I invite you to present a valid conceptualization of the soul compatible with religious doctrine.
Ah! Now I get it. Thanks.
First thought: I don’t see why comparing a soul to an elementary particle fails to work at all. Elementary particles, as you stated, can change in some ways, just not in arbitrary ways. By the same token, for example, I see no reason why a soul can’t change in some ways (clearly, as you say, it would have to be able to if it is to record memories, experiences, and so on) but not in all. It would certainly seem to be a pretty fundamental thing, were it to exist. And yes, if a memory or an experience can be stored on a soul, it seems logical to assume that they can be erased as well. This, however, is an assumption without a shred of proof.
Second thought: when making a proof by contradiction, it behooves one to list ALL the assumptions, because all your proof by contradiction does is tell you that they can’t all be correct; you must pick which assumption you believe is wrong. And as long as there’s more than one of them, you can’t claim to have disproven any given assumption. But of course you already know this.
I would suggest that tacitly that’s what you’re doing; you’re making a raft of assumptions about souls, not all of which are explicitly stated. You’re making a raft of assumptions about physical reality, not all of which are explicitly stated. You then find that these are mutually incompatiblem, so far so good. You still need to justify why the particular assumption you feel is wrong is, in fact, the one that IS wrong.
Why, for instance, should we assume that the false assumption is that souls exist, and not that the ability of souls to control human thoughts and behaviors implies that they can be disrupted? Why should we assume that the false assumption is that souls exist, and not that their ability to store memories implies a corresponding ability to have memories erased?
It’s logically necessary. If the soul is capable of change, it can be changed back.
Because it’s not an assumption.
It’s logically necessary. If the soul is capable of change, it can be changed back.
Because it’s not an assumption.
No, those are both assumptions, pure and simple; you haven’t proven them to be true, you’ve asserted them to be true. Without proof, they’re assumptions. Axioms, if you will. No one says your axioms must be correct.
F’rinstance… It does not logically follow that because the soul is capable of some changes, it is capable of all changes. If it is not capable of all changes, then in particular it need not be capable of losing memories. (This is sort of what I was trying to get across with my fundamental particle analogy; not all properties are susceptible to change. You may persist in stating otherwise, but without a separate proof you’ve just… made an assumption.)
What it really seems to me that you’ve proven, if anything, is that those things which can be changed and destroyed are not immortal and unchanging, which is not particularly interesting. What you have assumed is that the soul can be changed, can be destroyed, and in ways which are not consistent with the general conception of a soul.
You may have very good reasons for making those assumptions, but until you provide me with proof of those assumptions, you can’t honestly claim to have shown the general conception of a soul to be inconsistent in and of itself, only that it’s inconsistent with some other assumptions that you would like to be true.
If some pattern of interactions can store information in a soul, other interactions can disrupt that information storage.
If some aspect of the soul is structured to make this impossible, there’re interactions that can disrupt that.
You’re asserting that interactions can disrupt information storage on a soul, or if something prevents them from doing so, that which prevents them can be disrupted instead. I see no reason to believe this must be true, although it darn well could be true.
After all, I can equally well make the assertion that the fact that some properties of an object can be changed does not imply that all properties of that object can be changed. This seems logical enough to me, and seems to be experimentally verified in any event. It seems to me that it contradicts your statement, which I contend could be boiled down to “at least one property of the soul can be changed; therefore, more than one property of the soul can be changed.” This hardly follows, does it?
Hence, the original statement can’t be considered as anything more than an assumption or axiom, and as such could potentially be wrong.
I have the feeling this isn’t going to go anywhere, as it looks rather as if we’re both just reiterating our positions; perhaps I ought to bow out for a while?
Actually, I think souls are probably a local force, centered on a person, that are connected to the passage of time. Not unlike the gravitational field that we each have due to our mass.
Each living thing would have one that is generated by it’s existance, or rather tied to it’s existance, and the formulation of neurons in the brain then follows a portion of this pattern. The connectivity between the two forces, that of the conciousness of the living being, and that of the soul are reinforced throughout their lifetime, hence the connectivity to the passage of time.
The soul then is not immortal, but timeless, and thereby, to a degree, indestructible.
This is my incomplete theory of the soul. In all honesty though, I still recommend waiting until we die, and just seeing if it’s real or not. For the time being, it’s nature makes less difference to me than it’s existance.
