@Madness:
a) Perception must be a meaningful representation of properties of reality as it is, otherwise science breaks.
b) Decisions between true and false propositions must be free (and refer to reality as is) and not determined by circumstance, otherwise science breaks.
How does this statement account for much scientific research using advancing technological prosthetics to test hypothesis, which we cannot with our (possibly)fiveish biological sensory perceptions?
Ultimately it is down to our biological senses. The ATLAS detector takes particle tracks in proton-proton collisions and writes huge amounts of data on tape, over which an analysis is run. But in the end, scientists have to read the result plot from a computer screen with their bare eyes. They have to believe that what appears in their mind correlates with the state of the detector. The whole calibration process of such machines proceeds from the known to the unknown - one first demonstrates that the detector responds to something which one knows as expected, then goes into the unknown. If you follow the chain, you end up by comparing detector readouts with visible particle tracks in a mist chamber.
We can extend and augment the biological senses, but all that requires that we can trust them somewhere. If the perception of the eye could not be assumed to refer to properties of anything real, no detector could ever be calibrated, nor could its data be read and understood.
b) Decisions between true and false propositions must be free (and refer to reality as is) and not determined by circumstance, otherwise science breaks.
b) Could you offer some exposition? Like instances, which you found in my words (apologies for lack of clarity), I find this contextual and lacking coherency based on possible connotations...
As this is a conceptual point, it's only possible to come up with gedankenexperiments, so it's difficult. But what about this one:
Consider a people D with a very simple deterministic mind which is based on a set of rules. If a member of D classifies the scene as being outside, and if he detects a small, white moving object with fluttering motion in the scene, and if he has ever been told before about how to observe butterflies, he will be convinced that he is observing a butterfly. Now, given this set of rules, he will be convinced to observe a butterfly even if the object he's observing is really a small sheet of paper drifting in the wind, and he will hold to this conviction even if he can clearly see that the object has a rectangular shape rather than a body and wings --- because his mind is determined by circumstances. He has no choice to reconsider his classification, nor would he see any reason to. Many others of his people would readily agree with him, there'd be some who would not, but he would be convinced that they've never been told before how to observe butterflies, and once they would be educated, then they would agree with him.
It is terribly obvious what is going on when observing the problem from outside, having a human mind which is not tied to such simple deterministic rules. But even talking to any members of D, we could not convince them that their conviction to have truly seen a butterfly has really not so much to do with here being a butterfly --- they'd probably argue that we miss the obvious.Honestly, I think Bakker's arguments, while seeming ultimately pessimistic, take acceptance as a matter of degree. Even if his methodology weren't assumed, Neil-it would still be the Jester, the ultimate Shaman of your example, because of the efficacy with which he might induce any experience, the sum of all, not the some of many.
I honestly can't even buy into Neil's bare reasoning. Suppose you can show with a suitable machine that you can artificially induce any perception or experience. What this proves is that perceptions and experiences can be deceiving insofar as their cause is determined - under certain circumstances you see an apple where there is no external reality corresponding to the perception, under certain circumstances you can feel causation where there is none, under certain circumstances you feel pleasure where there is damage to your body.
This doesn't prove that there are no real apples, no real causation or no real damage to your body. The ability of a conjurer to pull a rabbit out of a hat doesn't tell me anything about where real rabbits come from.
What Neil reasons is that because a system may deceive, it does deceive, so he goes de-actiavting it. But putting out my eyes because they may be deceiving isn't really such a good idea, because I end up not seeing anything. Neill sort of assumes he can get the illusion machinery of the brain out of the way and then sees things closer to how they really are - but I don't think that works, illusionary perceptions use the same brain structures as real perceptions, getting rid of illusions isn't so easy.
Are you assuming everything in relation to consciousness-as-experienced as fact?
I tend to be very careful with the word 'fact'. For me, it's a bootstrap process. Things have to be either evident, or justified by something evident, which leads to chains of things depending on other things to be true.
