I noticed someone write the following:
"Now, it is true that even today, we don't really understand what magnetism, or gravity for that matter, actually is. We can measure and describe how it works, but we still don't know what it fundamentally is. Nevertheless, we are fully confident that it is a natural, rather than supernatural, phenomenon. "
This doesn't make much sense to me. Ultimately we can't define supernatural vs. natural because we don't even know what 'natural' is, never mind supernatural. What are strings made of? God? How does gravity ultimately work? Because God makes it work? Maybe, or maybe it's the FSM. So what does it mean to say that we are fully confident that gravity is a natural, rather than supernatural, phenomenon? It's a meaningless statement.
As for segulos, there's no real difference between a segulah and the rest of religion. That's pretty obvious.
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gravity is rational
the question is, is following the religion or your ancestors rational
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr4UkL-TcHk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr4UkL-TcHk
"As for segulos, there's no real difference between a segulah and the rest of religion. That's pretty obvious."
Seriously?
You need to read this. You seriously need to read this, if you can make that statement.
http://www.facebook.com/notes/rabbi-dr-nathan-lopes-cardozo/god-as-an-idol-the-tragedy-of-the-religious/209411742424228
Sugulahs go directly against the rest of religion, which says that G-d can not be bribed.
Lipman - Awesome.
Where did you see such utter nonsense?
I'd really appreciate if one of you would post about what your relationship has been like over the past 6 years. Has he tried to be mekarev you? Is kiruv inherently irrational? What's the deal?
If God encompasses all, as many voices in our tradition teach, then there is no such thing as 'supernatural'. There might be phenomenae that our current understandings of science do not explain. But that does not make it supernatural or a 'miracle'. Every day life is a miracle!
Bivrachah,
This Good Life
TGL, thanks for clearing that up.
A meaningless statement without additional context.
If.
If.
If.
If the queen had a schlong.....
Can anybody explain the difference between "supernatural" and "magical?"
I think you have a point that it is hard to define natural and supernatural. If we say natural is anything that can be explained by the laws of physics as we currently understand them, then consciousness is supernatural and so is dark matter etc. So that isn't so useful a distinction.
>Can anybody explain the difference between "supernatural" and "magical?"
Supernatural is the source. The supernatural exists with man even being passive. It doesn't need magic. But magic requires the supernatural. "Magic" is that active tapping into the supernatural for man to use it for whatever gains he requires (with or without the consent of the "source") either by spells or tapping into some specific supernatural law.
Holy Hyrax, that is good, but he asked for the difference between "supernatural" and "magical", not "magic".
So using your base: "magical" is an adjective describing human actions which access supernatural phenomena.
"supernatural" are laws and phenomena which exist in contradiction to the natural laws that we can test and verify.
Gravity is therefore obviously natural, because we can test and verify it. Love, hatred, Design, Art, Music, Games, literature, etc are Magical, and the forces that allow us to create love, hatred, design, art, music etc. are supernatural, since we can not verify or test them.
Er, you certainly can test love, hatred, design, art, music, games, and literature.
Things don't need to be magical and untestable to be special and meaningful! Pain and pleasure are directly testable in terms of receptor signaling and neural activity; pain still hurts and pleasure still feels good.
Gravity is the behavior of an object in a distorted space-time field induced by the presence of a massive body.
This property is predictable, measurable, and consistent throughout the universe.
We humans think inductively. Therefore, since gravity and other laws of physics hold true whenever we are able to measure them, we assume that the always hold true. That is what we mean by "natural". If someone claimed a "supernatural" event which defies these laws, then by induction either the claim is false (the most likely response), or the law was wrong in the first place and didn't allow for the phenomenon, which would be redefined as natural.
So, actually, there really isn't such a thing as a supernatural phenomenon, only a supernatural claim.
