God of little things

[The Glue Man]

...And we haven't even touched on motives and emotions yet?
Some other time maybe.

[Mal Volio]

Suggesting that well developed instincts are a denial of  rationality elides a large corpus of philosophical thought.

My observation is that rather than conform to the dictum 'whereof one cannot speak one must remain silent'
-a reasonable response to ideas of faith- some, and only some scientists pick at the logical scab as an affront to a unifying theory.

Now there I agree, but that is a shift form your original position

It was you who bought up the ghostly hokum to perceived  mediumship,

Was it ? It must have been via paranormal activity; either that or else I have no idea what meaning those words are trying to carry.

I could offer a range of borderline and esoteric but still scientific means which remain unexplored because of a paradigmatic prejudice.

If it is consistent with rationality and with hypothesis testing, modification and/or rejection, then it is consistent with science.  Otherwise it is faith.  Science can be borderline and esoteric, or mainstream, as can faith.  Doesn't mean that one morphs into the other or that a clear separation of them is in any way prejudiced.

As we've agreed (I think) it is a Good Thing

[The Glue Man]

Suggesting that well developed instincts are a denial of  rationality elides a large corpus of philosophical thought.

My observation is that rather than conform to the dictum 'whereof one cannot speak one must remain silent'
-a reasonable response to ideas of faith- some, and only some scientists pick at the logical scab as an affront to a unifying theory.

Now there I agree, but that is a shift form your original position

It was you who bought up the ghostly hokum to perceived  mediumship,

Was it ? It must have been via paranormal activity; either that or else I have no idea what meaning those words are trying to carry.

I could offer a range of borderline and esoteric but still scientific means which remain unexplored because of a paradigmatic prejudice.

If it is consistent with rationality and with hypothesis testing, modification and/or rejection, then it is consistent with science.  Otherwise it is faith.  Science can be borderline and esoteric, or mainstream, as can faith.  Doesn't mean that one morphs into the other or that a clear separation of them is in any way prejudiced.

As we've agreed (I think) it is a Good Thing

If I admit to puckishness on the subject it is because I'm not selling anything.
There is no mental door closed, certainly not to quantum mechanics or what I know of string theory, no institution to please, no research grant to bolster, etc, etc. 
End of the day it's just chat. Not that chat is ever just.
I don't mean to chide but you jumped on the spookiness angle.

My take on psychic tabloid tv is of a willing suspension of disbelief similar to one I would exercise on any creative text.
If, as was being implied through the language and medium (sic) of television the woman had the abilities that were being suggested, I want to know how.

It maybe that the facility is there but doesn't yield to taxonomic abstraction in a way we can yet understand. It may be an extreme sensitivity to brain function we have yet to unravel it might even be simultaneity at some quantum level. She may yet speak to the dead. Frankly I have no idea.
That I find some science to be a sledgehammer to turn the pages of a pocket book may not have universal currency but there you go.
The language I use may be my own but it's intended to throw light, not close shutters.

[The Glue Man]

Agreed with the response from Mal. In common with a lot of people I would love it if such things as mental/psychic powers existed, especially if they could be developed. I doubt they do, but am open to proof. That proof requires definition and reinforcement by proper testing, not a single TV programme. For an example, I propose the previous "proof" of homeopathy's effectiveness that evaporated under proper double-blind testing.
Being an atheist (except for FSM and the Great Cthulhu, may you be touched by his slimy tentacle) does not make me blind to possibility. Give me an hypothesis and let it be tested. If it works, I will change my world view. Tell me about your garden unicorn, but don't tell me I simply have to have faith.

Sorry TT. You'll have to take whatever responses are going and cut and paste.

[Mal Volio]

I don't mean to chide but you jumped on the spookiness angle.

I commented on the requirement for proper trials.  I jumped on nothing, and certainly not spookiness.  The example of psychic woman was yours. I'd apply the same approach to eg mobile phone safety issues.

It maybe that the facility is there but doesn't yield to taxonomic abstraction in a way we can yet understand. It may be an extreme sensitivity to brain function we have yet to unravel it might even be simultaneity at some quantum level. She may yet speak to the dead. Frankly I have no idea.
That I find some science to be a sledgehammer to turn the pages of a pocket book may not have universal currency but there you go.

