Just an Evo robot

I refer you to messages 19, and message 30 where I explain why evolution is incompatible with dualism. Neither you, nor Paisano has given any substantial response to these posts.Evolution is not the only argument against dualism; but it's the only one which is relevant to this thread.An afterlife is possible with dualism, I'm not even going to argue that. ALL my arguments that an afterlife is not possible stem from a monistic viewpoint which, as I have argued, is the only one compatible with evolution.

Yes, on that level of course not. I'd assumed you meant by any means of external investigation, in which case yes we can distinguish them. Emotional responses, different thought patterns and even remembering things all show up when monitoring brain activity. I also rather suspect that with a better understanding of how the brain works they could be deduced from the state of the neurons. Evidence so far is that they are going the other way. Early systems had no distinct hardware/software distinction, while modern PCs are using increasingly complex systems to enforce the hardware/software distinction. JVM, the .NET runtime, even the HAL in NT derived Windows all serve this purpose. Go broad enough and I'll agree with you. For an analogy based on the distinction between software and hardware in PCs however, I don't think there's any water to be held in the comparison.

Why you believe evolution is incompatible with dualism.But since you are talking about two things, the soul and afterlife, which are outside the realm of scientific resolution, what you have is simply conjecture.There is no problem that I can see with believing in either a soul or an afterlife, either restricted or open, and still agreeing that the TOE is the most likely explaination for the evidence we see.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Perhaps you'd like to explain how dualism evolved then?

[quote] Evidence so far is that they are going the other way. Early systems had no distinct hardware/software distinction, while modern PCs are using increasingly complex systems to enforce the hardware/software distinction. JVM, the .NET runtime, even the HAL in NT derived Windows all serve this purpose.[quote] Perhaps we are talking at cross purposes. One might say that the punch card system constituted only hardware, and thus exhibited no disntinction, but IMO thats not an accurate description.I cannot understand at all why you think this distinction is being increasingly drawn; the Virtual Machine aims precisely to construct a kinda pseudo-hardware in which to execute the desire software - this it seems to me is exemplary of the steady blurring of hardware and software. The company I work for uses a lot of Unix workstations running an NT-emulator which in turn executes something like Netscape; we have divorced the software from dependance on hardware, not least becuase we can effectively emulate hardware, not least because hardware is only information science carved in silicon.IMO the distinction between hardware and software is purely notional. Matter and energy are translatable into one another after all.

They are two different things. There is no need to explain that the soul or a belief in the afterlife evolved. One is a matter of belief, the other is a record or observations and a description of how those observations may have come about.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

If you're proposing that mind is a different substance then you are proposing that a significatnt functional part of a human being is a different substance. I want to know how that arrangement evolved, I want to know how a purely physical mechanism such as evolution managed to produce a hybrid spirit/material entity.In other words, how did dualism evolve?The other dualist alternative, tIko, is that soul isn't mind, that you don't need a soul to think, or do, anything. It's just there until the afterlife when it takes what you are away, and becomes you-in-the-afterlife. I think it's obvious how unsatisfactory a conception that is and I think it suffers from the monism-with-an-afterlife problems I've discussed above.

As I have said.A purely physical means such as Evolution did not produce a soul. The soul did not evolve. Soul is a property of religion, faith and belief.Evolution can explain the body. It can explain structure. It can explain species and exinction. It can explain the fossil record and the variety of critters we see around us.It can not explain the soul or afterlife. Those are taken on faith. There is no requirement that you or anyone else believe in either. And your belief, or disbelief, have no bearing on their existence or non-existence.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

I never claimed it did. However it did produce us, and it did produce our brains. How did a soul, that supposedly does our thinking for us and is thus critically important in our survival come to be associated with the physical form as it evolved? How did the evolution of behaviour occur with this non-physical thinker? How did the 'bridge' between mind and body evolve? What advantages did it bring in it's intermediary stages? What were those intermediary stages? How can only humans have souls when there is no clear dividing line between human and non-human in an evolutionary world?Your soul, if it existed, would not be a divorced entity unrelated to your physical form and action. You cannot pretend that the origin of the physical form is not pertinent to the nature or existence of the soul.

All very good questions.First, though, IMHO it is not the soul that does our thinking. Rather, it may well be that our thinking influences the soul.Second, the existence of a soul is not critical to survival. Afterall, it continues to exist even after we are dead.A yes, the soul is divorced from physical form. It existed before the form and will exist after the form.And finally, I am not sure that only humans have souls.One other thing. IMHO there is no intermediate stage of soul, no partial soul, no evolving soul. It, like life, is, or isn't.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Ah! Ok. So you're not talking a Cartesian Dualist view of mind/body, ok - so how does it work in your conception? And how does your conception avoid the problems I discussed for Monism and the afterlife above? This isn't directly relevant to anything but I stuck out for me anyway. Life is not clearly defined as an is/isn't category, it's not clear where life begins, or ends and it's not clear what is, or isn't life (particularly for things like Viruses and Prions). I believe there was a thread about this not so long ago?

Your argument assumes facts not in evidence, namely strict philosophical materialism. It would be more precise for you to say dualism is incompatible with materialism. I'd even agree with that much.You presuppose that, because evolution is stochastic, it is purposeless. This is just equivocation. You also presuppose that human sentience is realized and sourced purely from physical processes. AFAIK, we just don't know one way or the other. This is why I asked for references.I realize this seems the most plausible position to you, given your axioms, but it is by no means established fact.

I started to say I'm not sure I understand what your asking, but that would be a lie.I'm quite sure I don't understand what you're asking.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

It makes no such assumption. If you claim it does, show where. I make no such presupposition, nor is such an assumption necessary to my argument. I make no such presupposition.And you're still not answering any of the arguments I've made.

Sorry, I spent quite some time studying the Philsophy of the mind/body question, and the problems of dualism and monism. I tend to forget what is or isn't commonly understood terminology.In classic Cartesian Dualism (so called because Decartes was the first to formally propose it) there is body which is physical, and mind which is not made of any physical thing. The mind does the thinking. In classical Christian theology, the mind and soul are the same thing.Classic Monism claims that there is only the material world, and that the mind and body are made of the same stuff. There's also neutral Monism which claims that everything is made of the same stuff but that stuff is both mind and body, and property Dualism which claims that while the brain is the origin and cause of mind, the mind cannot be fully explained in terms of reductive physics.Now you say that we don't think with our soul, yes? OK, so what then do you think we think with? Is what we think with the same thing as mind (the conscious awareness)? How does that mind relate to the soul? And how does the soul link with the brain? And, I guess, what is the soul then?Early I was arguing (in brief) that Monism doesn't allow for an afterlife because in any afterlife we still need to think, and the thinking is done by a physical thing and the afterlife is non-physical. If you're saying that the soul doesn't think, then presumably the brain does? Ok, so how when it comes to be an afterlife do your thoughts, beliefs and memories come to be carried forward?