Musika:
Its more like a covering. Like an article of clothing moves under the agency of the body that is moving it. As a covering, the article of clothing has no independent agency.
Are you saying that the soul has no independent agency, then?
Jan Ardena would have it that your soul
is you
, and that without your soul there would be no conscious you. Both you and he say that you believe that souls migrate from one body to another, retaining some ongoing essence of a person that defies the death of a physical body.
Now you speak as if the soul is merely a passenger in a body, with no ability to affect anything in the body, at least as far as causing action goes. Like clothes, the soul is merely an adjunct, with no independent agency.
What does this soul of yours do, in practical terms? From what you have written, I get the impression that the soul's one and only role is to provide a "spark of life" to a body. You assume that without a soul there is no life. Or, to put it another way, it seems to me that when you say "soul" you are using it essentially as a synonym for "life essence" or some equivalent metaphysical concept. Is that correct?
There is a ton of mysterious processes that underpin such a theory.
Such as?
Psychology (or even biology) is nowhere near being classified as a sub branch of physics.
I'm inclined to disagree. I doubt that there are many biologists, for example, who think that the processes of life cannot be reduced, at the lowest level, to chemistry, then physics. This is not to say that the
organisation of biological systems is not immensely complex. Chemists and biologists are specialists with special expertise, but that does not mean that chemistry and biology aren't grounded in physics.
The "problem" lies in identifying the agency by attributing correlation with causation.
You just told me that souls have no agency, did you not?
You could just as easily argue that light bulbs (for as long as one has a "problem" identifying the direct agency of electricity) cause electricity since fiddling with them in predictable and repeatable ways causes the light to deteriorate or even extinguish, and there is ample evidence that light from bulbs arises from electricity.
I don't think I understand how this example is relevant to your argument. Probably I don't understand why you think this example is a good analogy for the soul in a body. Could you explain further?
Undetectable?
You are begging the question with this use of language.
Most people are capable of detecting not only whether they are alive but whether other living entities are also.
This is why I get the impression that you believe that a soul is a magical "spark of life".
If your view is that having a soul merely means that something is alive, then I have no particular issue with that view. You can call "life" a "soul" if you want to; it doesn't particular bother me if you prefer to use a circumlocution instead of talking directly about what you want to talk about.
But I'm fairly sure, based on other things that you have written, that you actually believe that a soul is
more than a mere "spark of life". In particular, you said you believed in reincarnation, which implies a
continuity of an individual soul from one life to the next.
I agree with you that whether something is alive or dead is detectable, as a general principle. Of course, there are many marginal cases where we could argue the question "Is it alive?" But let's stick to talking about human beings, who are usually fairly clearly either alive or dead.
If "the soul" is merely a substitute term for "living", then "the soul" is detectable. On the other hand, if the same soul is supposed to migrate from one body to another, then I'd say
that is completely undetected - and undetectable, as far as I am aware. Correct me if I'm wrong.
You don't see the inherent problem of demanding the presence of a material mechanism to evidence a transcendental claim?
I'm not sure whether you are so much arguing against the existence of the soul but arguing against any sort of world view that incorporates ideas transcendent to matter.
My concern is with how the rubber meets the road when it comes to your "transcendent" soul.
If, as you seem to be saying now, the soul is merely a passenger with no agency, then I guess it is not surprising that actions such as raising my arm do not require the soul to
act to cause the action. The soul just sits back and watches, like the clothes do, I suppose.
On the other hand, Jan, at least, claims that your soul
is the real you - the one who makes the choice to raise the arm. In that view, the soul is not a mere passenger, but the prime causal agent in the action that results. Do you agree with Jan on this, or is your view different?
Assuming Jan's position, my question is how the desires or plans of the soul are translated into action in the physical world. What is the chain of causes that goes from the soul wanting to raise the arm, through to the arm being raised?
You complain that I am demanding a "material mechanism". The raising of an arm is a material action, with undeniable material causes, up to a point. If we cannot trace material causes back to the soul that you posit, then at some point in the chain there must be a "trancendent" cause of a material effect. But how would that work? I imagine the best you can come up with is that's it's an unknowable magical mystery given by God, or something equivalent. I don't find that particularly satisfactory, but I assume it works for you.
In case you're not clear on
why I'm not satisfied with the soul (or God) magic, it's because as soon as you introduce magic like that, real understanding stops right there. All you can do is to have
faith that, somehow, God makes it all happen. And I don't want to have to accept that something as basic as raising my arm can't be explained without invoking the magic of an unevidenced deity.
But regardless, if we do exist in a world underpinned by transcendent agencies, in what way would you expect an investigation of this world to reveal different results than what it does already?
I wouldn't. I don't much like the idea of living in that kind of world. In such a world, human beings are reduced to impotent puppets of the transcendent processes which we can never hope to understand. I have better hopes for human potential than that. It's a depressing and fatalistic kind of world view.
Of course, I admit that this objection is purely philosophical and is based on my own personal values, just as your position is purely based on your philosophical world view. Neither of us can be proven wrong.