Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Typical Agruments Against The Soul

1. If the mind/soul exist how do they interact with the body?

Leo: I use the radio analogy music is not produce by the radio but interacts with it

2. There's a strong correlation between brain states and mental states

Leo: There is also a strong correlation between the radio and the music but that does not mean that mental capacities can't continue after the brain and body is destroyed

3. >As brain complexity increases, mental abilities also increase

A powerful radio can pick up more signals than a weak radio.

4. Alzheimers and other brain diseases destroyed memories

In Irreducible Mind the authors call into question that assumption

There is also a brief but fascinating discussion of an "even rarer kind of deathbed experience, but one that like NDEs calls into question the absolute dependence of mental functioning on the state of the brain":

There are scattered reports of people apparently recovering from dementia shortly before death. The eminent physician Benjamin Rush, author of the first American treatise on mental illness, observed that "most of mad people discover a greater or less degree of reason in the last days or hours of their lives". Similarly, in his classic study of hallucinations, Brierre de Boismont noted that "at the approach of death we observe that ... the intellect, which may have been obscured or extinguished during many years, is again restored in all its integrity". Flournoy mentioned that French psychiatrists had recently published cases of mentally ill persons who showed sudden improvement in their condition shortly before death....

[Other examples of more recent vintage follow. Then:]

Such cases are few in number and not adequately documented, but the persistence of such reports suggest that they may represent a real phenomenon that could potentially be substantiated by further in traditions. If so, they would seriously undermine the assumption that in such diseases as Alzheimer's the mind itself is destroyed in lockstep with the brain. Like many of the experiences discussed in this chapter, such cases would suggest that in some conditions, consciousness may be enhanced, not destroyed, when constraints normally supplied by the brain are sufficiently loosened. [Pages 410-411]

5. Why do ghosts wear clothes?

The answer to that is that the ghost is going to want to present themselves not naked but presentable to the person he or she visits like in apparitions and in dreams.

6. Does every living thing have a soul?

I would say yes we all have made of a etheric substance.

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