What exactly is the soul?

[ynotzap]

The heart is the first physical instrument through which the soul moves the other parts of the body. therefore as a mover, the soul is united to the other parts of the body through the medium of the heart

The heart supplies the blood which carries the neutrients and oxygen and all the things needed to sustain life, and the health of the body. This enables the body to have locomotion, physical movement as well as movement within the body. The heart is also supplied electrical pulses from the brain through the nervous system. Some of these impulses from the brain are automatically keeping up the proper rhthym for the heart by stimulating the muscles of the heart at the proper time. Other impulses are controlled through the brain and nervous system to move the body as a unit, this is voluntary control from a command from the will, as faculty of the mind. I choose to stop, I choose to go. So an act of the soul causes the body to act, because they operate as one unit. In this sense it is said “the soul as mover is united to the body”

ynotzap:

As the form of the body, the soul is united to every part of the body essentially and directly. the being of man is the union of matter and spirit, body and soul, one is incomplete without the other.

There is a physical order in the body, and this order shows purpose for the different actions in the body. The activity of the soul is controlling and sustaining this order, that makes the body what it is, a human body, soul united to matter, or spirit united to the physical. This is the essential nature of man, this is called form.

ynotzap:

It is the soul that abstracts from the physical image called the phantom image, the spiritual concepts The brain stores all of the imput of sensible realities, things that are sensed through the senses and fed to the brain. Again in this life the soul in dependent upon the body to supply it this sensory imput to be able to abstract intellectual concepts which are spiritual, concepts which will give the person understanding, knowledge of universal truths.

When our senses are stimulated by things, they send electrical impulses to the brain where they are stored (in neurons, I think) The brain responds to electrical stimulations that exhibit recall of sense impressions. These sense impressions produce images in the brain called “phantoms” from which ideas abstracted. eg. the eye responds to color, shape as experienced when we see a “car’. The mind or intellect recognized these colors and shapes as a “car” So every time we hear the word 'car”, we have associated that “word” with the image of a car. Now we don’t need to see the car physically to “know” what it is. The idea and the image are connected, associated. The idea is the spiritual representation of the what is sensed. So to explain "what a car is"is to go to deeper thinking. Then we tell what a car is made of, it’s purpose, how it operates, and this requires a lot of ideas, but each idea finds it’s counter part in the senses, as something that was sensed and given a name. a word(sound) That why we need words that represent meanings, and meanings are something understood, and not sensed directly, for they are spiritual concept. But they are initially derived from the senses as sense impressions. There is no understanding without words being associated with sense impressions, in humans they are connected. For this reason, if our brain suffer damage, we cease to understand. We are spirit united to matter. Incidently, matter can not be destroyed, it’s state of existence can change eg. the body can change into gas, lliquid or solid, but it will always remain matter. That’s why when the soul leaves the body, (the principle of activity that keeps the body a living body) the body turns to the elemental compounds of matter often referred to as “dust”

ynotzap:

The intellect;, a power of the soul does not need a bodily organ in its operations as the senses do. The human soul is the Act of an organic body because the body is an organ
The intelligible species (concepts) is made to be actually understood by abstraction from the phantasms; (sensible image) If the body fails in sensing, the soul will not be able to abstract thoughts from what is sensed, but the soul will still retain its abilities to abstract intelligible species (thoughts, which are spiritual, not physical, they can only be understood not sensed)

The intellect the power of the soul to know does not in itself (it can subsist in itself) need a physical organ to operate because it is a spiritual substance independent of matter. It is because of the soul that the body is a body, an entity composed of specialized tissues and adapted to performance of specific functions involved in physical and spiritual actions The body is used by the soul as an instrument.

Faith l960
Sorry it took so long, I got side-tracted, I’ll try to make it plainer for you, although you may have to look some words up, this is philosophy

 

[Faith1960]

Faith l960
Sorry it took so long, I got side-tracted, I’ll try to make it plainer for you, although you may have to look some words up, this is philosophy

Its a good thing i didnt have a lifelong dream to become a philosopher.

