02:40
@Dcleve Well, I did not expect that! I was puzzled as to how you could construe a rather mundane claim, that would be equally fitting in a humanities discussion, as scientism, though now I am guessing that I should have phrased "nothing else to discuss here but that evidence" differently. Regardless of how you got there, let me see if I can be clearer by putting it another way:
Matthew made the claim that science has been unable to detect souls, and clearly you do not agree. To respond, however, with anything other than by bringing forth the scientific evidence (if only by pointing to where it is documented) only delays saying what would need to be said to dispute Matthew's claim. Evidence does not do much unless it is made evident!
Note that these are very general statements about how such claims are handled, and the fact that this case happens to be about a scientific question is just accidental.
All of this is in reference to your first response to Matthew's claim. Subsequently, you did attempt to do what was needed here, but it falls short for the reason I gave yesterday: "if there was an explanation for consciousness in a way that required immaterial souls, then the success of that explanation would be reason to take seriously the proposition that there are immaterial souls, but we are a long way from [any explanation sufficiently worked out to justify that conclusion.]"
The success of one putative explanation is not assured by the failure of another - it has to succeed on its own merits. Again, this is a general point that is not specific to science.
What you and Blackmore are doing falls short of the scientific method in these ways: flaws in one hypothesis are not, ipso facto, predictions by the others, and the last hypothesis standing is not ipso facto correct - it has to work on its own terms, where working means explaining things with sufficient specificity to be falsifiable.
You say "What has been rejected is the principle of UNIVERSAL reductionism." Well, maybe, but absent any compelling reason to think that physicalism demands universal reductionism, there is little reason to think that the arguments of the sort you pointed to earlier will be any more effective in this case than they would have been if deployed at the end of the 19th. century against chemistry being reducible.
11 hours later…
13:57
@ARaybould -- both you and Michael replies with scientism - you declared only science evidence was ever worth talking about, and Michael claimed that only published journal articles on science theories are worth consideration. SCIENCE of course operates with openness to consideration of ideas, and to hypotheses, and to both thought problems and informal empirical observations. Einstein's famous thought problems about the experiences of passengers on trains are a notable example.
Note the @MatthewChristopherBartsh has previously asserted that only 3rd person evidence should ever be considered, which is the core assumption of the scientistic movement of behaviorism. Michal -- I have noted that you have failed to respond to the very effective refutation I posted, nor answered how you get up in the morning. Responding to refuting test cases is a key element of doing science. Claiming to be scientific, but evading refutations, is to be pseudoscientific instead.
14:27
@Dcleve "Meanwhile. DELUSIONISM is not a science theory, and there is precious little evidence, or testing of the claim undertaken by delusionists. You are actively engaged in an extensive dialog with a Delusionist advocate, where his primary activity is to provide rationalizations and plausibility arguments for a delusionist POV, no science whatsoever. So -- is there nothing to discuss with Matthew?"
@Dcleve First, delusionism may be a scientific theory or rather, a group of scientific theories. Frankish wrote, "Illusionism replaces the hard problem with the illusion problem — the problem of
explaining how the illusion of phenomenality arises and why it is so powerful. This
problem is not easy but not impossibly hard either. The method is to form hypotheses
about the underlying cognitive mechanisms and their bases in neurophysiology and
neuroanatomy, drawing on evidence from across the cognitive sciences. There are many
explaining how the illusion of phenomenality arises and why it is so powerful. This
problem is not easy but not impossibly hard either. The method is to form hypotheses
about the underlying cognitive mechanisms and their bases in neurophysiology and
neuroanatomy, drawing on evidence from across the cognitive sciences. There are many
@Dcleve keithfrankish.github.io/articles/… is where the above quote is from. It's not behind a paywall.
@MatthewChristopherBartsh -- Frankish is a philosopher, not a scientist, and his personal web page is not a refereed science journal. And our discussion here of illusionism has not been limited to science journal articles. This is because philosophy and science bleed into each other, AND that otologic theory of mind is not yet IN science, it is best discussed in philosophy of mind today, as the field is simply too unsettled to BE a science yet.
