The human soul

Kyrin Wyldstar wrote: How am I conflating? Subjective reality is personal experience. Objective reality is provable function through direct evidence.

Because it seems often when I'm talking about one, you reference it as if it were the other. But I guess this really is getting into the meta-discussion stuff now.... we should probably take our semantics into private messages if I continue to confuse in my explanations of previous posts.

I think the thread is getting pulled out by, one again, 'proof or it doesn't exist'.

Yeah, passionate debate can be fun, but conversation is thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. I see that on some parties, but its already been covered we cannot prove the existence of a soul, at least not scientifically, so to continue to dig heel and demand that we prove it is... well, not the point of this thread...

What are your thoughts on the human soul? Does it exist? Doesn’t it? If it does? What does the soul “include” (personality, memory, etc)? Where does it reside? Do non-humans (animals, trees) have one? Do inert beings (mountains, for instance) have one? Have you had any experiences that have given you evidence for the probability of the human soul?

The thread wasn't about proving it one way or another. The soul is a personal thing, so we only have personal experience, rather than objective experience. Asking for otherwise is unreasonable and brings the entire conversation to a screeching halt...

I am more than happy to continue here, if others are. I would appreciate it, though, if we could limit the category errors and ‘straw-men’ that are being constructed – and at least admit them when they are pointed out. It makes having a decent discussion interminably difficult e.g.



To answer the question what are “valid branches of epistemology”? :

Epistemology definition: the study of the nature of knowledge, justification and the rationality of belief.

Branches of Epistemology: Historical, Empiricism, Idealism, Rationalism, Constructivism, Pragmatism, Indian pramana, naturalized epistemology, and so on
(source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology)

Everyone is entitled to have their preferences, but there is a skill to using different epistemologies to analyse a given proposition or answer a specific question.

If we apply a materialist lens to answer the question: does a human soul exist? the answer will be: no (based on lack of evidence). However, there are other valid branches of epistemology where the answer will be: maybe, or, yes.

You can choose to ignore other epistemologies and stick to a narrow, ‘no’ answer – but there are other valid approaches, and answers. This is not off-topic in my opinion.

Referring to the video on page one of this thread– the reason why I introduced it as not answering Manu’s question is because the ‘soul’ as a symbol, escapes easy definition. We can talk around it, but not to it, precisely. McGilchrist describes the problem as follows:

“The soul is a deliberately ambiguous topic, resisting definition in the same manner as all ultimate symbols which provide the root metaphors for the systems of human thought (e.g. energy, gravity, matter, nature etc). As a result, spirituality is often about not-knowing, because knowing inevitably means you’ve got it wrong. In this way the soul isn’t even a concept – it’s a symbol.

Tagore summarised the murkiness using the analogy of water “Small wisdom is like water in a glass – clear, transparent, pure. The great wisdom is like water in the sea – dark, mysterious and impenetrable.” For great wisdom, making explanations more explicit and more precise doesn’t make it easier to understand – it means we understand something other than that which we are seeking to know. We can’t understand murky waters if we clear them! Thus, we rely on mythos to understand the logos.”

I would argue that science (based in materialist assumptions) cannot satisfactorily tackle the premise of ‘soul’ questions, let alone the questions themselves. It’s the wrong tool for the job.

Much like the quantum physics you mentioned earlier in the thread – the answers to many questions, depend on the means by which you ask the question, and formulate the answer, rather than necessarily revealing something pertaining to an objective (or subjective) reality.

Ironically, I think Gist gave an excellent description of the soul in his first post in this thread:
“We can speak of them as figures of speech, as metaphors, concepts to help us convey how we feel about ourselves, each other, the world around us and our place in it, or to help us appreciate all of those things. “

The word ‘soul’ has validity in language because we don’t have a better word to summarise that sentence - and all the other aspects that 'soul' can cover. That difficult-to-define sense of energy, connection, and interdependence has existed for millenia, and continues to exist across the world and is symbolised in the word ‘soul’. That sense / feeling exists – as does, love, anger, fear and so on. You can describe them using neurotransmitters, and other accepted methods within the scientific paradigm - but that would be like reading about a concerto – it’s not the same as listening to it.

