We live in two worlds: the interior, spiritual, world of pain and colors and emotion and smells and heat and cold—all the stuff our experience is made of—and the exterior world of cats and coffee mugs and other people and atoms and electrons and bananas.
But those cats, and those other people, in the external world are just bodies. Our external view of them provides no direct evidence of their interior lives.
My son has recently purchased a Pleo Dinosaur—a robotic pet run by an artificial intelligence program.
The toy is obviously in the early stages of development, but even so it inspires two fairly strong reactions in different people. Some find it charming and lovable, others find it creepy.
But even those who find it creepy do so because they "know" it has no internal life, and yet they can't help but "feel" it does.
The toy plays with our natural ability to ascribe an inner life to another person, or to a cat or dog, based on external behaviors. Some of this is a kind of unsupportable induction, but most of it seems to be hardwired.
And we are probably right to make the jump where other people, and even cats, are concerned. It's conceivable that we may even be right about a robotic pet—though I wouldn't bet on it.
But the fact remains that we do not perceive this inner, spiritual life in others—whom we only get to know through the exterior view. We infer it.
And we infer it as part of their inner world, by analogy to our own.
In the last two to three hundred years, science—what used to be called natural philosophy—has made great strides in understanding the exterior world. The fields of physics, chemistry, and biology have grown by leaps and bounds.
And this study of the external world has even addressed problems which we used to think of as completely interior: drugs which alleviate depression, for example. This should be no surprise. The two worlds obviously fit very closely. In fact, they seem to be two sides of a coin.
But when it comes to addressing the inner world directly—dealing with the day to day reality of how to function as a fundamentally spiritual being—there have been only two alternatives.
For those who can afford it there is psychotherapy. It takes money, because it requires the direct, one-on-one attention of a psychologist or counselor, and it requires that you either come from a very enlightened background, or are brave enough to overcome the objections of relatives and friends who consider the whole enterprise disreputable.
Our culture has not helped by giving psychology a medical frame. Why would you go to a doctor unless you were sick?
On the other hand, there's religion, which has positioned itself as the sole source of spirituality.
In most cases, the religious worldview has also been unashamedly supernatural—insisting that consciousness, spirit, the soul is an supernatural entity, merely occupying the body: driving it, as you or I would drive a car.
Oddly enough, a great many materialists have obliged religion by accepting this claim. Once they do this, the next step is obvious. If the soul is, by definition, not part of the natural world, then it must not exist.
But by this point, I hope you can see that such a conclusion is just silly. It flies in the face of both reason and experience. The external, material, world is certainly real—unless you're ready to embrace a Matrix scenario. But our knowledge of that real world comes to us entirely through our inner world. We deduce it's existence from the contents of our conscious experience. To reject consciousness while accepting the world we've built on it makes no sense at all.
A much better approach is to do what Newton did, when he accepted the idea of action at a distance: admit that the universe may not fit our preconceived notions—that there is apparently more to matter than we had previously noticed. To accept the idea that consciousness, that the soul, is a natural phenomenon, a normal part of the material world, even if we can't see it from the outside, looking in.
