No reason justifies disbelief.

[Belacqua]

You want an example of a method that doesn't include the study of the natural world but is somehow shown to be reliable by beings existing in the natural world.

No I don't. 

I was pointing out that when we use the word "reliable" this is what we mean. That is all.

---

Reliability has a great deal to do with future expectations.

No one here is against reliability.

[LadyForCamus]

That’s not off topic at all! It’s completely on topic. What knowledge have you gained using this non-scientific method?

I've never said that I have gained non-scientific knowledge. I'm not sure it's even possible.

Then why are you accusing me of being stubborn in a philosophical commitment? I'm not sure it's possible either. That's my whole point.  If/when someone can show that it is possible, I'll be forced to change my mind, won't I?  But, to say: "well, you don't know that it's impossible, therefore your position of disbelief is unjustified", is no different than saying: "you can't prove unicorns don't exist, therefore your disbelief is unjustified." When a good reason comes along that would justify my acceptance of the proposition: "There are other pathways to knowledge in addition to, yet wholly apart from empirical methods", then I'll accept it.  Have you anything to offer?

Second question:

Why can’t empirical investigation detect a god?  What distinctive qualities of god render him undetectable?  Perhaps you’re the closed-minded one to assume empirical investigation could never gather any information about god.  That sounds like a metaphysical commitment on your part.

That is not the way the classical theologians have defined him, since Plato, Aristotle, Gregory Chrystosum, etc. etc. etc. By definition God is not one object added to the number of all the other objects. God and the universe do not make two. God is idea. God is non-material, therefore not measurable or quantifiable.

I thought you hadn't worked out a definition of god yet?  No matter; forging ahead:

1. What reason is there to believe the definition that classical theologians gave to god is even close to accurate?  What reason is there to think that they are more correct in their definition of god, than the definition given to me by the first panhandler on the street that I come across?  What good is a definition for something if you can't even demonstrate the thing you are defining exists in the first place? This is where that pesky issue of evidence and reliability sneaks its way back into the discussion. My definition of god includes that god has physical, detectable attributes, he just chooses when he can be detected, and when he cant.  Tell me why my definition is wrong. Tell me how you know I'm wrong, While you're at it, what is an immaterial thing?  Please and thank you.

It is a metaphysical commitment on the part of the people who believe this way. Of course. I never said having a metaphysical commitment is bad; we all have them.

lol, sure.  That's why you're here, right? Because you think my position is an admirable one?

[The Grand Nudger]

I've been thinking about this intuition thing. It's totally bologna, lol. What is intuition in the first place? It's an unconscious assessment of empirical data, expressed as an innate, informed sense.  Without sense experience, there is no information, and so there couldn't be intuition.  Empiricism is the platform off of which intuition takes its leap. Sure, maybe its a "back of the house" assessment, like you said, but its still an assessment. That it feels different is irrelevant, and as you said, we use the same methods to distinguish between good/bad intuition and good/bad sense experience.  That's because they're essentially the same thing.  Giving something a different label doesn't magically transform it into something other than exactly what it is.

It's certainly possible that intuition is just another example of a subconscious form of information processing, and that this information is itself derived from sensory experience, but I think that a nominally rational intuitionist could object to the formulation above as proceeding from a question begging affirmation of empiricism, and even leverage the same closing remark - that calling every x empirical won't make it so any more than calling some empirical thing intuition would. 

I'd point out that you've given no reason to conclude that intuition can't be different from empirical observation and no reason that it would be impossible for intuition to provide knowledge.  You've given an opinion as to it's credibility/accuracy, and it's one that most (if not every) intuitionist would share with you.  The point of contention between the two positions simply isn't being addressed at all.  

How could I know that I exist without having a subjective experience first?

