You Are Right, But You Are Wrong.

[+Hammerclaw]

On 11/11/2020 at 2:39 PM, danydandan said:

I found this article pretty interesting. As a scientifically minded sceptic it can be difficult to convince a believer in a conspiracy, the supernatural or whatever, that they may need to reevaluate their position or conclusions. This article discusses Pascal's thoughts on the matter of persuasion when discussing ideas.

Article

What are peoples thoughts on the above and do you think this technique would actually be useful?

Useful to what purpose, altering their absolutism?

[openozy]

12 hours ago, TashaMarie said:

As a non academic type  I disagree.  Looking for the truth is never limiting

To be fair you do seem to rule out anything that is unprovable scientifically atm so that is limiting yourself.Only going on your posts I've read,correct me if I've missed something.

[XenoFish]

47 minutes ago, Hammerclaw said:

Useful to what purpose, altering their absolutism?

The problem is Hammer is that if you and other realized how right I am and how wrong you are, you'd realize that I'm half as wrong as you are half as right. Then right in the middle we'd realized that I have no clue what the hell I'm talking about.

[TashaMarie]

1 hour ago, openozy said:

To be fair you do seem to rule out anything that is unprovable scientifically atm so that is limiting yourself.Only going on your posts I've read,correct me if I've missed something.

No I state my opinion on what is posted.  I think if you read most of my replies it is based on my opinions not that of science.  I do not have enough knowledge of science to really use that as an argument.  

[+Hammerclaw]

1 hour ago, XenoFish said:

The problem is Hammer is that if you and other realized how right I am and how wrong you are, you'd realize that I'm half as wrong as you are half as right. Then right in the middle we'd realized that I have no clue what the hell I'm talking about.

From their perspective, they may decide that--while the other guy is right from his perspective, his perspective is totally wrong. In other words, understanding an opponents point-of-view is in nowise, agreeing with it. The OPs original citation is a fine example of sophistry.

[XenoFish]

38 minutes ago, Hammerclaw said:

From their perspective, they may decide that--while the other guy is right from his perspective, his perspective is totally wrong. In other words, understanding an opponents point-of-view is in nowise, agreeing with it. The OPs original citation is a fine example of sophistry.

Ugh, why did I even bother. 

[XenoFish]

What is true? What is belief? What is the tunnel vision we all possess and are possessed by? If I speak my truth all will hear an opinion. To convince another of my truth there must be a shared emotion-bound-belief. A tiny mustard seed of belief or doubt within the psyche of another. To change another mind you must season your words with emotions that invoke and evoke a desired response. If the idea you've shared takes root, it will change their mind.

Just think about how mass media plays people for fools. Emotions are the weak spot. 

[spartan max2]

6 minutes ago, XenoFish said:

What is true? What is belief? What is the tunnel vision we all possess and are possessed by? If I speak my truth all will hear an opinion. To convince another of my truth there must be a shared emotion-bound-belief. A tiny mustard seed of belief or doubt within the psyche of another. To change another mind you must season your words with emotions that invoke and evoke a desired response. If the idea you've shared takes root, it will change their mind.

Just think about how mass media plays people for fools. Emotions are the weak spot. 

Aren't you supposed to be taking it easy, mister?  lol

[XenoFish]

2 minutes ago, spartan max2 said:

Aren't you supposed to be taking it easy, mister?  lol

Only when I'm dead.

[TigerBright19]

Truth without proof and validation is based on faith, perception, and assumption.  e.g.  I was given a history lesson about the year 1779.  I have faith in my teacher's ability to tell me the truth, I perceive he is trustworthy and has no desire to mislead me, and I assume what he is telling me is true.  He assumed the history book he read out was telling him the truth.  The author of the book assumed the sources he used were telling the author the truth.  The sources had obtained letters written in 1779 and they assumed the letters were authentic and the people who gave them the letters were telling them the truth.  The people who owned the letters assumed the original people who wrote the letters in 1779 were telling the truth.  The original people who wrote the letters had assumed the information they were writing about was the truth.

Leo Tolstoy — "History would be a wonderful thing – if it were only true."

