This diary is the result of whisky. It also has no political content whatsoever.
I was just reading on another cite a series of comments all about the soul. The prevailing view was that the soul was an outdated concept that we wise moderns can well do without, sort of like the easter bunny or phlogiston.
I think this is wrong.
When I was very little I was made to go to a Catholic church school thing that, for reasons I cannot fathom, actually occured during the week. We cathloc kids were picked up by the bus from school early on Tuesday (or Thursday?) and spent a half hour with sister Mary whoever.
I don't remember much, but I remember that when Sister Mary whoever talked about the soul, she was totally confusing. "where is the soul?" she asked and drew a picture of a human body on the chalkboard. I don't know whether it was a fellow seven year old or the sister herself who finally drew a picture around the stick figure on the board. That is your soul, the picture seemed to say, its all of you, not a part of you.
This would be fine if the drawing was not a stickfigure and if the implication was still that the soul was in some way something I have. So when I asked the question, "Will I continue after death" the response is "your soul will continue." This gave my little seven year old mind the idea that the soul was something I have, some special thing or aspect of myself.
Of course understood in this way I had no clue what Sister Mary was talking about.
The proper way to think of the soul is to think of yourself. I don't mean look in the mirror, I mean consider the referent of the first person pronoun, "I". What are you talking about when you use the word "I" to what does this word refer?
There are all kinds of views. Some say it refers to nothing, some would say it refers to this body, the animal I am.
To say that there is a soul is just to deny these last two contentions. When I use the word "I" , I do not refer to my body and yet I am talking about something. That something is the center of my conscioussnes, which is nothing other than the soul.
So when the Rene Descartes said that even if he is dreaming, he still knows he exists. "I think, therefore I am" he was on to something important, something that no advance in neuroscience can in principle negate. The fact that I can refer to myself even in a dream world indicates that I don't mean my body, my brain, or some part of my brain when I use "I" I can think that this life is a dream and when I think such thoughts, I find myself out of balance, the world has lost its bearings. To think these things causes epistemic discomfort. But the discomfort is about the world of things, the spatially extended world of middle sized objects I typically encounter. I don't lose balance with respect to myself. I am still I, even in the matrix, even in a dream, even if as Descartes playfully suggests, its just me and the weirdo evil demon, who gets a charge out of deceiving me.
Human beings have a tendency to interpret the world on the basis of what is observed. So it is assumed that if I am something, I must be roughly the same sort of thing that tables rocks and stars are made of.
But this move is to confuse subject and object, to confuse self and world.
If we are to think clearly about these matters, we need to reflect back on ourselves, on the thinker, not the object of thought. One may still, after doing the experiment, think some sort of materialism is true, either by heroic effort in denying the facts of introspection, or by a more nuanced view that is based on our ignorance of the intrinsic character of things (what is an electron? in the end a mathematically described relational being).
Whichever way one goes, its important to start by thinking clearly.
That, dear Kossacks, is my unpolitical drunken rant of the evening.