Software in some sense does exist in a spiritual realm in the same way Aquinas talked about "incorporeal beings". You can't hold or point to software or souls or gods. You can hold and point to hardware and bodies.
Of course, I have no idea what Aquinas actually believed. I just find his conclusions around the existence of "incorporeal beings" and "souls" to be consistent with the emergent-agent idea we're talking about.
For instance, in a very un-catholic view, Aquinas argued that - to some extent - animals and even plants have souls in this way.
Software does not exist in any spiritual realm, it's just that the word "software" refers to a state rather than a system. There is nothing "spiritual" or "mystical" going on there. It's completely mundane physics. You can't point at software for the same reason you can't point at sleep or death or urgency. It's just a quirk of natural language that we overload nouns to refer to both systems and states.
I absolutely love your writing BTW! I wasn't aware of it before today. It's really derailed my whole workday. It's fun to discover a new author like this, thank you for responding to my comment :)
I don't mean to argue that anything spiritual/supernatural is going on when I'm talking about an emergent god agent here. I'm arguing that gods are in the same ontological category as individual human minds are. I'm sure most religious people, Aquinas included, would need quite a lot more mysticism to be injected into the idea before they would recognize it as their own.
I don't fully believe it, to be honest. Mostly because I have no way of testing it or experiencing it. But, it's a fun idea and it's fun to imagine how my own little caricaturized model of Aquinas' mind might find some things to agree with. As far as I can tell, he was a person that desperately wanted a cohesive model of the "full stack" of things. Unfortunately for him, the best understandings at his time were pretty rough by today's standards.
Software in some sense does exist in a spiritual realm in the same way Aquinas talked about "incorporeal beings". You can't hold or point to software or souls or gods. You can hold and point to hardware and bodies.
Of course, I have no idea what Aquinas actually believed. I just find his conclusions around the existence of "incorporeal beings" and "souls" to be consistent with the emergent-agent idea we're talking about.
For instance, in a very un-catholic view, Aquinas argued that - to some extent - animals and even plants have souls in this way.