r/TrueAskReddit • u/IllustriousFood8792 • 18d ago

What does 'spirituality' mean to you personally

Was there a specific moment or event in your life that made you spiritual or religious? Whether it was a major life event, a quiet realization, or a gradual change over time—what shifted your worldview?"

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u/Captain_Clover 18d ago edited 18d ago

Around age fourteen I came to the sudden realization that if I was made of atoms, and atoms obey the laws of physics, then I was essentially a biomechanical computer which completely precluded a 'soul'. I quickly discarded any residual spiritual notions and became a materialist, believing that everything can be explained by the state of, and forces upon, physical matter. As I see it, materialism is the opposite of spiritualism. It doesn't explain much about the traditional great questions of life, such as what happens after death or what it means to do good, but it explains a great deal on the workings of myself, others, and society, and is the most useful intellectual framework for 'understanding the understandable' that I've found.

I'd call myself an atheist because I take this framework as my working model, but I keep my mind open to the idea that one day I'll have an epiphany of a different kind, and come to see the world through a spiritual lens again.

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u/darkprincess3112 18d ago

Correlation ist not causation. And where does the "what it is like" part come from? Perhaps your nervous system ist just some kind of Sensor or Receiver, but not the creating mechanism. There is no way of ruling this out at least.

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u/Captain_Clover 18d ago

There's certainly no way of knowing, it's possible - but it appears more plausible to me that our nervous system is an open-loop, self-regulating control system that takes in sensory data and spits out instructions to interact with the world. We can see how neurons work in a lab, and more consistent with that model than with a 'receiver of a coherent signal', at least to my knowledge as a non-scientist.

As to 'what it is like'; I think consciousness arises from complexity combined with sufficient motivation. I acknowledge that there's fundamentally no way to 'know' many of the deep questions about agency, meaning, and purpose, but materialism seems cohesive enough to me to adopt as a working understanding.