Your Immortal Soul

Okay I know we've touched on this before but it's been a long time and neither Bill nor I can remember much about it and we've gotten more participants since then, so let's explore this whole business of the 'Immortal Soul'. Primitive man as far back as 100,000 years ago believed in this apparently from some burial rituals and arrangements that have been discovered by anthropologists. We are here, alive and self-aware, and aware that we're self-aware, and our very conscious existence astounds and confounds us to the point that there seems something 'magical' about it. This seems worth discussing.

In a nutshell:
1) Do you believe that there is something apart from mind and body that, for lack of any scientific designation, would be called the 'soul'? Why or why not?

2) If you do believe in a 'soul', what would it consist of? What would it preserve? Earthly memories? Personality? Or just the purest kernel of self-awareness? What is the root 'you' that you identify a 'soul' with?

3) If you don't believe in a soul, what do you consider to be your most fundamental, bedrock notion of 'self' or identity?

Paul,
I look at mine everyday, just to be sure the tread hasn't worn thru yet.

Seriously, the symbolism and language of Christian soul searching is found in so much of the worlds religous literature, some that preceeded christ and some post christ, that it is an ignorant person who claims all knowledge of the subject by their reading solely of the C. bible on the subject.

Thinking of my past journey to Florence, Italy where I viewed the bottled remains of christian believers waiting for the second coming..they must have failed to pay their tithes...way past time for a pick up. Time to call the lords glorious goverment center and find out what the problem is.

1) I don't think so. Drugs can knock out and make you inconscious. They can turn off the soul, so to speak. The personality and memories can be altered by drugs or brain
damage. Apparently, the soul depends of the body.

2) If all earthly memories were lost, nobody could tell it was me, could they? I mean, if you take all the words out of a story, is it still the same story?

3) I think the most fundamental notions of "self" is the memories stored in the brain. If someone replaced absolutely all my memories with your memories, I think my brain would think it was Paul in a new body. What else *could* it think?

Now, this was deep, wasn't it?

Erlend

Not asking for much are you? 8^)

1) Yes, in complexity theory, the soul would qualify as an emergent characteristic. Where the sum of the parts is greater than the whole and cannot be reductively analyzed.

2) Subscribing to #1 would lead me to believe it is transient phenomena and only arises when the component parts are all together. To persist beyond that would require divine interention, which has always troubled me, but if I accept its continuity, I think memories would have to go and it would be preserved strictly as an image made up of the sum of moral choices and actions.

3) The underlying moral "code" that makes a given individual choose their actions (including actions of faith, compassion, humanity, etc. ). In other words, if the sum of our colourful existence were an image, the soul is the reduction of that image converted to grey scale.

In Christian theology, the acceptance of Christ would further process the image into pure white. Don't know if it will really work that way, but that is what faith is for. Even if Christianity works differently, following the model of Christ as the archetypical perfect moral actor improves your greyscale image as well. Is it faith or works? My answer is Yes

That's my initial response.