Explaining supernatural (or an attempt of doing so, featuring you)

[Tempokai]

My take on supernatural, written in 1AM instead of sleeping: it exists, but people literally "grow up" from the unstable reality it provides. Most grow up early, with few being unstable sometimes throughout their lives.

That's why there's ghost sightings, unexplained anomalies, disappearances that can't be explained with science, etc., given that the natural instability happens so rare it is basically an exception that proves the rule. Stable reality is stable because it works in hidden rules.

Supernatural breaks those just enough in a small area to affect the person bordering instability to mess with them, and if it fails it is never seen again until the person is unstable again, which may or not happen in their whole life.

The more person doesn't have an anchor in reality, the more supernatural their reality will become. If that person is surrounded by mentally sane and anchored in reality people, the reality keeps those rule stable. The person just looks mentally ill, and we can heal it using the hidden rules (e.g. psychology and drugs and whatever with hardline correlations and causations) using the science, the closest framework that got into explaining the universal rules.

When the people start believing that something is such en masse, that thing will happen, becomes the changed rule of the world, until outsider comes and restores it with superior stability of the reality (aka superior logic that correlates to hidden rules).

Supernatural instability often is an entity(-ies) that embodies the idea of something the human can comprehend, twisting it into incomprehensible ways of interpreting it, that not any stable person could accept it as a rule.

The hidden rules are ineffable, once they're written down they don't explain what truly happened. The rules that can be spoken are not the eternal rules. You can't simply bruteforce them into instability however you like. More likely than not you'll go insane trying to comprehend everything, and your changed supernatural reality will not affect the stable reality one bit, unless you force everyone to believe like you.


I want to know about your takes about supernatural. This is a topic that really interests me outside fiction, and this is what I "understand" about supernatural.

 

[RepresentingEnvy]

I personally don't believe in the supernatural. Not to say that it doesn't exist, but I have never experienced something that I would describe as supernatural. Though, I do find it to be interesting in fiction.

 

[Madkins]

Mankind has always strived to answer the "Tough" questions of life.
Why do bad things happen?
Why is there suffering?
Why do bad people win?
There is a lack of understanding when it comes to the fact that morals are not agreed upon worldwide, therefore easy answers are sought in place of assigning blame to oneself or another.
People have a tendency to seek easy answers over trying to understand the reality of a situation. This doesn't mean it's necessarily their fault, it can come from trauma, or upbringing, and even culture. Even as simple as a need to fit into a particular group.

You hear a bump in the night, and your brain can't comprehend why or how... It may assign the label ghost.
You hear a scream in the woods at night... Must be the boogey man.

Humans evolved over many millennia to naturally be willing to believe another person over the experience of themselves. This is of course barring things like schizophrenia.
The need to belong is a reliable way to make others forgo critical thinking for a natural evolutionary instinct.

Before the discovery of "Rogue Waves" People truly believed that ships disappearing at sea was due to sea monsters. That's why they decorate the old maps. No one said this was fantasy due to the lack of a better option, and the need to be seen as a legitimate seafarer.

There are literally hundreds of billions of cameras in the world currently and there is no proof of supernatural events, just Hollywood magic. The easy way to distinguish whether a story is a lie or not is to see if someone tries to make money from it. There's always a book to sell.

Aliens (At last the visiting earth kind) are supernatural as well, physics says this concept is 100% impossible. The rules of thermodynamics also say that ghosts are impossible.

 

[TheKillingAlice]

My all-time go-to answer for anything supernatural, as well as theological, has always been and will always be: I believe in anything and nothing at the same time.
In my eyes, if something doesn't want to be found, it will not be found. There can be no absolute evidence of something "not" existing if you can't even tell where you would need to look for it.
At the same time, I wouldn't treat these topics as if they definitely existed. I'm just open to the idea that they could - while remaining sceptical, as I would be with anything non-supernatural that someone's trying to feed me as well.
Mankind, in general, has always sought for something better than themselves; something bigger than themselves. Wherever you look in this world, no matter how much people have been connected or disconnected, you will find different versions of Gods or higher beings, looking over or even punishing the people. Since turning to an all-knowing, all-seeing, omnipotent being is something that gives you hope in the darkest of times - and if things don't turn out well, you don't have to blame yourself, you can simply curse your God for failing you. I believe that is an innate part of human nature.
The same goes for any derivative concept, like magic, or more modern beings like vampires. Bad things must have been done by monsters, because it was easier to pin it on a being with no shape, than to believe your friendly neighbor could whip out his shovel and deck you.
At the same time, I like to belive that some of these stories are rooted in some truth. But who knows about that, right?

 

[AliceMoonvale]

When a big spooky ghost decides to show up in front of a big group of teens with their iphones and they record it in decent quality, maybe I'll believe.

