Is the Filter Theory committing the ad hoc fallacy and is it unfalsifiable?

I don’t understand what you are saying here. There no link between QM and information theory. Information theory is based on classic probability theory.

I am not a qualified to dig deep into this on the top of my head.  No link is not true.  QM is, likewise a probability based theory.  And information theory math works with QM math.  Calculations of quantum processing of information yield pragmatic results.  If you are really curious on this, I would do a little research.

OK, I read the study you reference. (Sarraf, M., Woodley, M., Tressoldi, P. (2020). Anomalous information reception by mediums: A meta-analysis of the scientific evidence. Explore 17, 10.1016/j.explore.2020.04.002.)

It does have some merit. It is a compilation of 18 studies of mediums. In each of these studies, mediums were told the name of the deceased that the person in another room wanted to hear from. These mediums then prepared reported messages they were hearing from the named deceased person.

Later the person requesting the reading would be presented two readings, one reportedly from the requested departed person, and one reportedly from somebody else. In general the people requesting the services of the medium guessed the right message about half the time. In some studies they guessed correctly slightly more than half the time. In other studies, they guessed wrong more than half the time.

Though many of these studies had right answers slightly more than half the time, the findings were not enough for science to call them significant. If, for illustration, you flip a coin 50 times, and come up with heads 26 times, that is not enough to prove the coin flip is anything but random.

But suppose you did many such coin flip studies and find more correct guesses than wrong guesses every time you flipped the coin 50 times. Then you might tend to believe you had an unfair coin. That is equivalent to what this study does. It combines many studies of mediums, each with a small positive or negative affect, and concludes that overall there is a slight significant positive correlation with guessing the right message rather than the wrong one.

That could mean that, there is a slight tendency to hear from the deceased. Or it could mean there is a slight tendency to somehow get transmissions from the person in the other room in ways not currently understood. Or it could mean that there are things in the experimental design that change the odds just slightly in favor of right guesses.

For instance, a medium who is a skilled cold reader might make a different reading for a request for a deceased man named "Peter" compared with one for a man named "Pedro". The person who is looking for a reading from Uncle Peter might then find that the reading prepared for Peter is closer to what he expected compared to the reading for Pedro. Thus, there may be a few occasions where the name helps to give the medium a slight clue, and that may be enough to show slightly more positive readings.

So what is causing the small favoring toward correct readings? I think experimental design, such as using the name as a hint on how to make the reading, is the most likely cause. The second most likely cause is that the medium was somehow sensing something from the living. The least likely cause, in my opinion, is that the medium was hearing from the deceased. This is because, as I have argued here, I find it extremely unlikely that people survive death. So I find one of these other causes more likely.

One other option is that there is a publishing bias. Positive results are much easier to publish then one that shows no effect or perhaps a small negative effect. Perhaps if unpublished reports had been included in this meta-analysis, the results would have been quite different.

Another possibility, due to the fact that there are many studies involved, is that some of the studies may have had a significant flaw in the design. A few bad pieces of beef ruins the whole beef stew.

So I find this study interesting, but the small observed affect does nothing to overthrow all of neuroscience, which finds that the mind is dependent on the brain, and hence is unlikely to survive death.

I take a break from the forum and I come back and there's new faces, bois we vibing. 

Your alternative explanations for medium perception are sweet af and go into the trouble of living agent PSI in any area of parapsychology research. I like the willingless to entertain that alongside more mundane explantions. 

Other people have gone into the rest of what you said a bit but the 2 cents I felt like adding is: the people involved in these studies are experienced with cold and hot reading, the possibility is always there but to me it seems a bit of a far fetched thing. That and not publishing non-effective studies is an all too common critique of parapsychology, but the issue with it comes down to the numbers. To nullify the P value would take a certain number of studies with non results and unfortunately parapsychology is understaffed and underfunded, there simply isn't enough money and personnel to do the studies to fail and then to get hidden away in the first place. There are many studies in traditional areas of science that recieve the funding that an entire parapsychology department wouldn't get in an entire year, so certainly not a total dismissal of the critique but something to keep in mind. 