 

[ynotzap]

Faith i960: I witnessed a woman dying, she place her head on a pillow, sighed, I think, then a pale warm glow appeared on her face, I knew she had died. I noticed that she was still breathing, then the breathing became slower and slower, over a short period of time. I told this to the nurse who said that she had died, and the breathing was a reflex action.

Animals are said to have sense knowledge based on sense memories which do not need a rational soul,or spirit, but a sentient or material one, as vegitative life exhibits
The human rational soul is said to possess all of these capabilities. We share the animal capabilities including sense memories, and sense knowledge, and we go one further, we are capable of reasoning, and knowing spiritually Add all of these capabilities up and we have a human

 

[GEddie]

Faith i960: I witnessed a woman dying, she place her head on a pillow, sighed, I think, then a pale warm glow appeared on her face, I knew she had died. I noticed that she was still breathing, then the breathing became slower and slower, over a short period of time. I told this to the nurse who said that she had died, and the breathing was a reflex action.

Animals are said to have sense knowledge based on sense memories which do not need a rational soul,or spirit, but a sentient or material one, as vegitative life exhibits
The human rational soul is said to possess all of these capabilities. We share the animal capabilities including sense memories, and sense knowledge, and we go one further, we are capable of reasoning, and knowing spiritually Add all of these capabilities up and we have a human

IIUC, you’re not dead if you’re breathing. Breath is life, biologically.

A “glow in the face” can be anything, IMNAAHO

ICXC NIKA

 

[Aloysium]

I’ve seen a few people die. I’ve seen some linger the way you describe the person whom the nurse said was dead. If she were dead they would have shipped her off to the morgue. Actually, in most of these situations, those accompanying the person from life are very careful about what they say. It has been my impression that a least on one occasion I had enough evidence to believe that the spirit of the person was present after she stopped breathing. I am naturally not going to share it because it was personal and not up for any discussion. Consider me crazy, it doesn’t matter. I am telling you; believe it or don’t.

 

[GEddie]

I’ve seen a few people die. I’ve seen some linger the way you describe the person whom the nurse said was dead. If she were dead they would have shipped her off to the morgue. Actually, in most of these situations, those accompanying the person from life are very careful about what they say. It has been my impression that a least on one occasion I had enough evidence to believe that the spirit of the person was present after she stopped breathing. I am naturally not going to share it because it was personal and not up for any discussion. Consider me crazy, it doesn’t matter. I am telling you; believe it or don’t.

You don’t have to say, and I certainly don’t doubt that someone can be “alive” even if the breathing has failed, but if someone is breathing they are most definitely alive.

GOD Bless and ICXC NIKA.

 

[ynotzap]

IIUC, you’re not dead if you’re breathing. Breath is life, biologically.

A “glow in the face” can be anything, IMNAAHO

ICXC NIKA

I took the nurses word and experience about the situation. A reflex action, like the chicken with it’s head chopped off. The glow , and pale complexion, a serene expression gave the impression that she had died. The nurse testified to this reflex action, as found in other patients who had died. It was just an awareness on my part Can we have biological movement without life, did you ever see a lizards tail move when separated from the body? they even use this feature to fool prey, to distract them, while they run away. Is the tail called “living” because it moves? We are part animals, we have animality and rationality as a unit called rational animals.

 

[JuanFlorencio]

On your last point, agreed but I doubt that those scientists and medicos preface every decision by worrying about whether they are proving or disproving pre-scientific philosophical dogma, since doing so would just get in the way of their work. Btw, I’ll deny this conversation ever took place since on CAF I’m constantly being told that all scientists are naughty materialists and there cannot possibly be any Catholic scientists, no sirree, don’t come here with such nonsense, etc., etc.

I don’t know what is going on other persons minds. I just tell you what I have seen and what I have listened. Perhaps I don’t force any assumption in this regard because I don’t feel the need to.

I was going for something else: A thousand years ago, philosophers must have struggled to imagine how something like a moving image could be remembered in the mind. How in heaven’s name could a moving image be recorded in static material substance? Well, obviously it can’t, it’s impossible, it must be supernatural, some kind of immaterial spiritual substance.

