Bohandas, RE: "Supernatural"
I dont ascribe to the idea that supernatural things CANNOT exist-- That means I have knowledge of them- specifically, knowledge that they do not exist.
Rather, I say that if they do exist, we cannot know about them, because they exist outside the physical reality in which we find ourselves. Take for instance, the hypothetical situation where true AI is created, but is nurtured in a purely computer simulated environment. That AI has no physical sensors, manipulators, or other means of sensing or knowing anything at all about OUR physical reality. To it, our physical reality is "Supernatural". To us, it's virtual reality is an extension of our own physical reality, in that its foundation is tied to the physical laws of our reality.
Try as the AI might, short of gaining access to a physical world avatar of some kind (even if it is just some real-world sensors feeding it data) it will never properly grasp our reality's nature. It has no way to verify if what we tell it through the virtual world it finds itself in is actually true or not.
Now extend this further-- What if the AI is being grown in a fully blind experiment manner- The researchers ARE indeed there, watching everything that happens in the "Self-consistent" virtual world, but they dont directly act on the AI or the AI's environment in any measurable way. The AI might come to think that there are "gods" "outside", but it cant prove it-- there is no evidence. Other AIs in the system may assert that the very notion of the existence of these 'gods' is nonsense. But the researchers are still quite real; the nature of their existence is radically different from that of the AIs.
Likewise, there could well be "gods" outside of our universe, watching us. The one thing we have, is the lack of evidence that they are manipulating things here in our universe--- so they seem to be at most passive observers. So- while such beings MIGHT exist, they dont seem willing or able to do anything TO us, or FOR us-- so worshiping them is just wasted energy. We might try to conjecture about their natures, but without data to guide those conjectures, we might as well be conjecturing about invisible pink unicorns-- Wild speculation is all you will get from that exercise, and those speculations are wholly untestable-- no knowledge is obtained, only opinions.
This leads me to my thesis:
The supernatural MAY be real; We have no way of determining this.
Since we have no way of determining this, it makes no sense to conjecture about this "maybe real" thing, since we can never interact with it.
Since we have no way of determining this, we can never verify any claims made about it.
Basically, religion is
"Not even wrong". Conversely, so is hard atheism, because it presupposes having knowledge to state "there are no gods" as being an empirical fact; On what empirical basis is this 'fact' founded? So far, I have never encountered a direct proof of this, only elaborate inferences that ultimately boil down to a logical fallacy. At best, it is a belief based on the idea that "because this is probably true, it is." Nevermind that the universe we live in does not work that way. You can have 99% certainty that you will measure an electron in your trap, but 1% of the time, it is spontaneously outside it. Our universe does not deal in absolutes of this kind. --And that is with things we CAN observe and test.
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Topic: Railgun and Spirituality Discussion (Read 686034 times)