The soul and the will.

The notion of a soul doesn't really have a place in philosophy. Concepts such as the platonic soul have no relation to religious concepts of soul but are of course confusing the matter because of the equivocation.
Free will is a common topic and has been written about by many philosophers from Aristotle to Popper but it is for practical purposes a pointless discussion since it is, by definition, impossible to ever tell the difference. There is no possible way that inhabitants of a world in which free will exists/doesn't exist can ever tell which is the case, because to do so would require observation from a point of view that doesn't obey that world's laws and can actually put them to the test.

There's no single authoritative view of what a soul could be or ought to be, Josh, and some like me think it's a meaningless concept.

Much of the traditional Western view of souls derive from the work of Plato and Aristotle, then elaborated by thinkers like Avicenna, Aquinas and Augustine. In the selection below I've tried provide an historical perspective of Western thought, mainly using Wikipedia quotations, and shown how diverse thought can be outside Western beliefs.

So here's Plato's view:
But Aristotle disagreed:
The problem of defining soul got more complicated when religious dogma was added, so we have a diversity of Christian views:
These views are reasonably compatible with a Judaic view too:
And not too dissimilar from Muslim belief:
But the further we stray from Western thought, the less 'soul' follows these Platonic/Aristotelian ideas.

In Hinduism for example:
Or Buddhism:
When we get to ancient Egyptian belief it gets very different:
And a Taoist view is arguably more different still:
As a secular humanist I don't believe any of the above. I think that life is just chemical reactions, that organic function arises from the way the chemicals are organised, that thought is a result of organic function and our perception of self is an artifact of thought. So when the chemicals get disorganised and stop reacting as they used, life and thought are extinguished, and those chemicals go on to do other things -- they might even become part of some other life. A Buddhist view is perhaps closest to my own, but we differ in certain particulars.

I hope that helps!

Thanks, Ruv. I was trying to answer the Buddhist way, and since I'm new, was struggling. I think your paragraph sums it up nicely.

I only know enough to be dangerous, but... Here's some reading on "free will" which is my interpretation of what you mean by "the will."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination_(Calvinism)

I'm posting this about free will because I like it a lot.
"Is God a Taoist?"
http://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTaoist.html

It's reprinted in the book "The Mind's I" which has has both fiction and commentary. It may not help you with your story, but I found the book fascinating.

The question of soul and free will is being discussed over in Josh's other thread in SFF, and BenB mentioned it in passing in his links. I wanted to pick it up here in a comparative religious philosophy sense.

I think that soul intersects and free intersect on the subject of morality. In particular, questions of soul and free will give us the following sorts of worries:

Who am I? Am I good or bad? Is the good or bad I did yesterday part of me today? When am I free to choose between good and bad, and when do I have no choice at all? Must I be punished for bad that I did which I don't remember choosing? What if I chose bad yesterday and good today -- must I still be punished for yesterday's bad? Can I also be rewarded for today's good? What if part of me chooses good, and another part chooses bad at the same time? Am I responsible for my parts, or simply made of my parts? Must my good parts be punished for my bad deeds, and shall my bad parts be rewarded for my good deeds? What about bad I thought about but didn't do? Is it bad that I thought about it or good that I didn't do it, or both?

I find these questions both comically neurotic and existentially grave. Our notion of 'soul' -- our sense of self and spiritual identity -- underpins our moral character. Whatever culture we sample, the stories told about soul are fundamentally moral stories. It's no stretch then to say that 'soul' is our most political religious construct. However many souls we have, and however they're composed, the main purpose of having them at all seems to be so we can have moral fights over them. If religions had no souls to fight over it's hard to imagine them having many fights at all.

So my question: do we absolutely need a notion of soul? Why or why not? And why should it be one soul like most of the major religions, and not five or ten like the Egyptians or Taoists? Or none, like the Buddhists? And how many parts should a soul be said to contain and why? What if we had a soul, but ignored it? And if we didn't have a soul but thought we did, what might that fantasy cost us?

In short: why are souls so controversial? Why are people so adamant that they have the right idea about them?

SO THIS is where my other post went - I could have SWORN I made a post in "this" thread, but when I saw it in New Posts I didn't see my post, so I posted it again. I completely missed it that there were two threads with similar titles.

Was it my free will writing and posting that message again, or was I predestined to do it?

