'Supernatural' discussions on WP

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I don't get the impression that I have any sort of high position from which to give edicts, I hope this thread won't come off that way, just that I noticed some things in a recent thread - things I suppose I've known for a while - that might potentially match a current social climate that could accommodate them. Really I'm hoping to write this in a short enough post to be readable and that these ideas might be useful enough to other people that they may consider them as tools in their own approach.

A couple of the most common pitfalls that derail any useful conversation or analysis of, lets say, anomalous subjective experience. I you can think of any particularly strong arguments against these two points let me know, especially if you can do so while properly steelmanning them because that probably would lead to some very interesting discussion:

1) Calling it 'supernatural'. This might actually be an idea that's ready to see it's time because I now occasionally hear other people saying it on Youtube who have a lot more intellectual authority than I'm allowed. The idea is basically this - the concept of the supernatural is incoherent. To call something real is to call it natural, to suggest that something's real is to suggest that something's natural. This does not state that one or the other side of the argument for anything like consciousness only on neurons or through all of matter is incorrect, rather it takes a big lacuna out of the argument. if someone is a mind/body dualist they are making a claim about nature, same for a reductive materialist. Also to use the word supernatural to poison the well on any suggestion about nature that falls into the slush fund of what's traditionally been coined supernatural and short-circuit conversation right then and there is a really regressive approach in that it attempts to hammer labels to things, ie. strawman ideas, and it says a lot more about the holder of that heuristic (not always in particularly good ways) than it does about the holder of the idea that they disagree with.

2) The idea that fully subjective experiences are of infinite kind and quality. This is the idea that you can hallucinate absolutely anything. That's not to say at all that there aren't more than enough hallucinatory experiences that can be confused for mystical ones or that's it's any sort of foregone conclusions that mystical experiences themselves aren't simply the much healthier inverse or flip-side of hallucination that speaks of peak mental health but tells us perhaps just as little about the outside/objective world. The key problems I have with this 'you can hallucinate anything' approach - first it would suggest that we have infinite neural pathways in the brain to give rise to infinitely many qualities of hallucination, something that just doesn't rhyme with any mainstream neuroscience that I'm aware of, second it acts as a basket or catch-all for any claim about human experience that doesn't sit plush with current understandings of the state of the universe hence it's much more of a hand-waving exercise than anything useful. A more useful approach perhaps, if you really want to explore an experience's likelihood of being a hallucination - chase it down that rabbit hole in specific detail. Oliver Sack had some great offerings on things like this with Charles Bonnett syndrome, and there are indeed visual patterns or audio patterns that we can chase down and reliably say that they're either neurological chatter or indistinguishable from neurological chatter.


If anyone else has some similar ideas they might want to add which they think might help guide such discussions feel free to add them below. My hope is that we can rationally explore more terrain in ways that's productive or even if plenty of people would opt not to (their choice) I'd love to at least see those who might be looking for such guide posts for framing productive conversation on this to have a place to find such.

Dean Radin has published a book : Supernormal

From what I've listened to about it on some social-media videos, distinctions are made between what is super-normal, versus super-natural, versus para-normal, versus normal, etc. Super-normal and super-natural get easily confused amongst laypersons. The issue with these discussions is that «beliefs» around them are just that... beliefs.

Also, personal-experiences that are not witnessed/shared with others, are by definition, subjective. I cannot provide «objective-proof» that I witnessed a flying cat outside the window yesterday without live-streaming it on video (this did not actually happen though; just an arbitrary example). Even IF I managed to live-stream such a seemingly abnormal (possibly super-natural, para-normal, etc) occurrence, technology does exist in this day and age that can basically make it look like your house burnt down, and you need gofundme donations, even though your home remains completely unscathed.

I have gained some of my BEST «wisdom» for understanding life from so-called «dream» experiences. Personally, I think a so-called «hallucination» can be described as being akin to a waking dream, something that so-called «psychics» might experience a lot. Or so-called schizophrenics. Creative/inventive ideas had to originate and come from somewhere after all. The so-called «generation of thought» had to have been «patterned» into such «ideas» (such ideas like heavier-than-air-flight, plate-tectonics, solutions to numerous problems, various «scientific» advancements, etc) for a reason.

