Why not say bodies then? Why go along with a bizzare reduction and promote a hallucination even within materialism or physicalism?
This was not the only issue I had with what you said however. My previous post was not just about the reduction of mind to brain rather than body.
then there is that Word ‘physical’. Like it means something.
Run with that…please.
More, please…
Moreno excuse me for side stepping that issue for a moment, and try to explain soul to the OP.
If we are totally cynical about any concept, or unable to make any believable propositions about any construct mankind has developed, there are still so many unanswered questions remaining even to the most skeptical truth seeker.
My proposition of trying to prove whether something such as the soul exists or not, is not seeking answers to what the soul might be, but rather, how did it come to be that men sought to elevate the soul into the realm of the heavenly.
That men developed ethics which raised ideas such as goodness, wisdom, beauty, love, can be interpreted as much a product of evolution, as the physical descriptions of evolved organisms. Cultural artifacts corresponding to various human development stages underline the ideas behind the ideals which those artifacts represented, and became representative of.
Most groups of people have developed systems of thought and belief , sometimes having cross cultural influence, sometimes developing autonomous systems on their own. These beliefs seem to have intrinsically developed for thousands of years.
One of the things that skeptics point out, right off the bat, is that all belief systems are of a defensive posture, they came about as developmental props to defend mankind against elements, and to seek protection from what they perceived to be higher powers.
Faith is a basic element in man, faith is akin to trust, albeit it’s more diverse, it is a trust about the very being of men. Trust comes up from evolution as an early sign of the herding instinct, it is an essential ingredient for the social survival of species.
Human beings have the same urge to unite with fellow humans for the purpose of elevating their sense of security and belonging within their social group.
This social integration was followed by differentiation, the rise of the individual patterned after ideal models such as leaders, priests, shamans, warrior-heroes,and the like.
Where does the soul come into this schematic description? As, the individual becomes aware of his individuality, and his relationship qualities to his group,he becomes aware through the process of observing what the desirable qualities are, which are keys to the sustenance into membership into that group. The idea of qualification becomes a concept where these qualification move further away from the actual to the more abstract definitional value, due to factors of increasing migration, emergence of inter tribal conflict and resulting alienation and casualty, and other things.
The qualititative ideal becomes abstract, but still nominally aware, of it's connection to the original.
As the model of these virtues moves still further away, the idea becomes ethereal, and prone to be disassociated from real experience, they may not even be close to what real examples of these virtues they may have originated from.
The next step is to find a mythology, where these virtues "really exist", and projection into higher symbols manifest, and the Gods are born.
The god's have something we can also participate in, if we could just be like them sharing their virtues, and men begin to project the anthropomorphism which develops.
Alternatively, the gods are attracted to these qualities for the same reason, and a reciprocity develops between men and gods. They begin to share some thing, the soul, which contains all these qualities.
Now the idea is, not whether the soul exists or not, since it has become a pure concept, it cannot exist in the way existence is understood, so it becomes the Being(s) which contain these essential or shared qualities.
The development of such a concept begs it's own essential nature, why? : because it represents an advanced stage of utility for men, a need to utilize their energies to the best of their betterment, so as to evolve their sense of trust. Trust is not a classical idea, it came later with the development of the social contract. The soul of man, at this level is a social contract, whereby men can feel more secure, and it becomes the spirit within which the ideas of the enlightenment were formed.
The point is,soul even if seen in terms of psycho-social determinants is still something, something very powerful, and uses religious theme to buttress it's assumptions. This is why the church/state separation was not until, the state found itself sufficiently embedded in it's institutions.
Soul is a device, a real utilitarian entity,that's a necessary tool for eliciting trust, brotherhood and love. iI's spiritual counterpart, which if we were to focus on the material/social determinants become equally viable as a higher yet concept, the love of God could be seen as the highest anthropomorphic projection there is. Science can never become this, the soul, because, although we can share in the utility that's comes with using the inventions of science, it can never be admitted that science invented nature, or brought it about or anything like that. It is Nature, even in it's widest sense, that brought about the possibility for understanding anything. This understanding necessarily implies a concept such as the soul, because it's necessity is shown by the fact, that it has developed alongside man, as a creature. Without your soul, and mankind's, and God's , the Logos, the highest soul, we would loose it the necessary human bodage to survive.
