Do we have an immaterial soul?

Thanks for your thoughts.

I agree with you that the belief that we have a soul, as in have a sense of identity, awareness, sense of meaning etc., is a matter of experience. However, to say that we have an *immaterial* soul is saying something very different. It's saying that our soul - however you prefer to define it - isn't contingent upon our physical bodies. That's not a question you can settle by appealing to experience. It's a question whose answer depends on evidence and reasoning.

No doubt there's some arguments against the existence of an immaterial soul that beg the question, which assume that the soul must be material. But as you say, strawmen arguments are no good, so let's not use bad arguments for the opposing position as evidence to support our own position (the so called fallacy-fallacy). Tbe good arguments against the soul certainly don't assume that the soul must be material. Rather, they say that the soul, whether it be immaterial or material - must interact with the material world. If it wasn't the case, we couldn't even be talking about it - because parts of our body - such as our lips and tongue and fingertips - are able to communicate the message of the soul, as I'm doing right now (assuming I'm not a calculating machine ;)).

So we know that the soul does interact with the material world. The question then becomes: how? At this point we can speculate about how an immaterial soul interacts with a material body (presumably the link is in our brain), but this seems awfully 17th century thinking; a hangover from the days of Descartes' dualism. Surely the simpler explanation is that our brain *is* the substrate of our soul, rather than a mere transmitter/receiver to an immaterial world. And sure enough, when we look at the human brain, we don't find structures looking like radio parts, we find neural connections that hold memories; i.e. we find the underpinnings for our soul purely in the material world.