Vorkosigan

But TWD, that makes your "private evidence" simply "public evidence" that nobody else currently has access to.

However, theistic evidence is evidence that nobody else can possibly have access to, or public evidence that nobody would regard as evidence.

Theli

Public evidence can't be only "private". BTW Private evidence is a very bad term. Since it cannot be presented and therefore is of no value.

Hobbs

That's the distinction as I understood it. There may not be any remaining public evidence of what I had for breakfast, but there could have been: I could have left crumbs, someone could have photographed me, etc. But no one other than me has, or could possibly have, evidence of my memory of what I ate for breakfast.

I have often heard theists appeal to this sort of evidence to justify belief in god: "I have a personal relationship with God," "I feel God's presence," etc. I have also often heard arguments along the lines of: "Do you love your wife? Can you prove it? No? Then why do I have to prove God exists to be justified in believing that he does?"

But if that is what they mean by "God," then I believe that their god exists. In that sense of existence, I believe Billy Graham's god exists, Jerry Falwell's god exists, Osama bin Laden's god exists, and Bishop Spong's god exists (or, at least Spong's god may exist, sort of, in some sense).

Yes, they have their warm fuzzies, their enlightening insights, their life-changing realizations, their deeply moving experiences of connectedness with something giving them a meaning and purpose in life. But that proves nothing other than that they have had those experiences. It does not prove that their interpretations or understandings of those experiences are accurate. I know what they mean when they talk of these experiences. I have them myself. I used to interpret them the way they do. I now have a much different interpretation.

Theists' real, genuine, private experiences do not mean that they are correct in believing that there is a publicly accessible, objectively existing God which is the cause of their experiences. Absent a public proof of such an objectively existing entity, and especially given the radically different and incompatible notions of what this entity supposedly is, it is much more plausible to say that all these conflicting "gods" which people believe in are socially learned interpretations of their own private experiences which, like my love for my wife, will die with the experiencer.

Transworldly Depraved

Jerry Smith:

You said:

Well, I cannot help believing that I had a bagel for breakfast last Friday. I find myself strongly inclined to believe it on the basis of the experience of remembering. It seems to me strongly to be the case and I have no reason to doubt it.

It seems that you are suggesting an unreasonably high standard on what can qualify as a warranted belief. If our beliefs about the past based upon memory require validation from a source distinct from memory, would you suggest that this is true of other grounds on which we base our beliefs? For example, would you suggest that we cannot trust our senses to form reliable beliefs about the physical world unless we can confirm those beliefs by a ground that is distinct from our senses?

Transworldly Depraved

turtonm:

You wrote:

By private evidence, I mean any event of which only one person has access. Public evidence is just any event of which more than one person has access.

Transworldly Depraved

Hobbs:

You said:

Does that mean I should think of my memory of eating a bagel last Friday as a "warm fuzzy"?

Hobbs

Of course not. You should think of it as a life-changing realization.

Jerry Smith

TWD,

You said:

This is similar to what someone (?) termed 'the argument from personal incredulity'. I suppose it would be called the argument from personal 'credulity'. Because you remember having a bagel last Friday, you are strongly inclined to believe that you did. You say you have no reason to doubt that it is so, which may be the case (however unreliable our memories often are), but rationality says that in spite of our strong inclination to believe something, we cannot rationally conclude the truth of it without objective evidence - and with good reason. If you what you need is to draw a factual conclusion, the subjective evidence of your own faulty memory is not enough.

You may never need to know with scientific certainty what you had for breakfast last Friday, but in the unlikely event that you should need to know that, you will need objective evidence.

You said further:

First, I don't think it is too high a standard to ask for objective evidence to confirm beliefs ground solely in memories of the past: Memories are very often distorted, invented, and forgotten. This is a proven fact.

Second, It is true that we can ultimately gain access to all objective evidence only through our senses. The evidence that exists objectively which is accessible to anyone is only accessible to the individual in a uniquely subjective way. This is a problem that must be resolved before rational empiricism can be exercised in the grand tradition which has yielded such dramatic results in the past two centuries... The practical solution to this problem involves both rigor and a qualified trust in the integrity of our physical senses. (If there is a philosophical solution besides the practical one, I'm sure it would be over my head).

We must first have some kind of limited but fundamental trust in the integrity of our physical senses, or we must abandon any hope of a rational understanding of the world we live in. However, we cannot have an unqualified trust that every perception must clearly betray the underlying truth (whole truth & nothing but the truth) of what we are perceiving. We must familiarize ourselves with the limitations of our sensory perceptions, undertake to illuminate means by which our perceptions can be interpreted under varying circumstances, and employ rigorous examination to identify spurious, distorted, misconstrued, and false perceptions.

Of course, it is only after we have used these means to establish the facts that our perceptions relate to us, that they can become evidence, and only then that the real process of rigorous examination the evidence begins. But that comes later - right now we are dealing only with the basis on which our perceptions of objective reality can qualify as evidence.

By these methods, we can hope to approach a rational investigation of the evidence that will reveal to us the closest approximations to the truth about the world around us that we can hope for.

[ January 10, 2002: Message edited by: Jerry Smith ]</p>

Synaesthesia

Jerry Smith,
I don’t think that we should presuppose the rationality of our own thought. Anyone can verify to whatever degree the sophistication of their knowledge permits that we are rational but creative, reliable but imperfect, and that our ideas are correctable but conservative. There are empirical reasons that an epistemic system that treats memories as “subjective”, without evidential value, is seriously flawed. We do, after all, trust our lives to memories.

Our memories are due to brain states. We know that our episodic memories are generally encoded because those events did indeed occur. Therefore the fact that you have a memory of an event, given that there is no additional reason to believe otherwise (ie. ate 24 extra strength dramamine pills.), is compelling, objective evidence that that incident occurred. This is not a guarantee that your interpretation of the incident is correct or even a guarantee that it occurred, but it is evidence. Sometimes, for some purposes, they are exceedingly good evidence since it is possible to evaluate the usefulness and accuracy of our memories.

The problem here is that the fact of our sensory perception is framed as a problem. The problem is how to go about checking for mistakes, how to build our models of perception and determining how to perceive our models as we build them. What I am suggesting is that our solution will not be merely ivory tower philosophy or practical implementation, it will take the form of testable empirical theories of the mind- An empirical account of how we make use of evidence. Such a theory would not give us certainty but it would give clarity.

Regards,
Synaesthesia

Jerry Smith

Agreed - as you say - 'generally' and 'sometimes'... Not good enough for scientific certainty, but usually good enough for a working guess...

Which makes you a proponent of scientific psychology... and more power to you! That is not my calling, but it is very good to know that others are more willing than I...