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TheOtherDave comments on The "supernatural" category - Less Wrong Discussion
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I guess so?
I mean, I'm really not sure what it means for something to be theism except without any gods, but I suppose that describes my hypothetical friend's cosmology.
Then again, I suppose it describes my cosmology as well.
I mean, I believe the universe is arranged in such a way that (for example) particles attract one another with a force that is proportional to their mass and inversely proportional to the square of their distance, but I suppose I would agree (albeit queasily) that the Law of Gravitation behaves as if there were a god with the desire to cause things to attract one another in this way.
I guess.
I suspect I've altogether missed your point.
Ah, I could have been more clear. My point is that "ontologically basic mental things" is shorthand for a more nuanced definition of supernatural which does include your Law of Karma, even though the Law of Karma doesn't talk about disembodied minds.
By this definition, "the Universe computes whether an event is just" is a supernatural hypothesis, but "the Universe computes the inverse square of distance" is not.
I agree that the ability to insert a god into a hypothesis doesn't have much to do with whether the hypothesis was supernatural to begin with.
OK, fair enough.
While I have some understanding of what "ontologically basic mental things" might be (and I am not convinced that "supernatural" is routinely used to mean that), I do not have the vaguest beginnings of a clue what the nuanced definition you are asserting it actually serves as a shorthand for might be, so it's conceivable that I would agree that "supernatural" means it, if I ever did find out what it was.
(I've made a couple of attempts to read the post you link to, but I keep wandering off before I get to the end. IMHO it takes way too long to get to any point worth making.)