Soul, or No Soul? -3

Please review earlier posts on this topic to understand the flow of the information.  The following is my response to the point raised by the soul critics at the end of the last post.

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I do understand what you are saying. I spent quite awhile contemplating this, and I still do not think I can accept it. Although I don’t totally reject it either…just right now evidence points to the contrary in my opinion.

I am considering “thought” from a very fundamental level. Neural synapses, pathways, chemical interactions etc. These are what create the thought. So it could be said that we are nothing more than a collection of molecular interaction and compilations (and thus no soul). But where I get stuck is that nothing within the molecular points to what could be awareness. If it could, we ourselves could create artificial intelligence. We can currently see how the brain works and we can create the neural pathways that create thought, but we can not create a machine (“mind”) which allows thought to be witnessed by the machine that needs to do the experiencing of the thought.

We can map out the brain, we can give a computer a thought, but we can’t give a computer the ability to understand that it is thinking.

Maybe over time we will begin to understand this phenomenon, or maybe this is already completely understood and I have missed it in my studies. But if so, then we should have AI which is able to experience life as we do. And we do not, we have not even come close.

So at this moment, I can not strip away the “soul”. Or as I call it the observer, or the awareness that is actually aware thought (or anything for that matter) is occurring. Why is eye sight not just a snap shot like what a computer would take? How is that we are able to “see” what is taken in by the eye? The mechanics of the eye allow for a picture to be taken, just as a computer can take. But the computer is not aware of what it sees. We are. How is this explained away? The computer has nothing to do with anything, I just use it as a comparison. But even just looking at our senses on their own…. The eye is structured to allow for sight, but once again there is nothing inside the mind which explains why we are aware sight is occurring. If we could understand this we could bring sight to those that are blind.

I was considering what you said “A thought is only observed after it has arisen, and not as it arises.”

But if it is not observed AS it arises, how could it be remembered? It has to be observed at the exact moment it arises. Awareness of the thought and thought itself must exist simultaneously for the thought to be brought into the conscious realm. If that thought was not observed at its exact conception, it could not be in the mind, for we would have no idea it even occurred. It would be as if someone yelled at you and you did not hear them…you would not know the yelling (the thought in this case) had occurred. This is the difference between us and a computer – or soul and no soul to me – the soul is the awareness of the yelling in the mind.

So whether it is called a soul or not, matters little to me, but there is something which is not explained off so easily when we really consider how thought itself is experienced.

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At this point we start to get into very philosophical debate.  Which as mentioned in the previous post means the debate will likely not be settled anytime soon.  The counter provided to my arguments above lies in the idea that everything is an illusion, so the physical which lies within the illusion is pointless (I have very much condensed this idea here).  My points about the physical are thus non-useful – or so the other side would say.  And I actually agree with this to a point.

I do believe the world is an illusion, which can be molded and sculpted to a certain extent by our will, and can be changed to a great extent by collective will.  I believe we are spiritual beings which have decided to have a human experience and we keep ourselves locked in the illusion by way of the ego.  But my belief is that if this is true, if it is all just an illusion, it our job to experience as much of it as we can.  And this includes contemplating and experiencing the things which happen within this world.

Each of us individually can settle the debate within our self.  No matter whether we believe in a soul, intuition which may be a part of the soul, or simply that randomness is guiding us through an illusion or a concrete physical world, all we can do in this life time is accomplish and strive for what we feel needs to be done in each moment.

In this way, no matter what our actual belief we end up with the same result.  We experience life fully and realize that this life is all we have at this moment.  If there is an afterlife (and I have written about this in the past, so likely you know that I believe there is…but it is not what dogmatic religions teach) then all we can do is prepare ourselves by fully focusing on this life and not worrying about the afterlife.  Live each moment for the moment, live it fully and richly and that may include any number of things…including philosophical thought in my case.

~Cory Mitchell

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