What is the human soul, and if you know

[John_Martin]

Ack! Just because an explanation accords with what “seems” to be happening does not provide adequate foundation. Ptolemaic solar system, the luminiferous aether, and so on… What is the basis for you saying that wills and appetites are in the “soul” rather than (just) the mind?

Ooooh - you will miss it - seeing it in yourself is not the foundation of its accuracy of description (that you can find reading Aquinas), but making yourself the guinea pig is how you will enjoy the company of your soul rather than talking about some “thing” with no substance in your understanding.

And, actually, modern scientific method is about what “seems to be happening” in experimentation based upon reasoning about that seeming controlled reality. I have no problems with this.

 

[Nixbits]

But surely the scientific method is such that, having devised a hypothesis that seems to accord with what is observed, experiments are then carried out specifically to try to prove or disprove the hypothesis with respect to any other explanation.

Have experiments been carried out that verify the soul hypothesis and disprove the ‘mind without a soul’ hypothesis? I suspect not, or else the existence of the soul would be taught in biology lessons.

So, is it that experiments have been carried out but they do not prove the existence of the soul? In which case the idea of the soul persists despite scientific evidence to the contrary. Or is it that the nature of the hypothesised soul is such that no experiment can be devised? In which case it remains an unproven idea.

 

[John_Martin]

“Soul” is an artificial term, rather than hypothesis, for whatever it is that animates a material body to self-movement (rather than only moving when re-positioned by some other action on it from outside itself). This material body could be plant or animal.

The term “soul” persists, not because all believe in a non-material animator of material bodies, but because all accept the definition that “animation or self movement is present (life), and we will use the term soul for whatever it is that facilitates or causes this self movement”. And when the self movement ceases, suddenly there begins decomposition of all the structures, cells, molecules, etc. into non-animated material. The soul is gone, even though all the materials at that instant still appear intact for a moment or more, and there is no movement of the object by itself, whether plant or animal. All would agree that whatever animated that body no longer is animating it (or that something about that body makes it no longer suitable to animation as an individual of its species).

 

[BHL_20]

The OP has been banned. That means the pro-soul people win the argument by default!

 

[Aloysium]

But surely the scientific method is such that, having devised a hypothesis that seems to accord with what is observed, experiments are then carried out specifically to try to prove or disprove the hypothesis with respect to any other explanation.

Have experiments been carried out that verify the soul hypothesis and disprove the ‘mind without a soul’ hypothesis? I suspect not, or else the existence of the soul would be taught in biology lessons.

So, is it that experiments have been carried out but they do not prove the existence of the soul? In which case the idea of the soul persists despite scientific evidence to the contrary. Or is it that the nature of the hypothesised soul is such that no experiment can be devised? In which case it remains an unproven idea.

While this is how you say that the validity of ideas should be assessed, I would assert that 99.9% of what you “know” to be true has not been determined by your personal experimentation. Ultimately, all you know is based on faith in something, and most, you have accepted on authority.

I would also point out that science is a social phenomenon. Whatever concepts, ideas, imaginings that you have about the world, they are part of the social fabric that is the realm of human knowledge. Science is component of systems that have to do with ideology, politics, economics and honour. From the food you eat, the news you read, the toilet paper you use, from morning to night, this very experience is the product of scientific research and development. You cannot take the human factor out of science. In addition, I would say that ultimately, it is only through preset ways that we perceive and understand the universe that we form ideas about ourselves in the world.

So, here I am communicating with you. We are physical beings and we connect within nature, as part of nature. I could go into a long discussion as to the myriad of factors that go into the building of the experience you are having at the moment. Your very ability to see and organize these symbols, their transformation into ideas can be understood neurophysiologically. If you notice that you are sitting on a chair, you can understand how the innumerable biochemical events that are taking place in your brain are such that their organization presents itself as gestalts in the mind. There is an organized pattern of perception, feeling and thought that is in one moment thinking about these words, and the next thinking about your behind. You are one person, who can be understood in accordance to different dimensions/categorical systems/ frameworks/whatever - mind and body. In addition to these irrefutable two ways of understanding ourselves, is the spiritual soul.

I am here communicating to you who exists in your moment - this very moment to you. It is irrefutable that I exist now as it is irrefutable that you exist now. The problem is that on my drive to my weekly retreat, I may die. Although we are connecting here, I may no longer be on this earth at the time when you read this.

We are real and we connect with the world. We are mysteries as is the world. In this moment that mystery comes into existence as experience which is the manifestation of our having fundamentally a relational nature. This is all about the soul - the existence of oneself in the world as a separate being participating in and communing with the world. Love is the perfect expression of relating - a giving oneself over to that which is other and thereby becoming one with it. We do this all the time. You are doing this now as you read and understand these words. The soul has to do with the overarching reality of what is truly going on. You get it by just being.

I have to leave. sorry for typos.

 

[GEddie]

The soul cannot be observed directly. For that matter, neither can the mind (which is an aspect of soul).

But then, neither can life; we hear bodies breathe, feel the warmth of skin, see heads nod and toes wiggle and infer that life is present, but we never see life. Yet the existence of life is never called into doubt.

ICXC NIKA

 

[Nixbits]

John, I don’t have a problem with people using the word ‘soul’ to mean the animating life force. The fact that living things are alive can be observed, tested, measured. However, it has been suggested on this thread that the soul is something distinct from the mind. I’m not convinced of that. That’s a claim that could perhaps be subject to scientific enquiry.

In any case, in my experience, when people use the word ‘soul’ in a religious context, they are talking about something more. It is the something that endures after death of the material body. That’s the part that interests me, because it seems to me to be a claim without any evidence to back it up.

 

[John_Martin]

Hello, Nixbits,
First, your choice of the words “the animating life-force” indicates “power”. “Soul” is actually taken to mean an “Object” which has “animating life force” as a power belonging to it, so it is potentially able to animate, and when you see movement in a body, then you are observing this object actually moving the body (what was potency is becoming actual).

If you are an adherent (strict adherent) to the causal relatedness of reality, then when you see something that you regard as living, as having self-caused movement, and if that movement is from a material cause that is materially part of the material body, I would think it would be short order before you are able to say what moves the body (which would be termed an act of the will) such that you could spatially locate that material called “the Will”, and it should be short order before you can locate that material part of the body which moves images and words and concepts in and out of the brain and mouth through the intelligent choice of neurons to trigger and then move the center for processing both imagined and sensed images and symbols.

However, logically, you cannot say that it is self-moving because something else external to the body’s material that moves the body would be required to cause this internal mover to move, to be alive itself. Something would be needed to animate the material of the body’s internal material animator.

As to the religious claims of the soul continuing when separated from the body, and being a spiritual thing, while revelation clarifies this, still philosophers outside Catholicism have speculated that it has to be this way (read Aristotle’s “de Anima” to see a fairly concise and not difficult to follow treatise on the soul. Or what I suggested to the OP before he or she was banned, dhspriory.org/thomas/english/QDdeAnima.htm to see what a Catholic would say - much longer piece, where your animating object will be taxed quite heavily in working your way through it).

Being an adherent to this revelation, I find the suggested treatises to be quite compelling and also accurate descriptions of what I find happening within myself, to the point where I can feel like I know myself and act in accord with them and having no surprises that their descriptions do not detail, much like NASA feels comfortable sending rockets into space based on theories in math an physics with no surprises that their understanding of math and physics did not detail.