= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Jiro comments on Psychic Powers - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (93)
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.
If you think I wanted to classify taking Vitamin at a different time of day as an spiritual experience than you haven't understood my position.
You're not classifying it as a spiritual experience, but you're classifying it in the same category as a spiritual experience. You're saying that both of them are "empiric". You imply that since taking vitamin D3 at different times of day iis empiric, and nobody could object to that, and spiritual experiences are empiric too, nobody should object to them either.
But your category "empiric" is so broad that it includes things that aren't really very similar.
No. There isn't something inherently empiric of taking vitamin D3 at a specific time of the day. There's something empiric about the way that advice get's generated as opposed to theory driven drug development that only tests drug candidates where it has a biochemical target.
Objecting to spiritual experience is an interesting choice of words.
Do you mean that if people meditate in a spiritually framed setting, do you think they won't have experiences? Do you mean you object in the sense that you think those are bad experiences and the people shouldn't have those experience? The way people object to LSD and ban it, because it leads to objectionable experiences?
"Object" here means "object to the use of, as a way of determining things about reality".
I don't really care if you like triggering brain malfunctions, but don't expect me to believe you when you tell me the hallucinations are of real things. And that's equally true whether you triggered the brain malfunction through a drug or a "spiritual experience". Billions of people believe that when Mohammed starved himself and went into the desert, the angel Gabriel that he saw really was there. I do not.
The question of whether the object of a hallucination is "real" is a question about having a theory about the world. I advocate against focusing on that question. I advocate to focus on whether you can make reliable predictions.
Yes, that's not an easy concept to understand if you are bound up with thinking the important and meaningful question is whether or not the angel Gabriel was really there. It typical for the new atheist crowd to focus on those questions and because you are emotionally invested into that question you pattern-match myself into a category that's not the position I advocate.
Whether the angel Gabriel was really there is inherently the most important and meaningful question because how people act based on that can leave me dead. Whether something leaves me dead is pretty important. You can't just say it isn't important and make it become unimportant.
Very few people act on whether or not the angel Gabriel was really there or not. A lot of people act on whether or not they think the angel Gabriel was really there. If James thinks that Gabriel was there, then James will act as if Gabriel had been there; if John think Gabriel wasn't there, then John will act as if Gabriel hadn't been there.
Yes, you care about the question and it's very meaningful to you.
At the same time is valuable to understand that there are other people who don't care about the question and care about different things and that you won't understand them if you project your own values about which questions are meaningful on them.