We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.
– Voltaire, without a doubt one of the greatest Frenchmen who have lived. His novel, Candide, with its great character Dr Pangloss, reads as fresh today as when it was written two centuries and a half ago.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Listen to other brutes reasoning about the brutes; their soul is a spiritual soul which dies with the body; but what proof have you of it?
We humans are superior in this, at least: we aren’t scared of the vacuum cleaner.
And though they may die without an idea of death, most of the nature shows I’ve seen indicate that they’ve got a pretty good notion that being masticated and devoured is something to avoid.
Oh, I don’t know. I’m on my 3rd and 4th teens at the moment, and they’ve all been so afraid of the vac that they will wade through crap up to their kneecaps rather than pick the junk up and vacuum the rug in their room. I know they’re not afraid of dirty plates and yesterday’s socks and underwear, because they surround themselves with them. so it must be the hoover.
Animals have a certain serenity, I suppose. They live in a world of perception and reaction, preprogrammed moves in response to any stimulus which matches a particular template in their instincts and genetic instruction manual.
Humans are blessed, or cursed according to your wont, with an imagination which does what the animal mind cannot—create alternatives which do not yet exist, choosing between realities which can only develop when they are selected and brought into existence.
How and when did this change happen? We only have guesses about something lost in the dim mists of prehistory.
Instapundit links to an interview with Dr. Dyson at Techcentral in which he mentions the recent discovery of a section of RNA with some interesting mutations. It’s worth reading. There’s some discussion at Chicagoboyz about it also, but nothing too deep as of yet.
We do know that the human race was reduced to a few thousands more than once in our evolutionary journey.
My own opinion, for what it is worth, is that the survivors were the ones who, somehow, realized that that sharp stick might come in handy again in the future, so they kept it, and started trying to create situations in which they could use it again.
Now, that use might have been to stab an animal, dig some roots, spear some fish, or sneak up and kill the guy that had done any or all of those things and steal his stuff. I guess we’ll never know.
It’s always fascinated me that people have struggled for centuries to answer the question, “What separates humans from animals?”, when the fact of the question is the answer.
Indeed, with the advent of the deep green assertion that humans are a cancer in the body of the animal kingdom, it is best to remember that we are just a part of the biosphere, a variation on a theme which hasn’t come close to finishing the symphony as yet.
I recall envying my Olde English many years ago for the constancy of his devotion, and that miraculous ability to close his eyes and instantly be asleep, while I tossed and turned, trying to figure out how I would pay the bills, or whether it was worth getting the car fixed yet again.
But advantage? No, that was all mine—I could turn the doorknob and leave whenever I wanted, and then turn it again and get in out of the rain.
And that’s without even mentioning the wonder of opening the fridge, and operating the can opener.
The universe awaits.
And animals also don’t vote for politicians or pay taxes! No wonder some philosophers want humans to be classified as ‘just another animal’- either we wouldn’t need to pay taxes, or the tax base would be enormously broadened!
And one of my nature shows indicated that Elephants do know about death- they were inspecting the skull of a dead elephant, as though looking for any marks to tell them who it had been in life.
veryretired writes:
Well, one of my questions, also permeating part if my work (particularly that on automatic speech recognition) is
I have two main hypotheses, that are not necessarily competing. Firstly is “the spark of life”, perhaps characterised by a deep instinct for survival. Secondly is “brain power” (both computation and storage).
Now, of course, humans are not separated from animals by the “spark of life”, though they are so separated from machines.
We are now getting to the stage where we can build machines with “brain power” approaching that of humans, at least on limited single functions (playing chess, recognising speech). But we have not yet built a machine with the intellectual power of even the middling animals (say a mouse).
It worries me that perhaps there is something else too.
I wonder if I will live long enough to get anywhere near to the answer to my question.
With apologies to Voltaire and Johnathan.
Best regards
Voltaire also said that the English like to execute an admiral from time to time, “pour encourager les autres”.
With recent events in Iran…
How about “Does anything separate humans from animals?” and “Does anything separate humans from machines?”
We are now getting to the stage where we can build machines with “brain power” approaching that of humans, at least on limited single functions (playing chess, recognising speech). But we have not yet built a machine with the intellectual power of even the middling animals (say a mouse).
It worries me that perhaps there is something else too.
