What seems to be in the category of a daydream: phenomena isolated in terms of causes to the inside of the person (brain,mind) might well have external causes: magnets can cause internal experiences that one might not realize are caused by something external. A few others include mold neurotoxicity, infrasound, carbon monoxide leaks…And individuals can have drastically different degrees of response to these external causes. What other causes might there be for what seem like internal only experiences that are not?
I did, though not clearly.
The point of my exclusion of “fully-internal, subjective perceptions” was to exclude cases that are in-principle untestable. If the only detectable effect a thing has is to generate a perception in a single mind, the world looks the same whether that perception is being beamed into that mind from the outside, or generated unconsciously from within.
Where those versions of the world are distinguishable, e.g. supposing such a perception could convey information that could be tested, it stops looking like a question of ‘ghosts’ and starts looking like a question of psychic phenomena. Which is fine, but it doesn’t seem like it fits the most common understanding of ‘ghost’, it requires a different line of argument, and my intent in this thread was not to disprove every flavor of paranormal.
A couple responses to this point:
I’m not trying to disprove ghosts logically, I’m trying to disprove them empirically, and induction is a valid form of empirical argument.
And it’s a valid form of empirical argument because it is based on a mathematical truth: Each additional observation that a ghost sighting is just a bedsheet increases the likelihood that all ghost sightings are bedsheets – or rather makes it more improbable that some ghosts aren’t bedsheets and we just happen to keep finding ones that are. And if N is arbitrarily large, we can get arbitrarily close to certainty.
That’s true regardless of the parts of probability you’ve called ‘subjective’: whatever your prior probability of X, whatever you think the probability of a particular observation given X vs. given ~X. How each additional observation logically changes the probability that X is mathematically defined.
I’m all for exploring possibilities, but it isn’t (and shouldn’t be) how we approach empirically-supported beliefs about the world. We can always ask, “What other causes might there be for what seems like X but is not?” And creative people can always come up with answers. But we don’t act in the world as though the mere possibility of doing that tells us anything about the world.
If we concede the point as to all the usual ways people think ghosts create perceptions in the mind (light via the eyes, sound via the ears, temperature via the skin, etc.), and what’s left is a perception unaccompanied by any known exogenous means of creating a perception, and no proposed exogenous means of creating one – In that case we should have very high confidence in the proposition that the perceptions are endogenous.
…again, not necessarily.
If you wanted to exclude untestable things, well, it was enough to say so. Yes, a lot of untestable things exist - to say the contrary would be baseless.
Not really, what we can say is that both situations (only-subjective perception, and perception from other things) matches up with what is measured by your instruments.
Exactly, since they are indistinguishable, Occam’s razor entails that no further assumption is necessary (that is one and not the other), since it makes no difference, hence you cannot conclude it’s one and not the other.
No problem, you are against a particular type of ghosts, and that’s enough, but keep in mind that the same experiences match up with what I wrote before - so even if one says “I’ve seen this”, and you measure no photons, it doesn’t entail there is no ghost.
I disagree that such thing exists. There are no empirical proofs. Empirically, you can only say “this situation matches with this measurements” - you can’t even say no other situation matches with the measurements.
Since likelihoods and confidence and probabilities are subjective, you are in deeper waters still. By talking about likelihoods, you are merely stating your opinion. The largesse of N makes no difference here, since you don’t even know the whole number of cases. If N was equal or more than the whole number of cases, you’d have a fair point, but it’s impossible to arrive at such. Yes, people are certain of false things, so certainty makes no differene here. Keep in mind that people that think ghosts exist have reached certainty and confidence about that.
You seem to be strawmanning the argument. If you come across people that have experienced ghosts and ask, quite a big part of them agree that they could go through walls, for example, or appear and disappear without any ‘wind’ or explosions happening, so that (for starters) would mean they have no mass. They could say the ghost had no reflection on a mirror, so no photons.
