Reply With QuoteWhat really depresses me is that this meaningless bollocks sounds reasonable to somebody. A little learning is indeed dangerous.Originally Posted by Farsight
'Force' seems like a word almost designed to blur the issue, and to be read in the wrong way by all sorts of mugs. Somewhat akin to 'energy' in various woo disciplines.
What if we visualised our radios when they don't work, as long as they are a similar distance from our brain as parts of our body are?
Seriously, the brain already has all kinds of ways of influencing the body which we know about, and which actually work, since that is the reason for having brains.
Many scientists spend a lot of time trying to understand more about those mechanisms.
No.
He's no more doing 'neuroscience' than you're doing 'physics', unless maybe if one adds the prefix 'cargo cult'.
Here's a chemist speculating about stuff he doesn't seem to understand, and writing a book on it.
That's not even doing science, let alone neuroscience.
Assuming that there must be some kind of mysterious 'other' mechanism of effect of the brain on the body seems, if anything, more to be suggesting that someone has given up on even trying to really understand more about the subtle interactions of the mechanisms we already know about, than someone trying to open up a new area of understanding.
That sounds precisely like someone failing to understand the appropriate level[s] of abstraction to use when trying to actually understand something.
You'd think that a chemist might know better than that.
What really depresses me is that this meaningless bollocks sounds reasonable to somebody. A little learning is indeed dangerous.
What doesn't surprise me is that it's being defended by farsight.
I went through it paragraph by paragraph looking for the problem. You didn't, you just dismissed it as “quantum drivel”. The guy's a neuroscientist, we do make electrons out of electromagnetic waves via pair production, electrons do interfere in a dual slit experiment, and this guy did get better:
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23871598-man-paralysed-by-stroke-uses-mind-power-to-walk-again.do
“A stroke victim whose whole body was left paralysed except for his eyes has confounded medical opinion by making a full recovery. Graham Miles was diagnosed with "locked-in" syndrome and told by doctors he would never be able to move his whole body again after suffering a stroke aged 49 in December 1993. Initially, the only way the gas engineer was able to communicate was by moving his eyelids. But within a few months he had taken his first steps. Today, Mr Miles, 66, has made such a recovery that he is able to walk, talk and has even taken up motor racing.”
You did?
No.
He isn't.
He's an ex-chemist who wrote a totally speculative book on (at best) pseudo-new-age neuroscience.
After his PhD, he worked in industry as a chemist for three whole years, spent the next year as a non-chemist for the same company, and has spent the last 11 years doing motivational speaking and spiritual stuff, apart from one year working as a science teacher.
Of course, if you'd actually read his website, you'd know that.
So?
Just because someone was labeled as having locked in syndrome does not mean they had it.
Even if they had locked in syndrome, this does not preclude spontanious recovery.
Even if they have improved to the point of walking this does not mean they ahve not been left with permenant disability sufficient to ensure a poor quality of life for them and their family.
In essence the story provides no insight whatsoever.
The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease. Voltaire
It does seem like this guy was a pretty untypical case - recovery started within a very short time, whereas it appears that for many people, even being diagnosed as being locked-in rather than comatose can take some time.
Even if his recovery did take a deal of determination and hard work on his part, it would seem like he was probably rather less completely injured than the great majority of people who remain locked-in.
Not directly. I used the phrase "quantum drivel" but to refer to a hypothetical waste of time irrelevant to the discussion of the roll of a die. However the analogy was there. My dismissal wasn't that it was "quantum drivel" but that the reductionist approach leant no benefit to the discussion. My main objection I spelt out afterwards.
Again it appears that you're too close to the subject matter to see it so take step back and you'll see the objection repeated below.
Why don't you go through that paragraph by paragraph and see if you can spot an error rather than introduce the non-sequitur of an incorrect prognosis being given?The danger of Hamilton's approach is the inferences that might be made. No he doesn't explicitly make them but I'm pretty sure the implication was part of his intent.
Disease, it's all quantum fields. The minds can have an effect at the quantum level, therefore the mind can effect disease.
What he doesn't mention is the limitation of this effect. It's true in as much as the placebo effect is real but the placebo effect is limited. Instead Hamilton leaves the reader to make the leap that all disease can be cured purely by the power of the mind.
