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[malloc]

Oh also -- going from Wisconsin to Illinois also has weed dispensary signs, as someone noted in the comments.

It seems like those have exploded around here (St Louis and its western suburbs) as well.

[WeepingElf]

I'll assume that God is outside the system entirely, thus not made of matter; I'll also assume that there is no such thing as a non-material soul. What does he do to incarnate?

According to Rupert Sheldrake's morphic field theory (which I am somewhat into, though not entirely convinced), the soul is a morphic field. Note that such morphic fields would be natural rather than supernatural entities; it's essentially nested morphic fields all the way down to the quantum fields of the fundamental particles (which rather behave like oscillation patters than whirling little balls of matter), so morphic fields would be something like quantum fields of macroscopic systems, and morphic resonance a kind of quantum entanglement, though this is probably a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics

[Travis B.]

I am of the view that consciousness is merely an emergent property of matter, which being emergent is greater than the sum of its parts. What one might call the 'soul' is simply consciousness as such.

[Travis B.]

For the sake of comparison, other emergent properties of matter include being able to represent and store mathematical ideas and the ability to carry out or be used to carry out computations.

[WeepingElf]

I am of the view that consciousness is merely an emergent property of matter, which being emergent is greater than the sum of its parts. What one might call the 'soul' is simply consciousness as such.

Yes. Consciousness is an emergent property of the human mind, which in turn is a pattern of activity in the brain, a material physical system. While the brain almost certainly does not work the same way as a computer system, the comparison with the hardware and software of the latter is not entirely off the mark: the software is a pattern of activity in the hardware, and the mind is a pattern of activity in the brain. There is of course the question of free will, which probably has to do with the human mind most likely involving quantum indeterminacy. The "morphic fields" I mentioned about an hour ago are just one way of conceiving complex systems with emerging properties like this.

[bradrn]

so morphic fields would be something like quantum fields of macroscopic systems, and morphic resonance a kind of quantum entanglement, though this is probably a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics

No ‘probably’; it is a misunderstanding, of the sort which is so fundamentally wrong that it’s hard to know where to even begin explaining.

[zompist]

As an ex-Catholic, the idea of there not being a soul is against the teachings of "The Church", and if you can posit that "God" is outside our universe and can interact with the universe directly (though rarely does), then you can also posit that souls, whatever else they are, are also outside the universe and able to interact with it. None of this can be scientifically proven of course, but it technically doesn't go against anything that science has proven. It just also fails Occam's razor.

Sure, you can posit souls, but it's not science, and non-physical substrates (like "vital spirits") have not fared well in science.

By contrast, when Aquinas was doing his synthesis, the best science of the day— Aristotle plus the Arab commentators— accepted or even insisted on the soul.

[bradrn]

As an ex-Catholic, the idea of there not being a soul is against the teachings of "The Church", and if you can posit that "God" is outside our universe and can interact with the universe directly (though rarely does), then you can also posit that souls, whatever else they are, are also outside the universe and able to interact with it. None of this can be scientifically proven of course, but it technically doesn't go against anything that science has proven. It just also fails Occam's razor.

Sure, you can posit souls, but it's not science, and non-physical substrates (like "vital spirits") have not fared well in science.

I agree with linguistcat’s wording here: ‘it technically doesn't go against anything that science has proven’. That is to say, it’s not proven, but it doesn’t actually contradict scientifically known facts either. So modern science can’t actually say anything in particular, positive or negative, about the existence or nonexistence of immortal souls. The only principles left to point you in one direction or the other are metaphysical ones like the aforementioned Occam’s razor (if you disbelieve) or faith in some religion (if you do believe).

[Travis B.]

As an ex-Catholic, the idea of there not being a soul is against the teachings of "The Church", and if you can posit that "God" is outside our universe and can interact with the universe directly (though rarely does), then you can also posit that souls, whatever else they are, are also outside the universe and able to interact with it. None of this can be scientifically proven of course, but it technically doesn't go against anything that science has proven. It just also fails Occam's razor.

Sure, you can posit souls, but it's not science, and non-physical substrates (like "vital spirits") have not fared well in science.

I agree with linguistcat’s wording here: ‘it technically doesn't go against anything that science has proven’. That is to say, it’s not proven, but it doesn’t actually contradict scientifically known facts either. So modern science can’t actually say anything in particular, positive or negative, about the existence or nonexistence of immortal souls. The only principles left to point you in one direction or the other are metaphysical ones like the aforementioned Occam’s razor (if you disbelieve) or faith in some religion (if you do believe).

