Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Philosophy Club

[JackDaydream]

It does seem that people got carried away with belief in the soul and spirits in the past or possibly extremely confused. This was in certain ideas about the afterlife. In Christianity, there is a mixture of belief in an immortal soul derived from Plato and this was sometimes juxtaposed by the idea of a resurrection of the body at the end of the world. There was some uncertainty about whether the resurrection body is a physical or spiritual one. Some religions speak of the idea of the reincarnation of the soul, with periods in between in bardo, as dimensions of heavens and hells, such as in.'The Tibetan Book of the Dead'.

The belief in the concept of the soul was a way of thinking about such possibilities. While I keep a fairly open mind about the posibilitities of some form of existence beyond this life, to some extent, the various forms of such lives and the eternal soul may be symbolic of the continuity of life in the grand picture.

It does seem that the dogmatic teaching of the soul was used and abused to the point where this life was not seen as important. It was possible or permissible to see the physical body and the natural world as less important than the physical. It may have contributed to the current ecological crisis and have been used to justify inequalities on the basis that it would all be rectified in a future afterlife. Of course, belief that there is no soul or spirit can be abused too with people and living beings being seen as equal to objects rather than being seen as having any 'sacred' value. It is not as if materialism will translate into a basis for ethics automatically. In this sense, it may not be belief in or lack of belief in the concept of a soul may be applied to a picture of how one should live in various, arbitrary ways in religious and secular philosophies.

It is my impression that idealism does not exist without the idea of the soul.

In my opinion, since the mind is a functioning human brain, for the brain to disintegrate means that the mind disintegrates together.

The common idea of the "soul" is that of a spiritual being that lacks all the characteristics of physical things.

By definition, the soul is an untenable concept that only derives from the subjective interpretation of consciousness.

Yes, it does seem that the idea of the soul is connected to a basis for idealism. Also, it is often linked to more esoteric systems of thought, ranging from Hinduism to the development of theosophy in the West.

I am not sure what it would mean for the 'mind' to disintegrate at death and whether that would mean that it vanishes. Even amongst those who believe that death is the ultimate end it is unknown at what point all consciousness exists and whether this is at brain death itself. To think that this would be the point would signify that consciousness is located in the brain rather than distributed throughout the body, including the heart. Of course, the death of the body occurs in gradual way with the death of significant organs. Also, there may be disintegration of the mind in times leading up to death, such as the loss of memory in forms of dementia.

Even within Eastern thought there are a mixture of views. Apart from the idea of reincarnation there is the concept of Nirvana, which means 'snuffing out', like blowing out a candle. I have heard discussion as to whether this is a permanent or temporary process of departure from the wheel of rebirth.

Some thinkers in the East and West have suggested that people's souls live on in the evolutionary process, such as in becoming spiritual beings, such as Ascended Masters. This would include Jesus, the Buddha and St Germain. Within esoteric Christianity, there is the idea that the risen Christ who appeared after the resurrection there is the idea that Christ appeared in that kind of body before ascending into heaven.

As for the idea of the soul being an untenable concept, even the idea of the mind and self are open to question. Dennett and the behaviorist, BF Skinner, have seen consciousness as an illusion, even though most people think that they have a mind. Even the idea of the self, which is viewed to be the starting point of subjective awareness is open to query, but this may be about it as a process rather than an entity and it is possible to see the concepts of mind and soul as processes too.

Even before death, there is destruction of the brain in accidents, degenerative diseases, etc. In all cases the causal relationship between the neurological system and the mind can be seen. The destruction of the neurological system results in the destruction of the mind.

Consciousness is one of the modes of functioning of the brain. The one in which the data from the environment, the neural connection that corresponds to what is perceived and the physiological reactions that correspond according to the structure of the individual and according to previous experiences are superimposed in real time.

All this only happens in the brain and is completely dependent on that neurological structure.

The corruption of that structure means the impossibility for these processes to occur.

I do not find good reasons to consider the possibility of the existence of spiritual planes and their implications.

What is the structure of the soul? Where does the soul keep what it has learned? What changes in the soul? In which part of the soul does this evolution occur? How is it that the soul, of a nature other than the mundane, the opposite of the impermanent of physical reality, evolves?

There is a problem with concepts with interchakngeable definitions.

Saying that consciousness is an illusion must be preceded by a clarification of what kind of consciousness one is referring to.

It is logical that people think that they have a mind. If mind is an activity of the brain, when one thinks one cannot think that one has not thought.

It is a different thing to think that consciousness is the subjective experience of the "I" and not what is experienced. This is complicated but I suppose it would be a little clearer if you yourself tried to see if, when you refer to experiencing your "I", you are experiencing the "I" or something other than that "I".

In thinking about the subjective nature of the 'I', the transpersonal philosopher, Ken Wilber thinks of the 'witness' consciousness. This involves the ability to reflect upon one's inner experience. The ability to reflect is central to human inner experience and it involves the use of words and concepts. One way which I find to be important in being able to stand (or sit) back and observe one's thoughts, or the stream of consciousness, is meditation.

To some extent, all the various terms, soul, self and consciousness are constructs to describe the inner experiences. Each of these concepts are probably partial conceptions, although it is important in psychology and philosophy to try to use these terms in such a way as to gain a clearer perspective of the nature of mental states and experiences.

