Plausibility, Evidence, and the search for Explanations

[mfbukowski]

19 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

How does a human, that only experiences consciousness, differentiate between natural and super natural stimuli? Isn’t it fair to say that “natural” stimuli are those that we can understand with “science”, those can recreate, poke and prod, etc? And that super natural are the ones that “science” can’t explain? Doesn’t that make it a category error to compare the two?

In my opinion, to think there is a category error IS THE category error!! 

They are all human experiences.  But yes on another level I understand what you mean- the difference is not a "category error" it is more about seeing categories themselves in a different way.  It is more like one is a map of Paris and the other is a walk through Paris. William James would say that one is like a description of a steak on a restaurant menu, and biting into a juicy, sizzling steak with onions.   The map and the menu involve intellectual abstraction and intentional diversion from the true experience to attempt to "capture" it,  while the walk and the bite are direct experiences, truth itself, the nitty gritty, the heart and soul of the experience and not at all descriptive.   They do not even attempt to describe what it's like to walk through Paris or eat a steak.   

The alphabetical squiggles in the word "steak" have no flavor, the walk through Paris has smells and sounds and bumps into other folks, the feeling one has in hearing a siren nearby etc.!

The experience itself is ineffable!   It is much more than a mere "catgory mistake!"

One is description and I would say that the pure experience is not able to be described

Rorty siggy explanation opportunity.  Danger!!   

Yes humans "only experience".!

Any differentiation between religious and scientific experience simply is created from the point of view of the describer!   It's the steak on the menu vs sizzling onions, the impartial map vs the smell of diesel mixed with frying potatoes. 

  All of what we KNOW about alleged "reality" has come from a human mind; think about it and you will see that! It cannot be otherwise.  All we have is our perception AND then the way we linguistically communicate - as best as we are able- the nature of the experience.

Additionally in LDS metaphysics, energy is seen as "refined matter" and "miracles" and the "supernatural" therefore is not necessary for the LDS paradigm to work.  The concept  does not really exist as a bifurcation of reality as it does in other religions- since God himself has volunteered to use only natural laws in his creation from existing matter, so too there is no need for a concept of the "supernatural"!

  Instead, what others see as "supernatural" is simply for us,  a description of an unknown natural phenomenon.   Television for example might have been seen as "supernatural" in the 14th cntury and one might have been burned as a witch simply by producing images of people speaking apparently out of a box!

So again, as I see it and many many others- virtually all present philosophers influenced by postmodernism - all we can KNOW is what humans CAN know: human experience.

We do not "see things" as bats and whales do, we do not have echolocation as a "sense".   We cannot see UV so we do not have "night vision".  We do not smell as bears can, or see as eagles can.

Individually we can only see what we can individually see and understand, if we are blind we have never experienced color.  Yet what we DO have is language which enables us to "pool" experience and therefore see beyond our personal limitations.

But language is not perfect, and I think only by studying language(s) can one fully appreciate how poorly they "correspond" to our experiences.

Maybe a discussion of two famous instances of private experience would help, I will use Joseph Smith and Galileo as examples

 As with all of us, in the case of both Galileo and Joseph Smith what they experienced is limited by what they experienced,   HOW they DESCRIBED their individual experiences was from differing points of view.  Galileo got out his telescope and looked at Saturn and noticed there were bumps around the middle.  Joseph went into the woods to pray.  Each was looking for information from a different source, Joseph was looking for God and knew from the beginning that what he learned if he learned anything would be a private experience about the PURPOSE of the universe and which church was "True".  On the other hand, Galileo was looking for information about the universe about HOW the universe works which comes from direct perception, that he could share with others.   In other words, Galileo was in an intellectual mode to seek answers about HOW the universe worked that could be shared with others and verified that way, and Joseph was looking for private answers about WHY God created the universe and which church was "true", if any.

n both cases, that moment, he was, let's say, the first person to do that.   At that moment it was a private experience, not unlike Joseph's vision- NO ONE ELSE in either case had experienced precisely either of those experiences!

But what is the difference between the two?  

Galileo could tell others about his experience,  at that moment still, a "private" experience. 

This is one historical account of the fiction/parable of what allegedly "really happened": http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/observations/saturn.html#:~:text=In 1616 Galileo announced to,in 1626%2C few noticed this.

