![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
My most longsuffering readers know of my excessive allusions to epistemology, but since I had to look up the passage for a different reason, I think I shall quote David Eagleman on the topic, in just a moment.
Because our brains are wired to jump to conclusions (a UCLA neuroscientist, being interviewed on NPR the other night, said, "Let me ask the question 'What do cows drink?' Now, the part of your brain that said 'Milk' when you heard that is the part that gives immediate responses that have to be countered by the more reflective function that says 'Wait a minute, that's not right, cows drink water.'"
And indeed, that was exactly what had happened in my own mind in the instant before he said that.
In like fashion, the world is frequently divided into those who say "There is no way to prove that true, so it must be false" and those who say "There is no way to prove that false, so it must be true." Few indeed are those who can say, and really mean it, "There is no way to prove that one way or another, so it must be thought about but not believed in or disbelieved."
Jeff Kripal explores some topics I consider pretty silly, and so does he, sometimes, but the topics lead into much more fruitful questions about how we jump to conclusions and how social construction interacts with our inbuilt mental makeup and with our daily experience, which is never quite identical to what socially inherited forms are trying to tell us is the way things are. There are methodological issues here that apply to many more fields of intellectual investigation than happen to intrigue Kripal at the moment.
I don't want to go any further with that line of inquiry at the moment, but I was delighted to learn that Dr. Kripal and Dr. Eagleman actually work across the street from one another, the religion department at Rice University being on one side and the Baylor University College of Medicine on the other. My hypothetical Conference on Consciousness could be staged on an extremely low travel budget.
So here is Eagleman in Incognito, following the improbable thought experiment he has just proposed that could have come out of one of Kripal's books. I offer this in lieu of the review essay I know I will never get round to writing: "Knowing as little as we do at this point in history, we must retain concepts like this [improbable but possible idea] in the large filing cabinet of ideas that we cannot yet rule in favor of or against. So even though few working scientists will design experiments around eccentric hypotheses, ideas always need to be proposed and nurtured as possibilities until evidence weighs in one way or the other."
Eagleman goes on to write that the law of parsimony, a.k.a. Occam's razor, is pretty much useless as a tool for investigation, since "this line of reasoning has failed at least as many times in the past as it has succeeded. For example, it is more parsimonious to assume that the sun goes around the Earth, that atoms at the smallest scale operate in accordance with the same rules that objects at larger scales follow, and that we perceive what is really out there. ...In my view, the argument from parsimony is really no argument at all--it typically functions only to shut down more interesting discussion." [p. 222.]
The discussion would include what sorts of experiments would actually create conditions under which to test some of the more outlandish hypotheses some of Kripal's people have proposed. The empirical circumstances are usually badly described because the participants are operating with unexamined cultural assumptions and inherited terminology.
Because our brains are wired to jump to conclusions (a UCLA neuroscientist, being interviewed on NPR the other night, said, "Let me ask the question 'What do cows drink?' Now, the part of your brain that said 'Milk' when you heard that is the part that gives immediate responses that have to be countered by the more reflective function that says 'Wait a minute, that's not right, cows drink water.'"
And indeed, that was exactly what had happened in my own mind in the instant before he said that.
In like fashion, the world is frequently divided into those who say "There is no way to prove that true, so it must be false" and those who say "There is no way to prove that false, so it must be true." Few indeed are those who can say, and really mean it, "There is no way to prove that one way or another, so it must be thought about but not believed in or disbelieved."
Jeff Kripal explores some topics I consider pretty silly, and so does he, sometimes, but the topics lead into much more fruitful questions about how we jump to conclusions and how social construction interacts with our inbuilt mental makeup and with our daily experience, which is never quite identical to what socially inherited forms are trying to tell us is the way things are. There are methodological issues here that apply to many more fields of intellectual investigation than happen to intrigue Kripal at the moment.
I don't want to go any further with that line of inquiry at the moment, but I was delighted to learn that Dr. Kripal and Dr. Eagleman actually work across the street from one another, the religion department at Rice University being on one side and the Baylor University College of Medicine on the other. My hypothetical Conference on Consciousness could be staged on an extremely low travel budget.
So here is Eagleman in Incognito, following the improbable thought experiment he has just proposed that could have come out of one of Kripal's books. I offer this in lieu of the review essay I know I will never get round to writing: "Knowing as little as we do at this point in history, we must retain concepts like this [improbable but possible idea] in the large filing cabinet of ideas that we cannot yet rule in favor of or against. So even though few working scientists will design experiments around eccentric hypotheses, ideas always need to be proposed and nurtured as possibilities until evidence weighs in one way or the other."
Eagleman goes on to write that the law of parsimony, a.k.a. Occam's razor, is pretty much useless as a tool for investigation, since "this line of reasoning has failed at least as many times in the past as it has succeeded. For example, it is more parsimonious to assume that the sun goes around the Earth, that atoms at the smallest scale operate in accordance with the same rules that objects at larger scales follow, and that we perceive what is really out there. ...In my view, the argument from parsimony is really no argument at all--it typically functions only to shut down more interesting discussion." [p. 222.]
The discussion would include what sorts of experiments would actually create conditions under which to test some of the more outlandish hypotheses some of Kripal's people have proposed. The empirical circumstances are usually badly described because the participants are operating with unexamined cultural assumptions and inherited terminology.
