Nature of the soul after death?

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What exactly are the “operations” of the soul after death? By this I mean, what does the soul “experience”? The act of seeing, hearing tasting, having emotions, learning, etc. are all physical, they are limited to the brain. What we think of as “consciousness”, is usually confined to what I just listed. So what states do we “experience” after death? Can the soul really be said to experience anything? Is there a different kind of consciousness within the soul that is separated from that of the body?
 
Is there an answer to this? Who knows? I feel like we currently live in this dimensional state: left right up down east west, you get my drift.
But the Lord exsists, as does your soul, in a dimension which is outside of our comprehension: no time etc etc. i guess thats the “place” where souls are until the final judgement, be that North or South. Pun intended. 😎
 
You do all these things when you’re sleeping and the senses in dreams doesn’t come from your body. You can swim in your dreams while your body is in a dry bed, for instance.
 
Yes, but dreams are illusions created by the brain. The soul cannot experience the brain, to say that we experience dream like states after death implies our brain is still alive giving us the illusions, and we are not only soul at that point but still body, and if still body then still alive.
 
How do you know dreams are created by the brain?
 
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JoeVig said:
Is there an answer to this? Who knows?
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Right, you’d have to die and come back, or get messages from someone in a soul state. Both of which things have happened and people have left accounts. Whether they are credible or not is up to the person reading.
 
The problem of mind vs brain it’s not a scientific problem but a philosophical one.
 
The nature of the soul doesn’t change after death. The soul continues to be spiritual. In humans the soul it’s not a nature but an essence. Humans don’t have two natures.

The soul was created to be united to a material body. Death leaves the soul in a unnatural state.

The soul needs a medium to function. That’s why the souls in Heaven are given “long white robes” as a medium. Possibly this is a kind of material body surrogate.
 
Well, we can’t really know. I have some speculation based on Saint Thomas Aquinas’ thoughts. By itself, I would think it’s experience would be rather limited, if we could say anything about it at all. However, it would certainly be within God’s power to augment its experience, say, by giving a saved soul the beatific vision. It would be filled with experiencing God’s goodness. We also know that those in Heaven can, with God’s help, hear the prayers directed at them, and can pray in what manner they can for the living, though this might not be the bodily type of praying we would normally think of. I imagine that without God one way or the other and left to its own devices, the soul would feel quite empty. A soul on its own with no body and no intervention from God (except the basics of God’s creative act allowing things to exist according to their nature) makes me think of the traditional concept of Sheol, the pit, the darkness… though that might just be fancy on my part.

We do believe in the resurrection of the dead, so the soul will eventually be united with the body and its sensitive powers again.
 
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I believe the soul is something we wont really be able to understand until the next world. It is true a soul needs a body. That’s why we must wait until judgment day to get them back.
I find it interesting that the poor souls from purgatory don’t have a body but appear dirtied and chained when appearing to those on earth for prayers. Continually they become more bright until they appear to the person praying for then in beautiful white robes and a dazzling, radiant smile.
 
Well, going in the opposite direction, even animals without immortal souls or rational thought are conscious, so I suppose it depends on what we mean by consciousness… But I assume that souls, on some level, must be aware or conscious even when separated from the body, even if the experience of consciousness is different from our own. I imagine that can be further amplified by the grace of God.
 
Yes, indeed. Aquinas even differentiates things like sensory memory and intellectual memory, so in a sense the soul could be said to have a different kind of “consciousness” than what we experience with the body.
 
I just want to clarify that when I speak of consciousness, I am speaking specifically about qualia. So that means my real question is, do souls expereince qualia, or is this just a physical process of the brain? I don’t feel like Aquinas gives a satisfactory answer here.
 
Soul cannot experience anything without body, according to Hylomorphic dualism.
 
There is growing evidence coming from near death experiences. A certain percentage of folks see after a lifetime of blindness. The thing about them is they were seeing things and able to describe them having never seen them before. Recognizing colors and such. Fathr Spitzer discusses it well on his program.
 
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Yes, so what then is the nature of consciousness in a soul without a body? Is there some kind of qualia, perhaps a qualia distinct from what we experience now?
 
Within recent years, neuroscience has been able to explain these things in terms of the brain.
 
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