How many philosophies can handle premonition?

[Papus79]

There is a mountain of evidence, but intuition is unruly and cannot simply be called up on demand. Conscious awareness is the mere tip of the iceberg of consciousness. Most of us are aware of only an infinitesimal amount of what is going on within or around us, but some people's sphere of conscious awareness is much greater than average. When awareness is highly refined and focused in a particular field such as art or science, we call it genius. There can also be a more general sort of psychological or intuitive genius that is more fluid and difficult to categorize.

Kundalini events are a fascinating lot too. it doesn't take apophenia or intuition to know whether or not your spine feels like it's been set on fire from the base upward.

[Consul]

I agree with calling random events, random and calling related events, related. Though most users of the term "coincidence" feel they are communicating clearly.

Coincidence isn't the same as randomness. Coincidence is the spatiotemporal co-occurrence of events which don't stand in causal relations to each other and aren't effects of a common cause. Coincident events may be random events, but they may as well be nonrandom events.

[Felix]

Kundalini events are a fascinating lot too.

Yes, one of the stranger chronicles about it -- https://amzn.to/33Vo2BK

[NickGaspar]

Felix: those who believe that one can only gather information through one's five senses will claim such abilities are impossible - which in a sense is true because they don't seem to be possible for them.

NickGaspar: Sure.... are there any objective, sufficient evidence? that's all you need and you got my attention!

There is a mountain of evidence, but intuition is unruly and cannot simply be called up on demand. Conscious awareness is the mere tip of the iceberg of consciousness. Most of us are aware of only an infinitesimal amount of what is going on within or around us, but some people's sphere of conscious awareness is much greater than average. When awareness is highly refined and focused in a particular field such as art or science, we call it genius. There can also be a more general sort of psychological or intuitive genius that is more fluid and difficult to categorize.

I have enrolled to numerous Moocs on the Mind and consciousness, but I have never heard such claims about consciousness (as an iceberg etc) which are not shared by Science.
Consciousness is only the 3rd important mind property. First is Awakeness and the second is Awareness (Self awareness,of your environment) Third comes consciousness through which we can direct our attention either on our self,organic or environment important stimuli.
This is our current understanding of those mind properties.
Now I also don't know what you mean by the word ''intuition'' but its nothing more than a heuristic. Its always there, part of our fast mode thinking (or Zombie mode as Dr. Terrence Sejnowski labels it) and we can skip it only by using our Slow mode thinking(analytical, logical). The second mode demands resources (energy) and time and we often allow the first mode to rule.
So I think its better to start with definitions to be sure that we are in the same page and then the references of those claims.

[NickGaspar]

Nick, would I be correct in suggesting the idea here that you're not an empiricist, and sort of the other degree that you likely wouldn't agree with science that clashes with philosophic first-principles that you're entertaining as reality or truth?

I am a Methodological Naturalist. This means that I accept empiricism as a type of limit in our observations and in science. So Empiricism is currently a Pragmatic Necessity for our Reasoning not a philosophical bias as in a worldview. Any speculation beyond empirical evaluation is valid as an attempt form hypotheses but the acceptance of such speculations as our belief is an irrational act!
Now as a Methodological Naturalism I don't deal with evaluations like absolute reality or truth. In MN and in science in general we can only construct TENTATIVE hypotheses based solely on our current facts. We know that our observations change along with our technology (evolution of technical apparatus) and so do our facts. So we can only evaluate the truth value of a claim in relation to our current facts....not to an absolute ideas of truth.

The problem I have with that approach is that science is *constantly* tapping philosophy back in on its path, and very few of our purely intellectual speculations are ever correct because we're living in a world of such high complexity, what Vervaeke often brings up as combinatorially explosive, that our intellectual inklings and models will normally only ever touch on what we see. Part of why science has to get extremely specific in its claims is for the removal of variables.

Science is an essential step in Philosophy as Aristotle acknowledged in his grand work to systematize Philosophy.
Its the only tool we have with an empirical methodology which sets strict standards and doesn't allow speculations with unknown truth value to sneak in our epistemology. Science is the sole reason why our Natural Philosophy experienced this amazing run away success in epistemology, from the Renaissance till this day!
The "tapping" you mentioned on philosophy is done by Skepticism(the urge to be as correct as possible) not science. Skepticism uses Science to do the tapping because science has demonstrated the epistemic potential of its methodologies and Philosophy has demonstrated how bad it can derail our intellectual efforts if we let "her" unchecked!

That said - totalizing ontological worldviews, whether reductive materialist, theist, pantheist/panentheist, idealist, neutral monist, or whatever else tend to be private matters, some people will debate them with others to see whether the worldview they hold is as well-informed as they believe it is, others will try proselytizing but the problem I find with the later is that the quality of criticism is rarely of a useful quality.

My view is that all those positions are irrational and unjustified. We need to introduce logic and identify the default position by using the Null Hypothesis. Accepting our limits in our observation,our understanding our testing methods and accepting our current epistemology as the best we currently have , should be the foundation of our philosophy.
We know that intuition is not a credible pathway to knowledge so we should never base our philosophy on such heuristics. Methodological Naturalism is the single most reliable way to approach any question in life. We need to accept our limitations in what we can observe and accept our current facts and theories as tentative...this is all that we can do).

That said though the question is a question, it is a specific question, how many philosophies can handle premonition. It can indeed be answered even by people who are flatly agnostic, or even antagonistic to the idea of premonition being real, because the concept of what it's claimed to be is pretty clear cut - ie. knowledge of the future, and so the question is which models of cosmology have the future or some coherent version of it already existing and potentially accessible.

I won't address this paragraph since this is a useless topic in my opinion. The number of philosophies "handling premonitions" say nothing for the epistemic capabilities of this heuristic. Its like evaluating an ad populum fallacy. The statistics of our intuition being right or wrong have never passed the mark of random chance so we don't have any justification to treat them differently.

