It depends what it is made of. 
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And nowadays it’s become a kind of embarrassment to talk about the soul; and yet until now it has been central to most cultures. The word has disappeared. And language is an aspect of reality. If it’s true, as Wittgenstein said, that philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by language, making something disappear by language could bewitch us into thinking it didn’t exist.
I liked this turn of phrase as it answers some of my atheist critics who think I’m soft as well as daft. Unfortunately most of them have little enough regard for Wittgenstein either, viewing his work along with the rest of philosophy as pertinent to those seeking work in the fast food industry … on the frontline. Looks like I can’t cite a subtle work to make a subtle point to someone who will only see black and white.
Sorry about the lenght but I had to cover the issues. I hate incomplete work.
I watched the video and found it poetic and some things quite cogent from a scientific point of view. When he talked about knowing. It reminded me of Peierls view of Quantum:
" The moment at which you can throw away one possibility and keep only the other is when you finally become conscious of the fact that the experiment has given one result … You see, the quantum mechanical description is in terms of knowledge, and knowledge requires somebody who knows. " Rudolf Peierls, in P. C. W. Davies and Julian Brown, The Ghost in the Atom, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) p.74
We know something to be true in a way that, to paraphrase what Klax said, a bag of transisters can’t. Because of the things below, I must disagree with your statement that the soul can not be held up as an object by the rational mind. It can. Consider Searles Chinese room, if I recall correctly you knew Searles? or was it someone else?
You are sitting in a room with a book of rules for responding to various sequences of Chinese symbols. You don’t know Chinese. Searles then points out, in relation to artificial intelligence:
“I get small bunches of Chinese symbols passed to me (questions in Chinese), and I look up in a rule book (the program) what I am supposed to do. I perform certain operations on the symbols in accordance with the rules (that is, I carry out the steps in the program) and give back small bunches of symbols (answers to the questions) to those outside the room. I am the computer implementing a program for answering questions in Chinese, but all the same I do not understand a word of Chinese. And this is the point: if I do not understand Chinese solely on the basis of implementing a computer program for understanding Chinese, then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis, because no digital computer has anything I do not have.” John R. Searles, “Consciousness as a Biological Problem,” in John R. Searles, The Mystery of Consciousness, (New York: A New York Review Book, 1997), p.11
The difference between the bag of transistors and the bag of enzymes is that when I learned Chinese, I have the qualia, the internal experience of KNOWING Chinese. When I didn’t know Chinese, or when I am trying to learn a new subject in Chinese, I have to use the dictionary all the time. Knowing Chinese allows me to know the meaning of the sentence. It is the qualia, that science can’t explain. It is called the hard problem
“And this is our central quandary. Either we believe in a nonmaterial soul that lives outside the laws of physics, which amounts to a nonscientific belief in magic, or we reject that idea, in which case the eternally beckoning question “"'hat could ever make a mere physical pattern be me?” - the question that philosopher David Chalmers has seductively and successfully nicknamed “The Hard Problem” - seems just as far from having an answer today (or, for that matter, at any time in the future) as it was many centuries ago.” Douglas Hofstadter, I am a Strange Loop, (New York: Basic Books, 2007), p.360-361
Given the pejorative used in his consensus view of the non-existence of the soul, and knowing that one doesn’t look for what one doesn’t believe exists, it is no surprise that Hofstadter calls the soul magic and decides in his book that the soul doesn’t exist. Materialism, after all IS the consensus view of both Christians and atheists today.
“Why do we experience consciousness at all? Nothing in any objective scientific theory of physics or information accounts for the subjective qualities of our otherwise empirically measurable experiences. In the integrated information theory proposed by Giullo Tononi, consciousness is what information feels like when it reaches a certain level of sophistication, But the fact of that feeling has no underpinning. That is the hard problem.” Guy Inchbald, New Scientist, July 13, 2019, p. 24
Calling consciousness an epiphenomenon of the brain is not an explanation. It is like doctors calling my narrowed spinal column of a few weeks ago, a ‘stenosis’ which in Greek means narrow. lol. Epiphenomenon, like stenosis sounds so ‘scientific’ as if it is an explanation.