 

Edited November 17, 2020 by TigerBright19

[+Hammerclaw]

4 hours ago, XenoFish said:

Ugh, why did I even bother. 

Don't ask me, man, I don't work here.

[Mr Walker]

On 11/15/2020 at 7:01 PM, Nuclear Wessel said:

So you don't have any supporting evidence.

I have the same supporting evidence that my "god" exists as that my wife exists  Neither is transferable to an online sceptic I cant prove to you that I have a wife or a dog  i cant prove to you that a real l iving powerful being interacts inmy life   You can believe the first two  because the y are quite common You cant believe the latter because you  have no expernce with such things 

The point is that this is how you or I decide what is real in our daily lives NOT how we convince others   How do YOU know/decide if your breakfast was real,  or part of a dream or an hallucination?  

it is not hard is it. 

If i did not have the same type of evidences i wouldn't be arguing that these things are real/physical /have their own impendent existence  

If you encountered an angel or a ghost, how would you go about proving its reality to yourself?   How would you determine it had its own existence outside your mind?  

[eight bits]

3 hours ago, Mr Walker said:

The point is that this is how you or I decide what is real in our daily lives NOT how we convince others   How do YOU know/decide if your breakfast was real,  or part of a dream or an hallucination?  

The question is not trivial, and ultimately touches on the capacity to implement Pascal's advice.

I am persuaded by Daryl Bem (who became a woo-ist in retirement, but in his active career was an elite experimental psychologist) that there is no privileged declarative self-knowledge - that is, I don't know anything factual about myself that could not in principle be known by a hypothetical best friend who was with me for any event in question.

"Declarative" here excludes inherently private interior experience, like what does green look like to me?, what is it like for me to feel happy? ...  It also excludes procedural or performance knowledge - it is possible, within the Bem constraint, to be the only human being who can perform a given task (e.g. be the last speaker of a dying language).

We are talking about facts, and only interested in "biographical" ones: whether you are married, whether you have a dog, what you had for breakfast this morning. Also, it is a "ceiling" constraint, not a "floor." Maybe you don't "know" anything because you're a brain in a vat, etc. Your best friend might know that and you don't - the claim, then, isn't that you know everything about yourself your best friend does, but rather that you don't know more facts about yourself than that.

This framework, then, rather neatly divides your pseudo-conundrum. Yes, the online skeptic knows less about you than the hypothetical Bem-best-friend. Nevertheless, for you to know something factual about yourself, it must in principle be knowable by your BBF, too. "Transferable" evidence may be an important distinction for other purposes, but not to this one. The BBF was there, Johnny.

With your question thus divided, we can follow each stream of concern separately. What can the online skeptic know about you? As I put it in a recent post, "All I need to know." Need here refers both to the content of what I believe about you, and also the confidence with which I profess that belief. I am confident enough that you are married, somewhat less confident that you've ever been within three meters of a living dog, but still confident enough for any webly purpose, and I know nothing about your recent meals, which meshes nicely with how much I care about that.

What can you know about you? Within the Bem framework, that's limited by evidence, what can be observed. You can observe lights in the night, but you can't observe that they are a god. That's an inference on your part.

A last-ditch save might be to argue that your best friend would reach the same inference you did. Every concept has its frontier of application, and Bem certainly knew that there is no "bright and shining line" between obervation and inference. But, fortuitously, we have nearby witnesses. You suggested that the light source was truck headlights, and the eyewitnesses were fine with that. It is at least possible, then, that your hypothetical BBF would reach the same conclusion that the actual eyewitnesses did.

If the Ben framework inplies anything it is that if you and a reasonable BBF could disagree about a biographical fact claim ("I met a god that night" is declarative and biographical), then you don't know it. Of course, you can have beliefs, but so what?

Which, whether you accept that conclusion or not, nevertheless meets the burden of distinguishing your claims about a wife and a dog or even your breakfast from your encounters with gods-aliens-angels, or whatever they are this week. And to perfect that distinction, I don't have to know anything about you except the content of your posting. Which I do.

