Logical positivism [split: A splendid video about evolution]

Be that as it may, it's clearly a different sense of "religious" to that which David is using. He's clearly talking about religiousness in the institutional sense, relating to those organised faith traditions which have a fixed set of beliefs and rituals, and typically also a formalised clergy and places of worship - traditions like Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Jainism.

"Religious" is a word with different senses. There is even a sense according to which Einstein, an agnostic who rejected a personal God as well as life after death, described himself as "religious", a sense to which he referred as "cosmic" religiousness, based on a sort of awe at "the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought".

We need to be careful not to conflate the different senses of "religious", and recognise and respect the senses in which others are using the term, rather than ignoring those and imposing our own sense onto them. That serves no productive purpose and in fact is corrosive to good-faith discussion.

I hadn't noticed this comment earlier. I understand what David means by "religious," though I wasn't aware the term might be seen as inflammatory.
It probably won't surprise anyone that I subscribe to the philosophy of logical positivism. This view holds that ontological statements are meaningful only if they can be verified through empirical observation or are analytically true (such as logical or mathematical statements).

As such, I reject claims about spiritual dimensions and similar concepts when they assert ontological content, treating them as pseudo-statements, a term originally used by A.J. Ayer (and hopefully not taken as inflammatory in this context).

[Laird]

This view holds that ontological statements are meaningful only if they can be verified through empirical observation or are analytically true (such as logical or mathematical statements).

Then it is a false view, unless by "meaningful" you mean something different than what is usually meant: ontological statements like "Reality is not confined to (exhausted by) this so-called 'physical' universe" clearly are meaningful - and truth-apt (definitively either true or false) - even though you think that they can't be verified through empirical observation, which brings us to:

As @Valmar points out, such statements are verifiable through empirical observation, so, again, you must have in mind a particularly narrow definition of "empirical observation", which in turn brings us to:

This view is generally such a narrow one that I don't understand why anybody would find value in it.

This view is generally such a narrow one that I don't understand why anybody would find value in it.

I understand why logical positivism can come across as narrow. But from my point of view, that’s actually part of its strength. It provides a clear framework for separating what we can reasonably investigate or discuss in terms of truth claims, from what lies outside empirical or logical analysis.
For example, whether there are 0, 1, 2, or even 5 or 10 spiritual dimensions is not something we can assert as true or false — not because it's necessarily wrong, but because there's no way to empirically verify or falsify it.

I understand why logical positivism can come across as narrow. But from my point of view, that’s actually part of its strength. It provides a clear framework for separating what we can reasonably investigate or discuss in terms of truth claims, from what lies outside empirical or logical analysis.
For example, whether there are 0, 1, 2, or even 5 or 10 spiritual dimensions is not something we can assert as true or false — not because it's necessarily wrong, but because there's no way to empirically verify or falsify it.

A key thing you leave out is that logical positivism asserts that scientific facts are the only actual kinds of facts, and that everything else must necessarily be false.

That's not a "strength" ~ that's just Scientism, to put it bluntly.

Scientific experimentation cannot tell us about the meaning of life, why we like apples over bananas, why we like the colour red and not the colour blue, why we like rock music and dislike classical. (these are just random examples, by the way) Science fails to tell us why some things are considered morally correct, and others not.

A nice article I found:

https://philosophynow.org/issues/133/Ein...Positivism

Logical positivism was a philosophical movement of the 1920s and 30s which wanted to introduce the methodology of science and mathematics to philosophy. As part of this ambition, the Vienna Circle (Wiener Kreis in German) of logical positivists tried to purge philosophy of metaphysics – by which they meant any speculation that could not be tested using the methods of modern empirical science. The members of the Vienna Circle, including its nominal leader Moritz Schlick, found the speculative claims of traditional metaphysics, especially those based on religion, to be false, uncertain, or sterile. For Rudolph Carnap, another influential member of the Circle, “the (pseudo)statements of metaphysics do not serve for the description of states of affairs.” They are, like poetry and music, “in the domain of art and not in the domain of theory” (from ‘The End of Metaphysics?’ in Western Philosophy: An Anthology, edited by John Cottingham). Carnap confidently proclaimed that in the Circle’s new materialist philosophy of science, “a radical elimination of metaphysics is attained, which was not yet possible from the earlier anti-metaphysical standpoints.”

In fact, the logical positivists dismissed all non-scientific speculation altogether, not just in philosophy, insisting that all statements and theories are literally meaningless unless they can be logically verified or checked by experiment or observation. This is the so-called verification principle. A.J. Ayer was not a member of the Vienna Circle, but was powerfully influenced by it, and sprang its ideas upon the English-speaking world with his book Language, Truth and Logic. He argued that every verifiable proposition is meaningful (though it may be either true or false), and any unprovable claim, whether about science or metaphysics or the existence of God, is meaningless. Claims about ethics, he said, are also unverifiable so their only meaning can be as expressions of our emotional attitudes. According to verificationism, the meaning of any statement lies in its method of verification.

Soon, Karl Popper in his Logic of Scientific Discovery pointed out a problem with verification: no number of observations that agree with a theory can ever conclusively prove it true. A classic example is the claim that “all swans are white.” Not even a large number of sightings of white swans will prove this true, but even a single sighting of a non-white swan will disprove it (‘falsify it’). He argued that a “theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice… the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.” So for Popper falsifiability, not verifiability, is the test which distinguishes genuine science from what Popper called ‘pseudo-science’ – or ‘metaphysics’.

