Do we posess a soul, or is it all chemical?
- Thread starter Jack_Uzi
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That's a tough question. I think it depends on one's definition of a soul. Maybe your soul is the thing that goes to heaven that you die. Maybe your soul is actually your conscience. Or maybe your soul is a collection of all of your emotions, all of your thoughts, all of your personalities, rolled into one thing, defining what you are. That's what I believe the soul is. It doesn't have to be spiritual.
We don't know if there is a soul or not. There is no evidence that one exists. From what we do know, the brain SEEMS to be the seat of consciousness. Every single experiment and observation indicates that this is the case.
Your memories are stored in your brain. How do we know this? Well we have examined patients that have had brain damage to certain regions of the brain, and have lost memories. Logically, this indicates that the brain houses your memories as a pattern of neural connections.
Your ability to process images, understand language, count, imagine 3D objects, and even recognize faces are all known to be different functions of the brain. Again, medical science has case histories of people who have lost these abilities after having their brains damaged by accident or disease.
There have been accounts of individuals undergoing rapid personality shifts when their brains are damaged (The case of Mr. Gage is an example). Again, this indicates the likelihood that your personality, memory, cognitive functions and whatnot are functions of the neural tissue of your brain.
Does this knowledge absolutely rule out the possibility of a soul..... well no. But we are learning more and more about the brain every single day, and it is becoming ever more likely that consciousness is just another function of the brain, albeit a function that involves multiple sections of the brain working in tandem.
So although science cannot (yet) rule out the possibility of the soul, there is no evidence of one. In my opinion, the "soul" was a concept created by people a long time ago, who didn't know much about neural science and biology. The concept of a soul was just an ad-hoc explanation for the phenomena of consciousness, which the ancients, in their ignorance, could not explain.
I fail to see why people should cling to old ideas, when the new ideas fit the evidence better. Simply put, you have no reason to believe in the soul, other than the fact that you want to believe in it. And merely wanting something to be true is never a good reason for believing it to be true.
Yes, science cannot explain everything. It is a human processes that requires effort. But if you are going to use the fact that science cannot explain everything to justify religion, that's a logical fallacy. It's a "god-of-the-gaps" - where you try to cram in your god for every single question we don't currently have a definitive answer for. As science closes these gaps, as it has been doing for hundreds of years, the areas for people to let their god dwell shrink rapidly, ever so.
500 years ago, we didn't know how the rain formed, so we said "a god did it". Now we know it is due to water vapour condensing in the atmosphere. A long time ago, we didn't know what the sun was, so many people said it was a god. But now we do know what the sun is - it is an immense ball of (mostly) hydrogen gas undergoing nuclear fusion.
Science doesn't know everything, and sometimes it gets things wrong. But we learn more and more and our theories get ever more accurate. Proof that science is right in most things is all around you in the form of technology. If our theories on electromagnetic forces and atomic physics was incorrect, you wouldn't be using a computer, and a nuclear power plant would fail to produce energy.
Science has, through technology, proven itself to be a very good way of understanding the universe. Because it relies on human knowledge and human experimentation, mistakes will be made. But science allows for the correction of mistakes.
Religion, on the other hand, admits no errors or mistakes. It insists that it is perfect from the get-go. It insists that it is divinely inspired. So, unlike science which is a human effort, the Bible should have NO MISTAKES in it because it supposedly comes from a god/gods. Yet it does have mistakes - the genesis account of creation is ludicrous and outdated. Noah's ark is a biological and physical impossibility. Humans cannot walk on water. You can claim that this is "god's miracles", but that suspiciously sounds like "magic" to me.
Simply put, science explains much more than religion, and provides much more power than religion. You say that science cannot explain everything, but "god did it" is HARDLY an explanation, but merely a way to ignore the problem. Science tries to find answers that can be backed by evidence. Religion just says "god did it, the end", as if that was a courageous way of facing the world.
Religiosity is the opposite of curiosity. Science explores and creates, while religion merely claims it is true through sheer force of insistence and faith.
I don't know if there is a god. But logically, if I have no proof, to believe in one would be silly. I can only believe in things that can be proven, and science has a lot of proof backing itself up. Religion can only hid in the gaps in our knowledge, which are ever shrinking. One day, maybe, there will be no gaps. Where then will religion hide?
