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Sometimes though the math is compatible with multiple different kind of metaphysics and the issue comes when you try to use / try to pretend that the facts about special relativity and quantum mechanics is somehow evidence that your preferred metaphysics is true. I think thats one way to cirtique Leo , because he would either need to show why the facts about quantum mechanics and special relativity can't be comaptible with a different metaphyiscs or he would need to show some explanatory virtue or virtues that he thinks his metaphyiscs is better on compared to other metaphysical theories. Ideally , if we would have the power to do so - we would write a perfect algorithm for any given problem or question, but thats not how life works most of the time (ill-defined problems, lack of knowledge etc), so we use heruistics and shortcuts ,but ideally we would algorithmize it (there are physical computational limits, but I don't see a logical issue - like I don't see why in principle we couldn't formalize all of our problems and then write an algorithm for it). Although we have to be careful with intuitions, because they can also be misleading or even if they are true, they can be used as conclusions, but often times the implications that are derived from a given conclusion can also be false (just like you said with the problem of misinterpretation).

There are multiple different things not just solipsism that seem to be close to impossible to prove or to disprove (if those terms like 'prove' and 'disprove' are defined in an inferential sense) . If you only care about inferential justification, then you should probably stay agnostic about a big set of metaphysical claims (including whether solipsism is true or false) But if you are okay with non-inferential justification or if you don't care about inferential justification, then there might be ways to get around it . Direct experience could be potentially categorized under "non-inferential justification" , but I personally still have issues with how the term 'direct experience' is used, because it seem to be used in a vague way and sometimes people seem to be using the term in different ways (because one person can claim that direct experience "proves" that solipsism is true and another can say that direct experience proves/tells you that a completely different metaphysics is true).

No not necessarily, because under my semantics, explanations doesn't have to have an explanation. There is a difference between saying X explains choice Y vs choice Y doesn't have any explanation at all. But to be more precise, I can put it this way - running back the exact same scenario multiple times (same circumstance, same environment, same preferences etc), where you are presented with the exact same options, do you have the ability to choose a different option ? if yes, then I would categorize that as free will.

If the meaning of free will isn't cashed out as - random choice, then I don't know what is meant by it. If you are presented with 2 options (A and B) and you choose A over B and there is no explanation in principle why you chose A over B, then thats gonna be free will, but I take that to be a random choice. If it can be explained by something, then thats gonna be determinism or in some cases compatibilism.

Sure nouns are not statements and they cant have a truth value (they are neither true nor false), but earlier you didn't just give a noun, you gave a declarative statement that has a truth value. Under my view a hypothesis is just a proposition (declarative statement that can be true or false) that is used to explain something. So yes, under this semantics what you provided earlier was a hypothesis or more like a series of statements where each statement can have a truth value.

So when a given data can be accounted for by multiple different hypothesis , how do you disambiguate between them and how do you check which one is the case? Yes really, there are multiple people who claim to see spirits and some of them are absolutely miserable. If the reply is that those are not real psychics then thats not gonna be interesting because thats just gonna beg the question. Also I dont know why "naturality" is brought up, whats the relevance of what is natural and what is not? Its a loaded and vague term and it is often times used either in a meaningless way or it is used in a loaded way where it is assumed that everything that is natural is automatically good.

Thats one hypothesis, but there can be a lot of other hypothesis that can explain the data of "seeing spirits" without concluding that it was natural incliniation. But all of this seem to be completely tangential to op's problem/question. Because seeing spirits is compatible with being miserable and with suffering. But its not even about how you grow up, the question is in the context of - given that one grew up in a society and lives in a society, can one live and be completely alone all the time and have good mental health? But regardless what the actual answer to that question is, other than relying on our intuitions (that are informed by our biases and by limited data that we are aware of) and providing just so stories, it would be more fruitful if people here would argue providing studies to back up their claims.

Yeah I understand that, but I was questioning this premise: What do you base that claim on? It seems to me that a person growing up totally by themselves would be just as likely (if not more) to get obsessed with survival and to not care about spirituality at all.

Can you explain why would that be the case and what you are basing this on? Whats the issue with saying that the child wouldn't develop spiritually on its own and that the child wouldn't care about spiritual development?