Whereas we all have a mobile phone which can make and remember a movie. If mobile phones can do it without any immaterial spiritual substance, so can our minds. (Another way to look at this is that immaterial spiritual substance turned out to be what we now call electricity, but I digress ).

You know, I have some colleagues here who are engineers on electronics, computing systems and robotics, and as during a time I was very curious about how those computer devices called “memories” work, I was asking them about it. To my surprise they could not answer my second or third set of questions. They seemed to know no more than you do about it: those things work and that is it. I don’t know if, for you, it is a sign of intellectual superiority over the ancients, but their ignorance did not concern them at all: Use it and don’t ask, said they.

I have my children and a modern mobile phone, and, believe it or not, I am still one of those ancient guys who find enormous differences between them. When we had our first child, I used to think of him as a marvelous being who, after the union of two tiny cells, worked as a singular and incomprehensible (to me it is still definitely incomprehensible) “matter attractor”, protected within his mother’s womb and taking matter from her mother’s body to form himself. He was growing and developing by himself without any intervention from us. Once he was constituted, he came out and started to cry, and to breath, and he looked for his mother… To me, it is… incomprehensible…

As for my mobile phone…, it was designed and assembled by some of those marvelous human beings (though there must be some robots in the production line as well). It didn’t assemble itself. Mobile phones don’t remember anything; they just reproduce something which was recorded in their “memories”.

I don’t believe the mind is a homunculus, although that does seem to be a popular folk belief. To me that’s similar to the belief in qualia, and to the belief in immaterial substance. Each of these starts with an assumption that the mind is a thing which can be isolated. Then, when it’s nowhere to be found, hey presto it must be in an immaterial substance, which perfectly explains why it’s nowhere to be found. But the initial assumption is wrong. We can isolate functions, but we can’t isolate the mind. The mind emerges from the components, the mind is greater than the sum of its parts.

Yes, that belief is kind of embedded in language. Even you speak in such a way that it would seem you believe in the existence of the homunculus. When you talk about the brain, it also would seem to be the homunculus for you; haven’t you noticed that?

On the other hand, I think that if you limited yourself to describe just what you perceive, you would never say something like “the mind emerges from the components”. You don’t see any mind emerging, Inocente. By saying that you are only repeating other “ancient pre-scientific philosophical dogma”.

 

[ynotzap]

I took the nurses word and experience about the situation. A reflex action, like the chicken with it’s head chopped off. The glow , and pale complexion, a serene expression gave the impression that she had died. The nurse testified to this reflex action, as found in other patients who had died. It was just an awareness on my part Can we have biological movement without life, did you ever see a lizards tail move when separated from the body? they even use this feature to fool prey, to distract them, while they run away. Is the tail called “living” because it moves? We are part animals, we have animality and rationality as a unit called rational animals.

Also did you ever see a dead body sit up. It’s call rigormortis (stiffness of death), it’s the result of coagulation of the muscle protein. So things do move after death, including breathing, which I think is due to the para-sympathetic nervous system, which keeps a body living while unconscious, maybe a residual effect that remains in the body after death. IMHO

 

[ynotzap]

Its a good thing i didnt have a lifelong dream to become a philosopher.

Neither did I, but it’s just following an internal mental desire to know the truth, as we all have. God planted it in our minds in order to know Him, love Him and to serve Him and be happy with Him in the next world. Everyone is a natural philosopher.

 

[GEddie]

Its a good thing i didnt have a lifelong dream to become a philosopher.

No great loss.

Philosophy and US$4.50 will buy you a drink at Starbucks.

ICXC NIKA

 

[Faith1960]

I dont want to turnbthis into a Caitlyn Jenner thread, ,so please dont go there but i just heard on Dr. Drew that women and men have different brains.
A woman to man and a man to woman said their brains are that of the gender they have switched to.
I found that interesting.
Just thought Id mention it since we’re talking about brains.

 

[GEddie]

I dont want to turnbthis into a Caitlyn Jenner thread, ,so please dont go there but i just heard on Dr. Drew that women and men have different brains.
A woman to man and a man to woman said their brains are that of the gender they have switched to.
I found that interesting.
Just thought Id mention it since we’re talking about brains.

