HistoricalLing comments on Stuff That Makes Stuff Happen - Less Wrong

51 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 18 October 2012 10:49AM

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Comment author: HistoricalLing 17 October 2012 09:27:40AM -1 points [-]

Previous koan:

"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 that can be studied by experiments, but I don't agree that they can't be real."

that's pretty much the worst koan I've ever heard