Souls

[Torrere]

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?)