Simple question. And by soul I mean some part of you that is preserved after death. If you do, I ask: When you were born, when you were 2, when you were 5, or 12, 15, 17, 20...at all of these stages, you were very different from who you are now. If you went back and talked to yourself when you were a toddler, or a preteen, or on your 16th birthday....they are you in some sense, but they wouldn't be who you call yourself now. You'd say you know so much more, you've experienced a lot more, you're so much more grown. Your goals have changed, so has your look, and what you think about, and your reflection on your own self. But the soul, from the way everyone describes it, it is unchanging and immortal. So which one of yourselves is really your soul? You now? You in 10 years? you when you were born, or when you die? Since this doesn't make sence, would you call the soul, if it was static, a life force? But what's the point of having a soul then, if the very essence of who you really are - your personality and ideas and thoughts and very identity (which is always changing) - is not preserved at all? If not, do you believe in something different? Nothing at all? What do you believe and/or accept? All in all, this has been an internal conflict for me for quite some while. Suffering a crisis of self from an unresolved battle of intelect and spirituality. I am a child of science and logic, and the idea of a soul seems only the offspring of thousands of years of quelling the instinctive fear of the unknown. But then again, I feel a void where the belief in a soul should be. Where am I going, what is this all even for if nothing is perminant, etc. Searching for my own answers, and I'm not accepting them. But thats a different story.
Do I believe in a soul that's separate from my brain? That's a definite "nicht-nicht" as Ali G would put it. Yes, I am different from how I was when I was 6 years old... so fucking what? Does that justify a duality? Are you people that fucking childish/fickle? God damnit! No... there's no preservation of the soul. When you're dead, that's it. Byebye. Make the most of every second you have--or don't. It's not uplifting, I'll admit. But that's life. Doesn't that (shouldn't) that ring a bell?
Sounds like you already think that the soul is the same thing as a person's life. If you are a "child of science and logic," then why are you not looking at this from a scientific and logical point-of-view? You're saying that you have "instinctive fears of the unknown." This is not scientific or logical: it is purely emotional. Like many of us, it sounds like you were brought up being taught about how the soul lives on after death - blah, blah, blah - and are now afraid to realize that what you've been taught all these years is a bunch of bull.
It must be great to believe you have a soul, that you will live on after the last waltz blardy blardy blar. Alas I cant believe in santa anymore , how can I belive in an identical delusion? even though the gifts would be much greater.
Ring a bell? I think somebody rung yours a little too hard... Why don't your prove it? Show me the real, concrete, scientific proof that allows us to say F U SOUL! You just don't exist! Just because we can't prove it does exist doesn't mean it doesn't... You know, kind of like the earth was once flat and we would all fall off the edge, or black holes don't exist, or man will never fly, or walk on the moon... If no one ever had any visonary, ridicluous, controversial ideas then we probably wouldn't have gotten far as a species. It's the belief in something greater then us exists and that we can prove it, that drives us. I have a soul, too bad you don't.
i believe in the inexplicable reality that we constantly apply inaccurate terms to in order for our limited minds to convey subjective information.
Do you believe there is a secret society of teletubbies partying in a subterranean base within the planet Pluto? Probably not, right? In all likelihood, since I'm guessing for the most part you're a somewhat rational person, you don't believe that to be the case. However, you can't prove they're not there, can you? Just because you can't prove something one way or another (you can't absolutely prove anything) doesn't make it logical to believe.
And the spelling. From what I've seen, it's 'Occam' or 'Ockham'. But it's not meant to disprove anything, it just talks about likelihoods, right? As for the soul, when I find one, I'll let you know. As far as I know all this happiness and belief and stuff is just caused by chemicals flooding your brain, but that doesn't mean it isn't cool.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and it's not even widely believed that there is an absence of evidence. I encourage you to read 'The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death', by a Harvard and Yale educated professor of psychology: http://www.amazon.com/Afterlife-Experiments-Breakthrough-Scientific-Evidence/dp/074343658X
How do you know that it isn't? Nothing you've said shows or proves anything about that one way or the other. Do you believe in love? If so, prove that "love" exists and that it's not just some silly-assed ideal so we can get laid every so often. And just where should it be? It seems that if you know where the belief should be, and it ain't there, then you don't believe. So what? You're gonna' die anyway, just like believers. But are believers happier in life? I think so. What about you? Baron Max
This better serves as an argument for a soul, rather than against it. Why, after growing and changing from the 'singularity' of the zygote, up through childhood, maturity, and death, would not the personality, if able, change and grow even more? If we can be a 'different' person at 6, 16, and 60, then a conversion from a corporeal existence to an ethereal state would be but one more stage of evolution. The continuity of self would be retained in some manner. This is not 'evidence' for a soul, of course, but it shows another way in which the concept of soul is conceptually plausible.
Funny, that's what gospel preachers said about Origin of Species. Of course, they never read it, either. They didn't have to, as they 'already knew the truth'. To test an extension of this metaphor, do you also share with those preachers the idea that you have already internalised all the significant facts about the world? And that anything which may contradict these 'facts' is heresy by definition? Paradigm shifts come only after trial and tribulations. Schopenhauer said that a new truth goes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is vigorously opposed. And third, it is accepted as self-evident. Perhaps the concept of a 'soul' is moving from the first to second stage?
No you richard. Im saying that this afterdeath type research has been going on in certain scientific institutes or decades, but once submitted for peer review invariably they turn out to be conducted incorrectly and any subsequent independent testing of one of these so called "breakthroughs" always come back false. Evolution on the other hand has been shown to be correct every time that it is tested and stands up to each and every subsequent discovery.
