Are we purely material beings or do we have souls?
- Thread starter James R
- Start date
If believing that makes you happy, then you go on believing that. But anyway the offers always open for a ride on my two unicorns. 
Are you a grown man?
Isn't there a song with that title? Rsoul omio, tonight's the night
Ooops, no sorry, that's O solo mio
Feeling hurt? Still not able to ram your nonsense down mine and others throats?
Now all you need to do to shut me up, is come up with some real empirical evidence of anything resembling this beast you call a soul. If you have that real empirical evidence, then I suggest you write up a scientific paper for review, and/or start a thread with it in the sciences. Success will certainly see you with a Nobel prize in November.
Paddo...
...aren’t you able to answer straight-forward questions?
...aren’t you able to answer straight-forward questions?
https://qz.com/789780/neuroscience-...ered-it-basically-unnecessary-to-have-a-soul/
Neuroscience and psychology have rendered it basically unnecessary to have a soul:
Many people today believe they possess a soul. While conceptions of the soul differ, many would describe it as an “invisible force that appears to animate us.”
It’s often believed the soul can survive death and is intimately associated with a person’s memories, passions and values. Some argue the soul has no mass, takes no space and is localized nowhere.
But as a neuroscientist and psychologist, I have no use for the soul. On the contrary, all functions attributable to this kind of soul can be explained by the workings of the brain.
Psychology is the study of behavior. To carry out their work of modifying behavior, such as in treating addiction, phobia, anxiety and depression, psychologists do not need to assume people have souls. For the psychologists, it is not so much that souls do not exist, it is that there is no need for them.
It is said psychology lost its soul in the 1930s. By this time, the discipline fully became a science, relying on experimentation and control rather than introspection.
What is the soul?
It is not only religious thinkers who have proposed that we possess a soul. Some of the most notable proponents have been philosophers, such as Plato (424-348 BCE) and René Descartes in the 17th century.
Plato believed we do not learn new things but recall things we knew before birth. For this to be so, he concluded, we must have a soul.
Centuries later, Descartes wrote his thesis Passions of the Soul, where he argued there was a distinction between the mind, which he described as a “thinking substance”, and the body, “the extended substance”. He wrote:
… because we have no conception of the body as thinking in any way, we have reason to believe that every kind of thought which exists in us belongs to the soul.
One of the many arguments Descartes advanced for the existence of the soul was that the brain, which is a part of the body, is mortal and divisible—meaning it has different parts—and the soul is eternal and indivisible—meaning it is an inseparable whole. Therefore, he concluded they must be different things.
But advances in neuroscience have shown these arguments to be false.
Stripping humans of the soul
In the 1960s, Nobel laureate Roger Sperry showed that the mind and our consciousness are divisible, therefore disproving that aspect of Descartes’ theory.
Sperry studied patients whose corpus callosum, the superhighway connecting the right and left hemispheres, had been severed by surgery aiming to control the spread of epileptic seizures. The surgery blocked or reduced the transfer of perceptual, sensory, motor and cognitive information between the two hemispheres
Sperry showed each hemisphere could be trained to perform a task, but this experience was not available to the untrained hemisphere. That is, each hemisphere could process information outside the awareness of the other. In essence, this meant the operation produced a double consciousness.
In his effort to prove the existence of the soul in humans, Descartes actually provided an argument against it.
Thus, Descartes cannot be correct in his assertion the brain is divisible but the soul, which can be read as the mind or consciousness, is not. In his effort to prove the existence of the soul in humans, Descartes actually provided an argument against it.
Rather than investigating rats with souls, psychologists stripped humans of theirs. In 1949, psychologist D.O. Hebb claimed the mind is the integration of the activity of the brain.
Many neurophilosophers have come to the same conclusion as the psychologists, with Patricia Churchland more recently claiming there is no ghost in the machine.
The brain does it all
If the soul is where emotion and motivation reside, where mental activity occurs, sensations are perceived, memories are stored, reasoning takes place and decisions are taken, then there is no need to hypothesize its existence. There is an organ that already performs these functions: the brain.
This idea goes back to the ancient physician Hippocrates (460-377 BCE) who said:
Men ought to know that from nothing else but the brain come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency and lamentations. And by this … we acquire wisdom and knowledge, and see and hear, and know what are foul and what are fair, what are bad and what are good, what are sweet and what are unsavoury…
Consider one of the functions supposedly—if we listen to Plato—carried out by the soul: memory. A major knock on the head can make you lose your memories of the past several years. If the soul is an immaterial substance separate from our physical being, it should not be injured by the knock. If memory were stored in the soul, it should not have been lost.The brain is the organ with a map of our body, the outside world and our experience. Damage to the brain, as in accidents, dementias or congenital malformations, produces a commensurate damage to personality.
