Does the soul exist?

[pianoperformer]

I'm quite obviously copying the format of the title of the "does god exist?" thread, but this is a very similar question, only about the soul.

When I say soul, I mean the thing that many religions and belief systems say moves on after the body dies. I'm not referring to any specific religious belief, nor about any specific afterlife. We're merely discussing the existence, or lack thereof, of the soul.

I'm on the fence right now between skepticism and belief regarding the soul. I've questioned many of my other beliefs and found them lacking, so have discarded them. The soul is one of those more precious beliefs that I'm reluctant to discard, yet can see no satisfactory evidence for its existence. It's certainly frightening to think that there might not be a soul, but emotion has no place when trying to determine the truth.

Does the soul exist? Why or why not?

Does it follow the laws of physics? Why or why not?

If so:

• What is its energy source? We know that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, and that any kind of work takes energy, so the soul must have some source of energy in order to supply it with energy and thus preserve its existence.
• Of what is it composed?
• How did it come into existence, and can it be dispersed?

If not, why not? What excludes it from the laws that everything else obeys?

If the soul exists, why does the consciousness of an individual seem so attached to the brain? I mean, if one has brain damage, their consciousness seems to be affected. Their personality may change, or they may lose their memory. In fact, it is known, or at least suspected, where certain things such as personality lie in the brain.

I'd like this thread to remain civil. I just want evidence, but not to be attacked, obviously. Also, I don't think the scientific method should be discarded, as so many who hold such beliefs seem to be willing to do. The scientific method is the one tool we have for gaining new knowledge that by its nature updates itself as new data are discovered and integrated. Also, unless you are a physicist who has explicitly studied such subjects, please don't invoke quantum mechanics, string theory, or any other scientific theory that the average person is likely not to be very familiar with, because you probably misunderstand it or are easily distorting it to your own uses that probably do not actually fit the theory.

Other than that, I'd love to hear any ideas or discussion of the above questions.

[Anna Conlan]

I believe the soul is a piece of Source energy and consciousness. It draws its vital life force from Source, because it is Source. Source is all that exists, pure love. I believe souls came into consciousness when they separated from Source, in order to experience a relative reality, but the soul can keep a connection back to Source. Enlightenment for me is making the journey back to Love, back to the realization that we are one and the same.

The soul exists outside of time and space - the soul has past, a present and future lifetimes that all occur at once.

[John Freestone]

Hi pianoperformer, that's a well-phrased question.

My take on it is that there is no soul. Science has developed from philosophy and religion, which itself can be traced back to the first guesses primitive humans made about who they were and what the world was. I'm sure that science is a great improvement, although it is still based on certain assumptions, which may be wrong. Generally, as we have evolved more rigorous methods of deciding what is true and what is false, we have as a species discarded more and more myths (and scientific theories themselves become disproved or modified in the light of new evidence). From this modern standpoint, we have developed the - on the whole, rather good - habit of basing the decision of the reality of things on evidence. There is not really any sound evidence for the soul, immortal or otherwise. There is not really even any sound evidence that what we perceive as a whole gestalt of flowing experience is real. The evidence is mounting that it is an illusion we create in our brains and bodies, but it is an incredibly powerful illusion that it is hard to see beyond. Neurobiology is helping us see beyond it.

We seem almost certain to be just animals in every sense of the word, despite being rather advanced, having evolved over millions of years from simpler animals. Our consciousness, whatever it is, makes sense as an emergent property of advanced brains. The idea that there is something unique about humans, as many religions say, on this issue of having a soul, can be seen now to be bias.

However, I am playing with a tentative idea that, rather as energy is not created or destroyed, consciousness may not be, but it is easy to misunderstand that. It just means that lower animals have less awareness of their environment, plants even less, microbes hardly any, and I don't know how to reasonably end the series. It is nonsense to imagine that a microbe or a molecule has awareness the way a human being does, but a molecule does nevertheless respond to its environment.