As for one study overthrowing neuroscience, that is very correct. Results from parapsychology are the gaps in the theories, things on the fringes of the established paradigm that will one day have to be confronted. Right now current physicalist theories of neuroscience continues to make great strides in understanding and one day they'll reach the far edges of what they can explain. At that point they'll either incorperate them into the theory or they'll be its undoing, I like to think of stuff like parapsychology and anomalistic research advancing the weirdness inwards in advance while the paradigm expands outwards.

What about this follow-on study of mediumship accuracy from 2022, which employed 28 mediums, also with a triple-blind protocol:

Is There Someone in the Hereafter? Mediumship Accuracy of 100 Readings Obtained with a Triple Level of Blinding Protocol

Patrizio Tressoldi, Laura Liberale, and Fernando Sinesio

http://www.patriziotressoldi.it/cmssimpl...ter_22.pdf

Note: the calculated cumulative p value was 0.000048.

Here we have another study with blinded mediums apparently giving readings, with the readings being at least partially recognizable as from the intended deceased person.

100 sitters had come and asked for readings for a particular deceased person. Mediums were given only the first name of the deceased, and came up with readings for that person. Later the sitters were grouped in pairs, where both sitters received both readings. The sitters apparently picked the reading intended for their requested deceased person 65% of the time.

In the past such studies were often plagued with methodological flaws or showed no significant conclusion for the mediums. (Battista et al, The Myth of an Afterlife, p615) This study claims to have a more rigid control and to be clearly positive for mediumship accuracy.

If we assume that nobody altered the readings or biased the study to filter out the results they wanted, we are left with reports from the mediums that had a slight tendency to match the requested person. They were not a perfect match, but they were accurate enough for 65% to choose the "correct" reading. How did these reports come to contain this level of correct information? I can think of three ways it could happen:

1. The mediums got their information from the deceased.
   
2. The mediums go their information from the living through PSI.
   
3. The mediums got their information from some physical means.
   

Option 1 is clearly incredible. I find no evidence that a mind could continue after death. I have seen no post here that gives an answer for anterograde amnesia after brain injury that is reasonably consistent with an afterlife. I think the same applies to retrograde amnesia, loss of consciousness under anesthesia, language difficulties after brain injury, etc. So I find it hard to believe that the dead are communicating here.

Even if the dead could communicate with the living, how did the mediums contact the right person? All they had was the first name. If the medium was told the name was Mario, how did he contact the right Mario? There were three different people named Teresa whom the mediums were told to contact (full data is at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.13311710). How did they get the right one when they were told the next reading was to come from Teresa?

Option 2 is also clearly incredible, as it makes an unrealistic claim for PSI. But at least the supposed source would be alive, which I would think is more likely compared with getting information from the dead. Dead man tell no tales.

Option 3 is also incredible, as the controls in place should have prevented the mediums from getting information from elsewhere. But I suspect this is the case. For mediums have long used fraud to verify their skills (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediumship). If they had real powers, why did many mediums resort to fraud?) In this study, could some of the sitters have found a way to contact the mediums before the study? Could the mediums, who gave their readings over Skype or WhatsApp without anybody supervising them, have had assistants on the Internet gleaning information to use in the readings? I don't know, but I find this possibility more credible than options 1 and 2.

I would like to see a study like this done where the medium does not even know the questions. Questions could be asked at random to the sitter in another room, with the deceased directed to give the answer to the medium in a nearby room. The deceased would know the question, but the medium would not. If the answers are just coming from the medium's mind, rather than coming from the deceased, this would reveal the problem.

Here we have another study with blinded mediums apparently giving readings, with the readings being at least partially recognizable as from the intended deceased person.

100 sitters had come and asked for readings for a particular deceased person. Mediums were given only the first name of the deceased, and came up with readings for that person. Later the sitters were grouped in pairs, where both sitters received both readings. The sitters apparently picked the reading intended for their requested deceased person 65% of the time.

In the past such studies were often plagued with methodological flaws or showed no significant conclusion for the mediums. (Battista et al, The Myth of an Afterlife, p615) This study claims to have a more rigid control and to be clearly positive for mediumship accuracy.

