4 ms·
Because if your Bayesian prior on being "tracked by supernatural entities that caused [your] car and appliances to malfunction" is distinguishable from zero the
by lisper 4y ago
Because if your Bayesian prior on being "tracked by supernatural entities that caused [your] car and appliances to malfunction" is distinguishable from zero then your mental faculties are open to question unless you can produce evidence for it. And there is no reproducible evidence for any supernatural phenomenon, let alone one as dramatic as this.
- zarmin 4y ago> then your mental faculties are open to question unless you can produce evidence for it Why?
- lisper 4y agoBecause if you believe extraordinary things without evidence then your thinking is not constrained by objective reality. That is the definition of being delusional.
- stevenhuang 4y agoThere is countless experiential evidence. https://www.narcap.de/dokumente/COMETA-Report-englisch.pdf https://www.narcap.de/dokumente/COMETA-Report-englisch.pdf https://www.narcap.org/blog/narcaptr20 https://www.narcap.org/blog/narcaptr20
- lisper 4y agoUFOs are not supernatural. Of course there are UFOs. The only question is whether any of them are extraterrestrial (which would be extraordinary, but still not supernatural). (And BTW, the readiness with which UFO advocates conflate "UFO", "extraterrestrial" and "supernatural", all of which are completely distinct from one another, is indicative of the generally sloppy thinking that goes on in that community.)
- danbruc 4y agoEven more, supernatural stuff does not exist. Period. There might be natural stuff which we did not yet discover or which we do not understand properly, but there is no supernatural stuff.
- lisper 4y agoTo be fair, there could be supernatural stuff, i.e. stuff whose behavior is not constrained by any discernible natural law. There just isn't any evidence that such stuff actually exists in our universe. All of the "evidence" for supernatural phenomena can be more readily explained by people making mistakes, sensory illusions, cognitive biases, or just flat-out making shit up.
- fantasticshower 4y agoWhat would it even mean to have evidence of something supernatural? Wouldn't having evidence (an observation?) make it no longer supernatural (above the natural)?
- lisper 4y agoI guess that depends on your definition of the word "natural". But one of the notable characteristics of nature as it actually exists in our universe is that its behavior is governed by discernible laws with very low Kolmogorov complexity. This is what makes science possible. But the universe doesn't have to be that way. Harry-Potter-stye magic could exist in principle, and that would be different enough from nature-as-we-know-it to deserve a different label despite the fact that magic would, in such a world, be "natural".
- stevenhuang 4y agoI suggest checking out Dean Radin's Real Magic. I'm in the middle of it now, and it seems persuasive in the affirmative. It tries to use the scientific method to objectively determine if "real" magic (supernatural, psi, etc) exists.
- lisper 4y agoI'll give long odds against.