Searles writes:
“Even for a system of whose qualia I have near-perfect knowledge, myself for example, the problem of qualia is serious. It is this: How is it possible for physical, objective, quantitatively describable neuron firings to cause qualitative, private, subjective experiences? How, to put it naively, does the brain get us over the hump from electrochemistry to feeling? That is the hard part of the mind-body problem that is left over after we see that consciousness must be caused by brain processes and is itself a feature of the brain.” John R. Searles, “Francis Crick, the Binding Problem, and the Hypothesis of Forty Hertz,” in John R. Searles, The Mystery of Consciousness, (New York: A New York Review Book, 1997), p. 28
Our consciousness is subjective, but science is objective. So I think it is a mistake to think the soul can’t be held up by the rational mind. Especially if one looks at quantum mechanics.
Physics is supposed to be out there, separate from human consciousness or the human observer. It is supposed to be objective and never involve the subjective. But quantum requires the subjective to be involved as the observer. The subjective observer says what happens in quantum experiments. I have used this before but as you re-read it ask how can the subjective observer determine what happened 2 billion years ago?
Theoretical physicist John Wheeler further elucidates the role of the observer with what are called “delayed-choice” thought experiments. (See Fig. 2.)
" Wheeler noted that it is possible to devise a double slit experiment at the cosmic level using light coming from quasars and a galaxy which operates as a gravitational lens on the way to Earth, bending the light inwardly as it passes by massive objects (as predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity). This light would generate an interference pattern showing that light has travelled as waves. But if a measurement would be performed before the screen on which the interference pattern takes form, the pattern would dissolve and the photons would change from waves into particles. In other words, our choice on how to measure the light coming from a quasar influences the nature of the light emitted 10 billion years ago. According to Wheeler, this experiment would show that ‘retrocausal effects operate at the quantum level. " 13The light’s passage by the massive light-bending galaxy occurred long before there were any people or multicellular life on earth. Yet our decision today determines what happened to that light 2 billion years ago. To paraphrase Weinberg and Wigner, “Human beings are in the cookie jar at the beginning of the laws of QM.” Matter is obeying consciousness. Matter, at its most fundamental level, is NOT master of consciousness; consciousness is master of the matter! The Migrant Mind: Quantum Soul
Steven Weinberg, a hard-core atheist, admitted that quantum can not be formulated in a way that avoids consciousness. I will take his and Wigner’s view as authoritative, although I too have gone through as many interpretations of quantum as I can find and in every one of them I know how consciousness becomes involved, even in those that claim to avoid the problem.
" Fundamentally, I have an ideal of what a physical theory should be. It should be something that doesn’t refer in any specific way to human beings. It should be something from which everything else–including anything you can say systematically about chemistry, or biology, or human affairs–can be derived. It shouldn’t have human beings at the beginning in the laws of nature. And yet, I don’t see any way of formulating quantum mechanics without an interpretative postulate that refers to what happens when people choose to measure one thing or another. " Steven Weinberg cited by Tim Folger, How Does the Quantum World Cross Over?, Scientific American, July 2018, p. 32
This has led me and others like Stephen M Barr and Euan Squires, to conclude that the soul is not subject to the laws of physics:
“A careful analysis of the logical structure of quantum theory suggests that for quantum theory to make sense it has to posit the existence of observers who lie, at least in part, outside of the description provided by physics.” Stephen M. Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), p. 27-28
Elizabeth was eldest daughter of the “Winter-King” Frederick of Bohemia.
One problem, in particular, troubled her: she failed to comprehend in what way the thinking soul could possibly influence the body which was not thinking.
…
"Elizabeth’s problem remains as a basic difficulty with dualism. How can we understand the ‘connection’ between the mental substance and the physical body? It seems obvious that there has to be such a connection. In particular, it is surely reasonable to say that our conscious minds are affected by what happens in the physical world, i.e. by our sensual experiences.
