Existence of the soul

Google 'mind/body dualism' and read up a bit. You'll find that the idea has been tossed around for tens of centuries and there are some serious holes in it. You should at least inform yourself of what your predecesors have done.------------------
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"it has nothing to do with whether or not you even are a person."
i never said animals don't have "souls".
"Whether or not he would give his life for his kids, or his brothers, or enough of his cousins, is."
Ok let's pretend i had a mentally handicapped brother as a result of bad genes, which as a result he can't reproduce. I would still be willing to sacrifice for him even though that may mean the end of my immeidaite family gene line.you said you had genetic evidence, What?
I gave obsevational evidence too. ( here i should mention that Jim D = me ,it's a long story, but to make it short i didn't have access to my regular computer, and i don't have my password memorized, I apoligize for this and it won't happen again, sorry)"More copies of the individual's superior "altruism"" correct me if I am wrong but what genes you have is completely random so technically you may have just saved some people without this "gene". also i thought Altruism is a trait aquired through experience (at least for people)so this whole argument is off i guess and i just brought up self sacrifice for the "mind over matter argument.
Altruism in animals maybe a genetic thing which they cannot go agianst, but all that serves to prove is that they have no "souls"
(notice the qoutation marks) (Don't ream me for saying animals have no souls as that is not what was intended with this)
I don't think that there not being a soul ever be proven, while something other than brains and genes could be.

So? Your altruism genes don't know about his bad genes.Yes, kin selection isn't always advantageous. Did I say it was? But it's undeniable that kin selection is sufficiently advantageous, in general, that a gene for altruism could very well spread throughout the population. Your counterexamples don't really prove anything except that kin selection is occasionally detrimental to some individual's genes, which I haven't argued with. But it's sufficiently advantageous to many genes in many indivduals to persist. The good outweighs the bad, genetically speaking. Sure, and my explanation explains your evidence without recourse to untestable supernatural entities, aka "souls". Therefore my explanation is more likely to be correct. Yes. On average, your siblings have 50% of your genes, each. So if your selfless actions save two or more of them, odds are you passed on more of your genes than if you alone had survived. Well, you certainly haven't proved - even to the point of accepting a soul hypothesis - that souls exist. And your hypothesis is amazingly incomplete. You don't have a soul mechanism. What are souls? How do they influence the body and mind? Where do they go when we die? What are they made out of?Do you see how your soul hypothesis raises more questions than it answers? That's why it's a bad theory. Until you have more to your idea than "souls exist" it's not a better theory than simple explanations from sociology.

I think I should clarify.
my "soul" is not the tradiional soul of Christianity.
my "soul" is something other than chemical reactions in the brain.Altruism isn't a gene. if it is they will find it in the genome hopefully before you and I die, than you can laugh in my face.anyways my list of observations go a lot deeper than "altruism"What are souls? How do they influence the body and mind? Where do they go when we die? What are they made out of?as to when a soul enters the body is like the argument "when does life begin?" i'll say at conception being a person who does not believe in abortion. when it leaves brain death i assume.you know the soul is there in the same way you know a object is in a bag you cannot open. you will never see it, never touch it yet, it is there and it can never be directly proven. essentially we are the bags. a bag that can replicate itself is uselless, unless it is holding something. to deny that anything is being held is to deny purpose.

Actually, many patients of a new procedure called Hypothermic Cardiac Arrest (which is used to remove aneurysms) report having vivid experiences even during clinically induced brain death which lasts up to an hour. Specifically, these experiences are reported as occurring whilst the patient's EEG is flat, auditory evoked potentials in the brain stem are absent, and blood flow to the brain has ceased. A very detailed account of this phenomenon can be found here.It is important to note that the imagery reported by these patients tend to coincide with their already preconceived notions of the afterlife, so no conclusions can be drawn about the veracity of any religion's claims to the truth about after-death experiences. In other words, a Christian might see Jesus, but a Muslim might see Mohammed, and a Hindu might see Krishna. Basically what it indicates to me is that any after death experience will be whatever one expects it to be -- that is, if it's real at all.Blessings,::[This message has been edited by ::, 08-19-2003]

