Both big tech entrepreneurs Kai-Fu Lee and Jack Ma seem to believe in souls or something but they do not believe that souls can be trusted with freedom, the way governments can:
Kai-Fu Lee’s thought-provoking comments on the soul echo the sentiments of Jack Ma, co-founder and head of Alibaba, China’s equivalent of Amazon. He is a self-made billionaire and, by many accounts, the richest man in China. When the soul comes up again, it is in the context of LQ, the Love Quotient (as in EQ, emotional quotient, or IQ, intelligence quotient):
That said:
Ma also said in 2017 that China benefits from the stability of a one-party system. He seems comfortable with China’s big data police (“it can help pinpoint terrorist activity”) but he wishes his government would stick to governing, by which he seems to mean, not stifling innovation. And then there was the data-sharing scandal: “‘There’s no way to refuse’: China’s Alibaba under fire over use of customer data.”
Denyse O’Leary, “Chinese technocracy surges ahead with AI surveillance” at Mind Matters News
Well, as they say, love is a many-splendored thing. And once again, we may get a chance to test whether the soul exists.
On the soul: On the soul: The real reason why only human beings speak. Language is a tool for abstract thinking—a necessary tool for abstraction—and humans are the only animals who think abstractly (Michael Egnor)
On displacement by technology: Jay Richards: Creative freedom, not robots, is the future of work. In an information economy, there will be a place where the human person is at the very center
A chilling snippet on mass surveillance in China. China is helping other countries restrict their citizens’ internet, while shunning the U.S.
and
China’s AI package for Africa includes mass surveillance technology Africa sees development aid; China sees an expanding African database
Nothing new or techy about this. China’s religion has ALWAYS been worshipping the emperor.
Belief in human souls and the existence of a supernatural God are the foundations of the oldest pieces of human culture. Bushmen of the Kalahari and natives of Tierra del Fuego (and everybody in between) believed in God and souls when they were first contacted by European explorers. So those beliefs MUST BE at least 50,000 years old, out of Africa-wise.
Every human religion consists of 3 parts: ceremony, doctrine, and personal religious experience. Most “religious” people (e.g., me) never have a personal religious experience, but they accept enough doctrine from a specific religion to avoid having to build a complete religion of their own.
I understand that part of Jewish doctrine is that humans do NOT have souls. What Jehovah promised The Chosen People was happiness ON THIS EARTH. And when their mortal bodies die, the mortal bodies are buried in the ground where they “sleep with their ancestors”. I guess that there are other religions (the ancient Romans?) that believe in God, but not in immortal souls.
There might some day be a very lucky doctor who can prove that a clinically dead body is reanimated (an interesting term) by the return of the Soul to its mere Earthly container, but once you Believe, there isn’t any need for proofs.
Soul is a Hebrew concept, a synonym for a living breathing creature. When the creature stops breathing, the soul is dead. Anybody who uses the word in any other context either doesn’t know what they are talking about, or is trying to sell something you don’t need. Except musicians. Musicians are cool, and they know exactly what they mean by “soul”.
SmartAZ @ 3
What about the “Hebrew” who said:
“And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”
Does he not know what he is talking about?
Was he trying to sell something you don’t need?
“When the creature stops breathing, the soul is dead.”
So you think that in heaven that we will not breathe?
There is considerable confusion and not a little overlap in the meanings (and usages) of “soul” and “spirit” in the Bible and in modern usage. In Genesis 2:7, as I understand it, God breaths a spirit (breath of life) into Adam and he becomes a living soul (being). The soul may refer to the spirit of the entire person, depending on how it is used, whereas the spirit is always non-physical. Hence, the SOS signal, “save our souls”, usually requests physical rescue rather than spiritual redemption. Perhaps the switch from OT Hebrew to NT Greek causes some of the confusion? Not knowing much of either, I cannot say.
I understand that people here think that the soul actually exists, that it is eternal, and that it survives death. But this raises a few questions.
1) By eternal, are you only referring to the life of the current universe?
2) Where did the soul reside in the billions of years before the human was born?
3) Are there a finite number of souls?
4) When does the soul enter the physical human?
