(September 18, 2011 at 7:44 pm)padraic Wrote:Quote:whilst, in reality, we know they are not (There has never been any evidence for them, and they defy all sorts of laws of physics which have been tested, they are essentially a complete nonsense story that young minds routinely invent).
No,we do not know any such thing as fact. I do not believe in demons for the same reason I do not believe in gods;lack of credible evidence. That is not the same as making the positive claim that they do not exist.
I was just speaking informally in the natural language, if I were to restate this in precise terms it would come out as roughly what you said including pointing out that since the chance of this thing is so insignificant that my actions do not take into account the possibility of such things and neither should yours unless you can present evidence that makes me update my belief etc. etc.
It's like any communication in reality, you can almost endlessly produce caveats - It's like if I invited you for dinner and poured you a glass of wine and suddenly got the fear that it was poisoned: I would say, "no it's not" rather than "I do not belief it is poisoned despite the fact that I do not have perfect information about the entire causal reality around the glass, but according to all evidence I have to date there is an insignificant probability that it is poisoned such that you need not take the possibility into account.".
Given this, if what I say is misleading I'd like a short way to express what I actually mean - coining a new word is not an option since one would have to re-explain it almost every time they used it.
(September 18, 2011 at 8:30 pm)KichigaiNeko Wrote: As for people "reading your thoughts" there is no evidence for this as far as I am aware. Personal experience is that with people who know you well (say Family members) you often can "pick-up" roughly what they are thinking. I am to understand this as a survival tactic of the familial group...but I am to understand that a hell of a lot of body language gets read as well.
Well, as you probably know (but didn't state) this is because they have reasonably accurate models of the minds of their family members in their own mind - this coupled with the input of the various expressions, recent actions, etc. of the family members.. they can make much better predictions than they would for other people. Well, perhaps we should look at the research paper[s] in question.