Anyway, I must necessarily admit that I do not have any real ideas that facilitate discussion, only an encouragement for others to do their own research instead of just believing whatever I say. I can place information regarding what I believe to be true into a forum-post such as this on-line web-site, but, just like leading a horse to water to consume such substance, I can only place information before others for consideration, not make one consume/believe.

The biggest issue (to me, and probably others, depending on how much homework/research they have done) with these subjects is that, just like with politics/religion (which are essentially one and the same), many of the «beliefs» that people have about these subjects are essentially... dogmatic (and thus religious). The behaviours and responses from certain groups of people to these subjects tend to be predictable enough (i.e.: parroting the exact same mantras), and fairly parallel across the board amongst them, such that one such as myself can only conclude that they hold cult-beliefs (thus the expression: Great minds think alike but fools seldomly differ).

I think it would be easier to start with animal-behaviours (Dr. Rupert Sheldrake has written much on this subject).

I think it becomes an important distinction to flesh out when the lines start blurring. If you saw for example a tree fall in the woods and you were the only person to see it and didn't record the event on your phone it's still you witnessing an objective event in nature and something you'd perhaps only question if there were a lot of other circumstances around it that would make you question your state of mind at that moment.

Things get stranger if someone finds themselves in a situation where they see something so strange/absurd that almost anyone would say hands-down that it was a hallucination (the kinds of things of things Jacques Vallee used to talk about) which then leave some sort of physical evidence of their having been there. One has to at least consider the possibility that there are aspects of what they saw that may have been confined or reduced by psychological symbolism in their own minds but they also saw something that clearly had a physical effect. They have to then grapple with the notion that what they saw wasn't the thing itself, that their mind's shaping of it was a subjective reduction or abstraction, but that there was an objective/external event that their minds were interpreting. The question then becomes how strong or how tenuous the real overlap between the subjective and objective aspects of the event were.

If, for example, we had something tantamount to static-electric lightning that manifested in field build-ups and were known for tickling people's visual cortexes and/or temporal lobes one could maybe have a hallucination precipitated by a physical phenomena, one where what was seen was completely downstream from what happened in such away that what was experienced bore no proper descriptive quality of it's cause, much like maybe the experience of LSD doesn't describe the chemical itself. Things get a lot tougher however when you find yourself encountering what you may feel forced to describe as 'other' - ie. when you find, either in your internal, external, or some seeming combined space, that you're having a sort of encounter with something that's clearly looking at you and regarding you in second person as if you were engaging in a social interaction with another sentient being. Such experiences are very difficult to pin down the cause of if they don't involve physical effects, and one might be rightly tempted to call such an experience subjective (I've occasonally played with the idea that such experiences can sometimes or even often be the right hemisphere of the brain saying something explicit to the left), but if those experiences also come with outside/external effects - that's again where peeling apart subjective and objective or what aspects of the experience where which becomes particularly challenging.

My Cr0.02...

1) To many people on the social fringe, "supernatural" seems to mean ghosts, hauntings, and psychic phenomena. It has also been used to describe Atlantis, UFOs, Bigfoot, Unicorns, Faeries, and just about every other creature from myth and legend. Using the word "supernatural" to describe people's alleged experiences is to dismiss those experiences to the back pages of a supermarket tabloid. Thus, the word "supernatural" has become a dog-whistle word that is used to imply a general lack of sophistication among the people who report such alleged events.

2) The word "hallucination" is best used to describe an alleged supernatural event when there no material evidence to support it -- since there is no proof, the reporting party must have imagined or "hallucinated" the alleged event, if they are not outright lying about it.

While it may be infuriating to an alleged witness to have their experiences dismissed as delusions, hallucinations, or fabrications, it is also important to note that such people seem more interested in being believed than in providing any proof to support those beliefs.

