[betty boop]

I’m telling you that the simplest answer is usually the right one, and the simplest answer is: the world is what it is. You make the best of the hand you’re dealt, and when you die, it’s over. Personalities are indeed just part of your chemistry. Even animals have personalities, and differ from one another. I have three cats. They have different personalities. They don’t have souls.

Your "simplest answer" — "the world is what it is" — is a non-answer. To me, it indicates a refusal both to apperceive or explain. You aver, but do not show any evidence in support of your assertion — except perhaps evidence that you have set yourself up as the measure of Reality in your own mind.

Evidently on your view, human beings reduce to their chemical composition — that's all there is — and the "world" is a matter of opinion, which differs from person to person. Although how can there be an "opinion" if all a human being is, is his chemical composition? Do chemicals "think" or "opine?"

But the Reality as measured by you is evidently grotesquely reduced to what can be known by means of direct sense perception. This is the positivistic Cartesian/Newtonian reduction, which envisions the world as a mechanism — i.e., the so-called machine metaphor.

But this machine metaphor, which evidently gave such comfort to Pierre Simon Laplace (the French mathematician and astronomer who authored Mécanique Céleste [Celestial Mechanics]), is ultimately self-defeating for two reasons: (1) All machines are purpose-built; and (2) All machines operate by means of a set of instructions, or "software."

So to invoke the machine metaphor does not get rid of the problem of "non-observables": purpose (whose purpose?) and instructions (information). Since these are examples of what has been called non-phenomenal reality, they are indetectible by sense perception in principle. It takes an act of the mind to explore these realities — a willingness not just to "perceive" (the processing of sense data), but to apperceive (the relation of sense data to each other and to the larger environment in which they occur, which is evidently structured by universal laws which are not themselves direct observables).

As the poet William Blake put it,

We are led to believe a lie
When we see with, and not through
The eye.

If find it rather amusing that atheists and others of scientistic bent classify the soul as "the ghost in the machine." But I thought these folks didn't believe in "ghosts!" That's another non-observable in principle. How can they use this term without involving themselves in yet another self-contradition?

It seems to me (FWIW) that atheists and others of scientistic bent of mind are either totally irrational, or guilty of intellectual sloth....

[A_perfect_lady]

Well, you have a tendency to try and group atheists and then draw a circle around the group. Then you try to characterize them as a group, and develop a description of their thought processes which you then declare irrational. Of course it's irrational, it's your own invention. Atheists are not a group, per se. I'm certainly not a member of any atheist group. If you want to argue with me, that's fine, but argue with ME, not some French mathematician that I don't give a rip about.

And remember, I don't have to prove anything because you can't prove a negative. You can't prove unicorns don't exist, you can only indicate that you've never seen one. That doesn't mean you must accept their existence until someone proves conclusively that they cannot possibly exist.

[A_perfect_lady]

Your "simplest answer" — "the world is what it is" — is a non-answer.

I should add that it's not a non-answer, it's simply an answer you don't like or accept. What you're saying is, "I don't like that one, come up with another." But no matter how elegantly you put it, it's still kind of a childish response.

[1010RD]

Outstanding post.

The appeal to Occam’s Razor (abused & misunderstood in most cases) gives the veneer of intellectualism when in fact it is the avoidance of thinking altogether.