What is the "Soul"?

Fresco, Val, and Heimdall

It seems to me...

Our perceptions of Ultimate Concepts such as TRUTH and REALITY certainly are social constructs.

However, I agree that definitionally...the REALITY is...whatever it IS...whether we perceive it (or even whether we CAN perceive it) or not.

And I think the same can be said about TRUTH. TRUTH is...whatever it IS...whether we perceive it or not.

Nothing wrong with making guesses about what either IS...nor is there anything intrinsically wrong with different people supposing different things about either.

Fact is, the "social construct" of those words probably is necessary for us to function. (Certainly makes the administration of law easier!)

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Frank Apisa wrote:

Fresco, Val, and Heimdall

Our perceptions of Ultimate Concepts such as TRUTH and REALITY certainly are social constructs.

Yes, there is a layered structure here from referent (TRUTH or REALITY) at the bottom, above that our perception of that referent, and above that our word or description for it. Social constructs influence our perceptions and our vocabulary, but not necessarily the referent.

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Frank: Excellent post; I agreed with everything you said! Laughing

But seriously; fresco: you're taking the subjectivity argument a step too far. Like I, and others here, have said, our perceptions of reality don't constitute ultimate reality, they only create our own individual world that may or may not have anything to do with the 'real' world.
Heimdall: How did politics enter into this? :wink: Refresh my memory; what's "PI" again? Thanks.

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Val,

Of course all "claims" are social constructs because I don't need to make declarations in the absence of an audience. The evaluation of any "construct" or "claim about a social construct" lies therefore in its social consequences. i.e. the concept "soul" and its expected "fate" can be evaluated in terms of historical events concerning supposed "authority over souls", but to talk about the nature of "existence of souls" is vacuous. There IS only the concept (and your relationship with it) and to be in relationship at all is to invoke "existence".

Similarly, Taliesin when you say "I go too far" in pushing "subjective reality" you mean "too far for your liking" or "you don't interact with the concept of reality in this way". But since you cannot demonstrate any"objective reality" to the satisfaction of a hypothetical social consensus, then all you have is that "interaction".
In anticipation of a possible objection concerning "scientific agreement" being the possible basis of "reality" with which we can discuss "soul" we immediately run into the philosophical problem of the "reality of unseen structures" such as electrons.
Things that are not directly "observable" are normally deemed to exist in as much as they explain "observable events", but note that those events are ultimately socially or paradigmatically selected as being "significant". (The backdrop to this line of reasoning is the Copenhagen convention about quantum events and the mutual existence relationship between observer and observed)

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fresco: I meant that you took the argument farther than it made sense, not that you took it in an ugly direction or anything like that. As I've stated, we might perceive things subjectively, but that doesn't alter the 'truth.'
I'm not sure I know what you mean by "significant." We as a society pay more attention to some things than others, but from a scientific perspective, everything is equally "significant." Explain the Copenhagen convention to me, please? I'm not really up on my Physics current events (or not so current, to be honest). :wink:

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Taliesin181

I don't think we can reduce this to a simple explanation, If you consult...

www.upscale.utoronto.ca/GeneralInterest/Harrison/Complementarity/CompCopen.html

...with particular reference to the "blind man" metaphor, you might get the essence of a nondualist view of "us and the world". (You might perhaps read this with respect to the philosophical issue of what the "self" with reference to situations where a limb is amputated say...i.e. what if anything does the perceiving ?)
NB All "scientific data" are gathered with respect to some guiding hypothesis which directs observation...i.e. defines what is "significant".
QM brings this to a head by highlighting paradoxes created using different theories....observer and observed are mutually defining each other.

The importance of this item is that is generated from "conventional science" but it directly mirrored in philosophy by Wittgensteins "meaning is use" both of which imply that action/interaction is the fundamental issue and "reality" as an external frame of reference is a contruct.

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Taliesin181 wrote:

Heimdall: How did politics enter into this? :wink: Refresh my memory; what's "PI" again? Thanks.

