site banner
PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   4053 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 14, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Do you believe in any ‘supernatural’ stuff like ghosts or psionic powers?

What are the most convincing things you’ve seen/read one way or another?

No and no. I've found any and all supposed evidence of it to be a shaggy-dog dicktease. I enjoy these things as fiction and find purported IRL instances to be very ineptly written by stupid people who know less than me about physics, biology, history, psychology, and Magic, The Gathering. Same attitude I have towards UFO people and Astrology people.

No? I have a degree in Zoology and won a competitive EDH tourney running Toshiro Umezawa, and I've extensively read trash genre fiction.

Yes, but only from my own personal exposure. No writings on it would have been convincing to me.

Me and groups of up to 6 people all experiencing the same things, both together and separately, convinced me.

I am content for such things to remain not well understood, however.

Me and groups of up to 6 people all experiencing the same things, both together and separately, convinced me.

Care to share your experience?

I have a strange fascination with the supernatural having always been attracted to the Occult, the Mystic, the Otherworldly, the Numinous while not believing any of the claims.

The supernatural has been instead a great inspiration in the pursue of my more "rational" passions. I remember being in second grade, having finished Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and wanting to study Potions. That brought me to the discovery that there was a thing called Chemistry which seemed suspiciously similar to Potions. What other "mystical" arts existed in the world? Ironically then, my passion for Magic fomented my passion for Science: if Potions are Chemistry than Transfiguration is Material Science? If Astrology is Astrophysics then Numerology is Math? The study of spells? Language learning. The study of the obscure forces of the Universe? Physics.

Ages ago while reading lesswrong I tried to get rid of these fascinations and in my opinion it made my life more miser: the "irrational" part was actually an important part of how I process the world, and seeing myself as a Mage was actually more in line with my natural proclivities (and more fun).

Even now, while still not being a believer, I cannot shake that there is something out there: in fact, the more I study the astrophysics of the early Universe the more fucked up it all seems; but that's probably the strange architecture of my brain. It is a sort of fascination similar to wanting to peek down while standing near a precipice, or even wanting to jump, wanting to scratch the surface and discover all this secret dangerous "knowledge".

Not really, no.

In terms of most convincing, the first time I had sleep paralysis it was preceded by an erotic dream. I was having the dream and then "woke up" to the feeling of something sitting on my chest and having the image of a black demonic creature with red burning eyes (similar to this painting, which I believe I had already seen at that time). I mumbled my way through the Lord's Prayer until I woke up fully.

After waking up, I fully understood how someone could genuinely believe they had been visited by succubi / incubi. For me, it was sorted by continuing to have instances of sleep paralysis (usually not preceded by erotic dreams and with a whole menagerie of creatures of different forms tormenting me) that did not conform to that pattern until I improved my sleeping habits, at which point the sleep paralysis became much rarer.

Were you able to close your eyes during sleep paralysis?

I honestly can't remember with certainty- I can say for sure that sometimes my eyes were open and sometimes they were closed and there were cases on both fronts where I did not "see" whatever happened to be plaguing me, but "knew" with clarity what it was and where it was. But I do not recall specifically closing or opening my eyes during an episode.

No.

Though weirdly, I do think I had an encounter with a púca in its goat-form on a hillside.

So, 🤷‍♀️

I feel like there's a story there that's not being told.

No.

The closest I've come to the supernatural was a single unexplainable experience that I had with another atheist-skeptic at 3am that we both vividly remember. Incredibly fast and close lights with no attached sound passing by us on a lonely highway.

Beyond that, there's been nothing even remotely convincing beyond science being unable to figure out the source of everything. Perhaps a bit unlike nara, I'm comfortable with giving the mathematicians/physicists/astronomers one freebie. I think it's very possible there is no source of everything, it just is.

I've had unnerving instances of intuition, déjà vu, etc. but it happens rarely enough that it seems like a combination of random chance and my sensory data hopping into a "memory" space of my brain.

I have seen claims that deja vu is actually a seizure in the temporal lobe.

Before anyone gets alarmed, that doesn't mean it's a big deal, just a minor hiccup in an otherwise highly specialized and efficient machine. It's a nigh universal experience, and unless it's regular and recurrent, not something to worry about by itself.

https://www.epilepsyadvocate.com/blog/epilepsy-and-deja-vu

What about jamais vu?

The same article claims both count.

As I stress again, just because it is "technically" a seizure is no big deal, it is super common/almost always benign. Just another glitch in the system really.

But some people have chronic jamais vu for a long time. So it can't just be caused by seizures. Unless people can have constant seizures.

The definition of a seizure is simply uncontrolled/abnormal erratic firing of a group of neurons. That can range from anything from weird sensations, muscle jerks or stiffness, and largely inconsequential things like deja vu and jamais vu.

Just because it's a "seizure" doesn't mean it has to align with the popular conception of someone passing out or thrashing about on the floor! Even more broadly recognized forms of seizures can be of little longterm consequence, such as absence seizures in children, which manifest as them zoning out or staring, or just automatically doing things like walking while having no later recollection of events.

DV/JV can be a sign of temporal lobe epilepsy, but is posited to be occur as a very minor/inconsequential form of "seizure" by itself.

For example:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23315620/

Conclusions: Déjà vu is common and qualitatively similar whether it occurs as an epileptic aura or normal phenomenon. However ictal déjà vu occurs more frequently and is accompanied by several distinctive features. It is distinguished primarily by 'the company it keeps'.

