The advantage of having a soul.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Another of my philosophical musings.

It has long puzzled me why we should seem to have this natural tendency to believe in an unchanging eternal soul. This is not, I suspect, something that we pick up through childhood indoctrination along with the rest of the religious bunkum we are bombarded with, but a genuine, inbuilt notion that there is an essential "usness".

I think it is all tied in with the way in which our brains have evolved. Humans are alone among animals in being able to place themselves in hypothetical situations and extrapolate the results of those situations without direct, prior experience. A chimpanzee can use a stick to disturb termites and also to test the depth of water but only if it has seen another chimp doing the same (I recently heard, on David Attenborough's Life, that they can only learn such skills when they copy them during childhood.) Different groups of chimps use sticks in different ways and cannot seem to extrapolate between one use and others. Some use sticks to disturb termites but rely on their fingers to pick up and eat them, whereas others eat them straight from the stick, the difference being the tribes from which those chimps belong. Some use a stick to extract termites but never think to apply the same process to ants, whereas in other tribes, the reverse is true.

Man, on the other hand, can see someone using a stick to extract ants and think, "I could use that same method to get at those termites." The history of Human technology is littered with examples of such lateral thinking. But the important thing here is the use of the pronoun "I" in the musings above. One of the reasons that we can think in that way, perhaps the key to it, is that we have a sense of self. We can conceive of ourselves as being a unique, unchanging, continuous presence in the world. It is only once we can do this that we can extrapolate into our futures.

But this ability to personify ourselves comes at a price. It means that we can also extend that extrapolation to its logical conclusion, our own demises. We see others around us grow old and die. We see our own bodies aging and thus cannot avoid our mortality. But this throws up a conflict between our concept of an unchanging self and our knowledge of death - it is this conflict that leads to the concept of a soul, of a part of us that is somehow separate from our bodies. That this is a false concept is one of the most difficult logical leaps to make. We need that concept of self to function as humans. It is core to our ability to progress and build upon our existing knowledge. It is at the heart of what makes us human in the first place. But it is a lie. A convenient fiction which gives us the huge, evolutionary advantage of being able to adapt to changing circumstances technologically, over a few generations, rather than evolutionarily, over several millennia.

I know that every atom of my body is different than what was there a few years ago. I know that my memory plays tricks on me, that I have forgotten things, misremembered things, merged memories into one, blotted things out and otherwise jumbled up the neural pathways that are the nearest thing I have to continuity. I know that this mental rejigging and amendment is only going to get worse as I get older and that I may well end up with most of my memories irretrievably lost before I die. I know that my attitudes and personality are different now to what they were 10, 20, 30 years ago. I know all of this but I still call my self, "I". I still think of myself as the same person I was at birth and at every point between there and now. I have filled this post with words like myself, me, I, us, we, etc. I talk in these terms because I think in these terms because that is what humans DO! And that is what a soul is. That idea that the individual genetic construct writing these words is somehow constant throughout its existence and not merely a collection of chemical processes in continuous flux.

That it isn't true is irrelevant to my DNA - it gets the job done is all that counts to natural selection.

[Rum]

Quite so..even names change it seems!

..and I think you hit the essence of the thing - DNA continues. The 'I' changes and the body changes and the temporary constructs and illusions we build which help us make sense of the world don't ever even exist objectively.

DNA rules.

[AshtonBlack]

Quite so..even names change it seems!

..and I think you hit the essence of the thing - DNA continues. The 'I' changes and the body changes and the temporary constructs and illusions we build which help us make sense of the world don't ever even exist objectively.

DNA rules.

Culture rules better.

[FBM]

...And that is what a soul is. That idea that the individual genetic construct writing these words is somehow constant throughout its existence and not merely a collection of chemical processes in continuous flux.

That it isn't true is irrelevant to my DNA - it gets the job done is all that counts to natural selection.

Well said, and I mean the whole post, not just the quoted part.

As a thought, the idea that "...the individual genetic..." is also inconstant, isn't it?

[JimC]

Excellent post - ties in with my long-held belief that our conciousness is a neurally generated illusion that gets the job done as far as being a pragmatically functioning agent in a dangerous world - why should the illusion want to disappear with death?

[FBM]

Excellent post - ties in with my long-held belief that our conciousness is a neurally generated illusion that gets the job done as far as being a pragmatically functioning agent in a dangerous world - why should the illusion want to disappear with death?

Ah! Good point. The illusion serves to keep the organism alive, so it seems only reasonable that it would resist the idea that its demise is inevitable...

[Sisifo]

I think that the human brain finds very hard to deal with change. Almost every analysis, past or present of any kind is bidimensional and stills the moment of the analysis, or presents a linear singular action-reaction sketch. The ability of integrate in our thinking and analysis multiple actions happening at odd times, interacting simultaneously seems to be very difficult. Even in linear singular analysis, it's difficult to deal with more than 3 or 4 changes, as proved in the average playing of games, like chess, xianqui or go...

A peasant needs often years to realize that the rain pattern has changed, and he should change the kind of crop. And companies stick to their agonizing ends, unable to make fast changes, as addressed in "Who got my Cheese".

The evolutionary reason of that? I guess that in agregated numbersl a brain that asumes that tomorrow is going to be just like today is more fruitful, as most of the time, it would be right.

Death is the ultimate change... If people can't deal with smaller change, how would they deal with the biggest one?

[Xamonas Chegwé]

...And that is what a soul is. That idea that the individual genetic construct writing these words is somehow constant throughout its existence and not merely a collection of chemical processes in continuous flux.

That it isn't true is irrelevant to my DNA - it gets the job done is all that counts to natural selection.

Well said, and I mean the whole post, not just the quoted part.

As a thought, the idea that "...the individual genetic..." is also inconstant, isn't it?

Not really. I was referring to the one that existed at the time, as opposed to the fairly similar one (with the same genotype, minus a ton of telomeres) that exists now. There is no permanence to a person, merely a constant continuity between states. And our mental continuity is the biggest illusion of all - try having a stroke.

[FBM]

Not really. I was referring to the one that existed at the time, as opposed to the fairly similar one (with the same genotype, minus a ton of telomeres) that exists now. There is no permanence to a person, merely a constant continuity between states. And our mental continuity is the biggest illusion of all - try having a stroke.

The illusion of mental continuity was what I was getting at. This thought/idea isn't really the same one as I had the last time I thought it. It's a whole new (fleeting) phenomenon. Same with memories. People tend to think that we repeat the same memories by accessing some hidden storehouse, but it seems more accurate to say that we have a new memory of the event each time we think about it. (Is this related to what you were getting at, or have I drifted off into left field somewhere? )

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Not really. I was referring to the one that existed at the time, as opposed to the fairly similar one (with the same genotype, minus a ton of telomeres) that exists now. There is no permanence to a person, merely a constant continuity between states. And our mental continuity is the biggest illusion of all - try having a stroke.

The illusion of mental continuity was what I was getting at. This thought/idea isn't really the same one as I had the last time I thought it. It's a whole new (fleeting) phenomenon. Same with memories. People tend to think that we repeat the same memories by accessing some hidden storehouse, but it seems more accurate to say that we have a new memory of the event each time we think about it. (Is this related to what you were getting at, or have I drifted off into left field somewhere? )

No. You pretty much nailed it. Mental continuity is as illusory as physical continuity. Our fat brains do a great job of blurring the joins though.

[locutus7]

I would like to sell my soul, if someone actually shows up that wants it. Like the devil. The great thing about the imaginary soul is, you could sell an endless number and still remain unchanged (but richer).