As we have been shown to have been cast out.
Critics will point to the abhorrance associated with the innumerable horrors as an example of the absence of God.
But god is always there, hidden sometimes,but always bursting forth as hope eternal, in eternal grace.
Brain, body, shit that’s made of solids liquids and gasses, or waves even maybe. It’s all the same. The soul isn’t like those, unless you define it in a way that’s reducible to the way you define the soul, in which case you’re just calling the physical stuff a soul, so you wouldn’t even really need to call it that at all. You could not call it that and everything would be fine. The description could be no more robust.
Promote what hallucination? Why is reductionism bizzare? It’s like, one of the two main things in philosophy of mind, which is what I assume we’re doing when we start throing the soul around outside the religion forums, I mean, especially in the philosophy forum. I figure this is a good place to start talking about reducing things, because we’re here in the philosophy forum talking about the soul. I like the idea that if something can be quantified, then it can be formalized, and that if it can be formalized, then it must be the case that it’s been reduced to a set of symbols. If it’s a set of symbols, then there isn’t a whole lot of qualitative consideration that’s really even possible. Since we think and communicate in languages, (most all of which, arguably, can be reduced down to their barest assumptions and conditions and what have you, it’s best to keep our descriptions and clean and tidy as possible, so that when we get ready to analyze and interpret things and apply meaning to them ourselves, we’re not all caught up sorting through multiple labels for the same things. It’s violates the law of efficiency or something.
We are animals with higher intelligence only.
The origin of such debates - the existence of souls - was generated by both imagination of human beings and the God. Live and death, so simple, people imagine because of fear. It is harsh to tell people who suffer from physical disability or pains that there is no souls as all. In another word, soul is a comfort. My only constructive and interesting view towards soul is that it is the comfort from the God. The God comfort people who are dying by telling them the story of an afterlife. It is a good attempt, but it also exposed the existence of the God. The God use power of communication with all of us - the whispers into our heads - to start all these.
The God also abuses the power of communication on criminals, which make criminals suffer from mental problems. Besides, the God also interfere our fate by doing that. That is the origin of schizophenia. It is the hints for the existence of the God.
Teru Wong
Beholder of the Truth
A strange thing happened to me personally this morning: I. Signed on to ILP, and looked at this OP. My wife called to me asking me about a quote she found while looking up a dream she had.
It went like this: "Dreams are illustrations …from the book your soul is writing about. "
Here it comes. Open wide 
I assume you know the concepts of phenomena and noumena, right? What we know of the brain is purely phenomenal. It’s a squishy, greyish, wet, blood-soaked, warm, electrochemically living object that weighs about 3 pounds and fits in the palms of your hands if cupped together. This is what the brain looks like (feels like, sounds like…) when presented to the senses. But what is it like “in itself”? That is, if we want to know what is essential to the existence (structure, content, substance…) of the brain itself independently of what it ends up appearing to be like to the senses, then we’re asking about the noumenal brain-in-itself.
This is my solution to the brain/mind duality: the mind just is the noumenal brain-in-itself. It’s not supposed to resemble what the brain looks like to some remote sensory modality. It exists as pure experience. And I’m inclined to say pure being.
That’s not what people normally mean by mind, they mean a persons thoughts, feelings, memories, moods, cognition, emotion and sensation, their conscious awareness, conscience, knowledge, wisdom and understanding, what they’re passionate about, what motivates them, drives them. These processes are the mind perceiving itself via introspection. When people use the word brain, they’re referring to that warm, fatty, bloody organ normally located in the skull. This is the brain perceiving other brains, or, itself during surgery via sensation. When people use the word soul, they’re referring to the parts of the brain/mind (same thing) that supposedly never change, (identity… personality). The soul refers to the continuity of the person, whether it be their brain/mind, body or both. The essence, the part or parts, the brain/mind atom or atoms that’re supposedly indivisible, underlying the various processes.
