Souls
 

For the purposes of this thread, I will classify souls as being an intangible part of a person that does not cease to exist when a person dies, within which some integral part of that person is contained. There is also the supposition that after a soul's physical firmanent dies, the soul goes to Heaven or Hell or Cleveland or Wherever, but you don't need to believe in that.

The question series is:
Do people have souls?
If people have souls; do cats have souls?

I have two souls and cats have four.;)
Past experience has taught me that I'm not sure. Read my post at 7:23 PM. :confused:

I guess I think of soul as the shifting essence of a being, of whatever lifeform you chose. And it's presence is dependent on the experiences of a physical life, but can exist in an array of forms beyond that, through consciousness: thought, memory, echo. Then there's all that slippery time stuff too. I don't think souls hit the highway, I think they knit together, become a cool glass of water, grit on your fingers, or a hot, humid night.

I think there has to be something that goes on, something that is ultimately responsible for whatever you've done up to then. If you've done well, some metaphysical Xerox of all that you are that slips through the looking glass and gets a sit-down with whomever was just responsible for this bitch of an acid trip called "life" that we just went through. Just some kindly old man, neatly dressed, sitting in one of two overstuffed chairs across a coffee table. He gestures that you sit, and proceeds to say "Okay, you made it through. Now here's the deal."

Contrarily, were you to have done things to merit retribution, that same Xerox would be subjected to some pretty bad shit. What exactly, I don't know. Personally, I like to work off the Inferno, cause I've not heard anything better.

They have souls in singapore. Check out the picture. :D

I believe that there are no souls, we are simply what we physically are.

The purpose of this poll is that I believe that souls were invented (by Christians or their predecessors) to distinguish human beings from the other animals: "not only were we made in God's form, but we have souls which persist after our deaths". Most of the dedicated Christians that I've spoken to believe, very definitively, that only humans have souls

In person, I have received many interesting responses. One woman told me that she believed that souls were the ability to feel emotion; to love and to feel emotional hurt. Hence, she believed that cats and dogs and horses also had souls.

According to a spokeswoman of the "Jews for Jesus" group, the Bible states that there will be animals in Heaven, but she wasn't sure if there would be cats and she wasn't sure if the animals in Heaven would have souls like the humans do.

My extended range of questioning is: if other animals have souls, what is the point at which those animals stop having souls? Trilobytes?

What happens if you meet your former meals in the Afterlife?

"No hard feelings? Because it looks like we both met our proper destiny in life."

According to the Hare Krsnas, the soul is a teeny little thing. I conceive of their idea of the soul as being a tiny pill-shaped translucent thing, with a gradient of hippie colors (to demonstrate how close or far it is to or from enlightenment). It subtly affects and is affected by the person animated by the soul; as if the person and the soul seep into each other.

I spoke with a evangelistic Christian holding a big sign on a street corner, and asked him some of these questions. According to him, the soul is the ability to think and to feel emotions. I asked him a out cats, and he answered with horses. Supposedly with some basis in the Bible, he said that horses have souls and that there are horses and motley other animals in Heaven. I started asking him if horses could go to hell or heaven, and what determined where they went; whether and how the criteria were different for horses than humans. He answered that he thought that horses had a different deal with God than humans do. However, both are God's creations, and hence in part why he felt that the questions of the afterlife should be similar for humans and horses.

WTF!? The poll is closed? I just got here dammit.

re: souls
 

a famous physicist in the last century, I think it was... umm... crud, I can't remember. Penrose! that was it! anyway, Penrose stipulated that souls (and I guess, by extension, consciousness) was a the end result of a series of quantum interactions occuring between the electrons making up our brains. The main part of this process was a situation he called 'chaotic dipole oscillation'. Basically he was saying that our brains, carrying more neurons then there are stars in the universe (supposedly), were merely trillions upon trillions of yes/no switches. When combined with the holographic model of thought this begins to make some sense. A hologram is an interesting thing when examined concurrently with thought processes. Imagine you have a sheet of holograph film. No matter which way you look through it it will not resolve into any particular image. but shine a light through any part and you will find the whole image in all 3 dimensions. Now cut that film in half. You'd think that the image would be halved as well, but not so. The image is still there, all 3-d's, maybe a little fuzzier. Cut the thing down as small as you like, the image will remain whole. Thought works this way as well. Neurophysiologists have experimented with memory processes for sometime. They found when showing the film of a scene from their subjects childhood one portion of the brain would be stimulated. Removing that portion of the brain, however, did not cause the patient to forget the memory. The details may have become a bit harder to recall, but the memory as a whole remained intact. With the brain acting as a hologram, all of these yes/no positions in our brain will have an exponential impact upon one another. Each change in one dipole (yes/no position)results in a change in the whole. Without going into the mathematics of it (mostly because I don't understand them myself) I'd say that despite my atheism I can believe that we have souls. I have a soul, and all my long-departed kitties souls are hovering around my head somehwre, plotting terrible revenge on the cars that ran them down.

Welcome to the Cellar, Greenian. :) I'm having trouble making the conection between "chaotic dipole oscillation" and the existence of a/the soul. But I enjoyed reading about it (cdo) very much. Thanks.

hey bruce
 

well bruce, I'm not a spiritual guy, so I'm looking less at the idea of 'soul' as an independent thing. it seems to me like soul and consciousness are kind of interchangable. I was making a case for consciousness, actually I guess I was arguing for, although my example might not fit the actual definition of a soul. I'm glad to hear you enjoyed reading it though.

Points to geenian for the most creative reply.
I'll be boring: We're lumps of slowly decaying flesh, when we die we decompose and help the grass grow. How romantic of me.

Cats on the other hand...

Slag: I agree! I demand a recount or I'll dent your chad!

Cats have not one, but 9 souls. Everyone knows that!! But if people have souls...hmmm...I'm not so sure. I think some people do, some people don't, some people call it thier consience, and some people call it their consience and ignore it. I would like to classifly myself as one of the people who call it thier consience.

Ooh! The thread is back, and my opinions have changed!

First, greenian: what you were showing us is that memory is stored holographically. I've long heard that memory is written on the surface of the brain, but I hadn't learned of the holographic slant to the idea until I heard it recently on this forum. Nonetheless, I believe that holographic memory does not necessarily relate to thought, the soul or the mind. You may be mixing metaphors.

Even conceiving of thought as holographic, it is still wholly based in and part of the brain. Should the brain decompose, it takes the holograms with it.

So; nowadays I'm fascinated by obsolete science. The brain was once held to be a primitive organ which reacted to stimuli. When the brain wasn't reacting to something, people thought that it was inactive: when somebody did an experiment on a dog and found that the brain was electrically active all the time, people were shocked.

People used to believe that the soul was held flimsily in the body. The sneeze was recognized to be a powerful phenomenon (just look at how someone's head jerks back), so powerful that it might force the soul out of the body. Hence why people still say "bless you!"

The soul was where our personality was stored, our conciousness and our capability of free will. The notion of a zombie was 'someone without a soul', which meant that a zombie operated only by the brain and did the will of the necromancer.

I believe that the soul is something which was based in the mythology of "how the human body operates" and which has been evicted by the modern perception of the brain.

(addendum: In paragraph four, is 'science' the right word?)