The idea of immortality is so appealing as to be wise to doubt. Anything that feels good to believe is worth checking out very carefully. There is certainly a recycling of matter and energy, but I don't expect there is any reason or evolutionary principle that supports the idea of some kind of conscious individual returning to 'Source', or reincarnation.

If we hold this idea that there are concepts that get into our culture that have no basis in reality, and that evidence for something should be the basis for trying to theorise about what something is, many such questions become almost pointless - we can leave the idea of soul on the back burner, keep an open mind in case some new evidence comes up, and there will always be people investigating the claim - but since there is no real evidence (I know people will dispute this, it is a personal opinion), there is no need to ask what properties soul has, where it comes from, what it means, or how many we can fit on the head of a pin (oh, that's angels).

[pianoperformer]

Anna Conlan:

Very poetic indeed, but how do you know? Or, is it just something that sounds nice to believe in? Why would we have many lifetimes occurring at one time? Why, then, are we not aware of being conscious in all of these lifetimes?

If source is all that exists, how is it pure love? Our world, i'm sure you agree, is far from being pure love.

You didn't answer though whether the soul is subject to the same laws of physics as everything else. Why or why not? If so, and it draws energy from this source, and source is all that exists, then how does that work? That sounds rather complicated. What form of energy, exactly, does it use?

John Freestone, I agree with most of what you said. Well, I am just asking about the properties, because if it does follow the laws of physics (why shouldn't it?), then they would be valid questions, wouldn't they? If it doesn't, then we must ask why not.

I agree though, there is no evidence. But it'd be nice to have at least some sort of workable hypothesis, rather than some feel-good rhetoric that really means nothing and doesn't make much sense when broken down, which I think is basically what a lot of the new-age philosophies are, or really any religious or spiritual philosophy.

Your idea about consciousness is interesting, though. I do wonder what sort of consciousness simpler lifeforms have. What exactly makes up consciousness? What makes an object conscious? Things react to their environment, yes, but so does hydrogen—if there are two hydrogens and an oxygen around, they are probably going to bond, because that's the natural thing to do. But one wouldn't claim that atoms are conscious, would they? It's just electromagnitism acting on them (forgive me if I got the wrong force).

Thanks for the replies.

[Anagogy]

Originally Posted by John Freestone

The idea of immortality is so appealing as to be wise to doubt. Anything that feels good to believe is worth checking out very carefully. There is certainly a recycling of matter and energy, but I don't expect there is any reason or evolutionary principle that supports the idea of some kind of conscious individual returning to 'Source', or reincarnation.

Originally Posted by pianoperformer

I agree though, there is no evidence. But it'd be nice to have at least some sort of workable hypothesis, rather than some feel-good rhetoric that really means nothing and doesn't make much sense when broken down, which I think is basically what a lot of the new-age philosophies are, or really any religious or spiritual philosophy.

Have either of you read "Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation" by Ian Stevenson? Or "Unlearned Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy" by the same author? There is more evidence for reincarnation than people would like to think. Dr. Ian Stevenson was Carlson Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Division of Parapsychology, Department of Behavioral Medicine and Psychiatry, at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Lots of hard to explain evidence in his books. Or rather, hard to explain if one does not accept reincarnation as a reality.

Or perhaps Brian Weiss' books on reincarnation, or Michael Newton's? Or "Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind" or "Lessons from the Light: What We Can Learn from the Near-death Experience" by Kenneth Ring, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Connecticut and co founder and past president of the International Association for Near Death Studies? There are many others. You might want to check some out. It may be illuminating.

Originally Posted by pianoperformer

Your idea about consciousness is interesting, though. I do wonder what sort of consciousness simpler lifeforms have. What exactly makes up consciousness? What makes an object conscious? Things react to their environment, yes, but so does hydrogen—if there are two hydrogens and an oxygen around, they are probably going to bond, because that's the natural thing to do. But one wouldn't claim that atoms are conscious, would they? It's just electromagnitism acting on them (forgive me if I got the wrong force).

I would argue that all things possess consciousness of many different varieties, complexities, and intensities. But I suppose I don't have any hard evidence to throw at you with regard to that just at this moment.

