Stuck with the soul | Hacker News Reader

Stuck with the soul

aeon.co

16 pointsdrdee42 comments

I used to have much the same view as the author. My view changed after reading what Christian theologians and philosophers actually wrote on the topic, as opposed to what I had just kind of figured they must have written.

When I read Aquinas on the soul, I realized:

- Aquinas means something quite different by "soul" than I had assumed.

- According to Aquinas's definition, I already believed in souls. (If you think that there's an important ontological difference between a turtle and turtle puree in a blender, you believe in Aquinas's souls.)

- Aquinas claims that rational souls are immortal because they can know and participate in a realm of eternal truths, so there must be some part of the soul that is already there, and hence eternal.

- Take that argument or leave it, but it is no more or less wacky than any other mainstream position in the philosophy of mathematics, where there are many problems for which there are simply no non-wacky possible solutions.

Correct or not, I found Aquinas's position surprisingly down-to-earth and was disappointed not to see it discussed.

To elaborate, the soul is defined as the animating principle. In fact the words “animate” and “animal” both come from the Latin word for soul “animus.” So we don’t need to prove the existence of the soul. We don’t even need to claim that it’s substantially spirit, although I do happen to believe that makes the most sense. We simply have to say that a living thing has something that its otherwise identically configured recently inanimate remains do not.

I do find it amusing that purely materialist life scientists gave up on defining life.

We simply have to say that a running computer has something that its otherwise identically configured recently broken remains do not.

I don’t think that’s a substantive argument for needing a term like “soul”.

And Joscha Bach might define "soul" in terms of computation.

That's not incompatible with this conception of souls. A sort of simple animism is fully compatible. A computer has a soul the way a rock has a soul: it manifests rock-ness in some way that is both unique to itself and different from what would be possessed by that same material as a pile of gravel, or lava.

This is so different from the kind of soul a person or a forest has that it's not an extremely useful grouping in a lot of ways. But it's not a contradiction and there are cases where it is useful.

The author is truly out of his depth and it is embarrassing that he could not be bothered to research the various conceptions of the "soul" that exist in the philosophical literature, given that his very field takes its name from the Greek name for soul, "psyche" (ψυχή).

The popular view of the soul today is indeed strange. It has a Cartesian flavor, some kind of ghastly thing, perhaps some kind of ectoplasm, haunting a corporeal body or something like that. This is not the traditional view held by Aristotelian/Thomistic philosophers or theologians. Their view can be summed up with the following statement:

The soul is the form of the body.

Thus, what we call the soul in this regard is but the thing that causes a body to be what it is, namely, its form. By analogy, the form of a bronze sphere is its spherical shape. Pound the ball with a hammer into a cube and you've no longer got a bronze sphere.

Now, in the case of rational animals, I'll have to correct you somewhat. The immortality that Aristotle and Thomas are talking about is due to the intellectual and volitional faculties that such animals possess. Because we are capable of abstraction, the intellect must be incorporeal as abstraction involves the consideration of form apart from matter. But matter joined to form (as it always is "out there") always results in a thing that is of the kind as determined by the form; you will never encounter triangularity "in the wild", only concrete triangles. Matter is the principle of individuation. Thus, for form to exist by itself, there must be something immaterial in which it must inhere. Hence, the intellect is immaterial. And because matter is the principle of change, and form is not, only matter is corruptible, because it is subject to change. Therefore, the intellect as such cannot die. Thus, in rational animals, death is more like an amputation of the body rather than annihilation (non-rational animals simply cease to exist). Resurrection is, therefore, a restoration of the body to the person who has been truncated to mere intellect and will. But the intellect and will are not some ghost as the form of human beings is that of a rational animal. It is not as is the case for Descartes that the body and mind are separate things in their own right only incidentally connected in the way the driver of a car is only incidentally its driver. The intellect is a part, and the form is inherent to every faculty and thus your body is what it is as determined by the same form that determines the intellect as part. In short, you could not have had any other body than the one you have, or more accurately stated, you could not have been any other body than the body that you are, as you are every faculty and part that you are intrinsically by virtue of your form.

This will seem very difficult to grasp for those who have not encountered this before as it is very abstract and it does take time to understand the basic ideas. But the basic idea, that the soul is the form of the body, makes soul a kind of special case of form, the form of living things, and form is necessary for any identity and intelligibility. Everything is what it is by virtue of its form.

Some further reading [0].

[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/03/what-is-soul.html

Seems arrogant to say there’s no such thing as a soul when we have a hard time even defining consciousness.

A problem with this is why one's heuristic should tend toward magic from mythology.

When you encounter unknowns and feel compelled to fill in the blank, why should you reach towards "souls"/"god" than towards more prosaic things like physics and computation?

