On Fri, 2 Nov 2018 15:54:04 -0700 (PDT), Quadibloc
wrote:
In any event, while I find MacDougall's experiments unconvincing,
to say the
least, I don't need them to be convinced of the existence of the
human spirit.

As I understand these terms, the "soul" is, in the Bible, supposed
to be a vital
spark which allows both humans and animals to be alive, whereas the
"spirit" is
the immaterial component of the human mind.

In that sense, while I don't believe in the "soul" I certainly do
believe in the
"spirit". From direct observation. I see what I see, I hear what I
hear, I
think, therefore I exist.

Human consciousness is something science has not even _begun_ to
get to grips
with explaining. It does not have the tools to even approach the
job.

I fully agree with all this. We have a great mystery ahead of us to
research here, and what comes out of it we don't know in advance, of
course.

But a tentative hypothesis could be that the "spirit", I.e. our
consciousness, is the organisation of matter, which is what makes us
alive, and also conscious. We see that organisation matters a lot in
other cases. The difference between a book containing a great novel
from a very similar book (same size, same binding, same paper
quality, same number of pages, same amount of ink on the pages)
containing random gibberish is only the organisation of the ink
pattern on the pages. And the difference between a computer running
many useful programs from an identical computer waiting to have an OS
installed is the organisation of bit values in its memory. In these
cases the organisation itself has no mass, which is compatible with
the idea that the spirit also has no mass.

However, the claim that the human spirit somehow survives the
physical death of the body, to go on living forever in heaven or hell
(Christianity, Judaism, Islam), or to be transferred to another body
(Hinduism, Buddhism), is highly doubtful. There is also a strange
asymmetry in the claims by Christianity, Judaism, Islam: they claim
that the human spirit lives on in eternity after death, but not that
it already has existed in eternity before birth. Why this asymmetry?
Presumably because it reflects human fear: what happened before birth
is in the past and already has happened so we need not worry about
that. But what happens after death is in the future and we humans
worry so much about the future that whole professions can profit well
on that worry (e.g. financial forecasters, astrologers, and several
others).

Hinduism and Buddhism has more symmetry in their claims since they
say that our current incarnation is not the first one, we have many
earlier incarnation. However the claim that the spirit transfers to
other bodies but still maintains some identity is still highly
doubtful.