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[Xantalos]

Hmm...
1. Get bad soul that just departed body
2. Attach windmills with generators attached to them
3. Attach many, many, many deflated helium balloons, ready to be inflated at the push of a button
4. Let sould plummet down to hell
5. Just before it reaches hell, activate balloons, sending the soul rocketing upward. When it's just about to be propelled into heaven, deflate the balloons, sending the soul rocketing back down to hell
6. Infinite energy from constant moving of the windmills.
7. Profit

How's my badly thought-out plan for you, Bay12?

[Thecard]

The soul is our humanity, our link to God and to each other.

Mine seems to be in operable; I’m not able to communicate with either.

No.  It is never inoperable.

[Itnetlolor]

Hmm...
1. Get bad soul that just departed body
2. Attach windmills with generators attached to them
3. Attach many, many, many deflated helium balloons, ready to be inflated at the push of a button
4. Let sould plummet down to hell
5. Just before it reaches hell, activate balloons, sending the soul rocketing upward. When it's just about to be propelled into heaven, deflate the balloons, sending the soul rocketing back down to hell
6. Infinite energy from constant moving of the windmills.
7. Profit

How's my badly thought-out plan for you, Bay12?

Really bad. To inefficient.

What you need is a bi-polar spirit, and make them have an existential crisis every time they reach Heaven and Hell. The swapping of spiritual polarity will then make them bounce back almost instantly each cycle. Have it happen rapidly enough, and you can conduct some serious chi. In my case, I have turned a spirit into an A/C supernatural motor.

However, the possibility of Purgatory working as a neutral zone could invite some trouble from outside sources; so we would need a way to isolate the spirit to be stuck in a pure black & white morality barrier in order for this to work most efficiently. As for Orange & Blues, along with those with grey zones, I am uncertain of their conductivity. You'll have to find particular religions those souls have been a part of if you want to find the right spiritual materials to use to make a proper supernatural motor.

Now the next problem, finding a way to make use of this new energy source. We may need a time case, and free-will wiring; but that will require some serious time-braiding. But what kind of machines can be powered by such a thing, outside an artificial god?

[Thecard]

Hmm...
1. Get bad soul that just departed body
2. Attach windmills with generators attached to them
3. Attach many, many, many deflated helium balloons, ready to be inflated at the push of a button
4. Let sould plummet down to hell
5. Just before it reaches hell, activate balloons, sending the soul rocketing upward. When it's just about to be propelled into heaven, deflate the balloons, sending the soul rocketing back down to hell
6. Infinite energy from constant moving of the windmills.
7. Profit

How's my badly thought-out plan for you, Bay12?

Like you need a shit-ton of balloons, Xan.
But, if you're going by modern interpretations of hell, you won't need to activate the balloons, the hot air from burning bodies of the damned will lift it.
Really, this could almost work in realistic settings.  Just... you'd need a lot of helium for what you have, so it wouldn't really be energy-efficient.  Replace the multiple balloons with one hot-air balloon.

[Fenrir]

No.  It is never inoperable.

Well then its turned off, or not there in the first place, because I can’t feel it, and I certainly don’t sense the presence of a deity.

[Thecard]

No.  It is never inoperable.

Well then its turned off, or not there in the first place, because I can’t feel it, and I certainly don’t sense the presence of a deity.

Doesn't mean nothing is there.
We certainly aren't all-knowing.  If we were, I'd have probably won the lottery by now.

[Xantalos]

Hmm...
1. Get bad soul that just departed body
2. Attach windmills with generators attached to them
3. Attach many, many, many deflated helium balloons, ready to be inflated at the push of a button
4. Let sould plummet down to hell
5. Just before it reaches hell, activate balloons, sending the soul rocketing upward. When it's just about to be propelled into heaven, deflate the balloons, sending the soul rocketing back down to hell
6. Infinite energy from constant moving of the windmills.
7. Profit

How's my badly thought-out plan for you, Bay12?

Really bad. To inefficient.

What you need is a bi-polar spirit, and make them have an existential crisis every time they reach heaven and Hell. The swapping of spiritual polarity will then make them bounce back. Have it happen rapidly enough, and you can conduct some serious chi. In my case, I have turned a spirit into an A/C supernatural motor.

