the soul is not dependent on brain activity

[Evangelicalhumanist]

As a Chomskyesque retort, I could ask, have you ever met a sentence that came to be, apart from an invisible soul?




John

What's the difference between "an invisible soul" and "no soul at all?" A living, biological electro-chemical brain. And those have been known to create sentences.

Now, if you have some sort of evidence that the sentence you wrote above came, not from your living, biological, electro-chemical brain, but rather from an invisible soul, then I'm sure we'd all love to examine it here. We await same with bated breath.

 

[John D. Brey]

What's the difference between "an invisible soul" and "no soul at all?" A living, biological electro-chemical brain. And those have been known to create sentences.

Now, if you have some sort of evidence that the sentence you wrote above came, not from your living, biological, electro-chemical brain, but rather from an invisible soul, then I'm sure we'd all love to examine it here. We await same with bated breath.

Sometimes my electro-chemical brain is a lazy so-and-so in relationship to the desires of my soul. I've been beating my brain like a stubborn mule to get it to perform in some other threads. And now it's refusing to serve the desires of my soul to answer your question in this thread. . . At this very moment it's telling my soul, "Why don't you just take a hike back to the damn limbo of the lost you came from, and leave me, the arse you road in on, alone to nap?"



John

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

Sometimes my electro-chemical brain is a lazy deadbeat in relationship to the desires of my soul. I've been beating my brain like a stubborn mule to get it to perform in some other threads. And now it's refusing to serve the desires of my soul to answer your question in this thread. . . At this very moment it's telling my soul, "Why don't you just take a hike back to the damn limbo of the lost you came from, and leave me, the arse you road in on, alone to nap?"



John

Um-hum? Seems to me like your brain has more smarts than your soul.

 

[viole]

Sometimes my electro-chemical brain is a lazy deadbeat in relationship to the desires of my soul. I've been beating my brain like a stubborn mule to get it to perform in some other threads. And now it's refusing to serve the desires of my soul to answer your question in this thread. . . At this very moment it's telling my soul, "Why don't you just take a hike back to the damn limbo of the lost you came from, and leave me, the arse you road in on, alone to nap?"



John

Why do you need your brain to perform, if the soul is all you need?
Are you telling us that the soul needs the brain, in any way? Why?

Ciao

- viole

 

[John D. Brey]

Why do you need your brain to perform, if the soul is all you need?
Are you telling us that the soul needs the brain, in any way? Why?

Ciao

- viole

The software of a computer needs the hardware just like a soul needs the hardware of the brain. But no matter how much software, or information, you load onto your computer, it doesn't weigh so much as a feather more than the hardware without the information or software. I have so much stuff on my computer I'm just sure I'm going to walk into the office some day and find the computer has crashed through the desk and the floor . . . but it never does. So I just keep loading it with more just like I do my brain.



John

 

[IndigoChild5559]

I believe consciousness (the soul) is not dependent on brain activity

I believe your soul is the real you. Your body is the vehicle that enables your soul to do its work in this world. Just as a driver controls a car through its control mechanisms while sitting in the driver's seat, the soul uses the brain to control the body.

the soul control the nervous system and, through it, various organs in the body.

Soul is the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal and eternal. the body is only temporary

Any thoughts?

You believe this, but it is not a proven thing that any "soul" can survive the death of the brain.

 

[viole]

The software of a computer needs the hardware just like a soul needs the hardware of the brain. But no matter how much software, or information, you load onto your computer, it doesn't weigh so much as a feather more than the hardware without the information or software. I have so much stuff on my computer I'm just sure I'm going to walk into the office some day and find the computer has crashed through the desk and the floor . . . but it never does. So I just keep loading it with more just like I do my brain.



John

Yet. information is physical. In fact, at a fixed temperature it has a well defined energy, and therefore mass. So, it has some weight. Put enough of it, and it will acquire a lot of weight. There is really nothing metaphysical about it, despite looking very immaterial.

As a matter of fact, there is a physical bound on the quantity of information you can put in your skull. And that depends, strangely,, on the surface of your skull, and not its volume, Once you reach it, your skull will become a black hole. Which is quite heavy.