…
"Returning to more reasonable ideas, we accept that the physical world has an effect upon the mental. Although it is perhaps hard to see how this might come about, it does not cause any major difficulties, essentially because we have no laws to describe the behaviour of the mental substance. However, it is natural to suppose that there is also an influence going the other way. We are conscious of the desire to do something and can translate that desire into the particular action. This again is how things appear to be. Thus the mental substance can affect the physical." Euan Squires Conscious Mind in the Physical World, (New York: Adam Hilger, 1990), p. 85-86
In this last, while we may not understand the connection, Squires answers Elizabeth’s problem. The mental thought that ‘I need milk’, can be translated by my mind into bodily action that drives me to the store in my car where I purchase milk.
But more than that, the human mind affects the behavior of quantum particles which are not inside the body, not necessarily near their body and it affects how the particles behaved in the past, not just in the here and now. What is the connection? I don’t know, but I know that the connection works both ways.
Speaking of the wavefunction of the universe in Quantum Cosmology (there is a wave function that describes everything in existence), Squires points out that it becomes clear that some observer totally external to the system must be considered, or, leave the measurement problem unsolved.
“…because of quantum correlations it is true to say that the only wavefunction that can be claimed to exist as part of physical reality, and not just an approximation, is the wavefunction that contains everything, i.e., the wavefunction of the universe.
"An immediate concern in quantum cosmology is that there can be no question of having an outside observer, external to the system, which can be described by classical physics and hence can provide at least a pseudo-solution to the measurement problem. By construction, there is now nothing outside the system being considered, so the measurement problem cannot be avoided. I am not aware of any attempts that have been made to apply the explicit collapse mechanisms to quantum cosmology,and although some interesting results have been obtained using the Bohm model, this is only just beginning to be taken seriously, hence most quantum cosmologists use a version of the many-worlds interpretation, even if without admitting this fact!” Euan Squires, The Mystery of the Quantum World, 2nd ed., (Bristol: Institute of Physics Publishing, 1994), p. 142-143
Such a consciousness could only be God, or called a God, and he can’t be made of matter from our universe, so something non-physical must exist, be it a spiritual God or a spiritual soul. And thus, the rational mind can apprehend the existence if not the qualities of the soul.
One more item, I discussed this with a doctor I saw 2 weeks ago. there apparently is no site in the body which can be said to be the executive center of consciousness. we know where arousal takes place and we know what is active when we are aware, but no one site seems to be the control center, the ‘executive function’. She agreed that that was the case. We obviously have one or consciousness couldn’t exist. Does it exist outside our universe, outside the laws of physics?
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Thank you for your effort to share your insight into QM. I’m afraid most of it is opaque to me.
But yes I knew Searles from attending a graduate seminar he was giving as a senior. So I heard the Chinese room argument from the horse’s mouth and was convinced of its relevance immediately. All the old talk around the Turing test for the presence of consciousness was silly.
In the quote I pulled from the transcript which Dale shared, just above your post, I thought he makes a good argument for the importance of not dismissing “soul” for superficial reasons owing to assumptions about how neuroscience obviates the need for the word. As he goes on to say it is a category error since soul, to the degree we can speak of it as an object at all, is a phenomenal object of first person experience. Science doesn’t yet and -as I take it you agree- probably never will be a tool that can make such a determination.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I hope you are feeling well and I hope very selfishly to enjoy hearing more of your thoughts on these kinds of things. As a non-Christian it has seemed to me that Christianity could do more to place some of its better insights into a broader cultural ‘market’. Rather than sell it as an all or nothing package, let each tenet have a go at impacting a broader audience. That reminds me of the speaker’s joke regarding meeting God half way by buying a ticket when he prays to win the lottery - something I’ve never done.
