That's not true, you could explore your delusions to learn more about them. So what reasons do you have for believing that other people exist?



What criteria did you use to determine that other people exist? Do you require more or less proof for other beliefs?



Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. - Einstein

But ignoring the existence argument, how about the scientific method? Why do you trust to the scientific method, when it hasn't been proved?

Sorry Bushido..

I can't even believe I'm going to say this.
After reading his first post..

It even made sense to me.

I do have to agree with Spider.

You can't 'accept' certain things'
Yet call others the opposite.

When neither can be proved or disproved.
Because the methods used to prove the validity of each.
Can't be proven to effectively 'work'.

What constitutes evidence is always dependent on the claims made, or on what is being tested.

This is also not to be confused with proofs, which can only be had in a mathematical sense.

That we exist is a fundamental assumption that has plenty of evidence . . . alas no proof exists nor can exist.

Again, this is completely off topic to if skepticism is a proper perspective, and if we can know things by testing them.

Which I might add is clearly true, and is proved each time you pat your pants leg to test to see if your keys are there.

Science is not some magic that cannot be understood. Skepticism is a part of science, without skepticism there would be no desire to test anything.

Healthy skepticism should be based on how demonstrable a given claim is.

If the claim is I have keys in my pocket and I can know this by patting the outside of the pocket then that claim can be tested.

If someone can pat there pants leg, demonstrate it makes a jingling sound, allow me to do the same and sense the deformation of the pattern in the pocket of the keys and then finally remove the keys from there pocket showing them for all to see, then its clear what is true and what is not true about that given claim.

So how can we test any given claim that anyone wants to make?

Well lets start with the claim first, how about that?

One claim is that we exist. The other claim is that we can see the future.

Do you see the difference? Do you really think we need to treat these claims the same? Do you really think I am being dishonest is expecting one to be assumed and the other not?

We all accept "certain" things without need to test them, its called knowledge. Once you gain knowledge of a given thing, its not needed to reestablish that knowledge again.

The problem is in knowing what is true, and what is not true knowledge. Testing is a big part of that.

However, knowing that no one has a test that will "prove" everyone else exists beyond my own mind is a pointless endeavor, knowing that this is pointless is what allows you to choose one way or the other.

1) Assuming everyone else exists makes reality definable. By assuming the person who is claiming they have keys in there pocket exists, I can now test and gain knowledge about that claim.

2) Not assuming that everyone else exists puts me into a place were no tests can be trusted. If that person doesn't really exist then it is my confirming in my own imagination that the keys do actually exist in my own imagination.

This is what I mean by we must discard solipsism to know anything and one cannot use solipsism to discredit proper skepticism.

Can you explain why you think Nader's claims are correct while there is no current evidence to convince the "scientific community"?



The point made is quite clear, you decide yourself what you consider "valid" using a sliding scale of requirements...

Can you demonstrate that the "scientific community" doesn't agree with him?

Regardless the tests which his conclusions are based on still exist, the facts those test have revealed still need explaining.

His explanations are one of a few, however all of them are based on how the brain recalls and uses memory data. All of them offer insights into situations where we remember something differently then it actually happened, all of them offer good scientific and plausible explanations for JB's so called vision. So pick your theory of execution its still far more plausible then she, or I saw the future in our various experiences than we just inserted imagery into a memory that did not contain it in reality.

AND, none of this regardless of conclusion changes the fact that being skeptical of claims is the only way to discover the truth.

I think the song in the OP is becoming more and more relevant the longer this thread lasts . . . thats awesome.

Hey Spider . . . why are you skeptical of Global warming? Why is that skepticism valid, but mine is not? Spider walked into a trap.

Regardless of conclusion skepticism is valid. Honesty has a lot to do with reaching the truth.

Ok, I change my side..
Spider, I'm with them. xD

I believe I am real.
I don't believe I need to 'test' whether or not that is true.

I did drugs, so I know the difference between hallucinating and reality; in that aspect.

