Consensus Reality and Paranormal Research

I found this online. My thinking is similar, maybe he says it better.

http://www.closertotruth.com/video-profi...

Leslie, John
John is a philosopher who focuses on explaining existence. He is the author of Universes (the first comprehensive philosophical study of multiple universes and their implications); The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction; Infinite Minds; and Immortality Defended; and he is the editor of Modern Philosophy and Cosmology. Oxford-educated, he served on the faculty of the Philosophy Department at the University of Guelph, Ontario, until he became Professor Emeritus so as to pursue his own research.

Hi Dave,

Very good comments- getting right to the heart of any root differences between us and the weaknesses of my own position.

I think you're right drawing attention to words, but as i am stereotyped, i myself fall into the use of those stereotypes. So you're right, there are seeming inferences from the use of words that are more my failure. Perhaps it is a curse how descriptive we must be when minds of different thoughts meet. Attempts at forming the same lexicon are pretty common strand across education I guess; as they need to be if we are to understand one-another. Something I perhaps took for granted during my school years.

Materialism: To me this is close-minded terminology. I can see, given the history of philosophical dispute between material realists and more imaginative ideas, why it came about, but it was always philosophical. There is no science class called 'Materialism 101'. 2500 years ago philosophers were able to speculate that perhaps there was only matter and that was all there was, but this is so different to modern science that comparisons only exhibit misunderstanding.

As is often pointed out scientific understanding came from a highly religious background. Many of the earlier thinkers struggled far harder with what they were seeing and how it compared to their texts than we do today. In fact today we are left with philosophical points, a shadow of the former.

Given that the modern materialist framework has no boundaries excluding non-material entities such as forces, energies, potentials or probabilities or just other mathematical entities I see no need for the term ‘materialist’ as a strictly physicalist description within science itself. I never encountered it until it was used as a derogatory term to label me. As a philosophy I can still understand and believe in the entire material construct of the understood portions of the universe (as you say- to the resolution that we understand it) and still have plenty of space for the non-material. In fact you might argue that what is already known within science gives us a few tools in which to dimly illuminate the non-material.

Seeing Magic

One way in which normal 'material' science can see 'magic', if we were to purposefully define magic outside of unknown particles, interactions, forces so we can truly, and just for the sake of argument, call it non-material, would be through mathematics. It has been quite common in science to construct the mathematics that describes the affect of some unknown force before the entity causing the affect is understood (and especially in this case where part of the defining description of magical entities might well be that they can never be understood using scientific tools- else why argue they will always be outside of the material paradigm). I hope you can see that even if the affect of ‘magic’ was random (and no-one claims that it is - they claim it is purposed) you would still be able to define its affect on known behaviors (the already detailed mathematical entities used to describe nature) mathematically. In fact many claim that this is exactly the sort of data that does exist (Sheldrake for example). So it cannot be had both ways.

If this sort of stuff affects the 'material' world in ways that can be mathematically described (even if random), which it would have to if it is to have any power within the material world (and be non-random if it is to do anything useful) then, at least in its affects on it, it would become part of the standard material description. So because of all that (and that all materialism does is change to incorporate anything that is discovered) I do not think it is valid outside of philosophical circles in which it has a pretty limited scope anyway, defining as it does in its own favor. As such it is more of a derogatory term than anything really useful to define people.

Better to talk about the individual things than an ancient philosophy that perhaps is not too inclusive of many individual’s thoughts and how they would label themselves today.

I guess I would like the hard line interpretation of an ancient view of the world to be compared to the thoroughly adaptive construct which, though being currently material (but in the modern, not ancient sense) is absolutely adaptive enough to feature fully spiritual or magical models if they were proven to exist. There are many ways it could do this from functionally singular descriptions using new forces and entities to just plain old exclusion principles where one thing exists but is different enough to be separate from one thing and another, such as confining to different dimensions, branes or just the realizations of different energy types with new properties. Modern materialism could easily feature all this, if the evidence suggested it was necessary. If the labeling of modern science as materialistic is because it isn’t doing this then I would ask what do people expect? If we were to include things for which there is no or poor evidence then we would ultimately be no different to a religion, certainly if everything everybody wanted was included.

Having said all that I am happy to use the term ‘materialist’ to describe myself as I see a need to recapture it from those who would abuse it. Each time I listen to a church leader label anyone who doesn’t accept his evidence for his personal hypothesis as ‘materialist’ and use it in the sense of a ‘denier of possibility’ I cringe. The Pope is particularly good at it.

Atheism

Obviously this is a bit of a trickier position than the idealism behind the idea that the spirit exists as it is an exclusive position of possibility, which is always trickier.

Non-belief in the various God hypothesis is common across the world. Every believer disagrees with some God types others belief in, you would be some sort of belief schizophrenic if you believed in all of the several hundred thousand God types at the same time. I guess there is good reason to think that the belief systems of the brain can only really handle a limited amount of belief and could never accept the inputs and descriptions held by every belief.

So disbelief is almost an absolute. Atheism is perhaps special in that it is unconvinced by any position. Making it seem immediately unreasonable to many.

There are two sides to my own disbelief. The first is a failure to be convinced by particular theological arguments. The second is a problem seeing the reasons that people pick particular philosophies and then take the further step of arguing that they are real. There are more examples of that than just deism or theism of course.

One argument against atheism is that it permanently discludes the idea of God. It is, as ever, slightly more complicated than that. This would be a real criticism, especially where it interfaces with science, as it would be in denial if we were in a deistic or theistic universe. The extent to which that might be true would depend largely on what any true concept of God actually is. To be more precise to what degree there is a difference between an immensely powerful being (like the Q from Startrek) and God. If God is specifically defined by the examples seen in theology then I will probably see no personally reasonable reason to ever agree with it. If what we have is a universe started by very powerful aliens with incredible technology then we would have to decide whether the current theological concepts can be bent that far or whether the universe is really atheistic in formation. That strays close to deism of course, but I hope you can see the difference. The claims of the powers and activities of God are, to me, part of the definition that forms part of the definition of my own atheism. I think that is the best way of putting it anyway, though convoluted in structure.

Scientist

You are right to pull up the differences in my statement here. There are of course some points missed by the point that materialism and atheism are philosophies while scientist is not.

Materialism I feel I have addressed. Anyone can arrive at skepticism of the God claims from any different angle, and everybody does to one extent or another. The mingling of science and atheism or specifically the mingling of science and the claims by theological figures or philosophers centers around the lack of specific real world evidence for their claims. I enjoy reading about the stories of the sun falling out of the sky or people flying into the clouds, becoming invisible, holding meetings with glowing creatures etc. We need not discuss the difference between purely narrative structures and science. Secular study of religion is almost always contrary to religious claims where testable though. Through textual criticism, tests of historicity and ancient archeology we find more and more reasons to be skeptical of these claimed truths.

Of course science is also a philosophy. The work done in the workshops is also different to that in its showrooms. Often criticism is laid at over speculation of workshop ideas. Most thinkers appreciate the difference between religious and scientific philosophy. Many even separate the two into individual realms. The use of faith is very different to the slow and laborious building of data and theory. To me it is a shortcut, miss out the hard work and arrive at the answer you would like to be true.

There are scientists of faith, but merging the two into a single individual is very different from successfully merging the philosophies and data. So far as I am aware of no-one who has been able to merge the scientific data and the theistic hypothesis. The likes of Francis Collins are very poor examples as far as science goes, but good ones of the required faith jumps. Deistic merging’s are easy. I can do that right now. Though as I have pointed out deism isn’t actually contrary to atheism, as it would depend on the exact nature of the being being proposed – godlike or powerlike.

No. We should dismiss any test which has not produced the highest quality of data, just as is normal. We do this because we want to have the highest confidence in that what is included in ‘knowledge’ is actually real. It would be exceptionally easy to fill our textbooks and libraries with speculation and conjecture and begin teaching it to our children. Speculative results are to be found in all fields from pharmacology to the paranormal to everything else. I would only ask that everyone be treated fairly. If there was a section in every test ever proposed that assessed belief in the person conducting the test and that tick box was then used to devalue every test if the person didn’t believe then we would be in a very bad world. Imagine if a drug was produced and someone skeptical showed that it caused harm, but the results were thrown away because the individual was skeptical whereas the research done by the drug company was done by believers and showed it was fine. How suspicious would you be?

I am even willing to accept that there is some sort of positivism or optimism required to achieve these results in the subjects. That being skeptical really can inhibit the affect from showing (in the likes of mind reading for example). I am not however willing to accept that experiments cannot be setup so that the subjects are not aware of skepticism. Blinded trials, randomized controls and placebos are all used to do exactly this in other experiments. I accept that this is a good reason why the likes of Randi’s experiments may have failed, but I do not accept it for research on a whole. Only quality of experiment should be used to gauge value, not the belief of those conducting it as their beliefs should be controlled in the methodology of the experiment as is normal in other fields of research.

