The question isn’t “why shouldn’t we have both” it’s rather “why don’t we have both in a way that reasonable founded”.
You speak of not being committed to theories, but the further we go in that direction the less ability we have to generalize the things we discover empirically.
If you train calibration you can generalize without theories. Generalizing isn’t something that you need to do explicitely through theories. Phenomelogical investigation provides a way to have knowledge that your brain can generalize on system I level.
If the evidence for (say) ghosts is good enough, I will (I hope) start believing in ghosts.
That not the direction in which I’m arguing. I’m arguing that you should focus on predictions instead of concepts like whether or not ghosts exists.
Splendid. I’m all in favour of empiricism.
Being for empiricism is not the same thing as practicing it. Actually practicing means valuing experience higher than theories.
Would you like to be more specific about some things you think naturalists get wrong?
The framing “things that naturalists get wrong” suggests that I think “naturalists get belief X wrong and should believe Y instead”. That not the main position that I advocate.
Studies consistently show that people get things wrong by being overconfident. The key is to become more open to accept that reality tends to unfold in ways that your theories wouldn’t predict.
OK, so your response to “system 1 makes a lot of big mistakes” is not “get system 2 in charge in those situations” but “try to train system 1 to do better”. Once again I have to ask: why not both?
Now, let’s apply some empiricism to your suggestion here. Making theories, making them precise, getting detailed predictions out of them and comparing with experiment has been at the heart of the scientific enterprise since, say, Galileo. It’s worked incredibly well. Not instead of empirical investigation; not instead of well-trained Systems 1 generating intuitive predictions and ideas.
What do we have on the other side? Perhaps “be more specific about some things naturalists get wrong” was the wrong challenge. But so far everything you’ve offered is, well, theories. Maybe you’d rather call them predictions. But what they clearly aren’t is empirical evidence.
[...] predictions instead of concepts [...]
First of all, if you read the sentence I wrote immediately after the one you quoted, you will see that I endorsed exactly that idea before you mentioned it: given substantial evidence for ghosts but not enough to justify a change of overall theory, I should adopt the belief that the world behaves in something like the way it would if it contained ghosts.
Second: it turns out that concepts are really useful. They are especially useful when more than one person is involved. Suppose I am good at predicting the weather. If all I have is a well-trained system 1, I can’t communicate my expertise to you at all; I can just demonstrate it and hope you catch on. If I have half-baked folk theories, I can say “when the sky is such-and-such a colour the weather the following day tends to be such-and-such”, and you can test how well those claims hold up and use them to predict a bit yourself. If I have a full-blown scientific theory, you can put it into a big computer and take lots of measurements and use them to predict where hurricanes will make landfall. This actually works pretty well considering what a big hairy system global weather is.
Actually practicing means valuing experience higher than theories.
Type error.
What you should actually do is to pay attention to both experience and theories in proportion to how well established they are. You can be wrong about your experiences (especially your past experiences). You can be very wrong about your interpretation of your experiences. You can be even wronger about other people’s experiences. And, yes, theories can be badly wrong too. (And so can your deductions from them.)
This is all kinda obvious, and I suspect you aren’t really saying we should have no theories at all or that we should unquestioningly accept everything that comes dressed as empirical evidence. Rather, you think the balance is wrong. (Right?) But: whose balance? How do you know? E.g., it looks to me as if you are making unwarranted assumptions about my own relative valuation of theory and experience; for all I know, perhaps you’re doing the same to others and this whole thing is an exercise in knocking down straw men. “But I tell you, you should have an open mind and not assume your theories are always right!” “But I tell you, the sun does rise in the east!”
become more open
More than what? If the answer is “always more” then that seems to require that theories are completely valueless, which (see above) I think is an absurd position.
You have been saying a lot about how important it is to look at actual empirical evidence rather than just building theories. Good; let us do so. You are suggesting, in this thread, that people open to spiritual experiences will make better predictions than committed naturalists. Let’s have some empirical evidence. What better predictions are the spiritual-experience guys making? What worse predictions are the naturalists making? Give us some examples!