In relation to the idea of the 'mind', there is a tendency for people to think that it comes down to neuroscience. However, that is the wiring not the phenomenological reality itself. Some philosophers have thought that ideas are innate and this would raise the question as to whether it is connected to the nature of brain processes or an 'out there' picture of inner reality. That could be about the structure of the soul and the problem which may arise here is the nature of the invisible and processes. But, it is possible that there are laws and patterns of both inner and outer reality, especially as quantum physics shows lack of 'solidity' at the quantum level, making mind and matter more fluid.

[JackDaydream]

I see the soul as a collection of particular attributes. The kind of being you are. I don't think these traits persist after death but similar collections of traits will be found in others, but obviously not exactly the same. Those differences hardly seems an issue since there are many adults alive who have more in common with me today that I have in common with my child self. Even those who claim reincarnation don't posit that the reincarnation will be exactly the same.

Moral of the story is to not get too attached to what you are, because that configuration will surely die, either in your lifetime or at its conclusion.

It does seem that there is a lot in common amongst individuals and this may be due to the basic aspects of what a human being is. In some ways, each person is unique and part of the collective blueprint of being a human being. Attachment to other people, material objects, one's own body and to anything is problematic as nothing is permanent.

The commonality is, in part, being human, but it's mostly just natural variation. Some people will be more alike than others and some, by small chance, will be remarkably alike. I worked in personnel for a long time and met many, many people. Every now and then you would run into someone who would be remarkably like someone you know, to the point where it can be difficult at first not to treat them like that other person.

Out of eight billion, chances are that we all have some mental "clones" somewhere.

One idea which I have come across is the idea that homosexuality and transsexualism occur because people have experienced of different lives in both genders. That would mean that the soul itself is not any specific gender but has trace memories from previous lives, based on attachments in a former lifetime. Some have argued that ties between individuals go back to previous lifetimes at the level of soul connections. I have met people who view some of their relationships, especially ones in the family, in such a way. If I think about my own family experience, I would probably say that it would probably be my mother who I would see as the one who stands out in that way, but this may be down to me being an only child. It is hard to know how much is flights of fantasy.

How would that work? Do we exist in a dimension that we didn't know existed? It's speculative. I would not even bet my car on that, let alone my life, and I drive an ancient Corolla from the 20th century.

I know what you mean about resemblances because I notice them too. However, it is hard to know to what extent they are real or about our own associations. For example, I know that when I have made comparisons between people in conversation another person may see it differently. This is because they are interpretations in one's inner vision and interpretations. Also, even if a person may appear in many ways to have a similar life and nature to another the inner consciousness of the two may be very different.

[JackDaydream]

It seems that the idea of the 'soul' has been replaced by that of the 'self' in philosophy and psychology. This may be partly a reflection of the transition from religious thinking to secular humanism. However, as well as having a bearing on aspects of the philosophy of religion it is also an issue relating to the the way in which 'mind' is understood.

I was reading R Swinburne's entry in the 'Oxford Companion to Philosophy', which includes the following,
'The human soul is that which gives life to the human being. For Aristotle, the soul was simply the form of the body, i.e. the way the body behaved, and thus not capable of existing separate from it; plants and animals also had souls of their kinds.'
He also says,
'Most modern philosophers deny the existence of an immaterial soul.'

I find these considerations extremely difficult for thinking about the nature of life, consciousness and life and death. There may have been problems arising from seeing souls as immaterial as opposed to imminent or as a separate entity, and it may have led to the classic mind-body problem, as the concepts of soul and mind include a fuzzy overlap.

The idea is the self may be seen as being about subjectivity and the seat of consciousness. However, in a way it may be dismissive of the reality and importance of conscious experience, and the 'spark of consciousness'.

It also is important to consider that the idea of a soul may be applicable to animals and all living forms. This may also be applicable to issues of systems, including the ecosystem, with some nodding towards the concept of panpsychism in its soft form. It may be useful for thinking of the planet and the 'world soul', and James Lovelock's concept of Gaia may capture this. The idea of the soul may be important in issue of 'deep ecology' and respect for the 'sacred' aspects of 'nature' and what Fritjof Capra describes as 'the web of life'.

My own understanding of the soul, especially in its use amongst transpersonal writers, such as Thomas Moore, is that it gives value to the importance of the cultivation of the inner world, in his books, 'The Care of the Soul', and, 'The Dark Night of the Soul'. He is not necessarily speaking about the disembodied idea of the soul but about the value of inner aspects of questing. Within many philosophy discussions there often seems to be a tendency to try to pin down the nature of reality to appearances.

In understanding the experiential aspects of consciousness and the appreciation of the value of life, I see the idea of 'soul' as being a term which still has relevance. Of course, it is ambiguous, but so are the terms body, mind, self and consciousness. What do you think about the idea of soul as a concept and in relation to terms such as mind and self? Of course, some of it comes down to definitions but such words are important as tools for philosophical constructs. What are your thoughts? Also, if you are opposed to the notion of the soul, why?

I think it's a word which carries unnecessary baggage because it's associated with a religious view as somehow connected with god and eternal life. So I don't use it, because I don't believe that.