Arisaig wrote: I think the thread is getting pulled out by, one again, 'proof or it doesn't exist'.

Yeah, passionate debate can be fun, but conversation is thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. I see that on some parties, but its already been covered we cannot prove the existence of a soul, at least not scientifically, so to continue to dig heel and demand that we prove it is... well, not the point of this thread...

What are your thoughts on the human soul? Does it exist? Doesn’t it? If it does? What does the soul “include” (personality, memory, etc)? Where does it reside? Do non-humans (animals, trees) have one? Do inert beings (mountains, for instance) have one? Have you had any experiences that have given you evidence for the probability of the human soul?

The thread wasn't about proving it one way or another. The soul is a personal thing, so we only have personal experience, rather than objective experience. Asking for otherwise is unreasonable and brings the entire conversation to a screeching halt...

One can argue proofs and certainties if one is so inclined, and we sure have no shortage of those discussions. I for one neither have nor was asked for any proof, and find it a frankly silly demand to make on such matters. It's not that I much care who keeps deciding that proofs are what this all ought be about so much of the time, but, as you say, it sure doesn't help advance the conversation. My personal opinion is that we would be collectively better off if we could let go of this sophism and move on to the substance and merits of the positions and arguments presened. There is every opportunity to talk of proofs in a dedicated thread and very little benefit to derailing every interesting thread to one about them instead.

Now...
Surely you would agree, as many others I hope might, that what ever subjective, or "personal experience" as they would put it I do or do not have, your access to it is highly limited at best. This may sound like I'm contradicting my usual position on this. Bear with me, we'll get there. You can, so my statement would go, intercept any signal coming into me, you can monitor, at least in principle, the entire activity of my nervous system. But, this "personal experience" of mine, the what it is like to have those processes occur from a first-person perspective, is something that I'm sure you would insist you cannot be a witness to, because by definition there can be no external witness to it. In other words, you have no means of confirming not only the contents of my personal experience, technically you cannot confirm that I have any such thing at all. You think you feel like you have your own, and you know enough about our respective bodies to expect mine to function a lot like yours, in its basics, but by the very subjectivity woven into the definition of that experience, there is no test you can perform to distinguish me from what philosophers of cognition would call a p-zombie, something that - though it behaves like any ordinary person - has no qualia the way others allegedly do. Shy of presupposing that I am as much a person as you think you are, if you instead start out neutrally on that question, you couldn't construct any argument sufficient to convince you, even tentatively, that I am not a robot. I think that much is incontroversial, because we have defined the personal experience as strictly personal, outside the realm of testability.
Likewise, I have no means of overcoming a healthy scepticism towards your being either. If I had you and a robot copy of you that behaved in all of the same ways you did and I were to decide after an arbitrary amount of pondering time which one of you is a person and which one is the p-zombie, my chance of getting it wrong is 50%, because the trial is constructed so that any information I have access to is identical between the two of you.
Now let's scale this up. If you were tasked to tell me from my robot clone and had an assistant, both your chances of agreeing which one of us is the soul-inhabited Gisteron is half, and the chance of either of you being correct in your pick is half as well. There is, after all, no argument by which you could convince your assistant of your pick being the correct one, since no test would indicate anything one way or another. The intuition of two people does not tell you anything more about my having or not having qualia than the intuition of one, or of two thousand more assistants. Nobody can confirm to me that I have a subjective experience, they cannot even confirm it to themselves.
So... Do I not feel like I have a subjective experience myself? Can I not confirm that much to myself? Well... Who can tell me what it would be like to not have subjective experience? It would be quite a paradox if anyone could, since who ever has had the experience of not having experience... has something it is like to... be someone it is not like anythiing to be...? By definition, if I have a subjective experience, I have no idea what it would be like not to, so I cannot say that it would be different. Not only can I not know whether you have any sort of subjective experience, or anyone else for that matter... I technically cannot know that even I have something of the sort.

