Oh yeah. I love atheists, its good practice to argue with the completely illogical. 

pffft they're probably caught up in this whole evolution garbage.

How can they think straight if they think their cousins crave bananas?

Hello Mr. Brokenfaith and welcome to the RRS forums,

What are you practicing for ?

 I like to keep in good mental shape, the best way to do that is to argue. 

This false premise pretty much arbitrarily decides you can't find any evidence to ever discount a soul. You have failed.

 I'm not looking for physical evidence of the soul, there is none. 

But then there is no physical evidence against a soul is there?

So it makes sense that we should resolve the issue with sense and logic, doesn't it?

 Nice!

But seriously though, don't blame the drugs, it was the fast food that did it. 

I already made an argument for the soul, a quite good one since you all seem to be incapable of arguing against it. 

Besides, there is NO FUCKING PHYSICAL EVIDENCE THAT SUPPORTS OR DENIES THE EXISTENCE OF A SOUL. SCIENCE IS NOT GOING TO HELP US OUT HERE BECAUSE ITS NOT A SCIENTIFIC IDEA!

So yeah, if you know that the soul doesn't exist, or know of a scientific way to determine its existence or not, then by all means, enlighten me. COme on I dare you.

Oh wait. you cant. 

Show our parting guest what he's won......

Woah, man. That's deep.

I could not agree more! In fact, I think both of your points are fantastic!

Allow me to begin our discourse, unburdened by such ridiculous ideas as 'proofs' and 'science';

God is a girl!

There is a sky illuminating us, IAMJACKSBROKENFAITH! Someone is out there that we truly trust.

Thoughts?

You said it yourself. The soul is not a scientific idea. It's a figment of your imagination. Quite literally.

BTW - nice avatar. Where did you get it?

Pineapple, I want you to take this as nicely as you can, because you know all I can give you is a left handed compliment.  Despite all the times that you're a pain in my ass, I can't help but appreciate your sense of humor when you say shit like this.

Although a small excerpt in this piece I display below was taken from a previous piece I compiled, most of it I wrote just now, while somewhat drunk, so, bear with me:

There are so many possible objections to your argument it is difficult to know where to begin. It’s like being a kid in a candy store. Firstly, the premise is immediately open to question. Where is the justificatory basis for asserting that there are an infinite number of mental states? Consider that, one’s mental state can effectively have two primary causal factors. The first is their perceptive experience. It is certainly true to say that mental states result from the experiences that one is having in the form of sensory data. It is also true to say that, in terms of ontogeny, a conscious mind cannot develop without sensations, or experiences. At the same time, the mental state of a perceptive organism can depend largely on their neural structure and the nature of the neural networks they form. This, again, can be divided into two broad categories. Firstly, there are fixed differences in sensory equipment, in turn partially determining the mental states that will result from the interaction of that sensory equipment with the external world. This difference usually isn’t much for two humans both in possession of their full sensory faculties, but can differ quite radically between different organisms with different capacities, or humans deprived of certain experiential basis, as the Mary’s Room Thought Experiment demonstrates.

Second, perceptive experiences form the basis for memories, this in turn determines the response of organisms to certain external stimuli, this response taking the form of mental states. This is aptly demonstrated, and is well-established on a neurophysiological basis. Neuroscientists speak of plasticity in terms of the ability of networks to shift and overwrite each other in terms of their synaptic formations and connections. The whole concept which I just outlined above is usually summed up by neuroscientist as follows: Thought is a combination of sensation and memory. Thus, if we think about all the possible permutations of sensory experiences and neural structures of the perceiving organism at a certain instance, then the number of resulting mental states will be extremely large. In fact, it will be wholly beyond comprehension. Much larger than any number anyone could conceive of. Indeed, it could be infinite, depending on how it was defined. But even if it wasn’t, it would be so large that it may as well be. Thus, your first premise is little more than an argument from personal incredulity. We can certainly establish that there is a huge number of possible neural state-perceptive experience combinations. If we become more technical and break “perceptive experience” down into arrangements of matter and how they interact with each other and sense data to form causal chains resulting in our experiences, we could in principle speak of infinite possibilities in terms of perceptive experience if we consider temporality in our understanding of a single, instant material arrangement within one instant of time, and then state that the same combination at another time would result in a different mental state because of the change in the neural structures of the experiencing organism between t1 and t2. Under this, it would be conceivable to speak of infinite possible mental states purely in terms of intrinsic material properties of neural networks and properties of arrangements of matter resulting in our perceptual experiences. But, as I have shown above, it wouldn’t really matter if we couldn’t.

