Mid-morning. You are waiting on the Boy
Scouts to deliver twenty some bags of mulch today as they do every year. You
pulled the Honda out so they can put the bags in the garage for the time being
– distribute the bags to the directed locations and you can place the mulch
where needed. Carol is now dressed and ready to meet the day so you might take
a quick nap before things get busy. – Amorella
Mid-afternoon.
The mulch arrived late morning when you and Carol were working in the yard, and
Tim had begun mowing your yard when you left for a late lunch at Smashburgers.
Busy Saturday; you will probably put out some mulch this afternoon or this
evening. You are debating the beginning of editing chapter fifteen, as you
appear to be moving along once again. Presently you are waiting for Carol to
complete her walk at Pine Hill Lakes Park.
Yesterday
you mentioned about how it would be for at thought to be carried through a
micro black hole but first we have to define the physics of a thought, which
you assume is as a light wave. Light energy waves in a black hole would be
absorbed. The thought would be lost. – Amorella
1513 hours. How is it that the Dead
are able to communicate in the story? They appear to have their memories
connected with heartansoulanmind. How are we going to explain this into
plausible fiction if it comes up?
We just did in the last chapter – it is the
soul line, a connection between two souls. The soul is the filter between
heartanmind. The Living might refer to this as a soul-friend or soul-brother or
soul-sister. – Amorella
Presently
you are waiting for Carol at Grandma’s Garden at 8107 Ohio Route 48 several
miles north of Lebanon in the far west Waynesville area. You are having trouble
because there is so much information on “soul” and “spirit” on Wikipedia
Offline. For consistency I’ll edit what we need. “Soul” first. – Amorella
** **
Soul
A soul in certain spiritual,
philosophical, and psychological traditions is the incorporeal essence of a
person, living thing, or object. Many philosophical and spiritual systems teach
that only humans have souls, while others teach that all living things, and
even inanimate objects (such as rivers), have souls. The latter belief is
commonly called animism. Soul can function as a synonym for spirit, mind or self; scientific
works, in particular, often consider 'soul' as a synonym for 'mind'.
**
Semantics
Although the terms soul and spirit
are sometimes used interchangeably, soul may denote a more worldly and
less transcendent aspect of a person. According to psychologist James Hillman,
soul has an affinity for negative thoughts and images, whereas spirit seeks to
rise above the entanglements of life and death. The words soul and psyche can also be treated synonymously,
although psyche has more physical connotations, whereas soul is
connected more closely to spirituality and religion.
**
It has been argued that a strict line
of causality fails to explain certain phenomenon within human experience such
as free will, which have at times been attributed to the soul.
**
Socrates and Plato
Plato, drawing on the words of his teacher Socrates, considered the
soul the essence of a person, being that which decides how we behave. He
considered this essence to be an incorporeal, eternal occupant of our being. As
bodies die, the soul is continually reborn in subsequent bodies. The Platonic
soul comprises three parts:
1.
the logos, or
logistikon (mind, nous, or reason)
2.
the thymos, or
thumetikon (emotion, or spiritedness, or masculine)
3.
the eros, or
epithumetikon (appetitive, or desire, or feminine)
Each of these has a function in a
balanced, level and peaceful soul.
**
Thomas Aquinas
Following Aristotle and
Avicenna, St. Thomas Aquinas understood the soul to be the first actuality of
the living body. Consequent to this, he distinguished three orders of life:
plants, which feed and grow; animals, which add sensation to the operations of
plants; and humans, which add intellect to the operations of animals.
Concerning the human soul, his
epistemological theory required that, since the knower becomes what he knows
the soul was definitely not corporeal: for, if it were corporeal when it knew
what some corporeal thing was, that thing would come to be within it.
Therefore, the soul had an operation which did not rely on a bodily organ and
therefore the soul could subsist without the body. Furthermore, since the
rational soul of human beings was a subsistent form and not something made up
of matter and form, it could not be destroyed in any natural process. The full
argument for the immortality of the soul and Thomas's elaboration of
Aristotelian theory is found in Question 75 of the Summa Theologica.
**
Immanuel Kant
In his discussions of rational
psychology Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) identified the soul as the "I"
in the strictest sense and that the existence of inner experience can neither
be proved nor disproved. "We cannot prove a priori the immateriality of
the soul, but rather only so much: that all properties and actions of the soul
cannot be cognized from materiality." It is from the "I", or
soul, that Kant proposes transcendental rationalization, but cautions that such
rationalization can only determine the limits of knowledge if it is to remain
practical.
**
Philosophy of mind
For a contemporary
understanding of the soul/mind and the problem concerning its connection to the
brain/body, consider the rejection of Descartes’ mind/body dualism by Gilbert
Ryle’s ghost-in-the-machine argument, the tenuous unassailability of Richard Swinburne’s
argument for the soul, and the advances, which have been made in neuroscience
and which are steadily uncovering the truth/falsity of the concept of an
independent soul/mind. The philosophies of mind and of personal identity also contribute to a contemporary understanding of the
mind.
