Soul

[Tex]

The only thing I'd like to add to Chad's post is that the quantities aren't only thoughts, but also truly exist within our universe outside of our own thoughts. Otherwise, he got what I'm trying to say pretty well.

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I hadn't been thinking of James Brown but there certainly are better meanings to attach to "soul" than auxiliary immaterial brain supplement. This is such a reach and really so pointless. If that is all you can think to make of a 'soul' then why even bother?

I bother because many people deny the auxiliary immaterial brain supplement. You guys are like flat world-ers to me. Plus, there are other immaterial things to speak of, and I'd figure the atheist crowd, generally also being the more intelligent crowd, would feel more at home if I dealt with numbers before other immaterial stuff.

[Whateverist]

I hadn't been thinking of James Brown but there certainly are better meanings to attach to "soul" than auxiliary immaterial brain supplement. This is such a reach and really so pointless. If that is all you can think to make of a 'soul' then why even bother?

I bother because many people deny the auxiliary immaterial brain supplement. You guys are like flat world-ers to me. Plus, there are other immaterial things to speak of, and I'd figure the atheist crowd, generally also being the more intelligent crowd, would feel more at home if I dealt with numbers before other immaterial stuff.

You might add that I am also a muggle as I do not believe in sorcerers or witches. This whole project of trying to 'prove' that a spiritual realm is necessary to explain our mental capacities is ludicrous. If there is any correlate to 'soul' I do not see why it needs to be enabled by something beyond the material, biological processes of our brains. There are intelligent things to say about 'soul' but this literal search for an extra-dimensional cog is really just masturbation on the part of the rational mind. Pointless.

[Tex]

If there is any correlate to 'soul' I do not see why it needs to be enabled by something beyond the material, biological processes of our brains.

"...It needs to be enabled by something beyond the material..." because there are things beyond the material. I'm trying to show one of those things, quantity.

[Shell B]

Quantity is not beyond the material. It is a method. It is not a thing. It is simply a method devised by humans to account for amounts and such, much like God is a method by which you get support for hating the things you hate.

[Neo-Scholastic]

…trying to 'prove' that a spiritual realm is necessary to explain our mental capacities is ludicrous. If there is any correlate to 'soul' I do not see why it needs to be enabled by something beyond the material, biological processes of our brains

And I find it equally absurd that insensate substances can support qualitative experiences regardless how complexly they interact. Physical theories of mind always ignore subjective experience as having any causal relationship with objectively observable facts about matter. Physical theories dismiss first-person reality as illusory or as impotent epiphenomena.

That is because mental and material properties are of two distinct types each of which has recognizable effects on reality. By analogy, balls roll regardless of what they are made of. Unfired clay can be molded regardless of the shape it currently has. But, in any particular instance, form and substance do not occur one apart from the other. So while first-person experiences do not occur apart from the body that has them, we must recognize that individual brains vary. Each person’s neural pathways have been formed independent of each other and has a unique “finger print”.

Most healthy brains can perform certain mathematical and logical operations with invariant forms, despite the fact that each brain takes a unique route to the result. The truth or validity of certain thoughts does not depend on the structure of the brain that has the thought. It must depend on some common referant that does not vary, otherwise there is no true correlation between the thoughts in one brain and the thought in another. Formal descriptions of thought processes, like addition, result in outcomes that are consistently and actually true for every case, regardless of whose brain does the thinking. The same cannot be said of physical processes described my models that approximate reality.

Now what you must do Tex is prove that the common reference for invariant thought operation consists of form only apart from substance.

[Tex]

Quantity is not beyond the material. It is a method. It is not a thing. It is simply a method devised by humans to account for amounts and such, much like God is a method by which you get support for hating the things you hate.

And are insults like that your method for dehumanizing the opposition? Because if you need to convince yourself and others to set up predispositions against a group, dehumanizing works wonders.

Anyway, does quantity exist outside of our minds? You say its a method, so is it based within that which is outside of us (not that we can't understand ourselves, but lets just stick with experience)? If it is all in our heads, you cannot say that the quantity of the force between car A as it hit car B affects anything. There isn't actually force there because force, a quantity, is only in our mind. Quantity must be outside of the mind.