[Dannyboy1]

From Galileo’s time onward, scientists’ precise observations contributed to a picture of the world that looked very much like a massive piece of mechanical clockwork; they had little practical use for such ideas as soul, spirit, or consciousness.

René Descartes is especially famous for the statement I think, therefore I am. But the truth is, the think part of that declaration puzzled Descartes, much as it has puzzled scientists for centuries since. Just how is it that we think? Where do our thoughts come from? How do the bits of physical matter that constitute our brains generate consciousness? The answers to those questions open up a tremendous new world of possibility for what we can achieve in our lives, and they form a central part of The Answer.

A World Inside the Atom

In the generations following Galileo and Descartes, Sir Isaac Newton took the idea of nature-as-machine much further, detailing the precise laws that govern how that machine operates. All of classical physics, and in fact, all of modern science, has been built upon the foundation created by Newton. His laws of motion made possible the advance of modern technology, from simple steam engines to the space probes that have analyzed soil samples on Mars.

But scientists eventually reached the limits of the Newtonian worldview. As their tools grew more sophisticated, their explorations of the physical world took them deep into the heart of the atom, where the nature of reality proved to be something quite different from anything Descartes or Newton ever imagined.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, scientists began looking into the world within the atomic nucleus, and they were shocked to discover that on the subatomic level, the physical world did not behave at all the way Newton said it should. In fact, the “atom” itself turned out to be a sort of illusion: The closer scientists looked, the less it really appeared to be there.

And when our vision of the atom fractured, the foundation of classical physics fractured along with it. Our view of how the world works was in for a radical transformation.

Everything Is Energy

When we say the name Albert Einstein, what comes to mind? Perhaps you think of his wild mane of white hair, or that famous picture of the distinguished physicist sticking out his tongue. Or maybe you think simply, “Genius.” But whatever picture you have, you will also probably come up with “E=MC2.”

Why on earth would a mathematical equation for a sophisticated theory be so famous that even nonscientists recognize it immediately? Because with that simple equation, “Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared,” Einstein shattered centuries of thinking and radically altered our view of how the world works.

One reason Einstein’s idea was so transformative was that for the first time ever, it described how energy and matter are not only related, but can be transformed back and forth into each other. Now the elegant, clear-cut world of classical, Newtonian physics would be forced to move over and make room for the fuzzy, strange, nearly unimaginable world of quantum physics.

Quantum physics is the study of how the world works on the smallest scale, at a level far smaller than the atom. And as scientists studied the nature of reality on a smaller and smaller scale, something strange began to happen: The deeper we went into reality, the more it seemed to dissolve from view. The search for the smallest known particle of matter had instead turned up distinct yet elusive little packets of energy, which physicists called quanta.

The Einstein breakthrough comes down to this: Everything is energy. A rock, a planet, a glass of water, your hand, everything you can touch, taste, or smell - it’s all made of molecules, which are made of atoms, which are made of protons and electrons and neutrons, which are made of nothing but vibrating packets of energy.

This is where quantum physics intersects with what I found inside that cardboard box. What physicists found has everything to do with how you are going to create the life of your dreams by building your dream business. For once we know that everything is energy - that there is no absolute distinction between matter and energy - then the boundaries between the physical world and the world of our thoughts start to disappear as well.

Reading the Mind of God

In the decades that followed Einstein’s theory of relativity, the new quantum physics began to reveal some very strange things. The tiny packets of energy known as quanta exhibited some very peculiar behaviors, including an unexplainable ability to influence one another, a property called entanglement.

In his book Science and the Akashic Field, physicist Ervin Laszlo describes a series of experiments conducted by lie detector expert Cleve Backster. Backster took some white blood cells from the mouths of his subjects and cultured them in a test tube. He then moved the cultures to distant locations, more than seven miles away. He attached lie detectors to the cultures and then performed a series of experiments on his subjects.

