In various threads there have been various discussions about what materialism is, and isn’t, and various definitions have been proposed and cited. In this thread I want to ask a different question, addressed specifically to those who regard “materialism” as a bad thing. William, for instance, has said that “materialism” was “disproven” in the 18th century, yet laments
the spread of an 18th century myth in our public school system and in our culture at large.
So here is my question: if you are against something called “materialism” and see it as a bad thing (for whatever reason), what is your definition of the “materialism” you are against?
Very interesting (but not unexpected). Thanks for posting the link.
I have never been able to see 3D on a television screen, but before my right eye got really bad, I could see 3D in a movie theater. My second surgery is next week. It’ll be interesting to see the world again, assuming that happens.
Alan Fox said:
And there is ongoing research being conducted. The question becomes: when has that reality been established?
There may be, but I have no knowledge of it.
Yes, it would dramatically affect everything. So there’s a lot of good reason for many not to welcome such news. Let’s say that it was known at some government level that intention does actually affect reality in a very fundamental way. This would mean that how the media was used to influence perceptions could in fact manipulate the balance of future outcomes. If the general public was aware of this, it might make it more difficult for a few to manipulate the minds of the masses via media into intentional states that served their selfish purposes.
But, that’s just speculation. It would make for an interesting movie or book at this point.
No experimental protocol is perfect. As the first link I offered indicates, unless the psi exists, the results call into question all similar medical research because they didn’t accommodate for the hypothetical researcher bias. It’s interesting that scientists would rather throw a whole body of medical research than admit that psi probably exists. It seems apparent that the protocols are fine; they just don’t like what the evidence indicates.
Well yes, medical research has been called into question, particularly research based on P values.
So do you have a point?
When you can be directly aware of the mug without any of your senses, then #1 will be something other than a euphemism for #2. Under materialism/empricism, all you have is #2, however you state it. Unless you’re going to tell me how, without the sensory translation and representation system, you are “directly” aware of the mug?
If you mean that the concept of a coffee-mug is “dependent on us,” I can’t disagree — I’m a Wittgensteinian, not a Platonist, about concepts! — though the details of “dependent on us” aren’t altogether obvious.
I think that what I want to say here is that the goal or point of our discursive practices — such as the norms governing the use of “coffee mug” — is to give us practical orientation in a perceptual field, conducive to the satisfaction of our needs and interests, but which is also responsive to real structures that constitute the ontological ground of our habits of classification and description.
In short, one can be (and should be) both a pragmatist and a metaphysical realist.
I have the (as far as I know unique) ability to adjust the receiver (i.e the target) of the mind-signal I am transmitting from “free-will-dimension” where I am able to directly connect to the component particles of the mug itself and they became the host for my awareness. As such I become directly “aware” of the mug because, in essence, I *am* the mug for the duration.
This is possible because, as you know, the brain is just a receiver for the “mind-signal” and through many years of pratice I am able to switch targets at will.
I believe this also explains psi phenomenon, as it seems to be a similar system. The user targets an external item e.g. a spoon. Their mind-signal does not wholly become targeted at the spoon (otherwise the spoon bender would obviously notice this) but it seems that just enough does get diverted to the spoon to allow a little unconscious control to take place, sufficient to weaken the molecular bonds and allow the spoon to subsequently bend with only a little physical pressure.
As such I am directly aware of the mug on my desk without any intervening physical processes taking place between the mug and my physical body.
And what’s the reason that this has only been noticed now, rather than at any prior point in human history?
Also, time to put your tinfoil hat on William,
It’s interesting you have absolutely no interest in trying to determine that yourself, via my more then generous offer.
For what definition of “objective”?
What’s wrong with corroboration?
As has happened on more than one occasion before, xkcd has a highly apposite strip:
https://xkcd.com/808/
I think it is a bit of a silly comment. If what she is saying is that it is “testable”, i.e. predictable – a regularity about the world – then she doesn’t need to qualify it by saying “it’s not supernatural”.