Wait, what wicked sorcery is this? Have I just destroyed the famous "Cogito ergo sum" argument? Have I applied scepticism so consistently and deeply as to dispose of even the solipsist position, hitherto thought of as the most extreme form of it? Yes. Yes, I have. Can we know anything at all now? Not anything synthetic, no... At least not by any definition of knowledge that invokes truthiness. When I say that we know for a fact there is no soul, I'm talking about facts, not truths. The position is a pragmatic one. We can have no confidence in what we think is our subjective experience, unless we presuppose them and trust them blindly and unreasonably, and every less-than-entirely-subjective indication one way or another points us to there being no possibility of anything like a soul. Is that a proof? Not in any mathematical sense, no. There is some technical wiggle room. I tried to invite an appreciation for why we trust the models we have, why in any court of law, or colloquially we might as well say that things like QFT are "true". But that a proof makes not. We know that none of us have souls not with 100% certainty, we "only" know it far, far, far, far beyond any reasonable doubt. It is "only" a necessary conclusion from the single most certain thing we have outside of purely definitional matters. That the sun will rise tomorrow is orders of magnitude less likely than the nonexistence of souls.

Loudzoo wrote: To answer the question what are “valid branches of epistemology”? :

Epistemology definition: the study of the nature of knowledge, justification and the rationality of belief.

Branches of Epistemology: Historical, Empiricism, Idealism, Rationalism, Constructivism, Pragmatism, Indian pramana, naturalized epistemology, and so on
(source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology)

Everyone is entitled to have their preferences, but there is a skill to using different epistemologies to analyse a given proposition or answer a specific question.

Sure. I am not trained in that skill and have no interest in pursuing any training in it in future.

If we apply a materialist lens to answer the question: does a human soul exist? the answer will be: no (based on lack of evidence). However, there are other valid branches of epistemology where the answer will be: maybe, or, yes.

You can choose to ignore other epistemologies and stick to a narrow, ‘no’ answer – but there are other valid approaches, and answers.

Well, I for one was unaware that materialism was any kind of epistemology at all, and your listing doesn't include it either. I thought it was the assertion that only material things exist. I reject that assertion. I don't care what would follow from it... at all.
By your definition of epistemology, they are all methods by which we come to justify beliefs. None of them are complete worldviews that warrant concrete answers to given questions. You already got my "approach" wrong by asserting a worldview I reject as if it were a mere approach to claims rather than itself a claim.

I would argue that science (based in materialist assumptions) cannot satisfactorily tackle the premise of ‘soul’ questions, let alone the questions themselves. It’s the wrong tool for the job.

Science is based in materialist assumptions, is it? That's interesting. Can you name one, and also what about science would collapse without it, being based on it?

Much like the quantum physics you mentioned earlier in the thread – the answers to many questions, depend on the means by which you ask the question, and formulate the answer, rather than necessarily revealing something pertaining to an objective (or subjective) reality.

That's false. At the risk of sounding antagonistic - please, don't get this the wrong way, I do not mean to offend - this passage sounds like it was written by someone who has no clue whatsoever what they are even talking about. Quantum physics is motivated and driven by experiment before anything else. Almost none of the electronics in the device you used to compose the post I'm responding to would exist if we didn't have a very, very good understanding of it by now. Would you question whether it pertains to reality if instead of me saying that it shows us souls are nonsense someone else would be telling you about a universal magical consciousness field? Those same woo peddlers would make sure to mention that "nobody really understands quantum physics", so that if someone objects to their lies, like I might, their listeners could safely dismiss those objections with something very much like it "depends on the means by which you ask the question, and formulate the answer". It doesn't. There are other approaches to quantum theory, sure. They make either false predictions or none at all. We do not use them because they do not work.