Finally, note that we never reach the question of what, if anything, I personally believe about alien angel gods, and whether or not they'd be apt to manifest as pillars of light while curing the smoking habits of selected very special people. It suffices that a reasonable person could regard all that as inherently inferential and not observational. I don't have to hold any particular set of beliefs to recognize that more uncertainty is justified about your headlight interpretation than your dog stories.

Edited November 17, 2020 by eight bits

[Mr Walker]

14 hours ago, eight bits said:

The question is not trivial, and ultimately touches on the capacity to implement Pascal's advice.

I am persuaded by Daryl Bem (who became a woo-ist in retirement, but in his active career was an elite experimental psychologist) that there is no privileged declarative self-knowledge - that is, I don't know anything factual about myself that could not in principle be known by a hypothetical best friend who was with me for any event in question.

"Declarative" here excludes inherently private interior experience, like what does green look like to me?, what is it like for me to feel happy? ...  It also excludes procedural or performance knowledge - it is possible, within the Bem constraint, to be the only human being who can perform a given task (e.g. be the last speaker of a dying language).

We are talking about facts, and only interested in "biographical" ones: whether you are married, whether you have a dog, what you had for breakfast this morning. Also, it is a "ceiling" constraint, not a "floor." Maybe you don't "know" anything because you're a brain in a vat, etc. Your best friend might know that and you don't - the claim, then, isn't that you know everything about yourself your best friend does, but rather that you don't know more facts about yourself than that.

This framework, then, rather neatly divides your pseudo-conundrum. Yes, the online skeptic knows less about you than the hypothetical Bem-best-friend. Nevertheless, for you to know something factual about yourself, it must in principle be knowable by your BBF, too. "Transferable" evidence may be an important distinction for other purposes, but not to this one. The BBF was there, Johnny.

With your question thus divided, we can follow each stream of concern separately. What can the online skeptic know about you? As I put it in a recent post, "All I need to know." Need here refers both to the content of what I believe about you, and also the confidence with which I profess that belief. I am confident enough that you are married, somewhat less confident that you've ever been within three meters of a living dog, but still confident enough for any webly purpose, and I know nothing about your recent meals, which meshes nicely with how much I care about that.

What can you know about you? Within the Bem framework, that's limited by evidence, what can be observed. You can observe lights in the night, but you can't observe that they are a god. That's an inference on your part.

A last-ditch save might be to argue that your best friend would reach the same inference you did. Every concept has its frontier of application, and Bem certainly knew that there is no "bright and shining line" between obervation and inference. But, fortuitously, we have nearby witnesses. You suggested that the light source was truck headlights, and the eyewitnesses were fine with that. It is at least possible, then, that your hypothetical BBF would reach the same conclusion that the actual eyewitnesses did.

If the Ben framework inplies anything it is that if you and a reasonable BBF could disagree about a biographical fact claim ("I met a god that night" is declarative and biographical), then you don't know it. Of course, you can have beliefs, but so what?

Which, whether you accept that conclusion or not, nevertheless meets the burden of distinguishing your claims about a wife and a dog or even your breakfast from your encounters with gods-aliens-angels, or whatever they are this week. And to perfect that distinction, I don't have to know anything about you except the content of your posting. Which I do.

Finally, note that we never reach the question of what, if anything, I personally believe about alien angel gods, and whether or not they'd be apt to manifest as pillars of light while curing the smoking habits of selected very special people. It suffices that a reasonable person could regard all that as inherently inferential and not observational. I don't have to hold any particular set of beliefs to recognize that more uncertainty is justified about your headlight interpretation than your dog stories.

I disagree (mostly)  with your second paragraph 

Unless your best friend is a mind reader, who lives with you every second of the time, there is no way the y can come close to knowing you  as you know yourself.

Ive lived with one woman pretty constantly  for 45 years  and i can assure you  we do not know each other that well 

Second suppose you live on an island by yourself without a friend. Your mind is evolved to discern reality from  non reality, to survive.

It can tell what has objective self  reality and what does not, unless or until, it begins to malfunction 

On the other hand it, in part, confirms my point.

