Meeting on "What is a soul?"

We had our discussion last night on "What is a soul".

It was a very lively discussion,  separated mainly by the rationalist against the other side that believe in experience.  Analysis versus feeling.

While my original intention was to explore the difference between a living person and a corpse and I define "soul" as the abstraction for this difference,  just about everyone else have the concept of the religious soul or an entity that leaves our body when we die.

The linguist in our midst pointed out that we have difficulty nailing the definition of soul, spirit, and even consciousness and that the discussion is confusing when these meanings overlap and we have different takes of it when we express ourselves.  Moreover,  just because we have a word for something does not prove its existence.

Wendy thought that we should not restrict the meaning of these words as we are discovering these entities and it depends on how we feel and experience the presence of our soul and spirit.

Shula pointed out that the rationalist aim to categorize and understand while there is another segment of people who seem to be impressed by what we do not understand and almost actively try not to understand it in case we break the mystery.

Bruce related what he heard from the Messy lectures from CBC and that science is not always the right tool to explain faith and spiritual matters and that using science to analyze faith is like trying to have soup with a fork.

Sandra and Stuart mention several examples of where they feel the presence of someone else around them,  either from some one who passed away some time ago or when alone out in the wilderness.  They just know from this strong feeling that someone else is present.

Rafi said that he felt his grandmother's presence when he entered her room even though she is in another country.  He knew that she is not there and therefore explained his feeling of her presence as a mental trick our brain plays on us.  Much like the feeling of deja vu which have been scientifically explained to be a mistake in our thinking.

Rafi further felt that while everyone have their experiences and strong feelings that these experiences are very true for them,  it does not advance the understanding until we can have a rational explanation and evidence to back it up so that it extends beyond a personal belief.

Several people in the room had near death experiences where their hearts were stopped in surgery or where they were declared clinically dead before being resuscitated back to life. Sherry raised the interesting question of whether the "soul" would always return to the same body after such an occurance?

On the one hand, I can appreciate the rationalist side of not wanting to accept anything that is not evidence based and insisting on better definitions.

However, from brain activity scans, there is evidence that we have the ability to feel the pain and joy of those around us, and further more there is some evidence (perhaps not very strong) that we have more than a 50-50 chance of knowing that someone is watching us. Suggestions of telepathy. 

Can we rule out all our feelings such as the presence of others, our heart felt connectedness to them as all tricks our brain is playing on us or is there something we do not know yet?

A lot of people last night would go with what they feel and "know".

Shula pointed out that knowledge is true belief plus evidence. I am assuming that evidence is something that is acceptable to others as well as the person with the experience.

The discussion did not go where I intended but it was interesting never the less.  Leaning towards the rationalist but find it hard to close the door on the other side.

1/30/2013 What is a soul?

What is your understanding of what a soul is?

For the religious, it is the immaterial part of a person, the cause of actuating an individual's life, all this given by god to make us different from animals, plants and inanimate objects.

A computer, smart as it is with a lot of abilities, does not have a soul.

A plant, no matter how productive with fruits and how beautiful with its flowers, does not have a soul.

Animals, straightly speaking, at least by religious views, do not have a soul.

Also according to the religious, souls carry on after we die.


I was once in a celebration of life for a lady who just passed away.  As part of the ceremony, they played a recording made by this lady and it is as if she was in our midst again.  For a brief time, we felt that connection to her again. 

Was that her soul?

She was gone but modern technology of voice recording somehow brought her back?

What about our pets that seem to understand what we are going through?  How can they not have a soul and still sense our emotions? Have some sense of what we may be doing next?

Do we have to have a soul in order to have emotions?

How can systems of flesh, blood, and nerves alone create emotions, intentions, desires without a soul?

One concept is to just look at the soul as a place holder explanation for the gap between our human physical body and the unexplainable human qualities we experience.  We don't know quite what it is but there is definitely something there.  The religious may call it a god given soul, others may call it the "essence" of being human but we have not yet been able to explain it in terms that we can reproduce elsewhere else.

