reliability of eye-witness accounts

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Oh great, you just turned a conversation about memory into evolution/creation debate. See why I don't have much respect for you?

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Uh, that comment has nothing to do with evolution or creation. I have no respect for you. You don't know what you are talking about :/

Whether I remember wrong or not it doesn't matter. We as humans form opinions on what we feel we remember correctly.

hehe I just realized who you are Lam. I thought you were someone who just likes being rude. But I guess you have your reasons.

The same thing as?: "We should trust our eyes" is quite a different argument than "the stuff you do remember is what matters". Not 100% secure, no. Having that kind of attitude could send the wrong person to the electric chair. All memory is falliable, yours included. What you believe to have genuinely occurred may not have occurred at all. You are not immune to this phenomenon just because you want to be.I'll ask again, since you didn't answer the first time:

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"We should trust our eyes" is quite a different argument than "the stuff you do remember is what matters".

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You've seen what you remember right? I don't see a difference.

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Not 100% secure, no. Having that kind of attitude could send the wrong person to the electric chair. All memory is falliable, yours included. What you believe to have genuinely occurred may not have occurred at all. You are not immune to this phenomenon just because you want to be.

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Of course and that's alright. I never said I wanted to be. Do you not recognize when things you remember might not have happened? And I know you don't but sometimes you do and memories that are questionable are usually trivial.I believe the specific imprint you recieve from something is what matters, like if you have a dream and it shows you to turn your life around(happened last night) the fact that it really happened or that you really saw it does that matter? I guess that illustrates what I'm trying to say a little more clearly.I believe God instills certain memories in your mind to help guide you along. That a certain impression you recieve is meant, not just a coincidence.

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Do you honestly feel that every single memory you have is 100% accurate?

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As I've said before on this thread, no. Do you think I think I'm God or something?

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-one word to describe me, spectacular yes

A while back there was some ABC news show about how unreliable eyewitnesses can be, particularly when they are involved with another activity.They showed a video tape of three people tossing around different colored balls. They ask you to count how many times a certain colored ball was tossed. At the end of the test they didn't ask so much about the number of tosses, but about the gorilla. What gorilla? I thought it was a trick, but a replay showed that after a few seconds of ball tossing a guy in a gorilla suit came out and stayed on camera for several seconds.I was so intent on my count that I never saw it. I was wondering about my lack of observation when they mentioned that over half who view the tape with those instructions don't see the gorilla.Inaccurate perception plus inaccurate recall can make a number of people poor eyewitnesses, so who to believe?ABB

Do you always dodge the main point in real life conversations?

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People, please look at the Style Guide for EvC thread by Sylas. Pay particular attention to step 3.SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Refusal to use the search engine may cause brain cancer.

Do you practice giving out random unsupported beliefs? Mind giving me the specific bible reference to this statement?

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People, please look at the Style Guide for EvC thread by Sylas. Pay particular attention to step 3.SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Refusal to use the search engine may cause brain cancer.

There is a difference, Chris. There are several reasons why you may not remember correctly what you saw.First of all, when you witness something, you may not be able to see things clearly, or you may, for example, get the colours wrong because of monochrome streetlights. Thus you can become convinced that the murderer wore a yellow shirt, whereas, in daylight, it's a light blue shirt.Then it may be the case that you are interpreting what you see, depending on your state of mind. If you had witnessed the same scene in a different mindset or mood, you might have interpreted what you saw differently.Afterward, when the memories start to fade, you may be mixing them up, interchanging persons and things in diverse scenes you've witnessed that may be a bit similar. You may unwittingly add elements to your memory that you haven't actually seen or heard, but which your common sense tells you must have been the case, even if in reality the scene you witnessed was one of those rare events where, by sheer coincidence, things go just a little different than common sense would have you expect. In the same way, elements may be removed entirely from memory. Still, you are convinced that this is how you saw things.Another illustration of how memory can trick us, is the following experiment, described here, by Susan Blackmore: She gives the following reference for this: This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 01 March 2005 10:42 AM

Then what did you mean by: It sure seems like you are stating that my decision to not trust my own viewpoint 100% was the wrong one, and that it would lead to me having a "bad existence". Now it's "alright" and you're fine living your life that way? This is the crux of the problem I have with your argument. You seem to be saying that if something is important, you will remember it correctly. That is simply not the case. Repeated reexamination of memories, which tends to happen with important ones, will likely amplify or distort those memories. The meaning of dreams and God to life decisions is not the subject of this thread. However, in a way, you've refuted your own argument:You've stated that dreams can be "real" enough that they can lead to life-changing events, and that is doesn't matter whether these dream "memories" are real or not. Kind of refutes your position that important life-shaping memories are correct, doesn't it? A dream memory is a false memory, but to you it is real enough to "turn your life around" - you are basing the course of your life upon the "memory" of something that didn't happen. Actually, I went back and checked. This is the first time you answered the question.Whether knowingly or not you've changed your argument and the details of that argument several times in the past several messages (while claiming you haven't)... it's getting a bit silly.