If she’s saying something else, then it’s not going to “bias” her research, because her research can ONLY test what is testable.
If “materialism” excludes putative psi- type mind-effects a priori, then I am simply not a materialist.
If materialism is simply the conclusion that the psi-type mind-effects (e.g. “intention fields”) are not warranted by the evidence available then I am, because that is the provisional conclusion I draw.
I think minds are extremely powerful, but I do not think they exercise their power via “fields” (apart from electromagnetic fields).
Corroboration comes in through the senses, and thus is a representation. It’s part of the map.
Psi phenomena of one sort or another have been claimed to occur/exist pretty much throughout history. It’s been scientifically investigated for well over a hundred years.
Two reasons to think it isn’t real:
If it were real, it would be so extremely useful it would have found uses, and it hasn’t*
When you actually look at the methodologies, they are all prone to confounds.
*ETA: I see Randall Munroe got there first.
But when independent observers corroborate each other, you have consilient evidence that the map is good.
I’m sorry, perhaps you missed it go by just then:
https://xkcd.com/808/
Anyway, those are just restatements of facts. Cows have weight. Apples are things. People claimed to read minds all through history. And so?
Homoeopathy has also been scientifically investigated for well over a hundred years.
And you know what. If you don’t add “and during that scientific investigation they found it’s totally bullshit” then all you are doing is hijacking science™ in the cause of establishing the particular brand of woo you are selling is backed by actual real science™ by not including the end of the sentence. It’s like when people quote Darwin framing the problem and then don’t quote the solution he gives. You know what I mean.
In my (1), we’re describing the perceptual encounter at the level of my subjective experience; in (2), we’re describing the perceptual encounter at the level of physical, chemical, and neurophysiological activity involved. The two descriptions are operating at different “levels”, the personal and the sub-personal. I don’t think that (2) undermines (1). Compare the following:
(3) The oak tree converts solar energy into chemical energy.
(4) Photons striking the chlorophyll molecules in the chloroplasts inside the oak tree’s cells, thereby driving a chemical reaction that converts carbon dioxide and water into glucose.
The truth of (4) doesn’t mean that (3) is false; (4) describes the process that enables (3) to be the case, at a different level of description.
Likewise, the physical, chemical, and neurobiological description of how I perceive does not undermine the truth of the claim that when I, the embodied cognitive agent that a person is, perceive, I am directly aware of the objects perceived. I do not infer them from the presence of “sense-data. The activation vectors across neuronal populations in my sensory cortex are not representations of objects to me; they are the mechanisms whereby I am immediately aware of objects.
Lurking here in the background is a deeply vexed question of what counts as “immediate” or “mediated”. I take the Sellarsian line — first developed by Wilfrid’s father, the philosopher Roy Wood Sellars — that sensations are not epistemological intermediaries but rather causal intermediaries. That is, I do not justify my belief in objects in terms of my immediate awareness of sensations, but rather sensations are part of the causal process whereby I am immediately aware of objects.
I have to say that many tests of putative psi effects completely underestimate the power of non-psi effects. There’s loads of stuff we know without being aware of how we know it. That doesn’t mean psi is at work – it could (more easily IMO) be millions of years of finely honed perceptual apparatus, including quite subtle bits of specialised brain circuitry for recognising things like “biological movement” and, indeed “intention”.
Right. Perception can be direct only if directness doesn’t require that there be no causal intermediaries, because obviously those are there. In my paper I suggest that perception is epistemically indirect….sometimes. Usually not.
ETA: Sorry–I guess the thread has gone on to ghost-busting. Careful about ectoplasmic rashes, everyone. They SUCK!
OMagain:
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
KN,
Whether you should accept #1 depends on what you mean by “non-inferentially”. The visual system is highly inferential, but the inferences are automatic and pre-conscious.
To me it seems that if inferences are being made, then perception isn’t direct.