How could you have a subjective experience that didn't proceed from knowledge of self?  The existent self may be the axiom from which all statements of experience are made.  There is no "I see" without there first being an "I".  A skeptical response here could even be that you don't know that you exist, as you briefly mentioned before...but that you assume it.   With -or- without subjective experience, as those experiences can be in error, can be manufactured or populated with unrepresentative contents..or in the case of intuition above as we discussed it, may be happening entirely without your knowledge of them.  As innate knowledge would frame it, your self is not the kind of conclusion, but a necessary truth from which those other empirical observations are derived.  A favorite of innate knowledge theories are things like axioms and mathematics.  

Like before, with intuition, I could stab in the dark with examples but a more direct approach would be to ask if you can state with authenticity that you possess no innate knowledge whatsoever?  You seemed amenable to the idea of intuition, albeit leery with regards to it's accuracy, is it possible that innate knowledge presents a similar situation or circumstance?

[LadyForCamus]

Yes, it's complicated.  However, I think Belaqua has attempted to describe another way of collecting knowledge, and it was summarily discarded.

My view of things is this: we start with raw experience, filter it through our world view, and then categorize and systematize it.  There are plenty of experiences, in my opinion, which are so intellectually, emotionally or philosophically powerful that they are worth categorizing as such.  You might call them religious experiences, or moments of realization.

I myself have had experiences which I recognize as matching descriptions of religious experience.  I can honestly say to a Christian talking about the feeling of communion with God that I've been there.  Personally, I don't think it's necessary to attribute the experience to God or any other mythological source.  But what I CAN say is that the truth of that moment is self-contained: either you've had the experience and can "get it," and can understand why Christians might call it God, or you haven't had that experience.

This is an interesting thing you've mentioned here.  I have had This Experience while listening to a particular piece of music, in particular moments in time. It was a 100% unique, and as you called it, self-contained experience, in that if the music had been seconds on in the piece; if I had heard it a minute later than I had; if my brain chemistry had been even a shade different than it was at that  exact moment, I wouldn't have had the experience. I even did attribute it to god once, when I was young. Then I began treatment for depression/anxiety.  I started medication.  My emotions are far more even-keeled now; I don't have the horrid mood swings anymore, but I don't have Those Experiences anymore either. I understand why Christians call it god, but it isn't god. It's just a brain, doing things.

Science might provide interesting insights.  Very many so-called spiritual experiences have been reproduced in the lab: lucid dreams, OBEs, near-death experiences, and so on.  But in my opinion, having the experience provides a level of insight that none of the mechanisms a scientist might use can proxy for.

But, just because science can't recreate the experience, doesn't mean that there is some woo-element to what it is, or what caused it.

There's another path by which experiences can be confirmed: by the following of instructions meant to arrive at a particular mental realization or state of mind.  The problem is that it often requires an investment that an unconvinced party is unwilling to make-- and those unwilling to make it, being unable to reproduce the experience, will nevertheless place the BOP on those who outlined the path to having the experience, and discard both the experience and verbal descriptions of the kind of realized truth the experiencer had.

A simple example would be that of lucid dreaming.  If I told you that you could wake up in your dreams, and have complete control over the dream content, and that in this state, the dream felt much more vivid and full of detail even than waking life, then what next?  You could discard my assertion as woo or as an overzealous exaggeration.  But I have actual knowledge of lucid dreaming that your appeals for me to "show the evidence" cannot devalue.  To really be qualified to discuss the issue, you'd have to have a lucid dream, the steps of which can fairly easily be followed by all.

Well, lucid dreaming is fairly well understood from a scientific standpoint, if I remember correctly. I have lucid dreams all the time.  In fact, I suffer from hypnogogic/hypnopompic hallucinations rather frequently. Science also has a grasp on the cause of those experiences. Just because someone doesn't have first hand experience of something, doesn't mean they don't know something about it. If we can identify a cause, and we can identify an effect, what's left that matters?  If I only had the experience of these hallucinations without any knowledge of what they actually are, and what causes them...well, that could leave me open to any number of terrifying possible thoughts, wouldn't it?  Maybe I would think I was possessed, or being haunted, and then commit suicide. Conscious experience is an effect. I can't think of any reason to give it its own special category.

So the short answer to your question: another way of arriving at knowledge is by personal introspection.  And the categories of truth arrived at in this way are qualitatively different than those arrived at inference from objective observation.