Ciao

- viole

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

I believe consciousness (the soul) is not dependent on brain activity

I believe your soul is the real you. Your body is the vehicle that enables your soul to do its work in this world. Just as a driver controls a car through its control mechanisms while sitting in the driver's seat, the soul uses the brain to control the body.

the soul control the nervous system and, through it, various organs in the body.

Soul is the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal and eternal. the body is only temporary

Any thoughts?

Do you have any evidence so that I can distinguish this idea from the idea that our reality is actually an MMORPG like world of warcraft, where every human is actually controlled by an extra-dimensional alien playing the game?

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

The software of a computer needs the hardware just like a soul needs the hardware of the brain. But no matter how much software, or information, you load onto your computer, it doesn't weigh so much as a feather more than the hardware without the information or software. I have so much stuff on my computer I'm just sure I'm going to walk into the office some day and find the computer has crashed through the desk and the floor . . . but it never does. So I just keep loading it with more just like I do my brain.



John

That is a terrible analogy, and you should be able to work out why. Software on a computer is nothing more than instructions for what the hardware is supposed to do -- instructions written by an entity with a brain. Who/what is writing the instructions that constitute your analogous soul/software?

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

A causal relationship doesn't imply dependence for the phenomenon's existence. It only implies that the observation of that phenomenon is dependent upon a substrate.

You seem to be saying that if I observe a causal relationship resulting in the repeatable appearance of a phenomena - say leaving an ice cube in the sun and watching it melt - that I can't say that the melting was caused by the suns heat, only that the observation of that phenomenon of melting depends on the sun. That can't be what you mean, can it?

What if there is an afterlife? What if you are judged for 'not' believing in God or accepting a religion?

Then I was doomed from birth. There was no other path available to me once I learned critical thinking. Agnostic atheism was a foregone conclusion, as no other position is compatible with the laws of reason in a person with no psychological need for a god belief or a religion. I added that last part to recognize those who get comfort from a god belief. Maybe I'd be a theist if that described me, but it doesn't, so I have no reason to go there.

Are you worried about that?

No. But I have a life to live and must choose a way to live it. If this choice lands me in hell or some other dystopic afterlife, it was unavoidable to me, as I have good reason to live it the way I do embracing reason, compassion, and empiricism while rejecting faith and received "wisdom" to be believed by faith, and I must be true to that as a matter of personal integrity. It's who I am now.

Sometimes my electro-chemical brain is a lazy so-and-so in relationship to the desires of my soul.

Or maybe you've misunderstood how your brain produces your mind. The conflict you describe is easily understood as occurring between competing brain centers each with a different will. Our reptilian and mammalian ancestors gifted us with an assortment of mental proclivities that promoted survival in pre-intellectual minds.

The reptilian brain is vigilant and reflexive. Behavior is relatively simple. This is likely the part of your brain being lazy. Have you ever observed a lizard or crocodile? They don't seem to move much without an apparent purpose in mind, like stealth hunting (hide relatively motionless, then strike), and very little interests them. No curiosity.

Your mammalian brain includes the limbic system and introduces emotion (fear, desire) and more complex instinctual behavior such as parenting and hunting in teams.

Your human brain is the part that reasons in language and mathematical symbols, and is often in conflict with lower centers, as when trying to quit cigarettes. Withdrawal prompts the lower centers to seek relief with a cigarette, while higher centers say to resist that impulse. It's this higher center where uniquely human behaviors arise, and which some of the religious have said is due to an injected soul containing the image of its creator.

 

[Nakosis]

I believe consciousness (the soul) is not dependent on brain activity

I believe your soul is the real you. Your body is the vehicle that enables your soul to do its work in this world. Just as a driver controls a car through its control mechanisms while sitting in the driver's seat, the soul uses the brain to control the body.

the soul control the nervous system and, through it, various organs in the body.

Soul is the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal and eternal. the body is only temporary

Any thoughts?

If you soul is consciousness, where does your soul go when you lose consciousness?
Does it disappear?
When you are unconscious does that mean you have no soul?

 

[John D. Brey]

That is a terrible analogy, and you should be able to work out why. Software on a computer is nothing more than instructions for what the hardware is supposed to do -- instructions written by an entity with a brain. Who/what is writing the instructions that constitute your analogous soul/software?

