This definition of supernatural sounds like it would be something inherently unexplainable. I would prefer to equate “supernatural” with “unexplained” - either the “supernatural” entity or occurance was nonexistant and simply believed to be real, or it was real and natural but either mispercieved or unexplainable with the current state of the art.
If supernatural does not fall into one of these categories, what could it be? The idea that part of the physical world could be forever immune from the exploration of the physical world seems meaningless to me.
“With the current state of the art” is a humongous problem, I think. Consider ball lightning, which has no definitive explanation under the current state of the art (the link goes to a fairly plausible theory, but my limited understanding is that it’s not universally accepted–can anyone elaborate?) I don’t think many people consider ball lightning to be supernatural, though.
There’s a further problem: it means that things move from being supernatural to being natural. Until Darwin came along, evolution was supernatural; until Mendel came along, the mechanism for natural selection was supernatural. (These are admittedly oversimplified, but if you’d like to refer to Darwin’s and Mendel’s less famous predecessors, that’ll just push the transition from supernatural to natural back by a few decades). Does this correspond to how we want to use the word? That is, are you comfortable declaring certain phenomena supernatural at one point in history and natural at another point in history?
I’m not; nor am I comfortable declaring an existing phenomenon supernatural if I believe it may one day be explained.
My proposed definition, that supernatural phenomena comprise that subset of nonexistent phenomena that cannot exist due to characteristics of the cosmos, may sometimes result in incorrectly declaring a natural phenomenon supernatural. (For example, I might declare ghosts to be supernatural, unaware that next month someone is going to discover a previously-unknown natural life-field that survives corporeal death). In such a case, I would have incorrectly applied the word “supernatural,” not applied it correctly only to see the word become incorrect.
Actually, I don’t see it as a problem. There are real things that can be explained and real things that can’t - neither are supernatural. At least, my take on what supernatural means is “above nature”, i.e., things that are both real and can never be scientifically explained.
“Can never” is very different from “with the current state of the art.” Are you modifying your definition, then?
If you are, I like it more. I’m still a little uncomfortable with declaring something existent forever beyond the reach of scientific inquiry, though, but that’s a much smaller problem IMO than declaring it supernatural because today’s scientists can’t explain it.
I am busy over the past couple of days, so I am going to just get into this one little personal conversation, and not try to keep up with the rest of the thread. If I missed some interesting points I apologize to both their proposer and to myself, for missing them.
Well the meme itself is the non-physical part, the mechanism for sharing it is what the material exists to do. There is an idea of angels as being unable to communicate with one another, they are static archetypes that lack free-will. They are entities for whom a rigid truth is absolutely certain. This is why the material world and humans exist, to link the angels together, for in the spiritual there is no way for them to mix, each category is it’s own absolute. In the Material things are far more mutable than that “higher” truth. Me personally I think the descriptor of higher or lower truth is another of what I am beginning to think of as “Flat Earth” concepts. Though higher could be more celestial/spacy whereas lower are more Earth centered going down to the core as we are still beings that are attached to the Earth and have not detached yet.
So what I would argue is that the ideas themselves are spiritual, and the mechanism for transmitting them are material. Thus the metaphysical and the physical. They both need one another to exist, for the physical gives the ideas form, and the ideas form the physical.
Well I don’t see a big difference conceptually between demons and germs. Both are beings that infest our insides and despoil them. Germs are just a more elegant description of the internal process. I wouldn’t go so far as to toss out the old tradition, rather I would say that our current understanding is more elegant and refined. The idea of demons is more primitive, but it’s still part of the lineage of the idea of germs. In the modern context demons have taken on a more psychological context, so in a modern context, I would classify demons as malware in our psychic software whereas germs would be more like oxidation on a circuit board or termites that eat apart a house. So if we have a meme that we are stuck on that does us ill, that’s a “Demon”.
Well I think scientists do it that way too. Look at how many rejected hypotheses there are? Certainly our tools to detect a false hypothesis have critically reduced the amount of time it takes to falsify a hypothesis, but that doesn’t mean there is any lower amount of BS going back and forth amongst scientists and wannabe scientists. Certain SF authors are better at predicting the future than others. I think Neal Stephenson is more adept at it than others. Of course he has the added advantage of living in a time where the technology he is writing about is in it’s infancy and he is only predictign that technology to some pretty logical conclusions. I think the science fiction authors that are remembered the longest are the ones that have the most impact on the way our culture actually moves. Though I would say that science fiction becomes true because it inspires the scientists who then implement the great ideas that our SF writers had. That’s the thing about predicting the future, you play a part in shaping it by doing so. That’s one of the most dangerous aspects of prophecy. If enough people believe it, they are very likely to make it happen, just so that they can be satisfied that what they believe is true.
Yes, I agree there is a big gap. All I am arguing is that the ancients weren’t all a bunch of ignorant fucks hanging around. Has humanity matured? Yes, I think it has, but I do think that there have been a lot of really smart people who came to the truth, years, decades, centuries and even millenia before it became accepted by the population at large.
Inanimate objects ARE memes, they don’t TRANSMIT memes. Like a rock is an idea that shapes the matter. The objects are God’s thoughts, as well as God’s corpus. Just like every cell in our body is capable of sensory perception, so is every piece of matter. I am not attempting to anthropomorphize it, only saying that the way that objects such as rocks transmute the vibration of the energy that goes through them is, just as our brains transmute parts of the consciousness. What I am arguing is that all energy is consciousness itself, and that everything is experiencing everything else. Do I think that rocks have a will in the same way people do? Not really, in the same way as my individual cells are kind of along for the ride and do the bidding of my will.
