Do we make leaps of faith too?

[McQ]

I recently found this video and thought it might be fitting here.  If follows what I said about being open to ideas.  You may want to FF to 2:17 if you don't feel like sitting through the intro.  I'm very interested what you all think of the content.
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=jRf835hwpKI&feature=related

Hope I followed the link to the right thing. The link I followed took me to an old video of an even older, discredited sleep study of researchers trying to send images to sleeping subjects via their minds.

Is that the right one? I was expecting something newer and more credible. Honest. If it is the right one, then this study was discredited long ago. Just a few reasons it was: It is an un-blinded study, it has no crossover arm, no control arm, and the researchers should never have been able to have contact directly with the subjects they were sending images to. It also was not of sufficient sample size to be powered to draw any conclusions from.

[joeactor]

Whoa!

This is quite a thread (woooooo, dogie!)

Ok, time to use an old mantra to (hopefully) clear a bit of the foggy confusion.  (feel free to tune out if you've heard all this before ;-)

In matters of god(s) try to distinguish "knowledge" from "belief".  For knowledge, I use Gnostic to mean that a person claims to know, and Agnostic to claim that they either don't know, or can't know.  For belief, I use Theist to mean that a person believes there is a god or gods, and Atheist to mean that a person believes there is no god.

This gives the four basic positions of:
1) Agnostic Atheist: doesn't know or define god(s), believes no god(s) exist
2) Gnostic Atheist: knows and defines that there are no god(s), believes no god(s) exist
3) Agnostic Theist: doesn't know or define god(s), believes god(s) exist
4) Gnostic Theist: knows and defines there are god(s), believes god(s) exist

IMHO, everyone uses beliefs where evidence is lacking.  Some believe in god(s), some believe there are no god(s)... but they are both beliefs.

I actually have much less of a problem with the belief side of the equation.  Since there is no evidence either way, you can believe whatever you want.

I really have more of an issue with the knowledge side.  IMHO, the only honest answer to the god(s) question is "I don't know" (and neither do you).

... "so, JoeActor... do you believe in Santa and Invisible Pink Unicorns too?"
Nope.  I'm agnostic about them.  There is no evidence, so it is an unknown (no matter how unlikely).

What I really don't get is why people are so uncomfortable saying "I don't know".
This also seems tied in some ways to cultural issues.  Western thinking is very cause and effect, and leaves less room for unknowns.

Or not - what do I know?  I'm agnostic!

JoeActor

[DennisK]

I recently found this video and thought it might be fitting here.  If follows what I said about being open to ideas.  You may want to FF to 2:17 if you don't feel like sitting through the intro.  I'm very interested what you all think of the content.
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=jRf835hwpKI&feature=related

Hope I followed the link to the right thing. The link I followed took me to an old video of an even older, discredited sleep study of researchers trying to send images to sleeping subjects via their minds.

Is that the right one? I was expecting something newer and more credible. Honest. If it is the right one, then this study was discredited long ago. Just a few reasons it was: It is an un-blinded study, it has no crossover arm, no control arm, and the researchers should never have been able to have contact directly with the subjects they were sending images to. It also was not of sufficient sample size to be powered to draw any conclusions from.

I stumbled on the video after watching a Frontline show about the tortures our country commits.  One video leads to another and another.  Anyway, I saw it and thought it was interesting, but I am not presenting it as evidence -just thought.  I wasn't aware that it was discredited, but I wasn't delusional about that possibility.  

I don't know that you can handle the brain and thoughts exactly the same as you would with other scientific observations. It could be argued that the meetings between the participants prior to the studies were a way to make a personal connection and integral to the study.  The meeting should have been recorded and included in the study, though (I assume it wasn't).  I can't remember the name of the program I saw on PBS some years ago about parrots or some 'speaking' birds who were used to perform a similar experiment.  The owner would go in another room and think about what was on a random card and the bird would speak the word.  I can't recall the details, but it was amazing.  I am open to the idea that ESP is possible.

