Solipsism Syndrome (youtube)

Guybrush · 03-23-2010, 03:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neapolitan

That is true. I'm only guessing, to the ancient philosophers, things could be divided as seen and unseen, abstract and concrete, tangible and intangible, whatever nomenclature they used. The "body" is something tangilbe, you can use your five senses to detect it, but "soul" is something that can not be detected by the five senses. [I won't go into detail about the soul.] But there is a lot in science that has yet to be seen yet can be infered. What other abstract ideas would you say also need scientific approval for there existence? If you are going to approach it in a scientific way I wouldn't dismiss it just on the grounds it can be seen.

Some things in science might be hard to see, but I wouldn't say there's much in science that can't be measured. Even though the scientists can't see the particles they bang together in accelerators themselves, they are detected by the instruments. Things in science which have not yet been measured are really treated very much like hypotheses in my experience which basically means people tend to be careful treating them as truths.

According to the Occam's razor principle which is popular in science, the simplest explanation is the best. The simplest explanation is the one which requires you to do the least amount of new assumptions about the universe we live in. The assumption we do not have souls does not lead to any troublesome assumptions in science - it is pretty consistent with what we know so far. The assumption that souls do exist will lead to a lot of new assumptions and so is the unfavourable option. What I mean is that if there's no way to prove souls' existence, you should be critical and sceptical in your thinking around the subject if you want to minimize the chance of you believing in something which is wrong.

I don't believe in things which have no energy and no mass and can't possibly be measured in any way. Even abstract concepts like thoughts are made from something. If souls really do exist, it should be possible to measure one. The same goes for God!