If you  were with me when a god or ghost manifested you would see it and experience it 

BUT your inner experience would be difernt to mine,  just as when two people together encounter anything

I think we have another conflict of language 

Many inner experiences ARE factual Eg love is a series of neural networks in my mind  It is real and physical and can be observed and recorded  but only i can experience it 

I am colour blind in greens and reds (to a small extent Thus i simply wont see them as you do And these factual differences influence the way we interpret our world and construct our beliefs values etc.  

Everything in my life is a fact, from  what i had for breakfast, to how i feel about my wife,  to whether i met a god or a ghost.

Ie the y are potentially CAPABLE of objective knowledge and proof   

But potentially doesn't  mean practically 

Unless  transferrable evidences can be provided and accepted no one else can know ANYTHING about me (unless we shared an experience, in which case the y can know the external experience but not the internal one )

So you have (as it happens) a   justified true belief that i have a wife and dogs.

  You certainly don't know this. How confident you feel is a choice of your own mind 

Soory but i can potentially KNOIW everything about myself  (although i might not actually yet know everything)

  That s because everything about me is contained  within me  It is just a matter of learning to find and identify all the components of slef and constructing reconstructing them as you want them to be  

I know more than most about myself  due to the hundreds, if not thousands, of hours i spent examining myself and constructing the person  i wanted to be, in both body and mind, as well as  constructing the  circumstances of my life 

 Psychology and cognitive studies also gives me an advantage in this, as does basic,  but extensive, medical knowldge. 

So, by Bern's argument, when i see a cat i can not infer, let alone know,  that it is a cat.

Why not ?

and if i can then i can certainly tell if something's a god/non god based on the established parameters for gods 

The other witnesses relied on me to tell them what i saw 

I lied 

There were no truck lights 

Ive explained what i saw heard and experienced/felt 

Take it or leave it   Someone standing next   to me would have seen the column of light exactly as i did. and described its physical appearance as i do   

The y would have heard the voce  speak the words it did 

However what the y made of it would depend on their inner world view 

I didnt know what to make of it for a long time.  It it took a lot of study thought and further encounters for me to understand what it was

My first two conclusions were tha t a it was a manifestation of  an inner ability of my own mind (I dismissed that as hubris and unevidenced) 

The second thought was that it was a powerful demonstration of several technologies,  used to communicate with me and remove my addiction 

It was never a religious experience (i was raised atheist/humanist and was still so)   While i call it "god" because that is a frame of reference every one id familiar wit, hive concluded from  a long association with it, that it is the material form of the cosmic consciousness; an ancient alien entity(natural or artificial) with a specific role in the development of human beings 

Yep that  is simply  my "best guess" or logical deduction,  given my contact with it over almost 60 years, now 

Again, how is the claim "i met a god last night "any different  to the claim, "I nearly ran over a wombat last night"  Of course i know what i encountered  IF i can know when i encounter a cat or dog, or wombat, theni can know when i encounter a god or a ghost. Any  other proposition is illogical  

My friend might have been from Germany and didn't know what a wombat was Thus he couldn't confirm it as a wombat but he could confirm we nearly ran over it 

You said this

Which, whether you accept that conclusion or not, nevertheless meets the burden of distinguishing your claims about a wife and a dog or even your breakfast from your encounters with gods-aliens-angels, or whatever they are this week. And to perfect that distinction, I don't have to know anything about you except the content of your posting. Which I do.

Of course i disagree. You haven't  really given any logical reasons for this argument.

   It is based on  an assumption that a god /ghost etc. is of a different character or quality to a cat or a dog, or eggs on toast  .

In my life, that simply is not the case.  

You have to chose whether to believe/disbelieve EVERY/any claim i make.

There is no categorical distinction between the claims.    

The content of my posts is not evidence for anything.

 You are perceiving or interpreting that   content through preconceived opinions 

Ps it has nothing to do with the "reasonableness" of a person, and all to do with their own experiences, knowledge and understandings. 

Reasonable scientists in Europe refused to believe that the platypus was a real creature even when specimens were sent to them.   

Your uncertainty is your construct, and thus yours to deal with.

