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[MaximumZero]

Well, Yoink, we can have a peaceful discussion of our thoughts on the universe. Instead of going, "YOU'RE WRONG, STUPID!" we can get each other to say, "Huh. I didn't see it that way before." If we're open, honest and frank about our beliefs and views, and everyone remains calm, we can increase the enlightenment of everyone.

[Hanslanda]

Exactly. It would be boring, foolish and trite if this thread just devolved into typical bullshit, so its up to everyone who posts here to be intelligent and thoughtful about their posts, as well as consider what everyone else has said. Sure, people are going to be upset when you start poking holes in the whole 'soul' thing. I experienced some consternation myself. But if I just posted the first thing that came to mind, I'd be a troll, and I don't want that. I want us all to be real people trying to help each other, instead of faceless anonymous constructs throwing piles of shit at each other.
Which is why I decided to back out of the discussion for the time being. Doesn't mean I don't want to hear what these people have to say, it just means I can't trust myself to be a behaved participator for the moment.

[MaximumZero]

Seems to me that you're doing just fine.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

But this just for practical purposes. For philosophical purposes the question of a soul is an interesting one.

even for a philosophical discussion, an object you would call soul would have to be defined. that's my main beef with mystical concepts; i'm ok with them being mystical, metaphysical, unprovable even, but they're not defined at all. words without a proper definition are worthless. how do you distinguish a non intervening creator from a scientific principle? how do you distinguish a ghost from a life form based on another substance other than matter? must a soul be immortal and immutable? and if it doesn't, can we accept the specific chemical configuration that defines a person's personality as a soul?
if you define a word broadly enough, anything can fit in it, and by poking holes into their mythologies, science has been pushing the mystics to take up increasingly abstract and increasingly meaningless concepts...

[alway]

But this just for practical purposes. For philosophical purposes the question of a soul is an interesting one.

even for a philosophical discussion, an object you would call soul would have to be defined. that's my main beef with mystical concepts; i'm ok with them being mystical, metaphysical, unprovable even, but they're not defined at all. words without a proper definition are worthless. how do you distinguish a non intervening creator from a scientific principle? how do you distinguish a ghost from a life form based on another substance other than matter? must a soul be immortal and immutable? and if it doesn't, can we accept the specific chemical configuration that defines a person's personality as a soul?
if you define a word broadly enough, anything can fit in it, and by poking holes into their mythologies, science has been pushing the mystics to take up increasingly abstract and increasingly meaningless concepts...

The other problem is we know the brain does, at the very least, have a major effect on who we are as well as being responsible for sending the signals to our body to commit any action, be it walking or chewing; not even someone with a strong belief in souls can refute this obvious fact. Additionally, for the claim of the soul to have any sort of interaction with our body (and anything, including personality or actions falls under this broad category of interaction), there must be some transition point. By very definition, in order for this transition point to be effected by a cause outside of known physics, we should observe strange energy readings/effects which violate known physics; because if we didn't, it would be explainable using known physics.

This idea was original envisioned century/s ago, and it was expected we would therefor find a sub-organ in the brain which acted like a remote control car's receiver; but for interaction with an external soul. No such region of the brain was found. The idea was then posited that perhaps it wasn't a single centralized region of control, but rather was distributed into special nodules or cells clusters in the brain. No such thing was found. So it was then posited that perhaps sub-cellular quantum randomness was at play. However, this too would have been detected as vast statistical anomalies in the brain; nerve cells consist of so many atoms as to render such quantum effects either nonexistent or such obvious statistical anomalies as to be immediately recognizable. No such thing was found.

Without this very critical interface between the nervous system and the soul, the entire idea of a soul being involved with any actions done by the body is blown out of the water. At the very most, you could have a 1-way transmission from physical universe to magic-soul-universe, as we would, and haven't, been able to observe a transmission from the magic-soul-universe to the physical universe.

Furthermore, aspects of your mind can be not only disabled (as would be case in a remote-control-body soul scenario), but can be fundamentally changed by changing the brain. As the previously mentioned case of Phineas Gage brings up, the destruction of part of the brain completely changed his personality. Similarly, modern experiments using electromagnets have temporarily disabled parts of the brain. They have even changed people's sense of morality temporarily using such systems. Mind altering drugs will also quite literally alter your mind; be they the illegal sort or prescribed mood-changers.

In summary, dualism is dead. You are the meat in your head.

[Descan]

Posting to Watch.

[kaijyuu]

Rant time! I'm on the offensive here, so feel free to stand up and defend yourself here if I'm attacking your position.



Burden of Proof


Many times I hear people saying "don't ask me to prove you wrong." Which is a fair thing to say... but it's not always in response to people actually asking to be proven wrong.

I'm agnostic. I make no claim. I put no weight behind any of my arguments; they're all idle musings, random hypotheses. The most you'll get out of me is gut feeling, and "this is how I'd like it to be." But if pressured, I will NOT put any real support behind any specific assertion.

More than once I've been responded to with people trying to shove burden of proof on me (not here, thankfully). Trying to get me to provide evidence when the very heart of my position is that there IS no evidence*. These people are silly, thinking they don't have to defend their arguments. Hypocrites doing exactly what they accuse others of doing: circular logic claiming self evidence.