I’ll buy William dinner at the restaurant of his choice if he can bend one of my dinner spoons. One of them fell in the disposer and the result was a new disposer. None bent in 45 years. But mind powers should have no trouble.
I’m doubting that, though I suppose it depends on what you mean by “inference.”
Neil,
We discussed this a year ago in the following thread:
Direct and Indirect Perception
There is no actual motion in these illusions. The motion is wholly inferred.
I’m not looking to reopen an old discussion. I was just stating my position.
It is misperceived. It does not follow that the perceptual system was doing any inferring, though perhaps you are in your thoughts about it.
It is too much of a jump to go from optical illusion to inference.
Neil,
An incorrect inference is still an inference. And it’s easy to see why the inference would be favored by natural selection. Objects almost always persist in real life, so an inference based on persistence will prevail over one that assumes that objects poof into and out of existence.
Consider a very simple motion illusion in which a red circle at position A on the screen disappears at the same time that an identical red circle appears at nearby position B. The stimulus is actually compatible with two interpretations:
1. A red ball at position A poofed out of existence at the same time that an identical-looking red ball poofed into existence at position B.
2. A red ball moved from position A to position B.
Our visual systems choose #2, and that’s a good thing. Objects usually persist in real life, so it’s better on average to bet that way.
The inference is in the perceptual system, because it can’t be “turned off” even when you are intellectually aware that it is an illusion.
Well we normally think of motion at the macro level and poofing at the quantum level.
Sometimes it takes considerable effort to unpack inferences.
Kantian Naturalist,
Describing a process differently, and to different degrees of specificity, doesn’t alter what empricism/materialism holds to be factually occurring, which ultimately is the more detailed description. However, if you require using the term “direct awareness” as if it is something other than what the more detailed description indicates (interpreted representations of sensory data) in order to sustain your philosophy, then believe as you wish.
For me, however, if my philosophy required that I believe I have direct awareness of a thing outside of my mind, I wouldn’t try draw an equivalence between two conceptually incompatible things via semantics. That’s like compatibilist free will – just describe a process that is not direct awareness, call it direct awareness, and then ask what right others have of challenging your semantics. If calling the interpretive representational process “direct awareness” satisfies you, and if calling physically caused choices “free will” satisfies you, good for you.
Synesthesia is clear evidence that we do not have “direct awareness” of anything, but rather depend on physiological interpretations that produce cognitive, perceived representations. All we have are maps made from a potentially flawed and/or divergent (from the apparent norm) map-making system (under empirical materialism, that is).
Oh? And what do you have then?
EL said:
Please support your assertion that it hasn’t been found to have uses.
There are no perfect protocols. Againk, at some point, all one is doing is denying the evidence based on the mere possibility that the research was flawed.
Elizabeth,
Yes, indeed, any explanation other than “psi is real” will do, no matter how vague or unsupported by the evidence.
You have the map telling you that the map is good. Yay. All you have, still, is the map.
********************************
So far, this is a quibble about what “inference” means. If you two can agree on that, maybe you will also agree about whether perception is inferential.
Simply untrue. If psi is real I’m perfectly willing to accept that. Why would it be otherwise?
The problem is William is your inability to understand why it’s rejected. It’s the same reason why you think faith healers can cure cancer.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
You present 1 study that shows psi is real. I present 1000 that shows it is not. Yet because you have a vested interest in it being real you reject 1000 in favour of one, the one that gives you the answer you are looking for.
You are also presumably a climate change denier on the same basis.
You really don’t get it do you, even after all this time.
Why do you reject the overwhelming majority of research that shows the effect is not real and rule out the possibility that the research was flawed on the one you do accept?
On the contrary, the onus is on those proposing that it exists to demonstrate its usefulness.
Where are the military applications?
Where are the Intelligence Service applications?
Where are the power generation applications?
Where are the forensic applications?
Where are the medical applications?
