Frank Apisa wrote:Heim
Sounds to me that your argument here is artificial.
One could easily define "soul" as "fingerprints"...and then suggest one looks at one's finger tips to confirm the existence of a soul.
Frank:
I think there is some justification to your complaint, although I wasn't attempting to prove the existence of the soul in my most recent post or in my response to Taliesin. I was trying to convey what my concept of the soul is and was somewhat carried away with my recent discovery of a reasonable argument for where it is located. But, here I will try to convince you and others of its existence.
Almost everyone accepts the existence of "consciousness", not merely as a physiological state, but as a name for whatever it is that is the root of our perception of the flow of thoughts, sensations, etc. (indications) as a unity of some kind. To assert that consciousness exists is to assert that there is such a unity, i.e., that the indications in the flow are more than just an arbitrary aggregate. I pick up a cat and move it and a whole bundle of connected things move with it - fur, paws, eyeballs, etc. In similar fashion, if I move my head, the bundle of connected indications moves with it. In this respect, consciousness is like a cat and, I think, one is justified in saying it exists.
However, there are a couple problems with consciousness. First, we have no obvious objective counterpart. Consciousness appears to be immaterial, although clearly associated with a material object (your head). You will seek in vain for a material explanation of it in physics texts. Second, consciousness is a deficient kind of object. At least in the minds of most American philosophers, consciousness has no reaction on the world. If I kick a cat, I feel in my foot the reaction to that kick. But, they believe, that if you kick a man in the head, it affects his consciousness, but that his response follows solely from the laws of physics and not from the fact that he is mad enough to kill you. Consciousness then is purely passive (epiphenomenal).
The concept of the soul is that consciousness is only one side of an object whose other side is the will. Consciousness is the input, the will is the output. Consciousness is not, then, a first class object like a rock, but a functional view of a first class object. Consciousness is to the soul as "absorber of photons" is to a rock.
That consciousness exists is to me obvious. That there is a reaction on the world that proceeds somehow depending on the contents of consciousness is also obvious. By putting consciousness and will together, I get a first class object, something that is acted upon (knows) and reacts (wills). I call this first class object the "soul", for which designation there is ample justification in the history of Western philosophy.
Once you accept that the soul exists, there arises the question of where exactly it is located. It can be somewhere in this universe or somewhere in another universe or nowhere. The least weird answer is that it is in this universe. If it is in this universe, then it could be somewhere in my head or it could be, say, buried under Mt. Kilimanjaro by an alien civilization and communicating with my mind by frequency modulated tachyon beams. Again, the least weird answer is that it is somewhere in my head. This then connects up with my previous post regarding the soul's precise location.
Taliesin:
Your view of the soul as a poetic expression of the collective unconscious derives from a different idea of the soul than does mine. I don't really see a conflict, just two different ideas that are not about the same thing.
