My basic belief is that modern science/reductive materialism is missing a big piece of the puzzle.
First off, like most anti-skeptics you can't demonstrate a competent knowledge of science or an interest in learning about it. This was made very evident in your Shroud thread. So like most anti-skeptics, you attack a straw man you've constructed to represent science. Now we're faced with the irony of you trying to use science to prove the existence of one of the puzzle pieces you say science is missing. I speculated you want to prove immortality should be a scientifically tenable belief, and that skeptics' disbelief of it is therefore an ideological conclusion, not a scientific one. It's the age-old tactic of trying to classify scientific methods as a competing psuedo-religious belief system. Am I on the right track?
Second, even after repeated questioning you can't show or describe what, if anything, science is missing. All you can bring up are vague impressions or ideas you have, which you declare are forever beyond science's ability to understand. You even go so far as to accuse scientists of deliberately avoiding them. The best you can come up with are web links to various woo peddlers spouting nonsensical, mystical-sounding platitudes to uncritical and gullible followers.
It amounts to a vast circular argument designed to compensate for (usually unjustified) feelings of inferiority. I'm sorry the intellectual world rejected you all those years ago, but find a less vindictive way of dealing with that.
Nothing really makes sense.
I'll echo Joe Bentley. Have an existential crisis if that's what you want. But have it on your own time. Don't project it onto others. If you can't make sense of something or anything, deal with it. Don't blame people who think differently than you do about the world and don't presume to speak for them out of what is basically an argument from ignorance.
Again we face irony that despite your excoriation of science, you're trying to compute your way out of this crisis. The only thing I can imagine would cause proof of immortality to suddenly make sense of things is if it were somehow to invoke one of the classical formulations of religion that preaches immortality and goes on to invent a purpose and plan for life out of whole cloth. If there were some grand design upon which you could rely, you could personally make better sense of your world.
If you need that crutch, fine. Don't insinuate that we all should.
Free will doesn't make sense, but I tend to believe in it anyway...
Sounds like your personal problem to me. I don't have any issue with free will, and I don't see how trying to prove immortality would affect your evaluation of it. In our one finite life we exercise free will and bear its consequences. I don't see how that would change if extended to eternity.
I still believe that scientifically speaking, we're all absolute miracles!
That's not speaking scientifically.
We take our existences totally for granted -- but, where in the hell did we come from?
I don't agree that we take our existence for granted. But obviously your judgment arises out of your made-up notion that we are all miracles. You see people who, in your estimation, don't properly respect the "miracle" of their own existence and you translate that into some shortfall on their part. For my part, I don't need some narcissistic notion of self in order to live my life. I don't have to believe, as do the Mormons for example, that I'm a god in embryo, created to fulfill some galactic master plan and destined for greatness.
We are the vanguard of an evolutionary process. The mind is merely one emergent property of that evolution. I am quite aware that many people desperately wish there to be more, and aspire to some lofty genesis. However they can show no evidence for it, or evidence for a need for it. It is for some a comfortable belief, and were it left a belief I wouldn't mind. But when they claim it is fact and that they can prove it to a skeptical mind by objective means, they had better be able to deliver the goods. Failing at it and falling back on "holistic thinking" to soothe their shattered egos doesn't interest me, nor does veiled elitism against those who don't need their emotional and pseudo-intellectual crutch.
I believe that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
That can mean many things, not all of which your critics would dispute. The problem is that here and now you've proposed an aspect of the whole -- an immortal soul -- which alludes to certain specific properties, none of which you can demonstrate exists or has an effect. In fact you can't even describe the characteristics of the synergistic whole, and have at times denied that they have any characteristics.
That pseudo-philosophical and pseudo-intellectual gibberish does not substitute for reasoning in any way of thinking.
I believe that analytic minds have difficulty perceiving (or, imagining) what holistic minds call "transcendence" -- what makes a philosophy religious.
Asked and answered.
1. Holistic thinking doesn't mean what you think it means.
2. The distinction you propose to draw was discredited decades ago.
3. You have not shown you are any more a holistic thinker than your critics.
4. You have not shown your critics are any less able to think holistically than you or anyone else.
5. You have not shown that "holistic thinking" is best at addressing the questions you raise.
6. You have here proposed a mode of proof that is, in your taxonomy, clearly analytical.
By my count this is the fourth time I've confronted you with these facts, and this will almost certainly be the fourth time you ignore it. You can't address them, and that inability reveals the fundamental delusion behind your claim. The upshot is that you've invented a mode of thinking out of thin air, declared it to be superior at the sorts of things you deem critical, declared yourself a master at it, and reprehend those who don't accept your particular self-styled genius. Again, don't take out your academic failure on others.
What you call "transcendence" I call irrational superstition. That's what makes a philosophy religious. You had plenty of opportunity to discuss actual philosophy here, but as I mentioned before all you can manage is meaningless starry-eyed mysticism. If you want to make up stories and believe them, go right ahead. But giving that exercise a pretentious name and boastfully climbing atop a pedestal for it only engenders laughter.
Well, thank you. I can't have asked for a better confirmation that your purpose here is to make yourself feel better by calling small-minded any who don't think as you do and accept your evasive, nonsensical dribble as some sort of gospel. Now that we've cleared the air on that, are you finally ready to give up your clearly deceased attempt to "essentially prove immortality mathematically?"
You cannot do it. You've been thoroughly refuted and you know it. After four years of stubbornly pushing the same error, can we finally be rid of your folly?
