I was just surprised that you were surprised by the kinds of comments you were talking about. — Wayfarer

Me too.

Though I think it angered me more than surprised me.

The extreme sensitivity of the subject matter, someone putting themselves out there with a personal and obviously non-empirical comment, and the one word response "proof!"

Maybe it was just a perfect storm.

Maybe I was hoping this was a better neighborhood.

And it probably is.

Then it's a matter of taste?

How do you know that there is a problem? It makes no sense to say you know something without having a shred of evidence in favor thereof. You're simply failing to count the reasons we have to believe QM is flawed in someway as evidence. — NKBJ

What are the reasons to believe QM is flawed?

And yes, there is no evidence that there is a problem with either QM or GR. The known problems are purely theoretical.

What we talk of as 'real' has to be tangible, measurable, understable, at least in principle, by science - otherwise what are you talking about? (Which is basically what Pseudonym is asking.) — Wayfarer

This is why I do not personally find Scientism compelling, but I do find it's diametric opposite offensive, hence my preference that it remain a valid world-view. What we "talk" of should, of course, remain unrestricted insofar as it does not risk harm to others, but in discussions about Scientism vs Philosophy, what's at stake is not circumscribing what can be "talked" about, it is is defining authority and authority (in a positive social environment) comes from agreement (think democracy).

We can only agree on that which can be measured. A measure is a scale in the shared world which we can go to to find agreement. It has absolutely nothing to do with materialism or physicalism, as primary world-views, those are just consequences.

Even if we took something as entirely material as the height of objects. If we had no external scale, no agreed on measurements of height, then it would not make sense to talk about height either, despite it being entirely material. There would be not point in me comparing the animal I've seen which I describe as "quite tall", to the one that my friend sees which he describes as "very tall". We can gain nothing useful from that exchange because neither of us has any idea how tall the other's animal actually is relative to our own internal experience.

So, that which is measured on some external, agreed upon scale, deriveds authority from the widespread agreement on that scale. A scientists who measures the speed of light in the widely agreed upon scale of kilometres per hour is inviting anyone else to measure the same thing on the same scale. He is not claiming personal authority to make pronouncements about the real world, we all agreed on the scale, it's publicly available (kilometres and hours, that is), so any proposition using it has a fair and just authority.

With Philosophical and theological propositions, this is not the case. A spiritual experience of one person cannot be measured on a publicly agreed on scale, so has no just authority. St Paul may well "talk" about his life experiences, but he cannot claim any more authority of spiritual matter than my Grandma because his experiences are not measurable by something which has widespread agreement. It is this sort of talk which offends me. "In Leviticus it says...", "the Buddha said...", Kant proves..., "Plato shows us that..." etc. None of these things have any just authority to be considered above any other simply because the standards by which they are shared are not widely agreed on. It's not that we can't "talk" about them, but that's not all we do is it? We "declare" things about them, we Pronounce things, we pay tax-payers money to further the study of them, we make laws about protecting those who believe in them. And that's just in the modern democratic countries. Elsewhere we make laws condemning people to death simply for opposing them, make laws which force people to follow what they say no matter how much unhappiness it brings them. It's a hell of a lot more than just "talking"

OP was prompted by a discussion I was following about "what happens after you die." Someone commented to the effect "we do not know if the soul is a material thing. it could be that it lives on after the body dies."

The comment was met with the one word demand "proof!"

I was struck by the rudeness of the response in light of the personal and intimate nature of the comment. — Arne

I think if you'd have started the OP with this, the discussion would have been very different.

Anyway, to analyse this particular exchange;

Firstly, the proposition was specifically about what we don't know and what "could" be the case, so any proof of such a claim would not be in the form of empirical evidence anyway. Proving that something "could" be the case is only a matter of demonstrating that there are no agreed on facts about the world which prevent it. So technically, this exchange has nothing to do with empirical evidence and I can see no reason to believe that the opponent meant empirical proof and not argumentative proof.

But let's say for the sake of discussion, that the claim was "a soul lives on after the body dies" (without the 'could be'. Then the person would be making a claim about the properties of an object (the soul) which they claim exists in the shared experience. In this case, a request (hopefully politely) for empirical proof would be entirely appropriate. The philosophical proposition here would have strayed into territory best covered by science. To use your analogy, it would the the proposer who was talking about pizza but measuring it by their musical judgement, the interlocutor is the one asking that pizza be measured by the taste of pizza.

discussions take on a life of their own. If we end up at the same place as when the discussion started, there is no point in the discussion. Just saying. I am moving on to other things now. I suspect our paths will cross again. :smile:

Thanks for the references.