Now, I used to enjoy sharing ghost stories around a campfire somewhere in the deep woods of northern Michigan. "Bloody Hook", "White Lady", "Mary Worth", and other stories were a thrill to tell and hear. One of my favorites is about the Girl Scout who so intent on beating everyone else in cookie sale that she tried to use the "Forbidden Trestle" as a shortcut and lost her life when she either got stuck in the middle of the trestle and was struck by a train, or she leapt to her death to avoid being crushed and dismembered by the train.

"... and to this day, when the moon is bright, and the wind blows cold, some say you can still hear her voice near the trestle, calling out 'Please buy my cookies'..."

Come to think of it ... those campfire ghost stories seem much more believable when you're only 12 years old...

I'm glad to at least see now two people agreeing that 'supernatural' is a distraction.

When I do a quick google search of the word 'natural' the first two definitions that come up deal with a) the physical world and b) intrinsics. merriam-webster.com does something I thought was a bit unusual (then again maybe just unusual for the sake of this conversation) in making definition 1 ' based on an inherent sense of right and wrong natural justice'.

I'm not 100% sure whether it's actually in the definition, whether it's sort of a multiplication of intrinsics and physical nature, but it seems like its fair to say that natural is synonymous with 'that which is real' - it's just tough to pin down



I think this touches on a couple valid points:

1) When a person kicks and thrashes to have people please believe them it makes them look dumb and unsophisticated, and in a lot of ways when they go this route it seems to offer persuasive circumstantial evidence (much to the comfort and reassurance of many) that the whole episode is a symptom of them being dumb and fanciful.

2) If you know you're not that sort of person, and you know that you had an experience that forcibly stretched your conceptions of reality in ways where examination of them would require a leap of null credulity to write off as hallucinations - knowing the score of how social exchange - you do your own version of 'shut up and calculate', really better phrased 'shut up and research'. I mean you can talk to people about it but you have to show and ideally have real openness to the idea that it was a hallucination or, if more transcendental, simply a multi-layer neurological resonance of some type. Otherwise most people are used to, at least once or twice a year, having someone knock on their door with chic tracks or something of the like saying 'believe me' or 'believe our founder/s' - there's nothing unusual or interesting about it.

If it's a complex enough phenomena to get an otherwise lucid and analytical individual to question their assumptions about the baseline of reality, odds are pretty good that even if in the end it proves no such thing it's still very likely to reveal very important truths about human brains, cognition, etc. which is why it's still worth examining rigorously regardless of what the ultimate source is determined to be.

I've had a few experiences that others would have described as "Supernatural"; but because I already knew that people would ignore what I had to say, I did not tell anyone about them. This gave me time enough to check things out and determine that the "ghost" was actually a large sheet of translucent plastic being blown about by the wind, that the "voices" were my brothers playing tricks on me with their walkie-talkies, and that the weird behavior of the family dog at a certain time in the evening was caused by a faulty tube in the family TV giving off ultrasonic noise that only the dog could hear.

Otherwise, I too would have been the one saying, "I saw a ghost, I'm hearing voices, and the dog is acting funny! THIS HOUSE IS HAUNTED!"

Agreed, and if you find out that the causes - neurological or otherwise - were something more interesting it's worth doing your homework to see if you might have possibly tripped over something that could offer new insights into either neurology, the nature of consciousness, or the world we live in. The more grandiose and unusual the trajectory of the experience and what claims it would demand the better it is to keep hard assertions about its meaning quite humble but beat the heck out of the books and analysis to get your own proper closure on the matter.

Also I think you implied something like this earlier, and if so I'd agree, that it's two very different things to say that you had an experience best described as seeing a ghost on one hand and to say I saw a ghost on the other - the former is a description of a sensory experience which makes no additional demands over and above 'my senses said x', the later demands belief in certain kinds of external entities that - to date - no one's found universally satisfactory evidence for.

Yes, that event with the TV tube got me hooked on electronics when the repairman showed me the waveform on the oscilloscope ("Wow! You can use that to see things that only a dog can hear! Neat-o!").

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRfuAukYTKg

The Human Mind in all that encompasses of course including Body too and all the ways less and more Cleary Understood
or not in how our Minds Interact with the Environment as Whole is a Territory too complex to be understood with the Linear 'think' of Current Science, alone; And the relatively speaking Antiquated Tool of the Scientific Method to understand what is currently beyond the Grasp of Science per the Human Mind And Body in totality of Interaction with Environment.

