Our emotions are physical in nature. Biological effects can have deep and profound effects on our true selves...

>Our emotions are physical in nature. Biological effects can have deep and profound effects on our true selves. Degenerative diseases of the brain can erode personality, brain damage can cause sudden changes in character, tumors can alter our feelings and biochemical imbalances radically swing our moods. Neurologists have delved deep into the brain and discovered that depression, love, niceness, politeness, aggression, abstract thinking, judgement, patience, instincts and memories have turned out to have biochemical causes, not spiritual ones, and can all be radically affected by brain damage and brain surgery. This is all only possible if consciousness and emotions are all physical, with no need for soul theory.

>If there was a soul, brain damage could not also damage our emotional feelings: but it does. Electrical stimulation of the brain causes actual desire to arise instantly. If memory, behavior and emotions are all controlled by the physical brain, what is a soul for? Any free will it exerts is promptly overridden by biological chemistry hence why so many diseases have an uncontrollable effect on personality. Modern science proves that the idea of souls is misguided. Everything is biological.

Then how do you propose we solve the hard problem OP?

Memory? Write so much that your "soul" is embedded into lines of text. Immortality. Your thoughts repeating whenever anyone reads them. Nietzsche, Montaigne, Plato, St Augustine, Voltaire... all immortal.

No, I mean the hard problem of consciousness which is essentially asking why people have individual subjective preferences even though they receive the same neurological stimuli.

Back to plebbit

Qualia is subjective cause our brains are all different to each other... Pretty simple?
Now why qualia exist could be as simple as
>Any DYNAMIC (as in its structure changes on the micro level constantly, moving/"loose" parts) computer that's complex enough will achieve qualia.
Our brains function like tiny "hive minds" working as a one. Each neuron acting in unison yet individually, each brain region doing the same.

>Qualia is subjective cause our brains are all different to each other

>why people have individual subjective preferences even though they receive the same neurological stimuli.

Throw a ball against a wall it bounces a certain way.
Throw the same ball the exact same way but against a different wall.
And it will bounce differently.

>Everything is biological.

I agree but it is a depressing worldview destined to failure.

If you look at it with old eyes.
Those guys eastwards and pagans had a point.
The cycle. Death and new life, not rebirth.

There is no counter for nihilism.

It is the depressing truth of life that we live for no reason but to be slaves to our evolutionary programming.

>There is no counter for nihilism.

...

This pretty much proves the point.

...

Watch as Schopenhauer elegantly btfo's of materialism in one simple off hand paragraph.

>[Materialism] seeks the primary and most simple state of matter, and then tries to develop all the others from it; ascending from mere mechanism, to chemism, to polarity, to the vegetable and to the animal kingdom. And if we suppose this to have been done, the last link in the chain would be animal sensibility - that is knowledge - which would consequently now appear as a mere modification or state of matter produced by causality. Now if we had followed materialism thus far with clear ideas, when we reached its highest point we would suddenly be seized with a fit of the inextinguishable laughter of the Olympians. As if waking from a dream, we would all at once become aware that its final result - knowledge, which it reached so laboriously, was presupposed as the indispensable condition of its very starting-point, mere matter; and when we imagined that we thought matter, we really thought only the subject that perceives matter; the eye that sees it, the hand that feels it, the understanding that knows it. Thus the tremendous petitio principii reveals itself unexpectedly.

Is he arguing that since we need a mind to think about matter it cannot exist without a mind to think about it? Or am I lost here?

Even if souls were real they would be emotionless because what we call emotions are just biological chemicals.

pretty much

A very Lovecraftian post

Well that's disappointing.

So was he the originator of the "If a tree fall in the forest" question?

What's disappointing is the materialist's handwaving to said question.

Because it's ridiculous.

Things existed before there were people to witness them so they must not need people to witness them to exist.

>because i said so

>nothing existed before people

Do you believe we rode around on dinosaurs?

>How Can Mirrors Be Real If Our Eyes Aren't Real

great argument

this but unironically

>great argument

No it's not. It's stupid, and yet it counters your even stupider argument. We are the special Olympians of fucking philosophical debate here, nobody is really winning.

>ur wrong cuz dinosaurs n shiet
really activated my almonds

>ur wrong cuz if I can't see it, it ain't fo real.

my jimmies are beginning to rustle.

except that's true.

You must live like a dog.

Are you surprised to see the sun return to you every morning?

congratulations. you have the sentient ability of a 1 year old human.

observe the rabid redditor as his ideology is threatened

We've gone from serious, to ridiculous, to humorous, and onto just sad.

You make me sad.

I don't want to talk to you anymore.

You dont offer anything to the discussion. Just stop replying.

you've described the redditors posting in this thread.

I don't know why I'm reddit, I'm not on Veeky Forums often so I may have missed some "these are the right opinions on this board" threads.
And I never browse reddit. In fact, how can you know it's reddit? To know what is reddit you have to browse it regularly yes?

Some religions consider the soul to be a different thing than personality/consciousness y'know?

In fact mixing the "persona" with the soul is viewed as a great confusion by some

So just follow your evolutionary programming and realise it was your purpose all along and it will bring you happiness. Marry (pair bond) and reproduce and make sure the genetic code that is you lives forever.

There is no hard problem. Brains "give rise" to consciousness in the same way that H2O "gives rise" to water - they're merely different levels of analysis of the same phenomena. Expecting a deeper explanation is absurd.

As yes the "soul as cosmic parasite" """theory""". Remind me again why I should care what happens to a "soul" that is not in any sense "me"?

i think you'd find most religions separate the eternal soul from material personality/emotion