(May 9, 2014 at 8:33 am)Confused Ape Wrote: 1: What is a soul? Is it the same as the sense of self which Julian Baggini is talking about?
2: Do Muslims never change throughout their lives? For example, would you say you're exactly the same as you were when you were two years old?
3: If souls exist, how do they operate in the physical world? What if souls create a sense of self because of how the human brain works? I don't believe in souls but I've sometimes wondered how my soul would operate in the physical world if I had one.
1. Yes, the "soul" and the "self" sound pretty much the same thing to me. Why? Because, basically, I think of the soul as the most fundamental quality that makes up the self. It is at the core of the self. Maybe the soul also has a physical dimension to it, or maybe it doesn't, but I don't know.
2. Yes, Muslims certainly change throughout their lives, like everyone else. I'm not arguing against that because that's a fact.
3. I can't think of any way to describe the operation of souls in a physical sense. In my opinion, it just has to be felt; it's a complete human experience. The soul is something that we have to gradually discover within ourselves, not anywhere else.
Muslims also believe that all souls have something in common, which is that it has an innate natural disposition (or tendency) to believe in the existence of God, and to believe in His absolute one-ness. I've been thinking that maybe that is the source of the sense of "self," because it matches with how we view our own selves: We think of ourselves as being one, or whole. We automatically combine all the self-related memories into a single self. But this "single self" that we imagine is not precisely single in reality; there are millions of different selves that are interacting with each other. The only universal self which is one/whole/unitary/single has to be God.
According to the Quran, a memory of who God is has been pre-installed in every soul - even if you are an atheist now - and we have all testified to this. This is that before we were thrown into the physical world, all souls were gathered in the presence of God and then He asked us: "Am I not your Lord?" And then every soul replied, "Yes, we have testified!" (Surah 7:172). So, we all testified that God exists. It's only that we don't remember this covenant anymore. We can't retrieve this memory from way way back, but the memory is still ingrained in our souls, and I believe that this is what creates and shapes our sense of the self.
I think this idea has at least some support because even current research on human psychology suggests that there is a strong link between memory and the self. This is known as the Self-Memory System (SMS), where one's memory is the data base of the self. Here are two interesting papers about that:
http://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/k.allan/page...%20jml.pdf
http://faculty.washington.edu/agg/pdf/Se...81.OCR.pdf
So going back, if the knowledge of God is the first thing that was installed in our memory system, and if the Self-Memory System theory of the self is true, then that memory (i.e. the knowledge that there is a God) must be the primary thing that causes the sense of self to emerge. This idea corresponds with another verse in the Quran where it beautifully states that when people forget God, they have also forgotten their own selves (or their souls): "And be not like those who forgot Allah, so He made them forget themselves" (Surah 59:19).
Put in another way, the verse is telling us that we cannot find our true selves without finding God first. Unless one becomes mindful of God and remembers Him frequently, he cannot set out on the path of real self-understanding. Without God, our sense of self is more of a pseudo-self. We may think that we understand ourselves, but we don't. We'd have forgotten our own selves without even knowing it.
