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Permalink Reply by Heather Spoonheim on May 6, 2011 at 5:07am

Nelson is cool - he just pushes people to think and maybe read up on the subject themselves rather than hammering down a wad of already distilled facts.  He pointed me to a couple good books on theory of mind stuff and I'm just getting started on one now.  It's always fun to just use our imagination as well, but sometimes a little futile when experimentation to investigate several imaginative postulations has already proven them to be false.

 

I picked up something when he pointed out 'religion' and 'religious thought' that I hadn't really formed into words yet.  I think I have tended to call 'religious thought' a 'god-concept', but religious thought is a lot better phrase.  The idea that aspects of the world might conform to behaviors that model a consciousness stems from us seeing things that aren't really there, so in that sense we could have 'religious thought' before ever stepping forward to a 'god concept'.  I tend to jump into thinking of it at the 'god concept' level, which sort of ignores the evolutionary roots of religious thought and just trundles off into how the idea evolved AFTER is occurred.  The difference between evolution an abiogenesis, if you will.

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Permalink Reply by Nelson on May 6, 2011 at 3:23am

Nelson, Why was the idea of a soul attractive? I'm not sure but it doesn't stop me from guessing and forming opinions based on archetypical human behaviors.

first, it wasn't clear to anyone that that's what you did, forming opinions based on archetypal human behaviors. second, that you were apparently forming opinions based on archetypal human behaviors is an answer to the question i asked- why was the idea of a soul attractive? in answering the question i asked it's odd to frame the answer by saying that you didn't need to answer the question.  

 

I think when the idea of the soul would have arose was when we may gave been significantly less evolved mentally.

we should probably back up and get on common ground regarding what a successful explanation should be able to do before it can be considered a successful explanation. you can't just tack on things, ad hoc, to your theory in order to account for objections. greater ad hoc'ness is a feature of a poor explanation. (note that a successful explanation and a true explanation are still two different things. an explanation may successfully explain that explanandum while not necessarily being true.)

this needs to be agreed on because in order to posit that the idea of a soul would have arisen when we were significantly less evolved mentally you'd have to justify thinking this was true. what about a less evolved brain would make the idea of a soul more attractive as a way to offset the fear of death where a more evolved mental capacity wouldn't have favored it. we need to be careful that we're not playing pin the tail on the donkey by adding things to a theory that are themselves unjustified in order to account for flaws in the theory.

and anyway, it is generally agreed on the strength of archaeological evidence (ritualized burials) that religious thought in some sense existed 40,000 years ago. and it existed in fully modern humans. in order for your theory, and it's modification positing a less evolved mentality, to hold water, either we'd have to be wrong about the time line of human evolution or we'd have to be wrong about the earliest instances of religious thought.

everything you say after this point is automatically false if you stick to this notion of a less evolved mentality since this is such a fatal flaw. there is absolutely ZERO evidence that not yet fully modern humans (those with a less evolved mentality) had anything even approaching a belief in souls. and by the time we have evidence of anyone having those beliefs 40,000 years ago they were already fully modern humans.

but even without this, problems...

 

Shaman, wise elders could have come up with the idea and passed it down.

first, that they could have is not really the issue. your claim is more like that they DID (or if it's not then what's the point? because, really, i could posit all sorts of hypotheses concocted to fit the evidence. what matters is if we have any reason to think one hypothesis true over and above the others). accordingly, it matters less what could have happened than what is likely to have happened given the evidence.

and then there's the fact that you have problems even that they could have done so. the very existence of a shaman- a holy man- suggests the existence of something like a religion including the belief in a life force (animism). so it does no good to posit that a holy man who would have existed in the context of an already existing tradition that included the belief whose origins you seek to explain would have come up with the idea and passed it down.  

 

So you wouldn't agree that the story of god is meaningless without the idea of a soul? Native religions and the spirit world? Religions that center around reincarnation?

you'll have to point me to what i said that makes you think that that's my position. i personally do think that there's no believing in a soul without believing in a god to go with that soul. but believe it or not i've come across atheists who don't believe in god but do believe that some mechanism for a post-life continued consciousness- what surely most people would recognize as a "soul"- does exist.

i personally fail to see how we are to have this soul without our having been imbued with it by some supernatural force. so no supernatural force, no soul.

 

I have to disagree with you that the egg came before the chicken in this sense. Religion came before the idea of the soul.

then you have a problem. because you're either disagreeing with the evidence from the cognitive sciences or you're misunderstanding the distinction between religion and religious thought, or both.  

religious thought seems to have come before the idea of a soul, but religion- that came later.

religious thought is Minimally Counter-Intuitive beliefs that get picked up on by our Hyper-active Agency Detection system and then fleshed out by our Theory of Mind.

religion is the codified ritualized mythology, usually including a cosmogeny, that develops later.

i think we might agree more than you're grasping. i'm saying first religious thought, then the soul, then religion. you seem to be taking me to be saying first religion, then the soul. i'm not.

