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RE: What Can Science Tell Us About the Soul?
Thank you for bringing awareness to these topics.
'Thinking' you can understand your true essence with the mind, does not work. Your mind is better suited as a tool, like a car or computer.
You come before mind. Your true essence does not have to 'attach' to thought. It is free to dwell on thought or to ignore thought. When you spend enough time between thoughts, deep realization occurs. Life becomes easy.
But, generally it takes strife and torment endured over long periods of time, before one stops looking 'out' and instead looks 'in'.
That isn't how neurologists do it. They are assisted by computers, instruments, and other tools of the sort you referenced. It's also not just one person endeavoring to understand the brain, but a great many, coming at it from different angles. This represents a distributed intelligence much more powerful than a single human brain, in possession of artificial perceptive capacities that it lacks.
These are some nice looking words. I wonder what experiments have been carried out to discern whether they accurately reflect reality.
Thousands (millions?) of meditators have experienced various levels of awareness without thought, especially of narrowly defined linguistic thought. I am one of them, but only of momentary gaps between thoughts, because I kind of suck at it. Much science on this, though in its early stages, from researchers and "athletes of the mind," who meditate more deeply and regularly, working together.
www.mindandlife.org
I personally don't jump from that fact to a soul, but until we have better theory, it has to remain an open question. This seems like an advance, though I've only read the free chapter online. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/being-no-one
We do. The brain is something like a biological computer. Damaging specific parts of it has predictable impairing effects on the aspects of cognition they're known to be responsible for. It has been demonstrated that memories are stored locally. It has been demonstrated that emotions arise from brain activity. Everything determined about the brain so far bears out the view that we're basically biological robots, and we no more survive our own death than the contents of a pulverized hard drive.
Except for those parts of us stored in other people's brains, and in our writings, and in our environments (as @mada writes about occasionally). The whole concept of storage is pretty tricky, since the embodied cognition people and the robotics people have been showing how many of our responses are just re-computed on the fly every time.
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/06/outfielder-problem.html
I wrote about the evolving history of memory as a concept here a couple of months ago.
http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com/cgi-bin/mag.cgi?do=columns&vol=randall_hayes&article=007
I'm not so much arguing against your hypothesis as making a strong personal claim as a card-carrying neuroscientist that neuroscience as a field does not yet have good answers to these questions, and should therefore remain humble in the face of our ignorance. The Epstein article quoted above, though I agree with some of it, is perhaps not the best example of the attitude I favor.
https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer
Though on a second reading it's more temperate than I 'remembered.'