More on the existance of our souls

Faith & Science Conversation
21

Contrasting with the way dishonest rhetoric here seeks to paint everyone into black and white teams of some absurd team sport, there are numerous positions here. Here are four to start with…

  1. There is only the body and its organs like the brain. This even includes some religious sects who believe this body and its organs will or can be resurrected. I suppose this also includes those who speak of a mind or spirit but think these are no more than functions or emergent properties of the body and brain.
  2. There is not only the body and brain, but a mental soul which drives the body like a car and which can therefore drive other bodies just as we drive different cars. This is your classic dualism and loved by Gnostics, believers in reincarnation, and those who like to make the mind into some kind of proof of their beliefs.
  3. There is not only a body and brain, but a soul and spirit also. And the mind consists of various functions of brain, soul, and spirit. When the body and brain dies, the soul continues to exist and the spirit connect it to God… or something like that.
  4. There is not only a body and brain, but also a mind and spirit as well. The body and brain are both physical and biological, while the mind is physical but memetic (produced by a different inheritance than DNA) rather than biological, while the spirit is a non-physical product of the choices made by the physical living organism and continues to exist after the body and mind are gone.

I am described by position 4.

And now because gbob insists I will comment on his endlessly long OP in detail.

Which just goes to show that the function of the brain has nothing to do with shape. You can do the same thing with a computer. Its not where the parts are but the function of the parts and the connections between them.

This doesn’t follow any more than the ideas of creationists that life had to be designed and manufactured by something else. It is a demonstrable FACT that systems can organize themselves. This is the very nature of life itself.

Agreed.

This, however, does not follow. It just means that the patient is aware that normal operation by which his motion comes from a decision to move has been bypassed.

These are linguistic functions of the mind which takes a bit more than just an electrical zap to a part of the brain.

I have come to a more nuanced conclusion that is more consistent with the data. There is not only the biological living organism of the body but the also physical memetic living organism of the mind and the non-physical spirit which plays practically no functional role during ones physical life.

I am a monist who thinks that there are a number of different effective dualisms. I am a living organism not a physical device because I am a product of self-organization not design. But that living organism is not the body but the physical mind. However that is just another layer of the onion of circumstance, because beneath this my truest self is the spirit which purely a product of my own choices and cannot be altered by things outside myself. Much of the mind is occupied by an understanding of the rules and things of this world and of which loses significance when our life in this world comes to an end.

Consciousness is can indeed be called an emergent property of the process of life. Which is simply to say that not everything can be reduced to component parts in much the same way a book is more than just paper and ink. But much in the same way that acknowledging the failure of all the proofs of God’s existence does not mean you don’t believe God exists, a denial that consciousness is any kind of proof of the non-physical doesn’t mean you don’t believe the spiritual exists. These proofs are not only crutches to prop up beliefs with inadequate faith but ultimately replace ones faith in God and the spirit with a faith in faulty mental constructs.

While gbob’s puppet master dualism struggles to the point of denial with Wilson’s observation, my position has no difficulty with this at all. He is resorting the same old same old fundy cursing of scientists as no more than a bunch of atheists and thus we hear the recurrent of echo of the medieval church’s condemnation of Galileo – because they insist on equating Christianity with their own personal metaphysical worldview.

There is no such experimental evidence. The act of observation in quantum mechanics is done by a measuring device only. It is demonstrable that a conscious observer has no effect whatsoever on the experiments.

I don’t need to twist science into a prop for religious faith. I see enough reason to keep my faith in the unaltered teachings of the Bible itself.

22

Duh, yeah!!! The way science works is someone puts up data and says this is what it means. Someone else will either agree or say no, that data means this. That is how my group of geoscientists worked over the years. I put Penfield’s data up, not a person commented and said why or how Penfield’s misinterpreted his data. It was simply ignored.

Science consists of debate about facts and observations, not merely the statement of one’s belief system. When you earlier said you wouldn’t subscribe to a journal to get a piece of information, if only I could tell you how many times in my life I have done precisely that, or driven 100 miles to a library with a rare book for the data contained on that one page. If one isn’t that desirous to know the data, it becomes difficult for one to say he is really looking for the Truth rather than merely looking for supporting data for his views.

But thank you for taking on Penfield’s when no one else did even if I had to goad you into it.
I am in a hotel at MD Anderson with my old ipad so I had to shorthand my replies and can’t quote you in my replies.