So, in other Words, for Practical Intents and Purposes our Minds are 'Super Natural' for we cannot Discretely Measure our
Minds Reliably in Repeated Measure for the Very Nature of Consciousness itself is an Overall Mystery to Science Still; A Vast Domain for Endless Exploration the Mind is and a Vast Potential the Mind is that Group Think that 'Artificially' Adheres to rules and instruction and guidelines of Past Think stagnates in the Dead Seas of the Mind and Body of
Past as the Potentials of the Mind and Body Die in Group Think Trapped in the Caves of 'fore Painting by Numbers
the Art that Remains Nearly the Same on Cave Walls still and within.

In more than other Words the Mind is Beyond Measure and Beyond Infinity for Infinity is a Measure of Science and Mind is beyond all Measures of Science and that's Just Simple Logic for those who have used enough of their Human Potential
in ways of Mind and Body and the rest of Reality to use Both Arts and Sciences to Relate the World to others in New
Ways of Exploration that Require an Endeavor of Exploration that Requires an Exercise Greater than what currently
Resides between the Ears and Beyond of what Science Cannot Measure now.

In Still other Words with Metaphor there is the Right Brain that Explores the Unknown and the Left Brain that Records
what it sees; For Folks who Stay Mostly in the Left Brain way of think, a Metaphor for their Experience of Life is
one more of parroting what has come before Versus Exploring what is yet to come.

Ha! Don't Expect to have a Target Audience if one is Exploring a New Realm of Human Potential in Intelligences
Yet to be Measured by a Tool as small and antiquated as the Scientific Method or Systemizing Minds.

And in other words too; don't expect to make money or likes or follows or shares or whatever else is the Material
or Emotional Reward at Hand from others for a life in the 'Real New Supernatural' requires intrinsic Rewards for the
Fuel of Muse that Keeps the unknown uncovering even more.

I find it amusing when folks say something is Wrong with the OP's Brain writing this when I've never Had a Problem
understanding him for I have the Context in what he is exploring to understand him. For instance, the Term 'Steel
Manning' where one attempts to Strengthen the Opinion of others in Discussion rather than using Pejorative Language
in even Debate terms like 'Strawmen' to Attempt to Weaken it to make some Serotonin Points within to 'become a bigger man' within in real time terms of feel and sense life now.

Hehe; most Humans, even ones who suggest they are highly rational are mostly controlled by Basic oneupmanship
in "Peterson Lobster Rules of fight" as they are Deficit in the Intrinsic Neuro-Chemicals and Neuro-Hormones that
Humans who have Acquired the Potential to Generate these Feel Good Material Reductionist Parts of Life are in a
Distinct Advantage over others when it comes to Discussion of any kind for there are no Emotional Needs
underlying suffering to be filled up by External Means of some kind of a Primal Fight whether that
is a Verbal or Physical oneupmanship as that comes and goes too. The Greatest Martial Artists Never
Ever get into a Physical Confrontation for they Truly do the Advanced Intelligence of Fueling their own
Feel Good 'parts' within as far as Neuro-Chemicals and Neuro-Hormones go within, so any so-called 'slight'
Bounces off like Titanium to use another Metaphor and a Song by Sia too. It's true, Generating one's own Happiness
within is rather 'Supernatural' to the Overwhelming General Population at hand but even Science has Crude Methods
to Measure this Inner Fulfillment among Yogi's who have Developed a Systemizing Science way of Attaining Bliss and
Nirvana As An OVERALL 'Autotelic' Kingdom of Heaven within. And truly it's not Rocket Science in the First place it is
all built in Innate Instinctual Intuitive Intelligence that Science now shows one can and will attain through a Practice
of Free Style Moving Meditation; in other words too, Tai Chi Classes are not Required Just Balance that makes Bliss
in Moving; it's as simple as that but too complicated for folks who believe Heaven has to be complicated to attain
now. Meanwhile, the Other Animals Move like Rice Paper Walkers as this Grace is a Source of all Will and Strength.

