Does clone or fertilized egg have soul?

My younger sister got a bit disappointed when I told her that christians don't think you can take animals with you to heaven. She's a christian of course and had buried some animal (i don't remember what is was) and even put a cross over it when i mentioned that. She got really mad at me when i told her that animals don't have souls and are just meat&blood machines.

Some years later I told her that rocks have souls too, but she didn't believe me.

I'm unsure if I am using soul in the right contexts, is there any difference between soul and conscience? If there is how do they relate to each other?

personally, i believe that anything that has a nervous system has a soul (that's where i believe the soul lives while in the physical world, not in the heart like most people seem to believe). the reason this makes sense to me is that the nervous system is basically our link to the physical world. it allows us to experience what physical things feel like, taste like, etc., so that we can retain those memories when we leave the physical world. it also carries electric pulses (ie. energy (ie. the soul)).

i'm uncertain on my beliefs regarding a God. i have 2 thoughts on this:

1. God has always existed, created the universe (by turning some of "his" energy in to matter (hence The Big Bang), which is the reverse of an atomic bomb), and created new souls from "his" energy.

2. There is no God, only souls that are all equal to one another that have always existed, and created the universe in the same way as i decribed in #1.

as for when we enter the body, i believe that takes place when the body is able to support a soul (ie. when it has a developed nervous system). it doesn't happen at birth because we all have subconcious memories of being in the womb.

this might sound a little stupid to most people, but have you ever seen what psychics can do? there's a guy call John Edward who does a show called Crossing Over, where there's an audience of people, and he'll come to a person or persons with messages from relatives/friends who have passed over. the people in the audience are not actors, as their emotions are obviously real (plus they've had celebrities on there before), and the stuff he comes up with aren't just lucky guesses, as he comes up with some very specific stuff, and is always accurate.

nullus

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as for when we enter the body, i believe that takes place when the body is able to support a soul (ie. when it has a developed nervous system). it doesn't happen at birth because we all have subconcious memories of being in the womb.

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What determines that a soul must enter the brain? If a soul exists before we are born, why do we have no consious memories of existance pre-body? Is it because we can aquire no memories without sensory experience? If so, does that then imply that we stop accumulating new memories (and experiences) after we leave our physical body? If the souls exist in a form of pure energy, why aren't they detectable by physical apparatus (that can detect other forms of pure energy)?

There are so many assertions that are left unexplained when we introduce the notion of a soul. Personnally, I think the notion of a soul gives us a way round accepting our own mortality, which is what makes the idea so attractive to many people.

You are ready to believe in anything they put into you, that's how you all work, I'm feeling like talking to Leo. Your successors will surely agree with me. Do you want me to qwestion you or do you want me to accept your situation?

Simon
1. what is soul?
2. whats the difference between soul and conscience?
3. how do they relate to each other?

Kedaman

1. what is soul?
I don't know. That's what I'm trying to find out. I suppose that if consiousness is not a brain function, and the brain is a mere tool of the consiousness, then the soul is your consiousness.

2. whats the difference between soul and conscience?
Well your conscience is the sensation you get when you feel guity. I don't know why we have it but I would imaging it arises from our sense of empathy. Psycopaths are supposed to be lacking a conscience so does that mean they don't have a soul?

3. how do they relate to each other?
I don't know if they relate to each other attall. I think you're asking the wrong person really.

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Originally posted by simonm
What determines that a soul must enter the brain? If a soul exists before we are born, why do we have no consious memories of existance pre-body? Is it because we can aquire no memories without sensory experience? If so, does that then imply that we stop accumulating new memories (and experiences) after we leave our physical body? If the souls exist in a form of pure energy, why aren't they detectable by physical apparatus (that can detect other forms of pure energy)?

There are so many assertions that are left unexplained when we introduce the notion of a soul. Personnally, I think the notion of a soul gives us a way round accepting our own mortality, which is what makes the idea so attractive to many people.

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i believe we have no concious memories prior to this life because they're buried in our subconcious. the only memories we have access to while in a concious state are the memories in our brain. these memories also exist in the subconcious memory. you may then ask me why we sometimes remember dreams, seeing as we're in a subconcious state then. well, i believe that when we dream, we sort of partially come out of the body and exist in between the spiritual and physical world. ever get the feeling, when you're drifting off to sleep, that you suddenly come crashing down with a thud? i believe that happens because you're kind of falling back in to your body.

but the energy of the soul is detectable by physical aparatus: the brain. you can choose to disbelieve it, but i believe in psychic ability.