I don't think we need a special word to understand the meaning and importance of being an experiencing subject. It's what brings meaning, purpose, value, interests, mattering, morality and everything worth having into the universe. In my view, if we could concentrate on that a bit more, our shared humanity, we might do a bit better at being humans in this world. And treat other experiencing species better too, based on what we can scientifically understand about what it means to be them, rather than worrying about whether they have god-given souls.

There are potential pros and cons associated with serious belief in an afterlife with an immortal soul which will be judged according to some religious teaching. It can bring hope and comfort, and motivate believers to do good. But it can also motivate people to do awful things, with little concerns for consequences in this world. A lot of that is down to the individual, and the culture I think. It's not necessarily a good or bad thing, it can be both. I wouldn't want to take the good stuff away from people who benefit from it, but I def wouldn't want to live in a theocracy - the public square should be run on a secular basis.

Yes, I do see potential problems with the word soul because it can conjure up all kinds of connotations. So, I am careful of its use and that is one of the reasons why I wrote the post. On the other hand, I see it as being a possible alternative to some materialistic pictures of consciousness. Also, the idea of an afterlife, and immortality can be experienced with negative and positive consequences.

Personally, this life has enough stresses , so I am not sure that I want to live forever, unless it is in a different mode of being. But, it doesn't stop me from spending moments wondering about whether there is some part of one's unique being which continues eternally at a deep level. This may be at a deeper level than ego consciousness, which is where the idea of the soul may be relevant.

[JackDaydream]

Jack

As for the idea of the soul being an untenable concept, even the idea of the mind and self are open to question. Dennett and the behaviorist, BF Skinner, have seen consciousness as an illusion, even though most people think that they have a mind. Even the idea of the self, which is viewed to be the starting point of subjective awareness is open to query, but this may be about it as a process rather than an entity and it is possible to see the concepts of mind and soul as processes too.

Dennett dazzles with convoluted dancing around his flashy claims. Ultimately he relies on functionalism, which doesn't address whether conscious experience is 'real' vs an 'illusion', but that doesn't sell books because most people would agree conscious experience is not a perfect representation of reality. The 'user interface' analogy works well enough, but it dodges the Hard Question while pretending to make it dissolve by being ambiguous.

I think he's right about dismissing the notion of the Cartesian Theatre tho, with 'the self' as a mini me watching it all play out and issuing commands. It seems more likely to me that a sense of being a unified self emerges from the mechanisms which filter and focus the cacophany of input to create a coherent, unified field of consciousness. That's Me, I think. Which manifests as an embodied agent with a first person pov, located in specific space and time, navigating the world 'out there'. An ongoing, moment to moment process, with a backstory and congruent thread of identity. Where the priority is utility and coherence, with built-in 'good enough' short cuts. So whatever my conscious experience is up to at any given time, is Me.

Neural correlation strongly suggests that when my physical brain processes cease, so does my experience. All the empirical evidence points that way too. And that's a tough thing to contemplate, for yourself and your loved ones. So it's not hard to see the motivation for believing we somehow go on, in some idealised form without the mundane irritations and suffering of being a physical human. Who knows, maybe, but it seems a lot like wishful thinking. And if the people you hate get to burn for eternity, well that's divine justice innit.

If there is 'something' after death, panpsychism looks like a contender. A reincarnation of sorts, but not as this Me - my proto-sentient particles will be scattered and might end up in worms or tree roots, stream sedimentation, star dust - nothing like the human Me.

Dennet is such an influential figure and while I am not sure that I agree with his outlook, I do think he presents his arguments extremely well. With the neural processes and death, it may indeed mean that life, as we know it ends. But, I do say 'as we know it'. I definitely don't think that a clear case can be made for life after death from NDEs but it does raise the possibility of some kind of inner journey of significance on another level. Also, Aldous Huxley's idea of "mind at large', with the brain as a filter does present a way of a doorway into another dimension beyond the usual physical one. Huxley draws upon the ideas of Bergson on the 'creative mind' and he backs these up with his own experiences of masculine. I took LSD twice and it 'felt' like I had stepped into another dimension of the 'soul', but I am aware that this was simply what I felt.

The relationship between pansychism and the idea of reincarnation is interesting. It could be like a disintegration of the various aspects of mind and matter, like a cosmic recycling process.

[JackDaydream]

The concept of a soul has gone a long way from being used to refer to a kind of material thing or stuff that is both spatially extended and spatially located, to being used to refer to a totally immaterial thing (substance) that is both spatially unextended and spatially unlocated (= Cartesian souls).

