Space Cadet Will Hutton is sadly misinformed.

[JavaScriptDonkey]

a standard exercise is to walk slowly towards two people, one giving out friendly thoughts and the other vicious ones -- your task is to walk on the friendly side. Do that every day for two weeks and you will start to get better at it, but no conscious thought is involved.

Maybe not conscious thought, but you'll be reading their body language (or was that what you meant?). If you're claiming some sort of extrasensory ability then can you correctly interpret their thoughts if they're each behind an opaque screen? If so, then Randi's $1m awaits you.

It's subconscious perception. The various jitsu disciplines are full of it.

[AndySir]

UE - That's a statement of faith, unless you can demonstrate to me that you have some knowledge of a plane outside the universe where the numbers live (and how knowledge from this plane has been communicated to us). I don't see any difference between this and 'God made the numbers and told them to me'.

As for the other contributors Prokopton appears not to have read the debate about mathematics, but jumped in with his own opinion anyway. Can't tell you how much I love it when people do that. Ludwig believes that he knows what all Frenchmen are like because he's met some. Apparently this system of knowledge has proven correct on several occasions.

I think my challenge still stands, unless any students of von Mises (and I'm sure we have a few) wish to launch a spirited defense of methodological individualism.

[Prokopton]

Please no Randi conversations! I was talking about intuition not ESP. Intuition -- something no scientist could be without IMO. I could talk about ESP but this isn't the place!

@Andysir

Prokopton appears not to have read the debate about mathematics, but jumped in with his own opinion anyway. Can't tell you how much I love it when people do that.

Glad to have given you the thrill... I guess I'll plead guilty there.

As for the 'challenge' though, I wouldn't be starting from here as your man said.

As you posed it:

nor did I believe that anyone bar the faith crowd and some lunatic fringe used any other system of acquiring knowledge than the scientific method [...] So far I think empiricism is the only school of thought which has allowed us to advance our knowledge.

... it equates 'scientific method' with empiricism, which is a much wider concept. Even mystics claim to be empiricists in a sense, gathering their knowledge from experience. Scientific method in essence is a set of protocols for testing observation and inference, and certainly increases knowledge esp. of the physical world. It's actually not as efficient by any means for psychological purposes, although still very useful. It also doesn't work without imagination and intuition.

On economics agreed, and I wish they would learn to be scientists... I wouldn't be without dialectic when it comes to the study of ethics, however.

[UndercoverElephant]

UE - That's a statement of faith, unless you can demonstrate to me that you have some knowledge of a plane outside the universe where the numbers live (and how knowledge from this plane has been communicated to us). I don't see any difference between this and 'God made the numbers and told them to me'.

I'm not sure I'd class it as faith, but you're right that I can't prove anything about noumenal entities of this sort. "God made the numbers and told them to me" is different in at least three ways - first it involves a God, second it involves the numbers having been created instead of self-existing and third it involves an epistemological claim about it being possible to "mystically" know things about noumena. They are all metaphysical claims, but they aren't the same.

I believe this because it is the most parsimonious, elegant or aesthetically-appealling metaphysical theory about numbers, at least with respect to everything else I believe.

[Ludwig]

It's actually not as efficient by any means for psychological purposes, although still very useful. It also doesn't work without imagination and intuition.

"One cannot underestimate the role of intuition and imagination in the sciences." - Heinz Pagels, physicist.

Intuition and imagination are what mark out creative scientists from mere technicians. The technicians typically rank themselves among the true scientists, precisely because they lack the imagination to see that there is anything lacking in their own approach.

[Ludwig]

Ludwig believes that he knows what all Frenchmen are like because he's met some. Apparently this system of knowledge has proven correct on several occasions.

You clearly haven't the faintest idea what I was talking about.

I've wasted far too much time in the past discussing this subject with people who think they're smarter and better read than they really are.

[UndercoverElephant]

Please no Randi conversations!

Are you familar with Randi's forum (JREF)?

I'm an old-timer there....and infamous.

[caspian]

Please no Randi conversations!

That was a throwaway remark by me. I should've known that any mention of Randi would be like a red rag to a bull. I invoked his name merely to illustrate my point about martial arts being a branch of the physical world, rather than the paranormal. I'm a fan of Randi, but I understand why he irritates a lot of people.

[Ludwig]

Please no Randi conversations!

Are you familar with Randi's forum (JREF)?

I'm an old-timer there....and infamous.

I admire your stamina, but I can't really see why you bother :\ In my experience, some people are temperamentally unable to understand arguments that make any appeal to the imagination, or that upset their rigid world-view. It doesn't matter how clearly you try to explain, they either don't understand your concepts, or they're subconsciously so horrified that their safe and rigid world-view might be deficient, that they won't take in what you say. It really is like banging your head against a brick wall - a futile and singularly unrewarding use of mental energy.

[Prokopton]

As far as I'm concerned Randi and his prize are totally non-scientific and the man himself is a dishonorable liar; he's been caught a million times. I would never go near JREF forums as such conversations don't interest me. I've had them in the past in order to hear what people thought the issues were... no plans to revisit.

I'm might be happy to discuss 'the paranormal' (daft label) at some point, in the martial arts (to which the question is sometimes entirely relevant IME) or elsewhere, although I'm obviously aware there is a difference between discussing and proving, and I don't want to have 'but you can't prove it' conversations any more than Ludwig does.

But please, intuition was where I was going, not the paranormal this time around.

[JavaScriptDonkey]

Please no Randi conversations!

Are you familar with Randi's forum (JREF)?

I'm an old-timer there....and infamous.

