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gjm comments on Psychic Powers - Less Wrong
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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.
I think perhaps we mean very different things by "reductionism". I see absolutely no conflict between the QS movement and reductionism.
Fine with me, at least in principle. (Whether I'd actually be on board with funding those trials would depend on how much money is available, what other promising things there are to spend money on, etc.; it could be that those other things have stronger evidence that they're worth funding.)
I don't see why we shouldn't have both. Research should be directed at things that, on the basis of the available evidence, have the best chance of producing the most valuable results. Some of the available evidence comes from direct observation. Some comes from theoretical analysis or modelling of molecular-bio systems. Different kinds of evidence will be differentially relevant to different kinds of desired effects. (If you want to maximize your chance of living to 100, you may do best to look at lifestyles of different communities. If you want to maximize your chance of living to 200, you probably need something -- no one has a very good idea what yet -- for which direct empirical evidence doesn't exist yet, because no one is living to anything like 200. Maybe what's needed is some kind of funky nanotech. If so, it's probably going to need those molecular biologists.)
Splendid. I'm all in favour of empiricism. But again, perhaps we mean different things by that word. 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. To make any statement that goes beyond just repeating simple empirical observations we've already made, we need theories. Our attachment to our theories shouldn't go beyond the evidence we have for them. We should be on the lookout for signs that our theories are wrong. But that doesn't mean giving up on theories; it just means being rational about them.
If the evidence for (say) ghosts is good enough, I will (I hope) start believing in ghosts. If it's not quite that good, I may start believing that the world behaves kinda as if there are ghosts -- which is probably enough to generate those better predictions you say more open-minded people will have.
Right now, it looks to me as if quite-firmly-committed naturalism generates pretty good predictions. Would you like to be more specific about some things you think naturalists get wrong?
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.
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?
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?
Reductionism doesn't mean "is currently being explained by being reduced to simpler ideas". It's closer to "can potentially be explained by being reduced to simpler ideas". Testing hypotheses in general is neither reductionist nor anti-reductionist, although there could be anti-reductionist ways of generating the hypotheses. If you think that differences in vitamin D3 ultimately will depend on some molecular cause, you're fine. If you think differences in vitamin D3 will just depend on the time of day because there's a special physical law dealing with vitamin D3 and time of day and this physical law has no components, you're not.
In other words, you're overstating what counts as anti-reductionist in order to make spiritual experiences, which actually are anti-reductionist in practice, look good.
You are hiding behind definitions of words while ignoring why our society funds things the way it does. I care about the predictions that people who are commited to certain ideas make. I don't care about whether a position is justificable under rationalism with definition X.
Then let me phrase it without using definitions: You're classifying "vitamin D3 response depends on time of day" with "spiritual experiences" in order to make spiritual experiences look good. They aren't similar.
Like when?