Thank you very much. Thank you for the sort of philosophy of religion also for having me in the Timistic Institute.

So just real quick, what I'm going to talk about today, I'm going to try to address it at a lot of different levels.

So there will be at points at which I'll be happy to get into some rather technical concepts,

but there will be also points where I'm trying to bring it together to a much more general set of questions

that others can understand.

So sometimes technical questions will probably

need to come up in the Q&A as well as other general questions.

And so I invite all those sort of questions at the end.

In the lab that I work on, we don't talk about any of the kind of stuff in general

that we're going to be working. I work on a lab that works on rodent experiments that are

looking on similar mechanisms and trying to understand memory and perceptual mechanisms

that are comparable to cases of dementia in human cases,

and ultimately trying to come up with tasks that could be clinically used in the human case.

So what I'll be talking about today is much more general,

a lot more philosophical and metaphysical than what the day-to-day is going on in our particular lab.

So the first question we want to ask is why should we worry about the soul?

There are a lot of different ways in which we use the concept of the idea of soul.

Some of them are metaphysically innocuous and they're just sort of another way of saying like

my deepest desires or my heart or what I'm really interested in or the things that I sort of

find the ultimate meaning in life

a sort of more metaphorical or rhetorical but no less serious way of talking about the soul.

But I'm going to talk about the soul in a way that's more contentious and is more reference to

...