What We Are and What We Aren’t
What is a soul? If I had to describe my interpretation, the soul is the most defining and enduring aspect of a life. Many people claim not to believe in it, but I would posit that we all have some notion of what I just described. Some may feel the religious overtones alienate the word “soul” for them, but it’s just a word. We all believe in it, but where we differ are our views about whether a soul is eternal or not as well as whether it’s something separate from the body, possibly existing on some other plane of existence, or whether it’s incorporated with the body and decays along with it after death, or perhaps even something in between. I don’t have much in the way of answers, but I do have a lot of questions that I think are worth pondering.
Souls as Patterns
Souls are often depicted as energy in literature and movies, points of flickering light or human-shaped shimmering luminescence. A lot of people have embraced this depiction, but it doesn’t really conclude from human experience. If you look at the world around us, energy is used up in the process of things fulfilling some function or by creatures to survive and act. Energy is just a resource. If there is a soul that exists beyond our bodies, then perhaps this soul requires some sort of energy source, but it makes no sense to think of the soul itself as energy, something that gets used and converted into a different form in the process, approaching entropy.
I’ve heard said that our bodies are composed of a few dollars worth of common chemicals, as if to trivialize a human being, but it’s how we’re put together that makes up our value. That’s like valuing a sculpture based on how much cheap clay it’s composed of and ignoring that it perhaps took hundreds of person-hours to shape. Meanwhile the human body took millions of years to become the many forms it takes on today. What’s meaningful about us is our patterns– our DNA, our memories, our personalities, the many decisions we have made throughout our lives. So whether our souls exist separately or strictly as one with our bodies or parts thereof, such as in our memories via the patterns of our brain’s neuron pathways, they are still patterns. Our bodies merely use energy to function.
If you actually make the effort to think about these things, then you may find it has an impact on whatever other views you have about the nature of yourself and the universe around you. If the soul is a pattern, what does that mean about the persistence of said soul? Are our patterns not ever-changing? Is that not the nature of life and all of existence? The pattern that described your personality and memories a year ago no longer matches the pattern that describes you now. For that matter, neither does the pattern of five minutes ago before you started reading this post. Are those specific patterns lost forever and “dead”? In that particular sense, our souls cannot be eternal, for if we were not constantly interacting with our environment, learning new things, making decisions that changed our souls, we would be no different from inanimate objects. We’d be dead.
The nature of the soul affects how you view things like choices, and the choices we make have an impact on who we become and the choices we make in the future. What did you choose to eat tonight for dinner? If you were stranded on an island, your choices for food would be limited. You may be able to go left, right, forward, or backward, but you likely cannot go up because you are at the moment incapable of flight. The choice to kill someone might never occur to a person without someone committing an act severe enough to anger them to the point of considering murder. Your pattern has been altered by incorporating these thoughts I’m now conveying to you. My pattern has encroached upon yours whether you agree with anything I’m saying or not. Your choice to agree or disagree was made possible by reading my words. If I hadn’t written this article, you would be a slightly different person than you are now. The choice to read my article would not exist for you. The world around you seems to some extent a type of container, shaping your soul the way a vase shapes the water within it, by presenting only so many choices to us. What choices were you exposed to while growing up? Were you raised by farmers? Industrialists? Programmers? Christians? Muslims? Jews? Alcoholics? Hippies?
A problem with that is it raises another important question. Where does “you” end and the rest of the universe begin? Where do you draw the boundary?
Do you believe there is an eternal version of you, a soul, that exists on another plane of existence? Is your body just a shell for that ever-evolving pattern? Does your body describe any part of what is your soul? If your body is male, does that affect the choices you make about who you might spend your life with? Does your soul really have a true choice for your mate or mates or did your body do some of the deciding? How much of you continues on when your body dies? It seems obvious to me that my memories are part of my brain and therefore probably decay after my death, but I admit to speculating occasionally and reluctantly whether or not some other part of what defines me might continue into some form of afterlife or reincarnation. It might carry something of me on, wisdom perhaps or the capacity to empathize, but certainly absent memories of this life. Do your memories exist in your brain or in your soul? Have you considered that at least some of what you now think of as “you” might end with your body even as another part, your soul, moves on?