"Like many (or indeed all) sixth and fifth century thinkers who expressed views on the nature or or constitution of the soul, Heraclitus thought that the soul was bodily, but composed of an unusually fine or rare kind of matter, e.g. air or fire. (A possible exception is the Pythagorean Philolaus, who may have held that the soul is an 'attunement' of the body.) The prevalence of the idea that the soul is bodily explains the absence of problems about the relation between soul and body. Soul and body were not thought to be radically different in kind; their difference seemed just to consist in a difference in degree of properties such as fineness and mobility.
…
Coming from the theories of Plato and Aristotle, the first thing that might strike us about the theories of soul adopted by the two dominant Hellenistic schools, Epicurus' Garden and the Stoa, is the doctrine, shared by both, that the soul is corporeal. A number of Stoic arguments for the claim that the soul is a body have come down to us (see Annas 1992, 39-41). The best one of these is that the soul is a body because (roughly) only bodies affect one another, and soul and body do affect one another, for instance in cases of bodily damage and emotion. Epicurus employs the same argument in his Letter to Herodotus, which provides an outline of his physical doctrines (Long & Sedley 1987 [in what follows L&S] 14A7). In a way that reminds one of Presocratic theories, both Epicurus and the Stoics hold that the soul is a particularly fine kind of body, diffused all the way through the perceptible (flesh-and-blood) body of the animate organism. As if echoing the view of the soul that Simmias in the Phaedo presents as the majority view, Epicurus thinks that the soul is dispersed at death along with its constituent atoms, losing the powers that it has while it is contained by the body of the organism that it ensouls (L&S 14A6).
…
Epicurus is an atomist, and in accordance with his atomism he takes the soul, like everything else that there is except for the void, to be ultimately composed of atoms. Our sources are somewhat unclear as to exactly which kinds of materials he took to be involved in the composition of soul. It is very probable, though, that in addition to some relatively familiar materials—such as fire-like and wind-like stuffs, or rather the atoms making up such stuffs —the soul, on Epicurus' view, also includes, in fact as a key ingredient, atoms of a nameless kind of substance, which is responsible for sense-perception.
...
Stoic physics allows for three different kinds of pneuma (lit. ‘breath’), a breath-like material compound of two of the four Stoic elements, fire and air."

Ancient Theories of Soul: http: //plato.stanford. edu/entries/ancient-soul/

The concept of the soul definitely has a long history and it is useful to see its roots in the Stoic perspective. It had a lot of significance for the ancients, including Egytian thought. It may have faded out, especially in the mainstream of philosophy but is still held as significant in many esoteric traditions.

[JackDaydream]

One other matter which I have been thinking about is if the idea of soul is accepted, as the underlying source of consciousness as an animating factor of sentience does AI have a soul? In an extreme form of pansychism it could be said to have a soul, in the way of matter being 'alive'. However, it would not be the same as in sentient beings.

[Belindi]

Immortal souls.
Immortal can mean either everlasting or eternal. Obviously there is nothing in the temporal relative world that endures for ever. That leaves us to seek out what it is to be eternal.

Because an event can never not have happened, there is something that is eternal. Obviously what is eternal is not temporal in the sense of differentiated systems of information. Therefore what is eternal is something that is undifferentiated.

Therefore the common idea of differentiated souls is not an eternity candidate. Events too are differentiated one from another only by human creativity and environment of natural necessity.

[JackDaydream]

Immortal souls.
Immortal can mean either everlasting or eternal. Obviously there is nothing in the temporal relative world that endures for ever. That leaves us to seek out what it is to be eternal.

Because an event can never not have happened, there is something that is eternal. Obviously what is eternal is not temporal in the sense of differentiated systems of information. Therefore what is eternal is something that is undifferentiated.

Therefore the common idea of differentiated souls is not an eternity candidate. Events too are differentiated one from another only by human creativity and environment of natural necessity.

The use of the terms immortal and eternal is interesting because they are often used interchangeably but have subtle differences as you point out correctly. I remember first coming across a book in the school library when I was about 14, by a Christian writer, JB Phillips, if I remember correctly, who took the idea of eternal life to mean existing in the 'mind of God' forever. That would imply the idea that everyone and everything exists forever. Of course, it is so different from traditional teachings of Christianity and the idea of 'mind of God' can also be taken symbolically as well.

[Sy Borg]

I see the soul as a collection of particular attributes. The kind of being you are. I don't think these traits persist after death but similar collections of traits will be found in others, but obviously not exactly the same. Those differences hardly seems an issue since there are many adults alive who have more in common with me today that I have in common with my child self. Even those who claim reincarnation don't posit that the reincarnation will be exactly the same.

Moral of the story is to not get too attached to what you are, because that configuration will surely die, either in your lifetime or at its conclusion.

It does seem that there is a lot in common amongst individuals and this may be due to the basic aspects of what a human being is. In some ways, each person is unique and part of the collective blueprint of being a human being. Attachment to other people, material objects, one's own body and to anything is problematic as nothing is permanent.

The commonality is, in part, being human, but it's mostly just natural variation. Some people will be more alike than others and some, by small chance, will be remarkably alike. I worked in personnel for a long time and met many, many people. Every now and then you would run into someone who would be remarkably like someone you know, to the point where it can be difficult at first not to treat them like that other person.

Out of eight billion, chances are that we all have some mental "clones" somewhere.

One idea which I have come across is the idea that homosexuality and transsexualism occur because people have experienced of different lives in both genders. That would mean that the soul itself is not any specific gender but has trace memories from previous lives, based on attachments in a former lifetime. Some have argued that ties between individuals go back to previous lifetimes at the level of soul connections. I have met people who view some of their relationships, especially ones in the family, in such a way. If I think about my own family experience, I would probably say that it would probably be my mother who I would see as the one who stands out in that way, but this may be down to me being an only child. It is hard to know how much is flights of fantasy.

How would that work? Do we exist in a dimension that we didn't know existed? It's speculative. I would not even bet my car on that, let alone my life, and I drive an ancient Corolla from the 20th century.

