That is the very point at the heart of this.
I think sometimes there is a bias for everything to be objectively verifiable to be recognized. While I want my physicians and judges to rely on the objectively verifiable, I think it gets over played.
For example, I have been training horses for over 25 years. I learned the vast majority of what I know through trial, error and injury. The techniques I have kept are not ones I can objectively document, as it varies with every horse.
90% of the working horse trainers rely heavily on operant conditioning, pressure and breaking the horses spirit. All things that are objectively verifiable by the result…the ultimate human flaw…immediate results at any cost.
To “teach” a horse is much more subjective. IE: Xenophen, Dorrance or Hunt. It is largely reading body language, but this is only the input portion for the trainer. It’s sensing when the horse is either getting it or losing the lesson which is completely subjective. It moves away from “text book” technique into the realm of philosophy.
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I could not. The assumption is you would tell me if we were face to face. You may also have a subjective bias towards voicing your suffering. That would have no effect on the level of pain you may or may not be experiencing.
Well wouldn’t the the fact that training of type A works, represent objective verification for a claim that training type A works?
So in the context of the discussion, which has largely centred around the subjective claim to have experienced a deity. We have a claim, two in fact, the first ratty hears a voice in his head, and the second that this voice is an all powerful deity.
So firstly no one can objectively verify a deity exists of course, whereas the efficacy of certain types of training for horses can be objectively evidenced. I understand that in the absence of knowing which training works best, we might need to experiment, and this might be based initially on subjective opinion as we have nothing else, but the results then might provide objective evidence that a type of training is more or less efficacious than another, whereas all claims from personal experience of a deity don’t provide any objectively verifiable data, and arrive at wildly different conclusions.
Just so.
If I had iron self control and could mask the outward signs that I was in pain, then you’d have no clue if I was suffering from toothache, even if we were seated opposite each other across a table. That’s how hidden these subjective experiences can be. They are often entirely ‘locked away’ in another person’s mind and totally inaccessible to anyone else.
That’s the whole point of my creating those Venn diagrams and posting them in this thread. To show VISUALLY how one person’s subjective experience is inaccessible to anyone else. The only thing that can bridge the gulf between one person’s mind and another person’s mind is language.
Which I show bridging the gulf between Sheldon, Rat_Spit and me in the second Venn diagram. But in this forum language is especially limited in what it can do. Right now you can’t hear my voice saying these words. So you can’t pick up on how I place stress and emphasis on certain words in a sentence. You can’t pick up on any emotion in my voice. You can’t pick up on any regional accents that might betray where I come from. And probably much more.
Worse, we are not in the same room. So there’s no eye contact between us. You can’t read my body language or take note of certain gestures and how I perform them. Nor can you subconsciously pick up on any other clues that seeing me would give you.
None of the above is possible in this forum. All we have are words appearing on a screen.
So, all of the claims about ego death in this thread suffer from the loss of everything I described above. All rat_spit has to use to present objective evidence for his claims are strings of letters on a screen.
How can they adequately do the job of convincing us of the truth of his claims?
I certainly don’t know.
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Define “works”. Merely making a horse comply through pressure, force and breaking their spirit sets you, or some other poor bastard, up for a potential train wreck when the horse sees an escape or finally decides to push back.
You have taught nothing. You have merely imposed your will.
Again, the flaw in the human desire for quick verifiable results is one of the standard arguments made against theists. They accept a deity as the answer. The truth is much harder to obtain and hold.
I could expand on horse training past the point where all of your eyes glaze over. I have rehabbed more horses than I can recall. I have brought abused horses back from the Type A training methods they have experienced.
To be succinct, with horses, it comes down to the connection. The variable and impossible to document moment when the traumatized horse drops their fear and accepts you as a safe and congruent partner.
If I could sum this up in a quick repeatable scientific process…I’d be on a beach in Aruba right now,
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I mean for example If we claim training type A is the most effective at achieving Y, and we try training types A B and C, then we repeat the experiment, and in every instance we find it is true that training type A best achieves Y, we have objective verification of the claim. I am not claiming this can be done of course, merely pointing out that no one can objectively verify a claim they have experienced a deity, and the method is obviously unreliable as it produces conflicting claims for countless different deities.
We don’t of course have any objectively verifiable evidence deities are even possible, beyond epistemic possibility.
I don’t think that’s true. I think there are other tools / techniques to “bridge that gulf”
Which can communicate more than their isolated face value.
Equitation Science, relies heavily on a combination of operant conditioning and physiological monitoring of the horses vital signs to determine the best prescribed operant methods.
It can verify heart rate and body temperature to determine if the pressure is escalating past the point of achieving the operant goal. It is results based.