[NickGaspar]

Well it isn't "dishonesty". I only mentioned an example on a common misconception people have.

as if that explanation applies in the case of his mother.

As the years pass we tend to "add" things in our stories or when we are young we are gullible to what older people tell us.

And here you are mind reading, in the sense that you assuming this is applicable in his case.

It is one thing to say 'I would need more to be convinced myself'. It is another to explain what is going on in his mother's case.

I am not dismissing your claim at all, I only state that I found other explanations far more probable than someone being able to foresee the future or to sense things and I only do that because you can not back up your claim with evidence. I am open for any claims if evidence are provided but I can not lower my standards because I need to be sure about the truth value of the claims I accept.

Sure, but at the same time you need to be careful about assuming that your model of 'these experiences' is corrent in any case that comes up. There is a middle path and one that is more rational. To assume your model applies here to his mother is mere speculation.

I am not the one making the claims here Karpel. I only point to well known and possible scenarios that could explain his case without the need to assume a scenario with an unknown "possibility status". There are scientists for so many years evaluating cases of intuition but somehow....such anecdotal stories seem to avoid evaluation under laboratory conditions!!!! strange?

[NickGaspar]

That's not what I said, and it sounds like you're using a private definition of 'intuition' as anything you personally disagree with or don't believe. That's a great way to never learn much of anything but - some people are into that.

That was not a definition, since it includes the word intuition.... It was a description of Human behavior!> Humans are Creative and imaginative so when they reach their limits in their observations or understanding they tend to pick an explanatory story that fits their philosophical predispositions which in turn shapes their ''intuition"....again zero definition "inside".[/quote]

I did talk about falsifiability, I did talk about what it is for people to perform scientific experiments on what's falsifiable, that you're repeatedly claiming is unfalsifiable, and I mentioned a particular research experiment where reductive materialists are getting results too far above chance right along side other researchers. Is it only the scientific method or falsifiable, and not intuition, when you agree with it?

Intuition is needed when we can not test or falsify a claim/position. If it is falsifiable we can wait for the results and be sure about it.
The problem arises when people follow they intuition and side with a story even if it beyond any investigation. So I never said that you talked about falsifiability. The concept is in every position that demands intuition to be accepted. Why is this so difficult???
Now I won't side with "reductive materialists"(whatever this label means) since I am a Methodological Naturalist and I avoid irrational positions.

"Is it only the scientific method or falsifiable, and not intuition, when you agree with it"

I don't get your point..can you elaborate?

You're repeatedly, and constantly, crow-barring in gut feelings. No one else is.

Kahneman showed that gut feelings depend either on unconscious environmental cues that "silently informing"s us about an event (which is the most reliable type of intuitive thinking) or a heuristic based on our philosophical bias. Unfortunately speculations that we can not investigated are base on the second heuristic type.
I am the only one crow barring in gut feelings because its not a reliable pathway to truth and in unfalsifiable cases its a useless practice.

In my opinion this is not philosophy but an attempt to category philosophical views. In order to do Philosophy its essential to be informed about the limits of our heuristics and how they are informed by our vices.

... and agree with you on everything it seems.
[/quote]
If you agreed with me then you should be able to understand why gut feelings is not a reliable pathway to knowledge of wisdom.
Is there a position that we can not accept on gut feeling alone?

[Papus79]

I am a Methodological Naturalist. This means that I accept empiricism as a type of limit in our observations and in science. So Empiricism is currently a Pragmatic Necessity for our Reasoning not a philosophical bias as in a worldview. Any speculation beyond empirical evaluation is valid as an attempt form hypotheses but the acceptance of such speculations as our belief is an irrational act!
Now as a Methodological Naturalism I don't deal with evaluations like absolute reality or truth. In MN and in science in general we can only construct TENTATIVE hypotheses based solely on our current facts. We know that our observations change along with our technology (evolution of technical apparatus) and so do our facts. So we can only evaluate the truth value of a claim in relation to our current facts....not to an absolute ideas of truth.

So I would agree that empiricism is an incredibly useful tool, I don't know if I'm mistaken in the idea that by empiricism people strictly mean external sensory observation - I think it's something of a mistake to completely void internal 'x happened' sorts of facts, they can be trickier to suss out because seeing certain things in your own mind, in dreams, having a mystical experience, etc. tends to be highly symbolic and it take a lot of skepticism, as you put it further down, to stick with relationships between things and stick with psychological or physiological explanations until or unless you actually hit such a point where psychological or physiological explanations - or at least psychology and physiology as we conceive of them to date - fail to adequately explain what's been observed.

That said - totalizing ontological worldviews, whether reductive materialist, theist, pantheist/panentheist, idealist, neutral monist, or whatever else tend to be private matters, some people will debate them with others to see whether the worldview they hold is as well-informed as they believe it is, others will try proselytizing but the problem I find with the later is that the quality of criticism is rarely of a useful quality.

My view is that all those positions are irrational and unjustified. We need to introduce logic and identify the default position by using the Null Hypothesis. Accepting our limits in our observation,our understanding our testing methods and accepting our current epistemology as the best we currently have , should be the foundation of our philosophy.

So I'll state where I agree first. Science provides the closest thing we can get to what we might think of as 'certain' knowledge but it's only relatively certain if you take outcomes at their minimum face value. If an experiment establishes that there is a relationship between x and y and it's repeated enough times with the same result then you've found a reliable relationship. The scientific endeavor works to make sense of reality as best it can by establishing as many of those relatively solid links as possible so that we know where we have stable platforms to work from. Part of why it's been so successful culturally, aside from the technology and innovation it's given, is that it's given people a more certain and solid sense of the world - ie. it's much easier to conduct a society with a pool of agreed on scientific facts rather than religious or metaphysical beliefs in the public sphere (or worse - warring tribes) is much more readily bridged in it's commonality and a lot of our Darwinian jetsam, ie. the stuff that's holding us back on social progress, is also much easier to successfully defeat albeit we're finding out in current politics that there are areligious ways that evolution can attempt to pry knowledge and stability away from culture - the strange applications of postmodernism to dissect and attack science in reason is a good example of how this can happen without a theology.

