Deconstructing Popper's Falsification and Vienna Circle Verification

Fred,

1] What if our individual perceptions of notes were off by one octave(as an example)?

I don't yet know if that would ever make for a difference (a consequence) that would matter.

What if I liked chocolate, and you vanilla? Would that be evidence that we perceived music(or taste)differently, and reached different conclusions from the 'same' sensory stimuli?

Yes, but conclusions are conceptual things. We don't perceive conclusions. There is something called "perceptual judgment" but no one on planet earth has been able to show me how it is that you can reach a judgment with the 4 perceptual powers of awareness (i.e., sense perception, memory, imagination, and crude association). It may be because I am too thick in the skull ...

:-)

it is difficult to imagine an objective consequence to actual subjective differences in perception...say, being an entire octave off -- other than, some of us prefer chocolate over vanilla.

I agree (above) that it's difficult to imagine an objective consequence of being an octave off, but I also think the personal preferences issue (chocolate vs. vanilla) is a separate issue altogether.

I'm not seeing the obvious comparison to objective contradiction(such as the triangle/square, 3/4 contradiction.)

That's because there is no obvious comparison to objective contradiction (if it was obvious we wouldn't be in debate about it). Instead of stating what's obvious, you have to use imagination to visualize things that might come up -- like when I visualized the example of musical notes and how you have got to be off by exactly an octave in order to escape contradiction. The salient point is that you may never hear notes just like the other guy does, but you still will, ultimately, discover that you don't hear notes in the same way.

Ed

Post 61

Friday, May 27, 2011 - 4:56am

Ed:

Here is an example I am aware of -- an actual personal anecdote -- that relates to differences in perception, or at least processing/filtering -- of the same aural stimuli.

When I am in a crowded room, like a bar or restaurant, and there is a general 'din' -- a loud buzz of conversation -- my wife reports that she has no trouble conversing back and forth, and can hear me speaking plainly. She is able to 'focus' her hearing and tune out the general din.

What I hear over time is inreasingly just the din, and it seems like I can hear crystal clearly the conversations of folks several tables away, as if I was sitting with them, with no effort at all, but I must strain to hear what my wife, who is sitting right next to me, is saying. The people in the booth with me, immediately in front of me, all sound like they are underwater, while the people far from me sound like they are speaking on top of a pristine mountaintop through clear Alpine air. My 'selectivity' is inverted. There might even be a name for this minor affliction, I don't know. It is not debilitating in any way, just a little annoying.

(I'm not ignoring my wife or trying to ignore my wife. This happens whenever I'm in one of these crowded room din things, no matter who I am with.)

It gets increasingly worse the longer I'm in the crowded room.

I'm not sure this is an example of perception; it might be the inversion of a lower level aural processing function, like a 'filter' that in me, for whatever reason, insists on being inverted in that situation. It is an example, I think, of a different 'weighting' function being applied to the stimuli presented by my ears.

It gives me a hint, it helps me imagine, I think, that there might be something to your suggestion that we could detect differences in perceiving musical notes that were discordant (ie, not miraculaously off by precisely one octave.)

But the 'personal preferences' explanation for the chocolate/vanillia preferences still pointa to an ability to self-weight 'the same' sensory inputs differently. If we are all given essentially 'the same' wetbits(that may be true in a coarse sense, but I don't think it is true in an absolute/detailed sense), and those wetbits are presented with 'the same' sensory inputs, then only a difference in weighting somewhere in all that neural network-like processing can explain why we reach different conclusions on the subject of subjective tastes.

And if such differences are not only possible but likely and necessary in order to explain subjectively different conclusions, then I don't see why they are unlikely in the functioning of the lower level neural-network like processes that present (and process and 'filter') sensory input to our perception/cognition wet bits.

We subjectively resonate differently to the objective world. It is what makes us individuals, and not identical cogs, marshallable bees in a giant bee colony, resonating identically in all respects to the same sensory inputs.