 

 

Edited November 18, 2020 by Mr Walker

[+Nuclear Wessel]

2 hours ago, Mr Walker said:

Again, how is the claim "i met a god last night "any different  to the claim, "I nearly ran over a wombat last night"  

Gods don't exist.

[Mr Walker]

2 hours ago, Nuclear Wessel said:

Gods don't exist.

lol I respect your belief. 

"gods"  is just a name we give to a range of entities. SOME of those entities exist, and interact with humans. 

You don't believe this.

 That is a  logical and reasonable belief, especially   if you  have had no contact with them,   but it happens to be   a false belief  

 

I know it to be true that beings we call 'god(s)"  exist. Even though that  is not really what they are, it is what we call such beings.

   If  you have any evidence  to prove "gods"  don t exist, I would be very interested to hear it.

  That includes evidences you  cant transfer to me, but know for yourself.

  If these beings did not exist, both my wife and i would be dead,  so your evidences will need to be quite convincing  . 

If you  don't want to call them gods, I am more than happy with that.   I don't think of them as gods, either.

It/they  is/are powerful, technologically advanced, alien beings or artificial intelligences.   

Edited November 18, 2020 by Mr Walker

[+Nuclear Wessel]

36 minutes ago, Mr Walker said:

I know it to be true that beings we call 'god(s)"  exist. Even though that  is not really what they are, it is what we call such beings.

That is your belief.

[eight bits]

7 hours ago, Mr Walker said:

Unless your best friend is a mind reader, who lives with you every second of the time, there is no way the y can come close to knowing you  as you know yourself.

Apparently you sped-read past the specification of which kinds of knowledge we're talking about. This limits the value of pursuing a conversation about it with you.

BTW, I know a woman who didn't know her first name until she applied for a passport and saw her name on her birth certificate. It is not unusual in geneaology to encounter people who don't know the anniversary of their birth, because records disagree or don't exist. The Bem constraint, then, bites.

7 hours ago, Mr Walker said:

It can tell what has objective self  reality and what does not, unless or until, it begins to malfunction 

"It" can try (since when is any human being an "it"?). Errors of discernment are inevitable during normal functioning.

7 hours ago, Mr Walker said:

If you  were with me when a god or ghost manifested you would see it and experience it 

You fail to grasp that in the headlights story, other people were with you. They saw lights, not a god, to their own satisfaction.  Mine, too, and I don't think that my being there as opposed to my reading, and re-re-reading your expertly crafted narrative of this pivotal event in world history would make any difference to my conclusion.

7 hours ago, Mr Walker said:

Many inner experiences ARE factual Eg love is a series of neural networks in my mind  It is real and physical and can be observed and recorded  but only i can experience it 

Whatever you experience as "love" is a private mental state, and as such that is beyond the scope of the Bem constraint. You'd know that if you'd read the post well.

7 hours ago, Mr Walker said:

I am colour blind in greens and reds (to a small extent Thus i simply wont see them as you do And these factual differences influence the way we interpret our world and construct our beliefs values etc. 

As it says in the post you didn't read well, there is no issue that you might know less than another witness.

7 hours ago, Mr Walker said:

the y can know the external experience but not the internal one

Not an issue here. Whether you love some woman is outside the scope of the Bem constraint; whether you married her is within it.

7 hours ago, Mr Walker said:

Soory but i can potentially KNOIW everything about myself  (although i might not actually yet know everything)

The real importance of the Bem constraint is that it allows me to classify your claim as what it is: mystical nonsense.

Even without Bem's help, it is trivial to construct factual questions about your past that you can't answer from personal knowledge. The woman I mentioned: she doesn't know her birth name from personal knowledge, luckily she lives in a time and place where official scribes record that sort of information. All those people I mentioned who don't know the anniversary of their birth? That information is irretrievably lost, and was already lost during their lifetimes.

The Bem constraint understates the full difficulty of autobiographical recall, since if we manage to establish that you could possibly know something, there would still be the problem of whether you recalled it accurately. There's nothing wrong with the misnamed woman's memory; memory problems impede our self-knowledge in addition to the Bem constraint.

That you have inflated your self-image to Michelin Man proportions, to where you think you're an exception is laughable.