Tired of evidence of things like aliens, big foot and ghosts being in 240p despite technological progress. Especially now it being the year of our lord Kirbo, 2026.

I need to see shit caught in 4k HD.

 

[LiteraryWho]

If the supernatural existed, it would be the natural, and some mega corporation would be selling it at Walmart.

 

[Anemic_Vampire]

written in 1AM

If you had waited two more hours, you could have met the 3AM ghost!

your friendly neighbor could whip out his shovel and deck you.

Sus, coming from a person called Killing Alice...

I believe supernatural can't happen. I don't really understand how it could exist or work in reality, therefore it can't happen, if that makes sense.

Like, for example, if vampires actually existed on our planet, and if they turned at least one person into a vampire per month or something. Or if, vampires infrequently killed a human for blood, there would be a sharp and noticeable decline in population. I can't do math, but Google says, at this rate, it will take less than 5 years, or a decade at a slower rate, before the whole population is either turned into vampires or are dead.

There is the thing about vampire hunters, but let's ignore them for a second. Or let's ignore them forever.

So far, humanity has survived for millions of years and still going, so that means vampires can't realistically exist.

 

[JayMark]

I'm naturally super.

 

[TheKillingAlice]

Like, for example, if vampires actually existed on our planet, and if they turned at least one person into a vampire per month or something. Or if, vampires infrequently killed a human for blood, there would be a sharp and noticeable decline in population.

But there have been, like, serial killers, doing their things for years in the same area, but nobody noticed. People vanish without a trace on the daily, and we just sleep on it - that is, in fact, a thing. So that doesn't work out. They could also live on donations or not kill people; maybe they really can influence your mind? Or take people so drunk, they don't notice?
Like, I'm just spit-balling here, but you get what I mean. It wouldn't actually be that hard.

 

[RepresentingEnvy]

So far, humanity has survived for millions of years and still going, so that means vampires can't realistically exist.

Yes, tell them that. It will make them all more surprised later. Good Duchess!

 

[Rosica]

Why do you think Asians don't age? They're vegan vampires.

 

[Nevafrost]

I believe supernatural entities made from smokeless fire do exist. Got firsthand experience lol

 

[OmegaC]

I have a pretty interesting theory about this. It's all about dreams.

People often think dreams are illusory, but in reality, the brain still receives input just like when we're awake. It's only illusory in the sense that the input doesn't come from the real world, it's generated by the brain itself.

I've encountered many instances where I simply couldn't remember whether a memory was a dream or reality. Memories sometimes overlap like that.

And the brain is heavily influenced by expectations (don't underestimate this). For example, in the case of sleep paralysis, a timid person might see a demon, but for me (who's chill about sleep paralysis), it's simply a sensation of my body floating in mid-air (like an out-of-body experience).

So my best conclusion is that the dream was recorded by the brain into the memory region associated with the real world. The more spiritually inclined a person is, the more likely they are to believe in it, and the more they believe, the more the brain shows them that thing, it's a vicious cycle.

But in the end, I can't be sure that the supernatural isn't real; it's just my hypothesis to make sense of it all.

Trivia: If you break down the term "supernatural" into "super" and "natural", philosophically speaking, this corresponds to Ontological Dualism or Ontological Pluralism.

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Spoiler: My Baby

How to Gaslight YHWH

 

[ShrimpShady]

Specifically for ghosts, but applies to other supernatural phenomenon as well (such as aliens and cryptids), I won't believe they're real until someone records one with a high definition camera, approaches it, and interacts with it directly.

Oh you saw a spooky lady in the woods, took a 2 minute shaky cam liveleak video, and then ran away the second she turned to look at you? Okay, buddy. Try holding it in a rear naked choke next time

 

[JayMark]

 

[CountVanBadger]

I attribute all supernatural events to the duck that follows me everywhere. I've never seen it, but that's because it's always standing behind me. Everyone else says it isn't there, but that's because it's bribing them not to blow its cover.

It thinks its so sneaky, but I've got it all figured out. Things moving when I'm not looking? The duck moved them. Bite marks appearing all over my body while I sleep? The duck did it. Unexplained garlic bread in my kitchen? T H E D U C K H U N G E R S. Corpses of long dead relatives I never knew I had suddenly materializing in my living room to whisper secrets about what really happens after death and the unspeakable things that control the universe? The duck used ancestry.com to look up my family history, duck up their graves, invented Star Trek-style teleportation, and also it's a ventriloquist.

I'm going to catch it someday. That's why at random points throughout the day, I'll suddenly spin around and yell "GOT YOU!" It hasn't worked yet, and I just got my twelfth restraining order, but that stupid bird has to let its guard down eventually, and when it does I'm going to use it to make a duckducken (that's when you cram a duck inside of itself and then cook it until all that's left is a fine powdery ash).

I hate that duck.