If we assume that nobody altered the readings or biased the study to filter out the results they wanted, we are left with reports from the mediums that had a slight tendency to match the requested person. They were not a perfect match, but they were accurate enough for 65% to choose the "correct" reading. How did these reports come to contain this level of correct information? I can think of three ways it could happen:

1. The mediums got their information from the deceased.
   
2. The mediums go their information from the living through PSI.
   
3. The mediums got their information from some physical means.
   

Option 1 is clearly incredible. I find no evidence that a mind could continue after death. I have seen no post here that gives an answer for anterograde amnesia after brain injury that is reasonably consistent with an afterlife. I think the same applies to retrograde amnesia, loss of consciousness under anesthesia, language difficulties after brain injury, etc. So I find it hard to believe that the dead are communicating here.

Even if the dead could communicate with the living, how did the mediums contact the right person? All they had was the first name. If the medium was told the name was Mario, how did he contact the right Mario? There were three different people named Teresa whom the mediums were told to contact (full data is at  https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.13311710). How did they get the right one when they were told the next reading was to come from Teresa?

Option 2 is also clearly incredible, as it makes an unrealistic claim for PSI. But at least the supposed source would be alive, which I would think is more likely compared with getting information from the dead. Dead man tell no tales.

Option 3 is also incredible, as the controls in place should have prevented the mediums from getting information from elsewhere. But I suspect this is the case. For mediums have long used fraud to verify their skills (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediumship). If they had real powers, why did many mediums resort to fraud?) In this study, could some of the sitters have found a way to contact the mediums before the study? Could the mediums, who gave their readings over Skype or WhatsApp without anybody supervising them, have had assistants on the Internet gleaning information to use in the readings? I don't know, but I find this possibility more credible than options 1 and 2.

I would like to see a study like this done where the medium does not even know the questions. Questions could be asked at random to the sitter in another room, with the deceased directed to give the answer to the medium in a nearby room. The deceased would know the question, but the medium would not. If the answers are just coming from the medium's mind, rather than coming from the deceased, this would reveal the problem.

So the best you can do is to tiresomely repeat for the nth time the same appeals to incredulity and arguments by assertion and references from a hopelessly biased Wikipedia, and then take the last resort of, despite the absence of evidence, speculatively accusing the mediums and probably also the investigators themselves of fraud. Conversation over.

[Laird]

Let's go for a whirl then, @Merle - via this very belated combined response to your long-ago responses to me.

To start with I lay some groundwork based on a consideration of two phenomena: the brain and experience. I've chosen to use "experience" so as to avoid the problems with words like "mind" and "consciousness", which either come with baggage or are defined differently by various parties in this exchange.

Briefly, though, it's important to define clearly enough what I mean by the two terms that I have chosen, so, here goes, noting that, unfortunately, it's impossible to feasibly define "experience" without using one of the "problematic" words.

"The brain" is that squishy lump of stuff between one's ears.

"Experience" is what happens in consciousness; what consciousness does; what consciousness is characterised by (in the sense that "a conscious experience" is a tautology); it includes - but is not limited to - sensing, perceiving, feeling, thinking, remembering, desiring, imagining, deciding, etc.

Clearly, the brain and experience are two different things. Equally clearly, there is some sort of relationship between the two.

In the context of this discussion, the main options are:

1. The brain is what experience looks like from the outside, with either:
   
   1. Experience determining the brain's form (idealism in at least some variants, such as Bernado Kastrup's analytic idealism), or,
      
   2. The brain's form determining experience (most - all? - forms of physicalism which don't explicitly or implicitly deny the reality of experience).
      
