eventually you are going to have to accept the idea of " the soul" - as what you propose doesnt actually make any sense otherwise. So "magic" ie forces beyond the known material world and science is involved.
"What does it mean to investigate reality? It means that man must forget all hearsay and examine truth himself, for he does not know whether statements he hears are in accordance with reality or not. Wherever he finds truth or reality, he must hold to it, forsaking, discarding all else; for outside of reality there is naught but superstition and imagination.”
“In man there are two natures; his spiritual or higher nature and his material or lower nature. In one he approaches God, in the other he lives for the world alone. Signs of both these natures are to be found in men.”
"Know, verily, that the soul is a sign of God, a heavenly gem whose reality the most learned of men hath failed to grasp, and whose mystery no mind, however acute, can ever hope to unravel."
"The essential identity of every human being is a rational and immortal soul, which is “entirely out of the order of the physical creation.”"
"The body of a man is “like unto a mirror, his soul is as the sun, and his mental faculties even as the rays that emanate from that source of light.”"
" the rational soul, meaning the human spirit, does not descend into the body -- that is to say, it does not enter it, for descent and entrance are characteristics of bodies, and the rational soul is exempt from this. The spirit never entered this body, so in quitting it, it will not be in need of an abiding-place: no, the spirit is connected with the body, as this light is with this mirror. When the mirror is clear and perfect, the light of the lamp will be apparent in it, and when the mirror becomes covered with dust or breaks, the light will disappear."
"The soul is not a combination of elements, it is not composed of many atoms, it is of one indivisible substance and therefore eternal. It is entirely out of the order of the physical creation; it is immortal!"
"Scientific philosophy has demonstrated that a simple element ('simple' meaning 'not composed') is indestructible, eternal. The soul, not being a composition of elements, is, in character, as a simple element, and therefore cannot cease to exist. The soul, being of that one indivisible substance, can suffer neither disintegration nor destruction, therefore there is no reason for its coming to an end."
"All sciences, knowledge, arts, wonders, institutions, discoveries and enterprises come from the exercised intelligence of the rational soul.”
"The soul, like the intellect, is an abstraction. Intelligence does not partake of the quality of space, though it is related to man’s brain. The intellect resides there, but not materially. Search in the brain you will not find the intellect. In the same way though the soul is the resident of the body, it is not to be found in the body."
If you say "This is faith," that is the antithesis of empiricism.
The parameters of what you call "soul" are essentially those of the mind in biocog model except for one: immortality. The mind is not a substance, it is an emergent informational space which will dissolve and cease to be when the brain ceases to function. It is, as you say, unlocalised but totally self-contained and private, with no power to act on the physical world except through its connections with the body. Thus, no telepathy, telekinesis, prescience and so on.
no, empiricism led me to Faith, all the weird and wonderful things in the world, including strange coincidences or synchronicities. "O Thou who art the most hidden of the hidden, and the most manifest of the manifest." Surely you've experience things not likely to have happened by pure chance?
Indeed, but they all turned out to have a natural explanation. There's enough wonder in the universe without inventing supernatural spirits.
I'm not sure you're using the word empiricism in the formal sense. It means that all knowledge comes from sensory experience but requires objective validation. Empiricists were opposed to metaphysical musings, e.g. Bernard's elan vitale.
Yes, there is wonder in the universe and the human mind is the most wonderful - no one has a clue about how the brain is linked with consciousness at the human level of creativity. Last example and then I'm finished in this chat. Several years back I heard the song "Land of the Silver Birch" - that was enough to motivate me to work for a year to pack up our family of seven, arrange a work visa for my husband, and move to British Columbia, Canada for 15 months. The power of a song..... which after all is just vibrations of air molecules hitting our ear drum, then transmitted through the middle ear bones into the cochlear and then to the auditory centres of the brain. How do you explain the power of music without a "soul" to be affected by it?
There is this doctrine that started 2026 years ago. People believe it and jump through the hoops. Freud exploited these hoop jumping tigers making things worse.
Soul came from that doctrine.
And somehow spirit, soul, and other terms try to describe that what the biological body and the electro chemical mind are not.
