Re:Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?
by blablabla123 on Monday December 27, 2021 @08:05AM
(#29702165)
That, also considering things like Gödel Incompleteness, Halting problem, P vs NP being so difficult, Emergence, divergences and intrinsically probabilistic theories in Physics: that already feels sufficiently counterintuitive and supernatural to me. At least there is a vast area of things not yet understood
Re:Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?
by nottorp on Monday December 27, 2021 @08:40AM
(#29702412)
> At least there is a vast area of things not yet understood
They key is to accept that there are phenomena we don't know enough about yet. There's no supernatural, just stuff that needs a couple more hundred years of research :)
Re:Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?
by NateEag on Monday December 27, 2021 @10:46AM
(#29703391)
If you don't understand it, how do you know it's natural?
Not saying it has to be supernatural, just that if you think it's not yet understood, being sure it's not supernatural seems like unfounded confidence.
Re:Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?
by akiselev on Monday December 27, 2021 @02:11PM
(#29705703)
That question is a pandora's box that can't be given the nuance it deserves in an HN comment so I'll leave you with the Plato encyclopedia entry on naturalism [1] which was a philosophical debate which wrestled with this very topic in the first half of the 20th century. The vast majority of scientists and philosophers default to the definition from physicalism [2]
Re:Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?
by yosito on Monday December 27, 2021 @02:55PM
(#29706125)
I think you've got it backwards. The default assumption is that only the natural world exists. If something is not understood, the assumption should be that it has natural causes. A supernatural cause would imply the existence of something outside of natural causes, and to assert that that something exists without being able to demonstrate it is where the unfounded confidence lies.
Re:Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?
by NateEag on Monday December 27, 2021 @07:25PM
(#29708699)
My point is not that the default assumption should be either the supernatural or the natural, but that perhaps actual agnosticism is the humble stance.
Re:Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?
by marcofatica on Monday December 27, 2021 @07:53AM
(#29702093)
I'm not sure I agree with this take.
> It is not composed of matter at all.
Is this not false? Maybe not at the level we can see with our human eyes, but any computer process does exist as matter, in the bits of code stored on the disk and the electrical circuits that execute it
Re:Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?
by Veen on Monday December 27, 2021 @08:59AM
(#29702549)
I think the point is that compuational processes are an emergent property of matter, but not matter. It's like how when I look at the plant on my desk, I see a green thing. The "experience of greenness" isn't composed of matter; it emerges as a result of the interaction of matter and energy in particular ways, but is not itself matter.
> We are about to study the idea of a computational process. Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.
> A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer's idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer's spells. They are carefully composed from symbolic expressions in arcane and esoteric programming languages that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform.
> A computational process, in a correctly working computer, executes programs precisely and accurately. Thus, like the sorcerer's apprentice, novice programmers must learn to understand and to anticipate the consequences of their conjuring. Even small errors (usually called bugs or glitches) in programs can have complex and unanticipated consequences.
I do think the supernatural exists but simply as perceived emergent properties of natual systems. For example, most of us have experienced love and might describe it as a supernatural experience. That is a real experience to most of us. Yet we know that in reality, the experience we had emerged from a complex set of natual systems (hormones, brainwaves, etc) that are far beyond our understanding.
So to answer your question, my spirital practices are things that increase my wellbeing and bring about these supernatural experiences.
Regularly: breath-focused meditation, time in nature, swimming laps, sex, burning incense, journaling/reflection.
Occasionally: fasting, ayahuasca, solitude retreats.