“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.”
My reply, before reading other replies, is that the question is wrongly posed. The described phenomena can be part of a causal universe, because they are causal processes.
Consider the psychic cousin. I draw a card from his deck—it is (say) the three of clubs. Let us further assume that he correctly guesses the card that I have drawn, and does so in 99% of trials. In such circumstances, his statement of the card that I have drawn (‘you have drawn the three of clubs!’) is caused by my drawing the three of clubs. The mechanism of that causality may not be known, but it is there.
Similarly for the example of “communing on a deep level with the entire universe in order to realize that your partner truly loves you”—there’s a causal link, there, and the cause is “your partner truly loves you”. (Personally, I’d prefer to check the conclusion by some other means in order to prevent observer bias effects, but this becomes tricky for this example).
Purely spiritual phenomena, therefore, are firmly inside the realm of causal processes, even if they are not yet fully understood.
“Your partner truly loves you” could also be a purely spiritual phenomenon outside the realm of science. This implies that it has no observable consequences; a partner who truly loves you is no less and no more likely to dump you than one who doesn’t. This is an unusual idea of true love.
It could be. However, the consequences of the questioner’s “communing with the universe” are observable; I can observe whether you claim that your partner truly loves you or not afterwards.
Since this is an observable consequence, I therefore conclude that if it is possible to commune with the universe in such a way, and if the results of such communing are correlated at all to the state “your partner truly loves you”, then that state has consequences (i.e. whether or not you say that it is true after communing with the universe) and thus can be part of a causal universe.
Right. If there was no causal link between the card drawn and the psychic predicting the card, then the psychic wouldn’t get the right answer. There has to be a causal link, or else the psychic answer would have nothing to do with the card that you picked, and then it wouldn’t be any better then random.
Causal diagrams don’t require understanding of the links- if the content of the card influences your cousin’s claim, then we would draw an arc from the card to the claim in our causal diagram, even if we don’t know how he’s influenced by the card.
(Privately, I would suspect the speaker’s belief is not rigorous, and would not put much weight by it, but why challenge them on a factual matter when we’re discussing causal networks?)
It’s not clear to me that you’ve sufficiently expanded your belief that your partner truly loves you, or what it means to commune with the universe, or what separates physical and non-physical processes. If we define as real things which are part of reality, and acknowledge that your belief in your partner’s true love exists in reality, why are we not content to find real causes for that belief?
(Of course, there are many status reasons to turn to spiritual causes. But the instrumental benefits are probably outweighed by the epistemic detriments- or, at least, I should not privately believe their claim, even if I consider it worthy of public endorsement.)
“Magic” just means “I don’t know how it works.” (Pratchett, somewhere in the Tiffany Aching novels.)
If the world is exhibiting some regularity, you can always ask how that happens. “No mechanism” is itself a prediction: that none will be found. Where did that prediction come from?
Taboo the word real for a moment. Also any related words, like ‘actual.’ What do you mean when you say that it can be real?
You say your cousin can tell you the name of a card before he looks at it, after a random draw of the deck. But he does it. It’s an act on his part. This isn’t a mere word-issue either: you don’t think the same thing will happen if I try to predict a card you draw from a deck. So you are talking about a direct link between his statement and the card. Unless you think he is doing it by chance (so that there is just a correlation, and an extremely improbable one at that) you think that there is a causal link between the card drawn and the prediction. Saying you don’t know what it is, is not the same thing as saying that it is not there.
Likewise, when you say that you commune with the universe, you are stating some act, “communing” and some result “finding out that your partner loves you.” You don’t expect this to fail the next time you do it, or you wouldn’t perform the act to that effect. (You might perform it to “see if it works this time” but that would be another matter.) So I don’t think you really believe what you think you believe. Why would you “commune with the universe” if it did not cause effects such as “realizing your partner truly loves you”?
I agree that anything else is outside the realm of science, but it can still be real, you know. [Two examples with hidden mechanisms]
Mechanisms can be well hidden; if you deny that there is mechanism, you’re just cheating yourself out of the chance to figure out what the mechanism was. When you “commune with the universe”, you’re actually putting your brain into a meditative state where it queries large volumes of remembered weak evidence that you can’t recall by normal means. You can use that state for other things, too (but you’ll fool yourself if you don’t understand its limitations). When your cousin does card tricks, he’s explicitly presenting you with a hard puzzle—figure out just how he’s cheating. Answers are in books, but custom forbids giving spoilers. Figure it out, and you can fool others the same way.
Probably I would start with “You say about your cousin that it’s not something that scientists could study. That’s an interesting claim. Suppose I tried to study it… say, suppose I asked him to demonstrate this ability a hundred times, and wrote down for each demonstration what card I drew, and what card he named. That’s one way to start to do science, to observe the phenomenon and record my observations. Would something prevent me from doing that? Would the ability itself stop working? Something else?”
Their answer would give me more of a sense of what I was dealing with. It doesn’t engage with the reality question directly, but how I engage with the reality question will depend a lot on their answer to this question.
That’s one way to start to do science, to observe the phenomenon and record my observations. Would something prevent me from doing that? Would the ability itself stop working? Something else?
Suppose that the Great Psychicator who imbues all psychics with their amazing powers hates Science and revokes their abilities the moment one decides to systematically study them, so all such experiments lead to a null result. This model “explains” the null results found by the James Randi Educational Foundation.
This might look far-fetched, but recall that “Nature” already behaves like it, say in the double-slit experiment. Replace “psychic abilities” with “interference pattern produced by an electron psychically detecting the other slit” and “systematic study” with “adding detector to one of the slits”. The moment you start this “systematic study” the electron’s “psychic abilities” to sense the presence of the other slit disappear without a trace.
(nods) This is basically (modulo snark) the position of several people I know who believe in such things, and at least one LW contributor.
Faced with that response, I usually pursue a track along the lines of “Ah, I see. That makes sense as far as it goes, but it gets tricky, because it’s also true that we frequently perceive patterns that aren’t justified by the data at all, but without systematic study it’s hard to tell. For example, (examples).”