Oncoming traffic is also all just quantum fields but if you're in the path of a bus you'd be better using the power of the mind (at the quantum level) to send signals to your legs (which really are neurochemical transmissions even if those neurochemical transmisions are in turn made up of quantum fields) to move you out of the way rather than trying to "mind quantum" the bus out of existence through positive thinking.
As for the free will argument to dismiss the materialistic view of the mind that's argument to consequences. Even if a materialistic viewpoint were to remove the possibility of free will (and I'm sure that's debatable by better philosophers than me) then just ebcause I don't like that idea, wouldn't t make it any the less true. Furthermore breakign these neurotransmissions down into their quantum components does nothing to stop it being materialistic, so what then is he trying to imply here?
Which is a kind of reasoning which it is very easy for some people to fall into.
In the case of the guy who recovered to a large extent after being diagnosed as being locked-in, if he is correctly reported, one could take it as him claiming that *anyone* can recover if they have enough willpower.
Without wishing to take anything away from his achievements of recovery, he has no way of knowing how much effort other people have put into trying to recover movement, and he has no obvious way of knowing how any oter person's initial damage compares to his own.
Furthermore, even he failed to make a complete recovery.
Is that because he just didn't try hard enough, or simply because there was a limit to how much he could recover, irrespective of the mental effort he used.
It's basically faith healing logic - if someone gets better, then it's down to faith +/or divine intervention, if they don't, the implication is that they just didn't have enough faith, not simply that the process has either limited effect or no effect.
OK, he's not a neuroscientist, my mistake, apologies. He just refers to neuroscience.
That was no non-sequitur. The guy was written off by medical opinion, now he's walking. And no problem, I'll go through your response paragraph by paragraph. And I'll rip it apart:
The danger of Hamilton's approach is the inferences that might be made. No he doesn't explicitly make them but I'm pretty sure the implication was part of his intent.
So, the danger isn't what he actually says, but in the inferences that might be made? What kind of pie-eyed logic is that? It's not what he actually said, but what people might infer? Oh come on. Go through what he actually said step by step like I did and when you can't point out any flaws, concede.
Disease, it's all quantum fields. The minds can have an effect at the quantum level, therefore the mind can effect disease.
Consider the situation where 100 people contract some serious pathogen. All receive the same treatment, but 50 die. Amongst the fatalities are fit young subjects. Amongst the survivors are infirm older subjects. Why do we see such a distribution? We might look for better immune systems amongst the "battle hardened" older people, or immune responses amongst the young that go awry. After that we scratch around looking for other factors, and when we can't find any more, we're left looking at things like willpower and grit and determination. Now watch my lips: it isn't crackpot to consider such things.
What he doesn't mention is the limitation of this effect. It's true in as much as the placebo effect is real but the placebo effect is limited. Instead Hamilton leaves the reader to make the leap that all disease can be cured purely by the power of the mind.
Oh no he doesn't leave the reader to make a leap. That's a pathetic misrepresentation. This guy worked for AstraZeneca. He not some jehovah's witness or homepath. He isn't suggesting that willpower is a substitute for antibiotics.
Oncoming traffic is also all just quantum fields but if you're in the path of a bus you'd be better using the power of the mind (at the quantum level) to send signals to your legs (which really are neurochemical transmissions even if those neurochemical transmisions are in turn made up of quantum fields) to move you out of the way rather than trying to "mind quantum" the bus out of existence through positive thinking.
This is a ridiculous straw-man argument. You're using a farcical scenario to dismiss the benefits of positive outlook. What would you rather advocate? That patients just roll over and die?
As for the free will argument to dismiss the materialistic view of the mind that's argument to consequences. Even if a materialistic viewpoint were to remove the possibility of free will (and I'm sure that's debatable by better philosophers than me) then just ebcause I don't like that idea, wouldn't make it any the less true.
He isn't saying there is no free will. Read what he did say, he's countering those who say there is no free will. Here it is: "Many believe that there is no such force or energy associated with a thought; that thoughts are, in fact, by-products of chemical interactions in the brain. Taking this line, there could be no free will. Each thought that we think of as our own would be merely the result of brain chemistry. But this cannot account for what we are now seeing in neuroscience; that imagining something can cause a change in the chemistry and actual fine structure of the brain".
