Do spiritual things exist?

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Oops! I remember that I once told someone: "I don't believe in ghosts!"

That would single out faith I believe in spiritiual things.

the other day i was talking with someone about tripping shrooms and we talked about that moment after your trip when you lay in bed and the darknes infront of your eyes starts to wave and wiggle. that moment couldn't have taken place if the world we live in is truly 3 dimensional.

Apparently as infants we see the world both in two dimensions and upside down. As we get older, typically all before our earliest memories, we have both of those things corrected. There are veil-thinning aspects of hallucinogens but the specific effect your mentioning I'd have to attribute to neurological phenomena.

jup it's your mind trying to make sense of the void

Its tough to relate the connection your making though with just seeing space move. I had plenty of times where I'd see the same things with my eyes open or closed whether it was zig-zagging fractals crawling through each other like a mount of caterpillars or seeing something that looks like a psychedelic 3D drawing of the inside of a mitochondrial structure.
I've had plenty of visuals that seemed to come from places completely outside my experience and outside of my present environment but I'd think that's an entirely different thing than where you're going with this.

Spiritual things all boil down to belief.

But then, so does science. At the root of science is the belief that science has validity. You can't use science to prove that science has validity. You must use some other form of ratiocination.

The fact that some people belief that they have been abducted by aliens isn't really up for dispute. They believe it, whether you believe it or not. And the fact that they believe it exists. You can't really argue that the belief in alien abductions doesn't exist. At best, you can only argue that there is insufficient proof that alien abductions happen, even though a bunch of people claim that they do.

In the sense that the belief in them exists, so do god, alien abductions, santa claus, and the honest politician.

It's also clear that alien abductees have had some sort of an experience. I'm not sure what "really" happened to them, or what their experience would have looked like to me if I'd been present, but it's pretty clear that they have had some sort of experience. (wikipedia: "black swan"). It's also not clear to me how you or I would describe our experiences if we'd had the same experience that the abductees are describing. But it's likely that we'd describe it somehow, even if our descriptions were radically different.

In all of those senses, spiritual things do exist.

But then, the number "1" doesn't exist in the physical world either. It's an abstraction. A pure concept. A model by which we evaluate the world. The very idea that 1 != 0 is taken as an assumption in modern science - a presupposition, a belief. Without it, the rest of mathematics tends to fall apart and with it, mathematics seems to be quite useful.

When it comes right down to it, we don't have any scientific evidence to prove that "reality" exists. You could all just be a figment of my imagination. Or I could be a brain in a vat. Or dreaming.

Are dreams real? Are they any more or less real than the number "1"? Can you prove either assertion?

This is just simple solipsism. It's hard to argue against, but relatively useless as a perspective. If you're a brain in a vat, but you have no way of verifying that ... what difference does it make?

Precisely!

Odd how many people think it matters.

But then, the same is pretty much true of alien abductions. Until you've experienced it, how much difference does it make really?

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Last edited by SpiritBlooms on 09 Jul 2012, 7:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It's okay if peopel do not believe in such things. But if spirtual things start to attack earth then it's another story.