From: swf@teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic
Subject: Re: Soul
Date: 4 Sep 92 04:10:02 GMT
Reply-To: swf@tdat.teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
Distribution: world
Organization: NCR Teradata Database Business Unit

In article <1992Aug30.024256.7153@r-node.gts.org> Marc.Cormier%nautical@r-node.gts.org (Marc Cormier) writes:
|X-Posting-Software: UnixBBS 1.03 S/N 120921
|
|   The following message is a new twist (I hope it is) on the old debate on
|the existence of God or the Afterlife.
|   Since most religions require a spirit or soul to survive death, a way to
|prove the inexistence of such an entity is to take all its' attributed
|characteristics and prove them to be purely physical and biological in
|nature. 

True, and I think this may be one of the factors contributing to the
fundamental fear of science among Fundamentalist christians - they fear
that science will eliminate the soul.

|   Among the many characteristics attributed to the Human soul (according to
|christian, judaic and islamic religions) are the following:
|   Thought, Reasoning, Emotions, Personality, Animator of the being, and so
|on. 
|    
|    However all (ALL!) of the above charactersitics of the Soul are
|perfectly explainable in RATIONAL Scientific terms. Namely Biochemistry, and
|Biology. ...

That is only the implementation layer.  These features also involve a
higher level of analysis, the funtional level.  At this level they can be
viewed as data processing operations.  This is a key point, as I will
explain below.  [Note, in biology multiple levels of explanation are
generally required to elucidate a problem].
|  
|    Today's religious and philosophically enclined theologians will probably
|push the soul into the realms of the unattainable world. A obvious and
|logical choice. The last resort. ...
|Now it has nowhere to go. It does not exist. ...

I agree that is the last resort, but I tend to disagree with the conclusion,
which depends on what you mean by 'soul'.  If you mean some transcendent
entity independent of the physical world, then you are right, it does
not exist.  But if you are willing touse the term to refer to the functional
complex composed of (most of) the features/processes you described above,
then it *does* exist.  (I would tend to leave the 'Animator' bit out).

Note, there need be nothing metaphysical here.  The soul in this view
is just an operational description of a 'cybernetic' system.

I maintain that this approach allows an Afterlife as readily as the
metaphysical one, but with less extraneous baggage.


If my identity, my self, if you will, is found in this system we described,
and if, as seems likely, that the intrinsic properties of it are the
data processing or cybernetic ones, then it is easily transferable to
new hardware, as long as the new hardware is functionally comparable,
and the contents of the system are transfered completely and accurately.

Thus, *I* can be transplanted to a new body, and thus to a new life.


This is in fact perfectly compatible with the Biblical view of the
Afterlife (which, after all, talks about a *resurection* into a *new*
*body*).
-- 
sarima@teradata.com			(formerly tdatirv!sarima)
  or
Stanley.Friesen@ElSegundoCA.ncr.com