There is something called publication bias that should be a concern to more people. I will try a quick explanation as it is important – sorry if you already understand it. When an experiment is performed you will get a result. This result will depend on the quality of your experiment and whether what you are trying to test is real or not. What is important though is what happens when lots of the same tests are performed. Assuming what you are testing is real (if it isn’t you should start to see a random spread – even though some experiments will fall where you would like them to – this is noise in your data) then you will get something special when you plot all the experiments results.
The poorer experiments will have a greater diversity of result than the better ones (say ones with more participants) so if you plot the quality of the experiment against the result you should see a pyramid with the poorer experiments down below with greater variation of result honing in like a triangle towards the true value, which will be within the area that your good experiments will cluster. This should be seen no matter what you are testing from the age of rocks to drugs, anything at all. If you do not see this then either the experiments were all designed and performed perfectly, which is unlikely as different experiments have different budgets, time allocations, methodologies and design setups, sample sizes, some are cursory tests before large scale studies begin etc etc. If you do not see this triangle in the graphed data then almost certainly you are seeing the affects of publication bias where researchers are only publishing the data they most like. This isn’t always done for bad reasons, but should be considered something of a problem and the resulting data is not reliable. Homeopathic data for some reason seems to be missing the bottom of the graph.

Me:

You:

This is a matter of understanding of what we mean by ‘knowledge’ or ‘understanding’.

Firstly your philosophy is good so you understand why you cannot use a problem in understanding as a positive argument for other specific beliefs. For any specific idea a lack of understanding is a problem and positive understanding in another direction is even worse.

We have a resolution and a context problem here. When the researchers stated that we do not understand what is going on at a really fundamental level it is likely they were referring to a lack of experimental data for extended models of the standard model such as supersymmetry or the multiple dimensions given by string theory, existence of the Higgs, inflation models, whether dark matter is made of WIMP’s etc. It is unlikely they were referring to specific counterarguments of otherworldly claims in countenance to their own understanding. This is fine except their sentences should by put in context of what they think it is we do not know (since these boundaries will define what might fit in the gaps and they are the best to say) if they are to be used as assertions to other claims.

Do we understand quantum mechanics? Depends what you mean. Given the sheer number of things it underpins and the complexity of these things both physically and within our lives we had better hope we do. If we do not then it is unlikely we would achieve the successes by random. I think you refer more to a resolution and implication issue. We are perhaps not willing to face the implications of quantum mechanics in our worldview. We also only understand quantum mechanics as what it is, an incomplete part of a picture. So the question is do we, by looking at this incomplete part of the picture, understand the whole? Well no, of course not. But just like a painting of a beach scene, even if you only have a quarter of it you can still rule out many other paintings. In short it would still manage to add to our understanding of the scene even if not fully revealed. If you contrast something like quantum mechanics to the bible, say the King James Version as opposed to the Standard Version or the New Revised Standard Version or the Common Version or any of the other multitude then compare them to the Masoretic Text or the Leningrad Codex compared to the Dead Sea Scrolls then ask the same question. Can we really trust what we might be tempted to call knowledge? And to what resolution can we trust it and the picture it would make us paint?

As for

This depends again on the resolution/scale at which the nonsense begins. It is completely true that they break down at certain scales and that this is a big weakness. Yep, you can definitely call the answers they give at these scales nonsense, and indeed physicists do. As educated persons who might understand these things though we would be irresponsible to let this slip into a more grandiose and ridiculous argument that these are nonsense in their entirety. I have encountered enough people that have read poor descriptions and built them into poor argument – especially with quantum mechanics now it is the new buzz word theory of those wanting to sound clever, though if you pin them down they do eventually accept that they use it as further metaphor for their narratives. Either these can be seen as approximations of the universes behaviour, albeit incredibly accurate ones, or the universe has slightly different properties at different times and scales which are not encompassed by these theories. Both views have their value. Not featuring descriptions of more fundamental properties, be them strings or whatever, does make the theories approximations, but the universe also does differ at different scales and times. It definitely doesn’t mean that your maths is wrong if it doesn’t take these changes into account, just that it is incomplete – it would be an incomplete picture of knowledge, not an unfactual one, like saying a map without America on it was wrong, it would be and it wouldn’t.
Of course one thing that could be wrong while the maths is right is the conceptualisation. Here I completely accept that we will probably never be sure and that we can see a little narrative creeping in. It is, as ever, more complex than that though, the idea of a unified spacetime and gravity as the curvature of that spacetime was not pulled out of the imagination like a storybook might be. Instead it arises from the mathematics. Though this does not completely undermine the narrative objection it does complicate it.

I refer here to theological or logical sillyness, absurdness ad infinitum. There is a connection to common sense of course, but common sense as a biologically derived principle or feeling is conditioned by its environment and so isn’t a very good way of determining even itself. Common sense cannot even say whether common sense is common sensical. It is perhaps just an intuitive reaction to how new data compares to old in the brain, not exactly a useful feature of assessing new understanding.

Picking the two slits experiment reveals a little of your sense of humor; intellectually devious to the extreme.
We might question, for example, the deviousness of picking a non-common sense example to highlight the non-common sensical nature of non common sensical knowledge! If anything the two slits experiment can only serve as a perfect example of the non common sense understanding that quantum mechanics seems to demand.

