One thing which I would really like to encourage much deeper consideration on, and which I really both feel and reason cannot presently be
over emphasized, is that of the
linguistic model. As I have pointed out, and
Thomas also, (and I may tend to harp on this, so . . . ) is that while we have received this notion, from ages past, which now has been very fairly and securely demonstrated to be unrealistic;
by extension, far from the truth of our real, pragmatic world in which we live.
While we can of course retain the noun--the empirically accurate sense naturally being the referent--we will have to adopt a new verb.
That, would without material doubt would be the copula '
be.' Life forms
are souls; '
have' being inaccurate as it prescribes possession. I am a soul, my cats are souls, the friendly intelligent crow which shares their food is a soul...
bless its little raven soul...(these birds are so cute in a sense).
Pemerson wrote:
What makes animals so extraordinary is they have no ego.
I argue that what we'll find, essentially, is that the notion of ego (
of course having adjusted the Freudian model with the better understanding) is not quite so distinct a matter from the array of certain cerebral structures firing in connective loops. What we usually consider ego, thus, will is found to be an element of brain which animals of course have as well. In a twist of paradoxical fact, however, as can be understood through certain psychopathic spectrum syndromes, we can see that prefrontal connectivity--an especially tell-tale sign of the H. sapiens brain build's advantage--is what gives rise to the ability to sense this '
ego' build/state. We could thus present it, actually, as saying humans have
egos while animals (other than a few primates, the dolphin, and a whale or two [maybe]) don't, simple because of having or not having that certain build of prefrontal cortex.
CalamityJane wrote:
Remember our friend Pavlov : dogs salivated when the bell was rang,
that's not an emotion, rather desire, sensation, belief - non-physical attributes we affiliate with being soulful.
We will have to keep in mind that with classical conditioning, what we are doing is exercising plasticity--
in other words, long-term potentiation (LTP). This, most obviously, therefore, is very physical a matter--
in the sense that certain neuromodulators and biochemicals are needed to produce the spines necessary for synaptic connectivity, and the neuron and support glial too, are of course actually lipids...which are real physical things.
Additionally, I am quite certain we'll find, most evidently, that animals to eat out of necessity--
but we usually don't think of it in that way. The cognitive processes of sub-cortical which control feeding, reward, and homeostasis, are most usually never '
spot lighted' by top-down retrieval of the executive cortical maps (
consciousness), so we tend to think of the activity that reaches that certain threshold (consciousness) as being '
willful' (and a portion of it is) but it is largely '
hardwired' in . . . thus out of reach to executive control.
Tastes, in the sense of
likes and dislikes, again, we'll find are exactly elements of both genetic pressure (to a lesser degree), and classical conditioning-like effects from individual history in a given environment. This factor of personality, however, is very physical a thing.
And I too agree that we'll have to be a bit careful about anthropomorphizing, yet, as a number of recent studies with horses, dogs, and prairie volves have greatly suggested, what we are seeing is a matter of the continuum of brain build/state. In other words, what is at the level of brain build that we see in these species, is in the human too, but with more added (in the bigger build that evolved in H. sapiens).
So, all animals are souls (putting other life forms aside for the moment), and that of course, as
Thomas has more correctly suggested, includes all of us human beings.
