Active Users:1197 Time:23/11/2024 03:47:55 AM
It would really depend on the mechanism - Edit 1

Before modification by Isaac at 12/04/2011 06:30:58 AM

Keep in mind that the soul as something tangible and physical is not really a rare concept. Also, people are pretty used to new bits of science being proclaimed as proving or disproving some philosophical concept and both scientist and layman are usually skeptical of such assertions. As a Christian and a scientist, I can't really imagine any biological or even physical component to my 'soul', and generally when I try to think along those lines I just assume even if God needs to store my brain on actual physical hardrive so to speak, he could probably slap it onto the event horizon of a small blackhole with room to spare. And for that matter, a lot of Quantum Mysticism varieties, along with speculative Hard Sci-fi, revolve around just such concepts, one of the leading candidates for WIMP Dark Matter is after all a Planck Mass Black Hole, and that sort of data storage should rise with the square of mass or the square of radius, same thing in this case, very compact and the WIMP version assumes it basically doesn't interact with anything. Whichever, known science already has plenty of explanations which cover a lot of previously mystical concepts, and its rarely had much impact other than to spawn newer mystical concepts and maybe to serve as a feather that broke the camel's back for a few people leaning away from religion. I can't recall anything specific that made me an atheist as a kid, or agnostic later on, or Christian these days that has anything to do with science. And what you're suggesting for your thought experiment here is basically 'proof of soul' and we have nothing to compare that too historically, excepts endless examples of this or that person claiming some new bit of science proved/disproved God. So I can't see something like that causing a crisis of faith, anymore than if I told people, quite truthfully, that their entire life in excruciating detail beyond anything they could hope to remember could be stored on the surface of an object smaller than a proton. And that would probably elicit no more response than "Wow, even better than my iPod!" The brain itself already serves as a pretty good biological equivalent of what many have considered a soul throughout history, it hasn't really rocked the boat much.

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