Besides your belief that there is no higher power, what are your thoughts on supernatural phenomena?
Besides your belief that there is no higher power, what are your thoughts on supernatural phenomena?
Lets take a little break from politics and have us a real atheist conversation.
Personally, I'm open to the idea of the existence of supernatural phenomena, and I believe mainstream religions are actually complicated incomplete stories full of misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and half-truths.
Basically, I think that these stories are not as simple and straightforward as they seem to be to religious people. I feel like there is a lot more to them. Concluding that all these stories are just made up or came out of nowhere is kind of hard for me.
While James Randi was alive, he offered $1,000,000 for proof of the supernatural. He never got that proof. I think that's pretty telling.
There's stuff I've experienced that I can't understand or explain. Certainly, I trust other's witnesses of their own experiences, even if they seem supernatural to me. But, I don't consider that good enough evidence to believe in the supernatural.
Unexplained does not mean unexplainable nor supernatural.
There are all kinds of things in my life I have experienced that I cannot explain. For one thing, I am not an expert on everything. For another, I am a prisoner inside a skull that has to rely on not especially precise equipment in terms of sensory input. In other words, the meat sacks in our heads cannot be trusted. In fact, going back to Randi, if they could be trusted, Randi and other magicians would never have a job.
None of that is evidence for the supernatural.
Let me preface this by saying I tend to go with the Null hypothesis until proven otherwise, and as such don't believe in the unproven supernatural.
Regardless, there are two ways to interpret James Randi never getting proof.
- There are no provable supernatural claims.
- Those who could prove a supernatural claim have
no use forsome reason a $1,000,000 prize would not be sufficiently enticing.
Edit: Reworked #2 for accuracy and clarity. Added wording in italics.
Paraphrasing I believe — Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
No nothing is “supernatural “. We may not yet know what we’re seeing or exactly what happened… we simply don’t understand it yet.
Yet is relevant point there IMHO. We will.
and not understanding how something functions isnt a reason to assign intent or awareness to the thing.
But there is also a possibility that what we don't understand transcends the laws of nature. That's what supernatural means. A possibility that our universe is also governed by supernatural forces, as much as it is governed by natural forces.
If something can "transcend" the laws of nature, then the ability to do that is part of the laws of nature, and thus it transcends nothing. We just didn't know all of the rules.
If ghosts are real, then they aren't breaking the rules of nature because clearly the rules of nature allow for ghosts, we just don't understand how yet, but then ghosts are natural.
By definition, anything real is natural, and anything supernatural is not.
Er um— no.
There is nothing that is “supernatural “
There is nothing that is proven and repeated not beholden to the laws of nature.
Yes it is possible, but there isn’t any proof of anything transcending nature. You’re making a “god of the gaps” argument. It is illogical to assume that god or anything supernatural keeps getting smaller and smaller so as to hide in those ever shrinking gaps.
Supernatural phenomena do not actually exist as far as I can tell. There's no actual evidence to my knowledge, and plenty of evidence that humans are not particularly good at perceiving or interpreting the universe around us as it actually is. Our brains are not a reliable narrator, supernatural phenomena are most likely a consequence of this rather than anything genuinely supernatural.
This argument is a very common one. It's only valid at a scientific standpoint, since you can't really scientifically prove something that transcends the laws of nature. However, at a historical standpoint, the existence of supernatural phenomena can be considered. There is also no evidence that supernatural phenomena does not exist.
I'm not sure what you mean about a historical standpoint. I don't think there's anything in the historical record that could be considered actual evidence of supernatural phenomena. History as an academic discipline is a kind of science and generally approaches the subject matter with the scientific method.
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60% the person experiencing it misunderstood or misinterpreted what they were looking at because they were stupid and gullible, but not maliciously making things up.
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35% completely fabricated and never happened and created to legitimately defraud or troll others.
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5% something scientific that we simply don't understand yet.
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0% actual supernatural occurrences.
That 5% is the most exciting thing in the world.
Completely agree.
What constitues "something scientific"? That sounds fascinating.
There's a whole crap tonne about the universe we really don't understand yet; especially when you get down to the quantum level, spooky action at a distance, wave functions, etc...
In a very real way, we're still just cavemen banging on rocks as far as the sum total knowledge of how things work out there in what we call "reality". So within that vast gap of what we know, and what we don't know, there's could be a lot of things going on.
Is that a ghost? or is that a momentary glitch in the fabric of space-time? Or is it just someone mistaking a cars headlight bouncing of a chandelier and into a door that is ajar at just the right angle. One of those theories is provable using the scientific method and the knowledge that we currently have. One of those theories might eventually be able to be proven with knowledge that we don't yet possess. And one of those theories is so-called "supernatural".
As a reasonable human with critical thinking skills, I'll put my money on either of the last ones before I'll put my money on the first.
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I do not currently believe in any supernatural anything, for the exact same reasons I do not believe in gods.
- There is no persuasive evidence of anything supernatural
- Many supernatural phenomena were discovered to have naturalistic explanations
- The only evidence provided for supernatural phenomena is anecdotal
It's entirely possible for there to be supernatural stuff, but the time to believe it is when it is demonstrated.
