Whats a soul ?

Depends on what you mean by 'clearly established.'

From: http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/ConsciousRealism2.pdf
Conscious Realism
and the Mind-Body Problem
Donald D. Hoffman
Department of Cognitive Science
University of California at Irvine, USA

Abstract

Despite substantial efforts by many researchers, we still have no scientific theory of how brain activity can create, or be, conscious experience. This is troubling, since we have a large body of correlations between brain activity and consciousness, correlations normally assumed to entail that brain activity creates conscious experience. Here I explore a solution to the mind-body problem that starts with the converse assumption: these correlations arise because consciousness creates brain activity, and indeed creates all objects and properties of the physical world. To this end, I develop two theses. The multimodal user interface theory of perception states that perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to that world. Conscious realism states that the objective world consists of conscious agents and their experiences; these can be mathematically modeled and empirically explored in the normal scientific manner.

From Conclusion:

Nobody explains everything. If you want to solve the mind-body problem you can take the physical as given and explain the genesis of conscious experience, or take conscious experience as given and explain the genesis of the physical. Explaining the genesis of conscious experience from the physical has proved, so far, intractable. Explaining the genesis of the physical from conscious experience has proved quite feasible.

Sure, I believe in a "soul".

However I'm a materialist empiricist with an education in psychology who as far as religon goes is a agnostic atheist, so my terms for what constitutes a soul is probably not very similar to those of your average churchgoer.

It is however extremely interesting that different biological structures can generate what is seemingly fairly compatible information handling characteristics, to the extent that we can say they seem to be fairly equal (we can't _prove_ they are however, in the same manner that we can't know how it is like to be a teapot...or wait...a bat I mean).

What we are now guessing at is that even though our bodies' neural nets can be different in how hubs/clusters/pathways pop up, they still generate electromagnetic "patterns" that are very similar...these patterns then, we can guess is what actually constitutes your reality, not the neural nets in and off themselves.

So somewhere along this chain of fairly weird phenomena there is something that causes us to be...well....er...human and to feel conscious. Heritage, environment, physics or whatnot...it's still something that qualifies as a soul. Though ofcourse, I wouldn't _call_ it a soul if I was writing some professional essay on the matter, but still...the beauty of the concept does seem to deserve a word of such scope when discussing it more freely.

Would anyone agree a "soul" would mean the deeper parts of your brain that is hard to access.

I've read his statement you quoted and this part over and over for about 10 minutes now and still cannot figure out what you are trying to say here.

1. If materialism is true it follows that we would expect things which affect the brain to also affect our mind.
2. We observe that things which affect the brain also affect our mind.
3. Therefore, Materialism is true.

This is a logical fallacy (as materialism could be false, yet things which affect the brain could still affect our mind).

Thanks again, Bunny.

That's true, I guess I didn't articulate it perfectly. I understand that we have "conscious" and "emotion", I feel the "soul" is what gives that to us as opposed to just being my consciousness. If that makes sense. It's also something I haven't bothered to think too deeply about before.

[QUOTE=duffe;24700458]Depends on what you mean by 'clearly established.'

From: http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/ConsciousRealism2.pdf
Conscious Realism
and the Mind-Body Problem
Donald D. Hoffman
Department of Cognitive Science
University of California at Irvine, USA

I posted a thread about this in SMP. Along with a few of it's implications. If you get a chance let me know what you think. I called it God and Creators.

no

I understand what affirming the consequent is, I just do not understand how it applies to assuming that the mind is entirely derived from the brain until we either find a better explanation or some new piece of information that does not fit with that idea. In other words, why should we not assume that the brain makes us 'us' when we know that it is at least part of it and we do not have anything that alters 'us' that cannot at least potentially be explained by our brains? Many of the theists in this forum like to trot out the 'well we cannot claim something about X until we know every specific thing about X with absolute certainty' nonsense and it just gets old. When you get right down to it, it is really nothing more than the 'prove god does not exist' argument.

Id agree soul is just another word for brain.

The soul is a just a term for "who you are deep down inside"

Embodiment and essence (non-hippy/religious version)

** funny, to me, how every definition is tied to the mind and/or body up until you die.. then it just magically detaches itself and becomes free

Pretty well covers it.
"you can't explain the soul."
" yes I can. let's talk about it - what color is it? , what ... "

Sure - there are lots of arguments for assuming materialism or for taking it as a working hypothesis. The one Concerto was responding to was not a good one.

You're right that "there might be something else" is not a good reason for believing in any non-physical component of mental phenomena. It's not relevant to the existence of the above logical fallacy, but it's correct.