Much talked about, much used, the concept of soul has nowadays turned into a chewing gum, especially when put in the context of reincarnation. The truth is that the concept of soul has been tackled by both philosophy and religion since antiquity; this should account for the dozens of definitions there are. The soul is also connected to immortality, as it is widely believed that it’s the one and only component that survives physical death. In connection with the body, the latter is seen either as its prison or its shrine.
In terms of etymology, the word soul is linked by some scholars with the word sea, probably reflecting early Germanic peoples’ beliefs that the bottom of the sea was the place where souls originate and return. The corresponding Greek word psyche literally means a “gasp of air blown into”.
Do I believe in soul? Well, I used to. I am not so sure any more that the concept can be of real use; on the contrary, it can be misleading. People talk about the soul and reincarnation, as if it is their personality that will survive; a grave misunderstanding. Soul and personality are not the same. If it exists, the soul is the underlying layer where the ingredients of personality (thoughts, emotions, sentiments) softly fall upon or, by contrast, achingly leave their burning etchings on. It is the sum-up, the end result of a person’s tendencies, virtues, vices, ethics, codes of conduct, etc. It is the “therefore” of one’s life.
If there really is something of the sort, it should be likened to a processor and personality to a piece of software. Thus, “real” love for example should translate into love of the processor rather than the software.
And then there are other questions. Is soul restricted to humans? In other words, is it only humans that have soul? What about animals, plants, minerals? Is the animistic view to be ruled out as total folly?
What do you think?
20 comments:
Isn't the concept of a soul just a little too convenient? For those afraid of dying, it is a way to live forever (ugh).
And isn't the concept of a soul just a little too transparent? For those who want people to behave according to a set moral code, behaving well assigns one to heaven, sinning assigns one to hell.
Since there is no physical trace of a soul, it is one of those things that can't be proved or disproved, so it is simply left to each and every one of us to decide whether or not to believe we have a soul. For me it is too convenient and too transparent.
"Since there is no physical trace of a soul, it is one of those things that can't be proved or disproved"
It's not something measurable or observable, I agree with that. But isn’t it true that you can feel or that you have insight or that you can trace a stratum like the one I described above in your own psychology? And I can trace it too. What is it then and where is it? Is it just chemical reactions in the neurons of our brain? Is it hormones? Is it our DNA? Is it something too ethereal for our microscopes and other organs to observe? I frankly don't know.
And then there is a strange sense of unity with everything there is, especially if you are into meditation or practices of the sort. There is the sense of an underlying something that connects everything; in my readings I have come across the words “consciousness”, “awareness” and “space” and I have used those to describe it. Couldn’t the word “soul” be an alternative? What about a global soul, something on which “thoughts, emotions, sentiments softly fall upon or, by contrast, achingly leave their burning etchings on”? What is it that makes a flock of birds or fish to take the same turn at the very same moment? What lies behind the humdrum, the constant clatter of human life? What would we hear if we could only listen?
Yes, the concept of soul is too convenient and too transparent the way it is used. This however doesn’t in itself prove the soul inexistent.
Nature does not create something without a purpose. What is the purpose of having a soul? We have fingers and an opposable thumb to make us more dexterous. We have senses to tell us about the world around us. We have a brain to better understand and improve that world; it allows us to invent, create, and imagine. Is the soul then something of our imagination? I think so. It gives us comfort to imagine that there is something beyond the humdrum of human existence and death. So if the soul is anything it is a product of our imagination that gives us comfort at times when we need a reason to live.
I can live with a definition as such, at least for now. If the human mind evolves some new meaning to the word "soul" then the definition will change and I could live with that. How about you?
I try to leave my mind open and I prefer not to pretend that I know everything. Hence, if there is a purpose to the existence of soul perhaps it is one we just can't figure out yet. This at the theoretical level.
At the practical level (how this is applied to my everyday life), I find the concept "not necessary" to explain the world, as I already wrote. I don't need to put the soul in the picture, because I don't believe that we are here to learn something and then die only to come back and learn some more. What would be the purpose of dying then?
If there is something to be learnt, I don't see why it couldn't be at the level of the species rather than that of the individual. It makes more sense to me that way. That's why I find something like a global soul more appealing.
"So if the soul is anything it is a product of our imagination that gives us comfort at times when we need a reason to live."
It is a grave mistake to dismiss imagination. Imagination exists, therefore it is real. You can argue about that which is imagined, but not about imagination. Once you acknowledge that imagination exists, then comes the questions: Where is it located? How does it work? According to some, imagination is a core function of the soul - not of the body.
