reason Hi FireQuan, It would be nice if all people could keep to their point and use facts and reason to prove it. It will never happen! You can assume the best about people but can't expect it. You know I have had a lot of conversations with people and discussions on forums (not this one) where I just stopped trying to extract that logic because I realized it just wasn't present. It's like a fight. I have been in martial arts since '84 and never had a fight. I have avoided several fights with psychology. I remember one time a "friend" I was out with provoked a fight with huge guy over a traffic light. In a minute we were out of the cars and on the street face to face. My friend backed down and left me confronted by the big guy with a bad temper. I didn't have any issue with him so I spoke with respect, called him Sir a couple of times and he got back in his car and drove away. He was in the wrong regarding the traffic light, but leaving him or me bleeding on the sidewalk wouldn't have solved the issue. One of my favorite lines from a movie is in "As Good As It Gets" with Jack Nicholson. He is a writer with OCD and a mean streak. A female fan comes to his door and asks "you write female characters so accurately. How do you get inside the mind of a woman so well?" He answers, "Simple, I just think like a man, then take away all reason and accountability." The girl at the door starts to tear up on the verge of crying and he closes the door. I love that line, not because I'm sexist but because I see it in both men and women every day. I see it in coworkers, service personnel, retail staff and citizens in general. When I'm about to lose my mind I remember that line from the movie and giggle to myself. The other day I was at the drive thru getting a morning coffee and the lady asked me : "is that for here or to go?" I couldn't make that up! That made my day! Sure it was seriously stupid and frustrating to take the extra 30 sec out of my life that I would never get back while I was trying to get to work on time - but I must have laughed to myself about a dozen times that day and told a couple of co-workers when they asked what I was giggling to myself about. Lack of reason can be frustrating but it can also be very entertaining. This post reminds me of another piece of advice I got from someone regarding public debate on martial arts. He told me : "you can claim that your way is right as much as you like and no one gets offended - just don't claim that their way is wrong". This is very useful. It is also a good exercise in logic to have to prove your point without (seeming to) disproving the other's. Best to All
My trusty Webster's dictionary defines empirical as: "Relying on experience or observation alone, often without due regard for system or theory." So by definition, personal experience = empirical proof.
What I find most irritating is that the things I say are obvious - and, of course, they have all been said by other men. And some women, heh. Just on this board alone, most people accept that if, say, wing chun or ninjitsu guys claim that their stuff really works, it's perfectly legitimate to ask for the reasons why they say that, and to explore those reasons, to look for evidence, etc. - all the normal ways we establish facts as a community of thinking beings. But woe betide anyone who applies the same perfectly reasonable logic to taiji or Xing Yi - woe betide... because the full force of de-educated arguing strategies will come in to place - mostly, to attack me, call me names. And these aren't stupid people - these are otherwise intelligent, rational men and women, who seem to undergoe some kind of self-lobotmy where they suddenly think it is legitimate and appropriate to attack the person who wants to utlilize rational, reasonable, shareable, means of establishing truths. It's as crass as: 'Does taiji really work in a fight?' 'Shut up you idiot' - it's as crass as that, and it's a decline for our society as whole, across the board, that we have become de-educated to that level. I think you're trying to tell me that it'snot worth bothering. I choose to believe that is - not for taiji, bur because our entire society is beinbg deliberately de-educated to make us more believe the lies of other people and Governments. MArk my words, these petty insults on me are nothing - we'll all rue that we didn't make an effort to stand against de-education.
