From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Sat May 11 2002 - 18:56:53 MDT
[arcadia]
There are some things one must experience to believe, but before one can experience them, one has to ... not 'believe' as such, but at least be somewhat open to the possibilities.
[rhinoceros]
It seems you are not talking about things such as telepathy, because in that case a telepath would be able to report to the non-believers something that he/she shouldn't know, which would be a convincing case of information transfer. More likely, you are talking about internal states of mind with no external physical manifestation, which only another believer or an open mind would be able to recognize or accept. Am I wrong?
[arcadia]
Second, even within the limits of real science, which is to say, the application of the scientific method, some things don't work for just everybody, especially for people who are trying to prove they don't work. SO the requirement of the scientific method that an experiment be repeatable by all concerned parties is just out. An individual experimenter, faced with this situation, can either decide just not to investigate things that, by nature, can't really fit within the 'scientific' consensus-reality, as many do, or one can continue investigating but be considered a flake, or one can investigate and keep quiet about it.
[rhinoceros]
I can understand the last part, which explains why sometimes even scientists are unwilling to use the scientific method. However, I am not so sure about the first part, about the scientific method and repeatability. If we are talking about mental states with no external physical manifestation, then it would only be a matter of psychology and physiology.
[arcadia]
I like what Niels Bohr had to say, in effect, that all we 'know' is what our instruments tell us. Whatever we think we know about why our instruments say this, or how it all ties together, says more about us and the structure of our minds than it does about reality.
[rhinoceros]
I can agree that knowledge about reality is not reality itself, and it functions through our direct or indirect perception. However, knowledge about reality is not just perception -- if it was, we wouldn't be able to make predictions and build things using this knowledge.
As I see it, the differential equations of physics are a partial projection of reality into a mathematical model. This model is based on some physical quantities which we have chosen because they seem to be convenient, measurable and predictable, such as position, momentum, time, etc. Bohr said that (or something to that effect) at a time when the existing mathematical model was under attack, and went on to formulate a new theory. It seems that even in that theory his assertion that "we 'know' what our instruments tell us" says something about Bohr. Subsequent theories questioned even our perception of position and momentum, but still, they did give us better predictions.
---- This message was posted by rhinoceros to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=25462>
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