The Soul

[Angrboda]

I think Cinjin Cain makes an important point. We associate the soul with features of consciousness. But much of who we are occurs in the subconscious. In automatic driving, wherein we drive without really being conscious of what is happening in our driving, is the soul in control or something else? Is the subconscious a part of the soul, and if not, who is she? In some very famous experiments in which a bundle of nerves connecting left and right halves of the brain were severed, for medical reasons, it was found that, lacking the communication between the two halves, each acted independently, possessed of unique wills and personalities. Did one soul become two? Were there two all along? Perhaps there are even more!

Another thing I think is worth bearing in mind is that the soul is a metaphysical trope specific to certain cultures. It might even be an archetype in the Jungian sense. However, when cheesy documentaries talk about what the Egyptian's believed about the soul, a lot of it is nonsense -- the Egyptian beliefs about the person are far removed from the western concept of a soul, believing there to be five seperate parts, each having different roles and different timelines (See Wiki, Egyptian Soul; It's a confusing article I won't claim to understand, but one thing's clear, "This ain't your Daddy's soul."). I won't claim expertise in Buddhist psychology, but from what little I understand of Buddhism, what we call the self, which most align with the soul,that part is illusion -- not real; so what part of the western concept of the soul do Buddhists agree with? I don't know, but it's likely a strained agreement. I won't claim to be knowledgeable about Chinese metaphysics, even though I am a Taoist, but I'm not aware of the idea in either Taoism or Confucianism. I don't know offhand what the Greeks believed, much less other ancient cultures like Sumer, Akkad and Babylon, but likely they too had unique ideas of what it is to be human. As westerners it's an unfortunate tendency to "see clearly no farther than our hands can touch" [1] and fall into the trap of believing the idea that the concept of the soul is a natural and universal idea. It is not that simple.

I too have a longstanding interest in the soul, though I deny "the soul" and affirm the mind/brain. Human consciousness is a very mysterious phenomena. Our awareness, our minds, are like nothing that we see in the world itself. Where does it come from? How does it do that? Good questions. In my philosophy group, we tend to break down the answers to these questions into two ballparks: the physicalists, who believe mind is just the activity of certain configurations of matter, called brains; then there are those who we say "believe in special sauce" -- that sure there's something physical involved, but there's also some special something more, and the physical can't explain the weird, mysterious things like "what is redness" and "how am I aware". From my perspective, I am an Eliminative Materialist. I, like the physicalists, believe that mind is no more than matter, but go even further in suggesting that once we fully understand what is going on in the brain, many of our concepts of mind -- what a belief is, a memory, an emotion, a thought -- will be eliminated as not identifying real "things" in the mind -- that our current concepts of mind will be eliminated and replaced with an entirely different set of concepts, rooted in what the brain is actually doing. Now as a flavor of physicalist, I contend that features of consciousness are nothing more than variables in a computer taking on different values ("is_tree(true).in_view" etc.), but I confess it's hard for me to fully conceive how this acts. I believe, that if anything, consciousness has to be viewed as a process -- not a state -- values can't get up and dance the dance that is consciousness by themselves, consciousness is the dance! But what does it mean for a process to be aware? [2] I think it may be akin to the problem of conceiving of something that is both a wave and a particle, the classic wave/particle duality of quantum physics; it's not illogical, just not something our minds can form a single, coherent 'picture' of in our heads.

[1] Marge Piercy, "Song Of The Fucked Duck"
[2] I've even added process philosophy -- a branch of philosophy that treats processes and other motions through time as ontologically as primary as classic metaphysics treats 'things' -- to my reading list.