Well you're making a good point, in a round about way, because we often confuse our terms, saying 'empirical proof' when in fact, we mean empirically garnered data. Empirical information isn't the same things as 'proof'. Long before we had the fathers of Empiricism, we had Kant, explaining how the raw material of personal experience is processed in to objective knowledge of the world. Naturally, everything we input goes via personal experience. What we don't do is trust one person's experience; even our own, because, naturally, we know that people can be manipulated, or delusional, to name just a couple of reasons. We never have, individually, an objective view of the world - another often made mistake. We each only have our subjective views. What Kant said was that we then bring those views together, and ensure that each of us is seeing the same thing - within reason. We can all see the tiger in the cave, or we can all reasonably see that such a person genuinely defeated another person in a fight. By sharing our subjective views and perspectives, we synthesize objective knowledge of the world around us. Words like objective, empirical, rational, are used very loosely these days. Rationalism, for example, means thinking about stuff - say, as Thomas Aquinas developed a rational argument to prove the existence of God. However, just because someone experiences something, that doesn't mean that it is empirically deduced information. For example, thinking that, say, when you had an experience of God that that was 'empirical proof' of the existence of God is called the fallacy of 'subreption'. Empiricism is a method of information gathering, not a proof. In the same way, just because someone experieces their teacher throwing them about, they haven't experienced 'empirical proof' that their teacher can seriously use taiji - that's confusing the gathering of limited information with an over all conclusion; subreption again.
Also, I think we should point out that when we say 'empirical evidence' that can cause a little confusion, because we sometime mean two slightly different, but related things by 'evidence'. For example, we can mean something which directly proves something - such as 'here is the evidence he is guilty; a video of him murdering the victim.' But we also use 'evidence' to mean something closer to an exhibit in court, or information that goes towards building a case/proof of something. When we say 'we want empirical evidence' we obviously don't mean that we want to see your memories and experiences - because we can't look in to your head. We don't mean that what youhave experienced is what we're asking for as 'empirical evidence' - we're obvously asking for something that we, the audience, can empirically experience. Your stories, say, of your experiences are something we can experience empirically - but they aren't empirical evidence of the events you describe, obviously. When the audience/rational consensus asks for empirical evidence, they are asking for things which they each can experience - exhibits, such as videos, etc. A person's personal experiences can only be experienced as stories - we don't experience what they relate as directly, empiricaly received information. So, in other words, the subjects or contents of stories, anecdotes, etc., aren't empirical evidence in the sense that the rational consensus means, at all. Only the stories are - so they themselves, and the person telling them, become the exhibits that we process - your reasons, biases, exaggerations, etc., just as we would view a video and assess whether it was faked, whether it shows a misleading angle, etc. In short, anecdotes of personal experience are a very limited, low quality kind fo evidence.
Once 'subreption' is understood - and it is a bit of a lemon-eyer - we need to consider that for a long time in Europe, philosophy, and indeed science, went hand in hand with religion. God, obviously, can't be proven by empirical observation - you can't go and see him. 'Rationalism' allowed people like Kant and Aquinas to come up with theories of thought, and connecting ideas together, to provide mental proofs of God. Empiricism doesn't mean personal experience at all in the sense that you're referencing it here - 'without due regard for system or theory' means simply observing, without applying religious or political doctrine, say. It doesn't mean, for example, that experiencing God is an empirical experience - which is the implicaton of what you're saying here. People did make that mistake - which is why Kant specifically killed it off by explaining 'subreption'. So no - personal experience isn't by definition empirical proof. 'Empiricism' simply means observing the evidence; not that the act observation is itself evidence. Interesting though - because that's the specific mistake in rationalism which Kant addressed when explaining synthetic knowledge.
But what if all, or at least the majority of perspectives are skewed in the same way? What if say the fear of people who are racially different to us is a quality that has been selected for its survival value. Is objective knowledge possible in that area? Also even if objective knowledge can exist doesn't it do so in some abstract sense because as soon as an individual tries to access it it becomes subjective?
Yes it does. Definitions of words are agreed upon by concensus, perhaps that concensus is rational, perhaps not. However, your insistence that empirical means something very different than the agreed upon social (rational) concensus is amusing. Empirical proof is proof that is gathered, garnered or based on personal experience, that's what it means. Empiricism means: "A theory that all knowledge originates in experience."
