A Counter-Analogy

According to most neurophysiologists, the "soul" obviously emerges naturally from the tangled thicket of neural interconnections in the brain (this is from the well-known and incontrovertibly established physical law that if a deterministic machine gets seriously frickin' complicated, then a ghost should be expected to emerge from it. I think it's the fourth law of thermodynamics or something).

While this is not the first time I've encountered the idea of the following analogical counter-example, it is the first time I've seen this particular expression of it:

"Imagine an intelligent and curious person who knows nothing about electricity or electromagnetic radiation. He is shown a television set for the first time. He might at first suppose that the set actually contained little people, whose images he saw on the screen. But when he looked inside and found only wires, condensers, transistors, and so on, he might adopt the more sophisticated theory that the screen images somehow arose from complicated interactions among the components of the set. This hypothesis would seem particularly plausible when he found that the images became distorted or disappeared completely when components were removed, and that the images were restored to normal when these components were put back in their proper places."

Of course, the real facts of the case are that the images are not generated by the set at all, and come from somewhere else. The set only allows them to be expressed locally on the screen. The potential analogy is with the soul, which while needing a body and nervous system to express itself and act in the world, is not thereby generated by the body and nervous system.

H/T tinabrewer in this comment thread.