One point that I don't see raised a lot is that otherwise perfectly mentally healthy people can experience hallucinations. They may even find them comforting, and some even then do not believe the visions are real. I have a suspicion that a lot of ghost sightings, etc, might be such hallucinations. But I can't demonstrate that, and I'm honestly not sure how we could, unless we can find a way to trigger such hallucinations on purpose.
Most ghost sightings happen in low lighting when our brains are trying to fill the gaps of limited information. Evolution taught meat to think and it doesn't do the best job at times.
Well it is better (for survival) to imagine a predator than to imagine an ice cream truck.
I suppose I'm more thinking about examples like one in this comment section where they see a ghost sober in the middle of the day.
Don't forget carbon monoxide poisoning most likely contributed significantly to ghost stories before the risks of indoor fires for heat were known.
Agreed. I had a ghost encounter in 2019, as an atheist with no supernatural beliefs since 2007. I knew in the moment that it was a hallucination, but accepted it as an emotional release for what it seemed to be at the time.
“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia
I think it's hard to find "true experiences with the supernatural" credible because even if the person believes it happened: humans make for awful sensors. They might feel warm when they're cold or vice versa. They regularly see things that don't exist. More than half of us appear to be some kind of moron.
And why would a ghost be unmeasurable? Why could something be truly ethereal when everything ever measured or recorded is not? Plus, the seemingly random limitations on any sort of fairy, ghost, or deity make it pretty much dead in the water as far as theories go. Imagine this, you're some kind of land-god of wealth and/or stealing and potentially eating babies. But you go years or decades without fulfilling your own theme or being seen by humans? And you can't leave your territory as defined by human maps like you need permission from city councilmen?
All of this on top of the belief I hold that life is a culmination of billions of tiny mechanisms that, upon systemic failure, result in something akin to gears no longer turning in a clock means: either machinery and electronics all have "souls" or humans don't. Where would you draw the line? Do waterfalls have souls? The grand canyon? Dogs?
So pretty unlikely, all things considered.
People do not understand that visual hallucinations can happen to anyone when they are sober. Our brains are not perfect machines.
Overall, 84.8 percent of the volunteers that took part in the study reported having experienced some form of anomalous visual experiences in their life. More than a third of them (37.8 percent) reported that they had experienced an actual visual hallucination similar to what a patient with a psychotic disorder may experience. When the scientists analyzed the additional questions of whether an experience would agree with a clinical definition of visual hallucinations, about 17.4 percent of volunteers had experienced a hallucination that met these criteria.
And I'm guessing the other 15.2 either didn't remember or didn't really understand the question.
It's even more a problem with hearing things that aren't there or, far more commonly, just hearing something but misidentifying it. The whole EVP thing that "paranormal investigators" are so fond of is all about hearing a sound and just assuming that sound is a voice because of our flawed brains (and flawed ears).
Humans seem to be wired to be like this. That's why pareidolia is a thing.
Honestly, 15% sounds like it's right in the range of the number of people who will just lie on surveys - be it purposefully or not -- in order to present a superior version of themselves to a piece of paper.
There hasn't been any proof in all of history that any supernatural phenomenon was real.
Until there is, my thoughts on it are: not real, never happened.There also hasn’t been any proof that supernatural phenomena doesn't exist. It's why I choose to keep an open mind about it. It's a subject that suffers a lot of stigma in the science-centric world we live in, and thus few people talk about it.
There also hasn’t been any proof that supernatural phenomena doesn’t exist
You can't prove a negative. Which is why in the scientific method, the onus is on the person making the claim to provide the proof, not the other way around. That's why we rarely engage in debates with people who don't grasp that concept, because for the most part they're argument comes down to "You can't prove it doesn't exist, so therefore I'm right."
“Supernatural” is just unexplained, or misunderstood, natural phenomena.
I’ve spent years working in supposedly haunted buildings (as security.)
the guy who loves sharing his ghost story really didn’t appreciate being told that the “fleeting man” he saw apparitions of, were his own reflection (specifically in a corner window of a conference room, or in certain circumstances, in double-paned windows.)
Nor did he appreciate being told the ghost “walking” down the stairwell was really just the fire sprinkler standpipe clunking against the stairs as the building cooled off. (And the reason it happened around the same time every night was the building’s hvac being set to a lower temp to save energy.)
He most certainly didn’t enjoy being told that the doors closing in his face were caused by shorts in the magnetic door holders and that he really should have put that in his report (he was written up for not reporting a maintenance issue.)
He also got written up when we found out that he was leaving windows cracked in the space above him, but he wrote them off as ghosts screaming instead of the wind whistling through a slightly cracked window.
Our understanding of the universe is imperfect- and it probably always will be. The point of science is to improve that understanding using evidence and experimentation.
I’ll take science any day of the week.
I used to believe in all sorts of supernatural horseshit back in the 80s, we all did. But I had one friend that thought he had some sort of power because thermostats would kick in when he walked by.
"Uh, dude, there's a bimetallic strip in there that's on the very edge of tripping. A slight breeze will indeed kick it off."