If you’re a strict materialist, what parts of your body would you consider “you”? Is it just your brain? Maybe it’s not even your whole brain. Much of the brain just runs autonomic systems like your heart and digestion. Do you include the subconscious? What part of your brain is deciding what you dream? Is that part of you or not? Do you count the body? Your hormonal processes affect your choices and actions. Your reflexes and athletic ability surely have an impact on your recreational choices and whether you become a professional athlete, for instance. If your hand is chopped off, you probably don’t consider it part of you anymore. The detached and decaying limb no longer has much affect on your choices. For that matter, if the nerves to your legs are damaged beyond use making you a paraplegic, are they still part of you? Is “you” defined by the extent of your senses? Does that mean “you” extends out to your fingertips and toes, essentially as far as you can feel? If we’re basing it on your senses, why consider only sense of touch? What about as far out as you can see or hear? Watch on television? Read about?
You might say none of that is “you” because, while you can sense it, you can’t control it. You can only control your body. But you’re only doing that by sending electric signals out from your brain. Considering that, can you not relay signals further out through other mediums? You can throw a ball and knock something over. You can blow out a candle. If you kindly ask someone standing next to a light switch to flip on the light, they’re fairly likely to comply.
And recall that your pattern and your choices were affected by me deciding to write this article. The lines get really blurry the more you think about it. The thoughts that inspired this article are certainly a small but important part of what I think defines me. I’m sharing my pattern with you right now. I’m impressing upon you a small part of who I am. You are tainted by the essence of me! You can choose to repeat these thoughts and propagate them to other living things, keeping part of my soul alive, or you can stifle them within your brain, which will one day decay, and let them die. Better yet, you can keep parts or even elaborate on those and discard others, or even refute parts in hopes of stifling those thoughts in others as well. Our mortal lives are a sort of selection process. However, if you believe that all of what exists in your mind now will continue after your death in an eternal soul, then you will carry my tainted thoughts with you into the afterlife, including all the parts that you firmly disagree with.
That’s all I’ll say for now. I just want to ask questions that some may not have given much thought to. I just ask that you think about the merit of the notion of souls as patterns, and if it makes sense to you, begin to pay attention to other places where you sense ever-shifting patterns that also seem to grow in complexity, but that deserves its own article.
I’ve thought about this before, and as a first attempt would place the line of demarcation between “you” and “not-you” at the point where sensory input begins to travel along biological pathways.
Looking forward to a future containing non-biological sapience would force me to sacrifice clarity from an already vague statement, and generalize to the point where input becomes tightly coupled to the decision-making process.
i’m wondering if and where synchronicities relate to the “pattern” concept, especially pattern interaction. i’ll say or think, or read or see on tv some odd word or phrase, and it will pop up again somewhere shortly thereafter. and they tend to come in waves. they seem too specific to be mere coincidence, at least in terms of randomness.
an example: i dropped AOL and my friend says she’s glad i “finally got off the AOL titty”. i respond with an email with subject line “titty caca”. now as it so happens my mom leaves newspaper articles for me to read and several months’ worth had piled up. after sending the email i decide to read some of them, pick up the first one, read it then instinctively flip it over to check out the other side and for one of the articles there was a picture of a lake… yes, it was Lake Titicaca. the pic was face-down the whole time, couldn’t have cued me. i was just bouncing off my friend’s comment, used that term in doing so, then just so happen to look at a piece of paper that had been infront of me for months, with that same term (titty caca) used in a different context.
that’s just one example but they happen to me all the time. not always as extreme as that one, but many are. i was logging them at one point, trying to see a pattern. there were literally hundreds with times and dates, but sadly i lost them all in a system crash ans stopped logging in frustration.
also, there are some studies suggesting our nervous system and every cell in our bodies are part of our thought process and may actually store memories of sorts. don’t have links handy, just something i’ve read in passing.