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Originally posted by kedaman
You are ready to believe in anything they put into you, that's how you all work, I'm feeling like talking to Leo. Your successors will surely agree with me. Do you want me to qwestion you or do you want me to accept your situation?

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are you talking to me? :)

Simon

consciousness, soul and conscience, aren't they synonyms?

4. whats the difference between soul and consciousness?
5. how do they relate to each other?

If conscience is the ability to feel guilty then I think it's just information. Does phychopaths have a part of their brain damaged or inactive?

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Originally posted by nullus


are you talking to me? :)

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Yeah, I didn't mean to sound rude :)

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Originally posted by kedaman
You are ready to believe in anything they put into you, that's how you all work, I'm feeling like talking to Leo. Your successors will surely agree with me. Do you want me to qwestion you or do you want me to accept your situation?

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ok, do you mean i'm just blindly accepting that this John Edward guy is telling the truth? i don't think i am, as i can't think of any other explanation to what he, and other psychics, do. maybe reading people's minds? but they sometimes come up with stuff that a person has no knowledge of, then that person goes and reasearches it and validates it.

you can question me or accept my beliefs, i don't care. it's up to you. :)

nullus
There are people who refute nonscientific information, they call it "belief in the mystic" or at least Guv seems to use that term.
I argue that information is mere nonvalidable data, and it's reliability or objective value is nonsense. Information is a tool.
That pretty much says that I think believers are stupid, whether they are scientist or religious. To believe is to commit yourself to information as if they were constantly true and build up a universal method of handling any other information.
Now if you go scoop in a lot of information on your way, say a kid could learn almost anything you teach it, you encounter information that is rendered obsolete, that is useless, but actually is considered false. This information is useless because it can't be used on anything in particular, say "there are ghosts" can't be used since you haven't encountered any ghosts, it doesn't mean that there aren't any ghosts but only the degree of uselessness renders it obsolete and is therefore considered nonsense. Now let's take a very consistent information, "everyone dies" or "1+1=2" that information can be applied on a large scale of phenomenons and it seems to never fail, that you call "fact" however there's no particular difference between a fact and a strong belief. They are both strong commitments to information.
I have to pause here and ask if you understand what I have so far.

Kedaman

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consciousness, soul and conscience, aren't they synonyms?

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No. They convey completely different meanings (although they may be related to each other).

As for questions 4 and 5, as I have said, you are asking the wrong person. I don't believe that we have a soul so I can't really define it.

Nullus

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i believe we have no concious memories prior to this life because they're buried in our subconcious. the only memories we have access to while in a concious state are the memories in our brain. these memories also exist in the subconcious memory.

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OK, what you're saying here (if you will allow me to summerise) is that: Our subconsious memories exist in the mind of our soul and do not in the brain and are therefore innaccessible to our consious minds. Is that correct?

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ever get the feeling, when you're drifting off to sleep, that you suddenly come crashing down with a thud? i believe that happens because you're kind of falling back in to your body.

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I have not had that particular sensation but I have had weird experiences in the half awake/asleep state. I would be more inclinded to attribute these experiences to self projected realities that we are capable of rendering due to free forming brain patterns (not normally possible when we're fully awake) which are in turn due to the extremely relaxed state we are in.

Another reason I doubt so called "out of body experiences" is why do feel sensations of motion when we are not "connected up" to our body (which has the sensors required to detect motion).

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but the energy of the soul is detectable by physical aparatus: the brain. you can choose to disbelieve it, but i believe in psychic ability.

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Well, those that detect other souls due to phychic ability would do so by detecting them with their souls and not their physical brains right?

Still, why can't we detect these forms of energy by any independant and measurable means?

If soul is energy, can it be converted to mass, electromagnetic radiation or kinetic energy? E=soul*k=mc^2 or something?

Kedaman

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That pretty much says that I think believers are stupid, whether they are scientist or religious. To believe is to commit yourself to information as if they were constantly true and build up a universal method of handling any other information.