Your memories are stored in your brain. How do we know this? Well we have examined patients that have had brain damage to certain regions of the brain, and have lost memories. Logically, this indicates that the brain houses your memories as a pattern of neural connections.
Your ability to process images, understand language, count, imagine 3D objects, and even recognize faces are all known to be different functions of the brain. Again, medical science has case histories of people who have lost these abilities after having their brains damaged by accident or disease.
There have been accounts of individuals undergoing rapid personality shifts when their brains are damaged (The case of Mr. Gage is an example). Again, this indicates the likelihood that your personality, memory, cognitive functions and whatnot are functions of the neural tissue of your brain.
Does this knowledge absolutely rule out the possibility of a soul..... well no. But we are learning more and more about the brain every single day, and it is becoming ever more likely that consciousness is just another function of the brain, albeit a function that involves multiple sections of the brain working in tandem.
So although science cannot (yet) rule out the possibility of the soul, there is no evidence of one. In my opinion, the "soul" was a concept created by people a long time ago, who didn't know much about neural science and biology. The concept of a soul was just an ad-hoc explanation for the phenomena of consciousness, which the ancients, in their ignorance, could not explain.
I fail to see why people should cling to old ideas, when the new ideas fit the evidence better. Simply put, you have no reason to believe in the soul, other than the fact that you want to believe in it. And merely wanting something to be true is never a good reason for believing it to be true.
Yes, science cannot explain everything. It is a human processes that requires effort. But if you are going to use the fact that science cannot explain everything to justify religion, that's a logical fallacy. It's a "god-of-the-gaps" - where you try to cram in your god for every single question we don't currently have a definitive answer for. As science closes these gaps, as it has been doing for hundreds of years, the areas for people to let their god dwell shrink rapidly, ever so.
500 years ago, we didn't know how the rain formed, so we said "a god did it". Now we know it is due to water vapour condensing in the atmosphere. A long time ago, we didn't know what the sun was, so many people said it was a god. But now we do know what the sun is - it is an immense ball of (mostly) hydrogen gas undergoing nuclear fusion.
Science doesn't know everything, and sometimes it gets things wrong. But we learn more and more and our theories get ever more accurate. Proof that science is right in most things is all around you in the form of technology. If our theories on electromagnetic forces and atomic physics was incorrect, you wouldn't be using a computer, and a nuclear power plant would fail to produce energy.
Science has, through technology, proven itself to be a very good way of understanding the universe. Because it relies on human knowledge and human experimentation, mistakes will be made. But science allows for the correction of mistakes.
Religion, on the other hand, admits no errors or mistakes. It insists that it is perfect from the get-go. It insists that it is divinely inspired. So, unlike science which is a human effort, the Bible should have NO MISTAKES in it because it supposedly comes from a god/gods. Yet it does have mistakes - the genesis account of creation is ludicrous and outdated. Noah's ark is a biological and physical impossibility. Humans cannot walk on water. You can claim that this is "god's miracles", but that suspiciously sounds like "magic" to me.
Simply put, science explains much more than religion, and provides much more power than religion. You say that science cannot explain everything, but "god did it" is HARDLY an explanation, but merely a way to ignore the problem. Science tries to find answers that can be backed by evidence. Religion just says "god did it, the end", as if that was a courageous way of facing the world.
Religiosity is the opposite of curiosity. Science explores and creates, while religion merely claims it is true through sheer force of insistence and faith.
I don't know if there is a god. But logically, if I have no proof, to believe in one would be silly. I can only believe in things that can be proven, and science has a lot of proof backing itself up. Religion can only hid in the gaps in our knowledge, which are ever shrinking. One day, maybe, there will be no gaps. Where then will religion hide?
The problem there, of course, is that ideas do have a physical representation. An idea encodes some information and that takes the form of a polychronous neural activity.Ciran said:
Therefore you reduce an idea to some physical event, which is very much allowed to affect other physical entities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_MacDougall_(doctor)Korolev said:
No proof?
And this isn't just against you, but people need to do research into the scientific method and look at studies that refute their claims rather than group think their way through life.