The human brain has about 100 trillion synapses (connections between neurons). A neuron can fire up to 200 times per second. Thus the information-processing capacity of the human brain is about 20,000 trillion operations per second.
The most powerful man-made computer currently in existence has a capacity of 280 trillion operations per second, or about 1/70 of that of the human brain (and probably substantially less than the mouse brain).
Given the exponential rate of growth of computer processing power, computers should catch up and overtake the human brain in a decade or so. Even if a computer capable of running a complete simulation of a brain requires, say, 100 times the processing power of that brain, we’ll have such computers in a few years more. Then we’ll see if “there is something else too”. I very much doubt it. Throughout history humans have resorted to supernatural explanations of whatever they could not understand at the time, but once our technology became developed enough to really analyze the phenomenon in question, it always turned out that there was nothing there but ordinary matter and energy.
I wonder if I will live long enough to get anywhere near to the answer to my question.
Unless you’re already elderly or have a habit of stepping in front of speeding buses, I think your chances are good.
Those who think there may be ‘something else’ —
a soul? — would certainly not be in Voltaire’s company.
Candide must be the most savagely anti religious book written. Who can forget poor Candide in the extremity of vile torture at the hands of his Barbary pirate enslavers who has to think ‘this is the best of all possible (Panglossian) worlds’
Infidel753,
Having a computer powerful enough to simulate a human brain does not by itself enable you to run that simulation. My computer is powerful enough to simulate lots of things but it won’t do a damn thing without the right software.
Figuring the programming out is a much bigger challenge than just getting enough logic gates together working fast enough.
I suspect we may not be smart enough to figure the brain out because all we’ve got are brains with which to do it. Can we understand ourselves?
In anycase no Turing machine can answer the kind of questions that Godel envisaged in his Incompleteness theorems. That’s rather a problem.
I’m not positing some kinda “divine spark” – rather that we’re probably not smart enough to figure out consciousness.
There’s a possibility that we could setup some kinda evolutionary process which might end up producing consciousness but we’d have very little control over what we ended up with. We might not even recognize it for what it was. It might be so different from us that a Turing Test would be meaningless. I always thought that was a flaw in the TT – it’s explicitly about a machine impersonating a human.
Personally I’m not to fussed about having a “plastic pal” who’s fun to be with. I’d rather just enhance my own performance by being able to connect directly into a super-fast Turing machine.
“In anycase no Turing machine can answer the kind of questions that Godel envisaged in his Incompleteness theorems. That’s rather a problem.”
Is it? Why?
I’ve heard there’s a project going on to map all the neurons in a human brain. It probably won’t be long before they’ll be able to map the particular response characteristics of each neuron. It’s an open question whether that would be enough, but it will be very interesting finding out.
Pa Annoyed: I’ve heard there’s a project going on to map all the neurons in a human brain. It probably won’t be long before they’ll be able to map the particular response characteristics of each neuron. It’s an open question whether that would be enough, but it will be very interesting finding out.
If memory serves, the resolution of brain-scanning technology doubles every two years. We’ll be able to do this by the time we have computers with the necessary processing power to simulate the brain, or soon thereafter.
Nick M: Having a computer powerful enough to simulate a human brain does not by itself enable you to run that simulation. My computer is powerful enough to simulate lots of things but it won’t do a damn thing without the right software.
This is a bigger challenge, but when we can analyze the workings of the brain in the necessary detail, we should be able to figure out how to design the software to simulate it.
Then, we have a modified Turing-test situation with a higher standard: Once we have a simulation of a specific person, will the simulation be able to respond to stimuli so as to prove that it is, in fact, that specific person?
If so, then there is nothing meaningful happening in the brain that the simulation has not captured.
This will mean that (a) the concept of the soul will have been empirically debunked, and (b) real immortality will be possible, since the same “programs” making up an individual which now run on a perishable organic brain can be sustained indefinitely on artificial hardware instead.
Can we do this? All precedent (100% of fully-understood phenomena consist of ordinary matter and energy patterns, 0% have a supernatural component) says yes.
The necessary technology is two or three decades away, not centuries. So we might as well just wait and see.
I’d rather just enhance my own performance by being able to connect directly into a super-fast Turing machine.
