You'll get a hundred different answers here, but never mind. In Western culture, a long time back, a division was made between 'mind' and 'matter', which then became a division between 'soul' and 'body', with 'the body' being 'material' and 'the soul' being - well, being what, exactly?

But before going down this road, consider this point: we don't know what 'matter' is. It seems obvious what 'matter' is, but the truth is, scientists have built the largest and most complicated apparatus in the history of the world, to find out what 'matter' is. And at this time - they still can't say. There are murmurs that they need an even bigger machine, although it is understood they're not going to get one. But meanwhile, there are as many questions as there always were - it's not as if 'matter' has turned out to be some self-organising, self-explanatory stuff in terms of which everything else can be understood. Far from it.

So just remember that, whatever comes next.

Scientists have done a pretty good job explaining matter and energy and explaining how that's all the universe is made of, with dark and anti- matter being material forms.

One question I would have is about your use of 'personality', a something which to me has the same sort of existence as 'soul': I hear others speak of it, it seems to make sense to say it sometimes, but I wouldn't like to say it 'exists'. Where does someone's 'personality' reside?

Otherwise, I doubt there is anything of me that will survive after death except others' memories of me, I love some soul music, I believe a small number of people I know have good souls, and one of my favourite poems bids 'And so good morrow to our waking souls!' But perhaps this is inadequate: I've just decided that it doesn't matter to me whether or not the soul is an 'entity' of some kind. I'll speak of it sometimes, willy-nilly, while worrying about something else, and accept it on the terms offered when others speak of the soul to me.

we don't know what 'matter' is. — Wayfarer

So we know what "soul" is?

A few quick ideas on the subject:

1) No one can say what is the nature of quanta and energy. It is all subject to interpretation and quanta phenomenon (such as entanglement and non-locality) had been observed at the molecule level. Thus there are many unknowns regarding the stuff off nature of nature that can only be discussed philosophically.

2) Science had no explanation what's so ever regarding qualia which is pretty much fundamental to human experiential existence.

Given this, I would speculate that:

1) There is no duality in nature. Everything is made of the same stuff with different substantially.

2) Everything is fundamentally mind that grows along a substantiality spectrum starting with quanta, electrons, atoms, molecules, etc.

3) Mind can be considered memory, creative intuition, and will.

4) Memory persists in the fabric of the universe. Evidence of this would be inherited traits, instincts, innate skills, and unexplainable skills (child prodigies, idiot savants, etc.).

It is this persistence if memory that we might call a soul.

1) No one can say what is the nature of quanta and energy. It is all subject to interpretation and quanta phenomenon (such as entanglement and noon-locality) had been observed at the molecule level. Thus there are many unknowns regarding the stuff off nature of nature that can only be discussed philosophically.

Physicists can. The fact you accept the terms as separate shows you acknowledge someone can say what their nature is.

2) Science had no explanation what's so ever regarding qualia which is pretty much fundamental to human experiential existence.

Qualia is an abstract human concept; so science need not explain it or even accept it exists.

1) There is no duality in nature. Everything is made of the same stuff with different substantially.

So, you do think people can say what is the nature of quanta and energy; you just think it's only you. Sorry, the scientists are a bit more qualified.

2) Everything is fundamentally mind that grows along a substantiality spectrum starting with quanta, electrons, atoms, molecules, etc.

No, there is no scientific or factual foundation supporting this.

It is this persistence if memory that we might call a soul.

Since you've spread the definition to the entire universe, we can't call it an individual soul.

Physicists can. — Thanatos Sand

Science had one and only one thing, the Schrodinger equation that provides a probabilistic prediction for the location of the "electron". All interpretations of quanta are metaphysical in nature.

Qualia is an abstract human concept; so science need not explain it or even accept it exists. — Thanatos Sand

Qualia is the essence of human existence (as opposed to abstract mathematical equations or linguistics) and it is what everyone experiences throughout their lives. Science had no explanation for qualia. That Scientism, the religious belief in science, attempts to corral all of human existence in an "illusion" pretty much puts it in the realm Hinduism, with a similar caste system. The actually process by which Scientism and Hinduism arrive at the same conclusion is pretty much the same - belief in some supernatural forces (e.g. Natural Laws, Maya) that govern our existence and create this illusion.

No, there is no scientific or factual foundation supporting this. — Thanatos Sand

There is no scientific evidence for anything relating to the nature of life. It is a metaphysical. There is no duality. There is a continuum and for this they is scientific evidence. And there is also much evidence for the persistence if memory, i.e. habitual activity in the universe.