Where I would disagree is this - you should not accept current epistemology without caveats. The caveats would be that if you have sufficient reason to disagree with the current epistemology it becomes somewhat your responsibility to do what you can to understand the nature of those disagreements, what it is your seeing that culture seems to turn a blind eye on, and from there you also have to attack your own disagreement with as many of the popular explanations - especially the highest quality ones - to see if they actually do resolve the problem. If they don't and it's a simple enough problem that you can perform some type of thorough scientific experiment on your own then you should do it, if you're nobody it's unlikely that you'll be submitting your results to any peer-reviewed journal that's worth submitting it to, and from that perspective you'd write up your experiment as precisely and thoroughly as possible along with a meticulous explanation of protocol, that will at least improve your odds of being able to send it to a college professor or someone with tenure who might be interested in trying it themselves, seeing if they get the same result, sticking their name to it, and submitting it to a real journal. On the other hand what your looking at won't always be that clean or tidy, that is when you can perform a scientific experiment right off the top you're dealing with something that I'd call 'low-hanging-fruit', ie. it's an easy conflict to put to the test and resolve. If it's a much more complex conflict you may need to spend a lot more time with it trying to carve the problem at it's joints and then figuring out - if you could come up with an experiment that would establish a firm link between what you're observing and what's already 'generally accepted' science - what that experiment would look like, and again as a private experimenter the $$ needed to vet or falsify the hypothesis would need to be in your financial means, ie. you don't get to run a trial with 1000 people or ask if you can borrow CERN for a minute.

The other piece of this is 'generally accepted' science. While I'll admit things aren't quite as bad as they were maybe 100 to 150 years ago we're still in a position where our ability to give all of it a fair hearing and analysis is still marred by a political and cultural battle. On one hand we have a lot of purely historical contingencies that have shaped our culture. For example there were a lot of people playing with forms of mind-matter monism, like Neoplatonism and Hermeticism, in the early and mid Renaissance, a lot of that was crushed by the Reformation and then the Catholic Counter-Reformation, which pushed institutional Christianity into something much more literal. By the time you get to the Calvinists and Puritans internal experience and imagination are seen as being of the devil (in a way I suppose, if we think of that as the place where the subconscious parts of the brain and more animalistic parts of our circuitry try to persuade us to serve their ends they weren't entirely wrong in that) and this combined with the sort of dualism Descartes talked about for culture to get the sense that there were heaven, hell, angels, demons, all kinds of external realities, that the world was sort of just a machine, and that nothing useful was going on internally with people. As science advanced and started to rip down the dogmatic and literal assessments of reality made by religion, and with religion being increasingly literal and wrong ideas about the world, we took dualism and lobbed off the beings, heaven, hell, etc. because it didn't seem like it was needed and the people who claimed authority on such things were reliably wrong in their predictions and assessments of reality.

If we look at the 19th century that was really the heyday of what you might think of as Newtonian materialism. People were being told that they were better off not going into physics by the end of that century because there were only a couple mysteries that needed to be solved. Radioactivity and QM took us in a completely different direction in terms of understanding fundamental particles and the nature of their behavior. As of the early 21st century now we really thought we'd have consciousness itself under wraps with some sort of theory for how neurons generate consciousness but that's increasingly looking unlikely and we're contending with the problem David Chalmers posed as the hard problem - ie. how would completely non-sentient matter give rise to sentience, or what exactly is special about neurons, as a form of matter, to switch the lights on? The theories that actually start with subjective experience and work their way outward, like IIT and similar, will probably be our best bet on having some sort of chance at seeing patterns in nature or in the brain that actually map on to what we'd anticipate from the structure and functioning of subjective experience.

What's important about that last part - it could very well turn out that the right people in academia will say the right thing, it could be something nearly identical to something that someone like William Blake or Jacob Boehme would have claimed about mind, and they would do absolutely everything in their power to break any possible connection between what they've established by research vs. what an earlier commentator, by different methods and especially methods associated to be connected with institutions or cultural currents antagonistic to their own, might have said that matched their experimental observations verbatim. To a degree they're right to do that for a couple reasons - 1) there are tons of people out there who aren't crazy about reality, want to believe whatever they want to believe (ie. won't think critically), and they'll cede all kind of social power to psychopaths and con-artists which is what a large part of the Enlightenment was about fixing and 2) they've been beating the absolute certainty of reductive materialism drum so hard for so long (even identifying reductive materialism or increasingly matter-bound explanations for everything as the epitome of progress) that moving away from that is really embarrassing and they need a side-door to save face and to keep power they'd figure that they need to do as much as they can to convince people that they weren't wrong about that.

That last part, obviously, isn't science but politics. It's part of why it's probably a much better idea to worry about the integrity of the process of the scientific method and whether that's staying relatively in-tact in our culture much more than worrying about flippant remarks that one physicist or even bow-tie wearing guy with a bachelors who likes science might say about the current state of knowledge.

We know that intuition is not a credible pathway to knowledge so we should never base our philosophy on such heuristics. Methodological Naturalism is the single most reliable way to approach any question in life. We need to accept our limitations in what we can observe and accept our current facts and theories as tentative...this is all that we can do).

Is intuition equal to an observation or a set of observations that hasn't yet had a spate of peer-reviewed articles in mainstream papers? Might sound like a strange question but for the last few pages of this thread it seems to be what you're implying.

