h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Religion aside (a nasty landmine of a topic to avoid), belief in the supernatural/paranormal/occult is strong these days. From what I can tell, h2g2's community tends to be fairly intelligent and reasonable. Nevertheless, I am consistently surprised by what people will believe. No, I am not a true believer, and no, I am honesty not looking to step upon your beliefs. I am genuinely curious.

Do you believe in anything that dwells in the realm of the supernatural/paranormal/occult? If so, what? And why?

No, because I'm intelligent and reasonable and whatever else you said above. The office is Feng Shuied to keep my Chinese office mate happy and I shall clean the house, including the windows, before Chinese New Year because it needs cleaning

I have absolutely no belief in the supernatural. Here are some of the things that I don't believe:

- you shouldn't talk about the weather being nice because it might get its own back and change for the worse.

- you shouldn't enter last week's winning numbers into the Lottery, because they'll never come up twice in a row.

- you should respect the last wishes of people who have died, even if no-one else except yourself ever knows about it.

Are any of you starting to feel you do believe in the supernatural?

People like to believe in the supernatural because it adds mystique and a sense of wonder to the day by day drudgery.
ESP,ghosts etc. when talked about are all hearsay arguements, always I knew a friend or this happened to me, but throughout all no one has come forward with any evidence that has stood up.

James Randi, a famous sceptic, a few years ago offered $1 million dollars to anyone who could prove any psychic feat under scientific conditions. Funnily enough there have been no takers..... strange that!!!

I'm not a total skeptic, but I think probably things like magick, if they do exist as definable forces, are more to do with our own minds than anything else, and that they're not going to be things we can normally affect directly. If they were, it stands to reason that proof would have come to light already.

However, I'm pretty certain practisioners of magick are onto something, even if it's only working on the power our own minds can give us, without affecting the outside world at all. Things like lucid dreaming I definitely believe in, probably because I've had the odd lucid dream - or at least what I remember as a lucid dream. There has to be a reason why we don't use most of our brains most of the time.

If you've ever sat in an old house by candlelight, you'll realise why a lot of ghosts disappeared with the coming of electric light

Indeed you do.

No I don't - I'm too busy trying not to step on the cracks in the pavement.

I believe nothing is supernatural (ie outside of nature). There are things we cannot explain at the moment. They are part of nature, and are perfectly "normal" but defy our current understanding. If you took a pair of two-way radios back in time and did a demonstration of taliking to someone without wires several miles away, they would call it magic. They could take the radios apart and even understand the internal workings, but unless you explained the theory of radio waves and the electromagnetic spectrum to them, they still wouldn't understand the science behind it.

We still don't know what causes gravitational fields, yet I don't see anyone who doesn't believe in gravity!

I suppose the difficulty is that experiments involving gravity are repeatable, and ghost sightings or whatever are not. I just think some of the supernatural will eventually be explained and accepted as fact.

Supernatural is not really the right word, but in the absence of a better one...

I agree, that some of what we now consider to be supernatural may very well enter our repository of scientific "knowledge" in the future.

Wasn't it Arthur .C. Clarke who said that any suitably advanced science would appear as a kind of magic? Does it work the other way what appears supernatural now will eventually be subsumed under "The Explainable?"

Clive

Any suitably advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Any suitably advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

Thus one day they'll both be the same to us.

I don't believe in the supernatural but I think you sometimes get some insight into why some people do. I had a little example about an hour ago. I was walking the dogs and saw another dog walker coming towards us. The other dog walker was wearing a blue top and the dog looked like a Labrador or golden retriever. I called my dogs to put them on their leads because I didn't recognise the other person and so didn't know how well behaved his dog would be.

When I straightened up from putting on the dogs' leads, the other person and dog had gone. There was nowhere they could have gone, but they'd disappeared entirely. I puzzled for a few minutes looking everywhere and trying to work out how they could have vanished. Eventually I had to admit to myself that they weren't there in the first place. I must've seen some combination of fence-posts, trees, hedges, shadows and my own brain, having decided it was a dog and its person, filled in the rest according to what I expected to see.

