occlude comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! - Less Wrong
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Imagine that you have a switch in your home which responds to your touch by turning on a lamp (this probably won't take much imagination). One day this lamp, which was off, suddenly and for no apparent reason turns on. Would you assign supernatural or mundane causes to this event?
Now this isn't absolute proof that the switch wasn't turned on by something otherworldly; perhaps it responds to both mundane and supernatural causes. But, well, if I may be blunt, Occam's Razor. If your best explanations are "the Hand of Zeus" and "Mittens, my cat," then ...
I assume much the same things about this as any other sense: it's there to give information about the world, but trickable. I mean, how tired you feel is a good measure of how long it's been since you've slept, but you can drink coffee and end up feeling more energetic than is merited. So if I want to be able to tell how much sleep I really need, I should avoid caffeine. That doesn't mean the existence of caffeine makes your subjective feelings of your own energy level arbitrary or worthless.