That will come. Once we can upload an individual mind into a computer, it should be easy to increase that individual’s intelligence by adding more data-processing capacity. Given powerful-enough machines, there will no longer be any inherent limit to human intelligence.
Infidel753,
100% of fully-understood phenomena consist of ordinary matter and energy patterns, 0% have a supernatural component)
Err… That means you’re saying all scientific problems can be solved and will be solved in a finite period of time.
What if we haven’t got a sufficient data-set? Or it’s just too bloody difficult. A perfect representation or model of something is identical to the original (Link) OK, it could be isomorphic rather than an exact replica but it would have to be at least as complicated.
Pa,
It’s bloody technical and it’s years since I did formal logic. I can recommend a book: Infinity & The Mind by Rudy Rucker which isn’t. There should be informal proofs all over the ‘net. Basically, Godel proves that no finite set of axioms is enough to encompass all math* whilst being self-consistent. This put a permanent kibosh on Hilbert’s program to derive all math from a small set of axioms which could then be plodded through. Now, frankly, I’ve lost the plot of this. I hope I have been of some help 🙁
Err… That means you’re saying all scientific problems can be solved and will be solved in a finite period of time.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here, but I stand by what I said, in the words I said it. No phenomenon which we fully understand has ever turned out to include a supernatural component. There is no reason to think that supernatural elements exist as part of any observed phenomenon, including the human mind. There’s no evidence, no suggestion, no hint, absolutely nothing that gives us any reason to think that any supposed supernatural concept such as a “soul” will turn out to be real.
“All scientific problems” is a pretty broad category. I’m saying that the specific problem we’re talking about can and will be solved in 20 to 30 years.
What if we haven’t got a sufficient data-set? Or it’s just too bloody difficult.
I’m saying that once our brain-scanning technology and computational power reach a certain very high but quantifiable level of sophistication, which will probably happen in two or three decades, we will have both adequate data and the necessary capabilities. I haven’t seen anything to suggest that what I’m talking about is anything more than just an extremely complex, but still quantifiable and solvable, engineering problem.
A perfect representation or model of something is identical to the original
That’s my point. If we can create a computer simulation of the mind of a person which is identical to the original, down the the last significant detail of the firing patterns of every individual neuron, then it will be that person.
Infidel753,
Yes, I know what Godel’s theorems are, and Turing’s Halting problem and all the rest of it. What I was asking was why it was a problem. The same limitations apply as strongly to humans as to machines.
I am relieved, at least, that you didn’t direct me to Penrose’s odd ideas on the subject. Like Hoyle, a man popularly more famous for what he got horribly wrong than for all his considerable and significant achievements.
Sorry, that last one should have been addressed to Nick.
Humans ask questions, and machines are either the answer, or are used to find the answer. If a machine posed a question to itself, how would it find the solution, except by building another machine?
Re- the Soul. Both sides could be correct. If we are Souls in bodies, then the souls will be found to have structures and components just as gross physical bodies do, and so would be amenable to scientific study. the Other side would simply be a finer grade of matter which interpenetrates ordinary matter, not another dimension.
Humans ask questions, and machines are either the answer, or are used to find the answer. If a machine posed a question to itself, how would it find the solution, except by building another machine?
You’re assuming that humans and machines are fundamentally different. I’m saying that a human mind running on electronic hardware would be as fully human as one running on organic hardware (a brain), so long as the “programs” were identical.
Re- the Soul. Both sides could be correct. If we are Souls in bodies, then the souls will be found to have structures and components just as gross physical bodies do, and so would be amenable to scientific study. the Other side would simply be a finer grade of matter which interpenetrates ordinary matter, not another dimension.
But there’s no evidence for that. There’s nothing that implies or even vaguely hints that any such thing as a soul might exist. There’s no point in trying to explain a phenomenon if there’s no reason to suspect that the phenomenon exists in the first place.
Sorry, infidel, I have read what I interpret to be good facts for souls. Not only are there current Near-Death experiences, such as the one on a British show about a woman whose brain was switched off for the surgery, but who still had mind experiences, but I think some people who report on Astral Projections and Out-of-body experiences are genuine. Nobody has been able to de-bunk Edgar Cayce, who claimed that he was engaged in astral projection when getting his information. Some of this information is being confirmed now- a lot of climatologists now say that global warming is caused by the number of cosmic particles which reach the atmosphere, which is linked to the sun, and this peaked in 1998. Edgar Cayce specifically said that there would be a Solar Cycle which would peak in 1998, but he said this in the 1930es! Some of his predictions did not come true, but those were usually ones relating to free will choices.
