Marcus, Thanks for responding. My bad. I used "validator" in a narrow technical sense, not in its more regular sense of a proof. My use comes from measurement theory in psychology. I am not an expert in measurement theory, but here goes: A measure is "valid" when it can be shown to correspond to the thing being measured. So to say that anything ... brain state, verbal report, whatever ... is a measure of atheistic thinking is to imply that there is something that there is, apart from the measures, that constitutes atheistic thinking. So, in my usage, the "validator" is the thing you are trying to get at when you are trying to "diagnose" religiosity or its absense. A high sugar content in a single urine test is a somewhat valid measure of some degree of diabetes, but several blood glucose tests is a much better validator, and a hemoglobin A1C, which gives you a measure of how high the glucose has been for the last 3 months, is even better. The best validator is, of course, kind of a conceptual notion, because it is the thing itself, the thing that all of these measures are attempting to get at. And you can NEVER get at it because you always have to be measuring it or sampling it, etc. Maybe that one-meter rod in Paris (or whatever) is a pure validator, but if so, it is one of the few.
It is one of the standard knee slappers in the history of psychology when we begin to confuse the measure with the thing it is trying to measure. So when someone proposes a measure of something complicated such as "atheism", it's fair to ask what the validator of that measure would be, what the measure is actually intended to GET AT. And one of the kind of standard observations that my kind of psychologist often makes, is that validator of something complex like atheism is actually a complex behavior pattern, not lodged in an instant, but observable in a person over many circumstances and over a sustained period of time. That's what that was all about. Have a merry Christmas ... or ... (I guess) ... not? Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ -----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Marcus G. Daniels Sent: Monday, December 22, 2014 10:08 PM To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' Subject: [FRIAM] [ SPAM ] RE: clinical diagnosis of [a]theism? Nick writes: "What is the validator here, and against what is it validated." Without the possibility of evidence to decide a question, an atheist is one example of a person that will reject it as being invalid. So one thing I'd expect to find in the brain of an atheist is a mechanism to evaluate propositions. Propositions need to be subdivided into smaller propositions until evidence supports them as being true or false. Without evidence a proposition is both true and false, which is uninformative and means to look elsewhere. What makes a person take public positions on this particular thing (no deities) might be little more than personality. An activist mentality, a desire to protect personal preferences from a group rather than the group imposing views on the individual. It's of course possible for a person to pursue self-interest with discretion and without conflict. I suppose these are the folks that sit quietly at meetings intended for brainstorming and at question/answer sessions. Daringly protecting the principle of "Don't look ignorant" at all costs. Working "behind the scenes" in a collegial way, etc. Validation is not a question of beliefs being present or absent without delusion or misrepresentation, it's a question of how active and obvious the resistance is to undecidable propositions. The activism part of it could be the absence of an inhibitory mechanism or the presence of a social behavior. The motivation for a biomarker is that if there is a practiced capability there should be a pattern of connectivity to implement it. In particular, if the topology of that connectivity had a strong hierarchical component to it, then there might be very high level locator neurons that identified weak parts of arguments. For the atheist, one could imagine op-amp like neural circuits to increase sensitivity when coupled to an "authority figure speaking" signal. For the theist, the op-amp could be wired up to memory cells. If a belief was established, the authority figure would further reinforce the memory. If it was weakly established and there was no authority figure signal, then it would tend to zero out. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