Yes, but that would be a baseless assumption. The fact of the matter is that 3/4 of an ounce has been lost. That is all. This is exactly the kind of behavior that leads people to attribute everything they don't currently understand to something mythic or supernatural with no basis. (ie:Ancient Greeks didn't have a full understanding of lightning, therefore explained it with Zeus).KEM10 said:
Ask yourself this; if none of us feared death, would we really even have come up with the idea of a soul in the first place? It just sounds like wishful thinking.
They both don't disappear as far as I'm aware. 
They'd shard off into quarks, neutrons and protons
They'd shard off into quarks, neutrons and protons
They'd shard off into quarks, neutrons and protons
They both don't disappear as far as I'm aware.PissOffRoth said:
They'd shard off into quarks, neutrons and protonsI don't think they are mutually exclusive. I also don't think that a soul by it's nature has to be an intangible thing. While humans are not as unpredictable as we would like to think, we still possess individuality, whether that's mystical or a unique chemical and electrical balance is debatable.Jack_Uzi said:
I say electrical because I personally think that your essence is more going to be the impulses in your brain than the chemicals in your body. I feel it will be possible at some point to transfer people into robotic or cloned bodies by transferring that electrical energy. Though the person might find themselves with new impulses depending on the exact chemical makeup of a new body.
In essence we are all chemical, but as we develop our personalities and our individuality we create something that chemicals cant, a soul.
Or at least thats my take on it.
Or at least thats my take on it.
Fun fact, he wasn't trying to prove you have a soul, he was attempting to disprove dead weight (the theory that you gain weight while dieing which explains why it is harder to move towards the end of life). It was after his first test that he saw the weight loss and thought he screwed up. Then it happened 3 or 4 more times, excluding the ones where the methodology was ruined. One scale was tampered with so no accurate reading was recorded (guy lost too much weight) and another died within 5 minutes of hitting the table so no baseline was formed.esin said:
I don't fear death, I just find this test fascinating and it is a form of scientific proof that there is a soul. Only problem is that it needs to be done again with modern technology to lock it into place for a full debunk or prove.
As humans that's a question we simply don't know the answer to, and anyone who boldly claims to KNOW one way or the other is an idiot.
Just one more note: to those of you who say science can be wrong, that is precisely its strength. Science is a self-correcting process, that takes a long time. It is an ever improving process, a body of knowledge that tests itself against the world to see if its ideas hold up. You should be celebrating the fact that science can change its mind, because it allows errors to be weeded out.
Few ideas are ever correct the first time around. This is why they need to be tested. Newton's laws of physics were good and they are still useful for explaining the motion of everyday objects and interactions. But Newton's laws were made by an Englishman who lived in an age before we had incredibly accurate instruments to measure things that are close to the speed of light. When we did create such instruments, we finally understood that Newton wasn't entirely accurate, and indeed, he couldn't have been given the time and age he lived in. Newton's laws are still good but they can't explain motion at relativistic speeds. This isn't Newton's fault, or a failure of his logic - simply put, different maths applies for objects moving close to the speed of light. So we EXPANDED science to be able to describe such phenomena.
Science is ever improving, as can be evidenced by our ever improving technology. We couldn't have built planes, microwaves, satellites, nuclear bombs, or, indeed, videogame consoles if our technology was not accurate to some degree. And as our technology improves, our ways of investigating also improve, which allows us to correct and modify our theories with ever increasing accuracy and vigour, allowing us to explain more about the universe, which in turn, allows us to create better instruments for exploring the universe, which leads to more science, in a never-ending cycle of self-improvement and exploration.
In my mind, science is a far more courageous undertaking than religion. Religion merely states "god did it, the end". It is far more arrogant than science, and depends solely on faith. The few miracles the church trots out every so-often are very shaky and in most cases can be explained by science (for example, a patient whose cancer spontaneously goes into remission is not evidence of a miracle, but only that the patient had good adaptive immune system. Atheists have had cancer go into remission to you know). Religion says "this book, which could have been written by anyone, is absolutely true". Science says that nothing is true until it can be backed up by an experiment or mathematical logic.
I can live in a world where I don't know everything. I don't know where I'll be when I die. I don't know how the universe began. I don't know exactly how consciousness arises in the brain.
What I DO know is that I'm willing to accept that, willing to accept that we don't know everything, willing to accept that the true answers take hundreds of years hard work, sweat and toil on the part of scientists.