When the topic of the soul comes up, politics often enters in. I was actually trying to keep the politics out.

PI of course is that tasty stuff that's baked in round PI pans with circumference 3.14159... times diameter.

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Wow. Sorry, heimdall, I had a brain stall; I thought you were using an acronym (P.I.), not the mathematical symbol Pi.
What did you mean by this, though, if not a political statement?

Quote:

Truth and reality are what they are regardless of what the dominant political party pretends. You remind me of the state that legislated PI to be 22/7 to simplify mathematics.

Why does "the topic of the soul" invite politics? Please explain.
fresco: The "blind man" example doesn't make logical sense to me; I can go as far as

Quote:

"think of a blind person who gets around with the assistance of a cane. In time that person will probably treat the cane as part of his or her body, and will think of the outside world as beginning just at the tip of the cane.

then it stops making sense. The blind man can't 'extend his senses through the cane into the road' much less 'to the whole world." he can only feel resistance to his cane by solid objects. I'm willing to entertain further discussion about this, i.e. you describing it it in a way that makes sense/proves me wrong :wink: , but as it stands I don't agree with the theory.

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Going forward...the blind mans cane held still on the road transmits vibrations of the traffic....his mental picture extends out along the road..."roadness" to him includes those significant vibrations just like "roadness" to us contains significant visual images...we may not "see" the blowing leaves perhaps unless we are in some particular mindset....what IS there depends on who or what we are as observers....our perceptual needs...perception is active not passive....we interact...categorize..reflect on the category...predict...reinteract..etc.

Going backwards...the recent amputee has changed from an able bodied to disabled observer...the world has become a "different place" involving different perceptual needs...his relationships have altered... including his relationship with himself..

And what of "reality" for different species ?...is a "tree" still a "tree" to a bird or is it "a perching" ?

What IS depends on the observer. The act of observation changes the mutual interactive status of both observer and observed. (In physics the photons from the illuminating source alter the state of that which is illuminated which alters the state of the observation device)

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Very interesting retort, Val. You and Heimdal are objectivists and "naive realists" (remember this is a technical epistemological category, not an insult). Your retort reminds me of the argument that All generalizations are false including this one. I recommend to you the book by the social theorists, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, "The Social Construction of Reality". They consider reification the original sin of the intellect because in reifying our concepts we are forgetting their origins: forgetting that they are made by humans for human uses. We seem to think they are givens, given to us by non-human or pre-human reality. When Fresco asserts that concepts, like soul, are social constructions, he is asserting, I believe, that our entired perceived world is socially, or culturally, constructed (that is to say the meaningfulness of our world). This is essentially the thesis of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea, and his first sentence in that classic is "The world is my idea." Fundamentally, he and other German Idealists argued that humans represent the world to themselves; this is the nature of culture, and anthropologist often show HOW humans of particular societies represent the world to themselves. As I see it, Fresco's assertion is what we might call a self-conscious representation of the situation, a generalization about generalizations that realizes it is included among the generalizations included, but as such transcends them. Didn't Bertrand Russell address this problem in his "theory of types"? I've forgotten the argument. Two kinds of paradigms are involved here. The first is diachronic: the notion of the soul in the Middle Ages was taken for granted as axiomatically so. People did not argue about its reality. Today we see that there has been a fundamental "paradigm shift", a situation in which people now argue, as we are doing, about the ontological status of "the soul". The second is synchronic. It regards paradigmatic differences today. I refer to the fact that some people today consider, as part of their worldview, truths to be objective and absolute realities, derived from God or who knows where, while others consider "truths" to be relative and constructed. I don't think we can argue fruitfully across this paradigmatic line. The roots of disagreement are too deep.

-edited

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JLN,

The paradigmatic line even seems to have been drawn in US politics with the "believers" on one side irrespective of particular belief ! Its enough to make even an atheist like me say "God help you !" Laughing