A paranormal prediction for the next year

[John Clark]

I have been a member of the Extropian List for many years and at the
beginning of the year it is my habit to send a message to that list about
the paranormal and psi. Sense the subject of Rupert Sheldrake and
other forms of infantile junk science has come up here I thought I'd
send it to this list also. One year from now I intend to send this same
message yet again.
================
One year ago I sent the following post to the list, I did not change one
word. One year from now I intend to send this same message yet again.
================
One year ago I sent the following post to the list, I did not change one
word. One year from now I intend to send this same message yet again.
================
One year ago I sent the following post to the list, I did not change one
word. One year from now I intend to send this same message yet again.
================
One year ago I sent the following post to the list, I did not change one
word. One year from now I intend to send this same message yet again.
================
One year ago I sent the following post to the list, I did not change one
word. One year from now I intend to send this same message yet again.
================
One year ago I sent the following post to the list, I did not change one
word. One year from now I intend to send this same message yet again.
================
One year ago I sent the following post to the list, I did not change one
word. One year from now I intend to send this same message yet again.
================

Happy New Year all.

I predict that a paper reporting positive psi results will NOT appear in
Nature or Science in the next year. This may seem an outrageous
prediction, after all psi is hardly a rare phenomena, millions of
people with no training have managed to observe it, or claim they have.
And I am sure the good people at Nature and Science would want to
say something about this very important and obvious part of our natural
world if they could, but I predict they will be unable to find anything
interesting to say about it.

You might think my prediction is crazy, like saying a waitress with an
eight's grade education in Duluth Minnesota can regularly observe the
Higgs boson with no difficulty but the highly trained Physicists at CERN
in Switzerland cannot. Nevertheless I am confident my prediction is true
because my ghostly spirit guide Mohammad Duntoldme spoke to me
about it in a dream.

PS: I am also confident I can make this very same prediction one year from
today.

    John K Clark

[Stephen P. King]

Hi,

So how ever many years ago you there confident that CERN would
discover the Higgs? And this post proves....? Pfft, do better, John.

--
Onward!

Stephen

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 Stephen P. King <step...@charter.net> wrote:

> So how ever many years ago you there confident that CERN would discover the Higgs?

About 15, and in not one of those 15 years would I have confidently predicted that nothing new about the Higgs would be discovered in the next year, but I will make that prediction about the paranormal.
 

And this post proves....?

That in the last 200 years research into the supernatural has produced precisely ZERO results; and I'm not even talking about developing a theory to explain how it works, I'm talking about obtaining enough experimental evidence to show that a explanation is needed. We could be having this same exact conversation about the paranormal in 1913, or even 1813 and you could still be complaining that mainstream scientists (they were called Natural Philosophers back then) were not paying enough attention to psi or ESP or spiritualism or whatever. The field has not moved one inch in centuries, not one Planck Length. As a result those doing full time ESP work today are third or fourth rate, if they were really skilled in the art of experimentation they'd be doing other things, they would never pick a field as moribund as parapsychology. However if you're all thumbs in the lab then parapsychology researcher is the perfect career choice because if you're looking for something that doesn't exist a poor researcher will get more encouraging results than a good one.
 

> Pfft, do better, John.

If you disagree with me then show the courage of your convictions and let's make a bet! If there is a article in Science or Nature or Physical Review Letters about something (by whatever name) in the brain or in the mind that violates the known laws of physics before January 4 2014 I will give you $1000, and if there is not you only have to give me $100. I don't demand a explanation of this new phenomena just that the editors of one of those journals thinks that there is something interesting there, something that needs to be explain. So do we have a bet? I'm completely serious about this and if there is anybody else who would like to take this bet please say so; come on, I'm giving you 10 to 1 odds. if you believe in this crap then it's easy money.

  John K Clark

[Craig Weinberg]

That's like betting that the Catholic Church won't make Martin Luther a saint again this year.

