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> A spiritualism that tries to pass simple checks should either actually predict "physical reality" and thus become science, or drop any pretenses that it can be observable in the "physical reality", thus going firmly into the realm of not even fairy tales but of strictly internal experience of an observer, hence becoming solipsist. The above works if you disregard that all observations of “physical reality”, any models, and the meta mode of attending to reality that leads you to structure your models in a particular way and choose which experiments to perform, are all a product of your mind and start treating physical models as gospel. Natural science is about making predictions, not speaking truth. It offers models as a shortcut to predictions, but does not even claim to offer complete knowledge or “true” models. The territory is unknowable, all we have is maps, and all maps are wrong (physical models being a special case of maps). Natural science by design is not equipped to get us to any true reference points, and becomes remarkably useless as soon as our mind gets under the spotlight—though what it does do is provide us some useful maps (notably, “useful” as defined by our minds. You see the pattern). It is a struggle to live a life given such uncertainty. We have options as to how to represent the territory, and so we go about it with varying degrees of rigour. A seemingly popular approach of just taking the current models provided by natural sciences and using them as a proxy of truth does not score high on rigour in my opinion, since it strikes me as taking physics as a poor surrogate for religion. Thus, I personally have no problem with spirituality, unless it flies in the face of observations and fails to offer sound philosophical reasoning. Like in physics models are shortcuts for predictions, spirituality/religion could be considered shortcuts for philosophy (with a degree of charitability, depending on the views one holds), and reducing philosophy to physics would degrade, not elevate it (after all, natural sciences came from and are subordinate to philosophy, not the other way around). This is also why being a physicist and simultaneously a religious person (the case with many famous physicists) is not a contradiction. |