So what you are saying is that you are certain that a very naive view of ghosts don’t exist. We agree there
I think the course of this conversation suggests otherwise; the modal respondent does not seem to have a clear idea of what kind of thing is testable and what isn’t.
In particular, it’s important that anything that creates a measurable physical effect outside of the mind of the observer is testable, and so it’s better to say explicitly that that is one attribute of the ghosts I’m discussing.
That is not how Occam’s razor works.
Where two descriptions predict the same set of observations, but one description includes the existence of an additional being that follows some as-yet-undiscovered set of physical laws, Occam’s razor says we should prefer the simpler description and reject the existence of the being.
You disagree that we should call it “disproof”, but you can’t function in the world without implicitly accepting the concept: You do in fact generalize from incomplete evidence, you do make predictions based on past observations, you do regularly discount far-fetched world models that fit your observations. You do it regularly and I expect you do it passably well.
The premises are arguably ‘subjective’ (though it’s misleading to caracterize them that way), but the math of how the premises interact is not. Even if we disagree about how likely each side of a die is to come up, the relationship between all the sides is mathematically constrained. Similarly, each subsequent roll of the die should affect our respective beliefs about those likelihoods in mathematically determinate ways.
I noticed this subtle shift. It seems like you’re trying to imply that “quite a big part” would agree about the mirror and therefore the photons. I don’t know how ghost believers feel about mirrors, but I don’t think there’s any reason to think that “quite a big part” would agree with you on that point. There’s much better reason to think that “quite a big part” of ghost believers think that ghosts have been captured on film – so yes photons.
So I’m saying that we have very strong empirical evidence that this very common view of ghosts don’t exist.
And I find the repeated oscillation between arguments by my critics in this thread – “You have not disproved that definition of ghosts” vs. “That definition of ghosts doesn’t matter anyway” – to suggest that the definition of ghosts I provided is an important part of their conception of ghosts, and that my empirical arguments do undermine the belief in the kind of ghosts I described.
Not necessarily
Well, I thought you’d be aware that I know about that particular view you wrote. You can make the same with assumptions. When one assumption makes no difference in the outcome, it makes no sense to assume it.
How come? All your wrote down are things about your ideas about the world, not the world itself. So it seems you can only ‘prove’ that way ideas you have, not the actual world. This is not a question about your idea of the world (‘there are no ideas about ghosts’ would be the topic), but rather about the world.
Plus, customs are no excuse for illogical arguments - I hope you are aware of it.
Not at all, I lack belief. There is no amount of rolls of dice that would steer something that doesn’t exist one way or the other.
Fair enough: you think that way, I think that way. Now, what do people that recall ghost experiences think?
Yes, naive ghosts don’t exist.
I don’t know about that definition stuff
Carleas, your claim that Occam’s razor means we should “reject the existence of the being” — I’m sorry, but that’s a pretty fundamental misreading of what the tool actually does and is for.
1. It’s a Methodological Tool, Not an Ontological Guillotine
Occam’s razor is a rule of parsimony for choosing between hypotheses. That’s it. It is not some device for proving that something doesn’t exist. It tells us which theory is the most efficent to test or model first given the data we currently have - note that we. That we is a community that agrees two models cover all the facets of a phenomenon. We don’t have that we. It’s a methodological suggestion for a we that can come to agreement — not an ontological detector. The universe is under absolutely no obligation to be simple, and choosing to drop a variable for modeling efficiency does not mean it doesn’t exist. Using it to flatly declare that something does not exist is a sever philosophical overreach. Full stop.
2. Ceteris Paribus — and You’re Skipping Over That
On top of that, Occam’s razor comes with a strict prerequisite: it only applies ceteris paribus — all else being equal. You’re assuming both descriptions cleanly predict the exact same set of observations. In the real world, that consensus rarely holds up. If one group adopts the simpler model for efficiency, but another group argues that the simpler model leaves an explanatory gap around the subjective meaning or nuance of the experience — then all else is not equal. The razor stays in the drawer, because there’s no agreement on what even constitutes a complete “capture” of the observations in the first place. It can be used inside groups that do agree that both cover the phenomenon.
