Souls/spirits do not exist - hence religions are irrelevant.

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spookz,

even if souls can be proved to exist, i would still think religion to be irrevelant.
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That is probably more accurate than you realize. If evidence was ever discovered for souls or even gods, then that would constitute knowledge and knowledge is the realm of science and at that point religion would become redundant.

Religions can only survive when evidence is absent.

From Webster: Science - the state of knowing: knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding.

This is why religion and science will always be opposites; they are mutually exclusive.

chris
what kind of proof are you looking for again?
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LOL.

But of course I am not looking for proof in the same way that I’m not looking for proof of all the other millions of imaginary objects and ideas that humans create. Now if someone can offer some evidence or proofs of their claims then I’ll take a closer look.
 
"Now, even though the realms of religion and science in themselves are clearly marked off from each other, nevertheless there exist between the two strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies. Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up. But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." -Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions
 
Evil,

"Now, even though the realms of religion and science in themselves are clearly marked off from each other, nevertheless there exist between the two strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies.
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History seems to indicate otherwise. When science was weak, millennia ago, religion ruled the world. As science gained footholds and dispelled ignorance, religion always gave up ground and receded. Or in more recent times, when religion ruled the world it was known as the dark ages.

Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up.
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I do not see that religion has ever set goals, it has sought instead to prevent the establishment of goals since it maintains it already has all the answers and there is little else to learn. However, individuals who were either non-religious or not content with the answers that religion offered did set goals for themselves. They speculated on alternatives to religion, and in so doing sought true knowledge that we have come to know as science.

But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding.
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No argument from me.

This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion.
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Only in as much that people want to have answers to life, the universe, and everything. But I don’t need to be religious to have those desires.

To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is comprehensible to reason.
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I think for those who view existence objectively then they see all the evidence they need that there is order and harmony in the way things work. That is not faith, that’s a trust, based on past experiences, that more will be revealed if they look.

The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." -Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions
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But of course Einstein wasn’t speaking of any conventional religion. His religion was nature itself and the order and harmony that he observed. His religion was the awe and wonder of such a perfectly ordered universe.
 
Cris,

I don't do religion so as a result I feel no need to argue/debate
about whether there is a god or not a god. I have my own set of
beliefs (for lack of a better term) but they are my beliefs and
what works for me in my life. They are not something I feel the
need to push on anyone OR prove to anyone. It is late and I am
tired so I don't feel up to expounding on this, if you want more
clarification please let me know.

I am well aware of where Einstien stood on religion, I find a lot of
what he says on the subject very thought provoking. Your post
reminded me of that part of Ideas and Opinions so I posted
it. I found it interesting and thought you might as well kinda
thing. I guess I should have added that to my post, I apologize
for not being more clear in that respect. :)
 
Evilpoet,

Hey, no problem, but the religion forum tends to be a pit of fire. Your comments were appreciated and my apologies if I appeared overly confrontational. My objective was precision but much of this forum is very subjective.

Take care
 
An old Steve Martin "bit": This guy dies. He finds himself in Heaven--and it's like all the cliches---angels with bird wings playing harps and lyres; folks with halos walking around on white, puffy clouds; pearly gates, the whole routine. He turns to St. Peter and says, "Man! In college, they told me this was all bullshit!"
 
A world without souls.

The Problem Of Reincarnation.

http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/snuffit3/nosouls.html

Simply put, reincarnation is the process of recycling souls, until they get themselves out of the loop, through enlightenment or any other mystical truth attainment. When a certain soul has achieved enough knowledge about (insert your own favorite esoteric goal here), they're taken out of the circuit, to some sort of pleasing "next world."

Considering the state of the planet (insert your favorite social or ecological disaster here), enlightenment is not being reached, i.e. people are neither striving for, nor obtaining mystical or religious knowledge. So, if we are stuck in a karmic-somatic feedback loop, with no one leaving, where are all of these new bodies coming from?

If there are a fixed number of souls, and an increasing number of bodies, it should be obvious to see that the majority of people in the world today are being born without souls. This would not only answer the reason for the callous and insensitive nature of society at large, but also explain the diminishing role that religion plays in our lives.

So what is the solution? How to assuage the fears of the masses that they might have no soul? Hundreds, nay, millions, would riot and rampage, causing more destruction than their present ignorant actions against the planet, unless they could be told a way of finding out if they had a soul.

Imagine the thought of millions of drones who finally realize that, for them, there is no purpose to their lives. Think of the anguish, the despair, the (true) feeling of futility. This would lead naturally to the only rational procedure that would affect a decent solution.

