Why We Need Skeptics in the Skeptiko Forum

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

I may be wrong, but I think there is something else at work as well. Some of us, I think, look at this kind of evidence from a wider perspective, considering ALL the accounts in a cumulative manner. I know I do this. And it becomes not so important to me if some details in specific cases are ambiguous. Other people, for whatever reason look at every single case and focus exclusively on the details that are the weakest. What is their motivation for doing this? What is my motivation for how I view things?

Because considering all the accounts in a cumulative manner is just a way of going with the flow. The problems are going to be in the details of each account, not in their accumulation.

~~ Paul

 

[Tyler]

Yes I've used the jigsaw analogy before to describe the way the Pseudoskeptics think to the rest of us and I think they don't even realise how "Illogical" their thinking is. They misuse terms such as "critical thinking" to justify what is in effect delusional thinking and confirmation bias.

If they are delusional, and they are, why engage them? Why not howl at the moon or stand outside the barbed wire fence of the local insanitorium and scream back and forth?

How many wasted man-decades have passed with such useless pandering? Think of what positive things that could have been accomplished, and were not, in people's personal spiritual development or in the collective good?

When it's life review time, are spirit guides and master advisers going to stand and applaud and megaphone "Great job, you won a useless Internet quarrel, well accomplished!" ?

Don't bet on it.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

"The determined outcome of reasoning. . . . .," sounds an awful lot like: "We will hang you after your fair trail."

I was assuming that reasoning is determined precisely because that was the context of your statement to which I responded:

"Serious question : how can you ever be the least bit confident that you have indeed ":found the truth", when the path that you use to get to the truth, involves using personal judgement and evaluative decision-making - a reasoning process that you yourself have claimed is limited to either random, or determined outcomes. . . . I ask again, How can you BE, an open-minded skeptic, if you have no free-will?"

How can you arrive at a balanced decision between two competing alternatives, if you are certain there is only one pre-determined outcome available?

First of all, my deliberation is part of the predetermination. And the actual state of affairs is part of the predetermination. So why can't that lead to a correct decision? There may also be some randomness thrown in. But say I make the incorrect decision. That's the end of the story, right? I get slapped in the face and try again.

What exactly is going on in your mind when you deliberate between the truth or falseness of a proposition. . . . . What is happening in that internal dialog when you begin with doubt and ignorance, and eventually end with a resolution? Do you patiently wait until the pre-determined light bulb goes off. . . . ? Or do you go through the motions of a mock deliberation, knowing all along that you will make the one decision you are capable of, the decision that your environment and your subconscious is fated to select ?

Again, you fail to consider the fact that the deliberation is part of the chain of events. It appears that you believe that my brain simply dances around for awhile, irrelevant to the decision, and then I finally heave a big sigh and utter the predetermined decision.

To me, that doesn't sound like accurate reasoning - it sounds like simple discovery, or computation. I think proper 'reasoning' requires a multitude of open-ended decisions all along the way, from the very moment you choose to enter the conflict.

And why are these things missing from the physicalist world?

If you take me to dinner, and the waitress asks, "Hamburger or Fish ?", then I have to make a decision. Maybe I like both today, so I really don't care, and I just pick one for the hell of it. This is not reasoning, this is random, and has nothing to do with free will - (but it's still a decision that was not pre-determined.)

How do you know it wasn't predetermined?

If you suggest that the fish is cheaper than the hamburger, and I should "think about it," then I will have to engage my reasoning. I'll have to ask myself : Which is healthier, which is quicker to cook, have I had hamburger already today, which is more culturally conscious, is this place famous for its fish, is Paul just being cheap........and on and on.

Yup.

It is true, you know, that every last one of these factors will be severely influenced by my past experiences, my education, my social awareness, allergies, taste, -- an almost infinite catalog of memories; and most of these factors will be handled mechanically, as in discovery, or computation. But the SUM TOTAL of these factors under consideration RIGHT NOW - has never ever been encountered before in the history of the universe. We could go to the same café, a hundred more times, and every last time, would be uniquely different. And so the factors in my final decision will also always be different. If you consider each factor as being worth, say, 10 points for hamburger and 10 points for fish, AND you knew ahead of time WHICH factors I was going to include THIS TIME, and which factors I was going to ignore, then you could guess with a certain probability what I was going to choose, based on past choices. . . . . But this isn't the past. This is an entirely new choice. Maybe fish was at 98 percent and then the next table orders a burger and the delicious aroma just overwhelms me.

