Hey Sam.

Thanks for posting some links. Here's a quote from the first paper:

This is in line with the hypothesis that the core components of a NDE are neurophysiologically determined [4], [18]. If we assume that some physiological mechanisms can account for NDEs (e.g. OBEs caused by a deficient multisensory integration at the right [19], [20], [21] or left [22] temporo-parietal junction or feeling the presence of another (deceased) person possibly caused by left temporo-parietal junction dysfunction [20]), then the subject really perceived these phenomena, albeit not corresponding to occurring events in reality. At this point, NDEs can meet the definition of hallucinations : “Any percept-like experience which (a) occurs in the absence of an appropriate stimulus, (b) had the full force or impact of the corresponding actual (real) perception, and (c) is not amenable to direct and voluntary control by the experiencer” [23]. Note that hallucinations are recognized to most often have pathophysiological or pharmacological origins, as we hypothesize, also is the case for NDEs. As for hallucinations, NDEs present a real perceptual bias (due to physiological mechanisms taking place during NDEs) and can include as many characteristics as real event memories. In addition, the effects of emotional and self-referential values of the NDE could make it a kind of “super-real” memory containing even more characteristics than real event memories. Considering together the concept of flashbulb memories and the similarity of NDEs with hallucinations, the higher amount of characteristics for NDEs that was here observed suggest that the memories of NDEs are flashbulb memories of hallucinations.

So these folks think NDEs are hallucinations rather than confabulations.

It's also a tiny, tiny study and I wonder whether those magic p-values mean anything at all.

Not even a mathematician can draw a generic triangle, nor can you think of one. Every geometry or trigonometry textbook you will ever see has illustrations in it that are specific triangles. In working a problem using such an illustration, you simply (!) follow a rule not to rely on features of the triangle that, while they are present in the triangle you have drawn or are given, are not specified in the problem.

This procedure might be what Grice refers to as "deeming".

I wouldn't want to post on any philosophy forum that wouldn't ban me. — Groucho Marx, I think

You should conduct multiple polls with the answers arranged differently so as not to influence how people vote.

Yeah, "number of entities" posited is not a good measure. (Unless positing God is positing one more than you need.) It's really number of types of entities we care about. You could use Dawkins' complexity measure, that a designer for the whole universe would be have to be even more complex than the universe we're explaining.

It still feels to me like a question of how much of some resource or other is too much to pay for an explanation.

Something else I felt my model captured was our sense that adhoc explanations are a kind of cheating, printing your own money as needed.

Simpler typically means less chance of error / higher chance of subsequently discovering errors (and easier to comprehend). — jorndoe

Yes, I agree with everyone's alternative characterizations of the razor. What's missing is why we should care. For instance, why should you want to make fewer errors? I see a related calculation to mine, given above. It's inefficient to waste resources by making errors you could easily have avoided. Implicitly you're designing an auction where we bid time and effort, and if you spend more than I, you've overpaid.

ADDED: there's a coder's maxim that you shouldn't make a program as cleverly as you can, because if it has a bug, by definition you're not clever enough to find it.

That is to say that no additional information about X can be obtained by adding to A - specifying that other things have to happen. Any other account B would be an intersection of A with other events*3* which is less likely than A. In fact, A is the most likely theory. — fdrake

So this would explain Ockham's razor with one more step, that it is rational to select the theory most likely to be true, and that relates to the other usual version of the razor, that the simplest explanation is most likely to be true. Yes?

It's nice to be able to prove this version of the razor. Violating it, on this view, is just violating a different norm than what I was headed for, but I assume I'll connect them one of these days, when the Grand Theory of Rationality has revealed itself to me.

The Wikipedia article also gives the "original":

"Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity" (Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate).

There is a nice edition of David Hume's Enquiries available free online here.

I've spent almost all my life here, just outside Athens.

One more note: the psychological facts are not in dispute. That people do have these memories is not being challenged, and having such memories is a psychological phenomenon.

What the source, or even cause, of these memories is, that's the question. You propose an answer to that question. So, on the one hand, there is the event of the consciousness leaving and then returning to the body, and, on the other hand, there are the memories of this event (or caused or brought about by the event).

Does blowing into a balloon cause it to inflate?

I observe a guy blowing into a balloon, and I observe the balloon inflating. Then I do this 10,000 more times. I find that sometimes the blowing is not accompanied by the balloon inflating, but usually is. I investigate further and find some children cannot produce enough air pressure to inflate a balloon; some balloons were defective; some people used an ineffective technique. No balloon was ever observed inflating without someone or something blowing into it.

If we're talking causation/explanation, then step 1 is establishing correlation between two event types. So we have to be able to make separate observations of the putative causes and the effect we hope to explain.

That's it really.

Fair enough.