So since it is out of the mind, is quantity material or immaterial? If material, it should have physical properties. In an aquarium I can take out the water, I can take out fish, I can add rocks or plants, whatever. In an atom, we can basically do the same thing. We can add electrons, share electrons, move it around from location to location, but if we use reason, we can know that for some things, material qualities are absent. My example all thread has been an unbonded oxygen atom. It has 6 electrons in it's outside shell. We can remove electrons, yes, but we can't remove 6. I don't want to remove or add any electrons, I just want to remove the 6. Not only that, I want to paint the 6 six green. This all sounds ridiculous, and that is the point. Quantity doesn't have these material aspects.

Well, lets just say it has material aspects that we don't know about. That's do-able. The problem is that we know quantity. Quantity doesn't enter through the light in our eyes, nor compressions that the ears pick up. It is not sensed by touch nor any of the senses we have. There is no way that quantity should be known if it is material. Our knowledge of quantity as immaterial allows us to know of our own soul (yes, animals have them too). Quantity must be processed by something that is also immaterial, and I call this a soul. The soul and the brain work simultaneously, so if there are problems with the brain, there will be problems overall.

That should catch you up on 10 pages.

Now what you must do Tex is prove that the common reference for invariant thought operation consists of form only apart from substance.

Not if I assert a hylomorphic metaphysics, which basically is what I'm doing. All I need them to do is recognize that form even exists.

[Ryantology]

I can't paint sound green, does that mean noise is immaterial?

Anyway, does quantity exist outside of our minds? You say its a method, so is it based within that which is outside of us (not that we can't understand ourselves, but lets just stick with experience)? If it is all in our heads, you cannot say that the quantity of the force between car A as it hit car B affects anything. There isn't actually force there because force, a quantity, is only in our mind. Quantity must be outside of the mind.

Quantity is only what humans have invented in order to easily organize and recognize patterns in a certain way. Quantity is just one of a million methods by which human brains perceive and process patterns in nature. It doesn't exist as an ethereal concept in nature that humans magically tap into.

[Tonus]

Perhaps pattern recognition is a better model for that part of consciousness that Tex is referring to as the soul, than numbers are. The eyes and brain see two dots and a line. The soul sees a face.

[Whateverist]

All I need them to do is recognize ..

And there is the catch. You are lost in the medium of language. Try to imagine the world apart from language and see if you can find anything like what you are talking about there. And no, that isn't proof that there is another dimension made accessible by our souls which enable us to realize things. It just means that our highly evolved capacity for vocalizing can make us mistake the symbol for the thing.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Quantity is only what humans have invented in order to easily organize and recognize patterns in a certain way. Quantity is just one of a million methods by which human brains perceive and process patterns in nature.

The ability to recognize a pattern presupposes a pattern to be recognized. How is it possible for us to rationally make distinctions from the seamless continuum of reality? For example, where does a corner end? The use of words and symbols to convey meaning requires more than the referent objects themselves. Foundational certainties must exist in order to identify referent objects.

Not if I assert a hylomorphic metaphysics, which basically is what I'm doing. All I need them to do is recognize that form even exists.

I don't know that term. You must educate me as we go along.

I don’t think ‘6’ is a good example. I’m just thinking out loud now because I do not have all my thoughts together on this one. Just as we recognize rough composite substances, like wood, and more pure ones, like water, they are still derived from more basic and more pure substance. Hence we have an atomic theory for substances. Science is still working on finding the Primal Matter out of which all substances are formed, i.e. “Formed”.

Yet, form, itself seems to be taken for granted, as if it were nothing at all, just a convenient fiction. That is a grand oversight. We do not yet have an ‘atomic’ theory for forms. It seems to me that 6 is a composite form, just like Euclidean triangles and perfect spheres. Whereas, “one” is much more pure, since it contains within itself the principle of unity required to unite six 1s as a single quantity.