Well reading it I’m not seeing any real studies or math or anything, just back and forth with people saying “Well it looks like we can’t find a soul anywhere, therefore without any real evidence consciousness is just an illusion and we as people don’t really exist, just sort of… believing we do because of brain juices.”
Which is the laughable position of eliminativism. Admittedly I didn’t read the whole thing, but I’m seeing names and quotes, I’m not seeing data.
Science consists of having a theory and testing the theory empirically. This work focuses on the theoretical model, and references numerous studies supporting their position.
therefore without any real evidence consciousness is just an illusion and we as people don’t really exist, just sort of… believing we do because of brain juices
That’s not what it says at all. What it’s actually saying is that what we perceive as consciousness is a byproduct of the subconscious and the likely evolutionary value of this construct is to facilitate social transfer of experience. It’s an argument against mind-body dualism which is itself a deeply unscientific concept.
Furthermore, the whole idea of a soul is laughably unscientific since it posits that there’s this magical entity that’s not an emergent property of the physical reality.
I never said I was “For” the soul hypothesis, just that the way this read was “Well we know conciousness isn’t magic, so clearly it doesn’t exist at all in any meaningful way!” Which is… a leap at best.
And this answer seems like more materialist apologia masquerading as science. So we don’t exist, and the illusion that we do is so we can tell other people who don’t exist about how we’re not existing? You see why that’s dumb right?
And, how do we know there isn’t a non-physical reality from which this reality is itself an emergent property? That seems more likely than “People don’t REALLY exist”