Meh.

I'm not taking a side yet..
Ima just sit, and watch.

o.o

Well to be on my side you do not need to accept my conclusions. My side is just that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to support them, and to truly understand requires testing.

For the specific example of a vision which steers you away from danger, well here is how my own hindsight analysis went.

1) I woke up and thought I saw the future.
2) I learned about how memory and cognitive mistakes occur.
3) I have no scientific explanation (by scientific I mean testable)
4) there for it is a good possibility the event was due to cognitive mistakes occurring.

However, If I really did think I could see the future, there are ways to test it and I can guarantee I would test and document. Only by documenting can you then run analysis against your results to determine if it is statistically significant, or if guessing works just as well. I wonder what would have happened if I had no seen the news paper that day, what would have been my explanation to my friend who had. What if I was blinded from seeing his expression while I described my vision. What would have been the details?

Documentation is a way to remove selection bias.
The cold reading John Edwards does is a good example of selection bias at work.

Do we count his misses? Or do we only perk up when he hits? How many names can he rattle off before someone chimes in? What about events, well certain events occur to all of us at least once in our lives, chances are we have all been in auto accidents, chance are we know someone who died in one . . . ect ect. We remember the hits forget the misses and attribute significance when really we have good guess work going on.

The article you linked to demonstrated that...






And yet you relay that info as if it were verified fact...






Insights? Plausible? You are still not certain of how memory recall works, are you?






How can you honestly say that? Your predetermined conclusions hides the truth from you. You will only see what you want to see if you draw conclusions before doing research.








The only thing of relevance would be the illogical appeal to ridicule.

The best part is that the "work" by Nader would probrably be a target of that song, after all, there is still no explaination as to "how" his assumptions work.


So, laugh at homeopathy even though it has led to medical breakthroughs.

Laugh at the avoidance of immunizations even though there is strong evidence of the dangers. And when you don't have a valid counter-argument, attack the character of the messenger.

Laugh at the posibility of aliens, even though "we" still search for life on other planets.


So yeah, I see where you would find relevance...





I'd call what most people call skepticism something more like psuedoskepticism...

You wanna call yourself a skeptic? I assert that there is no psycic phenomenon whatsoever. Be skeptical of that.

So, given that the entire premise of homeopathy is wrong, please do tell what breakthrough's you are talking about?

Fact, vaccines have made it possible for there to be 7 billion people on earth, they do have dangers, the risk to benefit ratio is extremely in favor of its benefit. Also Vaccines do not cause autism.

Laugh at the possibility of aliens, never, in fact I believe is not possible, but a guarantee that life has evolved independently from earth. Would I be skeptical if someone claimed they were an alien . . . yes, yes I would, and I would require some very compelling evidence to consider it for acceptance as truth.



Glad you followed that.

The 'number' of senses we have depends on how you define those senses. We could combine taste and smell as variations of the same sense, if we like. We could break touch down into components. We could include proprioception and balance as senses.

Other animals can sense magnetic and electric fields (not as light, but as directed fields with perceived intensity).

Intuition and hunches are not 'senses' as we use the word here. An animal that 'senses' an oncoming store may smell changes in the air, or even (?) sense changes in atmospheric pressure. Animals that 'sense' they are being stalked may sense changes the in sounds produced by other animals.

Of course, any sane/intelligent person ought to do this.

If your evidently sane/intelligent/honest wife of 30 years says she picked up milk at the store today, an act that she's done almost every week for the last decade, it would be reasonable to accept this claim at face value.

If your son has lied to you multiple times in the past about some minor troubles he's gotten into in school, and you get contrary reports regarding a recent event from the teacher and other students, then you probably shouldn't take his claim at face value.

Its reasonable to allow the circumstances of a claim and our previous knowledge to somewhat influence our standards of evidence. You can take this 'too far', or do this in an unreasonable way, but I haven't seen Bushido do this.






We cannot prove that people exist outside of us, but that doesn't mean there is certainly and definitely no evidence that people exist outside of us.