I admire your stamina, but I can't really see why you bother :\ In my experience, some people are temperamentally unable to understand arguments that make any appeal to the imagination, or that upset their rigid world-view. It doesn't matter how clearly you try to explain, they either don't understand your concepts, or they're subconsciously so horrified that their safe and rigid world-view might be deficient, that they won't take in what you say. It really is like banging your head against a brick wall - a futile and singularly unrewarding use of mental energy.

So in your world view anyone who disagrees with you is mentally defective?

[RogueMale]

Randi is a con artist. His rules state that if any test he sets up for psychic or paranormal phenomena yields positive resutls - and there is a long list of ones that have done - he can argue that his own experiment was flawed, and so deny the participant the $1m.

He has done this on numerous occasions - for example, one participant correctly guesed the contents of a sealed box, and Randi argued that, in spite of all the checks that he had put in place to prevent cheating, the participant must nevertheless have cheated.

You are not going to get away with that. Matt Blaze, the guy in question, figured out what was in the box using his cryptography skills. He admits to this. Here's the full story: http://www.crypto.com/blog/psychic_cryptanalysis/.

[UndercoverElephant]

Are you familar with Randi's forum (JREF)?

I'm an old-timer there....and infamous.

I admire your stamina, but I can't really see why you bother :\ In my experience, some people are temperamentally unable to understand arguments that make any appeal to the imagination, or that upset their rigid world-view. It doesn't matter how clearly you try to explain, they either don't understand your concepts, or they're subconsciously so horrified that their safe and rigid world-view might be deficient, that they won't take in what you say. It really is like banging your head against a brick wall - a futile and singularly unrewarding use of mental energy.

So in your world view anyone who disagrees with you is mentally defective?

Randi and his ilk (Dawkins, Dennett, Shermer) aren't exactly mentally defective, but they are unintentionally misleading people because of an abject failure to understand how their scientistic belief system is not the only valid one. That belief system, they think, is based only on science. They are wrong. It is based on a strong set of metaphysical and epistemic assumption which are either completely unacknowledged or wrongly believed to be based on science or rational thought. In short, their grasp of philosophy is so poor that they don't have any idea just how poor it is. They tend to think of philosophy as pointless pontificating, on the grounds that it has been around for thousands of years and doesn't appear to have "proved" anything. So they end up doing bad philosophy and calling it science and rationalism.

In the specific case of Randi, he is misleading people into believing that the fact that nobody can pass his tests justifies us in believing that (all) "paranormal" phenomena are non-existent. We don't need his prize to justify skepticism with respect to the paranormal - if you've never experienced anything paranormal then your skepticism is automatically justified. So the idea is that this sort of proves to everybody else that such things are impossible, so that anybody who believes in paranormal phenomena can be seen to be an idiot. But there is no reason to come to that conclusion. If you look at what is actually claimed by many parapsychologists and believers in paranormal phenomena then you will find that most of them will tell you that these phenomena are "shy" or belief-system dependent. In other words they have a completely different metaphysical model and believe that reality doesn't always behave in the same way for all people all of the time, but that it responds to what people believe about it (in ways that do not require the laws of physics to be broken, only that extremely improbable sequences of events can occur for reasons unknowable to science.) As a result, these phenomena will never manifest overtly in the presence of a skeptic. The Randi-ite will cry foul at this point and start wailing about Occam's razor or trying to psychoanalyse the believer's motives for wanting to believe in this stuff, but this doesn't help them.

Science has not demonstrated the non-existence of paranormal phenomena because there is no reason to believe that science would be able to detect them if they do exist.

I am an ex-Dawkinsian who has spent a great deal of time trying to help those people to understand why I rejected their way of thinking about reality and knowledge. Some will listen. Most get angry.

[RogueMale]

The trouble with that is that every single generation has had its share of people who thought that civilisation was coming to an end.

Here is the relevant section taken from the late David Fleming's book, Lean Logic, which will be published on the 7th of July:

Wolf, The. The fallacy that, since previous warnings of a problem have been wrong, or premature, or misunderstood, they must be wrong now.

While I agree with David Fleming on the point he made here, someone else might point out that David Fleming himself was one of the ones crying wolf.

It's worth asking whether there were people in past generations predicting the end of civilization (without any accompanying end of world) brought about by the actions of people. I can't think of any. It's usually been the end of the world brought about by God. And I know of three comments that people trot out to prove I'm wrong about some of the things I say:

(1) That someone in Ancient Greece said that the youth of today are worse behaved than ever. (Debunked here:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=408989).

(2) That London would be deep in horse manure within a few decades. (Debunked here: http://www.forteantimes.com/strangedays ... _dung.html).

(3) It wasn't because we ran out of stones that the stone age ended. (Debunked here: http://www.powerswitch.org.uk/forum/vie ... php?t=9915).

And, of course, supposing by some miracle we do manage to persuade people to reduce consumption and live more in tune with the natural world. Then, if we're not too late already, nothing will happen: civilization won't end, there will be no shortage of energy (because demand will have plummeted) and global warming won't be too much of a problem. We will have proved ourselves wrong, and people will smugly point this out.

[UndercoverElephant]

It's worth asking whether there were people in past generations predicting the end of civilization (without any accompanying end of world) brought about by the actions of people. I can't think of any.

People may well have said that about their civilisation - especially if they were citizens of the late Roman empire, for example. The question you are asking only really applies to the age of modern global civilisation going back about 200 years. I reckon you might have found people who believed that WWI was going to be the end of civilisation, and you would definately have done so during the Cuban missile crisis. But none of those examples are like what is being predicted today because they were all stoppable by humans just stopping and taking a step back. Wars eventually end. If nobody pressed the button, no nuclear weapons go off. The difference is that we are now facing an unavoidable man-made global catastrophe and it is far too late for anyone to do anything to stop it from happening. This is new.