Is it possible to prove the existence of supernatural entities?
Is it possible to prove the existence of supernatural entities?
Let's say that it's scientifically proven that ghosts exist. Would they then stop being supernatural and become natural, thus making it impossible to ever have proof of the supernatural?
This question reminds me of Tim Minchin's observations of alternative medicine. By definition, alternative medicine has either not been proved to work, or has been proved not to work.
You know what we call alternative medicine that has been proved to work?
Medicine.
55Great tune, too.
8That's kinda what I was thinking of, but not really sure if it was the same thing or not.
On a side note, have you heard his more "serious" songs? I'll Take Lonely Tonight is so good IMO (not that he was lacking in talent doing comedic songs)
5Not this one, thanks for the recommendation, but I've heard White Wine In The Sun, and that's touched me even though I've spent all my Christmases in the Northern hemisphere. 🙂
2
Reminds me of this ships doctor I was chitchattibg with. He said something along the lines of:
"The difference between a doctor and a witch doctor isn't that big. The main difference is in sticking to what has been proven to work, and discarding what doesn't
3Not related, but I was reminded of this old joke: what's the difference between God and a doctor? God doesn't think he's a doctor.
1
You know what we call alternative medicine that has been proved to work?
Medicine.
Sort of. You have things like willow bark which obviously work and are still considered alternative medicine. However, the pharmaceutical product synthesized from and to work like willow bark is one of the most recognizable OTC medicines in the world -- aspirin.
2Except what we get with the ancient records regarding willow bark were just what we’d expect with folk medicine: anecdotal claims that it treats a wide range of ailments without any proposed mechanism of action.
It wasn’t until willow extract was actually made into a pharmaceutical that it became anywhere near useful. That willow tea you’re imagining ancient people drank didn’t actually exist and if it did, they were not getting enough salicylic acid from it to equal even a single aspirin.
In short, aspirin follows the above rule: alternative medicine was proven to work, and then became medicine. But the end result is far detached from how it was used thousands of years before it was actually shown to work.
2Similarly many Chinese traditional medicinal techniques do work. Chinese medicine is undoubtedly "alternative medicine". You can cure aches and pains using medicinal herbs. They probably aren't as effective as scientifically synthesised compounds designed specifically for this purpose, but many of them actually work. Others are just placebo. The Chinese government regulates Chinese medicine in China and it is approved for use in many low-level medical applications. But if you have cancer, no herbs will save you and any claims to the contrary are just mere quackery.
Some Chinese medicinal techniques have made their way into "Western medicine", as it is called in China. The most famous traditional Chinese medicinal practice adapted this way is variolation, which was refined by science and become vaccination.
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Exactly. The supernatural is things beyond nature - if you can prove something supernatural is part of nature, then it's not supernatural, so it would now be natural.
It's similar to the quote, "What do you call alternative medicine that works? Medicine"
38It would simply move the concept of "ghost" from the realm of unproven and unexplained phenomena into the realm of proven but unexplained phenomena, joining the ranks of other proven but unexplained phenomena like gravity or particle-wave duality. In all of those cases, it would be possible to observe, quantify, model, and predict the effects of the phenomena in our natural environment, even if we don't have a complete grasp of the mechanism by which they work.
Ghosts wouldn't he supernatural anymore, just natural and observable.
And then humans will try to figure out how to turn them into gasoline, and/or have sex with them.
16The current accepted explanation for gravity is that it comes from the fundamental twisting of spacetime in the presence of mass, as described in general relativity. It has held up perfectly ever since, including the recent measurements of gravity waves.
Wave-particle duality arises naturally whenever you start working with wavefunctions. It only seems weird to us because nothing else in our daily lives behaves the same way.
4Hey thanks for weighing in!
You're gonna have a field day with what I just wrote downthread. Please be gentle. 😁
1
It seems I am out of the loop about gravity. How is it "unexplained"? Seems pretty straight forward (or "downward") to me.
2We know two masses attract each other across space, and have characterized a model that accurately predicts the magnitude of the force of the attraction over distance and time. What we don't know is exactly why those two bodies are attracted, and how the force actually operates.
For other fundamental forces, the electromagnetic force, the strong and weak nuclear forces and light, we have a reasonably good handle for how they operate in the quantum and relativistic physical frameworks, and we can reconcile their behavior between the two systems. We can't say the same for gravitational force, and it's causing problems for our understanding of how the Universe came to be, and how it is evolving. We have only recently in the last 20 years successfully detected gravitational waves with LIGO, and are currently searching for proof of a cosmic background gravitational field. We have but yet identified a quantum particle responsible for "transmitting" gravitational waves. Likewise, we cannot reconcile our observations of Universal expansion with the amount of mass we can account for across the cosmos-- that whole thing about dark matter that interacts with other masses gravitationally, but seemingly not with the other fundamental forces.
