Have you ever had a religious or supernatural experience?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

These poll results are horrifying.

Put another way, have you ever had a weird experience of some kind or another you still can't quite explain? My experience has been that even the most committed atheists and materialists usually have, just as even the most committed religious people have usually had doubts at some point.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

These poll results are horrifying.

Put another way, have you ever had a weird experience of some kind or another you still can't quite explain? My experience has been that even the most committed atheists and materialists usually have, just as even the most committed religious people have usually had doubts at some point.

No. But then again, I've never done drugs, so that probably helps.

This response is absurdly self-congratulatory and unprovokedly hostile to other posters, even by your standards. 8/10, would rage again.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The observer effect doesn't postulate that nothing happens without observation, merely that observation alters any perceived outcomes. With no observer, things would still happen, but without the quantum effects of the observer's presence.

What, for you, is the key difference in credibility between the Christian miracles that you have been discussing this whole time, apparently happening with no clear element of human will, and the practices of shamanism (which you insist on referring to derogatorily) found in numerous cultures, in which it is the power of human interaction with the sphere of the spiritual that creates results as well as the value of performance and self-expression, or in the interaction of science with the forces of creation in such a manner? I find the latter two to be far more interesting and philosophically sound means of realization, personally. Why would the latent power of forces beyond us intercede on our behalf without some sort of manipulation and fundamental understanding of the workings thereof? Why is the idea of "there being no mind-independent reality" incompatible to you with the acknowledgement of the presence of spiritual force of which we as a species occupy a part?

You are correct about the observer effect specifically - I should have cited superposition and wave collapse, which do require an observer. There are a number of metaphysical positions consistent with quantum mechanics, including dualism, theism, idealism, panpsychism, and solipsism, but materialism is not one of them.

Yeah, but the "observer" in wave collapse could just as well be a coin or a potato, there's no need for an intelligent or conscious being as an observer

Yeah, this is a key point in quantum theory, and is what separates serious articulations of the Copenhagen interpretation (which is itself not as rock-solid of an orthodoxy now as it was half a century ago) from out-and-out pseudoscience.

My favorite (conceptually/"aesthetically") non-Copenhagen, indisputably-materialist interpretation of quantum mechanics is Bohm's pilot wave theory, but that one goes back many decades so I'm not sure how supported it is these days.