Can our soul survive our physical death?

I am excluding the legacy notion of the soul in that while the works of Shakespeare and Dickens still influence us to this day, and some would say that their soul lives on, it is their legacy.

If we do not think that a computer possess a soul, then what is it that we are transferring when we download a program, an app, a video game? 


Some of it is smart enough to recognize our voice, know enough to remind us what to do when we get to the office, remember who our family members are.

Do programs and personal databases constitute the elemental building blocks of a soul?

When these programs and databases connect to the web, gets input from other databases and initiate actions and prompts because of these outside influences, is it getting closer to a soul?

Some may say that is still deterministic and pre-programmed.

What about programs that are influenced by crowd source information, statistics, use probability and preference weights to recommend something for us? The ones that learns our past preference and what influence us and how.

When someone dies, what do we make of this program that knows all of this persons past history, inclinations, and how he will react to external events?

Can this person's database and program be used to interact with their grand children so that they can know their grandfather better?

Can this program and database continue to run after the person's physical death and simulate how he would have reacted to events after his death and keep on evolving as if he is still alive?

Is that his soul?

Meeting on "Why we value purity"

We had an interesting discussion on why we seem to have a positive feeling for things that are "pure".

I had proposed a few possible reasons but a new stronger idea emerge from the discussion.

Gerry was emphatic that we feel the goodness in purity and it is something we experience.  For Gerry, experience is real compared to any discourse of why we feel the way we do.

Ricki wondered about the possibility of pure evil and whether that is a correct use of the word pure. If pure can be used to describe evil, then there is nothing good about being pure and it is only a description of the composition of something.

Shula proposed that images of purity takes us to a simpler black and white picture, a more idealistic view of what should be.  In a world of purity, everything is in its place as we expect it, heroes are always good and villains always bad.  The course forward is always clear.

Ricki also mentioned that purity allows us to see things in stereotypes in our neat categories making the world easy to understand, removing uncertainties.

Gerry mentioned that he was moved by President Obama's inauguration speech.

Presidential speeches to the public appear to be crafted along the lines of simplicity and purity.  This facilitates communication to the masses and move our emotions to motivate us. Any talk of details of conflicts and grayness would hinder the call to our emotions.  Gerry made reference to the the calling of the innocence of the child in him and that seems to align with the simplicity explanation of purity and its ability to evoke emotion in us.

We then discuss the concept of purity in brides wearing white.  It seems that white implies pure but this is only cultural.  In Asia, white is more for funerals and mourning while happy occasions like weddings, red is the color.

But white also connects purity with cleanliness.  The phrase "pure as drifting snow" from the novel Dr. Zhivago comes to mind. Why is frozen water so appealing? 

Rafi said that in the Russian language,  purity and cleanliness is the same word.  The reference in Dr. Zhivago on drifting snow is partly that it has not yet been "contaminated" by any other contact after the snow was formed and before falling to the ground but also referred to the feature of how a snow fall covers everything and make what was otherwise a ghastly scene of battle, death, and suffering all white and peaceful.

To think that something like snow or anything "natural" is contaminated somehow because of human contact is such a guilt laden idea and yet it seem so pervasive in popular thinking.  We tend to think of the "virgin forest" until humans come to somehow make it not as good as before.

Bruce suggested that it may be the poets and artist among us who do not live in the forest that paint this picture and that the real forest is full of bugs, bacteria, dirt, as well as the beautiful flowers etc.

Finally, we cannot leave the subject of purity without discussing the appeal of tradition, where the same positive feeling is attributed to following the same practice every year,  thereby bringing stability and sense of belonging for us.  Again the comforting rules and predictability play their part just as in the attraction of purity.

Jan 23, Why is purity so valued?

Ivory soap, "its 99% pure.....!"