And we Australians read in one of our major papers about a man being found by a psychic, lost on his own large property. The psychic, Lena McGregor, said she used telepathy to find him, and no-one has been able to debunk her, either. (page 13, Sunday Telegraph, May 14 2006. http://www.sundaytelegraph.com.au)
However, I would certainly agree that science can solve these issues, if scientists can just be weaned from their prejudices! I remember the Para Committee, which looked into Gaucaulin’s evidence for Astrology, couldn’t actually pinpoint any error, and then said there must be an error somewhere!
I remember an Australian scientist who claimed to have disproved the old belief that more crimes and misdemeanours happen under a full moon. However, when I looked at her numbers, more incidents were reported under a full moon, though only by a small amount.
Is there such a creature as an unprejudiced scientist? If so, let such super-beings study the evidence for the soul, and see what they say!
Re: Souls
It seems that atheists and infidels are always remarkably confident in that they can debunk religious claims, without actually investigating what those claims are.
Some people might call that a strawman, but there’s something more at play here, often when I point out errors I’m told “I’m not interested in the minutiae, I want to debunk the whole thing!” When in fact that minutiae dismantled their argument.
So then would being able to simulate a human brain perfectly debunk the existance of souls?
No of course not!
No more so than being able to see how brain damage affects thinking. I’ve had people argue that this disproves the soul.
The problem is that many materialists simply don’t know what the traditional definition of the soul is, or indeed what the Christian view on the soul and the body is. That of course is a pardonable offence since many Christians don’t know either.
First all that a computer simulation or neurophysics can prove is that the brain = the mind. However people have argued for centuries about the relationship between the brain, the body and the soul.
They’ve also known that things that affect the body, like alcohol or drugs, have serious effects on the mind, and it makes little sense to argue that such things could affect the immortal soul. Therefore a traditionalist would always view the Mind as seperate from the Soul.
This brings us to the idea of Heaven and the soul, you may believe that Christians think that they will die and go to Heaven (or Hell) and that’s it. The problem is that this view is wrong, as wrong as it can be.
The Christian view of Heaven has always been as a temporary storage location, where the soul, the immortal spark as it were, waits to be reunited with the body. Which it will be during the physical resurrection of the dead, at which point people will live in new physical bodies on a perfect Earth. Not in Heaven.
This is necessary since human beings are, according to Christian theology, not purely spiritual or purely material beings but a mixture.
In short the advances of neurosurgery and computer science may threaten Biblical Literalists and Creationists, but it won’t threaten orthodox Christianity (little o).
P.S. In case anyone is interested if the computer should be sapient the Roman Catholic Church and others believe that all Rational Beings have a soul.
A recording of me is no more me than identical twins are one personality in two bodies! Would ‘I’ be in two places at once whilst the recording was being made? Would the recorded ‘NickG2’ have nerves? Since input from nerves is what mind evaluates, what would the mind make of a nerveless, inputless world?
Edgar Cayce, the psychic christian I mentioned earlier, believed that animals are also souls, but in a different level of development. According to this view, computers will not have souls, unless a soul decides to inhabit, or haunt, a computer!
Would the recorded ‘NickG2’ have nerves? Since input from nerves is what mind evaluates, what would the mind make of a nerveless, inputless world?
Obviously life as a disembodied consciousness wouldn’t be worth living. However, virtual reality or sensory/motor interface with a physical body grown for the purpose would both be easier to develop than the kind of uploading technology I’m talking about, so such options would be available by then.
The word “haunt” above seems rather appropriate. Ghost in the machine?
People such as James Randi have already done the wearisome grunt work of debunking drivel like Cayce, psychics, and near-death experiences, and I’m certainly not going to spend time re-inventing the wheel here.
Is there such a creature as an unprejudiced scientist?
No scientist would claim that scientists are completely unbiased. What’s unique about science is that its processes for evaluating evidence include specific procedures for filtering out observer bias.
“It seems that atheists and infidels are always remarkably confident in that they can debunk religious claims, without actually investigating what those claims are.”
There aren’t any claims. There’s only a shifting morass of argument that continually changes shape as you prod it.
