Does the soul exist - Apart from the body/brain?

[ataraxia]

How else would a soul speak to us?

By the way:

2 in 5 Americans believe ghosts are real and 1 in 5 say they've seen one, survey says​

More Americans believe in UFO abductions and Elvis sightings at the local grocery store than they do in basic evolutionary biology or climate change science. So that’s not really saying much.

 

[ataraxia]

That is exactly the point of the thread. There is a lot of things in life that cannot be explained by "modern science and questioning". Check back on the thread for posts that show what those things are. Events that science has never been able to explain.

The OP is all about the idea that there are other universes that are not based on science and questioning, and these not being religious ideas.

People tend to fall for magical purposes and special thinking, conspiracy theories (just think how popular Q is even after all the failed prophecies), and thinking they have some special knowledge and insight.

Why? It’s very odd, but there is actually a psychology behind it. It’s clearly a very natural human tendency, and one which experience has taught us we should be on guard against:

How Can So Many People Believe Such Weird Things?

Beliefs contradicted by evidence are the norm, not the exception.

www.psychologytoday.com

 

[ataraxia]

That is exactly the point of the thread. There is a lot of things in life that cannot be explained by "modern science and questioning". Check back on the thread for posts that show what those things are. Events that science has never been able to explain.

The OP is all about the idea that there are other universes that are not based on science and questioning, and these not being religious ideas.

“ People who lack an understanding of how to rationally and systematically appraise information, and how to rigorously evaluate evidence, are at high risk of being left behind in the increasingly competitive knowledge economy. Countries with lower levels of these skills and with larger numbers of citizens prone to believing implausible conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and folk beliefs characterized by magical thinking will quickly fall behind countries with more educated, science-literate, information-savvy citizens.

Most people have only a superficial grasp of the scientific method. Science is hard. Intuitionist thinking (“gut thinking”), with all its attendant cognitive biases, is natural, whereas rigorous critical thinking has to be taught, and it cannot be taught quickly or easily. The widespread lack of scientific literacy and rigorous critical thinking skills in many societies reflects a failure of the education system. And it reflects a popular media culture that all too often glorifies celebrity, indulges shallowness, dumbs down complex concepts, expects too little of readers/viewers, assumes a short attention span, and generally prioritizes content that entertains and shocks, over content that informs and educates.

The great science popularizer Carl Sagan observed:

"People who are curious, intelligent, dedicated to understanding the world, may nevertheless be (in our view) mired in superstition and pseudoscience. You could say, Well, they ought to know better, they ought to be more critical, and so on; but that's too harsh. It's not very much their fault, I say. It's the fault of a society that preferentially propagates the baloney and holds back the ambrosia. The least effective way for skeptics to get the attention of these bright, curious, interested people is to belittle, or condescend, or show arrogance toward their beliefs. They may be credulous, but they're not stupid. If we bear in mind human frailty and fallibility, we will understand their plight […] They believe things for reasons. Let us not dismiss pseudoscience or even superstition with contempt." 12

Sagan also left us with this sober warning: gullibility kills.”

How Can So Many People Believe Such Weird Things?

Beliefs contradicted by evidence are the norm, not the exception.

www.psychologytoday.com

 

[Eatomus]

I'm sure that Putin is counting on the fact that he does not have an eternal soul, and that he will not have to worry about being just as aware of his surroundings 100 million years from now as he is this day, 3/22/2022, as he kills. rapes, slaughters.
Him and Tim Mcveigh, among others.
Interesting to me the overall difference in character in the type of people that consider that the reality of an eternal consciousness would spell disaster for them, and the type people that are calmly & deeply comforted by the thought.

 

[Mithrae]

These are all traditional concepts which are increasingly coming under question and not withstanding critical modern science and questioning.

As I noted earlier in the thread, it's a fairly obvious fallacy of association to throw together a big list of magic, abductions, Qanon, souls, quasars, gods, demons, astrology and Santa and 'argue' that because most of the stuff on that list is unreal it all must be. Yet that fallacy has been the entire thrust of four consecutive posts that you've made. That's not a terribly impressive follow-up to your proclamation that you could show that souls violate the laws of physics etc.!

