The Soul - is there proof?

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Yes it is. It is a form of Empiricism, a school of Realist Philosophy, but nowadays more and more post-empiricist. Please go look up what philosophy means.

Seems to me it's not so much 'a form of philosophy' as a product of philosophy.

 

[KCfromNC]

I didn't want to discuss any specific ones

Then you shouldn't have mentioned them in post 223.

No, that's begging the question as you assume Materialism.

No, pointing out evidence which only applies if you assume what you want to prove is begging the question, which is what you are doing.

Reality isn't equally fair to all points of view. The answer is not to pretend that accepting reality is a logical falalcy.

Not if Naturalistic Materialism is true, but then neither is the claim that Naturalistic Materialism is true, so...

You'll have to show your work.

Do you understand what an axiom means?

Do you understand that dodging a question by asking an unrelated questions looks like a dodge?

Not really as pain is not actually strongly correlated with reality, according to Medicine.

Citation needed.

Reason

Speaking of begging the question.

Yes it is. It is a form of Empiricism, a school of Realist Philosophy, but nowadays more and more post-empiricist. Please go look up what philosophy means.

If you're really set on pretending that science is philosophy, then you're put in the weird position of claiming that professional philosophers are unqualified to do philosophy. Seems to be a bit of strange contradiction.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Pain doesn't exist in and of itself. It is a function of nociceptive pathways receiving stimuli.

Among other things - pain is not dependent on nociceptive pathways receiving stimuli.

Pain often is not correlated with reality at all, such as phantom pain, referred pain, psychosomatic pain etc.

These forms of pain are dependent, like all pain, on the reality of neural activity in the brain. In these cases (apart from referred pain) the stimulation of nociceptors is absent, although there may be activity in the CNS portion of the nociceptive pathway. Reality isn't just outside the body or brain, it's inside too.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

Seems to me it's not so much 'a form of philosophy' as a product of philosophy.

Science is a form of philosophy. Until the late 19th century, the term Natural Philosophy was used quite frequently as a synonym for Science.

Among other things - pain is not dependent on nociceptive pathways receiving stimuli.

I am an Anaesthetist. Pain and its relief is a significant part of my occupation. Pain is a sensori-neural construct, a highly subjective experience loosely correlated to nociceptive pathways in the forms of Transduction, Transmission, Modulation and finally Perception. While true pain is not necessarily dependant on nociception, the example here offered by KC would have to be and this is what I was referring to.

These forms of pain are dependent, like all pain, on the reality of neural activity in the brain. In these cases (apart from referred pain) the stimulation of nociceptors is absent, although there may be activity in the CNS portion of the nociceptive pathway. Reality isn't just outside the body or brain, it's inside too.

Again, I was responding to KC's attempt to connect perception of pain to proof of reality. Even if all pain is neural functioning, it doesn't alter the fact that external events aren't well correlated with perceived pain.

Neuronal function is anyway very poorly correlated with perception of pain. It is highly subjective. I do not understand what you are trying to say as nothing here alters the argument in any way, shape or form.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

Then you shouldn't have mentioned them in post 223.

? As I said, applicable to any axiom.

Reality isn't equally fair to all points of view. The answer is not to pretend that accepting reality is a logical falalcy.

Your characterisation of 'reality' as proven in this case is the fallacy.

You'll have to show your work.



Do you understand that dodging a question by asking an unrelated questions looks like a dodge?



Citation needed.



Speaking of begging the question.

I have explained all of these ad nauseam in this thread. I need not repeat myself if someone deigns not to read.

If you're really set on pretending that science is philosophy, then you're put in the weird position of claiming that professional philosophers are unqualified to do philosophy. Seems to be a bit of strange contradiction.

Never made this claim.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

In my example, the person was widely known to have previously not had a leg. And the "twin" possibility is easily resolvable. As for collective hallucination, that explanation can be discounted over time with appropriate tests.

Either way, I suggest it is self-evidently true that given a sufficiently bizarre turn of events, people would indeed abandon materialism. I politely suggest that you need this to not be the case in order for your position to have traction.