7 hours ago, Mr Walker said:

So, by Bern's argument, when i see a cat i can not infer, let alone know,  that it is a cat.

What you infer is outside the constraint. As was mentioned in the post you didn't read well, there is no bright and shining line separating perception from inference. We have dedicated detectors for environmental features that are important to us, facial recognition being a familiar but amazing example. I think a lot of people also have dedicated "cat recognizers."

Of course, ROC binds. Occasionally I mistake one person for another (and have been mistaken for some other person). Occasionally the cat detector will be set off by an owl sculpture. The price of working at all is to misfire occasionally.

In any case, Bem is not a moron. So what do you think? Did Bem teach that you can't recognize a cat? Why do you waste your readers' time with bullscheiss?

7 hours ago, Mr Walker said:

The y would have heard the voce  speak the words it did 

Maybe. It's amazing what people can hear in the noise of a truck's engine, brakes and shifting gears ... voices in general and voices speaking our native language are both things for which we probably have dedicated detectors, and ROC rules.  However, mistaken perceptual detection isn't contagious, so I wouldn't assume that a hypothetical witness would hear the voice any better than the real people who were nearby at the time. Yes, yes, they were too far away, etc. But the bigger problem is that there was no voice, just plenty of noise.

7 hours ago, Mr Walker said:

You haven't  really given any logical reasons for this argument.

And you have repeatedly shown that you didn't read the post well. It includes the searchable term Daryl Bem. He did a lot of work, you're looking for what's on topic here: persuasion. A specific and remarkable kind of persuasion: convincing somebody without violence and without denying the sincerity of their recollection, that they committed a crime that they didn't actually commit.

Not that the police typically look to Pascal for hints about interrogation techniques, but ... it is an interesting application (misapplication) of the general approach advocated in the OP.

 

Edited November 18, 2020 by eight bits

[jmccr8]

6 hours ago, Mr Walker said:

lol I respect your belief. 

"gods"  is just a name we give to a range of entities. SOME of those entities exist, and interact with humans. 

You don't believe this.

 That is a  logical and reasonable belief, especially   if you  have had no contact with them,   but it happens to be   a false belief  

 

I know it to be true that beings we call 'god(s)"  exist. Even though that  is not really what they are, it is what we call such beings.

   If  you have any evidence  to prove "gods"  don t exist, I would be very interested to hear it.

  That includes evidences you  cant transfer to me, but know for yourself.

  If these beings did not exist, both my wife and i would be dead,  so your evidences will need to be quite convincing  . 

If you  don't want to call them gods, I am more than happy with that.   I don't think of them as gods, either.

It/they  is/are powerful, technologically advanced, alien beings or artificial intelligences.   

Hi Walker

Why call them gods if you don't think they are and why infer that anyone else would see them as gods I don't and have never seen them either.

jmccr8

[danydandan]

On 11/16/2020 at 9:37 PM, Hammerclaw said:

Useful to what purpose, altering their absolutism?

Yeah. That's pretty much the point.

[Mr Walker]

13 hours ago, Nuclear Wessel said:

That is your belief.

Only if you  also think I  only believe that I have a wife and 3 dogs 

Where evidences and facts exist, we have knowledge.

Beliefs are constructs built  for purposes like hope or need.

The y are disconnected from truth ie a belief may be true or false .

I know this won't change your mind, but feel the need to point out that t you aren't accepting/understanding  my pov (no need to believe it )

[Mr Walker]

6 hours ago, jmccr8 said:

Hi Walker

Why call them gods if you don't think they are and why infer that anyone else would see them as gods I don't and have never seen them either.

jmccr8

Ive explained this many times 

When speaking  in person or online with people. The common term for such beings is god(s) You will notice i almost never capitalise the word, because for me god is like cat ie just our common name for something

If i dont call it god I have to go into all my background  experience with it.  I have to explain about the nature of the cosmic consciousness, and my contact with it from the age of 13 

This entity (IMO)  is exactly what most humans have always considered to be a god( from  the time the earliest human developed the capacity to identify and name gods

I dint mean you will physically see them (although you may in the future ) I meant "see' them as perceive them as gods 

Today we are a bit more likely  to see them as benevolent powerful alien beings, but most people still think of them, and call them, gods. 

