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“it is difficult to imagine how the human mind could function without the conviction that there is something irreducibly real in the world; and it is impossible to imagine how consciousness could appear without conferring a meaning on man's impulses and experiences. Consciousness of a real and meaningful world is intimately connected with the discovery of the sacred. Through experience of the sacred, the human mind has perceived the difference between what reveals itself as being real, powerful, rich, and meaningful and what lacks these qualities, that is, the chaotic and dangerous flux of things, their fortuitous and senseless appearances and disappearances"

Eliade, Mircea. The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion. University of Chicago Press, 1984

Now, while Eliade’s word is not final, I think it touches on your question of what spiritual means in the context of mankind. Being a spiritual animal means being an animal embodied with consciousness, an animal that is aware of its existence in both space AND time.

Eliade is a great read for a number of reasons but the best reason is because he can be read from an atheistic or religious perspective and his passages are no less revelatory. If you want to believe that there is no purpose to existing that is fine, I wouldn’t recommend it, but that is fine. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that consciousness transcends evolutionary necessity and by that nature alone deserves serious and legitimate thought and preservation.

This quotation appears to just replace the word "spiritual" with "sacred," another word that I find to have nebulous meaning. It contains a lot of words, but appears to be saying vanishingly little of substance. Or maybe it's just over my head.

> Being a spiritual animal means being an animal embodied with consciousness, an animal that is aware of its existence in both space AND time.

So, you're defining "spiritual" as "conscious." That's fine, but why not say "conscious"? It's clearer that way.

Under this definition, I agree that we are spiritual (conscious) animals.

But I'm willing to bet that the original poster I responded to used the word "spiritual" in a different sense than you do, which is a problem. When you both sort out what you're actually saying, let me know!

Edit to add one more point:

> But that doesn’t take away from the fact that consciousness transcends evolutionary necessity

I think the phrase "evolutionary necessity" is problematic on its own from a biological perspective, but even if we ignore that, do you have any sources for this claim?

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5081170/

I believe the original quotation used sacred because “spiritual” implies spirit or soul, whereas all ideologies do not align with that specifically. I could be mistaken though.

I don’t think it’s over your head I just think it’s academic literary fluff from Eliade, but at its core it breaks down that developing consciousness meant that we also developed methods to conceptualize something that was more real than reality itself. For example, numbers do not “exist” in reality, but represent reality more accurately than it represents itself most of the time. That’s why they’re so useful.

There are truths that are abstracted out of reality, that is a commonplace in human existence - sacred, spiritual, divine, esoteric, whatever you want to call it, there is an innate connection between humankind and something that is beyond humankind (a sort of meta-reality) and that relationship has aided our development since the dawn of consciousness. Connecting that to any one religion would be a fools errand but it does describe how our very being is tied to something more than just the damned physical world, more than just animalistic instinct. It’s all abstraction.

That is my interpretation anyway.

>So, you’re defining “spiritual” as “conscious.”

Good callout, I wasn’t very specific. I think conscious is the baseline reality, it makes being spiritual a possibility. A prerequisite. Being spiritual would be the willingness to use that consciousness to abstract specifically on the human condition, and voluntarily conclude that we ourselves have a part to play in something that is more real than the reality in front of us.

I can’t speak for the original poster, but I am still developing what I consider to be my spiritual knowledge, and I don’t foresee myself learning all there is to be known any time soon. Still young in that regard.

Edit for your edit on transcending evolutionary necessity: No sources, but let’s say even if, for example, the theory that consciousness emerged in early hominids as a side effect of a brain that rapidly grew to visually detect snakes[1], even in that scenario consciousness is still the side effect. And that means that a prerequisite to spiritual abstraction would be just an evolutionary side effect.

We still do not understand the evolutionary emergence of consciousness and why it appears to be so rare, so I’m not going to act like I have the answers there. But billions of years passed on earth before a human first questioned their place in the universe, and to me that is self-evidence of a lack of evolutionarily necessity. I understand if that conclusion is not solid enough for most though.

And to respond to your edit:

The study you cited doesn't appear to have anything to say about the general appearance of consciousness, so I don't think it's really relevant to our discussion here.

> We still do not understand the evolutionary emergence of consciousness and why it appears to be so rare, so I’m not going to act like I have the answers there.

Yes, I agree 100%. But because of this, I don't think you're correct in claiming outright that consciousness transcends evolutionary necessity (this is a positive claim that requires evidence). It's OK to say we don't know!

https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.00821

That example I gave of the emergence of consciousness being a result of a growing brain was just an example and not necessarily what I believe, but it was on based this article from 2016:

Which really just breaks down consciousness potentially being a byproduct of having a drastically higher number of neurological connections than lesser developed animal brains.

So combining the two, the growing brain, caused by an increase in size of the visual cortex to detect snake patterns, increased the number of neurological connections and as a result the brain gradually became consciously aware. That’s just one theory that I used.

And I 100% agree it’s okay to say that we don’t know, we don’t. And I don’t! But that won’t stop me from thinking about it like, a lot.

Edit: spelling

So do you agree with me that the statement "consciousness transcends evolutionary necessity" is not necessarily correct?

