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.

Personally I take them with a grain of salt, some supernatural phenomena are probably not yet understood by current science. Now I sound like an ancient aliens person meme.

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 phenomena is possible but not probable.

The only "supernatural" thing I believe in is reincarnation, and that's just a game of numbers. I believe we're on the verge of discovering that black holes birth new universes. Then your existence and rebirth just becomes a statistical eventuality. From your POV you would die and then immediately be aware of your next life; since death is a state of non-being, an infinite amount of time could pass between those two moments but you wouldn't experience any of it. So, it isn't really even supernatural since I don't believe anything like karma or whatever mediates the process.

I first want to call out all of the responses with "philosophical insurance".

By that I mean things like "If it IS real, it's not supernatural, so even if I rolled my eyes at it, and you prove me wrong, I'm still right"

We're just hanging out and casually talking about stuff here. No enforcers are going to come back and read these and hunt you down if someone ends up proving that ghosts or something is real. Also, you can still keep your Atheist card, if you think there might still be some weird stuff out there that science cannot yet explain.

As for me, I've had a few "Supernatural experiences" myself, and they've convinced me that there is another "force" out there that we don't understand.

what's the difference between higher power and supernatural phenomena?

sounds more like agnosticism to me...

I'm basically at a point where I don't think any actual magic or phenomena exists, but the disciplines of metaphysical practice themselves are worthwhile for introspection and working on your mindset. Also I don't like to give voice to my own skepticism that much - I don't defend it or argue because I can't be talked out of it and it's not very fun to be that guy. It's more fun to entertain the fanciful things and hold ideas lightly among people who are inclined to talk about phenomena.

I don't have anything to add to this conversation as I'm in agreement that the "supernatural" is simply how humans have historically described natural phenomena that is not yet understood.

Now... what I do find interesting is the shared art. I've seen similar styles, but not this piece. I looked it up and thought I would share because I find it to be pretty rad.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flammarion_engraving

The Flammarion engraving is a wood engraving by an unknown artist. Its first documented appearance is in the book L'atmosphère : météorologie populaire ("The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology"), published in 1888 by the French astronomer and writer Camille Flammarion.

The illustration depicts a man, dressed as a pilgrim in a long robe and carrying a walking stick, who has reached a point where the flat Earth meets the firmament. The pilgrim kneels down and passes his head, shoulders, right arm, and the top of the walking stick through an opening in the firmament, which is depicted as covered on the inside by the stars, Sun, and Moon. Behind the sky, the pilgrim finds a marvelous realm of circling clouds, fires and suns. One of the elements of the cosmic machinery resembles traditional pictorial representations of the "wheel in the middle of a wheel" described in the visions of the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel.