Do you think your distinction maps to the free will vs. determinism dimension?
I think what makes me confused is that religion is heavily mixed into the animistic view. Can the animistic view (in particular with respect to natural phenomena) exist without being based on religion?
I don’t have any hard and fast answers, so I cannot be completely sure.
My guess is that a “spirit” person is more likely to believe in free will, while a “gear” person is more likely to believe in the absence of free will. What free will means precisely, I’m not sure, so it feels forced for me to claim that another person would believe free will, when I myself am unable to make an argument that is as convincing to me as I’m sure their arguments must be to them. I haven’t thought much of free will, but the only way I’m personally able to conceive of it is that my mind is somehow determined by brain-states which in turn are defined by configurations of elementary particles (my brain/my body/the universe) with known laws, if unknown (in practice) solutions. So personally I’m in the “it’s gears all the way down” camp, at least with the caveat that I haven’t thought about it much. But there are people who genuinely claim to believe in free will and I take their word for it, whatever those words mean to them. So my guess at the beginning of the paragraph should interpreted as: if you ask a “spirit” person he will most likely say, “yes, I believe in free will”, while a “gear” person will most likely say “no, I do not believe in free will.” The factual content of each claim is a separate issue. Whether either world-view can be made self-consistent is a further issue. I think a “spiritist” would accept the will of someone as a sufficient first cause of a phenomenon, with the will being conceived of only as a “law unto itself”.
When it comes to determinism, I think a “gearist” are more likely to be determinists, since that is what has dominated all of the sciences (except for quantum physics).
“Spiritits” on the other hand, I don’t know. If God has a plan for everything and everyone, that sounds pretty deterministic. But if you pray for him to grant you this one wish, then you don’t know whether he will change the course of the universe for your benefit or no, so I would call that pretty indeterministic. Even if you don’t pray, you can never really know what God has in store for you. If all your Gods are explicitly capricious, then there are no pretensions to determinism. I think a “spiritist” is more likely to believe in indeterminism.
The animistic view with respect to natural phenomena feels very religious to me as well. I use the word “feel” here because I have no precise definition of religion and maybe none exists. (See the very beginning of my comments in this thread.) If you believe that the river is alive, that the wind can be angry, and the waves vengeful, is that (proto?) religious? Or is it simply the pathetic fallacy? What if you believe, with Aristotle, that “nature abhors a vacuum”? That is animistic with out being, I think, religious. Or what of Le Chatelier’s Principle, in which a chemical reaction “resists” the change you impose on it (e.g. if you impose an increased pressure, the chemicals will react to decrease the pressure again)?
Do you think your distinction maps to the free will vs. determinism dimension?
I think what makes me confused is that religion is heavily mixed into the animistic view. Can the animistic view (in particular with respect to natural phenomena) exist without being based on religion?
I don’t have any hard and fast answers, so I cannot be completely sure.
My guess is that a “spirit” person is more likely to believe in free will, while a “gear” person is more likely to believe in the absence of free will. What free will means precisely, I’m not sure, so it feels forced for me to claim that another person would believe free will, when I myself am unable to make an argument that is as convincing to me as I’m sure their arguments must be to them. I haven’t thought much of free will, but the only way I’m personally able to conceive of it is that my mind is somehow determined by brain-states which in turn are defined by configurations of elementary particles (my brain/my body/the universe) with known laws, if unknown (in practice) solutions. So personally I’m in the “it’s gears all the way down” camp, at least with the caveat that I haven’t thought about it much. But there are people who genuinely claim to believe in free will and I take their word for it, whatever those words mean to them. So my guess at the beginning of the paragraph should interpreted as: if you ask a “spirit” person he will most likely say, “yes, I believe in free will”, while a “gear” person will most likely say “no, I do not believe in free will.” The factual content of each claim is a separate issue. Whether either world-view can be made self-consistent is a further issue. I think a “spiritist” would accept the will of someone as a sufficient first cause of a phenomenon, with the will being conceived of only as a “law unto itself”.
When it comes to determinism, I think a “gearist” are more likely to be determinists, since that is what has dominated all of the sciences (except for quantum physics).
“Spiritits” on the other hand, I don’t know. If God has a plan for everything and everyone, that sounds pretty deterministic. But if you pray for him to grant you this one wish, then you don’t know whether he will change the course of the universe for your benefit or no, so I would call that pretty indeterministic. Even if you don’t pray, you can never really know what God has in store for you. If all your Gods are explicitly capricious, then there are no pretensions to determinism. I think a “spiritist” is more likely to believe in indeterminism.
The animistic view with respect to natural phenomena feels very religious to me as well. I use the word “feel” here because I have no precise definition of religion and maybe none exists. (See the very beginning of my comments in this thread.) If you believe that the river is alive, that the wind can be angry, and the waves vengeful, is that (proto?) religious? Or is it simply the pathetic fallacy? What if you believe, with Aristotle, that “nature abhors a vacuum”? That is animistic with out being, I think, religious. Or what of Le Chatelier’s Principle, in which a chemical reaction “resists” the change you impose on it (e.g. if you impose an increased pressure, the chemicals will react to decrease the pressure again)?