Planting Season Isn't Leaving Me Much Time For Research

Bela Bartok, talking about his folklore research once said he was intrigued about a curse popular among the impoverished peasants,  "May you have to buy your bread."  He, living in cities all of his life, didn't understand it at first but eventually he realized that it was, in effect, a wish that someones crops fail so they would have to buy food, maybe starving or going into debt since money was rare to absent in the lives of the peasants.   It's something I can understand.  As someone who made the oh, so practical decision to pursue a career in music, I've long been dependent on gardening to provide a good part of my food.   The cold spring has made it a late start as it is and there are still problems with the arm I broke.  So, I'm reduced to posting an exchange I have had recently.   This is part of the comment thread from Jeffrey J. Kripal's excellent article at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

People who have read much of what I've written won't find a lot of new material in the exchange but, who knows, maybe there are some new readers here.   I hope to have a proper post on Jeffrey Kripal's excellent article later.

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  jim birch • 3 days ago

  
  

  Seriously, who really knows exactly what Twain dreamed and what happened? Did Twain himself? Fact: Every time a memory is recalled it is recreated and it changes. Fact: At times of stress and emotional activity memories are even more unreliable. The evidence is in on this. What more, Twain was great at making believable stuff up and you don't have to know you are deceiving yourself to make stuff up.

  You can take this kind of story as the primary data on the nature of the universe. Alternately, you could look to the independently verifiable discoveries of physics, biology, evolution and psychology as primary data. Evolutionary theory suggests that making up believable, interesting stories that are tuned the proclivities of your fellow humans is highly adaptive. We are biased towards good stories.

  This is why gut feeling and anecdotes don't cut it in science. That's why, for example, they spent billions building the Large Hadron Collider rather than asking a great author for an opinion.

Anthony_McCarthy  jim birch • 3 days ago

Who knows when a materialist researcher asks the subject of an experiment what they were experiencing when the fMRI was lighting up, if they are giving an honest or accurate account of their experience? You don't get to dismiss peoples' reports of their experience when it isn't convenient for your ideology and then claim that reports of experience that you can turn into a story that supports your ideology are more trustworthy.

You are absolutely wrong if you think that psychology isn't absolutely dependent on reports of subjective experience because it is saturated with those, it solicits those constantly. And there is nothing about the reports of subjective experience that it uses that makes it any more credible than any other reports of subjective experience. The only difference is in the pretense that, because it is called science, that that somehow purifies the reports it uses. The same is true for any part of biology that attempts to deal with behavior and thoughts. It is even worse when the subject is ethology because, then, it is a researcher, trained in the conventions and habits of his specialty, who is replacing reports by the subject of their thoughts, something only they can possibly know, with his own, creative narrative of what that is.

Considering Twain's initial reluctance to share his experience under his own name, because he knew it would get attacked by 19th century version of today's pseudo-skeptics and his persistence in asserting its truth in the face of that, I'd say his story is credible in a way that the casual reports of people in fMRI based experiments haven't been tested as being.

When it is that kind of experience, science isn't the method of evaluating it that will produce anything. It is too subjective, too complex and too one-off for science to do anything with. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't have persuasive value of exactly the same kind that science is ultimately based in. Ultimately everything, even logic, mathematics and science, is dependent on persuasion and not absolute proof. People have a right to make their own judgement as to what they find persuasive, and even if you want to protest that is a right, it's what's going to happen anyway. Which is the reason that most people reject a materialist explanation of their experience of the world. They find that is wider than what materialism can account for.

jim birch  Anthony_McCarthy • 2 days ago

I don't dismiss people's subjective reports, I take them with a grain of salt. If a million people have 10 dreams in a night there's very likely going to be some that correspond remarkably well with the future, isn't there?

Alternative 1: Einsteins General Relativity - a hypothesis that has a precise mathematical formulation, has been subject to stringent testing, has produced a number of very accurate predictions that have worked out, is basic to so much physics, and, makes a clear statement about how information can flow in spacetime - is WRONG.

Alternative 2: Twain has some kind of dream involving his brother's death, possibly due to the fact that he noticed that the work he was doing was dangerous and he was worrying about it. A short time later, Twain's brother was actually killed and some aspects of the death process may - this is now untestable - have been remarkably similar to what actually happened or what Twain thought happened after he had been over it in his head numerous times. BTW: You might notice that intelligent creative people regularly strongly believe things that are wrong, and must be wrong because different intelligent creative people believe contradictory things, for example: you and I. Humans have unreliable memories and and a capacity to "storify" random events into juicy narratives.

If you know much about physics and the amount of careful testing that is required to accept it, you wouldn't lightly drop it on the basis of a bunch emotionally resonant stories and fluffy ideas. (Ideas that when thought through actually produce more questions than they answer, like, "how does this work?" and, "why doesn't everyone do this all the time? it would be totally useful" and so on.) I'm very clear about which side of that particular line I come down on, and why. YMMV.

(And, yes, General Relativity does have some problems, but, as I understand them, they are not the kind that makes your acceptance of Twain's dream divination any more reasonable at all. If you can come up with a theory of spacetime that matches the breadth and reliability of relativity, plus allows and explains predetermination, you will get not just a Noble prize and a very superior kind of celebrity, but likely a sainthood as well. Unfortunately, it probably won't resolve what happened in Twain's case because the old prosaic explanation works pretty well too.)