Something crooked happened with blogger. I had written a reply to James, I could see it a couple of hours back and now it's gone for Heaven's sake!
Here we go again then:
@James
I hope I can keep an open mind and an aversion to the tendency to pretend that I know everything. I can easily accept for example that the purpose of the soul is something we just haven't figured out yet. This at the theoretical level.
At the practical level (at how philosophical concepts affect my everyday life), however, and like I've already written, I find the concept soul "not necessary". This is because I don't believe that we come here to learn and then die only to come back and learn some more. What would be the purpose of dying then?
If there is such a thing as evolution, I feel it is better applied to our species as a whole rather than to individuals. This is why I can more easily relate to the concept of a global soul.
@ersi
According to others, imagination is the core function of personality rather than soul (together with memory they are believed to be the two pillars on which personality is built).
According to cognitive scientists, it is just another brain function with interesting implications as to consciousness itself.
Imagination is the formation of a mental image of something that is not perceived as real and is not present to the senses; imagination reveals what the world could be. But it seems plain that imagination, too, is a product of chemistry and physics. We do not use our fingers to imagine something, we must use our mind in the forming mental images, sensations and concepts. This is not too difficult as I am imagining right now as to what you might look like, ersi. The mental picture I have of you now is no doubt wrong but I can imagine what I think, so imagination is also, at times, a distorted image of reality. It take brain power to imagine and the brain, as we know, functions via chemistry and physics.
I will admit, my argument is weak for when it comes to something like imagination, my imagination runs wild.
Imagination is also what makes our sensory experience meaningful, enabling us to interpret and make sense of it, whether from a conventional perspective or from a fresh, original, individual one. It is what makes perception more than the mere physical stimulation of sense organs. It also produces mental imagery, visual and otherwise, which is what makes it possible for us to think outside the confines of our present perceptual reality, to consider memories of the past and possibilities for the future, and to weigh alternatives against one another. Thus, imagination makes possible all our thinking about what is, what has been, and, perhaps most important, what might be.
James: Thus, imagination makes possible all our thinking about what is, what has been, and, perhaps most important, what might be.
Very true. As such, it is a cognitive function of paramount importance.
http://cleareaching.blogspot.com/2010/03/without-fantasy.html
I have to agree with you and keep open the possibility that soul is perhaps a figment of our imagination, intended to describe the stratum between a higher self (essence) and personality.
@J
"But it seems plain that imagination, too, is a product of chemistry and physics. We do not use our fingers to imagine something, we must use our mind in the forming mental images, sensations and concepts."
True, we do not use our fingers for imagination. But our fingers are physics and chemistry, so why do you say "imagination, too, is a product of chemistry and physics"? Why keep talking about spiritual matters when your core tenet is denial of spiritual reality?
The practicality of the concept of soul becomes obvious as soon as you understand that it is precisely meant to denote the non-material or "supernatural" reality. If you try to bind it to matter and nature, it will necessarily elude you forever. Anyway, the concept of soul can be bypassed with Buddhist concepts, yet you don't seem to be adhering to those either.
@C
James said: "Imagination makes possible all our thinking about what is, what has been, and, perhaps most important, what might be."
Aren't they simple memory and the ordinary intellect which remember and plan? If so, then, according to James's system, imagination would only be the "might be" bit - the element of doubt, in other words, or daydreaming, things we know to be false. For me (and you), imagination is not false.
Look, I'm lazy in general, but I am not a lazy thinker. I wish I would be a lazy debater...
Imagination by definition is false, the images and concepts we create in our mind are abstract, untouchable and unavailable to anyone including ourselves. We can put our imagined images and concepts down on paper but only then do they become really real. Otherwise they are simply ideas in the cyberspace of our thinking. I know you want to say that thinking is real and it is, but it is simple chemistry and physics.
Just because I can imagine the concept of a soul, does not mean that there is indeed a real soul. In fact the concept had to be explained to me by another person for me to even imagine a soul. We can all imagine a soul but it takes a leap of faith (blind faith) to even pretend it is real. And that is just what we do with a lot of philosophical and religious concepts, we pretend or imagine them to be real. But only by pretending to believe them do imagined things become real to us, but this is not enough to make them really real. I can say "I believe in (a) God", but what I am really doing is pretending that God is real and then believing in that pretense. Not even The Pope has seen God, so people have to convince themselves first that God exists (pretend) and then believe in what they pretend is real.
