What is the "Soul"?

...wishful thinking by the imagination which unfortunately wouldn't even qualify as hot air; THAT would at least be useful if the furnace blows

Re: What is the "Soul"?
Soul is a word. A meaningless word.

val & Swift: Why do you think that, though? Tell me more about what you think it entails, where you think the idea came from, and why you think it doesn't exist. Thanks.

The scientific knowledge we have only shows how things are manifest in the physical world and do not disprove the existence of a soul. However, I am not stating that I believe there is a soul, nor am I stating that there is no soul. Just that science has not disproven the possibility, only helped to explain the mechanics in the physical world.

What is a soul? It's definitly occult related.

What is a soul? It's definitly occult related.

Dauer, do you think that Science can conduct any meaningful research into the existence and nature of the soul? Science certainly cannot prove that souls do not exist; Science can't prove ANY negatives. We CAN say that all that we do know (or believe we know) about the NATURAL world--whether that knowing came from Science or the eons of pre-scientific human learning from experience--is inconsistent with beliefs about souls. That's clearly why the concept of soul fits only within the framework of SUPERNATURALISM.

"Soul" to me is a "synthetic" experience. Consciousness and complexity yield the illusion or the sense that the "whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts". It's the symbiotic convergence, a crescendo of virtually all the individual "parts" of your being and THIS is the true wonder of it, when God equals the soul though neither exist! One can speak or write of both without being inconsistent! ...and since I don't wish to indulge further in abstractions, that's all I want to say!

JL,

Well, it depends on what your definition of soul is. Clearly, there is no physical evidence of the soul and science will never discover physical evidence of the soul. It may be possible a scanner could eventually be made that could detect a soul, but that is a flight of fancy. However, I see no contradiction between the idea of a soul and the world around us.

I should make it clear that all I believe regarding the soul is that there is a part of us beyond the physical, and I do not suggest it is immortal. It's not that I declare it not to be immortal, but I will not know what happens when I die until I do. It is just as likely the soul is reabsorbed, or becomes one with the One, or reincarnates, or flies up to a magical city called Hamster where tiny violins play the bongos and RoFL, the giant water bottle, whips the staplers into concupiscent Kurds, searching for an angry fix.

Well, I find the last one slightly less likely. However, my belief is simply that if we could remove the physical we would find something else. There's a kabbalistic image, very anthropomorphic though without implying anything by it, that this world, which they call the world of action, is God's robes. So remove the kelipah/shell and there is only one thing left. Of course their idea is that the soul is indeed Divine, and that there are Divine sparks hidden everywhere. So that's probably more where I am today. The soul is divine, and removing the physical world we would see that all is God, including the soul, which would not be distinguishable from the rest of God.

I have no trouble with that. I like the metaphors. And I do believe that "THE PHYSICAL" and even "THE NATURAL" are human constructions. But then so is the value judgement "Divine." I sense that Ultimate Reality goes beyond all our constructions. I like Tillich's effort to allude to such a transcendental reality as "The God above God."

We have absolutely no idea if there are souls or not...just as we have absolutely no idea if there are gods or not. So spending time thinking about what souls or gods are like...should they exist...is probably wasted time.

Enjoy life!

Taliesin:
Assuming that soul means something that is not physical, I cannot accept it's existence, because it is strange to all my conditions of experience. Besides, soul is frequently defined by a negatif predicate, like immaterial. But we must not define something by what it isn't.
And what is it to be immaterial? All our experience is physical. Our senses, nervous system, brain, are subjected to physical conditions.
About our ideas, they are organic manifestations - neuronal activity.
That doesn't mean I consider that ideas are caused by the brain, but they correspond to brain activity and are impossible without it. So, unless you consider that soul is the same thing as conscience and therefore something that has a physical base, I will not accept it's existence.

My view of the soul is a kind of Midland between the position of having a soul and there being no such thing as a soul. when you look at history, and at all the different mythologies of the world, you find archetypes. When you consider these commonalities across isolated civilizations and across physical borders, you have to accept that there is something that links us all. Jung, Freud's student, called this the collective unconscious, a kind of instinctual pool of everyone's memories who had ever existed. I believe that all religion is is an attempt to comprehend the elusive realm of the subconscious, and that the 'soul' is actually a poetic expression of the collective unconscious. So people who believe they've been reincarnated, etc. are actually just subconsciously drawing on one of the billions of memories the collective has to offer, and making it their own. So as far as religion is concerned, there is no soul, but as far as this shared link between us all, yes, I believe it does exist.
Val: What, then, does create ideas, if not the brain?

Taliesin:
I see two levels. Ideas don't exist without brain activity. Perhaps they even have a correspondance with neuronal patterns of activity.But, if ideas were caused by the brain activity - I mean, I think of something because my brain had a certain kind of activity - reason would be impossible. Logic, science, would be impossible.
I will remind you the example given by Socrates in the "Phaedon": he says that according to Anaxagoras, he is in his cell waiting for death because the muscles and bones of his legs allowed him to walk from the place of the trial to the cell. But that is the "how", not the "why". He is in the cell because the verdict of the people of Athens was death penalty. And because he refused to exile himself.

Tal and Val...

...tell me...

...what do you fine folks have against the notion of...

... "I really do not know...and the evidence is so ambivalent it really makes no sense to make guesses based on it?"

(Frank, this post answered your question about why should people promote guesses, why not just sit and admit they do not know. You seem to have deleted that comment: at least I cannot find it now. Anyway, here's my response):

Because, Frank, that would put an end to their speculative intellectual llfe. Better to indulge in the sport of metaphysical speculation than to just sit in agnostic wonder. At least this is what many people might tacitly think. I think it is wonderful to sit in divine ignorance (a mystical bliss). But as I always remind you the agnostic posture, regarding "god" holds that there MAY be a God (at least the non-evidence is no more against the proposition than it is for it). THAT gives too much credit to the theistic thesis as far as I'm concerned.

Uh oh, here we go again.

--edited

What is soul? James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Gil Scott-Heron. The soul is just an expression of the inner self. Where it goes, Nobody knows.

Cav: "Where it goes, Nobody knows."
Who, me?

I have no idea of what you are talking about.

I did not delete anything from my posts.

If you want to debate what I have said...do so. I enjoy that. If you want to pretend I said something so that you can debate that...have the decency to acknowledge that means you can find nothing in what I actually said to debate...so you are making stuff up to look like you are debating me. I would enjoy that also.




I am as active as you in speculation about the unknown...but I do not pretend that I am giving facts rather than guesses.

My comments to Tal and Val had really to do with that. If my wording was poor, I apologize.




Well that has to do with shortcomings in your abilities to think and reason, JL...not with the correctness of my position.