We usually think of science and spirituality as opposing forces. This is largely due to the linking of spirituality with religions and mythology. Spirituality is mainly an attempt to understand our true nature beyond appearances and to understand our future after our inevitable death.
I'm sure that the motivation for spiritual people is to try to understand our 'true nature', but it doesn't seem to base that on anything - as a 'discipline' it makes assertions that are accepted based on how they make people feel rather than on any demonstrable basis.
Science also tries to understand our lives and the world around us....but restricts itself to material realities.
The scientific method does not restrict itself intrinsically to the 'material', it restricts itself to empiricism. If you can't demonstrate that something exists, if you can't measure it directly or indirectly, then it's outside of science's remit; however, if you can't demonstrate that something exists, what basis do you have for presuming that it's part of our 'true nature'?
However, in spite of its materialism, science has managed to hint at realities beyond the material in certain areas. I have tried to identify some of those areas in science that could provide insights on the true nature nature of reality beyond the material.
Here we go....
Many people have tried using science directly to study and understand spirituality. This is like using a microscope to look at the stars.
No it's like using a microscope to look at fairies.
Many different ‘realities’ exist at different levels.
Do they? Reality simply is; it can be useful, in some circumstances, to isolate one 'level' or 'scale' to try to infer or deduce information from the available data, but those 'scales' are subjective artifices, those scales are not isolated 'realities' of their own.
Anthropic Principle
The 'fine tuning' argument has been demonstrated to be flawed in any number of ways, but none quite so succinctly as Douglas Adams' puddle analogy -
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principleQM - Copenhagen Interpretation
I can't fathom the depths of the irony that is making a claim that an interpretation of quantum mechanics that requires an observer somehow justifies claims that are proposed to be outside of science's remit because they can't be observed...
Evolution: The Theory of Evolution has brought out the fact that biological life evolves from simple forms to more complex and varied forms.
A degree of caution is needed here; the theory of evolution as it currently stands shows how life CAN evolve from simple to more complex forms, but it equally shows that life can evolve from more complex to simpler forms of life, if that's what's immediately beneficial. Notwithstanding the difficulties in measuring 'complexity - there are ferns with over a thousand chromosomes, the
Dapnia water flea has 30,000+ genes (vs human 25,000 or so), insects have an entire physical restructuring process mid-life... which measure of 'complexity' counts here?
Regardless, the theory of evolution is the best current model of the mechanism by which the variety of life that we see in current and historical nature has come about; it does not need any 'spiritual' component to make it work, and it does not lead to any conclusion of something 'spiritual'. Whilst it can be seen, in some ways, as a correlate for deliberate design, it is a fundamentally different process; design is guide, deliberately aimed intent depending on reliable performance, and the current theory of evolution by natural selection is explicitly based upon selection working on random variation arising from imperfect reproduction.
Therefore we cannot infer that evolution is some universal concept that underpins everything; evolution is particularly the natural, unconscious, reactive process of lifeforms adapting over time to current situations, whereas design is the deliberate reactive or proactive process of adapting to current or potential situations.
Software Model
I don't recall who it is, but there's someone on, or who has been on, the boards who is far better placed to pick apart this misunderstanding, but the 'hardware-software' model of the human brain is of at best limited usefulness - the brain physically changes under the process of learning new information, and does not respond consistently depending on variables like hormone levels, whereas the hardware of a computer remains constant.
However, where the idea of consciousness being some remote software that operates on the 'hardware' of the brain really falls down is that there's no interface. There's no evidence for activity in the brain that would require some unseen outside prompt or stimulus, there's no gap in the current explanations which only some unseen hand could explain. That doesn't definitively prove that it's not happening - absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, after all - but it leaves disembodied consciousness as an unfounded claim, which only becomes even less tenable as we learn more and more about how the brain does actually achieve what it achieves.
Subjective nature of Reality: Science has pointed out that what we experience as objective reality is actually just a subjective experience created by our senses and brain. The objective world that we believe in as ‘real’, is just a series of impulses and images in our brain.
