The sense I get from the person, what the cards say, and what my own predispositions say, all have a bearing on what I say during a reading. As for justifying the part determined by the cards, I can offer two:
-they might simply be a way of limiting what I can say since I'm not going to tell someone something completely counter to the traditional meaning. That limitation might force me to be more creative than if I was just going off my own predispositions alone.
-I also would hope tech and science oriented people wouldn't rule out that the question being asked has a bearing on what cards show up before running an experiment. I'm agnostic on that point myself, but I could expound at least two theories that would allow for that kind of foreshadowing without contradicting any beliefs that are held by at least a plurality of the HN crowd. What is contradicted by that belief is our instincts based on Newtonian physics, but those have already been proven incomplete.
Have you ever considered that your practise might be harming real people based on what sounds like pretty much inferences? Like you might just be messing up a perfectly good relationship someone has, or anything like that?
I got fired from a job one time because the woman running it decided I was the reason that the business was "cursed". I got yelled at in French, a language I don't understand, and only understood after the other person I was working with found me in a nearby park confused as to why I had just been yelled at and fired. Turns out boss had hired this guy to come in and do a tarot reading, and because of my star sign and the reading he said I was the reason things weren't working (It was literally because she had purchased a grill from wal-mart which had lied about how hot it could get instead of investing in something commercial). Even better was how she shut the whole business down right after this, all based on the word of one man with a deck of medieval divination cards which she seemed to put all of her belief in.
As a result I fucking lie about my birthday to strangers to say I'm an aquarius and I find people like me a lot more. I honestly do my best to avoid those people though, don't want the experience of someone making up insane bullshit and blaming me arbitrarily again. That was horrible.
> I also would hope tech and science oriented people wouldn't rule out that the question being asked has a bearing on what cards show up before running an experiment
Yes, we would rule it out, short of the Tarot reader secretly manipulating the deck.
There's no polite way of saying this, so I'll be straight: that's magical thinking. You cannot influence what cards show up just by the question you ask: you can only do so by actually manipulating the deck with your bare hands (or having a trick deck).
There's no two ways about this. Experiments have been conducted time and time again. Anyone able to reproduce the claimed effect would be rich by now.
No such experiment is possible, because the cards don't have single meanings. Any completely random set of results will look meaningful to a tarot card reader, because that's the whole point of the reading. Can you imagine an experiment that would allow for a negative result?
Sure: have clients submit readings that were 'hits' in their own subjective experience, generate several random readings, and present them to professional readers along with the real reading and a description of what actually happened. If the readers can't guess the actual reading above chance, it's a negative result. Of course, you can't get a double blind unless the description is supplied by someone who doesn't know what the original reading was, so it might be a hard experiment to carry off.
But I get the wider point; meaning and facts aren't exactly the same thing.
If I understand your proposed experiment correctly, it's not at all suitable to demonstrate the question determines what cards come up.
What your experiment would do, if successful, would be to provide evidence that given a set of ordered Tarot cards, experts agree on what is the interpretation [1], that is, that the interpretation itself is not random but it derives by well known rules from the set of cards. Note this has nothing to do with showing the cards were in any way influenced by the question!
[1] this would be big enough, since we know no two Tarot readers agree on the interpretation of any set of cards, so I expect the experiment would fail to demonstrate there's a deterministic interpretation.
I'm not sure you do understand it. My hypothesis is that if knowing the actual events of a 'successful' reading allows one to infer what cards were drawn, that there's a causal relationship between what cards are drawn and how successful the reading is.
But I think the question of experimentation risks obscuring an important point you touched on, namely the distinction between facts and meaning. They're certainly not the same thing, I think of them as three-dimensional and four dimensional analyses of the same dataset. If divination is worth anything it's because it deals with meaning, but the relation of that to the facts of the situation being examined is ambiguous.
The experiment wouldn't show this at all. It would simply provide some evidence there's some kind of "objective" reading of a given Tarot result, not that it was predetermined by the cards.
It's easy to provide a counterexample: suppose I ask the same question N times, and N times the cards show different results, and each time the "experts" agree on a single interpretation. This in no way shows that the question determines the result; it merely shows there is an agreed upon procedure to interpret the result of cards.
Let me give you a simple example: let's say the question is "what lies in my future?" and each time it gets asked, a single Tarot card is drawn. Each time a different card gets drawn (for the same question and same person asking), but all experts agree on this interpretation: "the card is a picture of (thing)".
This interpretation is deterministic, every expert agrees on it, yet the card drawn doesn't get determined by the question.
I hope I have shown your experiment is flawed.
As for the rest of your comment re: meaning vs fact, I'm sorry but it's the same old cop-out all mystics end up claiming whenever backed against a wall.
What I'm proposing is a variation on an experiment that's been run many times in remote viewing settings and it goes as follows:
1. Person A puts a picture in a vault.
2. Person B draws a picture of what they think is in the vault.
3. Person A groups the picture person B drew with three other pictures and hands them, along with the picture in the vault, to person C.
4. Person C compares the picture in the vault to the four drawings they've been handed and decides which is the closest.
If the picture person B drew is judged closest, it's a positive result. If positive results happen to a statistically unlikely degree, it's evidence for psi being real[1].