Back to our fiction- imagined to make my point- pretend that Galileo met with his buddy Dominic and said:  "Hey Dominic !  Last night I looked through my telescope at Saturn and there were bumps on the sides!"    Dominic at that moment would have been justified to think that G. had gone bonkers, or that G. had had a vision etc.   Let's say he did not believe there were bumps on Saturn.   How could that be resolved between G and D?   Suppose that the next night, D. came to G's house and G got out his telescope and let D look at Saturn and suddenly that sole, private of experience of Galileo became SCIENCE!  

There were now "two witnesses", two "experiencers" with the "same experience"- in one sense.  Why one sense? because the DETAILS of the two experiences were totally different- only one aspect was truly shared.  Only the bumps on Saturn were the "same experience" at that point in time. 

What might have been Dominic's experience?

Dominic's complete experience (pretending that we can describe it perfectly- of course a fiction in itself) was that his friend Galileo told him about bumps on Saturn.  Perhaps part of D's experience was thinking his buddy had lost it.  Perhaps the nearly believed G, because he trust him.  Perhaps that night before he made the observation himself, he could not get the idea out of his head.   If there WERE bumps, what could be the sources?   Telescopes could be blurry.  Saturn gave off light.  Could it be that what his friend G "actually" saw was an angel, and the bumps were only blurry wings of the angel?  We cannot know Dominic's complete set of complex experiences he might have experienced so we cannot say really that there are "two same experiences".

This is actually relevant in science because whether or not what one analyst's experienced was exactly the "same" as what another analyst experienced.

But what differentiates science from religion then is that religious experience is totally subjective and private with only one observer, whereas what qualifies as science MUST be replicable.  Yet each replication is actually a private experience, which then is experessed in a natural language which instantly makes the experience report ambiguous.   The recent Covid pandemic has given many many of us a chance to understand this well- most covid tests require that two horizontal lines of black pigmentation must appear in a window on the testing device within a specified period.   One line indicates a negative result, and two lines indicate a positive result, and the line might be very light and hard to see.  How saturated with pigment the line has to be to be counted as "positive" may be a problem.   So even in science there are many chances for subjectively defining "what really happened"

 

We do not EXPERIENCE the wavelength of light, we EXPERIENCE the color we call "red".  That is one way of putting it; only ONE WAY to describe that experience.  The "quality" of the experience- called in philosophy a "quale",or plural "qualia" ie: the redness of red -cannot be measured by scientific instruments, only the wavelength hts.  Think of a blind scientist who was an expert on color perception in the brain as well as all there can be known scientifically about color.

Yet because he is blind he has NEVER EXPERIENCED "what it is like to see colors".   How can you describe to him what it is "like to see color"?  

You can't.  How about the difference between the smell of onions and flowers?  The difference between the sounds of a trumpet and a violin?  We simply don't even "have the words" to communicate these things to other.  Yet the differences are clear as a bell, even if there are no words to describe them.   What then is "reality"?

( I believe that direct experience of qualia IS what is commonly called "truth".  "The cat is on the mat" does not describe a cat OR a mat, it describes my PERCEPTION that the quale that I know as "cat" is in a relation I would describe as "being on" a section of fiber I would call a "mat")

Rorty quote: 

Quote

 Truth cannot be out there- cannot exist independently of the human mind-

So how do we differentiate between supernatural from natural?

I DON'T differentiate-and I believe that is a reasonable position for the church and is the whole point of pragmatism/postmodernism!  All humans can know derives from human experience; that is a tautology like "A=A".  Truth is relative to observation and we don't all see things the same ways, with the same puposes in mind

Our mind/brain/senses take in incoming chaos, ignore what needs to be ignored (perhaps sounds higher than we need to hear, the ability to echolocate, etc) and organize the world we know and experience.

Now consider where this leads us with our model, /paradigm of an anthropomorphic God. We see God as our "Father" and describe him as a glorified deified Human Being.  His "nature" (a fairly useless word that means so much it means virtually nothing- the nature of a dog is to be like a dog, a human like a human) and ours are similar yet of course he is infintely above us

We can grow to be like Him.

One must understand humanity to truly understand God, and to truly understand God is to understand the priorities of Humanity.   If God is human, then theology becomes Humanism. 

Both movements seek the perfection of Humankind- so what kind of paradigm is the best paradigm for humanity?

We ought to be thinking about that more than we do imo. 

Quote

 

And that super natural are the ones that “science” can’t explain? Doesn’t that make it a category error to compare the two?

