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Originally Posted by astromark
For those interested you will have noticed the start of an endless discussion regarding the soul and what if any connection to the finding of the Hoggs Boson Particle.
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Is that the fat one?
sorry, but I couldn't resist...
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So, it would seem that some people see a soul as some part of the human being that can at death leave the body and live on. I wish to examine this and understand what proof or evidence there is for this understanding. Can you help me ?
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Proof. Evidence. The former is something best left to the mathematicians. Evidence, on the other hand, can range from very, very iron-clad, to tenuous and misleading, at best, and still be considered "evidence." To qualify what's acceptable or not, various venues which consider evidence have their own rules, which are called, amazingly enough, "the rules of evidence."
Would personal testimony count among your rules of evidence? How about photos? What if they're doctored?
Obviously, the bit about mass reduction at the moment of death was absurd. If there were any measurable amount, we'd be exploding at death rather than merely giving up our last breath.
In the other thread, I proposed using various brain scan techniques to map out the differences between those who believe they're connected with the spiritual world and those who don't believe it exists at all. If there is a difference, it wouldn't necessarily constitute evidence of a spiritual world. Rather, it may only constitute evidence that something in the brains of those who're spiritual works differently than the brains of those who aren't. Perhaps the spiritualists are in touch with a facet of the human mind the pragmaticists are not. On the other hand, it may be the pragmaticists who're fully in touch with their intuition, and recognize it and call it as such.
But making that determination is step two, if not three or four.
The first step is finding out if there's a difference between the brains.
I had another thought this afternoon -
what if the difference isn't in the brains, but in the lower central or peripheral nervous system itself? Could there be a sort of memory in the spinal cord? How about distributed throughout the body? Perhaps one, the other, or both function as a separate "brain,"
as do the left and right lobes of the human brain, but given the nature of the connection, while they're great at controlling certain functions and providing feedback, they may be poor at basic communication. Thus, that communication from the spinal cord, the PNS, or both isn't understood, or even heard, directly, by the cerebral cortex...
...except as either intuition, or at a "spiritual" level.
Perhaps intuition itself is a melding of messages from the spinal cord and the PNS.
Who knows?
We do have the tools to do some mapping, so perhaps it's time someone smarter than me on brain and CNS/PNS functioning design a test and start testing.