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One important issue here is that if something "supernatural" is capable of affecting the world and causing "natural" consequences then it is definitely possible to study this "supernatural" entity through its actions and, therefore, reducing it to something "natural" in our approach of trying to understand it.

Does not logically follow.
We can sometimes see the effect, but the cause of the effect we, being natural entities, can not control.

We can't control it but we know it will act in a consistent manner that we can predict - allowing us to set up controlled experiments.

Supernatural forces do not act on the natural world in a consistent manner that we can predict.

Last edited by resedit (2008-01-22 12:12 am)

resedit wrote:

We can't control it but we know it will act in a consistent manner that we can predict - allowing us to set up controlled experiments.

Supernatural forces do not act on the natural world in a consistent manner that we can predict.

So you are now saying that the difference between the natural and the supernatural has to do with the fact that the first is law abiding and the second is not. This is something that I had considered in the first post of this thread and dismissed:

I am sure they do not mean that something natural is something that is "law abiding" because there is no reason to believe that the ultimate reality of the things we consider most "natural" are law abiding anyway.

Last edited by soulcrusher (2008-01-22 12:20 am)

StaticAge wrote:

As lame as it might sound, if you imagine a type of virtual world, where artificially constructed computer minds inhabit a computer simulation, the persons living within that reality may have an inkling of our physical world, may even detect a human programmers intervention if one should ever take place, but what sort of testing available to them in that virtual existence would be able to prove the existence of our physical world?

They may try doing something that would lead to a necessary intervention from the programmers i.e. hypothesize what of their actions will cause the programmer to intervene?

They could play the science game with the programmer and learn about him and his world.

Once you allow causal connections between domains (e.g. from the supernatural to the natural) then you allow information to flow from one domain to the other and thus it is possible for the virtual people to learn about the outside using the same methods they would use to learn about their virtual world.

In this case there is no difference between acquiring knowledge of the virtual world and acquiring knowledge of the real world.

mo' ron wrote:

What do you mean by things can be not law abiding?

Randomness is a law.

When I say "law abiding" I mean that there is some underlying order to the events, i.e. that there is some pattern from which a general law might be concluded that explains/summarizes/predicts a particular set of events.

In the case of an entirely chaotic universe then there are no laws in this sense.

Last edited by soulcrusher (2008-01-22 12:34 am)

soulcrusher wrote:

mo' ron wrote:

soulcrusher wrote:

They may try doing something that would lead to a necessary intervention from the programmers i.e. hypothesize what of their actions will cause the programmer to intervene?

They could play the science game with the programmer and learn about him and his world.

They could also look for mathematical errors or limits inherent in computer processing.

I'm surprised no scientists have attempted to look for aliasing errors in our universe yet

Well, I do not know how far they have looked into this but I am sure many have already thought about the possibility of the Universe being a computer.

I recently read a book on that topic.

soulcrusher wrote:

In the case of an entirely chaotic universe then there are no laws in this sense.

Chaotic systems aren't lawless, they are just so complex, the outputs can't accurately be predicted by the inputs.

But they do follow laws on the scales that are simple enough to measure.

There are very few things that I could imagine would truly be lawless in the universe, and these would be passive properties anyway.

soulcrusher wrote:

resedit wrote:

We can't control it but we know it will act in a consistent manner that we can predict - allowing us to set up controlled experiments.

Supernatural forces do not act on the natural world in a consistent manner that we can predict.

So you are now saying that the difference between the natural and the supernatural has to do with the fact that the first is law abiding and the second is not.

No. The natural world follows the laws of nature, many of which are probably un-discovered or mis-understood.

How the supernatural works, whether it also is law abiding or not, I can't say - there may be several sets that are super natural to the natural that have different constraints themselves, but supernatural is super to natural and therefore is not bound by the laws of nature, discovered or not. They may be bound by laws in their own set, however - laws that science does not and can not examine and discover.

Last edited by resedit (2008-01-22 1:01 am)

Tallgeese wrote:

soulcrusher wrote:

the possibility of the Universe being a computer.

I recently read a book on that topic.

That's a different kind of computer than I was thinking of. I would say it's a given that the universe is that kind of computer that they describe.

mo' ron wrote:

soulcrusher wrote:

What I am trying to get at is that anything that is causally connected to us is vulnerable to be studied scientifically and consequently everything, except that which is causally disconnected from us, is natural.

