Question about "faith"

[The Grand Nudger]

I never said I had truth; only that truth isn't achieved by agreement. 

Fundamentallly, do you think that there is such a thing as truth, and that this thing is attainable by human beings?  How is it achieved, and can you then demonstrate the truth of your superstitions by whatever method you select?

You've indicated that you cannot rationally conclude god, that it must be assumed. You've asserted that science is unreliable and/or inapplicable. You've insisted that our sensory faculties are untrustworthy. Fine, now that reason, science, direct experience, and consensus are all out...where does your truth (or any truth) come from?

[Mister Agenda]

And why did we conjecture souls in the first place? We lack records but experiences of dreams, hallucinations, and psychedelic drugs give a reason to suspect we leave our bodies and go to some different place where the rules of the waking world aren't preserved. 

I think that anthropologists would strongly take issue with the notion that we lack records.  Sure, dreams...hallucinations, drugs..but these are all just sub-groups of a larger set.  Human experience.  Our everyday human experience also provides us with the intuition that we are or have a something we routinely call a soul.  We credibly employ the term even when we don't believe in spirits.  

Our inability to comprehend the processes involved lead us to fill that conceptual void with the specific contents of our immediate mythologies - and it's worth pointing out that immateriality is the exception to the rule on that count.

I think I was unclear. We lack records of when we first started to think we had souls, and why. Since that would have been before recorded history began, we lack those records. Of course there are records of soul issues after we started making records. My apologies for not being more specific.

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You care enough about the bickering to consistently get things wrong. That's more than chance would predict in statistical terms lol.

I would think not caring would be quite compatible with getting things wrong.

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That's the equivalent of non-scientists claiming science isn't reliable because scientists disagree. I don't believe truth is established by unanimous vote, perhaps you do, and we can disagree about that.

No, it's not. It's more like the outlying scientists claiming they represent the scientific consensus.

[The Grand Nudger]

Again, anthropologists don't think so. They point to red ochre burials and artwork and practical objects and more as records of full modernity - which they place around 50k years ago. That leaves something like 150k years before that, and with no reason to assume that we thought like we do today before full modernity, and every observation we've made establishing that we did and do beyond that point - that puts a clock on souls.

I guess that it's difficult to imagine a human being that doesn't just think different things than we do, but that doesn't think like we do at all - but that's what we find in the archaeological record. We haven't always thought the things that we do now, and we haven't always thought the way we do now, at all. Not about the ordinary things or the hallucinations or the dreams or the drugs - not about the things that provide us with the intuition of soul, or even about the bison that lives outside our hovels. As far as we can tell, that's an effect of full modernity, and it's one of the defining aspects of observed full modernity.

Before full modernity, expecting another human being to have so much as a familiar concept of self necessary to the modern concept of soul is wishful thinking based on what we are today. If they did, they never did anything to indicate as much, even though they would create mounds of reasons to think as much, independently, all over the world, beyond some point in time. Meanwhile our historical records, and particularly our historical records about beliefs, indicate their placement at the beginning of man ( contemporary religions are incapable of imagining man as anything different to full modernity). We know that's not true - so, in this case, those records are less valuable than those which inform our academic positions on the subject. Those guys were mythmaking, and we don't base our conclusions on the content of their myths, we base them by digging through the trash and checking the walls for graffiti. We base them on when we started burying our dead, and when we added ritual to burial. So on and so forth.

[John 6IX Breezy]

Feel free to quote me if I've said "science is unreliable," or that our "senses are untrustworthy," etc. These are conclusions you've reached on your own which I do not hold.

[Mister Agenda]

Again, anthropologists don't think so.  They point to red ochre burials and artwork and practical objects and more as records of full modernity - which they place around 50k years ago.  That leaves something like 150k years before that, and with no reason to assume that we thought like we do today before full modernity, and every observation we've made establishing that we did and do beyond that point - that puts a clock on souls.

I guess that it's difficult to imagine a human being that doesn't just think different things than we do, but that doesn't think like we do at all - but that's what we find in the archaeological record.

Do we have cave drawings that explain why they started believing they had souls?

[The Grand Nudger]

We think that archaeological evidences shows that we began believing in souls, not why. The answer to the question of why is addressed by all of the reasons we believe in souls today - again, as an artifact of our shared full modernity. Most of the cave art speaks to how we viewed ourselves in relation to the world around us, though. Souls lie in the confluence between burial and ritual burial with funerary objects - a practice we started then and continue to this day, globally.

We went from not giving a shit, wherever they fall - to caring for a body, to believing that something persists after the body and must be provided with necessary goods by laying them in state or with the remains.

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-diving even deeper, circumstantial concerns have been ruled out. The circumstances between disparate group of humans pre and post modernity was not equivalent, the circumstances for individual groups pre and post modernity very often was, (or was reduced), and the circumstances of some groups were relevantly equivalent or better pre modernity than they are for a massive number of contemporary humans who do engage in these behaviors.

Something very specifically about us changed. It wasn't more or less free time, it wasn't more or less stuff.

[Mister Agenda]

This may interest you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_c...ath_ritual

[Sal]

This may interest you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_c...ath_ritual

We usually pride us as being, somehow, distinct from the animal kingdom - but always being reminded by nature that we are not.

[The Grand Nudger]

Human burial isn't interesting for being unique - it's interesting because we take it to be indicative of internal state. That makes it interesting in elephants for the same reason it's absence and then explosion is interesting in humans. If elephants started having quinceaneras all over the globe, we might start to wonder what was going on in their skulls, and what happened to make them assume the previously novel or non-existent behavior.

[Sal]

Not exactly elephants, but we might observe an analog of that for bitches who wean off their pups, right? Instinctual or not, there seems to be at least some semblance of growing up from adolescence to adulthood in pups.