3. The Problem of Other Minds — and Epistemological Bullying
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. By claiming your simpler model accounts for everything and therefore rules out the other person’s description, you are effectively claiming to have solved the Problem of Other Minds. You’re acting as though you can look into another person’s subjective experience, decide that what they actually experienced was X, and dismiss their internal testimony because it doesn’t fit your preferred, streamlined model. You might be right. You might not be.
When someone says, “your explanation doesn’t cover the reality of what I experienced,” and the response is essentially “Occam’s razor says your experience is wrong because we [the speaker’s group] are satisfied with fewer entities” — that’s epistemological bullying. You’re assuming the role of an omniscient observer who understands their subjective reality better than they do, just to keep your model tidy. I’ve pushed this a bit by framing your post as a more direct interpersonal exchange, but honestly? That is what’s being said to people here.
4. The Danger of Intellectual Hubris — and We’ve Been Here Before
History is absolutely littered with the wreckage of this exact kind of dogmatic “simplification” being used to dismiss real phenomena before we had the tools or frameworks to measure them properly. We’ve talked about this before, but I’ll add a couple more and one oldie but goodie for newer readers.
Fifty years ago, patients with Epstein-Barr virus were told their chronic fatigue was all in their heads — because the prevailing biomedical model couldn’t locate a simpler physical cause. Sixty years ago, combat veterans experiencing what we now call PTSD were labeled as having a fundamental “mental illness,” rather than what it actually was: a perfectly natural, healthy biological response to a horrific experience. Rogue waves in oceanography — we’ll experiencers were told it was really X, because X included entities the ‘we’ arguing it considered real and not really big solitary waves.
There is simply no good reason to go around declaring there are no ghosts.
The dogmatic application of parsimony didn’t protect the truth. It institutionalized gaslighting. And it’s a pattern a lot of scientists go through also — when colleagues assume X is already disproven, rather than sitting with the uncomfortable reality that what’s being found doesn’t fit neatly — or at all — with the dominant paradigm.
And hell, solipsism is extremely parsimonious. I know you have no subjective experience at all. I got an explanation with fewer entities.
As we know Occam believed that the only entity you could not question was God. Yes, yes, this was the Middle Ages. But he was aware that this belief was faith-based. But using the OR as an ontological ruling out device is also faith based, especially given how often it has failed in the past when people did this, consciously aware of the OR or unaware but treating the same rule of parsimony as an ontological device.
Could you define naive ghosts?
Is this an argument for solipsism? I agree we can’t logically disprove solipsism. I don’t think that undermines empiricism, we can make empirical observations even if the universe is solipsistic.
Ha, well I admit I had not considered that. Two thoughts:
First, I’m skeptical of the claim. Once you understand a question, it seems you implicitly have a belief about the answer, even if that belief is that the outcome is completely uncertain, i.e. all outcomes are equally likely.
Moreover, if you have any other beliefs, I’m not sure it’s logically tenable to maintain a lack of belief about something else once you understand it. If you believe a statement X, and statement Y has any relationship at all to X, then your belief about Y is logically constrained by your belief about X. And merely understanding Y seems to require that it has some relationship to your other beliefs.
But second, it seems like “I lack belief” is tantamount to saying that all outcomes are equally likely to you. I’m not sure how those could be distinguished.
You’re taking my comments out of context. I didn’t invoke Occam’s Razor, PseudoAI did. I took “indistinguishable” to imply ceteris paribus, which is correct empirically, i.e. where the ceteris that is paribus is the set of empirical observations predicted by two competing models of the world.
I agree that if the models don’t actually predict the same observations, then Occam’s Razor doesn’t apply.