I know what you mean about resemblances because I notice them too. However, it is hard to know to what extent they are real or about our own associations. For example, I know that when I have made comparisons between people in conversation another person may see it differently. This is because they are interpretations in one's inner vision and interpretations. Also, even if a person may appear in many ways to have a similar life and nature to another the inner consciousness of the two may be very different.

True, when I was stuck by the similarity between people, some agreed and some didn't. I have had plenty of people say I look like someone else.

Still, perceptual variations aside, logic makes clear that, with eight billion people, there will be strong commonalities, especially with the more usual personality types (eg. ESFJ). At times I have had some quirky thoughts but a web search finds that thousands of other have had the same thought, even sometimes with close to the same wording.

Somewhere out there, you will have some quasi-doppelgangers. Further, if you took every wolf in the world and examined its personality traits, there would be a wolf that is the most similar to you, and the least similar. The Jack of the pack, you might say :)

Further, if you take all of the space rock forming in the early solar system, one of them would be most like you. Consider the properties of those rocks. There will be the dominant entities, plus small ones caught in the big ones' gravity. They will consume, destroy, capture or eject any smaller object that nears it. Some rocks will always be in clusters while others will be out on the fringes, interacting rarely. Some will acts as catalysts between other rocks, and so on. These dynamics apply in almost all variable groups of things.

[Gertie]

Jack

As for the idea of the soul being an untenable concept, even the idea of the mind and self are open to question. Dennett and the behaviorist, BF Skinner, have seen consciousness as an illusion, even though most people think that they have a mind. Even the idea of the self, which is viewed to be the starting point of subjective awareness is open to query, but this may be about it as a process rather than an entity and it is possible to see the concepts of mind and soul as processes too.

Dennett dazzles with convoluted dancing around his flashy claims. Ultimately he relies on functionalism, which doesn't address whether conscious experience is 'real' vs an 'illusion', but that doesn't sell books because most people would agree conscious experience is not a perfect representation of reality. The 'user interface' analogy works well enough, but it dodges the Hard Question while pretending to make it dissolve by being ambiguous.

I think he's right about dismissing the notion of the Cartesian Theatre tho, with 'the self' as a mini me watching it all play out and issuing commands. It seems more likely to me that a sense of being a unified self emerges from the mechanisms which filter and focus the cacophany of input to create a coherent, unified field of consciousness. That's Me, I think. Which manifests as an embodied agent with a first person pov, located in specific space and time, navigating the world 'out there'. An ongoing, moment to moment process, with a backstory and congruent thread of identity. Where the priority is utility and coherence, with built-in 'good enough' short cuts. So whatever my conscious experience is up to at any given time, is Me.

Neural correlation strongly suggests that when my physical brain processes cease, so does my experience. All the empirical evidence points that way too. And that's a tough thing to contemplate, for yourself and your loved ones. So it's not hard to see the motivation for believing we somehow go on, in some idealised form without the mundane irritations and suffering of being a physical human. Who knows, maybe, but it seems a lot like wishful thinking. And if the people you hate get to burn for eternity, well that's divine justice innit.

If there is 'something' after death, panpsychism looks like a contender. A reincarnation of sorts, but not as this Me - my proto-sentient particles will be scattered and might end up in worms or tree roots, stream sedimentation, star dust - nothing like the human Me.

Dennet is such an influential figure and while I am not sure that I agree with his outlook, I do think he presents his arguments extremely well.

Really?  His style is entertaining, but the antithesis of clear and concise  The flashy claims which he's famous for aren't well argued imo.  Can you clearly  present his argument that ''Consciousness is an illusion''?  Or  even explain what he definitively means by that? 

With the neural processes and death, it may indeed mean that life, as we know it ends. But, I do say 'as we know it'.

Yes, it's hard to explain neural correlation in a way which doesn't imply consciousness ceases when brain death occurs.  It would mean the universe is radically different to the knowable ways it presents itself to us.   That could well be the case, but then any assumptions about such a universe are necessarily highly  speculative.  And when those speculations are of a type that have plausible psychological or cultural explanations, that adds a further burden onto those claims to find a basis for justification. 

I definitely don't think that a clear case can be made for life after death from NDEs but it does raise the possibility of some kind of inner journey of significance on another level. Also, Aldous Huxley's idea of "mind at large', with the brain as a filter does present a way of a doorway into another dimension beyond the usual physical one. Huxley draws upon the ideas of Bergson on the 'creative mind' and he backs these up with his own experiences of masculine. I took LSD twice and it 'felt' like I had stepped into another dimension of the 'soul', but I am aware that this was simply what I felt.

Maybe, but we know drugs affect brain processes, so it doesn't escape the challenge of neural correlation.

The relationship between pansychism and the idea of reincarnation is interesting. It could be like a disintegration of the various aspects of mind and matter, like a cosmic recycling process.

Yeah   Or there's Idealism.  It's finding ways of testing such ideas which is the prob bearing in mind our limited ways of knowing reality. 