If you notice, no private phenomena can be easily substantiated. There won't be any publications proving the fact that we laugh because things are funny, or that there is another way that blueness can be demonstrated besides seeing it for yourself.

Research of psi may indeed be misguided in trying to make public that which is so specifically private. To me, it makes sense that there is a directly proportionate relation, so that the more interior and esoteric the experience, the more resistant it will be to public examination. This seems to be our intuition - 'you're not going to believe this,' etc.

This doesn't mean that there are not experiences which do not fit easily into a simplistic cartoon of physics which imagines thoughtless matter accidentally thinking. Science may forever preside only over the realism of public space, and forever sneer at private experience, or it may address privacy itself in a scientific and unbiased way someday. As has been pointed out here, quoted from Planck, it is not likely that the old guard of physics will ever be able to get beyond their own prejudice, and will go to their graves hanging on to the legacies of the 19th and 20th centuries...two centuries which may, like the fossil fuels which powered them, turn out to be anomalies.

Craig

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013  Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

> That's like betting that the Catholic Church won't make Martin Luther a saint again this year.

I don't see the analogy. The Catholic Church, like all religions, claims to have all the answers and the last thing they'd want is to dig up difficult questions; but physicists at CERN have spent 10 billion dollars on a particle accelerator for the sole purpose of finding something that they can not explain. And so far, to their considerable disappointment, they have not been successful.

 

If you notice, no private phenomena can be easily substantiated.

If psi were a private phenomena I would have no problem with it, the problem is that people can't stop blabbing about it and claiming that it gave them actionable intelligence that they otherwise would not have. 

> There won't be any publications proving the fact that we laugh because things are funny,

That's because the existence of funny things is not in dispute, and the non-existence of psi is no longer either.

> Research of psi may indeed be misguided

May? Decades of research with absolutely positively NOTHING to show for it, not even evidence that there is something there to study, if that isn't misguided what is?

> it is not likely that the old guard of physics will ever be able to get beyond their own prejudice, and will go to their graves hanging on to the legacies of the 19th and 20th centuries

And just like today in the 19th century fans of junk science were complaining that they were not given enough respect by mainstream scientists, but history has proven that they were given all the respect they deserved.

By the way, I've been on the everything list for all of 2012 and, although I strongly disagreed with some of the things said, I marveled that it was blissfully free of downright junk science. But then just a few days ago at the beginning of this new year somebody mentioned Rupert Sheldrake and overnight the IQ of the list dropped by 40 points.

  John K Clark

 

[Craig Weinberg]

On Saturday, January 5, 2013 11:05:24 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013  Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

> That's like betting that the Catholic Church won't make Martin Luther a saint again this year.

I don't see the analogy.

I'm not surprised.
 

The Catholic Church, like all religions, claims to have all the answers and the last thing they'd want is to dig up difficult questions; but physicists at CERN have spent 10 billion dollars on a particle accelerator for the sole purpose of finding something that they can not explain. And so far, to their considerable disappointment, they have not been successful.

You mean that physicists have been given 10 billion dollars to spend on particle accelerators (and comfortable salaries as well, among other things I would imagine). If someone was going to give me 10 billion dollars I think that I could try to find something that I could not explain also. Not saying that scientific curiosity is fake, only that you are applying a naive double standard to Big Science over Big Religion. As always - follow the money. What physics has confirmed is that its model pf matter is self-consistent, not that it has scientifically explained what forces and fields actually are.
 

 

If you notice, no private phenomena can be easily substantiated.

If psi were a private phenomena I would have no problem with it, the problem is that people can't stop blabbing about it and claiming that it gave them actionable intelligence that they otherwise would not have. 

Actionable intelligence is private. It only becomes public if we try to prove it publicly, but like the double slit experiment, sometimes the act of trying to prove things - even intending to prove things is not a neutral act. Each moment of our experience has many different layers of interaction and feedback, some explicit and local, others intuitive, implicit, and perhaps relating to a 'larger now'.

