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!
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!