You used it and it had the effect you wanted. That in no way implies that you know why it had that effect. That seems pretty much part of epistemology 101.
You can imagine rubbing yourself against somebody else, flat skin on flat skin. But it just feels kind of pointless and so you stop.
This is a high-level explanation of why it works. I am not talking about it on the level of neurons or specific mental algorithms. But to me, it seems that this explanation captures a core part of why the technique works. You can just perform the experiment and imagine this, then you will see that it works. It is not a hard experiment to perform.
I see, I agree. I guess we had different ideas about what constitutes an explanation. This probably does not satisfy your requirements for an explanation. I am also not sure how to generate such a model. It seems like I have an intuition about that this can not be dangerous, but they don’t really have underlying an understanding of what exactly is going on. It’s probably more of the type where I have observed certain things in the past that were not dangerous and this seems sufficiently like them. But at least to some extend that intuition has compressed the actual observed instances, such that I can’t recall all of them in detail to give you the same opportunity to generate an intuition based on them (given that you would believe I report the instances accurately).
You used it and it had the effect you wanted. That in no way implies that you know why it had that effect. That seems pretty much part of epistemology 101.
Quoting myself:
This is a high-level explanation of why it works. I am not talking about it on the level of neurons or specific mental algorithms. But to me, it seems that this explanation captures a core part of why the technique works. You can just perform the experiment and imagine this, then you will see that it works. It is not a hard experiment to perform.
I don’t feel like that explains very much. It doesn’t feel like the kind of model that can tell you what side effects the intervention has.
I see, I agree. I guess we had different ideas about what constitutes an explanation. This probably does not satisfy your requirements for an explanation. I am also not sure how to generate such a model. It seems like I have an intuition about that this can not be dangerous, but they don’t really have underlying an understanding of what exactly is going on. It’s probably more of the type where I have observed certain things in the past that were not dangerous and this seems sufficiently like them. But at least to some extend that intuition has compressed the actual observed instances, such that I can’t recall all of them in detail to give you the same opportunity to generate an intuition based on them (given that you would believe I report the instances accurately).