I said that Google/The Internet are a pretty decent metaphor, but that it’s not actually God. The Internet would be the body, and Google would be the intelligence. Thanks.
Liberal, you have said in this thread that not everything can be proven by science. I am not sure what other methods you have in mind besides sceince to prove something. Afterall, science is fundamentally nothing more than using ones senses to observe. By what other method do you propose to prove something beyond observation?
I fear I’m not being clear - what I’m trying to say is, since the meaning of supernatural seems to be “that which science cannot (ever) explain”, then there ain’t no sucha thing as supernatural. What people call supernatural is either a mistake or insufficient knowledge. In other words, I think we agree
Another problem; how would we know that it’s beyond science ? After all, if it’s really beyond science, science likely won’t be able to tell us, and science is the best method of gaining knowledge we’ve got.
The reason I have a problem with a lot of these “beyonds” myself like “Beyond Nature” or “Beyond Science” is that it’s making a lot of BIG assumptions about the future, and what “science” will be able to account for in the future. The misapplication of science has led people down a lot of fallacious roads, leading to detractors making sweeping statements about science and it’s incapacities, but I tend to find those rather silly, and assumptive.
Yeah, that’s why I’m not entirely comfortable with it. However, that’s a problem shared by many words. If I say, “That’s impossible!” I’m essentially saying, “THat cannot be done!” It may turn out that it can be done and I just don’t yet know how to do it; in that case, I’m mistaken if I call something impossible.
I think that “supernatural” is similar. I may say that something cannot be explained by science, and it may turn out that it can be explained and scientists just don’t know yet how to explain it; in that case, I’d be mistaken if I call it supernatural.
I still prefer my definition, but I understand that one.
That is grossly incomplete, looking back I have to conclude that the vast majority of those mystic memes were misleading, and that is ignoring that many that were indeed found to be valid later were suppressed for thousands of years because other misleading memes were imposed: Democritus was correct about the atoms (and he was not too fond of gods BTW) but Aristotle’s ideas about them were the ones that became accepted later by the 800 pound gorilla of the day: the Roman Christian Church, one still wonders how advanced we would be today if it had turned otherwise. OTOH, there are memes that were also discussed before by scientists that had no capacity to show they were correct, for example: Maxwell’s equations (and one can be hard pressed to find ancient examples of memes like that!) were not confirmed until after his death, today they make possible what you see in this computer screen right now.
If you are asking how we could know for sure, we can’t. Neither can we distinguish a hypothesis as being correct, vs. another one that might become correct with more information. That’s why if telepathy were repeatable, we’d keep studying it. If we found a new particle and a transmitter and receiver in our brains, voila, the natural hypothesis would rule.
But why rule out a potential set of hypotheses a priori?
No, I said there seems to be no emission. The supernatural would be as provisional a hypothesis as any other, and more than most. If information through mindreading could be transmitted at faster than light, that it could be done though all sorts of shielding, would be evidence that it was not natural.
But scientists would be all over it to show that it was natural and to try to understand it. That’s why fans of telepathy who say that nasty old scientists ignore their findings for no reason are so wrong. If there were strong evidence for something that seemed supernatural, it would revolutionize science whether it turned out to be supernatural or not. But there is none, as we all agree.
This could get us into a debate about whether ideas are physical or not. If you agree that whatever they are, they get transmitted by physical means which use energy, good enough for me.
At a high enough conceptual level, we are all simple solids. Demons have some sort if intelligence, germs don’t. Demons get driven out by spells - germs by specific drugs acting on specific parts of their metabolism. Etc. Besides the shared characteristics of being in our body and causing diseases, they are not much alike at all, and someone studying the best way of expelling demons would never stumble on penicillin.
Some of this I said. I would hope that literary talent has something to do with whether a writer is remembered. Ray Bradbury is totally scientifically illiterate. In “The Martian Chronicles” people on Mars see details of the destruction of earth with their naked eyes, a mistake even the Planet Stories writers would never make. Doesn’t make the book not a classic, though.
Stupid, no. Ignorant, yes. They were ignorant of the structure of matter, of the cause of lightning, of the size of the planets, of the nature of the stars. Nothing wrong with being ignorant. We’re ignorant of tons of stuff also. And they didn’t even know the stuff they got right, since they had no way of confirming it. They simply threw stuff out there, with logical justification, and, crucially, they never tested it. If they had, they would have invented science.
Your will might be the bidding of your cells. Cells have limited sensory input, in that they react to stimuli, but that is not the same as ours - it is purely chemical. Read Dawkins on memes. Inanimate objects are not what he means by them.
I’ve defined it upthread. As of today you are correct, because of lack of evidence, but this discussion is only interesting on the assumption that some very convincing evidence unexplained naturally has been found. Why doesn’t everyone who thinks this will never happen (and I’m one) just suppose it has and go on from there from now on. This is as silly as answering a question about aliens visiting by repeatly saying that this would never happen, and it could only be a hoax.
Oh, so a scientist, given strong evidence of the supernatural, should just ignore it? That would be a poor scientist indeed.
I still don’t see how this differs from being unexplained.
That’s what we’re doing.
No, let’s try again. Given a phenomenon such as mindreading, as you describe it, a scientist would try to understand it. But to label it “supernatural” tells us nothing about the phenomenon, advances the study in no way, opens no avenues of inquiry, nada.
