The lights in our house have been going on and off at strange times over the last few days. Naturally, my first thought was "Oh jeez - poltergeists!" But a more reasonable explanation is that one of our neighbors got some X10 modules for Christmas, and the signals are leaking out of their house and into ours via the power lines. (We use X10 modules to remotely control many of the lights and appliances in the house.) Or perhaps the new computers are pumping so much electomagnetic interference into the house wiring that the X10 modules are being influenced by it.
Still, why should I dismiss the notion of ghosts out of hand? For every rational explanation for weird noises at night, lights flashing on and off, and other household oddities, I can come up with an irrational, or perhaps just extranormal, explanation as well. My house may be bursting at the seams with all manner of ghosts, spirits, imps, sprites, wisps, wraiths, spectres, faerie, and other denizens of the shadow world. Hundreds of generations of our ancestors believed in such things - who are we to say that they weren't right?
Of course, one normally looks at the situation from the other viewpoint. That is not a ghost walking across the ceiling making that odd klunking noise - it is the beams contracting at a different rate than the skin of the house as the structure cools after sunset. That is the rationally accepted explanation, and far be it from me to question its veracity. (Although I appear to be doing that, don't I?)
It seems to me that if we accept the premise that there are no ghosts because there are simple rational explanations for most, if not all, observable phenomena in the real world, then it is not a great leap to start questioning the existence of the soul as well, at least the soul as an entity separate from the corporeal being. I suppose it depends on the exact definition of "soul".
The dictionary is not particularly enlightening on this topic, defining a soul as "the immaterial essence, animating principle, or actuating cause of an individual life." These seem like three somewhat different things to me. The one that comes closest to my conception of the soul is "immaterial essence". I believe that this essence is an emergent property of the total experiences of a person, and not some bestowed object, or even non-object. Perhaps other things than living creatures could then be said to have a soul, since they might possess an immaterial essence. I am thinking specifically of music, which must be experienced to be effective. Or perhaps music is simply one way for souls to communicate.
In any case, I don't believe in a soul as some ghost-like entity that rises out of your body when you die. I view the soul as more of a pattern of behavior, a set of somewhat predictable responses to stimuli that is particular to each person. When the person goes, so does their soul. (Or should that be "when the soul goes, so does the person?")
Some day this may not be the case. If a computer could successfully mimic the behaviors of a person, including their ability to learn and to be influenced by their environment, then that person's soul might live on within the machine. Why, then, wait until the person dies to run this program? Could souls then be duplicated? Future generations may very well have to struggle with these very questions. Maybe they already have, and we are the result.
Imagine - how much of the world have you actually seen? Wouldn't it be easier to mention a bunch of places and generate two dimensional images of them than to actually simulate them in 3D, along with the attendant smells, tastes, textures, and sounds? How routine is your life, and why? Maybe it was just easier for the programmers to make it that way.
Of course, if I offer such ideas without proof, I am venturing into the realm of religion, which I prefer to hold at arms' length. I can't prove that the world is a simulation any more than I can prove that ghosts don't (or do!) exist. I will offer an interesting bit of food for thought, though. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle would seem to place a limit on the precision of the product of a particle's position and its velocity. Might this be due to limited arithmetic precision on the machine running the simulation?
You can respond to my ranting here.
There's no such thing as rants.