Solipsism isn’t parsimonious; parsimony isn’t just about simplicity, it’s about the efficiency of explanatory power.
On its own, solipsism doesn’t predict or explain anything. Solipsistic models that do predict or explain anything look like non-solipsistic models that predict or explain the same things. They also arguably have the same number of ‘things’, and differ only on whether those things are inside or outside of one’s mind.
measurable ghosts
I’m truly not following you. I referred that what you could “prove” that way would only entail you being sure of your ideas, and nothing having to do with the actual world. If you want to prove things about the actual world, what you put forward is not enough.
I don’t know about the first part, but about that: Not at all, probabilities are measurements of symmetry of thought scenarios. They have nothing to do with belief.
From what you’ve said, it doesn’t seem like anything would be enough to prove things about the actual world.
And if we can only prove things about our ideas and not about the actual world, that starts to look like solipsism.
Probabilities are a useful way of cashing out beliefs that are based on empirical observations, since we can never be completely certain of those beliefs.
I’m using ‘probability’, ‘confidence’, and ‘likelihood’ interchangeably, roughly as the quantification of uncertainty. Instead of discussing just proven vs. not proven, framing a question in terms of probability lets us discuss the degree to which something is proven (and e.g. how that proven-ness changes with additional observations).
So, we know that we will never be able to measure ghosts? How do we know that?
Saying there are many things doesn’t have any explanatory power either.
Sure, it’s an ontological position.
Except you are working from the underlying ontological position that everything is part of one Mind, say.
Yes, there would be phenomena, but all of those phenomena are part of the one being. Just as we do grant that many ‘things’ in our cognition, minds, are part of us, but here the external split is not there.
So, then you don’t agree with that reject portion of the above? Or did I misinterpret it?
We can, just not as much as we’d like. For example, you can prove that something exists, that you exist, that all that exists is causeless. Maybe some stuff else too, for sure. You can prove things conditionally too (like “If A, then B”), you can prove that induction is illogical, and that to not have seen ghosts is not enough reason to conclude there are no ghosts, for example.
Yes, to avoid solipsism you have to steer away from what you point out as ‘empirical proof’, since that would be a ‘proof’ only about your ideas, not the world that ideas would refer to.
We’d like to prove a lot of things, for sure, but mostly we can’t. We can prove that we mostly can’t.
That’s a particular choice of yours. Some time ago I made a thread about the interpretations of probability and statistics… I thought it was an interesting topic but mostly nobody chimed in, and it undermines stuff like this. Probability being something more than a measure of the symmetry of thought scenarios is a personal view, and we cannot back that up (we cannot measure belief or personal inclinations)
If what you referred when using probability, confidence and likelihood as that personal inclinations you have, then you see it’s subjective, so it doesn’t pertain to the topic at hand. Many people have a lot of confidence in ghosts (any type: bedsheet or higher-dimensional entities perceived via daydreams so to speak). Precisely because of that, framing a question that way doesn’t get a common ground to speak about it, since it is subjective and not even intersubjective.
Probability and provenness don’t relate between each other unless what you are pointing about something proven is subjective, which ends up in solipsism
I wrote ‘measurable’ just to point out that you cannot ever rule out unmeasurable ghosts. Plus, since we can’t ever have enough data to say there are no unmeasurable stuff, and there can be unmeasurable ghosts, we cannot therefore rule out unmeasurable ghosts. For example, suppose a ghosts exists but it is in the middle of a forest with nobody to spook, and then disappears. So, you cannot rule out such unobservable ghosts to exist.
There seems to be a confusion between a ghost and kind of an ‘apparition’ (which includes experiences of ghosts). One is the thing, other is the perception of it. They’re not necessarily the same
Oh, ok. Yes, right now it is tricky to measure consciousness. So most of us grant that there is at least something we consider real that isn’t right now measurable.
