Is it me or is this site in its death throes?

Uhm... spoken word, namely stories and songs? You are familiar with how history was passed on before it was written, right?

 

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That's fantastic piece of history if written by that monk, he wrote what he saw and applied his belief and understanding too , it's open to us now to use the fact and interpret that he saw comet but his conclusion was wrong. So what?

 

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I was just emphasizing the need for transmission of knowledge.

 

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Kittamaru,

I am not denying that people can know and believe falsehood as truth. But that does not belittle the underlying observation.

Take James R post, the monk witnesses a comet, but at that time comet concept was not known, so he treats the same as star and puts down the observation with salt and pepper of his belief and understanding. It's up to you and me now to ignore his conclusion and give it an interpretation based on enhanced understanding of this time. That's it, this does not change the historical importance of s monk witnessing a comet and recording it albeit with incorrect conclusion.

I am still firm in my stand that by attacking MR, you violated site rule, that was in bad taste.

 

*shrugs* And you are welcome to your opinions. If you wish to claim that my showing how MR was being disingenuous and dishonest by applying different standards to his Paranormal beliefs, then claiming those same said standards are "insufficient" for Religious belief... well, I would suggest then that an internet forum might not be the best place for the one who feels attacked, as it was a simple statement of fact.

James, of course, is the final word in this - if you feel I was in the wrong, feel free to take it up with him via private message.

I'm not sure what you felt needed emphasized - it should be self evident that there is a need for some medium to transfer knowledge? I am also not sure how:

"emphasizes the need for transmission of knowledge". It reads more as though you are challenging sideshowbob's assertion that:

*shrug* Just saying.

 

You keep shrugging but make sure that your shoulder bones do not get dislocated.

You must understand the amount of loss of information in case of poor transmission of perception from a person to another person and then another person, till it gets documented. It is not that all the perceptions are meticulously passed on from x to y. Got it or you want to shrug again?

 

So, once again - what was your issue with Sideshowbob's statement that "History is a combination of individual perceptions and objective documentation." What part of that statement did you disagree with that you felt the need to make a seemingly contentious statement? Where, in his statement, did Sideshowbob ever give you the impression he did not feel that the transmission of information was unimportant, especially given he specifically stated that history was a combination of the two?

You are claiming that we are "not understanding the amount of loss of information" due to poor transmission of perception until it is documented - where, pray tell, was this either disputed or, for that matter, even brought up? It seems to me you are simply trying to stir the shit pot, as it were... trying to cause conflict where none needs to be.

Since you seem so fond of pointing out perceived slights of the forums rules, I'm sure I don't need to point out that your recent posts have potentially breached several of them? Specifically:

To further elaborate:

Perhaps one who lives in a glass house should not cast stones?

 

I'm defining 'knowledge' as 'justified true belief' for the sake of argument. So by saying "they knew what they were experiencing", it seems to me that you are suggesting that the ancient authors' statements were always true and were always satisfactorily justified. I don't think that was the case. It certainly isn't true when people express their beliefs and opinions today. In other words, when people say that they know something, that doesn't automatically mean that they do. Typically (always?) they are just expressing their beliefs.

I'm more inclined to agree with you when reports are phenomenological, when they describe experiences. 'I saw three faint lights below'. It still isn't necessarily true, since the witness might be lying, might have been hallucinating, might have miscounted or something. But just as a description of an experience, it seems reasonably strong. Compare that to 'The king's party was camped in the valley below'. That obviously includes the assumption that the three faint lights (if they existed) were indeed the king's party. That obviously needs justification and might more easily be wrong.

 

OK, you keep silencing people with your adhoms..and if countered you keep justifying with your apparent superior hierarchy position here. **Shrug.

 

Even in that deliberately biased example we can make out the phenomenological attributes of the object witnessed and separate them from his interpretation of what it might be. This is a valuable historical anecdote in that regard and evidence of the passage of a comet at that time in history. In other examples we can read accounts of battles, accounts of plagues, accounts of all sorts of mundane events from many who lived thru them. These also provide good evidence of those historical events that we can base our modern day histories on. It's simply disengenuous to say anecdotal accounts of the past are unreliable because they might be flawed. Accurate accounts will corroborate themselves as we compare them to each other.

 

What a cop-out non-response - you are unable to refute what I said (which makes sense, as it is nothing but the truth), and are simply trying to weasel out of the confrontation that you know you are in the wrong on.

I accept your concession.

For the record - my "apparent superior hierarchy position" has exactly zero bearing on what I said - I quoted the rules of SciForums (you know, the very same ones you agreed to when you signed up, and the very same ones you, moments ago, made reference to? Surely you remember...).

I would say this is a fair assessment of belief and "knowing" something. You can "know" what you saw, in so much as you have recollection of what your senses told you - that does not necessarily mean you have any knowledge or awareness of what it was you actually bore witness to (case in point, various paranormal sightings. As an example - the statement of "I saw several lights travelling in a fast-moving zig-zag pattern" is more factually accurate than "I saw a martian craft performing evasive maneuvers" Likewise, saying "I saw Jesus walk into the house, and then he walked out with Lazareth, who we had thought was dead." would be more factually correct than "The Son of God raised Lazareth from the dead!").

