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From: rlr@pyuxn.UUCP (Rich Rosen)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy,net.sci,net.misc
Subject: Re: Mind/Brain:  S. Maclaine's speculations on gluons
Message-ID: <835@pyuxn.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 9-Jul-84 11:13:54 EDT
Article-I.D.: pyuxn.835
Posted: Mon Jul  9 11:13:54 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 10-Jul-84 01:44:04 EDT
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Organization: Bell Communications Research, Piscataway N.J.
Lines: 33

> Just because you don't understand or believe in something, and just
> because scientists can't measure something, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
> Were you to travel back in time and warn the peasants to stay away from
> a specific area because it was poisoned with invisible evil spirits at what
> would in the future become the site of a Uranium mine, does not mean that
> radiation does not exist, just because they would have been unable to see it.
> Now, how would you prove to them that you spoke the enlightened truth?
> Unless you could dazzle them with a geiger counter which hadn't been invented
> yet by the scientists of the time?

Interesting analogy.  Allow me to extend it.

Apparently if you were a peasant in that time, you might believe the mystical
person from the future and his talk of "uranium" (unless your fellow peasants
labelled him/her a witch because he/she weighed the same as a duck :-).  On
the other hand, you would be just as likely to believe another person who also
claimed some mystical powers, when he/she said that the world was not flat,
or round, but shaped like a giant frog, with the world as we know it somewhere
on the frog's back.

If *I* were the peasant in question (assuming I was educated to think
independently as people are supposed to be nowadays), I wouldn't believe
either of them.

Of course, in reality, neither of us would have believed either of the
mystical people.  The church would have branded them as heretics and their
words would have been drowned out by the crackling fire.

The point is: in the absence of verifiable evidence (or well-developed
thought experiments grounded in reality), ALL speculative ideas (ESP,
god, tooth fairy, Easter bunny, free will) have *equal* weight:  none.
-- 
"Submitted for your approval..."		  Rich Rosen    pyuxn!rlr