OK great. So first, let’s talk about the logic, which is modus tollens:
A → B If ghosts that emit or reflect light are the cause of most incidents in which people claim to have seen a ghost then the number and quality of pictures and videos of ghosts would increase apace with the number and quality of cameras close at hand.
~B
The number and quality of pictures and videos of ghosts has not increased apace with the number and quality of cameras close at hand.
Therefore
~A
Ghosts that emit or reflect light are not the cause of most incidents in which people claim to have seen a ghost.
Do you agree that this argument is sound, i.e. the logic is correct, even you disagree with (1) and/or (2)?
Correct, and we can get there. But right now you’re resisting conceding basic claims like “more cameras will produce more pictures of things that regularly emit light”, so I’m taking it in steps.
Say more about this. What sense of “necessary” are you using here?
Keep in mind that Occam’s Razor exists because every empirical observation permits of multiple explanations. How is this conditional (1. A → B) less valid than conditionals used to falsify other normal empirical claims?
Do you have examples?
I was trying to tie your points back to the context of why defining belief came up, which was a couple claims by PsueudoAI that seemed to conflict, i.e. thinking there were no swans while not believing there were no swans. Basically asking how a nuanced understanding of belief interacts with my equation of think(X) \land \{act\text{-}as\text{-}though(X) \iff think(x)\} \implies believe(X)
My impression is that bringing up ‘belief’ was tangent that could lead into interesting questions about the nature of ‘belief’ and ‘thought’, but doesn’t advance the discussion of ghosts.
This is an excellent take on Pascal’s Wager. Doubting god as an infohazard.
Related to some of your points above re: “experiencers”, I recently watched Contact for the first time, and the scene where Dr. Arroway is testifying before Congress about what happened to her reminded me of some of the exchanges in this thread. If nothing else, it makes vivid why I might be accused of ‘arrogance’.
It’s not a matter of who resists or so, that is not necessarily so. You can say, that, that you in particular expect that, and I would agree.
I don’t know what Ockham’s razor has to do with it, but if you are to use it, you have to let go of the assumption that what is unmeasured is more or less like what is measured (that is one thing that entails Ockham’s razor - you get rid of all the assumptions that lead to the same results). I don’t know what you meant by your question.
To see that there are lots of ‘evidences’ of that, you just have to delve into groups dedicated to ‘paranormal’ or the like. I’m not interested in such. Anyhow, ghosts are not necessarily captured by cameras, so it makes no difference.
I mention it because your use of “necessarily” suggested logical entailment, where B must follow from A.
Let me rephrase (1) to make this clear:
~B → ~A If the number and quality of pictures and videos of ghosts does not increase proportionally* with the number and quality of cameras close at hand Thenthe simplest explanation is that mosts incidents in which people claim to have seen a ghost are not caused by ghosts that emit or reflect light.
*‘proportionally’ is clearer than ‘apace’; the numbers rise and fall together.
Here again, assume Occam’s Razor: without adding additional hypotheses, an increase in the regular use of cameras will increase the number of pictures of things that regularly emit or reflect light.
A ghost that emits or reflects light would necessarily be capturable by a device that captures light. Right?
That is not the simplest explanation. The simplest explanation (the one requiring the least assumptions) always is coincidence. For example, you are supposing what you are trying to photograph is of a quality which is independent of the ability of instruments.
Now, certainly, the lack of compelling evidence doesn’t make me trust that, but that’s entirely different.
Yes, anything that interacts with light interacts with light, but a ghost doesn’t necessarily interact with light.
Perhaps. But something external that leads to people seeing things need not register in a camera. There are a number of phenomena that can lead to people seeing things - pretty much just as if photons in clusters/patterns are hitting the retina, but a camera would not pick them up - cosmic ray flashes, infrasound, magnetic phosphenes.
Further in relation to the greater argument, why is there no increase in ghost photos? Well, the early period, when there were lots of ghost photos, the technology was very different. And it lent itself to apparitional phenomena, in part because of long exposure times. Then, as technology got better, you had less of these phenomena, but that doesn’t mean that none of the photographs were of ghosts; there may have been a similar amount of accurate ghost photos, but because of better technology, there was a filter for a lot of ones that weren’t ghosts. And then nowadays, you’d have to get by such incredible criteria for it to be considered an unexplainable by normal causes photo, given the flexibility of photography. And then there are problems, if we’re getting into the recent past, with smartphones, because they’re actually a little bit like brains in reverse. They are using AI technology to weed stuff out, rather than see things that aren’t there. So I don’t think the whole argument holds, because we don’t really know all the factors that have led to there being less ghost photos. I can see it interpreted as, well, now the stuff that fools everybody is gone, right? That that makes sense, but that doesn’t mean that some of them aren’t ghosts or that we don’t have a steady or a steady per capita rate of ghosts being photographed.—And then on a more general level, we don’t know what real external phenomena can elicit an image in a mind. I realize that’s moving beyond the camera issue, but it is part of the wider context for me.
