Lógos Sokratikós

I beg your pardon, I really don't get you.
Please elaborate your idea of the differences between "soul" and "mind", and,
Please explain what you mean by "higher motive".

Thank you beforehand.

PS> And thank you for being a good sport and firing up the discussion. I swear I come here every day and sigh when I don't find anything new and challenging!

Naked Ape

Sorry but I thought her arguement stemed from from the absurd, proceeded through the absurd, and ended in the absurd.
I asked you for a summary of her points since I was unable to detect anything that appeared to be a point made by Sophie in that discussion.
I find that you like to argue in Sohpie's style, and I have a hard time getting any signal though the condescension:
Not a lot of substance, but no shortage of attitude.

We unbelievers are just to dumb, pigheaded, or otherwise stubborn to admit that the true believers have it right. Now where have I heard that before? I must confess I have never found that to be a convincing style of argument.

Cheers,

Naked Ape

Surreal Reality

From the Simpsons:

What is mind?
Never matter.
What is matter?
Never mind.

Amedeo

This thread started with a duality: Brain and Mind.
Soon afterwards, a slightly different duality was mentioned: Body and Soul.
In one way or another, regardless of explanations or lack thereof, many of use recognize different things in man, on account of which we classify them as either physical or mental, somatic or psychical, organismic and spiritual, or according to other dichotomies.

So, I ask, is the duality or dichotomy in the substance called MAN or in the human phenomena (apparent facts) which we classify? Shall we say that "walking" and "having a toothache" are two different kinds of human phenomena (obviously falling into two different categories), or events in different kinds of parts which constiture man? Is walking a physical occurrence and toothache a psychical occurrence?

The more we list human phenomena, the more we find that they fall into two distinct categories, whereas walking, writing, rolling on the grass, lifting boxes fall in one category. Occurrences such as salivation, urination, bleeding, etc., fall in a class distinct from that of walking, yet both classes pertain to the genus "bodily," whereas a toothache, the pleasure of eating an ice-cream, the thinking about body and soul, the undertaking of a walk, etc. , belong to the experiential, conscious, or mental, or psychical sphere.
I have no doubt about the validity of the two great SPHERES of human phenomena, the physical and the psychical.

Both words, "physical"and "psychical" are Greek. They came with the baggage of the view that man consists of two kinds of things: the body, like other physical things, and the soul (psyche), like the material of the stars. The earliest conception of the soul was that of an "astral body," tenuous but indestructible. The soul of the deceased occasionally appeared in dreams or during the waking hours (in which case they are called ghosts). They are the "shades" or shadow-like bodies which go to the Underword at death.

The Orphics had a preparation for those who were about to die. ((Inscriptions on gold tablets were occasionatly buried with the deceased.)) One said, basically: When you, in the Underworld, approach the river Lethe (the river of forgetffuless or oblivion), do not cross it. Say to the guardian, "I am a child of the earth [bodily, mortal] and of the stars [astral, immortal]. I have sat at the feet of Orpheus [who sand and taught of the gods]. And now I have come to claim my [heavenly] birthright.

The river Lethe would imply the extinction of memory, of one's own identity, for all that becomes conscious subsists in memory. And, unlike physical things, memory is not changed by new acquisitions. A ball of clay which acquires the shape of a cube does not retain its own past; it is not a "memomerative" sort of thing. Any physical thing is undone when it is made into something new. Without mememory, all experiences in the making would dissolve by the oncoming of different experiences. So, we are aware of two kinds of things: physical and non-physical, changing into something else, and retaing whatever they become. We have an empirical distinction of body and mind. Are they two kinds of being, as Plato and others thought?
That's the question.

As we continue our exploration of human phenomena, let's hear the first man who began to doubt that man consists of two substances. The Renaissance philosopher Pomponazzi made remarks to this effect (when dealing with the issue of the immortality of the soul): The same subject that walks and bleeds gets tired and hungry: It is one and the same substance which displays physical phenomena and experiential (psychic) phenomena: Iwalk and feel tired; I chew food and have a toothache. The same subject that falls and feels pain thinks and deliberates. The unity of ME (of the I) is experientially given. The "I" does not consist of two kinds of things.
And yet the dichotomy of the phenomena persists.

You have brought out facts to the effect that when a part of the brain [physical] is destroyed, there are no longer certain mental functions. We can make correlations between brain and mind.

Let's continue the explorations.

Amedeo

I am driving a car very slowly. As I come upon an upward slanting road, the car stops moving and starts rolling backwards. Immediately I apply more gas and the car resumes its movement up the road. In the meanwhile there are observers who, with their naked eyes and with instruments, detect everything that is going on. Afterwards, they write a report on the physical occurrences and do the describing in terms of long-established physics: Forces at work; inability to overcome the gravitation pull; increase burning of gasoline; faster rotary movements; and so forth.

Now, I go to a grocery store and buy bags of potatoes. I put them on a counter one and a time. Eventually I pick them, but at a certain point, I cannot hold them and they drop to the floor. A team of observers did the same thing as before, describing the liftings, the applied forced, and so on and on. But this time, something was happening which they could not observe: My internal thrusting forward to pick the bags, the strain at holding them, the heaviness that I felt, and the eventual relief at being free from the bags. I LIVED the operations that they described: I performed actions, I felt strains and heaviness, and so forth. They observed an occurrence; I lived the occurrence. This living involves conscious thrusts toward acting, strain-consciousness, heaviness-consciousness, etc. The lived occurrence is a conscious occurrence. The heaviness that I feel is not the weight of a bag, that is, the amount of pressure that a bad exerts on a scale. I was looking at the bags and expereinced the red color. I had redness-consciouness. Those observes of what transpired between the bags and my eyes detected and measured some events and later reported light-waves, and so forth. The lived occurrence and the observed occurrence are totally different.