"Er, you certainly can test love, hatred, design, art, music, games, and literature. "
Really, and what are those tests? What objective criteria do you use to know if something is art or scribbles? What criteria is there to know if something is designed or emergent? Given a random sound from the library of congress, how do you know if something is "music" or not? There are no objective tests for these things, they do not follow any natural process.
And what does meaningful have to do with anything? I guess meaning is another form of Magic. What objective criteria is there to know if something has intrinsic meaning?
"This property is predictable, measurable, and consistent throughout the universe."
Can that be said of art, music, design, literature?
No, it can not.
Vagueness and/or subjectivity in definition does not make something untestable. Art and music certainly follow natural processes: they are creative products of biological brains appreciated by other biological brains. For art and music, you can objectively test:
-Test how structural features of art are common or different across different cultures (e.g. reviewed by Nisbett & Masuda, 2003. Culture and point of view. PNAS.)
-Test whether and when people perceive an object to be a piece of art or scribbles (e.g. Hawley-Dolan, A., & Winner, E.. 2011. Seeing the Mind Behind the Art. Psychological Science.)
-How listening to different types of music affects a person's brain, and how that correlates with subjective reports of liking it (e.g. Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia.)
-Etc, etc, etc.
It is an empirically testable question WHY some people consider X a work of art and some people consider it scribbles, and the answer will have something to do with their brains, cognition, and culture.
>And what does meaningful have to do with anything? I guess meaning is another form of Magic. What objective criteria is there to know if something has intrinsic meaning?
Oy. Meaningful, as in " a subjective mind/brain state of finding something special, uplifting, and deeply relevant." I brought it up because people often seem to feel that if art is understood naturalistically, it becomes devoid of feeling "special." I disagree.
>"This property is predictable, measurable, and consistent throughout the universe."
>Can that be said of art, music, design, literature?
This is silly. They are all natural products of human culture and cognition, and you can measure properties of all of the above and make good predictions about them. Are they always consistent? No, because they have vague and shifting definitions. Are "heaps" always consistently the same size everywhere in everyone's judgment? No? I guess "heaps" are supernatural properties of the universe.
"It is an empirically testable question WHY some people consider X a work of art and some people consider it scribbles, and the answer will have something to do with their brains, cognition, and culture."
So what you are saying, is that human beings are natural things and they can be studied and their thoughts, behaviors and decisions can be tested. But we are talking about music itself, not how a person or a bird responds to music.
" Are "heaps" always consistently the same size everywhere in everyone's judgment? No? I guess "heaps" are "
A heap is defined by the shape of the contents which rest on a surface, not the number of items, nor even what size the items are. Just the shape. Same with pile, mound, or any other synonym. It would really help if you stuck to the topic at hand, and stopped trying to make silly analogies or assumptions. These tangents are annoying. Unless you are referring to the non testable or falsifiable nature of language itself, which then yes would likely constitute as a very structured form of magic.
"" a subjective mind/brain state of finding something special, uplifting, and deeply relevant.""
And if a person is mute and paralyzed, how do you know if they find something meaningful or not? What is the objective criteria which can be tested, verified and or falsified? Which machine exactly can be created that tells us if something is meaningful or not.
"They are all natural products of human culture and cognition, and you can measure properties of all of the above and make good predictions about them."
Curious. So sunsets can't be art? The sound of wolves at night can't be music? Art critics, and Audiophiles would disagree. There are entire groups of people who spend millions of dollars on art that previous to them purchasing the item, nobody would consider such an item as art. It has an ever shifting definition, so no predictions can not be made. As soon as you come up with a working definition of art, an artist creates a work which moves a large number of people, and demonstrates to them that this thing is art even though it doesn't fit that definition. (Duchamp's toilet is a prime example of this.)
I am curious by the way, have you ever actually looked into the research which you quoted? Have you seen if they have any consistency to them at all? If the topic of those papers were electromagnetism instead of art or music, would you find them to be convincing?
>language itself, which then yes would likely constitute as a very structured form of magic.
