Super natural belief or disbelief..what do you think?

[Velvet-Tongue]

Just curious how much or how little the people here blieve in this kind of thing? I guess a 10 point scale would make this easiest..but please include some more info if you have a comment.

10 = Absolutely believe in this.
1 = Absolutely do -not- believe in this.

Ghosts/Spirits - 3/10: I'm open to the idea of ghosts and other spooky creatures. The evidence however has always been wonky, skewed or straight up falsified but there have a been a few incidents that make me wonder. My experience with "ball lightning" still kinda sits in my brain and makes me wonder.

Psychic Intuition/Powers - 10/10 - I do believe that some people have abilities beyond the norm and are capable of gaining information from a non physical source. At Dragon*Con (lol) they had several scientists on the panels including one group with state funding that looks into this. Through lots of testing, double-blind studies and other things the scientists themselves were convinced that some form of psychic intuition is possible but difficult to replicate under scientific tests. Plus numerous documented sources of Psychic leading police to bodies, People finding water with dowsing rods, predicting accurately earthquakes and other natural disasters has made me pretty certain that some people are the real deal.

Magic: 2/10 Magic as most people see it..I don't believe in. The human brain is pretty amazing as it is and just by convincing yourself of something you can do a lot of pretty amazing stuff. (One women had a quarter placed on her arm. The researcher told her it was hot, red hot, burning..over and over until she believed it and she actually got a heat bubble on her arm), (A guy believed he could nurse his child so he told himself every day that he wanted to lactate and nurse his child..within a few months one of his man boobs had grown and had begun to lactate..creepy), (Some buddhist monks can sit in caves on top of snow covered mountains all day and night with just their thin orange robes and not die..they've learned to stimulate their bodies to raise their core temperatures using meditation..thats just cool.)

So yeah..I don't believe in Magic persay..but I do believe the ideas behind magic/ritual etc cause a powerful placebo response in true believers which allows them to do amazing/beyond the norm things. Same thing with tarot cards..do they predict the future? I don't know for sure..what their real value is for me is that they cause you to critically think and perceive the world alot differently then you're used to which is helpful.

/done

[Raza]

There's no supernatural, only un-understood natural phenomena. Everything is theoretically mechanical, reducible, knowable. Everything may not be observable, though, so on some levels we'll be reduced to guessing and seeing what doesn't get falsified over time.

Problem with most supernatural speculation is that it's too much fun. People don't look for something to explain, they think of explanations they like and look for things to explain by them. Generally this results in overly complex and/or technically inadequate explanations for things that were either already decently understood, or things that cannot/have not been observed by anyone not partial to the theory supposedly explaining them.

[RubyViolence]

Definitely a 10. I am definitely a believer.

[inox]

Problem with most supernatural speculation is that it's too much fun. People don't look for something to explain, they think of explanations they like and look for things to explain by them.

Indeed. Way too many people desperately want a framework. Rather than maintain a heavy dose of skepticism, they become vested in a given outcome so that things fit with what else they've imagined/hoped to be true.

Most people aren't comfortable with not having all of the answers. Certainty, even artificial, can relieve the pressure of worry of all kinds.

[TheDeathKnight]

I'm with Raza on this one.

All you have to do is look at history.

Back in caveman days, they thought lightning was "magic", or the gods lashing out, or any number of supernatural things. Now we know it's electricity. We know how it is created, how it works, and can even harness it for our own uses.

So sure, there are things we still don't understand about the world, life, humans, etc.

But that doesn't mean it's "supernatural".

Just not understood yet.

Maybe we will eventually come up with some kind of device that lets us see "ghosts", and find out they are a species of creature that exists on a wavelength that we can't normally see. Just like we could not see things like viruses and bacteria, until the invention of the microscope.