Imagine, for example, if every time Donald Trump told a lie, his nose actually grew in front of tens of millions of TV viewers and as confirmable by video. Could this be a collective hallunication? Of course - you could claim that we hallucinate even on video replay. But with the appropriate procedures, this possibility becomes wildly implausible. Of course, you will always be able to manufacture a possible explanation re how people could preserve naturalism given any possible event. I suggest it is simply self-evident that this is not what would happen.

You appear to be saying that people will hold onto their naturalistic world-view no matter what. Where is the support for such skepticism? People abandoned Newtonian physics after all, they did not claim that quantum phenomena were an "illusion".

Yes, people hold onto untenable positions with great vigour, but that can only be pushed so far.

I respectfully disagree. I have never seen people to be reasonable and mentioned examples where people did exactly this.
You are far too trusting of humanity which has a great capacity for stupidity, self-deception and irrationality.

 

[KCfromNC]

Science is a form of philosophy. Until the late 19th century, the term Natural Philosophy was used quite frequently as a synonym for Science.

And it isn't today, which coincidentally is when we are talking.

Science and philosophy education and practice has essentially no overlap. They're separate fields pursued using different approaches by different people. The fact that scientists have opinions on epistemological questions doesn't make science a philosophy any more than any other field.

While true pain is not necessarily dependant on nociception, the example here offered by KC would have to be and this is what I was referring to.

For someone who used a train on the tracks analogy for brain function you're suddenly getting very literal when it suits you.

Neuronal function is anyway very poorly correlated with perception of pain. It is highly subjective. I do not understand what you are trying to say as nothing here alters the argument in any way, shape or form.

Does any of this obfuscation have anything to do with the fact that correctly interpreting sense data to avoid falling off cliffs vs. not provides a differential survival rate which would result in evolutionary change?

 

[Chesterton]

I am very skeptical about this claim. I believe the mainstream view is that measurement of any kind - including by an 'unconscious' instrument - causes the famous "waveform collapse". I will look into this more.

Correct, measurement of any kind. Setting up unconcious detectors always has the exact same effect, even if you close your eyes. But it takes consciousness to set up a detector as well as to later observe it.

Citation needed.

No not really. But here's a few quotes from some pretty smart guys:

"[T]he atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts." - Werner Heisenberg

[But Heisenberg went on to insist that these philosophical issues raised by quantum mechanics applied to the big as well as the small.]

"Whether electrons, light quanta, benzol molecules, or stones, we shall always come up against these two characteristics, the corpuscular and the undular." - Werner Heisenberg

"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real." - Niels Bohr

"A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself." - Niels Bohr

"Observations not only disturb what is to be measured, they produce it." - Pascual Jordan

"The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment." - Bernard d'Espagnat

"In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it." - Martin Rees

"The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.” - Werner Heisenberg

That's not the case.

What's the case?

That's not what the science tells us.

What does the science tell us?

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Correct, measurement of any kind. Setting up unconcious detectors always has the exact same effect, even if you close your eyes. But it takes consciousness to set up a detector as well as to later observe it.

Not really; a measurement or observation in quantum mechanics is any interaction with the quantum system in question that can transfer information including that of any wandering particle (which is partly why the qubits in quantum computers are so difficult to maintain in superposition). Human-readable detectors are just one, indirect, means of observation.

... here's a few quotes from some pretty smart guys:

Some of those quotes were made in the early days of QM investigations and don't reflect the current consensus.

What's the case?

There are atoms (they do exist independent of minds), but they are not classical entities. The universe is quantum mechanical at heart (including you). It appears mostly classical at macro scales.

What does the science tell us?

Matter is real, but is not what we once thought it was. Our consciousness enables us to apprehend it, but is not relevant to whether it 'emerges from mere potentiality'.

The soul hypothesis is not an adequate hypothesis in scientific terms - it fails all the criteria of abduction; it's ill-defined, untestable, unfalsifiable, unevidenced, non-conservative (contradicts fundamental laws of physics), it's scope is poor (has no explanatory power, doesn't unify our knowledge or understanding), it's not parsimonious - it introduces an additional entity and an extra substance (as in substance dualism), and it raises more philosophical questions than it answers.

 

[expos4ever]

I do not understand how some of you appear to be arguing that the mind "creates" reality. I am quite confident that you are over-reaching: yes, nature has this flavor of indeterminacy built into it. But that hardly justifies concluding it is not "real" and that "the soul/mind is primary".

