When we are dead.

[Flaight]

You gave it a soul to transfer. That's making it special.

The idea is consistent with today's understanding of science at an abstract level. You seem to have injected a religious interpretation to my view and made it look special. But you did that last part in your mind. Not me.

 

I strongly believe that life (or soul if you want to call it that) will be a detectable, measurable quantity in the future which science will deal with. Just because life is an unknown entity in science today doesn't mean it will be so forever. If there ever was a break through, I believe that it would follow through a lot of scientific ideas that we already have.

[Hellfire]

Holy crap this thread is still alive?

Er.. proceed.

[fanman]

The idea is consistent with today's understanding of science at an abstract level. You seem to have injected a religious interpretation to my view and made it look special. But you did that last part in your mind. Not me.

 

I strongly believe that life (or soul if you want to call it that) will be a detectable, measurable quantity in the future which science will deal with. Just because life is an unknown entity in science today doesn't mean it will be so forever. If there ever was a break through, I believe that it would follow through a lot of scientific ideas that we already have.

 

Then what exactly is being "transfered"? It's a completely ridiculous idea.

[Supergrunch]

The idea is consistent with today's understanding of science at an abstract level. You seem to have injected a religious interpretation to my view and made it look special. But you did that last part in your mind. Not me.

 

I strongly believe that life (or soul if you want to call it that) will be a detectable, measurable quantity in the future which science will deal with. Just because life is an unknown entity in science today doesn't mean it will be so forever. If there ever was a break through, I believe that it would follow through a lot of scientific ideas that we already have.

But the thing is that life isn't an unknown quantity in science... people began to dispell vitalism once Friedrich Woehler first sythesised urea from inorganic components in 1828. For instance, the seemingly autonomous behaviour of an amoeba can be explained by relatively simple rules, such as drifting down concentration gradients towards food sources and the like.

 

This isn't to say that I don't believe in consciousness- I think it is an emergent consequence of complex biological systems.

[Flaight]

Then what exactly is being "transfered"? It's a completely ridiculous idea.

It was believed long ago that everything had a linear system; everything just started and ended. More scrutiny lead to a much more cyclic, repetitive system to describe our environment. Just as rain falls and water vapourizes and rain falls again, a macroscopic view was often in a system of conservation, where one form (of energy, if you like) changes its appearance to present another without "ending" in absolute terms. That rainfall example may be prematurely simplistic, but it should suffice at the level of this discussion. At any rate, that idea of repetitive cycle crops up in every area of science. It explains why I tend to find cyclic description more scientifically natural than a linear counterpart.

 

My view is that there is more to life than just a biological system, but not in a supernatural sense. I think there is a medium, which we haven't detected yet, which carries this... form of energy or whatever you want to call it, and it is in a cyclic system of its own, much like most other systems we observe around us. And I believe that life is a combination of this 'source' residing in a bilogical system that is our body.

 

I guess a lot of this depends on whether you believe life is just a straight forward problem of solving the biological, chemical (as we know it today) puzzle that make up our bodies. Furthermore, some people even believe that human mind is nothing more than just a massive database. I don't have anything to say for or against those views. I just believe that there seems to be more than biology to life, and I happen to hold a view that this... 'life entity', or whatever we are calling it, exists to make us possible and it is not created or lost - instead, they are recycled i.e. it's somewhat akin to the idea of reincarnation in some religious circles, but I personally hold this view without any religious motivation or reliance; it is a logical idea that isn't reliant on religion to exist in a scientific mind. If I used terms like 'reincarnation', it would be out of linguistic convenience (but I do see the pros and cons of this because of people's preconception of such words).

 

And that system itself, or the idea if you will, is not ridiculous at all. It's perfectly consistent with a lot of other scientific descriptions of this world. In contrast, my ability to believe in it can be described as ridiculous, but on the other hand, every opinion outside the realm of scientific certainty can be spun as ridiculous depending on what angle you take. It also depends on how complete you think our science is and how much you feel the need to ridicule ideas that are not directly supported by today's science in detail.

 

Incidentally, Supergrunch's point is an interesting one. It lead me to explicitely state that I think our body is just a container to which life (or whatever you want to call it) wires into.