Interaction between body and soul

[Scorpion]

What if the soul does not normally interact with the brain, thereby causing no unexpected electrical activity. It just lays dormant waiting for the person to live out their lives. Then normal consciousness could be a property of the brain, but when we die we enter the spirit body, which has recorded in its memory everything that happened to us.

 

[jrhowell]

What if the soul does not normally interact with the brain, thereby causing no unexpected electrical activity. It just lays dormant waiting for the person to live out their lives. Then normal consciousness could be a property of the brain, but when we die we enter the spirit body, which has recorded in its memory everything that happened to us.

That sort of soul could play no part in explaining human consciousness, the main reason that many people assume the existence of a soul in the first place.

At least human consciousness is observable. Life after death not so much.

 

[Darat]

I think this is false, and I have explained why in OP.

It is empirical science, whatever we think doesn't change the facts. All you do in the opening post is to try and move the goal posts, however the goal posts are these days set in concrete so aren't moving for the likes of you and me.

 

[Darat]

What if the soul does not normally interact with the brain, thereby causing no unexpected electrical activity. It just lays dormant waiting for the person to live out their lives. Then normal consciousness could be a property of the brain, but when we die we enter the spirit body, which has recorded in its memory everything that happened to us.

That doesn't escape the criticism, you say the soul records what the brain does therefore there is energy/information transferred from the brain to the soul so again there would be something to measure. Which ever way you slice it if something interacts with the brain we could in principle detect something.

 

[Loss Leader]

What if the soul does not normally interact with the brain, thereby causing no unexpected electrical activity. It just lays dormant waiting for the person to live out their lives. Then normal consciousness could be a property of the brain, but when we die we enter the spirit body, which has recorded in its memory everything that happened to us.

Why are you assuming the existence of a soul? There is no properly controlled evidence that I know of which is inconsistent with the material brain being the sole seat of consciousness.

 

[JayUtah]

What if the soul does not normally interact with the brain, thereby causing no unexpected electrical activity. It just lays dormant waiting for the person to live out their lives. Then normal consciousness could be a property of the brain, but when we die we enter the spirit body, which has recorded in its memory everything that happened to us.

If the soul "records in its memory" via the brain and sensory organs, then -- as others have said -- that requires interaction that can be measured. If the soul's memory of events is entirely independent of the body, then that just leaves open all the important questions. It also obviates the need for incarnation. You say the soul lays "dormant," by which I take it you mean there is no ongoing absorption of anything from the environment. Then magically this soul ends up having acquired a record of everything that happened, without any evidence of the interaction, either ongoing or in one fell swoop.

 

[Scorpion]

Why are you assuming the existence of a soul? There is no properly controlled evidence that I know of which is inconsistent with the material brain being the sole seat of consciousness.

See my thread 'scorpions spiritualism' to read my experiences of esp and telepathy, and messages from the spirit world. Such subjective experiences are the reason I believe in the soul. To others they are just anecdotes, but to me they are evidence.

There is also the matter of my last 50 years of battling against schizophrenia and winning. In that struggle I learned that chemicals do not control my thoughts, I do.

 

[JayUtah]

...but to me they are evidence.

That's not what the word evidence means.

There is also the matter of my last 50 years of battling against schizophrenia and winning.

How do you know you're winning?

In that struggle I learned that chemicals do not control my thoughts, I do.

The pharmacological effect of the medicines commonly used to treat schizophrenia is well known. The general failure of schizophrenics at metacognition is also well known. I'm not sure why your mental illness is relevant to your argument here. This is not a thread about you. It's a thread about souls.

 

[Scorpion]

If the soul "records in its memory" via the brain and sensory organs, then -- as others have said -- that requires interaction that can be measured. If the soul's memory of events is entirely independent of the body, then that just leaves open all the important questions. It also obviates the need for incarnation. You say the soul lays "dormant," by which I take it you mean there is no ongoing absorption of anything from the environment. Then magically this soul ends up having acquired a record of everything that happened, without any evidence of the interaction, either ongoing or in one fell swoop.

We take our consciousness with us don't we? everything the brain has experienced in life is in our thoughts, so why would that not be remembered in a spirit mind when we die?

 

[JayUtah]

We take our consciousness with us don't we? everything the brain has experienced in life is in our thoughts,

This is generally true of the organism. To say that "everything" from a multi-decade life is remembered, by any means, seems beyond the mark. A similar property for the soul has not been proven because the existence of a soul has not been proven. It's fruitless to speculate about the properties of something for which there is no evidence of existence.

...so why would that not be remembered in a spirit mind when we die?

Begging the question, non sequitur, and shifting the burden of proof. Was that intended to be a serious argument?

