Natural vs Supernatural

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Natural vs Supernatural

OmegaKV
I think it is useful to divide the phenomena of the world into two categories:

1) Natural phenomena. Phenomena that we can understand, or one day hope to understand.

2) Supernatural phenomena. Phenomena we can probably never hope to understand.

I consider the creation of something from nothing (or the existence of something rather than nothing) to be a supernatural event, because it violates every conception of the human mind. But atheists would not call it supernatural, because atheists do not believe in mysteries. Atheists believe that given enough study, any phenomena can be understood by the human mind.

The soul and consciousness are supernatural phenomena, because not only are they poorly understood, but they are unexplainable, because only science can be understood, and all of science exists only to predict the movement of objects, and the existence of the soul is not a question of the movement of objects.

The question of whether there is an afterlife is a supernatural question, since it is the question of what happens to the soul after death of the body, and the soul is itself supernatural.
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Re: Natural vs Supernatural

R.C. Christian
OmegaKV wrote
The soul and consciousness are supernatural phenomena...
No, they are not phenomena, they are human constructs; sums of observable phenomena that the human (or other animal) body/system displays. There isn't a separate soul; soul is a product of the multi-scale, bound infinite complexity of the body.

From that point on, your argument builds upon the above false premise, producing a couple more false premises along the way.
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Re: Natural vs Supernatural

OmegaKV
R.C. Christian wrote
No, they are not phenomena, they are human constructs; sums of observable phenomena that the human (or other animal) body/system displays.
If you believe this then you are denying your own sentience and the existence of sensations of things such as colors. It is hard for me to refute this to you though, because all I know is my own sentience, not yours.

There isn't a separate soul; soul is a product of the multi-scale, bound infinite complexity of the body.
Can you explain what you mean by this?
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Re: Natural vs Supernatural

R.C. Christian
OmegaKV wrote
If you believe this then you are denying your own sentience and the existence of sensations of things such as colors. It is hard for me to refute this to you though, because all I know is my own sentience, not yours.
How am I denying something that I included among the things I can observe? I can observe what my senses allow me to, but I could never observe separate, well defined entities of soul or consciousness. What definition of either the "soul" or "consciousness" describe them to be something that's not a product of phenomena observable through the senses (including the sixth sense, thinking as well)?

OmegaKV wrote
There isn't a separate soul; soul is a product of the multi-scale, bound infinite complexity of the body.
Can you explain what you mean by this?
Every entity that's included in the Infinite Whole, i.e. the World that itself is not the Infinite Whole is necessarily bound infinity, because there are other observable entities that are not the entity in question. There's an observable boundary (f.ex. our skin) beyond which there are other entities (air, other people, objects, etc.). But upon examination towards smaller scales, there's always matter displaying all kinds of different patterns. Of course there's a limit to human observation, but that's true regarding every observable areas. The best we can do is to go by the assumption (Occam's Razor applies here) that if something displayed a certain nature on so many different scales, it won't suddenly display a different nature or go out of existence; that would be a so called "strong emergence", just like the emergence of a soul (i.e. a separate, well defined and new entity) from complex matter would be a strong emergence as well.
But the sum of certain aspects of this self-organized matter that displays all kinds of different patterns on infinite scales IS itself what we observe as "soul" or "consciousness". And that's why humans can't model soul or consciousness with AI. Because no matter how complex they make an AI, and no matter on how many different scales they build it, on some (actually infinite amount of, in at least one direction) scales it won't be similar to a human being, but instead it will carry the patterns of their original material (i.e. the material they are constructed of, like silicon, someone else's neurons or who knows what they try to make a thinking machine out of). Yet, there is nothing new in it, only matter, organized in a particular way.
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Re: Natural vs Supernatural

OmegaKV
It's a different question whether consciousness arises from a physical phenomenon vs whether consciousness is identical to the physical phenomenon. For example, a particle produces a number of fields and all its interactions can be described in terms of these fields, but this does not mean that the concept of a particle is identical to the fields. A particle is a concept in its own right. By the way I would consider the fact that a particle produces these fields to be a supernatural phenomenon.

And if you say that a particle is a mental construct for modelling the interactions of fields, this may be the case. And this may be the case for psychology too. But it is not the case for consciousness, because consciousness is just something you experience, it does not model anything.
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Re: Natural vs Supernatural

R.C. Christian
What more is there but the physical phenomenon? There's nothing I can observe that I could circumscribe as "hey, this IS consciousness" or "soul". All I have is the observable world through my senses.
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Re: Natural vs Supernatural

fschmidt
Administrator
In reply to this post by OmegaKV
I don't agree with these definitions.  For things that we can't understand, things like quarks and the origin of the universe, saying that we don't understand doesn't make these supernatural.  What is supernatural is things that are contrary to our understanding of observed experience.  So consciousness is not supernatural, but the soul is supernatural to the extent that it is independent of the body because it is contrary to observed experience for anything like the soul to exist independently of a body.  An afterlife is supernatural for similar reasons.

Many religions emphasize supernatural events as an expression of God's power.  The Old Testament is ambiguous.  For example the parting of the Red Sea may have been done using canal locks, but this would have appeared to be supernatural for slaves for whom this would have been contrary to their observed experience.  So in a sense, the Old Testament offers both interpretations - supernatural, or using the natural to appear supernatural to impress the ignorant.

