I find conversation about religion and spirituality frequently made unnecessarily difficult by conflation of distinct and different topics and concepts.
Personally, I don't hold strong opinions one way or another on many of the points I'm about to discuss, but regardless, enjoy thinking, and chatting with friends about existential questions every now and then. My aim here is to tease apart and define some of points that I find people argue over, often without realising they're not on the same page.
Definition of a spirit:
So, I'd like to propose the following language to disambiguate spiritual and/or religious discussion, if not generally, at least for this discussion. I'm ambitiously aiming to un-fuzz this normally fuzzy topic.
While "spirit" is a ubiquitous and emotionally charged word, I invite the reader to leave behind their own preconceived personal definition, and sit beside me in my attempt to build shared definitions/understanding as close as possible to first principles.
Here's my proposal for definitions of some granular attributes of a "spirit":
- Effect
- A spirit may or may not have a material impact on our physical environment.
- A spirit may or may not have the capacity to control that impact.
- A spirit may or may not have limitless capacity to control their a limitless impact.
- A spirit's impact may or may not be constrained by normal material, physical, probabilistic constraints.
- A spirit may or may not be able to perfectly predict the impact of their actions or the actions that they cause.
- Cognition/Perception/Judgement
- A spirit may or may not have preferences and opinions about values, behaviors, groups, morality etc.
- Experience/Feeling
- A spirit may or may not have a sense of self, it may or may not be able to suffer or experience joy.
- A spirit's experience may be static, timeless and unchanging; or dynamic and flowing.
- A spirit's experience may be familiar, conceivable but unfamiliar, or inconceivable.
- Individuality
- A spirit may be singular, a collective or amorphous.
- Non-Physicality/Immateriality/Intangibility/Immeasurability
- Most of the time when someone is talking about something spiritual, they suggest that it requires faith. Taking something on faith is the same as taking something to be true despite a lack of evidence; or a lack of credible evidence. A lack of evidence is not the same as disproving something.
- Existence
- A spirit may be intrinsic, it may exist in a vacuum; by itself.
- A spirit may be an emergent property of matter, thoughts and/or culture.
- Spirits simply may not exist.
- Plane/Dimension
- A spirit may co-exist with us in temporally, spatial and morally.
- A spirit may have some mode of existence that exists outside of our comprehension of time, space, values and experience.
- It feels intellectually arrogant to me to suppose that you
- Cause
- A spirit may or may not be affected by, brought in or out of existence by material, thoughts, actions etc.
Occam's Razor is:
1. A probabilistic interpretation
2. Assumes you make reasonable assumptions
3. Assumes that your axioms are accurate
I don't think it is a convincing argument in unintuitive domains; or in domains where axioms are approximately assumptions.
Layers of belief
Based on the frequency with which it comes up, I am sure it has been addressed. Regardless, I am driven slightly mad by the argument that "no good god could exist if it created/allows suffering" (or similar). If you are willing to accept that a there exists some spirit with capability transcendent to matter and cause/effect (in ways relatable to a human), or existed before time. Then why is it any more likely that the same spirit's sense of suffering and/or morality is equal or even comparable to our own.
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