Are we supposed to believe we are ghosts?

[rousseau]

That there's both spirit (or ghost if you prefer) and matter is extremely intuitive and FAR more obvious-seeming than either "there's nothing but bodies" or "there's nothing but spirit". When we take experience as presented... before applying a buttload of philosophical and scientific abstraction to it... the fact is that subjective experiencing doesn't feel material at all. Our everyday experience (before trying to negate the experience with philosophy) is as a kind of immaterial entity inside the head looking out through our eyes at a material world "out there".

So, no, you're not "supposed to believe we are ghosts". You just automatically feel like one, as a human being, until you've applied abstract thought and convinced yourself that the experience isn't correct.

Which raises the (great) question: why does poetry, art, music and the like emerge in almost every culture? If we're just a conglomeration of atoms without free-will, why don't even Atheists act this way?

The answer is emergence. Emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviours which emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole. The process requires no pre-existing immaterial components.

My comment wasn't suggesting immaterial components, I think you're missing the gist of my point.

 

[Hermit]

That there's both spirit (or ghost if you prefer) and matter is extremely intuitive and FAR more obvious-seeming than either "there's nothing but bodies" or "there's nothing but spirit". When we take experience as presented... before applying a buttload of philosophical and scientific abstraction to it... the fact is that subjective experiencing doesn't feel material at all. Our everyday experience (before trying to negate the experience with philosophy) is as a kind of immaterial entity inside the head looking out through our eyes at a material world "out there".

So, no, you're not "supposed to believe we are ghosts". You just automatically feel like one, as a human being, until you've applied abstract thought and convinced yourself that the experience isn't correct.

Which raises the (great) question: why does poetry, art, music and the like emerge in almost every culture? If we're just a conglomeration of atoms without free-will, why don't even Atheists act this way?

The answer is emergence. Emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviours which emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole. The process requires no pre-existing immaterial components.

My comment wasn't suggesting immaterial components, I think you're missing the gist of my point.

Obviously. What is the gist of your point?

Mine was that we have become more than a conglomeration of atoms by the process of emergence.

 

[rousseau]

That there's both spirit (or ghost if you prefer) and matter is extremely intuitive and FAR more obvious-seeming than either "there's nothing but bodies" or "there's nothing but spirit". When we take experience as presented... before applying a buttload of philosophical and scientific abstraction to it... the fact is that subjective experiencing doesn't feel material at all. Our everyday experience (before trying to negate the experience with philosophy) is as a kind of immaterial entity inside the head looking out through our eyes at a material world "out there".

So, no, you're not "supposed to believe we are ghosts". You just automatically feel like one, as a human being, until you've applied abstract thought and convinced yourself that the experience isn't correct.

Which raises the (great) question: why does poetry, art, music and the like emerge in almost every culture? If we're just a conglomeration of atoms without free-will, why don't even Atheists act this way?

The answer is emergence. Emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviours which emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole. The process requires no pre-existing immaterial components.

My comment wasn't suggesting immaterial components, I think you're missing the gist of my point.

Obviously. What is the gist of your point?

Mine was that we have become more than a conglomeration of atoms by the process of emergence.

It was along the lines of scientific reasoning not being adequate to explain human experience. Of course, full materialism, that's fine. But we aren't cold machines who always do the most rational thing, we also have what one could call 'spiritual' motives.

Which speaks to Abaddon's comment that the 'spiritual' nature of our existence is immediately obvious, and maybe it's even somewhat true.

Sure, I'm not going to argue that I literally have a soul and am going to heaven, but that's not the interesting part about being human.

 

[Hermit]

Of course, full materialism, that's fine. But we aren't cold machines who always do the most rational thing, we also have what one could call 'spiritual' motives..

Emergence would cover that.

 

[steve_bank]

The human spirit and a disembodied spirit are two different things.

Aert, muisc, and poetry are expressions of the 'human spirit' or soul. Where soul does not refer to anything supernatural.


Human experience boils down to the inanimate cells in our brains. Emergent properties IMO do not apply. Even if we can not yet model it, it all comes down to our brains and the way they work.the way our brains are wired.

