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Are all mediums con artists then?

Interesting Ian said:
One doesn't necessarily need evidence to back up arguments. The arguments alone suffice.

You need to be more specific. Are we talking about free will here? I've provided arguments many times in the past. I can't just keep pasting them in all the time, especially as this would be very much off-topic.
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Could be too far OT to pursue right now, I apologize if that is the case. I just thought it was a huge generalization you were making regarding materialists/sceptics...

If arguments alone suffice... to what end? Sure I could provide an argument but without evidence it's like a homeopathic medicine... it works because we want it to (placebo) not because of any evidence for it.

(How's that for veering way OT? sorry for the interuption...:D )
 
Ashles said:
Well that's my point. If you have no reason to believe a thing exists, then why would you think it may?
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First of all there are all sorts of reasons. There is a great deal of evidence for survival, and from a philosophical perspective it all hangs together and makes sense.

Now I agree that it feels that we most probably cease to exist. After all we all experience deep sleep every night. So it's very easy to imagine that we simply cease to exist, and quite frankly it seems weird to to suppose that after we die we will experience a wholly different reality.

And then of course there's the way that mental states seem to be so dependent on brain states. We have people like Phineas Gage who apparently was a great person before his accident (I'll be discussing his case in my forthcoming website. Stay tuned!). Afterwards he was a bad tempered git all the time. And then there's alzheimers, split-brain patients etc etc. All of this is evidence that the brain produces consciousness and therefore "life after death" is unlikely (not impossible though eg the brain could produce consciousness but still for reincarnation to occurr).


But for all that I would say the evidence and reasons for subscribing to the survival hypothesis (life after death) significantly outweighs the evidence against it.
 
Interesting Ian said:
One doesn't necessarily need evidence to back up arguments.
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There you have it, folks. The one sentence that tells you everything you need to know about him. And the one sentence that gives us all a reason to completely ignore everything he has to say from here on out.
 
wolfgirl said:
There you have it, folks. The one sentence that tells you everything you need to know about him. And the one sentence that gives us all a reason to completely ignore everything he has to say from here on out.
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I'm so proud! In a response to little ole me we have the true nature of Ian's thought process.

Sniff...
 
Okay, okay...

You already had adequate evidence of this...

It was fun for a minute though!

:p
 
Interesting Ian said:
First of all there are all sorts of reasons. There is a great deal of evidence for survival, and from a philosophical perspective it all hangs together and makes sense.

Now I agree that it feels that we most probably cease to exist. After all we all experience deep sleep every night. So it's very easy to imagine that we simply cease to exist, and quite frankly it seems weird to to suppose that after we die we will experience a wholly different reality.

And then of course there's the way that mental states seem to be so dependent on brain states. We have people like Phineas Gage who apparently was a great person before his accident (I'll be discussing his case in my forthcoming website. Stay tuned!). Afterwards he was a bad tempered git all the time. And then there's alzheimers, split-brain patients etc etc. All of this is evidence that the brain produces consciousness and therefore "life after death" is unlikely (not impossible though eg the brain could produce consciousness but still for reincarnation to occurr).


But for all that I would say the evidence and reasons for subscribing to the survival hypothesis (life after death) significantly outweighs the evidence against it.
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I don't understand - you make clear and well elaborated cases for why post death existence appears unlikely according to observable evidence, and then simply state that "the evidence and reasons for subscribing to the survival hypothesis (life after death) significantly outweighs the evidence against it."

I agree the reasons are certainly compelling - who wouldn't want to believe in life after death for a variety of reasons?
But the evidence isn't there. That's the problem.

You seem to think we wouldn't love you to be correct. I wish it were so. The concept of death seems so wrong on a fundamental level.
But mere desire does not make a thing true, or even likely. Or even plausible.

Without evidence it is just a belief or a wish - which of course everyone is entitled to.
But there is no point in claiming there is evidence to back up our wishes, when there isn't.

As the quote goes (approximately):
"If I call a tail a leg how many legs does a dog have? Four - calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg"
 
Interesting Ian said:
... I'm just telling you how it is. If it weren't for the rules the insults would be much worse. Trust me on that...

... People on here are incorrigibly stupid and nothing I can say will alter that. So people on here just deserve to be insulted so far as I'm concerned...

... I despise skeptics and I really feel ill-inclined to be polite to them...
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Poor soul!!!! Just go away and you will be happier. Go away.
 
Ian seems so utterly annoyed that somebody contributed that knows more than he does about philosophy. Pathetic.
 
Ian said:
One doesn't necessarily need evidence to back up arguments. The arguments alone suffice.
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Well, the arguments alone suffice for conversational purposes, perhaps. Do you mean something more than that? If so, then the arguments must employ logic that proves the point in contention without need for evidence. I haven't seen that yet.

~~ Paul
 
Interesting Ian said:
One doesn't necessarily need evidence to back up arguments. The arguments alone suffice.
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And then you get laughed out of court.
Seriously, Ian, with no evidence to back up an argument, you're merely engaging in pie-in-the-sky-wouldn't-it-be-nice conversation. We're not interested in all the maybe's out there, we're interested in what is. And it is your burden as the claimant to show some evidence that any of the gris-gris you think are real are indeed real.
 
Originally posted by Ian:
Some mediums appear to be genuine in the sense they are acquiring information by non-normal means.
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Which ones? Names?
 
Bodhi Dharma Zen said:
Yup, we all KNOW that heavy stuff falls faster than lighter stuff. Who is the idiot who wants/need evidence? For crying out loud!
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Not to defend Ian, but I think he's right: in some cases, you can eliminate an hypothesis because it is logically unsound, without doing any experiments.

It should be pointed out, though, that this is pretty limited to the task of disproof, although you can sometimes prove something by showing its opposite is unsound. You need to have mutually exclusive conclusions for this to work.

In the case you mention above, Newton disproved the theory that heavier objects fall faster in a mental exercise long before he did his public demonstration. He reasoned that if a heavy object fell faster than a lighter object, there was no good way to model what would happen when a light and heavy object were tied together. It led to contradictions, and so the hypothesis had to be discarded.

But that's different than proving that differently-weighed objects fall at exactly the same speed (maybe objects fall at random speeds?), and also, all the reasoning in the world was academic to ordinary people, so a public demonstration was warranted.


A famous critique of omnipotency is: "can God make a rock so big he can't lift it". The paradox caused by assuming omnipotence suggests that assuming it is unsound.
 
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sat556 said:
Ian seems so utterly annoyed that somebody contributed that knows more than he does about philosophy. Pathetic.
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Philosophy is not a body of knowledge, it's a skill.

And besides, I'm aware of the ultimate origin of the word "skepticism". However it is both entirely irrelevant to the topic under discussion and, moreover, entirely uninteresting.
 
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