Let me rephrase: How is it possible that something that exhibits no empirical signs can be proved to exist through an empirical experiment?
You haven’t been paying attention to quantum theory, which suggests that everything from quarks to pianos exists as a probability waveform, vis a vis the Schroedinger’s Cat thought experiment.
I thought that was “spring theory”, that everything is made up of vibrating sub-atomic slinkies.
Wanna bet?
Firstly, forgiveness if this post is somewhat incoherent. This topic is inherently unclear and I am suffering from a lack of sleep.
There is no inherent contradiction in an element of the ‘spiritual’ world affecting the physical world and yet not being itself objectively provable. After all love can certainly affect the physical world, yet nobody has been able to objectively establish that love exists. Few people would dispute that love exists. Almost everyone acknowledges the existence of love. Yet nobody can provide any empirical evidence that love exists. And just to keep things clear here I am employing “empirical” in the sense of “based on the results of observation and experiment”. Love itself is a sensation. It can’t be observed and certainly no experiment that I am aware of has ever measured love or quantified it in any way.
We might be able to measure changes in brain chemistry of people who claim to be are experiencing a sensation of love but such an approach fails to be empirical itself. Firstly this approach requires us to accept that someone who says they are experiencing a sensation of love is in fact doing so, IOW it requires that we accept the existence of the very thing we are endeavouring to find evidence of. We are not basing the conclusion that people feel love on experiment and evidence, rather we are basing our experiments on an acceptance that people feel a sensation of love. That is not an empirical approach. And closely tied to that, by measuring the brain chemistry of people who are experiencing love we are in fact measuring the changes in the physical world brought about by the sensation. We are not basing our belief in the existence of love in our observations and measurement a sensation of love itself. Once again we are forced to accept that a sensation of love exists and then observe the physical effects of it. That can be easily established because we can see the same chemical changes when people are asked to think about loved ones who are not physically present. Clearly the physical changes in the brain are occurring because love existed, rather than love existing because the changes occurred.
So if we can accept that love exists we have what seems to be a perfect example of something for which there is no empirical evidence but which nonetheless affects the physical world. We can demonstrate that love or being in love can cause a measurable change ion the physical properties of the human brain. But we can not observe love itself. We can’t weight it or measure its albedo or anything else. We all accept that love is a real thing and accepting that we can measure the changes it produces in the brains of the afflicted but we can’t determine the existence of love itself by observation or experiment. There is no empirical evidence that love exists and never can be. The only reason we accept that love exists is because we experience it and can measure what happens after it exists. We do not accept the existence of love because we can observe it.
Now I know that someone is going to say that the ability to observe the physical effects is itself empirical evidence, but your position then becomes perfectly self-referential. As AHunter has said, you are leaping to conclusions because they sit well with the rest of what you think and believe. You already believe that love exists so you conclude that the changes produced after love is felt is evidence of the existence of love. But you never at any stage demonstrated the existence of love by observation or experiment. Rather you simply demonstrated that something you had pre-supposed to exist produced certain results. You leapt to the conclusion that agreed with what you already believed.
This is very similar to a round table discussion I once saw which included, amongst others, a Buddhist monk and some eminent neuroscientist. The scientist had just finished explaining in some depth why spirituality was unnecessary by giving a lengthy description of depolarisation events and neural cascades and so forth. He concluded with some comment like “so there is no need for a spirit of any sort. All our thoughts and emotions just start with the depolarisation of a neuron”. The monk then said that in Buddhist philosophy first there is thought, and the thought then effects the physical change. He quite calmly where he could find the experiments that demonstrated that the thought did not initiate the depolarisation. The neuroscientist looked like he had been asked where he could find evidence that the sky was blue. Of course there was none, neuroscience started from the assumption that all thought and emotion was the result of a change in the physical world and proceeded form there.
