This is probably just the first of a few posts following Jingle Dance - I think the conclusions of that piece imply some other interesting points that deserve a bit more attention. The first of these points follows the unsubstantiality of perception. I won't justify that business here; for that, look to the post titled Jingle Dance. Instead, I just want to point out an important corollary. If our senses can't be trusted, and all we experience is subjective, we are left with only one piece of objectivity. This piece is our awareness, consciousness, the soul, whatever you want to call it. It is the pure state of existence that we all seem to experience - our presentness in the current moment. I claim that the existence of the soul, at least in myself, is an objective fact. I obviously can't speak to anyone else's soul, but if you, reading this, feel that you are conscious, then I'd argue you should take your soul as an objective fact as well. I say it's objective because the consciousness I'm talking about is pure experience, and experience is tautological. What I believe I'm experiencing IS what I'm experiencing, by definition, regardless of whether or not it has any basis in reality. Cogito, ergo sum. Experience is tautological, I say. That's cramming a lot of meaning into not very many words. I think specific cases are more self-evident than the general one here, so to start I'll just say and needs a bit more justification. Think about the types of experiences that people have. People can experience emotional states - like sadness, anger, or happiness - or material states - like hunger, pain, or pleasure - but whatever the nature of the event, the very perception of an experience is proof that it is really happening. If I notice the feeling of pain, then I am in pain. It doesn't matter whether I'm actually under any physical stress, or whether a brain scan would reveal some specific neural pathways firing or not. Pain may be said to be imaginary, or all in one's head, but even that is still pain as surely as any kind created by physical influence. So if the only thing I can be certain of is that I'm aware, and that I am experiencing what I believe I'm experiencing, then suddenly the spiritual becomes more concrete than the material. It's possible that my memories are fabricated and my senses are tricking me and all that nonsense, but if you try to convince me that I am not truly conscious, I won't hear a word of it. I know that I'm conscious because I know anything at all; consciousness is atomic, the basis on which all perception is built. I find in this a refutation to the theory that consciousness is purely an illusion, a product of sufficiently complex neural structures. To try and disprove the existence of consciousness through material means, which can only be employed after assuming the accuracy of perception, is to put the cart before the horse, and a fundamental contradiction of terms. Further, I find in this even a partial refutation of certain types of determinism, which is a school I tend to adhere to in the general case. I believe the material world gives strong evidence for a deterministic view of humans, but, again, I don't actually think there's any absolute truth to be found in the material realm, while I do think there is an absolute truth in the existence of the spirit. Any flavor of determinism that doesn't account for the soul, then, I cannot accept. I can accept that my mortal self is on rails, going through life on a path that was laid out since the beginning of time - but, in that case, my body clearly has a passenger.