The advertiser here clearly thinks that it is appealing to have something that is pure.....never mind what that thing is.

Would it matter if it is 99% pure poison?  we don't seem to want to know.  Just thinking that it is close to perfectly pure is good enough.

When going for ethnic food, a very common question is "is it authentic?"  Kind of a similar move as preferring purity.
 
Children of mixed blood have long suffered the scorn of society until recent times.  The change in attitude is remarkable in that mixed blood children are now cherished as having the best of both worlds.

What are the possible reason for preference for purity and authenticity?

1. Precious material. Something like gold which is valuable and expensive in its own right would be cheapened if mixed with some other cheaper metal.  Therefore, in valuable commodities, purity indicates no degrading from the valuable material.  (But soap is cheap!)

2.  Tribalism. When there is pride of association with a social group, there is a natural preference for a "true blue" example of that group as value is defined by the group.

3.  Deferral to expert.  If a trusted source said that Chinese food is good, then we want to find a place serving "authentic Chinese food" just so that we can experience what our expert recommended.

4.  Easy classification.  We make sense of the world by categorizing everything into stereotypes.  These stereotypes reside in neat, well defined boxes in our minds and we do not want to complicate our understanding with blurry edges, in between situations. 

5.  There must be other reasons.  Let us know what you think!

So,  should we prefer purity?  Let's look at some counter examples:

Pure gold is soft and yellow.  The 14K and 10K gold is much stronger, better suited to making intricate jewellery, prettier color according to most preferences.

Metallurgist have long discovered that alloys of different metals makes for better strength and other physical characteristics.  Purity is definitely not valued here.

Fusion foods is all the rage. Combining ancient practices with new food groups is continuing to expand our taste buds.  After all, if it taste good, does it matter what category we put it in? Is variety not preferable to narrow selection?

While tradition can be a distillation of experience from those before us, we can also benefit from explorations outside of tradition.  A good tradition will stand up to these tests while changing circumstances will demand shifts in tradition to suit the times.  The pursuit of purity in tradition makes it rigid and gradually falls out of favor for being irrelevant with the times.

The conclusion?  Purity, but for what purpose?

Not all purity is worth going for, even if some may be.

Evil

I went to Mano's philosopher's cafe on Wednesday when the discussion was about evil.

Mano suggested that the concept of evil is from previous religious times when there was the dichotomy of angels and demons, good and evil.

Augustine suggested that instead of seeing the two polarities of good and evil,  that there may only be good and perfection on one side, and then it degrades down to less and less good until there is no good at all.  Kind of like light and darkness where darkness is just a lack of light rather than the opposite of light.

More significantly, evil was used as a kind of scape goat to allow us to use it as a place holder as an explanation for some deplorable circumstances.  When we say the shooter that killed children in a primary school is evil,  we are half satisfied that there is a semi explanation for that tragedy.

But using evil as an explanation does not explain anything. It only alleviate us of our possible responsibility in the matter and shift all blame on to the scape goat of evil.

Evil is also one of those black and white concepts that is too conveniently bad. There is no grey scale for a deeper description of the cause.

Is a psychopath evil? His lack of empathy for others make them prone to hurting others.  However, we no longer think people with learning disability as lazy because they were born without some of the abilities that we have.  Should we therefore blame a psychopath for not having empathy when it is something he is born lacking?

If we can be born evil, where is the compassion we have for others that are born with a disability?

Once we get out of the black and white scape goat model of evil,  we are into the messy reality of society where nothing is ever definitively bad or good and we are all responsible to some extent for what is happening.  Just by doing nothing, we are not pushing back the pressure of gun lobbyist and other special interest groups pushing their agendas.  In that sense, we are all responsible and cannot blame others.

We will not ever find out something is definitively right or wrong but we have to act based on what we know at the moment and our judgement of what should be done.  Knowing that we may be wrong but at some point, acting on what we think is sufficient information because not acting is also a contribution to the ultimate outcome.