How do you know exactly what you have knowledge of? How do you know it truly is what you think it is?

[The Grand Nudger]

A science of mind might be a very personal thing, and there have in fact been schools of psychology based on introspection.  However, science as we normally mean today it does not include personal insight.

OFC it does.............?  It just doesn't stop there.  Mostly because that hasn't shown itself to be a prudent or productive course of action.  

The Buddhists know the territory of mind particularly well, and I'd point to the Tibetan tradition of meditation as the best case in point.  Now, you might not agree with their source attributions, but they know truths about what this or that state of mind is like and how to achieve it unlike anyone, including scientists.

Even if you don't agree that this is true, there is a whole category of questions which science cannot answer-- those about qualia.
What is it like to taste chocolate?
What is it like to watch the sun rise after sleeping on a park bench in the middle of winter?
What is it like not to have the answer to a question, and then have the answer enter into your awareness, fully-formed?

Science can talk around these questions, but cannot answer them.  Knowledge of what things are like is in the experience of them, not in descriptions of brain function about them.

It doesn't matter whether or not I agree with them, I was pointing out that we have done scientific research on both the claims and the methods, that there was no barrier preventing it.  It's not as if some invisible wall saddled up into the labs and pulled some buddhist gandalf shit on science, there.

In any case, hasn't and can't are not interchangeable.  I still wonder why you think this, and why/how you think you know this...and that's before I start to question the specific examples and suggest that, as with you misconceptions about empiricism, you may not have an entirely accurate picture of the competence of empirical observation and empirical methods in those regards...each of them, themselves, an invocation of an empirical observation.

Human experience is very literally the thing that empiricism claims all of our knowledge to be derived from..and it's difficult to see why our experience wouldn't be a good tool to explain or describe...our experience..particularly in light of how productive empirical means have been toward that very question - obviously with the caveat that we did not -stop- at the point of experience alone but applied a regimented process to it's contents? Personally, IDK that the process that buddhism employed is entirely unproductive (or other than empirical), but we didn't exactly meditate our way to the moon or to our current understanding of the brain.

Not that it would matter, as I've already commented on..because even if science couldn't, not hadn't, but couldn't answer some question...and even if all of science were wrong wrong wrong, that wouldn't demonstrate any other than empirical or any metaphysical answer was right, or that there was anything in either set. That's just not how that works.

[bennyboy]

In any case, hasn't and can't are not interchangeable.  I still wonder why you think this, and why/how you think you know this

This is a very common logical fallacy made in the name of science, and we've already talked about it. No number of scientific discoveries provide evidence that science is well-suited to solve a particular new problem-- unless problems of a similar category have already been solved.

"I believe we will find a way to cure cancer" is pretty reasonable. We've cured some diseases, and we are able to observe and interact with cancer.

"I believe science will eventually explain exactly why there is mind in the universe" is not reasonable. There's nothing like mind, and because we are talking about bridging the gap between subjective and objective frameworks, and not having done so before, we have no good reason to believe that it can be done through material observation and inference.

"We haven't found what caused the Big Bang. . . yet" is not reasonable, either, for the same reason. Solving some problems would require an observational perspective to which we don't have access, and we have no particularly compelling reason to believe that any scientific discovery would allow us to attain that perspective.

Sure, maybe some clever clogs WILL bridge the gap between mind and matter-- but there's no evidence yet that this is possible.
Some young Einstein MIGHT conceivably find a way to observe our Universe from a new perspective-- but there's no evidence yet that this is possible.

Jesus MIGHT conceivably fly down from the heavens and save humanity-- but there's no evidence that this is possible.

[The Grand Nudger]

In any case, hasn't and can't are not interchangeable.  I still wonder why you think this, and why/how you think you know this

This is a very common logical fallacy made in the name of science, and we've already talked about it.  No number of scientific discoveries provide evidence that science is well-suited to solve a particular new problem-- unless problems of a similar category have already been solved.

