Philosophical Question - Amiguing

[psxphill]

Oh does it I'm glad you know everything.
 
So do tell me, where does my imagination get it from?

At a fundamental level it's chemical releases caused by pattern matching.
 
Ideas that feel right match patterns that trigger chemicals that hit the pleasure sensors.
 
If you want to know how the brain works then there is plenty of information from the scientific community, not so much from the religious community.
 

Our physical bodies certainly are, but is that all there's to it?

There is no proof either way, most religions do require you to believe there is more to it.
 
Science isn't as bold as religion in an answer to that question. A scientific answer would be, does there need to be anything more for the system to work? Is what we consider a soul just the configuration of neurons in the brain?
 
Science can't prove there isn't a soul, isn't a god or that god doesn't communicate directly with a soul. A scientist will only ever offer proof for an alternative explanation. Religion requires you to believe in things with no proof.
 
There is very little different in a theist and an atheist. An atheist disbelieves in all religions, a theist disbelieves in all but one religion. I don't know what makes someone believe in one religion over others, when none of them offer proof. It seems to me that people fall in love with religion the same way they fall in love with people.

[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.