I'm just tired of threads where people say that television, as it has been explained to us by the Establishment, is actually impossible.

I stand for the athemn and put my hand on my heart. I struggle with this. But I give my alliegence to our nation as it could be, tragically not as it is. — MysticMonist

I stand and put my hand on my heart because that's how I was raised.

I stand and put my hand on my heart, because whether this country really was founded on an idea, not a race or a religion, we used to believe it was, and it still could be.

Loyal to nothing but the dream.

Heretic!

You're confusing use and mention.

I think some of what's happened socially is just a numbers game. There was a time when a white guy competed for the best jobs with the best pay and benefits only with other white guys. Now he competes with women and non-white guys. When the economy was growing, you could pretend this was not going to be an issue. Now you've got some pretty unhappy older white guys who don't understand why their lives aren't going as planned.

Every country has social problems, but you address those politically. It's a simple fact that in the US today, you've got one party that spends a lot of time enrolling voters and trying to increase access to the vote, and one party that spends a lot of time restricting access to the vote and diluting the power of those voters they can't disenfranchise through the most extreme gerrymandering this country has ever seen. There is more than policy difference between the two major parties in the US. One of them has gradually become an anti-democratic institution.

As it happens, that party is now laser focused on those white guys from the first paragraph.

It would be more fair if each district were drawn with at least one right and one left angle. — Pierre-Normand

Priceless.

Some of them aren't even science. — Michael

I think philosophy has been helpful in sorting science from non-science, but that's mostly foundational work that's long since done. These days, I think scientists are the best judges of what is and isn't science, and that judgment like everything else they do, will be provisional. String theory looked like non-science to a lot of physicists and they said so. They can deal. They don't need us.

But there are questions about how they do what they do, why it works when it does and fails when it does, what the enterprise as a whole amounts to. That looks like philosophy to me.

My problem with a number of posts around here is that they're not philosophy of science at all; they're science. Philosophy of science deals with the nature of theory, of evidence, of confirmation, the nature of induction, of confidence and certainty. It is a branch of the theory of knowledge. Making sense of what scientists say or presenting alternative interpretations of their data should be done elsewhere on the interwebs, especially as you are more likely to find a higher level of expertise than you can assume here. If you don't understand something, go to StackExchange or Quora or Google it.

The question I posed was, if the physical representation changes, and the information does not, then how can the information be said to be physical? — Wayfarer

If the mental representation changes, and the information does not, then how can the information be said to be mental?

At least since Richard Nixon and his buddies formulated the southern strategy to appeal to racial animosities in southern states to break the south away from the Democratic Party. — T Clark

Bingo.

REDMAP gets an honorable mention. I believe we are the only democracy on Earth that allows elected officials to draw electoral maps.

It's an interesting puzzle, Sam. I have lots of stuff I'm having trouble getting into good enough shape to post, but here's something.

Your hypothesis is something like this:

(C) An individual's consciousness can leave and return to her body.

This is offered as an explanation for why someone might have a near death experience, and competes with hypotheses that treat the NDE as a type of hallucination or something.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, there are events of type (C). We want to see if NDEs are always, sometimes, or never accompanied by instances of (C). But so far as I can tell, we have no way of separating the observations.

For comparison, suppose you want to see if a flame of a certain temperature will burn some material. You can establish that the temperature is reached, and that's one observation; whether the material burns when exposed to that temperature is another observation.

But in this case, whatever evidence we have that an event of type (C) has occurred is the same as the evidence that an NDE has occurred.

So my question is something like this: is (C) an hypothesis that would explain the occurrence of NDEs, and we simply don't have independent access to type (C) events; or is (C) more of a description or interpretation of NDEs rather than a potential explanation?

I've been trying to figure out what to do if it's the first option, but I'm interested to hear your thoughts while I'm working on it.

So the argument is that we attempt to predict our future sensory inputs to minimise our need to actually process anything. And then what we fail to predict is where we retrospectively have to put the further attentional effort in. — apokrisis

That makes good sense.

But I wasn't kidding. I was thinking of the stuff about measuring the information content of a theory-- better, a prediction. If your prediction is that either the sun will rise tomorrow or it won't, you're incapable of being surprised, but that's because "either the sun rose or it didn't" has zero information content. It's just the Popper thing. You want to create the possibility of being surprised by making predictions with high information content. You want to predict things that are unlikely, not things that are dead certain.

You seem to be missing the point. The redness which you are seeing, when you see a red thing, is in your mind, the image is in your mind. So it is not the case that you are distinguishing the property from the object, but you are separating the property from the object. The redness of the object is in the image, within your mind, while the object remains out there, being sensed. — Metaphysician Undercover

Any chance there is some relation between the object out there and the image of the object in my mind?

