I know, I know. Why spirits are nonsense.

 The word for it is epistomology.  It is how we know what we know.  I've previously discussed the sliding scale of knowledge on the line of what we believe and placed the X and Y axes as perception and evidence.  Epistomology would focus on the latter.  How do we come to know what we know, those things that are not faith based or unsupported beliefs.  We come to them by observing the world around us and determining, through evidence of our senses, what is real.  The senses are, of course, fallible and they can be fooled.  Been there and done that.  As a quick note it is my opinion that the best way to a religious experience is magic mushrooms.  Just saying.  Apart from self induced or organically occurring hallucinations we do rely on our senses to tell us about the real world and , reliable or not, they are all we have.  Objectivists like to reference the objective real world as that thing that our senses are showing us.  OK.  That is a lovely abstract thought exercise.  It means that there are "true facts" out there that do not depend on an observer to declare that they are true.  A chair remains a chair whether I am observing it or not.  If you walk into the room after I leave you will see the same chair ergo it is objectively there.  Nifty thought but it doesn't matter because the only thing that does matter is you and I experienced that chair.  There is no point in talking about either or both of us not experiencing it.  

I'm going to go with a mirage analogy here.  You and I are crossing a desert and see an oasis in the distance.  One of us decides it is real and the other decides it is an illusion.  Objectively it is there or it is not but since both of us see it and we don't agree on the reality of it one of us is wrong.  How do we determine which of us that is?  We turn our caravan toward the oasis and investigate.  We find out if it is there or not.The truth of whether it is there or not is entirely based on evidence, experience, a subjective point of view.

Here is where I am going with this.  In order to accept that anything is true, that it actually exists and isn't a mirage or hallucination or other invention of our mind, we need some evidence.  We absolutely need it.  We need to be able to verify that the existence of the thing corresponds with reality to the degree that this falls on the knowledge side of our sliding scale and not the belief without evidence side.  This is where we go back to abstract concepts.  I have already touched on the three big ones, perfection, nothing and immortality, infinity or eternity.  We can point to nothing in human experience to demontrate or illustrate these qualities.  They are only thought to exist.  This time I want to talk about one that is slightly less abstract.  I want to talk about consciousness.  Where it is not at all abstract is where we see it in ourselves and other living things.  We can determine, with hard scientific evidence, when someone is conscious or unconscious, even if that line is not always a precise or clear delineation.  By another definition consciousness could be merely self awareness.  This would delineate between plants and us or ourselves and what we would designate as lesser animal species which we don't consider to be at all self aware.  Where I am going with this is that consciousness, in whatever way we choose to designate it, exists on this planet in living things.  No one in their right mind believes that non living things have any sort of genuine consciousness.  Did I just declare that pantheists are not in their right minds?  Yep.  Sue me.

Let us now consider the arguments, posits, suppositions, whatever you choose to call them, that spirits, gods or ghosts of the dearly departed exist in reality.  This is where the link to abstract thought resides.  In order to believe that any such invisible entity exists in reality one must believe that it is possible for consciousness to exist without corporeal or temporal form, without life.  Just like something being eternal or perfect or nothing, we have nothing to which we can point to demonstrate or illustrate consciousness apart from life.  There is simply nothing in human experience that corresponds to this.  It is an imagined characteristic of a thing with zero evidence to support it.  Is it possible that such a thing could exist?  It is possible that a unicorn exists somewhere.  No one has ever seen one so why bother about it being possible?  When someone can point to it then start believing it is true and real.

I would just like to touch on some questions that the idea of disembodied consciousness might exist.  I've heard it described as energy.  Energy can be measured.  Disembodied energy cannot.  Is it some form of energy outside of physical investigation?  If that is the case then it is not manifesting in our physical world.  If it was that would be measurable.  My final question is what makes this disembodied consciousness cohere into an identifiable entity?  What causes it to have any confining properties that makes it distinguishable as a particular being?  If I continue as a spirit after I die what makes my "energy" coalesce as me and retain my identity?  One must assume some laws of supernature, so to speak, that correspond with the laws of nature that currently cause the atoms of my being to coalesce and render me, the human named Dean.  As my spirit self, me and God would have to be limited and confined somehow to designate one from the other.  If God is everywhere and everything then he is also me.  Add to that the idea that he is perfect and after I die he makes me perfect too then I am identical to him.  There cannot be two forms of perfect.  If I am perfect in a different way than God is, then one of us is not perfect.  If my spirit is different from God's spirit then his ends where mine begins and he has a limit to his being.  He is contained in some way.  Until anyone can come up with a coherent description of the laws by which disembodied consciousness is bound and limited there is no reason to bother with that idea.  To come full circle on the abstraction of such an idea, there is nothing humans can point to, no evidence that such a thing can exist or does exist anywhaere in the known universe.  It is a cute idea that has absolutely no correspondence with reality.  Until we expore the universe and find it elsewhere our only examples of conciousness are living things on planet Earth.  Consciousness requires living, functioning brains.  If we are the highest consciousness in the universe that might be sad but might well be the reality of it.  Maybe this physical universe can't evolve anything better.  From where we are sitting it hasn't.  Nonetheless, it does appear that consciousness does evolve or has evolved here and that is the sole source of it so far.  Imagining that it exists in some other realm or dimension and that it can even interact with this one is nonsense.  I haven't seen it and any and all evidence of such is easily dismissed as anecdote and woo.