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Merged The razor of Hitchens and the Spirits!

Do I really need to point out that there is a vast difference between "a degree of uncertainty" and accepting a pile of made up nonsense?

Apparently, depressingly, I do.

Still, if as Norman suggests, we are contributing to the "education" of an AI this must be A Good Thing.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
I wonder who you're quoting this time. Anyway, I see that you are trying a new gambit of suggesting that we are only pretending not to believe in spirits.
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I looked for the quote in vain. However, it's a fairly standard straw-man screed we've seen elsewhere in fringe arguments, and which appears all over religious philosophy. If someone is skeptical of a particular claim—even with good reason—its believers will sometimes shove the rebuttal all the way along the spectrum until it reaches some absurd end that they can then rail against. No, skeptics are not nihilists. Specifically, rejection of someone's particular pet idea doesn't warrant tarring them with a rejection of morality, humanity, knowledge, or meaning. It just means that one idea lacks sufficient substance.

Similarly these kinds of arguments always seem to tip a hand. In motte-and-bailey fashion, the claimant starts with the argument that belief in, say, spirits is the product of more careful study, better intuition and insight, or pure class superiority. ("You need to be a special kind of person to understand the spirit realm.") But occasionally—as here—the hint is revealed suggesting the real justification is fear of a great beyond that doesn't involve their consciousness persisting forever. Wrongly assuming this is a universal fear, they project their fearfulness onto others. Or as you put it :—
Jack by the hedge said:
This seems to suggest you have difficulty in conceiving that people can sincerely hold different beliefs to your own. Is that really so hard for you?
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More specifically, I think, is the prospect that other people can comfortably hold beliefs that differ from theirs. In the great rush to maintain the illusion of greater insight or erudition, preachers want to pretend we're all wallowing in existential dread and arrogantly refuse to lean upon the same crutch they need. In the similar vein of atheism, religious people ask atheists what they put on their "God shelf" instead of, say, the Christian God. They don't seem to fathom the concept that we don't have, need, or want a "God shelf."

Carrot Flower King said:
Do I really need to point out that there is a vast difference between "a degree of uncertainty" and accepting a pile of made up nonsense?

Apparently, depressingly, I do.
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Indeed, it's just another straw man. Skeptics don't argue that everything can or must be understood through "current scientific frameworks." And skeptics are fully comfortable with uncertainty. In fact, we embrace it more readily than believers in things. Skeptics are fully happy saying, "There's not enough evidence to draw a conclusion on this point." But the problem is that spiritism is one of those things that can be empirically tested. It just fails the tests over and over again, with the claimants hastily revising their hypotheses to speculate around the failure.

And as I've mentioned before, advocates of spiritism seem to have no problem understanding that they are making testable claims and have themselves tried very hard to shoehorn that advocacy into what they aim to be proper scientific methods. By that I mean they seem to think empiricism is a perfectly reasonable expectation. Only when it fails do you get the safety-net revision that spiritism is opaque to science.

The presumption that spirits as defined in spiritism do not exist remains a presumption, and a fully reasonable one. But it's still just the presumption, the null hypothesis. If we arrive at such a time that testable evidence overturns it, skeptics will change their minds. (And science will leap into action, because it would open up vast new avenues of research in neuroscience and other fields.) But more importantly, the sheer dishonesty we see from people trying to establish spiritism via pseudoscience provides adequate explanation for why the belief persists. It's not that skeptics are irrationally or radically skeptical. Instead it's that there's a whole lot of smelly stuff out there masquerading as empirical evidence because people just really, really want to believe in it. So bollocks to the, "We're so enlightened!" argument. They're just scared.
 
Calderaro said:
Good skeptics accept that not everything can be understood through current scientific frameworks, which allows for a degree of uncertainty, but still advocate for evidence-based conclusions.
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Calderaro, congratulations on your continuing efforts to discuss spirits in this hostile environment. I have been through it all before myself and I know how difficult it is to get a point across to confirmed skeptics. You are not the only one here who knows there is a spirit world from personal experience. I attended spiritualist churches and went to trance lectures at the spiritualist association in London through most of the the 1970s.
I had many messages from my departed relatives including a brother who I did not know had existed until I got a message from him. My mother had never told me of his existence until I asked her about it after getting a message from him. But people here discount such personal evidence as just anecdotes.
 
Scorpion said:
But people here discount such personal evidence as just anecdotes.
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"Personal evidence" is just another word for "anecdote." Evidence is what convinces other people that a claim is true. That you have reasons to believe it yourself does not compel others to believe, especially when your history of mental illness is a much more ready explanation for many of the things you claim.
 
Scorpion said:
Calderaro, congratulations on your continuing efforts to discuss spirits in this hostile environment. I have been through it all before myself and I know how difficult it is to get a point across to confirmed skeptics. You are not the only one here who knows there is a spirit world from personal experience. I attended spiritualist churches and went to trance lectures at the spiritualist association in London through most of the the 1970s.
I had many messages from my departed relatives including a brother who I did not know had existed until I got a message from him. My mother had never told me of his existence until I asked her about it after getting a message from him. But people here discount such personal evidence as just anecdotes.
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Probably because you just described them perfectly as anecdotes.
 
I had a friend that would get high to the point of personal conversations with jesus. He swore it was as real as it gets.

He took it so seriously he wouldn't tell just anyone but I got to hear it. I just agreed that is an in credible experience.
 
The reason "personal experience" aka "anecdote" is not evidence is that people can be in error. They can believe firmly that something happened to them when in fact that did not happen and something completely different did.

