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Do Elephants Have Souls? (2013)
- dvh 7y agoDo humans have souls?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- DonaldFisk 7y agoThe article says, "To modern science it is, if anything, the hard problem of consciousness, also commonly thought to be the province of just one species." That's as good a definition as any, doesn't require religious belief, and it doesn't depend on whether Chalmers is right, Dennett is right, or whether your soul (i.e. phenomenal consciousness) survives your death. Do any scientists claim only humans are conscious though? I can't think of any.
- lwansbrough 7y agoTwo things need to be answered in order to answer this question, in my opinion. 1.) Define a soul, and 2.) how much of a human can you remove, or how far can you zoom in before what you're looking at doesn't have a soul? I would argue that cells don't have souls, and by extension, humans don't have souls. But if you disagree, do atoms have souls? If no, and humans are made of cells which are made of molecules which are comprised of atoms, where does the soul come in? At any rate, I accept that's a very scientific perspective - but it's my perspective.
- DonaldFisk 7y agoWhat's your definition of a soul? Cells don't have intelligence, but people obviously do, so it's possible for all of something's parts to lack something that the whole has.
- lwansbrough 7y agoI don’t believe in a soul in the classical sense. I believe consciousness (which many people attribute as being part of the soul) is just a complicated loop of observe-interpret-act-reflect, which I suppose is programmed by our experiences during our life. Intelligence in the sense that you’re describing it is basically the increasing complication of a system that adapts to its environment. So I would say cells by that definition do have intelligence, but it’s not complex. I do think an emergent property of complexity is consciousness, but the “soul” as many people think of it is more than just consciousness. The idea of the soul as something detached from the body and non-transient is just wishful thinking.
- lordnacho 7y ago> I would argue that cells don't have souls, and by extension, humans don't have souls. It must be an emergent property. Cells don't have nationality either, but through some complex interactions people have nationality.
- booleandilemma 7y agoNationality is just something we made up though. Nations are also something we made up. Only the earth exists, and its geography. We could give cells nationality if we wanted to.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoIf that's a sincere inquiry and not witty criticism of the implicit assumption in the title that they do, you might look for the book written by/about the first heart-lung transplant recipient. I saw an interesting interview with her many years ago. She talked about experiences where she seemingly channeled the personality and preferences of the donor for a time following the surgery.
- everdev 7y agoThat's an interesting example of information being stored in parts of our body besides our brain which is a theory gaining more popularity. I wouldn't be surprised if further study confirmed this. A soul usually implies a religious / supernatural energy that survives our death. It's an inherently non-testable theory. I think the question if "do humans have souls?" is just an example of how the question "do elephants have souls?" can have no testable answer, just personal opinion based on your belief system.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoShe also had interesting dreams about the guy who donated her organs and similar. Some belief systems would see that as in line with souls being real. It's all a simulacra in 4D anyway. I think it's fine to go with whatever mental models float your boat in that regard. (Mind you, I reserve the right to do the same thing and don't feel compelled to agree with anyone else about such topics.)
- mikeash 7y agoSeems to me that mind alteration due to an organ transplant is solid evidence against the existence of the soul.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoI didn't chime in to initiate debate on the subject. I was merely suggesting a potential resource for someone potentially interested in exploring the topic for themselves. I generally do not debate such things.
- thangalin 7y agoA couple of related essays on the topic: https://web.archive.org/web/20131016213539/http://davidjarvis.ca/dave/essays/evolution-of-the-soul-01.shtml https://web.archive.org/web/20131016213539/http://davidjarvi... https://web.archive.org/web/20131016213547/http://davidjarvis.ca/dave/essays/evolution-of-the-soul-02.shtml https://web.archive.org/web/20131016213547/http://davidjarvi...
- noonespecial 7y agoWe want it to be binary. Does or doesn't. It probably isn't. The right question is probably "How much soul do elephants have?" And by that, we probably just mean (in the most roundabout of ways) how much of ourselves do we see in them.
- blotter_paper 7y agoDepends on the person. Ignoring the metaphysical question, some people mean "how much of ourselves do we see in them?" Other people mean something like "how much of a theoretical limit of intelligent capacity do we see in them?" The distinction here is that if we use ourselves as the definition of 100% soulfull then anything more intelligent than us has less of a soul simply because it deviates from our norm, whereas if we use some theoretical limit of intelligence we allow ourselves to potentially recognise something else as being more soulfull than us. What we mean by intelligence, and whether we care about specific types of intelligence (e.g. social intelligence) more than others, is left as an exercise for the reader.