 

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So you are admitting you understand that what one "knows" they are witnessing can easily be mistaken or incorrect, due to insufficient knowledge... yet you wish to argue that one cannot "know" something that is false...

So you admit that one can "know" something that is incorrect.

 

Perhaps you can explain why you are arguing for the accuracy of anecdotal accounts with the Bible while at the same time dismissing them for real historical events. I mean nobody was there when the creation of the world happened, yet you accept that account as accurate why? Because Moses wrote it? How did he know what happened? How did he know about Noah's flood? Or Sodom and Gomorrah? Your religion teaches you that these scriptures were magically generated by God thru the hands of prophets who wrote them, making them infallible accounts. Can you explain how this process occurs and whether it is scientific or not?

 

Cop out? And me? You must be feeling anaemic after loosing 40 pounds.

1. Your reference to MR ghost beliefs was unwarranted in this thread, in simple words it was nothing, no argument but adhominem attack on his person.

2. You do not understand the meaning of perception and how the transfer of 'perception' from a person to another person has the substantial risk of misinformation getting transmitted.

3. You have almost succeeded in cornering me by referring to my glass house. Bad very bad.

And BTW I have no intent of taking this up with James R through PM or otherwise. Now let's keep off,

 

No..you were quite wrong about that. Nobody can know something that is incorrect. They can only believe it.

 

The way I see it, I think that MR is trying to defend eye-witness testimony. The 'I know it because I saw it with my own eyes' kind of claims. MR thinks those kind of reports are evidence (as do I) and MR seems to think that they are very good and very direct evidence. This argument has a history and extends over multiple threads.

Kittamaru and Bells have tried to argue that eye-witness testimony is bullshit by its nature. Hence the loud but demonstrably false claims that there is no evidence for ufos, ghosts or (in a different context) religious miracles. (There's a vast body of evidence, probably more evidence than for most historical events.)

My interest in this isn't to argue that ufos, ghosts and religious miracles are all real (I'm skeptical about all of them to various degrees) but to combat what I take is bad philosophy. I don't think that personal experience can be dismissed that easily (since that's ultimately how all of us know everything we know).

See this page and the pages following:

http://www.sciforums.com/threads/magical-realists-magical-reality.149729/page-13

MR seems to me to be arguing that history is based on the testimony of eye-witnesses, that our historical sources are often anecdotal reports. I'm inclined to agree somewhat. We need to really look closely at our historical sources to judge their connection to the things they report. Then I went on to argue (in the thread in the link) that science is based on scientists' eye-witness experience of what happens with their experiments on their lab benches. Physical evidence was inevitably brought up, but physical evidence still has to be perceived by human beings who understand and interpret it.

I think that MR's point there was that Kittamaru was sliding the goal-posts, employing some hugely stringent (but as yet unjustified) epistemological standard when it comes to MR's eye-witness reports of things like ghosts and ufos that are unwelcome to Kittamaru, but then reverting to a far looser credulity when it comes to his own Christian beliefs. MR was just pointing out that what works for risen-saviors and holy-ghosts works equally well for ufos and garden-variety ghosts.

 

Word of mouth.

 

That's a weird statement. Classical example of knowing something is incorrect is Newton's laws instead of GR.

 

I have no problem accepting eyewitness testimony, and in cases where the phenomenon is something we have evolved to understand (i.e. seeing someone steal a car) then it's likely that the person is able to interpret what he saw correctly. He may still have an incentive to lie or distort, of course, but he is equipped to at least understand what he is seeing.

However, that does not extend to interpreting events that we are not equipped to understand. If we were bats or falcons, we might have a chance at interpreting airborne objects correctly. But we don't - all our evolution, and (for most people) all our experience revolves around understanding things close to us moving slowly. That's why, for example, most people are astounded at "how slowly" a 747 lands. It, of course, doesn't land slowly - in fact it lands considerably faster than smaller airliners - but since our visual equipment judges speeds based in part on relative sizes, we misinterpret what we see. Remove the ground reference and it is even less likely that we will make sense of what we are seeing.

This is true even when people are observing well-known airborne objects. After airliner crashes, NTSB investigators will often ask eyewitnesses what they saw. At this point they have an accurate understanding of the aircraft's altitude (from mode-C returns as well as black box data) so they have a baseline to compare to. And most people are wildly wrong - sometimes by a factor of ten - when they describe what altitude the aircraft was at.

So take a case where altitude, speed and acceleration are unknown, and the likelihood of any eyewitness accurately describing an airborne event is close to zero. Not their fault - they are simply not equipped to understand what they are seeing.

I've never seen anyone claim there is no evidence. I have seen people claim there is no GOOD evidence. There is evidence for everything, including that the Earth is flat; there is just no _good_ evidence.

 

Sorry if I'm taking you out of context here...

A ufo is a ufo. The fun is in the claim for what that ufo is/was?