Brain vs Soul

Davian said:

Neuroplasticity is quite fascinating, but, by your own admission, we have no direct evidence that we are more than our brain/body.

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variant said:

I would think it is always responcable as it is the system making the decisions, the question I find interesting is how dysfunctional brains are supposed to be held to the same standards as functional ones.

Our ability to make correct decisions/judgments is certainly not created equal in any case.

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Resha Caner said:

True. And so I was pointing out that in Lutheran theology, the dysfunctional nature is recognized as a bound will. Further, it is said that a bound will can't make that decision, so it must be freed.

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Smidlee said:

Any evidence we are to witness has to come from the brain unless someone can escape from their brain (people claimed to have near-death experience but we still dismiss them as direct evidence.). I don't see how direct evidence (that can be shown to someone else) would be possible since we are referring to something beyond the brain itself.

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Smidlee said:

Everything I know about the world around me comes from the five senses and that information is process by the brain so it's hard for me to imagine it could explain "me" .

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bhsmte said:

Could you clarify what you mean by a; "bound will" and give an example of one?

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Davian said:

I do not know what you mean by "beyond the brain". Where?

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It would depend on what you mean when you say "me". When I say "me", I think of it in terms used by current neuroscience and philosophers, as in this thread.

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"Maybe, Eagleman concludes. Or maybe not. It is extremely unlikely that we just happen to be living at the moment when all things will soon be explained. Previous generations claimed the same, and they were all quite wrong. The likelier scenario, he observes, is that the more we learn about the brain and consciousness, the stranger, not simpler, things will get. Here is where one of his thought experiments comes in. A parable:

" Imagine that you are a Kalahari Bushman and that you stumble upon a transistor radio in the sand. You might pick it up, twiddle the knobs, and suddenly, to your surprise, hear voices streaming out of this strange little box. … Now let’s say you begin a careful, scientific study of what causes the voices. You notice that each time you pull out the green wire, the voices stop. When you put the wire back on its contact, the voices begin again. … You come to a clear conclusion: The voices depend entirely on the integrity of the circuitry. At some point, a young person asks you how some simple loops of electrical signals can engender music and conversations, and you admit that you don’t know—but you insist that your science is about to crack that problem at any moment."

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Assuming that you are truly isolated, what you do not know is pretty much everything that you need to know: radio waves, electromagnetism, distant cities, radio stations, and modern civilization—everything outside the radio box. You would not have the capacity to even imagine such things. And if you could, Eagleman says, "you have no technology to demonstrate the existence of the waves, and everyone justifiably points out that the onus is on you to convince them." You could convince almost no one, and you yourself would probably reject the existence of such mysterious, spiritlike waves. You would become a "radio materialist." Eagleman points out at the end of his book: "I’m not asserting that the brain is like a radio, but I am pointing out that it could be true. There is nothing in our current science that rules this out."

Countless clues suggest that the human brain may function as an imperfect receiver of some transhuman signal.

William James, Henri Bergson, and Aldous Huxley all argued the same long before Eagleman. Bergson even used the same radio analogy. This is where the historian of religions—this one, anyway—steps in. There are, after all, countless other clues in the history of religions that rule the radio theory in, and that suggest, though hardly prove, that the human brain may function as a super-evolved neurological radio or television and, in rare but revealing moments when the channel suddenly "switches," as an imperfect receiver of some transhuman signal that simply does not play by the rules as we know them.

Although it relies on an imperfect technological metaphor, the beauty of the radio or transmission model is that it is symmetrical, intellectually generous, and—above all—capable of demonstrating what we actually see in the historical data, when we really look. It is symmetrical and generous in the sense that it affirms everything we have been doing for the past century or so in the humanities and the sciences (all that Aristotelian stuff about the body and the brain), and it puts back on the table much of the evidence that we have taken off as impossible or nonexistent (all that Platonic stuff about the human spirit). In this same generous, symmetrical spirit, it is not that materialism is wrong. It is that it is half-right.

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Smidlee said:

The soul would be something beyond the brain as the brain is designed to process the information coming from our five senses.

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Smidlee said:

"me" as the one who is typing to you now. You can't use the brain to prove something greater than those five senses the brain can process.

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Smidlee said:

Here is an interesting article on the subject : Embrace the Unexplained - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Davian said:

I still do not see why you have brought this word 'soul' into this conversation. Where is it, and what does it do? How do we test that?


Still too vague. Is the "me" that you refer to include your fingers? Do you see the problem of using the common vernacular? Try using the nomenclature that Metzinger uses in that video I linked to.

Interesting, but seems to boil down to wishful thinking.

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Smidlee said:

You can study the brain by using the brain but have to use your soul to study the soul.

Not wish thinking but trying to thinking outside the box which modern day scientist do all the time. I find naturalist are guilty of a lot of wishful thinking.

As long as I'm alive and my body is functioning correctly then yes my fingers is a part of my will and person.

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Smidlee said:

You can study the brain by using the brain but have to use your soul to study the soul.

Not wish thinking but trying to thinking outside the box which modern day scientist do all the time. I find naturalist are guilty of a lot of wishful thinking.

As long as I'm alive and my body is functioning correctly then yes my fingers is a part of my will and person.

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bhsmte said:

What soul? Show it to me.

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Smidlee said:

If I can "show it" to you it wouldn't be a "soul". That would require the soul somehow can effect electromagnetic waves directly which in turn would be naturalism.

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bhsmte said:

Show me it exists.

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Smidlee said:

If I can "show it" to you it wouldn't be a "soul". That would require the soul to effect electromagnetic waves directly which in turn would be naturalism.

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Smidlee said:

It's within you. Without that I might as well trying to prove the soul to a rock.

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Davian said:

If you cannot show it to anyone, why should they think it exists? Maybe you are just making it up.

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Smidlee said:

The most important things in my life are not things I can simply pull out of my pocket and show someone.

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Davian said:

How am I to know that you are not just making up this "soul" thing?

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Davian said:

How am I to know that you are not just making up this "soul" thing?

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