Searching for meaning for these things is a trap. It can be a harmless hobby, but for many people it becomes something more and can tear them apart (e.g. inducing anxiety or obsession with it).
Many (but not necessarily all) people who sell this type of paraphernalia or services are con artists looking to make a buck off of desperate people who are looking to make sense of their lives in places where they won't.
I have some personal experience with this kind of thing. Back in the `70s my father had a small group of "followers" who considered him to be a sort of "guru". We lived in Hollywood, so there were a lot of folks into that sort of thing.
They believed he had mystical powers. Truth was he was only looking to get laid, and he hurt a lot of women who fell for his BS, and their husbands/boyfriends.
I have a family member now who claims he's a "God". He lived in Hollywood too when he "realized" this. He's not quite as convincing as my father was, but he's pretty good at getting others to believe him.
There is more to the world around us than we understand.
Tarot cards / systems of interpreting them are a good window into how human minds work, and insofar as that's relevant may indeed be useful. Many of them are also pretty.
The tools of rationality, collection of evidence and the scientific method are the best ways we have yet developed to further our understanding of the world. They are not (nor ever will be) complete.
Blanket dismissals of the metaphysical are as baseless, and no more worthy of consideration than, the simplistic assertions like "the sun revolves around the earth... because we say so".
On the other hand, if something is unknown, you can either believe it's true or you can believe it's false. If you believe things are true before having any real evidence, then you open yourself to a literal infinity of internally contradictory beliefs. If you instead assume nothing is true until there's evidence, then you do not invite any internally contradictory beliefs.
I think that's a bit of a false dichotomy. One could withhold judgment so as to not hold a belief either way. Some people may answer "I don't know" when asked if they believe something. They hold no conviction one way or the other. It's this curious state in between that provides the most potential for people to explore new ideas.
One could believe in things and not care about proving them to others, yet this will not convince others nor produce any evidence.
One could also hold the view that everything is false and not worth looking into unless someone else provides proof. This will not produce evidence either.
Obviously the range of how individuals approach things is continuous and not discrete like this. But I still think those willing to entertain ideas without accepting or denying them can better explore that topic and use those thoughts cross domains. A world without strict self imposed mental boundaries can be beneficial.
There's an important distinction between knowing and believing. Saying "I don't know" is a statement of knowledge, but that is different from a statement of belief. For instance, I am an agnostic atheist: I don't know if any gods exist, but I don't believe they do. One can be entirely capable of believing or not believing while still being open to the idea that their beliefs may be wrong because they don't know. Saying "I believe gravity pulls me towards Earth" doesn't preclude me from changing that belief if, say, evidence presents itself that I'm actually being held down on the ground by an invisible demigod's barbell -- it just means I currently believe gravity to be the cause.
"One could believe in things and not care about proving them to others, yet this will not convince others nor produce any evidence."
Sure, but just because someone believes something doesn't make it true, so beliefs without evidence don't matter. That is, except when those beliefs inform the person's behavior; then they matter greatly, because they affect people around them despite not having any basis for their behaviors (since they have no basis for their beliefs).
"One could also hold the view that everything is false and not worth looking into unless someone else provides proof. This will not produce evidence either."
"Someone else" could also be "that same person"; but even if it's not, then it would still motivate the production of evidence by requiring someone to look for evidence in order to convince said person.
"But I still think those willing to entertain ideas without accepting or denying them can better explore that topic and use those thoughts cross domains. A world without strict self imposed mental boundaries can be beneficial."
I agree completely. And the biggest imposed mental boundary is equating "I believe" with "I know" :) "I don't know" is valid and, indeed, generally the best approach, epistemically speaking; "I neither believe nor disbelieve" is apathy at best, self-deception at worst.
"What do you guys think of Tarot or other metaphysical things?"
There might be some things we don't understand, like the 21 ounces or whatever that one loses after death. Very interesting, so far unexplained, yet documented phenomenon. Similar things can be said about certain reincarnation and near death experiences - how could they know some of the stuff they do? Maybe there are yet unidentified physical explaination, maybe something else. I am looking forward to answers either way.
For stuff like tarot, there are probably some interesting body language or physiological things that are behind it. I have a hard time believing most stuff like this and mediums. However, that could be that there are a large number hacks obscuring an extremely small number of people with actual talents. I'm also looking forward to any research finding on these topics.
>There might be some things we don't understand, like the 21 ounces or whatever that one loses after death. Very interesting, so far unexplained, yet well documented phenomenon.
Sorry, but this has been pretty thoroughly debunked[0].
The follow up experiment on the goats showed an unexplained weight gain and subsequent return to normal.
All my comment was meant to show was that there are things that happen that we have no proven explaination for. The world is still full of unexplained, and even uninvestigated, stuff. It would be interesting to hear the real reason for the weight changes after death (in goats). It may not be about the soul or whatever, but maybe we will learn something new about the physical world.