That's nice, whatever it is you think you're commenting on...but hasn't and can't still aren't interchangeable.  I still wonder why you think this, and why/how you think you know it.

-and, ofc, why it would even matter?

[bennyboy]

This is a very common logical fallacy made in the name of science, and we've already talked about it.  No number of scientific discoveries provide evidence that science is well-suited to solve a particular new problem-- unless problems of a similar category have already been solved.

That's nice, whatever it is you think you're commenting on...but hasn't and can't still aren't interchangeable.  I still wonder why you think this, and why/how you think you know it.

-and, ofc, why it would even matter?

Again. . . this is an idea that you've introduced, and you're commenting on it as though I said it.  Did I say hasn't = can't?

I would say that if you want to assert that science can answer all kinds of questions, then you'll have to demonstrate this to be true.  As you know, I'm perfectly willing to demonstrate that the evidence is against science answering certain kinds of questions: because of the nature of the question, and because of the nature of science.

Why do I think science cannot explain psychogony?  Because we are limited to objective observations, and mind is subjective.  You can't examine a mind in the lab.
Why do I think science cannot explain ultimate cosmogony?  Because it's limited to material observations from within the Universe, and because we have no reason to believe that limitation can be transcended.

It's not just "Science hasn't solved this, so it can't."  There are plenty of unsolved problems that I feel pretty sure will be solved.  I expect, for example, a general cure to cancer within a century.

[Rahn127]

As I read the past few pages, there appeared to be some disagreement on how we acquire knowledge and that someone can acquire knowledge through some other means than empirical observation of reality.

Perhaps someone could guess correctly every single time without thinking, without looking, without measuring.

That would be utterly fantastic.
You would guess every single answer correct on every test. Make the best choice every single time a choice was to be made, but there are some things that you can't guess correctly.

This type of guessing correctly can occur in a movie or animation, meaning that the entire situation is setup for the person to guess correctly.

Kind of like a magician handing you a seemingly shuffled deck of cards and then is able to tell you every card in order in the deck.

He memorized them but yet it appears as if he's guessing correctly every time.

So, another way of knowing information before it happens would be a kind of time travel, but still in that sense, you are discovering what happened through empirical means and then traveling back in time to make it appear as if you are guessing correctly every single time.

[Abaddon_ire]

It's a good question, isn't it?  We find ourselves facing the same question with empirical knowledge.  How can we distinguish between accurate and inaccurate intuition, how can we distinguish between accurate and inaccurate sense experience?  Most would offer deduction in either case...or any of a number of other methodological ways of organizing our thoughts.     

Describing accurate intuition as a lucky guess leaves open the door for accurate sense experience to be, equally, a lucky guess.  I could, after all, look to my left and see a fairy outside the window.  I'm lucky that I don't..because if I did, then I would very likely be wrong about the issue of whether or not fairies are outside my window.  Ultimately, this weakest form of the other than empirical doesn't posit that we are or can be certain, that it will always be possible to distinguish between accurate intuitions -or- accurate experiences and inaccurate ones, it doesn't even make the claim that intuition is the foundation of all knowledge, or that a nominally rational person would have to accept a conclusion derived from intuition....it merely seeks to add intuition to the possible sources of knowledge.  It only establishes, if accepted, that the claim of empiricism is wrong.

I've been thinking about this intuition thing. It's totally bologna, lol. What is intuition in the first place? It's an unconscious assessment of empirical data, expressed as an innate, informed sense.  Without sense experience, there is no information, and so there couldn't be intuition.  Empiricism is the platform off of which intuition takes its leap. Sure, maybe its a "back of the house" assessment, like you said, but its still an assessment. That it feels different is irrelevant, and as you said, we use the same methods to distinguish between good/bad intuition and good/bad sense experience.  That's because they're essentially the same thing.  Giving something a different label doesn't magically transform it into something other than exactly what it is.

I'm not sure that is quite right. "Intuition" can still work absent any data at all. Data is not required. I suspect that baseless intuition is preferentially selected by evolution and the unintended consequence is religion.