Belief - repost

[andrewducker]

Question three was borked. Rewritten to actually cover all the bases, and not be internally contradictory. Apologies to the 7 people who already filled it in!

[Poll #1427776]

Comments

[andrewducker]

Absolutely.

Seems to be the standard definition of the word:
"of or relating to an order of existence beyond the visible observable universe ; especially : of or relating to God or a god, demigod, spirit, or devil"
"departing from what is usual or normal especially so as to appear to transcend the laws of nature"

[robhu.livejournal.com]

What I'm trying to get at is whether it's system specific. If I make an AI and run it in an AI world I control, am I supernatural from the AI's perspective?

What about the example of Neo? He's not the creator, but he found some buffer overflows in the implementation of his world. Is he supernatural?

So the term supernatural for you does not have all that much to do with the nature of stuff, but the degree of control over a system?

A problem with viewing it in that way is that it doesn't seem to say very much, or at least doesn't say what atheists tend to want it to say. If I create an AI that doesn't make me supernatural, it just means the AI is incapable (in practice or in theory) of reaching out to determine things about the stuffness of the higher level (or prior) domain in which I live. It becomes more of a statement about cause and the inability to determine things.

Similarly "of or relating to an order of existence beyond the visible observable universe" is a pretty crappy definition. I would assume that you, like me, consider there to be things which exist beyond the visible universe, but if you wrote a astronomical paper about such things you'd be laughed out of town for using the term 'supernatural'.

The second definition isn't very useful either. Lots of things have departed from what is usual or normal so as to appear to transcend the laws of nature, but then the laws have been expanded as we've understood them. So the issue has been limitation of knowledge again, not that the things are actually 'supernatural' whatever that means.

It seems like to me that some things will forever remain outside of the ability of humans to determine (and may be theoretically outside of our ability to determine, if they're outside of our light cone for instance), but it would be silly to say that makes them 'supernatural'.

[andrewducker]

at least doesn't say what atheists tend to want it to say.

It doesn't?

It seems to capture what most people think of as supernatural events - i.e. spooky ones which act in ways we would not normally consider possible.

To go back to a previous comment of mine - we live within a system of "natural laws" - if God, or other supernatural beings exist then they do not obey those laws - they are above/beyond them. To an AI, the creatures which created its "artificial" universe are as Gods. To me, a being which can tweak the laws of physics to its whim, or ignore them entirely, is a god.