 We use intuition all the time. Don't you ever notice how things often work out smoothly when you take coincidences and lucky timing as an invitation to 'go with it' rather than rigidly sticking with your pre-arranged schedule?

> There won't be any publications proving the fact that we laugh because things are funny,

That's because the existence of funny things is not in dispute, and the non-existence of psi is no longer either.

If people who had no sense of humor were in charge of peer reviews, then I think that you would find that the existence of funny things would be in dispute and that the non-existence of them would not be either.
 

> Research of psi may indeed be misguided

May? Decades of research with absolutely positively NOTHING to show for it, not even evidence that there is something there to study, if that isn't misguided what is?

In science though, we can't claim that we know for certain that any course of research is misguided, only that it has not proved anything so far. The record of AI development is similarly fruitless at demonstrating computer awareness.
 

> it is not likely that the old guard of physics will ever be able to get beyond their own prejudice, and will go to their graves hanging on to the legacies of the 19th and 20th centuries

And just like today in the 19th century fans of junk science were complaining that they were not given enough respect by mainstream scientists, but history has proven that they were given all the respect they deserved.

Medical science played with leeches and incantations for a long time before other methods were developed. What psi researchers have done so far may be no better than Paracelsus did, but so what? That doesn't mean that what they are looking at can be explained away by 20th century physics. We don't say 'pfft, stupid medieval doctors not only failed to cure the plague, but they helped spread it' and dismiss the whole idea of medicine based on that.
 

By the way, I've been on the everything list for all of 2012 and, although I strongly disagreed with some of the things said, I marveled that it was blissfully free of downright junk science. But then just a few days ago at the beginning of this new year somebody mentioned Rupert Sheldrake and overnight the IQ of the list dropped by 40 points.

You know that Rupert Sheldrake was the Director of Studies in Biochemistry and Cell biology at Cambridge, right?

"and a Research Fellow of the Royal Society. From 1974 to 1985 he worked in Hyderabad in India as Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics"

If you are expecting pioneers in frontier fields not to be flaky compared to the hordes of careerists in the established fields of science, then it is always going to look to you that we have the best possible understanding of science right now and that all deviation from it is stupidity or heresy. That isn't how progress works. If you want to understand something which challenges the status quo, you can't always do it in a way that the status quo is going to embrace.

Craig

  John K Clark

 

[John Clark]

On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 12:21 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

> You mean that physicists have been given 10 billion dollars to spend on particle accelerators (and comfortable salaries as well, among other things I would imagine).

Yes.

> If someone was going to give me 10 billion dollars I think that I could try to find something that I could not explain also.

And physicists have *tried* to do that also, so far no luck, but nothing gets their blood moving like a experimental result they can't explain. If psi was real physicists would love it, if psi was real it would have been proven to everybody's satisfaction in the 17'th century,  if psi was real high school kids would be repeating the 300 year old experiments in their science fair projects, if psi was real I personally would love it too, in fact it's hard to imagine anyone not loving something as cool as psi. But unfortunately psi is not real. 

 > We use intuition all the time.

I have no quarrel with intuition, I have no problem with using rules of thumb and or probability to make decisions, it's pseudo science that I don't like.

> If people who had no sense of humor were in charge of peer reviews, then I think that you would find that the existence of funny things would be in dispute

Even people who have no sense of humor can deduce that other people do have it, and even if the peer review editors had no psi ability themselves they could deduce that other people had them if they did. But they don't so they can't.

> In science though, we can't claim that we know for certain that any course of research is misguided, only that it has not proved anything so far.

We know with certainty that all the paranormal research of the last century has produced absolutely nothing and they might as well of kept their hands in their pockets for the last hundred years; so if you were a talented researcher with good judgement would you pick that field, would you spend your finite resources on that crap?  

> The record of AI development is similarly fruitless at demonstrating computer awareness.