In one of his tests, he showed his subject a television program depicting the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. This man was a former navy gunner who had actually been present at Pearl Harbor during the attack. When the face of a navy gunner appeared on the screen, the man’s face betrayed an emotional reaction—and at that precise moment, the lie detector’s needle seven and a half miles away jumped, exactly as it would have had it been attached to the man himself, and not just to a test tube of his cultured white blood cells miles away.

How is such a thing possible? In the language of quantum physics, the particles of the gunner’s body are still connected or “entangled” with one another, and no matter how far apart they are separated in space, they will continue to influence one another. In fact, this effect appears to occur at speeds faster than the speed of light, which violates one of Einstein’s basic rules.

Scientists dubbed this mind-boggling capacity for instantaneous interconnection nonlocality. Einstein had a somewhat less technical term for it. He called it spooky actionat a distance.

A Bizarre Discovery: Thought Influences Matter

Within twenty years of Einstein’s radical work, another revolution in worldview occurred, just as cataclysmic as Einstein’s. It started with two of the early pioneers of the quantum world, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and his protégé Werner Heisenberg.

Bohr and Heisenberg studied the puzzling behaviors of these tiny subatomic particles and recognized that once you look deep within the heart of atoms, these “indivisible particles” are something like tiny packets of possibility.

Each subatomic particle appeared to exist not as a solid, stable “thing,” but as the potential of any one of its various possible selves. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle stated that it was not possible to measure all of a subatomic particle’s properties at the same time. For example, if you record information about the location of a proton, you cannot pin down its speed or trajectory; if you figure out its speed, now its precise location eludes you.

Bohr and Heisenberg’s work suggested that at its most basic level, physical matter isn’t exactly anything yet. At the subatomic scale, according to this new understanding, reality was made not of solid substance but of fields of potentiality - more like a set of possible sketches or ideas of a thing than the thing itself. A particle would take on the specific character of a material “thing” only when it was measured or observed.

In fact, even more bizarre, it was soon found that the mere intention of measuring particles, even without carrying out the actual act itself, would still affect the particles in question!

Suddenly subjectivity - the action of consciousness upon a piece of “matter” - had become an essential component in the very nature of reality.

The Zero-Point Field

As scientists continued pursuing their explorations on staggeringly small scales, they eventually found themselves staring at something truly confounding. They termed it the zero-point field (ZPF), because at this most infinitesimal of levels, some sort of force appears to be present even at a temperature of absolute zero, when all known forms of energy vanish.

Here, beneath the level of energy itself, exists a still more basic level. The field at this level is not exactly “energy” anymore, nor is it a field of empty space. It is best described, physicists realized, as a field of information.

To put it another way, the undifferentiated ocean out of which energy arises appears to be a sea of pure consciousness, from which matter emerges in clustered localities here and there. Consciousness is what the universe is made of; matter and energy are just two of the forms that consciousness takes. Ervin Laszlo calls this field that underlies and connects all things the A-field, in deference to the ancient Vedic concept of the Akashic record, a nonphysical repository of all knowledge in the universe, including all human experience.

The psychologist Carl Jung called it the collective unconscious. It has been intuited and described for thousands of years and in a multitude of terms and images throughout human history. Only in the last few decades has science caught up to what we always sensed but could never fully explain.

Says Laszlo: “The ancients knew that space is not empty; it is the origin and memory of all things that exist and have ever existed. . . .[This insight] is now being rediscovered at the cutting edge of the sciences [and is emerging] as a main pillar of the scientific world’s picture of the twenty-first century. This will profoundly change our concept of ourselves and of the world.”

[John Freestone]

Wow, Dannyboy1, that was some condensed history of everything! I've been here before. I get all excited about some new-fangled fizzicks and think that's where God is, it's ok, we can get back to praying when we want something. The problem always seems to be that when these ideas are taken out of context, they can be moulded into shapes that resemble ancient wisdom, but perhaps are quite different. Particle entanglement, for instance, may have been demonstrated, but not its usefulness in the business setting.