The answer, of course, is systematic mass suicide. If the nations of the earth committed suicide in regulated shifts, while keeping births at a constant rate, we could easily wean out the soulless, due to the fact that those without wouldn't come back. The only people to be born would be the result of reincarnation.

It would be the pruning of a species that has become incompatible with its environment. The health of the human species (and all other species, as well) would be assured, due to the fact that the total spirituality of the planet would dramatically rise, and the earth would finally be safe and healthy for the human and animal souls to attain enlightenment.
 
BTW, just in case someone might be confused, I am NOT suggesting we commit systematic mas suicide.
 
I feel like for a suicide atm
who wants to join? - we'll spend all our money on dancers, chicks and expensive drinks, drink wine and overdose morphy and die
 
Just an offtopic thought...it would be cool if we found the proteins/organs/glands in the brain related to religion and removed them at birth...:D

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There is no god, afterlife or divine love. There is only Entropy, the mother from which we were all born. She tugs our souls with the beautiful, maternal love of chaos. Why do you keep Her waiting?
 
chris

"It should also be noted that the brain does not act like a storage device but only retains tiny aspects of original memories. The brain is then exceptionally good at filling in the blanks and reconstructing memories"

do you have any more info on this? (links)

i also feel reincarnation or whatever storyline religion has wrapped around the concept of soul is only incidental to the question of the existence of souls/spirits/conciousness. i tend to see the soul as an alternate form of being and nothing more (due to lack of info)

also would a parasite in a symbiotic relaionship with a human
be workable analogy for this soul/human relationship?

;)
 
Parasite? Well...how exactly would a soul feed on the body? Scary...

As for religion...Cris, I believe you should give religion at least its historical significance and the few bits of good it did. It served to unite humankind in its early days, and served as a sort of psychological comfort device to encourage when stuck in despair. Reason is powerful and steady. I admit emotion can be extremely unsteady but it can in some rare cases help an individual achieve more than with reason.

Of course, emo is a poor substitute for reason. But was there a better way in early times, when there wasn't enough scientific thought for people to be so reasonable? My two bits of thought on the topic.

__________________________________________
There is no god, afterlife or divine love. There is only Entropy, the mother from which we were all born. She tugs our souls with the beautiful, maternal love of chaos. Why do you keep Her waiting?
 
spookz,

I’m afraid my comments come from memories of past readings, of which I have not made a reliable note, however, my most recent readings are from Susan Greenfield, Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford University.

http://www.sirc.org/about/susan_greenfield.html

Her best selling book ‘The Human Brain a Guided Tour’ is a fairly easy read and I think it covers most of the issues I have raised here.
 
Those are nice, but I've read them all.

Well, at least the titles.
 
Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious. There is nothing we know about more directly than consciousness, but it is extraordinarily hard to reconcile it with everything else we know. Why does it exist? What does it do? How could it possibly arise from neural processes in the brain? These questions are among the most intriguing in all of science.

From an objective viewpoint, the brain is relatively comprehensible. When you look at this page, there is a whir of processing: photons strike your retina, electrical signals are passed up your optic nerve and between different areas of your brain, and eventually you might respond with a smile, a perplexed frown or a remark. But there is also a subjective aspect. When you look at the page, you are conscious of it, directly experiencing the images and words as part of your private, mental life. You have vivid impressions of colored flowers and vibrant sky. At the same time, you may be feeling some emotions and forming some thoughts. Together such experiences make up consciousness: the subjective, inner life of the mind.

For many years, consciousness was shunned by researchers studying the brain and the mind. The prevailing view was that science, which depends on objectivity, could not accommodate something as subjective as consciousness. The behaviorist movement in psychology, dominant earlier in this century concentrated on external behavior and disallowed any talk of internal mental processes. Later, the rise of cognitive science focused attention on processes inside the head. Still, consciousness remained off-limits, fit only for late-night discussion over drinks.

Over the past several years, however, an increasing number of neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers have been rejecting the idea that consciousness cannot be studied and are attempting to delve into its secrets. As might be expected of a field so new, there is a tangle of diverse and conflicting theories, often using basic concepts in incompatible ways. To help unsnarl the tangle, philosophical reasoning is vital.

The myriad views within the field range from reductionist theories, according to which consciousness can be explained by the standard methods of neuroscience and psychology, to the position of the so-called mysterians, who say we will never understand consciousness at all. I believe that on close analysis both of these views can be seen to be mistaken and that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Against reductionism I will argue that the tools of neuroscience cannot provide a full account of conscious experience, although they have much to offer. Against mysterianism I will hold that consciousness might be explained by a new kind of theory. The full details of such a theory are still out of reach, but careful reasoning and some educated inferences can reveal something of its general nature. For example, it will probably involve new fundamental laws, and the concept of information may play a central role. These faint glimmerings suggest that a theory of consciousness may have startling consequences for our view of the universe and of ourselves.

