Does the Soul exist...

that's completely twisting it around. you are one positing that consciousness requires some special non-matter matter.

No I'm not. The mind is completely immaterial and separate to the body. The entity that controls our physical body could be called the 'soul'. There is no evidence that consciousness can come from inanimate matter at all, so we must conclude the mind is something seperate

the real question that needs to be answered in moving this conversation forward is:

Does consciousness happen on a material level, or a non-material level?

Except you know, drugs, alcohol and brain damage, sleep deprivation, etc. which evidently affects cognitive function.

Does damaging your CPU change the software that runs on it?

>There is no evidence that consciousness can come from inanimate matter at all, so we must conclude the mind is something seperate

We have no evidence that souls exists, so occam's razor suggests that consciousness CAN come from inanimate matter. After all, there's no real reason why it couldn't.

Is comparing the mind to a computer not self-defeating?

>After all, there's no real reason why it couldn't
Matter cannot create something insubstantial.

where do values and ideas exist? what part of my brain creates courage/beauty?

where does math exist?

Light doesn't have substance, yet reactions of matter create it all the time. And if computer programs can be stored in matter, who is to say that consciousness has to be something insubstantial in the first place?

Lol photons have mass

>Light doesn't have substance
Then how do you see? Something is interacting with your retina. Light is very different than something like an idea which exists purely as an abstract concept without any physical form whatsoever.

Our brains are inanimate matter? Really?

That sounds like bullshit to me.

What makes consciousness different? After all, it has to interact with your brain as well. You certainly COULD posit some kind of quintessence that allows your otherwise insubstantial consciousness to interact with your brain, but why would you need to? Occam's razor. There's no real reason why consciousness would NEED to be something insubstantial in the first place.

>the mind must be insubstantial because it doesn't proceed from matter
>light is insubstantial
>light cannot be insubstantial because it interacts with the eye
Well, you've certainly proven your mind to be insubstantial, at least.

Alright I'm bored so I'll bite.
Photons are quanta of electromagnetism. They're as substantial as ripples in a pond.

What is thought? When you read what is that voice in your head giving voice to the words? You can 'hear' it, but it is a completely immaterial phenomenon occurring. Can you tell me of any other interaction of matter that creates something completely without physical form?

Neurons firing in your brain. It's certainly a pleasant idea that there's something more to it, but "I feel that there must be something more to it" isn't much of an argument.

If light was insubstantial then it wouldn't be able to interact with anything. Insubstantial, without substance. You can only see because your retina is interacting with something with substance.

And if consciousness was insubstantial, it wouldn't be able to interact with anything. Therefore, consciousness must have substance.

nooooo. neurons firing in your brain are happy/sad. which neurons created religion?

Hell if I know, I'm not a neurologist.

Sure.
A dot used to denote a single instance of something carries the insubstantial concept of one by modifying or creating something substantial. This can also be done in reverse to end up with the logical fallacy you fell into.

Your mind creates the meaning. The dot itself creates nothing.

Is vitalism true? It seems reasonable to conclude that it does since it is an impossibility for life to be derived from inanimate matter.

So the mind is capable of interacting with "substance" which by your own admission requires the mind to have substance.

No because inanimate means nothing from a physics standpoint.
It's just degrees of complexity coupled with the human desire to have meaning in life.

mind/brain issue

dogs are conscious. dogs dont derive meaning from things

dogs dont kill each other over prophets. but they are conscious

>inanimate matter

The electrochemical environment of the brain is hardly inanimate. Its highly highly complex, literally the frontier of science. We know more about space than we know about the human brain.

>Dogs don't derive meaning
Literally pavlovs dogs.

Pavlovian responses are unconscious, but there is evidence that the smarter dogs can be taught numeracy.

There are no inanimate matter, just slow matter and fast matter.

I believe inanimate refers to collections of matter that do not follow rules to maximise their probability of replicating themselves.

> since it is an impossibility for conscious thought to be derived from inanimate matter
I'd love to why this is suddenly an accepted premise. Here I was thinking neurons do the thinking.

Computer programs can self replicate, they don't have souls.

Everyone with an asinine urge to say shit like "Muh x can't arise from y" without a proper justification should take a really long hard look at themselves. This is embarrassing.

So much about this universe we ALREADY KNOW arises from simpler properties. Literally all particles that make us are timeless, and yet we're here experiencing time. Fluid dynamics arise from simplistic particle physics. Absurdly varietous chemical interactions arise from much simpler atomic properties. What the fuck do you know that makes it impossible for consciousness to be a certain form of information processing?

Soul of the Gaps.

If science can't explain it 100%, then there's a Go-Soul.

That's because we have no empirical evidence for the existence of the soul and thus can't device a method of detecting the existence of computer program based souls.

There's no computer program souls. Just as there is no extra-terrestrial soul that go inside matter and control the matters.

Ur dum.