A relevant issue for panpsychism is The Combination Problem, wiki -

''The problem arises from the tension between the seemingly irreducible nature of consciousness and its ubiquity. If consciousness is ubiquitous, then in some versions of panpsychism every atom (or every bit, depending on the theory) has a minimal level of it. How then, as Keith Frankish puts it, do these "tiny consciousnesses combine" to create larger conscious experiences such as "the twinge of pain" he feels in his knee?[111] This objection has garnered significant attention,[11][111][1] and many have attempted to answer it.[94][112] None of the proposed answers has gained widespread acceptance.[11]''

If this type of panpsychism is true, when my body disintegrates it's hard to see how all the fundamental particle bits of my consciousness might re-combine with soil, oxygen and everything else to re-constitute anything remotely like this Me.

[Pattern-chaser]

A common part of life for individuals is that the sun rises each morning and sweeps across the sky until it sets at sunset.

But that is just an intuitive interpretation that does not correspond to reality.

Actually, no. What you describe is an accurate observation of apparent reality from a particular geographical location. Observation from a point outside the solar system gives rise to a very different (heliocentric) observation that is equally valid.

But this doesn't matter. There is no argument here, just an exchange of views. This isn't a vital point that must be dissected and hammered home.

[JackDaydream]

Jack

As for the idea of the soul being an untenable concept, even the idea of the mind and self are open to question. Dennett and the behaviorist, BF Skinner, have seen consciousness as an illusion, even though most people think that they have a mind. Even the idea of the self, which is viewed to be the starting point of subjective awareness is open to query, but this may be about it as a process rather than an entity and it is possible to see the concepts of mind and soul as processes too.

Dennett dazzles with convoluted dancing around his flashy claims. Ultimately he relies on functionalism, which doesn't address whether conscious experience is 'real' vs an 'illusion', but that doesn't sell books because most people would agree conscious experience is not a perfect representation of reality. The 'user interface' analogy works well enough, but it dodges the Hard Question while pretending to make it dissolve by being ambiguous.

I think he's right about dismissing the notion of the Cartesian Theatre tho, with 'the self' as a mini me watching it all play out and issuing commands. It seems more likely to me that a sense of being a unified self emerges from the mechanisms which filter and focus the cacophany of input to create a coherent, unified field of consciousness. That's Me, I think. Which manifests as an embodied agent with a first person pov, located in specific space and time, navigating the world 'out there'. An ongoing, moment to moment process, with a backstory and congruent thread of identity. Where the priority is utility and coherence, with built-in 'good enough' short cuts. So whatever my conscious experience is up to at any given time, is Me.

Neural correlation strongly suggests that when my physical brain processes cease, so does my experience. All the empirical evidence points that way too. And that's a tough thing to contemplate, for yourself and your loved ones. So it's not hard to see the motivation for believing we somehow go on, in some idealised form without the mundane irritations and suffering of being a physical human. Who knows, maybe, but it seems a lot like wishful thinking. And if the people you hate get to burn for eternity, well that's divine justice innit.

If there is 'something' after death, panpsychism looks like a contender. A reincarnation of sorts, but not as this Me - my proto-sentient particles will be scattered and might end up in worms or tree roots, stream sedimentation, star dust - nothing like the human Me.

Dennet is such an influential figure and while I am not sure that I agree with his outlook, I do think he presents his arguments extremely well.

Really?  His style is entertaining, but the antithesis of clear and concise  The flashy claims which he's famous for aren't well argued imo.  Can you clearly  present his argument that ''Consciousness is an illusion''?  Or  even explain what he definitively means by that? 

With the neural processes and death, it may indeed mean that life, as we know it ends. But, I do say 'as we know it'.

Yes, it's hard to explain neural correlation in a way which doesn't imply consciousness ceases when brain death occurs.  It would mean the universe is radically different to the knowable ways it presents itself to us.   That could well be the case, but then any assumptions about such a universe are necessarily highly  speculative.  And when those speculations are of a type that have plausible psychological or cultural explanations, that adds a further burden onto those claims to find a basis for justification. 

I definitely don't think that a clear case can be made for life after death from NDEs but it does raise the possibility of some kind of inner journey of significance on another level. Also, Aldous Huxley's idea of "mind at large', with the brain as a filter does present a way of a doorway into another dimension beyond the usual physical one. Huxley draws upon the ideas of Bergson on the 'creative mind' and he backs these up with his own experiences of masculine. I took LSD twice and it 'felt' like I had stepped into another dimension of the 'soul', but I am aware that this was simply what I felt.

Maybe, but we know drugs affect brain processes, so it doesn't escape the challenge of neural correlation.

The relationship between pansychism and the idea of reincarnation is interesting. It could be like a disintegration of the various aspects of mind and matter, like a cosmic recycling process.

Yeah   Or there's Idealism.  It's finding ways of testing such ideas which is the prob bearing in mind our limited ways of knowing reality. 

A relevant issue for panpsychism is The Combination Problem, wiki -

''The problem arises from the tension between the seemingly irreducible nature of consciousness and its ubiquity. If consciousness is ubiquitous, then in some versions of panpsychism every atom (or every bit, depending on the theory) has a minimal level of it. How then, as Keith Frankish puts it, do these "tiny consciousnesses combine" to create larger conscious experiences such as "the twinge of pain" he feels in his knee?[111] This objection has garnered significant attention,[11][111][1] and many have attempted to answer it.[94][112] None of the proposed answers has gained widespread acceptance.[11]''

If this type of panpsychism is true, when my body disintegrates it's hard to see how all the fundamental particle bits of my consciousness might re-combine with soil, oxygen and everything else to re-constitute anything remotely like this Me.

