The “soul” as defined here is said to be an immaterial object that provides us with consciousness, morality, and awareness. It leaves the body at death. How can its existance be proven?
Simple…take a human to clinical death (heart stopped, brain waves flat), then reanimate!
I’m not contesting that souls can be affected by the material world. Rather, I’m questioning your claim that this necessarily means they can be disrupted. As g8rguy and I have said, that seems like a rather gross and unfounded assumption on your part.
ralph124c: But they weren’t REALLY dead. Of course, this posits a world in which a soul ‘knows’ which coma it’s host will come out of, for example.
TVAA, you’re missing a big point. Foist, imagine a system which doesn’t accept any inputs. What input would disrupt said system?
Take a system which accepts inputs A or B, which only produce results A1 or B1, neither of which destroys the system.
Finally, posit this: Souls exist in the physical world. They exhibit properties which seem to be contradictory, but only because nothing else exhibits said characteristics. Stating that just because nothing else has qualities A and B does not mean that something CANNOT have qualities A and B. Until you get a soul in a lab, don’t tell us what it can, can’t, and must do.
That being said, wouldn’t it be easier to go the route of, “People seem to be powered by neurochemistry. Neurochemistry exists. If you wish to posit external influences on neurochemistry that are really powering people, please demonstrate them.”?
Won’t suffice to convince many. Its looking more and more likely that such things could be done.
Not really hard to imagine though. Tie not being much of a factor, all Souls could be waiting around till doomsday.
I know that. It’s used in conversations like these to trim down a model to it’s essentials and not include any additional assumptions. My problem was that TVAA’s concept of the soul had been so shaved down that it was invalid when he started arguing.
I’ve been accused of misremembering something!! Oh, the shame! The indignity! The -what was I saying again? 
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.
Even though this has been addressed, I might as well go over it briefly:
The thing to keep in mind it that we’re talking abut a metaphysical soul here. (If we’re talking about a soul suspended in the brain activity, a sledgehammer will indeedy disrupt it -as has been demonstrated repeeatedly throughout history.) As a metaphysical thing, it is not accessible to the physical world, where we usually keep our sledgehammers. Your only access would be the interface. Overloading the interface wrecks the interface; there is no reason to believe that even the half of the interface which exists in “the non-physical plane” would be damaged by the overload. Again, people’s interface to their souls break rather often; that’s not a point being contested.
And the sledgehammer example is explicitly assuming that you and your sledgehammer can get to where the computer is. I’m not saying that I have magic knowledge that the soul can be disrupted from the physical plane, but rather that your assumption about the available weak spot of souls is unfounded.
(And Godel’s arguement only works on systems that can totally describe themselves, as is explicitly stated in that book. There is no reason whatsoever to think that the body-brain interface can be described that way.)
On to interesting things.
Killing and reanimating things wouldn’t necessarily be proof that there is something permanent remaining aware and storing the data. There is something strictly physical that replicates that phenomenon: my friend, the computer! (I always keep one near me when responding to these sort of posts.) Killing computers happens all the time; often, just for fun, they die on their own. After it’s thoroughly in it’s coma, we kill the power, perhaps let it seit for a few seconds to make sure that it’s really dead, and then reanimate it again.
After reanimation, the computer experiences several things that are not normal to its operation, such as the loading of its bios and the examination of its memory and, sometimes, hard drives. One can only image what these would appear like to a sentient computer.
One can also only imagine what sensations the process of reanimating a human brain would cause within it. And, given the ability and tendency of the human mind to interpret things and even revise memories to fit expected criteria, the small number of people who report X event having occured “while” they were dead can easily be imagined to be a physical effect.
(All persons should note that this is a serious discussion of souls, not a prostelyting session on NDEs. This means you, lekatt)
ACK!! The
got out of its quote somehow in my previous post! TVAA actually said it, presceding the remarks that actually got in their quote block. If you wondered why I said it, now you know: I didn’t mean to.
Here’s mistaken #1: you think it’s possible for the soul to be influenced by human beings, but not other things. Humans are made of the same stuff everything else is. As such, the souls would be part of the physical world.
There’s no way to isolate the soul in that way. Since they interact with bodies in certain ways, they can be interacted with by other things, since bodies are merely arrangements of other stuff.
If computers can accept electronic pulses as input, lightning will destroy them. If they’re made of matter, magnetic and gravitational fields will affect them. However the soul functions, there will be a way to disrupt that functioning.
It’s one thing to observe phenomena we can’t yet describe; it’s another to postulate phenomena and then proclaim that there are no rules determining them. “Souls just magically work” is not an explanation, it’s a cop-out. How do they work?
Well, keep in mind that I am not arguing that souls are indeed supernatural; my position is that “souls” are the self-perspective of brain activity. Thus, the sledgehammer, disruptive photo, and so forth would in fact damage or eliminate the soul.
However, the idea that ‘anything that can be interfaced with at all can be manipulated completely to the point of destruction’ is false, and I intend to argue against it. Sure, in my perspective, it doesn’t apply, but it is false nonetheless, and is therefore worthy of correction.
I of course cannot tell you for certain how souls work; I’ve told you my guess, and that’s as far as I get. However, I can postulate a scenario where supernatural souls would exist and be undamageable via any physical action.
