Vague, oversimplistic, poorly motivated ideologies that claim to solve all our problems like this are distractions from actual problems and actual solutions, imo.

That's only a problem for those that posit that intentionality is fundamental. — noAxioms

:up: :up: :100:

But why does that association exist at all? Why is there a link between a specific pattern of neural activity and a specific type of conscious feeling, one that consistently fits the body’s needs? — tom111

I understand this, but it seems like this question is nothing above the hard problem of consciousness - why do we have experiences, "period". Personally, the issue of psychophysical harmony then has little content beyond the basic issue of subjective experience.

Why does consciousness map onto physical and behavioural organisation in such an orderly, adaptive way, instead of being random or disconnected? — tom111

To me, it wouldn't make sense otherwise. If experiences are purportedly about things, connected to a "law-"ful physical universe, then how could they appear random or disconnected, it seems undermining. It seems to me that if experiences were hypothetically not "lined up" to the world, whatever that means, you wouldn't beable to sensically perceive this.

As kind of my own devil's advocate (because I am not sure I would actually seriously entertain this issue or way of framing things full-stop), rather than saying that experiences are somehow coincidentally "lined-up", it feels more sensical to me to say that the irreducibility of subjective qualia renders them arbitrary, and it is in fact the functional aspects which make them seem coincidentally "lined-up", when really they are arbitrary. I don't see how you can make a clean divide between experiences and functional aspects because all the observable consequences of my experiences on myself, all my attempts to understand them, involve inherently a functional aspect that renders them sensical (e.g. like how reporting on one's own experience is clearly part of the functional realm of our own behaviors).

What does it mean for an experience to "mirror" or "match" physical and functional organization? This seems to be somewhat similar to Chalmers' "hard problem of consciousness," — SophistiCat

I was going to say the same thing. I first heard this phrase "psychophysical harmony" on his podcast (which was good but seems to have stopped running) and I just didn't have any inuition about why this is an issue or that there is something to be explained about why pain feeling is linked to certain behavioral responses or stuff like that. The idea that your pain could feel any other way such that it is some how mis-matching functional responses doesn't even really make sense to me because it seems to me that the perception of something as pleasent is inherently entangled with functional responses or dispositions unless you perhaps you have some kind of brain damage. There doesn't seem to be anything additional in this issue beyond just the general hard problem of consciousness, imo.

The moment such a statement is made, it leaves the purely formal domain and enters the empirical one — Wolfgang

Well, no imo because its a description of what the maths says. Its directly analogous to variational principles of least action in physics which don't specifically have empirical content because they are formal tools that are used to describe lots of different things in physics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_principles

a framework so flexible that any observation can be redescribed post hoc as free-energy minimization. — Wolfgang

But this is the point. Free energy minimization gives you a framework where you can write down the equations describing the conditions for a system to maintain its own existence over time. That might not be interesting for a rock. But I think thats quite interesting for more complicated self-organizing systems. Its a framework for describing what complex self-organizing systems do, like choosing to describe physical systems as following paths of least action.

If organisms truly sought to minimize surprisal, they would remain in dark, stimulus-free environments. — Wolfgang

To avoid this absurdity, the theory must implicitly introduce meaning — assuming that the organism “wants” stimulation, “prefers” survival, or “seeks” adaptation. But these are semantic predicates, not physical ones. Hence, the principle only works by smuggling intentionality through the back door — the very thing it claims to explain. — Wolfgang

False. A system will have wants or preferences or seeks things out because if it doesn't it dies. And the point of FEP is that any system that continues to exist looks like it is modelling its environment. Things like preferences are an inherent part of that model and are necessitated. It comes for free. Nothing is required to be smuggled in.