It doesn't bother me in the least that we may ultimately be machine like in our processing or that we share undeniable and obvious similarities. What I find little evidence of is that we are thouroughly identical machines at the mpst fundamental level. The possible combinations of those similar wetbits into subjectively weighted neural-net like processes is so great that it insures uniqueness. We are fundamentally individuals at our topmost levels of processing, not identical cogs. Yet we share more than enough similarities to adequately function together and cooperate.

Others view ourselves as fundamentally identical, with just enough individuality so that we know where to mail the 1040's to.

regards
Fred

Post 62

Friday, May 27, 2011 - 12:14pm

Fred,

What I hear over time is inreasingly just the din, and it seems like I can hear crystal clearly the conversations of folks several tables away, as if I was sitting with them, with no effort at all, but I must strain to hear what my wife, who is sitting right next to me, is saying ...

I do that, too!

My preliminary hypothesis is evolutionary. That it is because we are male -- and males evolutionarily needed to be focused on stimuli from a distance, as it approached or even came somewhat near the cave or camp (to ward off invaders), and also as part of a hunting strategy. This is opposed to females, who needed to be focused on stimuli closer by (e.g., a child or "husband" in need or want and giving her subtle cues about that need or want).

It's chauvinistic, but it's my guess:
Men could only survive if they paid great attention to all surrounding areas, all of the time. Women could only survive if they paid great attention to men (who, themselves, guaranteed that perimeter of safety in which to live and be safe).

:-)

Ed

Post 63

Friday, May 27, 2011 - 2:24pm

would you consider that as how the gender difference is regarding the rest of the animal kingdom? if not, then how explain it arising among humans pre-civilized era........

Post 64

Friday, May 27, 2011 - 3:37pm

Robert,

********

would you consider that as how the gender difference is regarding the rest of the animal kingdom?

********

Yes, I work outside and sometimes I am at a farm or ranch. The other day, some folks had llamas. The female llama was laying down and getting some sun. She paid me no mind when I went up to the house. But the male llama was hyper-vigilant and watching my every move. He simply would not take his eyes off of me. I believe that if I were to take several steps in his direction, that he would have become irate.

I've noticed this same, gender-specific behavior throughout several disparate species and, if anything, it gets worse as the species approach in genetic similarity to humans (e.g. hyper-protective Silverback gorillas).

Ed

Post 65

Saturday, January 12, 2013 - 6:34pm

speaking of Popper, Ed what do you make of Lester's essay about critical rationalism:

http://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/critical-rationalism

and his earlier essay here: http://www.la-articles.org.uk/falsificationism.htm

(Edited by Michael Philip on 1/12, 6:41pm)

(Edited by Michael Philip on 1/12, 6:42pm)

Post 66

Saturday, January 12, 2013 - 9:28pm

Michael,

While I don't agree with Lester that knowledge is fallible and that induction is impossible, I discovered that falsification can be twisted around on itself in order to arrive at absolute truth -- something which was most definitely not what Popper intended! From your link:

But Popper noticed a crucial asymmetry: the falsification of universal theories is logically possible; we need just one counter instance. �All swans are white� cannot be verified by any finite number of positive instances of white swans. It can be falsified by one instance of a non-white swan; as this �well-supported� theory eventually was falsified by the discovery of black swans in Australia.

Okay, not let's see if we can discover an absolute truth utilizing Popperian falsification. Let's take the proposition: "All swans are white" and determine it's truth-value. We are not going to determine its truth-value in some kind of a limited context. Instead, we are going to determine its truth-value absolutely. Here goes:

If all swans are white, then no swans will be discovered which are black.
In Australia, black swans were discovered.
-------------------------------
Therefore, it is absolutely true that the proposition "All swans are white" is false.

Now, here's the rub: You can recycle this method and exhaust the alternatives, arriving at infallible knowledge. Now, practically, you cannot exhaust all alternatives all of the time, but you can exhaust some alternatives all of the time and -- and this is crucial -- you can exhaust all alternatives some of the time. Take the empirical matter of a normal coin flip. You do not have to become aware of the side that faces up, if you can become aware of the side that faces down. You will know the full result of the coin flip from just partial knowledge. Just getting half of the information already exhausts all the alternatives -- and it doesn't even have to be the "half" that you care about.