Heck, it might be a complicated set of stimuli, some of them even affecting other parts of the brain, not just the visual cortex somehow. And yes, like in many of our image formations, when we see things, we may be filling in, but perhaps some of the data that is doing the filling in isn’t coming in via visual stimuli or the visual parts of the brain, either direct as photons onto the retina, or indirectly through means unknown or in conjunction with other types of stimuli that give the brain enough information to develop a gestalt.
Can you spell out what you mean here? Something like “most incidents in which people claim to have seen a ghost are caused by coincidence”?
‘Coincidence’ isn’t ‘ghosts that emit or reflect light’, right?
Sure, there are many meanings of the word ‘ghost’. For present purposes, I am referring to the referents that do include the attribute of ‘emit or reflect light’.
This is true, but that doesn’t rebut my point.
First, it really does concede something: people say they ‘see’ ghosts, and if what’s actually happening is that non-light phenomena are triggering cells in the retina, then though they’re having a visual sensory experience, they aren’t ‘seeing’ anything in the traditional sense – the Wikipedia page on infrasound describes the effect as “an optical illusion caused by his eyeballs resonating” (emphasis mine).
Second, it’s the kind of post hoc modification to save a hypothesis that I’d mentioned in discussing Occam’s Razor:
‘people see ghosts because there are light emitting or reflecting ghosts’
becomes
‘people “see” ghosts because there are cosmic ray/infrasound/magnetic field emitting ghosts and those emissions directly stimulate the eye’
Third, and relatedly, those aren’t free additions to the model. These alternative causes suggest other effects that should be detectable. Cosmic rays can affect electronics; infrasound can generate vibrations in other materials; magnetic fields sufficient to cause magnetophosphenes are attested in the context of MRIs, which use massive amounts of power, are loud enough to cause hearing loss, and can accelerate magnetic materials to sufficient velocity to kill.
Are any of these phenomena common in reports of ghost sightings? If not, we need to make further post hoc modifications to the model to explain why.
These are fair points, but much of what I said above applies here as well:
It concedes a certain lack of ‘concreteness’ to what ghosts might be;
It’s a post hoc modification to save the hypothesis; and
It implies a different pattern that we should be able to detect in the number and quality of ghost photos.
Yes, it might be. But that narrows the space of possibilities for what these types of ghosts can be.
Furthermore, these possibilities have to be prima facie less likely than the initial hypothesis that it’s just normal light stimulating our retinas in the normal way.
And narrowing the space, and leaving behind prima facie less-likely hypotheses, should increase our willingness to accept hypotheses that explain ghost sightings by mundane and endogenous phenomena – i.e., that there are no ghosts.
I have entered a context between you and pseudoai, which at times I have trouble following. So, my responses may not honor that context.
That doesn’t mean this would be an optical illusion.
If that is the claim of the believer or the hypothesis in question, sure, these exceptions and any other possible ones don’t support the hypothesis.
Those are problems for people suggestibg those specific phenomena are the causes. I was not presenting them that way. My point was that external stimuli creating visual experiences don’t have to be photons hitting the retina, and thus photons not registering the camera is not proof that an external phenomena is causing what they ‘see’. I’m not theory building; I am trying to undermine assumptions.
Again, I was pointing to things as exceptions. We don’t know what other exceptions there are. Further, you are, again, treating my response as if I have put out a specific hypothesis. I haven’t. My position is: you don’t know. You don’t know what might be happening. My point is not: here is what is happening.
That said, it was just a bit luck that some scientists had the right equipment while in near enough to test ball lightning. It was not why they were there. To do some long term investigation - given that there this is a scattershot phenomenon in terms of time - with the right equipment would be an extremely expensive operation. Maybe some billionaire will fund this actually your question is a bit odd.
