Hacker News Reader

Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

There are a few possibilities.

No souls: you take a definition of "soul" as something supernatural and reject it's existence.

Binary souls: souls exist in some beings in an absolute way either existing or not. A body gains a soul at some point during birth or development and loses it at death. Some creatures have them others do not.

Continuous souls: everything has one, some more than others. A rock has a tiny bit, a tree some more, an intelligent animal more, and a human the most. Soul develops as you gain consciousness in childhood. A philosopher has more soul than a comatose person.

Souls can be an emergent phenomenon out of certain kinds of complexity like consciousness. Souls can also be something outside physics as we understand it now. You can accept or reject either one.

Whatever elephants have, there is quite a lot of it. You wouldn't be so wrong calling it soul.

View on HN

I will assume below that soul = conscience = first person experience of reality

> No souls: you take a definition of "soul" as something supernatural and reject it's existence.

This position is technically called eliminative materialism, that consciousness or the first person experience of reality is an illusion. I find this to be the most absurd idea in the history of ideas, for the simple fact that I have direct experience of consciousness (my own). Or, to quote Descartes: I think, therefore I am.

> Continuous souls

This is a version of Panpsychism. I do not hold this view, but a lot of people that I respect do (for example, Ben Goertzel, the AGi researcher).

> Souls can be an emergent phenomenon out of certain kinds of complexity like consciousness.

This is known as emergentism. It is more or less the mainstream view nowadays with the scientifically literate. I consider it to be pseudoscience, because it uses the term "emergence" to hide a magic step. It is a complicated and technical discussion, but long story short, things emerge from building blocks. Markets emerge from individual transactions. Swarms emerge from certains behaviors of birds, and so on. What are the building blocks of consciousness in this model? I am not saying that they do not exist, but just saying "well it emerges somehow" is the same as believing in the supernatural, but hiding it in scientific language (aka scientsim).

The list above only contains hypothesis based on physicalism (a not super rigorous definition: the belief that matter is the fundamental stuff of reality). Physicalism seems obvious to the current status quo, but if you become more sophisticated with the mind-body problem you will see that it does not really rest on a sold foundation. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

What the list omits are the idealistic or neo-plationist hypothesis: that consciousness is the fundamental stuff of reality and matter is a second-order phenomenon. I am not defending any sort of supernatural or religious idea, I am simply pointing out that people assume too much out of a lack of philosophical sophistication. Idealism is perfectly compatible with all of modern science, and there is no particular reason to assume physicalism. The absolute belief in physicalism is akin to a modern religious dogma and it does violence to science and extends logical reasoning and empiricism beyond its current limits.

> This position is technically called eliminative materialism, that consciousness or the first person experience of reality is an illusion. I find this to be the most absurd idea in the history of ideas, for the simple fact that I have direct experience of consciousness (my own). Or, to quote Descartes: I think, therefore I am.

What is an illusion, but a thing that can be experienced yet is not real?

> Physicalism seems obvious to the current status quo, but if you become more sophisticated with the mind-body problem you will see that it does not really rest on a sold foundation.

The ability to induce altered states of consciousness (such as death) through entirely physical means demonstrates that consciousness is a physical phenomenon.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

The logical possibility argument for philosophical zombies is essentially flawed. It posits that the conceivability of a philosophical zombie is sufficient to demonstrate meaningfulness, but plenty of conceivable things are not meaningful. Suppose I conceive instead of a person who knows a counterargument to mind-body dualism. Accepting the philosophical zombie argument requires accepting its refutation.

I guess this goes into definitions of consciousness, which I don't have the background nor inclination to do. But if we define it, as the grandparent does, as "first person experience of reality", then there is something special about this particular illusion. Usually, one would reject the interpretation of an experience, not the experience itself. For instance, this could go as follows: "yes, from your vantage point, the experience was that a rabbit was pulled from an empty hat, BUT what actually occurred was that the rabbit was pulled from a hole in the table below."

With consciousness, "the experience of the trick" and "the trick" are one and the same: if I have a "first person experience of reality" (which I have), then I struggle to see how it can be viewed as a trick. Due to the property of consciousness being a subjective state, it seems that eliminative materialists claim that even the EXPERIENCE of the rabbit being pulled from the empty hat is an illusion, which to me is just nonsensical (but I assume that with suitable definitions you can work around that).