Well, I can see why it seems like that, and it is a bit of a lemon-eyer, but my interpretation isn't mine at all - it's standard. What you're doing is making what is known as a 'category error' - confusing which thing you're talking about. Empiricism was meant to mean something quite simple - simply that we stop applying theory first - such as that God created man - and go look at what is actually out there as evidence - such as fossils. It was never meant to mean that our perceptual processes are in themselves empirical proof - as in, if I see something, it is therefore 'empirically proved' - which, is what you said or implied, if I'm not mistaken. Well, obviously empiricism doesn't work like that - 'proof' isn't considered as established just by having a personal experience, because I can also personally experience things like feeling that black people are inferior, or feeling the presence of God; these aren't classed either as empirical evidence or empirical proof by anyone... but how can that be, if personal experience equates to empirical proof in your schema? Well, your schema is obviousy wrong, is the answer - and it's a classical category error. Long before Gilbert Ryle gave us the idea of category errors, Immanuel Kant was already dealing with people who thought that their personal experiences - such as of feeling the presence of God - were objective views - after all, they were self aware of experiencing themselves experiencing it - so that is the very definition of an objective view - so they thought. But they were wrong. Kant explained - and we still use this explanation today: that experiencing yourself doing something - such as feeling the presence of God, or seeing a vision - doesn't in any way prove or support the thing experienced, and it remains, firmly, a subjective menatal event. Thinking that it is an objective view is called the fallacy of 'subreption'. Most famously used here by people saying things like 'well I've experienced how great my teacher is - THERE'S your proof!' Because of that, we had rationalism providing us with mental arguments - such as working out why God simply must exist, entirely through reason and deliberation. The reason why your dictionary says that 'empiricism is free from dogma or theory' is entirely because of that - it grew as a movement out of the Enlightenment specifically to free us from religious reason which out religious theory before all else. What it doesn't mean is that your personal experiences are empirical proof - even on the much simpler level of what you mean by 'proof' - because it contradicts even the definition of empirical you yourself offer, to suggest that the evidence itself would 'prove' anything - proof is a conclusion, used as part of a theory, adapted and established from raw data - i.e. empirical evidence - and your definition has already told us that empirical means obtaining data free from theory. As I've said before, you're confusing empirical data with 'proof'. No one thinks, or ever thought, after Kant, that simply experiencing something was any kind of proof at all - empirical evidence isn't the same thing as proof - empirical evidence is data only. Obviously, disagree as you wish - you have to go and research it, think about it. To confuse empirically viewed evidence 'proof' is in itself an error, but more deeply, to fail to understand the difference between viewed data, say, seeing a fossil, and the experience of seeing it, is subreption; and I recognise that is not an easily accessible distinction. The easiest I can make it is, say you're a Creationsist, and you see a fossil, and then you actually experience the deepest of sensatons that youare holding something made and placed there by Satan to mislead the faithful. Thinking that your feeling is empirical proof that the devil really did that, is subreption. Empiricism merely meant - and of course, it is subject to much criticism; see KarlPopper for example - that you look at the evidence, record it coldly, with as little mental and cultural interference as possible. See also Husserl, the father of transcendental phenomenological reductionism - fancy name for trying to observe social phenomenon without applying personal and cultural bias. It's actually quite the opposite of what you suggest - empiricism doesn't mean for one second that we put forwards our mental interpretations of phenomena (which are our personal experiences) - it measn that we try our best to 'bracket off' our personal filters, and simply act as recording devices - and the recordings we then provide are not usually our feelings or experiences, but pictures, drawings, scientific measurements and reports, statistics, photographs etc.; not our personal experiences in any other sense. And that data is not considered 'empirical proof' at all - it is considered 'empirical data' or information. Proof is a part of a hypothesis; part of a theoretical model, of which empirical data is another component. I hope that clears it up for you - please don't make it about me; my explanation is completely standard, which you can find out yourself by researching the issues. Sometimes, though, obviously, there are times when personal feelings can be recorded as data - such as emotional states, hallucinogenic trips etc. But again, they aren'c considered 'proof' of anything, certainly not 'empirical proof' - they're just raw data which, under pure empirical method, we are expected to record as dispassionately as possible.