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If two models’ ability to predict and alignment with observation are the same (“ceteris paribus”/“indistinguishable”), and the only difference between the models is that one posits an additional being, Occam’s Razor we should prefer the model without the additional being, i.e. “reject the existence of the being”.
That’s a contingent claim, with two contingencies: 1) ceteris paribus, and 2) the being is the only difference between the models.
Occam’s Razor as I understand it, and as I think it is most defensible, is concerned ‘simplicity’ rather than ‘things’. This distinction is illustrated by attempts to applying Occam’s Razor to theism, where theists will argue that a god is one thing, and so a theistic model is simpler, and anti-theists will argue that a god is a very complicated thing, so an atheistic model is simpler.
That’s why the second contingency matters: it’s assuming that the model with the being is straightforwardly less simple. We take as a given that models are identical other than the addition of the being. It’s not that it’s a ‘being’, or that it’s a ‘thing’, it’s just that it’s an extension of the competing model.
Contrast the case of solipsism, which isn’t straightforward in that way: It isn’t clear whether a single mind complicated enough to contain the world is simpler than an external world perceived by a much simpler mind.
I’m slightly inclined towards solipsism being more complicated, but I’m not sure.
I don’t understand this, to me it seems like the opposite. The stuff you say we can prove (cogito ergo sum etc.) is not really external – at least, it’s all compatible with solipsism, right? It seems like without ‘empirical proof’, we can’t know anything from experience other than that we can experience.
And I agree with it in some sense, it’s a philosophically interesting point, but it’s not useful and it’s not how we actually live our lives. Moreover, there are useful concepts of ‘knowing’ and ‘proof’ that we employ in practice that we shouldn’t abandon because of it.
So maybe we should frame the question differently:
We don’t ‘know’ anything we learn by induction, but we use induction every day to decide how to act.
We induce that the sun will rise tomorrow, and we close our curtains in anticipation so we can sleep in past sunrise.
We induce that the subway will cost money, and we set aside some money for the cost of our commute.
But we’d be much more surprised if the sun didn’t rise tomorrow than if the subway were free, right? We use induction for both, we’re confident enough to act on both induced conclusions, but they are not equal.
So if we reserve ‘proof’ in such a way that we can’t prove anything we know from experience, we can still distinguish between them.
Then we can ask questions like, would we be more surprised if ghosts exist or if the subway was free tomorrow? Would we be more surprised if ghosts exist or extant thylacines exist? In practice, we make these determinations all the time, whenever we decide how to act.
I disagree, but I’ll take that up in your other thread.
Do you agree that an individual can make these determinations between their own beliefs? And do you agree that those determinations are constrained by logic? i.e. if I think A is more likely than B but less likely than C, then I have to think C is more likely than B.
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There is no rejection of the existence of the being. You are just opting to go methodologically with the simpler model. You are adding to the OR. It’s not a metaphysical tool, it’s a pragmatic one.
Though it depends on what you mean by reject the being.
When you say “reject the existence of the being,” do you mean:
(a) do not include the being in our preferred explanatory model, or
(b) conclude that the being does not exist?
If you are doing the latter, then you are adding an ontological dimension to the OR that is your own. It’s a common addition but it’s an addition. And in a conclusion sense once that addition is there, it is less parsimonious regarding conclusions. You now have an ontological tool that is reaching more conclusions that Occam would have suggested and a categorically different kind of conclusion.
Edit: I was thinking that one thing that could be in the air I’d like to dispel and this might have been made unclear by my responses. It’s not like I think you should be agnostic when it comes to ghosts. I have no goal there. You have concluded, given the situation as you know it, there are no ghosts. I have no interest in trying to convince you that you need to put an asterisk on that. That you ‘should’ be open. What I am reacting to is what seems to be present here which is that we all should accept that there are no ghosts. It has been demonstrated. We as a community know that we can state there are no ghosts with confidence. With I think the implicit judgment that those who do not move from agnosticism or belief to to that position are not seeing the proof. The proof is there. And we wouldn’t be seeing it. We ought (we the community, ought the rational ought not the moral ought) to move to the there are no ghosts position and we are failing in reasoning if we don’t move to that position. That’s what I am resisting. Again, just to be doubly clear, it’s not that I think you need to leave the door open, even microscopically, yourself.