I have only read some of Dennett's writings and from some discussion I had with other people, they may have been his best. What I really meant when I said he argues well was really that from the way he writes I can see why people are convinced by his arguments. This probably does come down to his 'flashy' style.

I definitely don't agree with the idea of consciousness as an illusion. I had plenty of discussion with 3017Amen some time ago about this aspect of Dennett's writing, as well as Dennett's perspective on qualia. The analysis of Dennett is a clear materialist stance, which leaves out the soul, just as the behaviorism of BF Skinner does. Skinner may have had an influence far greater than Dennett because he was such an influential figure in the development of psychology in the last century.

One book which I read a few days ago was, Brent Phillip's
'Where Science Meets Spirit' (2008), which argues that consciousness creates matter and the author argues,
'instead of thinking of ourselves as mostly helpless beings running around in some external world, being influenced by powerful events and influences outside of ourselves, physicists have come to understand that we are actually more like computers running a sophisticated hologram...In fact, it only exists in our minds. '

He also argues for the soul level as the depth or core of one's functioning, with specific reference to the idea of 'a broken soul'. At times I identify as being a broken soul, which leads me in the direction of shamanistic conceptions of the nature of reality. Brent describes the idea of a broken soul in the following way,
'A "broken soul" occurs when we have experiences that are so intensely painful and difficult that the energy at the very core of our being fractures. People who spend their entire lives being broken or feeling that it is impossible for them to be completely fixed often have broken soul'. When working in mental health care I always came more from the point of view of the idea of broken aspects of a person, often related to traumatic experiences, rather than the medical model alone.

In relation to pansychism, it is a perspective which I am thinking about for a while, but I am not sure if it captures the picture fully. Maybe, I am an idealist deep down, but I do see some problems of the dualistic split within thinking of the mind-body relationship.

[Sy Borg]

I definitely don't agree with the idea of consciousness as an illusion.

Agreed. They caught what I think of as "the philosopher's disease", where obviously real phenomena are declared "an illusion". A better claim is that consciousness may not be quite what we think it is.

[Pattern-chaser]

They caught what I think of as "the philosopher's disease", where obviously real phenomena are declared "an illusion".

I think there is a 'disease' with which philosophers can become 'infected'. Its primary symptom involves the fabrication of emotional and arbitrary 'justifications'. Misstating of evidence, especially exaggeration-for-effect, is characteristically symptomatic. This condition is diagnosed when the existence of possibly real phenomena is declared "obvious", "self-evident" or "certain".

There is no known cure.

[Gertie]

Jack



Dennett dazzles with convoluted dancing around his flashy claims. Ultimately he relies on functionalism, which doesn't address whether conscious experience is 'real' vs an 'illusion', but that doesn't sell books because most people would agree conscious experience is not a perfect representation of reality. The 'user interface' analogy works well enough, but it dodges the Hard Question while pretending to make it dissolve by being ambiguous.

I think he's right about dismissing the notion of the Cartesian Theatre tho, with 'the self' as a mini me watching it all play out and issuing commands. It seems more likely to me that a sense of being a unified self emerges from the mechanisms which filter and focus the cacophany of input to create a coherent, unified field of consciousness. That's Me, I think. Which manifests as an embodied agent with a first person pov, located in specific space and time, navigating the world 'out there'. An ongoing, moment to moment process, with a backstory and congruent thread of identity. Where the priority is utility and coherence, with built-in 'good enough' short cuts. So whatever my conscious experience is up to at any given time, is Me.

Neural correlation strongly suggests that when my physical brain processes cease, so does my experience. All the empirical evidence points that way too. And that's a tough thing to contemplate, for yourself and your loved ones. So it's not hard to see the motivation for believing we somehow go on, in some idealised form without the mundane irritations and suffering of being a physical human. Who knows, maybe, but it seems a lot like wishful thinking. And if the people you hate get to burn for eternity, well that's divine justice innit.

If there is 'something' after death, panpsychism looks like a contender. A reincarnation of sorts, but not as this Me - my proto-sentient particles will be scattered and might end up in worms or tree roots, stream sedimentation, star dust - nothing like the human Me.

Dennet is such an influential figure and while I am not sure that I agree with his outlook, I do think he presents his arguments extremely well.

Really?  His style is entertaining, but the antithesis of clear and concise  The flashy claims which he's famous for aren't well argued imo.  Can you clearly  present his argument that ''Consciousness is an illusion''?  Or  even explain what he definitively means by that? 

With the neural processes and death, it may indeed mean that life, as we know it ends. But, I do say 'as we know it'.

Yes, it's hard to explain neural correlation in a way which doesn't imply consciousness ceases when brain death occurs.  It would mean the universe is radically different to the knowable ways it presents itself to us.   That could well be the case, but then any assumptions about such a universe are necessarily highly  speculative.  And when those speculations are of a type that have plausible psychological or cultural explanations, that adds a further burden onto those claims to find a basis for justification. 