I am not defending a hypothesis. And that hypothesis may have assumptions in it that ghost believers are not bound to. Even those binding themselves to it may not realize what THEY are assuming and granting the con team.
I don’t think so. Not if you are using ‘proof’ ‘disproven’ when making your hypothesis.
There’s a reason science tends to avoid ‘proof’ in relation to arguments/cases like the one you make.
Honestly, I don’t think proving things depends on arguments that increase our willingness to accept hypotheses. They need to, well, prove them. And, again, you have this ‘our’, but there isn’t a clear ‘we’ here, which I’ve gone into before.
If your point is that your arguments have increased your willness to accept the hypothesis there are no ghosts, I have no not the slightest problem with that. By this I don’t mean only you, this makes sense for many people. I don’t think that is irrational at all. I just think there is no universal we, and until you can demonstrate you know what people’s experiences were like, not just many or even the majority of them, I don’t think that everyone should agree. I also don’t think you demonstrated there are no ghosts.
This may only be a semantic point, but I’m curious why you say this. It seems like any non-light stimulation of the retina (or optic nerve, occipital lobe, etc.) that is experienced as light would be an optical illusion in a literal sense: it’s not ‘optics’, but it looks like it is.
I guess if a thing that doesn’t emit or reflect light somehow stimulates our visual processes in a way we interpret as light, but that non-light stimulation is in some sense ‘accurate’. Even then, the optics seem literally illusory.
Is it just the negative association that ‘illusion’ has? It’s not necessarily a put down: a rainbow is an optical illusion.
I agree. I’ve focused on light and pictures because they’re concrete, and people are familiar with cameras and how they’ve become more common. There’s a strong case that ghosts don’t emit or reflect light.
And the visual experience of ghosts is near-universal in the descriptions of the kinds of ghosts I’m talking about. If ghosts don’t emit or reflect light, then at best these visual experiences are not normal visual experiences, and the best explanation becomes some exotic and as-yet-unspecified interaction with the visual system. Ruling out photons really does go a long way in undermining the naive understanding (‘naive’ in the sense of ‘haven’t argued about it for the past year’) of what’s actually happening when people ‘see ghosts’ (and I think that’s supported by various people’s resistance to that claim in this thread).
But sure, there are other possibilities. I think every known way to create visual sensations without photons will be either endogenous (e.g. low blood sugar), or cause other significant physical effects that should also be detected (as I argued for e.g. magnetophosphenes).
It could be something unknown. It can always be something unknown. But we have no reason to suppose that there is such a thing other than to avoid a disfavored conclusion.
By “increase our willingness to accept”, I’m talking about credence.
There may be a crux of disagreement here, which is also a crux of my disagreement with PseudoAI: do you agree that there is nothing we can conclude from empirical observation that isn’t at its base a claim about probabilities?
Can you be specific? What is coincident with what?
The claim isn’t true in general: If every time I push a button a buzzer sounds, the hypothesis that the button causes the buzzer to sound is much more parsimonious than the hypothesis that there is no relationship between the button and the buzzer and it’s just a string of coincidences.
To me it being an optical illusion means you see something that isn’t there. Stimuli lead to a false conclusion.
I did not find the arguments convincing. I have responded to them at various points in the thread.
I’m not asking anyone to suppose there is an unknown factor.
Yes, I thought so.
I generally work with that, yes. I think there are problems that arise with that. Most theories or assertions, including that one, have a lot of subassertions in support of that. How does one add these probabilities together? But in general yes, and that’s why I think inductive proofs about the non-existence of something should be avoided, just as they are avoided in science. And even existence, where the gold star is ‘theory’, not ‘proof’. You seem to think we need to close the door on ghosts. That that is the only rational conclusion. I don’t think there is a we, nor do I see any reason to accept what your proposal concludes about all experiences.
Yes, you’ve worked out, to your own satisfaction, that you know enough to rule out other things. A pattern which has a history of being both correct and incorrect in its conclusions.
Do you find them sound? My impression is that your priors for ghosts existing are high enough that evidence against their existence (for even my circumscribed definition of ‘ghost’) can’t overcome them. It that case, it would be consistent to find the argument both sound and unconvincing.
If it isn’t sound, I’m not sure which part fails:
that the pattern of ghost photographs over time is as I describe
that ghosts that emit or reflect light would create the pattern I say we should expect
that the combination of (1) and (2) strongly imply that there are no ghosts that emit or reflect light.
that the nonexistence of ghosts that emit or reflect light significantly undermines the larger class of ghosts that have effects on the material world that are independently measurable (at least in principle).