Nope. He apparently had some sort of "cold" aura.
I grew up in a house built in the 1920s and the first owner died in it. I spent years working in a recording studio that was in a Victorian farmhouse that was a sanatorium for sick children for a while, so I assume a huge number of them died there. And some in pain and trauma.
I never once saw or heard a ghost.
I saw and heard a lot of mice in the latter because the owner (who lived upstairs) didn't understand basic concepts like "doing the dishes" or "putting away food," but no ghosts.
That place was a shithole filled with crazy people. I could write a book except I'm still friends with a couple of them.
I think it's highly unlikely and the universe is amazing and bizarre enough without us imagining outside forces acting on it.
It’s entirely possible that supernatural phenomena exist. It’s also possible that what we call “supernatural” is merely science we don’t understand yet. After all, things like lightning and disease used to be attributed to gods, evil spirits, witchcraft, etc. I guess I’d call myself an open-minded skeptic, if that makes any sense.
The point of "super" natural is that it CAN'T be explained using the rules of our universe. Unexplained things that COULD be explained aren't super. They're just natural.
Makes sense.
99% of people don't know how electricity works. About the same for the internet. About ten people on the planet could make a computer processor
Yeah, it makes sense!
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/718/
Basically, it's not that hard to believe there are so many stories.
If it can be oberved and explained then it isn't supernatural. Therefore nothing can be supernatural.
A ton of real things would fit in with all the supernatural stereotypes if we didn't already accept them due to science.
I disagree. You seem to be unfamiliar with the definition of supernatural. Supernatural is anything that transcends the laws of nature. Not things that can't be observed or explained. Something that defies the laws of nature is not natural now, is it?
I don't believe in "supernatural phenomena" either. If they'd exist, we'd actually have prove of their existence. There's about 8 billion people on this planet and for some reason all the "recorded" phenomena date back to before everyone had an easy to record device in their pockets. They've all gone down to 0 for some odd reason, even though it is as easy as ever to actually provide literal proof - if they existed in the first place.
People who experience supernatural phenomena are experiencing either natural phenomena they are too stupid to understand, are fooled by man made things, or are hallucinating for whatever reason.
The reason why you don't see in supernatural phenomena is because those who experience it don't report it, because of the stigmatization surrounding the subject. If you say you saw something supernatural and reported it, people will ridicule you, or call you crazy. If video evidence is provided, it's fake or edited. There are however videos featuring things that cannot be explained rationally, opening the door to potential supernatural explanations.
There are like 9 ghost hunting TV shows on Hulu, probably. Belief in the supernatural isn't some underground fringe theory that will get you shunned or locked up. There are oodles of people out there that earnestly believe in spirits and psychics and auras and reincarnation and witchcraft and whatever the fuck else people can come up with to either
a.) make sense of a world they don't understand or b.) help them feel like they have more control in a world that makes them feel powerless
And each of them would be absolutely thrilled if there was some incontrovertible proof of their particular flavor of magic, but there isn't, and those people are suckers. If you're willing to believe that there's any amount of paranormal shit going on in the world, despite having no proof of it, you might want to reevaluate your position as an atheist. I know I would.
There are however videos featuring things that cannot be explained rationally
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_effect
Also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(illusion)
I saw David Copperfield walk through the Great Wall of China on live TV. I don't think he actually walked through the Great Wall of China. I also don't think he made the Statue of Liberty disappear.
I also saw Teller of Penn and Teller drown in a water tank with my own eyes at a live show and he stayed there, dead and unmoving, for the entire intermission. Then he was back on stage a few minutes later.
I do not think Teller drowned and came back from the dead even though that is exactly what I saw.
Uh-huh...
Our Brains are a meat pudding that runs on less electricity than a light bulb. I don't think it's unreasonable to get some hallucinations and signal interference. Especially when the pudding is stressed or poisoned . Plus we straight up know there are senses and ranges of senses we do not perceive. Reality is another thing all together through the eyes of a mantis shrimp. Our perception is incredibly biased and limited, so miracles (magic) are an easy explanation when our senses fail us.
Some say that our brains are actually filters. What we perceive is just what your brain lets us perceive, and that there's more to the universe than we could ever comprehend.
I fully believe there's something beyond our 3 spatial dimensions we call reality. What that is, I don't know. Does it have sentience, I doubt. I also think these things fall into unknowables, things each individual will develop a different feel for, and should be deeply personal.
Why do you fully believe this? What do you base this firm conviction on?
I don't see any reason not to, at present. I don't necessarily believe in, say, supernatural entities, but I'm more concerned with origin, what exists beyond our universe, the nature of consciousness, etc. I believe a lot of that is simply outside of our abilities to fully understand as humans.
Take a 4th spatial dimension as a simple example. We can do all the work on understanding how one would work mathematically. We can even get something approaching an intuition about how things would move and work in a 4th dimension, but we're simply not equipped to see, experience, interact with this 4th dimension. Another easy example of an unknowable is the thoughts and mental state of another. We can make inferences, we can ask, and we can trust that the information we get from those sources is accurate, but there's no way to verify.
