(September 23, 2019 at 8:50 pm)Belaqua Wrote: Like Jehanne, you declare victory by begging the question. You assert, without proof, that a soul is made of measurable energy, and then say it hasn't been measured.
Except that everything we as material beings with material senses can profit from bothering to discuss, IS made of measurable energy. If it's supernatural (above or outside of nature) then nothing can possibly be known or experienced or discussed about it. One can only speculate, and not even do that very well.
Of course while in some theoretical sense there could be subtle energies we have not yet observed or detected, that is just a pseudo-scientific way of saying it's supernatural, when you unpack it. Unless and until we can observe or detect a thing, we shouldn't make things up concerning it.
I also think that sometimes out of fear of seeming like we're overreaching -- a noble impulse to epistemological humility -- we are reluctant to say that if a thing exists we should be able to demonstrate that it does, because, heck, there might be some force hiding in plain sight that we're missing. But the truth is that we can with the aid of instruments "see" the entire EM spectrum and detect very subtle indirect effects of various forces, so while we can never be sure we aren't missing SOMETHING, in practice, it's unlikely we're missing anything of significance and consequence at this point. An energy so weak or subtle that we haven't identified it yet probably can't DO much, after all, or conceal a whole invisible realm or something.
Things like souls reflect more our hopes and dreams and imagination than anything else.
I suspect the soul is a conceptual repository for everything about what it feels like to be human that we aren't quite capable of fully grasping intellectually. It is all our unanswered questions and longing. It is all our fear of dissolution and impermanence, our need for belonging and meaning. It is our attempt to explain how we're different from sociopaths or why a dead body looks like an obscene empty husk of the person we knew. We invent these concepts to distance ourselves from full awareness of how little we understand about the human condition, and in fact, about how much we probably never WILL understand. We literally make up answers we don't have, and tell ourselves soothing stories, rather than sit with the reality of our own ignorance and the fact that some things are simply beyond our ken.
I think it's more honest to just say that people known to us seem almost as if they have an ethereal, timeless quality that feels, but isn't, magical. Some je ne sais quoi that makes them seem special in hard to quantify ways. Something that makes it unutterably sad when we lose them to death or madness. Some mechanism that makes each person seem like more than the sum of their parts. We can acknowledge what it looks and feels like to us to experience each other, and acknowledge the mystery, the intense emotions and attachments and the grief and loss. But to start ascribing properties without basis and even against all evidence -- to say that consciousness can in any way be discarnate, or immortal -- that is not helpful or justifiable.