Anthony_McCarthy  jim birch • 2 days ago

Your choosing Einstein's work to make your argument doesn't work, it is a false comparison. Other than Einstein's report that his thinking was aided by an experience of imagining riding on a light beam, it has little to nothing to do with reports of subjective experience as you condemned in your first comment. My point is that materialists, always the first to condemn reports of subjective experience when they don't like the resulting conclusions drawn from it, have no problem with calling the collection of reports of subjective experience "science" when the results are something they can use in promoting their ideology. The profession of so many prominent "skeptics", Ray Hyamn, James Alcock, Barry Byerstein, Richard Weismann,... psychology, has continuously collected self-reports of subjective experience - often in a very leading and unreliable manner - and presented their analysis and conclusions of it as if it were hard science. If the standards they demand for the generally far more carefully conducted experiments psi researchers were applied to psychological research, their "science" would evaporate.

Literally every alleged science that deals with human and animal behavior and thinking is based on subjective reports of experience by human subjects asked to report on what their experience is or was, or subjective reports from scientists of what they are seeing - pretending that those scientists don't have a professional and personal bias as they make those observations. All of science, really, is supposed to be based in reporting subjective experience, observation. If what is observed is simple and accurate measurement of it is possible, as with the objects that physics deals with, the reliability of those observations is high. If it is something vague and complex and open to interpretation, behavior, it is far less reliably accurate. When it is of something that is invisible, the experience of what happens in peoples' minds, it is of little to no reliability of the kind that you can get in physics. When it is guessing what animals and people in the lost past where thinking, that is only likely to tell you about what the scientist making up those narratives was thinking about it.

There are other problems with your comparison but I've already made too many comments on this thread.

jim birch  Anthony_McCarthy • 2 days ago

Sorry, you don't understand science. All the raw data of science is subjective, just like any other field of human endeavour. Like everyone else, scientists can be deluded. Like everyone else they are prone to fashion, group think, cool stories, biases, error, fluffy thinking. Plenty of scientists have believed in spooky things. They are human and it's an evolved human propensity.

It's a matter of how you treat this subjectivity problem. I won't go through the philosophy of science - there's plenty of stuff you can read - but some of the key points are testability, independent verification, internal consistency and compatibility with other established theory. These are why science works and we are not still back in the dark ages of basic impulses and fanciful stories.

You might also like to find out a little more about Relativity and time before you casually claim that someone's subjective experience would trump the physicist's theory of time that is experimentally rock solid. I would want a hell of a lot lot more solid evidence before I'd take a attractively spooky personal narrative over highly confirmed basic physics. Where is the real evidence? How about someone who can consistently predict dice throws at better than chance? Can you point to someone who can predict lottery numbers and has grown rich doing so? I think not.

Your derogatory term "materialist" is just a cover for fluffy thinking. If there is a non-material world out there, demonstrate it a reliable, intersubjective way. Guess what? Come up with anything more that one-off anecdotes and there would immediate rush of "materialist" scientists out there studying it. Until then, your grandiose theorizing remains in the realm of human fictional narrative, nothing more.

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If you are genuinely interesting in advancing your understanding of the world you might try this question: Just supposing the universe is a set material events, what needs explaining and what are those explanations? (Clue: traditional explanations are highly delusional, if sticky.) Supposing subjectivity was just evolved self-aware brain activity, how might this work and how does that change things? (Clue: A lot.) Would it be easy to for humans to understand? (No.) Is our capacity for spooky stories consistent with evolution, ie, adaptive? (Yes.)

Anthony_McCarthy  jim birch • a day ago

"but some of the key points are testability, independent verification, internal consistency and compatibility with other established theory"

You're seriously out of date. Such scientists as Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Sean Carroll, and others have removed the need for those old fashioned standards of science. Dawkins creates "behaviors" unobserved and unevidenced extending back into the paleolithic era and back far into the far remoter past. He has no evidence that such "behaviors" were ever engaged in but he doesn't stop there. He claims that those "behaviors" were the instructions of genes to the organisms that expressed them (he created the genes, by the way, making his words flesh, literally) and that the "behaviors" become "adaptations" because they constitute a reproductive advantage through natural selection ("natural selection" is a magic word in the mouths of "scientists" such as Dawkins, with power to create marvelous things out of nothing). Only, not only the "behaviors" are entirely unevidenced, neither are the animals that "did" them are imaginary, the adaptive stories are imaginary, the offspring are imaginary and the unstated statistics of how many offspring organisms performing Dawkins' "behaviors" left as opposed to the members of the species which didn't perform them did, is made up. Dawkins seems to regularly forget that for natural selection to be relevant to a "behavior" then there would have to be members of the species that didn't perform them, otherwise nothing would being selected. I analyzed his most famous creation myth and showed that it is also mathematically impossible and contradicts some of the most classic holdings of the very Darwinism that Dawkins uses in a most question begging manner.

http://zthoughtcriminal.blogsp...

