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?

Years after first reading this, I think I've internalized its central point in a clear-to-me way, and I'd like to post it here in case it's useful to someone else with a similar bent to their thinking.

Without worrying about the specific nature of the Schrodinger equation, we can say the universe is governed by a set of equations of form x, where each x[i] is some variable in the universe's configuration space, each f[i] is some continuous function, and t is a parameter representing time. This would be true even in a classical universe---the configuration space would just look more like the coordinates for a bunch of particles, and less like parameters of a waveform. All this is really saying is that the universe has some configuration at every time.

Now, one thing you can do with parametric equations is eliminate the parameter. If we have, say, 1000 parametric equations relating x[1] through x[1000] to t, we can convert these to 999 equations relating x[1] through x[1000] to one another, and "cut out the middleman" so to speak. Your new equations will define the same curve in configuration space, and you can determine the relative order of events just by tracing along that curve (as long as there are no "singularities"---points where two different values of t gave you the same point in the configuration space).

Moreover, from inside the universe there's no way to tell the difference between these two situations. "Two hours ago" can mean either "at t - 2hr" or it can mean "at the point on this curve in configuration space where the clocks all say it's 7:00 instead of 9:00", and there's no experimental distinction to be made between these meanings. So positing a fundamental thing called "time" doesn't actually have any explanatory power!

From this understanding, timeless physics is better viewed as a more parsimonious way to frame any theory, rather than a part of quantum theory specifically. We could just as well explain Newtonian physics timelessly.