First of all, the information which we synthesize must be accesible by all rational men. For example, if one man says there is a tiger in the cave, but all other men go in and say there isn't, and no one is lying, we don't accept the first man's claim as useable grist to synthesize further knowledge. But here's where it becomes a real lemon-eyer. The point of synthetic knowledge is that we can take two things observed by rational people, then mentally synthesize a third piece of knowledge, and then find that to be true - which is what synthetic knowledge actually means. For example, Kant was the first person to prove that mathematics was based on synthetic propositions - if you have one and two, you can synthesize from that knowledge of the existence of three. What's more, you can then use that knowledge to go on and prove that in that schema, three really does exist, then use that to synthesize further knowledge. Two, synthetic knowledge is mostly testable. Synthetic knowledge means working out something from two or more component parts that you could never have worked out from any of the individual component parts. We can even do it on our own - I can see the sun, feel its warmth, then feel a warm rock, out in the sun. Either of those two on their own don't tell me that the sun warms up rocks - but with both observations together, I can synthesize the knowledge that the sun's heat warms up rocks. If people say, my teacher does taiji, and then another person says, you're an idiot if you don't think he can really use it, then there's no way for me to synthesize knowledge about that teacher from that information. Either way, what needs to be fully understood is that objective knowledge is not the same thing as an objective view - you will always have a subjective view, but the objective map of the workd comes about via synthesizing from basic information awareness of things happening that we couldn't work out just from one piece of information - we build a rational picture of the world from empirical evidence, and we check that it is true by synthesizing new information which in turn proves to be borne out by experience and observations. Again, objective knowledge just means a practical map of the world that conforms to experience. It is not the same thing as an objective view, which we can never have, technically. How do we synthesize knowledge that black people are inferior? We don't - and a million people thinking that they are only gives us one thing, even if it seems like a million things - and that one thing is a subjective view, not an empirical observation.
I have done the research, and it's not about you, except for the fact that your knowledge about the definition of empirical is empirical, and as such it runs counter to the definitions that exist in an English language dictionary. One of the alternative definitions for the word empiricism is: "Quackery, charlatanry." The courage to face what is true rather than what is comfortable, or to accept that previously held beliefs were incorrect, is important in all aspects of life; language arts as well as martial ones.
I really can't make it much clearer. Empiricism means observing things, as opposed to building mental theories, say, out of theological principles. 'Empirical proof' doesn't mean that if you experience something it is therefore empirically proved. I'm sorry - it doesn't, and the dictionary definition you gave is a little open to interpretation, and I'm afraid you've interpreted it slightly wrongly. It's obviously not true to say that experiencing something is empircal proof of it - and arguing the point is moot - you'll still be wrong, no matter what. Empiricism is a data gathering means, and simply refers to observing the world and recording the raw data. You are, of course, free to think that if you experience something that you have direct empirical proof of it -such as, if you experience the voice of God telling you something, that you have direct empirical proof of the existence of God. But I'm afraid you won't have. Many people do think that, and you can hear religious people arguing from that position of fallacy any day of the week. But they, like you, will be wrong. More, and I'm afraid slightly better, research, is my advice to you, OP.
Guys, I think you should pack it in. Fire Quan knows what he's talking about. And you have walked into a buzz-saw. The last couple posts touch on why I side with the atheists even though I'm personally religious. My reasons for believing what I believe are personal and subjective. The skeptics and non-believers come from a much stronger position in terms of evidence, logic and philosophical depth. With this "empty force" bull **** the ground you're standing on isn't simply shaky. It doesn't even exist.
