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J. B.

Massimo Pigliucci on How to Tell Science From Bunk | Skeptiko - Science at the Tipping ... - 0 views

www.skeptiko.com/-how-to-tell-science-from-bunk

Scientism Philosophy of Science Scientific Bias NDEs

shared by J. B. on 27 Feb 11 - Cached
  • that’s like saying the vast majority of astrologers are in agreement with the fact that astrology works.
    • J. B.
      J. B. on 27 Feb 11
       
      Couldn't all this come back to bite him? You can't appeal to individual scientists as authorities, because we can find individual scientists who say anything. And we can't just appeal to scientific consensus, because any consensus in any field could be analogous to "the vast majority of astrologers" having a consensus.
  • The theory is that consciousness, in some way we don’t totally understand, survives bodily death. Now, that’s well-constructed. It’s not totally framed up in scientific terms but it’s an important theory because it contradicts the prevailing materialistic explanation of consciousness, which is pretty much nonexistent because consciousness is something we’re grabbing at. So to say that consciousness in some way we don’t understand seems to survive bodily death, I don’t know why that violates some sacred creed of science.
  • If we’re going to play the expert game, it’s too easy. That’s one of the things that I get into in the book. Almost for any position whatsoever, no matter how far out it is, you will find somebody with a PhD. or an MD that is willing to defend that position. But that’s not the way science works. I mean, you can find scientists who deny climate change. You can find scientists who deny evolution. You can find scientists…
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  • If somebody who does near-death experience research claims that what these people are doing is experience-having a supernatural experience, that’s not science. It’s not science because first of all, science cannot actually say anything about the supernatural to begin with. That’s not what science does.
  • science has been well understood over the last several decades in philosophy as a particular kind of activity which is based on a particular set of assumptions about what is being studied, one of those assumptions is regularity of the laws of nature.
    • J. B.
      J. B. on 27 Feb 11
       
      Are the laws of nature discovered or are they a set of a priori assumptions? Are the laws of nature descriptive or prescriptive? Can't we modify the laws of nature as we discover more about the universe or reality?
  • It’s your paranormal explanations don’t seem to me explanations at all. There’s no mechanism that is being proposed; there is no understanding of how these kinds of things happen. That’s not science.
    • J. B.
      J. B. on 27 Feb 11
       
      Does a mechanism have to be provided in order for it to qualify as a scientific explanation? What mechanism did Newton give? And do we understand how gravity happens?
  • his definition of death, which is as good as I’ve heard, is to say to look at cardiac arrest patients and to know that when someone has a cardiac arrest, this is not a heart attack, this is cardiac arrest. Your heart has stopped. We know within 10 to 15 seconds your brain stops. We know that if we do nothing, you’re dead.
  • One of the most widely accepted ways in both theoretical science and philosophy of science these days, thinking about the relationship between claims and evidence, is the Bayesian framework. So Bayesian theory which is very wide-spread in statistical analysis decision-making theory and so on and so forth, and it’s now being used in several other areas of science.
  • That doesn’t mean we understand consciousness. It doesn’t mean that we have a good mechanistic explanation for what’s going on, but it is something that philosophers of mind refer to as the “no ectoplasm clause.” The no ectoplasm clause is the idea that whatever consciousness is, it seems to depend on the brain.
    • J. B.
      J. B. on 27 Feb 11
       
      If there is no good mechanistic explanation of what's going on, does this mean there is no science of consciousness?
  • you go to the sources, to the actual experts, you look at what they’re saying and say, ‘Well, is there a consensus within that community?’ And if the answer is yes there is, then the best bet for somebody who does not have technical expertise in that area is to say, ‘Look, unless there is in fact a controversy within the scientific community, my best bet is to go with the current consensus,’ of course with the understanding that every consensus in science is provisional.
    • J. B.
      J. B. on 27 Feb 11
       
      Does this contradict his earlier remark about consensus among astrologers?
  • So the argument from authority of course, is a fallacy when you use it this way, if you’re saying that it necessarily follows from a scientific consensus or from what an authority says that what that authority says is true. So if I were to say that, “You know what? I know for certain that climate change is real. Why? Because the experts say so,” that would definitely be an example of a logical fallacy. You cannot derive certain knowledge, you cannot derive consequentially, absolutely certain knowledge from the fact that there is agreement within a certain community of experts because of course, the history of science shows that the community of experts can be wrong.
  • J. B. on 27 Feb 11
     
    Alex Tsakiris interviews Massimo Pigliucci. They get into an interesting conversation on NDEs.
  • J. B. on 27 Feb 11
     
    Alex Tsakiris interviews Massimo Pigliucci. They get into an interesting conversation on NDEs.
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