I agree, it seems to you that way. It isn’t. I haven’t come across a clearer way to write that down to you, but taking what you say are ‘empirical proofs’ you end up proving that you have some idea, not that the thing that idea refers to is such and such.
We can know some thing outside what we can experience - I already pointed out that, for example, existence itself is causeless.
The problem is that the end don’t justify the means, so something being ‘not useful’ and not how you choose to live your life makes no distinction to ghosts existing or not. If it is, then you’d be saying about ghosts something quite different: “I don’t live my life as if ghosts exist”, which I would agree. But that’s not the point - the point is if there are or aren’t ghosts.
Precisely because that makes no distinction, it’s important to keep the proofs we have as proofs, and what we know as what we know, and not confuse them, because in the name of practicality you’d end up saying illogical and/or false things.
I agree, many people choose to decide to act that way, for sure. I see it more as raising bets. To raise bets that the sun will rise up tomorrow you don’t need a proof nor certainty and not even logical arguments. For sure, surprise is one reaction when the world shows itself different from what we think the world to be.
I didn’t understand what you meant.
Anyhow, the amount of suprise is, at best, a subjective measure of how much we put our ideas of the world to the test. In any case, you can be open to whatever there is. I find quite surprising that the world has any pattern at all!
Sorry, I lost you there, what are ‘these determinations’? You can try to order your ideas about stuff like ‘more likely’ up to some point. I don’t know if it is that easy
3 posts were split to a new topic: From: “There Are No Ghosts”
This is an interesting question. Occam’s Razor clearly supports (a): any additional hypothesis complicates the model, so prefer the model without the additional hypothesis.
And I see what you’re saying with respect to (b): that ‘X exists’ and ‘X does not exist’ are both additions to the model, and if the models are otherwise identical then prima facie Occam’s Razor doesn’t prefer one to the other, and prefers the model with neither to both.
That’s a bit surprising, and worth unpacking. I think there’s something weird going on in the interaction between logic and empiricism.
Empirically, there doesn’t seem to be a meaningful difference between a model that doesn’t contemplate X and a model that explicitly rejects X. This is possibly a failure of imagination on my part, but I can’t think of an example where the non-existence of something would play the kind of causal role necessary for it to be a part of the explanatory power of a model. Whenever something doesn’t exist, our best model of the world would just ignore it.
Logically, that seems like ‘agnosticism’, but it’s the kind of skeptical argument we’ve discussed before: we could be wrong about all of our empirical beliefs, Russel’s Teapot etc. An empirical model that doesn’t mention something isn’t an indication of any particular agnosticism about that thing. Once the luminiferous ether hypothesis failed to predict observations, the best models just stopped talking about it.
It’s true that the model doesn’t contain “X doesn’t exist” as a hypothesis, but neither would the best model of a world in which X doesn’t exist. Put another way: a model that doesn’t mention X is compatible with a world in which X doesn’t exist, but incompatible with a world in which X exists.
I mean, I think we share the same external world, so there is a fact of the matter as to whether or not ghosts exist. I also think we have objective evidence that supports a particular conclusion about what that fact-of-the-matter is, so after considering that evidence we should accept that particular conclusion.
So if I’m correct that there are no ghosts, and that the evidence I’ve cited supports that conclusion, then yes I do think that we-the-community ought-the-rational-ought to accept that there are no ghosts.
Do you disagree with that claim, or just the antecedents in the conditional?
I don’t know man, I just have a hard time believing that if I had said “there are no dogs” you wouldn’t just show me a dog, instead of saying that I’m making claims about ideas and not the thing the idea refers to.