There is also active debate on the topic, such as:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3420423/#sec7title

Same here with late-night encounter. Years back, I was walking along a country road at night with my mother - it had no lighting - and as we passed one particular place where there was a fence/gate in the wall, I had a feeling there was something behind it, something that it would be better not to encounter.

Very odd, I said nothing, and when we walked back on the return trip I waited to see if I would feel the same when passing that spot. No, but my mother later asked me "Did you think there was someone or something behind that gate?" because she had felt the same.

What was it? No idea, except maybe ancestral instincts kicking in about being out at night when predators might be lying in wait. I've never had an experience like it before or since, and I never had any feeling about that particular place prior. There weren't any ghost stories or other folk tales associated with it, so I wasn't primed to feel 'haunted'.

Do you believe in any ‘supernatural’ stuff like ghosts or psionic powers?

Not as such, no.

What are the most convincing things you’ve seen/read one way or another?

The cosmological and teleological arguments for the existence of God are pretty compelling to me, especially when paired with arguments about living in a simulation. Why does anything exist? Why does reality follow orderly laws? Occasionally a physicist or astronomer will make a bunch of noise about how it isn't mysterious, here have some equations about quantum vacuums or some shit, case closed, but from a philosophical perspective that's no answer at all. If the laws of the universe are themselves responsible for the existence of the universe, you still haven't explained why there are laws. The answer "well we have to stop somewhere" is an admission that they haven't accomplished the god-killing mathematics they've been using to sell their book after all.

On balance these arguments get you a lot less than most theists appear to think, since it seems like an intentional being capable of creating at least one universe is probably so alien that treating it like a loving father figure who wants to help you find your car keys is a stretch, and more than a stretch. And maybe there are just "fundamental laws" that are how everything is and how everything always will be--how could I possibly know? I can't even begin to check. But in my experience, nothing comes from nothing, and infinities exist only in the realm of mathematics, so the fact that I nevertheless find myself existing in a finite universe is pretty damn surprising.

Arguably, then, the most supernatural thing I have any experience with is me and my conscious existence, which for some reason goes away for a while every night. Emergent properties are kind of spooky!

So, closer to home--leaps of intuition and the generation of new knowledge are often kind of spooky. Occasionally--not more than two or three times a year, sometimes every couple of years--I will realize something and at the same time know it is true. (Trivial things, usually--so-and-so is pregnant even though she's not showing yet, they fired that guy because next month the board of directors wants to do this other thing, etc.) Sometimes this involves the prediction of future events. These realizations are almost never mistaken, and they are always arguably discernible based on facts that I actually know, but that I hadn't specifically put together in context. This seems like good evidence that there is a part of my brain that is making connections or processing information without my conscious effort. But I can understand why some people might treat that "aha!" feeling as a revelation from God or something.

But that's not the spooky part. The spooky part is how this sometimes leads to weird coincidences like Leibniz and Newton inventing calculus at the same time. The obvious hypothesis is that there was enough overlapping knowledge accumulated in a particular place at a particular time to generate these ideas, so multiple people arrive at the conclusion simultaneously. But then I read about, like, Anaximander realizing the rudiments of evolution (but not natural selection) in ancient Greece and notice that it took thousands of years for anyone to really do something with that idea, and I find myself re-puzzled by where it is we actually get "new" knowledge.

Would it be antagonistic or obnoxious if I jumped in to argue with some of this?

Would it be antagonistic or obnoxious if I jumped in to argue with some of this?

It would not!

Well, I suppose you could probably find a way to argue that is antagonistic or obnoxious, but just the fact of arguing by itself wouldn't reach that level automatically. This is a discussion website, so generally argument is not only permitted, but encouraged!

I hope it's not encouraged for third parties to jump into survey/top-level-question threads to tell responders how wrong they are. That would be a major deterrent from posting in those threads.

I don't remember exactly what I was originally going to say; but I hope that some of the following is relevant.

"Why does anything exist" seems like an obvious dead end. Something that doesn't exist can't be the cause of something that does, so if everything that exists (or existed in the past) needs a causal explanation, you just have an infinite regress. Figuring out what exactly one means by "exist" can be useful, but I can't see how that would point to anything like "the existence of God", rather than something like "the word means different things in different contexts, and in other contexts it doesn't mean anything".

Does reality follow orderly laws, or do we develop laws to model regularities in reality? A reality has to have some kind of consistent behavior for anything to inhabit and observe it, but ours is also full of disorderly and unexplained phenomena. From one perspective, we should expect to find ourselves in an orderly reality because it's a simpler hypothesis, and we should assign simpler hypotheses higher priority than more complicated ones. From another, we assume that our reality is orderly because it's a simpler hypothesis, and simpler hypotheses are easier to work with.

You say "nothing comes from nothing", but we generally don't think of math as "coming from" or "going" anywhere. It's just inherently, timelessly true, independently of any particular material reality. Iterative functions and sequences have initial values or states. The universal dovetailer function, after a sufficiently large finite number of steps, inevitably produces a finite universe containing you.

Are you not sure that other people have supernatural conscious existences? What would you consider evidence for or against it?

"Conscious" is also another word that seems to mean different things in different contexts, but that seems like a tangent. I don't know why creatures sleep or why we experience it the way we do.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats