Questions For People Who Believe in Souls

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No, but choosing to accept the possibility, choosing to believe has an extraordinary effect on your life. When the belief is widespread, it has an extraordinary effect on the society you live in.



You assume this is also true of me?


This is an atheist slur, I know because I used to use it, firstly to annoy the religious by linking their belief to children's stories, secondly to convince myself that my view was superior and more adult. Religion is much more than a comfortable story to help children sleep, it's an all encompassing view of Man's place in the universe and his duties in this life.




Ditto. This self-elevation, by the way, is your emotional crutch.



You've lost me here, I'm afraid. It sounds like atheist Freudian psychobabble (because religion is a mental disease of course).



How would you square this obsoleteness with demographic realities? The difference in birth rates between the religious and non-religious suggests that Godlessness may be an evolutionary dead end. The future belongs to the religious, perhaps even the religious third world hordes if nothing is done. I like tying religion to social evolution though, I often think the same way, I just think that religion is not akin to an appendix that can be surgically removed without any harm to the patient and that modern atheism is actually a sleek, fashionable throwback to a more primitive time (the Bible is full of atheists mocking and jeering the prophets). You might be living in the past man....



Likewise, but don't worry, I won't have a mental breakdown or start to hate you because of what you write.

The immaterial substrate that allows otherwise inanimate matter to take on the characteristics we observe in that which we consider to be alive. It is what separates the living from the dead, it is what defines something as being alive. Chemistry alone cannot explain why what we consider to be alive truly is. One can have all the chemistry in the universe, and arrange it in every combination possible, but life will not arise from it. Also, and as the Law of Biogenesis clearly states (brought to us by Pasteur), "life can only ever arise from life". That is, the belief that "in the beginning was the soup, and from it we spontaneously arose" is fantasy. Abiogenesis is a myth, but one that many like to convince themselves is possible, because they know that if it isn't possible (and it surely is not), then they will have to accept a divine origin (and for people who define who they are via the term "atheist", this is of course unacceptable, and just too triggering).

It does? Is it reasonable to suppose that if we were to just get the chemistry right we could actually create, from scratch, life in the lab? Haven't people been trying to do this since Shelley wrote 'Frankenstein' way back in the early 1800's? No, reason actually leads us to the conclusion that souls do exist.

Sort of, but not exactly.

Your soul is your "you", and your physical body is just a temporary vessel. If you've ever had an out-of-body experience, I imagine that dying would be very similar.

Your reasoning lacks...err... reason...

Previously "we" have established that a person's personality is the result of physical neurons and an electro/chemical "symbiosis"...
Damage the physical brain and you change an individual's depth of personality at minimum or change it profoundly...

You need a brain to have a personality...
This is a simple observable fact...

And a personality matures in tandem with brain development and life experience...

As a child, we are self-centred quasi-human beings as a result of our lack of brain development...
As a child, we lack the ability to reason because the logical mechanism of the brain isn't developed...
Once the threshold of a higher/relevant reasoning/logical-self-assessment ability is reached it manifests itself as the adolescent phase of life...

What I have stated are recognised scientific facts...
The notion that the imposition of a mature personality infused soul is amusing and fallacious, based on reason and clinical observation...

Any moral judgement uses acts/deeds/thoughts/motivations of an individual...
Without a brain, with its consciousness, this can't be achieved with or without a soul...
Without the Frankensteinian biological mechanism of body and mind/consciousness, there is no possibility of any deeds at all...
Without deeds/actions/thoughts/motivation there is no capacity to be moral or immoral...

A soul's redemption or its condemnation is purely dependant on its biological mechanism...
And if the personality can be changed/perverted through simple trauma to the brain, the integrity of the entire soul thesis becomes compromised and a mockery of objective justice...


Reason, life wisdom and an objective mindset which is aware of social conditioning, would suggest the concept of a soul is the result of human creativity inspired by existential anxiety and a manipulative desire to instill social order...surely...

What you are proposing is simply wishful thinking, imo...
There is no evidence of the existence of a soul...
There are simply anomalies which have yet to be explained...

BTW, once again, could someone definitively define the concept of a "soul"...
So far "we" are equating a "soul" with the personality of a person that maintains cohesion after death...

You said you were leaving this forum!

Liar, liar, pants on fire!...

Reason suggests there is a soul?
Isn't the soul irrefutably connected with the God notion...
And isn't that powered by faith, rather than reason?

For millennia, religion battle against science and proclaimed that "faith" be embraced rather than reason...
WTF?

For once I'm actually going to say I didn't read all of that and I have a strong suspicion that it had very little difference or new information from what you've said above with Mikah.