Connection is not a function of operant conditioning. I know I am not a horse…and the horse knows it, too. The horse defies a trainer for 4 reasons:
1.) Pain
2.) Misunderstanding the ask
3.) Fear
4.) Disrespect
Equitation Science ignores and dismisses 2 and 4 and uses mechanical monitoring of the horse to determine 1 and 3. It relies on the predator\prey dynamic.
It gets results. It objectifies the horse into a Harley with hooves.
Quick example. I have a 22 year old gelding I met when he was about a year old. At 6 months he blew a stifle (knee for humans) and was unable to walk. A cow vet diagnosed a fractured hip and told the owners to stall him for a year and then just turn him out of he lives. No extraction potential, no value.
He had reached a point where he had lost muscle mass on the injured leg, his hooves looked like Alladin slippers. He had lost any instinctive socialization and was terrified of everything.I spent a year working with him until the owner just gave him to me. I knew he was never going to be rideable. My emphasis was not on training, but rather teaching the horse to be a horse again.
Without writing a thesis, currently he is the #2 horse in a pasture with 15 other horses. Beau’s problem was not results, but healing from trauma. Equitation Science would be like bringing a pistol to a child’s birthday party in this instance.
And I am not defending a deity or anyone proselytizing one. I am merely pointing out that sometimes the subjective is all you have in a given instance. Failure to act in the absence of the objective would have killed that horse.
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I’ve been keeping up (more or less) with the current chatter on giving LLMs “context” to keep them from “misunderstanding” (hallucinating). And it’s a similar situation there.
When embarking on any task, humans have all sorts of context, but the problem is (1) they’re often not even aware of it, it just sort of appears as needed in between their ears and (2) it’s often unclear what parts of available context will be needed and important for any given project, until one “feels” one’s way into it.
So it’s all the rage right now to give the models this context. Naively one would think you could just write down everything you know so the models would know it, but that would be about as likely to work as if you were put on the spot to write down everything you know about training horses so that I, or anyone, could do it. Experience and judgment aside, there’s so much in your noggin about horse whispering that you probably couldn’t get it all out if you tried.
Another problem (and this is relevant to Sheldon and Ratty’s dispute about the limits of words) is that words aren’t an ideal medium to convey context or past experience even if one could comprehensively do it. Because words can be misunderstood. Or the emphasis can shift just from subtle word choices in ways that aren’t intended. How often have you said something, someone questions it, and you admit that that wasn’t how you intended it to be understood, maybe one or two of the words you chose were poor or assumed too much “context” from the other person.
What’s needed is less like words and more like what LLM wranglers call “embeddings” – already known and learned (if not, in the case of LLMs, understood) context that come from prior experience. Or to coin another word for it: expertise.
Given all this, I cannot see the value of your expertise or mine going away any time soon, even though this would be the wet dream of parsimonious businesspeople everywhere.
Nor can I see any amount of careful laying out of principles, rules, and concepts that can substitute for it. We can have an intelligent conversation about how doing some of that laying of groundwork is helpful for basic training of noobs, but we cannot possibly turn a noob into an expert if they just sit down and read a few paragraphs of words, however expertly crafted.
But not enough to convert a subjective experience into objective evidence for that experience.
For example, do my words qualify as objective evidence that I am experiencing toothache?
Y / N ?
“But not enough IMO, to convert….”
There, fixed it for ya.
Which goes back to your earlier point about the written word. It only provides around 7% of communication. It is given context by the reader. The reader must interpret context and meaning through their subjective bias.
Well then, since you take issue with my claim, please answer the question that followed on from it.
Nope. I take issue with the unsubstantiated nature of the claim.
It’s not unsubstantiated because its the working standard of this forum.
As sceptics we do not accept the subjective claims made by anyone but instead ask the claim makers to support their assertions with objective evidence.
If words alone on a computer screen qualified as objective evidence of subjective experiences then we would be obliged to accept any and all assertions made by anyone as objective evidence.
Instead we sceptics ask for corroborating evidence from OUTSIDE of this forum and not just claims made using strings of words WITHIN it. We ask the claim makers to cite their sources. We look to see if their claims made WITHIN the forum are contradicted by sources OUTSIDE of the forum. If they are, then the claim is rejected as not reaching the threshold of objective evidence.
So no, my position is more than just being an opinion. It’s the working standard here and in other forums runs by sceptics.
I daresay you’ve held to this standard yourself when you’ve engaged in debate here, CyberLN.
So, were you just holding to an opinion then, when you were doing that?
Thank you, Cynical1.
Your point is the Achilles Heel of the argument that words alone can convert a subjective experience into objective evidence for that experience.
Since the reader is injecting their own subjective bias into the words they read on a screen, how can a claim about subjective experience written here ever approach the threshold of objective evidence?
Surely what is needed is something external to what is happening just in this forum?
Something independent of both the writer and the reader that can corroborate the claim, perhaps?
“Nothing can be known, not even this” - Carneades