Followed by a longish discussion to get clear on the idea that some perceived patterns are indeed hallucinatory in this sense, even though your cousin’s psychic power isn’t necessarily one of those patterns. This sometimes fails… nobody I know actually claims that all perceived patterns are non-hallucinatory, but some people I know reject the path from “not all perceived patterns are non-hallucinatory” to “some perceived patterns are hallucinatory.” Which I generally interpret as refusing to have the conversation at all because they don’t like where it’s headed. a preference I usually respect out of politeness.
If it succeeds, I move on to “OK. So when I see a pattern that goes away when I begin systematic study, there are two possible theories: either the phenomenon is evasive as you describe, or my brain is perceiving patterns that aren’t there in the first place. How might I go about telling the difference, so I could be sure which was which? For example, if I wake up in the middle of the night frightened that there’s an intruder in my house, what could I do to figure out whether there is one or not?”
Which moves pretty quickly to the realization that an intruder in my house that systematically evades detection becomes increasingly implausible the more failed tests I perform, and at some point the theory that there simply isn’t such an intruder becomes more plausible.
I generally consider this a good place to stop with most people. Lather, rinse, repeat. They have one track that supports “I believe X no matter how many experiments fail to provide evidence for it,” and another track that supports “the more experiments fail to provide evidence for X, the less I should believe X”. They tend to mutually inhibit one another. The more that second track is activated, the less powerful that first track is; eventually it crumbles.
an intruder in my house that systematically evades detection becomes increasingly implausible the more failed tests I perform
But things keep disappearing from my house at random! Surely it’s an evidence for an invisible intruder, not only for my memory going bad! And this never happens in the office, so it can’t be my memory! Therefore intruder!
I’m not really interested in role-playing out a whole conversation. If you insist that your invisible intruder, like your cousin’s psychic ability, is real and evasive, I look for a different example. If you insist that everything you ever think about, however idly, is real and evasive, I tap out and recommend you seek professional help.
Which moves pretty quickly to the realization that an intruder in my house that systematically evades detection becomes increasingly implausible the more failed tests I perform, and at some point the theory that there simply isn’t such an intruder becomes more plausible.
This assume’s that the person you are talking to didn’t perform any tests that provide them evidence for their belief.
If you are facing someone who got his ideas from reading books, that might work. If you are facing someone who does have reference experiences for his belief, things get a bit different. You are basically telling them that they intruder that they found in their house is a hallucination.
The observer could go and study his cousin systematically. The cousin does 1000 trials and no trial shows any evidence that his cousin isn’t psychic. If the observer believes “the more experiments fail to provide evidence for X, the less I should believe X”, the huge quantity of experiements dictate to himself that he should believe that his cousin is psychic. The idea that the cousin uses a trick is supposed to become increasingly implausible the more failed tests the observer performs.
Some experiements are obviously systematically flawed. Doing more of those experiments shouldn’t lead you to increase your belief.
The debate is more more about which experiements are systematically flawed than it’s about “I believe X no matter how many experiments fail to provide evidence for it,” vs “the more experiments fail to provide evidence for X, the less I should believe X”.
This assumes that the person you are talking to didn’t perform any tests that provide them evidence for their belief.
It doesn’t assume this, it infers it about a particular person from the evidence provided by shminux above. The interlocutor shminux is describing rejects the idea that experimental results can be definitive on this question, which is different from the position you describe here. (Anyone who starts out asserting the former, then switches to the latter in mid-stream, is no longer asserting a coherent position at all and requires altogether different techniques for engaging with them.)
The debate is more more about which experiements are systematically flawed
I’m not quite sure what you mean by “the debate”. Is there only one? That surprises me; it certainly seems to me that some people adopt the stance shminux described, to which I responded.
All that aside, I certainly agree with you that my response to someone taking the stance you describe here (embracing experimentalism as it applies to psychic phenomena in theory, but implementing experiments in a problematic way) should differ from my response to someone taking the stance shminux describes above (rejecting experimentalism as it applies to psychic phenomena).
The interlocutor shminux is describing rejects the idea that experimental results can be definitive on this question, which is different from the position you describe here.
That depends on what you mean by “experiment”. If you mean doing a proper replicable controlled experiment than there is no experimental evidence. If you mean any evidence based on observation than there is experimental evidence.
In other words, there is evidence for the intruder, just not scientific evidence in the sense of this post.
I don’t in fact mean, by “experiment”, any evidence based on observation. I agree that there is evidence for (and against) the intruder, and did not say otherwise, although in general I don’t endorse using “evidence” in this sense without tagging it in some way (e.g., “Bayesian evidence”), since the alternative is reliably confusing.
How does the Great Psychicator distinguish between Science and normal events? Maybe we can trick it.
What would you propose?
This model is more complicated and so it’s less probable.
True. But so is Quantum Mechanics vs Classical Mechanics. (Un)Fortunately, CM is not enough to explain what we see (e.g. the interference pattern). To make a parallel with the issue at hand, the null-psychic model alone (without the complicated machinery of cognitive biases) does not explain the many non-scientifically tested claims of psychic powers.
A model where people are delusional about psychic powers or making claims about them they don’t believe is less complicated than a model with a Great Psychicator because we already know that people are delusional in lots of ways similar to that.
RE: tricking it. The problem is that we can’t observe one of the groups involved here, or we invalidate the experiment. But it seems likely to me that all conditions that could prohibit it from working when science is involved would also prohibit the claims about it working from having any basis in reality. In other words, either it can be tricked, or those people making the claims must concede that they don’t really have any basis to assert that it works. Any conditions which allow it to prohibit science should also preclude anyone from being justified in making claims about the reasons why it works.
An infinitely complex Great Psychicator would be smart enough to fool our experiments though, I think.
An infinitely complex Great Psychicator would be smart enough to fool our experiments though, I think.
Actually, all this entity would have to do is to foil any attempts to go meta on a certain class of phenomena, like psychic powers (and plenty of others, say, homeopathy). In a simulated universe this could be as “simple” as detecting that a certain computation is likely to discover its simulated nature and disallow this computation by altering the inputs. A sensible security safeguard, really. This can be done by terminating and rolling back any computation that is dangerously close to getting out of control and restarting it from a safe point with the inputs adjusted. Nothing infinite is required. In fact, there is very little extra complexity beyond sounding an alarm when dangerous things happen. Of course, anything can be “explained” in the framework of a simulation.