>This is a version of Panpsychism. I do not hold this view, but a lot of people that I respect do (for example, Ben Goertzel, the AGi researcher).

Certainly you can successfully argue that a tree doesn't have a soul, but what is impossible, I think, is drawing a line somewhere that says this thing has a soul and this other thing doesn't.

Humans 4,000 years ago? 40,000? 400,000? How about the closely related hominids Homo Sapiens interbred with and extincted? Find me the child who had a soul whose parents did not. I think finding and binning animals into soul and no-soul is absurd. The only alternative is some sort of continuum.

>I consider it to be pseudoscience, because it uses the term "emergence" to hide a magic step.

I get it, the objection to the hand-waving non-explanation of "emergence". I see it differently as a zoomed out understanding that we just have yet to fill in the details. Many mundane things are emergent. "Temperature" and "pressure" don't fundamentally exist, they are bulk properties which emerge from the physics of quantum electrodynamics (QED) of large numbers of atoms. We can fully derive and explain that emergence. We can't do that with consciousness, but the conjecture is that there is one.

>onsciousness is the fundamental stuff of reality and matter is a second-order phenomenon

I see this as a restatement of 'you take a definition of "soul" as something supernatural' or seeing it from a different angle. Perhaps what is missing is "Yes souls: you take a definition of "soul" as something supernatural and accept its existence. 'Supernatural' meaning nothing more than something which cannot be explained by current physics.

>The absolute belief in physicalism is akin to a modern religious dogma and it does violence to science and extends logical reasoning and empiricism beyond its current limits.

No disagreement. Mythos underlies everything, and "scientific" understanding of the universe rejecting all religions is based just as much in mythos as any of them.

> just saying "well it emerges somehow" is the same as believing in the supernatural, but hiding it in scientific language (aka scientsim).

I'm not sure I agree here. Nothing strikes me as unreasonable to hypothesize that consciousness can be something that "emerges somehow", say from a certain system of computations. Yes, it does hide a magic step, but is that not the crux of it? We don't know enough about consciousness to say otherwise. To so thoroughly dismiss this possibility as supernatural from the one statement seems undeserved.

Emergentism isn't simply saying that we don't know the steps, it's saying that the steps are not fundamentally knowable by studying the base reality underneath; you have to study the higher-order system at it's own level of supervenience. The building blocks don't feel, the thing that emerges from the interactions between the building blocks is what feels, which isn't really a "thing" at all in the sense that the thing we've labelled as an electron might be a thing. That which we have labelled as an electron may or may not be a piece of the most fundamental, real reality (it could be implemented on some arbitrary hardware another level of supervenience down, but we could only theoretically discover that it is, not that it isn't). You and I, we're just labels put on the interactions between loosely defined collections of things, and those collections are just made up social constructs with no basis in base reality. We were useful to the patterns that repeat themselves many levels of supervenience below us, so we got made up.

I oscillate between believing that electrons probably feel, believing that multi-electron systems with any level of information processing (i.e. any implementations of any functions besides the identity function and the constant functions) probably feel, and believing that some more complex, not yet fully understood subset of implemented functions are all that feels. I'm not actually trying to argue for or against emergentism, I'm super undecided about it. I've been leaning more towards it since my last acid trip, but the one before that had me going the other direction.

> Souls can be an emergent phenomenon out of certain kinds of complexity like consciousness.

This is the one I like. If you have a self, then you have a soul.

> If you have a self, then you have a soul.

So, Ruby has a soul and Javascript doesn’t. Makes sense ;)

JavaScript has a thoul, much like Lisp, but for different reasons.

JavaScript was inspired by Self. Does Self have a soul?

My neighbor has a Soul. Cute little car.

A soul is just the unique arrangements of neurons in a brain and body constructed by evolutionary impacts and those learned from the environment.

It's there and it's real.

In that regard, the more different you "think and react" the most unique your soul is. This is largely based on observation. Since we can't observe, typically, differences in behavior among chickens, we think they have no soul.

Own chickens and observe them for a little while and you'll see otherwise if you allow yourself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com