Posted: Nov 19, 2011 11:02 am
andrewk wrote:I've been thinking a little more about this topic, hence the following:
Is it possible for there to be anything that we validly call supernatural?
You wrote a lot, but presented mostly circular language-play you invented, yourself, to make it appear as if you were thinking about something. Verbiage is not a substitute for thinking.
You're not focused so much on 'supernatural' as on 'validity'. Anyone can talk about the 'supernatural'. See? I just did it.
Perhaps you should do a similar analysis on an intersubjective concept of 'validity'. Some think that if two people can talk about a topic, it has 'validity'. But that just means that two people pretend to find one another mutually intelligible. Therefore, do not confuse 'validity' with 'intelligibility', since separate signs are available for each.
You talk about the supernatural as if it were stuff that we simply have no other way to talk about except to say, "It might be so". If that is your personal definition of it, then you should check with other people, instead of pretending to analyse, when what you're doing is pleading with people to accept your definition. People who have an uneasy relationship with 'unknowns' cannot solve this problem with philosophy and circular trips around the dictionary. 'Unknowns' have a coherent meaning in equations you are trying to solve for the 'unknowns'. Elsewhere, not so much.
Why do people plead with one another to accept personal definitions of shit? Can't we all just get along with each other's subjectivity? We do, in general, and try to draw the line at butchering each other over foreign subjectivities, which arises not because of subjectivity, but because people are social animals, and gather into social groups to which identities are attached. That it is incoherent to attach identity to a 'group' outside of mathematics is irrelevant to most people. Cheers.
andrewk wrote:Perhaps if an object is so complex that it cannot be described by any finite set of laws, we could say that it is Irreducibly Supernatural. God could be such an object. However, there are some problems with this:
Trying to explain the incoherence of theology to theists from a non-theistic perspective! Yeah, that should work.
People embarrassed to practice theology as a going concern sometimes try to characterise 'The Universe as a Whole'. If it looks, quacks, walks, eats, and smells like a duck, andrew, odds on, it's a duck. Unless it's an optical, auditory, and olfactory illusion, all rolled into one.