general supernatural exploration - part 1

[Merlin]

Supernatural
adjective: supernatural
1. (of a manifestation or event) attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature.  "a supernatural being"

noun: supernatural; plural noun: supernaturals
1. manifestations or events considered to be of supernatural origin, such as ghosts.
"a frightening manifestation of the supernatural"

So demons, voices, apparition, pandemonium ...

But you guys seem to be defining winning the lottery as a supernatural event!
ffs!

As you were.

A tupe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcFz9MqpGFg

[ju4o]

Hello Merlin.  Your perspective is interesting as ever.  While the title of this thread does refer to the supernatural, the first question asked in the opening post is,

"what is the difference between supernatural and paranormal ?"

In my opinion there is indeed a difference between those two things, and my contribution to the thread is, at present, and hopefully, an exploration of some aspects of the paranormal.

[Mr X]

hello everyone,

i just popped in to post an tupe, in the spirit of g hoping everyone and good weekend.

i dont expect anyone to belief me but my next question to j was to ask about the difference between the paranormal and supernatural.
in passing, i was chuffed to see merlin posting and more chuffed to see what he posted. looking up the basic definitions of those words had been on my mind regarding the question for j.

wanting to ask j about paranormal/supernatural definitions was not and passing thought. i was thinking about it quite a lot a few hours before popping in. (sparked by mr paranormal being mentioned)

have a good weekend everyone. i hope everyone is happy this sunday.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRJYCW_dCN4

x.

ps, z,i will get back to you upstairs during the week.

[ju4o]

I think the supernatural is more of a spiritual thing though in its cruder manifestations it does also include the kinds of pandemony things which Merlin mentioned.

Here is a quote which I like about the supernatural (from Thomas Buckley, Standing Ground: Yurok Indian Spirituality, 1850-1990):

An elder who spoke to me at length in the 1970s had an immediately transformative experience.  Going into a trance in a "prayer seat" in the high mountains, he saw, as though through a tunnel, a small hole of light opening into a meadow (locally, a "prairie") in the sky.  A spiritual being took him up to this world above.  He saw people there, "all in the prime of life - about thirty-five years".  He could not talk with them or eat with them, lest he lose control and be unable to get back to earth.  He knew this to be the "beauty world", where the spirits of trained people go at death, waiting, he told me, for the time when they would come back to earth in new forms.  He was guided back to the seat by one of the spirit beings, and when he returned to his body in the prayer seat he knew what "beauty" truly was, and "walked in beauty".

This man said an interesting thing.  The spirits that he saw were not, he asserted, really there - their forms were simply the best his imagination could provide, given that "the spiritual is completely different from the material", and thus unimaginable.

There are two ways of reading that passage.  Well, there are obviously more than two ways, but I'm going to point out two ways in particular.

One way would focus on the elder "admitting", in the second paragraph, that the spirits are "not really there", and that therefore the experience was "only in imagination".

The other way would see this passage as an expression of the idea that what we imagine is at best a creative approximation to what is really there.

[tally-ho!]

but who is the Mysterious Mister Paranormal?

you are not telling, Ju4o san? 

looking for him all i found was  definitions of the paranormal...
like
: very xstrange and not able to be explained by what scientists know about nature and the world - http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/paranormal (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/paranormal)
 
Mr Para-normal is obviously not as snobbish as Mr Supernatural - he doesn't consider itself as superior, to compair his self-importance to nature itself. like, "anything which is natural, is inferior to me by definition!"
while nature, be whatever scientists, occultists or desperate housekeepers think about him, is as is, (or is it?) (unless Mr Super-Natural plans to change the interrelations between atom particles?)
norm, on the other hand, is not as is. it's defined by a group of sentient beings, and might differ from group (sosciety" "tribe" "flock") to group.

Mr Para-normal says just, "anything which is lower then me ("on the nazgul food chain"?) it not normal.

ok.
Mr Paranormal obviously consider himself above the low -
 a criminal? a tyrant? legislator?
is this the case, Ju4osito?

Xsito? Gito ?Merlinito?

[Merlin]

I don't see a distinction.
Paranormal / Supernatural are basically synonymous.

synonymous
adjective: synonymous

    1.  (of a word or phrase) having the same meaning as another word or phrase in the same language.

Which is to say that Mr. Supernatural is aka Mr. Paranormal.
But he is certainly not Mr. Coincidence, Mr. Daydream, Mr. Topsy-Turvy or other known Mr. Man

What's Going On
https://youtu.be/Qy2Km7oly6M?t=1m12s

[tally-ho!]

oops - missed ju4osito's answer to me (so many exciting new posts on page 9, that i never had another look at page

"who is Mr Paranormal?"

Hello Ms Z.  Conceptually, Mr Paranormal is an explanatory anthropomorphism.  The first question I would like to consider is, whether an explanation is called for.

When Mr G announced the rules for Round A, I envisaged we might have some fun.  For the purposes of this post I would like to present an imagined sequence of events.  Let us imagine that Mr G would have reached across from his desk to the nearest bookshelf and taken out the first book which came to hand.  For example ...
...

J4: Interesting.  I guess 'parameterization'.

Mr G: Correct.

Well, as you all know, it didn't exactly happen like that.  What went wrong is that Mr G, for Round A, not only chose a 3-letter word, but he went so far as to tell us in advance that it was a simple 3-letter word.  I immediately felt that to correctly guess the word 'hat', given that we had been told in advance that the word was only 3 letters, would be so darned unimpressive that I couldn't bring myself to do it.  Therefore I had to choose another tack, as we have seen.