So,  we have just gotten rid of evil.

Except that we have spread it out all among us as lack of goodness or not caring from our parts.

Not exactly a good trade but that is how it is.

Adult children

I participated in a local SFU philosopher's cafe discussion on "adult children" a few days ago.

The moderator chose this topic to discuss the increasing prevalence of 20-30 year olds living with their parents and the implications of this to our society now and into the future.

This inevitably led into the various approaches to bringing up children and how each of us feels about our relationships with our parents and our children.

The moderator showed Canadian statistics that show both 20-25 year olds and 25-30 year old staying with family as an increasing trend in Canada in percentages of 60% and 40% overall across the country with Toronto having the highest percentage.

There is no doubt that the high cost of housing in urban areas like Toronto and Vancouver is squeezing on the affordability of the young people from leaving their parents' place.  However, there are also participants in the cafe that thinks it is a good idea to have an integrated family with the various generations all living together, helping and supporting each other.

I thought that the way to independence is through taking on responsibility, learning from mistakes, and gaining confidence from successes. This is best done away from the parents. 

While it may be too early to be leaving home at 14 as the middle age English practice is for young boys to go being an apprentice, a seaman, or some other trade, it is definitely time to move away from the parents after starting one's work live or after high school.

The sooner one becomes independent, the earlier one would learn from smaller mistakes and preventing bigger ones down the road.  Parents can act as backups but should be at a distance so that they are not rushing in to prevent the small mistakes that are actually learning opportunities.

The moderator also mentioned his observation of the younger generation's difficulty in making life decisions in career choice, marriage, and starting a family.  The completely wide open choices facing someone graduating from school or university is actually counter productive in that the graduate have difficulty making these major decisions with no life experience and the threat of making the wrong choice continually cause them to delay committing to one.

The moderator made the comment that we tended to be more motivated by avoiding negatives than by gaining more positives.

The future is a murky one with all these possibilities.  However, instead of pondering, if one just makes a choice, the field becomes narrower.  Instead of being restricted, the vision is actually more focused and the possible next steps more concrete.  Progress is being made.

The moderator's viewpoint is that instead of taking a wide open set of choices as a starting point, we can well use the experience of the people before us and use their choices as default or short list choices to narrow our selections.  We can always come up with reasons to reject or take exception to them but it gives us a more manageable task to move on.

Life become more purposeful instead of constantly worrying about missed opportunities.

It is a somewhat counter intuitive argument but I found it quite persuasive.  There are too many examples of young people searching for what they want to do and years go by.  They see their peers making progress in areas that they once thought was not the best and that only put more pressure on making that perfect choice.  This only lead to looking for quick fixes to leap frog which unfortunately results in higher probability of failures.

All the while they are living under their parent's wings while they search.

Meeting on usury, honeymoon loans and financial regulation

We had our meeting on usury Wednesday evening.  It was a lively discussion.

Rafi started off by explaining that usury is more than just a loan but a loan with a high interest rate and generally applied to people who have no other options.  Usury generally imply an exploitative situation even though it may be an agreement by both parties.

Dan had taken the trouble of obtaining a brochure from a Payday Loan store and showed it to the group.  It advertise the cost of the loan in dollar terms for two weeks without ever referencing to the standard annual interest rate which would be in the hundreds or thousands of percent.

Dan's point is that the society would be more efficient if everything is measured in standardized terms. Therefore, all loans, including credit card loans and payday loans need to be quoted in annualized percentage points so that we do not have to make conversions to know how high the interests are.

Richard pulled out a $20 note and said that he consider lending a loan like renting out a house.  In lending the $20, he is renting it out to the borrower because the lender do not get to use that money while it is lent (rented) out and the interest is equivalent to the rent paid.

Therefore interest, like rent, compensate for loss of use while the money was lent out.

