Inyash Brodsky

He'd be like, you're Spinoza-ing.

You're taking a word that means something magical and trying to turn it into a thing that is actually materially explainable.

I personally like the word because I've been very much...

spirituality curious recently and i do think that words like this point at something that uh at least feels intuitively um important to being human and we do need to talk about it how do you disentangle the religious spiritual magic aspect of soul from what we're actually trying to get at when we're talking about recursion and self-consciousness and realizing that we exist in time

It's surprising how many people lose their faith on missions of the Mormons that I've talked to.

And then you started questioning everything.

Personally, I almost don't want to bother if I'm going to join a religion or...

I don't know, try to corrupt an existing religion for my own purposes.

I would want to join a religion that is basically full of secular people already who understand that soul is taken metaphorically and don't believe in any magic stuff.

So this is why I'm much more okay now using words like soul and spirituality, because I know what they're pointing at.

And anybody who...

i'm seriously talking about religious stuff with is also going to know that we aren't talking about any actual non-material phenomena uh but that's difficult like i think it would have to be somewhere in the in the foundational doctrine or the rights or something that this stuff doesn't actually exist because i've now met a lot of rationalists not a lot of rationalists

Some rationalists and a lot of post-rationalists who are slipping back into the, oh, but actually magical stuff may exist and there may be, you know, spirits and entities outside of us.

And it makes me, I mean, it makes me cringe because I'm like, yeah.

No, we left all that behind and for good reason.

And unless you have good evidence that you can use to support that kind of thing, let's stick to what's actually important when we're talking about what the human soul is, that we're talking about recursion and understanding of the self as an object that we can think about.

So...

My main answer is to ignore it and only have these conversations with other people who are on board with me in the same thing.

Which I guess maybe isn't a completely practical answer.

But when you're talking with other people who do believe in the mystical stuff...