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From: tan@ihlpg.UUCP (Bill Tanenbaum)
Newsgroups: net.med
Subject: Re: Purging Stoll and his kind
Message-ID: <1292@ihlpg.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 21-Sep-85 22:58:50 EDT
Article-I.D.: ihlpg.1292
Posted: Sat Sep 21 22:58:50 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 22-Sep-85 07:02:40 EDT
References: <2172@ukma.UUCP> <813@mcnc.mcnc.UUCP> <272@bbncc5.UUCP> <10437@ucbvax.ARPA>
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Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 36

> [Steve Dyer]
> >   ......     I would go further, setting as one of the ground
> >rules a certain respect for logic and scientific materialism.  ....
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> [Tom - tedrick@berkeley]
> [Stuff omitted]
> I thought that Godel's incompleteness theorems, Quantum
> physics and such had blown scientific materialism out of
> the water, at least as far as being a "true" description
> of the world.
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Wrong.  Only as far as being a "complete" description.
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> What the unorthodox approach has in its favor
> is often based on personal experience, which tends to be
> difficult to treat scientifically.
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Those on the "orthodox" side have personal experiences too.
Sometimes these experiences include controlled double blind experiments.
Amazing how the personal experiences of the "unorthodox" are almost
never reproducible by non-true believers in that particular
"unorthodoxy".  In those few cases when they ARE reproducible, they
quickly become the new orthodoxy.
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> I think that the orthodox group might benefit from practices
> promoting personal experience (perhaps Yoga/meditation, fasting
> or whatever),
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How about voodoo? Or wife beating.  Those are personal experiences
too.  Tell me what isn't a personal experience.
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> while the unorthodox group might benefit from a study of logic.
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Right on.
-- 
Bill Tanenbaum - AT&T Bell Labs - Naperville IL  ihnp4!ihlpg!tan