i'm not a great believer in the soul per se, one because the human body biologically has no room for such a phantom being to exist. however, my question to those theists is; how do you explain indentical twins? at the first instance of the zygotic cell dividing, instead of staying together, the two new cells break apart and start forming into two separate beings, though biologically they are one person. so, what happens with their soul? these identical twins were supposed to be one person yet they're not, so what happens to the soul of the one person? does it half? is one twin without a soul? i have no opinion myself, i was just wondering what others thought.
This is a very good question, atheroy! I don't believe individuals have individual souls. I believe there is only one soul that we all have, and I believe that is God within us and we are One with God. Identical twins have the same soul as everybody else. If we each had our own individual souls, eventually souls would run out. Since we all have this one soul, there's plenty to go around for everybody. The soul never dies. It is eternal. Therefore, we are given eternal life when we visit Planet Earth, and we still have the eternal spirit when we shed our "earthsuits." The portion that occupied our bodies while we were alive just returns to the whole but never dies. There is a period of time our part of the Soul travels or hangs around our families; it may go somewhere else to do some good somewhere else. Eventually it will find a body to encompass and it will teach the owner of that body certain lessons during their lifetime. I've read that the portion of the One Soul often returns in the same family. You and I share the same soul, for example. We share it with the whole human race. That is why when one human being hurts another, it hurts us, too. The soul is made up of energy just like our bodies and the world around us. We're no different than a rock or a computer or a tree. We're all One, and so is our Spirit.
According to well-known religious dogma, each person possesses an invisible, ethereal, indestructible soul, the quality of which is determined by the person's deeds. No matter their shared origin, identical twins would each possess their own respective souls, which could inevitably be distinguished from one another through differing degrees of iniquity, or "stain". This effect is inexorable, as the souls occupy separate bodies, which will and must experience the world differently and, consequently, make unlike decisions. One twin could chose a path of righteousness, whereas his or her fellow could chose immorality. Due to unthinkable multiplicity and numerousness of moral choices in one's life, it is highly improbable that the twins could maintain their spiritual likeness. The corporeal and mental attributes of twins gradually grow dissimilar from birth. This suggests that their spiritual welfare would do likewise.
Atheroy, Identical twins is just one problem for those who believe in the gibberish of souls and even M*Ws concept. Here is a small portion of a well-written post from a past member (Boris) which highlights some of the vast problems for those who would like a soul to exist. Enjoy. For the purposes of this argument, we must first determine that of all the body parts, it is the brain that makes us who we are. After all, you can take a normal human, amputate all of her limbs, and she will still be defined as a human being. You can take a human being and cut out his heart, lungs, kidneys, bowels, etc. and he would still be a human being (for as long as surgical machines can do the work of the missing organs.) If you cut off somebody's head, and somehow manage to keep it alive, then it's the head we would point toward when we discuss that person; the headless body will no longer be ol' Joe -- since here's ol' Joe's head that speaks in Joe's voice and thinks and feels like Joe, and possesses all of Joe's knowledge, etc. So we can keep imaginatively (and nonchalantly) stripping Joe of body parts until only the brain is left floating in a jar. At this point, we can still safely point to the brain and say that it's Joe; we can incinerate the other body parts, but as long as the brain is alive, Joe is alive too. Incidentally, that's why clinical death is defined as brain death. Any other failed organ can be replaced, at least in principle; however a brain cannot be replaced. Even if Joe clinically died, and you transplanted Brent's brain into Joe's skull, all you would have done is transplant Brent's persona into Joe's body; Joe would still be dead as a doornail. Now then, it seems that the brain is the crucial part of us that makes us who we are. Incidentally, the brain also physically controls the body. If you want to bend a finger, a train of signals has to travel from your brain down your spinal cord and through your peripheral nervous system all the way to the muscles of that particular finger, so that they contract or expand so as to bend the finger in the way you wanted. If the pathway between the brain and any particular part of the body is breached even at one spot, you will lose your control over that part of your body. Hence, the brain is not only the defining part of what it is to be human -- it is also the part that actually controls the body! So, if the soul is to interact with the body, it is clear that the soul must interact with the brain. But where in the brain does this interaction with the soul occur? It turns out that there is no possible answer. As you may or may not know, the brain can be crudely subdivided into an old brain and the new brain, the latter composed of the left and right cerebral hemispheres. The old brain consists basically of the brainstem, and in humans is more or less a mere interface between the new brain and the