Correlating brain activity to thoughts is not the same as being able to distill love or emotional experience down to objective understanding. The difference is spiritual experience.
Oxytocin is a part of how people experience love, but it will never be possible to objectively assess whether someone is experiencing love by measuring it or any other physical quantity.
We can measure the wavelength of light and track how it stimulates cone cells and the brain, but we will never be able to measure the spiritual experience of color.
It is science that will always be chasing the ‘gaps’ in measuring spiritual experience. No matter how closely we can measure ourselves physically, the actual spiritual experience will always transcend it.
Trying even to describe spirituality at all is difficult because it’s an inherently nebulous thing. It can only be known, never proven.
I respectfully disagree. There’s nothing inherently preventing a future technology that’s able to objectively measure personal experiences, since we don’t have any evidence to suggest that thoughts and experiences happen anywhere other than physically in the brain.
Thus-far unobserved spirits are an unnecessary addition to the neurochemical processes we know to occur in the brain and know to drive thinking. By Occam’s Razor, an evidence-based worldview must reject these unnecessary assumptions.
Also, no, science is not “filling gaps in spirituality”. The claim that there are spirits is the positive case, and bears the burden of proof.
Oh, ok. I still think we might be able to measure such things in the future, but that’s a much more defensible position. I don’t see how that pertains to spiritualism tho, maybe there’s a term that fits that better. Belief in qualia?
Correlating brain activity to thoughts is not the same as being able to distill love or emotional experience down to objective understanding. The difference is spiritual experience.
Oxytocin is a part of how people experience love, but it will never be possible to objectively assess whether someone is experiencing love by measuring it or any other physical quantity.
We can measure the wavelength of light and track how it stimulates cone cells and the brain, but we will never be able to measure the spiritual experience of color.
It is science that will always be chasing the ‘gaps’ in measuring spiritual experience. No matter how closely we can measure ourselves physically, the actual spiritual experience will always transcend it.
Trying even to describe spirituality at all is difficult because it’s an inherently nebulous thing. It can only be known, never proven.
I respectfully disagree. There’s nothing inherently preventing a future technology that’s able to objectively measure personal experiences, since we don’t have any evidence to suggest that thoughts and experiences happen anywhere other than physically in the brain.
Thus-far unobserved spirits are an unnecessary addition to the neurochemical processes we know to occur in the brain and know to drive thinking. By Occam’s Razor, an evidence-based worldview must reject these unnecessary assumptions.
Also, no, science is not “filling gaps in spirituality”. The claim that there are spirits is the positive case, and bears the burden of proof.
You assume I mean spirits that physically exist separately from people. I do not. You have missed my point entirely.
Even the simple question of what the experience of color is like is totally beyond empiricism.
Not everything has a scientific answer, and that’s ok.
Oh, ok. I still think we might be able to measure such things in the future, but that’s a much more defensible position. I don’t see how that pertains to spiritualism tho, maybe there’s a term that fits that better. Belief in qualia?