It's more apparent in situations like bee-hives, where worker siblings are far closer genetically than you are to your siblings. It's there, nonetheless - it has a real statistical effect that goes up the closer related you are to whoever you're saving. No, I can weigh the bag, and compare it to an empty bag. That tells me one thing about the object. I can x-ray the bag and find out more. There's any number of tests I can perform and each one gives me more information about the mystery object until I know exactly what it is.You're not talking about a metaphoric mystery soul, that we can never test or analyze. You're talking about a very real soul that has a very real effect, and (I assume) is distinguishable from a lack of a soul. Ergo it should be accessable for scientific inquiry - especially if everyone has one! They should be easy to find.If you're going to look at very real human behvaior, and explain it with a soul, then the soul has to have an effect on the physical world in order to be a part of our minds and bodies, which are physical. If it can affect the physical world then the physical world can affect it. And thus, we should be able to perform tests on souls. Says you. I say that the purpose of bags is to keep things out, not hold them in. Or I could just say that there's no such thing as purpose except for that purpose we assign to objects. Objects have no inherent purpose.

How do they work out when the experiences actually happened ? Why could it not be the effects of going into brain death and coming out of it - a highly abonormal situation - and then reconstructed by the brain after the fact ?

What does a "soul" do ? What in your view is it ?It seems to me that you are simply assuming that the brain can't be responsible for some behaviour and assinging that to a "soul"

I don't have the answers that your excellent questions deserve, although I'm somewhat certain that the alternative you describe has not been entirely ruled out. If I recall correctly, there are some patients who report observations of the operating room from outside the body which could only have been observed whilst the patient was being operated upon. If you browse Home - Near-Death Experiences and the Afterlife you might find some more examples, or Google "near death experience."Blessings,::

Is that the "soul-of-the-gaps" argument? Blessings,::

Anecdotal reports of patients seeing what happened in the operating theatre are all very well. But they are just anecdotes. As soon as we get well documented accounts then we can start taking them more seriously. But for now, there are just too many ways events can be reconstructed after the fact - as well as all the problems of human memory.

hmmm.... I am always tossing about this question myself, and I think there is something intrensicaly metaphisical about life in general. As I see it, the world around us is a manifestation of the metaphisical, not separete but parallel, thus I see life, "soul", as something that resides in and drives all living things.I would say that a good argument for a soul would be "what thinks the thoughts before I think them?"Why do I ponder things, take pleasure in asthetics, have a personality quite diffrent from a geneticaly identical twin who was brought up under identical circustances etc.Again, I am not saying that these one day coulden't be acounted for scientificaly, but just because they are scientific dosn't make their existance any less "magical" Human consiousness is an amazing example of the metaphisical. It has an intangible existance, anchored in the real world. Infact, the whole idea of self consious matter seems metaphisical to me. So many questions, so many posibilities!Just my two cents

I see kin selection as a reason of why some animal show seemingly altruistic behavior. As for humans, i don't think it has as much of a role.The reason those seemingly impossible things occur (things that would go against the hardwiring of our animal instincts) is because the human race isn't limited by survival of the fittest. Because of out intelligence we have dramatically reduced the number of infant and child deaths, and greatly extended the age of death from natural causes. Innovations such as domestication of animals, the development of weapons, and agriculture are shared by a group of people. This makes it so you no longer need to be the best survivor in a group to reproduce. Just your average joe has been doing a great job of reproducing. The human that hordes all the food (and maybe shares a bit with his brothers and sisters) is no longer a great deal better off than anyone else. They are on equal ground because there is no shortage of food... on the contrary. a human, in doing that, would isolate themselves, and have less of a chance of survival when compared to an individual in a group.we all stand on the shoulder of giants. the human race doesn't start from scratch with each generation. instead we cooperate to stay strong. well... maybe not strong... instead we cooperate to reproduce more efficiently.

Interesting topic here. I have argued with my wife on this one too. (she, born again, me agnostic/athiest).
could it not be possible that the human body is like an organic computer. Its own form of A.I, and its own internal power source. could the thing called a soul be the resonate energy of this system, and near death experiances are just this manifestation, like when a lightbulb is switched off, the heat energy still glows briefly as it dissipates? would be interested to hear thoughts on this. :-p

I can certainly appreciate your insistance on improved scientific rigor when evaluating these claims. My goal was merely to present cases which seem to indicate that indeed there may well be something there in the cases of NDE's to subject to that greater rigor. Certainly I would not assert that these instances have withstood the scrituny of peer-review or are immune from the fallibility of human memory, etc. I would assert, however, that the commonalities among independant reports seem to indicate that there exists phenomena which can be rigorously explored once apporpriate controls can be devised for the variable influences.The real problem is the ethics involved when trying to source subjects for experimentation.Blessings,::