On Paracausality and Truth-Seeking

Hey Aydin,

Glad we met up for dinner with Rishi and Dawson.

It's rare to find someone willing to engage seriously with questions about truth, faith, God, and the supernatural while maintaining intellectual rigor.

I've been thinking about something since we talked. Specifically about terminology.

You used "acausal" to describe the phenomena we both take seriously: synchronicity, retrocausality, the stuff that doesn't fit the materialist frame. I kept turning that word over in my head the evening after dinner and again this morning. And I landed on something: paracausal.

Turns out a video game uses the term (Destiny). But setting that aside, I actually think it's much better than "supernatural."

Here's why: "supernatural" implies above or outside nature. It creates an artificial divide where these phenomena either don't exist or are too weird to take seriously. It's a word that signals "not real" to most scientifically-minded people.

"Paracausal" works better. But here's the frame I'd put it in: There's one unified set of rules that governs reality. Physics, as scientists recognize it, is a subset. It's the part we've mapped and can replicate in controlled conditions. But physics isn't the whole ruleset. It's nested within a larger structure that includes what we might call paracausal phenomena: synchronicity, retrocausality, whatever's going on with consciousness and the spiritual realm.

It's not two separate systems running in parallel. It's one system, where physics is a special case. The locally deterministic, replicable slice. The paracausal stuff isn't violating the rules; it's operating according to rules we haven't fully mapped yet.

Your framework about free energy minimization and confidence thresholds maps well here. Most people's threshold is calibrated to the physics subset. They filter out anything that doesn't fit. But the truth-seekers, as you said, restructure their ontology to subsume the anomalies rather than blocking them out. That's not lowering your epistemic standards. It's expanding your model to fit more of reality.

Anyway, wanted to share that and encourage you. The work you're doing in synthetic embryology is going to be profoundly consequential. As you step into more responsibility, how you think about reality will shape everything. Not just the physics subset, but the full ruleset. Truth matters.

Keep going on the truth-seeking path. Happy to continue the conversation anytime.

Gary