Had an empty field of maybe half an acre by a house we lived in for a while-- this is semi-rural North Georgia. One time, instead of bush-hogging the whole thing, I cut a maze for the kids so they could go through and pick blackberries.

You could see the maze on Google Earth.

I only have to find that my states of belief are reliable in minimising the surprises I encounter in the world. — apokrisis

This sounds reasonable, but isn't the surest way to minimize surprise to reduce the information content of your beliefs?

In the old days, when people forwarded jokes to their friends in email, a friend of mine received a joke that he himself had typed and sent to a friend like a year before. Networks are cool.

My version of this:
Particle physicist is pulled over, cop comes up and says, "Sir, do you realize you were going 65 mph and the speed limit here is 45?"
Physicist says, "Oh thanks a lot. Now I'm lost!"

That fact that it can be encoded in multiple ways,without the meaning being changed, shows that the meaning can be distinguished from the representation. — Wayfarer

So here's the thing.

We have the problem of universals. Two things have the same property, being red, say. Gracious, how is this possible? Is there some thing, redness, besides the two red things? Mysteries!

We're not satisfied with the idea that there's this thing redness besides red things. So instead we just say, it's not that redness is separable from red things, not physically, but we can separate it from red things in our minds. We're not sure what this mental separating consists of. Introspection suggests that when you imagine red, you imagine a red thing, however vague, so that's no help.

The very word "separating" starts to look wrong, so we might say "distinguishing" instead. We merely distinguish the property from the objects that possess it. And what is distinguishing?

Now here are some objects with the property of carrying the same information. We distinguish the information from the objects (meaning bearer of a property), just like we always do.

And yet, here, right in front of us, would seem to be exactly what we need to understand what distinguishing amounts to, to finally understand what the deal is with properties and universals. Here's an idea--information! -- that might actually help.

So it seems to me foolish not to look very closely indeed at how information works and instead give it the same tired old hand-waving treatment as we've given universals.

If it doesn't work out, we can always go back to hand-waving.

In the context of the thread, the original post was about the fact that 'information' and 'representation' can be separated, — Wayfarer

Actually, no. Your data is that the same information can be encoded multiple ways; more precisely, that it is possible to translate from one system of encoding to another while preserving information; you have not shown that information ever occurs, or can occur, without in fact being encoded in some physical system.

a pile of pebbles does not convey any information, whereas something spelled out in pebbles might. — Wayfarer

You're just restricting the word "information" to mean "something a person thought of", making it a synonym for "semantic content". On your usage, the senses have nothing to do with information and that's patently absurd.

I'm not ignoring it. I'm saying that 'the arrangement' is of a different order to the physical. Semantics is not reducible to physics. — Wayfarer

Whether the dog is biting the man or the man is biting the dog is not a question of semantics.

Left to its own devices, a pile of pebbles won't convey information; it has to be arranged in order to convey information. — Wayfarer

Look again: it is arranged. Or are you suggesting there can be a pile of pebbles that is not arranged in any particular way? And when you look, you capture some of light the pile of pebbles radiates, with no intention whatsoever, and that light also has a particular arrangement.

my argument is that what is being conveyed is not describable as 'physical', even if all of the individual components that comprise the messages are physical. — Wayfarer

That's because you choose to ignore that the arrangement of these physical components is also physical.

Well, I am saying 'not physical', so that's close! — Wayfarer

How close?

There's a physical difference between a dog biting a man and a man biting a dog, although these two possible systems have the same total mass.

Arrangement counts for something.

I guess you could let an admin log in using your account, so they could see the message, and then change your password after. Not a great solution, but if it's an extreme situation, it might be worth it.

Blindfold chess is a thing. It takes a ton of energy.

Information appears to be massless, is perhaps what you wanted to say, and that is interesting.

The only thing that 'consumes free energy' is the manufacturing of whatever physical copy you make. — Wayfarer

In my case, since you asked, the main inputs to keep me running are caffeine, nicotine, and peanut butter. I think maintenance of my memories is paid for by the peanut butter.

Samuel's point was simply that the actual information - it might be a story, for example, or a formula - can be transmitted, but you still retain it. — Wayfarer

Yes, you keep your copy, if you're getting enough peanut butter. I think I mentioned that you keep your copy. Or are you suggesting that, peanut butter aside, I can just have the actual information instead, the real thing, and not bother with having a copy?

What's the difference between a hard drive full of information, and a hard drive with nothing on it? They both weigh the same, they're physically identical - the only difference is that the 'full' drive 'contains' information, — Wayfarer

Seriously? "Physically identical"?

A hard drive with the collected works of Peirce on it-- let's say it's a big hard drive-- is physically identical to a hard drive fresh from the factory?

Supposing there were a physical difference, do you think electricity might be required to produce that difference?