"Do we have a soul or not? Prove it!" (2015)

Originally posted by Dasa
It is the easiest question to answer.

Proof of the soul is consciousness and everything that goes with it.(mind, intelligence, free will and ego)

Honest men accept this.

Dishonest men will not.............(but they cannot explain consciousness.) and they come up with the most stupid and foolish arguments to reject this proof.

The people who reject the ...[text shortened]... unk science will tell you ................that life comes from dead matter but they cannot proof it.

Originally posted by josephw

Is God a liar?

Originally posted by Grampy Bobby (OP)
Original post by phillip beer (on 01 Jun '04 16:34) Thread 11214 (7 Pages)
Do we have a soul or not? Prove it!

"It is the oldest of questions. Do we have an eternal soul or do we die and that is it. What is the nature of our consciousness?"

Note: Recently found this eleven year old thread while searching for something els ...[text shortened]... quite awhile yet is still relevant to many other threads on this spirituality forum. Your insights?

Originally posted by sonship
I think you understand me so far.

Originally posted by twhitehead
No, I clearly don't.

[b]Then take a "mind" on a lower lever if you wish. How did the first mind emerge from some threshold complex combination of matter ?
Why are you so focused on 'the first mind'? What is so special about the first mind? To be honest I have no idea what the first mind was. A major problem in determining the first mind would be ...[text shortened]... /b]
The same way non-galaxy starts can produce a galaxy, or non-story pages can produce a book.[/b]

me: I see. So are you saying it is useless to use language to discuss the soul and identity ?

tw: No, I am saying the current definitions do not define distinct physical objects but rather grey edged concepts.
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As such it is in error to make certain claims about them.

If you were to claim that the Zambezi river is brown, you would be wrong as there are times of year when it is green. Similarly, almost any claim you make about the Zambezi river is going to have problems due to the fact that the concept is grey edged.
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That is rather a self defeating argument. You just claimed that three times a year it is green.

I don't think it is fair to insist that YOU can make a claim about your river but I cannot because of grey edged-ness of the term "river."

me: A river can dry up.

tw: And is it still there when it does? Is it the same river or a different one? Can we dig it up and move it?
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I don't honestly think that the grey edge-ness of the term "river" forbids people to discuss such things as a running river, a dried up river, a river bed, the level of water or none at all.

I don't think communication between humans about rivers is so severely hindered by the grey-edge-ness of the word "river."

And I think we can discuss souls.
I don't think it is fair to reason that we can talk about "souls" as long as we conclude with Naturalistic explanations only. And that we have to stop talking about souls when a Supernatural aspect to their existence is introduced by a Christian Theist.

me:
You'll have to explain how the river analogy hinders me from conceiving of YOUR identity or MY identity or the identity of anyone else.

tw: I am trying to. Do you think the Zambezi river has an identity? Yes or no?
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We give the Zambezi river an identity - Zambezi.
I'm giggling now. So I hope you have a good point here.


Is it really necessary?
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Yes, for geographic and other purposes it is necessary that the people of that region of the globe give that river an identity.


Not entirely, but it would aid communication if we didn't talk across each other all the time.
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It would be needed in communication to be more precise as to what we are talking about in speaking of the Zambese river. I can imagine some instances where possibly we would have to be more precise.

But so what?

me: Come on twhitehead, you know what I mean by your mind, your emotion, and your will.

tw: I know the standard definitions, but the way you talk about them suggests you mean something more. For example, I believe that emotions are directly affected by chemicals in the brain. Do you agree?
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Some emotions apparently can be effected by chemicals.
There is a close interaction between the physical brain matter with its chemistry and the feeling of some emotions.

I think this may be the third repetition of this acknowledgment by me in this thread.

me: Do you think you are of more value than a termite ?

tw: Does a termite have a soul? Can it have emotions?
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The question stands regardless if the termite has one or not.
Was that a yes or a no?

I don't know that it is important to you but the Bible says animals have souls. Some of the Hebrew language may be more particular as to which animals. I am not well versed on that subject.

But anyway, termite soul or no termite soul, I think you have more value than a termite. Me too.

You may have noticed that there is no other creature on the earth quite as special as a human being. This is not saying dolphins or chimps are not special. This is not saying whales singing to each other is not special. This is not saying ant social colonies are not special.

This is simply saying human beings seem to occupy a class in which not other creatures share. Now I have a belief here. It says in the Bible that this uniqueness is due to the fact that God created man in His own image and according to His own likeness.

Our value, above the interesting termite (soul or no) is because we reflect some thing of the unique uncreated Divine Life. Even if animals do have souls, the human soul is unique still.