 

[expos4ever]

Not really; a measurement or observation in quantum mechanics is any interaction with the quantum system in question that can transfer information....

I am not challenging you on this (you obviously know more about this than me), but are you sure (or at least confident) that this is exactly what the "orthodox" interpretation of quantum mechanics understands an observation to be? Are there interactions that cannot transfer information? - I would have thought that to "interact" necessarily entails the exchange of information.

Based on some spotty reading, I suspect you are right and that there is widespread misunderstanding in the general public. More specifically, the error is the belief that only a conscious being can be the agent of observation that is responsible for "collapsing the probability wave".

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Science is a form of philosophy. Until the late 19th century, the term Natural Philosophy was used quite frequently as a synonym for Science.

True, but not the issue at hand. You said, "Scientific Method is a form of philosophy" (my bolding). Science is a form of philosophy, the scientific method is a tool of science.

I am an Anaesthetist. Pain and its relief is a significant part of my occupation. Pain is a sensori-neural construct, a highly subjective experience loosely correlated to nociceptive pathways in the forms of Transduction, Transmission, Modulation and finally Perception.

Yup, no argument there.

While true pain is not necessarily dependant on nociception, the example here offered by KC would have to be and this is what I was referring to.

OK - it wasn't clear.

Again, I was responding to KC's attempt to connect perception of pain to proof of reality. Even if all pain is neural functioning, it doesn't alter the fact that external events aren't well correlated with perceived pain.

Indeed; to avoid misunderstanding in this context, it was worth qualifying that it was external events or reality.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

I am not challenging you on this (you obviously know more about this than me), but are you sure (or at least confident) that this is exactly what the "orthodox" interpretation of quantum mechanics understands an observation to be? Are there interaction that cannot transfer information?

Sorry, I didn't express that well - it was intended to imply that an interaction (e.g. particle interaction) transfers information, i.e. in that respect is a measurement or observation, and so no different in principle from a human-made detector or human senses.

Based on some spotty reading, I suspect you are right and that there is widespread misunderstanding in the general public. More specifically, the error is the belief that only a conscious being can be the agent of observation that is responsible for "collapsing the probability wave".

Yes, the 'Conscious Collapse' idea (von Neumann–Wigner interpretation) was never very popular, although a few physicists still seem to support it. It has all the problems of other wave function collapse interpretations (e.g. being an ad-hoc addition to the quantum formalism) plus a whole lot more - e.g. when does it occur? where does it occur? how does it occur? It's been adopted by some dualists and pseudo-scientific groups, who probably see it as a response to the interaction problem, but it's so vague and anthropocentric, that it's hard to see how it could progress.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

I do not understand how some of you appear to be arguing that the mind "creates" reality.

I've seen this idea confused with the idea that the mind 'creates reality' in the sense that it creates an internal model of it that is our experiential reality.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

And it isn't today, which coincidentally is when we are talking.

Science and philosophy education and practice has essentially no overlap. They're separate fields pursued using different approaches by different people. The fact that scientists have opinions on epistemological questions doesn't make science a philosophy any more than any other field.

You are mistaken. Science and Philosophy are tied together at the hip, as this discussion of Quantum Mechanics in this thread clearly illustrates. Besides, I had to do philosophy when I was studying and it has helped me immensely in my medical career, especially navigating the murky worlds of Neurology, Psychiatry and Evidence-Based practice.

Whether you like it or not, Science is merely a subdivision of Philosophy and this idea that Science somehow uses different methods than philosophy is merely a damning indictment of our Education system. I don't know about the US, but where I am from, most Scientific careers and Medical fields are obligated to do a little formal philosophy.

For someone who used a train on the tracks analogy for brain function you're suddenly getting very literal when it suits you.

You clearly did not understand my analogy at all. I used it to illustrate the fallacious idea that a pathway is the same as the function that requires it. It is of course not a perfect analogy, nor meant to be.

Just to explain a bit more: Pain can be demonstated. I can explain to you exactly how the impulse travels, what receptors are activated, what neurotransmitters are employed etc. It is only in the last aspect of conscious perception that we can no longer follow what is going on fully. Thought and Reason cannot be so described nor shown how nerve functioning directly correlates to it in the same manner.
But as I said previously, no one is denying that neuronal function is not directly related to thought and Reason, just that it is not necessarily solely responsible for it.