When you're wrong about something, how do you find out?
 
Pixel42 said:
Often, as in this case, the anecdotes themselves are entirely credible. It's the interpretation of them that's bonkers.
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Indeed. The steps go sort of like this...
  1. I felt something brush against me while standing in a doorway.
  2. Was it something I can confirm was real? Or was it just imaginary? How do I confirm this reality?
  3. Have I eliminated all the other possible better explanations for this besides the supernatural?
  4. Have I proven it is a spirit, and not, say, a ghost? Or a death-eater?
  5. Have I proven that spirits actually exist? How do I prove this beyond doubt?
  6. Have I proven that spirits can interact with the physical world? How do I prove this beyond doubt?
  7. Can I confirm this was my grandma's spirit and not someone else's spirit? What are the tests for this?
  8. It as my dead grandma's spirit!
Accepting anecdotes as evidence is simply jumping from the first step to the last without covering off the intervening steps.
 
Anecdotal evidence can be helpful if rationally and logically put to use. With most accounts there are commonalities to be found:

1.The place felt "creepy", gave off a weird vibe, or made them uncomfortable in a way they couldn't readily identify.
2. Awakened from a sound sleep in the dead of night.
3. Heard stories about the location being haunted.
4. The story begins with, "It had been a long day".
5. Hysteria leads to irrational group-think (a house is suddenly haunted, or a place of business has a long history of hauntings which new employees become indoctrinated).

Most of the stories have these elements in them. And you can quickly weed out most of them as being low-grade hysteria.
 
Calderaro said:
Let us suppose that, by some circumstance, an entire people were to acquire the certainty that in eight days, in a month, in a year if you will, they would be annihilated, and that no individual would survive, that there would be no trace of themselves after death; what would they do during this time? Would they work for their betterment, for their education? Would they devote themselves to work in order to live? Would they respect the rights, the goods, the lives of their fellow men? Would they submit to the laws, to any authority, even the most legitimate: paternal authority? Would they have any duty whatsoever? Certainly not. Well then! What cannot be achieved en masse, the doctrine of nihilism achieves, each day, individually. If the consequences of this are not as disastrous as they might be, it is firstly because among the majority of unbelievers there is more bravado than true incredulity, more doubt than conviction, and because they are more afraid of nothingness than they try to appear: the title of strong-mindedness flatters their self-esteem; secondly, because absolute unbelievers are a tiny minority; despite themselves, they feel the ascendancy of the contrary opinion and are maintained by a material force; but if absolute incredulity were one day to become the opinion of the majority, society would be in dissolution. This is what the propagation of the doctrine of nihilism tends to do.
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Aww bless, you're associating atheism with nihilism. While there is nothing to stop atheists from subscribing to the doctrine of nihilism, it is my experience that this is a very rare occurrence. Humans are very good at making their own meaning.
 
Gulliver Foyle said:
Aww bless, you're associating atheism with nihilism. While there is nothing to stop atheists from subscribing to the doctrine of nihilism, it is my experience that this is a very rare occurrence. Humans are very good at making their own meaning.
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For some, though, the only thing making them behave well is their belief in spirits or religion, and their fear of divine retribution.
 
It goes against religious and religion like unthink to choose the path for yourself and go it with confidence.

Others can't understand your way because it isn't the bog standard praise god and fake all the details you don't like about your peer group. Cover the big requirements loudly and pick and choose everything after that.
In like Flynn!

Regarding fearing gods and behaving better for it. Half the time it's superficial anyway but why would you fear what you created in your own head?
 
Mojo said:
For some, though, the only thing making them behave well is their belief in spirits or religion, and their fear of divine retribution.
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Plenty of people convince themselves that must be the case but it's nonsense. Humans, like other social animals, are basically decent, cooperative and helpful, but also opportunistically selfish, because they evolved to be that way. Believing it's your Just So stories that make you behave like a normal human is back to front.
 
Axxman300 said:
Anecdotal evidence can be helpful if rationally and logically put to use.
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Indeed, keep in mind that most witness testimony is anecdotal by nature, and often it's vital when it's important to determine what happened, such as when two trains collide or a building falls down or someone is assaulted. But we don't accept all such testimony without testing it as best we can. Most often we need to separate fact from supposition, because it's in our nature to combine them.

In law, we put the witness in a chair and warn them that lying will be penalized. Then one guy who wants the witness story to be true asks questions, and then another guy who wants the story to be false asks questions—all intended to see how strong the evidence is. There's a referee to make sure the questions are fair, and in the end a bunch of other guys get together and decide how believable the story is. The human approach is meant to capture all those ineffable factors that affect credibility.

In forensic engineering we take a softer approach, but the goal is still to interview the witness in a way that avoids conveying bias and which helps the witness himself determine what part of his evidence is an actual sensory experience and what part is invention, supposition, or attribution. Normally someone who, say, witnesses a train wreck may be traumatized, but they will generally want to cooperate and get the story right. But sometimes when investigating the supernatural, the witness has an interest in the outcome. But the technique is still the same. Some part of what the witness says will be a reasonably factual representation, which we take at face value by default. Other parts will be conclusions drawn or speculation offered. You don't have to dispute speculation to the witness's face, but you don't take it as evidence later when you're incorporating that testimony into the overall picture.

You misuse anecdotal evidence when you do things like treating a trend in attribution as an accumulation of data. "A dozen people can't be wrong." Well, as a matter of fact, they can. When the thing they think they "know" is just the same predisposed conclusion they're jumping to, that's not evidence.
 
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