Of course there’s nothing about the brain/mind and body that doesn’t change. Our thoughts change, our feelings change, even our identity and personality changes, they’re all effected by themselves, by the internal workings of the brain/mind interacting with itself, and they’re all effected by their environment. Thoughts come and go, feelings come and go, identity and personality comes and goes, they change due to hormonal changes, memory loss and memory gain, interpretations of new experiences, reinterpretations of previous experiences, being subjected to new environments, age, different substances being put into and taken out of the body, and so on. The personality, like all things in the brain/mind, is undergoing constant and continuous change. The continuity is what we call the soul, that which remains largely or in the case of spiritualists, wholly unchanged, throughout the entirety of a persons life, and beyond.
However, this continuity is not a thing in itself… it’s an approximation. The continuity is not me, I am what I am right now, I am more myself this instant than I ever was or ever will be, this is the real me. The continuity that exists throughout all the years of my life, is not the real me, is not a thing that can be perceived, or that hss thoughts and feelings of its own. Take a river for example. Nothing about a river (or a mountain for that matter) or anything in nature stays the same. However, we give some rivers names like the Nile river. Is the Nile river the same river it was 5000 years ago? Even though it’s been undergoing constant change, it’s still roughly the same river, relatively speaking. There’d be nothing wrong with giving it a new name now, since it’s undergone 50000 years of constant and continuous change… there’d be nothing wrong if we gave it a new name every year. We keep the same name for convenience, not to suggest the nile river has never changed, but because we’re more/less dealing with the same river that the Egyptians of 5000 years ago were dealing with. It’s so very similar from our vantage point, it’s not worth giving it another name, or interacting with it much differently, or thinking about it much differently. The same principles can be and are applied to the brain/mind, and to all things. But the Nile river is not a thing that never changes (there is no thing that never changes). There is no sameness, there si only similarity, between you and others, between who and what you are, were and will become. You’re a process… like a river.
There is no sameness about you, your body, your brain/mind, there is similarity. The similarity is not a thing that can be interacted with, the similarity is repetition, a measurable pattern in the process of the brain/mind, not a dot, presently existing or in a particular space/time, but a line we draw in between the dots. Everything changes and degeneration/dying means the brain/mind and body our breaking down, disintegrating, cells, thoughts, feelings, neurons and the sensory faculties all begin to die off, like when a river dries up, culminating in death, the rough/relative cessation of continuity. Nothing inside you is immune from this process, nothing is safe/secure. You’re a part of the world, like everything around you. This Is your home, you owe yourself to the lakes, the rivers, the soil and streams, the earth itself and all the plants and animals in it.
That’s what I mean by mind too. That’s what I think is really going on inside us. A brain is just what it ends up looking like when our mental content is translated into sensory form.
“Soul” can mean different things to different people. I don’t presume to know what one or another individual means by it. But I do think it’s a fair bet that one usually equates (in a rough manner of speaking) soul with mind, self, and consciousness.
You might be interested in this thread I started a while ago:
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=182124
If you’re refering to my use of “thing-in-itself,” I make no claims about permanence.
The soul is the focal point of an individual’s experience.
For me idealism/materialism are compatible. Brain/mind are one and the same.
Everything is impermanent. Identity is a meaningful similarity between states.
Meaningful is relative. A meaningful similarity tween two states is not a thing.
I agree. The only difference between me and the materialists is that I believe the reduction goes from matter to mind, not mind to matter (and this turns out to be a huge difference).
Then this is as Ayan Rand would have his Atlas Shrug? Where is d63?
Right, our beliefs are very close. There’s a slight difference. For me, brain/mind are interchangeable, each can be reduced to the other. Each can be explained in the language of the other, ultimately, I think. For every event in the mind, there’s an equal and corresponding event in the brain. Changes in the mind don’t cause changes in the brain, they correspond with them. For every event in the brain, there’s an equal and corresponding event in the mind. Events in the brain don’t cause events in the mind, they correspond with them. Apprehending the brain/mind via introspection is analogous to perceiving a house from the inside-out, apprehending the brain/mind via sensation is analogous to perceiving a house from the outside-in. Software versus hardware, one is no more real than the other. It’s like perceiving the same waterfall with the eye and the ear. We do not think the eye is seeing something the ear isn’t hearing, we do not think the ear is hearing something the eye isn’t seeing, they’re perceiving the same thing in a different way. Therefore, there’s no conflict… no problem in need of solving. Of course none of us know for sure, but this supposition seems most reasonable to me.