I'm with Old Palden on this one,. Here are two statements. 1. E=MC2 2. All Philosiphers are a****holes. The first statement I can prove mathematically with reasoned and REPEATABLE observation and calculation. = Empirical proof. The second (although I may believe it to be true), I cannot prove. Therefore I simply do not make the statement. The fact that Kant or Aquinus or whoever else proposed some THEORIES (and that is all they are because they cannot be proved empirically) does not make them true. Provide me with some scientifically, repeatable experimental data which proves they are correct and I may start to believe you. That is why I call Philosophy a Pseudo Science. You say you cannot provide proof of a negative. Absolutely correct. All Philosophers are ar**holes. Qigong is a cult . Which of these statements is true? Very best wishes
Hi All, I would like to reply but there is no use. I believe that I am posting a message on MAP But there is a mad scientist deceiving me into falsely believing that I am posting a message on MAP Therefore I cannot know that I am posting a message on MAP ( I may be in the Matrix). So there is no point posting. [What is the effect of pure skepticism on empirical data gathering and subjective vs objective reason, or even free will vs determinism? Do I exist? Are you reading this? Can you ever REALLY know? If you are reading this was it your choice? Was Descartes wrong when he said "cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am)? Do you choose the Red Pill or the Green Pill? ]
Hello Jalan7, Seems like too many people on this forum are only interested in self-centred arguments, and not enough on genuine discussions. I'll try to back-track on the subject. From what I have experienced, EF most probably base on mainly two phenomenons (plus probably lots of others): 1. Trained Synaesthesia 2. Classical conditioning 1. Synaesthesia is an involuntary sensation, though what you choose to do with the sensation is voluntary. Therefore, a lot of times when the "Master" does an EF on a "Student", the student usually does feel something. Whether he chooses to fall over or keep standing is up to him though. 2. If I see a truck coming towards me, I will instinctively jump out of the way, whether I choose to or not. It is a self-protection reflex. Some "no-touch" throws happens through this. I believe it can have a real use in fights, in manipulating the opponent's psychology. Needs further exploration though. Cheers, John
wow - a serious response Hi ImperialTaiChi, I think you nailed it. Also there may be room to consider that when a Master has superior stick, join, adhere, follow (along with the two conditions you described) then it may appear to generate EF. Someone posted earlier making a comparisson to throwing a fake in fighting. I gets a reaction that creates an opening. But the trick with a fake is that you have to be adaptible enough to follow through if there is a real opening. So in the mind it shouldn't really be a fake at all. Then the mind should be flexible enough to make any intended attack into a fake. I discussed EF with my Shifu following this post and he asked me which kind of EF did I mean? There is the EF that is generally associated with the term in the West and there is "empty" vs "full" force. This is when the partner gives up too much and you continue to follow the Yin point with little pressure until they move themselves to the end of there root range and get moved. So basically they "move by themselves" and don't support enough. As a result they basically unbalance themselves trying to avoid the push and you capitalize on this type of mistake by sticking and following. I have used this alot with people with less experience but I didn't know that it could also be termed EF (at least to the Chinese). So I figure that if I can use this type of EF then someone with 50 years experience may be able to use the same skill with a different appearance - seeming to use the EF that started this thread. There are alot of videos claiming to demonstrate EF on youtube that are clearly a load of malarky - that make me embarassed to even watch - they are so shameful! If there is any hope to develop a scientific understanding of EF then we have to get away from the idea that there is some magical forcefield. If some high level masters can use a real EF then it has to be a tangible and not a magical skill and be based on Taiji rules from the classics. My teacher is a very sensible man of good character that I have known for several years. He said he saw his teacher, Lin Mo Gen, keep a dove (pigeon) from flying off of his hand using listening energy. In the stories about Yang Lu Chan he used a sparrow but Master Lin could not accomplish this with such a small bird - his Listening energy was not strong/light enough. Still a pigeon sized bird is pretty impressive. Those skills we read about in the old stories may seem to be near impossible - even lost to todays taiji practitioner. But Master Lin could accomplish similar feat after 50 years of training. If he had started earlier ( he started around his early 30's and performed this in his 80's) or could live an extra 30 years maybe he could develop more. Anyway, something like this may seem magical or impossible. Some may have read the accounts of Yang Lu Chan's skills and assume they had been embellished. What if they weren't but we are too closed minded to shoot for the sky? Could be a big mistake. Best Wishes. Jamie
Hello Jamie, Exactly my thoughts too. There is no such thing as magic; it only means we haven't studied enough to explain it scientifically yet. Cheers, John
You are right. In this difficult time for Quan, the last thing we should do is self centredly promote our own selves, or selfish agendas.
THIS is Empty Force!!! [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdzlurKTVtI"]YouTube - hadoken Ryu Theme[/ame]