Your understanding of “neurophysiology” seems to extend roughly to your conception that “chemical A+ chemical B” equals fear”. I think you need a slight crash course before we continue:

Neuron: A neuron is the fundamental unit of the brain. It accounts for 10% of the cells that constitute the organ, the rest being glial or support cells. A neuron propogates an electrical charge via voltage-gated ion channels across a stretch of thin, long cell called the axon towards a junction with the receptor unit of another neuron (called a dendrite) at which point it performs a signal transduction by converting the eletrical signal into a chemical one into the release of excicatory or inhibitary neurotransmitters which determines whether the signal recieved by the receptor neuron is depolarazing (increase the signal) or hyperpolarizing (depress the signal). All neurons generate a binary signal by firing in a threshold all-or-nothing style called an action potential, also somtimes shortened to AP.

Neural cluster: A neural cluster is a group of closely related neurons forming a "pack" or a "unit". These neurons can be designated in terms of distinct functions (which depends on the speciality of the neuron in question, since they are type-grouped)

Synapse: A synapse is a junction between the end of the axon of one neuron and the dendrite of another. THe synapse is the point at which the two neurons are seperated via a cleft which must be crossed by the transmitter signals. The synapse is the point where a signal is decoded and recoded for determining the overall membrane potential of the post-synaptic neuron. This in turn is directly proportional to the number of action potentials the neuron generates per second. This in turn codes a signal for the neuron to pass on to its linked

Synaptogenesis: Synaptogenesis is a combination of synapse and genesis. It is the formation of a synapse The -genesis suffix is common in biology to indicate the formation or creation of something. Neurogenesis is neural formation. Embryogenesis is the formation of an embryo. Spermatogenesis is the formation of the male gamete, and Oogenesis is the formation of an egg cell, etc. Synaptogenesis is the foundation of memory formation. The linking of two hitherto unassociated neural clusters is the basis for association which is the basis of memory, thought and language.

Association: Association is the foundation of memory. It is where the subject associates certain concepts, abstracts or entities with other concepts, abstracts or entities. This is central to language, memory and thought. The thing which sits in front of me is associated the word computer. It is also associated with the words black, grey, blue, etc. etc. The complexity and degree of associative links that a brain forms is a reasonable reflection of their cognitive ability. Cognitive scientists do not speak of cognition in terms of brain size, which is an unhelpful measure past a certain point, but rather synapse formation, for it reflects the ability of the subject for abstract thought. The impairing of the formation of synapses is an effect which can be induced by many different drugs which act as depolarizing agents which rapidly shut down the stimulus received by neurons, and some which do the opposite and overload the neurons with stimuli by acting as depolarizing agents. The latter case is called "tripping" and severely impairs the subject's capacity for abstract, reasoned thought.

With this crash course in mind, hopefully you can see the degree to which your simplification fails. Ultimately, this should be sufficient to understand the degree to which our mental states, and physical ones, are linked, and, more importantly, to stress, the complexity of this relationship. If you can find some room for a separate ontological entity with no causal powers (to state that a non-physical entity has causal powers in the physical world resulting in mental states once again leads you to internal contradiction as it requires you to assign to this non-physical entity a physical attribute), somehow “fits in” with the interaction between the external objects responsible for our perceptual experience and our neuronal networks, then demonstrate.

There are plenty more criticisms to go through. Obviously, we could start with your non sequitur assertion that there exists a disembodied conscious entity responsible for creating an entity which is responsible for our consciousness. This appears to lead to internal contradiction, because as has already been demonstrated, the combination of our material perceptual experiences combined with our neural networks, and so forth, constitute central and necessary components of an organism with the capacity for perception and introspection (the former, obviously, by definition, the latter follows). Thus, this raises the question of how it is possible to invent another being, of a separate ontological category, which has the property of consciousness just tied to the material, 3D world, we inhabit, who created the very source of perception and introspection. If this is the case, then it appears to be shooting itself in the foot. It would be somewhat akin to claiming that atoms were invented by people (who are composed of atoms).

Finally, one must question your vehement assertion that the investigation into consciousness is forever beyond the realm of natural science. This appears to be intentionally vague, and without justificatory basis. It seems that “metaphysics” is a label applied to something until scientific investigation demonstrates a meaningful model behind it. I stress that since it is the job of science to investigate phenomenon then it appears, from an epistemological standpoint, to be problematic to say that we can conclude in a phenomenon that cannot be investigated by science. Why is this so? Consider it. When it is through some complicated causal chain, which via deduction, we can link some model or external object to some feature of our perceptual experience, then we are performing a scientific investigation. Solely by means of using our intuitive understanding based on our immediate perceptual experience, we wouldn’t get very far, but, by means of accumulating knowledge, we can effectively link causal chains of experienced phenomenon to an external world behind the experiences. Thus, for example, we would be unable to conclude in “dark matter” on the basis of our analysis of galactic motions through telescopes if we didn’t already have an understanding of what galactic motion should look like based on Relativity, which in turn, we wouldn’t have been able to conclude in if we didn’t have a set of equations describing our intuitive basis for relative motion, called “Newtonian mechanics”, which in turn we wouldn’t be able to conclude in unless we had…

You get the idea. So, in effect, by ass