Or does your elevation of experience over theory only apply to other people’s theories?
If I have a full-blown scientific theory, you can put it into a big computer and take lots of measurements and use them to predict where hurricanes will make landfall. This actually works pretty well considering what a big hairy system global weather is.
There are multiple issues here. You can throw a bunch of weather data into a machine learning algorithm and get results even if you don’t have a good scientific theory. I don’t need a commitment to the underlying structure of the weather and decide whether it’s atoms or air/water/fire/earth.
If the machine learning algorithm includes a node for which you don’t have any reductionist reason for the node being useful for predicting the weather, I don’t think you should cut that node when the model with the node fits the data better.
Secondly we have access to information about our bodies through perception in a way we don’t have perception of the weather.
Let’s have some empirical evidence. What better predictions are the spiritual-experience guys making? What worse predictions are the naturalists making? Give us some examples!
I can’t give you experiences via this medium. When I speak about the value of experience I mean using actual experience.
More practically I can’t effectively tell you a story about a territory for which you don’t have a map. You can reach for maps that you know but in which you don’t believe like ghosts did it but that doesn’t help.
Imagine I tell you a story of a card magician. His audience makes all sorts of predictions that turn out to be wrong. I could tell you about the experience the audience has and how things that violate their reductionist driven predictions constantly happen. Then you would tell me: “But the magician isn’t really doing it, that example doesn’t count”, “Please tell me what the magician is really doing”. If I would try to explain a card trick that wouldn’t shift your underlying beliefs at all.
If I tell you: “A workshop facilitator can hold the support point for the movement of the whole room”, then apart from “A workshop facilitator” you would likely get a different meaning for every following word than the one that’s intended because you lack the relevant mental map to make sense of the sentence.
Or does your elevation of experience over theory only apply to other people’s theories?
No, it’s certainly also something I practice myself.
You can throw a bunch of weather data into a machine learning algorithm and get results even if you don’t have a good scientific theory.
But can you get results as good as you can get with the theory? I notice that the world’s major meteorological offices all seem to have big simulations rather than throwing everything into a machine learning algorithm and hoping for the best, so I’m thinking probably not.
I can’t give you experiences via this medium.
I’m not asking you to give me experiences. I’m asking you to be more specific about these allegedly better predictions you say people can make if they are less committed to naturalism.
I can’t effectively tell you a story about a territory for which you don’t have a map. [...] you lack the relevant mental map to make sense of the sentence.
I don’t think you have any idea what maps I have for what territories. But in any case I’m not asking you to tell me an effective story. I am asking you to give me some examples where being less committed to naturalism has led to better predictions.
If the only examples of better predictions you can find are ones that you can’t even describe without technical jargon, and whose technical jargon you are unable to explain to anyone who hasn’t had the same experiences you have, I hope I will be forgiven for being a bit skeptical about these alleged better predictions.
Then you would tell me: [...]
Please don’t tell me what I would do unless you actually know. It’s rude and it’s counterproductive.
I’d be interested, though, if you’d say a little more about this card magician example, because if you’re suggesting that some such example would support your argument here (which I appreciate you might not be) then again I wonder whether you’re using terms like “reductionist” differently from me, to denote some kind of straw-man naive reductionism that I think few people here would endorse. But maybe not; you haven’t exactly made it clear what you have in mind.
No, it’s certainly also something I practice myself.
I regret to say that in this thread it doesn’t look that way. You are making claims and dispensing advice in the name of empiricism but completely refusing to give a shred of empirical evidence supporting either the claims or the advice.
Please don’t tell me what I would do unless you actually know.
I believe that making explicit predictions is very helpful and that the reason that one might be theoretically wrong shouldn’t stop prediction making.
I hope I will be forgiven for being a bit skeptical about these alleged better predictions.
The key here is the meaning of the word ‘skeptic’. If you use the word meaning that you don’t know whether the claims I’m making are true that’s completely fine. If you mean with it that you reject the claims than I think that’s a wrong conclusion to draw. I don’t think that’s true skepticism.