But my question now is this:  what if Round A had gone like I imagined it could?  What would people think?
 

all i can tell, Ju4osito, is what i am thinking now.
hmm
cross-timelines telepathy...

too paranormalized for me!

[ju4o]

what i am thinking now.
hmm
cross-timelines telepathy...

too paranormalized for me!

Thanks, great thought.  For me the only problem with it is that it does not help me continue my argument.

What I could do is offer an answer to my own question, and see how it goes.  To recap, here is the question: if the following diologue had popped up on the forum,

Mr G: OK folks, ready get set go.  For Round A the number is 14611498900249997356682144316044411105508199092393145435306

J4: Interesting.  I guess 'parameterization'.

Mr G: Correct.

what would people think?  Here is what I suggest some people might think:

It's absurd to say you "guessed" the word.  You couldn't possibly have done.  It's way beyond what one could call a "lucky guess".  Either Mr G gave you a hint, or you found a way of getting back from the number to the word.  There is no other realistic possibility.

[tally-ho!]

who possibly are your imagined  telepathicly challenged PARAMETERYSED people, Ju14?

[tally-ho!]

wait -
baited my homework, but -

i took it that G worked a method to get to a number and back to the word ?
otherwise what  all this complex method is for?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsy33p2Ir1w (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsy33p2Ir1w)

[Mr X]

hello.

the two words do seem to be synonymous.

supernatural is more of a spiritual thing though in its cruder manifestations it does also include the kinds of pandemony things

this could be the first definition. that idea that the same thing could have and crude and refined form is not new as it is and good repeatable idea.

what do you think of ghosts or demons merlin, any experience ?

lucky guesses are a thing that is possible, luck of the draw. or maybe and supernatural being is guiding everything, that there is no telepathy or pyschospace, just and supernatural force.
or maybe it just luck. or something else.

mr x.

ps. pandemonium is such an nice word.

ppss. i cant belief i listened to that whole tupe merlin, and i enjoyed it.

[ju4o]

I'm curious about why you 2 think 'supernatural' and 'paranormal' are synonymous.

Or are you just saying that supernatural=bunk and paranormal=bunk and therefore they are the same thing.

Note, by the way, that the words have quite different histories.  Supernatural comes from medieval theology and paranormal comes from 19th century psychical research.

Homeopathy is an example of something that many people (if they are at all interested in it and know something about it) might regard as paranormal but not supernatural.

[tally-ho!]

Ju40: Homeopathy is an example of something that many people (if they are at all interested in it and know something about it) might regard as paranormal but not supernatural.

how about Feng-Shwee?

the words have quite different histories.  Supernatural comes from medieval theology and paranormal comes from 19th century psychical research.

was about to write that history is irrelevant for a word's meaning, and bla bla, maximum for it's connotation, than i caught your drift.
soetimes i'm really challenged, or, how did X put it? "a sweet summer child".

excuseme, fantastic 4 .
i still have some to learn.

[Mr X]

j.

i dont think the bunk line, i find both interesting.

the words seem synonymous as thats how it seems. for a layman they appear to be interchangeable or pretty much the same. like they have become over time slang for each other. that is my guess.

from wiki -Paranormal Activity is a 2007 American found footage supernatural horror film

the different historys is interesting. paranormal seems to be the more popular word.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranormal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernatural
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preternatural
(some good reading, havent finished yet)
(on my google, paranormal came up straight away with the wiki page, supernatural went result pages deep without leading to the wiki page (due to the tv show by the same name))
(edit - adding "the" when googling supernatural fixes that. the supernatural.)

i read most of the homeopathy wiki page today. i have heard of the dilution part and it being discredited before though there were some interesting concepts in theory. is that something you belief in or have ever had paranormal experience from ?

mr x.

[ju4o]

Another thing worth looking up in wikipedia is cryptographic hash
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function

To solve the problems of Round 1, what Mr G valiantly attempted to design is essentially a cryptographic hash function.  Round 1 began approximately like this:

Mr X:  I have generated 4 random numbers between 1 and 50.  Anyone is welcome to guess them.

Mr G:  I guess 2, 12, 12 and 40.

Mr X:  Your guess for the first number is correct.

There is a problem with this, which is that Mr X could have had a secret plan to convince us that telepathy is real when it is not, and he could have said that Mr G's first guess was correct whatever Mr G had guessed.

There is also a mirror-image problem, which is that Mr X could have had a secret plan to convince us that telepathy does not exist even though it does, and he could have said that Mr G's guess was incorrect even if it was actually correct.

A nice way to solve both these problems is for Mr X to create for each secret number an object H, which has the following properties:

(1) it is easy for Mr X to create H and post it on the forum
(2) knowing H does not make it easier for anyone to guess the secret number
(3) anyone who makes a guess can easily ask H "is this number right or wrong?" and H will answer correctly.

This does open up the possibility that a determined guesser could guess every number between 1 and 50 in turn until he or she chances upon the correct number.  But if we vastly increase the range of the random numbers, so that instead of being between 1 and 50 the secret number is between 1 and a million (for example) then it becomes infeasible to systematically try every number in turn.

So that is exactly what Mr G did.  Noting that there are about a million words in English, he changed the game from a number-guessing game to a word-guessing game, and he showed how to create the object H with (hopefully) the properties listed above.