Hohwy concedes that FEP is better seen as a framework than a theory. — Wolfgang

Yes, and Friston sees it the same way, I have been saying it that too. At the same time brains and what brains do in terms of constructing models and fulfilling the predictions of an organism is clearly a corollary of complicated systems that need extremely complicated forms of self-regulation in order to continue to survive. And we can use more specific, testable models of predictive processing or similar to describe what brains do.

it is a semantic conflation. — Wolfgang

Disagree, it is a rigorous mathematical framework with provable claims whose central, general claims are provable. Obviously, with regard to brains, it makes no specific predictions. But as a unifying theory of self-organization, it does exactly what it says on the tin, and its impossible for it to be any more precise empirically because the notion of a self-organizing system is far to general to have any specific empirical consequences. Exactly the same for a "general system's theory". Nonetheless, this theory is fundamentally describing in the most general sense what self-organizing systems do, and gives you a formal framework to talk about them which you can flesh out with your own specific models in specific domains.

what they literally mean;
if they are literal, they presuppose an experiencing subject. — Wolfgang

As I've said before, this isn't because theories are invalid. Predictive models to describe neurons are testable and can replicate single neuron responses. They are doing exactly what they should in an effective way.

The issue is you want them to describe something else. And thats fine, but no theory in neuroscience has ever claimed to explain subjective experience, nor do they want to. Thats not the most interesting part of neuroscience.

That is precisely what renders it incoherent. — Wolfgang

Nothing incoherent. Its a mathematical framework you can use as a tool to describe self-organizing systems, and it can be put to effective use for many purposes. This is an interesting one I have cited before:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.21217

I take the point that on its own FEP is not a theory of consciousness (and I am talking in the easy sense, NOT about subjectivity), because it is too general, but I think it can have an important role in the hierarchy of different ways, different theories of describing what brains do as living, self-organizing systems. And I think the generality is a positive because it necessarily acknowledges that you will never find strict boundaries or dividing lines between conscious and non-conscious, living and non-living, and I don't think you can have a full account of these things without that acknowledgement.

Edit: spelling and crossing out

This generality immunizes it against falsification and therefore removes it from the domain of empirical science. — Wolfgang

I don't think this matters if you treat it in the proper sense as a conceptualizing framework. If you can have testable theories at a lower level, then there's no issue. Its like criticizing mathematics for being unfalsifiable when thats not the point of mathematics. Mathematics can be used as a tool for the purpose of describing scientific theories.

I think at the core, you are thinking about Friston's theory in terms of subjective experience. This is not what it is about in any sense.

The category error is yours for thinking a theory or principle is about something that it is not intended to be about.

You cannot speak of “prediction” or “inference” without presupposing a model that experiences something to be predicted or inferred. — Wolfgang

I don't think this is true. Yoy can describe a single neuron as doing predictive coding. I don't think most people believe we need to ascribe them with experience. You might say "prediction" or "inference" is the wrong word because in your head they are somehow connected to qualia, but thats then just semantics that has no bearing on the validity of models or what they intended to do.

This raises the simple but essential question:
What is Friston’s theory actually for?
What does it allow us to know that we did not already know?
If it is neither empirically testable nor conceptually coherent, it remains a formal metaphor — a kind of mathematical cosmology of life that explains everything and therefore nothing.
A theory that can be applied to all systems explains no system in particular; it produces not knowledge, but only a symbolic sense of connectedness. — Wolfgang

It is a conceptual framework in which you can give things a formal description. I would say the benefit is conceptualizing how the world works, just like what philosophy does in general. Philosophy doesn't necessarily provide us with new knowledge about the world, but it people use it to organize their concepts of the world in a self-consistent way. As a mathematical tool it provides a choice for how one can describe systems they are interested in, like how in physics, there are usually different formulations of the same theory. None of the formulations predict anything different, but they are different perspectives on the same thing.

And I will emphasize it is "conceptually coherent" in your specific sense of the phrase if we are not talking about qualia. Because thats not what its intended to do and what most neuroscientific theories are not about. We are dealing with the easy not hard problems of consciousness. In that sense, any of these theories from neuroscience can be fully consistent theories of consciousness (in the easy sense). They are not intending on solving hard problems.

