JL admits he's no physicist, MC gets a reductio ad absurdum when asking "for info" (and I am asked to leave fifth grade behind)

1) Bible Prophecy, TV, Changing Subject onto Common Sense - Science, 2) Continued Debate with MC and JL on Common Sense and on Science of Subatomic Particles, 3) JL admits he's no physicist, MC gets a reductio ad absurdum when asking "for info" (and I am asked to leave fifth grade behind)

MC

I didn't mean to come off that way. I took an appeal to the senses and talk of common sense like,"I said common sense primes this, in the sense it has a last say whether one believes these things are right, these things are proven and correctly proven - or not."

That makes it seem like the sense of intuition.

A lot of what you are describing seems to be true about how people organize information into categories and form heuristics. Other parts sound like the idealized types the brain develops to help make quick sense of the world.

Other still describe gradience, basic- level categorization, and more.

It just doesn't take you as far as you want to go. The specialization required to make the kind of decisions you want common sense to handle cannot be achieved in common (unless you had a bunch of super-geniuses like I said).

When you make your argument you can be normative or positive in your approach. This is the key to understanding the scientific approach and how it is superior to common sense. The common sense approach is normative and doesn't make evidence primary in drawing a conclusion. It follows the argument and gathers evidence to support it.

JL and I are saying the scientific approach is positive, that is, it gathers evidence and then builds an argument. Proceeding in this order removes biases due to the type of reasoning we are talking about.

I thought you were just some Johnny Come Lately. You are the real deal HGL.

HGL

// I took an appeal to the senses and talk of common sense like,"I said common sense primes this, in the sense it has a last say whether one believes these things are right, these things are proven and correctly proven - or not." //

Very correctly so.

// That makes it seem like the sense of intuition. //

If you like to word it that way, I would rather say common sense makes use of intuitive insight.

I would also say a complex argument can prove sth - but only if each step of it is intuitively correct. An equation which is even more complex than an argument can be part of such a proof. BUT it must intuitively make sense to make that type of equation to that problem.

One can *approximate* the form of a lense as being flat/even in the middle and narrowing down towards the edges. So *approximately* it is a wide circle low helight cylinder surrounded by a prism which has a narrow triangular cut, whereof the narrow base is the height of the cylinder and the length is the circle which at base is mid cylinder's circumference and at edges of lense the circumference of all the lense.

But one knows very well that calculating the focal length of the lense by that approximation makes less sense than actually testing focal length after making the lense. So, it would not be common sense to consider that a lense approximated as described while really having a normal lense shape would be correctly calculated as to focal length by an equation starting from the said approximation.

And if one were to produce a lense exactly like the geometric description I gave, to match the equation, it makes sense to predict it could hardly function as a lense, since its focal point would be spread out and the colours not assemble on one point.

That is where my dictum common sense and intuitive insight about relevance of an equation primes the equations, as far as real scientific certainty is concerned.

// A lot of what you are describing seems to be true about how people organize information into categories and form heuristics. Other parts sound like the idealized types the brain develops to help make quick sense of the world. Other still describe gradience, basic- level categorization, and more.

It just doesn't take you as far as you want to go. The specialization required to make the kind of decisions you want common sense to handle cannot be achieved in common (unless you had a bunch of super-geniuses like I said). //

And as I said, however much you specialise, you need to have your heuristics firmly rooted in common sense.

A specialist who has become divorced from it is very likely to produce nonsense and not be checked by other specialists similarily divorced from it.

Your points, as I take it, adds up to specialists having their own rules of logic, not only their given assumptions, but their own way how to deal with assumptions interacting with observations.

And that is as stupid as the Hindoo theory each caste has its own morals. Or that Arjuna had a right and duty to go into battle to kill his own cousins, because he was kshatria. And alas, I think that is what Bhagavadgita means in context. Poor Krishna must be burning in Hell if he said those things.

MC

//Your points, as I take it, adds up to specialists having their own rules of logic, not only their given assumptions, but their own way how to deal with assumptions interacting with observations.//

I am not assuming this conclusion. It is based on research. This is what Cognitive Science is based on.

//And as I said, however much you specialise, you need to have your heuristics firmly rooted in common sense.//

A more accurate way to say this might be that specialization has its heuristics firmly based on basic-level categorizations.

