moshez 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: moshez 23 October 2012 11:12:57PM 2 points [-]

Replying without reading any of the other answers. Apologies in advance for redundancy:

Meditation 1: The psychic cousin is indeed connected to the network of things. Let's assume that it works, for simplicity, on decks of two cards: an Ace and a King.

Probabilities: Moshe picked Ace/Cousin says Moshe picked Ace -- 0.4 Moshe picked King/Cousin says Moshe picked Ace -- 0.1 Moshe picked Ace/Cousin says Moshe picked King -- 0.1 Moshe picked King/Cousin says Moshe picked Ace -- 0.4

The True Love/Communing is more complicated: Does True Love have any discernible effect? If we assume True Love, say, changes the probability of having a fight (or some property of the fight -- for example, a fight without reconciliation inside of 24 hours), then we should have a diagram:

True Love --> Communing says True Love | | \/ No fight

and resulting joint probability distributions. Since "fighting" is something observable (by a trained psychologist, say, who puts them in the "Love Lab" http://www.gottman.com/49847/The-Love-Lab.html) we have connectedness.

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