Maggie's Farm

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Friday, September 12. 2008

What is "supernatural"?

Overcoming Bias, in a discussion of science and the supernatural, quotes Richard Carrier's definition:

A "supernatural" explanation appeals to ontologically basic mental things, mental entities that cannot be reduced to nonmental entities.

Doesn't most of our lives consist of ontologically basic mental things: wishes, fantasies, thoughts, dreams, emotions, ideas?

Posted by The Barrister in Religion, The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation at 12:33 | Comments (8) | Trackbacks (0)

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I have no idea what you mean by this. Are you talking about qualia? Our lives consist of mental entities, but not irreducible mental entities. We have brains, the brains are made of neurons.
#1 Eliezer Yudkowsky on 2008-09-12 12:57 (Reply)
No soul for you, Eliezer? Methinks otherwise.
#1.1 BD on 2008-09-12 13:14 (Reply)
Stanley Cavell The Claim of Reason, that soul is the grammatical reflex of body,

It may be that the sense of falsification comes from the way I understand the phrase ``have a body.'' It is really a mythological way of saying that I am flesh. But I am not satisfied with this myth, for it implies that I also have something other than a body, call it a soul. Now I have three things to put together: a body, a soul, and me. (So there are four things to be placed: I plus those three.) But I no more have a soul than I have a body. That is what I say here and now. People who say they have a soul sometimes militantly take its possession as a point of pride, for instance William Ernest Henley and G.B.Shaw. Take the phrase ``have a soul'' as a mythological way of saying that I am spirit. If the body individuates flesh and spirit, singles me out, what does the soul do? It binds me to others.

www.amazon.com/gp/reader/019513107X/ref=sib_dp_pop_fc?ie=UTF8&p=S001#
search inside for Shaw.
#1.1.1 Ron Hardin (Link) on 2008-09-12 13:23 (Reply)
Matter has no inwards. - Coleridge (after Schelling)

Whose Biographia Literaria, chs V-IX, more or less disposes of cognitive science.
#2 Ron Hardin (Link) on 2008-09-12 13:02 (Reply)
We are hyperdimensional beings of some sort, and we cast a shadow into materiality, and that shadow is our bodies.

Terrence McKenna

Giants mired in time.

Proust
--
Where there's matter there's mind, and spirit above that. From above, downwards.
---
The stages of life are set, a man passes through.

Mangled, from Blake
#3 Bob on 2008-09-12 20:30 (Reply)
"Naturalists understand but a few things. Those that they don't are, by definition supernatural - i.e., they don't exist. Makes for a tidier mind - or at least easier to pass tests" -- Me.
#4 Roy Lofquist on 2008-09-12 22:18 (Reply)
"Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural." -G.K. Chesterton
#5 Pajak on 2008-09-12 23:26 (Reply)
You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.
C. S. Lewis
#6 sean on 2008-09-13 07:38 (Reply)

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