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Always good to make sure we are on the same footing and following the actual definition of words.

So...

Supernatural

1. (adjective = descriptive word) (of a manifestation or event) attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature.

2. (noun = objective word) manifestations or events considered to be of supernatural origin, such as ghosts.

...

So by believing in tradtion, the supernatural or mythology you are effectively basing your existence on nothing at all. You are living your life according to stories written by people who are uneducated and/or ignorant (either through their own fault or due to the time they lived in). Stories written about topics of discussion far beyond their own comprehension at the time.

If that is what you want to live your life by then go for it.

I appreciate the clarity and groundedness of what you are saying, but personally I take issue with lumping belief in supernatural forces/manifestations into the same category as tradition and mythology, and the labelling of this as basing your existance on nothing at all, I find it kind of insulting, not terribly so, but I just consider it to be a little too reductionist for me not to pipe up.

Most people I know (myself included) who believe in things which would currently be classed as supernatural, do not have this belief because it has been passed onto them through story and tradition, we believe these things because of personal experience which cannot be explained or understood within the scientific paradigm.

Often these experiences have such a pronounced effect that they call into question the validity of following consensus view, when what you have experienced with your own body, your own mind and your own eyes does not find validation in the world around you.

Some like to jump immediately to labelling such experiences as neurological or perceptual dysfunction, which I will not rule out, but if we are to be realistic, humans have ALWAYS been encountering things we cannot easily explain, and if we disregarded all of these experiences as meaningless I doubt we could have developed this far as a race.

So if something is labelled 'super natural', it goes beyond our established consensus of what is natural, or what is scientifically understood, but since when has scientific evidence been the be all and end all of reality? Science works on hypothesis to establish probable causes for things which earlier we could not understand. There are many many things which had previously been considered supernatural, which we now feel we have a sufficient scientific understanding of to classify as natural. So really, by that token, why can't it be presumed that there are things that are considered supernatural now, but may in future be understood to such an extent that we accept them as natural?

I recently had a discussion with my dad along similar lines, he gave an example of early civilisations believing that natural forces, such as say, a volcano, were embued with the spirit of a god or a deity, and this was logical for them to believe because they had no better explanations for the phenomenon they observed. When the volcano erupted their belief would be that they had angered this 'god', but really the resulting activity was due to the rising of magma in response to increased pressure underneath the surface of the earth. I accept this notion, its all good and well, but personally I have more faith in the mysterious nature of the universe, than I have faith in science to sufficiently elucidate these mysteries to such an extent that humans can safely say we understand them. My thoughts in response to what my dad said were along these lines, well yes, the volcano may be a natural phenomenon, which we can observe and explain the natural forces and factors which are evident, but to me this is only one half of the picture. I think it seems quite plausible that a certain kind of energy could build up around a volcano throughout its lifetime that may have an effect on those who come into its field of influence, and this energy may have the capacity to interact with the consciousness of those tribes. I don't mean to say that the volcano is a god, or neccesarily a sentient being, but rather that it may contain certain configurations of energy and modes of activity that can teach those who live around it certain lessons.

The Maori word for spirit is 'wairua', which translates literally to 'two rivers', indicating that the forces matter and spirit are intertwined, always flowing together, and one stream cannot exist without the other. If we are to limit our focus to their world of observable matter and scientific exploration, we are cutting ourselves short.

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"science

ˈsʌɪəns/

noun

the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment."

Hey Ace, maybe science will one day work out all this spiritual and supernatural stuffs. I wonder how much the scientists are observing and experimenting with spirits? Maybe if they just gave it a shot...?

Edited by theuserformallyknownasd00d

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Once at work, I convinced a workmate that she fucked up, and she took the brunt of the punishment. I guess if you plant the seed early enough then you can convince yourself of anything.

I can't see science types and spiritual types ever seeing eye to eye in here that's for sure. And I mean who's a science guy to a 25th generation Koori or Maori chap? And visa versa, they are worlds apart but worlds colliding in a beautiful necessary synchronicity. One day, we'll work out the secrets to this being animal stuff and both of ya'll will have a decent crack fo real.

That's only if the freemasons let us and don't take over the world first

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I was just reading an article last week about how science and religion could one day morph together.