This same thing, the fundamentally unknowable, exists pretty much everywhere if you dig deep enough. I like to think of this relationship with unknowables as "spirituality". Understanding that there are simply things that I cannot grasp, and being okay with that forms the basis for my spiritual worldview.
As stated before, as well, I believe this is all DEEPLY personal. I doubt any two people will ever arrive at the exact same conclusions. The thing with unknowables is there's no way to really be "right" short of following your intuition, so as long as your personal beliefs don't start impacting the will and agency of others, you do you.
Asking if the supernatural exists is not a scientific question whose answer can be derived empirically. Which to me means the question isn't even worth asking until a bunch of other questions can be asked / answered enough that this question becomes a scientific one, belief really has nothing to do with it (not sure I'm even capable of belief like that).
Concluding that all these stories are made up IS the simplest and most logical explanation. But, they almost certainly do not come from nothing. We as a species are kinda hardwired to understand things, and when we encounter something we don't, we have a tendency to either make shit up or seek things that satisfy that understanding (even if its not really understanding). The result is that we have all these fantastic stories and myths that are only distantly related to reality.
So basically, you're saying that if it's not science, it's not worth the time?
I'm saying that it's not worth asking this question yet. There are a bunch of other foundational questions that need to be asked and answered first (there is a never-ending loop of ask/ answer, btw, it can be quite infuriating), before this supernatural question can be asked scientifically.
I'm saying let's focus on finding and asking these more basic questions first, then we can take the little baby, scientifically sound steps towards asking what the answer to life, the universe, and everything is. Ironically, if there is any purpose in life, it's finding our own special way to take these little baby steps for humanity.
Sorry but I'm going to call out what I see as some pretty blatant motte-and-bailey argumentation by the OP and their offense taken to people trying to nail down the definition of supernatural is illustrative.
They have their bailey, belief in things like the occult, ghosts, demons, etc, that are almost certainly bullshit. To the extent that they can be falsified, they have been. This is the typical definition of what people think when you say "supernatural" and people are right to answer "no" when asked if they believe in it.
But then you have OP falling back on their motte when this happens, taking a nebulous definition of supernatural and asking rhetorical philosophical questions about reality, perception, and the unknown. The fallacy is that these questions do nothing to strengthen or refute the original argument about the supernatural.
Nobody is here to argue that nothing is unknown and even unknowable but that doesn't make the things that people typically call "supernatural" any less bullshit. Demons and ghosts are just not the kinds of things that are waiting around to surprise us. And shifting the conversation from your bailey to your motte to protect your feelings on the former is not a good way to have a friendly debate.
All that aside, if you are interested in expanding your understanding of the universe then I'd really encourage you to divert the effort you're putting into the "supernatural" into learning about the actual natural universe instead. Our universe really is fantastic on its own. There's plenty of interesting, wacky, and unknown things happening all around us that you can learn about without resorting to magic. If anything, magic is the boring answer imo.
They have their bailey, belief in things like the occult, ghosts, demons, etc, that are almost certainly bullshit. To the extent that they can be falsified, they have been. This is the typical definition of what people think when you say “supernatural” and people are right to answer “no” when asked if they believe in it.
You say that people are right to answer "no" when asked if they believe in this stuff. That is just not true at all. That's because that as much as good evidence can be hard to come by for supernatural stuff, there is also no official evidence whatsoever that proves that such things do not exist. Therefore, the most accurate answer should really be "I don't know", because of the subject's unfalsifiable nature, and how it's outside scientific testing. You still have a right to say "yes", or "no" though.
But then you have OP falling back on their motte when this happens, taking a nebulous definition of supernatural and asking philosophical questions about reality, perception, and the unknown. The fallacy is that these questions do nothing to strengthen or refute the original argument about the supernatural.
That "nebulous" definition of supernatural that I keep using IS the literal definition of the word. You even described it yourself how I described it on your second paragraph, first line. Yes, I have been "asking philosophical questions about reality, perception, and the unknown". And why can't I do that? My post is an open-ended question. This means that the conversation can go anywhere, provided that the context continues to match the topic of the post. What do you mean by "original argument about the supernatural"? Again, this post is meant to be an open-ended question where others contribute their thoughts on the supernatural, I share my opinions on their thoughts, and we agree, or disagree. There is no "original argument about the supernatural".
Nobody is here to argue that nothing is unknown and even unknowable but that doesn’t make the things that people typically call “supernatural” any less bullshit. Demons and ghosts are just not the kinds of things that are waiting around to surprise us. And shifting the conversation from your bailey to your motte to protect your feelings on the former is not a good way to have a friendly debate.
Actually, people here have argued such, as supernatural phenomena is a mysterious topic. Nowhere have I declared that there are no BS claims in the supernatural world. However, saying that all supernatural claims are complete BS without evidence supporting it is a biased take. Some are debunked, and some aren't, which is how we end up with unexplained claims that are beyond rational explanation. A scenario like this is the reason why we should stay open-minded about supernatural phenomena, instead of completely denouncing it.
