Normal or paranormal

[GrowingSmaller]

Are the laws of physics etc normal or paranormal..?

Personally I go for a dual aspect universe, completely normal and completely paranormal.

"Paranormal events are phenomena described in popular culture, folklore and other non-scientific bodies of knowledge, whose existence within these contexts is described to lie beyond normal experience or scientific explanation.[1][2][3][4]"
^^
Wikipediia...

Whats your take?

 

[DogmaHunter]

My take?

My take is that by its definition of "...to lie beyond normal experience or scientific explanation", it kind of smells really hard like the "paranormal" is no more then an appeal to ignorance. Much like the "supernatural".

Think about it. Nobody understands it. It's beyond explanation. It can't be demonstrated to be real.
It kind of sounds like it doesn't exist.

 

[juvenissun]

Are the laws of physics etc normal or paranormal..?

Personally I go for a dual aspect universe, completely normal and completely paranormal.

I don't think you can find a case which is half and half. Can you?

 

[GrowingSmaller]

Well there are natural laws, but what causes the natural laws? The laws do the explaining, but they themselves themselves are unexplained. And to try and explain a natural law by another, is just to rainse the question "what caused that one?"

Thats my 50/50.

Even if we have a toal theory of everything, what makes you assume it would explain itself(if you do)? Laws of physics do not explain themselves, they explain phenomenon (or describe them).

For any natural explanation you can say "explain the explanation" and you're back to square one.

Like, for instance if it uses maths and logic, does it actually explain maths and logic?

So yes, even if you take a seemingly rigorous naturalism, like the one by K Augustine (and his "A defense of Naturalism" is the only essay Ive read on the topic btw), it is not self explanatory, and therefore it is "unexplianed" by naturalism itself.

OK, someones going to say "category mistake, laws dont describe laws" but isnt that the point I am trying to make? The "elephant in the room"...

"Elephant in the room" or "Elephant in the living room" is an English metaphorical idiom for an obvious truth that is either being ignored or going unaddressed... (wikipedia)

Even for something so simple as a boiled egg. It is in one aspect as plain as a pikestaff, and on the other hand a whaaaat - an egg? A complete mystery.

At to one leven science is all we have. At another it is a failed attempt to sweep the mystery under the rug.

 

[quatona]

Are the laws of physics etc normal or paranormal..?

Personally I go for a dual aspect universe, completely normal and completely paranormal.

"Paranormal events are phenomena described in popular culture, folklore and other non-scientific bodies of knowledge, whose existence within these contexts is described to lie beyond normal experience or scientific explanation.[1][2][3][4]"
^^
Wikipediia...

Whats your take?

Category error.
The "laws of physics" aren´t events.

 

[loveofourlord]

Well there are natural laws, but what causes the natural laws? The laws do the explaining, but they themselves themselves are unexplained. And to try and explain a natural law by another, is just to rainse the question "what caused that one?"

Thats my 50/50.

Even if we have a toal theory of everything, what makes you assume it would explain itself(if you do)? Laws of physics do not explain themselves, they explain phenomenon (or describe them).

For any natural explanation you can say "explain the explanation" and you're back to square one.

Like, for instance if it uses maths and logic, does it actually explain maths and logic?

So yes, even if you take a seemingly rigorous naturalism, like the one by K Augustine (and his "A defense of Naturalism" is the only essay Ive read on the topic btw), it is not self explanatory, and therefore it is "unexplianed" by naturalism itself.

OK, someones going to say "category mistake, laws dont describe laws" but isnt that the point I am trying to make? The "elephant in the room"...

"Elephant in the room" or "Elephant in the living room" is an English metaphorical idiom for an obvious truth that is either being ignored or going unaddressed... (wikipedia)

Even for something so simple as a boiled egg. It is in one aspect as plain as a pikestaff, and on the other hand a whaaaat - an egg? A complete mystery.

At to one leven science is all we have. At another it is a failed attempt to sweep the mystery under the rug.

math and logic don't exist, I think people mistake this, there is no such actual thing as math or logic, they are concepts, simply descriptions of patterns we see.

There is no 2, or 4, 2 and 4 are concepts for a group of items, that come out to 6 when combined. Way I've tried to explain it in the past is, saying explain math, is like sayng, explain yellow or red. Red or yellow don't exist outside of concepts, they are a label we have given a concept for a certain wavelength of light our eyes see. Red is the description a label for something.

 

[Shempster]

Just asking the question means you are interested in string theory. A multi-

 

[GrowingSmaller]

Category error.
The "laws of physics" aren´t events.

