Why when our brain is compromised, i.e. surgery, car accident…a person can change, from moral to immoral. Not only a personality change, but an ethical - moral change. I have always thought that we had inherently known “right or wrong”. I am assuming that our ‘soul’ is conducive of our moral decisions, I am speaking secularly. I guess what I am getting at is, what defines us, our soul? our brain? … Do they exist together or separate?
I am not a fan of debate over subjects which are inconclusive, much too frustrating for me! I think this may have an answer.
The soul is just a name for something in the body; ‘I am all body, and nothing else besides.’
I find it useful to use the word soul to refer to the subconscious.
On the “sub-consciousness”:
“Similarly, our emotions are not “inner states” but are ways of relating to the world.; they too are “intentional.” In this case, emotive behavior involves physical changes and what he calls a quasi “magical” attempt to transform the world by changing ourselves. The person who gets “worked up” when failing to hit the golf ball or to open the jar lid, is, on Sartre’s reading, “intending” a world where physiological changes “conjure up” solutions in the problematic world. The person who literally “jumps for joy,” to cite another of his examples, is trying by a kind of incantation to possess a good “all at once” that can be realized only across a temporal spread. If emotion is a joke, he warns, it is a joke we believe in. These are all spontaneous, preflective relations. They are not the products of reflective decision. Yet insofar as they are even prereflectively conscious, we are responsible for them. And this raises the question of freedom, a necessary condition for ascribing responsibility and the heart of his philosophy.”
At this point, all I can really say is this: It’s your opinion.
Do you believe Plato or Aristotle was correct?
Plato believed the soul lived seperately in the world of forms/ideas.
Aristotle, on the other hand, believed the soul was one with the body.
I don’t have enough information to give you a straight opinion or any sort of “correct” answer, but I believe more in Plato’s ideas.
I tend to believe Plato as well. Funny, I was just discussing with a friend, about the “flat liner experiments”, If only we could have a more trusted, controlled setting. There is no reason that given our advancements we couldn’t have a conclusive answer once and for all! I guess the question would be, are we ready for it?
I don’t believe this is true, they’re maybe some cases that have concluded this but I would wager they were mistaken. Only choice can override morality IMO and its pretty hard to determine if a person has chosen this or not, only that person knows for sure. From my personal experience I already know that I can choose to be immoral so why the need for brain damage to explain it.
I believe that a Soul is independent of our bodies and is attached to the Spirit of life forever, if not then there is no life after death so who cares.
It is very much personnel opinion in these cases, mine is that the “soul” is a combination of sub-concious mind, personality and the aspirarions of what we would hope to be as a person. I quite liked Freuds idea of the super-ego being the closest definition of the soul. I do believe that it has an attachment to the body but not necessarily resides therein.
Also I had watched a documentary on people whos personality had dramatically changed after organ transplant so there may be an argument for a persons “essence/soul” being contained in the body.