Don´t you, Wolfgang, feel emotions ? (Escamillo)

Sure, but has this to do with the question whether a testable set of predictions is right or wrong?

M.Ted,
when you speak about science you speak very obviously about something of which you have close to no knowledge. That's a pity. I wouldn't even know where to start to correct your misconceptions. You confuse facts with theories, research methodology with statements about the environment. Science is completely different to a religion in so many respects. If a scientist would start to sound really like a religious person (some do, I know) she does something wrong.

I know that awkward feeling you have that scientists sometimes tell you that your very personal experiences are wrong from my personal experience when doing experiments about human errors of memory, perception and thinking.

If I induce a memory error in a person some of them get really emotionally upset when I tell them they are in error. I know they are for I am in control of the situation and can if necessary replay the situation. Some of them even believe a replay to be a fake for they rather trust their recollection than me. There are some visual illusions so strong that some students never believe me when I say that their perception in a situation is in error. I do it sometimes on purpose without showing them how it was made. I think they can learn something about human nature by noticing that their personal experiences and recollections can be fooled. But asome will never learn that and very< deeply don't want to. I can't help that. A mind has to be at least a tiny bit open to get some things in.

An extreme case which all people accept are phantom limbs. If you had lost your leg, your nerve cells will still represent you as whole and you will have feelings(itch and all that) in a nonexistent limb. That feels so real that some even believe the limb is there (in another sphere) and it itches out there. You are the expert on your personal feelings, so I'd never tell you it should not itch because it isn't there. However, you are not the expert on what happens in your brain and your nervous system you are but the recipient of a final impression. And if you are fooled by your nervous system it feels completely real to you (and you are the only expert about that feeling) but you are not the expert (in some situations) on whether what you feel corresponds to reality or not.

With a certain disturbance in one part of the brain (don't recollect which) people lose the body feeling. We normally perceive the 'I' somewhere behind the eyes or in the breast but that feeling can be lost permanently or (more often) for a short time. In extreme cases people see themselves as a doppelgaenger. The experience feels(according to many reports) as completely real and compelling. But it isn't true in another sense of the word.

For most people and in most situations it does not matter. But sometimes it matters and therefore psychologists can learn (some won't) to distinguish between feelings, experiences and reality. That does not mean not to take the experiences serious. It is true to them and insomuch it has to be taken serious but a real feeling or experience may have in extreme casses no correspondance in reality. Does it matter what the truth is? In many case not.

So if someone believes to have been abducted by a UFO it doesn't normally interfere with the daily functioning of that person (so it would matter on a worldwide level if we would believe that to be true). She may go on believing that and noone is affected in any negative sense. If a bad therapist implants a wrong memory to a client that she has been abused as a child by her father the objective truth matters.

So, yes, there are people who are much better experts than yourself under which circumstances your experiences, feelings, memories are more likely to have no correspondance in reality. Whether you have these feelings or not, you are the expert for and noone else.

So if someone tells me I recollect such and such I can never (yet) tell whether that report about a recollection is wrong. I could not say no, you don't have that recollection for I believe they have. But I may be in a position to tell them that the recollection they experience may have no factual basis.

Wolfgang