Timeline for Is there a modern, secular argument for the soul?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 14, 2014 at 0:22 | comment | added | yters | An excellent answer (see comments for further clarification), and shows me I haven't quite asked the question I want to ask :) | |
| Jun 14, 2014 at 0:21 | vote | accept | yters | ||
| Jun 13, 2014 at 1:37 | comment | added | virmaior | Let us continue this discussion in chat. | |
| Jun 13, 2014 at 1:10 | comment | added | yters | That is a good clarification. What would preclude a scifi scenario where we created nanotechnology that could organize itself at a fundamental level? For example, Michael Crichton wrote about this scenario in the book Prey. Would such technology have a soul? | |
| Jun 13, 2014 at 0:57 | comment | added | virmaior | To repeat what I was saying earlier, soul is not merely process but organizing process that sustains the thing as what it is. The electrical circuits passing through a computer are a processing running on hardware that is not self-maintaining at a fundamental level. For Aristotle, plants have souls as do animals as do humans. Because each has a type of existence organized and maintained under a certain kind. | |
| Jun 13, 2014 at 0:56 | comment | added | virmaior | I will try to make the distinction more clearly. On the Aristotelian picture, a thing has a soul if it organizes itself. As in, if it contains within itself, a system that organizes itself. We grow from fertilized egg all the way to adult human being according to an internal maintenance pattern. When we get injured, our healing process when it can restores us to what we are. Self-maintaining computers emulate this but computers fit more under the category of artifact which in this vocabulary means something built that cannot do that. | |
| Jun 13, 2014 at 0:42 | comment | added | yters | Why isn't what you are describing merely a more powerful software/hardware combination? There are self maintaining computers today, such as the control systems that monitor our electrical grid. It isn't that I disagree with you, it is you need to make a clear, principled distinction between a machine on the one hand and an embodied soul on the other to answer the question. | |
| Jun 12, 2014 at 23:52 | comment | added | virmaior | To give an analogy, OS X and Windows computers just fail if something goes wrong with the hardware (like when I pull out the MD-VGA adapter when it's sleeping). A soul also manages the hardware -- it does not merely run on top of it like a program. Thus, if I put too much alcohol into my body, I don't segfault in the same way. | |
| Jun 12, 2014 at 23:51 | comment | added | virmaior | @yters By process, Aristotle means an organizing process that unifies and sustains the thing, so it couldn't be mere software running on hardware. It would also need to be a maintenance program that can regenerate the thing into what it is (which is reminding me of terminator). Not seeing how this makes it "an approximation of a computational reality." For Aristotle, soul is what makes it so that my matter stays organized human-wise and that makes it so that I can engage in acts of thought. | |
| Jun 12, 2014 at 22:44 | comment | added | yters | Well, the problem here is that if the soul is a process, then it can be replicated with a computer. In which case my points stand - that modernity has shown while the soul may be a psychologically useful concept, it is an approximation of a computational reality. As such, the soul would not exist in reality. For the soul to exist, it must be something that could not, even in principle, be replicated with a computer program. How would Aristotle differentiate a soul from a program? | |
| Jun 12, 2014 at 5:50 | history | answered | virmaior | CC BY-SA 3.0 |