That relgion, supernatural beliefs, and artistic expression exists in all cultures says something about how are brains work.

 

[atrib]

It was along the lines of scientific reasoning not being adequate to explain human experience.

Not fully, not yet anyway. We understand how our senses interact with the external world (sight, sound, smell, touch and taste) and these interactions can be described using our current knowledge, at the sub-atomic level through the Standard Model, and at the macroscopic emergent levels of chemistry and biology. What we don't presently understand is how the collection of about 100 billion cells that make up our nervous system parse the data from these interactions to develop a model of the external world in our heads.

Of course, full materialism, that's fine. But we aren't cold machines who always do the most rational thing, we also have what one could call 'spiritual' motives.

Every human is unique and has lived a unique life that has shaped and programmed their nervous system in subtly to significantly different ways. We experience the world in (subtly to significantly) different ways and respond to these experiences in (subtly to significantly) different ways. There is no ghost in the machine, there is just a sophisticated neural network that behaves in ways we don't fully understand and cannot always predict.

 

[Jarhyn]

It was along the lines of scientific reasoning not being adequate to explain human experience.

Not fully, not yet anyway. We understand how our senses interact with the external world (sight, sound, smell, touch and taste) and these interactions can be described using our current knowledge, at the sub-atomic level through the Standard Model, and at the macroscopic emergent levels of chemistry and biology. What we don't presently understand is how the collection of about 100 billion cells that make up our nervous system parse the data from these interactions to develop a model of the external world in our heads.

Of course, full materialism, that's fine. But we aren't cold machines who always do the most rational thing, we also have what one could call 'spiritual' motives.

Every human is unique and has lived a unique life that has shaped and programmed their nervous system in subtly to significantly different ways. We experience the world in (subtly to significantly) different ways and respond to these experiences in (subtly to significantly) different ways. There is no ghost in the machine, there is just a sophisticated neural network that behaves in ways we don't fully understand and cannot always predict.

It was along the lines of scientific reasoning not being adequate to explain human experience.

Not fully, not yet anyway. We understand how our senses interact with the external world (sight, sound, smell, touch and taste) and these interactions can be described using our current knowledge, at the sub-atomic level through the Standard Model, and at the macroscopic emergent levels of chemistry and biology. What we don't presently understand is how the collection of about 100 billion cells that make up our nervous system parse the data from these interactions to develop a model of the external world in our heads.

Of course, full materialism, that's fine. But we aren't cold machines who always do the most rational thing, we also have what one could call 'spiritual' motives.

Every human is unique and has lived a unique life that has shaped and programmed their nervous system in subtly to significantly different ways. We experience the world in (subtly to significantly) different ways and respond to these experiences in (subtly to significantly) different ways. There is no ghost in the machine, there is just a sophisticated neural network that behaves in ways we don't fully understand and cannot always predict.

The brain is the ghost soul in the machine. It also happens entirely to be a machine.

I would as soon expect that IF someone is dying and getting their neural graph identity shoved into some other thing in the host universe --going to "heaven"-- the spinning up an observer account/ghost, even then, is not a "soul".

In that case of relationship it would be "ghost is to soul as drone is to pilot"

 

[skepticalbip]

..

There is no ghost in the machine, there is just a sophisticated neural network that behaves in ways we don't fully understand and cannot always predict.

Well said. One of the big differences I have noted among different people is that there are some who are comfortable with accepting that there are things that humans don't understand and then there are some that are made uneasy by the unknown so they lean on the "spiritual" or even the metaphysical as an answer to banish the 'unknown'.

 

[rousseau]

It was along the lines of scientific reasoning not being adequate to explain human experience.

Not fully, not yet anyway. We understand how our senses interact with the external world (sight, sound, smell, touch and taste) and these interactions can be described using our current knowledge, at the sub-atomic level through the Standard Model, and at the macroscopic emergent levels of chemistry and biology. What we don't presently understand is how the collection of about 100 billion cells that make up our nervous system parse the data from these interactions to develop a model of the external world in our heads.

Of course, full materialism, that's fine. But we aren't cold machines who always do the most rational thing, we also have what one could call 'spiritual' motives.