One Bottom line here is Heaven is not Supernatural; it is real now and as easy to Bring as a Dance that is Free.

The Best thing of all in Heaven is you don't have to tear anyone down and nothing ever bothers you now as for all
Practical Intents and Purposes you are Faster than a Speeding Bullet for what really counts within. And Yeah when
someone 'Thinks' they are going to Challenge you in 'A Bar Fight' You Turn on Your Hurricane Eye of the Silence of the
Lion Before the First Claw Strike. I've never ever had anyone respond to that other than a walk or literal run away.


Once one attains this State of Heaven within there are no practical limits for many intents from Before and that's Beyond Infinity enough for me. In the Words of 'Cold Play' and a 'Great Adventure' I turn my 'MaGiC own' without Pre-Planning Life
for the Depths of my Sub-Conscious Mind and Body is so far Beyond the Intelligence of the Rider my Conscious Mind on
top/bottom of the Blue Whale Sub-Conscious Transient-Hypo Frontality Potential in Flow where Transient becomes more than Temporary and an 'Autotelic State' and Nation of Being comes Next NoW as Real Heaven Eternally now within
with no so-Called Collective Record of the so-called experience of time, distance, or space.

And one of the nicest things of All is Science is finally Growing up to see God within;
hehe; at least with New Terms that provide a rudimentary Frame Work of the Beyond of Rainbows that are
as real as real will ever be and to borrow a phrase from Jordan Peterson 'more than real' too. That can't possibly
Make Sense until you arrive at the Destinations I've Already been to in years before in terms of Human Clock Measure
of Time. And to Be Clear You is not directed at anyone but those who have yet to arrive in a Time out of Time; a
Distance out of Distance; and a Space out of Space that is one with God and Beyond any 3 Letter Word of 'fore;
Even
Love.

I'd say we have almost limitless possibilities for additional threads, until Alex lets nature retake the site (could be sooner than later at this rate), for discussing positive beliefs. I'm more trying focus on technique and etiquette for fleshing out details without conversations either landing in one ditch or the other immediately.

I wouldn't dispute people's right to stand on the soap box, I just don't think gears can mesh unless there's an agreed upon framework of analysis. It can be intensely gratifying sometimes to peddle like crazy on a bike that's in 10th gear, just that it's not as practical if one's hoping to get somewhere.

In addition, relaxing the rules of investigation means that any crackpot idea and subjective delusion would be accepted as fact, similar to the idea that every child should receive a trophy for just showing up to the race.

That's what's so great about the Scientific Method -- if the experience can be verified by either objective proof or further experimental results, then we can freely discuss that experience as a real and repeatable event, and not as a personal delusion or fantasy.

Would it be possible for us to take this discussion to a new thread rather than drawing it out in this one?

There appears to be a nested claim here and in your post before my last response (correct me if I'm wrong) that either no one or almost no one has had any subjective experience that you haven't. I'm not sure how you make your case for that, I'm not 100% sure how we'd have much of a discussion about it, we could try, but I don't think this particular thread is the right place for it.

Sure, if you think it's necessary.That was not my claim.

I am saying that a set of standardized guidelines for discussing the supernatural may be in order, so as to prevent the discussion from veering off from the supernatural into the totally weird.

If the supernatural is an incoherent concept then what we're ultimately trying to untangle true or false claims about the natural (objective and subjective included) as well as sort out more accurate or less accurate interpretations of the sorts of anomalous experiences that make up the sorts of edge cases we'd want to examine. That an experience is subjective or neurological, for example, might not be all there is to be said about it and may not exhaust the limits of its implications. It's also useful, if people are going to entertain ideas like panpsychism, to hash out what constitutes the more persuasive edge of circumstantial evidence for that and what doesn't.

The whole point here though is to find ways to weed out sloppy thinking and have guidelines on how to kill that before it starts. That said it's really awesome, and makes everything easier, when enough science has been done on every detail of a sphere of conversation to make a really solid case for its grounding. Where that's not comprehensively available adult sophistication and maturity have to suffice.