Something within these realms.
But yeah, i'm guessing somewhat educated there.
I try hard to look from your perspective but im not there yet.
Partly undoctrinaded, while exploring my own reasoning.
The problem is people want to believe in immortality. Once that door is opened, all sorts of gremlins rush through. We just accept that this is it, bro, only one bite at the cherry, then back to nothingness. We weren't uncomfortable for millions of years before we were born, it won't be any different in a hundred years from now when we're all feeding the worms. That's if the militarists haven't incinerated even the worms.
I think that the most practical aspect of free will is its application to the courts and decisions about criminality, et cetera.
And this puts psychiatrists in a very commanding position, as the people who influence whether free will has been exercised or not in any particular case.
Scientifically, the BioCognitive model is needed more than ever not only to provide a formal basis of mind for the “mind sciences”, but also to dispel the myths of life after death and bring us closer to a more accurate model of life. After listening to numerous experts talk about their ides of consciousness (mind) they end up with a version of panpsychism, idealism or talk about microtubules or quantum fields for hours, none of which are remotely useful.
Secondly, it also needs scrutiny. That is, more eyes to find faults are better than eyes that never look.
Regarding free will, at the risk or repeating what was written/discussed here a few months ago, another problem with determinists (and actually non-determinists) who say that if we rewound to five minutes ago where everything was the same atomically (i.e. the whole world molecule by molecule) and one chose beer instead of wine, one would do the same repeatedly (i.e. never choose wine) given those conditions, is that it rigs the game; we can never go back to test this so it is impossible to say either way.
Whittling it down to the brain, which is absolutely necessary for the mind to emerge, as you say, the mind reduces to the brain according to mind brain identify theory (MBIT) which as you also point out, can never be proven (i.e. a thought can never be positively identified).
However, let’s presume one was able to tinker with just one neuron at the exact second I chose beer and stopped it firing (not lesion it, stopping its action potential, or without getting too technical, an earlier stage in the process) and I chose wine instead, MBIT determinists could rightly say that as they changed just one thing, they are correct (i.e. you could not have chosen wine without the tinkering, therefore you would repeatedly choose beer always unless that one subtle change was made.
Thus, whilst I do agree with the idea of the mind as informational state as you have outlined, the logic of “singular neuronal tinkering (changing one thing)” if it were possible is what could lead to a conclusion of a deterministic informational space if in any way that space relies on the state of one’s brain to emerge (which everyone agrees it does).
Another popular rebuttal of free will used today is the split-brain patients which are used to argue, among other grounds, because they confabulate reasons for things they did/saw which they claim to not have done/saw, that we do not in fact reason knowingly. I don’t agree with these cases per se proving anything about free will in a brain without its corpus callosum cut, but along with the Libet experiments, this grab bag of scientific findings is used to bamboozle hoi polloi over the matter.
With the old wine vs beer debate, it's important not to allow them to conflate the emergent mind with the neural mechanism that generates it. Content and mechanism are different orders of being. Yes, interfering with the smooth integrated function of brain e.g. with alcohol or other drugs, concussion, high fever, sleep deprivation, etc. interferes with the mental output, that's not in question, but the brain has high levels of computational redundancy, it can work around a small defect. The argument about changing a single point in the brain to produce a totally different output is of the same level of sophistication as the boy who stood on his right leg and concluded his left leg did not support him, then changed legs and concluded his right leg did not support him, therefore his legs did not keep him upright. Any brain output such as choosing what to drink is the product of a vastly complex mechanism; changing a single point won't do anything.
I agree about the split brain stuff, it was all sooo exciting 45 years ago but seems to have fallen away since then.
I dont see it as linear and flat as free will vs determinism.
I see both as soap bubbles that intersect with heaps of grey zone al around them
External forces can stand in the way of free will, and can force one into a determinism situation no matter how much free will exists between ones ears.
Same for the determinism bubble actually.
Wile I find it interesting and I to some level can agree with you, i tend to see forces that take the choice of free will away from people.
Specially when surrounded by Freudian minds and systems based on Freuds crap. Those institutional forces can destroy people exactly on this topic.
