Thirdly, you make an argument from ignorance. "We don't know it all, therefore there are supernatural influences."
Actually I said: "That's not to say that possibility makes it so..."
Anyway, just as the neurologists in the article I cited emphasise the importance of psychological data as well as medical data, I too would point out that the outcomes are as important as the mechanics. After all, we trust that people are sufficiently self-aware to tell us how they feel - we don't stop them and say: "Actually, you only think you feel bad, you are just a collection of bits that somehow has become more than the sum of it's bits and is caught in an endless self-awareness loop, so no, you can't have the day off..." hehe
When a very intelligent scientist tells me that he believes that he has a soul or some sense of himself that he considers seperate from his body then I take that very seriously. It may well be his brain and mouth presenting this data to me, but that's just the message, is it also the author? You focus on the mechanics but they don't fully explain all of the outcomes just yet, including sense of self. Therefore something is missing in our knowledge, or is it - could our perception itself be correct? And if not, why not? Who cares if the body has to be functional before a claim about having a soul can be made? As if it could be any other way even if there really is a soul. We need to establish if there is not a seperation between message(brain, body, mouth) and author (currently of unknown origin, especially where high level decisions come into play).
Study after study fails to find conclusive evidence of non-physical affects on our experience.
Of-course it would be impossible to find proof of something non-physical, but affects is an interesting subject and I think you missed my earlier point about it. You see, the best the 'yes' crowd can ever hope for is for everything to be completely measured about the brain and for there to still not be any indication as to what casues higher order decisions to be made. This of-course will always be met with the suggestion that we can always learn more by some yet unrealised method or will learn to interpret the data differently and that 'one day' we will prove it's all just in our heads. Which is where we are at now anyway.
I would speculate that if there were some kind of platonic will able to act on a healthy brain, that it would do so in broad brushstrokes and would be severely limited by what the biological computer throws up. If our brain really is one of the most complicated things in the physical universe, and If the universe was made for humans as many on this forum believe, then I suppose there is a certain platonic logic to having the soul's keyhole view consisting of such sophisticated neuronal patterning. And patterns, rather than some kind of regular computing logic, seem to be the language of the brain. Everything we see so far fits in with the idea of a soul; We would expect to see data in, data sorted, data computed and dare I say it: presented. (How do we know neuronal firing patterns are not what the soul 'sees'?) Then data heads back out in a similar way. What happens between the coming in and going out?
That's the real question. Until we can pinpoint the exact mechanism for higher order decisions then we cannot rule out something else at work, however unlikely that may seem. As for being unconscious, the soul could simply miss out on input during this time. Who knows.
Study after study finds a connection between the physical interactions of neurons with their environment and each other, and our experience. Yet you suggest that, because we don't know absolutely everything about how this works, there is "plenty of room to speculate" extra-dimensional entities.
There is a strange thing going on with decisions, deep self-awareness and apparant free will. If we can say for sure that our highest-order decision making is caused by purely biological actions then fair enough, but notice that we cannot yet pinpoint and explain this very thing that many perceive to be coming from a platonic will. Think about that. These two points presently support each other: the perception that it's non-physical and the lack of measurement showing that it is physical. If Penrose's mathematical work is right and there really is no way to generate self-awareness with regular math based computing, and we are all waiting around to see if some quirky quantum phenomena can do it, then I fail to see why we can't also wait around and see if 'nothing' causes it (ie: that would imply something external at work, maybe extraphysical, maybe supernatural, not that we'd be able to prove it).
Why should we consider the human soul any more seriously than we consider all these other *possible* extra-dimensional entities?
Because higher level decision making in humans is one of the few remaining areas of apparant spontaneous action that has not been fully explained, and because many intelligent humans claim to know that something about themselves is extant apart from that which they can sense with their regular senses.
That's not what I'm saying.
The robot thing was in jest
I was serious about the thread being interesting though.
But we are made of parts nevertheless, and I think it's somewhat egotistical to be unwilling to even consider the possibility that lowly, physical parts can give rise to beautiful, feeling beings.
I probably wouldn't use the word egotistical. People can't help it if their sense of self happens to coincide with themselves. By sense of self in the context of this discussion I mean the fact that we have, for example, a sense of self which can imagine itself going on forever, and some can certainly imagine this sense being transfered to perhaps a different machine. This is quite different from the sense of physical self, I say. This is a known condition, which happens to coincide with the person experiencing it, so it only seems egotistical, I think. So, is this perception of a self seperate from the body in turn created by the body? Maybe. But why should we discount it while accepting scientific assessments arrived at with merely our regular senses? Even with the other senses cut off, although we eventually go insane, we still have a sense of self.
I don't think the brain is merely how the soul expresses itself, it is also obviously how it expresses its own self in many areas, especially the 'involuntary' ones. Still, the very fact that we can step back and assess these things as if we were doing so from some platonic vantage point is very telling. However, if we are to rule out all such vantage points as being illusory then we quickly lose any basis for making a claim for either idea. The seat of consciousness, the exact point of decision making, the perceived experience of free will: these are the areas we need to know more about. We wouldn't know anything about them exept that we experience them. Experiences can normally be initiated by physical input, but the funny thing about these particular experiences/perceptions is that the perception itself for many is that we have a deep down essence which is more than physical somehow.
Sorry for these wrody posts, it's just a hard thing to put into words sometimes. [edit: including the word 'wordy' Lol]