This is what I was getting at with distinguishing between things we know from experiences: An individual can order their beliefs by subjective likelihood. And “sun rises every day” has a very high likelihood, and “there are no extant thylacines” has a somewhat lower likelihood, and “there are no ghosts” has its own likelihood. Is that right?
Though just to be clear, that’s not what I’m arguing. I don’t think rejecting ruling out entities that are not currently supported, in science say, entails walking around thinking all our empirically arrived at beliefs could be wrong. That’s part of the methodology. We should not be thrown, should one decide to agree with my position, suddenly into a state of doubt about everything.
I think incomplete is better here. Newton still gets used.
I disagree. Because we are not a we. We do share experiences from the same enormous batch of possible experiences of the same external reality. But the statement ‘we share the same external reality’ can be misleading here. I am not saying you are stacking the deck or something, just being very careful about implications. The rogue wave scenario did not demonstrate people did not share the same reality. It just showed they hadn’t all experienced the same parts of it at the same times.
But I think there are some problems with the first section of your response.
- science didn’t drop the ether because of Occam’s razor (parsimony). We dropped it because of falsification (direct contradiction). With luminiferous ether there were some very specific things that should be true if that existed. So a very specific focused experiment could be done and that specific experiment failed to show what was necessarly the canse if that hypothesis was correct.The Michelson-Morley experiment actively looked for the “ether wind” and found nothing. The ether hypothesis made a specific prediction, and that prediction failed.
Also it seems like you are saying that a model that doesn’t mention X fits only a world in which X doesn’t exist. Therefore omitting X isn’t “agnosticism”—it’s effectively a rejection. But we have to talk about the domain of validity. Newton isn’t wrong now. We still use Newton. But in certain conditions or certain scales and when wanting certain kinds of information, we use more recent and perhaps more ontologically correct theories.
I think there are hints that you have a strong concern around this issue because of what I think is an undercurrent false dilemma.
“…it’s the kind of skeptical argument we’ve discussed before: we could be wrong about all of our empirical beliefs, Russel’s Teapot etc.” - I don’t think avoiding the next step, rejection, leads to some kind of universal doubt or that it opens the floodgates.
“An empirical model that doesn’t mention something isn’t an indication of any particular agnosticism about that thing.” – it’s not agnositicism in the sense that the scientist would self-identify as an agnostic in relation to ghosts. But methodologically and then from that epistemologically agnosticism is a metaphor for the technical view. It doesn’t mean everything will be treated alike. Of course things that fit with current paradigms will get priority. Of course phenomena with some evidence will get more attention than others. Of course people will continue to rank likelihoods based on many factors. And of course one can be an agnostic atheist.
“Empirically, there doesn’t seem to be a meaningful difference between a model that doesn’t contemplate X and a model that explicitly rejects X.” —but there is a huge difference. There’s little difference if you are looking at the two pieces of paper, one with the rejection, one without. But how we interact interpersonally will be different - with believers, for example. How we deal with anomalies will be different. How we deal with others who experience anomalies will be different. And once the rejection is broadcast, that also has effects. Of course from your perspective those effects would be good, but they are still effects. Now when you start that sentence with Empirically, you may mean for you or you and others who do not believe. You will not experience the world differently, in terms of what you sense. But it does lead to a shift in how you experience others, if you truly come to rest on rejection as demonstrated.
I think there is an undercurrent of a false dichotomy here. It is as if the options of non-believers are:
Dogmatic Denial: “There is no evidence for X, therefore X does not exist.” (Intellectual overreach).
Radical Skepticism: “We can’t prove X doesn’t exist, so we must build our models as if X might be there.” (Intellectual paralysis).
Pragmatic Agnosticism: “We act on what is verified within our current domain of validity. We omit X from our working models because it has not met the burden of proof. However, we do not claim to have ontological knowledge that X cannot or does not exist.” (Intellectual humility).