Is there another kind of characteristic? If you can’t observe it, then you wouldn’t know about it, right?
Seems to me that “non-observable” = “imaginary”.
Or to be more precise; any non-observable characteristic that you claim knowledge of HAS to be imaginary, because any knowledge of said characterstic imparted to you would constitute an observation.
If memories are recorded in the “soul”, then why would they have to be recorded in the brain as well? Back-up?
And before you say we don’t know that memories are stored in the brain, let me remind you that there is ample evidence that they are, such as electrical stimulation of different areas of the brain eliciting different memories.
What, you’re all still here? I told you. Metaphysical claims aren’t going to get proved or disproved by evidence. Even if we know exactly how a computer works, nothing prevents a metaphysician from positing that it has a motivating soul. If we discover everything about the brain and its operation in the experience of consciousness, that wont do anything to refute anything other than the supposed necessity of metaphysical arguments (a necessity that I believe I’ve already fatally undermined).
Hardly. The usual assumption is that souls are not subject to destruction; if you wish us to believe otherwise, you must convince us. We know that if a soul is able to influence a body, then it must be able to perceive the body in some way, and hence be affected in the way necessary for perception. To claim that it can be affected in any other way is to make an unfounded assertion, pure and simple.
**
If a non-metallic asteroid could be affected by a thermonuclear warhead, what would prevent it from being affected by a magnetic field?
The simple fact of the matter is that if two things are different, then they behave differently. That’s, after all, what it means for them to be different in the first place. For you to insist otherwise goes against, well, all logic and a few thousand years of empirical evidence.
Switching over to blowero briefly, I’ll make the same objection that I believe I’ve made earlier already. This:
is horsepuckey.
Non-observable means non-observable, and no more. The inability to see something does not mean that said thing doesn’t exist, nor that said thing does exist, merely that said thing, if it exists, can’t be seen.
—Non-observable means non-observable, and no more. The inability to see something does not mean that said thing doesn’t exist, nor that said thing does exist, merely that said thing, if it exists, can’t be seen.—
I think you’re being a little off-topic here. blow didn’t say that imaginary = non-existent. His point was if something is unobservable, and someone claims knowledge of it, they are claiming an observation of the unobservable: which strongly suggests that they are imagining it, not actually percieving it. Maybe there IS a soul: however, if it is unobservable, then someone claiming to have observed it is going wrong somewhere.
His point seems to be that you can’t have it both ways: you can’t claim all the rhetorical of upsides of something being “unobservable” and then claim to have observed it.
Of course, there are potential holes in that argument, not limited to the possibility that some people allow “know” to imply more than just “detect” but also include logical deductions and ontological claims.
I don’t care what you believe. All I have to do is show that your conceptualization of the soul is logically inconsistent.
** [snip] Wrong. The soul doesn’t need to be affectable by the material world to affect it, it needs to be affectable if the soul’s changes are to be systematically related to the state of the material world.
NO. I can only conclude that you have no experience with actually generating abstract models of hypotheses. If the soul can be affected by some configurations of matter, there are mechanisms by which this information can be exchanged, regardless of whether these mechanisms are implied by current physics. These mechanisms are necessarily vulnerable.
**
The asteriod in question is indeed affected by the electromagnetic force. That’s why it can be seen; indeed, that’s primarily why the thermonuclear warhead will destroy it. The laws of physics that underlie the warhead underlie the field as well. The matter of the asteriod would indeed be affected by magnetic fields – it’s just that the asteroid’s path wouldn’t be deflected.
Not seen, interacted with.
Something that cannot be interacted with doesn’t exist; that’s what “existence” means.
Apos: If metaphysical claims cannot be proved or disproved by evidence (even in theory), then they’re not part of reality. If no series of events that would be affected by the truth or falsity of a metaphysical claim can take place, then that metaphysical concept is fundamentally unreal and thus does not exist.
How in the bloody blue thundering heck can you possibly show my conceptualization of the soul to be logically inconsistent if you don’t even know what it IS? All you’ve done is to make a bunch of assertions and used them to disprove YOUR view of a soul, a view which contains all sorts of random assumptions. Fine. Why should I care?
This is an important point (albeit not one which has anything to do with the point you snipped, as far as I can tell, since the point you snipped made no mention of the material world affecting the soul except by doing whatever it is that the material world does to allow the soul to perceive it). Why should the soul’s changes be systematically related to the state of the material world? I would call that… an assumption.
It should be patently obvious that if A can affect B, then A can, in fact, affect B. This is the first part of what you’ve said, and I agree. The second part appears to be based upon what has already been argued to be a misapplication of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. I’m not sure that it IS a misapplication of the theorem or not, but I’m sure willing to bet that way. Frankly, I don’t see how the inability of a complicated system to be complete means that said complicated system must of necessity be able to destroy itself.
Oh, for Christ’s sake! Look, I know what constitutes an observation, believe it or not; it’s one of those things one picks up as a physicist. I happened to choose to not use the same two words (observation and interaction) because after a while, the redundancy becomes crushing. Nevertheless, I would hope you knew what I mean. You may not agree with me, but at least do me the courtesy of assuming I’m not an idiot, okay? Thanks.
Since when?
Look, you can’t interact with, to pick a random example, things beyond the edge of the observable universe. Are you seriously claiming that as the observable universe expands, new things just pop into existence out of nothingness?
Frankly, it seems that my participation in this debate has long since become useless, since at this point, there’s a large skull shaped dent in my desk due to this thread. I suspect there may well be a similar dent in yours. As such, I’m bowing out.
Oh, except to answer your challenge on how eyes could be made that couldn’t be blinded. Simply enough, add a second set of eyelids whose transmission varies in inverse proportion to the intensity of light shining upon them; in such a way, no more than some maximum intensity of light could reach the eye to blind it. And as such, they couldn’t be blinded. What could be simpler?