The answer is obvious: you shouldn't because there's a solid track record of magical memes being fictional.

(Also, imo, if you can't define concepts like consciousness, that might be a clue that they don't exist either. Or, at the very least, you're not communicating anything meaningful when using those concepts even if you feel like you are.)

You're describing external phenomena. Our experience of consciousness / qualia is simultaneously "known" and ineffible. How can we talk about what consciousness isn't, when we can't even talk about what it is?

Physicalism is easy to argue for: if all you have is STEM, then everything looks like physics. However, considering you have to grant magic existence to all those bits and bobs and atoms with all the arbitrary rules for how they interact—not being able to define those bits and bobs from first principles without involving conscious observers, yet pretending that mind and consciousness (you know, those only things you actually have access to) are an illusion—it actually becomes quite contrived.

The more elegant solution is in fact idealistic monism: if the only phenomenon we can grant objective existence to is our minds, by treating time-space as merely a simplified interface to it we can avoid creating many unnecessary entities.

Which is not an argument against physics—just that we should not assume physics has the answers to questions that are fundamentally outside of its scope.

This was a dead-end in the history of Western thought. We started an irrelevant definition of knowledge (Cartesian Rationalism where geometry is the paragon of knowing) and arrived at equally irrelevant conclusions about metaphysics (Cartesian Dualism which eventual collapsed into Spinozaist monism (Hegel is correct in his assessment of Leibniz on this point)). Kant is trying to solve a set of non-problems with a highly innovative method that offers some seriously questionable solutions when you really get deep into German Idealism. The simply reality is that our knowledge and methods of understanding the physical world is more robust than the Rationalists would acknowledge, and our knowledge of our metal world is far more tenuous than we would care to accept. We really don't have access to as much of our minds as we intuitively think we do. The unravelling of this theory starts with Freud but modern psychology and neuroscience present a huge number of examples where it is very clear that we do not have direct access to the thing we call a unified consciousness or the self. The isn't about physics answering the question as much as the fact that the origin of mind and thinking will have a physical origin. Reductivism is equally played. Trying to reduce this process down to bits and atoms is probably not helpful or interesting. But it is really a moot point as to whether an emergent phenomenon is an ontologically separate thing from it's substrate. It is physical nonetheless in more or less the same way that we would think of the more basic entities. A form of soft-immaterialism might be secured in trying to ascribe existence to this emergent state of matter, but given what we know about people's ability to introspect their own consciousness I doubt that the traditional concept of 'soul' handed down to us from the Scholastic tradition can really be salvaged.

This trying to salvage time-space as implicit objective reality is tired for reasons I won’t repeat. Saying “mind and thinking is rooted in physical reality” doesn’t make it so. That aside, not trying to discard them as illusions is appreciated.

No-one said anything about space, time or objectivity. Those are all weird, but external reality is something we know just as well as we know internal reality. (Internalist conceptions of mind don't pan out). Saying mind and thinking can exist without any physical basis doesn't make it possible either, but I will point out that everyone I've ever met who was capable of thinking had a healthy living body. The arguments that have been deployed to show that incorporeal thinking is possible and the subjective knowledge is the only true knowledge have always been flawed in their theory of knowledge. They all treat geometry as the paragon of knowing. When, in fact, the rationalist mode of knowing is a rather peculiar and idiosyncratic form of knowledge that doesn't really generalize. In some highly reductive sense, you can argue that we don't really come into contact with an external reality, and people have. Though in the same sense we also don't come into contact with an internal reality except in an very unimpressive fashion.

So while people have spun up plenty of complicated arguments to show that we know nothing about anything, in a very real sense we clearly know quite a lot about the world around us. We know that when someone is knocked unconscious they weren't off thinking great thoughts when their brain was flatlining (if/when they come back they confirm this). Our knowledge of this is, surprisingly more solid than our ability to accurately introspect our internal state of consciousness. As to what exactly changes when the innumerable pulses of neurons sprang back to life, that's a mystery. Something is happening. It is pretty clearly connected with thinking.

> Saying mind and thinking can exist without any physical basis doesn't make it possible either

It doesn’t need to be made possible because it logically is. (Both approaches are possible, that is not even an argument.) But not only is it possible, I’d argue that in fact it is less contrived because there is one less construct (that “physical basis”) to will into being from nothingness.

