Atheism

We are overzealous pattern recognition machines.

The proto-hominids who saw a tiger in the bush when there wasn't one had a higher chance of passing on their genes than the ones who didn't see a tiger when there was one.

And now their descendants see tigers in the stars.

If LLMs have taught us anything about pattern recognition machines it's that when they don't find a pattern to match they don't say they have no matches... they just pull a somewhat fitting match off their arse, or an outright random one. They hallucinate.

And that's even before we get to our actual minds. We've got pattern recognition machinery in our retinas. What reaches our brain is already highly processed (to make tigers easier to spot), and then it gets into the visual processing part of the brain, which uses sophisticated autocompletion using previously stored patterns to fill in the blanks and highlight anything remotely interesting... often including things that aren't there (see optical illusions, for instance). That's what we "see", and then we get to make up stuff based on that (and the same probably applies to our other senses, too).

Add to that that we're notoriously bad at recognising randomness (or lack thereof). A coin falls heads up four times in a row and we suspect shenanigans, as if it wasn't as likely or unlikely as any other pattern.

We see some craters that look like a smiley face (pattern recognition strikes again) on Mars and we think it's a fake picture (it's 2024, after all), or a Watchmen reference. And when we learn it's actually real our hair stands up. We get goosebumps. It can't be natural. Must be super natural. Aliens. Gods. Ancient civilizations. All while we ignore the thousands of craters that don't look like a smiley face.

But, hey, at least we're not getting eaten by hidden tigers, so win some lose some, I guess.

“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”

― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

I'd recommend Manly P Halls book on "secret teachings". I think alot of "religion" is just philosophy + myth.

Idk about "supernatural" but there definitely seems like there's a lot of undiscovered psychological phenomenon we haven't figured out. It's hard to research and quantify subjective experiences.

“Supernatural” is just unexplained, or misunderstood, natural phenomena.

I’ve spent years working in supposedly haunted buildings (as security.)

the guy who loves sharing his ghost story really didn’t appreciate being told that the “fleeting man” he saw apparitions of, were his own reflection (specifically in a corner window of a conference room, or in certain circumstances, in double-paned windows.)

Nor did he appreciate being told the ghost “walking” down the stairwell was really just the fire sprinkler standpipe clunking against the stairs as the building cooled off. (And the reason it happened around the same time every night was the building’s hvac being set to a lower temp to save energy.)

He most certainly didn’t enjoy being told that the doors closing in his face were caused by shorts in the magnetic door holders and that he really should have put that in his report (he was written up for not reporting a maintenance issue.)

He also got written up when we found out that he was leaving windows cracked in the space above him, but he wrote them off as ghosts screaming instead of the wind whistling through a slightly cracked window.

Our understanding of the universe is imperfect- and it probably always will be. The point of science is to improve that understanding using evidence and experimentation.

I’ll take science any day of the week.

I fully believe there's ~something~ beyond our 3 spatial dimensions we call reality. What that is, I don't know. Does it have sentience, I doubt. I also think these things fall into unknowables, things each individual will develop a different feel for, and should be deeply personal.

While James Randi was alive, he offered $1,000,000 for proof of the supernatural. He never got that proof. I think that's pretty telling.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/718/

Basically, it's not that hard to believe there are so many stories.

• 60% the person experiencing it misunderstood or misinterpreted what they were looking at because they were stupid and gullible, but not maliciously making things up.

• 35% completely fabricated and never happened and created to legitimately defraud or troll others.

• 5% something scientific that we simply don't understand yet.

• 0% actual supernatural occurrences.

Paraphrasing I believe — Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

No nothing is “supernatural “. We may not yet know what we’re seeing or exactly what happened… we simply don’t understand it yet.

Yet is relevant point there IMHO. We will.

Supernatural phenomena do not actually exist as far as I can tell. There's no actual evidence to my knowledge, and plenty of evidence that humans are not particularly good at perceiving or interpreting the universe around us as it actually is. Our brains are not a reliable narrator, supernatural phenomena are most likely a consequence of this rather than anything genuinely supernatural.

I’m a strict naturalist - I believe that supernatural phenomena do not exist. I do not believe in the unknown.

There is no supernatural. Everything is natural. I'm agnostic, so I won't rule out something exists some people would call a god, but even if it exists, I would count it as natural.

I don't believe in "supernatural phenomena" either. If they'd exist, we'd actually have prove of their existence. There's about 8 billion people on this planet and for some reason all the "recorded" phenomena date back to before everyone had an easy to record device in their pockets. They've all gone down to 0 for some odd reason, even though it is as easy as ever to actually provide literal proof - if they existed in the first place.

People who experience supernatural phenomena are experiencing either natural phenomena they are too stupid to understand, are fooled by man made things, or are hallucinating for whatever reason.

It’s entirely possible that supernatural phenomena exist. It’s also possible that what we call “supernatural” is merely science we don’t understand yet. After all, things like lightning and disease used to be attributed to gods, evil spirits, witchcraft, etc. I guess I’d call myself an open-minded skeptic, if that makes any sense.

There hasn't been any proof in all of history that any supernatural phenomenon was real.
Until there is, my thoughts on it are: not real, never happened.

I think there may be some scientific explanation for a variety of things that are attributed to the supernatural; and not necessarily just mundane things like knocks and creaks in your house, paradolia causing images of faces in image noise and shit like that. For example, with how places that have unusual geomagnetic activity tend to also have higher than average ghost sightings, I think some people may just be extra sensitive to magnetic fields which causes them to hallucinate.

So many myths and monsters are basically caused by misunderstandings, not seeing something clearly enough to identify it, or even exaggerating a story that's been passed down verbally over a long time. Not to mention things caused by mental illness in times before advanced medicine and psychology. Many alien abduction stories and succubus sightings are almost certainly the result of hallucinations induced by sleep paralysis.