The Right Spirit

I have a long weekend ahead, because next Tuesday is a public holiday (Nuzul Al-Quran) and I am also taking Monday off.  Nuzul Al-Quran falls on the 17th day of the holy month of Ramadan and is the day which the first verses of the Quran were revealed to the Prophet Mohammad. I wrote a blog article last year about this event.

In a way, every artistic inspiration, is like something divinely revealed. The artistic impulse, is in its essence spiritual. All great works of art, in a sense, have to be created because they are part of the spiritual unfoldment of the human race--like flowers, bursting forth in the wilderness. 

We resonate with these works of art because, we all share an innate desire to connect with the larger whole. When I listen to a piece of great music, my whole being reacts instinctively, in sympathy with the thoughts and feelings of the composer; in an instant we both touch a core, which I can only describe is spiritual. 

We humans cannot help but be spiritual. Even the most godless individual has that divine spark in him. He or she would have feelings towards someone other than themselves. That yearning for connection is the beginning of spirituality. When we perform 'irrational' acts like sing, dance or express love towards someone else, we are responding to the spirit. 

What is this elusive thing called 'spirit'? It is similar to asking whether AI has 'consciousness'. Spirit, mind, consciousness, soul, self--these are all vaguely defined words that point towards the same general direction. Is there something more to matter? 

Philosophy has sought to answer this question in a multitude of ways. You can have a pure physicalist view of the universe, where everything is only matter. Consciousness, in this view is kind of an illusion. We are trying to define something that does not exist. We think we are conscious and has a soul or spirit, when in essence we are just a highly complex agglomeration of living cells, ultimately made up of atoms, and if we go even deeper, quarks. This is the stance of science.

There are those who find this physicalist view of the universe unsatisfying, even demeaning. They prefer to put consciousness as the basic ingredient of the universe. Pan-psychism is taking this approach. When consciousness is adopted as an axiom, you don't have to explain it anymore, because that is the starting point. And we all 'know' what is consciousness. Hey, are we not 'conscious'?

 Cartesian dualism where there is consciousness, as well as matter, is another approach. Science is very comfortable in the world of matter but is not close to answering the question of consciousness. Science doesn't like magical explanations of consciousness. It will try to use existing knowledge to explain or hypothesise the phenomena of consciousness, if the concept has to be accepted as real at all. You have explanations that range consciousness being a natural emergent property of complex systems to exotic theories, like the one proposed by Sir Roger Penrose, where consciousness is caused by the collapse of superposition quantum states in microtubules in our neurons. 

I'm in no hurry to jump into any definite conclusion to this question. I love both the intuitive approach of religious traditions and the rational methods of science. Spirituality and science are two sides of the same coin, two aspects of being human, and I am comfortable with both.  Life is richer, when experienced this way. And that I think, is the right spirit to adopt.