The problem with the concept of an 'immortal soul' is that the human mind is fundamentally material in origin, yet an 'immortal soul' is a special metaphysical quantity whose existence on top of something material in nature that would need to be justified. If humans have 'immortal souls', then there is no good reason why not just higher animals such as chimpanzees and dolphins and crows and octopuses have 'immortal souls', but also animals such as houseflies and sea urchins.

Of course, if one treats consciousness as an emergent quality of a material mind, then one does not run into this, because one can posit different degrees of consciousness based upon a given animal's brain's neural capacity.

[Torco]

well not really. as with many ways in which religion is made to look more plausible than it is, here the question is indictive vs. deductive reasoning.

like, if what one wants is apodictic, deductive, totally ironclad reasoning then yes, there's nothing in science that directly states that it is impossible for consciousness to be caused not by the activity of the brain but, rather, by the influence of some immaterial unobserved substance. by that standard, though, there's nothing in science that can retort to any claim we might want to make. it's a bit like positing that the big bang was retroactively caused by spain winning the current world cup: it's not possible to definitely prove it false, sure, but it is silly. there's a lot in science that suggests the mind is emergent from bodily activity and not from the action of an immaterial soul. and we all know what that includes: drugs affecting the mind, brain surgery affecting the mind, hormones affecting the mind, bullets to the brain affecting the mind, blood sugar affecting the mind, and a bunch of other mindstate correlates.

now sure, we can say that consciousness or mental activity is maybe caused by both what's going on in the body and also the soul, but that's like saying the sun shines because of nuclear fusion and also, through retroactive causation, because of spain's world cup victory. sure, could be, but seriously now.

[bradrn]

The problem with the concept of an 'immortal soul' is that the human mind is fundamentally material in origin, yet an 'immortal soul' is a special metaphysical quantity whose existence on top of something material in nature that would need to be justified. If humans have 'immortal souls', then there is no good reason why not just higher animals such as chimpanzees and dolphins and crows and octopuses have 'immortal souls', but also animals such as houseflies and sea urchins.

A few relevant points, in no particular order:

• ‘Mind’ and ‘soul’ are not necessarily synonyms. Newborn babies are presumed to have immortal souls, as are people with severe intellectual disabilities. (And even unborn fetuses, insofar as I understand the anti-abortion campaigners.)
• Taking this a bit further, Chabad states explicitly that in Judaism ‘every created entity possesses a "soul." […] every blade of grass has a soul, and every grain of sand’. So they would apparently agree with your conclusion there, and disagree that the idea of a ‘soul’ necessarily conflicts with materialism.
• Conversely, a material mind does not necessarily induce a soul. Secularly, this is the infamous ‘p-zombie’. Religiously, I am reminded of a remarkable passage from the book Past Master (by the devoutly Catholic author RA Lafferty) in which he shows a soul being bestowed on an android which, he makes clear, was fully intelligent yet soulless earlier in the book.
• The notion that ‘the human mind is fundamentally material in origin’ is itself a premise yet to be fully proved. Personally, of course, I think it is very likely true. Many Catholics would presumably agree with me (e.g. Lafferty as mentioned). Presumably others were not. Of course, either way it doesn’t matter, because ‘mind’ and ‘soul’ are different kinds of things.

[zompist]

Sure, you can posit souls, but it's not science, and non-physical substrates (like "vital spirits") have not fared well in science.

I agree with linguistcat’s wording here: ‘it technically doesn't go against anything that science has proven’. That is to say, it’s not proven, but it doesn’t actually contradict scientifically known facts either.

This is precisely compatible with what I just said. Yes, you can make suppositions that are not supported by science.

There's two areas where you kind of have to: mathematics and morality. You have to start with some axioms in both areas. Of course, you can't do science without math, that's why mathematicians are so smug.

So modern science can’t actually say anything in particular, positive or negative, about the existence or nonexistence of immortal souls.

Sure it can, it can say "that's not science." Science doesn't like things that are untestable, unfalsifiable, and not needed to explain known facts.

Now, Travis's statement that "the human mind is fundamentally material in origin" is not proven... but it's a far better hypothesis than it would have been 200 or 2000 years ago. Heck, with LLMs it looks better than it did five years ago. Not because LLMs are conscious, but because it's now clear that language can be handled with "fundamentally material" processs.

Again, dualism is not disproven, and we're not at the point where everything about the human mind can be explained mechanistically. But dualism is scientifically sterile. It's not an idea that suggests experiments or falsifiable theories.