The entity that writes the instructions to make the computer hardware function a particular way is the same entity that uses the hardware of the human brain to produce the instructions for the computer:

It is the glory of the human cerebral cortex that it -----unique among all animals and unprecedented in all geological time ---has the power to defy the dictates of the selfish genes. We can enjoy sex without procreation. We can devote our lives to philosophy, mathematics, poetry, astrophysics, music, geology, or the warmth of human love, in defiance of the old [reptile] brain's genetic urging that these are a waste of time ---time that "should" be spent fighting rivals and pursuing multiple sexual partners: "As I see it, we have a profound choice to make. It is a choice between favoring the old brain or favoring the new brain. More specifically, do we want our future to be driven by the processes that got us here, namely, natural selection, competition, and the drive of the selfish genes? Or, do we want our future to be driven by intelligence and its desire to understand the world?"​

​

Richard Dawkins, introducing Jeff Hawkins, One Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence (bracket mine, based on earlier comment in intro. Last quotation is Dawkins quoting Hawkins).​

The brain is a biological machine whose master is the gene. Richard Dawkins refers to that machine as the "reptile brain," in contradistinction to a "new" kind of brain whose master is no longer the gene, such that we might ask, if the reptile brain serves the gene (mate, kill, repeat), then what's being served by Richard Dawkins new brain? Who's the master of the new brain? And what's the goal of the master of the new brain if not genetic replication as the means for survival? How's the new brain going to survive in this godforsaken world if it's a panzy that won't mate, kill, repeat?

Reading philosophy through Coke-bottle lenses might be a great joy for Peewee Hermans and their kind. But surely some of the joy will be reduced when they're sodomized by the brain-children of the gene whose marching orders are mate, rape, kill, repeat?




John

 

[John D. Brey]

Yet. information is physical. In fact, at a fixed temperature it has a well defined energy, and therefore mass. So, it has some weight. Put enough of it, and it will acquire a lot of weight. There is really nothing metaphysical about it, despite looking very immaterial.

How do you take the temperature of information? Mine often seems fevered such that I should like to check its temperature to know whether to administer antibiotics?

As a matter of fact, there is a physical bound on the quantity of information you can put in your skull. And that depends, strangely,, on the surface of your skull, and not its volume, Once you reach it, your skull will become a black hole. Which is quite heavy.

When I speak to liberals and hippies they're always saying what I say is heavy man. And that might be since I already have two black holes affecting the volume of my head. I stick my fingers in these black holes when I don't like what they're sucking in. And to date neither black hole has absorbed any of my fingers, one in the middle which I should hate to lose since I use it so often when summing up arguments directed toward liberals and hippies.



John

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

The entity that writes the instructions to make the computer hardware function a particular way is the same entity that uses the hardware of the human brain to produce the instructions for the computer:

It is the glory of the human cerebral cortex that it -----unique among all animals and unprecedented in all geological time ---has the power to defy the dictates of the selfish genes. We can enjoy sex without procreation. We can devote our lives to philosophy, mathematics, poetry, astrophysics, music, geology, or the warmth of human love, in defiance of the old [reptile] brain's genetic urging that these are a waste of time ---time that "should" be spent fighting rivals and pursuing multiple sexual partners: "As I see it, we have a profound choice to make. It is a choice between favoring the old brain or favoring the new brain. More specifically, do we want our future to be driven by the processes that got us here, namely, natural selection, competition, and the drive of the selfish genes? Or, do we want our future to be driven by intelligence and its desire to understand the world?"​

​

Richard Dawkins, introducing Jeff Hawkins, One Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence (bracket mine, based on earlier comment in intro. Last quotation is Dawkins quoting Hawkins).​

The brain is a biological machine whose master is the gene. Richard Dawkins refers to that machine as the "reptile brain," in contradistinction to a "new" kind of brain whose master is no longer the gene, such that we might ask, if the reptile brain serves the gene (mate, kill, repeat), then what's being served by Richard Dawkins new brain? Who's the master of the new brain? And what's the goal of the master of the new brain if not genetic replication as the means for survival? How's the new brain going to survive in this godforsaken world if it's a panzy that won't mate, kill, repeat?

