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Absolutely. An athiest can believe in the soul. The soul, spirit, katra or whatever you want to call it is just a label. Something we use as a descriptive to help understand that which we really don't understand at all. Athiesm is, if I remember correctly concerned with the universe and man, not man, the universe and God. It should be perfectly reasonable to presume that there would be some sort of bio-electrical field that is interwoven into our very molecules, a energetic field that works in concert with our body and mind to govern our bodies. And it would not be too far a stretch to presume that this bio-electric field survives physical death.

But this is only a belief. Largely unprovable at this point in time. But a comforting and somewhat logical explanation that sits well with me just the same.

   

No - nothing proposed by that interview suggests that brains actually operate at the quantum level.

What is suggested is that the processes of the brain can be expressed using the same math as used in describing quantum physics. That's not saying the brain is working at another quantum state.

You make baseless claims such as that the periodic table of elements needs to be reinvented, quote Douglas Adams and wonder why I don't take you seriously.

Let me refresh your memory again: the discussion is whether an atheist can come to terms with the notion of a soul. Even if any of the "quantum brain" arguments you're making were valid, that doesn't suggest there's a unique soul attached to people that exists beyond the body.

The only argument made in that regard is that you don't like the idea that all memories are lost when one dies - that's not an argument at all, that's a personal preference.

   

Gee, sounds a lot like religious belief to me - reality based on what's comforting as opposed to what's real.

   

Response to RomanP:

The involvement of Buddhist spiritual leadership with the expansive phase of the Japanese Empire should be enough proof that the Buddhist claim to non-violence has a lot of holes in it. Should Buddhist monks in Japan who blessed Kamizake pilots before they went on a final flight or gave the divine stamp of approval to Japanese Army troops who tore through China not be regarded in the same light as Catholic or Lutheran ministers who blessed German troops during their colourful activities in Poland and western Russia? Not to mention the sad reality that the Buddhist faction in Sri Lanka should be fairly consdered as equally responsible as their Tamil opponents (inventors of the suicide bomb - gotta love Hinduism too!) for the civil war that's been wracking their country for decades.

Non-violence is easy enough to push or disguise as a major pillar of any religion. It usually isn't that difficult to find enough examples, however, that non-violence is usually only applied to one's fellow co-religionists. Non-believers are generally regarded by all sides (except by atheists, of course, who actually understand that the only real solution is to have the guts and courage to leave each other alone) as being fair targets for any sort of egregious behaviour.

Anyway, as a general rule, shouldn't a religion that awards Hollywood types like Richard Gere and Steven Segal titles of the "holiest of the holy" be regarded at best as laughable? If this is the sort of ground they operate on then Buddhism should be taken about as seriously as Scientology.

   

And yet that ALSO sounds like most scientific theories as well being as how many of them are deemed to be the logical explanation that sits well with scientists untill another theory comes along that sounds better. That also smacks of human preference interfering in the mix as well, not very scientific but please show me a major scientific theory that doesn't have human preference and politics mixed in with it.

   

Atheists do not have souls. Ask them, they'll tell you the same.

   

No, it doesn't sound like any scientific theory whatsoever - a scientific argument doesn't include personal comfort with the consequences as a premise.

You argument consisted of stating a hypothesis and then giving your personal opinion of it as a conclusion - that's not scientific at all.

   

Imho, for what it's worth, you are right in the sense of a soul going to heaven or live on while we are dead. I don't believe in that. As an Atheist, I think dead is dead, and there is not such a thing as an afterlife, or spirit that moves on into another body an do that again and again to "live till eternity".

I have just as much proof for this as a non-Atheist, who believes the soul exists, and so does an afterlife: none.

   

Actually, many of our most dearly held scientific beliefs faced tremendous opposition due to the scientific community's and the public's "personal comfort" with the new idea. Many much needed new ideas that should be accepted aren't still because of that. Some folks call it politics. I call it the politics of personal comfort.

Science isn't as cut and dry as you think since a thinking, fallable, and yes, quite feeling HUMAN being is making that science a reality. In essence, we see that science through that person's eyes, not their logic. Everything that scientist does is tainted by their thoughts, feelings and beliefs.

The human body has an electrical field, some might call it a bio-electric field. This controls a lot of what is felt, performed and acted out via the human mind and body. So how far fetched would the idea of a soul be? A soul that is not governed by relgion but that just is? And then if it exists, does it matter if you believe in it or not for it to exist? Then what is stopping an athiest from believing in a soul?

   

Any new hypothesis faces opposition in science - attempting to prove it wrong is called falsification and is necessary.

As for the public's acceptance of the new theory, that's irrelevant - proving science doesn't include any consideration of popular opinion. Implimenting it may certainly involve such considerations, but that's not part of science itself.

What "much needed new ideas" aren't being accepted by the scientific community, exactly? Are you sure you're not discussing the acceptance of policy related to science, as opposed to science itself?

..and that's precisely why we have the concept of the Scientific Method, which requires all such bias to be eliminated. If there happens to be personal bias introduced, it's simply bad science.