The contemporary approach does not so
much attack the existence of an independent soul as render the concept less
relevant. The advances in neuroscience mainly serve to support the mind/brain
identity hypothesis, showing the extent of the correlation between mental
states and physical-brain states. The notion of soul has less explanatory power
in a western world-view, which prefers the empirical explanations involving observable
and locatable elements of the brain. Even so, there remain considerable
objections to simple-identity theory. Notably, philosophers such as Thomas
Nagel and David Chalmers have argued that the correlation between
physical-brain states and mental states is not strong enough to support
identity theory. Nagel (1974) argues that no amount of physical data is
sufficient to provide the "what it is like" of first-person
experience, and Chalmers (1996) argues for an "explanatory gap"
between functions of the brain and phenomenal experience. On the whole,
brain/mind identity theory does poorly in accounting for mental phenomena of
qualia and intentionality. While neuroscience has done much to illuminate the
functioning of the brain, much of subjective experience remains mysterious.
**
Anthroposophy
Rudolf Steiner differentiated
three stages of soul development, which interpenetrate one another in
consciousness:
4.
the "sentient
soul", centering on sensations, drives, and passions, with strong conative
(will) and emotional components;
5.
the
"intellectual" or "mind soul", internalizing and reflecting
on outer experience, with strong affective (feeling) and cognitive (thinking)
components; and
the "consciousness soul",
in search of universal, objective truths
**
Science
Science and medicine seek
naturalistic accounts of the observable natural world. This stance is known as
methodological naturalism. Much of the scientific study relating to the soul
has involved investigating the soul as an object of human belief, or as a
concept that shapes cognition and an understanding of the world, rather than as
an entity in and of itself.
When modern scientists speak of
the soul outside of this cultural and psychological context, they generally
treat soul as a poetic synonym for mind. Francis Crick’s book, The Astonishing Hyposthesis, for
example, has the subtitle, "The scientific search for the soul".
Crick held the position that one can learn everything knowable about the human
soul by studying the workings of the human brain. Depending on one's belief
regarding the relationship between the soul and the mind, then, the findings of
neuroscience may be relevant to one's understanding of the soul. Skeptic Robert
T. Carroll suggests that the concept of a non-substantial substance is an oxymoron, and that the
scholarship done by philosophers and psychologists based on the assumption of a
non-physical entity has not furthered scientific understanding of the working
of the mind.
Daniel Dennett has championed the
idea that the human survival strategy depends heavily on adoption of the
intentional stance, a behavioral strategy that predicts the actions of others
based on the expectation that they have a mind like one's own (see theory of
mind). Mirror neurons in brain regions such as Broca’s area may facilitate this
behavioral strategy. The intentional stance, Dennett suggests, has proven so
successful that people tend to apply it to all aspects of human experience,
thus leading to animism and to other conceptualizations of soul.
Selected from – Wikipedia Offline -
soul
** **
Spirit
The English word spirit
(from Latin spiritus
"breath ") has many differing meanings and connotations, most of them
relating to a non-corporeal substance contrasting with the material body. The
spirit of a living thing usually refers to or explains its consciousness.
The notions of a person's
"spirit" and "soul" often also overlap, as both contrast
with body and both are understood as surviving the bodily death in religion and
occultism, and "spirit" can also
have the sense of "ghost", i.e. a manifestation of the spirit of a
deceased person.
**
Metaphysical contexts
In metaphysical terms,
"spirit" has acquired a number of meanings:
6.
An incorporeal but
ubiquitous, non-quantifiable substance or energy present individually in all
living things. Unlike the concept of souls (often regarded as eternal and
sometimes believed to pre-exist the body) a spirit develops and grows as an
integral aspect of a living being. This concept of the individual spirit occurs
commonly in animism. Note the distinction between this concept of spirit and
that of the pre-existing or eternal soul: belief in souls occurs specifically
and far less commonly, particularly in traditional societies. One might more
properly term this type/aspect of spirit "life" (bios in
Greek) or "aether" rather than "spirit" (pneuma in
Greek)
7.
A daemon sprite, or
especially a ghost. People usually conceive of a ghost as a wandering spirit
from a being no longer living, having survived the death of the body yet
maintaining at least vestiges of mind and of consciousness
In religion and spirituality, the
respiration of a human has for obvious reasons become seen as strongly linked
with the very occurrence of life. A similar significance has become attached to
human blood. Spirit, in this sense, means the thing that separates a living
body from a corpse—and usually implies intelligence, consciousness, and
sentience.