 

[Scorpion]

I'm not sure why your mental illness is relevant to your argument here.

It is my experience I can overcome chemical chaos in the brain. I say that is because I tuned myself to my immortal spirit, and was not ruled by the bowl of porridge inside my skull.

 

[JoeMorgue]

We take our consciousness with us don't we? everything the brain has experienced in life is in our thoughts, so why would that not be remembered in a spirit mind when we die?

You don't "experience" anything after you die.

That's what death means.

 

[JayUtah]

It is my experience I can overcome chemical chaos in the brain. I say that is because I tuned myself to my immortal spirit, and was not ruled by the bowl of porridge inside my skull.

How do you know the delusion of having an immortal spirit is not just the product of the bowl of porridge inside your skull? How do you know that your conclusion to have overcome "chemical chaos" is not merely the failure of metacognition that is a well-known symptom of schizophrenia?

The topic of this thread his how the soul, if any, interacts with the brain in a way that makes sense to what we know about the physics that governs interactions among everything else. This is not a thread about you. You have said that the soul lays "dormant" during mortal life How can that be, if you are winning your fight with schizophrenia by tuning in to your soul while you're still mortal? As usual, you contradict yourself constantly. Fix that. And no amount of repeating your anecdotes and no amount of vigorous introspection can produce evidence that is relevant to this thread, which is focused on measurable phenomena. You have a thread for you to ramble in, and there are several issues there awaiting your attention.

 

[The Norseman]

I see no reason to suppose there is such a thing as an immortal soul, but Carroll's questions here seem to miss the point and assumes that a soul, if it existed, would be another material entity that we haven't yet discovered.

I don't see how that's a problem.

 

[Belz...]

Here is my possible solution to this problem.

There is none. The problem is not that we can't detect the soul now. It's that we can't detect it even in principle. You think theists will agree that one day we may develop a technological soul detector? Nope. It's invisible by definition, which is actually the biggest flaw in that 'theory'.

 

[litewave]

What if the soul does not normally interact with the brain, thereby causing no unexpected electrical activity. It just lays dormant waiting for the person to live out their lives. Then normal consciousness could be a property of the brain, but when we die we enter the spirit body, which has recorded in its memory everything that happened to us.

I admit I didn't think of the possibility of a "dormant" soul, although it seems to be a frequent claim in both esoteric and exoteric religions that the "spiritual aspect" of man is suppressed on earth, as a result of an ancient spiritual fall. If the soul is largely inactive that would make it even more difficult to detect. Now that I think about the reports of near-death experiences, people often report having a kind of "life review" where they re-experience events from their life and take lessons from them; maybe that's related to extraction of data/memories from the brain to the soul as it leaves the body.

 

[sackett]

Scorpion and litewave can carry the thread now. Whither, we know not.

 

[JayUtah]

...people often report having a kind of "life review" where they re-experience events from their life and take lessons from them; maybe that's related to extraction of data/memories from the brain to the soul as it leaves the body.

Okay, think that through. The people who report this didn't finish dying. They woke up. Otherwise, how could they tell us what they experienced? We don't know if any of the people who went on to die experienced the life review. So we can't say definitively that the life review is actually part of death. But for the sake of argument, let's say it is. Again, because people didn't finish dying, we can say that the process precedes death. It starts before death occurs. That suggests there's something about impending death that triggers it. Okay, that works reasonably well for people who die calmly in hospital beds. And it works reasonably well for people who got a sudden shock and "saw their lives flash before their eyes."

But what about when death is the result of a sudden, catastrophically traumatic brain injury, such as by gunshot? People die in some pretty awful ways, and not all of them can be foreseen and not all of them allow time for the memory dump before the brain is rendered non-functional. If you're posing this as a sort of natural process of evolution, then you can say that death by traumatic brain injury deprives the spirit of life memory. In that case it just sucks to die that way, but that's the breaks. But if you propose this kind of dualism as something designed and dictated by, say, an omnipotent god, then you have to answer that plot hole.

 

[Loss Leader]

See my thread 'scorpions spiritualism' to read my experiences of esp and telepathy, and messages from the spirit world. Such subjective experiences are the reason I believe in the soul. To others they are just anecdotes, but to me they are evidence.

Unverifiable, unrepeatable, unfalsifiable stories are not evidence, at least not in any scientific sense. A repeatable experiment for which a positive result definitely shows the existence of esp or telepathy would be evidence. So far, no properly controlled experiment has isolated these things.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Unverifiable, unrepeatable, unfalsifiable stories are not evidence, at least not in any scientific sense.

Don't word it like that. He'll see it as an open door the idea that there is some sort of equally valid type of evidence that just isn't scientific.