I'll tell you why I say the answer is no to whether or not the occult, demons, or ghosts exist. There's a phenomenon in statistics where if you were to select a random element from an infinite set of equally probable elements, the probability that a specific element will be selected is 0%. Not close to 0, literally 0.
These kinds of supernatural phenomena that have no evidence belong to an infinite set of equally unlikely phenomena with no evidence. Their likelihood of being real is 0%. Only when phenomena has some tangible evidence explaining it can we elevate it to a finite set with a non-zero likelihood of being real.
...there is also no official evidence whatsoever that proves that such things do not exist
That statement right there sums up the problem.
No, you cannot prove that the supernatural does not exist. The same way you cannot prove that god doesn't exist, or that there isn't a teakettle in orbit around the sun between Venus and Mercury. The lack of evidence against their existence is not evidence for it. However, since there have been so many claims of supernatural phenomena, gods and near-sun teakettles, and none of them have been shown to be true, I feel confident in saying that they don't exist.
Here are some interesting counterpoints though...
The James Randi prize has never been claimed. No person has been able to demonstrate the existence of supernatural phenomena in order to claim an easy 1 million dollars.
Everything that has ever been discovered has turned out to be not magic.
I'm fully atheist, but I have seen ghosts in front of me, clear as day, while completely sober, during the daylight.
I have also seen some wild, completely unexplainable things. There's too much out there.
I have too, in company no less and we both saw the same thing. It's disheartening to see such ready dismissal of what I saw by others though lol
Wait, is this a depiction of the flat earth dome cutting someone in half?
You look at it too literally, but yes, that's what it looks like. It's actually a symbolic painting supposed to represent the pursuit for mystical knowledge.
It's a bad Victorian picture of their defective understanding of the medieval mystical world view.
The only phenomenon that I take seriously as potentially supernatural, or connected to something we have no way of explaining is the experience of consciousness.
Fair. You should check out Robert Monroe.
I'd recommend Manly P Halls book on "secret teachings". I think alot of "religion" is just philosophy + myth.
I don't think it makes sense as a term. If it occurs in the real world, has real impacts on it, but is hard to understand that doesn't mean it is supernatural, just not understood. The double slit experiment is not supernatural, just hard to understand. Things can happen in coincidental ways, but something had to happen so even if very coincidental it can be natural. What would it mean to be supernatural? I mean, really, some small part of the universe behaving badly for a moment for a reason we don't understand is not magic, it is just ignorance on our part. So I am open to phenomena, they happen, but a supernatural explanation could never be justified in my view. Just because I can't think of why something happens doesn't make it magic, it could far more easily be something we have seen time and again, my own ignorance.
Evidence?
Seconding custard_swallower. Strict naturalism. I see no reason to believe in any supernatural claim of any kind.
Relatively recently I had a new hypothesis for some of the feelings people attribute to hauntings; bad vibes. I know someone who smokes indoors in their home. Before I had purged supernatural beliefs of all kinds from my worldview I thought there was some kind of curse or haunting wrong with the place. No, it's the ill effects of third-hand smoke.
Belief in non-theistic supernatural phenomena appears to be a crutch for theistic supernatural belief; it gives a convenient explanation for something so that you don't exercise your rational faculties to find the real reason and then have the kind of experience that can contribute to unraveling god-beliefs.
Of course, there are rational explanations to things that people think are supernatural, but some things transcend rational explanations, and remain unexplained. This is where we may start to consider the supernatural.
I've yet to find any such thing and those that have been presented to me tend to be in the 'we have insufficient information' category for why it can't be clearly determined what happened. People love to wedge the supernatural into those crevices in spite of still not being a good fit.
Slight nitpick, I don't "believe" there is no higher power. I don't believe in any of the claims people have made that a higher power exists. By default we don't believe in anything.
"Natural" simply means "real". Any phenomena that does exist, known or not, is by definition natural.
There are no supernatural phenomena. There are things that really happen (which are natural) and hallucinations and delusions (which also arise naturally). That's all. Most of the woo I see is either the result of deliberate deception or stupidly implausible interpretation.
Let me ask you a funny question, and see where this conversation takes us.
Do you think that the current reality we experience as humans is true reality?
If something has observable properties, then it is part of nature, as we could observe it, model it, and include it into our scientific theories. If something has no observable properties, then it is not distinguishable from something that does not exist. Supernatural phenomena thus, tautologically, are not distinguishable from something that does not exist. Indeed, I would go as far as even saying the definition of nonexistence is to lack observable properties. That is why i se supernatural phenomena as a no-go. It either lacks observable properties, so it does not exist as a matter of definition, or it has observable properties, meaning it is just natural and not supernatural.
Funny, I was saying a simplified version of this to my daughter yesterday: We can't see the wind, but we can build a wind detector since the wind has an observable effect on the universe. We can't see atoms, but we can build an atom detector since atoms have an observable effect on the universe. We can't build a god detector or a ghost detector because gods and ghosts have no observable effect on the universe.
Ghosts and gods and magic simply do not fit in with how we have observed the universe working and they would cause a lot of basic problems with things we can observe, yet they do not. The simplest explanation is that there are no such things as gods or ghosts or magic.