This situation is very similar. There are many things in this world that we can’t determine from measurement or experimentation. Arguably there is nothing that we can determine from experiment and measurement. All we can do is observe the effects of these things after we accept that they already exist. IOW we leap to conclusions as to what caused the effect based on the rest of what we believe.
And this I gather is precisely AHunter’s point. What we call empirical and rational aren’t methods of investigation shorn of all pre-suppositions, prejudices and illogical and arbitrary axioms. Empiricism relies on axiom and prejudice as much as anything else. We are forced to pre-suppose that a thought is caused by a neuron depolarising. We are forced to presuppose that the photon is blocked because there is an intervening electron shell. But we have no way of empirically determining that this is the case. No experiment can ever establish that the neuron didn’t depolarise because the thought existed. No experiment can establish that the electron shell wasn’t produced because the photon ceased to move. We simply make an assumption about what is cause and what is effect because they sit well with the rest of what we already think and believe.
What’s your basis for claiming this?
These “dark alleys” are typically better explored via study in non-science departments, or by application to one of the many institutions of pseudo-science that abound these days, some of them online and granting impressive-sounding degrees.
Not to worry. You’d just plead it down to misdemeanor puffery and walk, as usual. 
Blake: That analysis can be applied to anything, even physical objects. We needn’t observe “love” in every individual, we only need to observe it in a particular individual-- as that individual defines it. We don’t even have to get into brain chemsitry, as we can measure changes in physiological process when the person is with the object of his/her love. This is not substantly different than who we determined the existence of electrons. We haven’t proven that every atom in the universe has electrons, but only those we’ve probed. In the same way we needn’t measure love in every person on the earth.
There’s naught so refreshing as a cold splash of envy. 
This is two unrelated points so I will address them separately.
- Of course this can be applied to many things, possibly even anything. I said exactly that above: “Arguably there is nothing that we can determine from experiment and measurement.”. So no argument here. I gather this was AHunter’s point. People disparage spiritual arguments that pertain to anything that can’t be objectively falsified. But the exact same people will cheerfully overlook what you just said: there is no logical reasoning that allows us to conclude that anyhting can be objectively falsified. “Spiritual” arguments aren’t unique in relying on unprovable axioms and prejudice as their ultimate basis. What we call “empirical” argument in fact isn’t special. It ultimately relies on unfalsifiable assumptions and arbitrary axioms just as much as the spiritual argument.
Just because you acknowledge that accepting the existence of physical objects involves leaping to conclusions because they sit well with the rest of what you think doesn’t invalidate AHunter’s position, in fact quite the opposite.
- You claim that we can know of the existence of love because we are able to observe love in a sample of the population. That is a reasonable enough position and one that nobody has actually disputed.
But you then go on to say that you can observe love because you can “measure changes in physiological process when the person is with the object of his/her love”. You haven’t solved anything. You still haven’t observed love, all you have observed is the effects of the sensation of love.
Why do you not also allow this argument as evidence of the existence of gods and spirits? A shaman claims that she experiences communication with ancestor spirits when she enters a trance. If we can measure changes in physiological processes or brain chemistry when the person is in the trance then why do you not accept that as evidence that ancestor spirits exist?
I fail to see any distinction between these two phenomena. In neither case can we observe the phenomenon itself. All we can do is observe the physiological processes associated with the sensation of those phenomena. Yet we will happily use the changes associated with the experience of love as evidence for the existence of love, but we won’t allow the use of changes associated with the experience of spirits as evidence for the existence of spirits.
Why is that? Is it simply because it doesn’t sit well with what we believe?
Don’t get me wrong here, I also believe that love exists and I also don’t believe that a shaman can communicate with dead ancestors. But I am willing to admit that I do so because one agrees with my prejudices and one does not. IOW I am in no doubt that AHunter is correct when he says that my objectivism is just a specialized emotion driven process involving leaping to conclusions because they agree with my prejudices.
What I would like to know is whether you are attempting to say that this is not the case. Is there some logical reason why you think that physiological changes associated with an experience of love is evidence of the existence of love itself, while physiological changes associated with an experience of spirits is not evidence of the existence of the spirits themselves?
