Everything is reactive.
That includes thought. since all events cascade from the origin.
Act implies choice and selection, because you can not choose, you can not act..
Faith being a consequence of physical systems is a thing that may exist.
What would happen happens with or without faith/ belief as a concept.. but faith and belief as their physical counterparts setting the next domino in motion is possible..
The problem is you are mixing the magical idea of faith, of which is a departure from our current reality with the current reality..
Your faith is magical.. and it can not influence reality because magic as defined can only run in parallel.. If the streams cross, then the stream is neither magic nor non magic.. Even if this is a possibility, we could not perceive such a universe given the current limitation of our binary processing system.
I've read precisely what you've written.. And I break it down to your intentions, because in that way, I can understand what you're attempting to accomplish...
You deride my writing and logic.. Everything that ever occurs is rational and happens as it should have.. I am rational independent of your capability to understand me
It is possible within the perceived universe to define its opposite.. this is a necessary condition for existence.. But that doesn't mean the realities of said opposites can cross.
I'm not talking about a theoretical concept of how things could possibly be, if you only use thought to derive it, but a real principal that everyone makes use of daily in interacting with the world they find themselves in.
Arthur C. Clarke once wrote: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
I will expand that a little while keeping to the core of the thought: "Anything you perceive that you don't yet understand is indistiguishable from magic."
The process you go through in order to make sense of your universe is what I am discussing. It's irrelevant whether what you perceive is "real" or not, or whether your choices and actions are predetermined electrochemically or not, but the process that is used to make enough sense of your surroundings to function is the same.
It's a feedback loop that includes gathering evidence, forming hypotheses, formulating actions and executing them to increase the body of evidence and eventually acting in faith based on that evidence.
This is what happens irrespective of what is being perceived and interacted with.
If you want to extend this to MY faith and YOUR faith as you seem to want to separate things, let's look at an example. I can write to you that I have a mug of some new drink you have never heard of on my desk and how that drink tastes. I trust that the drink not only exists, but has certain properties (flavour, sweetness, texture, etc), based on the evidence of it that I have perceived / experienced. You have no perception of the drink except for my written words. Your "faith" in the existence of the drink is entirely dependent on how much you know about me and whether you trust me and my motives in telling you about the drink. For you to tell me that the drink CANNOT exist or be perceived, or that my trust in it's existence is "magical" and not based in "reality", simply because it's not something you have experience of is both presumptuous and judgemental. It's fine to tell me you don't believe it exists because you haven't got enough evidence to support belief in it, though (to overcome your unbelief).
I understand your desire to separate the physical and metaphysical, but the method of dealing with both is the same and it is this method / mechanism which is under discussion here. The senses used to perceive each may be different, but the process of working out just how "real" things are in each is the same.
The thing is, you don't have proof that faith doesn't affect the world in a metaphysical point of view.
I agree.
In that case, you don't know how anything works, except the fact that you're alive and that *something* is causing you to do things and we call it 'free will' as people don't like it when things aren't named.
Metaphysics has 2 questions: "What's out there?" and "What is it like?"
The problem happens due to the fact that both the answers transcends what people can comprehend, and we do that in opposites. You can think that something is bad, because it's the opposite of good, and vice versa. If you think about it enough, you can understand that this is the basis of how we understand things.
It's outside the scope of our limited means to comprehend our entire universe, but when we start to gain evidences telling us what something is like we can conclude that that thing most likely exists. Existence is a requirement of character, something must exist in order for its properties to be measured. Often we postulate the existence of something based on discovering some aspect of it, some part of what it is "like", such as dark matter.
We cannot know what's out there, and we cannot know what its like, as both answers transcend this duality, which is out of our comprehension.
Therefore, this 'faith' is the closest thing that you can comprehend, of the answer to these two metaphysical questions. This faith, can also be whatever the person desires it to be.
We can know some of what's out there and some of the characteristics of those things we do perceive. Faith is always involved, though, as the component that allows us to accept what we perceive and move on from merely gathering evidence to acting on it. If we didn't believe the moon was there we could not have landed people on it, for instance.
While faith can be what each person desires, it's only beneficial to the person when it matches "reality" enough to allow interaction.
