Evidence of a Soul

Just to be recycled into another star somewhere else in the cosmos

 

Ha-ha. So many scientists today would stand by the fact that 2+2=5 if they had been taught it at college. I often think that when people give up on them they revert to poetry and music in order to relieve their frustration.
Try this video next time a scientists reacts as if you are the stupid one.

 

I don’t think that consciousness and a soul are the same thing. That’s just me.

 

Why not?

 

Consciousness is merely awareness of ourselves and what’s around us. A soul is more of a spiritual/mystical belief, and if you believe in the existence of souls, a soul exists whether someone is conscious or not. That’s why I don’t think they mean the same thing.

 

Referring to the Abstract the article references, I'm not seeing much about a "soul" but I am finding a lot of info in the abstract quite interesting. I'm going to post some here to come back to and it's quite a lengthy abstract so I might post more later on.

 

I think the Pennfield-Hammeroff thesis is fascinating and deserves further exploration--much like M-theory does. It's not science in the sense of being empirically demonstrable yet, but it at least has some empirical grounding. I balk at talking about soul in this context, though, because the phenomenon Pennfield & Hammeroff were talking about takes place in the brain. To me, soul suggests that we are variants of Casper the Friendly ghost, inhabiting a physical shell which will "give up the ghost" some day and let us fly off to another destination. That would be wildly speculative on the basis of our present knowledge.

 

I find this to be a very silly concept. Just like the concept that our soul is situated somewhere within our body. Remember, the soul is something that we understand to be nonpyhsical----like a spirit. I used to pose a problem similar to this to people: Consider that you are sitting in the seat of a jet car on a dragstrip. You get the light to go and suddenly thousand's of pounds of thrust sends you barrelling down the strip, and for added speed you have an afterburner that gives a kick greater than just the engines. By the time you have driven that quarter mile---a very short distance---you have probably accelerated to 300 or more miles per hour. So with that intense acceleration, you have to wonder, why does your soul---that ethereal nonphysical thing that presumably could go through walls---stay in your body?

This takes us back to the age-old problem of how can something nonphysical interact with that which is physical?

The connection must be far more fundamental than consciousness or the soul being 'held' by some cellular structure. It would make far more sense if consciousness or the soul was an aspect of essence---that hidden non-physical reality that gives rise to the physical.

So how does the soul, or mind, or consciousness stick to the body? It doesn't, the physical body is the direct result of that nonphysical being at the point where it pierces into the physical dimensions of space-time. This is the opposite of the epiphenomenalist view that consciousness is a reflection (and therefore an illusion) of a physical reality. The epiphenomenalist argues that consciousness simply reflects what happens biochemically in the brain. They argue that we think, for example, that we are making decisions, but in truth our minds are just reacting to physical stimulus biochemically. The decision, and the thought are actually illusion. My argument is that the decision and the thought are real---that the biochemical reaction, and the resulting brain waves, are a reflection of the concsiousness which, if anything is an illusion, would be the physical side.

Think about it----all physical reality is composed of particles which have a position in space-time for only the briefest moment of time, because they are in motion, but this motion means that they are superpositioned across the whole universe as a wave-like field that is neither wave nor field. The Quantum Wave is very obviously a higher dimensional reality. What makes these continuously appearing and disappearing particles and subatomic particles create the objects that you and I know as our physical reality, including our own bodies, is Quantum Information. I argue that consciousness as well is a higher dimensional thing, and in the point of here and now, where our body has a physical existence----our mind along with the Quantum Information that gives our body form, creates who and where we are. Upon death, our consciousness simply continues in that higher dimensional reality.

 

i would consider having been born with innate preferences, rather than a completely blank slate, evidence of both past lives,
and of something that endures the lack of a physical platform, to sustain memories as such.

i find no reason to assume however, our species to be unique in possessing such a nature, should it so happen to exist.

and if life is not eternal, i see no reason to assume death must be either.

beyond that, what is not known is not known,
yet nothing has to be known in order to exist.

this last is proven, because there are always new things to be discovered and learned.

 

i might actually agree to the extent, that a consciousness might wink out completely, and yet a billion years of non-existence later, the same soul be born again in yet another infant, of another sapient speices, in another world. yet i would disagree on the one count, that what is not known, is not required by anything, to be any one way we might imagine it to be.

 

That’s true but just theoretically speaking, the two don’t mean the same thing (to me).

 

we, as humans, are living souls and when we die, we are a dead soul. Souls do not live on forever.