[malloc]

Now, Travis's statement that "the human mind is fundamentally material in origin" is not proven... but it's a far better hypothesis than it would have been 200 or 2000 years ago. Heck, with LLMs it looks better than it did five years ago. Not because LLMs are conscious, but because it's now clear that language can be handled with "fundamentally material" processs.

Quite. The fact that AI can imitate humans so convincingly and master so many aspects of human cognition seems like pretty strong evidence against dualism. There comes a point where you must either acknowledge the mind arises from matter rather than soul or else argue that Sam Altman is actually a powerful sorcerer capable of forging souls and binding them to data centers.

[Man in Space]

Now, Travis's statement that "the human mind is fundamentally material in origin" is not proven... but it's a far better hypothesis than it would have been 200 or 2000 years ago. Heck, with LLMs it looks better than it did five years ago. Not because LLMs are conscious, but because it's now clear that language can be handled with "fundamentally material" processs.

Quite. The fact that AI can imitate humans so convincingly and master so many aspects of human cognition seems like pretty strong evidence against dualism. There comes a point where you must either acknowledge the mind arises from matter rather than soul or else argue that Sam Altman is actually a powerful sorcerer capable of forging souls and binding them to data centers.

SCP-7997?

[Richard W]

... that Sam Altman is actually a powerful sorcerer capable of forging souls and binding them to data centers.

Doesn't that fit the financial facts?

[Raphael]

... that Sam Altman is actually a powerful sorcerer capable of forging souls and binding them to data centers.

Doesn't that fit the financial facts?

It fits what the financial people think the financial facts are.

[WeepingElf]

so morphic fields would be something like quantum fields of macroscopic systems, and morphic resonance a kind of quantum entanglement, though this is probably a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics

No ‘probably’; it is a misunderstanding, of the sort which is so fundamentally wrong that it’s hard to know where to even begin explaining.

I guessed that

EDIT: Indeed, I have thought again about those morphic fields. They are an interesting philosophy which looks nice to laypeople like me, but they probably don't describe reality particularly well. They at least make (at least to me) more sense than Plato's immutable Forms, which IMHO fail at evolution and creativity.

[Ares Land]

For amusement value, perhaps we could work out a brand-new set of heresies based on modern understanding of the brain. Actual believers will probably want to look away. (Though no disrespect is intended; as the universe is not Aristotelian, the traditional theology can't be correct anyway.)

I'll assume that God is outside the system entirely, thus not made of matter; I'll also assume that there is no such thing as a non-material soul. What does he do to incarnate?

This is fun -- though I'd second the warning, this is going to be a little irreverent.

(also, did Jesus have a Y chromosome?)

God exists outside all physical constraints, including causality. So I'd say he arranges matter "beforehand" (really, outside all time and causality constraints) so that the brain develops in such a way He thinks divine thoughts. No remote control needed.

God being omniscient, He knows the position of every particle in the universe. There is something of a theological problem here, because incarnated he can't physically hold that information. However, knowing beforehand what information he needs and when, and so can make sure the necessary information is available in some neural pathway when he precisely needs it.

God isn't limited by 20th century or even 25th century biology, and most likely no one is going to dissect his body. Perhaps he just creates a human-shaped frame whose inside doesn't look anything like human flesh, but is better able to support divine consciousness and power. Of course, the end result is no more "human" than Superman is, even if he's optimized more for teaching than for fighting crooks.

It's not explicitly in the rules, but I'm pretty sure dissecting God's body is a mortal sin according to Catholicism.
Following the spirit of the idea, logically, the physician who would do so would probably notice nothing unusual. Following the idea of God working outside time altogether, I think matters would be arranged in such a way that the appropriate piece of divine consciousness is available at the proper moment.

But maybe we could have a sort of schism here -- is God like a computer programmer, inclined not to waste time and CPU cycles on the parts no one will see? Or is he like an old-school craftsman or fashion designer, who'd spend as much time on the visible parts as on the invisible ones?
Was the planet Mars fully rendered before interplanetary probes? Or did those rock formations appear when Viking rendered, as if they had existed for billions of years?

(If I had to answer, I'd say fully rendered. It's not like God has to preserve resources. )

---

This reminds me of something I once read in Gershom Scholem.
Apparently, there was in early Jewish mysticism a tradition of working out the physical dimensions of God's body. Did they still have an idea of God as corporeal and physical at the time? Or is it a metaphor? Or is it something else entirely? I don't know. Gershom Scholem's too complicated for my poor brain.