- noonespecial 7y agoI'm actually quite certain we would experience a superior intelligence with inscrutable motives as "soulless".
- blotter_paper 7y agoWhat about a loving, benevolent intelligence that was only three times as intelligent as the smartest human, never lied or cheated, didn't turn us into paperclips, and liked to write poetry more beautiful than anything we'd ever read before? Inscrutable motives are not necessary for this thought experiment if you accept the orthogonality thesis, or if you limit yourself to conceiving of intelligences so close to our own (while still superior) that their motives don't degenerate into whatever you think the motives of sufficiently advanced intelligences degenerate into.
- noonespecial 7y ago
- colechristensen 7y agoThere are a few possibilities. No souls: you take a definition of "soul" as something supernatural and reject it's existence. Binary souls: souls exist in some beings in an absolute way either existing or not. A body gains a soul at some point during birth or development and loses it at death. Some creatures have them others do not. Continuous souls: everything has one, some more than others. A rock has a tiny bit, a tree some more, an intelligent animal more, and a human the most. Soul develops as you gain consciousness in childhood. A philosopher has more soul than a comatose person. Souls can be an emergent phenomenon out of certain kinds of complexity like consciousness. Souls can also be something outside physics as we understand it now. You can accept or reject either one. Whatever elephants have, there is quite a lot of it. You wouldn't be so wrong calling it soul.
- brianberns 7y ago> Souls can be an emergent phenomenon out of certain kinds of complexity like consciousness. This is the one I like. If you have a self, then you have a soul.
- ronilan 7y ago> If you have a self, then you have a soul. So, Ruby has a soul and Javascript doesn’t. Makes sense ;)
- mistercow 7y agoJavaScript has a thoul, much like Lisp, but for different reasons.
- Stratoscope 7y agoJavaScript was inspired by Self. Does Self have a soul? My neighbor has a Soul. Cute little car.
- anon1m0us 7y agoA soul is just the unique arrangements of neurons in a brain and body constructed by evolutionary impacts and those learned from the environment. It's there and it's real. In that regard, the more different you "think and react" the most unique your soul is. This is largely based on observation. Since we can't observe, typically, differences in behavior among chickens, we think they have no soul. Own chickens and observe them for a little while and you'll see otherwise if you allow yourself.
- elephriend 7y agoAnswer: Yes. Elephants have souls. Or, at least, they have the same exact thing humans have, if humans can safely agree that a human can possess something worth referring to as a soul. But there is no social consensus thereof (whether or not they have the same thing we seem to have), between them or us, because they cannot speak, write or use sign language, to communicate their subjective experience to each other or any other species. We are the only species to represent a best bet for noticing their sentience, and we would not have contemplated such a thing in a meaningful way that overrules to collective preference among humans, to hunt and poach for things like sport and trophy ivory, at least not until roughly the middle of the 20th century.
- dang 7y agoAll: This article is not about souls. It's about elephants, humans, how we relate to elephants, how they relate to us, how humans relate to non-humans. It is erudite and beautiful. It uses the astonishing literature about elephants to ask about ourselves, them, and the world. "Soul" here is a trope for aspects of humanness that we may or may not have in common. Usually we just edit titles that are triggering people. If I were to do that here, I might rename it "Elephants and Anthropomorphism". But when an article is this rich, moving, even profound, taking away its title would maim it. It bears a much better discussion than the thread has given it so far, so please let's talk about what's interesting.
- interfixus 7y agoCompletely agree. A very long read, but superbly worth it. Wide-ranging, well-written, informative, thoughtful, and fluff-free. The "soul" in the headline is eye-catching but somewhat distractive from the rich contents of the article. Btw. - and off-topically - almost shockingly for a magazine style publication these days: The New Atlantis pages stand on their own - they work ouf of the box, without any of the usual reliance on scripts and external crutches. I am hereby a fan.
- hateful 7y agoDon't let religion hijack the word. The word soul in non-religious meaning (which more than often is referring to an "immortal soul", or a soul independent of a body), is referring to your "you-ness", the fact that you are greater than the sum of your parts. It's referring to the program running on the hardware, rather than the hardware. Cogito, ergo sum
- solipsism 7y agoplease let's talk about what's interesting and stay off the metaphysics. Most would agree there's a point at which moderation goes too far. I can't tell if you're making an appeal as a person, or making a decree as a moderator. I read the article, and it's absolutely full of metaphysics. From the questions surrounding determinism and free will, to the questions of the moral responsibility of those in dominant positions, to the nature of love and pain and grief. These metaphysical topics interest me, and apparently they interested the writer, even if they don't interest you.