spinal cord, as far as cognitive function is concerned. This is not to say that the old brain is insignificant, since it contains physiologically crucial centers controlling everything from heart beats to breathing to sleep-wake cycles. However, it is the new brain that is responsible for any behavior that we would consider above comatose. The new brain possesses vast tracts processing and combining information from the five senses, it possesses structures that plan, initiate, and control movement, it possesses structures responsible for emotions, it possesses structures involved in memory, attention, spatial navigation, object recognition, production, perception, and comprehension of speech, etc, etc, etc. In fact, brain damage studies show that every last bit of the new brain in adult humans is involved in at least one, and often several, cognitive tasks. So, it would seem that the soul must be in contact with the entire brain if it was to account for all of our human faculties. However, this does not hold when we consider abnormal physiology. Certain birth defects cause some children to be born with only one cerebral hemisphere; other children lose a hemisphere to surgical intervention very early in life. Despite the fact that for an adult to lose a hemisphere would be absolutely devastating in terms of loss of function and aspects of personality, these children grow up to be nearly normal in all respects. This is just one example where the amazing plasticity of the brain shows itself in full glory. Thing is, the plasticity is lost early in life as the brain becomes increasingly organized, since for a highly structured brain plastic change would actually mean loss of function rather than gain. Yet, the very fact that people are alive who function normally with only one hemisphere (and a brain that is organized vastly differently!), as opposed to the "normal" people who have two hemispheres and a totally different brain organization -- poses difficulties for any proposed mechanism of interaction between the soul and the brain. Already, it would seem that the mechanism is not dependent on the soul, but must adapt to the developing brain on-the-go, so as to connect the soul to the brain correctly, whatever the final architecture of the adult brain may be. The functional portion of the brain is composed of vast and very complex networks of a total adult average of 10,000,000,000 special cells called neurons (the bodies of these cells contain pigment and are often collectively referred to as "gray matter"). Each neuron sends out slender connections to other neurons, and an average neuron is connected to about 10,000 others (these interconnection fibers are wrapped in other special cells that form an electrical insulation around these "wires"; as a result the connections look white to the eye, and en masse are referred to as "white matter"). Of course, there are trillions of other cells in the brain besides neurons, which compose blood vessels, provide insulation and scaffolding for the connections between neurons, nourish neurons and clean up their waste, fight invading pathogens, etc -- but neurons are what actually does all the work of cognition. Neurons work by sending electrical impulses to other neurons, and accepting similar messages. Without going into too much gory detail, the effect of the messages on any particular neuron is mediated by a slew of factors from the actual chemicals used to pass the message between neurons, to the actual characteristics of the voltage signals that neurons send to each other. But the great and overriding point here is that neurons are literally billions of independent cells, communicating among each other, and every now and then sending impulses through your peripheral nervous system to affect what your body does. It seems that to control the body, the soul would have to connect individually to every last neuron in the brain and control what it does. But neurons die all the time, and new neurons are born also (although at a much slower rate.) Furthermore, the actual connections between neurons change constantly, and so the role any particular neuron plays in the overall function of the brain varies with time. So, how does the soul know what each neuron's current function is? Additionally, it seems that scientists can predict neuronal behavior precisely, based purely on the electrochemical impulses it is receiving from other neurons. So it appears that there is no mysterious soul behind the curtains telling this neuron to fire and that one to hold off once every millisecond; behavior of neurons is determined exactly by the input they receive from other neurons. And some of those other neurons receive a lot of their input from sensory organs, such as the pressure, pain, temperature, etc. (in other words, somatosensory) receptors on your skin and other organs, or from your eyes, ears, nose, or tongue, or from the vestibular apparatus in your inner ear, etc. So it seems that the brain is a deterministic machine that is driven by inputs from its environment. And all of those receptors and organs have also been studied in detail, and found to be purely biochemical and physically deterministic. There is no place left for the soul to operate! There is no end to the problems that neuropathology brings for the soul, and I am not going to attempt to list even a small portion of such problems. However, I already mentioned the conundrum posed by neural plasticity. I'll present just one more "problem", and then move on to the next argument. The problem has to do with the split-brain patients. Some people are subject to debilitating seizures, which are uncontrollable through drugs. A seizure is really a runaway chain reaction where a bunch of neurons starts firing chaotically, and the chaos spreads