Witness Evidence

[bennyboy]

As soon as you quit observing it... It's a memory....one that according to some, maybe highly flawed memory.  What is being proposed here, crumbles a good many arguments on this board.   Ohh... You think this is possible.... Perhaps your memory was influenced by something you read and its now just a false memory?  You would not even realize you are mistaken?

You are right about this. The struggle to separate fantasy from reality is a full-time job, even though for the most part we do it automatically. That's why people take notes right away rather than waiting, and why they look to confirm via reliable witnesses WITH GOOD METHODS, that their results are correct.

If I ran an expriment and it seemed I'd achieved cold fusion, I'd check my notes, re-run the experiment, ask others to re-run it, check their methods to make sure they were collecting information properly, etc.

And then we have theists. They've made a "discovery" which, if true, would be infinitely more important even than the discovery of cold fusion. And how do they check it? Wishy-thinking, false attributions, and an appeal to numbers of people who ALSO fail to collect information in a useful and meaningful way. And that's your problem: you are relying on the testimony of witnesses who either do not know how to witness correctly, or are very deliberately doing it wrong. The entire population of Christians, therefore, is incapable of providing "evidence" of the existence of God.

[Edwardo Piet]

"You're still referring, principally, to -actual- evidence.  There's at least a bullet in the guys leg.

Gaze through the Second Amendment thread.  There are lots of people who shoot themselves in the leg and initially claimed that "some " (usually) "black guy shot them" only to admit later on that they shot themselves. 

In many jurisdictions that is not even a crime until they file a false police report.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaZXHosiV6w

[robvalue]

Bennyboy: Shazzingggg!

http://youtu.be/u0tCQ0vbkjU

[Esquilax]

So you don't believe the science when your own memories are concerned, and are willing to act on them then I see.

Well, according to your own argument, that science was done and filtered through the lens of the scientist's senses, and recounted from memory, making it so completely unreliable to you that you shouldn't believe it yourself, so what's the problem?

 If I found myself on trial and knew the testimony of others was mistaken, then I would want any strong evidence I could provide, that places me somewhere else or opposes the other evidence.   This would include good witness testimony.  How about you?  Would witnesses be good evidence you where not guilty, if you where found falsely accused?  I can confidently say, that I don't think I would want you lot on my jury.

You're equivocating. The issue isn't witness testimony, it's testimony considered within the context surrounding it. Witnesses on their own tell you, at best, what that witness believes, and at worst, what they're attempting to lie about. This is not great evidence in an objective sense, so what you do is, you take those statements and you check them against the known facts of the situation. You do know that perjury exists, right? Witness testimony isn't automatically believed in a courtroom, it is verified against that which is known about the case, and falsehoods are both acknowledged and accounted for within the legal system.

You say you wouldn't want us on the jury if you were falsely accused of a crime, but I think you would because the exact same argument you've made there can be used in reverse to convict you, if courts worked the way you seem to want them to. If you can have good witness testimony that can be automatically believed in order to exonerate you, then equally, you could have deceptive witness testimony manufactured for the purposes of convicting you, rather than for the purposes of properly reflecting the events of the crime. In both cases, what you'd want is a jury that is willing to filter testimony for the truth, and render their judgment based on that, rather than "so and so said so." You'd want a jury that'll accept the evidence, no matter how many people come out and baselessly assert that you done did the crime.

[downbeatplumb]

On the subject of false memories. My old boss brought me a t-shirt back from holidays. She was going to buy me a bottle of wine then remembered that I'd told her I don't like wine. If you knew me you'd know how ridiculous this is.

[The Grand Nudger]

My wife hid her paraphernalia from me for the first 6 months of our relationship, thinking that she recalled me saying some nasty, nasty things about potheads.  I really miss how wholesome she used to think I was. Thought she'd landed a real cracker, lol.