Ooh, not bad!
Maybe we don't need windmills with generators on them - just attach a True Neutral spirit to a generator, and have the bi-polar spirit from your plan knock against him every time he goes past, generating power!
In case you're wondering, no, I know nothing about conserving energy; I run on Rule of Cool. Or Rule of Impractical.

[Fenrir]

Doesn't mean nothing is there.

You said it was a “link to God”, so I surmised it was some kind of sensor or communications unit or something. Unless you are more specific, I can’t really know what it is you are telling me.

[alway]

The trouble with brain-duping is it requires at the very least highly advanced robots which are much smaller than neurons. You can't do it when they're dead; decay of both tissue and signal occurs almost instantaneously (which is also why cryonics are a bit nebulous). In order to capture both the nervous structure and electrochemical data, you would need to pepper the brain with trillions upon trillions of nanobot sensors, ensure they were distributed to each and every nerve and synapse, and then have them all record their respective data at exactly the same moment, then have some way to retrieve that data. It's probably doable, but yeah, it's at least 50 years away, if not 100 or more. Probably well after the creation of advanced general intelligence.

Except they won't and they weren't because it doesn't work that way. Or as I like to say: Show me where the soul interfaces with the brain, and I will build you a perpetual motion machine which runs on soul power.

No one denies muscles are moved by electrical impulses in the nerves; they don't move through magic. Nerves are themselves not magic. In order for something outside physical laws to influence something material, physical laws must be broken. There would be rogue electro-chemical impulses with no physical cause, or at the absolute least, qunatum statistical improbabilities of the highest degree; in any of these cases, energy conservation is not preserved, and thus it could be used to build a perpetual motion machine. None of this happens; if it did, we would detect it; as such, there are no immaterial 'souls' driving you like an RC car.

Bro.  There's something you aren't considering: The soul is not a physical thing.  It is not the brain.  It is not our emotions.  The soul is our humanity, our link to God and to each other.
But that's a religious debate, for another time on another thread, I think.

Also, even if you could harness the power of souls, you could not make perpetual motion.  Energy is always transferred into other forms, and those forms often don't carry energy very well.

You don't understand. Your brain and the muscles you are using are both material, physical things. In order for physical things to be manipulated by non-physical things, there must be an interface between the two. If you were to look at this interface point from a purely physical perspective, physical systems would by necessity act in a way which would violate physical laws. If this were not the case, then the physical systems would not act any differently if the non-physical system did not exist. If the soul does not act in such a way as to violate physical laws, it is functionally equivalent to it not existing; that is, your 'faith, humanity, and link to God' would be exactly the same without it, by virtue of the physical system doing exactly the same thing naturally. Early scientists looked for this exact thing in the brain; a lobe or section in which this interface occurred. It was never found. It was then thought to be distributed throughout the entire brain. It was never found. Which is why in the fields of both Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience, dualism is a dead concept.

And so, again, a non-physical soul existing would result in physically observable effects on the physical body, as well as violations of one or more conservation laws at the interface, allowing for universal net entropy to decrease - a perpetual motion machine (granted, not a particularly efficient or scale-able one, but one nonetheless.

[King DZA]

The only way I'd ever consider becoming a cyborg is if I was the only one (or at the very least a member of a very, very small group of people) with access to such technology, as that is the only way it would be cool enough to make it worth it for me. Being a technologically enhanced human being is lame if everyone else gets to be just as technologically enhanced as you...

[Zrk2]

Even once we can do it, copying a human mind will be no simple task. You'd probably need specialized equipment that most people would not just have laying around. Eventually we'll get to the "casual copying" point, but that's even further off.

Then there's the whole philosophical implication, and the likely insanity that would come from losing your body. Not to mention the impossibility to preform basic human functions like sex and sleep. I bet being uploaded to a machine would end in insanity in 90% of cases.

[alway]

Even once we can do it, copying a human mind will be no simple task. You'd probably need specialized equipment that most people would not just have laying around. Eventually we'll get to the "casual copying" point, but that's even further off.