Ps strange as it may seem most people are a lot more comfortable accepting and believing tha t another human is in contact with a god or an angel than with a powerful kind alien entity   It is a kind of cultural acceptance/tolerance , which is another reason i use the word 

[+Hammerclaw]

50 minutes ago, danydandan said:

Yeah. That's pretty much the point.

"In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."   Benjamin Franklin.

[Mr Walker]

12 hours ago, eight bits said:

Apparently you sped-read past the specification of which kinds of knowledge we're talking about. This limits the value of pursuing a conversation about it with you.

BTW, I know a woman who didn't know her first name until she applied for a passport and saw her name on her birth certificate. It is not unusual in geneaology to encounter people who don't know the anniversary of their birth, because records disagree or don't exist. The Bem constraint, then, bites.

"It" can try (since when is any human being an "it"?). Errors of discernment are inevitable during normal functioning.

You fail to grasp that in the headlights story, other people were with you. They saw lights, not a god, to their own satisfaction.  Mine, too, and I don't think that my being there as opposed to my reading, and re-re-reading your expertly crafted narrative of this pivotal event in world history would make any difference to my conclusion.

Whatever you experience as "love" is a private mental state, and as such that is beyond the scope of the Bem constraint. You'd know that if you'd read the post well.

As it says in the post you didn't read well, there is no issue that you might know less than another witness.

Not an issue here. Whether you love some woman is outside the scope of the Bem constraint; whether you married her is within it.

The real importance of the Bem constraint is that it allows me to classify your claim as what it is: mystical nonsense.

Even without Bem's help, it is trivial to construct factual questions about your past that you can't answer from personal knowledge. The woman I mentioned: she doesn't know her birth name from personal knowledge, luckily she lives in a time and place where official scribes record that sort of information. All those people I mentioned who don't know the anniversary of their birth? That information is irretrievably lost, and was already lost during their lifetimes.

The Bem constraint understates the full difficulty of autobiographical recall, since if we manage to establish that you could possibly know something, there would still be the problem of whether you recalled it accurately. There's nothing wrong with the misnamed woman's memory; memory problems impede our self-knowledge in addition to the Bem constraint.

That you have inflated your self-image to Michelin Man proportions, to where you think you're an exception is laughable.

What you infer is outside the constraint. As was mentioned in the post you didn't read well, there is no bright and shining line separating perception from inference. We have dedicated detectors for environmental features that are important to us, facial recognition being a familiar but amazing example. I think a lot of people also have dedicated "cat recognizers."

Of course, ROC binds. Occasionally I mistake one person for another (and have been mistaken for some other person). Occasionally the cat detector will be set off by an owl sculpture. The price of working at all is to misfire occasionally.

In any case, Bem is not a moron. So what do you think? Did Bem teach that you can't recognize a cat? Why do you waste your readers' time with bullscheiss?

Maybe. It's amazing what people can hear in the noise of a truck's engine, brakes and shifting gears ... voices in general and voices speaking our native language are both things for which we probably have dedicated detectors, and ROC rules.  However, mistaken perceptual detection isn't contagious, so I wouldn't assume that a hypothetical witness would hear the voice any better than the real people who were nearby at the time. Yes, yes, they were too far away, etc. But the bigger problem is that there was no voice, just plenty of noise.

And you have repeatedly shown that you didn't read the post well. It includes the searchable term Daryl Bem. He did a lot of work, you're looking for what's on topic here: persuasion. A specific and remarkable kind of persuasion: convincing somebody without violence and without denying the sincerity of their recollection, that they committed a crime that they didn't actually commit.

Not that the police typically look to Pascal for hints about interrogation techniques, but ... it is an interesting application (misapplication) of the general approach advocated in the OP.

 

Na i answer bit by bit, without reading the  whole thing first.

I can change what i write as i read more,  but in this case didnt need to change much; just make one concession. I will come back to this later but the Bern constraint is an artificial ,and often false  construct which you can adapt or use to make a point  

eg assumedly the people mentioned believed the y knew their name or birthdate Ie the y had a name and a birthday each  year 

As it turned out this was justified true(or false)  belief, not knowledge 

Not everything we learn by experience is true knowledge  but the only true knowldge is gained by experience.