As if people resist them. Then the system can and will eject them.
Essentially ending any oppertunity of a carreer in the classical sense.
Joshua Wong, a prominent Hong Kong pro-democracy activist, was expected to leave prison next year. Instead, he will appear at Hong Kong’s High Court on Wednesday, where he is now expected to plead guilty to collusion with foreign forces. Like those for which Mr Wong was sentenced in 2024, the charges were ginned up in the aftermath of the protests that enveloped Hong Kong in 2019-20. The Chinese government introduced a national-security law in the city in 2020 that its authorities have used to silence dissent ever since.
Yet the will to freedom is not easy to extinguish. On August 21st two activists, Chow Hang-tung and Lee Cheuk-yan, were convicted of inciting subversion having organised candlelight vigils marking the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, among other activities. Both have been in jail since 2021. Unbowed, Ms Chow told the court a week later that she “would rather be a criminal than a person who betrays their conscience”.
You are not separate from your mind, they're one and the same thing, an assemblage of beliefs and experiences. There is, however, nothing to say the beliefs should all be consistent and plenty to explain why they're not, which produces distress.
To be clear, I don't believe in religious doctrine. Yet I try to figure out how it works.
How people believe a story about something virtual in ancient history.
A story that could be a lie, or twisted out of perspective .
People who try to understand the mind. And life in general get told a plausible fantasy so elaborate and complex that the cant really grasp it.
Only those who constructed the story. They are far ahead into the story. Theologically in depth trained. Or in my view indoctrinated into the fantasy.
But others genually believe.
And that shapes their idea of soul.
My idea of soul is different yet I still call it soul.
Soul as a deeper thing that connects mind and body.
The grey area where physical senses cross over in emotion and mind senses. The place where you can put yourself in position of another person and feel its feelings. And by that electro-bio-chemically feel or experience the feeling of an idea that originates in another person's body.
As in listening to music, and make your body move to the thoughts and emotions of the musician.
Or as in reading a book.
Or .. listening to a preacher who played with emotions
Or listening to a psychopath who leans on the other extreme of the dark side of shit.
Soul being the transfer of thought into physical feeling and movement the soup where mind and body meet in electro chemical exchange?
Here it makes sense to give that area a name, and soul is a word that does make sense.
Spirit.
Even Chi. As all of this is energy, life energy.
But not anything religious.
Just bioelectrochemically.
And here the things that Reich played with become interesting as he could actually prove that energy, not only in the body but also managed to capture it in the space that surrounds us.
And from there things get more interesting if you play with Tesla toys, chemicals in batteries, magnetism, satstics, radio waves, capacity, induction. And how it all crosses over. And how water is interacting with all of that. As our bodies are mostly water.
And here this music is again.
Frequencies that interact with our bodies electrochemical emotions.
I think religion develops from two themes. First, we don't like uncertainty. We like to know what's out there in the dark, whose footsteps they are, who's looking at us, just because danger. Uncertainty readily morphs into danger. Second is the lust for power and control. The person who says "I know what's going on out there, I know where we're all going" is in a stronger position than somebody who admits he doesn't, and he soon manipulates that into gaining status and power and wealth for himself. The original message is soon lost, as with "prosperity gospel" in Christianity and ISIS in Islam.
eventually you are going to have to accept the idea of " the soul" - as what you propose doesnt actually make any sense otherwise. So "magic" ie forces beyond the known material world and science is involved.
Can you define the properties of your "soul," and the laws of the universe within which it operates and is constrained?
You have to come at it empirically!
These quotes are from my faith tradition.
"What does it mean to investigate reality? It means that man must forget all hearsay and examine truth himself, for he does not know whether statements he hears are in accordance with reality or not. Wherever he finds truth or reality, he must hold to it, forsaking, discarding all else; for outside of reality there is naught but superstition and imagination.”
“In man there are two natures; his spiritual or higher nature and his material or lower nature. In one he approaches God, in the other he lives for the world alone. Signs of both these natures are to be found in men.”