The preacher preaches a simple message to the congregation, you point out the flaws, they refine it, you point out more flaws, they circle dizzyingly throwing out Latin allusions and references to philosophers and theologians you’ve never heard of, and at great effort you chase down every last link, nail down every last point, until they have withdrawn to a set of meaningless vaccuous maybe’s that you can’t argue with because they don’t actually say anything. They immediately declare victory, and next week they’re preaching the same fire and brimstone to the congregation they were before.
We don’t need to investigate religious claims to debunk them. All we have to do is to investigate the method by which you came by them. 🙂
To: Pa Annoyed
Well that’s a mighty big strawman there!
The idea that body, mind and soul may be three seperate things go back several millenia, not many computers or neurosurgeons around then. The philosophy and theology remains the same.
As for the methodology it’s simple: Formal Logic.
Accept a set of axioms and then reason from them, that is the methodology. If you have a problem with that feel free to contact the Dominicans and try to point out flaws in their chain of logic.
And how can you have a morass of argument if you’re not making claims? It’s literally not possible. Or are they arguing about nothing in particular like some kind of Seinfeldesque theologian?
If you’re going to bring up Creationism (always a favourite) I should point out that St Augustine proved that a literal reading of Genesis made no sense. He did that over a thousand years ago, almost two thousand years ago.
Yet those claims are far outside the realm of orthodoxy, that takes us into Kent Hovind and LeHaye territory. The land of “bible scholars” who argue that they’ll use the bible Jesus did, the King James Version.
If you argue that St Augustine is obscure… welll…
I’ll be charitable and say that the problem seem to be that you’re used to arguing with the LeHaye, Jack Chick, and Kent Hovinds of the world. People who are as ignorant of theology as they are of biology and geology.
Candide is a superficial work, the irony obvious and shallow. The satire is crass and focused solely on easy targets.
Voltaire appears like an unregenerate adolescent who wants to shock the world by sneering at it. Baron Grimm wrote, when Candide first appeared, “a judicious critic writing 2,000 years from now will probably say that the author was only 25 when he wrote it. In fact, Voltaire was 65”
Pa,
Sorry. I got outta my depth. Nah, I wasn’t going to mention Penrose… I vaguely recalled a proof that I’ve just looked up and it turns out TM didn’t stand for Turing Machine.
Infidel753,
My point, poorly expressed, perhaps, was that all currently understood/ ansered scientific questions can be understood in terms of currently understood patterns of matter and energy is (apart from being a tautology*) holds no guarantees for the future. Nucleons and things like the Strong Force were not even dreamed of in C19th physics.
I raised the idea that a perfect model is as complicated as the thing in itself for two reasons. The first to point out that getting a full description of a complicated system is well… complicated. We can’t even analytically solve the three body problem and you’re on about the brain! Modelling, as I understand it, in science is to simplify and abstract in order to get something we understand the principles of and can tinker with, not a reverse-engineered copy.
OK maybe we could reverse-engineer your brain and end up with Infidel753A and you’ve got immortality of a sort (until the hard-drive breaks down) but I don’t see how producing a copy does more than that. I don’t see how photocopying the first draft of a novel helps much with correcting the spelling.
Even if it could, I think your time scale is hopelesly optimistic. I mean, I’m not typing this from a city on the moon, using electricity too cheap to meter.
Gee whiz! It’s a good thing atheists aren’t making any claims they haven’t proven! 8-|
(That was sarcasm, just in case I was being too subtle.)
Infidel’s predictions are interesting but it pays to make a distinction between the processing power of a perfect duplicate (1 for 1) verses the processing power required to run in emulation mode.
“The idea that body, mind and soul may be three seperate things go back several millenia”
OK. So? Does that have any bearing on whether the theory is correct?
There are lots of ideas that go back millenia, most of them wrong.
“not many computers or neurosurgeons around then”
Maybe that’s why they got it wrong, then? 😉
“As for the methodology it’s simple: Formal Logic.”
Oh goody! I love formal logic!
“Accept a set of axioms and then reason from them, that is the methodology.”
And of course one of the axioms is usually equivalent to one saying that God exists and the precepts of our religion are true. Of course, there are other systems of axioms in which the proposal is false. How can one distinguish between them?
What axioms do you propose?
