recovering-some-spiritual-concepts

* WORK IN PROGRESS *

Dragons did not turn out to be real and I don't follow J. Peterson when he says the story archetype of a thing would be the same as the thing being real.

A different bar needs to be set before I call a thing real. It needs to be a useful citizen in the scientific tradition of explanation making.

Dragons are not real, but dinosaurs were. And whoever looked at a fossil and said 'giant lizard-like thing' was actually talking about a real thing in nature and deserves credit.

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I want to say we have the same situation with concepts like 'spirits', 'the soul'.

• Memetics is like a red-strand of the - real - spiritual concepts.
• Information is like a doorway to emergent phenomena.
• Form: Arrangement; Information is about the interplay of things.
• substrate independent | copyable [Marletto, Deutsch]
• Like a book is not the letters, a book is the story.
• An organism is not the atoms but the principle of organisation.
• Lebensprinzip, the knowledge stored in the genes, the spirit of a species [Braitenberg].
• Knowledge: Information with causal power. software entities.
• genes [biology], memes [Dawkins], tremes [Blackmore] are software entities, capabable of recruiting matter (top down causation) to further their interests.
• Information processing, cybernetics, epistemology and all information based approaches to science are in the business of explaining spirits.
• Including the study of bureaucracies and large scale memetic structures.