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And before anyone tries to tell me "I don't believe in souls" which they inevitably will, despite everything I say here, let me clear up some things here. The word soul only has anything to do with religion, is because of dumb old Webster's relating it to heaven or hell or junk. This is a christocentric view of the soul, however, and doesn't accurately tell us anything.
Soul is not "some creepy life force granted by God which leaves the body and goes to heaven and/or gets sold to demons". It can be defined as such. But this is a lousy definition that leaves out pretty much every other religion. And is completely unworkable with other worldviews, like atheism. We're tossing it aside in favor of a better one.
I'm going to use two college level words to roughly define what a soul is: anima and gestalt. Gestalt is "an organized whole that is more than the sum of its parts." Anima has a great number of definitions, but the simplest is psyche which refers to two things "life and self". We're going to start with gestalt first. Supose I'm Frankenstein. I want to do two experiments. First, I'm going to cut all organs apart and the body itself, leave them as pieces for approximately 4 seconds, and then stitch all skin, bones, vessels and flesh, and organs back together. The result would be a corpse. While we can cut open a body for surgery, pulling it apart is something entirely different. Next, I'm going to transplant all organs into a genetic clone with no organs. While living organs have been successfully transferred into another living body, I would expect this experiment to fail. And yet, you can do this with any computer, except for the OS. This implies that for anything to live, it has a sense of self, of ownership, and that this requires a sense of wholeness.
Anima is defined loosely as life and the self. Yet these are two different things, aren't they? What if they weren't? Let's assume for a second, that to be alive is nothing but a sense of self. You cannot find the soul as an organ on the body, but there is a definite sense of consciousness, of one's mark in the world. In fact, when one stops making an impact on the world, one is said to be dead. Let's examine things that move, but do not have anima to speak of. The Energizer Bunny. Water in a stream, lava, a boulder falling from a cliff. In all but the first, the reason that such move is due to forces like gravity. In the first, the beastie is animated (note the word, it implies the semblance of an anima without an actual one) by electricity and an on switch, and maybe programming. It doesn't have independent thought. The energizer bunny will always bang the drum as long as it has power. What you won't expect it to do, is anything else. It won't plot the destruction of life on Earth, it won't move from China to Russia. It just keeps going and going.
These are what souls are. Now, there are two (maybe three) types of soul or self. The collective, the individual (and the universal). The collective soul is most shown for simple lifeforms. Mushrooms, insects, bacteria, coral, all of these have a sense only of larger goal. The individual ant maybe be squished, but the hive moves according to a specific will. The individual soul is the ability to be distinct. The individual soul can create art, cooking, music, or whatever. Now let's talk about resonance. This is a term I'm using, for lack of a better one, to describe that ability to share one's self, through one's art or cooking. If you go to an IHOP, you are unlikely to get pancakes that no matter how delicious, are anything but pancakes. However, if someone makes Ma Po Tofu from scratch, they are unlikely to make it quite the same as another person. I have actually seen this phenomenon in a fish fry. Same batter, same fish, different cooks. Different end result. It tastes different and looks different.
You are defining "soul" to suit your point of view.
Do you really think people here are going to let that fly?
Hey, we have prolific posters who redefine God every day so as to prolong tortuous multi-page threads. Why not the soul? How about the soul as ALL THE MATTER THAT HAS EVER EXISTED?
And before anyone tries to tell me "I don't believe in souls" which they inevitably will, despite everything I say here, let me clear up some things here. The word soul only has anything to do with religion, is because of dumb old Webster's relating it to heaven or hell or junk. This is a christocentric view of the soul, however, and doesn't accurately tell us anything.
Soul is not "some creepy life force granted by God which leaves the body and goes to heaven and/or gets sold to demons". It can be defined as such. But this is a lousy definition that leaves out pretty much every other religion. And is completely unworkable with other worldviews, like atheism. We're tossing it aside in favor of a better one.
I'm going to use two college level words to roughly define what a soul is: anima and gestalt. Gestalt is "an organized whole that is more than the sum of its parts." Anima has a great number of definitions, but the simplest is psyche which refers to two things "life and self". We're going to start with gestalt first. Supose I'm Frankenstein. I want to do two experiments. First, I'm going to cut all organs apart and the body itself, leave them as pieces for approximately 4 seconds, and then stitch all skin, bones, vessels and flesh, and organs back together. The result would be a corpse. While we can cut open a body for surgery, pulling it apart is something entirely different. Next, I'm going to transplant all organs into a genetic clone with no organs. While living organs have been successfully transferred into another living body, I would expect this experiment to fail. And yet, you can do this with any computer, except for the OS. This implies that for anything to live, it has a sense of self, of ownership, and that this requires a sense of wholeness.
Anima is defined loosely as life and the self. Yet these are two different things, aren't they? What if they weren't? Let's assume for a second, that to be alive is nothing but a sense of self. You cannot find the soul as an organ on the body, but there is a definite sense of consciousness, of one's mark in the world. In fact, when one stops making an impact on the world, one is said to be dead. Let's examine things that move, but do not have anima to speak of. The Energizer Bunny. Water in a stream, lava, a boulder falling from a cliff. In all but the first, the reason that such move is due to forces like gravity. In the first, the beastie is animated (note the word, it implies the semblance of an anima without an actual one) by electricity and an on switch, and maybe programming. It doesn't have independent thought. The energizer bunny will always bang the drum as long as it has power. What you won't expect it to do, is anything else. It won't plot the destruction of life on Earth, it won't move from China to Russia. It just keeps going and going.
These are what souls are. Now, there are two (maybe three) types of soul or self. The collective, the individual (and the universal). The collective soul is most shown for simple lifeforms. Mushrooms, insects, bacteria, coral, all of these have a sense only of larger goal. The individual ant maybe be squished, but the hive moves according to a specific will. The individual soul is the ability to be distinct. The individual soul can create art, cooking, music, or whatever. Now let's talk about resonance. This is a term I'm using, for lack of a better one, to describe that ability to share one's self, through one's art or cooking. If you go to an IHOP, you are unlikely to get pancakes that no matter how delicious, are anything but pancakes. However, if someone makes Ma Po Tofu from scratch, they are unlikely to make it quite the same as another person. I have actually seen this phenomenon in a fish fry. Same batter, same fish, different cooks. Different end result. It tastes different and looks different.
As a computer wthout an OS is like a body without a brain...So what does this tell you the soul is?....
I don't like the word "soul." It comes with a lot of attached religious baggage and is usually only used in reference to humans. I prefer "spirit" (singular). And I believe everything that lives has within it a spark of spirit.
hmmmm...by objects are you referring to living objects like trees and such, or are you suggesting my Dodge Cummins has a soul?
Cars have souls. Didn't you ever see the end of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life?
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