From the link below

http://www.speakingtree.in/spiritual-blogs/seekers/pilgrimage/science-and-religion-are-becoming-one-great-scientists

Science and religion are becoming one. Great scientists
By: C P Verma on Jul 22, 2015 | 55 Views | Post Response

Science and religion are becoming one. Great scientists — Eddington, Planck, Einstein — became aware that science alone is not enough. There is something far more mysterious which cannot be grasped only through scientific methodology and means, something which needs a different approach, which needs more meditative awareness. Eddington says in his autobiography, “When I started my career as a scientist, I used to think that the world consisted of things, but as I grow old I am becoming more and more aware that the world does not consist of things but of thoughts.”

Reality is far closer to thoughts than to things. Reality is far more mysterious than you can weigh or measure. Reality is not only objective, it is also subjective. Reality is not only content, it is also consciousness. And the greatest religious people, like J Krishnamurti, are aware that religion cannot exist anymore as it has existed up to now. Something of a radical change is needed. My own approach is that we have to create Zorba the Buddha. The new Buddha will be a synthesis of Zorba the Greek and Gautama the Buddha. He cannot be just Zorba, and he cannot be just Buddha. And that’s my whole effort to create a bridge between Zorba and Buddha, between the earth, this shore, and the farther shore, the beyond.

New Science

A totally new science is bound to arrive. It will be both science and religion. It will be science both of the inner and the outer. In fact, the days of religion are over, just science will do, one word will do. ‘Science’ is a beautiful word; it means knowing, wisdom.

Science should be divided in two categories: objective science — chemistry, physics, mathematics, etc — and subjective science. Then there is no need to divide religion and science. And the meeting of religion and science in one whole will create for the first time a whole man.


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How you know, by Mel Acheson

Another epistemological tour de force.

Probable, Possible, my black hen,

She lays eggs in the Relative When.

She doesnt lay eggs in the Positive Now

Because shes unable to postulate how.

The Space Childs Mother Goose By Frederick Winsor

People dont pay much attention to how they know; they just start arguing about what they know. From that beginning, grades and egos and jobs are on the line. If you know the answer, you get a better grade, you feel superior, youre promoted. Theres security in thinking youre building your life on a solid foundation of knowledge.

The idea of how is disconcerting. Thinking about thinking undermines what you think. If you were looking for a cognitive rock to stand on, how leaves you floating.

Fortunately, knowledge is buoyant. The cognitive boat can take you to new and exciting places. With a few ideas and a handful of equations, it can fill the universe with meaning. Unfortunately, the boat doesnt come with a warranty. The history of ideas is a record of sinkings. You can be sure (almost) of one thing: What you believe today to be certain will someday go down.

For practical purposes (for building a life or a career), the how doesnt matter. The carpenter doesnt have to know how hammers are made in order to drive nails. Nor do scientists need to know how knowledge is made in order to build theories. But then carpenters dont claim to be building Ultimate Truth.

The how has two parts, roughly corresponding to production and marketing. Individuals are constantly thinking up new ideas, exploring new things and looking at old things in new ways, testing the ideas and the observations against each other, judging how much sense it all makes. Then populations of individuals buy some of these ideas and pass up others. The ideas that most individuals buy become accepted theories and constitute knowledge.

Hence, scientific knowledge is not an ever-closer approximation of some unknown Truth. Rather, theories are selected (in the sense used in theories of biological evolution) by the environment in which theyre proposed: by the level of awareness and understanding of the people using them, by the characteristics of that part of reality people currently live in, by the dynamics of social and cultural power. Instead of being built on a foundation, knowledge is composed of relationships.

The metaphor of construction is misleading. There is no foundation which justifies all subsequent knowledge built on it. Modern physics, for example, is anchored to a philosophy that sank over a century ago, as Karl Popper (among others) has pointed out. The rocks that sank it were the discoveries in the late 1800s about how the brain works. Neurons firing in your brain are distinguished only by their relationship with other neurons. Information about the world is not transmitted by nerves but is created metaphorically in the classification of impulses. Facts are not given. Evidence is not evident. And the entire apparatus (your brain) comes preassembled and running.

The construction metaphor can only go this far: The progress of knowledge is a remodeling of existing neural structures. Sequences of neural firings can be rearranged, new sequences can be added or removed. But any sequence you might think is fundamental turns out to be just another association of associations of associations.

This has a couple of interesting consequences: The hegemony of physics over the other sciences is attributed to its being more fundamental. Presumably, the other sciences ultimately can be reduced to the collisions of elementary particles with which physics deals. Any theory in any other science, no matter how reasonable it may be in light of its own domain of evidence, must receive the imprimatur of physics to be taken seriously. The idea that psychology, say, could provide a critique of physical theories is considered absurd.

