One of philosophy's roots is an interest in doing something about snake-oil salesmen and the power of mystery religions. 'Be open-minded, but not so open-minded your brain rolls out.' — Mongrel

And who has the credentials to judge when one's ''brain rolls out.''? No one!

I'm a certified roll-out checker.

I'm a certified roll-out checker. — Mongrel

Where did you study? I was working on my rolloutcheckology PhD at Oxbridge, but I took some time out to travel Europe and just couldn't get back into it.

H&K University (school of hard knocks)

Perhaps the gap that separates us from belief in superstitions or what you all call magical thinking is the failure to see a mechanism that produces the results. For instance, to me, the placebo effect is simply a name given to this gap. — TheMadFool

The placebo effect is a powerful one that accounts, for instance, for much of the apparent 'effect' of antidepressants, including drugs not intended for depression that are prescribed for depression, if Irving Kirsch and Marcia Angell are to be believed (NrB article from 2011). To me there isn't exactly a gap here: our beliefs influence outcomes, or at least our reports of outcomes (for studies of placebo rely of course on reports). That's the finding, reproduced widely.

There is a gap for some sorts of physicalism, in that 'belief' here seems an irreducible factor. And this is belief on all sides, including the beliefs of professional practitioners, which certainly influence such outcomes.

Socially and indeed even in academe there are many cases in which belief, if shared by sufficient numbers of people, has effects, for the very belief shifts the way we think. An unpopular revolution today that brings cheap bread tomorrow will soon found itself high in the ratings.

Psychology is itself susceptible to problems with its own beliefs. There's some interesting work by a man called Schwitzgebel on over 100 years of surveys of whether we dream in black and white or in colour, which strongly suggests that our beliefs, at least as recorded by mainstream psychological studies, have varied with the rise and fall of black and white movies and television, without psychologists noticing the historical variations. He's refined the paper but here's an early version of it.

There is a gap for some sorts of physicalism, in that 'belief' here seems an irreducible factor. And this is belief on all sides, including the beliefs of professional practitioners, which certainly influence such outcomes. — mcdoodle

Yes, that's what I'm referring to. We just don't know how, for example, the placebo effect works. Yet, we know it's real. Thanks. This is a very good example of when people close the gap between doubt and belief without knowledge of the causal process. In my favor, it shows how superstitions may be believed despite people objecting on the grounds that there's no known causal process that can explain them. Thanks again

The thing is, second-by-second events happen that push future events in any one of many different outcomes. Tracking all of these potentially significant events in the life of the whole world is not possible. Whether it's Hitler, Jesus, you, me, a thunderstorm, an airliner crashing, the collapse of a building, a crop failure, catching a nice batch of fish or catching nothing--whatever you choose as a topic, tracing it's ultimate cause in the cosmos is impossible.

People from the "everything is determined by physics since the Big Bang" lobby have the same problem. Successfully tracing all the chains of causation requires an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent god whose will moved all the events of the cosmos since it's very beginning.

We can track gross causes: Cheaper, inferior material caused an apartment fire to get out of control and kill many people in London. Sloppy sanitation in a food plant can be identified as the cause of a large food poisoning event. Compulsive gambling can be identified as the cause of a personal bankruptcy. These are discreet, short-run, events.

But even here, there are limitations. On Sunday I left my bike on a bus. I didn't think about the bike as I got off and went about my errands in the shopping center until two hours later when I headed back to the bus stop. Suddenly I remembered--way way way too late. I can not account for this lapse of attention. Some chain of events left me in a distracted fuzzy-minded state--but what? Don't know, can't tell, too many possible factors. (I picked up the bike yesterday at bus system's Lost and Found office.)

I'm a certified roll-out checker. — Mongrel

Good for you but I'll need to cross-check your certificate.:)

I don't want to believe in superstition. I'm quite comfortable in materialism. However, I've been troubled by the total lack of any spark in such a worldview. It's too dull and boring being a materialist.

So, I did some web surfing and there's a lot of stuff on the net about the supernatural. I don't know what their credibility ratings are but it intrigues me that there's so much supernatural stuff going on in the world.

I just wanted to link my materialism to the spiritual in the most reasonable way I could think of.

Good for you but I'll need to cross-check your certificate.:) — TheMadFool

It's written in chalk on the pavement near that grocery store you frequent. I'm surprised you didn't see it.

Deciding to do any act for whatever cited reason is magical.

This thread will be the cause of me planting a Calotropis in the lower garden, so I can attract Monarch butterflies. Any butterfly may spark a vision of the chaos of indeterminable casual chains, crisscrossing like neurons in a network.

To be scientific using a Popperian meme: this thread will not be the actual cause (nor will it won't be) of me planting a Calotropis in the lower garden because the hypothesis (that it did) is unfalsifiable.

I just wanted to link my materialism to the spiritual in the most reasonable way I could think of. — TheMadFool

That's a reasonable desire, me thinks. I won't suggest any books about it, but I've wanted to do the same thing, in a way. Let's avoid spooky stuff.

