Aaron5 comments on Mundane Magic - Less Wrong

102 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 31 October 2008 04:00PM

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Comment author: Aaron5 31 October 2008 04:58:53PM 2 points [-]

Carrier's system still seems to create a circular situation where the smaller parts we reduce larger things into continue, in a sense, to be mental constructions. Electrons behave in ways Einstein called "spooky", and it takes very sophisticated systems to describe them, and then, the descriptions are probabilistic. The important thing is that we're still observing something, whereas the supernatural is basically a collection of spectacular reports that cannot be verified. How much greater would it be to have a third eye to read people's thoughts, in addition to the amazing eye you described? Would you really be bored by it, if you knew there was some bizarre quantum explanation? Heck, New Age types make appeals to all sorts of seemingly reductionist explanations. The problem isn't that the supernatural concept can't be broken down beyond one's mental process, it's that there is no phenomena beyond the person's mental process in the first place. Carrier's distinction only seems to ensure that you're debating pseudo-scientists instead of supernaturalists.

I recently had an argument at work over Barrack Obama's supposedly unverifiable Hawaiian birth certificate. I accessed all of the various websites showing the certificates authenticity. But everything I said or pulled up on the internet was met with disbelief. There was some alternate person my co-worker could point to saying the opposite. This was a debate on the reality of a perfectly mundane, real object. When people stop looking at the objective, outside world, there's unfortunately no philosophical argument that will pull them back in.