Experience confirms this.
I believe the Bible explains why.

In the search for truth I include both contributions.

me: We cannot weigh a memory.

tw: You cannot weight the words in a book either. Nevertheless, they are still stored in the book just as a memory is stored in your brain. There is no real difference between the two.
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I am not sure that the memory is stored in the brain.
Under a microscope we cannot see the memory of someone's now year's celebration for instance. This is not trivialization, just a handy example.

The actual psychological memory is the stuff of souls.
Whatever chemical matter is seen to be activated in the brain in association with the memory, we cannot say IS the memory.

The latter is spatial and can be located in space.
The former is not.
I am thinking of an airplane right now. Do you think that thought is physically nearer to my right ear or my left ear ?
I don't think it is located in space at all.

Souls are something immaterial, with consciousness and identity and our "selves."

It is true that removing part of the brain will hinder some function of a person. I don't think that removing half a person's brain would remove half of that person's soul.


We cannot tell how many grams a memory of some event in life weighs. But we can weigh the brain.
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You saying what I believe then.

me: If something is true of the brain which is not true of the identity this proves that they are not the same.

tw: Nobody is claiming they are the same, just as a story is not the same as the book it is in. Nevertheless, the story is in the book and wholly dependent on the book for its existence. Burn the book and the story is gone.
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Did you ever read the novel or see the movie Fahrenheit 451? That's a story by Ray Bradbury. An important and valid point of it was that if all books were burned the stories in them could be kept in existence in the minds of some dedicated people.

The story is in the mind.
And the mind is part of the soul.
Symbols exist in the books.
Without minds there would be no meaning to the symbols and thus no story. And even if the book with symbols were destroyed the story could continue to exist.

skip ...

I think we can be sure that a story is dependent on the book it is in.
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A soul had to put it IN the book to begin with.
And a soul has to read it OUT of the book.
A soul can also retain the story in the mind after the book is destroyed.


Remove a page and the story changes.
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Some soul familiar with the story may insert the missing portion mentally even if a page is removed. That is because the story got into the mind.


Change some letters and the story changes. Add words, remove words, the story changes.
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A mind can determine where typos exist.
A mind can repair the story if it recognizes that damage has been done to it. And a mind can alter the story. It is not now the same story as the original mind encoded into the pages. But both are stories in the minds of souls.

skip ...

me: Consciousness is not a property that physics books ascribe to matter.

tw: Only because physics books typically look at a different scale.
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I don't know where you are going with this. But in the search for real truth we take the contributions of physics books and we take the contributions of other realms of knowledge too.

God has provided revelation on some things that we could not otherwise know. These contribute to the overall search for reality.

You don't believe God or that God has spoken. I do.
And the many of the alternative explanations for things a Naturalist provides I find to be less plausible.

I have refrained from Bible quotes up to now.
For some readers now I provide a reference:

" He who planted the ear, does He not hear ?
He who formed the eye, does He not see ?
... He who teaches man knowledge, does He not reprove?

Jehovah knows the thoughts of man, that they are vanity." (Psalm 94:10,11b)

And this relation is extended to the immaterial soul of man with its thinking, gaining knowledge, imagining.

You won't find physics books describing story books either, but the fact remains that a book can contain a story and the story can be thought of as a physical property of that book.
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Well, reducing the story to symbols such as human language letters you can think of the story as being in the book stored. I don't dispute how one can view this.

It is quite legitimate to recognize that the story is first in the mind that conceived it and decided to encode it in language symbols. And a mind read and interpreted the symbols of language to receive the story and remember it possibly for further passing verbally - the story.

Quite a bit of immaterial activity goes on there. And that involves immaterial souls.

Yes, mind is information or the structure of matter rather than the individual components of matter, just as a galaxy is not the same thing as the individual stars that make it up.
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Mind and matter are in close coordination as seen by some limited instances of thinking with physical brain states. And one "can" virtually equate them on some superficial level.

There is not enough there to say they are each other in an overall commitment to physicality or Naturalistic materialism.

The story in the book is more than the letters.
The mind, emotion, and will, consciousness and identity are more than physical brain states.

When Jesus told the dying thief "This day you will be with me in Paradise" , Jesus, (whose words I take very seriously) indicated that his SOUL would continue after physical crucifixion.

Regardless of how Jesus may be a bother to us, I think it behooves us to draw from His wisdom.

Proof is the empirical (relating to spatio-temporal events) or logical demonstration of the truth or falsity of an asserted proposition. Since the soul, by definition, is neither spacial nor temporal, any proposition concerning its existence or non-existence is not subject to proof or demonstration.

