Psience Quest

(2017-10-17, 04:43 PM)Chris Wrote: [ -> ]It's fair to say I tend to the proponent side for psi, on the basis of the evidence, but not for the afterlife, because I think the evidence for that is more problematic.

But I also tend to look directly at the evidence rather than thinking about the metaphysical implications and drawing conclusions from that. So as I can't (or won't) look at the evidence about Darwinism, I'm not going to draw a conclusion there. But in any case, I'm not convinced that psi couldn't be consistent with Darwinism, or with the view that consciousness is purely a result of physical processes in the brain. If psi exists, we know so very little about how it works.

It seems most here and at skeptiko have an either or outlook. I see no thoughts except yours that the two could present two real aspects of reality.

(2017-10-17, 05:19 PM)DaveB Wrote: [ -> ]The problem is that I think science has become very rigid on certain subjects, and will put up endless essentially spurious arguments rather than shift ground. This 'policy' is becoming rather thin, but it can still give the superficial impression that there is a conventional scientific debate in progress.

In a way, I think you either have to approach psi with a total disregard of science, or you have to wade into some of these debates - as a number of people here have tried to do. Many of the Skeptiko podcasts also picked away at the various questions:

1)           Does science have an understanding of what consciousness is?

2)           Does science treat the evidence for psi fairly?

3)           Does science treat the various death-related phenomena (NDE's, deathbed visions, mediumship) in a fair minded way?

The problem isn't that no scientists rethink their positions, btu that the system then brands them - in effect - as heretics, and ignores them!

David

None of which really has anything to do with my not having the background knowledge or the time to read a lot of technical arguments about Darwinism.

(2017-10-17, 04:43 PM)Chris Wrote: [ -> ]But in any case, I'm not convinced that psi couldn't be consistent with Darwinism, or with the view that consciousness is purely a result of physical processes in the brain. If psi exists, we know so very little about how it works.

On one hand is the meaning of "Darwinism" inferred in general speech - and on the other - what Darwin actually wrote.

As someone who has read Darwin's work, it finds a much more prominent role for intelligent action's role in evolution; than it is given credit.  Darwin believed in and endorsed mental evolution!

Quote: As in ‘The Descent,’ there is almost no mention of natural selection in ‘The Expression.’ Instead, the principle throughout is implied: individuals that can communicate better, using their species-specific behaviors, are likely to have more offspring. -  from Darwin and Animal Behavior by R. A. Boakes, University of Sydney

I am prescribing a science methodology whereby physics/chemistry is at one level of process modeling and communication and information processing is at another.  There are no units of measure for communication in the chemistry of biology.

If communication is a major factor in biological evolution, (duh) then it is measured by informational processes!  DNA maybe described by organic chemistry - but its function  is the communication of instructions.  The study of DNA processes is via Bioinformatics.

Here is a tasty tidbit: 

Quote: Two years after publishing ‘The Expression,’ the then 65-year-old Darwin invited to his home in the country a young physiologist, George Romanes. Darwin decided that Romanes was just the person to develop the ideas on mental evolution that Darwin had proposed in ‘The Descent.’ Their admiration was mutual. Darwin became a revered father figure for Romanes who for the rest of his life vigorously defended every aspect of Darwin’s theories, even those that after Darwin’s death in 1882 began to look increasingly dubious, such as his theory of inheritance, ‘pangenesis,’ and his belief that instinctive behavior could evolve both as a result of natural selection and from inheritance of individually acquired habits. Romanes’ aim in life became that of first accumulating systematic data on animal behavior and then using these to construct a detailed theory of mental evolution following the lines that Darwin had sketched - ibid

http://www.eebweb.arizona.edu/Courses/Ec...havior.pdf

Natural Selection was not as important to Darwin as it is Neo-Darwinists.  The influence of the information processing done by living things is much more causal in evolution that mutation. In the last twenty-five years Lamarckian inheritance has made a huge comeback.

The answer to how minds work - is the answer to how living things evolve.

(2017-10-17, 05:16 PM)Steve001 Wrote: [ -> ]Explain in detail how the former makes the latter impossible. Do you realize your rational if applied to QM and Classical physics would be a binary choice. We know that's not true.

 Darwinism can be summarized as claiming that the following process produced the entire array of living organisms including man. 

- Species are comprised of individuals that vary ever so slightly from each other with respect to their many traits.
- Species have a tendency to increase in numbers over generations at a geometric rate.
- This tendency is checked, to use the language of Thomas Malthus' On the Principle of Population, by limited resources, disease, predation, and so on, creating a struggle for survival among the members of a species.
- Some individuals will have variations that give them a slight advantage in this struggle, variations that allow more efficient or better access to resources, greater resistance to disease, greater success at avoiding predation, and so on.
- These individuals will tend to survive better and leave more offspring.
- Offspring tend to inherit the variations of their parents.
- Therefore favorable variations will tend to be passed on more frequently than others and thus be preserved, a tendency Darwin labeled ‘Natural Selection’.
- Over time, especially in a slowly changing environment, this process will cause the character of species to change.
- Given a long enough period of time, the descendant populations of an ancestor species will differ enough both from it and each other to be classified as different species, a process capable of indefinite iteration. There are, in addition, forces that encourage divergence among descendant populations, and the elimination of intermediate varieties.