I prefer not to belong to an imaginary or "pretend" reality, after all what good does it do to fool yourself? I suppose there are weaker minded people that have to depend on something imaginary in order to cope with this life on earth but it doesn't make this reality anymore real, it makes it more like "Alice in Wonderland".
The issue of reality is harder to grasp than what one would readily think. Is there a “really real” reality? If there is, then everybody should have the same perception of it. Do you think this is the case, James? Because it’s not. Each one of us perceives eg colours, shades, smells, touch differently. What is blue for me, might be greenish for you or near-black to another. The only thing that we all share (and consequently agree on) is the abstraction of the object that we see. Let’s see that through an example.
Imagine that you, me and ersi are sitting round a table. There is a cube on the table. Each one of us sees it from a different perspective. I might argue it’s blue, you greenish and ersi near-black. We won’t be able to agree on its colour; but we will all agree it’s a cube alright. How do we know it’s a cube, if we can’t see all of its sides? Because imagination in everyone of us fills in the parts we can’t see.
Strangely, this function of imagination applies to our memories as well. The euristics in our brain sort memories by relevance, i.e. according to how they relate with each other. There is no sorting by occurrence in time. This is why memories fuse and blend with other memories and the result is a hybrid, altered memory – which we are afterwards certain that happened exactly as we remember it.
As for this issue: James - “that is just what we do with a lot of philosophical and religious concepts, we pretend or imagine them to be real”, I would add “and not only with such concepts; literally with everything”. Even when we give an interpretation of another’s attitude, such as this: Why keep talking about spiritual matters when your core tenet is denial of spiritual reality?, we are making a projection, i.e. we pretend or imagine that we know it for real.
Soul relations (or whichever way we are to call it) can be measured. While with certain very few precious individuals agreement is just about as deep as can be seen or felt, with James, for example, I only agree on the point that he is in denial of spiritual reality. To add disagreement upon disagreement, he does not admit this point directly...
There are dimensions to these kinds of (mis)matches. The match can grow deeper when selfishness is removed, the light is let in, the vision becomes clearer and secrets are uncovered. By the same methods and the same clarity of vision, any fundamental mismatch can be detected and corresponding precautions taken.
The handy one-word concept to refer to this landscape of psychological features and their social implications is "soul". How else are we to name it? It is a fully established concept. Psychology means "the science of soul".
Yes. It is a handy, one-word concept. I can readily use it exactly because it is such, even if I don't need it to interpret the world the way I do.
In relation to soul connection that you brought up, if the Buddhist model is true, then there isn't really such an issue. Buddhism sees all people sharing the same underlying something (global consciousness). This has several implications, however, because it only follows that everyone should be in connection with everyone else.
Now this connection can be precious and matching, conductive to love and mutuality - or not. This does not legitimize us to say that connections of the second type are less important. On the contrary. I'm sure you know that people with whom you experience hardship and disagreement are by far your best teachers ever. So much so, that in fact, if they didn't give you/us/anyone hardship, I would doubt the love.
So, beware: if you are making evaluations and speak about matching and mismatching soul connections, you are not speaking from a higher level. It's your likes and dislikes that are speaking, meaning your personality (or, if you'd rather, your brain).
Now here is the question: When the bacterium dies, does it get an afterlife?
There are not many people in the United States who believe that bacteria go to heaven. The Bible does not talk about heaven being filled with all the disease, putrefaction and pestilence that bacteria cause. And what, exactly, would go to heaven? Do all of the bacterium's molecules get transported to another dimension so that they can keep reacting? If that were happening, there would be thousands of tons of chemicals leaving earth every day. Clearly there is no afterlife for bacteria cells.
What about mosquitoes? A mosquito is much more complex than a bacterium cell. For one thing, a mosquito is a multi-cellular insect with amazing capabilities. But if you look at each cell in a mosquito, it is very much like a bacterium in its basic functioning.
Do mosquitoes get an afterlife? Clearly not. Think of how many mosquitoes have lived and died over the course of millions of years. No one imagines heaven being full of septillions of everlasting mosquitoes. There is also the problem that we saw with bacteria -- the only way for a mosquito to go to heaven would be to somehow transport all the chemicals in a mosquito from earth to heaven.
What about mice? They are no different from mosquitoes. Mice are multicellular organisms, but each cell is a little chemical factory very much like a bacterium. Dogs? Ditto. Chimps? Ditto.
So what about humans?