Then there's the whole philosophical implication, and the likely insanity that would come from losing your body. Not to mention the impossibility to preform basic human functions like sex and sleep. I bet being uploaded to a machine would end in insanity in 90% of cases.

Assuming no equivalent sensor information was created, yes. It's exactly the same as a sensory deprivation chamber, actually. Which is why you need a little bit more than just the brain; you need some sort of I/O as well; preferably some which is highly similar to that which we naturally have.

[Thecard]

Doesn't mean nothing is there.

You said it was a “link to God”, so I surmised it was some kind of sensor or communications unit or something. Unless you are more specific, I can’t really know what it is you are telling me.

No.  He isn't connecting to you like you connect to satellite TV.  God gave us all a soul, and that is what lives on to the next life.


Al, you seem to be confusing what I said with your predetermined definition.  I never said the soul was anywhere in your body, nor did I say that it controls anything you do.  It just is.

As I said earlier, I cannot present faith to you in a logical way. 
Reason and Doubt go hand in hand, Faith walks with Trust.
I don't honestly expect you to read that and believe me.  But I don't know why you do not understand what I mean when I talk about belief.

Faith isn't something that you can reason with.  You just have it.  I don't know what exactly it is, but I do know faith is not something of this world.  This world is logical, you've got this world all figured out.  You understand it.  You know why things happen, how they happen.  But this world, it is not the only world.

I'm not afraid to say that I don't know where the soul is, or how exactly God gives it to us.  Logic doesn't know either.

And I know, some of you don't like it when I say "it is" instead of "I think it is" or "I believe it is" but I can say it no other way.  You are sure of gravity too, right?  I am more confident of God than I am of gravity.  And don't tell yourselves you are moderates, that you are neutral or free thinkers.  You believe in something too.  You are simply on an opposite end of a spectrum, a spectrum that has no true center.

But I'm fine with that, I am not afraid of talking with atheists.  You tell me there is no soul, I tell you there is.  You do not shake me, and I do not shake you.  I actually really enjoy talking with you guys about this.  You ask questions I have never heard before, and I am glad to know I can answer them, to my best ability.

And you guys keep bringing religion up, so I guess you must not mind talking to me about it either.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Even once we can do it, copying a human mind will be no simple task. You'd probably need specialized equipment that most people would not just have laying around. Eventually we'll get to the "casual copying" point, but that's even further off.

Then there's the whole philosophical implication, and the likely insanity that would come from losing your body. Not to mention the impossibility to preform basic human functions like sex and sleep. I bet being uploaded to a machine would end in insanity in 90% of cases.

We're emulating the brain. You probably could still sleep, even inside a computer. Or we could just suppress that area of the brain after transfer.

And you don't need sex to survive.

You are sure of gravity too, right?

We don't actually know how gravity works, for the record. Gravitons are the speculated particle that could make gravity happen....but we've never seen one. Gravity also works regardless of distance, upon all matter in the universe.

And don't tell yourselves you are moderates, that you are neutral or free thinkers.  You believe in something too.  You are simply on an opposite end of a spectrum, a spectrum that has no true center.

This I have to call out. Don't you get all pseudo-golden mean fallacy on us. How can you say we aren't free thinkers when you are the one who won't even consider answering questions that conflict with your religion?

[Fenrir]

The only way I'd ever consider becoming a cyborg is if I was the only one (or at the very least a member of a very, very small group of people) with access to such technology, as that is the only way it would be cool enough to make it worth it for me. Being a technologically enhanced human being is lame if everyone else gets to be just as technologically enhanced as you...

Wouldn’t it be worse to be the only human being that isn’t technologically advanced?

But I don't know why you do not understand what I mean when I talk about belief.

It probably has something to do with the fact that you admit that it’s completely illogical and continue to believe it anyway.

You believe in something too.

False comparison. I don’t do what you’re doing. I make an effort to believe things because they are supported by evidence and reasoning. I don’t just say “I have faith,” and take that as an acceptable reason to think something is true.

And you guys keep bringing religion up, so I guess you must not mind talking to me about it either.

I am fairly sure it was you that brought up religion.