---

In defense of dualism -- we do know objects that are real but not physical. For instance, the English language. English manifests somewhere in the Broca area of English-speaking brains, also as ink on paper, patterns in electronics, sound waves or morse code. It can produced and processed by mechanical processes too (with LLMs for instance, but with enough time we could probably work out something with index cards.)

Another is the Catholic Church, which manifests as physical phenomena: cathedrals, churches, specific words or rituals, the Pope but can't be directly identified with any of these material things.
Of course we can retort that English is ultimately the product of human minds; Catholics would insist that while there's a human component to the Church it's essentially created by God (not being a believer, of course, I believe it's a fully human construct, but I can't prove it. )

But what the most intriguing example, to me at least, is mathematics. A mathematic objects, say a sine function, is not material, it manifests in many distinct phenomena: from the behavior of electrons to drawing a circle in the sand with a stick.
I don't think we can settle the question of whether mathematics is purely a product of human brain. Doing advanced math is like exploring within a distinct realm (I've forgotten most advanced math, but it certainly felt that way, and actual mathematicians certainly report the same feeling). Often math starts with some sort of practical problem; but at other times pure and abstract mathematical speculation leads to objects that turn out to have completely unexpected applications.

To put it another way, there is something to the Platonic idea of Forms.

I've used the idea for a con-religion: to Tarandim scholars, a god can be seen as an abstract form that can manifest as the sea during a storm, or as a human-like presence, or a spooky feeling during a temple ritual. As they believe in reincarnation, they believe the same abstract soul can manifest as different people at different points in time (or a scary presence when you're alone in the dark.)

[bradrn]

This reminds me of something I once read in Gershom Scholem.
Apparently, there was in early Jewish mysticism a tradition of working out the physical dimensions of God's body. Did they still have an idea of God as corporeal and physical at the time? Or is it a metaphor? Or is it something else entirely? I don't know. Gershom Scholem's too complicated for my poor brain.

I looked it up, and apparently it’s this? I know nothing about it but some of the links are interesting.

I've used the idea for a con-religion: to Tarandim scholars, a god can be seen as an abstract form that can manifest as the sea during a storm, or as a human-like presence, or a spooky feeling during a temple ritual. As they believe in reincarnation, they believe the same abstract soul can manifest as different people at different points in time (or a scary presence when you're alone in the dark.)

If I’m understanding it rightly, I’ve seen a variation of this idea before, in Ursula Le Guin’s short story A Man of the People (collected in Four Ways to Forgiveness). Most explicitly:

“[…] Learning the Sun-stuff, he always asked, why thus? why this way, not another way? I answered: Because in what we do daily and in the way we do it, we enact the gods. He said: Then the gods are only what we do. I said: In what we do rightly, the gods are: that is the truth. […]”

Specific things which are described as manifestations of a god include: a man costumed as ball lightning, the act of sexual intercourse, the feeling upon meeting someone who went away to a high-technological society. The state of depression is described as a god dying.

[Ares Land]

This reminds me of something I once read in Gershom Scholem.
Apparently, there was in early Jewish mysticism a tradition of working out the physical dimensions of God's body. Did they still have an idea of God as corporeal and physical at the time? Or is it a metaphor? Or is it something else entirely? I don't know. Gershom Scholem's too complicated for my poor brain.

I looked it up, and apparently it’s this? I know nothing about it but some of the links are interesting.

That's it. I read about it in On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (I bought it years ago, the title was promising but it's definitely too difficult for me) It does seem both obscure and heretical!

There's also the novel Towing Jehovah. (I never read it, and I don't really want to. I think it's one of those cases when the idea is so brilliant the execution can only be disappointing.)

If I’m understanding it rightly, I’ve seen a variation of this idea before, in Ursula Le Guin’s short story A Man of the People (collected in Four Ways to Forgiveness). Most explicitly:

“[…] Learning the Sun-stuff, he always asked, why thus? why this way, not another way? I answered: Because in what we do daily and in the way we do it, we enact the gods. He said: Then the gods are only what we do. I said: In what we do rightly, the gods are: that is the truth. […]”

Specific things which are described as manifestations of a god include: a man costumed as ball lightning, the act of sexual intercourse, the feeling upon meeting someone who went away to a high-technological society. The state of depression is described as a god dying.

I'll have to read the story -- I'd never even heard of it and it's interesting how close this comes to my idea.