Well, I agree about the pssibilities of course.  So letsinvestigate them. Until we do so they remain anecdotal.  Interesting also that you see science as  a sledghammer approach.  On the contrary, it can be subtle and precise as a scalpel.  What it won't do is gently waft with warm zephyrs te possibility of something which can't be made manifest via evidence

[The Glue Man]

Well if you're going to deny the efficacy of woolly thinking there's no point continuing.

[sam]

Does anyone else remember the great Borg-McEnroe tennis matches?

[pcolbeck]

Yes but is Mal Volio or Glue Man Borg ? and I feel sorry for whoever is the referee as I seem to remember him coming in for a great deal of stick.

[bardsandwarriors]

Glue Man, your old lady on the telly sounds remarkable. Some would say, she is the random exception which proves the rule. But I've always held that the exception disproves the rule, and a better, more widely encompassing rule is needed. Such a rule would include both science and mysticism, by explaining or allowing both as parts of something else. It is only by aggressively honing in on the exceptional case, or the grossly misfitting detail (in the style of Sherlock Holmes), that a true picture of reality can be found; and such a realisation is often fundamentally different to what you had imagined, and quite startling.

I think we need one of those, but in the meantime I believe in both science and the old lady, metaphorically speaking, and (to me) the old lady is far more interesting. I like nice cogs, but the spirit of invention is what grabs me.

Mal Volio: the requirement for proper trials.

The Glue Man: 'whereof one cannot speak one must remain silent'

MV: Science is very easy to talk about in an authoritative way, if black and white is all you need. Once you know your facts, you are a masterful source of wisdom and knowledge. Facts are easy.

But there is a consensus reality beyond science which cannot be proven, and some of which might not be mass delusion either. Because they aren't pinned down precisely, woolly thinking is all they have. These things, in time, may be explained and filed neatly in the science box, at which point I will get bored by them; and you will start believing in them.

My point is that perhaps we are all on the same staircase to wisdom. Near the bottom, where there is certainty and authority, sits you; and higher up, where everything gets fuzzier, sniffing the air and watching wisps go by, sits Glue Man. The difference is only in temperament, and which step you prefer to sit on.

In the meantime, you think yourself much more convincing than GM. But if one day GM figures out something important, or says something that inspires someone else to greatness, you might be saying how useful he is, sitting up there musing about unproven things.

I can see why your reliance on bare, indisputable facts gives you confidence; but doesn't it also reduce your world to a lump of rock floating in space?

PS. I am the clever person in the crowd :) Someone else can change the scoreboard.

[Mal Volio]

MV: Science is very easy to talk about in an authoritative way, if black and white is all you need. Once you know your facts, you are a masterful source of wisdom and knowledge. Facts are easy.

But there is a consensus reality beyond science which cannot be proven,

....I can see why your reliance on bare, indisputable facts gives you confidence; but doesn't it also reduce your world to a lump of rock floating in space?

Facts aren't the point B&W.  Facts can be found in a book. Facts are sterile, a bare rocky place indeed.

Science isn't a body of knowledge.  It is a process.  A damn pointy one.  But I'm not talking about science per se here, I'm talking about rational thought.

A reality which is by its nature not investigable, not testible, irrational, must be not materially manifest, a myth.  Faith. 

If you are talking about something possible but not yet known, that is not in itself inherenetly unknowable.  Just that we haven't looked yet

I think that there are things that are unknowable, but I also think that because of that they must lie outside our experience. Permanently.

[Mal Volio]

And your staircase is circular: the analogy only holds if there is a greater truth, one which mere mortals like me are not worthy to be privy to.

It actually relies on your belief, otherwise it doesn't go anywhere.   The Emperor's new landing.

[bardsandwarriors]

A lot of what you think is unknowable, is probably knowable. In the past the power of the gods has moved on from explaining the weather, emotions, plague and disease, the stars and rivers, fortune and misfortune, to other things as those things have been explained away by science. The gods are like the labour party, moving their ground when they start losing arguments on the old ground. As a god collective, they hold many of the most interesting ideas which are strange and - to you - perhaps 'unknowable'. But many of the things that the gods represent now, will become the science of the future. It is rational process which causes that, agreed. But right now, the myths and the beliefs are what sustain those concepts in the culture, and encourage more thoughts in those terms.

My staircase has at its top, the gods of our time and their 'powers' - not the weather, but the workings of the brain; the soul, underlying realities, motivations, the philosopher's "problem of subjectivity" (or whatever it is called). Who are you to say these things are unknowable? Your neanderthal equivalent - the wizard of his day, who died on an ice slope with a bag of fire-making equipment - thought that the gods which destroyed the crops could never be fully understood, and he was completely wrong. But it is vague and woolly up there. Thought processes are tenuous and imprecise, and not easily explained.

