Explain this, you empiricists

Veritass said:
Quoted for truth. Einstein's theories of relativity are the classic example of this; they did not fit into the scientific theory of the day, and were amazing leaps of intuition. The science of the day was not even capable of testing the validity of his theories.

Eventually, science caught up somewhat, but they are still constructing this new wing of the maze. That is what your analogy needs: the constant construction by new scientists.

The thing with Einstein is that he was actually able to construct a mathematical framework in which his theories worked.. a framework which yielded formulas, which could be used to make predictions about the real world, which can (and have) been tested.

So while he made a huge intuitive leap to come up with his ideas, he was actually able to back them up with something concrete that could be - and was, tested.
 
@Bozo
Yes, science has its limits and reality is in no way subservient to it. However, it is far and away the best method (really the only method) for gaining knowledge about the nature of our shared presumed external reality. Intuition is part of the scientific method after all, it comes under the heading: generate testable hypothesis.

Really, I don't think we are far apart on this. You are just bemoaning narrow thinking.

Veritass wrote:
Einstein's theories of relativity are the classic example of this; they did not fit into the scientific theory of the day, and were amazing leaps of intuition. The science of the day was not even capable of testing the validity of his theories.
They were amazing leaps of intuition but they also did fit into the scientific theory of the day. That much is obvious by their quick acceptance and incorporation into ongoing work. Some of the results of relativity explained existing outstanding problems, others were capable of testing with some additional work which was started almost immediately, and some we are still not capable of testing to satisfaction (e.g. gravity waves).
Eventually, science caught up somewhat, but they are still constructing this new wing of the maze. That is what your analogy needs: the constant construction by new scientists.
I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me or Bozo here. In his analogy scientists are caught in a maze while other non-scientific intuitive thinkers simply leap over the walls. In my reconstruction it is scientists who lead the way over the walls, scientists such as Einstein, but they must first build a ladder.
 
Corlindale said:
It's just that most people who use the "scientists are soo set in their old ways"- argument are advocates of non-scientific ideas like ID or Creationism, and merely uses it to mean "scientists are dumb because they do not accept our baseless theory", and so it tends to switch on my annoyance reflex.
I get tha same annoyance reflex from that and also from when people don’t give any other explanation to certain phenomena but that is “just coincidence” or "we don’t need such knowledge".
Corlindale said:
Why "for sure"?

Couldn't we have two independent events,
This is one possibility and I personally think it could be the case here, but for me these kind of things are ever important notions how we construct our reality and how we seem to put lot of emphasizes into certain kind of happenings as important while others are mere “coincidences”. What I’m mostly interested is the predictability of certain scenarios, thought patterns and in overall patterns of certain events in life. It has to do with chaos theory and game theory. If we go further we end up into quantum mechanics and I have also hunch that even Rupert Sheldrake is on to something talking about morphic fields (or morphogenetic fields).

The problem with the physical science example in this case is that it very quickly becomes reductionistic which causes certain possible scenarios to be overlooked because they aren’t simplistic enough or don’t follow certain order of fixed rules. I find this being probably many consider still mathematical ability being some sort of example of one’s intelligence and logic. Unfortunately pure brute calculating power and direct evidence isn’t enough. We need leaps of faith. We need people who can connect two dots that seem to be miles apart at first from each other but when looked from certain angle are in fact in same line. That is the work of genius, putting things together that seem for other people have no connection at all. Entirely different case is, could we find such connection here. One connection is "for sure" and it exists in our mind which makes it psychological one. Birdjaguar already covered this with his message by saying how important these kind of anecdotes are for human life as inviduals. But I believe they serve also very important duty by working as "vessels" moving our consciousness from one "reasonable" event to another one. And like we know work of brain predates action which together create our behaviour.

Now here comes the part of the theory why I consider this important and fascinating. Someone dreams about something that later becomes reality are two events inside the same system. This doesn’t mean they have direct causality but they are both parts of the system, they share similarities. The internal world and the external world share similar qualities and that’s why I’m interested about this kind of phenomena. So if we could consider area of New Jersey being “one system” (or environment) which part Bozo is, it would mean that since he lives there, his brain would have gathered knowledge of conditions inside the system. Now, using law of probability inside that system there’s possibility someone can predict possible events inside the system based into certain changing variables in the environment. The most interesting part is why Bozo was the person especially since he mentioned it to his friend. So example question is are some people more likely to predict the changes inside the system because their brain somehow can create connections subconsciouscly while other brains don’t. One thing I’m sure and it is that some people consider these kind of connections being non-important and you can see it even in this thread. In other words some people’s thoughts have fixed orbits and other people don’t. Or let me rephrase it, we all have fixed orbits of thoughts but there isn’t right or wrong about them, they are just different kind of orbits. And this again brings us how our thought patterns and behaviour models are based into our enviroment and how we could predict it, and what it tells about our concept of reality.