Richard also mentioned that even though the loan arrangement may be a contract agreed to by both parties,  there is always the question as to whether both parties completely know what it is they are agreeing to. The knowledge level of the parties are not always up to what is required and who is making sure one party is not taking advantage of the other?

Shula mentioned that the business ethics course she is teaching is based on full disclosure in doing business.  However, it is difficult to determine whether the brochure from the Payday Loans company measures up to the full disclosure yardstick.  It clearly state what the cost is.  Is it obliged to also show what its competitor's price is as well?

The discussion naturally flowed to the frustration with the financial system in general and how money is no longer based on anything concrete other than trust in the government issuing it that they will not make it worthless by printing more and more of it.

There were also comments about lenders like monetary fund that force debtor countries to meet austerity conditions after lending the money.  Rafi saw it as a way for the developed countries to keep the financially strapped countries from defaulting, preventing poor people from rioting and possibly creating future consumers for the developed countries.

All in all, a wide ranging discussion and we did not get close to discussing honeymoon loans at all!

1/9/2013 Usury, honeymoon loans, and financial regulation

This coming Wednesday,  we will be discussing loans at the Ideas Cafe.

Usury, or to charge for lending money, was seen as an evil from thousands of years ago.  I understand that the church was against charging interest on loans which forced borrowers to borrow from those outside the faith.  This opened the opportunity for the Florentine bankers to lend a discounted amount but demand repayment in full just so that they can say they are not charging interest on the loan.


Trust human ingenuity to get around a man made rule.

There will always be people who can use a loan now and people who are saving money for the future so it is a natural match for these two parties to come together and agree on an interest rate that both sides would find equitable.

But are money lenders still seen as greedy today?  Is that partly responsible for people's negative image of bankers?  Should working people saving for their retirement and lending that retirement money before they need it be seen in the same light?

Maybe that it is just that there is more borrowers than lenders and in a democracy, the minority can get victimized by the majority.

When we save money, are we not lending it to the bank?  Suddenly,  it does not seem so unreasonable to demand that the bank pay us interest to deposit with (lend to) them.  When we invest in bonds, we look for as high an interest as we can get.  Yet we complain about the bankers and investment houses for not giving us decent returns for our money.

Is this just our selfish view of our role depending on whether we are the borrower or the lender?

Maybe it is the middleman, the banker and the investment house that is taking too much in between the depositor and the borrower. 

Why are we not bypassing the middleman? Why do credit unions not offer substantially better deals than the banks?


What about the reasons for taking out a loan. 

We can all see the need for that housewife in the third world that needed to borrow money to buy a sewing machine so that she can do some sewing to earn extra income for the family.  Or the manufacturer who borrow money to upgrade their plant to higher efficiencies or to serve more markets.  But what about car loans, especially car loans to get that bigger gas guzzler?


Or a loan to go on vacation? Is it ever justified to borrow money just to relax? Particularly through credit card loans on high interest rates?

What if the vacation is for one's honeymoon.  Happens when one is young, with little savings, years of earning power ahead, and a once in a lifetime event that is meant to last forever.  Is this not the epitome of justifying a loan for an opportunity never to be experienced again?


Or is it to saddle one's budding marriage with extra burden ?

What about the amount of interest being charged for loans.  Is this an agreement between the lender and borrower and nobody else?  Should the government be involved in limiting the amount of interest charged?

While it is easy to say government should stay out of private agreements,  we need to recognize that the experienced player in this is at a definite advantage.  There are enough variations in the rate calculation, collateral obligations, early redemption privileges and all manners of other details to confuse the inexperienced borrower or lender.

But government regulations tends to be the blunt instrument, oblivious of the individual situation.  Where is the balance between protecting the inexperienced versus limiting the market?

Then there are the third parties that were never brought into the agreement but maybe involved, either in bailing out the insolvent borrower, or lost their investment on what is represented as a "sure thing"?  How do we identify these third parties ahead of time and protect them before the borrower and lender agree with each other?