Computers are far smarter than they were 10 years ago, but making machines behave intelligently is supposed to be the easy AI problem, the hard problem is making them conscious; armchair philosophers are constantly spinning theories that they think will solve the hard problem, you've done it yourself, and yet they don't even attempt to solve the easy problem. Why is it that you can solve the hard problem but don't even claim to know the first thing about solving the easy problem? It's because the "easy" problem is far far more difficult than the "hard" problem.

 > You know that Rupert Sheldrake was the Director of Studies in Biochemistry and Cell biology at Cambridge, right?and a Research Fellow of the Royal Society. From 1974 to 1985 he worked in Hyderabad in India as Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute

My beef with Sheldrake has nothing to do with him helping farmers grow more food, my complaint is that he's a crackpot. He wouldn't be the first scientist to go nuts, Brian Josephson was a much better scientist than Sheldrake ever was and in the early 60's wrote an absolutely brilliant paper on superconductivity and won a Nobel Prize, but very soon after that he abandoned the scientific method. The parapsychology meme virus infected his mind and he hasn't had a creative thought since and for the last half century has accomplished precisely nothing. There seems to be no idea so screwy he can't make himself believe  it. The poor man has lost his mind.

 

> If you want to understand something which challenges the status quo, you can't always do it in a way that the status quo is going to embrace.

All junk science researchers fantasize that they are misunderstood geniuses that history will eventually vindicate, but what history has actually shown us is that for every Galileo there are 6.02 * 10^23 crackpots.    

  John K Clark

[Craig Weinberg]

On Saturday, January 5, 2013 4:28:30 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:

On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 12:21 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

> You mean that physicists have been given 10 billion dollars to spend on particle accelerators (and comfortable salaries as well, among other things I would imagine).

Yes.

> If someone was going to give me 10 billion dollars I think that I could try to find something that I could not explain also.

And physicists have *tried* to do that also, so far no luck, but nothing gets their blood moving like a experimental result they can't explain. If psi was real physicists would love it, if psi was real it would have been proven to everybody's satisfaction in the 17'th century,  if psi was real high school kids would be repeating the 300 year old experiments in their science fair projects, if psi was real I personally would love it too, in fact it's hard to imagine anyone not loving something as cool as psi. But unfortunately psi is not real. 

 > We use intuition all the time.

I have no quarrel with intuition, I have no problem with using rules of thumb and or probability to make decisions, it's pseudo science that I don't like.

> If people who had no sense of humor were in charge of peer reviews, then I think that you would find that the existence of funny things would be in dispute

Even people who have no sense of humor can deduce that other people do have it,

Would they if only 0.001% of the population had a sense of humor? If movies and books and cartoons were made for the other 99.999% and contained no humorous references?
 

and even if the peer review editors had no psi ability themselves they could deduce that other people had them if they did. But they don't so they can't.

Maybe, but not necessarily. We have words for things like luck and kismet and destiny, which could not easily be modeled as physical phenomena, but that doesn't mean that there is nothing at all to them in all cases.
 

> In science though, we can't claim that we know for certain that any course of research is misguided, only that it has not proved anything so far.

We know with certainty that all the paranormal research of the last century has produced absolutely nothing and they might as well of kept their hands in their pockets for the last hundred years; so if you were a talented researcher with good judgement would you pick that field, would you spend your finite resources on that crap?  

I'm not personally drawn to investigate those areas, but then again, I have my own framework for understanding non-ordinary awareness. If I were personally impacted by some psi-related event or capacity, I don't see any reason not to spend time and effort looking into it. We don't all have to be watching infinitesimal particle collisions on multi-billion dollar racetracks.

> The record of AI development is similarly fruitless at demonstrating computer awareness.

Computers are far smarter than they were 10 years ago, but making machines behave intelligently is supposed to be the easy AI problem, the hard problem is making them conscious; armchair philosophers are constantly spinning theories that they think will solve the hard problem, you've done it yourself, and yet they don't even attempt to solve the easy problem. Why is it that you can solve the hard problem but don't even claim to know the first thing about solving the easy problem? It's because the "easy" problem is far far more difficult than the "hard" problem.