Well consciousness is non-observable. That is one reason many have equated consciousness with souls as it appears to transcend what it is aware of.
Consciousness = souls in that they are nothing….nothing perceivable. Yet here is consciousness apparently observing this screen. But how can nothing observe something? How could there be ‘observing’ if there is no observer?
If souls = consciousness then souls exist in as much as consciousness does, but since consciousness[souls] is nothing then it is not a link in cause and effect.
posted by ** JasonFin**
I would say to a spiritualists (nondualist) consciousness IS the entity that we are. Where as to a realist consciousness is an attribute of the physical body/brain entity.
That’s what I’m saying. So why are my non-observable characteristics any worse than the ones TVAA started this thread with?
As I said before, I find myself to be a fairly decent observer of my own soul. That’s why I dropped this conversation two days ago. I have no need to justify the existance of my soul, and if you don’t think you have one, hey, you may not I can’t promise anything.
It was actually one of the criteria that TVAA set out, and has been arguing about. I’m saying it’s not necessarily the case. As I said before, based on the otherwise non-observant criteria laid out, this debate falls into the category of semantics. There is no ‘right’ viewpoint you can put out. If we wanted to postulate on scientific theories as to what the soul might comprise and then test them, sure.
Recommendations for anyone with loves one? Take a picture, it might last longer then they do, otherwise have some faith.
the “soul” is basically an extension of, or is indeed “consciousness”. You can no more prove that we are conscious than you can that we have a soul. You can not prove to me your own self-awareness. Even though that self-awareness is intrinsic to the question itself.
For that mater the fact that we do not know how to interract directly with the soul, other than through the interface of the body, does not mean that such interraction is not possible. Only that we do not yet know the means.
It would be more accurate that I’ve disproven the general conceptualization of souls, the view that the vast majority of those who believe in souls cite when I’ve asked them.
The general claim is that souls are involved with some aspect of human consciousness, often moral judgments and ethics. Unless the soul’s intervention is supposed to be random noise, its effects would have to be related in some way to the situation at hand.
This is highly non-obvious; there’s no known reason why Newton’s Third Law must necessarily apply to souls. My argument doesn’t require this assumption.
It’s a logical point related to G’sIT, namely that all things are imperfect.
[snip]
** The observable universe doesn’t expand: my lightcone is set. If non-locality is permitted, the question becomes extremely complex. Those things that are outside my lightcone aren’t real relative to me: they simply don’t exist.
Things generally don’t “pop into existence out of nothingness”: they become detectable, which is different.
Are you quite] certain you’re a physicist? How could these second eyelinds avoid being destroryed by the intensity of the light they block? Besides, how would they stop a pointy stick?
If I am one entity and that entity is consciousness and all knowledge comes about through a subject—object relation in which consciousness is the subject then the subject can never observe itself as ‘object’
That is, consciousness cannot observe itself observing, cannot become an object to itself, its own observation.
** PhuQan G Nyus**
wrote:
If soul = consciousness who or what would be interacting with it?
TVAA, G’sIT doesn’t say that all things are imperfect, it says that all systems sufficently complicated to encode statements about the system itself cannot resolve all statements as being either true or false. Basically, if you can write “This statement is not true” in the language, it can have statements without truth value.
This rocked the world of mathematics, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with thge perfection of things in physical reality. You can have a perfect brick. The way I make a brick, it’s not self-referential. As a matter of fact, G’sIT has nothing whatsoever to do with anything in reality; it refers only to symbolic truth-stating systems.
You are most definitely misapplying it. This fact, and this fact alone, is what I’ve been trying to point out to you for the entire time I’ve been here.
We can theorize that an extraphysical, eternal soul exists, and until we demonstrate that nothing is in fact effecting the chemistry of human brains, it cannot be disproven. There is also no reason to believe it, other than a) that mommy said so, b) I read it in this book here, or c) I cannot stand the thought that my personal existence might just be a temporary symptom of chemistry. If you’re dead set on disproving metaphysical souls, prove that there is no point at which the physical operations of the brain have been caused to behave unnaturally (preumably influenced by some metaphysical soul). Until the possibility of a soul pushing our buttons has been disproved, the nonexistence of souls has not been disproved. Period.
Oh, and Iamthat? The soul/consciousness can be assured of its existence by its awareness of other things; things that don’t exist have low awareness levels. And it could be interacting with all the things that aren’t it.
First of all, even if we don’t know about it, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.
And second, even if a given characteristic is unobservable, that doesn’t mean we can’t infer its existence. We might not observe the characteristic itself, but that doesn’t preclude learning about its existence by inferring it from other phenomena.
—That is, consciousness cannot observe itself observing, cannot become an object to itself, its own observation.—
Why? I can see my eyes. Computers can examine their own bytecode for errors and correct them.
At the very least, that wouldn’t seem any less explained than the operation of a soul.
Geez, I went to all the trouble to put in a caveat after that statement, and you just blatantly ignored it. Sometimes I don’t know why I bother.:rolleyes:
Well at least Apos got it:
But to logically deduce a thing, doesn’t there have to be an observation somewhere along the line? Take quantum mechanics, for example: Nobody actually “sees” a subatomic particle, but they do observe the results of one particle smashing into another. We don’t “see” gravity, but we see its effect on objects. There’s got to be some sort of observation in there somewhere, no matter how indirect. Which brings us back around to TVAA’s point, which if I’m not mistaken, is that to claim the existence of something that does not materially affect reality in any way, yet of which we have knowledge, is illogical.
If you are unwilling to advance any definition and/or characteristics of a soul, then the concept is meaningless.