One more thing if you haven’t heard of the book, “Mister God, This is Anna” by Fynn, about a little genius girl who was obsessed with mirrors and would point them at each other creating endless patterns of reflection, and she said, “I think maybe this is how Mr God is”, basically positing a universal soul/consciousness for which we are all a sort of sensory unit.
so we our “selves” could just be perceptory functions that allow the uiverse to observe itself, since bieng “everything”, it can’t step outside itself, so it has to figure a way to observe and experience itself from within.
i realise i’m personifying the universe more than is probably accurate, but it’s a good metaphor for a logical problem that such an all-inclusive “beingness” would encounter in trying to observe itself: how does something which includes “everything” see itself in the mirror? with sensory subsets in infinite different patterns.
that allows for a concept of immortality, but leaves “us” an intact beings in the realm of mortality, just like the cells in our bodies are constantly replaced in the process of iterating the pattern that is “us”.
the univese could be the ultimate “us”, incorporating all of us but being none of us, just the sum of ever-changing parts in an infinitely-changing but energy-conserving whole. or something like that.
where that leaves free will, i don’t know.
Cool artwork Dale.
Just because the various cells, organs, and appendages of our bodies help us to experience the world, doesn’t mean they aren’t autonomous (free will) to some degree or another.
Trust me, your memories are in your brain, not in your soul. Anybody who has had personal experience with medical anesthesia that leaves you perfectly conscious and interactive but suppresses with your ability to store memories will attest to this. Unless we are willing to claim that medicines and other chemicals affect your soul and not just your physical brain.
Correct me if I’m wrong Dale, but is that script supposed to be Malayalam?
The only thing it’s supposed to be is cool looking. I don’t remember what it is.
I am not convinced that there is such a thing as a soul. Thus I don’t believe that a soul is something that is real. Unless there is evidence that there is such a thing as a soul it is irrational to believe that a soul is something that is real.
$
Did you read the first paragraph, Reardon? I’m sure you don’t like the word I used to describe “the most defining and enduring aspect of a life” but that’s just semantics. It sounds to me like you believe “the most defining and enduring aspect of a life” is incorporated in your brain and body and therefore dies and decays along with your body. You have plenty of evidence of that. What you don’t have evidence for is something separate from your body.
I’m too illiterate to read such a long, well thought out post. I would prefer if Dale read it into a mic and made a downloadable mp3.
Thanks
I’m planning to go back and read some of my blog posts for YouTube. Do you know how I can extract just the audio from a QT file for a download-able file?
Dale
Apparently you did not read my name carefully. There is no “o” in my name. You are not the only one however. This happens a lot because people apparently don’t bother to look at my name or perhaps other person’s names as well long enough to notice how it is spelled. It would be like if I spelled your name Dayle. My advice is not to assume you know how someone spells their name and take the time to take note of how they spell it. I can understand misspelling someone’s name if you have not seen how it is spelled but there is no reason to misspell someone’s name when you have seen how it is spelled.
You are correct that there is no evidence for something separate from the body and that is why it is irrational to believe in a so called soul.
Yeah, well I wouldn’t go into a neurotic rant about someone misspelling my name though.
You can be a vocabulary authoritarian if you want but I’m going to be a vocabulary libertarian and point out that words evolve. I think the word “soul” has evolved to have meaning in a modern society, and to some people, it’s not separate from the body nor is it eternal in the sense that many religious people have described it.
Dale
I am not a vocabulary authoritarian or any kind of authoritarian. Spelling is not vocabulary. Whatever you believe is a soul can you define it in a single sentence or at least a few sentences? That blog entry was lengthy and rather uninteresting imo. That is why I didn’t bother to read it entirely. Anthem btw is no lengthy. I recommend it if you want to read a novel that is not lengthy.
I defined it one sentence, the 2nd sentence in the very first paragraph actually.