Science had one and only one thing, the Schrodinger equation that provides a probabilistic prediction for the location of the "electron". All interpretations of quanta are metaphysical in nature.

No, science had and has many things. And you haven't even established all is quanta, so how it is interpreted is moot.

Qualia is the essence of human existence (as opposed to abstract mathematical equations or linguistics) and it is what everyone experiences throughout their lives

No, it's not, and you haven't shown it is.

That Scientism, the religious belief in science, attempts to corral all of human existence in an "illusion" pretty much puts it in the realm Hinduism, with a similar caste system.

Correct belief in science, as I have shown, is not Scientism.

The actually process by which Scientism and Hinduism arrive at the same conclusion is pretty much the same - belief in some supernatural forces (e.g. Natural Laws, Maya) that govern our existence and create this illusion.

The only one who has shown belief in supernatural forces so far has been you.

There is no scientific evidence for anything relating to the nature of life. It is a metaphysical.

There is plenty of scientific evidence for anything relating to the nature of life, which is not metaphysical.

And there is also much evidence for the persistence if memory, i.e. habitual activity in the universe

There is no evidence for the human concept of memory in the universe.

A lot of philosophers seem to believe in something like a soul, and they call it Mind, a metaphysical substance separate from matter. They're called Dualists. I often call them Spiritualists.

As Wayfarer brought out, the imagined dissection of us into body and soul, body and Mind, or body and Consciousness is artificial and cultural.

There aren't separate body-and-soul. There's just the animal.

Everything in your experience is consistent with what an animal would be expected to experience.

That position has been called "philosophy-of-mind Physicalism. (..not to be confused with metaphysical Physicalism, which I don't subscribe to.)

For brevity, I abbreviate philosophy-of-mind Physicalism as "pomp". When I say "Physicalism", without a qualifying-phrase, I mean metaphysical Physicalism.

Some here don't like it, but the scientists are right this time, about that anyway.

There's something called an Elminative Physicalist, who (if I remember correctly) takes a more extreme position, and says that the external, objective, 3rd-person point-of-view is the only valid one, and that our own 1st-person experience is fictitious. A ridiculous position, I'd say.

That view is probably common among scientists, and, in that instance, they're wrong..

Your life is a life-experience possibility-story, and it's centered on you, its Protagonist. You're its primary and essential component. So the person (or other animal) is primary in its life-experience story.

So I believe in the primacy of the person (or other animal), in their reality, which consists of a life-experience possibility-story.

People sometimes confuse a philosophy-of-mind position with a metaphysical position. It's true that, when someone states a philosophy-of-mind position, that seems to raise the question of what metaphysical position they subscribe to.

When a philosophy-of-mind position is stated, the question of "What is?" isn't far beneath.

So let me outline my suggestion about that. It would probably be called Eliminative Ontic Structural Non-Realism.

Physicists Michael Faraday (1844), Frank Tippler ('70s or '80s), and Max Tegmark (more recent) have pointed ot that experience, observation and experiment are completely consistent with the physical world consisting only of relation in mathematical/logical structure. No need for "concrete" objectively-real "stuff".

That position that that structure is all that the physical world consists of has been called Eliminative Ontic Structuralism.

Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis has been called Ontic Stuctural Realism, suggesting that Tegmark regards our external world as having its own existence, maybe the primary existence. That was my impression, too, when reading things that he's said.

That's where I disagree. As I mentioned above, I point out that your life is centered on your own experience. The relevant inter-related if-then structure is your own life-experience possibility-story, in which you're primary, and the essential component.

So, I'd replace the "Realism" with "Non-Realism".

A physical world, like ours, consists of a system of inter-referring if-then statements.

Physical laws are hypothetical "if" facts that relate some other hypothetical "if" facts called "quantity-values".

Those physical laws and some quantity-values are parts of the "if" clause of "if-then" facts. Those "if-then" facts' "then" conclusions consist of other quantity-values.

Mathematical theorems are if-then facts whose "if" clause includes (but isn't limited to) a set of axioms.

There are also abstract logical "if-then" facts.

Experience, observation and experiment are completely consistent with the physical world consisting on nothing other than that system of inter-referring "if-then"s.

Of course our experience with the details of that physical system consist largely of hearing from physicists about what they've found out by their experiments. But, in any case, statements about our physical world can still be stated as "if-then" statements.

For example, if I say that there's a traffic roundabout at the intersection of 34th & vine, that's the same as saying that if you go to 34th & Vine, you'll encounter a traffic-roundabout.

Declarative grammar is convenient, but maybe we start believing too much in our grammar. Maybe conditional grammar is what more accurately describes our physical world.

Anyway, where I differ from others who have suggested Eliminative Ontic Structuralism is that I suggest that this hypothetical system of inter-related "if-then"s, this "possibility-story", consists of your own personal life-experience possibility-story.

Hence "Eliminative Ontic Structural Non-Realism".

I call my that metaphyiscal proposal "Skepticism", because it makes no assumptions and posits no brute-facts. Complete rejection of assumptions is certainly skeptical, justifying my name for the metaphysics that I propose.

I claim that Skepticism is the parsimonious metaphysics, favored by Ockham's Principle of Parsimony.

A also claim that Skepticism qualifies as a version of Vedanta. Vedanta has several versions, of which Advaita is the most popular. Skepticism differs from Advaita, and the other usual Vedanta versions, but I claim that it shares the basic conclusions and consequences of Vedanta.

Michael Ossipoff

Does it matter to you if this soul, you ask about, dies?

If no, then it exists.
If yes, then I don't know.

2) Everything is fundamentally mind that grows along a substantiality spectrum starting with quanta, electrons, atoms, molecules, etc. — Rich

Interesting. Reminds me of Teilhard de Chardin.

Interesting. Reminds me of Teilhard de Chardin. — Noble Dust

Actually, it reminds me of basic college physics. Everything is made of the same stuff and quantum is entangled between observer and observed.

Have you read Teilhard de Chardin?

Have you read Teilhard de Chardin? — Noble Dust

My primary inspirations are Bergson, Sheldrake, Bohm, Daoists and Heraclitus. All were (are) keen observers of the world. However, I do find French philosophers in general more in touch with life and less enamored by technology.

You might like him, but maybe you wouldn't learn anything new. His idea of the pleroma is bizarre but intriguing. He was a paleontologist and a Jesuit priest.

Thanks. I will educate myself on his ideas.

Scientists have done a pretty good job explaining matter and energy and explaining how that's all the universe is made of, with dark and anti- matter being material forms. — Thanatos Sand

Scientists now realise that something unknown is holding the Universe together, because it doesn't behave as it ought to, according to their theories. They don't know what this "something" is but they think of it in terms of matter and energy, because they're the only kinds of things that they are prepared to consider.

What else would they consider? God? And scientists used to not know why electrons or singularities behave the way they do. That just necessitates insufficiency of present knowledge, not a supernatural cause.

Do you think the soul exists as a separate entity from our body, do you think personality has to do with the soul, do you think some souls shine brighter than others or can our existence and disposition be chalked down to environment and biology? — Locks

You should read some Plato. There is very much information there concerning the nature of the soul, and why it is necessary to assume that we have a soul. Much is anecdotal. Here's an example. The thirsty man will drink water to quench his thirst. But if the water is contaminated he will not drink it even if he is very thirsty. What can account for this fact, that when he is thirsty, sometimes he will drink the water, and other times he will not, other than the assumption that he has a soul which is in control of his body?

That just necessitates insufficiency of present knowledge, not a supernatural cause. — Thanatos Sand

Do you think that the soul, if it exists, is necessarily something supernatural? How would you define "supernatural", and "soul", such that the soul is necessarily supernatural?

I define supernatural as it is defined. Go look it up. And since nobody has found the soul in nature or through natural means, it's either supernatural or nonexistent. You're free to show how it could be otherwise.

And since nobody has found the soul in nature or through natural means, it's either supernatural or nonexistent. — Thanatos Sand

This claim is founded on an unsupported assumption; that everything that is "natural" is capable of being "found".

No. it's not, not at all. It's based on the well-supported assumption it hasn't been found yet in a world that has been well-scanned by near-exhaustive means.

However, feel free to back up your unfounded assumption a natural soul could be present in our natural world without being found.

It's based on the well-supported assumption it hasn't been found yet in a world that has been well-scanned by near-exhaustive means. — Thanatos Sand

The point about the 'dark matter' example is this: the current cosmological model is that dark matter/energy accounts for 96% of the known universe. The obverse of this is that what is currently understood as matter and energy accounts for 4% of the known universe. (This is documented in the book The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality
by Richard Panek : http://a.co/3qK4Ul0 .)

I was listening to radio interview with Lawrence Krauss once, when the interviewer casually remarked that 'dark matter' might actually interpenetrate the 'ordinary matter' that we understand - that we're sorrounded by unseen matter and energy . Krauss said, 'may be', and the conversation moved on(!) So think about that - the notion that the vast majority of matter and energy is not even perceptible to science, yet it exists all around us.

It's possible that there is no dark matter, and that current theories are incorrect in some unknown way. But it tends to undermine the idea that science has anything like a complete account of the nature of reality.

That's only one issue. There is another major, huge issue in current physics, which is that many physicists are prepared to entertain the notion of 'parallel worlds' - that 'this world' is but one of an infinite array of worlds, which almost (but not quite) exactly mirror this one.

Then there's the 'multiverse speculation':

When Moses asks to see who or what he has been conversing with on Mount Sinai, he is placed in a crevice and told to look out once the radiance has passed (no peeking now!). Anything more than a glimpse of God's receding back, the story implies, would blow his mortal fuses. The equivalent passage in Hindu scripture occurs in the Bhagavad Gita – and, as befitting that most frank of all religions, is more explicit about the nature of the fatal vision. Krishna responds to the warrior Arjuna's request by telling him that no man can bear his naked splendour, then goes right ahead and gives him the necessary upgrade: "divine sight". What follows is one of the wildest, most truly psychedelic episodes in world literature.

No longer veiled by a human semblance, Krishna appears in his universal aspect: a boundless, roaring, all-containing cosmos with a billion eyes and mouths, bristling with "heavenly weapons" and ablaze with the light of a thousand suns. The sight is fearsome not only in its manifold strangeness but because its fire is a consuming one. "The flames of thy mouths," a horrified Arjuna cries, "devour all the worlds … how terrible thy splendours burn!"

Until recently, a physicist would have regarded this scene as the picturesque delirium of a pre-scientific age. Most still would. And yet the contemplation of the unspeakable flowering of an infinity of worlds is no longer the province of "mystics, charlatans and cranks", as the leading string theorist Michio Kaku has written, but instead occupies "the finest minds on the planet".

Welcome to the multiverse.

The Hidden Reality

You know the original meaning of the word 'occult' is 'hidden', right? Well, there's plenty of places to hide in these stories. So don't appeal to science to support your naive realism - it's so last century ;-)

And since nobody has found the soul in nature or through natural means, it's either supernatural or nonexistent. — Thanatos Sand

Aristotle found the soul through natural means, and his entire biology is centred around the existence of the soul. You should read it, it's called "On the Soul", and it is very comprehensive, covering the different life forms and their various different activities.

Do you understand that a living thing is different from a non-living thing, and that there is a difference between being alive and being dead? What is this difference, if not the soul?

I'm a deep thinker addict — Locks

>:O

Do you think the soul exists — Locks

Define soul.

Aristotle found the soul through natural means, and his entire biology is centred around the existence of the soul. — Metaphysician Undercover

Aristotle's understanding was, as I understand it, more along the lines of 'the unitive principle'; he was not a dualist, in that he didn't believe it made sense to say the soul exists separately from the body. It is more like the person is an 'embodied soul', or 'an ensouled body'.

Aristotle's understanding was, as I understand it, more along the lines of 'the unitive principle'; he was not a dualist, in that he didn't believe it made sense to say the soul exists separately from the body. It is more like the person is an 'embodied soul', or 'an ensouled body'. — Wayfarer

His first definition of "soul" is "the first grade of actuality of a body having life potentially in it". It is important to notice that there is no actual body, which is "ensouled", but the body, which has no actuality prior to having soul, is given actual existence by the soul. The soul is the first actuality of that body

The body which will be the living body, only potentially exists prior to having a soul. So it is the soul which gives actual existence to the material body, by actualizing what only exists potentially, prior to that actualization. Therefore the actual soul must exist prior to the actual body as that which actualizes the potential of a body, giving actual existence to the body

The only naive one is you with your adolescent occultism. I suggest you go back to playing your Led Zeppelin albums backwards and letting the grownup continue.

Aristotle found nothing. He theorized a concept of the soul. Big difference.

. So it is the soul which gives actual existence to the material body, by actualizing what only exists potentially, prior to that actualization. — Metaphysician Undercover

Rather than 'actual existence', I would say - 'being'. And it's significant that the only living beings are referred to as 'beings'.