Death

[Cyberman]

I have no idea what I did with the link there. Sorry about that. I'll try again: http://neurophilosophy.wordpress.com/200...neas-gage/

As for my take on the mind/soul thing, I've said it elsewhere and often that the mind may be the brain's way of experiencing what it feels like to be a brain from the inside. And cases such as the Phineas Gage one suggest that the soul may be nothing more than our own attempts to understand what it feels like to have a mind. Jeff Dee (iirc) once remarked on the Atheist Experience about a case in which a devoutly religious person suffered a brain injury, after which his personality changed and he was an atheist. This is not to say that atheism is the result of a faulty brain, but the question then becomes what happened to this person's soul? Did he somehow lose his original one and had to be issued with a new, atheist one?

[Adjusted Sanity]

I have no idea what I did with the link there. Sorry about that. I'll try again: http://neurophilosophy.wordpress.com/200...neas-gage/

As for my take on the mind/soul thing, I've said it elsewhere and often that the mind may be the brain's way of experiencing what it feels like to be a brain from the inside. And cases such as the Phineas Gage one suggest that the soul may be nothing more than our own attempts to understand what it feels like to have a mind. Jeff Dee (iirc) once remarked on the Atheist Experience about a case in which a devoutly religious person suffered a brain injury, after which his personality changed and he was an atheist. This is not to say that atheism is the result of a faulty brain, but the question then becomes what happened to this person's soul? Did he somehow lose his original one and had to be issued with a new, atheist one?

I've always though a soul would just be a storage place for all your experiences in life for preparation when you die. The soul doesn't have to be completely connected to the consciousness, It could be just a place for it to relocate when you die.

[Cyberman]

"It could be" just about anything that your imagination wants it to be. If you're going to make stuff up for the sake of personal comfort or convenience, why stop at the philosophical equivalent of a hard drive? Without anything to tie the concept into reality, it's all fluff and white noise.

[mediamogul]

I have no idea what I did with the link there. Sorry about that. I'll try again: http://neurophilosophy.wordpress.com/200...neas-gage/

As for my take on the mind/soul thing, I've said it elsewhere and often that the mind may be the brain's way of experiencing what it feels like to be a brain from the inside. And cases such as the Phineas Gage one suggest that the soul may be nothing more than our own attempts to understand what it feels like to have a mind. Jeff Dee (iirc) once remarked on the Atheist Experience about a case in which a devoutly religious person suffered a brain injury, after which his personality changed and he was an atheist. This is not to say that atheism is the result of a faulty brain, but the question then becomes what happened to this person's soul? Did he somehow lose his original one and had to be issued with a new, atheist one?

Very interesting article. I had heard of the case before but that is amazing. It never ceases to amaze me what radical changes in behavior and personality can result from even a chemical change in the brain, never mind severe structural damage. I have seen emerging psychotic disorders wreak havoc on a persons otherwise stable functioning. Many psychotic disorders emerge in the late teens and early twenties in people who previously had no symptoms. Fascinating.

[Welsh cake]

Well when I die my soul is going to hell,

How and why?

I've already been told.

By whom?

You can be an atheist by definition and still believe in a soul.

Define soul.

Atheist has a definition. If the definition of atheist was someone who does not believe in unproven phenomena then your statement would be true.

Call me an 'aspiritualist' then.

If we discover souls it merely means reality is far more complex than we originally thought. It doesn't thereby confirm the existence of places/states such as Heaven or Hell that are associated with religious beliefs and theology.

[oxymoron]

Lots of references to the mind and the consciousness. There is no scientific definition of the former, and no consensus on the latter. If, as seems likely, they are emergent phenomena, then they are labels, and do not constitute things in their own right. Personally, I think that "mind" is unhelpful (and seems to derive from vitalism or dualism) and "consciousness" is downright misleading. The question "how do brains do what they do?" is the really relevant one, and we've made a number of very strong inroads into understanding the most complex mechanism known to us. We don't hear "why are livers magical?" yet physiologically they both originate via much the same physical mechanisms and from much the same raw materials as brains.

"Souls" are the hangover from a complete misunderstanding of what living creatures are and how they operate. These days, belief in them is wilful, not enlightened. It's generally based on the premise that "if it feels like it's what it is, then it probably is that". Yet time and again - and especially in the fields of psychology and neuroscience - that has not held up. The notions of will and volition as we experience them are looking under threat (as started in the 1970s by Benjamin Libet's experiments which showed that action potentials can originate before conscious awareness). If there was a shred of evidence for a soul, that would help; but they seem to be only wishful thinking originating from our fears of death, and the desire to transcend it. There's no evidence that either that happens (despite the fact that there would be 100,000,000,000 human souls alone kicking around to date), or any idea of how it could (other than "magic pixies"). Until it does, it remains very much in the "garbage" pile.

[Adjusted Sanity]

"It could be" just about anything that your imagination wants it to be. If you're going to make stuff up for the sake of personal comfort or convenience, why stop at the philosophical equivalent of a hard drive? Without anything to tie the concept into reality, it's all fluff and white noise.

That's exactly what I think a soul is. A hard drive. It would be an efficient way of preserving one's self. which is what a soul is supposed to do in theory.

---

If we discover souls it merely means reality is far more complex than we originally thought. It doesn't thereby confirm the existence of places/states such as Heaven or Hell that are associated with religious beliefs and theology.

I don't believe in heaven and hell anyway. makes no sense to punish us for being human. Of course the "spirit world" could just be a totalitarian dictatorship. Which would suck pretty hard.

[Cyberman]

"It could be" just about anything that your imagination wants it to be. If you're going to make stuff up for the sake of personal comfort or convenience, why stop at the philosophical equivalent of a hard drive? Without anything to tie the concept into reality, it's all fluff and white noise.

That's exactly what I think a soul is. A hard drive. It would be an efficient way of preserving one's self. which is what a soul is supposed to do in theory.

And I repeat, why stop at that? Entertaining a concept, saying "it could be such-and-such", is fine but that is far from the end of the journey. Positing the idea is not the conclusion. Quite to the contrary in fact. The next step, if you are serious about discovering the truth, is to find out how your concept marries into reality. For starters, where does this hard drive reside? Is it of the body? If so, where would we have to look for it? Emo Phillips has a wonderfully absurd line about how he used to think the brain was the most important organ in the body, until he realised what was telling him that. We already know that the brain is the repository of our thought processes, our memories, our personality. We already know that damage to the brain can result in a total personality change, examples already cited demonstrate that a person can go from a devout believer to a staunch atheist (and presumably vice versa). If you want to postulate this spiritual hard drive idea these are the sort of questions and established obstacles you have to confront.

Incidentally, there is no theory of what a soul is supposed to do.

[FallentoReason]

That's exactly what I think a soul is. A hard drive. It would be an efficient way of preserving one's self. which is what a soul is supposed to do in theory.

Hmm.. I smell sock puppet. You're BigBoy aren't you? Or sjosan from AF.com. This line of argument has been shown to have an almost endless amount of flaws.

[Adjusted Sanity]

That's exactly what I think a soul is. A hard drive. It would be an efficient way of preserving one's self. which is what a soul is supposed to do in theory.

Hmm.. I smell sock puppet. You're BigBoy aren't you? Or sjosan from AF.com. This line of argument has been shown to have an almost endless amount of flaws.

Nope. I really hate both of those usernames anyway. Can't see myself using them.