2. Experiences are distinct from and fully determined by the brain (epiphenominalism).
   
3. Experiences are distinct from the brain and causally interact with it in both directions. Typically, this is fleshed out by positing the existence of a mind - distinct from the brain - which either:
   
   1. Has a form, which, similarly with respect to the brain in #1.1 above (idealism), is what experience looks like from the outside (interactionist dualism), or,
      
   2. Is formless (Cartesian dualism? I haven't studied it but my understanding is that that term fits here).
      

Now, per the arguments in the thread on Titus's Exit Epiphenominalism paper, to which I've just added a post (which I encourage you to read in tandem with this one) with some additional arguments, option #2 (epiphenominalism) is false, because it provides no possibility for the causal efficacy of experience, and thus if it were true we could not know that we were experiencing, let alone what we were experiencing, yet we do know that and what we are experiencing.

By parallel arguments, #1.2 (physicalism) is false. The parallel is this: it is just as true on physicalism as on epiphenominalism that the nature of an experience is causally irrelevant; it is only the physical facts (about the brain) that determine the subsequent physical facts (about the brain), and whatever the experiences are that are in turn determined by those physical facts is irrelevant to the physical facts; the experiences are in the same sense as on epiphenominalism merely the steam off the brain's engine.

It's not perfectly clear whether your own view best matches #1.2, #2, some combination, or something related, but what is clear is that your view is that experience is wholly determined in one way or another by the brain, so the arguments that I've provided apply to it.

Option #1.1 (idealism) is unappealing because it is unclear why (and hard to conceive that) experience would be structured as though it were matter operating according to the laws of physics. Why would experience take the very intricately sub-divided - apparently unnecessarily so - form that it does: that of a bunch of tiny sub-atomic particles gathered together into atoms, then molecules, then organised into cells, some of which are neurons, which themselves are organised into an unfathomably intricate neural network? It is hard to see how this could be a straightforward reflection of experience, and just as hard to see why experience would not be reflected straightforwardly in its form. (A similar observation applies to option #1.2 as well, of course).

Option #3.2 is unappealing because experience is differentiated and thus seems to entail some sort of structure and dimensionality, and thus some sort of form.

We are left then with option #3.1, which, "fortuitously" and interestingly, has a lot of empirical evidence to support it - much of which has been and is discussed on this board.

OK. There's the groundwork. Now, to respond to your posts (out of order):

Again, your terminology is off: consciousness isn't a model; it is that within and by which models are constructed and comprehended.

Even if your terminology is accepted though, your response that, on your view, consciousness is causally efficacious - and thus that your view is not subject to the otherwise fatal argument (from the inability to know we're conscious) that Titus provided and which I summarised - fails: a model is not a cause in the relevant sense. Your view remains stuck with a causally impotent consciousness which cannot "touch itself" - yet we know that our consciousness can and does touch itself (know of its own existence).

You made me think.

Not hard enough, because you failed to respond to the argument, instead simply ignoring it. I explained - and have reiterated above - why this...

So anyway, yes, our awareness can become aware of being self aware

...could not be the case on your view. Simply affirming that it is the case does not defuse the argument.

If you don't understand the argument, then let's try to work out why.

"Roughly in the ballpark (groan)" doesn't do a lot to help me understand your views.

A brief clarification in case it's needed: my parenthetical groan was not a reaction to anything you'd written, but the reaction I anticipated to my bad (but unintentional) pun.

I would appreciate if they would markup my original paragraphs as shown below to match what you think happens.

I don't have the patience to do that, nor do I think I have the knowledge to do it accurately. Here's my rough sense of things though:

The brain is very much involved in processing sensory information, and in learning innately via feedback, so, yes, it is very much involved in the activity of tennis-playing at that level. I'm not sure how much it constructs models in the full sense, but maybe to an extent it does model reality. The mind, though, definitely models reality, and that's where the higher-level aspects of the game of tennis occur: strategising, recognising what one's opponent is doing, assessing what's working and what's not, calibrating and recalibrating one's strategy in response, emotionally (re)motivating oneself and encouraging oneself, etc etc. Some of that may, though, be aided and assisted by, or reflected in, the brain: my sense is that the filter model is not quite apt; I prefer a model more like "solvency", in which the mind ("soul" if you prefer) is "in solution" (in the chemical sense) with the brain.