> in a very real sense we clearly know quite a lot about the world around us

This is a good illustration of how everything looks like a nail to the hammer of STEM. I am a little sleepy to continue this argument properly, but while we (with our minds) have created some models that enabled us to do some things (which things, notably, effect our minds in every instance) there is no knowing of even the basic fundamentals about the world around us. Physics cannot be a sole tool for achieving such knowledge because questions such as “what actually exists” are outside of its purview—e.g., the idea of mind as the territory and perceived time-space as a map/interface is not at odds with physics (which in this scenario, while not under spotlight anymore, would along with other natural sciences still be recognized as a tool for effecting desired changes in the territory). Sadly, core philosophy, which purview these questions do fall under, is currently on the sidelines.

This is an argument for agnosticism. All else being equal it would be just as presumptuous to postulate the existence or non-existence of an entity. But I think that the arc of history would suggest that all things are not equal. We do after all know a thing or two about consciousness even if a clean definition eludes us (we also don't really have good definitions for lots of things so maybe finding definitions is not the more urgent goal of philosophy). It was less than 100 years ago that vitalism held sway in the philosophy of biology. We find a similar state in the study of mind. You can still postulate the existence of something like the soul, but I think it is increasingly hard to say that this thing is not generated by matter as people once said.

One philosopher’s arrogance is another’s “not even wrong.” Why bother refuting something that isn’t defined?

Wow. This might be one of the most poorly written essays I've ever come across in a supposedly serious medium.

Where to begin, even? The first paragraph perhaps:

> As with Justice Potter Stewart’s non-definition of pornography – ‘I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it’ – the soul is slippery

So is prose! Right through his grasp.

Holding the soul as a process rather than a thing makes it possibly for me to integrate both beliefs (there is a soul and there is also not a soul).

The idea of a soul is probably the reason we believe in human rights, animal rights and so on. We should be careful not to abandon it, even if we are not sure what it really means but just know intuitively. With the recent AI advances I see a lot of chat dance around the subject of the soul without mentioning the word.

There's one alternative for defining the basis of "rights" and "personhood" that I don't hear expressed much.

It's not romantic (you might call it deeply cynical) or all that satisfying, emotionally, but it's extremely parismonous and cuts through many moral dilemmas.

It's "social contract": I grant you personhood because you've forced me to. How? Because you can kill me if I'm mean to you. And you can really help me if I'm nice to you. By treating you like a "person", I'm extending a set of manners to you. I do this because you can reciprocate a social contract with me, both negatively (harm me if I harm you) and positively (help me if I help you) to a great enough extent.

Even if I kill you because you're powerless against me, other people will know I killed you, and they might kill me because they're scared I'll kill them, and people have written this down into laws saying you don't have the right to kill others, and so I have to resist killing you because you are "a person". Maybe I'll also feel bad because I'm programmed with empathy, which is another way you fill the social contract (I'm harmed by harming you).

What about a dog? Or a person in a coma?

Here it gets circular. These beings cannot fulfill the social contract to the extent a normally-functioning adult human can. But if normally-functioning humans care enough about these beings to extend them personhood, I'm again forced to extend personhood to those beings as well: if I don't, the more powerful humans will harm me. Or, to flip it, if I [harm|help] beings that the powerful humans care about, I'm [harm|help]ing the powerful humans. Because they're powerful, they will reciprocate the social contract in kind.

The circularity is: if enough humans decide a tree is a person[0] and will charge you for murder if you kill the tree, you have no choice but to go with it.

Basically: you go along to get along, unless you don't have to and can force others to. That's always the way it's worked and will work.

0: https://www.fastcompany.com/90738287/this-tree-owns-itself-a...

Social contract theory is one of the most disastrous and foolish ideas ever conceived.

So you’re saying that if I can hurt you and get away with it, then that would be basically okay?

More accurately the concept of the soul has been used for thousands of years to _deny_ rights to others as part of the great chain of being.

As the article points out the soul in its original conception had the exact opposite purpose, to establish man's dominion over earth and everything on it. Animal rights are a fairly new invention, and the most popular argument against them has always been that unlike humans, they have no soul, which establishes an exclusive human relationship with some divinity or another.

Rights based discourse always has a flipside, the not-havers of rights. Doing away with souls and rights and switching to a frame of welfare would be a pretty huge boon for animals as well as many humans.

The source for alleged rights is always some scripture, some arcane interpretation of nature or history. You can always deny people their rights based on some text they allegedly derive from. You can, by definition, not deny people their demand for welfare or subjective interests.

Case in point, the right to vote. Not only didn't it magically extend to everyone because it was conceived of as a right, arguably the opposite was the case.

This article is really just trying to outline the hard problem of consciousness. That it is a fundamental aspect of the universe such as space and time or that it is a physical process of the brain.

I don’t think we have to reject the idea of a soul (mostly related with religion or spirituality) for “empirical evidence”. If we had said evidence, it would be a solved problem. It’s a problem that science cannot explain. Some things require other ways of knowing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousnes...