What many people don't seem to understand is that the reason established scientific conclusions are so reliable is because at its best science limits itself through the scientific method to phenomena subject to repeatable observation, experimentation and quantification. Happily, through persistent effort and ingenuity we've found that a staggering array and depth of things can become subject to that approach and it may well be that given enough time everything in existence will be... but we are far, far away from that point yet. Again as previously noted in the thread, for but one example, what we know as 'ordinary' matter and energy make up only 5% of the calculated mass-energy of the observable universe. And in fact even that is misleadingly optimistic: The actual range of scientific or even generally reliable observations made by humans covers probably less than 1% of the populated land surface areas of a single tiny planet at the edge of a mediocre galaxy... for a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the time-frame that planet has existed... for the most part only in an infinitesimally small range of the light spectrum! It's actually quite staggering how much we have managed to infer about the past and about the rest of the universe from buried strata and decayed isotopes and the scraps of radiation that flash through our miniscule field of vision.

But maybe that puts into some perspective the even more staggering presumption and arrogance of folk who mistakenly re-appropriate the methodological naturalism of science into a kind of reductive philosophical naturalism which suggests that only phenomena subject to our current repeatable observation, experimentation and quantification can be legitimately considered to exist. Stuff lying outside the realm of current scientific knowledge will obviously be more open to question and less certain than scientific information, but that doesn't make it worthy of the kind of insults and dogmatism which we've been seeing as the primary - almost the only - kind of 'arguments' we've seen from the anti-soul crowd in this thread.

We might say that something like anthropogenic global warming is proven essentially to the point of 100% certainty. But if you had to put a percentage figure on it (or a scale of 1 to 5 if that's your thing), how would you rate your confidence in the proposition that human consciousness persists beyond death? 0%? 10%? Something more like 50/50?

 

[Luckyone]

More Americans believe in UFO abductions and Elvis sightings at the local grocery store than they do in basic evolutionary biology or climate change science. So that’s not really saying much.

It doesn't prove that ghosts don't exist either.

 

[Luckyone]

People tend to fall for magical purposes and special thinking, conspiracy theories (just think how popular Q is even after all the failed prophecies), and thinking they have some special knowledge and insight.

Why? It’s very odd, but there is actually a psychology behind it. It’s clearly a very natural human tendency, and one which experience has taught us we should be on guard against:

How Can So Many People Believe Such Weird Things?

Beliefs contradicted by evidence are the norm, not the exception.

www.psychologytoday.com

Once again, it does not disprove it either.

Simply stated, even science has not been able to prove that these alternate universes do not exist.

 

[Luckyone]

“ People who lack an understanding of how to rationally and systematically appraise information, and how to rigorously evaluate evidence, are at high risk of being left behind in the increasingly competitive knowledge economy. Countries with lower levels of these skills and with larger numbers of citizens prone to believing implausible conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and folk beliefs characterized by magical thinking will quickly fall behind countries with more educated, science-literate, information-savvy citizens.

Most people have only a superficial grasp of the scientific method. Science is hard. Intuitionist thinking (“gut thinking”), with all its attendant cognitive biases, is natural, whereas rigorous critical thinking has to be taught, and it cannot be taught quickly or easily. The widespread lack of scientific literacy and rigorous critical thinking skills in many societies reflects a failure of the education system. And it reflects a popular media culture that all too often glorifies celebrity, indulges shallowness, dumbs down complex concepts, expects too little of readers/viewers, assumes a short attention span, and generally prioritizes content that entertains and shocks, over content that informs and educates.

The great science popularizer Carl Sagan observed:

"People who are curious, intelligent, dedicated to understanding the world, may nevertheless be (in our view) mired in superstition and pseudoscience. You could say, Well, they ought to know better, they ought to be more critical, and so on; but that's too harsh. It's not very much their fault, I say. It's the fault of a society that preferentially propagates the baloney and holds back the ambrosia. The least effective way for skeptics to get the attention of these bright, curious, interested people is to belittle, or condescend, or show arrogance toward their beliefs. They may be credulous, but they're not stupid. If we bear in mind human frailty and fallibility, we will understand their plight […] They believe things for reasons. Let us not dismiss pseudoscience or even superstition with contempt." 12

Sagan also left us with this sober warning: gullibility kills.”

How Can So Many People Believe Such Weird Things?

Beliefs contradicted by evidence are the norm, not the exception.

www.psychologytoday.com

Look, I am not talking about the kooks, the religious zealots and the fantasy dwellers (which we have a lot of in this board).

