[ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life?

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sat, Dec 31, 2011 at 01:29:37AM -0700, Kelly Anderson wrote:
> 2011/12/30 Tara Maya <tara at taramayastales.com>:
> > It is striking that this belief in a soul is so pervasive.
> 
> I don't find it so striking. Even with all our modern science, we
> cannot really explain consciousness very well at all... just some kind

The word consciousness is completely meaningless. 
In order to explain something you should define it first.
If you can't define it, then http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57PWqFowq-4

> of emergent behavior of neurons... so making something up that
> separates consciousness (which is admittedly mysterious) from the body
> (which isn't quite so mysterious) seems like a natural thing for our
> pattern recognition engines to do.

Depends on the amount of bullshit you've ingested over your
total lifetime. Intuition is not destiny. It can be recalibrated.
 
> This separated thing from our body gets picked up by the local shaman,
> and used to his advantage, and we're all trapped for millennia in a
> false pattern of thought.