The existance of my own soul is measurable and determinate to me. I couldn’t possibly begin to prove it’s existance to someone else, but, as long as it’s there, why would I?
Why? That strikes me as a rather unfounded assumption on your part.
[sigh] g8rguy, go find a copy of Godel, Escher, Bach and read it. It does a better job of explaining the concepts behind information manipulation than I could ever do.
Suffice it to say that’s it’s not merely possible for there to be a way to disrupt souls, it’s logically required if there’s a way to affect them in the first place. Your statements would be correct if the above point were an assumption instead of a consequence.
Copaesthetic: What? I have no idea what you’re talking about.
The existence of your soul can’t be only perceptible to you.
JThunder: It’s not an assumption.
If souls cannot be affected by the material world, they cannot determine what’s going on! Without information from the physical world, how can they respond? How can they direct? How can they make choices if they don’t know a choice is required, or what the available options are?
If souls can only perceive, then they simply don’t exist, as they can’t affect our universe at all. Their nature is incompatible with existence relative to us.
—To spiritualists it is self-evident that there is something truly extraordinary about personal consciousness that is not present in any measure in the inanimate world.—
This seems to be giving away their own game: how can they know it isn’t present in any measure in the “inamimate” world? Looks like spiritualists are even more dogmatic materialists than the materialists.
Did I say it wasn’t perceptible to anyone else? I said it was measurable and determinate to me. That means that I can perceive it. I presented my own little theory of what might be it’s physical nature, but in reality I have never found it necessary to validate it. My question was, why would I?
I am, for example, highly aware of where my truck is right now. I can see it through my window. Had I been able to see it through my window for several years consistantly, I might never have decided that it would be necessary to develop a plausible proof of it’s existance. So, my theory includes a basic concept, which is as far as I’ve gotten.
Forces can act on a person, can’t they? I don’t think that a soul records memories as you might think of them, but time as is relative to the individual. It’s a theory.
We’re all going to die one day. Don’t you have things you could be doing? You could spend an entire lifetime on this concept and still find that there is no soul, and be wrong. Why worry?
I don’t think you can measure the quantity/quality of soul/spirit/consciousness with logic, nor with any physical forms of scientific methods.
If you wish to know about spirit, read about OBEs, and NDEs.
For instance, there is the account of Pam Reynolds.
http://www.near-death.com/experiences/evidence01.html
Pam’s NDE is just one of many hundreds that have been documented and brought to the public attention.
If you find her experience interesting, you can search the net for literally thousands of Out- of-Body and Near Death experiences. I don’t think anyone making a good study of these events will remain skeptical.
I realized there have been attempts to “explain away” these events, but none successful. More scientists are looking into them than ever before, and are saying positive things. Cites can be provided. There is very strong evidence we will live after the death of our bodies. I think this is just a validation of what humanity has known all along. As far back as 4000 years ago, until today.
One of the reasons this has even become an issue, in my opinion, is the breakdown of religious doctrine and dogma. Religious contraditions are no longer believed by most people. Another reason is Charles Darwin, and his theory. The theory of evolution gave the religious nonbelievers a place to hang their hats, and it was promoted as real far beyond its ability to prove itself. While there may have been some process like evolution take place it certainly does not negate the presence of human spirituality.
Love
Leroy
I wonder something: are you defining a soul to be anything more than just a recording medium? What exactly do you mean by “disruption” of the soul? I’ve been acting under the assumption that you mean that a soul could be destroyed.
Well, if I have the time to find a copy, I’ll read it (assuming that I can take the time from writing my dissertation to do so), but could you possibly give me the brief summary? Because it is at best utterly unintuitive. After all, I have already named one object which can be affected, and can be altered, but cannot be altered freely and cannot be destroyed by itself, so my naive impression is that this is a counterexample. Nevertheless, given the field I work in, I’m prepared to accept unintuitive things as true, but not without being convinced.
To take your side for the moment, I agree that there must be some way for a soul to influence the physical world if it is to have existence in any meaningful sense, although I think it’s too categorical to say that if we can’t see it then it does not exist. By analogy, I can’t see outside of the observable universe, even in principle, yet while I can’t prove that more exists, I have good and solid reasons for believing that more DOES exist.