That said though the question is a question, it is a specific question, how many philosophies can handle premonition. It can indeed be answered even by people who are flatly agnostic, or even antagonistic to the idea of premonition being real, because the concept of what it's claimed to be is pretty clear cut - ie. knowledge of the future, and so the question is which models of cosmology have the future or some coherent version of it already existing and potentially accessible.

I won't address this paragraph since this is a useless topic in my opinion. The number of philosophies "handling premonitions" say nothing for the epistemic capabilities of this heuristic. Its like evaluating an ad populum fallacy. The statistics of our intuition being right or wrong have never passed the mark of random chance so we don't have any justification to treat them differently.

Whether or not you find the topic interesting is somewhat indifferent. Do we have the right to talk about it without your express permission?

[Papus79]

That's not what I said, and it sounds like you're using a private definition of 'intuition' as anything you personally disagree with or don't believe. That's a great way to never learn much of anything but - some people are into that.

That was not a definition, since it includes the word intuition.... It was a description of Human behavior!> Humans are Creative and imaginative so when they reach their limits in their observations or understanding they tend to pick an explanatory story that fits their philosophical predispositions which in turn shapes their ''intuition"....again zero definition "inside".

So an observation is an observation. There are all kinds of mental gymnastics a person 'could' do to try and stretch and bend many observations into something they aren't but sometimes, even often enough, there can just be two or three observations that suggest in and of themselves things that don't sit well within a popular paradigm of the times. That doesn't breed certainty that they're wrong or fanciful, it doesn't breed certainty that they're right or that the person who experienced them is going to change the world, much more likely the person who experienced them is going to have a heck of a lot of due diligence ahead of them to figure out what exactly it was that they observed and especially if they genuinely care what's true or not true they're kind of trapped, ie. they have to either thoroughly prove to themselves that they did everything they could to falsify the notion and that it withstood their tests or, if it doesn't withstand their tests, it's equally important that they find explanatory closure on what it is that happened - anything short of that they're stuck with a mystery that they're willfully ignoring.

I did talk about falsifiability, I did talk about what it is for people to perform scientific experiments on what's falsifiable, that you're repeatedly claiming is unfalsifiable, and I mentioned a particular research experiment where reductive materialists are getting results too far above chance right along side other researchers. Is it only the scientific method or falsifiable, and not intuition, when you agree with it?

Intuition is needed when we can not test or falsify a claim/position. If it is falsifiable we can wait for the results and be sure about it.
The problem arises when people follow they intuition and side with a story even if it beyond any investigation. So I never said that you talked about falsifiability. The concept is in every position that demands intuition to be accepted. Why is this so difficult???

From this I really don't think you followed what I said. Do you know what the Ganzfeld experiment is?

"Is it only the scientific method or falsifiable, and not intuition, when you agree with it"

I don't get your point..can you elaborate?

I think the best way to elaborate is to emphasize my earlier question - are intuitions observations?

You're repeatedly, and constantly, crow-barring in gut feelings. No one else is.

Kahneman showed that gut feelings depend either on unconscious environmental cues that "silently informing"s us about an event (which is the most reliable type of intuitive thinking) or a heuristic based on our philosophical bias. Unfortunately speculations that we can not investigated are base on the second heuristic type.
I am the only one crow barring in gut feelings because its not a reliable pathway to truth and in unfalsifiable cases its a useless practice.

Do you believe its possible for anyone to pry reason away from intuition or do you believe that it's impossible for a person whose reasoning intuitively to know that they're thinking intuitively? I ask because it seems like anyone in this thread so far who's disagreeing with you is having 'gut feelings' even when those gut feelings are observations.

If you agreed with me then you should be able to understand why gut feelings is not a reliable pathway to knowledge of wisdom.
Is there a position that we can not accept on gut feeling alone?

I'd simply disagree that observations and data qualify as gut feelings. If it were otherwise we couldn't do science.

[NickGaspar]

So I would agree that empiricism is an incredibly useful tool, I don't know if I'm mistaken in the idea that by empiricism people strictly mean external sensory observation - I think it's something of a mistake to completely void internal 'x happened' sorts of facts, they can be trickier to suss out because seeing certain things in your own mind, in dreams, having a mystical experience, etc. tends to be highly symbolic and it take a lot of skepticism, as you put it further down, to stick with relationships between things and stick with psychological or physiological explanations until or unless you actually hit such a point where psychological or physiological explanations - or at least psychology and physiology as we conceive of them to date - fail to adequately explain what's been observed.

Let's clarify those terms so we can be sure about what we are in agreement.
Empiricism is a philosophical theory, a declaration based on the fact that we need to "crosscheck" our claims in relation to empirical facts in order to be sure that we deal with knowledge claims not a bias opinion, faith based belief, coincidence or a low statistical probability.
Methodological Naturalism does NOT adopt the absolute claim of Empiricism. It only uses Empirical Evaluation in its standards of evidence, since we are human being with weaknesses, heuristic and biases and we need to be sure that our epistemology is free from all that.
So in science empirical evaluation is a criterion, empiricism is viewed as part of our current limitations in our methodologies and mystical experiences, mirages, dreams, personal revelation, intuition etc are not accepted on face value. They need to be empirically verified too. Do we have a record on how good those types of claims do in our epistemology? Yes and its a real bad one! In fact none of our current scientific frameworks are products of such type of "revelation".
So in science and in philosophy is not "wrong" to make intuitive claims BUT it is Irrational to accepted them before they are verified.
Can you identify a scientific framework or a mathematical formulation product of intuitive thinking ALONE that ever made it in our official scientific epistemology?

