"One (possibility) is that we are, in fact, immense beings tasked with the physically demanding job of maintaining and upholding the cosmos. However, God entitles us to a vacation from time to time, and this we take as tiny, insignificant human beings, born into a resort called Earth. While here, we enjoy parochial pleasures, interesting ourselves in very small matters like watching movies, falling in love and so on. At the end of our lives, we return to work, terribly disappointed to be leaving our tiny earthly bodies.
"Strange enough? Well, here’s another possibility. “There are three deaths,” Eagleman writes. “The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.” In this scheme, when we die, we go to a cosmic waiting room where we mark time until our name is never again mentioned. The famous are trapped here, of course, for a very long time; they wish for obscurity, but it may take an eternity to arrive.
"How about another afterlife, in which God is a microbe whose real concern is the battles and triumphs of other microbes? Our problem here is that we are simply too big. Our fate is irrelevant to the real show, which is the one in which microbes participate."
(Alexander McCall Smith's book review in the New York Times of David Angleman's Forty Tales From the Afterlife.)
I have a grumba-da-zippy. Because I think I have a grumba-da-zippy, it exists to me. I can't prove it, you can't disprove it. Rationality has nothing to do with it because I think it doesn't make sense to you - and by my definition rationality can only deal with things that makes sense to US. What my grumba-da-zippy does is not an issue, and it does nothing. It just sits there and fidgets.
OK, you folks on this thread are having too much fun. :-D
But let me suggest an argument or two to balance out the stalwart agnosticism on this thread. I'll accept the Wiki definition for the soul: "In many religions and parts of philosophy, the soul is the immaterial part of a person. It is usually thought to consist of one's thoughts and personality, and can be synonymous with the spirit, mind or self.[1] In theology, the soul is often believed to live on after the person’s death, and some religions posit that God creates souls. In some cultures, non-human living things, and sometimes inanimate objects are said to have souls, a belief known as animism.[2]"
(BTW, on the last point, National Geographic last night had an interesting documentary on the Stonehenge, speculating that the animists that built it believed that souls inhabited the stones. Thus, to the question, can a carrot have a soul: some animists would say: yes.) There are in my view three arguments for the existence of the soul:
1. The persistence and prevelance of belief that there is a soul-- something distinct from bodily mechanics-- through all recorded time and in almost every culture.
Obviously, the mere existence of belief no matter how universal doesn't equate to the existence of its reality. However, on prima facie grounds, this strikes me as compelling and the counter-arguments (genetic basis for supersitions, fear of death, reverence for ancestors, self-ego, and so on) are not knock-out punches to the doctrine of the soul.
2. The conservation of energy premise that mental energy is neither is neither created nor lost in a closed system.
Of course, whether the energy that makes up my personality and emotions persists after my death as a recognized entity is another matter is more a matter of theology (reincarnation, heaven) or fantasy and folklore (ghosts and the weird).
3. The final argument relates to our inability to clearly define the human mind. The analogy of the human brain to a computer seems to fall apart on analysis as we cannot model states of cognition and consciousness mechnically, such as dread, jealousy, greed, affection, ambition, and numinous, to name a few. While it is possible that increased increased research in cybernetics and robiotics may fill in these gaps, I think it is more likely that we will never replicate what the human mind can do.
Can a machine have a soul? I don't see how as everything we see from that machine (toast from a toaster or calculations of pi from a computer) are nothing more or less than the operations of machine itself. We don't have that same kind of certitude about the processing of the human mind. It's a reasonable scientific premsie, but it is far from settled fact.
My own view is that the soul can exist in humans and higher animals, but it need not exist. It is a quality like joy not an essence like blood. And it is largely an imputed quality and dependent on its nurturing community. For example, a puppy in a neurotic family will absorb those neurotic qualities and will generally become a neurotic dog. A puppy in a fun-loving family will become fun-loving. That neurosis or playfulness is the soul of the dog. This is why generations of cats and dogs within the same human family often have the same disposition. On the other hand, a feral dog may not have a soul at all-- it will do nothing more and nothing elss what a feral dog will do to survive.
