Do materialist lay-people have anything interesting to offer?

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Don't you think that modern neuroscience is based off of anecdote? I poke your brain, you tell me how you feel. Me telling you how I feel is anecdotal; I have an experience that is only accessible by myself. If you refuse to accept my experiences as nothing more than anecdotal, then the experiment cannot be done. I remember reading an article by a gentleman that was asked to think of something. He decided to screw around with the experimenters and think of something else. The FMRI showed that his patterns were identical to those who had followed the experimental protocol ( I'm paraphrasing the story here a bit, but it's somewhere on the old forum ).

Not all information relayed by a person is anecdotal. There are ways of gathering formal accounts. An anecdote is an informal account. Many NDE reports, for example, are informal.

Of course it's possible for subjects to screw around with psychology experiments. As we advance our understanding, we should be able to detect this more and more.

~~ Paul

 

[malf]

Don't you think that modern neuroscience is based off of anecdote? I poke your brain, you tell me how you feel. Me telling you how I feel is anecdotal; I have an experience that is only accessible by myself. If you refuse to accept my experiences as nothing more than anecdotal, then the experiment cannot be done. I remember reading an article by a gentleman that was asked to think of something. He decided to screw around with the experimenters and think of something else. The FMRI showed that his patterns were identical to those who had followed the experimental protocol ( I'm paraphrasing the story here a bit, but it's somewhere on the old forum ).

You appear to have given a great example of why anecdotes are poor quality evidence (in what appears to have been a poorly controlled experiment).

You can't merely say that anecdote represents strong evidence in one case, and not in another.

I haven't said this.

 

[Iyace]

Not all information relayed by a person is anecdotal. There are ways of gathering formal accounts. An anecdote is an informal account. Many NDE reports, for example, are informal.

Of course it's possible for subjects to screw around with psychology experiments. As we advance our understanding, we should be able to detect this more and more.

~~ Paul

All information relayed by a person's internal experiences are anecdotes. If we're not relying on these to be at least nominally accurate, then good neuroscience cannot be done. If we're saying that anecdotes can indeed be a good way to supplement existing evidence, then there's no issue.

Then you finish with an assumption, which may or may not be the case

 

[David Bailey]

All information relayed by a person's internal experiences are anecdotes. If we're not relying on these to be at least nominally accurate, then good neuroscience cannot be done. If we're saying that anecdotes can indeed be a good way to supplement existing evidence, then there's no issue.

Then you finish with an assumption, which may or may not be the case

This is spot on! For years, psychology went down a complete dead end called behaviorism - just because it didn't want to handle anything subjective. The problem is that everything about the mind, is subjective!

David

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

All information relayed by a person's internal experiences are anecdotes.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Experiences don't relay information. Do you mean all information relayed verbally? Such information can be made less anecdotal by formal interview methods. And then there are objective ways of looking at internal experiences, such as fMRI.

~~ Paul

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

This is spot on! For years, psychology went down a complete dead end called behaviorism - just because it didn't want to handle anything subjective.

You tend to exaggerate the demise of various areas of science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorism#21st-century_behavior_analysis

~~ Paul