across the cortex, disrupting any cognitive function in its wake. Seizures can sometimes be combated through drugs, which help regulate neuronal activity and stop it from crossing a vital threshold above which it spins out of control. Newer methods include electrodes implanted directly into the particular brain region where seizures originate, so that an implanted computer can detect an onset of the seizure and apply a mild electric current between electrodes, which in effect "resets" the surrounding neural tissue and stops a seizure in its tracks. However, a while ago such advanced treatments were not available, and in extremely debilitating cases the only recourse was surgery. Most often, the small brain region where seizures originate was surgically removed (the mild loss in cognitive function was a small price to pay for the freedom from frequent seizures, and was especially tolerable for children whose brains are still plastic enough to compensate for the injury). However, in a few cases the offending region was crucial to certain treasured faculties, such as for example production or comprehension of speech, or control of posture. In other cases the offending region was just too large. In these cases, the surgeons did the next best thing to excising the part of the brain -- they selectively cut some of the connections between this brain part and other parts of the brain, so that the seizures would only occur locally and would not spread. Seizures can occur in relatively localized regions of the cortex, but for some unfortunate people they occur globally, spreading from one hemisphere to the other like wildfire. In these cases, where excision was not an option, surgeons used to sever the huge bundle of fibers (called "corpus callosum") that connects the right hemisphere with the left. The corpus callosum is the major connection between the hemispheres, and although there are other small communication channels via which certain parts of the two hemispheres exchange information, when the corpus callosum is severed for all practical purposes the hemispheres are cut off from each other. For this reason, the patients that underwent this type of surgery came to be known as split-brain patients. And they permanently exhibit the weirdest behaviors. They really do have two separate, almost independent brains in their skull. Most of the time, the brains coexist peacefully. However, sometimes they don't agree with each other and the results can range from comic to absurd to horrible. Because of the way the brain is wired up to the body, each hemisphere controls the opposite half of the body. So, the right hemisphere controls the left arm, leg, etc., while the left hemisphere controls the right half. One patient had a problem with his left hemisphere: apparently, it just couldn't stand his wife. At the mere sight of his spouse, his right hand would immediately form a fist, his right leg start making valiant attempts to get the body closer to the wife, and his right arm start violently swinging at the wife with a clear intent to do damage. With his left leg he would fight his right leg, and with his left hand try to restrain his right hand, all the while displaying a grimace of rage on the right side of his face while the left side of the face expressed clear alarm and distress. Another lady had an even more serious problem, with the two halves of her body engaging in a vicious feud. She literally beat herself up, tried to choke herself in her sleep, tore her own hair out, and all of that occurred in the context of the right side of her body doing damage to the left side, and vice versa. Fortunately, such horrible side effects tend to mellow out as time passes, but the patients never return to normal -- to the end of their lives, they literally remain split in half. Yet, if a single, indivisible, unified soul was controlling the brain, then surely cutting the link between the hemispheres would not preclude them from functioning in harmony! At the very least, they shouldn't be trying to kill each other! But contrary to all common sense as we used to know it, the two hemispheres literally turn into two distinct personalities. Each of them is capable of independent emotion, independent knowledge, and independent interaction with the world. For example, questions can be asked of the right hemisphere, and it will answer them (though not verbally, because in most people the right hemisphere is incapable of language) -- but the left, verbal, hemisphere will never know about either the questions or the answers, and will in fact tell you so when asked. Even more poignantly, the right hemisphere possesses knowledge that the left hemisphere doesn't, and vice versa. Both hemispheres exhibit structured thought and problem solving abilities, independent of each other. Both of them express feelings and emotions, again independently of each other. Each has its own stream of consciousness, again independent of the other hemisphere. So indeed, the two hemispheres are in most respects separate, distinct, independent human beings! Yet, they originally only had one soul. How would the doctrine of souls explain such a phenomenon? Yet another difficulty lies in the transfer of memory or knowledge between the brain and the soul. For example, you might remember what you did during the last Christmas, and when asked you would tell us a story describing what happened. This process of recalling facts and then verbalizing them involves many crucial faculties that are just about as central to our stream of consciousness as anything -- so presumably at least a large part of the process occurs in the soul and not in the physical brain. However, it is well known that the brain contains certain regions specifically dedicated to memory. When these regions are