That’s not how it works, William. I suggest that it is your lack of expertise in experimental methodology that is leading you astray here, and also here:
Nope. That is unsupported insinuation on your part. Most psychologists (including myself) would be very excited if psi could be shown to be real. However, the onus is always, in science, to attempt to falsify. And in all the psi studies I have looked at, there are alternative explanations. Those need to be checked out before psi effects can be confidently concluded. And a major sign that the alternatives are more likely is the classic finding of smaller effects sizes with larger sample sizes and better-controlled experiments.
If effect sizes are inversely correlated with experimental quality, then that is a strong indication that the effects are artefacts.
You are perceiving bias where there is only rigor.
Yes, indeed. it’s models all the way down, as I’ve said. Data at one level is a model at a lower level of analysis.
That is why corroboration by independent observers is so important, and why that is what is meant by “objective” in science (i.e. the word is used very different from the way you use it, which is more like “real”). If many people find the same model gives consistent predictions we can conclude that the model probably does represent an underlying “objective” (in your sense) reality. It’s the best evidence we have that solipsism is false.
Just because our only access to reality is via independently testable models does not tell us that reality does not exist. It just means we are always handling reality through gloves.
Exactly. Which is why arguments about consciousness from “qualia” are so misguided.
There are no “raw feels”. Glad we agree on something, anyway.
Perfect.
OMagain said:
As I’ve explained in the past, OMagain, my beliefs are not based on scientific evidence (per se) at all. My beliefs (meaning, “to act as if true, but not hold to be true”) are entirely based on personal experience and whether or not those beliefs appear to help me achieve my goals in life. I don’t require even one research paper to act as if psi is a real commodity because I experience what appears to be psi phenomena in my life on almost a daily basis. I also employ intentionality techniques to affect reality and it appears to work for me. What the scientific community says about such things doesn’t matter to me at all as far as my personal beliefs are concerned.
I don’t present research in order to support my views or to prove them to others. I present that scientific research here in order to demonstrate my points about “bad materialism” and so-called materialists by how they react to that research/scientific evidence. Metaphysical materialism unnecessarily constrains perspectives; it biases interpretations and expectations; it organizes the world into agreement with whatever one thinks is the limits of “materialism”. I think science would better operate under “methodological pragmatism” instead of assert what is and is not real, and what is and is not possible.
I have no reason to believe/deny “climate change”, whatever that is supposed to be. I’m highly skeptical that any such environmental doomsday crisis posturing is much more than a pretense for political corruption and increased state control & power, or a psychological archetype reinvented under the imprimatur of science and capitalized on by various “green” businesses.
I’ve lived through predictions of global cooling and overpopulation disasters, and several religious doomsday predictions. None of it happened.
EL said:
No, the onus is on anyone who makes a positive claim. I didn’t make a claim here; you did. I’ll take this to mean you cannot support it.
Do you have expertise in the study and interpretation of psi, EL? It appears your errant equivalence of psi with other phenomena as if it can be tested the same way is leading you astray. To wit:
Have you thought this through, conceptually? If psi is real, if intention can affect actual outcomes of research, what does that mean when one is attempting to falsify the hypothesis? What it means, EL, is that a different kind of protocol is necessary – not necessarily one of “less stringent quality”, which psi investigators have developed and are implementing.
Yes. In most research, there are always other possible explanations; when it comes to psi, though any other possible explanation will do to deny psi exists.
You have to conceptually think through what it would mean if psi actually existed, what it would mean to the nature of such research, how to develop protocols, how to test, and what “large sample sizes” would mean in terms of competing intentions and if they would wash out over larger and larger sample sizes. PSI wouldn’t be like other commodities, EL; it requires a paradigm shift in how one conceptualizes research because psi would be a fundamentally different kind of commodity.
But because of your ignorance about scientific methodology, you mistake their reactions for something other than what they are. As I said, you mistake, for instance, bias for rigor.