If you simply would believe in less stuff I would be okay with that outcome. You don’t need to believe that the specific claim that I made is true. There might be a contest in the future where you make experience that verify what I told you, but I’m okay with the fact that you haven’t yet made them.
When I’m saying: “Don’t reject theories because you believe them to be impossible based on reductionist reasoning and instead be open (with is something different than accepting)” I’m advocating skepticism.
. You are making claims and dispensing advice in the name of empiricism but completely refusing to give a shred of empirical evidence supporting either the claims or the advice.
I believe that emprirical evidence is about actually experiencing something and that’s not something I can give you. I would prefer to live in a world where I could transfer the evidence that I have for believing what I believe over the internet but I don’t believe I live in such a world.
I’m also okay with pluralism where other people don’t believe in what I believe.
While thinking about specific examples, what do you think will the average person say when I ask them: “Is it possible to perceive the sound of silence in a way that’s different from simply hearing the absence of sounds?”
I believe that making explicit predictions is very helpful
Sure. I suggest that when you make explicit predictions about someone you are in conversation with, you take the trouble to (1) make your level of confidence explicit and (2) acknowledge that you are extrapolating and could be wrong. Because otherwise you are at risk of being obnoxiously rude, and you are likely to be wrong.
The key here is the meaning of the word ‘skeptic’.
What I meant on this occasion is that (1) you have given me no reason to believe the confident-sounding claims you are making about better predictions, (2) I think it likely that if you had actual good support for those claims you would be showing some of it, and (3) on the whole I think it very likely that in fact those claims are false. But of course I don’t know they’re false.
(You made some remarks earlier about mental maps I allegedly don’t have. Here’s something you seem to be lacking: you write as if my only options are “believe true”, “believe false”, and “no opinion”, but in fact there are many more. If I think there’s a 40% chance that you actually have something a reasonable person could regard as good evidence that less-naturalist people make better predictions in any situations it’s reasonable to care about, and a 20% chance that in fact less-naturalist people do make better predictions in any situations it’s reasonable to care about—have I “rejected” your claims, or just “don’t know whether the claims are true”? I suggest: not exactly either.)
instead be open (which is something different than accepting)
I’m afraid you are still failing to be clear. (Whether the problem is that you aren’t expressing yourself clearly, or that you aren’t thinking clearly, I don’t know.)
If “reject theories” and “believe them to be impossible” mean “consider them certainly false”, then: that’s just not a thing I do, and it’s not a thing the standard-issue LW position advocates, and it’s not something any good reasoner should be doing in any but the most extreme cases. If you’re arguing against that then you are fighting a straw man.
If those phrases mean “consider them at least a bit less likely”, then: Yup, I do that, and I endorse it, and I expect others around here to do so too—and nothing you have said has offered the slightest vestige of a reason to think there’s anything wrong with that.
If they mean something intermediate, then for what you say to be any use you need to give some indication of what intermediate thing they mean. You think reductionists (or naturalists, or whatever other term you prefer on any given occasion) are too confident about naturalism, that they’re giving too much weight to their theoretical understanding of the universe when making predictions. But you seem astonishingly unwilling to be any more specific than that. You won’t give examples. You won’t say what level of confidence, what degree of weight, might be appropriate. You certainly aren’t prepared to make any attempt at communicating any reasons you might have for thinking this. All you’re apparently willing to do is to say: “booo, these people are wronger than I am”.
What possible use is that to anyone else?
I believe that empirical evidence is about actually experiencing something and that’s not something I can give you.
Let’s be clear here about what I was asking for. I’m not asking for you to transfer (say) some spiritual experience from your mind to mine. We’re one level of abstraction up from that. I’m asking for examples of predictions that more-naturalist, more-reductionist people get wronger than less-naturalist, less-reductionist people.
what do you think will the average person say when I ask them [...]
