality is subjective and they refuse to conform i.e. believe the incorrect view of a objective reality. They know what they experience is real, and it is but society tried to force them to accept the incorrect view.

It a way we do create our own reality - if reality is subjective, we come up with ways to deal with what we perceive as real and what we are told as real. IMHO objective reality exists only in the supernatural.

The idea that the sun god pulls the sun across the sky has SOME merit precisely because it does have predictive value. It’s obviously far inferior as an explanation than the idea that the earth spins in space, but it’s not WHOLLY worthless.

It’s like the creationist argument: “What use is half an eye?” The answer, of course, is that half an eye is better than none.

Not all views have equal merit and no one is arguing that they do.

No argument here. I doubt **mswas **would disagree with you either.

The question is not “Is empiricism the only valid epistemology?” I suspect most of us would agree that it is. The question is “What is the nature of the truth that empiricism provides us with?”

This is of particular importance with fields where the objects of study are more abstract. For example, with the proposition “the earth spins on its axis in space” each of the individual terms are relatively concrete and unambiguous. But what is the truth value of a proposition like “schizophrenia is a form of insanity”. The answer depends on how we structure “insanity” as a concept. The danger of naive positivism is treating “insanity” as a real thing rather than a theoretical construction in an of itself. Grouping behaviors into “sane” and “insane” certainly has predictive value; it’s a very useful tool for grappling with a complex set of behaviors. But behaviors themselves are not inherently sane or insane. It’s a organizing principle that we impose.

Isaac Newton was wrong, but his theories still had a great deal of utility within a limited domain. The point is not that all theories are equally valid, but that even very poor theories can have utility in limited domains. And, conversely, that our current theories are not reality, merely another more useful approximation.

Only in the area of phsyics, where he was trying to match reality and did a good enough jobs that Newtonian physics is still useful. Where he acted like a “shaman” by going into alchemy he produced nothing of worth. Newton undercuts you argument, by demonstrating that even in the hands of a genius, such anti-scientific thinking is a waste of time.

Sure. But I don’t want to get sidetracked into an ultimately futile philosophical argument on the nature or either one. So I think for the purpose of this thread we should use words as already defined.

Thus “knowledge” simply means the range of one’s information or understanding and/or the sum of what is known : the body of truth, information, and principles acquired by humankind.

While “reality” is the totality of real things and events.

I’d only add to the second what I said before. Namely that which exists objectively. Further, in so far as I know, the best way we have of acquiring/determining either one is the scientific method.

Now, if those facts are in dispute, again, there’s no debate to be had – unless we’re privy to some wondrous revelation not known to man prior to this thread. But I am not holding my breath.

I can’t speak for mswas, nor would I want to, but no, that is not how I understand him at all. Seems to me he simply accepts as real (see his views on vitalism) that which he deems as such. I have a poor view of people that think that way, especially in health related fields.

Sleep-deprivation, religious beliefs and perhaps even cultural mores in addition to the mind-bending substances I alluded to earlier. Besides what I think would be the most obvious explanation in my case – which is simply saying “such and such happened to me and I don’t understand how/why.”

I don’t know why people (in general) seem to be so scared of admitting as much. Fact is most of us understand little of what surrounds us beyond basic detail. And yet we know quite a bit more about reality than did our ancestors of a short five centuries ago.

Right. Done for the evening.

What happens when a brain scientist observes herself having a stroke? Does one hemisphere of the brain perceive one part of reality and the other hemisphere perceive another?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor explains her Stroke of Insight. (Less than twenty minutes long and well-told.)

Getting to that totality requires that you remain an open-minded skeptic.

It seems to me that finding common ground and understanding is going to require that we stop judging each other’s motives. (This isn’t directed at you specifically, RedFury.) It certainly isn’t very scientific or productive.

Why do you ask me not to post in your thread about something and then you attack me for it when I oblige you? That’s kind of dirty pool. Especially since you are misrepresenting me so disingenuously. I accept that Shiatsu is an effective form of massage treatment and that it is based on Qi and that it works, because I have experienced it firsthand. There is nothing unscientific about that view. I am not making any commentary about the effects it has, I am not making ANY claims. I do not claim Shiatsu is a medical treatment, I do not market it as such. So WTF is up with this bug up all you people’s asses? You seem like you are opposed to something you’ve never even tried, that you don’t understand that you can’t even define most likely. For some inexplicable reason Shiatsu is a fabulous form of massage, it feels great. Why I need to be consistently attacked and harangued for that I don’t fucking know.

I’m getting pretty sick of your shit. Either include me in your fucking Pit thread that got moved to Great Debates, or don’t, but stop using me as your negative example if you don’t want to hear what I have to say.

