Philosophical Question - Amiguing

[psxphill]

That doesn't follow. Damage to the brain would only have no effect on personality if the brain played absolutely no part in things beyond mechanical coordination, which I don't think most people who believe in a soul are claiming.

I was under the impression that souls were autonomous as they can carry on existing after we are dead. No religion has provided any explanation of that though, so it is possible that your brain and soul could work together and when your brain died your soul goes off in some form of emergency mode.
 

Again, though, the problem with that idea is that a "soul" that exists within a biologically-deterministic flesh-and-blood creature doesn't fit the general definition of a soul at all, because it's still (theoretically) bound by biochemical determinism.

There is no general definition of soul. I googled definition of soul and it came back with:
 
 
1. The spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal.
2. A person's moral or emotional nature or sense of identity.
 
 
The visible effects of a person's "soul" are what everyone can agree to, where that comes from is what is up for debate. Religion's don't own the word soul.
 
I believe the human "soul" is deterministic, it's just currently too impossibly complex to model it. The idea of the soul being separate came because they couldn't comprehend that anything in the human body could do something that complex, they didn't have digital watches then either though.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Did anybody read my earlier post about the meaning of the word soul? The idea of an immortal soul we owe as much to philosophy as to religion.

I'm actually with Psxphill at this moment, the soul is an emergent process. The physical laws the atoms obey might be well understood, but understanding how something works at an atomic level, and understanding what it does at the macroscopic level, are two completely different things. The "determinism" of the soul is not physical/biological determinism though, it is abstracted from that. Just like you can have machine-independent programming languages, you can have biology-independent souls, but they still need a body to run on.

[stefcep2]

The soul is simply the vehicle for immortality invented by humans to explain how people could live forever when it became obvious that dead bodies decay and can never be revived-: the body dies, but the "soul" can live forever, therefore immortality is possible.

Why is "immortality" so important to humans?  At its heart, its because humans don't want to let go of loved ones that pass away ie we'll all meet up again because we have "souls" that live forever.

Me- I try to  make the most of the time with the people that matter to me in this existence.

[Mrs Beanbag]

I found this paper a while ago, quite interesting:
http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/InstituteofCognitionCulture/FileUploadPage/Filetoupload,90230,en.pdf

The concept of the state of the dead in children is actually not a million miles away from ancient Sumerian beliefs on the subject. Perhaps we have gradually rationalised these "natural" beliefs over the centuries. But belief in the afterlife wasn't as universal in the ancient world as is commonly thought.

[Thorham]

The soul is simply the vehicle for immortality invented by humans to explain how people could live forever when it became obvious that dead bodies decay and can never be revived-: the body dies, but the "soul" can live forever, therefore immortality is possible.

Or perhaps because of the realization that there may be more than just the physical universe.

[stefcep2]

Or perhaps because of the realization that there may be more than just the physical universe.

I can't disprove that there may be more than just the physical universe.  

Or even if there is another or perhaps many more physical universes, no matter what Brian Greene thinks about it!

And believing that there is an afterlife probably helps people copes with the finality of death-by not dealing with the finality of death.

The downside is that we may end up not full appreciating *this* existence, the here and now, in the belief that there is an afterlife...which might not be there.

[commodorejohn]

The downside is that we may end up not full appreciating *this* existence, the here and now, in the belief that there is an afterlife...which might not be there.

Not that there aren't people who do this, but they don't go hand-in-hand.

(And it's bad theology in a number of different religions, anyway, since what you do in this life usually counts big-time even if the end of this life isn't the end of you.)

[Mrs Beanbag]

Interesting/relevant article in the news today:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8593748.stm