While as the religious people are far more arrogant than the scientists, insisting that they know everything, even when they have no proof. Insisting that their institution already has the final say, despite their bible being riddled with physical, chemical and biological impossibilities and superstition. They are arrogant for insisting that their bible is perfect and for never admitting errors, not the scientists who at least try to get proof, who at least can admit that theories need to change to fit new evidence.
Of course scientists don't know everything. If we thought we did, WE'D STOP! But we don't and we haven't stopped searching. Religion has.
Simply put, using science, I can create a vaccine. I can't with the Bible. Using science, I can modify the genome of a bacteria or animal. I can't with the Bible. Using science, I can use a spectrometer to analyse the emission of energy from electrons to determine chemical composition of materials. I cannot do that with a Bible.
Science doesn't know everything. But at least our answers are backed up by proof. We don't know everything, we don't claim to. But religion claims to know everything, yet provides SO LITTLE useful knowledge. So in other words, science knows MORE than religion. And technology is the proof.
Few ideas are ever correct the first time around. This is why they need to be tested. Newton's laws of physics were good and they are still useful for explaining the motion of everyday objects and interactions. But Newton's laws were made by an Englishman who lived in an age before we had incredibly accurate instruments to measure things that are close to the speed of light. When we did create such instruments, we finally understood that Newton wasn't entirely accurate, and indeed, he couldn't have been given the time and age he lived in. Newton's laws are still good but they can't explain motion at relativistic speeds. This isn't Newton's fault, or a failure of his logic - simply put, different maths applies for objects moving close to the speed of light. So we EXPANDED science to be able to describe such phenomena.
Science is ever improving, as can be evidenced by our ever improving technology. We couldn't have built planes, microwaves, satellites, nuclear bombs, or, indeed, videogame consoles if our technology was not accurate to some degree. And as our technology improves, our ways of investigating also improve, which allows us to correct and modify our theories with ever increasing accuracy and vigour, allowing us to explain more about the universe, which in turn, allows us to create better instruments for exploring the universe, which leads to more science, in a never-ending cycle of self-improvement and exploration.
In my mind, science is a far more courageous undertaking than religion. Religion merely states "god did it, the end". It is far more arrogant than science, and depends solely on faith. The few miracles the church trots out every so-often are very shaky and in most cases can be explained by science (for example, a patient whose cancer spontaneously goes into remission is not evidence of a miracle, but only that the patient had good adaptive immune system. Atheists have had cancer go into remission to you know). Religion says "this book, which could have been written by anyone, is absolutely true". Science says that nothing is true until it can be backed up by an experiment or mathematical logic.
I can live in a world where I don't know everything. I don't know where I'll be when I die. I don't know how the universe began. I don't know exactly how consciousness arises in the brain.
What I DO know is that I'm willing to accept that, willing to accept that we don't know everything, willing to accept that the true answers take hundreds of years hard work, sweat and toil on the part of scientists.
While as the religious people are far more arrogant than the scientists, insisting that they know everything, even when they have no proof. Insisting that their institution already has the final say, despite their bible being riddled with physical, chemical and biological impossibilities and superstition. They are arrogant for insisting that their bible is perfect and for never admitting errors, not the scientists who at least try to get proof, who at least can admit that theories need to change to fit new evidence.
Of course scientists don't know everything. If we thought we did, WE'D STOP! But we don't and we haven't stopped searching. Religion has.
Simply put, using science, I can create a vaccine. I can't with the Bible. Using science, I can modify the genome of a bacteria or animal. I can't with the Bible. Using science, I can use a spectrometer to analyse the emission of energy from electrons to determine chemical composition of materials. I cannot do that with a Bible.
Science doesn't know everything. But at least our answers are backed up by proof. We don't know everything, we don't claim to. But religion claims to know everything, yet provides SO LITTLE useful knowledge. So in other words, science knows MORE than religion. And technology is the proof.
In your opinion.PayJ567 said:
In your opinion.Jedamethis said:
IN YOUR OPINION, DAMMIT!GiglameshSoulEater said:
OP: Ehhhh.... Sorry about that.
Anyway, to determine if a person has a soul, we must FIRST determine what a soul is.
This is not me agree or disagreeing with you here. But if we are all just complex 'machines', why on earth should we still care for each other? I think our evolution has taken a step in the wrong direction if this is true. Because we would be better of if we were next door neighbours of the ants in that case.formless777 said:
