Do you have a soul?

[John Dibble]

The consciousness that is me is an emergent property of my brain as far as I can tell, so no.

[John Dibble]

Those who have not believed in Christ in the life they were given, will still live forever, but it will be judged and sent to an eternity in a lake of sulphur fire and eternal separation from God.  No one will ever get used to hell and no one will die once in hell, it will be constant excruciating torment and torture that has no end whatsoever.  Once a soul is sent to hell there is no hope for it anymore, it can never get to heaven after that.

Remember folks, God loves you so much that if you don't love him back in the right fashion he'll ship you off to his fiery torture basement where you'll endlessly writhe in indescribable agony with no hope of escape. Truly the act of a loving parental figure and not of a sadistic narcissistic sociopath.

[John Dibble]

Those who have not believed in Christ in the life they were given, will still live forever, but it will be judged and sent to an eternity in a lake of sulphur fire and eternal separation from God.  No one will ever get used to hell and no one will die once in hell, it will be constant excruciating torment and torture that has no end whatsoever.  Once a soul is sent to hell there is no hope for it anymore, it can never get to heaven after that.

Remember folks, God loves you so much that if you don't love him back in the right fashion he'll ship you off to his fiery torture basement where you'll endlessly writhe in indescribable agony with no hope of escape. Truly the act of a loving parental figure and not of a sadistic narcissistic sociopath.

You have to understand that while God is a loving God, He is also a just God.  Romans 3:23 says "For all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God."  Every single person on this earth has sinned and since God is a perfect God, one little white lie is enough to send a person to hell.

It is not just to punish someone for failing to meet a standard that by definition they can't possibly reach, nor is it just to levy an infinite punishment onto someone for deeds that are finite. Somewhere inside of you there's something that realizes this - after all, you wouldn't even send someone to jail for a white lie, but at the same time you say someone who makes a white lie deserves endless agony for which there is no earthly comparison. Why the disconnect? Why the double standard?

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He's supposed to be all powerful - why exactly does he need to send himself to be brutally sacrificed to himself to make a loophole in the rules he made? Why can't he just snap his fingers and declare the rules changed?

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The scandal of Christianity is that it posits the supposedly loving God created a fiery torture basement in which to cause people endless pain for all eternity.

[John Dibble]

Atheist though I may be, I believe in ghosts. There certainly are many unexplained occurences and phenomena that are (sometimes falsely) concluded as paranormal activity. These occurences are caused by leftover energy from the person who once was there. Therefore, my conclusion is that people must have souls.

So what exactly is your evidence for the the bolded portion?

[John Dibble]

Atheist though I may be, I believe in ghosts. There certainly are many unexplained occurences and phenomena that are (sometimes falsely) concluded as paranormal activity. These occurences are caused by leftover energy from the person who once was there. Therefore, my conclusion is that people must have souls.

So what exactly is your evidence for the the bolded portion?

Spend the night in the Queen Mary.

Telling a person to spend the night in some place or another that is allegedly haunted is not evidence.

[John Dibble]

Well I'm not a Ginger... so I guess so.

What do you mean by 'Ginger'?  What is it? 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginger_Kids

[John Dibble]

Maybe for you. And that's okay.

Sure, we can be made of atoms and stardust and this and that. But that's just superfluous. Who cares? Stars and planets and atoms? Those definitions operate in the confines of our world, not Truth. Maybe our senses are a result of the matter in our brains--hell, I'm sure some scientific process actually explains our ability to hear and see, etc. But the state of actually seeing something trumps the bells and whistles of it all. And you may disagree--I just think that's a more limited way of looking at things (as I'm sure you probably think about my thought process too ).

So the 'state of actually seeing something' isn't simply scientific, even though the fact we can see can be explained by science as you admit? If anything you are adding the 'bells and whistles' to experiences that are very fantastic but easily explainable.

You can explain how it is that we are able to see. Fine. But explain what it is actually like to see to someone who has never seen before.

No, but that's a problem of communication, not a problem of fact. Even if I can't adequately describe what sight is I could demonstrate to a blind person that I have a way of sensing that they do not. It's easy to think of an experiment to do so, for example:

I could hand them a piece of clear tupperware and a small red block. I would leave the room and the blind person would decide whether or not to put the block in the tupperware. When done, the blind person would call me back in and I would quickly determine whether or not the block is in the tupperware. I could repeat this as many times as needed to show that I'm not just guessing and that I can really determine the presence of the block with 100% accuracy each time.