damaged, the result is amnesia -- loss of memory -- despite the fact that all other cognitive functions remain intact. Now, what happens when an amnesic is asked to describe something they knew prior to the brain damage, but of which they now have no recollection? The request gets correctly processed and understood by the subject, as can be verified by questioning him about it. Presumably, such higher understanding resides in the soul, so the soul indeed knows what is being asked. The patient is also perfectly able to verbalize other facts, and to tell stories not connected to the particular lost memory -- so these faculties are preserved as well. Therefore, if the soul still retains the memory whose representation is lost in the physical brain, it should have no problem verbalizing that memory and telling stories about it, and thus in fact amnesia would never even be observed! Yet, amnesia is real and very predictable based on which regions of the brain are damaged. So, it seems that destroying a part of the physical brain utterly destroys the memories it used to help encode. This means that the soul does not possess memory; memory is purely a property of the brain. Which means that when the brain dies, all memories die with it. Which means that the entire personality dies with the brain, since memory includes, in addition to explicit facts, everything from learned skills such as language, coordinated movement, or art, to such things as preferences, attitudes, beliefs, etc. Which comes into a huge clash with all the claims of afterlife where the souls are supposed to retain memory of earthly existence and even maintain their pre-death personality.
every religion talks of a soul, though they may differ on reincarnation. whether you wish to believe in the idea of a soul is altogether upto you, but hindu philosophy states that a soul enters an embryo roughly after 2 months of its formation. a soul isn't transmitted via sexual intercourse, else all of us would be carrying millions of souls within our semen Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! ----------------------------------------------- www.triatma.com
While the Catholic church teaches that at conception the soul is placed within the body, there have been many theories over history some of which were accepted. Some have even contented that soul is placed within the baby 30 days after birth. The seperation into two seperate twins could be explained by two souls inhabiting one cell or the cell that break aparts God sends a new soul. Anyways, the soul itself could be in control of only a group of a few cells in the brain. Or maybe it's in charge of the position of one electron. The theory on this is very inexact. Just because you can disprove a conventual theory, does not mean that it's untrue.
Maybe you should consider what is meant by the concept of 'soul' first. It is a bit like quantum theory in the respect that it is used in contexts where the mere physical, demonstrable qualities just don't cut it. Even today people use the term "heart and soul" without really attaching any defined meaning to either word, but the meaning is understood. In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word is Nephesh (from the root Naphash, to take breath), which was understood as the the essence of life. If you trace the word from Genesis onwards you see these translations: creature-> living creature-> life-> man-> people-> soul The Jewish soul was a sort of combination between 'spirit' and 'body'; a mediator. It pointed to our existence in an invisible plane. By using the word soul, a person described 'life' as something that existed beyond perception as well, almost as a romantic notion. The word appears most frequently in the Psalms in phrases like "my soul longs..." etc. It seems that Boris tried to magnify the physical to such an all-encompassing extent that there was no room left for even the immaterial. I think he missed the point. In Homer's Greece, and in the New Testament, the word is psyche (or Psuche), the life-force. Plato developed the dualist context of form and ideal - where soul was the ideal (and in fact the 'real') and form (the body) was an imperfect reflection, aspiring to its ideal from while trapped in its physical form. Neither of these hold up well to Western scrutiny. Its "existence" cannot be proven scientifically any more than God's existence can be. In stead, the concept has been developed into whatever different religions/philosophies want it to mean - like M*Woman's New Age angle. It does not reflect any consistent reality and only describes some ethereal aspect of existence. If you want an answer to the twin-question, you have to specify what you mean by "soul", since it is not something that can be measured objectively. So depending on how critical you want to be: if you're alive, then you have a soul - at least in its most conservative and basic meaning: "that in which there is life". From there on you can define "soul" just as you would define "life". And from a Christian perspective: God looks at your soul, not your body. By "see", I mean it like we only see a person, and not the various properties of a body individually until we focus on them. Twins are two people (or they would not have been called "twins" at all). Before they became two people, they had one soul. In another sense, people only share the "same soul" in the sense that they share their life as living beings. But they cannot share what they do not share - their individuality. God does not share our souls because He is an individuality. God told Moses in Ex.33:20 "you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live." We do not share His existence - "beings" do not share "to Be", but we share his "existence" by existing, by deriving our "to be" from "I am".