I don’t know. There aren’t many average people here. What I would say if asked that question is something like: “For sure there are multiple different possible experiences of not-sound—e.g., being in an anechoic chamber, having your eardrums destroyed, having the nerves joining ears to brain severed, being completely deaf from birth, maybe surrounding yourself with very predictable sound and training yourself not to notice it—and multiple different ways to experience any of those things—e.g., you can attend to things other than the soundlessness, or attend to the soundlessness in different ways. Whether I’d call any of the possibilities ‘perceiving the sound of silence’, I don’t know; would you care to say more about what you mean by that?”
And I would give maybe 60:40 odds in favour of your having something interesting to say about silence, or perception, or experience, or something, rather than merely emitting deep-sounding word salad.
Were you by any remote chance intending that this might lead to some actual examples of predictions that more-committed naturalists tend to get wronger? That would be interesting.
Because otherwise you are at risk of being obnoxiously rude, and you are likely to be wrong.
I think norms of conversation that prevent honest communication by labeling it as rude are not useful for discussions that are about learning about the world.
You should express different beliefs because your beliefs are rude kills an atmosphere of learning.
Of course managing the resulting emotions with empathy is something that’s much easier in person and it might very well prevent anything positive to happen in this online conversation.
I’m afraid you are still failing to be clear. (Whether the problem is that you aren’t expressing yourself clearly, or that you aren’t thinking clearly, I don’t know.)
The problem is that I’m refering to concepts that are likely not in your map.
I know that various people have taken months of in person teaching to get the concepts to which I’m refering, so it’s not suprising to me that the ideas don’t feel clear to you. If what I’m saying what feel clear to you, you would ignore what I’m saying. Successfully pointing somewhere that’s outside of your present map feels inherently unclear. For me it’s a success that you don’t feel like I’m meaning of those those things that are inside your map.
Whether I’d call any of the possibilities ‘perceiving the sound of silence’, I don’t know; would you care to say more about what you mean by that?”
At one of the meditations I lead in an LW context I made the point to focus on perception of silence as something besides simply absence of sound. Afterwards I checked with the person in the room where I was predicting that they least likely got something from the experience and they did experience a silence that was distinct from the absence of sound.
It’s no big shiny effect, but I would suspect that many committed naturalists think silence = absence of sound and any suggestion that it isn’t is emitting deep-sounding word salad. The person developed a new phenomological category for listening to silence that’s distinct from not hearing sounds.
Now, that’s an experience I gave the person in a 20 minute meditation and it wasn’t the only thing I did in that 20 minutes. In multiple days, especially with a teacher that has more skill than I have at the moment, more new experiences are possible.
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.
If what I’m saying what feel clear to you, you would ignore what I’m saying.
We’re all empiricists here, so let’s run an experiment. You’ve got this theory that gjm won’t understand if you try to explain. How ’bout you stop rehashing that, actually try to explain some of those technical terms you mentioned earlier, and see how your theory holds up?
If you train calibration you can generalize without theories.
That is a rather astonishing claim. What does achieving a 60% success rate on yes-no decisions when I am 60% confident have to do with extrapolation without theories?
The question isn’t “why shouldn’t we have both” it’s rather “why don’t we have both in a way that reasonable founded”.
If you train calibration you can generalize without theories. Generalizing isn’t something that you need to do explicitely through theories. Phenomelogical investigation provides a way to have knowledge that your brain can generalize on system I level.
That not the direction in which I’m arguing. I’m arguing that you should focus on predictions instead of concepts like whether or not ghosts exists.
Being for empiricism is not the same thing as practicing it. Actually practicing means valuing experience higher than theories.
The framing “things that naturalists get wrong” suggests that I think “naturalists get belief X wrong and should believe Y instead”. That not the main position that I advocate. Studies consistently show that people get things wrong by being overconfident. The key is to become more open to accept that reality tends to unfold in ways that your theories wouldn’t predict.
OK, so your response to “system 1 makes a lot of big mistakes” is not “get system 2 in charge in those situations” but “try to train system 1 to do better”. Once again I have to ask: why not both?
