There’s a lot of (mostly very obscure) talk about “the soul” here and elsewhere. (Is it supposed to be different from you, your “mind,” your “ego” etc.? Is it some combo of [some of] them, or what?) A friend recently passed along the following quote from psychologist James Hillman that I thought was nice–and maybe demystifying–at least a little bit.
By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment — and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground.
It is as if consciousness rests upon a self-sustaining and imagining substrate — an inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence — that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego, and consciousness go into eclipse. Soul appears as a factor independent of the events in which we are immersed. Though I cannot identify soul with anything else, I also can never grasp it apart from other things, perhaps because it is like a reflection in a flowing mirror, or like the moon which mediates only borrowed light. But just this peculiar and paradoxical intervening variable gives one the sense of having or being soul. However intangible and indefinable it is, soul carries highest importance in hierarchies of human values, frequently being identified with the principle of life and even of divinity.
In another attempt upon the idea of soul I suggest that the word refers to that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern. These four qualifications I had already put forth some years ago. I had begun to use the term freely, usually interchangeably with psyche (from Greek) and anima (from Latin). Now I am adding three necessary modifications. First, soul refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second, the significance soul makes possible, whether in love or in religious concern, derives from its special relation with death. And third, by soul I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, fantasy — that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical.”
James Hillman — Re-Visioning Psychology
Folks use the terms “idea” and “form” pretty much interchangeably.
Right now I have an idea of an Ideal triangle in my mind. It’s there I can rotate it I can study it I can measure it’s angles, I can use it to construct other more intricate ideal shapes and test it to see if it works for certain tasks.
All of this happens in my mind.
In fact I have no way to know that anything at all exists outside my mind. But I know that some things (like triangles) exist.
peace
You have no evidence whatsoever that anything at all exists outside your immaterial mind.
You presume that physical brains exist but you have no evidence that this is the case.
peace
All right, I’ll have a go at defining the soul.
For any organism x belonging to a natural kind F, x’s soul is the truthmaker for its being an F.
That’s an Aristotelian definition, and as you can see, it presupposes essentialism, which may sound uncongenial to evolutionists, but need not do so. Although species change over time, they change very slowly, and at any given moment, the biosphere appears to be made up of clearly defined types of organisms.
The real question that needs to be answered concerning the soul is whether it can be said to act and/or experience in its own right, or whether actions and feelings can only be ascribed to organisms as such. I would hold that certainly for humans (and probably also some mammals and birds), there are certain kinds of actions that we perform and experiences that we undergo, which cannot be characterized as bodily processes, although they certainly supervene on underlying bodily processes. For these actions and experiences, then, we need to posit the soul as a subject. But that doesn’t commit us to the Cartesian belief that soul and body are two things: a spirit acting on an animal. When Aquinas argues that the act of intellect is not the act of a bodily organ, he is not showing that there is a non-animal act engaged in by human beings. He is showing, rather, that not every act of an animal is a bodily act. The human soul, with its ability to reason using language, does not distinguish us from animals; it distinguishes us as animals.
For plants and non-sentient animals, on the other hand, we can simply treat the soul as equivalent to the dedicated functionality inside an organism, whereby the parts subserve the good of the whole.
The following article may be helpful:
From Augustine’s Mind to Aquinas’ Soul by Fr. John O’Callaghan.
I agree that if we think of this materialistically (that matter is condensed spirit) then spirit becomes nothing more than extremely rarified matter. But reality is much more complicated than this.
I believe that thinking is a spiritual activity. Take a very simple example of a child building a snowman. S(he) begins by thinking about the end result. Matter is re-formed according to spiritual forces. I can look at a snowman and see from it the thought processes of its creator.
I think that our present day materialistic science is one-sided in that it focuses on centric forces at the expense of planar forces.
From “Space and Counter-Space” by George Adams, written in 1940:
Matter gets its form from the interaction of pointwise and planar forces.
There is evidence, damage to the brain can affect the function of the mind. Like all evidence it is provisional.
Really you can measure its angles?
Measurable or not, those angles aren’t IN heads or minds, even if thoughts of them are. Minds aren’t containers.
Charle, by the hoary hosts of hoggoth, there is, apparently, no ethereal realm too goofy for you–so long as some Steinerian says it resembles a ram’s bladder.