Do you know where I could find information on the specifics of the discrediting view?

[Kylyssa]

I think we make no leaps of faith, I think we walk over tiny little "faith" cracks.  At least I don't span any major, gaping chasms which require me to have faith about what's going to be there to catch me.  Hell, if it's wider than three feet across, I'm going to be damned sure there's a sturdy, reliable bridge across it, one which passes my careful inspection.  I don't cross unreliable bridges, I'm too afraid of falling.

Bridges made of past performance and observable reality with strong structural underpinnings work better than bridges made of good intentions and fairy dust sitting atop a complex structure of fear and desire.  You can observe everything that goes into the former bridge and you can observe nothing that goes into the latter.  The latter is a leap of faith, the former may have tiny spaces in it, but they are small enough to walk over.  Most times you don't even need to look down to avoid them assuming you've already inspected the bridge yourself.  That doesn't mean I'm not going to go and check if some joker says there's a hole in my bridge a mile wide, but enough times seeing it's sturdy and getting supporting structure added to it regularly and I might stop listening.

[BadPoison]

@Kylyssa: Great analogy!

I would usually define "faith" as a belief in an idea beyond what the physical evidence would usually warrant.

So when someone says "You have faith all of the time. You hae faith that the chair you're sitting in will hold you up don't you? And don't you have faith that tomorrow will come?" I think they're missusing the term. My definition of faith wouldn't really work here. I do not have "faith" that this chair will hold me in the sense that because I've observed it's reliability in the past, the evidence supports the notion that the chair will continue to be reliable. This is not the same as having faith in a god. Faith in a god would be a belief in an idea beyond what the evidence would warrant.

[Wechtlein Uns]

A good point to make to those people who accuse you of having faith that the sun will come up is to tell them, "What are you talking about? I don't have to believe in the sunrise. I just observe that it happens."

[McQ]

I recently found this video and thought it might be fitting here.  If follows what I said about being open to ideas.  You may want to FF to 2:17 if you don't feel like sitting through the intro.  I'm very interested what you all think of the content.
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=jRf835hwpKI&feature=related

Hope I followed the link to the right thing. The link I followed took me to an old video of an even older, discredited sleep study of researchers trying to send images to sleeping subjects via their minds.

Is that the right one? I was expecting something newer and more credible. Honest. If it is the right one, then this study was discredited long ago. Just a few reasons it was: It is an un-blinded study, it has no crossover arm, no control arm, and the researchers should never have been able to have contact directly with the subjects they were sending images to. It also was not of sufficient sample size to be powered to draw any conclusions from.

I stumbled on the video after watching a Frontline show about the tortures our country commits.  One video leads to another and another.  Anyway, I saw it and thought it was interesting, but I am not presenting it as evidence -just thought.  I wasn't aware that it was discredited, but I wasn't delusional about that possibility.  

I don't know that you can handle the brain and thoughts exactly the same as you would with other scientific observations. It could be argued that the meetings between the participants prior to the studies were a way to make a personal connection and integral to the study.  The meeting should have been recorded and included in the study, though (I assume it wasn't).  I can't remember the name of the program I saw on PBS some years ago about parrots or some 'speaking' birds who were used to perform a similar experiment.  The owner would go in another room and think about what was on a random card and the bird would speak the word.  I can't recall the details, but it was amazing.  I am open to the idea that ESP is possible.

Do you know where I could find information on the specifics of the discrediting view?

First and foremost, I want to go on record as saying I wish ESP existed. I want it to be true. It would be cool. I have no axe to grind against the idea of it. I wish more genuine scientific studies could be done, although plenty already have. Now, moving on...