I take a dim view of people who dismiss things they can’t even define. It’s not very scientific.

Your post has been reported.

Hell you opened the floodgates so I’ll just paste my posts from the other thread here.

Don’t be stupid. Qi, Chi or Ki doesn’t exist. You’re arguing for something as archaic and backwards as medically treating the four humors.

Pathetic.

Thanks.

Yes, I think that there is truth to this. People get too caught up in the narrative.

What I would say to this is I have no explanation. Maybe they actually were abducted by aliens. I do not know.

Yes, we tend to be antagonistic to personal experience.

I don’t think it has much to do with science but with the way people perceive themselves as being more rational. They believe themselves to be more rational by group affiliation.

I was mocking the whole thing. Basically how people get all upset that people believe in psychic phenomena.

Yes, that is true, but it also happens where group affiliation supersedes the ideology. That happens quite commonly. In this case, people act as if they are skeptics by essence, instead of skeptics by the fact that they use skepticism as a tool.

Nope. I don’t believe anything resembling this.

The debunkings of Shiatsu by people who don’t even know what it is.

I agree. But what I meant was that I wouldn’t have any problem rejecting the Qi explanation if a superior explanation came along. But right now, I know that Shiatsu has an effect, so I’ll run with it rather than trying to overthink it, I don’t claim it to have any western medical explanation.

Don’t ever change.

Yes, but I do not know what that physiological mechanism is, though I know some of the justifications used to explain it. You’ll notice I am not offering any of those justifications.

If it’s psychosomatic then why is that funny? My point is that just because something is ‘all in your head’ that doesn’t make it ‘not real’. Some things work by a relationship. It’s funny how love between two people can only work if both people believe in it right? Kind of convenient no?

Yes, that’s an unfortunate circumstance, but people bring it upon themselves by needing an a priori explanation to every experience. Be open to something you can’t understand working for you, and it just might. It comes from people being too enamored with what they believe. They think that it’s a lot more important to know how things work than it actually is.

Yes, that is true, but just because you are atheist who likes to believe they are skeptical, that doesn’t mean that they are immune to this.

That’s a no-true Scotsman argument being used to rebut a straw man. Rationally inclined does not mean ‘rational’. There’s the rub. Everyone is irrational to some degree. I’ve yet to meet a person who is perfectly rational. Of course it can be claimed that I’d simply reject such a person if I met them but I don’t think that I would.

Actually this is a fallacy. Metaphysics are beyond the realm of science ‘sort of’ in that conflicting metaphysical belief systems can be mutually exclusive and yet both work. Like thoughts are metaphysical. That doesn’t mean that they do not relate to the physical world, only that a thought can contain something that is not adequately described by it’s physical components. Telling me what neuroreceptors are firing doesn’t tell me whether or not I am thinking about antidisestablishmentarianism or Eve Online as both are likely to engage the same parts of the brain as both are intellectual pursuits. An EEG cannot tell you the contents of someone’s thoughts. Just because something is subjective doesn’t make it not really real. Our subjective experiences are a part of ‘objective’ reality.

No I do not, science is the study of the natural world, and nothing exists outside of the natural world. As I said before. Metaphysics are not supernatural, they are just not physical. The natural world contains more than that which is purely physical.

Well, that’s only because false equivalencies are useless. Atheists are susceptible to groupthink and irrational behavior. Trying to draw some equivalency is pointless. Some Christians are more rational than some atheists and some atheists are more rational than some Christians. I don’t think that one can really tell anything meaningful about a person’s level of rationality by their self-chosen ideological signifiers.

Not going to call people out, otherwise people will come in and feel the need to defend themselves. I can understand why you’d like some examples, I hope you can understand why I don’t want to single anyone out.

Yes, it is much the same thing. Which is why I don’t even try to explain why Shiatsu works scientifically. If someone else figures it out that’s great, but I am fine performing it and having it performed upon me.

Yes. I too think that, but I also think that the desire to engage in in-group/out-group behavior sometimes supersedes any rational motives. You and I used to play with this on #i knowingly and willfully when we would try to separate groups to pound on each other, or when we’d gang up on people together in order to mess with the groupings. Radar doesn’t work by lasers, but that was hardly the point was it? The point was making fun of the stupids and ultimately everyone there got a turn in the barrel.

Yes, I know. You’re one of the good ones.

Post reported for calling me stupid.

Go get a Shiatsu from someone who can actually give one, not the rub and the tug lady and actually report back. Shiatsu feels fucking great. Until then don’t lecture me on science when you are dismissing something you don’t even know the first thing about.

Stop stalking me it’s not cute anymore.