Or take the empirical matter of whether Canada is north of Mexico or not, or closer to the North Pole, or not. There is nothing analytic that says that this must have been the case. Instead, it is an empirical matter. Now, we don't have to investigatively "GPS" every square millimeter of Canada and check it against every square millimeter of Mexico -- we don't have to completely know our subject matter! -- in order to arrive at infallible knowledge about where the 2 countries are in the world. Instead, we could just GPS the borders and utilize geometry theorems to ascertain that all area inside these borders is limited to the latitude limits of the borders themselves. In this manner, we have only empirically discovered less than 1% of each of the countries (only their borders), but we arrive at knowledge about them that is 100% certain.

Incomplete knowledge, along with noncontradictory integration, can lead to one to certainty.

Ed

Post 67

Saturday, January 12, 2013 - 9:58pm

To continue with some really colorful and imaginative elaboration, let's say you have a shoe box and you want to -- with nothing other than empirical investigation -- ascertain whether the shoes are in it, or whether the box is empty. You want to arrive at infallible knowledge about that. There are many things you can do, some of them being crucial experiments (experiments which lead to conclusive evidence), in order to know for a fact whether the shoes are in the box or not:

1) You could weigh the box.
2) You could look for the shoes on the floor.
3) You could set the box on fire and determine if you smell the rubber soles burning.
4) You could look inside the box.
5) You could X-ray the box.
6) You could give the box to a friend as a gift and -- if say, later on, they thank you for the shoes -- you can retroactively deduce that the shoes were, indeed, inside the box.
7) You could fill the box with water, meticulously determining the volume of water required in order to fill the box. In this case you need 2 rough estimates ...

a) amount of water required to fill an empty box
b) amount of water required to fill that box when it contains a pair of shoes

... but even though these estimates are only estimates, they afford you with knowledge which is not an estimate. You go from simple estimation to exact knowledge, merely by using your mind correctly. For instance, let's say that -- using simple geometry -- you discover that the box would hold about 32 ounces of water if it was empty, and somewhere around 10 ounces of water if the shoes were inside. Now, as you titrate water into the box, you notice that it starts overflowing before you reach 15 ounces of fluid transfer. From this limited and partial information, you can already arrive at the infallible knowledge that the box is not empty and likely contains the shoes. You may verify this with some of the other steps listed above, or with even other steps not already mentioned.

Now skeptics are sneering, and they want to try to show how this cannot be the case. They frantically propose arbitrary explanations for the findings:

But what if you were accidentally testing the box while it was resting on a hot burner of the stove. If that arbitrary situation were the case -- then the water could be simply boiling out over the top of the box instead of filling the box up to the rim before overflowing. In that case, your empirical experience will deceive you into falsely concluding that the shoes were inside and displacing the water and causing it to overflow before accepting 32 ounces!

My first response is to hit back: If you want to be able to arbitrarily postulate dynamic changes in the conditions, then I get to arbitrarily postulate retroactive solutions -- such as checking the temperature of the water which is overflowing out of the box (to see if it is at boiling temperature). This is the same method you can use to debunk Descartes' argument that a demon might be deceiving you -- you arbitrarily posit an angel which is tricking the demon into thinking he's deceiving you. If Descartes complains that you are violating the principle of parsimony by adding unnecessary factors into the equation, then agree with him to make it as simple as possible: Make him get rid of his arbitrary addition of the demon in the first place.

Skeptics can't have it both ways.

:-)

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 1/12, 10:02pm)

Post 68

Sunday, January 13, 2013 - 3:15pm

If I am reading you correctly Ed, you're basically saying that we can use the process of elimination to arrive at truth? My understanding of Popper is that he claimed that a claim is not scientific unless it is falsifiable. That's different than saying falsification has practical applications.

