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steven0461 comments on The "supernatural" category - Less Wrong
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While that's a pretty good definition, I don't think it quite captures the nuances of how the word is used.
With respect to the "ontologically basic" part, that's a fairly abstruse concept for most people, and the intuition I have is people generally decide whether to call proposed entities "supernatural" without thinking very hard about whether such concepts apply. If someone claims to talk to spirits, they may not have any strong opinion on whether the spirits are made of nonmental spirit foam, but saying they're therefore uncertain about whether the spirits are supernatural sounds off to me. Conversely, I can think of positions in the philosophy of mind that it would sound off to call supernatural regardless of whether they appeal to fundamentally mental things. I think it's at least partly just a matter of genre: things can be prototypically supernatural or marginally supernatural like they can be prototypically science fiction or marginally science fiction.
With regard to "mental", it seems to me that word is standing in for a whole class of things that aren't simple and mechanical. An ontologically basic architectural or legal entity sounds like it should qualify as supernatural, as does an ontologically basic dead rat.
Agreed on 'mental' not being a necessary condition. A magical pixie dust used in some new age prosperity ritual would be a purportedly supernatural phenomenon, but there would be nothing mental about that.
The supernatural is that which is believed by its believers to be neither reducible to, nor explainable in terms of, the natural.
Generally, when a person talks about "spirits" they imply the existence of consciousness divorced from a brain (or something similar). This seems to assume "consciousness" as an ontologically basic thing.
Do you disagree, then, that "they may not have any strong opinion on whether the spirits are made of nonmental spirit foam"?
They may not describe themselves as having a strong opinion about that, or even thinking of it in those terms, but I don't see how they could come to the conclusion that spirits exist without the underlying assumption that consciousness is ontologically basic.
1) In "Excluding the Supernatural", Eliezer says:
I think this version of the definition includes more of what we think of as "supernatural" without including anything that we wouldn't. Under this definition, an ontologically basic dead rat would be supernatural, as I think it should be. Of course, this is assuming I have anything like a correct picture of what you mean. I can't really envision an ontologically basic dead rat, but neither can I see what good it would do me to do so.
2) The phrase "ontologically basic dead rat" is surprisingly funny.