Jenyar, What was the point? That a soul exists and interacts with the physical body? What Boris is demonstrating is that there is no meaningful way that a ’soul’ can communicate with the physical, and that it can have no memory or identity, that the brain accounts for everything we observe, leaving no role for a soul, or that anything meaningful can be said about soul apart from it being a word. But it wasn’t that Boris magnified the physical but simply that there isn’t any room for the immaterial because everything we observe is physical. Can you show that Boris is wrong?
Jenyar, I disagree with the comparison. We know we exist, we know we are physical, we know we have a brain, and clinical studies have recorded correlations between the brain and all the classical functions that have been attributed to a soul. The question should not be that the existence of a soul cannot be proven scientifically but that a soul, if it exists fulfills no purpose, making it effectively redundant and useless. Which incidentally is consistent with the definition of anything that does not exist.
Jenyar, Or more precisely: creature-> living creature-> life-> man-> people-> breath. The idea of breath, from both Hebrew and Greek, was a direct observation that when someone dies they have no breath. In their ignorance those early philosophers assumed that the breath was the life force which left the body when the body died. The primary concept of soul was based on a fallacy and should no longer be given any serious attention. Would he have made the same statements had he known the true physiology of the brain?
This is simply not accurate and very one sided. Clinical studies was unable to understand exactly how the brain generates thoughts or dreams or where memory is recorded. Einstein brain was found to be identical to any human brain....All these things are attributed to the soul, things that our studies can not link solely to the brain. Face it Cris, your argument that the brain is biological is failing, because if it's merely a piece of meat, how do you explain the fact that each person have unique processing for that same piece of blubber, noggin, or noodle as my daughter describe it.
Flores, Who said anything about understanding exactly how the brain works? We still have much to do there. My statement concerned correlations between such things as emotions, memories, and brain activity. The brain has been damaged in every conceivable way through war, disease and through accidents. Where such patients have been studied it has not been difficult to determine what functions are missing and then correlate them to the damaged portion of the brain. This is good, it had been rumored that he had a brain. What is your basis for comparison? Size and weight? Did you analyze every neural network in his brain? All what things? Are you joking? Would you like me to list the thousands of papers that show the brain is biological? I don’t believe you can be that ignorant. The human brain contains some 200 billion neurons with each having potentially several thousand connections from other neurons. Each neuron receives signals from other neurons and depending on the number of signals and their magnitude will also emit a signal to another neuron. Each neuron fires on average 200 times each second, or 200 Hertz. If we compare that massive processing power to modern computers, say 2GHz Intel Pentiums, we would need 20,000 such machines tightly coupled and networked and operating in parallel to achieve the equivalent raw power of the brain. When a human baby is born it already has an enormous number of neurons but they have no connections between each other. This is why a baby is pretty much helpless. All the sensory inputs from touching, sensing, hearing, and smelling, all go towards forming new connections between neurons. In this way the human learns and builds its own unique set of neural networks. If you know any math then you could perhaps calculate the very large number of possible permutations between 200 billion neurons with each having thousands of connections to other neurons. Now please tell me that you now have some inkling of an idea of how the human brain operates and why Einstein is different to you. Given your new understanding of the massive power of the human brain can you now tell me why a soul might be required and how it could supplement the massive power of the brain?