What I would like to see unified theory that combines internal and external world and I belive the notion of these worlds as separate are mere illusion. They share similar qualities and by understanding the gaps and connections between the events that happen in the internal world and external world will be instumental in our race to understand the reality as it is.

Maybe the term could be as much "many-interpretations world” as “many-worlds interpretation”
I answer some points little bit later.
And I know my text might be little bit hard to understand, but I'm pretty sure you get the picture where I'm getting at.
If you don't, I'll try to explain later in more detail.
 
Event A-the dream occurs

Event B-the person wakes up and suddenly with a brief interval the dream comes true.

What is the causal connection of these two events?

There is no fact in this phenomenon,only interpretation from warlocks,scientist,psychoanalysts..etc.etc.
 
C~G said:
We need leaps of faith.

Yes, but a leap of faith based on nothing but a hunch becomes a random leap of faith.. you could end up anywhere.

If you at least base your 'leap of faith' on something concrete you might be leaping in the right direction.
 
warpus said:
Yes, but a leap of faith based on nothing but a hunch becomes a random leap of faith.. you could end up anywhere.

If you at least base your 'leap of faith' on something concrete you might be leaping in the right direction.
You mean something "concrete" like numbers where Einstein based his views?

I want to point out there haven't been done statistical analysis of these kind of events mainly because the starting of such project would probably need such "leap of faith" and because people would dismiss it anyway with mere coincidence.

Certain research subjects and themes lack first of all the respect from scientific community and also funding. See Rupert for as an example.
 
C~G said:
You mean something "concrete" like numbers where Einstein based his views?

No. Instead of just jumping, screaming "Something!" and watching where you end up, look around a bit first and pick a direction to leap in based on some hard data.
 
warpus said:
look around a bit first and pick a direction to leap in based on some hard data.
Ok.

In this case, what is the hard data you're talking about?

Only thing people this far have pointed out is "coincidence" and "law of probability". Which IMO don't cover this since we don't know how many people dream about certain things, how dreams are created in our mind and how many people tell about them to their friends that after brief moment come true.

And those calculations which riffraff and someone else suggested are jokes which pretty much tells how seriously people take this kind of things.

In other words, this is seens as "soft science" like sociology which isn't seen as important as "hard science". Which IMHO is BS.

But eventually tide will turn and these kind of things will get more support which mean that they can be seen and studied as real science and not only as "pseudoscience".
 
warpus said:
What? 6.4 billion people dreaming is bound to result in a couple interesting dreams every night.

You don't need to study every single of these dreams to understand that coincidences will happen, given numbers like that.

6.4 billion? I thought it was much less than that.
 
Birdjaguar said:
I believe that he is saying only that science cannot explain what happened. It could be a very "natural" event that is beyond our current knowledge base just like genetic mutation was 500 years ago. or quantum theory was 100 years ago.
These are two separate concepts: The claim that science cannot explain it, and the claim that it "could" be an event beyond our current understanding.

The latter could be true and I don't see any evidence for that. The former is a very strong claim, which is being made without evidence - no one has yet shown why it cannot be a coincidence.

Bozo Erectus said:
On the one hand, you have one set of people who require physical proof and evidence, every step of the way before proceeding, and then another set of people who, while welcoming proof and evidence, dont see that the lack of it should be an impediment to speculation and serious thought.
Strawman. The former group are happy to speculate - the point is that we require evidence to believe.

What I don't understand is the idea of making claims even in the absence of any evidence. I sometimes even see people where their burden of proof is often inconsistent, in that they require 100% proof to disprove their assertions (creationists are a classic example - no evidence in favour, but they refuse to believe evolution because they don't have 100% proof).

Birdjaguar said:
And the irony of it is that those people (bolded group) live most of their daily lives doing things that are irrational and based on anecdotal knowedge. :mischief:
Examples? In particular, avoid the strawman please - I want examples where this group believe in things without any evidence whatsoever.

Veritass said:
Quoted for truth. Einstein's theories of relativity are the classic example of this; they did not fit into the scientific theory of the day, and were amazing leaps of intuition.
That's not true. On the contrary, it was the current scientific theory which was known not to be correct, and did not fit with observed evidence. Einstein's theories were made to fit with observed evidence. This then implied that other things must be true, which could then be tested.