 

I don't think many religious stories have any leg to stand on without the idea of a soul or spirit world or reincarnation. You have this mythology of the soul (which I agree would have arose in many different cultures) and then you have this mythology of RELIGION which basically explains what is going to happen to your soul depending on how amicable you are in your lifetime.

based on this it seems that you're misunderstanding the distinction between religious thought and religion.

 

But this is kind of my point. When the idea of the soul was first used to comfort, explain, give strength. There was no fear of hell yet as what i'm saying is that would have came later.

your response is a combination of misunderstanding my point and again missing the distinction between religious thought and religion.

 

Actually I can argue that. There are MANY people even today who believe they have a soul but have no mythology to explain it.

that would be a great point except that we're talking about how the idea of a soul would have formed originally, not what people believe about it 40,000 years later in modern society.

 

To be clear I suppose when I use the all encompassing word "SOUL" i'm thinking of more of BOTH christian souls, spirit worlds, reincarnation, animism and anything of the like where your sense of self may live on without your body.

this is problematic, to say the least, because they're such different concepts. the high theology concept of a soul on Christianity is pretty different than the life force of animism. to say that the idea of an animistic life force developed along the lines you propose is far easier to defend than that the idea of a Christian soul did so. the idea of a Christian soul certainly seems to have evolved from simple animism but to say that your theory accounts on its own for the Christian soul concept is hardly true at all.

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Permalink Reply by Arcus on May 8, 2011 at 9:49am

Could we perhaps say that the soul is to psychology what alchemy is to chemistry? Pseudoscience that had its roots in something real?

I guess my belief in a soul stops where it stops equating with psychology. And I "believe" (more accurately: trust) in psychology.

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Permalink Reply by Cloudy on May 6, 2011 at 3:01am

I believe in the feeling and biographical characteristic of empathy called "soul". If you can't identify what that is, you are either without, or just not in touch with it.

 

No supernatural idea to be intended.

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Permalink Reply by Nelson on May 6, 2011 at 3:30am

I believe in the feeling and biographical characteristic of empathy called "soul". If you can't identify what that is, you are either without, or just not in touch with it.

absolutely no offense intended but that sounded like word-salad. "the feeling and biographical characteristic of empathy called 'soul'"? what?

in order for me to say that i can or can't identify what that is you'll have to first better identify what it is. :)

stripping all the other pseudo-profundity away, if all you're talking about is a feeling of empathy for your fellow human beings then why not just say that instead of confusing the issue and allowing religious baggage to be smuggled in by referring to this feeling as a "soul"?

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Permalink Reply by dragotron on May 6, 2011 at 4:24am

I'm gonna quickly just respond to this comment and say I agree with Nelson on this point. Obviously. And Nelson's response touches on a major problem I have with the word "soul". I like your phrasing of "religious baggage" here. There are MANY MANY different terms, meanings, implications and connotations of the word soul. But at it's core I think we all know that it refers to the idea that one can somehow live on after the death of their body.

 

Back to the topic of what came first the soul or religion. Well. I'm not going to go back and reply to every response you've made as I find most of them long winded and straying far from the point i'm making and we could end up going on and on forever.  What I will say is that I believe Christianity and many if not most religions came as a way of explaining the idea of the soul. I don't see any way around that, that is a loose explanation to what i've come to believe and I don't see any reason to be debating it unless you're going to point out some sort of evidence that says other wise. I haven't seen that in any of your responses above.

 

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Permalink Reply by Boci Boci Tarka on May 6, 2011 at 4:02am

No, I don't. Modern imaging clearly shows that mental processes are the results of brain activity. So, conciousness dies with the brain.

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Permalink Reply by Heather Spoonheim on May 6, 2011 at 4:11am

Well aren't you a party pooper. :(

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Permalink Reply by dragotron on May 6, 2011 at 4:35am

I don't think he's pooping on the party :)

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Permalink Reply by Heather Spoonheim on May 6, 2011 at 6:17am

Scrooge!

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Permalink Reply by Brian Stewart on May 6, 2011 at 9:27am

No I don't believe in a soul...or to put it more accurately I don't believe I have a soul or that my soul will go to some greener pastures or hell etc etc...to put another spin on it: How is a 'soul'-concept different from the concept of a "spirit"?

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Permalink Reply by dragotron on May 6, 2011 at 9:47am

the soul and the spirit may have different origins but to me they both refer to a component of your sense of self which can exist without your body. I don't believe in souls, spirits, ghosts, reincarnation or anything that implies you can live on without your body. You often get people responding to any reason here with a statement similar to one if the following: " but energy doesn't die! It just takes on another form!" or "we're all made of stardust" or "your soul is just the type of person you are" or "your soul can't be explained by science! do you hate kittens too?"

 

My thinking here is how does the fact that the universe does not expel a piece of matter or energy mean that your soul is going to live on? And if it TRULY is a part of your being. Why do you not remember a thing about it before you were born? If it just changes so much that you can no longer comprehend it or you simply don't remember it then HOW does it even have any connection to you in the hear and now?

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