I think that the "solvency" model might help you to better understand why I don't find your points such as failure to recall memories, and loss of consciousness during general anaesthetic to be particularly problematic for interactionist dualism, because I think it might give you a better sense of how tight and close I see the coupling between mind (or "soul" on your terms, if you prefer) and brain (body in general) to be: that they are like two substances together in solution.

We keep hearing that somehow soul and mind are intertwined

"Soul" is, I think, a poor word to use in this discussion, because it has different meanings, and although you've defined what you mean by it, it might still be confusing for others who might define it differently. Anyhow, one way to look at this bearing in mind to some extent your definition of "soul", and my definition of "mind"...

but the exact nature of this intertwinement are undefined.

...is that the mind is one of the aspects or components of the soul, kind of like the brain is one of the aspects or components of the body.

A little better elaboration on what exactly is wrong with your terminology seems worth adding:

A model doesn't feel; a model doesn't experience; it is merely abstract and conceptual and thus cannot even in principle feel or experience - but these are precisely what define consciousness.

I think the model of consciousness includes the modeled concept that these things feel a certain way. Why can that not be part of the model?

You seem to have missed the point.

You might have heard the phrase, "The map is not the territory". We can adapted it here as, "The model is not the modelled".

A model containing a concept that things feel a certain way is not a feeling and does not feel. A model of consciousness is not conscious.

Does that help the point to stick?

Do non-physical entities feel and experience? How can a non-physical entity even do anything? Isn't "non-physical entity" an oxymoron? If you think non-physical entities exist, how do they do things that physical things can't do? Is it magic? If not, how is it different to say "a non-physical entity did this physically impossible thing" instead of "magic did this physically impossible thing"?

See my groundwork top of post: I'm working on a conception of (non-physical) mind as described in relational option #3.1, but "non-physical" has become a fraught term in this context in this discussion, so maybe we should avoid it. If it isn't clear how my groundwork leading to #3.1 answers your questions, then feel free to rephrase them.

[Laird]

Is this really an argument for dualism, or rather just further demonstration physicalism is false? Though I guess this also depends on what someone means by "physical". If Information is included I'm not sure Psi or Survival is beyond the bounds of some future physics.

I guess Survival stuff could arguably be a functional dualism between the body at present and the consciousness that continues without it.

Re that to which I've added emphasis: yep, exactly, the evidence we discuss suggests at least a functional dualism.

[Laird]

I feel I have rebut this... i.e. Mandela's death being linked to changes in RNG output... as being wholly without any foundation, other than Radin asserting it to be so. There are loads of other things that could also affect the the output of these RNG devices, which Radin's studies fail to control for, particularly around power supply changes to the device/the devices post processing - required to get any sort of nice usable stream of numbers. We've been through this RNG stuff many times before, so I'm not going to detail it here again.

Yep, we've been through this RNG stuff before, and your claims have been comprehensively refuted.

[Laird]

@Laird was making the point that if one is a "Physicalist" and thus believes the fundamental constituents of reality are non-conscious and everything is reducible to those constituents, then the final explanation for evolution cannot involve "raw feels" (qualia).

[Or I think that's the point he's making, he can ideally clarify if not.]

One could say all the explanations at the biological level can be "cashed out" at the level of physics but it is hard to see why we have the feel responses we do if feels are not part of the story of natural selection. But if all actions are due to non-conscious constituents of physics then it doesn't actually matter if we feel pain is bad or pleasure is good because [regardless of our conscious awareness the actions are determined by movements at the level of physics biology arguably would reduce to].

It's called the Problem or Mystery of Psycho (Mind) - Physical (Body) Harmony.

Yep, exactly - and in my recent post in the old thread on Titus's Exit Epiphenomenalism paper, I cover the variation of this evolutionary argument apparently made by William James. I think it's a very strong one given a presumption of evolution by natural selection.

[Laird]

Perhaps...but I find all explanations for why there is suffering if God is All Powerful [And All Good] to be unsatisfying. Though I also accept perhaps I've not read or thought deeply enough about such things...Probably a discussion for another thread though...

...such as, say, this one?

Yep, we've been through this RNG stuff before, and your claims have been comprehensively refuted.

Process, voltage and temperature variation is just a fact of life for TRNG’s.