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I think what you are saying here really is that to hold beliefs with absolute certainty is stupid rather than to hold any sort of belief.
The key, as I think you are getting at, is that beliefs are tools and are to be held and applied where it is useful to do so and discard them when they are no longer helpful.
I agree with this and to anyone who would state that they can be sure that any one of their beliefs can be held with absolute certainty, I would ask them how they would judge the reliability of a belief. By what scale can you validate a belief to test it's truthfullness?
OK, some beliefs will appear to be verified by observational evidence but that is not sufficient proof to guarantee the validity of a belief. That is mere inductive reasoning (which has been shown to be vastly inadequate for proving anything).
The pros/cons of inductive reasoning aside, you still can't be sure that observational evidence is truly verifying what you already believe. The brain's ability to interpret information in such a way that re-inforces it's existing beliefs has been shown to be a very selective mechanism indeed.

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Originally posted by kedaman
There are people who refute nonscientific information, they call it "belief in the mystic" or at least Guv seems to use that term.
I argue that information is mere nonvalidable data, and it's reliability or objective value is nonsense. Information is a tool.
That pretty much says that I think believers are stupid, whether they are scientist or religious. To believe is to commit yourself to information as if they were constantly true and build up a universal method of handling any other information.
Now if you go scoop in a lot of information on your way, say a kid could learn almost anything you teach it, you encounter information that is rendered obsolete, that is useless, but actually is considered false. This information is useless because it can't be used on anything in particular, say "there are ghosts" can't be used since you haven't encountered any ghosts, it doesn't mean that there aren't any ghosts but only the degree of uselessness renders it obsolete and is therefore considered nonsense. Now let's take a very consistent information, "everyone dies" or "1+1=2" that information can be applied on a large scale of phenomenons and it seems to never fail, that you call "fact" however there's no particular difference between a fact and a strong belief. They are both strong commitments to information.
I have to pause here and ask if you understand what I have so far.

If soul is energy, can it be converted to mass, electromagnetic radiation or kinetic energy? E=soul*k=mc^2 or something?

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it is often quite hard to understand what you're saying, but i think i'm following you... ;) continue with what you wanna say anyway, and i'll try to make sense of it. :)

like i said, i believe we were responsible for The Big Bang, by converting some of our energy to matter. :)

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Originally posted by simonm
OK, what you're saying here (if you will allow me to summerise) is that: Our subconsious memories exist in the mind of our soul and do not in the brain and are therefore innaccessible to our consious minds. Is that correct?

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yup, that's basically what i'm saying.

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Well, those that detect other souls due to phychic ability would do so by detecting them with their souls and not their physical brains right?

Still, why can't we detect these forms of energy by any independant and measurable means?

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i'm not too sure how it works, seeing as i don't posess any strong psychic ability, but i believe it's kind of a mix of the two. your soul would tune in to the energy of another soul, which would then allow your brain to interpret messages from them.

well, i'm no scientist. maybe the energy of a soul can be detected by a machine someone builds. but maybe we'd have to build a machine as advanced as a brain to do it.

Nullus

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well, i'm no scientist. maybe the energy of a soul can be detected by a machine someone builds. but maybe we'd have to build a machine as advanced as a brain to do it.

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I'm not talking about being able to build a machine that can interpret, understand and even interact with a soul. All I want to do is just detect it for starters. That would be nice. That would at least show the sceptics that there is something there even if we couldn't understand it.

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Originally posted by simonm
I'm not talking about being able to build a machine that can interpret, understand and even interact with a soul. All I want to do is just detect it for starters. That would be nice. That would at least show the sceptics that there is something there even if we couldn't understand it.

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that's kind of what i meant though. :) maybe we'd have to build a machine as advanced as a brain to even detect souls. but if we did build a machine that could do that, why would you believe it any more than when a living being detects spiritual energy?

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I think what you are saying here really is that to hold beliefs with absolute certainty is stupid rather than to hold any sort of belief.

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As you say sort of belief, i think you mean there as a certain degree to belief, I'm not quite if we could say absolute certainty but if we say belief as a degree, I'd take as a proportional parameter. Otherways a definitive solution would be to define belief to commit to a piece of information as if it was true.

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The key, as I think you are getting at, is that beliefs are tools and are to be held and applied where it is useful to do so and discard them when they are no longer helpful.

