Supernatural experiences - an aspie thing?

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Very interesting reading:

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-11-g ... waken.html

ALL parts in science require leaps in the imagination.
This is not to discredit science or the scientific method at all.
The scientific method is the best thing we've got to use to address reality with our conscious thought.

As time passes science provides us more mental models and explanations for what we observe in reality, but at the same time reality leaps ever further away from our conscious reach.
With every answer comes many more questions. It is all about the exploration of the unknown.
To think of the unknown as something toxic due to some label like "supernatural" is not productive at all. Our definition of what is natural is no more valid than our definition of reality.

The systematic categorization of other labels such as "ghost" and "god" are also not productive.
Stigma over words doesn't belong in science.

Also, I wanted to add that all aspects of reality, or perception of reality cannot be reproduced at will in a lab.

Here's a crude example. If you experienced the perception of a lunar eclipse, and then told other people who did not experience it, then they may ask you to prove it. In theory, test equipment could record information so that a lunar eclipse could be perceived by others and confirmed as a fact. However, once you are put into a lab environment you have no way to cause a lunar eclipse to happen, even though it had happened before, and you perceived it.

Don't get distracted by technicalities of my example. The point is that not everything in reality happens in a way that makes it easy for scientists to test or confirm. That's a wrong assumption. Another wrong assumption is that our test equipment can discern everything that happens in reality.

We only perceive a small percentage of what happens in reality. Our test equipment expands this range of perception for us. As our technology improves the range grows. The point of this is that there's still a lot more out there we cannot perceive. A good scientist will admit this.

Very well said.

Without detracting from your post I must just say I don't see why the terms "supernatural", "god", "ghosts" should have a stigma attached to them?

Moving on from that small detail, the link you make between the imagination and science is very much the case. The boring type of science is that which trudges myopically forward through increments of statistical probabilities; its the rather safe path taken by large swathes of acadaemia. The truly exciting science is the crazy variety where the "mad professor" postulates some radically extreme hypothesis (with a large dose of imagination implicit therein) and then sets forth to prove it. Every so often the said "mad professor" succeeds an completely breaks the scientific mould. Galileo, Newton, Einstein are some such people.

The current theories postulating the coexistence of multiple universes in other dimensions is the current fringe of science. If anything sounds "supernatural" this does; supernatural in the sense that if some sort of wormhole opened up and threatened to suck one of us in we might be regarded as slightly mad when reporting the incident to our fellow humans. Of course, this has not happened to me, but I provide this fictitious situation to illustrate how that which we do not know and understand may manifest in seemingly "supernatural" ways. If it did, any denial of it would simply be a refusal to acknowledge physical phenomena, which would be decidedly unscientific.

There are plenty of examples of scientists rejecting things as totally impossible - one example relatively recently being the idea that planes could fly. This was scoffed at and dismissed. Ditto germs. And many other things that are now accepted as commonplace scientific realities. Every generation, there are people who think there will be no more surprising discoveries. But there are also always people who keep an open mind and support the search for new ways to explore the frontiers of potential new discovery.

History suggests it is better to keep an open mind.

I wasn't even referring to fringe science.
I was referring to physics established 80 years ago.

jabberwokky is the one attributing the label 'supernatural' to the unknown, not me.. and definitely not scientists.

as i said, scientists use methodological naturalism which assumes everything is naturalistic in cause, because this is what has shown to be true time and time again.
if god/angels/ghosts whatever were discovered to be real, that would cause us to rethink everything.

to be clear we're not talking about a truth claim that the 'supernatural' doesn't exist, although the onus is most definitely on the one claiming it does exist to prove it.

You can't just redefine the word supernatural to fit your needs either.. the multiverse hypothesis for instance, is not as you say 'supernatural', it is an implication of various theories in physics and unlike supernatural claims is well-motivated and makes sense in a naturalistic worldview.


also to address some of u guys' points, if things like angels and divine intervention were shown to be, they wouldn't 'become natural', they would still be supernatural, they would just be accepted.
everything we see is what you would expect from a naturalistic reality. you would not expect angels or gods to arise by 'natural' means.

Let me ask a question... Can a cow jump 8 or 9 feet straight up from a standing position?

If the answer is no, I think I experienced something supernatural.