The mind or brain (which was the subject of the sentence)   is an it As it happens, in these gender sensitive times it is now acceptable( along with some other neutral words like they )  to describe a person, without assigning gender .

Na (again)  it is you who have consistently failed to carefully read the headlights story and to ,rather, reinvent it in your own terms to meet your own beliefs. 

My parents inside  our house with the blinds down, saw this light( it was so powerful)

.When i came back inside they asked me what had caused the light. On the spur of the moment, rather than  have to  go into the appearance of a god/alien being  who had just removed my long addiction to nicotine   I told them a truck had entered our driveway to turn around, and its lights had shone at the house  This seemed a good idea at the time and still does . 

The y were not there to witness what happened, but if the y had  been,  the y would have seen a big pillar of intense light materialise and a minute or two later, dematerialise  

No what i call love is an observable, and even measurable, pattern of neural  energy  which i constructed from  learned previous patterns and maintain with will, discipline and repetition.  Thus if Bern was accurate it would fit within the effect. 

knowledge includes our perceptions 

ie Ican know a dog exists  and know i love it or i can know a dog exists and know i fear it. Our inner and external  knowledge is, in part, inseparable (another fallacy of the Bern constraint 

You seem to be defining knowledge (and perhaps reality )  as only something external, or which can be shared.  PART of our knowldge, and our reality, is individual and unique, whatever our shared experiences are.  ( Another reason why a witness cannot perceive or experience a common external reality in the same  way as a person standing beside them.

On e of the reasons the  Bern constraint is clearly  false (or you have misunderstood/applied it   is tha t my knowledge of gods (for example) is neither mystical nor nonsense Iti s based on the normal physical evidences and  logic by which i can see and identify a cat 

to repeat this bit form your post 

 

What you infer is outside the constraint. As was mentioned in the post you didn't read well, there is no bright and shining line separating perception from inference. We have dedicated detectors for environmental features that are important to us, facial recognition being a familiar but amazing example. I think a lot of people also have dedicated "cat recognizers."

Of course, ROC binds. Occasionally I mistake one person for another (and have been mistaken for some other person). Occasionally the cat detector will be set off by an owl sculpture. The price of working at all is to misfire occasionally.

In any case, Bem is not a moron. So what do you think? Did Bem teach that you can't recognize a cat? Why do you waste your readers' time with bullscheiss?

You need to make this clearer My question was "if a god is like a cat then why cant we use and apply the same rules for both 

eg If i can know something is a cat why cant i know something  is a god?   If i can only infer something is a god why can i know something's a cat ?

If your answer is that gods are NOT like cats, then we may as well move on.  

This voice like the light was external to my mind

Its pretty easy to distinguish internal voices from  external ones 

"god" has the abilty to communicate mind to mind but also using the voices of others via electronic media or simply just speaking out loud with or without a visible presence 

I put it down to advanced technologies but while i cant speak for others its very simple to tell a voce in your head  from one which comes through your ears (the physical sensations are completely different   to begin with)  

lol as ive said before i have some difficulty with precise print on my  screen I just looked up closer and saw his name is Bem.

Maybe my spell checker corrected it automatically the first time Anyway while ironic given the part of your post i was reading its not connected to the deabte 

His arguments may seem logical to you because the y fit your preconceived understandings . The y are not logical to me, because they y are filled with incorrect assumptions/understandings,  and thus conclusions 

The y do not match things i know tot be true 

(but yep,i am only basing this  on your points. I will go and look him up.  Itis possible there is a different understanding of his work to that which you have presented 

Ps I said i can potentially know everything about myself, but tha t i did not 

Many people  have the potential to know more about themselves but are constrained by circumstances 

Irretrievably lost? 

Perhaps.

 Perhaps not 

Edited November 18, 2020 by Mr Walker

[eight bits]

3 hours ago, Mr Walker said:

If your answer is that gods are NOT like cats, then we may as well move on.  

May as well.