The easy problem is harder than the hard problem in the sense that it is the long way around. It is like trying to reconstruct the recipe for apple pie using a mass spectrometer and electron microscope. It is not easy by any means, but it is much easier than trying to explain why and there is a such thing as an experience of tasting the flavor of apple pie. In naming the two problems hard and easy, Chalmers was just trying to make the point that it is a whole different order of difficult. The easy problem is quantitatively difficult, but progress is inevitable with applied effort. The hard problem is qualitatively difficult, so that not only is progress not inevitable, but it is not necessarily a realistic possibility.

 > You know that Rupert Sheldrake was the Director of Studies in Biochemistry and Cell biology at Cambridge, right?and a Research Fellow of the Royal Society. From 1974 to 1985 he worked in Hyderabad in India as Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute

My beef with Sheldrake has nothing to do with him helping farmers grow more food, my complaint is that he's a crackpot. He wouldn't be the first scientist to go nuts, Brian Josephson was a much better scientist than Sheldrake ever was and in the early 60's wrote an absolutely brilliant paper on superconductivity and won a Nobel Prize, but very soon after that he abandoned the scientific method. The parapsychology meme virus infected his mind and he hasn't had a creative thought since and for the last half century has accomplished precisely nothing. There seems to be no idea so screwy he can't make himself believe  it. The poor man has lost his mind.

Genius and madness are notoriously close. If it weren't for crackpots though, we would never likely be tempted to explore new areas. Why doesn't some respectable non-crackpot reproduce Sheldrake's experiments and prove him wrong?
 

 

> If you want to understand something which challenges the status quo, you can't always do it in a way that the status quo is going to embrace.

All junk science researchers fantasize that they are misunderstood geniuses that history will eventually vindicate, but what history has actually shown us is that for every Galileo there are 6.02 * 10^23 crackpots.    

And for every methodical scientist working under the radar toward some measure of greatness there are  6.02 * 10^23 dull-minded careerists whose life's work will never amount to more than unread publications. Human attention is not so finite and precious that we cannot afford for a tiny fraction of the population to deviate from the herd. I say that increasing that number 10 fold could only help.

Craig

  John K Clark

[meekerdb]

On 1/5/2013 5:39 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

The easy problem is harder than the hard problem in the sense that it is the long way around.

No, it's harder because you can tell when you've failed.

Brent

[John Clark]

On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

>>Even people who have no sense of humor can deduce that other people do have it,

>Would they if only 0.001% of the population had a sense of humor?

Yes, because unlike psi it would be easily repeatable, if one person who claimed to have a sense of humor laughed and said that was a very good joke it is statistically very likely (although not certain) that another person who also claimed to have a sense of humor would make the same noise, but the sound of laughter would not be heard when the vast majority who don't even understand what the word "humor" means heard the joke.  

> Chalmers was just trying to make the point that it is a whole different order of difficult. The easy problem is quantitatively difficult, but progress is inevitable with applied effort. The hard problem is qualitatively difficult, so that not only is progress not inevitable, but it is not necessarily a realistic possibility.

And that's what doesn't add up. As you say solving the easy problem is inevitable, and solving it would be of some philosophical interest and earn its discoverer several trillion dollars as a bonus, and yet nobody on this list casually spins theories about how to solve it. In contrast although success is not guaranteed and there would be no financial bonus in solving the hard problem every dilettante has their own theory about it and some, such as yourself, have even claimed to have already solved it.

The reason for this is that a hard problem theory doesn't have to actually do anything, but a easy problem theory most certainly does. Any hard problem theory will work just fine, any at all,  but the wrong easy problem theory will send a start-up company into bankruptcy.  So the end result is that being a hard problem theorist is ridiculously easy but being a easy problem theorist is devilishly hard, and that's why armchair philosophers concentrate on the one and not the other.    