Which part of this is libertarian free will?

I realize this is not 'libertarian free-will,' but I don't know anyone who argues in favor of that, anyway (except a few libertarians) But it isn't completely random, either. And it doesn't reject the notion that a determined cause will have a determined effect. Rather, I suggest that an adult human mind prior to decision making is home to a host of factors, all of which may be determined in one way or another, but the polymorphic assembly of these factors is a unique beast whose nature cannot be determined before the fact. And you cannot expect a pre-determined decision, based on an undetermined cause.

I'm with you until the final sentence. I don't know what it means.

~~ Paul

 

[Michael]

I did not raise doubt in advance of any information. If there was no information, this thread would not have been started.

If we can't go "outside the boundaries of the current story" to investigate it, then you are suggesting we merely buy it without critical analysis. Then why don't you just admit that you want to believe it without question?

~~ Paul

You have no facts about the story other than the story. What you are doing is simply conjecturing outside of the boundaries of the story, not a critical analysis of the evidence provided to you. If the upcoming report provides more information about the outside boundaries then you have more evidence available to you instead of simply conjecturing. Or, you can do your own research into the story, talk to people, investigate the incident, given your concern about what might be happening outside of the boundaries of the facts you have available to you. I do believe the OBE account, I have no reason not to believe it. If at some point evidence is presented that shows it to have been fraud or confabulation, I'll change my mind.

 

[Michael]

Hmmm....undocumented stories don't offer much reliability or validity (for the reasons outlined by Ian Stevenson, among others). So now the suggestion seems to be that a story's validity and reliability increases the less you know about the story (as in, it is unreasonable to raise doubts prior to knowing the details).

And then we have the suggestion that the details don't matter anyway, that it is the total which matters. Two dozen crab apples aren't two dozen crab apples, but one Golden Delicious.

I guess we can wait for the report, but if (as Ian Stevenson suggested) the goal is to gather testimony before information is exchanged, I don't see how gathering more stories after information is exchanged addresses the problem.

Linda

Yes, we are just going to have to wait for the report to have anything more meaningful to say about the facts of the story. The story is very compelling, I find it believable. Throwing up clouds of conjecture around the story now does not add more evidence, just adds more conjecture and there's no boundary on how much of that you can do.

 

[fls]

Yes, we are just going to have to wait for the report to have anything more meaningful to say about the facts of the story. The story is very compelling, I find it believable. Throwing up clouds of conjecture around the story now does not add more evidence, just adds more conjecture and there's no boundary on how much of that you can do.

The story is compelling, but it's only compelling if the events happened as described. And stories almost always differ from the actual events. For example, we inevitably remember statements as more accurate than they were, after the fact. And while we tend to remember what information was given, we forget who provided that information and mis-attribute who it came from.

There's a lot of research on the errors we make when reconstructing and recounting a story. So it isn't a matter of believing the story until proven otherwise, but a matter of asking "is there any way to regard this story as free from the memory errors which plague all stories?" Sometimes there are. One way to increase the reliability of a story is to record it in a permanent form when it is first told, and on subsequent retellings. Then it becomes possible to trace when a particular bit of information first made its appearance. Another way is to record the information under blind conditions - that is, before there is any opportunity for information to be added by sources other than the original storyteller. We can also look at which elements of the story are least likely to be influenced by cognitive and memory errors. Unfortunately, the parts of the story which make it most compelling also tend to be the parts most prone to error.

I appreciate that Smithy went to the trouble of gathering more information, but the problem is that unless Smithy uncovered a recording of the patient recounting his experiences under blind conditions, none of that information addresses the cognitive and memory errors which will make the story unreliable. The horse is out of the barn.

Realistically, there's not much point in investigating Yet Another Undocumented Story (YAUS). If you are going to put your resources into a project, put them into gathering reliable and valid information instead. Parapsychology researchers (at least some, anyway) recognize the value of documented (recorded and blinded) interviews over stories collected after the fact. Ian Stevenson, for example, wrote about this problem in his papers and put a system in place to interview and record subjects under blind conditions. Unfortunately, similar to NDEs, often there has already been some exchange of information, by the time the researchers hear about a case. Andy Paquette is another person who made a point of recording his dreams prior to attempting any verification of those dreams.

Linda

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

You have no facts about the story other than the story. What you are doing is simply conjecturing outside of the boundaries of the story, not a critical analysis of the evidence provided to you. If the upcoming report provides more information about the outside boundaries then you have more evidence available to you instead of simply conjecturing.