The thing is, the purely material world of early earth was lifeless. In time life came about -- how is a whole nuther discussion. But it did. And it appears to have come about out of the purely material. Early life was not, presumably "spiritual". One doesn't usually think of the spirituality of blue-green algae. Eventually (billions of years) life evolved into animals that had an interest in the "spiritual". This spiritual being is the offspring of the purely material--though the distance between parentage and offspring is very long.

You can suppose that life has striven to reach for the spiritual from the very beginning--the teleological approach. It's a nice spiritual approach. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ is the man you want to go to for this approach. He was a Jesuit priest, French idealist philosopher trained as a paleontologist and geologist and took part in the discovery of Peking Man (not to be confused with the discovery of Peking Duck).

"Nothing is mere" Feynman said.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere." I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more ? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part—perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why ? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it ? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”
― Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics

The "butterfly effect" is often misunderstood, mainly I think because it is poorly worded.

Rather than expressing it as"a butterfly flapping its wings at X could cause a hurricane at Y"

I think this would be better

"it is impossible to calculate the long term effect on the weather of a butterfly flapping its wings".

"Nothing is mere" Feynman said — Bitter Crank

(Y)

Thanks for the reply.

To be scientific using a Popperian meme: this thread will not be the actual cause (nor will it won't be) of me planting a Calotropis in the lower garden because the hypothesis (that it did) is unfalsifiable — Nils Loc

But is science the sole guardian of truth?

Falsifiability is naturally built into our thinking. We don't need science to judge our thinking. I think you've put the cart before the horse. For example:

1) If my lucky shirt is any good then we should win this game

2) We didn't win this game

Therefore,

3) My lucky shirt isn't any good

See? Falsifiability is part of any hypothesis. Science is a subset of our hypotheses.

Why would you assume that you know how your lucky shirt works?

Maybe your lucky shirt just increases the probability you will win by 1%. Could you scientifically verify that your lucky shirt increases the probability that you will win by 1%?

Maybe your lucky shirt is solar powered and the sun went behind the clouds at the most crucial moment.

Maybe your lucky shirt is paired with unlucky shoes but you were ignorant about all the unlucky variables.

Maybe your lucky shirt backed the other team. See, it does work! If it can affect game outcomes, it can also have a mind of its own.

Complexity doesn't imply impossibility.

I agree the problem is complex but to say the hypothesis is non-falsifiable would require stronger support than just ''the problem is too complex''. There has to be a sense of real impossibility in it. For example, take the following hypothesis:

There's an invisible, undetectable elf dancing on your head.

This is an unfalsifiable hypothesis because it's impossible to detect the undetectable.

Maybe your lucky shirt backed the other team. See, it does work! If it can affect game outcomes, it can also have a mind of its own. — Bitter Crank

:D Yes, anything's possible when we're superstitious. I didn't think of that LOL

I think this would be better

"it is impossible to calculate the long term effect on the weather of a butterfly flapping its wings". — Jake Tarragon

A more precise statement can be made. It is that under a deterministic iterated system, points (or states) that start out very close together may end up with radically different fates. One point might remain bounded, while a nearby point spirals off to infinity.

With respect to the butterfly:

If you have two universes that are exactly the same; but in one the butterfly flaps its wings, and in the other it doesn't; then when you let your deterministic world run according to its rules and equations, those two universes may have vastly different fates. One may be coherent and stable and the other may disolve into randomness. One may support life and the other not.

It's not about causation. It's about the behavior of nearby points under iterated deterministic systems.

It's counterintuitive. We think that if we have some deterministic system and two points (or states) start out close together, their behavior can't be too different under iteration of the rules. But this turns out to be false. Nearby points can have vastly different futures.

We think that "a tiny difference will dissipate or smooth out over time." But the opposite is true. The tiniest difference in the initial conditions can lead to dramatically different futures.

The classic example is the Mandelbrot set. We've all seen those beautiful pictures. Here's a nice specimen. Hopefully this will post the link and not the image, which is fairly large and worth clicking on.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Mandel_zoom_11_satellite_double_spiral.jpg

Without going into detail, the Mandelbrot set (the part traditionally rendered in black) is the set of points that remain bounded under a given iteration. All the other points eventually wander off to infinity. [That just means they are unbounded, there's nothing mystical or actually infinite going on here, it's just an expression meaning unbounded].

The part of the plane that isn't black, the complement of the Mandelbrot set, can be colored like this: You color each point according to how many iterations (within some range) it takes to get a distance of 2 from the origin. And that assignment of colors results in the wild Mandelbrot pictures we see, which have all this crazy fractal detail at every possible zoom level.

Wikipedia has an excellent writeup. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set

And the point is that you have a perfectly deterministic and actually very simple rule that lets you trace out the evolution of a point under continued iteration of the rule. But points that are very close together can end up with wildly different fates. Some remain forever within a circle of radius 2. And others wander off to infinity. [Once an iteration goes outside the circle of radius 2, it will eventually go to infinity].

That's what the butterfly story is illustrating. The universe in which the butterfly flaps its wings; and the universe in which the butterfly doesn't flap its wings; may have wildly and qualitatively different evolutions.

