A Scientific Basis for Spirit

[Abracadabra]

Actually Occam's Razor proposes that one should not inflate beyond what is necessary the number of entities required to explain something. Alternatively, that given a choice between competeing hypotheses, the one making the fewest assumptions is generally the more correct one. So the principle still applies, I'm afraid, whatever your HO. The system (the human brain in this case) operates upon principles which are either well understood or dimly so but scientifically investigable. The spirit hypothesis proposes an entity (in the Occam sense) extraneous to the system. Such an entity ought to be detectable if it has any effect on the system at all, or at the very least its effects should. Otherwise how would we even know anything about it at all? That's the bit that can be eliminated, the part that cannot be detected and that has no effects which can be detected.

I fully understand what you are saying. But you making some pretty wild assumptions, IMHO.

You're saying, "The spirit hypothesis proposes an entity (in the Occam sense) extraneous to the system."

That is not exactly true. That all depends on the technical details of the theory and the limits you place on "the system".

After all, even the purely secular view of an 'emergent property' is a bit of cheat. It's simply pretending to have 'created' an answer that is 'part of the system' but not really a part of it.

It requires some ghostly "emergent property" to be the "spirit that has an experience".

So it's already creating completely imaginary made-up things that are clearly not part of "the system".

Since I'm considering the seat of "spirit" to actually exist in some underlying fabric of spacetime (i.e. in some form of quantum fields information), then in a very real sense, my place for spirit to 'reside' actually has more merit with respect to "the system" than would a speculated "emergent property".

So Occam's Razor could potentially favor this theory over a totally unwarranted theory of an make-pretend "emergent property".

By the way, this isn't exactly "my theory", other scientists are considering this possibility. In fact, some of them are addressing the interface issues using entanglement ideas from quantum mechanics. They are suggesting that the human brain may actually be a 'quantum computer'. If that's true then such theories would indeed be well within the scope of 'the system'.

The brain being a 'quantum computer' opens up all sorts of capabilities.

In fact, we already know that the brain doesn't work anything at all like our silicone computers. Our computers are digital based on a CPU that's really nothing more than a very simple adding machine. But our brains are clearly more closely related to analog computers, something we have basically given up on in terms of technology.

But an analog computer has a far better chance of evolving into a quantum computer for reason that should be obvious if you happen to understand computer technology and electronics.

I love these discussions by the way. Everyone else might think I'm nuts, but I get a lot of good ideas out of these discussions.