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MixedNuts comments on The Fabric of Real Things - Less Wrong
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Koan 1:
How would you reply?
My reply, before reading other replies, is that the question is wrongly posed. The described phenomena can be part of a causal universe, because they are causal processes.
Consider the psychic cousin. I draw a card from his deck - it is (say) the three of clubs. Let us further assume that he correctly guesses the card that I have drawn, and does so in 99% of trials. In such circumstances, his statement of the card that I have drawn ('you have drawn the three of clubs!') is caused by my drawing the three of clubs. The mechanism of that causality may not be known, but it is there.
Similarly for the example of "communing on a deep level with the entire universe in order to realize that your partner truly loves you" - there's a causal link, there, and the cause is "your partner truly loves you". (Personally, I'd prefer to check the conclusion by some other means in order to prevent observer bias effects, but this becomes tricky for this example).
Purely spiritual phenomena, therefore, are firmly inside the realm of causal processes, even if they are not yet fully understood.
"Your partner truly loves you" could also be a purely spiritual phenomenon outside the realm of science. This implies that it has no observable consequences; a partner who truly loves you is no less and no more likely to dump you than one who doesn't. This is an unusual idea of true love.
It could be. However, the consequences of the questioner's "communing with the universe" are observable; I can observe whether you claim that your partner truly loves you or not afterwards.
Since this is an observable consequence, I therefore conclude that if it is possible to commune with the universe in such a way, and if the results of such communing are correlated at all to the state "your partner truly loves you", then that state has consequences (i.e. whether or not you say that it is true after communing with the universe) and thus can be part of a causal universe.
And since it has observable consequences, you can do science to it! Yay!