Every human is unique and has lived a unique life that has shaped and programmed their nervous system in subtly to significantly different ways. We experience the world in (subtly to significantly) different ways and respond to these experiences in (subtly to significantly) different ways. There is no ghost in the machine, there is just a sophisticated neural network that behaves in ways we don't fully understand and cannot always predict.

No argument from me there. Maybe I'm not conveying my meaning well, which is that human behaviour isn't entirely materialistic, or incentivized to power. A part of physically derived behaviour is 'spiritual' behaviour. In theory it can be traced back to an interplay between internal systems, but it still has an 'otherworldly' quality nonetheless.

This is why religion exists, because our experience is very 'spirit' like, and many of us aim for high ideals, not just to gain power and reproduce.

I'm far beyond claiming that there is an actual ghost in the machine. It's more like an explanation of why the concept of a soul exists in the first place. Physically it's clearly nonsense, but in practice human culture is tightly linked to the concept of spirituality. That is so for a reason.

 

[atrib]

A part of physically derived behaviour is 'spiritual' behaviour. In theory it can be traced back to an interplay between internal systems, but it still has an 'otherworldly' quality nonetheless.

What do you mean by spiritual and otherworldly?

 

[abaddon]

Which raises the (great) question: why does poetry, art, music and the like emerge in almost every culture? If we're just a conglomeration of atoms without free-will, why don't even Atheists act this way?

I'm not sure what "act this way" means here. Act what way? Act as of they're "just atoms"?

If that's what you're asking, I think it's impossible to act that way. The emergent properties are not less real than the particles.

Reductionism by definition is a stripping away. It's a useful tool but whatever descriptions are necessarily incomplete. There is no one who is "just atoms" or "just a brain". Anyone who talks like that is someone who wants over-simplicity so that feeling knowledgeable comes easy (and probably there's a fantasy about control over nature when people think like this and try, tragically, to "act this way").

 

[abaddon]

Which speaks to Abaddon's comment that the 'spiritual' nature of our existence is immediately obvious, and maybe it's even somewhat true.

I was trying to say it's not stupid to perceive 'experiencing' as the immaterial property of a "spirit" inside a body since that's our experience. It might be wrong, but it's not stupid.

In theory of mind, physicalism is the most popular attempt at an explanation but 1) it's not successful and the declaration that "we're close" is just optimism; and 2) the other explanations deserve better than only being jeered at. With the exception of substance dualism... haha. That theory is done and over. But a quite serious, and non-religious, alternative is property dualism. I'm not arguing for it. I'm just saying that how experiencing does not feel material at all has led to people taking our experience of ourselves as seriously as should be done.

 

[rousseau]

A part of physically derived behaviour is 'spiritual' behaviour. In theory it can be traced back to an interplay between internal systems, but it still has an 'otherworldly' quality nonetheless.

What do you mean by spiritual and otherworldly?

I think if you take a closer look at my post you'll see that the answer is already in there.

I get that if you analyze most forms of human behavior it can be reduced to some form of evolutionary fitness yadda yadda. But I genuinely believe that there are many of us who actually want to help others, or make the world a more beautiful place, without any expectation of reward or gain. People who want to transcend the limitations of human nature and society, to 'go beyond' as it were.

That's certainly not everyone. But I think it's true that our cultures aren't entirely about cold rationalism and efficiency, they're also about beauty, friendship, love, sharing, etc etc. Really you can call that whatever you want, spirituality or otherwise, but when you break it down human experience feels like more than the sum of it's parts. Like there is something more there than pure survival.

And that's why so many of us have come to believe in a literal soul, and that humans are somewhat God-like. Because immediate perception suggests that this is the case. What I'm suggesting is that this perception isn't exactly wrong, it's just an incorrect interpretation of the source of the perception.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

A part of physically derived behaviour is 'spiritual' behaviour. In theory it can be traced back to an interplay between internal systems, but it still has an 'otherworldly' quality nonetheless.

What do you mean by spiritual and otherworldly?

I think if you take a closer look at my post you'll see that the answer is already in there.

