Is this a joke or have you been spending some time with the mormons?

A self-soul. This would make a soul a purely individualistic experience/manifestation based on self-awareness.

I posit that I have a soul. Further, I posit that RLK does not have a soul. Further, I posit that fish (genus: Antigonia) have no soul but fish (genus: Chaetodon) do.

Are these statements contradictions? Nonsense? Insolvable? Not worth making/asking or discussing?

I assume that you are talking about the soul as self-awareness. If that is the case, I will give you my opinion.

The first statement is neither nonsense nor insolvable for you as you experience that self-awareness directly. The second statement is not nonsense either since any position that you take with respect to my soul is either a working assumption or a denial of a position, but it is insolvable. It is probably worth discussing. Going to the third statement, if broadened to the question of the self-awareness of animals it is again not nonsense but it is also not solvable. In my opinion it is not worth discussing, but that may well be arguable.

The questions are presently insolvable since we haven't yet reached consensus on a definition for soul.

To those who think they have a workable definition: I don't personally feel like I have a soul, so does that mean that I don't have one?

Do people who have a soul feel like they have a soul? if they don't feel it, then how do they know?

Also, is having a soul a good thing? and why is it better than not having a soul?

Almost no matter what, I'm imagining substantialism about souls is not helpful. You perhaps are a soul (if not only a soul) but you don't have one. There's not really any feasible way for souls to be substantial. Same kind of problem as Cartesian dualism in mind/body

Me: Soul - The remnant of our spirit body which used to reside in heaven before being cast to Earth/Hell to relearn how to be good through life in sufferable animal bodies.

I imagine that your post is a joke, but if not; false dichotomy.

Eh...it makes sense to me. The new testament has a significant amount of versus which speak of the flesh as somewhat base, and the soul as a much more significant thing, such as:

And Jesus makes some very esoteric sounding statements to Nicodemus that I'll go ahead and use as supporting evidence :

Some christians may say that verse 13 only applies to Jesus in order to retain their chant and be saved doctrine, however it would make no sense since both Enoch and Elijah ascended to heaven, and he had just finished making statements indicating that one should be reborn as their spirit being in the preceding verses.

and I'll throw in a little Paul (or whomever wrote Romans) though his writing style is generally unclear, this seems somewhat clear:

If I remember correctly, I was one of those three. I'll point out that the person generally regarded as the greatest English-language philosopher, David Hume, made the same claim, and many philosophers have agreed with him. Even more importantly, an entire religion (Buddhism) has as a core tenet that there is no substantial self, and that experiences that we take to be of it are either illusory or mistaken. So you really should include a fourth alternative here, which is that you are yourself mistaken.

Descartes famously argued that the one thing I can know with certainty is that I exist, because it was impossible to doubt this. He was wrong. It might be impossible to doubt that doubting is going on, but that doesn't license the claim that there is some substance that is doing the doubting.

Apparently you did not understand the poll question. The question did not require that there be substance to your perception of self. It only asked if you could identify the effect that was being described and could verify that you experienced that perception of self. Hume made arguments about the significance of the perception, but he never denied that he experienced it or pretended that he did not know what people were talking about when they referred to it.

Descartes was right by the way, but since he was a French speaker you have not made a claim of relative worth between his insights and Hume's.

Hume said that he perceives hot, cold, fear, pain, etc (what he called impressions). However, there was no impression, no perception, of a self itself. In this sense, he says, he has no perception of a self.

Of course, Hume goes on to say that the self is actually just the set of all these perceptions of hot, soft, pain and so on. But the set itself isn't perceived--it is an idea or abstraction. All we perceive are the sensory and emotional content. So does Hume claim to perceive the self? No. Instead, he claims to perceive the bits and pieces of impressions that make up the self.

I find you curiously incorrigible on this point. You expressed amazement that some people claim to not perceive the self, and then, instead of trying to understand what they mean by this, you decided to just stop with the claim that they are just fundamentally different from you or too stupid to understand.

Okay.

I experience a phenomenon that would make it impossible to answer "No" to the poll question truthfully. I do perceive a "self". There is nothing more to understand. Maybe you are different. Why is that impossible?

Descartes once shut himself up in an ‘oven’ like a loaf of bread and cooked his brain and had visions, from which he formulated a basis for some of his most celebrated mutterings. He spoke French, was a military office in the Dutch Army (fought in some battles), and wrote much of his philosophical works in Latin. He was a brilliant mathematician and philosopher, but that does not immune him from criticism nor protect him from humorous jabs from others.

In conjunction with our discussion on a soul, giving it a definition of self-awareness, the above is significant. I will be so bold as to submit that I posited that I, Zeno had a soul and RLK did not for, at least partially, the above reasons in the quote.

I wanted someone, probably a better thinker than I, to sort out the problem(s) and difficulties inherent in my questioning. If goes to the heart and meat of the matter. An obvious reason why it has been the subject of much contention and argument for so long and remains, essentially, unresolved - Or at least no consensus agreement among respectable/influential philosophers.

