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So it turns out the dualists are right. There is a material world of atoms, rocks, gravity and photons....but there exists an immaterial spiritual realm of information, gods, and cognition.

But here's the thing, the principles of human biology and what we know about the material world hold true. Your eyes see because of cells that catch light. Your thoughts, feelings, loves and fears all very much do come from biochemical algorithms and stimuli rewiring the architecture of your brain.

Remove a person's ability to produce certain hormones and you get the usual results, there are no abstract meta-emotions or meta-feelings to fill the gaps.

Yet somehow ghosts and spiritual entities are alive and real. They compute, feel, and experience without being made of physical matter or energy. Like a computer running software, only you open it up and see that its motherboard and CPUs are actually just inert scrap metal.

How is this the case?

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    $\begingroup$ If they can interact with the physical world then they are made of plain old physical stuff. If they cannot interact with the physical world, then they are Russel's teapots and there is no motive for anybody to care about them and there's no way for anybody to know anything about them. $\endgroup$
    – AlexP
    Apr 28 at 18:34
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    $\begingroup$ Does it really matter how they think? Does your spirit realm really require explanation? Its the sort of thing that people seem generally happy to accept in their fiction. "We don't understand it" is fine. "Ethereal equivalents of matter" is also fine. What do you want out of your setting? $\endgroup$
    – Starfish Prime
    Apr 28 at 18:39
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    $\begingroup$ We're not a brainstorming site. Yiu can come up with whatever mechanism you want or choose to handwave and ignore the mechanism entirely. How do you expect there to be specific non subjective answers to this question? $\endgroup$
    – sphennings
    Apr 28 at 18:46
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    $\begingroup$ @sphennings respectfully I based this question on another post that touched on the concept of dualism and materialism. Questions that have specific but subjective answers seemed to be accepted here barring questions solely about physics. So can you elaborate on what the issue is? $\endgroup$
    – AllSeeingEye33
    Apr 28 at 21:01
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    $\begingroup$ @sphennings "How do you expect there to be specific non subjective answers to this question?" <- While this question could probably be answered more than one way (as can pretty much all magic/metaphysical based questions on here), he's only asked for a single answer that meets specific criteria; so, it's not a brainstorming question. As long as it is foreseeable that one answer might meet the criteria better than another, the question is on topic. Yes, there are a lot of explanations for how a soul could possibly function, but they don't all fit equally well. $\endgroup$
    – Nosajimiki
    Apr 28 at 21:54

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Your brain is the user interface for your body.

Your soul is you. It is where you think, where you feel, where YOU most truly and actually exist... but a soul can not control a physical body directly. Souls are mostly incompatible with the physical world; so, you need an interface. Something that can translate between an ethereal input/output interface and the physical world. And that is where your brain comes in.

When your eye sees, your brain takes in the bio-chemical signals of your nervous system and creates an ethereal pattern that a soul can perceive the same way a computer needs a video driver to convert software data into a signal that a monitor can output. And when you want to move, there are ethereal patterns that your soul manipulates to trigger electrochemical patterns in your brain much like how your user interface can only trigger the available functions in a videogame. If you think of it like this, when you play a videogame, you are not writing out machine code processes for every foot step and motion, those are all scripted behaviors inside the simulation. If something happens to this interface, then you become unable to do what you want to do in the simulation.

So when you suffer a traumatic brain injury, your soul still knows what's going on, but his interface has become unresponsive and glitchy. When it tries to bring up dialogue options, half the options aren't there and when you do pick one, the wires might get crossed and your body does something else instead. And when you die, it's like a total system crash. The game stops loading, you can't log in anymore, and so there is nothing for a soul to do but just get up and go on with its exitance (or create a new character if your setting allows for reincarnation).

Imagine the following 3 dialogue boxes in a videogame. A whole and intelligent spiritual being playing a baby may itself be smart enough to go work at Apple as thier lead developer, but the only options the brain allows for are various forms of gibberish. For a grown man, the brain has developed, and the soul has "leveled up" his character enough to unlock all sorts of useful (and many ill advised) options to work with. Then you have the elder or disabled self where the brain has become compromised, so your UI is compromised.

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How is this the case?

It is the case because the dualists are only half right. They did get the bit about there being a material and a spiritual world correctly. But they are wrong in seeing them as entirely separate.

You describe the spiritual world as consisting of "information, gods and cognition". This world is intimately connected to the material world because information is carried by matter. Note that this holds true even if it can also be carried by non-material means.

Cognition is an ability to process information. The material world has that too. It happens whenever matter (which, remember, carries information) interacts with other matter.

Gods can then be described, in purely materialistic terms, as having a body which is not an object but a system. So say the body of the god of the forest is not the trees, but the ecosystem of that forest. This body then processes information by having its component objects - trees, other plants, animals, soil, moisture, nutrients and more - interact with each other in complex patterns.

It's actually not that much different from our own lived experience as humans. We think of ourselves as individuals, but we too are systems with somewhat blurry boundaries. Not only are there untold numbers of other organisms living in and on us, but we also constantly exchange matter with what we think of as the outside world. Since this implies that we also exchange information, you can even think of human body as being both material and spiritual by your earlier definition.

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Hormones are signalling molecules in biological organisms. As these ghosts are clearly not biological, they don't need them. They are a product of completely different evolution (or construction, or magical process of some sort).

It doesn't mean they can't demonstrate emotions or feelings. Some people find it difficult to believe the new generation of AI is not sentient, teaching them emulating emotions is relatively simple. If you emulate something well enough, at some point it stops being an emulation and turns into copy. We are far from it now, but it is not impossible.

There are tons of SF about robots with feelings, they are doing just fine without organic hardware. There seem to be nothing particularly new here.

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Your spirit and body are intertwined

Although there is a spiritual realm, your spirit and your body and working together. The spirit would cause consciousness but also be affected by what happens to the body. If your spirit and body are separated you can think separate from your body, but until then you are bound to what you your brain is thinking. Your spirit drives you, but the brain is important to thought while living.

If the spiritual realm does not have to be truly immaterial, rather incapable of interacting normally with the material world, the problem of sensory input while separated from the body is resolved.

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