I was going to write a point-by-point response to this: The New Epistemic Deal | Two-Phase Cosmology But any given point looked pretty heavy on its own, so I decided to launch the threads one at time.
This one is on point 6: We cannot expect people to believe things (any things) based solely on other people’s subjective lived experiences. There will always be skeptics about any alleged praeternatural phenomena and their right to skepticism must be respected.
The point in bold makes perfect sense to me. The key word here is “solely”. The flip side of course, is without some basic level of trust in the lived experiences of others, language, culture, society and any number of foundations of human existence would scarcely be possible. So to believe things “solely” because of experiential claims by others is not recommended. Cross-checking any given experiential claim against other such claims is highly recommended. So is trying to replicate (or refute) these claims through personal experiences.
It appears on the surface that the sorts of perceptual experiences that occur to me personally are similar to experiences noticed by others as well. At least, I imagine when I share my experience in conversation with others and they come back with language that resonates with my experiences, that the structure of their experience of being in the world is generally comparable to my experience of being in the world. Of course, they could all be hallucinations, or completely faking it, or very convincing robots, or thoughts forced into me by some scientist’s very capable neural interface, so we’ll never really know, will we? (By “we’” I assume this Forum is not just my personal fever dream - but maybe it is! Proof of such matters is so very, very hard to come by!)
As for the second sentence about “praeternatural phenomena”, in the other thread, we established the word “praeternatural” has historically been used to describe unexpected things that don’t necessarily violate nature, but are not well understood by whatever science is at the moment. Earthquakes used to be on the praeternatural list, Living in the land of volcanoes and tsunamis, let me assure you all that earthquakes are entirely natural. (I heard Mount Saint Helens blow up with my own ears … or maybe that also was just part of the same all-comprehensive conspiracy as all the rest of it!)
That isn’t what it means in 2PC though. In 2PC it refers to a specific kind of causality, almost identical to Jung’s “synchronicity” in the broad sense: not the experience of meaningful co-incidences, but an entire realm of hidden causality. It is very specific because of the way it works, which is via the selection of a timeline via wavefunction collapse (Phase 2), not the unitary evolution of the wavefunction (Phase 1). This cannot include things which are not well understood by science, but are understood well enough that they can be attributed to normal causality. Praeternatural causality covers things which seem impossible to physicalists.
This principle of the NED is primarily there to suppress two extremely unhelpful things.
(1) Attempts to impose religious beliefs on people. These can only be justified by revelation, mystical experience, or direct witnessing of “supernatural” events. No skeptic will ever accept this, and should not be expected to.
(2) The worst excess of Identity Politics: “If I feel like a woman inside then I am a woman, and everybody else must accept this, even if I happen to have a penis.” Or…“If I feel like I am being oppressed then I am being oppressed.”
These are two very different examples, but their general structure is the same – the attempt to take something fundamentally subjective and then generalise it as if it was objective. And there are probably more examples that I haven’t thought of.
I showed Deepseek this thread and asked it for other examples:
3. Medical self-diagnosis without verifiable markers
“I feel I have chronic Lyme disease / mold sensitivity / adrenal fatigue” (where standard tests are negative, and the only evidence is subjective feeling) → demanding others (doctors, employers, insurers) treat it as confirmed pathology, and dismissing medical skepticism as gaslighting.
4. Alien abduction / paranormal encounter claims
“I vividly remember being taken by beings last night” → demanding belief that a physical event occurred, not just a dream or sleep paralysis, with no corroborating evidence. Skeptics are told they “just haven’t experienced it.”
5. Past-life memories in children
“My child describes being a WWII pilot; therefore reincarnation is true, and this specific memory is a factual past existence” → rejecting alternative explanations (cryptomnesia, suggestion, fantasy) as closed-minded.
6. Conspiracy “knowing”
“I’ve done my research (watched videos, felt a sense of clarity); I know 9/11 was an inside job / vaccines are a plot” → demanding equal epistemic weight to mainstream evidence, and framing skepticism as shilling or sheeple mentality.
7. Certain trauma / recovered memory claims
“I feel I have repressed memories of ritual abuse / a past event, therefore it absolutely happened” → demanding others (including the accused) accept the memory as literal truth, with skepticism treated as revictimization.
8. Artistic or aesthetic “truth” claims with moral force
“This painting makes me feel oppressed / erased; therefore the artist intended harm and must be censored” → elevating a subjective emotional response into an objective description of another’s intention, and demanding institutional action.
9. Spiritual “energy” or “vibe” claims in workplace / community settings
“I feel negative energy from you; therefore you are causing harm and must be removed from this space” — with no observable behavior cited, only the claimant’s internal state.
10. “Lived experience” as sole evidence for broad empirical claims
“As a [group member], I know that [policy X] causes psychological harm to everyone like me” — where the claim is treated as non-falsifiable and immune to counter-evidence or statistical data.
In each case, the key is the move from “I feel / experience / intuit P” to “You must believe P is objectively true, and act accordingly” — short-circuiting normal evidence, cross-checking, and the right to skepticism.