I am talking about "real" events in life that have not been able to be explained by science. I am talking about the fact that our knowledge of our universe is minimal compared to what is out there. We have not even been able to prove totally whether there are other civilizations in the universe or whether we are alone in the universe. There is a whole lot more that we do not know than what we know.

I understand fully that science of what is, does give us tangible ways to measure what things are and within that science, things are what they are. Nonetheless, what we don't yet know, we don't know.

Throughout time there have been many, many things that have not yet been able to be explained by science, which goes to "prove" that there are things we yet do not know. Could it be that ultimately science (when we get that science we don't yet know) will be able to explain it? Yes, but then again, the door is open to things in this universe that may not be "based on science". There is no way that you (or anyone else) can be 100% sure that those do not exist. It is as simple as that.

 

[bomberfox]

Unless I've missed something you're the only person who has actually offered an argument/evidence against the idea of souls. There've been an awful lot of association fallacies (it's dumb to believe in souls or gods or magic or the 'supernatural'), ad hominem (those guys are religious so their arguments don't count), appeals to authority (these scientists say there are no souls, even if they can't show it) and flat-out dogmatism and of course insults from the anti-soul side... and a bit of those or other fallacies from the pro- side too. So props for actually presenting an argument

However there's at least two fairly obvious ways of thinking about 'souls' (I prefer the term minds, but in most cases it's mere semantics), and observations on the effects of brain damage only seem to be relevant against one of them. Broadly, either souls are independent or dependent on organic processes, or when thinking about human souls more specifically either
- Souls are more or less independent and somehow 'bound' to brains, or
- Brains 'create' souls or form them from some unknown substance, as a sort of gestational phase of our existence

If souls were more or less independent and the body/brain something like an avatar or exploration suit to experience this aspect of reality, then besides fairly superficial things like gathering experience and memories we probably wouldn't expect changes or damage in the brain to dramatically affect the soul: Things like major personality changes as a consequence of brain damage, which have been observed, seem to weigh quite heavily against that first way of thinking about souls, as you suggest.

But if our bodies and brains are more of a gestational phase of our existence, a way in which souls are formed or imprinted onto some other, currently-unknown substance, then there would be an almost absolute correspondence between the brain and soul until the causal connection between the two is severed or weakened; major changes to the brain should result in major changes to the 'soul.'

Thanks!

 

[Michael Cole]

Interesting discussion. I'm surprised it's remained in GP. There's the science/anti-science angle and the religious angle, but not really a political discussion.

As others have mentioned, what we're discussing is consciousness, which by definition, is subjective. That is important. "I think, therefore I am" is completely subjective. Objectively, I may be a brain in a jar. There is no way for me to know.

There's a lot to ponder, and I'm sure humans have thought about these questions since long before recorded history.

We can question what consciousness actually is, and indeed, whether it means anything in the grand scheme of the universe. There are organisms without brains that are much more adapted to survival than we are, both individually and as a species. Water bears can be freeze-dried, shipped off to Mars and brought back to life. The coelacanth has existed unchanged for 450 million years. If there's a god, those are two of his best works.

Objectively, as someone mentioned, consciousness is merely the interaction of chemicals and tissue. While this may be true, it doesn't explain why "I" experience the chemical reactions in my brain rather than yours. Sounds silly, at first, but is it?

The question I ask, which I'm not certain can be answered, is why am I experiencing this life in my body, rather than someone else's? The old retort, "Why wasn't I born rich?" isn't as dismissive as it seems.

Furthermore, humans are not the only conscious beings. Our dogs and cats are conscious. All hominids (the great apes, which includes us) are self-aware. Why wasn't I born an orangutan?

How 'bout time? Why was my consciousness not only attached to my body, but in 1957? Why didn't I "wake up" (become self-aware, at whatever young infant age that occurs) in the 17th century?

All this wondering relies on one prerequisite, that consciousness is something unique and substantive apart from the brain. That I can imagine myself living in another's body, at a different time, does not substantiate the validity of the questions, but it is an interesting subject.

 

[The Old Soul]

Interesting that throughout this thread, no one has mentioned the "Spirit Molecule," DMT. Researchers have studied the effects of DMT (it is manufactured naturally in most animals and plants) and correlation of DMT production at the time of death, being the gateway drug that 'introduces' the dying to whatever happens afterwards.

