loremazd said:
Soul is just a word, you're the one putting extra meaning in it. It's our way of defining what separates our minds from other creatures, our ability to think diffently, and our sense of self. Religion takes the idea that the soul exists after death, is all.
Plus your resoning is rickety "You have no right to get offended when I or anyone else rejectures your assumption because you're dumb," is essentially the idea. Of course they have the right, you're calling them stupid for believing something you dont.
It's not even really that flawed a premise. It's like if you had someone living indoors and looking out, would they believe in wind? Perhaps they'd think that plants rustling would be their natural state, rather than believe in this unquantifiable -wind- everyone talks about. Everything is limited by perception, and the more we learn, the more we know. Choosing not to believe due to ones own perceptions has little difference in one who believes due to their own perceptions.
It's kind of like claiming -love- doesn't exist and it's pure biology. A belief in only the quantifiable limits you, and that's no unfounded claim there. As we know and learn more, we find new truths and find that there is even more we do not understand. The unmeasurable becomes measurable.
I did not say I rejected the notion of a soul because the OP is dumb. I said I'm right to reject the notion of a soul because it's vague and unsubstantiated by evidence. I'll take your wind metaphor for instance:
If a person is looking out the window and trying to understand why some things move around sometimes while others do not, indeed, they would be unlikely to come up with the correct answer because they can't feel the wind.
But! if that person tried to sell me on the idea that invisible faeries were flying down and shaking things, I wouldn't buy it for a second. And frankly, he would be spitting in the face of reason to believe it himself. That explanation would either have no evidence or be unprovable (if he defined the faeries as not having any detectable properties other than moving things, or perhaps didn't go out of his way to define the faeries at all). Even if it's limited in it's predictive and explanatory power, any alternative based on evidence would be better. And if this hypothetical person really just couldn't extrapolate any meaningful theory from the data available, the proper answer to the question is "I don't know." Not faeries.
You say "soul is just a word." And that's my point exactly. On one hand it's a placeholder for things that we don't understand, like how love works. On the other, it's a magic, transcendental element that can exist independently of one's body or allow us to love across time and space or whatever the hell else you decide it does. In the first it's just meaningless. In that context it just means "this thing
x we don't understand yet." In the second, it's unverifiable and/or unsupported by the evidence.
Actually, the first use of "soul" is acceptable; it's convenient to have a word that describes the particular thing we don't understand. But I know the OP was using an unspecified version of the second use. He went to great lengths to make sure that his hypothetical robot mind was indistinguishable from a human mind. The only "soul" he could be talking about would be some supernatural one. And the fact that he didn't even bother to specify
which one annoys me even more. Not only does he expect people to accept that his claim is just as valid as theirs, but he's not even telling us what his claim
is!
And maybe reserving your beliefs for the quantifiable does limit you, in a sense. But it also protects you from dumb bullshit like astrology and homeopathy. Believing in supernatural abstractions like "souls" is just as silly, if not nearly as harmful. Even if you point to something we can't explain, you can't just go "there, my definition of a soul is suddenly correct." You're supposed to say "I don't know why that happens," and an acceptable addition would be, "and we'll call its cause the 'soul' until we understand it better." But you can't say
anything about it except that it causes that thing you don't understand.