A real theory of consciousness must instead explain the transition from physical stability to autocatalytic self-reference — Wolfgang

I think it is worth noting there is obviously a continuum between inanimate and animate living things, with no strict dividing line. It is then unlikely that there can be a single, unique theory of living things or consciousness due to this because any such theories will have to make arbitrary distinctions about where living things end and non-living things start. Clearly then, a theory which fully encompasses the continuum must be maximally general, but that doesn't mean it is mutually exclusive of other theories of increasingly less generality. We shouldn't be looking for a single unique theory that explains everything. We need a plurality of tools that describes phenomena at various levels of generality from the highest to lowest.

If it does not, it becomes irrelevant to the problem it is most often cited for. — Wolfgang

Again, the category error is yourse because the theory can be used for things and many papers have been written using it to construct models that are even compared to data. The category error is yours in thinking that it is meant not for those things but explaining phenomenal consciousness. The theory is being used for all those things it is good at in those papers. It is not being misapplied, you are mislabeling it.

they are principally unverifiable — Wolfgang

No more than any other scientific theory. I mean, the reason why predictive coding (as a specific machine learning architecture) became popular is because machine learning architectures were designed that described actual neural responses. So this theory can be empirically evaluated as much as any other scientific theory in the sense that you can build models and test them.

Now, Friston's free energy principle is a mathematical principle that is unfalsifiable and much more general than any specific theory about the brain...

but specific kinds or families of predictive processing models for what neurons and the brain do are obviously testable, which is what I am talking about in the first paragraph.

From “organisms behave as if anticipating” it does not follow that they literally minimize epistemic uncertainty. — Wolfgang

But as I already explained, this is a crucial point of Friston's theory. He is not saying that organisms have some intentional uncertainty minimization thing they do. He is saying that in order to exist, they have to look like they are doing that. It doesn't matter how that is achieved, which is why his theory generalizes across many domains. Evolutionary natural selection can be framed as free energy minimization.

Sliding between these domains without a strict translation rule is a category error. — Wolfgang

At the highest level of generality, Friston's theory is more of general mathematical principle that can be shown to be the case generally for complicated systems regardless of the specific way they are described.

In this paper, he makes a great deal of effort to connect his principle to physics - statistical, newtonian and quantum mechanics - to emphasize the generality of the description as applying to random dynamical systems of which fundamental physics might be seen as special cases.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.10184

The relationship between free energy minimization and stochastic systems was shown before even Friston started his idea: e.g.

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=17970774975628711245&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1


So the category error you accuse him of doesn't hold because the theory is much more general than you suggest.

subjective experience — Wolfgang

This seems to be your main issue, which is fine because these theories aren't meant to solve the hard problem of explain subjective experience.

I clearly didn't read the quote properly because re-reading it I think its not that far from my view, broadly. Maybe not identical, but not really fundamentally that disagreeable. I am just quite allergic to the way that passage was written so it put me off reading it more closely.

Just the manufacture seems to defy any tech. Can't say 3D print a squirrel, finish, and then 'turn it on'. Or can you? Best I could come up with is a frog, printed totally frozen. When finished, thaw it out. Frogs/turtles can deal with that. Again, I am mostly agreeing with your side of the discussion with Joshs. — noAxioms

Well, you won't know just by looking at our technology. We don't know what technology will happen or can happen. Its speculation. But I said if we had the technology to do something. I think that the ultimate limit is what the laws of physics would allow you to do, what can be manipulated, which seems to be quite a lot. I remember people give examples that if you smash a glass on the floor and see it smash everywhere, there is nothing in Newtonian physics that says the reverse process can't happen: i.e. lots of sprinkles of glass from all directions gather up on the floor into a perfectly formed glass then bounce up into someones hand. This is a completely physically acceptable process; it can happen under Newtonian physics even if the initial conditions would be very difficult to produce. It just needs a method (or technology) to produce the initial conditions. There's a lot physics might seem to allow you to do in principle if you get the conditions correct, the technology to produce those conditions. But at the same time, such processes will still remaon physically acceptable in principle even if it is very difficult to get those required conditions together.

Yes , that’s what I thought. So that indicates a distinctly different philosophical perspective on human and animal
cognition. My perspective to closer to enactivists like Evan Thompson: — Joshs

I mean the quote doesn't seem distinctly enactivist to me, but more focused on the inability to explain qualia. At the same time, I can clarify that I didn't mean anything about qualia or experience in the previous post, I only meant behavior, as I mentioned in the first sentence. I just struggle to find any motivation for the sentiment that in principle physical mechanisms cannot explain all behavior, partly because that claim would entail some radical revisions to what we know about the universe that I think we should probably be more aware of by now.

Edit: and I should probably clarify more that targeting behavior specifically was due to the p-zombie thought experiment I described which is about the threat of epiphenomenalism.

You’re saying you think you and I are approaching our understanding of human and animal cognition from the same philosophical perspective? — Joshs

Broadly, yes.

And what does our disagreement over relevance pertain to? — Joshs

When I came into this thread I was talking about the hard problem of consciousness and the plausibility that physical mechanisms can produce all human behavior. The point was that I don't believe there is anything in the field of neuroscience or A.I. that produces a doubt about the idea that we will be able to keep continuing to see what brains do as instantiated entirely in physical interactions of components as opposed to requiring some additional mental woo we don't yet understand.

Everything I want to argue for and against concerning what a.i. is and can become is already contained with my dfferences with you concerning what humans and other animals are doing when they think. — Joshs

I don't think there is any fundamental difference here between what I think about what humans and animals do, I think the disagreement is about relevance.

Given their trouble even producing a manufactured cell from scratch (a designed one, not a reproduction of abiogenesis, which is unlikely to be done), you wonder if it can even be done in principle. — noAxioms

Well this is then just a speculation about technological capability, which I referred to conditionally.

Given that the thinking of our best engineers doesn’t even represent the leading edge of thinking of our era, it’s kind of hard to imagine how their slightly moldy concepts instantiated in a self-learning a.i., will lead to the singularity. — Joshs

I don't understand this sentiment. It's not a refutation of the possibilities of what can be created, neither is it a realistic sentiment about how the world works. Things change, ideas advance, ideas bleed over between different fields. Doubt anyone in 1950 at the time could tangibly envision technologoy that does what A.I. are doing now.

The fact that the architectures of our most self-organizing machines depend on locking in certain grounding concepts to define the parameters and properties of self-organization ( properties which will change along with the concepts in a few years as the engineers come up with better machines) means that these concepts are in fact forms of hardcoding. — Joshs

And this would apply to all living organisms: jellyfish, plants, the many kinds of brains, neural webs, etc, etc.

1. what does this have to do with prediction — Wolfgang

I mean, informational entropy is a central part of Friston's theory.

2. what do you want to do with such a general statement — Wolfgang

I'm just correcting your assertion that organisms need to know how to calculate probabilities.

I think its a nice framework for examining self-organization and conceptualizing what living organisms and brains do.

He analogizes a physical principle with a semantic concept — Wolfgang

Like informational entropy and physical entropy ... ??

And then he assumes organisms have the ability to calculate probabilities. — Wolfgang

No, the point is that if complex systems exist for extended periods of time, they must appear as if they are modelling their environment in the sense that their states are statistically coupled to those of their environment.

What does hardcoded mean? — Joshs

Pre-programmed, in contrast to self-organization. Its not some technical concept. For instance, you could say pain or hunger is in some sense hard-coded into us.

You have then seemed to base the rest of the post on latching onto thia use of the word "hardcoded" even though I initially brought that word up in the post to say that "hardcode" is exactly not what characterizes self-organization or what A.I. do.

And can we also create life from scratch if we had all the technological capabilities? What I am going on about are the important differences between the cognizing of a living organism and the thinking of a human-designed machine. — Joshs

It seems to me you are going on about differences between living organisms and our current machines. But there is no refutation here that in principle one can build machines which are as complex as living organisms. You haven't set out any reason why those differences wouldn't be breachable. You just say that living organisms are like this and machines we have built are like that. You don't seem to think that in principle we can understand the principles of self-organization and use that to build self-organizing machines when people have been doing that for decades. The learning that A.I. does isn't even all that different to self-organization in the sense that in modern A.I. we don't hardcode the capabilities and things these systems are actually doing; usually people don't even really know how the A.I. they have designed does what it does on a mechanical level. What is being hardcoded, effectively, is the ability for a system to learn to do things by itself without explicit supervision, which is self-organization.