[RoadRunner79]

Yes I do apply the "science" to myself. I don't assume my memories are always correct. In fact, I've often overruled my memories as unreliable because I have reason to do so. But you want a false dichotomy where either my memories are totally reliable or worthless, to me. That's not reality, that's binary thinking which is sadly extremely common in debates with theists. I made a whole topic about it here. Whether or not a whole other person's testimony is reliable to me is a completely different question.

Whether it's reliable for a court, or for science, is yet another question. These are not all the same issue.

The part I bolded and highlighted above is all I'm asking for.   I haven't said that they are completely reliable or completely unreliable.  And if the physical evidence points to me being guilty of something, and yet I remember distinctly being somewhere and doing something completely different at the time, It's not even going to cross my mind, that I may be mistaken.

I don't assume that testimony is unreliable, especially when it is shown to be good testimony.  But we do need to test our witnesses, including ourselves.

[IATIA]

It is obvious that someone here has not grasped the idea of "faulty memories" or is just too obtuse to admit their fault.

We are all in a class together. A man walks in and shoots the instructor, turns and looks at the class, then walks out, never to be seen again. The police show up and the investigation begins.

Everybody can agree that a man walked in and shot the instructor. Descriptions, however, will be varied. the exact time it happened will vary. The amount of time the shooter looked at the class will vary. A lineup ensues and several, if not most, were able to pick a man from the lineup. The shooter was not in the lineup.

This is a proven fact. It has been tested over and over. Memory is faulty. Bias is strong. And once the questions begin, leading questions, especially from lawyers, will distort the memory even more. Over a month from now, the stories will have changed from the initial police reports.

The discovery channel did an experiment that involved a nature hike which was to be documented by the students. Midway through the hike, there was a barricade, some strewn debris and a couple of men standing there. One month after the episode, each of the students were asked about the men and debris. Several of the students told of interactions they had with these men and one even insisted that she was detained at gunpoint. There was no interaction between the students and the men and each student was shown a video of the encounter. Most were shocked at their faulty memory.

These experiments are repeatable and the results are always the same. Everyone's memory sucks. It is a proven fact, time and time again. Get over it!

[RoadRunner79]

As soon as you quit observing it... It's a memory....one that according to some, maybe highly flawed memory.  What is being proposed here, crumbles a good many arguments on this board.   Ohh... You think this is possible.... Perhaps your memory was influenced by something you read and its now just a false memory?  You would not even realize you are mistaken?

You are right about this.  The struggle to separate fantasy from reality is a full-time job, even though for the most part we do it automatically.  That's why people take notes right away rather than waiting, and why they look to confirm via reliable witnesses WITH GOOD METHODS, that their results are correct.

If I ran an expriment and it seemed I'd achieved cold fusion, I'd check my notes, re-run the experiment, ask others to re-run it, check their methods to make sure they were collecting information properly, etc.

And then we have theists.  They've made a "discovery" which, if true, would be infinitely more important even than the discovery of cold fusion.  And how do they check it?  Wishy-thinking, false attributions, and an appeal to numbers of people who ALSO fail to collect information in a useful and meaningful way.  And that's your problem: you are relying on the testimony of witnesses who either do not know how to witness correctly, or are very deliberately doing it wrong.  The entire population of Christians, therefore, is incapable of providing "evidence" of the existence of God.

You do realize that you cannot repeat history right?   And even if you can repeat the outcome, that does not necessarily demonstrate the means.    Science isn't concerned with history (although it may be involved with it).  The focus of science doesn't care about what happens once, but cannot be repeated.   I once brought up alchemy in this regards, and that given good testimonial evidence would show that it did happen, even if there are unknown conditions where it cannot be repeated.   A friend who is also a chemist for an R&D firm, said they experienced this very thing.   While trying to do something else, they accidently created a compound, that would be worth a lot of money to their company.   What they started with, what they did, and what the ended up with was all documented, and witnessed by a number of people.  Further, the spent a lot of money trying to replicate the results.   However the only physical evidence they ended up with is the final results.   However it not being repeatable is only evidence, that they do not know how they did it, not that it did not happen.

[robvalue]

Edit: never mind.