In a simulated universe this could be as “simple” as detecting that a certain computation is likely to discover its simulated nature and disallow this computation by altering the inputs.
But mixing “certain computation” and “discover” like that is mixing syntax and semantics—in order to watch out for that occurrence, you’d have to be aware of all possible semantics for a certain computation, to know if it counts as a “discovery”.
you’d have to be aware of all possible semantics for a certain computation
Not at all. You set up a trigger such as “50% of all AI researchers believe in the simulation argument”, then trace back their reasons for believing so and restart from a safe point with less dangerous inputs.
You set up a trigger such as “50% of all AI researchers believe in the simulation argument”
If your simulation has beliefs as a primitive, then you can set up that sort of trigger—but then it’s not a universe anything like ours.
If your simulation is simulating things like particles or atoms, then you don’t have direct access to whether they’ve arranged themselves into a “belief” unless you keep track of every possible way that an arrangement of atoms can be interpreted as a “belief”.
Sure, if you run your computation unstructured at the level of quarks and leptons, then you cannot tell what happens in the minds of simulated humans. This would be silly, and no one does any non-trivial bit of programming this way. There are always multi-level structures, like modules. classes, interfaces… Some of these can be created on the fly as needed (admittedly, this is a tricky part, though by no means impossible). So after a time you end up with a module that represents, say, a human, with sub-modules representing beliefs and interfaces representing communication with other humans, etc. And now you are well equipped to set up an alert.
If the Great Psychicator uses triggers on a level of reality less precise than the atomic or subatomic ones, then I believe its triggers could not possibly be precise enough to A. prevent science from discovering psychic powers and simultaneously B. allow normal people not doing science access to its psychic powers.
If there’s a flaw in its model of the universe, we can exploit that and use the flaw do to science (this would probably involve some VERY complex work arounds, but the universe is self consistent so it seems possible in theory). So the relevant question is whether or not its model of the universe is better than ours, which is why I concede that a sufficiently complex Great Psychicator would be able to trick us.
If the Great Psychicator uses triggers on a level of reality less precise than the atomic or subatomic ones, then I believe its triggers could not possibly be precise enough to A. prevent science from discovering psychic powers and simultaneously B. allow normal people not doing science access to its psychic powers.
No, it just needs to be better at optimizing than we are.
I don’t know exactly what you mean by “optimizing”, but if your main point is that it’s an issue of comparative advantage then I agree. Or, if your point is that it’s not sufficient for humans to have a better model of reality in the abstract, we’d also need to be able to apply that model in such a way as to trick the GP and that might not be possible depending on the nature of the GP’s intervention, I can agree with that as well.
Yeah, thanks. This is part of what I was trying to get at. And I’m further contending that if the semantics for every possible scientific experiment were invalidated, then in doing so the hypothetical Great Psychicator would also have to invalidate the semantics for any legitimate claims that psychic powers worked. The two categories overlap perfectly.
This isn’t intended to be an argument from definition, I hope that is also clear.
I am interested in the idea that what your cousin does happens without a mechanism. Does this mean that the process does not involve your cousin at all? That it happens whether or not your cousin is around? If so, why do you say that it’s your cousin who does it?
I could ask the same kind of questions about your communing with the universe, but let’s take these things one at a time.
If your cousin reliably names my card, it is causally correlated to my drawing the card. I never specified the nature of the casual relationship-whether it’s mirrors, marked cards, or the cards whispering in his brain, you told me that my action and his statement are connected. If ‘purely spiritual phenomena’ have effects, they’re causal processes, connected at the very least to your state of mind- if they don’t have effects I’m not sure what we’re arguing about.
You said: “IF you draw a card… [then] he can tell you the name of your card”. Sounds causal to me! Otherwise he could tell me the name of my card whether I draw it or not!
Also, you commune with the universe TO realize that your partner loves you. If you don’t believe the results of your divination are caused by your partner’s love why are you doing it?
In short, you may believe you believe that these are ‘non-causal processes’, but on the level that determines your behavior, you believe they are causal processes. I suspect this is because either labeling these things non-scientific is important to you for some reason (love of mystery, or perhaps it’s what your peer group says to believe) or you don’t understand what the words ‘non-causal process’ mean and it’s just a password.
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.
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.
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.
I believe that your cousin can, under the right circumstances, reliably guess which card you picked. There are all sorts of card tricks that let one do exactly that if the setup is right. But I confidently predict that his guess is not causally separated from the choice of card.
To turn this into a concrete empirical prediction: Suppose that I have your cousin repeat his trick several times (say 100) for me, and each time I eliminate any causal interaction between the the deck and your cousin that I can think of. Then I predict with probability ~1 that, within several rounds, your cousin will not be able to guess which card I draw.
If this prediction turns out to be wrong, and your cousin can still reliably guess which card I drew even when we are in lead boxes on opposite sides of the planet, then I will gladly discard my model of reality, since it will have predicted a true state of affairs to be impossible.
Even this wouldn’t be enough to prove your cousin’s power is acausal, since there are conceivable causal influences that I couldn’t eliminate easily.For example, maybe we live in a computer simulation that runs standard physics all the time, except for a high-level override which configures your cousin’s visual cortex to a see a picture of every card that anyone draws from a deck. But I would certainly require evidence at least that strong before even considering the possibility that your cousin can guess cards acausally.
it’s not a causal thing that scientists could study
A scientist is just a person who learns about things by looking at them (ie causally interacting with them), plus some social conventions to make up for human fallibility. Do you claim that the social conventions of science stop one from learning about this thing by looking at it, or that one cannot learn about this thing by looking at it at all. If the former, then again I confidently predict that you are wrong. If the latter, then I can only ask how you learned about the thing, if not by looking at it.
Same thing when I commune on a deep level with the entire universe in order to realize that my partner truly loves >me.
You mean to say that your confidence that your partner loves you is not a result of your direct interactions with em? How terrible!
Both cases are quite different.
In the first case we have an observation. The cousin can know the name of a card without looking at the card. The observer has no explanation about how the cousin knows.
The observer therefore reasons says that cousin has a property P that causes him to know the card.
The moment you call P “being psychic” you add a lot of connotations that have nothing to do with what the observer knows about the process. That added baggage is meaningless.