Of course modern Atheists believe in the supernatural, like that people can magically change their sex.  But their supernatural beliefs are not attributed to God, but rather to their belief in their own God-like powers of reason.
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Re: Natural vs Supernatural

OmegaKV
In reply to this post by R.C. Christian
R.C. Christian wrote
What more is there but the physical phenomenon? There's nothing I can observe that I could circumscribe as "hey, this IS consciousness" or "soul". All I have is the observable world through my senses.
I would say the most obvious example is colors. Colors as we (or at least I) experience them have no basis in reality. The reality is that colors are just different wavelengths of light. But the experience of perceiving colors is something magical. This is the distinction.
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Re: Natural vs Supernatural

OmegaKV
In reply to this post by fschmidt
fschmidt wrote
I don't agree with these definitions.  For things that we can't understand, things like quarks and the origin of the universe, saying that we don't understand doesn't make these supernatural.  
Things like cutting edge physics are not supernatural because they are mostly just a matter of collecting more data and then we will understand them.

But this is different from things like the creation of something from nothing, and the problem of motion. These are things that a rational person should conclude are impossible, and yet we observe them.

I would consider the observer effect for the double slit experiment to be a supernatural phenomenon if it is true, but I have doubts that it is true.

fschmidt wrote
 it is contrary to observed experience for anything like the soul to exist independently of a body.  
I would say it is unobserved but "contrary to observed experience" is a stronger statement which I would disagree with. What has been observed that would suggest that the soul does not exist independently of the body?
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Re: Natural vs Supernatural

R.C. Christian
In reply to this post by OmegaKV
OmegaKV wrote
I would say the most obvious example is colors. Colors as we (or at least I) experience them have no basis in reality.
Seeing a color and recognizing it is no different from the recognition of a texture or light/shadow. In fact, empirically, upon examination on smaller scales, color IS a combination of texture and the light that illuminates that texture. Color is just one of the perceptual properties.

OmegaKV wrote
The reality is that colors are just different wavelengths of light.
That is a human made construct. The original reality is the perceived color itself; it is there immediately, even for a newborn, without having to learn about wavelengths.



OmegaKV wrote
But the experience of perceiving colors is something magical.
It isn't magical to me. I can see the world as something infinitely interesting, but magical it isn't.
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Re: Natural vs Supernatural

OmegaKV
I can't refute this because for all know you are being genuine and your experience is duller than mine. I do have solipsistic thoughts at times.
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Re: Natural vs Supernatural

R.C. Christian
In reply to this post by OmegaKV
OmegaKV wrote
What has been observed that would suggest that the soul does not exist independently of the body?
The body. What would be the role of the body if the soul could exist independently? Why does behavior change when the body changes, for example, someone suffers brain injury?
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Re: Natural vs Supernatural

OmegaKV
This post was updated on .
R.C. Christian wrote
OmegaKV wrote
What has been observed that would suggest that the soul does not exist independently of the body?
The body. What would be the role of the body if the soul could exist independently? Why does behavior change when the body changes, for example, someone suffers brain injury?
You could say for example that the brain damaged person's soul experiences things that do not get communicated to the brain due to the brain damage, so the body cannot express them.

Personality is a different concept than the soul. The soul at its most basic is just experience. It may or may not influence personality, and the personality may or not influence the soul. I tend to think they do influence each other but it is a separate discussion.
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Re: Natural vs Supernatural

R.C. Christian
OmegaKV wrote
Personality is a different concept than the soul. The soul at its most basic is just experience. It may or may not influence personality, and the personality may or not influence the soul. I tend to think they do influence each other but it is a separate discussion.
No true Scotsman. Going by the above, the soul is a mystical entity that is in connection with many known things but is separate from each one of them, so any discussion that attempts to argue its non-discreteness fails, because none of those known things contain any part of soul.


OmegaKV wrote
Personality is a different concept than the soul. The soul at its most basic is just experience.
We won't attempt to test how your experience changes by causing brain damage to you, but did you feel and think the same you do now when you were just 3 years old, was your perception and experience the same as it is now? When your body is sick or tired, do you feel and think the same as when you are fresh and healthy, does your experience remain the same in all cases?
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Re: Natural vs Supernatural

OmegaKV
R.C. Christian wrote
OmegaKV wrote
Personality is a different concept than the soul. The soul at its most basic is just experience. It may or may not influence personality, and the personality may or not influence the soul. I tend to think they do influence each other but it is a separate discussion.
No true Scotsman. Going by the above, the soul is a mystical entity that is in connection with many known things but is separate from each one of them, so any discussion that attempts to argue its non-discreteness fails, because none of those known things contain any part of soul.
If you read my original post I used the word "soul" in the most basic sense. Whether there is feedback from the soul to the brain is irrelevant to my original point.

R.C. Christian wrote
OmegaKV wrote
Personality is a different concept than the soul. The soul at its most basic is just experience.
We won't attempt to test how your experience changes by causing brain damage to you, but did you feel and think the same you do now when you were just 3 years old, was your perception and experience the same as it is now?
I can't be certain how I experienced things when I was 3 because I cannot relive when I was 3. To remember things is just to replay what is stored in your brain, and there might not be feedback from the soul to the brain, so memories might not be affected by the soul.

R.C. Christian wrote
When your body is sick or tired, do you feel and think the same as when you are fresh and healthy, does your experience remain the same in all cases?
No because the inputs the soul receives are first filtered through the brain. so if the brain is tired this will affect the soul's experience.
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Re: Natural vs Supernatural

R.C. Christian
Next!