Actually, I suspect that our expectation of our own transcendence comes from our natural fear of death, as a coping mechanism. Because we are acutely aware of death, we come up with belief systems which appeal to people by getting around it. But you're right in that such belief is completely irrational.

Honestly, I don't see any true dilemma's here; just a passionate, and understandable, desire to escape mortality. I can't offer you any hope there, other than to suggest that once you confront mortality rather than hiding from it, it becomes easier to deal with the idea of dieing. But the concept of a soul is badly broken, and there is no reason to believe in any mechanism for eternal life.

in this day and age we really should know better than to trust our feelings and instincts, although i admit the notion of a soul is very inticing but then that means that there are an infinite amount of conciousnesses troughout the universe, (seeing as there would have been an infinte amount of intelligent civillisations).

If there is anything to our knowledge which constitutes a soul it is our consciousness. In terms of mortality there is some small comfort in just the truth that the consciousness isn't fully understood, there is room for surprises, yet. 

Consciousness is the conglomerate interactivity of the psyche, just judging by how imaginative and fertile the soil of a psyche can be makes imt kin to a universe in and of itself, which goes to why we have some troubling understanding it, but moreover, that favours a similar truth existing for both consciousness and the universe. Consciousness could very well be much bigger than life with its quite huge, and ever evolving, internal degrees of freedom, like a universe. But does it hang around when the lights go out? Well the problem with knowing that or not isn't a matter really for a theory of consciousness, at all. It has much more to do with our understanding of death itself.

Our concept of death is almost purely biological, it's not heavily grounded in other sciences. If it was we'd have very different ideas of death. For example, if death was considered in pure chemical terms then we would probably frame it essentially as carbon recycling and see it much like it was seen in some ancient tribal cultures, a natural sharing of the material of life where our ancestors literally lived on in the grass that grew from their bodies. If we viewed it in pure physics terms, then for many years in history we'd have though that some transcendent part of us always existed in the ether (well actually we did for a long time), and more recently, we wouldn't really have a concept of death at all, we'd look at it in a similar way to how we see TV transmission, at death some comparitive image of us would carry over on a universal signal in scrambled form, to perhaps be unscrambled again by a reciever in another universe in another time... in pure physics terms death is quite clouded and we couldn't understand it that way so well and also avoid strange and unreasonable superstition creeping in.  In terms of death, we have three seemingly incompatible probabilities in science, so to keep it neat and practical our only coherent and well known idea is basically biological.

In essence death confuses us even more than consciouness, and both are necessary for the answer to this question of an eternal soul.  

The soul is a quantum level imprint on the cosmic foam.

See. I can make up shit too. Send money to www.wavefreakrules.com

Well, why wouldn't you believe that. I mean, what experience do you have of not existing?

All life seeks to survive, its what allows us to live in the first place. Even some people who commit suicide do so to have a lasting influence of some sort, on others. 

Thankyou Eloise, you were one of the theists I was hoping would respond. I would like to know how you would respond to the idea that any sense of self is an illusion. Each moment we are just a state. Our memories create the sense of a continuous experience but infact we essentially die every moment, replaced by another state, that is convinced it is us due to having the memories created by our current state and previous states.

This came up in an argument about teleportation. I would think that the only way to achieve it would be to destroy the original and create a copy. Would the copy be any less you than you before you stepped into the teleporter? It would have memories telling it that it had lived your life, how does that differ from what you have now? What id you did noy destroy the original? If both are you has your consiousness (soul) now split, or has a new one been created for the copy?

I think this is relevant because it is esentially the same as my previous question. Are we more than the chemicals and electrical signals in our brains?

Gavagai

I don't think there is anything noble in my question. I really don't want what I believe to turn out to be true. Atheists would say I'm trying to hide from reality, and giving theists evidence for their "noone is really an atheist" argument. Theists might say I'm trying to believe for the wrong reasons and only providing evidence for the atheist argument "Religion exists because we fear death". Both opinions would be valid critisisms of my current state. This is me at my weakest.

To me that seems like the worst of both worlds. Finite existence and supernatural beings playing games with us. Naturally that doesn't make it wrong, it just doesn't help with my existential angst. Although I suppose it would give me someone to be mad at about the deal we get.

I'm just going to repeat back what I think you're saying to see if I understand your point. Correct me if I've got it wrong.

The soul experiences things, but the experience is not of the phsyical world interacting with our senses but of the mind.

