Quote:
Originally Posted by Acting Like Godot  You see ...
... that really depends on what you mean by "reality", "magic", "mind" and "subjective".
However, these are the very matters which you are too afraid to explore. Gasp, the swan might be black! Or you might somehow wrongly perceive it to be. |
Gosh, what a lot of posts raging about how illogical I am and how I can't let other people have their beliefs! I seem to have hit a nerve.
Look, I'm quite happy for other people to have different beliefs from me, ok? As a matter of fact, I joined in this thread and put my opinion forward, and it seems to have been at odds with yours and now look, you're going on and on at me (or more often, about me) like I'm some kind of fascist. You don't own this frikkin thread, Acting. Other people are allowed to disagree with you, and yes, you can get as upset as you like about it.
What is interesting is the number of issues that get raised and you just drop, however. Somewhere back in this thread I'm supposed to have been intellectually dishonest, but no explanation has been forthcoming. Next, I was supposed to be trying to make children into alcoholics. I explained your erroneous thinking, but you just drop that. By contrast, I was corrected on your having posted something about near death experiences without reason in this thread, and I acknowledged the error. Now, apparently, I am illogical, because I post the opinion that a particular take on the LoA, a magical supernatural one, is almost certainly wrong.
It is not, in fact, a silly suggestion, and the idea of searching for black swans is an interesting metaphor. I am one of those who happen to believe, after a certain amount of careful thought, experimentation and reading, that all the research into all forms of psi phenomena - magick and fortune telling and psychokinesis, etc. - has not brought to light the reality of these things. In addition, careful study of the facts of the research has demonstrated likely reasons why sometimes such studies throw up occasionally persuasive results in the short term, and why metastudies can suggest that something real is happening. In addition to that, psychological study has shown and elucidated some of the very powerful ways in which people think they have performed magic or experienced a psi phenomenon, when objectively they have just fooled themselves. There are indeed a number of scientists who have given their careers to investigating psi claims - deliberately helping people look for black swans - and finally have decided enough is enough.
I find your metaphor interesting because I don't in fact know whether there are any black swans. Therefore, if it was of great importance to me, your point would stand: not having found any so far among many many white swans, it would be illogical of me to just not bother looking. However, if I had searched pretty damn systematically for all the swans the world over, and had not yet found any black ones, then I suggest that it would be reasonable of me to conclude - always temporarily, as is the correct way in science - that there are no black swans, and desist from wasting my life searching.
Now, if some primitive or other kept insisting that black swans do exist, you just have to get in the right frame of mind to see them, I would try to educate him. His black swans may be subjectively real to him, but are a delusion, I feel. If he continues to believe in black swans, that is up to him, and I am not interested in forcing my opinion down his throat, though he may feel that I am trying to do so.
Hence my prediction stands, not on the illogicality that I can't know the result of an experiment still ongoing, but on the reasonable projection from past scientific study. Of course, I may be wrong: consciousnesses may be able to float out of their dead bodies.
Anyway, peace and love, man.