The neuronal activity in the brain is responsible for the cognitive and emotional dysfunctions in people with autism; it would be cruel and unethical to blame their hypothetical souls.
Manipulation of the brain is sufficient to alter emotion and mood. The soul is totally superfluous to this process.
The ability of psychotherapeutic drugs to alter mood provides another line of evidence against the presence of the soul. If you produce a chemical imbalance in the brain, such as by depleting dopamine, noradrenaline and serotonin with tetrabenazine, you can induce depression in some people.
Correspondingly, many depressed people can be helped by drugs that increase the function of these neurotransmitters in the brain.
The brain is where thinking takes place, love and hatred reside, sensations become perceptions, personality is formed, memories and beliefs are held, and where decisions are made. As D.K. Johnson said: “There is nothing left for the soul to do.”
Neuroscience and psychology have rendered it basically unnecessary to have a soul:
Many people today believe they possess a soul. While conceptions of the soul differ, many would describe it as an “invisible force that appears to animate us.”
It’s often believed the soul can survive death and is intimately associated with a person’s memories, passions and values. Some argue the soul has no mass, takes no space and is localized nowhere.
But as a neuroscientist and psychologist, I have no use for the soul. On the contrary, all functions attributable to this kind of soul can be explained by the workings of the brain.
Psychology is the study of behavior. To carry out their work of modifying behavior, such as in treating addiction, phobia, anxiety and depression, psychologists do not need to assume people have souls. For the psychologists, it is not so much that souls do not exist, it is that there is no need for them.
It is said psychology lost its soul in the 1930s. By this time, the discipline fully became a science, relying on experimentation and control rather than introspection.
What is the soul?
It is not only religious thinkers who have proposed that we possess a soul. Some of the most notable proponents have been philosophers, such as Plato (424-348 BCE) and René Descartes in the 17th century.
Plato believed we do not learn new things but recall things we knew before birth. For this to be so, he concluded, we must have a soul.
Centuries later, Descartes wrote his thesis Passions of the Soul, where he argued there was a distinction between the mind, which he described as a “thinking substance”, and the body, “the extended substance”. He wrote:
… because we have no conception of the body as thinking in any way, we have reason to believe that every kind of thought which exists in us belongs to the soul.
One of the many arguments Descartes advanced for the existence of the soul was that the brain, which is a part of the body, is mortal and divisible—meaning it has different parts—and the soul is eternal and indivisible—meaning it is an inseparable whole. Therefore, he concluded they must be different things.
But advances in neuroscience have shown these arguments to be false.
Stripping humans of the soul
In the 1960s, Nobel laureate Roger Sperry showed that the mind and our consciousness are divisible, therefore disproving that aspect of Descartes’ theory.
Sperry studied patients whose corpus callosum, the superhighway connecting the right and left hemispheres, had been severed by surgery aiming to control the spread of epileptic seizures. The surgery blocked or reduced the transfer of perceptual, sensory, motor and cognitive information between the two hemispheres
Sperry showed each hemisphere could be trained to perform a task, but this experience was not available to the untrained hemisphere. That is, each hemisphere could process information outside the awareness of the other. In essence, this meant the operation produced a double consciousness.
In his effort to prove the existence of the soul in humans, Descartes actually provided an argument against it.
Thus, Descartes cannot be correct in his assertion the brain is divisible but the soul, which can be read as the mind or consciousness, is not. In his effort to prove the existence of the soul in humans, Descartes actually provided an argument against it.
Rather than investigating rats with souls, psychologists stripped humans of theirs. In 1949, psychologist D.O. Hebb claimed the mind is the integration of the activity of the brain.
Many neurophilosophers have come to the same conclusion as the psychologists, with Patricia Churchland more recently claiming there is no ghost in the machine.
The brain does it all
If the soul is where emotion and motivation reside, where mental activity occurs, sensations are perceived, memories are stored, reasoning takes place and decisions are taken, then there is no need to hypothesize its existence. There is an organ that already performs these functions: the brain.
This idea goes back to the ancient physician Hippocrates (460-377 BCE) who said:
Men ought to know that from nothing else but the brain come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency and lamentations. And by this … we acquire wisdom and knowledge, and see and hear, and know what are foul and what are fair, what are bad and what are good, what are sweet and what are unsavoury…
Consider one of the functions supposedly—if we listen to Plato—carried out by the soul: memory. A major knock on the head can make you lose your memories of the past several years. If the soul is an immaterial substance separate from our physical being, it should not be injured by the knock. If memory were stored in the soul, it should not have been lost.The brain is the organ with a map of our body, the outside world and our experience. Damage to the brain, as in accidents, dementias or congenital malformations, produces a commensurate damage to personality.
