No Soul?

Is there no room for soul in modern science?

No soul?

The question I have concerning “no soul” is that most modern empiricists consider the concept of soul as useless. The possibility of a soul, apart from brain and the mind as the functioning of the brain, on this view is unverifiable. But contemporary physics has actually opened the way for us to view the mind as connected in subatomic ways with the non-local universe. This has some physicists going back to the vocabulary of soul and finding a use for it. I think this is the easiest way out of this today!

String theory. http://www.superstringtheory.com/ 

It seems quarks do things that only a mathematical description like string theory can explain. But string theory is not something that can be verified by any other means than using math to construct a beautiful picture that explains what we do find by extrapolating into things we cannot investigate. This keeps mathematicians happy because we assume math is accurate to reality -- whatever that is.

If string theory is accepted (there are several competing theories) then it would seem that all quarks have characteristics we do not normally see in physical experience, but that they must have to fit the theory.

Quarks make up everything including our e-bits and qubits (the elements that enform (learning forms pathways and neural connections in our brain) when we learn and think).

It would seem that our e-bits (entangled bits) and our qubits (quantum bits) are on strings that go from dimension to dimension explaining how we can do things linear machines cannot. We are quantum computers rather than Turing Machines.

But the strings are attached to all the quarks on the string through all the dimensions running through time, just as a thread runs from point a to point b in space.

All of time exists at "once" in the Einsteinian (old "One Mug"!) Universe, though we individually are traveling through time in the sense that we think of "now" as a present passing in the direction from past to future, just as we think of the scenery as we pass from one place to another.

But the quarks that make up our brain states are accessible to us as we are open to them, so that what we remember as past is the quarks on the string at that time, what we project into the future are the quarks on the string at that time, and so on. We share these enformed bits with all those who are "thinking" the "same thought." We can think in all dimensions at once.

So, as we enform our thinking to match a particular thought pattern we join the minds of all those that are thinking likewise. We "know" their thoughts.

You can do this over distances and over time.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195132564/o/qid=949649737/sr=8-1/104-0204630-8819676 

By the way, I would argue that what theologians referred to as “angels” are now called “forces” such as electromagnetism, nuclear (strong and weak) and gravity. Have a look at this and use your imagination: http://www.newadvent.org/summa/105001.htm and it starts here: http://www.newadvent.org/summa/105000.htm

Can you find a persistent self? In reading the quotation from Hume that starts on page 128 and continues on to page 129 in Velasquez ed. 9 he argues that there are no impressions you can have that you base your conception of a self on. Try this for your "self" and see if you can find something to prove him wrong.

What makes Hume's exercise interesting is the postmodern view that we have of the person. In that view the view each of us has is dependent on the cultural view that we share with those others we have learned to think of as persons! Since different groups of people think in different paradigms, or languages, or games within languages, there are different characteristics associated with being a person from group to group. What Hume has us looking for is our interpretation of what our interactive group of what we have come to learn are persons use to identify what a person is and how that somehow belongs to us. But Hume has set a definition of what a person is for the purpose of this test and has us looking for something we cannot find! But how can we describe the feeling we get that we cannot find ourselves within ourselves!? Should we wander around all day worrying if we are people then? Imagine that. I feel like saying, "I am just pretending to be a person. I am acting! Am I fooling anyone?"

Thanks to this question Hume has set the stage for others to notice just how dependent we all are on others for our sense of who we are. Today we even refer to those people that have the most importance for building and maintaining our sense of who we are as our "significant others." For now, my answer is that a person’s soul is the entire set of conscious states from birth to death that forms the self that has conscious states. What I think makes me aware of what I am experiencing at any point in linear time is the self that is interconnected through out all time concentrating on that particular moment. We may eventually stop experiencing things from linear moment to moment but current theory tells me my soul exists forever. And that is somehow a very comforting thought. But as one questioner asked Aquinas, at death does our soul continue to experience consciousness as we do in finite time? – Aquinas answered that he did not know but thought so.

Dialogue questions:

Imagine what things this theory would enable us to discover about ourselves and our relationships with others, with the order in the universe, and what this means about our existence over time?

How would this explain various attempts, many religious, to explain "ourselves" as souls? Or as something more than the body we have in the physical here and now?