> So how ever many years ago you there confident that CERN would discover the Higgs?
And this post proves....?
> Pfft, do better, John.
> 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,
> Research of psi may indeed be misguided
> 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
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
> 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.
> We use intuition all the time.
> 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
> 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.
> 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
> 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.
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
The easy problem is harder than the hard problem in the sense that it is the long way around.
>>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?
> 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.
> Genius and madness are notoriously close.
> 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.
> Why doesn't some respectable non-crackpot reproduce Sheldrake's experiments and prove him wrong?
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
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.
If you have convinced yourself that the problem isn't real or important then you have failed.
Craig
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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."
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
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>> 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?
>> 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?
> Building 100ft sculptures of people's cats out of toothpicks would be devilishly hard
> and profitable too.
> Why does that matter?
> I don't see a contest between the easy and hard 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.'
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.
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