Nice, you help. But i still dont understand. If theyre not things then they're what.... descriptions?

The "big idea" is thay everything is half mysterious, what Heidegger would call the "mystery of being" as opposed to the "average everydayness" maybe, of everyday life we are so accustomed to it seems perfectly normal.

So theres "normal" and "non normal" if you would give a clue on this?

Two sides of a rubics cube.

 

[GrimKingGrim]

My thing is anything that happened outside of human influence is natural.

 

[quatona]

Nice, you help. But i still dont understand. If theyre not things then they're what.... descriptions?

Hang on. I didn´t say "they aren´t things" (well, they aren´t things, either), but I said "they aren´t events" (because the definition you provided defined "paranormal events").
Natural laws are our category for determining events as "normal" (because we think we have figured out reliable cause and effect relations).
Categories aren´t events nor things (and they aren´t descriptions of things, either). Categories are ideas about the groupings of things or events by certain criteria.

The "big idea" is thay everything is half mysterious, what Heidegger would call the "mystery of being" as opposed to the "average everydayness" maybe, of everyday life we are so accustomed to it seems perfectly normal.

I don´t understand how you arrive at this conclusion.
A rock falling down is a perfectly "normal" event (since it conforms with what we think we have figured out about the functioning of this world).
Now, if a rock fell up, that would be (by current standards) not normal (and if you insist on semantically creating a positive category for something we have no category for you can call it "paranormal", "supernormal", "subnormal", "parallel-normal", "mysterious", "miracle" or whatever).
But even if this happened, I don´t see how we could conclude that either of the events is "half mysterious" and "half normal". One would be considered normal, the other non normal.
But let´s not rash things. Rocks haven´t been observed to fall up.

However, if that will happen one day, the question is: How will we treat this phenomenon?
Will we just stand there shoulder-shrugging and concluding that there is a non-normal realm, or will we try to figure out what´s wrong with our "natural laws" and try to refine them (IOW make sure that factual events will be incorporated in the category "normal")? It seems to me that the latter has been done with great success throughout history of science.

So theres "normal" and "non normal" if you would give a clue on this?

I would prefer to say there´s "understood" and "not (yet) understood", in order to avoid presumptiousness.

 

[Loudmouth]

Well there are natural laws, but what causes the natural laws?

How do you start at "I don't know" and end up at "it's paranormal"?

At the end of the day, everything we do have an explanation for is normal. We have never had a paranormal explanation replace a natural explanation, only the opposite. So many things that were once thought to be paranormal turned out to have natural explanations.

 

[GrowingSmaller]

Yes I agree, but the way I look at things the "unexplained" is not unexplainable, just yet to be "norlmalised" iunder the rubrics of science. So its paranormal, even if only for a while.

 

[GrowingSmaller]

Quatona, its not the rock falling down that's mysterious, but the existence of rock, falling and down (up sideways etc) in the first place. They can be traced back to earth formation, splitting off of unified forces somewhere in cosmological history etc. But the "cosmos itself" the brute fact of being, the sheer unexpectedness of existence - thats what I mean. Evades that type of analysis. Even if thers an ultimate scientific explanation, the very fact there is an explanation (etc, and a rock, falling...) is still profound to me.

This relates to the issue of why is there something rather than nothing. Perhaps its a category mistake to ask? If there is a choice, nothing (if it is logically analysed) cannot be the source of a causal explanation. Nothing cannot be the reason for something. No reason at all is the only so-called reason, which nothing could ever be. Thats not an empirical matter, its a priori logic.


Ø cannot be a cause, so it cannot be a source of explanation.

So were left with "Why is there something?" - a quesiton which takes us intio the network of relationships called "physical reality", in that we have to relate our cognition and theory not to nothing (for reasons just outlined) and hence the only option - the only possible trace of explanation - is more somethings. Thats established by a process of eliminaiton.

• Either A (nothing) or B (something) does the explaining.
  
• Not A,
• Therefore B.

Sounds to me like a symmetry of sorts: "Explanations relate to physical and within physical reality, and are a posteriori" and "absence of explanations relate to the absolute ground of being, and are a priori".

So "being" (the absolute truth of existence) is unexplaned, paranormal, in that its logically impossible to explain it. All possible explanations are a posteriori, fact based, and within the network of existence. Its a bit like the deconstructionist observation (IIRC): in order to define a word, we have to use more words.