This means that categories are not merely organized in a hierarchy from most general to most specific, but they are also organized so that the categories that are cognitively "basic" (common sense) are "in the middle" of a general-to-specific hierarchy.

Generalization proceeds "upward" from the basic level and specialization proceeds "downwards"

When we make make complex judgements like preferring relativity over a geocentric model, the categories we are using are below the level of common sense. The generalizations we draw from the same information operates above the level of common sense.

HGL

// When you make your argument you can be normative or positive in your approach. This is the key to understanding the scientific approach and how it is superior to common sense. The common sense approach is normative and doesn't make evidence primary in drawing a conclusion. It follows the argument and gathers evidence to support it. //

Evidence simply means what is evident.

Evidence can be:

• sensory data
• calculations
• introspection
• memory
• tradition (written or oral retellings of a "collective memory")

AND in order to make sense one needs to have a common sense approach to each case the certainty and relevance of each piece of evidence.

// JL and I are saying the scientific approach is positive, that is, it gathers evidence and then builds an argument. Proceeding in this order removes biases due to the type of reasoning we are talking about. //

No.

He just showed a very heavy bias in favour of his colleagues having with perfect correctness seen evidence and adapted the argument to it.

I exposed this. I challenged him, he had no idea how such and such a fact had been calculated and he was not answering how we knew the specific details on atomic theory I was asking him about.

// I am not assuming this conclusion. It is based on research. This is what Cognitive Science is based on.//

Well, Cognitive Science is very unlike even atomic theory not at all a science. Atomic theory may be a flawed one, your Cognitive Science is way out.

And of course heavily biassed against the concept of common sense and patronising against the people who are likely to have recourse to it.

MC

How can we talk to each other if you dismiss all of cognitive science without actually tackling the objections it throws in your way?

Does anyone else have insight into common sense?

HGL

Yes. Most people do.

Studen ts of cognitive science are not most people.

Neither am I. I try to use the common sense I can gather from them in a more consistent way, where they are negligently trusting expertise they should not trust. But I do not try to replace their common sense with the special expertise rules of non-logic that replace common sense among the expertise.

"How can we talk to each other if you dismiss all of cognitive science without actually tackling the objections it throws in your way?"

I have already said I am much more interested in talking to JL about proofs ("how they calculated" etc) than with you about cognitive pseudoscience.

Plus your objection presupposes that cognitive science is so absorbing your mind as a religion - the Catholic one - is absorbing mine. I e, it makes your so called non-confessional science a religion. Perhaps a branch of Buddhism?

MC

And somehow this means you can use common sense to dismiss, "equations accessible to and producible by very skilled physicists,"?

I brought up the research on how the brain organizes information because that is crucial to understanding what common sense is and how it cannot do the job of forming higher level concepts.

This is a major problem in science education. How do you teach science to people who largely don't understand it?

HGL

I was not dismissing equations, I said we must know by common sense if they are relevant before we trust the result.

"How do you teach science to people who largely don't understand it?"

As they taught it to you, by making it your religion.

The so called research on how "brain organises information" is a pseudo-science much worse than pseudo-scientific sides to physics.

MC

Would I be right in saying you think common sense is more important than the equations?

I am saying common sense can't do the work of knowing whether something would be relevant.

//The so called research on how "brain organises information" is a pseudo-science much worse than pseudo-scientific sides to physics.//

That's, like, your opinion.

Even if you side with the "others", we share the experiments.

HGL

I am saying common sense is exactly what does that.

You would not just be right in what you just said, but uncommonly late in understanding what I just said several times over the last few days.

"That's, like, your opinion."

It is my very definite one.

MC

You keep reasserting what you think after I explain what I think, and it seems like you keep correcting me.

That is leading me to constantly wonder if It seems like I don't understand you.

HGL

The guys who thought tey had found Higg's boson trusted their equations. Look at this:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/10/higgs-boson-discovery-particle_n_6133502.html

MC

When he was presenting that work about the Higgs, he admits that he could be wrong.

HGL

"That is leading me to constantly wonder if It seems like I don't understand you."

Side effect of meditation and "empathy"? How about trying logic, once in a while instead. And grammar.

I usually take pains to state my meaning so it cannot be misunderstood by a good reader. You aren't.