No offense, but methinks you are nuts and need to do some reading in cognitive science. I think the "language is magic" hypothesis has not fared well in recent years compared to other ones, but feel free to check it out yourself. (Steven Pinker has some nice books on language.)
>I am curious by the way, have you ever actually looked into the research which you quoted
Um...yeah.
So, to recap, you think that because the word "music" has a vague definition, music itself is magical, as is all language. Righto. I'm going to stick over here in reality. While here, I think I will will set off some patterned air compressions from electronic speakers which, upon entering my inner ear, will be transformed by hair cells into neural signals that reach my auditory cortex. At that point, with links to memory regions such as the hippocampus, my brain will identify the vibrations as a Beethoven sonata. This will probably cause the pleasure centers in my ventral striatum to fire, given that my culture and prior exposure have predisposed me to respond pleasurably to Beethoven and not, say, to total serialism. Total magic.
Oh, and as a side note, I mentioned "heap" as a reference to the Sorites paradox, which is a paradigmatic case of vague language.
Ah poorly educated engineers. Of course I know why you mentioned heaps... but do you know the intelectual limits of the paradox? Apparently not since you seem to think that all vague language is the same. Just as you confuse the knowledge of lingusitic grammar with vocabulary. You keep sticking your head in the sand of ' reality' and continue being a consumer of the world instead of a Creator. You use words like culture and predisposed with understanding the implications or meaning behind those eordsbin the context of the conversation. You might as well use the word magic for all the meaning those words have. Two brothers go to music school. One ends up loving beatoven the other hates him.
By the way since you left it out if your little story, beatoven arouses specific emotions because of the mathematical ratios between the notes, regardless of species or culture. But I'm sure you knew that. And those emotions are present regardless if you like or dislike the music. But that us also true with random noise
> Gravity is the behavior of an object in a distorted space-time field induced by the presence of a massive body.
> This property is predictable, measurable, and consistent throughout the universe.
So 'natural' means predictable, measurable etc, and supernatural means unpredictable? I guess my wife is super-natural!
what the fuck is a beatoven?
A "beatoven" is an overly intellectual MO turned skeptic who is so love with his own mental gymnastics while blogging and otherwise engaged, that he wouldn't appreciate the "wonder" of the supernatural even if he were "beaten" over the head with "it."
>You use words like culture and predisposed with understanding the implications or meaning behind those eordsbin the context of the conversation. You might as well use the word magic for all the meaning those words have.
Why do religious people think they will catch me with a term for which I don't have a naturalistic understanding? If I say I have a sense of awe for the universe, they say "Aha! Well what's awe?!" It's an emotion rooted in a brain state. I mention "meaningful." "Aha! What's meaningful?" It's a mind-brain state as above.
I work in cognitive sciences. Of COURSE I have a naturalistic understanding of "culture" and "predisposed." Goodness, ignorance of how something works on your part does not make it magic.
> Two brothers go to music school. One ends up loving beatoven the other hates him.
That. Is. Not. "Magic." This is the SILLIEST argument I have ever seen. Read some books or articles on cognition, genetics, and cultural transmission.
>You use words like culture and predisposed with understanding the implications or meaning behind those eordsbin the context of the conversation. You might as well use the word magic for all the meaning those words have.
Why do religious people think they will catch me with a term for which I don't have a naturalistic understanding? If I say I have a sense of awe for the universe, they say "Aha! Well what's awe?!" It's an emotion rooted in a brain state. I mention "meaningful." "Aha! What's meaningful?" It's a mind-brain state as above.
I work in cognitive sciences. Of COURSE I have a naturalistic understanding of "culture" and "predisposed." Goodness, ignorance of how something works on your part does not make it magic.
> Two brothers go to music school. One ends up loving beatoven the other hates him.
That. Is. Not. "Magic." This is the SILLIEST argument I have ever seen. Read some books or articles on cognition, genetics, and cultural transmission.