[SiodaSchneider]

Ghosts/Spirits 10: I myself have seen what i believe are spirits or ghosts, most of the time they are just hanging out or something and quite nice. other times i get the feeling the would like nothing more than to tear me to shreds. i normally run from the latter
Psychic Intuition/Powers 10: again i have experienced instances where i knew something was going to happen and it did, now this MAY have just been me subconsciously figuring out the most logical outcome, but it happens far more often than not. also there are times when someone knows something they shouldnt.
Magic 9: i do believe certain people have abilities that cannot at this time be explained by science. but to me this is more an ability of wills, not some mystical ritualistic routine with insense and such. however that is just me

again, these are my views on the subject, if you share them, thats nice, if not, oh well, your free not to do so. thats the wonder of being human, you get free will

[Mr Karl]

it really doesn't matter if they're real or not

[Morning Glory]

I believe in all of these things, but like you guys have said, as the results of normal, or natural phenomenon that is not yet fully understood or perceived.

Your viewpoint on magic Velvet Tongue is right on.

One of the greatest and most fundamental discoveries of science was dimensional space. Universe and multi-universes occur simultaneous, but as Bucky Fuller noted, it is "non simultaneously apprehended." We can't talk about The Universe because we are not omniscient. Instead we have to say that we are dealing with a tangent space, this dimension, or this area, this coordinate, this system, etc.; a fractional representation.

Same thing goes with time. Einstein tied space and time as two connected parts and we can only ever observe time indirectly as the relationship between two objects. Universal Time is equal to Universal Space.

I think that all these phenomena are part of Universal Consciousness. We can only comprehend the conscious exchange between two objects and so we put a box around "my" thoughts just the same as "this" space and "this" moment in time. Jung was onto this in his theory of Collective Unconscious and more biologists are agreeing that "thought and mind" are not merely products of the brain but are active on a cellular level throughout the organism.

I think that organism is evolving to reach these "higher" levels of feeling, perception and thought. It really isn't that far fetched, the data supports that has always been happening, from amoeba to man. No reason why it should stop now.

[Raza]

I thought that 'dimensional space' meant that any point in existence could be uniquely described by attributing it a value for each of a number (typically three spatial, plus time) of dimensions.

Now granted, if there were cartoon-style alternate universes where events occurred simultaneously with us and at our location, yet unpercievably to us due to some kind of 'channel' property having a different value, that distinguishing property could reasonably be called a dimension. I wasn't aware that we'd actually discovered one or more of these though, and in fact discovering a dimension that isn't moved into or out of by anything reaching our perception seems downright unlikely to me.

[Morning Glory]

What?

The first dimension is horizontal or following the X axis on a grid system. The second dimension is vertical or following the Y axis. The third dimension is "outwards" along the Z axis. The fourth dimension is parallel to the other dimensions and is sometimes called the W axis. So on with each successive parallel dimension.

When I say that we "discovered" dimensional space I mean the realization that these properties were attributes of space. Before that people understood them as the movement of objects, in fact they thought that the movement of objects was all that there was in existence and the space between them was nothing. They also thought that the universe was a cube called Earth that had flashing lights glued to the ceiling.

[TheDeathKnight]

One other interesting aspect to consider, is the fact that human beings have a specific set of tools with which we observe and evaluate the world around us. Our eyes only see so much of the spectrum. Our brain can only compute so much. It would be like asking a dog or a cat to understand the universe around them. They might see the cars, the house, the trees, the people, but not really truly understand their nature. So who's to say that we also don't see or truly understand our environment? At least we are smart enough to use tools and science to expand our knowledge. But we still have limitations.

[Mr Karl]

isn't the first dimension simply a dot?......................hmmm, not really but it should be a dimension before the line

[Morning Glory]

isn't the first dimension simply a dot?......................hmmm, not really but it should be a dimension before the line

well it sorta is. A line is just a bunch of dots. The whole plane is just dots. It's taken for granted that there are X amount of dots. When you say point A it's understood, but left unsaid that there is a point B, C, D... not to mention points A1, A2, A3.... That's what I'm talking about.