I definitely don't think that a clear case can be made for life after death from NDEs but it does raise the possibility of some kind of inner journey of significance on another level. Also, Aldous Huxley's idea of "mind at large', with the brain as a filter does present a way of a doorway into another dimension beyond the usual physical one. Huxley draws upon the ideas of Bergson on the 'creative mind' and he backs these up with his own experiences of masculine. I took LSD twice and it 'felt' like I had stepped into another dimension of the 'soul', but I am aware that this was simply what I felt.

Maybe, but we know drugs affect brain processes, so it doesn't escape the challenge of neural correlation.

The relationship between pansychism and the idea of reincarnation is interesting. It could be like a disintegration of the various aspects of mind and matter, like a cosmic recycling process.

Yeah   Or there's Idealism.  It's finding ways of testing such ideas which is the prob bearing in mind our limited ways of knowing reality. 

A relevant issue for panpsychism is The Combination Problem, wiki -

''The problem arises from the tension between the seemingly irreducible nature of consciousness and its ubiquity. If consciousness is ubiquitous, then in some versions of panpsychism every atom (or every bit, depending on the theory) has a minimal level of it. How then, as Keith Frankish puts it, do these "tiny consciousnesses combine" to create larger conscious experiences such as "the twinge of pain" he feels in his knee?[111] This objection has garnered significant attention,[11][111][1] and many have attempted to answer it.[94][112] None of the proposed answers has gained widespread acceptance.[11]''

If this type of panpsychism is true, when my body disintegrates it's hard to see how all the fundamental particle bits of my consciousness might re-combine with soil, oxygen and everything else to re-constitute anything remotely like this Me.

I have only read some of Dennett's writings and from some discussion I had with other people, they may have been his best. What I really meant when I said he argues well was really that from the way he writes I can see why people are convinced by his arguments. This probably does come down to his 'flashy' style.

I definitely don't agree with the idea of consciousness as an illusion.

It's not even clear what Dennett means by ''Consciousness is an illusion''. Sometimes Dennett talks like an eliminitivist saying that all conscious experience is material stuff and behaviour, so pain IS the firing of C fibres and saying ''ouch'' and that's all there is. Other times he seems to say 'what it is like' phenomenal experience does exist, but it's not what our folk psychology thinks it is. He obfuscates via enticing winding metaphorical journeys which you get so lost in you forget you've not reached the promised conclusion. And by drawing our attention to functionalism and behaviouralism, which effectively dodge the Hard Problem by simply ignoring it. It's poor stuff imo, he drives me barmy lol.

One book which I read a few days ago was, Brent Phillip's
'Where Science Meets Spirit' (2008), which argues that consciousness creates matter and the author argues,
'instead of thinking of ourselves as mostly helpless beings running around in some external world, being influenced by powerful events and influences outside of ourselves, physicists have come to understand that we are actually more like computers running a sophisticated hologram...In fact, it only exists in our minds. '

What is the argument?

He also argues for the soul level as the depth or core of one's functioning, with specific reference to the idea of 'a broken soul'. At times I identify as being a broken soul, which leads me in the direction of shamanistic conceptions of the nature of reality. Brent describes the idea of a broken soul in the following way,
'A "broken soul" occurs when we have experiences that are so intensely painful and difficult that the energy at the very core of our being fractures. People who spend their entire lives being broken or feeling that it is impossible for them to be completely fixed often have broken soul'. When working in mental health care I always came more from the point of view of the idea of broken aspects of a person, often related to traumatic experiences, rather than the medical model alone.

I think this type of talk resonates with many of us. There's this idea that people who don't express themselves in these types of spiritual ways don't have similar feelings, but it's part of the human condition. Finding solace where you can in the face of existential angst is a personal thing imo. Whatever works for you or me and does no harm, that's a good thing in my book.

However to argue for the existence of a soul as non-metaphorical, literal thing is a different matter.

And I don't want medical professionals treating me on the basis of my broken soul, which they can't locate but presumably believe exists independently of my physical and mental health. Why bother treating me at all if this life is just a difficult phase to be endured before the good stuff. Very few people actually put such beliefs into practice, thank goodness. They pick and choose what works for them.

In relation to pansychism, it is a perspective which I am thinking about for a while, but I am not sure if it captures the picture fully. Maybe, I am an idealist deep down, but I do see some problems of the dualistic split within thinking of the mind-body relationship.

There are problems with all of our ''what if...' hypotheses about the mind-body relationship, and no apparent way to test which, if any, are on the right track. The only wrong answer is to claim you know the right answer.

When we're not equipped to know something, we're left with trying to extrapolate from what we do know. The world presents itself to us in the form of our conscious experience of physical stuff and laws of nature, in a form which most people agree is a model of actual reality (solid tables, colours, the sound of a tree falling in a forest, etc). But what physicalism has going for it is it's managed to create an incredibly detailed, broad, empirical, coherent, and testably predictive interpretation of what our experience represents. It just can't explain the mind-body relationship using its scientific methodologies. In terms of detail, evidence, predictive power and so on, it's in a different league to panpsychism and idealism. And its discovery of neural correlation pretty much seals the deal on an 'afterlife' imo.

But it might be fundamentally wrong. The problem for alternative positions is they're necessarily highly speculative, difficult to compellingly argue or evidence, and prone to bias.