**
Individual spirits envisaged as interconnected
with all other spirits and with "The Spirit" (singular and
capitalized). This concept relates to theories of a unified spirituality, to
universal consciousness and to some concepts of Deity. In this scenario all
separate "spirits", when connected, form a greater unity, the Spirit,
which has an identity separate from its elements plus a consciousness and
intellect greater than its elements; an ultimate, unified, non-dual awareness
or force of life combining or transcending all individual units of consciousness.
The experience of such a connection can become a primary basis for spiritual
belief. The term spirit occurs in this sense in (to name but a few)
Anthroposophy, Aurobindo, A Course In
Miracles, Hegel, Ken Wilber, and Meher Baba (though in his teachings,
"spirits" are only apparently separate from each other and
from "The Spirit.") In this use, the term seems conceptually
identical to Plotinus’s “The One” and Friedrich Schelling’s “Absolute”.
Similarly, according to the panetheistic/pantheistic view, Spirit equates to
essence that can manifest itself as mind/soul through any level in pantheistic
hierarchy/holarchy, such as through a mind/soul of a single cell (with very
primitive, elemental consciousness), or through a human or animal mind/soul (with
consciousness on a level of organic synergy of an individual human/animal), or
through a (superior) mind/soul with synergetically extremely
complex/sophisticated consciousness of whole galaxies involving all sub-levels,
all emanating (since the superior mind/soul operates non-dimensionally, or
trans-dimensionally) from the one Spirit
**
Related concepts in other languages
Similar concepts in other
languages include Greek pneuma and
Sanskrit akasha/atman, see also Prana.
Some languages use a word for "spirit"
often closely related (if not synonymous) to "mind". Examples include
the German, Geist (related to the
English word "ghost") or the French, 'l'esprit'. English versions of
the Judaeo-Christian Bible most commonly translate the Hebrew word
"ruach" (רוח; "wind") as "the spirit", whose
essence is divine (see Holy Spirit and “ruach hakodesh”). Alternatively, Hebrew
texts commonly use the word nephesh.
Kabbalists regard nephesh as one of the five parts of the Jewish
soul, , where nephesh (animal) refers to the physical being and its
animal instincts. Similarly, Scandinavian languages, Baltic languages, Slavic
languages and the Chinese language (qi)
use the words for "breath" to express concepts similar to "the
spirit".
Selected from Wikipedia Offline -
spirit
** **
You
are home. Carol is about to water her plants. You finished selections of soul
and spirit from Wikipedia Offline. These passages relate to what you consider
the soul or spirit to me. This is important in context because it adds an
authenticity if you to look for definitions. This allows you to be free of
concern and uncalled for doubts concerning these fictional books. Kapish? –
Amorella
1749 hours. All of the definitions
above certainly do fit my comfort level. I can’t imagine anyone arguing about
such things, particularly in a fiction. I can’t help but see the humor in your
use of ‘kapish’. I hesitated to add it, thinking it was my imagination without
a sense of reason to it. Mostly one thinks of the old “Godfather” films and
Italian gangsters and the like, not something I would expect Amorella to use
even if the word is in my vocabulary. . . . Now, oddly I feel like I
should tread lightly.
That’s
because I’m instilled more deeply within that you might imagine, boy. –
Amorella
1757
hours. This makes me think that I might not be so good at this translation
business Amorella. Whatever stirs in my spiritual center (where this appears to
originate) I am afraid you picked a person who is NOT really a perfect match for
this.
Last night you told Carol in an aside after
watching this week’s “Elementary” that one time not too long before Bob Pringle
died you two were sitting in the car talking and you said something that caused
him to turn, look at you directly, and say, “For someone who is a genius you
can be pretty dumb.” You both laughed at the comic honesty. For you it was a
confirmation you have realized most of your life, you have a ‘spark’ within but
it is from a pretty dull piece of flint. It makes you almost grin as you sit
here at the keyboard. The juxtaposition of anyone thinking you half way
intelligent and once they get to know you, they learn better. And, Bob knew you
much better than most.
1805 hours. It amuses me still. I can
see Bob’s look and hear his honest voice as clear as day. I was surprised he
put me in a genius category at the immediate introduction of the statement, but
when he concluded I understood completely. It is so refreshing when someone you
think you know so well, treats you to the fact that he knows you better than
you think he does. Bob is one of the best of friends in my heart.
Post, no more tonight. Relax and enjoy the
evening. - Amorella
2133
hours. We had leftovers and watched “Surviving Jack”, “This Old House” and I
watched “Grimm”. It took some time to read over the selections from Wikipedia
Offline. I am quite comfortable with these selections as an overall
intellectual and emotional sense of what soul
and spirit mean in context with/to
the blog and the Merlyn books. Ha, if
someone would ever ask me, I would tell her or him to read my blog from
beginning to end first, then ask me a question. – rho
That, in a nutshell, is exactly what you
would do. – Amorella
2141 hours. You are very wise,
Amorella. What a comfort you are to me. Thank you.
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