this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
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I was alluding to the belief that while neither sperm nor egg (the 'components') have a soul, a fertilised egg somehow does.
Yes, but what's particularly odd about a belief in the soul? I think it's false in our universe, but I can imagine an alternate universe in which it is true. If I lived before the development of our modern understanding of neuroscience and the invention of computers, I would not have enough evidence to be convinced that it was false even in our universe. We still have no idea what subjective consciousness is or how it can be formed from computation, so I think reasonable people can refuse to rule out the existence of souls even in the modern day.
The idea that a soul is assigned to a fertilized egg at conception is somewhat arbitrary even if souls do exist, but presumably souls would be assigned to bodies some time before birth and conception is the only really sharp dividing line. Better safe than sorry if being wrong means killing a lot of people...
It depends what exactly you mean by 'soul'. If it's some sort of disembodied manifestation of our personality and memories that exists indepedent of the body then the problem is that there's no evidence for it. And instead we find evidence supporting (but not explaining) that our 'being' is one and the same as our brain. Consider, for example, that damage to specific parts of the brain not only impair certain parts of personality but can also destroy specific memories. That's because these things are physically one and the same as the brain. We just don't understand the subjective concious experience but there are some pretty solid boundaries delimiting what it is not.
I agree. In prehistory I would have believed the breeze in the crops was the work of elves and that thunder was sent by Thor because that's what it looks like and they didn't know better. But we don't live there. And we do know better.
by who?
There's no evidence for this, of course. If one wants to pick the Judeo-Christian tradition there's still no reason to believe it given the bible that Jesus used considers early foetuses to not be people.