I’ve been talking on the other thread about spirituality and psychological correlations in the other thread The transcendent: Is it all in our heads? I still intend to investigate questions with you all there, but I want to hone in a bit more on some growing concerns I have with the way I’ve begun to think about my own mind.
Due to my interest (perhaps a better word is obsession) with the aforementioned topic, I’ve sensed my beliefs shifting from embracing a separate substance called a “soul” to being more convinced of our concept of self and consciousness being produced by the brain… at the very least, I am unsure what to think about our possession of “spirit”. This is very saddening to me, as I said in the other thread, I’m having a hard time grasping how a spiritual God can have a relationship with something physical, and how I can perceive him if I am physical in my entirety. He may communicate by inducing psychosis through our practices and everyday life, but then I’m not sure how to interpret that or how to view it as anything more than mere “psychosis”.
I’ve become very hyper-aware of my own thought processes in all of this. I notice when thoughts come into my head without my conscious prompting, which makes me wonder if all of my thoughts are just products of a subconscious that I am unaware of. I notice myself reducing every idea and feeling to neural networks and firings. In notice when my beliefs start to shift despite my desire to have control over them. I notice how poorly I remember things, and how helpless I am to do anything about the things I cannot recall. I really have begun to just feel like squishy, slimy machine—a brain.
It would be cool if Biologos would produce more resources on CSR and the mind-body-soul conversations, though their primary topics of interest are also important. But given the very robust and understandable explanations of secular science to reduce religious experience down to epiphenomena of culture and mental evolution, I am sure many religion-curious minds find that to be as much a sticking point as the way we should approach Genesis (maybe I’m of a minority here, but I found the ability to change my opinion on that fairly easy once good reasons were provided).
Anyway, for those here who embrace non-reductive physicalism (or dual-aspect monism, etc.), how do you keep physicalism from stripping your confidence in your sense of reality and ability to connect with God? And for those that are not physicalists, what keeps you from dismissing a spiritual attribute of humans (or living things)? Viewing ones’ self as an advanced biological computer can be demoralizing, if you haven’t been there before 