The human body is nothing but a set of chemical reactions. The chemical reactions powering a human life are no different from the reactions powering the life of a bacterium, a mosquito, a mouse, a dog or a chimp. When a human being dies, the chemical reactions stop. There is no "soul" mixed in with the chemicals, just like there is no soul in a bacterium, a mosquito, a mouse, a dog or a chimp. Why would there be an afterlife for the chemicals that make up a human body?
The whole notion of your "soul" is completely imaginary. The concept of a "soul" has been invented by religion because many people have trouble facing their own mortality. It makes people feel better, but the concept is a complete fabrication.
It is when you think about the chemical reactions powering your life and your brain that you realize how completely imaginary your "soul" truly is. And at that point, everything about religion comes unraveled.
"The concept of a "soul" has been invented by religion because many people have trouble facing their own mortality."
Let's see if I have trouble facing it.
Afterlife is not heaven. It is experientially quite the same life as the physical life, but with the emphasis on the night-dream side of experiences. From the point of view of heaven, both life and afterlife are a form of death,* because both life and afterlife have a beginning and an ending.
But there is something that continues through all these changes. That is the soul. This concept is convenient and well established - therefore useful, if nothing more.
Afterlife is not physical or chemical. It is protoplasmic. Well, it is useless to explain it to someone who only believes in matter. It's the same as you trying to explain to me that there only is matter and the non-material things I see and experience are not real. We can agree that seeing is believing and it is really hard to believe something you don't see.
There is no effort in dying. Death is natural and you don't get to heaven simply by dying. To get to heaven is a tremendous effort according to some religions, or inexplicable grace according to some other religions.
* Afterlife is prelife to the next physical life. Inasmuch as death equals afterlife, both life and death are the same thing. Both in synthesis can be termed "life" or "death" (i.e. referring to both at the same time), depending on the point of view. Matthew 16:25 "For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it."
Ok. Your made your point clear, James. Of course, what you are describing in your comment is essentially a denial of afterlife and not of the soul per se. You are, hence, denying the connection of the soul to immortality. Now, as I have said many times, I don't believe in that connection either, at least not the way it is usually presented.
But, just for the sake of discussion, I'll try to tackle the issue from another standpoint, a little bit like playing the devil's advocate. What will happen, if we replace the word "soul" with the word "energy"? Maybe something interesting will come out. Let’s see.
Bacteria don't get an afterlife and neither do mosquitoes. But they have cells, thus molecular structures and these molecular structures are made up of zillions of atoms, i.e. particles in movement. Now movement produces energy, doesn’t it? Clearly, then, both bacteria and mosquitoes emit energy, just by the very fact that they are alive. Kirlian photography provides evidence of the fact and I think that this point can extend to the entire fauna and flora of the planet. It can also cover minerals and anything else we consider inanimate or still, even stones, dirt, etc. which are all made up of atoms and particles. Humans of course also fall under the same rule. Therefore, everything living on this planet emits energy just by the sheer fact that it lives.
Now, as you may remember from school, strange things happen with energy. For example, it is easily transformed or it can create fields – but the one thing it can never do is get lost. According to the law of conservation of energy, energy can’t get lost – thus it can only transform, a little bit like reincarnation. Only it gets more complicated than that, because we have to put intelligence in our reasoning too, as particles, molecules, cells and organs somehow know how to function, which means that they have intelligence or information embedded somewhere. Apart from energy, therefore, we must also take information into consideration.
Now the energy of the bacteria or the mosquito or a cat or a human, when they die, where does it go? I mean, since it cannot get lost, it has to go someplace or get transformed. Of course we all know the “earth to earth and dust to dust” motto, which might account for the transformation of energy part. But what about the information that is linked to this energy, where does this information go? Does it get stored in some other medium? Does it get transformed into something else? Does it just vanish? We don’t know. It would seem inconsistent of the creator to have it simply vanish, wouldn’t it? And on top of that there are plenty other things we also don’t know and can’t explain, such as “spooky actions at a distance”. These involve both energy and intelligence/information.
I am thinking now that the problem could be just linguistic or “connotational” after all. Maybe the word “soul” is all too heavy with connotations and should be replaced with another: “energy” or “information” or perhaps a new word that we don’t know yet. As simple as that.
@ersi
I'm sorry, dear. Your reasoning is too difficult even for me to take down. But of course everyone is entitled to the belief system that works best for them all the same... :)
This is not to say that I don't value your input, ersi, if it sounded like that. My apologies. I really value your comments, always. :)
Post a Comment