--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Hugo" <fintlewoodle...@...> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <jstein@> wrote: > > > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "curtisdeltablues" > > <curtisdeltablues@> wrote: > > > > Do you share this belief about yourself,is that why you > > > are so quick to defend him? > > > > BREAKING NEWS: You don't have to share a person's beliefs > > to defend them from unfair attack. > > But using them as an excuse to launch and attack of your own > is OK.
Maybe you'd want to review what I said to Curtis and see whether it could actually be classified as an "attack," as opposed to disagreement. If one is defending somebody from what one considers an unfair attack, it's kind of hard to avoid expressing disagreement. > > That said, I don't know whether one's state of mind can > > affect "the world" (depending on what you mean by "world"), > > and *neither do you*. > > Given that we know what causes earthquakes and there is no > evidence that the mind can affect the physical world I > can't see what there is to gain from continually speculating > that ancient beliefs invented to explain unpleasant occurences > have any sort of place outside of selling "spiritual" nonsense. > Something Chopra does rather well out of. > > But like Chopra, I don't believe one person's meditation > > can bring about an earthquake. > > How about 5000 people? Most likely not, but I wouldn't rule it out entirely. Curtis says that if the mind *could* affect the physical world, it would have to be "some new thing," because at this point we don't know of any way it could happen. But we still haven't figured out what consciousness is or how it operates, so I think we should leave a bit of room for "some new thing." Yes, that's an "argument from ignorance," at least in terms of whether the possibility of such a phenomenon should be ruled out (as opposed to claiming it's true, which I'm not doing). But you and Curtis are countering it with an "argument from personal incredulity" as to whether such a "new thing" is possible, so I figure we're even. And then there's always "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Seems to me it makes sense to hold open, even if only ever-so-slightly, the possibility that evidence is absent because we *don't know how to test for it*. You and I were discussing awhile back Lawrence LeShan's recent book about researching telepathy, in which he makes the point that we can't prove it doesn't exist, all we can prove is that it doesn't show up reliably in controlled laboratory experiments. He says we should focus instead on studying instances of purported telepathy to see whether we can get a better idea of the characteristics of such instances, their parameters, which might help us figure out better ways to test for it. You ask above "what there is to gain from continually speculating that ancient beliefs invented to explain unpleasant occurences have any sort of place outside of selling 'spiritual' nonsense." Couple of big assumptions there, and they may well be valid--but gee, seems to me there'd be quite a few potential real-world benefits if we could nail down that "mental states" *can* affect the physical world, and how this occurs.