Case two is about metaphors. The observer engages into an acitivity A to get goal B. Goal B is about having a change in his own belief system that the oberver now believes C. C being that the partner loves her.
So the person assumes that there’s a clear causal relationship between A and B.
Some form of meditation could feel like the observer engages in A and allow him to reach B.
There are two struggles:
Firstly, the semantics of naming A. Naming A can plausibly help with doing A successfully. Members of this community will probably more comfortable with naming A differently.
Secondly there the issue of whether a belief change in my own mind can be “real”. That category of claims didn’t get yet discussed in this sequence, but I think it makes sense to speak of belief changes as real.
There another issue about this koan. If you ask a buddhist whether they belief that the universe is a connected fabric of causes and effects, they’ll answer:
“Of course I believe in karma”.
You don’t need to believe in a reductionist worldview to say that the world is made up of cause and effect.
Written in a somewhat fake wisdom manner, without reading other replies:
If you chose a different card, would he not say a different card’s name? Therefore, the card he says is causally linked to your choice of card. And would you not hear different words if he said something different? Therefore, your observations are causally linked to the card he says. Just because we do not know how something works – nay, even if it is Unknowable™ – that doesn’t make it causally unshackled from reality.
1: If your cousin can demonstrate that ability using somebody else’s deck, under experimental conditions that I specify and he is not aware of ahead of time, I will give him a thousand dollars.
2: In the counter-factual case where he accomplishes this, that does not mean that his ability is outside the realm of science (well, probably it means the experiment was flawed, but we’ll assume otherwise). There have been a wide range of inexplicable phenomena which are now understood by science. If your cousin’s psychic powers are real, then science can study them, and break down the black box to find out what’s inside. There are certainly causal arrows there, in any case. If there weren’t, we wouldn’t know about it.
3: If your strongest evidence that your partner loves you is psychic intuition, you should definitely get a prenup.
CCC and others have given most of my answer. As a practical matter, I would ask: ‘Do you need to commune with the entire universe in order to realize your partner loves you? If you have no good evidence taken from your relationship, from the interactions between you, that seems like a giant warning sign.’
Note too that the part about the psychic cousin (if we falsely assume that it has a clear meaning which the character wants to state openly) seems meant to describe a graph with a “spiritual” node that connects to the cousin’s card-naming behavior and to nothing else that we can observe. Which does not violate this particular rule, but does seem needlessly complicated.
There may or may not be intervening steps, but if your cousins predictions are accurate we can create causal models that either have predictions->card drawn or card drawn->predictions.
As someone with some experience dealing with this, having learned how difficult it is to fix I would reply something like “You are wrong. If you want to learn WHY you’re wrong, tell me and we can work on this together. Otherwise, I’m going to go now.”
Playing the game a bit: “Okay, bear with me a moment, this is going to sound a little odd.
I’m not sure what you mean by “outside the realm of causal processes”. Does that mean it happens on its own, with no outside influence at all? Nothing causes it, it just… Happens? Even if it’s a ‘magic’ skill, shouldn’t he be the one to activate it? I mean, worst case scenario, it’s caused by someone drawing a card from a deck. It doesn’t happen completely independently of reality, it’s CAUSED by something. If your cousin is the only one with this power, I’m sure he could be studied by the scientists and they could figure out what lights up in his brain as he does it.
A minor note, I was once a card magician, and there are very specific ways to either force people to choose the card you want, or to figure out what card they’ve chosen. I can show you a few, if you want.
Next, ‘communing with the entire universe’ is a pretty arrogant thing to say, isn’t it? I never got any communication, anyway. Question for you—how would it feel to look deeply inwards, ask ‘the universe’ questions, and receive answers from your own mind? Would it feel much different from what you feel now? Usually it’s better to assume that confusing or ‘unexplained’ things are happening in your mind, not in reality. You FEEL like the universe has told you that he loves you, but that would look exactly the same as if it was just your unconscious mind telling you. How often have people said that they were deeply, permanently in love, but then it didn’t work out? Do you really think you’re that much better than everyone else?”
In reality, I would deny the statement about what can be don by his cousin. But for the purpose of this exercise, I would say that if there was truly no causal mechanism, you would have no basis for saying that it was true, because you would have no evidence for it. In fact, you wouldn’t even be aware of it. If your cousin can name my card, he does so through a causal mechanism of some kind.
Let us stipulate that your cousin is indeed psychic. This is not a purely spiritual phenomenon. Then there is certainly correlation between me drawing QH and between him saying “queen of hearts”. Probably no direct causal link—I’d guess it has intermediate nodes related to patterns of neurons in his brain—but the graph certainly has a path between the two nodes.
If something does not correlate with anything, then it is not real in the sense that it does not determine your experiences.
Well first of all, we’re not perfect philosophers of perfect emptiness. We get our beliefs from somewhere. So it’s true that all sorts of things are true that we have no evidence of. For instance, it’s very, very likely there’s life outside our solar system, but I don’t have any evidence of it, so I act as if it’s not true because in my model of the universe, it’s very unlikely that that life will affect me during my natural lifetime.
I would even go far as to say that there may be matter beyond the horizon of the matter that expanded after the big bang, or that we’re all running on an alien matrix, or that God is real but he’s just hiding, and I act as if it’s false. Not because they’re untrue, or unlikely to be true, as I have no way to tell. But because I am very, very unlikely to ever, ever get evidence about any of those things, and they probably will never, and probably could never (especially in the near future) affect me. Not so much a “Nuh uh,” as a “So what?”
You know your partner loves you based on evidence. If you have no evidence (from past experience or otherwise), then you are very likely wrong. Love operates according to mechanisms, and we understand some of those mechanisms.
Similarly, just because you don’t understand the mechanism by which your psychic cousin works, doesn’t mean there isn’t one. He could be getting unbelievably lucky, or he could be playing a trick, or there could be things we don’t know yet that really truly give him psychic powers. You don’t know what the mechanism is, but you haven’t really investigated either, have you? Even if you never find out what the mechanism is, how much evidence is that that there is no mechanism?
Lastly, I’m not sure, “no mechanism” even makes sense. What does it mean for something to have no mechanism? What does a thing that doesn’t have a mechanism look like? How would you tell?
