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 (nobody)...and 106 guests Last 5 registered Oplandisks nothingstar N_loop yipe foxtrotromeo Browse members... |
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Just what is the soul of a man? |
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when we're little, we soak in the patterns and sounds our parents emit. mimic them. eventually, there's enough data that language takes hold (however it does; we'll leave that for now). you soak up your parents' patterns -- has your father ever said, "you're a gentleman and a scholar?" mine did. so have the dads of other people my age, too. your parents (or whoever raises you as a babe) form a basis. then in comes sesame street, youtube, school, human culture at large. you vacuum up patterns from all over humanity. some of it is shared, but everyone carries within them a slightly different set of patterns based on their individual experience. by the time you're in kindergarten, your personal archive of patterns has enough variation from person to person that you've become a bona fide individual. genetics play the other half, causing you to prefer one set of patterns over another. put simply, it is like a very long tape loop continually overwriting itself, until it is finally switched off, and lost (like tears in the rain) |
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a process |
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The penis -Freud |
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of course the floaty ghost inside you that leaves when you dead |
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i think the soul is the puzzle you build about your own person and what sticks you up as a man |
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an emergent property |
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I'm really horny for welt to come back and own us with a righteous list of Soul Facts |
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The metaphysical us |
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nothing |
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found a cult over that |
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maybe the ancient chineses already did. 10 years ago next thing id do was opening a book of chinese philosophy in search for answers, coming out bored inevitably. |
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face this, welt, before the brain drives your fingers to the keyboard. |
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soul of man is pecan nut |
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I'm afraid I don't have any soul facts. I tend towards the view that whatever it is that is saying/typing "I" is not the soul. In other words: The meaning/reference of the term "I" not the soul. But the soul would - in comparison to that which says "I" - be something external. Your soul would be something you face - almost like an external object like a tree, the teeth of a bear or a glass-bottle. But what is it? I am not my soul. All I know about myself ("my I") is that I can utter the word "I" right now (and full sentences with it). But what for? And why is a soul-shaped entity blocking my view? |
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You all know that for humankind the general idea is the being with the physical presence. You can ponce it all you want, and for years and years and years, Tony and Welt, you wonderful, wonderful beings. |
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The being without the physical being. God I’m a cunt to myself. |
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Sounds like to me you think the soul is somewhere in the mix of memory, conscience and perception-distorting idiosyncracies of consciousness, with perhaps a soupçon of subjectively uncanny self-awareness. But we already have words for those things. So over and above that, what is the soul of a man? Or, why use that word at all? |
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🧐 |
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i agree about the shaping of the soul happening from external causes, but whats going on is totally internal |
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you're the only one who keeps track of it |
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How much does a conscience weigh? |
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Category mistake. Also, half its weight when doubled. |
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half its weight when cooked |
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Why use the word ‚soul‘? I guess to build on the ancient Greek tradition. Soul is traditionally understood as ( a ) that which makes a living being alive, and ( b ) a force that naturally has specific desires and pursues specific aims. So that’s a richer concept than just affirming the existence of ‚memory‘, ‚consciousness‘ and ‚self-awareness‘. It’s richer because the concepts ‚memory‘, ‚consciousness‘ and ‚self-awareness‘ are mute about the aims for which they are used. (For instance: You could use your faculty of memory for the aim of memorizing the track-lengths of every single Autechre track or you could use it in order to memorize every name you’ve ever been called or just about anything else). But a soul - as traditionally understood - would have natural aims which essentially belong to it. So, using a crude Aristotelian notion, to the Elephant’s soul would belong the desire to walk around and trumpet and live an elephanty life and so on. .. So the initial question could be rephrased: What is the status of the natural aims living beings find themselves with? What is it that constitutes being alive? And who are you - since you obviously are not identical to your soul, your aims or the matter that makes up your body ? |
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you have to be tuned to the world |
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sounds like detaching the oink from the pig. would you buy canned oinks |
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I wouldn't necessarily buy canned oinks. But I would buy a real pig and I would see a difference between the pig, on the one hand, and its oinking, on the other hand. And I would wonder what it is that makes it oink at this point in time rather than another. There's some x that makes the pig oink in a specific situation. But it's not the pig itself, because it's perfectly compatible with the nature of the pig that it might not oink in a certain sitution. And it's not the circumstances, because the pig might or might not oink in the very same circumstances. There is an agent here. And it's not clear who or what that agent is. |
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☔️ 🐷🎶 |
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Ah but the pig does not step into the same river twice. Circumstances are never the same. And in a sense it's never the same pig twice. |
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i have the impression that you’re stuck between two untenable extremes. Your first answer amounted to a denial of the difference between action, agent and situation, because it’s all connected. It’s like going to a judge and asking whether the thief who stole your pigs should be condemned. And the judge replies: „What are you talking about? The thief and his thieving are one and the same thing, just like the lightning is the flesh. I can’t identify a separate thief: there’s just the action. Go home!“ Your second answer amounts to a denial of there being a continuous agent, because now - in contrast - you stress disconnection to the extent that there’s not even a continuous agent or continuous circumstances. It’s like going to the judge and asking whether the thief who stole your pigs should be condemned. And the judge replies: „What are you talking about? The thief that existed a second ago is now a different person. I can’t identify a current thief. Go home!“ But if that’s the case then the judge is simply refusing to do his work. Not a judge, but an undead ghost of a judge, still connected to reality, but fading from it; reality either [answer 1] condensing into a big monomorphic blur, or reality [answer 2] fragmenting into a dissconected mix of atomic pieces and subpieces |
