If the "boring view" of reality is correct, then you can never predict anything irreducible because you are reducible. You can never get Bayesian confirmation for a hypothesis of irreducibility, because any prediction you can make is, therefore, something that could also be predicted by a reducible thing, namely your brain.

Benja Fallenstein commented:

I think that while you can in this case never devise an empirical test whose outcome could logically prove irreducibility, there is no clear reason to believe that you cannot devise a test whose counterfactual outcome in an irreducible world would make irreducibility subjectively much more probable (given an Occamian prior).
Without getting into reducibility/irreducibility, consider the scenario that the physical universe makes it possible to build a hypercomputer —that performs operations on arbitrary real numbers, for example —but that our brains do not actually make use of this: they can be simulated perfectly well by an ordinary Turing machine, thank you very much...

Well, that's a very intelligent argument, Benja Fallenstein. But I have a crushing reply to your argument, such that, once I deliver it, you will at once give up further debate with me on this particular point:

You're right.

Alas, I don't get modesty credit on this one, because after publishing yesterday's post I realized a similar flaw on my own—this one concerning Occam's Razor and psychic powers:

If beliefs and desires are irreducible and ontologically basic entities, or have an ontologically basic component not covered by existing science, that would make it far more likely that there was an ontological rule governing the interaction of different minds—an interaction which bypassed ordinary "material" means of communication like sound waves, known to existing science.

If naturalism is correct, then there exists a conjugate reductionist model that makes the same predictions as any concrete prediction that any parapsychologist can make about telepathy.

Indeed, if naturalism is correct, the only reason we can conceive of beliefs as "fundamental" is due to lack of self-knowledge of our own neurons—that the peculiar reflective architecture of our own minds exposes the "belief" class but hides the machinery behind it.

Nonetheless, the discovery of information transfer between brains, in the absence of any k...

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