Yet if you step back you can see much deeper patterns in the apparent randomness. That's chaos.

As a historical note, all of this was anticipated and visualized in the mind of Henri Poincaré. He discovered chaos in the 1880's, a century before anyone dreamed of graphical software that could render images of these kinds of sets.

I accept your distinction about unfalsifiable claims.

under a deterministic iterated system, points (or states) that start out very close together may end up with radically different fates. — fishfry

mmm not very snappy though is it :). Also a bit misleading because what does "end up" actually mean? There is no "end" as such, just a flow of states, and the "young" states of two systems that start off nearly identical are likely to be very broadly similar. For example, the butterfly will have no effect upon whether that thunderstorm brewing above it will break or not.

:D I did say I was stretching the theory to its limits. — TheMadFool

Yuh. That is a full-on stretch. :(

Why such a dim view of superstition? Is it because you think it's not rational or is it because, like me, you fear the consequences if it were true? — TheMadFool

The only thing I fear is stupidity. It is just profound to see how people delude themselves, even when facts are staring right at them, for instance the concept of 'individuality' when people follow en-masse as they fall victim to marketing stratagems that enable them to think that they represent someone unique, and so people go on injecting shit into their faces or buying hundreds or even thousands of followers on social networking sites to pretend to popularity and the worst part is that everyone is the same, doing the same shit, thinking the same shit but working really hard to present themselves as "special" or different from the other same shit. Take a selfie and write some bollocks and everyone will congratulate you for being... the same shit as them.

The world feeds on this 'fear' you have, it drives multibillion dollar businesses as it ensures people continue to remain stupid enough to think that they are 'special'.

We are a fucking spec of dust. Accept it.

I'm one thousandth of a sparkly sequin. And that's way better than being a speck of dust. That's why I act all la-di-da on these forums.

We are a fucking spec of dust. Accept it. — TimeLine

Yes, perspective changes everything. I once lived in a small world - everything looked so daunting and so big. I still feel that way but this ''speck of dust'' really shakes up my world. I feel smaller of course but there's so many bigger things to appreciate. Does that sound odd?

Small changes making big differences.

So, can I change the fate of the universe by blinking my eye?

So, can I change the fate of the universe by blinking my eye? — TheMadFool

Wouldn't be fate if you could.
You are part of the causal chain of local events, blink of eye or not. What you are labeling 'change' is not change by any usual definition. Change is what happens to a candle over an hour once it has been lit. Change is not what happens to the candle given the alternate choice to leave it on the dash of your car instead.

↪fishfry Small changes making big differences.

So, can I change the fate of the universe by blinking my eye? — TheMadFool

Why are you quoting words I didn't say in my post?

But you said small changes can magnify as the causal chain moves forward in time. Isn't an eye-blink a small change? Can you absolutely rule out the possibility that it won't magnify its effects down the causal web? I know that's shifting the burden of proof to you but it's intriguing.

Why are you quoting words I didn't say in my post? — fishfry

Isn't that the gist of your post?

Isn't that the gist of your post? — TheMadFool

If you quote you should quote literally. If you are paraphrasing someone, you should not make it look like you're quoting them. A stylistic nitpick, to be sure. Something professional journalists do ... when you put something in quotes it should be the exact words the person said. Not the reporter's paraphrase, which is bound to include the reporter's own worldview and spin.

In this case I also feel that you misconstrued my words. Your paraphrase changed my meaning.

You attributed to me the claim that "Small changes making big differences."

But this is absolutely false. There is no "making" involved. There is no causal relation. It's just that nearby points in the plane have qualitatively different behavior under iteration. Likewise similar states of the universe may nevertheless evolve in profoundly different ways.

Nothing is "making" anything change; and if this is what you took from what I wrote, then I did not express myself with sufficient clarity.

Nearby points may have huge differences in their evolution.

That is what I said, that is all I said. That's what chaos is about, that's what the Mandelbrot set is about and that's what this butterfly story is about. The butterfly story is only a simplification for the public. It's not to be taken as meaning that anything causes anything. It represents a more subtle truth that isn't always understood by thinking the butterfly causes anything.

I did my best to explain this in my post but perhaps I can do better if you tell me why you think anything "makes" anything here. Nearby points may have radically different fates under iteration. That's all.

But you said small changes can magnify as the causal chain moves forward in time. Isn't an eye-blink a small change? Can you absolutely rule out the possibility that it won't magnify its effects down the causal web? — TheMadFool

An eye blink is a small difference from a not-blink. That difference (there is no change here) amplifies. and in the two divergent paths, the weather is totally different in a matter of months, and a different list of people have died from accidents. Accidental death is quite chaotic, but slow death not so much.

The difference magnifies only if in a chaotic dynamic system not tuned to a strange attractor, and the weather for the most part doesn't have strange attractors, but orbiting things can. So difference yes, but certain storms are predicable well in advance. It will rain on Colorado Springs at 3:30 PM on Sept 7, 2018. You heard it here first folks.