So I'll state where I agree first. Science provides the closest thing we can get to what we might think of as 'certain' knowledge but it's only relatively certain if you take outcomes at their minimum face value. If an experiment establishes that there is a relationship between x and y and it's repeated enough times with the same result then you've found a reliable relationship. The scientific endeavor works to make sense of reality as best it can by establishing as many of those relatively solid links as possible so that we know where we have stable platforms to work from. Part of why it's been so successful culturally, aside from the technology and innovation it's given, is that it's given people a more certain and solid sense of the world - ie. it's much easier to conduct a society with a pool of agreed on scientific facts rather than religious or metaphysical beliefs in the public sphere (or worse - warring tribes) is much more readily bridged in it's commonality and a lot of our Darwinian jetsam, ie. the stuff that's holding us back on social progress, is also much easier to successfully defeat albeit we're finding out in current politics that there are areligious ways that evolution can attempt to pry knowledge and stability away from culture - the strange applications of postmodernism to dissect and attack science in reason is a good example of how this can happen without a theology.

Science systematically provides instrumentally valuable "claims" about the world which are in agreement with Current facts. This is what scientific knowledge is. Science doesn't deal with relative or absolute certainty or absolute truth. Everything is tentative and changes since our facts about the world change with our ability to make more accurate observations.

Now the theory of evolution IS a FACT! I don't know why you keep pushing it in the realm of religious metaphysics.
ITs the oldest framework we have which describes, explains, predicts and produces technical applications. *all 4 goods of a scientific theory".
Evolution and the hypothesis of common ancestry is not the reason why people get divided. The problem arises from religious indoctrination and their Death Denying Ideologies(Ernest Becker) that evolution renders them irrelevant at best. So I agree, religious dogmas and unfalsifiable metaphysics collide with scientific frameworks like evolution so we need to stop organized indoctrination, teach kids Basic Logic and Scientific principles, Inform them why ideas based on intuition and ineffable revelations should not be accepted on face value.

Where I would disagree is this - you should not accept current epistemology without caveats. The caveats would be that if you have sufficient reason to disagree with the current epistemology it becomes somewhat your responsibility to do what you can to understand the nature of those disagreements, what it is your seeing that culture seems to turn a blind eye on, and from there you also have to attack your own disagreement with as many of the popular explanations - especially the highest quality ones - to see if they actually do resolve the problem.

I don't think that you understand the position of Methodological Naturalism or science.
As I said MANY times, all scientific knowledge is our tentative position about the world's phenomena. In science we don't have dogmas but only FALSIFIABLE frameworks! This means that every time we use the principles of a theory to make a prediction (like in QM to calculate the position of a particles, or in Evolution to produce vaccines or a new organism to fit in a specific environmental niche, or in gravity or astrodynamics) we constantly put to test that framework and any other connected theory. So in science we don't accept our rrent epistemology without caveats.
i.e. Europe spent 5 billion euros and 20 + years to construct the LHC in Cern in order to test, once again, the Standard Model and how accurate it describes our world. Are you familiar with any other method that would spend so much money and time just to test a well accepted framework which is in use everyday, producing goods and solutions?
So we don't accept anything on face value in science....but we also don't reject frameworks that are instrumentally useful and epistemically connected to the rest of our epistemology just because we had a charming intuitive idea. In order to do metaphysics we need to step on our current knowledge in order to have a valid starting point.

If they don't and it's a simple enough problem that you can perform some type of thorough scientific experiment on your own then you should do it, if you're nobody it's unlikely that you'll be submitting your results to any peer-reviewed journal that's worth submitting it to, and from that perspective you'd write up your experiment as precisely and thoroughly as possible along with a meticulous explanation of protocol, that will at least improve your odds of being able to send it to a college professor or someone with tenure who might be interested in trying it themselves, seeing if they get the same result, sticking their name to it, and submitting it to a real journal. On the other hand what your looking at won't always be that clean or tidy, that is when you can perform a scientific experiment right off the top you're dealing with something that I'd call 'low-hanging-fruit', ie. it's an easy conflict to put to the test and resolve. If it's a much more complex conflict you may need to spend a lot more time with it trying to carve the problem at it's joints and then figuring out - if you could come up with an experiment that would establish a firm link between what you're observing and what's already 'generally accepted' science - what that experiment would look like, and again as a private experimenter the $$ needed to vet or falsify the hypothesis would need to be in your financial means, ie. you don't get to run a trial with 1000 people or ask if you can borrow CERN for a minute.

Ok ....science is difficult! I agree. Does that mean we should lower our guard and our standards of evidence and accept questionable methods like intuition or personal revelations on face value? Can you please explain your point , maybe I am missing something here.

If we look at the 19th century that was really the heyday of what you might think of as Newtonian materialism. People were being told that they were better off not going into physics by the end of that century because there were only a couple mysteries that needed to be solved. Radioactivity and QM took us in a completely different direction in terms of understanding fundamental particles and the nature of their behavior. As of the early 21st century now we really thought we'd have consciousness itself under wraps with some sort of theory for how neurons generate consciousness but that's increasingly looking unlikely and we're contending with the problem David Chalmers posed as the hard problem - ie. how would completely non-sentient matter give rise to sentience, or what exactly is special about neurons, as a form of matter, to switch the lights on? The theories that actually start with subjective experience and work their way outward, like IIT and similar, will probably be our best bet on having some sort of chance at seeing patterns in nature or in the brain that actually map on to what we'd anticipate from the structure and functioning of subjective experience.