- ARandomerDude 7y ago> let's talk about what's interesting and stay off the metaphysics Assumption: metaphysics isn't interesting. Clearly many in the HN community disagree.
- dang 7y agoI've detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19836524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19836524 and marked it off-topic. Yes, that's a case I'd make quite strongly. Internet metaphysics isn't interesting in the way the HN guidelines use that word. Such comments tend to be generic, predictable, and self-referential. They're rarely motivated by the article at hand—this case being a perfect example, since it was only the word "soul" that triggered the discussion, not anything the article actually says. They're not inspired by curiosity, and don't gratify it. They're mostly about rehearsing philosophical scripts, and the internet comment is too trivial a format to support genuine reasoning about those. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- warent 7y agoHN is moderated, not democratized.
- modzu 7y agowhat? this is like asking, do elephants go to heaven? isn't the proper question, phrased scientifically (albiet a nascent science), whether elephants have consciousness? EDIT: skimming the article i see it's quite literary so i think the choice of words was meant to reflect more humanism than merely saying "concsious" would capture: ie, meaning or purpose, emotion, etc
- DonHopkins 7y agoI don't know if elephants go to heaven, but I do know how you can tell if there's an elephant hiding under your bed: Your face is pressed up against the ceiling.
- Vanit 7y ago4 feet 4 soles right.
- leshokunin 7y agoWe haven't even been able to define the meaning of what a soul is, measure it, find it, or anything. On top of that, we don't speak elephant, and our tools to assess whether they have souls don't exist (since we can't even define them, as per above). So... Who knows? They sure show a lot of empathy and emotions.
- incompatible 7y ago"Soul" is a religious concept, not a scientific one. Religion doesn't care about "the meaning of what a soul is, measure it, find it, or anything".
- shmerl 7y agoI'd say it's a mystical concept, not specifically religious (some religions are viewing it the same way). And it's incorrect that the meaning doesn't matter. In short, most mystical schools view the soul as something that defines the being. It's not a physical thing, but rather spiritual, or in other words - informational.
- jsgo 7y agoI believe the person above was saying that those who are most inclined to believe in the concept of a soul would find the importance of a definition of what a soul is to be on the low end of the totem pole. I'm not a huge fan of things that get that close to all or nothing, but I do know quite a few religious people and they aren't particularly concerned with the definition of it so much as what it represents. Whether it is a fear of questioning something or just finding it of minimal value, I do not know.
- shmerl 7y ago> I believe the person above was saying that those who are most inclined to believe in the concept of a soul would find the importance of a definition of what a soul is to be on the low end of the totem pole. Not in my experience though. But I agree that it depends on religion.
- noopnoop 7y agoAccording to Sanatana Dharma / Hinduism (which has undeniably contributed the most to the study of consciousness), elephants too have an Atman. Now can atman be translated to a soul? Probably not, but there is no English equivalent for Atman, which is the consciousness that all living beings possess. All Atman is part of the eternal blissful consciousness of the Universe, called Sat-Chid-Ananda & collectively it is called the Brahman. That is why we say "Aham Brahmasmi" meaning, "I am Brahman / I am of Brahman". It is very well described in the Upanishads (One of the ancient scriptures of Hinduism) & has been even explained by Erwin Schrödinger as one of the few (only) ways to understand consciousness. Please do us all a favor & avoid wikipedia to read & understand this stuff.
- ggm 7y agoThey certainly seem to have concepts of empathy and justice, and retain memory of people as distinct individuals and acts of good or bad intent by same in past times. What they don't seem to have is a grasp of the nuances of language in the way we do. They undoubtedly communicate but it's hard to see a sense of analogy and synthesis of new ideas in anything elephants communicate to us. Of course on the same measures we fail to communicate these metanconstructs back to them and since overwhelmingly our treatment of elephants lacks evidence of empathy and concern and shows no sense of justice perhaps the real question is: Do we?
