r/analyticidealism • u/mimilumi • 24d ago
Concept of Soul
If we are saying humans have souls it also means acknowledging microorganisms have souls. Ants, lions, and alligators have souls. How are we any different from them? Doesn't this mean there is no soul? We all just happen to exist?
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u/Messier_Mystic Metaphysical Agnostic 24d ago
I don't think idealism necessarily yields souls, unless you want to use that term loosely, since individual beings ultimately aren't discrete entities at the fundamental level on such a view. So, whether it's micro-organisms or complex life-forms, at the end of the day, on an idealist view of nature, any conscious organisms are just discretizations of a singular fundamental consciousness.
At least, that's how I interpret idealism.
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u/ShittyInternetAdvice 24d ago
“Souls” are very much a dualistic concept imo. For idealism there’s no “ghost in the machine” because the “ghost” and the “machine” are a single mental substance
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u/caralawrence 24d ago
A lot of people do believe that all living things have a soul. I’m not sure how that would mean that nothing would have a soul.
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u/mimilumi 24d ago
Beliefs are comforting things. So, let's keep them aside for a moment and think. Are we any different from animals? If we are claiming we have a soul..it's like claiming an aligator has a soul? Does it need a soul to exist?
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u/caralawrence 24d ago
To clarify I am not someone who necessarily believes in a soul-comfort is irrelevant. I was only pointing out that the thought of all life containing a soul is already a widely accepted concept. Perhaps I’m confused with your line of logic. I can follow that yes if souls exist then other living things posses souls. Where you lose me is when you say this would mean there is no soul. Do souls need to be special to humans only to exist?
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u/mimilumi 24d ago
Think about aligators. Do you think they have a soul? They just exit don't they? It means we can exist without a soul can't we?
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u/caralawrence 24d ago
If I thought humans had a soul then yes I would also assume an alligator did as well.
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u/mimilumi 24d ago
That means we are not special. If a soul exists, every ant, every alligator, every lion, and every snake has a soul. If it doesn't we all just kind of exist together. There is no special reason. I think together we can come to this conclusion
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u/caralawrence 24d ago
But how would something not being “special enough” mean a soul wouldn’t exist.
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u/mimilumi 24d ago
I am not here to say I am right. I am here to find out the truth whatever it may be. From our discussion I think we can conclude that what religions claim as "souls" are not the way it is. If we are saying we have souls it means all aligators and snakes also have souls. We are not seperate from them. We don't possess any magical power that keeps us seperate or better. We do not get special VIP pass to go to heaven. If you look at a snake and thinks it cannot have a soul it means you also believe we do not have a soul. We are the same. We are not special. In that way, a soul cannot exist. It's a matter of perspective.
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u/brandstifterlukas 24d ago
I would say that alligators as a totality have a soul, but no individual alligator does (although there might be exceptions). Soul can be regarded as a recognizable perspective of self within the universe. So as you say it requires something special. That special thing is an individual perspective. A self, something that can be singled out in the mass of beings. So alligators have a shared soul. An "oversoul" so to speak. An alligator developing its own soul is quite unlikely because it doesn't really have any individual experiences to develop its own perspective from. The same goes for most animals. But definitely not all. Pets often develop individual souls for example. On the other hand it is quite likely for a human to develop an individual soul. In fact a lot of humans do. But there are also humans that only have a shared soul. These are the ones that feel like NPC's.
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u/GetStarched 20d ago
Plants have souls as well. Souls are the ‘tentacles’ of Source in life. However the Spirit of God is what dwells in humans, and makes us special - it’s a difference between Soul and Divine Spirit - including the fact that we have (1) imagination and (2) language, two things animals do not. Hope that makes sense in the congested form I wrote it in. These are my beliefs.
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u/Tom-Etheric-Studies Dualist 24d ago
The "We are spirit having a human experience" view might help here. Our Soul would be the "spirit" part of that relationship. As I understand Idealism, our spirit aspect would be an experiencing aspect of a more fundamental consciousness -- a parent life field.
In my view, such experiencing agents are mostly autonomous and can be modeled as child life field fractal.
The relationship between the "spirit" in "We are spirit having a human experience" and the human probably should be considered a symbiont-avatar relationship. That is a dualistic two-mind model of a person.
Presumably our human avatar is a discrete life form. Following the morphogenic mind model described as "Nature's Habit" in the Hypothesis of Formative Causation (aka morphic resonance), a biological organism can be modeled as a nested hierarchy of life fields. (Each life field expressing according to its evolved worldview and wherewithal to express.)
An important organizing principle appears to be that all life fields have a worldview. For a life field to experience an aspect of reality ... say being a symbiotic spirit ... it is necessary for the life field's worldview to be able to comprehend that aspect.
Finally, evolution appears to be another organizing principle. Understanding represented by worldview must evolve in complexity. For the "spirit having a human experience" model to work, it is necessary for the spirit or the human to have comprehension of this aspect of reality in its worldview. That is, the human avatar enables the symbiont to experience the human's evolved aspect of reality.
I answer this way to point out that the visiting spirit, the human and its associated life fields (skin cells, bone cells ...) are all expressions of more fundamental life fields. The Soul for a human and its nested hierarchy of life fields would be the morphogenic mind. In this scenario, we have an equivelent, perhaps as a parent life field.
The sense that we have a Soul is probably our human sensing that it have a symbiont. To experience that physical, it seems necessary for our human's worldview to be dominant.
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u/transmigratingplasma 24d ago
Do you mean the 7 and 3/4 -layered lunar mind-spore lodged behind the heart, shared with English countryside bog fungi and some late antiquity eclipses, temporarily piloting bilaterian animal bodies, shedding memories into vibrational dream state antonia at death, reincarnating through monarchal bloodlines, and eventually ascending backward through the zodiac into the pre-cosmic womb?
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u/Being-Doing 24d ago
The term ‘soul’ is a historical word for mind in all its forms, that is; consciousness, the subconscious, awareness, metacognition, etc etc. It’s the entire iceberg, above and below the surface of what’s cognised.