“feel free to contact the Dominicans and try to point out flaws in their chain of logic.”
Which chain? There are lots of “proofs” all with their own flaws, most of which have been pointed out already. And why the Dominicans? Why not the Buddhists, or Ancient Egyptians, or Scientologists? They all have detailed claims regarding souls, all mutually incompatible. All, so far as one can see, made up out of whole cloth.
If you want to have a go at proving the existence of the soul by means of formal logic, please, go ahead. I’d love to see it!
“If you’re going to bring up Creationism…”
No, I wasn’t.
“And how can you have a morass of argument if you’re not making claims?”
Because you make the claims and then deny you’re making them. Or that you meant what I interpreted them to mean. Or that you can find a learned theologian who claimed the opposite. Or that this is the simplistic view which of course has to be interpreted correctly by experts. Or that it is the result of a long complicated chain of events involving a mistranslation from Aramaic to Greek in a particular obscure codex by some scribe a thousand years ago, or it’s a mystery and beyond human understanding.
There is no unique, well-defined set of claims made by Christianity that can be analysed for their truth. What it claims depends on how hard you push it. If you keep on pushing as far as it will go, there’s nothing left.
“I’ll be charitable and say that the problem seem to be that you’re used to arguing with the LeHaye, Jack Chick, and Kent Hovinds of the world.”
Am I talking to an expert now? Please say yes! I’m more used to reading the likes of Alvin Plantinga, but to discuss this with a real expert would be a joy.
Seriously, if you want to present or reference an argument for the existence of the soul, I’d be very interested. And if its a good one, grateful. But based on past experience, I’m not hopeful that a constructive dialogue is possible here. I should warn you that if you don’t like your beliefs to be challenged, and I know many religious people can be genuinely upset, which is not my aim, it’s best not to debate me. I wouldn’t take a decision not to respond to me as a vindication.
(I like to get that sorted out up front, in case things get heated later on. I’d rather debate, but only for fun.)
I’m just going to address your first couple of points that is:
“The idea that body, mind and soul may be three seperate things go back several millenia”
OK. So? Does that have any bearing on whether the theory is correct?
There are lots of ideas that go back millenia, most of them wrong.
I get a strange feeling of deja-vu, I get that a lot in these arguments, it’s almost as if the reader deliberately tries not to see the point…
However in the interest of fairness I’ll explain, this is not an example of the fallacy from antiquity, since my argument was not that it was right because it was old. Let me give an analogy…
Imagine a hill, covered in mist so you can only see the lover slopes which is filled with blue flowers. One day a traveller comes down from the hill and says “The top of the hill is covered in purple flowers.”
Many people take this belief in purple-flowers-on-top-of-the-hill to heart, and create a religion around it.
Some people begin to argue about whether the middle-slopes of the hill is also covered in purple flowers, and the argument goes back and forth. Sometimes the fog receeds a little and many people point out that the glimpses they get are not purplish.
Some argue that the hill must be covered entirely in blue flowers, others say that the three levels have different coloured flowers. Most of the Wise Men, including the most famous, claim that the middle-slopes cannot have the same colour as the peak for various reasons.
One day a group of explorers go up the hillside, but they can’t get past the middle-section, when they return they bring back a bundle of red and blue flowers and go “A-HA! Now you see! We’ve proven that the flowers on top of the mountain aren’t purple!”
When the Wise Men object they’re told…
“You’re just changing your old opinions because of new evidence!”
And when they point out the fact that they have held the same views for a very, very long time, and that the Great Sages did the same… well…
So you see the argument here is that showing that the mind and the brain is pretty much the same thing won’t disprove the soul. Moreover it won’t even disprove, or seriously challenge, small o orthodoxy, because the idea that the soul and the mind were the same thing was never central to (or even necessarily a part of) small o orthodoxy.
I’m also interested to see how they got it wrong?
“The Mind cannot be part of the Soul, but most be tied closer to the body, because wine and various drugs affects the mind. A man can test your pulse and watch your eyes for some indication of your mind. Surely such material means should not be able to have such an immediate affect on the immortal soul?”
Lets disregard the bit of the soul right now…
What this basically says is: The Mind and the Body are closely linked, perhaps the same. The proof of this is that drugs and alcohol can affect both.
