Can souls split?

Forrest Valkai likes to talk about Phineas Gage. #mind #consciousness #soul

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[beastshawnee]

My mom had a traumatic brain injury. While she lives even today-I have never seen my real mother again. She has memories and she even has improved greatly but that spark that was her essence has been gone over 2 decades now. It’s tragic.

[DanSmith-fjuw]

If a normal person starts hearing voices in their head they rightfully get concerned and seek help, if a religious person starts hearing voices they claim they are a prophet and start leading others by their delusions.

[jkilmer]

Dementia, Alzheimer's and all the variations of it seem to have the same effect...

Especially whenever I talked to my dad prior to his death from It.

Yes I agree you're right

[drakegonnan]

This is similar to what finally made me leave the cult I was raised in.
I have Disassociative Identity Disorder, and nobody could give me an answer as to what was going on. My local leader said demons, but when I sent a letter to some of the general authorities, it was nothing, a challenge.
In the end, it came down to an argument as to whether or not my alters had souls, if they were pieces of me, if I was possessed, or whatever.
After my parents just couldn't decide and figured I just didn't believe enough... I finally stopped caring about whatever metaphysical explanations they tried to shove my way, and fell back on my old favorite, science. It's not perfect, I've never found all the answers I've ever wanted... but at least I'm not being told it's my fault I'm still this way every day

[OTGBob]

Old guy once told me "If you're evil your whole life and die, you start to stink pretty quickly. If you're good your whole life and die, you start to stink pretty quickly."

[Alulim-Eridu]

I generally hold the same positions as Forrest
. . .but just for the sake of argument,
let’s imagine the brain is like a radio,
which “receives” consciousness
& then plays it

If you smash a radio, it might not play the song quite right anymore.
But that doesn’t effect the signal at all.

Or if we imagine the brain like stained glass.
-If you have a stained glass window with a picture of a flower on it…
It doesn’t matter whether you have just a white light shining behind it,
you still see a colorful flower from the other side.

Even if you mess up the stained glass window a little, by throwing paint on it, or cracking the glass
. . .you might not see the same colors & images
…but the source of the white light is still unaffected

[Onyx-qdtl]

The Vikings believed the soul resided in the head. In a sense… They were kind of right. Although they also believed your existence continued after death do you could drink and party with the gods for eternity. That part might need some reevaluation…

[timothybrown]

Never heard anyone come up with a reasonable explanation as to what they think a soul is.

[RikRiorik]

Most convincing argument for the lack of a soul around.

[drawnmyattention]

Some Dualists respond with the metaphor of ‘brain as radio receiver’: its hardware must be present and functioning in order to receive the immaterial ‘radio waves’ of consciousness. And mystics are tuned to more frequencies. A flick of Occam’s Razor should take care of all this.

BTW, we need not resolve the hard problem of consciousness before rejecting Dualism as too baroque and unwieldy. Gaps in our knowledge don't mean that anything goes. One might as well posit undetectable pixies who hover overhead, generating and contolling our consciousness, and then transmitting it to our brains.

[shannontaylor]

"My consciousness after my death" makes as much sense as "before time". Thus there is no such thing as "my death" to me; it's as real as fairies, spaghetti monsters and such. I have the now, therefore I am infinite in my closed system.

[utah]

You're right. There's no evidence that our consciousness is anything but the works of an amazingly complex organ. Souls are a wishful fantasy.

[InformationIsTheEdge]

If there was an intact version of my grandmother trapped in that broken mind and disabled body granted to her by dementia, then the god that did that is even more wicked than I imagined.

[coleburns]

Because it hurts egos to think that we're just organic, self-aware, self-repairing machines. But we are, no matter how we feel about it.

[AnnoyingNewsletters]

When I was watching the episode this clip is from, it felt like Descartes' argument with actual science woven through it.

[stewy]

"Oh, I wonder if he'll reference that guy who blew a railway bar through--"
"Did a part of Phineas Gage--?"
Well, there we go.

[mattreigada]

If I were attempting to explain this in some sort of fictional piece of fantasy, I would explain it by separating the experience of being from behavioral determinism. This would be difficult to explain but the simplest way I can imagine trying is it is what we mean when we say "If I were you..." If you were me, it would follow that you would have all my same memories, dispositions, and predilections making the statement kind of vacuous. Unless we consider some separate thing removed of those memories and biases which is capable of experiencing and executing them. This would presumably have to be the "self" we experience in every moment and the apparent thing that makes us feel like we are in this moment right now rather than yesterday or tomorrow. This would be the thing that persist even through an event like amnesia.

Obviously there's no reason that thing can't exist as a naturalistic feature of the mind and brain, but if it were fiction I would have no problem throwing the word "soul" at it and calling it a day.

[Carolinacaveman]

The go to argument I always get is that the brain is an antenna and the soul is like a signal. Alter the antenna and the signal can be distorted on the receiver's end.

[sonalib]

Thing is that when we are living then we eat outside things and breathe the oxygen from trees so whatever we intake and excrete is connected to the beyond the physicality of our bodies especially if you have influence over other people or resources

[Ghalaghor_McAllistor]

Of course, Voldeort and his Horcruxes is perfect evidence for the soul existing!1!!11!1