It's an illusion? I want a source, explaining me how it is an illusion. I understand that we can "reason this away", I don't want reason. Reason alone is never enough. I need empirical evidence (reason + methodological experience). Empirical evidence is the only tool we have in understanding things like this, IMO. And I'm simply asking if someone in the HN crowd has researched the empirical evidence.

__A way too short primer on how astrology is nonsense__

For example, when it comes to astrology it's quite clear to me how it is an illusion. For one, the physical mechanisms explained behind it are nonsense. That's not strong enough though as you can have theoretical nonsense but still a predictive model! So we also have to show how the model works. And it can be shown. In other words, it can be shown why the outcomes of astrology are as they are! Aka why does it always feel kinda true? Well, psychologists have researched this in multiple ways. And the result of that is interesting. I'll give you an example of one study I know about.

A psychologist once did an experiment on his students. He said he'd all give them a personalized message about who they are as a person and asked the whole class to rate how accurate it stated who they were as a person. He wrote the same generic positive personality description to all of them and it was rated as a 4 on average (1 to 5 scale). I've learned this 15 years ago, so I don't know the specific study anymore. I did a quick Google search on it and found [1]. That's strong data showcasing why astrology readings feels "kinda true" to most people. The reason: most of what astrologists say are positive things. Other things they say can be showcased by other things psychologists found (e.g. techniques like cold-reading or like assessing who a person is and simply taking a risk on making a statement about that and if it doesn't work then redirect conversation flow so that the person forgets).

My point is, there are tons of holes with astrology.

__Back to hypnosis__

With hypnosis I see holes as well, but they are all about the mechanism as to why hypnosis does what it does. In other words, you can still have a "predictive model" (or in this case a technique that works to alter people their behavior, you have no clue why it works but it works). What I don't see are strong explanations as to why people behave the way they do. The only few things I know are:

* People can induce adrenaline at will (via the Wim Hof Method) [2]

* People can feel like they're in a dream state while they are awake through psychedelics (no source needed, personal experience as well)

* People can get into a very strong emotional state (e.g. flow) via any means really.

In other words, to me it shows that humans are quite capable of a very big emotional and behavioral range under a specific set of circumstances. So couldn't it be that there is some mechanism through which it happens via hypnosis? The first trick they use is to get highly suggestible people, alright, fair enough. But then when you have highly suggestible people, what is exactly happening to them? Apparently, according to one of the meta-studies I found, they use hypnosis to reduce people their pain during surgery. If that's the case, then it's clearly not just an illusion that doesn't warrant further research. It may be an illusion (it also may not fully be), but it at least warrants a scientific understanding of what's happening.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect

[2] https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1322174111