To a point - some questions aren't worth testing. Questions like "What if I can eat uranium?" or "What happens if I fill my car's gas tank with water" are costly and avoidable.
Using basic reasoning skills instead of credulous consideration of magical powers seems a reasonable threshold for discarding certain research. I don't need to spend billions of dollars trying to figure out how to cut people in half and put them back together like a magician, even if thousands or even billions of people have "witnessed" such an event.
Science doesn't allow for a rational mechanism that would enable psychic powers like telepathy, seeing the future, and remote viewing without augmenting the brain with a technological interface and machines that captured and transmitted the information. There's simply no room for reasonable experimentation around these types of claims, unless it's psychological in nature; things which are known and provable limit any possible mechanism by which psychic powers can operate.
If you wanted to posit some sort of technological mechanism, then you're getting into simulations, aliens, secret government implants, or other theories that lack plausibility as well.
We'll likely have common BCI augmentations within the next century. Networked human brains will exhibit psychic-like abilities and the potential is amazing, but until that happens, claims about such things are fraudulent, deceptive, or deluded.
> Science doesn't allow for a rational mechanism that would enable psychic powers like telepathy
Yet. Keep in mind that everyone thought getting sick was magic until germs were discovered, we used to be completely unaware of electromagnetism, etc. etc.
> If you wanted to posit some sort of technological mechanism, then you're getting into simulations, aliens, secret government implants, or other theories that lack plausibility as well.
This isn't a statement made in good faith, you're pre-poisoning the well with a slippery slope.
There appears to be ample scientific evidence that at least some future events already exist. Check out _Time Loops_ by Eric Wargo for a good summary.
To be fair, you're also 'pre-poisoning the well with a slippery slope' to a degree in your first point. The way I read it you're basically saying there "keep in mind we also thought we knew how things worked ones, maybe we're wrong again". But this to me is a giant straw man, if a common one. We did not have a convincing model of how a lot of the world worked in those times. It's not that we thought that there are no germs. We could not see things as small as germs, and we knew at the time that there are limits to how small a thing we can see. Right now we know that there is a limit to how small a thing can be, and arguably we can detect things at sizes comparable to that. There were no convincing and "complete" models of most of the areas of knowledge. The models we have right now leave a lot of room for "unknown", but only in very specific amounts and in very specific places, not every possible unknown.
So the direct comparison is whether the current state of knowledge leaves as much room for telepathy as the state of knowledge a couple of hundred years ago left for germs, and the answer is a resounding no.
There's no yet involved - there's no room in the current understanding of science that would allow a completely unmeasurable mechanism to interact with the brain such that you could exhibit psychic powers. You'd need to completely discount everything known about how the universe works in order to allow for brains that can do magical things. What you're suggesting is comparable to "what if it's the unfavorable opinions of micro-organisms that cause illness." According to everything we know, you can't just toss out the germ theory of disease. Things are knowable. Sometimes things we know preclude the possibility of other things being true.
Because knowable things preclude the possibility of built-in psychic powers, you need a technological basis, therefore my statement about simulations, aliens, and government implant theories follow - the statement is in perfectly good faith. I genuinely believe science banishes magic and psychic powers to the realm of delusion and bad thinking.
The universe is a big place, and we don't know everything. Scientific thinking has allowed us to start peeling things back, and build on repeatable observations, and develop a framework and structure for understanding how the universe works. It means opinionated germs, psychic powers, the moon being made of cheese, and other things are excluded from things that can be rationally considered to be possible.
Part of scientific thinking is the willingness to entertain any outcome, no matter how impossible or fantastic it might seem, if the evidence supports it. Another part is the willingness to discard incorrect ways of thinking about things - we know what cells can do and how electromagnetism works. There's no unexplained energy consumption or transmissions involved in human biology that would even hint at the possibility these things could be real. There's no evidence to suggest any possible mechanism to achieve magical or psychic powers.
There is a lot of evidence that humans lie and cheat and defraud eachother - and themselves. The presence of evidence discounting the possibility of special powers, in the additional context that humans are really bad at perceiving baseline reality or communicating proper error bounds, means the only rational way to look at claims of psychic phenomena is to discount them and spend time on meaningful things.
Psychic phenomena aren't real; they're a dead end. That's about as close to "proving a negative" as you might be able to get. There is no magic.
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