From Sastra: "Supernaturalists seem to have a lot of trouble trying to make sense of abstractions and levels of experience: they want to take everything literally, as irreducible substances. Love is only real to them if it’s a thing, a sort of spiritual-substance which is made of neither matter nor energy because it is the immaterial essence of love. Ironically, that makes them super-materialists — spinning material into finer and finer substances until like only comes from like. Love is derived from love. Otherwise, it can only have the same properties that were there in its origin.Despite their claims to be so comfortable with “higher levels” of reality, supernaturalists are concrete thinkers. They can only make sense of immaterial abstractions by turning them into spirit-things in a spirit-world. It’s the same sort of composition fallacy that causes people to have a serious problem with understanding how life can come from non-life. Things are supposed to be stable, discontinuous units of essential natures which are forever separated by what they ARE. If inert matter can live, it must be because a vital force made of life gets into the matter to somehow to make it live."
1 comment:
That's incredibly well put. For some time I've been trying to say something similar, about how "spirit particles" are just another layer. More to the point, the addition of "spirit particles" still doesn't actually explain what a "soul" is (by soul here I mean self awareness, I'm being secular about the word). I think I've said this before here, but what if we did live in a world where spirits existed and we also had a developing scientific evidence for, and knowledge about, these spirits and that the seat of consciousness lies in them? What is to stop someone from saying "that's not enough to explain what conciousness is, I propose a super-spirit realm where our awareness sits".
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