(June 4, 2020 at 7:22 pm)Belacqua Wrote:(June 4, 2020 at 10:26 am)polymath257 Wrote: And yet they fit the definition you gave.
No they certainly don't.
It's true we lack information about Julius Caesar's meal on the day before he was killed. But we are perfectly comfortable with all of the concepts involved. "Caesar," "meal," "day before," and "killed" are all things we comprehend. If you read what I said, it's clear that I'm not talking about that kind of thing.
"Neoliberal economics" is to "earthworms" as "X" is to "human beings."
The concept of neoliberal economics is entirely outside of what earthworms can grasp. It's not as if they lack some bit of information which they could discover if they knew where to look. It's entirely possible that there are all kinds of things which are, similarly, beyond what humans can grasp. Not because we lack some bit of information, but because our minds just can't do it.
If you don't like calling such things supernatural it's OK with me. But it's the way many other people use the word. William Blake, for example, personifies nature as Vala -- a name which refers to a veil. For him, nature is that veil over reality which is available only to our corporeal senses. He believes there is more to the world than that.
And there are certainly concepts in math that are beyond the human ability to comprehend: proofs that would take longer than the age of the universe to scan, concepts that are so complicated, they would need for storage than is available in the universe to store, etc.
Are such mathematical concepts 'supernatural'?
I could also believe that physics is complicated enough that there are aspects of the physical laws that, even if we understood the basic laws, we would never be able to understand the application in some complex situations.
Are such 'supernatural'?
Would neoliberal economics be 'supernatural' because an earthworm fails to be able to understand it? if so, that seems like a very strange use of the term.
For example, suppose there is a superintelligent race of aliens. They *have* done science and figured out some laws that humans could never grasp because of our puny brains. Are such laws 'supernatural'? Again, if so, it seems like a very strange use of the term, especially if a highly intelligent race could find and understand those laws using the scientific method.