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Where did these ideas come from if not from impressions? Where they created out of nothing? If your brain can create knowledge apart from sense data, why can't an input less brain do that too?

There must be some reason you were convinced it was true? How could be believe that certain angles add to 180° if you don't know about degrees? If you met someone who had no concept of geometry they wouldn't just know that the angles add up to 180°. You'd have to teach them that that is the...

I like to imagine a brain in a vat without any nerves attached. Maybe that brain would still get some inputs, but hypothetically we could cap the nerve endings such that no signal gets inputted. It would be like seeing out our your toe, or smelling through our TV, in each case no signal...

I don't think it is independent of empirical testing. We may not empirically test the angles of a triangle directly, but that proof relies on axioms that we have imperially tested. To know that the angles add up to 180 degrees, we must have experienced Euclid's postulates. Because of this we...

I agree that Hume's argument is that all knowledge ultimately comes from the senses. But I think Hume would agree that we can have knowledge of things we haven't had impressions of; and the process of stringing together impressions into complex thoughts is reason. We can produce the idea of a...

Ill have to go read some Leibniz then. And yes probably best to avoid a full on debate but just a few quick points. I agree that the sense data is generated inside the brain. But why should we expect anything to go on inside a brain without inputs. Is there an example of something that could...

I think the objects themselves are not part of our human experience. It is our sense data which is the experience, and this data can be combined together to produce guesses about what the experience of an abstract object would be like. What convinced me of this is to imagine a brain that had no...

I think that Hume was right in that all knowledge comes from experience. So any way in which you show or prove something has to at some level be reliant on experience and therefore not certain. Just because a system of logic is sound and complete does not mean that its axioms are true. I would...

Posts moved from Symptom perceptions, illness beliefs and coping in chronic fatigue syndrome, 2009, Moss-Morris Although that is still not definitive as it assumes that our sense data and the laws of logic are accurate. But hey that kind of proof is about as good as we can get.

The HCs in that study had lower SCP volumes than the LC patients in the above study (who had much lower SCP volumes than their controls). Not sure how that could happen.

People always judge others behavior in terms of how they think they would react in a certain situation. But I think that ignores what it would be like to experience the world as someone else, everyone has reasons for why they act like they do, even if in hindsight that person realizes they...

The volume reduction in the SCP seem significant enough that you'd have expected it to be picked up in a previous study. Perhaps it has been.

What was it that changed your mind? Was it was your own personal experience? Because that might be great evidence for you, but that isn't a good reason for others to change their minds. Was it the evidence that is presented in these books? If so, then can we talk about that evidence directly...

I completely agree, and I think the problem might be something like that. I would argue that makes it all the more important not to use money on treatment trials without a good justification and instead in developing new research tools. That's why I don't think testing treatments in this way...

The analogy was to a gadget. In humans we would have to use imaging or blood samples to see what is going wrong. That can be done while the malfunctioning bits are in operation. How do you know we have to try maximum doses? There might be some non-linear dose dependent response. If you think...

That would be an incredibly inefficient way to go about it. Given you know nothing about the issue there are literally an infinite number of things that might fix it. If you try something and it doesn't work all that tells you is that you can rule out that one specific thing, assuming you did...

I don't have a strong opinion on subgroups but don't think we have good reasons for ruling them out. The key symptoms of ME/CFS are still vague enough to result from different processes. As we have seen in other threads, PEM is not one unique thing and is described differently in different...

That has already happens. There are plenty of anecdotes but nothing that seems particularly promising. For all we know a drug that works for ME/CFS might be dangerous and or specialized to the point that no one would chose to test it.

Given the stark difference in symptoms between ME/CFS and healthy controls why would we expect that subtle differences in metabolites could play an important role in the disease? There are thousands and thousands of variables that can cause changes in given levels of metabolites that subtle...

I also think there is a group of people that get red/blue feet and hands from being upright too long and/or too hot. My guess is that it happens more frequently in people who are given the POTS label and is probably worse when general symptoms are worse. To me it feels like the opposite problem...