(December 15, 2020 at 11:25 am)Eleven Wrote: Correct me if I am wrong, but science is not in the business of discovering god or the soul.
What we have, then, is a philosophy of what-ifs that like to pretend at reality.
I would say science is very much in the business of discovering anything that does and can or has the possibility to exist. This does include god and soul.
God, as it is commonly posited, is an intelligent being with intent and behavior—capable of performing action—in the language of science this means to be able to persist through space and time and be able to manipulate mass & energy. Even at a very basic level, this has physics, chemistry, biology written all over it.
Soul is supposedly an extension to life after death —so this is more specific to chemistry and biology. Because matter, or underlying energy of the unique body of a living organism that made it is never really lost as per law of conservation of energy—however it is not usable in any manner that is meaningful to our human perception. Biologically speaking the molecules that made up the body are recycled and some of it is perhaps part of various other organisms. Realistically we are made up many others who lived previously if that’s taken on its face value.
To some extent “soul” has lost its meaning in modern times—the “soul” of 21st century is “consciousness” which many confuse with also something to do with quantum physics (due to one of its poor formulated interpretations, where an observer is causing reality to take form) and now every Douglas and Harris who doesn’t want to go the “soul” way because it’s just too magical for our 21st century appetite, goes the “consciousness“ way—and what is consciousness? Your guess is as good as mine but there seems to some consensus among philosophers: it’s the subjective experience of an object (object and not just living organisms as, as per panpsychism, everything including rocks and oak tree and grain of sand have consciousness).
Roger Penrose, who is recipient of 2020 Nobel Prize believes in Panpsychism. Erwin Schrodinger believed in it— Bertrand Russell believed in a version of it.
However, it’s one thing for scientists to hypothesize something like this, it’s quite another for layman to eagerly latch on to something to validate their primitive religious beliefs through new hypotheses that may never materialize.