But this is what the nature of the human cognitive apparatus allows. Its mechanism of classifying neural impulses treats the evidence and theories of physics exactly the same as it does those of every other science. Gestalts can be the fundamental objects of perception as readily as can the parts that compose them. If there is a foundation to science, its this business of reclassification of neural relationships, not the content of any particular discipline.

Disciplines can relate to each other, but one cant dictate to another. Reasonableness is the relationship of a theory to the evidence it seeks to explain, not its subservience to physics. Thus the idea that the conclusions of comparative mythology arent to be taken seriously until they conform to the currently accepted theory of celestial mechanics is without foundation.

The second interesting consequence concerns the many efforts to justify knowledge by starting with some simple element and building up all the rest. The brain works in just the opposite way: It starts with everything and narrows its focus to some simple thing. This has its usefulness, but along the way a lot gets discarded. When the process is reversed, what was discarded is likely to be ignored. The result is a picture of the universe thats simplistic, reductive, incognizant.

This is what Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine discovered in his examination of dynamics. It bothered him that the fundamental laws of dynamics treated time as reversible when all experience indicated it wasnt. With the advent of the awareness of complex systems, he worked out generalized equations of state for populations of particles. He found that irreversibility of time and multiple solutions based on probability were inherent, essential characteristics of those systems. Reversibility only appeared in isolated systems at equilibrium. Its especially interesting that the complexity of his generalized equations persists down to as few as three particles: Thus the three-body problem in gravitational analysis is already beyond the scope of traditional dynamics.

In other words, what has been proclaimed the fundamentals of physics upon which more complex systems are built is actually a degenerate case derived from those more general complex systems. In working up from the degenerate case to the complex, the multiple solutions are missed. To get the larger picture, you have to start with complexity and work down.

The craving to justify the content of scientific knowledge, to establish it on some absolute truth, can never be satisfied. The mechanism of knowledge doesnt work that way. This doesnt mean our knowledge is not true. But its truth is a truth within limits.

Its a truth of special cases. Its a truth of human scale. The how of knowing may leave us floating, but we can learn to swim.

Mel Acheson

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That guy certainly likes to use big words rigged together in a way to sound complex and smart.
Good for him. I bet he makes a decent amount of money out of doing that.
I'm not entirely sure what you are actually trying to say with that rambling poetic narrative.
I'm not sure where people get the idea of science searching for a fundamental univerasl truth. Science is a methodical search for meaning behind everyday occurences.
Everything is relative after all so there isn't a truly universal truth, its case dependent and relative to the situation.
The key thing though is that when a certain level of understanding is achieved one can accurately predict the outcome of the understood situation.

An excellent example of lack of fundamental truth is the particle-wave duality exhibited by fundamental particles.
In some situations fundamental particles act like true particles. They can be modelled and predicted as such in such situations. So are they truthfully a particle, in a universal sense? Well yes. IN that situation.
In a completely different situation the same "particle" will behave as a wave. It is universally truthful that in that situation the "particle" is not correctly modelled as a particle but is truthfully a wave.

It would be a more stimulating conversation if you were able to write your own arguments too, Thunder. It just seems a bit cheap if I'm arguing against statements that I can search for and read myself online. What is the point of conversation if none of it is based upon your own understanding, perspective and logical analysis of the topic under scrutiny?
I could just write my own little diary of my own thoughts on such topics if it appealed to me.

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Also

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Electric_Universe

The "Electric Universe" (EU) is an umbrella term that covers various pseudo-scientific cosmological ideas built around the claim that the formation and existence of various features of the universe can be better explained by electromagnetism than by gravity

There are some god damn huge problems with that sentence.
Gravity is an incredibly weak force. Electromagnetism is really quite strong. That's important.

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heresy!! :P

neil degrasse tyson is on Q and A tomorrow. personally, i won't be watching.

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I don't usually watch TV so nor will I be lulz.

You should watch his cosmos series though. Pretty damn interesting and could be of great value to you too.

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That guy certainly likes to use big words rigged together in a way to sound complex and smart.

Good for him. I bet he makes a decent amount of money out of doing that.

I'm not entirely sure what you are actually trying to say with that rambling poetic narrative.

I'm not sure where people get the idea of science searching for a fundamental univerasl truth. Science is a methodical search for meaning behind everyday occurences.

Everything is relative after all so there isn't a truly universal truth, its case dependent and relative to the situation.