Now, let’s apply some empiricism to your suggestion here. Making theories, making them precise, getting detailed predictions out of them and comparing with experiment has been at the heart of the scientific enterprise since, say, Galileo. It’s worked incredibly well. Not instead of empirical investigation; not instead of well-trained Systems 1 generating intuitive predictions and ideas.
What do we have on the other side? Perhaps “be more specific about some things naturalists get wrong” was the wrong challenge. But so far everything you’ve offered is, well, theories. Maybe you’d rather call them predictions. But what they clearly aren’t is empirical evidence.
First of all, if you read the sentence I wrote immediately after the one you quoted, you will see that I endorsed exactly that idea before you mentioned it: given substantial evidence for ghosts but not enough to justify a change of overall theory, I should adopt the belief that the world behaves in something like the way it would if it contained ghosts.
Second: it turns out that concepts are really useful. They are especially useful when more than one person is involved. Suppose I am good at predicting the weather. If all I have is a well-trained system 1, I can’t communicate my expertise to you at all; I can just demonstrate it and hope you catch on. If I have half-baked folk theories, I can say “when the sky is such-and-such a colour the weather the following day tends to be such-and-such”, and you can test how well those claims hold up and use them to predict a bit yourself. If I have a full-blown scientific theory, you can put it into a big computer and take lots of measurements and use them to predict where hurricanes will make landfall. This actually works pretty well considering what a big hairy system global weather is.
Type error.
What you should actually do is to pay attention to both experience and theories in proportion to how well established they are. You can be wrong about your experiences (especially your past experiences). You can be very wrong about your interpretation of your experiences. You can be even wronger about other people’s experiences. And, yes, theories can be badly wrong too. (And so can your deductions from them.)
This is all kinda obvious, and I suspect you aren’t really saying we should have no theories at all or that we should unquestioningly accept everything that comes dressed as empirical evidence. Rather, you think the balance is wrong. (Right?) But: whose balance? How do you know? E.g., it looks to me as if you are making unwarranted assumptions about my own relative valuation of theory and experience; for all I know, perhaps you’re doing the same to others and this whole thing is an exercise in knocking down straw men. “But I tell you, you should have an open mind and not assume your theories are always right!” “But I tell you, the sun does rise in the east!”
More than what? If the answer is “always more” then that seems to require that theories are completely valueless, which (see above) I think is an absurd position.
You have been saying a lot about how important it is to look at actual empirical evidence rather than just building theories. Good; let us do so. You are suggesting, in this thread, that people open to spiritual experiences will make better predictions than committed naturalists. Let’s have some empirical evidence. What better predictions are the spiritual-experience guys making? What worse predictions are the naturalists making? Give us some examples!
Or does your elevation of experience over theory only apply to other people’s theories?
There are multiple issues here. You can throw a bunch of weather data into a machine learning algorithm and get results even if you don’t have a good scientific theory. I don’t need a commitment to the underlying structure of the weather and decide whether it’s atoms or air/water/fire/earth. If the machine learning algorithm includes a node for which you don’t have any reductionist reason for the node being useful for predicting the weather, I don’t think you should cut that node when the model with the node fits the data better.
Secondly we have access to information about our bodies through perception in a way we don’t have perception of the weather.
I can’t give you experiences via this medium. When I speak about the value of experience I mean using actual experience.
More practically I can’t effectively tell you a story about a territory for which you don’t have a map. You can reach for maps that you know but in which you don’t believe like
ghosts did itbut that doesn’t help.Imagine I tell you a story of a card magician. His audience makes all sorts of predictions that turn out to be wrong. I could tell you about the experience the audience has and how things that violate their reductionist driven predictions constantly happen. Then you would tell me: “But the magician isn’t really doing it, that example doesn’t count”, “Please tell me what the magician is really doing”. If I would try to explain a card trick that wouldn’t shift your underlying beliefs at all.