The neuronal activity in the brain is responsible for the cognitive and emotional dysfunctions in people with autism; it would be cruel and unethical to blame their hypothetical souls.
Manipulation of the brain is sufficient to alter emotion and mood. The soul is totally superfluous to this process.
The ability of psychotherapeutic drugs to alter mood provides another line of evidence against the presence of the soul. If you produce a chemical imbalance in the brain, such as by depleting dopamine, noradrenaline and serotonin with tetrabenazine, you can induce depression in some people.
Correspondingly, many depressed people can be helped by drugs that increase the function of these neurotransmitters in the brain.
The brain is where thinking takes place, love and hatred reside, sensations become perceptions, personality is formed, memories and beliefs are held, and where decisions are made. As D.K. Johnson said: “There is nothing left for the soul to do.”
Would you look at that, it just happens to fit into the consensus.
Yeah sure it does! Another example how you twist, turn, lie, misinterpret, redefine etc to suit your agenda. Man, do you have a king size problem!!!
headline:Neuroscience and psychology have rendered it basically unnecessary to have a soul:
“There is nothing left for the soul to do.”
The ability of psychotherapeutic drugs to alter mood provides another line of evidence against the presence of the soul.
Manipulation of the brain is sufficient to alter emotion and mood. The soul is totally superfluous to this process.
The neuronal activity in the brain is responsible for the cognitive and emotional dysfunctions in people with autism; it would be cruel and unethical to blame their hypothetical souls.
Many neurophilosophers have come to the same conclusion as the psychologists, with Patricia Churchland more recently claiming there is no ghost in the machine.
The brain does it all
If the soul is where emotion and motivation reside, where mental activity occurs, sensations are perceived, memories are stored, reasoning takes place and decisions are taken, then there is no need to hypothesize its existence. There is an organ that already performs these functions: the brain.
Xelasnave.1947
Valued Senior Member
Yes you were off topic... deny it if you dare...and you did not like being called out...you sook. You were still blathering about evolution as if no one had explained it for you.
Well you assume too much I have not been drinking, not that it's any of your business you judgemental ass.... and I was just trying to make river feel at home and show him I am not intolerant of his ideas.
You are probably to thick to notice that we were discussing souls .... not that one should bother given it is just more make believe and superstitious nonsense.
You are just upset because I call you out for having no evidence for anything you present, that your reason is lacking, that you can not accept science even when you are spoon fed, and I refuse to accept your constant lieing and me drawing attention to your lieing and questioning if all you talk about is correct why the need to lie....and you have the Gaul to carry on in such a righteousness and pretentious manner you are a convicted troll who lies habitually...shame on you...and your despicable shot at my disability shows what a coward you are..no apology and all your carry on is no doubt so I will forget...well I won't.. making fun of a cripple I hope you are proud of yourself.
You will be happy to know I fixed my main rig and have been out taking some photos...drunk? How could I work with precision equipment requiring fine adjustment if drunk...just saying...honestly I really must be getting to you but I only have been pointing out the truth its just that you cant take it..if you dont want to be ridiculed stop lieing , trolling and making disgusting insults...
You like discussion but your discussion is about make believe, and when that fact is pointed out you sook, you sad thing.
You were so far off topic you needed to be told, I told you and you have a dummy spit...now get on with it and babble about your make believe soul.
And worse still your off topic was going over your problems with evolution..give it a break..the evidence is available and it tells us ID is bullshit nonsense never to be taught in schools for good reason, and that The Theory of Evolution explains the diversity of species much better than an ancient non science book.
You think you are so clever considering this and that playing philosopher well bring some evidence to the table for a soul ...well you can't because it is all just make believe just like kids pretending they saw a fairey in the garden...you suffer a deluded notion that if you talk about something that makes it real..that is sad..grow up and stop playing pretend.
Anyways I hope you are well Jan and coping ok with the virus conditions
Alex
Xelasnave.1947
Valued Senior Member
Thank you for such a brilliant post Paddo.
It's hard keeping Jan on topic ..he just can't let go of the fact that there is so much hard science to support Evolution and being so obsessed with his ID delusion and creation myth he can't focus on this thread.
These ID folk get nasty if you confront them with facts...they just hate facts particularly good and well researched science facts.