Of course the theory has been greatly elaborated, but this is the basic process. With Darwinism all living organisms including man originated entirely from a process combining stochastic and random phenomena and mechanically deterministic phenomena (random mutation and natural selection) operating entirely within the known laws of physics. 

- According to Darwinism all that is human originated from elaborations of this basic process, a mechanism combining randomness and an elimination principle following known physical law.
 
- But paranormal phenomena are human phenomena that if real violate the known laws of physics.
 
- So psi and an afterlife if real clearly can't be purely the outworkings of an elaborate physical mechanism (Darwinism) which operates entirely within the known laws of physics, since such outworkings would have to follow the same basic physical laws as their source.

- So Darwinism and psi/afterlife are mutually contradictory.

Darwinism has long been interpreted by its leading proponents in science as being the essence of reductive materialism or naturalism, and has been applied to all of nature. That is, it has the clear materialistic implication that all spiritual notions whatsoever are purely superstitions, or at most "memes" socially spreading in the population. Psi and the afterlife are classified in that belief system as "spiritual notions". In other words, the clear implication of Darwinism as interpreted by experts is the impossibility of psi and an afterlife.

(2017-10-17, 09:20 PM)nbtruthman Wrote: [ -> ]- According to Darwinism all that is human originated from elaborations of this basic process, a mechanism combining randomness and an elimination principle following known physical law.
 
- But paranormal phenomena are human phenomena that if real violate the known laws of physics.
 
- So psi and an afterlife if real clearly can't be purely the outworkings of an elaborate physical mechanism (Darwinism) which operates entirely within the known laws of physics, since such outworkings would have to follow the same basic physical laws as their source.

- So Darwinism and psi/afterlife are mutually contradictory.

That doesn't quite make sense to me. If there were physical laws we didn't know about, then wouldn't Darwinism be the result of the actual physical laws, not the known ones?

For the sake of argument, suppose psi is the result of some physical laws we don't currently know about - say some laws involving the interaction of complicated collections of information with matter. Then where relevant your elimination principle would follow the physical laws we know about, together with the psi laws, and there doesn't seem to be a problem.

(2017-10-17, 09:56 PM)Chris Wrote: [ -> ]That doesn't quite make sense to me. If there were physical laws we didn't know about, then wouldn't Darwinism be the result of the actual physical laws, not the known ones?

For the sake of argument, suppose psi is the result of some physical laws we don't currently know about - say some laws involving the interaction of complicated collections of information with matter. Then where relevant your elimination principle would follow the physical laws we know about, together with the psi laws, and there doesn't seem to be a problem.

Perhaps it would help if you could define what constitutes a physical law? Psi events seem to defy physical laws as presently defined so it is hard to imagine a new law which might accommodate such events. It seems to me that is why QM is so controversial. The results of experiments seem to confirm non-locality, entanglement, etc., but they are accepted anyway. From what I see in such discussions, either the so-called realists attempt to force-fit those aspects into a classical framework or throw up their hands and say "forget the philosophy and do the maths".

(2017-10-17, 10:13 PM)Kamarling Wrote: [ -> ]Perhaps it would help if you could define what constitutes a physical law? 

I was just thinking of any kind of law that described interactions in the physical world.

(2017-10-17, 09:56 PM)Chris Wrote: [ -> ]That doesn't quite make sense to me. If there were physical laws we didn't know about, then wouldn't Darwinism be the result of the actual physical laws, not the known ones?

For the sake of argument, suppose psi is the result of some physical laws we don't currently know about - say some laws involving the interaction of complicated collections of information with matter. Then where relevant your elimination principle would follow the physical laws we know about, together with the psi laws, and there doesn't seem to be a problem.

Nicely put.

(2017-10-17, 10:13 PM)Kamarling Wrote: [ -> ]Perhaps it would help if you could define what constitutes a physical law? Psi events seem to defy physical laws as presently defined so it is hard to imagine a new law which might accommodate such events. It seems to me that is why QM is so controversial. The results of experiments seem to confirm non-locality, entanglement, etc., but they are accepted anyway. From what I see in such discussions, either the so-called realists attempt to force-fit those aspects into a classical framework or throw up their hands and say "forget the philosophy and do the maths".

Chris doesn't need to define what a physical law when anyone including you can google the answer.

(2017-10-17, 10:49 PM)Steve001 Wrote: [ -> ]Chris doesn't need to define what a physical law when anyone including you can google the answer.

I think Chris can decide for himself what he wishes to answer. Anything can be googled but this isn't wikipedia, it is a discussion. I was asking for Chris' perspective, not a google definition (nor your opinion, for that matter).