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Have you considered that our very consciousness is supernatural?
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Considered at length, and ultimately rejected due to lack of evidence.

There's a lot of beauty in embracing not-knowing.

Ignorance is bliss.

I dunno about that.

absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

Wrong. It's not strong evidence of absence, but it absolutely is evidence.

Wrong. If there is no evidence, then there is no proof either way.

Imagine looking at a point in the night sky and say you want to check if there is a start at that point. You look at the most powerful telescope that we have, and yet you see no star.

Is that a non-strong evidence, as you put it, that there is no star at that point? I think not. There is no evidence one way or other. That is it.

But the scientific community of today is like "We have looked with the most powerful telescopes that we have, and yet there is no star, so it seems that there is really no star there".

This is ABSURD.

Because "most powerful telescope we have today" is an arbitrary claim. There is always the chance that the "Most powerful" is just not good enough for the task at hand. But the "scientists" (as well as the business that wants this proof badly to sell their products) don't like to admit it.


> There is always the chance that the "Most powerful" is just not good enough for the task at hand.

And that chance is not 100%, and so any given strength of telescope is in fact excluding some of the hypothesis space. That is the definition of evidence.

Every time I point a telescope that would be able to detect a star of a given brightness and distance somewhere, and it fails to see a star, that limits the remaining space for people who believe in stars to make claims about what stars can be, until they're finally at the point where they can only make the most esoteric claims about “stars” that have no observable effects on the world, at which there's no point even including “stars” in your physics model.

I'm at that point with respect to god: every concrete claim has either been disproven, or isn't actually a claim about the observable world, at which point I shrug and say that this thing you insist on defining has no impact on anything.


> excluding some of the hypothesis space. That is the definition of evidence.

Not really, because in this case the "hypothesis space" is infinite, so your experiment exhausting some finite amount of space is not adding anything to the evidence.

So the point is when this "hypothesis space" is infinite or extremely large, if the best experiments that we can do right now can only explore a tiny fraction of that, then it is ABSURD to claim evidence of absence just because "We put our gold standard test and still didn't find anything".

>at which point I shrug and say that this thing you insist on defining has no impact on anything.

It is possible that this "thing" only interact with our world via events that we observe as truly random. Then you wouldn't go ahead and say random events have no impact on anything, will you?


You've retreated that we're no longer in the realm of “consciousness is supernatural”, and I rest my case. Retreating to an infinite hypothesis space that I can never fully exclude only helps you if there is no mundane explanation, otherwise I reject it for the same reason I can reject the boltzman-brain hypothesis. “But there's still a chance!” is a line from a comedy, not statistics.

That was about the star example, not about the “consciousness is supernatural” and the rest about the evidence for god which you bought up. You seemed to have confused between multiple threads of reasoning. May be, try to stick to one at a time?

I do believe (believe, not know) that consciousness is something bigger than we know, I can even believe in panpsychism sometimes but I don't think any religion have any real clue about the nature of consciousness.

I don’t necessarily disagree but how do you get to the conclusion?

It's not something we can pinpoint in any experiment, even not clear how to design one in theory. Yet we know by our very personal experience that it exists. Sounds pretty supernatural to me.

Hm, how does one not get into that conclusion? Most everyone would agree we have the concept of "selfness", yet I don't think there's a scientific theory to explain how a set of physiochemical processes can have that endresult to an observer, any more than a computer has the idea of "me".

I just don't think that unexplained == supernatural, so the conclusion does not seem obvious to me

Why then does it change if we take drugs?

What does “supernatural” in the context of your comment means to you?

Ah, a man (or women) after my own heart in HN.

Do you limit it to human‘s consciousness?

> consciousness

What else is there?


Many other species. (E.g. apes)

Man is just an animal.


Which is why I omitted "Human" when I quoted you..

You didn't quote me. Ex falso quodlibet.

Yea, you are right.

How could it be?



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