I sense your genuine love of the subject and excitement about the new physics, but people who know about quantum mechanics in detail laugh at such suggestions, so I'm not sure I hold much store by them.


Anagogy, I haven't read any of the books you've read, but Deepak Chopra, whom the Guardian described as 'the rock star of the new spirituality', struck me as quite biased and utterly unable to string logical arguments together, in his book Life After Death, which I read recently. Let me give you an example. He argues that we can tell that we are immortal - never having been born, and never to die - by the following thought experiment:

You know that you are alive now, right? Ok. Now try to remember a time before you were alive. Can you do that? No? Well, that is because you were never born. It actually proves that you can't have ever not been in existence! Furthermore, since you were never born, you can never die.

He seems to offer this as a serious, reasoned argument, begins the book with it and certainly makes no stronger claim. He also makes ridiculous claims about so-called evidence for souls from OBEs (out of body experiences), which again are just joining the dots from what is reported, via more hearsay and assumption, to arrive at the conclusion he believes already. Now I don't know about you, but I can't remember the last time I was in deep sleep. So by his reasoning, I have never been asleep. He puts quite a spin on not remembering a period of unconsciousness. The assumption from never having been born to never dying is equally ridiculous.

Some of those authors might be more in the know than Chopra. You might be right, I don't know. "I don't know" is a useful position when we don't know. You should try it, since almost everything you've written is really extremely conjectural. I am getting close to not bothering to pick those kinds of books up off the shelf now, like the English psi researcher, Susan Blackmore, who retired from the weariness of endlessly looking for spookiness and failing to find any. She describes on her website the arrival of another document regarding a psychic claim to investigate and just realising that life is short and you can only spend so long turning over stones and finding nothing and saying it might be under the next one.

There has to be some connection between all parts of the universe, but unless you are going to specify what those connections are and under what conditions they operate, you are just talking woo. Everything in the universe can be energy and yet you not have an immortal soul, be able to levitate or time travel. Yes, the uncertainty principle and qm and chaos theory are really cool, but let's not get carried away here.

The evidence seems to be mounting for a deep connection between all paranormal phenomena, from souls to ghosts to astral planes to healing crystals to angels to God, and that connection is a complex field of human error, desire, vague concepts, poor reasoning and magical thinking. Part of that evidence is from psychological research, and part of it is from real science developing models of how the human animal developed the emergent property of self-consciousness, no woo required, 100% fact, just add attention. I'm just at the beginning of looking into what the facts are that they discover (having been busy weirded out on shadows for most of my life). I'm sure that some scientists are going all mystic zen, but most of them aren't.

The 'evidence' of blood cells and lie detector tests? Silly. Utter tripe. Sorry. I'm happy to follow links if you can provide them and discuss any of these points further. Even lie detectors are so unreliable as to have been outlawed in the courts of many countries, AFAIK, and quite what anyone would be trying to establish by connecting one up to a bunch of human cells and asking the donor questions is anyone's guess. For a scientific study you would need dozens, if not hundreds, of participants. Had it shown anything significant, others would have repeated it. The discovery of human cell entanglement would by now be on its way to winning somebody the Nobel Prize. Of course, if particles can be entangled, they can be in someone's cells, but the result is NOT EVER going to be demonstrated by a lie detector. Have you checked the date of your source. It's not April 1 is it?

[The Cloud]

I personally don't believe that there is a soul. In addition to the questions of what energy it would be composed of and what laws would govern its behavior, I have an additional gripe; what about us would it contain? Because when it really comes down to it, our perceptions about ourselves aren't really our selves. "Me" is just a concept in our heads of who we are. It simplifies language, but does not capture the reality of the situation. Are you your personality? Your physical makeup? Your experiences? But all those things change constantly. If that's who you are, then who you truly are exists for exactly one moment, because everything changes from moment to moment. Since as soon as you have time to think about yourself, you are gone, you can never truly know who you are. That's my personal belief, at least, that we are not nouns. We are verbs. We are the actions of the moment, and persist for only that long.

So even if there is a soul, if it can't capture who I am does it really matter to me whether or not I have one?