I get that if you analyze most forms of human behavior it can be reduced to some form of evolutionary fitness yadda yadda. But I genuinely believe that there are many of us who actually want to help others, or make the world a more beautiful place, without any expectation of reward or gain. People who want to transcend the limitations of human nature and society, to 'go beyond' as it were.

That's certainly not everyone. But I think it's true that our cultures aren't entirely about cold rationalism and efficiency, they're also about beauty, friendship, love, sharing, etc etc. Really you can call that whatever you want, spirituality or otherwise, but when you break it down human experience feels like more than the sum of it's parts. Like there is something more there than pure survival.

And that's why so many of us have come to believe in a literal soul, and that humans are somewhat God-like. Because immediate perception suggests that this is the case. What I'm suggesting is that this perception isn't exactly wrong, it's just an incorrect interpretation of the source of the perception.

Why can't we just attribute those behaviors to natural selection? Humans are each unique. You can distinguish each one from the whole. Is that something spiritual or just a behavior that has been presently selected for because it has survival value?

What we do not know is how those atoms all work together. That's all. But some of us want to give it a spooky quality. That behavior has also been presently selected for. Altruism has been selected for as has been not killing our children. But some people do kill their children so the behavior is still present. Our brains are really different and unique, same as our outward appearances. We just don't know how to look at that brain, how to sense it, like we observe ourselves externally. I don't think there is anything spooky or otherworldly about that although I totally get where you are coming from. It's a very empirical matter and for the more sane among us has nothing to do with ghosts or believing in ghosts.

 

[bilby]

That there's both spirit (or ghost if you prefer) and matter is extremely intuitive and FAR more obvious-seeming than either "there's nothing but bodies" or "there's nothing but spirit". When we take experience as presented... before applying a buttload of philosophical and scientific abstraction to it... the fact is that subjective experiencing doesn't feel material at all. Our everyday experience (before trying to negate the experience with philosophy) is as a kind of immaterial entity inside the head looking out through our eyes at a material world "out there".

So, no, you're not "supposed to believe we are ghosts". You just automatically feel like one, as a human being, until you've applied abstract thought and convinced yourself that the experience isn't correct.

Which raises the (great) question: why does poetry, art, music and the like emerge in almost every culture? If we're just a conglomeration of atoms without free-will, why don't even Atheists act this way?

Because, like theists, atheists are in possession of fully functional endocrine systems.

And who says we are just a conglomeration of atoms without free-will? Leaving aside the 'free-will' question (which has been beaten to death on these boards, and still has people attacking its corpse), these conglomerations of atoms exhibit a large number of emergent properties that are hugely interesting.

The idea that atheists think people are just conglomerations of atoms is an old and particularly vicious slur. You don't need to have an immortal soul for me to care more about you than about a cow, or a tree, or a rock.

 

[bilby]

A part of physically derived behaviour is 'spiritual' behaviour. In theory it can be traced back to an interplay between internal systems, but it still has an 'otherworldly' quality nonetheless.

What do you mean by spiritual and otherworldly?

I think if you take a closer look at my post you'll see that the answer is already in there.

I get that if you analyze most forms of human behavior it can be reduced to some form of evolutionary fitness yadda yadda. But I genuinely believe that there are many of us who actually want to help others, or make the world a more beautiful place, without any expectation of reward or gain. People who want to transcend the limitations of human nature and society, to 'go beyond' as it were.

That's certainly not everyone. But I think it's true that our cultures aren't entirely about cold rationalism and efficiency, they're also about beauty, friendship, love, sharing, etc etc. Really you can call that whatever you want, spirituality or otherwise, but when you break it down human experience feels like more than the sum of it's parts. Like there is something more there than pure survival.

And that's why so many of us have come to believe in a literal soul, and that humans are somewhat God-like. Because immediate perception suggests that this is the case. What I'm suggesting is that this perception isn't exactly wrong, it's just an incorrect interpretation of the source of the perception.

It's natural selection in a social species with hugely complex endocrine interactions that are outside, but both driven by, and drivers of, neural processes.

If you want your genes to propagate through the population, it's not enough to understand that you made an error; You need to also feel bad about it, perhaps guilty about it.