It's not that only third person observable data should ever be considered, it is that only third person observable data is data. Consider what you want, but it isn't data if it is a conclusion based on introspection.
@Dcleve " Michal -- I have noted that you have failed to respond to the very effective refutation I posted, nor answered how you get up in the morning. Responding to refuting test cases is a key element of doing science. Claiming to be scientific, but evading refutations, is to be pseudoscientific instead."
@MatthewChristopherBartsh -- you keep making claims about science, basically citing yourself as an expert. I point instead to Karl Poper, whose thinking about science in the early part of the 20th century now IS how we do science. Popper noted that all observation is first person. And that we can never have objective data. The closest we can ever get is intersubjective consensus. I trust Sir Karl about what is science over you.
15:11
@ARaybould "Matthew made the claim that science has been unable to detect souls, and clearly you do not agree. To respond, however, with anything other than by bringing forth the scientific evidence (if only by pointing to where it is documented) only delays saying what would need to be said to dispute Matthew's claim. Evidence does not do much unless it is made evident!"
15:37
@MatthewChristopherBartsh "Dcleve Are you a Christian?" Why do you ask? Are you hoping for more deflection tangents to pursue, plus ad hominem fallacies, to distract from your views being refuted?
@MatthewChristopherBartsh -- note I savaged ARaybould over the quote you like so much. I pointed out that IN SCIENCE, evidence is not limited to "science evidence", that science is not the limit of knowledge, and that I HAD ALREADY PROVIDED a massive amount of science evidence in my links. Your endorsing unsupported and falsified claims, BECAUSE THEY SUPPORT YOU, is the essence of political/ideological reasoning, as opposed to scientific or philosophical reasoning.
You are seeking out confirmation bias, and deliberately ignoring refutations. ARaybould temporized significantly on that line, after my critique. Your citing him/her for support for a line they already abandoned, is even more intellectually invalid.
@ARaybould -- "flaws in one hypothesis are not, ipso facto, predictions by the others, and the last hypothesis standing is not ipso facto correct - it has to work on its own terms, where working means explaining things with sufficient specificity to be falsifiable." Your innuendo here is that BOTH Illusionism, AND ensoulment dualism fail to be falsifiable, or to "work on their own terms". I hold that his innuendo is false, and both Programmes are testable.
I cited tests of illusionism, the most notable of which is it explicitly throws out most of our data on consciousness by declaring it illusory. Blackmore, Mussolino, and all of Augustine's contributors consider dualism to be falsifiable, AND falsified.
Meanwhile THIs objection: "if there was an explanation for consciousness in a way that required immaterial souls, then the success of that explanation would be reason to take seriously the proposition that there are immaterial souls, but we are a long way from [any explanation sufficiently worked out to justify that conclusion.]" parses, along with your other posts noting that the set of competing theories may always be larger, to be the rationalist objection to any induciton.
Empiricism NEVER provides a "necessity" argument, it cannot. It only provides a pragmatic justification, and for every empirical conclusion, a rationalist can always blue sky a "but what if". This is as true for every physics theory as it is for either delusionism, or ensoulment. You are setting an impossible standard, that if applied across the board, would lead you to reject all of science.
16:56
@ARaybould "When we compare the pain of a toothache to the pain of a previous toothache or to a painful toe, what are we comparing?"
@ARaybould If you have video footage or other third party observations, you could compare the pain behaviors, such as what did you say about the pain, how loud and long did you scream, how much sleep did you lose, how much did you sweat, how fast did your heart pound, and so on.
@ARaybould If you have only introspection to gauge your present pain level, and only memories of introspection to gauge your previous pain level, then I guess you are comparing the former with the latter. Your statements about which one is worse would be data, but what you think you are referring to, the pain and its level would not be data, neither the previous case, nor the present case. And you certainly wouldn't be comparing qualia.
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