I'll need a more specific thing than just "soul". What defines it can vary from religion to religion, place to place and even person to person. Is it a ethereal manifestion that could exist without a body, can it interact with our world, can it reeincarnate? does it go somewhere after the body dies or does it also die? Because if it can't interact with the physical world or live without a body, reincarnate, posses, exist on it's own... than it's just called consciousness. If it can do any of these, I'll need some evidence other than what the vatican says.

No, but it changes the way the software functions. Now, if you change the hard drive, yes, it does. Never tried to play a game with a fucked up cartrige?

I'll give you a starter on Buddhism.

Buddhists define human identity and human consciousness. Human identity is what each individual thinks is himself, the body, the memories, the name, etc. The consciousness is the awareness of these things.

However Buddhists derive the human identity is not fixed and always in change and not eternal.

They identify that non-buddhists hold the idea of soul as ever lasting, eternal and reincarnating. However in the Buddhist examination of the self reveals no such thing.

It does. Depending on the type of damage, it can have different consequences. If its severe, then the software cannot run. If the damage takes place in some transistors, then it will give off inaccurate readings. Calculating PI for example to nth number would shit up or something. If its bad current/frequency, then software could crash the whole system.

Just because you don't see it as non material it doesn't mean it isn't. It's all chemical reactions, that's why hormones, drugs, temperature and direct damage to the brain can change behavior.

My dad recently when through a surgerie to remove his thyroid, and his personality changed and continues to change as the doctors change his prescription of hormones.

>since it is an impossibility for conscious thought to be derived from inanimate matter
[citation needed]
(Plus that particular matter is pretty animated.)

Given that all evidence of conscious thought, as well as the nature and process of those thoughts, can be altered in any number of ways by messing with what you refer to as "inanimate matter" - that doesn't leave much of anything for a soul to do.

If there are souls, all testable evidence suggests they probably have nothing to do with consciousness, or thought, or memory, as all these things seem stored and alterable from within the material body.

I think he's trying to say (in his ass backwards computer illiterate metaphor) is that your CPU brain processes your thoughts and personality, which is stored somewhere else and most likely sent through a mystical ethernet port. So even though the brain can be damaged, there's still your personality and warm fuzzy stuff that all exists off site and is unharmed
All it made me want to do is hurt him really fucking badly, along with anyone who uses computer shit in a metaphor when they don't know what they're talking about. That shit seriously pisses me off

Clapping your hands. Sound isn't a material in form of a 3d ripple that goes through everything, it's matter being affect by an action. There's no such thing as heat, that's just how you perceive that something is energy release on a atomic level.

That's what your thoughts are: the way you perceive chemical reactions going on in your brain.

It doesn't, everything that defines our identity can be changed: memory, personality, body

Even if I where to ignore biology, that idea that religion is something inherent to the human soul is fucking stupid. You think one day someone, isolated out of everything decided to write the bible? Even in the most ridiculous religions, it's expected that a supernatural entity will tell what's up to many people for many years.

>I make a program to do a thing
>it gets a soul, out of the blue
>it keeps doing the thing I made it do it

So in your concept, a soul is both insubstancial and useless?

The soul is the form of the body, bro

Occam was a fifthly nominalist. Read Aristotle you degenerate

Radio with the volume off. Vidya game with the monitor unplugged. I mean, yeah, the puter is still "imagining" it's little PhysX world with all interactions and rules involved, but it isn't interacting with the outside world. Much the same as a dreaming brain. That voice in your head while reading is merely your internal text to speech process and imagination - it doesn't make it any more real than any other internalized process in any other being or machine, save that you can perceive it in yourself, while you may not in another.

>which neurons created religion?
^

The identity changes, but concious doesn't? And what happens to their "soul" when they die?

He said buddhists dont believe in the soul/self so at least Not in an individual one

>If its severe, then the software cannot run.
Problem with this idea that the body is a computer remotely controlled by a soul, is that there's no comparable system that cannot be isolated and affected within the local body. The "hardware" and the "software" are all contained therein, and the only "networking" occurs with other bodies and the material world. There is no thought, no memory, no identity, that isn't tied directly to the state of material body or stored in the memory of another material body or object.

So if there is some sort of undetectable soul, its existence cannot be inferred by any action the mind or body might take. It has no effect on the material world, and, like the old p-zombie problem, there'd be no way to tell apart someone under the control of a soul, and material body merely reacting as it should.

Nonetheless, we all know consciousness and perception happens, even if we can only prove it to ourselves, and simply politely assume that everyone else is having some similar experience. At the same time, this same experience suggests that said perception and consciousness is entirely dependant on the state of the body, and altering the body alters consciousness. There's no communicable evidence to suggest otherwise that can't more easily be chalked up to mundane causes.

Of course, by our nature, we rebel against this state of affairs, as our psyche naturally screams, "But I exist, dammit!", and can't truly imagine it ever being otherwise, even though it was clearly the case for all that countless time before we were born.

Its not such a hard idea to believe we are aware of what we are thinking. The hard idea is translating the awareness into a extra-matter composite that somehow controls matter.

If we simply take the idea that we are simply conscious but thats merely a physical by product of the complex brain chemistry, this resolves the issue of needing an extra-matter entity.