I am also under the impression that you just don’t think that class of ghosts is very important to the broader claim that “there are no ghosts”.
Aren’t you? I’m not sure how to interpret this other than as an appeal to an unknown factor:
You point out several exceptions, none of which resolve the problem I’ve described, and when I pointed that out you fall back to some other unspecified exception. The possibility of an unknown factor is a fairly explicit premise in your argument.
I agree this is a problem, especially where I’m appealing to it in a hand-wavey and intuitive way, rather than specifying actual probabilities.
One place we agree is that there isn’t really a ‘closing the door’ on empirical questions.
Still, given the evidence we have, I think we can be as confident that there are no ghosts as we are of many other statements we frequently and uncontroversially acknowledge.
That isn’t ‘closing the door’: future evidence may not fit with no-ghost models. But that is also true of every statement about the external world, even claims about which we are significantly more confident.
It’s not confusion, they are literally the same thing. First two sentences from Wikipedia (emphasis in original):
In philosophy, Occam’s razor [ ] is the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements. It is also known as the principle of parsimony or the law of parsimony.
This comes off kind of ad hommy. I have criticized your arguments, I think most or all of them. I think some of them are very good arguments. But I don’t think they come anywhere near proof. I don’t understand why you don’t take the same precautions that science generally does, while at the same time arguing from scientific epistemology.
Where my priors come it: yes, I have experiences that I consider to be of ghosts. This puts me into a different epistemic category. I am not saying that this is my problem with your position. I am recognizing that your arguments to your beliefs. I don’t consider you irrational when it comes to your belief there are no ghosts. I don’t think you have proven it, regardless of whether a person has or has not had experiences they consider to be of ghosts. If I look at the situation outside my own perspective I understand why non-experiencers believe there are no ghosts. I don’t think it rises to a certainty. That’s my focus on the arguments, even if I have been critical of them. I object to the ‘we’ because of my priors. We are not in the same position. Just as the experiencers of rogue waves and ball lightning were not but also perhaps situations where the experiencers were misinterpreting what they experienced, all of them.
You just describe the situation for you, not for me.
So, there are claims of which you are even more confident. To me this ends the discussion of proof, which I think is misapplied. If I missed you acknowledging this earlier, my apologies. We have there are not ghosts, which you view with a very high level of certainty and then there are assertions which you view as being such that we can be even more confident.
I think proof is misplaced for things in a category where not only can they be revised, that is possible, but there is a category or set of beliefs which we are even more certain of.
Then there is the continued use of we. It is as if everyone must have the same degrees of certainty as you. This is separate from the proof issue.
I guess I find it tiring to understand the situation from your perspective, given what you have and have not experienced, and how this affects your beliefs. I can accept your position as rational, even if I think your are arguments have been less final or certain than you think. That is based on the arguments themselves, not my priors.
But in relation to me, you seem utterly unable to grant me the same respect or perhaps even realize that we are not in the same position. Note: by respect I do not mean that you need to shift your level of certainty because there are believers or because I am. The respect is to understand that I am not in the same position as you. This does not mean my interpretation must be correct. It’s treating me with humility. I have experienced things you have not. I remain unconvinced by the explanations I have been told for what it really happening. I’m not in your position. There isn’t a we. Beyond that, though not the same point, we have a history of people experiencing things and correctly interpreting them, but being told they must be wrong and are being too emotional - etc. - and yet later it turned out they were correct.
I know you recognize this, but every time you have written we, as if we are all in the same position, it is as if, experience means nothing here. In a sense there is also, running through the whole thread, that your priors cannot be affecting your certainty around your arguments.
I still don’t understand why you think scientists are irrational when they avoid drawing the type of conclusion (in their capacity as scientists) you want to draw here.
For example, I look back on the thylacine example. You said scientists have said it is extinct. But that is in the intersection of science and public policy, land use allocation and a host of other issues. In that interdisciplinary situation where probabilities are necessary, they contributed to a list that is not a scientific paper, but a civic position. I point out that wikipedia, which was your source of evidence (not that I am contesting it in this case), has a different position on ghosts. There is no parallel claim - and why? because there isn’t same kind of civic need for one, so the more cautious scientific stance is taken.
