Ramone on Knowing God
Riffing off Eliezer on consciousness, here is (my alter-ego) Ramone on spirituality:
We are souls who know we are spiritual. Since we can conceive of mere non-soul "animals," physical bodies without spirit, spirituality must be a non-physical "something more." (Until someone proves this is not logically possible, we assume it is.) We call this something more "God", or at least a part of God. So our full selves, which we call a "soul", contains both a God-part and an animal-part.
We know God is real and that we are not animals. Skeptics ask: how do we know? Our God-part, being God and spirit, can directly see God and that it is spiritual. What could be simpler? But skeptics persist; they correctly note that it may well be that the spiritual, or God, part of our soul has no causal influence on the body, or animal, part of our soul. If so, they wonder, how could our animal-parts know about God? Their mistake is to think that animals "know" anything – clearly only souls know anything. We obviously use words like "know" and "think" to refer only to high noble things, not base lowly things; there is only a superficial analogy between signal processing in animal bodies and the what spiritual souls know or think.
But base skeptics persist with their base analogy, asking how our animal parts can process signals to see they are part of a soul with a spiritual part? After all, skeptics sneer, if spirits have no causal influence on bodies, and if in some alternate evil universe our bodies were in fact not parts of souls but lone animals, would not those bodies process the same signals the same way? If so, would they not then incorrectly "think", with their animal pseudo-thoughts, that they were part of a soul? Yes, such imagined abominations could have abominable pseudo-thoughts, but since in our actual universe we actually are spiritual souls, why is it so strange that we actually think that we are what we in fact are?
To belabor the obvious, Ramone’s God argument is intended to mirror Chalmer’s qualia argument. Accept both or neither, or show the difference. (FYI, Chalmers and I exchanged about twenty emails last fall.)