- grecy 7y agoI've spent a lot of time with a lot of elephants in the wild over the last 3 years driving around Africa. I strongly believe that anyone who believes a human has a soul would believe an elephant has a soul if they observed them for as long as I have. They are incredible, extraordinarily intelligent and as the article says, capable of very sophisticated social structures like empathy, justice and vengeance.
- blotter_paper 7y agoI think you underestimate the human ability to ignore that which challenges our world views. I've known people who loved their dogs but still felt that their dogs didn't experience the world, only acting as if they did. Not just that the dogs lacked self-awareness or something, but that the dogs did not experience anything, because they don't have magical metaphysical souls like we obviously do. I've known these people, and discussed this topic with them at length. If somebody can have a loving relationship with a social animal and still feel this way, I have a hard time believing that spending three years with a significantly more intelligent non-human animal would necessarily change their mind.
- hitekker 7y agoPerhaps less about worldview and more about how some people just love their pets for the unqualified affection and nothing more. That is, not actually loving the pets, just loving _having_ a pet. For these people, it’s just a shallow and transactional relationship masked with pretty words.
- blotter_paper 7y agoI really think it's the worldview, with the caveat that this particular worldview, "x doesn't feel," allows people to exploit x without remorse. If everybody suddenly believed that x experiences love and pain, factory farming would make a lot of them feel really bad. I say this as somebody who thinks x does feel, still hunts x, and still eats x even when it's factory farmed. If I felt like my individual actions affected the market place enough to prevent a single individual from species x from being factory farmed, I wouldn't buy x from the grocery store, but I would still hunt it in the wild. Having spent half a decade as a vegan before ever hunting x, I'm pretty certain of my convictions there. I've grappled with this conundrum, and come to terms with it. I know an avid hunter who also grapples with this conundrum, and hasn't come to terms with it; he doesn't eat factory farmed meat on principle, loves hunting animals, and gets simultaneously really happy and really sad when he successfully kills one. "I acquired this duck," he says with a smile, "but it had to die," he says with a frown. Edit: I'll add this quote from Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
- crankylinuxuser 7y agoMu. (Unask the question.) Define "soul". Define "spirit". Define "consciousness". Now show me how to measure them in some capacity. We cannot make informed decisions without a way to measure these things. Without measurement, is no science. It is belief, not science.
- wintorez 7y agoCame to say this. Asking "Do Elephants Have Souls?" is the same as "Do avocados have mana?" or "Does yeti catch cold?"
- 29athrowaway 7y agoThe soul is defined to be an "incorporeal" part of you. But what is it? Is it your memory? No. Is it consciousness? No. Is it your cognitive ability or creativity? No. Is it your what defines your emotions? No. Drink enough or hit your head hard enough and you'll see that all of those get affected in one way or another. So they're not incorporeal. So what is the "soul" really? It is an ambiguous and archaic term. If souls are real then "surviving" becomes much easier. That's why people like the concept.
- mbfg 7y agoLikely, elephants are more intelligent then humans in that they realize there's no reason to think they have souls.
- voodootrucker 7y agoWhy is such an unscientific question so high on HN? Or to rephrase, if we don't know what a soul is, how can we hope to answer it WRT elephants? So how and why should a reasoning person rate an article like this?
- dang 7y agoThree answers: unscientific things are welcome on HN; the title is not to be taken literally; a good comment reacts to more than just a title.
- DonHopkins 7y agoPlus elephants make really great floppy disks, because they never forget. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_Memory_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_Memory_Systems https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fb/ElephantFloppy.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fb/ElephantFlopp... The brand was originally devised as an inexpensive, mass-market product. Its imposing pachyderm logo, designed by Rollin Binzer was often paired with bright orange or yellow and black packaging, which was in stark contrast of the more conservative silvers and blues used by competitors like IBM. Shane's advisers feared this would undermine the credibility of the product. However, Elephant eventually became viewed as a premium product, eventually becoming one of the highest-margin floppies on the market and one of the best-selling media brands in history.
- aitchnyu 7y agoNow I get the Postgresql logo, and Hadoop too, even though the latter was named after the creator's boy's toy elephant.