Originally posted by sonship
I take this as dodging the question by posing another.

The posts were getting a bit long so let me try and summarize:
1. I don't think we disagree that the mind is information and in some ways not physical.
2. You have claimed that minds cannot arise without other minds but have given zero justification for this belief. Despite repeatedly stressing that you think it the only rational belief to hold, it appears that it is actually a wholly religious belief.
3. If you do choose to provide justification, make sure that you explain why your justification doesn't equally apply to rivers, ie why is it not rational for me to equally claim that there must be a universal river that created all other rivers.
4. Rivers and stories are also information and not wholly physical. By looking at rivers and stories we immediately see problems with trying to assign identity to them. Unless you can show that the soul has some special properties not applicable to stories or rivers then the soul too must suffer from the same identity crises.

Originally posted by Grampy Bobby
Originally posted by Agerg
"How about an answer now? or at least an acknowledgement that you don't have the faintest idea what a soul is, since all you really have is vague and or magical words for it."
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Agerg, if I [b]"don't have the faintest idea what a soul is" and all I "really have is vague and or m ...[text shortened]... ly waste your time asking me these questions in the first place? Please regain your objectivity.

Reveal Hidden Content

Originally posted by twhitehead
No, not at all. I just fail to see why the first mind arising from matter is any different from a current mind arising from matter and the latter question seems much easier to answer. You however seem to think there is something special about the former, but you are not saying what. Perhaps you could explain why the first mind was special?

[b]A purely ...[text shortened]... en any reasoning to support that. Why would it be superstitious to believe differently from you?

"How did evolution convert the water of biological tissue into the wine of consciousness?"

"We know of no comparable force [as with the force of gravity's accounting for the Big Bang's leading to creation of galaxies] that might explain how ever expanding lumps of matter might have developed an inner conscious life."

"There is nothing --- zilch ---- worthy of being called a research programme ... "

You are stumped.
And YOU are not alone in being stumped.

I don't see a problem.
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Well the problem that you claim not to see is that matter, by definition, does not include the concept of consciousness. If you add a lot of zeros you still end up with a big zero.

So your hope that you can combine a lot of matter and arrive at a thinking mind is a dilemma. Denial, I suppose is one way to deal with it. As you can see, some naturalist philosophers don't join you in this approach.


How did it happen? Evolution.
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Now you can talk about "grey edges" for a word here too.


Need more specifics?
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I don't require more specifics right now. I understand your religious commitment to this "faith" in Evolution.

You see twhitehead, one of the aspects of "religious" people (as you consider them) is that we can spot other "religious" people.


As a evolutionary biologist because I sure don't know. But I also no of no reason to think it couldn't happen.
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I did not insist that we talk about evolution and the first mind.
I made explanation about ANY recent mind appropriate to the discussion.

jw: I have a belief.

tw: Yes. You have religion.
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See above where you refer to your " religious " explanation - Evolution did it.

By the way, a "religious" explanation in either regard may just be also a true explanation. I think a Creating Mind with great power and purpose is more reasonable that your process which you put your "faith" in.

You can hold that your Evolution is more reasonable if you wish.
I personally don't have that much faith.

That doesn't make it right, nor does it make me wrong. You need logic and evidence to prove your belief right not just repeating it over and over.
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If you argue that "logic" excludes a Supreme Being who is self-aware, I don't see how that exclusion has to be the case.

I think "logic" can include in its reasoning process the factor of a Supreme Self aware God who created us in His image.

Any attempt to define logic as somehow basically Atheistic I would resist. Attempts to maintain that Athiests have a copyright on logic have never been successful in the history of philosophy, I think.

me: I think it would be superstitious to believe otherwise.

tw: Why? You have not given any reasoning to support that.
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Yes, I think I do. Your explanation is reminiscent of the animism of some ancient peoples. That is subscribing living spirits to matter of different kinds.

I think of your view as a more modern version of animism. And I think animism is superstitious.


Why would it be superstitious to believe differently from you?
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Why would it be not logical to believe differently from you ?

Originally posted by Agerg
My objectivity is fine thank you very much ... it is unfortunate you are not capable of recognising the utility of such questions [hidden]hint: you're supposed to try mull them over in your head and come to the realisation that you have no chance in hell in answering them, because for all your blustering and farting about with dictionary definitions, you know precisely jack-***t about souls.[/hidden]

Originally posted by sonship
Combine them in any combination you wish at any time past or present. Atoms and molecules still do not think.