Do you believe in the paranormal?!

I’m afraid he’s got you on this one Scrotie, “supernatural” is as much an oxymoron as superanything.

Supernatural things existing? Sure🙂

Off my mind, Guldan and Anduin.

I’m the one saying supernatural is an oxymoron.

Just not the word itself, which is where your point got dragged to for some reason.

If you’re going hardcore philosophical here, use oxymoron in it’s original meaning - as a rhetoric device that uses contradicting words deliberately. Calling any (supposedly) contradicting expression made by mistake or “false belief” an oxymoron waters down your argument. As for “supernatural”, I personally think that agnosticism is the way to go. :innocent:
But here’s “The Supernatural”, eerie music by the late Peter Green (of early Fleetwood Mac fame), back when he played for John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers:

A later work of P. Green’s Fleetwood Mac, less haunting, more sailing/flying and very well blending into my 1960/70 teenage summer memories:

Tempus fugit

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what are you even talking about?

there’s a TON of stuff that exists without being natural. You know, like every single artificially made thing.

Just because we can introduce something in the world does not in any sense of the word means that it’s a natural thing.

I guess the irony is, ghosts are only super natural if people made them up.

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I believe it was something like:

Just because you are paranoid doesnt mean you are not beeing followed.

Not the best thing to say to people who are actually paranoid about beeing followed.

I have quit BG btw,it has become to predictable to be fun. The whole game has become boring and a lottery. I will play 1-2 days again after patch comes out and gain 1000 mmr like always and then its back to actual games.

But ya,humans can predict many things. Beeing able to predict and anticipate the future is a key difference between animals and humans. It has to do with the neo cortex.

There is nothing weird about beeing able to forsee the future. Like we can already predict at what time the sun will rise tomorrow,animals cant do that. Some people think this is magic,but it really isnt.

Another example: Upon seeing the title of this thread i already knew which people would post in it,even before opening it. And after opening it it turned out i was correct.
Is this magic and supernatural? Maybe to some people in this thread it is.

You also dont need science to make reasonably accurate predictions,thats another misconception. Exact science helps by making predictions more accurate but for a reasonable accurate prediction it isnt always needed. Like humans could predict the sun and the moon long before Newton found his formula.

Complicated subject.

In theory you could be able to predict everything in the universe including “random” events.

In practice it’s not really possible but there are people that usually not fail on it.

Like when i play classic miracle rogue and start my combo without have all pieces in hand.
I somehow always draw all pieces during the combo.

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Lots of animals, including humans, can predict the future.

There is certain behaviour in animals that might suggest they can anticipate the future. For example animals that hibernate and build a stash for the winter.
But this is learned behaviour and instincts,it is not based on actually forseeing the future.

Maybe dolpins could,about that i am not 100% sure i have to admit.

And you know this how? :slightly_smiling_face:. This is basically the theory that people are special. If you look you will see many examples of animals (and even plants according to recent studies) preparing for future events.

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There are some people who think free will is infinite. There are other people who think free will doesn’t exist. Both ideas are wrong, but the first is less wrong.

The truth is that free will is like an area or a volume. The area of a circle can be finite, limited, bordered, yet within that area there are infinite points. That’s the optimistic way of looking at it. The pessimistic way is: freedom is the volume of the cage you’re in.

I prefer to think all of it as yin and yang. Freedom implies limitations; limitations imply freedom.

Humans aren’t special. We’ve just got the roomiest cages.

That’s a bold statement, especially considering that in our current understanding of how the brain works, free will actually doesn’t exist because of hard determinism and that free will exists mainly in the form of an illusion.

Arguing against determinism would require some outside knowledge of how matter interacts with each other that we currently don’t have.

I would think one as educated as yourself would be quite knowledgeable of determinism. You’d have to make some case that shows molecules/atoms/whatever can change position and velocity from a source outside of matter. Otherwise, the tiniest bit of matter is affected by all the matter around it, which we know is true. What outside substance exists outside of matter that changes the velocity and direction of matter do you know about?

I find it strange your argument against supernatural things points to the super natural just becoming natural and then argue that free will doesn’t exist in the next sentence. If free will does exist, you’d almost certainly have to believe in something supernatural.

If free will exists and I believe in it, then free will is not supernatural.
If free will doesn’t exist and I believe in it, then what I’m believing in is actually non-existent. Which I guess is a synonym for supernatural.

This is just argument from ignorance fallacy.

Free will clearly exists. Run an experiment where you decide which keys on a keyboard to press. Can you will certain keys over others? Yes you can. Therefore free will exists.

What’s going on here is essentially this: we clearly see a phenomenon, but we don’t understand how that phenomenon works under the hood, therefore some people are saying the phenomenon doesn’t exist. That’s just bad logic. What I might accept is that, someday in the future, we’ll discover that this free will thing works a particular way “under the hood” that might not be particularly intuitive. And that’ll be okay.

I suggest OP starts using his powers to predict lottery numbers instead of BG games.

Also:

  • hard determinism
  • quantum mechanics (via Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle)

Choose only one. To paraphrase Einstein, either God plays dice or he doesn’t.

Edit: for clarity, I am an atheist and I’m using the word God metaphorically, not literally, here. Einstein was not an atheist.

I think you’re overly attached to determinism. We model some natural phenomena with deterministic models and some with non-deterministic models. Regardless of how we do it though, all we have are descriptive models. Whether or not the universe itself is deterministic is entirely open.

We’re very attached to ideas that help us make sense of the world around us as it presents itself in our daily lives. Determinism is one of those ideas. Our reliance on it is ingrained in the way we think. In a way, it’s similar to our belief that the real numbers describe the real world. They’re very good at modeling the world we see using our senses, but they start to break down when you zoom in too far on things. For all we know, the world could be discrete.

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Exactly. When I refer to “free will” I know I’m talking about a complicated phenomenon we haven’t gotten to the bottom of. But I wouldn’t say that a person is not a human being because, technically, they’re an amalgam of trillions of cells, some of which are different species e.g. bacteria, and that to call oneself “human” is to deny the bacterial component of one’s physical being. This is the same form as the argument to say that will might not be free, because it has limitations. I acknowledge that limitations exist, just like how I acknowledge that bacteria live in my digestive tract, but the existence of limitations doesn’t imply the absence of freedom.

I’m prepared to accept that study into human neurology may eventually reveal that freedom works in a way that’s very counterintuitive to conventional understanding. And I already reject completely the belief in anything resembling an immortal soul that can transcend the need for material, biological “hardware.” But free will exists because even if freedom DOES turn out to be an “illusion” of some form or another, it’s an illusion that exists. And exists demonstrably.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: balance, in any asymmetrical game, is an illusion. Like breaking encryption, given infinite time to understand all of the implications of the design asymmetry, there is only one optimal strategy (assuming all players are identical, because individual player physical and mental characteristics can also be a relevant variable in the calculation). But balance is an illusion that EXISTS and its upkeep is important. It’s an important illusion with real consequences. Bluffs exist. Fiction exists. Mythos exists. Lies exist. It’s not quite sufficient to point at something, say it’s representing a falsehood, and then act as if it isn’t there — or more importantly, that it isn’t doing anything.

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I think the questions of free will and determinism can be fun and instructive to think about, but they’re almost certainly unanswerable in any conclusive way. It’s similar to the debate mathematicians sometimes have about whether math is invented or discovered.

At the end of the day we all stick with a model that’s reasonable and lets us live in our own heads.