Ahh "The Soul"...a perfect example of man allowing desire to color belief.

well thats just a well structured point that he has right there.

Proposal that I must accept? Please. The argument isn't even coherent. A lot of jawjacking which adds up basically to Mr Harris's incredulity that you could go from having a damaged brain to another existence intact. Well, if you have a soul then obviously the brain isn't the center and it doesn't really matter what happens to it.

Having a soul means there is a creator who gave you one. Why should it be too hard for God to move you from one place to the other. That is why this argument just breaks down. It doesn't consider the logical implications of what it's talking about. It picks and chooses and ends up with nothing but inconsistancy. Really what he is after is to try to isolate the question of the soul so as to gain ground on the question of God. Sorry, Sam, they're inseperable. When you bring the question around to what it's really asking, could God do this, then there really isn't anything to debate about anymore is there.

I hide my soul in the head of my penis

Not that I believe in souls, but this seems to be more of an argument against a particular interpretation of how souls work (i.e. the Judeo-Christian version). Many sects of Buddhism for instance don't posit that you will remember anything or retain any part of yourself after death. For them, the only thing that gets carried over is your karma. Again, not saying I believe that, but this argument doesn't really disprove that view of the soul.

Well, if you have a soul then obviously the brain isn't the center and it doesn't really matter what happens to it.


Well, that's just the point - it sure does seem like the brain matters. If you damage a certain area of the brain, you forget, say, the names of animals. Does your soul remember the names of the animals? If so, then how come you don't? If not, then why do you know the names of animals again when you die?

I'll put this simpler: somewhere, you (your brain, mind, soul, whatever) recognizes Grandma. It seems like the part doing this is your brain, since we can make you fail at it by breaking the brain. But, if you still remember Grandma when your brain is completely dead, then it must be in the soul.

And it's not just remembering things. People have had their personalities changed, and pretty much everything about them changed through brain injury. And you can even turn some of these functions on and off at whim with powerful magnets.

The "damaged receiver" theory doesn't really make sense either. I mean, sure we can imagine the soul being on the other end of a broken telephone line - but the way people behave doesn't fit this model unless the "soul" is forgetting stuff too. We could imagine all sorts of ways we could distinguish between "not communicating perfectly with someone who's still all there" and "communicating OK with someone who is not all there" - and they all point towards the latter.

Now of course God could still manage. He could let your brain do it while you're alive, but then move these functions to your soul when you die. He could simulate things such that things behave just how they would as though your brain was in control, but really your soul is. He could do anything I guess.

But, unless we already believed in God and souls, we'd never come to that kind of conclusion because it's much simpler (and more fitting with all the evidence we have) to believe that this stuff is all done by the brain.

>> ^shinyblurry:

Proposal that I must accept? Please. The argument isn't even coherent. A lot of jawjacking which adds up basically to Mr Harris's incredulity that you could go from having a damaged brain to another existence intact. Well, if you have a soul then obviously the brain isn't the center and it doesn't really matter what happens to it.
Having a soul means there is a creator who gave you one. Why should it be too hard for God to move you from one place to the other. That is why this argument just breaks down. It doesn't consider the logical implications of what it's talking about. It picks and chooses and ends up with nothing but inconsistancy. Really what he is after is to try to isolate the question of the soul so as to gain ground on the question of God. Sorry, Sam, they're inseperable. When you bring the question around to what it's really asking, could God do this, then there really isn't anything to debate about anymore is there.


Good to see we have an expert on the soul here on the Sift!

It's more likely that every bit of EVIDENCE we have is that the brain is undoubtedly "you". It's the conscious and unconscious and your sense of self.
Not much evidence for anything else, soul, god or any other guff. But I could be wrong of course. Maybe the soul is running a backup copy every day.

I don't think neuroscience speaks to the question of souls. If you are trying to speak vagaries like souls, you should start by defining your terms. It isn't even clear, for instance, that neuroscience speaks to concepts like "consciousness" (again, whatever that means). Maybe this is a clip that would be better served with some context about the claims he is refuting. Otherwise, it's a pompous Sam Harris doing what pompous Sam Harris does: read some Oliver Sacks and call yourself a neuroscientist.

>> ^shinyblurry:
Having a soul means there is a creator who gave you one.