There is some truth to what you say but only SOME. And voicing my objection to what you say and the speaker in the video is not going to be an easy task because there are many dimensions to it. I guess I am even going to have to resort to a few metaphors. LOL
First of all, my principle objection to the soul idea is that it is tied to antiquated pre-science thinking of living things being animated by some non-physical stuff or thing. But science simply does not support this idea of there being any life stuff or animating thing – life is all about self-organizing processes. Nevertheless to the speaker’s starting question, “what use is the soul as an idea?” I have voiced a considerable affirmative. Just because the root idea from which it was derived must be abandoned as antiquated nonsense doesn’t mean that all the things which the idea has grown to encompass has no value.
What is my reaction to this imagery of contrasting the mountain tops where all can be seen to the dark thickly grown low places? Well I would compare it to the contrast between sobriety and a drunken stupor. To be sure, the state of sobriety insists on self-control while the drunken stupor lets go of it, but in doing so it dives into such muddle, morass, and irresponsibility that it often becomes more domineering and controlling of others. I may like the taste of a few alcoholic beverages but never liked the effect of alcohol – like I have told my son, greater stupidity is not a state to which I have ever aspired. In that context, this rhetoric about “no risk but no contact” sounds like a rather atrocious excuse for drug abuse which I think is absolute nonsense. There are plenty risks and contact in life without abandoning self-control in drunken stupors and tripping on drugs. Perhaps, my loner and intellectual inclinations have never left me so desperate for contact that I would shoot myself in head like that. To be sure it has made those few experiences I have had of love and the divine seem quite miraculous and life transforming, but I can only give thanks that these haven’t inspired such desperation for more.
Furthermore, talk of such things certainly does not make me uncomfortable because I have never indulged in the delusion that logic, reason, science, understanding, the mountain tops, and all that are the limits of reality. I know very well their limitations and that is the way the reality can be incorporated into an intellectual treatment by acknowledging those limitations. I think much of it is also captured by my contrast between the objective observation which is the essence of science and the subjective participation which is required by life. AND there are many ways in which the subjective, non-intellectual, mystic, or soulful aspects of life can be explored in poetry and art without trying to cut reason and self-control from from your brain by something like drugs.
Oh and that hassidic idea of animal soul and divine soul sounds a great deal like my own contrast between the genetic inheritance we have in common with the animals contrasted with the memetic inheritance I believe that we have from God.
I also see in the speakers talk about spirituality being more about not-knowing than knowing as pointing to some dangers of intellectualism in spiritual matters. This was a good point. With science we have a way of not only testing our ideas but of constantly leading us to more questions with an end result that we have more questions than we started with. But in spiritual matters, by comparison, it is too easy to box ourselves into thinking we have all the answers already. Thus the speaker suggests that we can find more truth in mythos than by making things intellectually explicit. Bravo! This is well said. I doubt this is going to make me drink any kool-aid, as it were, and thus it is likely to simply get filed in the limitations section of my thinking.
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That reminds me of @gbob’s lottery ticket analogy in his Turkish translator experience.
One day he is at prayer, and God says to him, “Look, Samuel, meet me halfway – buy a ticket.”
And I feel there’s a deep spiritual truth in that, that we only get there if we are prepared to ‘buy a ticket’.
Many aren’t, having bowed the knee to philosophical naturalism.
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I think philosophical naturalism is very often a winning ticket, so long as you don’t misapply it to matters not covered by naturalism of any stripe. But rejecting soul as a meaningful concept on account of empirical findings would be a category error. No finding of naturalism will ever trump your own tastes. loves or values. All would be category errors.
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That’s okay. Try not to over do it. 
Well neither the speaker nor I would disagree with that entirely, but I at least would disagree with characterizing the traditional idea of soul as being based on pre-science thinking. I suspect the idea of soul is not arrived at by any thought process, that it was something directly apprehended probably before language. To toss “soul” out as a poor concept would be an action beyond the power of our rational minds. What soul is is more basic and essential to what we are than is our rational mind. But our rational mind does have the power to fool itself into mis-categorizing soul as a mere label for a primitive idea. “Soul” deserves your continued affirmation not because you can reshape it in a manner more rationally pleasing but because it out ranks and predates you. All life is from the body; our minds have only the power to shut us off from that life. The soul and the body are inseparable.