> Genius and madness are notoriously close.

There is a bit of madness in many geniuses, but most madmen have no trace of genius whatsoever because madness is a much more common phenomenon than genius. Tesla was a genius and a crackpot, but for every Tesla there is a mole of pure unadulterated crackpots.
 

> If it weren't for crackpots though, we would never likely be tempted to explore new areas. [...] we cannot afford for a tiny fraction of the population to deviate from the herd. I say that increasing that number 10 fold could only help.

Yeah, all the problems of the world come from the fact that there just aren't enough loonies running around. 

> Why doesn't some respectable non-crackpot reproduce Sheldrake's experiments and prove him wrong?

They have, but like any card caring member of the crackpot guild being proven wrong has absolutely no effect on  Sheldrake's behavior or that of his fans.

  John K Clark
 

[Craig Weinberg]

It's not hard for me to tell at all. If you understand how and why experience exists, then you have succeeded. If you have convinced yourself that the problem isn't real or important then you have failed.

Craig

[Craig Weinberg]

On Sunday, January 6, 2013 1:24:48 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:

On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

>>Even people who have no sense of humor can deduce that other people do have it,

>Would they if only 0.001% of the population had a sense of humor?

Yes, because unlike psi it would be easily repeatable, if one person who claimed to have a sense of humor laughed and said that was a very good joke it is statistically very likely (although not certain) that another person who also claimed to have a sense of humor would make the same noise,

Why? Do all people who have a good sense of humor laugh at the same jokes?
 

but the sound of laughter would not be heard when the vast majority who don't even understand what the word "humor" means heard the joke.   

> Chalmers was just trying to make the point that it is a whole different order of difficult. The easy problem is quantitatively difficult, but progress is inevitable with applied effort. The hard problem is qualitatively difficult, so that not only is progress not inevitable, but it is not necessarily a realistic possibility.

And that's what doesn't add up. As you say solving the easy problem is inevitable, and solving it would be of some philosophical interest and earn its discoverer several trillion dollars as a bonus, and yet nobody on this list casually spins theories about how to solve it. In contrast although success is not guaranteed and there would be no financial bonus in solving the hard problem every dilettante has their own theory about it and some, such as yourself, have even claimed to have already solved it.

Solving the easy problem doesn't necessarily require a theory, just access to expensive laboratory equipment, hospitals, political influence, etc. It's like the Human Genome Project - the theory is not the problem, it just takes a lot of cataloging and correlating requiring huge amounts of time.
 

The reason for this is that a hard problem theory doesn't have to actually do anything, but a easy problem theory most certainly does. Any hard problem theory will work just fine, any at all, 

For example?
 

but the wrong easy problem theory will send a start-up company into bankruptcy.  So the end result is that being a hard problem theorist is ridiculously easy but being a easy problem theorist is devilishly hard, and that's why armchair philosophers concentrate on the one and not the other.    

Building 100ft sculptures of people's cats out of toothpicks would be devilishly hard and profitable too. Why does that matter? I don't understand this theme of one-upsmanship. I don't see a contest between the easy and hard problem or between computer or human superiority. You apparently do though. Everything seems to boil down to some variation of 'My assumptions are justified because winners win with winning assumptions, and winning always wins... and don't forget the winning.'

> Genius and madness are notoriously close.

There is a bit of madness in many geniuses, but most madmen have no trace of genius whatsoever because madness is a much more common phenomenon than genius. Tesla was a genius and a crackpot, but for every Tesla there is a mole of pure unadulterated crackpots.

I think the ratio is less extreme than you might think. Anyone who is crazy has access, by definition, to perspectives that the majority do not. Genius is the ability to use those sensitivities to some greater understanding, and with luck, innovation. Most people in a psych ward are not geniuses, but I would guess that particularly among some kinds of mental illness, there is a disproportionately high level of intelligence.