[John Dibble]

You're the one that's missing the point - it really is about demonstrating that something is real. There are numerous claims of the metaphysical, many of which contradict each other. Should we take all of them seriously just because someone's got a gut feeling that they are true?

[John Dibble]

The case for the existence of mental substances goes rather a bit beyond a 'gut feeling', since we all have a direct and very real experience of something that seems very difficult to explain in other terms.

Is this the royal we you're referring to?

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If the substance is other than the brain, sure, but what other substance is there any actual evidence for? If you want to claim that there's some other substance, then you have to provide evidence for that claim just like any other.

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The evidence is quite convincing to me. Damage someone's brain and you can affect not just someone's abilities, but their emotions, moods, and behaviors as well. Same with using drugs, be they medical or otherwise. Upon brain death there is no indication that a person remains at all. Science by no means claims to have a complete understanding of the brain, but the brain is quite obviously a physical thing that obviously can be affected by physical things in ways that are detectable. If you wish to posit the existence of something else connected to our consciousness, what other than an argument from incredulity do you have to demonstrate to people that it is more than a delusion?

[John Dibble]

John Dibble,

In order to vindicate reductive materialism, you have to show more than that material states cause mental states. You have to show that material states are identical to mental states.

It's already been shown to some extent. Chemical imbalances can cause any number of mental conditions, and using chemicals to change the balance can provide relief for those conditions. Physical input changes physical output.

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Being consistent with something and being evidence for something are entirely different things. I could posit that gravity is due to fairies using magic to bend spacetime based on the mass of the matter in the area and the evidence we have would be entirely consistent with this explanation - after all, we seen in the presence of massive objects that spacetime is warped. However, there's no evidence for fairy magic being present, so why would we tack that on?

[John Dibble]

You do not show that two things are identical by showing that one gives rise to the other. You're again ignoring the difference between nomological supervenience and logical identity.

I did not cite your facts as evidence of mind-body dualism. The point is that (contrary to your earlier suggestion) they in no way favor reductive materialism over its rivals.

No, but you're asking me to take mind-body dualism seriously - why should I? What compelling reasons or evidence do you have? Like I said, I can tack fairies onto relativity but without having a good reason to do so I'd just seem silly.

The case for the existence of mental substances goes rather a bit beyond a 'gut feeling', since we all have a direct and very real experience of something that seems very difficult to explain in other terms.

Is this the royal we you're referring to?

Let me put it like this: you don't experience 'neurochemical process XYZ', you experience a desire for ice-cream. Now, it may be the case that what actually happens when we desire ice-cream is a 'neurochemical process XYZ', that my desire is actually identical to an exchange of chemicals in the brain, but to say that this is the case, like every explanation of an X in terms of Y, requires further explanation.

Now, it's alltogether possible that you yourself never find yourself having a desire, holding onto a belief, or experiencing a sensation, but I somewhat doubt that.

You should have said it that way in the first place rather than being vague. Yes, I experience desires, beliefs, sensations, etc. However, I see no compelling reason to attribute them to things other than brain states given what I know.

[John Dibble]

Reality doesn't care about what you can't imagine or what you might prefer it to be. Just because we don't know everything about how the brain works doesn't mean it's legitimate to tack on additional ideas for which there are no evidence. That's not a path to finding the truth, that's just making stuff up.

[John Dibble]

Reality doesn't care about what you can't imagine or what you might prefer it to be. Just because we don't know everything about how the brain works doesn't mean it's legitimate to tack on additional ideas for which there are no evidence. That's not a path to finding the truth, that's just making stuff up.

I think you are confusing cause and identity.

I think I'm not. I think I'm asking for evidence for a non-physical mind and all I'm getting is people saying that the evidence for a physical one isn't inconsistent with a non-physical one. That of course is not evidence for it, for the reasons I've pointed out. So do you or anyone else here actually have any evidence for a non-physical aspect of mind?

[John Dibble]

The experience of thinking is inherently non-physical.

If the brain is indeed the sole source of consciousness and thought is the result of neurochemical processes then thinking is purely a physical action. What is your evidence that thinking involves more than purely material processes?

[John Dibble]

The experience of thinking is inherently non-physical.

If the brain is indeed the sole source of consciousness and thought is the result of neurochemical processes then thinking is purely a physical action. What is your evidence that thinking involves more than purely material processes?

My evidence is purely the reason why when we attempt to teleport living beings, the energy and way of living is left behind. Energy is not and cannot be controlled by matter.

