As one who believes life is more than the chemistry of an organism, that a soul is a real 'thing' existing in some where/when we have yet to measure, I would offer that physical life is more akin to a virtual reality world TO THE SOUL which is the origin of the animation in the body. Of course, The Creator is the source of all life, on any plane. But I am led to believe that the soul has temporal and spatial aspects, so the trick is to seek the temporal components of the physical and therein we may discover the temporal aspects of the soul which is not the body.
Thanks for the thoughtful replies!
This will sound somewhat rambling, hopefully my point will coalesce.
Mathematics is defined as being, in a way, a type of language. I can’t say whether mathematics is part of the foundational basis of the universe or not. But it has some interesting lessons imbedded in it.
In mathematics, we form hypotheses about numbers, objects, spaces, equations. We then attempt to prove the hypotheses.
The essence of a good proof is that it has two qualities, it must be both
A) necessary and
B) sufficient
The “necessary” part means that the proof provided actually addresses the fundamental issues of the problem at hand. For instance if I wanted a proof that 3X3=9, and a student supplied a paper saying “because it’s Tuesday”, then his proof does not in any way meet the “necessary” requirements.
Sufficiency means that the proof covers all formations and permutations of the problem. For instance if you were going to try to prove an equation for all real numbers, it would be NECESSARY that you prove it for negative numbers, also positive numbers, and it would be SUFFICIENT if it gets proved for all positive numbers, all negative numbers, and zero.
Imagine I invite the worlds expert in bricks for a consult. Also, the worlds expert in lumber and construction.
They wait for me in a room drinking coffee, and I walk in, say “Good evening, gentlemen. Please tell me about architecture”.
They both kind of chuckle, get a look on their face that briefly looks like Gomer Pyle, and tell me that architecture is not their discipline.
Their knowledge and expertise cannot bridge the gap that would lead them to the Taj Mahal.
An almost exactly similar situation with the materialist scientists. They know about quarks and leptons and forces and clocks, but can they tell us about sunrises? Funerals? Rainbows?
Their knowledge does not bridge the gap into the experiential world. It simply does not and can not. Ever.
I often wonder how many of the material scientists are aware of that. Every so often, you see a glimpse of it when a famous scientist or philosopher kinda sorta admits that they are painted into a corner of their own creation and don’t have the tools to get outside of it.
For any comprehensive view of the universe, a knowledge of the material aspects is a necessary part.
But it is not sufficient.
Just like with the Taj Mahal, it is necessary that we understand bricks and mortar and wood, but it is not sufficient.
I find it interesting that the things physicists study, the material things, are pre-existing.
But the new things in the universe, the emerging things, are experiential.
For me, I take that as some sort of clue.
I’ve played around quite a bit with Conway’s “Game of Life”
It is a simple procedure/algorithm/program that can and does, using simple rules and objects, generate very complex patterns.
All of it is STRICTLY deterministic.
There are no morals involved. No opinions. No free will.
Yet it is truly dazzling the intricacies, the patterns, the cycles that get generated.
At this point, I would be hesitant to call anything generated by GOL as a “behavior”. But it is getting closer all the time.
As these computational methods and simulations improve, we will gradually some to understand the richness of the world we live in compared to the relative sterility of GOL and a strictly mechanistic, deterministic universe.
And those contrasts will be the answers. The purpose. The meaning. The reason for life.
But I don’t see these insights coming from yet another billion or multi-billion electron volt collider. Physics doesn’t have the tools and the language to completely describe reality.
Interesting notion, dear brother in Christ. All I can say about that is Einstein did show the ultimate convertibility/convergence of energy and mass in his most famous equation: E = MC2....
Beyond that fascinating fact, I'm still not sure that "spirit/soul" can be reduced to material/mechanistic expression without introducing a colossal category error into the analysis....