Gravity is natural - the operation of natural law.
The issue concerns the cause of gravity. Either one says that such things don't need a cause, or one argues that the cause lies within nature itself, or one says that it is caused by a Force outside nature. I don't agree that we don't know what nature is. I would have thought that such a claim about a regular word in our vocabulary might have been supported by an argument!
Not quite sure what segulos have to do with anything either.
http://news.yahoo.com/israeli-algorithm-sheds-light-bible-163128454.html
> I don't agree that we don't know what nature is.
OK, so how does gravity work?
"Why do religious people think they will catch me with a term for which I don't have a naturalistic understanding?"
Grumpy much? Did I say you don't have a naturalistic understanding? No, I said the words are meaningless in this context. Get a grip on yourself. "predisposed" just means, that you choose to ignore the fact that the topic can not be tested or falsified. It's a fancy word for "circular logic"
"That. Is. Not. "Magic." This is the SILLIEST argument I have ever seen. Read some books or articles on cognition, genetics, and cultural transmission"
I suggest you read a book on jumping to conclusions. You seem to do it a lot. Did I say that two people experiencing something differently is magic? No, that example was only brought up to point out that "predisposed" and "culture" are meaningless words which you MIGHT AS WELL, call magic, for all the meaning it has.
There is no magic in the consumption of music or the affect it has on people. Creation of music, art, literature, etc however, is a different thing all together. You keep looking at things through the lens of a consumer, of a man who sticks his head in the sand and says, this is my world, I will play with it, and feel great!
>No, that example was only brought up to point out that "predisposed" and "culture" are meaningless words which you MIGHT AS WELL, call magic, for all the meaning it has.
But they're not. They are complex, which might feel meaningless or magical, but isn't.
"Predisposed" means, containing neural wiring that makes certain cognitive and behavioral responses more likely than others. This can come from genetics, learning, and gene-environment interactions. (Anything ranging from prenatal hormone exposure to repeated exposure to a stimulus throughout life can change gene expression, brain development, and behavior.)
This can be tested and falsified in many ways. Etc for culture.
>Creation of music, art, literature, etc however, is a different thing all together. You keep looking at things through the lens of a consumer
Actually, I've engaged in different types of creative arts and endeavors my entire life, and love them! While the creative experience often feels "magical," that doesn't mean I think it literally works by magic. It is still special and wonderful to me anyway.
"This can come from genetics, learning, and gene-environment interactions" ... "This can be tested and falsified in many ways. Etc for culture"
You can not differentiate or isolate which factor is the determining factor for a predisposition. There are no conclusive experiments which can predict which change in which factor will change the behavior of a specific person. Right now, its all rolling dice.
"hat doesn't mean I think it literally works by magic. " Since you don't have a working definition of magic, and can not separate what is natural and what is supernatural, it's sort of irrelevant of how you think it literally works. I have been defining magic as anything which can not be tested, falsified, or reproduced in a consistent manner. That is not the same definition you would normally use. I have made the creative process by definition magic.
>You can not differentiate or isolate which factor is the determining factor for a predisposition.
You are making things up. There usually is no single "determining factor" for complex behaviors--there are complex interacting causal pathways. And hundreds of experiments can be done and have been done to isolate individual contributing factors and figure out how they interact.
A clean example you could look up, if you have access, is Casey et al, 2011. Transitional and translational studies of risk for anxiety. It's complex...but eminently studyable.
> I have been defining magic as anything which can not be tested, falsified, or reproduced in a consistent manner... I have made the creative process by definition magic.
Except that you can also test the creative process.
If gravity is natural then why in all accounts of heaven, are events described as taking place in a gravitational field that works the same way as it does on earth when there are no earthlike bodies anywhere near it?
If gravity is natural why was Elijah able to use a chariot to reach sufficient escape velocity to ascend to heaven, and how could he withstand the g forces involved?
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