You're getting off track - the fact that there are fallible scientists in the world doesn't excuse the fact that you invented a hypothesis and accepted it with no proof whatsoever. Your statement is not scientific, or similar to science.

Electricity is not proof of a soul, or are you going to suggest my computer also has a soul?

For that matter, how 'far fetched' would an omnipotent God be? If science was based merely on people going around thinking about what may or may not be "far fetched", we'd be in a sorry state.

Look, I don't really care what you believe or not - just realize that what you're proposing is an irrational belief, not some proposed scientific theory supported by evidence. I haven't personally seen any conclusive evidence of the soul's existance, and since I don't have any overbearing desire to confirm its existance, it's not something I'm going to accept on a whim.

   

I don't really think I'm getting that far off track since the people that will ultimately prove the existance or not of a human soul are the scientists that despite rigorously using the scientific method will still be doing the research through their flawed and very human perspective. And in the end, the only group of organized humans the athiests will believe are scientists using the scientific method.



Not at all, all I'm suggesting is that you, a human you, could very well have a soul. Science has not proven the soul does NOT exist anymore so than supporters of the soul theory have proven it does. There is enough evidence present in this problem to suggest that "something" is there by the affects being generated. Enough to warrant further investigation.



The irrationality of what I propose is largely determined from what angle you approach this debate on. The purely scientific mindset that a soul does not exist because we simply cannot find one is not particularly revealing one for me. A lot of new ideas, theories and in fact some of our greatest leap forwards came about by the discovery of something or some theory that was largely held to be ABSOLUTELY impossible. All I'm saying is just because something is NOT there, doesn't make it non-existant. Keep an open mind to the possible.

   

Roger Penrose puts together a pretty strong case that the brain works at a quantum level in his book "The Emperor's New Mind." Penrose is head math dude at Oxford, which is another wauy of saying he's one of the smartest guys ont he planet, so he's no lightweight.

From the Wikipedia entry for the book:

   

Not all of them. I used to buy souls from atheists. I used to ask them if they believed in God, and if they said "No" then I'd ask them to sell me their soul for five bucks. Most of them wouldn't. I said, "Why not? As far as you're concerned, I'm just giving you five bucks for no reason." Still, most wouldn't sell it. Maybe I should have upped the offer.

Anyways I kept them all in my wallet, but then I accidentally put the wallet through the wash, so there's a washing machine out there somewhere that owns about ten souls.

   

At least they were honest... They couldn't sell you anything they didn't own or have

   

Everything that has a quantitative state operates at a quantum level. If there is one of something in this universe, existing in both time and space, it is quantum.

Rocks are quantum, hydrogen is quantum, and so is your brain.



You can't be seriously claiming to have read this and missed the entire first couple of pages.



You've now claimed that the brain does not operate at a quantum level, and that discussion of consciousness has nothing to do with wave-particle theory, and here we have two scientists with PhDs in parapsychology and neurophysiology saying exactly the opposite, in a discussion you claim to have read and understood.

Can you explain how this is possible?

It seems to me that the only way you could read and understand this material and then dismiss everything I've said so far as nonsense, even though it agrees with what appears to be a rather commonly agreed upon set of laws among the people who study this subject for a living, is that you're afraid to admit that it is beyond your imagination to conceive of how it is that you can exist at all.



The problem is that you're ignorant of the subject matter and dismissive of anything you don't understand. My Douglas Adams quotes do not disagree with actual science, and you would know that if you had even the tiniest understanding of what is being discussed.

I'm not the first person to suggest that our entire idea of the atom needs to be reworked, many of the greatest physicists of the 20th century have said the same thing. The entire subject of subatomic physics would not exist if it were not for such thought. There is actually a billion dollar particle accelerator project being built in Sweden right now that may either confirm the theory it was built to prove, which would turn physics on its head or, in proving the theory incorrect, still require us to rethink everything we know about physics.



Since an atheist cannot believe in things that are supernatural, we must think about this scientifically. If we scientifically define a soul as a collection of information that survives the body (do you have a better definition, or a different one? I don't think I've seen you come up with one yet, which would seem to suggest that you are more interested in stifling realistic discussion than actually considering anything you might not have previously understood), then we must take quantum mechanics into account, what we know about the nature of subatomic particles and thoughts on their interactions with the very thing that gives us consciousness, that is, our nervous system.

To suggest that our nervous systems do not have any sort of quantum interactions is to suggest that our bodies are not following the laws of physics in this universe, which would really be sheer nonsense.



It's not a preference, because I never said anything about liking it or not liking it, nor did I even allude to any such thing. I said that I have trouble believing that all of the information we've stored in our lifetime becomes nothing when we die, given the computational potential we've discovered in neural networks created out of single artificial atoms.

This is not crazy talk, it's science that is in practise right now, and is being used in everything from cracking some of the world's strongest encryption algorithms to manufacturing the e-Ink screens in the eBook reader Amazon.com released last week.

   

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