A question of spirits/souls

Jeanie wrote:

I agree, and it is having a resurgence currently, but I believe, like most things, it will eventually give way to other ways of thinking. There will be a backlash against it, then it will rise up again and so on and so on. History tells us that, and based on history we have no reason to believe that this current climate will prevail for eternity.

Ok, so because there is no scientific evidence to support the existence of souls you are saying they do not exist? Even though many things start out with no scientific evidence to support them? I've yet to see evidence to the contrary that was irrefutable. I guess what I'm saying is to my mind the jury is still out and until such times as a definitive, rational argument that makes sense to me for or against the existence of soul is put forward, then I will continue to believe in their existence.

As to the degenerative neurological disorder, firstly it is not my brain that I am victim to, it is my immune system. The scientific and biological action is that something (and they're not absolutely certain what, could be a combination of things) sets my incorrectly functioning immune system to attacking the myelin coating on the nerves. This makes holes & scars in the myelin which make the nerves misfire causing the message from my brain to be interrupted along the nerve and stopping function. So my brain is still working, my extremities are still working (or have the potential to continue working) they simply aren't getting the instruction or the impulse. Depending on how bad the scarring and whether or not the defective immune response can be stopped will depend on whether or not function returns. Well that and copious amounts of retraining the neural pathways. All of this is scientific and a biological function and has nothing to do with my soul. My soul would come into it when I decide or not to fight the biology. The essence of who I am in that moment will either spring up to fight the disease and it's outcome or be too tired to care depending on the day and the meds. I don't believe in the after life so once you stop breathing it is all over. My soul does not float around free of disease looking for another body to inhabit or fly off to somewhere magical where the disease does not exist. Who I am, the essence of me will live on in those who remember me, and how I view the world and all that I did in it will influence them to a greater or lesser degree until they too die. Of course other people that do believe in GOD and the afterlife will see it differently. Did that make any sense to you at all?

Byrnzie wrote:

It's interesting that quantum physicists have as much as declared the existence of 'soul', and/or 'spirit' in the world.
You should check out Michael Talbot's two books 'Mysticism and the new physics', and 'The Holographic Universe'.

Jeanie wrote:

hehe! yeah, sounds great! my grandmother's dorsal frontalorbital cortex lives on in me!

I understand what you are saying but can you see that a "soul" is an emotional thing and how the scientific terminology just isn't gonna cut it? Not to mention that her frontalorbital cortex does not live on in me, it is 6 foot under and probably completely decomposed by now. But saying that the output from her brain is now living in me doesn't really do it either. This is what I mean about science needing to discuss these things in terms that people can relate to. It is more than her brain function that I would consider her essence. Possibly it's also the chemical interaction between us, as well as the nurture element, could be a lot of things but simply stating the scientific side of it isn't enough. People hold these beliefs on a deeply emotional level. You cannot break them down with cold hard fact and expect people to embrace them. The reasons why her brain was able to affect my brain in such a way, even if it was explained as only a series of biological functions and emotional triggers and hormonal interactions that would not be something that I would embrace simply because it is too clinical and does not do our relationship to each other justice. And if I'm trying to see it in a scientific way, can you then see how this would be complete bunkum to those who are not?

oh and just on that last bit, I realize how others interpret and define a soul, but I've never been one to follow the rules when it comes to spirituality. Although I suppose if I believe that my grandmother's soul lives on in me that I do believe that it has some transcendental qualities.

angelica wrote:

If you want to find out, you can do a search on the board for "David Bohm". I've quoted a ton of stuff on him here in the past. You scoffed at the quotes I've posted from this well-known physicist and man-who-hung-out-with-Einstein-and-discussed-theory-with-him. You've dismissed him because of the spiritual things he's said. Besides on the board, there is lots to read about him elsewhere. I'm sure if you're interested, you'll find it.

His big theory is about the "holomovement"--which is how he perceives all that we see and know about. And he co-developed a holographic model of the brain.

"Bohm also made significant theoretical contributions to neuropsychology and the development of the holonomic model of the functioning of the brain" ~wikipedia

1.5 A chief benefit of PDP models is the power of representing information in combinations of activities of many units. The basic idea is that a dozen detector cells considered separately can encode only 12 states, for example, while 12 binary units considered in combination can detect 2 to the 12th power or 4096 states. As the number of units escalates to brain proportions, the advantages of combinatoric coding become overwhelming. Though this idea has been around for a long time (i.e., Bridgeman, 1971), it was neglected in the enthusiasm for detectors of lines, edges, faces, and even hands. The book points out how vector coding can combine combinatoric efficiency with distributed processing to retrieve separate messages from overlapping sets of simulated neurons. The idea is not a new one; it was standard fare for Cornell undergraduates in the mid-1960s, and the mathematics is a first cousin of the orthogonal polynomials known to every student of statistics. But here distributed coding is combined with powerful simulation techniques and with architectures that make the ideas realizable.

1.6 The new approach distinguishes several types of distributed codes, with vector coding for instance being useful in some situations and vector averaging in others. The approach can make sense of the myriad of different neural responses, each neuron seemingly having its own ``personality'' of response profile, taking combinatoric advantage of the diversity to create distinct vector codes for every possible situation. The approach is causing a re-evaluation of data that had been uninterpretable under the old feature detector scheme, but fit well with vector coding (Bridgeman, 1992).