 

First of all science deliberately avoids questions about teleology- walk up to a scientist and ask her what the purpose of Earth is- now THAT IS a category error!

It's not their job.

Furthermore some aspects of cognitive science do study what are called "qualia" from a scientific viewpoint- describing brain chemicals etc, but that is not to discuss the redness of red (say)

I believe the still small voice- interchangeably the spirit vs Holy Ghost vs Light of Christ IS /are a question of qualia with probably built in brain mechanics.

We needed qualia to survive and not eat the wrong colored fruits in our old days in the trees and we still need qualia to hear God. 

 

Edited September 30, 2022 by mfbukowski

[JarMan]

On 9/29/2022 at 9:00 PM, mfbukowski said:

Well it would probably take a lot more to discuss this through than either of us is willing spend

1- Define "apologist" : pro or anti LDS?

No thanks. For the record, I don't see you as an apologist. Nor am I using the term pejoratively.

On 9/29/2022 at 9:00 PM, mfbukowski said:

2- I do not talk about differences between "supernatural" and "natural" events, I think in terms of how humans experience the world which includes the possibilities of both categories in the same experience 

As mentioned earlier, it doesn't matter if God works within the laws of the universe or not. It doesn't matter how you or I experience the world. What matters is that we can't empirically measure God. Without measurement there can be no quantification and therefore no quantitative comparison to something that can be measured.

On 9/29/2022 at 9:00 PM, mfbukowski said:

3- I don't know what theory of truth you use to see a lack of quantifiable experience as "fallacious". Religion is not science.  I accept Alma 32 and a neo pragmatic, Postmodern view of truth which essentially says that truth "bears fruit" that works for a specific question, 

Well I had more to say, but we are SO far apart....

This is all fine and good, but really not relevant to my point. Your misrepresentation of my position makes me wonder if you are really trying to understand it. I get the sense you are trying to shift the conversation to find some philosophical bone to pick with me.

[mfbukowski]

24 minutes ago, JarMan said:

Without measurement there can be no quantification and therefore no quantitative comparison to something that can be measured.

Of course not

I really don't care how much God weighs.  No bones to pick unless you insist.

Edited October 1, 2022 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

On 9/28/2022 at 4:06 PM, tagriffy said:

You're going to immediately run into problems here. Translation isn't so simple that one is likely to be able to come up with a detection test that will handle translations. A word in one language very rarely, if ever, has an exact one-for-one translation into another. And just as in English a given word in other languages can have a range of different meanings. This in turn means a translator is going to have to choose from multiple words to render that given term. That means the translator is going to have to interpret the text, and of course the translator would be drawing up their own experiences. And this assumes we're talking about a fairly literal translation. Long story short: the translator is going to almost always be an author of the rendered text in some sense. I wouldn't say it is absolutely impossible for such a test to be devised, but it it is so unlikely as to make effectively impossible.

Well said mi amigo!

[Benjamin McGuire]

There is, however, some research going on in this particular area. There are several issues which make this a challenge.

First, the few attempts to identify a stylometry for a translator have largely failed to do so. For example:

Mikhailov M, Villikka M. Is there such a thing as a translator’s style? In: Rayson P, Wilson A, McEnery T, Hardie A, Khoja S, editors. Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2001 conference. Lancaster: Lancaster University (UK); 2001. p. 378–386.

Rybicki J. The great mystery of the (almost) invisible translator: Stylometry in translation In: Oakes MP, Ji M, editors. Quantitative Methods in Corpus-Based Translation Studies: A practical guide to descriptive translation research. Studies in Corpus Linguistics. John Benjamins Publishing; 2012. p. 231–248.

Although there have been more recent attempts that have begun to find enough difference to draw the distinction of a translator, like this one:

El-Fiqi H, Petraki E, Abbass HA. Network motifs for translator stylometry identification. PLoS One. 2019 Feb 8;14(2):e0211809. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0211809. PMID: 30735512; PMCID: PMC6368295.

It's a complicated issue with only limited interest (some of the related studies are interested less in the identification of the translator and more in how to filter out the 'noise' created by the translator). These methods normally require that we have both the source text and one or more translations (to allow for a comparison). The standard metric for translation is also a little different than other stylometric approaches: vocabulary richness. The reason for this metric is that there isn't a one-to-one correspondence between source and translation. Vocabulary richness generally works across the language barrier - at least in terms of computational comparisons. This creates a more than obvious problem for the Book of Mormon - we have no original language text. And this means that these kinds of approaches are not applicable to the question of the Book of Mormon as a translation.

