Can we have a physically based spirituality?

There’s always been a question around the spiritualism of the secular person. Can someone who lives their life entirely in the physical world experience spirituality?

Spirituality is the idea that people, animals or even things have a ‘spirit’. That is, a non-physical manifestation which grants it a special kind of profoundness. Another way of looking at spirituality is the anthropomorphisation of all things. This is the idea of a higher plane with relatable characters like Gods and such. Some religions have considered that places, objects and even the whole world are imbued with their own spirits – a kind of personhood – and so have built spirituality out of that.

But what is profound to the physicalist, or at least to me? Personally I think life is profound. I don’t believe in the idea of some ethereal spirit which can be neatly separated from a lifeform. In terms of talking about spirituality as such, all this means is that the notion of the spirit is coupled with the physical form. Tautologically, things seem alive because they are alive.

What is special about a particular life form lives and dies with that life form’s physical presence.

Yet, this is an oversimplification. While a large number of life forms are essentially indivisible entities, the truth is that life we as humans relate to most strongly is made up of many cells. Each of these cells potentially sustains its own life in a suitable environment. The boundaries of where a “spirit” lies then are somewhat blurred by this fact.

This then implies that spirits are not in fact strictly individual, but can also potentially be a collective. As a human, particularly a human who is aligned with the Anglosphere notion of individualism, you are then most familiar with the level that ends with the whole person. That is: your self, your ego. Yet you are made up of many living things which can each be said to have their own spirits.

But is the ego really the limit of what contains a spirit in this sense? Sociologists and psychologists have documented a phenomenon known as “deindividuation” when people are in crowd. In deindividuation, individuals give up their sense of individualism and become part of a crowd. People lose their sense of individualism to such an extent that they will often act with the crowd in ways that entirely contradict the individual’s own personal beliefs and values. A scary example of deindividuation involves people joining in with others’ calls that someone should commit suicide. They do so despite finding that abhorrent.

As ugly as this example is, it shows that people have the capacity to almost literally “lose themselves” to a crowd. They temporarily sacrifice what makes them who they are in order to exist as a part of this larger entity. The crowd as a concept then seems to have the capacity to develop its own views and its own morality. A crowd can co-opt people into becoming not much more than how we consider the cells in our own bodies. Perhaps then, the crowd has its own spirit as well.

What does emergent consciousness tell us about the world we live in?

The theory of emergent consciousness essentially states that consciousness arises naturally from unconscious components, so long as they satisfy some (as yet mostly uncharacterised) properties. The key property that we can identify is that those components should communicate with one another somehow. The only really agreed upon example of that is in the brains of higher animals.

However we see other potential examples of this in life. In the example I mentioned before, the crowd clearly has many communicating participants (sometimes this communication happens through body language and tone rather than in spoken language as such). Potentially the crowd also temporarily develops a kind of consciousness.

Interestingly, crowds often seem to act less intelligently than individuals. Perhaps this has something to do with the inefficiency with which the components communicate relative to the high speed direct connections of the electromechanical neural network of the brain. But perhaps it is just that the crowd’s incentives and will are somewhat alien to us as individuals.A

A fascinating aspect of the brain is how many parts are separate, yet they contain elements of what we’d think of as our “self”. For instance the areas of the brain that process language are separate – if you destroy Broca’s region and Wernicke’s region remains in tact, then you may be able to understand language but not form your own. You can destroy a part of the brain which is responsible for explicit memories while retaining your ability to learn skills – such as was the case with Patient H.M.

The problem of course lies in the definition of ‘consciousness’, which we do not have a clear definition of. For the purposes of this writing, I will adopt an idea of consciousness being some kind of cognitive processing which cannot purely be explained by instinctive or ‘inborn’ behaviours. That is conscious thought must be learned, and it must have some notion of will – a purpose and drive.

Could a planet think?

The Gaia hypothesis broadly states that the Earth in some way is an intelligent, self-regulating system. There is evidence for certain aspects of the general idea of this, although the original book on the subject by James Lovelock has come under some scrutiny for some specific claims which were refuted by various influential scientists. Nevertheless the overarching concept has inspired numerous fields of study such as Earth System Science under which many widely accepted fields have flourished such as ecology, geology, oceanography, etc.

Nevertheless, where spirituality and personal meaning are concerned, any kind of physical plausibility whatsoever is a high bar to pass.

The truth is that even well studied and popularised fields have significant gaps. We are all familiar with the probabilistic nature of weather reports, for instance, especially here in the UK where we are famous for our small talk on the subject. We are still a long way from fully understanding many of these fields. While I do not want to start proposing “god of the gaps” style hypotheses, the devil is very much so likely to be in the detail, and assuming that all Earth Systems are simple unintelligent feedback loops is an assumption that may come back to haunt scientists who try to reconcile their understanding of many disparate systems.

But we do know certain things: for example if a population of animals breeds too much and exhausts its food supply, its numbers will crash significantly. This phenomenon is known as the “population bottleneck” – resulting in the death of most of its members. The rest of the local ecosystem will then usually eventually recover or change into a new form through adaptation, evolution and migration.

If all of the life forms and maybe some of the physical systems on and near Earth are engaged in a kind of complex feedback system, similar to this, then potentially it, too, has this notion of consciousness I described before. Perhaps with the individual lifeforms and other relevant objects communicating in ways which are counterintuitive. I will not claim this to be scientifically verifiable, but merely a philosophical thought on what kind of spirituality is physically plausible.

Through these recovery mechanisms of adaptation, evolution and migration, I think it is fair to say that if Mother Gaia has a will, then she is mercurial. She wants to survive, and will not suffer repeated errors in her attempts to do so.

Is everything a signal?

If neurons communicate with each other through electrochemical signalling, then how does the mind of Gaia work?

Clearly when humans talk to one another, we are signalling various things to one another which affects the parties involved in the conversation. Often our conversations have externalities such that we are actually creating indirect signals which can affect a wider group.

For instance: someone asks their partner to go to the shop to buy some milk: they do so and buy the last bottle. This causes the store manager to order more milk, sending a signal to the market that there is demand for milk, slightly affecting the price of milk. This one signal of wanting milk has ramifications beyond the scope of merely the participants of the conversation.

If asking somebody for something is a signal, then murder must be a very strong signal. Consider predator-prey dynamics: how do human scientists know that one animal is the predator and one is the prey? Obviously they watch the predator kill and eat the prey a number of times. A predator eating its prey is not only a satisfying meal for the predator in question but it also sends a powerful signal about the organisation of the food chain out into the world. In this case the signal has been received by some ecologists, but they are not the only likely recipients of this information.

I could go on. To state the generalised format of this “universal signal hypothesis”: every form of interaction between two life forms generates a signal, and that signal plausibly is the Gaian analogy to the neurochemical signalling which happens in the human brain.

Every action we take, every utterance we make, every conflict we end up in sends some signal out into the world and affects it oh-so slightly. And if Gaia is indeed conscious, then that action is literally driving her mind.

All things in balance then: If Gaia is conscious then she serves us, but we must also serve her. We are neither fully individual nor fully collective; we cannot exist without Gaia and she will change without us. To serve the climate is to serve our own needs.