Reading philosophy through Coke-bottle lenses might be a great joy for Peewee Hermans and their kind. But surely some of the joy will be reduced when they're sodomized by the brain-children of the gene whose marching orders are mate, rape, kill, repeat?




John

You've spent a lot of time studying scripture, but you are woefully behind in the sciences, I'm afraid. We are not the only animal that has sex for pleasure, rather than mating. Chimps and bonobos do it, and (surprise, surprise) so do dolphines. Female dolphins stimulate themselves and each other (they have remarkably functional clitorises), and males use each others' blowholes (the only known example of "nasal sex" anywhere). Many animals species have been observed to engage in homosexual sex: 8% or more rams are only interested in other rams, for example, making sheep one of the more frequent partakers of "the love that dare not speak its name."

And genes create brains (of all kinds), but are not the "masters" of them. Genes (like viruses) function only to replicate themselves -- and they do this by laying out and executing the plans for animals that can survive to mate and rear successful offspring, offspring that will continue the process. If a slight change in body or behavioural plan can provide an advantage that leads to increased levels of procreation, then that gene will quickly overtake the unmutated gene that was its progenitor in the gene pool of that species.

And what that suggests (or should suggest, if you are really thinking) is that female dolphins stimulating each others' clitorises, or males getting off in the nose-holes of other males, or rams tupping other rams must have a genetic origin and provide some advantage. The trick is to know what that advantage is. In humans, for example, there is increasingly good reason to believe that male homosexuality (the chances of which increase the more older brothers one has) may provide a reproductive benefit by having strong males at home to protect the family, which increases the likelihood of the parents' genes being passed on.

 

[John D. Brey]

You've spent a lot of time studying scripture, but you are woefully behind in the sciences, I'm afraid. We are not the only animal that has sex for pleasure, rather than mating. Chimps and bonobos do it, and (surprise, surprise) so do dolphines. Female dolphins stimulate themselves and each other (they have remarkably functional clitorises), and males use each others' blowholes (the only known example of "nasal sex" anywhere). Many animals species have been observed to engage in homosexual sex: 8% or more rams are only interested in other rams, for example, making sheep one of the more frequent partakers of "the love that dare not speak its name."

And genes create brains (of all kinds), but are not the "masters" of them. Genes (like viruses) function only to replicate themselves -- and they do this by laying out and executing the plans for animals that can survive to mate and rear successful offspring, offspring that will continue the process. If a slight change in body or behavioural plan can provide an advantage that leads to increased levels of procreation, then that gene will quickly overtake the unmutated gene that was its progenitor in the gene pool of that species.

And what that suggests (or should suggest, if you are really thinking) is that female dolphins stimulating each others' clitorises, or males getting off in the nose-holes of other males, or rams tupping other rams must have a genetic origin and provide some advantage. The trick is to know what that advantage is. In humans, for example, there is increasingly good reason to believe that male homosexuality (the chances of which increase the more older brothers one has) may provide a reproductive benefit by having strong males at home to protect the family, which increases the likelihood of the parents' genes being passed on.

Scientifically speaking, all binary reproducing organisms were once lesbians. Lesbianism is the natural state of all binary reproduction prior to the rise of the bi-"gendered" sexual revolution whose icon, idol, statue, is the phallus. Dante made the phallus the central pillar of hell seemingly implying the scientifically obvious superiority of lesbianism to the reign began with the phallus. A superiority, mind you, that's too obvious to note since when all organisms were lesbians there was no hellish programmed-death in the DNA of any living organism. Dante's use of the phallus as the central pillar of hell is scientifically sound since the phallus is the source and Deliverer of death and hades, neither of which were allowed to swim in the gene pool of life prior to the rise of the reign of the phallus.

Ditto for transvestites and transgendering types: they are, scientifically speaking, more ancient than any heterosexual found in the natural world or the Bible. Careful exegesis of the Hebrew text of Genesis clarifies that Eve was a clone of ha-dam. Had not the shenanigans found in Genesis 2:21 taken place, Eve and ha-adam would have been lesbian sisters and not "husband and wife." Furthermore, the demonic graft that takes place in Genesis 2:21 (the creation of the phallus) makes ha-adam, there, and thereafter called "Adam," not really a "male" so to say, but really just a phallic-facade of the female.

