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?
In the buddhist way I don't believe in a soul or souls. But buddhists do believe in existence, but its all the same. However, Buddhisim is a religious belief system so its problematic as any religion can be turned into something it wasn't intended to be.
ReplyDeleteOn a personal level, I don't want to offend someone's faith or values but I suspect once we die, that's it. I can't say what, if any thing will happen after.
I also think that love is what moves us (or at least me). If I love cars maybe I will change my name to Porche. Or if I love gossip maybe I'll become a politician. Or, if I love nature, a biologist.
VTS
We are just reading a book on brain science at the Ideas book club and the author quoted Sigmund Freud as saying the study of psychoanalysis is the study of what happens in our minds between stimulation and response.
DeleteLove, jealousy, anger, and all the emotions seems to be our mental reaction upon perceiving some external stimulus, then through judgment, we interpret that stimulus as good or bad, construct a narrative and react to that narrative resulting in some action.
Maybe that is another take on what is our soul.
A number of people from various religions believe in a kind of idea where mind and brain are two ways of looking at the same thing; likewise, soul and body are two ways of looking at the same thing. It can still be a monism of sorts.
ReplyDeleteSome Christians who have a tri-partite God also believe humans, made in the image of God, are also tri-partite and therefore have body, soul, and spirit. These could all each be nuomenal or phenomenal.
If phenomenol, then bodies are sensed, souls are perceived, and spirits are discerned. The sensing, perceiving, and discerning could be done by reasoning or by faith (or both).
Faith examines presuppositions and reasoning examines evidence. Both would be required and neither alone would be sufficient.
Just as we need to examine that which is in our given social stock of knowledge, we must also examine what might be conspicuous by its absence or omission.
If eschatology of soul requires some ultimate form of transformation, then it would probably be some kind of future fulfillment. Therefore what is not in our social stock of knowledge may be even more relevant here.
If there be a soul, I assume it would be more than an array of numbers with units. It could be relational or part of a community. I am currently reading "The Being of the Beautiful" (Part I = Theaetetus; Part II = The Sophist; and, Part III = The Statesman) and for fiction am reading "Only Superhuman" by Bennett (2012) which discusses human modification.
My metaphysics instructor suggested putting concepts under stress. Subjecting humanity to modifications, as is done in science fiction, can allow us to get at the essence and family resemblances.
If we are souls or if we have souls, then how are we to best manage them? CL
Managing our souls........
DeleteJust following the previous comment thread on love, emotions, and psychoanalysis, maybe understanding the reason of how we judge external events, how we form an explanation of it, and how we decide on the response is the key to better understand our behavior.
Freud leaned towards the unconscious, our suppressed desires, and thoughts that otherwise escape our conscious minds to explain our actions.
If we truly know why we want to do something, would we not be managing our soul with more rationality than reacting unexplanably?
Sometimes the "soul" consists of mind, will, and emotions. Does the "spirit" have higher functions like conscience, and communion with the spirit world? The "black box" between stimulus and response can get quite complex. Silvano Arieti in "Creativity: The Magic Synthesis" suggests that creativity is a synthesis of primary process thinking and secondary process thinking. Trinities abound. Christian miinisters studied "soul analysis" in Halle before Kierkegaard called himself a psychologist and well before Freud took up psychoanalysis. Contextualizing the black box, "soul" exists in a community or society and serves latent and manifest functions there too. For religion it may serve a propaganda function as well. Threads, real and figurative, are endless! CL
ReplyDeleteI wish I had read the following before our meeting.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2013/01/02/health-inside-your-brain-dark-side.html
Seeking seat of consciousness in dark side of brain
The brain may be most active when doing nothing at all.
This par in particular caught my attention.
"It's part of an effort to understand a mysterious neural network only recently described, called the "default mode network," a stark name for what some believe could ultimately harbour the secrets of the soul."
Dan