To clear up a misunderstanding of this, a study is not necessarily discredited by someone or some group simply pointing out the scientific errors made in it, although in this case, it is more than enough to do so. What drives the nail into the coffin of this research is that it was not reproducible in decades of testing under properly controlled conditions. Add to that the fact that parapsychology is a pseudoscience, not accredited or recognized by legitimate psychologists. The only people to claim that this study had reproducible results were the people who wrote about it or participated in it in the first place. And they never published additional results! That's a no go in science. You don't "peer review" your own study. None of the results of studies like this were ever reproduced under solid controlled conditions. This is plainly stated by the U.S. National Research Council (link to their site): http://sites.nationalacademies.org/nrc/index.htm

They are the working arm of the U.S. National Academies (their link): http://www.nationalacademies.org/

Here is their statement:

Among all the sciences, there is one known as parapsychology. It studies certain reported but unsubstantiated events (such as ESP, psychokinesis, dowsing, prophecy) that have no presently known explanation. Like all other sciences, it develops theories to explain these claimed events and attempts to test those theories by experimentation. See also science.
      However, unlike in other sciences, none of the parapsychologists' experiments have both shown positive results and have been replicated by independent researchers. Even the Guinness Book of Records, listing the single most astonishing performance in ESP, apologizes and reports that the episode fails to meet even their standards. Data in some important basic parapsychological experiments that yielded apparently positive results have been shown to be falsifiedâ€"â€"though parapsychology is not alone in this respect.
      Some students of paranormal matters say that such claims cannot be examined rationally. If that is the case, then their studies do not belong with science, but in the same category as flat-Earth theories and perpetual-motion machines, none of which can have the slightest importance to anyone except, perhaps, students of abnormal psychology or editors of the sensational press.
      Psychologist Dr. David Marks, who has done extensive investigation of the parapsychologists' work, has said:  

      Parascience has so far failed to produce a single repeatable finding and, until it does, will continue to be viewed as an incoherent collection of belief systems steeped in fantasy, illusion and error.

      The U.S. National Research Council in 1988 concluded a well-funded two-year study by a special committee and published a report, Enhancing Human Performance, which concluded:  

      The committee finds no scientific justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years, for the existence of parapsychological phenomena. In the committee's view, the best scientific evidence does not justify the conclusion that ESPâ€"â€"that is, gathering information about objects or thoughts without the intervention of known sensory mechanismsâ€"â€"exists. Nor does scientific evidence offer support for the existence of psychokinesisâ€"â€"that is, the influence of thoughts upon objects without the intervention of known physical processes.

      Nonetheless, courses in parapsychology are offered in more than two hundred colleges and universities in the United States alone, and degrees in parapsychology are offered at several schools, in particular at John F. Kennedy University in Orinda, California. Their Graduate School of Consciousness Studies offers a parapsychology master of science degree.

Stanley Krippner, PhD., who is one of the co-researchers in the sleep studies, is mainly and foremost a parapsychologist. Here is his web page: http://www.parapsych.org/members/s_krippner.html

If you will notice his authorship on his own web page (where one would publish his most important or noteworthy contributions), it is not exactly full of peer reviewed studies, to be kind. Although I agree with his idea of doing real, scientific research into parapsychological phenomena, nothing to date indicates any actual, real, phenomena exist, and the research he has done has never been duplicated. His organization, the Parapsychological Association, loves to tout its "affiliation" with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). However, even a cursory look into that relationship shows that they have merely sponsored special sessions for interdisciplinary scientific audiences, such as the AAAS. That is not an endorsement by, nor a subgroup of, the AAAS.

Wow, I didn't think I was going to give such a long answer! LOL! Dennis, I am not saying that things like this are not possible. Again, I would like for this to be true. They are, however, improbable, and at least, under controlled, rigorous study, completely non-existent. Until they are shown to exist, I will continue to hold to the opinion that they do not exist, even though I wish they did.

Sorry for the long-winded answer!

[DennisK]

Damn it, McQ.  You know how I hate reading.  Can you put all future responses on YouTube?  I promise to give you 5 stars.