[Mr Karl]

yeah I know, I was just pondering the individual dot, and how it could have it's own dimension seperate from more than one dot.................I dunno,I'm pathetic with math, but I'm still not sure if I can say with certainty that 1+1=2 in absolutely any given situation. once I'm sure of that then maybe I'll be ready to tackle the supernatural

[Velvet-Tongue]

/stolen from the internets

Length, Width, and Height, are the only that have given names. Each successive dimension is called the fourth dimension, the fifth dimension, and so on.

The corresponding mensural shapes, however, do have names:
0D = point
1D = line segment
2D = square
3D = cube
4D = tesseract (or hypercube)
5D = penteract
6D = hexeract
7D = hepteract
8D = octeract
9D = enneract
10D = dekeract

The basic idea behind a hypercube is this: Two points can make a line if you have a dimension. Four lines can be folded into a square by adding a second dimesion. Six squares can be folded into a cube by adding a third dimension. Eight cubes could be folded into a hypecube if we could access the fourth dimension. And so on.

[Buster Friendly]

Indeed. Way too many people desperately want a framework. Rather than maintain a heavy dose of skepticism, they become vested in a given outcome so that things fit with what else they've imagined/hoped to be true.

Most people aren't comfortable with not having all of the answers. Certainty, even artificial, can relieve the pressure of worry of all kinds.

I think this applies to some "hardcore" skeptics sometimes as well, denying that some things actually "are" because it doesn't fit the world as they understand it, or the given explanation is faulty.

Mesmer was an example of this- His theory of "Animal Magnetism" was disproven by a panel of leading "scientists" (natural philosophers) of the day- I think Ben Franklin might have been on the panel during the period where he was the ambassador to France, but I'm not sure- Anyway, the panel evaluated Mesmer's theory, and decided that his explanation of his results couldn't possibly work the way he said it did, but they didn't actually refute that he got the results he did. Because of this he was branded a fraud. (Which he was to some degree, he claimed to know how his results were being obtained when he clearly had no idea.)

Natural philosophers of the 1700's were in agreement that meteorites didn't exist for a while, because "obviously stones cannot fall from the skies, that's just superstious."

I do not believe in "the supernatural", only in phenomena we do not have a clear understanding of yet. (kinda what Raza said.)

[Ajax Knucklebones]

I think this applies to some "hardcore" skeptics sometimes as well, denying that some things actually "are" because it doesn't fit the world as they understand it, or the given explanation is faulty.

Mesmer was an example of this- His theory of "Animal Magnetism" was disproven by a panel of leading "scientists" (natural philosophers) of the day- I think Ben Franklin might have been on the panel during the period where he was the ambassador to France, but I'm not sure- Anyway, the panel evaluated Mesmer's theory, and decided that his explanation of his results couldn't possibly work the way he said it did, but they didn't actually refute that he got the results he did. Because of this he was branded a fraud. (Which he was to some degree, he claimed to know how his results were being obtained when he clearly had no idea.)

Natural philosophers of the 1700's were in agreement that meteorites didn't exist for a while, because "obviously stones cannot fall from the skies, that's just superstious."

I do not believe in "the supernatural", only in phenomena we do not have a clear understanding of yet. (kinda what Raza said.)

I think, for the most part, we really don't have an understanding of shit. Just a bunch of theories proved on the base of bias findings.

[Morning Glory]

Everything is fake.

[toxicat]

Just because one doesn't believe in something doesn't mean it does not exist. Energy healing is a good example of this - it does its job regardless of any belief on the part of the recipient. The appreciation comes later, and so does the belief, usually.

[Mr Karl]

/stolen from the internets



The basic idea behind a hypercube is this: Two points can make a line if you have a dimension. Four lines can be folded into a square by adding a second dimesion. Six squares can be folded into a cube by adding a third dimension. Eight cubes could be folded into a hypecube if we could access the fourth dimension. And so on.

very interesting................but, like the supernatural, pretty useless