5) Do identical twins have one soul or two?
6) Do fraternal twin fetuses that have merged into one early in development have two souls or one?
I have many more questions but these are good enough to start.
BB @ 7,
I’m sure there are Christians/theists who are more than willing to speculate on these matters, but most of those questions are on matters that are truly outside our realm. In fact, if there is a higher realm, we should expect there to be many things that we do not know. We should even expect there to be things we cannot even conceive of. To come at it from the opposite direction, i.e., to insist that answers be available for any pose-able question is to presume that we have access to everything, and can comprehend everything that is, including things outside the physical realm. I see no reason to accept such a premise.
The lack of forthcoming and satisfactory answers to these questions therefore does not mean much. It certainly does not provide evidence against theism or Christianity.
Or, assume that answers to all such questions _were_ available: then the belief system being discussed would necessarily be one that would completely fit inside a human mind. Therefore, it would not be talking about anything transcendent, and it would be no bigger or better than the human mind holding it.
BB, as EDTA alluded to, your questions are more of a theological and philosophical nature than they are of a scientific nature.
It seems to me, scientifically speaking, since you apparently do not believe in life after death or that you have an eternal soul, the first questions you should have asked, as far as the science itself is concerned, is, “What scientific evidence do you have for life after death and for an eternal soul?”
In regards to life after death, the scientific evidence for life after death is far, far, more robust than the scientific evidence for Darwinian evolution is. As Dr. Egnor explains, “The most “parsimonious” explanation — the simplest scientific explanation — is that the (Near Death) experience was real. Tens of millions of people have had such experiences. That is tens of millions of more times than we have observed the origin of species , (or the origin of life, or the origin of a protein/gene, or the origin of a molecular machine), which is never.,,, The materialist reaction, in short, is unscientific and close-minded. NDE’s show fellows like Coyne at their sneering unscientific irrational worst. Somebody finds a crushed fragment of a fossil and it’s earth-shaking evidence. Tens of million of people have life-changing spiritual experiences and it’s all a big yawn.”
As to the physical reality of the eternal soul itself. Believe it or not the question of whether we actually have a soul or not plays right into the main debate between ID advocates and Darwinists.
The main debate between ID advocates and Darwinists is over the inability of material processes to generate information. Darwinists simply have zero scientific evidence that material processes can generate non-trivial levels of information. Whereas, on the other hand, ID advocates have a veritable infinity of examples that they can point to of intelligent minds generating massive amounts of information information.
What is interesting about information, and one of the primary reasons that material processes will never be able explain to origination of information, is the immaterial nature of information. As Dr. Stephen Meyer explains, “information is a mass-less quantity. Now, if information is not a material entity, then how can any materialistic explanation account for its origin? How can any material cause explain it’s origin?
And this is the real and fundamental problem that the presence of information in biology has posed. It creates a fundamental challenge to the materialistic, evolutionary scenarios because information is a different kind of entity that matter and energy cannot produce.”
In further establishing the immaterial nature of information, it is interesting to note that immaterial information can be encoded on a virtual endless variety of material substrates, and yet the meaning of the information never changes from one material substrate to the next. i.e. Immaterial information is simply not reducible to a materialistic explanation!
George Ellis further elucidates the immaterial nature of information and of mind in the following excellent article,,
Moreover, one of the primary presuppositions of Darwinists is that they hold that information to be merely emergent from a material basis. Yet, contrary to that primary presupposition of Darwinists, immaterial information is now shown to be its own distinct physical entity that is separate from matter and energy, A distinct physical entity that has, of all things, a ‘thermodynamic content’.
In fact, researchers have now built “ an information engine—a device that converts information into work—with an efficiency that exceeds the conventional second law of thermodynamics.”
Although the preceding is certainly very strong empirical evidence for the physical reality of immaterial information, the coup de grace for demonstrating that immaterial information is its own distinct physical entity, separate from matter and energy, is Quantum Teleportation:
Moreover, this immaterial quantum information that is now shown to be physically real is also found to be ‘conserved’. That is to say, ‘the conservation of quantum information means that quantum information cannot be created nor destroyed.’