In this context, if there is divine intervention in our physical universe (e.g. miracles) then the existence of god becomes a testable scientific hypothesis and he is, therefore, a theoretical entity, no different than an electron. Of course, one would expect the behavior of god to be much more complicated and elaborate to that of an electron, but he would still be an object that we can study. Even god would then be natural.

This is not necessarily true. If you presume god to be like a drunken retard (in that he has god powers, but doesn't care about our existence and won't respond to our actions), it's feasible for him to be able to occasionally, seemingly at random, tweak the laws of physics (ie the properties of the universe) on a localized scale to create supernatural events.

Agreed. But at least in principle - never mind our spatial, temporal and computational limitations as mere mortals - if we had registered every single event in history we could factor out this randomness influence, and conclude that the Universe is almost law abiding except for this "random noise", which, even though you might want to call god, would have been reduced in this scenario to simply another fact of nature.

Just because we cannot reduce it to a law does not mean it's supernatural.

As you know, the state of matter on the quantum level is probabilistic. It wouldn't take too many gambles going in a particular way to create a miraculous situations. Even if a scientist were measuring the matter of the miracle the entire time, it would just look like the particles took on a slightly unusual, but allowed for, state.

The probably of "miracles" arising from the probabilistic nature of reality given our current scientific knowledge is effectively zero.

By this I mean that if I see a man (flesh and bone) resurrecting I will not claim that it was due to quantum probabilities as we understand them today.

Last edited by soulcrusher (2008-01-22 1:16 am)

resedit wrote:

soulcrusher wrote:

resedit wrote:

We can't control it but we know it will act in a consistent manner that we can predict - allowing us to set up controlled experiments.

Supernatural forces do not act on the natural world in a consistent manner that we can predict.

So you are now saying that the difference between the natural and the supernatural has to do with the fact that the first is law abiding and the second is not.

No. The natural world follows the laws of nature, many of which are probably un-discovered or mis-understood.

How the supernatural works, whether it also is law abiding or not, I can't say - there may be several sets that are super natural to the natural that have different constraints themselves, but supernatural is super to natural and therefore is not bound by the laws of nature, discovered or not. They may be bound by laws in their own set, however - laws that science does not and can not examine and discover.

So you are saying that:

1. the natural is a subset of the supernatural.
2. the supernatural is that which cannot be explained by science.

Which is okay with me as long as the supernatural is causally disconnected from the natural - which would lead to some form of deism/pantheism which is afaik the only defensible "religious" position.

But I am sure that you also believe that there might be causal connections between the natural and the supernatural.

And then I ask, how can there be a causal connection between the two domains and yet still have the supernatural being inaccessible to science?

This is precisely what I have been trying to argue against.

And then I ask, how can there be a causal connection between the two domains and yet still have the supernatural being inaccessible to science?

Because science is about repeatable experimentation.
If you come up with something - you document it by experiments that others can repeat. That requires a controlled experiment, and you can not subject the supernatural to such control.

soulcrusher wrote:

StaticAge wrote:

As lame as it might sound, if you imagine a type of virtual world, where artificially constructed computer minds inhabit a computer simulation, the persons living within that reality may have an inkling of our physical world, may even detect a human programmers intervention if one should ever take place, but what sort of testing available to them in that virtual existence would be able to prove the existence of our physical world?

They may try doing something that would lead to a necessary intervention from the programmers i.e. hypothesize what of their actions will cause the programmer to intervene?

They could play the science game with the programmer and learn about him and his world.

Once you allow causal connections between domains (e.g. from the supernatural to the natural) then you allow information to flow from one domain to the other and thus it is possible for the virtual people to learn about the outside using the same methods they would use to learn about their virtual world.

In this case there is no difference between acquiring knowledge of the virtual world and acquiring knowledge of the real world.

Thats a whole lot of presumptions made about who the programmers are and what they care about. I dont see what any virtual person could do that would force one to intervene. It would be a guessing game as to what makes them tick, and how many failed experiments do you suppose it would take before they gave up the game?

There was a commercial that was on tv a year or so ago where a guy is in his garage testing a switch on the wall, and cant figure out what it does, so he gets his wife to watch while he flips it on and off several times before giving up, and the punchline was next door his older neighbor was sitting in her car and her garage door was going up and smashing back down on her car as he was flipping the switch. If the effects of ones actions are not observed, the causal connection may never be found, even if it does exist.