Scientific perspective on the soul

OK, further indication you have no basis for your claims.

  1. resorting to ad hominem attacks, the last bastion of a potential debater who has no valid arguments to support their side.

  2. bringing an obtuse philosophy term into a science discussion as a blanket retort when it has absolutely no relation to the subject at hand.

If you want to provide some evidence that qualia has anything to do with proving the supernatural bring it forward otherwise I will quit wasting my time responding to this non-debate.

Maybe you could start by explaining how a term like qualia, which was coined to describe purely subjective experience, in any way demonstrates any universal supernatural function at all.

Yes, yes, it’s all us. :rolleyes:

Calling your debate opponents stupid, however indirectly, isn’t going to advance your implicit claims to being the intellectual superior here. Like I said before, ad hominem posturing is the worst sort of debate tactic.

Qualia don’t exist.

I am not here to debate but to exchange ideas and learn. I don’t perceive anyone as an opponent; shit we have no idea who anyone really is, although I suspect all of us are losers in the sense that we have way too much free time.

Where did I say someone was stupid. I said a particular position approached incredulity. That is not a personal attack.

Oh now I see – the KISS. Well I hardly noticed. The point is to keep it simple and stupid. There is no personal attack.

GQ and IMHO are thataway ->

That’s not how it’s generally read. Replace “and” with “,”

Click the icon over on the right hand side. Go ahead. It won’t add one more jot of substance to your totally substanceless post, but go ahead.

So what’s your position exactly? Is the only reason you don’t propose a testable hypothesis and test it that there is no certainty you will get the Nobel? That’s what’s holding you back?

Have you ever seen a little dog ferociously barking and snapping at a large dog on the other side of a secure fence, trying to give the world the impression that the only reason it doesn’t go out and rip the big dog to pieces is that there’s a darn fence in the way?

I disagree; all sentient beings experience their existence. They are not reflex machines.

How do you know this? “I don’t, I just assume” would be an entirely plausible answer, just so you know.

Experiencing their existence is pretty much what the word sentient means.

So this is a debate over whether there is such a thing as consciousness? Hardly a great debate there–it’s obvious to anything that is conscious.

Heh, good point. Missed the sentient bit.

It’s an ongoing drama.

That’s a debate over whether the mind is a non physical thing, not about whether we are conscious beings.

I have no idea what we are except that we are not machines. I feel and contemplate and experience sensations and when I am introspective I perceive the mental process we call consciousness.

It is glib pretense at sophistication to be able to ignore this fundamental mystery, just as it is false science to pretend we have even an approach to being able to understand it. We can understand how the brain processes things, but we cannot understand how it makes sentience because the brain is a material, physical object and such objects do not feel and perceive and experience.

Sure they do - our brains are one good example. In fact, they’re the only example of something that perceives and experiences things. Just because we don’t understand all the details doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Lookup David Chalmers homepage-there’s a lot of references to work written about consciousness.

I guess science will just have to plog along without you, then.

Consciousness is not really the issue; sentience is more relevant. I think consciousness probably evolved out of sentience although the link if it exists is not something I pretend to have any understanding of.

Well I go away for awhile; I just got word my partner/husband’s father just passed in Seattle so I will be going there shortly.

As someone has already said you think you are the same person because you have the memories that you had yesterday. But I mentioned personality changes - are you the same person then? And aren’t you a very different person than you were when you were ten years old? If your mind today popped into your body at 15 wouldn’t you do most things very differently? So, if you changed over decades you must have changed somehow over then. So maybe you are the same person as yesterday, but incrementally different and over time it adds up.

In any case that doesn’t imply a soul, since your computer is pretty much the same from day to day also. My dog has changed her personality slightly, but she is still the same dog as the day before. If the hardware is the same, and the software is the same, what changes is the state, slightly, and some inputs.

Ok now were fantasizing.