You are getting ahead of yourself
First you need to provide evidence that the physical brain exists outside my mind. Good luck with that
peace
If I know two of the angles and a side length of a triangle I can be 100 percent accurate as to the rest of it’s parts. So for the ideal triangle I can be 100 % accurate.
peace
You sure do a lot of asserting but not a lot of demonstrating.
😉
As I’ve already explained, look up the word “triangle.” You’ll find that they have to have sides and angles. Minds have thoughts–no sides, no angles. If you don’t believe that, also look up “mind” and see if you find anything about sides or angles there.
QED
Apparently FMM thinks that there is an actual immaterial triangle inside his (immaterial) mind.
No need to argue for any of this when it can all be presupposed!
You have no evidence, no argument, and no way to differentiate between “immaterial” and “non-existent”.
Would you care to address the actual issue now?
No, the real question that needs to be answered is what exactly you mean by “soul” and whether or not you have any evidence that such a thing exists.
Yes. What I’d like him to get is that the “inside” there is just a metaphor. Thoughts are OF things; the things aren’t actually IN them.
Fine ,measure a side, how did you measure and keep the thought of the triangle in your mind at the same time? Do you imagine the perfect ruler?
I am constantly losing my tape , your technique could save lots of time. In addition it might be another convincing point for a thing that could be called God existing.
Sure, most people want souls to be ghosts. That’s what you want too, so you refuse any other view.
Most people believe atoms are tiny colourful balls. Good enough?
I didn’t call souls limits. I said, “The same way as the body has its limits vis-a-vis the universe, the individual soul has its limits vis-a-vis the universal soul.”
Principles are eternal. That’s why souls are called immortal. Is there some difference between eternal and immortal for you? Most people may think so. Let them think so.
If they were IN them I doubt I would waste my time on triangles.
I exist and I am not the same thing as my materiel body.
I know this because you could duplicate every atom in my body and lay the exactly cloned result next to me in your presence and I know there would not be two of me in front of you.
This is the actual issue the problem is you are so far down the rabbit hole of your materialist presuppositions that you are unable to even see it.
peace
Show me a neuroscientist who says the same thing. “Hmm, this guy’s brain states and patterns represent an ideal triangle. That’s what he must be thinking about.”
You can’t imagine a ruler next to a triangle?
Your lost tape does not help if you are measuring something in your mind.
In order for something in the physical universe to be of benefit to your mental world you need to use the mental tools of abduction and analogy
peace
Jesus’ body immortal. Jesus’ nature is eternal. Not sure about principles. You seem to have given this some thought.
I take no position on any supposed distinction between eternal and immortal) sounds like the doubtful/dubious distinction). But I don’t think souls are called eternal because this or that ‘principle” is thought to be. As indicated, flocks would leave their churches in droves if they thought that’s all they were getting.
Are you sure? Where would they go? This stuff is cultural, not logical.
Alan Fox,
No, not sure. But if churches offer immortality, and some people go for that reason, telling them ‘well, this principle is eternal, even if you’re not,’ won’t be too satisfying. Who but metaphysicians give a tinker’s damn about whether some alleged principle is eternal?
The same way, no kid likes school physics. If they had their want, nobody would go to school. Would that mean the education is wrong?
There’s a difference between expert knowledge and layman knowledge. To you it may seem that church’s job is to keep people as their members. In reality (according to the scriptures no less), church that sees this as its primary goal is a false church. Christian churches have to proclaim the gospel, repentance, and salvation; very unpopular things, so naturally churches should have fairly small membership.
Well, it’s all the same to me, of course, but I doubt too many church elders would go along with that program. After all, look what happened to the Shakers.
You know nothing of the kind. You presuppose everything and then brag about it.
Imagination is funny, it makes a cloudy day sunny
Makes a bee think of honey just as I think of you
Imagination is crazy, your whole perspective gets hazy
Starts you asking a daisy “What to do, what to do?”
Have you ever felt a gentle touch and then a kiss
And then and then, find it’s only your imagination again?
Oh, well
Are you really going to argue that there can be two of you alive at the same time.
If I kill pedant number one am I Innocent of murder as long as pedant number two is still around? Can I kill you a hundred times and be innocent as long as I have a physical replacement handy.