It would be useful to have OP and RLK duke this one out in a civil manner so I can see what happens. Perhaps we can start with man and work our way down to fishes in a sort of bias descent.

PS> This was posted after RLK's response, but I didn't see it. JFYI.

Not impossible RLK. How probable?

PS. I'm traveling soon so will have limited input to all this. This may mollify some. Besides OP and RLK are better equipped to sort out the difficulties. In addition, my humor always gets in the way.

I see the traffic light analogy as useful here. I have asserted that I see a profound difference between the light on the top and the light on the bottom. Someone else has asserted that they see no difference and has proposed an elaborate rationalization as to why there is none. But in fact, the rationalization suggests pretty strongly that they also perceive the difference but for some reason feel compelled to deny it.

At that point, what is there to argue? I perceive it for myself so your rationalizations are truly an immense waste of intellectual energy.

Of course it isn't impossible. I'm am willing to acknowledge that you have experienced a phenomenon that I haven't.

Lol. Here you go: I have never had a perception of the self--at least, not one of which I'm aware. Furthermore, I suspect you have also never had a perception of the self and have been socialized/rationalized into believing that you have.

Should we just stop here?

I voted "Yes" in RLK's poll but this conversation makes me think I don't know what he meant after all. You directly perceive the self? Are you getting your philosophy of mind from the Numbskulls?

For what it is worth, I am also inclined against the view that our ordinary sensory experiences are pre-theoretical, so I don't think an experience of greenness gives me epistemic certainty that I am experiencinghaving a direct experience of greenness. See Sellars's criticism of the Myth of the Given in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (PDF) for the seminal discussion of this topic.

This is not to deny that we are having the experience of greenness, but rather that the nature of our experience is in some sense unquestionable and transparent. In other words, I can't even be certain that I'm experiencing greenness when I think I am.

Edit: This post is confusing and probably best ignored except for the links. It is really hard to talk about this stuff.

I'm not sure why you're making the problem so difficult. You haven't even defined your terms clearly yet and already you're trying to derive relationships from it. So...


If I define 'soul' as 'the direct experience of pain or pleasure' then everyone who claims to directly experience pain or pleasure can be said to have a soul.

Simple.

I don't understand you guys. How is it so clear to me and so foggy for you? Just put the pieces together. Poker player's right? Well what is your opponent telling you?

The soul. The life. The sex. The drugs. The rock n roll. You experience. Your soul captures. It takes every experience with it.



It want's to live. God want's to live. But it's simple. Respect it. Respect life. And you will gain. What God has made you think is a sin. Because it is a sin. Until you understand. Then. It's Living.

Not so simple from my framework as one of my criticisms is that humans don't have direct experiences of pain or pleasure.

This is what I wanted to hear.

Now I simply redefine it as an indirect OR direct experience of pain OR pleasure, and voila! Anyone who claims to have experienced pain or pleasure directly or indirectly (whichever of these they believe in) has a soul.

Simple.

If you want to refute this further you'll have to doubt experience altogether. In which case, I'll simply continue to redefine experience until we arrive at an agreeable set of definitions that can be used to determine who has a soul.

Sure you can define "soul" however you want. Here: I define "soul" as the property of having a nose. There, now everyone (except Michael Jackson) has a soul. So what?

The point of these kind of discussions is that they are part of a larger conversation within philosophy, science, theology, and human enquiry generally about the nature and existence of the soul, its relevance to our actions, and so on. If you define "soul" in such a way that it has no relevance to that conversation, then you are just talking about something else, regardless of whether you spell it the same way. Our attachment is not (or at least, should not be) to the label, but to the concepts or objects to which that label is meant to refer.

Anyway, I'll admit that my conversation with RLK is somewhat divergent from the OP as we are talking about the self rather than the soul.

Self is something A, and the Soul is something B. Separate.

The self invented the idea of a soul.

How did the idea of a soul originate? Is it different than self? Self-awareness? Consciousness?


I disagree that it is the same kind of problem as mind/body.

Its not the divergence I'm concerned about, but rather the pointlessness of the conversation - as illustrated by my example.

Skepticism is all well and good, but if you actually want to answer - who has or doesn't have a soul - you need an agreed-upon set of definitions and methodology. It doesn't look like neither you, nor RLK are willing to bend to an agreed-upon definition, so the conversation is rather pointless beyond that.

If your version of a 'soul' is some ethereal and unattainable sense of self and RLK's version is biblical or empirical (i.e., self-awareness) then part ways and agree to not talk about souls anymore.

For those of us who seriously want to take up Zeno's challenge and answer - how do we know who has a soul and who doesn't - I have proposed a definition I am happy with: a definition that answers the question.

P.S. if you wish to define a 'soul' as 'the property of having a nose' go right ahead, but this definition has nothing to do with subjective experience, which I believe is an important component in defining 'soul'. Feel free to dispute this component however.

by same kind of problem I just mean the problem of substance, and in positing a non-material substance which somehow interacts with the material world.