- protomyth 7y agoI guess the answer is do you believe you have a soul? If you get that far do you think that extends to animals? Some? An elephant or a whale, but not an ant? all? One part of the anthropomorphism part they touched on (but I'm not sure the last line is universally agreed to)[1], is that humans will do that to more than living things. We once talked about the souls of ships and lately a piece of metal, mechanisms, and circuits was mourned like family member when it lost its battle against the conditions on the next planet over. We pack up and form tribes with other humans, animals, and even inanimate objects that we claim have lives of their own. We invest in things. To the point, I'm pretty sure someone, somewhere added retrieving our lost probe to the must do immediately upon getting their ourselves list. I get the feeling if we have souls, then we invest little parts of them in the things we value. 1) from article: Meanwhile, on our end, we the human race are masters of projection, from the teddy bears (or in my case, stuffed raccoons and walruses) that we befriend as children to the humanoid robots that we may build or purchase as adults, engineered to cue us to respond to them like sentient beings. We like to feel that these inanimate objects have reciprocal affections for us, although we always know at some level that they do not.
- etxm 7y agoNo. And neither do you. Edit: How dare I have an opinion on opinions.
- sovande 7y ago"Descartes reasoned that since animals are not rational, they are not conscious, and since they are not conscious, they cannot even be aware of pain; their piteous howls during the horrible experiments he conducted on them were to him mere reflex, the unfelt expression of material reactions akin to the shrieking of a teakettle." The Cartesian world view on biology has been catastrophic to our fellow mammals and even today aspects of this perspective survives. Physiologically, humans are not very different from other mammals, even if we want to be. We all have a limbic system and that means we all have the same emotions. Animals have feelings and emotions. When things happen to them, they react with emotions be it sorrow, anger, happiness, fear.
- wazoox 7y agoThe cartesian view on biology was a necessity to avoid public burning, and essential to make positive science possible. Before Descartes, it wasn't at all clear and obvious that mere things had no intention, no wants, no "soul". In fact, Aristotelian physics considered that a stone drops because of its "grave" nature, that it somehow wishes to go down (The last gasp of this magical thinking lasted well into the 19th century, until Pasteur finally demonstrated that there is no spontaneous generation). By excluding everything non-human from any "soul", Descartes made science as we know it possible. It was a paradigm shift of immense conceptual importance.
- dusted 7y agoDo souls even exist?
- torgian 7y agoAnswer: We don't know!
- perrygrande 7y agoThe elephant is one of my favourite creatures on this earth
- _ph_ 7y agoElephants are faszinating creatures with a complex social behavior. My connection with elephants comes from the Zoo of Cologne, which opened a new facility for elephants in 2005. Built from scratch to allow keeping up to 20 elephants in a herd, giving them as much freedom as possible. So it is quite large and set up to keep the elephants with minimal interaction with the keepers (protected contact). Starting with 5 elephants, the herd has grown to 14 today, to a large part by births. Whoever visits Cologne and is interested in elphants, shouldn't miss to visit them. The elephant facility is equipped with a wide range of cameras, there is a "control room" for running the camp. In the first years, there was a web stream (anyone remembers real player?) running 24/7 allowing everyone to watch the elephants close up. Especially after in the hours after the zoo is closed for the public, a lot of highly interesting behavior could be observed. The stream for example settled the question: do elephants lie down to sleep? Yes, at about 1am in the morning the would lay down for a few hours, often in a larger group together. The observations via the web cams gave me a deep impression of the social interaction of elphants. They have a lot of individual personality and the groups have a tight social structure and interaction.
- r00fus 7y agoMan, I miss Köln. It was a very interesting winter in 2002, where archaeologists were unearthing an entire underground city (you could see it through a pyramid-like window). If you ever visit, down some of their Kölsch and get a Kölsch key (their beer-rival is the nearby region of Alt - at the company I was consulting for, many of the folks had replaced their Alt keys with Kölsch ones)
- ruinedThread 7y agoYou ruined the thread with this bullshit sticky pinned to the top, you fucking dickless asshole. Thanks for nothing.
- inflatableDodo 7y agoThis article makes a few statements that are currently being demolished; >"Also a matter of conventional wisdom is the idea that human beings are on one side of a great divide while all animals are on the other" >"To modern science it is, if anything, the hard problem of consciousness, also commonly thought to be the province of just one species." My usual response to these kind of assertions is to direct people towards, 'The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness' - http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConscious... Here's the summary; >"“The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and manyother creatures,including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.” Also, I'd add something to the section on anthropomorphism. One that is touched on by the first paragraph in that section; >"Though thanks to Darwin (if not Aristotle) it should come as no surprise that animals seem to experience in some way many of the same things we do, physically and emotionally, in science the supposed imposition of “human” characteristics on non-human animals is a powerful taboo." I have long thought that from an evolutionary perspective it would be incredibly surprising if the characteristics of humans appeared in some catastophic development, such as in Julian Jaynes' book, 'The Origin of Consiousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind'. Anthropomorphisis of animals is often dismissed as being an arrogant practice that serves the person and not the animal. I would argue that a flat denial of 'human' attributes to other animals is far more so.