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We conventionally say it's the same pig or person or river if it has the proper kind of causal connections from moment to moment. But the momentary pigs and people and rivers are not identical in the sense of frozen and unchanging. They're more like ships of Theseus than unchanging, non-composite, immutable kernels. They're more like verbs than nouns, processes than objects. Everypig is fire. A Thesean pig doesn't need a soul to explain why it oinks now and not then. It changes over time. Whereas your "kernel" pig-soul lacks such an explanation. It's a black box. You'd have to start replicating the Thesean pig within the kernel pig to give it state, and change... it would have to become composite... as Joe Pesci says in Casino, if you're gonna whack someone, make sure you got the hole dug first, or else pretty soon you're diggin' another fuckin' hole. As for what consequences this has on the criminal justice system - I'm fascinated by how obsessed kernel-thinkers are with the urge to discipline and punish. But even the justice system recognizes that people change over time - we offer time off a sentence for good behaviour, and parole boards examine whether the Thesean self has reformed (i.e., changed), and we recognize that sometimes there are extenuating circumstances such that actions cannot be attributed to conscious intent. Justice is properly more about preventing harm than punishment of "a bad kernel" for its own sake. |
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I really don‘t know what to make of that reply. You seem to argue against someone who envokes the concept of soul to explain specific animal or human behavior. But what I‘m stressing again and again is that a soul does not adequately explain specific behavior. That’s the very starting point. And that souls ‘exist’ is undeniable if you use the word to refer to the linked phenomena of ( a ) being alive and ( b ) goal-directed behavior. You could at best claim that these phenomena are surface-level illusions and need to be re-interpreted for an adequate understanding. In general your position seems to amount to the conviction that we “need no explanation” because stuff just changes. But that’s just giving up the project of understanding, it seems. |
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lol no, my "conviction" if you want to call it that, is that explanations of agency are only possible under a Thesean / composite model of self, and not explicable at all under a simple / unitary kernel model of self. I mean, we don't just say that people and pigs do things when they do because things change. We look at specifically what's changing and how and why it changes. I'm addressing the general metaphysics of our disagreement, not the specific nuts and bolts of psychology and behaviour. I'm saying that there ARE nuts and bolts. Capisce? |
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What do you think is the “general metaphysics of our disagreement”? I think we might have talked past each other to a considerable extent. I really don’t know what this ‘kernel theory’ has to do with anything I said. |
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soul is the sum of a persons experiences, that's IT. |
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Well, like Stimpy in the Ask Doctor Stupid skit, you want to explain the can of beans in terms of a queen bean (the soul) and the other beans are worker beans, whereas I think the can of beans is its own explanation. (I tried and tried to find that clip, where is it??) |
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I wonder if the micro organisms that make a lot of who I am have souls. And if so, wether their souls influence my soul. Is my soul the master soul? |
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Yeah, but you’d have to include will. Possibly. |
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I have this mitochondrial cell, goes by the name “Floydd 96 fx”. It wants me to do bad things, and is trying to create a revolution through my colon. He has a bad soul. Also bacteria influence what I consume. Soul consumers. I’m just a bus. |
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You're missing my point. I don't talk about the soul because I think it's an entity that could or should explain specific actions. I just note that souls exist. I note that they don't explain behavior. I wonder what it is that could explain behavior. Why is it obvious that souls exist? Look at your hand and bang it on a piece of wood. That's what you call a hand. Now 'look' at nothing in particular - there are thoughts, ideas, feelings streaming into your consciousness which you yourself do not actively produce. That's what you call a soul. |
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“there are thoughts, ideas, feelings streaming into your consciousness which you yourself do not actively produce.” What do you mean by “do not actually produce”? Are you talking about will, or the unconscious? |
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I mean, I could take that as saying “well my soul is out of my control”. Or maybe that you’re a victim of your soul, and that there’s something else (or greater) that’s involved. |
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“obviously are not identical to your soul” Gosh I missed that part. So yeah you clearly believe there’s you, and then there’s your soul. You seem to point out that the non soul bit will rationalise and is the “calculator” part of your being (your Autechre example). I just don’t get that. So you believe there’s welt, and then welt’s soul? Could you help me understand by better define the part of welt that is “soulless”? Because if it’s just differentiating artistic sensibility and maths then I’m just not feeling your groove here. |
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I think Nietzsche put it quite nicely when he wrote in Beyond Good and Evil: "With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small, terse fact, which is unwillingly recognized by these credulous minds--namely, that a thought comes when "it" wishes, and not when "I" wish ; so that it is a PERVERSION of the facts of the case to say that the subject "I" is the condition of the predicate "think". There are certain thoughts and ideas which you can control. You can sit down and decide to do maths or finish a work-project and so on and then you simply do it. But you can also sit down with no particular aim. And then thoughts and ideas and feelings come. But you don't actively invite them. You're very passive with regards to them. ... There's something going on there. And it's not identical to you insofar as you are an agent. So what is it? |
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Sorry, I messed up copy and pasting the quote I was replying to: “And who are you - since you obviously are not identical to your soul, your aims or the matter that makes up your body ?” |
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I guess I lean towards identifying myself with something that is active. What is relevant about 'I' is the agency. ... But if I don't choose which thoughts come, or which aims I have (because they are natural aims, for instance). Then it follows that these things don't belong to my 'I'. I wouldn't be surprised if there's something very wrong with that idea. But I'm nut sure what it is. |
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Are you saying like “the ecosystem part of me isn’t my soul because it can’t think?” |
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Ah don’t hide behind him! I like Nietzsche far more than tiny does, but I simply don’t agree. I prefer David lynch’s Anolgy when it comes to getting ideas. Getting an idea isn’t a passive thing simply because it “just came”. Thinking that it came out of nowhere is of course reinforced because you can’t work out where it came from, where the impulse starts. Doesn’t mean it didn’t come from somewhere inside you. |
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