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Manfred comments on The "supernatural" category - Less Wrong Discussion

8 Post author: rstarkov 24 March 2011 08:52PM

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Comment author: Manfred 25 March 2011 12:08:35AM 7 points [-]

It's also often used to mean "not material," or "not obeying the same laws as most stuff we see." So the stuff we see around us is the "natural," and things that don't follow natural law are "supernatural."

I suspect most supernatural beliefs are non-reductable just because they're made up by people and people don't generally think in terms of reductionism. I prefer "magic" form for complicated human-interacting ontologically basic things.

Comment author: rstarkov 25 March 2011 12:39:43AM 1 point [-]

Sounds like a reasonable way of putting it. So a weapon shooting invisible (to the human eye) bullets would be classified as "supernatural" by someone from the stone age, because to them, killing someone requires direct contact with a visible weapon or projectile, that has appreciable travel time. Right?

Although "hard science" would have to be excluded from this, even though it contains lots of stuff that doesn't obey the same laws as most stuff we see.

Comment author: Dreaded_Anomaly 25 March 2011 01:35:27AM 0 points [-]

It's also often used to mean "not material," or "not obeying the same laws as most stuff we see." So the stuff we see around us is the "natural," and things that don't follow natural law are "supernatural."

I think this is the key. Supernatural phenomena can't be defined to obey natural laws; if they did, they would be blatantly impossible. (For a really detailed example of this, see Sean Carroll's blog post Telekinesis and Quantum Field Theory.)