Sal2: No, ‘pretend’ imples you could stop pretending and do things differently. Scientists can’t just decide to stop ‘pretending’, and get ‘real’, and reach into their lab drawers and pull out their angel-counters or their djinn measurers.

Right: they can’t stop pretending and still do science; that’s a professional standard. But they can in their personal lives honestly believe and do all kinds of strange things totally at odds with their professional methodologies. So you are wrong again. tnx.

Sal2: If ghosts could be verified by empirical means such as witnesses and videotapes, we wouldn’t be talking about unamenable to empirical investigation now, would we? And if such things can be captured on recording devices or seen by eyewitnesses, they can’t be entirely supernatural, since indications of them are arriving at our witnesses or videotapes by natural means. Light, a physical quantity, has to either radiate from or bounce off the surface of what we see.

ENTIRELY supernatural? Nothing can be, by your definition ENTIRELY supernatural and still affect the real world. You are arguing petitio principii. I note as well that a supernatural entity could pop photons into cameras wherever it liked, make everybody hallucinate the same thing, whatever. That’s why they are called “supernatural”. The problem with empirical investigations of such things is that one cannot expect them, if they ate real, to be orderly. But one CAN ask whether or not the phenomena observed can be accounted for by other means, if the phenomena is in any way regular, etc.

Sal2: I can’t tell what’s a meme for YOU unless you let me know (for instance, I know that there are quite a few words among them). Do you believe that believing Zoroastrian exist? (Parsees in India are Zoroastrians). Can you recognize that they have such beliefs if they don’t tell you?

Right: and not only do you have to ask me about my memes, but if I lack insight, I can’t necessarily tell you my memes. So: you can’t tell what a meme is not, in general. We went through this. You CAN tell what a star is not, in general. Why you have trouble with this I’ll never know.