Categorization schemes that lead to 'greater than 6' make more sense to me, too.



Up through 10th grade, I agree emphatically. My teachers junior and senior year were awesome, though, being careful with their claims. They claimed very little, only said "these people have this belief, for this reason" or "this group reported this result". (The textbooks were pretty good, too.)

Over the years I've discovered many hundreds of 'scientific' claims which I'd learned in K-10 which turned out to be wrong.

A lot of teachers are just dumb.



Are you sure he was locked in an asylum because he advocated hand washing? Or maybe an underlying physical condition was aggravated by his inability to cope, emotionally, with the reality that the medical establishment wouldn't listen to him?




Not all self-described 'scientific communities' are equally adept at shifting their views based on new evidence. I feel there is a bit of conflation here between 'a community of people taking a scientific approach', and a 'community of people that defines themselves as the authority on a topic'.

Prioritizing 'evidence' or 'community dogma' is a cultural value that has been slowly percolating through the disciplines. Even today, I find 'psychology' laughable as a 'science' because they have been dragging their heals to the 'strictly evidence' party.

Most physicians are not scientists. Unless there is a major change in 'accepted beliefs' that directly effects their practice, many will hold onto whatever beliefs they were taught in medical school - for their whole lives. And those are the 'authorities' that lay people most often come in contact with. This narrowness and rigidity does not reflect on the community of medical researchers.
.

You use the word 'evidence' differently than I use it.

If I left a clean kitchen last night, and find dirty pans in the sink in the morning, I see this as 'evidence' that one of my roommates did some cooking. It isn't proof. They may have dirtied the dishes without cooking, or someone else might have snuck in to do this, or they may have simply swapped similar looking dirty pans for the clean pans, the list goes on.

I don't even consider this 'strong evidence' that someone did some cooking, but it certainly is suggestive evidence.


Similarly, the sustained consistency of my sensory experience of the material universe is, at the very least, suggestive evidence that an external material universe exists.

You can, and you should. Absolute 'proof' is not the measure of any sane person's estimation of what is real. Spider correctly argues that we cannot even 'prove' that reality exists. If you require absolute proof before accepting something as true, then you cannot accept anything as true. Which is why skeptics, scientists, and rationalists, and the like don't require 'absolute proof', only definitive, strong (sometimes repeatable) evidence. The requirement of absolute proof is where people hide when they want to discredit reason, and pretend that all forms of sanity and insanity are equal, because they all fail the standard of absolute proof.

Exactly. It is intelligent and reasonable to adjust are standards of evidence to the circumstances and the claim, and work with provisional conclusions.

If you claimed that your keys were in my pocket, I would require that I actually look at the keys, rather than simple feel their presence.

If you claimed that the pope's keys were in my pocket, we'd have to do even more than simply pull them out and look at them.

I have the impression that the scientific community does not agree on the models or mechanism of memory, but that they do agree that we are universally subject to the rewriting of our own memories without being aware of it.

Disagreement on one question shouldn't be confused with disagreement on the other question.

Let me break it down for you, Semmelweis' colleague secretly committed him to an insane asylum and then another colleague tricked Semmelweis into going with him to an asylum, where Semmelweis was beaten and later died of his wounds.

What is that evidence?

I'm not skeptical of Global warming, I'm skeptical of man made Global warming. There is a lot of evidence against the belief and not much to support the idea. So what makes me skeptical of Global Warming is good science.

Why are you not skeptical of Global warming? Is it just that you love the kool-aid or is there another reason?

I admit that other people may not exist. Some degree of suggestive evidence of the existence of other people is found in the fact that I have the experience of perceiving other people. That much is true while awake or asleep, while alert or distracted, while on mushrooms and while not. The experiences I have while asleep or on mushrooms fail to meet my criteria of even 'suggestive evidence' because those experiences are completely inconsistent. There is no continuity or repeatability. My experience of my family, however, is far more consistent that I would like.