The key thing though is that when a certain level of understanding is achieved one can accurately predict the outcome of the understood situation.

An excellent example of lack of fundamental truth is the particle-wave duality exhibited by fundamental particles.

In some situations fundamental particles act like true particles. They can be modelled and predicted as such in such situations. So are they truthfully a particle, in a universal sense? Well yes. IN that situation.

In a completely different situation the same "particle" will behave as a wave. It is universally truthful that in that situation the "particle" is not correctly modelled as a particle but is truthfully a wave.

It would be a more stimulating conversation if you were able to write your own arguments too, Thunder. It just seems a bit cheap if I'm arguing against statements that I can search for and read myself online. What is the point of conversation if none of it is based upon your own understanding, perspective and logical analysis of the topic under scrutiny?

I could just write my own little diary of my own thoughts on such topics if it appealed to me.

yes that was one of the harder ones to follow, and he does try to be poetic. i think you'll find he gets no money or very little for writing those.

it wasn't aimed directly at you ace, it just happened to be published days ago and i thought it was apt to the entire conversation that sprang from your post.

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I don't usually watch TV so nor will I be lulz.

You should watch his cosmos series though. Pretty damn interesting and could be of great value to you too.

i believe in electric universe theory, which is widely claimed to be pseudo-science, even though experimental evidence and observations seem to show EU is a lot more viable than all of the nonsense mainstream astro-physics i hoovered up for the past twenty years.

i don't need to watch the reboot of cosmos to know what it will say.

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i believe in electric universe theory, which is widely claimed to be pseudo-science, even though experimental evidence and observations seem to show EU is a lot more viable than all of the nonsense mainstream astro-physics i hoovered up for the past twenty years.

i don't need to watch the reboot of cosmos to know what it will say.

Belief is individual and that is fine. Beliefs can also be wrong which is also fine.

Would you mind linking me to the experiments? I'd be interested in genuinely checking out their methods and logic. I'd honestly love to be proven wrong. There's nothing more exciting because it completely changes the opportunities that you thought were available to you.

If you listened to a heap of nonsense physics then it's probably not mainstream. You shoud probably consider reevaluating your sources of information to ensure there is some factual or logical basis for your physical understanding of what's around you.

Also I've watched both of the cosmos series. They are distinctly different. In fact I find the original a bit of a poetic pain in the ass (despite the info in it).

Open your mind Thunder. Give it a chance and you might enjoy it :)

Edited by ace1928

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My bad. Sorry.

Edited by bogfrog

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I've got nothing against anyone mentioned in this thread or against anyone in this thread
Poetry is nice at times but its not the most useful medium for myself personally to absorb information.
I did respond to what was said. There wasn't much said within the pretty language.

Not giving a fuck what peope think of you is a fantastic state of mind to be in :)
Keep it up

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we're derailing bog's thread at this point ace. shall we take this to PM? i'll be more than happy to talk at length since you have shown interest. do understand that i'm a layperson, and that these theories i talk about have been widely ridiculed as 'dissident' for decades. velikovsky and sagan had a public debate AFAIK! halton arp defied our interpretation of redshift. hannes alfven won the nobel prize for physics but his ideas of a plasma cosmology were rejected.

let's talk about it but don't get your expectations up that there is some kind of happy middle ground between what i'm parroting and what our education systems are parroting.

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I thought the thread was long derailed. I'll leave now. No point upsetting anyone further. And I've said all that I really need to say.

I was not aware of any malicious statements said in any of my posts but I suppose that could depend on how you take it.

Sorry bog. Sorry thunder. I did not intend to upset or anger.

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I hope you are terrorised by a ghost one day and then you can see for yourself how well your beloved science defends you.

Spiritual terrorism

well isnt this lovely

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boggy, I think he was criticising the essay TI posted (post no. 55)

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Quantum entanglement could have negated all of this. If you guys and Bogfrog had met none of this would have happened.

Spooky action at a distance.

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Yeah I agree with Anodyne, I think you read too much into this Boggy, no-one was having a go at you.

edit: c'mon Change there's no need for that. I seem to remember someone wanting to see a ghost one night :shroomer:

Chill people.

Edited by Sally

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My apologies. This was not made clear enough to me.

Personal shit causing over exaggerated reactions.

Sorry ace.

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My apologies. This was not made clear enough to me.

Personal shit causing over exaggerated reactions.

Sorry ace.

All g. There were no hard feelings anyway. No point in that :P

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