Adrenal responses and lifting cars

[IronFist]

Anyone wanna talk about how auras relate to the whole bioelectric/qi thing?

[Merryprankster]

you must first pre-suppose its existence

no.

no it doesn't. pre-supposing something exists allows me to do two things:

1. create a self-consistent framework, however inaccurate that framework might be.

2. have faith regardless of the outcome.


creating a testable hypothesis may involve making an assumption regarding causation. i presuppose existance of nothing in this scenario. there is a cognitive difference, even if they are colloquially similar. one process is prejudgment, the other reserves judgment and is willing to modify, discard and move on should evidence dictate.

even then, i don't have to assume the thing i'm lasking questions about exists! i can just look to the results of my experiment, re: the specific question.

words mean things. definitions matter. semantics are important.

for instance, infinite and finite without bound aren't the same no matter how much people try to equate them.

[Merryprankster]

as there is ife in all of the universe down to life beginning at the very smallest and lightest particle..........................

as an example my above, your quotation presupposes chi. it argues from itself. teleological - nothing LEADS you to this conclusion, logically.

you choose to believe it "because." this is fine but suffers from the same problem as christian apology.

[Ford Prefect]

I have to start coming here on weekends.

[scotty1]

Don't do it Ford!

[Nick Forrer]

A few points

1) Mp is correct- to tentatively posit the existence of something- i.e. to ask yourself questions of the form: what would it be like for x to exist; what tangible effects would x have and thus what kind of observations would corroborate x's existence, what kind of empirical data would allow us to distinguish the presence of x from the absence of x- is different from an argument that has to presuppose (however tacitly) the existence of x in order to prove that x exists.

2) The every day language in which problems are formulated often contains ambiguities that can lead to unwarranted conclusions if one is not careful. Statements that have as their subject terms nouns that refer to non existent entities - such as 'Santa claus does not exist' - are particularly notorious in this regard. Is this statement true or false? True obviously, and yet how is it possible to make true statements about things which do not exist? To deny that Santa Claus exists dont we first have to (in some sense of the word) presuppose that Santa Claus exists? Is non existence a property of Santa Claus? How can non existent things even have properties?

3) A hypothesis formulated in sufficiently general and vague terms will be easy to corroborate. However this is not an explanatory virtue but a vice. The true test of the scientific credentials of a theory (i.e. what Popper terms 'a criterion of demarcation between science and pseudo science') is not how many observations confirm it but how easily an osbservation could (in theory) disprove it.

To illustrate

Consider Marx's prediction that whenever a Capitalist society became sufficiently riddled with its own internal contradictions it would succumb to a revolution. Every time you point to society X as a counter example and say - x is capitalist- why hasn't there been a revolution there? Marx can reply - because it isnt sufficiently riddled with internal contradicitions yet. In other words he can fit every attempted refutation into his theory without having to modify it because it (his theory) is formulated in sufficiently general terms to allow for such an accomodation.

Now contrast this with Einsteins predicition (based on a counter intuitive leap of logic, not observation) that gravity affects the path of light. Eddington was able to confirm this by looking at the position of a star during a solar eclipse and noting that its position in the sky was different from at night (because the gravity of the sun bent the light that it emitted during the day). However the important thing was not that he confirmed Einsteins conjecture but that he failed to disprove it which would have been very easy to do were it not true. All that it would have taken to prove Einstein wrong would be for the star to be in the same position during the eclipse . What is notable about Einsteins theory (which distinguishes it from Marx's) is the amount of risk associated with it. The theory makes clear exactly what kind of observation would be required to refute it.

4) In the absence of concrete evidence to the contrary scientists will often posit the existence of something to 'plug the gap' in a an otherwise elegant theory. Sometimes the thing posited will turn out to exist and sometimes not - Darwin posited the existence of a certain kind of long nosed insect when he came across a flower that would require such an insect for pollination- he turned out to be correct. A more recent example- Scientists posit the existence of dark matter because their theories require it- there remains no empirical evidence of it existing though.

5) A belief in Science is distinct from a scientific belief