Lovely. As I said, I look forward to reading it.

Or, you can do your own research into the story, talk to people, investigate the incident, given your concern about what might be happening outside of the boundaries of the facts you have available to you. I do believe the OBE account, I have no reason not to believe it. If at some point evidence is presented that shows it to have been fraud or confabulation, I'll change my mind.

I have attempted to find more information, without any luck. Do you think, for example, that someone can tell us whether anyone talked to the patient after he woke up and what exactly was said? Do you think someone has a recording of the events as they occurred?

Edited to add: As Linda said.

~~ Paul

 

[Michael]

The story is compelling, but it's only compelling if the events happened as described. And stories almost always differ from the actual events. For example, we inevitably remember statements as more accurate than they were, after the fact. And while we tend to remember what information was given, we forget who provided that information and mis-attribute who it came from.

There's a lot of research on the errors we make when reconstructing and recounting a story. So it isn't a matter of believing the story until proven otherwise, but a matter of asking "is there any way to regard this story as free from the memory errors which plague all stories?" Sometimes there are. One way to increase the reliability of a story is to record it in a permanent form when it is first told, and on subsequent retellings. Then it becomes possible to trace when a particular bit of information first made its appearance. Another way is to record the information under blind conditions - that is, before there is any opportunity for information to be added by sources other than the original storyteller. We can also look at which elements of the story are least likely to be influenced by cognitive and memory errors. Unfortunately, the parts of the story which make it most compelling also tend to be the parts most prone to error.

I appreciate that Smithy went to the trouble of gathering more information, but the problem is that unless Smithy uncovered a recording of the patient recounting his experiences under blind conditions, none of that information addresses the cognitive and memory errors which will make the story unreliable. The horse is out of the barn.

Realistically, there's not much point in investigating Yet Another Undocumented Story (YAUS). If you are going to put your resources into a project, put them into gathering reliable and valid information instead. Parapsychology researchers (at least some, anyway) recognize the value of documented (recorded and blinded) interviews over stories collected after the fact. Ian Stevenson, for example, wrote about this problem in his papers and put a system in place to interview and record subjects under blind conditions. Unfortunately, similar to NDEs, often there has already been some exchange of information, by the time the researchers hear about a case. Andy Paquette is another person who made a point of recording his dreams prior to attempting any verification of those dreams.

Linda

Like I said, there is no boundary to, no limit to, the amount of conjecture one can churn up to cast doubt on the actual evidence without having to produce any new evidence. What would be a nice change of pace, from you and Paul, is a serious discussion of the evidence itself. The story is compelling and believable to me. Show me something actual about this case, a new fact, about the people involved or the operation itself, that would demonstrate that I ought not to believe it. That would be much harder to do. Conjecture all you want. It is nothing else without new evidence or facts. So let's wait to see what additional information we get in the report. I subscribe to the journal so will definitely be reading it.

 

[Arouet]

Let's take a step back for a moment and try and take a bird's eye view of what we have here.

What we have is a very interesting story told by one of the participants. The story raises some really interesting issues relating to the amount of time he was apparently without heartbeat as well as what his experiences were as he came back online.

This case certainly has value in terms of raising questions. The question is how helpful it is in terms of answering them. That depends on how strong the risk of errors are to the various elements. There may be some low risk elements: the medical records themselves, and some high risk elements (how the story came about).

Remember that when we say high risk of error we are not stating as a fact that errors occurred but simply recognising the likelihood of errors contaminating the results.

So what do we do with that? What we do in every case where there is high risk of error: figure out a way to reduce that risk. We file this case away as an interesting case study and we come up with techniques to catch these kinds of cases in the future in a manner that minimises the risk of error. fls has made some suggestions towards that goal. We withhold making any firm conclusions about this particular case - and certainly do not consider any conclusions to be obvious.

In this manner we can move from less reliable to more reliable and hopefully gain some real understanding of what is going on in this kinds of cases.

This, IMO, is the skeptical approach to these kind of cases.

 

[Michael]

Lovely. As I said, I look forward to reading it.


I have attempted to find more information, without any luck. Do you think, for example, that someone can tell us whether anyone talked to the patient after he woke up and what exactly was said? Do you think someone has a recording of the events as they occurred?

Edited to add: As Linda said.