It's not enough to notice that that person is sexually attractive, because you will be outcompeted for their attention by someone who both notices and falls madly in love.

It's not enough to understand that it's better for your kids if you do X, Y, or Z; to be competitive, you need to be irrationally passionate about their success.

Of course, we all know of situations that get very ugly due to people overdoing these emotional states (and millions of others). But underdoing them isn't evolutionarily successful, or at least, wasn't for most of social primate evolution.

None of this is a mystery - but most people are unaware of it, and prefer to think that it's some kind of external influence (which from a purely neurological perspective, our brains are correct to assess that it is).

Our brains and their workings are constantly subjected to external influences that are entirely driven by a desire for us to succeed as individuals. But those influences, despite being external to the brain, are not external to our bodies. They are our endocrine systems, and while it is fashionable to pretend that civilised people are now risen above such base influences, they are nevertheless a massive driver of our behaviour - perhaps even more important than our brains.

Your brain constantly claims to be in complete control. But brains are lying bastards, and you shouldn't trust yours, particularly when it's big-noting itself.

 

[rousseau]

A part of physically derived behaviour is 'spiritual' behaviour. In theory it can be traced back to an interplay between internal systems, but it still has an 'otherworldly' quality nonetheless.

What do you mean by spiritual and otherworldly?

I think if you take a closer look at my post you'll see that the answer is already in there.

I get that if you analyze most forms of human behavior it can be reduced to some form of evolutionary fitness yadda yadda. But I genuinely believe that there are many of us who actually want to help others, or make the world a more beautiful place, without any expectation of reward or gain. People who want to transcend the limitations of human nature and society, to 'go beyond' as it were.

That's certainly not everyone. But I think it's true that our cultures aren't entirely about cold rationalism and efficiency, they're also about beauty, friendship, love, sharing, etc etc. Really you can call that whatever you want, spirituality or otherwise, but when you break it down human experience feels like more than the sum of it's parts. Like there is something more there than pure survival.

And that's why so many of us have come to believe in a literal soul, and that humans are somewhat God-like. Because immediate perception suggests that this is the case. What I'm suggesting is that this perception isn't exactly wrong, it's just an incorrect interpretation of the source of the perception.

It's natural selection in a social species with hugely complex endocrine interactions that are outside, but both driven by, and drivers of, neural processes.

If you want your genes to propagate through the population, it's not enough to understand that you made an error; You need to also feel bad about it, perhaps guilty about it.

It's not enough to notice that that person is sexually attractive, because you will be outcompeted for their attention by someone who both notices and falls madly in love.

It's not enough to understand that it's better for your kids if you do X, Y, or Z; to be competitive, you need to be irrationally passionate about their success.

Of course, we all know of situations that get very ugly due to people overdoing these emotional states (and millions of others). But underdoing them isn't evolutionarily successful, or at least, wasn't for most of social primate evolution.

None of this is a mystery - but most people are unaware of it, and prefer to think that it's some kind of external influence (which from a purely neurological perspective, our brains are correct to assess that it is).

Our brains and their workings are constantly subjected to external influences that are entirely driven by a desire for us to succeed as individuals. But those influences, despite being external to the brain, are not external to our bodies. They are our endocrine systems, and while it is fashionable to pretend that civilised people are now risen above such base influences, they are nevertheless a massive driver of our behaviour - perhaps even more important than our brains.

Your brain constantly claims to be in complete control. But brains are lying bastards, and you shouldn't trust yours, particularly when it's big-noting itself.

It's a dim, and perhaps wrong, view that everything we do can be traced back to fitness. It may be true that sociologically we can only physically do that which benefits us, but that doesn't mean every single person is just trying to propagate their genes all the time. I can think of several examples where this isn't the case. Leonard Cohen, Crawford Young writing into his eighties, to name a few.

Certainly many of us might not be aware of our instinctive drives at all, but it's not exactly uncommon for that not to be the case.

Maybe you can still explain such behaviour in some other scientific way, but that's beyond the point I'm making, which is that our behaviour isn't always coldly rational or logical. We can 'do more' than just look out for ourselves.