I probably butchered that explanation badly and made some actual physicists scream with the frustration (and if so, i apologize. please weigh in and educate us!), but my point is yes, we know a lot about gravity but we just don't know why or how gravity works.
4
Porque no los dos?
1I'd try ghost sex. 👻
1Settle down Beverly
2
Not true.
We'd also sell tickets to see them.
1I think this makes gravity supernatural, we believe it but don't understand it, it's above (super) our understaning of nature. I'm not sure if this it what am axiom refers to, building all our theories on an unknown foundation. So I think ghosts could remain supernatural, we know they exsist, but their exitense is above our natural understanding. I mean, if I define supernatual as meaning above nature.
-5Supernatural means things that are beyond nature (I.e. don't obey our known understand of nature).
If ghosts are proven to exist in nature, then they become part of nature, thus are no longer supernatural.
We might not have a definitive explanation for gravity, but it is definitively within our understanding of nature - we can observe it, test it, and predict its effects far into the future.
3
If you can prove it then it's natural. So no.
13That's why they are called "supernatural". It actually means "beyond natural laws".
13For a moment you would have proof of the supernatural, then it would turn into regular proof of the natural.
12It would be the poof of the supernatural
2
Only in a sense. Only if they are “supernatural” in the sense of going beyond one’s current conception of “natural”.
For example, someone photographing a nuclear explosion would be “proving the existence of a supernatural entity” if they showed that photograph to someone whose physics hadn’t yet gotten to the point of understanding nuclear fission yet.
Nuclear fission is supernatural to previous-generation physics.
It’s not supernatural to Real Physics but Real Physics is an ideal that will always elude us.
7That's basically why it's still unsolved whether consciousness is a non-physical gestalt in itself or just a trick of the human neurological phenomenon: it's logically impossible to apply empirical methods to observe something outside the bounds of the natural world as we experience it. I had to write a paper on it for my master's degree a mere five years ago but I didn't really fall on either side. If you want to read more, I suggest reading up on "zombies": https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/
Likewise, without wanting to start a debate (and I won't reply if you do), it's why "you should prove that God exists" is uncompelling: God by nature isn't supposed to exist within the realm of empirically provable things.
6Pretty much. Same as mythological creatures. If you discovered and recorded proof of a dragon, mermaid, wendigo, etc they'd no longer be considered mythological. At that point they're simply creatures.
6I quite like cryptozoology, looking for proof of animals that don't officially exist. Loads of the animals over the decades have been found and proven and then they just go over to zoology and people still think of cryptozoology as a pseudoscience, it's really weird.
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Physical proof cannot prove metaphysical things. It would be like someone living in a video game trying to prove there is a world above its own.
6No, because if you can prove it then it is just natural.
6Exactly this. Once we advance to the point where we can detect the supernatural, we'll also have better understanding of how the universe works.
1
To answer your title, no.
To answer your post, yes, pretty much (imo).
Why do your post and title have different (almost opposite) questions? Lol
4They're not different questions in my head (I guess because I have all the context of what I'm thinking and just expressed myself badly).
I'm coming at this entirely from a philosophical point of view. I'm not asking if it's technically possible to build a machine to prove the existence of the supernatural, but whether such a machine would change our categorisation of the now-proven thing
2
If you want some deeper philosophical insights on the matter, you can check David Hume. He asked and gave an answer to a similar question. He talked about miracles, cause and effect and our foundations of knowledge.
You can also look at the discussions around the validity of inductive reasoning as a means of knowledge and what that means for science.
They are pretty fascinating discussions.
3Maybe. First step: what entity? Second step: what is special about them that can be used to prove they exist?
3In a sense, if ghosts were beings from outside our universe, you could still call them supernatural, as they could be beings beyond our laws of physics i.e. what is natural in our world.
Of course there would be no magic to them and they would still be bound to their laws of physics.
2I wrote an article about exactly this: https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/tautological-denial-of-magic-0e311ca94c2a
0Oh my god, why are people so dumb. Like do you think everything is Magic in the world or something? Don't you feel like an asshole for not trying to learn anything? The more small things you know, the more you can find out by yourself through contacts. So no they wouldn't suddenly become a different type of energy or whatever, I'll become natural like you said. They would just describe it differently. And say hey this is a being composed of such and such matter or whatever and that's it. And then we call that thing a ghost. You know you can think these things out in your mind right? Like you ask a question and then in your head you know you feel well what would I need to know to figure that out, and you know use your fucking head
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