There is absolutely nothing of any substance in Josh's post that refutes the idea that one could build a self-organizing machine.

I really don't understand what you are going on about. A brain is a physical object. In principal, you can build a brain that does all the things brains do from scratch if you had the technological capabilities.

No, I don't and you don't here provided sufficient evidence to convince me of your view. Rather, it seems to me that, given the impressive results we have obtained with computers you are concluding that our congition is also algorithmic. — boundless

How would you interpret the fact that our brain (or at least the component that seems involved in processing information and long distance message-passing) is almost entirely composed of the same kind of cell with the same fundamental underlying physiological and anatomical structures and mechanism in terms of membrane potentials that induce action potentials.

We don't have a deep understanding in which we can build detailed realistic functioning models of exactly what human brains are doing and why but we have a reasonably good basis for understanding the kind of information processing principles that underlie what neurons do such as in terms of efficient, sparse, predictive coding using recurrent connectivity. And really, LLM architectures work under very similar basic principles to what neurons do which is just prediction. You can fidn studies that the same kind of models used for LLMs are actually really very good at predicting neural responses to things like language processing because fundamentally they are doing the same thing, prediction.

All living beings seem to have a 'sense' of unity, that there is a distinction between 'self' and 'not self' and so on. They do not just 'do' things. — boundless

There is no reason to think that these things can't be achieved with the same fundamental processes that transformers already use... why? Because they work in the same way brains do. The difference is that all LLMs are trained to do is predict words. Human brains don't just predict but act and control themselves; not just that, but these things are clearly biased, in terms of the evolutionarily-conserved structure of the brain itself, for very biologically specific control (i.e. what you would call homeostatic and allostatic). But the point is that there is no reason to think these things cannot be performed by the same processes that fundamentally underlie what transformers and LLMs do if you just structure them or design them in a way that allows them to do that. It would be surprising if they didn't imo because that seems to be what brains do. Neurons share the same core fundamental physiological, anatomical, functional properties, and there is the same kinds of interplay between excitation and inhibition, that are used for everything from homeostatic regulatory responses from the hypothalamus and midbrain to visual processing, motor control, language, executive functions, emotion, etc. There is of course a great variety in neurons and structures across the brain but they all share fundamental commonalities with some shared core which is virtually ubiquitious.

I will say bluntly that no machine we invent will do what we do, which is to think. — Joshs

I don't see the grounds for such a statement. A brain is just a certain kind of machine, and it thinks. If brains exist, then in principle you can build one. LLMs don't have a lot of things humans have, but doesn't mean that in principle you could build machines that do.

and they operate according to algorithms (programmed by us) just like mechanical calculators. — boundless

And you don't think we do? Our brains are bundles of neurons which all work in very similar ways. You could easily make an argument that we operate in accordance with some very basic kind or family of algorithms recapitulated in many different ways across the brain.

All their activities can be explained by saying that they just do what they are programmed for. — boundless

As can a human brain.

I mean, none of this has any relevance to any points I am making. Obviously, to artificially recreate a human brain to acceptable approximation, you need to construct this computational system with the kinds of inputs, kinds of architectures, capabilities, whatever, that a human does. I am not making any arguments based on specific assumptions about specific computing systems, just on what is in principle possible.

Yes, I guess it depends on how easily convinced you are about this being case. For me, without further reason to believe otherwise, it seems like the biggest roadblocks in modelling something like the brain is intractable complexity. There is no indication that in principle we cannot someday model all our own behaviors and reports through computer models. I think even just looking at AI now indicates that there isn't really a conceivable limit on what they can do given enough power and the right inputs, which is what you might expect from something which is Turing complete: i.e. they can compute anything in principle.

Well, if we can in principle explain our reports and behaviors regarding our own conscious experiences in terms of physics and biology, and epiphenomenalism is ridiculous, then this suggests that a coherent view of these kinds of metaphysics has to be monistic, if thats the right word.