One can’t compress a computer chip (for that is actually what the computer consists of, by a factor of 14 and still avoid quantum tunneling between the circuits . The man with the small later of brain inside his cranium had about 108 cc of brain. That is the size of a reuses monkey, yet he is normal. So I reject your claim about compressing computers that much and still have them work

Yes systems can organize, but that doesn’t mean that the brain doesn’t do computation, so I don’t understand what the point of this is.

Zapping linguistic areas will bring forth utterances and sounds so again the person doesn’t think he made the sound

Of course consciousness can be called emergent. It can be called anything but that name doesn’t explain the step by step process by which 700 nn becomes the sensation of red. Or how the vapors coming from the frying pan turn into the smell of bacon. Emergent just means one doesn’t even try to explain the process. Emergent is a more elegant word than is in that old science joke where the mathematician writes in his proof text, “and then a miracle happened”.

emergent tells us nothing and shuts down debate because it postulates nothing observational at all.

I don’t struggle with Wilson. If consciousness comes from the brain, I would expect there to be a locality with an executive center. The fact that one doesn’t exist can be interpreted in one of two ways, as you do or as if the exec center is somewhere else.

I will point out that you are the one outside the plurality of belief on QM because 42% hold to the Copenhagen interp. That interp says nothing exists until it is observed, which gives the observer incredible powers to bring reality into existence.

I have a full day of scans and dinner with my son tomorrow night so I might not be on for a couple of days. I will find out Wed. If the last meds have quit working in which case, life gets short.

23

Hi gbob, as usual with your posts, you don’t actually deal with what I present but rather use sneers like ‘opinion’, or state how you want things to be as if they were facts. This is of course your choice, but it doesn’t, in my mind, make for a response worthy of an answer. It seems to be like an adult form of parallel play where one kid says one thing and the other says something almost unrelated.

Therefore, until you show be the same courtesy by responding to the fact that there are more than just two positions in your imaginary black and white team sport, I will ignore your comments as irrelevant. Do I have your position pegged in number two or would you like to make corrections? Do you understand the position stated in number 4 and the difference from your own? Until you do that then don’t bother with rhetoric aimed at positions like number 1 which have nothing to do with mine.

24

I’m monist - the dialectical synthesis, as in evolution, etc, etc - as there is no reason to be anything else, God - The One - or no God. I don’t deny dualism. It doesn’t arise as warranted to explain anything at all.

25

Just like providence.

26

Now that’s a concept I can do business with.

27

Unbelievers sure don’t think that providence is warranted to explain anything!
 
 

Good trick, combining those two.

28

Why would they? I use it as it’s safe to do so in all Christian company.

29

So if I believe that the mind is separate from the body then I won’t lose all consciousness under anesthesia?

That’s just it. Did I make a choice, or was there only one outcome given my past experience and current mind set? How could we tell?

You seem to just assert that we have intentionality without actually demonstrating it.

Added in edit:

When you use a random number generator on a computer, does the computer decide which number to give you? Does the computer have intetionality?

30

What I meant is that you cannot reconcile ‘providence’ with ‘no God’, the former being God’s intervening action.

31

Why would I? When did I?

32

You so frequently say “…or no God”, so sometimes the overall context is blurred.

33

Because that’s a perfectly rational interpretation of reality. In fact the only one.

34

That doesn’t really address what I just said. You need to fill in some blanks, but it’s okay if you don’t.

35

An interesting article to consider:

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36

That concords with what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes as well (“Righteous Mind”) where he likens our inner “intuitionist” to an elephant a person is riding, and the tiny actually self-conscious part (the part that we think and reason with) is the tiny rider on top that exerts very little control over the elephant, but functions more as a helper (and justifier) for where the elephant already decided it wanted to go in the first place. Even just looking at anybody or anything, your elephant has already decided whether it does or does not like them before your conscious mind has even processed what was going on. Only after time, and much effort does the rider ever prevail if later course corrections (or about-faces) are necessary.

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37

Haidt is a Humean. Aren’t we all.

38

Aye, no God is a perfectly rational interpretation of reality. In fact the only one. But we ain’t rational are we? By a long chalk. Luckily for God! We crave significance. Jesus, as revealed by the Church, gives us that hope.

39

Hardly perfectly. Christianity is not irrational. Actually, it is more rational than atheism. It’s just not scientific, or scientifically limited.

40

Christianity covers ontology, teleology, epistemology and all the rest. Atheism? Not so much.