Use your head man
peace
The thing is that you not being identical to your body doesn’t follow from the fact that there aren’t two of you as a result of the cloning, because the two bodies aren’t identical. They can’t be, because they’re in different places. All the qualitative similarities of the parts suggests to physicalists is that any thoughts will be qualitatively the same.
Think, man!
Some of my thoughts on the soul:
If we want to develop our bodies in the right way then we are careful in what we eat and drink and we carry out physical exercise. In a similar way the soul is that part of the individual that can be developed spiritually by attaining knowledge and working on the feeling and willing life. Crying and laughing, these are outward signs that something has had an effect on our soul. Inspirational music, certain religious writings, the sight of a beautiful scene; these are the sort of things which nourish the soul. During normal development we reach a point in our lives where the body naturally begins to decline but our souls can still develop further into later life.
The soul is that part of us through which we experience love, sympathy, antipathy, regret and all the other inward feelings. And that part which can be developed through living in the right way. Easy to say, hard to do.
Steiner:
Most of us are too weak to get very far along this path. But those who thinks that there is no path that they need follow are only deceiving themselves. The easiest option is to deny the path.
True. In fairness, though, intentionality is very difficult to understand. We can forgive FMM for having found the containment-metaphor a handy way if grabbling with it.
The ideal triangle is not a mental picture of a triangle and so is not actually a concept in our mind. But we do have to look within to find it because it is nowhere to be found out there in the external world.
It is an objective entity that we perceive by looking within, and it is not a static thing but is dynamic, ever moving form. Each of its angles contains all angles from approaching zero to approaching 180 degrees. It will not do to picture any random triangle in our mind and then proclaim “that triangle is ideal”.
Tagora-maladadda, yoyo. Argle-bargle, blaghuglala, aplamathalada, gafhooozhietzu.
Deepak Chopra would be proud to have come up with this gobbledygook.
Materialism works by rejecting introspection. And by accepting the mind-brain identity theory without thinking what it entails.
Yes we all agree that Tagora-maladadda, yoyo. Argle-bargle, blaghuglala, aplamathalada, gafhooozhietzu. is goobledegook.
As for my thoughts on the ideal triangle, do you wish to give any other response than “gobbledegook”? For instance: Do you think that the ideal triangle is subjective, objective or non-existent? If you do believe that there is such an entity, do you think that it is single or that there are as many ideal triangles as minds which apprehend them?
I appreciate responses that stimulate further discussion.
To paraphrase a saying I have heard:
To know yourself look at the world, to know the world look within yourself.
A. I don’t know any materialists who reject introspection (and I know more materialists than you do).
B. Mind-brain identity theorists, whether they’re right or wrong, spend much more time thinking and writing about what their view entails than you do.
You just disagree with them, based on “Scriptures” and bad philosophy.
Yes, it is certainly confusing, especially when one doesn’t simply yell “Revelation–I win!” or “Scriptures!” every time one is stuck. I give you credit for wading in without magic words or holy books.
You don’t know even this one?
Then you evidently have, by reading their works more thoroughly than I have, found the answer to the question how it’s possible to read someone else’s mind by looking at brain states and patterns – the very thing Patrick asserted recently. Please share the answer. Thanks.
Erik,
So you claim that rumraket disavows introspection? Well, you’re wrong about almost everything else, but let’s see if you’re right about this one anyhow. It’s possible, and easy to find out:
Oh, Rumraket, do you deny that there is introspection?
And a follow-up: If you don’t deny introspection, why did you reject CharlieM’s argument from introspection?
And walto, how about answering my questions? By answering them, you just might prove me wrong for a change, instead of emptily asserting it.
Let me ask you, Charlie, do you think your own “higher organs” have developed because of your work in this vineyard, or are you just hoping? If the former, please tell us what your higher organs of sense have revealed to you.
Materialism does not require any such “reading ability,” and your suggestion that it does betrays utter confusion.
What questions?
What does the following statement mean?
Alternatively, explain how mind-brain identity theory does not entail the mind-reading ability by observing brain states and patterns. Thank you very much for volunteering to finally clear these things up for me.
Ask patrick. He’s generally full of shit, but maybe he has some idea here.