I assert that your mechanics will fall flat on its face if it amounts to nothing but a ‘third-person’ mechanics. — Joshs

But everything in your previous post was "third-person mechanics".

According to Kuhn, when paradigms change, the accounts they express inhabit slightly different worlds. — Joshs

Which is when scientists disagree with each other. But scientists don't generally set out to disagree with each other or foresee science as being full of ideas that are inherently contradictory. They aim for a family of models which agree on underlying metaphysics, ontology, on empirical predictions - and when they don't scientists will explain that away as idealization or models and science in general not being good enough yet or complete enough. You can view the mind and brain through many different perspectives and scales with different methods, and people have different hypotheses. But most people don't think that they don't or can't agree in principle, at least in the future.

There is another, perhaps more important, issue at play here. It’s not just a matter of providing an explanation. It’s recognizing that there are a multiplicity of explanations to choose from, differing accounts each with their own strengths and weaknesses. — Joshs

I don't really find this that interesting in the context of the problem of consciousness. Its almost a triviality of science that different problems, different descriptions utilize different models or explanations. Given that any plurality of explanations need to be mutually self-consistent, at least in principle, this isn't interesting. Ofcourse, there are actual scientific models that are not actually mutually consistent, but most people don't recognize that kind of thing as somehow alluding to a reality with inherent mutual inconsistencies. Possibly the only real exception is in foundations of physics albeit there is no consensus position there.



Or maybe the dualism of physical and mental is illusory with regard to fundamental metaphysics.

To me, they would if they had exactly the same brains as us but just devoid of any "lights on" inside. My impression is that there is nothing really in biology that suggests we couldn't explain our behavior entirely in terms of the mechanics of brains, at least in principle.

But why aren't the physically different statuses simply physical? — Patterner

What's also interesting here imo is the the question of why something "simply physical" would exclaim things that to us sound like proclamations of consciousness and experience yet surely are produced solely by physical chains of events. I don't see a strong reason why a "simply physical" version of us wouldn't make those exact same kinds of claims as us insofar as they would have the same brains as us. And I don't think most biologists believe there is something fundamentally glaring about brains that would render them insufficient for producing the complex behaviors we are capable of.

How do you determine what is part of the system and what is not?
Is it possible for a system to contain a system?
If yes, what exactly is a system of all systems? — Pieter R van Wyk

In the Markov Blanket perspective, there are no strict boundaries and systems under this definition can be recursively nested within each other, which is natural; molecules in cellular components in cells in organs in people in societies, ecosystems, solar systems, etc, etc.

Because its a rigorous formal framework, it can be put into practise. An interesting proposal in this paper where they do this, producing algorithms for distinguishing systems and components of systems - "a Markov Blanket detection algorithm".

https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.21217

Point particles with intrinsic properties is itself an incoherent idea. Therefore you wrongly classify your interpretation as coherent. "Point particles" is just a mathematical facilitation, which physicists know does not represent anything real, due to that incoherency. Therefore it does not avoid the so-called measurement problem, it's just a fiction which simplifies some calculations. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well I don't think there is any picture or theories of any kind of physics or metaphysics where a point particle wouldn't be a kind of idealization or fiction to simplify conceptualizations of the world. The fact that fields are fundamental doesn't necessarily make particles inconsistent with them; but I do take the point that quantum field theory does seem to suggest to people that some point particle properties just cannot exist in QFT (e.g. a photon cannot be localized in space like a you would expect of a point-particle). But I believe this only conflicts with point particles if you conflate a particle with the quantum state - its the quantum state which cannot be localized. This would not be the case in stochastic mechanics or Bohmian mechanics where neither particles nor field configurations would be identical to a quantum state, so there would be no inherent contradictions even if particles are generalized by a field description.

Very nice analysis :up: :up:

Rather, experience cannot be disentangled from the functional structure of the brain; attempts to do so result in bizarre paradoxes like the p-zombie who believes they are conscious, reports their own experiences and can converse about it as well as yourself.