Anyways thanks for bringing the thread back on topic some one had to take control whilst Jan has one of his/her tail spins.
Alex
Alex, your responses are a complete mess, and as such, trying to have a conversation with you is a futile task. How you haven’t been warned yet, is a mystery.
But I have a question.
Are you a psychopath?
But I have a question.
Are you a psychopath?
Xelasnave.1947
Valued Senior Member
Are you lieing or do you really mean that?
Alex
Xelasnave.1947
Valued Senior Member
You don't get it Jan.
You do bad things yet you have no idea why you get no respect.
I have set out in detail the issues.
Perhaps you dont like being on the receiving end ... where you expect fair play, honesty and direct answers..you have shown your approach is far from genuine and so that's Sortta what you will get from me.
I really don't care what you believe but your nonsense with evolution is unacceptable and shows in fact that you are the one who can not be fairdincum...Paddo knows the call I just made...put it this way if you were at the pub no one would have a beer with you even if you were buying..you crapped in your nest so don't blame others that they won't play your silly games.
But a discussion is a two sided event and I will not tolerate lies and unfortunately you have an uncontrollable habit to lie ...in my book one lie and it's all over...so you need not expect a discussion from me ..you have done your dash.
You have a question...I ignore your question...it sounds far from genuine Sortta like that one..are you still beating your wife.
But rest assured your cripple joke certainly did offend me so you can be happy there...
Alex
I know why this clown didn’t cite any sources.Yeah sure it does! Another example how you twist, turn, lie, misinterpret, redefine etc to suit your agenda. Man, do you have a king size problem!!!
headline:Neuroscience and psychology have rendered it basically unnecessary to have a soul:
“There is nothing left for the soul to do.”
The ability of psychotherapeutic drugs to alter mood provides another line of evidence against the presence of the soul.
Manipulation of the brain is sufficient to alter emotion and mood. The soul is totally superfluous to this process.
The neuronal activity in the brain is responsible for the cognitive and emotional dysfunctions in people with autism; it would be cruel and unethical to blame their hypothetical souls.
Many neurophilosophers have come to the same conclusion as the psychologists, with Patricia Churchland more recently claiming there is no ghost in the machine.
The brain does it all
If the soul is where emotion and motivation reside, where mental activity occurs, sensations are perceived, memories are stored, reasoning takes place and decisions are taken, then there is no need to hypothesize its existence. There is an organ that already performs these functions: the brain.
He got this information from this website, which appears to be a subsidiary of this company.
This is the “about us” on their home page.
“A business intelligence platform that provides financial institutions and general businesses with the insights they need to analyze and formulate business strategies, including global company financial, industry reports, market data, and M&A deals.”
Where is the science? Clown.
Jan Ardena:
Similarly, what causes your impression that I am a conscious human being? You say it's my soul. I say that's an unnecessary additional hypothesis, for the same reason that the pixie is unnecessary for explaining the piano.
Do you believe in the pixie, Jan? If not, why not?
You assert that human bodies have souls that connect to them but which are ultimately independent of them. You say that a human body cannot operate as a person without a soul. But, as I have shown, the soul is an unnecessary additional hypothesis for explaining how human beings are observed to behave. The material body does the same job with greater parsimony.
You have failed to come to grips with my piano analogy. Your soul is no different, conceptually, from the magical pixie that is said to make the piano sounds.
In the piano metaphor, the magical pixie is the soul.
You seem confused. My experiences weren't mentioned in the piano example. The question is: what causes the piano sound? You say it's the pixie, but that's an unnecessary additional hypothesis.
Similarly, what causes your impression that I am a conscious human being? You say it's my soul. I say that's an unnecessary additional hypothesis, for the same reason that the pixie is unnecessary for explaining the piano.
You missed the point of the analogy, clearly. I just told you why your idea of an invisible puppet master controlling the body is an unnecessary hypothesis. Try reading through it again.
Just like the speakers in the piano are slave to the magical invisible pixie.
Do you believe in the pixie, Jan? If not, why not?
But this clown did give a source, as I always do.
https://qz.com/789780/neuroscience-...ered-it-basically-unnecessary-to-have-a-soul/
My question to you is, how the bloody hell anyone can keep telling blatant untruths like you do, when it is there in black and white?
Do you believe all here trying to put you straight are as gullible as you? or river for that matter? sheesh!!!
The article debunks convincingly any aspect or need for a soul. If you were man enough to accept that fact, and then just reject it, people would start having some respect for you...like teroko for example...like the female paleontologist you linked to a while back.