At the bottom are the things which everyone agrees on. Things which have already been explained by science and moved into the domain of common knowledge. You daren't go past that step which other people agree on. You dare not open yourself to the ridicule of unsympathetic people.

Program on Radio 4 earlier today: Newton, Boyle, et al, and their "Royal Society". They tested natural remedies to see if they worked. They looked for two-headed calves. At the time, that was a noble quest. But they were ridiculed for "weighing air". What seemed ludicrous, was the most proftable result of all. If someone hadn't previously "believed" that air was a substance which could be weighed, they wouldn't have thought to test such a wild idea. But in those days, two-headed calves were ten a penny ;)

[Mal Volio]

A lot of what you think is unknowable, is probably knowable.

I was thinking about how you can have complete knowledge of the entirety of a system (the universe) from within/as a component of that system. I'm pretty sure (can't recall the details) that it is impossible.

My staircase has at its top, the gods of our time and their 'powers' - not the weather, but the workings of the brain; the soul, underlying realities, motivations, the philosopher's "problem of subjectivity" (or whatever it is called). Who are you to say these things are unknowable? Your neanderthal equivalent - the wizard of his day, who died on an ice slope with a bag of fire-making equipment - thought that the gods which destroyed the crops could never be fully understood, and he was completely wrong. But it is vague and woolly up there. Thought processes are tenuous and imprecise, and not easily explained.

At the bottom are the things which everyone agrees on. Things which have already been explained by science and moved into the domain of common knowledge. You daren't go past that step which other people agree on. You dare not open yourself to the ridicule of unsympathetic people.

Not at all. I am quite happy to have any of my ideas challenged, though ridicule is a little harsh.

The ideas you put at the top of your stairs appear to be things that you consider can't stand up to analysis and questioning, by the sympthetic or unsympathetic.  If they can, then they are most definitely a part of a rational world system.  If they lie beyond rationality (and rationality is not time-constrained, unlike knowledge) then they are matters of faith.

I think you are maybe confounding my ideas about the power of the human mind to comprehend, with a wish to deny all that is not yet known that I most certainly would never espouse.

[The Glue Man]

The pot is still on the hob I see.

My ire was raised because a subject that has absorbed the nations of the world since time immemorial, the key thinkers, the great artists -and I'll still take my Renaissance masters against C20th self harmers, diverting as their works may be- not to mention the underpinnings of the British judicial system, was considered too primitive a subject for a cycling message board.
Well get me.
I hadn't realised I'd set up my amulet stall in the middle of the British Humanist Society annual knees-up.

To suspend as many judgements for as long as possible seems an entirely human thing to do.
For all but the last few seconds of the world clock we haven't had the tools to test our notions, right or wrong. The subtle knives of science aren't the only cutlery in the place and anyway, the leeches have barely had the lid put on.
If the question is, 'how to be?' so-called primitive societies could show us a thing or two and one suspects those of a generation or ten back might despair of us, ringworm and scurvey not withstanding. I don't buy into the one dimensional ladder of progress.

Bards is a handier man with a metaphor than I and has common sense too ( and why I hold him in such esteem ) and especially like the labour party metaphor in spite of habitually voting for them.
I still don't see a single God as an especially outdated notion. Sure, he/she/it comes with a certain baggage but there may be life in the old dog yet and there are better things for science to do than take her bone away. More so as they seem to think they've let the cat out of the bag.
Even Mal Volio, a chap I can't conceive of without a bell jar and a dead mouse, an enlightenment sage in a frock coat in the National Portrait Gallery, seems to be a good cove.
So much for non sequiturs. As the chap who started the rumpus it's the best I can do for closure. I do shit butties too (not work safe) and pop songs (arts and entertainment) and have been told I dance rather well, if overly influenced by period Soul Train moves but as for the Big Stuff, one may have thrown more heat than light.
Do carry on without me.

[Mal Volio]

You have no idea about me do you ?  ;)

Well done.  The point was about 10,000 leagues thataway.

[redshift]

Upshot:
Esoteric metaphor and non-sequitur;

Result:
Those who get god, get god.
Those who don't get god,  get to say "See, the emperor wears no clothes!"
Those who don't care, get to say "There's an emperor?"

So, no change there, then.