SmokeAndMirrors said:
That is internally contradictory. If something exists, it is not beyond nature. Nature may not work with exactly the same physical rules in all places in the universe (and almost certainly not if what we live in is, in fact, a multiverse). But it's still within nature, even if it's working in ways that seem strange to us. If it exists, it is natural, whether we understand it or not.
I have seen this line taken, but I think it's not so clear. Nature, as a concept, comes with a number of properties that are super-added to mere being or existence. To say that necessarily, for all X, if X exists, X is natural, is to do one of two things:
1. Assert that whatever properties are part of the concept "natural" are also properties of everything that exists, or
2. To simply coin another term for "being."
1 is a substantive, if unclear, claim (just what are the properties implied by the concept "natural"). 2 sounds closer to what you've said above, but it doesn't seem worthwhile to me to go about inventing new synonyms, especially in this case.
On the other hand, in a commonsense way, someone who claims that the supernatural is real is (usually) making an intelligible claim--something like angels, demons, ghosts, psychic powers, etc. are claimed to exist. Nature is usually thought to comprise the set of all things that don't behave in mathematically-predictable ways (though admittedly that is a 17th century revision of the concept of nature--still, it's the one that operates most commonly in Western culture).
SmokeAndMirrors said:
To my mind, as "psychology" is the name of things we don't understand well enough to call neurology, "supernatural" is the name of things we don't understand well enough to call psychology. I find that much more probable than that we are interfacing with some other reality. Some other reality may well exist -- in fact, some branches of quantum physics think that is quite likely. But as of yet, no modality has been proposed for how we might possibly be aware of that, were it true.
As far as "nothing but imaginary," well... how do you mean "nothing"? Ideas have shaped the entire world so extremely that we may ultimately wind up destroying it by accident. I take the imaginary quite seriously, personally. As far as I can tell, nothing changes the world quite so much. But perhaps such is the way of the artistic type.
A couple of suggestions about this:
1. The notion that psychology does, or will eventually, reduce to neurology is a common one, but there are some very good reasons to think such a program of reduction is not viable. That is, there are some very good reasons to think that even if we had perfect knowledge of the human brain, we would not be able to completely explain the mind thereby. I can expand on this if requested, though the gist of it is that we already have what should be sufficient knowledge of the brain, but the mind remains entirely mysterious.
2. My experience of the supernatural came after a long period of training in the occult. Most people you run into in occult circles are what I sometimes call "fluffy bunnies" who merely dabble. A few of us take the matter seriously and spend a few hours every day in meditation, prayer, and ceremony. After a decade of doing that with no discernible results, suddenly things started to happen. And to be clear, while I won't go into specifics, I do not mean things that could be a matter of easy misinterpretation or figments of my imagination. I mean stuff like spirits appearing physically and visibly to disclose information about the future that later proved correct, physical objects moving about the room on their own, coincidences so improbable as to strain credulity at any other explanation, and so on.
3. But you have a certain amount of insight here, in that occult phenomena begin in what we commonly call imagination. But imagination is not produced by the brain, exactly. It is a window onto another reality, and training it is the first order of business.
