Since the beginning of the universe...

[squeakthedragon]

[AlchemicPhilosopher]

Ah, squeakthedragon! You must be new to the forums. I've become increasingly disenchanted by the lack of meaningful discussion for the better part of a year.

On a happier note...

Or at least a more relevant one I would like to say that I agree with you almost completely. I look at the word 'supernatural' from another perspective. Why use the word at all? Sure there are phenomena worthy of a label with as much impact as they potentially have in themselves, but I prefer to think that the universe is far more grand and elegant if these phenomena actually conform to a framework we have yet to fully grasp. All that occurs in this world is natural, in the purist sense. What is natural is not what is currently within our scope of knowledge, but rather, what is possible. Who are we to judge what is possible, and by implication, what is impossible?

Rationale, however, is a tool used to focus our efforts on something within our reach, or just beyond it (but still in view). When we say, "surely there is a rational explanation for [insert whatever ridiculous phenomenon you see fit]," we aren't dismissing the event, or so I would like to think. Rather, we are keeping record that it happened and waiting for an explanation of 'how' it happened. It may be an inadequate declaration, but it's a noble one.

[squeakthedragon]

In a conversation that came up elsewhere, it was remarked that the human mind operates on a system of closure - the brain wishes to close connections and make perfect loops. This is in part simply a survival strategy; an eagerness to figure out the environment and act upon it (or not act upon it, such as avoiding threats).

"Closure" is what causes people to jump to conclusions. The rationalist might point at this and say "ah hah! This is the cause of magical thinking, where human beings have created explanations for the sake of having them, even if they're not well thought out!"

Perhaps! But the same urges affect everyone, including the rationalist. Many people say "I believe nothing until the evidence is in". But few can really balance themselves on the head of the pin; most people believe, deep down, that a large swath of ideas are "safe" to effectively dismiss. "After all, there's no compelling reason to think much on whether unicorns exist; and if one shows up some day, it will obviously prove its existence, so who cares!"

This can steamroll a little far in a lot of people though. Soon, plenty of ideas become "unicorns" in the mind of a rational person who is overly dismissive, and become summarily dismissed. There's a fair number of people who see themselves as "science minded" today, who consider anyone that even spends a mental cycle thinking about anything that has "the stink of the supernatural about it" to be fools and morons. Worse, many self-proclaimed rationalist go so far as to call anyone who "wastes time with foolish thoughts" (to quote one direction) to be a danger to society - inevitably, they argue, anyone with a non-rational, non-scientific foolish thought in there head is a danger, for their actions will in some way be colored by their "irrational beliefs". (For these people, there is no difference between pondering an idea and believing in it - which itself is not really a rational way to approach things, but they're ironically blind to this.)

For myself, I believe that this particular flavor of "rationalism" gone astray is partly due to the perceived war between religion, superstition, and rationalism in Western societies. People who see themselves as logical, skeptical, scientific, often are pushed to feel if they're fighting (which in some cases, yes, may be literally true) against a black tide of dangerous irrationalism. Unfortunately, far too many rationalists I've met in the west have an extreme western bias.

Their ideas of "the supernatural" for example, comes mostly out of the three big Abrahamic religions of the West and Middle-East, and the folklore superstitions of the west. They've no really solid understanding that orders of human thinking from other cultures and hemispheres have anything more interesting to offer than the Western "bunk" that they've characterized as the enemy. And they're not really interested in exploring.

Also, this working ignorance seems to result in the tendency to see religion or really, the orders of subjective human perception that create things such as religion, as purely negative. Flaws and outdated evolutionary widgets to be controlled ruthlessly or better, ripped out. Again, "silly ideas" as nothing but a danger to the progress, as they see it, of the human race.

The thing is, all of this is quite understandable. One cannot really blame the westerner for having these attitudes, because of the incredible damage that has been done to much of western history and society due to the religions organizations that have dominated so much of history. But like any "war" the combatants inevitably retreat to extremes and begin pumping out propaganda and demonization of "the enemy".

[AlchemicPhilosopher]

[Asymptote]

squeakthedragon - Fri May 07, 2010 8:11 pm
“In a conversation that came up elsewhere, it was remarked that the human mind operates on a system of closure - the brain wishes to close connections and make perfect loops. This is in part simply a survival strategy; an eagerness to figure out the environment and act upon it (or not act upon it, such as avoiding threats”

---- To add to your thinking, I have some knowledge which may solidify your claim: I would like to suggest you examine Gestalt psychology, which was founded by a person who would wholly agree with your statement. An example of Gestalt thinking is that people need or ‘automatically’ fill in the dotted lines to create a complete picture. The ‘mind’ cannot accept an incomplete picture. I do however, think that this cognitive process is designed to help the human intelligence see patterns in the environment (external stimuli) to allow for quick decision making which does seem similar to your survival theory.

To digress slightly, people’s perceptions of the world are often incomplete, as such “the missing element” is either filled in by our personal knowledge, ignorance and un-resolved issues, allowing for the term, “projection” and thus subjective perception. We create the whole picture by filling in what we want or need to see… Racism is a good example: People seeing aggressive vandictive behavior in the opposite ‘race’, where in actual fact the behavior is conducted with quite a neutral feeling and complete non-aggression.

Back to the Gestalt theory, students were presented with a circle drawn on paper, and one piece of the circle was missing, when asked the question, “What shape is this?” Answer was non-other than, “A circle!” But it isn’t a circle, as one small segment of the shape was missing… A reverse and quite interesting example is how a lecturer in the US walked into a psychology lecture with a tape recorder, which had a sentence recorded on its tape memory but set to repeat 100 times, and placed it onto the lecturer stand. The students were asked to write what they heard on paper every time they heard a sentence emit from the machine… the result: each student wrote the original ‘true’ sentence which emitted from the recorder… the last sentence written by the students was completely different from the ‘actual’ sentence and unique in that each student diverged from the original sentence to the extent that it became an example of ‘ a broken down telephone story’. The students started to hear what they wanted to hear, from the same stimuli… and started to believe that the recorder actually contained many different sentences…
Another explanation can be found in a psychological term, “heuristic” which occurs in the human neural network. Apparently the brain loves to short-circuit information, to make the process of thinking as quick and “efficient” as possible … the downside is we have an internal neural default setting: which is: “What-ever, I just want to go home..”

We actually have to actively disengage this process in order to think in our own original and creative manner… if we let fatigue dominate our thinking, we begin to see things in a ‘normal’ and very mundane manner…

Squeakthedragon - Sun May 16, 2010 3:06 pm
“For myself, I believe that this particular flavor of "rationalism" gone astray is partly due to the perceived war between religion, superstition, and rationalism in Western societies. People who see themselves as logical, skeptical, scientific, often are pushed to feel if they're fighting (which in some cases, yes, may be literally true) against a black tide of dangerous irrationalism. Unfortunately, far too many rationalists I've met in the west have an extreme western bias.”

---- It could be said, following the logical application of Gestalt theory, that when people from a ‘collective group’ (A nationality) perceive a situation in a similar manner… that the overall consensus of this shared perception must be correct! Again, people fall into the trap of perceiving what they want to see in order to maintain their own survival or to remain a loyal member of their collective group.