Ethnographic Research (Help please!)

[robvalue]

I'd be interested to see a definition of what a "spiritual" or "incorporeal" thing is meant to be. Here's my take on these definitions:

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I generally see people say things like "non-physical" or "immaterial". But physical and material are just other ways of saying literally exists, as opposed to abstract concepts or properties. The latter are ways of understanding or interpreting things that exist, but don't exist in their own right or have any possible impact. Something is physical/material if we could highlight it as a subsection of reality. This (presumably) means that there is theoretically some way these things could be measured, since there is something "there" to measure, but that certainly doesn't mean it's possible for humans to measure it, perhaps ever. For a being that was aware of everything that exists however, a simple function which returned 1 for existent and 0 for nonexistent would be able to "measure" it.

So to say something exists but is immaterial, non-physical, incorporeal or spiritual would be a contradiction. It generally seems to be a way of wanting something to be there, but hiding it from any possible scrutiny. It's a semantic non-gap. The only other category I can think of, for things that have some impact on reality but aren't subsections of it, are "rules of reality". These are the kind of thing we're always trying our best to model using science. If there's some fourth category that has to be created just to hide spiritual things in, then that just shows how far removed from reality it actually is.

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