I mention this not to rehash old ground, but to point out that I think I hit this kind of actually not so strong as you think kind of argument on your part throughout the thread. I think your priors led to you interpreting this as a kind of smoking gun about science ‘proving negatives around the existence of X’ that it wasn’t.
My point being, it’s not that I recognize the soundness of your arguments, but I have my priors, so I question your position. No, again and again, I encounter arguments that I think are weaker or much weaker than you seem to think, especially in the context of proof and we would be irrational if we did not accept there are not ghosts. This has been demonstrated.
As said I have criticized your positions and arguments throughout. I’m not going back to do this again. Though I will note one thing:
Strong suggest is continuously conflated with proven not to exist.
We were talking about a specific argument in relation to ghosts, there visibility. I was pointing out that there might be unknown factors related to ghosts being seen.
MIGHT BE.
It seems like you cannot concieve of someone who is not trying to convince you ghosts don’t exist. So when I say
This fits perfectly with…
I’m not asking anyone to suppose there is an unknown factor.
But you interpret this as I am asking you to suppose there is an unknown factor.
Can you see the difference? Did I assert there was an unknown factor? Did I say that it is one of those three? Have I ever tried to convince you ghosts are real?
Here you manage to interpret me more correctly. Though even assertions of possibility are strong in a sense. My point is that from your limited perspective, you can’t rule them out. I brought up and I said why I brought up those examples to mention that we know there are things that can lead to visual experience, caused by things external to the brain/mind. I was explicit.
What did you do?
You treated them as assertions as if I was saying it was one of those. IOW you treated my post as an argument that ghosts exist and one of these phenomena explain why people are really seeing ghosts but cameras are not.
When we get past this, you are now say that you, Carleas, need to accept that there is an unknown factor that is leading to this. Even though I had just critiqued the certainty of your argument about camera, which included the possibility that cameras might well have accurately captured ghosts and that you argument that the changes in frequency over time somehow proves cameras have not on occasion captured ghosts or we’d have more photos now.
You can’t seem to hear the difference between you haven’t proved it and here’s why ghosts are real. And this has gone on for a long time.
That was not my intent, and I apologize for coming off that way.
Let me state my claim more clearly: if you have high prior credence that ghosts exist, it is rational to maintain a high (if slightly less high) credence that ghosts exist despite even strong evidence that they don’t.
I agree you’ve considered and responded to my arguments. My impression comes from a theme I see in those responses, i.e. that, even where they are good, my arguments do not compel the conclusion that “there are no ghosts”. You point to the spaces that my arguments don’t touch: to alternative conceptions of ‘ghosts’, to the possibility for alternative mechanisms to explain observations, to the residue of uncertainty my argument can’t dispel.
And assuming high priors, it’s consistent to be unconvinced by any argument with a residue of uncertainty.
So I was curious in what way you found my argument not just unconvincing, but unsound.
Granted: the possibility of the unknown is part of the ‘residue of uncertainty’.
Your examples support the assertion that such a possibility remains.
My rebuttals support the assertion that possible unknowns have their own possible unknowns (e.g. other physical effects) that constrain the scope of possibility.
Yes. For one thing, my credence in any belief that is a necessary part of why I believe there are no ghosts would seem to logically constrain my confidence about ghosts.
But I’m also more confident that e.g. the sun exists than that ghosts do not exist. I’m more confident that the sun exists than that capybaras exist, but I’m very confident capybaras exist.
‘Proof’ is not a significant part of my claim. Looking through this thread, I don’t see anywhere that I’ve said something like “X proves there are no ghosts”. Here I say that we can “prove to a blind person that there are different colors of light”. Here I say that “table-turning [and] N-say[s] were conclusively disproved”.
But in relation to ghosts, my earliest uses acknowledge the objection you’re raising: here I make distinction between “logical proof” and “empirical proof”, and acknowledge the limitation of empirical argument; and here I put ‘prove’ in scare quotes to “flag words that I think are problematic”.
I dunno, this seems semantic. I do think it’s appropriate to use terms like ‘proof’ in certain formal empirical contexts (and as I’ve arguedbefore, scientists sometimes do), but I agree we should be careful and be conscious of the limits of empirical knowledge.
More to my point here, in colloquial contexts where we regularly talk about ‘knowing’ things or ‘proving’ things about the external world, we should not object to claims on the basis that we can’t ‘know’ or ‘prove’ anything about the external world.
If there were a civic need for one, you would be OK with saying that there are no ghosts?
