Holy Spirit
Working together humans achieve more than would be possible working separately. The value of a group of humans is greater than the sum of the parts. This post explores how that extra surplus — lets call it the holy spirit — is what makes it worthwhile to devote a lifetime to helping and working with others.
Synergy
Synergy is the name given to the effect that a collection of things together might be worth more than the things separately. It is a fancy name for something also known as teamwork. It is that extra something that you get when you work together with others.
There is no question that humans are social animals who succeed by working together. Humans have always lived in communities. Even though there are exceptional special cases, generally a human by themselves in the wilderness can not survive. The fact that we walk on two legs is evidence of communal habits going back millions of years, because a broken leg would be a death sentence without others to support you. There is evidence that mothers bearing a child succeeded only by the help of others for millions of years.
Working together is the human superpower. It is the essential ingredient that separates us from all other animals on the planet. We share knowledge, and culture grows in capability thousands of times faster than evolution could do through genetics. When viewed in this way, it really is a kind of magic.
Holy Spirit
Yes, of course, I am borrowing from Christian mythology in using this term holy spirit, but there is some rationale for this. Christians believe that God has added something special to humans, a spirit, or inner experience that other animals don’t have. That inner spirit is what makes humans more like God. It does match the inner sensation that your will is somehow separate from your body, and that we appear to be a spirit that runs a body.
Nonbelievers also see this inner sensation as special. Materialists see this as emergent from the working of the universe. The universe has this great quality, determined by apriori logic, to be able to form consciousness. The glory of consciousness is not diminished by seeing it as emergent from physical universe. Much of the feeling associated with this logic of the universe, is the same feeling that a Christian has about God. Drawing upon Spinoza’s concept of God being the driving logic of the universe, we see the logic of the universe providing us with a conscious subject view of the world, in precisely analogous way that Christians talk about God giving us the holy spirit.
Conclusion
I am hereby proposing that nonbelievers use the term “holy spirit” to talk about that special capability that humans are able to do beyond what we normally attribute to material causes. It is a label that captures the idea of human social behavior being special. Groups of humans always accomplish more than that number of single humans working separately could. We truly work together to gain a surplus over what individuals do. The hold spirit in this sense becomes both the synergy that results from working together, as well as the guiding purpose for working together in the first place. Both Christians and non-believers can agree that this holy spirit lives within us, and makes us special.