Most likely Dateline NBC, Friday January 16, 2004. The original video may be viewed at Demo 15. Requires Java, and doesn't seem to work in Opera 8.0b2 with Sun J2RE 1.5, but does work in IE for me, with the same Java.See also Visual Cognition Lab. At the bottom there's a link to more demonstrations.

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Maybe, or it could mean that we are degenerating morally overall so that witness integrity is actually less reliable than it used to be and it's a good thing we have sophisticated forensics. Not something that could be proved but something I suspect may be the case. One of those private musings again.

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Is the fact that the human brain is susceptible to optical illusions a sign that we are morally degenerating too?

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This is where personal integrity plays a big part though. If people's judgments of what they witnessed are as easily swayed as some of these studies show, I think that is about integrity more than anything natural about memory.

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Uh, no, not really.Is someone who experiences an optical illusion effect lacking in integrity when they tell you what they see, or are they being truthful but their brain is fooling them?

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I think people today have less solid standards of honesty so that emotions and biases and external influences more easily compromise their view of things.

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Does someone who experiences an optical illusion on a less solid standard of honesty?Emotions and biases and external influences have been pretty much the sole, or at least the main, basis for human views for millenia. Religious thought and dogma, which is nothing if it isn't the group manifestation of emotion, bias and external influence, completely ruled the cultures of the world until science and rational thought eventually was able to gain a foothold a few hundred years ago.But I will actually agree that people in the US these days, even in our technological, high-tech age, are generally more susceptible to fuzzy, irrational thinking, because we have had such a anti-intellectual, anti-critical thought, pro-blind allegience climate.However, let me qualify that by saying that logical thinking is not at all natural for humans. Human biases and thought errors and communal reinforcements are what enabeled us to survive early in our existence.

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Now don't totalize what I'm saying here. This is another personal musing on a possible trend, just something I think may be the case that would be just about impossible to prove.

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Why do you think this is the case, though? Based upon what evidence?

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Of course physical evidence has a part when it's available, but it isn't always. Would you be less like to cavil and object if I hadn't said "mainstay" (which is not synonymous with "only kind of evidence" by the way), but something vaguer like "an important part of" the law? "Mainstay" doesn't rule out other kinds of evidence.

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"Mainstay" implies "main", as in "most used".Correct?

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Sure, but the Biblical standard DOES take into account human fallibility, that's the whole point of requiring more than one witness.

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You have been challenging this very simple obvious statement but that simple obvious statement still stands.

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Well, that is true, but that is very weak as some kind of accolade for the Bible. More than one witness does not hurt, but it doesn't particularly help with regards to reliability.The people who wrote the Bible clearly thought that eye witnesses were very important, but we now know that eyewitnesses are not all that useful.

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this is from the other thread you didn't reply to.
Can you (personally) tell when to trust your eyes and when not to?

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Actually, I did reply.I said that I did not always trust my eyes.In day to day life, the stakes are low, so I generally trust that the apple that I bought at the store which is sitting on the table three feet away is, indeed, an apple.

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Can you cite an example in life of when you didn't trust your own eyes?

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Sure.When driving on the interstate highways, it is common to see all manner of stuff on the side of the road. My persomal tendency, however, is to see them all as some kind of dead animal. Sometimes they are dead animals, but sometimes I totally think they are dead animals until I get close enough to see that it is a piece of dirty carpet or a mound of earth.It's not just that I think they might be dead animals; I am sure they are dead animals, and I'm always surprised when I see that it isn't an animal at all.

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You've seen what you remember right? I don't see a difference.

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Once, There was an accident at a farm I worked at in which a horse kicked a woman when she was out in the field with them.I there was a lawsuit resulting from the accident, and I had to give a deposition several years later regarding the invident.One of the reasons the woman was in the field was because one of the horses had a leadrope still attached to his halter which was a danger to him and needed to be removed.I recalled very vividly a certain one of the horses running around with a leadrope swinging from his halter. I could (and still can) picture him, his tail streaming out behind him, his knees and hocks lifted really high.The thing is, I never saw that. The horse with the leadrope still attached to him was actually a totally different horse. Different color, different way of moving, everything.So, no what you remember isn't always what you actually see.

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Do you not recognize when things you remember might not have happened? And I know you don't but sometimes you do and memories that are questionable are usually trivial.

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There have been more than a few cases of people being exonerated from rape charges after being very confidently identified as the attacker by the rape victim herself, except that the DNA evidence of semen collected was not possibly a match to his.Anything but trivial, wouldn't you say?