Thanks for asking (and thanks for the music).

I’m trying to understand why some people are very comfortable acknowledging the existence of some abstractions (moods), have mixed feelings about others (numbers), and are generally very uncomfortable with certain others (gods, spirits).

@skado that's a fascinating concept.

I don't have a religious horror story upon which to grind my axe but imagine that could be a psychological impetus for any discomfort.

There is a difference between knowing that the concept of numbers, moods, gods and spirits exist in the consciousness of highly evolved animals, and knowing that any absurd anthropomorphic attributes ascribed to numbers, moods, gods and spirits is arrant errant nonsense.

Do gods and spirits with powers to affect the world exist as far as you are concerned?

@waitingforgodo
They exist as evolved psychological features and emergent behaviors of Homo sapiens. They exist as numbers and moods exist. That is to say, they clearly do affect the world.

As far as appears to me, they are, in themselves, non-material (what was once called spiritual) relationships and concepts which are both available to human experience, and at the same time unavoidable.

If moods and numbers didn’t have power to change things (utility) we wouldn’t continue to employ them.

But the substrate from which they emerge is nothing but the known and yet-to-be-known laws of physics that operate in our natural universe.

How do you see it?

@skado your thoughtful questions are deserving of deeper consideration than my meagre metier may muster.

Understanding of numbers, moods and beliefs may be endemic to animalia (with well developed nervous systems).

The effect upon the world is what animals do with their cognition of numbers moods and beliefs not the numbers moods and beliefs.

I see monkeys who will destroy the planet before the star subsumes it, but not necessarily before the sapient apes fling their shit from the earthly cage into the galaxy in the paroxysms of ecstasy that anthropomorphic chauvinism predicates, lol.

And you?

@waitingforgodo

All I see is Biology being Bio Logical.

@skado word

Why doesn't that surprise me?