So, when my physical being is being observed, I am a body in which various process are going on. When the same physical being is being lived [for it is what I am), various consciouness-events occur. My being BECOMES conscious -- redness-conscious, heaviness-conscious; forcing or straining-conscious, and eventually thinkingly-conscious, thrusting itself into action consciously (so that "it acts" and "I act" is the same thing). My reality is an I unto myself and an IT unto others. My being is -- to speak from the two different points of view -- a body and a soul at once; something physical and something spiritual; something endowed with a brain and a mind. There is a duality of perspective, not an ontological duality. (If only I existed, then necessarily the two opposite sets of findings would imply that I am a body plus a soul. The truth of the matter that insofar as I know myself, the object of this knowledge is "spirit;" insofar as I am known by others, the object of knowledge is "matter."

The ultimate distinction between matter or the physical is that it keeps on changing, so that it is what it becomes without retaining its own past, whereas it is the nature of consciousness to be retentive of what it was earlier; it is memorative.

How is consciouness and/or memory formed? This is a....meta-physical question, if by "physical" we mean that sort of thing which is observed and is transitory. But "the Physical' and "the spirital' are NOT substances, as we just finished saying. So it would be absurd to think of the spiritual and memeorative being formed within the physical, or vice-versa. / We have to construct a notion of Being on the basis of our observations (physics) and our livings (psychology). How is BEING itself (which we observe and live)?
Can we ever conceive that which must be named by the formula
"EXISTENCE X TIME"?

Amedeo

BEING AND BECOMING.....
PARMENIDES NAD HERACLITUS...
like the dichotomy of
Body and Soul....
Matter and Spirit.....
Brain and Mind.....

I was abot to write a response inthe trhead "Questions about Reality," but thew I saw that what I was going to say is a logical continuation of what I wote here.

It's the eternal philosophical question: is the UNIVERSE of REALITY that which is described by Parmenides as BEING [That-Which-Is; What-Is or exists]or that which is described by Heraclitus as that which beomes, or is in flux [going on, changing,...]???

That which IS is all at once, continuing in its identity, wuthout beginning, without end, uncause, not annihilable, not subject to increases or diminutions, etc. (As Parmenides said and elaborated), infinite in space, etc. (As Mel;issus continued), immoble (as Zeno continued). (Being, therefore, has been called God or Divine Reality by some people, OR some people applied all that is said of BEIND to what they call God.

That which is in process does not, by definition, exist all at once: what was real yesterday is no lober real. The individual realities of today had a being and can end. They are cause in some way or other, and can be made to persi [not to annihilate, but to change into somethin else), The continuity of that which becomes is temporate, rather than an enduring present (as it is in Being). The more we descrive that which is and that which becomes, the more realize that they are essentially distinct. So, some people have theought of YWO SYBSTANCES, God (Being) and UNIVERSE (Becoming0, just as some people think of two SUBSTANCES: Body and Soul, and the like.

Whereas, as far as I know, nobody has ever spoken as I did above [in terms of two perspectives rather than two substances], certainly Bruno (the one that was burnt to death in 1600) was the first one to resolve the opposition of Parmenides and Heraclitus. The reality they speak of is ONE ( not TWO), but it is spoken from two points ov view. Briefly put:

When our attention focus on individuals around us, we see then being born and dying, arising and perishing....(as Anaximader saw and spoke of "physys -- he being the first physicist in history) The Heraclitean description of reality (or individual realities) is certainly correct, true. On the other hand, when we consider the TOTALITY of realities or the "world" or "universe" (as that which included many realities at the same time), that we cansay: IT IS! IT exists And what exists does not have have beginning. It does not arise from That-Which_is-Not. There is no changege taking place between Being and Nothing (as there is between a green leaf and a yellow lea. The difference between green and yelloe is a difference in realities, not a difference between existence and non-existence.

GLOBALLY spoken, the reality at an instant of time, or the reality of what emerges and perishes ENDuRES. Matter is PERMANENT, but it exists in the process of trans-formation, in time. (What exists in time is NOT a sequence of individuals that have an absolute beginning and an absolute end. There is no annihilation of a green leaf and the absolute beginning, or creation, of a yellow leaf. Creation and annihilations do NOT occur; thansformations occur.

Parmenides and Heraclitus speak of ONE reality from two view-points, andf they give the impression that they are talking about TWO kinds of realities -- natural and divine, finite and infinite, beginningless and uncause, beginningful and causes, immoble and moving, and so forth.

Bruno's philosophy (which in principle includes the human unity of what appears dichotomous) can be called: UNITARIANISM. It resolves the opposition on the cosmic scale as well the oppositions on the human scale.
Thgose who speak of the interactions of body and mind, or of god and the world, mis-know what they are talking about.

UnderStudy

In the world of total possibilities where each possibility is limited by the tendency (think of tendency as a Quantum mechanical effect) SOUL is the limit on a set of tendencies which can be realised by the bearer of the soul. Mind is the selection from the set of tendencies.

Simply said: Soul is all the things that can be done and Mind is the active set taken from soul. You have heard of a sweet soul. This means that someone with a sweet soul do not posess tendencies outside that sweet soul whereas those listed with wicked souls have within their tendencies wicked thought and wicked action.

Bobinius

Ok, why should we even bother to consider this poetry something more than imagination?

UnderStudy

Usually in the upper fora while appealing to the base imagination of others may be a shortcut to pedalestinian behaviour there are more effective, acceptable methods of demonstrating dissention.

An appeal to reason may have been more profound rather than your appeal to virtue,

Writing styles can range from the flowery poetic to the raging barbaric but what seperates good writing from bad writing or even critique from opinion is content and the examination of content certainly not the presentation of content, :wave: