Where's Your Soul

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I've always wondered what people ment by someone's soul and it got me thinkin.

Here's the scenario

You are placed on a operating table and a doctor starts cutting you open to find your "soul". (Now in this scenario you can't bleed to death or anything right). The doctor starts by cutting your arms and legs off. After this your fine your still "your self". Next he cuts your head of your torso however your fine (you still being the only responsive thing left the head). The doctor plugs you up to a machine so you can talk and breath properly still. Next he cuts off and out your ears, skin, lips, eys ect. Now "Your" (brain in a skull) still being responsive using the machine to talk to the doctor and so he carries on cutting away. But even if he cuts of the bits of brain that allow you to talk, move, think "your" still their alive so maybe there is somthing called a soul??? even when our bodies are destroyed theirs still somthing left....us.

I'd everyone to offer there point of view on this most odd topic

I had a topic like this once. The cells of Henrietta Lacks are still alive, probably several kilograms have been generated from the sample taken from her before her "death" in 1951.

The soul is an imaginary concept, and so cannot be surgically removed.

Nowhere. One cannot find a soul in the physical space-time manifold.

ruveyn

Well wheres that "thing" that make you "you"

Even the you that thinks its your you isn't your you because there are activities going on that supplies information and stimulation to the conscious you and separately to the unconscious you that works with the you to make the you. Obviously it's not simple.

Ahh...nothings ever simple in this world

Agreed. Of course, just because something is imagined does not mean it is does not exist. As a musician, I can "dream up" all kinds of sounds and songs. It just means that the song only exists in my head until such a time as I can sonically realize it. The song is still "there," it exists, just not in such a form as can be communicated to another human being.

Sadly, such things as the "soul" can only exist in the mind. You can't "communicate" a soul to anyone. All you have are the physical manifestations of the soul as far as evidence of it goes--that is, what makes you you. If you cry when certain things upset you, when you express your ideas in words to another person, when you cook food or go out to eat and show preferences for specific flavors which may or may not be shaped by your own culture... Many things in our physical existence are shaped by thoughts and feelings that have no physical expression. They aren't "real," although they really are part of our experience.

As far as the physical location of the soul, that has been debated throughout time. From a Christian point of view, this has been expressed as the kidneys and the bowels in the Bible. It makes sense--it was evident even to people in ancient times that blood accumulated around the kidneys. The blood being the source of life itself, it only made sense that the seat of the soul was the kidneys. If you feel anxiety or depressive moods, do you not feel some kind of stomach or intestinal discomfort? How many times have you done something based on a "gut feeling"? The word "hysteria" is actually derived from another word for "uterus" (look it up). More often these days we seem to locate it somewhere in our thoracic cavity since that seems to be where emotions are "felt." Our current understanding today might place the soul in the head, since that is what governs all our physical cognitive senses. It seems to me that the location of the soul is ascribed to certain areas based on our understanding of the physical human body. Perhaps there is no ONE location, but rather the soul occupies the entirety of the body. We know that the body can't live without the head. But then again, most of our bodily organs are essential for life--you HAVE to have a heart, you HAVE to have a liver, you HAVE to have your kidneys, you HAVE to have your brain, as just a few examples, and some organs are more essential than others (you CAN live without your thyroid, but you'll need drugs for the rest of your life in order to replace its function). I suppose it's conceivable that the soul inhabits the entirety of the human body and coexists with all its senses.

Gotta have Fantomas' Delirium Cordia playing while reading your description.

Each of our minds gets to know the outside world through sensory perception and forming a virtual world inside our brains. Everything we "know" exists in that virtual world.We can manipulate the virtual world and the objects within it to create novel virtual objects and then we can manipulate the real world to realize these objects n the outside world. All sorts of objects, both exact virtualizations of real things and of imaginary things that do not and frequently could not exist in the real world are in there. To confuse the inner virtualizations with the real things in the outside world is a major error.

That's actually interesting coming from you, Sand! Be careful, though. Keep thinking like that, and you MIGHT be on the verge of a breakthrough!

In all seriousness, I'm not sure that there is any real confusion of the two worlds, though. Take Edison, for example. If you were to liken the realization of ideas from the "virtual" world, as you put it, to giving birth, Edison fell victim to more spontaneous abortions and stillbirths than actual live births. And every now and then, you have people like Tesla who give birth to fantastic monstrosities.

Some of these ideas seem destined for short lives and extinction. In the musical world, you used to have an instrument called the Awful Clyde (ophicleide, sorry). And then there are instruments such as the Synclavier that were built in such a way that they'd never be obsoleted. Too bad you only really see them in film post-production houses used to playing back sound effects.

There is no "you" it is an illusion. It is a trick of your ideas, which like your genes, replicate themselves if they can. The one's that replicate themselves well, survive, the one's that don't disappear.

The idea of a self is an idea, which your brain makes "you" believe, that way it can replicate the ideas stored in it so much better.

You don't go around telling the world that 2 + 2 = 4 do you? it's not some thing that you "believe" that "makes you you" that is "a part of who you are"

but your religion, your beliefs, you theories of how the world works... those are the things that you do go around telling people. Some more so than others.
So, by creating this false-you inside of your brain, creating the feeling that there is in fact a central area where things are decided and chosen, it is able to induce you into spreading the ideas, so that they can spread even more. It does this by making you think that those ideas are a part of who you are.

There is no soul, no elan vital, no life-force, it doesn't exist. What we experience as self is simply the perception our bodies have of the whole of everything, our genes, our ideas/memes, our environment. Susan Blackmore labeled this the "selfplex" the last chapter of her book The Meme Machine is very good at describing the idea.

I'm still not 100% sure that she has EVERYTHING right mind you, she writes off free will arbitrarily, which may be valid, but I'm still not convinced that it cannot co-exist with the rest of what she says. But that exception noted, she puts it in a way that I was better able to understand than any other description i've yet read.

There are a hundred billion things that make you, you.. The cells of your body.

ruveyn

I imagine this doctor must be a Creationist

my soul is in the high mountains where the weather is always cold

You're looking at it the wrong way, by the way.


Your soul isn't inside of your body. Your body is inside of your 4th dimensional soul/spirit.