"Know, verily, that the soul is a sign of God, a heavenly gem whose reality the most learned of men hath failed to grasp, and whose mystery no mind, however acute, can ever hope to unravel."
"The essential identity of every human being is a rational and immortal soul, which is “entirely out of the order of the physical creation.”"
"The body of a man is “like unto a mirror, his soul is as the sun, and his mental faculties even as the rays that emanate from that source of light.”"
" the rational soul, meaning the human spirit, does not descend into the body -- that is to say, it does not enter it, for descent and entrance are characteristics of bodies, and the rational soul is exempt from this. The spirit never entered this body, so in quitting it, it will not be in need of an abiding-place: no, the spirit is connected with the body, as this light is with this mirror. When the mirror is clear and perfect, the light of the lamp will be apparent in it, and when the mirror becomes covered with dust or breaks, the light will disappear."
"The soul is not a combination of elements, it is not composed of many atoms, it is of one indivisible substance and therefore eternal. It is entirely out of the order of the physical creation; it is immortal!"
"Scientific philosophy has demonstrated that a simple element ('simple' meaning 'not composed') is indestructible, eternal. The soul, not being a composition of elements, is, in character, as a simple element, and therefore cannot cease to exist. The soul, being of that one indivisible substance, can suffer neither disintegration nor destruction, therefore there is no reason for its coming to an end."
"All sciences, knowledge, arts, wonders, institutions, discoveries and enterprises come from the exercised intelligence of the rational soul.”
"The soul, like the intellect, is an abstraction. Intelligence does not partake of the quality of space, though it is related to man’s brain. The intellect resides there, but not materially. Search in the brain you will not find the intellect. In the same way though the soul is the resident of the body, it is not to be found in the body."
If you say "This is faith," that is the antithesis of empiricism.
The parameters of what you call "soul" are essentially those of the mind in biocog model except for one: immortality. The mind is not a substance, it is an emergent informational space which will dissolve and cease to be when the brain ceases to function. It is, as you say, unlocalised but totally self-contained and private, with no power to act on the physical world except through its connections with the body. Thus, no telepathy, telekinesis, prescience and so on.
no, empiricism led me to Faith, all the weird and wonderful things in the world, including strange coincidences or synchronicities. "O Thou who art the most hidden of the hidden, and the most manifest of the manifest." Surely you've experience things not likely to have happened by pure chance?
Indeed, but they all turned out to have a natural explanation. There's enough wonder in the universe without inventing supernatural spirits.
I'm not sure you're using the word empiricism in the formal sense. It means that all knowledge comes from sensory experience but requires objective validation. Empiricists were opposed to metaphysical musings, e.g. Bernard's elan vitale.
Yes, there is wonder in the universe and the human mind is the most wonderful - no one has a clue about how the brain is linked with consciousness at the human level of creativity. Last example and then I'm finished in this chat. Several years back I heard the song "Land of the Silver Birch" - that was enough to motivate me to work for a year to pack up our family of seven, arrange a work visa for my husband, and move to British Columbia, Canada for 15 months. The power of a song..... which after all is just vibrations of air molecules hitting our ear drum, then transmitted through the middle ear bones into the cochlear and then to the auditory centres of the brain. How do you explain the power of music without a "soul" to be affected by it?
Mind body and soul.
Body being the biological wrapper
Define soul independently of mind and/or body. I don't think it can be done.
Hehe, true. But Let me try.
There is this doctrine that started 2026 years ago. People believe it and jump through the hoops. Freud exploited these hoop jumping tigers making things worse.
Soul came from that doctrine.
And somehow spirit, soul, and other terms try to describe that what the biological body and the electro chemical mind are not.
Something within these realms.
But yeah, i'm guessing somewhat educated there.
I try hard to look from your perspective but im not there yet.
Partly undoctrinaded, while exploring my own reasoning.
The problem is people want to believe in immortality. Once that door is opened, all sorts of gremlins rush through. We just accept that this is it, bro, only one bite at the cherry, then back to nothingness. We weren't uncomfortable for millions of years before we were born, it won't be any different in a hundred years from now when we're all feeding the worms. That's if the militarists haven't incinerated even the worms.