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Yes

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By what scale can you validate a belief to test it's truthfullness?

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I think validation of beliefs are nonsense. Information cannot be true nor false. That is the main problem with human reasoning. I think the cumulative information that we've gained both conscious and unconscious (of which genetic information is also part of) is a result of this kind of reasoning which in turn inprisonate our minds to think certain things are the way the seems to be. "We die because we believe we will die". "We can't fly because we don't believe in that". This might sound a bit radical so I might have to give lot of explanation
to why I think this.

Unconscious information is such information we are not aware of, however our minds process it anyway because it's rudimentary and doesn't need any further thought on. It's some kind of big database of principes we never think of but still use when we experience our environment. I'm not only talking about our insticts or reflexes. I'm also talking about how we look at ourselves and our environment, our body might for instance just be a very detailed piece of information stored deep within our database, the universe around us more or less built in in the database, and when we think we percept stuff, we just dig up stuff from that database. "Where's the real universe i used to know?" you might ask. Who said anything about real? If there is one thing we can closely study and operate, that is information, if there's something that we can never reach, that is outher reality.

Okay that was lots in a heap, didn't intend to go that fast, anyway if there's something that doesn't make sense, ask :)

Nullus

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that's kind of what i meant though. maybe we'd have to build a machine as advanced as a brain to even detect souls. but if we did build a machine that could do that, why would you believe it any more than when a living being detects spiritual energy?

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I don't see why. If souls are just pure energy, why can't we detect them (as we might any other energy)?

We can detect enery in the brain (when it is alive) in the form of electrical impulses and this just stops when the brain dies (and cannot be detected moving away). I don't think people will ever accept an explanation of the soul existing as pure energy unless we provide an independant means of verifying it's existance.

You are calling it "spiritual energy" so does this mean that you suspect that it is an entirely different form of energy that is yet to be discovered?

The so called "evidence" for detecting spiritual energy can often be explained by other means and we do not have to resort to the paranormal explanation. Why do I dislike the paranormal explanation? Because it makes additional assertions that themselves are unexplained and raises more questions that it answers. The paranormal explanation is just one possibility that I could make up to "fit" the evidence and untill the other questions that I posed (and many more) are answered as well, it remains an unlikely explanation in my mind.

My Opinion is that to believe in Soul you must believe in a higher power

but than again that is only my opinion
1. we dont see soul
2. we dont hear soul
3. we dont feel soul

its a intangible form, so to believe there is a soul, i guess you would have to believe there is a higher power to give and explain soul
since we cant seem to explain soul

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Originally posted by simonm
I don't see why. If souls are just pure energy, why can't we detect them (as we might any other energy)?

We can detect enery in the brain (when it is alive) in the form of electrical impulses and this just stops when the brain dies (and cannot be detected moving away). I don't think people will ever accept an explanation of the soul existing as pure energy unless we provide an independant means of verifying it's existance.

You are calling it "spiritual energy" so does this mean that you suspect that it is an entirely different form of energy that is yet to be discovered?

The so called "evidence" for detecting spiritual energy can often be explained by other means and we do not have to resort to the paranormal explanation. Why do I dislike the paranormal explanation? Because it makes additional assertions that themselves are unexplained and raises more questions that it answers. The paranormal explanation is just one possibility that I could make up to "fit" the evidence and untill the other questions that I posed (and many more) are answered as well, it remains an unlikely explanation in my mind.

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well, yeah, i believe spiritual energy is an entirely different form of energy than the kind we already know of. afterall, this energy encapsulates intelligence and emotion, so there'd obviously have to be something different about it.

perhaps the reason we can detect energy in a living brain and not when the brain dies is because when a soul is connected to a body, it gives off electrical impulses that interact with the brain which can be detected. who knows.

maybe these questions can never be answered beyond any doubt while we're here. i guess we'll just have to find out when we die. :)

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Originally posted by kovan
My Opinion is that to believe in Soul you must believe in a higher power

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why must there be a higher power in order for souls to exist? do you believe in the soul? if so, what do you believe the soul is? :)

Well when speaking of the soul
it usually refers to either having a good or bad soul
which is somewhere linked to religion
because most religions
at least the ones i am familiar with, talk about the soul
either being in heaven or hell

so to believe there is heaven and hell
i guess there must be a belief in higher power such as God or gods