Saturday, August 21, 2021

When Science Resembles Sorcery

Unfamiliar technology and a truly supernatural act of sorcery could be visually indistinguishable if they manifested in certain ways.  This fact has been popularized in the last decade by films like Zack Snyder's Justice League and Thor and has even shown up in places like the Baba Yaga DLC for Rise of the Tomb Raider (I analyze this theme in my review here [1]), but it has likely been pondered by many people from differing worldviews long before cinema was even invented as an artistic medium.  It is a truth relevant to how looking at something does not truly confirm if it is or is not even made of matter, made of some immaterial substance like a hallucination within one's consciousness, or made of something else that is nonphysical, much less if it even truly exists.

Certain kind of technological or even natural phenomena that take place without artificial technology could look like something that would not take place if the material world was left to itself.  Inversely, a supernatural event could have the appearance of something unfolding because of the uninfluenced laws of nature.  The spectacle would look the same as either case.  Only the exact nature of the event would differ.  How could one tell the difference?  It would be impossible: only baseline facts about how logical axioms must by necessity apply in either situation and about how only logically possible events can even take place could be known.  In other words, only logical and conceptual truths about what one sees can truly be proven.

Those in some cultures might assume this ambiguity is evidence that a given event has supernatural origins, and those in contemporary Western culture might assume that this is evidence for at least a naturalistic conception of how to use the scientific method (naturalism is false metaphysically, but someone could even recognize the immateriality of things like logic, consciousness, and space and still think that science as an epistemological approach has nothing to do with observations of supernatural phenomena), but anyone who assumes either way is a fool.  This is not evidence for supernaturalism or the splendor of nature; it is proof that visual perceptions do not prove anything at all except that someone is seeing something their sight can tell them almost nothing about when it comes to its ultimate nature.

Some events that seem scientific could turn out to be almost purely supernatural and some events that seem supernatural could ultimately be scientific.  Logic reveals that perception alone cannot prove which category something falls into.  Many people do not even appreciate just how difficult it is to prove the existence of any kind of matter without also leaping into the fallacious belief that matter cannot be fully known to exist.  That any matter at all is real is something many people take for granted on faith, as opposed to admitting that basic perception alone does not and cannot prove that any sort of physical body for one's consciousness, stimuli outside of the body, and larger environment that holdd those stimuli exists.

What can be proven quite easily is that, unless logic fully established othereise, either a supernatural or scientific nature could lurk behind an observed event or object--or even both together, intertwined as the immaterial and material are in other ways, such as how a physical body cannot have thoughts without a nonphysical consciousness to inhabit it.  The numerous technological events of everyday life seem to be material in nature, certainly, but it is always possible for a technological or broader scientific feat to only be accomplished because a law of physics like gravity has more in common with the supernatural than might be expected.  Only a slave to preferences and assumptions would believe otherwise even when corrected.


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