[extropy-chat] John Wright finds God

[Hara Ra]

The history of science finds more and more phenomena which were understood 
as supernatural to have ultimately scientific explanations, so same become 
natural. An example is ball lightning. It is no major specuation that 
hallucination coupled with strong stimulation of "this is centrally and 
ulitimately important" (probably a function of the RAS) would create 
experiences of the Numinous and Spiritual.

The relative rarity and detailed differences between these events have 
prevented the usual scientific investigations, which require repeated 
examples to verify conjectures.

The flip side of all this is my vision of the Spiritual Nano Store, with 
shelves like a health food store, with bottles labled things like "Angelic 
Ascencion", "Dante's Inferno, Level 3", "Pentetcostal Hallelujia", "The 
Quaker Ezperience" and so on. Inside is a small pill with a few nanites 
which enter your brain and run for a few hours.

I want to clearly distinguish between my cynicism about the super natural 
nature of supernatuality and the valid and useful psycholgical value of 
same. BTDT, BTW.

>By supernatural, I mean what is meant in the ordinary sense of the world:
>whatever is not of the natural world. My belief is that the natural world 
>stands
>to the supernatural as the mind to the body. No description of the body 
>and its
>motions, no matter how accurate, is sufficient to describe the meaning 
>which the
>mind puts upon it. As far as biologist is concerned, the determination of 
>a man
>to do a certain act, which he sets in motion his body to do, is 
>supernatural to
>the science of biology: it stands behind it, cannot be explained in terms 
>of it,
>and informs it with meaning. If a man is hallucinating because he is drunk,
>there is a natural explanation for his visions; if he is seeing visions 
>because
>he is visited by a Spirit, there is no natural explanation.

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=   Hara Ra (aka Gregory Yob)    =
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