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To elaborate, the soul is defined as the animating principle. In fact the words “animate” and “animal” both come from the Latin word for soul “animus.” So we do
by User23 4y ago
To elaborate, the soul is defined as the animating principle. In fact the words “animate” and “animal” both come from the Latin word for soul “animus.” So we don’t need to prove the existence of the soul. We don’t even need to claim that it’s substantially spirit, although I do happen to believe that makes the most sense. We simply have to say that a living thing has something that its otherwise identically configured recently inanimate remains do not.
I do find it amusing that purely materialist life scientists gave up on defining life.
- layer8 4y agoWe simply have to say that a running computer has something that its otherwise identically configured recently broken remains do not. I don’t think that’s a substantive argument for needing a term like “soul”.
- macrolocal 4y agoAnd Joscha Bach might define "soul" in terms of computation.
- giraffe_lady 4y agoThat's not incompatible with this conception of souls. A sort of simple animism is fully compatible. A computer has a soul the way a rock has a soul: it manifests rock-ness in some way that is both unique to itself and different from what would be possessed by that same material as a pile of gravel, or lava. This is so different from the kind of soul a person or a forest has that it's not an extremely useful grouping in a lot of ways. But it's not a contradiction and there are cases where it is useful.