hairyfigment comments on The Fabric of Real Things - Less Wrong

16 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 October 2012 02:11AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 October 2012 05:49:27AM 1 point [-]

Koan 1:

"You say that a universe is a connected fabric of causes and effects. Well, that's a very Western viewpoint - that it's all about mechanistic, deterministic stuff. I agree that anything else is outside the realm of science, but it can still be real, you know. My cousin is psychic - if you draw a card from his deck of cards, he can tell you the name of your card before he looks at it. There's no mechanism for it - it's not a causal thing that scientists could study - he just does it. Same thing when I commune on a deep level with the entire universe in order to realize that my partner truly loves me. I agree that purely spiritual phenomena are outside the realm of causal processes, which can be scientifically understood, but I don't agree that they can't be real."

How would you reply?

Comment author: hairyfigment 13 October 2012 08:24:59PM 1 point [-]

CCC and others have given most of my answer. As a practical matter, I would ask: 'Do you need to commune with the entire universe in order to realize your partner loves you? If you have no good evidence taken from your relationship, from the interactions between you, that seems like a giant warning sign.'

Note too that the part about the psychic cousin (if we falsely assume that it has a clear meaning which the character wants to state openly) seems meant to describe a graph with a "spiritual" node that connects to the cousin's card-naming behavior and to nothing else that we can observe. Which does not violate this particular rule, but does seem needlessly complicated.

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