Newton's work was on mathematical formulations. It was not part of a Indefensible philosophical worldview (Materialism), but product of science(Methodological Naturalism). What people see in a formulation from a metaphysical aspect, is irrelevant to its descriptive and predictive power. Those who said )in 19th century) that that there were only a couple of mysteries left to be solved, they were factually wrong or scientific illiterate. History of science doesn't mention anything like this...on the contrary, every time we manage to expand the circle of our knowledge,we always make bigger the perimeter of our ignorance.
Now on the the question of the conscious states of the brain. There are competing theories about our conscious states (3 if I am not wrong).
We have the NCC model and the ARASystem and we understand the emergent qualities of the phenomenon. Those who thought that we would have answered all the questions about the human brain , again, were scientifically ignorant about the complexity of the organ and its workings.
DAvid Chalmers "hard problem" is not even a problem...its a shallow deepity and I will explain why I say that.
Lets apply his question to other functions of biology.
" how would completely non-sentient matter give rise to sentience,"
1. How would a completely non-digestive matter give rise to digestion.
2. How would a completely non-glossy matter give rise to glossiness
3. How would a completely non-mitosis matter give rise to mitosis
4.How would a completely non-organic matter give rise to organic elements.
5. How would a completely non-illuminated matter give rise to photons.
Matter just does those things. Again its like asking why a jumping electron produces photos or why the sky can be blue...They just do and we only have to find the mechanism responsible for those results.
The same debate was popular with life from '' inanimate matter.'' We got rid off it and those philosophers immigrated to the next "mysterious' phenomenon, bringing with them all their tricks and "deep questions".
We will have to wait for science to complete its investigation, present its findings........and observe once more all thosePhilosophers transforming their "how" questions to empty "why" questions.

What's important about that last part - it could very well turn out that the right people in academia will say the right thing, it could be something nearly identical to something that someone like William Blake or Jacob Boehme would have claimed about mind, and they would do absolutely everything in their power to break any possible connection between what they've established by research vs. what an earlier commentator, by different methods and especially methods associated to be connected with institutions or cultural currents antagonistic to their own, might have said that matched their experimental observations verbatim. To a degree they're right to do that for a couple reasons - 1) there are tons of people out there who aren't crazy about reality, want to believe whatever they want to believe (ie. won't think critically), and they'll cede all kind of social power to psychopaths and con-artists which is what a large part of the Enlightenment was about fixing and 2) they've been beating the absolute certainty of reductive materialism drum so hard for so long (even identifying reductive materialism or increasingly matter-bound explanations for everything as the epitome of progress) that moving away from that is really embarrassing and they need a side-door to save face and to keep power they'd figure that they need to do as much as they can to convince people that they weren't wrong about that.

- This is a Scientific field of study on the Mind. Why are you insisting to bring in a philosophical worldview and beat down on it? Do you have indications about an alternative realm that we should investigate and with what methodologies? Shouldn't we use science to study the brain and its working?

That last part, obviously, isn't science but politics. It's part of why it's probably a much better idea to worry about the integrity of the process of the scientific method and whether that's staying relatively in-tact in our culture much more than worrying about flippant remarks that one physicist or even bow-tie wearing guy with a bachelors who likes science might say about the current state of knowledge.

We can only do science on what we can observe and test. Brains are observable and we can test which parts and functions of them are Necessary and Sufficient to explain the emergence of mind properties. Till today we don't have the need to assume non physical process in order to explain what we observe by the human brain. SO its not about politics. Its all about Pragmatic Necessity and Sufficiency...those two pillars of causality.

Is intuition equal to an observation or a set of observations that hasn't yet had a spate of peer-reviewed articles in mainstream papers? Might sound like a strange question but for the last few pages of this thread it seems to be what you're implying.

Well we publish hypotheses which are our interpretation of what we observe.
So your question should be are intuitive claims equal to scientific hypotheses? it depends. WHo makes the intuitive claim. How well is he informed and is he familiar with those observations. Is he using credible philosophical principles in his intuitive claim? A scientist can take an intuitive call, but as I said before, intuitive judgments can be based on unconscious cues or experience or etc. So we need a specific example.

Whether or not you find the topic interesting is somewhat indifferent. Do we have the right to talk about it without your express permission?

Why do you ask me? DO you think that you need permission to talk about it???
Don't I have the right not to participate in an ad populum fallacious statement ? I think I have the right to skip this topic since its nothing to do with philosophy. The number of philosophical views enjoying faith based standards (faith in an intuitive call!)says nothing about the useful or truth value of the practice.

[NickGaspar]

So an observation is an observation. There are all kinds of mental gymnastics a person 'could' do to try and stretch and bend many observations into something they aren't but sometimes, even often enough, there can just be two or three observations that suggest in and of themselves things that don't sit well within a popular paradigm of the times. That doesn't breed certainty that they're wrong or fanciful, it doesn't breed certainty that they're right or that the person who experienced them is going to change the world, much more likely the person who experienced them is going to have a heck of a lot of due diligence ahead of them to figure out what exactly it was that they observed and especially if they genuinely care what's true or not true they're kind of trapped, ie. they have to either thoroughly prove to themselves that they did everything they could to falsify the notion and that it withstood their tests or, if it doesn't withstand their tests, it's equally important that they find explanatory closure on what it is that happened - anything short of that they're stuck with a mystery that they're willfully ignoring.

Sure...we can massage anything to fit our biases. This is why in science we have high standards of evidence and we don't accept on face value our interpretations on an observation. This is why we don't accept heuristics without empirical verification.

From this I really don't think you followed what I said. Do you know what the Ganzfeld experiment is?

What about it????!!! How by pointing out that falsifiability is a condition for gut feelings to exist and for clarifying that you never talked about falsifiability ...that brought us to a paranormal claim?

I think the best way to elaborate is to emphasize my earlier question - are intuitions observations?

Again I suggest to read Daniel Kahneman's book. He is a Psychologist and earned a Nobel prize in Economics for those studies on intuition and many other heuristics part of our Fast mode thinking. Intuition can be either cues which we don't consciously realize that we observe them, can be a wishful thought, can be a philosophical bias, can be anything affecting our decision so intuitive claims are not credible.

Do you believe its possible for anyone to pry reason away from intuition or do you believe that it's impossible for a person whose reasoning intuitively to know that they're thinking intuitively? I ask because it seems like anyone in this thread so far who's disagreeing with you is having 'gut feelings' even when those gut feelings are observations.