Cris, if you don't understand how the brain works, then why do you act like the expert in brain surgery and how do you eliminate the existance of the soul with such confidance.....am I missing something about your knowledge, or are you trying to bake your cake and eat it too. Many researches have already announced that based on the state of the art knowledge, there is no difference in biological makeup between Einseirn brain, a serial killer brain, a gay person brain, and a normal brain....Do you have any comments on that beside the fact that we don't know much about the brain, because if that is your answer consider yourself defeated, since I can claim what I want about the brain. Are you joking? Would you like me to list the thousands of papers that show the brain is biological? Comeon Cris, I try to be very respectfull while I talk to you and you know how hard it is for me to do that when I debate a subject that I care about, so I only hint to you that.... This is all good information, but the computer contains hundreds and thousands of chips too capable of transmitting so many signals and without me initiating the power to the computer, you can shove the computer down the drain. The brain is similar to the computer, it has all the neorons but without a soul, there is no energy, no power, it's dead. No I don't. You have just spent pages of ink telling me that every part of the body is replacable except for the brain. Do you mind telling me what is so special about the brain that makes it irreplacable, i.e. to make the question easier, what is so unique about life that man hasn't been able to create to far. The soul is required to operate and energize the fatty, yucky, noggin, noodle, gooey brain tissues that would rott in a matter of days.
Flores, Read Boris’s post again. Can you quote such a researcher and the paper involved and the detailed criteria they used.? There is no difference between two identical model Intel CPU chips but they could each be running different programs. Apply that analogy to the brain. While the biological makeup can be the same the functioning neural networks will be very different. I don’t know much about how my car works but I don’t claim it has a supernatural component to make it work. If you don’t know anything about the brain then why jump to fantasy claims about supernatural entities being involved? What role then does food and water and cell metabolism play then in your opinion? These explain the fuel source and the power supply mechanism. If you remove the fuel then you die, if you interfere with metabolism then you die. Presumably if a soul was the power source then we wouldn’t need food, water, or metabolism. This appears to prove that your claim that the soul is a power source is false. How does an alleged soul provide power? What mechanism is used? How does a soul route oxygen and nutrients to brain cells? Please read my post again, I don’t know whether you are joking or you simply failed to comprehend the magnitude of the importance of the brain. Don’t you think that the processing power of 20,000 state of the art computers compressed into a highly organized biological structure in your head has some value? Or do you take the position of the ancient Egyptians who thought that the heart held our intelligence and during mummification they preserved all the organs but liquefied the brain and discarded it? The brain will rot when deprived of oxygen and nutrients. What has an alleged soul to do with any of that? We know how cell metabolism operates, why do you claim a soul takes on this role instead? You don’t appear to have ever studied biology, is this correct? Here is a link to something on metabolism that might help you - http://www.accessexcellence.org/AB/GG/cell_Metab.html
Your logic fails miserabely and the discussion boils down to this. You have a circular argument that says that without a brain, there is no processing of oxygen and nutrients, and without the oxygen the brain will rott....Nice Cris, you have placed your logic in a tight infinite loop....Are you sure you don't need a soul to snatch you out of this circular bad logic of yours. While you are at it, remember the physics law of energy can't be lost or destroyed and try to comprehend death.
when you decompose your energy is not lost, it is used by bacteria or whatever else might be eating you while your under ground. i think it is to early to assign the unknown element of the brain to a soul- look how far our understanding of everthing around us has advanced in the past hundred years. with the brains complexity, not to mention the bodies, i wouldn't contribute much either way. i myself favour the thought that we have processors in our heads that are the stem of thought and consciousness, as i reckon its a more profound idea than just having a soul that is attached to the body through some mystical intervention. besides, so much study has already gone into the functions of the brain and so much can be correlated between studies on the brqain that i reckon the brain is where it's at, i think using a soul to describe what's going on inside of us is in one respect- piking out. come on, there's gotta be more to it than that, the way everything is around us, i wouldn't expect anything less; otherwise people have a genuine belief in such an entity, which i can respect. yeah, basically we don't know yet, give it a couple of years and we'll have a much clearer picture.
This is the problem with you Atheist, your mind immediately assign simplicity to one words uttered by Theists. You assume that soul is a simple answer, well it is not, it's merely the function that is used to describe a complex phenomena of how life operates. X might seem simple, but when you describe x=y^2+z+ dy/dx2 + ect......it is not that simple. The evolution of the Atheist logic is incorrect, we don't look at the minute many details and try to put them together to understand the model, science advance by coming up with a basic model or black box, then filling up the gaps. Why do you think all the laws of physics where developed before we could understand the magnitude to which they could be used. Every action has a reaction was a solid model that was known centuries ago, yet it's application to automautive couldn't have been dreamt of centuries ago.
Flores, Except that I have not said anything like that. It was your story, not mine, you apear to be arguing against yourself. And this statement was relevant becuase....?