The Hard Problem

Researchers use the word "consciousness" in many different ways. To clarify the issues, we first have to separate the problems that are often clustered together under the name. For this purpose, I find it useful to distinguish between the "easy problems" and the "hard problem" of consciousness. The easy problems are by no means trivial - they are actually as challenging as most in psychology and biology - but it is with the hard problem that the central mystery lies.

The easy problems of consciousness include the following: How can a human subject discriminate sensory stimuli and react to them appropriately? How does the brain integrate information from many different sources and use this information to control behavior? How is it that subjects can verbalize their internal states? Although all these questions are associated with consciousness, they all concern the objective mechanisms of the cognitive system. Consequently, we have every reason to expect that continued work in cognitive psychology and neuroscience will answer them.

The hard problem, in contrast, is the question of how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience. This puzzle involves the inner aspect of thought and perception: the way things feel for the subject. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations, such as that of vivid blue. Or think of the ineffable sound of a distant oboe, the agony of an intense pain, the sparkle of happiness or the meditative quality of a moment lost in thought. All are part of what I am calling consciousness. It is these phenomena that pose the real mystery of the mind.

To illustrate the distinction, consider a thought experiment devised by the Australian philosopher Frank Jackson. Suppose that Mary, a neuroscientist in the 23rd century, is the world's leading expert on the brain processes responsible for color vision. But Mary has lived her whole life in a black-and-white room and has never seen any other colors. She knows everything there is to know about physical processes in the brain - its biology, structure and function. This understanding enables her to grasp everything there is to know about the easy problems: how the brain discriminates stimuli, integrates information and produces verbal reports. From her knowledge of color vision, she knows the way color names correspond with wavelengths on the light spectrum. But there is still something crucial about color vision that Man does not know: what it is like to experience a color such as red. It follows that there are facts about conscious experience that cannot be deduced from physical facts about the functioning of the brain.

Indeed, nobody knows why these physical processes are accompanied by conscious experience at all. Why is it that when our brains process light of a certain wavelength, we have an experience of deep purple? Why do we have any experience at all? Could not an unconscious automaton have performed the same tasks just as well? These are questions that we would like a theory of consciousness to answer.

I am not denying that consciousness arises from the brain. We know, for example, that the subjective experience of vision is closely linked to processes in the visual cortex. It is the link itself that perplexes, however. Remarkably, subjective experience seems to emerge from a physical process. But we have no idea how or why this is.

Is Neuroscience Enough?

Given the flurry of recent work on Consciousness in neuroscience and psychology, one might think this mystery is starting to be cleared up. On closer examination, however, it turns out that almost all the current work addresses only the easy problems of consciousness. The confidence of the reductionist view comes from the progress on the easy problems, but none of this makes any difference where the hard problem is concerned.

Consider the hypothesis put forward by neurobiologists Francis Crick of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego and Christof Koch of the California Institute of Technology. They suggest that consciousness may arise from certain oscillations in the cerebral cortex, which become synchronized as neurons fire 40 times per second. Crick and Koch believe the phenomenon might explain how different attributes of a single perceived object (its color and shape, for example), which are processed in different parts of the brain, are merged into a coherent whole. In this theory, two pieces of information become bound together precisely when they are represented by synchronized neural firings.

The hypothesis could conceivably elucidate one of the easy problems about how information is integrated in the brain. But why should synchronized oscillations give rise to a visual experience, no matter how much integration is taking place? This question involves the hard problem, about which the theory has nothing to offer. Indeed, Crick and Koch are agnostic about whether the hard problem can be solved by science at all.

The same kind of critique could be applied to almost all the recent work on consciousness. In his 1991 book Consciousness Explained, philosopher Daniel C. Dennett laid out a sophisticated theory of how numerous independent processes in the brain combine to produce a coherent response to a perceived event. The theory might do much to explain how we produce verbal reports on our internal states, but it tells us very little about why there should be a subjective experience behind these reports. Like other reductionist theories, Dennett's is a theory of the easy problems.

The critical common trait among these easy problems is that they all concern how a cognitive or behavioral function is performed. All are ultimately questions about how the brain carries out some task-how it discriminates stimuli, integrates information, produces reports and so on. Once neurobiology specifies appropriate neural mechanisms, showing how the functions are performed, the easy problems are solved. The hard problem of consciousness, in contrast, goes beyond problems about how functions are performed. Even if every behavioral and cognitive function related to consciousness were explained, there would still remain a further mystery: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by conscious experience? It is this additional conundrum that makes the hard problem hard.