Moreover, it is also important to note at this time that Quantum non-locality, i.e. ‘spooky action at a distance’ as Einstein termed it, is one of the most enigmatic, and yet is also one of the most verified, aspects of Quantum Mechanics.
And while atheistic materialists are at a complete loss to explain how particles can be instantly correlated,,,
,,, And while atheistic materialists are at a complete loss to explain how particles can be instantly correlated, on the other hand Christian Theists readily have a beyond space-time, matter-energy, cause that they can appeal to in order to explain quantum non-locality:
And this ‘spooky action at a distance’ of ‘non-local’ quantum entanglement, which requires a cause which is beyond space-time, matter-energy, in order to explain its existence, is now found to be ubiquitous within molecular biology:
Besides providing direct empirical falsification to neo-Darwinian claims in general, claims that say immaterial information does not exist apart from its representation on a material substrate, the implication of finding ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, and ‘conserved’, quantum information in molecular biology on such a massive scale, in every DNA and protein molecule, is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious.
That pleasant implication, or course, being the fact that we now have very strong physical evidence directly implying that we do indeed have an eternal soul that lives beyond the death of our material bodies.
In the following video Stuart Hameroff states ‘it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”
As to scientifically establishing the physical reality of heaven and hell,..
Whereas, atheists have no compelling evidence for all the various extra dimensions, parallel universe and/or multiverse scenarios that they have put forth to ‘explain away’ fine tuning, quantum wave collapse, etc. etc. (in fact there is much evidence that can be mustered against those claims), Christians, on the other hand, can appeal directly to the higher dimensional mathematics behind Quantum Mechanics, Special Relativity and General Relativity to support their belief that God upholds this universe in its continual existence, as well as to support their belief in a heavenly dimension and in a hellish dimension. Here is a video where I lay out and defend that line of evidence:
Thus BB, far from life after death and your eternal soul being figments of imagination, the fact of the matter is that our most powerful theories in science, relativity and quantum mechanics respectfully, now provide the Christian Theist with many lines of powerful scientific evidence for his belief in life after death and an eternal soul.
Moreover on top of all that, allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics, as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned,,,, (Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Max Planck, to name a few of the Christian founders),,, and as quantum mechanics itself now empirically demands (with the closing of the free will loophole by Anton Zeilinger and company), rightly allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics provides us with a very plausible resolution for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’ in that Christ’s resurrection from the dead provides an empirically backed reconciliation, via the Shroud of Turin, between quantum mechanics and general relativity into the much sought after ‘Theory of Everything”. Here are a few posts where I lay out and defend some of the evidence for that claim:
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/the-multiverse-is-just-religion-theoretical-physicist-charges/#comment-680519
Verses and Music:
BB, why is there inescapably morally governed reasoning and not merely dynamic-stochastic processing on a computational substrate? KF
PS: Reppert:
FE & SAZ etc, there is considerable overlap among: soul, spirit, heart, mind and more. They all pivot on there being an inner man that transcends merely material properties. KF
PS: Again, I am reminded of Reppert:
I have long since put up the Smith Model with a two-tier controller cybernetic loop model as a useful context. I recently spoke to a supervisory oracle that can be viewed in terms of a fifth dimensional interface.
KF
I’m afraid I don’t see what your point is. My questions are the ones that follow on if we assume that the soul exists and that it is eternal. If you are interested in addressing any or all of them, I would enjoy the discussion.
BB, note your loaded word, “assume.” There is some serious evidence that is visible, absent imposition of a priori evolutionary materialism (as Lewontin described) as a lock-out crooked yardstick imposed as standard of straight, accurate, upright. A worldview BTW which is self-refuting and necessarily false. You are being pointed to some of a whole world of evidence, but as they say, you cannot make the horse drink. KF
BB,
If a higher realm does exist, then there will be questions to which we mortals simply don’t have answers. Some of your questions may be in that category, and you may have to decide some things without complete knowledge. What will you do then? If the failure on our part to answer any one question means that you will stick to only those beliefs that you feel you completely grasp, then how do you know you aren’t artificially limiting yourself?