What the hell is a 'soul' anyway?

[Lucanus]

So information cannot be associated with a particular state of matter and energy?

If you were not so hopelessly ignorant you would know that some things can be distinct without being alienable. For example, a purely material explaination of a book says absolutely nothing about its content and people can discuss the content of a book without making any reference to its material. Moreover the contents of the book are not bound to a particular material, the content could take the material form of an audio recording or a film or a memorization. The material of the book can support a wide variety of content from David Foster Wallace to a Chinese phone book.

But see, the content of the audio recording or the book is *completely* material. I fail to see why the information should be independent of its support, not to mention someone who is actually capable of interpreting it. A Chinese phonebook is completely unintelligible (therefore, void of any sort of information) to somebody who does not read Chinese. If nobody in the world was capable of reading Chinese, that phonebook would be completely meaningless and hold no information whatsoever anymore, because nobody would be able to understand it. That's the reason why I think that information exists only in our minds as a way to interpret and understand the world around us.

Also, don't you think that people "discussing the content of a book" have made some sort of decodification, recodification, copy-and-paste of the content from that book to their own neural networks?

And how would you go about testing this assertion? If it can't be verified then, as Kitan said, it's woo-ey word salad.

It’s call information theory. But I can understand how people like you and Kitan, being stuck in 19th century science think of it as woo. I find it continually amusing how supposedly ‘logical and scientific’ atheists cling to their irrational dogma even as modern natural science has started to come full circle, albeit with using different nomenclature. Information is just a reincarnation and extension of Aquinas’s moderate realism. The notion of ‘emergent properties’ (the atheists undefined mind-brain theory) is a watered down version of essentialism. Atheist dogmatic thinking prevents them from noticing that the nominalism/conceptualism they embrace is incompatible with emergent properties.

That was an hilarious amount of hand-waving and ad hom. Next time someone says you're spewing word salad, please try to explain it. Oh, and citations please.

ETA: What about computers, CDs, VHS tapes? They store information, so do they have a soul?

’Estimated Time of Arrival’? When it comes to inanimate things, we usually substitute the words ‘function’ for Final End and content for Formal Cause.

The fact that you call ideas beyond the comprehention of your narrow dogmatic worldview 'word salad' only shows the ignorance and stupidity of the person making the accusation.

If you were not so hopelessly a pompous douchebag, you would know that ETA means "Edited to add". But that's beside the point...

Again, you just can't see that the one holding a "narrow dogmatic worldview" is you. What is a "final end"? What is a "formal cause"? Are they accurate descriptions of how reality works, backed by experiment and evidence, or are they just a human construct we have to make sense of what we commonly experience?

[ErGingerbreadMandude]

Personality = Soul

[robvalue]

It's that thing you lose after voting for David Cameron.

[Whateverist]

Yeah, I agree with Rob. The "soul" is a metaphorical way of referring to something essential about oneself or others. Unlike some other artifacts of a person, soul is a given to be discovered, not something arbitrarily selected. Ones only choice in relation to the soul is acceptance or rejection, fulfillment or alienation.

[tonechaser77]

I always thought that if someone had "soul" it meant they were either a really good musician, usually blues or gospel, or could sing really well. Sheesh, I learned something today!! ;-)

[Mystic]

What is a soul? 

That which is being constantly created with God the light/good/beautiful/glorious/honorable/purity aspect of it is true existence, while the non-existence with polar opposite is the darkness, and it's through power of ignorance.

The soul is equipped with forces of reason (light) and forces of ignorance (darkness/uncleanness). It's a constant battle. You can witness this battle within yourself.

There is 72 forces of reason in summary and 72 forces of ignorance, I can tell you them according to hadiths of our Imams, but I am not going to here, because it will bore you.

It's what chooses between good and evil, and it's what inherits praiseworthy actions or condemned actions, increasing in value or in devalue, in positive travel towards God or negative travel away from God.