Because we make a hypthesis and test it. Just as we hypothesize (and test for) the cause of “love” in chemical reactions in the brain rather than being shot by cupid’s arrow, we hypothesize and test for the cause of “religious experience” as chemical reactions in the brain rather than communion with spirits. And we find that the former explanations allow us to predict what will happen in the physical world whereas the latter do not.
But if you want to call “chemical proccess in the brain” “cupid’s arrow”, that’s fine. It’s just that you won’t find any evidence of cupid or an arrow whereas you will find chemicals and chemcial reactions.
The world in which we live has been and continues to be strongly affected by the concept of freedom. You could argue that freedom does not exist. Even those who claim most strongly otherwise consider it to be an abstract political state which exists in the potential. Like most abstractions, where it acts is not in the physical world (at least not directly) but in the world of people’s thoughts, concepts, worldviews.
I will, at this time, claim that freedom exists. I could make an attempt to define it, but I doubt that I’d do better than the wide range of poets and authors of essays.
You could, of course, take the position that “freedom” does not exist; that there is only the (silly, ignorant, superstitious) belief-system about freedom which actually exists; that can be operationalized with a sociological questionnaire, and social behaviors studied as correlates of the harboring of such a belief. Because it is not something that exists with direct empirical manifestations, I cannot bring you evidence that shows I am right and you are wrong. I am nevertheless (in my opinion) right.
But empirically speaking, all we ever measure are the “effects” of things. This doesn’t seem any more or less true of “love” than it does of electrons. No one can see an electron; but if you shuffle your feet on the carpet and then touch a metal doorknob, you may directly experience the effects of electrons; alternatively, you can hook up some meter with a little dial with numbers on it and measure volts and amperes and so on.
This is as true for love as it is for electrons, or the element oxygen, or anything else in the world. We measure love by its effects; “love” is an abstraction, something we use to explain a wide variety of effects we observe in the world. (Actually “love” is a whole complex series of more or less related abstractions, since “love” has rather more definitions than “oxygen” or “electron”, without even getting into tennis scores.)
When I talk about measuring the effects of love, I don’t mean hooking people up to EEG’s or PET scanners or functional MRI’s; I mean, more basically, we observe the way people around us behave, what actions they take (including what they say, as a subset of their actions, like saying “I love you”). There is simply no way to reach out and directly commune with someone’s soul, however romantic the notion may be. We have nothing to go on but empirical observations. Put that way, it sounds nasty and cold and unfeeling, but if you stop to think about it, people who believe in love in the absence of empirical evidence for it tend to become the subjects of restraining orders.
If I am reading your OP correctly, your puzzle analogy is the central part of your argument. You are saying we justifiably form beliefs asserting the existence of objects for which we have no empirical evidence, on the basis of the fact that many other beliefs we have entail the existence of some such object.
I’d agree with something like that. I think it’s even part of the way science is practiced. Some subatomic particles, for example, were posited before they were empirically accessible. Certain facts about those particles which already had been observed, and about the way we believe subatomic particles behave, led us to strongly suspect (and some, I’m sure, to literally believe) that certain unobserved particles exist.
But I don’t think any empiricist finds any difficulty in this.
The way you’ve phrased the title of this thread is as follows: “Some things exist which do not exhibit empirical signs.” Such as the puzzle piece, and such as the unobserved particle. But those empiricists you’re trying to target would say something like this: “Anything which exists can exhibit empirical signs.” Notice this is different than saying “Anything which exists does exhibit empirical signs.” Notice also that the title of this thread contradicts the latter, but fails to contradict your real target.
The empiricist you’re targeting would say “I don’t have the puzzle piece in hand to show you, but I can tell you exactly what it would look like empirically if I did.” And the particle physicist can say “I haven’t observed this particle, but I can tell you exactly what properties we would find in it if I did.”