If I tell you: “A workshop facilitator can hold the support point for the movement of the whole room”, then apart from “A workshop facilitator” you would likely get a different meaning for every following word than the one that’s intended because you lack the relevant mental map to make sense of the sentence.
No, it’s certainly also something I practice myself.
But can you get results as good as you can get with the theory? I notice that the world’s major meteorological offices all seem to have big simulations rather than throwing everything into a machine learning algorithm and hoping for the best, so I’m thinking probably not.
I’m not asking you to give me experiences. I’m asking you to be more specific about these allegedly better predictions you say people can make if they are less committed to naturalism.
I don’t think you have any idea what maps I have for what territories. But in any case I’m not asking you to tell me an effective story. I am asking you to give me some examples where being less committed to naturalism has led to better predictions.
If the only examples of better predictions you can find are ones that you can’t even describe without technical jargon, and whose technical jargon you are unable to explain to anyone who hasn’t had the same experiences you have, I hope I will be forgiven for being a bit skeptical about these alleged better predictions.
Please don’t tell me what I would do unless you actually know. It’s rude and it’s counterproductive.
I’d be interested, though, if you’d say a little more about this card magician example, because if you’re suggesting that some such example would support your argument here (which I appreciate you might not be) then again I wonder whether you’re using terms like “reductionist” differently from me, to denote some kind of straw-man naive reductionism that I think few people here would endorse. But maybe not; you haven’t exactly made it clear what you have in mind.
I regret to say that in this thread it doesn’t look that way. You are making claims and dispensing advice in the name of empiricism but completely refusing to give a shred of empirical evidence supporting either the claims or the advice.
I believe that making explicit predictions is very helpful and that the reason that one might be theoretically wrong shouldn’t stop prediction making.
The key here is the meaning of the word ‘skeptic’. If you use the word meaning that you don’t know whether the claims I’m making are true that’s completely fine. If you mean with it that you reject the claims than I think that’s a wrong conclusion to draw. I don’t think that’s true skepticism.
If you simply would believe in less stuff I would be okay with that outcome. You don’t need to believe that the specific claim that I made is true. There might be a contest in the future where you make experience that verify what I told you, but I’m okay with the fact that you haven’t yet made them.
When I’m saying: “Don’t reject theories because you believe them to be impossible based on reductionist reasoning and instead be open (with is something different than accepting)” I’m advocating skepticism.
I believe that emprirical evidence is about actually experiencing something and that’s not something I can give you. I would prefer to live in a world where I could transfer the evidence that I have for believing what I believe over the internet but I don’t believe I live in such a world.
I’m also okay with pluralism where other people don’t believe in what I believe.
While thinking about specific examples, what do you think will the average person say when I ask them: “Is it possible to perceive the sound of silence in a way that’s different from simply hearing the absence of sounds?”
Sure. I suggest that when you make explicit predictions about someone you are in conversation with, you take the trouble to (1) make your level of confidence explicit and (2) acknowledge that you are extrapolating and could be wrong. Because otherwise you are at risk of being obnoxiously rude, and you are likely to be wrong.
What I meant on this occasion is that (1) you have given me no reason to believe the confident-sounding claims you are making about better predictions, (2) I think it likely that if you had actual good support for those claims you would be showing some of it, and (3) on the whole I think it very likely that in fact those claims are false. But of course I don’t know they’re false.
(You made some remarks earlier about mental maps I allegedly don’t have. Here’s something you seem to be lacking: you write as if my only options are “believe true”, “believe false”, and “no opinion”, but in fact there are many more. If I think there’s a 40% chance that you actually have something a reasonable person could regard as good evidence that less-naturalist people make better predictions in any situations it’s reasonable to care about, and a 20% chance that in fact less-naturalist people do make better predictions in any situations it’s reasonable to care about—have I “rejected” your claims, or just “don’t know whether the claims are true”? I suggest: not exactly either.)
I’m afraid you are still failing to be clear. (Whether the problem is that you aren’t expressing yourself clearly, or that you aren’t thinking clearly, I don’t know.)
