A bit of an analogy - where I live, the "scientific" claim was long that there are no cougars hereabouts (a claim since modified or rescinded, I believe)...

Fair nuff. But the point of "scientific" claims is that they're open to disproval - in your example, by cougar scat, claw and tooth marks on dead animals, video cameras in likely places, or reports of sightings by people with sufficient experience to know what they're seeing. The "electromechanical" hypothesis for awareness (or whatever you choose to call it) is open to disproval once the structures and operating mechanisms in the brain are understood. If there isn't a way that this could create awareness, this hypothesis fails.

The problem with the "soul" hypothesis is that by definition it's unprovable. Some philosophies claim provability, notably psychics who claim to be able to contact the dead. To date they're short on provable successes. And in fact, if anyone *does* prove the existence of souls and the existence (or non-existence) of an afterlife, every major religion will be defunct overnight, because religion requires faith, not proof.

That's why it's called the last great adventure. If you *know* there's life after death, your only question is what it's going to be like. If you don't even know whether it exists, it really is the unknown. And I'm pretty sure even most strongly-religious people still have the question at the back of their minds - the nagging feeling you get before an abseil of "is this rope going to hold me?"

But I'm with Lynne on the subject of death. It doesn't scare me, but I hope I don't suffer (and that those dear to me don't suffer). We've got living wills to try to prevent this.

Graham.