I could write it out, but my argument doesn't depend on this Bayesian framework. Most people won't understand it anyway. What I think is funny is that I estimated the probability of my conclusion being correct at 95% even before the Bayesian analysis. — Sam26

No one's going to take you seriously unless you are going to back up your mathematical claims. I would like to see how you got to these numbers.

Edit: in [ ] : nevermind, I see what you're saying for this bit.

Updating yields a posterior probability of approximately 0.95 (95%). — Sam26

Can you explicitly write out this calculation?

Yes, it does seem odd that even though we don't need brains for experiences, our earthly-transcendent spirits have experiences of the exact same kind which are supported by brains which, in the earth-bound counterparts, would be compromised by brain injury. If I have a stroke, will my stroke-related deficits manifest in the afterlife? If not, why do I even have a brain in the physical world that can be disrupted to produce stroke-light deficits. If stroke-like deficits are specific to my earth-bound experiences, why does my transcendent experiences resemble my earth-bound ones? Lots of bogglement ensues.

It would put into question things we know about how physics and biology works.

Very much hoping for a chapter on your NPC hypothesis.

But don't you see how momentous that decision would be? The admission that the fundamental particles of physics are not themselves physical? That you choose not to see this, is not any kind of argument. — Wayfarer

But you can say the wavefunction is just mathematical object that is describing the behavior of physical particles without being identical to them. You can use an evolving probability density function to describe the behavior of a single particle undergoing diffusion, the evolving probability density function is not the particle itself.

luck — Sam26

This can only be done statistically.

history and forensics don't wait for lab recreations to draw conclusions — Sam26

Because forensics is based on established science which is used to assess whats going on. History makes much weaker inferences than the ones you are trying to make.

but that doesn't erase the explanatory power of what's already on the table. — Sam26

No explanatory power at all. You don't have any model, just a vague claim that life exists after death based on circumstantial evidence rather than any explicit refutation.

for every edge case — Sam26

You shouldn't be using underexplored edge cases to make leaping claims that overturn entire paradigms.

you know, the ones courts and historians use daily) — Sam26

Good lord, try brining this to a court or historian and lets see how that goes.

That's not a fallacy; that's consistency. Your crowd's the one gerrymandering epistemology to protect pet paradigms. — Sam26

Just ridiculous to think you can overturn the whole body of knowledge regarding physical science from a few case studies that completely lacking in methodological rigor. And yes, its the entire body, because if there was any other weird stuff going on that was anything like the claims you are making, we probably would have found it scientifically by now.

"more rigorous testing" while ignoring the rigor already in play. — Sam26

Its very basic. Take a class in methods in sociology and see what they tell you about the pros and cos between things like case studies and qualitative research as opposed to quantitative ones.

Clinicians deal with anomalous data all the time without tossing out naturalism wholesale. Historians reconstruct events from fragmentary evidence without demanding Petri dishes. — Sam26

Yes, they make inferences as reasonable based on evidence and the methodological principles they have been taught. Do you really think any of these people would come to the same conclusions as you regarding this topic? If not, there is no point bringing them up.

independent reports matching on checkable facts. — Sam26

Yeah, and you don't know if those effects would replicate in systematic study with lots of these cases as opposed to the case studies where you cant control what people say, how things are reported or checked, cant control how or why these case studies came to prominence (i.e. some kind of selection effect in sampling). You can't control lucky statements, you can't control actual genuine naturalustic ways people may have come to that knowledge. Unless these things are systematically tested then we are forever speculating on these case studies without a definitive conclusion about what happened.

quantum weirdness, consciousness gaps, — Sam26

Quantum weirdness is naturalistic and consciousness is naturalistically studied.

You say science isn't different from other knowledge, but then pivot to demanding everything fit sociology, cog sci, or biomed methods? — Sam26

Because its clearly the subject matter. How is it not? Those are the natural methods you would use to answer exactly this topic.

it's about what holds up under scrutiny. And mine does — Sam26

The whole issue is the dearth of scrutiny, ironically.

but know you're missing out on a paradigm shift. Your call. — Sam26

:lol: :rofl: