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Originally Posted by asdfasdf32
To be clear, you're saying that any form of life has a soul (including something like prokaryotic bacteria), is this accurate? Building on this, if current theories of abiogenesis are correct, when does the 'soul' enter in, i.e. when are you asserting non-life becomes life? I'm assuming you don't consider self replicating crystals alive, but this may be presumptuous.
Yes, I'm saying that anything that is alive has a soul, because a soul is by definition just whatever it is that makes a living thing alive. (Again, this definition is perfectly consistent with reductionist materialism--you can say that what makes a living thing alive is just the complex coordination of atoms and nothing else, so that everything that a living thing does can be reduced to the activity of atoms). With Aristotle, I also recognize that at the boundary between the living and the non-living it could be hard for us to tell the difference. If a bacteria is alive, then yes, it has soul; if a self-replicating crystal is alive, then it has a soul. Scientific consensus today is that a bacteria is alive, while a crystal is not, and I accept that opinion as the most reasonable.
What I think is necessary is to shift the conversation from criticisms of the soul that assume a soul must be a dualistic substance to a discussion of whether (a) living things are really essentially different in kind from non-living things, or if (b) a living thing is really nothing but a material complex reducible to its smallest parts. In either case, I would say that there is a soul. In other words, I don't think "is there a soul?" is an interesting question; I do think that questions about reductionism vs. ontological emergence--and Aristotle's hylomorphic theory--are much more interesting.