IUBio

mind/soul (blueprint??))

Terry Smith terrys at gastro.apana.org.au
Fri Nov 6 03:28:46 EST 1998


> From: "Ray Scanlon" <rscanlon at wsg.net>
> Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 15:33:25 -0500

> I suspect that if majority vote were to rule, the following might be
> adopted:

If ever science were to include, as part of it's validation techniques,
`majority voting', then it might be worthwhile considering whether your
undemonstrated and untested assertion had any substance..

> Mind--that part or faculty of the human soul by which it knows and
> reasons as distinguished from the power to feel and to will.

> I say this because the large majority are religious and only the
> minority deny the soul. My argument is that it is the brain that
> thinks, the soul is aware only. Probably most who work in cognitive
> and allied sciences envision "mind" as an homunculus that selects

Your `argument' is merly an assertion, and by no stretch of the
imagiantion a *scientific* argument. This being so, your proposing it as a
suitable topic of discussion in a science forum, together with the lack of
any method of testing, any supporting data, or even a hint as to how such
data may be gathered, isn't merely ineptitude personified, but an outright
breach of netiquette.

Your need for an `homunculus' was a concept in studies considered until
the late nineteenth century - an result of the acceptance of `religious'
ideas as other than wishful thinking and pipe-dreams. For you now to
suggest that such ideas are part of scientific methodology, and offer the
source of such untestable phenomena as a viable [and in any way equal]
alternative to the straw-man you construct is behaviour I find
intellectually and morally disgusting.

Terry
--
| Australia - Howard's '50s Theme Park. #



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