Comment by qsera
9 hours ago
> excluding some of the hypothesis space. That is the definition of evidence.
Not really, because in this case the "hypothesis space" is infinite, so your experiment exhausting some finite amount of space is not adding anything to the evidence.
So the point is when this "hypothesis space" is infinite or extremely large, if the best experiments that we can do right now can only explore a tiny fraction of that, then it is ABSURD to claim evidence of absence just because "We put our gold standard test and still didn't find anything".
>at which point I shrug and say that this thing you insist on defining has no impact on anything.
It is possible that this "thing" only interact with our world via events that we observe as truly random. Then you wouldn't go ahead and say random events have no impact on anything, will you?
You've retreated that we're no longer in the realm of “consciousness is supernatural”, and I rest my case. Retreating to an infinite hypothesis space that I can never fully exclude only helps you if there is no mundane explanation, otherwise I reject it for the same reason I can reject the boltzman-brain hypothesis. “But there's still a chance!” is a line from a comedy, not statistics.
That was about the star example, not about the “consciousness is supernatural” and the rest about the evidence for god which you bought up. You seemed to have confused between multiple threads of reasoning. May be, try to stick to one at a time?