[Ecoste]

"It is useless speculating about things we can't ever know of."

And how do you know which things we can know of and which we cannot? Trusting your gut instinct on that isn't scientific. And why is speculating about immaterial things useless? I'm sure many great mathematicians heard some form of "what you're doing is useless and has no use or relation in the real world" especially in the realm of pure mathematics.

You bring up the soul which is a convenient example, but let's instead use a concept which YOU know exists for yourself which is consciousness. Can we ever know anything more about the mystery of consciousness or life or why any of this world and universe exists? Are those unknowable? Should we not talk about them? Should we only try to apply the lens of science here and for some reason not try to advance our understanding using philosophy even though it might not be as formal and unambiguous as math?

[pixl97]

Yea, the previous posters take is just outright crazy to me....

Imagine reality as the problem space of all things that could exist within the constraints of physics. The problem with observational evidence that it is only providing a tiny window into what is possible, really only the most probable are going to be what you see for the most part. Philosophy gives a means of meta views of systems and simplified system views that allow us to find otherwise unreachable islands of what can exist in our reality.

[thrance]

Here is my reasoning: immaterial objects (such as the soul) are by definition outside of the material world, and thus unobservable. We can't ever (dis)prove the existence of an unobservable object.

As for the other questions you mentioned, I still haven't found any reason to believe their answers are unkowable.

If anyone disproves my first reasoning, I will have to consider the question of the soul as worth pursuing again.

Just like in mathematics, if you have sufficient proof that a theorem is unprovable, it is useless trying to prove it!

So no, I don't trust my gut feeling about wether or not to seek the answer to something.