(February 12, 2020 at 4:01 pm)FlatAssembler Wrote:(February 12, 2020 at 10:45 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: I was under complete sedation for nine hours once, when I opened my eyes it felt like only a moment had passed.
That's precisely my point.
I think most people, including the apologetics, imagine soul as if it were, to use computer language, the BIOS of the brain, except that it never runs out of power. That idea sounds fine at first, but there are actually many problems with it. First of all, how do you define "person"? If it's psychological continuity, and I think almost everybody these days would agree on that definition, then that soul isn't actually you.
And there is another problem with that, namely, if there were souls which behaved like a BIOS of the brain, we would expect to be able to tell how long we have been unconscious once we wake up, just like a computer can tell how long it's been shut down (assuming BIOS is working, and it's hard to imagine why a soul that can survive physical death would temporarily stop working). And obviously, we aren't.
It would be slightly less absurd to suggest that dolphins have a soul than that humans have a soul, don't you think? To dolphins, it can't happen that they are unconscious for a long period of time and then wake up: if a dolphin falls unconscious, it drowns. Yet, such things happen to almost every human at least once in their lifetime.
Perhaps, then, the soul is analogous to the programmer of the BIOS of the brain? It writes it, installs it, runs it, updates it as necessary, but when the hardware dies, the programmer does not. If the BIOS crashes, the programmer can reset it. If that resets the BIOS clock, then that accounts for amnesia. If the amnesia is cured, the programmer had a backup. It the personality is altered in the process, the programmer installed a new version. And so forth.
Of course, that fixes some problem with the analogy, but introduces a whole new bunch of problems. For example, it implies reincarnation. Which starts a whole new analogy about a whole other religious belief. E.G. Why do people experience memories of past lives? Because the programmer reused some old code for the new version. Why do some people experience alien abduction? Because the BIOS was infected with a virus. Or the programmer swiped some code from another programmer. DNA then becomes no more than a computer code and also actual information as the ID loons claim, and so on.
When one thinks about it, one could invent a whole new religion based on how computers work. If I had time, I would do it for the giggles.