-FrL-
But as a theist I can then say “There is this phenomenon, ‘prayer’. It doesn’t exhibit any direct empirical manifestations. It can create outcomes that can, themselves, be measured, but not in a fashion where you could demonstrate that nothing else could elicit those outcomes. So I am not claiming empirical confirmation of the validity of the process of prayer here, but positing its existence ‘fits’ with the set of tangible experienced I’ve had, and it has explanatory power there for me. I do not consider it to be a nonreal or ‘superstitious’ phenomenon. I believe in it.”
I can do that for prayer, defining my terms and avoiding a cascade of theistic terms each of which is defined via yet more theistic terms.
Are we cool, then?
You can posit the existence of real prayer phenomena, (PP,) and explain exactly which observable phenomena would be caused by PP if they were to exist. But your position (as you’ve described it) would be suspect because of your claim that no observable phenomena you explain by recourse to PP couldn’t have been just as well explained by other means. (I take it you mean they could have been explained by other plausible physical explanations.) Since that is the case, you leave people (and indeed, you your self have) no clear reason to accept the position that PP exist. Your claim that it has explanatory power for you is undercut by your claim that the observable outcome of PP could be explained by other (plausible physical) means, since this means there is nothing rationally compelling you (or anyone else) to posit the existence of PP as an explanation. An acceptable explanation in physical terms already lies at hand. (And physical explanations are already known to have a high degree of reliability.)
If, instead, you meant there is no alternative explanation for observable consequences of PP which has some kind of established plausibility already, but rather that PP is one of a number of possible explanations none of which stands out as particularly more compelling than any other, then you still have a problem. I take it you don’t just mean that the consequences of PP are explainable by other means, but also that all possible consequences of PP could be explainable by other means. If that is a correct reading, then your proposal regarding prayer is, as they say, “untestable.” This means that while it may be a fine story regarded aesthetically, there is nothing compelling you or anyone else to take your position to describe the facts. I will grant you the possibility that, for all we know, it may turn out that the correct description of the facts is untestable. But if that turns out to be the case, then all bets are off. We can tell whatever story we like–and of what interest could such a game be in the long run?* More interesting (and productive, and amenable to the achievment of goals) is to formulate testable hypotheses, and to test them.
If I’m wrong, and you mean to say that there are concievable consequences of PP which could only be explained by reference to PP, then I take it all back: You’ve got a genuine testable hypothesis on your hands, and you’re welcome to argue for its plausibility or the necessity of it as a hypothesis in the face of whatever the known facts may be.
-FrL-
*Notice what I find myself saying here: If the correct description of the facts is not a testable one, then the pursuit of truth loses both its appeal, and even its possibility.
And how is this different from saying “But the puzzle could equally well not have any such puzzle piece. A puzzle piece such as you’ve described could account for the shapes and colors of the puzzle pieces we do have on the board, but it isn’t necessary. The puzzle could simply have a hole there. No reason it couldn’t. There is absolutely nothing about that red stripe there that makes it necessary that it continue on into space where we can’t see. It’s complete as it is. Not one piece that’s on this table ‘depends’ on this hypothetical missing puzzle piece, and neither does the puzzle as a whole.” – ??
I doubt that they could be explained to many folks’ threshold of “plausibility” without reference to at least a few abstractions, abstractions which, like prayer, manifest themselves only indirectly. At a minimum, I suspect you’d have a very hard time avoiding a reference to “consciousness” or something similar. (Does “consciousness” exist? Oh really?) (There are, of course, people of a radicallly Skinnerian bent who would argue that there is no such thing as “consciousness”, there is only behavior. I’ll take them on in a “plausible to the audience” comparison of explanatory models any day, though.)
As I’ve already said (many times, although perhaps badly / not clearly) the reason you, I, or anyone else ever accepts anything as part of their overall explanation-of-reality is because it feels right, it fits, it helps to make organized sense of the sum-total package of sensory input. Not the presence of rationally compelling linear deductive tests and verifications. Having rationally compelling linear deductive tests to support an explanation makes it more likely that we’ll embrace the proposed theory, but when it does so, it does so as a subset of the larger context, which is our embrace of explanations because they feel right and fit in with our larger model.