The Explanatory Gap

Some have suggested that to solve the hard problem, we need to bring in new tools of physical explanation: nonlinear dynamics, say, or new discoveries in neuroscience, or quantum mechanics. But these ideas suffer from exactly the same difficulty. Consider a proposal from Stuart R. Hameroff of the University of Arizona and Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford. They hold that consciousness arises from quantum-physical processes taking place in microtubules, which are protein structures inside neurons. It is possible (if not likely) that such a hypothesis will lead to an explanation of how the brain makes decisions or even how it proves mathematical theorems, as Hameroff and Penrose suggest. But even if it does, the theory is silent about how these processes might give rise to conscious experience. Indeed, the same problem arises with any theory of consciousness based only on physical processing.

The trouble is that physical theories are best suited to explaining why systems have a certain physical structure and how they perform various functions. Most problems in science have this form; to explain life, for example, we need to describe how a physical system can reproduce, adapt and metabolize. But consciousness is a different sort of problem entirely, as it goes beyond the explanation of structure and function.

Of course, neuroscience is not irrelevant to the study of consciousness. For one, it may be able to reveal the nature of the neural correlate of consciousness - the brain processes most directly associated with conscious experience. It may even give a detailed correspondence between specific processes in the brain and related components of experience. But until we know why these processes give rise to conscious experience at all, we will not have crossed what philosopher Joseph Levine has called the explanatory gap between physical processes and consciousness. Making that leap will demand a new kind of theory.

A True Theory of Everything

In searching for an alternative, a key observation is that not all entities in science are explained in terms of more basic entities. In physics, for example, space-time, mass and charge (among other things) are regarded as fundamental features of the world, as they are not reducible to anything simpler. Despite this irreducibility, detailed and useful theories relate these entities to one another in terms of fundamental laws. Together these features and laws explain a great variety of complex and subtle phenomena.

It is widely believed that physics provides a complete catalogue of the universe's fundamental features and laws. As physicist Steven Weinberg puts it in his 1992 book Dreams of a Final Theory, the goal of physics is a "theory of everything" from which all there is to know about the universe can be derived. But Weinberg concedes that there is a problem with consciousness. Despite the power of physical theory, the existence of consciousness does not seem to be derivable from physical laws. He defends physics by arguing that it might eventually explain what he calls the objective correlates of consciousness (that is, the neural correlates), but of course to do this is not to explain consciousness itself. If the existence of consciousness cannot be derived from physical laws, a theory of physics is not a true theory of everything. So a final theory must contain an additional fundamental component.

Toward this end, I propose that conscious experience be considered a fundamental feature, irreducible to anything more basic. The idea may seem strange at first, but consistency seems to demand it. In the 19th century it turned out that electromagnetic phenomena could not be explained in terms of previously known principles. As a consequence, scientists introduced electromagnetic charge as a new fundamental entity and studied the associated fundamental laws. Similar reasoning should apply to consciousness. If existing fundamental theories cannot encompass it, then something new is required.

Where there is a fundamental property, there are fundamental laws. In this case, the laws must relate experience to elements of physical theory. These laws will almost certainly not interfere with those of the physical world; it seems that the latter form a closed system in their own right. Rather the laws will serve as a bridge, specifying how experience depends on underlying physical processes. It is this bridge that will cross the explanatory gap.

Thus, a complete theory will have two components: physical laws, telling us about the behavior of physical systems from the infinitesimal to the cosmological, and what we might call psychophysical laws, telling us how some of those systems are associated with conscious experience. These two components will constitute a true theory of everything. (Scientific American, December 1995)

The Puzzle of Conscious Experience
 
a few ncc proposals

40-hertz oscillations in the cerebral cortex (Crick and Koch 1990)
Intralaminar nucleus in the thalamus (Bogen 1995)
Re-entrant loops in thalamocortical systems (Edelman 1989)
40-hertz rhythmic activity in thalamocortical systems (Llinas et al 1994)
Nucleus reticularis (Taylor and Alavi 1995)
Extended reticular-thalamic activation system (Newman and Baars 1993)
Anterior cingulate system (Cotterill 1994)
Neural assemblies bound by NMDA (Flohr 1995)
Temporally-extended neural activity (Libet 1994)
Backprojections to lower cortical areas (Cauller and Kulics 1991)
Neurons in extrastriate visual cortex projecting to prefrontal areas (Crick and Koch 1995)
Neural activity in area V5/MT (Tootell et al 1995)
Certain neurons in the superior temporal sulcus (Logothetis and Schall 1989)
Neuronal gestalts in an epicenter (Greenfield 1995)
Outputs of a comparator system in the hippocampus (Gray 1995)
Quantum coherence in microtubules (Hameroff 1994)
Global workspace (Baars 1988)
Activated semantic memories (Hardcastle 1995)
High-quality representations (Farah 1994)
Selector inputs to action systems (Shallice 1988)


*whats yer fave??