I'm not speaking of validation or proof, but believe that all we think and do is grounded in the world as we're a part of it, and to the extent philosophical propositions are contrary to what we regularly encounter and interact with the fact we do so renders those propositions questionable.

I think ti’s more the case that philosophy ought to make us question our sense of normallity and what we generally assume and take for granted. You can see that in scientific method but in the case of science, it is generally applied to very specific subject matter. Whereas philosophy in the Socratic and Platonic tradition calls into question what we think we know about justice, knowledge, virtue, and other broad subjects of that kind. I think overall this has been lost sight of.

This is why I do not personally find Scientism compelling, but I do find it's diametric opposite offensive, hence my preference that it remain a valid world-view — Pseudonym

That is the only thing you ever say.

But let's say for the sake of discussion, that the claim was "a soul lives on after the body dies" (without the 'could be'. Then the person would be making a claim about the properties of an object (the soul) which they claim exists in the shared experience. In this case, a request (hopefully politely) for empirical proof would be entirely appropriate. — Pseudonym

Well, there is actually research, from a psychiatrist by the name of Ian Stevenson, who held a privately-endowed chair at the University of Virginia, from 1967 until 2002. During this period, he conducted a research program on children who claimed to remember previous lives.

He traveled extensively over a period of forty years, investigating three thousand cases of children around the world who claimed to remember past lives. His position was that certain phobias, philias, unusual abilities and illnesses could not be fully explained by heredity or the environment. He believed that reincarnation provided a third type of explanation.

Stevenson helped to found the Society for Scientific Exploration in 1982 and was the author of around three hundred papers and fourteen books on reincarnation, including Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1966) and European Cases of the Reincarnation Type (2003). His major work was the 2,268-page, two-volume Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects (1997). This reported two hundred cases of birthmarks and birth defects that seemed to correspond in some way to a wound on the deceased person whose life the child recalled. He wrote a shorter version of the same research for the general reader, Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect (1997). — Wikipedia

In one such case

In Sri Lanka, a toddler one day overheard her mother mentioning the name of an obscure town (“Kataragama”) that the girl had never been to. The girl informed the mother that she drowned there when her “dumb” (mentally challenged) brother pushed her in the river, that she had a bald father named “Herath” who sold flowers in a market near the Buddhist stupa, that she lived in a house that had a glass window in the roof (a skylight), dogs in the backyard that were tied up and fed meat, that the house was next door to a big Hindu temple, outside of which people smashed coconuts on the ground. Stevenson was able to confirm that there was, indeed, a flower vendor in Kataragama who ran a stall near the Buddhist stupa whose two-year-old daughter had drowned in the river while the girl played with her mentally challenged brother. The man lived in a house where the neighbors threw meat to dogs tied up in their backyard, and it was adjacent to the main temple where devotees practiced a religious ritual of smashing coconuts on the ground. The little girl did get a few items wrong, however. For instance, the dead girl’s dad wasn’t bald (but her grandfather and uncle were) and his name wasn’t “Herath”—that was the name, rather, of the dead girl’s cousin. Otherwise, 27 of the 30 idiosyncratic, verifiable statements she made panned out. The two families never met, nor did they have any friends, coworkers, or other acquaintances in common, so if you take it all at face value, the details couldn’t have been acquired in any obvious way.

Now having discussed Stevenson on this and other forums previously, I expect that what you will say is that he must have been tendentious, or his methodology must have been flawed, or he was gullible in what he was prepared to believe. In any case, whatever the evidence, it can't be true. And if you read the Wikipedia entry on Stevenson, you will find ample support for this reaction to Stevenson. So you don't need to tell me that you will dismiss it out of hand - heard it all before.

Myself, I have, at least, an open mind. Recently there was a TV documentary on 'child prodigies' on ABC TV (Australia). One of them was a child pianist who had been admitted to the Julliard School of Music in New York (at 7, one of the youngest ever) . The piano teacher was interviewed, saying she recognised the precocity of this young girl. She said, 'every year when we audition, we have some kids who come in, who are 8-9 years old, they play at break-neck speed, they don't miss a single note. But they don't move you. ' [commentator] 'Simply memorising a skill is not good enough. For a child to be a prodigy, there has to be an additional quality'. [teacher] 'We know we can develop technique, but we can't develop a soul'.

Was this child the re-incarnation of a great pianist? I'm not claiming to know. Perhaps there is an 'archetypical realm' of piano genius which takes form (or incarnates) in such children. But whatever it is, I'm sure it nothing that can be explained in terms that evolutionary biology, or science, will ever understand; not their ability, not how they got it, and, especially, what it means.