We can talk endlessly about but it's spiritual in the sense it's not found in space or four dimensions, but it takes on parable forms and the next world is a manifestation of it's actions, whether good or evil, and we are creating a world within us. Every time we see sin, we open portals of uncleannness that Satanic forces can attack us with and when we do good deeds, we open portals in which obedient spirits can help us with (Angels, Prophets, Imams).

The spiritual kingdom and the true nature of our existence with respect to that, is that of an 7 earths with 7 heavens, that of 7 stages, with 6 days, and the last being an endless none ending day that will not be completed ever but is the ever last reward we are meant for.

From God's earth everything grows, his water descends and gives life to everything...and the pure blessed water is the nature we all originated upon and this is something we can spiritually see.

The soul like the brain cannot be summarized in a few sentences and you understand at all. It's an endless knowledge, and there is in it a connection to God.

[FifthElement]

The notion of ‘emergent properties’ (the atheists undefined mind-brain theory) is a watered down version of essentialism. Atheist dogmatic thinking prevents them from noticing that the nominalism/conceptualism they embrace is incompatible with emergent properties.

There you go again, talking about emergence like it's something you actually do understand...

Scientific understanding of emergence, and for that matter, scientific understanding of ANYTHING, will always, till the end of time, be greater than "god did it", no matter how you spin it 

[robvalue]

Atheist dogma huh? There is no atheist dogma. Atheists are free to believe whatever whacked out crazy non-God related stuff they want. The realm of magic and made up nonsense is just as open, minus one detail, to the atheist. If you mean naturalist, please say naturalist.

One thing I've found extremely interesting is the way people can fail to recognise things about themselves. Sometimes very obvious things. Many times, various people have pointed out things about me which I was totally oblivious to. To try and translate this into "soul speak", that means other people can somehow see my soul and notice things about it that my intimate connection with it has failed to show.

Has that happened to any of you guys?

[Ronkonkoma]

This is a series of questions I always ask when people start talking about souls. I'd like to collect the local soul-believers' answers on this topic, but if you don't believe in souls, feel free to add more questions.

What is a soul?

What is it made of?

Does it interact with the material world?

If it does, how can we measure its activity based on its interactions with the material world?

If it doesn't, what does it explain that can't be better explained by a materialist solution?

The term soul was first introduced by the Greek philosophers. Its the immaterial part of you, a part of the immaterial world.

The Greek philosophers realized that Mathematics is also a part of the immaterial world.

The soul, like math, has no weight or mass, you can't see it and it doesn't alter light.

Like math, you can study its effects because the soul gives human life its fundamental essence and value.

This concept became more refined after Christian teaching met the philosophies of Plato, Aristoteles, and Socrates.

The human soul houses the core of human desire, and as such is an important basis of our understanding of personhood.

This has implications on human dignity, human rights, responsibilities, and freedom. If you ignore these things, you see important implications, the culmination of which are the Gulags of the Soviet Union for instance, or the Holocaust, or the carpet bombing of Dresden and perhaps the destruction of Hiroshima.  

All these things (dignity, rights, responsibilities, freedom), like the soul, are immaterial.

Value, like the soul, is also immaterial.

Value can generate bills of money from seemingly "nothing". In material terms, a stack of bills is nothing but paper. But money can be put to use to alter material things, such as the great cathedrals and churches of Europe, which are direct expressions on the effect of the soul on matter.

Similarly, persons in material terms are seemingly nothing but DNA, or ribonucleic acids, but they can generate ideas, hopes and dreams, and put values into reality. Say for example, I value my kids, I can alter reality by reading to them at night. I made that value a reality in the irreversible past. DNA can't do that. On the other hand, our material brain is the most complex thing we know of in the entire universe. In material terms there is no way that we have any idea what a thought, or a value, or a soul is.

Good night, kids.

[ErGingerbreadMandude]

You have a good soul = You have a good personality.
You don't have a soul = You don't have a personality.

Rocks don't have a personality therefore they don't have a soul.
Girls have personalitities therefore they have a soul.

It's not that hard..