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Comment by hibernator149 | Hacker News Reader

The only way to perceive actual reality and truth is to be magically endowed with this ability? The author of this quote can't imagine how this ability might result from evolution? Personal incredulity does not count as proof. Naturalism is our only chance for understanding this world, everything else is just magical thinking without proof.

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Naturalism is a metaphysical position; a second order claim about what kind of phenomena count as real. It is different than a methodological committment to only considering a certain set of causal relations -- this methodological committment makes research possible, not the metaphysical committment of naturalism, which is extremely untenable, as it can't account for the most basic aspects of our experience.

Absolutely. We are still suffering as a society from the baggage of the 20th century, when man rather foolishly imagined that science would explain everything. This was pretty much ruled out philosophically from the get-go, but we still have this naive scientism which crops up everywhere and claims to have explained the human condition and origin, when it has done nothing of the sort.

For most of us, mystery is intolerable. So we take the authoritative story on faith. And use it to create an airtight coccoon about ourselves. A bubble of dream where no phenomenon goes unexplained.

Do you have the magical ability to see, hear, and otherwise perceive reality? It's one thing to have sensory perceptions, it's another to consider them all somehow connected, and it's entirely another to do so while ruling out any other forms of perception which may not be known to you yet.

If I make a mistake in my perception of reality there is a chance I might die. I have many emotional reactions that prevent and attempt to correct for this misalignment whenever it occurs (surprise, disgust, doubt, anger). Are these the magical abilities that would get me closer to perceiving reality?

You may as well assert, since you cannot be sure of another's subjective yet perhaps eminently palpable experiences, that naturalism is the only chance for the rational, thinking masses to conceive of the world and its reasons. And that's very well. But the accused magical thinking could be first-hand and self-proving, but not transmissible much less generalizable, that science's naturalism may only get you so far down the tube of reality.

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