The existence of a conscious observer seeing a scene is evident. The existence of an internal stream of thought, a higher consciousness, is evident. Perceptions of an external world are evident.
These things lead to experiences. I have to assume that the perceptions and experiences are meaningful in relation to the external world, then I can start to built observation and reasoning techniques to infer properties of the external world from my experiences (if I were in the Matrix, I could not do that, I would be much mistaken).
These start out simple - correlating visual and tactile information with my mental picture of the scene - usually works (there it starts going wrong, there are perception illusions where it doesn't - so already at that level I have to be aware that my knowledge of the external world as reflected in the senses is incomplete and flawed). Making predictions based on recurring events (sun will rise tomorrow) - usually works.
Then it gets more complex (with the possibility of more flaws) - math and an axiom system (where again the axioms are taken to be true because they are obvious, not because they can be justified by other means). Consistency conditions that several perspectives must lead to the same result (I'm still not sure if they're real - the higher consciousness has consistency as a necessary condition to exist, but physics does not - so consistency may not be that important in reality as is but in reality as perceived). Science.
All relies on what has come before, and I always trust the lower building blocks more than the higher, because the higher have so much more room for error. Statistical analysis - do you know what probability actually is? Can you explain it? I know perhaps a handful of scientists who
really know what it is, although many more can apply the techniques (and even more can't). Detectors - they do go wrong, and in fact experimentalists trust their eyes over the machine and look at actual event displays to see if the detector does what it's supposed to do rather than trust the machine-internal checks. I trust my ability to experience pain much, much more than a brain scan to tell whether I am in pain or not.
You can sometimes get a dissonance - higher-level reasoning contradicting lower level. So then I might dismiss an experience as wrong because of science telling me so - but then the only remaining guiding principle is consistency, I would only want to do that to make my picture of the world more consistent, not less so.
I don't go so much for facts as I go for likelihood - I try to investigate a problem from as many angles as I can, and then see if there is a coherent picture suggesting itself or not.
@Callan S.
I think you've been misslead to think science involves reasoning. Atleast reasoning in the sense of coming to a conclusion, rather than a conclusion coming to it. Do you think scientists reason a conclusion, then run thousands of experiments just for fun, even though they've already come to a conclusion?
May I gently remind you that I am an academy researcher at a university, and that it's therefore unlikely that I have been misled to think anything wrong referring to how science works?
How do you think experiments are planned? Do you really think people spend a few billions to build an accelerator and detectors just to see what happens? Experiments are done to test hypotheses, which in turn are based on conclusions drawn from past experiments. Of course reasoning features at every stage.
Also 'proof' and 'incompleteness theorem' in the one sentence seems a little jarring.
Evidently you have not read this up. Your loss - math can actually prove that it is incomplete and that there are true statements not provable by math.
In general: Admittedly I find the line of discussion if Neuropath is fiction bizarre. I may be dumb enough to miss out some experimental facts of neuroscience or psychology, and I am willing to learn, should this prove necessary, but I am not dumb enough to miss the fact that I am discussing a book, There's a whole chain of ideas related to 'willing suspension of disbelief' in discussing fiction - but I feel this gets tedious for me and I won't elaborate.
I am frankly not sure that I want to continue the whole discussion. I've tried to explain my points, I haven't seen anything which I would really recognize as a counter-argument (which may be my bias, or may not) and so I feel I am not really learning anything I haven't known before (which again may be my fault or not). I am not a Bakker fan and have moved to the next book a while ago, and I increasingly start to wonder if I shouldn't be doing something else with my time.
Personally I think Neil (aka Bakker) pulls a conjuring trick, and part of the trick is that the outcome is unpleasant, so if you reject the conclusion, there's always the 'But you only reject it because it is unpleasant.' - which distracts from the fact that the proposition should be evaluated for true/false, not for pleasant/unpleasant, and that there's no correlation. But I think I am done trying to illustrate that trick - if you don't see it by now, then you're either right, or you won't or can't see it.