Sure people are capable of analytic thinking but they do need to identify their biases and logical fallacies (special pleading in their standards of acceptance) and always challenge their presumptions.
Can you bring an example of a "gut feeling" based on observation?

Sure Observations and data are not gut feelings.....but the interpretations of those can be based on a gut feeling when the available data are not conclusive
i.e.We have Quantum mechanics! Our observations have produced more than 10 competing interpretations. Since all of them are unfalsifiable, you will have to make a choice based on your gut feelings right? So gut feeling decisions is what we do when we don't have enough evidence to make a choice based on knowledge. And again''' Is there a position that we can not accept on gut feeling alone? Intuition/premonition/gut feelings were useful ways to avoid a possible hidden predator in the Savannah but its not a rational way to address questions about the ontology of phenomena.

[Papus79]

Let's clarify those terms so we can be sure about what we are in agreement.
Empiricism is a philosophical theory, a declaration based on the fact that we need to "crosscheck" our claims in relation to empirical facts in order to be sure that we deal with knowledge claims not a bias opinion, faith based belief, coincidence or a low statistical probability.
Methodological Naturalism does NOT adopt the absolute claim of Empiricism. It only uses Empirical Evaluation in its standards of evidence, since we are human being with weaknesses, heuristic and biases and we need to be sure that our epistemology is free from all that.

So far so good...

So in science empirical evaluation is a criterion, empiricism is viewed as part of our current limitations in our methodologies and mystical experiences, mirages, dreams, personal revelation, intuition etc are not accepted on face value. They need to be empirically verified too. Do we have a record on how good those types of claims do in our epistemology? Yes and its a real bad one! In fact none of our current scientific frameworks are products of such type of "revelation".

I think the only reason it got to be a thing to believe certain revelations literally was that they fit certain political or philosophic frameworks whom adopted them and plenty, like John's 'Revelation', seemed to have some cryptographic elements.

So in science and in philosophy is not "wrong" to make intuitive claims BUT it is Irrational to accepted them before they are verified.
Can you identify a scientific framework or a mathematical formulation product of intuitive thinking ALONE that ever made it in our official scientific epistemology?

This is merging a few claims actually. Maybe a good analogy - if you're looking for rigorous systems of logic 'from the ether' you can find tens of thousands of pages of 'channeled' content that from the Victorian era. The question of whether they've been useful to the hard sciences (which they haven't) and whether there was an interesting phenomenology to how the information was picked up on or received are two distinct questions. It takes a bit of an odd person to believe that if it comes from an unknown or not-yet-understood source it must be true.

Science systematically provides instrumentally valuable "claims" about the world which are in agreement with Current facts. This is what scientific knowledge is. Science doesn't deal with relative or absolute certainty or absolute truth. Everything is tentative and changes since our facts about the world change with our ability to make more accurate observations.

There are ranges of information that it still handles better than others. This is part of why philosophy is still a thing or why we don't have social psychology cooked down to a set of physics equations (yet...).

Now the theory of evolution IS a FACT! I don't know why you keep pushing it in the realm of religious metaphysics.

That's getting interpolated. I was saying that a large part of what's holding us back in the way of social and intellectual progress is Darwinian baggage in the literal sense, ie. that it's a stochastic process that seems to care much more for immediate environmental fitness or maximized pay-outs than truth (and on social and political levels this constantly threatens to break down sense-making). That's a large part of what the scientific edifice is stuck fighting against and why I think it gets as bent out of shape as it does over anything that even smells like it could be a claim that there's something 'spiritual' about matter, consciousness, or the interrelationships between the two. As I was saying before - they're not wrong to have that sociological concern, on the other hand if you happen to be dealing with a wide array of your own subjective evidence against reductive materialism or similar formulations of it that means that the essence of that concern needs to be respected.

I don't think that you understand the position of Methodological Naturalism or science.
As I said MANY times, all scientific knowledge is our tentative position about the world's phenomena. In science we don't have dogmas but only FALSIFIABLE frameworks! This means that every time we use the principles of a theory to make a prediction (like in QM to calculate the position of a particles, or in Evolution to produce vaccines or a new organism to fit in a specific environmental niche, or in gravity or astrodynamics) we constantly put to test that framework and any other connected theory. So in science we don't accept our rrent epistemology without caveats.
i.e. Europe spent 5 billion euros and 20 + years to construct the LHC in Cern in order to test, once again, the Standard Model and how accurate it describes our world. Are you familiar with any other method that would spend so much money and time just to test a well accepted framework which is in use everyday, producing goods and solutions?
So we don't accept anything on face value in science....but we also don't reject frameworks that are instrumentally useful and epistemically connected to the rest of our epistemology just because we had a charming intuitive idea. In order to do metaphysics we need to step on our current knowledge in order to have a valid starting point.

Interesting, but I'm looking around this thread for someone who'd disagree with that. Not having much luck.

Ok ....science is difficult! I agree. Does that mean we should lower our guard and our standards of evidence and accept questionable methods like intuition or personal revelations on face value? Can you please explain your point , maybe I am missing something here.

Same... with the caveat that it's one thing to offer to prove something (like offering to prove premonitions are real - which I have no interest in doing) and a completely different thing to ask the question I originally formulated in my OP - ie. what framework could accommodate its existence.

Now on the the question of the conscious states of the brain. There are competing theories about our conscious states (3 if I am not wrong).
We have the NCC model and the ARASystem and we understand the emergent qualities of the phenomenon. Those who thought that we would have answered all the questions about the human brain , again, were scientifically ignorant about the complexity of the organ and its workings.
DAvid Chalmers "hard problem" is not even a problem...its a shallow deepity and I will explain why I say that.
Lets apply his question to other functions of biology.
" how would completely non-sentient matter give rise to sentience,"
1. How would a completely non-digestive matter give rise to digestion.
2. How would a completely non-glossy matter give rise to glossiness
3. How would a completely non-mitosis matter give rise to mitosis
4.How would a completely non-organic matter give rise to organic elements.
5. How would a completely non-illuminated matter give rise to photons.