I don’t partake of any drugs and only a small calories portion of wine with dinner. But there are activities one can engage in which draw out your intuition and open you up to creative inspiration. I’ve always felt more connected and alive when engaged in aesthetic activities and/or in nature. We all have these capacities but it is true that alcohol and drugs are used as a gateway by some.
Exactly.
Interesting. I think our rational minds would live in our animal souls, to build on the hassidic idea. The divine soul would always be other to where we experience ourselves to be. It isn’t and can’t be ours.
At the end of his other video on the divided brain which I posted here once, he concludes by observing that the intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind a faithful servant, but today we have forgotten the gift and elevated the servant. I think we are in a relationship of mutual dependence with the sacred.
Yes, and no kool aid for me either, thanks. It is very rare to find Christians capable of accepting a defacto-theist rating on the Dawkins scale where as I find many willing to acknowledge their weak epistemic position as atheists for knowing with certainty if any gods exist. But there are more here on this site capable of keeping their balance from such a position, maintaining strong belief along with realistic humility in the claims they make to others.
Yes and many are not aware of the many “humble” atheists who are simply not interested in religion because they choose to devote their time to other pursuits – particularly in universities. And when confronted by the question they will simply say acknowledge the vast diversity of thought in the world about things like that.
As for me… On the one hand I rate myself as a 1.5 on the Dawkins scale because I equate living accordingly with knowledge itself, rejecting traditional definitions of knowledge as “justified true belief” as little more than hot air since the fact is that nobody believes things they think are not true or not justified. So I know God exists as well I know anything else, but I consider doubt to be a necessity for intellectual integrity and mental health. On the other hand, with respect to objective knowledge (i.e. with a reasonable expectation that others should agree) of the existence of God I am classic agnostic since I don’t think that is possible.
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I tend to agree with you. For Christianity to flourish we have to have a culture that is receptive and in part it is for this reason I object to accommodationalism because why would a culture be receptive when the adherrents don’t believe there is actual historic truth to what we say.
Today I got a note from an old friend who had read my quantum soul blog post. It cheered me up. He said:
That quantum article was really awesome…lifted my spirit after reading it I had to say a prayer myself after reading your article thanking God that He left such breadcrumbs for someone to find…and thanking Him for using you to recognize and communicate such things to the rest of us
For a guy like me at the end of my life, which was spent trying to solve some serious apologetic problems we Christians have, and having my ideas rejected at every step, such tid bits are dear to me as I look back on what I did with my life.
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This reminds me of Descartes, famous but always misquoted statement. What he said was “I doubt, therefor I think, therefore I am(exist).”
The same reasoning would applie to anything that the consciousness does. It seems to me that it is almost a mental illness for me to suggest that I don’t exist. Thus, I could say,
“I love, therefore, I emot, therefore I exist”
Or 'I want spaghetti, therefore I think, therefore I exist."
These statements are only disprovable by each individual denying that there is an ‘I’ inside him who thinks.
Saying that the ‘I’ is an illusion, as some suggest doesn’t escape the problem.
I sense an illusion of an ego inside me. Therefore I am aware, therefore I exist.
After all, what is it that experiences the illusion?
Indeed. So much of what we take notice of seems to be pre-consciously selected by a portion of our mind other than our conscious minds. It seems clear to me that there is more going on with the organism of my body than what I can take credit for as my deliberate doing. It is as though we have a silent partner holding the world together for us to make the kind of experience we have possible. I guess you know, this silent partner is what I think gives rise to and supports God belief. But the notion of God I find much less compelling than that of soul. It doesn’t disturb or anger me that people think differently about it than I do. Frankly I find your lot generally more interested in such things than the crowd I more often hang with online.
What in essence are all these I statements doing? It seems to me that the key feature is ownership.
