- echo630
- |
- Exalted Mythic Member
- gamertag: [none]
- user homepage:
That's right. My plumage is brighter than yours.
ghostvirus, I don't really embrace any epistemological methodology, as you put it, but I am using one. You can try and figure out what that might entail, but I'm not that serious about it. I'm using formal logic: if the soul exists, the so-and-so. There is nothing wrong with that, as you used it yourself in your discussion of consciousness.
Now, I have not been talking too much about the neurobiological bases of consciousness because I haven't had the need too--and I still don't have a need to. I, for one, agree with you. I mean, that is evidence indeed. If you look back at my posts, you would see that I do agree with that; I have mostly just summed us up as being a bag of skin and bones and organs and beliefs and so on. If I wanted to get into neurobiology, I could, but it would mostly be an exercise in mental auto--blam!-. We're on the same page as far as that goes.
But we are also not really talking about consciousness. We're talking about the possibility of something above and beyond and between consciousness, something invisible, something immaterial, held hostage by the body, something outside the possible radar of science and reason: namely, the soul. Now, as I've said time and again, I do not believe in the soul, but if you DO believe in such a soul, you can engage in dialectic to dig out the truth of what you could possibly know about it. There is nothing wrong with that, it is a fine method. It is, so it seems, the only method that we can even use to talk about it. So all of this stuff about begging the question is ridiculous--I am using an assumption on a conditional proof, so of course it will seem like I am begging the question to someone who isn't following my point. It is not begging the question, however, because I am not using the ACP and the inferred argument to conclude that there is a soul; I am using the assumption that there is a soul (such as I have described) to move on to broader topics about the afterlife. That is not what begging the question means. That is what ACP means.