Some people would've sworn they'd seen a ghost because that would be so much more exciting to them. I find the power of the mind quite extraordinary, myself and find my own conclusion quite adequate and convincing.

Sal

The logic of this previous posting seems faulty:

"Any suitably advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Any suitably advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Thus one day they'll both be the same to us."

Yes, any suitably technology could be indistinguishable from magic when one wanted to disguise it as such.
However, the second statement, "Any suitably advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology", to me, does not necessarily hold true. It assumes that technology has no limits. The boundaries of "magic" are only limited by one's imagination (where such things dwell). Human technology has its limits, even if only the limits put on it by the physical laws of the region of reality in which it exists.
Of course, all of this is moot if you happen to believe in magic. That would explain the posting.

STOP
Before we go on -
My last reply to MaW was just a lot of unneccessary nitpicking. We all know the point everyone's trying to make. Unfortunately, that point is one of skepticism. My question seemed to attract many fellow skeptics.

I have my beliefs of why people believe the things they do. Nevertheless, I want to hear it from the mouth of the believer. Where are they?

I fear that all this skepticism may have scared them off. Or was it the original question itself? I asked for what people believe, but I also asked why. Is it that the foundation for belief in the supernatural is weakened the light of true self-examination?

C'mon people, you don't have to convince me. Just least tell me why.

(Or perhaps I'll start a new forum where people can just tell me about weird things that've happened to them. No belief discussion, just unexplained experiences.)

Is ESP supernatural ?

I believe in a form of ESP. A person who I was very close to some years ago often had similar thoughts at similar times to me, even though we were widely seperated in distance, and we hadn't spoken since the night before.

I put it down to our closeness and receptiveness. Neither of us have experienced it with any other people.

Do I beleive in spirits and the other supernatuaral stuff ? I have an open mind on it. I have only other people's experiences to go on, which isn't enough for me to make a decision.

Most of these postings refer to the 'unknown power of the mind'; or speculate that 'mental tricks' (Magicians) or 'tricks of the mind'
(Sal's imagined dogwalker) are a function or disfunction of our minds. In summary, everyone says it's all in your mind one way or another. And to that extent everyone is right. And wrong.

Voodoo (in the widest possible sense -ie: all pagan mysticism) is the largest 'religion' in the world. By applying mental focus on things, people, animals, spirits ..it is possible to understand and even manipulate them. It is not even necessary to enter altered states of consciousness but, just as in the other (Jewish/Christian, Islamic, Budhist) big three religions, it helps to close your eyes when preying (sic).
The 'natural' relationship between sight and smell is lost on modern men. Recent studies on pheremones suggest we have a latent 'sense' that can 'see' thru time and distance but researchers hesitate to explore the 'super' natural for fear of ridicule. Trouble is, what they are poking around at is quite natural. It is us who are un-natural.
While it was not written specifically for the topic at hand I refer you to http://www.h2g2.com/A499656 for some insight into the human imagination/the sense of smell/magic/precognition/ESP/etc.

I wasn't trying to put across a skeptical viewpoint. Rather, I would say that if magick of some sort does exist, it would really be no different from technology or science. I envisaged for a story that hasn't gotten past the first few paragraphs yet a version of our world where people could take Arcane Sciences degrees, and children were taught Magic alongside Chemistry, Physics and Biology. For surely, if it exists, it is part of the universe and so would be governed by laws, as is everything else we currently think we understand?

Of course, I could be wrong.

Like I said, I was just being a nitpicking b*st*rd. I like the story idea though. While being a skeptic in most things, the supernatural is one my areas of interest.

I saw a ghost...twice!!! Two different ghosts, one at my Great Grandmothers house and another at a buddies house. (And no mind altering substances where used.)