8 years ago
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Does Your ‘Self’ Have a Soul?
Most religions claim that there is more to the self than the brain. The traditional understanding is that human sentience and selfhood are conveyed via some kind of nonphysical substance, often called a ‘soul.’ By Robert Lawrence Kuhn.
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I hear blah blah blah blah. Where's the evidence? And I mean, evidence supported by repeatable experiments, not hallucinations or hoaxes.
Who knows what they're talking about? From what I can make out, they're describing an abstract concept, how we use the word, and what we mean by it. The gist seems to be about some idea you're never going to prove experimentally, because that's not what we mean by the word. Okay, one of them is clearly selling the soul as a consumer product and wants you to go all in on his brand of it, but the rest of it's not about some concrete thing you can go down and pay for at your friendly neighborhood McGod location. Where that guy goes all Christian mystical and woo-woo is where I think you can start to see what it ought not to mean. My 2¢. YMMV.
I don't generally have a problem with philosophy, but this reeks too much of trying to take advantage of the massive biases imposed on most of humanity by religion. I'm also not in principle opposed to the idea of a soul or whatever, as long as the argument involves some actual evidence or a falsifiable hypothesis that can be tested.
Accepting the soul as something that isn't provable experimentally is a dangerous thing. It can be used to justify everything, from everyone's different ideas of what a "soul" is, to pretty much everything else. If evidence is not required, anything can exist.