Far from my scientific acumen being lax, as you imply, I'm one of the few scientists who know and concede that there's no such thing as a biological "male" in any true scientific sense. What we know of, and lazily refer to as a "male," is nothing more than an evolutionary transformation, transgendering, of the female species, and is not, by any true scientific reasoning, an ontologically new specimen such as we find when the first living organism arises as what today we know of as a female (the ability to produce offspring existed in the first living things long before gender arose with the creation of the facade of femininity that is the ******* labeled "male").

This is science. And you can take it to the bank, the knowledge bank: there's only one, singular, actual, male, in the entire history of living organisms on planet earth. And if a person doesn't know that, know who this male is, they will get the privilege of spying Dante's pillar of hell a second time; the first being when it propositioned to father them while they were a female seed in the womb, and the second time being when they descend beneath the hymen of the morgue and find themselves in the Incoming Processing Center of hell with a bird's-eye view of the central corridor of hades with its ornate phallic pillar.




John

 

[John D. Brey]

Or maybe you've misunderstood how your brain produces your mind. The conflict you describe is easily understood as occurring between competing brain centers each with a different will.

"Will" doesn't come cheap until it's free. And it's usually not recognized as free will until it's associated with a sentient soul.

Our reptilian and mammalian ancestors gifted us with an assortment of mental proclivities that promoted survival in pre-intellectual minds.

If you read Richard Dawkins' rambling preamble to the stuff Jeff Hawkins is hocking, you'll see that both he and Hawkins speak of the "old" or "reptilian" brain as a sad has-been going the way of the dinosaur. They really do. Just read the book. Why I emphasize that is that Dawkins and Hawkins ramble on oblivious to the fact that they both sport bruised black eyes caused when they poke themselves with the fist they were drawing back to take a jab at theism. Do you see what I'm getting at?

Dawkins and Hawkins' sad has-been, the reptillian or mammalian brain, the "old brain," St. Paul's "old man," has no God-consciousness or theism? Not one single lizard, snake, or non-human mammal, has God-consciousness or theology. That had to wait for the new brain that came with what Dawkins and Hawkins are hocking and peddling as some newfangled ability of the human mind that these clowns are just now realizing exists beyond the ken of their asinine neo-Darwinism.

All the things Dawkins and Hawkins say about the "new brain" and what its purpose and abilities are, has been stated as part of the Judeo/Christian epoch for more than four-thousand years now. Jews and Christians have been teaching, preaching, inculcating their offspring about the virtues of the new brain for thousands of years while atheists like Dawkins and Hawkins are too self-centered and ego-centric (primary qualities of the old brain) to realize, or concede, that their unwitting plagiarism of Paul the apostle to the heathen is so pagan and silly as to defy definition.

No ancient animal prayed to God. No Neanderthal sang A Mighty Fortress. And the offspring of these ancient mammals and Neanderthal are clearly, scientifically speaking [drum roll please] atheists. Atheist have yet to unlock the most precious commodity of the new brain ---God-consciousness. It's like a kid opening his present on Christ-mass and finding the coolest, badest, drone ever made. He opens it, unpacks it, and throws the battery away with the wrapping paper. ----- That's what atheists do with the new brain. They unwrap it and throw the battery ---God-consciousness---to the dogs who lap it up unaware of anything but that it tastes absolutely delicious (John 6:53).



John

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Atheist have yet to unlock the most precious commodity of the new brain ---God-consciousness. It's like a kid opening his present on Christ-mass and finding the coolest, badest, drone ever made. He opens it, unpacks it, and throws the battery away with the wrapping paper. ----- That's what atheists do with the new brain. They unwrap it and throw the battery ---God-consciousness---to the dogs who lap it up unaware of anything but that it tastes absolutely delicious (John 6:53).

Atheists are people with no need for a god belief or a religion. We're comfortable without holy books and praying. You seem to see that as a disadvantage. I see it as a release from a type of bondage. I used to be one of its captives, but I tunneled out. You seem to think the opposite - that having this need benefits you. Is that correct? Do you see faith in a god as a good thing? If so, how and why?