Seriously, thanks for the response.  It was thorough and makes sense.  Would you believe I had a dream which revealed to me you would say exactly what you wrote?  Also, in part of the dream you morphed into a computer named Hal and you tried to kill me after eavesdropping on a conversation between a colleague and myself.  Later, I shut you down, traveled to another dimension, saw myself being born and the rest is hazy.  Pretty freaky stuff, eh?

The kid in me also wants it to be true, although I would like to have sole possession of such power.  Unfortunately, there is little adult in me (not meant to sound creepy) to battle this urge.  For future reference, please don't show me any data discrediting Santa.  My heart can't take it right no.

[McQ]

Damn it, McQ.  You know how I hate reading.  Can you put all future responses on YouTube?  I promise to give you 5 stars.

Seriously, thanks for the response.  It was thorough and makes sense.  Would you believe I had a dream which revealed to me you would say exactly what you wrote?  Also, in part of the dream you morphed into a computer named Hal and you tried to kill me after eavesdropping on a conversation between a colleague and myself.  Later, I shut you down, traveled to another dimension, saw myself being born and the rest is hazy.  Pretty freaky stuff, eh?

The kid in me also wants it to be true, although I would like to have sole possession of such power.  Unfortunately, there is little adult in me (not meant to sound creepy) to battle this urge.  For future reference, please don't show me any data discrediting Santa.  My heart can't take it right no.

Damn, you're right, Dennis! I look at that post now and want to kick my ass across the room for throwing up so much information like that! LOL! My biggest frustration with the early years of psychic research was that the researchers did really sloppy work, or allowed the subjects too much leeway and it contaminated the results. I would be happy to run good tests under better controls to see some results. However, this is where I'll agree with you on a funding issue. There's very little money to be spent on this.

What's cool is seeing this thread along with the other one on the Japanese researchers who may have found a way to know what someone s thinking via machines. That's cool and scary at the same time for a lot of people.

Love the dream, except for the trying to kill part. Although as HAL, I guess it would be my duty to carry it out.

And Santa? Dude, he's real. I see him on NORAD every year! No doubt it's him. Hell, why would the government lie, especially about Santa?  

[Kyuuketsuki]

In matters of god(s) try to distinguish "knowledge" from "belief". For knowledge, I use Gnostic to mean that a person claims to know, and Agnostic to claim that they either don't know, or can't know. For belief, I use Theist to mean that a person believes there is a god or gods, and Atheist to mean that a person believes there is no god.

1) Agnostic Atheist: doesn't know or define god(s), believes no god(s) exist
2) Gnostic Atheist: knows and defines that there are no god(s), believes no god(s) exist
3) Agnostic Theist: doesn't know or define god(s), believes god(s) exist
4) Gnostic Theist: knows and defines there are god(s), believes god(s) exist

You see I don't accept those definitions as valid.

In my view, and in essence I base this on an English Grammar & logic argument, "theist" (based on the Greek "theos") means to be "with god" and atheist, reversing the sense of the word with the "a" prefix though it's worth noting that there (apparently) was a Greek word "atheos", means "not with God". I agree that "gnostic" (in a religious context) means to "know God" and "agnostic", again reversing the sense of the word, means to "not know God" ... in essence all of these are simple definitions, mere labels.

I cannot however accept that "agnostic" means "cannot know" because it takes the meaning of the word away from being a simple definition to a philosophical stance and therefore begs the question, "Why can we not know?"  ... as such I view this claimed meaning for "agnostic" as nothing more than a philosophical dodge on the part of those that claim it.

Kyu

[joeactor]

In matters of god(s) try to distinguish "knowledge" from "belief". For knowledge, I use Gnostic to mean that a person claims to know, and Agnostic to claim that they either don't know, or can't know. For belief, I use Theist to mean that a person believes there is a god or gods, and Atheist to mean that a person believes there is no god.

1) Agnostic Atheist: doesn't know or define god(s), believes no god(s) exist
2) Gnostic Atheist: knows and defines that there are no god(s), believes no god(s) exist
3) Agnostic Theist: doesn't know or define god(s), believes god(s) exist
4) Gnostic Theist: knows and defines there are god(s), believes god(s) exist

You see I don't accept those definitions as valid.