 

> If it weren't for crackpots though, we would never likely be tempted to explore new areas. [...] we cannot afford for a tiny fraction of the population to deviate from the herd. I say that increasing that number 10 fold could only help.

Yeah, all the problems of the world come from the fact that there just aren't enough loonies running around. 

Loonies have never been a source of oppression to me. It always been the fearful, conformist people who have caused problems in my life.
 

> Why doesn't some respectable non-crackpot reproduce Sheldrake's experiments and prove him wrong?

They have,

For example?
 

but like any card caring member of the crackpot guild being proven wrong has absolutely no effect on  Sheldrake's behavior or that of his fans.

If someone has proved Sheldrake wrong, I would be interested in reading about it.

Craig
 

  John K Clark
 

[Bruno Marchal]

I guess you meant  "it's harder because you CAN'T tell when you've failed."

But this is theory dependent. With comp + classical theory of knowledge (recover by Theatetus applied on Gödel's beweisbar arithmetical predicate) you get a whole theory of qualia+quanta. Evidences from empirical quanta on it does give evidence on the theory of qualia (the hard problem), and refutation by quanta refute automatically the qualia theory, and so it can be shown wrong.

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[meekerdb]

On 1/8/2013 6:36 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Saturday, January 5, 2013 8:47:14 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 1/5/2013 5:39 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

The easy problem is harder than the hard problem in the sense that it is the long way around.

No, it's harder because you can tell when you've failed.

Brent

It's not hard for me to tell at all. If you understand how and why experience exists, then you have succeeded.

And you do because you've put a label on it, "sense".  You're right, that is easy.

Brent

If you have convinced yourself that the problem isn't real or important then you have failed.

Craig

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[meekerdb]

On 1/8/2013 9:30 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 06 Jan 2013, at 02:47, meekerdb wrote:

On 1/5/2013 5:39 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

The easy problem is harder than the hard problem in the sense that it is the long way around.

No, it's harder because you can tell when you've failed.

I guess you meant  "it's harder because you CAN'T tell when you've failed."

No, I meant the "easy problem" is harder because you can tell when you've failed to explain intelligence: You use your hypothetical explanation to make something that should be intelligent. When it acts stupid, you've failed.

Brent

But this is theory dependent. With comp + classical theory of knowledge (recover by Theatetus applied on Gödel's beweisbar arithmetical predicate) you get a whole theory of qualia+quanta. Evidences from empirical quanta on it does give evidence on the theory of qualia (the hard problem), and refutation by quanta refute automatically the qualia theory, and so it can be shown wrong.

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

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[John Clark]

On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at  Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

>> unlike psi it would be easily repeatable, if one person who claimed to have a sense of humor laughed and said that was a very good joke it is statistically very likely (although not certain) that another person who also claimed to have a sense of humor would make the same noise,

> Why? Do all people who have a good sense of humor laugh at the same jokes?

Pretty much, certainly the probability of hearing the sound of laughter is much higher than you'd expect from pure randomness, otherwise it would be impossible for professional comedians to make a living. There are professional  fortune tellers but they make their living by fooling the stupid not mother nature. If psi is a real phenomenon I don't understand why state lotteries nevertheless consistently manage make money. 

>> a hard problem theory doesn't have to actually do anything, but a easy problem theory most certainly does. Any hard problem theory will work just fine, any at all, 

> For example?

Only one thing in the universe can produce consciousness, the left big toe on a size 12 foot. This theory is perfectly consistent with everything I have ever observed about consciousness. By the way, I happen to ware size 12 shoes and still have 10 toes.

> Building 100ft sculptures of people's cats out of toothpicks would be devilishly hard

Yes.
 

> and profitable too.

No.

> Why does that matter?

Beats the hell out of me.

> I don't see a contest between the easy and hard problem

If you have 2 problems to solve you don't see the value of solving the easy one first and then using the wisdom gained from that solution to solve the harder problem?