I think there’s a stronger case for extant thylacines than there is for ghosts, but I’d still describe thylacines as extinct.
For what it’s worth, it isn’t a lack of respect. My discounting of the evidentiary value of experience includes my own experiences. I try to practice self-skepticism, about my observations and my interpretations of them.
Humans are unreliable witnesses.
And my continued confusion about this objection.
‘We’ (you and I and others) are talking about shared external reality; even if ‘we’ (human beings capable of participating in discussions of shared reality) each have our own set of experiences of it, there is a union of those sets – a place where the evidence to which ‘we’ (human beings capable of participating in discussions of shared reality) have access overlaps – that ‘we’ (human beings capable of participating in discussions of shared reality) can reason from.
That is the main point of my responses, with the addition of what I have noticed as framing this as ‘we’ should all accept this position and it is irrational to do otherwise. I don’t think your arguments come anywhere near that. Further, when I say something is a good argument, I don’t mean that it has crossed the threshold into some specific degree of certainty. I just mean the reasoning, in an ongoing discussion, makes a possibly good point. It’s not sloppy or fallacy- ridden. I think you are taking this to mean, I see your arguments are strong and leave only some uncertainty about whether ghosts exist and my objection is that they can’t be ruled out nor have you proven they don’t exist. I don’t think they are that strong and I am also not really trying to find some kind of degree. My goals are humbler.
I really don’t want to go back and reargue them. I didn’t use the word ‘unsound’ I don’t think, at least not until recently. But I thought most of your arguments were unsound. Unsound not as a binary evaluation, just I don’t think they demonstrated what they were intended to in many cases. I don’t mean simply the main assertion, there are not ghosts, but the sub-assertion. Perhaps a premise was off, for example.
OK, it seemed like there were a lot of discussion where you were trying to say prove or proof did apply to the whole argument, not just parts. I would say empirical evidence, instead, but I kept seeing ‘proof’ come up. But if you are saying here you don’t assert that the existence of ghosts has been disproven, great. If you don’t think it is irrational to believe in ghosts, that’d be great also.
me: I don’t think I have objected on brain in the vat grounds or other radical skepticism grounds like that. Further, it seems to me you have been trying to claim something higher than colloquial ground. I’m not sure what all these discussions of scientists declaring thylacines extinct and discussions of inductive proof, etc. have all been about if we are just tossing around ideas in a colloquial way. It seems, then, many things could have been conceded long ago by you. Not your position, but about what level of rigor we are talking about here. I hope you can see how many of your posts here would lead one to believe you were not just intending us to think you mean a colloquial sense of knowing and proving. I mean, again, even the phrase empirical proof seems to be tweaking this upwards in certainty. Empirical arguments, empirical evidence, but I balk at, and generally science does, ‘empirical proof.’ The would go for theory in a positive arguments. Rather than theories of the non-existence of X. My point here is not to go through that whole argument again, but to point out that this has not seemed at all a colloquial discussion. That it was important to rebut the idea that you were using something different from scientific epistemology.
me: I’d still in discussions disagree with the conclusion though I might not join a thread. Who is saying it? What is the civic need? – I realize it was a hypothetical, so these are rhetorical questions. I don’t object to allocation of land use based on thylacine being considered extinct. I might if I had seen one or several. My point was that they are two different contexts: scientific knowledge and practical civic decision-making.
And I have no objection to people asserting their disbelief and feeling very confident about their position. Again, I have to pick my spots in the world.
In a philosophy forum, it’s a different situation. The same pattern, while specific to ghosts here, happens in all sorts of situations with different phenomena. It becomes important to me then, and I hold people to a higher standard, given the wider implications and patterns of this kind I see in society. Some posters I would give up on very fast because there’s no real point. Others, like yourself, it seems worthwhile to object.
I think you’re still missing me here, though I admit it is hard for me to formulate. It is not that I want you to respect my witness account and treat it like evidence for you. I want you to stop treating us as a we in regard to this issue.