From a ‘where do our Words come from and what are they explaining to’ perspective, this seems almost unavoidable. Materialists take a model based on experience and then treat the model as more real than the experience and use Words -like physical and material - that only have meaning in as phenomenological triggers.
One way to respond is to say: if whatever we decide is real, in the whole future history of humanity or sentience, is physical, then if science finds whatever people are Calling souls, it will be physical, by this overarching nothing can be excluded definition of physical -which, by the way, is the way we seem to be defining physical, given that it is an expanding set of whatever we decide exists. We verify using devices or phenomena we already call physical new stuff we now call physical. To me the Word has no meaning other than ‘verified.’ If that is the case then souls, if we end up in that time, finding them, would be physical, yes. The other response is to say, we don’t know this is the case. You are speculating. We keep finding new stuff and Calling it brain or mind. We still have unsolved stuff.
The reduction of mind to brain rather than body is bizzare.
And it is contradicted by neuroscience and physiology.
IOW if a physicalist reduces mind to body, that is consistant at least, with research so far. I understand that model. I get it. I disagree, but there is consistancy. To reduce mind to brain is silly and not justified.
Gib, eyes, moreno:
Very convincing argument. How do we know it’s correspondence going on and not causation?
People with abnormal brain function may bring about biochemical change by the way they think, their dopamine/seratonin levels may be a result of cognitive misapplication.
Has there ever been a study on inherent brain biochemical imbalance versus as a result of cognitive developmental changes? Were they conclusive?
Obe,
The way I see it, everything is information at base–not objects, not processes, information (I sometimes say “meaning”). This is what the mind is, after all–a system of information being processed, communicated (to itself and from itself), transformed and translated. This is the nature of information itself–to be in flux, to always beget further information.
As far as the human mind goes, some information is consciously processed within itself, and it becomes the next state of the mind, the next thought or feeling or experience, but some information is lost to consciousness and leaves the human mind. If you want to understand how this plays out in the human brain, think of a chain of neurons firing in a row. Each neuron stimulates the next one in the chain and you get a signal being propagated. This might be what’s happening when one follows a train of thought. But while this is happen, other physical processes are occurring as side effects: heat loss, exchange of oxygen via the blood-brain barrier, light being reflected, etc. These would represent information processes that aren’t being consciously experienced.
Take light being reflected on your brain. A neurosurgeon examining your brain will see this squishy, grey, wet object because of these light rays. They are reflected off your brain, travel through the air, and strike the neurosurgeon’s retina, whereupon he ends up seeing a squishy, grey, wet object. But in terms of information being conveyed, what has happened is that the information being processed in your mind has had implications that entail other kinds of information that you aren’t consciously pondering. These other kinds of information are represented by the light being reflected off your brain. They continue to undergo transformation and begetting of further information. When the light finally impacts the neurosurgeon’s retina and makes its way to his visual cortex (where he finally sees a brain), this information has been translated into a sensory (visual) form that tells the neurosurgeon “there is a squishy, grey, wet brain here.”
The whole matrix of physical terminology we bring in to describe this process is simply a representation (or a translation you could say–into the language of matter) of what is all along just information being transformed, interpreted, and communicated.
So, in a sense, you could say your mind causes (indirectly) your brain (i.e. it leads to your brain existing for the neurosurgeon). But as it concerns information more than material pushes and pulls, I like to call it a “semantic” process rather than a mechanical one. One piece of information doesn’t “cause” the next, it entails it.
hey concerning og post, not sure if you ‘need’ a soul for if souls exist many of us would have one and have no available test to see if you didnt need one. I believe youve got one but i have no proof.(2 cents)