In any form or fashion. If you do believe in a supernatural thing(s) what?
No. I believe there are unexplained, and probably unexplainable things, but they all exist as part of the natural universe.
Isaac Newton put it best:
“I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
It’s completely stupid, short sighted and ignorant of us to think that we know everything there is know about the universe and natural world. There is still so much more to learn about and understand and probably far more than we can even comprehend.
But we also have to regulate how much we know and don’t know and how we can understand or not understand … because as Richard Feynman put it …
“Keep an open mind … but not so open that your brain falls out”
And honestly a lot less is left unexplained than most people seem to assume. Or maybe just most believers.
Tim Minchin summed it up wonderfully for me.
Because throughout history
Every mystery
Ever solved has turned out to be
Not magicNo. But I love them for storytelling purposes.
Thank you for your direct answer.
What does it really mean to be supernatural? What’s the difference between, say, a ghost and dark matter? We don’t really know what either one is. Is it that we can reliably find evidence of dark matter, even if we don’t know what it is, so it’s not “super” anymore? It seems to me that “supernatural” is just a name for the ones we don’t actually believe in.
What do you mean by supernatural?
It means ‘beyond the natural world’, I think, but what does ‘natural’ mean? That is exists without humans? That it’s good for the planet? That it’s something theoretically knowable by empirical means? That’s it’s something knowable by logical/rational means?
I believe that I as a conscious experience exist. I don’t believe anything else with certainty, although I believe a great many things conditional on the empirical (‘natural’?) world being assumed to be true.
The word supernatural: phenomena or entities are those beyond the laws of the nature
But the “laws of nature” are just provisional rules we’ve deduced through observation. When we see things that violate the rules as we’ve deduced them (and we often have), we figure out new rules—we don’t just assume there are things to which the rules don’t apply.
Were electrons supernatural before we had the laws to describe them? Would something that’s supernatural now still be supernatural if we came up with laws describing its behavior?
I appreciate I made an edit to add more to my comment that you may not have seen; are you equivocating ‘the laws of nature’ with empirical knowledge (ie knowledge which can be gained by evaluating our sensory experience and assuming that it represents a true world)? If not, how are you defining it?
yes: human consciousness, personhood, sapience, whatever we call it. I think people are a little bit special.
No. Or maybe. Depending on your definition of each particular supernatural things.
Do I believe that any “UFO” spotted in the sky is a craft from an alien race? No. However, do I believe people genuinely see things that can’t be explained or identified in the sky, that could plausibly be extraterrestrial, inter-dimensional or top secret in ways we generally don’t currently understand? Yes, absolutely.
Do I believe that we all have souls that exist outside our physical form, that persist after death? Absolutely not. But do I believe people who aren’t lying genuinely see people or entities that we would generally refer to as “ghosts”? Yes. But beyond believing people really do “see” these things, I don’t know if they are always hallucinations or if people are witnessing some kind of other phenomena.
I’m a sceptic at heart. There’s nothing I won’t believe for ideological reasons, but evidence is key. Things that there is currently no evidence for could theoretically still exist, but will always require proof for me to actually believe in.
If enough people say they’re actually experiencing something is that not proof enough to believe in something? First hand experiences that are all very similar and have been known throughout human history. What else do you need?
That’s proof that many people experienced something. It’s not proof of what that something is.
What if enough people say what it is?
That means that’s what they think/believe it is. Might be what it is, might not be.
No.
No. The absence of them every time we look for them is very, very suspicious.
Fair
I believe in aliens if that counts.
Indeed, any good alien subreddits on Lemmy?
Aliens count? As “supernatural”? Well gosh golly, do squid count too? I guess it really isn’t that straightforward what “supernatural” means, is it?
You weak bug. Aliens that have what we would call psychic abilities or can shift through space I would count as supernatural yes
What about aliens that are just living beings not from Earth with no special abilities?
What’s up with you people. Are you all atheist and hard edge scientist who believe in nothing unless you already saw it. If they are just living beings then that’s what they would be… I’m talking supernatural though
And I’m trying to find out what you think of as “supernatural”. It’s not “aliens”, as we’ve established, it’s “aliens with supernatural abilities”. See why it’s important to discuss these things?
None that I know of unfortunately
You could start your own . . .
I work in 911 dispatch, and it absolutely feels like on and around a full moon our calls get weirder
We’re not necessarily getting more or more serious calls than average, so it’s kind of hard to point to any measurable statistic that would back up that assertion, and it’s not just people with psych issues calling and ranting at us, so you can’t even just go by mentions of callers “rambling” or “not making sense” in the notes of our calls, a lot of them are just bizarre situations that seem really unlikely or convoluted.
I’m kind of loath to label it as supernatural though. I feel like if there is actually a correlation and not just confirmation bias on my part, it probably has some reasonable scientific explanation.
Tbh, a full moon means a lot of increased predatory activity, I wouldn’t be surprised if we subconsciously become more anxious and rash, and I wouldn’t consider that any more supernatural than the tides (provided there’s actually at some point a link discovered).
Not really. Granted though the human mind is limited so likely things go through my mind. Luck or something but in the long more critical thinking form of my existence no.
I think humans are natural storytellers who rely on the construction of narratives for most of our basic thought processes. But the natural world is inimical to narrative, so we employ narrative worlds whose functioning is adapted to the requirements of storytelling. (Even “naturalistic” storytelling relies on subtle tweaks to the laws of causality and probability, if nothing else.)
So I believe that we can’t make sense of the world without relying at least implicitly on the supernatural, but I don’t believe that it corresponds to anything external to our own cognition.
Now that almost everyone on planet earth has a small camera with them at all times, it would have been really cool to have discovered some supernatural stuff, be it ghosts, Big Foot, Nessie, whatever (and someone still might, who knows?) , but instead all we get is police brutality. 🙁
I believe that our understanding of "natural is imperfect and immature, thus there are an enormous number of things and phenomena that don’t yet fit into our understanding of natural, thus are supernatural. At least until we learn and adapt our understanding of natural.