*since i am partial to all things quantum, i dig hameroff and penrose

:D

Leading physicist Roger Penrose asserts that there is an essential component to consciousness which our present scientific scope does not address. "This missing ingredient would be needed in order that the central issues of human mentality could ever be accommodated within a coherent scientific world-view. I shall maintain that this ingredient is itself something that is not beyond science - although, no doubt, it is an appropriately expanded scientific world-view that we shall need (Penrose 7)." In essence, a new branch of science must be created/discovered.

Penrose continues, "I would maintain that there is yet no physical, biological, or computational theory that comes very close to explaining our consciousness and consequent intelligence; but that should not deter us from striving to search for one (Penrose 8)."

"Biologists seem to be generally of the opinion that there is no necessity to be forced out of a classical framework (of physics) when discussing the large-scale implications of those primitive quantum ingredients (Penrose 348)." Basically, Penrose believes that there is a major correlation between quantum physics theory and consciousness.

Current estimations show that we have 1011, or one hundred billion, operational neurons, each capable of sending about a thousand signals per second, which equates to the ability of the brain to theoretically achieve one hundred trillion basic operations per second.

Whilst neurons are accepted as the elementary component of the nervous system and the brain, it is actually the microtubules within the neurons which are believed to control the brain. A microtubule - a constituent of the cytoskeleton of a cell - is a hollow tube that normally consists of thirteen tubulin dimers.

"If, on the other hand, we consider the tubulin dimer as the basic computational unit, then we must bear in mind that there are some one million dimers per neuron, the elementary operations now being performed some one hundred thousand times faster, giving us a total of around 1027 operations per second (Penrose 366)." Let me reiterate this astounding calculation: at the brain’s highest possible level of operation, an octillion operations per second can be performed!

While working towards discovering the capabilities of the human brain, Penrose believes strongly in what he calls "quantum coherence." "If it is microtubules that control the activity of the brain, then there must be something within the action of microtubules that is different from mere computation (Penrose 367)." Before delving into branches of physics which are far enough over my head for me to be standing in the Marinaras Trench, Penrose states that, "Such non-computational action must be the result of some reasonably large-scale quantum-coherent phenomenon, coupled in some way with microscopic behaviour (Penrose 367)."

Consciousness Connects Our Brains to the Fundamental Level of the Universe


*tie this into bohm's and eccles's shit and i just might not die "a stinking.......thing"


Neuroscientist Sir John Eccles dismisses the materialistic standpoint as a "superstition", and advocates dualist interactionism: he argues that there is a mental world in addition to the material world, and that our mind or self acts on the brain (particularly the supplementary motor area of the neocortex) at the quantum level by increasing the probability of the firing of selected neurons (Eccles, 1994; Giroldini, 1991). He argues that the mind is not only nonphysical but absolutely nonmaterial and nonsubstantial. However, if it were not associated with any form of energy-substance whatsoever, it would be a pure abstraction and therefore unable to exert any influence on the physical world. This objection also applies to antireductionists who shun the word "dualist" and describe matter and consciousness as complementary or dyadic aspects of reality, yet deny consciousness any energetic or substantial nature, thereby implying that it is fundamentally different from matter and in fact a mere abstraction.


Thus, although Bohm rejects the view that human consciousness brings quantum systems into existence, and does not believe that our minds normally have a significant effect on the outcome of a measurement (except in the sense that we choose the experimental setup), his interpretation opens the way for the operation of deeper, subtler, more mindlike levels of reality. He argues that consciousness is rooted deep in the implicate order, and is therefore present to some degree in all material forms. He suggests that there may be an infinite series of implicate orders, each having both a matter aspect and a consciousness aspect: "everything material is also mental and everything mental is also material, but there are many more infinitely subtle levels of matter than we are aware of" (Weber, 1990, p. 151). The concept of the implicate domain could be seen as an extended form of materialism, but, he says, "it could equally well be called idealism, spirit, consciousness. The separation of the two -- matter and spirit -- is an abstraction. The ground is always one." (Weber, 1990, p. 101)

Consciousness, Causality, and Quantum Physics
 
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