Critically think much? Just because you choose the simplest answer to fit your paradigms, doesn't make it true. One has to define what a "soul" is first, and whether humans even have one to begin with. This is what science does through testing and empirical evidence. Not blindly accept it as fact because of convenience and then build an entire framework for an ideology on it.

>> ^shinyblurry:

Proposal that I must accept? Please. The argument isn't even coherent. A lot of jawjacking which adds up basically to Mr Harris's incredulity that you could go from having a damaged brain to another existence intact. Well, if you have a soul then obviously the brain isn't the center and it doesn't really matter what happens to it.
Having a soul means there is a creator who gave you one. Why should it be too hard for God to move you from one place to the other. That is why this argument just breaks down. It doesn't consider the logical implications of what it's talking about. It picks and chooses and ends up with nothing but inconsistancy. Really what he is after is to try to isolate the question of the soul so as to gain ground on the question of God. Sorry, Sam, they're inseperable. When you bring the question around to what it's really asking, could God do this, then there really isn't anything to debate about anymore is there.


He actually opens up very diplomatically. He says that it "could be that..." and explains how science doesn't "care" what it ends up finding about the mind. Then he continues to say that there's a lot of evidence that makes it hard to believe that the soul and the mind are a related faculty, and moreover unless further evidence comes forth, the idea of a soul is unfounded.

That's as diplomatic as you can get, yet you choose to be offended. Why? Is it because you've put all of your eggs in a brittle, rigid basket? Is it simply because what science has innocently found, right or wrong, good or bad, goes against what a group of ignorant pre-enlightenment era man conjured-up in his fact-deficient brain and wrote down as the word of god? What a silly, silly way of thinking existing.

>> ^Deano:
>> ^shinyblurry:
Proposal that I must accept? Please. The argument isn't even coherent. A lot of jawjacking which adds up basically to Mr Harris's incredulity that you could go from having a damaged brain to another existence intact. Well, if you have a soul then obviously the brain isn't the center and it doesn't really matter what happens to it.
Having a soul means there is a creator who gave you one. Why should it be too hard for God to move you from one place to the other. That is why this argument just breaks down. It doesn't consider the logical implications of what it's talking about. It picks and chooses and ends up with nothing but inconsistancy. Really what he is after is to try to isolate the question of the soul so as to gain ground on the question of God. Sorry, Sam, they're inseperable. When you bring the question around to what it's really asking, could God do this, then there really isn't anything to debate about anymore is there.

Good to see we have an expert on the soul here on the Sift!
It's more likely that every bit of EVIDENCE we have is that brain is undoubtedly "you". It's the conscious and unconscious and your sense of self.
Not much evidence for anything else, soul, god or any other guff. But I could be wrong of course. Maybe the soul is running a backup copy every day.


There's plenty of evidence, just not from sources you would accept. My experience confirms there is a soul, your mileage may vary. If you would like to think of yourself of some vague conglomeration of wiring and chemicals, having no life but this one, it being nothing more than the product of random chance, having no intrinsic meaning, but rather subject to happenstance and absurdity, have at it.

To me, the materialist perspective is the most primitive. There is more going on beneath the surface of things than anyone could know or see; the barest glimpse of it will convince you everything you know is wrong. If you're lucky, you might realize that you are actually loved and always have been. Good luck.

>> ^probie:
>> ^shinyblurry:
Having a soul means there is a creator who gave you one.

Critically think much? Just because you choose the simplest answer to fit your paradigms, doesn't make it true. One has to define what a "soul" is first, and whether humans even have one to begin with. This is what science does through testing and empirical evidence. Not blindly accept it as fact because of convenience and then build an entire framework for an ideology on it.


lol, you're funny. You ever notice the things you accuse people of are the things you end up doing during the accusing? If you were paying attention at all he is talking about the judeo-christian belief specifically, so soul is already defined. A soul being what God gave us. So, under those terms, the discussion is fairly moot. It explains why we could be damaged and yet be undamaged later. There isn't any meaningful discussion on the soul without talking about the God that gave you one. He tries to seperate the question of God and the question of the soul into two different questions, but they are inseperable.