Its a simply easy explanation that satisfies all but the hardcore theists who believe god puts something in body and that something moves across matter and into a different place/different body.

More or less agree, yet the mind still rebels against this idea - we really shouldn't be conscious, in the grander sense, simply because we are complex, and what's worse, is that we can't really prove that we are conscious, only that we react as if we are, as any physical body of our makeup should.

How or why this complex system gives rise to our individual perception maybe an unanswerable or incommunicable question. It maybe that, in the end, the reliance on all this mystical stuff to fill those gaps may never really go away, even as it becomes increasingly unsatisfying, as more and more questions surrounding the unanswerable are answered.

We already know complex things can be generated by simple things. Particle physics is one grand science that exemplifies this case. An example of even simpler one is the double pendulum experiment, which shows the chaotic nature of the world.

So to suggest that complex things like consciousness are impossible or shouldn't be possible requires a faith rather than fact.

As for the nature of perception, that is something will most likely be done in the coming 21st century, if not 22nd century. The nature of mind/body problem will be solved at least for the scientific curious with the rise of nano computers and advancing artificial intelligence.

>itt: A dumbass OP, 19 shitposters and one of the worst logical fallacies I've seen this week.

Here's the problem, though: Occam's razor should apply favorably to the existence of a simple, unilateral concept that engenders the soul. What other process can be so simple, in order to explain such an inherently known, necessary concept?

It's clear I'm thinking right now, and the easiest and most sane way to justify that is by saying that I, as an individual, have a soul. Of course, you can define that in many ways, but the point stands yet that I must be conscious of some nature because of some process.

>easiest and most sane way
>oh yes, I have an invisible extra-matter entity controlling my skeletons
>oh don't forget once I die, that extra-matter entity will fly off from the body and into either a baby or another all powerful and invisible extra-matter entity will pull the extra-matter entity up into heaven

You need to reconsider your word choice.

Including the soul is adding a layer of complexity not taking it away.
Disgusting tripfag.

>Does the Soul exist?

Does a dog have legs? Yes.
How do I know that? Because I know what a dog is, and I know what a leg is - and I know that the one thing is part of the other.

Does the Soul exist?
Tell me what you mean by the word "soul" - otherwise I can't answer your question.
For example "souls" in the way Aristotle meant the word, clearly exist, but I doubt you mean the same thing when you use the word "soul".

Prove it

Are you shitting me? You think chemicals reactions, which is something we know well for two centuries, is more complex than something no one was able to define or to prove it exist?

Not like literally anything else has been derived from inanimate matter, especially stuff we don't fully understand.

Oh wait, literally everything has.

Are posters getting dumber, or just louder?

>blatant bait post
>70+ replies

It's not only Veeky Forums, Veeky Forums as a whole is completely overrun by cancer.

Veeky Forums was always terrible.

Sage this foolishness.

>without any physical form whatsoever

Ideas have physical form through thoughts and patterns of electrochemical signals in the human brain.

If you damage someone's brain you can damage the way they think. Damage to certain parts of the brain consistently results in similar damage to thinking. This is clear evidence that thought is a physical action that takes place in specific regions of the brain. Further, chemicals applied to the brain also result in consistent changes to the way people think. Since physical changes to physical matter are affecting consciousness we have evidence that thought and consciousness arise from matter.

science denying faggots getting BTFO one post at a time
great job my friend

I fucking hate the humanities.

You're jacking off to an abstraction of an illusion.

This is seemingly never understood by you liberal arts loving wank puffins.

Nailed it

Can we all just cut the bullshit? There's no such thing as a "soul". There isn't some higher force driving us. We're no different than really smart animals or very complex computers.

...

This meme is over used.

can we call our awareness a soul?

if something is aware it has a soul

is that chair aware? no, no soul
is that AI aware? yes, it has a soul

pffft, fucking philosophers

>can we call our awareness a soul?

Why? I mean, I could call your mother "a human", that doesn't make it meaningful or true.

...

clearly she is aware, fits the conundrum.

feels human to me bruh

So what if our thoughts are derived from matter but behave in a way that it can't be defined as material or immaterial?

Enlighten us.

Perhaps the soul exists, but perishes with the body.

I was so hopeful, too.

You can easily counter this by comparing it to how altering a TV affects what it shows but the source isn't actually changed.

That's very possible. It may be there is some truth to neuroscience, but there has to be a spiritual element to thought, this I would defend with my life.

Consciousness or the soul, is an immaterial phenomenon that can best be explained as follows. Any sufficiently large neural structure is capable of causing a pattern to form from that chaos of its electromagnetic activity, past a certain level of complexity, this pattern becomes aware that it, in and of itself is a pattern separate the body. This is called the watcher watching.

Your soul is a multidimensional frequency, the only instruments we have which are sufficiently advanced enough to interpret these frequencies are our own bodies. We interpret them through internalized sensations as things interact with our electromagnetic fields, this is what you would call magic.

Considering its caused by matter, its on a material level.