~~ Paul

You provide zero actual evidence that would support your conjecture that the story is anything other than what it is reported to be. You do see that you make things up, don't you? You engage in the very thing that you conjecture might explain the OBE away; you invent things out of thin air. I have no reason to assume the story is anything other than what it is. Show me something to disprove that. If you can't, then wait for more information to come out.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

You provide zero actual evidence that would support your conjecture that the story is anything other than what it is reported to be. You do see that you make things up, don't you? You engage in the very thing that you conjecture might explain the OBE away; you invent things out of thin air. I have no reason to assume the story is anything other than what it is. Show me something to disprove that. If you can't, then wait for more information to come out.

As Linda said, we have plenty of evidence that stories such as these are misremembered, modified, and confabulated. That is true of all stories.

What sort of evidence would you like me to find? Would you like me to locate the tape recordings of all the conversations that doctors and nurses had with the patient once he woke up, in the recovery room and his hospital room? Do you think such things exist? Would you like me to find the operating room videotape so we can check that the surgeons were standing in the doorway, or actually slightly in the room or out in the scrub room? Would you like me to consult the akashic record to find out what the patient could hear once his heart started up again? How about I locate the recording of the first time the patient relayed his experiences, and then the first time Rudy told the story?

What exactly are you asking me to do? If any of it has been done and shows up in the forthcoming report, that will be great.

~~ Paul

 

[Arouet]

You provide zero actual evidence that would support your conjecture that the story is anything other than what it is reported to be. You do see that you make things up, don't you? You engage in the very thing that you conjecture might explain the OBE away; you invent things out of thin air. I have no reason to assume the story is anything other than what it is. Show me something to disprove that. If you can't, then wait for more information to come out.

As per my last post that is why from a methodological standpoint we look at risk of error rather than trying to identify particular errors. The higher the risk of error the less confident we should be in the results.

 

[chuck.drake]

As Linda said, we have plenty of evidence that stories such as these are misremembered, modified, and confabulated. That is true of all stories.

~~ Paul

All anecdotal evidence is "misremembered, modified and confabulated." Cool.

 

[Arouet]

All anecdotal evidence is "misremembered, modified and confabulated." Cool.

Can we agree that anecdotes tend to have a higher risk of errror than stories that are documented in the manner that fls described?

 

[chuck.drake]

Can we agree that anecdotes tend to have a higher risk of errror than stories that are documented in the manner that fls described?

I think there is also a variable that is related to the number of anecdotes available. Two anecdotes expressing a phenomena is different than 20,000 anecdotes.

 

[fls]

Like I said, there is no boundary to, no limit to, the amount of conjecture one can churn up to cast doubt on the actual evidence without having to produce any new evidence.

There are limits and they are based on reliability and validity. That is, information which has decent reliability and validity will allow for less doubt, while information with poor reliability and validity pretty much automatically comes with doubt.

I appreciate that a different perspective would be to treat everything as accurate until proven otherwise. But as the title of the thread indicates, this is about a skeptical or scientific perspective, which pays attention to reliability and validity.

Linda

 

[Michael]

As Linda said, we have plenty of evidence that stories such as these are misremembered, modified, and confabulated. That is true of all stories.

What sort of evidence would you like me to find? Would you like me to locate the tape recordings of all the conversations that doctors and nurses had with the patient once he woke up, in the recovery room and his hospital room? Do you think such things exist? Would you like me to find the operating room videotape so we can check that the surgeons were standing in the doorway, or actually slightly in the room or out in the scrub room? Would you like me to consult the akashic record to find out what the patient could hear once his heart started up again? How about I locate the recording of the first time the patient relayed his experiences, and then the first time Rudy told the story?

What exactly are you asking me to do? If any of it has been done and shows up in the forthcoming report, that will be great.

~~ Paul

Something, anything, do you have anything new to offer?

 

[fls]

I think there is also a variable that is related to the number of anecdotes available. Two anecdotes expressing a phenomena is different than 20,000 anecdotes.

In what way? If a mistake is made 20,000 times, how is it less of a problem than if it is made twice?

Linda

 

[Michael]

As per my last post that is why from a methodological standpoint we look at risk of error rather than trying to identify particular errors. The higher the risk of error the less confident we should be in the results.

As long as you can demonstrate actual errors and not just conjectural errors. Given the current evidence available to you, do you see an actual error in the evidence? Is there a detail of this story that doesn't pan out? Can you identify anything at all that you can provide as evidence of actual error? I hope you aren't just saying that we can't trust even if any actual errors are never demonstrated.

 

[chuck.drake]

In what way? If a mistake is made 20,000 times, how is it less of a problem than if it is made twice?

Linda

OK.