That is the thinking that started the Mind-Body debate. Every time there’s been a development the non-believers yell “We’ve disproved the soul!” while all they’ve done is to prove even further how closely linked mind and body is.
And that brings me to the thing I spoke up about first, the idea that being able to track all the brain functions and maybe even transfer many of them to a machine, will somehow disprove the soul. It won’t, it won’t even require a Vatican council, all the theology and philosophy for dealing with this is already in place.
It certainly won’t threaten my beliefs, I’m a transhumanist and I’m looking forward to my brain-machine interface. So I believe in the Rapture of the Nerds AND the Rapture of the Believers!
I think this conversation has gone rather off the tracks here, I came here to give my views on the brain-mind-soul controversy, not to engage in a massive debate on the nature or reality and religion. If you want that I still recommend looking up the better trained Dominicans and old school Jesuits, though there are other educated religious heads too, but please… if you see a complete collection of the Left Behind series on the bookshelves… ah…
Read this first!
Infidel, you’ll have to do a lot better than that! I read James Randi in Flim-Flam, but did not find him persuasive. Cayce had a human talent, which could be good or bad, depending on various factors. I accept that some days his readings were bad and uninspired. It’s his successes that Randi didn’t look at, like knowing that Aluminum/Aluminium was a poison to sufferers of Alzheimers. Conventional Science confirmed this in the 1980s. Investigation of DNA and mitachondria is confirming his claims of people moving from a drowned Atlantis to safety points, even finding unique blood-types in the Gobi Desert- one of several places he said to look.
In conventional medical terms, people are still being cured today. Here in Sydney, I know a woman who had merely read about Cayce. When ordinary medicine couldn’t cure her infertility, she looked up the symptoms in books on Cayce, read what he claimed was a cure for another woman years before, tried it, and became pregnant. Her son, Michael, is living proof that some things about Cayce have not been explained or debunked. Edgar Cayce died in 1945, and she took his cure in 1980. He is dead, but his cures go on curing!
I notice you didn’t attempt to rebut the psychic who used telepathy to save someone’s life. Just going to leave it up to others, instead of looking for yourself, huh? In this regard, you might (not) want to read BBC Focus magazine, issue 174. Some of its’ pages are devoted to new proofs of telepathy.
I agree totally that scientists could explain these things, because I think that the ‘supernatural’ is simply little-applied aspects of the natural world. And as for the substance of the soul, hasn’t science itself just admitted that most of the mass of the Universe is composed of Dark Matter, which has been completely unnoticed up til now? Soul-stuff could be in that, or be another type of matter not yet discovered.
SD,
If I understand the point of your parable, you are saying that demonstrating that mind and body are the same does not disprove the ancient theory that mind, body, and soul are three separate things. Because the soul might still be different from the mind. OK, I’ve got that.
But I don’t see how that relates to the contention that the theory is old, that there were no computer scientists around when it was invented, or that the theology and philosophy is unchanged by modern developments.
It depends which definition of “soul” you want to start with – there have been many, and I don’t particularly want to start analysing one in detail only for you to switch and say of course you meant this other one. Aquinas, for example, claims that there is only body and soul, although the soul consists of two parts, managing knowledge and movement. [Summa Theologica, Q75.] At the same time, he equates “soul” to “life” – the etymology of psyche or anima being the “breath of life”. Nowadays we consider both understanding and decision-making to be functions of the mind, and “life” as a matter of biochemistry and nothing to do with breathing, so I’d say that his definition at least has been subsumed.
If you want to offer an alternative source, we can discuss it. But I’d rather discuss the actual theology/philosophy, rather than some vagueness about whether science addresses the claims of unidentified but ever so expert sources. I’ve seen some Dominican and Jesuit philosophy, and truly, it was of no better quality. I was hoping that you were the expert on this, since you were so confident. If all you’re doing is quoting the conclusions of old school Jesuits as an authority and you don’t actually understand what they say yourself, I’m not particularly interested.
I had a glance at your linked Left Behind plot summary. I got seriously bored after about three chapters/episodes. Was there any sort of point you wanted to make with it? Because it contains no arguments, evidence, or support for Christianity, theology, or belief in the soul. It’s got potential as a sci-fi/fantasy, but I could have cited Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Terry Pratchett with as much relevance.
I wish you every happiness in your beliefs. But they’re not for me.