Which gets us to Hawking and his demand that physics and cosmology be permitted to entirely jettison its subject matter, the physical world and physical law, but just about all of the rest of those things you list:

"We seem to be at a critical point in the history of science, in which we must alter our conception of goals and of what makes a physical theory acceptable. It appears that the fundamental numbers, and even the form, of the apparent laws of nature are not demanded by logic or physical principle. The parameters are free to take on many values and the laws to take on any form that leads to a self-consistent mathematical theory, and they do take on different values and different forms in different universes." [The Grand Design]

In short, he, his co-author Mlodinow and every physicist, cosmologist and scientist who let that extraordinary through unchallenged, want to be able to write science-fiction in equations and call it science.

They were preceeded by others accepted as scientists such as Freud and many others working in the alleged behavioral, cognitive and neurological sciences, the very sciences that depend entirely on the subjective reports of subjects. Reviewing the history of those "sciences" how theories, holdings, entire schools rise up, are held to be science for a number of years or even decades only to topple into the boneyard of discontinued science (all except for the professionals who still see clients for "treatment" at three figures an hour). I have seen statistics that psychiatrists survey as the most atheistic of professions, which doesn't speak well for the relationship between materialism and scientific integrity.

I have read a lot of science, including psychology, sociology, etc. and I have read a lot of the peer-reviewed literature of psi research and the psi research is, in most cases, entirely better conducted, more rigorous in its control of experiments, more modest in its claimed effects and more rigorously critiqued than any part of psychology. As the eminent statistician Jessica Utts has said, it has surpassed the requirements of science as required of other areas of research. Its un-acceptance is based on distortions of what that research is and the results it shows, when it isn't based in outright lies about it. The standards demanded by the professional pseudo-skeptics and their fans are not applied to any other science. At their worst, those who assert that James Randi is qualified to judge the validity of science, there is no lab that couldn't have its work debunked by his tactics and the license to lie given him by the media, by the pseudo-skeptics and by scientists, including critics of this article such a Jerry Coyne. That is also part of the insertion of ideological materialism directly into science which is as much a culture of scientists as it is any supposed standards of conducting research and analysis. Science exists nowhere in the known universe except in the minds and practices of scientists.

I think I understand enough of science to have a more realistic picture of it than you seem to.

jim birch  Anthony_McCarthy • 15 hours ago

Oh dear. Psi research. I get it now. To quote Wikipedia: "Most scientists regard parapsychology as pseudoscience. Parapsychology has been criticised for continuing investigation despite not having demonstrated conclusive evidence of psychic abilities in more than a century of research."

Get it: no conclusive evidence.

As far as I can see you are fighting some useless and dreary tribal war that I don't want to be involved in.

Write a reply if you like but I won't read it. Have a spooky day.

Anthony_McCarthy  jim birch • 3 hours ago

1. Wikipedia is the target of an open effort to bias its articles on exactly that area by Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipeidia

http://guerrillaskepticismonwi...

There have been efforts to correct obviously incorrect assertions in articles which would fall under their announced area of activity only to have those edits reversed and the editors blocked. Including information about scientists which I would think falls well into the category of slander. The people in charge of Wikipedia have been notified and they refuse to take action.

http://deanradin.blogspot.com/...

2. And it's not only in this area in which Wikipedia's own establishment has shown it is not trustworthy, there are even more troubling problems with some Wikipedias in other languages, notably the Croatian Wikipedia which is under the control of neo-Nazis and some such as the Kazakh Wikipedia, is under the control of the dictator's government.

http://wikipediocracy.com/2014...

3. Since you claim to be a scientist, what of your work or the work you use in your professional life would you want to be evaluated on the basis of a Wikipedia article instead of reading the reviewed research and evaluating it on that basis and by reading replications and other confirmation of it? I don't believe you would ever accept your own standards for judging psi research for topics you agree with. And that is a violation of the methodological requirement that the standard of criticism has to be controlled, so as to avoid the kind of bias that you and the pseudo-skeptics have made acceptable, substituting your bias for objective evaluation. The pseudo-skeptics demand a right to practice a double standard favoring their ideological beliefs. That is a recipe for destroying the integrity of science.

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Anthony_McCarthy  Anthony_McCarthy • a day ago

Rereading this, I can report that the worst, most shoddily conducted and most obviously useless psi research conduced in conjunction with an actual university, resulting in the granting of a PhD was that done by a grad student who would later become a star of pseudo-skepticism, Susan Blackmore. She attributed her entry into pseudo-skepticism to her disappointment at the results of her research. But her research was trash, I believe even she has admitted it was inadequately conducted, so it couldn't have shown anything. You can contrast that frequently cited (by pseudo-skeptics) junk with the psi research conducted by real scientists in line with scientifically rigorous requirements. Only I doubt pseudo-skeptics are really interested in a disinterested analysis of research or they'd have already done that.

Update:   I just noticed that the links in this don't work.  I'll try to fix that later.  Until then, I've decided to put one of them in my bloglist, Dean Radin's Entangled Minds.  You can read he is an excellent experimentalist and analyst by reading his archive.  You will find his post that I linked to in my comments at the top of his blog right now.