Theist zone

[Captain Scarlet]

1- What leads you to assume that there is a storage mechanism external to the brain?
There have been recorded instances of people recalling events that happened while 0 brain activity was going on or at least that the brain was unresponsive to input (light, sound, pain etc.) While some of them may be deducible with a creative imagination and some of them might have even been coached. The likelihood of all of them having no foundation in experience, IMO, is slim.

There are recorded instances of miraculous cures at Peter Popov roadshows, and the healings of South Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba. I bet if we did scientific studies these wouldn't amount to much. That isn't a great basis for belief nor a scientific one. Compare this with 50-60 years of research into diseases of the brain, medical studies into the effects of brain injury, pictures gathered through MRI which clearly indicate the physical nature of memory, the ID, what parts of the brain are responsible for what etc

2- What leads you to conclude that this is immaterial?
I know of no physical storage medium (with respect to the human organism) that continues to function outside of biological life. Even qualia, a sense of time, intuition all immaterial and purely conceptual cease on ceasing of brain activity (waking up from a coma with the idea it's 1970, etc.)

Indeed neither do I.

3- How would an immaterial anything interact with a material something?
IDK...

Indeed neither do I...but if it did (and it must if this argument is to go through) then is it immaterial in any sense if it can interact with the material.

4- If it does interact it must be doing so billions of times a second across the earth in humankind, so why can't we detect its presence?
maybe we don't yet have the means to measure it, or maybe it's not possible with material instruments to measure the immaterial, ID

Maybe...or maybe the reason is that the immaterial just does not exist. But I wondn't consider the 2 alternatives as having equal merit nor equal chances of being true.

5- Is it present in other animals as well as humankind? To my understanding it is

Interesting...care to speculate what happens after their deaths to their souls

6- The view that this is a soul and is the one consistent with xtianity is confirmation bias (as you concede)
yes.. but I'm open to possession by aliens, mass mind control, parasite infection, super complicated bacteria manipulation or other concepts

Yes we are all broadly open to ideas, I just don't advertise a willingness to believe in extremely unlikely ones.

7- I cannot see the logic that leads you to that conclusion you have conceded its fallacious (bias on your part)
You can't escape bias. Even if we both saw a soul literally coming out of someone's body we would each interpret it different, bias does not mean false, although it can imply impartial which I fully admit to. I still feel it's logical, not based on evidence though based on faith. If evidence supersedes that then I'll probably accept it. However my faith has show proven results to me that place events in my life clearly on the side of the synchronistic rather than probability and I see no reason not to apply it in this case.

True you cannot escape bias. Which is why we use methodological naturalism to assess the likelihood of something being true. Under this approach substance dualism is extremely unlikely.