He actually opens up very diplomatically. He says that it "could be that..." and explains how science doesn't "care" what it ends up finding about the mind. Then he continues to say that there's a lot of evidence that makes it hard to believe that the soul and the mind are a related faculty, and moreover unless further evidence comes forth, the idea of a soul is unfounded.
That's as diplomatic as you can get, yet you choose to be offended. Why? Is it because you've put all of your eggs in a brittle, rigid basket? Is it simply because what science has innocently found, right or wrong, good or bad, goes against what a group of ignorant pre-enlightenment era man conjured-up in his fact-deficient brain and wrote down as the word of god? What a silly, silly way of thinking existing.



Yes, it's extremely diplomatic to disguise the knife you're concealing behind an olive branch. Much like your reply here. You start out slightly magnanamously, explaining your viewpoint, and then you carry on to trash God and my beliefs, finishing with a little vitriolic cherry on top. I really think passive aggressive people are the worst kind of people besides atheists. Put them together and you've got a front seat to the 7th circle of hell. To me, you might as well be banging rocks together if you don't know you have a soul, or there is a God. People like this are mostly automated because they don't really know how anything works, or that God controls everything. You might as well be asleep for all the awareness you have. So believe what you will about religion, because I'm not religious. I follow Christ, and He hated religion. Trash my beliefs if you willl..to me, you're the one living a backwards ignorant life; You're 2000 years behind the times.

I just pointed out he was being diplomatic...I never said I had to be. Nor am I being passive aggressive. I forwardly attacked your beliefs. I guess I'm banging rocks together because I don't believe in magic or things there is not evidence for. I'm not saying I'll never believe, I just haven't experienced anything yet that made me a believer. The same way you don't believe in zeus or woden because that shit doesn't make sense to you. Extend that one more degree of bullshit, and that's where I stand.>> ^shinyblurry:

He actually opens up very diplomatically. He says that it "could be that..." and explains how science doesn't "care" what it ends up finding about the mind. Then he continues to say that there's a lot of evidence that makes it hard to believe that the soul and the mind are a related faculty, and moreover unless further evidence comes forth, the idea of a soul is unfounded.
That's as diplomatic as you can get, yet you choose to be offended. Why? Is it because you've put all of your eggs in a brittle, rigid basket? Is it simply because what science has innocently found, right or wrong, good or bad, goes against what a group of ignorant pre-enlightenment era man conjured-up in his fact-deficient brain and wrote down as the word of god? What a silly, silly way of thinking existing.


Yes, it's extremely diplomatic to disguise the knife you're concealing behind an olive branch. Much like your reply here. You start out slightly magnanamously, explaining your viewpoint, and then you carry on to trash God and my beliefs, finishing with a little vitriolic cherry on top. I really think passive aggressive people are the worst kind of people besides atheists. Put them together and you've got a front seat to the 7th circle of hell. To me, you might as well be banging rocks together if you don't know you have a soul, or there is a God. People like this are mostly automated because they don't really know how anything works, or that God controls everything. You might as well be asleep for all the awareness you have. So believe what you will about religion, because I'm not religious. I follow Christ, and He hated religion. Trash my beliefs if you willl..to me, you're the one living a backwards ignorant life; You're 2000 years behind the times.

The troll is now well-fed to the point of obesity.

>> ^shinyblurry:

>> ^Deano:
>> ^shinyblurry:
Proposal that I must accept? Please. The argument isn't even coherent. A lot of jawjacking which adds up basically to Mr Harris's incredulity that you could go from having a damaged brain to another existence intact. Well, if you have a soul then obviously the brain isn't the center and it doesn't really matter what happens to it.
Having a soul means there is a creator who gave you one. Why should it be too hard for God to move you from one place to the other. That is why this argument just breaks down. It doesn't consider the logical implications of what it's talking about. It picks and chooses and ends up with nothing but inconsistancy. Really what he is after is to try to isolate the question of the soul so as to gain ground on the question of God. Sorry, Sam, they're inseperable. When you bring the question around to what it's really asking, could God do this, then there really isn't anything to debate about anymore is there.

Good to see we have an expert on the soul here on the Sift!
It's more likely that every bit of EVIDENCE we have is that brain is undoubtedly "you". It's the conscious and unconscious and your sense of self.
Not much evidence for anything else, soul, god or any other guff. But I could be wrong of course. Maybe the soul is running a backup copy every day.