BTW, “PP”? = perhaps “Power of Prayer”? I assume from context it stands for ‘prayer’ since that’s what we’re speaking of here…
No, that hasn’t been stipulated yet. I’ve stipulated that you need not use the term “prayer”, and in so doing I’ve at least implicitly acknowledged that in order to call it “prayer”, the process as described in theory needs to have some reasonable amount of overlap with the process as conventionally described and understood by at least some of the theists some of the time. But as I said above, you’ll have your hands full trying to explain it without reference to some abstractions that don’t have direct concrete manifestions, and I think you’ll have them even more full trying to generate an explanation universally more compelling than the one I’m prepared to outline as an explanation of the same phenomena.
I’m unaware of any compulsion that ever forces much of anyone to embrace an explanation. Supplying me with reilably repeatable test results from a double-blind test, with very elegantly operationalized variables and well-thought-out controls? That can provide me with more data that any explanation that I do embrace is going to have to explain. But ultimately I’m going to embrace the explanation that feels right, that fits, that completes the picture.
All bets ARE off. For this and absolutely everything else. That’s what I’m saying. It’s all an art. Science is a tool in the service of the art of making sense of the world. A truly useful and beneficial tool, yes. But the process of making sense of the world remains an art, not a science.
Indeed. And what makes some stories better than others? There is something. Not something you can test for, measure, authenticate against. In order to do that, you’d have to have some way of knowing (already) for absolute certain WHAT IS SO in order to compare an explanatory model TO IT and gauge the goodness of the match. Nope. That “something” is (once again) the “feeling of a nice fit”. To borrow from Robert Pirsig again, the “elegance” of it. And that, too, exists but can’t be evaluated empirically.
A good total overall picture-of-reality does of course enable us to make accurate predictions. But only some aspects of a picture-of-reality lend themselves to testable prediction-making. A good theory yields no more than a subset of hypotheses which can be tested; the rest of it bridges across those assertions, knitting them together. Like a kid’s connect-the-dots game, theories construct descriptions of reality, grounding solidly onto points that can be evaluated; but remove the parts of the theory that haven’t been specifically tested and you lose the picture and end up with just a bunch of dots.
It’s the only game in town: making elegant sense of the world.
Notice what I’m saying in response: No description of the facts is more than intermittently testable in small places, and whether you choose at this time to acknowledge it or not, you do embrace a worldview only a very teeny tiny portion of which consists of falsifiable assertions that can be directly empirically tested.
And even the testable points can only be verified through mechanisms of testing that themselves consist overwhelmingly of relying upon a priori assumptions, “givens”, about the environment in which you’re doing your testing and what things mean.
The empirical world of “things in themselves” just isn’t what you think it is 
It will help me out if you can give me an example of an abstraction the empiricist must appeal to in order to justify his empiricist position.
I believe, by the way, that it’s aesthetics all the way down. But I find this to be an appallingly ugly story to tell.
-FrL-
It will help me out if you can give me an example of an abstraction the empiricist must appeal to in order to justify his empiricist position.
In the interest of full disclosure, by the way: I believe that it’s aesthetics all the way down. But I find this to be an appallingly ugly story to tell. So I try to find some false story to tell instead. And that’s the last you’ll hear about that from me.
-FrL-
It will help me out if you can give me an example of an abstraction the empiricist must appeal to in order to justify his empiricist position.
In the interest of full disclosure, by the way: I believe that it’s aesthetics all the way down. But I find this to be an appallingly ugly story to tell. So I try to find some false story to tell instead. And that’s probably the last you’ll hear about that from me.
-FrL-
Geez, sorry about that. Admins, please feel free to delete the first two versions of that post, as well as the present post.
-FrL-