No, you are extending the limitations of our subjective understanding and trying to infer characteristics of reality from that. That our understanding my only ever be subjective does not mean that reality is subjective - our understanding of reality, and the reality itself, may be different things.
Triune Brain
Unless I'm misunderstanding what you've written, this is saying scientific enquiry has provided an explanation for an observable phenomenon that previously had various 'spiritual' explanations?
Neural connectivity
In teaching this is summarised as 'Practice makes permanent'. Sure, if you teach people not to think critically they will be open to a non-critical worldview. That's not a validation of spirituality, it's a battle-cry for better education.
Implicit Pattern Learning
On a spectrum of people from less to more likely to find patterns, you'd expect there to be a consequence likelihood to false positives - that's not a validation of spirituality, that's a validation of statistics.
Bacterial influence
Nothing in this is inconsistent with the interpretation that certain gut microbiomes might lead people to, say, an unwarranted acceptance of unsubstantiated claims. It doesn't lead to a conclusion of 'spiritual', although it might explain the otherwise untenable position of 'spiritual'.
Spectrum
The development of the body of scientific knowledge affording more nuance and subtlety, particularly in the 'softer' sciences, appears to be a good thing, and having more sociological, neurological and ecological activity seen as points on a scale rather than absolute positions has led to more and better discoveries and applications.
None of that, though, means that we should now accept that Jesus sits just the other side of indigo on the rainbow. 'Spiritual' is not a position on a spectrum of understanding, it's a qualitatively different type of claim.
Quantum Field Theory/String Theory
These hark back to your point on 'levels' of reality. Our brains have evolved, and our individual experiences have formed, at the 'macroscopic' level, and our subjective understanding of what happens at the quantum level is only ever going to be interpreted through that lens. It's not that quantum activity is either, or both, particle or wave, it's that those are models were using to try to interpret activity that is functionally neither. What we can't presume is that, because our understanding of that level or reality is to some extent limited or flawed, that we can therefore presume all other flawed notions have equal merit.
An imperfect model of quantum wave/particle duality does not therefore mean consciousness is a universal field; that's the same fallacy as 'I don't know, therefore Jesus'.
Parallel Worlds
It's arguably whether 'multiverse' concepts are science or not - currently there are few models which make any sort of testable or potentially testable hypotheses. Which is not to say that I don't think it's a far more likely facet of reality than 'spirit', but that's not a claim that I can justify, it's just a personal preference.
Consciousness
If no-one knows what consciousness is (I'd agree) then we can't know that it's the 'core of our subjectivity'. Everything that we are is because of consciousness - I'm not sure this is the case, I am a continuum (we go back to that 'spectrum' idea) and for at least parts of that existence I was not conscious, but I probably 'was'. Consciousness appears to emerge from us, not the other way around - again, that's not definitive, but it's certainly evidence which is lacking from the spiritual model.
Unconscious Mind
Again, here, it seems that you're acknowledging a scientific model of a phenomenon that previously was at least open to 'spiritual' explanations. This appears to limit the space for spiritual models, not expand it or justify those models.
Multiple Personality/Dissociative Identity
Again, spectrums here - there are examples of DID where there are completely different 'alters' (one called 'Kevin', say, one called 'Carl') and there are examples where they're always 'Kevin', but sometimes 'Kevin' has a tendency to anger and violence, and sometimes 'Kevin' is a calm, mousy type. Normally Kevin doesn't remember what Carl did, but in the less striated version the memory can often be intact (although put down to 'unknown influences') - it's somewhere on the crossover from DID to 'just' a mood disorder, or associations with schizophrenic disorders.
Whilst this could lead to an interpretation of cosmopsychism - or even just the idea of multiple disembodied individual consciousnesses impacting on a single brain (Hardware/Software model above), there's no need to introduce unsubstantiated notions into the equation. We already have evidence that personality and consciousness are manifestations of brain activity, and that brain activity can influence other bodily organs strongly - it's as complete an explanation to say that the two patterns of brain activity result in two patterns of bodily organ behaviour, and that explanation only requires phenomena that have already been well demonstrated and documented.