I'll believe anything you tell me, including gods and magic, as long as you can present evidence appropriate to your claim. Anyone who wants me to believe what they're saying about anything divine or supernatural had better be able to back it up, or else I'm going to laugh in their face.
An interesting case for you to dive into: The Skinwalker Ranch.
I was quite interested in Snikwalker ranch for a hot second like 2 years ago, and what I can say is: There's no real evidence of anything supernatural, most of the claims are unverifiable and made by people who wanna believe in the first place, the previous owner of the ranch claimed they made up the supernatural bits to sell it, and every popular bit of information about is coded in scary music and spooky effects on TV programmes. I'd actually like to see if you got any like, scientific articles about it, because I never went that far with my interest. Just seems like a ranch with weird radio interference on Tuesdays. I'm open to accepting the existence of supernatural stuff, but evidence wise, I've never seen anything conclusive.
You know how various fantasy and sci-fi settings will say something like, "____ uses both science and magic," when describing how the world works? That ususally makes no sense. If magic has laws consistent enough to be used in machinery, it is just another branch of science. But with that out of the way, is that the only thing magic can be?
If magic was not just another type of science, it would have to supercede the natural world. Imagine a fantasy world that has gods who bestow power to their acolytes. Rather than using a natural process that could be recreated by mortals, the gods could actually break physical laws or even write new ones on a whim. In this world, magic isn't bound by a naturalistic worldview since it can change based on what a free-thinking entity chooses at any given moment.
That was a roundabout way of saying, "I don't think it matters." If the supernatural (magic) is knowable, we do not currently know it. If it turned out to be real, we may not even have a way of meaningfully interacting with it.
We are overzealous pattern recognition machines.
The proto-hominids who saw a tiger in the bush when there wasn't one had a higher chance of passing on their genes than the ones who didn't see a tiger when there was one.
And now their descendants see tigers in the stars.
If LLMs have taught us anything about pattern recognition machines it's that when they don't find a pattern to match they don't say they have no matches... they just pull a somewhat fitting match off their arse, or an outright random one. They hallucinate.
And that's even before we get to our actual minds. We've got pattern recognition machinery in our retinas. What reaches our brain is already highly processed (to make tigers easier to spot), and then it gets into the visual processing part of the brain, which uses sophisticated autocompletion using previously stored patterns to fill in the blanks and highlight anything remotely interesting... often including things that aren't there (see optical illusions, for instance). That's what we "see", and then we get to make up stuff based on that (and the same probably applies to our other senses, too).
Add to that that we're notoriously bad at recognising randomness (or lack thereof). A coin falls heads up four times in a row and we suspect shenanigans, as if it wasn't as likely or unlikely as any other pattern.
We see some craters that look like a smiley face (pattern recognition strikes again) on Mars and we think it's a fake picture (it's 2024, after all), or a Watchmen reference. And when we learn it's actually real our hair stands up. We get goosebumps. It can't be natural. Must be super natural. Aliens. Gods. Ancient civilizations. All while we ignore the thousands of craters that don't look like a smiley face.
But, hey, at least we're not getting eaten by hidden tigers, so win some lose some, I guess.
I have experienced weird things and I think it is something that is an explainable natural phenomena that humans attribute to the supernatural in their ignorance.
Like the "ominous feeling" of a basement being stuff like radon or unshielded wiring, things that are explainable without the supernatural.
A feeling that something is watching you? Some people end up experiencing supernatural phenomena after having such feelings. Especially if it's accompanied with a sense of dread.
I try to keep my thinking in line with scientific materialism. That also means things I believe need to be falsifiable, which means, I don't entirely believe them. There there always needs to be a bit of a hole or escape hatch in any truth to prevent it from becoming dogma.
I don't "believe" what I'm about to say, but it's something that has come up for me many times under psychedelics, which is the concept of a 'consciousness first' manifestation of reality. It's the closest thing I have to a spiritual or supernatural belief, and it's not really a belief because I don't believe it, but I do entertain the idea from time to time. The basic argument is that we've got the order of operations backwards, that the universe doesn't manifest consciousness through emergent properties, but rather that consciousness manifests universe concepts and scenarios that end up being plausible. This concepts extends the concept of consciousness to all matter and energy as well, because it all ends up being one and the same. I think of it as an extension of some Taoist thinking around wei wu wei where, because one is aught to find what they are looking for, if we can step back and stop dictating what we think/demand reality to be, reality may actually be much more fluid if we aren't so dogmatic in our thinking about it.
Anyways, I don't really believe any of that. But I think it would make for good science fiction, although it's already been done extremely well by Le Guin in her novella The Lathe of Heaven.
That also means things I believe need to be falsifiable
It's possible to have real science without it being falsifiable in the Popperian sense. For example, archeology, paleontology, cosmology, medicine (unless your sense of ethics would even shame a Nazi).
Popper's goal was to discredit soft sciences like sociology because he was an extreme conservative who didn't like the findings that people like Horkheimer and Adorno were coming up with.
As for psychedelics, one part of the mind that's affected by psychedelics is the part that tells you what's important and meaningful. What you're being shown is the subjectivity and emptiness of that sense of awe.
