They used the term "souls" to describe people, as animals are considered alive, i.e. "lives," but without souls. Distress calls aboard airliners today still use "souls" in the formatted message.

Well said and the core of this subject. My mind is clear in that there is no soul in respect to a physical thing. Your soul is the very essence of you. Contained in the neural pathways of your mind. Years of programing and experience have shaped who you are. Some inherited factors and all those silly little foibles are you. That is who you are. Some of us are not that happy with who we seem to be. We seek council and attempt change. Unfortunately the soul is you. Changing it and you are very complex issues. At death its gone. your essence lives on as a memory in the minds of those who knew you. Your soul died when your brain failed.
I can except that as true and understand why some do not. Its all about conditioned thinking. Understanding and compassion are part of who we are, my soul lives and grows. Its me.

Thanks farmerjumperdon, Peterscreek, Swift and astromark for your replies. astromark, I will need to marinade in your response a bit.

Continuing...

Everything is made up of atoms. Atoms are made up of microscopic particles; at the center is the nucleus. The nucleus is made up of even smaller particles of neutrons and protons and even smaller yet the electrons. Electrons are held in their shells by an electrical force.

When the battery is dead is there still -electrons/+protons with an electrical charge/force? If so, where is the force coming from?

Atoms seem to be independent, do they die?

Thanks,
megr

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We'll have to outwit the fiend with our superior intelligence.
Yukon Cornelius

The electrical potential and current in a battery comes from the location and movement of ions - atoms with one or more electrons added or subtracted (that is a very simple description). This gain/loss of electrons gives them a charge. But other than that, the fundamental existence of the atoms don't change. So, these types of electrochemical reactions do not "kill" the atoms. In fact, the only thing that could would be nuclear reactions - fission and fusion.

I'm not sure what any of that has to do with a soul.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

I said before, to little effect, that the most interesting thing, to me, about a "soul" is that our minds can entertain the concept.

Relevance to this site? Well, is it fair to speculate that the sort of extremely competent artificial intelligence that we might use for robotic planetary exploration might have the capacity to model itself in counterfactual contexts?

Neither do I.

I think when we say something is dead(a battery, a person), is that something completely without energy?

How are electrons/protons independent of outside energy sources, but yet have an electrical charge?

Are we saying that humans at death, are more dead then say a rock?


Thanks,
megr

__________________
We'll have to outwit the fiend with our superior intelligence.
Yukon Cornelius

Well, the problem is that there are different kinds of energy and different processes use different energy. A battery might not have any electrical potential left, so that you could use to light a lamp, but if it was, for example, a lead-acid battery, the acid in it could still react with your skin if you opened it up.

Similarly, upon the death of a person, the chemical and physical processes that supply food and oxygen to brain cells stop, and thus the chemical processes within those cells that allow brain cells to do their stuff stops. But that doesn't mean the atoms and chemicals within the body are "dead" in a chemical sense. I'm not sure how explicit we want to go on this, but there is plenty of chemistry and biology that happens to a body after death.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

Yes.

No new thoughts are springing into life, so I must be satisfied.

Thanks

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We'll have to outwit the fiend with our superior intelligence.
Yukon Cornelius

This is a common sneer in religious circles, and I'm not sure that it's even accurate. Sure, scientists all seem to come from Missouri, where the motto is, "Show me." Scientists require "hard" evidence, which is probably the origin of the "materialistic" label. BUT....

What about electromagnetic waves? These do not consist of matter, yet scientists are intensely interested in their qualities, their spectra, etc. Does this make some areas of science non-materialistic?

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

I guess it depends on what is meant by 'materialism'. Science explicitly relies on methodological naturalism, wherein one works from the principle that one should strive to explain all observable phenomena in terms of matter and material interactions. (For the purposes of this distinction, electromagnetism would count as a material interaction, even when virtual particles are involved.)

This idea is distinct from philosophical naturalism, which holds that all that exists is material.

Philosophical naturalism is a difficult stance to resolve with religion. Methodological naturalism doesn't, because it allows room for one to say that some religious ideas (such as God) don't necessarily fall in science's bailiwick.

I have always thought of the soul as a light, an energy; our spark, which makes you --> you and me --> me, which is basically what you said. I also agree that it is a conditioned thinking.

I think you are fortunate that your mind is clear on the subject.

Thanks,
megr

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We'll have to outwit the fiend with our superior intelligence.
Yukon Cornelius

Oh how cute!

Thousands of years of eastern / human philosophical thinking reduced so succinctly into five words!

Shalom!

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clear skies

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. CARL SAGAN

Mak: Pass the pepperoni please.
Fazor: "Hail, Bautainia! We pledge our hearts to thee! Science and woo, some babbling too, and astron-oh-meee!"
slang: And it made ash out of yew and tree.

Hey, here's 5 more:

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Problem is that the forms of energy we know [the 'forces'] are linked to matter and cannot be organized into a pattern that thinks for itself. They are produced in interactions between material particles and expand as waves, getting continuosly attenuated as they expand. Thus, the soul cannot be produced by any known process. Hence my comment above that there´s nothing to discuss, because we already know how these forces behave. It requires a novel form of energy or interaction between particles, of which we have no clue. It just cannot be discussed on a scientific, empirical basis.

The only empirical basis left is to think of the soul as a result of neural interactions. All the rest is philosophy.

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What brings us together is stronger than what pulls us apart

i have a tendency to think of nature as countless patterns.

and patterns repeat themselves,
I have yet to find any single "thing" in nature, while yes there are individual outcomes of an event, there are always more than one. I don't think that there has ever been an account of just "one" of anything. while i may have one tree in my yard, that tree is not the only tree on the world. there seems to me that there is actually never just "one" of anything. even particles that pop out of existence in the quantum pop back into existence to balance out.

Life is a series of patterns, even evolution is a series of patterns,
to me it is ridiculous to suggest that in amongst all of this repeating patterns where nature itself suggests that there is never one of anything, that consciousness is singular and that we have only one life.

however, on a side note, i have to wonder if the phone on my desk is proof that there are phones through out the building? or that life on this planet is proof that there is life elsewhere in the universe?

I would think not as that extension of logic, while sound, is untestable, it can only be rooted in faith.

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-work in progress--

Are photons not matter? Even if you don't accept the particle/wave duality as a possible theory, energy still acts on matter so it's effects on the material world bring it into the material arena to be examined.

And that is fine, but I have enjoyed looking at the possible science behind it. My knowledge is limited.

Thanks,
megr

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We'll have to outwit the fiend with our superior intelligence.
Yukon Cornelius

Quite. Here is an interesting fact....

With every breath you inhale astronomical amounts of atoms from the universe which end up in your heart cells, and your brain cells, and your kidney cells, and so on.... In fact, right this moment in a physical body we have millions atoms that once were in the bodies of Christ, or Moses, or Buddha, or Leonardo da Vinci.... You replace almost your entire body in less than one year. (98% of all the atoms in your body are replaced in less than one year). You literally make a new liver every six weeks, and new skin once a month, and new stomach lining every five days, and a new skeleton every three months, and brain cells and even DNA cells are replaced every six weeks. In two years you replace your entire body down to the last atom. -- Source

So our bodies are constantly being replaced with new atoms, but those new atoms apparently get placed into the same or nearly the same pattern.

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

That might work as a metaphor, but not as a description of what might actually be happening. Keep in mind that photons, like any other force mediating particle, can't really do much of anything on their own that's more interesting than moving really fast in a straight line. All the fun stuff happens when they interact with other kinds of matter.

maybe, the "soul" if there is one, just pops in and out of existence like quantum Virtual Particles.

http://hoku.as.utexas.edu/~gebhardt/...8/bhlect1.html
http://sci.tech-archive.net/Archive/.../msg02064.html
http://web.rollins.edu/~jsiry/Science.html
i have to wonder if the particle that pop in and out of existence carry the same "information"

and are the transient particles that just seemingly disappear, only to reappear again, merely traveling into and out of another dimension that we are unaware of?

what would preclude a "soul" (if one exists) from doing the same?

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-work in progress--

Farfetchedness?

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

What I take away from the preceeding discussion is that the soul, whatever it is, can be broken down into two possibilities:

1. It is nothing but known science, and, as astromark says, the essense of self, and when the body-brain passes away, so does the sould, living on only in the memories of others.

2. It is something beyond what we know of the physical world, and thus, it can't be measured, if even detected, by the physical world. Thus, the soul may very well go on after death, and may have been around before birth.

I said this before in this thread, it was echoed by another, and I'll re-echo it again: I think it's astounding that if this physical world is all there is, that we humans, apparently totally alone in the animal kingdom, think about spirtual worlds.

You are probably right (and it is a very interesting thought), but maybe other creatures do think about the spirtual world. How would we know, one way or another?

I recall, many years ago, a program about elephant behavior in the wild. They were following a particular pack of elephants around. In their travels, the pack came upon the bones of an elephant they had known. They behaved very differently towards those bones than those of other elephant bones they had come across - picking up the bones, examining them, and staying by them for an extended period of time.

Now maybe it was just the scent of an elephant that they were familiar with that lead to the different behavior. But how do we know what they were thinking about?

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

What I find astounding is that humans exist at all. Or animals, for that matter. Or plants. Such complexity....

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Fact?

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Actually, I was referring to the opposite: some people in science come across as sneering at concepts such as spirit, etc. Which, is why I am facsinated with the respect shown on this thread.

If you want to count doctors as scientists and the mind as immaterial, then psychiatrists study and treat disorders of an immaterial mind, which resides at least in the brain.

Leaving who sneers at what behind, there's two topics which just now came to my mind, which may or may not bear on this OP. One is a type of photography, which shows an immaterial print after the biological organ is gone: to wit, half a leaf, when photographed by the process (what is it called?), shows an immaterial reproduction of the missing half.

Kerillian photography, is that it?

The other topic is what I call "muscular memory", but it applies to teeth as well. For example, after a tooth is pulled, it sometimes feels like that tooth is still there. Amputees also experience the itching of the missing limb. Which, technically, is not what I meant by muscular memory...

Repeating the same activity over and over, until it can be done without thinking, and done very fast without thinking, could be because muscle cells have limited memories. Which, does not apply to this discussion.

I realize that memory exists in the brain. And, the brain could be remembering a missing tooth, limb, etc. But, why make the missing limb itch?

No, for the purpose of this discussion, Kerillian photography comes closest to producing evidence of an immaterial and unseen.field, which accompanies a physical and biological item.

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Salty
"...with God, all things are possible..." Even evolution

I believe you mean Kirlian photography, where an object exposed to a high-voltage electric field creates a coronal discharge that exposes the photographic plate.

The 'phantom leaf effect' actually has a fairly mundane cause. To create an image with phantom limbs, you must first press the whole object to the plate, and then tear off a piece of it. When you press the whole object to the plate you leave an imprint of residue that remains even in the spots where part of the object was removed. This imprint influences the discharge as well, so it can create patterns in the shape of the missing piece.

There's another thing that might be a problem for Kilrian photography's candidacy as evidence of souls: it doesn't seem to be very prejudiced. You can take Kirlian photographs of pretty much anything that can be convinced to conduct electricity - there are some lovely pictures of coins and the like that I'm sure are floating around on the Internet. Granted, that's not as much of a concern if you'd agree that your house key has a soul.


My first guess is that the brain is just responding to information from severed nerves. Probably whatever random signals they're sending look a lot like the signals that are sent when you have an itch in a non-phantom limb.

Dogs have been known to exhibit similar behavior at the gravesites of a recently departed master.

In truth, we really don't know what they're thinking about. While we don't know much about elephant "language," we do know it exists. Who's to say their collection of sounds isn't merely their set of phonemes (is that the right term), much as our collection of 46 sounds comprises the basics of our language. Perhaps their communications are fairly complex, although, given it's sparsity, I tend to doubt it.

There are five other species which pass the mirror test: chimps, orangs, bottlenose dolphins, asian elephants, and European magpies. Whether that's spiritual or not... I tend to doubt that, too, as anthropologists have identified that man had a solid language for more than a million years before he began painting death scenes on cave walls.

While all six mirror-test winners are said to be self-aware, there's more, including sentience (ability to perceive things subjectively) and sapience (wisdom/judgement).

I don't believe these abilities are necessarily stepping-stones, though, as I've known dogs who were idiots, and I've known some who exhibited a great deal of maturity and ability to reason and act accordingly in new situations, despite the fact that they were never trained to do so, and the situations lay well outside the bounds of what's normal for a dog in the wild.

I love the wind because it is moving whacked out molecules. I love the molecules blowing in my face.

Great link. Many of the links I have found regarding particle/quantum physics are largely over my head. Your link is just right.

I re-re-echo it.

Sarongsong and Cougar, the info on the regeneration of the body is something we all kinda know, but not to the degree articulated by your quotes. Amazing.

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We'll have to outwit the fiend with our superior intelligence.
Yukon Cornelius

so i have a question,
how do we know this following statement is true?

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-work in progress--