NDE - These are experiences of patients who have actually died in medical terms, due to heart attacks or accidents
No.
Life is one of those scientific concepts that seems obvious but for which we don't have a strong definition, and subsequently death as well. Going back to the 'spectrum' you talked about earlier, it seems that there is a gradation - I'd encourage you to look up the Infinite Monkey Cage's thought experiment on Schrodinger's Strawberry to get into ideas of when is something that was alive officially dead. Either way, how dead is dead is a question that we don't possibly fully understand, let alone come close to answering, so to make definitive claims about the existence of disembodied consciousnesses existence after 'death' on the basis of embodied consciousnesses subjective understanding following traumatic events and an at best partial completion of the process of 'dying' is reaching. Is it a possibility? Yes. Are there other explanations? Yes. Are any of them particularly stronger or weaker? Not that I can see. So this one probably sits under 'we just don't know', and until we understand the question better in order to have a basis for starting to determine what should constitute an answer that's likely to be as much as we can say about it.
Reincarnation
Billions upon billions of human deaths, and we have a handful of claims which have lucked onto enough accurate guesses/memories to be considered reliable (assuming that these are just guesses and not research). As an explanation, reincarnation has exactly as much basis as the idea of a group consciousness or genetic memory, and at least the last one gives us the Assassin's Creed sequence of video games. Yes, multiple cultures have claims of reincarnation, and Rupert Sheldrake, as confused as some of his claims are, at least gives us a 'scientific' explanation in his genomorphic resonance concept.
Again, it's not possible to discount it, but learnt stories are a far more likely explanation.
AI
I'm not sure where you're going with this. If consciousness is disembodied and only requires 'hardware' to run on, why is an 'artificial' brain somehow exempt? Does consciousness require hormonal influences? What if an artificial intelligence was constructed from a network of actual neurons in a gel suspension rather than a network of silicon based neural links?
They argue that…if we are able to create robots that behave like humans, it means that humans are clearly not very special and that the soul or atma is not necessary at all. This is not true!
And you are of course going to explain why that is necessarily not true, right?
Robots did not create themselves. It is directed and guided evolution driven by human intelligence that has made this kind of artificial intelligence possible.
Weren't you the one saying, above, that design was just a manifestation of the same universal evolution that gave rise to the 'complex' humans? I disagreed, I still do, but this inconsistency needs to be pointed out.
Humanity, equally, did not 'invent' itself - human culture is an expression of human behaviour, but the humans needed to be there first. If you use that as a justification to claim that therefore there must have been a consciousness that gave rise to humans, then you just keep pushing that first example further and further back - somewhere there has to be a consciousness that didn't arise as a result of the machinations of some other consciousness; if you see consciousness as emergent from other activity, this isn't an issue.
just because automatons can behave like humans, we cannot conclude that we are also automatons!
Why not? If we can accurately simulate a human's behaviour with an 'artificial' intelligence, in what way can we say that the AI and the human are different? Given the apparent fact that human biology is as deterministic in nature as the silicon-based activity of an AI, why are we presumed to be intrinsically qualitatively different?
Identifying ourselves entirely with the body and genetic programming is clearly wrong.
I'm afraid it's not as clear as you seem to think, certainly I can't see why that's wrong, and I suspect I'm not alone on that.
VR
The problem you have with VR is that you're exchanging a deliberately subjective experience for an accidentally subjective one, but all that does is highlight the subjectivity which wasn't really under question. Nothing within the subjective experience can directly tell us anything about the objective nature of reality; in order to do that we need to rely on empirical testing to try to establish underlying patterns which can be relied upon without recourse to our individual subjectivity - the scientific method is our current best tool for doing this. Spiritual claims manifestly fail to do any such thing, they operate from the presumption that we can intuit details of the objective reality from the subjective experience because they feel right, which is to not only fail to remove the subjectivity from the equation, but given that we have different subjective 'feelings' about those various spiritual claims actually doubles down on the subjectivity and compounds the problem.
O.