So, from the top: A Priori, Making Beliefs Pay Rent, No One Knows What Science Doesn’t Know, What is Evidence?, Fragility of Value (Why something is unlikely to be true without evidence of it), Uh what was that one about you failing the art and not the other way around?, and Not Even Wrong.
I assume they meant direct evidence. It’s truth or falseness do not affect us, we must extrapolate from our knowledge of the structure of the universe.
Koan 1:
How would you reply?
My reply, before reading other replies, is that the question is wrongly posed. The described phenomena can be part of a causal universe, because they are causal processes.
Consider the psychic cousin. I draw a card from his deck—it is (say) the three of clubs. Let us further assume that he correctly guesses the card that I have drawn, and does so in 99% of trials. In such circumstances, his statement of the card that I have drawn (‘you have drawn the three of clubs!’) is caused by my drawing the three of clubs. The mechanism of that causality may not be known, but it is there.
Similarly for the example of “communing on a deep level with the entire universe in order to realize that your partner truly loves you”—there’s a causal link, there, and the cause is “your partner truly loves you”. (Personally, I’d prefer to check the conclusion by some other means in order to prevent observer bias effects, but this becomes tricky for this example).
Purely spiritual phenomena, therefore, are firmly inside the realm of causal processes, even if they are not yet fully understood.
“Your partner truly loves you” could also be a purely spiritual phenomenon outside the realm of science. This implies that it has no observable consequences; a partner who truly loves you is no less and no more likely to dump you than one who doesn’t. This is an unusual idea of true love.
It could be. However, the consequences of the questioner’s “communing with the universe” are observable; I can observe whether you claim that your partner truly loves you or not afterwards.
Since this is an observable consequence, I therefore conclude that if it is possible to commune with the universe in such a way, and if the results of such communing are correlated at all to the state “your partner truly loves you”, then that state has consequences (i.e. whether or not you say that it is true after communing with the universe) and thus can be part of a causal universe.
And since it has observable consequences, you can do science to it! Yay!
Right. If there was no causal link between the card drawn and the psychic predicting the card, then the psychic wouldn’t get the right answer. There has to be a causal link, or else the psychic answer would have nothing to do with the card that you picked, and then it wouldn’t be any better then random.
Causal diagrams don’t require understanding of the links- if the content of the card influences your cousin’s claim, then we would draw an arc from the card to the claim in our causal diagram, even if we don’t know how he’s influenced by the card.
(Privately, I would suspect the speaker’s belief is not rigorous, and would not put much weight by it, but why challenge them on a factual matter when we’re discussing causal networks?)
It’s not clear to me that you’ve sufficiently expanded your belief that your partner truly loves you, or what it means to commune with the universe, or what separates physical and non-physical processes. If we define as real things which are part of reality, and acknowledge that your belief in your partner’s true love exists in reality, why are we not content to find real causes for that belief?
(Of course, there are many status reasons to turn to spiritual causes. But the instrumental benefits are probably outweighed by the epistemic detriments- or, at least, I should not privately believe their claim, even if I consider it worthy of public endorsement.)
“Magic” just means “I don’t know how it works.” (Pratchett, somewhere in the Tiffany Aching novels.)
If the world is exhibiting some regularity, you can always ask how that happens. “No mechanism” is itself a prediction: that none will be found. Where did that prediction come from?
Taboo the word real for a moment. Also any related words, like ‘actual.’ What do you mean when you say that it can be real?
You say your cousin can tell you the name of a card before he looks at it, after a random draw of the deck. But he does it. It’s an act on his part. This isn’t a mere word-issue either: you don’t think the same thing will happen if I try to predict a card you draw from a deck. So you are talking about a direct link between his statement and the card. Unless you think he is doing it by chance (so that there is just a correlation, and an extremely improbable one at that) you think that there is a causal link between the card drawn and the prediction. Saying you don’t know what it is, is not the same thing as saying that it is not there.
Likewise, when you say that you commune with the universe, you are stating some act, “communing” and some result “finding out that your partner loves you.” You don’t expect this to fail the next time you do it, or you wouldn’t perform the act to that effect. (You might perform it to “see if it works this time” but that would be another matter.) So I don’t think you really believe what you think you believe. Why would you “commune with the universe” if it did not cause effects such as “realizing your partner truly loves you”?
Mechanisms can be well hidden; if you deny that there is mechanism, you’re just cheating yourself out of the chance to figure out what the mechanism was. When you “commune with the universe”, you’re actually putting your brain into a meditative state where it queries large volumes of remembered weak evidence that you can’t recall by normal means. You can use that state for other things, too (but you’ll fool yourself if you don’t understand its limitations). When your cousin does card tricks, he’s explicitly presenting you with a hard puzzle—figure out just how he’s cheating. Answers are in books, but custom forbids giving spoilers. Figure it out, and you can fool others the same way.
Probably I would start with “You say about your cousin that it’s not something that scientists could study. That’s an interesting claim. Suppose I tried to study it… say, suppose I asked him to demonstrate this ability a hundred times, and wrote down for each demonstration what card I drew, and what card he named. That’s one way to start to do science, to observe the phenomenon and record my observations. Would something prevent me from doing that? Would the ability itself stop working? Something else?”
Their answer would give me more of a sense of what I was dealing with. It doesn’t engage with the reality question directly, but how I engage with the reality question will depend a lot on their answer to this question.
Suppose that the Great Psychicator who imbues all psychics with their amazing powers hates Science and revokes their abilities the moment one decides to systematically study them, so all such experiments lead to a null result. This model “explains” the null results found by the James Randi Educational Foundation.
This might look far-fetched, but recall that “Nature” already behaves like it, say in the double-slit experiment. Replace “psychic abilities” with “interference pattern produced by an electron psychically detecting the other slit” and “systematic study” with “adding detector to one of the slits”. The moment you start this “systematic study” the electron’s “psychic abilities” to sense the presence of the other slit disappear without a trace.
How would you proceed?
(nods) This is basically (modulo snark) the position of several people I know who believe in such things, and at least one LW contributor.
Faced with that response, I usually pursue a track along the lines of “Ah, I see. That makes sense as far as it goes, but it gets tricky, because it’s also true that we frequently perceive patterns that aren’t justified by the data at all, but without systematic study it’s hard to tell. For example, (examples).”