DMT - The Spirit Molecule

In the '90's, Dr. Rick Strassman conducted a Government-approved and funded clinical research study at the University of New Mexico in which he injected sixty volunteers with DMT. In Strassman's volunteers, it consistently produced near-death and mystical experiences. Many reported convincing encounters with intelligent nonhuman presences, aliens, angels, and spirits. Nearly all felt that the sessions were among the most profound experiences of their lives. Dr.Strassman also wrote a book about it - a very interesting read.

The effects of DMT and 'trip reports' correlate almost exactly to what NDE (Near Death Experience) accounts describe. In ancient times, what some would call prophets would stay in totally dark rooms for several hundred hours until the body naturally started producing influential amounts of DMT, and generate manifestations and visual accounts of a world beyond normal conscience and perception. The DMT experience is aptly described as totally spiritual and religious, and has been known and induced for centuries.

 

[Mithrae]

The effects of DMT and 'trip reports' correlate almost exactly to what NDE (Near Death Experience) accounts describe. In ancient times, what some would call prophets would stay in totally dark rooms for several hundred hours...

One of the criticisms made against supposed near-death experiences is that often the subject was actually in no danger of dying, so it wasn't "near death." But that kind of misses the point, in light of the similarities often reported between the experiences of psychedelic drugs (see also Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, an account of his experience on mescaline), NDE's, sensory deprivation and deep meditation. You haven't mentioned meditation, and you suggest several hundred hours as a threshold for sensory deprivation, but many people have reported 'hallucinatory' experiences similar to a psychedelic trip after even as little as fifteen minutes of sensory deprivation.

Seems to me that a plausible common thread between each of these types of experience is the potential for a willing or induced dissociation of the mind from the body, whether through the mental discipline of meditation, the feeling (even if later found to be factually inaccurate) of being 'near death' and so on.

Of course an alternative guess as to the reason for experiences like these, particularly psychedelic trips and NDEs, is that the brain itself generates the 'hallucinations.' It doesn't seem very obvious why that would be the case for sensory deprivation, and even less so for meditation, but there's at least one particularly intriguing case of a documented NDE, that of Pam Reynalds, for which a complete absence of brain activity was recorded:

As a last resort, Robert F. Spetzler, a neurosurgeon of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, decided that a rarely performed procedure, known as hypothermic cardiac arrest, could improve Reynolds's chances of surviving surgical removal of the aneurysm. During this procedure, also known as a standstill operation, Reynolds's body temperature was lowered to 50 °F (10 °C), her breathing and heartbeat stopped, and the blood drained from her head. Her eyes were closed with tape and small ear plugs with speakers were placed in her ears. These speakers emitted audible clicks which were used to check the function of the brain stem to ensure that she had a flat EEG—indicating a non-responsive brain—before the operation proceeded. The operation was a success and Reynolds recovered completely. The total surgery lasted about seven hours with a few complications along the way.[4]​

​

Reynolds reported that during the operation she heard a sound like a natural 'D' that seemed to pull her out of her body and allowed her to "float" above the operating room and watch the doctors perform the operation. Reynolds claims that during this time she felt "more aware than normal" and her vision was more focused and clearer than normal vision. She reported seeing the surgical "saw" but said it looked like an electric toothbrush, and this is in fact true. She said she could hear conversations between operating room staff, even though she had earphones in her ears which were making a loud clicking noise many times per second in order to monitor her brain function. At some point during the operation, she says she noticed a presence and was pulled towards a light. . . .​

There are ad hoc 'explanations' for Pam's experience too, of course; maybe she had anaesthesia awareness and a lucky guess about the saw during that part of the operation, and despite her reports maybe the hallucination didn't extend through the period for which she had no brain activity. The fact is that we can't really be sure one way or the other; but so-called 'sceptics' are often hyper-sceptical in only one direction, only against things which might conflict with their pseudo-scientific reductionism, and re-cast these guesses about alternative explanations for experiences like Pam's as constituting a thorough 'debunking' leaving them with zero evidentiary value.

Personally I would say that the ad hoc alternative doesn't seem any more convincing to me than Pam's own account and interpretation of her experience, implying that even Pam's account alone (to say nothing of the wide range of credible similar reports) would suggest something like a 50/50 plausibility for the proposition that consciousness can persist and even increase in vividness beyond the cessation of brain function.