You’re making comments on a post you didn’t bother to read? Can you tell me who it is that’s holding a gun to your head and making you visit my site? For that matter, can someone explain to me why I’m wasting my time responding to someone who has already demonstrated that they don’t want to take the time to listen? What’s a good word for a one-sided conversationalist, someone who speaks but doesn’t listen?
I need an ignore feature on this site.
Dale
You may not bother to read this but you probably will. I read part of the blog entry. I read about the first paragraph. You may not like criticism and that is understandable. However I think one should be able to tollerate criticism. Perhaps you are not used to criticism given that is seems that others who post comments to this site only have favorable comments and seem to praise your work. I like some of your cartoons and you know that but if you are going to allow comments you should be willing to tollerate comments that are critical rather than ignore them. I had a blog in the past and I welcomed critical comments. I never considered an ignore feature because rather than ignore criticism I would either defend my position or if the criticism was warranted I would accept it and even thank the critic. That is something that is unheard of today sadly. Have a nice day.
What is the most defining and enduring aspect of life? I don’t have a notion of what it is.
Rearden, I asked you before to explain WTF “intolerant of criticism” means. You never did. Go back and read what I asked about that so I don’t have to repeat it. You’re beyond tedious at this point.
Dale
I don’t recall you asking about intollerant of criticism. In my last post before this one I wrote that I think that one should tollerate criticism. That was just posted before your last post. You stated that you need an ignore feature on this site. I took that to mean that you would like to ignore criticism of ideas that you have expressed. If this is not the case then why would you want an ignore feature? The only way to avoid criticism on a website is to not post to it.
$
It was in a previous post from the first time you brought it up, one of the minarchism comics I think.
I find it comical that you don’t see the blatant double standard you are applying. You can ignore my post if you find it unworthy of your attention, but if I suggest ignoring your comments because I find them unworthy of my attention, I am “Intolerant of criticism”. I think you should try to make your points more persuasive instead of whining and resorting to ad hominems when your comments do not deliver the response you had hoped for.
I’m already giving you and your comments far more attention than they deserve, in my space that you chose to come to (along with over 10,000 unique visitors a month) but see how instead of just saying your comments suck, I’m explaining why? This is called “constructive criticism”. Look it up. I have actually tried to engage you in a two-sided conversation and have replied in order to give you an opportunity to elaborate on some of these particularly weak points, and you failed to do so. I don’t know why you think I should spend special effort to answer your questions and respond to your comments when you’ve already demonstrated you want to engage in a one-sided conversation, i.e. speaking but not listening. And then you criticize ME for not wanting to listen to you. *eye roll* Spectacularly hypocritical. Another word for you to look up: “reciprocation”
I haven’t deleted any of your comments, to my knowledge. That might be a worthy reason to call me intolerant of criticism. I do not consider the vast majority of them to be very compelling anyway so what’s the harm in letting the world read them?
Dale
You must have me confused with someone else. I have not engaged in ad hominems in my posts to this site. You haven’t really explained why you dislike my comments. Your last post is condesending. I have no problem with people expressing criticism and thus I am not being hypocritical. You and I have a disagreement. I don’t think that you are necessarily intolerant of criticism but there are people who don’t take criticism well. I have no problem with constructive criticism btw. I have not stated that I think that you should spend special effort to answer my questions. Again you are likely confusing me with someone else. Have a nice day.
$
Is that Tamil script?
Well, if you think about it, it’s possible to believe in naturalistic afterlives. Think about it: How would you know you were alive if you haven’t been dead before? You see, death is not nothingness. Death is simply the name that we have given to that which is unconscious. Sound is not really pure sound, it’s sound/silence. Light, also, is light/darkness. They are waves that have crests and troughs. In the same way death is just the ‘off’ part of the wave of consciousness. So you see, death IMPLYS life! They go together. Death doesn’t just win forever. Because if you say: “Well I’m going to be nothing after I die. It’s just going to be a dark nothingness for eternity…” Then what about the nothingness before you were born?