I remember something like a two hour interview on Youtube someone had with Michael Silberstein on the topic of the book Beyond the Dynamical Universe, the first half went well and the second went into stuff like the above - ie. the emergent 'wetness' of water being the same thing as an emergent 'something-its-like-to-be-ness' of subjective experience. You'd guess correctly if you'd assume I was on Silberstein's side of that argument.

Matter just does those things. Again its like asking why a jumping electron produces photos or why the sky can be blue...They just do and we only have to find the mechanism responsible for those results.

Two things seem like they can short-circuit curiosity, God and politics. We at least diminished the former significantly but, regrettably, they haven't been receding at an even pace.

- This is a Scientific field of study on the Mind. Why are you insisting to bring in a philosophical worldview and beat down on it? Do you have indications about an alternative realm that we should investigate and with what methodologies? Shouldn't we use science to study the brain and its working?

I was saying that as our theories for consciousness shift, even if they shift to a broader array of phenomena - like in a functionalist model (which in so many ways seems to map onto the behavior of mystical experience and suggest multiple potential levels of supervening conscious architecture beyond just neural connections), we'd just be planting a non-theological/non-religious flag in a territory of human experience that was previously governed by religion - ie. it doesn't disappear, it just gets explained or understood in a very different manner. I don't think it's clear cut that we're moving away from subjective phenomena or even the ability for subjective experience to connect in unusual or novel ways, just our religious frame of reference for those things.

Well we publish hypotheses which are our interpretation of what we observe.
So your question should be are intuitive claims equal to scientific hypotheses? it depends. Who makes the intuitive claim. How well is he informed and is he familiar with those observations. Is he using credible philosophical principles in his intuitive claim? A scientist can take an intuitive call, but as I said before, intuitive judgments can be based on unconscious cues or experience or etc. So we need a specific example.

If memory serves you were either implying to people that the order in which they recalled events earlier was incorrect (retelling their story in a completely different manner) or having it out with Google translate and losing the fight, one or the other.

Why do you ask me? DO you think that you need permission to talk about it???
Don't I have the right not to participate in an ad populum fallacious statement ? I think I have the right to skip this topic since its nothing to do with philosophy. The number of philosophical views enjoying faith based standards (faith in an intuitive call!)says nothing about the useful or truth value of the practice.

TY, with this much participation I'd love to know what it looks like when you are actually interested in a topic.

[Papus79]

I didn't bother with the rest because it was mostly either things I just covered in my last response or things that didn't require follow-up.

From this I really don't think you followed what I said. Do you know what the Ganzfeld experiment is?

What about it????!!!

If there are experiments that show a weak rather than no effect with things like psi - what are you doing with them? You may personally not be guilty of this but it seems like there's a notion of 'Oh, then everything we think we know is wrong and we'd need to throw the science books out' - the notion doesn't make sense unless we're really that hung up on identity theory or strong emergence.

How by pointing out that falsifiability is a condition for gut feelings to exist and for clarifying that you never talked about falsifiability ...that brought us to a paranormal claim?

^^ This is sort of what I mean. People lose their isht these days if anyone wants to talk about double-slit (quantum woo) or delayed choice quantum eraser. I get that a bunch of hippies want to turn that into 'we manifest things' but there seem to be even stronger feelings back the other way about outcomes.

If it's of any help for saying something about the consistency of worldviews here - I really get the sense that we're living in something that's massively recursive, not just in the way of awareness in that system but also in the ways in which data interacts between subjects and that we're barely scratching the surface on those relationships. Part of what I think puts these topics at odds with the sorts of systems of rigorous logic you're looking at is that they're much higher up a stack of emergence which makes examining them much more like a social psychology endeavor and the experiments can run into trouble with how many known variables we can strain out, how many unknown variables might additionally be effecting the outcomes, etc.

[NickGaspar]

[Papus79 post_id=340757 time=1571987963 user_id=47174]

Lets try to be in the same ball park, because this conversation is getting all over the place.
Should we accept unfalsifiable ideas based on intuition on face value, Yes or No?

[NickGaspar]

[Papus79 post_id=340769 time=1572004022 user_id=47174]

If there are experiments that show a weak rather than no effect with things like psi - what are you doing with them? You may personally not be guilty of this but it seems like there's a notion of 'Oh, then everything we think we know is wrong and we'd need to throw the science books out' - the notion doesn't make sense unless we're really that hung up on identity theory or strong emergence.

- there aren't any experiments that can objectively support such existential claims ( psi ). The critique on those experiments is revealing of the quality of their standards.

This is sort of what I mean. People lose their isht these days if anyone wants to talk about double-slit (quantum woo) or delayed choice quantum eraser. I get that a bunch of hippies want to turn that into 'we manifest things' but there seem to be even stronger feelings back the other way about outcomes.

-Well there is a huge difference talking about Quantum weirdness and Quantum woo. But I don't see the connection to the paranormal?? Can you elaborate?

If it's of any help for saying something about the consistency of worldviews here - I really get the sense that we're living in something that's massively recursive, not just in the way of awareness in that system but also in the ways in which data interacts between subjects and that we're barely scratching the surface on those relationships. Part of what I think puts these topics at odds with the sorts of systems of rigorous logic you're looking at is that they're much higher up a stack of emergence which makes examining them much more like a social psychology endeavor and the experiments can run into trouble with how many known variables we can strain out, how many unknown variables might additionally be effecting the outcomes, etc.

- Is this sense you are getting a product of you studying our current epistemology? The unknown complexity of the world should provide excuses to ignore logic and its rules?