I dont take objective morality or objective evil to be intelligible and its not even relevant in most cases. Whats interesting is that for motivation (to make an agent to do or not to do a particular thing) both subjectivists and objectivists always appeal to the given agent's subjective values and they try to demonstrate to them, that given the agent's values and standards - it would be in their best interest to do or not to do that thing. The question whether morals are objectively true or subjectively true, doesn't have much bearing on how a given agent behaves. Lets suppose its an objective moral obligation that you ought to rape as many people as many you can. Why would anyone care about this principle, if there is no punishment not abiding by this principle? No one would a give a fuck about it, unless there is a guaranteed punishment for not abiding by it. Or lets suppose that there is an objectively true moral principle that you shouldn't kill people for fun. Most people would abide by that principle , but again, not because its objectively true, but because its already aligned with most people's subjective preferences and values. Even when it comes to views, where God punishes you - the reason why you abide by those moral rules is because you don't want to get punished and not because they are objective (most people couldn't care less, whether those principles are grounded in God's subjective desires or whether those standards are somehow objective , what they care about is the punishment). But punishment can be given by subjectivists too.

The truthmaker for me (what makes it true or false) isn't indexed to my preferences , it is indexed to what I take justification to be. Its more like - yes, if you drop all the necessary conditions of a definition, that definition won't apply anymore.

Its not about what I like. The person who has a sound justification can be an immoral and incredibly annoying person , but that wouldnt change him/her being a genius. You could stack all the things I hate and put all those negative traits on the genius, but again , that still wouldnt change my view.

I have heard vegan arguments for killing predators or making them extinct (because their survival is necessarily dependent on killing). Obviously some set of things are assumed, before they would apply their argument ,for example that they would only do it if that wouldn't destroy the larger ecosystem that non-predators rely on (in other words - the ecosystem maintaining functions of those predators can be replaced).

In a lot of cases, they dont preach about the same truth. Some suggest reincarnation , others dont. Some suggest heaven and hell, others dont. Some suggest multiple Gods, others just one God. And even that one God can be cashed out in so many different ways. The number of ways these things can be conceptualized and contextualized , is endless.

Im not exactly sure what the challenge is. Im not sure, if you have an epistemic question or a sociology question. If the challenge is about questioning your premise that "usually people distinguish between genius and madman based on how much they like them" ,then, I won't challenge that, because I agree. But if the claim is that there isn't any good way or there isn't any good set of heruistics to differentiate between the two ,then I disagree. Making wild/outrageous claims is true for both, but only the genius is capable to provide either a sound justification for his/her claim and or can demonstrate that his/her claim is true. And "sound justification" entails (on my view) that the genius can either walk you through step by step for why people should adopt a new norm to judge things by (this can include changing our idea about what should be considered as a sound justification and this can include what kind of explanatory virtues we should care about and can include how those should be weighed) or simply using already existing norms in a given field, he/she can show you - why his/her theory/paradigm/model is better than the current one. Another difference is lack of clarity. A madman usually cant even spell out a clear norm to judge things by, just incoherently rambles about something and claims that his theory/model is better, but its usually unclear what is meant by "better" and or its unclear simply what his insight/breakthrough is about. Another one is that a madman usually won't have a basic understanding of the field he claims he has a unique insight about. He usually won't be able to name the competing theories and won't be able to specifically point out and explain the issue(s) with them.

@Elliott JP was completely lost in that debate and was just throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks. He utterly failed to make a case for objective morality.

From the premise of "telepathy is possible/real" the other premise of "Telepathy would be everywhere" doesn't necessarily follow, it only follows if you go with certain assumptions. A very easy way to demonstrate this is by granting that telepathy requires a set of factors that are only satisfied at specific levels of evolution. More specifically, one could postulate that telepathy requires a certain level of cognitive complexity in order to be possible. Under this view, we wouldn't expect telepathy to be everywhere.

Of course its one to say that the reason why most or a lot of people christian is because they were indoctrinated, but there is a seperate question whether there are good reasons to believe that Christianity is true or not. But regardless, this line of attack can be used against divine hiddenness. Why is it that the Christian God made it 10-100x harder for certain people to find him and to even have a chance to believe in him? (and of course there are those rare cases as well, where people don't even have a concept of Christianity, let alone have a chance to study it and then after that believe in it)

I know about Rupert, but I havent checked the studies yet, so I have no comments on them. I also know about some of the parapsych experiments that were done by the CIA , but I havent done a quality analysis on them, but they definitely seemed to be interesting back then. The interesting part of these discussions to me isn't necessarily about whether certain things are true or exist, but more about adjusting my epistemic standards and priors so that they can account for more things in a way where they don't lead to absurd categorization/conclusion. And yes, sometimes this can potentially mean that one needs to accept weird things being true/existing. In your case it seems that even if all those studies are bad, you still have independent reason(s) that makes you think that the phenomena is real. What convinced you?