There's plenty of evidence, just not from sources you would accept. My experience confirms there is a soul, your mileage may vary. If you would like to think of yourself of some vague conglomeration of wiring and chemicals, having no life but this one, it being nothing more than the product of random chance, having no intrinsic meaning, but rather subject to happenstance and absurdity, have at it.
To me, the materialist perspective is the most primitive. There is more going on beneath the surface of things than anyone could know or see; the barest glimpse of it will convince you everything you know is wrong. If you're lucky, you might realize that you are actually loved and always have been. Good luck.


I'm afraid with logic like that you can believe in anything and of course that means your "evidence" is utterly unreliable. And that's a self-deluding and potentially dangerous path to embark on.

>> ^Deano:
>> ^shinyblurry:
>> ^Deano:
>> ^shinyblurry:
Proposal that I must accept? Please. The argument isn't even coherent. A lot of jawjacking which adds up basically to Mr Harris's incredulity that you could go from having a damaged brain to another existence intact. Well, if you have a soul then obviously the brain isn't the center and it doesn't really matter what happens to it.
Having a soul means there is a creator who gave you one. Why should it be too hard for God to move you from one place to the other. That is why this argument just breaks down. It doesn't consider the logical implications of what it's talking about. It picks and chooses and ends up with nothing but inconsistancy. Really what he is after is to try to isolate the question of the soul so as to gain ground on the question of God. Sorry, Sam, they're inseperable. When you bring the question around to what it's really asking, could God do this, then there really isn't anything to debate about anymore is there.

Good to see we have an expert on the soul here on the Sift!
It's more likely that every bit of EVIDENCE we have is that brain is undoubtedly "you". It's the conscious and unconscious and your sense of self.
Not much evidence for anything else, soul, god or any other guff. But I could be wrong of course. Maybe the soul is running a backup copy every day.

There's plenty of evidence, just not from sources you would accept. My experience confirms there is a soul, your mileage may vary. If you would like to think of yourself of some vague conglomeration of wiring and chemicals, having no life but this one, it being nothing more than the product of random chance, having no intrinsic meaning, but rather subject to happenstance and absurdity, have at it.
To me, the materialist perspective is the most primitive. There is more going on beneath the surface of things than anyone could know or see; the barest glimpse of it will convince you everything you know is wrong. If you're lucky, you might realize that you are actually loved and always have been. Good luck.

I'm afraid with logic like that you can believe in anything and of course that means your "evidence" is utterly unreliable. And that's a self-deluding and potentially dangerous path to embark on.


Fortunately God works by direct revelation, so we don't need to sit around and wonder. Anyone who has experienced that doesn't doubt anymore that He is real. The logic I spoke of was to open your mind. The material universe is the thinnest of veils. The curtain was rent when God stepped down to become one of us. When I was agnostic, I did not perceive the Spirit and thought more like you do. I can see why people doubt, because I thought it was all nonsense. I didn't see it. When I did see I realized immediately that the entirety of my knowledge didn't amount to a whole lot. I wish everyone could have that moment and expand their awareness because it is an evolution of understanding of many orders of magnitude. It makes you pretty humble when you thought you had it down and had a grip on what is and isn't, and then learn you've been playing in the kiddie pool this whole time and didn't really know how to swim.

>> ^grahamslam:

I hide my soul in the head of my penis


Mine can't ever stay hidden for long.

>> ^shinyblurry:

>> ^probie:
>> ^shinyblurry:
Having a soul means there is a creator who gave you one.

Critically think much? Just because you choose the simplest answer to fit your paradigms, doesn't make it true. One has to define what a "soul" is first, and whether humans even have one to begin with. This is what science does through testing and empirical evidence. Not blindly accept it as fact because of convenience and then build an entire framework for an ideology on it.

lol, you're funny. You ever notice the things you accuse people of are the things you end up doing during the accusing? If you were paying attention at all he is talking about the judeo-christian belief specifically, so soul is already defined. A soul being what God gave us. So, under those terms, the discussion is fairly moot. It explains why we could be damaged and yet be undamaged later. There isn't any meaningful discussion on the soul without talking about the God that gave you one. He tries to seperate the question of God and the question of the soul into two different questions, but they are inseperable.


So, under those terms, the discussion is fairly moot.

I guess you can believe in anything when you don't have the cognitive capacity to think for yourself and just blindly accept what is given to you. You make a great sheep.

You can't use logic against the deluded and illogical.

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