I don't believe in incorporeal spirits, demons, ghosts, etc.

(I don't think it's inconceivable that there could be such things, but I think we have no particular reason to believe in them, and a lot of reasons not to. But that would be a blog post for another time. My reasons are pretty standard, however.)

However, I have some friends who profess a belief in such things.

(I think it's usually extremely poor form to say of an intellectual opponent "they profess to believe X" instead of "they believe X". It is usually uncharitable, hubristic, irrational, and often commits one to an implausible view of belief. However, the rest of my blog post here explains why I use this construction instead of the other construction here.)

For the record, I also have friends who belief in ghosts etc in an uncomplicated way. But I'm not talking about them here. I'm talking about friends who believe a certain type of thing about demons etc.

These friends, of whom I am talking, say to me things like: "no, you don't understand: a demon isn't an angry guy without a body. It's more like a pattern that gets played out across space and time. Surely you believe in patterns? Like the law of supply and demand?"

What I wish these guys would understand, I think, is that this is an extremely tendentious, ameliorative, and synergistic concept of demons. A large amount of philosophical work has been put into making this new concept in order to pretend like people have actually meant something reasonable by demons the whole time.

Here is my potted history of demonology:

1. In the beginning, things would happen that people didn't understand, like getting sick. Being human, they thought to themselves "Who likes to hurt me? Other humans, really. I bet this sickness was some type of guy. I've never seen him, so I guess he doesn't have a body, and just floats around like the wind or something."

2. Eventually, some people thought about this, and concluded it probably wasn't the case. Instead, sickness was probably caused by other, "natural" forces that we already knew about. For instance, maybe you got the common cold when you were cold for a while. Note that unlike some potted histories of science, I do not posit that people figured out germ theory before they made this switch. They just kind of changed their opinion, even though their second opinion wasn't necessarily more accurate (although maybe in some cases it was).

In fact, I'm led to believe that these two traditions I have named are not in conflict, at least in the minds of some people; leading, for example, to the Catholic Church's current official position (?) that sometimes sicknesses and mental problems are caused by natural causes, but sometimes they're caused by demons.

3. In the third leg of this stool of history, we have theologians, philosophers, and religious philosophers. To gloss over thousands of years of history and bitter warring factions, some of these guys had particular opinions. In fact, relevant to our purposes, some of them thought it was weird to posit a guy who didn't have a body but still had mental states. And so, from various sources comes the notion that a demon or such like is not a guy, but in fact an abstract object.

(Notably, a lot of these discussions were about the properties of God, who is a different type of angry guy with no body. While the timbre of the discussion is different in that case, I feel that what I'm saying here applies just as well to that case if not more so! The Bible clearly says that God is angry, and theologians have had to reconcile this with their other beliefs about God, and so have come up with ideas like he wasn't really angry he was just in a state analogous to anger except he wasn't actually in a state (he's timeless so he can't change, despite all the times when the Bible clearly says he changed in some way or changed his mind) that's just a fact about him that's analogous to being in a state.)

Meanwhile, the folk have gone on believing in demons, angry guys who don't have a body (or sometimes do have a body) who can make you ill and just generally like to mess things up for you and so forth.

I don't think the jump from 1 to 3 is more natural than the jump from 1 to 2. In fact I think the jump from 1 to 2 is more natural.

And, furthermore, since the mindset of 1 remains fairly prevalent, I think it's confusing, and furthermore disingenuous, to say "yes, I totally believe in demons; people who believe in demons are right. What I mean by demon is something completely different than those people have ever thought of."

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Update 2024-08-13: Further reading: Friend-of-the-blog Keaton has written a riff upon this concept: https://implicit.computer/blog/egregore/