I think that the most practical aspect of free will is its application to the courts and decisions about criminality, et cetera.
And this puts psychiatrists in a very commanding position, as the people who influence whether free will has been exercised or not in any particular case.
Scientifically, the BioCognitive model is needed more than ever not only to provide a formal basis of mind for the “mind sciences”, but also to dispel the myths of life after death and bring us closer to a more accurate model of life. After listening to numerous experts talk about their ides of consciousness (mind) they end up with a version of panpsychism, idealism or talk about microtubules or quantum fields for hours, none of which are remotely useful.
Secondly, it also needs scrutiny. That is, more eyes to find faults are better than eyes that never look.
Regarding free will, at the risk or repeating what was written/discussed here a few months ago, another problem with determinists (and actually non-determinists) who say that if we rewound to five minutes ago where everything was the same atomically (i.e. the whole world molecule by molecule) and one chose beer instead of wine, one would do the same repeatedly (i.e. never choose wine) given those conditions, is that it rigs the game; we can never go back to test this so it is impossible to say either way.
Whittling it down to the brain, which is absolutely necessary for the mind to emerge, as you say, the mind reduces to the brain according to mind brain identify theory (MBIT) which as you also point out, can never be proven (i.e. a thought can never be positively identified).
However, let’s presume one was able to tinker with just one neuron at the exact second I chose beer and stopped it firing (not lesion it, stopping its action potential, or without getting too technical, an earlier stage in the process) and I chose wine instead, MBIT determinists could rightly say that as they changed just one thing, they are correct (i.e. you could not have chosen wine without the tinkering, therefore you would repeatedly choose beer always unless that one subtle change was made.
Thus, whilst I do agree with the idea of the mind as informational state as you have outlined, the logic of “singular neuronal tinkering (changing one thing)” if it were possible is what could lead to a conclusion of a deterministic informational space if in any way that space relies on the state of one’s brain to emerge (which everyone agrees it does).
Another popular rebuttal of free will used today is the split-brain patients which are used to argue, among other grounds, because they confabulate reasons for things they did/saw which they claim to not have done/saw, that we do not in fact reason knowingly. I don’t agree with these cases per se proving anything about free will in a brain without its corpus callosum cut, but along with the Libet experiments, this grab bag of scientific findings is used to bamboozle hoi polloi over the matter.
With the old wine vs beer debate, it's important not to allow them to conflate the emergent mind with the neural mechanism that generates it. Content and mechanism are different orders of being. Yes, interfering with the smooth integrated function of brain e.g. with alcohol or other drugs, concussion, high fever, sleep deprivation, etc. interferes with the mental output, that's not in question, but the brain has high levels of computational redundancy, it can work around a small defect. The argument about changing a single point in the brain to produce a totally different output is of the same level of sophistication as the boy who stood on his right leg and concluded his left leg did not support him, then changed legs and concluded his right leg did not support him, therefore his legs did not keep him upright. Any brain output such as choosing what to drink is the product of a vastly complex mechanism; changing a single point won't do anything.
I agree about the split brain stuff, it was all sooo exciting 45 years ago but seems to have fallen away since then.
I dont see it as linear and flat as free will vs determinism.
I see both as soap bubbles that intersect with heaps of grey zone al around them
External forces can stand in the way of free will, and can force one into a determinism situation no matter how much free will exists between ones ears.
Same for the determinism bubble actually.
Wile I find it interesting and I to some level can agree with you, i tend to see forces that take the choice of free will away from people.
Specially when surrounded by Freudian minds and systems based on Freuds crap. Those institutional forces can destroy people exactly on this topic.
As if people resist them. Then the system can and will eject them.
Essentially ending any oppertunity of a carreer in the classical sense.
From The Economist Briefs this morning:
Some candles still burn in Hong Kong
Joshua Wong, a prominent Hong Kong pro-democracy activist, was expected to leave prison next year. Instead, he will appear at Hong Kong’s High Court on Wednesday, where he is now expected to plead guilty to collusion with foreign forces. Like those for which Mr Wong was sentenced in 2024, the charges were ginned up in the aftermath of the protests that enveloped Hong Kong in 2019-20. The Chinese government introduced a national-security law in the city in 2020 that its authorities have used to silence dissent ever since.
