You need to read the entire exchange between augie and me. I was only saying that an incorporeal soul is difficult to reconcile with atheism. He argued that it is easy, it would only require the soul to be proven. Then I argued that if the soul were proven, he would probably no longer be an atheist, so my point was intact.

I agree that even if there is a soul, it is actually quite possible for science to be unable to detect it.

True. But that was not my question. My question was, would it change your confidence in atheism?

I gotcha. And to be fair, it still might NOT convince me to lose the atheism, but it would put a pretty heavy dent in my worldview.

I don't think one can prove the existence of the soul. The problem is that if the soul doesn't exist then materialism must be true, and as C.S. Lewis and Victor Reppert have shown by the argument from reason, materialism is self-refuting. Therefore, if materialism is false, some form of dualism must be true.

it's unthinkable that the soul could be proven outside of science and experiments. science is the only way we prove anything.

if it were proven that the immortal soul exists it wouldn't convince me theism is true. i think it would be strong evidence for reincarnation too. and we already know that reincarnation is true for our individual atoms.

theism could be proven true pretty easily without proving the soul but since the abrahamic god is an idiot he prefers to play cosmic hide and seek instead of revealing himself to the world like he revealed himself to abraham.

This statement is obviously untrue. The square root of two is irrational, proven by mathematics without any experiments.

mathematics is a science...

I would rather not have this discussion derailed, but for others reading on the subject, here's a Critical Review of Victor Reppert's Defense of the Argument from Reason.

yes, but i wouldn't be signing up as a theist either.

Lol. I am done for tonight. Time for a glass of scotch. It cannot get any better.

i bet aaron will agree with me. at the very least i bet he would agree that they are identical in the rigor used to deal with the idea of proof.

edit: if anything mathematics is much more stringent than science regarding proof, so even if you want to declare them different, i don't really care.

hopefully you can name another branch of knowledge that will be used to prove the soul because i'll take both math and science!

I don't think it's quite as clear cut as you're making it out to be (btw I don't feel strongly one way or another on this issue, and generally despise getting into semantics)

http://www.arachnoid.com/is_math_a_science/index.html

This is no more true than saying smashing your tv with a sledge hammer will kill godzilla forever.

These things you list tamper with the body which carries the soul, or if you want to say the filter we see other's souls through (their bodies).

If you bash someones' head in their soul remains untouched. The vehicle, however, can be broken.

The soul hypothesis can never be tested, afterlife can never be touched by science. It can't be touched by man.

Face life without reflecting on it...theres a scary thought.

If it's an invisible ethereal Godzilla then you're right.

How do you know?

How do you know?

How do you know?

I think the Atomists shouldn't not be using the word soul then. Soul's definition should include the word immaterial.

I'm talking about how a child or a caveman might think that godzilla is 'in' the tv.

Even if I didn't 'know' the test could not prove a soul doesn't exist.


Not my thread to derail though.

Again, to make sure we're on the same page, I define soul as "the immaterial part of a person or living thing that contribute's to the person in some way (e.g. personality or emotions or memories)". If there is a soul, in my mind, this is how it would work. It is something that constantly "works", invisibly since its immaterial, to cause a person to have a personality and self awareness while he/she is alive on Earth. It does not have to be something that causes, say, one to switch to REM sleep or to involuntarily jerk one's hand away from a hot stove. These can have physical causes. But personality cannot have an entirely physical cause if there exists a soul. Upon physical death, this is how someone continues existing, by the immaterial soul (notice if you don't include "immaterial" in soul's definition, then you can't believe in life after death).


Anyway, I would say that the difference between you and that computer is not the soul. The difference is that you have more complex material stuff than the computer, and this extra stuff is what is responsible for your self awareness compared to the computer. If you add enough physical stuff (e.g. circuits, wires, act) to that computer, there will come a point where that computer becomes "aware" in the same way you are aware. It might take a lot of stuff, so much stuff that it may take millions of years of advances in artificial intelligence for that point to be reached (we humans have 85,000,000,000 neurons).

I have no problem with the first paragraph. That seems reasonable.

My problem is with the second paragraph. The bold statement is not proven. It is a belief. It is simply another way to say "I believe there is no soul". There is certainly no way at present to prove that it is true and it may well be that there is no way ever to prove that it is true. Once the computer is complex enough to produce behavior indistinguishable from a human, there is no test that will differentiate between a computer that is "aware" and one that is not.

Agreed. So it would seem the soul is wholly unnecessary, no?

I don't think the consequence of your statement being true implies what you think it implies.

Not at all.

There is no physical theory that explains how my mind is endowed with self-awareness. The soul is an explanation.

Given the situation which you have acknowledged, there will never be a physical explanation of how my mind is endowed with self-awareness. Therefore the soul will forever be a viable explanation.

The only experiment that can distinguish between these cases is death. I will await that inevitable resolution.

Isn't this just an argument from ignorance?

we can't explain it; let's make something up

religion in a nutshell.

here's an interesting question: once we invent an artificial intelligence that's as smart as or exceeds humans, would it be immoral to turn the computer off?

Really, I have a robot in mind rather than a computer. And there IS a test to differentiate between self awareness and non-self awareness. Place a mark on the robot's forehead. Then place the robot in front of a mirror. If the robot touches the mark while looking in the mirror, it is self aware. If not, it is not self aware.

Simple test. Used currently to see which animal species are self aware (I know for certain Chimpanzees have passed the test successfully, they are self aware).

I think RLK is using self aware to mean something slightly different than the way you're using it. I mean, we could probably program a robot to pass the test you're describing now. We would only need some sort of 'robot facial recognition' software, and then program the robot to touch anything on its face that did/didn't meet certain specifications. We would probably have to program in something that compared its own movements with the mirrored movements so it could differentiate between a reflection and an identical robot.