The real trouble for the ‘soul’ hypothesis isn’t that matters make magnificent amounts of sense without them(the apparent existence of subjective and introspective experience is pretty thoroughly weird); but that ‘souls’ don’t actually provide any clarity to the matter.
Some formulations are more flowery than others; but they boil down to ‘you can possess qualia by virtue of having a qualia-haver’, which provides absolutely no information that ‘well, I guess that sufficiently large chunks of brain meat are qualia-havers…’ doesn’t. The essentially weird bit doesn’t budge, you’ve just added some additional moving parts that don’t do anything.
Or as the tale of Laplace has him say, “I have no need of that hypothesis.”
The soul is untestable, unfalsifiable and offers no explanatory value. All the evidence we have is that the the brain is the mind. Damage the brain, damage the mind. There is no evidence of an independent mind outside of the brain.
How aren’t these things explainable with the plain old brain? Why add the extra cruft of having to shoehorn in an un-disprovable “entity” like a soul?
Depends. I can show you gravitational lensing in the Bullet Cluster that’s unexplainable without dark matter, and also perfectly consistent with dark matter predictions.
Likewise, dark energy accounts for the accelerating expansion of the universe. It’s not that it makes the math easier to include it. It’s that our models of the universe lose their predictive power without it.
If you remove the supposition of a soul, it in no way affects how a human system works.
Dark matter and dark energy are both place holder names for an unknown cause of measurable phenomenon in the natural world, namely gravity and expansion in the large-scale structure of space-time.
Souls are a fabulation made up to “explain” the wish-fulfillment fantasy of life after death for which there is no direct or indirect empirical evidence whatsoever.
One is an unknown cause of something observable which clearly exists and which it’s acknowledged we don’t know what it actually is. The other is something people invented because they liked the idea of it and which has nothing to do with the observable world.
Not the way @Mongrove defines it. They’ve apparently said they believe the soul is a necessary component to make animals have minds. But it doesn’t persist after death, or communicate with the super natural. So really you’re over-thinking it.
At this point we can pretty clearly surmise that @Mongrove doesn’t know what they’re arguing in favor of.
I’m resisting the urge to post Tim Minchin’ Storm.
My position is that it’s one thing to believe in things without any evidence other than wanting to, and quite another to make pseudoscientific arguments and claim evidence without any. The former is a fantasy, but an honest one. The latter is disingenuous skulduggery.
For cryin’ out loud. That thing is not a person. It’s a complicated printer. Is it OK to force a printer to print some unnecessary pages? It’s a little wasteful, perhaps, but no one in their right mind would worry about how the printer feels about it. This is no different.