I'm sorry you're stuck with the belief that consciousness is exclusively the process of the brain or how much it might bother you to hear that you're wrong on it. I really don't care about the feels on this one, naive materialism of this sort is just factually incorrect.

I can't think of many people in this thread who are unfamiliar with the current neuroscience, if any at all. The reason a lot of people disagree on this one is the evidence to the contrary. The limitations of the brain are interesting, they do explain forced adaptations people have to make when certain things get damaged, but that has nothing to do with all of the things that shouldn't be happening in accordance with reductive materialism that are, nor does it help with much of anything else like the Ganzfeld experiments, double and triple-blind tests of blessed food vs placebo, the random number generator work, and all kinds of other experiments that continue to show that there's more to mental activity and awareness.

Also for anyone whose had an NDE, and OBE, had massive synchronicies broken over their heads, encounters with gods or goddesses, or even dealt with a poltergeist, they know they're not crazy and they know that what they experienced had an internal logic to it that hallucination, selective attention, etc. can't even come close to explaining.

The thing that's really stupid about the current climate and it's religious/anti-religious baggage is that we have so many conversations, here's a perfect example, where buying into the evidence that naive materialism's failing or has failed to explain to universe is considered 1:1 with either being a theist, having a profound fear of death, or a hidden crypt-version of one, the other, or both. People as credible as Thomas Nagel have been picking at the corners of that already and increasing numbers of mainstream names are starting do as such. Now, the caveat with them is they're still at 'Please please don't get me wrong! I'm not suggesting spooky stuff! Just that our current take on materiality isn't quite cutting it on certain fronts and its looking incomplete at best!'. It's a stupid thing for people to even need to say, but in the current environment unfortunately I get it.

The reasons why I think the idea of consciousness surviving death are so horrifying to so many:

1) Fear of the religions - ie. that any evidence of such survival would have the rivers flowing with the blood of the nonbeliever (err.... maybe, depends what part of the world you live in but those parts it seems to happen anyway).

2) Some strange idea that it will mean that all of the scientific research needs to be thrown out the window, which gets mentioned often and I find it strange because this one makes absolutely no sense to me. Did you observe it under tight experimental conditions, have those tests been replicated and not only replicated for decades or even centuries? If so I have no idea what you're on about.

3) They sloppily scribble in that it would be proof of a biblical Yahweh or Allah, which makes no sense unless you're actually able to establish such a link empirically.

4) Probably the closest these come to making sense - they're horrified by the bloodiness and seeming lovelessness of evolution, the insidious things it does with human behavior, all of the suffering that's involved, and one can wheel out not only tons of truly brutal things that happen in the animal and insect kindgom (Dawkins IMHO does this well) or one could cite all kinds of conditions like the 20th century that were allowed to happen, so the thought of anything like a deity standing by and watching that, let alone creating all of this, morally repulses them at the deepest level. I have a fair amount of sympathy for this view but - there's just one nagging assumption strapped in here, ie. that there is any self-aware deity watching any of this. Consciousness beyond the brain evidences nothing other than consciousness beyond the brain and in an animistic frame or something along similar lines there's nothing there to hold moral responsibility for the world.


My own challenges in the past few years have been around these two concepts:

1) Organic life on earth and it's evolutionary impulses are as ugly and nasty as if they'd come about purely by accident.

2) Reductive materialism, while great for engineering and medicine, seems to only describe well the limitations of how consciousness and matter interface but when the assumptions get taken out farther it fails. Consciousness seems to evidence itself as a cyclical/recursive/self-referencing pattern that that can spin itself up with or without a brain, just that clearly if its consciousness outside a body and without a brain it seems to need large expanses and has very little leverage over matter (at most it can make itself known by playing our neurons).

One doesn't necessarily knock the other out of the box as we could have come about purely by chance and consciousness could very well be eternal and immortal; they're just uncomfortable bedfellows and for a long time we've had them in these really clean and neat categories. I've had to chew on the possibility of something sort of like a Nietzschean vitalism, if I were to try and give it a moral flavor.

Similarly I have met things that seem to care about us enough to gently interfere, whether guiding chance for us or leading us intellectually to certain kinds of discovery and showing us their approval along the way indicating that we've found what they wanted us to. My guess is they're not all-powerful or anything close. Perhaps more powerful than a human being? Don't know but it wouldn't surprise me. I can't even begin to imagine what their actual limitations are or might be, what the shape of those limitations would be, and perhaps the best they can do for us is pollinate ideas or help people find potentially new roads when the ones they're on come to an end. Strangely I've noticed that a lot of people find the dark gods and goddesses most incisive in this regard, ie. as tough teachers but caring teachers out for the person's betterment whose in contact with them nonetheless. One might use terms like gods, goddesses, archangels, dukes, olympic spirits, etc. as stand-ins for more proper scientific terminology because we simply have no clue what they are or where they come from - we just know they have a way of swimming through matter like a form of free-floating causality and that they have distinct personalities.