Followed by a longish discussion to get clear on the idea that some perceived patterns are indeed hallucinatory in this sense, even though your cousin’s psychic power isn’t necessarily one of those patterns. This sometimes fails… nobody I know actually claims that all perceived patterns are non-hallucinatory, but some people I know reject the path from “not all perceived patterns are non-hallucinatory” to “some perceived patterns are hallucinatory.” Which I generally interpret as refusing to have the conversation at all because they don’t like where it’s headed. a preference I usually respect out of politeness.
If it succeeds, I move on to “OK. So when I see a pattern that goes away when I begin systematic study, there are two possible theories: either the phenomenon is evasive as you describe, or my brain is perceiving patterns that aren’t there in the first place. How might I go about telling the difference, so I could be sure which was which? For example, if I wake up in the middle of the night frightened that there’s an intruder in my house, what could I do to figure out whether there is one or not?”
Which moves pretty quickly to the realization that an intruder in my house that systematically evades detection becomes increasingly implausible the more failed tests I perform, and at some point the theory that there simply isn’t such an intruder becomes more plausible.
I generally consider this a good place to stop with most people. Lather, rinse, repeat. They have one track that supports “I believe X no matter how many experiments fail to provide evidence for it,” and another track that supports “the more experiments fail to provide evidence for X, the less I should believe X”. They tend to mutually inhibit one another. The more that second track is activated, the less powerful that first track is; eventually it crumbles.
But things keep disappearing from my house at random! Surely it’s an evidence for an invisible intruder, not only for my memory going bad! And this never happens in the office, so it can’t be my memory! Therefore intruder!
I’m not really interested in role-playing out a whole conversation. If you insist that your invisible intruder, like your cousin’s psychic ability, is real and evasive, I look for a different example. If you insist that everything you ever think about, however idly, is real and evasive, I tap out and recommend you seek professional help.
I thought LW was that professional help…
Hmm, my pay slips must be getting lost in the post.
This assume’s that the person you are talking to didn’t perform any tests that provide them evidence for their belief. If you are facing someone who got his ideas from reading books, that might work. If you are facing someone who does have reference experiences for his belief, things get a bit different. You are basically telling them that they intruder that they found in their house is a hallucination.
The observer could go and study his cousin systematically. The cousin does 1000 trials and no trial shows any evidence that his cousin isn’t psychic. If the observer believes “the more experiments fail to provide evidence for X, the less I should believe X”, the huge quantity of experiements dictate to himself that he should believe that his cousin is psychic. The idea that the cousin uses a trick is supposed to become increasingly implausible the more failed tests the observer performs.
Some experiements are obviously systematically flawed. Doing more of those experiments shouldn’t lead you to increase your belief. The debate is more more about which experiements are systematically flawed than it’s about “I believe X no matter how many experiments fail to provide evidence for it,” vs “the more experiments fail to provide evidence for X, the less I should believe X”.
It doesn’t assume this, it infers it about a particular person from the evidence provided by shminux above. The interlocutor shminux is describing rejects the idea that experimental results can be definitive on this question, which is different from the position you describe here. (Anyone who starts out asserting the former, then switches to the latter in mid-stream, is no longer asserting a coherent position at all and requires altogether different techniques for engaging with them.)
I’m not quite sure what you mean by “the debate”.
Is there only one?
That surprises me; it certainly seems to me that some people adopt the stance shminux described, to which I responded.
All that aside, I certainly agree with you that my response to someone taking the stance you describe here (embracing experimentalism as it applies to psychic phenomena in theory, but implementing experiments in a problematic way) should differ from my response to someone taking the stance shminux describes above (rejecting experimentalism as it applies to psychic phenomena).
That depends on what you mean by “experiment”. If you mean doing a proper replicable controlled experiment than there is no experimental evidence. If you mean any evidence based on observation than there is experimental evidence.
In other words, there is evidence for the intruder, just not scientific evidence in the sense of this post.
I don’t in fact mean, by “experiment”, any evidence based on observation. I agree that there is evidence for (and against) the intruder, and did not say otherwise, although in general I don’t endorse using “evidence” in this sense without tagging it in some way (e.g., “Bayesian evidence”), since the alternative is reliably confusing.
How does the Great Psychicator distinguish between Science and normal events? Maybe we can trick it.
This model is more complicated and so it’s less probable.
What would you propose?
True. But so is Quantum Mechanics vs Classical Mechanics. (Un)Fortunately, CM is not enough to explain what we see (e.g. the interference pattern). To make a parallel with the issue at hand, the null-psychic model alone (without the complicated machinery of cognitive biases) does not explain the many non-scientifically tested claims of psychic powers.
A model where people are delusional about psychic powers or making claims about them they don’t believe is less complicated than a model with a Great Psychicator because we already know that people are delusional in lots of ways similar to that.
RE: tricking it. The problem is that we can’t observe one of the groups involved here, or we invalidate the experiment. But it seems likely to me that all conditions that could prohibit it from working when science is involved would also prohibit the claims about it working from having any basis in reality. In other words, either it can be tricked, or those people making the claims must concede that they don’t really have any basis to assert that it works. Any conditions which allow it to prohibit science should also preclude anyone from being justified in making claims about the reasons why it works.
An infinitely complex Great Psychicator would be smart enough to fool our experiments though, I think.
Actually, all this entity would have to do is to foil any attempts to go meta on a certain class of phenomena, like psychic powers (and plenty of others, say, homeopathy). In a simulated universe this could be as “simple” as detecting that a certain computation is likely to discover its simulated nature and disallow this computation by altering the inputs. A sensible security safeguard, really. This can be done by terminating and rolling back any computation that is dangerously close to getting out of control and restarting it from a safe point with the inputs adjusted. Nothing infinite is required. In fact, there is very little extra complexity beyond sounding an alarm when dangerous things happen. Of course, anything can be “explained” in the framework of a simulation.
But mixing “certain computation” and “discover” like that is mixing syntax and semantics—in order to watch out for that occurrence, you’d have to be aware of all possible semantics for a certain computation, to know if it counts as a “discovery”.
Not at all. You set up a trigger such as “50% of all AI researchers believe in the simulation argument”, then trace back their reasons for believing so and restart from a safe point with less dangerous inputs.