I also agree that if a soul is to be able to perceive the physical world, the physical world must be able to influence it. I don’t see at all how the ability to influence something implies the ability to influence it in arbitrary ways, and in particular implies the ability to destroy it.
Having read Godel, Escher & Bach, I can explain what TVAA is talking about, and why he is wrong, and give an example.
He is referring to the idea that all systems that are complicated enough to copletely describe themselves cannot be complete. (This would be Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, the main reason why he’s in the book, so far as I could tell. It’s a good book, though a bit of a long read.) The specifc example he’s referring to is the problem of creating a record player that could play any record. Because all record players have a resonance frequency, a record can be created for a given record player that that record player cannot play. So, from this, TVAA got the idea that anything can be destroyed if you know enough about it and can communicate with it.
This is, of course, not correct. There are two separate problems; context and access.
The problem of context is, sometimes, regardless of what it does, an object cannot destroy itself. The most obvious counterexample in light of the record player example is one where the record player pipes the music far far away from itself. Yes, the record player can play any record, since it can no way effect itself. The best you can do is get the iterface to break. We call it dying.
The problem of access is, the record player example assumes that there is no filtering whatsoever in the messages that are sent to/produced by the object to be effected. Of course, in most cases filtering is possible, particularly when the object is recieving filtered messages to start with (say, translated from raw sensation to brain activity).
Most computer internet protocols try desperately to avoid being destructible by users. Here is a simple example: A database can recieve requests, and respond with commands. All that it has to do to protect itself is properly filter invalid input out. All that would have to be done to avoid memory erasure is to filter out memory erasure commands. It’s done all the time.
So, it is not correct that the ability to interface with something gives you the guaranteed ability to crash it. If that were true, you can bet that nobody would dare be hosting this message board. (A fine example. Explain to me what post you can enter that will crash this message board. Posts only, into the edit box below. Coding errors do not count; souls are assumed not to have coding errors. Note that the message board interfaces in both directions.)
I was rather wondering if this was somehow supposed to be an application of the Incompleteness Theorem. Thanks for clearing that up, although of course feel free to educate me further, both of you! 
Do you even know what Occam’s Razor is? Hint: you don’t use it to disprove things.
Sometimes, an object can indeed destroy itself. Shoddy thinking, begbert2.
More importantly, it’s not possible to create an uncrashable system. Some systems are more stable than others. To use the record player example, no matter what countermeasures are taken to prevent the destruction of the player, these countermeasures create new vulnerabilities as they eliminate the old ones. Mathematically speaking, there is always a way to create a record that affects the new vulnerabilities of the player, no matter what is done. GEB’s example clearly states that a variety of methods are used to protect the player against dangerous records; they all fail.
begbert2, I suggest you go back and read that story again. Even if you have a valid objection about the math involved (which I don’t think you do), you’re misremembering the story.
If the soul can be affected by energy (which is required for it to be able to respond to the world), then some large amount of energy will disrupt its link with the body and destroy it.
Think: how could eyes be made that couldn’t be blinded? How could ears be made that couldn’t be deafened?
I don’t know if there’s a post that can crash the boards. (More precisely, I’m sure there’s a way to send data to the board that would cause it to crash – mathematics requires that there is one. Not being a phreaker, I don’t know how to do that.) I do know that the boards’ computers wouldn’t respond kindly to a spilled soda, or a sledgehammer.
See below on why you don’t get it.
Untrue: You are making an obvious error. God’s toal ability to exert force is not measurable or quantifiable. But nowhere did I state that He must exert al force all the time. He’s GOD!
If you require magic to explain a phenomenon, you haven’t actually explained it at all.
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Whicy is why i said it could not be explained scientifically. I did, in fact, explain it. That my explanation was not the kind you like I not my problem. Either disprove it using my axioms or accept that you cannot disprove it. You do not have to accept it, mind you.
But it is not required.
Anyway, here is what I am trying to get across to TVAA:
The soul IS you. What you percieve as reality is simply an overlay of matter upon true existance. All physical laws are merely a false shell atop that, and they don’t have to exist at all. Even what think of as immutable logic does not have to exist at all in the true reality.
In referring to this debate, this means to me that all natural law is nothing more than device to get us to where we are going. A soul, by nature, is what we are. It is not a recording device. It is not a computer. It IS you. Reality is a by-product of our choices.
Reality cannot destroy us, becuse it doesn’t exist!