1/ In the mid-2010s my metaphysics nearly broke. A Bay Area VC friend introduced me & other nerds to an “energy healer.” Reaction: yeah, ok. “Energy” did not have a place in our scientific ontologies.
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2/ Then, to our surprise, the healer did funny things with her hands, and made funny sounds, and skeptics found themselves shaking, crying, entering profoundly altered mental states, etc
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3/ From there I kept meeting “healer” ppl who could do similar things. The Bay Area was full of them – along with many many copycats who could not achieve the same effects, or could do so only through their audience being complicit
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4/ I’ve since encountered ppl who can achieve similar effects *over videochat* without doing much moving at all (eg no funny hand gestures)
All this despite internal protests of “no way this stuff is real” from me and other skeptic friends who have separately run into it
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5/ It also turns out it’s easily learnable; ppl have natural intuitions for how to do the “energy healing” thing if you give them an instruction like “pretend very earnestly that you can energy heal me” (it can’t b a joke; they need to actually try)
I’ve seen autists learn it
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6/ It’s forced me to conclude that either there’s some spooky social interaction medium we don’t understand (“energy”)
OR ppl are *much* more sensitive to barely perceptible fluctuations in others’ microexpressions, body posture, tone, temperature, scent, etc than supposed
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7/ Hypothesis 2 reminds me of Feynman’s story of discovering that his sense of smell had much greater sensitivity than anyone would have guessed
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8/ Onto my broader point…
Despite there potentially being good scientific explanations for the phenomenon, my scientistic worldview ruled it out. Not only wouldn’t have believed it unless I’d experienced it
…but I *wouldn’t have sought the evidence out to begin with*.
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9/ Having witnessed “energy healing,” I’ve had to open myself to big expanses of possibility (eg “If ppl are sensitive to barely perceptible social signals, what other useful info might we be picking up on but ignoring all the time?” “Is human magnetoreception a thing?” Etc)
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10/ There could be realms of mysterious & powerful phenomena are out there…which I might never seek out bc I presuppose their nonexistence
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Replying to
i think the acutal existence of energy is... not really plausible, but the other thing you're describing feels quite true to me; i think our capacity to fuck with, amplify, or generally influence our own perception is vastly underexplored
I don't see why subtle EM perception couldn't be a thing. This is literally the same shape as ancient drawings from yogis.
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This paper isn't very good but has some intriguing trailheads for the EM perception hypothesis
How is it not plausible?
I'm curious as to what makes you think
such, because your position reminds me
of Einstein when asked about Quantum
theory. "God does not play at dice." vibes
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