We can look back in time at ball lightning and rogue wave situations and see that scientific skeptics who ruled out the observations were not simply wrong, but could not really treat the experiencers as in a different category. It wouldn’t make sense to refer to experiencers as a ‘we’ when figuring out the general stance that is rational. This doesn’t mean somehow that they should have conceded the experiencers were right or treated their experiences as correctly interpreted. There is no we, however. They inhabit different epistemic parts of unfolding reality - reality including experience and potentially external reality. Those people had experiences that the scientists did not know the contents of, but acted as if they did. What really happened was X or Y or Z? There is no need to suddenly assert knowledge of what was actually going on in people’s heads. One can simply say that it does not fit current knowledge and we - the scientists and other skeptics - have nothing that supports your claims enough for us to accept it as sufficient evidence. They could explore the possibilities with those people and see if that shifts anything. Could your emotions, given that a large wave is scary, have significantly overestimated its size? But you don’t tell them that that’s what’s happening, I believe. You don’t say we should conclude or it is rational for us, including the experiencers, to conclude and it’s your belief that should be rationally concluded. There’s no us or we there.
When you keep saying we, it is as if I must actually be in the same position you are. I’m not.
Another way to look at this is: can two people be rational about something, even really quite rational, but reach different conclusions, opposed conclusions. I think so. Experience makes a difference, even if one is not remotely convinced the other person is correctly interpreting their experience.
And as I have had to point out repeatedly my posts are not attempts to convince you there are ghosts or that X is the mechanism or model for them. But my posts get responded to as if points made are assertions of mechanism or as if I am mounting that other argument. The latter is subtle but it’s there at times.
And it’s not that I think you don’t have personal respect for me. It’s like I am sort of invisible when you start talking about we. We have good reasons for considering people with different experiences as being in different categories. This does not entail that one side is categorically right. It’s just they are not in the same epistemic ‘we’.
This would be very clear with some issues. The blacks and whites deciding how much racism there is in an organization would have very different experiences. These could lead to opposed conclusions. I think, despite how this might seem like a weighted unfair example, you could have two opposed rational conclusions. But there isn’t a we. The experiences separate the two groups. And this may last for a long time. And that’s ok, however frustrating. Different experiences put people in different ‘places’ and groups and epistemic regions.
I can put it in terms of Occam’s razor again. Occam’s razor becomes problematic when you have significantly different experiences within the group. Occam’s razor works well if you have similar experiences, because then the explanatory power of the simpler, or the explanation with less entities, covers the experience. We, having similar experiences, don’t find the need for that extra entity. It is easier to slide into agreement on the choice. If you have different experiences, then it’s unlikely to work, and the OR was never intended to be kind of a referee in ontology discussions. It was meant as a methodology for moving forward with those that you have similar experiences with. Now, that’s a slight oversimplification. A dialogue between the two groups could potentially reconcile some of this, and one can certainly try to explain to the others, but hey, this could be caused by that. What do you think? I don’t think one need give up on finding that we, but that’s different from declaring it. Can we agree that these things are enough, that this is enough entities because actually X can be explained by these two entities? But if they can’t agree, or they say it doesn’t explain, then Occam’s razor can’t be used to determine group A is right and it can’t be used to determine that whole group moving forward. We don’t have a “we” .. Again: Occam’s razor is not a referee to reconcile different ontological positions. It’s a methodological tool where there is a genuine we.
Some of your formulations have been along the lines of we should believe…It is as if there must be one rational conclusion, now. I disagree. And sometimes it gets to the point of my thinking ok, I’m tired of being very respectful around this issue. Enough of me thinking about other people’s perspectives. I’ll just react like Ecmandu, tell you about you and why you don’t let yourself notice ghosts or some other similar ok-I-know-what’s-really-going-on-in-you type ad hom and leave it at that. Or just do this in my head and drop out. I won’t go there, just describing the feeling. OK, I’ll put you in my we but you’re a defective measure, perhaps not in reason, but in percpetion. We have the same external reality, so I know where the fault lies - the Ecmandu formulation. But I find that unappealing regardless of which end I am on.
In a sense I have always worked hard to see things from other people’s perspectives. When you keep using this we, I feel unreciprocated. And again this is not saying you need to agree with me or change your position. Just note that we are not a we in an important way regarding this discussion.
And to be very clear: I know you are not calling me names. You’re polite, focus on issues, but I think there is a kind disrespecting ‘move’ in the use of we. We are likely a we in many other ways but not this one. I also haven’t found your subarguments compelling - at least not in general. I think they have problems. So, these are separate types of reaction and I have both.
I do think that, in principle, we should be able to agree on the nature of shared reality. Finding that agreement is the whole project of empirical science.
But that doesn’t imply that it’s irrational to disagree. One of us being irrational is a possible explanation, but there are plenty of rational bases for disagreement. Merely disagreeing is not irrational.