Does any of this obfuscation have anything to do with the fact that correctly interpreting sense data to avoid falling off cliffs vs. not provides a differential survival rate which would result in evolutionary change?

The one obfuscating here would be you, as you have altered your premise a bit now. But yes, it would result in evolutionary change, but will that change result in a realistic view of reality or the rise of Reason?
You are once again treading into an epistemological quagmire by using the term 'correctly'. This is once more begging the question.

But if you read what was said earlier in the thread, we already discussed this at length. We are trying to ascertain if Reason and a true estimation of reality can arise from Evolution. As I explained earlier, our estimation might not be accurate and likely wouldn't be for all individuals, thus not allowing us to know if ours is.
Also there is a difference between thinking 'if I fall of the cliff, I will die, which is bad, so I must avoid it' and simple avoidance strategy. Jellyfish and tubeworms also do not approach their predators or dangerous situations. Is complex reasoning occuring here? Instinct and simple response pathways can explain this well enough without any reality testing being necessary or coming into play. You withdraw your hand from a hot surface before you become consciously aware of it, for instance.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

True, but not the issue at hand. You said, "Scientific Method is a form of philosophy" (my bolding). Science is a form of philosophy, the scientific method is a tool of science

Anything produced by Scientific Method is Science or Scientifically valid. Scientific Method is a form of reality testing, so is anyway a part of any scientific reasoning. So Scientific Method is Intrinsic to Science, which is a form of Philosophy and therefore Scientific Method is a subset of a form of Philosophy and not merely a 'tool'. Thus I stick with my statement that Scientific Method is a form of Philosophy, by Inductive reasoning.
There is anyway a difference between the description of the theoretical Method and its application, with the former very much being Philosophy and the latter perhaps described as a 'tool'.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Anything produced by Scientific Method is Science or Scientifically valid. Scientific Method is a form of reality testing, so is anyway a part of any scientific reasoning. So Scientific Method is Intrinsic to Science, which is a form of Philosophy and therefore Scientific Method is a subset of a form of Philosophy and not merely a 'tool'. Thus I stick with my statement that Scientific Method is a form of Philosophy, by Inductive reasoning.
There is anyway a difference between the description of the theoretical Method and its application, with the former very much being Philosophy and the latter perhaps described as a 'tool'.

OK - it looks like it comes down to a matter of opinion on whether a method or methodology is, or can be, a form of philosophy rather than a tool of philosophy. I still prefer the latter, but <shrug>.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

...We are trying to ascertain if Reason and a true estimation of reality can arise from Evolution. As I explained earlier, our estimation might not be accurate and likely wouldn't be for all individuals, thus not allowing us to know if ours is.
Also there is a difference between thinking 'if I fall of the cliff, I will die, which is bad, so I must avoid it' and simple avoidance strategy. Jellyfish and tubeworms also do not approach their predators or dangerous situations. Is complex reasoning occuring here? Instinct and simple response pathways can explain this well enough without any reality testing being necessary or coming into play. You withdraw your hand from a hot surface before you become consciously aware of it, for instance.

I would suggest that a 'good enough' representation of reality is necessary to survival of all creatures ('good enough' might be limited to appropriate tropisms in simple creatures), and for complex creatures in a competitive ecosystem, there will be lucrative niches for those with better representations (hence the evolution of eyes and other complex senses), to better compete, predate, or avoid predation. The flexibility of reasoning becomes advantageous in predicting and/or modeling predator or prey behaviour, devising strategies, and for some social creatures, cooperating and communicating within a group, or in complex social systems when success involves navigating social hierarchies, deceiving and detecting deceit, etc. There might also be some co-evolutionary reinforcement leading to exaggerated traits - human reasoning ability might have been 'forced' by competitive social environment (e.g. strength vs wits); sexual selection might also be involved.

Just sayin'.

 

[durangodawood]

Soooo... Have we found proof of the soul yet?

 

[vinsight4u]

Soooo... Have we found proof of the soul yet?

Jonah died, went to hell, then was restored to his body -then in
a great fish.