Hi js1138! So to be so tardy replying -- I was necessarily off-line yesterday.
RE: The above italics -- you've turned my question around! Why did you do that?
Perhaps you think these questions may be soluable by the tools and techniques of methodological naturalism. Only on that basis would you consider the answers legitimate. In other words, if science can't address them, then the questions refer to things that are unreal.
You referred to "AN" intelligence, as in a discrete entity or substance. I didn't use the article "an" in my question. I was simply referring to intelligence, for there is a mounting mass of data strongly indicating that information is critical in biological processes and evolution. Information is generally considered to be a product of intelligence, in contradistinction to a summation of a piling up of past accidents.
Your use of the article "AN" seems to point to a soul or spiritual entity. Is that what you wanted to talk about? William James has empirical evidences that such an entity actually exists, and that it can be evaluated by science because it is a phenomenal and temporal process. But this great American psychologist -- a pragmatic methodological naturalist -- well understood that he cannot call this entity a "soul," because "soul" is a religiously loaded term. So he just calls it: Thought. And Thought is not identical with "brain," nor is it an epiphenomenon of "brain." (But notwithstanding that he cannot use the word "soul," he gives one of the best definitions of it that I have seen in the scientific literature.)
Or did you really want to argue the pre- and/or post-existence of the soul? If you do, I'm not aware of a scientific method by which such considerations can be undertaken. Which is evidently why William James eschewed dealing with such aspects of the soul, confining himself -- as a good methodological naturalist should -- to the directly-observable phenomenal and temporal aspects, "in the here and now," so to speak.
Ultimately, the not-directly-observable aspects are a problem for philosophy -- and theology -- not science.
I think we may be "talking past each other" at this point. I'm not sure where you want to go with this...please advise!
Not exactly. If they aren't confirmable by the methods of science they aren't confirmable in any way that is convincing. All kinds of things are asserted by charlatans -- ESP, precognition, remote viewing -- you name it. If the phenomenon vanishes under scrutiny, it might as well be rubbish, because no one who is not motivated by wishful thinking will allow it to affect the major decisions in life.