People tend to lose their isht over that kind of thing because any mention of gods, goddesses, religion, magic, etc. is super-hyper-primitive woojoowoojoojuju and there's a mythology that every last bit of that stuff was the cultural equivalent of feeding ourselves a steady diet of lead paint chips, that every last bit of it was absolutely, completely, demonstrably wrong, and now that we're in 'the future' we're good prim proper science-believing consumerists or marxists. This seems to show just how feelings based and tribal we are because no one of the sort is capable of a serious conversation on these sorts of things. It seems like they're bound and tethered by all kinds of philosophical obligations, they're more sociopolitical in their ultimate content than anything near factual, and this is where I often find myself saying that in most public places image is everything - ie. it's not whether what you believe is actually true in the absolute sense, it's whether you'll be perceived as strong or weak, cool or loser, for believing it.

I still have no idea whether any kind of conversation - at all - is even possible on these topics being that there's a strange sort of grotesque inversion going on where the less a person knows about it, and ironically the less they know that they know about it, the more expertise they consider themselves having on the topic.

It would be really interesting if it turned out that the collective maturity was available to get into this sort of thing more but I tend to worry that I see people who have that maturity show up and then leave as quickly as they came once they see the collective content of this place - and they're clearly not all people who'd agree with me, just people who could have the conversation in an adult manner.

Iain McGilchrist offers some very useful insights between 20:00 and 22:00 on what the left brain does. Fascinating, because I see some of that emphasis jumping out in some of the discursive sticking points that tend to happen around here often - especially on topics that tend to be abstract at their base.

Thank you for your reasonable response...

I accept your social cohesion context...
I agree that in that context embracing unreality has its benefits...

However...
Your philosophical perspective is not my philosophical perspective...
Your life priorities are not my life priorities...

Read My signature:
"I am not here to change the world..."

And consider Sancho Panza's wise words:
"I did not make the world...I only see it..."

My primary focus is to see the world as it truely is...
Not how I wish it to be...
I am the Oracle of Truth after all...

Your philosophy implicitly commits you to this life system...
I never, repeat never have and never will...

I am an observer...
You are a player...
Philosophically speaking, I have transcended you primitives...


While we will never have a homogenous philosophical Weltanschauung, I hope we can both respect each other's individuality...

Pax...

Last edited by Pepe on 15 Apr 2018, 4:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

My response here is suspiciously "tit for tat" even to me but I am happy to short circuit your post due to the following:

Choosing not to read my post in its entirety and making assumptions that could easily be verified if you read what I said is laziness and/or a sign of disrespect...

Ciao...

You know, it was a really refreshing experience and in light of how it felt I realized I should try being a dick more often!

Also glad to see you're connecting the dots that no one here has a monopoly on this sort of behavior.

This is where I keep trying to engage you in debate and I do believe you invite debate with your one-liners about the non-existence of God, Mr Transcendent. You are not seeing the world as it truly is, because no one has that knowledge, not you, not I. You have chosen your materialist reality, as I have chosen mine.



Ah, but you are...

Mikah,

To one of the things you've been saying about the need for civic discipline, I think that may very well come front and center in the next five years or so. Right now what's happening with postmodernism, intersectional politics, and college Lord of the Flies is demonstrating that the modern hyper-rational human baptized by television and inoculated against unreason by an elite education is a really naive myth.

I'm a big fan of Jonathan Haidt's Heterodox Academy and I'm really looking forward to seeing what comes of that movement.

It would be nice, but there are so many other things that could sink us, it's hard to remain optimistic.



I read one of his books once, I can't say I know an awful lot about him, but he reminds me of Trevor Phillips or David Goodhart here, left wingers who have been ignoring for years the claims of their opponents about the massive all consuming fire heading our way ... who are just now starting to smell smoke.

You do me a disservice, mere non-transcendent human underling...
Have you considered the inherent qualifiers in my statement?
Apparently not...

Or perhaps you are more cunning that you first appear?
Are you simply trying to draw out my qualifications through feigned ignorance?

Regardless, here is the grandeur of my reasoning...
Take your time...
It has uncommon purity of thought which may overwhelm:

You seemly assumed I see myself as infallible...
False!
You seemingly made the assumption that I consider myself as the ultimate, complete conduit of pure truth...
False!

To be clear:
I have never claimed to be infused with a divine essence...
I have never claimed to be at the apex of objective weltanschauung...

Contrary to popular opinion, I am not perfection incarnate...
I am merely close...



Am not! <pout>