Furthermore breaking these neurotransmissions down into their quantum components does nothing to stop it being materialistic, so what then is he trying to imply here?
He's isn't "trying to imply" anything. He's saying it straight: thinking about something can cause a change in chemistry and structure: "The famous ‘piano’ study conducted at Harvard showed that volunteers could imagine playing piano notes over and over again, for 2 hours on 5 consecutive days, and the area of the brain connected to their finger muscles grew quite substantially."
Why is it that you guys dismiss scientific evidence when you don't like the sound of what somebody is saying? You call yourselves skeptics, but what you're skeptical of is scientific evidence and the related rational argument. So much so that instead of going through it piecemeal and offering your own counter-evidence and counter-argument, you dismiss it with abuse. Your behaviour is identical to that exhibited by creationists.
What evidence? I see a flawed argument but no sign of any evidence.
Where studies have been done on positive thinking/attitude regarding serious illness, it turns out that it makes no difference what you think. Whether you're in the optimistic/positive thinking or the pessimistic/negative thinking group the survival rates remain the same. You cannot think yourself better from a serious condition.
No evidence and a badly flawed argument.
I've seen absolutely no indication of abuse.
.
Well done,
Much better to have you read, understand and disagree with my comments than pretend they don't exist.
So we both agree that the placebo effect exists and that there is a role for positive thinking. There's no point in you attacking me for disagreeing with that because I simply didn't.
Now tell me what the reductionist approach employed by Hamilton adds to the discussion if it is not solely there as an avenue to enable magical thinking.
And if you want to doubt that this is Mr Hamilton's view then perhaps you might like to read some more of his site.
http://www.drdavidhamilton.com/
Which is nothing really to do with alleged quantum fields influencing recovery.
I doubt you'd find many qualified people being shocked by the idea that a diagnosis could be technically wrong, or that a prognosis could turn out to be excessively pessimistic.
Neither would you find many (any?) neuroscientists thinking that some magical mechanism had to be invented to account for a recovery from damage, when there are well-known non-magical repair mechanisms in the brain, and it's clear that varying degrees of post-injury recovery happen.
Since you seem to think that neuroscientists are actually experts that people should look up to, maybe you should see how many of them see any need for Hamilton's ideas in future learning about the brain.
On the other hand, maybe you're only in awe of someone being a neuroscientist when you think that someone saying something you'd like to believe in is a neuroscientist, which seems (at best) close to hypocrisy.
But you're then left effectively trying to use non-information to support a speculative theory.
If you can't actually quantify the effectiveness of any person's immune system (whether in pathogen identification, innate response, whether any particular response is inadequate, correct or excessive, etc), you can't know whether there is any difference left that is unexplained.
You might well say that in a particular scenario we're not sure we can explain what happened as being just down to differences in immune response (due to the impossbility of collecting sufficient information), and that there may be other factors, but that's an entirely different thing to stating that we can't explain what happened as being down to immune system differences, and that therefore there must be something else involved.
As Daniel Dennet said:
"'You haven't explained everything yet' is not a competing hypothesis"
Your the one pretending here. I went through the article linked to in the OP in detail, and I pulled your comments apart and clearly showed that your objection was down to what people "might infer" rather than what the article said.
Yes, we both agree that the placebo effect exists and there's a role for positive thinking. Hamilton is trying to employ the latter to tap into the former, and if it works, that's not quantum drivel.
FFS, here it is: some patients who might die, don't. What are you going say when that happens? That the prognosis was wrong? Every time?
I took a look at http://www.drdavidhamilton.com/Artic...important.html. It sounds reasonable. Like I said, this guy is no homeopath, he's a ex-drug company scientist with a PhD in organic chemistry who's been thinking hard about positive thinking and the placebo effect. Cut him some slack.
Good for you. Did you also see the stuff about dowsing? I bet you've got some great reasons why his defence of astrology makes perfect sense to you too.
Anyway what was it that you thought the introduction of reductionism added to the discussion of the placebo effect? You forgot to answer.So astrology isn’t unscientific but actually a very powerful science and should be taken much more seriously
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