- hi41 7y agoYa dang right!
- cicero 7y agoThere are lots of ideas floating around today regarding what is a soul and what makes humans different from other animals. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century had a very clear conception of this, rooted in Aristotle, that I believe is still relevant today. First of all, he said all living things have souls because a soul is the principle of life. By definition, it is the thing that is the difference between something that is alive and something that is not. Although we know a lot about the mechanisms of life today and how that breaks down as something dies, I think it's safe to say we still don't know exactly what makes a thing alive, and we certainly don't know how to create or restore life. If nothing else, soul is a useful label for that principle. According to Aristotle and Aquinas, what makes humans different from other animals is not the existence of a soul, and neither is it consciousness or emotions. What makes us different is that we have a rational soul, which means we are capable of recognizing universals and dealing with abstractions, which is connected with our use of language that can express and communicate these concepts. I recommend biologist and theologian Rev. Nicanor Austriaco, O.P. [1] for an explanation of how this developed and how the biblical idea of Adam fits in with modern evolution. I also recommend philosopher Dr. Michael Augros [2] for a very rich explanation of how we can understand that we have a rational soul, and what are its characteristics. Both of these men draw heavily on Aquinas, but they bring his ideas into modern biology and philosophical discussion. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MsJ67qtHYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MsJ67qtHYY 2: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0746R3TXN/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0746R3TXN/
- danielam 7y agoCartesian metaphysics has been problematic and disastrous in many ways, but many modern philosophers hold fast to some variation of Cartesianism. For instance, materialists are still Cartesians in the sense that they still hold to a Cartesian view of matter, having dispensed with the Cartesian view of mind. This has left them either seeking in vain for a way to account for things like so-called qualia within matter while preserving an essentially Cartesian view of matter, or left denying the reality of things like qualia altogether (eliminativism). On the other hand, Aristotle (who is only mentioned by the author in passing) and his philosophical heirs like Aquinas do not deny the common sense view that animals are conscious, have emotions, show affection, etc. However, Aristotelians and Thomists (A-T) don't always appear to be comfortable with the word "soul" perhaps because of the connotations it has acquired in the modern era, Cartesian or otherwise (think ectoplasm or ghost in the machine). For A-T philosophers, the "soul" is the form of the organism, that is to say, that which makes the organism what it is (by analogy, the form of a bronze sphere is sphericity). Thus, at the moment of death, the form is no more and what we have is not an organism nor even a body but the remains of the organism (here, A-T philosophers would say that the substantial form had ceased to enform the organism while the accidental form may persist and hence why the remains of the organism continue to hold the shape and structure of the living organism for some time after death). In any case, according to this view, all living things have "souls" because the soul is just the form of the organism. However, what A-T philosophers do accept is that the known non-human animals lack immaterial faculties like the intellect (i.e., the faculty by which humans beings abstract univerals from particulars). Thus, animals do not possess general or universal concepts like "Man" or "Number" or "Triangularity". But none of this is to deny that non-human animals are conscious, experience emotion, form bonds, and so on.
- mtnGoat 7y agoare we trying to justify torture? i can think of some others doing similar things that were jailed and not applauded. if we do it for science its ok? or only sometimes?
- wazoox 7y agoNo, I'm trying to state facts about history of philosophy and history of science. First, you're obviously applying your current world view to 1640, which doesn't make any sense. OK, all people from the past were barbaric, racist, violent, misogynistic, credulous so whatever they did and say should be dismissed without any further reflection, is this your point? Second, I don't even understand what you're trying to convey. Did Descartes advise to torture puppies for science?
- mtnGoat 7y agoall i picked up from your original comment was... its ok to think animals don't have souls because then we can torture them and call it science? And the first person to make that leap should be applauded? sorry, i don't subscribe to his nonsense, never will. and i wasnt trying to make any point, i was asking you a question about yours. have a good day.
- UnFleshedOne 7y agoHumans were torturing animals and each other long before Descartes. We basically don't need a justification for it, it is a natural tendency, just look at small children (among all animals really, we are just so much better at everything). If anything we need a justification _against_.