First, the way the supernatural soul would interface with the body: The soul exists in a reality that is external to physical reality as we know it. (This is, of course, given.) It can observe physical reality and, if it chooses, may react to what it sees there. It chooses to observe the brain state of the puppet body, to sift from it the sense information. To this extraphysical soul, all physical reality is a small, easily comprehended subset of the superreality in which it resides; no configuration of the brain can shock it enough to do harm. If the brain appears to be operating well enough, the soul may choose to ‘tweak’ the brain chemistry. Now this tweak is of course caused by a change in state in the extraphysical soul, but it is not a process that can be reversed. Sort of like an industrial strength fan fluttering a piece of paper at a distance. You can go and wave the paper all you want, but it’s not going to move the fan; not enough force can be generated. And even if you shred the paper, it cannot effect the fan.
So, the soul can only be effected by physical reality in ways that it chooses to be, which preesumably would not include its own destruction. This is a not-inconcievable scenario (give or take the lack of sighted ‘tweaks’) which demonstrates that not all interfaces can be forced backwards.
The important phrase here is “as we know it.” Souls are only “supernatural” in the sense that their workings are beyond what we know, and perhaps what we can know, of the nature of reality.
There is a huge difference between being outside of our current accepted laws of physics, and being outside of reality itself.
I looked at all of TVAA’s post up until yours, and I didn’t see him invoke Occam’s Razor at all. Exactly what characteristic(s) of the soul do you contend that TVAA is ignoring?
You mean observable characteristics blowero?
There aren’t any, right?
But, I would say that souls are destructable, and perhaps timeless, rather than eternal. I would say that they probably help form the neural pathways rather than altering them or controlling them later and may or may not record human memories as we think of them.
Well, I’ve been trying to be careful about using the term “supernatural” to refer to souls, though a few "metaphysical"s may have slipped in.
I think that regardless of who you are talking to, even proponents of an extraphysical, metanatural soul will tell you that it isn’t a random thing that has no properties, just that it isn’t subject to or viewable by this physical world. The term “spiritual” might come up as an alternative descriptor for the realm within which souls exist, and few would tell you that that realm does not have rules of its own.
I’ve been merely pointing out that just because souls might be able to reach in and effect the “physical” subset of reality, does not mean that they can be arbitrarily altered from within phsical reality. In other words, that one particular assumption that TVAA is making is flawed. This does not prove that souls are indestructible, merely that we cannot know wether they are destructible or not by making observations of their effect on physical reality.
If souls can’t be affected by “physical reality”, how then can they responsible for human behaviors?
If they have a particular “desired” effect on human brains, they’re also vulnerable to being affected by undesirable forces. Since human brains obey the same principles as the rest of the physical world, souls can’t be affected by one and not the other.
Sure, they would have to be affectable by physical reality. Just not arbitrarily.
No. We have no reason to assume that there is anything that a person can do to their own brain-state that would surprise the soul. And we ther is no reason not to believe that when things get too strange (ie: metal slugs where brain cells were supposed to be) the “soul” would be perfectly happy to merely stop paying attention to physical reality, as opposed to self-destructing.
Nope, not necessarily. Remember that brain-killing photo? If it were on page 131231312398761231 of the “Big Photo Album of Reality”, and the soul was only paying attention to page 8888888888888888, my personal physical brain state, no matter what you’re doing in the brain-killing photo it’s not going to effect the brain. We have every reason to believe that our souls do not “browse” often; most people never remote view, read minds, or have out-of-body experiences. So, your best-if-not-only bet for interacting with your souls is to do it through your head, or things that effect your head. Axioms to the contrary are neither obvious nor supported by evidence.
Why do souls have to be metaphysical?
http://www.angelfire.com/fl4/entropy/science/4d.html
http://wiretap.area.com/Gopher/Library/Classic/another.txt
http://www.simplyweb.net/~houlton/hyperpaper.html
Just something to think about.
Well, I would define 4-th dimensional souls as metaphysical for the purposes of this discussion, since for us, ‘physicalness’ has three dimensions. 4-th dimensional beings would (for the most part) exist outside of reality as we know it.
But souls don’t have the be metaphysical; I actually prefer them to be merely the self-relfective manifestation of one’s cranial activity. However, there’s nothing eternal about that, so we’re discussing the possibility of the aforementioned eternal metaphysical souls.
Right, and I was just giving an alternative definition to the standard thought of an eternal, metaphysical soul, that’s some being of energy inside of us, that leaves our bodies after death, and that can become solid, or vaporous at will, and break a lot of other laws of physics.
Technically, if the fourth dimension does exist, then it is perfectly natural, we just can’t perceive it. And if it does exist, and souls are four dimensional creatures, that would give a more logical explanation on how they are able to inhabit our bodies without us being able to detect it, or do any scientific testing on it.
But you’re the one placing arbitrary restrictions on the ways the world can interact with the souls.
You’re missing the point. How would the soul detect the brain cells? If the soul can be affected by brain cells, what would prevent it from being affected by metal slugs? They’re both made from matter, after all. What would prevent a configuration of matter from mimicking whatever property affected the soul and influencing it adversely?
We’re talking about physics (and metaphysics) here. It doesn’t matter if a particular soul doesn’t come in contact with something that would destroy it: it’s still “able to be destroyed”.
That hypothesis requires that the universe have at least five dimensions, with the “highest” being time. It wouldn’t make souls any less vulnerable than before.
And no, higher dimensions are not “metaphysical” in nature.