Considering how little we understand about the classical, let alone quantum, mechanics of the brain, it doesn't seem correct to dismiss the idea that something resembling, at least vaguely, a soul may exist.

What we call a "soul" today, may have a material, logical, explanation. Two of the greatest theoretical physicists, Wolfgang Pauli and David Bohm, seemed to think so.

What do you call a "soul" today?

It may not be correct to _totally_ dismiss it, but as someone with professional experience in physics and neuroscience, I feel quite certain in all-but dismissing it. I'm basically sure that the brain is not meaningfully quantum mechanical and that conscious states correspond essentially entirely to physical states and that even if the brain were to have some essential quantum mechanical character, the second conclusion would not change.

The unusual characteristics of quantum mechanics do not give us epistemological carte blanche to believe whatever we like.

Maybe, but I would avoid throwing around quantum mechanics here. The nervous system is generally not a quantum system (it is big), and while there is a ton of chaotic fluid stuff going on (it's all ions), everything we know about nervous systems suggests that they spend a decent amount of resources building in redundancy and eliminating (non-quantum) random events.

Near death experiences seem to offer enough evidence to suggest there's more to it than just the brain and body.

Near death experiences are easily explained as hallucinations under (usually) expectation bias in extreme/unusual situations.

They're easily dismissed as such by anyone not really looking in depth at them.

How do you explain similar reports from kids with no preconditioning, and across different cultures. Numerous reports of information given from subjects that are corroborated by third parties that couldn't be guessed from an unconscious person. People blind from birth describing what they see in an NDE.

Can point you at some sources if interested.

Couldn't it be a consequence of similar architecture? When a battery overheats to an extreme, failure modes look very similar despite being no coordination between different batteries.

How do you explain them wandering around the hospital out of their bodies and reporting on specific corroborated details after they are revived?

Here's a better summary of the evidence: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6172100/

> In this group of 287 NDErs with OBEs, there were 65 (23%) who personally investigated the accuracy of their own OBE observations after recovering from their life-threatening event. Based on these later investigations, none of these 65 OBErs found any inaccuracy in their own OBE observations.

Retrospective self-reported investigations multiplied by motivated reasoning feels pretty reasonable to me.

The aware study is another one with a better design but it doesn't have enough data back yet. Here's a link to the study that investigated NDE experiences in the blind that found some had reportedly seen things after near death: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc799333/m2/1...

> To examine this point from a statistical perspective and help to provide something of an overview of our findings here, we can list a number of the common features of NDEs and state how often they are mentioned in the interviews of our 21 respondents in the NDEr category. Feelings of peace, well-being, or being loved were reported in 20 interviews; a sense of separation from the physical body, or an actual out-of-body experience (OBE), in 14; seeing one's own physical body, in 10; going through a tunnel or dark space, in eight; meeting others, such as spirits, angels, or religious personages, in 12; seeing a radiant light, in eight; hearing noise or music, in seven; a life re view, in four; encountering a border.

Vicki's account of her NDE starting on page 9 of the pdf is riveting. And it's very interesting how similar NDE accounts are across people.

> inspection reveals no obvious differences among sight subgroups with respect to the frequency of NDE elements. Thus, whether one is blind from birth, loses one's sight in later life, or suffers from severe visual impair ment, the type of NDE reported appears to be much the same and is not structurally different from those described by sighted persons.

> Few ideas are as unsupported, ridiculous and even downright harmful as that of the ‘human soul’.

Immediately stopped reading. I used to think Aeon was top quality, but this is hubris dressed up as radical materialism.

That is a LOT of words dedicated to something that the author thinks is "ridiculous." People like this never pause to ask why they spend so much time thinking about things that they say are ridiculous fictions. I can say this because I used to be a radical materialist evangelist myself. Thankfully I grew out of that and settled into a comfortable agnosticism which I find much less exhausting.

>People like this never pause to ask why they spend so much time thinking about things that they say are ridiculous fictions.

Because belief in fictional things can have enormous consequences for society. The things may be fictional, but the humans that believe them are real.

the soul may well be a cultural construction.

nonetheless, human culture has always had the quality of somewhat existing separate from humans themselves. a big chunk of our culture now is written down.

all this written culture is now more independent than humans than ever before. but I digress. the point is that the soul may well be a cultural concept that literally means that the culture (or the humans) or their gods made themselves out of the proverbial thin air.

now there are machines than can write on their own. in a way all classical computing does is exactly that: rewrite things around according to tables (functions as mappings).

so a soul is something we chose to have, our culture has by this point accumulated possibly hundreds of different 'ways' to develop one but we're fundamentally free such that it's possible to chose not to have one i suppose.

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