An atheists guide to reality

[Angrboda]

"It's a property of the spirit" is an explanation, but as an explanation, it's about as worthless as they come.

Sometimes instead of looking of how much an explanation gives pragmatic scientific prediction, we should just look at what explanation is true given what we know and there can also be other benefits to knowing the truth of that explanation.

If someone were to ask why the oceans have tides, you might say, because of gravity. That's a true explanation, but it's also a poor one. It's difficult to tell whether a poor explanation is true or not. Like your explanation. How would you know that meaning isn't a property of the soul? Your explanation doesn't give anything to go on, you either accept it as a bare assertion or reject it. Now if someone were to say, "It's because the gravity of the moon pulls the loose skin of water on the surface of the earth as it rotates around the planet," that would be a good explanation, and would be amenable to determining whether or not it's true.

Yours isn't. Plus, your solution isn't parsimonious. In addition to the brain, you add an unseen spirit and some way for them to interact, none of which you have any evidence for. You're just making up stuff that sounds like an answer, but really isn't. You could equally well say there's a quantity in the brain that's not detectable called thruxnarb, and thruxnarb is capable of having value. It's just an ad hoc explanation that explains nothing.

I reject your explanation because it is too poor an explanation to count as meaningfully true. Do you have either evidence or a real explanation as to how meaning and the spirit works? If not, you have nothing but sophistry and word games.