I explcitly stated and implied multiple times that it is compatible with both. Where did I brought up that they need to justify their metaphysics? "its materialists that need to find an explanation" was the statement that made me think that you tried to claim that they have an obligation that idealists don't have. I don't think its unreasonable to interpret your statement that way. The potential pattern I was referring to isn't necessarily picture related in that "whats on the picture" . But looking back I can see the google watermark on the image at different positions (the exact watermark position might be region specific) It could also be about patterns related to the timing of when a sky picture is brought up by the algorithm. Or another one could be related to camera quality that can be different from region to region. You seem to be implying that psychic phenomena is either the best or one of the most reasonable explanations which is a crazy stance in my view. What set of things have you seen that moved your priors so much in favour of psychic phenomena being a probable explanation for things like this? My priors on psychic phenomena must be way different than yours, because I would consider so many other alternative explanations before concluding that "its more than likely that it was a psychic phenomena" or "one of the most reasonable explanation is that it was a psychic phenomena". When there are multiple alternative explanations that doesnt involve any psychic phenomena and you still find it a good explanation that epistemically opens up so much bullshit when it is not necessary. At this point whats stopping anyone from creating any incredibly weird esoteric, ontologically rich explanation for any given set of facts given that "simplicity" is valued this much? We can eliminate all the cringe low chance events and make all of them expected and probable by invoking invisible beings with certain intentions working behind the scenes. Why shouldnt we in principle just eliminate all low chance events and make all of them expected and purposeful under some grand narrative(embracing conspiracy theories)?

I am agnostic on it. I don't see the reason to claim either. What is the seeming that makes you to take the position that there isn't a pattern vs taking the agnostic position of "Im not sure if there is a pattern". Yeah, but presumably simplicity is not the only virtue we care about when it comes to explanations. Again I don't see why materlalists couldn't claim bruteness. The idea that the PSR (Principle of sufficient reason) is somehow necessary for or entailed by physicalism is something that I would ask an argument for if you have one. or I might be misinterpreting and you are trying to say that materialists usually have a norm of asking for or needing to find a further explanation/mechanism for things and you are not claiming that in principle they need to provide one explanation/mechanism for things. If this is the case, then my bad.

I don't see why we would think that, but regardless, that would just mean that the facts in the video are brute (in principle they dont have any explanation) or they are just random (which you understandably had an issue with). Both (bruteness and randomness) are compatible with both physicalism and idealism. But I dont think that psychic thing necessarily opens up a debate about physicalism vs idealism, because I don't see why psychic abilities wouldn't be in principle compatible with physicalism. At the end of the day, it will be about what kind of theoretical virtues you care about more. With respect to the topic at hand about providing a hypothesis that can explain the facts in the video - I think you need to do a lot more work to establish psychic phenomena being the best or even a good explanation and I don't see why after invoking psychic ability you would be freed from needing to provide the patterns/mechanisms of that ability. So there are two claims there, 1 that psychic ability explains the facts and 2 that psychic ability itself is brute. But if you grant bruteness when it comes to that ability, I don't see why a phyiscalist couldnt make the same move and say for example that Rainbolt's subsconscious mind picked up on patterns and thats how he managed to do it (and also claiming that the subconscious mind is brute, and it doesn't have any further explanation). Or they can invoke any other mechanism and then claim that that particular mechanism is brute. But anyway, there seem to be two different discussions. 1 about what explanation can account for the facts in the video and 2 physicalism vs idealism. I think that solving the second isn't needed in order to solve the first one. Also just as a further point, I don't think that all versions of physicalism commited to the idea that only things with physical quantities exist. My understanding is that as long as the mechanisms/things/relations that are invoked are not mind dependent, those can be categorized potentially under physicalism (so that can include things that are outside of time and space that cant be detected , and they can have an existence without a Mind grounding them). So a physicalist in pinciple could invoke weird shit like: things/laws/principles outside of time and space with causal power exist,and their existence isn't grounded/depended on a Mind.

Also if we want to go even further (I am not sure if you want to claim this) Do you have an argument that establish why in principle there cannot be a materialistic explanation?

I can grant for the sake of the argument that it is the way you outlined it. Im curious whats the response to this:

Its only unlikely if the algorithm is made the way you outlined it. If the algorithm only shows the sky of a handful of countries, then suddenly someone who plays this game for as much as Rainbolt (having thousands of hours behind his back), the task can be very easy. For example, lets entertain the possibility that the algorithm only shows the sky of 5 countries. Now if you have that background knowledge, you have a pretty good chance to pick the correct location even if you are a noob at this game. But lets go with the scenario where the algorithm can actually show the sky of all countries. In this case, if we go with two different hypothesis, one is what you said (psychic) the other one is that his subsconscious mind picked up on certain patterns after playing the game for thousands of hours. Whats the argument that you can provide that would motivate us to pick your hypothesis over the other one?