To quickly tackle your questions:
- I'd say materialism is a form of extreme empiricism. I don't recall saying you were a materialist in this thread (another straw man)
- Science doesn't have to be based on materialist assumptions, but it often is. Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental aspects and consciousness, are results of material interactions. That is the assumption that underpins a lot of science.
- From the things you say you do sound like a materialist: "You're assuming, on no grounds whatsoever, that a smell is something more or other than what we know smells are literally composed of."
- I was using QM as a simile. We know how to use QM to give us very precise and accurate answers in certain circumstances - I agree. I was referring to it the sense of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle - there is a fundamental limit on the precision with which complementary variables or canonically conjugate variables can be known. There is a fundamental limit on how precise we can be about the 'soul' using language, without constraining the meaning too much. It may have been a poor simile but with a modest amount of charity, hopefully you can see what i was getting at!

Onto your more recent post:
Interesting stuff - although it is confusing when you say "There is every opportunity to talk of proofs in a dedicated thread and very little benefit to derailing every interesting thread to one about them instead." - and then spend 900 words providing your own proof!

If (a big 'IF') I understand you correctly we can paraphrase by asking the questions: Are intangible 'things' factually true?
Definition: intangible

- unable to be touched; not having physical presence.

- difficult or impossible to define or understand; vague and abstract.

From one perspective intangible 'things' aren't true - if they can't even be defined, then how can we assess their truth? From another perspective they must be true - otherwise we wouldn't encounter them all the time, and we wouldn't need a word to describe the phenomenon. Both perspectives are "true" in their own way, but to prefer one over the other is simply subjective bias. Nothing wrong with that - as long as it is seen for what it is.

Loudzoo wrote: - I'd say materialism is a form of extreme empiricism.

I wouldn't. There is - to my knowledge - no empirical justifier for materialism as you go on to define it in the next point. After all, empiricism is not the position that only what we experience is true, but rather that any knowledge we may have must be ultimately rooted in experience. The assertion that all things are essentially material one way or another is not one you can come to know through any amount of experience.

- Science doesn't have to be based on materialist assumptions, but it often is. Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental aspects and consciousness, are results of material interactions. That is the assumption that underpins a lot of science.

I am not aware of as many as one scientific discipline that would be either helped or hindered by making that assumption. I am charitably assuming that material interactions include interactions with things that aren't matter, like, say, forces. It may be very intuitive and indicated by pretty much everything we know about nature, but no "a lot of science" I have any familiarity with would benefit from, let alone requires that assumption as an assumption.

- From the things you say you do sound like a materialist: "You're assuming, on no grounds whatsoever, that a smell is something more or other than what we know smells are literally composed of."

I don't see how that sounds like I'm a materialist. Just because I'm pointing out that to me you seem to be making assumptions based on nothing does not indicate that I think that all things are ultimately material. We sure have materialistic models for pretty much every aspect of smell (unless one wants to snake around definitions to avoid speaking of anything concrete at all), to the point that what ever "other" component may play a role in it we can safely say it would be an insignificant one, but that is far from the same as saying that there are no other components or that everything else is as material as smell in particular.

- I was using QM as a simile. We know how to use QM to give us very precise and accurate answers in certain circumstances - I agree. I was referring to it the sense of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle - there is a fundamental limit on the precision with which complementary variables or canonically conjugate variables can be known.

Yes. QM is non-deterministic. Far too many philosophy savvy folk object to that, too, referencing outdated "alternative approaches", but it's still what it is. Uncertainty is a prediction of quantum theory. We cannot predict individual points of data but we can predict just how large the minimal uncertainty is, and we can test that prediction against the experiment... And it works pretty damn well.

There is a fundamental limit on how precise we can be about the 'soul' using language, without constraining the meaning too much. It may have been a poor simile but with a modest amount of charity, hopefully you can see what i was getting at!

Sure, I guet what you're saying. That's why I keep using different phrases to refer to what it is I say doesn't exist. Call it soul, spirit, the essence of the person... Some kind of ghost in the machine, one way or the other. Yes, again, one can snake around all slippery, evade every objection by adopting a definition that just so happens to avoid it. To me that would be a silly game at best, and dishonest shifting the goal post at worst. No, there is not one "right" definition of the soul, but when people speak of it they tend to mean something by it, and a lot of the time it's not the music genre or the emotional investment in something like a piece of art people might say captured the soul of its artist. When asking about "The human soul", I think it'd be uncharitable to assume that the question is about some kind of spirit of humanity, our love for and goodness towards each other. We are talking about the ghost. The thing that is alleged to set us apart from robot clones or the corpses we leave behind. That's what I'm addressing. It's not the only possible usage of the term, but I daresay it is the one that was intended all along in this thread and in the one that inspired it. I shall stand corrected if that assumption of mine was in error.