(Edited by Michael Philip on 1/13, 3:22pm)

Post 69

Sunday, January 13, 2013 - 7:57pm

Michael,

My understanding of Popper is that he claimed that a claim is not scientific unless it is falsifiable.

Okay, but there are 3 ways to determine whether something is falsifiable, and I believe that Popper only believed that there was only 1 or 2 ways to do such a thing. Here are the 3 ways to falsify things:

1) witnessing a counter-example (using only your perceptual powers of awareness, such as your sense perception and crude association)
2) evidence-based reasoning (integrating evidence in a manner that is noncontradictory)
3) a priori reasoning (taking what you already know to be true, in order to determine the limits of what is possible in the world)

In the case of the shoes inside the box, if you open the box and see the shoes inside, then the converse of the proposition: "The shoes are in the box" is falsified via perception only. If you reason that if the shoes happened to be in the box, then the box wouldn't hold 32 ounces of water -- and if it, upon experiment, does hold 32 ounces of water -- then the proposition is falsified. Also, if the box is size 8 and your shoes are size 12, then you know -- without any empirical investigation into the matter -- that the proposition is falsified.

I'm pretty sure that Popper did not believe that empirical matters such as this could be falsified via a priori reasoning alone. I suspect that he may have even been only luke-warm with regard to the power of evidence-based reasoning -- in particular, evidence-based reasoning informed by inescapable axioms.

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 1/13, 7:59pm)

Post 70

Sunday, January 13, 2013 - 10:39pm

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is not falsifiable because the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

See Yes, We Have No Neutrons: An Eye-Opening Tour Through the Twists and Turns of Bad Science by A. K. Dewdney (John Wiley & Sons, 1997)

In your case, Ed, it is not that the box has shoes but that it holds Hermes's Magic Sandals.
One claim is falsifiable. The other is not.

Post 71

Tuesday, January 15, 2013 - 1:39pm

I gather that Popper has no theory of how concepts are formed. He uses the criteria of deductive validity to evaluate induction, and therefore finds it lacking. His philosophy comes off as very lazy

Post 72

Tuesday, January 15, 2013 - 3:26pm

Well, yeah, if Karl Popper had had Ayn Rand to explain everything to him, he would have come off looking a heck of a lot smarter. It would be really cool to have a time machine and go back and show Aristotle where he was wrong... and hey, maybe give guns to the Spartans at Thermopylae...

Popper only investigated other questions. Whatever failings his work evidences to us now, we benefit from it or not according to our capacities and interests.

Post 73

Tuesday, January 15, 2013 - 4:52pm

MEM,

In your case, Ed, it is not that the box has shoes but that it holds Hermes's Magic Sandals.
One claim is falsifiable. The other is not.

Okay, but there are 2 things to say about Popper. One is the issue of categorizing things as falsifiable or not, like you mention, but the other is his skepticism. As the link mentioned, if you take Popper at his word, knowledge is fallible and induction is impossible.

These are terrible, terrible things to believe -- and they open the door for terrible evils. Glance at the post-modern existentialists on the political left, for instance. Listen to the rants. Understand that they are just shouting their feelings. Discover how they contradict themselves. And look at the overall political situation we're in right now. There is an ominous parallel to that. There is also a slow solution for all of this.

If we accept the responsibility of becoming more outspokenly judgmental of others, we can prevent having to go through another Auschwitz.

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 1/15, 4:58pm)

Post 74

Tuesday, January 15, 2013 - 5:29pm

Ed could you explain, in a bit more detail, how these are terrible views politically speaking?
(Edited by Michael Philip on 1/15, 5:40pm)

(I read a similar FB status today: "Evidence can never prove anything. It is best used in attempted refutation. No one can find any proof in history. If you want proof do geometry.")
(Edited by Michael Philip on 1/15, 5:42pm)

Post 75

Tuesday, January 15, 2013 - 5:41pm

Michael P.,

A short story about it is coming ... [watch for new blog entry]

Ed

Post 76

Wednesday, January 16, 2013 - 5:03am