I think there may be some scientific explanation for a variety of things that are attributed to the supernatural; and not necessarily just mundane things like knocks and creaks in your house, paradolia causing images of faces in image noise and shit like that. For example, with how places that have unusual geomagnetic activity tend to also have higher than average ghost sightings, I think some people may just be extra sensitive to magnetic fields which causes them to hallucinate.
So many myths and monsters are basically caused by misunderstandings, not seeing something clearly enough to identify it, or even exaggerating a story that's been passed down verbally over a long time. Not to mention things caused by mental illness in times before advanced medicine and psychology. Many alien abduction stories and succubus sightings are almost certainly the result of hallucinations induced by sleep paralysis.
I have a “theory” that in these places where there are higher than normal “ghost sightings” and “encounters” that the spaces between our universe (think of the string theory of the universes) and another are even closer than “normal”, and that these “sightings” and “encounters” are a part of that crossover, and we just don’t currently have a way to measure it or interact in a meaningful way.
I also don’t really understand string theory all that well, I mostly just have a half-baked idea of what it is and how it works, so be gentle, please!
I think the vast majority of people who are even aware of the term “string theory” only have a half-baked idea of what it is. You’re in good company!
I know that some physicists think that the force of gravity is inexplicably weak, and that gravity isn’t as powerful as it “should” be. There’s a theory out there (or maybe it’s part of a larger theory, I don’t remember) that what we perceive as gravity is just “leaking” from (or possibly to) another dimension. That dovetails nicely with your own perspective.
Lets have a fun conversation.
What is a hallucination?
A phantom sense of something that isn't actually there. Be it feeling a touch, seeing something, hearing something, smelling something, etc. As real as it may seem to the brain experiencing it, it's entirely a product of that brain and can be caused by all sorts of things from illness and physical trauma to chemicals, lack of sleep, or even simply being deprived of stimulation.
I first want to call out all of the responses with "philosophical insurance".
By that I mean things like "If it IS real, it's not supernatural, so even if I rolled my eyes at it, and you prove me wrong, I'm still right"
We're just hanging out and casually talking about stuff here. No enforcers are going to come back and read these and hunt you down if someone ends up proving that ghosts or something is real. Also, you can still keep your Atheist card, if you think there might still be some weird stuff out there that science cannot yet explain.
As for me, I've had a few "Supernatural experiences" myself, and they've convinced me that there is another "force" out there that we don't understand.
what's the difference between higher power and supernatural phenomena?
sounds more like agnosticism to me...
Supernatural phenomina could mean that psychics aren't shysters, that some magicians are defying physics, or ghosts are real. Doesn't necessarily have to mean there's a god somewhere. I don't believe in any of those things but that's how I read this question.
Yes, that's what I meant.
Higher power = some kind of god or creator. Supernatural phenomena = anything that transcends/defies the laws of nature.
Personally I take them with a grain of salt, some supernatural phenomena are probably not yet understood by current science. Now I sound like an ancient aliens person meme.
I respect that you still consider it.
I'm basically at a point where I don't think any actual magic or phenomena exists, but the disciplines of metaphysical practice themselves are worthwhile for introspection and working on your mindset. Also I don't like to give voice to my own skepticism that much - I don't defend it or argue because I can't be talked out of it and it's not very fun to be that guy. It's more fun to entertain the fanciful things and hold ideas lightly among people who are inclined to talk about phenomena.
Supernatural phenomena is possible but not probable.
The only "supernatural" thing I believe in is reincarnation, and that's just a game of numbers. I believe we're on the verge of discovering that black holes birth new universes. Then your existence and rebirth just becomes a statistical eventuality. From your POV you would die and then immediately be aware of your next life; since death is a state of non-being, an infinite amount of time could pass between those two moments but you wouldn't experience any of it. So, it isn't really even supernatural since I don't believe anything like karma or whatever mediates the process.
If it happens, it's natural.
Yes, if. The whole thing hinges on whether or not black holes are actually universes. I feel that we will answer this question, and soon. Reincarnation is just what naturally follows after. But until we can lick black holes, it remains in the territory of the supernatural for now, since its all speculation and conjecture with no supporting evidence.
I don't have anything to add to this conversation as I'm in agreement that the "supernatural" is simply how humans have historically described natural phenomena that is not yet understood.
Now... what I do find interesting is the shared art. I've seen similar styles, but not this piece. I looked it up and thought I would share because I find it to be pretty rad.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flammarion_engraving
The Flammarion engraving is a wood engraving by an unknown artist. Its first documented appearance is in the book L'atmosphère : météorologie populaire ("The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology"), published in 1888 by the French astronomer and writer Camille Flammarion.
The illustration depicts a man, dressed as a pilgrim in a long robe and carrying a walking stick, who has reached a point where the flat Earth meets the firmament. The pilgrim kneels down and passes his head, shoulders, right arm, and the top of the walking stick through an opening in the firmament, which is depicted as covered on the inside by the stars, Sun, and Moon. Behind the sky, the pilgrim finds a marvelous realm of circling clouds, fires and suns. One of the elements of the cosmic machinery resembles traditional pictorial representations of the "wheel in the middle of a wheel" described in the visions of the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel.