If your simulation has beliefs as a primitive, then you can set up that sort of trigger—but then it’s not a universe anything like ours.
If your simulation is simulating things like particles or atoms, then you don’t have direct access to whether they’ve arranged themselves into a “belief” unless you keep track of every possible way that an arrangement of atoms can be interpreted as a “belief”.
Sure, if you run your computation unstructured at the level of quarks and leptons, then you cannot tell what happens in the minds of simulated humans. This would be silly, and no one does any non-trivial bit of programming this way. There are always multi-level structures, like modules. classes, interfaces… Some of these can be created on the fly as needed (admittedly, this is a tricky part, though by no means impossible). So after a time you end up with a module that represents, say, a human, with sub-modules representing beliefs and interfaces representing communication with other humans, etc. And now you are well equipped to set up an alert.
If the Great Psychicator uses triggers on a level of reality less precise than the atomic or subatomic ones, then I believe its triggers could not possibly be precise enough to A. prevent science from discovering psychic powers and simultaneously B. allow normal people not doing science access to its psychic powers.
If there’s a flaw in its model of the universe, we can exploit that and use the flaw do to science (this would probably involve some VERY complex work arounds, but the universe is self consistent so it seems possible in theory). So the relevant question is whether or not its model of the universe is better than ours, which is why I concede that a sufficiently complex Great Psychicator would be able to trick us.
No, it just needs to be better at optimizing than we are.
I don’t know exactly what you mean by “optimizing”, but if your main point is that it’s an issue of comparative advantage then I agree. Or, if your point is that it’s not sufficient for humans to have a better model of reality in the abstract, we’d also need to be able to apply that model in such a way as to trick the GP and that might not be possible depending on the nature of the GP’s intervention, I can agree with that as well.
Yeah, thanks. This is part of what I was trying to get at. And I’m further contending that if the semantics for every possible scientific experiment were invalidated, then in doing so the hypothetical Great Psychicator would also have to invalidate the semantics for any legitimate claims that psychic powers worked. The two categories overlap perfectly.
This isn’t intended to be an argument from definition, I hope that is also clear.
I am interested in the idea that what your cousin does happens without a mechanism. Does this mean that the process does not involve your cousin at all? That it happens whether or not your cousin is around? If so, why do you say that it’s your cousin who does it?
I could ask the same kind of questions about your communing with the universe, but let’s take these things one at a time.
If your cousin reliably names my card, it is causally correlated to my drawing the card. I never specified the nature of the casual relationship-whether it’s mirrors, marked cards, or the cards whispering in his brain, you told me that my action and his statement are connected. If ‘purely spiritual phenomena’ have effects, they’re causal processes, connected at the very least to your state of mind- if they don’t have effects I’m not sure what we’re arguing about.
Okay, hypothetical mystic dude.
You said: “IF you draw a card… [then] he can tell you the name of your card”. Sounds causal to me! Otherwise he could tell me the name of my card whether I draw it or not!
Also, you commune with the universe TO realize that your partner loves you. If you don’t believe the results of your divination are caused by your partner’s love why are you doing it?
In short, you may believe you believe that these are ‘non-causal processes’, but on the level that determines your behavior, you believe they are causal processes. I suspect this is because either labeling these things non-scientific is important to you for some reason (love of mystery, or perhaps it’s what your peer group says to believe) or you don’t understand what the words ‘non-causal process’ mean and it’s just a password.
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.
I believe that your cousin can, under the right circumstances, reliably guess which card you picked. There are all sorts of card tricks that let one do exactly that if the setup is right. But I confidently predict that his guess is not causally separated from the choice of card.
To turn this into a concrete empirical prediction: Suppose that I have your cousin repeat his trick several times (say 100) for me, and each time I eliminate any causal interaction between the the deck and your cousin that I can think of. Then I predict with probability ~1 that, within several rounds, your cousin will not be able to guess which card I draw.
If this prediction turns out to be wrong, and your cousin can still reliably guess which card I drew even when we are in lead boxes on opposite sides of the planet, then I will gladly discard my model of reality, since it will have predicted a true state of affairs to be impossible.
Even this wouldn’t be enough to prove your cousin’s power is acausal, since there are conceivable causal influences that I couldn’t eliminate easily.For example, maybe we live in a computer simulation that runs standard physics all the time, except for a high-level override which configures your cousin’s visual cortex to a see a picture of every card that anyone draws from a deck. But I would certainly require evidence at least that strong before even considering the possibility that your cousin can guess cards acausally.
A scientist is just a person who learns about things by looking at them (ie causally interacting with them), plus some social conventions to make up for human fallibility. Do you claim that the social conventions of science stop one from learning about this thing by looking at it, or that one cannot learn about this thing by looking at it at all. If the former, then again I confidently predict that you are wrong. If the latter, then I can only ask how you learned about the thing, if not by looking at it.
You mean to say that your confidence that your partner loves you is not a result of your direct interactions with em? How terrible!
Both cases are quite different. In the first case we have an observation. The cousin can know the name of a card without looking at the card. The observer has no explanation about how the cousin knows. The observer therefore reasons says that cousin has a property P that causes him to know the card.
The moment you call P “being psychic” you add a lot of connotations that have nothing to do with what the observer knows about the process. That added baggage is meaningless.
Case two is about metaphors. The observer engages into an acitivity A to get goal B. Goal B is about having a change in his own belief system that the oberver now believes C. C being that the partner loves her. So the person assumes that there’s a clear causal relationship between A and B. Some form of meditation could feel like the observer engages in A and allow him to reach B. There are two struggles: Firstly, the semantics of naming A. Naming A can plausibly help with doing A successfully. Members of this community will probably more comfortable with naming A differently. Secondly there the issue of whether a belief change in my own mind can be “real”. That category of claims didn’t get yet discussed in this sequence, but I think it makes sense to speak of belief changes as real.
There another issue about this koan. If you ask a buddhist whether they belief that the universe is a connected fabric of causes and effects, they’ll answer: “Of course I believe in karma”. You don’t need to believe in a reductionist worldview to say that the world is made up of cause and effect.