The mind is our thoughts, memories, emotions and information about the physical world, which are dependent on the physical reality of our brains and it's connection to the senses.

The soul is the essence of consiousness but does not have traits like emotion and intellect, It only experiences these within the mind.

I will attempt to locate those books. Thanks for the point of view.

I've tended to accept my own contradiction (symultaneously believing in the soul and not believeing in the soul) because of DesCartes - "I think, therefore I am". All I can be certain of is my own existence. As an individual being my senses do not necessarily carry more weight than my feelings. Infact the moment after first thinking this I was certain I could hear the voice of something, other than me, in my head tell me "Now you've got it".

The problem I'm having now is that the physical reality (experienced through the senses) can explain the emotional reality. Even my experience of "the voice of god" can be explained away. The reverse does not seem so true. How could the reality I experience through my feelings explain what I see and touch? This seems to tip the balance too much in favor if the physical.

Hi again, thanks for the compliment.

I think it's probably not most useful to look too hard from the angle of 'dying' each moment, for one, it probably happens more frequently than what we generally think of as moments LOL, but most of all it conflates one uncertainity with another, clearly not the way to proceed. 

To answer your question, no I don't think any sense of self is an illusion but some are illusionary to a degree, or at least in a certain frame of reference. Nothing is inherently wrong with our normal observation of "I" "Here", it just has more compound definition to it, I think it is good to remember that our normal sense of self still works virtually the same as always so I'll mention it.

We can't be absolutely sure moment to moment that our self is put back together congruently, but we can be fairly certain that it is consistent enough in the "middle", so to speak. The self-state system exists (in one easy to visualise way we can assume) as a wave form. For an idea of how that works you can refer to the Hawking model of the Universe wave function. 

http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hangar/6929/Image51.gif

 Replace 'universe' with 'self' in the picture, and imagine that the wave extends in both directions around the central state for near infinite proportions.  Now you can see how the self must be relatively consistent, it is being 'held together' by a really large contingent of not self's. So when you 'step out' for a moment, if a large enough proportion of the rest of the wave isn't doing so at exactly the same interval, you remain the same not-self that they rely on to exist. So then all your self bits naturally fall back into the contigency space held open for you by the rest of yourself. 

 It seems very much like we can count on this system to keep our macro-reality fairly consistent for a good stretch each 'side' of us in space-time, and for all intents and purposes we assume that to be true anyway, or else exactly what are we doing even thinking about it? But also, the wave state self has to allow for the real change that we percieve happening, and so there must be some movement in the shape somewhere, something must transform in some way. Then our coherent sense of self at best can only stretch a certain distance each 'side' of central us, at some distinct point it must change not-selfs as we change and carry over that change across a partially determined space-time distance. Determinations of this nature take us into gauge territory which is probably not applicable to this discussion so I'll leave it there. At least for the time being we can assume comfortably that a consistent self is a real reality. Any change that was really dramatic would happen far in our past or future in our terms (or at far distant multiverses) over graduated steps (just like classical ) so we can count on basic causality in macro reality for the time being, and this only means that we can assume more possibility and conceivability is true as well, especially at 'distant' points from our "core" self. 

I'm not quite up with the latest and greatest on teleportation, myself. My first interest here is the metaphysics of classical reality and quantum reality, and the underlying geometry. I'm not sure where teleportation is going right now, but this is my view. A teleported self would necessarily need to fulfill all of the above. In a sense that means that your not-self would have to "agree" to meet you halfway by 'allowing' you to recombine in the second location (it needent necessarily be a "conscious" agreement).  It's conceivable that with that aspect of the issue well in hand the copy of you would be exactly the same you. On the other hand without this agreement a copy of you can be made, but it might not be the same you, if it wasn't then it wouldn't be the same not-you's either, which could conceivably just send you to another universe altogether. 

 There is a lot of subtle shuffling involved in the concept of self that the multiverse raises, and it could well be that death and change are equivalencies as per some Pagan mythologies, death may just be another shuffling that leaves the conscious space in this universe 'empty', but that's almost pure speculation so don't quote me. It that were so it would look a little like the teleportation event where the copy is sent to another universe.  

This is still a hard question. Dualism is not dead ,yet, we may be more, but we may be just looking at monism through too many lenses as well. It's a valid debate at least, so for the time being either way is perfectly alright, it's also good to understand how strong both sides are and where and how they reach impasse, of course.