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ChristianKl comments on Psychic Powers - Less Wrong
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Comments (93)
The conclusion is rather strong one, Eliezer destroys the dreams of millions of people who are reading books about meditation, mind-control and other stuff. But this conclusion is stated at the end of the sequence which was preparing us all the way through - so it is good and gives a good chance to reflect over it.
That seems naive. Why do you think ths argument would convince someone who meditates and has his spiritual experiences?
I said that with a humor. But as there are a lot of people who believe in dragons, who are on the supernatural end of the scale, there are rational people who are on the opposite end of the scale AND there are a lot of people in the middle. They are partially rational and partially they can believe that e.g. by practicing meditation or some other practices they may achieve SUPERNATURAL abilities. So Eliezer's post may convince some of them to abandone their "dreams" of supernatural. Sayint this I don't mean that meditation or other practices are irrational and bad, things are not black and white :)
I don't think the talk about ontologically basic mental entities has much bearing on the expected amount of abilities you get through meditation. It has much more to do with whether you believe that certain people who meditate a lot of gained extraordinary abilities. Whether or not those are due to ontologically basic mental entities is not that important.
Some abilities are much easier to believe in if you already believe in ontologically basic mental entities or something very like them, just because they're hard to fit into a more modern/scientific/reductionist/naturalist understanding of the world.
I think it's reasonable to believe that there are no ontologically basic mental entities because you don't believe that anybody demostrated telepathy.
If you however believe that the data supports telepathy, then I find it strange to say "I defy the data, because I don't believe in tologically basic mental entities" as your whole case for there not being ontologically basic mental entities was about there not being telepathy.
I don't think it's true for many people that their main reason for not believing in OBMEs is that there appears to be no telepathy. If I disbelieve in OBMEs because I don't see how to fit them into a reductionist understanding of the world that has, on my view, achieved such stunning empirical success that it would need overwhelming evidence to overturn it, then defying the data when presented with apparent evidence for telepathy isn't so unreasonable.
(Someone doing that should of course consider possible mechanisms for telepathy that don't involve OBMEs, and should reconsider their objection to OBMEs if enough apparent evidence for them turns up. I am not defending outright immovability.)
Steam-engine weren't build because of reductionist thinking but because of empirical experimentation. When medicine was reductionist based instead of empirical based it is commonly believed that it killed more people than it cured. When it comes to new drugs 90% of those where there reductionist reason to believe they work turn out to flawed.
I think you get very soon into problems if you think that only things that you can explain from the ground up exist. Pratically I think it's very worthwhile to have a state of non-judgement where you let experience speak for itself without commiting to any deeper notion of the way things are.
Of course I grant that there are people who deeply believe in the naturalist view of the world and therefore will reject telepathy on those grounds. On the other hand I don't see why someone who has had a few spiritual experiences and seeks for more spiritual experiences should have that committment or why he should adopt it based on the reasoning of this article.
It sounds to me like you're arguing against a straw man. Reductionism doesn't mean believing the proposition "Nothing exists that I can't explain from the ground up". It means a commitment to trying to explain things from the ground up (or, actually, from the top down, but with the intention of getting as near as possible to whatever ground there may be), and to remaining dissatisfied with explanations in so far as they appeal to things whose properties aren't clearly specified.
You say that as if "reductionist" and "empirical" are opposing ideas somehow. Of course they aren't; reductionism and empiricism are two of the key ideas that make science work. You do everything you can to find out what actually happens, and you try to build theories as detailed and bullshit-free as you can that explains what you've found, and then you look for more empirical evidence to help decide between those theories, and then you look for better theories that match what you've found, and so on.
Not being empirical is a terrible mistake. It's not clear exactly what and when you're talking about, but do you have any grounds for thinking that the bad results you describe were the result of too much reductionism rather than of not enough empiricism?
Most new drugs don't work, quite true. Do you have any reason to think drug discovery would work better if it were somehow driven by a less reductionist view of how drugs work? Would you, if so, like to be more specific about what you have in mind? (And ... has anyone actually done it, saved lots of lives, and got rich?)
Who thinks that? (Thinking that certainly isn't what I mean by reductionism.)
The article isn't claiming to make a compelling case for naturalism, so I think Eliezer would agree with the last part of that. As to the first part, it sounds (but maybe I'm misunderstanding) as if you are saying that having had "a few spiritual experiences" constitutes strong evidence against naturalism. It's probably true that having "spiritual experiences" tends to make people less likely to be naturalists, but it's not at all clear to me why they are strong evidence against naturalism. There's nothing in naturalism to suggest that people shouldn't have such experiences.
(Unless you mean outright miraculous experiences. Those might be very good evidence against naturalism. By an extraordinary coincidence, they also appear to be very rare and to evaporate when examined closely.)
The QS movement is an alternative to reductionism. As a concrete example I believe that we should fund trials for vitamin D3 in the morning vs. vitamin D3 in the evening based on self-reports that people found vitamin D3 in the morning to be more helpful. I think those empiric experience should drive research priorities instead of research priorities being driven by molecular biological findings.
QS profits a lot from better technical equipment. Additionally we likely want to get better at developing phenomelogical abilities of select individuals to perceive and write down what goes on in their own bodies. In addition to qualitative descriptions those people also should do quantitave predictions over various QS metrics and calibrate their credence on those metrics.
The position for which I'm arguing is empiricism. Letting real world feedback guide your actions instead of being committed to theories. I think that there are cases where committment to naturalism leads to people making worse predictions than people who are committed to empiricism and simply letting the data speak for itself.
If I take someone with a standard STEM background and put him in an enviroment conductive to spiritual experiences I think that the person who's more open to updating their beliefs through data will make better predictions than one committed to his preconveived notions. At the process updating would optimally more about letting go off beliefs than about changing beliefs.