You don’t even understand what those “so-called materialists” (so-called by whom?) actually believe.
You have yet to demonstrate that whatever you are calling “metaphysical materialism” constrains anything other than what nobody disputes: that scientific methodology can only investigate reproducible phenomena.
If psi is reproducible, science can investigate it. If psi is not, then it can’t.
That’s an inbuilt constraint of the methodology and has nothing to do with philosophy, materialist, metaphysical or otherwise.
If you took the time to understand the methodology you would, perhaps, understand this i.e. that your focus of attack is a straw man.
The reason I, and other psychologists, are skeptical of psi isn’t because we are “metaphysical materialists” but because the reproducibility of the phenomena is notoriously poor, and gets poorer the more rigorous the study (to the extent that psi proponents talk about the “shyness” of psi effects).
If your model of the world invokes psi and intentional fields, and it works – great. Most of us have such models, without even thinking about them, and they permeate our speech: “I had a hunch that you’d call”; “Feel the burn”; “Open your mind”; “let the love flow”.
They are, to use your word, “reifications” of effects that are perfectly real, but may be poorly modeled scientifically by things like “intention fields”. My favorite non-psychological example is “suction”. It’s a reification that turns out to have serious limitations as a scientific model, although it works fine for a lot of purposes, e.g. selling Dyson vacuum cleaners.
“There are no useful applications” is a negative claim not a positive claim, The clue is in the word “no”.
Yes, I do, as it happens. My training is in experimental cognitive psychology. Psi investigators (including those you have cited) use those techniques.
If you think psi can’t be tested in that way, why on earth cite studies that do as evidence for psi?
Please give an example of such a “new type of protocol”. All the ones you have cited using the regular kind.
As I said, your insinuation is unfounded. Whenever we investigate an effect, whether it is of psi, or some other phenomenon, and we find an effect, the next step is to try to show it is not the effect that we hypothesised.
A perfect example is the supraluminal neutron finding. It would have been tremendously exciting had it been true. But being good researchers, they checked alternative explanations – and found them. That wasn’t because they refused to accept the possibility of supraluminal neutrons – just that such an extraordinary finding needs to be checked really thoroughly for alternative, and less exciting, explanation. Same with cold fusion.
Well, do tell. What would it mean? How would sample size calculations differ? Why would you need a “paradigm shift in how one conceptualizes research”?
What’s special about psi that makes it different from other things we research?
OMagain said:
What do you mean by “reject”? I’ll look over anything anyone wants to present here. However, as I said, I don’t base my beliefs on any scientific research whatsoever.
I’ve presented multiple published, peer-reviewed papers that show a PSI effect. What I’ve seen from the opposition here are papers and opinion articles that merely question the protocols and claim it is possible that the demonstrated positive psi effect is a false artifact. I don’t know what you are talking about when you refer to “the overwhelming majority of research that shows the effect is not real”. Certainly, no one has posted such research here that I see. I’m familiar with some such work, but seeing as you are the one referencing it, perhaps you could provide some quotes, links, and overviews?
Precisely. Moreoever, there are papers and rigorous scientific articles that show that it is very likely that the demonstrated psi effect is an artefact.
But you see that as “metaphysical materialist bias”. It is no such thing:
I suggest that it is your own personal belief system that is leading you to misunderstand the criticisms leveled at psi research.
Does not comport with
Hence there is no point. You are not convinced by evidence, except apparently when it agrees with your preconceptions.
EL said:
It’s still a positive claim, EL, even if phrased as a negative. You are claiming that there are no useful applications. Can you support that claim? Of course not. It’s rhetoric.
You’ll pardon me if I am skeptical of this.
I already have in past discussions – protocols such as using those individuals that show an initial capacity for psi; optimizing the environment to make those individuals feel comfortable; screening researchers involved for anti-psi bias; using blinding protocols on the researchers themselves to help prevent psi biasing.
Really?
http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2006-08436-001
Do you know what publication bias is William?