[extropy-chat] disproving the existence of "souls"

[kevin.osborne]

A couple of different research groups have now successfully killed,
frozen and reanimated pigs and dogs.
(http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,376140-2,00.html
and http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/29/zombie_dogs/)

Now this will no doubt make those with cryo-insurance happier with
their purchase, but where it comes in handy for bashing spirituality
nonsense is:

where was monsieur pig's soul while he was dead?
once he was reanimated, how did it get back?

of course the answer is that he has no soul, and when his neurons are
frozen he's simply in stasis. he can be revived in a number of hours
and according to the experiments "there is no neurological damage" and
he's the same pig he always was. keen on the green apples, not so much
the red.

one of the groups is looking to be ready for human trials in 18
months. once they start successfully freezing dead humans and
reanimating them down the track this is presumably going to pose a
decent theological quandary for the godbotherers and mystics.

there has never been and is not now anything more to us than our
flesh. there is no afterlife that our essence resides in or dissipates
to. we're simply meatsacks buzzing around at 40hz and in the near
future we'll be able to put ourselves into storage for the winter just
like our bathers.

any argument that the "universe" somehow "knew that we weren't
-really- going to die" and put us in "limbo" adds a whole new stack of
Occam-unfriendly unexplainable crap and tries to reanimate a
deterministic universe model that must have surely been finally put to
death by http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/11/4/14.