There is not only a wanting of spagetti and consequent thinking, but this wanting and thinking is mine.
There is not only an experience of illusion but this experience is mine.
I think this claim of ownership is the very essence of conciousness.
So I guess my question would be, what is it that is claiming ownership of these things? That is certainly something I see the spirit doing even if I do not buy into this idea of mental souls operating bodies like puppets.
I seem to remember, however, that making a distinction between self and others is something we acquire at some early stage of childhood development. And perhaps that is one of the things that makes our access to earlier events in our memory so difficult.
Yeah! we agree on a basic point. A rare event indeed. Yes, it is that something owns these qualia.
So I guess my question would be, what is it that is claiming ownership of these things? That is certainly something I see the spirit doing even if I do not buy into this idea of mental souls operating bodies like puppets.
I am less sure what is meant by ‘spirit’ My back ground includes a year of grad work in philosophy and I am a dualist in this regard. My inclination would be to say the soul and spirit are the same thing by a different name. If you don’t believe in the ‘soul’ then you too are a dualist and I would suggest that whatever name we call it that is the thing which holds ownership of the qualia.
What does the spirit do that the soul doesn’t and vice versa?
I seem to remember, however, that making a distinction between self and others is something we acquire at some early stage of childhood development.
My understanding is that memory re-organizes around 3-4 years old and many early memories are lost–not all, there are some people who remember way back. I remember my great grandmother who died with I was 2. I have one image of her on my grandfather’s stair case–there is no picture of her on that staircase, so it isn’t something I saw later.
Nephesh just means a living being. A being with a desire and thoughts. We are souls.
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Physics continually shows hints of God that are quickly stashed away and denied by the major players in physics. Consider the multiverse. I know you have your mind around that concept. The multiverse, like our universe, has a master wavefunction which controls the entire entity. So far as we can tell, a conscious observer is required to collapse that wavefunction to one specific instance out of all possible worlds which could exist. Such an observer for the multiverse MUST be outside of the multiverse. Smolin said this, speaking of the multiverse:
“According to this interpretation, only an observer who lived outside the universe, who had somehow the same relation to the whole universe that we may have towards some atoms of gas in a container, could observe this quantum state of the universe. According to the many-worlds interpretation, it is only such an observer who could know all of reality.
“It thus seems to me that the many-worlds interpretation can be understood as an attempt to preserve, in quantum theory of the whole universe, the notion of single-observer objectivity. I know no other way to understand the desire to posit that the quantum state of the universe corresponds to reality, in spite of the fact that there can be no observer inside the universe (as we ordinarily mean it) who can observe it. This formulation preserves the idea that there is a single objective view of reality by the extreme means of making that the view of an observer who does not live in the world.”
"It seems to me that the only possible name for such an observer is God, and the theory is to be criticized as being unlikely on these grounds.” Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos Oxford University press, 1997 p. 263-264
Note that Smolin immediately discounts the existence of a God but believes that God’s existence is a fatal flaw of the multiverse
Then a bit over a year ago, two physicists tried to apply quantum to the minds of observers actually using quantum. I posted on this in the Wigner’s friend thread. They ended up saying that the 6 observers they used saw contradictory things in their observations of the same event. Take Schroedinger’s cat. Some of the six occasionally say the cat dead while at the same time others saw the cat as alive, yet they were all in the same world. Imagine that argument. Physicist A. I see a live cat. Physicist B. 'You are blind, the cat is clearly dead", “Not so,” says physicist C the cat is purring in the lab. “Are you nuts?” says physicist D. “The cat is on his side with his tongue hanging out” and on and on.
A team actually confirmed that this happens and they suggested a ‘privileged observer’ who has access to all of the multiverse, works to get rid of such conflicts like this, which arise from the application of the mathematics of quantum. Proietti et al said:
"…one way to accommodate our result is by proclaiming that “facts of the world” can only be established by a privileged observer-e.g., one that would have access to the “global wavefunction” in the many worlds interpretation" Massimiliano Proietti et al,"Experimental rejection of observer-independence in the quantum world https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.05080.pdf, p. 4
What would be the name for a privileged being who lives above the multiverse? I would suggest we would call such a being, God!