Another area of research that has gotten more attention is the question of translator profiling - that is, what does the life experience of the translator contribute to the translation. This approach generally examines translator variation when multiple translations are present to see if there are differences based on a range of factors that include gender, language proficiency, cultural background, and so on. Again, without additional translations of the Book of Mormon by other translators, such a comparison is impossible.

I could continue but - for the purposes of this discussion there are two things to be aware of -

First, there are no methods currently that could help us differentiate a text of unknown authorship as being a translation or as being an original work.

Second, there is some literature supporting the idea that we can create a stylometric translator for multiple translators and then use these profiles to determine which translator translated a piece of text. The limitation here to the Book of Mormon prevents its use - the methodologies that have been forwarded are only useful in comparison and only useful when the real translator is in the mix of potential translators.

It might be possible to adapt this second question to the Book of Mormon - but only in a round about sort of way. We might (using the same sort of principle that Fields, Schaalje and Roper used when dealing with the closed set problem of Jockers' Nearest Shrunken Centroid methodology) test the Book of Mormon against itself. By breaking the text into sufficiently large chunks, we could create a number of translator profiles and then (at least somewhat arbitrarily) determine if these different profiles are similar enough to one another to determine if they were produced by the same translator. That is, we create a statistical envelope around a profile that would reasonably include sample profiles of the same author in different sections of the same translation and then check to see if those other profiles in fact fell within that envelope.

This could (and I emphasize the 'could' as being overly optimistic) in theory tell us whether the text as a translation fits a model of a single translator. The obvious challenge with this is the conflict that it runs into with other stylometric examinations of the Book of Mormon text which aim to show that the text has uniquely different authors (and not a single author). Any stylometric look at a translator would instead be looking for the similarity caused by the most recent author who ostensibly produced the entire text (as translator). It could be interesting. It is unlikely to find much that applies this sort of question in current stylometric research simply because the application is incredibly narrow and relatively unique.

From my own perspective, if the text is a translation, then it is a deliberately poor translation (at least as we value translation today). It clearly favors translationese as a deliberate marker of translation rather than working to making the translation process invisible to the audience.

I also wonder if the inclusion of archaic language would create contamination of author profiles. Perhaps we could test that using 19th century literature deliberately written in an archaic (i.e. King James) style.

 

[mfbukowski]

3 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

From my own perspective, if the text is a translation, then it is a deliberately poor translation (at least as we value translation today). It clearly favors translationese as a deliberate marker of translation rather than working to making the translation process invisible to the audience.

Don't know if you are a Wittgenstein fan, but virtually all his books in English have the German on one side and English on the facing page, which is a great help since the nuances of language often are actually the subject of the text. But reading both sides can be like hearing a "third voice" as one notices the choices of nuances the translator brings to the nuances in the "original".

Unfortunately the presumption that many readers will at least have a reading knowledge of both languages, which is required in academic philosophy, doesn't work for everything! 

 

 

[Benjamin McGuire]

41 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

Don't know if you are a Wittgenstein fan, but virtually all his books in English have the German on one side and English on the facing page, which is a great help since the nuances of language often are actually the subject of the text. But reading both sides can be like hearing a "third voice" as one notices the choices of nuances the translator brings to the nuances in the "original".

I cannot say that I am a Wittgenstein fan. But I am not unaware of him (and have a number of translations of his works). I only dabble in philosophy (as a formal study), and if I had to pick, I would say that I have been influenced more by Derrida (and maybe Davidson).

[mfbukowski]

59 minutes ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

I cannot say that I am a Wittgenstein fan. But I am not unaware of him (and have a number of translations of his works). I only dabble in philosophy (as a formal study), and if I had to pick, I would say that I have been influenced more by Derrida (and maybe Davidson).

"Same stuff!"

The weird thing about W is that the later stuff, after Tractatus, is all aphorisms not "about" philosophy, but like little puzzles that teach you how to think- not what to think- about the text one is examining.

It becomes a kind of "conversion process" where you are mystified by what he is trying to get across then suddenly it "clicks" as you get farther into it; the process IS "proving contraries" without directly stating conclusions.

But one you "get" it you are hooked!

 

Edited October 8, 2022 by mfbukowski