So let's get something straight: Burden of proof lies on those making a claim. Those saying "this is how it is." It doesn't matter WHAT the claim is, just so long as the claim is presented as a statement of fact. Atheism, theism, anything about the nature of the afterlife or supernatural, all of it. If you make a claim about it, just as if you claim knowledge or fact about anything, then you provide evidence**. Not anyone else. I don't care if your position is under the label "true" or "false," "right" or "wrong." It is not self evident***.



*Exceptions:
1) Religions that claim something empirical. That is something that can have evidence for or against it, proven right or wrong. IE, this dude at this period of time did this thing.
2) Contradictions. Logical incompatibilities within a religion (or other theory concerning the supernatural) can be used as evidence that it's wrong, or at least flawed. IE, invisible pink unicorns.

**Reasons you might not need to provide evidence:
1) Not claiming knowledge. Essentially your claim carries as much weight (honestly, even less) as the claim that the horse you bet on will win the race. IE, belief or hope.
2) Not claiming belief. This carries even less weight than #1, if that were possible. IE, idle musings.

***:
Invariably someone's going to counter this with a teapot. So I'll respond to it right now. There are some questions where the answer makes no practical difference. No matter your conclusion, your perception of the world is unchanged and you'll do nothing different. That's fine. However, while "may as well be false/true" is practically identical to "is false/true," it is not actually the same. It is a fallacy to jump from lack of knowledge -> knowledge. You can come to whatever conclusion you want, and thus claim belief, but you can never claim knowledge through this.

[MaximumZero]

Thank you, kaijyuu, that was very well said.

[Leafsnail]

Rant time! I'm on the offensive here, so feel free to stand up and defend yourself here if I'm attacking your position.

What's the point of defending yourself against someone who says that they "put no weight behind any of [their] arguments" ?

More seriously, most atheists if pressed (this includes Dawkins, incidentally) will say that they are slightly agnostic, but to such a tiny degree it isn't really worth caring about.  I agree, as I'd rather reserve the label "agnostic" for things where I genuinely feel the evidence is insufficient or conflicted rather than every unfalsifiable idea ever.

[Karlito]

It depends on how you define your terms really. Atheism can simply be a non-belief in god (weak atheism, negative atheism, agnostic atheism) or it can be an assertion that there is no god (strong atheism, positive atheism, gnostic atheism). For me it differs depending on the given definition of "God" (and there's a different definition for every believer). I can't really say anything either way about an abstract Deist God, but I'm pretty confident when I assert that Zeus isn't going around throwing lighting bolts and turning into birds to have sex with women.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

While it is not impossible for a god to theoretically exist, most if not all of the gods espoused by current and past religions are factually disprovable.

[Hiiri]

So let's get something straight: Burden of proof lies on those making a claim. Those saying "this is how it is." It doesn't matter WHAT the claim is, just so long as the claim is presented as a statement of fact. Atheism, theism, anything about the nature of the afterlife or supernatural, all of it. If you make a claim about it, just as if you claim knowledge or fact about anything, then you provide evidence**. Not anyone else. I don't care if your position is under the label "true" or "false," "right" or "wrong." It is not self evident***.

How is not believing something "making a claim"? You're either a theist or an atheist, there is no position in the middle. You either believe a claim or you don't.

[cerapa]

How is not believing something "making a claim"? You're either a theist or an atheist, there is no position in the middle. You either believe a claim or you don't.

There are two possibilities you currently see: "There is no god" and "There is a god". Both of them are claims. The middle position you seek is "I am uncertain about the existance of gods." Which is not a claim, but a lack of one. In my case it acts as the negative claim for practical purposes, simply for being, more practical as far as I understand.

[MagmaMcFry]

How is not believing something "making a claim"? You're either a theist or an atheist, there is no position in the middle. You either believe a claim or you don't.

There are two possibilities you currently see: "There is no god" and "There is a god". Both of them are claims. The middle position you seek is "I am uncertain about the existance of gods." Which is not a claim, but a lack of one. In my case it acts as the negative claim for practical purposes, simply for being, more practical as far as I understand.

Here's something interesting: Even if you can't know if God exists, there is something about God that we definitely do know, namely that there is no observable strong evidence for God. Because if there were, we'd know about it. Simply put: The existence of atheists disproves the influence of God.

[cerapa]

How is not believing something "making a claim"? You're either a theist or an atheist, there is no position in the middle. You either believe a claim or you don't.

There are two possibilities you currently see: "There is no god" and "There is a god". Both of them are claims. The middle position you seek is "I am uncertain about the existance of gods." Which is not a claim, but a lack of one. In my case it acts as the negative claim for practical purposes, simply for being, more practical as far as I understand.

Here's something interesting: Even if you can't know if God exists, there is something about God that we definitely do know, namely that there is no observable strong evidence for God. Because if there were, we'd know about it. Simply put: The existence of atheists disproves the influence of God.

There is always the possibility of god messing with our perceptions to make us not believe in it. But that is kinda a problem with empirical science that cannot be fixed. Probabilities and stuff get weird when your perceptions might be greatly altered.

And that is why I am philosophically agnostic. For practical purposes we are already screwed if we were altered like that, so we gotta go with the axiom that our perceptions are correct.