Written in a somewhat fake wisdom manner, without reading other replies:
If you chose a different card, would he not say a different card’s name? Therefore, the card he says is causally linked to your choice of card. And would you not hear different words if he said something different? Therefore, your observations are causally linked to the card he says. Just because we do not know how something works – nay, even if it is Unknowable™ – that doesn’t make it causally unshackled from reality.
1: If your cousin can demonstrate that ability using somebody else’s deck, under experimental conditions that I specify and he is not aware of ahead of time, I will give him a thousand dollars.
2: In the counter-factual case where he accomplishes this, that does not mean that his ability is outside the realm of science (well, probably it means the experiment was flawed, but we’ll assume otherwise). There have been a wide range of inexplicable phenomena which are now understood by science. If your cousin’s psychic powers are real, then science can study them, and break down the black box to find out what’s inside. There are certainly causal arrows there, in any case. If there weren’t, we wouldn’t know about it.
3: If your strongest evidence that your partner loves you is psychic intuition, you should definitely get a prenup.
CCC and others have given most of my answer. As a practical matter, I would ask: ‘Do you need to commune with the entire universe in order to realize your partner loves you? If you have no good evidence taken from your relationship, from the interactions between you, that seems like a giant warning sign.’
Note too that the part about the psychic cousin (if we falsely assume that it has a clear meaning which the character wants to state openly) seems meant to describe a graph with a “spiritual” node that connects to the cousin’s card-naming behavior and to nothing else that we can observe. Which does not violate this particular rule, but does seem needlessly complicated.
Mechanism is beside the point. Mechanism is just causal nodes in between. Having no mechanism just means there is a direct connection.
There may or may not be intervening steps, but if your cousins predictions are accurate we can create causal models that either have predictions->card drawn or card drawn->predictions.
Or predictions <-- lurking variable --> card drawn.
Or Great Psychiator->Card drawn ^ Great Psychiator->predictions
Which might look the same to use here within the universe but is far less likely as a prior.
As someone with some experience dealing with this, having learned how difficult it is to fix I would reply something like “You are wrong. If you want to learn WHY you’re wrong, tell me and we can work on this together. Otherwise, I’m going to go now.”
Playing the game a bit: “Okay, bear with me a moment, this is going to sound a little odd.
I’m not sure what you mean by “outside the realm of causal processes”. Does that mean it happens on its own, with no outside influence at all? Nothing causes it, it just… Happens? Even if it’s a ‘magic’ skill, shouldn’t he be the one to activate it? I mean, worst case scenario, it’s caused by someone drawing a card from a deck. It doesn’t happen completely independently of reality, it’s CAUSED by something. If your cousin is the only one with this power, I’m sure he could be studied by the scientists and they could figure out what lights up in his brain as he does it.
A minor note, I was once a card magician, and there are very specific ways to either force people to choose the card you want, or to figure out what card they’ve chosen. I can show you a few, if you want.
Next, ‘communing with the entire universe’ is a pretty arrogant thing to say, isn’t it? I never got any communication, anyway. Question for you—how would it feel to look deeply inwards, ask ‘the universe’ questions, and receive answers from your own mind? Would it feel much different from what you feel now? Usually it’s better to assume that confusing or ‘unexplained’ things are happening in your mind, not in reality. You FEEL like the universe has told you that he loves you, but that would look exactly the same as if it was just your unconscious mind telling you. How often have people said that they were deeply, permanently in love, but then it didn’t work out? Do you really think you’re that much better than everyone else?”
In reality, I would deny the statement about what can be don by his cousin. But for the purpose of this exercise, I would say that if there was truly no causal mechanism, you would have no basis for saying that it was true, because you would have no evidence for it. In fact, you wouldn’t even be aware of it. If your cousin can name my card, he does so through a causal mechanism of some kind.
In real life?
”You’re a loony.”
::walks away::
I suspect that’s not the answer you’re looking for, though. ;)
(Written without reading other comments.)
Let us stipulate that your cousin is indeed psychic. This is not a purely spiritual phenomenon. Then there is certainly correlation between me drawing QH and between him saying “queen of hearts”. Probably no direct causal link—I’d guess it has intermediate nodes related to patterns of neurons in his brain—but the graph certainly has a path between the two nodes.
If something does not correlate with anything, then it is not real in the sense that it does not determine your experiences.
Well first of all, we’re not perfect philosophers of perfect emptiness. We get our beliefs from somewhere. So it’s true that all sorts of things are true that we have no evidence of. For instance, it’s very, very likely there’s life outside our solar system, but I don’t have any evidence of it, so I act as if it’s not true because in my model of the universe, it’s very unlikely that that life will affect me during my natural lifetime.
I would even go far as to say that there may be matter beyond the horizon of the matter that expanded after the big bang, or that we’re all running on an alien matrix, or that God is real but he’s just hiding, and I act as if it’s false. Not because they’re untrue, or unlikely to be true, as I have no way to tell. But because I am very, very unlikely to ever, ever get evidence about any of those things, and they probably will never, and probably could never (especially in the near future) affect me. Not so much a “Nuh uh,” as a “So what?”
You know your partner loves you based on evidence. If you have no evidence (from past experience or otherwise), then you are very likely wrong. Love operates according to mechanisms, and we understand some of those mechanisms.
Similarly, just because you don’t understand the mechanism by which your psychic cousin works, doesn’t mean there isn’t one. He could be getting unbelievably lucky, or he could be playing a trick, or there could be things we don’t know yet that really truly give him psychic powers. You don’t know what the mechanism is, but you haven’t really investigated either, have you? Even if you never find out what the mechanism is, how much evidence is that that there is no mechanism?
Lastly, I’m not sure, “no mechanism” even makes sense. What does it mean for something to have no mechanism? What does a thing that doesn’t have a mechanism look like? How would you tell?
So, from the top: A Priori, Making Beliefs Pay Rent, No One Knows What Science Doesn’t Know, What is Evidence?, Fragility of Value (Why something is unlikely to be true without evidence of it), Uh what was that one about you failing the art and not the other way around?, and Not Even Wrong.
If there’s no evidence of it (circumstantial evidence included), what makes you think it’s very likely?
I assume they meant direct evidence. It’s truth or falseness do not affect us, we must extrapolate from our knowledge of the structure of the universe.