You should express different beliefs because your beliefs are rude kids an atmosphere of learning.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear; I certainly wasn’t suggesting you should say things you don’t believe for fear of rudeness. I was suggesting you shouldn’t make baseless claims about other people for fear of rudeness. Actually, I think there are more important reasons than rudeness (making confident false statements can mislead others or even yourself), but your comments about making explicit predictions led me to suspect that you’d be unmoved by them.
The problem is that I’m referring to concepts that are likely not in your map.
Perhaps that’s the problem. Or perhaps the problem is that you aren’t even trying to be understood. “You guys are making worse predictions than you would if you thought like me.” Oh, that’s interesting; what predictions? “There’s no point saying; you don’t have the necessary concepts.” Oh, what concepts? “There’s no point saying; you wouldn’t understand.” Well, you might be right, but how can a conversation like this possibly be any use to anyone? If indeed you know ahead of time that no one who disagrees with you is capable of understanding what you say without lengthy in-person training, what is the point of saying it?
listening to silence
OK, so let’s take a look at what’s happened here. The question is, if I understand you right, whether committed LW-style naturalist reductionists make worse predictions than you do about whether there’s scope for listening in a quiet room to produce something subjectively different from mere not-hearing-sound.
We’ve got exactly two data points here. One: you. Unfortunately, you haven’t told us what your prediction ahead of time actually was, but you say that the person you thought least likely to have had that experience did in fact have it, which doesn’t sound like a big predictive success to me. (Though it could have been, if you thought they were 95% likely to have the experience and others in the room more like 99%.) Two: me. If you read what I wrote you will see that the first thing I said was “For sure there are multiple different possible experiences of not-sound”, and i commented specifically that attending to the not-sound in different ways makes a difference. That looks like a straightforwardly correct prediction to me. I said I wasn’t sure whether that was what you meant by “perceiving the sound of silence”; i.e., I kept my mind open about things I wasn’t in a position to know. That looks to me like what you’re claiming people should do and naturalists are bad at.
So, maybe I’m missing something, but so far this example doesn’t seem like a triumphant success for the “materialists make bad predictions” position.
I would suspect that many committed naturalists think [...]
First, maybe you should apply some of that empiricism you like to talk about and notice that when you actually put the question to a committed naturalist you didn’t get that response.
Second, it seems to me—in fact it seems obvious to me—that there’s no actual inconsistency between “silence is just the absence of sound” and “if you tell people to listen to silence they often find that a novel experience and say it’s more than the absence of sound”. Those are two almost completely unrelated propositions.
First, maybe you should apply some of that empiricism you like to talk about and notice that when you actually put the question to a committed naturalist you didn’t get that response.
I do applied empiricism in the sense that I made a prediction that it’s worthless to try to give you a specific example and indeed I find that it’s worthless.
Or perhaps the problem is that you aren’t even trying to be understood. “You guys are making worse predictions than you would if you thought like me.” Oh, that’s interesting; what predictions? “There’s no point saying; you don’t have the necessary concepts.” Oh, what concepts? “There’s no point saying; you wouldn’t understand.”
Leading to the question
Well, you might be right, but how can a conversation like this possibly be any use to anyone?
A little later...
But generally writing more about the purpose of this conversation would only open more issues that I can’t fully explain.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear; I certainly wasn’t suggesting you should say things you don’t believe for fear of rudeness. I was suggesting you shouldn’t make baseless claims about other people for fear of rudeness. Actually, I think there are more important reasons than rudeness (making confident false statements can mislead others or even yourself), but your comments about making explicit predictions led me to suspect that you’d be unmoved by them.
Perhaps that’s the problem. Or perhaps the problem is that you aren’t even trying to be understood. “You guys are making worse predictions than you would if you thought like me.” Oh, that’s interesting; what predictions? “There’s no point saying; you don’t have the necessary concepts.” Oh, what concepts? “There’s no point saying; you wouldn’t understand.” Well, you might be right, but how can a conversation like this possibly be any use to anyone? If indeed you know ahead of time that no one who disagrees with you is capable of understanding what you say without lengthy in-person training, what is the point of saying it?
OK, so let’s take a look at what’s happened here. The question is, if I understand you right, whether committed LW-style naturalist reductionists make worse predictions than you do about whether there’s scope for listening in a quiet room to produce something subjectively different from mere not-hearing-sound.
We’ve got exactly two data points here. One: you. Unfortunately, you haven’t told us what your prediction ahead of time actually was, but you say that the person you thought least likely to have had that experience did in fact have it, which doesn’t sound like a big predictive success to me. (Though it could have been, if you thought they were 95% likely to have the experience and others in the room more like 99%.) Two: me. If you read what I wrote you will see that the first thing I said was “For sure there are multiple different possible experiences of not-sound”, and i commented specifically that attending to the not-sound in different ways makes a difference. That looks like a straightforwardly correct prediction to me. I said I wasn’t sure whether that was what you meant by “perceiving the sound of silence”; i.e., I kept my mind open about things I wasn’t in a position to know. That looks to me like what you’re claiming people should do and naturalists are bad at.
So, maybe I’m missing something, but so far this example doesn’t seem like a triumphant success for the “materialists make bad predictions” position.
First, maybe you should apply some of that empiricism you like to talk about and notice that when you actually put the question to a committed naturalist you didn’t get that response.
Second, it seems to me—in fact it seems obvious to me—that there’s no actual inconsistency between “silence is just the absence of sound” and “if you tell people to listen to silence they often find that a novel experience and say it’s more than the absence of sound”. Those are two almost completely unrelated propositions.
I do applied empiricism in the sense that I made a prediction that it’s worthless to try to give you a specific example and indeed I find that it’s worthless.
What sort of response would have been evidence of its not being worthless? What are you trying to achieve here?
As far as giving you the example, the goal of the example was giving you the example helps you to understand something that you haven’t before.
But generally writing more about the purpose of this conversation would only open more issues that I can’t fully explain.
Leading to the question
A little later...
It’s turtles all the way down