I suppose from the theological point of view (not saying that is what you are espousing) the idea that perhaps common sense is some type of god given ability to discern reality from non-reality, then the use of common sense as a yardstick for universal assessment might make sense, but from an evolutionary perspective its development and tailoring to our normal scale and ways of life render it quite useless for universal assessment. I guess we take it as we leave it. I don’t think it is much use; everybody seems to say everybody else lacks it, whatever that means.

I would extend that statement to ‘God forbid we should ever have to make the jump to that kind of assertion based on an inability to think of anything else or a distaste of any other idea.’

If we were to arrive at it from the ground up then it would be much better. I can conceive of universes where we might, but at least in its non-human aspects this universe appears completely natural, exactly how we might expect without a theistic explanation being required.

;) I didn’t say exactly that! Nah, I’m an idealist in the sense that I think everything should fit into a whole. No-one has any evidence either way so this is a good example of where I might be using something more equivalent to faith. So far the trend towards unified knowledge is at the very least inspiring. It is possible that the universe is partitioned off into different worlds. Perhaps two or maybe even many universes literally overlap one-another so that we can quite literally study individual ones and come up with different answers. That might be a nice way of explaining things actually, now I think about it. Anyway….

By the bit that you quote I more mean that I wish it wasn’t an either or proposition, and I don’t mean what hat you wear as a compromise or balance between philosophies, ideologies or evidence sets. I wish that while wearing the same hat we were able to build these beliefs into one. While I do believe that modern science encompasses and is reflective of better descriptions that result in more positive outcomes in understanding and that with education it is possible to identify what is theology, belief, wishful thinking or indeed just narrative I don’t mean to draw such a simple historical line between past beliefs and modern ones. In many ways modern ones are still the same as historical ones, or extensions of them. I think the fault comes with labeling modern knowledge as the ‘materialist paradigm’ which would seem to undermine it rather than treating it as the very hard won and exceptionally expensive endeavor it has been, whether its results are what you would wish or not.

All in all I am not just about the evidence, thought that is obviously still important if we want to be honest to it and with ourselves. What we are really dealing with is contrasting philosophies and how they regard the modern evidence – to what extent they are built from it, or sit/stand beside it, or just plain ignore it using ‘mistrust’ as a poor proxy for supporting alternative hypothesis. I would say you are right that a consensus based reality is manifested by our conceptions and narrative of that reality (though allowing for the narrative to be informed by such things as science to try and hone the narrative to reality). I would disagree that we create it rather than just live within our cultural/religious/philosophical and scientific understanding of it. I would say that it explains all the anomalies, not that have been brushed under the carpet, but are being worked on (though from many different angles in many countries and cultures, and to varying levels of success), not through the sort of level of understanding that I am used to, but instead by being such a far reaching idea that it claims powers in all realms. Sort of the same as saying everything works because an ‘everything works’ energy flows through everything. It is philosophy rather than science of course and so long as we are able to accept that then it can join the innumerable other philosophical narratives of nature.

Hi,

I'm just jumping in here myself. My reply to the good points above will be a bit longer.

I like your first paragraph. Following it further the idea of consciousness would have had to exist before consciousness did, which would be fun, add infinitum for all other entities...

On your second point there is, as ever, no philosophical point in trying to defend a current idea against future possibility. Not wanting to slip into the nihilism left if we were to all treat knowledge simply as that relative to future possibility and accepting of the fact that the philosophical point contains no data for its own i feel safe enough pointing out that the value has pretty much honed in on the current figure from previous less well evidenced or less accurate values.

I don't think dark matter or dark energy will bugger it up as these already feature in the value, but if our observable universe is only a small bubble of isolated spacetime within our universe, or our universe exists on the brane of a multi-universal structure then obviously the value would only represent our little bubble. That would still be a pretty profound discovery though.

There are a few ways the age value could change, variable speeds of light etc, but at the moment it doesnt appear they have done and the arguments as to why are much better than the opposite. A variable speed of light would change many things that have been measured and seen to not have changed.

I guess there is a difference in the use of philosophy and possibility when talking about things that have not yet been measured, such as spirit, and those that have, such as cross referenced radioactive decay. Uranium/Thorium and Strontium/Rubidium curves match as do the ratios of other radioactive products, giving the same date (within error) as each other. If the speed of light had been variable then they would have changed in different ways making the ratios different from each other. So if you dated a rock using different radioactive products and saw the different ratios producing different dates then, once you have ruled out everything else, it would be good evidence that the fundamental constants had changed with time. What you see though is that they match- hence the speed of light does not seem to have differed over at least the age of the rocks dated. Other techniques push it back much further. We will see i guess.