[pianoperformer]

Dannyboy1, unless you have a degree in physics and have studied quantum theory extensively, please don't even attempt to cite that as evidence of the soul. It is neat, and new, yes, but unfortunately can be twisted in all sorts of unnatural ways by people who desperately want to believe in paranormal phenomena, when that is not its domain at all. Newtonian physics works just fine on normal scales. It is the very small and the very large that it breaks down, and science is developing and modifying theories for these. However, nothing yet suggests even the remotest possibility of a soul.

[pianoperformer]

Originally Posted by The Cloud

I personally don't believe that there is a soul. In addition to the questions of what energy it would be composed of and what laws would govern its behavior, I have an additional gripe; what about us would it contain? Because when it really comes down to it, our perceptions about ourselves aren't really our selves. "Me" is just a concept in our heads of who we are. It simplifies language, but does not capture the reality of the situation. Are you your personality? Your physical makeup? Your experiences? But all those things change constantly. If that's who you are, then who you truly are exists for exactly one moment, because everything changes from moment to moment. Since as soon as you have time to think about yourself, you are gone, you can never truly know who you are. That's my personal belief, at least, that we are not nouns. We are verbs. We are the actions of the moment, and persist for only that long.

So even if there is a soul, if it can't capture who I am does it really matter to me whether or not I have one?

Good points. Of course, it does matter to many, because if such a thing doesn't exist, it means that there is nothing after death. Also, if there is no soul, we could argue there are no spirits, angels, demons, or all matter of things that people like to believe in, because it is the same idea.

[The Cloud]

Originally Posted by pianoperformer

if such a thing doesn't exist, it means that there is nothing after death.

That assumes that before death and after death are different things. You don't exist any more or less before you die than after you die, or before you were born for that matter. It's just an illusion, much like how a child will say that a tall skinny glass has more water in it than a short fat glass, not realizing that two different shapes can have the same volume and that the amount of water is the same. "You" don't exist as a discrete entity, you exist only in relation to the entire universe. Perhaps some factors are more noticeable than others, but everything affects you and is affected by you, effectively creating that which is you. Since you exist only in relation to the universe, you and the rest of the universe are in truth a single entity that can be intellectually divided into discrete quanta, but not truly divided. So how can "you" die, if there is no you? You live after death as you did before it, as a composite action of the universe.

[NightSpirit]

If you want to know whether we have a soul or not, have you ever tried to separate your soul from your body?

I'm not talking about accepting what others say about out of body experiences but about trying to do this yourself? I understand you are blind from other posts I have read, but if you floated above your own body and saw it or went to another place and saw things that were there, would that be proof enough for you?

Or would something like remote viewing while still in your body, if you could do this, convince you that our consciousness can be separate from our physical senses? Just trying to get a sense of what you would accept as proof and whether you are willing to be the one that proves it, to yourself at least.

We can talk about this till the world crumbles but there is no new argument under the sun. No one else's experiences can or should hold up as our own proof. Like you say, unless we are talking to the expert that went to the moon or to the bottom of the ocean or to someone that is an expert on physics, and even if we do read and accept what they say, what we are doing in any of those areas is accepting the beliefs and experiences of others as our own proof of the truth.

Spiritual matters may not be verifiable but neither is science in all cases either. There are as many differing expert opinions on global warming, drug effectiveness and side effects, economic trends, causes of cancer, forensic crime, etc., as there are people who claim to know there is or isn't life after death. Do these things not exist or happen because the experts disagree?

What you are requiring would be like asking someone to take you to the moon and get a rock before you will believe the rock that is on display could really be a moon rock or have any faith in a book by NASA of the trip. Why is the requirement for proof in these spiritual matters to be so far above what we accept in any other area of science?

We can also talk about the history, translation and purity of the Bible but the question is, do you really think the Apostle Paul was writing down a bunch of lies about the third heaven or that the miracles people wrote in the Bible are some kind of hypocritical conspiracy of men?