Whether or not there are ghosts is a question about shared reality: there is an objective fact of the matter. I think it’s one we can establish empirically, and we can do it on the available evidence.
By unsound, I did intend the logical binary of soundness, i.e. true premises from which the conclusion follows. Because empirical claims are ultimately probabilistic, my argument could be sound and still unconvincing.
I’m more saying that ‘proof’ is a messy concept, and it’s not one that we need to solve in order to make and accept mundane statements about the world of the form “there are no X”.
You say you are “not really trying to find some kind of degree”, but I’m not sure what you mean by ‘proof’ if not that. Empirical claims are always probabilistic, so ‘proof’ in this context seems like it must be a matter of degree.
There have been many, but recent examples include the objection to “clos[ing] the door” (i.e. reaching a conclusion based on the available evidence), and the objection that “proof is misplaced” where things can “be revised” or where there are “beliefs which we are even more certain of”.
Are you actually conceding that it’s colloquially true that “there are no ghosts”? What part of our disagreement is resolved by “there are no ghosts” being a colloquial claim?
It’s not an exaggeration, I’m not Creed shouting “you’re not real, man!”. It’s a literal claim about shared reality. It’s ‘colloquial’ in the sense that it doesn’t imply that ghosts are logically incoherent, or that we can resolve all our uncertainties about the external world, or that there is no other belief about which I am more confident. As I’ve said repeatedly, in various ways, “we ‘know’ it as well as we can know many of the mundane facts that we regularly accept”.
And I’m pretty sure you disagree with it in that sense.
I brought up thylacines to argue that ‘there are no ghosts’ is treated differently from other similar claims, i.e. “there are no extant thylacines” is a there-are-no-X claim that does not draw objections about knowledge and the nature of ‘proof’ or ‘closing the door’ or what have you. In the colloquial sense that we might be comfortable saying “thylacines are extinct”, it should also be unobjectionable to say “there are no ghosts”.
“There are no ghosts” is a colloquial claim, and I think you disagree with its colloquial sense, but unpacking our disagreement has been thoroughly non-colloquial.
I agree with this approach. It’s been interesting to look at the epistemics underlying our disagreement.
But it’s important not to lose sight of the normal standards while we apply the higher ones. “There are no ghosts” is a controversial claim before we hold it to a higher standard. Issues of ‘knowledge’ and ‘proof’ come up quickly when we start to look deeper, but they also come up when we look deeper into other similar claims, and they seem to arise at around the same level of depth.
So while holding the claim to this higher standard is interesting, it doesn’t seem to get at what makes the claim controversial. (I still think it’s something to do with how ‘ghosts’ relates to other beliefs, and which other beliefs, but that too is controversial.)
You’re interpreting my use of we as assertive and flattening, i.e. a claim that we are equally positioned in all relevant respects and thereby denying the differences between us. I don’t intend it that way.
Rather, I intend to invoke what we do actually have in common, despite our differences – a view-from-nowhere we. Without denying or minimizing our different beliefs and priors, we can both step out of the disagreement and reason about how each of us should reason within it, and in particular see what we should agree about despite what we disagree about.
This is informative:
I have not used that particular formulation. I have repeatedly used the formulation, “we should expect…”, in the context of contingent claims, typically something like, ‘if X is the case, we should expect to observe Y’.
One exception is here, where I use the formulation “we should conclude”:
In context, I am explaining the structure of my argument, and as a statement of a logical syllogism it is literally correct: from A \implies B and \neg B, we should conclude\neg A. We can disagree about whether A \implies B or whether \neg B, but given them, yes, we “should conclude…”.
I also stand by the “we should expect” formulation, in the full light of the fact that we bring a difference of perspective and beliefs. Despite those differences, without denying that they exist and are important to determining what we ultimately believe, it is not improper to argue that a hypothesis suggests observations we “should expect”. That’s how hypothesis testing works.
Of course, that’s not to say it’s improper to disagree about what we ‘should expect’ given a certain hypothesis, but there’s no way to have that conversation without suggesting that X being true implies an observable outcome that can be investigated.
Going forward, I will be cognizant that my use of ‘we’ could be interpreted as assertive/flattening, and take more care to avoid that use and to make clear that the we’s I do use are clearly the ‘view-from-nowhere we’. If you think any specific ‘we’ statement I make fails to do that, please let me know.
