JAB <
[email protected]d> writes:
On 11 Dec 2023 17:58:55 -0400, Mike Spencer
<[email protected]e> wrote:
Since no one has ever seen, measured, detected or produced any
evidence for existence of a soul distinct from the body,
Circumstantial evidence shows this soul concept has been around a long
time.
Agreed. What it is that distinguishes "who" from "what" must have
arisen as a question as soon as genus homo was advanced enough to
have anything we'd recognize as language.
Properly speaking...
Humbug.....
What you're calling humbug, more fully quoted:
Properly speaking, "life" is there continuously from before
conception. Your prime steak is "alive" until you cook it.
Perhaps your sense of "properly speaking" differs from mine. :-)
Perhaps I should have said, "Biochemically speaking..." or similar.
(The fictional representation of) Gottfried Leibniz (in Stephenson's
Baroque Cycle) opined that there are two labyrinths confounding natural philosophers: the nature of the continuum and the question of free
will. Cosmologists and quantum physicists are still hard at work on
the former with little consensus. The second would now be subsumed
under rubric of "the mind/body problem", also the subject of furious
research and speculation. What it is to which the word "soul" might
refer is swept up in the latter.
A distinction between "mind" and "spirit", a notion that "spiritual"
is something beyond or other than intrinsic consciousness pretty much
depends on positing and believing in a soul in the traditional
sense. This leads to belief in disembodied spirits, one or more
deities, animism, satanic possession and all that congeries of
religious and superstitious notions of the world.
I suggest that consciousness -- including mind, spirit and all the
vagueries surrounding or emerging from those notions -- is not a
*thing* but and *event*. The best analogy [1] I've thought of is that
if a candle flame. We think of a candle flame as a thing and it
does, in fact, depend on vaporized wax, oxygen and the surrounding air
(to implement convection) but it's not itself a thing. It's an
event. Take away the wax or the oxygen or gravity and it stops
occurring. That thinkers and whole cultures have for millennia thought
of fire as a *thing*, even as an elemental substance, doesn't mean
that we should today believe that its substantiality is more than
metaphor.
Keep in mind Elmer's thoughts were based upon what he knew then, and
some are in error today.
Well, opening lines at:
https://www.elmergreenfoundation.org/consciousness-diagram/
Physical matter exists on a continuum with spirit. Thus matter
may be considered to be the densest form of spirit, or
conversely, spirit may be considered to be the subtlest form of
matter.
or the whole of
https://www.elmergreenfoundation.org/17-propositions/
tell me that I'm not going to try to penetrate, let alone beat up or
critique what he has to say. Life is too short.
From 1947 to 1958 [Elmer Green] worked as a physicist at the Naval
Ordnance Test Station in China Lake, California where, as Director
of the Assessments Division, he oversaw the optical assessment of
self-guidance systems for rockets. During that time he conceived
of a "mental relay", an on-off switch that could be controlled
mentally. After his initial efforts to develop it were
unsuccessful, he was shown in a vision dream that the time was not
yet appropriate for that technology to emerge, though it would be
appropriate later.
Yeah, well, Linus Pauling [genuflect] kinda shingled off onto the fog
in his later years, too.
https://elmergreenfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Beyond-Biofeedback-Green-Green-Searchable.pdf
[1] Analogy, not metaphor. They're alike in importanty structural
ways, not just as a pleasing allusion or figure of speech
--
Mike Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada
--
Mike Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada
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