ColoradoGuy said:

I'm not very familiar with other religions, but the issue of free will is an ancient one for Christianity. The fundamental dilemma is that one can regard human free will as impinging on the omnipotence of God: if we can freely choose anything, then in some sense the future is not preordained, implying God doesn't know what will happen; but if God has ordained everything to come, then it is not really human free will.

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I think that Christian eschatology has shaped Christian philosophy on that point: free will matters because hell matters, and the philosophical question of what the Christian God can and can't know has been conformed to fit.

ColoradoGuy said:

I'm not very familiar with other religions, but the issue of free will is an ancient one for Christianity. The fundamental dilemma is that one can regard human free will as impinging on the omnipotence of God: if we can freely choose anything, then in some sense the future is not preordained, implying God doesn't know what will happen; but if God has ordained everything to come, then it is not really human free will.

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God knowing what the future possibilities are has no bearing on Free Will. If someone comes to a fork in the road and you tell them, "Down Path A is death. Down Path B is life." The person is still free to decide which path to take.

One piece of evidence that we have a soul (not the same as proof) is that humans strive for eternity; we want to leave a legacy or a mark on our world when we're gone. We build monuments to ourselves and our loved ones.

Way back when I was in elementary school we where told that the difference between humans and animals was that we built tools, but now we know that animals can build and use tools too. I think the real difference that sets us apart is our desire for eternity. Our soul then, is the part of us that goes on into eternity. The idea that we have this legacy to leave causes us to strive to live up to our potential or what we perceive our potential should be.

The Everett/Wheeler Theory or the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics suggests that wave function does not collapse at all, in fact, every interaction, every decision, every crossroads, is a split where parrallel worlds are created. In one we go right, in one we go straight, in one we go left, in one we turn around and go back the way we came. New versions of us and our world may be created. Which seems to make problems for concepts of free will. I mean if, in some sense, we are making every possible decision in some universe or another, do we still really have free will?

I'm not so sure that the picture of God we see in Genesis always knows what we're going to do or think. See Genesis 2:19

Ruv Draba said:

In short: why are souls so controversial? Why are people so adamant that they have the right idea about them?

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Because people cannot accept their own mortality. They find comfort in the thought that something will survive this state of suffering that we call life.

Once that idea gets accepted, the next question is; what will happen to our souls when we die?

"Ehm, we go to Heaven and live happily ever after?"

"We cannot all go to a Heaven, whatever that is."

"Then some go to the opposite of Heaven."

"Great idea! Lets call that Hell!"

"Awesome!"

and so on...

I wonder more about my atoms after I die. Where will they go? What will they do? Will they still matter? Har Har.

Gehanna

I recently visited a home for the aged, where a roomful of elderly people sat staring at a big-screen TV showing a romantic matinee while a nurse pumped the pedals of a pianola, belting out a tune that nobody sang to or even tapped a foot. Visitors would come and go, and the residents would neither notice nor care -- often they wouldn't recognise the people visiting them. In the time I was there, nobody asked for the TV to be unmuted, for the channel to be changed, to hear a different tune or for the rowdy pianola to shut the hell up.

Will springs from awareness and desire -- it's a property of mental function and hence arises from brain activity. When that activity begins to fail, awareness dims, desire blunts and will dies. As for soul, the idea that some element of self survives death seems meaningless when self cannot even withstand ageing.

Matter recycles; energy recycles, but life is not embodied in one or the other -- it is sustained by a fragile organisation of the two. That nebulous thing we call Self is simply a story we tell about an improbably rare, regrettably brief, constantly changing and eventually decaying arrangement of life. Since Self is only a story, we can make up whatever we like about it -- that it survives our own life, that it lingers to pursue its desires, that it'll reappear someplace else, that it'll be nurtured by some eternal presence, that its scope and compass are bigger than the scope and compass of our actual life.

Such tales are comforting perhaps, but for me they're also distracting, misleading, implausible, unprovable and Self-interested.

It has been argued that our humanity is notable for our ability to plan and anticipate far ahead of our present, and to see things from outside our own perspective. Those abilities also give us the certainty of our deaths, and the knowledge that when we die, the world's affairs will continue without a hiccup.

Is there anything more infuriating than the knowledge that the world does not value Self as much as Self does? Is there anything more liberating than to accept that, and not wish it otherwise?