[Laird]

I understand why logical positivism can come across as narrow. But from my point of view, that’s actually part of its strength. It provides a clear framework for separating what we can reasonably investigate or discuss in terms of truth claims, from what lies outside empirical or logical analysis.
For example, whether there are 0, 1, 2, or even 5 or 10 spiritual dimensions is not something we can assert as true or false — not because it's necessarily wrong, but because there's no way to empirically verify or falsify it.

You sort of skirted vaguely around the first issue I raised, so I'll ask an explicit question to confront it directly:

Do you accept that sentences of that form –"There are n spiritual dimensions", where n is an integer ≥ 0 – contain propositionally meaningful content, or, in other words, that each of them expresses a meaningful proposition, and thus that they are truth-apt, or, in other words, that each one is either true or false?

Note that in asking that, I am explicitly asking you to ignore whether or not we can know or ascertain or even investigate what each one's truth value is (i.e., whether it is true or false); I am simply asking you to acknowledge that, as meaningful propositions, statements of that form necessarily are either true or false, regardless of which one it is, and whether any of us knows or can know what it is.

You sort of skirted vaguely around the first issue I raised, so I'll ask an explicit question to confront it directly:

Do you accept that sentences of that form –"There are n spiritual dimensions", where n is an integer ≥ 0 – contain propositionally meaningful content, or, in other words, that each of them expresses a meaningful proposition, and thus that they are truth-apt, or, in other words, that each one is either true or false?

Note that in asking that, I am explicitly asking you to ignore whether or not we can know or ascertain or even investigate what each one's truth value is (i.e., whether it is true or false); I am simply asking you to acknowledge that, as meaningful propositions, statements of that form necessarily are either true or false, regardless of which one it is, and whether any of us knows or can know what it is.

I agree that from the standpoint of formal logic, the sentence “There are n spiritual dimensions” is well-formed and, strictly speaking, either true or false. But from a logical positivist perspective, the deeper issue is that the question itself is meaningless, because the terms involved can’t be empirically defined or verified. So the sentence has propositional form, but it doesn’t express a cognitively meaningful proposition, which means we can’t meaningfully assign it a truth value at all.

I agree that from the standpoint of formal logic, the sentence “There are n spiritual dimensions” is well-formed and, strictly speaking, either true or false. But from a logical positivist perspective, the deeper issue is that the question itself is meaningless, because the terms involved can’t be empirically defined or verified. So the sentence has propositional form, but it doesn’t express a cognitively meaningful proposition, which means we can’t meaningfully assign it a truth value at all.

That is an incredibly narrow of looking at things. Imagine a QM text that states, for every physical system there is a wavefunction  Ψ that .......

At that point the function  Ψ is pretty much undefined, and you couldn't sensibly give it a truth value until a lot more information about  Ψ is specified.

Imagine how Einstein must have groped about to come up with GR. Scientists have to deal with much vaguer ideas when inventing new concepts!

Personally I don't think we have to talk about God in these discussions. I mean it seems to me that injecting omniscience or omnipotence into a discussion is like inserting ∞ into a set of equations - a quick way to produce nonsense.

David

That is an incredibly narrow of looking at things. Imagine a QM text that states, for every physical system there is a wavefunction  Ψ that .......
At that point the function  Ψ is pretty much undefined, and you couldn't sensibly give it a truth value until a lot more information about  Ψ is specified

….

David

Exactly - which is why any physical/quantum chemistry textbook I know of defines Ψ in terms of the corresponding Hamiltonian for that specific physical system. The wavefunction only becomes meaningful when it's tied to observable, measurable properties through the Hamiltonian operator - this is completely in accordance with logical positivism's requirement that meaningful statements must be empirically verifiable.

I agree that from the standpoint of formal logic, the sentence “There are n spiritual dimensions” is well-formed and, strictly speaking, either true or false. But from a logical positivist perspective, the deeper issue is that the question itself is meaningless, because the terms involved can’t be empirically defined or verified. So the sentence has propositional form, but it doesn’t express a cognitively meaningful proposition, which means we can’t meaningfully assign it a truth value at all

But multiple subjects have independently had spiritual experiences of apparently other realities, therefore they have empirically experienced them.

What you mean is a scientific definition, or scientifically verified evidence of non-physical realities, which by definition has never been possible, because science is locked into a Materialist bias, physical tools, and so can never see beyond the physical at current.

Psychedelics involve experiencing different realities, OBEs involve layers above this one, NDEs involve coming close to the afterlife reality, veridical NDEs can be empirically verified ~ these can be indirectly defined and verified, yet the researcher themselves cannot empirically define and verify them for another.

You can't poke them in a petri dish. Yet they empirically exist for those that have experienced them.

That is an incredibly narrow of looking at things. Imagine a QM text that states, for every physical system there is a wavefunction  Ψ that .......

At that point the function  Ψ is pretty much undefined, and you couldn't sensibly give it a truth value until a lot more information about  Ψ is specified.

Imagine how Einstein must have groped about to come up with GR. Scientists have to deal with much vaguer ideas when inventing new concepts!

Personally I don't think we have to talk about God in these discussions. I mean it seems to me that injecting omniscience or omnipotence into a discussion is like inserting ∞ into a set of equations - a quick way to produce nonsense.

David

Indeed ~ spiritual dimensions stand on their own. References to "God" and whatnot have no meaning in such discussions ~ but it demonstrates a lack of understand between the difference between the religious and spiritual.