If scientific researchers, whoever they are, tells something of a soul, why is that to be trusted anymore than thirteen or more men saying they saw blind eyes opened or the dead raised, all by a man who also said we have a soul?

[DiscoDan]

Originally Posted by John Freestone

Anagogy, I haven't read any of the books you've read,

Here is a relevant link:

Reincarnation research - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ignore, of course, the section on "Research based on hypnotic regression" and be forewarned that, as I am sure you are aware, reading a summary on wikipedia is no substitute for reading the actual research.

[John Freestone]

Originally Posted by DiscoDan

Here is a relevant link:

Reincarnation research - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ignore, of course, the section on "Research based on hypnotic regression" and be forewarned that, as I am sure you are aware, reading a summary on wikipedia is no substitute for reading the actual research.

No, you're right. Nor is reading a book about the research. Nor reading a summary on wikipedia. However, I have been 'sent off' (I like to call it) to read quite a number of parapsychological claims over recent months, and wikipedia is rather good at summarizing and then presenting critique, objections from other viewpoints. I often find things like this immediately 'convincing' at an emotional and pre-rational level, but have to go back to scepticism when I've read the critiques by sceptics. I found that this review of one of Stevenson's books, linked to from wikipedia, persuaded me of the falseness of the claim. Then, if you follow the link from the bottom of that page, or click here, there is more concerning Stevenson's belief system, you might possibly reassess your view. That might depend on how much you want reincarnation to be true.

Intention manifestation - somebody wants somebody to come back, so they do (in their subjective reality) - chinese whispers - conflation of details - the researcher's bias - all these things are involved and once again my skepticism has been reaffirmed. I also think it is often overlooked how much information we process and store unconsciously (from physical, normal sources, I mean). I believe that it may be quite possible that children especially, perhaps when falling asleep or in a natural meditative state of mind, can overhear conversations that later they use and reassemble as interesting stories or that come out as 'dreams' and 'visions'. In modern societies, children fall asleep in front of televisions and are generally bombarded with news. It is hardly possible to discount reassembly and recall of such information in some cases, which the credulous immediately interpret as something spooky.

[Dannyboy1]

Originally Posted by pianoperformer

Dannyboy1, unless you have a degree in physics and have studied quantum theory extensively, please don't even attempt to cite that as evidence of the soul.

I want to be clear on this. I did not write that. That was an excerpt from "The Answer" by John Assaraf and Murray Smith. I couldn't fit it all in the post and mistakenly cut our the authors while trying to fit it in. I studied superconductors and some of the things in this article - Einstien's Theory of Relativity, Bohr's work, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, quarks, bosons, mesons, photons, leptons . . . all of this in college. I do not, however, have a degree in quantum physics. I know that some of the top professors in the world who taught at my school did believe that thought creates matter and sited some of the same things in this article. I was just showing how the most respected scientists in the world believe in and have found proof of connection between thought and creation of reality. Take from it what you will.

[newmark]

John; you say that "there is not any sound evidence of a soul, eternal or otherwise". This is of course true. What you don't say is that there is not any sound evidence of a lack of soul, eternal or otherwise.
Your decision not to believe in a soul is yours. It is not backed up by any scientific research because there is none.
My belief that there is a soul is likewise not backed up by any research.
We choose what we feel is more likely or what is more comfortable; or in some cases what other people around us think (I don't include you in the last category).
I feel it is more likely that there is a god and a soul, therefore I choose to believe in them. If I'm wrong, well, then I'll just have a deep sleep when I die; that's not so bad. And if I'm right, then we'll continue in some form and probably keep debating in the next world.

[mercuryrising]

I think the soul is the integrity of a being. A gestalt. Something which is greater than the sum of it's parts when put together. The spark of creativity within you. Your inner potential.

You said you are extracting all these beliefs based on them being irrational or not meeting standards set by the scientific method. Have you considered that some of those beliefs may be useful, though irrational? For example, there probably is no logical proof for the existence of a soul and the scientific method will conclude there isn't one. However, belief in a soul may have im