Re: The Awesomesauce with Religion
Reply #695 –
Surely you would laugh me away if I mixed up physical reading and writing, but this is precisely how mind-reading and telepathy differ, and you are insisting we should mix them up. I say that the work of neuroscientists, given their presuppositions, implies mind-reading, and I say mind-reading precisely because this is what I mean, not telepathy.
Telepathy would be hearing/speaking — without a known physical medium supporting such. Mind-reading would be hearing, without the other speaking — similarly.
fMRI studies of the sort Harris performs elide the essential statistical manipulations made, to get to the political or sociological or psychological point that drives the questionnaires. These are what these studies' conclusions depend upon; just your average opinion polls, dressed up in unsupportable scientistic window dressing…
The technique has some promise for diagnostic medicine. If it isn't totally discredited by what ersi correctly terms a form of phrenology.
So: If Harris' pseudoscience doesn't work, does Chomsky's various conspiracy theories?
We're back to square one, I believe. (What do you "observe," ersi? )