'The Soul.' Part 2.

You don't know what consciousness is or where it originates, that's why you're ignorant.

No, it does NOT 'originate' in the brain as the scientists in your studies 'claim' (read: not proved).

   Greetings, Mr. Spock

   It's difficult to say how much or what survives death.  Your attempts to force it to be comparable to things you know are not helping.  It is however rather obvious something is there in life though.

There was once a scientific consensus that the Earth was flat too, dimwit.

Imagine one had no knowledge of radio. One day one finds a radio and examines it. Music comes forth from the radio as one experiments with the controls. Some controls change the music - make it louder, quieter, produce different sound qualities, distort it, etc. Smash the radio and the music vanishes. "Oh," one says, "this radio creates music!"

That conclusion would entirely fit the evidence - and would be completely wrong. The radio creates the sound, yes, and even changes the music - but the music is created elsewhere and 'beamed' to the radio in a process that is not obvious to your experimentation.

One could hypothesise that your brain is like a radio; that your brain does not create consciousness, but rather that consciousness is 'beamed' into your brain from a source we cannot detect or, as yet, understand. Changes to the brain changes your consciousness - drugs, damage, etc. Under this hypothesis that would make sense, it's like changing the music by altering the radio. Smash the brain, and consciousness apparently ceases. Again, under this hypothesis that doesn't mean that consciousness has actually stopped, it's just that your brain isn't receiving it any more.

What's the true source? Perhaps a supernatural soul. Or a deity. Or perhaps it's a dragon floating in space in the Andromeda galaxy - a big ball of seven billion floating dragons, each projecting a consciousness into your brain. Every time somebody is born, a new dragon pops into existence.

Here's the thing, though. The conclusion about the radio isn't right, but it is the conclusion that the evidence supports. And if somebody wants to claim "no, this music is transmitted from somewhere else" then one would have to produce evidence to support that claim - one would have to come up with a way of detecting the 'radio waves'.

Likewise, we don't know where consciousness comes from, but all the evidence we have indicates that it is a process of the brain. That is the only reasonable conclusion, and it remains the only reasonable conclusion for now even if it turns out to be wrong in the future. There's nothing wrong with this; in science all conclusions are tentative, and all are subject to revision.

But that revision comes only when somebody provides evidence to prove that revision is needed. And nobody has ever provided proof that consciousness comes from anywhere other than the brain. If they want to believe it - or want other people to believe it - then they really need to provide that evidence. They need to come up with the equivalent of detecting the radio signals. And if they can't do that, then their hypothesis is nothing more or less than wishful thinking.

No it wasn't, most scientific/educated types knew the earth was round. Are you really this stupid or just a liar?

The thing I find interesting about soul belief is that it may even predate deity belief, such as ancestor worship and the like.

From an evolutionary point of view, I think this may have happened when we discovered how to control fire because for the first time in history, humans had a chance to be safe from predators and really consider our place in the world,  mesmerized by the dancing flames flickering.

Given that there is no evidence that souls exist, this is not the case.