If “reject theories” and “believe them to be impossible” mean “consider them certainly false”, then: that’s just not a thing I do, and it’s not a thing the standard-issue LW position advocates, and it’s not something any good reasoner should be doing in any but the most extreme cases. If you’re arguing against that then you are fighting a straw man.
If those phrases mean “consider them at least a bit less likely”, then: Yup, I do that, and I endorse it, and I expect others around here to do so too—and nothing you have said has offered the slightest vestige of a reason to think there’s anything wrong with that.
If they mean something intermediate, then for what you say to be any use you need to give some indication of what intermediate thing they mean. You think reductionists (or naturalists, or whatever other term you prefer on any given occasion) are too confident about naturalism, that they’re giving too much weight to their theoretical understanding of the universe when making predictions. But you seem astonishingly unwilling to be any more specific than that. You won’t give examples. You won’t say what level of confidence, what degree of weight, might be appropriate. You certainly aren’t prepared to make any attempt at communicating any reasons you might have for thinking this. All you’re apparently willing to do is to say: “booo, these people are wronger than I am”.
What possible use is that to anyone else?
Let’s be clear here about what I was asking for. I’m not asking for you to transfer (say) some spiritual experience from your mind to mine. We’re one level of abstraction up from that. I’m asking for examples of predictions that more-naturalist, more-reductionist people get wronger than less-naturalist, less-reductionist people.
I don’t know. There aren’t many average people here. What I would say if asked that question is something like: “For sure there are multiple different possible experiences of not-sound—e.g., being in an anechoic chamber, having your eardrums destroyed, having the nerves joining ears to brain severed, being completely deaf from birth, maybe surrounding yourself with very predictable sound and training yourself not to notice it—and multiple different ways to experience any of those things—e.g., you can attend to things other than the soundlessness, or attend to the soundlessness in different ways. Whether I’d call any of the possibilities ‘perceiving the sound of silence’, I don’t know; would you care to say more about what you mean by that?”
And I would give maybe 60:40 odds in favour of your having something interesting to say about silence, or perception, or experience, or something, rather than merely emitting deep-sounding word salad.
Were you by any remote chance intending that this might lead to some actual examples of predictions that more-committed naturalists tend to get wronger? That would be interesting.
I think norms of conversation that prevent honest communication by labeling it as rude are not useful for discussions that are about learning about the world. You should express different beliefs because your beliefs are rude kills an atmosphere of learning.
Of course managing the resulting emotions with empathy is something that’s much easier in person and it might very well prevent anything positive to happen in this online conversation.
The problem is that I’m refering to concepts that are likely not in your map. I know that various people have taken months of in person teaching to get the concepts to which I’m refering, so it’s not suprising to me that the ideas don’t feel clear to you. If what I’m saying what feel clear to you, you would ignore what I’m saying. Successfully pointing somewhere that’s outside of your present map feels inherently unclear. For me it’s a success that you don’t feel like I’m meaning of those those things that are inside your map.
At one of the meditations I lead in an LW context I made the point to focus on perception of silence as something besides simply absence of sound. Afterwards I checked with the person in the room where I was predicting that they least likely got something from the experience and they did experience a silence that was distinct from the absence of sound.
It’s no big shiny effect, but I would suspect that many committed naturalists think
silence = absence of soundand any suggestion that it isn’t isemitting deep-sounding word salad. The person developed a new phenomological category forlistening to silencethat’s distinct fromnot hearing sounds.Now, that’s an experience I gave the person in a 20 minute meditation and it wasn’t the only thing I did in that 20 minutes. In multiple days, especially with a teacher that has more skill than I have at the moment, more new experiences are possible.
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
We’re all empiricists here, so let’s run an experiment. You’ve got this theory that gjm won’t understand if you try to explain. How ’bout you stop rehashing that, actually try to explain some of those technical terms you mentioned earlier, and see how your theory holds up?
That is a rather astonishing claim. What does achieving a 60% success rate on yes-no decisions when I am 60% confident have to do with extrapolation without theories?