1. As danny has pointed out we don't have teleportation technology at this point in time, so either you're from the future or you're just pulling things out of your fanny.

2. When you say energy isn't and can't be controlled by matter, are you taking into account the energy manipulation required by the matter that makes up your computer and all of the matter based infrastructure in order for you to even post here? Or how about the chemical energy your body manipulates in order to continue functioning?

[John Dibble]

1. I believe you both missed the word attempt

Is English not your first language, because "missed the word attempt" is not a phrase that has actual meaning.

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When a substance touches your taste buds they detect the rough chemical composition of the substance and send electrical signals through your nervous system to your brain. Five types of signals can be sent that are associated with certain types of tastes - sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and savory. The brain will translate these signals into a distinct taste for the individual substance based on the combination and strength of the signals.

Sugars make taste buds send the signal for sweet. Since honey is mostly composed of sugars, so when it touches your tasted buds they will send the signals for "sweet" stronger than any other signal. It doesn't taste the same as when you put pure sugar on your tongue due to the presence of other substances which result in additional signals being sent at varying levels of strength.

The reason behind this mechanism is explained by evolution. Animals that can detect the chemical composition of foods have an advantage over those that don't for a few reasons. For humans, "sour" and "bitter" are generally regarded as unpleasant (at least on their own) as they may indicate that food is rotten or poisonous, whereas "sweet", "salty", and "savory" indicate the food contains calories and nutrition and are generally regarded as pleasant. Combined with the ability to store information, knowing which foods have what tastes can let the brain indicate which foods an animal would need to pursue if it is running low on a certain type of nutrition - for instance, if you are low on vitamin C you might crave oranges, lemons, or other vitamin C rich foods you've eaten before.

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A kindle fire or any other tablet computing device is still a computer.

[John Dibble]

A Kindle Fire is not a computer. If it is so is an iPad, or even a smartphone.

Yeah, those are computers. There's more computational power in any of those devices than in the machines that took up entire rooms that NASA used send men to the moon in the sixties. I have a degree in computer science, don't argue with me on this - you will lose.

[John Dibble]

1. The phrase makes complete sense, save the absence of italics. It really bugs me when the people who argue against me seem to find weakness not in the content of my speeches, but the grammar.

No, it doesn't, and neither does your teleporter nonsense. We neither have teleporters nor have we ever tried to teleport a human being. If it bugs you that people find weakness in your ability to communicate, I suggest making efforts to improve it. It might also help if you knew what the hell you were talking about.

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Please stop being an idiot, Mr. Nut.

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Because our evolutionary history is such that our species gets an advantage in perceiving them as sweet. There need not be any other reason, and even if I didn't have an answer to the question it isn't relevant - not knowing the answer to a question does not give you license to make stuff up to answer it.

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It's a computer however else you want to otherwise label it. It's just a computer designed for a specific task. The dictionary defines a computer as "an electronic device for storing and processing data, typically in binary form, according to instructions given to it in a variable program" - care to explain why you think your Kindle doesn't qualify as doing that?

[John Dibble]

1. The phrase makes complete sense, save the absence of italics. It really bugs me when the people who argue against me seem to find weakness not in the content of my speeches, but the grammar.

No, it doesn't, and neither does your teleporter nonsense. We neither have teleporters nor have we ever tried to teleport a human being. If it bugs you that people find weakness in your ability to communicate, I suggest making efforts to improve it. It might also help if you knew what the hell you were talking about.

Oh, come on. This is a subject where no one really knows what they're talking about. To assume intellectual superiority based on the conclusions one comes to in a religion and philosophy forum is pretty disappointing.

Hagrid, did you not see where this guy was trying to use teleportation as his evidence? The guy clearly has no clue what he's talking about.

[John Dibble]

What was the topic again? Souls? Really? I'd think it was about a bomb threat with all these heated insults thrown by Mr. Dibble. I'm very sorry I haven't met the expectations for the holder of a degree in computer science. Maybe its because I'm 14!

And what, you expect to have us take it easy on you because you're 14? What a lame excuse. At 14 you aren't a child anymore, so I'm not going to excuse nonsensical idiocy in arguments from you. Don't enter into a debate with adults if you're afraid of being treated like an adult. If you would rather be treated like a child and given the kid gloves, this isn't the forum for you.

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No you shouldn't have said attempts at teleporting humans, nor should you have said anything about scientists having "rendered it impossible" in this post. Nothing in the article mentions actual attempts to teleport any living thing, nor does it mention scientists saying teleportation of larger objects or living things would be impossible.