 

[quatona]

Quatona, its not the rock falling down that's mysterious, but the existence of rock, falling and down (up sideways etc) in the first place. They can be traced back to earth formation, splitting off of unified forces somewhere in cosmological history etc. But the "cosmos itself" the brute fact of being, the sheer unexpectedness of existence - thats what I mean. Evades that type of analysis. Even if thers an ultimate scientific explanation, the very fact there is an explanation (etc, and a rock, falling...) is still profound to me.

This relates to the issue of why is there something rather than nothing. Perhaps its a category mistake to ask? If there is a choice, nothing (if it is logically prior) cannot be the source of a causal explanation. Nothing cannot be the reason for something.

So were left with Why is there something?" - a quesiton which takes us intio the network of relationships called "physical reality", in that we have to relate our cognition and theory not to nothing (for reasons just outlined) and hence the only option - the only possible trace of explanation - is more somethings.

1. This renders the question "Why is there something?" unanswerable, logically. Personally, I have no inclination to occupy myself with questions that are constructed in a way that they are unanswerable. That´s the point where I tend towards concluding that not every question is meaningful.
2. It seems to me that calling each and everything (the universe, objects, events, patterns, concepts, ideas, hypotheses...) just "something" is a philosophically careless use of language.

 

[stevevw]

Are the laws of physics etc normal or paranormal..?

Personally I go for a dual aspect universe, completely normal and completely paranormal.

"Paranormal events are phenomena described in popular culture, folklore and other non-scientific bodies of knowledge, whose existence within these contexts is described to lie beyond normal experience or scientific explanation.[1][2][3][4]"
^^
Wikipediia...

Whats your take?

Its hard to know at the moment as we may not even understand what the laws are that need to be applied. Throughout history there have been many unusual occurrences. People have claimed many paranormal and supernatural events such as ghosts, UFOs, NDE, ESP, telepathy, telekinesis, miracles, healings, Psychic readings, Clairvoyants, reincarnation and past lives and other paranormal activities. Then there are the many other everyday occurrences like Déjà vu, intuition, luck, coincidences, ect.

All these have mostly been dismissed as figments of the imagination or that they have some other logical explanation to them. This may be true for most of them but not for all of them. There are definitely some unusual things that happen that defy explanation. Because people (scientists) have fobbed off these things most of the time they have never been thoroughly investigated. So we havnt put the same amount of time and effort into discovering what this all means and whether there is some truth to it.

But throughout time there have been some credible cases that prove there is something going on beyond the science and that cannot be explained through logical and rational ways. This in itself shows that we need to do some more investigations and need to take this more seriously. Some Universities have dedicated research labs that investigate these things and they have collected some good cases for their research. But in the end it wont matter to someone who disbelieves because they will always look for a logical answer.

 

[dgiharris]

I feel simply that everything that is labeled "paranormal" or "supernatural" are merely phenomena that we don't understand yet.

There was a time when rain and lightning where paranormal and supernatural. There was a time when disease and droughts were punishment for sinful behavior. *shrug*

It is the human condition to seek an explanation for everything, to see patterns in everything... So, that which we can explain falls under science, that which we can NOT explain falls under supernatural.

The truth is, they are one in the same. Rain and lightning and disease and droughts really don't care whether humans understand the phenomena or not, those things exist regardless.

Basically, it just depends on your frame of reference

 

[GrowingSmaller]

When I mentioned paranormal I wasnt intending the usual things like the yeti, but the philosophically unexplicable like existence.

 

[quatona]

When I mentioned paranormal I wasnt intending the usual things like the yeti, but the philosophically unexplicable like existence.

So when you said:

Personally I go for a dual aspect universe, completely normal and completely paranormal.

you meant to say the universe is both completely explicable and completely unexplicable?

 

[stevevw]

Paranormal can cover a wide variety of things.
The most notable paranormal beliefs include those that pertain to ghosts, extraterrestrial life, unidentified flying objects, psychic abilities or extrasensory perception, and cryptids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranormal
paranormal
That cannot be explained by science or reason and that seems to involve mysterious forces.

I wonder if spooky action at a distance would come under this meaning.

 

[GrowingSmaller]

So when you said:

Personally I go for a dual aspect universe, completely normal and completely paranormal.

you meant to say the universe is both completely explicable and completely unexplicable?

When I said "completely" that was hyperbole. I think this relates to set theory though. Imagine the explanation of all things. Does it explain itself. It would have to in order to be a complete explanation. Like the set of all sets, does it contain itself. Somehting like the "barber paradox" but with science....