Onto your more recent post:
Interesting stuff - although it is confusing when you say "There is every opportunity to talk of proofs in a dedicated thread and very little benefit to derailing every interesting thread to one about them instead." - and then spend 900 words providing your own proof!

I did not demand a proof nor was I asked for one. I asserted, with a carefully crafted preamble, that this assumption made so swiftly and commonly that "surely we have our subjective experience" is not warranted externally or internally. Sure, that may have been all a proof, but the point is that Ari's complaint that believability is being routed back to proofs or provability is not generally accurate. I know Kyrin is more liberal with the p-word than I am, but I'm sure she would agree that by her standards what constitutes a proof is not anything quite so definitive as to make the demand for it unreasonable. I myself don't demand proofs at all, because were I to speak of proofs I would mean something very much like a mathematical proof.
Anyway, do you have a substantive objection to anything I said, or do you want to keep it meta?

If (a big 'IF') I understand you correctly we can paraphrase by asking the questions: Are intangible 'things' factually true?
Definition: intangible...

From one perspective intangible 'things' aren't true - if they can't even be defined, then how can we assess their truth? From another perspective they must be true - otherwise we wouldn't encounter them all the time, and we wouldn't need a word to describe the phenomenon. Both perspectives are "true" in their own way, but to prefer one over the other is simply subjective bias. Nothing wrong with that - as long as it is seen for what it is.

What do you mean by "factually true". To me, at least the way I use "true", only propositions can be true or false. I suppose propositions are not things one can touch, and as such, yes, there exist intangible things that are true. Then there are constructs of language that are intangible in both senses of the definition provided. To me these are generally not propositions and as such cannot be assigned a truth-value
As for intangible individual terms...
There are no "correct" definitions of words, but there are common and less common usages. Words that have multiple conflicting roughly equally common usages gain meaning in a conversation once the participants have implicitly or explicitly agreed to employ one usage over all others for the purposes of the conversation at hand. Should the implicit agreement turn out to be illusory, the word in question ceases to have meaning, retroactively calling into question the meaning of statements made using it until an explicit agreement can be reached and statements rephrased or explicated as necessary.
At any rate, individual terms, in virtue of not being propositions, cannot be assigned a truth-value.

What is not the soul?

_Vergere_ wrote: What is not the soul?

If I cut off my hand, do I lose part of my soul? What of my leg? What of the rock on my driveway? What of my scarf? My chair? My nose? All can be stripped away without losing your soul.

You, the authentic experience of you, is the soul. So everything is not the soul, save for the soul itself.

Manu wrote: Inspire by another topic, I thought this was a big enough question in itself to explore here.

What are your thoughts on the human soul?

Numerous. That's what they are... But it might be more accurate to say that I have numerous "feelings" about the human soul.
There's a lot to unpack here, but I'll do my best.

Manu wrote: Does it exist? Doesn’t it?

I believe it does. Perhaps it is as someone else said, it depends on whether or not you feel that it does.

Manu wrote: If it does? What does the soul “include” (personality, memory, etc)?

The soul, I guess, would be the stuff that actually animates us. That which makes us alive and sentient (or not).

Manu wrote: Where does it reside?

First star to the right, straight on til daylight... Might as well be asking why the sky is blue. I could give you answer, but it might only detract from the experience.

Manu wrote: Do non-humans (animals, trees) have one? Do inert beings (mountains, for instance) have one?

I believe so. Mountains and places? Some of them do. If you've never heard of the "spirit of a place" or similar then you might want to go out and experience it.

Manu wrote: Have you had any experiences that have given you evidence for the probability of the human soul?

Uh, not really. At least not anything that would be empirical or scientific in any way... just anecdotal and personal "evidence."