"When he was presenting that work about the Higgs, he admits that he could be wrong."

He'd be a fool not to. Considering he's a carreer scientist and his work can ruin all of their carreers.

MC

//Side effect of meditation and "empathy"? How about trying logic, once in a while instead. And grammar.//

Can we put the 5th grade behind us? I thought we buried that hatched yesterday.

I think I have brought up, at least reasonable, objections to common sense being able to decide what you claim it can.

I need a little more than your word that it can. Can you help me out with any relevant information.

I am more than willing to answer any serious question if I actually slipped in my grammar and something wasn't clear.

Meditation isn't just a Buddhist thing, BTW.

Being a Catholic, I think you can understand that. I have St. Loyola's "Spiritual Exercises" on the shelf behind me.

HGL

"I think I have brought up, at least reasonable, objections to common sense being able to decide what you claim it can."

I have answered them.

Time after time.

You have ignored pertinence of answers through not quite seeing very many times what I was really saying. That is irritating. I do not enjoy debating with you very much and asking things like "can we put fifth grade behind us" is NOT mending things.

"I need a little more than your word that it can. Can you help me out with any relevant information."

I can give a reductio in absurdum of your position.

In your terms, common sense, logic, the kind of discourse people use mentally among each other was never given by any God nor developed by evolution with any view to make us understand the universe.

Therefore, in your terms, any higher concept, anything approaching truth beyond a merely pragmatic level needs to part ways with common sense as much as with basic misunderstandings.

So, what is it exactly which in each specialty is replacing common sense, replacing logic, and which is supposed to be a better guide to truth? How can we say evolution developed mathematicians ignoring the fact that zero is no number? How can we say God made it a commandment for Lawrence Krauss to consider zero a midpoint between a positive and a negative field AND at same time absolute nothing AND there being a fluctuation between p and n fields around that absolute nothing and other learned idiots to make other learned idiocies divorced from common sense for us to get information that is MORE reliable? Before you start picking o ut parts of my outburst, try considering it as a unity, even if I embroidered it rhetorially. "You weren't developed for understanding if information is really truly true, therefore I can tell you what is really truly true..."

To me this position is absurd. It would have been absurd while I was in fifth grade, it is absurd still and will be absurd till the end of my life.

But apart from this reductio in absurdum, I might soon have a near certainty of a practical example against you.

JL has been waiting long to answer my challenge.

Is he looking for an answer? Or is he waiting till you disarm my critical faculties first, so I shall not be able to pick his answer apart?

JL

I haven't been following this thread, I neither know nor care what your challenge is to be honest. I've made my point, that's all I wanted to do.

HGL

No, you have not made it.

You have not given an account on how Rutherford experiment or Cloud Chambers pro ve electrons exist as particles not only while emitted but also in each atom.

And that being so, you have not answered the challenge I gave.

Perhaps wisely so for a carreer scientist. Admitting too much uncertainty about the most widely accepted conclusions might in the end ruin lots of carreers, and people wanting to post pone that might ruin yours first.

JL

I'm not a physicist, I'm sure you can look it up for yourself, I don't feel inclined to prove such basic facts about reality to you at the moment, I've got better things to do.

HGL

Ah, you are NOT a physicist? And you still feel very confident that these things are "basic facts about reality"?

If you are NOT a physicist, I might have taken my confidence in common sense to the point of learning more than you about how physics is done and might be a better judge than you because of that very matter. Common sense, someone looks more into a matter, better he becomes a judge of it.

The very same common sense approach you use (in a less correct way, I feel, but I let our readers judge) to justify your great confidence in the same physicists.

And, if y ou are NOT a physicist, what are you, as per academic discipline?

JL

Yes, I'm perfectly confident that they are basic facts about reality, I know how rigorous the scientific method is - if physicists accept that electrons are in atoms, I know that they are justified in that conclusion.

I'm a Biologist (student), with an interest in physics.

HGL

Ah, ok.

In other words, your confidence in electrons being basic facts about reality is worth as much as your confidence that Earth is 4.5 billion years old as per a dating, done by one radioactive decay method

JL

I am far more confident about electrons than I am about 4.5 billion years being the precise age of the earth, but I am totally confident that the earth is of great age, in the billions of years range.