So, where's the evidence related to these dreams that shows they do not fit in with our current understanding of the Universe?
 
Bozo Erectus said:
But heres what I say: in order to reach meaningful conclusions with nothing but mathematical equations, dont you need to have complete knowledge of everything, all the parameters influencing the thing that you are calculating? Is everything known about how the brain functions on the Quantum level, about consciousness, or even about Time itself?

But lets say you know every single factor influencing a rapidly bouncing rubber ball in a large container of some kind. You know the exact wind, airpressure, gravity, mass of the ball and its exact 'bounciness', the material of the container it will be bouncing around in, the force used to throw the ball, all of that, everything. Would you be able ahead of time to successfully calculate and mark with a marker every single point in the container where the ball will make contact with?
You misunderstand probabilities. Knowing all the factors is only needed when you want to know the exact probability - or indeed, the exact outcome (which wouldn't be a probability at all, because you'd know the outcome). Here we just need to show that the probability of the event isn't astronomically small.

Indeed, the whole *point* of probability is that it is useful when we don't know all the details - it tells us how likely an event is, given that we don't know all the details.

What's happening here is that the ball makes contact with one part of the container, and a bunch of people scream "OMG Magic! Science can't explain that!"

Probability isn't about showing whether or not the ball *will* hit that point, it's about working out how likely that event is. Are you going to dispute that throwing a die isn't approximately 1/6, because we don't know all the factors? Even if it isn't exactly 1/6 due to some unevenness, 1/6 is a very good approximation.

If I throw two dice and get two sixes, is that magic, and can I say that coincidence is just a fancy way of saying "I don't know how it happened, it's still magic"?
 
Phlegmak said:
:confused: Coincidences aren't fascinating and they don't need further study.
They don't need further study in the sense of trying to determine some magical cause to them, agreed.

However, it can still be interesting and useful to investigate how likely given events are.
 
mdwh said:
They don't need further study in the sense of trying to determine some magical cause to them, agreed.

However, it can still be interesting and useful to investigate how likely given events are.

And who do you think would actually fund said studies? :crazyeye:
 
When you sleep, your consciousness is time traveling. Your consciousness jumps forward in time 8 hours, or however long you sleep. Think of time as a horizontal line. When you sleep, your consciousness rises up above the line into (mostly) empty space and then moves forward (it can move backwards on VERY rare occasions). In the empty space above time, loose events (things we would think of as random) float around before settling on a particular location. A blackout is a perfect example of such an event. Fairly often, these events will cross paths with a dreamer's consciousness, causing a dream of an event. Obviously if your consciousness is near, temporally, to an event, these intersections are more likely to happen. This is why dreams will "prophecy" events in the very near future fairly commonly, but almost never something in the far future.
 
Taliesin said:
Well, OK. You know I'm a theist, and a fairly doctrinally defined one at that, so you know that I agree with this statement. But there's a great difference in worth between theism, which is a valid (and correct) view of the world, and [insert paranormal claim here]. Believing in clairvoyance or invisible unicorns without rational examination of that belief is pretty silly, and the more specific the claim the sillier it is.

I would say that, even without the testament of Scripture and revelation and faith and all that, a general theistic creed would be a reasonable belief to hold, since as a worldview it's as least as good and coherent as any atheistic account. However, particular claims about what God is like require some evidence and/or reasoned thought; and claims about preternatural dream visions or spinning teacups, being more specific again, require a heck of a lot more in the way of evidence before they're even reasonable to consider.

I might be misjudging your point though, since I'm jumping in midstream and couldn't find exactly what you were responding to.
My point was a general one. It has become an OT "tradition" among atheists to equate belief in god to belief in invisible pink teacups. It is a silly and intellectually bankrupt argument designed to make theists appear stupid and an attempt to cut off real discussion. Brennan was just the guy who made the post while I was hanging around to notice. The second part of the post was clearly a troll. And in my quick scan, Warpus may have countered it with some effectiveness. I expect I'll get there eventually. ;)
 
I don't see why theism is being discussed as it has an entirely different basis than the assorted pseudosciences (prophecies, a lot of blather about "quantum" and "the nature of time" from people who understand neither, etc.)

Theism makes claims from the general (the unverse exists, it must have been caused). Pseudoscience takes a lot of individually meaningless specifics (aka coincidences) and tries to pile them up high enough to strongly imply a claim without directly proving it. There is no robust logic associated with pseudoscience - only the scientific equivalent of innuendo.

IMHO theism makes robust intellectual claims. But there's a difference between theology and religion...
 
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