Originally posted by twhitehead
Consequences are not the same as responsibility. Do you feel morally responsible for your 5 year old actions?
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Basically yes.
So, rather than discussing the subject matter,
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I am discussing it. Don't be bothered that I have some formed beliefs about it, as I discuss it.
your thoughts are all about countering possible questions / arguments that haven't been made?
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I "countered" by asking a question. And it was a genuine one.
Let me clarify my own position:
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Sure.
I have no position on the existence/non-existence of the soul prior to it being clearly defined. I do think conciousness is not a physical entity but rather emergent from physical entities. I do think it is entirely dependent on those physical entities and quite obviously so.
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My question would be, how obviously this can be assumed for the existence of mind.
Do you feel the mind emerged from matter ?
IE. No mind existed until somehow consciousness and mind emerged from the right combination of material particles.
I also think identity and conciousness are grey edged concepts.
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I agree that there are some grey areas in our understanding of these. I assume that's what you mean by "grey edged concept."
If you don't then how could you take credit for,
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I don't think we know everything about consciousness or mind.
A good amount is "grey" or uncertainty in our knowledge.
One would hope that your salary is dependent solely on your actual capabilities today. Should you still get that raise if you have forgotten everything you learned in college?
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If you remembered 40% of what you learned in college you would graduate Summa Cum Laude. That's what I heard a long time ago.
Anyway, the issue was the continuance of the ego, the
I. Credit and Blame, reward and discipline are based on the employee's "me-ness" remaining through various phases of employment.
If you haven't learned by this time that I do not talk about "going to heaven" that's surprising.
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Salary may be based on what you know now.
It could be based also on sex, education level, race, longevity with the company.
Whatever it is, the constancy of
ME-ness is what I was getting at and will not be distracted from.
me: "Going to heaven" is not a dearly held belief I garner from studying the Bible.
Yet that is clearly what this thread is all about. Maybe you should be arguing against Grampy?
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I gathered that the thread was about
"Do we have a soul or not?" and possible proofs offered. There may have been some side talk about heaven, that I didn't notice.
My assumption was that the EXISTENCE of the SOUL / Yes or No ... was the main subject of thread. I am on the affirmative side of the debate.
To start with - as Christian I regard the SOUL as the Mind, Emotion, and Will . The "proof" part of it I have not said anything about yet. Not sure what I'll say about that.
However, so much of what we do employs these three parts of out being.
1.) We THINK about something - Mind
2.) We FEEL Like or Dislike about it - Emotion
3.) We CHOOSE, this or that action or inaction - Will
I think this soul of man exists immaterially even after physical death. As far as you and I are concerned in this thread, I argued that
"I" is constant through the change of time.
My body cells will almost all be replaced with time. But it is still My body. And aging does not make
ME go out of existence to be replaced by someone else.
If you have a disagreement with that, state what it is.
me: I don't believe my soul stops existing. I believe my soul may be transformed as in "conformed to the image of the Firstborn" as the New Testament teaches. But I am responsible to cooperate with God in that transformation. And this transformed person is ever the same person, albeit then saturated, permeated, and filled up in personality with the Spirit of Jesus.
you:
So using your own fancy words,
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I don't consider them "fancy words". No more fancy than your term "emerge" really.
can you answer my actual question?
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A second time? Or do you have a new question?
If your five year old self were taken as the source of the transformation would that be no different in your opinion?
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This sounds like a completely new question.
And after reading and re-reading it, I think my original answer should address either way you have of packaging it.
I am the same person now as I was when I was five years old.
Now you're harping on minutia.
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Huh?
I said "Now you're harping on minutia."
No, I was asking you whether you were attempting to trivialise the questions to try and get out of dealing with them.
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No. No trivialization at all. I was just giving a kind of down-to-earth example. I consider this point minor. A more serious example would have accomplished the same thing.
Commitments I made ten years ago, I am held responsible for as the SAME person and not another.
If you have a major problem with that, what is it?
me:
The essential substance of the argument that a soul does not exist,...
you:
No such argument has been made.
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This sounds like an argument to me that the SOUL doesn't exist, especially after death:
If conciousness is considered part of the soul, then there are two basic problems to deal with:
1. It is undeniable that conciousness is substantially tied to the physical brain. Changing the brain changes the conciousness. The connection is so strong that it seems unreasonable to believe that conciousness would survive without the brain.
2. Continuity. My conciousness of today is not my conciousness of yesterday or 10 years ago. If my conciousness of 10 years ago is placed in heaven, then that is not who I identify as 'me'. The problem comes in when I get Alzheimers and loose all my memories and my conciousness goes insane and then I die. What conciousness continues after death? The insane memoryless one? The one just two days before Alzheimers started?
And the part of the argument that I addressed was your second point under "2.)"
For a start 'soul' has not been clearly defined.
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That may be true except that above I did give you some definition - Mind, Emotion, and Will of a person.
It was not an exhaustive definition. And you said "grey" edges exist. So I provided some definition to work with and left some "grey" edges as you expected.
However, I may not have understood what you meant by "grey edges". I took it to mean some grey areas in which our knowledge is rather limited.
What I have argued ...
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So an argument
has been made. I thought so.
is that conciousness almost certainly does not transcend the physical body and identity is a grey edged concept.
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I am not as certain that this is so obvious ("almost certainly" so). Nor do I see why it should be so obvious.
The soul is not the identical same thing as the physical body.
If it was, then everything that was true for the physical body would also be true for the soul. I don't think everything that is true for the physical body is true for the soul. That demonstrates that they are not the same thing.
While intricately inter-related, that doesn't make it obvious to me that one cannot continue if the other discontinues. But that would be hard to prove.
But that the existence of
mind emerged from matter is also hard to prove and seems more intuitively false. If you admit that identity is a "grey edged" concept, then why do you turn around and claim "almost certainly" [edited] this or that about it ?
A position as agnostic would be more honestly consistent about something you say is a "grey edged" concept.