[Osx-nutters] The separation of church and state.

[David Cake]

At 7:30 PM +0000 5/12/07, Stefano Mori wrote:
>On 2007-Dec-05, at 08:32, David Cake wrote:
>
>>>You cannot be a real dyed-in-the-wool scientist and really believe in 
>>>
>>>anything of this type.
>>>
>>
>>	Depends what you mean by 'belief'. I agree that if someone 
>>says 'and this is not open to doubt, because I have faith', then they 
>>are unscientific. But if you mean 'I cannot logically prove it in a 
>>falsifiable way, and know that it may be unprovable, but my intuition 
>>is that it is so', fine.
>>
>
>
>Intuition is a tricky one because as Ridley Scott said in a recent 
>interview, intuition is the voice of experience.

	More or less, yes. Its the experience that can't be 
explained, but is nevertheless there.

	The most valuable experience is often hard to explain. Its 
one of the most interesting results from all the efforts to create 
'expert systems' using old-fashined hard AI technology in the 80s. 
Which is that, when they went to try and take all that expert 
knowledge and codify it for computer systems, they found that real 
experts were often hopeless. They would try to create expert systems 
for, say, radiology. And the guys who were just new in the field, who 
had just passed their exams, would be able to say 'well, that smudge 
on the slides look like cancer because of this, and that, and the 
position of the whatnot, and and because x and y'. But the real 
experts, despite being much more accurate, would just say 'well, its 
look like cancer, doesn't it?'. Their knowledge had become 
internalised, and heaps of tiny details and correlations and such 
were all in there being processed, and it was no longer done as a 
rational chain of inferences.

>Intuition is more about art. It's the same realm as psychotherapy 
>(unscientific, untestable, but based on experience). Knowing 
>what's fashionable, what's cool, what's a great work of art, etc. 
>all unquantifiable, all defy definition, but nonetheless obvious to 
>the trained (by experience) eye (pattern).

	You can have intuition about complex rational subjects. 
Intuition about just about anything. Its not at all uncommon for 
mathematicians to talk about their intuition that x or y will be 
provable, even though they may be a long way from doing so (and, like 
all intuition, they might be proved wrong eventually).


>>	Certainly for belief used in the way that it is used in 
>>normal conversation, belief is fine. I believe that the new 
>>government of my country will be better than the old one. I believe 
>>this quite strongly. I could point to some evidence, but ultimately 
>>its subjective and based on unverifiable/unfalsifiable beliefs of 
>>mine, or my interpretations of complex arguments - that doesn't make 
>>me unscientific or irrational.
>>
>
>See there I'd call that intuition.

	I wouldn't - there is no doubt an element of intuition, but 
there are other elements that predominate, like my ideological bias, 
a host of complex specific arguments about minor things, and so on. 
Its too complex for me to call it intuition - I'd rather just call it 
judgement.

>>And similarly, you can have strong 
>>intuitions or such about spiritual things, and that can still be 
>>quite compatible with the scientific worldview.
>>
>
>
>Perhaps using the word "strong" is just an accident, but let's just 
>say that "strong" doesn't make it "right". What makes spiritual 
>intuitions right is the amount and quality of experience which they 
>are based on. This can of course just be personal experience, but 
>there has to be something, something which you experienced.

	Sure. But this doesn't change its epistemological status - 
in the case of spiritual things, its not uncommon for people to have 
a lot of experiences to back up their viewpoint, its just that these 
experiences are very subjective ones.

>When a person has a spontaneous experience of 
>overwhelming transpersonal love, that experience is as real to them 
>as the glass of water on the table. They felt it like an electric 
>shock. And it's that experience which may then start to alter their 
>worldview. They may begin to see the world as a place which includes 
>spiritual phenomena, or at least new phenomena which they hadn't 
>previously seen. It's not even necessary to call it spiritual.
>
>We can of course debate the nature of those experiences, and what 
>should be the correct interpretation of them. But I want to be clear 
>about this point, because, it worries me that the New Age crowd 
>tends to talk about "spirituality" in a very vague, empty and 
>basically useless kind of way, mainly because they haven't had the 
>experience to know what they are talking about. Either it's just 
>some drug induced altered states, or just New Age speak about "love" 
>and "connection".

	Without wishing to contradict (yeah, a lot of the New Age 
crowd seem to be empty fad followers to me too), but there are 
certainly sub-groups, particularly in the neo-pagan crowd, who are 
very good at seeking out strong spiritual experiences. Ritual is 
psychologically transformative, and some of the neo-pagan crowd are 
very good at it. I've experienced a few such things myself.
	Regards
		David
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.tit-wank.com/pipermail/osx-nutters/attachments/20071206/8c7d66d7/attachment-0001.htm