Soul

[Tex]

Hey, take it easy. I'm not ready to go steady or anything like that. Oh, for Christ's sake don't hump my leg!

Dang it...

But on a more serious note, do you think you need for there to be an other-worldly specialness about our subjective experience in order to justify your faith in souls, the bible, god etc.? If so I think you are wasting your time. Try to take breaks from discursive thought. It leads to massive confusion if you're not careful and frankly it just isn't all that healthy in large doses.

I'm not so sure about "subjective experience", but maybe "universal subjective experience". I hate the "near-death-experience" stories. They are completely worthless to tell people, even if true (which I don't think 99.99% are...). These are totally subjective. Quantity is something that everyone experiences, so that is why I use it for my example. I really do think I can reasonably come to the conclusion that souls exist based just on the premises "quantity is not material", "we know quantity" and "the brain does not know non-material things". The argument is still subjective because "we know quantity". However, it's something that no one can disagree with. It's not an argument by majority opinion, it's actually known.

[Whateverist]

I'm not so sure about "subjective experience", but maybe "universal subjective experience". I hate the "near-death-experience" stories. They are completely worthless to tell people, even if true (which I don't think 99.99% are...). These are totally subjective. Quantity is something that everyone experiences, so that is why I use it for my example. I really do think I can reasonably come to the conclusion that souls exist based just on the premises "quantity is not material", "we know quantity" and "the brain does not know non-material things". The argument is still subjective because "we know quantity". However, it's something that no one can disagree with. It's not an argument by majority opinion, it's actually known.

See I tend to go the other way. None of the minds representations are material. Every single idea/symbol/concept we use exists only in the mind, though it may be represented in various ways. The concept "duck" is not material, though it can be represented with this spelling. It can also be conveyed with the sound the word makes when spoken. But the concept itself, at least as taxonomists define it, exists only in our subjective experience. It is our idea/symbol/concept by which we classify a group of birds. Every particular duck is a member of just one species but it is also a member of certain, higher order groups by which we identify birds by their degree of relatedness to other creatures. So they are birds, vertebrates and so on.

Since every single subjective experience we have exists as such only in the mind we may as well choose between saying it is all generated by the brain or conclude that the brain is a kind of 'receiver' that picks up signals from the subjective realm. To my mind, the first description seems more likely.

That doesn't mean there can't be any sense in which the deeply intrapersonal is also transpersonal. We only have to let go of literalism. Remember, all this discursive thinking is relatively new stuff, and the fit to reality is not always perfect. I have no problem at all with your idea of "universal subjective experience". But you don't have to worry about the nuts and bolts of the physiology which make it possible. We are all instances of some very common experiences and share loads of DNA in common. If you approach subjective experience phenomenologically with careful rigor I think you do find loads of commonality. Certainly that is what Jung and Campbell and Hillman have found.

[Tex]

Phenomenological psychology is definitely a field I want to study more in, but the only guy I've read is Husserl. That's what is trying to say the brain is a receiver. Descartes, Hume, Locke, and all the modern guys are the opposite. I just have no knowledge in philosophers I can pull from and no idea about the argumentative style.

However, it does strike me quite strange that science would even consider that the brain generates the experience. It would seem to me that the brain generating the experience would mean the scientific measurements are not about reality, but on subjective experience. I don't know if there is further thought on this, but that is the first thing that strikes me: we cannot know anything outside of our own subjective experience.