Ruv Draba said:

I recently visited a home for the aged, where a roomful of elderly people sat staring at a big-screen TV showing a romantic matinee while a nurse pumped the pedals of a pianola, belting out a tune that nobody sang to or even tapped a foot. Visitors would come and go, and the residents would neither notice nor care -- often they wouldn't recognise the people visiting them. In the time I was there, nobody asked for the TV to be unmuted, for the channel to be changed, to hear a different tune or for the rowdy pianola to shut the hell up.

Will springs from awareness and desire -- it's a property of mental function and hence arises from brain activity. When that activity begins to fail, awareness dims, desire blunts and will dies. As for soul, the idea that some element of self survives death seems meaningless when self cannot even withstand ageing.

Matter recycles; energy recycles, but life is not embodied in one or the other -- it is sustained by a fragile organisation of the two. That nebulous thing we call Self is simply a story we tell about an improbably rare, regrettably brief, constantly changing and eventually decaying arrangement of life. Since Self is only a story, we can make up whatever we like about it -- that it survives our own life, that it lingers to pursue its desires, that it'll reappear someplace else, that it'll be nurtured by some eternal presence, that its scope and compass are bigger than the scope and compass of our actual life.

Such tales are comforting perhaps, but for me they're also distracting, misleading, implausible, unprovable and Self-interested.

It has been argued that our humanity is notable for our ability to plan and anticipate far ahead of our present, and to see things from outside our own perspective. Those abilities also give us the certainty of our deaths, and the knowledge that when we die, the world's affairs will continue without a hiccup.

Is there anything more infuriating than the knowledge that the world does not value Self as much as Self does? Is there anything more liberating than to accept that, and not wish it otherwise?

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Awesome.

ColoradoGuy said:

I'm not very familiar with other religions, but the issue of free will is an ancient one for Christianity. The fundamental dilemma is that one can regard human free will as impinging on the omnipotence of God: if we can freely choose anything, then in some sense the future is not preordained, implying God doesn't know what will happen; but if God has ordained everything to come, then it is not really human free will.

A famous discussion of free will (and it really is a discussion -- written as a dialogue in imitation of Plato's) comes from Saint Augustine in his On Free Choice of the Will (late 4th century C.E). He connects it to the problem of evil as the result of human agency. I don't want to clutter up the thread with bits of esoteric theology, but here's a good summary of Augustine's thought.

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The dilemma of man's free will vs. divine predestination has had theologians arguing for centuries, but imho, I think the argument is based on a false presupposition--which I don't believe in. The presupposition is that Time is always linear, as that is how we experience it in human history. But from what glimpses I get in the Bible about God's intersecting with time, I find no support for the notion that He exists in that same linear dimension. He intersects with our linear dimension when He intersects with human history, true. And, in His revelation to humans, He communicates that intersection to us most often in our own understanding of time--in linear terms (eg. "in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth").

But, IF you believe in the God of the Bible at all (and I do), you consider that, as the eternal Divine Being who was the Creator of Time, who existed before Time 'began', who is "the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow," it is quite likely that He exists in a different dimension of time altogether--and it is most certainly true that He Himself is not constrained by the limits of time, nor the linear sense of Time that He has given our planet. So that in the area of predestination or the free will of man, two seemingly contradictory things can both be true--from His own personal dimension and perspective and from ours.

Because He is described in the Bible repeatedly as the "eternal" Being with "no beginning and no end", my mind plays with the idea that in the divine dimension Time possibly shares some qualities with that which is spherical...but that's just a wondering on my part. I'm sure deeper minds than mine have considered that concept with greater sophistication.

(Totally off-topic, but this just reminded me of the last scene in the TV series "Lost" which I just viewed last night...where Jack's dad tells him in the afterlife that "Here there is no 'now.'").

Pat~ said:

. He intersects with our linear dimension when He intersects with human history, true. And, in His revelation to humans, He communicates that intersection to us most often in our own understanding of time--in linear terms (eg. "in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth").

But, IF you believe in the God of the Bible at all (and I do), you consider that, as the eternal Divine Being who was the Creator of Time, who existed before Time 'began', who is "the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow," it is quite likely that He exists in a different dimension of time altogether--and it is most certainly true that He Himself is not constrained by the limits of time, nor the linear sense of Time that He has given our planet. ).

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What a great post Pat!