No surprise there.

The Church has always taught that sex/gender is soul deep.

ICXC NIKA

 

[JuanFlorencio]

Inocente
Here are three questions I addressed to you in mu post 142 that you never answered:

1. What do you guys [you and Juan] believe is the difference between the brain and the mind?
2. Is there nothing additional that distinguishes the mind from the brain; something “immaterial” that could be considered “spiritual”?
3. And if there is something spiritual that forms a composite to create the mind, what is its function?

Your posts lately read like something a materialist would write. If that were so, I could better understand where you stand.

Yppop

Hi Yppop!

I am sorry I didn’t see your questions before. To me they are very difficult to answer as you put them. I can say that there are clear differences between human beings and every other creatures in the world; and among the varied activities of human beings there are some which I cannot attribute to the power of matter alone.

 

[Faith1960]

Synaesthesia (the crossing of human senses so as to eg. hear color or smell sounds) is well established. It is believed to result from extra crossings of synapses in the head.

Although it is a mystery to those not possessing Synaesthesia (while synaesthetics are baffled that everybody doesn’t perceive life in this way), it seems that everybody has the rudiments of these crossings, which is why we say “sharp” sounds or “loud” colors.

ICXC NIKA

So do we think with our brains, or not?

 

[GEddie]

So do we think with our brains, or not?

Why repeat this question again and again?

Again, I’ll answer: Our mind uses the brain to think, in the same way as using the eyes to see, or the limbs to move. But it is the live human being – the minded body, the breathing mind – that achieves the thinking, seeing, or movement.

ICXC NIKA

 

[Faith1960]

Why repeat this question again and again?

Again, I’ll answer: Our mind uses the brain to think, in the same way as using the eyes to see, or the limbs to move. But it is the live human being – the minded body, the breathing mind – that achieves the thinking, seeing, or movement.

ICXC NIKA

Because im getting a lot of confusing ,(to me) answers to the question.

Like i just dont get your last sentence – it seems (to me,) that it contradicts the sentence before it.

 

[Faith1960]

I just read part of an article that agrees with what many of you are saying but explained it in a way i could understand.
The only thing different, is it says the mind resides in the brain.

Thoughts?

 

[Blue_Horizon]

You are mostly preaching to the choir here; there’s no need for that tone.
I would agree that the noxious gases of poorly thought out ideas have caused what were once solid understandings, to melt into a watered down and vague confusion which drowns the terra firma of truth.

I wasn’t aware I was preaching to the converted (a number of contributors here clearly believe the brain is but a conduit of the senses to “the other side”, while the “other side” totally animates the body directly through the brain as a driver the car through its dumb steering wheel) … and the “tone” here is really no more than that Galileo prob felt before the geocentrists whose day had clearly passed .

 

[Blue_Horizon]

You know, I have some colleagues here who are engineers on electronics, computing systems and robotics, and as during a time I was very curious about how those computer devices called “memories” work, I was asking them about it. To my surprise they could not answer my second or third set of questions.

Well you can try me with your questions if you like.
I am the same sort of engineer…with the added advantage of being more philosophically literate having majored in Aquinas before getting into both hardware and software engineering.

Mobile phones don’t remember anything; they just reproduce something which was recorded in their “memories”.

Exactly, by the “faculty of memory” we are only speaking of a well circumscribed subset of allegedly human soul based activity.

I would have no problem if it was concluded that the recall of memories required activity originating purely from an intellective soul.

However to say that the “memory bank” itself has to also be in the spiritual side as well … that seems to be denied by Ochkam’s razor.

For if scientific findings raise the likely possibility that biological material can adequately explain the human “memory bank” then why look for a more “occult” explanation?

Sure, some types of memory may still need to be located in the intellective soul, a hybrid model is fine, man is still validly called an animal afterall.

And of course even if the “memory bank” was in fact located in biological matter … that bodily complexity still requires the support of a very sophisticated soul. However the support will be from a “lower” power of the soul (Aristotle and Aquinas accept that the soul has a hierachy of powers so to speak with “intellect” being at the pinnacle and found only in man).