Yet the will to freedom is not easy to extinguish. On August 21st two activists, Chow Hang-tung and Lee Cheuk-yan, were convicted of inciting subversion having organised candlelight vigils marking the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, among other activities. Both have been in jail since 2021. Unbowed, Ms Chow told the court a week later that she “would rather be a criminal than a person who betrays their conscience”.
This reply kept my mind occupied all day... and I do get your point, while my mind keeps digging not letting go of my point of view.
Very interesting what my mind is doing.
You are not separate from your mind, they're one and the same thing, an assemblage of beliefs and experiences. There is, however, nothing to say the beliefs should all be consistent and plenty to explain why they're not, which produces distress.
To be clear, I don't believe in religious doctrine. Yet I try to figure out how it works.
How people believe a story about something virtual in ancient history.
A story that could be a lie, or twisted out of perspective .
People who try to understand the mind. And life in general get told a plausible fantasy so elaborate and complex that the cant really grasp it.
Only those who constructed the story. They are far ahead into the story. Theologically in depth trained. Or in my view indoctrinated into the fantasy.
But others genually believe.
And that shapes their idea of soul.
My idea of soul is different yet I still call it soul.
Soul as a deeper thing that connects mind and body.
The grey area where physical senses cross over in emotion and mind senses. The place where you can put yourself in position of another person and feel its feelings. And by that electro-bio-chemically feel or experience the feeling of an idea that originates in another person's body.
As in listening to music, and make your body move to the thoughts and emotions of the musician.
Or as in reading a book.
Or .. listening to a preacher who played with emotions
Or listening to a psychopath who leans on the other extreme of the dark side of shit.
Soul being the transfer of thought into physical feeling and movement the soup where mind and body meet in electro chemical exchange?
Here it makes sense to give that area a name, and soul is a word that does make sense.
Spirit.
Even Chi. As all of this is energy, life energy.
But not anything religious.
Just bioelectrochemically.
And here the things that Reich played with become interesting as he could actually prove that energy, not only in the body but also managed to capture it in the space that surrounds us.
And from there things get more interesting if you play with Tesla toys, chemicals in batteries, magnetism, satstics, radio waves, capacity, induction. And how it all crosses over. And how water is interacting with all of that. As our bodies are mostly water.
And here this music is again.
Frequencies that interact with our bodies electrochemical emotions.
'Soul'
Insert a bit of James Brown or Miles Davis here
I think religion develops from two themes. First, we don't like uncertainty. We like to know what's out there in the dark, whose footsteps they are, who's looking at us, just because danger. Uncertainty readily morphs into danger. Second is the lust for power and control. The person who says "I know what's going on out there, I know where we're all going" is in a stronger position than somebody who admits he doesn't, and he soon manipulates that into gaining status and power and wealth for himself. The original message is soon lost, as with "prosperity gospel" in Christianity and ISIS in Islam.
But all those aspects are part of that very doctrine, the cause and the cure all in one.
The religion creates Fear Uncertainty and Doubt.
And at the same time it traps those with most fear into its cult first, those in fear spread their fear and capture the next.
And this mechanism is how Freud blames and traps.
Jump trough hoops that all end in blaming the parents or more specific mother if it gets complicated. And then offer the petrochemical cure.
Get addicted for life if you get the right chemical...
And big pharma is your dealer.
Taking the place of the church in fear porn cult religion analogy.
And politics does this again, with covid fear, climate fear.
Its the very same Freudian trap, Bernaysian, judea-christian. And many othe cults do the same.
Im a bit of a pitbull on this mechanism. :-) I convinced myself. Also dangerous, but i have my jaw locked and not planning to let this one go. :-)))
THIS consumes energy, and I forget to search for a solution.
I dont dislike religious people, they may believe whatever they like. While I think it's sad they often deny this doctrine.
Its interesting how lies and believing are being exploited and get us ever deeper instead of out.