> Everything seems to boil down to some variation of 'My assumptions are justified because winners win with winning assumptions, and winning always wins... and don't forget the winning.'

Very well put.

  John K Clark


 

[Craig Weinberg]

On Tuesday, January 8, 2013 12:37:47 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 1/8/2013 6:36 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Saturday, January 5, 2013 8:47:14 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 1/5/2013 5:39 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

The easy problem is harder than the hard problem in the sense that it is the long way around.

No, it's harder because you can tell when you've failed.

Brent

It's not hard for me to tell at all. If you understand how and why experience exists, then you have succeeded.

And you do because you've put a label on it, "sense".  You're right, that is easy.

Because I understand that the universe can only be experience. Without experience, there is no universe unless you arbitrarily take naive mechanism on faith. Nothing which is experienced within the universe can account for experience itself, and nothing can be imagined. To the contrary, that we see through our own eyes, hear through our own ears, think with our own minds is the only thing that cannot be denied or explained.

Saying that experience is sense is my way of implying that it is not human consciousness what the universe is, but rather there are many different qualities of perception and participation enfolded and juxtaposed throughout and that there isn't anything that is not an aspect of sense.

Craig

[Craig Weinberg]

On Tuesday, January 8, 2013 1:27:20 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:

On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at  Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

>> unlike psi it would be easily repeatable, if one person who claimed to have a sense of humor laughed and said that was a very good joke it is statistically very likely (although not certain) that another person who also claimed to have a sense of humor would make the same noise,

> Why? Do all people who have a good sense of humor laugh at the same jokes?

Pretty much, certainly the probability of hearing the sound of laughter is much higher than you'd expect from pure randomness, otherwise it would be impossible for professional comedians to make a living. There are professional  fortune tellers but they make their living by fooling the stupid not mother nature. If psi is a real phenomenon I don't understand why state lotteries nevertheless consistently manage make money. 

What's the difference between people who laugh at comedians and people who are counseled by psychics? There are more astrologers than astronomers, maybe that means that some people just have sensitivities that others lack? I would think it would be strange if there wasn't such variation. Some people are stronger in logic, some engineering, some poetry or painting, why wouldn't some people have a more developed intuition about people and their lives? Personally I don't trust others to counsel me in general, and even less so any random professional psychic, but I don't doubt that psychics have helped and hurt people as much as other kinds of therapists (who I would also avoid in general).
 

>> a hard problem theory doesn't have to actually do anything, but a easy problem theory most certainly does. Any hard problem theory will work just fine, any at all, 

> For example?

Only one thing in the universe can produce consciousness, the left big toe on a size 12 foot. This theory is perfectly consistent with everything I have ever observed about consciousness. By the way, I happen to ware size 12 shoes and still have 10 toes.

That's not a hard problem theory, that's an easy problem theory. It doesn't explain why there is consciousness in the first place. It doesn't matter whether consciousness appears in brain tissue for no reason or your big toe for no reason. They both come from the same stem cell anyhow, and there's really nothing very special about neurons.
 

> Building 100ft sculptures of people's cats out of toothpicks would be devilishly hard

Yes.
 

> and profitable too.

No.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/12/italy-rich-cat-tommaso_n_1143022.html

I think you might find enough clients in the $500,000 - $1,000,000 range to pay the rent. I guess it depends on the price of toothpicks.

> Why does that matter?

Beats the hell out of me.

> I don't see a contest between the easy and hard problem

If you have 2 problems to solve you don't see the value of solving the easy one first and then using the wisdom gained from that solution to solve the harder problem?

Why would every person on Earth have to work on one first and not the other? Should we stop all space exploration until after we cure cancer?
 

> Everything seems to boil down to some variation of 'My assumptions are justified because winners win with winning assumptions, and winning always wins... and don't forget the winning.'

Very well put.

; )
 

  John K Clark