When I say supernatural, this is what I mean.
As the article says, "The supernatural is hypernymic to religion. Religions are standardized supernaturalist worldviews." It also says "the supernatural is featured in folklore and religious contexts, but can also feature as an explanation in more secular contexts, as in the cases of superstitions or belief in the paranormal. The term is attributed to non-physical entities, such as angels, demons, gods and spirits."
There may be "non-physical entities, such as angels, demons, gods and spirits," but semantics clarifies how I would interpret their existence. They aren't entities as described by religious beliefs. Instead, they would be "natural" and certainly "alien" to the human experience. If they violate natural laws, it's only because humans lack the understanding to comprehend their nature.
There are absolutely "phenomena" beyond our current understanding. And you are correct when you say "mainstream religions are actually complicated incomplete stories full of misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and half-truths." Science and history have shown this to be exactly the case.
With that said, I am apostate for a good reason. Religion doesn't have the answers I zealously sought. It simply cannot, by its very nature and definition, do that. Science is the only way humans might honestly understand the world around them. While pragmatically I'm atheist, in terms of belief, I'm agnostic.
Alien non-physical entities may exist. Perhaps it's probable... somewhere in the universe. However, most religious beliefs can be demystified and logically explained false. For everything else, such beliefs make good stories. Until science proves or disproves the belief though, it remains just that--belief in a story.
I'd give anything to practice "magic." It's probably why I read so much fantasy. I love science fiction because it envisions so many very different and greater things. Frankly, I could have been spared an incredible amount of pain if there truly was a "benevolent" god I could trust. It would be absolutely wild to know that, beyond my short frail human existence, there factually is an afterlife.
More important to me than anything is Truth. Believing in something for which there is no evidence does me more harm than good. Trusting in that which is known and natural keeps me steady and able to embrace the moment rather than laying false hopes in an improbable future.
Sure. There absolutely could be non-physical entities. I would call them "alien" because that better describes them than our religious terms. If they exist though, I'd wager they wouldn't be friendly to humanity either by nature or intent. Angels and demons make better story devices than they do real life neighbors. We are at the top of our food chain. The last thing we need is to encounter something worse than we humans already are. If science ever proves that other beings exist, then we need to immediately determine next how to ensure human autonomy and survival amongst something that would more than likely be a threat.
Idk about "supernatural" but there definitely seems like there's a lot of undiscovered psychological phenomenon we haven't figured out. It's hard to research and quantify subjective experiences.
I've seen stuff fitting the popular descriptions for "underworld afterlife city of the dead", "the creator of the universe" and "discarnate spirits", so I sorta go with that.
I'm into meditation.
I think that arguing stories vs stories is bad epistemology and childish noise.
Just to provoke discussion…
How certain are you that these “popular descriptions” didn’t inform your dreaming/night terrors?
Prior to alien abductions it was vampires. Prior to vampires it was demons. Therianthorpes have been consistent, too.
It’s common for popular media to inform people’s nightmares, and sometimes there’s a moment between waking and sleep where we’re both conscious and yet still dreaming (complete with sleep paralysis.)
The same could be said of any observation.
It looked real enough.
Also, I said "meditation", not sleep. Remember?
(And by meditation I mean something esoteric and deep. My experience is long, the popular experience is scant and it's so uncommon that I may as well call it magic)
OP if you're feeling lost and without purpose there's more fulfilling things than getting trapped in the search for God. There's natural humanism. Read Carl Sagan. Read some Marcus Aurelius. There's a whole universe of interesting philosophy and science worth learning about rather than trying to find meaning in thy mystical and empty 'supernatural' hoping to stumble upon a sign that says made by god. The universe is majestic and endless and we are specks of atoms here for a short short time. Make the most of it while you can.
I'm not in search of a god to worship, or religion to be in. I'm free from those shackles. Now, I just like to dabble in the occult, and esotericism. I also like to deeply question reality. Yes, I love science too. I like to be on the fence between science, and the supernatural.
Anyone who is fence sitting or undecided about naturalism or empiricism and is dabbling with 'the supernatural' is just longing for a meaning or purpose. You don't get to claim to be free of the shackles of religion but still asks questions about the supernatural - can they really claim to be free? When I left my religion it took me a really long time to deprogram. It doesn't happen over night but it takes years. You can't be half pregnant: you either are or you aren't. You don't want to call it God because it's embarrassing, but what's the difference really? At that point it's just a semantic distinction.
If by natural forces we mean things like gravity, electromagnetism, color (strong force), and flavor (weak force), then absolutely there are phenomena that transcend those.
Those things are logic, causality, time, identity, math, etc. Ontology or metaphysics would be the formal subject. A lot of people in philosophy already study this, and it's considered one of the main branches of philosophy alongside epistemology and ethics/morality.
I've been studying causality lately, and it's fascinating how one of the best theories of it is that we diagnose causal relations based on how regular/reproducible they appear (Regularity Theory of Causation or RTC).
Just based on the premise of this question I think you should look into the work of Robert Anton Wilson if you haven’t already.