In my view, and in essence I base this on an English Grammar & logic argument, "theist" (based on the Greek "theos") means to be "with god" and atheist, reversing the sense of the word with the "a" prefix though it's worth noting that there (apparently) was a Greek word "atheos", means "not with God". I agree that "gnostic" (in a religious context) means to "know God" and "agnostic", again reversing the sense of the word, means to "not know God" ... in essence all of these are simple definitions, mere labels.

I cannot however accept that "agnostic" means "cannot know" because it takes the meaning of the word away from being a simple definition to a philosophical stance and therefore begs the question, "Why can we not know?"  ... as such I view this claimed meaning for "agnostic" as nothing more than a philosophical dodge on the part of those that claim it.

Kyu

Hi Kyu,

I see your point.  In the linguistic sense, you are probably correct.

However, the meaning of words do change over time ("nostrill" is one of my faves).

The point I was attempting to illustrate is that there is a difference between knowledge and belief, and that many of these discussions confuse the two - which only makes a consensus more difficult.

No matter how we define ourselves, we all have knowledge, and we all have beliefs.  And more importantly, there are things that none of us know.  Having a need to "know" is good, but admiting when you don't (or can't) know something is equally important (IMHO).  Maybe we can think of "not knowing" as the spaces between words, or the zero...

Ok, so here's my best physics joke to close:

Heisenberg is driving his care and gets pulled over by a cop.
Cop: "Do you know how fast you were going?"
Heisenberg: "No, but I know exactly where I am"

Thank You, I'm here all week.  Try the roast beef,
JoeActor

[joeactor]

Ok, not to get to Heisenbergy on you, but I thought the following conversation had some interesting thoughts:

This is from a conversation between Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli in 1952.

P: Do you believe in a personal God? I know well how hard it is to interpret this question exactly, but obviously you also feel the general content of the question.
H: Allow me to rephrase your question! â€" I said â€" This phrasing is closer to me: Can anybody grasp the things or the substantive order of events which exist beyond any doubt, or catch them as directly as the soul of another human being? If you ask the question in this manner my answer is unambiguously yes. And since my own experiences do not count in this topic let me cite the famous text of Pascal, which was sewn on his coat. “Fire” was his title, and it began with these words: “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob â€" not the God of sages and philosophers.” I append quickly, I do not accept God in this context.
P: So in other words, you think you can feel the substantive order as intensively as the soul of another person?
H: Yes, possibly.
P: Why did you use the word “soul” ? Why don’t you just say another “person“?
H: The “soul” indicates the substantive order, the internal seeds of beings, whose exterior manifestation is rather various. Because of this they are unidentifiable
P: I do not know if I fully agree with you. Overestimating the value of our own experiences would ultimately be a mistake.
H: I agree, although the basis of science is also just personal experience, or the experiences of others conveyed in reliable form.

The rest of the article is here if you're interested in the source.

Q: Why did Heisenberg hate driving?
A: Everytime he looked at the speedometer he got lost.

JoeActor

[McQ]

Absolutely love the Heisenberg jokes, Joe. Yeah, they're corny and require a rim shot at the end, but I love 'em!  

[joeactor]

Absolutely love the Heisenberg jokes, Joe. Yeah, they're corny and require a rim shot at the end, but I love 'em!  :banna:

[DennisK]

Damn, you're right, Dennis! I look at that post now and want to kick my ass across the room for throwing up so much information like that! LOL! My biggest frustration with the early years of psychic research was that the researchers did really sloppy work, or allowed the subjects too much leeway and it contaminated the results. I would be happy to run good tests under better controls to see some results. However, this is where I'll agree with you on a funding issue. There's very little money to be spent on this.

I'll kick in a few bucks.  Is there such a thing as a cyberspace collection basket?  If so, let's pass it around.  "Thanks be to McQ".