Yeah, all of this gets a big fat [citation needed] from me. I don't even know what a bunch of this stuff means. "Conceptualize something more real than reality itself" is nonsensical on its face, and you go on to describe numbers, which are simply an abstraction we use out of convenience, not anything that is "more real than reality itself" as far as I'm aware.

I don't know what "beyond humankind" means in this context, and I don't know what "our very being tied to something more than the physical world" means.

Again, maybe it's just over my head, but can you clearly explain what you mean by all of these things?

> Being spiritual would be the willingness to use that consciousness to abstract specifically on the human condition, and voluntarily conclude that we ourselves have a part to play in something that is more real than the reality in front of us.

And yeah, I'm definitely not in agreement with us being "spiritual" under this definition, because the premise that it's possible for something to be "more real than the reality in front of us" doesn't make any sense to me.

I’m not sure what you would like in the way of citations. Abstracting on its own operates outside of the physical world, the world of ideas is different than the physical world of events. You can choose to believe these are just electrical signals in the brain, nothing more, and that is the physical world, but my entire tangent here has been that I don’t believe that, and why.

Abstractions, at least ones that survive over long periods of time, like the use of numbers, or like human spirituality, tend to contain within them a large collection of truths. Large collections of truths are what I mean by a greater reality, because they are not reality, they are abstracted ideas that are based on reality, but serve a greater purpose.

Something being more real than the reality in front of us is not a new idea, idealism was introduced by Plato 2,400 years ago suggesting that true reality lies in the world of perfect ideas, otherwise put, a reality more real than the physical world.

Like I said though, all of this is my interpretations of readings and based on my own years of thought and experience.

I'd caution against comparing an actual, useful-in-everyday-life abstraction like numbers, with a vague wishy-washy idea like "human spirituality."

I'm familiar with idealism and I definitely got the sense that you were coming from that perspective. As you might have guessed, I'm a naturalist, and probably also a materialist, because I think naturalism most closely comports with what we understand about how the universe works. While idealism is interesting to read about, I have yet to meet anyone that could provide evidence for the fact that it is actually correct and naturalism is wrong, so that's why I was asking. I'm personally not that interested in philosophical concepts that have no evidence or application in the real world.

I'm also not aware of evidence for any "truths" that are themselves inherent to any abstractions we use as a species. For example, I can write an equation like so:

x + 7 = 10

I can solve for X and find that it is 3, and verify that my answer is correct by checking it against the original equation. I can do all of that using the abstractions we've developed and nothing more. But none of these truths are actually inherent to the abstraction of numbers; I could just have easily put seven apples in front of me, and added apples to another pile until I arrived at a total of 10 to find my answer.

Could you give me an example of an abstraction which contains a truth that does not ultimately derive from the material, as in the example above?

marnett 522 days ago

> I don’t believe I (or anyone else) have any fundamental purpose for existing. If you have evidence to the contrary, please share.

I didn't say existing, but persisting. This is kind of the basis of the point I was making. Clearly you do believe you have a fundamental purpose for persisting, as do most people - otherwise we would see more people deciding to stop living once they have come to the conclusion they have no fundamental purpose.

As to the point of humans being "just animals", you are correct; we are the only "just animals" that have spiritual religion as an emergent property of our species. Given where you are anchoring the beginnings of this discussion, I feel starting your research on the evolutionary origin of religion would be a good starting point to understanding what I mean when I say homo sapiens are a spiritual species.

angoragoats 521 days ago

Sorry for the confusion on terms, but it doesn't change the substance of what I previously said.

> Clearly you do believe you have a fundamental purpose for persisting

I don't. Also, believing that I have no fundamental purpose for persisting is not the same as me wishing to die.

Edit: after thinking about this a bit more, I realized that maybe we disagree over the meaning of the word "fundamental," so let me clarify: I do have reasons for wanting to continue to live, but those reasons are 1) many, and 2) not static over time. 10 years from now, I will likely have different reasons for wanting to persist. I also dislike the word "purpose," as it can imply some kind of "grand plan" or other woo that I vehemently reject. I apologize if I'm being too bristly at your use of terms, but I would better characterize my thoughts as: I have multiple reasons for wanting to persist, which change over time, are grounded in well being of myself and others around me, and not necessarily inherent to me as a person.

I don't believe any of this rises to "illogical faith in some purpose" as you originally asserted.

> Given where you are anchoring the beginnings of this discussion, I feel starting your research on the evolutionary origin of religion would be a good starting point to understanding what I mean when I say homo sapiens are a spiritual species.

If you claim something (especially something containing a term as fraught with varied meanings as "spiritual"), you should be prepared to explain what you mean, not say "go start some research," which among other things is presumptuous. Based on what you said here, I'll assume that by "spiritual animals" you just meant "animals that have developed religion," and we are in agreement. You can drop the term "spiritual" in that case as it just adds confusion.

So we are animals that have developed religion. So what? It doesn't change my initial point, which is that faith (in the traditional definition of the word) is irrational. People are of course free to believe whatever they want, but when their unsupported beliefs start to affect my life via the legal/educational/judicial/healthcare systems in my country, or when people try to assert that my evidence-based beliefs are somehow faith-based, you better believe I'm going to speak out about it.