In the UK, the Spiritualists National Union[0] is very popular among people who have an interest in mediumship / metaphysical, and the Churches across the country are widely accepted.
In philosophy, there's a concept called the "burden of proof", which basically says "a positive claim must be supported, a negative claim can be assumed". This is because, to simplify the formal logic quite a bit, it's logically inconsistent for everything to be true, but not inconsistent for everything to be false. Therefore, if the truth is unknown, it can be assumed to be nonexistent until further evidence arises.
In science, this burden of proof idea is called the null hypothesis: we assume nothing is true, and look for experimental evidence to "reject the null hypothesis" -- that is, we assume a positive claim is not true until we find evidence that it is. There's a fairly straightforward inductive syllogism for why that approach is the most reasonable, which I'll leave out here (unless you'd like me to outline it?) for brevity.
Therefore, Tarot, ghosts, an afterlife, psychics, etc. are all subject to the same burden of proof / null hypothesis rejection process as any other positive claims: until there's empirical, reproducible evidence supporting them, we must assume they are not true. And after centuries of asking for (and looking for) evidence, and even a long-standing million dollar prize for any that can be found, all we've ever had in that regard is... personal anecdotes and deeply-held beliefs. Neither of which constitute objective evidence, and neither of which manage to be consistently reproducible.
So the null hypothesis stands: they aren't real, and I genuinely invite anyone to find the evidence to reject that assumption, as long as the evidence they find is logically consistent, objective, and reproducible without confounding factors (i.e. if such evidence can only be reproduced while someone is on hallucinogenics, or while someone is in a house with a carbon monoxide leak, or while other factors could more plausibly explain the results, or...)
Many renowned scientists and researchers were also mystics. Mysticism is a personal, subjective framework for insight and self-improvement that doesn't have to follow the rules of the scientific method.
And the guy who discovered the first evidence of the Big Bang was a priest. But both facts are irrelevant. A thing is not more or less valid because of who believes it; the only thing that changes the validity of a claim is evidence about why the claim is (or isn't) true.
"Mysticism is a personal, subjective framework for insight and self-improvement that doesn't have to follow the rules of the scientific method."
Anything that makes claims about how the world works does, in fact, need to follow the scientific method. Why? Because it's a process that's literally designed to counteract the most common mistakes and biases that humans make in order to find the truth, and because so far, it's been the most accurate and effective method of predicting the future.
If you want self-improvement or mindfulness, that's fine and personal, but making claims about the nature of the universe isn't a personal opinion, it's a statement of fact about things external to yourself that is either true or false irrespective of your own experiences.
What about situations where a known affect is well documented, but the 'how' is unknown and not explained? We accept some of these as real, such as the use of many medications - we can see that they work or produce an affect, but don't know how.
I'm not saying that we should accept metaphysical claims as true, but our world does not strictly follow the null hypothesis either.
I think the null hypothesis and the burden of proof applies to a specific claim that "this is how it works". There are plenty of phenomena "officially" unexplained by science yet, and that's ok. But claiming that some cards have some magical meaning doesn't make sense.
True. Calling BS on magic is fine. But it could also be wrong to claim tarot is complete BS. It's possible the effects of a tarot reading are explainable by things like observation bias, the subject changing their behaviors due to the reading, or the reader using some sort of body language reading to influence their "interpretation" of the cards.
Let's be clear in our definitions here: when people say "Tarot is BS", they don't mean "it can never get the right result"; they mean "it doesn't get the right result through some mystical, spiritual, or divine knowledge as the practitioners of Tarot often claim it does". Additionally, if a Tarot practitioner does not make such claims, and instead points to any of the psychological explanations you mentioned, then the cards are no longer relevant to the practice anyway since they are not involved in the true mechanisms.
The claim "this medication produces this effect" is a separate claim from "this medication produces this effect via this process ". In those cases you mentioned, the first claim has enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis, and the second... well, if we don't know how it works, then we have yet to find such a claim that has rejected its null hypothesis.
For instance, aspirin works as a pain reliever. This has been shown with empirical evidence. However, if I said "aspirin relieves pain by infesting your blood with microscopic fairies who kiss your boo-boos from the inside out" -- that claim does not have enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis.
Nothing metaphysical about tarot, but it can be useful to challenge how you naturally think. The random cards you lay out force you to reconcile them with the story you tell yourself about where you are or a specific situation, and can show you connections and angles you might otherwise have ignored. Same goes for other methods of "divination" but tarot has a richer symbolic language than most.
Many (but not necessarily all) people who sell this type of paraphernalia or services are con artists looking to make a buck off of desperate people who are looking to make sense of their lives in places where they won't.