What I'm suggesting is replacing the picture in the vault in step 1 with a life event and the drawing in step 2 with drawing a card from a deck. The 'life event' makes it a difficult experiment to run practically, but nothing is impossible about the basic experiment of having a double-blinded judge match a prediction with an outcome.
Note also, while there's ample evidence that a qualified remote viewer can draw an accurate picture better than chance, I remain agnostic as to whether a qualified tarot reader can pull an accurate card better than chance. The skill might be entirely in the interpretation. But that just narrows down the question of how it works as something weird in the human nervous system, there might also be something weird in how random events happen. It helps my practice to leave that question open, though if there were an experiment like the one I suggested which did answer it, I'd be very interested in reading the results.
[1] since we're talking about backing against a wall, what do you do when presented with evidence like this?
P<10^-4. Note I pulled this one from google scholar at random after searching remote viewing experiments, there are many more like it. Parapsychology reproduces much more reliably than regular psychology, there's too much scrutiny not to.
> 1. Person A puts a picture in a vault. 2. Person B draws a picture of what they think is in the vault. 3. Person A groups the picture person B drew with three other pictures and hands them, along with the picture in the vault, to person C. 4. Person C compares the picture in the vault to the four drawings they've been handed and decides which is the closest.
Without knowing the details of the experiment, just from that description there are so many potential methodological problems there! Especially if conducted by someone on the fringe of science which doesn't understand how to do a proper experiment. For example, what's the communication between persons A, B & C. Is this double-blind? How are the other drawings chosen? What does "closest" mean, and is it mentioned verbally, do they fill out a form with rankings, or what? How are candidates B & C chosen?
What I'm telling you may seem unfair, but it's reasonable to cast these doubts because the people who would conduct and participate in this kind of experiment belong to a self-selecting group that doesn't understand how to conduct scientific experiments. They could of course be doing everything right, but there is good reason to be doubtful before we know the details.
Since, as you know, mainstream science doesn't currently consider PSI a real phenomenon. Would you say this is because of a conspiracy to suppress the truth, a dismissal because mainstream science is narrow minded, or what? Claims about PSI aren't nothing new, so this isn't "new stuff" they are skeptical about.
> Note also, while there's ample evidence that a qualified remote viewer can draw an accurate picture better than chance
Where is this ample evidence? Does the mainstream scientific consensus agree with your assertion?
> Parapsychology reproduces much more reliably than regular psychology, there's too much scrutiny not to.
This is not established, but also: we are comparing parapsychology to science; if you want to argue some or all branches of psychology aren't science either, feel free, but that's a different argument. There's no reproducibility and no scientific method to it. If you (you == not just you, Suo, but anyone) can reproduce parapsychological "experiments", how come you did not win the Amazing Randi challenge?
PS: the two experiments you posed don't even seem equivalent! We are still not demonstrating the question determines the cards!
A very simple one is a variation on the simulation hypothesis - if the simulation has only one RNG, we'd expect similar patterns to show up in all random data sets related to the same event, which could be interpreted by someone who's studied them.
I don't subscribe to the simulation hypothesis myself in a literal way, but I'm working on something like the above theory using the language of QBism. If you're familiar with the quantum eraser, it's a variation on the double slit experiment where the photon is split into two entangled photons, and the observation of one is made after the other has already impacted the photosensitive screen. My interpretation of the results is that reality is quite dependent on perspective, and facts determined in the future at larger scales can affect the paths taken to them in the present. How that could affect a card shuffle isn't obvious, hence why I'm agnostic on that question. But it certainly suggests a mechanism for precognition as it's tested in the lab [1] and it's possible that only certain cards are 'significant' when viewed from the final result, which might tilt the odds of how a shuffle turns out as some biologists believe happens in adaptive mutation[2].
If you're interested in this line of inquiry I've got an essay series up on the subject and would welcome feedback [3].
[1]Radin, Dean I. "Electrodermal presentiments of future emotions." Journal of Scientific Exploration 18.2 (2004): 253-273.
Unless you are a physicist, I wouldn't invoke quantum anything. If I'm not mistaken, randomly quoting "quantum" to support fringe theories is one of the key items in the Crackpot Index.
There is absolutely no doubt in science that posing a question has any influence in the order shuffled cards come up. None. No amount of links to quantum this or that, or adaptive mutations, or any other unrelated stuff is going to change that.
I hate that I have to be this direct with you, since your tone is friendly, because it makes me sound aggressive. However, the hard truth is that you're basically arguing garbage, a variation of "there's much we don't know, let's keep an open mind" which has been a tactic of pseudoscientists and scammers since forever.
To be honest, I liked it better when I thought you were admitting the cards themselves where irrelevant, a focus point for your own ramblings about the customer.
-they might simply be a way of limiting what I can say since I'm not going to tell someone something completely counter to the traditional meaning. That limitation might force me to be more creative than if I was just going off my own predispositions alone.
-I also would hope tech and science oriented people wouldn't rule out that the question being asked has a bearing on what cards show up before running an experiment. I'm agnostic on that point myself, but I could expound at least two theories that would allow for that kind of foreshadowing without contradicting any beliefs that are held by at least a plurality of the HN crowd. What is contradicted by that belief is our instincts based on Newtonian physics, but those have already been proven incomplete.