this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2025
65 points (91.1% liked)
Asklemmy
50879 readers
524 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What do you mean by supernatural?
It means 'beyond the natural world', I think, but what does 'natural' mean? That is exists without humans? That it's good for the planet? That it's something theoretically knowable by empirical means? That's it's something knowable by logical/rational means?
I believe that I as a conscious experience exist. I don't believe anything else with certainty, although I believe a great many things conditional on the empirical ('natural'?) world being assumed to be true.
The word supernatural: phenomena or entities are those beyond the laws of the nature
But the “laws of nature” are just provisional rules we’ve deduced through observation. When we see things that violate the rules as we've deduced them (and we often have), we figure out new rules—we don’t just assume there are things to which the rules don’t apply.
Were electrons supernatural before we had the laws to describe them? Would something that's supernatural now still be supernatural if we came up with laws describing its behavior?
I appreciate I made an edit to add more to my comment that you may not have seen; are you equivocating 'the laws of nature' with empirical knowledge (ie knowledge which can be gained by evaluating our sensory experience and assuming that it represents a true world)? If not, how are you defining it?