 

[John D. Brey]

Atheists are people with no need for a god belief or a religion. We're comfortable without holy books and praying.

Right. That's what I said. But Neanderthal had no need for God-belief or religion. Lizards, toads, and serpents, have no religion, or prayer books. All of that is the purview of the new brain not the old, atheist, mammalian, Neanderthal brain.

Atheists are under the miss-impression that belief in God is childish, or outdated; that it's something evolutionary advancement weeds out. But that's not the case. No creatures have been conscious of God in the biblical sense until relatively recently, a twinkling of the eye in cosmic time. And it's only since reaching God consciousness that man has reached the moon, Mars, and is peering out into the stars:

. . . by any conceivable standard, humanity is far and away life's greatest achievement. We are the mind of the biosphere, the solar system, and---who can say? ----perhaps the galaxy. Looking about us, we have learned to translate into our narrow audiovisual systems the sensory modalities of other organisms. We know much of the physicochemical basis of our own biology. We will soon create simple organisms in the laboratory. We have learned the history of the universe and look out almost to its edge. . . except for behaving like apes much of the time and suffering genetically limited lifespans we are godlike.​

​

Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth, p. 288-289.​

You seem to see that as a disadvantage. I see it as a release from a type of bondage. I used to be one of its captives, but I tunneled out. You seem to think the opposite - that having this need benefits you. Is that correct? Do you see faith in a god as a good thing? If so, how and why?

You weren't likely to have ever been captive to God consciousness except perhaps as a theory, or an idea (which you could discard), since once a person is truly conscious of God they're unlikely to become unconscious of God until they lose consciousness proper.

Faith is no more a good or bad thing than consciousness is a good or bad thing. Without consciousness there is no good or bad. And without faith there is no God, in which case there could, would, be no self-consciousness able to distinguish good from bad except in the most banal animal atheistic way.




John

 

[Copernicus]

I also believe consciousness survies death. My reading into various deathbed phenomena has given me sufficient grounds to maintain hope that consciousness continues after the demise of the physical body. Everyone knows about NDEs, but there are also many reports of terminal lucidity and veridical deathbed visions. Not to mention phenomena such as OBEs, apparitions, past life memories and so on.

People who insist that physical death extinguishes consciousness are pushing a dogma. I do not claim to know with certainty that an afterlife definitely exists, but I think looking into these phenomena gives us real hope that there may indeed be something there.

NDEs and OBEs do not happen to people who have died. All of them went on to describe their experiences, and there is good reason to believe that these experiences are normal in brains that undergo certain types of physical trauma.

See:

Near-Death Experiences: Neuroscience Perspectives on Near-Death Experiences​

One of the main problems with the idea that such experiences are evidence of out-of-body perceptions is that all of them refer to acts of perception that are tied to physical organs (eyes, ears, touch, etc.) in a physical body, yet the soul has allegedly left its physical body behind. It no longer has the physical equipment for binary vision or auditory input, yet it is still supposed to be receiving and interpreting physical signals (light hitting rods and cones in eyes or waves of sound causing auditory input). Nothing can be ruled out logically, but the likelihood that these experiences represent true out of body experiences is low.

 

[John D. Brey]

One of the main problems with the idea that such experiences are evidence of out-of-body perceptions is that all of them refer to acts of perception that are tied to physical organs (eyes, ears, touch, etc.) in a physical body, yet the soul has allegedly left its physical body behind. It no longer has the physical equipment for binary vision or auditory input, yet it is still supposed to be receiving and interpreting physical signals (light hitting rods and cones in eyes or waves of sound causing auditory input). Nothing can be ruled out logically, but the likelihood that these experiences represent true out of body experiences is low.

Everyone has experienced dreams that seem so real that when we wake we're sometimes shocked that we were dreaming. The visual and auditory experience in a dream doesn't rely on the eyes or ears.

There have been documented cases where someone had an out of body experience in the hospital and while out of their body they went down the hall to a room where doctors were talking about them and they repeated the discussion verbatim to the doctors when they revived to the doctor's amazement. Michael Talbot's, The Holographic Universe, documents many hard to explain phenomena that make it pretty clear we don't know as much as we think we do about such things.



John