Of course, one must remember that the multiverse became popular at the same time the Big Bang was discovered. Indeed, the Big bang was a pejorative name invented by Fred Hoyle if my memory serves. And Brubridge called it the First Church of the Big Bang.
" So beguiling is this argument that astronomer Geoffrey Burbridge has lamented that his fellow scientists are rushing off to join the "First Church of Christ of the Big Bang." Stephen Strauss, “An Innocent’s Guide to the Big Bang Theory: Fingerprint in Space Left by the Universe as a Baby Still Has Doubters Hurling Stones,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), April 25, 1992, p. 1.
cited by Theodore Schick Jr. The ‘Big Bang’ Argument for the Existence of God (1998*), Philo, 1:1, 1998, p. 95-96
“Hoyle, in particular, found the big bang abhorrent because he was vehemently antireligious and he thought the cosmological picture was disturbingly close to the biblical account.” Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, Endless Universe, (New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 179
Many physicists didn’t like an origin to the universe because it implied a God. But by trying to suppress God in the Big Bang by use of the multiverse, God pops out elsewhere.
Besides with quantum needing a conscious observer to collapse the wavelet, one must ask, who was the observer before any conscious animal arose? Only one answer can arise.
I am reminded of Bishop Berkeley’s limerick exchange. Berkeley’s philosopohy was identical to that of Quantum, although he lived 200 years earlier. From my oldest son’s EE book:
"I just want to mention Berkeley who maintained that matter would cease to exist if unobserved, but luckily there is God who perceives everything, so matter may exist after all. This view was attacked by Ronald Knox in the following limerick:
"There was a young man who said, 'God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
continues to be
When there’s no one about in the Quad.’
Berkeley replied in kind:
"Dear Sir: Your astonishment’s odd;
I am always about in the Quad.
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be,
Since observed by Yours faithfully, God."
L. Solymar and D. Walsh, Lectures on the Electrical Properties of Matter, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 59
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The spirit does not operate the body or indeed affect body, brain, or mind in any consistent way. That role of taking ownership of experiences and action is in the correct direction from physical to spiritual, so there is no conflict with the data there.
My objection was to the idea of a non-physical soul animating the body and giving it life or intelligence, and to the Gnostic/Plato identification of the soul with the mind operating the body like a puppet. I don’t think that can be reconciled with the results of scientific discovery. That may be where we part ways since you have reacted negatively every time I have stated this before.
By the way this doesn’t mean that nothing like the mind survives death because all of the experiences of the mind are included in the things that the spirit takes ownership of. It also resolves difficulties regarding mental malfunctions/disease because these may be things which the spirit do not take ownership of.
I’m not sure what to say about statements like: “I xxx, therefore I yyy, therefore I exist.” I can’t say as I’ve ever been moved to exclaim anything like that. Perhaps as you say they are a way of asserting ownership, but I just can’t imagine a situation where there’d be a reason to do so. Not sure who the audience would be. But I feel I must be missing your point.
Was there any claim that everyone thinks such things???
It is a typical beginning of rationalism, and for me that was a stage I went through around the age of 13. It is certainly not where I am now, for I don’t think you get around the basic fact the every use of logic takes you from premises to conclusions, and thus where it leads depends entirely on the premises you start with or accept along the way. And it is typically constructed in a backwards way to find what premises allow you to arrive at the conclusions you are already convinced are correct.
In any case, I was not the one making those statements but only using them to point out a particular aspect which I think is connected to consciousness.
I’m afraid I’m not qualified to appreciate your points about QM. I’m probably missing what you’re dishing. Any chance there is a dumbed down, laymen version?
I don’t look at much of this internal stuff mechanistically. Rather than say what any of it is, I only feel comfortable describing the way things seem. Personally I’m not ready to assert anything flat out.